115 In a 2019 interview with Dana Perino on Fox News’ The Daily Briefing, Face- book chairman and CEO Mark Zuckerberg (whose estimated net worth was then about one hundred billion dollars) responded as follows to the question of whether billionaires should exist: “I don’t think that in some cosmic sense that anyone deserves to have billions of dollars. There are a lot of people who do really good things and kind of help a lot of other people. And you get well compensated for that.” 1 Ideology moves past us quicker than thought. It is thus reasonable to pause and read for a moment the CEO’s spoken formulation, examining the apparent non sequitur that hangs in the paratactic void between Zuckerberg’s first sentence and the following two. There is an unconditional (“cosmic”) nonjustification for the existence of billionaires. So why should they exist? The gulf of this unconditional undeservingness must be leaped across by a judgment. Thus, what conditions the unconditionally unjustifiable into recognizable legitimacy is doing “good things,” giving help. 2 The justification for being “well compensated” is that one is helping a lot of other people, a fantastical narrative that posits a causal relation between a flow of help (one way) and a flow of value (back to the helper). The power to help brings com- pensation: the weights and balances of an economy. The more help given (“a lot of other people”), the more value received (“well compensated”). What is the moral of this socioeconomic fable? What lesson does it teach? At the end of the first volume of Capital, Marx analyzed and criticized the story of “primitive accumulation” prevailing in his times. Primitive accumu- lation is in fact Marx’s own shorthand name for the Ausgangspunkt—the “point of departure”—of the capitalist mode of production. 3 In Marx’s day, dominant commonsense and theoretical explanations of the preconditions and beginnings Primitive Accumulation, Again Ben Conisbee Baer