International Institute of Social History
May 29th, 2019
In all, the conference Primitive Accumulation, worked to thoroughly question the concepts that have been handed down to us by holding them up to history. Are state and market really so separate? Are peaceful exchange and violent expropriation really opposite poles? Is slavery really antagonistic to wage labor? In rousing final speeches, Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh linked these historical and theoretical questions to political questions facing us today. As global capitalism trudges through a long existential crisis and violence proliferates, it is useful analyze how its various elements have hung together and persisted.
Peter Linebaugh is a child of empire, schooled in London, Cattaraugus (NY), Washington, DC, Bonn, and Karachi. He has taught at Harvard University and Attica Penitentiary, at New York University and the Federal Penitentiary in Marion, Illinois. He used to edit Zerowork and was a member of the Midnight Notes Collective. He is the author of Stop, Thief!, The London Hanged, The Many-Headed Hydra (with Marcus Rediker), The Magna Carta Manifesto, and introductions to Verso’s selection of Thomas Paine’s writings and PM’s new edition of E.P. Thompson’s William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary. He lives in the region of the Great Lakes and works at the University of Toledo in Ohio.
