A Critique of Decolonial Ideology
The following text is the presentation given by the editorial group of the magazine To Dialytiko at the event held as part of the three-day programme ‘3 Days on War, Nationalism and Other Evils, 24–26 October’, organised by the RevDef group at the Fabrika Yfanet squat
The allure of ‘decolonial theory’ in an era of ideological confusion
In recent years, the discourse on ‘decolonisation’ has taken centre stage in academic circles and social movements, presented as a new, radical language of emancipation. Its impact is undeniable. By offering a framework for critiquing the so-called ‘white’, ‘Western’ gaze as a universal way of interpreting the world, this movement exerts a powerful allure. Its verbal form, ‘decolonise’, has become a catch-all term, applicable to every sphere, from university curricula and museums to dietary habits and personal relationships, promising to eradicate the oppressive structures bequeathed by colonialism.
It is, however, crucial to make it clear from the outset that the concept of ‘decolonisation’ examined here should not be confused with the historical, political and military process of the dismantling of colonial empires. That historical cycle, which included national liberation struggles and culminated in the formal independence of the former colonies as nation-states, had largely been completed by the 1970s. By contrast, the contemporary use of the term has taken on an almost exclusively metaphorical, cultural and epistemological meaning, which is the subject of this critique.
The rise of this theory cannot be understood in isolation from its broader historical context. Its prevalence coincides chronologically with, and is causally linked to, the weakness and decline of proletarian struggles and movements across almost the entire globe. The weakening of proletarian theoretical and practical critique was accompanied by the strengthening of geopolitical, ethnocultural, irrationalist and identity-based political tendencies and views, which were already present within social struggles. Decolonial theory, as the quintessential expression of this ‘ethnocultural turn’ within the left and the anti-authoritarian milieu, is not merely a new academic fad, but a symptom of a deep-rooted political defeat. Its conceptual origins lie in the ‘cultural turn’ that swept through the social sciences from the 1970s onwards, a shift which was itself the theoretical expression of the decline of the old labour movement.
This shift from the social relations of (re)production to culture and systems of knowledge as distinct spheres constitutes the core of the critique set out in this paper. Decolonial theory explicitly abandons the critique of capitalist universality and replaces class struggle – the fundamental driving force of historical change emerging from the contradictions of capitalism itself – with an ‘external impetus’ from subjects defined in cultural and geographical terms. In this process, it rigidly applies analytical binaries (West/non-West, whiteness/non-whiteness) that oversimplify complex social realities and lead to reactionary positions.
Taking as our starting point the critical analyses by Neil Larsen and Ross Wolfe,[1] we shall attempt to address the crucial questions raised by the comrades from revdef. We will endeavour to show that, despite its radical self-presentation, the decolonial turn has negative consequences from the perspective of developing an antagonistic movement against capital and the state, and leads to reactionary political blind alleys.
Part I: Neil Larsen’s critique of the ‘Jargon of Decoloniality’
At the heart of the Marxist critique of decolonial theory, as emphatically expressed in the work of Neil Larsen, lies the identification of a fundamental degradation: the replacement of the analysis of capitalism as the dominant mode of production with its description as a cultural project. Larsen’s analysis, inspired by the work of Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, focuses on the movement’s leading exponent, Walter Mignolo, and deconstructs his theoretical framework, revealing how it subordinates social and class relations to cultural and ethnic hierarchies and differences.
The ‘colonial matrix of power’ and the dehistoricisation of colonialism
A central concept in Mignolo’s thinking is the ‘colonial matrix of power’ (CMP), a structure that is said to have been established in the 16th century and to remain unchanged to this day, governing every aspect of modernity. According to this view, capitalism is but one of the manifestations of this matrix, whose primary element is the racial hierarchy of the world’s population (white/European versus non-white/non-European). Colonialism, therefore, is not a historically defined phase of capitalist primitive accumulation, but a perpetual, almost metaphysical, ontological condition that defines modernity as a whole.
