This paper develops ‘primitive accumulation’ prior to and then in Karl Marx’s œuvre. By exploring the concept in Adam Smith and Sir James Steuart the paper highlights early influences on Marx’s evolving constructions. Marx’s construction in the Grundrisse begins with a logical determination much like Smith’s and moves, by drawing on Steuart, towards a socio-historical determination of a transitional violence. In Capital, ‘primitive accumulation’ still retains its transitional structure and delimited history, but it also points to the oppressive afterlife of (...) the processes of primitive accumulation. The political key to ‘primitive accumulation’ in Capital flows from determining primitive accumulation as temporally bounded, but having an afterlife in the oppressive social reproduction of capitalist societies. Against deriving political stakes through extended readings of ‘primitive accumulation’, this paper shows that an ‘originating’ view is textually accurate in a way that centres rather than sidelines the social reproduction of oppressions in capitalist societies. (shrink)

This article criticises the political-economic analysis of settler colonial studies, which it draws out through an immanent critique of its most famous practitioners. It then offers a critical genealogy of the wider theoretical trend that secures it: the post-Cold War vogue of asserting the ever-increasing centrality of primitive accumulation in global capitalism – what we might term a mode of predation. Finally, it teases out the tensions and confusions in the reliance of settler colonial studies upon Marx’s concept of surplus (...) populations, as well as problems abounding in Patrick Wolfe’s ‘logic of elimination’. Overall, it argues that the frequent claim that we inhabit a global settler modernity cannot be sustained through these notions, and that this claim is profoundly moral and academic, lacking political and analytical value. The insistence on the durability of settler colonialism amounts, in this literature, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself. (shrink)

This article is a response to some of the criticisms made of How Revolutionary were the Bourgeois Revolutions? by Gerstenberger, Post and Riley. In particular, it focuses on two issues of definition – that of capitalism and the capitalist nation-state – which arise from the book’s ‘consequentialist’ claim that bourgeois revolutions are defined by a particular outcome: the establishment of nation-states dedicated to the accumulation of capital.

What was the connection between the structure of the German economy in the 1930s and German aggression in World Warii? Adam Tooze’sWages of Destructionforcefully poses this issue, but fails to adequately resolve it. Instead, on this decisive question, his analysis oscillates uneasily between two equally unconvincing models: rational-choice theory and cultural determinism. This surprising explanatory failure derives from an inadequate theorisation of German imperialism as the expression of the combined and uneven development of the German economy and society in the (...) late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. (shrink)

Higher education (HE) mobility programmes around the globe have been key initiatives over the past thirty years, driven by combinations of supranational and national state-led knowledge economy policies, university strategies, and decisions made by individuals regarding employability, credentials, or academic tourism. In this paper we argue that mobility too often is understood through the prism of internationalism, itself umbilically tied to and nourished by Enlightenment liberal thinking, such as Kantian cosmopolitanism, and the romantic figure of the wandering scholar. This has (...) the effect of reducing our understanding of transnational mobility to individual actors, their desires, and experiences. In this paper we ask: to what extent and in what ways can HE transnational mobility projects be understood as forms of imperialism? In this regard we examine the literature on imperialism and argue for a more capacious use of the term; as taking economic, political and cultural forms. We use these to examine the links between the expansion and securing of empires historically, the state’s spatial projects and global market making. We do this through the prism of two nations, the UK and China, comparing their state’s transnational HE strategies, selectivities and outcomes. (shrink)

Affirmative globalization studies stress positive aspects of global capitalism, while critical globalization studies use notions such as "Empire" and "new imperialism" to analyze the global economy's negativity. Critical globalization studies, however, frequently lack a precise theoretical notion of imperialism. This absence can be corrected by connecting the notion of a "new imperialism" to the classical theory of imperialism, as found in Lenin's canonical work. Empirical analysis of data from recent decades shows that Lenin's aspproach remains broadly correct, and that adaptation (...) of his method to new realities strengthens the theoretical foundation of recent work on global capitalism. (shrink)