Marx and Anti-Colonialism
Thalia Anthony
Introduction to Marx’s Anti-Colonial Contribution
This chapter explores the contribution to anti-colonial studies of 19th-century German philosopher, political economist and activist Karl Marx (1818-1883) and his colleague Friedrich Engels (1820-1895). In their collected works, On Colonialism (1983), and ancillary texts, they provide empirical observations and a mode of analysis for understanding the impetuses and processes of colonisation, including violence, land conquest, and exploitation. The dynamics of colonialism are laid out with considerable attention to the counterforce of Indigenous resistance and liberation struggles. Marx and Engels demonstrate how colonisation is steeped in the profit motivation of capital, the state’s dispossession of Indigenous land and the subordination and extraction of Indigenous peoples, cultures, and economies. Contrary to the view that Marx adopted a static economic determin-ist model, his work on colonialism demonstrates that his contribution was holistic and dynamic. He addressed the intersectionality of race and class and highlighted the need to analyse social change through the actions of people on the ground. Marx shifted the popular gaze from the machinations of the elites and the powerful to the struggles of the masses of ordinary people. Marx’s reading of how Indigenous people experienced and resisted colonisation ‘from below’ carved out a distinct analysis, which continues to influence anti-colonial and postcolonial thinking today.
Marx’s intellectual contribution was matched by a political and activist dimension that was internationalist in orientation. In his words, ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’ (1969: 13-15). Marx and Engels (1977) organised to build a communist political party that would forge solidarity with oppressed people in the colonies and internationally. He sought to influence government policy and public consciousness in relation to Indigenous struggles in the colonies, especially in his contributions to the New York Daily Tribune from 1851 to 1862. Marx regarded the emancipation of colonised peoples as critical for the struggles of oppressed peoples internationally. Notwithstanding a populist view in capitalist societies that Marx was Eurocentric, his analysis and consequent influence bears witness to his anti-colo-nial revolutionary role outside of Europe. His work and strategy informed keythinkers and leaders who led anti-colonial movements, including Manabendra Nath Roy, Vladimir Lenin, Frantz Fanon, Rosa Luxemburg, Nelson Mandela, C.L.R. James, W.E.B. Du Bois, José Carlos Mariâtegui, Fidel Castro, Howard Adams, and Angela Davis.
This chapter observes a simmering resurgence in Marxism in contemporary analyses of colonisation and colonial struggles, such as in the work of Glen Coulthard, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Vivek Chibber, and the school of Racial Capitalism. I trace the intersections of Marxism and Postcolonial/Subaltern Studies and propose that there is room for further exploration of the interface. I maintain that Marxism augments subaltern/postcolonial thinking by confecting the postcolonial focus on specific accounts, lived experiences, and agency, with the systemic focus on structural conditions (e.g. colonisation, exploitation, state violence). This reflects a key feature of Marx’s dialectical approach: to combine observations of concrete lived experiences with social patterns (Brophy, 2019: 302). This resonates with Fanon’s (1988: 39) study of the colonial condition as a conjuncture of oppressive forces and the human condition.
Marx’s analysis has influenced my study of colonisation and its legacy in settler colonies2 over the past two decades. Its appeal lies in its dialectical capacity to interpenetrate oppressive structures and patterns of colonial capitalism with First Nations acts of resistance, refusal, and resurgence (see Blagg and Anthony, 2019). The cornerstone of my methodology garners First Nations peoples’ standpoints on oppression and resistance, including in remote communities, in Aboriginal organisations, in prisons, in courts, and on the streets in protest. My reading of social justice draws heavily on a Marxist acceptance that change must be structural, systemic, and political. This coheres with Indigenous radical thought that Indigenous resurgence in the form of land claims and power shifts is a necessary antidote to colonisation (see Coulthard, 2014b; Alfred, 2009: 182; Alfred and Corntassel, 2005). It recognises that without political and economic transformation, including the reconfiguration of land ownership, capitalist, and state forces will continue subjugation along racial, gender, and class lines. The contribution of Marx to social change on the ground also inspires my activism in support of First Nations struggles, including as they relate to deaths in custody, torture in youth detention, stolen children, stolen wages, and the Australian Government’s Northern Territory Intervention. In a time of crisis and struggle for First Nations peoples, Marxist analysis of colonialism provides scholars and students with a mode of analysis to understand racism and struggle in settler colonies.
Marxist Analytic Precursors for His Work on Colonisation
The contribution of Marx and Engels to colonisation is embedded in their broader analytic devices of dialectics, class, and struggle. First, Marx and Engels regarded society and all its parts individually in a constant state of dialectical change. Dialectics, derived from Hegelian philosophy, entails the tension and fusion of contradictory (or opposing) forces. In Engels (1986: 62) words, the ‘interpenetration of opposites’ synthesise to produce a qualitatively different outcome.