This move has two disastrous consequences. First, it dehistoricises colonialism as such. Instead of a specific, violent process of integrating pre-capitalist societies into the world market and of primitive accumulation, colonialism is transformed into a static, eternal structure of domination. This prevents any meaningful assessment of the actual anti-colonial struggles of the 20th century and their outcomes, since, according to the logic of CMP, virtually nothing changed as a result of formal decolonisation. Second, capitalism as such is becoming part of the cultural sphere. It is no longer analysed in terms of the exploitation of labour and the accumulation of capital, but as a cultural imposition, as ‘Westernization’. Criticism is no longer directed against the relations of production, but against ‘Eurocentric knowledge’. This shift away from material and social relations and conditions, from the critique of political economy and of the political and ideological forms of capital, towards culturalism and the sphere of ‘knowledge/power’ is a defining feature of decolonial thought.
The jargon of decoloniality as a cover for the factual deficit
Larsen points out that this theoretical stripping away of material reality is masked by an ‘impenetrable jargon’. Terms such as ‘de-Westernization’, ‘re-Westernization’, ‘epistemic disobedience’ and ‘border thinking’ create a closed, self-referential system that gives the impression of theoretical depth, whilst in reality they obscure analysis. This language functions almost ritually, like an endless loop of self-repeating phrases that parody a genuine theoretical system. The invocation of ‘the knowing of everyday living in communities for whom academic, scholarly, and scientific knowledge is perfectly irrelevant’ becomes a rhetorical ploy to shield the theory from criticism, whilst remaining a discourse that is deeply academic and inaccessible to precisely those communities.
From class struggle to Carl Schmitt’s geopolitics
The most revealing aspect of Larsen’s critique, however, concerns the unexpected yet logically necessary connection between Mignolo’s thought and that of the Nazi legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt. Mignolo openly adopts Schmitt’s concept of the ‘Nomos of the Earth’. For Schmitt, the ‘Nomos of the Earth’ is the foundational act of spatial organisation and appropriation of the earth that precedes all law. It is the concrete order based on the friend-foe distinction and on sovereignty over a specific space, rejecting any abstract, universal legal principle.
Mignolo, drawing on Schmitt, proclaims ‘decoloniality’ as the ‘Third Nomos of the Earth’. This move is not innocent. It transforms a demand for emancipation into a blueprint for a new geopolitical division of the world. ‘De-Westernization’ is equated with the rise of a multipolar world, in which ‘civilization-states’ such as China, Russia and Iran (which Mignolo groups under the acronym CRI) are presented as the protagonists of this new order. The rejection of class analysis as a universal framework inevitably leads to the adoption of a geopolitical one, whereby the conflict is no longer between classes on a global scale, but between civilization-state blocs competing for hegemony. The structural affinity between the two theorists is clear: both Schmitt and Mignolo reject a universal principle of social transformation within world history (such as class struggle) and replace it with a principle based on geographical separation and the existential conflict between separate entities, which, in the case of decolonial theory, are culturally defined (friend/foe for Schmitt, West/non-West for Mignolo). Thus, the struggle against imperialism is diverted into support for one imperialist camp over the other, in the name of cultural difference.
How dangerous and politically slippery this framework is becomes even clearer when it is applied to more recent conflicts. While decolonial criticism has traditionally been directed against the ‘West’, the same conceptual framework can also be inverted. In the case of the war in Ukraine, for example, some proponents of decolonial theory have portrayed Russia as the colonial power and Ukraine as the subject of an anti-colonial struggle. This illustrates the departure from a coherent, materialist analysis of imperialism as a global capitalist phenomenon. Instead of analysing the competition between different imperialist poles, the conflict is reduced to a moralising narrative about ‘colonisers’ oppressing the ‘colonised’. In this way, the critique ends up supporting whichever state is deemed to be colonially subordinate in any given instance (e.g. Ukraine) and, by extension, the imperialist camp that supports it, whilst completely ignoring the capitalist nature of the conflict and the role of all the forces involved in perpetuating capitalist domination.
Part II: The distortion of dialectics
If Larsen’s critique reveals the political consequences of the ‘cultural turn’, Ross Wolfe’s analysis in ‘Dialectics and Difference’ delves into the philosophical core of decolonial theory, examining the attempt to ‘decolonise dialectics’, as articulated primarily by George Ciccariello-Maher. Wolfe argues that this endeavour does not constitute a correction or enrichment of the Marxist method, but a complete abandonment of its fundamental principles, with the result that nothing remains of dialectics but its name.
