Dispossession, Property, and the Clash of Interests: Reflections on Early Marx and Late Bensaïd

Bret Benjamin (bio)

A review of 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 dispossession. While neither Marx nor Bensaïd manages in these essays to develop a fully realized analysis of the relation between exploitation and dispossession under capital, both offer significant insights—particularly about the state, property, and class composition or fragmentation—and their pairing should prove generative to Marxists working to understand, and of course to transform, the conditions of the ever-growing ranks of the dispossessed under contemporary capital.

Many readers of Marx will know the wood theft essays primarily as an example of his “liberal rationalist”⁵ thinking from the period just prior to his break from the Berlin neo-Hegelians that corresponded with his developing critique of political economy. Indeed, Marx seems to appeal at times in these articles to the ideals of rational debate, a free press, and the principle by which the state might stand in as a universal arbiter capable of distributing justice equitably. Nevertheless, we also find in these early texts evidence of a rapidly sharpening critique of the modern representative state as an expression of bourgeois interests. For example, Marx highlights the implications of criminalizing a practice traditionally considered part of the commons. Firewood, previously understood as a free gift of nature harvested for the common good, is metamorphosed by the state into private property. Collection now becomes theft. Peasants who merely seek cooking fuel or protection from the cold are subjected not only to criminalization by the state, but also to the growing social control of the landowning class, to whom the new law requires the criminal to pay exorbitant fines and provide free labor. In language evocative of the fetishism section of Capital’s opening chapter, Marx declares that the “wood possesses the remarkable character such that as soon as it is stolen it secures for its owner state qualities it did not previously possess” (93). The state imbues the wood with properties that issue from its new legal form as property. By recharacterizing wood collection as theft, the state acts entirely on behalf of property-owners; in the process, the state is itself transformed from the universal representative of the citizenry to the mechanism through which an ownership class exerts social control:

The wood thief has robbed the forest owner of wood, but the forest owner has used the wood thief to steal the state itself. . . .  We are only surprised that the forest owner is not allowed to heat his stove with the wood thieves. (93-4)

These remarks may lack the analytical clarity of the 1848 Manifesto’s pronouncement that the “executive of the modern State is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” (Marx and Engels 486). However, the Swiftian image of landowners heating their stoves with the bodies of peasants guilty solely of collecting firewood puts us squarely on the road to a full-throated critique of the class power enmeshed within the liberal-democratic state.

Any apparent universality of rights inhering to the abstraction of citizen is belied by the inequalities of class power mediated by the state. Marx has yet to work out the core theoretical basis of his critique of capital: the social abstraction of labor that makes it commensurate with all commodities. He certainly cannot see in these essays how a category such as citizenship might take on a form of appearance determined by the deeper abstraction of labor that structures the capital relation. Yet glimpses of this relationship are evident. Consider the following passage:

There was no attempt to afford equal protection to the forest owner and the infringer of forest regulations, only equal protection for the small and large forest owners. In the latter, legal equality is measured down to the minutest detail while in the former inequality is an axiom. Why does the small forest owner demand the same protection as the big forest owner? Because both are forest owners. But are not both the forest owner and the infringers of forest regulations citizens of the state? If small and big forest owners have the same right to protection by the state, does this not apply even more so to small and big citizens of the state? (77)

In due time, Marx comes to demystify the formal equality of the contract under which labor power is purchased on the open market, consensually and for its fair value; this “free” exchange conceals the fact that the laborer, dispossessed of all means of production, enters the contract “like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing to expect but—a tanning” (Capital 280). The passage above, I would suggest, can be read as an analogous critique, conceived in these early essays solely within the political sphere of state, law, and citizenship, but paving the way for his later critique of formal freedom under conditions of structural inequality that characterize the capital relation.

