settler colonial studies

The recent proliferation of settler colonial and Indigenous studies of Palestine have addressed historical and present-day enclosure of Palestinian land, yet the question of ‘indigeneity’ is underexamined in this literature. Claims to indigeneity in Palestine straddle varied definitions: a racial category; as constructed through the colonial encounter or preceding colonialism; and as a local relation or an international juridico-political category. Using discourse analysis of a specific Palestinian sustainable agriculture initiative. I show how for Palestinians, claiming indigeneity brings into tension potential political economic gains, social relations of struggle, and discursive formations of collective subjectivity. A valorisation, commodification, and privatization of indigeniety narrows notions to the biological-cultural, offering challenges for Palestinian struggles for sovereignty. I conclude by asking what theorizing from Palestine offers to Marxist theories of racial capitalism and settler colonialism, and whether indigeneity can exceed its commodification.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

‘The people in Palestine are literally a part of the ecosystem!’ This exclamation came from Karmel Abufarha at webinar on January 28, 2021, hosted by the Abraham Path Initiative, a sustainable tourism non-government organization (NGO) that promotes ethical tourism to the Middle East, in partnership with Canaan Palestine. Canaan Palestine (formerly Canaan Fair Trade) is Palestine’s first and largest fair trade food product company, focusing particularly on olive oil. Abufarha,[i] marketing representative for Canaan Palestine, spoke to attendees over Zoom from his office in Burqin, a small village in the northern West Bank about five kilometers from Jenin, home to the headquarters of Canaan Palestine.

Over photographs of massive olive trees planted on stone terraces, and farmers and their children climbing into olive trees to harvest the fruit, Abufarha spoke passionately about the environmental and cultural value of the olive agro-ecosystem his family’s company cultivates, continuing the quote above:

The people in Palestine are literally a part of the ecosystem. It’s joined together, and so much today we disconnect. This is a living and breathing model of people living harmoniously with nature. You’re making land produce food for people, and it’s also holding so many other species of life – plants, animals, microbes, fungi, birds…it’s an amazing place.[ii]

Present in Abufarha’s comments is a promising political hope for a sustainable, ecologically ‘harmonious’ future in which humans and non-humans alike have their needs taken care of in Palestine. This utopian vision contains the assumption that the international (predominantly US and UK-based) attendees of the webinar agree that ‘living harmoniously with nature’ is a moral good; that attendees furthermore would be compelled by these descriptions to use their money to support these efforts (either by purchasing Canaan Palestine’s products or by donating to an affiliated non-profit like Abraham Path Initiative), and that such a money exchange would be an act of gift giving outside of the market economy, primarily an ethical, not consumerist, act.

Over a photograph of a family sorting a pile of olives on the ground, Abufarha praised Canaan’s farmers’ approach for being beyond capitalism: ‘A lot of food today, there isn’t the culture of it. It’s just producing food. It’s very overly economically driven, and this is a family – they own their land, and they’re teaching their sons and daughters what they’re doing and having a great time, living a great life doing this.’ Finally, Abufarha’s comments, as well as other materials produced by and about Palestinian farmers in recent years, make both implicit and explicit claims about the relationship between stewardship and territorial belonging: that Palestinians are the native or Indigenous people of the land of historic Palestine, that the land grows healthy under their care, and that Palestinians’ environmental stewardship is necessary not just for their own political sovereignty or independence, but also for the good of the entire planet.

What does it mean for Palestinian farmers to be ‘living a great life’ by participating in fair trade and organic farming and marketing their products to a global audience? In this vision of the great life, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is both ever present but also invisible. Palestinian fair trade emerged after decades of economic strangulation of agrarian livelihoods by Israel’s military occupation of the West Bank, as part of the ongoing Nakba, Israel’s settler colonial imperative to remove Palestinians from their land (particularly productive agricultural land). Yet during the webinar that opens this article, Abufarha did not mention the occupation or Israeli settler colonialism until directly asked by an attendee. Instead, the great life of a Palestinian farmer in the eyes of the global consumer is painted as one of the agrarian peasant idyll: farmers living in ecological sync with non-human plants and animals, only producing what they need to survive and thrive and not accumulate beyond those basic needs.

This article asks what work this discourse does in global market structures of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. It argues that the fair trade and organic industry in the West Bank—focusing on a case study of the Canaan Palestine company—enacts a valorisation process not only of agricultural products, but also of racial identity in Palestine. Specifically, this article argues that ‘indigeneity,’ a multifaceted social relation that cannot be reduced only to racial identity, has nonetheless been increasingly evacuated of its other definitions under the forces of neoliberal racial capitalism. Indigeneity has become co-terminous with specific images of the ‘ecologically noble savage’ Palestinian farmer, evoking a racial (not just cultural) identity position of Palestinians as cohabitating with natural ecosystems since time immemorial. This reduction of indigeneity only to a biological concept of race has occurred in multiple settler colonial contexts. I argue that this reduction happens first at the stage of valorisation (per Marx), or the creation of surplus value in the production process, then during circulation, as a form of commodification for Palestinian agricultural products to circulate on the global market in the chains of market exchange. Yet while Palestinian indigeneity is commodified, it also escapes commodification—the commodification of indigeneity isolates the biological-cultural in favor of specific neoliberal and settler colonial political ends, but there remains potential that indigeneity can escape or exceed racial capitalist commodification in Palestine.[iii]

In the first section, this article reviews existing theoretical and empirical literature on settler colonial studies of racialisation and racial capitalist theories of settler colonialism, explaining what thinking from Palestine offers to gaps and tensions in these literatures. In the second section, I offer a brief history of neoliberalism in Palestine to understand the political economic and ecological context of this case study. In the third section, I offer an overview of the specific ways and reasons that Palestinian indigeneity has been commodified by fair trade companies and non-profit organizations, through an analysis of printed and online materials from these companies as well as insights from interviews conducted with farmers participating in Canaan Palestine’s fair trade cooperatives and staff responsible for sales and marketing. In the conclusion, I reflect on the significance that theorizing racial capitalism and settler colonialism from this case study in Palestine offers to broader understandings of the relations between race and capital overall, ask what else needs to be done to unpack indigeneity in Palestine, and ask how indigeneity might exceed commodification.

Race, capital, colonialism, and Palestine

Here I recap the major paradigms and critiques of a settler colonial studies analysis of the Israeli occupation, a theoretical approach that has in recent years become increasingly central to understand historical and present issues in Palestine. Then, I outline issues of racial formation in settler colonial contexts, focusing on contested definitions of indigeneity in Palestine and elsewhere. Finally, I explain how indigeneity can and has been valorised and commodified in the Marxist sense.

Theories of settler colonialism and racial capitalism

A Marxist analysis of dispossession is crucial to understanding how settler colonialism has functioned in the past and present. While Marx’s writings touched more lightly on European imperialism’s role in capitalist formation, subsequent thinkers, revolutionaries, and social movements have found much power in using Marxist theories of primitive accumulation and dispossession to understand, critique, and combat settler colonialism and empire.[iv] However, simply transposing the European historical process of primitive accumulation as first described in the closing of Capital Vol. 1 to colonial contexts in other locations and time periods risks reifying colonized space and peoples as simply “field[s] of application” rather than sites to productively theorize how expropriation has shaped social relations in different times and spaces.[v] In most examples of settler colonialism, especially the Anglo colonization of North America, dispossession did not only violently separate Indigenous people from their lands but also meant the turning of the land itself into capital. As defined by Robert Nichols, under settler colonialism ‘dispossession merges commodification…and theft into one moment.’[vi] A historical materialist analysis of settler colonial dispossession ties together the abstraction of land as a commodity to the violent abstraction of racial classification, hierarchy, and settler colonial genocide.[vii]

Palestinian scholars have long recognized and criticized Israel as a settler colonial state, even before the occupation of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, and Golan Heights in 1967.[viii] Additionally, Palestinian resistance has been self-conceptualized and recognized by others as anticolonial struggle since before the 1967 occupation. Before and after the occupation of the West Bank (the central geographic focus of this article’s case study), Palestinians were part of transnational anticolonial political coalitions that included Indigenous peoples’ groups, such as the American Indian Movement in the 1960s.[ix] The understanding of Israel as a settler colonial state, even without always explicitly using the term, has long been part of Palestinian theorization of Zionist dispossession.

However, a marked “settler colonial turn” in Palestine studies scholarship re-emerged in the past decade partially as a reaction to the entrenchment of neoliberal privatisation after the militant uprising in the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and Israel proper of the Second Intifada (2000-2005). In the long shadow of the Oslo accords of 1993, with a two-state solution receding from future view, scholars, organizers, and ordinary people sought to understand and critique the ‘piecemeal approach to the establishment of some kind of sovereignty’ as a form of both material and discursive violence.[x] Understanding Israel as settler colonial also has allowed scholars to diagnose the specific racial apartheid form of the state and its structures, in which Israel treats Palestinians as, at best, second class ‘minority’ citizens with some amount of individual liberal rights but no national sovereignty rights, in order to try to maintain the boundaries of ‘liberal settler sovereignty.’[xi]

However, the settler colonial studies framework in Palestine studies is not without its critics, and has been called to task for its over-emphasis on the occupation of 1967 as a point of historical rupture or for positioning Palestinians as only reactive agents to Zionism.[xii] Some Palestinian scholars have called for an Indigenous studies lens as a corrective to these tendencies.[xiii] An Indigenous studies approach to Palestine, per Steven Salaita, is not meant to compare ‘the ceremonial or the spiritual’ or simply find ‘similarities’ between Native peoples globally, but is instead a ‘rhetorical act is meant to situate...Palestinian dispossession in a specific framework of colonial history.’[xiv]

The ‘specific framework of colonial history’ in which Palestinian dispossession is situated is itself one of racial capitalism, and the racialised hierarchies of difference that co-constituted capitalist accumulation and violence in the modern world. Drawing upon the genealogy of Black radical thought particularly between the US and South Africa, racial capitalism contends that if race has become the enduring and dominant framework of creating difference and hierarchy among populations under capitalism, and capital ‘can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups,’[xv] then all capitalism is racial capitalism.[xvi] Racial capitalist theory expands upon Marxist understandings of the formation of private property through enclosure, situating primitive accumulation through the colonial (and particularly, settler colonial) encounter, thus centering racial domination as co-constituted with capitalist property relations. As Andy Clarno explains, studies of racial capitalism foreground a ‘recognition that racialization and capital accumulation are mutually constitutive processes.’[xvii]

Understanding dispossession as an ongoing process under settler colonialism, instead of simply a formative precursor to capitalist accumulation, requires contending with dispossession as a racializing force shaped by discourses of difference.[xviii] Furthermore, thinking through racial capitalism and settler colonialism together complicates a ‘land/labor’ dichotomy which narrows racial violence as only occurring through either dispossession by accumulation/accumulation by dispossession, or by the exploitation of surplus populations—because Palestine and Palestinians, under settler colonialism, suffer from both. Finally, as first articulated by Cedric Robinson and expanded upon by Robin DG Kelley, the articulation of cultural or regional difference into racial categories and then hierarchies for the purpose of internal colonization, dispossession and proletarisation within Europe is crucial to understanding issues of race in Palestine-Israel historically and today.[xix] The liminal racial position of European Jews as ‘physically of Europe yet rejected by it’ was part of the antisemitic cauldron in which Zionism was formed.[xx] The Zionist settler colony that would become Israel constructed its new identity in the spirit of Europe and against the Arab Other (Jewish, Muslim, or Christian), yet the Zionist racialisation of the ‘new Jew’ in Palestine continued to ‘maintain… ‘Jews’ as a distinct entity from Europeans.’[xxi]

While racial capitalist and settler colonial projects have always been transnational, their structures have been enacted differently across space and time. As Patrick Wolfe noted, there is great ‘diversity distinguishing the regimes of difference with which colonizers have sought to manage subject populations.’[xxii] A comparative approach to racial formations and structures can obscure more than it reveals—rather than simply looking for what carries forth in multiple places, one should examine the work these structures do.[xxiii] Care must be taken to avoid applying theories to Palestine simply try to find similarities between the colonisation of Palestine and the colonization of the US, Canada, or other Anglo settler colonial states, particularly when searching for one-to-one comparisons between the racialisation of the settler and the native in multiple sites. Instead, it is worth asking what work transnational ‘racial regimes’ of private property and settler law do in multiple sites throughout place and time.[xxiv] For this case study, the question is less who fits into the categories of settler and native in Palestine, and more how these racial formations emerged under capitalist settler colonialism in the region and are continually shaped by these structures.

Racialisation under settler colonialism

How have scholars thus far theorised the formation of settler and native identities? As Sai Englert explains,

Processes of identification, including racialisation, operate within categories structured by the state. By mobilising these categories the state is able to exercise control, distribute rights, and facilitate exploitation, expropriation and exclusion. It is in this tension between the attempted imposition by the state of those categories and the response – of rejection or acquiescence – by the identified, that identities emerge.[xxv]

In the US, often the model example, state formation of settler identity was formed by what Maya Mikdashi termed a series of historical and contemporary ‘erasures’ making settler identity and whiteness into ‘both a phenotype and an ideological tool of oppression.’[xxvi] Settler whiteness is property, conferring ‘public and private privileges’ on its holders which are codified by legal structures.[xxvii] The privilege of whiteness undergirds structural white supremacy, and ‘is thus inextricably tied to the theft and appropriation of Indigenous lands in the first world.’[xxviii] In North America and globally, the racialisation of native people has been directly tied to the legal and material dispossession of their lands; per Joanne Barker (Delaware), ‘The erasure of the sovereign is the racialization of the ‘Indian.’’[xxix]In fact, some peoples who might otherwise be classified as Indigenous have rejected self-identification because of their associations of indigeneity as temporally bound to the past and therefore unable to attain sovereignty in the future.[xxx] The ‘rejection or acquiescence’ of an indigenous identity under settler colonialism is far from a static matter.

This unsettled nature of defining indigeneity can be represented by two major theorisations. In the first, indigeneity emerges during and after the encounter with settler colonialism—as often co-terminous with “colonized people” in settler colonial states.[xxxi] In the second, being Indigenous describes those who are rooted in specific and unique relations with place since time immemorial.[xxxii] A place-based understanding of indigeneity does not need to be a singular notion of biological essentialist identity, but instead can articulate indigeneity as the collection of ‘myriad place-based paradigms that share basic principles such as reciprocity and engagement with the land.’[xxxiii] This place-based understanding of indigeneity can work against the settler colonial state’s imperative of ‘creat[ing] a racialized and homogenized identity’ for Indigenous peoples by, for instance, drawing upon Native cosmologies and creation stories to ‘insist…that creators made the land specifically for them’—as in, each Native people is uniquely in their place, rather than one cohesive racial category.[xxxiv]

It is perhaps no surprise, though, that a place-based understanding of indigeneity has been divorced from the materialist understanding of indigeneity as a racial project under settler colonial and capitalist modernity. Furthermore, the contemporary neoliberal form of capitalism has seen the legal and political ‘partial decoupling of Indigenous ‘cultural’ claims from the radical aspirations for social, political and economic change that once underpinned them.’[xxxv] Such a severing leads inevitably to a purely cultural and even biological understanding of indigenous peoples that positions them as closer to nature, uncivilized, not fully human, incapable of entering into property relations, and therefore, not deserving of sovereignty—commonly known as the ‘ecologically noble savage’ myth.[xxxvi] The ecologically noble savage myth relies heavily upon and contributes to a biological understanding of race, because arguing native people are ‘inherently’ part of the environment often reduces them to occupying specific biological niche in a specifically dehumanising way, the same way an ecologist would describe a non-human plant or animal. Settler states and even some Indigenous communities contribute to the naturalisation of Indigeneity as a biological racial category by linking together place-based cultural practices or stories with biological phenotypes, such as through genetic science.[xxxvii] For instance, in Palestine-Israel, separating out Palestinian Bedouins as indigenous—but not other Palestinians—due to their cultural-ecological practices that fit such ecologically noble savage imagery has been criticized as reinforcing a ‘liberal multicultural notion of indigeneity’ and not challenging settler sovereignty of the law.[xxxviii]

In this case study, I argue that the culturalisation and racialisation of Palestinian farmers as Indigenous can position them and their agroecological knowledge and practices as ancient and unchanged, naturalising them as a separate biological race and erasing innovation and adaptation that has occurred over time.[xxxix] Israel has upheld the ‘image of the fellahin [Palestinian peasant farmers] as a living museum’ to deny Palestinians’ grievances for more resources towards sustainable development.[xl] It is this notion of indigeneity—that of a natural identifier, both embedded in static place/time and completely excavated from it—that has been valorised and commodified under neoliberal racial capitalism, to which this paper now turns.

