Empire and its Enemies: A Conversation with Priyamvada Gopal
For Jamhoor’s 2022 annual special issue on Imperialism in South Asia, we interviewed Priyamvada Gopal, renowned scholar on race, colonialism and imperialism.
Illustration: Jamhoor
Jamhoor presents a conversation with Prof. Priyamvada Gopal, renowned scholar on race and imperialism and author of “Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent”. Our conversation was wide-ranging. We examined how imperialism is manifesting in South Asia today, the rise of China in the region, and alliances between South Asian authoritarianisms and various imperialist actors. We also discussed the contested concept of imperialism itself, asking if it is still a useful analytic category.
On the flip side, we also discussed the politics of anti-imperialism and decolonization. Are the concepts of freedom and emancipation, concepts that have often driven anti-colonial movements, inherently European (as some have argued)? How can we square the current emphasis on epistemological decolonization with the necessity for material decolonization? And, in a context where some – on both the left and the right – appear to be rejecting universalisms and internationalism in favour of particularity, how can we make the case for, and forge, anti-colonial solidarities across difference?
Shozab Raza (SR): Hello everyone, I’m Shozab.
Hadia Akhtar Khan (HK): And I’m Hadia.
SR: And you’re tuned into Jamhoor Radio.
HK: Launched in 2018, Jamhoor is a critical Left media organization that covers politics in South Asia and its diasporas.
SR: Today, you’re listening to a special podcast to launch Jamhoor’s summer 2022 issue on Imperialism in South Asia. Visit our website jamhoor.org to learn more.
HK: In the past year, we witnessed the catastrophic ending of the US occupation of Afghanistan, the discovery of unmarked mass graves of indigenous children in Canada, the uneven distribution of COVID vaccines and a deepening of the conflict between the US and China. Imperialism has returned to centre stage.
SR: We will be speaking today with a fierce critic of imperialism: Priyamvada Gopal. Priya is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at Cambridge University. Her teaching and research interests include colonial and postcolonial studies, the novel, South Asian literature and critical race studies. She is the author of several books, including most recently, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (published by Verso in 2020). Priya is also a well-known public intellectual, who was named one of the world's top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine.
HK: We wanted to start off by laying down some definitions of how you see imperialism. For instance, people like David Harvey argue that imperialism is no longer a useful category with the emergence of other actors – like India, China and various other nation states – appropriating surplus from each other. He argues that the East is appropriating more surplus value than the West. Then there’s the other side like the Patnaiks who argue that imperialism is still a useful category because the global North is still siphoning off the major profits from the global South. How do you define imperialism today?
Priyamvada Gopal (PG): My barebones definition of imperialism, historical and present, is that it is racial capitalism. It is the racialized emergence of capitalism, or it is the emergence of capitalism alongside race ideologies. In that context, both Harvey and the Patnaiks have a point, and we need to come up with an understanding that considers both positions. The Patnaiks are right to say that we have still not left entirely the age of the great European empires – the post 1492 dispensation is still with us in a great many ways.
But it is also necessary to recognize the emergence of new actors in the form of the BRICS (certainly the first four actors there: Brazil, Russia, India, China). The two things are not contradictory, and the reason I say that is: it is not just that the old dispensation is with us, it is also that the new actors are working very much within the terms of the old dispensation. And this is the thing about the decolonization of the last 70-75 years, the post-Bandung dispensation, that is the most striking: there has been a failure (and failure is perhaps a euphemism) to break from racial capitalism. And by that, I don’t mean that these new actors are using the same racial ideologies, but rather that the world order is still deeply racialized and run in the interests of capital. That has not changed. So there has not been, if you like, an epistemological break from the old order.
“On the Left, we are sometimes still practicing a campist, cartoon anti-imperialism that acts as though we are still in 1955”
So, to me, the two positions are not contradictory. We must recognize – in ways sections of the Left are not recognizing – that this is not the same world order that emerged in 1945, even though it is yet to disappear. But equally, it is problematic to suggest, as some do, that the emergence of Russia, China and India has not changed the picture. And the lack of recognition of the latter speaks to something that is very close to my mind at the moment given what’s happening in the Ukraine. On the Left, we are sometimes still practicing a campist, cartoon anti-imperialism that acts as though we are still in 1955. But we’re not, and we need to take that into account.
