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GLG: At the root of the notion of capital-imperialism lies the discussion about expropriations, which refers to Marx’s reflection on so-called primitive accumulation. There is a long tradition of this debate going back to Rosa Luxemburg. How do you fit into this tradition? What does expropriation mean and what is its relation to the extraction of surplus value?
VF: Marx insists that expropriations integrate capitalist social dynamics. They are not only its “previous moment.” The existence of free workers constitutes the social basis for the expansion of its crucial social relationship, embedding capital and labor for value extraction (valorization of value). Nowadays, this massive disposability tends to reach the whole population, converting singular beings into a bare necessity, a compulsory disposal for the sale of labor-power under any conditions. Massive expropriation is the initial social condition and result of capitalist expansion.
Until recently, the vast majority of the world’s population lived in the countryside, under pre-capitalist conditions. The rural world appeared as an effective exteriority vis-à-vis urban capitalism, but this has changed. Rosa Luxemburg believed that the expansion of capital required non-capitalist frontiers because of the impossibility of mercantile achievement within the strict limits of capitalist societies. David Harvey modified the formulation asserting that, today, capitalism produces such externalities (the “dispossession” that portrays a further unfolding of “normalized” capitalism). I disagree: there has never been a “normalized” capitalism, and the countries in which that seemed to happen, employed barbaric and imperialist forms of value extraction. These are suggestive propositions, but we must insist that the basic social relation, internal (not external) to capital, is the production of necessities and the first of them is the production of social beings who need to provide their own subsistence through markets. Rosa Luxemburg reminds us of the overwhelming role of the continuous expansion of capitalist social relations.
full: http://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/on-capital-imperialism-an-interview-with-virginia-fontes/
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