Wayne Wapeemukwa

This article introduces the concept of “speculative expropriation” to reframe Marx’s analysis of expropriation in the context of settler colonialism and capitalism in the West. I begin by examining Marx’s ideas of primitive accumulation and original expropriation, showing how his incomplete analysis of social relations to land can be extended to the trans-Atlantic context. Drawing on Marx’s pre- Capital manuscripts, I examine his treatment of ground rent and its relationship to feudalism, highlighting how the development of capitalism in the West relied on mechanisms overlooked in conventional readings of Marx’s work. I argue that settler colonialism in the New World did not follow the same logic as European primitive accumulation, where land was taken from peasants. Instead, speculative expropriators gave land to settlers, but only under specific racial and gendered conditions that tied landowners to the financial and political systems of the settler state. The land was often granted with mortgages and preemptive land sales, which placed settlers in debt and subjected them to the control of colonial institutions. This financial framework, grounded in the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples, allowed capitalism to expand through speculative real estate and colonial constructs. By theorizing speculative expropriation, I show how the dynamics of settler colonialism reinvented capitalist accumulation, turning land ownership into a means of controlling settlers through debt rather than directly extracting their labor. This framework provides a new lens for understanding how capitalism expanded across the Atlantic and solidified its global reach in tandem with Indigenous dispossession and population replacement.

Marx studied how capitalism changes relations to land before and after Capital—but wielded different methodologies and reached different conclusions. In Grundrisse, Marx investigates precapitalism from a speculative standpoint. In Capital, Marx provides a selective and historical description of dispossession but delimits his analysis to Western Europe. Post-Capital, Marx wields Henry Lewis Morgan’s anthropology and Justus von Liebig’s ecology as scientific bases upon which to critique capitalist property relations. Specifically, Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production installed a historically specific relation to land; and that this relation was abstract, accumulative, and proprietorial. This article shows that Marx began to develop a critical theory of dispossession that overspills the historical, metaphysical, and developmental sequencing usually attributed to him. This late Marx believes that Indigenous peoples have a concrete, metabolic, and communal relationship to the land that communism must recapitulate and rehabilitate; this thesis has been misunderstood by readers of Marx, who impose an overly historicized interpretation upon his work.

The authors of this essay challenge the notion that “philosophy” is irredeemably Eurocentric by providing a series of personal, professional, and pedagogical reflections on their experience in a new graduate seminar on “Indigenous philosophy.” The authors—a graduate student, professor, and Indigenous course-facilitator—share in the fashion of “Indigenous storywork,” as outlined by Stó:lō pedagogue Jo-Ann Archibald. We begin with the instructor and how he was personally challenged to re-evaluate his roots and philosophical praxis in spite of his experience teaching over several decades. The second section describes a student experience and how they measured the exigencies of decolonization against the esteem that their family holds for Canada’s brand of multiculturalism. Finally, we turn to the Indigenous seminar facilitator and his skepticism over whether the course truly constituted decolonized, or “landed,” pedagogy. Throughout, the authors ask about the demands of decolonization and how philosophical pedagogy may center Indigenous futurity.