NewMac Conference Paper

(Australian) capitalism, (settler)

colonialism and neoliberal
multiculture: Breaking down
racelessness in political economy
Cameron Smith

Do political economists have a blind spot when it comes to issues of race and
racism? Meditations that have gone some way to address this question have appeared
sporadically over the past two decades, most notably in John Hobsons critical
historiography of the Eurocentrism of international political economy (IPE) in 2013.
Hobsons work developed a nuanced critique of IPE that attempted to open up the
various ways in which historically marginalised and oppressed groups are left out of
conventional methods of political economic analysis. His key argument was that both
mainstream (or problem-solving) and critical approaches to political economy1 had
effectively advanced provincial or parochial normative visions that defend or promote
or even celebrate Europe and/or the West as the highest or ideal normative referent in
the world political economy since as early as the mid-eighteenth century (2013a: 1025).
Hobsons intervention points to a key problem within political economy more
generally: global and local issues of racial exclusion and inequality are still mostly left
to scholars in other disciplines, predominantly critical race, postcolonial and settlercolonial theorists operating with a degree of interdisciplinarity across the disciplines of
history, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies.

This dearth of race-critical literature within contemporary political economy

more generally is problematic in two key respects. First, as Hobson points out, if
political economy remains inattentive to its Eurocentrism, then scholars will
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reproduce this discourse of power and prejudice in their writings (2013: 1027).
Furthermore, the material structures and discursive practices which give rise to the
various modalities of racial exclusion and inequality that operate across global and
local contexts, in my view, require the analytical attention of scholars attuned to the
structures and discourses that produce global capitalism: those that would broadly
identify themselves within the critical school of political economy. As I hope to
demonstrate in this paper, the reasoning behind this argument lies in the connectivity
between colonialism and the evolution of global capitalism, and particularly in the
development of settler-colonial capitalism in Australia. In other words, the key
argument of this paper is that contemporary modalities of racial exclusion and
inequality in Australia have been developed and reified in conjunction with the
development of Australian settler-colonial capitalism.

Postcolonialism/global capitalism, settlercolonialism/Australian capitalism

The relationship between contemporary modalities of race-based exclusion and
the historical development of Australian capitalism can be demonstrated most clearly
with reference to recent work by a range of scholars working in the fields of postcolonial
and settler-colonial studies. In the briefest of terms, both fields attempt to foreground
the constitutive influence of European colonisation on present political problems and
social formations, primarily through outlining how colonisation facilitated the
development of some areas whilst simultaneously exploiting others (Dirlik, 2002;
Veracini, 2012). As political economists have been accused of being unreflexive and
blind to issues of race and gender, postcolonial theorists have been criticised for overemphasising questions of culture and identity whilst neglecting questions of political
and economic structure. Arif Dirlik figures as perhaps one of the more spirited
interlocutors within this inter-disciplinary impasse, indicting contemporary
postcolonial theorists as largely being oblivious to [their] own conditions of existence
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and [their] relationship to contemporary configurations of power, even going as far to

suggest that the same theorists are complicit in promoting the ongoing conditions for
the reproduction of global capitalism (2002: 440). It would seem that Dirliks
motivation for such strident criticisms lies in his insistence on the confluence between
the evolution of global capitalism and European colonialism (2002: 441):

Modern European colonialism is incomprehensible without reference to the capitalism that

dynamised it, just as the formations of historical capitalism in Europe may not be
understood without reference to colonialism. This intimate relationship distinguishes
modern colonialism from other colonialisms, both in scope (the entire globe) and in depth
(the transformation of life at the everyday level. If the goal of global conquest by capitalism/
colonialism has become a reality only by the late twentieth century, the reality nevertheless
has a long history behind it that is deeply entangled in colonialism.

Hobson backs up Dirliks claims regarding the fusion of global capitalism and
European colonialism, arguing that the imposition of free trade in the colonies was
part of a larger imperial strategy whereby Britain sought to culturally convert nonEuropean countries along Western civilisational lines, in the process transforming
their legal, political, social and economic systems so that they would accord with
Western rationality (2013b: 1066). It is important to emphasise here that the dual
process of colonial and capitalist expansion was thoroughgoing, and reached beyond
the material practices of resource extraction and settlement into the reshaping of
everyday life. Issues of identity and structure are bound up in this dual process.

