Recovering Reparative Readings of Postcolonialism and Marxism

Introduction

Postcolonialism has had a vexed relationship with Marxism for as long as it has existed as a distinct strand of critical theory in the academy. If the first signs of disconnect were visible in Edward Said’s indictment of Marx as Orientalist (Said, 1985: 153–6), this alienation would only deepen in Homi Bhabha’s (1994) recasting of the colonial encounter in agonistic rather than antagonistic terms, and in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s (2000) critique of Marxist time as Eurocentric, to cite only some of the most influential interventions. For their part, Marxists were critical of what they saw as postcolonialism’s excessive focus on culture, its complicity with poststructuralism in repudiating capitalism’s foundational role in history, and its valorization of the very modes of belonging – hybridity and cosmopolitanism, now preferred over a purportedly outmoded and atavistic nationalism – that best served the needs of a relentlessly mobile late capitalism (Ahmad, 1994; Dirlik, 1994; Lazarus, 2002; Parry, 2004).

Despite revisionist historical and theoretical efforts at bridging this divide (Young, 2001), not to mention the passage of over two decades in which scholarship across disciplines has, untroubled by these polemics, drawn simultaneously on the resources of both postcolonialism and Marxism, two recent works of which I shall offer critical readings in this article remind us that the divide is alive, well, and enduringly disabling. John Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (2012), in delivering an ambitious, wide-ranging and scathing indictment of most mainstream international relations theory as Eurocentric, racist, or both, takes aim as much at Marxism and various forms of neo-Marxism as it does at theoretical approaches such as realism and liberalism that are more hegemonic within the discipline. Vivek Chibber’s Postcolonial Theory and the Specter of Capital (2013) renews the Marxist attack on postcolonialism, ironically deploying postcolonial concepts against the theoretical edifice of which they are part. Focusing more narrowly on the subfield of subaltern studies, he argues that in positing distinctions between capitalism in the ‘East’ and ‘West’, subaltern studies is itself a form of orientalism.

For those of us invested in the analysis of, and struggle against, multiple and intersecting forms of oppression on the basis of class, race, nation, gender, sexuality, disability and other axes of subordination, the continued mutual repudiation of postcolonialism and Marxism is disconcerting. While such arguments are analytically useful in alerting us to the potentials and pitfalls of various traditions of critical thought, the relative lack of attention in such polemics to reparative possibilities immanent within the theoretical formations being criticized forces us to choose positions that insist on the analytical and normative priority of certain forms of subordination over others. One might have thought that with the theorization of intersectionality by black and Third World feminists (Crenshaw, 1991; Mohanty, 1988) we had at last found a way to think about different forms of injustice together. Taking my cue from such work but resisting a view of intersectionality as the monopoly of certain forms of radical thought, in this article I want to explore the intersectional possibilities immanent within the political thought of the figures who are the principal targets of critique for Hobson and Chibber. Thus, against Hobson’s reading of Marx and Lenin as imperialist and Eurocentric respectively, I draw on alternative accounts that reveal both to have been deeply attentive to, and supportive of, anticolonial nationalism. Against Chibber’s reading of subaltern studies as orientalist, I suggest that its foundational premises rest on a claim not of cultural difference but of capitalist unevenness, rendering it far more convergent with mainstream Marxism than Chibber acknowledges. One casualty of the mutual repudiation of postcolonialism and Marxism is a forgetting of the theoretical achievements of an obvious area of overlap, namely black Marxism. In this regard, I find it salutary to return to the work of Frantz Fanon, whose remarkable oeuvre troubles the separation between the ‘cultural’ and ‘material’ that seems to have become a feature of the contemporary critical theoretic landscape.

Imperialist Marx? Eurocentric Lenin?

