I. María Lugones

Among decolonial feminists, perhaps none is more famous in the Anglophone world than María Lugones. For all of the recent attention to Lugones's work, however, the structural role of capitalism in her account is the most often neglected.Footnote ¹ In this section, I trace the persistent centrality of capitalism to Lugones's work, first through her articulation of the “colonial/modern gender system” and then through “the coloniality of gender.” Lugones's most well-known conceptual development, the colonial/modern gender system (CMGS), is often discussed in the absence of the anticapitalist framework in which it is elaborated.Footnote ² It is helpful to remember that CMGS is a critical response to Aníbal Quijano, whose central question turns on how colonial capitalismFootnote ³ reorganized the very structure of power itself throughout the period we have come to call “modernity.”Footnote ⁴ In order to render the deep structural interpenetration of capitalism, modernity, race, and colonization, Quijano argues for the “coloniality of power,” which points to the continued colonial/capitalist character of the modern world, even when formal structures of direct colonization have been replaced by postcolonial nation-state sovereignty (Quijano Reference Quijano2001). Although Lugones finds merit in naming coloniality as the deep fabric that underlies contemporary relations of power, the CMGS is Lugones's conceptual apparatus that critiques the limitations of the coloniality of power framework as Quijano articulates it, as it rests on and reproduces multiple patriarchal, cissexist, and heterosexist assumptions (Lugones Reference Lugones2007, 189–94).

Lugones's critique is aimed specifically at Quijano's work, but we must not forget that she is also addressing a more general trend in decolonial theory, evidenced in the work of what Emma Velez has called the “decolonial dudes” (Dussel, Mignolo, Quijano, Maldonado-Torres, and so on), in which gender and sexuality are taken as secondary, ancillary, or epiphenomenal to the questions of race, coloniality, and capitalism. But what is often lost in contemporary engagements with CMGS is the way in which, despite her trenchant critique of Quijano and the Marxist traditions of which he is a part, Lugones's analysis remains, at least in part, a critique of capitalism. That is to say, Lugones critiques Quijano and the others because their understanding of capitalism is not good enough, because gender, sex, and sexuality are fundamental constituting elements of it. In “Colonialidad y genero,” Lugones specifically critiques Quijano's failure on this point as a reproduction of a “capitalist, global, and Eurocentric” mentality:

The interest and commitment to generating a deepened and expansive critique of capitalism, one that would place gender, sex, and sexuality at the core, constitutes one of the central theoretical aims of Lugones's intervention. Preserving Quijano's insight that coloniality, modernity, and capitalism constitute a single system, Lugones argues that the colonial/modern gender system is equally a fundamental pole of this system:

Of these “elements,” Lugones insists we must include the system of oppositional sexism, patriarchy, sexual dimorphism, and heteronormative monogamy, all of which constituted central parts of the colonial project: “The imposition of this gender system was as constitutive of the coloniality of power as the coloniality of power was constitutive of it . . . whether control over labor, subjectivity/intersubjectivity, collective authority, [or] sex” (202).

In much of Lugones's later work, the focus on capitalism becomes even more explicit. Although her language shifts from “the colonial/modern gender system” to the “coloniality of gender,” her analysis continues to point to the fundamental centrality of gender and sexuality to coloniality and capitalism. In “Methodological Notes toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Lugones explains and expands on her critique of Quijano in terms that amplify the centrality of capitalism to the coloniality of gender: “In thinking of the coloniality of gender, I complicate his [Quijano's] understanding of the capitalist global system of power, but I also criticize his understanding of gender only in terms of sexual access to women” (Lugones Reference Lugones, Isasi-Díaz and Mendieta2011, 75). This “complication” refers to understanding the ways in which gender and sexualityFootnote ⁵ form foundational poles under capitalism: they shape identity, (non)access to the labor market, expectations for unpaid work, multiple forms of violence deployed on those who stray from its norms. They also form strategies of subjugation, dehumanization, and domination in the service of capitalist accumulation for colonial powers. In an article co-authored with Joshua Price, she and Price argue that one must understand “colonialism and capitalism as tightly tied historically and conceptually. Capitalism as the system of production of Western modernity was born out of the conquest and colonization of the Americas” (Lugones and Price Reference Lugones and Price2003, 330). Here Lugones and Price argue that coloniality is unthinkable without understanding the logic of capital, just as capitalism is historically and logically dependent on coloniality. They continue, “We cannot think of class as conceptually separable from race and gender given the history of labor control. . . . An analysis of class that understands it as both raced and gendered stands in the background of this work. However, the logic of capitalism is a logic of Western oppression of Latinos/as” (331). In this sense, class and capitalism remain foundational to Lugones's concept of the coloniality of gender; as she says, “the coloniality of gender is . . . what lies at the intersection of gender and class and race as central constructs of the capitalist world system of power” (Lugones Reference Lugones, Isasi-Díaz and Mendieta2011, 75).