SR: There are some people on the Left in South Asia, for instance in Pakistan, who think you can play off these contradictions between different imperialist rivalries to further a Left project. So, for instance, some on the Left are saying that maybe they’ll ally with China to counteract US imperialism. Others, like some ethnic separatists in Pakistan, are allying with the US imperialists to offset and counteract the Pakistani military. How should the Left in South Asia navigate in this context of inter-imperialist rivalry?
PG: That’s a challenging question. First, I’ll make a slight distinction here between “the Left” broadly defined, and peoples who are facing aggression, oppression, and occupation. When people face aggression, occupation, colonialism, there is a history of playing alliances and playing actors off each other, and it is an understandable pragmatic move that we must understand in historical terms.
“I’m not sure if a Left analysis, a Left morality if you like, can afford to just play a pragmatic game”
However, if we’re talking about a broad Left intellectual analysis of the situation and thinking about Left organizing in this context, we need to recall that, although these different camps exist, they are also constantly shifting. In a sense, one can say there is China on the one hand and the US on the other, but that form of campism overlooks the deep ties through capitalism between these economies and polities. Putin, who today is in everybody’s bad books, was actually a friend not all that long ago, and may yet become a friend. So, from a somewhat privileged, academic or intellectual viewpoint, I would say that a Left analysis must be cognizant that these are not permanent oppositions. These are not permanent affiliations.
The question that must be posed is: ethically, what is the position that the Left should take? The Left needs to grapple with the messiness of these camps and their temporary allegiances and their temporary oppositions, because, at the end of the day, what people are at the receiving end of is international capital and the various transmutations of the racial, caste, and religious ideologies. So, the ethical position: they cannot really afford to say today China, tomorrow Russia, maybe yesterday the United States. I do see how that might be a political imperative for people fighting existential struggles on the ground, but I’m not sure if a Left analysis, a Left morality if you like, can afford to just play a pragmatic game. That takes us up dead ends in the final analysis.
HK: So you’re saying that with the emergence of these new nations, the BRICS in particular, imperialism is obviously changing, yet at the same time the basic thing of capital accumulation remains. Within South Asia in particular, given India’s economic rise, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan, and China’s very interventionist role in Pakistan, how do you see the imperialist dynamics in this region shifting?
PG: That is such a big question! In one sense, there are multiple imperialisms and multiple state actors at play. I would say the official Left position in some ways is to support the emergence of China and to see that as a central element in decolonization, particularly in India, where the Hindu Right and various nationalists fear China and premise their self-assertion against China. For the Left, it’s quite easy to think of China as the alternative, the emergent power in the Global South that ends the 1492 dispensation.
“I don’t necessarily see a real opposition between Indian authoritarianism ... and Chinese state authoritarianism.....as an Indian, when I go home, in all the China hate-talk, the note I detect above all is envy.”
That troubles me because that overlooks the extent to which China is a rising and ongoing imperial power. There are peoples who are currently very much at the receiving end of the Chinese jackboot, and it is a jackboot. And I’m talking not only of the Tibetans. It seems to me troubling when people on the Left either claim that the ongoing oppression – and I’ll use that word vaguely – of the Uyghurs is a fantasy and a western myth, or that it’s just a form of rehabilitation or education. I’ve seen this argument made by people on the Left and it has struck me as utterly horrifying that anyone on the Left could take either of these positions.
And again, as I was saying earlier, I don’t necessarily see a real opposition between Indian authoritarianism as it is currently emerging and Chinese state authoritarianism. In fact, as an Indian, when I go home, in all the China hate-talk, the note I detect above all is envy. There’s this sense that we really ought to be like them. You’ll hear many nice, liberal middle-class Indians say that the reason India is backwards is this bloody democracy business we do. They say we should not deal with any protests, just clamp down, and make “progress” the first imperative. I’m not sure, even now, that there are not quite significant ties between Indian capital and Chinese capital, the Indian elites and Chinese elites, i.e. the political elites. So again, this becomes a false opposition. Again, it’s a campism that I don’t think will get us anywhere in the long-run, in terms of actually challenging imperialism or in terms of embracing something that we might actually call “decolonization”.
