The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the prehistoric stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it. (Marx, Capital Vol 1, Ch. 26, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” p. 875).
Last time I talked a bit about the “insurrectionary power” of asceticism, its capacity to lift individuals out of relations of oppressive power by an affirmative use of surplus obedience. The pattern of my thinking followed Foucault closely, especially the 1 March 1978 lecture, where he discusses various “revolts of conduct,” and focuses on one period at the heart of my interests, pagan late antiquity and early Christianity.1 Foucault’s point about revolts of conduct is that they don’t aim at sovereignty, but call into question the authority of those who claim a kind of salvific power. In effect they say “we do not wish to be saved by these people,” and thereby “the whole pastoral practice of salvation is challenged.”2
What happens in modernity is of course a process of secularization, whereby the state/sovereign power gains autonomy and is no longer guided by religious norms (the continuity between the two fields breaks), and yet the state’s interest in “the conduct of conduct” not only remains but grows intensified. Put differently, the state bears down on us as individuals, forces us into civilizational projects that require sometimes profound acts of self-denial and abnegation. The sign of the completion of these projects is the internalization of these norms. There is an ordinary or normal level of self-denial positively required for social life: in a Freudian register we could talk about the repressive engine of Kultur or Civilization, and the potential discontents it generates.
The machinery of repression is everywhere evident in totalitarian states. Good thing we live in a liberal order where this doesn’t happen, right?
Right?
Well of course it happens. It happens first of all as part of what Marx and Luxemburg and others defined as “Primitive Accumulation.” Which is to say, it happens at the point where premodern economic processes become transformed into modern ones, which in turn requires two very different sorts of human beings. For capitalism to work,
two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour power.3
This kind of encounter is never random, it always requires sovereign intervention (i.e. the intervention of force) to ensure that the conditions are met for individuals to “contract” in such a way.4 Once this happens, moreover, the state will do almost anything to ensure the continuation of the relation, indeed as we have seen it will eternally engage in new extractive experiments, new applications of power that sometimes have to take into account (and perhaps absorb) revolts from below. The energy for innovation on this front comes from opposition, but we should never imagine that the civilizational project ever goes away or ever ends.
In a settler-colonial nation like the United States, the various forms of self-discipline positively required by human beings on both sides of this relation — those who own the means of production and those who own labor-power — are a pillar in the construction and elaboration of race. To be more specific, the construction of whiteness in particular has at its heart a strong (if powerfully repressed) identification with the violence at the heart of this bargain. Contemporary white grievance constantly reiterates this point, a point that I would call something like the politics of unshared sacrifice, which at the very least acknowledges that sacrifice did take place, that the transition to modern capitalism is unnatural and has done violence to the human person, has distorted its place in the world and has especially disrupted older relations of continuity with others and with nature.
This is the argument of Michael Rogin. I will talk more about it next time.
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-1978 (Picador Press, 2004), p. 196.
Ibid., p. 200.
Marx, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 26, p. 875.
“In actual history, it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” (Marx, “The Secret of Primitive Accumulation,” Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 26, p. 874).