marxism and the incan (whom hath mixed their labour with) land

familiarizing myself with agraraian communities and making nomadicism unfamiliar

If John Locke had the guts to go visit the Yukon, he would have really hated Yukon First Nations claims to land, for our most notrious liberalist believed that altering the land was the way to have any rights to it. Fortunately for the Incans, their agricultural impacts under Locke’s colonial philsophies, would have had rights to their land. Unfortunately, that didn’t stop the conquest of the Spaniards (wasn’t Locked British anyway?)

This is all a long prelude to say that agricultural Indigenous communities are quite foreign to my studies, which centre of course, northern Yukon communitites where agriculture simply wasn’t so conducive to our 3 months of warmer temperatures and the frigid cold made excellent seasonal fridges without the fear of meat going bad in the winters. I’ve familiarized myself with a lot of justifications for claims to title regarding Indigenous nomads—concerning the existence of culturally modified trees, of oral traditions, etc, all to say that “look! just because the Indigenous people didn’t farm doesn’t mean it’s open to be colonized!”—but you don’t even have to do that with the Incan. Their presence on the land is a given, the conquest has to be justified even as such.

When Mariategui in Seven Interpretations of Peruvian Reality frames the colonization of the Incas as a socio-economic issue, and economic leaning heavily into the material resources of agriculture, agriculture embedded in Indigeous land, I was like “when the fuck was Mariategui born???”. I know this didn’t make much sense, so I shall elaborate: throughout Mariategui’s first three chapters, capitalism and Indigenous displacement in Peru are read to be inextricale. This goes much against the literature I’ve read in political science and philosophy, where Marxist analysis of the economy seems to yeild that racism, colonialism, gender ineqaulty, will all disapear with the abolition of economy, rather than an intersectional approach to combatting all as interrelated, contingent processes. In my current studies, Mariategui’s analysis would actually be considered very radical, more radical than Marx.

What is interesting to me is that the Incan economic developement rejects Marx’s determinist and harmful view of societal progression, from the “primitive” community, a slave-based society, a feudal soceity, a capitalist soceity, then finally, the end of a communist society. From my reading of Mariategui, it seems that Incan societies seem to have started in agraian communism then were forced to be a feudal society through conquest. Marxist perspectives have forced the transition of nomadic classes, the “primitive” communities, into capitalism as an attempt to also integrate them into western communism; or in other words, support the displacement of Indigenous peoples to reach a false ultimate ends. Yet the non-linear history of Incan economic change is so irrefutably influenced by colonization because of how central land/agriculture was to the society.

The agriculture backbone of Incan soceity is in my reading, why Mariategui considers the Spanish colonial project to have not been as based in religion but about the economic conquest. I find the social perspective of Spanish individualism and liberalism interesting as well, for in my intuition, I have felt most disconnected to the lack of community-oriented approach in our colonized world. If Marx thinks that the economy is the basis of all social inequality, then perhaps I believe it’s extreme liberalism (if I had to choose one, of course). And seeing that Mariategui sees colonization as a socio-economic project, I can’t help but agree.

I think this is the most technical reading reflection blog I’ve done so far, focusing on the specific parts of the paper rather than the big picture ideas presented. The structure of his writing is familiar, all of my favourite key terms addressed, formatted so similar to the historical texts in my discipline. However, I think my interpretation, because of my background is likely very biased because of the same prior knowledge. It challenges a lot of my assumptions about where the decolonial project should stem from.

From my Yukon perspective, the project of decolonization heavily involved the legitimation of Indigenous claims to their land, that they are the ones who know what is the best, and they know how to govern themselves. A project to establish that extraction and market economy disrupts the nutruance and sustainability of these lands. The the lack of tangible of Indigenous occupation is really an true embodiment of “leave no trace”, human presence a valubale part of the ecosystem, not separate or damaging to it. Title claims in the Yukon have unfortuantly heavily involved archaeologists, dependent on a few scraps of arrowhead chips, so I though that perhaps the recognition of different intangible forms of knowledge was pretty important.

Yet after reading Mariategui, I can’t help but wonder, if negotiating land rights a much smaller element of decolonization than I had originally assumed. If in a Peru where Incan presence was so irrefutable, then it looks like the focus on tangible evidnece of presence isn’t as important to settlers as I originally through. Materialistic sciences are not actually as dominant of colonial force then. So maybe there are parts of decolonization that I haven’t been putting enough emphasis on in my studies. Maybe the project of decolonization doesn’t just involve the land rights and self-determination of Indigenous peoples, but about reworking their collectivist ideologies into the colonial societies so we can never even attempt to justify extractivism and conquest again.

That’s it for me today. I feel like none of this makes sense so thank god it’s participation.

Daniel please say something nice to me I really like your compliments.

Annie