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Production can be carried on better under the modern police.
-Karl Marx, Grundrisse (1939/1973)
IN SOCIETIES THAT PRESENT TO US AS GIANT "COLLECTION^] OF COMmodities," the logic of "buying in order to sell dearer" that Karl Marx (1867/1993, 153, 306) describes in Capital determines the entirety of our social existence. At first sight, the surplus coming out of exchanging goods may strike one as somewhat magical. As we embark on an exploration of its enigmas, however, the shiny surface of the commodity world gets cracked and vanishes, revealing a thickly knitted web, as what initially stood as independent domains-that is, the political, the economic-turn out to be facets of capital as an all-encompassing social relation (Holloway & Picciotto 1978).
As a theory of society under capitalism and a critique ofpolitical economy that questions mythical narratives about the origins of capital resulting from the accumulation of stock, Marx (1867/1993, 1010) describes processes of so-called primitive accumulation that fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England displayed in "the classic form." As strictly speaking "not an accumulation ... at all" (Bottomore 2001,444), the giant process of dispossession pivoted on land enclosures and the violent separation of communities from their lands and means of living, which, as the Marxian analysis shows, relied on the sheer use of force. Outlawing communal forms of property, expelling peasants, and criminalizing customary age-old rights turned a mass of the destitute into vagrants. Terrorized under regimes such as Queen Elizabeth's poor laws, the dispossessed former serfs and peasants had to move into cities to start selling their labor force. Over a couple of generations, Marx observes, the displaced were transformed into wage labor, and the conditions for the development of capital set into place (Marx 1867/1993, 1029-31).
In fact, as Mark Neocleous (2000, xii; 2021, 48) argues, the earlier, brutal phase of primitive accumulation described by Marx constituted "a massive police operation" conducted through countless police measures, including those disguised as legal norms. Like the Elizabethan poor laws, such measures supported the transformation of the masses released from dissolving feudal bonds into wage workers. The original, initial wave of accumulation setting the foundation of capitalism thus involved extraordinary violence and a disregard for communal rights. Through myriad regulations banning non-commodified lifestyles, entire groups were left with no...