Decolonisation and its discontents. Part One

Why a theory of despair is shaping some left-wing responses to Gaza

Gaza 12 October 2023. © Anas Mohammed, Shutterstock

This week I’ve written elsewhere about the need for economic sovereignty in a post-conflict Palestinian state. This week's newsletter is a long-read, and comes in two parts. It’s a response to Simon Sebag Montefiore’s influential attack on decolonisation theory in The Atlantic. I’ll publish the whole thing on Medium next week, but for Conflict & Democracy subscribers only, here is Part I (Part II follows shortly) …

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Simon Sebag Montefiore's attack on decolonisation theory (The Atlantic, 27 October 2023) makes a valid point: that by defining the Jewish presence in Israel as "settler colonial" it legitimises the destruction of the state of Israel as an objective, and has led some on the left to justify the Hamas terror attack of 7 October. Under the banner of decolonisation, he writes:

"Western academics, students, artists, and activists have denied, excused, or even celebrated the murders by a terrorist sect that proclaims an anti-Jewish genocidal program."

This is true. And even though such people remain a minority within the Palestine solidarity movement, some among its majority have tolerated their presence.

But I doubt Sebag Montefiore's article will convince many of the young people proclaiming their “exhilaration” at the Hamas attack. Nor should it invalidate an academic discipline devoted to the study of a historic phenomenon labelled "settler colonialism", which that has advanced our understanding of white supremacy.

Sebag Montefiore describes decolonisation theory as:

"a toxic, historically nonsensical mix of Marxist theory, Soviet propaganda, and traditional anti-Semitism from the Middle Ages and the 19th century"

and notes that it has

"replaced traditional universalist leftist values, including internationalist standards of decency and respect for human life and the safety of innocent civilians".

But he cannot explain why it has done so, or how the "nonsensical mix" has solidified into a coherent ideology among young people, other than that its rise is part of a wider disintegration of rigour in academia.

Those of us on the left who do want to defend universalism, the rule of law and the Enlightenment tradition need to give a fuller account of the advantages and limits of decolonisation/settler colonialism theory; of the material roots of its popularity; and propose an alternative that goes beyond the reactionary defence of imperialist colonisation, which many liberals and conservatives have adopted.

The roots of left Hamas apologism

That these tasks are urgent can be seen from numerous apologies for Hamas terror coming from the left.

For clarity, I am not primarily speaking of the Leninist left, whose support for Hamas' violence is predictable, though cautiously worded, and flows from the early Comintern's methodology (which says that wars by colonised peoples against imperialist armies are always just). If we were only dealing with Socialist Worker ("Smash the Racist Israeli State") or the Revolutionary Communist Group, this would not be such a worrying phenomenon.

Instead, what we're dealing with is the coalescence of academic decolonisation theories and identity politics into an ideology that has attracted a wider group of young, otherwise left-liberal minded, progressives.

For brevity I will cite just two examples. The first is a resolution passed by the UCU branch at London University's SOAS on 18 October. It begins by noting:

"The ongoing settler colonial occupation of Palestine and escalation of genocidal violence by the apartheid Israeli state, now culminating in the indiscriminate attack and siege on Gaza..."

Let's break down the logic in the language. By designating the Jewish presence as a "settler colonial occupation" tout court - ie not just the illegal settlement/occupation of the West Bank - it confers permanent illegitimacy on the state of Israel, and thus rules out a Two State Solution.

The word "escalation" designates Israel's existence as inevitably genocidal. By mobilising the term "apartheid" the resolution implicitly links the Palestinian struggle to all other struggles against racism (except, of course, the struggle of Jews against anti-Semitism).

If, in addition to these hyperbolic claims, the UCU branch had added "and we condemn the Hamas attack", they might at least have signalled some elementary solidarity with its thousands of victims. Instead, they militantly defended their right not to do so, decrying:

"...the targeted and racialised demand and burden placed on Palestinians and their supporters, particularly people of colour, to perform a condemnation of violence as a yardstick of their humanity and, at times, in order to preclude their designation as terrorists".

In short, according to the SOAS-UCU resolution, it is racist to ask those chanting for a “global intifada” to condemn the 7 October attack: not only racist to the Palestinians but to their non-white supporters on campus.