Lugones articulates here a dynamic, nonadditive, nonreductive understanding of how gender, sex, and sexuality, on both the material and ideological levels, are structural to capitalism. She renders capitalism (as Quijano does) as a complex system of power that, though it is about economic relations, it cannot be reduced to labor or the economy; capitalism in Lugones's work, as in much of the decolonial tradition, is a form of power with proliferating effects on social life, interpersonal dynamics, practices, institutions, and social expectations in ways that significantly outstrip any crude reductionism to a binary base-and-superstructure model of the world. Lugones offers an integrated analysis of sex, gender, sexuality, and race in complex, multifaceted, and multidirectional logics that form the dynamic motor of capitalist modernity.

Central here is that in excising the critique of capitalism from Lugones's work we lose the full extent of her critique. We can neither remove the centrality of capitalism to Lugones's work nor underestimate the contribution of the colonial/modern gender system to a deep, thoroughgoing understanding of what capitalism is, how it emerged, and how it continues to function. Rather, the abolition of capitalism thus emerges as a central part of Lugones's conception of decolonial feminism. She explains, “I call the analysis of racialized capitalist gender oppression the coloniality of gender; I call the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender decolonial feminism” (Lugones Reference Lugones, Isasi-Díaz and Mendieta2011, 77, emphasis in original).

However, from Lugones's perspective, Marxism remains an inadequate academic and activist framework to confront capitalism in its fullest form. She and Price assert, “Marxism is one analysis that seeks out possibilities solely in terms of resistance to capitalist exploitation without any consideration of race or gender or the organization of sexuality” (Lugones and Price Reference Lugones and Price2003, 331). If we take this claim literally, it is demonstrably false, as significant bodies of Marxist literature take race, gender, and sexuality as fundamental axes to the constitution of capitalism.Footnote ⁶ If, however, we take it as a speculative claim that Marxism, even when attuned to racial and heteropatriarchal dynamics, has fundamentally focused on “resistance to capitalist exploitation,” Lugones points to the necessity of thinking about capitalism as a system that is more complicated and more capacious than a singular focus on exploitation. Gender, race, and sexuality are dynamics that are interarticulated with class, which means that exploitation is a central feature of their organization; however, capitalism fundamentally cannot be reduced to exploitation, even to theories of exploitation centered on gender, sex, and sexuality. Fundamentally, capitalism as a structure linked to coloniality, gender, and modernity far outstrips the economic realm. An exclusive focus on questions of exploitation, especially in regard to organizing, fails to adequately thematize the multifarious, multifaceted reach of capitalist logic; in an ironic sense, much anticapitalist thinking underplays how pervasive capitalism is by continuing to reduce it to exploitation and economic factors alone. Lugones's steadfast commitment to anticapitalist politics and her critique of Marxism taken together suggest that a decolonial and feminist account of capitalism would need to intervene in the ways that capitalism, as an integrated system, is always in excess of profit and accumulation.

Lugones's concepts of the CMGS and the coloniality of gender significantly shift the conceptual terrain of what capitalism is and how it functions. This absolutely central reframing of the analysis must anchor a decolonial feminism. One of the questions that Lugones's reframing opens up is how, once we have shifted our understanding of what capitalism is, we must also shift the way that movements coalesce to fight capitalism. Sylvia Wynter begins to answer this different but complementary question, highlighting how a shift in analysis often necessitates a shift in praxis.

II. Sylvia Wynter

Colonial capitalism forms a central problematic for Sylvia Wynter's work. Her commentaries on class, capitalism, and Marx have been vast and varied over her career, but I want to focus on Wynter's most sustained and direct engagement with anticapitalist movement organizing, in a paper she gave at the American Sociological Association in the fall of 1982. Focusing specifically on this paper illuminates Wynter's understanding of how capitalism is structured; although the critique of capitalism is certainly present in her other work, this explicit and sustained engagement clarifies how Wynter understands both the structure of capitalism and its points of intersection with coloniality.Footnote ⁷ But more specifically, this paper forms the clearest and most explicit engagement with the limitations in Marxist approaches to understanding capitalism; it thus also constitutes one of Wynter's clearest engagements with how social movements can and should approach the prospect of unseating a system that weaves together oppressions based on race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Wynter's paper, “Beyond Liberal and Marxist-Leninist Feminisms,” argues that these two approaches to politics share a common logical feature, what Wynter calls “abduction schemas” or “analogical systems.” Each of these theories is structured by a singular, anchoring “morphogenetic fantasy” that ultimately reduces its analysis of the world to a single foundational cause to which other forces of domination are added or analogized (Wynter Reference Wynter1982, 3). The morphogenetic fantasies of liberalism (“human nature”) and Marxism-Leninism (“economic forces”) ultimately function to reinscribe naturalized forms of hierarchy (specifically those of race, gender, and sexuality) internal to the elaboration of the theories themselves into their “modes of calculation” (8).

