Alec BlockisHistory of Political Theory

Final Essay05/02/13

Locke’s Second Treatise of ExploitationAn Essay on the Settler Contract and the Evolution

of Liberalism in the United States

Introduction

John Locke’s liberal theory can readily be regarded as a defense for the

recognition of a universal equality and liberty that permeates the human race. Yet,

the basis for such universalities is a progress towards radical privatization and life’s

necessary preservation through privatization. This progress is commonly referred

to as Locke’s ‘Labor Theory of Property’: the natural imperative to cultivate unsown

land and, through such labor, this land becomes your own property, which nobody

but yourself has the right to. Aside from one’s own life, all property can then be

relinquished through social contract, the agreement in which a group of people is

immersed, allowing them to circulate property as well as establishing a civilized,

legitimate society that adheres to natural laws and respects natural rights.

For Locke, this may very well be utopic, but Carol Pateman argues in her

essay, The Settler Contract, that the complicit imperative to colonize, disenfranchise,

and kill indigenous populations is underwritten in Locke’s social contract (amongst

other similar continental theories) and carried out by European states, including the

United States. Because many aspects of the U.S.’ political foundation mirrors Locke’s

liberalism (e.g. the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property in the Declaration

of Independence) it is worth exploring the settler contract’s emergence in

contemporary U.S. history, especially within the state’s self-preserving actions. This

essay argues that the U.S. functions as a settler polity and consequentially utilizes

tempered colonization as a means for its own preservation.

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Early America

Locke’s liberal theory is founded upon an infallible state of nature, that all

pre-societal men are born in the state of nature, wherein all men are free and equal

in terms of their right to acquire and retain property in any way they choose.1 One’s

own life is considered property in this sense. In this state, no man is obliged to

succumb to another man’s Will nor is any man’s life more important than his

neighbor’s. Man’s deliverance from the state of nature is marked by their obeisance

to the law of nature, through which they are thrust into society. The law of nature

stands in order to preserve the state of nature (equality and liberty) and states that

no human has the right to destroy himself or anything else in his possession. It also

stands that you cannot take another’s life or destroy their possessions.

A community living in obeisance to natural law forms, through social

contract, a civilized society paramount in morality and righteous existence.2 The

social contract, as briefly explained in the introduction, materializes as

interpersonal agreements between men, in accord with natural law, that preserves

property and liberty while limiting the contractors’ freedom to encroach upon one

another’s freedom. Along with regulating interpersonal agreements and civilized

society, the social contract stands as the basis for a society’s legitimate government.

Here, a government mobilizes only as arbitrators between men and their disputes

and generating positive legislation (in accordance with natural law) that precludes

the disputes’ reemergence.

1 Locke, John. Early Modern Texts, "Second Treatise of Government." Last modified 2008. Accessed March 31, 2013. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/lockseco.pdf.2 Ibid, “Second Treatise of Government.”

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What is essential here is that groups of people congregate upon an a priori

belief that property must be preserved and that it is an inalienable right (if not the

definition of freedom, a property-proxy) to acquire property. It’s here where we see

that it is moral to replace the state of nature, where one can constrict another’s

freedom through property-proxy, with a civil society to both protect a moral

community from the wanton of those still in the state of nature and preserve that

community’s freedom to produce property. This imperative to proliferate and

produce a society where ‘state of nature’ exists is what Pateman sees as the basis for

her settler contract.

In fact, the Lockean society-production imperative is a crucial aspect to what

Pateman call the ‘strict logic settler contract’: the thought implicit within social

contracts that presupposes a conception of civil society that must replace states of

nature, territories that have been previously untouched by such a society.3 She

avers that,

“Colonialism in general subordinates, exploits, kills, rapes, and makes maximum use of the colonized and their resources and lands. When colonists are planted in a terra nullius, an empty state of nature, the aim is not merely to dominate, govern, and use but to create a civil society. Therefore, the settlers have to make an original – settler – contract.”4 (pg. 38)

She uses an ancient legal term, terra nullius, to denote the pivotal concept that

facilitates this righteous colonialism. Terra nullius designates uncultivated or

wasted land that is therefore open to common usage and individual privatization. In

3 Carol Pateman, and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination, (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), chap. The Settler Contract.4 Ibid, The Settler Contract

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this way, occupation and settlement can be seen as the act of legally claiming terra

nullius.

