It is not, moreover, only spectacular violence but also the repetitive, incremental, often slow or concealed violence of appropriation that needs to be considered here. If socially necessary labor time constitutes the meaning of value for capital, as Jason W. Moore writes, such value is embedded in a web of life that capital insistently appropriates as the necessary prop, wedge, or pedestal for the exploitation of formally free wage labor. Marxist theory that assigns the primary novelty of capitalism to economic exploitation and the production of surplus value that structurally separates economic compulsion from direct domination fails to recognize what may be an even greater novelty of capitalism: the consistent extraeconomic processes of appropriation by which capital is able to “identify, secure, and channel unpaid work outside the commodity system into the circuit of capital.” As Marxist feminists have long noted, “the appropriation of accumulated unpaid work in human form,” including the labors of biological and social reproduction delivered the world over by women, provides the real historical conditions for “socially necessary labour-time.” A narrow sphere of productive relations, in this view, depends upon a more expansive sphere of appropriation in which cheap human and extrahuman nature are taken up by commodity production.
Embodied in the figures of the slave, the migrant worker, the household worker, the chronically unemployed, and the like, appropriation encompasses zones of both privatized and publicly sanctioned coercion and ethicopolitical devaluation that are inseparable from capitalist processes of valorization. Thus, rather than opposing notions of absolute sovereignty and its power of life over death with a biopolitically, productive materialist history, we might instead recognize how the two have been perdurably braided together (at least in part) through the conquest/commodification of black bodies (as well as in the conquest/commodification of indigenous lands) that for Marx comprises the moment of so-called primitive accumulation, extending this to the ongoing unpaid work of women the world over, accumulated unpaid work represented by labor migration, and war capitalism’s differentiation between the internally ordered, rule-bound spaces of production and market exchange and exceptional zones of armed appropriation. The latter are domains not only for enacting plunder, that is, primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession), but also for developing cutting-edge procedures, logics of calculation, circulation, abstraction, and infrastructure—the slaver’s management of human cargo, the camp, the prison, the forward military base—innovations that can proceed insofar as they are unfettered by legally protected human beings advancing new prejudices, built upon the old.
Nikhil Pal Singh, “On Race, Violence, and So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” Social Text 128
