Conclusion: a neo-Lemkian ontology in the age of the Anthropocene

The cases of the Sengwer in the Embobut Forest and the Gomeroi, Githabul and Wangan and Jagalingou nations in Australia manifestly exhibit Lemkin’s (1944, p. 79) two-stage process. This same two-stage process mirrors the two structures identified in Chapter 1 as the political economy of genocide of a rather peculiar type in the age of the Anthropocene. Moreover, in all the examined cases the capitalist system was shown to be inherently ecologically destructive, violating ‘the everlasting nature–imposed conditions of production’ (Marx, 1976, p. 290). The ‘treadmill of accumulation’ (Foster, 2005) under conditions of competition, which imbues capitalist production with the imperative to expand, transgresses the ‘metabolic interaction’ between human beings and nature and expands into non-capitalist territory, ‘into a world dense with cultural difference’ (Smith, 2002, p. 79) giving rise to the extra-economic processes of plunder, fraud or theft, from without the circuits of production and capital accumulation. Ultimately, it is the value-contradiction embedded within the various industrial (and financial) processes operating within the expanded reproduction of the circuits of capital, ‘capitalism’s inner dialectic’ (Harvey, 1981, p. 10), that elides nature’s contribution to production of value and its role in social reproduction more generally. This accounts for the externalisation of environmental (and social costs) and this is why, as I have argued elsewhere, capitalist ecology is eco-criminogenic and eco-genocidal (Crook, Short and South, 2018).

The political economy of ecologically induced genocide, of the type described above, involves a process of, first, primary accumulation which facilitates and consolidates de facto control of Indigenous land by creating ‘facts on the ground’ through dispersal programmes, population transfers, extermination programmes and so on, or as we saw in Kenya with the gazetting of national or wildlife parks or conservation areas. In Australia, simply the threat of violence latently manifest in the ostensibly peaceful ‘negotiations’ under the ‘Right to Negotiate’ provisions of the NTA with Indigenous people, if not engaged with, could eventually lead to the loss of all customary land rights and the threat of eventual control and enforcement actions by law enforcement agencies. This facilitates the second phase of securing de jure control of Indigenous land by creating the necessary legal and institutional architecture in the form of private and state property regimes which invariably deny the collective common law tenure rights of the traditional owner-conservators and assert the legal and political jurisdiction of the relevant settler-colonial or ‘postcolonial’ state. This completes the incorporation of Indigenous land and territory into global circuits of capital; the various eco-destructive industrial processes, referred to earlier, then unfold.

A crucial part of accomplishing the second phase of ‘imposing the national pattern of the oppressor’ and achieving de jure control involves sophisticated ideological and discursive practices which in the modern era no longer resemble overtly racist exterminatory ideologies, but adopt racially coded developmentalist overtones, sometimes with a green hue – practices which play a crucial part in (re)imposing spatial relations that, as they did in the colonial past, are vital to facilitating both the reproduction of the capitalist system and accumulation of capital and the reproduction of the neocolonial state through continued ‘internal territorialisation’ (Vandergeest and Peluso, 1995, p. 387). Mathews (2011, p. 10) remind us that this process of state formation is never complete ‘but requires continuous performance, a work that is always contested and never done’. Indeed, as we saw in both Australia and Kenya, in the past, and in the modern period through a global neoliberal logic, a number of agencies within the state apparatus, described by Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015, p. 62) as ‘institutionalised assemblages of actors mobilised around a common territorial objective’, pursue projects framed through discursive practices and enforced through the lethal threat of the monopoly of violence that continually ‘perform’ both objectives. In Australia, the cadastral technologies operating at various phases through its colonial history concentrated and segregated racialised populations, be it on reserves, cattle stations or, latterly, urban ghettos. In the current juncture, the behaviour and conduct of Indigenous peoples is spatially regulated through the racialised discourses or ‘cultural imaginaries’ (Mbembe, 2003, p. 26) of Indigenous rights and reconciliation in the post-Mabo era, compelling them to engage with colonial institutions like the NTA that facilitate the incorporation of their Indigenous lands into circuits of capital and further expand the internal territorialisation of the colonial state. In Kenya, the ‘assemblage of actors’ that included the KFS, county councils and the Ministry of Lands and the Ministry of Environment, Water and Natural Resources, as well as the ‘mediating institutions’ like the World Bank and EU, which still have not shaken free from their colonial past, carry over forms of colonial lawfare, political economy of land and racialised discourses of development that treat Indigenous peoples as impediments to progress. Like their former colonial masters, the new political and economic elites seek to impose racialised productions of space that restructure socioecologies and once more facilitate the expanded reproduction of capital and territorialisation of state.

