原始积累成为经济和生态灾难的原因

Primitive Accumulation as the Cause of Economic and Ecological Disaster

文章从马克思的“财富”概念入手,结合马克思的《资本论》等著作,强调资本原始积累造成生产者与生产资料的强制性分离,导致人与自然之间的新陈代谢交换产生断裂。而共产主义作为“否定之否定”,抛弃了资本主义商品化和资本增殖的逻辑,以使大多数劳动者都能拥有一种“自由富足”,重构后资本主义社会的生活愿景和生态图景。

Marx’s theory of primitive accumulation is not a mere historical description of the origin of capitalism, but depicts its destructive character because capitalist development radically transforms and reorganizes the entire metabolic exchange between humans and nature on an unprecedented scale and leads to “Lauderdale’s paradox”, i.e., capitalist always develops with social wealth impoverishment and artificial scarcity.According to Marx, the process of primitive accumulation always comes with the separation of the producers from their product materials, so is human being from nature. Therefore, “the original unity” between the producers and their objective condition of production is terminated. Marx insisted that it was necessary to rebuilt “the original unity” to transcend the historical alienation from nature to overcome the separation. He argued that the commodity was just a special “bourgeois form” of wealth but not all the wealth. It is important to recognize both the non-identity and the fundamental tensions between wealth and the commodity because such relations lead to irreparable rift between social and natural metabolism.There are also more far-extended possibilities of non capitalist wealth. The wealth of richness of societies is not about producing an ever greater quantity of commodities, but rather about the full and constant development of total potentialities of human beings. The nature resources can be also the wealth of societies. The abundance and sustainability of the natural wealth provided by the earth constitutes the essential material foundation for the prosperity of society.Capitalist production, however, impoverishes social wealth and total alienation by imposing “an entirely external end”upon producers for the sake of endless capital accumulation. By clearly grasping the truly destructive impact of primitive accumulation upon both social and natural wealth, it becomes possible to imagine an alternative society that truly repairs the metabolic rift and rehabilitates the abundance of the common wealth. This is particularly relevant to Marx’s famous assertion about the “negation of the negation”: primitive accumulation of capital at the dissolution of the commons counts as the first negation and communism will be the second one that aims at rehabilitating the commons at a higher scale for the sake of the full development of the richness of wealth for most working individuals.However, this statement must not be simply understood as emancipation of human desire to enjoy the richness of the world. Marx was already aware that the availability of natural wealth is limited and cannot be arbitrarily utilized for satisfying human desire. Comunism as the negation of the negation transcends artificial scarcity, but not scarcity itself as natural scarcity continues to remain. Therefore, it is possible to imagine a different kind of abundance of common wealth: radical abundance, which is quite different with bourgeois form and aims at restoration of common wealth and makes everybody to gain wealth equally.By “the negation of the negation”, more and more public commons will be opened and exploited for most people with less dependence on ever increasing productive forces. Because once artificial scarcity is overcome, people now free from the constant pressure to earn money thanks to the expanding comments would attain an attractive choice to work less without worrying about the degradation of their quality of life. Consequently, such a society will produce less unnecessary stuff and thus reduce the burden on the natural environment.In this way, it is possible to significantly expand the realm of freedom by realizing radical abundance for everyone. This is a negation of endless economic growth and also how “the negation of the negation”in communism in the 21st century increases the chances for free and sustainable human development without repeating the failures that prevailed in the 20thcentury.