What can a sepia-toned postcard of Lüderitz Bay (pictured), formerly a German South West Africa naval base, teach us about the dynamics of global capitalism? The answer is a great deal, according to the central argument of Heide Gerstenberger’s Market and Violence: The Functioning of Capitalism in History. For Gerstenberger, Karl Marx and Marxist theoreticians have fallen into a key misunderstanding regarding the role of violence in capitalism, an oversight they share with liberal figures like Adam Smith: namely, the optimistic interpretation of capitalist accumulation as a historically progressive social development that would ultimately eliminate direct, explicit forms of violence. The link between colonial violence and exploitation in German South West Africa is thus mobilised by Gerstenberger as one of several prime examples of the pervasiveness of overt violence in the “concrete historical developments” of capitalism. However, how plausible is this sepia-toned understanding of violence, as it were, in the face of increasingly digitalised forms of social life? With all the rich historical detail it provides, Gerstenberger’s book seems to shine more as a retrospective account of earlier forms of violence than as a prospective analysis of the sharply colourful and AI-mediated violence of contemporary market transactions.
Gerstenberger’s vocabulary of violence