Marx’s application of dialectics to a change in material conditions is known as dialectical materialism (Kursanov, 1967). Marx also applied dialectics to a historical understanding of social conflicts and change, which is known as historical materialism (Kelle and Kovalson, 1973). Antagonistic struggles between classes, as well as between other social forces, create new relationships in society and new societies (Marx, 1982: 635). This ultimately produces a synthesis of classes and a withering of the state under socialism, although only through human agency.
To illustrate, in colonisation there is a constant dialectical struggle between the coloniser and colonised people that produces qualitatively new relationships. Marx regards dominant colonial forces, no matter how violent or insidiously ideological, as offset by Indigenous peoples’ claims to their own societies and survival. This can result in liberation from colonial occupation, but even where colonialism remains, Indigenous opposition to domination informs relationships and change. Often, today, most change is at the ‘margins’ and does not threaten the power elites or ruling class (see generally Marx, 1982: 382). Indeed, this change validates existing structures, values, and behaviours and affirms the state and ruling class. Fanon (1991), Alfred (2009), and Coulthard (2014a) have acknowledged this legitimation in relation to the politics of Indigenous recognition and reconciliation. Nonetheless, it signals the role of Indigenous opposition in colonial dynamics.
Second, Marx and Engels (1977: 35) regarded class relationships and struggles as ordering human society in the period subsequent to ‘primitive communism’. Primitive communism, which is characteristic of Indigenous communal arrangements, demonstrates an alternative to class society (Anderson, 2016: 181), whereas in all class societies (slave, feudal, and capitalist societies) there is a dominant class of humans who oppress and exploit a subjugated class. The interests of the minority ruling class are generally antithetical to the interests of the dispossessed masses (e.g. slaves, serfs, and workers). However, class relationships are not static or complete, as Marx’s dialectical approach identifies. Marx also understood that societies include middle strata of individuals who drift between classes; that societies in transition can have coexisting class features (e.g. feudal and bourgeois); and that revolution from one class society to another can intensify repression (e.g. workers’ alienation from production under capitalism).
Arising from their class analysis, Marx and Engels identified how the ‘economic base’ (e.g. capitalist mode of production) influenced the ‘superstructure’ (e.g. the state, the church, the dominant culture, ideology, and law). The institutions and practices of the superstructure tend to align with dominant class interests; e.g. the state and courts protect private property (Marx and Engels, 2004: 57). Equally, practices of racism sustain capitalist exploitation of labour and the takeover of Indigenous land and divide resistance against the capitalist class (see Marx and Engels, 1977: 61). Marx’s (1982: 286) interpretation of the basesuperstructure relationship was dialectical; it evolved from ‘internal machinations’ (e.g. within legal institutions, see Brophy, 2019) and external pressures by social organisations and political mass movements. First Nations resistance, refusal, and resurgence shape these machinations.
Class and Primitive Accumulation in the Colonies
Marx and Engels (1983: 279, 292) viewed colonialism as extending the ruling class’ interests in reaping the value of foreign land, raw materials, and labour. Marx devoted special attention to the reproduction of British capital accumulation in 19th-century Empire building. The ‘treasures captured outside Europe by undisguised looting, enslavement, and murder’, Marx (1982: 918) described, ‘flowed back to the mother-country and were turned into capital there’. Plantation colonies in the United States, Latin America, the West Indies, and India were plundered for the benefit of the British capital (Marx and Engels, 1983: 294-5). Marx (1975: 387) born witness to the cultivation of Indian colonised land to generate a profit on the back of ‘the denudation of natural forests’ that rendered ‘the seasons more severe, and floods more rapid and extensive’.
In addition to pillaging land and resources, colonisation brought Indigenous people into social relations based on class (Marx and Engels, 1983: 304). Colonisers threatened communal social relations by pushing Indigenous people into private employment, removing them from their land and privatising land and inhibiting Indigenous people’s capacity to sustain themselves through communal work on and with their land. Marx (1982: ch. 26) coined the term ‘primitive accumulation’ to explain how colonisers ravaged the Indigenous means of production by bringing Indigenous people into class relations. The impact of primitive accumulation was felt acutely in North America and the Pacific, where communal Indigenous societies were forcefully deracinated to make way for class stratification. Marx (1975: 410) observed that in Punjab, India, ‘the English government works at dissolution ... of the collective property of the peasants’ to expropriate ‘communal land into the private property of the usurer’.