If the historical processes of the development of global capitalism and European

colonialism are so closely intertwined, then what is the import of such an argument in
the context of the historical development of Australian capitalism? We can begin to
address this question by utilising some theoretical insights that have been developed by
a range of scholars within settler-colonial studies. Conceived initially as an offshoot of
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postcolonial studies, the distinction between the two fields developed initially from a
desire to distinguish analytically between colonies of exploitation and colonies of
settlement, whilst also exposing how the categories of settler and indigene are
mutually constituted, inseparable categories (Wolfe, 1999; Veracini, 2012). Using Patrick
Wolfes oft-quoted comment, settler-colonial studies is adamant that invasion is a
structure not an event (1999: 163; 2015: 3). Lorenzo Veracini illustrates the significance
of this point:

Indigeneity as a category has its historical roots in settler colonialism, and should be seen
as a relational category that acquires its full meaning only when it is paralleled by its
dialectical counterpart - the non-indigenous settler - and by a political regime that is
exclusively controlled by settlers and their descendants (2012: 329, emphasis added).

As expressed in the last portion of the above quote, the clear injunction from
settler-colonial theorists to stress the ongoing primacy of a sovereign power that is
fundamentally premised on the original dispossession of indigenous peoples has
significant implications for those engaged in political economic analysis (ibid.; see also
Wolfe, 1999: 163). This injunction is particularly crucial when considering the
relationship between race and the evolution of Australian capitalism, as a
conceptualisation of the political regime/sovereign power (i.e. the state) as a
fundamentally settler-colonial assemblage in turn situates the (re)production of
Australian capitalism by the state as a fundamentally settler-colonial activity.

The settler-colonial character of Australian capitalism can be further explained

with particular reference to the specific modes of territoriality deployed within. To
Wolfe, the concept of territoriality simply describes the fusion of people and land,
particularly expressed through the system of ownership that prevails (2015: 3). In the
case of settler-colonial Australia, the seizure of Indigenous land by settlers did not
simply represent a transfer of ownership, through the mechanisms of sale, inheritance,
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or foreclosure. Instead, the settlers sought to replace an entire system of ownership

with another, externalising alternative modes of allocating ownerships beyond the
confines of the settler politico-legal system (Ibid.). Thus, the securing of settler-colonial
power and the conditions for Australian capitalism required (and still requires) the
marginalisation of alternative modes of territoriality and ownership - in other words,
the suppression of alternative sovereignties.

Rather than securing Indigenous consent to the transfer of ownership, or simply

physically removing or engaging in an active denial of Indigenous claims to
sovereignty, the suppression of alternative sovereignties in settler-colonial Australia
has primarily been enacted through various modes of assimilation, in which the
externality of Indigenous peoples is dissolved through their incorporation into settler
society (Wolfe, 2015: 5). This strategy serves not to resolve the problem of alternative
systems of ownership - instead, by doing away with alternative owners, they [settlers]
seek to obviate it (Ibid., emphasis added). Given the centrality of land ownership to
capitalism itself, this strategy constitutes the nexus of race and the evolution of
Australian capitalism. The pursuit of marking Indigeneity in order to actively facilitate
its dissolution serves a political economic purpose, and that purpose is to negate the
claims of alternative sovereignties and territorialities in order to facilitate the
conditions for the ongoing reproduction of settler-colonial capitalism. The recent
controversy over the funding of remote Indigenous homelands lends weight to the
assertion that, since invasion, there has been no specific moment inaugurating a postsettler colonial predicament (Veracini, 2012: 330).

Settler-colonialism and neoliberal multiculture

If we are still in a settler-colonial predicament - more specifically, if Australian
capitalism is inextricably bound up in the settler-colonial practice of suppressing
challenges to its sovereignty, particularly evidenced in the effacement of Indigenous
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modes of territoriality - then there are clear implications for those critical political
economists wishing to analyse (materially and discursively) relationships of racial
exclusion and inequality from the global to the local. Given the emphasis on issues of
territoriality and land ownership above, one could start with analysing the settlercolonial dynamics that are evident in contemporary debates surrounding land rights
and native title, resource extraction and nuclear waste dumping on Indigenous land, or
the seizure of Indigenous land in the Northern Territory Intervention (I am sure that
research addressing these topics would already exist, or at least be in production please do alert me to said research if you are aware of it). One could go further and
explore the settler-colonial underpinnings of racial anxiety and xenophobia within the
white populace regarding foreign investment in productive land and residential
housing. The spectre of invasion from foreign lands invoked within this xenophobia
provides an ideal opportunity to begin to elucidate the links between the
marginalisation of the Other within and the Other without, by quoting Wolfe at length:

For declarative purposes, federation signalled the ending of the frontier. The nation had
matured and come to exercise its dominion, albeit somewhat patchily, over the continental
landmass. Though individual Native groups would on occasion be hunted down up to the
1930s, federation marks the moment of nationhood, when the new Commonwealth came to
determine its own constitution, who should make it up, the fundamental questions of
citizenship and entitlement to share in the national space. The vision being the making of a
White nation, plans were drawn up to deport those of non-European ancestry. Since
deportation was not an option in the case of the Aboriginal people, to whom no extranational homeland could plausibly be assigned, Aboriginal assimilation functioned as an
internal correlation to the deportation of non-White foreigners. Though one included and the
other excluded, the two strategies were coordinated at the level of the whole, together
participating in the projected construction of a White Australia (2015: 21-22, emphasis
added).

