Decolonizing The Mind

A guide to decolonial theory and practice

© Amrit Publishers The Hague,
First print January 2023
Second reprint February 2023 
ISBN 978-90-74897-77-8
Cover Design: Gerard Daniels. Cover drawing: Nazrina Rodjan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Decolonizing The Mind

A guide to decolonial theory and practice

Sandew Hira

Amrit Publishers

Preface and acknowledgements

This book is the result of more than twelve years of research, organization, lectures, discussions and debates on decolonial thinking and more specifically on Decolonizing The Mind (DTM). It is the product of the social movements I have been involved in during the last decade.

My roots lie in Suriname, a former colony of Holland that gained political independence in 1975. In 1970 my family moved to Holland where I studied economics at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.

I became active in the Marxist movement in the Netherlands, the anti-racist movement in the communities of color and the solidarity movement with the anti-imperialist struggle in the world. In 1980 a coup d’état took place in Suriname that unleashed colonial and anti-colonial forces that got locked into a violent struggle with countercoups and ultimately a civil war. Between 1980 and 1992, 450 people out of a population of 500,000 perished due to political violence. Like many activists in the Diaspora, I also got involved in the social struggle in Suriname while also involved in the struggle in Holland against racism.

During this period, I became disillusioned with the Marxist movement for theoretical, ethical and practical reasons. Twelve years ago, in 2010, I met Ramon Grosfoguel from the University of California Berkeley who introduced me to the world of decolonial thinking. In the same period I was involved in debates with Dutch and Surinamese historians on colonial history and the need to provide another narrative of colonialism, especially of the history of slavery and indentured labor. At the same time, I met Stephen Small, also from the University of California Berkeley, who started to work with me on many of these themes.

They have become great friends who inspired and stimulated me to develop the theory of DTM. Stephen encouraged me in my work on trans-Atlantic slavery and reparations. Together with Arzu Merali we form the editorial board of the book series Decolonizing The Mind. Stephen has created an environment of charm, humor and stimulating intellectual debates in which my DTM-thinking could flourish. I am grateful for his friendship and warmth during the past years.

Ramon Grosfoguel has been of crucial importance in my endeavours in DTM. He founded the Decolonial International Network Foundation (DIN), of which I am the secretary. He leads Dialogo Global, a foundation that organizes annual summer schools in Barcelona on Decolonizing Knowledge and Power and in Granada on Islamic Liberation Theology. These summer schools offer me a space to actively engage with participants.

As a result, we became deeply involved in critical discussions with people around the world who are working on decolonial thinking. Dialogo Global was instrumental in providing the resources to develop DIN. The continuous and gracious support and commitment of Ramon to our joint work has created a strong bond of comradeship and friendship between us, a bond that has enriched my life.

The Islamic Human Rights Commission (IHRC) in London has also been a major force in developing DIN and this work. Massoud Shadjareh, Arzu Merali and the staff of IHRC have supported and encouraged me in many ways. Their support has been crucial for my work. They organized DTM courses in the UK. They facilitated the bi-annual meetings in Europe to build the theory and practice of DTM. They taught me a lot about their Islamic perspective on the world and the contribution of Islam to decolonial theory. They have provided the organizational environment, the resources and the intellectual climate to develop DIN and DTM. I am deeply grateful for the warmth, love and encouragement that they have given me throughout the years. Massoud, Arzu, Ramon and I are part of the DIN Foundation that was set up in December 2018 to promote decolonial education. I thank Faisal Bodi from IHRC for his tremendous help in the editing of the manuscript.

In my work for DIN I have also met and worked with many activists who inspired me to undertake this theoretical journey. I am grateful for their critical contribution to the development of my thinking about decolonial theory. I am looking forward to work in the coming years with Munyaradzi Mushonga, who was appointed as the Global Academic Director of DIN. Munya has become a dear friend and dedicated organizer. As a historian of Africa he hast taught me a lot about the history of that continent.

Over the past ten years I have been invited to present DTM at conferences, lectures and workshops in Belgium, Curacao, England, Finland, France, Malaysia, Mauritius, Portugal, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Suriname, Venezuela and the United States. I met and engaged with many people who have contributed to my thinking on DTM. I want to thank them all.

I thought decolonizing mathematics was impossible until I met Indian mathematician C.K. Raju. His work and discussion with me were crucial in developing the chapter on decolonizing mathematics. I thank him for this input and feedback.

Since 2015 I became involved in the work of truth, peace and reconciliation in Suriname. It was the practical application of DTM in political struggle. It had a profound impact on my life and work. This work was initiated by Melvin Linscheer, at that time the head of the National Security Agency of the government of Suriname. He and his wife Patty have become dear friends of myself and my wife Sitla Bonoo. My work on truth, peace and reconciliation helped in understanding the necessity of a strong theoretical basis in order to deal with the many practical problems in social struggle.

As always, my family is the bedrock of my existence. I fell in love with my wife Sitla 46 years ago and every day I keep on falling even deeper in love. Our daughter Pravini and our son Amrit are the sun around which we as parents circle and where we bathe in the warmth of their love. Our granddaughter Diya is a supernova that has brought the brightest light in our lives. Our daughter Pravini is a singer/songwriter, activist and storyteller who produced a musical documentary titled The Uprising in which she tells the story of DTM. Through this documentary she pressed me to be very precise and clear in my ideas on Decolonizing The Mind. Without love, family and friends, life has little meaning.

Sandew Hira

The Hague

The Netherlands

January 15, 2023

1. Introduction

Decolonial theory is a theory about the rise and decline of the western colonial world civilization and its impact on the globe. I define colonialism as “a global system of economic, political, social and cultural institutions that the colonizer has created in order to rule the world in a colonial world civilization” (see also paragraph 4.1.1 - Definition and paragraph 8.1.2 - The concept of civilization).

Decolonial theory as an explicit theory of liberation is only a few decades old. Since the start of colonialism there was always a decolonial response in the form of decolonial concepts. Decolonial theory has its origin in different parts of the world (see paragraph 2.2 - A global movement). It has produced valuable concepts in different disciplines of science. Many important contributions have been made to philosophy (epistemology) and social and cultural theory, but fewer on economic and political theory. These contributions are more or less independent from each other and have different basic concepts. There are contributions from Latin Abya Yala (Latin America), Africa, the US, Australia, Asia. Yet, in my view, as a theory it still has some serious limitations.

First, decolonial theory as a theory of liberation should provide clear policies for changing the world, for decolonizing the world. Much of the critique is about biases in knowledge production. I think that we should move beyond that area into the terrain of what the practical implications of decolonial theory are for social movements and progressive governments.

Second, decolonial theory is an amalgamation of a scattered landscape of concepts that are not necessarily related to each other and might even contradict other decolonial concepts. Some decolonial theorists argue against capitalism and others for promoting innovative entrepreneurship. It is not clear how a critique of epistemology is related to changing political institutions.

In order to overcome these limitations, I propose to develop decolonial theory as a comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical framework. Western Enlightenment has produced two such frameworks: Liberalism and Marxism.

A comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical framework has the following characteristics:

It is comprehensive because it has produced concepts of how to look at the most important dimensions of a society: a world-view, economics, politics, social relations including relations with nature, and culture. There are other important aspects of a society, but these dimensions are essential to make a framework comprehensive.

It is coherent because its concepts don’t contradict each other. They are consistent and logical.

It is integral because the concepts of the different dimensions are not just lumped together but are related to each other from a basic concept. In Liberalism this is “individual freedom” and in Marxism “class struggle”. In decolonial theory it is “mental slavery and decolonizing the mind (DTM)”.

Decolonial theory is very young. It took Liberalism and Marxism hundreds of years to develop into comprehensive, coherent and integral frameworks. John Locke (1631-1704), the founder of Liberalism, published his political ideas on government in 1689, more than 330 years ago. Adam Smith, the founder of the economic theory of Liberalism published his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in 1776, almost a century later. Basic socialist ideas were articulated in the French Revolution of 1789, more than 230 years ago. The Communist Manifesto, a founding document of the socialist movement, was published in 1848. “Das Kapital”, by Karl Marx, the founder of Marxism, was published in 1867, more than 150 years ago. There is still a lot of work to be done in developing a comprehensive, coherent and integral framework for decolonial theory and practice.

A comprehensive, coherent and integral framework provides mankind with a worldview of how a civilization should be established and how societies in this civilization should be organized economically, socially, politically and culturally. Outside the West, different civilizations have developed comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical frameworks. One such example is the Islamic civilization.

In Islam the basic concept is Tahwid, the oneness of Allah. The concept is not just a declaration of faith that there is one God and one God only. It is also a statement of the kind of society that can be built: the Ummah. This is a community of believers that is united under the guidance of one God. The guidance is to be found in the Qur’an, a religious text revealed to the prophet Muhammad through the archangel Gabriel over a period of 23 years, beginning in the month of Ramadan and ending in 632, the year of his death. Apart from the Qur’an there is a collection of records - the Hadith - of what Muhammad said and did during his life. Together with the Qur’an they are the sources for Islamic law and moral guidance.

I define a world view as a philosophy of how mankind evolved to where it is now and how it might evolve in the future. The Islamic worldview is based on the belief that life and existence came into being as a result of the will, desire and design of Allah, the creator. But humans are endowed with reason, with which they can develop nature and society. Regarding nature, Islam holds that humans are the vicegerents of Allah on earth. All the resources of this world are at their disposal as a trust, not as a property. Regarding human society, the core concept on which a society is based upon justice. Justice is a moral category that denotes how a society should be organized on the basis of fairness and the more or less equal distribution of rights and duties.¹

In Islamic economic theory, private ownership of means and production and the market are considered legitimate parts of an economic system, unlike in Marxism. Islam recognizes that there are differences between people that may lead to differences in their ability to earn and, hence, in the amount of wealth they may accumulate. But the rich have the duty of giving to the poor and needy. The Islamic economic system should provide for a balanced structure of relationships in the community, as what the rich are giving is regarded as what the poor are entitled to. Unlike Liberal economic theory where greed (maximum profit) is the basis for operating an economic system, in Islam the economic system is based on the moral values of social justice.²

There are different parts in Islamic social theory that deal with different aspects of social relations. The social theory is not a description of social relations, but a guide to how social relations should be organized. An example is the concept of Ummah, the community of believers, regardless of race, ethnicity, nation, gender and other social characteristics. Members of the Ummah should relate to each other on the basis of solidarity. Regarding gender, there are different interpretations in Islamic theology. Some argue that gender inequality is part of Islamic theology. Asma Lamrabet holds that “it is not Islam as a spiritual message that oppresses women, but rather its different interpretations and legal rulings founded by interpretative ideologies many centuries ago.”³

In the political theory of Islam an Islamic state is based on Islamic law, which in itself is based on the Qur’an and the Hadith. There is no separation of religion and politics as in secular states. On the contrary, politics is based on theology. Political institutions function on the basis of developing a religious community and serving this community in every aspect of life (economics, social relation, culture etc).⁴ The relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in a Muslim society are structured according to the principles of the Constitution of Medina. The Constitution was drawn up in 622 in Medina after the prophet Muhammad arrived following his migration from Mecca. Non-Muslims were guaranteed the same political and cultural rights as Muslims. They have autonomy and freedom of religion. This is not a nation-state, but a pluriversal state.

In contrast to Liberal cultural theory in which individualism and materialism form the basis of Westernized culture, Islamic cultural theory is based on the notion that Allah has ordained human beings to live a life of moral conduct that combines individual growth with social responsibility. Humans are encouraged to develop culture and science within the context of the guidance of the Qur’an and Hadith.⁵

I have given this brief description of the main points of the Islamic theoretical framework as an example of a comprehensive, coherent and integral framework from a non-Western civilization. There is a basic concept, Tawhid, on which a comprehensive system is erected for economic, social, political and cultural theory. This system is coherent. The different theories are interconnected and form a logical unity.

There are many different views within this framework, even on the main points that I just mentioned. There are critiques of Islamic theology that challenge the basic assumptions of the framework and point to the divergence of theory and practice of Islam. But on the whole, the purpose of my summary is to give an example of what other comprehensive, coherent and integral frameworks outside the west look like.

In African philosophy the concept of Ubuntu - I am, because we are - explains how individuals and society are interconnected. It might become the foundation of economic, social, political and cultural theories that are not grounded in individualism or class struggle, but in the notion of interconnected social relations.

In the indigenous cultures of Latin Abya Yala the concept of Buen Vivir (Good Life) expresses a harmonious relation between humans on the one hand and humans and nature on the other. A good life can only be achieved with others through the practice of solidarity and working together. A society should be based on the nurturing of a tender, harmonious and vigorous life for humans and nature (Pacha Mama, Mother Earth).

In Chinese Confucian philosophy, a society should be based on humanity (humaneness), duties and responsibilities of the members of the society and rituals and procedures.

In Hinduism and Buddhism, Dharma is a key concept. Although there is a variety of meanings attached to the term there are some general notions that give us an idea of this concept. There is the notion that people can achieve a happy life and save themselves from degradation and suffering if they follow moral laws like austerity, purity, compassion and truthfulness combined with spiritual discipline.

In the Eurocentric knowledge system, all non-Western knowledge has largely been discarded as backward and irrelevant for modern societies. I assert that outside the West, comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical frameworks have existed and assert their relevance today in the critique of Eurocentrism. In my view a comprehensive, coherent and integral decolonial theoretical framework should draw from those knowledge systems. This study is an attempt in that direction.

The basic concept that I use in developing a decolonial framework is the concept of mental slavery and Decolonizing The Mind. This concept maintains that Western knowledge production was founded on the manipulation of the mind (the colonization of the mind) into accepting Western superiority and non-Western inferiority. The greatest challenge of the future is decolonizing the mind which consists of three dimensions:

The critique of the Western colonization of the mind and thus Eurocentric knowledge production.

The development of an alternative comprehensive, coherent and integral knowledge production.

The translation of this new knowledge into viable policies to build a new pluriversal world civilization.

This study is just one of the many contributions to this endeavour. In every continent there are thinkers who are engaged in the same struggle to decolonize the mind. Eventually a decolonial comprehensive, coherent and integral theoretical framework will be the result of a collective effort by many thinkers across the globe.

I use the following approach in developing my contribution to this framework: I start with trying to understand why the decolonial movement started some decades ago (chapter two). It makes the link between the fall of the West and the rise of the rest. It also points to the collapse of the socialist bloc and the demise of Marxism as a theory of liberation. And it connects the rise of decolonial theory to the crisis of Western civilization.

DTM is a critique of Eurocentrism and the European Enlightenment. In order to develop this critique, it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the two major schools from the European Enlightenment: Liberalism and Marxism. In chapter three, I outline their world-view and their economic, social, political and cultural theory. This chapter is crucial because an in-depth understanding of their theories is needed to move to the next important step: the development of an alternative philosophy of liberation based on the concept of DTM.

The basic concept of a comprehensive, coherent and integral decolonial framework, in my view, is the concept of mental slavery: the process of the colonization of the mind. It distinguishes between two layers in this process: the basic and deepest layer of the production of knowledge on the one hand and the layer of the mechanisms of mental slavery. Chapter four deals with these issues.

From chapter five up to and including chapter twelve I use the following methodology in developing the building blocks for a DTM framework. I look at the basic concepts in the following disciplines:

Philosophy, notably epistemology (the theory of knowledge) (chapter five).

A DTM theory of racism. Strictly spoken, the study of racism is not a discipline but part of social theory. But because racism is so entrenched in Eurocentric epistemology, I have decided to spend a separate chapter on a DTM theory of racism (chapter six).