John Hobson’s The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics (2012) is perhaps best understood as seeking to make a contribution to postcolonial international relations. While clearly sympathetic to postcolonialism’s core claims about the Eurocentrism of mainstream social and political theory, Hobson is keen to sharpen these insights. In particular, he argues that Said’s notion of orientalism is insufficiently nuanced in its conflation of ‘scientific racism’ and ‘Eurocentric institutionalism’, which he understands as forms of hierarchical political thought underpinned by genetic/biological and institutional/cultural justifications respectively. In addition, Hobson argues that these distinct ways of justifying inequality could buttress both imperialist and anti-imperialist thought. Deploying these dual claims, Hobson constructs a 2 x 2 matrix within which he proceeds to map ‘Western International Theory’ between 1760 and 2010, by placing its most significant contributions in one of four categories: racist imperialism, racist anti-imperialism, Eurocentric imperialism, and Eurocentric anti-imperialism (Hobson, 2012: 3–13). As should be evident from this brief description, the book is wide-ranging in scope, taking aim at a staggering range of thinkers and theoretical traditions. What concerns me here is the placement of Marx, Lenin and various forms of neo-Marxism within this matrix in ways that I believe are symptomatic of a continuing, and somewhat casual, postcolonial repudiation of Marxism.

Hobson’s account of Marx begins with the familiar Saidian characterization of Marx as orientalist, and with the reading offered by Chakrabarty of Marx’s Eurocentric conception of history. But Hobson goes further than either of these critics in claiming that Marx was also ‘pro-imperialist’ (Hobson, 2012: 52–3). As is well known, Marx reads imperialism – and specifically British imperialism – as the force that propels ‘backward’ societies into capitalist modernity and thence into socialism and communism. The question this raises is whether this undoubtedly teleological view of history also carries implications of historical necessity and normative endorsement.

Aijaz Ahmad (1994: 225) has argued that Marx’s view of British colonialism in India as playing a progressive role in sweeping away the remnants of ‘Oriental despotism’ was analogous to his view of capitalism as playing a progressive role in dismantling feudalism in Europe. As Hobson well recognizes, Marx’s ‘progressive’ reading of imperialism is heavily qualified by his recognition of the ‘misery inflicted by the British on Hindostan’ (Marx, 1853a). Yet if Ahmad is correct in his ‘capitalism in Europe = imperialism in India’ analogy, then it is as odd to characterize Marx’s ambivalence about imperialism as ‘pro-imperialist’ as it would be to characterize his ambivalence about capitalism as ‘pro-capitalist’. Moreover, the ambivalence over the capitalist/imperialist moment never eclipses Marx’s conviction that the moment needs to be transcended and that this transcendence requires anticolonial struggle. Hobson’s characterization of Marx as ‘pro-imperialist’ seems to miss the point that the full working through of his dialectical conception of history requires anti-imperialist struggle. Indeed, Marx is categorical about this in his writings on India where he makes clear that the British bourgeoisie are simply laying the ‘material premises’ for the development of India’s productive powers, the full realization of which would require their appropriation by the Indian people either through the assistance of a proletarian revolution in Britain or at such time as ‘the Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether’ (Marx, 1853b).

