The decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo has promoted the slogan “neither capitalism nor communism, but decolonization.”¹
Zeev Sternhell, a historian of fascism, summed up the birth of fascist politics as an attempt to be “Neither of the right nor of the left.”²
This is not to imply that all forms of decoloniality are fascist, or that all forms of fascism hold a decolonial impulse. Though there are certainly a wealth of mass movements advocating fascist decoloniality — in India, Russia, and Japan, for instance — there are endless examples of decoloniality with other orientations. To draw this connection is simply to say that such a phenomenon should drive us to reflect on the relationship of radical politics to bourgeois civilization.
It is true that the framing of politics within left and right is an inheritance of the French Revolution, a Eurocentered bourgeois convention. Left and right are indeed the left and right wings of bourgeois civilization. They are two tendencies for bourgeois citizens to organize their society within the same basic order.
Nevertheless, Euro-bourgeois civilization is identical to global civilization. The left and right wings spread across the earth alongside the body of bourgeois civilization, even if left and right do not appear identical the world over. There is also a reason that those who wish to escape bourgeis civilization tend towards its ‘extremities’ in left and right. They seek to escape off of the feathers of the beast, but in the historical long run tend to merely give a new momentum and direction for the thing to stay in flight. Frantz Fanon understood this to be the fate for the bureaucratic mainstream of 20th century decolonization, which he accurately predicted would lay the groundwork for the neo-colonial global system which we live in today.³
This co-optative tendency has become a central concern in the past 50+ years for decolonial, communist, and fascist movements alike. The desire of fascism to escape the bourgeois enframing of left and right is not alien to communism, though the two hold different intent by it. Nevertheless there is genuine overlap between fascism, communism, and decoloniality which indicates the pitfalls we must be aware of in our long struggle to leave bourgeois civilization behind. Every liberation movement also contains the seeds of new forms of domination, revealing both its own weaknesses and the possibility for a deeper, more determinate sense of liberation.
Marxism and Decoloniality
It is not uncommon for Marxists to dismiss (or admonish) decoloniality as mere bourgeois particularity, if not an outright fascist ideology of Blood and Soil. Such a criticism can take multiple forms — some, like the International Communist Current, characterize the concern of decolonization as illusory compared to that of the proletariat, while others, like Moishe Postone, focus on the narrow Romantic and anti-semitic anti-capitalist positions associated with ‘Third Worldism.’⁴ These amount to universalist, or otherwise anti-particularist, critiques of what is perceived as narrow and reactionary in decolonization. Decoloniality is either in contradiction with history or is only a narrow and relative stage in the history of freedom. What must be focused on instead is an immanent critique of the capitalist social totality alone, which discovers or maintains the space for the realization of human freedom in history.
While these criticisms can hold water for some forms of decoloniality, they are not accurate for all. Decoloniality is not one, and forms of decoloniality have many directions and forms. The nouns decoloniality, decolonization are only meant to describe a general theme and perspective of thought and practice, not as tightly-bound a tradition as something like Marxism. In some respects this is an advantage, in others it means that there can just as well be fascist decoloniality as a communist one. The practical experience of decolonization for the mass of the colonized, however, tends towards communist social revolution as the negation of class society.⁵
Further, Marxist critique of decolonial particularity in favor of immanent critique can itself become complacent with the immanence of bourgeois civilization. In refusing to recognize a periphery or an exterior, it can become bound to cheering on the self-development of capitalism towards its culmination.⁶ What this means in political program is internalizing the values of bourgeois civilization, perceiving the tasks of communism as the living truth of bourgeois civilization or ‘Enlightenment.’ Such a perspective implies elite modernization, Eurocentrism, and an overestimation of the urban against the rural. If we insist that there is no value to worldviews exterior to bourgeois civilization, we risk adopting a complacent whiggish view of history in which it is an endless, linear accumulation of Progress towards some final end (in this case, Communism).
Just as there are many possible orientations of decoloniality in relation to communism, there are many possible orientations of Marxism in relation to decoloniality. There has been a tradition of decolonial Marxism, or a common substance of Marxism and decoloniality, from the 20th century to now. The Guyanese militant Walter Rodney described his own sense of the relation between Black Power and Marxism as “that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized in dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure.”⁶ Bolivian politician and theorist Álvaro García Linera has also, in turn, identified a common heart between indianismo and Marxism, despite their history of mutual suspicion.⁷ As many movements from the 20th century onward discovered, Marxism can itself become a guide for thinking through and practicing decolonization, even in spite of its metropolitan origins in Western Europe.⁸ As Frantz Fanon observed, “a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue.”⁹
In this perspective, the richness of communism is opened up. Just as a Eurocentric system implies a bad abstraction, a false universal which incorporates most of the world as its underside and a raw material to define its own contours of being, Eurocentered Marxism implies a tendency towards one-sided communism. It is impossible for communism to truly enrich itself with determinations, with particular content and intelligence, without accounting for the whole of the earth. The Eurocentered earth is not only Europe. Europe is not actually the true core dynamism— this is the illusion of a Eurocentered perspective itself, the illusion from within the Veil.¹¹
Eurocentrism is defined by the relationship of the West to the Rest, the global majority of the periphery to the global minority of the metropole. A communism wealthy with the histories now united into global, universal history by bourgeois civilization can only become so by cutting along the grain. It must inhabit a decolonial perspective in order to recognize the social totality in its finitude, instead of from a perspective in which it appears infinite — in which it appears to be the universal, homogenous substance of human life itself.
To understand the coloniality of power — especially that impersonal power of capital fundamental to modern bourgeois civilization — means to develop a stronger sense of liberation, or of what freedom must be. Freedom is always situational, and so understanding one’s world situation means deepening one’s capacity for self-emancipation. Decolonization is not only a step along the history of freedom, but a lesson of liberation core to realizing freedom out of the ‘free’ society of bourgeois civilization. What Marxists must understand is that decolonization is not alien to communism — to decolonize must mean to decolonize all of social life, including decolonizing everyday life from the power of capital. Decoloniality does not have to be a threat to communism, but can be a refining and clarifying of communism.
Marxism has techniques already amenable to decoloniality, but decoloniality must sharpen these tools. The need for this is revealed by the history of Marxism and its failure to recognize coloniality in its full extent, due to its originally Eurocentered perspective. In theorizing the development of capitalism and the world-market, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels initially assumed that the Western European mode of development would more or less be replicated abroad.¹² By extension, they expected the ‘normal form’ of free labor, wage-labor, to be universalized in the world economy.