Low and behold, terra nullius is central to Locke’s labor theory of property.

The labor theory of property explains how anything residing within ‘the commons’,

uncultivated or wasted5 earth, is open to occupation and settlement and through

cultivating these commons; by putting one’s labor into an unsowed space you make

that labored space your own and this proprietorship is protected by natural law and

a civil society’s government.6 To not cultivate common land would complicitly allow

it to waste and, consequentially, knowingly rob mankind (see footnote 5).

Pateman calls this righteous imperative to privatize, what a political theorist

or society understands as, ‘uncultivated land’ (in other words, terra nullius or

commons) the right of husbandry.7 She continues by showing that those without a

‘proper’ government or property, such as the Native Americans, are subject to

colonization due to the right of husbandry and the society’s presumed illegitimacy

of occupying land subject to husbandry. Patemans’ argument concords with Locke’s

disregard of a Native American government’s legitimacy because they don’t preside

5 For Locke, the term wasted delineates cultivated land that has not been consumed or utilized but, instead, become useless due to neglect or greed, ultimately robbing mankind: “So he who encloses land, and gets more of the conveniences of life from ten cultivated acres than he could have had from a hundred left to nature, can truly be said to give ninety acres to mankind [his italics]. For his labour now supplies him with provisions out of ten acres that would have needed a hundred uncultivated acres lying in common. I have here greatly understated the productivity of improved land, setting it at ten to one when really it is much nearer a hundred to one,” (Locke 2008, pg. 14).6 Locke, John. Early Modern Texts, "Second Treatise of Government." Last modified 2008. Accessed March 31, 2013. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/lockseco.pdf.7 Carol Pateman, and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination, (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), chap. The Settler Contract.

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peacefully nor is their power substantiated by a contractual society’s universal

agreement to its presence and authority.8 Per Locke:

“And thus we see that the kings of the Indians in America are little more than generals of their armies. They command absolutely in war, because there can’t be a plurality of governors and so, naturally, command is exercised on the king’s sole authority; but at home and in times of peace they exercise very little power, and have only a very moderate kind of sovereignty, the resolutions of peace and war being ordinarily made either by the people as a whole or by a council.”9 (pg. 35)

In more succinct language: if a society is founded upon and governed by a

population devoid of social contracts, thus respect for natural law, they lack

morality and cannot be reasoned10 with, therefore crippling the possibility of

handling land disputes diplomatically.11 In conjunction with the labor theory of

property and the right of husbandry, the designation of Native American

government as illegitimate delineates a strict logic settler contract within Locke’s

liberalism.

If New England’s Native Americans did not cultivate their land proper to the

determinations made in the Second Treatise of Government, the British colonists

were within their rights to put their own labor into American soil regardless of what

tribe occupies it. If a tribe responds to this labor with armed force, whether it’s for

8 Locke, John. Early Modern Texts, "Second Treatise of Government." Last modified 2008. Accessed March 31, 2013. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/lockseco.pdf.9 Ibid, “Second Treatise of Government.”10 Locke understands reason, the respect for natural law and contractual obligations, as a mutual necessity between warring parties. His example is that of a thief: when an individual breaks into another’s house by force and attempts to steal property, the thief has willed to not live by natural law and is therefore not capable of reason. Because he cannot be reasoned with, there is no assurance that thief will not also use the force, exerted to break into the home, to kill the homeowner. The thief’s violent unpredictability permits the homeowner to kill the thief in order to preserve such a moral individual (Locke 2008).11 Ibid, “Second Treatise of Government.”

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vengeance or land reclamation, the tribe is actually using unjustified force to steal

the colonist’s property. In this situation, it would be reasonable to assume that the

colonist’s lives are endangered and, in that moment, the Native Americans have

declared themselves to not live appropriate to the law of nature.