The rejection of totality and immanence
At the heart of Wolfe’s critique lies the observation that Ciccariello-Maher’s ‘decolonized dialectics’ rejects three cornerstones of the Hegelian and Marxist tradition: totality, reciprocal mediation and immanent critique. The concept of totality – that is, the view that capitalism constitutes a unified, global and integrated system in which the parts (economy, politics, ideology) are interconnected and mutually determined – is rejected as ‘Eurocentric’ and ‘imperialist’. In its place, an image of fragmented, multiple and local dialectics is proposed: a multiplicity of subject-positions situated to varying degrees ‘outside the system’.
At the same time, the concept of reciprocal mediation is abandoned; according to this concept, social categories do not exist as self-contained entities that interact externally whilst remaining otherwise unchanged, but are defined in relation to one another, in a relationship of reciprocal constitution. The antagonistic social classes, for example, are not two independent groups in conflict. One constitutes the necessary condition for the existence of the other; their identity is forged within the very contradictory relationship that connects them. By rejecting this concept, the decolonial approach presents a picture of a conflict between two sides that remain external to one another (‘West’–‘non-West’, ‘colonial empires’ and ‘national liberation movements’), as if their substance already existed and took shape in a sphere outside the historical dynamics of capitalist relations of exploitation and domination on a global scale.
This rejection of totality and reciprocal mediation has an inevitable consequence: the abandonment of the concept of immanence. In classical dialectics, the movement of history and the possibility of revolution derive internally from the contradictions inherent in social totality itself. The overcoming of capitalism is a possibility born out of its very development, through the class struggle between capital and labour. Conversely, from Ciccariello-Maher’s perspective, since there is no unified whole with internal contradictions, the impetus for change can only come ‘from without’. Progress depends on an ‘appeal to exteriority’ and on ‘colonial difference’ that exceeds an internally dialectical relation. The revolutionary event is not the maturation and resolution of the system’s internal contradictions, but an external assault by subjects (racialised, colonised) who are ontologically situated outside the totality.
This theoretical construct is not merely a philosophical disagreement. It constitutes a fundamental denial of the reality of capitalism. The power of capital lies precisely in its ability to incorporate and subordinate everything to its self-valorisation and its logic, leaving nothing truly ‘outside’. The rejection of the category of totality, in the name of respect for ‘difference’, has the paradoxical effect of leaving capitalism as a system unscathed. Critique may focus on specific manifestations of oppression, but the cohesive link that produces and reproduces them – the universal rule of capital in all its forms – remains invisible and untouchable.
From the proletariat to the ‘people’, from Marx to Sorel
The shift from immanence to exteriority inevitably leads to the replacement of the revolutionary subject. The proletariat, as the universal class whose very existence within capitalism creates the possibility of transcending itself, is replaced by the cross-class concept of the ‘people’ (pueblo), a coalition of identities where class is merely one factor alongside race, gender and nation. This populist shift allows Ciccariello-Maher to recast nationalism and traditionalism as potentially emancipatory weapons, i.e. as ‘weapons whose meaning appears to change depending on who wields them’.
Here, the deep affinity between his thinking and that of Georges Sorel is revealed, an affinity that Ciccariello-Maher himself evokes. Sorel, known for his criticism of rationalism and historical determinism, argued that revolutionary action does not stem from a rational understanding of material contradictions, but from the power of ‘myth’ – an image (such as the general strike) that mobilises the masses on a moral and emotional level. For Sorel, the relationship between the classes is not dialectical, but one of absolute incommensurability and irreconcilability, bordering on ‘nonrelation’.
It is precisely this Sorelian logic of absolute exteriority and the irrational constitution of the collective subject that is adopted by ‘decolonised dialectics’. The revolutionary rupture is not the result of a dialectical process, but an act of will stemming from a morally superior, external force.
This theoretical line stands in sharp contrast even to the tradition of anti-colonial Marxism. Thinkers such as José Carlos Mariátegui and C. L. R. James (despite whatever shortcomings their theories may have had) insisted that capitalism is a global system and that liberation requires the action of the global proletariat, acting within this totality. Even Fanon, despite the greater ambiguities and tensions in his later work, did not simply posit a mythical exteriority to capitalist modernity. Rather than seeking emancipation in subjects situated outside capitalist social relations, these thinkers focused on the concrete contradictions that imperialism generated both at the centre and in the periphery, linking anti-colonial struggle, albeit in different and sometimes contradictory ways, with the prospect of broader social transformation. The decolonial turn, by contrast, severs this link, leading to a politics which, in the name of difference, embraces populism and nationalism.
