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The history of class struggle: from original accumulation to neoliberalism
Monthly Review, May, 1997 by Kees van der Pijl
So each of these phases - original accumulation, the transformation of production, and the penetration of capital into the sphere of reproduction - generates its own forms of resistance and struggle. We can call these three types of struggle class struggles because the imposition of the discipline of capital can, of course, only come about by the action or collaboration of an interested social group; and this group, the ruling class of capitalists, will draw on the power resources available to it in the state as well as in the sphere of ideas to enforce discipline and restrict dissent to manageable proportions. At the same time, the resistance to the discipline of capital inevitably brings forth experiences and insights that challenge the dominant ideology, shaping an alternative perspective which is likewise collective and rooted in social practice. The cohesion of these forces of resistance is much more fragile and fleeting, and as we will see, the form of resistance varies under the three modes of imposing capitalist discipline.
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Let us now look at the three different arenas of class struggle.
Original Accumulation and Proletarianization
In pre-capitalist societies, "economic" relations are inseparable from non-"economic" relations, that is, from relations not driven primarily by private gain.(3) In original accumulation, economic relations are "disembedded" from this non-economic social context. Certain aspects of people's lives, ultimately including their labor power, are turned into commodities for the first time. The conflicts involved in original accumulation constitute a first, and usually violent, form of social struggle elicited by capitalist discipline. It has even been argued that this struggle of expropriation/appropriation, and not the regular struggle over wages, is the only real class struggle in capitalist conditions.(4) The very fact of being disinherited from one's more or less independent means of subsistence and the destruction of the entire life-word with which they are entwined, with its natural/traditional time-scales and rhythms, drives people to resistance.
Although original accumulation is the earliest stage of capitalist penetration, such processes are still continuing today. The English enclosures preceding the industrial revolution and the contemporary clearing out of Central American peasants to make their land available for commercial agriculture and cattle breeding, in this sense, belong to the same category. The assassination of the Brazilian rubber tapper, Chico Mendez, or of Iqbal Masih, a 12-year-old boy who organized some of the estimated 10 million child-workers under age 15 in Pakistan, and many other instances of extreme "disciplinary" violence, illustrate the severity of the clashes involved.
Original accumulation has effects on the formation of classes, and here too we can distinguish several phases or forms of expropriation and expulsion, appropriation and occupation. In its earliest forms, the dominant expropriating classes were likely to be landlords and their capitalist tenants. In other times and places, the relevant capitalist classes might be merchants, and this kind of merchant capital has often assumed piratical, criminal forms - the "robber-baron" of old, or the contemporary ex-Komsomol functionary privatizing the organization's real estate in the former Soviet Union.
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