This unequivocal recognition of the possibility that the ‘Hindoos’ might themselves overthrow the colonial yoke also calls into question Hobson’s reading of Marx as suggesting that once the East had entered into capitalism ‘the Western working class would come to the aid of the Eastern peoples in order to deliver them to the terminus of communism’ (Hobson, 2012: 55). Hobson relies heavily on Jorge Larrain’s conclusion that ‘Marx and Engels at this time did not believe in the right of self-determination of backward nations and thought that the national struggles for liberation and independence had to be subordinated to the needs of the stronger and more progressive nations’ (2012: 55). But the crucial and ambiguous qualification ‘at this time’ (at which time?) is never interrogated. As Erica Benner (1995: 197–199) has persuasively demonstrated, if in the 1840s the impetus for global proletarian revolution was thought to lie in the metropolitan working classes, by the 1860s – faced with the defeats of 1848, the expansion of European colonialism and, most importantly, the sense that there was no necessary identity of interests between the metropolitan working classes and colonized peoples – Marx and Engels came around to the view that national independence for the colonies could revitalize working class internationalism. It is in this context that they pay particular attention to Ireland. Hobson gives short shrift to the Irish writings, attributing the centrality accorded to Ireland in these later writings to the fact that ‘clearly Ireland was not characterized by the Asiatic mode of production’ (Hobson, 2012: 58). Yet a closer engagement with Marx’s views on the Irish struggle might have revealed that his re-evaluation of the importance of anti-colonial struggle came in part from a recognition of the complex links between national liberation and class struggle. Marx recognized that colonial possessions in Ireland strengthened the English aristocratic landowning classes in their struggle against the English working class, while leaving them vulnerable in Ireland to a hostility that was simultaneously economic and national. But colonialism also divided the working class in England, thereby weakening it as a revolutionary agent: English workers resented the Irish as competitors who lowered wages and the standard of living, while Irish workers viewed their English counterparts as tools of English domination over Ireland (Marx, 1869, 1870). Marx pays attention to Ireland not because of its cultural similitude – indeed it is crucial to recall that the Irish are not considered ‘white’ at this time – but because:

England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation. (Marx, 1870; emphasis in original)

Far from subordinating anticolonial liberation to the emancipation of the metropolitan working classes, Marx by this point appears to make the former a precondition for the latter. Two objections might be levelled against the argument made so far: first, that national liberation is still envisaged as a means to the end of more effective class struggle; and second, that Marx’s recognition of the importance of anti-colonial struggle in the peripheries of the world economy is confined (and consigned) to relatively less significant empirical-political works such as letters and newspaper articles. The first objection must be conceded, although one might legitimately question, as Marx did, whether bourgeois nationalist movements that effectively replace foreign colonial oppression with indigenous class domination are worthy of support (Lenin would go a step further in advocating tactical, and therefore temporary, alliance with such movements). The second objection is undermined by Kevin Anderson’s (2010) claim that Marx’s attention to non-Western societies worked its way into his later major theoretical works such as the Grundrisse and the much neglected but significantly revised French edition of Capital that appeared between 1872–5, becoming the last edition whose publication Marx personally supervised. Here, Anderson argues, Marx’s teleological view of history – evident in The Communist Manifesto (Marx and Engels, 2004) and offering the provocation for Chakrabarty’s (2000) postcolonial critique – gives way to a more multilinear conception. In particular, Marx repeatedly clarifies in these and later (1877–82) writings on Russia that the stadial account of development from feudalism through capitalism to socialism and communism that he had outlined in earlier writings applied only to countries that had already embarked upon the path of industrial development (in his time, Western Europe), leaving open the possibility that non-capitalist societies such as Russia and India would chart their own paths and might indeed move directly to socialism from indigenous communal lifeworlds without passing through the stage of capitalism (Anderson, 2010: 178–9, 224, 226–8). This crucial clarification implied also a shift in the earlier view of colonialism. If capitalism was no longer a necessary stage, colonialism – as the vehicle that brought capitalism to the stagnant and vegetative Orient – was no longer a necessary evil.

In contrast to Marx, Hobson reads Lenin as clearly anti-imperialist but as guilty of a ‘subliminal Eurocentrism’ (Hobson, 2012: 136). Hobson’s complaint arises from Lenin’s alleged portrayal of the East ‘as a helpless victim that is entirely defenceless and is stripped of both agency and dignity by a reified Leviathanesque West that struts the world stage like a Behemoth’ (2012: 139). For Hobson, what makes Lenin’s worldview Eurocentric ‘is its inability to factor in even a semblance of Eastern agency within the narrative, either of a developmental or a resistance capacity’ (2012: 142).

