Structural Violence Is Profit-Driven

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 3 illustrates that structural violence is profit-driven and that there is a formidable epistemic dimension to settler colonialism. Along with facilitating the taking of land, its function is the creation and maintenance of an intergenerational system of interpretive wealth that ties power to social meaning. The framework of “epistemic capitalism” emphasizes that settler colonial social systems are goal-oriented and brings into focus the shared analytic of functional settlement that incorporates dynastic structures of white supremacy and dispossessive technologies of violence through the goal of extracting profit. Drawing on work in progressive economics—specifically, Social Structure of Accumulation (SSA) theory—and theories of racial capitalism in the global south, this chapter develops the notion of “epistemic wealth” to explain the controlled transmissibility of profit in settler colonial societies and argue that a primary driver of social inequality is the intergenerational hoarding of epistemic goods that have been acquired and maintained through violence.