Radical Philosophy Review

published on June 27, 2018

Value and Violation
Toward a Decolonial Analytic of Capital

While the decolonial turn calls into question the broad structure of Western knowledge projects, it also suggests an investigation of the central objects and categories of these projects. This study undertakes this latter investigation in relation to Marxist theory. Starting from the work of Frantz Fanon and contemporary theorists of coloniality, I consider three central figures in the Marxian critique of capital: enclosure, valorization, and real subsumption. Interrogating familiar and heterodox accounts of these figures, my analysis exposes an architecture of injury that comprehends the structure of value and that articulates a process of extended violation working beyond the dialectic.