This is not a picture of Lenin that I recognize. Interestingly, all of Hobson’s references to Lenin date from before 1917 (2012: 348). But 1917 is a rather odd year in which to stop reading Lenin. For once at the helm of the new Soviet Russian state, Lenin found himself in a dire strategic situation, encircled by counterrevolutionary powers providing assistance to his White Russian enemies in the ongoing civil war and let down by the failure of revolutionary upheavals in Germany and Hungary. It was in this context that he proved receptive to the suggestion of Sultan-Galiev (the highest ranking Muslim member of the Soviet Communist Party) that the countries of the East were of potentially greater revolutionary significance (Young, 2001: 129). Accordingly, the ‘colonial question’ assumed centre stage at the 1920 Second Congress of the Comintern. In the famous ‘Draft Theses on National and Colonial Questions’ published in June 1920, Lenin (1920) calls – as much from anxiety as from ambition – for ‘the closest alliance, with Soviet Russia, of all the national and colonial liberation movements’. The Draft Theses occasioned fierce disagreements with communist delegates from the colonies. The Indian communist M. N. Roy, for example, strongly disagreed with Lenin’s call for a temporary alliance between communists and bourgeois nationalist elements of anti-colonial movements (Manjapra, 2010). There is no denying that Moscow was heavy handed in its relations with colonial communist parties, often dispensing grossly ill-informed instructions about the need for such alliances against the advice of local communists, with disastrous consequences (the example of China in the 1920s is relevant here). Yet the crucial point is that what was at issue in these arguments was not whether Eastern peoples had agency, but the rather more complex question of what kind of Eastern agency communists should throw their weight behind.

In some ways, Hobson reserves his harshest criticism for neo-Marxist approaches such as world systems theory, describing it as ‘one of the most Eurocentric international theories that have been formulated in the last 250 years!’ (Hobson, 2012: 252). Here the argument rests primarily on a reading of Immanuel Wallerstein, whom Hobson criticizes as Eurocentric, first, because of his account of the ‘rise of the West’ as attributable largely to endogenous factors, and, second, because of his understanding of the construction of the global economic structure by a hyper-agential West with the ‘victimized agency-less East’ locked permanently in relations of dependence (2012: 236–40). Hobson reads one instance of this denial of Eastern agency in Wallerstein’s insistence that attempts by socialist states to delink from the global capitalist economy are not only doomed to fail but end up reinforcing the system as revolutionary states learn the bitter lesson that accommodation to the rules of the game is the price of their survival in a hostile world (2012: 240).

This is puzzling because the more plausible reading of world systems theory is that it is not so much a denial of Eastern agency as a sobering account of the constraints within which it must operate. Indeed the architecture of world systems theory is prefigured in the work of black Marxists. When C. L. R. James (2001) narrates the tragedy of the Haitian Revolution, he is effectively arguing that there were limits to what even the heroic agency of a Toussaint L’Ouverture could achieve. One might also read the third chapter of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1967) as a precocious account of dependency and world systems theory. Outlining the structural relations between the metropolitan bourgeoisie, native bourgeoisie and native proletariat (prefiguring the categories of core, semi-periphery and periphery), Fanon provides a masterful account of the necessity, the difficulty, but also the possibility of liberation from these structural constraints. Conversely when Hobson invokes the ‘agential power of the East Asian NICs to break out of the periphery’ as evidence of the wrongness of world systems theory (Hobson, 2012: 242), he betrays the extreme voluntarism of his analysis. Missing in his discussion of this phenomenon is any acknowledgement of the benign structural position (Cold War geopolitical alliances, defence umbrellas, access to markets and technology) in which these states found themselves. I shall have occasion to return to a discussion of black Marxism, dependency theory, and the relationship between the two, in discussing the very different problems posed by Chibber’s book.

Subaltern Studies as Orientalism?