Part III: Political Implications and Theoretical Affinities: From Anti-Imperialism to Ethnocultural Populism
Building on the critiques developed by Larsen and Wolfe, we can now turn to some broader political implications and theoretical affinities of the decolonial turn, extending the argument beyond the specific claims made by either author. The departure of decolonial theory from the materialist and dialectical principles of Marxist critical theory is not merely an academic dispute. It has profound political implications, reshaping the very concept of the struggle against capitalist domination, including imperialism, and revealing selective theoretical affinities with irrational and populist currents.
The transition from dependency theory to decolonial ideology
Decolonial theory is often presented as the successor to dependency theory, which was developed in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s. However, this claim is misleading as it obscures a fundamental rupture that reflects a broader shift from historical materialism to cultural relativism. Dependency theories remain within the framework of political economy. They focus on the purported material mechanisms of unequal exchange and the transfer of surplus value from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘centre’, analysing how the structure of the global capitalist economy actively reproduced ‘underdevelopment’. Their critique was directed primarily at economic relations, even if it was flawed.
Decolonial thought, by contrast, marks a decisive shift from the economic to the cultural and epistemic. The primary structure of domination is no longer economic exploitation, but the ‘colonial matrix of power’ and knowledge – that is, the imposition of a Eurocentric worldview that devalues and erases local knowledge. The problem is not capitalism as a mode of production, but rather ‘modernity/coloniality’ as a unitary cultural-epistemological complex. This shift from materialist analysis to an idealist critique of knowledge is what fundamentally distinguishes the two currents.
Despite this fundamental difference, it is important to also examine the connections between dependency theory and decolonial theory: both replace the class as the agent of struggle with the people and the nation (decolonial theory, however, at a deeper level of rupture, since it denies capitalism itself the status of primary structure and not merely the agent that struggles against it), and advocate the creation of cross-class fronts between the proletarian masses and a ‘national-popular’ military-bureaucratic elite and, more broadly, with the decolonial, ‘anti-imperialist’ section of the bourgeoisie, primarily in the countries of the East and the South – if we may use these terms in a purely geographical sense – but also more broadly.
It should be noted here that Lenin’s own anti-imperialism regarded the world proletariat as the subject of the struggle and of revolutionary change. As he pointed out: ‘The dialectics of history are such that small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, play a part as one of the ferments, one of the bacilli, which help the real antiimperialist force, the socialist proletariat, to make its appearance on the scene’. However, in the very same text, published in July 1916, he attacks the internationalist criticism of the 1916 Irish uprising that had dismissed it as a ‘purely urban, petty-bourgeois movement, which, notwithstanding the sensation it caused, had not much social backing’. The thrust of his polemic is that social revolution demands the uprising of the petty bourgeoisie and the ‘backward’ workers, which will be exploited by ‘the class-conscious vanguard of the revolution, the advanced proletariat’, that is, the party, to capture power, just as ‘the general staffs in the current war are doing their utmost to utilise any national […] movement in the enemy camp’, since there is no such thing as a ‘“pure” social revolution’. (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Moscow 1962, Vol. 22, pp. 353–358).
This appraisal by Lenin stems from his distorted and top-down conception of the social revolution, as the party’s seizure of state power. In the case of developed capitalist countries, the party will ultimately merely administer production that has already been socialised by capitalism, which has now reached its state-monopoly stage, without any transformation of alienated and separated labour and, consequently, without any critique of capitalist science, but rather through the application of Taylorism and ‘one-man management’. In the case of colonies and underdeveloped capitalist countries, the party will impose a developmental dictatorship that will bring about the development of the productive forces and the completion of primitive accumulation. From here, the distance to Stalinism’s ‘socialism in one country’ and Third Worldism’s ‘alliance with the progressive sections of the bourgeoisie’ is very short indeed.
