Accumulation by dispossession
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- November 19th, 2012
Dispossessed of culture, health dispossessed, deprived of education, deprived of property, dispossessed of our body, stripped of our dignity, deprived of our rights, dispossessed of another possibility.
The history of capitalism is the history of continuous dispossession, the story of a continuous extraction of that produced collectively.
Without this continued accumulation by dispossession, without decrees, institutional and capitalists for fencing and extract income from social production, capitalist accumulation regime could not keep tactical directions.
That is the essence of an unjust model in its origin and unfair in its historical development.
While this speaks for itself, we travel a moment in the late fifteenth century to place its beginnings.
The history of capitalism is the history of continuous dispossession, the story of a continuous extraction of that produced collectively.
It is well known how the transition from a feudal economy to a capitalist basis was accompanied by a violent process under which it was expelled peasant classes of communal lands, means constituted their main source of survival.
This is what Karl Marx described in Capital as "primitive accumulation" founding chapter of capitalism upside down leaving the supposed "natural transition" so insistently told of liberal economists.
In turn, in the book The Caliban and the Witch (Federici, 2004) feminist activist Silvia Federici stands at the center of analysis of primitive accumulation witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; persecution and burning of women who did not want toaccept their subservient role to the man was so important for the development of capitalism as colonization and dispossession of their lands European peasantry.
As Federici says " the economic significance of the reproduction of labor performed at home, and their role in the accumulation of capital, became invisible, blending with a natural vocation and designated as" women 's work " '( Federici, 2004).
Normativización dispossession and land, dispossession and standardization bodies, dispossession and usurpation of other modes of existence.
Returning to the present, it is clear that there is no need to take the time as a single episode or as a side note cycles of capitalist accumulation.
Continuous processes of enclosure of communal lands, the devastation of territories (both material and cultural), the long line of colonial and neocolonial process drags capitalism, the citizen debt and the squandering of other ways of life are the genetic basis of a model served to perpetuate the dispossession.
What is the current public debt but a clear example of the strategy of capitalist dispossession?
What are evictions and brutal cuts in public assistance but a clear war against the social gains ?.
That is the main lesson offered bythe Anglo - American geographer David Harvey in his article The "new" imperialism: accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004).
In this text, Harvey goes minuta exemplary manner to a production model based on the spraying of existence where dispossession is not a historical, distant but a chapter in the ongoing process.
What is the current public debt but a clear example of the strategy of capitalist dispossession?
Harvey tells us how, since the 70s, contemporary stage of capitalism has undergone various processes of over-accumulation, ie, the generation of continuous surpluses, much surplus labor (unemployment) and capital (overabundance of goods can not be sold).
To survive, capitalism uses what Harvey calls "space-time adjustments" processes by which the crisis moves well in time or in other territories, ie, temporarily postponing it or moving it geographically.
Once devastated the chances of a historic moment or the productive capacities of a territory, capitalism shifts its crisis to find new life under which reproduce the same conditions, thus starting a new cycle of accumulation based on dispossession.
Harvey reminds us, the different phases of capitalism are based on the historical and current commodification and privatization of land and expulsion of rural populations; conversion of various forms of rights -common, collective property, estatal- in exclusive property rights; suppression of the right to the commons;transformation of the workforce in goods and suppression of alternative forms of production and consumption; "processes colonial, neocolonial and imperial appropriation of assets, including natural resources; monetization of exchange and tax collection, particularly of land; the slave trade;and usury, the national debt and ultimately the credit system . "(Harvey, 2004).
To this we must add new maneuvers standardization and domination over woman's body , decreeing what can or should do, obscuring its productive condition and limiting their autonomy.
What is desirable is not a world without markets and without rights, but a world without capitalism.
It is obvious that address this process needed oppositional forces acting federated manner worldwide, movements of revolt under which impose ' a form of globalization entirely different, not imperialist, which emphasizes social welfare and associated humanitarian objectives with forms creative uneven geographical development over the glorification of the power of money, the value of the stock market and the manifold and ceaseless accumulation of capital through the various spaces of the global economy by any means, but always ends up concentrating heavily on a few spaces of extraordinary wealth . "(Harvey, 2004).
