Primitive accumulation is the process by which precapitalist modes of production, such as feudalism and chattel slavery, are transformed into the capitalist mode of production.

Marx was not the first to consider the way in which feudal production was transformed into capitalism. For example, Adam Smith argued in The Wealth of Nations that capitalism arose out an ever increasing division of labor, where individual producers became extremely specialized at making useful goods. Eventually a particular section of the population became merchants dedicated to selling those goods. Other people rose up to own the factories where this highly specialized production could take place, and employed others as wage workers. Smith argued that those who rose to these positions did so by dint of hard work and saving.

Marx argued that this was far from the truth. The division of labor does not necessarily lead to capitalism, and saving (hoarding) money also does not lead to the development of capitalism.

Rather, as a contrast to Smith’s “original accumulation,” Marx detailed the “so-called primitive accumulation” as a process by which large swaths of the population are violently divorced from their traditional means of self-sufficiency. This process, unlike the bloodless version told by classical political economists, was one where common lands were closed to those peasants who used them:

“The parliamentary form of the robbery is that of Acts for enclosures of Commons, in other words, decrees by which the landlords grant themselves the people’s land as private property, decrees of expropriation of the people.” Capital: Expropriation of the Agricultural Population from the Land

and where those peasants who were forced off their lands were penalized for becoming vagabonds and thieves:

“The proletariat … were turned en masse into beggars, robbers, vagabonds, partly from inclination, in most cases from stress of circumstances. Hence at the end of the 15th and during the whole of the 16th century, throughout Western Europe a bloody legislation against vagabondage. The fathers of the present working-class were chastised for their enforced transformation into vagabonds and paupers. Legislation treated them as “voluntary” criminals, and assumed that it depended on their own good will to go on working under the old conditions that no longer existed.” Capital: Bloody Legislation Against the Expropriated, from the End of the 15th Century. Forcing Down of Wages by Acts of Parliament

Thus, unlike Smith’s history of the “natural” evolution of capital from the division of labor, and also unlike classical political economy’s lauding of the revolutionary character of capitalism, Marx argues that capitalism’s birth was a brutal, expropriative process:

“Hence, the historical movement which changes the producers into wage-workers, appears, on the one hand, as their emancipation from serfdom and from the fetters of the guilds, and this side alone exists for our bourgeois historians. But, on the other hand, these new freedmen became sellers of themselves only after they had been robbed of all their own means of production, and of all the guarantees of existence afforded by the old feudal arrangements. And the history of this, their expropriation, is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.” Capital: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

The result of this process was a large population of “free” laborers; that is

“Free labourers, in the double sense that neither they themselves form part and parcel of the means of production, as in the case of slaves, bondsmen, & c., nor do the means of production belong to them, as in the case of peasant-proprietors; they are, therefore, free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own.” Capital: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

It only through this process that capitalism can come into being and reproduce itself. This process leads to the two necessary classes in capitalism: the private owners of the means of production, and the free laborers who have no choice but to meet them in the marketplace and sell their labor-power to them:

“In themselves money and commodities are no more capital than are the means of production and of subsistence. They want transforming into capital. But this transformation itself can only take place under certain circumstances that centre in this, viz., that two very different kinds of commodity-possessors must come face to face and into contact; on the one hand, the owners of money, means of production, means of subsistence, who are eager to increase the sum of values they possess, by buying other people’s labour-power; on the other hand, free labourers, the sellers of their own labour-power, and therefore the sellers of labour.” Capital: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation

Source: https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#primitive-accumulation Robert Gehl