Elsewhere in India and in China, Marx and Engels (1983: 36) remained critical of British colonisation, where extant class relations and modes of production were exploited in the interests of the British ruling class. Marx (1983: 82) referred to the British mission as ‘the annihilation of the old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundations of Western society in Asia’. However, Marx and Engels attributed particular qualities to the colonisation of Indigenous communal societies where their means of production were displaced altogether. In these societies, the British nonetheless still retained aspects of their mode of production (e.g. farming, forestry and fishing) that was productive for the colonial project. Marx (1881) explained that ‘the suppression of communal land ownership was nothing but an act of English vandalism which drove the indigenous population backward rather than forward’.
Colonial Violence and the Role of the State -
Base/Superstructure Analysis
Leaning into their concept of base and superstructure, Marx and Engels (1983: 293) highlighted the role of the state as the ‘concentrated and organised force’ of the ruling class in the colonies. The colonial state and its police force facilitated the stealing of Indigenous people for ‘enslavement’ and the massacring and imprisoning of resisters (1983: 293; Marx, 1982: ch. 31). Through genocidal acts in the colonies, ‘capital comes into the world dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood’ (1982: 926). Marx (1982: 292): explains its role in bringing life to British capitalism:
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, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.
The British, according to Marx (1982: 82), inflicted ‘infinitely more’ misery than any kind suffered before. In India, the British state sponsored the monstrous ‘European despotism’ of the British East India Company (Marx and Engels 1983: 36). Another apparatus of the colonial superstructure, the church, was referred to by Marx (1982: 293), where he concluded that ‘British Christian Colonial Rule’ was responsible for gross barbarities on Australian Aboriginal people. This extends his analysis of the English ‘Bloody Legislation’ in which the state’s law enforcement apparatus criminalised the ‘vagabond’ to push displaced feudal workers into the proletariat, and French legislation that allowed whipping, branding and torturing of agricultural people ‘forcibly expropriated from the soil’ (Marx, 1982: 896, 899)
In Persia and China, Engels (1983: 124) identified the role of racist ideology, by the British media - another facet of the superstructure, to justify their aggression in the Second Anglo-Chinese War. It set up a racist dichotomy between the civility of the British and the barbarity of First People to condemn acts of resistance. He ridicules the ‘chivalrous English press’ for its headlines on the ‘horrible atrocities of the Chinese’ that vindicate and conceal British colonial belligerence (1983: 124).
National Liberation Struggles: Dialectical View of Colonisation
Marx and Engels’ dialectical study of colonialism involved understanding the contrary forces to colonisation. Consequently, they gave substantial attention to the role of the struggles of colonised people. In On Colonialism, Marx and Engels documented the dynamics of Indigenous resistance and liberation, the demands of these movements and outcomes across the world. They recognised Indigenous ‘hatred’ for British, French, Dutch, and American ‘war-steamers’ (Marx and Engels, 1983: 24-25). Marx and Engels (1983: 131) wrote about ‘a general disaffection exhibited against English supremacy on the part of the great Asiatic nations’. Their writing, and actions, lent support to Indigenous people’s struggles for their communal land and relations.
Marx and Engels advanced the idea of a unity between the national liberation movement in Asia and the revolutionary movement in Europe: both opposing the power of the ruling class (Marx and Engels, 1983: 125). They called on workers in industrialised countries, especially the British working class, to extend their solidarity to anti-colonial movements by protesting against their own government’s oppression in the colonies. Marx (1982: 125) also recognised that the southern Chinese peoples’ ‘struggle against foreigners’ coincided with their growing consciousness about the exploitative nature of the Chinese ruling class and its despotic political regime.
Marx and Engels regarded anti-colonial struggle as igniting struggles against ruling classes everywhere, including because their uprisings threaten capitalist expansion (1983: 19, 24). Hence, their dialectical analysis of colonialism did more than conceptualise colonies as receptors or objects of European capitalism but also as determinants of its course. While other philosophers went on to describe oppression in the colonies as a blueprint for oppression in Europe (e.g. Arendt, 1966 in relation to the Holocaust), Marx and Engels showed that uprisings in the colonies are a marker for revolutions in Europe.
