Capitalism and the Primal Horde

The Primal Horde of Capitalism

The concept of the primal horde is primarily associated with Freud’s project of evolutionary speculation in “Totem and Taboo,” where the horde is a a group arranged around male authority. Marx introduced a similar concept, that of primitive communism, aiming to describe the collective organization of tribes shortly before the anthropological gaze reached them. In both of their seminal works, primal hordes are origin stories articulated as indices of legitimation for the present and future movement of a social vector.

Origins are thereby esteemed as the authentic expression of an innermost human nature: a master drive. Why and how can we apply this framework to capitalism? There is no equivalent grand theory that argues for an explicit primal horde of capitalism, say in the classical or neoclassical tradition. However, the primal horde as a projective reading of history — a ahistorical historicizing — is a constitutive weapon in the legitimizing arsenal of economic theory, and more broadly legitimating accounts of capitalism.

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Within circles of critical theory one will encounter unsettled debates in regards to the origins of capitalism. Contenders are Dutch merchant capital, the enclosures of the British countryside, or the unravellings during late feudalism, to mention but a few. None of these accounts is similar in kind to the one presented by the primal horde. In linking capitalism to rational human decision making and in turn to human nature, this legitimizing argument trans-historicizes capitalism. I have two critical examples in mind. The first is the critique of E.

P. Thompson of the spasmodic view of British historians. The second is the dennociation of the myth of barter and trade as articulated by David Graeber. Thus far, not much is new.

There is a critical currency to what I propose in the following. Capitalism is defined by its institutional configurations. Since capital is a social relation, hence its definitional centrality to the system. But these configurations, as regimes of accumulation are always changing. The wage relation and the institutions it is contractually inscribed into are perpetually changing. Crisis is the name given to the moments of ruptures that lead to these changes. As the new regimes or epochs are in need of legitimizing and mobilizing narratives, new spirits are negotiated and formed that put bodies to work. Bodies are only driven by affects. Whereas a certain articulation of the spirit serves to legitimate a particular regime of accumulation, the primal horde is something akin to a specter: its negative correlate and devoid of any embodiment. It is not a positive call for mobilization, but rather the negative surrender to acceptance: capitalism is human nature.