Critical notes on postcolonial theory

WORKERS LIBERTY     Author: Martin Thomas


"Postcolonial theory came to prominence during a period of massive political defeats for the Left… [But in universities] there is a mass base for what we might call oppression studies… so… a movement from the bottom, which was a kind of demand for theories focusing on oppression, and a movement on top, which was among professors offering to supply theories focusing on oppression…" (Vivek Chibber1)

The most brightly-packaged items on the best-stocked shelves in left academia feature "postcolonial theory" and "decolonisation". The literature on those shelves, from over 40 years now, is huge and various.

A common thread is the replacement of social and economic class as an axis of analysis and struggle by the axes of colonial/ decolonial, Indigenous/ settler, etc. In some ways it recapitulates what was called "Third-World-ism" in the 1960s. That saw progress as centred round struggles, often peasant-based, against European or US domination of poorer countries, and to form independent governments that would pursue "autocentric", self-sufficient development. The model was provided by Stalin's USSR and Mao's China.

There was a real basis for that "Third-World-ism". There were huge struggles for liberation of ex-colonies. Algeria's struggle for independence from France, and Vietnam's struggle against US domination, stirred up workers and students in the economically-developed countries, and catalysed the rise of left-wing and revolutionary currents.

Then came triple disillusion. New regimes in which hopes had been placed – Algeria, Vietnam, Cuba, Ghana, Tanzania… - produced bureaucratic, corrupt, unequal societies, at best "developmentalist", in no way socialist. The archetype of the USSR collapsed; that of China turned to overt world-market-oriented state capitalism. And the late-1960s-early-1970s upsurge of working-class struggle in the economically-developed countries, which struggles like those of Algeria and Vietnam had surely helped to catalyse, subsided with the victories of neoliberalism from the late 1970s.

Many "Third-World-ists" lapsed into political conformity. Two new and easy channels for being left-wing opened up, however: NGOs, especially left-wing and more-or-less campaigning NGOs; and academia. Higher-education academics in the UK have increased tenfold since the early 1960s, from 20,000-odd to 230,000 (about twice as numerous as railworkers), and academic jobs have become more open to left-wingers. NGO left-wingers tend to see themselves as pursuing "social justice"; "decolonising" has become the preferred axis for left academics.
1 Tributaries of theory

The word postcolonial in its modern sense dates from the 1980s. The contemporary understanding of "settler-colonialism" - as a shaping force across the world rather than (as in the 1960s and 70s) a specific of some regimes mostly now overthrown - from the mid-1990s.2 "De-colonial" in its modern sense dates mostly from 2000. The whole varied school of thought mostly started with academics formed in and around the Communist Parties as, in the 1980s, they became dismayed about outcomes in the ex-colonies (particularly in India, where the CPs had given a sort of critical support to Nehru's heavily state-regulated development programme); about the CPs' strategies; and to some degree or another about the whole USSR-based "model" for development of poorer countries. Strands include:

• The "subaltern studies" school of writers on Indian history and India (starting at Sussex University in the early 1980s)3

• An effort to recycle the anti-colonial writings of Amilcar Cabral, leader of the independence movement in Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, from 1956 to 1973; and Frantz Fanon, a writer for the FLN national independence movement in Algeria, from 1956 to 1961 (and others, but especially of Cabral and Fanon, who both had some distance from Stalinism, and both died before independence). And to find new inspiration from them after the disappointing results of colonial independence and of "African socialism", "Arab socialism", etc.

• Images of the world as divided into Indigenous and settler-colonial, and progress as being about siding with the Indigenous against the settler-colonial

• Criticism of European literature taking off from Edward Said's 1978 book Orientalism, and using themes from Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida.

• Criticism of post-Enlightenment science and of Marxism as being irredeemably "Eurocentric". This criticism cross-cuts extensively with post-modernist ideas of the world such as flourished in the 1980s, such as the world being "discourse all the way down", and with critiques of science and of "grand narratives".4

• Identifying "colonialism" as the malign driving mechanism of modern society, over recent centuries and continuing after the fall of the big colonial empires. "Capitalism and the state are technologies of colonialism, developed over time to further colonial projects. Racism is an invention of colonialism".5 Adjacent strands derive from Cedric Robinson's 1983 book Black Marxism, which argued for seeing the world as "racial capitalism", with racism as the primary determinant, and the answer as an "Afrocentric" "Black radical tradition".

