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Dispossession, Property, and the Clash of Interests: Reflections on Early Marx and Late Bensaïd: A review of Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor

2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 32; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/pmc.2021.0013

1053-1920

Bret Benjamin,

Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development

Dispossession, Property, and the Clash of Interests: Reflections on Early Marx and Late BensaïdA review of Daniel Bensaïd, The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor Bret Benjamin (bio) Bensaïd, Daniel. The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor. Translated by Robert Nichols, U of Minnesota P, 2021. No honest history of capitalist modernity can fail to account for the violence of dispossession. Marx famously grapples with the distinction between the ideal operations of capital through which surplus value is extracted from waged workers at the point of production, and the regular and persistent applications of “direct, extra-economic force” (Capital 900) characteristic of the period of “so-called primitive accumulation,” when capital comes into the world “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt” (926). The relation between the economic and the extra-economic forms of violence, theft, enclosure, expropriation, and dispossession is ever in motion and, indeed, dialectically constituted. “Force,” Marx insists in his account of capital’s origins, “is the midwife of every old society which is pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power” (916). Many of the most important thinkers in the tradition that bears his name—from Rosa Luxemburg and Vladimir Lenin in the early decades of the twentieth century to David Harvey and Nancy Fraser today—have worked to define the precise theoretical and historical relationships between economic exploitation and the forms of dispossession which capital disavows.1 To what degree is the persistent use of force and theft a necessary precondition for ongoing capital accumulation? Do the dispossessions of the present issue from a different set of determinants than those that characterized the pre-history of capital in its conditions of emergence? How might this relation between exploitation and dispossession shed light on the structural unevenness of the world market, felt most acutely by those who have historically borne the most vicious forms of violence: the victims of imperialism and racialized discrimination? Robert Nichols has made noteworthy recent contributions to this always urgent debate in his writings on primitive accumulation and in his recent book, Theft is Property.2 As editor and translator of the brief but provocative The Dispossessed: Karl Marx’s Debates on Wood Theft and the Right of the Poor, Nichols makes a different sort of intervention, approaching the question of dispossession by pairing early writings by Marx with an essay by the eminent French public intellectual and activist Daniel Bensaïd. Originally published in 1842 in the Rheinische Zeitung, the five articles by Marx collected in this volume offer a characteristically blistering critique of positions set forth by the state and landowners during the Rhineland Assembly’s debates on legislation that criminalized the gathering of wood by peasants. Marx’s articles are preceded by the volume’s eponymous essay, Bensaïd’s “The Dispossessed,” originally published in 2007. The texts represent opposite poles of each author’s career. Marx’s Rheinische Zeitung articles, which Nichols contends “have long languished in obscurity, particularly in the English-speaking world” (xiv), were penned just prior to his profound engagement with, and critique of, political economy (only fully evident, Bensaïd rightly suggests, in the 1844 Paris Manuscripts). Bensaïd’s essay, by contrast, was written just three years before the end of his life when his long battle with AIDS appears to have prevented the completion of more sustained intellectual projects.3 Marx’s articles offer fascinating but incomplete points of intellectual departure, suggesting lines of connection between the critique in these early essays and his more fully conceived later work; Bensaïd’s essay offers an erudite account of the intellectual history of property that draws out the political implications of Marx’s wood theft articles, but struggles to articulate a structural account of dispossession and the capital relation. The pairing of early Marx and late Bensaïd is bolstered by Nichols’s helpful introduction, which provides historical context for both and brings their analyses up to the present.4 Taken as a whole, the volume makes a valuable contribution to longstanding Marxist debates about...