IN THE U.S. and U.K. academy, calls for decolonization have come to be associated with a program of institutional and curricular reform—one that challenges Eurocentric ideas by incorporating Indigenous, Black, or Global South voices and complements diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. According to this increasingly fashionable outlook, universities can decolonize their syllabi, for example, by ensuring adequate representation of non-white authors and reshaping classrooms to be more student-centered.
This understanding of decolonization bears only passing resemblance to the concept and practice as it emerged in the twentieth century. As elaborated by the late Guyanese historian and revolutionary socialist Walter Rodney in Decolonial Marxism, a recent collection of his unbound and lesser-known essays from the 1960s and ’70s, “decolonization is . . . inseparable from a total strategy for liberation,” which entails “control of the material resources” and “a restructuring of the society so that those who produce have the principal say in how their wealth is going to be distributed.” For figures like Rodney, decolonization was a comprehensive political project, centered not in universities but in global mass struggles.
At a time when influential decolonial scholarship has issued crude equations of Marxist thought with Eurocentric class reductionism, the title of the recent collection is itself is a provocation. (Rodney does not use the adjective “decolonial” nor, as we will argue, would he think “Marxism” needs such a qualifier.) Throughout Rodney’s tragically short life, Africa and indeed much of the world were the sites of wide-ranging Marxist struggles—from Amílcar Cabral’s Guinea-Bissau to the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), or Worker-Peasant Party, in Pakistan; from Naxalism in India to Maoism in the Philippines and communism in the Arab world; from Indigenous Maoism in North America to guerrillaism in Cuba, liberation theology in Latin America, and Black radicalism in the United States. Neither Eurocentric nor simply postcolonial, these worldly Marxisms represent a political tradition undergoing constant reinvention as it exceeds its origins in Europe to extend across settler colonies, (post)colonies, and metropoles—a Marxism that acquires universal significance precisely through its attention to particular contexts.