Primitive Accumulation and Political Economy

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Posted by Ch. Mahmood Anwar, community karma 799
Primitive accumulation is a roughshod process of dividing population and disassociating them from their various economic means of satisfying their lives. This process is known to create extreme privation and to bring ordinary people at subsistence level.

The same furious phenomenon gave birth to the capitalistic conceptions and responsible for unpleasant transformations at personal and societal level, according to many famous British chroniclers like Joan Thirsk. This dispossession was legalized by using most barbarian and merciless ways Marx (1977: 928). To accomplish this expropriation, feudal minds and bourgeoisie smashed the property and traditional rights of original producers like small farmers, tenants, sharecroppers and labourers with the help of state governments and courts (Tigar and Levy, 1977). Simply we can say that this legal dispossession was manufactured synthetically to create market of labor. Soon bourgeoisie felt that this enclosure is not sufficiently fulfilling the labor supply demands. It was analysed by land voracious devils that there exists many natural resources helping the ordinary people in survival (like wild herbs, water, coal, animals etc) (Everitt, 1967: 405). Hence, they turned the traditional economy into a political economy by vanishing the traditional rights of deprived rural people politically to reduce the wage level and to make the labour supply sufficient.  So, pragmatically this satanic policy annihilated the natural life and barriers to the accumulation (Foucault, 1979: 85). The horrific side effects of this primitive accumulation includes making people totally dependent on the political economy, destroying their means of living, and restricting people to struggle against the dinosaur system of wage labor market created by the blood sucking gentry (Perelman, 2000).

     Hutcheson (1749) wrote that primitive accumulation actually hides the formal slavery under the cover of “working class” as the wage market mechanism concurrently controls the state of deprivation. Similarly, Patrick Colquhoun (1815: 110) confessed that the maintenance of poverty is an essential ingredient to a society’s state of civilization. He noted that poverty is the source of wealth, if there is no poverty, than there would be no labor, no riches, no comfort and no benefits to the wealth owners. At this point it can be inferred clearly that to maintain the so-called civilization of the society, level of poverty should be increased to benefit society’s wealth accumulators. As far as this deprivation will aggrandize in the society the members having nothing to sell will sell their physical power, arms and brains Marx (1865: 55-56). In addition, it should be noted that classical political economists adopted a dual policy, at the same time admiring the leisure deeds of fortunate while condemning the acedia and languid of less fortunate. They argued that the deflated prices of basic goods required for survival increase sloth. The people can be compelled to servitude by inflating demand for basic goods and as a result the prices inflate Hutcheson (1755, 2:318-19). These strategies cut throat of already deprived people now with almost no purchase power and hence compelled them to enter into labor market and servitude.

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