Influence of Marx on Anti-Colonial Thought and Struggles
Early to Mid-Twentieth Century Anti-Colonial Theory and Movements
The principles expounded by Marx and Engels, and their writings on colonialism, had a direct bearing on anti-colonial analysis in the early 20th century. Activists and theoreticians across the world, including Manabendra Nath Roy in India, José Carlos Mariâtegui in Peru, Nelson Mandela in South Africa, Fidel Castro in Cuba, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania, Vladimir Lenin in Russia, and Rosa Luxemburg in Poland, along with broader anti-colonial movements,3 drew on Marxist ideas to elucidate the repression and resistance in colonies. These writers, like Marx and Engels, understood colonialism as spanning beyond the initial process of primitive accumulation and beyond the formal cessation of colonisation (e.g. post-WWII). Lenin explained that the world is divided between ‘oppressed, dependent and subject nations and the oppressing, exploiting and sovereign nations’ that extended into an era of imperialism (Lenin, 1965: 145). The inequality was built on ‘capitalist alliances’ and relied on military force to quash emancipation (1988: 92). He implored decolonisation struggles to be directed against foreign control and internal bourgeois domination so as to avoid co-option by the local ruling class (Lenin, 1965: 150).
Anti-colonial movements borrow heavily from the intellectual tradition of Marxism to build a theoretical and political foundation for their activism (Loomba, 2015: 247). In Cuba, for instance, Castro recognised that while the United States had nominally ceased its colonial occupation in 1903, its colonial legacy continued and required an anti-imperial and anti-capitalist struggle against the United States. Aime Cesaire in Discourse on Colonialism (1950) invoked Marxism to identify exploitative, dehumanising, and commodifying role of colonialism, describing ‘colonisation = thingification’ (Loomba, 2015: 41).
On this platform, he would become a parliamentary leader of Martinique in the Caribbean with the support of the Communist Part}’ of France.
Marxist ideas and praxis would be carried on by Fanon in outlining a revolutionary strategy for Algeria and greater Africa in the mid-20th century. He was concerned with the strategy of class struggles in the colonised world (Newlove 2019: 137), and his work corresponded with other African anti-colonial revolutionary thinkers and activists such as Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bussau. Fanon (1986: 17) articulates, in words similar to Marx, ‘what matters is not to know the world but to change it’. And again echoing Marx’s (1982: 414) comments in relation to slavery in the United States, ‘Labour in a white skin cannot emancipate itself where it is branded in a black skin’, Fanon (1986: 88, 1988: 38) wrote the ‘shameless’ exploitation and struggles of workers in the colonising world is linked to the struggles and liberation of colonised peoples.
Like Lenin, Fanon called for liberation to progress to socialism rather than bourgeois nationalism, which creates new forms of oppression (Fanon, 1991: 173, 1965: 169). He regarded the bourgeoisie as ‘the most annexationist in the world’ and observed how post-WWII independence of African colonies led to the ‘Africanization of the ruling class’ rather than its dismantling (Fanon, 1988: 187; see also see Gibson, 2011: 10). This new ‘native bourgeoisie’ pursued a programme with ‘minimum humanist content’ and ‘democratic ideas’ (Fanon, 1991: 162).4 Fanon (1991: 39), nonetheless, acknowledged that Marxist analysis needed to be ‘slightly stretched’ in relation to ‘human realities’ of the ‘the colonial problem’. He viewed that the lumpenproletariat, rather than the proletariat, ‘as the most radically revolutionary’ forces of a colonized people’ and that a humanist society could only be built from their leadership (Fanon, 1991: 128).
Identifying Colonial Modes of Production: Uneven Class Formation and Aboriginal Servitude
Marxist analysis shaped endeavours to classify colonial modes of production and economic development, including in Africa, Latin America, Philippines, India, and the Pacific (e.g. Alavi, 1975; Byres and Mukhia, 1985; Hartz, 1964). This work had not been undertaken by Marx himself beyond his discussion of primitive accumulation. Researchers and political leaders in the 1960s and 1970s recognised that classes developed unevenly’ in each colony’ (see Banaji, 1972: 2499)? In a public address to representatives of colonised nations, Cabral (1966) identified the formation of an ‘agricultural proletariat’ alongside a nascent urban proletariat in the colonies. Dr Hannah Middleton (1976: 4) of the Australian Communist Party documented how ‘rapid and disruptive social change’ forced Aboriginal labour onto cattle stations and made the class formation ‘uneven and highly’ complex’ (see also Thorpe, 1996: 66-67).
In my doctoral study’ on class in Australia’s cattle industry, I concluded that while capitalist labour relations may’ have developed in cities and towns, in remote areas, the relations between station owners and Aboriginal workers were closer to feudal servitude (Anthony, 2004a), and I have elsewhere identified aspects of slavery in the treatment of Aboriginal, Torres Strait, and Melanesian workers in Australia, including in pearling and sugar cane industries (Anthony and Gray, 2020). This drew on Marxist scholarship in the 1970s that conceptualised the role of slave labour in the colonies as necessary for capital accumulation internally and in foreign capitalist countries (Wallerstein, 1983, 1974) and Indigenous workers who propped up the local capitalist economy through ‘internal colonialism’ (Hartwig, 1978: 121; see also Hind, 1984). My work gave an Australian settlercolonial take on Marx’s (1976: 167) writing that slavery gave the colonies their value and was a pre-condition for the development of the large-scale industry.
