Decolonising critical theory
1.9. Searching for a decolonial Marxist politics
Here, I discuss the critical Marxist theory of Gramsci, Althusser and Foucault in relation to their formulation of questions of representation and the subject with the aim of putting them to dialogue with decolonial theory. The aim is to put this western critical theory into crisis by bringing it into a conversation with postcolonial and decolonial paradigms. Bartolovich notes that there are grounds for dialogue between Marxism and postcolonial studies availing an opportunity for productive theorising of the postcolonial moment (2002: 1). The urgency of closing the gap between postcolonial and Marxist approaches is due to the need for a “deeper theorisation of the specifics of postcolonial condition under global capitalism” (Samaddar, 2018: v). In the age of
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hyper-globalisation, most of the continent remains haunted by what Samaddar calls “postcolonial capitalism” such that Marxist insights are important for an understanding of contemporary Africa (2018: vi). Samaddar defines ‘postcolonial capitalism’ as simply a phenomenon of “capitalism in the postcolonial world” (2018: vi). A creolised decolonial marxist theory – putting into conversation marxism, postcolonial and decolonial approaches - offers better theoretical resources to understand Africa’s ‘postcolonial capitalism’. A creolised theoretical framework that brings postcolonial studies, decolonial approaches and Marxism into dialogue is imperative because, to all these approaches “the theorization of modernity has been of central interest” (Bartolovich, 2002: 15). While postcolonial approaches have tended to focus on modernity as a ‘cultural dilemma’, both decolonisation and Marxism have focused on modernity as inextricably bound to capitalism (Bartolovich, 2002: 15).
It would seem like an opportunity for genuine dialogue between these theoretical approaches was squandered in the debate between the Subaltern Studies school in India and Vivek Chibber over postcolonialism and Marxism (Samaddar, 2018: v). Samaddar notes that, on one hand, many in the subaltern studies group found Chibber’s conception of postcolonial theory very narrow, refusing to acknowledge the role of postcolonial and decolonial thinkers who experimented with Marxism such as Mao Tsetung, Frantz Fanon, Ho Chi Minh and Amilcar Cabral (2018: v). On the other hand, those sympathetic to Marxism felt that the subaltern school had approached the debate with the express aim of refuting Chibber’s criticism without opening themselves up for dialogue (Samaddar, 2018: v). Bartolovich notes that there has been a huge neglect of Marxism in postcolonial studies and Marxists have tended to dismiss postcolonial studies insights, as well, leading to “oversimplification, caricature, and trivialization” on both sides (2002: 1). Postcolonial thinkers have dismissed Marxism as Eurocentric and complicity with the master-narratives of modernity, while Marxists dismiss postcolonial studies as complicit with imperialism in its dalliance with globalisation, and that it is dematerialising and unhistorical in its approach to texts (Bartolovich, 2002: 1).
The question that arises out of that postcolonial politics is that of the subject. Samaddar raises a question on the possibility of “a postcolonial subject? Can the postcolonial attain subjecthood?”
(Samaddar, 2018: 40). His answer to the questions is that “the postcolonial is not a subject to itself,
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but only in relation to global capital” (Samaddar, 2018: 40). In the case of Africa, and in light of its colonial history, two subjectivities dominate the postcolonial as black African subjectivities:
migrants and labourers. In the postcolonial moment, global capital brings migration into view and makes question of the subject that of both difference and circularity between citizenship and migration. In the process “borders appear as a crucial stake in determining subjecthood” where the migrant becomes ‘the universal’ and the citizen becomes ‘the particular’ and “postcolonial subjectivity is determined through this tension” (Samaddar, 2018: 41). In the migrant, postcolonial capitalism has constructed its own subject that cannot exist outside of this postcolonial history of capital (Samaddar, 2018: 44). Postcolonial and decolonial thinkers would take that to mean the black African subject, a migrant all over the world, as a subject that is so visible in the ‘colonial present,’ cannot exist outside the history of slavery, colonialism and neoliberal postcolonialism.
However, for Samaddar, there are slight changes in the Global South, the postcolonial situation is under a permanent condition of primitive accumulation compared to the most modern form of capital, in the West, that can be taken as virtual capital (2018: 45).
The importance of Gramsci’s work in postcolonial work cannot be over-emphasised. His work on hegemony and the subaltern has offered important thinking tools in postcolonial studies. Gramsci innovated Marxist theory pointing out how “complex, contradictory and discordant ensemble of the superstructures is the reflection of the ensemble of the social relations of production” (Gramsci, 2000: 192). It is his conceptualisation of the subaltern that appeals to anticolonial theoretical work.
