.
“Radical universal decolonial
anticapitalist diversality,”
and other adventures in
academic mumbo-jumbo
.
.
Meaningless gibberish
.
Been reading various exponents of so-called “decolonial” theory of late — Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo, Anibal Quijano, and Ramón Grosfoguel, etc. So-called because its parameters are somewhat unclear. As far as I can tell, it didn’t really crystallize as a distinct discourse until the 1970s or 1980s. Even then, it wasn’t named as such. Only in the late 1990s and early 2000s did this designation emerge, promoted principally by scholars of Latin America. It was then retroactively applied to figures like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, who are today treated almost as decolonial theorists avant la lettre. Personally, this seems a rather sneaky operation. Césaire and Fanon weren’t academics, to begin with, and understood their own work as part of a project to literally decolonize the remaining colonies of European empires. That is to say, in other words, the removal of all colonial administration and oversight, withdrawal of colonial armies, usually within some sort of national liberation and self-determination framework.
Here a few distinctions might help to clear up the confusion. First of all, the distinction between “decoloniality” and “decolonization.” Decoloniality doesn’t refer to colonialism per se, but to a peculiar postcolonial condition dubbed “coloniality.” Quijano has theorized this in terms of “the coloniality of power”: “Coloniality of power is thus based upon ‘racial’ social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. Eurocentric coloniality of power has proved longer lasting than Eurocentric colonialism. Without it, the history of capitalism in Latin America and other related places in the world can hardly be explained…” Nelson Maldonado-Torres also riffs on this theme, only he ontologizes it, invoking Heidegger even as he criticizes the Nazi philosopher’s “forgetfulness” of “the coloniality of being”:
Coloniality is different from colonialism. While colonialism denotes a political and economic relation in which the sovereignty of a people rests on the power of another nation, making such nation an empire, coloniality instead refers to longstanding patterns of power which emerged as a result of colonialism, but that define culture, labor, intersubjective relations, and knowledge production well beyond the strict limits of colonial administrations. Thus does coloniality survive colonialism. It is maintained alive in books, in criteria for academic performance, in cultural patterns, common sense, the self-image of peoples, aspirations of self, and so many other aspects of our modern experience. As modern subjects we breath coloniality all the time and everyday.
Coloniality is not simply the aftermath or the residual form of any given form of colonial relation. Coloniality emerges in a particular sociohistorical setting, that of the discovery and conquest of the Americas. For it was in the context of this massive colonial enterprise — the most widespread and ambitious yet in the history of humankind — that capitalism, i.e., an already existing form of economic relation, became tied to forms of domination and subordination that would be central to maintaining colonial control first in the Americas, and then elsewhere. Coloniality refers, first and foremost, to the two axes of power that became operative and defined the spatiotemporal matrix of what was called at the time America.
This rhetorical sleight of hand solves a number of tricky problems for decolonial theorists. Latin America was already decolonized, by the end of the nineteenth century at the latest. Spain underwent a series of revolutions during that time that made it far too unstable to maintain substantial overseas holdings. Mexico enjoyed several decades of autonomy, losing a bit of territory to the United States before being invaded by Louis Napeolon’s France. But that lasted only six years, between 1861 and 1867. A few Antillean islands changed hands with the Spanish-American War, and Europe along with the US have consistently meddled in the domestic affairs of Central and South American countries since then (e.g., Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile, the Falklands War in 1982), but that’s more or less been the situation.
