The AFF’s insistence that settler colonialism is “structural” and “[buzzwords they say]” subsumes historical materialist understandings of violence. That reproduces colonial ideologies and ensures their method fails.

"logic of elimination" isn't ontological but contingent as a result of capitalist exploitation

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 than exploit 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 that resembles settler colonialism.’[34] Beneath the dizzying conceptual proliferation, Veracini’s basic move, like Brown, is to approximate dispossession and elimination, 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.

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 temporally before 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 and being 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 or exception to capitalism, theoretically and historically. The settler colonial uptake of this literature, typical in this regard, sees in primitive accumulation the constitutive 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 it inside 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 of Capital.

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 of Capital, 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.