In critiquing Marxist-Leninism, Wynter also displaces the terminology of “capitalism” nearly altogether, instead explaining that “the contemporary sociohistorical order” is structured through what she terms “classarchy,” an order that synthesizes patriarchy and monarchy (3) emerging ideologically through “the middle class cultural revolution” (5). The historical referent for this process was the enrichment of “The Freeman” (6) through “Europe's expropriation of the lands of the Americans, by the purchase-sale and use of the forced mass labor of Africans,” and in its revolt against “the aristocratic-monarchical order” (4). The rise of the bourgeois order foregrounded the “accumulation of non-landed property, of capital, as the General Equivalent Signifier of Identity and Status” (5). “The American that Jefferson invented,” she argues, “was a recycled mode of class-archy in its FREE WHITEMAN form. The Black-as-Negro functioned in American classarchy as Women had functioned in patriarchy” (9, emphasis in original).

The middle-class revolution transformed the logic of monarchy into classarchy. Principles of consanguinity became connaturality, divine right became natural sanction, and natural reason replaced noble blood as the ideological determinant stabilizing social hierarchies. This revolution was structurally committed to racism, not only through its reliance on slavery and colonization, but also in that the construction of the Freeman or “Man-as-Liber” was itself a racialized and gendered construct in which freedom signified a natural-born right to those born white men (6, emphasis in original). In this sense, Wynter argues that classarchy is a “sociodicy,” or “an order in which everyday praxis justifies the ways of the order to itself” (10–11). Wynter uses race, binary gender, and heteronormativity as her examples here.

We can already begin to see both the synergy between Lugones and Wynter as well as the differences in their focus. The coloniality of gender renders how race, sexuality, and class are articulated in and through a particular history of gender and gendering as essential parts of the colonial-capitalist story. Wynter's concept of classarchy folds into this matrix the way that monarchical structures of power and hierarchy become transmuted into this system, giving, in a sense, a speculatively genetic account for how the hierarchical impositions of colonial capitalism arose inside the European context even before the beginning of the colonial process. Given the deeply embedded nature of gender, race, class, sexuality, and hierarchy more generally to the structure of colonial capitalism, Wynter focuses on what kinds of social movements would be capable of intervening against such a complicated and proliferating structure without subtly reproducing it.

In considering how to orient liberation work, Wynter generates two examples of feminist movements that have begun to militate for a “feminism in its own name,” that is, in a way that does not reproduce the morphogenetic fantasy and its particularizing function (13). She points to the Marxist-feminist (though not Marxist-Leninist) Wages for Housework Campaign,Footnote ⁸ specifically through Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, and to lesbian militancy that demands the dismantling of heteronormativity (specifically in the work of Catherine MacKinnon and Virginia Woolf). Against a Marxist Leninism “based on the central concept of exploitation” through capitalist profit, (18) Marxist feminism “suggests that “exploitation” takes place in multiple forms inside and outside the factory, outside the process of production; which therefore suggests that the accumulation of value through production is a subset of multiple global and societal processes of such accumulation” (19). The multiplication of sites of value production “calls into question the mode of calculation” generated by more orthodox concepts of Marxism, which “elects one of the multiple factors as the Major Referent and General Equivalent” (9–20, emphasis in original). The logic and mode of calculation of nonfeminist Marxisms (and even feminist Marxist Leninisms) emerges, for Wynter, as a mode of stabilizing the complexity of multiple interdependent factors through reinscribing hierarchy in revolutionary analysis; the same is true of Eurocentric Marxists, who “substitute the class of classes . . . with a member of the class” (23). In both cases, rather than seeing “the historical global process by which a single network of accumulation was forcibly installed with all the peoples of the planet harnessed to the accumulation-project” (23), class reductionism of various Marxist varieties substitutes the white, male, industrial proletarian for all of the various people and subject positions dominated by capital.

The Wages for Housework Campaign, on Wynter's reading, specifically refuses this theoretical and rhetorical move, insisting on the specificity of the value of multiple sites in the process of accumulation and thus provides a path for feminism to pursue without relapsing into reductionist logics: “the call for equal pay for housewives, and for ‘comparable worth’ pay challenges, by implication, the system of representation of classarchy and the logic of the closed theoretical systems which make this mode of calculation ‘calculable.’ The call for housewives and equal pay threaten above all to unfix the Referent” (26).

