#dispossession

“This tainted state of alterity delivered meaning and urgency onto a new model of being, an optimal status criterion under constant threat of contagion. Out of bourgeois fears of racial impurity, disease, moral degradation, and pollution was born a new mode of humanness realizable only through proper bourgeois behavior, status, and the embodiment of whiteness. Anne McClintock alludes to the emergence of this status in her discussion of Victorian fetishism of soap. She outlines how the purifying symbolism evoked by soap—having become highly commodified during this era—was informed by the cultivation of emergent middle-class values, including, ‘monogamy ('clean' sex, which has value), industrial capital ('clean' money, which has value), Christianity ('being washed in the blood of the lamb'), class control ('cleansing the great unwashed'), and the imperial civilizing mission ('washing and clothing the savage').’[23] Soap became the mark of the white bourgeois subject, a necessary consumptive tool for pursuing the fulfillment of bourgeois selfhood. In the sense that cleansing oneself in the appropriate fashion was the mark of humanness, soap, and more generally the hygienic regime, served as a disciplinary and regulatory mechanism, instilling in the body politic a mode of subjective understanding in which the discourse of purity configured which thoughts and actions were deemed normative or transgressive.”

from “Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment” by Bench Ansfield in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis by Katherine McKittrick, ed.

Accumulation by Dispossession, Trump Style

How Trump turned the machinery of the state into a tool of extraction—and why naming the theft is the first step toward repair.

James B. Greenberg

Jun 25, 2025

In an age where corruption is sold as competence and cruelty as clarity, the line between governance and grift has grown dangerously thin. Under Trump, that line didn’t blur—it vanished. What emerged wasn’t just mismanagement or ideological extremism, but a systematic mode of extraction, where the state itself was turned into an engine of enrichment for the few.

This wasn’t new. The mechanics were already in place. But Trump stripped them of pretense. What took shape under his leadership was a raw and visible form of what might best be called accumulation by dispossession—not through innovation, but by seizure. Through privatization, deregulation, defunding, and destabilization, wealth was moved upward by force of policy.

The pandemic revealed this with brutal clarity. Relief funds intended to cushion the blow for workers and small businesses were rerouted to major corporations and political allies. Contracts for protective equipment flowed to the connected, not the competent. Oversight mechanisms were sidelined, and accountability dissolved. What should have been a moment of collective care became a marketplace of opportunity for those already positioned to profit.

Or take public lands. Under Trump, millions of acres were opened to extraction—drilling, mining, grazing—not for public benefit, but for private gain. Environmental protections were stripped, tribal sovereignty undermined, and sacred sites desecrated in the name of “freedom.” This wasn’t policy in the traditional sense—it was liquidation. What belonged to all was transferred to a few.

Even immigration policy was part of this calculus. Migrants were not only criminalized; they were commodified. Detention contracts, surveillance technologies, biometric databases, border walls—all became opportunities for profit. The state’s power to detain, sort, and exclude was outsourced and monetized. What looked like enforcement was, in fact, extraction.

What links these moves is not chaos, but coherence. Degrade the commons, discredit public institutions, and redirect the flow of value toward private interests. This wasn’t the dismantling of the state. It was the weaponization of its infrastructure for dispossession. A state repurposed not to serve, but to siphon.

But the logic of dispossession goes deeper than land and money. It erodes time, possibility, and the basic scaffolding of democratic life. Under Trump, trust in public systems was not merely lost—it was actively dismantled. Public education was politicized. The census was manipulated. The Postal Service was hobbled in plain sight. These weren’t isolated failures. They were deliberate efforts to fracture the systems that sustain social reproduction and civic belonging.

This form of rule draws from an older logic. What was once called primitive accumulation—the seizure of land, labor, and resources in the formation of early capitalism—now plays out inside the borders of established democracies. It no longer requires conquest abroad. It cannibalizes institutions at home. The tools are legal, bureaucratic, and digital. The violence is slower, but no less real.

Today, dispossession moves through zoning laws and budget line items, through the privatization of housing, water, and care. It travels through digital networks—data harvested, identities tracked, benefits denied by algorithm. It is ecological, too: extractive industries strip land and poison water while vulnerable communities bear the cost. Climate denial is not ignorance; it is strategy. A way to prolong profit at the expense of planetary survival.

All of this was wrapped in a populist script—a claim to speak for “the forgotten.” But the real beneficiaries were never the working poor. The tax cuts went to the wealthy. The deregulation favored polluters and profiteers. The rhetoric masked the fact that what was being restored was not dignity, but dominion—the power of wealth to go unchallenged.

And yet, dispossession is never just about theft. It is also about narrative. Trump didn’t just strip resources—he rewrote the moral economy. He told people they had been wronged, then sold them a performance of revenge: against immigrants, against environmentalists, against the very idea of collective responsibility. Extraction was reframed as justice. Looting as loyalty.

