David McNally - Primitive Accumulation, Migrant Workers and Social Reproduction in the Age of Austerity
Objavljeno:
The Age of Austerity ushered in by the global crisis of 2008-9 centrally involves cheapening the reproduction of labour-power by means of reducing both private wages and the social wage administered by the state. These policies have decided class, gender, racial and generational dimensions. To properly elucidate these dimensions, however, requires that we also grasp ongoing primitive accumulation as a crucial ‘moment’ in the austerity agenda. To accomplish this means addressing the role of the reproduction of the global reserve army of labour, and of precarious migrant workers, in the restructuring of labour-power on a world scale.
In order to develop the theory of primitive accumulation in these directions, this paper returns to tensions in Marx’s account of the social reproduction of labour-power. Here I argue that not only does Marx’s conceptualization require a gender analysis, but that it also needs to be developed with respect to the problematic of labour migration. I show where Marx points to ways in which we might do this. The analysis presented underlines the decisive importance of an anti-racist defence of migrant workers for any effective working class politics in the Age of Austerity.
David McNally - Prvotna akumulacija, migrantski delavci in družbena reprodukcija v dobi varčevanja
Doba varčevanja, ki jo je povzročila svetovna kriza iz let 2008–2009, v veliki meri temelji na pocenitvi reprodukcije delovne sile s pomočjo zniževanja tako zasebne mezde kakor družbene mezde, s katero upravlja država. Te politike so odločilno posegle v razredna, spolna, rasna in generacijska razmerja. Da bi jih lahko celovito osvetliti, pa moramo upoštevati tudi trenutno prvotno akumulacijo kot ključni »moment« varčevalne politike. Zato moramo analizirati vlogo, ki jo pri preoblikovanju delovne sile na svetovni ravni igrajo reprodukcija svetovne rezervne armade delovne sile in prekarni migrantski delavci.
Da bi lahko razvili teorijo prvotne akumulacije s tega gledišča, se bomo vrnili k napetosti v Marxovi obravnavi družbene reprodukcije delovne sile. Pokazali bomo, da Marxova konceptualizacija potrebuje ne samo analizo spolov, temveč jo je treba razviti tudi z vidika delavske migracije. Izpostavili bomo mesta, kjer nam to omogoča sam Marx. Predstavljena analiza bo poudarila ključnost antirasistične obrambe migrantskih delavcev za učinkovito politiko delavskega razreda v dobi varčevanja.
From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park, from Athens to Madrid, millions have mobilised and are mobilising against the dictatorship of capital, whatever its local expression might be. Although such massive protests and upheavals would have been unimaginable just a few years ago, with the onset of the gr...
I will examine two key aspects of Evgeny Preobrazhensky’s concept of ‘primitive socialist accumulation’: the notions that (a) the essential differences between socialism and capitalism are nationalised property and economic planning, and that (b) a transition from capitalism to socialism can take pl...
‘There is probably no other region in Europe where the past and present of the left are so severely out of sync with one another as they are in former Yugoslavia’, Boris Kanzleiter and Đorde Tomić write in a discussion of the state of the post-Yugoslav Left in the Balkans.
The Liberation Front of the Slovenian Nation was an organisation that led political armed resistance against fascist invaders and local quislings. It was established on 27 April 1941 in Ljubljana, shortly after the Axis powers disintegrated the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. It consisted of 18 groups; with...
If we don't understand a system as it is fully developed [its 'Being'] and thus its critical characteristics, we cannot investigate the 'becoming' of those characteristics. This is why Marx discussed primitive (or original) accumulation of capital only at the end of Volume 1 of Capital. Exclusive...
The barbaric wave of austerity crashing across Europe and much of the rest of the world both resembles and differs from the classical period of primitive accumulation which deprived masses of people of their means of production. Although landgrabs continue in this modern version of primitive accumul...
Since at least the time Rosa Luxemburg wrote The Accumulation of Capital, there have been various applications and theoretical developments of Marx’s historical account of the so-called primitive accumulation. Luxemburg argued that Marxists should expand Marx’s fixed historical description and rew...
The management and manipulation of crises is, according to David Harvey, one of the most important features of the so-called accumulation by dispossession, that is, the continuation and proliferation of accumulation practises that were grasped by Marx as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’. Debt crises, espec...
It is very symptomatic that the story of the great historical break of 1989 in Eastern Europe is usually articulated in purely political terms, often with obvious romantically-nationalistic overtones: winds of change have swept away old curtains and walls of the obsolete system, bringing about a sec...
It is impossible to talk about primitive accumulation without talking about commons. On the other hand, the reverse is not just possible but seems to be the norm, at least since commons began to gain general public currency after Ostrom’s Nobel prize and Hardt and Negri’s popularisations. Relieved f...
The European Union is often celebrated in the liberal commonsense discourse as a pacifistic project that finally brought peace, prosperity and brotherhood to modern Europe after centuries of wars between European nations or states. Furthermore, the EU is celebrated as a democratic project: immediate...
Primitive accumulation is not just the historical starting point of capitalism, but, qua coercive proletarianisation, central to its essence. The separation of labour from the means of existence holds sway in the concept of capital. Primitive accumulation is therefore not just a historical past fr...