Hard to imagine a policy proposal focused on social justice and the distribution of wealth not focus their struggle on the abolition of this ruthless process of dispossession.
The right to bankruptcy, disobedience to financial fraud, the struggle of the dispossessed classes, the creation of a movement of Terran scale that takes aim at a system of existence based on production, conservation and management of common property, such are the political objectives to mobilize today.
What is desirable is not a world without markets and without rights, but a world without capitalism.
Markets that respond to needs and not be as open to exploitation and speculation means; rights serve to confirm us as a just society rather than as pretexts for dispossession.
Desirable is the absolute disappearance of institutionalized theft as the only way of life, the trial of a historic crime that manages to remain invisible and that the current change of time can not go unpunished.
- View Original
- November 19th, 2012
Dispossessed of culture, health dispossessed, deprived of education, deprived of property, dispossessed of our body, stripped of our dignity, deprived of our rights, dispossessed of another possibility.
The history of capitalism is the history of continuous dispossession, the story of a continuous extraction of that produced collectively.
Without this continued accumulation by dispossession, without decrees, institutional and capitalists for fencing and extract income from social production, capitalist accumulation regime could not keep tactical directions.
That is the essence of an unjust model in its origin and unfair in its historical development.
While this speaks for itself, we travel a moment in the late fifteenth century to place its beginnings.
The history of capitalism is the history of continuous dispossession, the story of a continuous extraction of that produced collectively.
It is well known how the transition from a feudal economy to a capitalist basis was accompanied by a violent process under which it was expelled peasant classes of communal lands, means constituted their main source of survival.
This is what Karl Marx described in Capital as "primitive accumulation" founding chapter of capitalism upside down leaving the supposed "natural transition" so insistently told of liberal economists.
In turn, in the book The Caliban and the Witch (Federici, 2004) feminist activist Silvia Federici stands at the center of analysis of primitive accumulation witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; persecution and burning of women who did not want toaccept their subservient role to the man was so important for the development of capitalism as colonization and dispossession of their lands European peasantry.
As Federici says " the economic significance of the reproduction of labor performed at home, and their role in the accumulation of capital, became invisible, blending with a natural vocation and designated as" women 's work " '( Federici, 2004).
Normativización dispossession and land, dispossession and standardization bodies, dispossession and usurpation of other modes of existence.
Returning to the present, it is clear that there is no need to take the time as a single episode or as a side note cycles of capitalist accumulation.
Continuous processes of enclosure of communal lands, the devastation of territories (both material and cultural), the long line of colonial and neocolonial process drags capitalism, the citizen debt and the squandering of other ways of life are the genetic basis of a model served to perpetuate the dispossession.
What is the current public debt but a clear example of the strategy of capitalist dispossession?
What are evictions and brutal cuts in public assistance but a clear war against the social gains ?.
That is the main lesson offered bythe Anglo - American geographer David Harvey in his article The "new" imperialism: accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2004).
In this text, Harvey goes minuta exemplary manner to a production model based on the spraying of existence where dispossession is not a historical, distant but a chapter in the ongoing process.
What is the current public debt but a clear example of the strategy of capitalist dispossession?
Harvey tells us how, since the 70s, contemporary stage of capitalism has undergone various processes of over-accumulation, ie, the generation of continuous surpluses, much surplus labor (unemployment) and capital (overabundance of goods can not be sold).
To survive, capitalism uses what Harvey calls "space-time adjustments" processes by which the crisis moves well in time or in other territories, ie, temporarily postponing it or moving it geographically.
Once devastated the chances of a historic moment or the productive capacities of a territory, capitalism shifts its crisis to find new life under which reproduce the same conditions, thus starting a new cycle of accumulation based on dispossession.
Harvey reminds us, the different phases of capitalism are based on the historical and current commodification and privatization of land and expulsion of rural populations; conversion of various forms of rights -common, collective property, estatal- in exclusive property rights; suppression of the right to the commons;transformation of the workforce in goods and suppression of alternative forms of production and consumption; "processes colonial, neocolonial and imperial appropriation of assets, including natural resources; monetization of exchange and tax collection, particularly of land; the slave trade;and usury, the national debt and ultimately the credit system . "(Harvey, 2004).
