The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism: Race, Nature, and Accumulation

Editorial Note: Dr. Bikrum Gill's book, The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism: Race, Nature, and Accumulation, was published by Manchester University Press in 2024.

By Bikrum Gill

This book situates the post financial crisis phenomenon of the “global land grab” within the longue duree of the capitalist world system. It does so by advancing a theoretical and historical framework, called the political ecology of colonial capitalism, that clarifies the key role played by the co-production of race and nature in provisioning the “ecological surplus” that has historically secured the emergence and reproduction of capitalist development. The key premise of this book is that the global land grab constitutes another such attempted moment of re-securing the cheap food premise through racialized frontier appropriation. The argument advanced here is that, within the neoliberal crisis conjuncture, the hegemonic resolution of capital’s escalating social-ecological contradictions necessitates, through the practice of “global primitive accumulation,” the racialized construction of frontiers of unused nature in emergent zones of appropriation.

Excerpt

The form of the third movement: towards an agrarian question of national liberation

The national question has long constituted a key concern of Marxist praxis and the international socialist movement more broadly. While it rose to prominence in the debates of the third socialist international, as a means of clarifying the place of rising anti-colonial national liberation struggles in the movement for international socialism, the origins of the national question can be traced to Marx’s reflections on the geopolitics of capitalism. Lenin, the foremost theorist of the national question during the third international, grounded his position in an application of Marx’s analysis of the “Irish question” to the “national and colonial questions” posed to African and Asian peoples denied sovereignty by European and American capitalist imperialism (Lenin, 1914; 1920). What was of particular significance to Lenin was how Marx came to reverse his original formulation of the relation between proletarian revolution and national liberation, wherein he ultimately realized that the English working class would not come to attain revolutionary consciousness so long as it was materially located as part of a national formation oppressing the subjugated Irish nation. Lenin returned to these insights in the course of a debate with Rosa Luxembourg over whether socialists should support Polish independence, and further developed them, in his famous text Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Lenin, 1917), into a broader theoretical framework that emphasized that the national oppression of colonized peoples – in the political form of the denial of sovereignty – enabled the European bourgeoisie to stabilize the contradictions of capitalism and thus blunt the revolutionary consciousness of the working classes of the core European states. It was necessary, Lenin argued (1920), to therefore prioritize the national liberation of colonized peoples in the international socialist movement, as doing so would call into question the colonial markets and surplus drain that stabilized capitalist accumulation in the core. This would likely require, Lenin further argued, the need for proletarian movements in the core to tactically support bourgeois led national liberation movements in the periphery, as the latter were historically tasked with transitioning the colony from dependent to autonomous capitalist state at which point a proletarian class could emerge to lead a further socialist revolution.

The national question came to be most clearly linked to the agrarian question when both questions were taken up and advanced by revolutionary theorists engaged in anti-colonial struggle for national liberation. Fanon (1961), identified (along with Cabral) by Moyo, Jha, and Yeros (2011) as having given “fullest expression” to what they term the “agrarian question of national liberation,” complicated Lenin’s “theses on the national and colonial questions” by demonstrating that such questions could not be resolved by a bourgeois led national liberation movement that would result in a bourgeois form of national sovereignty. Whereas Lenin had urged the international socialist movement to, where necessary, provisionally support bourgeois nationalist forces in their fight to overthrow colonialism, Fanon argued that such a form of national liberation could be nothing more than a false dawn that would inevitably lead to neocolonial subjugation and the degeneration of nationalism into chauvinism and racism.