Regardless, I have to admit it has not been easy slogging through this dreck. Not because the concepts are all that difficult, nor even because the terminology is unfamiliar to me. Generally speaking, I think the difficulty is semantic and not syntactic, so once one gets past the clunky neologisms their arguments generally make sense. Everything falls into place. What is more frustrating, rather, is how hackneyed and predictable it is (not to mention intellectually lazy). Despite decolonial theorists’ nagging complaint that Europeans are ill-equipped to interpret non-European phenomena, and commit a kind of hermeneutic “violence” when they import categories from a foreign context or seek to apply them elsewhere, authors such as Grosfoguel have no qualms whatsoever in repeating warmed-over anti-communist platitudes about communism (e.g., Simone Weil’s quip “Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals,” subsequently the title of a book by French sociologist Raymond Aron). For example, Vladimir Lenin’s famous polemic against Karl Kautsky is somehow reducible to a religious dispute between Christianity and Judaism, as Grosfoguel writes:
Lenin’s vanguard party sets out from a messianic Christian understanding of cosmology. When Lenin tells us that “without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement,” he is using Karl Kautsky as his model. Lenin cites Kautsky to argue that workers are incapable of producing class consciousness or revolutionary theory because they don’t have the capacity to spontaneously produce either their own theory or class consciousness. As a result, these can only arrive to them from without, that is to say, by preaching to them. And who is it that produces this theory and goes forth to preach it? For Lenin, following Kautsky, it is only bourgeois intellectuals, critical of their own class position, who can produce the consciousness and theory that the proletariat needs in order to emancipate itself. Hence the need for a vanguard party.
This is another old debate which must be reconsidered through decolonial lenses. In Lenin via Kautsky, we see the old colonial episteme reproduced, in which theory is produced by white-bourgeois-patriarchal-Western elites and the masses are passive beings, objects rather than subjects of theory. Behind a purportedly atheist secularism, this perspective reproduces Judeo-Christian messianism embodied in a secular, leftist Marxist discourse. The difference between Lenin and Kautsky lies in the type of messianism. Lenin reproduces in a very crude manner Christian messianism, whereas Kautsky reproduces in a very crude manner Judaic messianism. In the latter, since the Messiah never arrived, what is important is the message rather than the messenger. On the other hand, in Christian messianism, since the Messiah is believed to have not only arrived, but also resurrected and still lives, so the messenger is more important than the message. In Jewish messianism, the prophets announce the arrival of the Messiah and the end of earthly empires. In Christian messianism, the Messiah is there and the task is not so much to question what he said, but rather to give oneself over to the Truth (the Holy Message) of the Messiah unquestioningly. From this Leninist Christian messianism, we arrive at Stalin, a Christian seminarian converted to Bolshevism. Stalin is the result of Lenin.
What happens when politics abandons this Judeo-Christian cosmology in favor of other cosmologies? Without denying the possibility of other messianisms, in the Zapatistas the decolonial turn appears in an “Other” form of doing politics which, setting out from various Indigenous cosmologies of Southern Mexico, proposes alternate forms of political practice. The Zapatistas thus set out from “walking while asking questions,” and from there propose a kind of “rearguard movement” which contributes to linking together a broad movement on the basis of the “wretched of the earth” of Mexico as such. “Walking while asking questions” leads to what the Zapatistas call a “rearguard movement,” against the “walking while preaching” of Leninism, which gives rise to the “vanguard party.” The vanguard party sets out from a canned, a priori program which, through being characterized as “scientific,” is self-defined as “true.” From this premise follows a missionary politics of preaching in order to convince and recruit the masses to the truth of the vanguard party program. Very different from this is the post-messianic politics of the Zapatistas, which sets out instead from “asking questions and listening” and in which the “rearguard” movement becomes a vehicle for a critical, transmodern dialogue which is epistemically diversal, and as a result, decolonial.
Zapatismo? …Really, that’s your punchline? Even leaving aside the shoddy analogy and faulty historical claims, Grosfoguel has a lot to answer for. Lars Lih or Mike Macnair, or indeed anyone who knows the first thing about the historiography of international Marxism, would likely have an aneurysm if they tried to read this nonsense. Beyond the poor scholarship, however, there are other aspects of decolonial theory which make it tough to endure and get through. Sorry, but the following lines — excerpted from the last section of an article by Grosfoguel with the quaint title of “towards a ‘radical universal decolonial anticapitalist diversality’ project” — are simply meaningless gibberish:
The need for a common critical language of decolonization requires a form of universality that is not any longer a monologic, monotopic imperial global/ universal design, from the right or the left, imposed by persuasion or force to the rest of the world in the name of progress or civilization. This new form of universality I will call a “radical universal decolonial anti-capitalist diversality” as a project of liberation. As opposed to the abstract universals of Eurocentric epistemologies, that subsume/dilute the particular into the same, a “radical universal decolonial anti-capitalist diversality” is therefore a concrete universal that builds a decolonial universal by respecting multiple local particularities in various struggles against patriarchy, capitalism, coloniality, and eurocentered modernity from a diversity of decolonial epistemic/ethical historical projects. This represents a fusion — between Dussel’s “transmodernity” and Quijano’s “socialization of power.” Dussel’s transmodernity lead us to what Mignolo has characterized as “diversality as a universal project” to decolonize eurocentered modernity, while Quijano’s socialization of power makes a call for a new form of radical anticapitalist universal imaginary that decolonizes Marxist/Socialist perspectives from its Eurocentric limits.