The failure of anti-colonial struggles to bring about any social emancipation and, often, any economic improvement in the ‘liberated’ nation-states following decolonisation – which, for the most part, had already been completed as a historical process by the 1970s – was understood by proponents of decolonial theory and critics of Orientalism as the result of the reproduction of the ‘Western system of knowledge and power’ and the racial and cultural hierarchies it entails. Such an interpretation, however, is profoundly flawed, as it shifts the focus away from social relations of production and exploitation towards an abstract level of ‘epistemic regimes’. Thus, it overlooks the fact that the perpetuation of unequal development stems from the structural integration of each nation-state into global capitalism: into the hierarchical system of states and the global market, and not from the prevalence of a Eurocentric way of thought. In this way, decolonial theory slips into a form of cultural relativism that glosses over the real class and capitalist dynamics and traps the proletariat in nationalist-populist strategies under the hegemony of bourgeois/bureaucratic elites.
| Theoretical Framework | Primary Contradiction | Main Analytical Focus | Subject of History | Position on Modernity / the Enlightenment | Political Goal |
| Marxian Critique | Capital vs. Labour | The capitalist mode of production | The international proletariat | Contradictory: it provides tools for universal critique (science, dialectics), while at the same time serving bourgeois interests | Worldwide communist revolution; a classless society |
| Anti-imperialism | Capital vs. Labour; inter-monopoly rivalry | Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism; state-monopoly capitalism | The typical communist party (intellectuals and working-class leadership) | An uncritical conception of bourgeois science (Taylorism, scientific management, etc.) | Dictatorship of the proletariat; development of the productive forces; eventual withering away of the state |
| Dependency Theory | Centre vs. Periphery | Unequal economic exchange; structures of global trade and the international financial system | National-popular blocs and states seeking autonomous development, politically mediated by bourgeois or military-bureaucratic leaderships | A defective, externally imposed model that produces underdevelopment | National industrial development; delinking from the world market; socialism |
| Decolonial Theory | West vs. the Rest (the colonial difference) | Epistemology, culture and knowledge (‘Colonial Matrix of Power’) | Colonised/racialised subjects, Indigenous peoples, bearers of ‘local knowledge’ | Inherently colonial and oppressive; its universalist claims function as instruments of domination | ‘Epistemic delinking’; ‘pluriversality’; de-Westernization |
Sorelian Logic: Myth, Violence, and the Convergence between Left and Right
The claim that decolonial theory shares a common logic with post-fascist far-right ethnocultural populism is theoretically grounded in its connection to Sorel’s thought. As mentioned above, Sorel, rejecting Marxist historical materialism as determinist and rationalist, emphasized the irrational formation of political subjects. For him, the masses are not mobilized by a scientific analysis of social conditions, but by the power of ‘myth’ – a collective, emotionally charged vision of the future that inspires heroism and self-sacrifice. Violence, in this context, is not merely a political tool, but a moral, regenerative force that purifies society of bourgeois decadence. This Sorelian framework of thought is evident in the decolonial approach. The ‘colonial difference’ functions as the foundational myth that constitutes the collective subject, not on the basis of shared material interests (as a class), but on the basis of a shared cultural-existential experience of oppression. The relationship with the ‘coloniser’ is not a dialectical relation of internal contradiction, but one of absolute exteriority and irreconcilability, exactly as Sorel described it in relation to social classes. Nationalism, populism, and traditionalism – which Ciccariello-Maher views as malleable ‘weapons’ – draw their power precisely from their ability to function as mobilizing myths, regardless of their rational or material content.
This replacement of the proletariat by the interclass ‘people’ and the revival of nationalism and traditionalism as potential ‘weapons’ paves the way for supporting political forces that are hostile to any emancipatory cause. When the primary conflict is defined as a cultural war between ‘the West and the Rest’, then any force that opposes ‘the West’ can be considered progressive, regardless of its class and political character.
Thus, reactionary movements – ranging from nationalist groups to Islamic fundamentalists in the Middle East and Africa – are presented as bearers of authentic, ‘local knowledge’ that resists the cultural imposition of the ‘colonial matrix of power’. Class exploitation and social oppression perpetrated by these forces within the domestic societies are overlooked or justified in the name of a broader anti-Western struggle. The struggle against imperialism is thus diverted into unconditional support for authoritarian regimes and movements, provided they are geopolitically aligned with the ‘right’ camp.