As they realized, however, capitalism as a world-system articulates itself unevenly. The demands of general capital, world capital, for accumulation do not act homogeneously. Capital is a homogenizing force, but it does not act on the same terrain across the earth.¹³ It is strategic, it does not repeat the model of wage labor abstractly. Thus global capitalism has incorporated chattel slavery, indentured servitude, corvée, and other forms of labor into the production of commodities and the accumulation of capital. Marx and Engels began to analyze these distinct articulations of capital, including the many forms which the wage relation can take, and opened up their analysis to a multilinear understanding of history.¹⁴
Though Marx and Engels put the analysis of colonization on the agenda, their followers did not necessarily follow in their sketch of the morphology of capitalism as a totality. Rosa Luxemburg, for instance, understood capital’s colonial expansion as stemming from it’s failure to close its circuits of accumulation.¹⁵ In her theory, capital needs a non-capitalist in order to realize capital through the consumption of capitalist commodities by non-capitalist modes of production. Once these non-capitalist exteriors have been exhausted by the expanding scale of capitalist production, the system breaks down.¹⁶
This theory posits the exploited exteriority of capital as strictly outside of bourgeois civilization. Though incorporated as a dependency, its essence is strictly exterior in a spatial-civilizational sense. The non-capitalist exterior is authentically itself, its selfhood as exteriority is not thoroughly mediated by Eurocentered capitalism except on its own edges. The metropole is the metropole, and the periphery is the periphery. The sense of capitalist totality here is rather one-dimensional — one has the spiral of capitalist production on the one hand, and the outside on the other. Coloniality is a frontier, an exterior — there is a certain step of distance between it and the everyday life of capitalist production. Though capital needs the exterior to realize its production on a total scale, totality is still separate from exteriority.
For this weakness, the Marxist economist Henryk Grossman critiqued Luxemburg’s model of capitalist reproduction. In his eyes, her strict separation of totality and exteriority appeared weak and plainly inaccurate.¹⁷ Her model displaces the core logic of capital to ‘frontiers,’ leaving a bourgeois political-economic understanding of the center as almost a closed system if not for the frontiers. Grossman, on the other hand, emphasizes the exploited as an underside to the system, not a strict exterior. Surplus-value is extracted within the totality of capital itself, even if it is produced outside of the contractual exchange of commodity labor-power for wages. Even where capital might appear as a spatially and civilizationally closed system (as it does in our neo-colonial situation), it lives through a vampirism of living labor.
This is much closer to Marx, and reveals where Marx’s critique of capital overlaps with decoloniality in its picture of bourgeois civilization’s contours. It is exactly the appearance of universality that facilitates capitalist exploitation, the periphery is exploited by the Self-Same, the Universal exploits the exteriorized non-Universal. This exploitation is not a frontier to the logic of capital within, but permeates the entire system to its very core.¹⁸ Exploitation is at the very heart of capital.
In spite of this strong insight, however, Marxists from Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels to Vladimir Lenin and beyond underestimated or even dismissed the importance of settler-colonialism to understanding societies like the U.S. Marx explicitly repeated the genocidal myth of virgin soil in his letter to Lincoln, and Engels had supported the U.S. invasion of Mexico in spite of abolitionists overwhelmingly opposing it as an imperial war.¹⁹ To them, settlerism was a means for bourgeois civilization to spread and ensure the ‘normal,’ ‘civilized’ conflict of proletariat and bourgeoisie which has communism as its horizon. Even Marx’s his later re-evaluations of Indigenous societies like the Haudenosaunee, he did not quite develop an understanding of what settlerism represented for the U.S. Engels thought similarly to Marx, believing that the completion of the U.S.’s ‘Manifest Destiny’ would ensure the development of a ripe capital-labor antagonism.
Both he and Marx recognized that settlerism offered a pressure valve for global capitalism, allowing ‘redundant’ populations to be turned into indentured servants, farmers, land speculators, and soldiers instead of becoming part of the ‘dangerous classes’ in Europe.²⁰ However, despite this understanding, they did not understand the fundamentally counterrevolutionary character of settlerism within the U.S., instead identifying quite strongly with the Yankees.²¹
Lenin repeated much of the same analysis, though his study of American agriculture for materials in his debate with the Narodniki enabled him to make deeper insights which must be extended. Lenin repeated the virgin soil myth just as Marx did, though he understood the consciously counterrevolutionary intention of settler policies like the Homestead Act. He noticed a similarity between Narodniki plans for land distribution and U.S. settlerism, arguing that “the American Republic has implemented in a capitalist way the ‘Narodnik’ idea of distributing unoccupied land to all applicants.”²² He further identified Black workers as a core revolutionary mass in the U.S., recognizing in their conditions a racialized form of class exploitation familiar to many ‘emancipated’ Russian serfs.²³
However, his model of capitalist development in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) falsely posits distinct stages of free-competitive capitalism and imperialist-monopoly capitalism.²⁴ This limited his ability to understand coloniality, though he was known among the socialists of his day for his intransigent advocacy for the right of self-determination and attacks on imperial chauvinism. This two-stage analysis underestimates the domination already immanent in capitalism, although it is based on a dialectical model tracing the self-negation of capitalism. Rather than a free-competitive stage of capitalism, the capitalist world-system should be understood as the world of 1492. Rather than having coloniality as its pre-capitalist predecessor or overripe form, coloniality and the capitalist mode of production go hand in hand.²⁵
Where Lenin and Marx reveal an extremely useful insight into settlerism, however, is their analysis of the capitalist negation of individual private property. As Marx notes in Capital (1867), property as an individual possession, an extension of the individual, is swept away by capital, which has no ties to any individuals except by contract.²⁶ Capital is not inherently bound to anyone — rather, they are bound to it. With the capitalist mode of production, the working classes are exploited by capital as a whole rather than only a few aristocrats. They might be able to choose the employers they sell their labor-power to, but they cannot choose to drop out of this exchange of commodities under pain of starvation or legal sanction.
Marx explicitly ties this insight to the tension between settler individiual private property, a practice encouraged by the state in the name of expropriating Indigenous peoples, and the demands of capital accumulation. Though settlers might grow cash crops, their direct control of colonized land undermines the disciplinary demands of capital.²⁷ They are not left only with the ownership of their labor-power — they own land seized from Indigenous peoples. For this reason, there is an inborn tendency of settlers to Romantic anti-capitalism.
This settlerrist project contains an immanent tendency to self-negation. Settlers demanded the sponsorship of the U.S. government, whether in the distribution of land (through the Homestead Act), the sponsorship of individual land ownership instead of the spread of slave plantation agriculture (Free Labor), or military defense from Indigenous peoples. The Federal government was itself interested in regulating and controlling the process of settler-colonization in order to maintain the cohesion of the Republic and the viability of the national economy as a whole.²⁸
Thus, through the very needs of this individualist settlerism itself, tendencies towards centralization emerged. During and after the Civil War, these tendencies made broad strides. The mass-mobilization of the Civil War — perhaps the first war to give the world an image of 20th century warfare — turned to mass-mobilization in the name of colonization and the repression of the proletariat. Union soldiers were deployed against rebellious workers in St. Louis in 1877 and elsewhere at the exact same time that they were deployed against the Dakota, Lakota, Comanche, Apache, and other peoples in order to defend settlers.