Gramsci’s concept of the subaltern is partly formulated in his discussion of the Southern Question.
Here he is responding to a newspaper article that characterizes the communists in Turin, Italy’s capital city, as interested in saving and representing peasants in the mostly rural Southern part of the country. The newspaper article alleges that Turin communists thought they would, by a
‘magical formula’ save the peasants. However, Gramsci’s response is that rather than a magical formula, Turin communists were committed to a “political alliance between Northern workers and Southern peasants, to oust the bourgeoisie from State power” (Gramsci, 1978: 442). It would seem Gramsci is refuting the hegemonic idea of ‘representing’ the peasantry by the urbanized working class. However, his proposal of an ‘alliance’ is still not free from possible charges of being hegemonic because, as he further explains, this alliance will be under “the leadership of the industrial proletariat” (Gramsci, 1978: 443). As Spivak (2005: 477), following Marx (1963) and
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Gramsci (1978), has noted, the subaltern is not a subaltern necessarily because it is oppressed, but because it cannot self-represent. Gramsci argues that the Turin communists had the ‘merit’ of
“bringing the Southern question forcibly to the attention of the workers’ vanguard” making it a national issue (1978: 443). In a sense the peasants are represented by both the communists and the working class, in the city, who are seen as the vanguard of the revolution. He places emphasis on the “hegemony of the proletariat” arguing that they are the “social basis of the proletarian dictatorship and of the workers’ State” (Gramsci, 1978: 443). Here the proletariat refers to both the working class, industrial labourers, in the cities and the peasants, who work on the land in the rural areas. However, the working class are the vanguard and therefore become representative of the peasants. To Gramsci’s benefit of doubt, he takes the Southern Question and with it, the peasants, seriously. This is similar to the case discussed in the opening of this chapter contribution;
that to his credit Gramsci takes the colonial question seriously. However, it is the violence of representation in theory that both the European peasants and the black labourers in Africa are under the European working class as the historical vanguard. Representation, in theory as well, silences (Lloyd, 2019; Alcoff, 1991). Gramsci notes that the challenge around peasants’ revolutionary agency is because they are tied to big landowners “through the mediation of the intellectual” (1978:
455). The implications of this are that peasants cannot be “autonomous, independent mass organizations […] capable of selecting out peasant cadres, themselves of peasant origin” to lead them (Gramsci, 1978: 455). The end results of this representation by intellectuals is that the peasant always end up tied to the state apparatus – the communes, provinces, and chamber of deputies – where they are represented by parties made up of intellectuals who are controlled by landowners (Gramsci, 1978: 455). In a sense, the peasants are subalternised in that they cannot represent themselves.
Althusser offers an important challenge to decolonial theory. He notes that, in working out his revolutionary theory, Marx had to abandon his bourgeois and petty-bourgeois positions “and adopt the class positions of the proletariat” (Althusser, 1971: 8). Althusser raises this point so as to emphasise the need to theorise from the conditions and the level of the oppressed. He privileges the position of the proletariat as the site for theory, a position “to see and analyse the mechanisms of a class society and therefore to produce a scientific knowledge of it” (Althusser, 1971: 8).
Althusser makes an important observation which is an opening, albeit small, for decolonial theory.
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In that this observation ties with Cusicanqui (2012) emphasis on the need to centre the indigenous people in theory, it can be taken as a small opening that can be later prised open by decolonial scholars who centre peasants or indigeneous people in their work (Cusicanqui, 2012; Tuck and Yang, 2012). Importantly, Althusser points out that these “class conditions are not ‘given’ in advance” and Marx’s “work contributed to their elaboration” (Althusser, 1971: 8). Besides representation, Althusser, links theorising to praxis noting that “without the proletariat’s class struggle, Marx could not have adopted the point of view of class exploitation, or carried out his scientific work” (1971: 8). Decolonial theory has to be attentive to the broader questions of our time, to focus its intellectual and revolutionary gaze on those spaces where black African subjectivity is made as colonial subjectivity, and can possibly be unmade, for example, migration.
