David Harvey's Theory of Accumulation by Dispossession: A Marxist Critique
David Harvey is well known for his extensive writings on accumulation by dispossession (ABD). ABD refers to “the continuation and proliferation of accretion practices” that Marx had designated as “primitive accumulation.” Harvey has sought to update Marx's theory of primitive accumulation to co...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Pluto Journals
2017-11-01
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| Series: | World Review of Political Economy |
| Online Access: | https://www.scienceopen.com/hosted-document?doi=10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.8.4.0590 |
| Summary: | David Harvey is well known for his extensive writings on accumulation by dispossession (ABD). ABD refers to “the continuation and proliferation of accretion practices” that Marx had designated as “primitive accumulation.” Harvey has sought to update Marx's theory of primitive accumulation to consider the ways in which dispossession occurs in present-day capitalism in its various forms. His theory of ABD is very problematic. Yet a comprehensive, critical assessment of Harvey's work on dispossession that considers its intellectual and political problems is missing. This article considers Harvey's ideas advanced since the 1980s to be problematic on multiple grounds. To begin, the concept of ABD itself is chaotic in the critical-realist philosophical sense: it includes processes which bear no internal relations, and it separates processes which should not be separated. He inflates the causal significance of the concept far too much, and mistakenly considers ABD to be the dominant moment of contemporary capitalism. He generally fails to connect ABD of producers to what I will call “accumulation by exploitation” of proletarians and semi-proletarians. His views on dispossession in the South with which he associates (new) imperialism are inadequate in part because he abstracts from the exploitative character of imperialism as it is rooted in production controlled by imperialist businesses. And the political implications of his theory, which significantly differ from the conclusions that Marx draws from his own analysis of dispossession in Capital vol. 1, and which have a dim view of the role of the working class in the anti-capitalist socialist movement, are reformist. |
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| ISSN: | 2042-891X 2042-8928 |