Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Indigenous Americas) (3 page)

Karl Marx, Settler-Colonialism, and Indigenous Dispossession in Post–White Paper Canada

What do I mean by a
colonial
—or more precisely,
settler-colonial
relationship? A settler-colonial relationship is one characterized by a particular form of
domination
; that is, it is a relationship where power—in this case, interrelated
discursive and nondiscursive facets of economic, gendered, racial, and state power—has been structured into a relatively secure or sedimented set of hierarchical social relations that continue to facilitate the
dispossession
of Indigenous peoples of their lands and self-determining authority. In this respect, Canada is no different from most other settler-colonial powers: in the Canadian context, colonial domination continues to be structurally committed to maintain—through force, fraud, and more recently, so-called “negotiations”—ongoing state access to the land and resources that contradictorily provide the material and spiritual sustenance of Indigenous societies on the one hand, and the foundation of colonial state-formation, settlement, and capitalist development on the other. As Patrick Wolfe states, “Whatever settlers may say—and they generally have a lot to say—the primary motive [of settler-colonialism] is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.”
28

In thinking about colonialism as a form of structured dispossession, I have found it useful to return to a cluster of insights developed by Karl Marx in chapters 26 through 32 of his first volume of
Capital
.
29
This section of
Capi
tal
is crucial because it is there that Marx most thoroughly links the totalizing power of
capital
with that of
colonialism
by way of his theory of “primitive accumulation.” Challenging the idyllic portrayal of capitalism’s origins by economists like Adam Smith, Marx’s chapters on primitive accumulation highlight the gruesomely violent nature of the transition from feudal to capitalist social relations in western Europe (with an emphasis placed on England). Marx’s historical excavation of the birth of the capitalist mode of production identifies a host of colonial-like state practices that served to violently strip—through “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder”
30
—noncapitalist producers, communities, and societies from their means of production and subsistence. In
Capital
these formative acts of violent
dispossession
set the stage for the emergence of capitalist accumulation and the reproduction of capitalist relations of production by tearing Indigenous societies, peasants, and other small-scale, self-sufficient agricultural producers from the source of their livelihood—
the land
. It was this horrific process that established the two necessary preconditions underwriting the capital relation itself: it forcefully opened up what were once collectively held territories and resources to privatization (dispossession and enclosure), which, over time, came to produce a “class” of workers compelled to enter the exploitative realm of the labor market for their survival
(proletarianization). The historical process of primitive accumulation thus refers to the violent transformation of noncapitalist forms of life into capitalist ones.

The critical purchase of Marx’s primitive accumulation thesis for analyzing the relationship between colonial rule and capitalist accumulation in the contemporary period has been the subject of much debate over the last couple of decades. Within and between the fields of Indigenous studies and Marxist political economy, these debates have at times been hostile and polarizing. At its worst, this hostility has led to the premature rejection of Marx and Marxism by some Indigenous studies scholars on the one side, and to the belligerent, often ignorant, and sometimes racist dismissal of Indigenous peoples’ contributions to radical thought and politics by Marxists on the other.
31
At their nondogmatic best, however, I believe that the conversations that continue to occur within and between these two diverse fields of critical inquiry (especially when placed in dialog with feminist, anarchist, queer, and postcolonial traditions) have the potential to shed much insight into the cycles of colonial domination and resistance that characterize the relationship between white settler states and Indigenous peoples.

To my mind, then, for Indigenous peoples to reject or ignore the insights of Marx would be a mistake, especially if this amounts to a refusal on our part to critically engage his important critique of capitalist exploitation and his extensive writings on the entangled relationship between capitalism and colonialism. As Tsimshian anthropologist Charles Menzies writes, “Marxism retains an incisive core that helps understand the dynamics of the world we live.” It “highlights the ways in which power is structured through ownership” and exposes the state’s role “in the accumulation of capital and the redistribution of wealth from the many to the few.”
32
All of this is not to suggest, however, that Marx’s contributions are without flaw; nor is it meant to suggest that Marxism provides a ready-made tool for Indigenous peoples to uncritically appropriate in their struggles for land and freedom. As suggested above, rendering Marx’s theoretical frame relevant to a comprehensive understanding of settler-colonialism and Indigenous resistance requires that it be transformed
in conversation
with the critical thought and practices of Indigenous peoples themselves. In the spirit of fostering this critical dialog, I suggest that three problematic features of Marx’s primitive accumulation thesis are in need of such a transformation.