The challenges around migration have panned out as an intersectional issue raising questions of sex, race, and gender, among other subjectivities. The global pain stirred by a picture such as that of the dead drowned bodies of Salvadoran migrant, Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez, and his daughter near the US border with Mexico locks people around the world in a shared sense of outrage such that, in Che Guevara’s words, they “tremble with indignation at [the] injustice”
making them “comrades” (In Latner, 2005: 112). These ‘comrades’ are beyond narrow subjectivities of race, gender or class but occupy the master subjectivity of ‘the human’ (Wynter, 2003; Fanon, 1963). Migration, and the crisis of how the state across the world has handled it becomes, not a class, gender or race struggle, but a human struggle. To complete and qualify this point, I note that Althusser posits that, in that “the political class struggle resounds in the ideological and philosophical class struggle; it can therefore succeed in transforming class positions in theory” (Althusser, 1971: 8). He further argues that “it is only on the positions of the proletariat that it is possible to provide a radical critique of new forms of bourgeois ideology, to obtain thereby a clear view of the mechanisms of imperialism and to advance in the construction of socialism” (Althusser, 1971: 9). While Althusser (1971:8) notes that ‘class positions’ are not given in advance, following Wynter (2003) and Mignolo (2007), I note that ‘the human’ is not pre- given. By displacing Althusser’s limited class category, with the intersectional category of ‘the human’, one can articulate a decolonial theoretical politics to liberate “the proletariat and […] the oppressed peoples of the world” (Althusser, 1971: 9 – 10). However, this is possible if, as Althusser rightly points out, one pays “maximum attention to the resources, new forms and inventions” of
‘the humans’ undermined as “disposable” (Bauman, 2014) by the state and the nation across the
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world. In a roundabout way, Althusser’s observation on the need to centre the proletariat subjects in theory is Marxist theory’s challenge to decolonial theory.
In his work, Foucault is interested in practices and how phenomena historically becomes what it means to people, such as how the prison becomes a place of damnation. In a series of lectures that he offered on the hermeneutics of the subject, he points out that he is interested in studying subjectivity “not only in its theoretical formulations, but analyzing it in relation to a set of practices” (Foucault, 2005: 491). Rabinow notes that, in his work, Foucault “avoids the abstract question: Does human nature exist?, and asks instead: How has the concept of human nature functioned in our society?” (1984: 4). This proffers another possible opening for decolonial politics. Instead of searching for the essence of a black African subject, who is human, it could be helpful to trace ways in which the human has been conceptualized and exploring possibilities that subverting this Eurocentric human can open. Foucault focuses on historically analyzing discourses and practices around the subject, power and knowledge. In what he calls the “the genealogy of the modern subject,” he notes that the Western culture has given a lot of importance to the problem of the subject in social, political, economic, legal, philosophical, and scientific realms (Foucault, 1972). Foucault posits that his interest is to ascertain when these practices cohered up and establish
“the point at which a particular discourse emerged from these techniques and came to be seen as true” (Foucault, 1972). It is important to understand how, partly, black African subjectivity in the postcolonial moment in Africa, has come to be associated with poverty, protests and (black-on- black) violence. It is also important to understand if that is true at all, and whether it is all that there is about black African subjectivity. Foucault points out that “the goal of my work […] has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects”
(Foucault, 1972). History is central to the genealogy of ideas, in this case the idea of black subjectivity in the postapartheid moment. History should be important to any decolonial theoretical politics.
Foucault’s work then allows us to look at colonialism, coloniality, postcoloniality and the colonial present as discourses; where we ask ourselves the question on how it is possible to speak of the human under these conditions. Following his teacher, Althusser’s theorization of ideology, Foucault sees discourses as having a material effect in that they produce “practices that
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systematically form the objects of which they speak” (1972: 135). Discourse, then, structures the constitution, and has an impact on how knowledge is organized such that knowledge becomes
“true” and is a social fact (Foucault, 1972). Foucault (1972) locates the logic of the discourse in the wider structures of society, what he calls the episteme, of the historical period in which that discourse is located. Here he points to the role of power in making discourses true, and this is based on rules and specific categories that become the criteria for legitimating knowledge and truth (Foucault, 1972). He notes how the rule are pre-given, coming before the emergence of a discourse (Foucault, 1972). What is important to point out is that, according to Foucault (1972), discourses hide their construction and mask their capacity to produce knowledge by claiming a-historicity.
This is where issues of power come up. In that Foucault seeks to “historicize grand abstractions”
(Rabinow, 1984: 4) this provides us an opening to historicize and break down postcolonial Africa and how black African subjectivity emerges in various spaces and institutions. In a direct challenge to Eurocentrism, it also teaches us to avoid the temptation to universalize, and if we take on strategic universalism to do so in the context that there is “no universal understanding that is beyond history and society” (Rabinow, 1984: 4).