Key Arguments

• Marx explicitly defines primitive accumulation as ‘the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner’, except where it is merely a change of form from slaves and serfs to wage-labourers.
• He differentiates between forms of private property depending on whether the proprietor is a worker or a non-worker, making clear that ‘the innumerable different shades of private property’ are merely intermediate forms between these two poles.
• He presents the transformation as a historical process in which ‘private property which is personally earned’ and fuses the independent worker with his conditions of labour ‘is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour.’
• This transformation constitutes ‘the pre-history of capital’, marked by ‘a whole series of forcible methods’ and ‘the expropriation of the great mass of the people from the soil, from the means of subsistence and from the instruments of labour.’

Source Quotes

Chapter 32: The Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation What does the primitive accumulation of capital, i.e. its historical genesis, resolve itself into? In so far as it is not the direct transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals.

In so far as it is not the direct transformation of slaves and serfs into wage-labourers, and therefore a mere change of form, it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner. Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according to whether these private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character.

Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals. But according to whether these private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character. The innumerable different shades of private property which appear at first sight are only reflections of the intermediate situations which lie between the two extremes.

But according to whether these private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character. The innumerable different shades of private property which appear at first sight are only reflections of the intermediate situations which lie between the two extremes. The private property of the worker in his means of production is the foundation of small-scale industry, and small-scale industry is a necessary condition for the development of social production and of the free individuality of the worker himself.

The expropriation of the direct producers was accomplished by means of the most merciless barbarism, and under the stimulus of the most infamous, the most sordid, the most petty and the most odious of passions. Private property which is personally earned, i.e. which is based, as it were, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour. As soon as this metamorphosis has sufficiently decomposed the old society throughout its depth and breadth, as soon as the workers have been turned into proletarians, and their means of labour into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, the further socialization of labour and the further transformation of the soil and other means of production into socially exploited and therefore communal means of production takes on a new form.

Key Concepts

• it only means the expropriation of the immediate producers, i.e. the dissolution of private property based on the labour of its owner.
• Private property, as the antithesis to social, collective property, exists only where the means of labour and the external conditions of labour belong to private individuals.
• according to whether these private individuals are workers or non-workers, private property has a different character.
• The innumerable different shades of private property which appear at first sight are only reflections of the intermediate situations which lie between the two extremes.
• Private property which is personally earned, i.e. which is based, as it were, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent working individual with the conditions of his labour, is supplanted by capitalist private property, which rests on the exploitation of alien, but formally free labour.

Context

Opening of Chapter 32, where Marx recapitulates the concept of primitive accumulation and characterizes it as the historical process that destroys labour-based private property and establishes capitalist private property.