What was原始积累？从当代争论回到马克思

Roberts, William Clare. forthcoming.’What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept’. European Journal of Political Theory.

（图片来源：《月薪娇妻》）

“原始积累”是个原始的概念吗？是过时的概念吗？

——不是。

1. 当代：“原始积累”仍被应用于资本主义研究，但被重新命名、定义与理解

比如： we are living in ‘an era of primitive accumulation’ (Federici, 2012: 138) When 大卫哈维也说David Harvey (2004: 64) claims that ‘the hallmark of [. . .] ‘‘the new imperialism’’’ of the 21^st century is ‘accumulation by dispossession’, he is rechristening and reformulating Marx’s notion.

大卫哈维是说：原始积累是资本主义内在的。

According to Harvey, however, ‘accumulation based upon predation, fraud, and violence’ is immanent in the operations of capitalism as such ... They all seek to reformulate the concept so as to name the ‘political violence operative in the capitalization of social reproduction’ (Ince, 2014: 106)

2. 回到马克思：原始积累就是资本积累吗？作为资本前史的原始积累

在马克思提出“原始积累”之前，当时的圣西门主义者都是将圈地与资本积累联系起来，作为一种伦理批判

Most socialists echoed the theory of the Saint-Simonians, according to which the accumulation of capital, and the attendant exploitation of the workers, are the direct consequence of the conquest of the land and the extortion this allowed the landed to exact from the poor producer.

——In England, this theory was promulgated by the influential Owenite William Thompson, who declared that the present system of commerce was an ‘empire of force and fraud’ (Thompson, 1850: 255)

但是，马克思是19世纪社会主义者中的例外

同代人忽视了劳动过程作为资本主义系统不同于其它的之处

He thought this way of thinking, by figuring capitalist exploitation as just another form of rent-seeking or extortion, misled the labouring classes in their struggle for self-emancipation ... Marx argued that exploitation takes a novel form under capitalism. ——如果说之前是强制劳动，那么资本主义则是“自由的”劳动市场，通过工资的形式，以劳动日、劳动强度、机器化过程来与以往的强制劳动、土地圈占的财富积累相区分。

Second, as much as Marx condemns the violent expropriation of the peasantry, he also justifies it as a necessary step on the way to the communist future

马克思故而指定资本的能动性，与原始积累区分：原始积累尽管是资本的前史，由此区分 财富as原始积累与财富as资本增殖。

Marx is concerned to specify the agency of capital. Marx (1976: 875, 928) identifies primitive accumulation as ‘the prehistory of capital’, not in order to consign it to the past, but in order to underscore the distinction between hording up wealth – money, land, products, whatever – and using it as capital. The violence of primitive accumulation can amass the former, but cannot make the accumulated wealth function as capital.

——Within capitalism, capital is the agent of accumulation by exploitation, not the agent of primitive accumulation.

3.回到马克思：资产阶级从何而来？是通过原始积累掠夺而来吗？？

——工资劳动者：由领主的土地圈地而来

Marx argues that landlords amassed land through enclosure and expropriation, thereby creating also the modern class of wage labourers; the capitalists then rose up between these two classes, coming to dominate both by exploiting the newly available resource of unattached labour-power ...

——资产阶级：在封建领主与农民/劳工之间迸出来，是机会性的、

The capitalists then rose up between these two classes, coming to dominate both by exploiting the newly available resource of unattached labour-power ... The capitalists’ power comes from being neither the conquerors nor the plundered. ... Marx answers by claiming that they arose from bailiffs, share-croppers and free peasants who were lucky enough to not be expropriated by the land-grabbers, and who were able to capitalize on the enclosures of common lands and the expropriation of their neighbours by expanding their field of production, utilizing the commons for pasturage, manuring larger plots and employing larger gangs of farm-hands in cooperative labour ... Thirty years later, Marx would insist that the landowners and the capitalists are distinct classes, noting that, ‘in England, the capitalist is mostly not even the owner of the land on which his factory stands’ (Marx, 2010: 343).

——Marx calls primitive accumulation ‘the prehistory of capital’, in short, not because capital (or capitalism) has its historical origin in acts of violence and theft, but because modern industrial capital originates in the opportunistic exploitation of new forms of freedom created by acts of violence and theft. Violence and heft are prehistoric because they cannot create capital, but only capital’s preconditions.

4. 回到马克思：国家服务于资本积累（即当代者认为的原始积累）吗？

原有看法分两种，国家是阶级统治的工具vs. 资产阶级的寄生虫

The first, most commonly associated with ‘the Marxist theory of the state’, figures the state as an instrument of class domination. The second figures the state as a parasite, striving for or achieving a sort of independence vis-a` -vis the bourgeoisie (Hunt, 1984: 4).

但是，作者认为马克思是整合观点，国家是资本所依赖的能动者，既自主又依赖

I argue that Part Eight of Capital contains a third model of the state, one that integrates elements of the instrumental and parasitic models: the state as dependent agent of capital. 

——The state is parasitic in that it depends upon the accumulation of capital (as I will discuss below), and this dependency accounts for both the state’s ‘relative autonomy’ from the actually existing class of capitalists, and for its very imperfect instrumental relation to capital as such. The state under capital is self-activating but subservient, a servile and corrupt henchman rather than a free agent.

——国家有兴趣搞资本积累是由于税收和债务之间的关系。

Marx does not try to explain how the state came to have an interest in the accumulation of capital. He does, however, indicate mechanisms by which this interest is preserved and recreated. The relationship between tax revenues and public indebtedness is one such mechanism.

——也就是说，国家的角色，依赖于资本积累，但是经济增长也是其自身的目的

As most commentators note, the state is the overwhelming agent of primitive accumulation. What goes unnoted is why. According to Marx, the state pursues policies of primitive accumulation because it has become dependent upon capital accumulation – economic growth – for its own existence and functioning ... these processes underscore both the complementarity of state action and capitalist production

5. 回到马克思：政治后果是什么？

Marx incessantly promoted within the IWMA the view that labourers should organize themselves by and for the sake of intervening in politics at the level of the state for the sake of dismantling the state. The end of Capital is one more piece of this advocacy.

——相较于当代从伦理上理解原始积累来批评资本主义，作者认为回到马克思是要政治与实践问题。

Capitalism poses not a moral or ethical problem, but a practical and political one

（Sociological理论缸第160期）

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