What was taken wasn’t only tangible. It was temporal. The future was foreclosed for many—through student debt, housing precarity, degraded schools, and unsafe work. This is how accumulation works now: not by creating wealth, but by extracting life from the margins—one hour, one service, one body at a time.

This is why the Trump era cannot be dismissed as mere chaos. It revealed something deeper: a governance model that no longer aims to build, only to strip; that sees care as waste and solidarity as threat. It exposed the machinery of extraction that had been running for decades—but now without shame, without brakes, without apology.

Yet even in the wreckage, the story isn’t over. Dispossession often generates its opposite: solidarity. When people lose what was promised—land, labor, dignity—they look to each other. Mutual aid networks surged in the pandemic. Teachers, nurses, transit workers, and tenants organized. The commons is not gone. It is damaged. But it can be rebuilt—not by nostalgia, but by design.

Reclaiming what has been taken will not be easy. The machinery of extraction is deeply embedded. But history teaches that even the most entrenched systems crack when the stories upholding them collapse. What we need now are new stories—grounded in dignity, interdependence, and a future not for sale.

Because what was lost in the Trump years wasn’t just public money. It was the idea that government could be something other than a shell game for the powerful. Recovering that idea will take more than elections. It will require repair—material, institutional, and moral.

And that begins by naming what happened for what it was: not just corruption or chaos, but a calculated project of dispossession. And by insisting, again, that the public belongs to the people—not to those who see it only as something to plunder.

Suggested Readings

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park, eds. Terrestrial Transformations: Political Ecology, Climate, and the Remaking of Planet Earth. New York: Lexington Books, 2023.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Pulido, Laura. Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014.

Scott, James C. Seeing Like a State:

How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.

Streeck, Wolfgang. Buying Time: The Delayed Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. London: Verso, 2014.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco-Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.

As Marx and, subsequently, others have noted, the spatial energy of capitalism works to deterritorialize people (that is, to detach them from prior bonds between people and place) and to reterritorialize them in relation to the requirements of capital (that is, to land conceived as resources and freed from the constraints of custom and to labor detached from land). For Marx the

wholesale expropriation of the agricultural population from the soil... created for the town industries the necessary supply of a 'free' and outlawed proletariat (1967, pt. 8, ch. 27).

For Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1977) - drawing on insights from psychoanalysis - capitalism may be thought of as a desiring machine, as a sort of territorial writing machine that functions to inscribe "the flows of desire upon the surface or body of the earth" (Thomas 1994, 171-72). In Henri Lefebvre's terms, it produces space in the image of its own relations of production (1991; Smith 1990, 90). For David Harvey it entails the "restless formation and reformation of geographical landscapes," and postpones the effects of its inherent contradictions by the conquest of space-capitalism's "spatial fix" (1982, ch. 13; 1985, 150, 156). In detail, positions differ; in general, it can hardly be doubted that in British Columbia industrial capitalism introduced new relationships between people and with land and that at the interface of the native and the nonnative, these relationships created total misunderstandings and powerful new axes of power that quickly detached native people from former lands. When a Tlingit chief was asked by a reserve commissioner about the work he did, he replied

I don't know how to work at anything. My father, grandfather, and uncle just taught me how to live, and I have always done what they told me-we learned this from our fathers and grandfathers and our uncles how to do the things among ourselves and we teach our children in the same way.

Two different worlds were facing each other, and one of them was fashioning very deliberate plans for the reallocation of land and the reordering of social relations. In 1875 the premier of British Columbia argued that the way to civilize native people was to bring them into the industrial workplace, there to learn the habits of thrift, time discipline, and materialism. Schools were secondary. The workplace was held to be the crucible of cultural change and, as such, the locus of what the premier depicted as a politics of altruism intended to bring native people up to the point where they could enter society as full, participating citizens. To draw them into the workplace, they had to be separated from land. Hence, in the premier's scheme of things, the small reserve, a space that could not yield a livelihood and would eject native labor toward the industrial workplace and, hence, toward civilization. Marx would have had no illusions about what was going on: native lives, he would have said, were being detached from their own means of production (from the land and the use value of their own labor on it) and were being transformed into free (unencumbered) wage laborers dependent on the social relations of capital. The social means of production and of subsistence were being converted into capital. Capital was benefiting doubly, acquiring access to land freed by small reserves and to cheap labor detached from land.