Grosfoguel is decidedly “anti-”:
A common language should be anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, anti-imperialist, and against the coloniality of power. It should be toward a world where power is socialized, but open to a diversality of institutional forms of socialization of power depending on the different decolonial epistemic and ethical responses of subaltern groups in the world system. Quijano’s call to socialize power could become another abstract universal that leads to a global design if it is not redefined and reconfigured from a transmodern perspective. The forms of anti-capitalist struggles and socialization of power that emerged in the Islamic world are quite different than the ones that emerged from indigenous peoples in the Americas or Bantu people in West Africa… All share in the decolonial anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal, and anti-imperialist project but provide diverse institutional forms and conceptions to the socialization of power according to their diverse, multiple epistemologies. To reproduce the Eurocentric socialist global designs of the twentieth century, those that departed from a unilateral eurocentered epistemic center, would just repeat the mistakes that led the left to a global disaster. This is a call for a universal that is also a pluriversal, for a concrete universal that would include all the epistemic particularities towards a “transmodern decolonial socialization of power.”
If this should turn out to be the “common critical language” that’s adopted, I’ll gladly take a vow of silence right now. Jargon such as this is hardly even known in Western European academia — where Martin Heidegger spun new nouns out of gerunds, Jacques Derrida played with signifiers/substitutions, and Gilles Deleuze produced a nearly endless supply of fresh concepts. But Theodor Adorno’s laid bare the device behind this obfuscatory prose long ago: “Whoever is versed in the jargon does not have to say what he thinks, does not even have to think it properly. The jargon takes over this task and devalues thought. Communication clicks and puts forward as truth what should instead be suspect by virtue of prompt collective agreement.”
Decoloniality
.
Although Grosfoguel et al. certainly consider it a point of pride that they draw from their native resources, and do not rely on master thinkers from the Occident, it is unlikely that anyone not steeped in that tradition could even begin to understand it. Mignolo brings up the necessity of “epistemic disobedience”: “Decolonial thinking presupposes de-linking (epistemically and politically) from the web of imperial knowledge.” The concept of de-linking is adapted from Samir Amin’s 1988 book on Eurocentrism. Loren Goldner explains that “de-linking is a fancy name for an idea first developed by Iosif Stalin called ‘socialism in one country’.” Grosfoguel indicates in an article about “The Epistemic Decolonial Turn” that his main points are
that a decolonial epistemic perspective requires a much broader canon of thought than simply the Western canon (including the Left Western canon);
that a truly universal decolonial perspective thus cannot be based on an abstract universal (one particular that raises itself as universal global design), but would have to be the result of the critical dialogue between diverse critical epistemic/ethical/political projects towards a pluriversal as oppose to a universal world;
that decolonization of knowledge would require to take seriously the epistemic perspective/cosmologies/insights of critical thinkers from the Global South thinking from and with subalternized racial/ethnic/sexual spaces and bodies.
Postmodernism and postructuralism as epistemological projects are caught in the Western canon, reproducing within its domains of thought and practice a coloniality of power/knowledge.
