A review of Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory, Robert Nichols, Duke University Press, 2020.
“Property is theft !” declared Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, denouncing the inanity of social institutions undergirding bourgeois society. He was criticized by Karl Marx, who judged the formula self-refuting, and by Marx Stirner, who wrote: “Is the concept ‘theft’ at all possible unless one allows validity to the concept ‘property’? How can one steal if property is not already extant?” Indigenous people face the same set of objections when they claim ownership of the land that has been stolen from them. Their traditional culture and enduring values often emphasize a special connection to land and place. They are the “children of the soil,” “sprung from the land itself” as the word “autochthonous” indicates in its Greek etymology. They can legitimately claim the right of first occupancy and document their collective memory of having been there first. The dispossession of their ancestral lands occurred under conditions that would today be judged unlawful or illegitimate, and that was condemned as such at the time it occurred. But on the other hand, the emphasis on possession and ownership contradicts the values of shared responsibility, stewardship, and common property that many Indigenous people, indeed many persons, associate with land and natural assets. How can one argue that the earth is not to be thought of as property at all, and that it has been stolen from its rightful owners? What does it mean, then, to be dispossessed of something that you never really “had” in the first place, and to reclaim something that was never really “yours” to begin with? Can we make the legitimate claims of Indigenous people compatible with political visions that do not advocate property and ownership at their point of departure?
Anglo settler colonialism
For Robert Nichols, these questions cannot be addressed in the abstract. They have to be situated in the historical context of “Anglo settler colonialism,” the process by which the modern nations of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States were formed. As its subtitle indicates, this book is intended as a contribution to “critical theory,” and there are many theoretical development that may rebuke more empirically-inclined readers. But putting the concept of dispossession in dialogue with the plight of Indigenous peoples facing settler colonialism allows the author to ground social theory in historical processes it is meant to explain and criticize. Critical theory is mostly indebted to Karl Marx, and the author of Das Kapital is indeed the main theoretical reference in Robert Nichols’ book, with two chapters out of four at least partially devoted to discussing his writings. But other authors from the classical tradition, from Locke to Rousseau and from Tocqueville to Mill, are also brought into the debate, as well as contemporary writers belonging to various strands of critical theory: analytical Marxism, new feminisms, critical race theory, radical Black critique, critical geography, Indigenous peoples’ scholarship, and postcolonialism. Indeed, for me one of the main attraction of Theft Is Property! was its openness to critical voices that do not usually feature into the intellectual mainstream, but that nonetheless formulate valid claims and propositions. I was not familiar with most of the contemporary authors quoted or discussed by Nichols, but their voices provide a useful contribution to contemporary debates about race, rights, and property.
Nor was I familiar with the detailed history of settler colonialism in the Anglo-saxon world. Nichols reminds us that “over the course of the nineteenth century alone, Anglo settler peoples managed to acquire an estimated 9.89 million square miles of land, that is, approximately 6 percent of the total land on the surface of Earth in about one hundred years.” It was the single largest and most significant land grab in human history. This great appropriation, or transformation of land into property, was also a great dispossession. As a result of settler colonialism, Indigenous peoples have been divested of their lands, that is, the territorial foundation of their societies, and deprived of their most basic rights. This is the context that we must keep in mind when we discuss the history of settler societies and the development of capitalism. We must understand more precisely how landed property came to function as a tool of colonial domination in such a way as to generate a unique “dilemma of dispossession.” Robert Nichols presents this dilemma as follows: “We can say that dispossession is a process in which novel proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation.” In effect, the dispossessed come to “have” something they cannot use, except by alienating it to another. New proprietary relations are generated but under structural conditions that demand their simultaneous negation. The United States and its settler elite accorded Indigenous peoples truncated property rights in an unequal exchange that “took away their title to their land and gave them the right only to sell.” Indigenous people are figured as the “original owners of the land,” but only retroactively. Contrary to Max Stirner’s assertion, what belongs to no one can in fact be stolen.
Karl Marx and dispossession
To understand the genealogy of dispossession, Robert Nichols turns to Karl Marx and his analysis of the transformation of land tenure within Europe during the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Marx borrows from the anarchist tradition the claim that modern European nation-states were the emanations of acts of massive theft. But he considered the anarchist slogan “Property is theft!” as self-refuting, since the concept of theft presupposes the existence of property. He therefore turned to the notion of dispossession, or expropriation, to refer to the initial alienation process that separated “immediate producers” from direct access to the means of production. For Marx, dispossession was linked to processes of proletarianization, market formation, and industrialization. Through a process of primitive accumulation, the feudal commons were subjected to various rounds of “enclosures.” Land were partitioned and closed off to peasants who had for hundreds of years enjoyed rights of access and use. Without direct access to the common lands that once had sustained their communities, peasants were forced to contract themselves into waged employment in the new manufactures that arose in urban centers. The enclosure of the English commons and transformation of the rural peasantry into an industrial workforce serves as the primary empirical reference from which Marx derives his conceptual tools. The concepts of primitive accumulation, exploitation, and alienation are thought through the experience of England and its historical trajectory that Marx and Engels studied closely. Other historical references, such as the privatization of public lands and criminalization of poverty (the “theft of wood”) in Rhineland or the rural commune (Mir) as the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia, are only brought in tangentially, and the territorial expansion of European societies into non-European lands is not analyzed in detail.
