Introduction.

In the last twenty years the neoliberal orthodoxy become predominant in all major levels of government and shaped the policy recommendations of the major think tanks all around the world. Countries have witnessed continuous massive attacks on those functions of the state which were designed to compensate for the inadequacies and injustices of the market. Cuts in social spending have taken of course many formsand shapes. This depended on what was the historical and socioeconomic context in which they were implemented, either the “rich” countries of the North, the “poor” countries of the South or the “transitional" countries of the East. Yet, upon a cursory reading of the enormous literature on this subject, one is left with the strong sensation that there is something common between, say, the cut in unemployment benefits in Britain brought about by the need to balance the budget; the wave of privatisation in Poland, brought about by the need to dismantle state socialism; and the cuts in food subsidies in Tanzania, brought about by the need to repay foreign debt.

This paper suggests that a reinterpretation of Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation may give us some important insights on the common social character of what prima facie appears to be different policies brought about by different circumstances. According to one main traditional interpretation, Marx's concept of primitive accumulation indicates the historical process that gave birth to the preconditions of a capitalist mode of production. These preconditions refer mainly to the creation of a section of the population with no other means of livelihood but their labour power to be sold in a nascent labour market and to the accumulation of capital that may be used for nascent industries. In this conception, the adjective “primitive” corresponds to a clear-cut temporal dimension (the past), which becomes the condition for a capitalist future. Alternatively, the same concept of primitive accumulation has been interpreted as a continuous phenomenon within the capitalist mode of production, especially in connection to Marxist analyses describing the subordination of the South to the North of the world economy.

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