Although the title of Chibber’s book promises an engagement with ‘postcolonial theory’, it is narrower in its scope, limiting itself to a critique of subaltern studies or, even more specifically, the work of three of its leading figures – Ranajit Guha, Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee. As Chibber (2013a: 12–22) reconstructs it, subaltern studies is committed to the proposition that capitalism in the ‘East’ differs from its counterpart in the ‘West’. In the colonized world, capitalism produces bourgeoisies characterized by ‘dominance without hegemony’ (Guha, 1998). Such a bourgeoisie is unable or unwilling to forge the sorts of hegemonic coalitions with workers and peasants that spearheaded the bourgeois revolutions against the ancien regimes of England and France. The result, in the colonies, is a disarticulated polity divided into elite and subaltern domains, each characterized by distinct idioms of power and resistance, and lacking the integrated political cultures of liberal capitalist states. One major implication of this understanding is that the terms and categories of conventional social theory, emerging as they do out of a particular experience of capitalism in the West, are indispensable but also inadequate in grasping the political modernity of the non-West. This inadequacy motivates the scholarly project of ‘provincializing Europe’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 16) as a space-clearing gesture enabling the pursuit of subaltern studies. Chibber identifies three respects in which, he argues, the subalternists are committed to making sharp East/West distinctions – the nature of the bourgeoisie, the nature of capitalist power, and the nature of resistance thereto. He endeavours to demonstrate that, in all three respects, East and West are more similar than distinct and that (his) Marxism offers a conceptual apparatus that is better able to theorize the universality of capital in conditions of cultural difference. I shall focus on his reflections on the bourgeoisie in this section, turning to the question of resistance in the following section.

Chibber (2013a: chs 2–4) strongly disagrees with what he presents as Guha’s account of the classic ‘bourgeois’ revolutions of England and France. He reads Guha as suggesting that those revolutions were driven by ‘heroic’ bourgeoisies that succeeded in dismantling feudal landed power by crafting wide coalitions over which they secured their hegemony through an accommodation of subaltern interests in the language of political and economic liberalism. Against this, Chibber offers a view of these revolutions as elite compacts in which the revolutionary leadership sought to deploy the insurrectionary zeal of the lower orders to attack the ancien regime, but also closed ranks among themselves so as to obviate excessive concessions to those below them.

If Hobson’s treatment of Marxism is misleading because of his temporally truncated readings of particular thinkers, Chibber’s treatment of postcolonialism suffers from a broader genealogical forgetting of the Marxist theoretical antecedents that underpin the subaltern studies project. Moreover, for a text that purports to tell the story of the world through an account of two universalisms – the universalizing drive of capital, and the universal interest of the subaltern classes in defending their well-being against capital’s domination (Chibber, 2013a: 202–3) – there is a curious absence of international political economy in Chibber’s book. Bourgeoisies and subalterns are locked in combat in hermetically sealed states, with the role of the international remaining somewhat obscure. It is with a view to recovering these forgotten genealogies, as well as the place of the international, that I turn to those currents of Marxism that unabashedly foreground distinctions between Western and colonized bourgeoisies (in ways that parallel Guha’s thesis), which might be regarded as providing the structural basis for the subaltern studies imaginary.

It is here that Fanon is instructive. Like Guha but well before him of course, Fanon clearly distinguishes between Western bourgeoisies and the national bourgeoisies of what he calls ‘under-developed’ countries. As he puts it:

A bourgeoisie similar to that which developed in Europe is able to elaborate an ideology and at the same time strengthen its own power. Such a bourgeoisie, dynamic, educated and secular, has fully succeeded in its undertaking of the accumulation of capital and has given to the nation a minimum of prosperity. In under-developed countries, we have seen that no true bourgeoisie exists. (Fanon, 1967: 141)

The reason for this crucial distinction is that the bourgeoisie of the under-developed country is a dependent bourgeoisie, ‘content with the role of the Western bourgeoisie’s business agent’ (1967: 122). In terms that clearly anticipate Guha’s argument, Fanon declares that ‘this bourgeoisie will manage to put away enough money to stiffen its domination. But it will always reveal itself as incapable of giving birth to an authentic bourgeois society with all the economic and industrial consequences which this entails’ (1967: 144; emphasis added). This incapacity stemmed from its inability to accumulate capital on the scale necessary for the birth of a bourgeois society that might in turn create the conditions for the emergence of a large-scale industrial proletariat – an inability that arose principally from the limitations placed on it by a metropolitan bourgeoisie bent on securing access to the resources of the (post)colony (1967: 140–44).