The whole congeries exists mainly in posher US, British, and Australian universities, though a number of the writers (as of their chief critics) are Indian expatriates there.

It seems paradoxical that more attention should be focused on combatting "colonialism" now, when almost all the colonies have won independence but had hopes dashed by the limits of capitalism, than in the era of the mass anti-colonial struggles. Perhaps it is that battles against real or attributed intellectual legacies of colonialism can be fought from within academia more easily than the older struggles for independence could be fought on the ground.
2 Through the optic of 7 October 2023

In the wake of the Hamas pogrom of 7 October 2023 and the vast ensuing Israeli government onslaught on Gaza, many (though not all) postcolonial-minded academics have hastened either to hail 7 October as decolonisation-in-action, or to denounce as colonialist calls to condemn the atrocity.

The article 'Decolonisation is not a metaphor', by Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, has been much cited. "Soft" versions of "decolonialism", efforts for reconciliation, understanding, and so on, are no substitute for "repatriation of Indigenous land and life". In opposition to what Tuck and Yang call continuous "re-invasion"; it is necessary to "unsettle" settlers. So says the article. In that frame Hamas's atrocity has been interpreted as a move to "repatriate" Palestinian land, and to "unsettle" the Israeli Jews, who are all "settlers".

Whether Tuck and Yang intended that is unclear. Tuck herself has denounced the Hamas attack6. Their article, like much postcolonial writing, develops through assertions rather than through the testing hypotheses by evidence and argument. I doubt that their call for "repatriation of Indigenous land and life" is meant as a call for their university campuses to be demolished, together with the water, sewage, cabling, and other systems there, and the land restored to hunter-gatherer and subsistence-agriculture life for present-day members of the peoples whose old way of life there was wiped out centuries ago.7 What they do mean, short of that, I don't know. But the division of the world primarily into "settlers" and "Indigenous" is a dead-end for large-scale social change.

The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (2007) deliberately offered no definition of "Indigenous", but the UN offers some indicators: "historical continuity with a given region prior to colonisation... strong link to their lands... distinct social, economic and political systems... distinct languages, cultures". The UN counts some 470-odd million Indigenous peoples, 6% of the world's population. Over 60% are in China (125 million), India (104 million), and Indonesia (60 million). Other large groups are the Amazigh (Berber) people in Algeria and Morocco and multiple minorities in Mexico, Ethiopia, and Kenya. In Europe, with its multiple population movements over centuries, the 80,000 or so Sami in northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland are about the only major group recognised as distinctly "Indigenous". Some groups, for example in the Amazon and in parts of Indonesia, still have much of their old distinct habitat and way of life; others have become more like disadvantaged minorities within the majority society, in a way not very different from recent-immigrant disadvantaged minorities.

Respect for Indigenous peoples which have preserved distinct areas and ways of life, and oppose forcible assimilation or dispersion; remedial measures where Indigenous peoples have had their ways of life destroyed and have been forcibly integrated into larger societies as disadvantaged or pauperised minorities; those are one thing. Making Indigenous vs settler the chief axis of politics is another.

The Indigenous peoples which retain distinct areas and ways of life more or less by definition economically secluded and less developed. They are small and scattered minorities. They have little leverage to change the world economic system. Making "Indigenous" the touchstone of politics is retreating from universalism into a competitive haggling among particularisms, by definition regulated by larger powers (which may be influenced by NGOs and academics).

A primary focus on Indigenous vs settler inescapably involves some degree of racialisation, i.e. ascription of rights and identity via a "race", a group delimited mostly by biological descent. (Classification in Canada, the USA, Australia, etc., is partly by descent and partly by acceptance by the authorities of the indigenous group; in Mexico, the government gives acceptance as the only criterion, not descent; but even in those cases it is assumed on all sides that no-one much will seek classification as "indigenous" unless they have some association-by-descent.)

The counterpart, the definition of "settler", is also elusive. Tuck and Yang write, reasonably, that a settler group is distinguished from migrants by the settlers setting the rules where they settle, and migrants adapting to local rules they find at their destination. But over generations now European (and Asian) settlers in the Americas and Australia, or Arab settlers in what is now the Arab world, have become by that definition migrants, adapting to local rules. The local-born descendants even of the first settlers adapted to local rules as they grew up, rather than bringing them in. And the original settlers are dead. Within Europe, especially, settlers and migrants and Indigenous have hybridised over centuries (consider the Romans, the Angles and Saxons, the Normans, etc. in England).

