What I'm Reading: George Ciccariello-Maher, "Decolonizing Dialectics"

I’m not too proud to open by admitting that there were chunks of this book that I didn’t understand because it is a tough read - especially if you haven’t read already the core texts it’s discussing - so this can only be a ‘General Impressions’ rather than a thorough review. I’m familiar with Marx and Fanon, and Ciccariello-Maher does a decent job catching me up with Sorel, Dussel, and Hegel, but I would have been better equipped to critically engage with his ideas if I had a firm grasp of those authors first, Hegel especially.

With that preface out of the way, I enjoyed it! Decolonizing Dialectics is about Marxism and what happens when it goes wrong - when people misapply it, think that it’s totally comprehensive, or engage with it uncritically - particularly when we ignore race and the legacies of struggling against colonialism and slavery. For instance, Ciccariello-Maher, via Fanon, shows how Satre cocked up by assuming that class struggle is the highest form of politics and that oppressed racial minorities should fall in line with Eurocentric Marxism rather than assert a political identity grounded in Blackness (in Fanon’s terminology, “Négritude”). Ciccariello-Maher argues that we can in fact have both Marxist class struggle and struggles for racial equality running in parallel without one being eaten up by the other. I was reminded a lot of Harsha Walia’s Undoing Border Imperialism, which through a less theoretical journey similarly argues that quite disparate groups can find common ground to work together and also respect each other’s parallel domains and areas of struggle.

Other personal highlights included the chapter on Venezuelan politics and the various ways “the people” or pueblo have been constructed as a political entity there; also the brief section on parliamentary socialism against which Sorel so bitterly warned and the irreconcilability of class difference.

In his discussion of Sorel, Fanon, and political violence I learned some very interesting things: I read Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth years ago but wasn’t really ready for it. It was nice to have Ciccariello-Maher here pointing out what Fanon’s specific beef with Hegel was and how it fit into the broader pattern of the struggles with which he was involved. Fanon talks about anticolonial violence as potentially liberating, and I would have been curious to see some discussion about toxic masculinity and how violence can sometimes be dangerously constructed as retributive in the mix there - maybe some stuff about assertions of black womanhood?

Though it was tough at times, I did get some juicy stuff out of it. It’s by no means a casual read but if this is in your area of study and you've been thinking about picking it up already, you can get it here. Thank you to Zoe who sent it to me from my Amazon wishlist!