Colonial Decay

As the common lesson of using ink-marks on paper to show the distinction between inside and outside teaches, there can be no concept of either of a pair without its opposite. Without two, there is zero, one being the creation of two. This applies to all systems with multiple parts, where the parts are formed by their relationship to each other. Such is seen in labor organization, where the owner and worker are formed only by their relationship to each other.

Ignorant of this codependency, the settler-colonial ideology of labor relations is one based on creating a bourgeois without a proletariat. The white settlers, who create themselves as a single caste with a spectrum of roles (petit blanc to boll weevil) defined by their degree of possession of the central object of the caste (whiteness), are all working in concert with this view of labor relations. The material reality of their production, the land, resources, and slaves, are all made to be absent. Unlike in feudal society, where the peasantry is held as part of the larger community, of which the monarch is the apex of, in settler-colonial society, the white believes himself to have done everything himself, with the physical production being of his own hands. In shameful recognition of his foundations - stealing the land he calls his own, using slavery for labor, he creates systems which work to render these things invisible. Slaves are robbed of their personhood, land is stripped of meaning by removal (by exile, killing, or enslavement) of native populations, and the lowest of the ruling caste, the petit blanc, are tasked with being closest to the dark reality of their society, consciously enforcing and upholding the more full blindness of the higher classes.

Such a structure emerged from the capitalist creation of societies. With the ideology of the complete individual in mind, the partial individuality of all people as codependant parts of a larger system had to be rectified. Thus emerges the invisibility of labor, where the bourgeois is imagined as complete, without need of the proletariat. This invisibility came about in practice from the capitalist idea via projects which sought to empower humans to capitalist individuality. In European colonialism, the colony’s financial organs made up a front facade that interacted with the markets of the world. Behind this front facade, in order to better cope with the stressors of the market, the colony itself was built on outsourcing to atomized individuals, all tasked with finding their own ways to extract the wants of the market and send it outwards.

There can be no healthy society built from this. Only as long as the colony remains in a state of perpetual expansion can it be said to be healthy, with constant motion delaying the inevitable return of the repressed and invisible. In most settler-colonial societies, this time of expansion has long past. The consequences of a society of invisibility is its destruction, as that which, in stable societies is perfectly visible, makes itself violently visible against its oppression, thus causing irreparable shock.