Surviving Indigenous populations in the Americas and Australia remain disadvantaged, and we have a duty of solidarity with them. But judging peoples' potential to win progress from the misdeeds or the sufferings of their ancestors is another matter.

Israel is for many influenced by "decolonial" thinking the archetype of the "settler-colonial" state. Whatever about the misdeeds of people of European, Asian, etc. origin in the Americas, Australia, and some parts of Asia, and whatever about Tuck's and Yang's talk of "repatriating land" and "unsettling settlers", no-one really questions that the now-majority nations in those countries can exercise political self-determination, or demands rights for the minorities deriving from populations previously settled in the areas other than in that frame. With Israel attitudes are different.

Maxime Rodinson wrote an essay in Jean-Paul Sartre's journal Les Temps Modernes (#253, July 1967) entitled 'Israel: fait colonial?' He concluded: yes, Zionism had a colonising character. An English translation ('Israel: a colonial-settler state?') was published in 1973 by the then "orthodox Trotskyist" Socialist Workers Party USA, with an introduction eagerly claiming that Rodinson's qualified yes justified the SWP-US's policy since 1971 that Israel must be abolished and its people subsumed into an (implicitly Arab-majority) "secular democratic Palestine" (in 1918-48 borders).

The introduction felt obliged to rebuke Rodinson for not spelling out that conclusion. Rodinson declared that he was now a historian, concerned to assess, not a revolutionary, concerned to prescribe (he had been a Communist Party member from 1937 to 1958). But he made it clear in his essay, and in his 1968 book Israel et le Refus Arabe (English: Israel and the Arabs) that he favoured compromise, something like two states. He decried the idea of demanding that the Israeli Jews disqualify or condemn themselves for their past sins or the sins of their ancestors. The world is not divided into good and bad peoples, the virtuous and the settler-colonialists. Besides, the Israeli Jewish settlers were also refugees. "Many went there because it was the life preserver thrown to them… It is useless to reproach them for it."

Today, some Israeli chauvinists claim the territory of Israel, or even all British-mandate Palestine, by saying that Jews are the "Indigenous" people of the area on the strength of the Biblical Jewish kingdoms there, predating the Arab and Muslim conquest.

There is little genetic continuity between modern and Biblical Jewish populations. Even if there were more, defining rights to an area genetically is racist nonsense. Israeli Jews' right to self-determination derives from living generations forming a nation, not from genetics.

Arab chauvinists claim the right to "return" and displace the Jews on the basis of genetics, too: that today's Palestinians descend (in the father's line, since that is how Palestinian refugee status goes) from the dominant population in the area before Zionist colonisation. But in truth the Palestinians' right to self-determination, also, derives from the living generation.

"National" rights belong to living collectives, defined by living generations, and understood as constantly in flux and as embracing and being modified by minorities. An internationalist working class can unite across and erode national borders by mutual recognition and respect of national rights. Descent-based claims to exclusive domain, and competing drives to settle accounts for past grievances, can produce only chauvinism and revanchism.8
3 Ireland as optic

Robert J C Young's big and deliberately eclectic textbook, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction, cites James Connolly as a pioneer-before-the-word of postcolonial theory on the grounds of three themes.

• The world has been blighted decisively by European (or, for Connolly, just British) domination, and social advance centres on pushing back that domination, rather than in class struggle which also (and very importantly) germinates in Europe (or in Britain)

• Social advance will come through rejection of economic models pushed by and involving links with the metropoles, and the adoption instead of a model of self-sufficient national development

• The call for a cultural return to local traditions and wisdoms, and a cultural rejection of metropolitan doctrines. (Here, Young depends on later constructions taking elements from Connolly's writings, and exaggerates Connolly's warmth towards the Gaelic-revival movement of his time. Connolly himself criticised it as tending "to deny the value of all other literature and the work of other peoples and… to make our Irish… too self-centred").

Connolly's part in the Easter Rising can also be drawn on by postcolonial writers wanting to valorise the strand in Fanon which suggests a redeeming function for anti-colonial violence. At the worst, Irish national identity has sometimes been equated with ancient Gaelic "indigenous" ancestry, with northern Protestants classified as "resident aliens", "planters", or "colons".

