2 - Society fragmented and the role of democracy

Summary

The entrepreneur also has a dark side. Indeed, what is to prevent entrepreneurs from appropriating all the means of production, denying all others the opportunity of entrepreneurship, and thereby taking away their liberty? If the entrepreneur legitimately, in other words thanks to his/her superior abilities, amasses power based on private property, will he/she not deprive all other potential entrepreneurs of the means to be an entrepreneur? From the beginning of capitalism, this question has dogged the entrepreneur, providing the political basis of a variety of different critiques. Marx makes the notion of ‘primitive accumulation’ a centrepiece of the socialist critique: by initially accumulating the means of production, certain individuals acquire unilateral power and can organize the productive system to impose their own conditions of exploitation on others.

The capitalist system presupposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property in the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. The process, therefore, that clears the way for the capitalist system, can be none other than the process which takes away from the labourer the possession of his means of production; a process that transforms, on the one hand, the social means of subsistence and of production into capital, on the other, the immediate producers into wage-labourers. The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. It appears as primitive, because it forms the pre-historic stage of capital and of the mode of production corresponding with it.