Primitive Accumulation
Primitive accumulation, Glen Coulthard writes, is “the violent transformation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones.”[1] First theorized in Capital, Marx writes about primitive accumulation as the birth of capitalist social relations in western Europe, more specifically in the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism. Coulthard, reading Marx, explains:
Marx’s historical excavation of the birth of the capitalist mode of production identifies a host of colonial-like state practices that served to violently strip—through “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder”—noncapitalist producers, communities, and societies from their means of production and subsistence…[T]hese formative acts of violent dispossession set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood—the land.[2]
Tearing self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood can be described as a two-step process: First, it requires “dispossession and enclosure.” Capitalist governments and corporations dispossess collectives of “the commons” or any collectively held resources and enclose them as private property or capital. Next, it requires “proletarianization.” The producers, who can no longer sustain themselves with their own land or collectively held resources, emerge as a “class” with no other option but to sell their labor in order to survive.
Coulthard complicates Marx’s concept by using it as a way of understanding colonial relations, rather than solely capital relations. The critical purchases of this contextual are many. Here I will just point to one in particular. Coulthard writes that settler colonial states, invested in colonial capitalist accumulation, required first and foremost land from Indigenous peoples and only secondarily labor. In turn, “The history and experience of dispossession, not proletarianization, has been the dominant background structure shaping the character of the historical relationship between Indigenous peoples in the Canadian settler state”—and the US, I would argue.[3]
For water politics in the arid American West, I see Coulthard’s reading of primitive accumulation as a way to link settler-anti-capitalist water movements to decolonial water movements without collapsing their contextual differences. In the arid West, for example, there is an adage popular among rural and poor settlers that “water flows uphill toward money.” Yet this adage could be better explained as a global phenomenon that is a problem for all self-sufficient agricultural producers. Shiva explains, the market paradigm of water (see “water culture”) is rendering water as a commodity, governed by the “invisible” and (“fair”) hand of the capitalist market. In reality, however, the market paradigm creates water scarcity for poor and Indigenous peoples by distributing water according to who has the capital to pay for it. It also disrupts the water cycle, the natural ability of water systems to recycle water within global and local watersheds. Perhaps support for “self-sufficient producers” could be a broad enough frame for both settler farmers, farm laborers, and Indigenous communities to banner together to resist ongoing practices of primitive accumulation by agribusiness organization and settler governments.
[1] Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition, 8.
[2] Coulthard, 7.
[3] Coulthard, 13.
