Most conversations about race and capitalism quickly degenerate into a chicken-or-egg discussion. You know the one. Which came first, racism or our beloved ‘free enterprise system’? I say we’ve had enough of that. The debate is played out. It’s monotonous and tired. But there’s a Marxist term from the debate still relevant to us. I’m referring to ‘primitive accumulation‘.
Does ‘primitive accumulation’ solve these issues? If so, how far does it take us? More broadly, does primitive accumulation account for the role of race in the capitalist system? Or if you approach these issues like, say, Ta-Nehisi Coates approaches them, does it account for the role of capitalism in the racial hierarchy?
Primitive Accumulation
First a bit of history. On Marx’s account of capitalism in Volume 1 of Capital, capital is a system of value-in-motion. The capitalist starts with tools, equipment, raw materials, etc. (constant capital). They add workers’ labor to this, labor the capitalist compensates at a level necessary to sustain the worker (variable capital) – a level determined by social norms varying between workers and across time. Workers add value to the goods they produce, value greater than their compensation (surplus-value). All this value – constant, variable, surplus – flows through the system and composes the value of the finished product. Insofar as the final value is greater than the constant capital plus variable capital, the capitalist profits.
Assuming all goes well for the capitalist, now it’s a big cycle. The capitalist uses profits to acquire more constant and variable capital. They produce more surplus-value, and then they acquire more constant and variable capital. And so on. A wonderful, endless cycle of accumulation.
Fin?
Well, no. There’s a problem here. A different chicken-or-egg problem. There’s only one way to generate new value in this system, and that’s by workers adding labor. But, at least in theory, the capitalist can’t get this labor without paying for it. And so, where did the original capital come from? How did the first capitalists acquire the tools, equipment, and labor to produce the surplus-value they needed to start the cycle?
To be clear, this is a theoretical problem strictly about origins. In mature capitalism, the credit system handles this. Nascent capitalists without cash take out loans. They use loan money to buy equipment and tools and pay workers. Marx discusses this at length in Volume 2 and Volume 3 of Capital. No surprise there. Primitive accumulation addresses the origin problem, not the persistence problem.
But What is It?
So what was this original capital? Classical economists like Adam Smith didn’t really address the issue, or at least didn’t address it seriously. Smith gave a just-so story. He said some workers worked really hard, built up wealth, and then hired other people. To put it politely, that’s a load of happy horseshit. It didn’t happen like that. Marx, on the other hand, first cited inherited wealth. Feudal societies had wealth, after all. Some early capitalists used wealth built up in the feudal system passed to them by their ancestors.
Most original capital, however, comes from a variety of things we’d call ‘theft’. Taking property and wealth from churches and state institutions. Expelling rural farmers from their land and forcing them into urban areas. Blocking access to formerly public resources. Outright colonialism and the clearing of land.
Oh, right, and slavery. From the gold and silver mines of Europe to the sugar plantations of Central America to the cotton fields of the US Deep South, people stole others and milked their labor for wealth.
Put these things together and what do we get? People stole capital and became capitalists. It’s at this point the system builds the wealth needed to start the cycle.
Racialized Slavery
Slavery is ancient, but racialized slavery isn’t. The Romans had a slave system, as did many other older civilizations. But they didn’t organize it around race. Pre-capitalist societies organized slavery around warfare, tribes, clans, and various systems of empire and colonization. Romans conquered and enslaved rivals, and they used slavery as a punishment for rebellious tribes and subjects.
Racialized slavery is a modern institution. And race is a surprisingly modern concept. It simply didn’t exist prior to primitive accumulation because people had better tools for any purpose the concept might have served. Worldwide travel, a worldwide slave trade, and an international settler colonial system were novel systems demanding novel concepts. ‘Race’ is what we got.
Native Americans and Variations in Primitive Accumulation
Theft didn’t look the same everywhere. In some places, slavery was the dominant form. And in other places, seizure of land or church property was the dominant form. Usually it was a mix. If we look at Haiti, Europeans stole land from Indigenous peoples. But Europeans used slavery in Haiti to steal the bulk of their wealth. When Touissaint L’Ouverture and the Black Jacobins went to work, they overthrew that system.
