Cocytus: Treachery and the Necessity of Expropriation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Clare Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Primary Agent

This chapter examines part eight of Capital, where Karl Marx highlights the treachery involved in “primitive accumulation.” Marx's narrative that the history of capitalism's creation is a history of treachery finds its most fitting illustrations in the depths of Dante's Hell, where Cocytus, the frozen wasteland at the bottom of the world, entombs the treacherous in ice. In the final three chapters of Capital, Marx shows how the modern state has come to be dependent upon capital accumulation, and, thus, the primary agent of primitive accumulation. The chapter first reconstructs Marx's account of the origins of the modern proletariat and of the capitalist class in order to harmonize his views on primitive accumulation with his understanding of capitalist exploitation. It then considers Marx's argument against separatism and petty production, and more specifically his contention that the working class can exit capitalism only through a confrontation with the necessity of expropriation.

From primitive accumulation to entangled accumulation: Decentring Marxist Theory of capitalist expansion

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-164
Author(s):  
Guilherme Leite Gonçalves ◽  
Sérgio Costa
Keyword(s):  
Capital Accumulation ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Continuous Process ◽  
Sharing Economy ◽  
Marxist Theory ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
History Of ◽  
Care Economy

During the last few decades, the concept of primitive accumulation ( ursprüngliche Akkumulation) introduced by Karl Marx and expanded by Rosa Luxemburg has been revived and improved. Accordingly, scholars have used this framework not to characterize a past moment in the history of capitalism, but to grasp the continuous process of coupling and uncoupling geographical and social spheres in the capital accumulation in different fields: financialization, the care economy, green grabbing, the sharing economy, real estate bubbles, data mining, etc. Despite the quality and productivity of these debates, they are still focused on authors and phenomena observed in the Global North, ignoring a long tradition of similar discussions developed especially in Latin America. The article seeks to decentre these debates by taking seriously into account approaches which address primitive accumulation from the perspective of (post)colonial and (post)slave societies. It coins the concept entangled accumulation to emphasize the interdependencies between practices of exploitation and expropriation, wage and slave labour, state power and illegal violence, and capitalist and non-capitalist economies, which have shaped capital accumulation throughout history.

What was primitive accumulation? Reconstructing the origin of a critical concept

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Clare Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Primitive Accumulation ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
History Of ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Historical Necessity ◽  
Labour Power

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criticisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ does not deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threatened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state.

On the Lives of Modern State Law

2022 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Samera Esmeir
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Modern State ◽  
State Law ◽  
The World ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
History Of ◽  
British Colonial ◽  
Intimate Life ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Key Questions

Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.

Soviet and Comintern Policies Toward the British General Strike of 1926

1953 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
Morton H. Cowden
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Active Participation ◽  
Strong Interest ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
General Strike

The first general strike in the history of England, with its mass labor action, was bound to attract strong interest from the workers' state which proclaimed as its rallying cry: “Workers of All Countries, Unite!” Soviet concern for the British working class followed logically from the active participation of Marx and Engels in the movement, and the continued attention shown by Lenin to this important “section” of the “world proletariat.”

Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’*

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Post
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
World Market ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThe notion of the labour-aristocracy is one of the oldest Marxian explanations of working-class conservatism and reformism. Despite its continued appeal to scholars and activists on the Left, there is no single, coherent theory of the labour-aristocracy. While all versions argue working-class conservatism and reformism reflects the politics of a privileged layer of workers who share in ‘monopoly’ super-profits, they differ on the sources of those super-profits: national dominance of the world-market in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels), imperialist investments in the ‘colonial world’/global South (Lenin and Zinoviev), or corporate monopoly in the twentieth century (Elbaum and Seltzer). The existence of a privileged layer of workers who share monopoly super-profits with the capitalist class cannot be empirically verified. This essay presents evidence that British capital’s dominance of key-branches of global capitalist production in the Victorian period, imperialist investment and corporate market-power can not explain wage-differentials among workers globally or nationally, and that relatively well-paid workers have and continue to play a leading rôle in radical and revolutionary working-class organisations and struggles. An alternative explanation of working-class radicalism, reformism, and conservatism will be the subject of a subsequent essay.

3. The history of political thought and Marxism

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Friedrich Engels

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.

scholarly journals Neuer Atheismus: New Atheism in Germany

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-51 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Zenk
Keyword(s):  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Natural Phenomenon ◽  
Daniel Dennett ◽  
The Public ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
New Atheism

Matthias Knutzen (born 1646 – died after 1674) was the first author we know of who self-identified as an atheist (Schröder 2010: 8). Before this, the term had solely been used pejoratively to label others. While Knutzen is almost completely forgotten now, authors such as Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, or Sigmund Freud are better remembered and might even be considered classic writers in the history of the atheist criticism of religion. Whatever may be said about the influence of any one of these authors, there is no doubt that Germany looks back on a notable history in this field. About a decade ago, Germany’s capital Berlin was even dubbed ‘the world capital of atheism’ by the American sociologist Peter L. Berger (2001: 195).Given this situation, I am bewildered by the expression ‘New Atheism’. Yet, undoubtedly, the term has become a catchphrase that is commonly used in the public discourse of several countries. The most prominent authors to be labelled ‘New Atheists’ are Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion, 2006), Daniel Dennett (Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, 2006), Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, 2004, and Letter to a Christian Nation, 2006), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Every­thing, 2007). These authors and their books – all of them international bestsellers – have been intensely discussed around the world, including in Germany. In this paper, I intend to illuminate some of the characteristics and remarkable traits of the German discourse on the ‘New Atheism’. Here we can distinguish between two phases. The German media initially characterised ‘New Atheism’ as a rather peculiarly American phenomenon. However, it soon came to be understood to be a part of German culture as well.

7. Institutions and States

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Ferdinand
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Weak States ◽  
Political Behaviour ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regular Patterns

This chapter deals with institutions and states. Institutions are essentially regular patterns of behaviour that provide stability and predictability to social life. Some institutions are informal, with no formally laid down rules such as the family, social classes, and kinship groups. Others are more formalized, having codified rules and organization. Examples include governments, parties, bureaucracies, legislatures, constitutions, and law courts. The state is defined as sovereign, with institutions that are public. After discussing the concept of institutions and the range of factors that structure political behaviour, the chapter considers the multi-faceted concept of the state. It then looks at the history of how the European type of state and the European state system spread around the world between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. It also examines the modern state and some of the differences between strong states, weak states, and democratic states.

8. Institutions and States

2020 ◽  
pp. 162-184
Author(s):  
Peter Ferdinand
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Weak States ◽  
Political Behaviour ◽  
The Family ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Regular Patterns

This chapter deals with institutions and states. Institutions are essentially regular patterns of behaviour that provide stability and predictability to social life. Some institutions are informal, with no formally laid down rules such as the family, social classes, and kinship groups. Others are more formalized, having codified rules and organization. Examples include governments, parties, bureaucracies, legislatures, constitutions, and law courts. The state is defined as sovereign, with institutions that are public. After discussing the concept of institutions and the range of factors that structure political behaviour, the chapter considers the multi-faceted concept of the state. It then looks at the history of how the European type of state and the European state system spread around the world between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. It also examines the modern state and some of the differences between strong states, weak states, and democratic states.

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