Primitive Accumulation and Imperialism

Interesting article from the Monthly Review:

http://monthlyreview.org/2013/10/01/primitive-accumulation-and-imperialism

I read this article last night and personally I recommend that you all read it. It de-emphasizes the "primitive" aspect of Marx's theory of primitive accumulation (noting that the more correct translation would be "primary" accumulation) as the primary focus of the theory and instead focuses on capitalism's need to create both a pool of labor and an internal market for it's goods. Which made me think that primary accumulation, outside of it's primitive context of course, has broader implications that intertwine with Marx's fetishizism of commodities and can be used to describe the contuning process where capitalism creates new markets and labor pools by commoditizing the "commons" (for what I mean by the commons there's a great article called the death of the commons which is great for understanding the process of primary accumulation from a non-Marxist ecological perspective http://www.sciencemag.org/content/162/3859/1243.full ) or by commoditizing relations that are "free: and do not operate according to the law of value. I think we can see our own modern equivalent of primary accumulation in the Japanese love industry where a market for basic human interactions has made the notion of romantic love completely subordinate to the rule of capital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpZbu7J7UL4

I suppose this has more interesting theoretical implications when applied to the internet. Hardt and Negri have infamously claimed that the internet acts as an essentially Communist medium and while this is plainly absurd since the very infrastructure which maintains the internet operates according to the law of value (power plants, server matiance, web content) the internet has rendered capitalism even more absurdly unnecessary. After all why do we need to pay for content when we can pirate it for free and a team of 5 modders can make better games than the largest companies. However with capital's need for primary accumulation it seems that one of the great conflicts in the expansion of capital is trying to reign in the amount of free content the internet has released. While I see that process as doomed to fail it does seem to point to a potential conflict where the productive forces might risk outgrowing the mode of production