Decolonization and the Left
James Heartfield, Ralph Leonard, and Andrew Sanchez
Platypus Review 184 | March 2026
On June 2, 2023, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on decolonization and the Left at Cambridge University. The speakers were James Heartfield (former member of the Revolutionary Communist Party (UK), author of The Aboriginesâ Protection Society and Britainâs Empires1), Ralph Leonard (writer at unHerd), and Andrew Sanchez (Professor of Social Anthropology at Cambridge, author of Criminal Capital2). The panel was moderated by Platypus member Victor Cova. An edited transcript follows.3
Introduction
Over the past few years and particularly since the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, decolonization has appeared as a federating catchword for radical politics in Britain and elsewhere. It appears to encompass a wide array of phenomena, forms of activism, and demands, and varies considerably in different geographical contexts, making it difficult to define. Yet to demand decolonization today necessarily points to the legacy of the drastic failures and limitations of decolonization in different historical moments: post-WWII struggles for national self-determination, Wilsonianism, the Bolivarian revolutions, and, perhaps above all, the American Revolution itself. To call for decolonization, rather than for the more traditionally Leftist slogans of anti-imperialism, national self-determination, and antiracism, also means questioning the Leftâs â and Marxismâs â own relation to liberalism.
What is decolonization for the Left today? What are its aims, and how can they be achieved today? How and why were previous phases of decolonization a failure or incomplete? What would it take to complete it? What tasks have we inherited from those failures? What potential exists today for fulfilling these tasks? How can the contemporary decolonization movement help achieve this? How does decolonization relate to the task of socialism, if at all? How does it relate to other ideas such as âanti-imperialismâ or âanti-racismâ? What bearing does the contemporary #Decolonize movement offer on previous forms of radical politics, and how might these earlier struggles judge the present?
Opening remarks
Andrew Sanchez: The decolonization projects of the mid-20th century are incomplete political projects. They are incomplete because they did not substantively and effectively dismantle economic, political, and intellectual structures. In academic jargon, the hangover of those structures is âcoloniality.â
Most postcolonial states introduce policies of economic protectionism precisely to safeguard against postcolonial recursion. But the effectiveness of these policies was sporadic, and the majority of the most substantial protection projects were dismantled in the 1990s.
In terms of political life, decolonization also did not dismantle the internal hierarchies, inequalities, and structures of colonial societies. Generally, the ruling elites of most postcolonial societies tend to be disproportionately composed of classes or ethnic groups that systematically benefited from or aided colonialism.
Intellectually, despite vibrant traditions of cultural nationalism and radical thought, values and ideas of colonial powers still disproportionately determine how people in postcolonial states think. They determine what matters and what is valued. We can see that clearly in political institutions through the ubiquity of Westminster party and parliamentary systems, through the ways in which laws are codified, and through the structures of education from primary to higher education. These intellectual questions are important right now because the current decolonization route is fundamentally a struggle for rights, voice, and representation, which means it is a struggle about peopleâs abilities to reinterpret things and so to redefine political and economic priorities.
Iâm concerned with a tendency in some quarters of the far Left to dismiss identity politics as unreal. The assumption that identity politics is unreal because it doesnât relate to things that are material or economic is a claim made from a position of privilege. Your identity might be your real politics. Your identity might determine whether you are secure, whether you are listened to, and whether you have the ability to impact the world around you. I understand the current decolonization movement as a struggle for rights and the ability to imagine new political possibilities.
I first became involved in the Left when I was about 15, when I joined the Socialist Workers Party (UK) (SWP). I was attracted to it because I was a working-class boy who grew up in a mixed-race household. Some people in my family are from the Caribbean, and some are from Roma gypsies. Coming from that background, I assumed the Left was an organized struggle for social justice. To me it was clear that any of those struggles would necessarily be about economy and class, but also about race and empire, gender and sexualities.
In the SWP, the first thing that I learned was tactics. They taught us how to organize and participate in demonstrations, how to run petitions nobody will ever read, and how to sell copies of the Socialist Worker. I also learned about the history of radical collective struggles in meetings just like this panel. Those meetings about radical history had a particular repertoire. You were supposed to know about the Paris Commune, the late 1960s student revolts, the general strikes, etc.
Now that I think about that experience of becoming a Leftist, it was problematic in a way that I couldnât have anticipated at the time. Revolutionary socialism is supposed to be the politics of the future when it is nonetheless a political project that has a tendency to fetishize the struggles of the past. Thatâs a sweeping statement, and I know not all forms of Left politics do that. In the late 2000s, the Occupy movement, the resurgence of popular anarchism, was thinking about new ways of doing demos.
As an anthropologist, I have an idea about why the Left needs a repertoire like this. It needs a repertoire of dramatic and heroic struggles because, frankly, being involved in the Left is a daily slog of struggle where you donât get to win very often. Having heroes and villains gives us a sense of engaging in a historically continuous global struggle where we are not only right, but we also sometimes win.
The Left has been overtaken by Black Lives Matter (BLM) and #MeToo because these movements define new forms and styles of struggle and are markedly more effective. What the Left can learn from decolonization is a willingness to be more creative and less bound by tactics and ideas of the past, which is to say becoming progressive.
In terms of what decolonization can learn from the Left â reforming things like statues, names, and symbols establishes the conditions that allow people to shift their perspectives on power and value, but that attention to the symbols is only worthwhile if followed by substantive change to how societies are organized. If it ends at the symbols, it is incomplete.
