Marx, the State, and Primitive Accumulation: Rethinking Dispossession Under Capitalism (Routledge Frontiers of Political Economy)

Critically engaging with contributions from both the Global North and South, this book offers a systematic rethinking of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation and its relevance to contemporary capitalism.The book argues that recent attempts to reinterpret dispossession often suffer from conceptual overstretch and a neglect of production and class relations. The book’s focus is the concept of expanded primitive accumulation: an ongoing, capitalist state-mediated process of extra-economic coercion that separates producers from privately owned, communal, and state-owned means of production and subsistence.This concept is situated within a broader framework that distinguishes and relates primitive accumulation, labour exploitation, normal capitalist exchange relations, and class differentiation within the totality of capitalist social relations.The analysis foregrounds the capitalist state as both enforcer and manager of dispossession, and shows that such processes are shaped by class s