The first feature involves what many critics have characterized as Marx’s rigidly
temporal
framing of the phenomenon. As early as 1899, for example, anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin made note of what seemed to be an “erroneous division” drawn in Marx “between the
primary
[or primitive] accumulation of capital and its
present day formulation
.”
33
The critical point here, which many contemporary writers have subsequently picked up on, is that Marx tended to portray primitive accumulation as if it constituted “a process confined to a particular (if indefinite) period—one already largely passed in England, but still underway in the colonies at the time Marx wrote.”
34
For Marx, although the era of violent, state dispossession may have
inaugurated
the accumulation process, in the end it is “the silent compulsion of economic relations” that ultimately “sets the seal on the domination of the capitalist over the worker.”
35
This formulation, however, clearly does not conform well to our present global reality. As the recent work of scholars as diverse as David Harvey, Silvia Federici, Taiaiake Alfred, Rauna Kuokkanen, and Andrea Smith (to name but a few) have highlighted, the escalating onslaught of violent, state-orchestrated enclosures following neoliberalism’s ascent to hegemony has unmistakably demonstrated the
persistent
role that unconcealed, violent dispossession continues to play in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist social relations in both the domestic and global contexts.
36

The second feature that needs to be addressed concerns the
normative developmentalism
that problematically underscored Marx’s
original
formulation of the primitive accumulation thesis. I stress “original” here because Marx began to reformulate this teleological aspect of his thought in the last decade of his life, and this reformulation has important implications with respect to how we ought to conceptualize the struggles of non-Western societies against the violence that has defined our encounter with colonial modernity. For much of his career, however, Marx propagated within his writings a typically nineteenth-century modernist view of history and historical progress. This developmentalist ontology provided the overarching frame from which thinkers as diverse as Immanuel Kant, Georg W. F. Hegel, John Stuart Mill, and Adam Smith sought to unpack and historically rank variation in “human cultural forms and modes of production” according to each form’s “approximation to the full development of the human good.”
37
As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri point out, this modernist commitment often led Marx (along with Engels) to depict those non-Western societies deemed to be positioned
at the lower end of this scale of historical or cultural development as “people without history,” existing “separate from the development of capital and locked in an immutable present without the capacity for historical innovation.”
38
As a result, Marx’s most influential work tends to not only portray primitive accumulation as a historical phenomenon in the sense that it constituted a prior or transitional stage in the development of the capitalist mode of production, but that it was also a historically
inevitable
process that would ultimately have a
beneficial
effect on those violently drawn into the capitalist circuit. Take, for instance, Marx’s often quoted 1853
New York Tribune
writings on colonial rule in India. There he suggests that, although vile and barbaric in practice, colonial dispossession would nonetheless have the “revolutionary” effect of bringing the “despotic,” “undignified,” and “stagnant” life of the Indians into the fold of capitalist-modernity and thus onto the one true path of human development—socialism.
39
Just as Hegel had infamously asserted before him that Africa exists at the “threshold of World History” with “no movement or development to exhibit,” Marx would similarly come to declare that “Indian society has no history at all, at least no known history.”
40
Clearly, any analysis or critique of contemporary settler-colonialism must be stripped of this Eurocentric feature of Marx’s original historical metanarrative.
41