The commodification and valorisation of indigenous identity

I argue here that under neoliberalism in settler colonial states, racial identity itself is valorised and commodified as capital. This requires the recognition of first, the emergence of racial identity as a process of labor, and the production of racial identity as a ‘purposeful activity aimed at the production of use-value,’ as any labor process is.[xli] The first form of commodification of human identity under racial capitalism was the literal turning of human beings into property: the enslavement of Black Africans.[xlii] The commodification of indigeneity underway in Palestine-Israel is not the same as this particular form of genocidal violence; Palestinians themselves are not enslaved, although they are subjected to maintenance as a surplus population.[xliii] To understand more fully how Israeli settler colonialism works as a process of accumulation by dispossession, it cannot be thought of separate from the valorisation and circulation of racial formations through capitalism within and beyond territorial Palestine. Dispossession creates and relies on the valorisation and commodification of indigeneity to enclose and expropriate Palestinian land in an ongoing process, thus commodifying the land.[xliv] That is to say, the impetus to separate Palestinianness as a racial category can be used to depoliticize the collective struggle of Palestinians as a political collective, allowing for the commodification of Palestinian as a simple identity category to circulate around the world separate from the material struggle over land.

According to Marx, valorisation occurs in the sphere of production, not of exchange—the commodity must be valorised before it enters the money exchange, or else there would be no surplus value to accumulate.[xlv] Thus value is imbued to racial identity in the gap between ‘the value of labor power and the value which that labor power valorizes in the labor process,’ or in the valorisation process.[xlvi] As criticisms of the commodification of cultural heritage have demonstrated, even non-tangible signifiers can be drawn into the market relation; commodifying identity enacts ‘a form of colonization of previously non-market goods/services.’[xlvii] However, valorisation of indigeneity as a racial identity under settler colonialism cannot happen without the concurrent expropriation of land; the commodification of racial identity and the commodification of land and nature go hand in hand.[xlviii] Agricultural production offers an especially useful lens to understand the nature of the co-production of the commodification of land with the commodification of racial identity under settler colonialism—aside from an increasing but still marginal technoscientific push for forms of agriculture completely detached from the ground, agriculture relies quite basically on the ‘appropriation of what exists in nature for the requirement of man.’[xlix] Furthermore, settler understandings of Indigenous sustainable agriculture (particularly organic agriculture), because of popular understandings of organic as ‘more natural’ or ‘closer to natural processes,’ can easily slip into ecologically noble savage myths. I turn now to understanding how indigeneity is valorised and commodified through agricultural products and their marketing.

There is no specific regulatory schema for an ‘indigenous’ product, as there are for other regulated labeling schemes like fair trade or organic that invoke specific social equity and environmentally conscious protocols. Nor are the terminologies analyzed in the following section of this article necessarily the same as the labeling and commodification of specific place-based products that are spatially limited (for instance, champagne or Darjeeling Tea) some of which are often termed as ‘indigenous’ foods to their location. However, I argue that marketing materials invoke a definition of indigeneity as an inherent and racialized cultural attachment to place in order to create a market. Food labeling schemes, as Julie Guthman has argued, are a form of ‘neoliberal governance’ in the Polanyian sense, in that they create markets where there previously were none.[l] Fair trade, while founded as a movement in the era of decolonization to empower producers in the Global South against Bretton Woods global development schemas, became increasingly neoliberal in the 1980s. Today, fair trade labeling schemas have been widely criticized for how they reenact rather than resist developmentalist logics, being reduced to a consumerist panacea that is reformist at best and simply greenwashing neoliberalism at worst.[li] So too has organic certification been criticized for the erasure of the political aspects of organic in favor of a technoscientific regulatory schema that does not challenge capitalist exploitation.[lii] However, criticism of fair trade and organic as only labeling schemas misses that, on the ground, those engaged in fair trade and organic production may understand these systems in a different way. For instance, unlike the massive multinational corporations who are the object of criticism in most studies, in Palestine, Palestinians founded and run the company creating the global market for their products—and for an Indigenous Palestinian identity itself. Farmers I spoke to who participate in fair trade marketing cooperatives feel excited and relieved at the possibilities of the global market to receive their products, while also curious about how those products are perceived by those who purchase them. The issue still remains, once the bottle of olive oil or box of spices circulates on the market, in what form does the label of indigenous in Palestine today sell—by who, to whom, and at what cost?

Here, I argue that the companies and organizations analyzed in this article have contributed to creating a global neoliberal market—one unregulated and increasingly unbounded—for an indigenous identity from Palestine where there previously was none.[liii] That identity has built upon earlier notions of the Palestinian fellah (peasant) as inherently tied to her land, and cannot be seen either fully replacing or being subsumed by peasant imaginaries—a racialised Palestinian indigeneity is intertwined with racial notions of the peasantry.[liv] Indeed, this new market builds upon older ‘environmental imaginaries’ of the Middle East that are legible to the Western consumers of these products and discourses,[lv] as ‘alternative consumption is inescapably associated with historical fantasies of the ecological ‘Other.’’[lvi] Palestinians are cast in the frame of what Sarah Besky has termed a ‘Third World agrarian imaginary,’ which she determines is ‘not only an image of farming as an original, ecologically balanced form of connection between people and place but also a set of ideas about the relationship between people and nature.’[lvii] When depicting Palestine and Palestinians, that imaginary is specifically of the unchanged bucolic peasant, tending her olive trees the same as she has for thousands of years. Palestinians themselves contribute to this framing in order to reap the benefits of global market participation for both personal and familial economic security and for political goals. The idea is that fair trade and organic market participation will keep farmers on their land in the face of Israel settler colonialism; thus, commodified Indigeneity and political resistance are embedded within each other. The success of this is somewhat hard to measure in quantitative terms, but for the farmers I spoke to, without fair trade, they felt that their personal livelihoods as well as Palestinian farmers in the northern West Bank in general would have suffered greatly, weakening their ability to stay on their land.

Fair trade exists not entirely within the Palestinian ‘resistance economy’ mode, however, which Tariq Dana argues must prioritize ‘a systemic reorientation of …economic institutions and activities, and, therefore, the social structures and relations at large,’ and reject simply economic amelioration of life under Israel settler colonialism.[lviii] First, fair trade and organic farming does not represent a full scale rejection of capitalism; as farmers and company staff at all levels of production often noted to me, farming is still a business, and a farmer who cannot make money off of their production will not stay a farmer for long. Fair trade aims to circumvent Israeli restrictions on the export of goods, but necessarily does still have to work within Israeli regulations on the movement and export of products and imports of inputs (e.g., fertilizers, tools). Finally, fair trade in particular differentiates itself from many resistance economy initiatives by its focus on the international market—a focus that lends itself to the commodification of indigeneity as global consumers seek to connect to ‘authentic’ Palestinian life through their purchases.

Finally, it is important to understand the commodification of indigeneity alongside its valorisation, to recognize value production before circulation, but also to ask how circulation feeds into future value production. The critique of the commodification of knowledge is well-covered in Marxist geography and related fields, and so too is a concurrent question as to the limits of a defetishisation of the commodity. It is important to understand both valorisation and commodification because I seek to unpack the work put into creating, maintaining, and disseminating the discourses which make up the commodity known as ‘identity’—to defetishize the commodity ‘because the production of commodities also involves knowledge and communicative interaction—themselves framed by various cultural norms that are relatively autonomous—and environmental inputs.’[lix] The marketing of food products as indigenously Palestinian does more than simply contribute to a discursive framework; it also ‘creates an innovative material culture embedded in global capitalism, a culture that redefines place-based authenticity.’[lx]

In the following section, I seek to unpack the markers of Palestinian indigeneity beyond ‘mere symbols’ and explain how they define and are redefined by the global capitalist markets in which they are created, circulated, and consumed. Before this, I turn to a brief history of the political economic context in which Palestinian indigeneity emerged in the twenty-first century.

Agrarian capitalism and dispossession in Palestine

Much has already been said in critical scholarship about the emergence, expansion, and impact of the Israeli occupation on Palestinian lives and lands. Rather than recounting the entire history, I focus here on a brief history of capitalism and agriculture in Palestine, especially Jenin governorate (where fair trade emerged) since the Ottoman era, to contextualize the emergence and impacts of the neoliberalisation of the Palestinian economy in the 1990s and 2000s. Agrarian capitalism and the incorporation of rural production into global market economies was well under way in Ottoman Palestine before the twentieth century, even before external pressures of European modernisation on Ottoman governance.[lxi] Zionist settlement beginning in the 1880s, and the imposition of the British Mandate from 1921-1947, together brought multiple political and economic crises to the Palestinian countryside, experienced unevenly depending on the geographic region. The coupling of land titling and private property with western notions of cultivation under the Ottoman land laws paved the way for Zionist acquisition of tracts of land from absentee landlords, although seeing this as simple dispossession negates that many fellahin (Palestinian peasantry) continued to tend to their plots in formal or informal sharecropping agreements.[lxii] This was particularly true in the northern hills (of which Jenin is a part), where orchards dominated the agroecosystem, allowing for a persistence of cultivation in the face of settler colonial dispossession before and after 1948:

In the hills of the Galilee and the West Bank, most Palestinians were small farmers for whom the olive tree and its products constituted a central means of subsistence and revenue generation in times of surplus…Unlike the plains—which were better suited to consolidation under large landholders, as well as to agricultural mechanization, intensive irrigation, and the cultivation of field crops—the hills, for the most part, remained the domain of smallholder peasants who relied on patchwork parcels of land, densely planted with fruit trees— first and foremost the olive.[lxiii]

Thus the hills of the West Bank served as an economic and ecological refuge of sort during the buildup of Zionist settlement in the Mandate Era and continuing during Jordanian rule. Jordan also continued the project of titling private property in the West Bank highlands, offering one level of protection against mass state land confiscation by Israel when it occupied the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip, Golan Heights, and Sinai Peninsula in 1967.

Yet the use of private property as defense against colonial dispossession soon formed a double bind in the 1970s, as Paul Kohlbry has shown. Israel moved their agricultural surplus into the Palestinian domestic market of the West Bank after its occupation, dropping prices for Palestinian agricultural goods while simultaneously cutting off their markets abroad. ‘By the late 1970s, landownership had been replaced by wages and remittances as the primary source of livelihood and social power, and rain-fed agriculture functioned as a secondary source of income.’[lxiv] The precarity of consistent agricultural cultivation opened up room for Israel to invoke laws allowing the seizure of ‘waste’ land, or that not under active cultivation, as state land, usually transferring it to Jewish-only settlements after a period of time. However, the proliferation of land titling in the north served as somewhat of a bulwark against this practice—meaning the histories of settler colonial dispossession told in most literature on Palestine, or the theories of racial capitalist dispossession, have not fully accounted for Jenin’s relatively high rate of agricultural land ownership and active cultivation in the West Bank.[lxv]

Even though farmers in the Jenin highlands, the site of the emergence of fair trade olive oil, were able to largely resist the direct expropriation of land, they were equally or even more so susceptible to the larger pressures of declining prices and pull of wage labor in Israel, and saw similar trends of agricultural work being abandoned in favor of wage labor inside Israel.[lxvi] This trend only grew after the 1993 Oslo Accords, creation of the Palestinian Authority, and, ostensibly, the move towards a two-state solution in policy and potential for Palestinian sovereignty in the West Bank. The building up of proto-state political and capitalist institutions occlude the ‘the continuity of Israeli settler colonialism’ leading policy makers and analysts to allude that ‘its effects could be halted and reversed once Palestinians achieved independence in the occupied territories.’[lxvii] The Oslo Accords served not as a rupture between settler colonialism and neoliberalism, but a continuation of settler colonialism by other means. The influx of international donor money in the 1990s and early 2000s privileged what Toufic Haddad terms a ‘neoliberal conflict resolution’ model, in which building up the Palestinian economy and state simultaneously evacuated the project of Palestinian sovereignty of its radical elements.[lxviii] Increased privatization set the state for the emergence of private enterprise as the harbinger of hope for many Palestinians after the Second Intifada, including the farmers participating in the projects outlined hence.

Today, internal trade (retail and wholesale) has become the dominant sector of the Palestinian economy since 2006, taking up an increasing share of both its GDP and labor force, while manufacturing and agriculture has declined.[lxix] Palestinian farmers report challenges that range from the direct impact of Israeli military incursions onto agricultural land and their destruction of agricultural equipment and crops, to issues of de-development and competition from Israeli products with lower prices, to the limited ability of the internal market to absorb agricultural surplus.[lxx] The occupation has led to declining production across multiple agricultural sectors, due to decreased access to arable land, restrictions on inputs to improve productivity, and the decline in the agricultural workforce due to the downward pressure on wages.[lxxi] However, speaking to both farmers and agronomists in the Jenin area during fieldwork in 2018 and 2021, most named their biggest problem as that of income and marketing. The decline of Palestinian agriculture brings up political concerns of the opening up of land to Israeli dispossession and fears of loss of cultural heritage and political identity tied to agricultural practices and heirloom plants and animals.[lxxii] But in Jenin, agriculture still accounts for the largest sector of its economy; the governorate further produces 29% of the olive oil of the West Bank.[lxxiii] The question of whether Jenin was ripe for the emergence of fair trade due to its agricultural persistence or whether fair trade has helped that persistence does not lead to simple either/or answers. Regardless, it is to the issue of the neoliberal environments of Palestinian agriculture in Jenin, and the environment that fostered the commodification of Palestinian indigeneity, to which we now turn.

Palestinian indigeneity and its commodification

The field of fair trade and organic agriculture in Palestine is diverse and growing; any attempt to fully chronicle the various efforts, from small permaculture farms focused on serving only a local village to large companies producing products for exports, would necessarily be incomplete. Rather than attempt to argue comprehensively across multiple case studies, I focus here on only the efforts of one company and one organization. Canaan Palestine is well-known for being the first fair trade company in Palestine. Formerly known as Canaan Fair Trade, Dr Nasser Abufarha concurrently founded the company and an affiliated non-profit organization, the Palestine Fair Trade Association (PFTA), in Jenin in 2005. Dr Abufarha responded to a need he saw during his dissertation research around the villages of his youth in Jenin governorate, where olive farmers were facing major price drops of finished olive oil due to the Second Intifada’s disruption of local market demand. Canaan Palestine boasts it was not only the first fair trade company in Occupied Palestine, but also that Dr Abufarha helped to create international standards for fair trade olive oil (which did not exist at Canaan and PFTA’s founding), making Canaan Palestine the first fair trade olive oil company globally.[lxxiv]

Today, Canaan Palestine sells three major categories of products, both directly to consumers and as bulk commodities to be relabeled or manufactured into other goods[lxxv]: 1) olive oil; 2) almonds and almond oil; and 3) ‘Palestinian specialties,’ a grouping of value-added food products (including freekeh,[lxxvi] maftoul.[lxxvii]za’atar,[lxxviii] and carob syrup). Marketing of Palestinian olive oil and other agricultural products do not always explicitly, and in fact rarely, put ‘indigenous’ as a physical label on their products, although it is occasionally mentioned in associated marketing materials.

When not identifying something explicitly as indigenous, marketing and promotional materials do commonly include related terminology that invoke Palestinians’ connections to land since time immemorial. In addition to materials related to the actual food products for sale, terminology also appears on outreach materials to promote visiting the Jenin area for socially minded tourists, and materials to encourage donations to non-profit organizations that support the farmers who sell their products to Canaan Palestine. Discourse that invokes Palestinian indigeneity falls into multiple categories: invoking a long and timeless history of Palestinian connection to the land; invoking that Palestinian farming and its products is better for environmental and human health; and invoking the idea that Palestinian farmers and their products are culturally authentic and unchanged over time, representing a social and ecological ‘back to the land’ relation.