The current decolonization movement should pay more attention to the distinctions between the positions of different postcolonial subjects, i.e., it should think about class and power. For example, if you come from certain elite West African communities with control of the political, economic, and intellectual life of your state, you should consider whether that community has that control because itâs the type of community that profited from the slave trade. Those positions of power are themselves expressions of coloniality. The current decolonization movement needs to not only know and recognize these things; it has to have a commitment to dismantle them.
Finally, the decolonization movement needs to understand the neocolonial terms of its own projects. In particular, global projects are overwhelmingly (but not exclusively) composed of North American reference points. For example, BLM has sparked a global reckoning for questions of racial power, but it raises the question of why it sparked the fire. The global Left could have been inspired to a reckoning with race at any point by being collectively outraged by things like caste injustice in India, which involves hundreds of millions of people, or by the fact that gypsies across Europe have been enslaved, murdered, terrorized, and imprisoned for hundreds of years, but they werenât outraged, and they didnât care.
The uncomfortable fact is that these issues were of great interest to the people they directly affected and the specialists that studied them, but other people didnât care enough to be motivated by them in a way that BLM did. Decolonization and the Left have to start confronting the fact that U.S. issues and politics have the capacity to become global issues. Thatâs a contradiction because the West, among other places, is a de facto neocolonial power. It has an undue level of power and authority, even through the exercise of violence, over other nationsâ ways of thought, their economy, and their politics.
James Heartfield: I want to use the word âcolonialismâ in a more prosaic, obvious way. Iâm familiar with the arguments about neocolonialism, but colonialism is a historically bounded event. Colonialism is over in the strict meaning of the word. If you extend the meaning of the word, you should know that you are doing so.
What weâre talking about, speaking as a historian, is the European empires, which shared most of the world in two ways, one around the 1600s to 1700s, the other around 1880 to 1945. These have pointedly been dismantled in the period from 1912 to the end of the WWII, picking up a particular pace in the 1960s, dribbling on in the British case with the colony of the six counties of Northern Ireland. Even then Iâm not sure you can speak of the six counties of Northern Ireland as colonies after the Good Friday Agreement (1998) and after the referendum on the 26 counties in Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland,4 in the sense that there isnât a national claim in the contest for power. We have mixed authority. Britainâs incapable of governing Northern Ireland; thatâs why they incorporate the South and the European Union. The South doesnât really want the six counties, which is what Articles 2 and 3 mean. Sinn FĂ©in is the biggest party, which is fascinating, but what it isnât, which you can see from the decrease in violence following the Good Friday Agreement, is an anti-colonial struggle.
This anti-colonial struggle within the borders of the United Kingdom is what had electrified me in politics and what got me writing. Kwame Nkrumahâs book on neocolonialism5 makes an excellent point: seek first the political kingdom, free yourself politically, and take political authority in your country from the imperialists. If they still control you through the economy, you are not really free.
But by now you can say that anti-colonialism â here I disagree with Andrew â was a massive success. The colonies are gone, the flags are down, the armies have left for the most part, the countries are independent. There is a misunderstanding: did anybody think that the end of colonialism would mean the end of capitalism and oppression? No, they just meant that the British, French, or Dutch would be out and that the people would be in a position to address their own problems. Now, if you live in India or Nigeria, you have to say that decolonization is the most amazing success story. Nearly half the people on the planet now live in places where they have freed themselves from colonial rule. And to dismiss that, to not understand that life they have made, to say that they are unfree and not responsible, is debilitating. I have no big idea of what confronts people in Jamaica or Ireland; I have no good advice because they are not my problems but their problems. Thatâs what it means to be independent. Colonialism is over.
There is something weird about prefacing our contemporary discussions about statues, books, and histories with decolonization. Sure, letâs have a conversation about whether these statues should be up or what books should be read, but letâs not call that decolonization. Decolonization was a war; it was a massive social conflict, and it is trivializing to say that the conversations weâre having about the curricula is somehow an extension of the decolonization struggle. They are interesting academic discussions but theyâre not decolonization struggles; that is verging on childish.
The works of postcolonial literature by Robbie Shilliam or Homi Bhabha are not about the developed world and its particular problems; they are a species of postmodern philosophy. Thatâs the actual wellsprings of decolonial literature, mostly an extension of Martin Heidegger and Carl Schmitt. I was there, by the way; when people like Shilliam or Bhabha were in college and reading those things people started to tap them on the shoulders and say, âyou stuck up twats. Talking about Jean-François Lyotard is so embarrassing.â They used to call them the theory boys. It was kind of embarrassing, all this intense activity. They try to dress this up in drag and attach this to some kind of big social struggle to make it sound grand and less ridiculous. Happily, Edward Said and Gayatri Spivak were there as a crossover point, and they lent this postmodern deconstruction of the grand narrative the clothes of a social struggle. They said theyâre not just messing about with a critique of rationality but doing real work, an extension of the work that Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon did. âJust as your comrades were fighting the British Empire back then, weâre fighting against the British Empire in the library. Weâre going to take over the oppressive power of Western rationality. Not Western machine guns or Western tanks, but the oppressive power of Descartes.â This is completely useless to anybody in the developing world or the developed world. It is a box-standard, end-of-the-20th-century, end-of-history social philosophy masquerading as decolonization.
