According to Marx, primitive accumulation plays an important role in triggering the capitalist relations because it constitutes the starting point of the production mechanism. The point of departure has a historical nature because capitalism is the product of pre-historic development and economic revolutions.
Specific attention should be given to the moment when the production process was separated from the means of production. Hence, when the leading actors, including the high social classes and lower layers offering labor force, entered the free market, even the slight inequalities existing among those groups could be significantly amplified.
As a result, the manufactures depend on the workforce to produce consumer goods whereas laborers were free in choosing the producers to whom they are ready to sell their labor power. The exchange is unfair because the workers make this choice to earn money for living. The service offered by them has become a commodity for the leading employers to offer their specific price.
The historic foundation of the emerging primitive accumulation is explained by the pre-historic existence of the classes that accumulated wealth and the groups who agreed to sell their services for manufacturing goods. Therefore, the workers did not have other choice than propose their own workforce as the commodity which they could sell.
Such a decision points to the emergence of capitalists relations. Such a system of commodity exchange has become the starting pointing in divorcing the manufacturer from the means of producing goods and services. The emerged distribution is also premised on the transformation of social means of production and subsistence into capitalist system.
As Marx states, the main principle of primitive accumulation lies in absence of equality. In particular, the economist elaborates on violent dispossession of the entire social class from taking control over the production means through illegal acts. Such a process, therefore, can be regarded as the victimization of the population that is initiated by the governmental apparatus.
The role of the state in shaping the primitive accumulation is emphasized, although violence was the leading means of controlling the population. In order to explain the nature of the necessary evil practiced by the state, Marx refers to the origins of primitive accumulation taking roots in sixteenth century to examine how this phenomenon was established. In the course of this exploration, the economist finds out that the capitalist structure has developed from the feudalism by dissolution of the constituents of production.
The gradual displacement of feudal system occurred by means of mutual engagement into developing a new system of commodity exchange. Presenting the human labor as a product that can be purchased has become the trigger of reconsideration of feudalist power, as well as the enslavement of the labor workers. Such a change can also be interpreted as a transition to a new type of servitude. The proposed interpretation differs much from the one introduced by Marx because it ignores the economic strategies of development.
In fact, the labor relations could be accepted as the mutual agreement between two classes entering the free market. Humans possessing labor as the only commodity should be more concerned with selling it to elite class whose wealth is enough to purchase means of production. Therefore, Marx’s explanation of the primitive accumulation seems to be more reasonable because it emphasizes the essence of capitalist system.