Discourses of indigeneity appeal to a global consumer market who desire to reach authenticity through food consumption, to have a unique experience of tasting a product allegedly unchanged for thousands of years, and often, to “act with one’s wallet” in solidarity with the Palestinian political struggle.[lxxix] However, these discourses emerge through a valorisation and commodification process enacted by Canaan Palestine and related organizations (as well as many sustainable agricultural efforts in Palestine not detailed directly in this article). The commodify fetish that obscures itself is in clear play here, and it is necessary to unpack how different actors labor under different conditions to contribute to this valorisation and commodification. One sphere of production is, of course, the orchard or farm. Farmers who sell their olive oil to Canaan must maintain organic certification, which every farmer I spoke to said was not a problem because of how their existing farming practices which they learned before Canaan was founded fit well with organic. In fact, one Palestinian agronomist I spoke to with experience in national agricultural research went so far as to say olive farming traditionally is always and has always been organic. The emphasis on theunchanged nature of the production of organic olives, particularly heirloom varieties (which will be detailed further below) after the transition to certified organic reinforces the argument that Palestinian ‘traditional’ or ‘indigenous’ olive oil is inherently and naturally better, even without the external imposition of international certification and regulation standards.[lxxx]

Beyond the agrarian sphere, there is labor conducted in circulation—not just the physical logistics of shipping products out of Palestine to markets abroad, but also in the discursive work of marketing, design, and communication by for-profit companies and non-profit organizations that further valorise the otherwise finished product of a bottle of olive oil. Take, for instance, a promotional tourism booklet from Canaan Palestine, distributed by Land of Canaan Foundation, a non-profit organization based in the US whose mission is to support the non-profit organizations associated with Canaan in Palestine. The booklet has on its front cover a photograph of khubz taboun (a traditional wood-fired flat bread), olive oil, fresh tomatoes, mint, and sliced cheese. Underneath the Canaan Palestine logo is written in italics, ‘You’re with family…’ Inside, different pages detail the potential trips a tourist could take, from touring the olive oil factory in Burqin to staying with a farming family for olive harvest. Describing the olive oil factory, the pamphlet says, ‘Palestine, the Land of Canaan, has witnessed the birth and development of the olive oil culture throughout the years. At Canaan, you learn the history of organic farming, and see exhibits of the olive oil food culture from the beginning of time to the latest state-of-the-art technology in olive oil processing.’ Describing a home-stay opportunity, it reads: ‘Meet the farmers, visit their lands, see their ancient trees, enjoy their delicious food, learn and experience their simple life-style, culture, traditions, and stay overnight in their warm homes. Welcome to village life!’ These descriptions invoke a simple yet comfortable Arab hospitality, both unchanged since time immemorial yet also contemporary —the style of the booklet would not be out of place as an advertisement for a hip coffee shop—and welcoming to non-Palestinians. These advertisements enlist a ‘Third world ecological imaginary’ of the Palestinian peasant farmer as one who is unthreatening and welcoming and in tune with  nature, and in doing so try to undo racist and Orientalist depictions of Arabs and Palestinians as violent, irrational terrorists. Many marketing staff at Canaan Palestine and farmers emphasized the importance of putting out positive messaging about Palestinians through their products and tourist visits to combat this Orientalist hegemony, especially for Americans.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down nearly all travel to Palestine, as Israel stopped issuing tourist visas without strict pre-approval criteria for over twenty months, the fair trade association still brought tourists ‘virtually’ by hosting events on Zoom. I attended one Zoom live event for a UK audience in November 2021. Hosted in an olive orchard, a few farmers from the nearby village came to cook food over an open fire and gathered around an olive tree to pick olives by hand to show on the video feed. Meanwhile, a few meters away, family members of the landowner and hired workers were also picking olives—using diesel generator-powered harvesters which worked much faster than hand harvesting. Mechanized harvest, which fair trade staff said has grown in popularity in recent years, did not fit the image of farming practices unchanged over time, and was not portrayed in the event. Yet this was not due to a duplicitousness on the part of the farmers or fair trade staff. Leaving out the mechanical harvester was partially practical (the loud noise of the diesel tractor overpowered the cell phone microphone used to record the event), and partially because of the assumptions the Palestinians recording had of their audience: they felt that the participants on the call did not want to see the mechanical harvest. but instead enjoyed seeing us harvesting by hand. Such imagery reinforced the ecologically noble savage imaginary of Palestine and Palestinians that Western consumers desire or even demand.

The idea of Palestinians as inherently ecologically friendly also emerges throughout printed marketing. Canaan Palestine centers its support for regenerative, not just organic, agriculture, a terminology in rising use in recent years to explain the agroecological practices of carbon sequestration in the soil and protecting soil health. In an Instagram Live conversation with Olive and Heart, an online marketplace for Palestinian fair trade products, Dr Abufarha boasts that Palestine is home to the ‘longest standing regenerative agricultural practices on earth.’[lxxxi] The Land of Canaan Foundation asks for support for intercropping legumes in olive orchards to aid in nitrogen fixation and lessen the need for external fertilizer inputs. The website explains that ‘Regenerative Agriculture is new to much of the organic world but traditional in Palestine’; donating will support the use of ‘ancient native seeds’ which ‘are drought resistant, don't need fertilizer, and are resistant to pests and diseases. Plus, their produce is nutrient dense and preferred by the knowledgeable consumer.’[lxxxii] The term ‘knowledgeable consumer’ here also evokes the imaginary of a well-educated customer who makes her shopping choices based on personal health considerations; regardless of the consumer’s individual racial identity, the ‘knowledgeable consumer’s’ choices are shaped by white ideals of bodily purity.

The donor to these projects can be reassured that they are supporting not only a local project that benefits the farmer, but also a project of indigenous land stewardship that is seen to benefit the entire world. In a time of increasing threats from climate change, the idea that Palestinians’ ‘ancient traditions protect the future,’ as the host of the opening Abraham Path webinar put it, positions the indigenous Palestinian as a racial subject responsible not only for her own people’s landed future but for the ecological health of the planet. The aforementioned live Zoom event occurred at the same time as COP 26, the annual UN Climate Conference, held in 2021 in Glasgow, Scotland. One virtual participant asked if the farmers had any messages for COP 26 delegates. ‘This year, we have been touched by the effects of climate change more than ever,’ one replied. Speaking to farmers through numerous interviews, many expressed global concerns both about Palestine’s political and environmental futures and expressed pride that their organic farming practices would help improve the environment not just for their local communities but for the whole world. At the same time, immense pressure is put on Palestinian farmers to hold responsibility for the fate of the world facing climate catastrophe. The failure of governing structures like COP to regulate the root causes of climate change on either a national or international level puts the onus on the marginalized of the world, like Palestinians, to take up individual responsibility to serve as a bulwark against climate change’s devastating effects. Neoliberalism’s impacts on environmental governance extends beyond what it has destroyed (regulations, welfare structures) but also what it creates; here, the figure of the Palestinian farmer as a “responsible steward” individually responsible for fixing her local agro-ecology and later, the rest of the world, through green capitalism.

In addition to these broader themes, the word indigenous does show up in specific places in Canaan Palestine materials. Canaan’s three olive oils available for sale online are variously named after the variety of olive making up the majority of its content (Rumi, Nabali) or the location of the olives that make up a blend (Jenin), with minimal description on the bottles itself. In the extended production description of the aforementioned varietal named oils, however, both olive trees cultivars are described as ‘indigenous.’ ‘Rumi olive trees are the indigenous Surri olive trees of Palestine. The name Rumi refers to the tree’s ancient heritage dating back to Roman times,’ reads one;[lxxxiii] the other, ‘Nabali olive trees are indigenous to Palestine and cultivated according to sustainable agricultural traditions passed down over millennia.’[lxxxiv]

Another example is a booklet published in both Arabic and English to showcase the work of the Center for Organic Research and Extension (CORE), a non-profit organization also founded by Dr Abufarha, whose mission is to support training and development of Canaan-affiliated farmers in sustainable and regenerative agriculture techniques. The booklet lists under CORE’s ‘main goals’ to ‘preserve and enhance indigenous plant varieties and animal races’; in the Arabic booklet, the term used ismahaliyya, which can be translated to ‘local,’ ‘domestic,’ ‘native,’ or less commonly, ‘indigenous.’ It is usually to describe a place or non-human object (nabatat mahaliyya or ‘native plants’ is the phrased used), not a person or people.

In both the case of the description of the olive cultivars and of the preservation of native plants and heirloom crop and livestock, ‘indigenous’ is used to directly refer to a non-human entity that Palestinians are in relation to in their work as agriculturalists. Yet the slippage between the olive tree and those who tend them is intentional. On Canaan Palestine’s website, a video titled ‘Canaan’s Living Culture’ plays on the front page. The voice of Dr Abufarha plays over clips that include him walking through fields of wheat, olive tree branches shaking in the wind, and a farmer looking back at the camera and gesturing onwards, inviting the viewer to walk through the trees. ‘We’re from here because we are part of here,’ his voiceover speaks. ‘This is the home of the olive tree. It is indigenous to the land. So are we.’[lxxxv]

The indigeneity invoked by Canaan Palestine is that of a place-based relation to land since time immemorial. This is stated quite simply in the booklet distributed by CORE, with a quote from Dr Abufarha as a header on one page: ‘Palestinian farmers lived in harmony with this ecosystem for thousands of years and continue to honor these traditions to this day.’ Surprisingly absent from these materials is the acknowledgement of the racialisation of Palestinians as indigenous under Israel settler colonialism, or increasingly, of the impacts of Israel’s occupation at all. Present in its origin story and much of its earlier marketing materials, the impact of Israel’s occupation on fair trade and organic farmers is conspicuously now absent from Canaan Palestine’s website description and of the online descriptions of non-profit supported projects at Land of Canaan Foundation. In some ways, this could be seen as incredibly liberatory; Canaan Palestine has transcended the need to define itself against the settler, and instead simply celebrates and disseminates authentic notions of Palestinian indigeneity that predate and exceed Zionism. Yet Israel’s occupation puts forth limits to valorising and commodifying indigeneity that can only be noted in this structural context, not beyond it.

The limits to value under settler colonialism

In 2011, reporting on its first six years of operation, Canaan Palestine put its price floor for a liter of olive oil at NIS 15 ($4 US), and explained the price paid to the farmer as containing a ‘social premium’:

Canaan pays farmers a sustainable price that includes a social premium, which is always above the market price. The social premium for farmers is intended to support the health, education, and overall well-being of farmers’ families. The social premium is part of the value chain of a product and represents a percentage of the price. As Canaan director Nasser Abufarha explains, if a bottle of olive oil sells for US$15.00, US$3.35 goes to the farmer (22.4%). The rest of the price is allocated for other pieces of the value chain…[lxxxvi]

The idea of a ‘social premium’ is a core part of fair trade projects as a whole; the consumer must be willing to pay for something above and beyond base product quality, to feel that they are supporting social, economic, and/or environmental values. For Palestinian olive oil, the overhead is, according to Lila Sharif, an ‘added social premium of solidarity.’[lxxxvii] However, no longer does Canaan Palestine even invoke that value of ‘solidarity’ directly in its marketing materials. The desire is for consumers beyond a core ‘Palestine solidarity’ customer base to engage with and purchase Canaan Palestine’s products. This came up repeatedly in my interviews with staff at Canaan Palestine in November and December 2021, as staff in the sales and marketing department of the company emphasized that they perceived the quality of their products as what was most appealing to international consumers. Such consumers are seen to be hailed by larger notions of authenticity and environmental protection, without going into the messier political questions of Palestinian sovereignty or Israeli settler colonial violence.

The issue emerges, what value does a commodified indigeneity hold? Farmers in the Jenin area are acutely aware of and engage in conversation, debate, and argument over the value of their products. Ten years after the aforementioned report, Canaan Palestine set the price for the 2021 harvest season for one kilogram of virgin olive oil at NIS 25.5 ($8.10 US) and for extra virgin at NIS 26.5 ($8.42 US). Each farmer has the choice to sell their product fully or partially to Canaan, through designated purchasers at olive oil presses or by bringing their product to Canaan’s factory directly. However, farmers must sell at least part of their harvest at least one time out of every three consecutive harvest seasons to remain in the fair trade network.[lxxxviii] Staff at Canaan and the fair trade association said this price was agreed upon between the company and farmer representatives, who are elected by the farmers every two years. However, the 2021 price proved to be controversial: buyers at non-fair-trade presses were paying NIS 28 per kilo, and farmers could even sell their oil directly on the local market for NIS 30 per kilo. On a daily basis in October and November 2021, I watched farmers come into the fair trade association’s office in Jenin to complain about Canaan’s price and argue it should be raised based on the local market price—or that they would simply sell to the local market instead. Interviews with some farmers with long-standing relationships with Canaan indicated some would sell part of their harvest to the local market and some to Canaan, or to the local market entirely, while others expressed a loyalty to Canaan for multiple years of positive treatment despite this year’s price discrepancy. Additionally, the fair trade association staff portrayed Canaan as more honest than the local olive oil brokers. ‘If you acted like a journalist and went to the [olive oil] press and asked the price, they might say 30 NIS [per kilo], but then if you went back and actually tried to sell them the oil, they would give you a price of 25 NIS,’ insisted Feras, a senior staff at the association.

The price discrepancy between non-fair-trade and fair trade olive oil raised the question as to what value the global market still brings to Palestinian farmers. If a commodified indigeneity does not bring extra value to a farmer and his family, is it worth pursuing? Why would farmers want to stay in a fair trade cooperative if the price was not higher than the local market, as fair trade promises? However, there are additionally ethical values not captured simply by the market relation, for instance, that of trust and long-term relationships between farmers, their purchasers, and their consumers overseas. Those relationships hold a less codified but no less important value, particularly, the potential to communicate and support Palestinian political goals—and while they may have been built on a Third world ecological imaginary of the Palestinian farmer, they do not necessarily have to rely on it.

One evening I was sitting in the home of Abu Ali, the olive farmer who I often stayed with in the village of Kufr Dan north of Jenin. I had been connected to Abu Ali directly from the fair trade association when I was seeking a host family, and he proudly showed me photos of the international visitors he had hosted over the years who had come to tour Canaan’s facilities. One night, he offered me a 250 ml bottle of Canaan olive oil, infused with lemon, as a gift. ‘How much would this olive oil cost in the US?’ he asked me. I pulled up Canaan Palestine’s US sales website and did the calculations of dollars to shekels and ounces to kilos. The sale price, of course, was much higher than what he is paid for the raw product—his question, though, was less about whether there was a direct correlation between what he was paid and what it was sold for (particularly a bottle of flavored oil that had been clearly modified from its raw form). Our conversation, however, showed that despite knowing that value is imbued to his product outside of his raw production of the olives, someone, somewhere, was benefitting extra from not just his socially necessary labor, in the strictest Marxist sense, but from his land and himself—from his Palestinianness.

It can easily be argued that settler colonial dispossession outweighs any commodity fetish imbued to identity. As long as Israel still tries to sever Palestinians from their lands in an ongoing process of enclosure, and the possibility for a revolutionary struggle staved, the ‘good life’ that fair trade and organic farming brings will always be an incomplete one. As Lila Sharif explains,

…through fair trade, Palestine is transformed from its commonplace site of violence and chaos to a commodity that is saturated with affective desires and high grade content. Palestine is suspended from violence, charity, and darkness, but is mainstreamed into a commodity that a worldly consumer can salivate over, chewing and digesting without the added ingredient of pain and violence.[lxxxix]

However, the ‘mainstream commodity’ of a commodified Palestinian indigeneity is partial. As long as settler colonialism persists, indigeneity will continue to be constricted and narrowed to a racial identity formation that is both hyper-consumed and devalued by settler colonial state structures and individuals alike. The purpose of marketing indigeneity at all in Palestine is for political gains, not just economic ones; yet in relying on techniques of circulation, the commodity fetish threatens to overwhelm the political power of indigeneity as a collective position against settler colonialism.

Conclusion

In her analysis of a short-lived mushroom farm in Jericho, Rayya El Zein encourages a understanding of the Palestinian ‘resistance economy’ that ‘shift[s] the notion of resistance from one that romanticizes microlevel agricultural collectives farming ancestral lands.’[xc] Instead it is crucial that ‘both capital and state-like institutions must be reimagined as tools, not for liberation, but for the process of struggle required by the latter—that is, as tools for the development of Palestinian labor.’[xci] Canaan Palestine, and fair trade and organic in Palestine writ large, use indigeneity as a tool for their economic and social work; so too, do the farmers participating in fair trade use Canaan and racial capitalism as a tool for their processes of economic and political struggle. Furthermore, in the vein of El Zein’s criticism of romanticism, taking for granted Palestinian indigeneity as inherently resistant to Israel settler colonialism—the commodification of indigeneity outlined in this article—is an imaginary that does little serve to the necessary struggle. Therefore, it behooves us to instead ask what Palestine offers to thinking settler colonialism and racial capitalism together, and what do these concepts then offer back to the struggle for Palestinian sovereignty still ongoing today.

The literature on settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Palestine must examine attend to the complexities of Palestinian capitalism historically and contemporarily under neoliberalism. This work, while robustly engaged with by political economists, anthropologists, geographers, and others in Palestine studies, is nonetheless not read enough outside of this geographic disciplinary silo. The transit of the question of Palestine to transnational questions of the settler colonial too often leaves behind the real ambivalence of capitalism and resistance on the ground. The farmers with whom I spoke were concerned with whether their products receive the best price possible on the market for their own and their family’s needs, while also expressing that they did feel that their work as farmers contributed to a better future for their communities and even for Palestine as a whole. Rather than seeing neoliberal capitalism as wholly exploitative or of alternative economic frameworks like fair trade as wholly liberatory, farmers expressed both pragmatic and principled stances as to why they participated in sustainable development schemas. Future scholarly work on settler colonialism and racial capitalism in Palestine should draw closer attention to these tensions and nuances.