This is precisely where the convergence with the modern far right lies. The far right, too, rejects the universal principles of Enlightenment, and pits the organic, cultural community of ‘the people’ against the abstract, cosmopolitan ‘other’, while relying on mobilization through national myth and appeals to tradition. When politics abandons the terrain of rational critique of material power relations and shifts to the realm of the irrational formation of identities through myth, the boundaries between ‘left’ and ‘right’ become dangerously fluid. Both versions of ethnocultural populism end up defending authoritarian regimes and imperialist powers (whether Russia and China in the name of ‘de-Westernization’, or the ‘West’ in the name of defending its ‘civilization’), provided that they embody the corresponding cultural myth.
The field of postcolonial/decolonial feminist and queer theory offers a characteristic example of this contradictory convergence. Decolonial queer texts rightly criticize the instrumental invocation of LGBTQI+ rights to justify imperialist interventions, a practice that has come to be described by the term pink-washing.[2] However, the proposed alternative – namely, the emphasis on a radical ontological otherness and the turn toward ‘authentic’ pre-colonial performances of gender – proves equally problematic.[3]
In an effort to eschew Eurocentrism, the positions put forward go so far as to idealize pre-modern forms of sociality or even to reinterpret subordination and confinement to the domestic sphere not as oppression, but as a form of agency![4] By abandoning universalism and universal concepts, the hypostatisation of cultural difference in the performance of gender and agency leads to a ‘cultural nativism’ that fails to find common ground and communicate with corresponding experiences in the ‘West’, slipping into essentialism. This theoretical drift toward cultural relativism has, tragically, ended up providing arguments for far-right reactionary forces, such as Hindu nationalism (Hindutva).[5]
The rhetoric of a ‘culturally authentic’ Indian identity – which must be protected from foreign influences – is now being exploited to entrench male domination in the name of tradition[6] and, above all, for the violent marginalization of the Muslim population, which is targeted as the ultimate ‘foreign body’ within the nation, while at the same time constituting the most impoverished segment of the surplus proletariat in India.
The ‘cultural difference’ supermarket in the context of ‘culture wars’ as pseudo-conflicts in the era of authoritarian neoliberalism and post-fascism
In the present era, the crisis of the reproduction of capital and the deepening of class discontent are addressed by promoting a rationally organized irrationalism. Instead of critiquing capitalist social relations, the debate shifts to cultural, national, and religious identities, which are presented as metaphysical forces that shape history. These ‘cultural wars’ divert from and obscure the real class war, serving as a source of legitimization and a means of overcoming the contradictions of capitalist social formations.
The opposition between capital and the proletariat has been replaced by a false dichotomy – that of the cultural distinction between West and East or North and South. This framework, strongly promoted by decolonial ideology, leaves no room for social emancipation, leading merely to support for one imperialist camp (e.g., China, Russia, Iran) over another.
Furthermore, internationalist solidarity is turned into a consumer product. Corporations and employers selectively use Palestinian, Ukrainian, or other national flags to promote an image of ‘social awareness’, depending on the audience they are targeting. In this way, political identity becomes a product in the supermarket of ideologies, obscuring the exploitative role of capital. The debate shifts from the class organization of the proletariat to supporting or rejecting individual capitalists according to the state camp they support. These conflicts are fraudulent because, while they showcase spectacular oppositions, they leave the essence of capitalist domination untouched, diverting social anger away from the real causes of exploitation and oppression.
The Danger of Decolonial Ideology in a New Era of State Capitalism, New Imperialism, War Economy, and the Militarization of Societies
The current period is characterized by the crisis of the ‘globalization’ model and the transition to a new version of state capitalism that takes the form of war economies. States are increasing military spending and militarize societies, as war offers a way out of the crisis and provides a means of eliminating the surplus proletariat.
Within this context, decolonial ideology becomes extremely dangerous. In abandoning the critique of capitalism as a global system, decolonial ideology replaces it with a mythological and reactionary distinction between the ‘West’ and the ‘non-West’. This ‘top-down analysis’, which focuses on conflicts between states, is readily transformed into ‘campism’: supporting one imperialist bloc over another. ‘Anti-imperialists’ end up supporting powers such as Russia, Iran, or China, presenting them as a counterweight to ‘Western’ imperialism.
This shift is not merely conceptually possible; it can also be materially favoured. In the current conjuncture, currents that translate anti-colonial discourse into geopolitical alignment can gain access to fundraising networks, NGO and trade-union infrastructures, media platforms, institutional recognition and, in some cases, direct diplomatic or material support from states. Such tendencies are therefore not merely present within the field; they can be selectively amplified and reproduced.