For Wynter, the call to compensate naturalized, feminized labor fundamentally undercuts the error she sees perpetuated by Marxist Leninism; in “refus[ing] the fixed Referent of ‘productive labor,’” Wynter exposes the ways in which capitalism exceeds this boundary, built not only on reproductive labor, but also on modes of thought, social practices, and schemas of valuation (27). For this reason, Wynter argues that a traditional Marxism will not bring the liberation it promises: “the Marxian concept of exploitation is only one form of multiple mechanisms of coercion and of domination” (31). In developing a synthetic, multivalent understanding of capital's imbrication with proliferating dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality, Wynter argues that discourses of liberation must point beyond the class struggle, classically conceived: “if all modes of resistance are defined as a struggle against exploitation one form of struggle becomes hegemonic, i.e., the labor mode of resistance. This mode then defines the targets, methods, places, and instruments of confrontation” (34). The problem for Wynter is that if capital encompasses a logic that exceeds questions of labor, then modes of resistance that focus only on labor, exploitation, and the workplace will fail to unseat the full force of capital itself.

We can see here some of the deep resonances between Lugones and Wynter. As I argued above, Lugones is also committed to a conception of capitalism that cannot be reduced to labor or even to the economic realm. In this sense, unfixing labor as the sole referent for understanding capitalism is necessary in order to trace the full contours of what Lugones calls the coloniality of gender. But, as Wynter explains, the question is not only an academic one; it is also a question about how to organize and orient movements of resistance.

Without unfixing labor as the sole referent for capitalism, Wynter argues that the Marxist-Leninist approach to resistance takes on a neo/colonizing form. The class-reductionism Wynter identifies as so pernicious to anticapitalism and to feminism extends beyond a merely academic misapprehension; it has direct consequences on social discourses and movement politics: “This representation enables the imposition of a power-prestige order of differential value between the Western class struggle, the Black race struggle, the struggle against sexism, and non-Western national-cultural struggles” (24). Positing the white, industrial, male proletarian as the model for all relations to capitalism not only analytically fails to render the extent of capitalism's reach, but it also perpetuates a Eurocentric erasure that is itself deeply imbricated in capital's logic.

From Wynter's perspective, then, a decolonial feminism requires “an autonomous frame of reference,” by which Wynter means one that could avoid the reproduction of the morphogenetic fantasy (12). When liberal feminism mobilizes against “male supremacy” or Marxist-Leninist feminism against “capitalist supremacy” (12), Wynter explains that they each miss the “multiple modes of supremacy” that interlock in the structure of classarchy, reproducing reductive logics through which one mode of subjection is taken as primary or fundamental to all of these others (13). These forms of feminism thus “operate as autonomized particularit[ies] rather than as a particularity constitutive of a new non-middle class mode of universality,” echoing Fanon's call for a new humanity and a new universality (14).Footnote ⁹

Rethinking the concepts of humanity and universality connects deeply to much of Wynter's other work. The “overrepresentation of Man” that forms the object of Wynter's critique in “Unsettling” is part and parcel of the middle-class mode of universality that has installed white bourgeois men and their desires/experiences as the governing logic of social life (Wynter Reference Wynter2003) Indeed, the question of the human, and the way that the structures of colonial capitalism recognize only “The Freeman” and “Man-as-Liber” as fully human, emerges as the central “double bind” (Parker Reference Parker2018) that recurs throughout Wynter's work (Mignolo Reference Mignolo and McKittrick2015). Wynter's discussion of this problem in this essay, however, differs from the discussion elsewhere in that here Wynter is concerned less with rendering how structures of domination are constituted through colonial concepts of humanity and universality than with how anticolonial and anticapitalist movements fail to adequately digest this insight. In this sense, social movements that refuse to excise the colonial/modern understanding of humanity and universality from their logics reproduce rather than unseat the fundamental notions of humanity and universality that underpin the very system they militate against.Footnote ¹⁰

For Wynter, this call toward a decolonized, feminist mode of universality is based in class politics. She explains,

Although Wynter displaces traditional Marxist concepts, class politics are an essential component of her thought, grounding anticapitalism through her articulation of a synthetic, intersectional approach to capital. “Class supremacy” in her work is not posited as the ultimate cause or the reductive base, but it does frame the fundamental texture of all other forms of oppression and domination. From Wynter's perspective, gender, race, and sexuality cannot be thought without class, but neither can class be thought apart from the full range of dominating logics of which it is a constitutive feature.

Taking Wynter's and Lugones's conceptions of decolonial feminism together strengthens the possibilities for an expansive understanding of capitalism. Lugones's analysis of the coloniality of gender charts the general logic of the colonial capitalist system that logically and historically hinged on the violent imposition of binary gender, patriarchy, and heterosexism; Wynter explores how a thoroughgoing response to this system must entail a mode of theorizing and enacting resistance that does not, subtly and despite its best intentions, replay this violence through prioritizing some aspects of this system over others. It is only when both academics and activists can displace the abduction schemas fundamental to the fixed referent that the possibility for unseating the coloniality of gender becomes actionable.