Furthermore, there is more to be said still on the topic of indigeneity in Palestine-Israel. The rise of claims to Jewish indigeneity, themselves often relying on a biological essentialism of race, must be contended with not just as a cynical response to Palestinian political organizing, but as another emergence of racial formations as property under racial capitalism locally and globally. Jewish indigeneity claims may not articulate indigeneity meaning those who have been colonized; nonetheless, as this article shows, the understanding of Palestinians as indigenous because of Israeli settler colonialism is not the only way, or sometimes even the primary way, Palestinians articulate themselves to a global public. It is not as simple as saying that Jewish indigeneity claims arose from Palestinian claims; we must theorize deeper the question of Jewish racialisation not just as settlers aiming to be natives in Palestine, but in asking why Jews have not been racialised as native in any of the other places we have called home—notably, Europe.

Finally, despite the bleak outlooks perhaps gleaned from this article, theorizing racial capitalism and settler colonialism from Palestine offers the potentials for a transnational solidarity that resists the narrowing and commodification of indigeneity and subalternity writ large into easily ‘digestible’ soundbites or products. The impossibility of Palestinian indigeneity as truly valued under settler colonialism—the impossibility of divorcing who Palestinians are from the land of Palestine—opens up a gap in settler hegemony that can be exploited and expanded. Palestinian indigeneity calls into question the limits of understanding indigeneity through the settler relation, yet also challenges whether an invocation of reclaiming the untouched past will bring liberation. Palestinian indigeneity is at the least a ‘tool for the process of struggle’; it remains to be seen how it might be taken up by a grassroots class struggle both on the ground in Palestine and transnationally.

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Monterescu, Daniel, and Ariel Handel 2019, ‘Liquid Indigeneity: Wine,         Science, and Colonial Politics in Israel/Palestine’, American    Ethnologist 46, 3: 313–27.

Moreton-Robinson, Aileen 2015, The White Possessive: Property, Power,   and Indigenous Sovereignty, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota      Press.

Nichols, Robert 2020, Theft is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory,

Durham: Duke University Press.

Olive and Heart, 2020, “Instagram Live Chat,” Available at         <https://www.instagram.com/p/CHlKv5Topov/&gt;

Osborne, Tracey 2018, ‘The de-commodification of nature: Indigenous        territorial claims as a challenge to carbon capitalism’, Environment     and Planning E: Nature and Space 1, 1-2: 62-66.

Peteet, Julie 2016, ‘The Work of Comparison: Israel/Palestine and      Apartheid’, Anthropological Quarterly 89, 1: 247–82.

Radcliffe, Sarah A 2017 ‘Geography and Indigeneity I: Indigeneity,     Coloniality and Knowledge’, Progress in Human Geography 41, 2:      220–29.

Reger, Jeffrey D 2017, ‘Olive Cultivation in the Galilee, 1948-1955:     Hegemony and Resistance’, Journal of Palestine Studies 46, 4: 28– 45.

Rifkin, Mark 2017, ‘Indigeneity, Apartheid, Palestine: On the Transit of         Political Metaphors’, Cultural Critique, no. 95: 25–70.

Robinson, Cedric J 1983, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Robinson, Shira 2013, Citizen Strangers: Palestinians and the Birth of         Israel’s Liberal Settler State, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Salaita, Steven 2016, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and   Palestine, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Salamanca, Omar Jabary, Mezna Qato, Kareem Rabie, and Sobhi Samour          2012, ‘Past Is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine’, Settler    Colonial Studies 2, 1: 1–8.

Sayegh, Fayez 2012, ‘Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (1965)’, Settler          Colonial Studies 2, 1: 206–25.

Seikaly, Sherene 2016, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Seikaly, Sherene, and Max Ajl 2014, ‘Of Europe: Zionism and the Jewish Other’, in Europe After Derrida: Crisis and Potentiality, edited by Agnes Czajka and Bora Isyar, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sharif, Lila 2014, ‘Savory Politics: Land, Memory, and the Ecological Occupation of Palestine’, Dissertation, University of California San   Diego.

Sharif, Lila 2016, ‘Vanishing Palestine’, Critical Ethnic Studies 2, 1: 17–39.

Shikaki, Ibrahim 2021, ‘The Demise of Palestinian Productive Sectors:        Internal Trade as a Microcosm of the Impact of Occupation’, Ramallah: Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network, Available at   < https://al-shabaka.org/briefs/demise-of-palestinian-productive-         sectors/>

Simpson, Audra 2014, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the    Borders of Settler States, Durham: Duke University Press.

Stoler, Ann Laura 2016, Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times,    Durham: Duke University Press.

TallBear, Kim 2013, Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota      Press.

Tartir, Alaa 2018, ‘Farming for Freedom: The Shackled Palestinian     Agricultural Sector’, In Crisis and Conflict in Agriculture, edited by   Rami Zurayk, Eckart Woertz, and Rachel Bahn, 144–56. CAB    International.

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Tesdell, Omar Imseeh, Yusra Othman, and Saher Alkhoury 2019, ‘Rainfed Agroecosystem Resilience in the Palestinian West Bank, 1918–2017’,       Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 43, 1: 21–39.

Watts, Michael J 2009, ‘The Southern Question: Agrarian Questions of Labour and Capital’, in Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question, edited by A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi and Cristóbal Kay, London: Routledge.

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Wolfe, Patrick 2016, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race,        New York: Verso.

[i] Karmel Abufarha is also the son of Canaan Palestine founder Dr Nasser Abufarha, who I will refer to as Dr Abufarha to distinguish the two.

[ii] Abraham Path Initiative, 2021, ‘Olive trees, olive oil, organic faming [sp], and coping with COVID.’, Available at <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3UjaAiFYeY>

[iii] On the potential for resisting commodification see Engel-di Mauro and Van Sant 2020, Osborne 2020; indigeneity beyond settler colonialism, see Simpson 2014.

[iv] See Bardawil 2020; Coulthard 2014; Locker-Biletzki 2019

[v] Nichols 2020, p. 53.

[vi] Nichols 2020, p. 8.

[vii] Bhandar 2018, p. 29.

[viii] See, for instance, Sayegh 2012.

[ix] See Estes 2019.

[x] Salamanca et al. 2012, p. 3.

[xi] S. Robinson 2013, p. 10. On apartheid and settler colonialism, see also Peteet 2016; Rifkin 2017.

[xii] See Bhandar and Ziadah 2016, Seikaly 2016.

[xiii] See, in particular, Sharif 2016; Barakat 2017.

[xiv] Salaita 2016, p. xviii.

[xv] Melamed 2015, p. 77.

[xvi] See, for instance, C. Robinson 1983; Byrd et al. 2018.

[xvii] Clarno 2017, p. 9

[xviii] See Coulthard 2014, pp.10-15; Clarno 2017.

[xix] C. Robinson 1983, pp. 26-28; Kelley 2017 p. 273.

[xx] Seikaly and Ajl 2014, p. 123.

[xxi] Seikaly and Ajl 2014, p. 128.

[xxii] Wolfe 2016, p. 24.

[xxiii] See, for instance, Feldman 2015; Stoler 2016; Hart 2018.

[xxiv] Bhandar 2018. For further strong examples of comparative projects which include Palestine and multiple sites, see also Clarno 2017, Fields 2017.

[xxv] Englert 2018, p. 153

[xxvi] Mikdashi 2013, p. 28.

[xxvii] Harris 1993, p. 1713.

[xxviii] Moreton-Robinson 2015, p. xiii.

[xxix] Barker 2005, p. 17.

[xxx] See, for instance, Ives 2018; Kauanui 2018. 

[xxxi] See Radcliffe 2017, Abu-Lughod 2020.

[xxxii] Cook-Lynn 1996, p. 88.

[xxxiii] Larsen and Johnson 2012, p. 3; see also Louis 2017.

[xxxiv] Bauer Jr. 2016, pp. 25, 27.

[xxxv] Coulthard 2014, p. 20.

[xxxvi] Grande 2004, p. 64.

[xxxvii] Examples outside of Palestine include Kauanui 2008; Tallbear 2013; Arvin 2015.

[xxxviii] Tatour 2019, p. 2.

[xxxix] See, for instance, Tesdell, Othman, and Alkhoury 2019.

[xl] Gutkowski 2018, p. 486.

[xli] Marx 1990, p. 290.

[xlii] See Harris 1993, p. 1720.

[xliii] See Farsakh 2005.

[xliv] Abu-Lughod 2020.

[xlv] Marx 1990, p. 302.

[xlvi] Marx 1990, p. 300.

[xlvii] Baillie, Chatzoglou, and Taha 2010, p.53; see also Kirtsoglou and Theodossopoulos 2004.

[xlviii] See Wiegman 2003, p. 301; McKee 2016.

[xlix] Marx 1990, p. 290.

[l] Guthman 2007.

[li] See Fridell, 2006; Fridell, 2007; Dolan, 2010; Jaffee, 2012.

[lii] See Guthman 2004.

[liii] There is a much longer history of the consumption of Palestinian olive oil as a solidarity economy that exceeds this categorisation. Palestinian immigrants and then refugees in the Arab world brought with them agricultural practices, flora, and fauna; they imported Palestinian food products to Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, the US, South America, and more. The sale of olive oil in Palestinian cultural and political spaces in the US predates the economy I describe here. I do not intend to put the Palestinian diaspora as outside of the realm of the global market; a narrowing of the focus here illuminates certain points about neoliberalism, and the larger story of the history of the solidarity economy should still be told. For a more full telling of this history, see Sharif 2014.

[liv] On the relations between indigeneity and the question of the peasant, see Watts 2009, pp. 281-83; Li 2014.

[lv] See Davis 2011.

[lvi] Bryant and Goodman 2004, p. 350

[lvii] Besky 2014, p. 30.

[lviii] Dana 2020, p. 198.

[lix] Castree 2001, p. 1522. See also Whitt 1998.

[lx] Montrescu and Hendel 2019, p. 314.

[lxi] See Doumani 1995.

[lxii] See Fakhr Eldin, 2019.

[lxiii] Reger 2017, p. 31.

[lxiv] Kohlbry 2018, p. 33.

[lxv] Relatedly, Jenin is the only West Bank governorate home to no Jewish-only settlements, as it was the only site of withdrawal of West Bank settlements from the 2005 disengagement policy (overshadowed in most literature by the dismantling of the Gaza Strip Gush Katif settlements). The reason given for this is often Jenin’s history of militant attacks on settlements and the notoriety of the Jenin Refugee Camp as a center of armed resistance in the Second Intifada; however, a fuller accounting of the reason for low settlement activity in the area and relation to political economy has yet to be written.

[lxvi] See Farsakh 2005.

[lxvii] Farsakh 2016, p. 56.

[lxviii] Haddad 2016, p. 7

[lxix] Shikaki 2021, p. 1.

[lxx] Isaac et al. 2015, p. 29.

[lxxi] See Tartir 2018.

[lxxii] See Abufarha 2008.

[lxxiii] Isaac et al. 2015, p. 20.

[lxxiv] Bruhn et al. 2012, p. 3.

[lxxv] The major recipients of bulk purchases include Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps (olive oil makes up a major basis of their castile soap), Lush Cosmetics (for almond oil), and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream (for bulk almonds to produce almond milk for dairy-free ice cream). Canaan Palestine products are also sometimes relabeled under generic fair trade labels in some countries, although the company has turned away from that practice in recent years, in favor of maintaining their own brand label.

[lxxvi] Cereal food made of whole durum wheat kernels, similar to bulgur

[lxxvii] Wheat ‘couscous,’ a durum pasta hand rolled into larger grains

[lxxviii] A spice blend made of Palestinian thyme (za’atar), sumac, sesame, and salt

[lxxix] For more on Palestinian olive oil and global consumption, see Meneley 2008, 2011, 2014; Sharif 2014.

[lxxx] The reality of this is, of course, complicated; Palestinian olive farming practices have changed over time and new techniques and technologies have come to Palestine via organic training programs. This fully history is beyond the scope of this paper at present.

[lxxxi] Olive and Heart, 2020, ‘Instagram Live Chat,’ Available at <https://www.instagram.com/p/CHlKv5Topov/&gt;

[lxxxii] Land of Canaan Foundation ‘Regenerative organic seed bank,’ Available at <https://www.landofcanaanfoundation.org/landrace-seed-bank-project-pales…;

[lxxxiii] Canaan USA, ‘Rumi olive oil,’ Available at <https://canaanusa.com/collections/all/products/rumi-olive-oil&gt;

[lxxxiv] Canaan USA, ‘Nabali olive oil,’ Available at <https://canaanusa.com/collections/all/products/nabali-olive-oil-light-f…;

[lxxxv] Canaan USA, ‘Canaan’s Living Culture,’ Available at <https://canaanusa.com/pages/about&gt;

[lxxxvi] Buhn et al. 2012, p. 15.

[lxxxvii] Sharif 2014, p. 177.

[lxxxviii] Interview and participant observation, October 2021

[lxxxix] Sharif 2014, p. 188.

[xc] El Zein 2017, p. 22.

[xci] El Zein 2017, p. 8.

This article criticises the political economic analysis of settler colonial studies, which it draws out through an immanent critique of its most famous practitioners. It then offers a critical genealogy of the wider theoretical trend that secures it: the post-Cold War vogue of asserting the ever-increasing centrality of primitive accumulation in global capitalism – what we might term a mode of predation. Finally, it teases out the tensions and confusions in the reliance of settler colonial studies upon Marx’s concept of surplus populations, as well as problems abounding in Patrick Wolfe’s “logic of elimination.” Overall, it argues that the frequent claim that we inhabit a global settler modernity cannot be sustained through these notions, and that this claim is profoundly moral and academic, lacking political and analytical value. The insistence on the durability of settler colonialism amounts, in this literature, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself.

This piece is being made available as a preprint edition of the Race and Capital special issue of Historical Materialism. The final published version of this text will be made available on the Brill website in the coming months, we ask that citations refer to the Brill edition.

Issue 32(2&3): Race and Capital

Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains.

                          –  Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space

The study of settler colonies has in recent decades consolidated into a discrete academic inquiry calling itself “settler colonial studies.” This is the most sustained, though not the only, academic attempt to consider the settler colony. Beginning life in the Australian academy, it finds its classic introduction in Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 monograph, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Today the project is carried forward by an eponymous journal, and cemented by academic touchstones like a Routledge Handbook.[1] Settler colonial studies argues for the analytical distinction of the settler colony from other colonial formations, premised upon its drive to secure land rather than labour, and its consequent organisation around the elimination of native societies rather than their enslavement or exploitation.[2] The settler colony, moreover, and unlike other genocidal events, persists. It is, in Wolfe’s phrasing, a ‘complex social formation’ and a ‘continuity through time.’[3] In the settler colony, ‘the colonisers come to stay – invasion is a structure not an event.’[4]

These formulations take Australia and Australian scholarship as their ‘key paradigm’ or ‘premier exemplar.’[5] That continent’s history, according to this literature, crystallises these core dynamics of settler colonialism and exemplifies their persistence into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – an ‘endless cycling of attempts to eliminate or absorb the Indigenous population.’[6] Unalloyed by elements like chattel slavery, Australia held the keys that unlocked the peculiar racialisation of settler colonialism in the Anglo settlements of the Americas and Australasia. In quick time, the paradigms of settler colonial studies extended beyond these continents, with its scholars developing a particularly enduring interest in Palestine.[7] In Lorenzo Veracini’s symptomatic phrasing, ‘As a scholarly field and as paradigm for analysis, settler colonial studies has gone global.’ It has ‘no geographical, cultural or chronological bounds.’[8]

This article, to an important extent, is about the globalisation (or universalisation) of this paradigm as a bad abstraction from an Australian model, which was itself inadequate to the Australian case, and particularly the Marxian concepts used to achieve this. In this regard, Wolfe’s final monograph, Traces of History, is a synecdoche. It begins, appropriately enough, with Wolfe himself, writing history on his verandah looking out over Healesville, Victoria. The local history – indeed, what transpired on the Coranderrk Aboriginal Station visible from Wolfe’s perch – permits him to establish the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism. From here, Wolfe fans out comparatively to variously racialised and subjugated populations in North and South America, Central Europe, and Palestine, where this logic reappears, or asserts itself in attenuated or alloyed forms, or is absent.[9] Nineteenth-century Australia, or the Coranderrk Station, duly abstracted, is adequate to index much of the world. This motion models the deeper way in which settler colonial studies conceives the history and present of its object, the settler colony. The formerly peripheral and exceptional moment becomes constitutive and central in every sense. The world was turned inside out in the process of colonisation, as surplus populations in Europe were displaced outwards; now it is folded back in, on the level of theory, and is suddenly adequate to account for the entire world.[10]

Settler colonial studies comes to rely, for its claims, almost singularly upon an expansive notion of primitive accumulation. This, in turn, leans on a prolific post-Cold War trend of Marxist thought in which “primitive accumulation” is, at once, unmoored from the transition debates and endogenous developments in the history of global capitalism – its crises, imperialism, financialisation, and myriad restructurings – and also taken to explain all of it. From here, the theorist may claim that primitive accumulation is exceptional to capitalism and capitalist accumulation not in a weak sense, but in a constitutive sense. All accumulation, we eventually learn, is deeply and secretly an ongoing form of primitive accumulation or dispossession, and this is the deep problem with capitalism – that it is a mode of predation. This, in a word, is the critique of capitalism from the standpoint of the commons.