Also noteworthy in the passage above is Marx’s attention to the state’s role in managing differences between and among property owners or individual capitals. While the state establishes and enforces a relation of inequality between landowners and the propertyless (big and small citizens), it meticulously insists on legal equality between big and small property owners. Why? Again, we find the seeds of the dialectical critique that Marx develops over the decades ahead. The state’s insistence on equality among landowners anticipates an argument from the “Working Day” chapter of Capital, the section of Volume I in which Marx first turns his attention to an historical account of class struggles within the state, declaring that “the most fundamental right under the law of capital is the equal exploitation of labor-power by all capitalists” (405). Paradoxically, the universal conditions under which the abstraction of labor power will ultimately assume its determinate form are pressed into being in part through competition between and among branches of capital and individual owners. In his account of the Assembly debates, Marx cites a forest owner who laments that landowning farmers can rely on laws that punish those who steal food whereas he has no such protections against the gathering of wood. Marx dons the persona of the forest owner to express faux outrage at this inequitable treatment: “Farm owners, why are you so magnanimous where my interests are concerned? Because your interests are already taken care of” (86).

Rather than a sphere defined by the abstract universality of citizenship, then, Marx depicts the emerging bourgeois state as a formal structure of equality that masks the direct and forcible operation of powerful interests. He offers the following gem:

Interest has no memory; it thinks only of itself. The one thing about which it is concerned, itself, it never forgets. But it is not concerned with contradictions, for it never comes into contradiction with itself. It is a constant improviser, for it has no system, only expedients. (87)

One would be hard-pressed to find a better description of the political elite today: to denounce them as contradictory—or more typically as hypocritical—misses the more basic point that any “principles” they might espouse must be understood to be identical with their interests. No memory, no system, no principle—merely the expedient exercise of power in the self-interest of political actors. To argue, following Marx, that the state is fundamentally a site of interest rather than of universal equality is merely to recognize that it will invariably be the site of intense class struggle under capital, both between those who own property and those who labor and/or who have been dispossessed, as well as between and among sectors of the owning class. Class struggle, in political terms, is the struggle between interests. The wood theft articles illustrate the transformation of direct violence into state-mediated violence, which in turn lays the groundwork for the abstract forms of social domination that characterize the social relation.⁶

For Bensaïd, such struggles become most visible through the form of property, and his essay is particularly effective in situating Marx’s articles on wood theft within an intellectual history about the origins of modern capitalist conceptions of property. His concise but illuminating survey begins in 1647 with the Levellers who locate a constitutive “property-in-the-person,” where “[t]o be free is to own oneself and, by extension, the means and products of one’s labor” (21). Their “point of departure,” according to Bensaïd, is not “a critique of property, but rather a conception of equality buttressed by a theological argument” (21). On his way to an analysis of Marx’s contributions, Bensaïd reflects on Hegel, who affirms the right of necessity; Rousseau, who “positions the inalienable right to existence (to ‘life’!) against any right to private property” (8); and Locke, Hobbes, and Proudhon, whose influence on the wood theft essays is evident.⁷

In surveying this intellectual tradition, Bensaïd ably demonstrates that capital does not invent property, just as it does not invent money, markets, or the sale of labor; rather, it finds existing social forms and transforms them to such an extent that they bear only superficial resemblance to their previous instantiations. As the wood is transformed through its relation to the state, so is property transformed by its relation to capital. Having been reconstituted by the determinants of the capital relation, however, the concept of property contains within it the contradictions of a form at once of capital and antithetical to it: “The critique of property,” he writes, “is thus at the very birth and heart of all variants of socialism that arose in the nineteenth century in resistance to triumphant capitalism” (30). Bensaïd reads in Marx an attempt to draw out the “original meaning of the notion of property, as used by Locke, for whom ‘every man is the owner of his own person,’ or by the Levellers who saw in it the foundation of individual autonomy” (51). Specifically, Bensaïd excavates the original conceptions of property as a means to better understand Marx’s humanism, his utopian striving for a society capable of producing fully developed, non-alienated human beings. Drawing on (and quoting) the work of Paul Serini, Bensaïd argues: “Owing to the ‘acquisitions’ of capitalist development, the era of the private property of the individual worker is irredeemably lost, but an ‘individual form of possession in the broadest sense’ remains the condition of the ‘free development of each’” (51). Tantalizing if undeveloped, this sketch of a reanimated Marxist individualism posits an immanent critique of capital from within the essence of property, a concept central to capital’s self-image but here mobilized for quite divergent ends.

