The history of colonization is one of how the land was stolen from indigenous peoples by colonizing powers. Colonies could only be established by violence. The colonies were those of European powers: Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, France, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, ... The decolonization that began in the wake of the Second World War with the final collapse of European empires cannot be characterized as a history of the reappropriation of the stolen, colonized land by indigenous peoples. Today's situation is not so clear cut (see below). Imperialism has assumed a new form of appearance as the domination of foreign countries by valorizing thingified value in the forms, in particular, of foreign investment capital and the world's dominating key currency, at present, the U.S. dollar. Stealing land from indigenous peoples and maintaining established relations of colonial land ownership continue in new, more or less violent, more or less underhand guises.
Left politics have become dominated by the activism of decolonization on all levels, from the economic through the socio-political to the cultural. There is an unceasing flow of empirical information about the continuing injustices in every corner of the globe from south to north and west to east, featuring, among other things, stolen generations and stolen land. In a sense the same disturbing, sickening story of oppression and resistance is being told over and over with even new details and nuances.
What is missing is how these historical movements of colonization and decolonization fit with the essential nature of global capitalism. To ask what capitalism is, i.e. what its essential whatness is, seems a wayward, outdated enterprise. There are no takers for the task since 'essentialism' has become a swear word in the mouths of 'critical' empiricists who haven't the least notion of what an essence is. Critical histories and accounts, necessarily empirical in nature, seem to suffice, complemented by literary reworkings of these harrowing histories. There is an infinity of stories to be told that teach the same lesson of oppression and injustice to be remedied, but stories cannot reveal the essence that underlies their unrelenting sameness. The truth of capitalism cannot come to light in this way.
As I have said many times, the essence of global capitalism resides in the complex socio-ontological structure of thingified value endlessly valorizing through its forms via its Protean Medium. This deeper-lying structure appears on the surface of social life disguised as the gainful game with its four cardinal incomes and income sources.* The pertinent one here is the value-form called ground-rent, that springs from the land, specifically, from private landed property. Ground-rent does not figure in the discourse of decolonization, and cannot do so, because the politics and discourse of decolonization are thoroughly empirical. The fundamental value-form of ground-rent through which the Earth is drawn into and exploited by valorizing thingified value is entirely alien to and absent from the discourse of decolonization. Therefore the latter is reduced to endlessly repeating its harrowing story in every new empirical variants, as if this would disclose hitherto unseen truths.
The dilemma posed by private, landed property and how it is intermeshed with the movement of valorizing thingified value is therefore not confronted head on. It is seen only superficially through a distorting mist of fateful compromises between the freedom of privately owned land and the land rights of indigenous peoples, as if the basically European liberal concept of human rights were up to the task of critiquing the essence. Privately owned land is mostly income-generating in a multitude of ways from residential and commercial location through all kinds of agriculture and aquaculture to the extractive industries that leave the largest scars on the Earth.
Instead of reclaiming their original lands, indigenous peoples are likely to settle for a share in the profits generated by the valorizing capital invested in their lands, if they have attained any rights at all through their struggles. This amounts to leaving the category of ground-rent intact in the global set-up, if only because it is invisible, and therefore cannot even be problematized.**
* Cf. the further reading.
** Ditto for the role of the category of ground-rent in understanding the shortage of residential real estate to house the populations of so-called advanced capitalist societies.
Further reading: 'An Invisible Global Social Value' TT&S Vol. 5 no. 2, 2024.
Capitalocene & The global law of movement.
Thingified value begets individualized freedom.
Seminal: Critique of Competitive Freedom and the Bourgeois-Democratic State: Outline of a Form-Analytic Extension of Marx's Uncompleted System Kurasje, Copenhagen 1984, reprinted 2015.
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