By the end of the 19th century, the Federal government’s close involvement in the management of settler expansion became a tool for limiting and expropriating small-time settlers, particularly those buried in debt.²⁹ The Federal government’s systematic use of protective tariffs, tax incentives, and hard money policy to facilitate industrialization disempowered small settlers in favor of industrial capital, who mustered the Grange and People’s Party in response but fell apart in the face of capital’s power and their own racist, particularist limitations.³⁰
Capital eventually must drive to expropriate settlers and transform them into wage-laborers. At the same time it must import new workers, who live without any possibility of taking land as individual private property. Lenin agreed with this analysis, demonstrating this tendency in U.S. agriculture in a critique of the attempt by Narodniki to adopt an American model as an antidote to the development of capitalism in Russian agriculture. This happened in the U.S. in the turn from the 19th to the 20th century, which Lenin took careful note of.³¹ The tendency culminated finally in the mass expropriations of land during the Great Depression.³² By the 1940s, the old style of individual ownership of land was a remnant of the past.³³ Agriculture was dominated by capitalist combines, not by individual ownership.
This does not mean that settlerism disappeared — this is where we must go further than Marx and Lenin. Rather than settlerism being negated alongside the negation of individual property ownership, settlerism was socialized. In the U.S.’s settler-colonial context, the general capital and the nation became something like one big settler. Proletarians were not outside of the settler relation but deployed in the name of it, transforming expropriated land into the image of capitalist industries. Though they did not own the land, and only reaped wealth in the form of wages, they lived by the colonization of the land. Settlerism set the morphology for the U.S. as a whole, extending far beyond the individual ownership of land by settlers.
As has been noted by the historian Stefan Aune and the communist militant J. Sakai alike, settlerism was extended by the U.S. in its overseas imperialism.³⁴ Rather than U.S. imperialism being a simple negation of the old settlerism, it realized it even more profoundly. The U.S. colonization of the Philippines, the conduct of genocidal warfare against Filipino and Haitian guerrillas, and the adoption of gunboat diplomacy all showed the marks of the strategies originally developed in the expropriation of Indigenous peoples. Psychologically, the U.S. sees ‘Indians’ the world over. From the Filipino rebels to the Viet Minh to the Taliban and now the Palestinian resistance, the U.S. keeps seeing ‘Indians’ in its enemies. It continues to extend its imperial strategy of settlerism abroad, having learned in its very beginnings how to conduct warfare as an occupying colonizer against peoples defending their homes. It is no coincidence that this theory was developed originally synthesized by the insights of Red Power, which connected the oppression of Indigenous peoples to that of the Vietnamese by U.S. imperialism.³⁵
It is important to note, however, that Sakai in particular is still limited in his understanding of the exteriority of Indigenous peoples and Black people to U.S. settler capitalism. In his perspective, Indigenous peoples are more or less homogeneous in interest as a “race.” This misses the importance of tensions, conflict, and competition within and among nations in the negotiation of settler-colonization. In his framework, for instance, one cannot understand the 1871 Camp Grant massacre of Pinal and Aravaipa Apaches, committed by Euro-Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono O’odham warriors.³⁶
Further, this underestimates the tense relationship of Black people to settler-colonialism. Though excluded from the status of whiteness, after the Civil War Black people were accommodated into the otherwise Anglo-Yankee definition of citizenship by the 14th Amendment.³⁷ Notably, the Amendment excluded Indigenous peoples, who were considered to fall under the jurisdictions of foreign affairs, and was later invoked against Asians and Mexicans.³⁸ The Federal government further tried to incorporate Black people into Yankee settlerism through such phenomena as Buffalo Soldiers, who were deployed against both Indigenous peoples and rebellious Mexicans defending common lands in the U.S. Southwest.³⁹
The trouble with settlerism is that, particularly when socialized into the general capital, it is a social relation in which all are complicit. This is why it appears as a civilizational struggle, a conflict of one way of life against another. Capital operates as a totality, we must think of the exterior as also a periphery or underside rather than reproducing Luxemburg’s understanding of capitalism.
The stakes of this understanding are also clear when we consider the need for decolonial or communist universalism. On the one hand, a perspective limited to the interests (in a narrow sense) of specific Indigenous nations can lead to complicity with the ‘objectively’ universalizing tendencies of capitalist coloniality.⁴⁰ For instance Clinton Rickard (Skarù:ręˀ), the Tuscarora leader and founder of the Indian Defense League, saw no incongruence between his fight for sovereignty and his participation in the U.S. invasion of the Philippines. In his eyes, this was simply part of the traditional alliance of his people with the U.S., just like any other alliance of two nations.⁴¹ This is a sibling perspective to that of the Herrenvolk (chosen people) socialists who throw their support behind imperialism in the name of their national working classes.⁴² Without revolutionary universalism to meet the bloodthirsty universalism of capital, we end up drawn into the bloodbath ourselves.
Rickard himself taught this lesson after reflecting on his experiences both participating in and fighting colonialism, declaring:
“We have seen the downfall of the British Empire and the decline of England in our day. This will happen whenever a nation oppresses people. It will happen to the United States if it continues to wrong my Indian people. A nation cannot build its future on a foundation of oppression.”⁴³
This is where the self-composition of Pan-Indigenism and communist internationalism is necessary to constitute the wretched of the earth as a common political subjectivity, a force which acts in world politics. This forces a choice on the peoples of the world, a choice which establishes who’s who and who stands where. This establishes the terrain of decision between coloniality and decoloniality.
Today there is a continuity of militant decolonial Pan-Indigenism right alongside the integrated form of 20th century Pan-Indigenism, which was innovated with President Richard Nixon’s Self-Determination reforms. Similarly there is a wealth of Herrenvolk workerism, with populist leaders like Bernie Sanders trying to push the small, sprouting seeds of a new labor movement against Palestine and other ‘enemies’ in favor of U.S. Empire. This is already a struggle of universalisms, the one repeating U.S. Imperial foreign policy and the other identifying itself with oppressed Palestinians and other indigenous peoples of the world in their struggle with coloniality.
But such struggle for universalism is not so simple. There is something else that J. Sakai notes which is missing in orthodox Marxist analyses of settlerism — that “white settler-colonialism and fascism occupy the same ecological niche.”⁴⁴ While Sakai sees this as preventing the development of fascism in settler-colonies except where settler status decays, I see this tendency as haunting settlerism from the outset (as the status of settlers is never entirely secure or permanently defined).