Bensaïd’s larger purpose in revisiting Marx’s wood theft essays is to reflect upon the contradictions of property in the era of globalization. Our era, he suggests, is characterized by the commodification and privatization of all spheres of social existence. We witness an accelerated enclosure of social wealth that had previously been understood as common, creating on the one hand an ever-more powerful capitalist class and on the other an ever-growing population of those who share the condition of dispossession. Bensaïd’s examples from 2007 fall in line with much of the literature on neoliberalism and globalization (his preferred term): the privatization of state and public or common goods, including even those goods that would seem to defy commodification such as ideas, knowledge, genes, water, the atmosphere, ecosystem, etc.⁸ “The extension of the commodification of the world to knowledge and life itself,” he writes, “poses with new acuteness the question of the public good and the common good of humanity” (46).

“The Dispossessed” therefore stands in conversation with that rich line of Marxist scholarship that considers the accumulation of capital in relation to both dispossession and exploitation. For instance, David Harvey, whose work Bensaïd cites approvingly, argues that contemporary class movements

are currently bi-furcated into movements around expanded reproduction . . . and movements around accumulation by dispossession in which everything from classic forms of primitive accumulation through practices destructive of cultures, histories and environments to the depredations wrought by contemporary forms of finance capital are the focus of resistance. (65)

Nancy Fraser, perhaps uncomfortable with Harvey’s expansive use of the term “accumulation” to describe practices that appear more akin to what Marx called the “centralization” of capital (that is, the upward redistribution of wealth rather than the expanding production of value; Capital 777), clarifies that “expropriation is accumulation by other means.” Expropriation—the term Fraser adopts rather than “dispossession”—necessarily implies that “the commandeered capacities get incorporated into the value-expanding process that defines capital. Simple theft is not enough” (166-67). Going further than Harvey, who merely suggests the need to find an “organic link” between exploitation and dispossession, Fraser offers a structural account of the relation between the expropriated and the exploited, which plays a constitutive role in the emergence and reproduction of capital and the capitalist state.⁹ She writes:

the subjection of those whom capital expropriates is a hidden condition of possibility for the freedom of those whom it exploits. Absent an account of the first, we cannot fully understand the second. Nor can we fully appreciate the nonaccidental character of capitalism’s historic entanglement with racial oppression. (166)

What, precisely, does Bensaïd add to this theoretical tradition? The answer is somewhat hazy. His analysis of specific examples of dispossession in the era of globalization is often penetrating. Consider his assessment of the conflicts that make capital incompatible with the planet’s climate and ecosystems:

Between market logic, where abstract labor time is the standard for all things, and the reasoned relations of time and space characteristic of natural conditions for the reproduction of the human species, there is no common measure. The incommensurability between market values and ecological values marks one of the historical limits of the capitalist mode of production. (56)

Such analysis is, sadly, as accurate and pressing today as it was in 2007. However, despite Bensaïd’s considerable expertise with both Marx and the tradition of political theory, the essay ultimately fails to develop an independent and sustained argument about the relation between dispossession and capital. It asserts that dispossession has taken on a new importance (who would doubt it?), but remains murky on the fundamental questions addressed more directly by Harvey and especially Fraser: whether dispossession is a structural feature of capital that exists alongside exploitation and accumulation, perhaps even as their condition of possibility, or whether dispossession should be understood to have superseded exploitation as the motivating force of contemporary capital.