As Marx famously put it, the history of primitive accumulation is written “in letters of blood and fire.” But primitive accumulation should not be relegated to a primitive past or a historical stage, from which we have hopefully escaped. Critics have raised objections not only with the historical accuracy of Marx’s description but also with the very idea that the overt, extra-economic violence required by capitalism is surpassed and transformed into a period of “silent compulsion” through exploitation. For these critics—Peter Kropotkin, Rosa Luxembourg, postcolonial authors—, political violence is a constitutive feature of capitalism’s expansion and takes the form of repression at home and colonial expansion abroad. Imperialism, according to Lenin, is the highest stage of capitalism. Colonies and formally independent countries in the South become peripheral zones because they specialize in the low-tech and labor-intensive activities, including the supply of raw materials and cheap labor to core zone areas, and thus become “underdeveloped” through unequal exchange mechanisms consequent to colonization and/or imperialism. To this violence against nature and violence against labor that sustains capitalism’s expansion, feminist author Silvia Federici adds that violence against women is congenital to the reproduction of labor and the formation of capital. But this expansion of primitive accumulation and constitutive violence into the present should not obscure the fact that colonial settler societies were born out of a massive act of land grabbing and dispossession. Viewed from this perspective, primitive accumulation acquires a new meaning that cannot be reduced to its past and present forms in capitalist societies.
How the land was won
More generally, critical thinkers who forget to account for the original dispossession of Indigenous peoples in their explanation of capitalist development perform an erasure of history. They treat the clearance and dispersion of people in settler colonies as a necessity, “just as trees and brushwood are cleared from the wastes of America or Australia” (Marx). But land, understood as an intermediary concept between nature and labor, can only be separated from its early occupiers through a violent process of dispossession and appropriation. Indigenous peoples bear the memory of this injustice and of their resistance to it. Their claim for collective atonement and redress is constitutive of their identities and subjectivities. Indigenous peoples have always resisted dispossession, but they have not always done so as Indigenous peoples. Instead, the very idea of indigeneity was, in part, forged in and through this mode of resistance. Dispossession is structural in the same sense that racism can be said to be structural: it generates long-standing patterns of vulnerability and marginalization, and creates subject positions through disciplinary power and repression. Anglo settlers obtained new territories through a variety of ways, some of them requiring violence, coercion and fraud, others based on legal terms and based in norms of reciprocity and consent. But the effects were always and everywhere the same: as Theodore Rossevelt expressed it, “Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or by a mixture of both, mattered relatively little as long as the land was won.” Or as a Seneca chief put it in 1811, “The white people buy and sell false rights to our lands. They have no right to buy and sell false rights to our lands.”
There is a tradition of resistance and critical thinking among Native Americans that lingers to these days. Parallel to the Great Awakening of Protestant faith that impacted the English colonies in America in the eighteenth century, there was an “Indian Great Awakening” that fused distinct religious, cultural, and political traditions into a pan-Indigenous movement with broad appeal among the Native population. In the nineteenth century, opposition to the Euro-American predation on Native lands came from three distinct perspectives: accommodationist, traditionalist, and syncretist, each articulating a political critique that converged in the denunciation of dispossession and the claim of a distinct Indigenous identity. The twentieth century has seen a remarkable revival of Indigenous syncretism and political militancy that now mobilizes against extractive development projects such as the Dakota Access Pipeline. By claiming that “there can never really be justice on stolen land,” they join forces with other social movements that advocate transnational solidarity and global justice. Robert Nichols also analyses rituals of dispossession in light of Black feminist theorists who have reflected on bodily dispossession and what it means to claim one’s body as one’s own. Self-ownership does not necessarily reinforce proprietary and commodified models of human personhood, especially in the context of enslavement, oppression, and sexual violence that Black women have been subjected to.
Native Lives Matter
On April 23, 2021, former Senator Rick Santorum caused an uproar when he declared: “There isn’t much Native American culture in American culture.” He elaborated: “We came here and created a blank slate. We birthed a nation from nothing. I mean, there was nothing here.” His remark was inspired by ignorance, bigotry, and white suprematism, and was rightly denounced as such. But in a sad way he was right. The reason there isn’t much Native cultural heritage in American culture is that most of it was destroyed or written out of the history books, by people just like Rick Santorum. The origins of American exceptionalism are mired in blood and plunder. Native American cultures have always been erased from the national narrative, as First Nations were forbidden to exhibit their culture, to carry it on and to express it in their native languages. Even now, Native Americans suffer from a disproportionate share of social ills and experience police brutality and cultural repression in their daily lives. Along with the Black Lives Matter movement, the Native Lives Matter campaign draws attention to social issues such as violence from law enforcement, high rates of incarceration, drug addiction, and mental health problems into a national dialogue calling for social justice reform. Thanksgiving, that quintessential American celebration, is commemorated as a National Day of Mourning by many Native Americans as a reminder of the genocide of millions of their people, the theft of their lands, and the relentless assault on their cultures. It is a day of remembrance and spiritual connection as well as a protest of the racism and oppression which Native Americans continue to experience. Penance and atonement, as well as thanksgiving and praising God, are part of the American tradition.
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