Holloway - Crack Capitalism.pdf - Libcom

IllId the huge growth of the cities in the last fifty years.2 However,
II is not just a question of the creation of new private property,
,Ind it is certainly not only on the margins of capitalism that
primitive accumulation is relevant.3 The old, past, established
property is also constantly at issue. Even the property of land
l'nclosed three hundred years ago is constituted only through a
process of constant reiteration, constantly renewed separation, or
enclosure. Capital accumulation itself, the amassing of profits, is
;1 constant process of separation of the producers from their own
product and hence from the means of production. The actual
and threatened violence required to produce and reproduce the
separation of the producers from the means of production is
possibly now far greater than anything that Marx even imagined.
The enclosure of land and the respect for private property require
an enormous army of people for their enforcement. If we count
not only security guards, police and army, but also judges,
lawyers, social workers and teachers (not to mention parents),
then a very significant part of the world's population is engaged
in the constantly reiterated separation of people from the means
of production. The term 'dull compulsion of economic relations'
does not do justice to the active and constantly contested nature
of capitalist appropriation.4
The same can be said not only of primitive accumulation
in its narrow sense but of all the forms of social relations that
are moments of the abstraction of labour. As Marcel Stoetzler
(2009: 169) puts it in an article on the creation of the separation
between women and men, 'When Hegel pointed to the daily
reading of a particular paper as one of the reiterative acts that
produce what looks like it has always been there, the same
can be said of Renan's "daily plebiscites" and Judith Butler's
daily acts of "performative reiteration" that produce the (real)
illusion of sex.' Primitive accumulation can perhaps be said to
be performative reiteration: in the same way as the separation
(and thereby definition) of girls and boys is a product of constant
repetition, so too the separation of people from the means of
production is the result of the daily reiteration that constitutes
private property as such.
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