Indeed, in both cases, what I earlier described as the international chain of capitalist production and trade is being reproduced through a continual, contested and dynamic process of state formation. Mbembe (2003, p. 26) succinctly summed this process up when he observed:

The writing of new spatial relations (territorialization) was, ultimately, tantamount to the production of boundaries and hierarchies, zones and enclaves; the subversion of existing property arrangements; the classification of people according to different categories; resource extraction; and, finally, the manufacturing of a large reservoir of cultural imaginaries. [emphasis added]

In the case of the Sengwer in Kenya, the cultural imaginary entailed a reframing of nature in a manner that cast them as irresponsible custodians or squatters, or simply reimagined socioecologies without them in. In Australia, the structure of rights possessing an intellectual lineage that stretches all the way back to the Enlightenment, bequeathed to it by the colonial state, in their colonial form presuppose the legitimacy of settler-colonial sovereignty, which excludes from view the long history of structural violence that was its sine qua non. In its current form, the Indigenous land rights offered under the NTA and all the other Indigenous land rights legislation, are still marked by racial elision, exclusion and exception, as human rights are more generally (Samson, 2020). Indeed, the broader liberal project has throughout its history been defined by a ‘logic of exclusion’ (Losurdo, 2011) that denudes or attenuates rights so they may be made compatible with what Adam Smith (1976, p. 687) argued was ‘the obvious and simple system of natural liberty’, namely the market.

This dynamic process of internal territorialisation is vital to facilitating the spatio-temporal fixes that Harvey (2003b, p. 64) understood were necessary to periodically resolving the contradictions that give rise to capital overaccumulation. This was most markedly the case in the age of neoliberalism, which as we saw brought in its wake radical transformations in the relations of genocide. Recall the observation that the various spatial practices and technologies that enable the ‘production of space’ (Lefebvre, 1974) and its rebranding with the hot iron of exchange value are ‘the handmaiden of property’ (Blomley, 2003, p. 127). This is in the final analysis about the material processes of accumulation by dispossession and surplus value extraction, not as Cavanagh and Himmelfarb (2015, p. 61) claim, conversely, about colonial state formation. As these processes of territorialisation, state formation and capital accumulation take place, the symbolic and political processes may be dominant, but in the final analysis the economic proves decisive. The racialised productions of space that restructure socioecologies in both sites of colonisation, in Kenya under the auspices of conservation, and in Australia the incorporation of Indigenous land into the orbit of extraction, did, indeed, amount to internal territorialisation that expanded the frontiers of the Kenyan and Australian settler-colonial state. But ultimately these processes facilitated the continued expanded reproduction of colonial capitalism and extended the commodity form to as yet unchartered spheres of nature–society relations (Heynen et al., 2007, p. 10).

Capitalist production relations as the vector driving eco-genocide in Australia is not just an aberration or idiographic, but in fact, gives rise to many instances, interconnected by a thousand threads. In fact, the case of Kenya illuminates the interconnectivity, ontologically speaking, of the two cases. In other words, one gives rise necessarily to the other, where one form of commodification of nature in the sphere of production (Australia, pastoralism, mining and extreme energy) and its associated environmental externalities leads to another form of commodification of nature, as a compensatory stabilising measure, in the sphere of reproduction and conservationism (Kenya and market environmentalism). While one capitalist mode causes ecological ruptures, another, spawned by the first, seeks to ‘fix’ them.