Studies of Racial Capitalism
The broad school of Racial Capitalism, predominantly located in the United States, also recognises that ‘industrial capitalism was built on the foundations of colonialism and slavery'’ (Clarno, 2017: 8; see James, 1989: 8; Davis, 2020). Racial Capitalism illustrates the modern world is shaped by ‘colonization, primitive accumulation, slavery’, and imperialism’ (Pulido, 2017: 527-8), and this continues to interweave ‘racialisation and capital accumulation’ (Clarno, 2017: 5, 9; see Shaw and Wilson, 2020: 384). Key' thinker Cederic Robinson (2000) postulated that racism is core to capitalist accumulation, both in Europe and outside of it. Capitalism requires racism because it entrenches inequalities, and racism flourishes under class conditions that privilege one class of human beings above another (see Melamed, 2015: 77). Assigning a differential value to racialised groups maximises exploitation, surplus value, and capital accumulation (Dorries et al.y 2019: 2). For Davis (1975: 187), emancipation at the intersections of class and race required the communist organisation to ‘carry’ Marxist-Leninist ideas to the Black Liberation struggle’.
Although Racial Capitalism pays particular attention to African American racism and slavery’, its studies extend to settler colonies. They highlight the function of violent colonial dispossession in primitive accumulation, capitalist exploitation and expropriation (Ralph and Singhal, 2019: 857; Byrd et al.y 2018). Melamed (2015: 80) states that Marx’s idea of primitive is ‘instructive’ of violent transformative processes that ‘extract people and things from previously' sustaining social relations and insert them into the capital-relation (Kapitalverhaltnis) that makes accumulation possible’. Consistent with Coulthard, Melamed (2015: 77) acknowledges that primitive accumulation continues through the state’s ‘liberal and multicultural’ terms of engagement that uphold ‘state-capital orders’. This does not altogether displace racialised violence in capital accumulation, which manifests in law enforcement. Andy' Clarno (2017: 9) identifies this violence in South Africa and Israel/Palestine and links it to land dispossession and racialised exploitation of labour (see also Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014: 1992). Indigenous people are both excluded and exploited to assure low wages (Clarno, 2017: 9-10). They are socio-spatially segregated and marginalised to ensure dependency' on the means of production (McClinktock, 2018: 3). Settler Colonial Studies, which has its key focus on the intersections of land, race, and the state, also acknowledges that while the colonial project is based on the elimination of the Indigenous population, exploitation of labour proceeds on this basis: ‘you, work for me while we wait you to disappear’ (Veracini, 2011: 2).
Indigenous Radical and Socialist Thought in Settler Colonies
A Marxist critique has informed Indigenous radical thought in settler colonies. The works of Metis scholar Howard Adams and Dene scholar Glen Coulthard, considered below, are recognised as sharing a view that ‘capitalism must die for Indigenous people to be free’ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2019; e.g. Adams, 1999: 44; Coulthard, 2013). They are part of a longer tradition of Canadian First Peoples involved in the socialist struggle, including within the early Communist Party of Canada where they organised within ‘Native fishing villages in British Columbia’ (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2019). This resonates with Australian Aboriginal worker struggles, such as on cattle stations, in cooperation with the Australian Communist Party (Middleton, 1977). Recently, socialist activist and Gumbanyggirr man Gavin Stanbrook (2019) pointed to the perils of capitalism for Australian First Nations people and the historic role of Australian ‘Black communists such as Kevin Cook and Chicka Dixon’.
In Prison of Grass (1975), Adams (1989) highlighted the common interest between Indigenous and working-class struggles and the indelible link between the defeat of capitalism and racism. He observed how First Peoples were exploited in hunting, trapping and fishing industries, in which corporations transformed and displaced communal practices of sustenance into profit-making enterprises, particularly the Hudson’s Bay Company (1989: 11). In the fur trade, Indigenous people were forced to abandon their ‘communal ideology’ in favour of an individualist one (1989: 27; see also Brophy 2019). However, the formation of classes was uneven, according to Adams (1989: 28), as many First Peoples ‘continued to live together in a communal society’, at least until 1885 when land holdings were privatised. He identified that racism was a vehicle to ‘get the greatest amount of [Indigenous] labor for the least possible pay’. By designating First Peoples as subhuman, capitalists could exploit them ‘freely’ (1989: 11).