This argument would receive fuller elaboration in the work of dependency theorists (Galtung, 1971; Cardoso and Faletto, 1979; Evans, 1979). Briefly summarized, their work provided an account of how colonialism produced disarticulated colonies with ‘modern’ sectors developed for capital accumulation and integrated into the metropolitan and world economies and ‘traditional’ sectors lacking such linkages and producing mainly for local demand. Colonial rule, whether direct or indirect, typically entailed collaboration with those elites most closely associated with modern sectors of the colony that enabled it to function as a source of capital. Where decolonization did not substantially disrupt these social structures but merely transferred power to local elites, the picture of disarticulation and dependence endured (and indeed was exacerbated in those postcolonies that pursued export-oriented strategies of growth). This meant that both during and after colonial rule, a large class of people – ‘subalterns’, or what Chatterjee (2004) would later call ‘political society’ – would have little stake in the structures and institutions of elite ‘civil society’. Crucially, dependency theorists emphasized that dependent bourgeoisies consolidated their power by relying on their external political and economic linkages – first with the colonial power and subsequently, in the circumstances of informal empire that characterized the Cold War, with either of the superpowers – rather than by bargaining with their working classes, as was characteristic of state formation in the West (Tilly, 1990). In other words, international dependence obviated the need for dependent bourgeoisies to seek domestic hegemony. Subaltern studies would contest a number of features of these arguments – their teleological premises, the tendency to view the ‘traditional’ as anachronism, etc. Yet its foundational claim that capitalism in the postcolonial world took a distinct form, being spearheaded by a non-hegemonic bourgeoisie, did not depart substantially from arguments developed within other currents of Marxism. One might see the subaltern studies agenda as that of elaborating the nature of power, resistance and modernity within those social spaces (the ‘traditional’ sectors of the periphery) that other forms of Marxism had dismissed, ignored, or otherwise misunderstood, without disagreeing with Marxist accounts of the structural conditions that produced and enabled such space.

Two further comments on the characterization of bourgeoisies and subalterns in Chibber’s disagreement with Guha are in order. First, to assert that peripheral bourgeoisies were distinct from metropolitan ones in being dominant without being hegemonic requires making no assumptions about the ‘heroism’ or enlightenment of the latter in securing hegemony. (Chibber (2013a: 49, 66, 80, 93, 97, 130) latches on to the term ‘heroism’ in Guha’s work in order to discredit him as offering a Whig history that reiterates capital’s self-serving vision of itself as driving the liberal revolutions of Western Europe.) Western bourgeoisies cultivated hegemony in their self-interest, first in pursuit of the dual objectives of state- and war-making that Tilly (1990) chronicles and, later, to obviate the threat of communist subversion from within and without. Peripheral bourgeoisies were equally self-interested but secured their interests through different strategies, enabled by their distinct structural position in the world economy. In other words, the differences between metropolitan and peripheral bourgeoisies in these accounts rest not on claims of cultural difference but on a cognizance of capitalist unevenness. In this sense, we might also see subaltern studies as building on and moving beyond Trotsky’s theory of ‘uneven and combined development’ (UCD). Contra Kamran Matin (2011), who considers the framework of UCD to be preferable to that of postcolonial theory for its ability to theorize capitalist unevenness without jettisoning the universal, I regard UCD not as an alternative to subaltern studies but as an explanation of the structural conditions that give rise to the forms of political culture that subaltern studies investigates.