Ralph Leonard: The idea of decolonization has become a fad in Western discourse in the past decade, especially since 2020, when protestors in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in the U.S. believed that taking down statues was a radical act of decolonization, and that finally, in this moment, the occident would face a reckoning with its century-long history of violence and colonialism against subaltern people. Of course, decolonization once denoted the political movement for national liberation that engulfed Africa and Asia in the mid-20th century, demanding national independence from European tutelage, where the nation-state model would be truly universalized across the world in place of the world of empires that preceded it. In the 21st century, however, decolonization increasingly denotes a primarily academic and cultural tendency influenced by the decolonial turn, promoted by thinkers such as Walter Mignolo and RamĂłn Grosfoguel, which takes aim at the supposed universality of Western knowledge and how itâs an instrument of the colonial matrix of power. The dependency theorists of the 1960s wanted the Third World to delink economically and politically from the global system; likewise, the decolonizers of today seek for marginalized groups to delink intellectually and epistemically from the Western tradition that has been vaunted for too long.
In essence, according to decolonial theory, the completion of the struggle against Western imperialism necessitates a rejection of the Western Weltanschauung6due to its supposedly inherent coloniality. Hence, decolonize the curriculum, decolonize the museum by returning the Benin Bronzes.7 As with any zany cultural radicalism, an entire cottage industry is created around it where anything and everything must be decolonized. Itâs symptomatic of how easily capitalist culture can assimilate ostensibly anti-capitalist means into its modus vivendi.8 OlĂșfáșčÌmi TĂĄĂwĂČ, a Nigerian academic, in his cogent critique of decolonial theory against decolonization,9 decried it as harming scholarship in Africa but also for its full embrace of the racialization of consciousness, as if modernity was in some intrinsic way anti-black, a position that relegates Africans to merely being the victims or resistors of modernity rather than agents within it or appropriators of it. In TĂĄĂwĂČâs words, it turns Africans into permanent subalterns within their own history. Decolonial theory presumes that âpeople of color,â or the colonized, have no connection with Western universality, that to be properly radical is to be disenchanted with all that is designated as Western, that they could only justify themselves or critique capitalism from the basis of a pre-modern or pre-capitalist, localized, autochthonous identityâs standpoint, whose thought must be purified of Western influence lest they remain subservient and thus alienated from themselves.
In contrast to this decolonial particularism, consider the universality of Frantz Fanon, often abused by decolonizers of today, who said in Wretched of the Earth (1961) that âAll elements for a solution to the major problems of humanity existed at at one time or another in European thoughtâ;10 or C. L. R. James, who said that âI denounce European colonialism. But I respect the learning and profound discoveries of Western civilisation.â11 Both of these statements could be lambasted as Eurocentric, but that would be to misunderstand them. They were not pious to the intrinsic greatness of Europe; rather, it was a recognition of a universal social form that happened to fertilize in Europe from the Renaissance onwards and spread outwards throughout the world. What we now call bourgeois society has surpassed all previous social formations, and within it held the keys to the universal emancipation of humanity. Their commitment to world revolution, as opposed to the mere decolonization of the mind, was rooted in the unequivocal observation that the basis of international socialism lay in what Marx had once designated the civilizing effect of capital, its drive to universality beyond national borders through trade and the world market, the antagonistic cooperation of nations of peoples, through immigration and the international division of labor. This form of communism may seem passĂ© to the theoreticians of decoloniality, but its historical program was far more profound and radical, precluding any talk of return to culture, repatriation, or strategic essentialism. Race, like the nation and patriarchy, will be thrown to the rubbish bin of history once and for all, realizing the potential immanent within bourgeois society of a world without races and fatherlands, where the accumulated cultural patrimony of civilization will belong to all without the need for a claim of exclusive ownership through ancestry.
Let me quote a passage from Fanonâs Black Skin, White Masks (1952) that exemplifies this radical universalism. You could call this true decolonization when he says,
I am a man, and I have to rework the worldâs 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 an 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 culture has a characteristic of exteriority. Furthermore, in human relationships, the western world can feel foreign to the black man. Not wanting to be thought of as a poor relation, an adopted son, or a bastard child, will he feverishly try to discover a black civilization?
Above all, let there be no misunderstanding. We are convinced that it would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would 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 working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.12
The prevalence of decolonial theory clearly stems from the failures of the national liberation movements, where the nation-state model became not an avenue of liberation and autonomy but an avenue of oppression and reproduced more divisions, whether ethnic or sectarian; and in turn these historical failures came from the defeat of socialism, which I present as this progressive, futuristic, internationalist movement to overcome capitalist imperialism. Because movements have failed to defeat the West politically, itâs now believed that one can defeat Western imperialism in the realm of thought and epistemology. This is folly â vulgar idealism and just reactionary. If socialism or any movement to overcome the contradictions of capital are to be revived as a real movement of history, it wonât be served well by decolonial theory. You canât critique capitalism from some indigenous or pre-capitalist identity; it will come from the negation of these things. To quote the famous words of Goetheâs Faust, âall that exists deserves to perish.â13
Responses
AS: Contemporary decolonization, as a political project, can be co-opted in performative ways; it can become a fad and turn intellectualist without any clear application. That doesnât mean the essential terms of the project are wrong. Ralph is probably raising these issues to the wrong person because I am an anthropologist and a professional academic, which means I assume that culture and ideas matter. Iâm in good company with most radical thinkers and vanguard socialists in believing that cultural ideas are important in establishing the conditions for radical struggle, including the types of struggles used now, like going out into the street with guns and machetes.
As for whether this project is simply about removing good thought from the world â no, it isnât. Iâm certain there are people who approach decolonizing the curriculum simplistically, as if itâs just about taking a few things off the reading list. When I use terms like that, Iâm simply saying that I want to create space in my studentsâ heads for a wider range of things weâve never thought of before. Thinking about things helps you imagine how to make things better. The distinction between the material and the ideological is itself an ideology.