This campist shift is dangerous because:
- Ιt legitimizes war: Instead of promoting the internationalist class struggle against all states, it paves the way for the broader militarization of society, calling on the proletariat to rally behind one national capital or another.
- It disorients the struggles: The enemy is no longer capital and the state, but an external, culturally defined ‘other’. This hinders the development of autonomous class organization and leads to national mobilization that demands the crushing of all internal resistance.
- It perpetuates oppression: Support for ‘national liberation’ movements, such as Hamas, ignores the fact that their goal is not class emancipation, but the creation of new capitalist states that will join the same international order.
In the era of new imperialism, where genocide and the elimination of surplus populations are escalating worldwide (from Gaza to Sudan), decolonial ideology functions as an ideological vehicle for the proletariat’s participation in its own mutual slaughter, turning it into cannon fodder for the benefit of the warring bourgeois classes. The only way out is not to choose a side, but to engage in proletarian internationalist action against all states and armies.
Conclusion
The preceding analysis aimed at outlining the basic tenets of a critique of decolonial theory from the standpoint of the class antagonistic movement against capital and the state. Our analysis attempted to demonstrate how the cultural turn and the absence of a critique of capitalism as a global social relation, the abandonment of the dialectical method, the selective theoretical affinities of decolonial theory with irrationalist populism, and its reactionary political implications – all combine to constitute a scene of theoretical and political disaster from a proletarian point of view.
Despite its radical phraseology, the decolonial turn not only fails to offer a coherent framework for understanding and overcoming contemporary forms of capitalist domination but also contributes to their perpetuation.
The fundamental problem, as Larsen argued, lies in the rejection of the concept of universality. This rejection is presented as a critique of ‘Eurocentrism’, but it is, in reality, a ruse. It is a ruse because no theory can exist without universal concepts – the ‘colonial matrix of power’ itself is presented as a universal structure that has governed the world for the past 500 years. The issue, therefore, is not universality per se, but its content.
Herein lies the crucial difference of dialectical thought. On the one hand, there is the false universality of bourgeois ideology, which presents the partial interests of the ruling class as the universal interests of humanity. On the other hand, however, there is the real, alien universality of capital. The domination of the commodity form – the imposition of the law of value on a global scale – is not merely an idea. It is a concrete mode of the world’s existence, a deep structural reality that links every local condition to the global totality of accumulation.
Against this negative, destructive universality of capital, Marxism posits the prospect of another, positive universality: that of communism. This is not about imposing a new, uniform cultural model, but about creating the material conditions – the abolition of private property and class exploitation – that will allow free development of all human potential. This universality does not stem from some external, culturally defined group, but from the proletariat, the class that is itself a product of the universality of capital and which, by liberating itself, liberates all humanity. Clearly, this is not, either, some mythical subject, to paraphrase something we wrote a few years ago:[7]
It is not possible to confine experience within the suffocating framework of an identity. Human experience must be liberated from all alienating forms of capitalist social relations. In stark contrast to decolonial – and not only decolonial – identity politics, the challenge for a movement whose goal is the abolition of capitalist social relations is to seek, within the diverse and fragmented experiences we have under capitalism, those elements that might potentially unite us rather than those that divide us, and if they do not suffice, to create them. This does not mean, however, that the specific demands and issues from which a struggle may begin are downplayed or dismissed.
For us, it is essential that experience take on its true dialectical form: that new, richer experiences be created connecting the subject with the totality of social relations. It is within this active process – and not on an abstract level – that concrete common interests can emerge.
The challenge for the revolutionary movement is to transcend the fragmentation of alienated social relations and to attempt, on a collective level, to link all the different – and often conflicting – experiences toward the abolition of the identity of separated experience. Such an autonomous collective organization of proletarian experience constitutes the basis for the creation of the proletarian sphere – that is, for the creation of the necessary forms and means of communication and action through which the fragmented experiences of oppression, exploitation, opposition, and struggle against capitalist social relations can be combined into a collective practice, into a way of life and struggle through which we can transform existing social conditions and relations and move toward the abolition of capital and all its alienating mediations.
