Marx on Colonization and Bonded Labor: The End of Capital and the Beginning of a Journey

The concluding chapter of Karl Marx’s Capital (volume 1) has received remarkably little scholarly commentary. This is especially surprising as Marx addresses there “the modern theory of colonization” developed by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. But rather than systematically pursue the issue of colonialism, Marx investigates Wakefield’s theory in order to illuminate the processes of primitive accumulation (or “originary dispossession”) that gave birth to capitalism in Europe. This article suggests directions in which Marx ought to have gone in order to analyze the globalization of capitalism outside of Europe by means of colonialism. In so doing, it proposes the need to recenter bondage, slavery, colonialism, and racism as constitutive elements of capitalism as a global system. JEL Classification: B51, N3, P1