Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century

Living Theories and True Ideas

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Morgan Ndlovu, Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Morgan Ndlovu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000411447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Marxism and Decolonization in the 21st Century is a ground-breaking work that highlights the resurgence and insurgence of Marxism and decolonization, and the ways in which decolonization and decoloniality are grounded in the contributions of Black Marxism, the Radical Black tradition, and anti-colonial liberation traditions.

Featuring leading and young scholars and activists, this book is a practical scholarly intervention that shows how democratic Marxism and decoloniality might converge to provoke planetary decolonization in the 21st century. At the centre of this process, enabled by both increasing human entanglements and the resilience of racism, the volume's contributors analyse converging forces of anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-patriarchy, anti-sexism, Indigenous People's movements, eco-feminist formations, and intellectual movements levelled against Eurocentrism.

This book will be of great interest to students, scholars, and intellectuals interested in Marxism, decolonization, and transnational activism.

1

Introduction

Marxism and decolonization in the 21st century

Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni and Morgan Ndlovu

What such historical spectacles of human endeavour share, of course, is the magnificence of human spirit: the inextinguishable resolve to refashion society according to some powerful but imperfect moral vision.

Cedric J. Robinson 2000: xxvii

Without revolutionary practice, without the translation of Marxist ideas into life, theory becomes a set of outworn dogmas and a cover for reformism and opportunism. Without Science, without a strictly scientific view of social development, revolutionary action degenerates into adventurism and leads to anarchism.

Institute of Marxism-Leninism 1973: 13

This introductory chapter performs five essential tasks. The first is to introduce Marxism (democratic Marxism of the 21st century) and decolonization (the radical planetary decoloniality of the 21st century) as indispensable science, methodology, ideology, and liberatory visions; simultaneously providing the global context of the limits of neoliberalism and the terminal capitalist crisis, which made possible the resurgence and insurgence of Marxism and decolonization.

The second task is to briefly introduce Marxism as a planetary vision of liberation that took the world by storm across space, time, and place, while simultaneously highlighting the ructions, squabbles, and contestations within Marxism. What is underscored is the resurgent democratic Marxism of the 21st century, which is less dogmatic, free from Stalinism, and open to engagement with other formations, including feminist, Indigenous, and decolonial movements.

The third task is to engage with the questions, intersections, and convergences of Marxism and decolonization while simultaneously highlighting their tensions, divergences, and ambiguities. Because the book is not interested in engagement with Western Marxism and its internal ideological ructions and epistemic squabbles, the intersections, and convergences as well as the tensions, divergences, and ambiguities of Marxism and decolonization are addressed empirically through the provision of selected life biographies of leading Black and African Marxists (Aimé Césaire from Martinique, Abdel Khaliq Mahgoub from the Sudan, Amilcar Cabral from Guinea-Bissau, and Walter Rodney from Guyana), whose lives of struggle and ideological orientations reflect how they deployed, critiqued, and stretched Marxism practically in the context of concrete force-fields and battlefields of national liberation histories and anti-colonial struggles.

A biographical perspective focused on selected Black and African Marxists who are actively involved in various concrete struggles enables a view of Marxism and decolonization as living theories rather than mere dry and abstract philosophies. Karl Marx ended the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) with his famous Thesis Eleven: ‘Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it’. This dovetails with Enrique Dussel’s (1985: 10) articulation of the philosophy of liberation:

Philosophy, when it is really philosophy and not sophistry or ideology, does not ponder philosophy. It does not ponder philosophical texts, except as pedagogical propaedeutic to provide itself with interpretive categories. Philosophy ponders the nonphilosophical; the reality.

The product is what is rendered in this book as Marxist and decolonial praxis; indeed, a complicated synthesis of Marxism and decolonization, haunted by divergent interpretations.

One can also refer to the emergence of the Subaltern Studies in India as an empirical example of where Indian Marxists engaged with the limits of Marxism and stretched it to explain their lived experiences and existing social world, leading to the birth of what is generally referred to as ‘postcolonial theory’ (often traced to the pioneering work of Edward Said of 1978). But, for India, the post-Emergency moment whereby the state itself became the major violator of democratic ideals provoked a questioning of both nationalist and classical Marxist accounts of liberation. Consequently, the general issues of subordination and domination (subjection and subjecthood), in its various iterations of class, caste, age, gender, and race, on the one hand, and on the other hand the matters of agency and autonomy, re-emerged in the form of Subaltern Studies (Ganguly 2015). What was at issue in relation to Marxism is better rendered by Dipesh Chakrabarty (1993: 1094) as ‘Marx after Marxism’, because Marxism was stretched, not abandoned. This is why Chakrabarty (1993: 1095) emphasized that ‘Our attachment to Marx’s thought has different roots. They go back to the question of European imperialism from which the problem of Indian modernity cannot be separated’.

For the purposes of the current book, what is also very relevant here is how Chakrabarty (1993) highlighted the importance of Marx’s concept of real labour/living labour versus abstract labour—with living labour as always particular, individualized, situated, and non-abstracted—a point that dovetails with the decolonial turn and its emphasis on the locus of enunciation (Grosfoguel 2007). Taken together, this reinforces the thesis of living theory invoked in the subtitle of this book; however, for a detailed articulation of postcolonial theory and for criticism of it deriving from the work of Vivek Chibber (2013), see Chapter 3 in this book. The problem with some Marxists like Chibber is their ideological rigidity and fidelity to Eurocentrism, which make it impossible for them to appreciate any thought beyond that which emerged from European Enlightenment in general and classical Marxism in particular. One can notice this in Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013), where the term ‘postcolonial theory’ is used to name any thought that emerged from outside Europe so as to dismiss it as pseudo-theory because there is only one universal truthful thought. There is even a return to such nebulous concepts as ‘human nature’ to counter the insurgent and resurgent scholarship and theorizing that project a ‘colonial difference’ as a departure point and a gesture to pluriversality rather than universalism (for details on colonial difference and pluriversality, see Mignolo and Walsh 2018).

