The concept of "primitive accumulation" comes from Adam Smith, who argued that the cycle of capital accumulation required an "original accumulation" to get up and running. Towards the end of Capital Vol. 1, Marx described a process of "primitive accumulation," consisting of acts of brute force and robbery ("non-economic coercion") which laid the basis for the capitalist mode of production(which, in its developed form, involves "purely economic coercion"). The central episode of "primitive accumulation," for Marx, was the enclosure of English peasant lands. He showed in great detail how the English peasantry was expropriated by the fuedal lords and nascent bourgeois farmers, with the collusion of the state (for example through vagabondage laws), for the purpose of converting common lands into sheep walks for the wool industry, and other export-oriented proto-capitalist agricultural enterprises.
Marx also threw in colonial plunder in a famous, although unfortunately brief, passage:
"The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve of the commercial hunting of black-skins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation."
The enclosures swelled the ranks of the landless proletariat, giving the city bourgeoisie a supply of workers who were neither guild members nor bonded serfs; and this new urban population hugely increased the domestic market for agricultural produce from the new market-oriented, cash-crop-producing farms and "manufactories." The necessary quantities of labor and capital, the latter including colonial profits, became available to a politically emboldened English bourgeoisie in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The "really revolutionary road" of the M-C-M' cycle was undertaken.
The main difference between Marx and Luxemburg is that, for Marx, "non-economic coercion" is a preparatory stage for capitalism proper, whereas for Luxemburg it is an ongoing aspect of capitalism in its confrontation with "direct producers" not yet separated from the means of production. And this difference is rooted in their opposing conceptions of how "total social reproduction" works under capitalism. Luxemburg argued, contra Marx, that capitalism cannot work as a closed system any more than it could begin with "purely economic coercion". Marx predicted overproduction crises and falling rates of profit as an outcome of the M-C-M' cycle, but thought that these contradictions would produce proletarian revolution in Europe. But Luxemburg saw (correctly, in my view) that capitalists could resolve these contradictions at the core of the system through renewed rounds of primitive accumulation, exporting surplus labor and capital to the colonies, and swelling the ranks of the global proletariat by expropriating peasant lands in new territories. Writing in the years before WWI, she observed that the European colonizers in Asia and Africa were repeating the English enclosure movement on an epic scale by forcing peasants to grow cash crops, or work on European-owned plantations, for wages to pay "head taxes"; implementing forced labor regimes no different from the English vagabondage laws; and turning "native" landlords into market-oriented cash crop farmers with tenant sharecroppers. They also trafficked in indentured labor, just like in 17th century England.
Luxemburg's argument is borne out by the history of the 20th century, which saw the greatest enclosure of peasant lands in world history, as well as a vast growth of the world's proletariat (defined as those without access to subsistence agricultural production, who must sell their labor for wages). This process especially ramped up after WWII: in 1950, only 29% of the total world population, and only 16% of population of the Third World, lived in cities. By 2000, around half of the total world population, and 41% of the Third World population, lived in cities. The driving force behind this massive exodus of peasants into the world's cities was, just like in Western Europe in previous centuries, the introduction of capitalist agriculture into peasant societies with feudal/tributary property relations. Peasants hand-tilling rice paddies or plots of corn couldn't compete with vast acreages of machine-harvested monocrops, using petrochemical fertilizers, producing for world instead of village markets. This is the line of continuity between the forced urbanization Rostow and Huntington advocated for Vietnam and the "Green Revolution" of Robert McNamara's World Bank.
At the same time, the massive dumping of subsidized US and European grain exports on the Third World (misrepresented as aid, but really a gift to the agribusiness lobbies) threw literally millions of peasants of the land. As we speak, Guatemalan and Honduran farmers are being put out of business by U.S. companies like Cargill and Conagra dumping subsidized corn exports under the CAFTA "free trade agreement." 2 million Mexican farmers were driven off the land by NAFTA, and CAFTA is an extension of that into Central America and the Dominican Republic. (FTAs with Colombia and Peru are next.) Ditto African cotton and sugar producers facing EU export dumping under the CAP. This is the latest round of enclosure, or "accumulation by dispossession," to use David Harvey's term.