The specificities and contingencies of each case notwithstanding, they represent but two manifestations of ecologically induced genocide, both driven, fundamentally, by the same genocidal structuring dynamics, and both connected historically by a global imperialist capitalist system (and the British empire more specifically). In fact, they are both settler colonies that were once part of the British empire that left a legacy of a global political economy determining their insertion into the international division of labour, which endures to this day: Australia is still dependent on agricultural, fossil and mineral exports and Kenya is still dependent on forestry, agriculture, fishing, tourism and increasingly on earning foreign currency exchange through neoliberal conservation, due in large part to its ‘dependent independence’ (Curtis, 2003, p. 330). Both form a part of a global chain of imperial production and trade and thus part of a ‘global chain of genocide’. Finally, both emerged as dialectical responses to the ecological contradiction at the heart of the political economy of capitalism in different contexts, those contexts being transmitted by a settler-colonial past. This is the engine of genocide, an inescapable condition that would carry over into the modern post-Mabo and post-independence period.

Once the burgeoning settler-colonial society and state in both Kenya and Australia became firmly entwined with international market forces, this predatory and expansionist form of capitalism led to an inevitable clash of two different modes of life and ultimately the subsumption of one by the other. This forcible articulation takes many forms (Hartwig, 1978, p. 129) and is determined to a large extent by the technical conditions in which settler-colonial capitalism historically finds the Indigenous mode of life. To the extent that capital can make use of or valorise some aspect of Indigenous material culture, it will be preserved at least partially in a deformed state. It is this forced articulation or hybridisation on political economic grounds that is often overlooked by the genocide literature. Where the sites of colonisation and their respective relations of genocide differed was in the manner of this forced articulation. As we saw Kenya, relations of genocide were uneven, because the various Indigenous groups had differing economic systems, not all of which were found to be by the colonial authorities conducive to the development of the settler colony. The fate of forest-dwelling people in Kenya like the Sengwer and their biopolitical status was conditioned by their hunter-gatherer mode, subjecting them to arguably greater degrees of ‘civilising violence’ (Cavanagh, 2016, p. 3) to secure their ‘liminal humanity’ than those Indigenous groups like the Kikuyu who were considered more advanced according to colonial social Darwinist thinking. Unfortunately, the stagist thinking of Kenya’s former colonial masters, the symbolic dimensions of colonialism, would prove adaptable to the current postcolonial juncture in the form of neoliberal environmentalism.

In Australia, an analogous process unfolded. In some cases, Indigenous people were able to adapt to the settler-colonial system, through various forms of articulation and hybridisation, in which elements of the settler economic system are fused with the largely nomadic Indigenous mode, but only with those industries that were compatible with those Indigenous communities, communities who were already destroyed in part by colonisation and its associated techniques of land theft, violence and disease. For the vast majority of Indigenous people, the more direct and unmediated dispossession and domicide reminiscent of the frontier violence stage took place. Paradoxically, articulation and hybridisation were made possible through relations of domination, subjugation and, ultimately, genocide, and yet this articulation allowed for the partial preservation of Indigenous connection to country and traditional modes of life. This seeming paradox is resolved once you understand that this state of affairs is only provisional and conditional on the continued viability of that particular colonial economy, or at least the viability of continued dependence on Indigenous labour, or, in the age of land rights, the Indigenous estate and the extraction of commodities and resources. Hartwig (1978, p. 129) argued the third mode of articulation was the destruction of non-capitalist societies and the freeing of the means of production. Arguably, the process of neoliberal assimilation in Australia examined in Chapter 3 may ultimately achieve this ontologically if not materially. In other words, some Indigenous people may still maintain ownership of land, but through a process of interpellation become transformed as entrepreneurs and rentiers. Remarking on these psychoactive affects in the Canadian settler colony, Coulthard (2014, p. 12) sharply observed ‘the long-term goal of indoctrinating the Indigenous population to the principles of private property, possessive individualism, and menial wage work’ would continue to be an important feature of Indigenous policy. This is not a foregone conclusion, however. As May (1983, p. 41) argues, even in extreme cases where domicide was the norm, Indigenous production relations were not completely destroyed. May (1983) has suggested the preservation of culture or its superstructure attests to the continued survival, in attenuated form, of the Indigenous mode of life; my research corroborates this, particularly those who resist these assimilatory and interpellating processes.

