Primitive Accumulation: Applying a Marxist Framework of Colonialism to the Americas

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s epigraph frames her “Culture of Conquest” chapter in An Indigenous People’s History of the United States within the context of exploitation and the maturation of early capitalism. Excerpted from Marx’s Capital vol. 1, the epigraph introduces Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument that the underpinnings of the capitalist expansion informed European settler-colonialism in North America. She writes that the legacy of the Crusades and post-medieval economic transformation gave rise to methods, tactics, and justifications of European colonialism: “European institutions and the worldview of conquest and colonialism had formed several centuries before that…[and] was the deadly element that European merchants and settlers brought to the Americas.” Dunbar-Ortiz describes the “worldview of conquest and colonialism” as a “profit-based religion” that fueled primitive accumulation, according to Marxist economic theory. Marxist scholar David Harvey writes that the deconstruction of the feudal order in Europe was predicated on “the merchant capitalist and the money lender,” whose accumulation of cash enabled the subsequent dispossession of land and other productive assets from the peasantry. Dunbar-Ortiz similarly argues that “the rise of the modern state in western Europe was based on the accumulation of wealth by means of exploiting human labor and displacing millions of subsistence producers from their lands.” She contends that the mechanism of land dispossession and capital accumulation was similarly employed in the American context: “the sacred status of property in the forms of land taken from Indigenous farmers…was seeded into the…founding of the United States.” Suggesting that property held a “sacred status,” she returns to her broader assertion that Europeans’ “profit-based religion” powered genocide and land theft.

Dunbar-Ortiz also points to the systematic “othering” of indigenous groups as a tactic to distract from reform to systemic inequality. She quotes 16th-century author Lope de Vega, who discussed the shared notion of whiteness that united classes and underpinned colonialism: “‘I am a man, although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of Jewish or Moorish blood.’” Once again, Dunbar-Ortiz references European examples before extending her argument into colonial America:

“This cross-class mind-set can be found as well in the stance of descendants of the old settlers of British colonization in North America. This then is the first instance of class leveling based on imagined racial sameness-the origin of white supremacy, the essential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa.”

The epigraph offers a basis for this argument since Professor Adolph Reed Jr. explains that race -- and therefore racism -- is an ideology fundamentally “anchored” to capitalism. According to Marxist racial theory, capitalist-engendered racism provides the justification for what Dunbar-Ortiz calls the “culture of conquest.”

At the end of the chapter, she addresses the “terminal narrative” that seeks to explain the considerable reduction in the Indigenous population of the Americas. Dunbar-Ortiz quotes Professor Benjamin Keen, writing that “historians ‘accept uncritically a fatalistic “epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity” explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors . . . which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections.’” Once again, Dunbar-Ortiz employs a historical materialist lens -- as presented in the epigraph -- to highlight these “socioeconomic factors” like loss of land and the disruption of trade networks, which left Indigenous communities more susceptible to disease. Ultimately, the epigraph succeeds in contextualizing Dunbar-Ortiz’s argument and situating it within a Marxist reading of European and Indigenous American history.