Augmenting the radical work of Adams, Marie Smallface Mamie, and Mel Watkins, Coulthard (2009: 54) perceives ‘an entangled relationship between capitalism and colonialism’ (2014: 8). Coulthard (2014a: 8) calls for Indigenous studies to be open to Marxism and for Marxists to engage with Indigenous radical thought in analysing ‘the cycles of colonial domination and resistance’. His book Red Skin, White Masks exposes how the state’s political recognition of Indigenous people does not redress the oppressive material conditions that underlie settler colonialism but rather legitimises them (Coulthard, 2014a: 152). For Coulthard (2014a: 7-8), the process of‘primitive accumulation’ exists a continuum from the inception of colonisation to current forms of‘structured dispossession’ of Indigenous land and culture. It provides a lens for understanding the settler state’s role in capital accumulation, which strips ‘noncapi-talitst producers, communities and societies’ of ‘their means of production and subsistence’ in the land (2014a: 8), in contrast to Indigenous societies where wealth is available to most (Coulthard, 2009: 11). Primitive accumulation can be enforced not only coercively but also through ‘state recognition and accommodation’ (2014a: 15).
Coulthard contends that Marx’s concept of the ‘mode of production’ is limited in its focus on productive techniques and exploitative labour relations. Coulthard (2014a: 14)implores an expanded concept that configures ‘the axes of exploitation and domination’ additionally ‘along racial, gender, and state lines’.6 He proposes that an examination of settler colonies requires the adoption of Marx’s ‘mode of life’ analysis laid out in his The German Ideology, which accounts for ‘interconnected social totality’. Coulthard asserts (2014a: 65) that this ‘mode of life’ concept pertains to First Nations circumstances because it accommodates culture and encompasses ‘our claims for land’. Coulthard (2014a: 8) suggests that Marxist analytic engagement with postcolonial traditions will also deepen an understanding of the multiplicity of impacts of colonisation.
Postcolonial and Subaltern Studies and Marxist Thought
There is growing interest in the common threads between Marxism and Postcolonial/Subaltern Studies. Proponents of a synergistic understanding counter postcolonial claims that Marxism and social theory do not resonate with Indigenous struggles and ways of seeing the world (see Lazarus and Varma, 2007: 309). Loomba (2015: 79) notes that Marxism provides an analysis of colonialism, consistent with postcolonial thought, that highlights ‘all ideas are inter-dependent with economic and social reality’, such that we cannot separate economic processes from the ordering of knowledge. Vivek Chibber (2013: 7), in Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital, asserts that Subaltern Studies, a term he prefers to the West’s ‘Postcolonial Studies’, ‘was largely seen as an innovation within Marxist theory, not as a radical departure from it’. However, its surge in popularity in the West, following Spivak’s essay ‘Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography’, marked a poststructuralist shift in the 1990s and a departure from Marxism (2013: 7-8).
Chibber (2013: 23, 130) states that Subaltern Studies can continue to draw on the strengths of Marxist analysis in identifying the role of capital and labour value in the East in subjugating Indigenous peoples. Marx and Subaltern Studies overlap because they both identify disruption and social change. Chibber (2013: 240) comments that it is ‘simply impossible to understand the sources of disruption to capitalism’s reproductive logic’ without understanding capitalism. Marx, like Subalternists, was cognisant of local resistance movements in the East as a source of constant disruption and dislocation. According to Chibber (2013: 210), postcolonial theorists rarefy the East by pointing to its lack of a revolutionary bourgeoisie and liberal institutions and its religious tendencies. This stereotypes Eastern cultures and downplays the ‘material interests’ of rural workers that are mobilised in resistance as well as obscures ‘the real dynamics of Eastern modernity’ (2013: 178, 210). Chibber (2013: 239) observes that Marxist thought is alive to local circumstances as well as discontinuities and ruptures by recognising that capital does not accumulate along a linear path.
Contrary to aligning Marxism with Eurocentrism, Chibber (2013: 291-3) suggests that ‘There is probably no project to which Marxist theorists have devoted more energy and time since the first Russian Revolution of 1905 than to understand the peculiar effects of capitalist development in the non-West’. He identifies how the East has informed socialist movements, including in the work of Lenin, Cabral, and Harold Wolpe - none of whom essentialises the East. Chibber urges Subaltern Studies to consider how capital, power, and agency work together and across cultures (2013: 285). This requires recognising the capitalist imperative in the colonies; the capacity for capitalism to give rise to diverse political and cultural formations; the various features of universal human consciousness that resist capitalism; and the role of radical Enlightenment in capitalism. Chibber (2013: 291-2) points out that Marx perceived the role of capital and class society across cultures, while postcolonial analysis essentialises the divide between East and West that resurrects Eurocentrism.
In Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, 13 authors advocate for a ‘strong and visible Marxist postcolonial studies’ (Bartolovich, 2002: 1). They seek to recoup political economy in postcolonial studies, including an analysis of labour practices, the sources of corporate profits and the ‘economic colonization of everyday life’, as well as underscore the sources of Indigenous resistance on materialist grounds (2002: 5). A Marxist analysis of capitalism and imperialism, and its strategic influence over anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements in Africa and Latin America, offers an anti-capitalist understanding of a postcolonial world that emphasises the role of capitalism in contributing to ‘uneven and combined development’ (2002: 8). Like Chibber, the authors insist that Marx and Marxism ‘belong (and have always belonged) to the whole world, not merely to Europe, or still less, to that mythical entity “the West”’ (Bartolovich, 2002: 8). They relate Marx to liberation struggles against imperialism in the post-War period and the creole culture of anti-imperialism to demonstrate that the Marxist legacy is not Eurocentric but, rather, is fundamental to unsettling Eurocentrism and critiquing colonialism and its aftereffects, which is consistent with postcolonial studies. Equally, the authors invite Marxists to engage with postcolonial studies in terms of subalternity (2002: 10-11).
Influence of Marxism on My Anti-Colonial Analysis and Activism
In my own research on the servitude of Indigenous workers, the over-crimi-nalisation of Indigenous people and First Nations expressions of resistance, I too have sought to intertwine Marxist understandings with subaltern and postcolonial studies to provide a holistic understanding of colonial structures and Indigenous struggles. I draw on Marxism as a mode of analysis to understand the intersectionality and dialectics of colonial relationships, which continue to be inscribed in racism and oppression of First Peoples in correspondence with First
Nations’ resistance, refusal, and resurgence. In this respect, and echoing Bipan Chandra (1981: 13), I utilise the ‘method and approach’ of‘historical materialism’ to understand settler-colonial societies, especially in Australia, as governed by dominant structures and classes that dynamically interact with First Nations people and yet are a product of a historical legacy.
Indeed, as an emerging scholar I was drawn to Marxist analysis because of its capacity to go beyond standard teachings of history and legal institutions, which was predicated on institutional norms and the rulings and practices of those in power (policy and law makers, judges, police, etc.). It enabled me to shift my own gaze to the struggles of oppressed people in shaping material conditions and reflect on the role of corporations and class in structuring oppression, which often fails to be accounted for in a myopic view of legal institutions and the criminal justice system. Accordingly, much of my earlier work was devoted to the role of pastoral corporations in co-opting police into the forced employment of Aboriginal labour and land grabs (Anthony, 2004a; 2007b, also Anthony and Blagg, 2020).
In adopting a Marxist frame to colonial legacies, I rely on features of subaltern and postcolonial studies and Indigenous radical thought to honour First Nations voices, experiences, and demands. Embedding my research in fieldwork with remote Aboriginal communities, prisons, and Aboriginal organisations reflects a postcolonial commitment to displacing dominant knowledge paradigms that reinforce structural power by elevating Indigenous worldviews, experiences of repression, and exploitation. It highlights strengths within communities in working against colonial norms and practices and in the furtherance of self-determination (Anthony and Sherwood, 2018). Some of the specific ways in which my work embraces Marxist analysis in concert with Indigenous and postcolonial approaches are discussed below.
First, my research applies a dialectical analysis to have regard to the conflicting forces in social, cultural, and economic conditions. It recognises that the powers of state and capital that serve to oppress Indigenous people are offset and transformed with Indigenous resistance. This includes identifying hybrid structures that meld state and Indigenous forms, such as Indigenous sentencing courts, Night Patrols and co-dependent employment relations (Blagg and Anthony, 2014; Anthony, 2015; 2004b). My fieldwork with Indigenous communities places emphasis on how First Peoples perceive and contribute to change, including in their everyday lives (Blagg and Anthony, 2014). It nonetheless recognises that oppressive state interventions, resulting in land grabs, the Northern Territory Intervention, exploitation and deaths in custody continue to feature in First Peoples engagement with the settler state and the ruling class (Anthony, 2013a).
Second, my research unpacks historical and material conditions that arise in contemporary colonial relationships. It traces control and management of First Peoples - whether in relation to the criminal justice system, state child removals, underpayment of workers or the diminution of land rights - to material conditions in colonisation. For instance, I explore how Indigenous people have historically received no wages on pastoral stations, despite their enormous contribution to the pastoral stations (which buoyed Australia’s economy in the Great Depression), and this has contributed to inter-generational poverty and ongoing claims for their stolen wages (Anthony, 2012; 2013b). First Peoples in Australia continue to have their income managed and are made to work without pay, including for companies, as part of the Community Development Program (Anthony, 2009). However, my work also honours First Nations’ organised resistance to these material conditions, including through walk-offs, legal actions, and strikes (Anthony, 2007a, 2007b).