These Native Americans can now be killed and whatever small amount of

land that they may have cultivated can be repossessed by the colonists through

conquest12, as reparation for British casualties and damage done to British

settlements. Because Locke has determined that the Native Americans do not have

a legitimate government, a state of war may continue until all Native American

combatants are killed. As long as the British colonists continue to cultivate land

occupied by other Native American tribes and the displaced tribes unjustly retaliate,

the colonists can continue to kill off Native Americans and take what little property

they may possess. Additionally, if a tribe does not unjustly retaliate to the colonists’

cultivation of their territory, the colonists can negate the tribes’ prior sovereignty

and absorb them into British law (assuming that the British law concurs with the

law of nature) as tenants of the territory they once freely inhabited. All of this

righteously occurs within Locke’s moral sphere and classifies itself as a strict logic

settler contract.

This mode of property acquisition is evident in the American Revolution. In

an effort to distance their colonial practices from Spain’s, “[t]he British agreed with

international lawyers that conquered peoples should retain their customs and

12 Locke’s conquest does not entitle the colonizer to large tracts of the colonized’s cultivated land because that land would have been more valuable than any damages that its cultivators could have incurred upon the colonizer (Locke 2008). Remnants of this modus operandi are manifest in the emergence of Native American reservation.

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property,”13 (pg. 45). The Crown was effectively acknowledging Native American

sovereignty against the colonist’s own designation that the Native Americans’

governments were not as legitimate as colonial government, which was followed by

a decree demanding that colonists halt land accession unless it was fairly purchased

and that all land must be purchased for The Crown.14

This decision eventually helped incite the American Revolution15; The Crown

was claiming land that the colonists had put their own labor into. The colonists

were making large profits off the lands and they didn’t want this constrained by

government that both limited husbandry’s expedience and claimed that colonists’

property as its own. When the colonies officially agreed to secede from British rule

in 1776, we can see the imperative to unrestricted property acquisition realize a

clear victory over the respect for law; the desire to colonize underwritten in a bid

for apparent freedom.

The privatization of terra nullius’ victory over British authority is further

supported by the fact that property owners predominantly supported the revolution

(rather than the U.S. populations at large). In the People’s History of the United

States, Howard Zinn shows that general enthusiasm for the Revolutionary War was

weak; the war itself was primarily supported by wealthy white men (e.g. John

Adams, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington) who undertook the challenge of

convincing the American populace to join the revolution.16 The Continental

13 Carol Pateman, and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination, (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), chap. The Settler Contract.14 Ibid, The Settler Contract15 Ibid, The Settler Contract16 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), chap. A Kind of Revolution.

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Congress, a legislative assembly also dominated by rich white men, guided the

colonies through the Revolutionary war, exemplifying this undertaking.

After the war, the newly formed United States continued to colonize land

occupied by Native Americans under the auspices of governments ran primarily by

men who were affluent in property, as well.17 Various Supreme Court cases

compiled by Natsu Taylor Saito illustrate this campaign.18 In Cherokee Nation v.

Georgia (1831), the Cherokees were deemed ‘domestic dependent nations’, those

who occupy territory entitled to the U.S. The Standing Bear (1879) case resulted in

a military arrest of the Poncas, who were attempting to return to their territory

from the reservation that they were originally relocated to. In the first case we see

an evolved right to protect one’s property employed as a pretense: the United States

has acquired Cherokee land, therefore the Cherokees have the right to live there but

their land belongs to the U.S. The second case exhibits an evolved property

protection right as well; the Poncas cannot rightfully reclaim the territory that now

belongs to a legitimate society nor can their abhorrent societal practices interfere

with civilization proper.

