What does «acumulación originaria» mean in Spanish?
- The original accumulation, also called a. prior or a. primitive. It is a concept developed by Karl Marx in the first volume of Capital (chapters XXIV and XXV). It is a key concept in that book, since it is the one that points out the historical character in the categories of political economy and capitalism itself. It is a precondition of the processes of capital accumulation. According to Marx, the original accumulation constitutes the expropriation of the direct producers or, in his words, "the annihilation of private property that is based on one's own labor, that is, the expropriation of the worker", allowing a key element of capitalism: "the exploitation of the formally free labor of others, that is, wage labor".