HK: In your book, Insurgent Empire, you trace the links between colonialism and fascism in the 20th century. How do you see these connections between colonialism, fascism, and imperialism playing out today? And do you think there’s a Fascist Internationale? How does fascism in the global South, through people like Modi, rely on these broader imperialist connections?
PG: I’m going to assume your question starts with South Asia. This is a very good question. My current analysis is that we can once again see the overlaps that were visible to anti-colonialists in the 1930s and '40s. The overlaps between expansionist, racialized, imperial ideologies and fascism.
“The question is: why has fascism emerged in a postcolonial context, in a context with an anti-colonial history? ”
Now, there are many on the Left who say, for good reason, that we shouldn’t use the word fascism lightly, that what happened in the 1930s was different to what is happening in India today or elsewhere. And while respecting that position, we cannot expect fascism in 2020s to look like it did in the 1930s — it will naturally have taken on a different form. But if we also think about what fascism was back then – which is capitalism in crisis, capitalism turning to authoritarian state institutions, capitalism in alliance with racial supremacism and racial ideologies which require the elimination of peoples who are deemed disposable or surplus — that is very much there in present day India and elsewhere. So, I am hot pressed to say: well, what other word would we use for this? You can use another word, but the fact is that the phenomenon of rampant capitalism, rampant concentration of wealth, profound inequality and discontent, combined with an ideology that very explicitly admired Nazism and very explicitly is about racial supremacism and nationalism based on religious racist ideas – that is fascism whatever name you call it.
Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire. Image: The Correspondent
The question is: why has fascism emerged in a postcolonial context, in a context with an anti-colonial history? That’s the really interesting question. The short answer is that decolonization was arrested very early on across South Asia – in Pakistan, in India, in Bangladesh. In a sense, it was hamstrung from the start and never really unfolded.
The project of redistribution, the project of emancipation, the project of radical equality – none of these things really took place. What did take place is exactly what Dr. Ambedkar raises the alarm around in India: the transfer of power. And in India and Pakistan, it was a fairly straightforward transfer of power to the elites, who in neither case really dismantled the colonial state and its most centralized, authoritarian, and repressive aspects. This is why, as Gyan Prakash has argued, the Emergency must be seen as something that was already there in a state that had not broken from the colonial dispensation.
So what we diagnose as fascism or proto-fascism in India today is tied up to that failure – that original failure – to break from colonialism’s imbrications in racial ideologies, racial capitalism, and a powerful centralized authoritarian state. So, we are legatees of colonialism — we as South Asians never really broke from the colonial dispensation. We are legatees of exactly that dispensation in the first part of the 20th century, where colonialism and fascism were friends before they were enemies, and here we are again not having broken from the colonial dispensation.
What has been very useful to me in thinking about this has been Dr. Ambedkar’s work because you can see how attuned he was to this reality even in 1942, just before the Quit India Movement. He’s raising the alarm, saying that Muslim League and Congress elites negotiating a transfer of power is not decolonization, that this is not the end of oppression. And I’m really struck by how prescient he was and how much of everything he foretold has come to pass.
HK: Can you expand a bit on how this colonial legacy has led to majoritarian nationalism in South Asia?
“we should recognize that the postwar nation-state, even when it sought to be plural and equal, ended up privileging certain majorities”
PG: The Bandung moment, which stressed the sovereignty and centrality of the nation-state, was a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we know it is quite important for oppressed, colonized peoples to invoke the nation-state as a category of emancipation – so we can’t dispense with the nation-state. But, on the other, we should recognize that the postwar nation-state, even when it sought to be plural and equal, ended up privileging certain majorities, whether those were linguistic, religious, racial or ethnic majorities. That majoritarianism, which was embedded into India, Pakistan, and several other postcolonial nation-states, has fed over the years into what we are seeing now in places like India. Even if you don’t want to call it fascism, as many scholars still hesitate to do, you can see that it is violent authoritarian majoritarianism. Perhaps we can agree that that is self-evident. And that what we have is a Hindu majoritarianism. Majoritarianism is a slightly problematic term here in that this is also a very upper-caste, Brahmanical Hinduism, and therefore not, in theory, a numerical majority. But it the regnant formation and we can call it majoritarianism.
