So-called Primitive Accumulation by Karl Marx - Essay Example

Primitive Accumulation has therefore been defined as the process of separating the producer from the means of production (Marx, n.pag.) thereby making a case for the expropriation of the property of the middle class. By introducing a capitalist economy, Marx said that the separation of producers from the means of production, that is expropriation, will allow freedom from the features of pre-capitalist systems including feudalism (n.pag.). This explains the expropriation of the private property owned by the middle class done to forcefully transform producers into labors for the government.

This would allow the means of production i.e. the laborers as well as money to be transformed into capital. Once the expropriation had been done, it would mean that the production process would start once again, produce, then reproduce, and reproduce forming a historical process. Since Marx believed that money and commodities are not capital in themselves (n.pag.), this meant that the means of production had to be transformed into capital. The divorcing of producers from the means of production would allow the transformation of the means into capital.

Marx explains that this transformation was only possible in case of interaction between the owners of the commodities or money: those possessing the means of production that are willing to increase the value of their holdings and those laborers willing to sell. Capitalist economy presumes a complete separation of the laborer from the means and thus when the production process starts, the separation is maintained (Marx, n.pag.). Thus, the separation would allow the laborer to become a free seller of his commodities enabling him to escape from the rule of guilds and other federations.

The separation as a movement would allow the producers to turn into wage laborers allowing them to escape from the bounds of guilds thereby granting them freedom from the bondage. But their freedom had only been acquired after they gave up their means of production in order to sell their commodities (Marx, n.pag.). Therefore, as the producers were expropriated of their means of production, they turned into wage laborers. As the bourgeois was separated from the producers and the means of production, this gave rise to free wage laborers who turned their commodities into capital by means of a historical process of production.

The notion of primitive accumulation therefore implies the separation of the laborer from the object of production thereby transforming them into wage workers. The capitalist production process stands on the pillars that separate the laborers from their means thereby alienating them from the objects. Thus, wage laborers as the industrial capitalists would now be free from guild masters and other feudal land lords as the owners of holders of wealth (Marx, n.pag.). According to Marx, this expropriation which has allowed laborers to free themselves from the feudal bondage and have now developed a social power that has resulted in a fruitful outcome (n.pag.).

In his famous book, Collapse, Jared Diamond made an argument of how certain disparities in the human societies have been originated as a result of environmental differences. In the book, he made a case for ecological disasters and environmental differences as providing the basis for the dominance of certain societies over the other. In a New York Times work by Diamond, he mentioned the possibility of capitalist corporations including Coca Cola, Wal-Mart, and Chevron, to