Dispossession without Labour: Bridging Abolition and Decolonisation
Glen Coulthard’s Red Skin, White Masks makes two decisive interventions. First, it shifts our lens from the capital relation to the colonial relation, disarticulating the process of primitive accumulation to emphasise its component parts: dispossession and proletarianisation. To do so is to both liberate the concept from its European origins by centring those contexts in which dispossession is not followed by proletarianisation, and to pose the political unity of different forms of dispossession: of land (as in settler-colonialism) as well as labour (as in chattel slavery). Second, Coulthard draws convincingly upon Frantz Fanon, whose work is essential for grasping both colonialism and white supremacy, but crucially their complex interrelation.