Mathematics and natural sciences (chapter seven).

History, notably world history (chapter eight).

Economic theory (chapter nine).

Social theory (chapter ten).

Cultural theory (chapter eleven).

Political theory (chapter twelve).

In each of these disciplines, I give an outline of the basic concepts and provide a critique of these concepts. All these disciplines have a wide array of authors - both in the past and today - who have developed the discipline. I focus my explanation and critique on the authors who are considered to be the founders of that discipline. After the critique, I discuss alternative concepts from a DTM point of view. Finally, I look into the practical implications for policy making. This is how I have developed my DTM framework.

The last chapter takes up the issue of the transition of a colonial world civilization into a new decolonial world civilization. We are experiencing the decline of the old world order, but what will emerge from the ashes of its destruction? How might a new world civilization look like from a DTM perspective? The concept of a new world civilization is at the core of DTM.

With this book I want to encourage open discussions and debates with people who disagree with the propositions I put forward. I realize that my knowledge is limited and the decolonial movement has a long way to go in the coming decades. In my view the only way to further the development of decolonial theory and practice is by critique and not by applause.

There is a note on the terminology that is used throughout this book. As I explain in paragraph 5.4.2.1 (The terminology) there is a link between terminology and the power to colonize the mind. Changing terminology can be an arduous enterprise.

Take the example of Abya Yala: Suppose that an Aztec discoverer from Mexico in 1750 managed to read about a country named China. In his time, it was known that he could travel westward to reach China, but he decides with the support of his rich rulers to travel to the east to find another route to China. He ends up in Europe but thinks he has landed in China. Now he calls all Europeans Chinese. He tells stories about the Chinese in the cities of London and Paris. Every textbook that is written about Europe since his voyage refers to the Italians, Germans or French as Chinese. This sound hilarious. Why? Not because it is impossible. In fact, that is exactly what happened to the people in the Abya-Yala. Columbus thought that in his search for a westward route to India he had actually landed in India, while in reality he landed in the Caribbean. He named all the people in Abya-Yala Indians, although they had many different names for their nations. The difference between Columbus and the Aztec discoverer is that the Aztec would have no power to enforce his terminology on the mind of the world, but the Spanish occupiers did have the power of an empire. In fact, if Columbus thought that he was searching for a route to China, the people of Abya Yala would now have been named “Chinese” in every Eurocentric history book.

America was named after Amerigo Vespucci (1454-1512). He was an Italian who travelled with Spanish and Portuguese invaders and mapped the continent, which he claimed to be a new continent. Columbus believed that he had not discovered a new continent but arrived in the old continent of Asia. The cartographers Martin Waldseemüller (1470-1520) and Matthias Ringmann (1482-1511) named the continent America, after the first name of Vespucci, Amerigo, in honor of his work.

As an act of resistance, the Bolivian Aymara leader Takir Mamani proposed the use of the term “Abya Yala” in the official declarations of governments and official institutions. He says that “placing foreign names on our villages, our cities, and our continents is equivalent to subjecting our identity to the will of our invaders and their heirs.”⁶ Abya Yala” means “Continent of Life”, “land in its full maturity” or “land of vital blood” in the language of the Kuna peoples of Panama and Colombia. I use Abya Yala when referring to the Americas as a whole and Latin, North or South Abya Yala when referring specifically to Latin, North and South America. When I specifically refer to the US, I just use US. I keep “America” in quotes that use “America”. When I refer to ethnicity that uses America (African American, White Americans) I keep “American”, because it is part of a name.

On September 14th, 2021 the Māori Party of New Zealand launched a petition to change the official name of the country to Aotearoa, its name in the te reo Māori language. The campaign also calls on Parliament to restore the Māori names for all towns, cities and place names. The Māori name for New Zeeland is Aotearoa. I use the Māori name when I refer to New Zeeland. I hope that I can be consistent in using decolonial names in this book and apologize if I err in this regard.

Finally, I use extensive citations in this book for two reasons. The first reason is educational. Whenever I refer to sources, I want to use primary sources. If I discuss an idea of a thinker of institutions, I quote from the primary source to show how the idea was articulated by the thinker and not by an interpreter of the thinker. Teaching students and readers to use primary sources enables them to think or interpret for themselves. The second reason is to show that many ideas that I develop in this book are based on work that others have done and on whose shoulders I stand.

2. The background of the rise of the decolonial movement and theory

2.1 The ghost of Cecil Rhodes

“Decolonizing knowledge and power”, “Decolonizing the universities”, “Decolonizing international relations”, “Decolonizing the diet”, “Decolonizing God”, “Decolonizing mathematics”, “Decolonizing The Mind (DTM)”. The internet is full of references to decolonizing something, yet many of these concepts seem to be unrelated to a far more common notion of decolonization: the political independence of European colonies.

The decolonial movement is not a fashion that started a few years ago and will disappear within the next decade. It is a movement that is rooted in historical forces that are shaping the future of the world. A good example of this movement comes from South Africa.

South Africa was occupied and colonized by the Dutch and the British. The country was formally declared independent from Britain, but the white Dutch and British did not leave South Africa. They stayed and instituted apartheid in law in 1948 under white minority rule with the strong support of Western powers. In 1994, after a prolonged struggle, apartheid was dismantled and the African National Congress under the leadership of Nelson Mandela took power in free elections. One might think that decolonization is not an issue at all in South Africa. More than twenty years after the ANC election victory students at the University of Cape Town started the Rhodes Must Fall movement that began with the toppling of a statue of Cecil Rhodes.

Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902) was a British imperialist with a colonial vision to build a railroad from Cairo to Cape Town as part of a project to colonize the whole of Africa. He proclaimed: “I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”⁷ Rhodes was a racist, a thief of African land, an exploiter of African workers in his mines and an advocate of apartheid. He acquired his immense wealth through genocide, enslavement, plunder and dispossession of Africans. He was prime minister of the Cape Colony and had commercial and political interests in South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Lesotho, and Swaziland. In the colonial narrative he is presented as a successful businessman who brought welfare to Africa. He is honoured in different ways by whites in Britain and Southern Africa. In South Africa a public university has been named after him. There was a statue of him at the University of Cape Town and there is still one in Oxford, England.

On March 9, 2015, a group of black students from the University of Cape Town threw human faeces at the statue of Rhodes and held a toyi-toyi protest dance by stomping their feet and chanting protest songs. They demanded that the statue of Rhodes at the university must be brought down. On March 12 the campus population discussed the statue in an open-air dialogue. In the following week students marched to the administrative building, Bremner, to demand a date for the removal of the statue. On March 20, they stormed the Bremner building during a meeting where the vice-chancellor spoke on the issue. On March 27, the university senate voted in favor of the removal of the statue. On April 9, the Rhodes statue was finally removed. And so the Rhodes Must Fall Movement took off in South Africa.

Subsequently the movement developed a dynamic of its own and articulated new and broader demands under the slogan “decolonizing the university”. The protest evolved into questioning the colonial nature of the curricula and the need to decolonize the educational system in South Africa as a whole. It touched upon issues of institutional racism, the colonial bias of Western knowledge production, issues of gender and sexuality, student housing and university fees. It started at the University of Cape Town but quickly moved to other universities in South Africa such as Stellenbosch University, Rhodes University, University of Pretoria and University of the Free State.

The issue of political independence that used to be linked to decolonization was absent from the demands because South Africa is already independent. It addresses the question of power and culture in a post-apartheid society that is governed by a liberation movement. And power and culture are seen in the context of the legacy of a colonial world system, and not just of the legacy of apartheid in South Africa.

The Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign was not limited to South Africa. The call for removing the statue of Rhodes resonated in another part of the world, in Oxford in the UK, where there is also a statue of Rhodes at Oxford University. Rhodes left funds to the university to finance scholarships. The Rhodes Trust has operated since 1902. In 2016 students from the university called for the removal of the statue. But it went beyond the question of statue removal. They formulated three aims of their campaign:

“1) Tackling the plague of colonial iconography (in the form of statues, plaques and paintings) that seeks to whitewash and distort history.

2) Reforming the Euro-centric curriculum to remedy the highly selective narrative of traditional academia – which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge – by integrating subjugated and local epistemologies. This will create a more intellectually rigorous, complete academy.

3) Addressing the underrepresentation and lack of welfare provision for Black and minority ethnic (BME) amongst Oxford’s academic staff and students.”⁸

The board of the university refused to heed that call.

Chris Patten, the chancellor of Oxford University (who was the final British governor of occupied Hong Kong, one of the last vestiges of the British empire), has accused the students of not abiding by the values of a liberal and open society. He referred to Nelson Mandela and philosopher Karl Popper to make his case: “If people at a university are not prepared to demonstrate the sort of generosity of spirit which Nelson Mandela showed towards Rhodes and towards history, if they are not prepared to embrace all those values which are contained in the most important book for any undergraduate, Karl Popper’s Open Society, if they are not prepared to embrace those issues then maybe they should think about being educated elsewhere.”⁹

In 2003 Nelson Mandela held a speech at Cape Town University at the Centenary Celebration of the Rhodes scholarship program. The program was offered by the Mandela-Rhodes Foundation. Mandela addressed the awkwardness of lending his name to the Rhodes Foundation: “This evening does help to remind us of the dramatic changes as well as the themes of continuity in the course of the history of our beloved country. That rogue governor from the early Dutch settlement of the Cape; the imperialist so-called ‘robber baron’ from the British colonial period; the political prisoner turned President of democratic South Africa. We represent radically different eras in the history and development of our country - epochs and approaches in fundamental historical opposition and contradiction to each other.”¹⁰

His critical remark did not change the outcome. The foundation is still named Mandela-Rhodes Foundation. Patten regards this as generosity. The Rhodes Must Fall movement regards it as capitulation. Patten sees Popper’s philosophical outlook as the only valid and universal account of epistemology. The students criticize the “highly selective narrative of traditional academia, which frames the West as sole producers of universal knowledge”.

There are thousands of groups around the world like RMF. They use the decolonial banner in their struggle against racism, imperialism and other forms of injustice. They are located in all parts of the world, from the global North to the global South.

2.2 A global movement

RMF started in academia. Many academics across the globe took up the subject of coloniality: how knowledge production has been colonized. Until then colonialism and decolonization were conceived in terms of political control of colonies. Peruvian scholar Anibal Quijano declares that “Coloniality ... is still the most general form of domination in the world today, once colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed.”¹¹ He defines coloniality as follows: “Coloniality of power was conceived together with America and Western Europe, and with the social category of ‘race’ as the key element of the social classification of colonized and colonizers. Unlike in any other previous experience of colonialism, the old ideas of superiority of the dominant, and the inferiority of dominated under European colonialism were mutated in a relationship of biologically and structurally superior and inferior.… So, coloniality of power is based upon ‘racial’ social classification of the world population under Eurocentered world power. But coloniality of power is not exhausted in the problem of ‘racist’ social relations. It pervaded and modulated the basic instances of the Eurocentered capitalist colonial/modern world power to become the cornerstone of this coloniality of power.”¹²

Enrique Dussel from Argentina/Mexico explains how the process of colonization of knowledge takes place: “Colonial elites were now systematically trained in the imperialist center. Oxford, Cambridge, and Paris were transformed into theaters of ‘reeducation’, of brainwashing, until well into the twentieth century. The colonial oligarchies were brown, black, or yellow, and they aped the philosophy they had learned abroad. True puppets, they repeated in the periphery what their eminent professors of the great metropolitan universities had propounded. In Cairo, Dakkar, Saigon, and Peking - as in Buenos Aires and Lima - they taught their pupils the ego cogito in which they themselves remained constituted as an idea or thought, entities at the disposal of the ‘will to power’, impotent, dominated wills, castrated teachers who castrated their pupils. These colonized philosophers had forgotten their past. The Arab world did not return to its own splendid philosophy dating back to the ninth century. India was ashamed of its sages and so was China, though both nations had produced treasures of thought for more than three millennia.”¹³

“Doing feminist theory and feminist philosophy in a decolonial way poses particular challenges,” writes Linda Alcolff from Panama.¹⁴ She develops a decolonial view on feminism: “In my view, the decolonial approach to feminist theory needs to address three projects. (1) The first is a task of critique: What of our concepts and categories carry an implicit legacy of their colonial genealogy? (2) The second task involves developing tools for cross- cultural communication. How do we engage in dialogic encounters under conditions of unequal power and against the backdrop of colonialism? How do we “speak with” under conditions of inequality and legitimate mistrust? (3) The third task involves methods for conducting local analyses within a global frame, so that we can contextualize local conditions within a relational, transnational framework that is capable of charting both local and global causality.”¹⁵

In Brazil, legal scholars of the Catholic University of Brasilia established Decolonizing and Comparing Legal Experiences Network (DECLEN) to discuss decolonization and the comparison between legal experiences in the domestic and international scope and to promote studies from a critical legal comparative perspective, deconstructing the orthodoxy of comparative law, especially.

Latin Abya Yala produced a long list of scholars that explored the colonization of knowledge and power and the relationship with modernity. They are from Latin Abya Yala, but work in universities in the United States. Walter Mignolo from Argentina, Linda Alcolff from Panama, Ramon Grosfoguel and Nelson Maldonado Torres from Puerto Rico are a few examples.

But decolonization was not limited to academia. In Bolivia it became part of the state structure. On December 18, 2005, Evo Morales was elected president of Bolivia with 54% of the votes, an absolute majority. Although his party was named Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS – Movement for Socialism) his policies were based on the ancient philosophies of the indigenous people and explicitly referred to decolonization as a major topic. In fact, it was taken up in the new constitution (see paragraph 2.5 The crisis of Western civilization).

In 2000, fifteen years before RMF in South Africa, a movement for decolonization had started in another part of the world: Asia. A Malaysian activist, Mohamed Idris - president of the Consumers Association of Penang in Malaysia (Penang) – proposed the idea of a building an international network under the name Multiversity with the aim of decolonizing the universities. The name was a direct challenge to the Westernized universities that claimed to produce universal knowledge. The network has organized seven biennial conferences since then covering a wide range of topics from decolonizing the curriculum to decolonizing mathematics. It brings together activists and academics. The critique of the Westernized universities was not limited to the dominant liberal narratives but included Marxist schools of thought.

Indian scholar Vinay Lal of the network explains his critique of the Marxist school of subaltern studies: “If you look at subaltern studies, what is very clear is that they basically work on the same model that the colonialists used to, you use a set of western theorists Gramsci, Foucault, Derrida, Levi-Strauss, all of these people but your raw material is still Indian, India is a factory that furnishes raw material. But they would never think of using for example, Gandhi’s practice and theory of sexuality to interrogate Foucault’s history of sexuality. They would never do that, they would use Foucault’s history of sexuality to understand Gandhi’s, they would never do the reverse. And it seems to me that that points to one of the kinds of limitations that I am suggesting you find incorporated within the present practice of history.”¹⁶

Decolonial thinking is not only a critique of colonial knowledge. Lal points to another world of knowledge that the West does not accept as valid knowledge, but that can produce valuable alternative concepts which can help us understand and change the world we live in.

In India mathematician Prof. C.K. Raju stands out as the only scholar in science that took up the issue of decolonizing mathematics. I discuss his work in chapter seven.