The reorientation of land and labor away from older customary uses had happened many times before, not only in earlier settler societies, but also in the British Isles and, somewhat later, in continental Europe. There, the centuries-long struggles over enclosure had been waged between many ordinary folk who sought to protect customary use rights to land and landlords who wanted to replace custom with private property rights and market economies. In the western highlands, tenants without formal contracts (the great majority) could be evicted "at will." Their former lands came to be managed by a few sheep farmers; their intricate local land uses were replaced by sheep pasture (Hunter 1976; Hornsby 1992, ch. 2). In Windsor Forest, a practical vernacular economy that had used the forest in innumerable local ways was slowly eaten away as the law increasingly favored notions of absolute property ownership, backed them up with hangings, and left less and less space for what E.P. Thompson calls "the messy complexities of coincident use-right" (1975, 241). Such developments were approximately reproduced in British Columbia, as a regime of exclusive property rights overrode a fisher-hunter-gatherer version of, in historian Jeanette Neeson's phrase, an "economy of multiple occupations" (1984, 138; Huitema, Osborne, and Ripmeester 2002). Even the rhetoric of dispossession - about lazy, filthy, improvident people who did not know how to use land properly - often sounded remarkably similar in locations thousands of miles apart (Pratt 1992, ch. 7). There was this difference: The argument against custom, multiple occupations, and the constraints of life worlds on the rights of property and the free play of the market became, in British Columbia, not an argument between different economies and classes (as it had been in Britain) but the more polarized, and characteristically racialized juxtaposition of civilization and savagery...

Moreover, in British Columbia, capital was far more attracted to the opportunities of native land than to the surplus value of native labor. In the early years, when labor was scarce, it sought native workers, but in the longer run, with its labor needs supplied otherwise (by Chinese workers contracted through labor brokers, by itinerant white loggers or miners), it was far more interested in unfettered access to resources. A bonanza of new resources awaited capital, and if native people who had always lived amid these resources could not be shipped away, they could be-indeed, had to be-detached from them. Their labor was useful for a time, but land in the form of fish, forests, and minerals was the prize, one not to be cluttered with native-use rights. From the perspective of capital, therefore, native people had to be dispossessed of their land. Otherwise, nature could hardly be developed. An industrial primary resource economy could hardly function.

In settler colonies, as Marx knew, the availability of agricultural land could turn wage laborers back into independent producers who worked for themselves instead of for capital (they vanished, Marx said, "from the labor market, but not into the workhouse") (1967, pt. 8, ch. 33). As such, they were unavailable to capital, and resisted its incursions, the source, Marx thought, of the prosperity and vitality of colonial societies. In British Columbia, where agricultural land was severely limited, many settlers were closely implicated with capital, although the objectives of the two were different and frequently antagonistic. Without the ready alternative of pioneer farming, many of them were wage laborers dependent on employment in the industrial labor market, yet often contending with capital in bitter strikes. Some of them sought to become capitalists. In M. A. Grainger's Woodsmen of the West, a short, vivid novel set in early modern British Columbia, the central character, Carter, wrestles with this opportunity. Carter had grown up on a rock farm in Nova Scotia, worked at various jobs across the continent, and fetched up in British Columbia at a time when, for a nominal fee, the government leased standing timber to small operators. He acquired a lease in a remote fjord and there, with a few men under towering glaciers at the edge of the world economy, attacked the forest. His chances were slight, but the land was his opportunity, his labor his means, and he threw himself at the forest with the intensity of Captain Ahab in pursuit of the white whale. There were many Carters.

But other immigrants did become something like Marx's independent producers. They had found a little land on the basis of which they hoped to get by, avoid the work relations of industrial capitalism, and leave their progeny more than they had known themselves. Their stories are poignant. A Czech peasant family, forced from home for want of land, finding its way to one of the coaltowns of southeastern British Columbia, and then, having accumulated a little cash from mining, homesteading in the province's arid interior. The homestead would consume a family's work while yielding a living of sorts from intermittent sales from a dry wheat farm and a large measure of domestic self-sufficiency-a farm just sustaining a family, providing a toe-hold in a new society, and a site of adaptation to it. Or, a young woman from a brick, working-class street in Derby, England, coming to British Columbia during the depression years before World War I, finding work up the coast in a railway hotel in Prince Rupert, quitting with five dollars to her name after a manager's amorous advances, traveling east as far as five dollars would take her on the second train out of Prince Rupert, working in a small frontier hotel, and eventually marrying a French Canadian farmer. There, in a northern British Columbian valley, in a context unlike any she could have imagined as a girl, she would raise a family and become a stalwart of a diverse local society in which no one was particularly well off. Such stories are at the heart of settler colonialism (Harris 1997, ch. 8).