In terms of whether colonialism is done and dusted â no, it isnât. In a strict, formal sense, we can date the dismantling of colonial states to specific moments. But if what we call coloniality is no longer real, we wouldnât be able to see that the majority of postcolonial states are made up of people whose lives are shorter and sicker than my life. Those facts slap us in the face every day.
Acknowledging these facts isnât about dismissing the efforts, struggles, and victories of the anti-colonial movement. I have absolute respect for those movements, and they were effective in some ways, but I canât just say, âitâs done.â If it were done, the world would not be so absolutely, disgracefully, unjustly unequal. And it is not incidental that this inequality still runs along the same lines as colonizer and colonized.
JS: Yes, absolutely, ideas matter. My daughter just went through her degree in English literature, and I love all the tweaking that goes on. There is only so much room in the curriculum, but broadening it is a great thing. We should enjoy the riches of human culture and civilization. English literature is just a tiny part of that.
I believe in real struggle, and I believe in ideas, but I was trying to illustrate their difference. I am not saying that reassessing history, literature, or culture isnât important, but the real succession of national struggles for independence was of a different order. We are in a different moment. Maybe we have grown up; maybe our civilization is becoming more intelligent, less prickly and defensive, more able to absorb, react, and respond. We can hear the crass things we used to say and flinch away. But, of course, people in the future will laugh at us and mock many of our judgments. Theyâll view with contempt things we feel absolutely certain about today. It is already happening to us now.
Andrew ended on a good point about inequality. It reminded me of Samir Aminâs dependency theory. They used to publish a book every year saying that capitalism was never going to take off in Korea. They were wrong, but I understood that they were saying that the coordinates of the past â the dominant West and the subordinate East and South â were being reproduced. In a broad sense, they were right; thatâs how capitalism works. People with the money tend to get more money, and people without the money tend to get less.
But dependency theory and the underdevelopment thesis donât understand that the world is dramatically dynamic. At the end of communism, many of us thought that China would become a colony again. Now we look back and realize we were wrong. Chinaâs development is extraordinary. Lots of people hate to hear that, but I think itâs fabulous. Iâve been reading about Chinaâs development projects in Laos. The West destroyed Laos; it was the most bombed place in the entire world; and now, even though it might seem mundane to build roads and railways, that is human civilization. Of course, I hate that politics in China is controlled and restricted, but itâs also a center of human ingenuity that will dominate the 21st century. We all ought to be thinking about these things. Europe definitely was the monster of the 19th century, but itâs now a ramshackle place. They keep saying that there is no war in Europe, but there is. They might say thatâs not really Europe or that Eastern Europe doesnât count, but thereâs always a war.
Honestly, I love America. So many superb things come out of America. Lots of horrible things come out of America, but so does much cultural influence. It is 300 million people thinking, working, creating â and yes, doing terrible things to each other and everyone else. But maybe America has not been broken by the century. You can see its dynamism when you look at the West Coast.
I never thought that the end of colonialism would mean the end of inequality. Rhetorically, I want to say that these countries remain dominated by capital, but you canât properly address the weaknesses of the elites in Nigeria or South Africa today if you are still stuck in that colonial rhetoric. When I meet people who are sharp and radical in their parts of the world, they are bored and repressed. Iâve met lots of Irish people who say to me, âTiocfaidh ĂĄr lĂĄ.â14 They feel constrained by republicanism. It was a dead end. It was a tremendously important contribution to history, but it is not where the future is coming from.
RL: For the question of whether colonialism still exists in our world today â I remember that one of the issues that first made me politically conscious was the question of Palestine. Engaging with that issue often raises this debate: is it an issue of settler colonialism? Zionism is often interpreted as a settler-colonial project in the Middle East, and yet Zionists describe themselves as a national liberation project. It is both a project of national liberation and nation-building, but the result of that nation-building was a settler-colonial project that extirpated the Palestinian Arabs.
Another point about the colonial issue is that if you engage with something like the Russian invasion of Ukraine, youâll see that many Ukrainian intellectuals and even the Ukrainian public often frame their rhetoric in terms of decolonization. Russiaâs actions â like imposing the Russian language, erasing Ukrainian cultural artefacts, kidnapping Ukrainian children to assimilate them, and committing massacres â echo past atrocities. Itâs reminiscent of what happened in Canada with indigenous children, or what the Nazis did to Polish children â kidnapping them and trying to make them German. You do find parallels, but overall, if weâre talking about capitalism today, the colonial frame is not the best way to understand capitalism in its totality â maybe a fragment.
Q&A
In 1848, the springtime of the peoples, Europe was in a struggle for national independence. The nation was conceived as a sovereign people that have the right to establish their own laws and reestablish civil society, which was juxtaposed to the traditional feudal elites. The nation was a new bourgeois concept. But those nation-states came into conflict with one another again , which gave rise to petty, conservative, reactionary nationalism as each nation-state sought to find its way within the wider capitalist system. The way you talk about the decolonial struggle in the 20th century makes me wonder, arenât we naturalizing the nation-state framework? Is the Nigerian, Rwandan, or Dominican state the same kind of sovereign that is speaking for the people, or are we missing the wider international context and struggle? Does the state and its elites stand for its people at large? My second point is that the Left should be outraged at the caste system in India. It points to a wider impotence of the Left. In the words of KoĆakowski, ââBleeding-heartismâ is not a political position.â15 What does it mean for the Left to be outraged? What kind of political position could emerge out of outrage at the caste system in India or at racial discrimination in the U.S.?