All these strands, taking the "worst" of Connolly, or of Connolly as later interpreted, as most suitable to be integrated into postcolonial discourse, have had judgement passed on them by history. In the first place, for centuries Dublin and the surrounds were the most Anglicised areas of Ireland, Ulster the least. In the second place, as Connolly himself at his best put it, for a contemporary socialist "the man whose forefathers manned the walls of Derry is as dear to us as he who traces his descent from the women who stood in the breaches of Limerick. Neither fought for Ireland, but only to decide which English king should rule Ireland. What have we to do with their quarrels? In the words of the United Irishmen – 'Let us bury our animosities with the bones of our ancestors'."
4 Differentiation among postcolonial writers

Postcolonial writers differ widely among themselves.9 Definitions and boundaries are elusive. Robert J C Young, in Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction, sets the boundaries of "postcolonial" thought as wide as he can, to include both the advocates and the opponents of the "cultural turn" which defines many postcolonial writers. He tries to include as many strands as he can in a scheme of a "tricontinental" (Asian-African-Latin-American) movement. For example, he fits in a strand in "postcolonial" theory which is obviously "Western"-university-derived, in fact largely Paris-derived, the philosophical influence of Foucault and Derrida, with the thin argument that Derrida was by origin Algerian-Jewish, and lived in Algeria until he came to Paris for lycée education; Foucault had a lecturer job in Tunisia for two years. So they were both really "colonial subjects".

Some pioneers of postcolonial theory moved away from it because of its "cultural turn", which has made much postcolonial writing either shade off into an academic version of NGO-ish "social justice" concerns or collapse into particularist obscurantism. So Sumit Sarkar, for example, criticised the the elevation of cultural themes as determinants above the material drives of imperialism and colonialism. "The polemical target is no longer the state as related, in however complex or mediated of ways, to patterns of class rule, exploitation, forms of surplus appropriation, but the modern state as embodying Western cultural (mainly rationalist) values…" And "power" is seen as all-pervasive. "The counterpoint [to oppressive power], if any, is seen to lie in the local, fragmentary, fleeting, marginal - as well as, sometimes, in survivals of the pre-modern or pre-colonial… Total rejection of universalism, in culturally relativist ways, may valorise ethnic or community identities as incommensurable and internally homogenised".10

Terry Eagleton suggests that there must be "a secret handbook for postcolonial critics, the first rule of which reads 'begin by rejecting the whole notion of postcolonialism'… the second rule… 'be as obscurantist as you can…'"11 Benita Parry was one of the major writers in the field yet also wrote a book titled a "materialist critique" of postcolonial studies and complained: "'postcolonial' can indicate... in the spirit of mastery favoured by Humpty Dumpty in his dealings with language, whatever an author chooses it to mean... it is not uncommon to find the term used in connection with any discursive contest against oppression or marginalisation — such as feminist or queer or disability studies".12 Robert J C Young writes that "postcolonial theory is not even a theory… What it has done is develop a set of conceptual resources… there is no single methodology".13 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, possibly the most famous of "postcolonial" writers, declares that she "separated… from postcolonial studies in… 1999. I am still separated from it".14

As far as I can make out, there has been a differentiation among postcolonial academics analogous to the differentiation among post-Stalinist political figures which has seen some shade off into liberalism (Eurocommunists and "post-Marxists") and others seek to re-run the old "two camps" worldview, but with China and its allies, or political-Islamist "anti-imperialism", in place of the old "socialist camp".
5 "Soft" and "hard" academic decolonialism

The more liberal-tending, Eurocommunist-like wing of postcolonial writers has achieved things. Between the 1920s and the 1960s courses in "Western civilisation", "from Plato to NATO" as critics wryly put it, were a standard in US universities. The British state used Oxford University's Classics and then Politics, Philosophy, and Economics courses as its primers for ruling the Empire. The new construct of "the West" as a homogeneous civilisation, developing sequentially from ancient Greece, surely served the storyline that European empires brought the benefits of culture and "good government" to Africa and Asia. Many universities have broadened their scope. In literary studies too: as Vivek Chibber comments, by 2000 "the conventional packaging… had expanded - at least at many élite American universities - to include the works of… Ngugi wa Thiongo, Aimé Césaire, Salman Rushdie, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez…"

Despite counter-pressure from conservatives, history courses today will introduce students to critical accounts of the European colonial empires. There is more to be done, but the scope has broadened.