To see where this approach leads in practice, let's look at a second example: the words of Barnaby Raine, a PhD student at Columbia University who shot to notoriety after he celebrated the Hamas attack, while it was in progress, by tweeting:

"Shabbat Shalom and may every coloniser fall everywhere"

Raine, who is Jewish, went on to attack Rishi Sunak for characterising the 7 October as a "pogrom", asking his critics (including myself):

"Do you see how reading the violence of the dispossessed as racist savagery works to dehumanise them and to legitimate a genocide against them? Europe constantly projects its obsessions onto Palestinians, who don't much care about the religion of their coloniser."

Raine's logic is the same as that of the infamous Harvard Student statement (see Conflict & Democracy 11 October 2023): because the violence of oppressed people may be justified, classifying a specific act of violence as in any way racist, or condemning its criminality, or condemning those who celebrate it, is itself racist.

This is what we are now up against: the abject degeneration of parts of the left intelligentsia into political amoralism, fuelled by a racialised reading of the structures of global capitalism which demotes all other dynamics.

At its worst it leads to unconditional/uncritical support for violence perpetrated by one of the most reactionary forces in the world. So how did it become the new orthodoxy for parts of the Western left?

The answer lies only partly in decolonisation theory; the wider problem - as I've explored here many times - is the emergence of neo-Stalinism in the West, which is strategically wedded to the overthrow of the rules-based global order, allied to Russia and China in geopolitics, amplified by their hybrid aggression techniques, and based on profoundly anti-humanist moral premises.

To defeat this ideology we have to do something Sebag Montefiore does not: accept what is real in the decolonisation thesis.

What is real in decolonisation theory?

First, that capitalism was born as a system predating on the peoples, natural resources and biosphere of the non-capitalist world - and was justified by expressly racist ideologies from the get-go.

During the so-called "primitive accumulation" phase - the 16th to late 18th centuries - capital accumulation took the form of African slave plantations, the massacre and displacement of indigenous peoples, the systematic use of indentured labour among colonised populations, the systematic plunder of natural resources, outright piracy and the unequal exchange of goods at gunpoint.

Then, in the 19th and 20th centuries, capitalism created a system of formal empires based on explicit Social Darwinist ideologies of white supremacy.

However, during this high period of imperialism (roughly the 1870s to the 1940s), the model of domination bifurcated: across much of Africa and Asia, the "classic" colonial relationship rested on the exploitation of indigenous peoples by a white colonial elite, and the export of resources back to the imperial heartland.

However, in the USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, non-European Russia and (it is argued) much of Latin America, imperialism took the form of "settler colonialism": implanting European-born workers and farmers, substantially replicating the economic model of the metropolitan countries, and either marginalising the indigenous population from the rule of law or eradicating them altogether.

During the post-1945 period, formal independence and self-determination did not lead to the end of economic subjugation for the former colonies. Nor did it end overt structural racism in the metropolitan countries. And today, as financial globalisation has gone into crisis, we are seeing parts of the Western political elite embrace overt, white ethno-nationalism, legitimising the overtly racist ideologies that were kept alive by the post-war far right (see recent Tory use of the Great Replacement Theory, for example).

Second, as a result, even today, accounts of reality that emphasise capitalism's inherent racial injustice run up against both conscious and unconscious bias in favour of an imperialism-forgiving, Eurocentric narrative.

Third, both in former colonies and the metropolitan heartlands, people of colour, the descendants of slaves and indigenous people share a common experience: their mental and physical health is continuously damaged and downgraded by the structural racism they experience, by the white supremacist narratives that surround them, and by inter-generational trauma.

Why has this methodology, which emerged in the 1990s and only really took off in the past 15 years, supplanted Marxism, structuralism and liberalism in academia, and now morphed into an ideology of resistance among some young people?

My hunch is: because it describes the lived experience of an increasingly multi-ethnic, young, global north population better than any of its rivals. And because - in a globally networked information sphere - it creates a shared language between people fighting poverty and oppression in the global south, and the ethnic minorities of the global north, in a way that neither Marxism, liberalism or secular nationalism was able to. Plus, as this week’s TikTok craze for quoting Osama Bin Laden shows, it is being massively boosted by Chinese and Russian hybrid warfare techniques.