Taking these figures’ work together opens up an important terrain of thinking that neither Wynter nor Lugones exhaustively investigates: the contemporary forms that the violence endemic to colonial capitalism takes in the contemporary world. Sayak Valencia explores how the contemporary structure of colonial capitalism is not an unproblematic unity; rather, colonial capitalism unfolds inside a highly differentiated geography of power and practices. In unlocking the differential trajectories of colonial capitalism's unfolding, Valencia explores how rooting analyses of colonial capitalism in specific geographies can enhance our understanding of capitalism as a structure and the kind of resistance necessary to unseat it.

III. Sayak Valencia

Mexican transfeminist Sayak Valencia approaches the question of capitalism from a different frame than either Lugones or Wynter; rather than locating a decolonial feminist perspective on capitalism from the perspective of the living present of the past, Valencia looks at the recent transformations of capitalism in the twentieth century in Mexico in particular, but also more generally in Latin America. From her perspective, with the advent of neoliberal globalization, capitalism has entered a new phase, what she calls “gore capitalism,” in which death, torture, and violence have become themselves marketable commodities. The rise of saleable violence through organized crime, organ theft, kidnapping, and contract murder as effects of the contemporary shape of coloniality shifts the fundamental structure of capitalist accumulation into a “new necrophallogocentric order” (Valencia Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018, 291). Building on the critiques of “intersectional, mestiza subjects,” among whom she names Chandra Mohanty, Chela Sandoval, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Cherrie Moraga, Valencia both critiques Marxist understandings of capitalism and extends them, charting a path toward a decolonial transfeminist anticapitalism. Mobilizing the decolonial philosophy of Walter Mignolo, Valencia argues that this new approach to capitalism can only come by way of “geopolitically situated forms of knowledge” that refuse false universalizations (113). In a theoretical move reminiscent of Wynter's call to unfix the referent of our thought and politics, Valencia critiques theories of capitalism that generate their theories with a Eurocentered referent; in so doing, Valencia insists that important and new facets of anticapitalist theory can be unlocked only by anchoring theory in the particularities of how capitalism develops differently across a differentiated colonial geography. In this sense, Valencia adds another dimension to Wynter's call, thematizing how the project of unfixing the referent of capitalism can benefit from specific place-based analyses of capitalism's trajectory in contexts like Mexico. From her perspective, the transformation of global capital has shifted the role of violence as a means of extraction, and thus, in order to generate an adequate analysis of capitalism in the contemporary conjuncture, the traditional theoretical tools of Marxist political economy need to be reworked from a decolonial and transfeminist perspective.

Valencia's focus on violence, though somewhat different from Lugones's and Wynter's, should be read as complementary to their work. Both Lugones's coloniality of gender and Wynter's classarchy chart the fundamental systemic violence that structures the world under colonial capitalism. Gore capitalism marks how these forms of systematic violence become concretized and crystalized into direct, interpersonal violence as one of its many effects. In this sense, Valencia charts how the coloniality of gender becomes lived in embodied practices of violence under classarchy. And for Valencia, one of the specific practices that arises out of colonial capitalism is the specific matrix of gore practices.

Valencia's theory hinges on a distinctly new phenomenon of the contemporary age: the “gore marketplace.” The gore marketplace opens up for sale “products and services . . . associated with necropower and necro-practices,” a whole panoply of death- and torture-related consumables (Valencia Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018, 225). Rather than framing this emergence as a micro-phenomenon or a liminal space, she argues that this portends the radical reshaping of capitalist logic itself, “not because the practices are new, but rather because in previous periods they remained below the surface” (214). The immediate cause of the gore marketplace can be located in neoliberal global developments—deregulation, financial speculation, the erosion of state-provided social services, neocolonial structural adjustment practices, debt inflation, wage depression, hyperconsumerist demand—all of which have led to the increasing precarity of people in the Global South in order to facilitate hyper-accumulation by states and private businesses in the North. As these developments exacerbate poverty, insecurity, and precarity, alternative forms of work offer the only path to survival: participation in illicit economies, including those that make use of spectacularized violence as integral features of its practice (murder, dismemberment, torture, snuff films, kidnappings, and so on). Although capitalism always relied on forms of violence as its condition of possibility, the new era “makes violence a tool of production and then globalizes it” (76). Gone are the neo/liberal ideological narratives of contract as nonviolence based in at least putative notions of “consent” to market relations (Harvey Reference Harvey2007, 39–63); neoliberalism often styles itself as the antidote to violence, but under gore capitalism, “the economy is itself a form of violence,” one without pretense or dissimulation (Valencia Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018, 84, emphasis in original). In eliminating the necessity to disavow the violence structural to its logic,  gore capitalism “derives from neoliberalism, yet it is not circumscribed or exhausted by it” (98). Gore's visibility, availability, and reach on the global market signal the dawn of a new era, structured by a new logic.

