I argue that Forst’s justification paradigm is less radical than claimed in that it fails to establish an immanent connection between the role of justification as a transcendental principle and as...

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capit...

The paper discusses the adequate role of ideal theory for the discussion of practical problems. Therefore, I will reconstruct the Rawlsian understanding of the ideal-theoretical method and confront it with the critiques of Raymond Geuss and Amartya Sen. While Geuss is sceptical, whether ideal theory provides an appropriately critical perspective, Sen doubts the practical usefulness of ideal-theoretical models. It will be shown, that Rawlsian ideal theory can deal with these criticisms and that it is a useful tool for solving practical (...) problems. (shrink)

The ongoing critical redeployment of primitive accumulation proceeds under two premises. First, it is argued that Marx, erroneously, confined primitive accumulation to the earliest history of capitalism. Second, Marx is supposed to have teleologically justified primitive accumulation as a necessary precondition for socialist development. This article argues that reading Marx’s account of primitive accumulation in the context of contemporaneous debates about working class and socialist strategy rebuts both of these criticisms. Marx’s definition of primitive accumulation as the ‘prehistory of capital’ (...) does not deny its contemporaneity, but marks the distinction between the operations of capital and those of other agencies – especially the state – which are necessary, but also external, to capital itself. This same distinction between capital, which accumulates via the exploitation of labour-power, and the state, which becomes dependent upon capitalist accumulation for its own existence, recasts the historical necessity of primitive accumulation. Marx characterizes the modern state as the armed and servile agent of capital, willing to carry out primitive accumulation wherever the conditions of capitalist accumulation are threatened. Hence, the recent reconstructions risk obliterating Marx’s key insights into the specificity of a) capital as a form of wealth and b) capital’s relationship to the state. (shrink)