If, from the late 18th century onwards, it was legitimate to critique capitalism based on its economic injustice (socialism) and gender injustice (feminism), it is also legitimate to critique capitalism on the basis of its racial injustice, and to explore/challenge the official story being told by e.g. statues of slave traders, war memorials for colonialist armies and the classic "British Empire" narrative taught in schools. The problem is, until the post-war generation of anti-colonial Marxist writers emerged (Fanon, Césaire, Rodney, Cabral etc), nobody had systematically done this - and even when they did, both orthodox Marxism and social democracy remained hostile to their insights.

As a journalist and historian who works in the tradition of historical materialism, for example, I have to recognise recognise that neither Marxism, Leninism, nor 20th century Western Marxism ever properly theorised the centrality of white supremacy to the history of capitalism.

That it took Frantz Fanon, a highly unorthodox Western Marxist, to “stretch Marxism” so that it could explain the long-term psychological impact of colonial power-structures on the people resisting them, is testimony to that. In addition, when it comes to the study of the USSR and PRC, most academic traditions have shared a methodological blindness to the imperialist, racist and settler colonial aspects of these regimes.

Decolonisation, if used as an analytical lens - alongside other lenses like class, gender, world systems theory and political economy - can help us throw light on both the past and the present. Witness, for example, the recent "decolonisation" of the Western academic approach to Ukraine, where a new generation of scholars has broken free of frameworks centred around the Russian Empire, the USSR and a Russian-dominated post-Soviet space.

The category of "settler colonialism", as Lorenzo Veracini points out, was only properly developed in the 1970s. Leninism had categorised countries like Australia and Canada as part of the imperialist metropole, barely registering the fate of their indigenous people. In the 1970s, the New Left began to notice that some "settler colonists" had actually fought against the interests of finance capital, and began to theorise such countries as a "third type", beyond the metropole/periphery binary. Finally, in the 1990s, the study of settler colonialism as an ideology, economic structure and pattern of violence matured, within the rising meta-discipline of “postcolonial studies”.

What's wrong with decolonisation theory?

What is problematic about decolonisation as a theory of resistance can be understood by comparing it to socialism and feminism. Both are universalist ideologies rooted in the Enlightenment: they state that the exploitation of workers, and the oppression of women is dysfunctional to human development and can be overcome through struggle.

Both presuppose that there is one human species, one social history of that species, and that different parts of social reality - the Manila slum, downtown Manhattan, the blasted ruins of Kharkiv - belong to a whole system.

But what is decolonisation? Either it is a contribution to the search for totality - our wider attempt to discover one, complex truth about the history and reality of capitalism; or it is a mirror image of white ethnocentrism, in which indigenous people, the descendants of black slaves, and non-white immigrants are said to possess a "truth" separate from everyone else’s, so that "race" and "settler colonialism" become the only valid frameworks for understanding capitalism.

As a historical materialist, when I use the category "worker" or "woman" I am describing a subset of the human species, whose members share (because, yes, Marxism is a form of essentialism) - a human essence. It's the same when I discuss ethnicities.

I know that "race" is an ideological construct. I know that genetics, however, recognises geographically-defined sub-clades of the human genome: so when I look at my own DNA profile, which tells me I am 27.5% "Ashkenazy Jewish", I do so confident of the fact that I am a member of the species homo sapiens and that my universal rights under international law derive from this biological attribute.

The trouble you can get into once you abandon humanist universalism can be illustrated from the celebrated academic paper "Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor" (Tuck and Yang, 2012) - whose title was repeatedly appropriated by some on the left to vaunt their exhilaration at the Hamas atrocity.

Tuck and Yang attack the use of "decolonisation" to describe the reform of curricula and institutional practices in American academia. For them it should mean so much more. Their paper is, inevitably, written in the impenetrable language that Sebag Montefiore identifies as a barrier to logical interrogation. But it yields some insights into why decolonisation has become an ideology, and what is wrong with it.

Tuck and Yang, speak of two kinds of colonialism: external and internal. The external form:

"denotes the expropriation of fragments of Indigenous worlds, animals, plants and human beings, extracting them in order to transport them to - and build the wealth, the privilege, or feed the appetites of - the colonizers, who get marked as the first world"

The internal form consists of:

"the biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the “domestic” borders of the imperial nation. This involves the use of particularized modes of control - prisons, ghettos, minoritizing, schooling, policing - to ensure the ascendancy of a nation and its white elite."