The Bandung conference was a meeting of the leaders of Asian and African states, many of which had recently gained independence, held in April 1955 in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia. Image: Australian Institute of International Affairs
India certainly came into being with many unresolved questions and majoritarianism made itself felt from the outset. We have, for instance, the unresolved situation in Kashmir. We have a situation where – not just recently, not just with Hindutva, but from the outset – the Indian state did not address this question. It chose to remain in a happy stasis and follow the logic of annexation. And that’s what we saw coming to culmination two-three years ago with the removal of Article 370 and basically a declaration that Kashmir was not going to be an issue at all – that it would simply be subsumed into the majoritarian nation-state. So what we see happening there is, on the one hand, the logic of majoritarianism and, on the other, every single weapon of the British colonial state being used by Indian elites. There isn’t even much of an attempt to hide this. The state is doing what the state thinks it is entitled to do. And, in the long run, this is going to be even more of a flashpoint than it has been. There is a great deal of trouble, sorrow, and violence being stored up and that is absolutely the consequence of the majoritarian logic of the postcolonial nation-state.
SR: If you’re tracing back to the logic of the colonial state, that means Congress also has a part to play in what is happening in India now? In some liberal circles, the BJP and Hindutva gets criticized as authoritarian, but Congress is viewed as innocent – it is seen as liberal democratic and celebrated. However, Congress from Indira Gandhi onwards exercised its own forms of authoritarianism, whether against the Sikhs in Punjab, the indigenous peoples in Jharkhand and so forth.
PG: What I’m saying is that we have a situation where the state was never decolonized. The apparatus of the state was handed over to the Congress in the first instance, and the BJP in a sense arose out of a breakaway section of the Congress, so these are all initially part of the same formation. They were just different pressure groups within the same formation. Again, Dr. Ambedkar, writing in the 1940s and pushing against what he calls a simple transfer of power, is attuned to the fact that the Congress is run by the Indian elites, and is particularly authoritarian around the caste question. Particularly authoritarian in refusing – and Gandhi was utterly complicit in this – self-representation and self-emancipation for the most oppressed castes. And you can see an authoritarian inclusivity, if you can call it that, as the Indian nation-state emerges and calls itself plural and inclusive. It is the inclusivity and pluralism of the majority. The majority agrees to be plural, to be inclusive.
In the context of the horrors of today, that Congress pluralism looks utopian. Part of me wants to bring back “majority niceness” because what we’re dealing with now is so horrific and so annihilating. But it would be dishonest to not see the links between that plural majoritarianism and the horrors of Hindutva today. I’m not conflating them, but I am saying there are kinship relations, and those relations should at the very least be acknowledged.
SR: That’s a good segue to our next question, which is on decolonization. You said right now that decolonization remains incomplete in the Global South (and even in the Global North). In the West or the Global North, there has been a resurgent interest in the question of decolonization, especially after a series of events such as the toppling of Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol and, in Canada, the discovery last year of mass graves of indigenous children. So there’s this talk again of decolonization. But there is this contestation happening over what it means to decolonize. On the one hand, you have folks like Walter Mignolo and Arturo Escobar, coming from the Latin American perspective, arguing that decolonization in the 20th century sense, as a state-centric process enamored by Western epistemology, was bound to fail. They argue that what we need instead of decolonization is decoloniality, which entails rejecting state-centrism and Western epistemology more broadly. Indeed, Mignolo et al. center the rejection of Western epistemology as key to any decolonial practice. On the other hand, scholars like Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang argue that, while concerns about epistemology are important, ultimately decolonization is – and they hold onto the term decolonization – a material process, centered especially on the reclamation of land. How do you position yourself in this debate? How do you see the relation between epistemological and material decolonization?
PG: That’s a huge question. I am — and it’s not a secret — quite skeptical of Mignolo et al. They have much to offer in terms of the critique of violence of modernity. The Latin American tradition in general has a great deal to offer in terms of a primary critique of colonialism. This was, after all, the first major site of colonialism in the Americas and so what comes out of Latin America, including what comes from Mignolo et al, is valuable. I should however point out that the decolonial tradition has also been challenged within Latin America, most notably by the anthropologist Sylvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who launches an indigenist challenge to some of the claims made by Mignolo et al.
