In 2024, the 26th Annual David Gordon Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Dr. David McNally, University of Houston
Discussant is Dr. Kirstin Munro, The New School for Social Research
Session Chair is Dr. Sirisha Naidu, University of Missouri-Kansas City
TITLE: Marx on Colonization: The End of Capital and the Beginning of a Journey
Abstract: The ending of Capital (volume 1) might be said to represent a beginning as well—one that remains largely unexplored. A critical undercurrent at this point in the text concerns capitalism and colonialism. In making colonization the topic of the final chapter of Capital, Marx’s primary interlocutor is the British colonial official Edward Gibbon Wakefield. Marx engages the latter’s work in order to demonstrate that Wakefield discovered in the New World the secret to the rise of capitalism in the Old: the dispossession of direct producers from the land. This allows him to complete his famous discussion of the primitive accumulation of capital.
Marx uses Wakefield, in other words, to look back to Europe, the original site of the emergence of capitalism, in order to account for its historical trajectory. What would it mean, however, to look from Europe toward the colonial world in the company of Wakefield and Marx? In the spirit of reading Capital as an always incomplete work, one in need of constant extension and elaboration, this paper follows Marx’s engagement with Wakefield in order to offer a plausible theoretical account of bonded labor and capitalist development in the so-called New World. It suggests that any rigorous account of racial capitalism must come to terms with this text. The paper further asks whether the historical trajectory toward colonialism also discloses “secrets” of our world system. In so doing, it raises important questions about slavery, capitalism, and past and future struggles for freedom.
The David Gordon Memorial Lecture is an invited lecture presented annually at the Allied Social Science Association meetings by an economist whose work follows in the tradition of David Gordon’s contributions. Not all David Gordon Memorial Lectures have been published in the RRPE, but those that have been are listed here.