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Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation

Capitalism has from its very beginning depended on the colonial and imperial arrangement as a way of providing it with cheap labour, cheap land, and cheap resources. That arrangement has also made it possible for the ruling classes in capitalist societies to secure a degree of consent from their working classes for imperialist exploitation abroad. This is one reason why, contrary to what some might have anticipated at the start of the twentieth century, revolution did not begin in the advanced capitalist societies. The greatest revolutionary potential emerged instead in the colonised world — from the periphery of the world system.

To understand why the revolution starts from the peripheries and why anti-imperialism is the principal contradiction, we must first understand the structure of imperialism and the relationship between capitalism and imperialism.

Capitalism is a system in which the means of production are owned privately by a capitalist class that exploits a dispossessed working class. The capitalist class holds political power. Both classes are market-dependent: capitalists compete with one another, and they do so by exploiting a working class that has no other way of reproducing its life than selling its labour power. This is a deeply exploitative yet highly productive system, one that generates surpluses which are claimed to benefit all of humanity — surpluses that exceed, in their potential, those of all preceding economic systems.

Marx takes up the question of primitive accumulation at the end of the first volume of Capital, asking how the capitalist system came into being — how a capitalist class that owns the means of production and a labouring class that is dispossessed emerged historically. Before offering his own answer, he begins with a critique of classical political economy. Thinkers like Adam Smith argued that this distribution of ownership was a question of those who were most efficient in their use of resources becoming owners, while those who were lazy or inefficient ended up with nothing. Capitalism, in this view, was the most efficient and productive way of organising society’s resources.

Marx refused this premise. Through a study of the English enclosures, he showed that the origins of capitalism lay not in a just distribution of capabilities but in force and violence. Through enclosures, large numbers of people lost access to common lands — to the means of reproducing their lives outside the market. They became “free” labourers in the sense that they no longer had direct access to the means of production. The capitalist class came to hold exclusive ownership not through market competition but through coercion. This is where the original quantum of capital comes from. It is generated through force, not through innovation. This fact calls into question the very foundations of capitalist rationality.

But primitive accumulation does not merely generate a stock of capital. It is also the process through which the social relations of capitalism are born. Land is enclosed; this dispossesses a class, which becomes a labouring class, while another class emerges as a capitalist class. Capital is a social relation between the two. As Marx argues in his chapter on the modern theory of colonisation, even a capitalist class with a monopoly over the means of production cannot realise surplus and profit without a dispossessed labouring class to put to work. Primitive accumulation thus has a qualitative component: it generates the very beings — capital and labour — whose contradictory relationship structures the capitalist system.

These market-dependent actors are driven towards a productive logic through competition. But the structuring contradiction between capital and labour produces severe tensions. The objective of the capitalist class is to drive down wages, but those same workers must also consume the goods produced. There is a contradiction between the realisation of profits and the suppression of wages: if the mass of society is a dispossessed working class whose wages are constantly driven down, the market through which profits can be realised will shrink. If wages rise to expand that market, they eat into profits. This is a contradiction that, as Utsa and Prabhat Patnaik have argued in Capital and Imperialism, bears directly on the question of why capitalism requires an imperial foundation.

The Limits of Western Marxism

The tradition of Western Marxism holds that primitive accumulation begins in Western Europe and generates contradictions that may require colonial markets to resolve them — for example, through the export of overproduced goods or the reinvestment of over-accumulated capital. But in this framing, colonialism and imperialism become secondary contradictions, subordinate to the ultimately primary contradiction between capital and labour. This is the tradition of thinkers like Robert Brenner, who argued that the South and the peripheries need to replicate the capitalist development path of the North — that they are less developed because they have not yet undergone the revolutionary transformations that produced capitalist social relations in the core.

But there is another moment in Marx that Western Marxism has systematically ignored. In the chapter on the genesis of the industrial capitalist, Marx writes:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the Aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalise the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.”

If we read this passage seriously, colonisation and the enslavement of non-Europeans are positioned as the enabling conditions for the emergence and subsequent unfolding of capitalism as a mode of production — a primary foundation rather than something secondary. Primitive accumulation must be reconsidered as a world-scale process involving both the enclosures in Europe and the colonisation of non-European worlds.

Third World Marxism

If the European register of primitive accumulation gives rise to the qualitative relation of capital and labour, what are the distinctive qualitative relations that emerge from primitive accumulation in the colonies, and how do these bear upon the reproduction of capitalism? It is in setting out to answer this question that we reach a limit in Marx’s account. There is a gap between his empirical observation that colonialism underpins capitalism and the analytical categories he devises to apprehend the capitalist mode of production. No distinctive qualitative relations emerge for Marx through the colonial register; colonialism appears only to provision a quantum of capital, in contrast with the European enclosures, to which Marx gives exclusive analytical significance in terms of the emergence of the capital-labour relation.