AS: Outrage on its own is not productive politics; it is performative and destructive. But outrage against injustice can be the most important initial steps. The BLM movement organized around outrage, and itâs a movement â I may be naĂŻvely hopeful here â that can have an impact on how policing is done.
The nation-state is a reductive and limiting concept. The world is more complex than nations and nation-states. There is also the interesting tension that nationalism is important to anti-colonial struggles. Partha Chatterjee has written about this. The idea that there are national identities in places like India, Jamaica, Nigeria, etc. was a motivating principle that people organized around.
JH: People often try to think beyond the nation-state, but somehow it keeps coming back. Even in the language of internationalism, you meet nationalism. Internationalism doesnât abolish nationalism; internationalism means solidarity with people in other places and fighting for their freedom. It means acknowledging the national rights of the Irish and of black South Africans.
The Bolshevik kind of internationalism never worked. Between 1917 and 23, guys used to go about in leather jackets and bald heads, really believing that they were the partisans of the future, that they were going to leave the nation-state behind. I have more respect for Hannah Arendtâs view that world government is a nonsensical position. Our world government is so vast that no person can ever control it. Here I disagree with the Platypus view â you canât escape the fact that political powers have a national form. If you want political authority, you have to address the national form that authority is distributed within.
RL: This is the paradox of nationalism. At least in its origin with the American War of Independence and the French Revolution, nationalism had a progressive, unifying power because it originally meant unifying different peoples, principalities, and provinces in the service of a common political project or vision. That was also the dream of the anti-colonial movement. In Nigeria, you wouldnât be Yoruba, Igbo, or Hausa, but Nigerian: citizens of a common republic. Unfortunately, in the colonial world, even that slightly utopian vision of nationalism has gone away. It is now seen as a social Darwinist struggle between ethnic groups: my tribe versus your tribe. Compared to that identity politics, the nation seems progressive. The nation did serve a necessary stage in human development, but it is not the end point. The problem is how to transcend the nation. My guess is as good as yours; itâs a difficult subject to broach.
As Andrew noted, there are still manifest inequalities and injustices aligned with former colonies and colonizers, and in the relations of domination between the global North and South. For me to be convinced that decolonization is over, Iâd like to hear more about how we look at these injustices and inequalities. What is productive about throwing out the concepts of decolonization? What are they stopping us from seeing? What can we see more clearly once we stop fussing over decolonization?
JH: It was always understood within the anti-colonial struggle that the great advantage of getting the occupying nation off your back is that you would be in a better position to see the inequalities within your own society. And it was always the case that colonial authorities didnât rule directly â it was never like âBritain rules India.â That was true at its absolute political apex, but most Indians never met a white person. For 300 years of Britain in India, it was the local elites that Britain encouraged, fostered, and negotiated with. I spent some time in Fiji talking about the Little War,16 and I was corrected intelligently by the Fijian chief, who said, âyou think it was Governor Arthur Gordon who organized this war against the upland Fijians, but that was us. We fought the war against the Hill Folk, and we got the British to give us guns.â It was a great correction because I, with my postcolonial glasses, could only see the European angle, and he was saying, âwe had ambitions and wanted to modernize, to make them go to church like us and be civilized.â Fiji has struggled to cope with how to get out of their colonial setup, which manifests in a fractious racial divide between Indo-Fijians and Fijians. But the way to get out, as people have found again and again, is to start thinking Fijian. Stop thinking, âweâve been hard done by,â and start thinking, âwe are defeating each other and need to sort this out.â
It is indeed intellectually and morally debilitating to refer back. The way that ZANUâPF17 constantly arrested social development within Zimbabwe was destructive, because it used the prism of colonial-era struggle.
RL: We also have to be careful not to validate colonial propaganda too much and give the white man the power of God, as if he has complete agency and others donât. Especially now in the postcolonial era, people within these nations and societies do have agency. They have the potential to change their own conditions, and any radical project, however conceived, must make people realize that they have this power and help them exercise it for their own benefit.
I want to return to the concept of decolonization affirming the idea of the nation-state. If the Left is a movement to affirm bourgeois rights and ideals of all people equally, what separates the Left from liberalism? If the Left is focused on the transformation of society and achieving socialism, why should the Left care about decolonization beyond transforming it into the movement for socialism?
AS: I donât mind if aspects of socialism sound like liberalism. For a long time, I thought about political life as picking a side, getting sucked in, and fighting to the death. I donât think that anymore. Socialism has aspects that are about striving for rights and justice â thatâs part of liberalism too. That doesnât negate socialism, nor does it rehabilitate liberalism. These things are not cults; they are a series of ideas about the world that supposedly gives us useful tools for understanding it, and if you understand it well enough you can do something.
JH: I agree. Rights are turned on their head every time you change the parameter of who has rights. You can read the poems of John Wilmot Rochester or the libertine Marquis de Sade and glory in that obscene freedom they asserted, but youâre always kind of upset that it involves spanking other people who didnât get a choice, lots of sybaritic pleasures at the expense of everybody else. You can love Aristotle and Plato, but it also irks you that they lived at the expense of slaves. But those rights are transformed when the slaves claim them. Thomas Sankara said that the French Revolution showed us the idea of freedom, and the Bolshevik Revolution showed us the actuality; what he meant was that, therefore, he was going to get involved in the national struggle in Ghana.
When you turn the national struggle of European powers into the national struggle of postcolonial powers, a new chapter of freedom opens. Whereas it has become hackneyed in Italy, it got this magic new drama in that postcolonial struggle, which gave it a real meaning. The drama gets finished, you end up in South Africa now, and you think, âis this what we fought for?â Maybe not, but now you can confront the problems of your day because you made these struggles.
