Marxism has long been criticized for its failure to elaborate a theoretical analysis of war. Prioritising a commercial view of history, Marxism has treated war as either a tool of policy or an anachronistic aberration. However, a more foundational and determinate role for capitalism’s violence has begun to be elaborated by Marxist scholars concerned with the place of accumulation in the history of capitalism. Alliez and Lazzarato, for example, insist that the violence of primitive accumulation subtends all capital relations. Capitalism, they argue, has always depended upon the expropriation of nature and so operates as a form of colonial warfare. This chapter draws on their insights to examine Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. Although the novel has been criticized by Marxist theorists for lacking a fully realised class analysis, its narrative of an unnamed Empire’s pitiless campaigns against barbarian forces offers an account of how commerce expropriates lives and land. This chapter argues that the personal ethics of corporeality, truth, and pain developed in the novel cannot be understood outside of this concern with the violent, collective experience of capital accumulation.