On this basis, Veracini may declare that settler colonialism is ‘perpetual primitive accumulation.’ The two theoretical paradigms are more or less identified; settler colonialism and ongoing primitive accumulation are ‘essentially alike.’[11] Ongoing primitive accumulation, or one of its cognate concepts (most famously, David Harvey's “accumulation by dispossession”) is taken to define the neoliberal present. The settler colony may then be said to ‘fundamentally define present dispensations.’[12] More specifically, the re-emergence of surplus populations around the world evinces, in this argument, the ongoing centrality of the “logics” of settler colonialism in global capitalism.

Capitalism today, and especially financialised capitalism, we should believe, is a settler colonial present, a rapacious global mode of predation.[13] Under the laws of universal settler colonialism, dispossession occurring before capitalism is functionally equivalent to dispossession during imperialist expansion and to dispossession under contemporary finance. The enclosure of the English commons, the incorporation of the New World and Antipodes into capitalist circuits, and mechanisms of financial accumulation today are essentially alike. The critique of capitalism and financialisation becomes self-explanatory. The problem with capitalism is, as it has always been, that it is predatory; and predation, on capitalism’s own ideology of justice and fairness, is immoral. This moralism evaporates the analytic distinctions that would specify the settler colony and acquits its theorist of historical study. Even the firm and gritty matter of land, settler colonialism’s ‘irreducible element,’ is airily abstracted into phenomenological standpoint theories and metaphysical assertions about the “logic of elimination.” Such theory can only endlessly rediscover its own premises in new phenomena across all history: an interminable enclosure of infinite commons, a universal settler colony.

This is not, it should be stated clearly, to argue that land dispossession and spoliation in historical settler colonies no longer occurs or has no political relevance today; this would be absurd. It is to dispute, however, that this fact contains a shortcut to an analysis of global capitalism and racialisation, or that it offers an adequate metaphor for the contemporary moment of outsourced production and financialisation. Against all the impulses and intuitions of settler colonial studies, we require a historical and materialist account of the settler colony capable of seeing in the dramatic restructuring of the settler economies and global capitalism something other than the universalisation of its own original “logics” and “structures.” It is one thing to argue that the evils of settler colonialism are not, or not only, past; it is quite another to see the world as a settler colony.[14]

The following pages develop these arguments through an immanent critique of settler colonial studies’ most famous practitioners and a critical genealogy of the recent deployment of Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation.

1. Turning the world outside in

Patrick Wolfe’s formulation of settler colonialism – in his monograph of 1999 – staked the analytic distinction of the settler colony and the settler colonial relation on the fact that settler societies did not make regular use of the labour of indigenous peoples, but instead sought to access and secure land. The settler colony was thus organised around an imperative to eliminate rather thanexploit indigenous peoples, where “elimination” concentrates a diverse strategic arsenal, from outright genocide to cunning policies of recognition and assimilation. Wolfe first articulated this “logic of elimination” – which Lorenzo Veracini considers a “discovery” analogous to that of the difference between bacteria and viruses – in 1994 in the context of Australia.[15] It is unlikely that Wolfe, in the 1990s, envisaged the development of “settler colonial studies” as an academic paradigm. But he remains undoubtedly its most famous practitioner and he participated avidly in its subsequent growth, including its application to twentieth-century Palestine.[16]

The settler colony’s unique immunity to the withdrawal of indigenous labour upsets the Hegelian machinations of French anti-colonial and critical theory, as well as the myriad formulations of postcolonial theory. In Wolfe’s hands, the settler is, by and large, independent of the native, standing in an unanalysed form of contiguity or co-presence, and characterised by a one-sided will to eliminate.[17] Native and settler are, strictly, in a relation of neither domination or exploitation, and all clever dialectical reversals are thus blocked in advance.[18] This fundamental and material feature of the settler colony – its structuring around indigenous land rather than indigenous labour – pushed Wolfe in 1999 to elevate the significance of ideology in struggles across the settler colonial relation.

In the settler-colonial economy, it is not the colonist but the native who is superfluous. This means that the sanctions practically available to the native are ideological ones. In settler-colonial formations, in other words, ideology has a higher systemic weighting – it looms larger, as it were – than in other colonial formations.[19]

Hence the remainder of this book: largely a critique of anthropological studies of Indigenous Australians.

Wolfe does not adopt an Althusserian, or similar, notion of ideology, which would seek to alert us to the “imaginary relation” we have to our “real conditions of existence.” The “level of ideology” (Wolfe’s phrase) seems to indicate instead forms of discursive struggle above or distinct from an economic or material level, if such levels could be said to bear any determinate relation to one another in his work.[20] One has the sense that Wolfe’s reversion to ideology as the level of struggle in the settler colony is a desperate move, betrayed in the confession that ‘for the native, ideology is all there is.’[21] This would appear to suggest that what we might call “real conditions” in the settler colony do not admit the possibility of other forms of struggle for the native. But the lack of a dependent labour relation, in and of itself, does not imply (and much less necessitates) an exemplary role for ideology. This overhasty conclusion points to an original gap in the theory, a problem with the paradigm. And it requires a richer and more historical political economy to fill – specifically, one that is capable of entertaining determinants beyond the form of exploitation in the immediate production process.[22] Indeed, the immediate process of production between exploiter and exploited is here a façade for an undeveloped phenomenological (non-) encounter between settler and native, one with properly ethical rather than political or economic dimensions.

In a later article for the Journal of Genocide Research, Wolfe sutures the material gap in his theory with the fantastic concept, primitive accumulation. This article, distinguishing between genocidal events and the eliminatory logic of settler colonialism, became the most influential statement of the major coordinates of settler colonial studies and by far its most cited work. Here, Wolfe maintains the missing dependent relation between settlers and indigenous peoples as the foundational distinction of the settler colony from other colonial formations. However, this time he does not therefore locate struggle fundamentally on the level of ideology. Instead, Wolfe substitutes notions of primitive accumulation and dispossession for the absent relation of labour and capital to characterise the situation of the settler colony. The logic of the settler colony, as before, is ‘premised on the securing – the obtaining and the maintaining – of territory.’ Now, a structural notion of dispossession – specifically,ongoing primitive accumulation – is required for its analysis.[23]

The problem thus substantively shifts from the level of ideology to the material fact of dispossession, understood, once again, as structure rather than event. This move foregrounds the historical processes that drove the colonisation across the frontiers of the New World – what Wolfe calls, ‘a primitive accumulation’ – while maintaining the ‘sustained duration’ of settler colonialism as one of its defining features.[24]The problem, now, is to bring the analysis forward to the present configuration: how to argue for the ongoing significance of this inside-outside dialectic as a structuring feature in a much-changed world, one without a territorial “outside” to capitalism. Wolfe, and settler colonial studies more broadly, sidesteps this central and historical question by inverting, on the level of theory, the historical processes of settlement. Colonisation, according to settler colonial studies, resolved intractable problems in the metropole by turning the world inside out, deferring internal contradictions and class conflict by displacing them abroad, to the outside. (This is, of course, the rudimentary Marxian theory of imperialism.) The critical move in the literature is then to present the contemporary world as now folded back in, a world permeated and structured by the “logics” of settler colonialism.[25]

On this account, the deeper dynamics that drove the colonisation of the New World still obtain; they are, on the authority of Rosa Luxemburg and David Harvey, permanent features of capitalism. (Indeed, we should observe the publication of Harvey’s influential book, The New Imperialism, between these two works by Patrick Wolfe.) Capitalism, we read, perpetually requires an “outside” for its expanded reproduction. The incorporation of this manifold outside into capital’s interior is the purview of primitive accumulation, or as Harvey rechristens it, accumulation by dispossession.[26] Ben Fine demonstrated years ago in this journal that the theory of crisis propelling the “new” imperialism – what Harvey calls, “overaccumulation” – amounts ultimately to a generalisation of Luxemburg’s widely rebuked underconsumptionist crisis theory. Accumulation by dispossession is the corresponding generalisation of primitive accumulation.[27] Harvey’s argument in The New Imperialism for capital’s permanent reliance on an “outside,” and his commitment to ‘take this ‘inside-outside’ dialectic seriously,’ does not engage the many refutations of Luxemburg’s revisions of Marx’s reproduction schemas.[28] Nor, certainly, does settler colonial studies, for whom this is an unquestioned, even dogmatic, point of departure.

Settler colonial studies, accepting as true this image of capitalist crisis and reproduction, teaches that the processes that unfolded on the frontier and in the settler colony – so many instances of “primitive accumulation” – are now permeating the whole world. Capitalism’s ongoing dependence on an “outside” apparently bespeaks its ongoing need for settler colonialism, which, now mediated by “accumulation by dispossession,” can stand in for such loose abstractions as financialisation and privatisation. Lorenzo Veracini thus argues that settler colonialism ‘has gone global,’ that we inhabit a worldwide ‘settler-colonial present.’[29] This is the settler colonial studies version of the “colonial laboratory” or “boomerang effect,” beloved of twentieth-century European critical theory.[30]

The global claims of settler colonial studies thus stand upon an uncritical incorporation of David Harvey’s analysis of contemporary global capitalism and the prevailing role of “accumulation by dispossession” therein. Next, settler colonial studies recognises the structures of its own object mirrored in those of the “new imperialism” or “neoliberal regime,” as laid out in Harvey’s account. This is sometimes as facile as the presence, in each, of the word, “dispossession,” and the claim that both processes are “structural” (not evental) or “ongoing” (not past). The crudest versions of this, such as those of Nicholas Brown and Veracini, proceed along arguments of formal analogy situated on the level of the theory itself, making at best weak gestures towards underlying material conditions or historical causation.

Brown, for instance, seeking to advance a notion of “settler accumulation,” begins with a survey of existing literature on settler colonialism and primitive accumulation. For the journal, Settler Colonial Studies, he writes: ‘Like settler colonialism, today primitive accumulation, more often than not, is theorised as a structure, not an event.’[31] The analogy rises to a higher level as Brown addresses the relationship between these two concepts: they are, we read, ‘dialectically intertwined.’ The argument for this assertion seems to be simply that David Harvey connects accumulation by dispossession and expanded reproduction in these terms. Brown, once more:

David Harvey insists that…‘the two aspects of expanded reproduction and accumulation by dispossession are organically linked, dialectically intertwined.’ Arguably, the same could be said of primitive accumulation and settler colonialism. The similar manner in which the two processes have been theorized in recent decades may just be a coincidence. More likely, it reflects the extent to which the ongoing processes are ‘dialectically intertwined.’[32]

It is enough, then, that certain tendencies exist in the literature to justify tendencies in the literature.

Veracini, with Gabriel Piterberg, endorses this argument by theoretical analogy, agreeing with Brown that settler colonialism and primitive accumulation are ‘essentially alike,’ and share an ‘organic bond.’[33] Four years later, in the pages of Rethinking Marxism, Veracini suggests that the global “settler-colonial present” is anchored by what he calls ‘accumulation without reproduction.’ This spin-off from Harvey, we learn, is a ‘mode of domination thatresembles settler colonialism.’[34] Beneath the dizzying conceptual proliferation, Veracini’s basic move, like Brown, is to approximate dispossession andelimination, where the first corresponds to Harvey’s overcapacious notion and the second to Wolfe’s term of art for the specific logic of the settler colony.[35] This approximation of dispossession and elimination is established principally by their shared opposition to exploitation – or, their shared position outside exploitation in the labour process.[36]

A type of dispossession that is fundamentally informed by a ‘logic of elimination’ or containment rather than exploitation is analogous to what indigenous peoples up against expanding settler-colonial regimes have faced and are facing.[37]

This, for Veracini, would secure the logic of settler colonialism as the predominant global mode of domination. However, and even on the evidence of his own article, these concepts do far more work to subsume the specificities of the settler colony, historical and present. The colonization and settlement of indigenous lands suddenly ‘resembles’ financialisation and privatisation: ‘The current ‘abdication’ of the state in order to pursue and defend private property begs the question [sic] of a possible return to ‘frontier’ arrangements.’[38] Begging the question, indeed.

This theoretical move to generalise settler colonial phenomena in the present, even when its claims are not quite so sensational, would hope to achieve a dialectical inversion whereby the erstwhile particular, marginal, or exceptional moment becomes the universal mode that it always already was.[39] However, the net effect is a feedback to the settler colony that dilutes its analytic specificity, especially the much-touted primacy of land. This projection of a particular Australian paradigm onto world history is not only self-evidently inadequate to the latter, but compromises study of the former as well, emptying it of all but a metaphysical settler will, an indomitable logic of elimination. The principal concept mediating this theoretical pivot between the Australian settler colony and global capitalism, as we have seen, is Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation, as renovated by Luxemburg and particularly by Harvey. The critique of settler colonial studies requires, therefore, a critique of this theoretical trend.

2. Mode of Predation: Primitive accumulation, external universal

The final section of the first volume of Marx’s Capital, “So-Called Primitive Accumulation,” follows seven sections that theorise the specifically capitalist mode of production, culminating in “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” Primitive accumulation has an uncertain status in Marx’sCapital, caught between the history and prehistory of capitalism, and containing a series of historical processes and observations, none of which have the clarity, formulation, or elaboration of other concepts and categories inCapital.[40] This has not, of course, prevented it from becoming a prominent concept in Marxist literature.

At the end of the Cold War, a tendency emerged to reinterpret Marx’s notion of so-called primitive accumulation as an increasingly central feature of capitalist social relations and capitalist accumulation. The subsequent explosion of academic deployments of primitive accumulation has already attracted several surveys. These typically bemoan the lack of conceptual clarity and attempt correctives, usually by restricting the definition of primitive accumulation, returning to Marx to “reread” Part VIII and distil a tighter definition of the process, or by breaking it down into component parts (disaggregation).[41] In this section, rather than partake in the hermeneutics of Part VIII, I intend to forward an argument about this post-Cold War trend itself, one that I have not encountered elsewhere. In a word, this trend achieves the subsumption of the remainder of Marxist theory by primitive accumulation, with effects flowing into the study of settler colonialism.

It must be stressed that I do not claim, here, to survey the entire gamut of recent work on primitive accumulation. I intend a particular literature, largely Anglo and emergent since 1990, that sought a “return” to the chapters on primitive accumulation and which now forms a citational ecosystem.[42] This literature unfolds in and across various subfields from Marxian geography, history, and political economy to various “studies,” such as settler colonial studies, critical race and ethnic studies, etc. Despite its disciplinary diversity, the literature shares a few basic convictions. In addition to diagnosing the growing importance of primitive accumulation since the 1970s, it agrees that primitive accumulation is not a phase but a constant and necessary feature of accumulation under capitalism, and that it includes a highly diverse range of extra-economic compulsions. No longer merely temporallybefore capitalism, it has come to denote, in the literature, that which occurs spatially beyond the frontier of capitalist relations, and those processes within capitalism’s spatio-temporal reach that do not qualify as capitalist accumulation proper. In the latter case, primitive accumulation stands for extractive processes that areconceptually outside of capitalist accumulation, the latter therefore figured narrowly in an ideal-typical form.