RL: Socialism is immanent to liberalism. It doesnât exist outside liberalism. Socialism exists because liberalism and bourgeois society overall came into their own self-contradiction within capitalism. Liberal society betrayed itself while socialists sought to apply the principles of âlibertĂ©, Ă©galitĂ©, fraternitĂ©â to their logical conclusion.
James, you said that colonialism is over in the historic sense of the word, but doesnât it hurt to categorize decolonization as a historically bound understanding of colonialism, considering that so many of our lives are still governed by laws that were set in stone by colonial powers? The ideas that colonialism is a historically bound phenomenon and that decolonization is a historic movement are brainchildren of neoliberal and, ironically, neocolonial institutions who ask us to accept such understandings of colonialism. You said that we cannot address problems if we are stuck in colonialism, but why shouldnât we be stuck in colonialism when we still live in spaces based on the privileges of caste, class, race, and gender? Why shouldnât we demand answers to what was done to our people? If asking for acknowledgement of crimes committed against colonized and enslaved people is being stuck in colonialism, I know millions who would agree with being stuck in a colonial situation.
JH: The present makes the past more than the past that makes the present. There is not an atom of the British Empire left. We can choose to recreate patterns of oppression and exploitation, and we do. What you describe is that the modern world needs inequality; it is the foundation of profit and surplus value. It receives boundaries and structures from the past, but substantially theyâre made in the present. It is not as if the past is imposing upon us and making us do these things; itâs much more that we, here in the present, are reinventing the past all the time to dominate us. Thatâs what we should undo.
Iâm not saying there isnât injustice, class society, or great inequality between national powers. I spend a lot of time writing about these things. You say that these laws are âset in stoneâ â literally, they are not. The nature of laws is that they might be inscribed in stone, but they are not made in stone; they are made of human relations. Different parts of the former British Empire may have oppressive laws on sexuality or on property; those things exist now. The people in those countries that let them exist are not Britain. Itâs not Britain that makes all their oppressive laws. In fact, the British Foreign Office is sneakily telling people not to go to Saudi Arabia because they have very backward laws â forget that we put them there â which is obviously dishonest. But you canât say that Britain is the country thatâs making Saudi Arabia have those oppressive laws; Saudi Arabia is the country making it have oppressive laws. Until the Saudis confront the elites there, those laws arenât going to change. But what would it mean for Britain to make prospects of democratizing those countries? It has to be addressed within those countries themselves.
Weâre selling them arms.
JH: Yes, and thatâs despicable. Iâm not against stopping that.
What is the issue the Left is encountering to transform society to something new, something more equitable, towards new possibilities of freedom? Is capitalism a colonial problem or is colonization a capitalism problem? Ralph said the way that the Left uses decolonization as a politics is a result of the failure of the movements for self-determination, which is itself a failure of the earlier socialist and communist revolutions in the early 20th century. The horizon of politics is capitalism, which is an international problem, and there is a failure to address that problem, so it turns into something else. James said something similar â did anyone think that the end of colonialism would mean the end of capitalism or oppression? Maybe Andrew would say that an orthodox Marxist or socialist would have to defend the universalism and modernity of liberalism and bourgeois society, while the issue of decolonization addresses that directly â the term of work for modern society is white supremacy, and thatâs the politics the Left would have to address. Is capitalism or coloniality the deeper problem? Either can be a distraction from each other.
AS: For the types of colonial projects we are discussing, colonization is essentially a problem of capitalism. You canât understand these colonial projects without the economic motivations that go into the slave trade and cash crops. For the sake of brevity and clarity I have focused on European colonial projects that collapsed in the mid-20th century, but the Spanish and Portuguese empire-building in the early years was governed by a spirit of political aggrandizing and economic self-interest. They werenât strictly capitalist in the first generations. You can say similar things for the Ottoman Empire and the Japanese Empire. Itâs largely capitalist, but not always.
JH: The trouble with talking about capitalism is that itâs a thin conceptual thing that is hard to get your teeth into it. We should reflect on why the colonial struggle has become so emblematic, especially since this historical moment is over. Iâm bemused that we are trying to understand modern and contemporary conflicts through the criticism of this mid-century subterranean war, but it somehow has moral weight. When I was growing up, it was the workerâs struggle thatâs essentially socialism, which was a limited point of view, but that was how we talked: everything was class struggle. Now everything is coloniality. I think we are embarrassed about pressing our own claims in Britain, and the topic of coloniality just has more authority, which has always been the case. The Marxist category of wage slavery exists because the Chartists struggled with the Anti-Slavery Society for the attention of the Victorian era, and they used to say in meetings that they didnât just want to fight against slavery but also against wage slavery in Britain. 19th-century proto-socialists were trying to make their problem alive for people who were attentive to the suffering of slaves in the West Indies but indifferent to the suffering of the wage slaves of Yorkshire. Even as Iâm saying it, it sounds priggish and weird.
In cinema, drama, and fiction, you can quickly pick out who the bad guys and good guys are. The bad guys are the racists with Ku Klux Klan hats, and when we see the poor suffering peasants in the fields, we know that they are the good guys. Thatâs the moral framework that we rest on. Anti-colonialism seems to speak to goodness and freedom, while the workersâ struggle looks vaguely racist, aggressive, and skinhead-y.