Of course, old-fashioned landgrabbing by force is still taking place. A look at Colombia, the Congo, Palestine or Iraq disproves the notion of that outright expropriation of peasant lands is a one-time stage of "primitive accumulation." But the pillage of resources is driving rural-to-urban migration through a larger mechanism: ecological destruction. Sociologists John M. Shandra and his colleagues provide numerous contemporary case studies of peasants being driven off the land, not by soldiers or landlords, but by its newfound uninhabitability.
On Cambodia:
"Large-scale deforestation and the associated ecological devastation have increased the occurrence of drought and flooding as well as erosion, so that soil fills channels carrying fresh water. Although the exploitation of the forests in Cambodia often has been the result of violent political conflict, this environmental degradation could soon make sections of the country uninhabitable, thereby precipitating increased rural to urban migration, as the livelihoods of communities that depend on the forests and the lake for food, shelter, and water resources are destroyed (Hong 2001). "
On the Philippines:
"In the rural provinces of this country, most people depend directly on forests for their livelihoods. Deforestation is making large numbers of Filipinos even poorer and forcing them to migrate to Manila, adding to its already sprawling population (Broad and Cavanagh 1993). Broad and Cavanagh describe this process in the following way:
'To witness this "push factor” for ourselves, we leave Manila's pollution and crowds behind and travel to the countryside. There we see that Manila's pollution represents but a small part of the Philippine environmental crisis. There we begin to catch a glimpse of a fundamental difference between the environmental problems of Manila and those in the countryside. As we venture outside Manila, we discover that most environmental problems involve the depletion and degradation of natural resources at the start of the production chain. Forests and fishing grounds for most Filipinos are sources of livelihoods. Countries like the Philippines are generally primary producers, with large subsistence sectors totally dependent upon natural resources. To live, people eat and sell the fish they catch or crops they grow-and typically, these people exist at the margin. For them, natural resource degradation becomes an immediate and life- and livelihood-threatening crisis. (1993:23-24) '"
On Brazil:
"In Brazil, people fleeing the drought ridden Sertao area in the northeast are legion and legend. Not surprisingly, much of their movement is hidden from the headlines. It is an internal migration that has been going on for decades. One famous saying sums up this movement: "In Sertao, one stays and dies or leaves and suffers." (1992:37) In this Brazilian province, each prolonged period of drought forces a few hundred thousand more people off the land. Deforestation was and remains high as forests were first cleared for coffee, then cotton, and today manioc. Field (1992:38) continues,
'As the soil becomes increasingly infertile, people move to the growing coastal cities. Small landholders move when their subsistence yields drop as their families grow. Other people are forced to move when large landowners worry about declining productivity and expel residents to make way for cattle. '"
On Haiti:
"Deforestation facilitating urbanward migration is also prevalent in Haiti. On discovery by Europeans, Haiti was densely forested. During its colonization by the French, it became known for its mahoganies and other hardwoods. After achieving independence in 1804, Haitians broke up large plantations and established a thriving peasant economy. Over the next two centuries, farmers cut forests for fuel and to make space for a growing population. Between the farmers and timber merchants, Haiti's forests disappeared (Field 1992). Today, Haitians struggle just to feed themselves, as mass soil erosion from deforestation has rendered the land unsuitable for agriculture. When that struggle or the threat to life is too great, rural residents push into urban slums or "flee their country because of political problems exacerbated by a ravaged environment" (Field 1992:38)."
One thing that neither Luxemburg nor Marx could foresee was that the introduction of capitalist agriculture did not mean the introduction of industrialization. The proletariat created by these new enclosures outside of the heartlands of capitalism was not being driven into industrializing metropoles with large formal employment sector; they were being driven into shantytowns, refugee camps and squatters' camps. This is why the UN estimates that about 1 billion people in the "developing world" are living in slums. The majority of African, Asian and Latin American peasants and their descendants could never be absorbed into an industrial proletariat as earlier European or American rural-to-urban migrants were. The ratio of formal employment to workers becomes lower the further one travels from the "core" of global capitalism, so that in megacities like Mumbai and Lagos the majority are either under-employed, unemployed, or work in the unregulated and superexploitative "informal sector." The idea of the "reserve army of labor" does not capture the depth of exclusion that slum dwellers in Luanda or Dhaka are facing; and the term "lumpenproletariat" carries a moralistic tinge of criminality. We need a new terminology to describe this new, more-than-half-urban global class structure created by the new enclosures. But Rosa Luxemburg provided some very important tools.
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