As a development generated by neoliberalism, the formation of gore capitalism has an inextricable (neo)colonial dimension. It can hardly be doubted that the internationalization of the “Chicago Boys” strategies for accumulation have been and continue to be imposed on Mexico in particular and the Global South in general in deeply colonial ways. Valencia calls attention to this dynamic, locating the spectacularized problems and violence in the third world as the outcome of violence imposed on it by the first. Gore capitalism is moreover sustained through a neocolonial outsourcing that “views developing countries as manufacturing centers for gore merchandise meant to satisfy international recreational and practical demand” (87).

However, in true decolonial form, her account does not reduce gore capitalism to mere unidirectional imposition, as if the people of the Global South are mere passive recipients of violence, ideology, and order from the North. Gore capitalism is constituted not only by neocolonial neoliberalism, but also through the agency of oppressed and exploited peoples. Her concept of necroempowerment as agential response to first-world accumulation practices speaks to a fundamental feminist necessity to recognize that oppression does not negate agency altogether, even if it certainly limits its possibilities. In this context, the act of using violence can be explained through capitalism, but cannot be reduced to it; nor can the act be explained through moralizing judgments. The use of violence as a means to survive, or even to amass capital, must be thought beyond these easy reductions. The necroempowerment of contemporary capitalism both “compl[ies] with the orders and directives of the heteropatriarchal and misogynist capitalism of the West” and in some ways resists it, subverts it, twists its logic, and uses it to the advantage of those who are structurally disadvantaged (108).

Just as capitalism has always been structured through gendered violence, gore capitalism is no exception. This connection is so deep that the current industrial geopolitical system has been called “the femicide machine” (González Rodríguez Reference González Rodríguez2012). The widespread femicide in Mexico is only the most obvious instantiation of the sexual and gendered consequences of turning violence into a powerful tool of enrichment. But gore capitalism not only produces gendered effects, it is anchored to a heteropatriarchal logic in a world “marked by gender, race, class, and the geopolitical distribution of vulnerability” (Valencia Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018, 300). Inside the contemporary system, the deployment of violence “becomes first a resource for masculine socialization and second a crucial tool for obtaining legitimacy through compliance with one of the most important demands of masculinity: access to power through economic enrichment and the superiority that this bestows within the hierarchy of patriarchal and capitalist value” (293). In other words, subtending gore capitalism lies a specifically heteropatriarchal notion of value, one that can be demonstrated only through violence. In the gore epoch, value itself becomes transmuted into misogynist violence, in its “physical, symbolic, media, and bodily” forms (287). From this perspective, Marxist fixations on value under capitalism take on another valence.

Valencia's concept of gore capitalism challenges prevailing ways that violence is conceptualized in analyses of capitalism.Footnote ¹¹ Part of what Valencia traces here is the way in which for much of the world, direct violence is not a mode of “primitive accumulation”Footnote ¹² consigned to the past, but is constitutive of capitalism itself. This is rather different from much of the contemporary theorization of “ongoing primitive accumulation,” in which direct means of coercion form the condition for the possibility of capital's valorization (Federici Reference Federici2012a; Soiland Reference Soiland2016; Beier Reference Beier2018). In these approaches, forms of direct violence continue in order to secure women's (especially racialized women's) specific vulnerability on the capitalist wage market and to maintain the extraction of women's unpaid social reproduction work in the home. But in the forms of violence Valencia discusses, violence is not used as a means to press proto-proletarians into the capitalist wage market, nor as a means of extracting land, labor, or resources necessary for commodity production; violence itself becomes the commodity, that which is bought and sold. In this sense, ongoing primitive accumulation perhaps seeks to thematize the right phenomenon, but hasn't developed an adequate conceptual tool. Rather than tracing the extra-economic means of violence used to stabilize the market, for Valencia, “violence has become the law of the market, inverting the usual relationship between these terms: until now it had been the market that set the rules for the use of violence” (Valencia Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018, 62). Under the current conditions of gore capitalism, violence can no longer be localized as a mere tool of the market in maintaining or stabilizing its conditions; the gendered and sexualized character of violence is synonymous with the market itself. When (toxic) masculinity materializes in the marketized sale of death, violence must be reconceived as integral to the logic of accumulation itself.

All three of the thinkers under consideration here are interested in the question of how capitalism is necessarily sutured to colonial structures of race, gender, class, and sexuality. Lugones answers this question historically: capitalism has always been committed to a heteropatriarchal logic in its accumulative strategy, and thus cannot be conceived in the absence of it. Wynter takes up this analysis, exploring how social movements conserve rather than reject this historical legacy in their interventions. Valencia, however, answers this question at a different level. If violence structures the contemporary gore marketplace, and this violence is a concretion of toxic masculinity, then the structure of capitalism relies on, as the ultimate source of value, a heteropatriarchal logic fused to the logic of accumulation. When wealth and power are socially coded as masculine supremacy, profit itself becomes a tool of heteropatriarchy; Valencia's articulation refuses the choice of either class reductionism or dual systems theory to generate an analysis of the synthetic logic of gore capitalism's essentially heteropatriarchal system of valuation.

