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My feeling isn't that Marx is trying to say capitalism was caused by primitive
accumulation; he is saying something about the distribution of capital in the
first “moments” of capitalism. No doubt there were industrious capitalists who thought, or worked hard to become rich capitalists, but your idea about the smart sandal maker, who pays someone a fair wage to operate their sandal machine is where you miss the point. Primitive accumulation is addressing the bigger question: why would someone be in a position to need, or want to work for the guy who had the sandal machine? Why are there a handful of wealthy capitalists and millions of propertyless poor all of a sudden? Marx is saying that capital was in fact unequally distributed from the start of capitalism and the guy who had nothing and then worked hard and made himself into a capitalist in some sort of “fair” way is the exception, not the rule. |
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