ABSTRACT
The so-called primitive accumulation is no longer primitive. As much recent
scholarship has recognized, the founding events that Marx saw as enabling
capitalist accumulation proper (i.e., the process of expanded reproduction)
are not just preconditions of capitalism but ongoing conditions of its
existence (DeAngelis 1999; Glassman 2006). Moreover, primitive accu-
mulation is itself subject to expanded reproduction, taking on new forms
and developing in new locations (e.g., privatization of state enterprises in
highly industrialized countries), thus leading David Harvey to update the concept under the heading of ‘‘accumulation by dispossession’’ (Harvey
The chapters in this section contribute to our understanding of con-
temporary primitive accumulation in two important ways. First, they build
on the developing literature that addresses what Neil Brenner and Nik
Theodore call ‘‘actually existing neoliberalism’’ (Brenner and Theodore
2002) – neoliberalism in its varied, protean, real-world forms rather than in
its thinly propagandistic self-descriptions. In this, they help us to discern some of what might demarcate the specifically neoliberal dimensions of
contemporary primitive accumulation. Second, the chapters in this section
focus on specific environmental dimensions – and contradictions – of primitive
accumulation that help us see some potential barriers of the neoliberal
project. While the main barrier to capitalist development that Marx saw as
being unleashed by original accumulation was the development of a work-
ing class with nothing to lose but the chains enslaving it to capital, the
possibility of environmental barriers to reproduction of capitalist relations has become an important contemporary reality (O’Connor 1988). But there
is no simple, unified ‘‘nature’’ to pose that barrier, any more than there has
turned out to be a simple, unified working class, so careful investigation of
specific environmental tensions and contradictions in the neoliberal project
is an important task, to which these chapters contribute.