Second, bringing the international and the geopolitical into the picture also casts subaltern success and failure in a different light. Chibber (2013a: 98) accuses Guha of being so preoccupied with the character of the bourgeoisie that the subaltern classes rarely emerge as actors in Dominance without Hegemony. Conversely, because Chibber sees bourgeoisies everywhere as the same, he must ascribe differential outcomes – the achievement of liberalism and democracy in the West, but not in large parts of the postcolonial world – largely to subaltern agency or lack thereof. We are offered a highly voluntaristic account in which liberal freedoms in the West are attributed almost entirely to struggles from below, and their absence in many other parts of the world to ‘the weakness of the labor movement and peasant organizations’ (Chibber, 2013b). Subalterns, in other words, have no one to blame but themselves. This precludes us from offering the most blindingly obvious account of the structural impediments facing even victorious subaltern interests that take power in the form of, say, a Mossadegh, an Arbenz, or an Allende.

Revisiting Fanon

How should we think about the nature of subaltern resistance? On this question too, Chibber accuses the subalternists of making unwarranted distinctions between the forms of ‘political psychology’ underpinning peasant and worker resistance in the West (secular, individual, rights-based) and East (religious/caste, communal, duty-bound). Chibber (2013a: chs 7, 8) offers a counter-reading of the work of Guha and Chatterjee on peasant movements in Bengal and Chakrabarty on jute mill workers in Calcutta, arguing that such resistance was informed not by religious or caste conceptions of duty and obligation but by universally appreciable considerations of material interest. He takes issue with Chakrabarty’s objection that materialist explanations for resistance impute external reasons to agents, shoehorning them into a universalist rubric rather than taking seriously the locally situated understandings that motivate action (2013a: 183). Chibber responds by arguing that the grounds on which agents make choices are not entirely constituted by culture and that there are some goals, needs or interests – in particular, ‘the simple need for physical well-being’ – that are ‘independent of culture’ and provide the basis for a universal materialist accounting of agency (2013a: 196–7).

This is, in some ways, the weakest claim in the book – one that threatens to take social theory back to the ‘truncated economism’ (Fraser, 2013: 9) that has provoked the hostility of new social movements for over half a century and that continues to underpin some of the most debilitating divisions within the left. At an analytical level, the claim is problematic because while the need for physical well-being may well stand outside of culture, it is ‘culture’ that enables a consciousness of this interest as something to which one is entitled rather than as a privilege that must be earned, not to mention a cognizance of how one might attain this interest acting individually or in concert with others.

Fanon is prescient on this inescapable relationship between the material and the cultural. As he makes clear in the introduction to Black Skin, White Masks:

The analysis that I am undertaking is psychological, In spite of this it is apparent to me that the effective disalienation of the black man entails an immediate recognition of social and economic realities. If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process: – primarily, economic; – subsequently, the internalization – or, better, the epidermalization – of this inferiority. (Fanon, 1986: 12–13)

The awareness of this ‘double process’ informed Fanon’s practice as a psychoanalyst and political activist. Commenting on a patient whom he diagnoses as suffering from a racial inferiority complex, he notes that ‘As a psychoanalyst, I should help my patient to become conscious of his unconscious and abandon his attempts at a hallucinatory whitening, but also to act in the direction of a change in the social structure’ (1986: 100). Indeed, this latter remark might lead us to question the order of priority – ‘primarily, subsequently’ – that Fanon suggests in the previous quote which appears to hew to a straightforwardly pre-Althusserian understanding of relations between base and superstructure. For it is difficult to see how the patient could be motivated to participate in the process of changing the (material) social structure without first becoming conscious of his unconscious. Without the mental decolonization that Fanon is so clearly calling for, the patient might conceivably have continued to respond to the material brutalities of racism in the futile and self-loathing register of ‘hallucinatory whitening’.