In conclusion, the task of an emancipatory movement today cannot be to delink from an abstract ‘West’ or to seek an authentic, pre-colonial identity. Such aspirations are doomed to remain at the level of rhetoric or, worse, to become a vehicle for new forms of nationalism and geopolitical rivalries.
True decolonisation – that is, the decolonisation of the world from the commodity and capital – coincides with the communist revolution. As Larsen writes, paraphrasing Adorno: ‘And as long as the precondition for abolishing […] imperialism […] is not consciously understood as the social universal of a post-capitalist, classless society that has transcended the domination of the commodity form – the universal of communism, in this sense – “decoloniality” remains at best a futile exercise, a deviation, and a dead end’. Cultural opposition to universality – whether it stems from the decolonial left or the nationalist right – constitutes the ‘historically appropriate form of untruth’ in the present era. A return to the critique of political economy and to the standpoint of the proletarian movement against capital and the state is not an act of nostalgia, but the only realistic path toward transcending a system that, in its universality, subsumes and produces all forms of oppression.
30 August 2026 (English version)
Editorial group of the magazine To Dialytiko
Notes
[1] Neil Larsen, ‘The Jargon of Decoloniality’, Catalyst, vol. 6, no. 2 (Summer 2022), pp. 52–77; and Ross Wolfe, ‘Dialectics and Difference: Against the “Decolonial Turn”’, Insurgent Notes, no. 15 (August 2017).
[2] The term pinkwashing has been widely used to describe the instrumental deployment of LGBTQI+ rights to deflect attention from other forms of state violence. See Sarah Schulman, ‘Israel and “Pinkwashing”’, The New York Times, November 22, 2011. For a more extensive discussion of the concept in relation to international solidarity movements, see also Sarah Schulman, Israel/Palestine and the Queer International, Duke University Press, 2012, pp. 133–156.
[3] See Rahul Rao, Out of Time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality, Oxford University Press, 2020. Rao points out that, despite the tactical value of highlighting the historicity of queer desire, this strategy is based on the ‘reification of the precolonial past’ as a purely indigenous space ‘untainted’ by the West. He argues that these idealizations lead to a ‘pinkwashing of the pre-colonial past’ (overlooking the stigmatization of non-normative desire within it) and trap queer politics in a shared nativism with nationalists, where only those forms of desire that can be proven to have pre-existed within the nation’s borders are recognized as legitimate.
[4] Saba Mahmood, in her ethnographic study of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton University Press, 2005, goes so far as to challenge the identification made by earlier feminists between agency and resistance to male authority, and to argue that forms of agency are constituted through discipline, obedience, moral self-formation, and the cultivation of virtues (e.g., modesty) – that is, through practices of piety, clearly drawing on the Foucauldian concept of the ‘technologies of the self’. For Mahmood, obedience to tradition constitutes a distinct form of subjectivity, as a capacity for action within specific historical and cultural contexts. To us, it is obvious that this position legitimizes the structures of male domination within Muslim countries – and beyond – and obscures the material coercion that women face there.
[5] See Meera Nanda, Prophets Facing Backward: Postmodern Critiques of Science and Hindu Nationalism in India, Rutgers University Press, 2003. Nanda thoroughly analyzes how postmodern and postcolonial critiques of scientific objectivity and Western rationalism (which promoted the idea of ‘alternative epistemologies’) were strategically adopted by the Hindu right. The goal was to legitimize pseudoscientific theories and religious myths as equal systems of knowledge, thereby shielding Hindu fundamentalism from criticism.
[6] See Tanika Sarkar, Hindu Wife, Hindu Nation: Community, Religion, and Cultural Nationalism, Indiana University Press, 2001. Sarkar demonstrates how the figure of the ‘chaste Hindu wife’ and the domestic sphere were transformed into central political symbols for the construction of Hindu nationalist identity. Strict adherence to patriarchal norms has been reframed as a national duty of resistance, while rhetoric about ‘protecting’ women’s honor is systematically used to demonize the Muslim population as a threat to the nation’s moral integrity.
[7] Editorial group of the journal To Dialytiko, ‘Presentation at the event “Capitalism, Class-Antagonistic Movement and Identity Politics”’, available at: https://dialytiko.gr/2020/07/27/eisigisi-tis-ekdilosis-quot-kapitalismos-taxiko-antagonistiko-kinima-kai-politikes-tis-taytotitas-quot/ (in Greek).