But without going into that, I have a skepticism on two grounds. It’s right to say that the state, and the nation-state in particular, has been far too central in our engagement with decolonization, and we need to think about what that has meant. I was suggesting that when I was talking about the wholesale use of the colonial state in South Asia. But I am skeptical of theories that call for, to use Mignolo’s term, “delinking” from Western epistemology or “delinking” from modernity. And that is because I don’t see modernity as simply oppression or simply colonialism. Modernity certainly emerges out of the colonial project and colonialism is needed to produce what we call modernity in a material and discursive sense, but modernity also ends up becoming a very messy, contradictory formation in which I don’t think the colonized and the enslaved are simply victims. They’re also agents of producing modernity. This is something that I tried to draw out in Insurgent Empire, building for instance on Susan Buck-Morss’ work. What we see as Western epistemology or what we deem to be Western modernity is actually quite reliant on the challenges and the contributions made by the enslaved and the colonized.
There is something questionable about handing over epistemology and modernity to the West. In a weird way, there are those in liberal and right-wing formations in the West who are happy to say, “we did modernity; we produced epistemology; we are the people who thought about radical equality or emancipation.” But that is simply not true. This is what I was trying to pull out of Insurgent Empire: that the resistance of the enslaved and the colonized is quite central to the emergence of ideas of freedom and equality. So, why should we hand over these ideas to the West? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. I don’t think I am with Mignolo et al. when they hand emancipation as an idea to the West. Yes, we need to make a distinction between paternalist emancipation and liberation, but these don’t belong to the West. So, I am not sure delinking makes a lot of sense. What we should be doing is relinking and making visible the contributions of the Global South, of the colonized, of the enslaved, to the West. Of course, Haiti is very central in this configuration. So no, not “delinking.”
“This idea that you can somehow suture things into ‘Western modernity’ and ‘Western epistemology’ – that strikes me as both intellectually indefensible and self-defeating.”
And the other thing is: what do you mean by Western epistemology? The West is a pretty messy formation. And there are fairly profound differences between, say, Nietzsche and Marx, or between Freud and Jung (just throwing out random examples). You have Spinoza and you have Fukuyama. This is a big epistemological tradition which, like any other epistemological tradition, has its fights, its camps, its disagreements, its contradictions. So, I’m not even on board with an idea called “Western epistemology.” That seems a little bit tendentious to me.
But more than that, assuming there is a concept called Western epistemology, where does it draw on and is there a clear boundary to be made between the West and the ideas coming from North Africa, Turkey or the Arab world? As a literary scholar, I know that medieval literature, the novel etc. are clearly not separable as purely Western. Yes, there is an English novel, but there are these roots that stretch across the boundaries of that which is deemed Europe and pull on and draw on other cultural, literary traditions. So it becomes a less easy task when you say what is this category called “the West” and does it not itself emerge out of the imperial encounter, and what precedes the West? What is it drawing on to constitute itself?
You can think of someone like Aimé Césaire, who says the West likes to think of itself as doing reason and science, as if other formations did not do science (and he talks about Syrian astronomy and Egyptian chemistry). This idea that you can somehow suture things into ‘Western modernity’ and ‘Western epistemology’ – that strikes me as both intellectually indefensible and self-defeating. This is not to say that there aren’t other epistemologies and bodies of knowledge that have not been marginalized, wounded, and suppressed. Indeed, they have. That is part of the work that we must do in thinking about decolonization.
I’m sorry I’ve gone on at such length, but I do want to add one other thing as you’ve asked me about the decolonial and Walter Mignolo in particular. Some months ago, we had a book emerging from the belly of the Hindu right-wing which has embraced, not decolonization, but the idea of the decolonial, and insists that what India needs is a return to Hindu epistemology, to Hindu knowledge, which of course is quite specifically Brahmin epistemology and Brahmin knowledge. And we had Professor Mignolo endorse this book, written by a very hardcore activist of the Hindu right who was, on the face of it, saying the West has been damaging, the West is the oppressor, and that we need to return to Indian sources. And although Professor Mignolo did withdraw his endorsement after an outcry, to me, the question is: why did you endorse this in the first place? And that isn’t just a question of a lack of knowledge of where the author was coming from. Rather, isn’t there something in the idea of the decolonial – to pull out another body of knowledge, to turn to the pre-colonial, to pull out something that isn’t Western and replace the Western by it – that is a ready-made recipe for what happened, which is the failure to question what these so-called non-Western epistemologies are and what their content is. And then again, these are very mixed traditions: they have emancipatory, liberatory dimensions and they have reactionary, very undesirable and deeply oppressive dimensions. So I don’t think we can recuperate something called “the decolonial” without engaging with difficulty. And it is not a simple matter of one epistemological tradition against another.
