The Commons Reading Group will begin our second phase of readings in April 2008, this time focused on primitive accumulation. The cross-cutting historical, economic, social, and metaphorical concepts of commons/enclosures left us with many questions about how to think about resistance to privatization and commodification. A crucial aspect of this answer seems to lie in the ways in which societies are pulled into the market society, in order to understand what it may mean to pull out.

If you are interested in joining, please use the contact form on this site. If you are not Toronto-based, but want to participate, consider starting up a reading group in your city or town and let's find a way to share notes.

Reading List

People will be responsible for getting hold of the readings themselves, but wherever possible, we will circulate scanned/digital articles via email. This schedule is subject to change, depending on the pace of our reading and by adapting the list as we go to our reading whims: the desire to fill historical gaps and attend to various intellectual trajectories.

Week 1

Karl Marx. Passages from Das Kapital, Volume 1 on Primitive Accumulation.

Rosa Luxemberg. Passages from The Accumulation of Capital. Chapters 4, 6, 7, 8.

Week 2

Nicholas V. The Bull Romanus Pontifex, January 8, 1455.

Arneil, Barbara. “John Locke, Natural Law And Colonialism.” History Of Political Thought. Xiii: 4. Winter 1992.

Banner, Stuart. How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier. Chapter 5 (Harvard, 2007).

Weeks 3 - 7

C.L.R. James. The Black Jacobins. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Weeks 8 - 13

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker. The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Boston: Beacon Press, 2000.

Week 14

Harvey, David. “The ‘New’ Imperialism: On Spatio-Temporal Fixes and Accumulation
by Dispossession.” The Socialist Register, 2004, 63–87.

Bunker, Stephen G. and Paul S. Ciccantell. Globalization and the Race for Resources. Johns Hopkins, 2005. (Chapter to be selected)

Week 15

Perleman, Michael. The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000. (Chapter to be selected)

Zarembka, Paul, 2000, “Accumulation of Capital, Its Definition: A Century after Lenin and Luxemburg”, Value, Capitalist Dynamics and Money, Research in Political Economy, Volume 18, P. Zarembka, editor, JAI/Elsevier, Stamford, CT and Amsterdam, pp. 183-241.

Supplementary readings

The main readings may be supplemented by readings from this list below. The exact schedule for these additional texts which will be determined as we go.

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.

Arrighi, Giovanni. “Globalization and the Race for Resources.” Contemporary Sociology: A Journal of Reviews, Volume 36, Number 1, January 2007, pp. 87-88(2).

Boal, Iain. “Up From the Bottom.” In First World, Ha Ha Ha! The Zapatista Challenge, edited by Elaine Katzenberger, 169-174. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995.

Coronil, Fernando. The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Mies, Maria. Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale. (Zed Books 1998).

Williams, Jr., Roger, A. Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights, and the Legal History of America. University of Minnesota Press, 2005.

Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley 1997).

Zarembka, Paul. "Primitive Accumulation in Marxism, Historical or Trans-historical Separation from Means of Production?" The Commoner (2002). Available from http://www.commoner.org.uk/debzarembka01.pdf.