Since apparently other white leftists have to almost deliberately misunderstand something, I’m now forced to do a 101 on the concept. I wish we didn’t have to have this conversation, but lo and behold the discourse is, as usual, in hell. Now I’ll freely admit I’m not the most well read on decolonization itself (I defer to some recommendations by comrades listed below). There is however, one very obvious myth about decolonization we can address.

Isn’t that just ethnonationalism / Blood and Soil but woke??

When dealing with settler colonialism, or any kind of colonization, we must first ask ourselves, whose end does this serve? The obvious answer: The capitalists, the clergy, the state, and whiteness itself. Now in truth, decolonization looks different everywhere, and this is because of our good friends material & historical conditions. They might be socialists, nationalists, or hell even anti-communists (assuming that the colonizing country is waving a red flag while claiming to be “anti-imperialist” as we’ve seen happen before). But this is all beside the point.

First and foremost, imperialism, in all it’s forms, serves the interest of the ruling classes. But on the myth itself, this makes a series of assumptions. First it assumes that decolonization itself – aiming at the end of the day for a condition that predates colonialism – is reactionary. South African communists resisted white minority rule for years, and when apartheid was over, they did not, contrary to the weird conspiracy theories of modern fascists, set up an ethnostate. This also didn’t happen in Vietnam, China, Algiers, and so on.

Second it assumes, in a rather racist way, that decolonization means total deportation of the settler. And to be clear, it does mean the annihilation of the settler state. But it would be impractical to deport every single person who wasn’t indigenous. Let us assume North America is decolonized and returned to it’s status as Turtle Island. How, it should be asked, would the natives (outnumbered as they are thanks to centuries of genocidal policy) deport the millions of people who weren’t indigenous? And what purpose would this serve? What utility does it have? No, when white leftists assume this ethnostatist position they do so for the same reason that fascists push the “white genocide” myth – Absence of white dominance implies (to them) the dominance by another race. But decolonization is the process of removing not only the colonizer as colonizer, but the colonized as colonized. Such mythological thinking doesn’t apply here.

Third it assumes that decolonization presupposes the state, and that that state looks the same way the colonial state did/does. We shall generously set aside that the Zapatistas, the Korean Anarchist Federation, the Kurdistan Worker’s Party, the (later phase) Black Liberation Army, the Awareness League, and more, did not assume the state. Instead, we must remember that colonial subjects had a way of life that preceded the colonist, and politics was one of the facets of that life. Furthermore we must remember that not every colonized people even possessed what we might refer to as a state, and that they possessed their own spiritual, sexual, and gender traditions & ideas. The colonizer did not bring political, spiritual, and sexual life with him, rather he brought his own with him and imposed it. Of course opposition to the state is a core principle of revolutionary socialists, but whatever path the colonized peoples of the world take is first and foremost their decision, so as to secure their newly found liberty. One does not get buried alive and then emerge without a spec of dirt on their clothing, nor matter how great that might be. But it does not, under any circumstances, automatically mean that the politics of the old and the politics of the new, are the same creature. Should they begin to, it is at this point where carefully considered critique comes into play, but the actual effort to decolonize, the effort towards liberation, this is a principal.

Recommended Reading from Comrades:

• The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon
• Black Skin, White Masks by Frantz Fanon
• Red Skin, White Mask by Glen Coulthard
• Traces of History by Patrick Wolf
• The Invention of Women by Oyeronke Oyewumi
• Orientalism by Edward Said
• Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson