[3] Karl Marx rejected such accounts as 'insipid childishness' for their omission of the role of violence, war, enslavement, and conquest in the historical accumulation of land and wealth.
[6]: 14 In The German Ideology and in volume 3 of Capital, Marx discusses how primitive accumulation alienates humans from nature.
[7] Smith, writing The Wealth of Nations in English, spoke of a "previous" accumulation;[8] Karl Marx, writing Das Kapital in German, reprised Smith's expression, by translating it to German as ursprünglich ("original, initial"); Marx's translators, in turn, rendered it into English as primitive.
In times long gone-by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living.
And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labour, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work.
Such childishness is every day preached to us in the defence of property.What must be explained is how the capitalist relations of production are historically established; in other words, how it comes about that means of production become privately owned and traded, and how capitalists can find workers on the labour market ready and willing to work for them because they have no other means of livelihood (also referred to as the "reserve army of labour").
At the same time as local obstacles to investment in manufactures are being overcome, and a unified national market is developing with a nationalist ideology, Marx sees a strong impulse to business development coming from world trade: The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a systematical combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system.
[13] In the last chapter of Capital, Volume I, Marx described the social conditions he thought necessary for capitalism with a comment about Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonization: Wakefield discovered that in the Colonies, property in money, means of subsistence, machines, and other means of production, does not as yet stamp a man as a capitalist if there be wanting the correlative – the wage-worker, the other man who is compelled to sell himself of his own free-will.
[14]This is indicative of Marx's more general fascination with settler colonialism, and his interest in how "free" lands—or, more accurately, lands seized from indigenous people—could disrupt capitalist social relations.
[citation needed] Marx's description of primitive accumulation may also be seen as a special case of the general principle of capitalist market expansion.
1, Marx compares the situations of England and Germany and points out that less developed countries also face a process of primitive accumulation.
Marx comments that "if, however, the German reader shrugs his shoulders at the condition of the English industrial and agricultural labourers, or in optimist fashion comforts himself with the thought that in Germany things are not nearly so bad, I must plainly tell him, "De te fabula narratur!
He continues, "Intrinsically, it is not a question of the higher or lower degree of development of the social antagonism that results from the natural laws of capitalist production.
The implication is that non-capitalist territories should be forced open not only to trade (which could be helpful) but also to permit capital to invest in profitable ventures using cheaper labour power, raw materials, low-cost land, and the like.
By contrast, Brass points out that in many instances, the process of depeasantization leads to workers who are unfree because they are unable personally to commodify or recommodify their labour, by selling it to the highest bidder.
Schumpeter's view was that imperialism is an atavistic impulse pursued by a state, independent of the interests of the economic ruling class.