Not every settler-colony is fascist by definition, but there is a certain historical association of settlerism and the development of fascism. For the French, the pied-noirs of Algeria were disproportionately hardline Vichy supporters. For the Spanish, much of the Nationalist leadership was made up of Canary Island settlers hardened by colonial warfare. Part of this can be understood through the lesson of Aimé Césaire: that fascism brings the violence of the periphery into the metropole, that what one does to Others begins to define what one is to the Self-Same.⁴⁵ But there is also something further in this association.
There is a certain ‘plebeian,’ commoner character of settlerism which to many settlers set the colonies apart from the ranks and titles of the metropoles. Though rank and title were rarely alien to colonies, the settler-colonial situation has historically facilitated a certain leveling tendency among settlers (at least in some modalities of colonization). The settlers are defined in their settlerhood, their relationship to the natives and the land as foreign conquerors remaking the land in line with their own needs (often, even ‘spiritual’ needs). There are a wealth of examples wherein settlers develop a certain sense of solidarity among themselves in relation to the metropole and the indigenous. The pied-noirs, the Boers, the Anglo-Americans, the criollos, the Zionists in Palestine and others came to consider themselves as holding distinct interests, as a defined mass group which had to defend itself in mass politics.
Similarly, fascism is defined by a ‘plebeian’ character. Unlike the Counter-Revolutionism of the 18th and early 19th centuries, fascism is perfectly at home in mass politics. Though rank and title involve themselves in fascist movements, this is not what’s particular to fascism compared to standard reactionism. Fascism identifies the national community, that collectivity supposedly uniting classes in a single interest, as the transcending spirit of society. What is valuable to fascists is not aristocracy in title as the aristocracy of the ‘spirit,’ the aristocracy of dynamism instead of passive, inherited aristocracy. The fascists thus hold a ‘plebeian’ perspective, one which overlaps with settlerism in its contours of domination. Both fascism and settlerism tend toward forms of rebellion invested in positivity, or givenness. They are not ‘revolutions’ with nothing to lose but their chains, they are ‘revolutions’ which change everything so that everything can stay the same.
J. Sakai has argued that “It is the absolute characteristic of settler society to be parasitic.”⁴⁶ However, to frame settlerism as identical to parasitism is both inaccurate, misunderstanding the core of this relation as it appears in the modern world, and risks the reactionary Romanticism of fascists. Critiquing settlers primarily for their failures of productivity, and by extension glorifying productivity, reproduces the old bourgeois moralist pastime of praising productive against unproductive labor. But what is productive is always productive relative to a specific arrangement of society — one can only speak of what is productive for a specific arrangement of society, for a particular society’s particular needs. And bourgeois civilization certainly produces a wealth of needs for colonialism, this is in fact fundamental to its global practice.
There is certainly parasitism at the hands of settlers, but that is not their primary, defining characteristic as a social group. Rather, what defines settlerism is that they are an entire group of people embodying imperial forms of labor that seek to force the entire world into their own image.⁴⁷ This world cannot tolerate whatever is non-identical to it, whether the natural world or the indigenous ‘natural-peoples.’
In fact, settler ‘anti-colonial’ nationalism ironically reveals the limits of decolonial thought which can only be resolved by communism — the abolition of imperializing forms of labor and social relations. Settler claims to indigeneity are based on the concept of property as an extension of the self, as a recreation of the world in one’s image. Capital socializes this proprietary relation to nature. Communism, on the other hand, must socialize relationality with all of life.
Imperial bourgeois civilization, including settlerism and ‘Third World’ bourgeois nationalism alike, worships labor and the domination of nature by the Self(-Same). The call to transform the land in the image of the laborer is core to settler-colonialism. This is the theme of virgin soil and the taming of the land, which appears in the national mythologies of the U.S., Israel, Australia, and other settler-colonies. This perspective asserts that (imperial) labor is the source of all wealth, of all use-values. Yet it also asserts, childlike in narcissism, that nature herself spreads her arms for the chosen-people race of settlers to enjoy the infinite wealth of her bosom. These two perspectives are not inherently contradictory — the latter tends to be paired with a dismissal of natives as squandering the wealth of their own Mother Nature, providing poor companionship compared to the rational and laborious resoluteness of the settlers. In either case, the main theme is the identity of nature to laboring settler humanity, whether through the rape-taming ‘wilderness’ or the coverture of marriage.
Marx himself warned against this worship of labor, viewing it with suspicion from 1845 in The German Ideology to his 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme.⁴⁸ While labor is the source of all value — value being a specific social relation, specific to the production of commodities — labor is not the source of all wealth. Marx uses wealth in the sense of use-values, the qualities of things which a living being discovers as useful to its needs in engaging with the world through its activity. The identification of wealth and value implied by the idea that labor is the source of all wealth means an identification of the world with capital, complicity with bourgeois civilization in its drive to close the earth into a Self-Same totality. The more human beings dominate nature like a foreign conqueror, the more human beings dominate each other.
The difference between such imperial forms of labor and other possible relationships to the world is revealed quite vividly in two passages by two North American authors. The one, the Euro-American John Steinbeck, author of the social realist epic The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The other, Luther Standing Bear (Sičhą́ǧu Oyáte and Oglála Lakhóta Oyáte), Sicangu and Oglala Lakota philosopher. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck wrote thusly of the history of his home state of California:
“Once California belonged to Mexico and its land to Mexicans; and a horde of tattered feverish Americans poured in. And such was their hunger for land that they took the land, stole Sutter’s land, Guerrero’ s land, took the grants and broke them up and growled and quarreled over them, those frantic hungry men; and they guarded with guns the land they had stolen. They put up houses and barns, they turned the earth and planted crops. And these things were possession, and possession was ownership.
“The Mexicans were weak and fed. They could not resist, because they wanted nothing in the world as frantically as the Americans wanted land.
“Then, with time, the squatters were no longer squatters, but owners; and their children grew up and had children on the land. And the hunger was gone from them, the feral hunger, the gnawing, tearing hunger for land, for water and earth and the good sky over it, for the green thrusting grass, for the swelling roots. They had these things so completely that they did not know about them any more. They had no more the stomach-tearing lust for a rich acre and a shining blade to plow it, for seed and a windmill beating its wings in the air. They arose in the dark no more to hear the sleepy birds’ first chittering, and the morning wind around the house while they waited for the first light to go out to the dear acres. These things were lost, and crops were reckoned in dollars, and land was valued by principal plus interest, and crops were bought and sold before they were planted. Then crop failure, drought, and flood were no longer little deaths within life, but simple losses of money. And all their love was thinned with money, and all their fierceness dribbled away in interest until they were no longer farmers at all, but little shopkeepers of crops, little manufacturers who must sell before they can make. Then those farmers who were not good shopkeepers lost their land to good shopkeepers. No matter how clever, how loving a man might be with earth and growing things, he could not survive if he were not a good shopkeeper. And as time went on, the business men had the farms, and the farms grew larger, but there were fewer of them.”⁴⁹
To Steinbeck, it is labor and the transformation of the land in the laboring subject’s own image which makes the land a home. The key is the identity of the world with the subject, the human subject is the center. Through this anthropocentrism and implicitly imperial sense of labor, the conquest of settlers in America is guaranteed by the conquest of labor over the earth. While Steinbeck recognizes the homelessness imposed by capital, and the negation of private property in its long-standing historical sense by the impersonal power of capital, he remains complacent with settlerism.