Consider, for example, the following passage in which Bensaïd expands on Marx’s claim in Contribution to Critique of Political Economy that all realms of science, art, politics, and social life have been “captured and put at the service of capital.” He asserts, quoting from Contribution throughout, that:

as big industry grows, “the creation of real wealth becomes less dependent upon labour time and the quantity of labour employed than upon the power of the agents set in motion during labour time. And their power—their POWERFUL EFFECTIVENESS—in turn bears no relation to the immediate labour time which their production costs, but depends, rather, upon the general level of development of science and the progress of technology or on the application of science to production.” Thus, “the theft of alien labour time, which is the basis of present wealth, appears to be a miserable foundation.” This miserable base is the reason for the disturbances of the world. The law of value can no longer measure the excesses of the world except at the price of ever-increasing global outbursts of violence. (41-2)

How are we to understand this argument? Is Bensaïd equating “the theft of alien labour time”—which for Marx refers to surplus value extracted by capitalists from workers in production—with the privatizations and enclosures that he has been calling dispossession? Does he suggest that contemporary capital does away with the distinction between exploitation and expropriation? Is he merely asserting that violence underpins the production of value? That has always been true. Or are the “ever-increasing global outbursts of violence” to be understood as a symptom of slackening profitability and of capital’s increasingly desperate efforts to amass wealth in the absence of real accumulation?¹⁰ Does the violence of the contemporary moment illustrate something about capital’s requirement for uneven geographical development or racialized divisions, theorized respectively by Harvey and Fraser? Such arguments would be compelling to me, but I am hard-pressed to find evidence for such claims in Bensaïd’s remarks. The confusion continues in a subsequent passage:

These philosophico-legal puzzles are the result of contradictions between the growing socialization of intellectual labor and the private appropriation of ideas, on the one hand; between abstract labor, which underlies the market measure, and concrete work which is difficult to quantify, on the other. From these contradictions results a generalized disruption of the law of value as an increasingly wretched means by which to measure exchange and social wealth. (43)

Bensaïd’s pairing of exchange and social wealth is puzzling. He is surely right to decry the dehumanizing barbarity of capital, which transforms human labor into the abstraction of labor power and limits the complexity and richness of life to one value-producing activity. The law of value has always been a wretched means to measure social wealth. But what does it mean to say that the law of value is also a wretched means to measure exchange? Does this imply that exchange has kicked itself loose of the determinations of the value form, as suggested by Hardt and Negri and by other strands of post-Marxist thought, with which Bensaïd is certainly in conversation? Or could it imply that the accounting function of value becomes increasingly difficult to discern as wealth is centralized through forms of dispossession, even as new value production stagnates? More fundamentally, in these repeated but opaque references to the law of value, is Bensaïd suggesting that new forms of dispossession have replaced or superseded value or accumulation for capital? Or does he understand dispossession as an expression of the underlying contradictions of value as constituted by the capital relation? Bensaïd’s position seems closer to the former; my own is most certainly the latter. But I offer this series of questions because, frustratingly, the essay never develops a sustained thesis on these crucial theoretical points. I am not criticizing Bensaïd’s position so much as his lack of a position. Armed with considerable erudition and learning, he wades into the rich Marxist debate about exploitation and expropriation only to gesture rather than argue.

If the theoretical underpinnings of Bensaïd’s account remain hazy and underdeveloped, his call for political action is clear and compelling. Echoing both the Manifesto and Marx’s critique of interestin the wood theft articles,Bensaïd concludes on this ringing note: “Who will prevail: self-interested calculation or solidarity and common interest, property and an enforceable right to existence? Our lives are worth more than their profits: ‘Rise up, dispossessed of the world!’” (57). Bensaïd’s political challenge is blunt: the world’s crises demand swift and transformative action—which side are you on? More subtly, he evokes the intellectual tradition his essay so adroitly analyzes: individual as opposed to private property rights, in which one holds a property claim over oneself and the products of one’s labor. In this way Bensaïd situates property not on the side of capital’s self-interest but rather on the side of common interest and the right to existence; he uses the conjunction “and” rather than “or” to link property with life instead of pitting them against one another. Here we can see evidence of the sophistication and substance of Bensaïd’s essay, and indeed of the volume as a whole, mining Marx’s early writings for critical insights and positing the essential relevance of his (emerging) critique of political economy to the social conflicts of our time. Filled with perceptive analysis and provocation, alongside a few notable frustrations, the volume warrants careful study. It would be unrealistic to expect a brief volume of this sort to develop a fully conceived theory of dispossession and its relation to capital. More modestly, we can credit Nichols for his pairing of Marx and Bensaïd, which lays a few more conceptual planks into the foundation from which such a theory might arise.

