ABSTRACT
The “intermestic negotiations in south-eastern Europe,” the “Balkan routes to state formation,” or the deadly but profitable militia economies in war-torn Lebanon evoke a similar picture to Mandeville’s account of early capitalism, but on a more global scale. Although embedded in the neoliberal schemes of a developed global capitalism, the political economy
of contemporary intra-state war reminds us rather of the “original economic sin” which Marx discerned in the period of “primitive accumulation.” Partly coinciding with Mandeville’s historical background, this period was not characterized by the “idyllic” means of liberal economic appropriation such as formal property rights and contracted labor. Quite the contrary, the historical signature of this infancy of the capitalist mode of production had been drawn by conquest, enslavement, robbery and murder. Whether in the form of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British colonialism, in the trade wars among European nations, or in the religious and civil wars that destroyed the social orders of Europe’s traditional societies, physical force was the crucial means of primitive accumulation, or in the words of Karl Marx: “Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (Marx 1867: 779).2