He even goes so far as to call for a “decolonization of postcolonial studies,” which is still far too reliant on the authority of Western thinkers. In an article of the same title, Grosfoguel recalls that “as a Latino in the United States, I was dissatisfied with the epistemic consequences of the knowledge produced by [the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group]. They underestimated in their own work ethnic or racial perspectives coming from the region, while at the same time privileging predominantly to Western thinkers, which is related to my second point: they gave epistemic privilege to what they called the ‘four horses of the apocalypse,’ that is, Foucault, Derrida, Gramsci, and Guha… Among the four main thinkers they privilege, three are ‘Eurocentric’ thinkers… Two (i.e., Derrida and Foucault) form part of the poststructuralist/postmodern Western canon. Only one (i.e., Rinajit Guha) is a thinker thinking from the South. By privileging Western thinkers as their central theoretical apparatus, they betrayed their goal to produce subaltern studies.” Mignolo writes in a similar vein that
Coloniality and decoloniality introduces a fracture with both the Eurocentered project of postmodernity and a project of postcoloniality heavily dependent on poststructuralism (i.e., insofar as Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida have been acknowledged as the grounding of the postcolonial canon): Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, and Homi Bhabha… Decoloniality sets out from other sources. From the decolonial shift already implicit in Nueva corónica and buen gobierno by Waman Puma de Ayala; in the decolonial critique and the activism of Mahatma Gandhi; in the fracture of Marxism in its encounter with colonial legacies in the Andes, articulated by José Carlos Mariátegui; and in the radical political and epistemological shifts enacted by Amilcar Cabral, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, Rigoberta Menchú, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. The decolonial shift, in other words, is a project of de-linking whereas postcolonial theory is a project of scholarly transformation within the academy.
Yet the palpable irony here is — even if Grosfoguel gets rid of the names Derrida, Gramsci, and Foucault while retaining only Guha, or if Mignolo jettisons Foucault, Lacan, and Derrida but holds on to Bhabha — they will still be working within this philosophical idiom, which they just disavowed. Nevertheless, this has nothing to do with the intrinsic “greatness” of European civilization or its unique “genius.” Rather, it has to do with an historic form of universality which happened to develop in Europe and expanded outward from there. Decolonial theorists tend to be dissatisfied with this version of events, though. Marx himself is not spared from the rebuke of “Eurocentrism,” as Mignolo observes: “Class consciousness means a ‘critical consciousness,’ which like the one generated by colonial difference and the colonial wound (e.g., critical border thinking), generates, in the first case, projects of emancipation and, in the second, projects of liberation. However, in Marx and in the Marxist tradition, the idea of ‘class consciousness’ hides the fact that the paradigmatic model of the proletarian is white, male, European…” (“On Subalterns and Other Agencies”).
Grosfoguel takes this a step further. Unlike many of his decolonial peers, he never had much affection for Marx. Quijano, by contrast, considers himself a Marxist to this day, and Dussel’s readings of Marx are both subtle and wide-ranging. None of this is present in Grosfoguel. “In social science we have concrete manifestations of epistemic Islamophobia in the work of Western-centric patriarchal theorists such as Karl Marx and Max Weber,” he maintains. “Marx believed that secularism was fundamental for revolution to have a chance in Muslim lands. This secularist view of Marx was a typical colonial strategy promoted by Western empires in order to destroy the ways of thinking and living of the colonial subjects and, thus, impede any trace of resistance.” Elsewhere Grosfoguel continues: “Just like the Western thinkers preceding him, Marx participates in an epistemic racism in which there is only one epistemology with access to universality: the Western tradition… Despite being from the left, Marxist thought ended up trapped in the same problems of Eurocentrism and colonialism that had imprisoned Eurocentered thinkers of the right.”
Universality and capital
.
Contrast the postcolonial particularism of someone like Grosfoguel with the Marxian universalism of someone like Mariátegui. Some misconceptions should be dispelled immediately before proceeding any further, on the topic of Mariátegui’s heterodoxy. For even his countryman Quijano writes: “A Marxist, considered today perhaps the greatest Latin American Marxist, Mariátegui was at the same time not a Marxist. He openly believed in God…” Michael Löwy has made a similar claim. It’s inaccurate, however, all the same. While Mariátegui initially wanted to enter the clergy, raised in a religious household, he distanced himself from Catholicism without feeling a need to desecrate or disrespect it. The essay he dedicated to “the religious factor” in his collection on Peruvian Reality is incredulous, yet appreciative. Like his fellow Marxists, Mariátegui suspected the reason radical anticlericalism failed was that it was divorced from material conditions: “Radical or ‘Gonzalez-Pradist’ protests lacked effectiveness because it offered no social and economic program.” On the role of “myth” in revolution, Mariátegui was more Sorelian than most.