To this we must add new maneuvers standardization and domination over woman's body , decreeing what can or should do, obscuring its productive condition and limiting their autonomy.
What is desirable is not a world without markets and without rights, but a world without capitalism.
It is obvious that address this process needed oppositional forces acting federated manner worldwide, movements of revolt under which impose ' a form of globalization entirely different, not imperialist, which emphasizes social welfare and associated humanitarian objectives with forms creative uneven geographical development over the glorification of the power of money, the value of the stock market and the manifold and ceaseless accumulation of capital through the various spaces of the global economy by any means, but always ends up concentrating heavily on a few spaces of extraordinary wealth . "(Harvey, 2004).
Hard to imagine a policy proposal focused on social justice and the distribution of wealth not focus their struggle on the abolition of this ruthless process of dispossession.
The right to bankruptcy, disobedience to financial fraud, the struggle of the dispossessed classes, the creation of a movement of Terran scale that takes aim at a system of existence based on production, conservation and management of common property, such are the political objectives to mobilize today.
What is desirable is not a world without markets and without rights, but a world without capitalism.
Markets that respond to needs and not be as open to exploitation and speculation means; rights serve to confirm us as a just society rather than as pretexts for dispossession.
Desirable is the absolute disappearance of institutionalized theft as the only way of life, the trial of a historic crime that manages to remain invisible and that the current change of time can not go unpunished.
The TTIP next: neither globalization nor protectionism, accumulation by dispossession
- View Original
- June 5th, 2017
Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump.LUIS GRAÑENA
Among the many coincidences that can be found in the electoral discourse Trump and Le Pen is rejected, at least in formal terms, of the Free Trade of new generation and specifically the TTIP and CETA.
Coated with first described as "protectionism" rhetoric in his campaign Trump and Le Pen have now endorsed a antitratados speech that neither seems unlikely to materialize or provide any alternative for the benefit of the social majorities.
Of course, it is undeniable that the arrival of the Trump Administration has marked a turning point in trade relations between the EU and the United States.
Based on this statement, the interest lies in elucidating whether trade policy of the United States is taking a real turn or if the much publicized break with the previous model is an element of the electoral / populist discourse without there being a real paradigm shift.
Abandoning the ratification process of the Transpacific Treaty, the suspension of negotiations on the TTIP, willingness to renegotiate NAFTA have been clear dramatic effects intended to show a change of route do not yet know what its extent or exact nature.
The truth and the truth is that the opposition between "protectionism" and "globalization" that much and so well exploited the extreme right on both sides of the Atlantic, is not an automatic translation of the struggle between sovereignty and democracy against neo-liberalism or free market no brakes.
Although it is that the story of Trump or Le Pen will try to exploit the dichotomy in the background it is false, since it lies a similar strategy of accumulation by dispossession, which occurs both within countries that govern or intend to govern and in its relations with other regions and states of the periphery.
Reading the paper on Trump's business strategy, which was leaked last March, it gives a good account of it.
In the same states that the new policy means a "real" change from that held by the previous administration (which in theory "sell"), although a detailed analysis of the proposals reveals sustaining a line that has never been lost: America for Americans, yes, but mostly for some and against the majority.
According to the document, the current trade policy objective of US trade expansion is such that it is freer and more open to Americans.
All commercial activities, continues the text, will target economic growth and employment promotion in the United States and the protection of enterprises, workers, industries and goods from the United States against those of other countries.
In this sense, they are to prevail bilateral agreements deal with regional and resist against attempts by the WTO to undermine the US position in the various multilateral treaties.
Actually, nothing new under the sun or different from what the great power has been doing in recent decades.
Specifically, Trump set the following objectives: to defend and expand aggressively the US sovereignty in trade matters; respond aggressively to distortions to competition, even if they are tolerated by the WTO;circumvent the WTO rules and promote bilateral treaties that improve the opening of the borders of other countries for US products and services; expand trade into new key markets and renegotiate treaties already in force, namely NAFTA.
That is, anything that was not at least mentioned in the previous book (Obama and Clinton and pushed for renegotiating NAFTA), anything that involves a radical change (instead of TPP are to negotiate bilateral treaties with each of the countries involved) and anything that was not present in the negotiations on the TTIP.