Long before RMF African scholar Ngugi wa Thiong’o from Kenya had put decolonizing the mind on the academic agenda with his 1981 publication Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature. He focuses on colonization through language. I discuss his contribution in paragraph 4.3.1.1 - The method of case studies. Six years earlier Chinweizu, Jemie, and Madobuike made their case for decolonizing African literature. They write: “Our basic assumption is ... that contemporary African culture is under foreign domination. For, on the one hand, our culture has to destroy all encrustrations of colonial mentality, and on the other hand, has to map out new foundations of an African modernity. This cultural task demands a deliberate and calculated process of syncretism: one which, above all, emphasizes valuable continuities with our pre-colonial culture, welcomes vitalizing contributions from other cultures, and exercises inventive genius in making a healthy and distinguished synthesis from them all.”¹⁷

A few decades later, in 2013, Sabelo Ndlovu Gatsheni from Zimbabwe tried to connect African thinking with decolonialty in Latin Abya Yala. He wants to “provide three concepts (coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge, and coloniality of being, borrowed from Latin American decolonial thinkers) on which to mount a decolonial epistemic perspective, as a combative epistemology to enable Africans to pursue a redemptive epistemological struggle. Such a struggle entails engaging in a deep diagnostic understanding of those African social formations and African experiences that began at the dawn of modernity and culminated in the current form of African subjectivity.”¹⁸

In Aotearoa (New Zeeland) Linda Tuhiwai Te Rina Smith published her book Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples in 1999. She pointed to the contradiction and struggle between academia and the Maori communities: “While Western theories and academics were describing, defining and explaining cultural demise, however, indigenous peoples were having their lands and resources systematically stripped by the state; were becoming ever more marginalized; and were subjected to the layers of colonialism imposed through economic and social policies. This failure of research, and of the academic community, to address the real social issues of Maori was recalled in later times when indigenous disquiet became more politicized and sophisticated. Very direct confrontations took place between Maori and some academic communities. Such confrontations have also occurred in Australia and other parts of the indigenous world, resulting in much more active resistances by communities to the presence and activities of researchers.”¹⁹

In Western Asia, Imam Rouhullah Khomeini, who led the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979, proclaimed Islam as a religion against colonialism: “Islam is a religion of those who struggle for truth and justice, of those who clamor for liberty and independence. It is the school of those who fight against colonialism.”²⁰

In different parts of the world a new decolonial movement is growing that challenges long time narratives in knowledge production and social struggle and transforms activism and social movements. How do we explain the rise of this new decolonial movement and where is it going? I see three factors behind the decolonial movement.

The fall of the west and the rise of the rest.

The collapse of the socialist bloc and the demise of Marxism.

The crisis of Western civilization.

2.3 The fall of the West and the rise of the rest

“Look around.”, writes CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria in an effort to graphically illustrate the economic rise of the rest. “The tallest building in the world is now in Dubai. The world’s richest man is Mexican, and its largest publicly traded corporation is Chinese. The world’s biggest plane is built in Russia and Ukraine, its leading refinery is in India, and its largest factories are all in China. By many measures, Hong Kong now rivals London and New York as the leading financial centre, and the United Arab Emirates is home to the most richly endowed investment fund. Once quintessentially American icons have been appropriated by foreigners. The world’s largest Ferris wheel is in Singapore. Its number one casino is not in Las Vegas but in Macao, which has also overtaken Vegas in annual gambling revenues. The biggest movie industry, in terms of both movies made and tickets sold, is Bollywood, not Hollywood. Even shopping, America’s greatest sporting activity, has gone global. Of the top ten malls in the world, only one is in the United States; the world’s biggest is in Dongguan, China. Such lists are arbitrary, but it is striking that twenty years ago, America was at the top in many, if not most, of these categories.”²¹

The rising economic power of the rest is illustrated in new international alliances such as the BRICS-countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) that represent large countries and fast-growing economies. They set up rival institutions such as the BRICS Development Bank and the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank that compete with the World Bank and the IMF which are dominated by the west.

The economic power of the rest has implications for their global political power. The US biggest rival, China, has gained political influence in all parts of the world with its Belt and Road Initiative. With this initiative China is investing billions of dollars in the construction of a global infrastructure (roads, harbors, airports, digital infrastructure) in more than 70 countries. It built political relations with all these countries that used to be under complete Western political control. In West Asia (the so-called Middle East in the terminology of Eurocentrists) Iran is now a major political force in that region, ironically because of the failure of the US invasion of Iraq. The US ousted Saddam Hussain but was unable to install a regime that was committed to furthering the US interests in the region.

The rise of the rest is not only apparent in the economic and political field. Even in education the US has lost its leading position. A global study that tests 500,000 pupils in over 70 countries every three years shows that pupils in Shanghai are the world’s best in reading, mathematics and science. The study tests 15-year-olds and their abilities in three fields: reading, science and mathematics. The US ranks 17th in reading, 23rd in science and 31st in mathematics.²²

It is not just about the rise of the rest and therefore the relative decline of the West. The decline of the West in absolute terms is obvious in the whole process of decolonization after World War II, in which dozens of countries gained political independence from European colonial powers. Between 1945 and 1950 Indonesia, Vietnam, Jordan, Syria, India, Pakistan, Myanmar and Sri Lanka won their independence. In 1960 eighteen countries gained their independence in one year, most of them in Africa: Cameroon, Togo, Mali, Madagascar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Somalia, Benin, Dahomey, Niger, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Chad, Central African Republic, Republic of the Congo, Cyprus, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania. Many Caribbean countries became politically independent in the seventies.

The ideological influence of the West has still remained in the media and culture of these countries. But in the past two decades the decline of the cultural power is visible in the media, as Fareed Zakaria explains: “In the first stage of globalization, everyone watched CNN. In the second stage, it was joined by the BBC and Sky News. Now every country is producing its own version of CNN—from Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya to New Delhi’s NDTV and Aaj Tak. These news channels are part of a powerful trend - the growth of new narratives. When I was growing up in India, current affairs, particularly global current affairs, were defined through a Western lens. You saw the world through the eyes of the BBC and Voice of America. You understood it through Time, Newsweek, the International Herald Tribune, and (in the old days) the Times of London. Today, there are many more channels of news that, more crucially, represent many quite different perspectives on the world. If you watch Al Jazeera, you will, of course, get a view of the Arab-Israeli conflict unlike any in the West. But it is not just Al Jazeera. If you watch an Indian network, you will get a very different view of Iran’s nuclear quest. Where you sit affects how you see the world.”²³

Zakaria nails the crucial point: “Where you sit affects how you see the world.” And this not only about geography. With modern technology a person of Egyptian descent can sit in London or New York and still follow Al Jazeera as if (s)he was living in Egypt. Actually, any person living in London or New York can watch Al Jazeera or any non-Western media outlet because of internet technology.

The last few decades have seen a steady decline in the ideological influence of the west not only in the mass media. The rise of social media (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram) created a whole new infrastructure over transfer of knowledge and opinions. The classical media (print media, radio, television) are now competing with social media, where any individual or organization can broadcast their information and gain millions of followers. The absolute control of the West of the media infrastructure for dissemination of information is over. They cannot prevent information from the former colonies reaching mass audiences all over the globe. That has opened the door for decolonial narratives that acknowledge the decline of the West and the rise of the rest.

2.4 The collapse of the socialist bloc and the demise of Marxism

2.4.1 The rise and fall of socialism

The decolonial movement is a social movement for liberation. It takes up issues of injustice (racism, sexism, colonization). For decades issues of injustice were articulated in the theoretical framework of socialism and Marxism. Marxism was a product of the European Enlightenment. Karl Marx (1818-1883) was involved in setting up the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. It was known as the First International, that lasted till 1876 when a split occurred between socialists and anarchists. It was mainly a gathering of European parties dealing with European problems, but it had produced a theoretical framework of socialism to deal with injustice. In 1889, another effort to bring about a united socialist party led to the formation of the Second International, which included two parties in Latin Abya Yala (Argentina and Uruguay). Differences on whether to support their own government in World War I or to stage a word revolution to overthrow capitalism in Europe led to the downfall of the organization. The Second International dissolved in 1916. In 1917, the first socialist nation was established with the Russian Revolution. Two years later the communist government of the Soviet Union established the Communist International (Comintern), also known as the Third International, to promote world revolution.

Many revolutionaries in the anti-colonial movement, however, were inspired by Marxism and socialism. The Comintern actively supported the establishment of communist parties in the colonial world. The second congress of 1920 adopted a resolution on the colonial and national question that stated that “all communist parties must support by action the revolutionary liberation movements in these countries. The form which this support shall take should be discussed with the communist party of the country in question, if there is one. This obligation refers in the first place to the active support of the workers in that country on which the backward nation is financially, or as a colony, dependent.”²⁴

Ho Chi Minh, who led the Vietnamese people in the anti-colonial struggle against France and the USA, explains the attractiveness of Marxism for colonized people. Ho Chi Minh lived in Paris after World War I and had joined the French Socialist Party. He describes his move from the Socialist Party to the Communist International: “The reason for my joining the French Socialist Party was that these ‘ladies and gentlemen’ – as I called my comrades at that moment – had shown their sympathy towards me, towards the struggle of the oppressed peoples. But I understood neither what was a party, a trade union, nor what was socialism nor communism. Heated discussions were then taking place in the branches of the Socialist Party about the question whether the Socialist Party should remain in the Second International: should a Two and a Half International be founded or should the Socialist Party join Lenin’s Third International? I attended the meetings regularly, twice or thrice a week, and attentively listened to the discussion. First, I could not understand thoroughly. Why were the discussions so heated? Either with the Second, Two and a Half or Third International, the revolution could be waged. What was the use of arguing? As for the First International, what had become of it? What I wanted most to know – and this precisely was not debated in the meetings – was: which International sides with the peoples of colonial countries? I raised this question – the most important in my opinion – in a meeting. Some comrades answered: It is the Third, not the Second International. And a comrade gave me Lenin’s ‘Thesis on the national and colonial questions’ published by l’Humanité to read. There were political terms difficult to understand in this thesis. But by dint of reading it again and again, finally I could grasp the main part of it. What emotion, enthusiasm, clear-sightedness and confidence it instilled into me! I wept for joy. Though sitting alone in my room, I shouted out aloud as if addressing large crowds: ‘Dear martyrs, compatriots! This is what we need, this is the path to our liberation!’. After that I had entire confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. At first, patriotism, not yet communism, led me to have confidence in Lenin, in the Third International. Step by step, along the struggle, by studying Marxism-Leninism parallel with participation in practical activities, I gradually came upon the fact that only socialism and communism can liberate the oppressed nations and the working people throughout the world from slavery.”²⁵

Socialism and Marxism became the leading theories of liberation and led to the rise of a socialist bloc in the world. In 1924 Mongolia saw the establishment of the Mongolian People’s Republic. Between 1944 and 1949 eleven countries became socialist: Albania, Poland, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, Czechoslovakia, North Korea, Hungary, China, and East Germany (German Democratic Republic). The countries in Eastern Europe, North Korea and China were not European colonies. Vietnam was a French colony.

Socialism was an attractive narrative of liberation for many colonized countries fighting for freedom. Between 1950 and 1989 eleven countries joined the socialist bloc: Cuba (not a European colony), Laos, Afghanistan, Angola, Benin, Cambodia, Congo-Brazzavile, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Somalia and South Yemen. These countries had a one-party system and a planned economy. There are other countries that articulated the goal of socialism in their constitution, although they have a multi-party system and some form of economic planning, but not central planning: Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, India, Nepal, Portugal, São Tomé and Príncipe, Sri Lanka and Tanzania.

After World War II many communist parties became involved in the Cold War as supporters of the Soviet Union. Almost four decades after the start of the Russian revolution the international communist movement received an existential shock. On February 25, 1956 at the 20th congress of the party, three years after the death of Joseph Stalin, the new General Secretary of the Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev, opened up on the devastating effect of the Stalinist cult of personality and the mass repression in the Soviet Union. He reported: “Stalin originated the concept ‘enemy of the people’. This term automatically made it unnecessary that the ideological errors of a man or men engaged in a controversy be proven. It made possible the use of the cruellest repression, violating all norms of revolutionary legality, against anyone who in any way disagreed with Stalin, against those who were only suspected of hostile intent, against those who had bad reputations… Stalin … used extreme methods and mass repressions at a time when the Revolution was already victorious, when the Soviet state was strengthened, when the exploiting classes were already liquidated and socialist relations were rooted solidly in all phases of national economy, when our Party was politically consolidated and had strengthened itself both numerically and ideologically.”²⁶

The Soviet Union almost lost World War II because Stalin executed many of its most able commanders. The image of socialism as a society for freedom and liberty for the working classes was shattered by Khrushchev’s revelations. Yet, in the West new social movements were looking for a narrative of liberation from capitalism. In the second half of the twentieth century, the student movement in Western Europe, the movement against the US war in Vietnam, the Civil Rights and Black Power movement in the USA and the feminist movement in the West found in the Marxist theory rather than the Soviet practice an ideological framework to articulate their struggle. Many leaders from the anti-colonial struggle were educated in the West. Their anti-imperialism found an attractive explanation in Marxism.

But the Cold War ended in a surprising way. Capitalism did not beat socialism. Socialism imploded and destroyed itself. In a period of just four short years, many socialist countries ended their existence as socialist states: in 1989 Cambodia, Hungary, Poland and Romania; in 1990 Benin, Czechoslovakia, South Yemen, East Germany, Mozambique and Bulgaria; in 1991 Somalia, Ethiopia and Soviet Union; in 1992 Mongolia, Congo-Brazzaville, Albania, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Angola. In the remaining countries (China, Vietnam, Cuba) experiments with a market economy are under way.

The decline of socialist and Marxist narratives and the implosion of the Eastern bloc have created the space for new theories of liberation to develop. Decolonial theory is one of these theories.

2.4.2 The story of Aimé Césaire

The story of Aimé Césaire (1913-2008) provides a good illustration of the transformation of a black activist from a Marxist to a decolonial theorist. Césaire was a black communist and artist from the French colony of Martinique and a prominent member of the French Communist Party. In 1956 he resigned from the party and wrote a letter to Maurice Thorez, the secretary-general of the Party, to explain his actions.