Contrast that perspective to this passage, wherein Standing Bear analyzes settler consciousness:
“The white man does not understand the Indian for the reason that he does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of his tree of life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled with primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its vastness not yet having yielded to his questing footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountain-tops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his path across the continent.
“But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.”⁵⁰
Here, ‘Man’ is decentered. The settler does not become indigenous through imperial labor — in fact, one of the needs behind this is their very fear of the land the settlers knows they are usurpers of. This is not a genuine indigenization but an attempted “settler move to innocence,” which Eve Tuck (Unangax̂) and K. Wayne Yang describe as “an attempt to deflect a settler identity, while continuing to enjoy settler privilege and occupying stolen land.”⁵¹
To try to conquer the land into one’s property, into an extension of oneself is not a true decolonization because of its very implied identity of the land with the subjectivity of the laborer. The narcissism of settler labor only means the revenge of nature, the return of the repressed, the mutilation of one’s own corporeal, natural being by the mutilation of nature. The North American settlers destroyed the soil and ecology of the continent in their own attempts to force it into the image of their needs — namely, intensive production of cash crops for the world market.
On the other hand, the Three Sisters (corn, beans, and squash) represent an alternative relationship of labor and nature. The Indigenous agricultural practice of growing these together is knowledge developed from a recognition of these plants in their own determinacy, an ecological understanding from relating to nature in its own distinctness and otherness from our own needs. Their artificial selection into plants useful for human needs could only be accomplished by humans understanding these vegetables’ characteristics and needs. Only by understanding the particular needs of other natural beings can we organize our own needs rationally and sustainably. This other possibility for labor means respecting the no-thing, the uncategorizable, the Other, the non-identical in nature. It means working with rather than against, unity and harmony through plurality instead of through homogeneity.
Decoloniality and Fascist Authenticity
The form that fascist decoloniality takes is, almost without exception, a rhetoric of authenticity. One must be true to the Self-Same, one must expel the artificial infection of the colonizer. The core object of critique in the West here is decadence, immorality, rootlessness, hostility to the traditions of the world. The virtue of the Native is rootedness, being-at-home, having an authenticity to return to. Fascist decoloniality is an ideology of return, of looping the Self-Same back into itself.
And yet, the ideology of authenticity only makers sense from the perspective of a colonial split in history (pre-colonial and colonial). To assert one’s authenticity in this general, racialized claim does not make sense without a situation with a terrain that has already been racialized.⁵² This racial-civilizational Manichaeism is caught in identity with the colonial world, it is not decolonization which leaves the home terrain of coloniality. It is Euro-colonialism which racializes that terrain, marking a distinction between the West and the Rest wherein the Rest are devalued as the not-West.
The fascist ideology of authenticity speaks within an already Eurocentered world perspective, where the authentic ones turn to face towards the West (in body, heart, and mind) in order to prove themselves as the Native. But the Native, in this generalized sense, is a category birthed by the Eurocentered world itself, the twin of the Colonizer. Thus fascist authenticity is a failed recognition, it’s a desperate desire to prove how little the Native needs the Colonizer by operating on the latter’s own metrics.
It is no surprise, by extension, that this ideology makes use of worldviews and techniques exported from Europe. To be the truest, most authentic Colonizer’s Native, they must use the methods of defining the Native innovated by the intelligentsia and bureaucratic apparatuses of the Colonizer. Orientalism, anthropology, missionary studies, language standardization, linear historiography… all are adopted from the Colonizer as trusty tools of Nativeology. Thus the Native inherits the neuroses of the Colonizer, already saturated with the practical psychological dilemmas that come with bourgeois civilization.
The mournful twin of Euro-modernization, Romanticism, has been exported throughout the world by colonization itself. The rhetoric and framing of European Romantics in their confrontation with emergent bourgeois civilization thus shapes the rhetoric and framing of Romantic nationalists confronting the West. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the grandfather of National Socialism, still makes his presence felt in nationalism worldwide, Johann Gottfried Herder influences the ideals of rootedness invoked against the West, Mikhail Bakunin’s contrasting of collective racial natural-being and the artificial statist decadence of the West has had appeal in East and South alike, John Ruskin’s Romantic medievalist critique of capitalism influenced Ananda Coomaraswamy and Mahatma Gandhi’s attempts to advocate an Indian spiritual ethic against Western colonization, Thomas Carlyle’s Romantic guild socialism has had much the same appeal, Oswald Spengler’s prediction of the decline of the West and the rise of the ‘darker nations’ has been taken as an accurate and inspiring prophecy, Martin Heidegger’s critique of technology and inauthenticity a wellspring for understanding Westoxification…
Bourgeois civilization turns its own contradictions and internal tensions into a world milieu, so that the entire world picks up the same tools of political discourse (even if in distinct manners). Bourgeois civilization exports its own internal opposition and integrates non-European lifeways into itself. Thus we see figures like the Egyptian Salafi theorist Sayyid Qutb incorporating the civilizational thought of Oswald Spengler while blasting apart traditions of Islamic jurisprudence in his flat dichotomy of the Self-Same and jahiliyyah (Age of Ignorance), which he identified with practically all societies and history up to and including Muslim societies and history after Prophet Muhammad.⁵³ To Qutb, all human societies which practice their interrelations in themselves and for themselves lead to degeneration and exploitation — only pure, unmediated submission to God can be the solution. Tawhid, or the unity of God with himself as the truth, and Sharia, law, are flatly identical in Qutb’s thought.⁵⁴ He thinks in a manner incredibly reminiscent of Western fascist thought, as he thinks with the very same Eurocentered tools and dichotomies which they take up.
Imperial Japanese nationalism reveals this tendency as well, with intellectuals like Kita Ikki identifying the power of the masses and the sovereignty of Japan as an Imperial State (an idea inherited more from European nationalist socialists than Japanese political traditions), while philosophers like Watsuji Tetsuro explicitly sought to incorporate the Romantic critiques of European Enlightenment offered by figures like Heidegger into Japanese traditions of thought.⁵⁵ The Imperial Japanese state itself should be brought up more often as an example of fascist decoloniality, not in spite of but because of the irony in its own imperialism. This state framed itself as a representative of the darker races of the earth — an authentic, rooted Native response against decadent Western modernity.⁵⁶ It was in fact the Japanese Imperialists who sought to supplant U.S. Anglification of the Philippines and to implement Tagalog-centered Nativization — at the exact same time that they enslaved Filipinos to accumulate capital for the war machine.⁵⁷ The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere is a natural conclusion of that decoloniality which deals in Blood and Soil and in the pursuit of the Self-Same.
