Primitive Accumulation and the Formation of Difference: On Marx and Schmitt

What Marx referred to as the "so-called primitive accumulation'' has been frequently revisited in contemporary theoretical writing, but has often been read simply as a unilateral process of destruction of the supposedly holistic community that preceded it. More broadly, this illogical or irrational moment of beginning, the origin of the historical presuppositions for capital's development, is a general problem of power, the problem of how an order that appears as a perfect circle, a closed circuit with no outside that nevertheless paradoxically requires something outside it, can be generated and maintained. Schmitt's discussion of the formation of the modern order of nation-states, the enclosure of territory, the maintenance of their borders, and the acts that sustain this order itself can be effectively cross-read with Marx's discussion. The moment of primitive accumulation is not so much a force of destruction or elimination of difference as it is an even greater violence of creation-the creation of the owner of labor power and the formation of a system of difference that will furnish the basis for capital's full deployment.