He starts with the impact of Khrushchev’s revelations: “Khrushchev’s revelations concerning Stalin are enough to have plunged all those who have participated in communist activity, to whatever degree, into an abyss of shock, pain, and shame… The dead, the tortured, the executed — no, neither posthumous rehabilitations, nor national funerals, nor official speeches can overcome them. These are not the kind of ghosts that one can ward off with a mechanical phrase.”²⁷

Césaire expected from the party an honest self-critique and a disassociation with crimes that would exonerate it. The party did nothing of that kind. And then Césaire moved to make a connection with colonialism: “But as serious as this grievance is — and as sufficient as it is by itself, since it represents the bankruptcy of an ideal and the pathetic illustration of the failure of a whole generation — I want to add a certain number of considerations related to my position as a man of colour.”²⁸

He specified what he meant: “Our questions (or, if you prefer, the colonial question) cannot be treated as a part of a more important whole, a part over which others can negotiate or come to whatever compromise seems appropriate in light of a general situation, of which they alone have the right to take stock. (Here it is clear that I am alluding to the French Communist Party’s vote on Algeria, by which it granted the Guy Mollet-Lacoste government full powers to carry out its North African policy — a circumstance that we have no guarantee will not be replicated in the future.)… It is clear that our struggle — the struggle of colonial peoples against colonialism, the struggle of peoples of color against racism—is more complex, or better yet, of a completely different nature than the fight of the French worker against French capitalism, and it cannot in any way be considered a part, a fragment, of that struggle.”²⁹

There is a third way in the social struggle; one that recognizes the fundamentally different nature of colonial oppression from class oppression: “Experience, harshly acquired experience, has taught us that we have at our disposal but one weapon, one sole efficient and undamaged weapon: the weapon of unity, the weapon of the anticolonial rallying of all who are willing, and the time during which we are dispersed according to the fissures of the metropolitan parties is also the time of our weakness and defeat.”³⁰

Here, for the first time, a Marxist from the Caribbean refused to define his or her ideology in terms of Europeans philosophies. In fact, the colonized now became free to criticize the Eurocentric Marxist. Césaire talked about his evaluation of the members of the Party: “Their inveterate assimilationism; their unconscious chauvinism; their fairly simplistic faith, which they share with bourgeois Europeans, in the omnilateral superiority of the West; their belief that evolution as it took place in Europe is the only evolution possible, the only kind desirable, the kind the whole world must undergo; to sum up, their rarely avowed but real belief in civilization with a capital C and progress with a capital P (as evidenced by their hostility to what they disdainfully call ‘cultural relativism’). All these flaws lead to a literary tribe that, concerning everything and nothing, dogmatizes in the name of the party. It must be said that the French communists have had a good teacher: Stalin. Stalin is indeed the very one who reintroduced the notion of “advanced” and “backward” peoples into socialist thinking.”³¹

Césaire wanted Marxism and communism to be placed in the service of black peoples, and not black peoples in the service of Marxism and communism. The doctrine and the movement should be made to fit men, not men to fit the doctrine or the movement. The Party offered solidarity with the French people. But Césaire remarked: “I do not want to erect solidarities in metaphysics. There are no allies by divine right. There are allies imposed upon us by place, time, and the nature of things. And if alliance with the French proletariat is exclusive; if it tends to make us forget or resist other alliances which are necessary and natural, legitimate and fertile; if communism destroys our most invigorating friendships — the friendship uniting us with the rest of the Caribbean, the friendship uniting us with Africa — then I say communism has done us a disservice in making us exchange living fraternity for what risks appearing to be the coldest of cold abstractions.”³²

The Marxist emphasis on class had shut off the reality of the colonized from world history. It did not see the other side of Western civilization in its proper perspective: colonialism. Césaire said: “The fact is that the so-called European civilization – “Western” civilization - as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem; that Europe is unable to justify itself either before the bar of “reason” or before the bar of “conscience”; and that, increasingly, it takes refuge in a hypocrisy which is all the more odious because it is less and less likely to deceive. Europe is indefensible.”³³

Césaire went through a trajectory of becoming a Marxist, then criticized Marxism and ended up with a new philosophy of liberation that took the colonial influence on the mind of the colonized into account. Marxists in other parts of the world followed a similar trajectory, especially after the fall of the Soviet-Union. M. N. Roy (1887-1954) from India was an important figure in the Communist International. He was the founder of the Communist Party of India and the Communist Party of Mexico. After World War II he became disillusioned with Marxism and tried to find a third way between Liberalism and Marxism in radical humanism.

Césaire’s critique of Marxism was not from a Liberal point of view. His social critique was that apart from class – proletariat and capitalist - there is another relevant social category that defines modern history: the colonized and the colonizer. And the colonizer is not only the European capitalist but is in the mind of the white working class. The communists themselves had accepted the concept of inferiority and superiority in the notion of advanced and backward people and thus were guilty of the racism that was part of colonialism. Césaire has now often been quoted as one of the founders of decolonial thinking.

Césaire’s condemnation of the French Communist Party was published well in advance of the fall of the socialist bloc and even before the massive wave of independence in the early 1960s. But it shows how the decline of Marxism opens up the road to decolonial theory and activism.

2.5 The crisis of Western civilization

“It is time to make America great again,” said Bill Clinton in 1992 in his campaign for president of the USA.³⁴ Donald Trump copied the slogan from Clinton in his 2016 presidential campaign. The slogan speaks to white Americans who feel that they are losing their dominant position inside and outside of the US. They have good reasons to believe this. In paragraph 2.3 above, I looked into the rise of the rest and the decline of the West. Inside the US there is a dramatic decline of white power in every way, starting with demography.

The total population of the USA will grow from 332 million in 2022 to 355 million in 2030 and reach 404 million in 2060. The share of what are called ‘non-Hispanic whites’ (the descendant from the European colonial powers) will decline from 61% to 44% in 2060. Within forty years whites will become a demographic minority in the USA! They are already a numerical minority in the state of California, which is the most populous state in the USA with almost 40 million people in 2022. In 2018, the share of non-Hispanic whites in the under age 15 population were already below 50% (49.9%). The fastest growing group are the Hispanics. Their share in the population will increase from 18% in 2016 to 27% in 2060, which is larger than the share of African Americans (from 13% to 15%). A large portion of these shifts has to do with immigration and birth rates in the US. But interestingly enough, there is also an increase in intermarriage. This further decreases the share of the white population of the USA.³⁵

The racist character of US society is evident from the fact that apartheid was only legally (not practically) abolished with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, less than sixty years ago. Universal suffrage in the USA was introduced a year later with the Voting Rights Act. Before 1965 African Americans were prohibited from exercising their electoral rights.

African-Americans have experienced four hundred years of racism, a racism that is fundamentally entrenched in the identity of white Americans who saw themselves as superior to people of color. Sixty years is hardly enough to eradicate this system. But African-Americans have made tremendous progress in the last few decades. In 1967 whites (non-Hispanic whites) had a median income of US$ 55,540. In 2018, it rose by 27% to US$ 70,642. The median income of African-Americans rose from US$ 28,510 in 1967 to US$ 58,665 in 2018, an increase of 45%, almost double the increase of whites. But there is still a big gap. In 2018, the median income of whites was 1.7 times the median income of African-Americans, but there is definitely a narrowing of the gap. In 1967 the median income of whites was almost twice as that of African-Americans.³⁶ Despite this economic progress African-Americans, and people of color in general, still face violence on a daily basis. A study on police violence in the USA reveals the following: “The burden of police violence fatalities in the USA is known to fall disproportionately on Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic populations. Recent studies suggest that over the life course, about one in every 1000 Black men are killed by the police in the USA, making them 2.5 times more likely to be killed by police than White men. Black women are about 1.4 times more likely to be killed by police than are White women. Systemic and direct racism, manifested in laws and policies as well as personal implicit biases, result in Black, Indigenous, and Hispanic Americans being the targets of police violence.”³⁷

In so-called underdeveloped countries poverty means living on less than $1.90 per day, consuming unsafe drinking water, facing no access to education and confronting the reality of a short life expectancy, according to the World Bank’s definition of extreme poverty. In the United States the definition of poverty is an individual with an income of less than $35 per day or a family of four with an income of less than $70 per day.³⁸

In 1974, 8% of the whites in the US lived in poverty. In absolute numbers it meant that 13 million whites were living in poverty. In 2019, this percentage was 7% (14 million). In 1974, 30% of African-Americans in the US (seven million) lived in poverty. In 2019 the percentage showed a big drop down to 19% (eight million).³⁹ The absolute number of all US citizens living in poverty has increased in the last 45 years from 23 million to 37 million. In comparison: according to the World Bank China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty since 1949. China has done much better than the US in fighting poverty.

There is a big rise of the economic, social, cultural and political strength of the African-American community in the US. The economic rise is illustrated by the data I provided above. The social rise is manifested in the rise of a black middle class. The cultural rise is evident in the role of black artists (music, stand-up comedy, actors) in popular culture. The political rise is apparent in the election of Barack Obama as the first black president of the US in 2008 and Kamala Harris in 2020 as the first female and black vice-president.

There are other cultural divisions growing in the US. The U.S. Census Bureau does not ask questions about religion, but the Pew Research Center combines their survey data on religion with the census data and concludes that in 2017 Muslims made up 1.1% of the population (3.45 million). They expect that by 2040, Muslims will replace Jews as the nation’s second-largest religious group after Christians. And by 2050, the U.S. Muslim population is projected to reach 8.1 million, or 2.1% of the nation’s total population — nearly twice the proportion that it is today.⁴⁰

An even larger group than the Muslims that doesn’t fit into the American social fabric are the undocumented workers. They are not registered as such by the US Census Bureau but the Brookings Institution that combines data from different sources estimates that the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. ranges from 10.5 million to 12 million, or approximately 3.2% – 3.6% of the population.⁴¹

There is a section of white America that sees these developments as a big threat to their identity, their way of life and their control of resources. It is not a small group. Donald Trump is the embodiment of that sentiment. In the presidential election of 2016, he got 63 million votes while Hillary Clinton got 66 million. But because of the peculiar system of electoral votes in the US, Trump won the election. In 2020, he got 74 million votes while Joe Biden got 81 million. The decline of the West and the rise of the rest is mirrored in the US in the decline of the power of white supremacy and the rise of the power of communities of color.

There is a crisis of identity of White America. For a long time, White America saw itself at the forefront of human civilization. Now it is a deep crisis of identity that is linked to the idea of civilization. Samuel Huntington, a US conservative political scientist and advisor of the apartheid regimes in South Africa in the 1980s, explains: “The balance of power among civilizations is shifting: the West is declining in relative influence; Asian civilizations are expanding their economic, military, and political strength; Islam is exploding demographically with destabilizing consequences for Muslim countries and their neighbors; and non-Western civilizations generally are reaffirming the value of their own cultures... A civilization-based world order is emerging: societies sharing cultural affinities cooperate with each other... The survival of the West depends on Americans reaffirming their Western identity and Westerners accepting their civilization as unique not universal and uniting to renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.”⁴²

Europe is part of the West. The decline of the West and the rise of the rest is also mirrored in the social transformation of Western Europe, defined here as the 28 countries of the European Union, plus Norway and Switzerland. After World War II, migration from the colonies led to a dramatic change in the social composition of Europe. In 2016, Europe had 26 million Muslims in a total population of 521 million (5%). There are three possible scenarios for demographic projections for 2050: zero migration, medium migration and high migration. In these scenarios the share of Muslims will grow to 7%, 11% or 14%. In absolute number the Muslims population will grow from 26 to 36, 58 or 76 million.⁴³ There are between 7-9 million black people from of Sub Saharan African or Afro-Caribbean descent.⁴⁴ The black communities from Saharan African descent have a sizable Muslim population. The UK is outside of the European Union and has 2.5 million blacks.

As the second and third generation people of color assert themselves as citizens of Europe they are confronted with deep-rooted racism. Europe prides itself on its core values of humanism and Christianity, the separation of religion and state and the legacy of the European Enlightenment. The non-Western communities in Europe challenge this white identity. It causes a crisis of identity of Western civilization in Europe. Samuel Huntington points this out: “Western culture is challenged by groups within Western societies. One such challenge comes from immigrants from other civilizations who reject assimilation and continue to adhere to and to propagate the values, customs, and cultures of their home societies.”⁴⁵

In the last few decades, the crisis of white identity has found its expression in the growing electoral influence of extreme right parties. Netherlands has the Party for Freedom, Belgium has Flemish Bloc, France has Front National, Austria has Freedom Party, Switzerland has Swiss People’s Party, Italy has Brothers of Italy. These parties participate in elections and get between 15%-30% of the votes. Many conservative and even social-democratic parties regularly borrow parts of their narrative to pander to the white electorates of their countries. And their basic narrative is that white identity and civilization is under threat from backward cultures. The so-called multicultural society that governments from the left had experimented with is dead. Their slogan is: “Make white Europe great again!” The defense of white European values is on the agenda.

The crisis of white identity is not limited to Europe and the US. Western colonialism started in Abya Yala with the genocide of the indigenous people in the sixteenth century. In some parts – especially in the Caribbean - the genocide literally eradicated the original population. But in a few countries the indigenous people are still a sizeable part of the population: Peru (45%), Bolivia (44%), Guatemala (41%), Mexico (28%) and to a lesser extent Belize (17%), Ecuador (14%) and Panama (12%). Over the course of decades in Bolivia the Aymara people built a mobilization that led to an electoral victory of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) under the leadership of Evo Morales. For centuries white people had controlled the government. When Morales took over, he introduced a new constitution that placed the struggle of the Bolivian people within the context of decolonization. The constitution of Bolivia explicitly states that the aim is to construct a just and harmonious society, built on decolonization. See paragraph 12.4.4.6 (The Latin Abya Yala narrative) for a discussion of the Bolivian constitution.

The international decolonial movement is driven by a multitude of long-term factors, especially the fall of the West and the rise of the rest, the collapse of the socialist bloc and the demise of Marxism and the crisis of Western civilization. Decolonial theory should be positioned in the context of the critique of, and dialogue with, the two major philosophical schools of the European Enlightenment: Liberalism and Marxism.

3. Two Eurocentric philosophies of liberation

3.1 The White Enlightenment

The rise of the European Enlightenment is inseparable from the development of colonialism. But that is not how many Westernized scholars see this movement. The Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment describes it as follows: “The Enlightenment is one of the crucial periods in Western history. For both admirers and critics alike, it is considered the beginning of modernity, the time when the basic questions facing our world were posed, though not answered, at least adequately. As such, the Enlightenment can be seen from two vantage points. On the one hand, its shapers and followers undertook a far-ranging critique of the world they had inherited. All aspects of traditional life - religion, political organization, social structure, science, human relations, human nature, history, economics, and the very grounds of human understanding - were subjected to intense scrutiny and investigation. On the other hand, proponents of the Enlightenment attempted to establish adequate grounds for a clearer and surer understanding of these topics. In short, the Enlightenment was characterized by the dynamic between criticism and innovation. Both sides of this equation - the criticisms levelled and the solutions proposed - still shape much of our contemporary culture.”⁴⁶

No mention is made of colonialism. In paragraph 6.3 (Biological racism), I explain how the Enlightenment was embedded in the rise of the European enslavement of Africans and how key exponents of the Enlightenment produced hardcore racist narratives about Black people. These narratives are not found in the jubilant writings of Eurocentric scholars on the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment was about the rise of modernity. Abya Yala intellectuals took up the issue by placing colonialism in the context of modernity. Argentinian scholar Walter Mignolo writes: “Modernity is the name for the historical process in which Europe began its progress toward world hegemony. It carries a darker side, coloniality... The ‘discovery’ of America and the genocide of Indians and African slaves are the very foundation of ‘modernity’, more so than the French or Industrial Revolutions. Better yet, they constitute the darker and hidden face of modernity, ‘coloniality’.”⁴⁷

The colonial foundation of the Enlightenment had three dimensions:

Eurocentrism and exceptionalism.

Racism.

Universalism.

In the White Enlightenment Europe is the center of world history. Europe is unique and exceptional in world history. Here is where humankind achieved its peak. Here is where scientific knowledge arose. No other place on the globe and at no point in history did humankind use reason to create the best possible society. Rationalism arose in Europe. Here is where people first started to think with their mind and not with other parts of their body as is the case in non-Western civilizations.

Europe is not just a geographical location. It is a point of racial identification for white people whether they live in Europe, the United States, Australia or South Africa. Scientific knowledge was produced by a white civilization. Other civilizations did not know scientific knowledge. The Enlightenment is called the Age of Reason, because only then did humans produce scientific knowledge based on observation and reason. Europe is exceptional. Non-White civilizations did not use reason but based their knowledge on backward superstition. Not only was Europe unique, but its white race was unique and superior to other races (see chapter six on racism and knowledge production for a full exposé of this question).

An important element of the Enlightenment was its claim of universalism. The ideas developed during the Enlightenment were not only valid for Europe but for the whole world. Any modern society should look like a European society. Its university should be based on European universities. Its architecture should resemble European architecture. Its social-economic foundation should be based on the European social-economic foundation. Its political foundation should resemble the political foundation of Europe.

