... For instance, any public servant who privatises public property at throwaway prices, even when he or she receives no direct gratification for it, is invariably hailed for this act by the corporate media, by the Bretton Woods institutions and by the global financial community as being a “visionary”, a bold promoter of “entrepreneurship” and a “liberal” thinker in tune with the modern times. This brings in its train a host of possible rewards: sundry “best Minister in Asia” (or similar) awards, lecture tours, World Bank assignments, offers of cushy corporate placements, various remunerative advisory roles, and post-retirement sinecures. None of this, however, will be considered “corruption”. “Corruption”, in short, is confined exclusively to gratification received directly as quid pro quo; it does not cover the far more pervasive case of gratification received from the system as a whole. The current crusade against corruption, therefore, by not looking at the system as a whole, misses the wood for the trees. Of course, one should not ignore the “trees”; and hence legislation against “corruption” even in this limited sense is important. But missing the wood is unpardonable; and the wood is what Marx called “primitive accumulation of capital”.
Primitive accumulation refers to the appropriation of the property of petty producers, peasants and the people at large (through, for instance, encroaching on common property or cornering budgetary resources or buying up state property at throwaway prices) by the capitalists or proto-capitalists. It is called primitive accumulation, as distinct from the normal process of accumulation under capitalism, because it entails not the reinvestment of the economic surplus produced under capitalism but a process of filching the property of other non-capitalist segments: the peasants, the petty producers, the state and the community (“commons”). Now, corruption too entails a process of filching others' property; corruption itself may constitute a form of primitive accumulation of capital, for example, when a “public servant” demands a bribe from the common man. But big ticket “corruption”, of the sort that has surfaced of late, is not itself primitive accumulation; it constitutes rather a levy on an ongoing process of primitive accumulation.
The escalation of “corruption” in the recent period is indicative of the fact that the proceeds of the primitive accumulation that has been unleashed by neoliberalism are being shared pervasively by the political class (and the bureaucracy). It is not only the monopolists, the financial oligarchy, the land sharks and the multinational corporations that are raking in the proceeds of primitive accumulation but also the government echelons at the highest level, which are recruited from the political class. But things are even worse. Significant segments of even those elements of the political class which are not “corrupt”, in the sense that they do not receive any direct gratification for conniving with the primitive accumulation of capital, are nonetheless actively complicit in the process: they belong very much to the system that promotes primitive accumulation and benefit from the indirect systemic gratification mentioned earlier. We are in short institutionalising a regime of primitive accumulation, with the bulk of the political class (barring a few honourable exceptions, notably the Left) being incorporated into this regime.