This system of value has not been well understood by traditional Marxists, nor even by Marxist feminists. This form of value, sutured inextricably to heteropatriarchy, moves beyond the central Marxist analytic of surplus value embedded in labor power. For Marxists and Marxist feminists, the ultimate source of value under capitalism derives from labor: accumulation is primarily a strategy of generating surplus by paying less than the value of labor. However, in the violence of the contract killing, the kidnapping, or the dismemberment-as-deterrent, the source of value is no longer the labor power located in the body, but is rather the body itself.Footnote ¹³ What emerges here is “the body as a strategy for accumulation” (Valencia Reference Valencia and Pluecker2018, 161), but completely opposite from the way that Marxist feminists usually conceive it: not toward the stabilization of accumulation through labor, but through the commodification of death. In this sense, “bodies have been transformed into an absolute commodity, utilizing the most gruesome kinds of violence to explicitly categorize those bodies and life itself, whose exchange value is monetary and transnational” (204).

Moreover, a form of specificity in these modes of relation stands largely outside traditional Marxist analyses. One of the sources of alienation under capitalism is in the fungibility of labor—in a real sense, the capitalist does not care about the unique individuality of workers, only about the labor they can perform. In this sense, individuality, over and above direct profit-generating skills, is totally ancillary to capitalist exploitation. But in contract killing, torture, and even more so in kidnapping, leverage comes only from the uniqueness of the individual. One could not replace the kidnapping victim with any other person or extract through torture a desired piece of information; their value comes directly from their specificity (their family ties, their wealth, their specific knowledge, their loved ones’ ability to influence policy, and so on). What is monetized, the source of value, is hence singularity rather than fungibility: “in gore capitalism, the force of work is replaced by gore practices, understood as the systematic and repeated use of the most explicit forms of violence to produce capital” (72).

Gore practices thus challenge prevailing historical-materialist approaches to capitalism, even feminist ones. But rather than depart from Marxism altogether, Valencia articulates an alternative approach: “Classical economic thinking about production, consumption, and its resultant capital no longer function, and the production process itself is subverted, converting it into something barely recognizable or interpretable. This reality makes clear the urgent need to retrofit concepts of political economy and its relations of production in order to develop an analysis of the contemporary phase of capitalism” (192). Doing so requires us to move away from reductive analyses of Mexico's place in the world order, which often reduces it to “Spare-Part-Factory-Countries that supply cheap labor and immigrants” to broaden our understanding of value, violence, and class struggle (85). This also requires moving beyond a Manichean understanding of a world based in bourgeois exploiters and proletarian victims, as gore practices form a “recolonized” and necroempowered site of “class struggle” against the colonial distribution of capitalism's riches and precarity (283). In this sense, the gore marketplace operates both as an intensification of capitalism and the expression of its injustice; though gore “is invested in the logic of the free market, it also inverts this logic from its location at the margins of legality. It also recuperates and reinforces that logic by centering violence and instigates a re-evaluation of capitalist logic by positing its own reloaded version of it, its gore version” (198).

The analytic of gore capitalism traces one of the ways that the imbrication of coloniality with gender, race, class, and sexuality takes shape in the contemporary world. One of the lessons of Valencia's work is that in order to trace the contemporary contours of the coloniality of gender, on the one hand, and in order to mobilize effective moments against it, on the other, deep explorations of the differential trajectories of colonial capitalism are necessary. Gore capitalism names one particularly potent manifestation of this conjunction, but Valencia's work gestures toward a broader vision that would require a multiplicity of empirically robust theories of colonial capitalism that trace the particular contours of capitalism's structures across time and place.

IV. Toward a Decolonial and Feminist Anticapitalism

Separate examination of each of these authors’ work has made it clear that each contains valuable insights for developing a decolonial and feminist anticapitalist framework, one that moves beyond the subtle Eurocentrism of much contemporary anticapitalist theory and practice. What I sketch in this section is not yet such a full theory, but rather is offered as a definitional signpost, a provisional explanation of what such a theory would entail. In so doing, I hope to show that although Lugones, Wynter, and Valencia elaborate different theories of capitalism framed by their own experiences, theoretical influences, and positionalities, their insights must be integrated in order to ground a robust theory of capitalism. The positions and terms of each author are singular and irreducible to one another, but certain common themes emerge in their conceptualizations of capitalism.

Each argues that rendering the deep structural complexities of capitalism in all of its forms requires a vibrant theoretical apparatus that can chart the multiple flows and conjunctions of oppression and exploitation, that can think capaciously and differentially about their constitution. Developing an adequate theory of capital requires rapt attention to the multiplicity of formations that constitute it, revealing the complicated and contradictory relations that constitute it. Without such a view of capitalism, the depth, complexity, and resiliency of capitalism will be missed.