It is here that Third World Marxism intervenes, deploying the Marxist method to overcome the Eurocentric limits of its content. As Samir Amin argued, to be a Marxist is to continue the work that Marx began. Marx did not account for the role of the underdevelopment of Asian and African societies in the formation of capitalism as a world system, but this does not necessitate abandoning Marx — only completing what he left unfinished. Thinkers like the Patnaiks, Walter Rodney, and Amin have sought to theorise the concepts and categories generated through the colonial register. Amin developed the category of global value and core-periphery underdevelopment; the Patnaiks speak of exogenous stimuli that stabilise accumulation in the core.

The key insight is this: the contradiction between capital and labour in the core is stabilised by an imperialist foundation. Capitalism could only ever emerge because, from the sixteenth century onwards, primitive accumulation in the colonies provisioned raw materials and facilitated a transfer of wealth from periphery to core. This generated super-profits precisely because it did not have to account for the reproductive capacity of the peoples in the peripheries. One could appropriate from the colonies without having to reproduce those societies in the way one needed to reproduce the working class in the core.

The qualitative relation that emerges through the colonial register, then, is the denial of sovereignty to colonised peoples. This denial of sovereignty — enforced through a logic of racialisation and maintained through violence — is the means through which food, raw materials, and industrial inputs are transferred to the core at depressed prices, repressing costs in terms of both the reproduction of the labouring class and industrial production, and thereby allowing wages to be suppressed and profits to be realised. If the European register of primitive accumulation generates the capital-labour relation, the colonial register generates the core-periphery relation, structured upon the absolute denial of sovereignty and introducing logics of genocide and elimination into the heart of capitalism.

The case of India illustrates this concretely. M.N. Roy describes how British colonialism transformed India from a semi-industrial country into an agricultural peasant-based society. The peasantry was ruled over by an intermediary landlord class through a logic of violence and force that enabled the extraction of surplus from the peripheral zone into the colonial metropole.

The Class Character of National Liberation

Lenin, in his 1913 text “Backward Europe and Advanced Asia,” identified a critical dynamic: in the colonised world, the bourgeoisie was siding with the proletariat and other popular forces because colonialism introduced an additional contradiction into the system. The European bourgeoisie, by contrast, had become so powerful and so fearful of its own proletariat that it was prepared to support anything backward and reactionary, both within its borders and beyond them. Lenin therefore urged the international socialist movement to prioritise the national liberation of colonised peoples, as doing so would call into question the colonial markets and surplus drain that stabilised capitalist accumulation in the core.

Lenin grounded his position in Marx’s analysis of the Irish question: Marx had come to realise that the English working class would not attain revolutionary consciousness so long as it was materially located within a national formation that oppressed the subjugated Irish nation. Lenin returned to these insights in his debate with Rosa Luxemburg over Polish independence and further developed them in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism into a broader framework: the national oppression of colonised peoples, in the political form of the denial of sovereignty, enabled the European bourgeoisie to stabilise the contradictions of capitalism, blunting the revolutionary consciousness of the core’s working classes. Lenin argued that it would likely be necessary for proletarian movements in the core to tactically support bourgeois-led national liberation movements in the periphery, since the latter were historically tasked with transitioning the colony from dependent to autonomous capitalist state, at which point a proletarian class could emerge to lead a further socialist revolution.

The Agrarian Question of National Liberation

The national question came to be most clearly linked to the agrarian question when both were taken up by revolutionary theorists engaged in anti-colonial struggles. Thinkers like Frantz Fanon and M.N. Roy complicated Lenin’s thesis by demonstrating that the national and colonial questions could not be resolved by a bourgeois national liberation movement resulting in a bourgeois form of national sovereignty.

Whereas Lenin had urged the international socialist movement to provisionally support bourgeois nationalist forces in their fight to overthrow colonialism, Fanon and Roy argued that such a form of national liberation could be nothing more than a false dawn, inevitably leading to neocolonial subjugation and the degeneration of nationalism into chauvinism and racism.

The assumption that newly liberated nations could follow the European path of first bourgeois, then socialist revolutions was flawed on two grounds. First, European bourgeois social formations achieved historical progress only through a colonial foundation that would not be available to bourgeois national development projects in the ex-colonies. Second, the bourgeois class that existed in the colonised world had been structured not as an independent national class capable of directing autonomous development, but as an intermediate, dependent class that profited from the appropriation of surplus from colony to metropole. Even after formal independence, such a class would not be capable of overturning the inherited colonial structure of the national economy. Rather, it would only claim for itself, under the guise of nationalisation, a greater share of the unfair advantages bequeathed by the colonial period. The national bourgeoisie, Roy and Fanon argued, would be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent and would play its part without any complex, in the most dignified manner.