The lives reflected in these stories, like the productions of capital, were sustained by land. Older regimes of custom had been broken, in most cases by enclosures or other displacements in the homeland several generations before emigration. Many settlers became property owners, holders of land in fee simple, beneficiaries of a landed opportunity that, previously, had been unobtainable. But use values had not given way entirely to exchange values, nor was labor entirely detached from land. Indeed, for all the work associated with it, the pioneer farm offered a temporary haven from capital. The family would be relatively autonomous (it would exploit itself). There would be no outside boss. Cultural assumptions about land as a source of security and family-centered independence; assumptions rooted in centuries of lives lived elsewhere seemed to have found a place of fulfillment. Often this was an illusion - the valleys of British Columbia are strewn with failed pioneer farms - but even illusions drew immigrants and occupied them with the land.

In short, and in a great variety of ways, British Columbia offered modest opportunities to ordinary people of limited means, opportunities that depended, directly or indirectly, on access to land. The wage laborer in the resource camp, as much as the pioneer farmer, depended on such access, as, indirectly, did the shopkeeper who relied on their custom.

In this respect, the interests of capital and settlers converged. For both, land was the opportunity at hand, an opportunity that gave settler colonialism its energy. Measured in relation to this opportunity, native people were superfluous. Worse, they were in the way, and, by one means or another, had to be removed. Patrick Wolfe is entirely correct in saying that "settler societies were (are) premised on the elimination of native societies," which, by occupying land of their ancestors, had got in the way (1999, 2). If, here and there, their labor was useful for a time, capital and settlers usually acquired labor by other means, and in so doing, facilitated the uninhibited construction of native people as redundant and expendable. In 1840 in Oxford, Herman Merivale, then a professor of political economy and later a permanent undersecretary at the Colonial Office, had concluded as much. He thought that the interests of settlers and native people were fundamentally opposed, and that if left to their own devices, settlers would launch wars of extermination. He knew what had been going on in some colonies - "wretched details of ferocity and treachery" - and considered that what he called the amalgamation (essentially, assimilation through acculturation and miscegenation) of native people into settler society to be the only possible solution (1928, lecture xviii). Merivale's motives were partly altruistic, yet assimilation as colonial practice was another means of eliminating "native" as a social category, as well as any land rights attached to it as, everywhere, settler colonialism would tend to do.

These different elements of what might be termed the foundational complex of settler colonial power were mutually reinforcing. When, in 1859, a first large sawmill was contemplated on the west coast of Vancouver Island, its manager purchased the land from the Crown and then, arriving at the intended mill site, dispersed its native inhabitants at the point of a cannon (Sproat 1868). He then worried somewhat about the proprieties of his actions, and talked with the chief, trying to convince him that, through contact with whites, his people would be civilized and improved. The chief would have none of it, but could stop neither the loggers nor the mill. The manager and his men had debated the issue of rights, concluding (in an approximation of Locke) that the chief and his people did not occupy the land in any civilized sense, that it lay in waste for want of labor, and that if labor were not brought to such land, then the worldwide progress of colonialism, which was "changing the whole surface of the earth," would come to a halt. Moreover, and whatever the rights or wrongs, they assumed, with unabashed self-interest, that colonists would keep what they had got: "this, without discussion, we on the west coast of Vancouver Island were all prepared to do." Capital was establishing itself at the edge of a forest within reach of the world economy, and, in so doing, was employing state sanctioned property rights, physical power, and cultural discourse in the service of interest."

"Settlers have systematically tried to obscure the fact of dispossession in a number of different ways. Most prominent amongst the discursive strategies used has been the denial that they encountered Indigenous societies at all. Even when settlers recognised the presence of Indigenous peoples and societies, they argued that these were so primitive as to be virtually undifferentiated from the local fauna and flora, which in turn justified their subjugation, or even their elimination, by Europeans. ....This assertion was then used to justify unleashing great violence against the inhabitants of newly conquered lands, to kill them, subjugate them, and put them to work on the land and in the mines from which the empire grew rich. S

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Nor were settlers in the Western Hemisphere alone in constructing such narratives, which are ubiquitous across the settler world – from Southern Africa where settlers claimed to have found empty lands that were later invaded by African populations, to Palestine where the Zionist movement talked about a ‘land without a people for a people without a land’. The so-called ‘Terra Nullius’ paradigm, which identified colonised lands as belonging to no one, formed a key justifying narrative for settler expansion around the globe. The claim of non-existing occupancy before ‘discovery’ was a central aspect when claiming ownership over land and removing the Indigenous peoples who inhabited it. The latter, turned into foreigners, migrants, or invaders, could then be fought ruthlessly by settlers in order to protect what was ‘rightfully’ theirs. In fact, this same principle remains central to denying Indigenous people the right to their land today. Settlers, of course, have always known these claims to be vacuous. This is clear given the energy they expounded in developing and imposing the necessary forms of violence and domination that made possible the conquest, displacement and/or exploitation of the same Indigenous people whom they claimed were absent.

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