Towards a new global gender order? Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law

This paper is a contribution to the argument that Engels’s work remains topical and may provide us with the analytical tools necessary to approach contemporary manifestations of capitalist contradictions. Based on Engels’s work on political economy (with emphasis on his contribution to the labour theory of value and the articulation of the law on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall) it will critically review the concept of “surveillance capitalism” as developed by Shoshana Zuboff, in order to explain central aspects of the process of digital surveillance. In particular, it will criticise the view expressed by Zuboff that surveillance capitalism constitutes a break with capitalism’s past and can be tamed through an enhancement of democratic accountability and regulation. Marxist contributions to the critique of digital surveillance have already approached this phenomenon in a many-sided manner. This paper builds upon these contributions and suggests that the exponential growth of digital platforms can be explained as a direct result of the development of capitalist contradictions, especially the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production as expressed in the law of the falling rate of profit.

Download Full-text

Post-socialist “primitive accumulation of capital” and the law

Acta Juridica Hungarica ◽

10.1556/ajur.49.2008.2.1 ◽

2008 ◽

Vol 49 (2) ◽

pp. 143-175

Author(s):

Tamás Sárközy

Keyword(s):

Primitive Accumulation ◽

The Law

Download Full-text

In Wakefield’s laboratory: Tangata Whenua into property/labour in Te Waipounamu

Journal of Sociology ◽

10.1177/1440783319893522 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 56 (2) ◽

pp. 229-246

Author(s):

Simon Barber

Keyword(s):

Political Economy ◽

New Zealand ◽

Social Relations ◽

Social Situation ◽

Primitive Accumulation

This article follows the alchemical political economy of Edward Gibbon Wakefield for whom Kāi Tahu whenua served as a laboratory. Wakefield’s clever formula for the transubstantiation of an incendiary social situation in Britain into new terrain for capital was designed to secure the transplantation of English economic and social relations to the colonies to ensure the persistence of a landless class compelled to sell their labour for wages. Ingeniously, the transport of that labour to the colonies was to be paid for by the market in land in the new colony: Kāi Tahu would be made to fund their own colonisation. I track the fate of capital’s settler dream for ready land and labour as it was brought into being by the New Zealand Company, subsequently taken over by the Crown, and as it continues into our present. The argument is divided into two parts. The first is the classical moment of primitive accumulation, clearing people from the land to provide a market in land and labour, ‘legal’ dispossession, and commodification. The second is the more recent continuation of the initial processes of dispossession and commodification as these assert themselves in processes of redress and as they are expressed in the corporatisation of Ngāi Tahu.

Download Full-text

Pirates of Silicon Valley: State of exception and dispossession in Web 2.0

First Monday ◽

10.5210/fm.v15i7.2799 ◽

2010 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Peter Jakobsson ◽

Fredrik Stiernstedt

Keyword(s):

Web 2.0 ◽

Silicon Valley ◽

The State ◽

State Of Exception ◽

Primitive Accumulation ◽

Free Labor ◽

Capitalist Economy ◽

The Law ◽

Cultural Commons ◽

Informational Economy

This paper investigates a paradox in the reception of Web 2.0. While some of its services are seen as creators of a new informational economy and are hence publicly legitimized, other features are increasingly under surveillance and policed, although in reality the differences between these services is far from obvious. Our thesis is that we are currently experiencing a temporary postponement of the law, in the context of Web 2.0. Agamben’s work on the state of exception is here used to theorize the informational economy as an ongoing dispossession, under the guise of ‘networked production’. This dispossession is seen as a parallel to the concept of ‘primitive accumulation’, as a means of moving things from the exterior to the interior of the capitalist economy. This theory lets us problematize the concept of free labor, the metaphor of the enclosure, and puts into question the dichotomy between copyright and cultural commons.

Download Full-text