ABSTRACT
In the ‘reformist-managerial’ approach, dislocation is a mere technical issue that is de-linked from development logic; this in turn secures the de-politicization of the issue of dislocation. Such a demotion at times and sheer indifference at other times to the moment of violence is not something peculiar to development logic or its precursor in colonialism. Its root is roughly traceable to how the classical political economists tackled the issue of dislocation during the formative period of industrial capitalism in Europe. In an extensive study, Perelman (2000, 2001) reveals how and why classical
political economy foreclosed the ‘origin’ moment or the ‘pre-history’ of capitalism and foregrounded instead an ahistorical and a naturalized facade of capitalism. In such renditions, the brute force of history that brought into being capitalism was deemed necessary and inevitable. It was defended through a displacement of the issue of force into the domain of morality encapsulated in a war against the sloth, indolence and leisure of the peasants and artisans. The elements of force included separation of direct producers frommeans of production through enclosure and then enacting the privatization of commons. At other times, it took the form of colonialism or the institutionalization of a disciplinary matrix to set up conceptions of wage labour, shop floor discipline, etc. Marx (1970, 1973, 1990) presented a systematic analysis and critique of this phenomenon by invoking what has since come to be known as ‘primitive accumulation’.1 Marx’s point was simple. This dislocation is neither accidental nor inevitable. Marx formulated the category primitive accumulation to represent the socio-political dimension of dislocation in the context of the origin and formation of capitalism. From aMarxian perspective, the erasure or the defence of violence telescoped
in the constitution of capitalism continued from classical political economy to its modern incarnation in neo-classical economics. There is complete silence on this issue as far as hardcore mainstream economics is concerned and, in
the case of development discourse, the moment of violence in dislocation is displaced to and subsumed under a progressive logic of history. This turns the moment of dislocation into the liberating ground of some future gain. Not surprisingly, the current ‘reformist-managerial’ agenda of compensation and resettlement evacuates from the discursive terrain the decisive moment of force that initiates the act of ‘separation’. It gets lost in the cacophony of developmental progress that such a ‘separation’ is supposed to usher in. The evolution of capitalism, of its aleatory formation, disappears into the march towards what the mainstream development discourse beckons as a ‘paradise’ in waiting. The ethic of dislocation in mainstream discourses is analysed in terms of failures or inadequacies of compensation and resettlement. It hardly pertains to a question concerning the event and issue of dislocation per se, that is, the point of separation itself. In this way, the issue of dislocation is subordinated to the rather ubiquitous consensus on development. By displacing the central moment of force involved in dislocation, the discourses of compensation and resettlement end up erasing or, at best, subordinating the socio-political history of dislocation. In the process, the intimate association of the socio-political history of dislocation with the origin and formation of capitalism is erased. In this rendition, force is, as if, the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one; it is itself an economic power. Marxian theory deploys the category primitive accumulation to highlight
the close connection between dislocation and capitalism by showing how and why the socio-political history of dislocation fundamentally constitutes the origin of capitalism. Capitalism materializes within the overdetermination of structures-subjects pertaining to economy, authority, meaning and nature. One of the fundamental concepts used by Marx to trace the violent materiality of the origin of capitalism was primitive accumulation. It represents the role of violence in the social formation of varied conditions of existence of capital (e.g. commodity, private property, shop floor discipline, etc.), such that the direct producers are separated from their objective conditions of existence, including their means of production. This guarantees a face off between two groups – the capitalists with capital and the workers with no possession and nothing to sell except their labour power. Primitive accumulation ensures the origin of the capitalist organization of exploitation. Unlike in the North, primitive accumulation has appeared in the South
through the colonial and the development discourses within which the category third world has played a crucial role in legitimizing the logic of violence associated with primitive accumulation. A debate has erupted within Marxism regarding whether primitive accumulation should be seen as a determinist and a necessary moment of history or whether it should be read in a nonteleological way. While we sympathize with the latter for reasons we will explain, we are somewhat at unease with the terms of debate. Our disquiet stems from the fact that the original idea of primitive accumulation, even when displaced to a non-teleological terrain, remains somewhat Euro-centric. This reflects the inability of the literature to ground primitive accumulation in
the context of development generally and more specifically in the context of a (foregrounded) third world-ism and a (foreclosed) world of the third. The challenge then is to confront and reveal the specificity of primitive accumulation in the South, that is, in the form dislocation takes via the development logic. Through our conceptualization of primitive accumulation, we demonstrate
how modes of violence qua dislocation are inalienably tied to the logic of development and how this development logic masks the adverse effects of the growth march of capitalism. Consequently, far from being a de-politicized moment, the event of dislocation telescoped under development logic is a part of the hegemonic move to foreclose the world of the third through the foregrounding of third world in order to allow the transition towards capitalism to proceed undeterred in the South; it is also to institute a ‘diachronic relegation of the other’ (here world of the third) to third world – third world as the ‘survived pre-history’ of a Western industrialized urban present; such diachronic relegation is premised on a ‘denial of coevalness’ – coevalness of the capitalist ethiclanguage and world of the third as a non-capitalist ethic-language (see Bunzl 2002: x). One salutary characteristic of our Marxian theorization of primitive accu-
mulation lies in its ability to capture within its framework the clashing opinions unfolding over the current forms of dislocation in India and elsewhere. Our theorization, on the one hand, explains the ‘reformist-managerial’ consideration of dislocation as a teleological movement of history that materializes by chopping, block by block, the devalued third world (and hence is progressive in the hegemonic development register). On the other hand, it also captures the ‘radical-movementist’ approach as situating dislocation in terms of an explicit mode of violence enacted over the world of the third (and hence is unethical and unjust). We start by exploring the movement from the orthodox rendition of primitive
accumulation to the current debate on primitive accumulation in which efforts are made, albeit in a somewhat Euro-centric orientation, to move the category beyond its determinist moorings. Incorporating the advances made in this debate, the next chapter will seek to posit a new reading in which class and world of the third are incorporated in the theorization of primitive accumulation. In the process, we shall explore how the varied insights emerging through this journey enrich our understanding regarding the questions and also the forms of dislocation.