But this still raises the question of
how
to address this residual feature of Marx’s analysis. For our purposes here, I suggest that this can most effectively be accomplished by
contextually shifting
our investigation from an emphasis on the
capital relation
to the
colonial relation
. As suggested in his critical appraisal of Edward G. Wakefield’s 1849 text,
A View of the Art of Colonization
, Marx was primarily interested in colonialism because it exposed some “truth” about the nature of capitalism.
42
His interest in the specific character of colonial domination was largely incidental. This is clearly evident in his position on primitive accumulation. As noted already, primitive accumulation involved a dual process for Marx: the accumulation of capital through violent state dispossession resulting in proletarianization. The weight given to these constituent elements, however, is by no means equal in Marx. As he explicitly states in chapter 33 of
Capital
, Marx had little interest in the condition of the “colonies” as such; rather, what caught his attention was “the secret discovered in the New World by the political economy of the Old World, and loudly proclaimed by it: that the capitalist mode of production and accumulation, and therefore capitalist private property as well, have for their fundamental condition the . .
.
expropriation of the worker
” (emphasis added).
43
When examined from this angle, colonial dispossession appears to constitute an appropriate object of critique and analysis only insofar as it unlocks the key to understanding the nature of capitalism: that capital is not a “thing,” but rather a “social relation” dependent on the perpetual separation of workers from the means of production.
44
This was obviously Marx’s primary concern, and it has subsequently remained the dominant concern of the Marxist tradition as a whole.
45
The contextual shift advocated here, by contrast, takes as its analytical frame the subject position of the colonized vis-à-vis the effects of
colonial dispossession
, rather than from the primary position of “the waged male proletariat [in] the process of commodity production,”
46
to borrow Silvia Federici’s useful formulation.

At least four critical insights into our settler-colonial present emerge from the resolution of these first two problems. First, by making the contextual shift in analysis from the capital-relation to the colonial-relation the inherent injustice of colonial rule is posited
on its own terms and in its own right
. By repositioning the colonial frame as our overarching lens of analysis it becomes far more difficult to justify in antiquated developmental terms (from either the right or the left) the assimilation of noncapitalist, non-Western, Indigenous modes of life based on the racist assumption that this assimilation will somehow magically redeem itself by bringing the fruits of capitalist modernity into the supposedly “backward” world of the colonized.
47
In a certain respect, this was also the guiding insight that eventually led Marx to reformulate his theory after 1871. Subsequently, in the last decade of his life, Marx no longer condemns non-Western and noncapitalist social formations to necessarily pass through the destructive phase of capitalist development as the condition of possibility for human freedom and flourishing. During this period, Marx had not only come to view more clearly how certain features of noncapitalist and capitalist modes of production “articulate” (albeit asymmetrically) in a given social formation, but also the ways in which aspects of the former can come to inform the construction of radical alternatives to the latter.
48

A similar insight informed Kropotkin’s early critique of Marx as well. The problem for Kropotkin was that Marx not only drew an “erroneous division” between the history of state dispossession and what has proven to be its persistent role in the accumulation process, but that this also seemed to justify in crude developmentalist terms the violent dispossession of place-based, non-state modes of self-sufficient Indigenous economic, political, and social
activity, only this time to be carried out under the auspices of the coercive authority of
socialist
states. This form of dispossession would eventually come to be championed by Soviet imperialists under the banner
socialist primitive accumulation
.
49
I suggest that by shifting our analytical frame to the colonial relation we might occupy a better angle from which to both anticipate and interrogate practices of settler-state dispossession justified under otherwise egalitarian principles and espoused with so-called “progressive” political agendas in mind. Instead, what must be recognized by those inclined to advocate a blanket “return of the commons” as a redistributive counterstrategy to the neoliberal state’s new round of enclosures, is that, in liberal settler states such as Canada, the “commons” not only belong to somebody—
the First Peoples of this land
—they also deeply inform and sustain Indigenous modes of thought and behavior that harbor profound insights into the maintenance of relationships within and between human beings and the natural world built on principles of reciprocity, nonexploitation and respectful coexistence. By ignoring or downplaying the injustice of colonial dispossession, critical theory and left political strategy not only risks becoming complicit in the very structures and processes of domination that it ought to oppose, but it also risks overlooking what could prove to be invaluable glimpses into the ethical practices and preconditions required for the construction of a more just and sustainable world order.