Footnotes

1. See Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, Routledge, 2003; Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, LeftWord Books, 2010; David Harvey, especially pp. 41-68; and Nancy Fraser. Nichols identifies specific connections between Bensaïd and E.P. Thompson, Customs In Common, Penguin, 1991; Midnight Notes Collective, Midnight Oil: Work, Energy, War, Autonomedia, 1992; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard UP, 2000; and David Harvey. Supplementing these, the following very partial list serves to indicate the diversity of Marxist approaches to the question of dispossession, especially as it relates to a critique of imperialism, racism, and neoliberalism: Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism,U of North Carolina P, 1983; Utsa Patnaik and Prabhat Patnaik, A Theory of Imperialism,Columbia UP, 2017, especially pp. 47-60; Mike Davis, Planet of Slums, Verso, 2006; Michael Denning, “Wageless Life,” New Left Review, no. 66, Nov./Dec. 2010, pp. 79-97; “Misery and Debt: On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital,” Endnotes, no. 2, April 2010, https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/2/en/endnotes-misery-and-debt.

2. “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation,” Radical Philosophy, vol. 194, Nov./Dec. 2015, pp. 18-28; Theft is Property, Duke UP, 2020.

3. Nichols cites Enzo Traverso’s statement to this effect, a hypothesis that seems to be echoed indirectly in the obituaries for Besaïd written respectively by Tariq Ali in The Guardian (“Daniel Bensaïd obituary”) and Alex Callinicos (“Obituary – Daniel Bensaïd (1946 – 2010)”), originally published on the Socialist Workers Party website and now archived on the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

4. Nichols’s updated translation of Marx’s wood theft articles does not appear to offer any major theoretical advances over that of Clemens Palme Dutt (Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 1, Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp. 224-263). However, the modernized syntax and vocabulary nicely accentuate the biting rhetorical style of Marx, whose withering critique of bourgeois logic is on masterful display in these articles.

5. Bensaïd approvingly adopts this term from Louis Althusser, For Marx, Verso, 1965, p. xxxiii.

6. See Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory, Cambridge UP, 1993.

7. Five years after the wood theft articles, Marx breaks fully from Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy. Bensaïd does an admirable job summarizing the theoretical distinctions that underpin this split, not yet worked out in the wood theft articles:

For Marx, elementary individual work is at once social work, which presupposes a prior social accumulation of knowledge and expertise. While Proudhon opposed the virtues of original work to the misery of bonded labor—‘real value’ to ‘fictitious value,’ production to speculation—Marx discovered the contrary: the unity of concrete and abstract labor, of exchange- and use-vale, the open secret of the commodity and the enchanted world of capital. (33)

8. To the question of whether such goods should properly be called commodities, see Kevin Floyd, “Automatic Subjects,” Historical Materialism, vol. 24, no. 2, 2016, pp. 61-86, https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206X-12341470.

9. Crucially, Fraser introduces the inextricability of expropriation and racial oppression, drawing explicit connections between US racism and the history of capitalist imperialism. In his introduction to The Dispossessed, Nichols notes that despite Bensaïd’s extensive work in Latin America and his familiarity with Trotskyist conceptions of “uneven and combined development,” the question of colonial or imperial expressions of dispossession are referenced in his essay “but not given a full treatment” (xx).

10. See Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence, Verso, 2006; Marxism and the Critique of Value, edited by Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown, M-C-M’ Press, 2014.

Works Cited

• Fraser, Nancy. “Expropriation and Exploitation in Racialized Capitalism: A Reply to Michael Dawson.” Critical Historical Studies, Spring 2016, pp. 163-178.
• Harvey, David. Spaces of Global Capitalism. Verso, 2019.
• Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy. Translated by Ben Fowkes,vol. 1,Penguin Books, 1976.
• — and Frederick Engels. “Manifesto of the Communist Party.” Translated by Samuel Moore, Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 6, Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pp. 477-519.