The European Enlightenment was initially based on one world view: Liberalism. It was the ideology of capitalism. Within the Enlightenment a critique of Liberalism developed that took issue with the injustice that the system of capitalism produced: Marxism. It was not particularly racist, but it was Eurocentric with a claim of universalism. Intellectuals from Liberalism and Marxism made the claim that their philosophies were philosophies of liberation. Both were rooted in the European Enlightenment. Decolonial theory as a philosophy of liberation is rooted in the struggle against colonialism and is a fundamental critique of the Enlightenment.

3.2 Liberalism as a philosophy of liberation

3.2.1 The view on world history

“Liberalism as an intellectual movement of ideas has been a pre-eminent force in the history of political thought, establishing itself since its conception in the early nineteenth century as ‘the outstanding doctrine of Western civilization’,” writes R. Turner.⁴⁸

Liberalism developed a view of world history that is summed up in the analysis of German philosopher George Hegel (1770-1831): History “moves from East to West”, he argues.⁴⁹ “World history has arisen in the southeast, and it has subsided into itself to the northwest.”⁵⁰ He concludes: “The sun takes its course from morning to evening, and so we move from Asia to Europe, the West.”⁵¹

Africa does not play a role in his view of world history although human civilization started there and produced one of the oldest and highly developed civilizations that lasted for 3,000 years: Ancient Egypt.

Europe represents modernity, the final stage (evening) of world history in which mankind has reached its destiny. In the Hegelian concept of world history there is a unilinear development in which mankind starts its historical journey at one point in time (in Asia, according to Hegel) and moves in one (straight or curved) line to its destination. What is the destination? According to Hegel the history of the world “is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom.”⁵²

His view was echoed in the 20th century by a Eurocentric scholar of color of Japanese descent, Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama, a neoconservative in the US, wrote in 1989: “The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war… The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”⁵³

The fall of the socialist bloc between 1989-1991 was a big impetus for western arrogance to declare the end of history. Liberalism will eventually become the endpoint of human history. Capitalism will outlive other social-economic systems. Liberal ideas will prevail. History moves in a linear way, from barbarism to modernity.

This argument is based on a classic concept of the Enlightenment and Eurocentric sciences: just as there are laws of nature that govern the natural world, so there are social laws that govern the social world. And just as the aim of the natural sciences is to discover the laws of nature, to the aim of the social sciences is to discover the laws of the social world. In the biological world, evolution theory explains that there is a biological law that life on planet earth develops from a simple organism to complex creatures. Similarly in the social world social formations develop from simple societies of collectors and hunters to complex industrial societies based on capitalism and individual freedom: modernity. It is merely a law of nature that all societies move from barbarism to modernity; and modernity is a civilization based on rationalism, science and capitalism (see paragraph 6.4.3 - The rise of the social sciences).

Western Europe, where capitalism and liberalism have developed, is the place where world history reaches its apex. In Western Europe, mankind arrives at its historic destination: freedom. Freedom is the stage in which a society has freed itself from barbarism, superstition, irrational behavior, economic scarcity, oppression and exploitation.

The colonization of the world led to a massive transfer of wealth from Abya Yala to Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It created a world economy with a global maritime industry, financial sector (insurance, banking) and new industries such as sugar production. The nineteenth century saw the rise of steam power, iron making, the invention of machines and a steep rise in production that led to the term “industrial revolution”. Europe led the world civilization to new heights where the rise of individual freedom was connected with a rise in material production, welfare and scientific progress.

The liberal view of colonialism is aptly summarized by one its main defenders: “Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end,” writes John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.”⁵⁴ Colonization was a civilization mission of the West, an attempt to educate and uplift the backward people outside of the West. Mankind had reached a state of development in the West where the principles of liberalism could adequately be implemented. For Europe, the colonies were the white man’s burden to civilize the uncivilized world.

What happens when a society refuses to follow the path of modernity? Then it becomes a duty for the well developed capitalist nations to bring these backward societies on the right path with propaganda, education, economic pressure, political destabilization and ultimately with military means. During the first centuries of colonialism it was a matter of civilizing the uncivilized word. Now it is matter of promoting democracy in undemocratic societies.

3.2.2 Economic theory

Economic theory deals with the production, distribution and the financing of goods and services. The economic theory of Liberalism is based on the work of classical economists, among them Adam Smith (1723-1790). His central thesis is that an economic system based on private property and free markets produces the best results for economic development and welfare. The law of supply and demands ensures an efficient and optimal flow of production, distribution and financing of goods and services. Adam Smith explains the reason behind this law. An individual “neither intends to promote the public interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it… He is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention. Nor is it always the worse for the society that it was no part of it. By pursuing his own interest, he frequently promotes that of the society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”⁵⁵

So, if everyone pursues his own selfish interest (which is profit maximization in the long run) the law of supply and demand ensures an outcome that is accepted as satisfactory by everyone. There is no ethics involved. This is an objective economic law.

Liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman acknowledges that behind the invisible hand there is something else that keeps the free market going. He states: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies is called the United States Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”⁵⁶

“The program of liberalism … if condensed into a single word, would have to read: property, that is, private ownership of the means of production... All the other demands of liberalism result from this fundamental demand,” says Austrian liberal economist Ludwig von Mises.⁵⁷ Private property is the cornerstone of liberal economics, of capitalism.

With private property and the free market comes a specific role of the state. Von Mises says: “As the liberal sees it, the task of the state consists solely and exclusively in guaranteeing the protection of life, health, liberty, and private property against violent attacks. Everything that goes beyond this, is an evil.”⁵⁸

There have been variations in the economic theory of liberalism, but the basic tenets are unchanged: free markets, private property and the state as an institution to protect them. The practice and theory of capitalism seem contradictory. The law of supply and demand would ensure an efficient and optimal flow of production, distribution and financing of goods and services. The practice is that there are periodic economic crises; depending on the theory it would be every 3-5 years, 7-11 years, 15-25 years or even 45 to 60 years. If capitalism is such a great system, why are there economic crises at regular times? The answer is that this is what makes it great. The periodic crises are a means of stimulating innovation. Austrian-US economist Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) argues that innovation is a process of creative destruction and is essential for capitalism. There are technical revolutions in the history of capitalism that drive the system to a higher level of production and distribution of goods and services. Schumpeter writes: “The opening up of new markets, foreign or domestic, and the organizational development from the craft shop and factory to such concerns as U.S. Steel illustrate the same process of industrial mutation ... that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within, incessantly destroying the old one, incessantly creating a new one. This process of Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in.”⁵⁹

Competition is the mechanism that leads to ineffective and outdated production processes being replaced by more efficient and innovative goods and services. There is no other way to achieve innovation. As capitalism is based on the free market and private ownership of the means of production, social needs such as health care, housing or education should be organized on the basis of the market and private entrepreneurship. The mechanisms of competition, supply and demand should be used to organize these services. These are the social laws that govern economics. Workers who are being laid off during a crisis, lose their home and end up homeless on the streets have to learn to live with these “laws”.

But the reality is that workers don’t abide by these social laws. When they organize and resist, especially during periods of grave economic crises, they might topple the system. Within liberal economic theory a school arose that pointed to the role of the state in propping up the capitalist system. In the classical economic theory, the state played a minimal role. British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) developed a theory of how the state should intervene in the markets during economic crises with fiscal and monetary policies to ensure the survival of capitalism.⁶⁰ Markets need not to be completely free. The state can intervene and regulate the market and thus the economy to guarantee its future functioning. Keynes says: “Whilst ... the enlargement of the functions of government, involved in the task of adjusting to one another the propensity to consume and the inducement to invest, would seem to a nineteenth-century publicist or to a contemporary American financier to be a terrific encroachment on individualism, I defend it, on the contrary, both as the only practicable means of avoiding the destruction of existing economic forms in their entirety and as the condition of the successful functioning of individual initiative.”⁶¹

In Europe, Keynesian theory was used by Social-Democratic parties to build the so-called welfare state: create a wide array of social services (health care, education, housing, elderly care, cultural facilities) with the government as a leading force while keeping the system of free market and private entrepreneurship intact. It worked for a while, but the past decennia there is a tendency to return to classical liberal theories (Neo Liberalism).

3.2.3 Political theory

Political theory deals with the process of the formation, institutionalization, perpetuation and challenging of power in a society. Power is expressed in control and administration of states and communities on the one hand and the struggle against that control and administration on the other.

Liberal political theory is based on four basic concepts:

The concept of parliamentary democracy.

The concept of the separation of church and state.

The concept of the nation-state.

The concept of the separation of powers.

3.2.3.1 The concept of parliamentary democracy

In Liberalism the concept of parliamentary democracy is linked to the concept of the individual. The individual should have the ability to determine who is going to rule the administration of the society. A parliament elected by individuals guarantees that a ruler will be chosen who represents the wishes of the collective of individuals.

Parliamentary democracy is a recent phenomenon in the history of Europe. One scholar summarized the political history of Europe as follows: “Europe west of the Elbe was for centuries after the Roman collapse an almost insignificant backwater of world history. The cities in which a small minority of its people lived were built among and of the ruins of what the Romans had left behind; none of them could have approached in magnificence Constantinople, Córdoba, Baghdad or Ch’ang-an... For just as long, no science, no school in the West could match those of Arab Spain or Asia. Nor could western Christendom produce an effective political unity or theoretical justification of power such as the eastern empire and the caliphates; for centuries even the greatest European kings were hardly more than barbarian warlords to whom men clung for protection and in fear of something worse.”⁶²

If we define a caliphate as a religious state led by a religious leader, then Europe for a long time was one big caliphate led by the Pope or a king linked to the Pope. The right to vote for every citizen was achieved only late in the 20th century in the West. In France women got voting rights in 1944, ten years before women in Türkiye got their voting rights. In the UK women got voting rights equal to men in 1928. In the United States universal suffrage for Afro-Americans and other minorities was introduced in 1965! The experience in important Western countries with full democracy is very young. Until today many Western countries are not allowed to elect their heads of state and instead have to live with previously feudal kings and queens as their unelected leaders, notably Denmark, Norway, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands and Belgium.

Parliamentary democracy comes with a multi-party system. Each party is the expression of the will of a section of the population. The mechanism of choosing representatives can be different in different countries due to their different histories. But the concept of representative democracy evolved to the point where a parliament is elected through political parties that compete with each other in election. Each party represents a group of individuals or a social group. So the diversity of opinions in a society is reflected in the diversity of the composition of the parliament.

3.2.3.2 The concept of the separation of church and state

John Locke (1632-1704), a philosopher of the English Enlightenment, laid the foundation for the concept of the separation of church and state. He used the argument of tolerance of the state versus religious fanaticism: “And the zealots hardly have patience to refrain from violence and rapine, so long till the cause be heard, and the poor man be, according to form, condemned to the loss of liberty, goods or life. Oh that our ecclesiastical orators, of every sect, would apply themselves, with all the strength of argument that they are able, to the confounding of men’s errours! But let them spare their persons. Let them not supply their want of reasons with the instruments of force, which belong to another jurisdiction, and do ill become a churchman’s hands. Let them not call in the magistrate’s authority to the aid of their eloquence, or learning; lest perhaps, whilst they pretend only love for the truth, this their intemperate zeal, breathing nothing but fire and sword, betray their ambition, and show that what they desire is temporal dominion.”⁶³ In order to prevent religious fanatics from using the state apparatus to enforce their views on others, there must be a separation of church and state.

There is an important link between the separation of church and state and Eurocentric epistemology. In paragraph 5.2.2. (How ethics was removed from science in the European Enlightenment) I explain the link. The European Enlightenment, in opposition to Christian theology, which held that the Bible is the source of knowledge, had concluded that knowledge production is a process of observation and reasoning (what happened), followed by theoretical analysis (why did it happen) and testing of theories (what will happen according to the theory). The next step was the actual separation of theology from science by proclaiming that scientific knowledge is the highest stage in the development of the human intellect (positivism). The last step in removing ethics from science is to apply positivism to both the natural and the social world. There is no right or wrong in science, only true and false. That also holds for the social sciences.

When the social sciences develop theories about society (economics, political theory, social theory, cultural theory) than these theories are not about ethics (right or wrong), but about science (true or false). What is the best political system? That is not an ethical but a scientific question. And the answer is the system that is rational is the best system. A rational system is a system that is based on scientific thought and not on irrational religious thought. Therefore, as in philosophy where there is a separation of theology and science, so in politics there should be a separation of church and state.

3.2.3.3 The concept of the nation-state

On the nation-state Liberalism takes the individual as the basic unit of society. Therefore its theory of the nation-state is simple: one nation lives in one state. The state is the administrative apparatus that operates in a confined geographical area. A nation is an ethnic group with common historical and cultural traits (language, religion, material and immaterial culture). In the concept of the nation-state a state is populated by one nation where the individuals share common norms and values.

In Europe these basic tenets were challenged with the rise of multicultural societies. In the big cities, Black and Muslim communities developed their own economic, social, cultural and even political institutions. They confronted white Europeans, who saw themselves as liberals with notions of freedom and equality, with institutional racism. Can an individual that adheres to Islam fight for acknowledgement of his or her belief in a liberal society? Several European states now curtail the freedom of Muslim women to dress as they wish. Mosques are limited in their freedom of religion by checking on the content of their sermons.

The answer of Liberalism to the question of how to deal with multicultural societies is the nation-state: one state, one nation. So, in order for people from different ethnic groups to live in one state, they have to integrate, which means that they have to accept the dominant norms and values and abandon their original culture. Initially, the dominant European political parties toyed with the idea of a multicultural society, but under the pressure of the rise of the extreme-right many of these parties proclaimed “the failure of the multicultural society” and then went back to the original idea of the European Enlightenment of one nation, one state.

3.2.3.4 The concept of the separation of powers

The concept of the separation of powers arose from an analysis of what form of government can best protect the freedom of the individual: monarchy, republic, despotic reign. French lawyer Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755) argues: “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty; because apprehensions may arise, lest the same monarch or senate should enact tyrannical laws, to execute them in a tyrannical manner. Again, there is no liberty if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive. Were it joined with the legislative, the life and liberty of the subject would be exposed to arbitrary control; for the judge would be then the legislator. Were it joined to the executive power, the judge might behave with violence and oppression.”⁶⁴

The separation of power is an institutional guarantee for ensuring that the individual can enjoy his freedom. It provides for mechanisms to govern a state with checks and balances. The government of the state is divided into three branches (trias politica), each with its own rights, powers and responsibilities. The legislative branch (the parliament) makes laws. The executive branch (the administration) executes and enforces law. The judicial branch consists of a system of courts that passes judgment in legal disputes and interprets, defends and applies the law in legal cases. This is the ideal political system of Liberalism.

3.2.4 Social theory

Social theory deals with the process of the organization of relations between human beings and between humans and their natural environment. In Eurocentric theories the relationship between humans and nature is not part of social relations. Liberalism does not acknowledge nature as part of social relations. The key social theory of Liberalism is in the notion of the individual. A society consists of individuals, persons with distinctive personal ideas, feelings, needs and wishes. The individual should have maximum freedom to have and act upon these ideas. A free society is a society that does not pose obstacles to the fulfillment of a man’s desires. Isaiah Berlin makes a distinction between positive liberty (the capacity to act upon one’s free will) and negative liberty (freedom from external restraint on one’s actions): “The sense of freedom ... entails not simply the absence of frustration (which may be obtained by killing desires), but the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities - absence of obstructions on roads along which a man can decide to walk. Such freedom ultimately depends not on whether I wish to walk at all, or how far, but on how many doors are open, how open they are, upon their relative importance in my life.”⁶⁵

What is the relationship between the individual and society? British Enlightenment philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) laid the foundation for this relationship from a liberal point of view. The individual is a subject of society. Society is ruled by a ruling authority. The biggest problem in a society is how to structure the relationship between ruler and community of subjects in such a way that the subject can enjoy maximum individual freedom. Mill writes: “By liberty, was meant protection against the tyranny of the political rulers. The rulers were conceived ... as in a necessarily antagonistic position to the people whom they ruled. The aim ... of patriots, was to set limits to the power which the ruler should be suffered to exercise over the community; and this limitation was what they meant by liberty. It was attempted in two ways. First, by obtaining a recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights, which it was to be regarded as a breach of duty in the ruler to infringe, and which, if he did infringe, specific resistance, or general rebellion, was held to be justifiable. A second, and generally a later expedient, was the establishment of constitutional checks; by which the consent of the community, or of a body of some sort supposed to represent its interests, was made a necessary condition to some of the more important acts of the governing power.”⁶⁶

The society should have rules and regulations that guarantees the individual rights so that the ruler can not violate these rights. Furthermore, there should be a process that ensures representation of the community of subjects in the ruling authority.

