Marxism and decoloniality: Marxist determinations of relationships

Unlike in the natural sciences, social science questions cannot be answered with experiments – at least when it comes to the larger historical context. For example, we cannot show experimentally whether and how capitalism would arise and develop without integral sexism. Likewise, we cannot simply read from given data the relationship between colonialism and capitalism. Does one precede the other? Or, conversely, are the logics of capital always already embedded in concrete expansion movements?

Before any empirical survey, such questions must, whether one likes it or not, be made the subject of a hopefully well-considered conceptualization. Marxism also once appeared with the claim to deal with such necessary theoretical relationship determinations that are difficult to grasp in everyday understanding. What may then appear to be superfluous philosophical speculation or learned talk becomes politically explosive from the perspective of those affected. Because people who have come into direct contact with the after-effects and side effects of European colonial practices understandably have an interest in reliable answers to such supposedly abstract questions about how the developed relationships of dependency can really be effectively reduced – and also a right to do so.

The paradoxical capitalism

From July 22nd to 24th, around 100 people came together in the student house on the Bockenheim campus in Frankfurt am Main to discuss precisely these questions. The motto was “Marxism and decoloniality”. Three-day summer school about the biographies of people from Marxist resistance movements and their view of the big questions of history and society. For example, Professor Encarnación Gutiérrez-Rodríguez from Goethe University spoke about the interconnections of colonialism and capitalism in migration and care work. A particular focus of the conference was on the difference between the so-called postcolonial theories on the one hand and decolonial traditions on the other. There were lectures and workshops by Kolja Lindner from Paris, as well as the reception of the Peruvian theorist José Mariátegui and the French anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon.

The paradoxical character of capitalism emerged as one of the greatest challenges in determining the relationship between capitalist and colonial rule. On the one hand, this is spreading globally and not only tends to turn everything into a commodity, but also relates very different living spaces to one another. On the other hand, this does not lead to an equalization of lifestyles, but rather to an increase in differences. The emergence of a bourgeois class in Europe, for example, which inserts itself between the old upper and lower classes and itself becomes the new dominant way of life, does not automatically lead to a similar development in other parts of the world.

On the contrary: the development of entire continents was prevented so that the necessary raw materials could be available for the emergence of a bourgeois middle-class society. Sugar, wool and fertilizer should be brought in as cheaply as possible; But at the same time, this exploitation had to be as cruel as possible – even if it was no longer rational from a purely economic point of view. Just as important as economic exploitation was the maintenance of an extremely hierarchical, racist difference and structural devaluation of everything non-European, people and their culture alike. Instead of a development towards equal exchange between equal contractual partners, as the global centers like to describe their distribution of wealth, in the colonial area we had to talk about targeted underdevelopment. This phenomenon, according to the general tenor at the summer school, can still be best understood today with the intellectual tools of Marxism.

One of the central thinkers describing this underdevelopment was the Pan-African historian Walter Rodney. In her lecture about his work, the author Bafta Sarbo spoke out against the incorporation of historical figures like Rodney into a modern, primarily pluralistically oriented publication and theory landscape. According to Sarbo, Rodney in particular, like many thinkers of his generation, does not see himself as a representative of a decolonial or black Marxism, but as a Marxist – without any other special addition. The intellectual fashion of carelessly attaching the label “decolonial” to resistant discourses sometimes results in ignoring their actual content and completely pushing the actual material decolonization into the background. Rather, Rodney’s work is an attempt not to present Marx’s thinking as a special European case, but rather to understand it as a step towards a general theory of history.

Just Western thinking?

For a long time, however, this way of thinking was considered outdated. Particularly in the last third of the 20th century, alongside exploitation, unequal conditions and blocked development, the theme of epistemic violence was also discovered. What is meant by this is not the physical violence that accompanies colonialism, but rather the intellectual dominance that it exerts on people, cultural systems – and, centrally, on the social scientific model and concept formation mentioned at the beginning. The scandalous thing about colonialism would therefore not only be the deliberate underdevelopment of societies, but above all the spread of a highly limited concept of what can be considered development.

To put it simply, the dispute revolves around how strongly the European-influenced ideas of progress and development really only express the special interests of a relatively small class of people, or whether they do not nevertheless contain generalizable and universal principles. A large part of the debate between different theories on the subject of coloniality today revolves around the question of where this line should be drawn.

This demarcation also runs right through Marxism. The Chicago sociologist Julian Go had already pointedly pointed out in 2013 that even well-intentioned, classic Marxist-seeming questions such as “Why did the Indian working class not develop a revolutionary consciousness?” are of little help and often even cause harm. They would spread the idea that the development of Indian colonialism should be analyzed in terms of the exploitation of English workers. The actual incomparability of both sides is erased. Because once you accept the plausible view that the successes of the English working class can only be explained to an important extent through the use of benefits from the British Empire, the image of the workers as the only or at least essential revolutionary force becomes at least clear questionable.

Similar considerations can be found in the Lebanese Marxist Mahdi Amel, whose work was presented at the conference by the Kiel Islamic scholar Lauan Al-Khazail in Frankfurt. Amel makes it clear how contested the terms of the decolonial struggle were or are in practice. On the one hand, Amel rejects the position of the theorist Edward Said, who also understood Marxism as an “Orientalism” – that is, as a romanticizing illusion of a fictitious external opposite to the European world. The Orient is not really studied in it, but is only used as a projection surface for European fantasies. Amel, on the other hand, stands for the project of making Marxism really usable for anti-colonial struggles instead of deconstructing its projections. On the other hand, Amel opposes the attempts of Arab bourgeois intellectuals to make the fiction of genuinely Arab thinking the basis of national liberation processes. A rejection of Marxist ideas of liberation fits into the concept of these attempts.

Constantly moving

The debate was already taking place in a similar form in revolutionary Russia: How is it that the revolution was successful in a place with relatively little industrialization? Can the phase of a civil society be skipped on the path to socialism? An answer would have to take into account that the implementation of bourgeois values ​​and institutions does not necessarily have to wait for the emergence of an actual bourgeoisie. Likewise, the social sciences do not have to wait passively and patiently for the results of the “experiments” of the course of history.

At the end of the conference, the social philosopher Ivo Eichhorn also drew a picture of Marxism as an intellectual tradition that is constantly in flux and development. Existential philosophical questions – what is, what does human beings need and want? What law does history follow? – couldn’t be answered anyway. Marxism would therefore do well to outsource the battles over these meta-language games rather than trying to decide them by hook or by crook. If you do it right, i.e. don’t fall for false generalizations and don’t just focus on deconstructing Western ways of thinking in order to make room for a supposedly more authentic philosophy, there is a real chance of actually further developing Marxist theories and concepts. They definitely deserved it.