“Marxian and Not Marxian”: Centering Sylvia Wynter in the Radical Tradition

This chapter shows that the greatest possibility for thinking Indigenous labour in the radical tradition lies in Sylvia Wynter’s work. It traces Wynter’s critique of capitalist political economy to three elements of this project: scarcity, land-labour and primitive accumulation, and black resistance and Death. It also reads, from the preceding chapter, the openings to indigeneity in Cedric Robinson, C. L . R. James, and Walter Rodney, in light of current discussions of abstract versus concrete labour, black Marxism’s future, and the rise of the Capitalocene as an analytic. Thus, while recognizing possibility, the chapter proceeds cautiously, elaborating how this recuperation of the radical tradition for indigeneity may risk incorporation into the Anthropocene-Capitalocene debate, that epochal shift (of the last twenty years) in thinking about capital and labour.