On the other side of things, we can look at the Soviet Union or China. Slavery, or something like it, wasn’t totally absent from these places. Theft of land and other property, however, loomed much larger. That’s where you get much of the initial capital behind their rapid 20th century industrialization. The Soviet Union’s story is one about collectivized agriculture and migration to cities. And in China, it’s about mass expulsion from rural lands and displacement to cities. Assuming we’re leaving out the Song Dynasty, which took even earlier steps toward industrialization. For the record, that dynasty stole land from nobles to generate wealth.
Only in the United States do we see a balance of all forms of primitive accumulation. US capitalists stole wealth through about every means imaginable. They extracted wealth from black Africans via racialized slavery. They stole massive quantities of land from Native Americans. And they internally displaced rural populations, sometimes multiple times. The twin wealth generators of racialized slavery and land theft provided the capital to create the largest wealth machine in Earth’s history.
Back to the First Chicken-or-Egg Question
What this story tells us is why the chicken-or-egg question about race and capitalism is so monotonous and tired. They’re critically linked. And these links are fundamental to how we think about both. Asking which one came first is beside the point and likely to mislead us.
How do we theorize about these things? Some people, like Ibram X. Kendi in Stamped from the Beginning, see race and capitalism as parallel systems developing together. I find this accurate in some ways, but limiting in others. To me it doesn’t make much sense to call them parallel. Without primitive accumulation, an essential component of capitalism, we probably never would’ve had anything like ‘race’. But where Kendi and I agree is that race isn’t a feature of the world independent from our thoughts and ideas. Nor is it something we should identify with biological or other physical markers.
Accumulation by Dispossession
And so, ‘primitive accumulation’ is a key tool in our analytical toolkit. It helps us explain the origins of capitalist wealth, and it helps explain the origins of ‘race’, to boot. Not a bad day’s work. But it runs into limits. Original capital has been around for a long time. Why does race persist? Why does it remain important long after the capitalist cycle begins? And why does it remain even after the abolition of slavery?
I don’t want to present this question unfairly to, let me say, more narrow-minded Marxists. Part of the story is that contemporary racism is vestigial. Slavery left black Americans economically disempowered. People who start off disempowered tend to remain so and they tend to pass this status to their children. Americans who tell a story like this one talk about eradicating the remnants of racism, through, e.g., closing various ‘achievement gaps‘.
It’s an accurate story, but it’s not the whole story. Why? Racism isn’t withering away. Wealth gaps in the US persist and even expand, particularly during times like the 2008 recession. And so, we need a better story here. We need a story accounting for racism’s persistence long past its apparent expiration date.
Newer Forms of Accumulation
One part of that story relates to the ‘wages of whiteness’, as W.E.B. Du Bois put it. To preserve capitalism, the system treats working class whites with surface respect and niceties. And it offers them certain advantages over non-whites, creating the fiction that they’re in control because they hold a status higher than those people. This the core of the system of white privilege, which I’m written about before.
That’s not the only reason race persists. In our current system of financialized capitalism, capital accumulation works through a system of grift and grifters. Capitalists push to privatize public resources, like utilities. They push for various forms of tax breaks and corporate welfare. They create shell companies, non-profits, and many forms of public-private partnerships to transfer resources from taxpayers to their own pockets. Capitalists charge rents, interest, user fees, late fees, transaction fees, service fees, and every other invented method of generating money without creating value.
David Harvey called this system ‘accumulation by dispossession‘, and it’s an ongoing form of capital accumulation building on primitive accumulation. The capitalist system endlessly expands, and it does so in any way people allow it. Far from confined to merely producing goods and services, capital also generates extraneous and extortionary fees.
This system helps racism persist, though probably doesn’t offer a complete explanation for that persistence. US capitalists pioneered many ways to financially exploit black Americans and other people of color. From sharecropping to slumlords to payday lenders, capital accumulated on the backs of black people longer after the US abolished slavery. And it accumulates on the backs of other people of color in novel ways. It’s through this system, and not merely through generational disadvantage, that racism keeps its grip.
