Between Equal Rights: Primitive Accumulation and Capital’s Violence

• Published date: 01 December 2018
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717748420
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591717748420

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(6) 885 –914

© The Author(s) 2017

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591717748420

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Article

Between Equal Rights:

Primitive Accumulation

and Capital’s Violence

Onur Ulas Ince1

Abstract

This essay attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent

analyses have adopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of

capital” for investigating the forcible methods by which the conditions of capital

accumulation are reproduced in the present. I argue that the current scholarship

is limited by a certain functionalism in its theorization of ongoing primitive

accumulation. The analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation, I

contend, can be better performed by the concepts of “capital-positing violence”

and “capital-preserving violence.” In coining these new concepts, I first refine the

conceptual core of primitive accumulation as the coercive capitalization of social

relations of reproduction, which falls into sharpest relief in the violent history

of colonial capitalism. I then elucidate this conceptual core with reference to

Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion and Walter Benjamin’s

reflections on law-making and law-preserving violence. The resultant concepts

of capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, I conclude, can illuminate both

the historical and the quotidian operations of the politico-juridical force that has

been constitutive of capitalism down to our present moment.

Keywords

capitalism, violence, colonialism, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt

Between equal rights, force decides.

—Karl Marx

1Singapore Management University, Singapore

Corresponding Author:

Onur Ulas Ince, Assistant Professor of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Singapore

Management University, 90 Stamford Road, Level 4, 178903, Singapore.

Email: ulasince@smu.edu.sg

748420PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717748420Political TheoryInce

research-article2017

886 Political Theory 46(6)

The turbulent course of neoliberal capitalism in the last four decades,

magnified by the 2008 financial crisis and its socioeconomic fallout, has

revived scholarly interest in the violence of capitalism as manifested both in

the strategies by which capitalist relations have been globally restructured

and in the social and ecological costs that such restructuration has entailed. A

growing number of researchers have recently resorted to Karl Marx’s notion

of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating the aggressive

processes of capitalist reorganization and intensification, variously instantiat-

ing in corporate empowerment, upward distribution of global wealth, hyper-

exploitation of labor in global commodity chains, finance-driven dispossession

and fiscal austerity, and new forms of commercial land grabbing.1 The cur-

rent appeal of the notion of primitive accumulation is not difficult to explain.

Marx himself elaborated this notion in his account of the violent origins of

the capitalist mode of production. His was a story written in “letters of blood

and fire,” in which he narrated the emergence of capitalism from the dispos-

session of direct producers and their coercion into waged exploitation by the

open extra-economic force of the state.2 In appropriating primitive accumula-

tion for contemporary analysis, commentators have maintained that such vio-

lent methods have never been wholly superseded by a purportedly mature

and peaceful capitalism, and that capitalism has always depended for its

reproduction on renewed acts of primitive accumulation carried out by extra-

economic coercion. Many now concur that primitive accumulation is a per-

manent feature of capitalism and drives the expansion of capitalist logics into

new social and ecological domains, though disagreement abounds over the

precise conceptual and empirical scope of the term.

What this essay sets out to address is the striking paucity of sustained

reflection in this theoretical renaissance on the status of violence and coer-

cion that belong to the definition of primitive accumulation. Existing studies

often focus on the functions, mechanisms, and effects of primitive accumula-

tion without a matching attention to the element of force that actuates them.3

I address this lacuna by mounting two interlocking arguments. First, I argue

that the violence of primitive accumulation harbors an irreducible political

dimension, understood as its constitutive status in founding and grounding

the institutional background conditions of capitalism. The political aspect of

this violence resides in its fundamental “lawmaking” capacity to constitute

not only a juridical but also a social order by “subsuming” (annihilating, sub-

ordinating, or reconstituting) existing institutions, practices, and norms of

social reproduction in ways that render them commensurate with the capital-

ist order of private property, labor, and the law of value. Second, I maintain

that the “colonial empire” rather than the nation-state furnished the politico-

legal framework within which capitalism historically emerged as a