Primitive Accumulation

The first edition of this Research Handbook offers unparalleled insights into the large-scale resurgence of interest in Marx and Marxism in recent years, with contributions devoted specifically to Marxist critiques of law, rights, and the state.

The Research Handbook brings together thirty-three scholars of Marx, Marxism, and law from around the world to offer theoretically informed introductions to the Marxist tradition of social critique, contemporary Marxist analyses of law and rights, and future orientations of Marxist legal analysis. Chapters testify to the strength of Marxist critical tools for understanding the role of law, rights, and the state in capitalist societies.

Exploring Marxist critique across an extraordinarily wide range of scholarly disciplines, this Research Handbook is a must-read for scholars of law, politics, sociology, philosophy, and political economy who are interested in Marxism. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students in these and related disciplines will also benefit from the Research Handbook.

The volume is edited by Paul O'Connell (Reader in Law, SOAS, University of London) and Umut Özsu (Associate Professor of Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University).

Contributors include Max Ajl (Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Social Sciences, Rural Sociology Group, Wageningen University & Research), Rémi Bachand (Professor of Law, Université du Québec à Montréal), Miriam Bak McKenna (Lecturer in Law, Lund University), Clyde W. Barrow (Professor of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Enzo Bello (Associate Professor, Universidade Federal Fluminense, Rio de Janeiro), Bill Bowring (Professor of Law, Birkbeck, University of London), Honor Brabazon (Assistant Professor of Sociology and Legal Studies, St. Jerome’s University in the University of Waterloo), Gustavo Capela (PhD Candidate in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley), Cosmin Sebastian Cercel (Associate Professor of Law, University of Nottingham), B. S. Chimni (Distinguished Professor of International Law, OP Jindal Global University), Pablo Ciocchini (Lecturer in Criminology, University of Liverpool), Natalia Delgado (Lecturer in Law, University of Southampton), Matthew Dimick (Professor of Law, University of Buffalo), Radha D’Souza (Reader in Law, University of Westminster), Michael Head (Professor of Law, Western Sydney University), Nate Holdren (Associate Professor of Law, Politics, and Society, Drake University), Rob Hunter (Independent Scholar, PhD in Politics, Princeton University), Talina Hürzeler (Independent Scholar, LLB, University of New South Wales), Bob Jessop (Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Lancaster), Rene José Keller (Independent Scholar, PhD in Law, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, and PhD in Social Work, Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul), Rafael Khachaturian (Lecturer in Critical Writing, University of Pennsylvania), Stéfanie Khoury (Independent Scholar, PhD in Sociology of Law, Università degli Studi di Milano and Universidad del País Vasco), Dimitrios Kivotidis (Lecturer in Law, University of East London), Daniel McLoughlin (Senior Lecturer in Law, Society, and Criminology, University of New South Wales), Eva Nanopoulos (Senior Lecturer in Law, Queen Mary, University of London), August H. Nimtz (Professor of Political Science and African American and African Studies, University of Minnesota), Paul O’Connell (Reader in Law, SOAS, University of London), Chris O’Kane (Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of Texas Rio Grande Valley), Rebecca Schein (Associate Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies, Carleton University), Igor Shoikhedbrod (Assistant Professor of Political Science and Law, Justice, and Society, Dalhousie University), Nimer Sultany (Reader in Law, SOAS, University of London), Christine Sypnowich (Professor of Philosophy, Queen’s University), and Ahmed White (Professor of Law, University of Colorado at Boulder).

This article presents two cases of listed real estate companies that operate in the Ruhr metropolitan region of Germany. The first is Immeo Wohnen, a subsidiary of the French Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) Foncière des Régions that was previously owned by a US hedge fund. The second is Vonovia, Germany’s largest real estate company, originally a subsidiary of a British private equity firm. Both examples embody what we call the shift from financialization 1.0 to financialization 2.0, i.e. the transition from pure speculation to long-term investment. We show that long-term investment strategies are used by REITS and listed funds in order to release housing into the privatized mainstream of capital accumulation. With the advent of the financialization of rental housing 2.0, the long-term investment focus of these funds paradoxically enables a short-term investment focus by buying and selling shares in these funds on the stock exchange.

Keywords: financialization, gentrification, Germany, primitive accumulation, private equity and hedge funds, rental housing

In the global present, violent conflict, crisis and austerity politics, and corporate expansion are forcing new and reworked forms of dispossession and enclosure, but also kindling new and reworked modes of resistance. The violence of what Marx referred to as ‘primitive accumulation’—the transformation of the social means of pro- duction into capital by means of mass dispos- session—would therefore appear to be very much alive in our times. This special feature has been conceived to consider the extent to which the concept of primitive accumulation has analytical purchase in the present, the degree to which it requires adjustment, and the ways in which peasant and Indigenous critiques demand its reformulation or even its abandonment. In Marx’s formulation, itself adapted from that of Adam Smith, primitive accumulation described the pro- cesses by which the capitalist mode of pro- duction is violently instigated. Marx’s theory further relied on a dual aspect by which separation from the land in the form of dispossession, along with integration into the labour market in the form of proletariani- sation, combine simultaneously to violently dislocate Indigenous and other non-capitalist communities from their diverse, often com- munitarian and self-sufficient, means of production.

The papers brought together within this special feature variously interrogate four pro- minent points of contention in Marx’s orig- inal theorisation. The first of these is the temporal assumption invested in primitive  accumulation as a set of originary processes occurring to instigate capitalist integration; processes which are therefore understood to be prior to, and separate from, subsequent patterns of accumulation. Vital adjustments of Marx’s work have sought to correct this temporal restriction and bring dispossession within broader theories of accumulation by drawing attention to the repetitive and ongoing enclosures found broadly across the global economy (e.g. De Angelis 2001; Harvey 2004; Kropotkin and Shatz 1995).

Recent efforts among anarchist geographers to re-investigate foundational concepts like ‘space’ and ‘territory’ have helped to cast a new light on the flows and regulations that shape contemporary life and spatial organization, both in and outside of neoliberal and consumerist developments. Political ecology, as a very diverse body of work that tries to articulate the ever-changing dialectic between society and environmental resources, and further, between the various classes, communities and groups constituting society itself, offers considerable latitude for the deployment and development of anarchist thought and critique. It is peculiar then that most political ecologists seem to shy away from further engagement with anarchist theory, falling back on Marxism and neo-Marxism, which remain the dominant political ideologies in the field. Given that the State is an institution inextricably bound to capitalism, and thus undeniably one of the primary perpetrators of environmental ruination, this is a curious crutch, worthy of our suspicion and doubt. While Murray Bookchin critiqued anti-ecological trends under the banner of ‘social ecology’ in the 1970s and 80s, the remerging field of anarchist geography in the 2010s has yet to advance an ‘ecology of freedom’ that demonstrates a sustained engagement with important domains like environmental justice, resource security, and ecological governance. We seek to rectify this deficiency in the literature.