RL: Iâll say that the problem is capitalism. Capitalism is an expression of the crisis in the modern project of freedom, which is what the advent of bourgeois society was meant to be, that the freedom of each would be the precondition of the freedom of all and that everyone would be free and equal, and there would an expression of brotherhood between humanity. Yet that doesnât fully materialize. When you address the problem of capitalism â and this is my gripe with decolonial theory â it is prone to attacking capitalism from a particularist standpoint when capitalism is a universal social form. You have to find a way to address it as a broader, international, universal social form. You canât do it in a particularist, sectarian, or even national frame. Itâs easy to say and harder to actualize.
We are in the UK, but the discussion is a little UK-centered with talk of the British Empire and its former colonies. I was happy when Ralph mentioned Kurdistan as an example of an ongoing straightforward colonization. It seems that we are saying that colonization, anti-colonizing movements, and Marxism are things of the past, and all we have today are the curricula. Andrew mentioned the Occupy Movement as a fresh energy and BLM as developing critical thought on the present. Why are contemporary decolonizing movements and their political theorists still doing old-fashioned decolonizing struggles but havenât considered present observations of political and economic relations? Why not think about the contemporaries? After the 2000s, there has been the new paradigm of the previously Marxist-Leninist Kurdish movement. Abdullah Ăcalan, the ideological leader of the Kurdistan freedom movement, discusses the notion of capitalist modernity versus democratic modernity, which is what weâre supposed to strive for together. It is transnational at the same time as a national liberal struggle. Also, the Left wouldnât agree with Andrew when he says that history is a burden or obstacle to a fresh movement. People can always learn from history through critiquing it rather than just forgetting it.
AS: Yes, why not think about the armed struggles of the present? That is consistent with my argument, which is that we shouldnât primarily focus on things like the armed struggles of the past, and armed struggles arenât a thing of the past. There are huge sums of people engaged in armed struggles around the world; they take it seriously and believe in their struggle towards something better. My engagement has been with particular types of Leftist politics. I have spent a hell of a lot of time engaging with the history of the armed struggles of the past and learning about exactly the kind of thing you just asked me.
RL: The question reminded me of another example of the anti-colonial struggles of the present, which is Western Sahara and Morocco. The Polisario Front18 is of the same kidney as some of the Kurdish groups: former Marxist-Leninists mixed with nationalism. Itâs an example that doesnât get talked about much because most people donât find that attractive to engage with, compared to, say, IsraelâPalestine.
JH: It was a depressing moment just after the election in Turkey â the disaster that the opposition made of it â and weâre stuck with that regime. For years I resisted the idea of the axis of evil, but there plainly is an alliance between Putin and ErdoÄan, which maybe also includes India. We have to get used to the fact that there is a reactionary power in the world which is not entirely derived from the West. Do we have the critical tools to address this emerging reaction? I hope you are right, because I can only see the strength of the reaction, not the opposition.
Do we need Leftism to motivate decolonization? Isnât liberalism enough? Is the Leftist position on colonialism the same as the liberal position? Liberalism and Marxism consider some forms of colonialism as progressive and other forms as regressive. What did it mean for Marx, Adam Smith, and Kautsky to say that the colonization of North America was progressive? Is a progressive form of colonialism still conceivable? If not, does it mean that liberalism as well as Marxism is obsolete, at least for these reasons?
JH: Colonialism always has a progressive aspect. Capitalism has a progressive aspect. You are not separating the world into evil and good. All of Britain is capitalist: the workers are capitalist, and the capitalists are capitalist. Itâs a capitalist social system. What is good is going to come from within. British people can see through it, transcend it, and go beyond it. Colonialism was massively destructive, but it destroyed all kinds of fixed societies where there were no paths out. Colonialism created different paths out.
The decolonization movement is the progressive side of colonialism. In Nkrumahâs books about the history of the revolution in Ghana,19 he talks about the ways that the urbanization of the working class was definitive in the trajectory of the movement. Sometimes he is a bit optimistic, but nonetheless heâs talking about a real thing. He says that colonialism organizes us against colonialism, in the same way that Karl Marx talks about capitalismâs tendency to organize the working people against capitalism. It provokes a reaction. That may sound like saying, âpunish us so we can fight back,â but this is how history works. It isnât like the good people are over here and the bad people are over there. Itâs the interaction and conflict that generate the next stage out.
AS: The idea of something being progressive is not a value judgement over whether or not something is good; itâs about the things motivating the projects and understanding the ability to make change through time. Depending on your taste and politics, you can regard the Soviet Union as a project of imperial colonialism that regarded itself as progressive.
In terms of whether or not you need decolonization to make socialism: you cannot establish any true socialism without first substantively achieving decolonization. But that doesnât mean that decolonization automatically turns into socialism. We had a great paper in Cambridge a few weeks ago about how the language of decolonization is being effectively co-opted by far-Right Hindu nationalism.20
RL: History is a tragedy, not a morality tale. Thatâs the first lesson you learn if you study history. But historically, colonialism, or the colonization of North America that you referred to, was progressive in that it helped ascertain the basis of the world market and cosmopolitan commercial society, which in turn produced its own gravediggers, the working class. It makes dialectical sense. Thatâs how Marxism believes colonialism was progressive. Would you say that this mature capitalist world is a form of progressive colonialism? There are Maoists who would say that Chinaâs rule in Tibet is a form of progressive colonialism because it overthrows the Dalai Lama and the Buddhist caste system, but weâll see about that. Imperialism has placed a task upon us, which is that of socialism, i.e., trying to overcome the contradictions of capitalism. Until we at least try to do it, who knows?
How does your Leftist politics impact your teaching? What does decolonizing the curriculum mean? This usually means that a reading list with a black academic or somebody indigenous is presented, everyone shows up to a seminar, and no one says anything. What should the students coming out of these classes look like, how should they talk, and what should they do?