French Enlightenment philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) introduced the concept of a social contract that regulates the relationship between the ruler and the subject. Rousseau posed the question on how to find a form of association “that will bring the whole common force to bear on defending and protecting each associate’s person and goods, doing this in such a way that each of them, while uniting himself with all, still obeys only himself and remains as free as before.”⁶⁷ The answer was: a social contract. This is an informal agreement with two key articles: “What man loses by the social contract is his natural liberty and an unrestricted right to anything he wants and can get. What he gains is civil liberty and the ownership of everything he possesses.”⁶⁸

The social contract (sometimes he uses the word “social compact”) is not a judicial document that is signed by a ruler and a subject. It is the outcome of a historical process. Rousseau says: “So if the social compact has opponents at the time when it is made, their opposition doesn’t invalidate the contract; it merely prevents them from being included in it, making them foreigners among citizens. Once a state has been instituted, residence constitutes consent; to live within its territory is to submit to its sovereignty. Apart from this primal contract, the vote of the majority always binds all the rest. This follows from the contract itself.”⁶⁹

There is another dimension to individual freedom, that German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) pointed to: the liberation of the mind. People in Europe at that time had learn to obey the ruler, the tax-collector, the police and the clergyman. The mind was not free to think, but only to obey. Kant defined the purpose of the Enlightenment as the need to liberate the individual mind: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!”⁷⁰

By engaging in critical thinking and public discussions man can become free from the restrictions that are put on his or her freedom. A key struggle in the European Enlightenment was between science and Christian theology. In chapter five on epistemology, I explain how this struggle eventually resulted in the separation of church and state in the field of politics and the separation of ethics and knowledge in the field of epistemology. So individual freedom is not only related to the social relation between individual and society but also to the intellectual relationship between the mind and the authority of knowledge production.

Classical liberal social theory from the European Enlightenment does not acknowledge other dimensions of social relations: class, caste, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality. Only since the last decades of the 20th century have scholars in the West applied the liberal theoretical framework to make these links (see chapter ten: Decolonizing social theory).

3.2.5 Cultural theory

Cultural theory deals with the process of production and dissemination of knowledge about nature and society and the material and immaterial expression of this knowledge. Knowledge is very broad. It is not just the production of ideas about nature and society. It is also about values, belief systems, communication, feelings and emotions of individuals and social groups about their identity and rules and rituals that express their identity.

There are institutions that produce and disseminate knowledge about identity. These institutions are very diverse, for example:

Educational institutions from kindergarten to universities and think tanks, but also institutions for maintaining public memory like statues, museums, names of public places (streets, buildings).

Artistic institutions: institutions (including individual) working on literature, visual and graphic arts, performing arts, music, architecture etc.

Social institutions like rituals for special events in the life of individuals and communities.

Communication institutions, notably the media: print, audio, visual, digital.

There not a specific cultural theory of Liberalism. In Liberalism cultural theory is part of social theory, and sometimes more specifically of cultural anthropology. Many studies on culture are more descriptive than theoretical. And in as far as they are theoretical, they are part of social theory and not as a distinctive theory of culture, and much less as a distinctive theoretical tradition within Liberalism.

The same goes for many other modern theories in science such as ecology, globalization, gender or sexuality. They are all part social or political theories of Liberalism rather than distinctive branches with their own basic categories.

3.2.6 Liberalism in the colonial world

Liberalism is a mainstream school of thought in across the whole world. Universities across the globe teach the basic concepts of Liberalism. Whether you are a student in Africa, West and East Asia, Oceania, Abya Yala or the Caribbean universities, you are taught the same theories from Europe and the US. Western civilization has colonized the educational system to such an extent that a uniform system of knowledge production and dissemination was established and continue to flourish outside the West.

In Europe and the US Liberalism was viewed as a theory of liberation. Liberalism was about modernity, freedom and progress. That resonated with certain intellectual circles in the colonized world.

Western colonization began in 1492 with the occupation of indigenous land in Abya Yala and the genocide of Indigenous people. Since the start of the sixteenth century another crime against humanity was committed by Europeans: the establishment of the system of European enslavement. Both crimes uprooted colonized communities in Africa and Abya Yala and created new oppressive societies based on the destruction of old ones. The European Enlightenment could not count on a sympathetic ear of the victims of these crimes.

But in East and West Asia, millennia old civilizations had existed that had confronted Western colonialism and were forced to articulate an answer to the question of how it was possible for these big societies to be overrun and overruled by small groups of Europeans? What is the road to their liberation? Is it a matter of copying the Enlightenment of the West or rejecting it? Are adaption and modification other options?

In the spring of 1919 the victors of World War I - the Allied forces, among them Britain, France, the US, Russia and Japan - organized a peace conference in Versailles, Paris. Germany, one of the defeated parties, had lost the Chinese territory of Shandong to Japan. Encouraged by US president Woodrow Wilson the Chinese delegates at the conference were hoping to regain control of Shandong. But the European partners of Japan refused to support the Chinese demands and Shandong remained under the control of the Japanese.

When news of the conference decision reached China students from the capital Beijing staged a mass demonstration on the morning of May Fourth, 1919 against the Treaty of Versailles. The protest spread across the country and led to the Chinese delegation’s refusal to sign the treaty in Paris.

China had been humiliated time and time again by the West. The British had forced the Chinese emperors in two Opium Wars (1839-1842 and 1856-1860) to allow them to import narcotics into China, thus addicting millions of Chinese with the devastating drugs. After the Boxer Rebellion (and the Opium Wars) the Europeans had imposed reparations on China for the cost of the war. The May Fourth demonstrations led to the wholesale questioning of Chinese identity and fate. It culminated in a new movement, the New Culture Movement, that took up the intellectual challenge to search for the root causes of Chinese misfortune in the modern era.

They found it in Chinese culture. Chinese culture was backward. China needed an Enlightenment like the West. The New Culture Movement posed the old against the new, religion against science, darkness and backwardness against light and progress. They established journals to plead their cause with titles such as New Youth, The New Tide, New Education, Young China, Young World, Youth and Society, The New Voice of Society, New Society, The New Man, The New Learning, The New Culture, The New Students. They argued for individual freedom from the traditional family structure. Chinese society emphasized the family and clan and stressed piety to the family and to the ruler of a backward society. The new society needed individual rights and individual freedom protected by the law. The old society was especially oppressive for women with foot binding as a sad example. Women’s liberation became a focal point in their education. Men and women should voluntarily sign an annually-renewable marriage contract. At the time of renewal, either party could choose to nullify the contract. Arranged marriages should be replaced by marriages of love. Supernatural beliefs and faith in religious orders should be replaced by science. The critique of religion was not limited to Chinese ancestor worship, but extended to Christianity. Jesus Christ was just another illegitimate child and the symbol of the cross was a remnant of primitive phallus worship.⁷¹

The May Fourth Movement and the New Culture Movement were anti-imperialist and anti-colonial, yet they were still rooted in Western Enlightenment and more specifically in Liberalism. China should shred the old and emulate the West in creating the new.

A similar discussion took place in the Muslim world. How should Muslims deal with the occupation of their land by Western powers? Syed Ahmad Khān (1817-1898), an influential Muslim leader in India who had worked for the East India Company argued that Islam needed to be reformed in the spirit of the European Enlightenment. See paragraph 4.4.2 (The global articulation of the concept of mental slavery) for a discussion between Khan and pan-islamist theorist Jamāl ad-Dīn al-Afghānī about this issue.

Well into the twentieth century, Liberalism found a defender in the South African liberation movement. In a speech in his defence at the Rivonia Trial in June 1964 Nelson Mandela (1918-2013) explained his political creed of Liberalism: “From my reading of Marxist literature and from conversations with Marxists, I have gained the impression that Communists regard the parliamentary system of the West as undemocratic and reactionary. But, on the contrary, I am an admirer of such a system. The Magna Carta, the Petition of Rights and the Bill of Rights, are documents which are held in veneration by democrats throughout the world. I have great respect for British political institutions, and for the country’s system of justice. I regard the British Parliament as the most democratic institution in the world, and the independence and impartiality of its judiciary never fail to arouse my admiration. The American Congress, that country’s doctrine of separation of powers, as well as the independence of its judiciary, arouse in me similar sentiments. I have been influenced in my thinking by both West and East.”⁷²

Liberalism had a certain attractiveness for activists and intellectuals in the colonies who were fighting the old social and political systems. It offered a way out of these systems that would bring them into a modern era of freedom and progress. But then there was the question of social justice. Another school in the European Enlightenment offered answers to that question: Marxism.

3.3 Marxism as a philosophy of liberation

3.3.1 The view on world history

German revolutionaries Karl Marx (1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) laid the foundation for a radical critique of the ideology and practice of Liberalism: capitalism. They also developed ideas about a new, socialist, society. Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better known as Lenin, develop Marxism and because of the Russian revolution became an authority on Marxist theory, so much so that it is often referred to as Marxism-Leninism.

For Liberalism, the capitalist society was the end phase of human history. Marxism saw communism as the end phase of human history. This vision was based on the concept of the mode of production.

Marx developed the concept of the mode of production as a historical law that explains how human societies develop: “In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.”⁷³

The material base determines the social, political and intellectual relations. As the material base develops due to technological progress there comes a phase where there is a conflict between the forces behind the progress of the material base and the social, political and intellectual structures that were created. According to Marx, “At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or - this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms - with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.”⁷⁴

In a schematic way Marxism distinguishes between the following modes of production⁷⁵:

Tribal mode of production (primitive communism). The economy is based on hunting and gathering. The resources and production are shared with all the members of the nomadic community. There is common ownership of the resources for production. There is no social differentiation; there are no social classes. Political decision making is done by the group. Knowledge production is based on magic, myths and rituals.

Neolithic mode of production (agriculture in the Stone Age). The basis is the agricultural community where humans have settled in geographical locations. Their economy is based on planting, harvesting and domestication of animals. The production exceeds the basic needs of the community and allows for the rise of social classes, but property is shared in hierarchical kinship groups or clans. The social division of labor leads to a shift from matriarchy to patriarchy. Animism is replaced by a belief in gods of fertility.

Asiatic mode of production (based on a view on Asian societies in India and China). This is a fully fledged class society with an economy that is based on a large peasantry that produces agricultural goods for the development of cities. Technology is developed to a level where a small industrial base becomes possible and the construction of huge infrastructural works like pyramids. There is a basic development of technological knowledge (architecture). A small ruling elite appropriates the surplus product of the peasantry with violence. The ruling elite is a theocracy that uses religion as an instrument of indoctrination by claiming to be the representative of God on earth.

Ancient or antique mode of production. This refers to the social formation of classical Greece and Rome in antiquity. The economy is based on agriculture, industry (mining and pottery) and advanced trade networks with money as an instrument of exchange. The social structure is based on slavery (the possession of human beings as property) and city states. The ruling elite has political structures of representation but base their role over the majority on force. There is the beginning of the production of scientific knowledge that enables the building of roads, bridges, harbors and other complex constructions.

Feudalism. The fall of the Roman empire ushered in an era of a return to subsistence agricultural in Western Europe (world history in Marxism is often based on European history). The economic base was an agricultural system in which peasants are granted the use of land by nobles in exchange for part of the produce and obligations to perform services to the nobles in times of crisis (logistic and military support). Technology was not highly developed. The class of nobles was supported by a class of clergymen who maintained a psychological control of the masses through religious duties. The cities were not very well developed and based on simple manufacturing.

Capitalism. During feudalism a merchant class had developed who saw opportunities to develop an economy based on private ownership of means of production and the development of the market. This required that the peasants should be separated from their land (expropriated) and turned into wage laborers. Production is based on maximum profits. Scientific knowledge should enable the rise of an economy based on industrialization. This would entail a revolution in culture that would eventually lead to the Enlightenment and Liberalism as the ideology of capitalism. Marxism sees capitalism as a progressive force in world history after the demise of feudalism. The Communist Manifesto explains: “The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilisation. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians’ intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.”⁷⁶ Capitalism is bad, but historically speaking it plays a civilizing role in world history by bringing the barbarians into the modern world.

Communism: For Liberalism capitalism is the last “mode of production” in human history. Marxism has a different view. Because capitalism is based on injustice (workers are exploited), sooner or later this injustice will be addressed by history through socialism that will end the system of capitalism. Capitalism is characterized by periodic economic, social and political crises. During these crises the working class will seize state power and abolish capitalism and establish a new mode of production: communism. Communism goes through two stages: socialism and communism. Lenin explains the first phase (socialism): “The means of production are no longer the private property of individuals. The means of production belong to the whole of society. Every member of society, performing a certain part of the socially necessary work, receives a certificate from society to the effect that he has done a certain amount of work. And with this certificate he receives from the public store of consumer goods a corresponding quantity of products. After a deduction is made of the amount of labor which goes to the public fund, every worker, therefore, receives from society as much as he has given to it.”⁷⁷ In this phase there is still injustice. People are not alike: one is strong, another is weak; one is married, another is not; one has more children, another has less, and so on. With an equal performance of labor, and hence an equal share in the social consumption fund, one will in fact receive more than another, one will be richer than another, and so on. There is no exploitation of man by man, because the means of production are in the hands of the state, but differences in wealth will exist. The second phase of communism is characterized by the phrases “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and “The withering away of the state”. Proper communism is only possible when technology and social organization have advanced to such a phase that all needs of the people can be satisfied in abundance. Technology abolishes the need for physical labor, because goods and services are produced by state of the art technology. Social relations have developed to a stage where people are not forced to work and work voluntarily. There is no need for a state apparatus that forces people to behave in a certain way with rules and regulations. There is no class of oppressors and no exploitation. People will interact with each other on the basis of respect and dignity. The state will gradually disappear and a technical system of administration will be in place to ensure production and distribution of goods and services. Lenin explains: “The state will be able to wither away completely when society adopts the rule: “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, i.e., when people have become so accustomed to observing the fundamental rules of social intercourse and when their labor has become so productive that they will voluntarily work according to their ability. ‘The narrow horizon of bourgeois law’, which compels one to calculate with the heartlessness of a Shylock whether one has not worked half an hour more than anybody else this narrow horizon will then be left behind. There will then be no need for society, in distributing the products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely ‘according to his needs’.”⁷⁸

This is how world history will end in a linear process from primitive communism through class societies to advanced communism.

