The primal scene of capital

This response to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Unpayable Debt (2022) takes up the question of violence and the role it plays in Karl Marx’s theorization of the capital-labor relation. Ferreira da Silva usefully highlights the way Marx, Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey posit the violence of primitive accumulation as anterior or external to the theoretical analysis of the scene of value, including the contractual relation between the dramatis personae of the free worker and capitalist, a presupposition of the capitalist mode of production. In response, this engagement works through Marx’s mode of presentation in Capital Vol. 1, arguing that the historical chapters on primitive accumulation in section eight revise and retroactively condition our understanding of the presumptive equality between capitalist and worker. By structuring the depiction of the abstract and theoretical mode of production in this way, Marx’s methodology reveals the overlapping modalities of violence and their immanent relation to the juridical standing of the free worker. This essay closes by reassessing the status of the free worker, as well as Ferreira da Silva’s critique, considering current conditions of neoliberal accumulation.