Day 015 – A Reckless Proposal
This presentation decolonizes Marx’s critique of political economy by re-theorizing the centrality of colonialism, imperialism and patriarchal domination to historical and actually existing racial capitalism. Drawing on the work of Silvia Federici and social reproduction feminists, decolonization and postcolonial theorists such as Frantz Fanon, Jairus Banaji, Kalyan Sanyal, Ranojit Guha, Glen Coulthard, and Leanne Simpson, as well as Western Marixists such Henri Lefebrve, David Harvey, Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker and Massimo D’Angelis, this paper re-situates the problematic of “intersecting systems of oppression” in relation to contemporary interpretations of Marx’s sarcastic debunking of classical political economy’s fable of primitive accumulation. In doing so, the paper problematizes the schematic distinction between ‘white settler colonialism’ and ‘colonialisms of exploitation’ (Patrick Wolfe) by arguing that colonialism, as an ongoing process of accumulated violence, is the production of patriarchal capitalist spaces of colonization of common wealth on a world scale. The singularity and local specificity of accumulated violence is explored in two ways; through a critical engagement with Jason Moore’s reworking of the theory of capitalist crisis to include ecological crises and through an examination of contemporary racisms and sexisms in Canada, Quebec and India as well as a consideration of feminist environmental social justice activisms and commoning practices across these locations. Through this itinerary, the paper argues that subalternized domains of social reproduction give rise to a multitude of autonomous domains of subaltern politics. Such a retheorization of the historical conditions of possibility of contemporary class politics from below articulates the point of departure for a properly post-Western Marxism adequate to the challenges of finding a path to a great transition to post-capitalism. This paper also fits two other conference themes: 1) Capitalism and Contemporary Oppressions and 2) Ecological Crisis. My colleague and research collaborator Dr. Sheena Wilson (on Feminist Energy Futures) has also proposed a paper for this conference and we would be happy to be placed on the same panel.