The assumption that the newly liberated nations would follow a European “stagist” path of first bourgeois, then socialist, revolutions was flawed on two grounds. The first is that European bourgeois social formations were only able to achieve historical progress, in the form of the development of the productive forces, through a colonial foundation that would not be available to bourgeois national development projects in the ex-colonies. Second, what bourgeois class that did exist in the colonized world had been structured, not as an independent national class capable of directing autonomous national development, but rather as an intermediary dependent class that profited from the appropriation of surplus from the colony to the metropole. Such a class would, even after formal independence, not be capable of overturning the inherited colonial structure of the national economy. Rather, it would only go so far as claiming for itself, under the guise of “nationalization,” a greater share of the “unfair advantages which are a legacy of the colonial period.” It would seek to preserve its material interests by maintaining a colonial economic structure which allowed “certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich” while the “rest of the colony follows its path of underdevelopment and poverty” (Fanon, 1961, 159). Such an extractive structure would continue to impoverish the majority of the country and prevent national resources from being oriented towards a coherent economic development program that could build up, on a broad basis, a domestic productive base capable of securing real sovereign power. Instead, the national bourgeoisie – both urban and the rural landed classes – would “not hesitate to invest in foreign banks the profits it makes out of its native soil,” thereby inhibiting the accumulation of a domestic source of investible capital that could allow for an overcoming of dependence on foreign capital. It is thus that Fanon concludes that the historic mission of the national bourgeoisie in the independence era consists of nothing more than “being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camoflauged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism.  The national bourgeoisie will be quite content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent, and it will play its part without any complex in a most dignified mannder” (153).

It is here that Fanon grasps and articulates the convergence between the national question and the agrarian question, giving rise in the process of doing so to what Moyo, Jha, and Yeros identify as an “agrarian question of national liberation.” Neo-colonialism, and its associated degeneration of nationalism into chauvinism and racism, could only be avoided, and thus substantive decolonization achieved, by “closing the road to the national bourgeoisie” (177) and instead conducting anti-colonial national liberation struggle, and ultimately securing sovereignty, upon the basis of the upward surge of the “wretched of the earth” – those classes of the colony subjected by colonial capitalism to what we have described as “appropriation and erasure.” Fanon is specifically speaking here of the Indigenous peasantry, whether still working the land in the countryside or reconstituted as a landless lumpenproletariat in the city, who “alone are revolutionary, for they have nothing to lose and everything to gain. The starving peasant, outside the class system, is the first among the exploited to discover that only violence pays. For him, there is no compromise, no coming to terms; colonization and decolonization are simply a question of relative strength” (61). This integral anti-colonial articulation arises out of the peasant’s structural location on the margins of the colonial economy, wherein through their outright dispossession or through colonial debt mechanisms, they were absolutely excluded from access to the surplus extracted from their traditional lands. The intensive “appropriation and erasure” of the peasantry and their lands is enforced by the “intermediary” class of the rural landed bourgeoisie. From the point of view of the peasantry, and unlike the national bourgeoisie, there can thus be “no compromise, no coming to terms” with the colonial structure, and an anti-colonial national liberation program organized around the interests of the peasantry centers the imperative of not only “taking back the land from the foreigner” but of ensuring that such a “taking back” is of a form that insists that “the land belongs to those that till it.” Constructing national sovereignty on the basis of peasant centered nationalization and land reform will necessarily compel a broader overturning of the inherited colonial structure so that the labor and resources of the national territory are re-organized in service of a “national-popular” form of sovereign economic development.

Fanon clarifies, then, that the emancipatory potential of the “third movement” of anti-colonial national liberation is itself contingent upon its structuring basis – ie whether it will take the bourgeois or peasant road. Both roads would, as we will see, have to confront the re-colonizing forces emanating from the imperial core, as anti-colonial national liberation, at its most general, imposes a reproduction crisis upon capitalism (Patnaik and Patnaik, 2021) that compels the latter to seek to impose neo-colonial conditions that can re-secure the ecological surplus necessary for the stabilization of the capital-labor relation. The neo-colonial counter-revolutionary movement, in turn, forces emergent postcolonial states to prioritize rapid industrialization as a means of building the material power through which national sovereignty could be defended. This, Moyo, Jha, and Yeros argue (2011), regrounds the “agrarian question of national liberation” as the pillar of all struggles, as the form of agrarian relations – bourgeois, landed property, or peasant centered land reform - that underly third world industrialization projects will have principal bearing upon whether they will lead up the “blind alley” of neo-colonialism or potentiate decolonized social-ecological futures. In turning to a historical investigation of the role of anti-colonialism in both contesting and reconstituting the capitalist world-ecology, we will see that the realization of such futures are contingent upon an emancipatory project of sovereign reclamation of agrarian socio-ecologies reoriented towards national development and sustained by a recognition of the co-constitutive reproduction of Indigenous/peasant knowledge, practice, and extra-human natures.

Bikrum Gill is a member of AISC.