AS: The students should think, be, and do exactly what they want to. If you teach, you should give people the tools to do their own thinking. The things that the next generation of people come up with should be better than what we came up with. Having said that, writing the curriculum is a project of power â not just with regard to coloniality â because the teacher is supposed to be qualified. When I write the curriculum, I think about how the students engaged with it last year, things they understood or didnât, things that are problematic, and I design the new year accordingly. I try to identify latent assumptions about our core questions and ways of thinking and I try to interrogate them and get myself outside of the box. Thatâs the substantive side where decolonization comes into teaching.
These are matters of personal feelings and taste. Iâve given you my hackneyed and slightly embarrassing narrative about the SWP and revolutionary socialism, but I strongly believe that a lecture or a seminar is not a missionary event. My job is not to convince people in the room that revolutionary socialism is right. If that were my job, Iâd be doing something else. My job is to show people ideas about the world that they can use to understand it better on their own. Any student is free to have any political opinion about the world as long as they can show how they arrived at that opinion and defend it with reference to empirical cases and sound intellectual processes. Teaching is ideally not proselytizing, but itâs hard for me to sustain that idealistic position on this panel.
JS: The choice of subject is important but not that important. In essence, all roads lead to Rome. The more you study human history, drama, or tragedy, the more you get out of it. Iâm glad that Britain is at last more attentive to the fact that there is a world and other people. Itâs been a long time coming. Writing the curriculum may look tokenistic, but weâre idiots; what do you expect? It takes a long time to get it right. A good teacher, if they think youâre going somewhere, will listen and be interested and encouraging. A bad teacher will say, âdonât do that.â Iâm probably a terrible teacher.
I never teach what I think because if I did, my students would all hate me forever. I try to teach what the established view is. The established view now is more decolonized than it used to be, so Iâll teach that because I have a responsibility to present not myself, not a biography, but to put all of the culture, as much as I have access to, in front of anybody who is willing to pay attention. That is an important responsibility, and we should take it seriously. Occasionally you can be prescriptive because you canât study everything all at once, but the best teachers know that there are many paths to understanding.
RL: Iâm not a teacher, and Iâm not sure if Iâd be good at it. I agree that the object of education should be to teach people how to think, not what to think. As for the curriculum, in an ideal world, it would try to tell the story of humanity and how it developed. We can bring out all the accumulated cultural patrimony of humanity, whether in China, India, Western Europe, etc. You try to eke out universal themes that could bind people into a common conversation across ages, beyond arbitrary social divisions we live in, and through that we can engage, critique, and arrive at a better, more holistic, more understanding enlightenment, what the Greeks called paideia â deep education. |P
Transcribed by Ceci Chang and Cristian Martinez Vega
1 James Heartfield, The Aboriginesâ Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1837â1909 (London: Hurst, 2011); James Heartfield, Britainâs Empires: A History, 1600â2020 (London: Anthem Press, 2022).
2 Andrew Sanchez, Criminal Capital: Violence, Corruption and Class in Industrial India (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2017).
3 Video available at <https://youtu.be/BfScpu06K_o>.
4 Articles 2 and 3 of the Constitution of Ireland were revised via the 19th Amendment in 1999.
5 Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1965).
6 [German] Conception of the world, worldview, etc.
7 Made up of bronze, brass, wood, ivory, and other materials, the Benin Bronzes are a group of thousands of plaques and sculptures that once adorned the palace of the Kingdom of Benin, in what is now Nigeria. They were mostly taken by British forces during the Benin Expedition of 1897, and they are now in the collections of museums around the world.
8 [Latin] Mode of living, way of life, etc.
9 OlĂșfáșčÌmi O. TĂĄĂwĂČ, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else) (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2022).
10 Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 237.
11 C.L.R. James, âThe Making of the Caribbean People,â in Spheres of Existence: Selected Writings (London: Alison and Busby, 1980), 179.
12 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 201, 205.
13 Johann von Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Part 1 (1808), 1.3.1340.
14 [Irish] Our day will come. It is a slogan of Irish republicanism that was coined in the 1970s during the Troubles.
15 Leszek KoĆakowski, âThe Concept of the Left,â in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 156.
16 A conflict in Fiji in 1886 involving British colonists, native Fijian groups, and the Kai Colo. Kai Colo is Fijian for âfrom the hills,â i.e., the inhabitants of the highlands of Viti Levu, who were opposed to the teachings of Christian missionaries, etc.
17 Zimbabwe African National Union â Patriotic Front, the ruling party of Zimbabwe since independence in 1980.
18 Also known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Saguia el-Hamra and RĂo de Oro, which is a Sahrawi nationalist liberation movement, founded in 1973, seeking to end the occupation of Western Sahara through armed resistance and political advocacy. It has opposed Spanish colonialism, Mauritanian irredentism, and Moroccan irredentism.
19 See Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1968).
20 See, for example, Annapurna Menon, âDebunking Hindutva Appropriation of Decolonial Thought,â Interfere: Journal for Critical Thought and Radical Politics 3 (2022): 36â57; Ratna Kapur, âRace-making, religion and rights in the post-colony: unmasking the pathogen in assembling a Hindu nation,â International Journal of Law in Context 18, no. 4 (December 2022): 499â516; Alexandra Lewis and Marie Lall, âFrom decolonisation to authoritarianism: the co-option of the decolonial agenda in higher education by right-wing nationalist elites in Russia and India,â Higher Education 87 (2024): 1471â88; and Meera Nanda, Postcolonial Theory and the Making of Hindu Nationalism: The Wages of Unreason (New York: Routledge, 2025).