By and large, however, he was rather “orthodox” in terms of his internationalism. This overarching commitment to world revolution is probably what led Mariátegui to join Trotsky’s Left Opposition at the end of the twenties. And Mariátegui was unequivocal about the basis of international communism in what Marx had described as “the civilizing effects” of capitalist modernity. Marx spoke of “the great civilizing influence of capital… i.e., its production of a stage of society in comparison to which all earlier ones appear as mere local developments of humanity…” Earlier, in the Grundrisse, he’d stated: “Capital drives beyond national barriers and prejudices, as well as traditional, confined, complacent, encrusted satisfactions of present needs, and reproductions of old ways of life.” Still earlier, in the Manifesto, he and Engels wrote that all parochial relations brought into capital’s fold are swiftly dissolved or else irrevocably modified. “It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production, thus introducing what it calls civilization into their midst — in a word, it creates a world after its own image.”
Lenin had likewise stressed the twin birth of nationalism alongside internationalism in capitalist development. “Developing capitalism knows two historical tendencies in the national question,” he wrote in a 1913 tract against the Bundists. “The first is the awakening of national life and national movements, as well as struggle against all national oppression, and the creation of national states; the second is the development and growing frequency of international intercourse in every form, the breakdown of national barriers, the creation of the international unity of capital… of economic life in general, of politics, science, and so on. What is left of capitalism’s progressive nature is its world-historical tendency, to break down national barriers, obliterate national distinctions, and to assimilate nations — a tendency which manifests itself more and more with every passing decade, which is one of the greatest driving forces transforming capitalism into socialism.” In a pamphlet written that same year, Lenin states: “Our banner does not carry the slogan ‘national culture’ but international culture, one which unites all the nations in a higher, socialist unity, and the way to which is already being paved by the international amalgamation of capital.”
Mariátegui concurs:
Internationalism is not a brand new current. For roughly a century or so now in European civilization one notes the tendency to develop an international organization of humanity. Nor is internationalism necessarily a revolutionary current. There is a socialist internationalism and a bourgeois internationalism, and this is neither absurd nor contradictory. When it finds its historical origin, internationalism is a result of emanation, a consequence of liberal ideas. The first major incubator of international organisms was the Manchester school. The liberal state emancipated industry and trade from feudal and absolutist barriers. Capitalist interests developed independently from the growth of the nation. The nation, finally, could no longer contain them within its borders. Capital is denationalized; industry began to conquer foreign markets; goods do not know boundaries and strive to move freely across all countries. The bourgeoisie becomes in favor of free trade. Free trade, both as an idea and as practice, was a real step toward internationalism in which the proletariat will recognize one of its desired ends, one of its ideals. Economic borders are thus weakened. This event strengthened the hope of a day to come when political borders no longer exist.
Accusations of “Eurocentrism” do not seem like they would bother Mariátegui all that much, either:
Socialism is certainly not an Indo-American doctrine. But no such doctrine, no contemporary system is or could be. And although socialism, like capitalism, may have been born in Europe, it is not specifically or particularly European. It is a worldwide movement, in which none of the countries that move within the orbit of Western civilization are excluded. This civilization drives towards universality with forces and means which no previous civilization possessed. Indo-America can and should have individuality and style in this new world order, but not its own culture or fate that is unique. One hundred years ago, we owed our independence as nations completely to the rhythm of Western history, whose compass has inexorably moved us since colonization… Liberty, Democracy, Parliament, Sovereignty of the People — all the great words men of that time pronounced, came from the European repertoire. History does not measure the greatness of such men for the originality of their ideas, however, but for the efficacy and genius with which they served them.