SR: We see a similar dynamic happening in Pakistan, where some right-wing parties are mobilizing, not the concept of decoloniality but decolonization. In March of this year, the Institute of Policy Studies, which is a think-tank sponsored, funded, and led by the right-wing Jamaat-e-Islami Party, held a conference called “Decolonizing Islamic Studies.” Essentially, they aimed to elevate and protect a patriarchal iteration of Islam through the language of decolonization.
PG: The thing to be said is that, of course, there is decolonization to be done and, of course, the West has traduced non-Western traditions and degraded them and so on. But the work of decolonization is not a matter of simple replacement. The work of decolonization – and this is something I say to my own undergraduates – is a two-way lens. The criticism and introspection that you demand of the West must be turned on your own self and your own traditions as well. It’s not a one-way street.
SR: We’ve talked about the epistemology of decolonization. Another question I had was about the materiality of decolonization. Mignolo generally ignores that, but there are people who do engage with the materiality of decolonization, like Tuck and Wang. But that engagement excludes Marxism, suggesting that Marxism is part of a Western project and should be confronted in any anti-colonial project. This is very different to how decolonization was imagined by anti-colonial actors in the 20th century, who often explicitly engaged with Marxism. What is lost when we remove Marxism from an anti-colonial or decolonial practice?
Priyamvada Gopal: It occurs to me that I forgot to answer your question on Tuck and Yang, material decolonization and their holding on to the idea. I’m very sympathetic to a lot of what Tuck and Yang say: that it’s very easy to fiddle with a curriculum and to now say we’ve decolonized, but what about the fact that your university is sitting on land that is literally stolen? It is very salutary, particularly in white settler-colonies, to say that decolonization isn’t just a matter of epistemologies, that this is a matter of fairly straightforward dispossession that requires restitution. And in a different way, the Caribbean colonies are raising questions of reparations, saying “here’s the bill for the damage.” I am very sympathetic to that.
Where I pull away from Tuck and Yang, and where they are actually curiously on the same page as theorists of decoloniality, is in their claim that different engagements in decolonization are incommensurable. They spend a lot of time critiquing postcolonial Asian migrants, for instance, or critiquing the South Asian or African engagement with decolonization because that is not about land. It is about land in some places, but let’s set that aside for now. This is about what they call following the trail of stolen resources. Now I agree that migrants must be attuned to where they are going to, and what structures they are participating in, but colonialism didn’t only take one form. It was land dispossession in some places, in other places it was a different kind of decimation: it was enslavement, it was indenture, it was the wholesale removal of resources, it was the wholesale destruction of economies. Our engagement with decolonization must take this range and these multiple manifestations of colonialism into account, and I don’t think, for instance, that the project of reclaiming land is incompatible or incommensurable with other kinds of decolonization.
Also, in terms of Tuck and Wang’s engagement, it is important that they put forward the question of how difficult this all is. What do you do if you are a migrant or the descendant of the enslaved living on land stolen from First Nations? There is no simple resolution. And just giving back the land will not resolve other complicated things that arise – for instance, the people who didn’t arrive in the Americas voluntarily and have been here for hundreds of years. So again, we’re back at the question of dealing with difficulties and how there are no simple binary solutions that would help.
On the question of Marxism: Marxism is pretty central, as you just pointed out, to many anti-colonial traditions. And it is very difficult to think of serious engagements with anti-colonialism that did not, at some level, draw on Marxism. But we also need to remember that people who engaged with Marxism –people like C.L.R. James, George Padmore, who I write about, but also people who come later – had a critical engagement with it. They have challenged Marxism’s blindnesses, its tendency to think in racialized terms. So yes, any engagement with decolonization cannot set aside Marxism, but that engagement has long been a critical one and that critical engagement must continue. And there have been in the Marxist tradition, within the broader left tradition, mistakes and repetitions of exclusion, whether those are on racial lines or gender lines or on questions of sexuality, religion, and so forth. And so decolonization is also about keeping the Marxist tradition critical and vibrant, and not devolving – as I fear it sometimes does – into campism, party-line taking.