Finally, Marx’s writings on colonialism have focused my research on the significance of capital accumulation and exploitative relations in influencing discriminatory legislation and state practices pertaining to Indigenous people and enlivening racism (Anthony, 2004a; 2008). My work has examined how the state and ruling class consorted with employers to force Australian Aboriginal workers into unpaid employment, feudal, and slave relations (Anthony 2003; Anthony and Gray, 2020). Aboriginal labour was violently extracted in the process of displacing Aboriginal communal relations, consistent with primitive accumulation (Anthony, 2007b; 2018). Native Police in the 19th century and Aboriginal Protection Acts in the 20th century facilitated pastoralists and other industries to take Aboriginal land, exploit Aboriginal workers, and control all aspects of their lives. This set the tone for relationships between settlers and Indigenous people and defined political governance structures and the operation of police powers (Anthony, 2004a; Anthony and Blagg, 2020).
My recent research has connected the servitude of Indigenous workers, the dispossession of Indigenous land, and the violent policing of Indigenous lives to current Indigenous poverty and marginalisation and policies and practices of quarantining Indigenous welfare money, denying Indigenous land rights, removing Indigenous children from families, criminalising Indigenous people, and condoning everyday racism (Anthony, 2009, 2013a, 2019). In this respect, the constellation of laws that directed Aboriginal lives from these earlier periods of control and displacement remerge in the carcéral archipelago of current controls (Blagg and Anthony, 2018). An aspect of my research, furthermore, encompasses how Aboriginal people sought to retain connections to country, culture, and family in the face of these exploitative practices. Refusal and resistance by Aboriginal workers shaped and reshaped colonial relations. However, my work categorically calls for Indigenous resurgence and a complete restructuring political, social, and economic relations as the only way to move closer to self-determination and social justice (Anthony, 2016).
Conclusion
The analysis and activism of Karl Marx in relation to anti-colonial projects continue, perhaps increasingly so, to provide a valuable frame for understanding how the state and capital bear on relationships with First Nations peoples. As capitalism struggles to provide answers for a range of socio-economic problems, including environmental harm, exploitation of labour across the world, poverty, pandemics, and state violence, Marxism provides a material alternative. It informs us of the need for social justice to entail substantive changes to material conditions and power relations rather than reforming institutions alone. Ultimately, Marxism is a call to action to change society, and this shapes how my academic work continuously interacts with my advocacy and activism. Academics should consider Marxist writings in conceiving their responsibilities to social change. This critically includes those engaged in anti-colonial and anti-racist scholarship and their need to support First Nations political movements and broader structural change.
My reading of Marxist ideas confects with subaltern/postcolonial studies and resists a binary approach to these schools of thought. A holistic understanding of society requires us to perceive structural and class pressures in conversation with the grounded experiences of First Nations peoples as constitutive of colonial conditions. Colonial questions remain as relevant today as when Marx wrote and have amplified resonance in a global system in which the inter-dependence and inequalities of nations and peoples continue to deepen. These discrepancies that emerge from exploitative relations among nations and peoples have deep colonial roots. Marx and Engels’ writing on colonialism provides a mode of analysis for critical examination and change, which remains relevant as long as our colonial structures remain.
Notes
- 1 My deep appreciation to Spiro Anthony, Susan Brophy, Michael Grewcock, Chris Newlove, Dorothea Anthony, and Vivek Chibber for their thoughtful feedback.
- 2 Settler colonies are a subset of colonies in which the foreign state seeks to supplant Indigenous land, economies, and societies with settler occupation, governance, and modes of production. This process is driven by an eliminationist logic (Wolfe, 2006: 387).
- 3 The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was formed in 1961 to bring together anticolonial revolutionary movements. This movement was influenced by Marxist ideology and practice in its opposition to colonialism (Satgar, 2019: 10).
- 4 More recently, Eve Darian-Smith (2004) observes the Indigenisation of the bourgeoisie in terms of ownership of casino gaming in the United States.
- 5 This is consistent with early remarks by Rosa Luxemburg (Loomba, 2015: 256).
- 6 For a reading of historical materialism that asserts that Coulthard’s additional factors are accommodated in Marxist analysis, see Bellamy Foster and Clark (2020) and Bellamy Foster et al. (2020).
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