3.3.2 Economic theory

The economic theory of Marxism is based on the concept of social surplus and surplus value. Every society produces goods and services. In a communal society without social classes everybody is involved in production and gets a share based on their needs. There is no social surplus. When a society produces more than it can consume, then there will be a social surplus. This gives rise to social classes: a class of oppressors that appropriates the social surplus that is produced by the class of the oppressed. The method of appropriation can be with brute force to compel people to work without payment and use them as property that can be bought and sold (slavery), the renting of land by a lord to a vassal who is obliged to transfer parts of his agricultural products to the lord (feudalism) or the use of labor markets in capitalism where the means of production, is owned by the capitalist class. The working class, which has no means of production (land, machines) is forced to sell its labor power in order to survive.

The basis of the capitalist economy is private ownership of the means of production and the market mechanism as the engine for production and distribution of goods and service. The fuel for the engine is the greed of the capitalist for maximum profit. Everything becomes a commodity to be sold on the market.

Capitalism has developed an ingenious way of appropriating the social surplus. Workers have no means of production. These are in the hands of the capitalists. The capitalists have individual freedom, but the workers have no individual freedom because they are forced to sell their labor power to the capitalist. So the liberal concept of individual freedom applies to a small segment of society: the capitalist class.

The workers (male/female) are the producer of goods and services. Suppose they produces a value of 100 units with their labor power. They need 10 units to survive (consumption). They get a wage of ten units, but the capitalist gets all the 100 units they have produced because he owns the means of production. So, the capitalist has a surplus value (“profit”) of 90 units. But unless he sells the products, he cannot make the profit. The free market enables him to sell his products and get his profits realized. The social surplus now turns into surplus value (profit). At the outset there are no brutal forces or oppressive laws to transfer social surplus from the oppressed class to the oppressor class. The combination of private ownership of the means of production with the market ensures this transfer. Capitalism is not an economic system of freedom as Liberalism claims. It is an inherent oppressive system that transfers the value produced by the workers to the capitalists.

The market does not ensure sustainable economic growth and welfare as Liberalism claims. The markets function in such a way that periodic economic crises are inherent to capitalism. There is not only one capitalist operating in the system. There are many capitalists and there is competition. Each capitalist produces for the market independently of other capitalists. Because of this anarchy, at some point, together they produce more than the consumers need, so there is periodically an overproduction. Some products cannot be sold. Profit rates fall and the capitalists try to shift their losses to the workers by lay-offs and cuts in wages. Periodic economic crises are intrinsic to the capitalist system and thus contradict Liberalism that says that capitalism ensures sustainable economic growth.⁷⁹

Exploitation of workers by capitalists is inherent to the system of private ownership of means of production and the market as a means to produce and distribute goods and services. Maximum profit for the capitalists is the incentive for the system to function. In capitalism everything becomes a commodity that can be bought and sold: education, health care, housing, culture etc. By definition, social injustice (the exploitation of the working class) is the result of the combination of private ownership of the means of production and the market mechanism. At the end of the day social justice is only possible with the abolition of private property of the means of production and the establishment of a planned economy where goods and services are distributed according to the needs of the workers.

The basis of the socialist economy is state ownership of the means of production and central planning as the engine for the production and distribution of goods and services. The fuel for the engine is the desire to provide the goods and services that the people need: housing, education, health care etc. In an analysis of the Paris Commune, Marx described the socialist economy as a “united co-operative societies … to regulate national production upon common plan, thus taking it under their own control, and putting an end to the constant anarchy and periodical convulsions which are the fatality of capitalist production.”⁸⁰

Distribution of goods and services are not regulated by the market, but by economic planning. The state sets up a planning board that is responsible for producing and distributing goods and services based on the needs of the population and not on the profit drive of private entrepreneurs. Thus, you will have investment in health care, education, social infrastructure as a priority in central planning.

3.3.3 Political theory

The political theory of Marxism focuses on the concept of class struggle. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” says the Communist Manifesto.⁸¹ The ruling class has an array of institution to maintain its power. The state (government, political parties, parliament, judiciary, police, intelligence services, army) serves the interest of the bourgeoisie. Freedom in a capitalist society is an illusion. The cultural institutions (media, universities as knowledge producers, educational system) reproduce the bourgeois narratives of liberalism and thus contribute to the illusion of political freedom. The judiciary and parliament are controlled by the capitalist class. There is no independent judiciary in a class society. There is class justice. There is no political freedom in a parliamentary system. Parliament is a class institution. Separation of powers is an illusion. When the crisis of capitalism is acute, all powers are mobilized to defeat the movement that wants to bring down capitalism. Reform of capitalism is an illusion. A revolution is needed to bring down capitalism, destroy the capitalist state and build a new socialist society. These are the main propositions in the political theory of Marxism.

Engels explains the rise of the state: “At a definite stage of economic development, which necessarily involved the cleavage of society into classes, the state became a necessity because of this cleavage.”⁸² A state apparatus arose when the class society arose: “As the state arose from the need to keep class antagonisms in check, but also arose in the thick of the fight between the classes, it is normally the state of the most powerful, economically ruling class, which by its means becomes also the politically ruling class, and so acquires new means of holding down and exploiting the oppressed class.... The state, which in all typical periods is without exception the state of the ruling class, and in all cases continues to be essentially a machine for holding down the oppressed, exploited class.”⁸³

Lenin builds on the work of Engels to explain the nature of the state in a socialist revolution. In capitalism the state is the “special coercive force” of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class. Lenin: “And from it follows that the ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, of millions of working people by handfuls of the rich, must be replaced by a ‘special coercive force’ for the suppression of the bourgeoisie by the proletariat (the dictatorship of the proletariat)... This is precisely the ‘act’ of taking possession of the means of production in the name of society.”⁸⁴

The struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat becomes manifest during the periodical crises of capitalism. The bourgeoisie tries to shift the burden of the crisis to the workers with layoffs and wage reduction. This lays the foundation for a revolution. But not every crisis results in a revolution. V.I. Lenin developed Marxist political theory to explain how a crisis can grow into a revolution: “To the Marxist it is indisputable that a revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, it is not every revolutionary situation that leads to revolution. What, generally speaking, are the symptoms of a revolutionary situation? We shall certainly not be mistaken if we indicate the following three major symptoms: (1) when it is impossible for the ruling classes to maintain their rule without any change; when there is a crisis, in one form or another, among the ‘upper classes’, a crisis in the policy of the ruling class, leading to a fissure through which the discontent and indignation of the oppressed classes burst forth. For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for ‘the lower classes not to want’ to live in the old way; it is also necessary that ‘the upper classes should be unable’ to live in the old way; (2) when the suffering and want of the oppressed classes have grown more acute than usual; (3) when, as a consequence of the above causes, there is a considerable increase in the activity of the masses, who uncomplainingly allow themselves to be robbed in ‘peace time’, but, in turbulent times, are drawn both by all the circumstances of the crisis and by the ‘upper classes’ themselves into independent historical action.”⁸⁵

A socialist revolution is impossible without a political vanguard to lead the revolution. Lenin explains: “We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers. [SH: meaning class consciousness] It would have to be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia. In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.”⁸⁶

So, the function of the vanguard party is to raise the class consciousness of the workers to the point where they are able to understand the necessity for revolutionary transformation. Where Liberalism regards capitalism as the justifiable status quo, Marxism argues that a socialist revolution is inevitable.

The socialist revolution will result in the dictatorship of the proletariat. Lenin: “The theory of class struggle, applied by Marx to the question of the state and the socialist revolution, leads as a matter of course to the recognition of the political rule of the proletariat, of its dictatorship, i.e., of undivided power directly backed by the armed force of the people. The overthrow of the bourgeoisie can be achieved only by the proletariat becoming the ruling class, capable of crushing the inevitable and desperate resistance of the bourgeoisie, and of organizing all the working and exploited people for the new economic system. The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organization of force, an organization of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population — the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semiproletarians — in the work of organizing a socialist economy.”⁸⁷

The socialist revolution is a violent revolution, because the bourgeoisie will not give up its power voluntarily. In a revolutionary situation the working class led by the Communist Party sets up a military committee to organize the takeover of the institution of the state and first and foremost destroys the armed forces of the bourgeoisie.

What happens next once the working class has taken over? Marx and Lenin drew important lessons from the Paris Commune. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 to 1871 workers in Paris seized control of the city on March 18, 1871 and formed a revolutionary government. That government lasted two months, until May 28, 1871, when it was crushed by the national French Army that executed between 10,000 and 20,000 Communards. Marx explains how the new system worked: “Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of the ruling class was to misrepresent the people in Parliament, universal suffrage was to serve the people, constituted in Communes, as individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for the workmen and managers in his business.”⁸⁸ The model of the Commune was as follows: “The Commune was formed of the municipal councillors, chosen by universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and revocable at short terms. The majority of its members were naturally working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class. The Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time.”⁸⁹ So there was no separation of powers as Montesquieu recommended.

What happens to the bureaucracy of the state? Lenin: “Abolishing the bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question. It is a utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy this is not a utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat... We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid “foremen and accountants” (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees).”⁹⁰

The repressive part of the bureaucracy - the army and police - will be replaced by the armed people in a socialist revolution. Because they form the majority of the population there is no need for a massive repression and the state as a repressive organ will wither away and finally cease to exist. Lenin: “Only communism makes the state absolutely unnecessary, for there is nobody to be suppressed ‘nobody’ in the sense of a class, of a systematic struggle against a definite section of the population. We are not utopians, and do not in the least deny the possibility and inevitability of excesses on the part of individual persons, or the need to stop such excesses. In the first place, however, no special machine, no special apparatus of suppression, is needed for this: this will be done by the armed people themselves, as simply and as readily as any crowd of civilized people, even in modern society, interferes to put a stop to a scuffle or to prevent a woman from being assaulted. And, secondly, we know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people, their want and their poverty. With the removal of this chief cause, excesses will inevitably begin to ‘wither away’. We do not know how quickly and in what succession, but we do know they will wither away. With their withering away the state will also wither away.”⁹¹

What is the role of nation-state in Marxist political theory? In short, socialism is not compatible with the nation-state. A national revolution is a first step towards an international revolution. The nation-state will give away to an international sister- and brotherhood of men and women. Taking the Paris Commune as a model, Friedrich Engels remarks: “On the same day the foreigners elected to the Commune were confirmed in office, because ‘the flag of the Commune is the flag of the World Republic’.”⁹²

The question of socialism and ethnicity was not related to racism of white colonizers vis-à-vis non-white colonized people. It was related to anti-Semitism. The basic tenet of Marxist theory on racism is articulated not with the concept of race, but the concept of nation, what we would call today an ethic group: a community of people with a common history and culture. The relationship between class and nation is that a nation consists of an oppressed and an oppressor class. But a nation can also be oppressed by another nation. In the oppressed nation the oppressor class fight together with the oppressed class against the oppressor nation, but at the end of the day they will betray the oppressed class in the oppressed nation. So that is why only international solidarity on a class basis can fight racism effectively. I deal extensively with the Marxist theory of racism in paragraph 6.7 (Marxist theories of racism).

3.3.4 Social theory

The social theory of Marxism rests on the concept of class. Not the individual, but class is the basis of society. The Marxist definition of class is not determined by income or social status. A class is defined in terms of the relationship between people and the means of production. In capitalism the bourgeoisie is the class that owns the means of production and thus controls the labor power of the class of workers that have only their labor to sell in order to survive. Individuals are members of a class. The nature of a class depends on the mode of production in a society as explained in paragraph 3.3.1 (The view on world history).

In Liberalism the individual is the main actor in history. In Marxism class is the main actor. The position of the individual is determined by his or her class position. A class is defined in terms of relationship between social groups and the means of production. In capitalism the two main classes are the bourgeoisie (capitalist class) and the proletariat (working class). The capitalist class owns the means of production and needs workers to work with these means of production (land, machines). The working class does not own the means of production and therefore is obliged to sell his/her labor power to the capitalist in order to survive. There is a smaller third class: the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeoisie is the class of owners of the means of production who don’t rely on hiring laborers (peasants, artisans and shopkeepers). Class societies are based on the division of labor. Marx states: “The division of labor implies the contradiction between the interest of the separate individual or the individual family and the communal interest of all individuals who have intercourse with one another.”⁹³

In a communist society the social system does away with the division of labor and thus with classes. According to Marx, “In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.”⁹⁴

Marxism acknowledges that class is not the only category for organizing social relations. Ethnicity is another category. The question of socialism and ethnicity is not related to the racism of white colonizers vis-à-vis non-white colonized people. It was related to anti-Semitism. In an essay on The Jewish Question, Marx answers German philosopher Bruno Bauer who discussed the demand for emancipation by the Jews. Marx: “Bruno Bauer replies to them: No one in Germany is politically emancipated. We ourselves are not free. How are we to free you? You Jews are egoists if you demand a special emancipation for yourselves as Jews. As Germans, you ought to work for the political emancipation of Germany, and as human beings, for the emancipation of mankind, and you should feel the particular kind of your oppression and your shame not as an exception to the rule, but on the contrary as a confirmation of the rule.”⁹⁵

Marx answers: “We do not say to the Jews, as Bauer does: You cannot be emancipated politically without emancipating yourselves radically from Judaism. On the contrary, we tell them: Because you can be emancipated politically without renouncing Judaism completely and incontrovertibly, political emancipation itself is not human emancipation. If you Jews want to be emancipated politically, without emancipating yourselves humanly, the half-hearted approach and contradiction is not in you alone, it is inherent in the nature and category of political emancipation.”⁹⁶

In the end religion and other forms of non-class identities are remnants of the past. It would be possible to have civil rights but real freedom is about freeing yourself from religion.

The discussion was brought to a practical organizational level in 1897 by a group of Jewish socialists. They founded the Jewish Labor Bund (“Circle”) in the Russian empire and claimed to represent the Jewish proletariat. Lenin argued that nationalism in an oppressed nation has a class dimension. There is nationalism of the working classes and nationalism of the bourgeoisie. Against nationalism Lenin posits internationalism: “In place of all forms of nationalism Marxism advances internationalism, the amalgamation of all nations in the higher unity, a unity that is growing before our eyes with every mile of railway line that is built, with every international trust, and every workers’ association that is formed.”⁹⁷

Lenin acknowledges that the class conscious worker can exhibit ethnic prejudices: “Take Russia and the attitude of Great Russians towards the Ukrainians. Naturally, every democrat, not to mention Marxists, will strongly oppose the incredible humiliation of Ukrainians, and demand complete equality for them.”⁹⁸

The workers of the oppressed nation cannot use this as an argument to break off relations with the working class of the oppressor nation.

Lenin states: “But it would be a downright betrayal of socialism and a silly policy even from the standpoint of the bourgeois “national aims” of the Ukrainians to weaken the ties and the alliance between the Ukrainian and Great-Russian proletariat that now exist within the confines of a single state… If a Ukrainian Marxist allows himself to be swayed by his quite legitimate and natural hatred of the Great-Russian oppressors to such a degree that he transfers even a particle of this hatred, even if it be only estrangement, to the proletarian culture and proletarian cause of the Great-Russian workers, then such a Marxist will get bogged down in bourgeois nationalism.”⁹⁹

So that is why the step of the Jewish Bund is unacceptable to Lenin. Lenin’s view is that the party of the proletariat should be united and not divided. The party of the proletariat should fight against prejudices against Jews and thus attract Jews to the party rather than encouraging them to form another party that organizes a section of the working class. Therefore, he was against the Bund.