A robust theory of capitalism would thus need to include a theoretico-historical understanding of how the current capitalist system developed in and through colonial and heterosexist politics. Understanding capitalism's history in order to understand its present configuration and its logic has always been a central facet of anticapitalist work; it is through the historical-materialist understanding of history that it becomes possible to understand the shape of what is through what has come before. There are cycles, logics, and patterns to any system; unlocking them is a central part of the dynamic possibility of bringing history and theory together. On this point, both Lugones and Wynter chart important directions for a decolonial and feminist history of capitalism's present. Lugones's colonial/modern gender system exposes that the history of capitalism is the history of racialized, gendered, sexualized colonization. Approaching the history of capitalism, colonization, racism, and heterosexism not from a multiple systems perspective, but from a single systems orientation forges the foundation of an anticapitalist theory as necessarily concerned with race, gender, coloniality, and sexuality. The colonial/modern gender system, in understanding these histories as irreducibly intertwined, is the only way to counter the separation of theory and history that is so common in nondecolonial anticapitalist thinking. Moreover, a robust, decolonial feminist theory of capitalism must pluralize the foundational narrative not only of what capitalism is, but how it developed historically, beyond the commonly rehearsed narrative of it as an endogamous invention of early modern Europe, recognizing how capitalism as a world system was not simply imposed on the world by Europe, but was invented through the racial-gendered practices of colonization itself. It is only through such a theoretical history that the full force of oppression, not only exploitation, can be unearthed as structural to capitalism as a system.

This insight must be carried through anticapitalist critique, not only in its history but also in its theory. Wynter's analysis makes clear through the critique of the morphogenetic fantasy that a decolonial and feminist theory of capitalism must refuse the all-too-common narrative that capitalism not only has a single history, but a singular form. A theory of capitalism must be wedded to understanding the ways in which systems are adaptive to regional and local conditions, how as a world system it has always been and continues to be mobile, plastic, and proliferating; in other worlds, contemporary anticapitalist theory relies far too often on abduction schemas and analogical reasoning in order to gesture toward plurality, but as Wynter reminds us, this is only ever an anemic accounting for difference, one that seeks to domesticate divergence by installing a master narrative as the anchor for theory. But a truly decolonial and feminist theory of capitalism would be irreducibly polycentric. What Wynter identifies as the moment in which Marxist feminism emerged as a “feminism in its own name” was when it refused to substitute a “member of the class” for “the class of classes.” Wynter recognizes the interwovenness of the world but does so in a way that grounds the domination of the world by capital in its differential manifestations. Integrating, in both history and theory, the multiple relays among capitalism, colonization, and heterosexism must be done in such a way that refuses to take manifestations of capitalist accumulation in the North, in the factory, in the white working classes as the material or ideological anchor for such a theory; indeed, it must refuse to take any specific site as the model against which all other instances of capitalism would be measured, judged, or substituted.

The practice of generating such a decolonial and feminist theory of capitalism must thus begin from the historico-theoretical commitment to a multiplicity of engaged and embodied local and regional studies. These studies would have to develop their own understandings of the specificities of particular practices and histories across multiple contexts, temporalities, and sites, bringing these together in order to understand capitalism simply as the system that ties these seemingly disparate points together. Valencia discloses one model (though surely not the only one) for how such an investigation would take place, refusing the importation of categories and assumptions from elsewhere. What Valencia shows, in one vivid example, is how careful attention to geographical specificity changes the theory of capitalism itself. Valencia's insistence also on resistance and agency as a central feminist theme is a lesson that must be mobilized in thinking about capitalism not only as a unilateral imposition, but as a system shaped through agential practices and contestations, through desire and need.

A decolonial, feminist theory of capitalism, in order to live up to the insights sketched by each one of these thinkers, would have to integrate all of these points. Unseating the multifaceted imbrication of gender, sex, race, and class under colonial capitalism thus requires a multifocal praxis. It demands not only reframing the historical narrative of the present, bringing to light the various intersectional oppressions through which it is constituted, but also a polycentric mode of accounting that attends to differences across multiple geographies of power. It also requires reframing anticapitalist movement work in line with these insights. In order to militate against the gendered and sexualized structures of colonial capitalism, all of these thinkers chart the necessity for thinking about capitalism beyond the easy reductions of this system to economics, to class, and to labor. Rethinking what capitalism is in line with the insights of Lugones, Wynter, and Valencia reveals it to be a deeper and more complex system than is often supposed; this in turn requires that resistance too becomes more capacious to rise to the challenge. It is only through grounding anticapitalist theory in the historical, theoretical, and empirical work guided by decolonial feminism that we may yet understand the full extent of capitalism as a system and that we may envision modes of resistance that uproot it in its entirety— which is to say, in not only its economic models, but in its colonial and heteropatriarchal logics.