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What is primitive accumulation?
Finance capitalism didn’t fall from the sky fully formed: before you can invest, you must steal and before you can employ, you must enslave, explains the MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY. But was it just a stage, or does it exist today too?

“PRIMITIVE accumulation” means the acquisition of capital (physical or financial) by expropriation rather than through exploitation.

Exploitation — paying workers less than the value they create (the difference, surplus value, is accumulated as profit) — is the characteristic and universal feature of “mature” capitalism.

Expropriation means seizure, confiscation, robbery; it is direct.

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