Accumulation Definition & Explanation

Definition

Accumulation refers to the act of accumulating one or more items, whether those objects are beneficial or unwanted, either entirely within one area of interest or across many domains.

Sociological Explanation

Capital Accumulation – Marxism says that capitalism grows by using labor to create surplus value, which is then used to create new capital. This new capital is then used to generate more surplus value, new wealth, and so on. In the long run, the total amount of money keeps growing.

According to Marx, the capitalist system’s most critical goal and change-driver is accumulation. Marx believes that this phenomenon is inherent to capitalism and necessary for the system’s survival. Therefore, any long-term danger to this phenomenon also threatens capitalism.

Marx saw capital accumulation as the main force driving capitalism and the process by which money is made available for further investment and profit. Workers are exploited, and their labor’s surplus value is expropriated to build capital. This money is amassed in an ever-shrinking number of hands, which use it to generate additional capital via greater exploitation.

The transition from precapitalist forms of production like feudalism and indentured servitude to the capitalist mode of production is known as primitive accumulation.

According to Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Protestant ideas and ideals were prerequisites for capitalist accumulation. The mindset, asceticism, and predestinarian religion that characterized the Protestant Reformation were unwittingly supportive of the actions underpinning capitalist accumulation in Western Europe.

A society’s culture develops due to the process known as “cultural accumulation,” which involves introducing new cultural elements. Most of the time, these different cultural traits come from lending from another community that lives nearby, like an ethnic minority, or from a culture that is highly regarded, like when parts of rock culture, attire, and singing and dancing from the US and Europe spread to other parts of the world.

Accumulation through Dispossession – David Harvey, a Marxist geographer, introduced this concept. It describes neoliberal economic practices that deprive private and public entities of their wealth or land, resulting in a concentration of power and wealth in the hands of a privileged few.