This article will be released in full online April 17, 2023. What did Marx mean in his discussion of "so-called primitive accumulation" in Capital? Here…
In Part Eight of Capital, titled “So-called Primitive Accumulation,” Marx describes the brutal processes that separated working people from the means of subsistence, and concentrated wealth in the hands of landlords and capitalists. It’s one of the most dramatic and readable parts of the book.
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Introduction
The Paris Commune of 1871 only lasted from March 18 to May 28, just 72 days, yet it is one of the most celebrated events in socialist history. It is a legend. Yet, what was it? What is it for us today? A model for socialists? A heroic failure? Negation of the state? Or the first workers’ government? Karl Marx wrote the most famous contemporary account, yet he failed to take up some of the Commune’s serious problems. Why?
In Part I of this essay, below, I look at the events of the Commune as they developed, relying largely on the work of Jacques Rougerie, whom we might call a representative of the school of “history from below,” and of Carolyn J. Eichner, a historian of women in the Commune. (Where quotations have no footnote, they come from Rougerie’s books.) In Part II, which can be read online here or in print in the summer 2021 issue of