This analytic tendency typically traces its insights back to Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (1913) and less often Samir Amin’sAccumulation on a World Scale (1974). We should, however, take Midnight Notes Collective’s 1990 issue, “The New Enclosures,” as its true point of origin. To be sure, the trend has a significant forerunner in European feminist Marxists of the 1970s and 80s, who studied Luxemburg’s work on the reproduction schemes and mobilised primitive accumulation to account, at once, for domestic and colonial processes of accumulation, each occurring “outside” the ideal-typical exploitation of the male wage.[43] These texts, however, have largely dropped out of the literature on primitive accumulation, notwithstanding Silvia Federici’s ongoing prominence, such that Kalyan Sanyal could observe in 1993 for Rethinking Marxism, ‘The last section ofCapital, volume 1, is rarely read and almost never discussed.’[44]

It was, thus, more properly the Midnight Notes issue of 1990 that brought, as Sandro Mezzadra observes, Marx’s chapters on primitive accumulation into the present, meaning both that it animated new discussion of these chapters and also projected their contents onto contemporary phenomena.[45] The political impulse of the Midnight Notes issue is to assert ground for common struggle in an increasingly stratified world, and after the failure of “actually existing socialism.” The underlying theoretical move is to metamorphise Marx’s account of the “old enclosures” of the English wastelands, enabling today’s theorists to class apparently diverse phenomena – from the debt crisis to homelessness and the collapse of socialism – within ‘a single unified process: the New Enclosures.’[46]

The risks of collapsing analytic integrity and nuance, and of basing political struggle on unsound analysis, are quickly obvious. For one, the historical account, in Marx, of the enclosure of the English commons transforms quietly into a concept, one capable of extremely diverse repetition. The concept itself has also multiplied, spawning a parody of imitation concepts, usually spinning off Harvey’s famous formulation, “accumulation by dispossession.”[47] Indeed, there is a way that primitive accumulation, one part of Capital, has been burdened with the weight of explaining every form of oppression or domination that is not an immaculate and straightforward exploitation of waged labour – including, as we saw, settler colonialism. The political consequence, as Mezzadra notes in critique of Federici, is to imagine the commons as something that we lost and must nostalgically recuperate, rather than something to produce.[48] I would add that whatever ‘came before’ or ‘lay outside’ has its own, and highly consequential, historicity.[49]

The uptake of this analysis in the past three decades has proceeded by rarefying the abstractions already present in Midnight Notes. The second issue of The Commoner, “Enclosures: The Mirror of Alternatives,” released a decade after the Midnight Notes issue, is a case in point. The articles comprising this issue became, in turn, a frequent reference for subsequent scholarship. In addition to reprinting the editorial introduction to Midnight Notes’ “New Enclosures” and Federici’s contribution to it, The Commoner excerpted a chapter from Michael Perelman’s book on primitive accumulation, published one year earlier, and also ran influential papers by Massimo De Angelis and Werner Bonefeld, who later developed their contributions into monographs.[50]

De Angelis’ article is exemplary for its simplification of existing Marxian theory, necessary, I believe, for the simplifications and confusions that abound in later primitive accumulation literature and onward to the study of the settler colony. He divides the reception of the primitive accumulation section of Capital neatly: those who follow Lenin and those who follow Luxemburg. Two respective interpretative traditions: ‘historical primitive accumulation’ and ‘inherent-continuous primitive accumulation.’ The difference turns on whether one thinks primitive accumulation is a historical phase or an ongoing feature of capitalist social relations, where the historical phase implicitly forms part of a teleological, developmentalist saga. This categorical distinction permits De Angelis to place, explicitly, the entire corpus of the transition debates, and the Brenner debate in particular, into the Leninist tradition, and proceed unencumbered by its controversies and intricacies.[51]

Freed of the transition question, De Angelis isolates what he considers the singular principle (the “secret”) at the heart of Marx’s theory: accumulation, whether primitive or capitalist, is predicated upon establishing and maintaining a ‘forced separation between people and the social means of production,’ or between labour and the conditions of labour. Licensed by fragmentary quotations from Marx’s unpublished writings, this principle of separation ends up establishing an identity between primitive and capitalist accumulation.[52] ‘Accumulation proper is nothing else than primitive accumulation.’ The differences between the establishment of this “separation” and its maintenance, which De Angelis distinguishes as the becoming andbeing of capitalism, and then the differences between its simple and expanded reproduction, reduce to a simple magnitude. ‘Accumulation is equal to primitive accumulation ‘to a higher degree’.’[53]

Bonefeld’s contribution to The Commoner advances this secret notion of separation in a more philosophical register.[54] He figures primitive accumulation as suspended (aufgehoben) in the commodity form. As the constitutive pre-positing action of the capital relation, ‘primitive accumulation, then, persists within the capital relation.’ It is both the presupposition of capitalist social relations and the realisation of these relations. It is a ‘constantly reproduced accumulation,’ whether through the separation of new populations from their means of production and subsistence, or through the reproduction of the wage relation in established capitalist economies.[55] As in De Angelis, the secret is that primitive accumulation encompasses both itself and capitalist accumulation.

These texts pose for us the relation of “ongoing primitive accumulation” to the capitalist mode of production: whether, and in what way, it is an outside orexception to capitalism, theoretically and historically. The settler colonial uptake of this literature, typical in this regard, sees in primitive accumulation theconstitutive outside to capitalism, that which founds and guarantees capitalist relations in a relation of exception (Ausnahme): included in capitalism because taken out. In De Angelis and Bonefeld, however, primitive accumulation is not only the oceanic outside to the capitalist mode of production, whether as what came before, what happens “beyond the line,” or what exceptional mechanisms are required to sustain it – already an immense burden for a single concept. Nor is itinside capitalism in the sense of merely continuing alongside it temporally, “dialectically intertwined” with expanded reproduction and sometimes predominant, as Harvey would have it. It has become identical and primary to all of capitalism, its whole spatio-temporal history and its entire theory. Here, primitive accumulation stands in for something fundamentally and secretly internal to capitalism, a simple truth suspended in all the formulas and schemas of Parts I through VII of Volume I ofCapital.

The Commoner is the extreme expression of the primitive accumulation vogue, in certain ways departing from its typical formulations. It provides, nonetheless, a fitting description of this literature considered as a whole. Whether primitive accumulation functions as an increasingly important outside to capitalism or as its deepest and truest kernel, this literature brackets and ultimately dissolves, in the name of primitive accumulation, the theoretical nuance and specificity of Capital, the many concepts of Marxian theory, and the voluminous tradition of historical materialism.

This most regularly plays out through the conviction that finance capital is one of the crucial modes of primitive accumulation today. Midnight Notes, firstly, emphasises the function of debt in the “New Enclosures.”[56] David Harvey implores, ‘above all we have to look at the speculative raiding carried out by hedge funds and other major institutions of finance capital as the cutting edge of accumulation by dispossession in recent times.’[57] More recently, Nancy Fraser identified debt and ‘highly inventive but dicey ‘financial products’’ as characteristic of her capacious notion of ‘expropriation,’ itself an elaboration of primitive accumulation and crudely opposed to exploitation in the familiar way.[58] Mezzadra, too, sees primitive accumulation as precisely detectable in the operation of global financial markets, an example of the “extractive” core of contemporary capitalism.[59] In this way, the undeniable rise of finance capital since 1973 meekly accommodates the further extension of primitive accumulation through political economic theory. There is, it seems, no need to theorise the novel effects of contemporary finance on global production, the history of global production that facilitated the rise of finance capital, the intricate problems that this raises for value theory and exploitation, the specificities of derivative capital assets, or, indeed, the kinds of crises to which all this is liable.[60]

In a word, this is the subsumption of Capital by primitive accumulation – subsumption in the Kantian sense of abstracting the particulars of the manifold beneath an external universal. As “mammal” may subsume bear, human, and dolphin, so “primitive accumulation” subsumes all that is entailed in the motion of the production and appropriation of absolute and relative surplus value, and the reproduction of capitalist relations. There is no longer any need to debate the transition or to concern oneself with the tendential laws of capitalist accumulation and its crises. Primitive accumulation, the external universal, has subsumed both theory and history – a theoretical trend that takes hold, fittingly, in the same moment that ideologues celebrated the end of history in the immediate post-Cold War years. Marxism thus spawned a corresponding theoretical tendency that obliterated the historicity ofCapital, reducing everything to a repetition of so-called primitive accumulation: interminable “enclosures” of infinite “commons.”

Through this prolific literature, the critique of capitalism on the academic left reduces to a critique of predation. What is wrong with capitalism and surplus value is that it is essentially predatory, and specifically that this predation is uneven, disproportionally affecting indigenous peoples and other non-white non-men. One thus finds, for example, an influential issue ofSocial Text from 2018 entitled, “Predatory Value,” and committed to a study of the ‘contemporary moment of predatory accumulation through the deeper temporalizations of colonization, settlement, and racialization.’[61]

Once again, David Harvey is at the root of things, starting with his liberal denunciations in the early 2000s of the “predatory” quality of the resurgent function of “accumulation by dispossession” in global capitalism.[62] Three years before the Social Text issue, one of its editors, Jodi Melamed, outlined the prevailing political economic angle of this literature. This is Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession with the admixture of “race” or “racial violence,” usually on the authority of Cedric Robinson. This analysis is encapsulated, almost parodically, when Melamed characterises her innovation in the shift from Harvey’s notion of a ‘state-finance nexus’ to her own ‘state-finance-racial violence nexus.’[63]

By the time of the Social Text issue, there is an explicit effort to move away from Harvey by substituting “economies of dispossession” for “accumulation by dispossession.”[64] Yet, in practice, his analysis still provides the major infrastructure of the theory and one may quite simply substitute these terms and add the modifier, “racial,” to the same nouns, and proceed as before.[65]The analysis, that is, remains familiar beneath the morphing terminology: the ongoing and intensifying role of “economies of dispossession” under the present reign of finance capital is grounds to affirm settler colonialism as a ‘determinate condition of capitalism.’[66]What matters here, and throughout the Social Text issue, is that capitalism dispossesses people; that it is, at its origins and to its core, “settler colonial.” Predation, or the accumulation of “predatory value,” slippery and resistant to rigorous definition, approximates, once again, “dispossession.”[67] And as we see in the editorial introduction and in contributions like Jodi Kim’s, finance is the big lever in the “economies of dispossession.”[68] Finance, one supposes, is today’s global mode of racial predation.

This demonstrates a major problem with the materialist analysis of the settler colony common even to opponents engaged in heated dispute, one that runs deeper than terminological or conceptual refinement, or adjustments in perspective. For instance, one of the editors of the Social Text issue on “predatory value,” Alyosha Goldstein, had already participated in a robust critique of Patrick Wolfe’s theory for its tendencies to ahistoricity and academic schematisation, accusing it of a form of “colonial unknowing,” and meanwhile calling for a “refocus” on the question of imperialism.[69] Yet nothing in that issue, or in Social Text two years later, delivers on this promising critique as it concerns political economy, notwithstanding refreshing contributions, such as Justin Leroy’s appeal that black studies and settler colonial studies each drop their competing claims to exceptionalism.[70] Glen Coulthard, in much the same way, reprimands commons-longing politics in his influential, Red Skin, White Masks, only to build his analysis fundamentally on Silvia Federici and David Harvey, foregrounding the general and contemporary role of primitive accumulation in capitalism.[71] Or witness Nandita Sharma’s venomous critique of settler colonial and critical indigenous studies nonetheless valorise the counter-ideal of enclosure and primitive accumulation – namely, the “global commons” – as the salient and urgent political task today. In this last example, the basic dialectic of enclosure and commoning proves more resilient even than the settler-native binary.[72] In all the above, disagreements are waged, terminology is shifted, but the analysis remains fundamentally the same. These academics, unencumbered by history, believe themselves, in their turn, to have discovered the secret of capitalism. It is dispossession all the way down. The world is a settler colony.

One must consider how distinct this objection – to the predatory qualities of capitalism – is from the liberal-bourgeois campaign against the predators and parasites of an earlier time: those landlords and bankers sitting atop their monopolies of enclosed land and hoards of interest-bearing capital, idly charging rents and clipping coupons; or the despotic sovereign that fines and taxes too much.[73] It seems true that the claim against predation remains profoundly moral – that it is unfair or unjust according to capitalism’s own ideology of political and juridical equality. The critique, in this way, boils down to a condemnation of the gaps between the ideals of capitalist society (reason, justice, universality) and its outcomes, the critique with which Moishe Postone famously denounced “traditional Marxism.” It is worth observing, here, another critical shortcoming shared by Postone’s traditional Marxists and settler colonial studies: namely, their attempt to ground a critical consciousness in a position ontologically or transcendentally outside of capitalism.[74] It is surely time to move beyond the banal insight that primitive accumulation is not only what occurred in capitalism’s prehistory, and beyond repetitive claims about the global “settler modernity.” Global capitalism is not a “settler colonial present.” Such a claim has neither political nor analytic value; its value is academic and moral.

The final section of this paper returns to settler colonial studies for a review of its heavy reliance on the concept of surplus populations in contemporary capitalism, and the implications of my critique for the “logic of elimination,” so central to Wolfe’s theory. Here we see the theoretical claims about the global settler colonial present break down on their own terms. The claim to a global settler present simply cannot be sustained through these concepts.

3. Superfluous populations and the logic of preservation

In 2016, Patrick Wolfe and David Lloyd admirably crystallised the dynamics I have sought to outline as the “collective project” before settler colonial studies, miniaturised in the journal issue they were introducing.

We hope that the gathering of these essays will help to advance and stimulate the larger collective project of researching the lines of continuity that link together the contested enterprise of ‘primitive’ accumulation that is inseparable from the inception of settler colonialism with the no-less contested current phase of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ that has seen the refunctioning of settler colonial logics of law and violence as the means to furthering and safeguarding the neoliberal economic regime.[75]

This passage follows a speedy review of Luxemburg – that capitalism ‘needs other races’ – and declares that although capital may no longer find a ‘geographic outside,’ it is ‘no less productive of forms of racialisation.’[76] On this basis, Wolfe and Lloyd declare a ‘new mode of accumulation’ (shorthanded “neoliberalism”) and a ‘renewed movement of enclosure,’ in which the logics of settler colonialism become, in every sense, central.[77]

The dynamic behind this dramatic re-emergence of the techniques of settler colonialism, we read, is the re-emergence of surplus populations in contemporary capitalism. Surplus populations and the problems they pose for state and capital emerge as the throughline between the settlement of the New World and the putative centrality of the “logic” of settler colonialism in global capitalism today. During the nineteenth century, they argue, the settler colonies provided an outlet for surplus populations generated as a matter of course by capitalist production. This enabled the metropole to avoid the dangerous grumblings of a ‘Malthusian excess,’ deferring crisis by displacing it outwards. Presently, and consequence of ‘capitalist automation,’ Wolfe and Lloyd claim that we may witness the same phenomena, only now without the possibility of an expansive movement outwards that might absorb the surplus. On today’s surplus population, they write:

As distinct from resistant Natives, this human surplus is produced within capitalism rather than external to it. In common with Natives, however, it obstructs rather than enables capitalist expansion. It is in relation to this community of redundancy, we believe, that settler colonialism’s inventory of local strategies is becoming increasingly congenial to neoliberalism’s emergent world order.[78]

This passage staggers a blurry line between identifying the globally dispossessed with indigenous peoples and meanwhile maintaining the uniqueness of the latter’s experience as the basis for a distinct theory of the settler colony. Perhaps most counter-intuitively, we remember that it was the settlers, and not the natives, who were the original surplus population in this story: settlement was a way to manage surplus population in the industrial core of England, an alternative, indeed, to eliminating this immiserated excess.[79] Wolfe and Lloyd suspend this tension in the generic category of “surplus populations” by obfuscating important nuances among the kinds of surplus populations generated as a matter of course in capitalist motion.[80]

Surplus populations, of course, are not necessarily or always economically superfluous, which is how Wolfe always understood natives in the settler colony.[81] Wolfe and Lloyd, in this piece, surely intend permanently superfluous populations, rather than the reserve army of labour, which may, among other things, help maintain profitability by applying downward pressure on wages. The superfluous native should instead remind us of Mike Davis’ description, a decade earlier, of the ‘permanently redundant mass’ of people unemployed by capital today, or of Kalyan Sanyal’s extensive work on the informal economy of postcolonial capitalism.[82] Yet neither of these scholars study the settler colony, and there is no genuine case here for why the same strategic “inventory” should be conducive to the fundamentally different moments of expansive colonisation and settlement and today’s “neoliberal regime” (to borrow their then-and-now periodisation). Indeed, the glimpses we catch are more suggestive of the biopolitical management of internal enemies subject to gridded spatial confinement, which, for Foucault and others, have their origins more properly in the franchise or dependent colonies than the settler colonies, and much less the Anglo settlements. This is a curious irony from the pen of Wolfe, who once complained caustically of the indistinct use of “colonialism” in postcolonial theory.[83]

But more pressing even than colonial differentiation, perhaps, is the superficiality of the argument itself. Closer attention to the devastating economy of today’s surplus humanity suggests stark differences, rather than continuity, with the history of settler colonies – especially on the fundamental question of land or territory, settler colonialism’s ‘irreducible element.’[84] In settler colonies, where land is relatively abundant, Wakefield advised that colonial governments impose an artificial price on land to discipline working-class settlers to the wage and establish the social relations proper to capitalism by forcing them to save before purchasing land (the fundamental curse upon the settler colony, for Wakefield, was high wages). Indeed, for him, colonisation meant ‘the creation and increase of everything but land, where there is nothing except land.’[85] Yet we encounter a very different situation in Davis’ Planet of Slums. There, Davis shows that today’s surplus humanity pays premium rents on the tiniest, most cramped, and squalid snatches of land, which therefore become valuable investments for speculative capital, certainly in no need of a state-imposed ‘sufficient price.’[86]

The difference is even more stark if we follow Aaron Benanav’s recent work on “demographic dispossession.” This shows that the principal mode of dispossession today does not even occur through land enclosure and migration, but rather population increase among the urban poor. In this way, the largest surplus populations in the world are increasingly a consequence of the inability of dispossessed workers to migrate, or settle, elsewhere. Whereas the population of Europe could remain stable during industrialisation, precisely because of the settler colonies, surplus populations today swell in theabsence of the techniques and regimes of settler colonialism.[87] One of the most salient consequences – one that Arghiri Emmanuel elaborated most clearly in his polemics with Charles Bettelheim – is that surplus Anglo settlers earned the world’s highest wages, while surplus populations today earn wages below even the cost of subsistence.[88]

The comparison could take us far, and risk taking us adrift. The major point is that the “neoliberal regime” must manage today’s crisis of surplus populations precisely without settler colonialism and in radically different circumstances to the nineteenth-century settler colony, rather than with straightforward recourse to its strategic inventory.[89] The contemporary crisis of surplus populations is a dubious place to stake the globality of settler colonialism in contemporary capitalism, and likely draws us toward the opposite conclusion altogether.