Indeed, the other side of this coin is Indigenous struggle, which, dialectically, alongside the evolving nature and composition of the Australian and Kenyan economy, shifted, as we saw, the settler–Indigenous struggle onto different terrain, and the relations of genocide into different modalities: in Australia, from frontier violence to the protection regimes, to land rights and NTA and what is called administrative genocide; in Kenya, from a settler-colonial society rooted primarily in white settler farming, to a post-independence regime that still ‘others’ Indigenous peoples as an obstacle to its full development. Ironically, from the vantage point of Kenya’s Indigenous people, it has further to come to decolonise than Australia, since some Indigenous groups like the Sengwer are still not officially recognised either by government or Court ruling as Indigenous and entitled to full customary rights to its ancestral land. In other respects, it is has gone further, since its newly minted 2010 constitution recognises, at least in the abstract, Indigenous rights to ancestral land and the legal parity of collective tenure rights with all other forms of property.

At each stage, the degree of their articulation with and incorporation into the settler-colonial economy and civil society more generally would prove decisive in shaping the nature of that struggle and through the dialectic of struggle and the dialectic of colonial-Indigenous identity, the development of their identity and consciousness. As Fanon (1963) ably argued, it is this struggle that would be necessary to purge their identity of any sense of inferiority. In the case of Australia, the resistance to settler-colonial domination would give rise almost immediately to a form of resistance which would eventually shape the development of a pan-Australian Indigenous consciousness, particularly in the twentieth century. In Kenya, a more complex discursive and symbolic terrain where Indigenous people are concerned, shaped in large part by the uneven nature of relations of genocide examined in Chapter 4, led to a stratified and hierarchical understanding of Kenya’s cultural mosaic. This would have lasting legacies that only now in the last decade or so are being addressed, where those at the bottom of that hierarchy are concerned. The uneven nature of relations of genocide in Kenya would postpone the development of a comparable pan-Kenyan movement of its Indigenous peoples. Dovetailing with the rise of a global human rights system driven by globalising forces in the post-war era, Indigenous peoples in Kenya are now asserting their claims, with the help of international networks of human rights NGOs, to a unique and culturally distinct way of life, and only now beginning in recent years to forge pan-Kenyan forms of struggle.

The imperative of the capitalist mode to expand means expropriating Indigenous territory and incorporating it into the normalised sphere of capitalist production, circulation and exchange. But what is different now, in the post-Mabo phase of genocide, is that it is achieved via the absence of overtly violent coercive means, and it is in place the Trojan Horse of Indigenous rights. Even in Kenya, as we saw, the ‘assemblage of state actors’ feel obliged to pay lip service to Indigenous rights like FPIC, though the traditional top-down, juridical, forms of state violence are still central. Arguably, it is not enough to simply indigenise human rights law, as Samson (2020, p. 162) argues, to address the aforementioned exceptions and elisions. Decoloniality must mean moving beyond the ‘colonial episteme’, of which colonial human rights is an expression. If, as Fanon (1967, p. 84) recognised, colonialism has a dual structure which operates both on the psychological and economic terrain, then we must dismantle the latter to have any hope of addressing the former and purging human rights of its parochialism. Recall Coulthard’s (2014, p. 173) warning that ‘for Indigenous nations to live, capitalism must die. And for capitalism to die, we must actively participate in the construction of Indigenous alternatives to it.’ This is not to argue that any struggle short of dismantling capitalism is futile. The evidence of Indigenous struggles in Australia and Kenya do point to the partial victories that legal and extra-legal struggles can wrest from the settler-colonial system. But even these partial victories, whether they be Indigenous rights hard won under the land recovery regimes in Australia or legal and constitutional recognition in Kenya, ultimately serve to shift the ‘structural target of the settler-colonial logic of elimination’ (Strakosch and Macoun, 2012, p. 44) and reproduce genocidal structuring dynamics in different modalities.

