Beyond Europe

Forgiveness for the out-of-the-orderly post; I’ve been reading Arendt and figured I’d go back to good old Marx and see how he develops colonialism. Of course, this is maybe one of the most troubling—and therefore the least-talked-about—moments in Marx: his stance on Europe’s modern colonizing project from the late 19^th to late 20^th centuries.

On the one hand, it seems almost like a done deal before you start thinking about it: projects ranging from anti-imperialism and radical democratism through to posthegemony studies, etc. all owe at least a procedural debt to Marx, in that their methods develop the concepts we’ve been discussing here [the relative surplus value, the symbolic character of the commodity viz. its paradoxically stubborn materiality] to address fluidities, breakdowns, and multitudes [thanks to H/N for that last one] responsive to global economy. On the other, though, the comparative dearth of explicitly anticolonial writing by Marx himself, coupled with a certain overlap between his stagist-materialist historiography and the more messianic moments in The Philosophy of History, has at times facilitated Marx’ inclusion, however fatuous, among the more disgraced European theorists of what I’ll crudely term the “European / non-European ‘relation’” [ex: Spengler, with all the melancholy organicism]. George Steinmetz has written critically on Marx with respect to the Blowback; I’ll take it off the world-historical circuit, here, by reading Marx’ exegetic chapter on E.G. Wakefield's systematic colonization.

The chapter begins with an assault on method: though one has the sense the Wakefield test wouldn't withstand many sallies--regardless of their specifics--Marx' are particularly damning:

1) Addressing Wakefield's utterly absurd suggestion that the division of economy into wage-labor and capital occurs as a collective, conscious hypostasis of an ideal accumulative impulse [the society wills and effects the antagonization of its productive relations],

2) Marx sarcastically and negatively reiterates not only a well-worn point re: the material root of capitalist production by mocking Wakefield's risible pronouncement that "Mit einem Wort: die Masse der Menschheit enteignet sich selbst" ["At a word: the mass of humanity expropriates itself"], but also highlights the permanence of its intolerance of economies exterior to its own, not once but twice paraphrasing what I presume is Wakefield's pathologization of intransigently precapitalist productive modes as Krebsschaden: as cancer.

3) To his credit, though, Marx tugs at this argument--rather than dismissing it outright, or relegating Wakefield [and modern colonialism with him] to the been-there, seen-that class of analytic apologists, he offers a diagnosis of modern colonialism's dominative mode in the face of entrenched pre- and anti-capitalist strata:

Wie nun den antikapitalistischen Krebsschaden der Kolonien heilen? Wollte man allen Grund und Boden mit einem Schlag aus Volkseigentum in Privateigentum verwandeln, so zerstörte man zwar die Wurzel des Übels, aber auch--die Kolonie. [715]

But how to heal the anticapitalist cancer of the colonies? If one turned all the earth and turf from general possession to private property in one fell swoop, one would indeed destroy the root of the evil, but also: the colony.

The real-political prescription is more insidious, of course; it is with the transformation of general possession into the stake of an arbitrary debt that an economy of recompense, i.e. an economy with 1) the capacity for the generation of surplus, and therefore with 2) the potential to antagonize its elements into labor and capital can emerge. But we must be more specific. It is not just an incorporation of colonial territory into the productive behaviors of the metropole which is taking place here, though this would be bad enough. Beyond this: systematic colonization is set in motion by the fixing of an original price, simultaneously and contradictorily very ideal ["künstlich" / "artificial"] -and- very material [it must be paid], whereby the population of colonial territory, what the Berlin Conference would later codify as "effective occupation," succeeded only upon the recognition of its agents' indebtedness, an acknowledgement which of course points up the "necessity" of the individual colonizer's 1) relation to metropolitan [or colonial-administrative] authority as a pre-propertied perspective, and 2) entrance into productive practices which can generate surplus toward the alleviation of debt.

Even reading just the sardonic barbs of the Wakefield analysis against Marx' normative anticapitalist economics yields a vehement, pre-Berlin Conference anticolonialism. Beyond this, though, we have with the original-debt complex an analysis which, when placed into the context of the man's [and the book's] arguments as a whole, describes a simultaneous incorporation and subordination of colonial territory in terms of antagonistic productive relations, in terms of expedience -- 75 years before Aimé Césaire, who hardly did it first, but arguably did it best, cut through the civilizing and got right to the matter-at-hand:

I am talking about natural economies that have been disrupted--harmonious and viable economies adapted to the indigenous population--about food crops destroyed, malnutrition permanently introduced, agricultural development oriented solely toward the benefit of the metropolitan countries; about the looting of products, the looting of raw materials. [...] They were societies that were not only ante-capitalist, as has been said, but also anti-capitalist. [43-44]