These case also show, what Pateman calls, the ‘tempered logic settler

contract’: the aftershock of colonial expansionist practices where the conquered

‘state of nature’ remains recognizable post-colonization and the status quo

instantiated through colonization is retained, utilizing a multitude of tactics.19 In

17 Zinn uses Maryland as an example by citing that the governor was required to have at least 5000£ worth of property and a senator needed at least 1000£ (Zinn: A Kind of Revolution 2003).18 Saito, Natsu Taylor. "Interning the "Non-Alien" Other: The Illusory Protections of Citizenship." Law and Contemporary Politics. no. 173 (2005): 175-213. http://law.duke.edu/journals/lcp (accessed May 3, 2013).19 Carol Pateman, and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination, (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2007), chap. The Settler Contract.

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other words, colonized populations that had inhabited territory deemed terra

nullius, particularly the Native American tribes, have assimilated their presence

within society (to varying extents) yet their presence is still perceivable and this

perception is still tainted by the prejudices held by the colonizing body. In order to

maintain the colonial status quo (e.g. the higher moral caliber of the European way

of life), colonial practices and ideology ensue and evolve into a more tacit

mechanism, even if these practices are undergone completely unconsciously.

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia has shown that the U.S. has secured Cherokee territory

yet the Cherokee people remain not only distinct from U.S. society; they are now

‘dependent’ upon it for survival. Standing bear showed the limits between the

Ponca people and U.S. society: land officially reserved for the development of

American society shall not be occupied by an abhorrent population.

Post-Colonial America and the Global Terra Nullius

U.S. colonial practice, as hinted at in the aforementioned cases, has taken on a

new form in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and has retained the crucial

component, terra nullius, from which a tempered settler contract circumscribes.

John Locke’s theories on increasing production beyond the producer’s ability to

consume the entirety of his labor’s product set the stage for this evolution of

colonial practices.20

As discussed in the previous section, one would be incurring an injustice

upon humanity by overproducing and, consequentially, leaving unused product to

20 Locke, John. Early Modern Texts, "Second Treatise of Government." Last modified 2008. Accessed March 31, 2013. http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/pdf/lockseco.pdf.

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spoil and waste. The problem of overproduction, though, comes into conflict with

the natural prerogative to cultivate as much arable terra nullius as one may come

into contact with, for the very sake of mankind. Locke reconciles this ‘problem’ with

his theory on the origin of money.21 Money has value upon agreement and, unlike

uncared for land, it can be kept without worrying about it spoiling. In this way,

money allows one to produce as much as they can and therefore, accumulate as

much capital as they are able, regardless of whether or not they will use it. Locke

writes that,

“If he traded his store of nuts for a piece of metal and had a pleasing color, or exchanged his sheep for shells, or his wool for a sparkling pebble or a diamond, and kept those… in his possession all his life, this wasn’t encroaching on anyone else’s rights,”22 (pg. 17)

Within Locke’s framework this is, in fact, very unlikely to encroach upon anybody

else’s rights to cultivated land as the value of such land has been frozen for the

laborer in an immutable chasm of capital and consumed elsewhere.

Despite this, what money does allow for, whether in Locke’s liberalism or in

late-Modern American liberalism, is the expansion of markets into territories

previously isolated from liberal society. This expansion, commonly known as

Globalization, refers to the European and American practice of opening markets in

places such as China and Africa where the U.S. and European countries can sell off

surplus product and extract cheap labor and goods. The consequence of this

practice (amongst many others), which has a plethora of defenses that I won’t

bother with here, is the introduction of previously nonexistent economic control

21 Ibid, “Second Treatise of Government.”22 Ibid, “Second Treatise of Government.”

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upon vulnerable regions. Globalization is the new colonial lens; rather than

conquering territory and governing it, the settler contract has tempered into

claiming a region is withholding a ‘market terra nullius’ and colonizing a people’s

economic system.

While globalizing efforts had existed since at least 1853, where the U.S.

deployed warships into Japanese ports to coerce Japan into opening its economic

frontiers to a liberal agenda and international trade, globalization noticeably took

off in the 1890s. Upon the aftermath of the Battle of Wounded Knee (1890), the U.S.