It is here that Fanon and Roy grasped the convergence between the national and agrarian questions. Neocolonialism and the degeneration of nationalism could only be avoided, and substantive liberation achieved, by what Fanon called “closing the road to the national bourgeoisie” and instead conducting anti-colonial struggle upon the upward surge of the wretched of the earth — those classes of the colonies subjected to the most absolute appropriation of their labour and resources. Fanon and Roy were speaking specifically about the peasantry, whether still working the land or reconstituted as a landless class in the city. For them, the peasantry alone constituted the revolutionary class, for they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. As Fanon wrote: “A starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him there is no compromise, no coming to terms. Colonisation and decolonisation are simply a question of relative strength.”

This integral anti-colonial position arose from the peasant’s structural location on the margins of the colonial economy, where through outright dispossession or colonial debt mechanisms they were absolutely excluded from access to the surplus extracted from their traditional lands. The intensive appropriation of the peasantry was enforced by an intermediate rural landed bourgeoisie. From the point of view of the peasantry, unlike the bourgeoisie, there could be no compromise with the colonial structure. An anti-colonial programme organised around the interests of the peasantry centred the imperative of taking back land — and insisted that land belongs to those who till it.

This form of anti-colonial revolution took its strongest expression in China, with the peasant basis of the Chinese revolution. It is only by structuring a liberation struggle around the interests of the peasantry that a postcolonial economy can be reorganised in a way that leads to sovereign conditions of development. Through land reform and nationalisation, dependent economic conditions imposed by the legacy of colonisation can be overcome. At the moment of independence, colonies confront a deficit of capital and technology accumulated over centuries of drain from periphery to core, creating the conditions for a reintroduction of dependency. Land reform and redistribution offer one means of overcoming this: as the Chinese experience demonstrated, the overthrow of the intermediary landlord class provisions a form of what Mao called labour accumulation — collective or small-scale agriculture generating surpluses that can be recycled locally into the construction of smaller industries, overcoming the dependency problem without reliance on capital and technology from the core.

The Question of Internationalism

A rule of the capitalist imperialist system has been this: when peoples from the peripheries rise up and truly challenge the structural foundations of the system — the property question, landlordism, the denial of sovereign control over resources — they can be subjected not merely to sanctions but to genocidal war. This has been the history of capitalist imperialism from the sixteenth century to today. The system can accept the existence of peoples in the peripheries so long as they play by its rules, so long as they do not disturb the questions of property and sovereign control over resources. If they remain within a dependent state, they can be permitted to participate under the guise of being “developing peoples” within the capitalist world system. But the moment they pose a genuine challenge, they can invite genocidal war upon themselves.

This is the context in which the question of solidarity arises, and it is the question that Che Guevara posed in his Message to the Tricontinental. Reflecting on the US bombardment of Vietnam — a war launched because the Vietnamese liberation forces had demonstrated, at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, a capacity to return to imperialism a force sufficient to deny its sovereign power over the resources of the periphery — Che wrote:

“There is a sad reality: Vietnam, a nation representing the aspirations, the hopes of a whole world of forgotten peoples, is tragically alone. The solidarity of all progressive forces of the world towards the people of Vietnam today is similar to the bitter irony of the plebeians coaxing on the gladiators in the Roman arena. It is not a matter of wishing success to the victim of aggression, but of sharing his fate. One must accompany him to his death or to victory.”

The parallels with the situation in Gaza are striking. The liberation forces in Gaza challenged the material basis of imperialist power. What followed was the founding rule of capitalist imperialism reasserted: if you refuse the structural conditions imposed upon you, you can be subjected to genocidal warfare. Che’s question — what does it mean to be in solidarity with the Vietnamese? — becomes our question today: what does it mean to be in solidarity with the people of Gaza?

It goes back to the contradiction that Lenin identified. Imperialism stabilises conditions of life in the core. Today, those conditions are increasingly unstable, and the contradictions are heightening — but they are heightening precisely because of resistance from the peripheries. The rise of China, the rise of sovereign development in the South, has restrained the ability of the Global North to drain wealth and resources from the periphery, which in turn impacts its capacity to contain prices, to contain inflation, and to manage the contradiction between capital and labour at home. Yet the fact remains: as we witness our states committing genocide in Gaza, working-class forces in the core have not been able to meet the people of Gaza where Che said we needed to meet the people of Vietnam. The genocide proceeds because the costs against it are not sufficiently high.

We can theorise the question of solidarity. We can attend protests. But there is something still preventing a sense of urgency, of organisation, sufficient to meet the people of the periphery on a plane of shared sacrifice. Che’s challenge remains urgent today — and so does the grounding contradiction of the capitalist world system that makes it so difficult to answer.