The trooper’s lights flash in the rearview mirror. The driver, a Black construction worker returning from a job site in Alabama, pulls over on Interstate 20. Inside his Ford Explorer: $11,340 in cash, the savings from three months of overtime. The trooper asks, “What’s the money for?” The man answers truthfully: he plans to pay his daughter’s college tuition. The officer takes the cash, issues no ticket, and files no criminal charge. The driver leaves with a receipt for civil asset forfeiture and instructions that he must sue the government to get his money back. The average American cannot afford a lawyer to pursue a $11,000 lawsuit against a state police department. So the state keeps the money. No crime. No charge. No conviction. Just transfer.
This is not an anomaly. This is not a corruption scandal requiring reform. This is primitive accumulation operating through the coercive apparatus of the state, in our epoch, on our highways. To understand modern police theft is to understand how capitalism reproduces itself through the institutionalized dispossession of the working class — especially its most exploited segments.
The Legal Architecture of Theft
Civil asset forfeiture in the United States operates on a legal fiction: the property is guilty, not the person. To seize assets, the state need only establish a “preponderance of evidence” suggesting the property was connected to criminal activity — a lower standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt,” which governs criminal convictions. The owner bears the burden of proof to reclaim their property, a reversal of the presumption of innocence that would be laughable if it did not ruin lives.
The numbers expose the machinery. Between 2000 and 2019, the Department of Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program alone collected over $15.5 billion in seized assets — money directly funneled to police departments and prosecutors’ offices. This is not a side operation; it is a revenue stream. In 2014, forfeiture funds constituted up to 20% of some district attorneys’ budgets. The perverse incentive is baked into the institutional structure: departments that seize more assets receive more money; departments that respect due process receive less.
Consider what these seizures look like in practice. Eighty percent of all forfeiture cases involve owners who are never charged with a crime. The average seizure amount is $1,276 — not a kingpin’s yacht, but a working family’s rent money. This is not asset forfeiture as counter-narcotics strategy; this is asset forfeiture as regressive taxation on the poor and the working class.
Primitive Accumulation Is Not a Historical Relic
Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation — the violent expropriation of common lands, the enclosure of shared resources, the direct seizure of wealth from direct producers — is often treated as a prelude to capitalism, a brutal but necessary historical stage that prepared the ground for mature capitalist relations. This is a catastrophic misreading. Primitive accumulation is not an event; it is a continuous process. Capital must always find new terrains for expropriation, new populations to dispossess, new assets to convert from use-value into exchange-value.
Civil asset forfeiture is a textbook contemporary example. The state does not merely regulate exchange relations between capitalists and workers; it actively intervenes to transfer property from the working class to the state-capital nexus. The seized cash does not stay in a government general fund. It supplies police equipment (militarized vehicles, weapons, surveillance technology) that protects property relations, funds departmental infrastructure that insulates police from democratic oversight, and flows into asset-sharing programs that reward predatory enforcement. The dispossessed worker receives nothing; the capitalist state reinvests in its own coercive capacity.
The racial dimension is not incidental to this process; it is structural. Black drivers are five times more likely than white drivers to have their assets seized during highway stops. The targeting is not merely a matter of racist policing (though it is that) but of the political economy of race under capitalism. Racism fragments the working class, identifies a vulnerable population for super-exploitation, and shields the system from unified resistance. Primitive accumulation has always been racialized — from the enclosure of Indigenous lands to the seizure of Black bodies as chattel. Civil asset forfeiture continues this lineage with a bureaucratic veneer.
The Bipartisan Consensus: Property Over People
One might expect a clear ideological divide on state seizure of private property without due process. One would be wrong. Civil asset forfeiture enjoys bipartisan support because it serves bipartisan purposes. Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the Equitable Sharing Program expanded. Both parties routinize the mechanism because both parties share a fundamental class orientation: the state’s primary function is enforcing property relations, and any mechanism that efficiently transfers assets from the vulnerable to the powerful is functionally useful regardless of which party controls Congress.
The Obama Administration’s Department of Justice increased forfeiture revenues. The Trump Administration continued the program. Bipartisan “reform” bills have been introduced for two decades — the Fairness in Asset Forfeiture Act, the Deterring Unjustified Seizures Act, the Due Process Act — all have failed or been gutted. Why? Because the system works for the class interests that dominate both parties. Police unions, prosecutors’ associations, and law enforcement supply chains form a lobbying bloc that crosses partisan lines. The working class, which bears the cost, has no comparable lobbying apparatus. This is not a failure of democracy; this is the democracy of capital.
The Counter-Argument: Disrupting Criminal Enterprises
The most sophisticated defense of civil asset forfeiture argues that targeting the profits of organized crime is essential to dismantling drug cartels, human trafficking networks, and other criminal enterprises. Without forfeiture, the argument goes, criminal organizations retain their capital and reconstitute their operations after arrests. Prosecutors cannot always prove criminal charges to a jury, but they can prove the connection between assets and criminal activity under civil standards. Forfeiture, on this view, is a pragmatic tool for disrupting illegal economies that cost communities far more than the seizures themselves.
This argument contains a grain of truth: illicit capital accumulation does pose a real problem for both workers and capitalists. Drug cartels, like legal corporations, seek to expand their operations and entrench their power. But the structure of civil forfeiture reveals the argument’s fatal flaw: the system does not target cartel leadership; it targets the most vulnerable participants in illicit economies and, overwhelmingly, people in no illicit economy at all. Only one percent of owners ever challenge a forfeiture in court — not because 99% of seizures are just, but because the cost of challenging a $1,276 seizure exceeds the amount at stake. The cartel financier retains his assets; the working-class courier loses his car.
The steel-man of the counter-argument would require a system that actually distinguishes between drug kingpins and construction workers. The existing system makes no such distinction because it was designed to punish the poor and the propertyless. The counter-argument is ideology masquerading as pragmatism.
Toward Abolition, Not Reform
Marxist analysis does not call for “reform” of primitive accumulation; it identifies the conditions for its abolition. Civil asset forfeiture cannot be “fixed” by raising the burden of proof or returning some portion of seized funds to affected communities. The problem is not the procedures but the purpose: the state seizes property from the working class to fund its own capacity for class enforcement. As long as police departments depend on seized assets for their budgets, and as long as the state’s primary function is to protect property relations, the mechanism will reproduce itself.
The real alternative is not better forfeiture rules but the de-commodification of public safety — disentangling police funding from asset seizure, and eventually from property itself. This requires deepening the analysis of police as a class institution rather than a reformable public service. It requires recognizing that police departments are not broken; they are working for the class that owns the means of production. The working class will never seize enough assets from itself to fund its own liberation.
When that state trooper took the construction worker’s $11,340, he was not fighting a war on drugs. He was collecting tribute for the capitalist state — a small toll in the continuous, violent process by which capital accumulates. The solution is not better toll collection; the solution is to seize the highway.