The other side of this Romanticism of the ‘Third World’ is the incorporation of ‘Third Worldism’ by the fascists of the metropole itself. If the West is the embodiment of decadent modernity, then the natural conclusion is that the Rest is the reliable store of an authentic, rooted alternative. This is fascist internationalism, another element where fascism reveals itself as the sublimation of revolutionary drives from their immanent reactionary tendencies themselves. These fascist ‘Third Worldists’ deal in noble savageism, and often argue that European countries are themselves victims of imperialism at the hands of rootless financial aristocrats (typically identified with Jewry). This rhetoric has a history stretching from Mikhail Bakunin to the original National Bolsheviks (Ernst Niekisch, Karl Otto Paetel) to elements of the modern European New Right (Alain de Benoist).⁵⁸ Colonialism posits the Natives of the world as ‘natural-peoples’, and this Romantic reaction takes that idea at its word.
Zionism reveals the immanent tendency of this metropolitan ‘right-decoloniality’ to turn decoloniality into its opposite. This seems like a strange place to turn from the subject of anti-semitic fascism, but Zionism is itself the internalization of anti-semitism (the so-called “Jewish Question”) into a political form. Zionism reveals a conservative form of how a people rendered a foundational Other of Euro-bourgeois civilization, of the world-system of 1492, confront their own position as a periphery. This peripheral perspective, this confrontation of the 1492-world from the perspective of an inside-outsider, is thus directly relevant to decoloniality.
The internalization of anti-semitism represented by Zionism is made evident by its agreement with the image of the rootless, parasitic Jew of the diaspora. Moses Hess said, in his Rome and Jerusalem (1862) that “the Christian nations will certainly not object to the restoration of the Jewish State, for they will thereby rid their respective countries of a foreign population which is a thorn in their side.”⁵⁹ Theodor Herzl, the leader of the World Zionist Organization, stated the case even more bluntly in a letter to the imperialist Cecil Rhodes — in order for Jews to become a ‘normal,’ rooted nation, they must be hardened through colonization and imperial labor.⁶⁰
Zionism responds to the “Jewish Question,” the problem of assimilation, by offering a project to assimilate Jews into the 1492-world through colonization outside of Europe. It agrees that Jews are intractably foreign to Europe, that they cannot but be ‘rootless parasites’ in diaspora.⁶¹ In order to become indigenized, Jews must colonize the land of Palestine. Through the redeeming force of labor, considered to be alien to the ‘parasitic’ Jews of diaspora, Jews could become rooted in Blood and Soil.⁶² The virgin soil myth of a “land without a people for a people without a land” emerged. After a century, this myth has undeniably confirmed itself as an ideology of genocide.
Such an affinity of colonial and indigenist rhetoric side by side is not without precedent. The historian Philip J. Deloria (Íŋyaŋ Woslál Háŋ) has demonstrated that early Anglo-American settler patriotism indulged deeply in indigenist Romanticism.⁶³ The Anglo settlers were supposed to have become natives of wild America just the same as the Indigenous peoples of the continent. Of course, the course of the U.S.’s development buried this form of indigenism in favor of the more respectably bourgeois icon of Columbia — an unmistakeable identification of Americanism with Westernism.⁶⁴
Some maintained the discursive thread as an ostensibly radical interpretation, whether in the form of Marx and Engels praising the American Revolution as the ‘natives’ standing up to an Empire and setting off a wave of emancipatory movements in Europe or even Frantz Fanon characterizing the arc of the U.S. as stretching from an anti-colonial liberation movement to a neo-colonial power.⁶⁵ Yet the Romanticism of free, wild kinship imagined by some settlers — whether the utopian socialists of the U.S. or the kibbutzim of Israel — falls apart in the face of the brute cannibalistic tendencies inherent to settlerism. The quasi-decolonial rhetoric of indigenization turns into its opposite through imperial labor, the need for the Self-Same, itself.⁶⁶
The pervasiveness of this self-negation in settler consciousness should not lead us to a one-dimensional analysis of indigenous peoples. The fascistic discourse of authenticity isn’t alien to the Indigenous peoples of North America. Historically, organizations like the American Indian Federation (AIF) promoted an anti-semitic doctrine of Indigenous rootedness versus Jewish cosmoplitan-communist deracination.⁶⁷ This Romantic anti-semitism is not nearly as pervasive due to the foreignness of anti-semitism to indigenous cultures, however. Anti-semitism for Indigenous radicalism is not nearly as common as in, say, mestizo ideologies of indigenista authenticity. Such anti-semitism comes from the perspective of a deeper colonial split, a Westernization. José Vasconcelos, one of the key theorists of Mexican indigenismo and the progenitor of the concept of la raza cósmica, collaborated with the Nazis during World War II and espoused anti-semitism in his writings.⁶⁸ We should not conflate all mestizo indigenismo with fascism, as they have ranged from communists associated with the journal Amauta in Perú to liberals resonant of John Collier, the American architect of the Indian New Deal. But this tendency must be recognized rather than dismissed.
‘Third World’ nationalism tends to be ripe ground for this fascist authenticity, in no small part because these nation-states are part and parcel of world (neo)coloniality. These nation-states adopt the Fourth World — “a forgotten world, the world of aboriginal peoples locked into independent states but without an adequate voice or say in the decisions which affect our lives,” [George Manuel (Secwépemc)] — as pacified mascots, at the very same time that they perceive them as a problem and inconvenience to be addressed.⁶⁹
Whether this is post-Revolutionary Mexico adopting Indigenous peoples as symbols of national ancestry, or the Egyptian state using Palestinian refugees as political pawns, this distinction between Third and Fourth World has direct practical consequences.⁷⁰ It is this very modernist concern with authenticity itself that facilitates the embourgeoisment of social relations among indigenous peoples, incorporating them into the world-capitalist unit of the nation-state. The association of fascist authenticity and neo-colonialism is quite evident when one looks at the examples of François Duvalier’s U.S.-collaborationist regime in Haiti, the promotion of Authenticité as a state ideology in Zaire under Mobutu Sese Seko at the same time that his regime worked closely with the U.S., France, and Belgium, Indonesia’s Islamic decolonial rhetoric tossed out freely while Indonesians are super-exploited by Eurocentered capital…
As Walter Rodney taught, the ‘Third World’ as a project is not unitary. Rather, he and his fellow ‘Third World’ Marxists had to show that “Marxism continues to grow as a Third World ideology in spite of the attempts to present it as something alien to the Third World. And it continues to grow as an independent ideology seeking clear alternatives to capitalism, in spite of the attempts to divert this process by focusing on a compromise between capitalism and socialism.”⁷¹
The Fourth World is not an original, natural authenticity — such a perspective simply implies something to be mined by bourgeois states, not unlike extraction from corporeal nature. Instead the Fourth World is more like Odradek in Franz Kafka’s “Cares of a Family Man” (1919) — an upsetting, uncategorizable, incomprehensible thing which troubles the consciousness of every imperial paterfamilias the world over. The Fourth World, in its inconvenience, is a site of political innovation even amidst its very deprivation. Though exclusion from the mainstream of society limits the possibilities available to it, it also opens up the need for for experiments in autonomy. This is why indigenous peoples are often innovators of political and military strategies of autonomy, whether the Zapatistas in Chiapas or the Palestinians in Gaza. As the Egyptian Marxist Samir Amin taught, historical change tends to move from dynamic margins to coagulated centers.⁷²
Of course, the indigenous peoples of the world do have to relate to the metropole in some way. Such is the reciprocal nature of identity — for every Native, there is a Colonizer. Relating to bourgeois civilization, with all of its tendencies, there are the options of relating the center, the status quo, or, for change to left and right, communism and fascism. This is a choice to make, but a choice made from an independent standpoint.
