Rosa Luxemburg and the Primitive Accumulation of Whiteness

Abstract

One of Rosa Luxemburg’s signal contributions to the critique of capitalism is her theorization of primitive accumulation as an ongoing imperial practice that is endemic to capitalism, rather than a historical phase belonging to capital’s pre-history. This dimension of her thought marks a turning point for theorizing capital’s violence. Indeed, a variety of contemporary thinkers have since built upon Luxemburg’s insights to interrogate the continuity of primitive accumulation in the present. Our paper extends Luxemburg’s distinctive intervention beyond its current application by interweaving her work on primitive accumulation with analyses of racial capitalism, the logic of global coloniality, and race-making in medieval Europe. We begin by examining how racial hierarchy and the historical production of whiteness complicate, supplement, and are bound up with Luxemburg’s prescient analysis of primitive accumulation. We then analyze several (re)constitutions of whiteness to conceptualize how they mediate and enable racial capitalism, from the European Middle Ages to our contemporary moment of neoliberal imperialism. Ultimately, we claim that creolizing Luxemburg enables the theorization of the primitive accumulation of whiteness, a concept that elucidates a dynamic by which racial capitalism operates. This concept highlights how processes of racialization, particularly the consolidation of whiteness as a racial-civilizational category, are necessary to ongoing imperial accumulations of capital; situates Luxemburg as a theorist of racial capitalism; and ensures that accounts of early modalities of whiteness in medieval race-making and later in neoliberal modes of imperialism do not understand whiteness or race as phenomena separate from capital.