THE VIOLENCE OF ACCUMULATION AND THE ACCUMULATION OF VIOLENCE Dr. Jonathan Saha ISRF Mid-Career Fellow, 2018–19
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rom at least as early as Karl Marx, histories of capital accumulation have drawn attention to the violence that attends it. Marx’s formulation of “so-called primitive accumulation” was plotted through the forcible dispossession of English peasants. In her critique of Marx’s formulation, Rosa Luxemburg drew out the centrality of imperialistic military expansions and state force in facilitating capital accumulation. Eric Williams foregrounded the systematic, racialised violence of slavery in the capital accumulation that laid the groundwork for the English industrial revolution. More recently, David Harvey has made the case for the centrality of violent dispossession as a perennial dynamic in capital accumulation. And scholars such as Donna Haraway and Jason Moore have highlighted the forms of violence accompanying capital accumulation that have affected other creatures beyond humans alone. 1 It seems that studies of accumulation necessarily entail an analysis of the violence that enables and perpetuates accumulation. Without wanting to play down this important area of study, it is possible—and perhaps productive—to reverse this line of enquiry to ask: can violence itself accumulate? That is, to examine how violence, and physical bodily violence in particular, has been iteratively reproduced in an expanded form over time. 1. Karl Marx, Capital, trans. by Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), i; Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (London: Routledge, 2003); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Deutsch, 1964); David Harvey, The New Imperialism, Clarendon Lectures in Geography and Environmental Studies (Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016); Jason W. Moore, ‘The Capitalocene, Part I: On the Nature and Origins of Our Ecological Crisis’, The Journal of Peasant Studies, 44.3 (2017), 594–630. 21