Decolonial theorists like José Carlos Mariátegui, Aimé Césaire, Frantz Fanon, and Walter Rodney all emphasized a natural affinity of communism and decoloniality, both expressing themselves through the self-emancipation of the wretched of the earth. Despite the framing of some, there is a long history of affinity of decololoniality and communism — from the millenarian movement of Manuel Quíntin Lame (Páez) establishing a legacy in the Communist Party of Colombia to the influence of Maoism on Red Power in Canada.⁷³ These militants, who might be considered ‘left-decolonial,’ reject the illusory radicalism of fascism in favor of communist universal emancipation. Many, like the Métis militant Howard Adams, attacked the rhetoric of authenticity as indicative of narrow, bourgeois nationalism — part and parcel of the colonial system, becoming complacent in it amidst the spectacle of refusal itself.⁷⁴
All of his hammers home the importance of thinking through the Westernization of global thought, as doing so enables us to be aware of and exercise suspicion towards tendencies towards fascist Romanticism and anti-semitism. It is not that decolonial thought is impossible and that everything is intractably Western, but that decoloniality must start from the premise that Euro-bourgeois society has remade the world in its image as a totality with the West at the center.⁷⁵ Capital is a totalizing power, incorporating even crisis and resistance (this drive to authenticity, for instance) into a more cohesive, closing totality. The ‘invisible hand’ of the market, the cunning of instrumental reason, always seems to find a way to bring subjective wills back into the fold.
The Romantic rhetoric of rootedness opens itself up to the reactionary limitation of humanity to a narrow, national-racial horizon. In spite of its rhetoric of good-concrete against bad-abstract, it in fact abstracts human beings apart from their openness. It does not recognize the truth that human nature is to be nothing in particular. It is an attempt at historical regression from bourgeois society into some Romanticized ‘primitive’ past of a Volksgemeinschaft, people’s community. In this it reveals in exaggerated form the immanent limitations of communalism, transforming the association of a community with a home into Self-Sameness.⁷⁶
The limits of communality revealed themselves in the treatment of outsiders, and particularly the fundamental outsiders — those without a community. Within communalist societies, these have primarily taken the form of the socially dead, the enslaved, those in whom society recognizes no relations.⁷⁷ Fascist decoloniality reproduces this hatred in its drive towards the enslavement and extermination of the Other. This is the dividing line for this fascist decoloniality — it does not seek a world where many worlds are possible, but a closed system composed of closed systems.
At the same time, the cosmopolitanism of bourgeois civilization is itself a drive to transform all individuals into contracting commodity-owners, into citizens. This limits human relationality into the exchange of equivalents, subordinating the wealth of characteristics in all human beings and nature as a whole to the image of capital. Against both of these, communism must call for something that might be described as a cosmopolitan rootedness. While ‘communalist’ societies confined their humanism to the members of the community, and considered other communities to be outside of their own cosmos except where adopted or enslaved through capture, communism must be based on the communal relationality (Gemeinwesen) of all living beings. This is a realization of a universal communalism. Global universality has been opened up by the horrific drives of colonialism, and global community must be realized by the wretched of this imperial earth.
Such a communist cosmopolitanism must not only define itself as a form of decoloniality against fascist decoloniality — it must make a strong stand against the narrowness of whiteness, almost always the substance of settler fascism. It is not the racial ‘particularism’ of the oppressed that has limited communism in the settler-colonies, but the particularity and class-collaborationism of the white race as a political bloc.⁷⁸ In order to build a communist community, we must break the centrality of white domination as a restriction of free relationality, as a mutilation and distortion of the non-white and white alike. The ‘particularism’ of the oppressed is not navel-gazing or a so-called reverse-racism, but a recognition of the terrain established by colonial racialization. The totality is the coloniality of power, the coloniality intertwined with our relations with the world, but this totality is not homogenous but differentiated. It is exactly in its differentiation — into Colonizers and Natives, White and non-White, Human and non-Human, Metropole and Periphery, Bourgeoisie and Proletariat — that it is articulated as a social totality.
However, some communist critics of the white race have expressed a discontent with analysis which emphasizes settler-colonialism as a central dilemma for countries like the U.S. The Marxist militant Noel Ignatiev, for example, questioned the thesis of J. Sakai’s book Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (1983):
“But people from Africa were imported to the western hemisphere along with people from Europe. Why aren’t they counted as ‘settlers’ too? That must be where class analysis comes in. Here is another outline of history: The ruling classes imported from Europe and Africa laborers, soldiers, prostitutes, and all the others necessary to clear out the indigenous inhabitants, transform the environment, and start the profit-machine turning[…]
“It is true that ‘the entire settler economy was raised up on a foundation of slave labor, slave products, and the slave trade.’ Of course the fisherman, the clerk, the overseer, the farmer were ‘dependent’ on the system of slave labor; so was the child who tended a loom thirteen hours a day in a cotton-mill. Not only that, the slave was ‘dependent’ on the mill worker and fisherman. Ever since the division of labor, human beings have depended on others for the things they need to live. The cotton does not care whether it was picked, nor the cloth whether it was spun, by a laborer who was whipped to work or driven by want, nor does the owner of capital care whether the laborer’s subsistence takes the form of a peck of corn or a money wage, so long as it is exceeded in value by the laborer’s output. Since in modern society most producers are exploited laborers it follows that each group of laborers ‘depends’ on the exploitation of others. To attempt to give this truism a profounder significance is to embrace the world view of the bourgeoisie, which holds that its mode of regulating the social division of labor is natural.”⁷⁹
Ignatiev is not incorrect to point out that all are complacent in the totality of exploitation through the system of universal dependency. This the contradiction of domination, that it is still a form of relationality. The trouble is that Ignatiev does not properly appreciate the influence of settler-colonization to the relations of classes and the terrain of politics. The issues of colonizing more land, the rights to that land, the conduct of war against Indigenous peoples, and the uses of colonized land and labor have all emerged as determining in the history of the U.S. and other settler-colonies.
