Thanks for that. I’ll have to think more about this. Jason Read has a good discussion of this in his book. I haven’t looked at that in a while, I should do that again. Werner Bonefeld argues (it’s in the title of his paper actually) that primitive accumulation is not primite but something else, in his contribution to the Commoner debate on primitive accumulation, here

http://www.commoner.org.uk/#dEbAtE:%20on%20primitive%20accumulation.

That’s another one I need to look over again. So much to do… I think the point that capitalism was not born of virtuous savings by the (proto)capitalists is really important, as is the point that the blood and fire did not have a fore-ordained outcome. I have to run, more later…
take care,
Nate

The question of how to interpret “primitive” in primitive accumulation is a very important issue, both in terms of translation and theory. One important thing to note is that Marx’ German text does not read “primitive Ackumulation”, even though it could have. Instead Marx speaks of “die [i]sogennante[/i] ursprunglische Ackumulation”. Rendering “ursprunglische” in English is a problem (in general, there seems to be lots of problems translating German into English), and it seems to me that originary is a better option than primitive. Since my native language is not English (its Swedish) I’m obviously on thin ice here, but I have the feeling that the etymological root of primitive (which stems from the greek [i]proton[/i]) has become considerably obscured by its more upfront present day meaning of “unevolved” or “uncultured” (correct me if I’m wrong!). Maybe it is because these kinds of characteristics are attributed to Ackumulation the very first part of Marx’ phrase often is forgotten or at least not paid very much attention to? What I’m thinking about here is of course the [i]sogennante[/i], or [i]so-called[/i], part of die [i]sogennante[/i] ursprunglische Ackumulation. When Marx speaks about this, he doesn’t speak of the violent exproriations of land etc., at least not in an immediate way. Die sogennante ursprunglische Ackumulation rather denotes the myth of the industrious Ur-bourgeois (homo oeconomicus) who by saving and maximizing the utilization of his scarce means one day had gathered enough to have another man work for him and so forth. Obviously Marx’ point is that capitalism as social system did not emerge this way, but in lots of blood and gore. I’m not entirely sure what I wanted to say with all of this, but it seems like rendering ursprunglische as primitive blocks out the ideology-critical dimension of the sogennante when primitive accumulation is used to denote the immediate expropriation of land, enclosure of commons etc. Does this make any sense?

/Henrik

You’re right on the vogelfreie as a type of bare life. The argument I want to make actually aims against the concept of bare life as such, in its bareness. Bare life is not really bare, for itself. It’s bare life for the sovereign. In the same way, the proletariat is not free of all qualities and differentiations, being simply a bearer of abtract power to work. Rather, the buyers of labor power are indifferent to most of the other determinations of the proletariat and they seek to eliminate many of the determinations they are aware of (such as any involving self-organization against capital). Agamben gives a pretty good critical account of some operations of some examples of power, but because he doesn’t acknowledge that his work is one-sided in terms of perspective (essentially it’s a top down or *ahem* bird’s eye view) that doesn’t allow much room in his work for discussing the non-bareness of those who fall under the reference of the term bare life. It also means that phenomena like the Warsaw ghetto uprising etc are totally inexplicable in Agambenian categories (hence the relative vacuousness [sp?] of his remarks on Tiananmen Square, despite that incident serving as an example in an otherwise interesting piece).

The reason I like vogelfreie as an avenue into this, other than that it comes from Marx and I just kinda like Marx, is that the bird metaphor implies a power despite the condition of being destitute, a power of flight. Fowkes’ translation as ‘free and rightless’ loses this resonance in a way which is common throughout much of marxism, taking the proletariat as primarily an object. Which reminds me, I have to check what the translation is in the Moore and Aveling.
take care,
Nate