Primitive Accumulation, Enclavity, Rural Marginalisation & Articulation.

In March 2006, The University of KwaZulu Natal's Centre for Civil Society in Durban aimed to reinvigorate a tradition of political economy by considering the legacies of Guy Mhone and José Negrao (Who died in 1996). The analytical traditions are diverse but complementary. Together they capture many of the ways that primitive accumulation continues to structure and reproduce systems of inequality. For example, from Luxembourg comes a sense of primitive accumulation as a permanent mode of imperial 'accumulation by dispossession' (in David Harvey's terms) such that, Force, fraud, oppression, looting are openly displayed without any attempt at concealment, and it requires an effort to discover within this tangle of political violence and contests of power the sern laws of the economic process. Bourgeois liberal theory takes into account only the former aspect: 'the realm of peaceful competition', the marvels of technology and pure commodity exchange; it separates it strictly from the other aspect; the realm of capital's blustering violence which is regarded as more or less incidental for foreign policy and quite independent of the economic sphere of capital. In reality, political power is nothing but a vehicle for the economic process. The conditions of the reproduction of capital provide the organic link between these two aspects of the accumulation of capital. he historical career of capitalism can only be appreciated by taking them together. 'Sweating blood and filth with every pore from head to toe' characterizes not only the birth of capital but also its progress in the world at every step, and thus capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent conortions and convulsions (1968(1923):453). As an example of the wide-ranging Colloquium deliberations, Gillan Hart's essay in this issue takes concern about articulation of capitalist and non-capitalist spheres of economy and society onto the terrains of politics, race and gender, in a conversation with Wolpe and Stuart Hall and through them with Althusser and Gramsci. Practical implications of the critique of primitive accumulation - of its 'commodification' of social spheres like water and education - are related by Prishani Naidoo and Salim Vally. Other papers from the Colloquium offer a strong sense of revived Southern African and international political-economic reasoning that stretches from economic to social to environmental factors.