In these countries, there is a certain equation of settlerhood and whiteness — though not every settler is white, every white is whitened by settlerism. The settlers are the Herrenvolk who must realize their mission in the world. This populist worldview has in the U.S. been expressed in settler resistance to proletarianization, in opposition to wars, in resistance to the state… This settler perspective is exactly one of the culprits for the weakness of communism as a mass movement in the U.S. compared to general populist radicalism.⁸⁰ Settlerism cannot be anything but central to understanding the settler-colonies. Settlerism is both a relation of people mediated by land, and a relation to nature itself — a mode of labor.
The Question of Nature
Nature is a core distinguishing theme between communism, fascism, and decoloniality in their critiques of bourgeois society. How a perspective constructs its relationship to nature, or constructs nature itself, reveals its own nature. One’s relationship to nature, one’s ethic of life amidst the world, is defining of any civilization. And the relationship of subjectivity to corporeal life is mediated through the metabolism of labor.
The domination of nature is the origin of exploitation, it is what enables the accumulation of surpluses and the control of those surpluses by those best fit for domination. Of course, origin is never sufficient explanation — there must be further determinations and specifications — but it is an important consideration in order to understand the trajectory of something. In the history of domination, we can recognize a certain theme of imperial forms of labor. These are forms of labor which posit a split between laboring subject and the object of labor, between actor and acted upon, between the doer and the done to, thinking and being, being and having, etc. This means a domination of the world by a subjectivity, the transformation of the world into a totality in its own image and the subordination of the exterior Other to itself. The imperial forms of labor pursue the identity of the world to itself, the realization of the Self-Same.
The response of radicalism to this theme of domination in the relationship of human beings and nature reveals its own contours. This can reveal the degree of complicity in bourgeois civilization (whether by communists, fascists, or decolonizers), but it can also reveal tendencies towards other forms of domination. By extension, it is key to determining the differences between ‘left’ and ‘right’ decolonization.
The mainstream relation to nature in decolonization has not been much different from that of the West. Nature becomes a territory for the new nation-state, a pool of resources to be extracted from for development along Western lines.⁸¹ This drive to recreate nature in the image of the national-bourgeois subject fails, on the one hand because this national-bourgeoisie is hopelessly dependent to the dominant powers of this Eurocentered neo-colonial world-system, and on the other because every drive to recreate nature in the image of the subject always fails. The destruction of nature destroys the cohesiveness of the nation itself, revealing who the state really prioritizes. There are some who are expendable, left to drown in the runoff of capitalist ecological destruction, and others who have the money to avoid these consequences in the short run. The traditional ecological practices of agricultural laborers and peasants are perceived as an inefficiency to be swept aside in modernization (or, more accurately, capitalization) of agriculture. This developmentalist model provokes discontent from within the project of nationalism itself.
One response to this exploitation of the earth from within the frame of nationalism itself takes the form of Romanticism. Bourgeois developmentalism is a betrayal of the homeland, a foreign and parasitic imposition. The elites hate the land as they hate the nation, and it is up to the authentic nationalists to restore a rooted relationship with the soil of the fatherland.⁸² This is a perspective of Blood and Soil, which considers nature as a cradle of humanity (or, rather, distinct cradles for distinct humans).⁸³ Each people is rooted in Blood and Soil in a homeland, they are racially-spiritually bound to these places. The connection is pure, it is immediate, it is embedded. Where labor is not tainted by Jewish abstractness, as in bourgeois civilization, it can be truly said that work makes you free (arbeit macht frei).⁸⁴
This perspective immanently leads into anti-semitism and other forms of hostility to Otherness.⁸⁵ Decoloniality understood as the restoration of the Self-Same to itself reveals all of the worst tendencies within communality. Communality is not sufficient in itself — there must be communist universalism, which recognizes and respects Otherness.
Communist universalism emerges from the diasporic figures of the world — in particular, the proletariat as the ultimate diasporic class in history. It is perfectly compatible with decolonial perspective. It is ‘rootless’ diaspora itself which has contributed significantly to the development of decolonial liberation movements, whether Black radicalism in the Atlantic or the broad development of national liberation movements in the metropoles of Paris, London, and Berlin in the 20th century.⁸⁶
Rootedness, the flat contrasting of the good-concrete and bad-abstract, is a stubbornly childish response to the dilemma of bourgeois civilization.⁸⁷ Abstraction, rootlessness, is not bad in itself — abstraction is immanent to concreteness, it is what ensures the richness of it (after all, how can one understand the wealth of characteristics without abstracting them?). Dead abstraction and flat concreteness go hand in hand, as they reproduce the split of subject and object. It is no coincidence that this perspective tends to fall into a trite image of a pure nature, of unsullied and broad landscapes spread wide open for the national-man. The vegetarianism of Adolf Hitler and Hindutva alike can be understood as reproducing this ideal of nature, which is clean of the indeterminacy, contingency, and flux revealed by the practice of labor.⁸⁸
Fascism incorporates the false dichotomy of workerism, fetishizing imperial forms of labor, and Romanticism, fetishizing the supposed purity of nature as the subordinated Other of the Self-Same subject. While the fascists fetishize the Self-Same, communism which is genuinely liberatory pursues the intersubjectivity of laboring subjectivity with Otherness. Communism which seeks the Self-Same rooted community turns into its opposite — it becomes a fascist worship of productive labor and the myth of Blood and Soil. Similarly, decoloniality which conceives of coloniality as primarily defined by “rootlessness” and “parasitism” reproduces an imperial mode of relation with the world.
There is a reason that Marx did not praise work as the highest virtue. Instead he considered the aim of communism to abolish work as we have known it thus far. Communism is established through the self-abolition of the proletariat, not the creation of a proletarian civilization. Labor cannot be the instrumental metabolism characteristic of its imperial forms. Labor must be the prime want of life, an expression of free association and understanding of the Otherness of natural beings.⁸⁹
Thus the true alternative, the communist alternative, is to realize decolonization by recognizing nature as a subject (or, rather, a wealth of subjectivities) and calling for universal kinship with the world. Labor must become a self-conscious free association rather than a subordination of Otherness into Self-Sameness.⁹⁰ Through the universality opened up by bourgeois civilization, we must carve out the contours of a civilization founded on love. Neither labor, nor Blood and Soil, but universal kinship represents the realization of decolonization.