The more "militant" postcolonialists seek instead to revalorise writers like Fanon and Cabral, and often tend to see themselves still as Marxists. Benita Parry, who died in 2020, even had a background in Trotskisant politics of a sort, in the Non-European Unity Movement in South Africa.

More "culturalist" postcolonial writers tend to query "national liberation" or "nationalism" as Eurocentric-derived schemes and think there is no remedy but to continue to "deconstruct" the "discourses". The more militant double down on "Third-World-ist" inspirations.

It is not a "Third-World-ism" like the 1960s or 70s, or the movements in solidarity with Algeria or Vietnam. There are many university departments of postcolonial studies and the like, but few postcolonialist student-activist groups, let alone worker groups.

The colonial liberation battles of the 1950s-70s did win, and often thanks to much heroism. Despite everything, independence brought improvements. In Tanzania at independence in 1961, after 76 years of German then British rule, literacy was 15%. It is now 82%. Infant mortality was 142 per thousand; it is now 34. The insult and affront of chronically-racist colonial rule has been lifted, even if the new independent state has its own brutalities.

But independence has also disappointed, and surely disappointed anyone who thought the ex-colonies would become models of socialist advance. Do Cabral and Fanon map out a road not followed which can explain and help?
6 Cabral and Fanon

Amilcar Cabral grew up in Cabo Verde, a group of islands off the African coast which had no indigenous population before the Portuguese Empire started a settlement there in 1460. The islands became a hub for the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery was abolished there in 1869. The population is mostly Creole. The islands were combined in a unit with Guinea-Bissau (on the mainland) for Portuguese administration, but became a separate state after independence. Cabo Verde is considerably less poor than Guinea-Bissau (GDP PPP per capita $9,000 vs $2,000).

Cabral had been born (in 1924) in Guinea-Bissau and was of partly mainland background. He got to study agronomy in Portugal (from 1945). He returned to Guinea-Bissau as an agronomist. In 1956 he and others, in Portugal, founded the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cabo Verde. The MPLA of Angola was formed at the same time, with Cabral also taking part. The PAIGC, starting with just six members, worked to expand its base. Seven years later, from 1963, it launched guerrilla war in selected areas of Guinea-Bissau where Portuguese colonial governance was weak, not in Cabo Verde.

Cabral was killed by dissident PAIGC members, possibly linked to the Portuguese state, in January 1973. By then the PAIGC had a structure of administration in large areas of Guinea-Bissau. Amilcar Cabral's close comrade and half-brother Luis Cabral succeeded him as PAIGC leader. Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde became independent in September 1974, after the revolution in Portugal. Luis Cabral was ousted in a 1980 coup by Nino Vieira, who had been one of the main military leaders of the PAIGC against Portugal. Independence has surely improved basic education and healthcare, which were minimal five hundred years after the first Portuguese slave-trade bases there and almost a hundred years after the formal seizure of the territory by the Portuguese empire. Guinea-Bissau remains one of the poorest countries in Africa, with high inequality and a ruling class clustered round the state machine, public projects, the administration of aid, etc.

Frantz Fanon, born in 1925, grew up in a middle-class multiracial family in Martinique, then as now under French rule. He quit Martinique to fight with De Gaulle's "Free French" forces in World War 2, then studied in Paris and Lyon, qualifying as a psychiatrist and reading widely.

In 1953 he got a job as a senior doctor at a mental hospital in Algeria. Anguished by seeing the results of the torture and abuse inflicted on Algerians after the FLN's war of independence broke out in 1954, he quietly joined the FLN in 1955. In 1957 he quit his job, and took another psychiatrist job in Tunis, where the FLN's central staff were based, and wrote for the FLN's fortnightly paper. (Fanon only ever learned minimal Arabic, but the paper was partly in French.) At the end of 1959 he quit his Tunis medical job to become a full-time ambassador in Accra for the FLN government-in-exile. He died in 1961 from leukemia. Algeria would become independent in 1962.