One of the things about some forms of Marxism that bothers me is how nation-statist it is – how it has failed to be internationalist. There are situations that require internationalism. And instead of building a Global South internationalism which the world really needs today, we have fallen into rightly criticizing NATO and the West for its tendentious invocation of the so-called international community, but we haven’t countered that with a meaningful internationalism that would, for instance, have something to say and do around despots, despotism, authoritarianism and religious violence in our countries. That has been one of the bad legacies of Bandung.
The Bandung conference in 1955, rather than having the Global South emerge, was very focused on national sovereignty and non-interference. But what about situations that do require a true international community – a real internationalism? And yeah, I’ll say it, a real intervention. When entire peoples are at the heel of violent state or violent state actors, what do we do? Do we just say “sorry, non-interference” or do we try and come up with something that is again embracing difficulty and is imaginative in terms of what we might do?
HK: I want to go back to when you were talking about the difficulties of forging solidarities between, say, First Nations peoples in North America and the black and brown, the descendants of slaves and brown immigrants. In your book you show that these white-black-brown solidarities were not just being forged because black and brown people were merely adopting Western ideals of universalism and freedom to articulate anti-colonialism. Rather, you show that the very universalist underpinnings of anti-colonial politics were themselves dialogically constructed in these interactions between white dissidents and black and brown anti-colonial activists. Reading that history in the context of today, where identity politics is predominant within Left and liberal spaces – whether it is university campuses or the mainstreaming of woke culture – there’s a sense that these past efforts to unite across these identities of race, gender, sexuality, failed because the particularities were being subsumed by broader categories like class. So, some argue we should reject this politics, which doesn’t take these particularities into account. What do you make of a rejection of universalism because of its association with Leftist subsumption of particularities?
PG: I’m going to retreat into the way I began, which is to say both are right and both are wrong. I do not see a binary between the particular and the universal as necessary. Again, I think alongside Aimé Césaire, who is also thinking alongside Hegel, when he says that I want a universal that is rich with all that is particular. We cannot do away with particularity. Human beings are products of specific circumstances, cultures, moments, families, and so forth, and we are very wedded to our senses of our particular selves and our particular societies – and that doesn’t have to be static. But there is something about human life that takes joy in the particular. And there are differences – of race, gender, sexuality etc. – that can’t be dispensed with in favour of the universal.
But I’m also skeptical of “radical alterity”, which says that human beings are completely different and there is no point in trying to find commonalities, but you accept that the other is the other and you be nice. That again seems to me to be a dead end because human beings have much that is particular, and they have much that is common. We must weave these two realities together.
I feel a little depressed when I see these oppositions: on the one hand, people embracing radical alterity – refusing the possibility of shared ideas, of universal goods and rights. But I also feel depressed when I see repeat polemics on the Left against woke-ism, whatever that might mean, and identity politics — as if we didn’t all have an identity politics, right? The main difference is “do you accept you have an identity politics or do you deny it?”
I find these quite tired attacks on so-called identity politics in the Left. This is happening quite late in the day; it is not stopping, and it is as though lessons have not been learnt. I find, equally, the other side which retreats into radical alterity and refuses universal engagement, problematic and – perhaps this is a weaselly answer but – my enjoining here is to be dialectical. What is the dialectic of the universal and the particular and what comes out of being both dialectical and, in Bakhtinian sense, dialogical? We change and become new people, to use a variation of Fanon’s term, by engagement with each other. But that does not come by saying, “here is a Marxist idea, everyone come on board, otherwise you’re just woke losers.” The universal must be forged through dialogue and engagement. There isn’t an easy way to do this. Everything in front of us requires grappling with something that is demanding.
