A comrade asked me earlier "Can u briefly explain Robert Nichols and Glen Coulthard’s theory of native dispossession and how it relates to Marx’s primitive accumulation theory?".

I thought some people may find my explanation of use/interest:

So they both draw upon Marx in recognising "primitive accumulation" the stealing of land, resources, labour etc from european peasants & colonial disposession in Ireland, eastern Europe & the americas is what produced the capital needed to create capitalist market relations.

However, both reconceptualise it, accounting for Marx's eurocentrism/temporal ontology & parochial view of it being a "pre-capitalist" stage of accumulation.

They recognise, as Kropotkin & Rosa Luxemberg prior, that this form of accumulation is a continuous process under capitalism constituting every stage of capitalisms structural reforms to new forms ...

They recognise, as Kropotkin & Rosa Luxemberg that this form of accumulation is a continuous process under capitalism, constituting every stage of capitalisms structural reforms to new forms

(e.g from agrarian mercantile capitalism to industrial capitalism to fordist capitalism to neoliberal capitalism etc) but also as an attended process that works to bring land resources labour, capital & other non-capitalist economic forms, into the capitalist world-system.

So rather than a pre-capitalist stage, its a constant process.

Now, in relation to native dispossession they make similar cases but with different arguments.

Coulthard argues that from an indigenous perspective, the parochial view that focuses only upon the consequences of dispossession creates proletarianization, from the indigenous perspective, dispossession is the consequence in and of itself from land, culture, ecologies etc.

And so argues to understand the social relationships that capitalist primitive or; pre accumulation or "accumulation by disposession", created for indigenous ppls, one must shift the unit of analysis from the "capital relation" to the "colonial relation".

This is also similar to Nichols argument, that dispossession needs to be articulated as a conceptual perspective in its own right in order to understand the social relations that settler-capitalism & its attended preaccumulations have created for indigenous peoples.

E.g "when related back to the two pillars of Marx’s primitive accumulation thesis -dispossession and proletarianization—it would appear that in Canada the history and experience of the former has structured the political relationship between Indigenous peoples and the state ...

to a greater extent than the latter. I also suggested that the primary experience of dispossession is what also tends to fuel the most common modes of Indigenous resistance to and criticism of the colonial relationship itself:

that is, Indigenous struggles against capitalist imperialism are best understood as struggles oriented around the question of land—struggles not only for land, but also deeply informed by what the land as a mode of reciprocal relationship" Red Skin white masks p. 60

So Marx's primitive accumulation is a key foundational analysis & concept to understanding the wider *colonial* structures, and that dispossession / property is theft, (the creation of private capitalist property through colonial theft) ...

is the key structure of settler-colonial/racial-capitalism for indigenous experiences & histories rather than merely preaccumulation that created alienated waged-proletarian labour within the capitalist market system.

And Nichols arguing the same, arguing for not seeing dispossession as merely a part of the overall historical structural relation of capitalist pre accumulation

but as a historical structural relation in & of its own right when looked at from the perspective of black & native peoples in the americas that requires theorizing & critique.

"Dispossession, can thus be used to name a historical process with supervenient properties, which has important implications for both descriptive and normative analysis.

This characterization is preferable then to one that juxtaposes structure verses event, since it specifies the mediation between structure and event by accounting for how various individual "events" of dispossession related to one another in recursive fashion" - Nichols p. 92