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Colonialism, Slavery and the Origins of Capitalism
Pranav Jani
Age of Awareness
Pranav Jani
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Age of Awareness
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6 min read
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Feb 20, 2020
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Notes on my lecture at the Socialism 2019 Conference, Chicago
August 2022: New audio link added, correcting an earlier problem.
InJuly 2019 I had the opportunity to deliver a lecture on a topic that’s long been on my mind, to an audience of activists and socialists interested in history and politics — as well as building movements today.
When I said to a friend I was nervous about the talk, they said: “Haven’t you given this a million times before?” The question shocked me because to my mind this was new stuff. In preparing for the talk I studied some history I had never read before, and challenged myself to give a Marxist history of colonialism and slavery that does not act that history itself began — for the enslaved and colonized — from the moment of European contact.
Here’s the audio link to the talk.
And here’s some more about what I tried to do there, and where my thoughts are going on these questions.
Naturally, one aspect of the lecture was to rehash terrain that’s already known to Marxists: that colonialism, slavery, and capitalism are tied together. The accumulated wealth taken from indigenous people in the Americas, from the slave trade and the exploitation of African labor, and from the conquest of South and Southeast Asia became the basis for the Industrial Revolution.
As Marx put it in Capital (1867):
The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the rosy dawn [yes, that’s 19th century sarcasm!] of the era of capitalist production.
The knee-jerk rejections of Marxism as Eurocentrism don’t do credit to the complexity of passages like this.
Atthe same time, many Marxist accounts are mainly interested in the history of Europe — and deal with African, Asian, and indigenous history and society only insofar as they further illuminate the critique of European capitalism and its ills.
A progressivist narrative often enters in, despite overt commitments to anti-racism, such that no matter how brutal and deplorable colonial violence and slavery were, the integration of the world into capitalist society gets seen as inevitable and historically necessary.
Francisco Pizarro, colonizer of Peru. Rather than being celebrated for “discovering” continents, Pizarro, Christopher Columbus and others deserve to be placed with the dictators and butchers of world history,
I don’t say this as a postmodernist academic who rejects Marxism’s “metanarratives” and attributes the most mechanical applications of Marxism to the entire political tradition.
I say this as a committed Marxist activist and scholar myself who has seen its potential in challenging linear, Eurocentric thought in talking about the world— but has also seen a strong opposing current in Marxist theory and practice that is often disinterested in non-European history, society, and culture.
How many times have those of us in Marxist circles heard that capitalism had an early phase that was brutal and contradictory but ultimately progressive for world history— in that it took human society to unseen heights, from which one could start to imagine, for the first time, a world without poverty and hunger and inequality? And that then, sometime in the early 20th century, a reactionary phase set in — and capitalism became ripe to be overthrown.
This way of looking at history creates a deep tension with Marxist political assertions about opposing colonialism and racism all the time.
Do we oppose the advance of the white settlers in North America who fought a revolutionary war against England in order to expand westward and colonize more Native land — or do we emphasize the world-historical importance of 1776?
Do we defend and hope for the victory of the 1857 Rebellion in British India that opposed the march of the East India Company after the Industrial Revolution — or do see the rebels as heroic but ultimately backward-looking, against the forward march of history?
I’ve documented and written about the complexities of Marx’s positions on this in many places, including here and here, and how he politically defended the 1857 Indian rebels and moved away from the celebration of “contradictory” British progress in his pre-Rebellion articles on India.
I like that Marx was honest enough about his support for the rebels that he did not let his theory get in the way of history. But at the end of the day, Marx’s writings on India illustrate the tension — they do not solve the problem.
Now, when you center the voices of the colonized and enslaved themselves, there is no doubt that these systems of oppression and exploitation need to be take on whenever they rear their heads. Paradigms of history be damned.
British officials in 1950s Kenya arrest suspected members of Mau Mau resistance. Many would be tortured in concentration camps.
Indeed, these voices open up the idea that — as in the Jamaica Kincaid quote that opens my speech — it might have been better for the Brown and Black people of the world if they had never met Europe at all.
Not because of some narrow racialism or hostility to cultural exchange. Not because of some romanticized view of the past. But because of how Europe came. To loot, to enslave, to convert, to rule — and more than ready to use any level of violence to meet those goals of conquest. By any means necessary.
As Kincaid says in A Small Place:
Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can’t quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.
As for what we were like before we met you, I no longer care. No periods of time over which my ancestors held sway, no documentation of complex civilisations, is any comfort to me. Even if I really came from people who were living like monkeys in trees, it was better to be that than what happened to me, what I became after I met you.
But in this talk I was actually less interested in debates within Marxism about Eurocentrism than in another set of questions, one that advances an understanding of how Black and Brown people came to be in the positions we are, and the deep historical associations that connect “people of color,” a term that’s in dispute today because it can erase real differences of history and experience.
How might we tell the story of slavery, colonialism, and settler colonialism in ways that show how these systems are intertwined historically?
How might we tell a history that, rather than seeing the Americas, Africa, and Asia as unique and discrete spaces, we see them as interconnected?
This meant studying things that, for me, were new, including:
learning about societies in the Americans, Africa, and Asia before European conquests and looting, and how they shaped what happened after Europe happened;
learning about how the different colonizing and enslaving powers overlapped and intertwined, from the Spanish and Portuguese to the Dutch, English, and French;
grasping the way that Asia had its own histories of settler colonialism and enslavement; that settler colonialism is also part of Africa’s history; that the indigenous people of the Americas experienced slavery and colonialism.
The Dutch East India Company (the VOC) were looters and butchers whose exploits are not properly criticized by leftists today. Give the Dutch colonizers their due!
Not all of this material made the final cut in the talk, of course, and sometimes I was so eager to tell the histories I learned about (especially about the Dutch! the hell with them!!) that I pack in too much detail. Hoping that anyone truly interested would sit down, pause the audio, and go through the details more slowly.
Anyway: working on this talk — and delivering it to an enthusiastic audience — opened an important door for me as I pursue a thoroughly decolonized Marxism in which the presence and histories of indigenous peoples and African and Asian peoples are at the very center of understanding capitalism’s development and, one day, its overthrow.
Colonialism
Marxism
Slavery
Settler Colonialism
Race
66
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Pranav Jani
Age of Awareness
Written by Pranav Jani
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Age of Awareness
Assoc Prof, English, Ohio St (postcolonial/ethnic studies). Social justice organizer. Writer, speaker. Desi. Family guy. Singer. Wannabe cook. He/him. @redguju.
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