SR: Keeping on this theme of solidarity, I want to ask about the material basis for solidarity. In your book Insurgent Empire, you mention figures like Shapurji Saklatvala, the British Indian communist who is among a series of folks arguing that the decolonization of India would benefit British white, working-class people as well. There were material gains to be had for subaltern people in Britain and in India. But then there are scholars, like Aditya Mukherjee in India, who argue that British colonialism was a supra-class project, that it (unevenly) benefitted both the bourgeoisie and proletariat in England, and that undermined the prospects of any solidarity between the working classes in Britain and working classes in India. There was a material basis, in other words, that prevented some of the ideas that Saklatvala promoted from becoming popular in British society. First, what do you make of that argument? And second, do you think that today the arguments that Saklatvala was making would have more currency in British society? We are, after all, now seeing more criticism of the colonial project in the West. May that partly have to do with the collapse of the material basis for that earlier metropolitan supra-class project (with austerity and so forth), such that people in the global North now feel more in solidarity with those in the South?
PG: That’s a great question. On Mukherjee’s point, there is something to be said. This is why racializing capitalism becomes so important because you create a racial hierarchy of the working class and you do create people who, in some sense and in a very minimal way, are benefitting from the fact that the country is now rich. We do know that the British welfare state was made possible by colonialism. And this is why, in one sense, we do not have a very sharp labour or trade union tradition of criticizing imperialism. Empire enriches a few but its crumbs are available to many, and that continues to be the case in many ways. The Euro-American masses are kept happy, for instance, with cheap products made in the sweatshops of the Global South.
In terms of Shapurji Saklatvala’s views on solidarity, there was an element in his thinking (and in my thinking about him) of hope. That is to say, can we get people — despite their differential economic and racialized positions — to think about who the shared oppressor is. And it is not easy, particularly because (and this is something we can now see more clearly than ever) the media, owned by billionaires, disseminates the stories that the working classes buy. Building solidarity is next to impossible because the ongoing billionaire press intervention is around race.
And this is where David Roediger’s work is important, as he shows how whiteness becomes a wage in its own right and obscures the economic exploitation. And you’ve seen the return in recent years of “the white working class” as a political category. And it’s been very depressing to witness people on the Left use the category as though it wasn’t a construct, as though it wasn’t a deliberate racialized construct, as if there was some self-evident oppression of white working classes as white working classes that we should be paying attention to. So solidarity is not easy. And I would not for a moment suggest that it’s a simple matter of getting people to recognize a common oppressor. There’s a lot that comes in the way and a lot that’s very material that comes in the way, that includes the media as well as differential access to resources.
SR: You’re right. In some ways in the West there is less solidarity with talk of the white working class, Brexit and so forth. But, on the other hand, while Saklatvala was a very marginal actor during his own time, now his ideas appear to be having slightly more currency. How do you explain that shift? Is that shift – despite all the Brexit and disconnection – happening because there are now more material bases for solidarity?
PG: There is more commonality emerging, and more people are realizing that they are being shafted by international capitalism. I’m not entirely sure I agree with you that solidarity is increasing. I agree that it ought to be, because austerity is actually a form of colonial impoverishment — it is actually a form of treating the poor as disposable and racializing them as unworthy of living. You would think it would generate commonality.
What we have not reckoned with – and this is where the Left needs to get its act together – is how powerful race is as a construct and how, in the face of great impoverishment, people will still turn on migrants. So when Brexit happened, working class people were being interviewed by the press and being told: “By the way, Brexit will mean you might earn less or your savings will go down in value.” And people were saying: “Actually, if it means we don’t get more migrants, we’ll take it on the chin.” I’m not saying that’s the only thing happening, but it is a serious formation of othering. Othering – racial, cultural and religious othering – has a tenacity and power that the billionaire press is able to deploy every single day. Unless we take it seriously and try to find solidarity through that juggernaut, despite that juggernaut, we’re in trouble. I completely agree that everyday capitalism is becoming clearer and clearer to ordinary people in the West, but their attention is being demanded by other stories and controversies.
HK: Thank you so much Priya for being on Jamhoor Radio. Unfortunately, that’s all we have time for today.
Thanks to our audience for tuning in to this podcast and do make sure to check out the rest of the articles in our issue on Imperialism.
SR: We would like to thank our patrons for supporting Jamhoor and making this issue possible. If you like our content, consider becoming a patron. You can do so by signing up at patreon.com/jamhoor.
Priyamvada Gopal is a fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, and author of Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent.