자본주의와 강탈 토지, 노동, 그리고 육체적 삶의 수탈 Capitalism and Robbery The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life

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자본주의와 강탈
토지, 노동, 그리고 육체적 생명의 수탈

Capitalism and Robbery

The Expropriation of Land, Labor, and Corporeal Life


자본주의 체제는 유상의 임금노동의 착취(exploitation) 에 기반하고 있는 만큼, 무상의 수탈(expropriation)은 자본주의적 수취방식과는 관계가 먼, 전근대적 수탈방식이거나 자본주의 발생초기에 잠시 나타나는 일시적 수탈방식으로 이해하는 견해가 있습니다. 최근 발표된 이 논문은 이런 통속적 관점을 비판하고, 경제외적 강제에 의한 수탈은 경제적 착취와 쌍을 이루는 자본주의 생산양식의 고유한 수탈방식임을 주장합니다. 즉 자본주의체제는 그 내포적 축적의 계기로 임노동에 대한 잉여가치를 추출하면서, 그 외연적 확산에 있어서는 강탈과 수탈에 근거하는, 이 두가지를 모두 자본축적의 계기로 삼고 작동하는 시스템이란 점을 설득력있는 근거를 제시하며 주장하고 있습니다. 인간과 사회와 자연에 대한 체제적 파괴가 복원 불가능한 임계점에까지 치닫고 있는 현실에서, 해결책을 찾기위해 그 근본원을 진단하는 데에 통찰력을 주는 기사로 필독을 추천합니다.



요지
Profit upon expropriation was the key economic category that Marx used in his critique of Smith’s notion of previous stock/accumulation.93 “Smith’s theology of previous accumulation,” Perelman writes, “suggested that capitalists’ commanding position was due to their past savings”—a view that Marx debunked.94 “So-called” previous accumulation was thus for Marx simply an ideological device of classical political economy meant to disguise the reality of “the expropriation of the immediate producers.”95From this perspective, capitalism was only possible due to the alienation or expropriation of nature, and the self-alienation or expropriation of human powers and corporeal life. Expropriation was characteristic of all previous class civilizations, but it took on a far more systematic character and assumed a vastly greater scale under capitalism, where it became part of a dyad, together with exploitation, giving rise to the capitalist juggernaut as a whole, the drive to endless exponential expansion, and finally the movement toward socialism, the negation of the negation.
In the new capitalist bourgeois society, expropriation was not the essence of the system as in tributary modes of production. Instead, it was to give rise to a whole new inner dynamic of exploitation that had its own self-propelling logic, manifested in the accumulation of capital. Exploitation in turn created the demand for ever-wider circles of expropriation, expanding the boundaries of the system. The dialectic of exploitation and expropriation that constituted capitalism was thus all the more a vicious spiral, associated with the logic of the accumulation of capital. Arising in the early modern era, capitalism led to the most brutal systems of expropriation the world has ever seen: slavery, misogyny (wife selling, burning of witches, the superexploitation of women and children), land grabbing, genocide, and the destruction of the earth, extending to the entire planet. Acutely aware of these contradictions, Marx wrote: “If money, according to Augier, ‘comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,’ capital comes dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt.”96
It is customary in mainstream political circles (as well for some further to the left) to treat these horrors associated with the development of capitalism on a world scale as mere “birth pains,” if they are acknowledged at all. Too often, they are treated as phenomena of the distant past to be forgotten, to be papered over by a triumphalist story of capital’s inevitable rise, or to be hidden away by the “nursery tale” of so-called primitive accumulation, whereby individual capitalists rose to riches by virtue of their own abstinence, pulling themselves up by their bootstraps.97
Yet, the horrors of the expropriation of the direct producers (including nonwaged workers) and the earth are not simply an “original sin,” but a constant reality of capitalism, by which it establishes its earthly domination and “polices the suffering on its borders.”98 In twenty-first-century late capitalism and late imperialism, this expropriation is in some ways going further than ever before with the deepening of imperialist value chains, whereby much of the surplus value of the entire world is siphoned off via a process of value capture, to feed the coffers of multinational corporations and the wealthy at the center of the system.99 This is accompanied by renewed battles over the misogynistic basis of private property, involving the control of women’s bodies; the resurgence of racial capitalism; and the destruction of the planet as a place of human habitation, breaking the “chain of human generations.”100



원문출처
https://monthlyreview.org/2019/12/01/capitalism-and-robbery/