Census Bureau had officially declared that the internal frontier had closed; no more

mainland would be colonized.23 For the United States, this had marked the steep

decline in conquest wars, refocusing military engagements on opening markets

overseas in hopes that this economic expansion would remedy domestic

underconsumption and prevent future recessions. This position was embodied by

an Indianan Senator, Albert Beveridge, in 1897 when he declared that, “American

factories are making more than they can consume. Fate has written our policy for

us; the trade of the world must and shall be ours,”24 (pg. 299).

The U.S. proceeded to open markets throughout the world, including Chinese

and Philippine territories.25 The 1898 Spanish-American War is a particularly

notable venture in globalization. Prior to U.S. intervention, Cuban rebels had been

fighting Spain, Cuba’s colonial governing body, for independence. The New York

Commercial Advertiser was noted for rationalizing U.S. entrance into the war as,

23 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), chap. The Empire and the People.24 Ibid, The Empire and the People.25 Ibid, The Empire and the People.

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“humanity and love of freedom, and above all, the desire that the commerce and

industry of every part of the world shall have full freedom of development in the

whole world’s interest,”26 (pg. 304). The Commercial Advertiser’s (plausibly

accurate) imagination of American intent towards our role in Cuba and the war

played out, at the very least, as ostensibly prophetic. Indeed, the U.S. was offered

sovereignty over Cuba upon America’s triumph in the Spanish-American war. In the

spirit of globalization, the U.S. ‘granted’ Cuba autonomy instead and opted to

intervene in Cuban affairs and supervise their finances.27

The U.S. expansionist tendency should be clear. Whether the U.S. expands

into markets territorially or economically, the notion of terra nullius and spreading

civil society dominates this aspect of foreign policy. Forcing states, such as Japan,

into trade with the U.S. is a lucid exhibition of creating an international market

where it hadn’t once existed while claiming that new market for the U.S. (we

wouldn’t open Japanese ports by force to not have Japan particularly exchange with

us). The Commercial Advertiser’s sentiment exemplified a desire to spread civilized

society. This civil society was, of course, defined by the concordance of humanity,

freedom, and industry, clearly mirroring Locke’s conflation of property

accumulation and preservation with freedom and equality. In deeming that the U.S.

has the right to open foreign markets under the auspices of humanity and freedom,

we find the same principles in a settler contract applied to non-territorial

colonialism and, by the very action of subjugating nations and populations to U.S.

economic policy, the familiar yet tempered visage of U.S. exceptionalism that

26 Ibid, The Empire and the People.27 Ibid, The Empire and the People.

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coincided with the Native Americans’ dehumanization. Globalizing ventures

continued into the end of the 20th century (at the very least) and has now been

accompanied by a tempered liberalism (neoliberalism) that facilitates unrestricted

exchange across international markets.

Michel Foucault’s discussion on liberalism and neoliberalism in The Birth of

Biopolitics offers a comprehensive analysis on the global implementation of

liberalism, the nations that profit from it, and what nations profiting from neoliberal

commerce must do to sustain themselves.28 Foucault begins his discussion with the

concept ‘European Equilibrium’. This equilibrium is a bipartite: dominant European

nations must perennially strengthen themselves economically while preserving the

current imperial configuration (the status quo between nations such as France and

decolonized West African nations).

Globalization is proffered as a response to absence of a self-sustaining

national market.29 European and American liberalism contemporarily supports

itself by extending markets around the world in order to position the world as its

economic domain. By lifting as many international trade restrictions as possible,

goods and liquidities can then be siphoned from labor countries and regions into

financial centers, predominantly (but not exclusively) concentrated in the U.S. and

western Europe.

Foucault also argues that these international economic arrangements, in

accordance with neoliberalism and globalization, are imbued with a sense of

28 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), chap. 24 January29 Ibid, 24 January.