Therefore, the fourth task of this book is to briefly explain the uniqueness of the decolonization of the 21st century and how it builds on, expands, and even transcends Marxism. The fifth and last task is to provide a brief structure of the book and summarize the contributions. Thus, while the book highlights the continuing presence of Marxism in decolonization, it also grapples with the complex politics, epistemic innovations, and attempts to decolonize Marxism in a context where the social world was shaped by colonial difference and racial capitalism. When Marxism encountered decolonization, the egg–chicken conundrum of matter and idea became accentuated as the decolonial theorists convincingly demonstrated how epistemology also framed reality and provided a window of opportunity to escape the prisonhouse of primacy of matter, beyond all other elements. This is why decolonial theories highlight issues of the locus of enunciation while at the same time pointing to entanglements and hetararchies of power (Grosfoguel 2007; Ndlovu-Gatsheni 2018, 2020).

What has emerged poignantly is that, if Marxism remains one of the best sciences for understanding capitalism in its different iterations, the resurgent and insurgent decolonization of the 21st century provides the best approach to understanding global coloniality; that is, the transhistoric and transnational expansion of colonialism and its contemporary replication at a global scale. At the centre of global coloniality is ever-mutating capitalism as a colonial matrix of power. In this book, Marxism and decolonization are approached as science, methodology, ideology, and liberatory visions, which possess inexhaustive analytical power and endurance. Their staying power as liberation ideas is enhanced by the fact that they emerged directly from the battlefields of human history. While Marxism emerged from a European context and decolonization from the Global South terrain of struggle, they both confront common enemies, namely capitalism and colonialism. They are both subversive and defiant. They defy both easy criticism and quick burial. They are passed on from generation to generation. They exist as living theories of life.

The contemporary terminal capitalist crisis, symbolized by the global financial crisis that has hit the world since 2008 and been exacerbated by the impact of the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, has given both Marxism and decolonization a boost in a world where ideology itself has been in short supply. However, at the end of the Cold War, liberal scholars like Francis Fukuyama (1992) once thought that Marxism and its vision of Socialism/Communism had been defeated by the Western bourgeois neoliberal ideology of democracy and human rights. At that time, Fukuyama (1992: xi) posited the ‘end of history’ and ‘the last man’, as he thought that all other ideologies such as ‘hereditary, monarchy, fascism, and most recently communism’ had been ‘conquered’ by the modern liberal democratic ideology. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the subsequent implosion of communist regimes in Eastern and Central Europe were hailed as the inexorable triumph of Western liberalism over Marxist ideology and other visions of the world. Fukuyama (ibid.) even boldly stated that liberalism was poised to constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and become ‘the final form of human government’. However, the continuing terminal capitalist crisis, accompanied not only by epistemic impasse, a deepening of inequalities, widening poverty, resilient racism, and patriarchy but also by various forms of social ruptures and violence, has led to the questioning of neoliberalism as the best form of human government.

It is in this context that Marxism (the democratic version of the 21st century) and decolonization (the radical decoloniality of the 21st century) have re-emerged as reliable planetary liberatory visions. Movements arose such as Rhodes Must Fall/Fees Must Fall, which began in South Africa in 2015 and quickly reverberated across university campuses across the world, and Black Lives Matter, which emerged from the belly of the beast of the US empire and quickly assumed planetary status following the murder of George Floyd. These are good examples of contemporary social and political formations informed by and drawing ideological resources from Marxism and decolonization. One finds Fanonian ideas on decolonization, the Black Consciousness notions of psychological decolonization, critical race theory, and class analysis, as well as Indigenous/endogenous, feminist, and queer theoretical resources converging tendentiously, revealing the potential of what Aditya Nigam (2020) depicts as ‘thinking across traditions’.

What is also beyond doubt is how Marxism and decolonization have intersected across time and space to animate various contemporary anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, anti-racist, and anti-capitalist struggles as they have manifested in the Global South, where the decolonization project has remained incomplete. The Portuguese sociologist and leading advocate of epistemologies of the South, Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2018: 1), defined the Global South as the ‘anti-imperialist South’, which ‘suffered injustice, oppression, and destruction caused by capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy’. What is clear from this book is that the contributors not only returned to read some of the key texts on Marxism and decolonization by such thinkers as Aimé Césaire, Kwame Nkrumah, Walter Rodney, Cedric Robinson, Frantz Fanon, Samir Amin, Immanuel Wallerstein, Amilcar Cabral, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and others, but also re-engaged with the ideas and philosophies of such figures as Steve Bantu Biko, Enrique Dussel, Onkgopotse Tiro, Kwame Ture, Kwei Armah, and others to demonstrate their contemporary relevance as ideological manuals and philosophers of liberation. With specific reference to the texts, Hamid Dabashi (2019: 125) highlights their unique qualities:

These are unruly texts that fit and belong to no particular discipline or field of academic discipline or department. They habitually defy and misbehave wherever you place and expect them to behave and yield or serve one discipline or another. These texts disallow themselves to be appropriated and put i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• The global contributions of Black decolonial Marxism—a foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Marxism and decolonization in the 21st century
• Part I Marxist and decolonial theories
• Part II Marxist and decolonial praxis
• Part III Empirical interventions: race, gender, class, culture, and land
• Postscript
• Index