After 1917, Lenin went a step further. The Russian revolution was not a revolution confined to the Russian part of the tsarist empire. The Union of Socialist Soviet Republics (USSR) comprises the Republics of Transcaucasia, Ukraine, Russia and Byelorussia. The different republic had multiple nations. With the support of Lenin, Stalin wrote an essay on the national question in which he defines a nation as “a historically constituted, stable community of people, formed on the basis of a common language, territory, economic life, and psychological make-up manifested in a common culture.”¹⁰⁰

Lenin sets forth his guidelines on dealing with the national question in the concept of the right to self-determination: “The class-conscious workers do not advocate secession. They know the advantages of large states and the amalgamation of large masses of workers. But large states can be democratic only if there is complete equality among the nations; that equality implies the right to secede.”¹⁰¹

He compares it with advocating the right to divorce in a marriage although you don’t advocate that people should divorce. But what about his earlier comments on bourgeois nationalism that wants to separate the working class? Lenin answers his critics as follows: “By supporting the right to secession, we are told, you are supporting the bourgeois nationalism of the oppressed nations. This is what Rosa Luxemburg says… Our reply to this is: No, it is to the bourgeoisie that a “practical” solution of this question is important. To the workers the important thing is to distinguish the principles of the two trends. Insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed and more strongly than anyone else, in favour, for we are the staunchest and the most consistent enemies of oppression. But insofar as the bourgeoisie of the oppressed nation stands for its own bourgeois nationalism, we stand against. We fight against the privileges and violence of the oppressor nation, and do not in any way condone strivings for privileges on the part of the oppressed nation.”¹⁰²

In other words, by this policy the working class of the oppressor nations hopes to convince the working class of the oppressed nation that she is willing to champion the rights of the latter. In doing so, she hopes to avoid an actual secession.

Marxist social theory has developed a view on gender. In Marxist analysis family is linked to the division of labor and to private property. Engels argues that the first division of labor was between the sexes: “The division of labor is purely primitive, between the sexes only. The man fights in the wars, goes hunting and fishing, procures the raw materials of food and the tools necessary for doing so. The woman looks after the house and the preparation of food and clothing, cooks, weaves, sews. They are each master in their own sphere: the man in the forest, the woman in the house. Each is owner of the instruments which he or she makes and uses: the man of the weapons, the hunting and fishing implements, the woman of the household gear. The housekeeping is communal among several and often many families. What is made and used in common is common property - the house, the garden, the long-boat.”¹⁰³

A revolution took place in the relationship between the sexes when production exceeded the necessities for survival. Engels explains: “With its increase of the productivity of labor, and therefore of wealth, and its extension of the field of production, the first great social division of labor was bound, in the general historical conditions prevailing, to bring slavery in its train. From the first great social division of labor arose the first great cleavage of society into two classes: masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited… With the herds and the other new riches, a revolution came over the family. To procure the necessities of life had always been the business of the man; he produced and owned the means of doing so. The herds were the new means of producing these necessities; the taming of the animals in the first instance and their later tending were the man’s work. To him, therefore, belonged the cattle, and to him the commodities and the slaves received in exchange for cattle. All the surplus which the acquisition of the necessities of life now yielded fell to the man; the woman shared in its enjoyment, but had no part in its ownership. The “savage” warrior and hunter had been content to take second place in the house, after the woman; the “gentler” shepherd, in the arrogance of his wealth, pushed himself forward into the first place and the woman down into the second. And she could not complain. The division of labor within the family had regulated the division of property between the man and the woman. That division of labor had remained the same; and yet it now turned the previous domestic relation upside down, simply because the division of labor outside the family had changed. The same cause which had ensured to the woman her previous supremacy in the house – that her activity was confined to domestic labor – this same cause now ensured the man’s supremacy in the house: the domestic labor of the woman no longer counted beside the acquisition of the necessities of life by the man; the latter was everything, the former an unimportant extra.¹⁰⁴

The family under capitalism develops into a monogamous unit. Engels argues that “it is based on the supremacy of the man, the express purpose being to produce children of undisputed paternity; such paternity is demanded because these children are later to come into their father’s property as his natural heirs.”¹⁰⁵

As the proletariat has no means of production (they have only their labor power for sale) the position of the proletarian family is different from that of the bourgeois family. The Communist Manifesto argues: “Our bourgeois, not content with having wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other’s wives. Bourgeois marriage is, in reality, a system of wives in common.”¹⁰⁶

So, what will the position be of women in a socialist society? Engels says: “We can already see from this that to emancipate woman and make her the equal of the man is and remains an impossibility so long as the woman is shut out from social productive labor and restricted to private domestic labor. The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labor over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labor by changing it more and more into a public industry.”¹⁰⁷

The Communist Manifesto is clearer. It poses the question: “What will be the influence of communist society on the family?” The answer is: “It will transform the relations between the sexes into a purely private matter which concerns only the persons involved and into which society has no occasion to intervene. It can do this since it does away with private property and educates children on a communal basis, and in this way removes the two bases of traditional marriage – the dependence rooted in private property, of the women on the man, and of the children on the parents.”¹⁰⁸

The relationship between man and women can take different forms but they will be all private. Society has no say in it. Children will be educated by society even if they live in monogamous families.

3.3.5 Cultural theory

In capitalism, culture reflects the class division of society. The dominant culture is the culture of the dominant class. In the concept of the mode of production the material base of a society (technology, natural circumstances and economy) determines the superstructure of legal, political and cultural institutions (see paragraph 3.3.1 - The view on world history). In capitalist society culture has become a commodity. Education is subjected to the laws of supply and demand and costs and revenue and not based on the needs of a population. The same goes many other parts of culture.

Knowledge production has a class bias. Its aim is to protect the capitalist system and ensure that workers don’t acquire a class consciousness that motivates them to overthrow capitalism. Education, art and communication are not neutral. They have a class bias. They celebrate and promote capitalism as a system and Liberalism as its ideology. In a socialist society, intellectual and cultural life is based on science and rational thinking which originated in the European Enlightenment. Religion will disappear when science thrives. Marx mentions in this regard the measures taken by the Paris Commune: “Having once got rid of the standing army and the police — the physical force elements of the old government — the Commune was anxious to break the spiritual force of repression, the ‘parson-power’, by the disestablishment and disendowment of all churches as proprietary bodies. The priests were sent back to the recesses of private life, there to feed upon the alms of the faithful in imitation of their predecessors, the apostles. The whole of the educational institutions were opened to the people gratuitously, and at the same time cleared of all interference of church and state. Thus, not only was education made accessible to all, but science itself freed from the fetters which class prejudice and governmental force had imposed upon it.”¹⁰⁹

3.3.6 Marxism in the colonial world

Colonialism is a system of injustice, oppression and exploitation. Marxism is a philosophy of liberation that explicitly addresses these issues. Therefore, it is quite understandable that many activists and intellectuals were attracted to Marxism in their search for a coherent theoretical framework to guide the struggle for liberation. The Russian revolution in 1917 had shown that liberation was possible with two main instruments:

A coherent theoretical framework that explains the world and offers guidance on how to change it.

The concept of a vanguard party as a political instrument to organize the liberation struggle to the point of taking state power.

The Russian revolution offers the colonized world an infrastructure to build communist parties across the globe: the Third International, better known as the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern helped to establish communist parties in different parts of the world. And some were successful in leading liberation struggles and seizing state power.

In classical Marxist theory the working class in the developed capitalist world would bring down capitalism. They formed the majority of the population. But in the colonized world the majority of the population consisted of peasants. The role of the communist party is to organize the colonized people from different classes (working class, the petty bourgeoisie (peasantry and small business) and the national bourgeoisie (the indigenous capitalists who are oppressed by foreign imperialist powers) in order to bring down the colonial and imperialist power to achieve national liberation. National liberation is the first step towards socialism.

In Europe communist parties assumed state power in the aftermath of World War II and were very much under the influence of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In countries like China and Vietnam the communist parties had a more independent development. Their revolutions were more peasant revolutions than workers revolutions. In China the revolution was not the result of an uprising of the working class but a guerilla war of the peasantry against the local bourgeoisie and the Japanese invaders. In Vietnam the revolution was a war of independence against the French colonial power and later a war of liberation against US imperialism and for reunification of South and North Vietnam. In Cuba the revolution was not even led by a communist party. Nor was it initially conceived by its leaders as a socialist revolution. In Africa many national liberation movements had cadres that were trained in the communist tradition, but their leadership was often a combination of people from different philosophical traditions: Marxism, nationalism, pan-Africanism.

The story of Aimé Césaire (see paragraph 2.4.2) highlights how communists critically reflect on Marxism and subsequently develop new concepts of liberation that are not founded in Marxism. Sometimes these concepts contradict basic categories of Marxism. Sometimes they are seen as an extension of Marxist theory. I will deal with these concepts when I further develop the theoretical framework of DTM (chapters seven to twelve).

Here, I present Marxism as part of a Eurocentric philosophy of Liberation. Enrique Dussel, an Argentinean philosopher of liberation, argues in his book on the “Unknown Marx” that there is a decolonial Marx who went beyond the well published concepts that are part of mainstream Marxism and uses categories that are close to decolonial theory in his unpublished manuscript.¹¹⁰ I deal with Marxism on the basis of the publications of its founders that have become part of the ideology of many socialist movements.

3.4 The rise of decolonial theory

3.4.1 Decolonial concepts in the struggle against colonialism

I have outlined the main features of the two most important philosophies of liberation that the European Enlightenment has produced. There are many thinkers in both traditions who have made contributions to further elaborate these features or amend them in order to strengthen their framework. I focus on the main features because they have the biggest impact in the popular discourse of that school of thought.

As I explained in chapter one, the rise of a global decolonial movement can be attributed to three major developments:

The fall of the West and the rise of the rest.

The collapse of the socialist bloc and the demise of Marxism.

The crisis of Western civilization.

These developments are linked to the two major schools of the European Enlightenment. The power of the west has an ideological base in Liberalism. The power of the socialist bloc had an ideological basis in Marxism.

The rise of “the rest” is not linked to one specific ideological base. China goes back to Confucius and connects millennia old philosophies with a Chinese brand of Marxism. The Iranian revolution is based on a concept of Islam as a theology of liberation. In Africa liberation philosophies incorporates the concept of age-old cosmologies such as Ubuntu. In Bolivia, liberation movements draw on the philosophies of the Aymara people.

The decline of the socialist bloc did not obliterate social movements that draw on Marxism as a source of inspiration. On the contrary, many of these movements try to connect Marxist concepts of social justice with new ideas on race, gender, sexuality and ecology. In this process some thinkers make links to decolonial concepts. I will deal with them in chapter ten (Decolonizing social theory).

In Liberalism the crisis of Western civilization is linked to the confrontation with non-Western civilizations. The narrative of Samuel Huntington (see paragraph 2.5 - The crisis of Western civilization) is an illustration of this link. In Marxism the critique of Black Marxists like Aimé Césaire is an example of how the crisis of civilization is expressed in the Marxist tradition (see paragraph 2.4.2 - The story of Aimé Césaire).

Against this background we can understand the rise of decolonial theory. There is no specific event of publication that can be regarded as the precise start of the decolonial movement. In fact, if we were to pinpoint an event that could be regarded as the start of decolonial thinking it is in the story of Anacaona. Theoretical concepts are not only expressed in words, but also in deeds.

On December 4, 1492, the Spanish barbarians arrived in Ayiti - as the Tainos called the isle of Haiti and Santo Domingo. They were confronted by heroic resistance. One of the leaders of the resistance was a young woman named Anacaona (“golden flower”). Born in 1474 as a daughter of a family of chiefs, she became a leader of her people. Her husband Caonabo organized the attack on La Navidad, a settlement of the Spanish barbarians on the north-west of the island. He was later captured and shipped to Spain, but died en route. Anacaona and her husband had one child.

In the fall of 1503, the Spaniards captured Anacaona and her noblemen during a feast. They were accused of conspiring to resist the Spanish occupation and were executed. Anacaona was sentenced to be hanged. She was offered clemency if she would give herself as a concubine to a Spaniard. Rather than accepting rape as her fate she chose to maintain her female dignity and refused. She was hanged at the age of 29.

We can imagine what thoughts might have gone through her mind: the barbarism of the Spaniards, the fear for a woman’s life filled with rape, the choice between dignity and death, a pride in her husband’s role in destroying La Navidad, the example she wanted to set for future generations of her people and the anxiety about her child becoming an orphan.

The Spanish concept of the role of the Taino female was based on the idea that the Spaniards had the right to force Taino women into a situation of perpetual rape.

Anacaona was not just an individual woman. She represented an oppressed people. Her submission was not just a submission of a woman to a man. It was the submission of a people to the oppressor.

Anacaona’s concept of dignity that speaks from her act was based on the following ideas:

The Spanish barbarians had no right to make decisions regarding her body and soul. By choosing death over rape she denied them this “right”.

She not only upheld her individual pride and dignity but also the pride and dignity of her people.

In the choice between dignity and death one should prefer death in dignity than a life of rape.

Her deed and the concept behind it are ingrained in the collective memory of the people of Haiti who praise her in their songs and works of art.

There are many stories where theoretical concepts can be derived from five hundred years of actual deeds of resistance against colonialism. I will give more examples in the coming chapters.

We have theoretical concepts that are articulated in the history of resistance against colonialism not only in deeds, but also in words. A telling example can be found in the speech of Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec ruler of Tenochtitlan (now Mexico City. On August 12th 1521, one year after Cuauhtémoc (“One who has descended like an eagle”) became the ruler of Tenochtitlan at the age of eighteenth, he held a speech at the end of a lost battle to drive the Spaniards out of his land. It was the last battle in a struggle to prevent the establishment of European colonial rule in Mexico. The day after his speech he was captured by Hernán Cortés, the Spanish barbarian who led the invasion of Aztec land. He was held captive for three and a half years before being executed upon the orders of Hernán Cortés. Cuauhtémoc was tortured by bathing his hands and feet in cooking oil. The next day he was hanged. The historical origin of the speech is disputed. The speech is said to be created by a group called Movimiento de la Mexicanidad in the 20th century. It took Cuauhtémoc as the icon to create awareness of colonization in Mexico. It brought together the elements of indigenous knowledge that contain the essential concepts in the speech. This is the text of his speech:¹¹¹

“Our Sun is now hidden from view. The face of our Sun has disappeared, and has left us in complete darkness. But we know it will return again, that it will rise again, and it will begin to illuminate us anew.

“But while our Sun is away, and remains in the residence of silence, we must swiftly join together and embrace. And in the very centre of our being, we must hide all that our hearts love, and hide all we know is a great treasure.

“We will destroy our creative centres, our schools, our ball courts, our youth centers, our places of song and diversion. Let happen until only our desolate streets remain, and we will only find comfort within our homes.

“This will be until that time when our new Sun rises.

“Dearest fathers and mothers, you must never forget to show young people the way, to teach your children. Make your children understand that while they live it is evidence of how good to us our dearest mother earth Anahuac has been.

“We have the shelter and protection of our destiny, expressed through great respect and positive behavior, and confirmed by those that have come before us. We keep them in mind because our parents enthusiastically cultivated this within our spirit. Then it will be the time for our children to assume their responsibilities.

“Do not forget to keep your children informed, remind them of how wonderful it will be, how we will rise again, and understand the reach of our power.

“And at that time we our mother earth Anahuac will realize her great destiny.”

There are three important elements in his speech.

First, Cuauhtémoc talks about an era of darkness that the barbaric invasion had brought for his people: “The face of our Sun has disappeared, and has left us in complete darkness.” This is in sharp contrast to the view of the colonizer who would present the era of colonialism as the era of progress that was codified in the 17th century in terms like Enlightenment and modernity. What the colonizer regarded as Enlightenment was in the experience of the colonized an era of darkness filled with genocide, theft, murder, rape, oppression and exploitation. What in academic decolonial theory became known as the other side of modernity was already articulated in this speech five hundred years ago.