The critique of human rights proffered by the Marxist canon is germane here. Contrary to popular belief that the Marxist tradition simply and one-sidedly repudiates the notion of human rights (Lukes, 1981), it is, in fact, much more nuanced. Whilst it is true there is no clear line on human rights within the works of Marx and Engels, one can construct a coherent and dialectically nuanced critique that is fruitful for our purposes here. Firstly, the dialectical method as employed within historical materialist framework treats all social phenomena as contradictory, interrelated and in a state of flux (O’Connell, 2017a). Therefore, any treatment of human rights which dismisses it as necessarily a tool of ruling elites in the maintenance of the status quo is one sided, which loses ‘the potential contribution of rights, a potential contribution which coexists with their negative potential’ (Sparer, 1984, p. 519). Put simply, human rights can be both emancipatory and a discourse and practice that reproduces the status quo. This was palpably demonstrated with the land recovery regimes and Indigenous rights systems in Australia in Chapters 2 and 3. As O’Connell (2017a) argues, ‘human rights are neither emancipatory nor inherently conservative; they are a complex combination of both tendencies’. Whether human rights do ultimately play a progressive or reactionary role can only be determined by understanding the specific array of social forces in any given historical juncture where human rights play a decisive role.

Moreover, knowledge is vital to social action, which is to say that the point of understanding the world is to change it. This is exemplified in Marx’s (1976b, p. 5) Theses of Feuerbach, where he famously asserted ‘philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. For this reason, Marxist analysis privileges the role that human (and Indigenous) rights claims can play in advancing social struggle (O’Connell, 2017b), and recognises it as an important resource for marginalised and oppressed groups, as well as the terrain of political struggle, even if that terrain as we have seen is uneven. Critically, this critique appreciates how such a struggle over human and Indigenous rights can achieve partial victories and potentially be the prelude to a broader contestation of the social order. However, as Marx’s (1975, pp. 146–74) critique of ‘bourgeois rights’ in On the Jewish Question suggests, although they constitute an advance, political emancipation falls short of addressing exploitation, which is ultimately rooted in the economic sphere. In other words, the structural impediments imposed by the ‘laws of motion’ of the capitalist system will, in the final analysis, militate against the full realisation of human and Indigenous rights. The experiences of Indigenous peoples in Kenya and Australia testify to this ontological reality. Therefore, to indigenise human rights we must also indigenise capitalist production itself. This is, I think, an oxymoron, if by indigenise (notwithstanding the recognition that, as argued above, there are Indigenous people who choose the ‘market as the path to development’) we mean a mode of organising a material culture in which labour and nature is not alienated. Arguably, given the threat to the biosphere posed by global capitalism (Crook and Short, 2014), and the expansion imperative of the capitalist system, even the potential for treaty negotiations which are taking place across Australia today with Indigenous communities (Wahlquist, 2018) may only ever be short lived in the long run. Perhaps it is the alliances forged across Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities, both locally and globally, which can, as we saw, impose material limits on the extent of capital accumulation, whether on the carbon commodity in Kenya or that of fossil capital in Australia.