The surplus population thesis, badly incoherent for analysing the present of the settler colony, is, moreover, only a partial explanation of the migration dynamics central to the history of various settler colonies.[90] Settler colonial studies, characteristically, highlights the significance of migration while deflecting serious study of it. Wolfe, in his major essay on Palestine, attributes overwhelming importance to migration sources in explaining dynamics in the settler colony. The demographic imbalance – caused by the nearly inexhaustible augmentation of settlers against the fixity of the ‘Native stock’ – constituted the decisive settler advantage.[91] Clearly, this is curious in the case of Zionism, where early settlement attempts were thwarted in large measure by what Zachary Lockman describes as ‘a virtually unlimited supply of cheap Arab labour.’[92] But there are, moreover, severe analytic limitations in simply positing a surplus population, whether settler or native, as “preaccumulated,” without accounting for the historical dynamics that produce it and facilitate their migration and reproduction in different lands.[93]

Wolfe might object that such an analysis would adopt the “perspective” of the settlers. ‘Scholarly resistance to the priority of the logic of elimination,’ he writes, ‘represents a settler perspective.’[94] This objection rehearses a characteristic sleight-of-hand in settler colonial studies whereby the “logic of elimination,” which initially followed from the territorial drive of settler colonialism, becomes primary. This logic, we recall, was proposed in opposition to the logic ofexploitation prevailing in other colonial formations. Settler colonialism, as structure, obeys an eliminatory logic because the settler project does not depend upon the reproduction of colonised workers but the securing of territory. It tends therefore toeliminate indigenous peoples, along with any claims they may make to the land. This eliminatory logic realises a diverse strategy, from outright genocide to the assimilation of indigenous cultures into the settler state, or even the “legal” purchase of land from imperial authorities, as in the case of Zionism. There is, however, a tendency to forget that the “logic of elimination,” on its own terms, is not in fact fundamental or prior to all else, but aconsequence of the settler power’s drive to secure territory, which must surely originateinside of capitalist history and its dynamics.[95] It is common for recapitulations of Wolfe’s theory to invert this relation in the sequence, or on the logic, of individual sentences.[96] Instead of a system or structure that seeks primarily to secure land, and which therefore requires, at different times and in very different forms, the elimination of indigenous populations, the “logic” of the “structure” becomes elimination as such.

The difference is therefore not mere sequence, but analytic primacy. When access to land is primary, one may pursue a materialist analysis of the interacting local and global forces that drove the historical pursuit of land and resources, as well as complex social relations of production, reproduction, imperialism, finance, and ground-rent. Upon these, one might achieve structural insights and relate them to historical and present waves of accumulation and struggle endogenous to capitalism’s history. This is, of course, methodological and highly abstract. Yet even at this level, we may perceive a dramatic difference to analyses that posit the “logic of elimination”as the structure of the settler colony, and on this basis, with all the analytic purity of theoretical schemata, unfold binaries of elimination and exploitation, violent dispossession and dull market compulsion, primitive and capitalist accumulation, outside and inside. The latter approach, uprooted and untethered, quietly leaves behind the materialist considerations of the earth and fascinates itself with the phenomenological density of the moment that Settler met Native, and merely implores us to take a side.

The “logic of elimination,” so untethered, permits cycles of academic pondering about the applicability of this theory to new cases: is South Africa, in fact, a case of settler colonialism?[97] Such banal musings even come to reverse their assessment and begin judging the adequacy of the history to the theory. Witness Veracini argue that Israeli settlers are erring in their brutal occupation of the West Bank. Because military occupation, he tells us more than once, reproduces the Palestinian national collective, it would be wiser to assimilate this sentiment by extending citizenship to the natives, like those canny settlers in Australia who must have read their theory.[98] Or we may read scholars like Omar Jabary Salamanca attribute failures in the Palestinian struggle to the ‘absence of a settler colonial analysis,’ the lack of which leads anti-Zionists to ‘accommodate settler colonial outcomes.’[99] (I suppose we can only hope that the Palestinians manage to read Salamanca before the Israelis discover Veracini’s advice and universalise citizenship.) And when Palestinians and Zionists depart from the script, these academics seem quicker to criticise the actors than the playwrights. Needless to say, this is a complex history of struggle, not an academic drama culminating in publication.

The logic of elimination, in this way, finally comes to resemble a new kind of master-slave relation, even though the formulation of settler colonial theory always intended precisely to distinguish it from such dialectics of dependency. From Saree Makdisi’s review of Wolfe’sTraces of History, quite perfectly titled, “Elimination as Structure,” we read: ‘The eliminationist structure renders the native necessary; with nothing to eliminate – no common other against which to align the state project – the structure would collapse.’[100] The possibility for materialist analysis of the settler colony in Palestine evaporates into a schematic theoretical structure, seemingly modelled on the political theory of Carl Schmitt: settler and native as friend and foe, dependent on one another for internal coherence. The logic of elimination, meanwhile, suddenly reveals itself as a logic of preservation, a reversal worthy of Hegel, except that the point was to theorise a relation in which the putative master does not depend on the slave. ‘It is not the colonist but the native who is superfluous.’[101]

It becomes clear, at this point, that words like “logics” and “structure” in settler colonial studies have intuitive rather than rigorous meanings. The levels and elemental relations of the “structure” – and the “logics” that govern it – lack methodological precision and genuine content. The confusions in the case of Palestine furnish evidence of this. This is a theory that promises only self-renewal and self-rediscovery, its own perpetuation. The insistence, in this theory, on the structural integrity and durability of the settler colony amounts, ultimately, to a claim on behalf of settler colonial studies itself.

Conclusion: The standpoint of the “commons”

In 2007, Peter Beilharz and Lloyd Cox lamented the ‘quiet shelving’ of a Marxist literature they dubbed, following the title of Donald Denoon’s 1983 monograph, “settler capitalism.” The most prominent representatives of this literature are Denoon and Philip McMichael. Beilharz and Cox consider settler colonialism (intending the concept cohering in Patrick Wolfe’s 1999 book) a cognate of settler capitalism. One could, with equal justice, locate a major discontinuity between the two, and consider settler colonial studies among the most avid participants in this quiet shelving. Certainly, they appear kindred when considered against a more conservative historiographical tradition in Australia, as in Beilharz and Cox’s review. Taken instead within a more critical or leftist corpus, settler colonial studies represents a dramatic departure, both self-conscious and not, from the analytic methods of the settler capitalism literature. In this way, Beilharz and Cox’s assessment of the disappearance of settler capitalism in Australian historiography, although not at all aimed at settler colonial studies, remains apt for the latter:

It was not so much that the concept of settler capitalism had been subject to vigorous intellectual scrutiny and been found wanting, as that it had been quietly shelved and substituted for by other concepts. These new concepts supposedly were and are more attuned to describing and explaining the dialectic between Australia’s past and its neoliberal restructuring from the 1980s until the present.[102]

With few exceptions, the works of settler capitalism tend to drop out of the repetitive and formulaic accounts of ongoing primitive accumulation in the settler colony and its supposed global significance under “neoliberalism.” In the absence of an analysis and critique of its own, this leaves settler colonial studies basically without an account of the political economy of the settler colony for the past century of its existence (only the ineliminable will to eliminate). This habit is not confined to settler capitalism. Several traditions of analytical and historical study on the settler colony from the 1970s and 80s are ‘quietly shelved’ in the post-Cold War accounts of settler colonial studies.[103] Indeed, settler colonial studies tends to consider settler capitalism, when it does not overlook it entirely, a sublated moment in the “career” of its own concept, a step on the path towards its triumphant consolidation into a discrete academic field, and then its subsequent blossoming in Australia, North America, and in relation to Palestine.[104] However, this final synthesis – the settler colonial studies moment – entails a symptomatic inattention towards the economic history and analysis prevailing at earlier stages of its conceptual “career.” We should, then, regard this final moment less as a crowning development and more as a departure.[105]

These overlooked works, meanwhile, suggest the need for a very different account of the political economy of the contemporary settler colony than the globalisation and perpetuation of its originary process, a so-called primitive accumulation to manage surplus populations. The failure to engage McMichael’s extensive theoretical and historical work on Australia, in particular, is a curious omission, given his explicity attention to the question of primitive accumulation.[106] One wonders whether it is because his work, rigorously historical, would not permit an easy description of post-1980s as a new enclosure. Beyond a mere insistence on the typological difference of the settler colony, this literature positions it dynamically in a world system, thus attempting to explain the outcomes of settler societies, rather than merely point out their difference from other colonial forms. These histories, perhaps tellingly, tend to break off some time in the early or mid-twentieth century, shifting towards new accounts of imperialism in the present that bear little or no relation to the history of the settlements.[107] The challenge to bring the account forward to the present is profound, and cannot be treated within the confines of the present work, although we would do well to begin with a return to economic histories and, with the guest editors of Theory & Event, refocus the question of imperialism beyond the schematic typologies of settler colonial studies.[108] At a minimum, theoretical and political linkages among settler colonies need to be historically grounded; our concept of it, as a process, needs determinants beyond the settler will to eliminate, or a misunderstanding of the category of surplus populations.

For its part, settler colonial studies, and as we have seen, presents a two-part history. In the first phase, settler colonialism was the crucial technique for resolving the contradiction of surplus populations in the industrial centre. Founded upon the old nomos of the earth, a world structured by a geographic outside, settler colonialism was the violent colonisation of the lands that lay beyond the line, via processes of primitive accumulation, to relieve the contradictions on the inside. The second phase, following the World Wars, properly begins with the “neoliberal regime,” presumably around 1973. In episode two, the erstwhile outside of capitalism reveals itself as capitalism’s innermost kernel; the world is turned outside in. This inside-outside dialectic proves itself a permanent and structural feature of capitalism, evinced in the ongoing production of surplus populations and the recurrence today of the processes of primitive accumulation proper to settler colonialism’s history, or at least metaphors of them.

Gaston Bachelard once quipped, ‘Outside and inside form a dialectic of division, the obvious geometry of which blinds us as soon as we bring it into play in metaphorical domains.’[109] Such a problematic dynamic may be said to apply beyond settler colonial studies to several fashionable literatures that take, as their premise, the conviction that primitive accumulation, or a cognate concept, is the major lever of contemporary capitalist accumulation as manifest by “finance” – the global mode of predation – in a world governed by the struggle between enclosure and resistance. This tendency treats everything from various environmental and anti-privatisation efforts to assertions of ancient rights to land and resources, human rights to migration and refuge, and to autonomy over the “digital commons,” the “general intellect,” and over bodies and social reproduction. This, it must be stressed, is only to name a few expressions; and this remarkable heterogeneity is sometimes celebrated as reflecting the diverse, plural, or non-monolithic imperatives of this politics of the commons.[110] Settler colonialism, figured as a predatory sequence that incorporates an “outside” through diverse processes of dispossession, is nonetheless paradigmatic of this imaginary: something natural or ancient or communal was taken or alienated, and must be recuperated; something both infinitely plural and irreducibly singular was coded and impoverished, and must be restored to its former plenitude.[111]

To paraphrase Moishe Postone’s critique of traditional Marxism, this is a condemnation of capitalism from the standpoint of the commons, a notion no less transhistorical than “labour” in certain traditions of twentieth-century Marxism.[112] For Postone, immanent social critique cannot proceed from a standpoint that purports to lie outside of its own social universe.[113] To do so leads to mere denunciations of the gap between the ideals of capitalism and its outcomes. One corollary of this analysis is a naked disinterest in the exploitation of workers, except where they are legally “unfree” – an analysis of global capitalism that returns to the origins of the New and Old Worlds and need not address the rise of global production in the Third World. Indeed, it seems plausible that the replacement of “labour” by “commons,” and “exploitation” by “elimination,” is not purely casual. We might consider it, rather, a symptom of the dramatic economic upheaval since the 1970s, where the traditional critical standpoint of the industrial worker all but vanishes from the Global North amid technological developments, outsourcing, and financialisation. In this context, the schematic opposition of a logic of exploitation and a logic of elimination becomes a viable analysis, at least when viewed from the standpoint of Patrick Wolfe’s verandah in Healesville. All this ultimately achieves, however, is a simple reversal of the formerly positive valence, such that the “worker,” automatic hero of a vulgar traditional Marxism, becomes a backward worker, a “settler” almost in J. Sakai’s meaning, thus displacing a thin notion of the “revolutionary subject” from the “worker” to the “native.”[114] These, however, are opposite sides of the same coin, which spins in a void and never quite hits the ground. 

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[1] See Cavanagh and Veracini (eds.) 2017. These two also maintain the blog, http://settlercolonialstudies.org/.

In the Handbook, Veracini describes settler colonial studies various as a ‘distinct subfield’ and a ‘scholarly field.’ See Veracini 2017, pp. 2–4.

[2] ‘The primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.’ Wolfe 2006, p. 388.

[3] ibid., p. 390.

[4] Wolfe 1999, p. 2.

[5] ‘The Australian example – and Australian scholarship – has offered a key paradigm for the field of settler colonial studies.’ Edmonds and Carey 2017, p. 371.

[6] Maddison 2017, p. 425.

[7] The interest in Palestine among the Australian practitioners of settler colonial studies has been warmly reciprocated by Palestine studies scholars. See, for only one example, Makdisi 2017. For a review of this “turn” in Palestine studies, see Busbridge 2017. Its relationship to the North American academy is much less straightforward. For a generous treatment of this, see Kauanui 2016.

Other theorists have expanded and adapted this model for the study of Algeria and certain territories subject to Japanese imperial rule. For an overview of this latter trend, see Uchida 2011, pp. 18–25.

Literatures on settler economies (or “settler capitalism”) often extend their comparative studies – although not Wolfe’s formulations – to Southern Africa and certain states of South America. See, for instance, various contributions to Lloyd, Metzer, and Sutch (eds.) 2013; see also Denoon 1983.

[8] Veracini 2017, p. 4.

[9] Wolfe 2016.

[10] The title of my article is a play on Piterberg and Veracini 2015, rather than its elaboration in the latter's book, out from Verso in 2021, The World Turned Inside Out. (The present article was written before the appearance of this book.) Nothing in this book, however, invalidates my claims or criticisms. On the contrary, one finds there further and increasingly absurd examples of the tendencies to weak analogy and unmoored comparison. See Veracini 2021.

[11] Piterberg and Veracini 2015, p. 469.

[12] Veracini 2019, p. 118.

[13] ibid.; see also Veracini 2015.

[14] ‘The new dispensation, accumulation by dispossession in the “creditocracy” age, ‘indigenises’ us all because it does not recognise, or suppresses, our sovereign collective capabilities as it appropriates whatever secondary ‘commons’ we may still hold.’ Veracini 2015, p 93.

[15] Wolfe 1994; Veracini 2015.

[16] Wolfe 2012.

[17] ‘If I were analysing the settler-colonial relationship or (heaven forbid) the practice of Aboriginality…my analysis would be guilty of constructing Aboriginal people…“in their absence.” But I am not analysing such things. Rather, in the logic of elimination, I am analysing what might be called the settler-colonial will, a historical force which ultimately derives from the primal drive to expansion which is generally glossed as capitalism. Though capitalism has energetically constructed and thrived upon a host of alterities, it is not ultimately dependent upon them.’ Wolfe 1994, p. 97.

[18] Although Veracini describes settler colonialism as a ‘mode of domination,’ Wolfe is clear that he does not intend to generate a socio-ontological relation of dominator and dominated. See ibid.; Veracini 2017.

[19] Wolfe 1999, pp. 2–3.

[20] ‘Where survival is a matter of not being assimilated, positionality is not just central to the issue – it is the issue. In a settler-colonial context, the question of who speaks goes far beyond liberal concerns with equity, dialogue or access to the academy. Claims to authority over indigenous discourse made from within the settler-colonial academy necessarily participate in the continuing usurpation of indigenous space.’ ibid., p. 3. Wolfe invokes Talal Asad’s 1979 lecture on ideology to stress the historicity and non-universal quality of the ‘level of ideology’ in any social formation. He opposes it to Fanon’s master-slave schema, in which colonists owe their existence to the colonial system. None of this, however, clarifies what precisely it means for Indigenous Australians to have only ‘ideology,’ except that it is different from the Algerian case. See Asad 1979.

