Source overview: Jodi Byrd et al - Predatory Value; A.G. Morise - Carriers and Ainos at Home

Introducing a special edition of Social Text, Jodi Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy discuss racial capitalism, or as Cedric Robinson argues in opposition to Marx's developmentalism, "the development of capitalism" as "historically inextricable from processes of racialization." They tie this into contemporary discussions of "financialization," or, through ongoing, disparate processes of "numeracy, abstractions, proceduralism," the "abstractability of humans as tools for capital." 

They write,

colonization and transatlantic slavery set in motion the dynamics and differential racialized valuations that continue to underwrite particular forms of subjection, property, commerce, and territoriality. Racialization and racism further colonial dispossession just as the colonization of Indigenous peoples and those subjected to colonial rule contribute to the specific conditions and practices through which racialized subordination are enacted. 

This is to say, that colonialism was/remains generative of racialized categories and racism, and that these "differential valuations," are tied to how subjective and economic categories are formed. This is most obviously visible in regimes of private property, which -- in a colonial setting, and subsequently in Europe in the transition from "feudalism" to "liberal capitalism") -- were/remain predicated on dispossession. Dispossession, they state (in reference to Denise Ferreira da Silva's discussion of "transparency versus affectability" and Elizabeth Povinelli's discussion of "the autological subject versus genealogical society"), is "insatiable predatory relation that entails a specific manner of world making that is at once predicated on and generative of a dialectic of biopolitical sorting." The authors describe the such property regimes as "economies of dispossession": "those multiple and intertwined genealogies of racialized property, subjection, and expropriation through which capitalism and colonialism take shape historically and change over time."

While evocative of David Harvey's famous critique of “accumulation by dispossession," the authors differentiate their own argument in that it is  not so much foundational (or "originary, or, in Marx's terms, "primitive") as it is ongoing, and how "colonization and racialization" are "constitutive and continuing" for capitalism itself. This is certainly true, and is demonstrably true that that. One need look only at the Dutch East India Company to find the roots of the modern corporation in extra-European colonialism. However, the authors stress that regimes of private property, and eventually, property relations between settlers and, before long, in Europe have their roots in the European dispossession of Indigenous land in the Americas. Indeed, "Imperialism provides the vectors of economic speculation and the enmeshment of administrative, plantation, and multiple colonial formations that have underpinned the rise of the world economy." Indeed, while many treat both "so-called original accumulation" as well as colonialism itself, "as merely a historical precursor to the subsequent depredations of racism rather than an ongoing relation of theft, displacement, foreclosure, and violence that cannot be reduced to one determinate relation to racialization," the authors stress that racial and colonial violence are "as ongoing conditions of possibility" for capitalist accumulation.

Indeed, and, as Glen Coulthard writes, "[s]ettler-colonialism is territorially acquisitive in perpetuity." The authors of this essay agree, writing,

Indigenous dispossession continues unabated to provide the logics that order power, violence, accumulation, and belonging for all those who find themselves on lands stripped from Indigenous peoples. ... Not only has land made territory made property in this sense provided the foundational relations of colonial accumulation and profit, but dispossession has also remained a perpetually incomplete project that continues to strive toward conforming and confirming these terms of value and belonging.

All of this is tied to property, and, as Hegel and others famously themselves argued, property is tied to conceptions of "proper" personhood, in that being propertied is to be human, and to be incapable of possessing property is to be (as Hegel put it) a "mere thing." Accordingly, "Colonization, Indigeneity, racialization, and chattel slavery and its afterlives, along with the heteropatriarchal household economy, are among the primary conditions of possibility for this proposition."

All this is enough to the Jordan Petersons of the world furrow their brows to the point of piercing muscle spasms, to be sure. But, in as much as (the authors stress) the conditions of racialized violence and settler colonialism are disavowed today, we can find direct and, indeed, celebratory references to this same dynamic in the recent past. 

Take, for example,  missionary and linguist A.G. Morice's short essay, "Carriers and Ainos at Home (The American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal Vol. XXIV Jan-Nov 1902)," which has obvious applications for my own research project. The essay is, put simply, a crude attempt to compare the Carrier people (or the Dakelh) of what's today British Columbia and the Ainu of what is today Hokkaido. Unlike Berthold Laufer, Morice does not attempt to construct a grand theory of a shared trans-Pacific culture, but, instead, identifies the purported kinship between such "savages" and non-human animals such as dogs and bears to be central to Indigenous people's "psychology," distinct as it is from "the white man." This, for Morice, is all that links "savages" from opposite sides of the north Pacific, and explains seeming cultural similarities. Indeed, "the Indian ... does not possess to the same extent as the white race the idea of domination, or such a key sense of ownership." Of domesticated animals, Morice differentiated "the self-styled 'noble' Aryan" from the "humbler Indian" in that the former is "the 'master' of his dog and the 'proprietor' of his horse."