Yet again, Mariátegui here sees Europe as central to the fate of all humanity:
The fate of all the workers of the world is in play in the European crisis. The development of the crisis ought to be of equal interest to workers of Peru and workers of the Far East. The crisis has Europe as the principal theater, but the crisis of European institutions is at the same time the crisis of institutions of Western civilization. And Peru, like other countries of the Americas, revolves inside the orbit of this civilization — not only because politically independent countries are being dealt with, but also because they are still economically colonized through their links to British, American, and French capitalism, and because both our culture and the types of institution are European. And now, precisely these democratic institutions — this culture, which we copied from Europe — come from a place that is now in a period of definitive, even total, crisis. Above all, capitalist civilization has historically internationalized the life of humanity; it has created the material connections among all peoples that establish an inevitable solidarity among them. Internationalism is not an idea, but a reality. Progress makes interests, ideas, customs, the people’s regimes unify and merge. Peru, like the other countries of the Americas, is not, then, outside the crisis, it is inside it. The world crisis has already had repercussions on these countries. And it will, of course, continue to do so. So a period of conservative reaction in Europe will likewise be a period of reaction in the Americas, and a period of revolution in Europe likewise will be a period of revolution in the Americas. More than a century ago, the life of humanity was not as linked as it is today, when today’s communication media did not exist, when the nations did not have the immediate, constant contact they have today. When there was no press, back when we were still distant spectators of European events, the French Revolution provided the origin for our own War of Independence and the creation of all these republics. Remembering this is enough for us to realize the rapidity with which the transformation of society is reflected in Latin American societies. Those who say that Peru, and Latin America in general, so far from the European revolution, have no idea of contemporary life, nor do they have even an approximate understanding of history. These people are surprised that the most advanced ideas in Europe make their way to Peru; but they are not surprised, on the other hand, at the airplane, the transatlantic ocean liner, the wireless telegraph, the radio — in sum, all the most advanced expressions of material progress in Europe.
Or at least it was central at that time. Today it might rather be the United States, Europe, and some East Asian countries. Not only is Mariátegui better than his self-styled inheritors, though; Fanon is, as well: “Disalienation will be for those whites and blacks who’ve refused to let themselves be locked in the substantialized ‘tower of the past.’ For many other black men disalienation will come from refusing to consider their reality as definitive…In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past. I do not want to sing the past to the detriment of my present and my future.” He asks in frustration: “What am I supposed to do with a black empire?…I am French… I am interested in French culture, French civilization, and the French,” “[all] I wanted…[was] to be a man among men.” After all, “I should like nothing better” than to drown in “the white flood composed of men like Sartre and Aragon,” since, as a man, “the Peloponnesian War is just as much mine as the invention of the compass.”
I am a man, and I have to rework the world’s past from the very beginning. I am not just responsible for the slave revolt in Saint Domingue. Every time a man has brought victory to the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to attempt to enslave his fellow man, I have felt a sense of solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.
For many black intellectuals, European civilization possesses a characteristic of exteriority. Furthermore, in human relationships, the western world can feel foreign to a black man. Not wanting to be thought a poor relation, an adopted son, or a bastard child, must he feverishly try to discover a black civilization?
Let there be no misunderstanding. We are convinced it would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature, or architecture, from the third century before Christ. We’d be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids who are working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.
There should be no attempt to fixate man, since it is his destiny which is to be unleashed… The density of History determines none of my acts. I am my own foundation. And it is by going beyond the historical, instrumental given that I initiate my cycle of freedom.
The misfortune of the man of color is having been enslaved. The misfortune and inhumanity of the white man are having killed man somewhere. And still today they are organizing this dehumanization rationally. But insofar as I have the possibility of existing absolutely, I have not the right to confine myself in a world of retroactive reparations.
Fanon’s words here remain to this day unsurpassed. That’s enough for now, though, as I’ve just been informed that noted decolonial critic and Bolivarian booster George Ciccariello-Maher is calling for some sort of transcendental decolonization of the Frankfurt School of critical theory. I will be busy hate-reading that in the meantime, but promise to report back later.