Three things strike me about these definitions.

First, they do not describe social relations at all. Instead, they describe relationships between a set of elite human beings (the white elite/colonisers) and a set of objects including, trees, animals and people reduced to sub-human status, none of which have agency.

Secondly, they do not actually concern relationships between countries: there is no theory of international relations or economic domination in there at all, whether we are talking about Australia's role in the British Empire, or of Nigeria's role in neoliberal globalisation.

Third, they are primarily interested in relationships within the global north: between people whose ancestors were "transported" here to serve the colonisers (ie migrant communities) and the surviving indigenous populations, who are assumed to be natural allies of each other.

Whatever insights this framework might provide, the one thing it cannot encompass is totality: it cannot describe or explain the economic, social and military relationships that drove the rise of capitalism and whose after-effects blight the lives of people all over the world. Indeed, in a footnote the authors insist:

"Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects."

Colonialism, therefore, is the primary process, causing and shaping all else, but its economic content is entirely secondary to the self-gratification of white elites.

From these premises - which in typical postmodernist fashioned are decreed ex-Cathedra without any supporting data or logic - flow several conclusions:

"Settlers are diverse, not just of white European descent, and include people of color, even from other colonial contexts... Therefore, settler nations are not immigrant nations".

As a result, ethnic identities in global north societies can be legitimately sorted into hierarchies. Applied to the USA, this statement could mean that a Korean grocery store owner, or an Indian-born software engineer should be classed as "settler colonists" in their own country.

Furthermore, attempts to build solidarity between the victims of imperialism may be invalid:

"In particular, describing all struggles against imperialism as ‘decolonizing’ creates a convenient ambiguity between decolonization and social justice work, especially among people of color, queer people, and other groups minoritized by the settler nation-state."

This, in turn, invalidates class as a framework for studying oppression:

"This is why ‘labor’ or ‘workers’ as an agential political class fails to activate the decolonizing project. “[S]hifting lines of the international division of labor” (Spivak, 1985, p. 84) bisect the very category of labor into caste-like bodies built for work on one hand and rewardable citizen-workers on the other. Some labor becomes settler, while excess labor becomes enslavable, criminal, murderable."

This is a version of the Leninist labour aristocracy thesis taken to extremes. While orthodox Leninists claim skilled white workers form a bourgeois layer within the working class, whose reformist politics have to be defeated by unskilled and poor workers with fewer stakes in the system, decolonisation suggests the primary division is even more irremediable. Those who work for "reward" (ie ordinary wages) are "settler labour", no matter that they may experience racism and exploitation; only those criminalised, enslaved and "murderable" can be truly classified as oppressed subjects.

Not all proponents of decolonisation theory take such an extreme methodological position. But if we were to sum up Tuck and Yang's thesis in formal logic it might look like this:

Colonialism is the cause of capitalism and the modern state. Its purpose is to create white supremacy, which has reproduced itself in successive forms (mercantile, industrial and now neoliberal financial capitalism). The primary relationship of oppression in the world is between white settler colonists and a variety of "things", including land, animals and people. This, not class exploitation or women’s oppression, is the primary dynamic in America, Europe and the UK.

As to the programme of decolonisation, the authors are clear as to what it is not:

"It is not converting Indigenous politics to a Western doctrine of liberation; it is not a philanthropic process of ‘helping’ the at-risk and alleviating suffering; it is not a generic term for struggle against oppressive conditions and outcomes. ... By contrast, decolonization specifically requires the repatriation of Indigenous land and life. Decolonization is not a metonym for social justice."

Again, translated into formal logic: Because capitalism, industrialisation and the modern state are products of racist settler colonialism, any struggle that fails to reverse the colonisation process is invalid.

Decolonisation theory, then, is a list of prohibitions: white workers cannot be exploited; white women cannot be oppressed; all attempts to fight for social justice are "moves to innocence" by the perpetrators. It is a parody of Leninism, only without the hope.

If applied to any Western society today it is a recipe for defeat and despair.