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naturalism, that neoliberal economics is the supreme morality and the very edifice

of liberty.30 In the spirit of John Locke, Foucault has observed that neoliberalism-as-

freedom compels individuals to see exchange, when unmediated by governing

powers, as a civil and legal obligation that is guaranteed by and appropriate to

‘nature’ rather than arbitrary law. Just as the U.S. globalized in the early 20th century

viz. a modernizing and moralizing international crusade, neoliberal economics

requires the instantiation of international law that preserves free trade’s presence

under the façade of morality. This, accompanied by the newly porous borders

between nations that facilitate exchange, heralds the world’s immersion into a

disciplinary imperialism. Not only must liberal nations claim territorial and market

terra nullius, they must recognize a disciplinary terra nullius, where nations

previously independent from liberal practices must exchange and exchange in

accordance with the methods specified by affluent, ruling nations (e.g. the 1944

Bretton Woods accord).

The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) exhibits this

temperament of disciplinary terra nullius and elucidates the emergence of the

tempered settler contract within NAFTA’s implementation. NAFTA is a treaty

signed by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico that had deregulated prior trade restrictions,

allowing capital and goods to move freely between the Mexican-U.S. border without

tariffs, obstacles, etcetera.31 The reduced restrictions between the U.S. and Mexico

are particularly significant because its consequences were the loss of 10,000 U.S.

30 Ibid, 24 January.31 Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States, (New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), chap. The Clinton Presidency.

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jobs and an increase in low-wage jobs in Mexico. The accumulation of labor in low-

wage areas and the accumulation of wealth in affluent property-owning areas is the

dynamic championed by neoliberalism and a growing international economic

discipline. Howard Zinn illustrates this dynamic here:

“The emphasis in foreign economic policy was on “the market economy” and “privatization.” This forced the people of former Soviet-bloc countries to fend for themselves in a supposedly “free” economy, without the social benefits that they had received under the admittedly inefficient and oppressive former regimes. Unregulated market capitalism turned out to be disastrous for people in the Soviet Union, who say huge fortunes accumulated by a few and deprivation for the masses,”32 (pg. 658).

While Locke does not outline the consequences of a global liberalism, his

entire theory rests upon a conceptual ‘natural’ discipline that sets the moral bar for

the entirety of humanity. Additionally, this state of nature and natural law is based

upon the freedom to privatize terra nullius to the greatest possible extent and the

radical equality that presupposes humanity’s right to property so long as they labor.

Furthermore, Pateman’s settler contract exposes that comporting with Lockean

liberalism necessitates the complicit agreement to reclassify occupied territory as

terra nullius, in order to engage in colonial practices, by the occupier’s de facto

abhorrence to the arbitrary moral claims that had facilitated colonial practices in

the first place. Whether a population’s territory, markets, economic system, or

cultures are exploited, liberal economics have functioned to replace ‘states of

nature’ (those treated as terra nullius) with a civil societal framework proffering

modernity and morality while evincing global exploitation.

32 Ibid, The Clinton Presidency.

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Conclusion

Throughout this essay it has been shown that Locke’s liberalism is present in

contemporary U.S. politics and its implicit settler contract, can be recognized in its

tempered form through neoliberalism and international discipline. I’ve

chronologically mentioned three manifestations of terra nullius and its

consequential colonization: territorial colonization, opening foreign markets, and

expanding a moral and economic international discipline. All three of these still

exists today (the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Keystone XL, or Wal-Mart’s

continued outsourcing venture), effectively narrating the sheer ubiquity of

liberalism’s accumulative and exploitative apparatuses. What we’ve found,

essentially, is that liberalism doesn’t only facilitate colonialism, it survives off

constant colonial endeavors in their multitudinous manifestations. The American

Revolution was sparked by property owners’ drive to colonize; early 20th century

expansion was engaged to preserve the United States’ status quo; the late 20th

century ventures into neoliberalism found international control through globalized

moral and economic standards, as well as capital accumulation in the pockets of

those who proffered such disciplines. Foucault had suggested that exploitation

preserves liberal polities and Locke had organized liberal theory as to allow

uninhibited capital accumulation. Both are evident in U.S. domestic and foreign

policy and both can be seen as the very mechanisms necessary to preserve a liberal

nation.

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