[21] Wolfe 1999.

[22] ‘Relations of production are simply not reducible to forms of exploitation.’ Banaji 2010, p. 41. This to say nothing of the various forms of labour that Indigenous Australians performed historically for settlers. See Meredith 2013, pp. 335–37. Naturally, Wolfe’s scheme does not intend to deny that “exploitation” never occurred in settler colonies. It does, however, encourage the removal of strike waves by, for instance, indigenous Australians and Palestinians from the research agenda.

[23] Wolfe 2006, p. 402. Wolfe, at times, flirts with a concept of his own devising, “preaccumulation,” which vaguely describes the ‘aggregate historical endowment’ that settlers brought with them to the colony and the independently accumulated ‘Indigenous plenitude’ they confronted. See Wolfe 2012, p. 137; Wolfe 2016, pp. 19–24. However, primitive accumulation remains the explanatory concept or mechanism of settler colonialism. “Preaccumulation” is mostly descriptive, and in any case would require significant disaggregation if it were to explain anything rigorously.

[24] Wolfe 2006, pp. 395, 400.

[25] Gabriel Piterberg and Lorenzo Veracini show that E. G. Wakefield’s theory of systematic colonisation intended to stabilise contradictions in the British core, which would otherwise lead to a revolutionary dissolution. See Piterberg and Veracini 2015. The metropolitan contradictions here, as I will show later, are crises caused by surplus populations and capital overaccumulation.

[26] Harvey 2003, pp. 140–43.

[27] Fine 2006, pp. 143–44. For further critiques of Harvey’s book, see, from the same issue, Brenner 2006; and Sutcliffe 2006. See also Smith 2016, pp. 199–203.

[28] For a succinct critique of Luxemburg relevant to the theory of imperialism, see Day and Gaido 2012.

On the other hand, for Max Henninger, Luxemburg’s failure to reinterpret rigorously Marx’s reproduction schemes is irrelevant to the fact that Luxemburg, more than Marx, saw the persistence of epochal destruction beyond the formative period of capitalism. Henninger 2014, p. 299.

[29] Veracini 2019, p. 118.

[30] This refers to the notion, appearing in Aimé Césaire, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault among others, of the racist management of populations in the colonies returning the European core, particularly in reference to Nazism. See Foucault 2003, p. 103; Césaire 2001, pp. 36–41; Arendt 1973, p. 155.

It is worth pointing out that this is in no way a notion specific to the settler colony and usually refers explicitly to other colonial formations. As a figure, its inadequacy to a settler colony like Australia is perhaps best expressed by the fact that many literal boomerangs were not designed to return, but to fly straight and kill.

[31] Brown 2014, pp. 3–4..

[32] ibid., p. 9.

[33] Piterberg and Veracini 2015, p. 469.

[34] Veracini 2019, p. 120. [My emphasis.]

[35] I describe dispossession and elimination in Veracini’s text as ‘approximating’ one another because a more precise relation is indiscernible.

[36] Presumably, exploitation means here the creation and eventual accumulation of surplus value through the employment of wage labour by capital in the immediate production process.

[37] Veracini 2019, p. 121. [My emphasis.]

[38] ibid., pp. 123, 129.

[39] On the centrality of the settler colony to the project of modernity, see Wolfe and Lloyd 2016, p. 394.

[40] For Marx, primitive accumulation refers minimally to a set of historical “presuppositions.” Whatever else it might be, “so-called primitive accumulation” intends historical processes that made possible, in the first place, surplus-value, capitalist production, and the ready availability of masses of capital and labour-power, each of which circularly presuppose the other in Marx’s theoretical presentation of the specifically capitalist mode of production. See Marx 1976, pp. 775, 873.

[41] See, for representative examples, Ince 2014; Nichols 2015; Tomba 2012. (The appendix of Tomba’s monograph is titled, “Layered Historiography: rereading so-called Primitive Accumulation.”) For an excellent article on primitive accumulation, see Roberts 2017.

There is not scope in this article to make an intervention on the level of these surveys. Suffice, for now, to say that the task, I believe, is not to stage yet another rereading of Part VIII of Capital or to achieve finally the authoritative reading, but to lighten the load on this concept and turn elsewhere.

[42] I am not, therefore, undertaking to study all interpretations of Part VIII of Capital. My point is not to attempt a correction or alternative reading (many such attempts already exist), but rather to explore critically the effects of this very influential interpretation, upon which settler colonial studies depends for its analysis of political economy, and many of its grander claims.

[43] For an overview of this literature, see Mies 2014.

[44] Sanyal 1993, p. 117.

[45] Mezzadra 2011, p. 303. Silvia Federici, more recently, confirmed this view on the origins of this primitive accumulation analysis in Federici 2019, p. 3.

[46] Midnight Notes Collective 1990, p. 2.

[47] Already in 2013, Derek Hall was able to identify ‘accumulation by displacement’ and ‘dispossession by displacement’, ‘accumulation by encroachment’, ‘accumulation by denial’, ‘primitive accumulation by dispossession’, and ‘dispossession by accumulation’. Hall 2013, p. 1584. We have already seen Lorenzo Veracini attempt ‘accumulation without reproduction.’ Nicholas Brown, in the article discussed above, also hazards ‘accumulation by possession.’ Brown 2014, p. 6.

[48] Mezzadra 2011, pp. 317–18. This is to say nothing of the way that the establishment of commons in North America was a crucial process of indigenous dispossession. See Greer 2012.

[49] Glen Coulthard makes this point precisely in relation to commons-longing politics in the settler colony. See Coulthard 2014, p. 12.

[50] It is worth noting that Federici’s paper for Midnight Notes, notwithstanding its title, does not use the enclosure metaphor or make a case for ongoing primitive accumulation, and instead provides a thoughtful analysis of Third World structural adjustments. Federici 1990. Her best-known work, however, is a crystalline example of this unfortunate theoretical trend. There, primitive accumulation is at one point a process of large-scale colonisation and enslavement, and elsewhere reduces to the production of absolute surplus value (the male wage included female reproductive labour, extending the unpaid part of the working day). For Federici, the enclosure of the commons, described by Marx, pales by comparison to the ‘expropriation’ of women through the witch-hunts; and the witch-hunts are in turn analogous to the colonisation of the New World. See Federici 2004, pp. 103–4, 115, 184, 198. For Perelman, see Perelman 2000.

[51] De Angelis would reaffirm this position in his later monograph. See De Angelis 2007, p. 230. For an approving remark on this precise move in settler colonial studies, see Piterberg and Veracini 2015, p. 474.

[52] It is worth noting, in passing, the tendency to authorise claims in this literature with isolated moments from Marx’s unpublished writings, from which it would be just as easy to mount the opposite argument. For instance: ‘The conditions which form [capital’s] point of departure…belong to its historic presuppositions, which precisely as historic presuppositions, are past and gone and hence belong to the history of its formation, but in no way to its contemporary history, i.e. not to the real system of the mode of production ruled by it…The conditions and presuppositions of the becoming, or the arising, of capital presuppose precisely that it is not yet in being but merely in becoming; they therefore disappear as real capital arises, capital which itself, on the basis of its own reality, posits the conditions for its realization.’ Marx 1973, pp. 459–60.

[53] De Angelis 2001. This analysis is recapitulated in De Angelis 2007, pp. 137–41. Onur Ulas Ince also objects to De Angelis rendering primitive accumulation merely quantitatively different from capitalist accumulation. Ince 2014, pp. 107–8.

[54] He maintains this analysis in Bonefeld 2014.

[55] Bonefeld 2001.

[56] Midnight Notes Collective 1990.

[57] Harvey 2004

[58] Fraser 2016, 168–69, 176.

[59] Mezzadra 2011, p. 306; Mezzadra 2015, p. 221.

[60] Primitive accumulation, however, is not the analytic of choice in recent monographs dedicated to financialisation from within the Marxist tradition. See, for only a couple of examples, Chesnais 2017 and Meister 2021. See also Historical Materialism’s symposium on Costas Lapavitsas (in volume 14) or the debate across 2012–13 between Tony Norfield and Dick Bryan and Michael Rafferty in the pages of volumes 20 and 21. The sole exception, here, is one moment in Bryan and Rafferty 2012, p 108.

[61] Byrd et al. 2018, p. 1.

[62] See Harvey 2003, pp. 144–48; Harvey 2004, pp. 72–75.

[63] Melamed 2015, p. 78.

[64] ‘The concept of economies of dispossession,’ they write, ‘differs from David Harvey’s notion of ‘accumulation by dispossession’ in a number of important ways, perhaps most significantly because of how this analytic underscores the constitutive and continuing role of both colonization and racialization for capitalism.’ Byrd et al. 2018, p. 2. This shift from primitive accumulation or accumulation by dispossession to dispossession as such follows the move to disaggregate dispossession from other processes described by Marx in the section on primitive accumulation, leading to the concept, ‘structured dispossession.’ See Coulthard 2014, p. 62; Coulthard 2014, p. 7; Simpson 2014, p. 74; Nichols 2015, p. 27.

For the analytic promise of this move, and it does have merits, it does not advance an analysis of the political economy of the settler colony, past or present, whether locally or in relation to the world economy. Land dispossession is shorn of any but the loosest economic determinations, drawing us away from the analysis of accumulation and political economy.

[65] This move is particularly dubious when one considers the excoriation Harvey receives from David Roediger precisely for relegating the function of race in capitalism and its history. See Roediger 2017, pp. 1–3, 25.

[66] Byrd et al. 2018, p. 10.

[67] ‘Dispossession is an insatiable predatory relation…’ ibid., p. 1.

[68] Kim 2018.

[69] Vimalassery et al. 2016. For a response to this issue from an adherent of settler colonial studies, see Young 2017.

[70] Leroy 2016.

[71] Coulthard 2014, pp. 7–12.

[72] Sharma 2020. For the clearest statement on this binary, see Wolfe 2013.

[73] On the connection between fines and predatory racial capitalism, see Kelley 2020, p. 25.

[74] Postone 1993, p. 38, 67; pp. 87–89, 358–59; p. 392

[75] Wolfe and Lloyd 2016, p. 116.

[76] ibid., p. 114.

[77] ibid., p. 109. For ‘enclosure,’ read: privatisation; this is a secondary enclosure of ‘social security, public utilities, education and, in the form of both urban and national parklands, even the remnants of public space.’

[78] ibid., p. 112.

[79] The transport of convict labour to Australia, for instance, was greatly increased by the frequent commutation of capital punishment to exile in the early nineteenth century. See McMichael 1984, p. 72.

[80] Marx 1976, p. 781ff. See also, Benanav and Clegg 2014.

[81] ‘In the settler-colonial economy, it is not the colonist but the native who is superfluous.’ Wolfe 1999, pp. 2–3.

[82] Davis 2006, p. 199; Sanyal 2007.

[83] ‘The specificity is important. For all the homage paid to heterogeneity and difference, the bulk of ‘post’-colonial theorizing is disabled by an oddly monolithic, and surprisingly unexamined, notion of colonialism.’ Wolfe 1999, p. 1; Veracini has also dedicated a book to the analytical distinction of the settler colony among colonial formations. See Veracini 2010. Neither of them, however, articulate the difference of settler colonialism within the history of capitalism, related to other colonial formation, as much as set out a schematic typology.

[84] Wolfe 2006, p. 388.

[85] As quoted in Piterberg and Veracini 2015, p. 463.

[86] Davis 2006, pp. 86–89.

[87] Benanav 2019.

[88] See Emmanuel 1972b. The twenty-first century ‘labor arbitrage,’ meanwhile, is the focus of Smith 2016.

[89] ‘The European urban-industrial revolutions were incapable of absorbing the entire supply of displaced rural labour, especially after continental agriculture was exposed to the devastating competition of the North American prairies and Argentine pampas from the 1870s. But mass emigration to the settler societies of the Americas and Australasia, as well as Siberia, provided a dynamic safety valve that prevented the rise of mega-Dublins and super-Napleses, as well as the spread of the kind of underclass anarchism that had taken root in the most immiserated parts of Southern Europe. Today, by contrast, surplus labour faces unprecedented barriers to emigration to rich countries.’ Davis 2006, p. 183. [Emphasis added.]

[90] See Keeling 2013, p. 274.

[91] Wolfe 2012, pp. 137–38; see also Wolfe 2016, pp. 20–21.

[92] Lockman 2012, p. 21.

[93] On preaccumulation, see note 23.

[94] Wolfe 2012, p. 135.

[95] From Wolfe himself, ‘Whatever settlers may say – and they generally have a lot to say – the primary motive for elimination is not race (or religion, ethnicity, grade of civilization, etc.) but access to territory. Territoriality is settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.’ Wolfe 2006, p. 388.

[96] See, for instance and in relation to Palestine, Busbridge 2017, p. 92; Amoruso, Pappe, and Richter-Devroe 2019, p. 455.

[97] Kauanui and Wolfe 2018; c.f. Cavanagh 2017, pp. 291–92

[98] Veracini 2013, p. 32; Veracini 2019, p. 578.

[99] ‘This lack of rigorous engagement [with settler colonialism] has consequences for movement building. The historic response to settler colonialism has been the struggle for decolonisation; in the absence of a settler colonial analysis, Palestinian strategies have tended to target or accommodate settler colonial outcomes rather than aiming to decolonise the structure itself.’ Salamanca et al. 2012, pp. 4–5. This is not an isolated flight of peer-review hubris. Seven years later, another set of editors introducing an issue of Interventions on Palestine and settler colonial studies cite this approvingly and add, ‘The settler colonial analytical lens thus, we conclude, is needed for genuine decolonization proposals.’ Amoruso, Pappe, and Richter-Devroe 2019, p. 461. Presumably, the other proposals for struggle are something less than “genuine.”

[100] Makdisi 2017, pp. 281–82; see also Wolfe 2016, p. 32.

[101] Wolfe 1999, pp. 2–3.

[102] Beilharz and Cox 2007, p. 113–14.

[103] The dependency school, for instance, is quickly dismissed for its economism or for failing to contain a readymade theory of the settler colony. See, respectively, Wolfe 1997; Veracini 2015, p. 28, pp. 39–40. One never sees, meanwhile, an engagement with Arghiri Emmanuel’s expansive comments on the wages of white settlers in his polemics with Charles Bettelheim (Emmanuel, 1972b), nor S. B. D. de Silva’s extensive typology of investment patterns in settler and non-settler situations (de Silva, 1982).

[104] Veracini 2013, pp. 313–33.

[105] In a searching self-critique from 1995, acknowledging foremostly his tendency to overlook indigenous agency in Settler Capitalism, Denoon also laments the effects, on his field, of the newly dominant neo-classical economic analysis. Is it pushing the matter too far to wonder how significant this context is for the departure from historical and economic analysis in settler colonial studies in the same years? Denoon 1995, pp. 137–38.

[106] McMichael 1977, McMichael 1980, McMichael 1984.

[107] Denoon's account breaks off with World War I, McMichael’s at the turn of the twentieth century. James Belich’s magisterial synthetic history of Anglo settlements extends through to the end of World War II, by which point the “settler revolution” is decidedly at an end (Belich 2009). Rob Steven’s unfortunately overlooked essay distinguishes firmly between the “historical account” and the present social implications (Steven 2000). Economic historians, moreover, generally agree, as Richard Sutch editorialises, that the settler economy today ‘can be supposed at an end’ (Sutch 2013, p. xxii). Tim Rooth marks this with the end of protectionism and opening to free trade in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the decline in the role of government debt locally and the switch, at least in the cases of Canada and Australia, from importing to exporting capital, as measured by foreign direct investment (Rooth 2013, pp. 447–48, p. 455). Francine McKenzie, for her part, focuses on changes in the international economy conditioned by Britain’s displacement from world economic hegemony, tracking the end of an ‘imperial trade network’ through changing patterns of trade and policy (McKenzie 2013, 486).

[108] See Vimalassery et al. 2016. See, by contrast, Veracini 2015, pp. 93–94.

[109] Bachelard 1964, p. 227.

[110] See the volume, Anomie of the Earth, edited by Luisetti et al in 2015, for a representative example.

[111] C.f. Greer 2012.

[112] See Postone 1993, p. 116. Peter Linebaugh, meanwhile, revels in the task ahead: ‘the vast and exciting project of rewriting history from the standpoint of the commons.’ Linebaugh 2014, p.8.

[113] Postone 1993, 87–88.

[114] The revolutionaries of today, for Silvia Federici, are no longer ‘factory workers,’ but toil in fields, kitchens, and fishing villages, meanwhile leading ‘ecological, indigenous, and feminist movements.’ ‘We see this,’ she writes, ‘in the new interest for the discourse and practice of the “commons” that is already spawning new initiatives, like ‘knowledge commons,’ time-banks, and accountability structures.’ See Federici 2015, pp. 209–10. See also Sakai 2014.