The best effort of the Australian settler-colonial state to extinguish Indigenous land rights and Indigenous sovereignty is in a certain sense, dialectically, conditioning a renaissance in Indigenous culture and spiritual and ecological connection to land and the development of an Indigenous people for itself, cognisant of its interests on national and even global scales. Likewise in Kenya, the step change in the intensity of state repression of Indigenous sovereignty in recent decades has galvanised Indigenous groups fuelling a resistance that has led to their collaboration with international NGOs and activist groups like the FPP or the IWGIA. This could have truly global implications, due to its grounding in ecological sensibilities and collective notions of ecological responsibility as custodians of earth, much like that found in most ‘cosmovisions’ of many Indigenous societies around the world (Havemann, 2016). Just as Marx in the nineteenth century believed that Indigenous communities rooted in ‘natural economies’ in Russia could help Russian society move beyond a capitalist system which is both alienated from labour and nature (Harding, 1991), and is consequently capable of driving both ecocide and genocide, so too can the deep spiritual attachment that many Indigenous communities have to nature, and the ecological-political orders that they are premised on. These ecological-political orders implicitly offer us answers to many of capitalism’s ills, not least its ecocidal character and the alienation from nature, as well as arguably lessons about alienated labour, a symptom also characteristic of developed capitalist economies. So today, too, we must learn from the Indigenous struggle and the black–green alliance emerging in Australia against the ecocidal war waged by capitalist production and elsewhere. Indeed, proposals put forward by a coalition of Indigenous and non-Indigenous activists in North America in a published book called the Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save Our Earth (The Red Nation, 2021) argue that any movement to avoid catastrophic climate change and repair ecological destruction is necessarily coterminous with the struggle for Indigenous liberation, arguing that Indigenous resistance founded on the values of ecological justice and ecological responsibility as custodians of earth is necessarily revolutionary. As it argues, ‘what’s often downplayed is the revolutionary potency of what Indigenous resistance stands for: caretaking and creating just relations between human and other-than-human worlds on a planet thoroughly devastated by capitalism’ (The Red Nation, 2021, p. 16).

Moreover, the potential for the Indigenous proletariat that played such a key role in the struggle of land rights and sovereignty in Australia, as we saw in Chapter 2, to once again leverage that structural power as part of the organised labour movement must be considered. As before, they can act as a transmission belt for ideas between Indigenous communities and the broader labour movement connected via an international chain of trade and production to the rest of the globe, only this time in the context of an emerging global environmental movement, must be considered. Although the politically driven neoliberal project in Australia wrought economic transformations that ‘pacified’ organised labour and suppressed levels of industrial struggle (Humphreys, 2018, p. 50), one cannot rule out a revival of industrial struggle. This could be a promising linkage precisely because of the structural power afforded by organised labour’s strategic position within the structures of capitalist production. Moreover, the subject position of the Indigenous proletariat is not only compatible with Indigenous lifeways, as evidenced by the history of Indigenous struggle examined in Chapter 2, but recent pathbreaking research into ‘fossil capital’ (Malm, 2016) has shown that that from its very inception, the incipient industrial working class resisted as much the ecological degradation wrought by capital as it did its exploitation and alienation from work (Malm, 2016, ch. 10). In other words, there is a resonance between the subject position of what Foster (2010) calls an emerging ‘environmental proletariat’ disproportionately exposed to the externalities of a globalised ecological crisis and an Indigenous proletariat which still retains its spiritual attachment to country.

Indigenous people are at the sharp end of the ecocidal and genocidal properties of a global capitalist system. It is their struggle to preserve their connection to country and forest, and to nature more generally, that may prove humanity’s last hope to awaken an ecological consciousness and remember its long since forgotten dependence on nature. For much of what is called the ‘developed world’, ‘progress’ has come at the expense of alienation from nature; this may prove its undoing. Instead, to reverse this alienation and restore our global ecology we must once again privilege our relationship with nature as the Indigenous people in this book do. As the Sengwer activist Elias Kimaiyo (author interview, 20/02/2018) affirmed, ‘Sengwer and the Forests are one and inseparable.’ It is this wisdom that must be rekindled.