As you may recall, on July 17, 2013 the Council of the European Union approved the Negotiating Guidelines on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between the European Union and the United States of America, better known as TTIP.
This document, which was not declassified until October 9, 2014, contains the basic objectives and contents of the agreement, establishing the primary purpose increased trade and investment between the EU and the United States.
To do this, the document framing the contents of the Treaty on three main pillars: market access, regulatory issues and non-tariff barriers (regulatory cooperation) and production of common binding rules, including a mechanism for settling disputes investor- State (ISDS).
This broad content has justified the TTIP, like the CETA, is baptized as a "Treaty of New Generation" because its main goal is not to eliminate tariffs, but to serve as a legal framework for transnational capital protect their interests against discretion, sovereign states.
And even after the change in the US administration talks have stalled, they have not been terminated; On the contrary, it seems that both powers are committed to resume them.
Certainly a new opening of these will be marked by a remarkable position of the US force that will keep the red lines that already stalled negotiations last fall.
Issues such as market opening of public procurement with the repeal or amendment of the Buy American Act or recognition of Appellations of Origin and raised as impossible concessions from the Obama Administration and now is pergeñan as impassable lines , yet more aggressively.
So, and the ace in the hole that would give priority to a treaty next generation with the United Kingdom before negotiating with the EU, the Government of Trump can take control of negotiations with a European Union that the negotiation of these treaties is causing increasingly large cracks.
At this juncture, the current trade policy objective of US trade expansion is such that it is freer and more open to Americans.
Anyway, the Trump Administration will be in front with an even more disunited and weak EU with the contradictions inherent in its own process of open channel integration.
The primacy of the economic and market in the same configuration of the EU without the necessary social dimension that attenuates, coupled with recent neoliberal attacks from their institutions to the rights and welfare of the social majorities of the continent, have aroused feeling of rejection towards the project that has been, for the moment, channeled more strongly to the right.
The absence of redistributive mechanisms at continental level and legal consecration, while budgetary stability as the undisputed straitjacket for the possibilities of economic intervention of States have led to fundamental economic freedoms (of movement of capital, services and goods ...) have continued to operate without barriers that curb increasing inequality and wealth accumulation through, and above countries.
Discontent thus will become even greater if we are not able to give a resounding on the same architecture of the European Union twist, and the extreme right continue to grow if his story false, continues to have a real grip on Brussels to hold on .
They, Le Pen and Trump, set themselves up as the saviors of the community, the nation and safety, labor and social, in front of institutionalized and the world globalization of the cold figures of the establishment of Washington or Brussels institutions .
But they also, at the same time, do not cease to defend in the background the same approach underlying the consequences criticize and who prey on widespread discontent.
Trump will continue unfettered free trade, which will enhance even, and the accumulation of a few and inequality for many increase.
It will, yes, from a reinvigorated nationalist and neo-protectionist speech, while his millionaire accounts will stop not grow and their businesses, which metaphor of his own ideology, not cease to jump from one country to another protected by treaties new generation sponsored by the US.
Le Pen, winning, will not end the socioeconomic basis that breeds inequality, social injustice and discontent, nor will Macron, much as now both decide to criticize the CETA is à la mode .
The Brexit, meanwhile, there will bea renewed push for democracy in the UK, that the hand of May and the Tories, is already beginning to embrace anew the possibility of increasing the neoliberal ties with the US and London turning into a haven for these new treaties that protect, remember, the impunity of transnational capital master of the traditional mechanisms of power.
Against social atomisation, extreme individualism, the impoverishment of broad layers of the population and increasing inequality, neoliberal capitalism, precisely because of all these factors, it seems to have found an escape route to continue conserving the accumulation encourages: nationalism of false protectionisms that basically not only do not change, but deepen, accumulation by dispossession that are suffering.
The TTIP next will possibly another name and other forms, but behind the same interests are always at the service of those who, for too long ago, vampirize the future of present and future generations.
Adoración Guamán. Professor of Labor Law at the University of Valencia. Gabriel Moreno.Researcher in Constitutional Law at the University of Valencia .