Taking a cue from Wolfe, it is important at this point to emphasise that the
intersections between settler-colonialism and Australian capitalism are not reducible
only to problems of territoriality and land ownership. Veracini explains, using the
experience of descendants of immigrants from post-colonial Algeria living in presentday France, how colonial and settler-colonial regimes have utilised similar (yet specific)
co-existing labour regimes, spatialised systems of control, and hierarchies of
citizenship statuses in order to reproduce their power amongst racially-marked groups
that are excluded internally and externally (2012: 331). All of these mechanisms still
exist, though in forms that are specific to their present temporal and geographical
locations - an insight that leads me to the key problematic with which my research is
currently preoccupied: the phenomenon of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Neoliberal multiculturalism has been insightfully theorised by Alana Lentin and

Gavan Titley in The Crises of Multiculturalism (2011), and also by Jodi Melamed in
Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial Capitalism (2011).2 In
short, this concept provides a starting point from which the loose assemblage of policies
and discursive formations that form the problematic of multiculturalism might be reconceptualised in an era in which the hegemony of neoliberalism, itself a slippery
aggregation of structural and discursive transformations, is continually being
constructed and reproduced. Apart from James Walshs recent article on the
marketisation of multiculturalism (2014), the conceptual identity of neoliberal
multiculturalism in Australia, and with the various political economic functions that it
serves, remain relatively under-analysed. In particular, the various ways in which
neoliberal multiculturalism may reproduce various modalities of racial exclusion and
inequality in the political economy of settler-colonial Australia are, to my knowledge,
not yet examined. The question of the ways in which neoliberal multiculturalism
reproduces settler-colonial capitalism thus forms the key focus of my research going
forward.

Given the confines of this paper, there is much more that could be unravelled in
terms of demonstrating the various connections between race and capitalism, in both
postcolonial/global and settler-colonial/Australian contexts. For example, I have not
managed to cover the Immigration Restriction Act 1901 - the piece of legislation which
formed the basis of the infamous White Australia Policy. That said, I believe I have
developed the point enough in order to conclude by emphasising again the importance
of treating both global capitalism and European colonialism, and Australian
capitalism and settler-colonialism as inextricably linked historical processes that are
still operational in the present. Any analyses of the various innovations that claim to
address racial exclusion and inequality within the contemporary Australian political
economy demand, at the very least, sensitivity to this dynamic.

Reference List
Cox, R., 1981. Social Forces, States and World Orders: Beyond International Relations
Theory. Millennium - Journal of International Studies, 10(2), pp.126155.

Dirlik, A., 2011. Rethinking Colonialism: Globalization, Postcolonialism, And The

Nation. Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 4(3), pp.428448.

Goldberg, D.T., 2009. The Threat of Race, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.

Hobson, J.M., 2013a. Part 1 Revealing the Eurocentric foundations of IPE: A critical
historiography of the discipline from the classical to the modern era. Review of
International Political Economy, 20(5), pp.10241054.

Hobson, J.M., 2013b. Part 2 Reconstructing the non-Eurocentric foundations of IPE:

From Eurocentric open economy politics to inter-civilizational political economy.
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Review of International Political Economy, 20(5), pp.10551081.

Lentin, A. & Titley, G., 2011. The Crises of Multiculturalism, London: Zed Books.

Melamed, J., 2011. Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial
Capitalism, University of Minnesota Press.

Robinson, C.J., 2005. Black Marxism, University of North Carolina Press.

Veracini, L., 2012. Settler Colonialism: A Global and Contemporary Phenomenon.

Arena Journal, (37/38), pp.322336.

Walsh, J.P., 2014. The marketization of multiculturalism: neoliberal restructuring and

cultural difference in Australia. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 37(2), pp.280301.

Wolfe, P. 2015. In Whole and In Part: The Racialisation of Indigenous People in

Australia. Chapter of a forthcoming book.

Wolfe, P. 1999. Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics
and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, London: Cassell.

The distinction between problem-solving and critical theories of political economy and

international relations was most famously made by Robert Cox in 1981. He concisely
described problem-solving theory as taking the world as it finds it, with the prevailing
social and power relationships and the institutions into which they are organised, as the
given framework for action (1981: 128), whilst describing critical theory as standing
apart from the prevailing order of the world and ask[ing] how that order came
about (Ibid.: 129). To Cox, critical theory, unlike problem solving theory, does not take
institutions and social and power relations for granted, but calls them into question by

concerning itself with their origins and how and whether they might be in the process of
changing (Ibid.)
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Both works draw heavily from the concepts of racial capitalism and racial

neoliberalism, which have been developed most notably by Cedric Robinson (2005) and
David Theo Goldberg (2009), respectively.

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