Fanon’s genius for thinking about race, class and gender together does not always yield progressive insights. Feminist critics have argued that despite his preoccupation with the ways in which the racism of colonial occupation structures gender relations (a central theme of Black Skin, White Masks), Fanon’s account of the liberatory potential of violence articulated most clearly in The Wretched of the Earth fails to take seriously the very different experiences of women in guerrilla warfare (White, 2007). In addition, queer theorists have demonstrated how Fanon’s account of the ‘libidinal economy of Negrophobia’ (Mercer, 1996: 114, 124) is shot through with homophobia as a result of its tendency to understand racism as a concomitant of sexual ‘perversion’ and, thereby, to associate homosexuality with whiteness (Edelman, 1994; Fuss, 1994). Such associations have left troubling consequences for African and other Third World liberation movements, which often sought to recuperate a masculinity humiliated by the experience of colonialism, in part, by enacting violence against African women and non-normative men (Stychin, 1998; Epprecht, 2005).

But my purpose in revisiting Fanon here is not to endorse particular insights about the ways in which gender, class and race are related under conditions of colonialism. Rather, I find Fanon useful in the context of this article as a reminder of the existence of a form of political thought that is situated in a position of productive ambivalence with respect to both postcolonialism and Marxism on account of its refusal to accord any one axis of subordination analytical or normative priority. Fanon and other black Marxists inaugurate a technique of political analysis, a way of thinking about race and class (and other forms of inequality) that is all but obscured in contemporary polemics that insist on viewing postcolonialism and Marxism as unremittingly opposed to one another.

None of this is to deny that some forms of postcolonialism and Marxism are indeed worlds apart: those variants of postcolonial thought most indebted to poststructuralism would seem to have little in common with the most crudely economistic forms of Marxism. What I am questioning here is the political usefulness of focusing on such undeniable and unbridgeable difference, to the relative neglect of the more difficult and reparative work of finding ways of thinking about different forms of injustice together. The works that I have surveyed in this article present us with a choice between postcolonialism and Marxism, a choice that I insist is not only unnecessary but also unavailable to those who find themselves in the crosshairs of multiple oppressions. Indeed, from the perspective of those multiply subordinated by intersecting oppressions, postcolonialism and Marxism – narrowly conceived, in their most orthodox avatars – might both appear inadequate but also indispensable, focusing as they do on distinct forms of hierarchy. The black feminist writer bell hooks (1994) best captures the spirit of my approach in her critical readings of Paulo Freire, Albert Memmi and Fanon himself. Castigating them for what she calls a ‘phallocentric paradigm of liberation’ in which freedom is inextricably linked to the experience of patriarchal manhood, she nonetheless expresses a deep admiration for their work. As she puts it:

To have work that promotes one’s liberation is such a powerful gift that it does not matter so much if the gift is flawed. Think of the work as water that contains some dirt. Because you are thirsty you are not too proud to extract the dirt and be nourished by the water. (hooks, 1994: 50)

Insofar as contemporary critique revels in explicating and deepening the fissures between postcolonialism and Marxism, it renders ever more remote the prospects for meaningful intersectional analysis and activism. I prefer to see postcolonialism and Marxism as flawed gifts, each of which helps to ‘extract the dirt’ from the other. This article makes a modest contribution towards that endeavour by offering, first, against the postcolonial caricature of Marx and Lenin as Eurocentric, alternative readings of them as advocates of anticolonial liberation who enable us to theorize national struggles without losing the centrality of class; and, second, against the Marxist caricature of subaltern studies as culturalist neo-orientalism, an alternative genealogy that positions it as a close relative of dependency and world systems theory that nonetheless remedies their neglect of ‘peripheral’ political cultures in an uneven world economy. In doing so, while also remembering the legacy of Fanon, I hope to have gestured at forms of political thinking that enable us to take seriously both the material and cultural roots of injustice in our contemporary world.