Duas leituras sobre o colonialismo como “pré-capitalismo agrário” na teoria da propriedade de Locke

This article examines John Locke's theory of property from two interconnected perspectives: (1) Barbara Arneil’s “contextual reading,” which relates Locke to 17th-century English colonial debates; and (2) the “structural analysis” of the chapter on “Property” in the Second Treatise, highlighting how his notion of “improved labor” underpinned the expropriation of Indigenous lands by English colonizers in America. On the one hand, Arneil demonstrates that Locke not only internalized pro-colonization arguments circulating in his time, but also grounded them philosophically in natural law. On the other hand, a close and direct reading of Locke demonstrates a complexification of the theory of natural equality, since the natural right to property, based on human essence, is differentiated according to phases of the state of nature, with more justified rights of appropriation related to a “more advanced” stage of human natural “evolutionism,” when the pre-capitalist agrarian economy developed. It is concluded that Lockean theory, by hierarchizing forms of work and cultivation, reinforced an assimilationist logic – perennial in contemporary practices – that subordinates other peoples to “higher” thoughts and practices.