In 1962-5, Algeria made socialistic experiments with agricultural cooperatives. But the military-dominated machine of the FLN imposed a one-party state. Even in the leftist period under Ahmed Ben Bella, the FLN government intervened repeatedly in the (only) union confederation, the UGTA, to ensure loyalist leadership.15 The "pieds rouges", the European leftists like Michel Pablo who went to Algeria to help after the bulk of the very right-wing European settlers ("pieds noirs") quit the country in 1962, often had to flee, or in any case quit. Algeria remains an unequal society dominated by a ruling class centred round a bureaucratic-military apparatus and the export of oil and gas (95% of the country's export income in recent times; in the colonial period, oil had only recently been discovered and the economy was still mostly agricultural).

Both Cabral and Fanon had reservations about the USSR or China as models, and about "Marxism" as they got it from the Communist Parties.

When Cabral first encountered the Portuguese Communist Party as a student in Portugal (from 1945), the CP did not officially even support independence for Portugal's African colonies. He queried the Stalinist theory of "national democracy" (as the "next stage" in a "stages theory" of political strategy in poorer countries).

He insisted that his movement was "not a Communist or a Marxist-Leninist party", though he would have known that the Angolan Communist Party was merged into the MPLA.

Fanon started in politics in 1945 supporting the successful Communist Party candidacy of Aimé Césaire, the chief political figure in Martinique at the time. When Fanon first "dabbled in student politics" in France in the early 1950s, he was "close to the local PCF [French Communist Party] branch, though never a member… participated in its anti-colonial demonstrations".

But the CP had been in the French government when it inflicted the Sétif massacre of 1945, and throughout Algeria's war of independence had the equivocal slogan "Peace in Algeria". (How? On what terms?) The FLN would ban the Algerian Communist Party (PCA) from agitating within its ranks, and banned the PCA outright after the FLN took power. Fanon condemned the French CP's record on Algeria. One psychiatrist whom he worked with in France had been active in the POUM in Spain during the late 1930s. Fanon was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre, who would write a preface for Fanon's most famous book, The Wretched of the Earth; Sartre had oscillated in and out of the sphere of influence of the Communist Party but denounced the Russian invasion of Hungary in 1956. Fanon is said to have disliked the USSR when he went there seeking treatment for leukemia in 1961 (though he chose the USSR first, against the USA, and went to the US only reluctantly when USSR doctors told him that only there could he hope for successful treatment). According to Leo Zeilig, Fanon even met and talked with French Trotskyists Jean Ayme and Pierre Broué in 1956.16

Yet Cabral's movement sought, got aid from, and did not criticise Stalinist states. The PAIGC's model of a socialist Guinea-Bissau was of a one-party state. The FLN kept good enough relations with the USSR to get aid. The nearest it had to a social model in Fanon's time was Nasser's Egypt, which in turn quasi-emulated and sought friendly ties with the USSR. Fanon never criticised the FLN.

Fanon praised Sékou Touré in Guinea as the best of the African independence leaders, on grounds of Sékou Touré's refusal, despite a punitive response from Paris designed to wreck independent Guinea, of the close ties imposed on other French ex-colonies in West Africa when they became independent (French "advisers", French military presence, close economic ties with France, French currency, etc.) He did not question Sékou Touré's USSR-derived model of "socialism" (one-party "developmentalist" state). He admired Castro and gave no indication of considering Cuba as other than a good model of socialism.

Guinea-Bissau and Algeria have seen predictable results from the sort of programme advocated by Cabral and Fanon: autonomous development "in one country" with a regime run by a single militarised revolutionary party. Predictable in terms of the criterion expressed by Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, understood by the Bolsheviks as making it impossible to envisage any sort of "socialism in one country" arising from the 1917 workers' revolution they led, and used by Trotsky to explicate the Stalinist degeneration.

"A great increase in productive power, a high degree of its development... is an absolutely necessary practical premise because without it want is merely made general, and with destitution the struggle for necessities and all the old filthy business would necessarily be reproduced".

With the poverty in African countries, even in Algeria, which thanks to oil and gas exports ranks for GDP PPP per capita above Ukraine and above Guinea-Bissau, class differentiation is almost inescapable. Fanon denounced the typical new ruling classes of the African states he observed as "a sort of little greedy caste, avid and voracious, with the mind of a huckster, only too glad to accept the dividends that the former colonial power hands out to it… Privileges multiply and corruption triumphs, while morality declines. Today the vultures are too numerous and too voracious in proportion to the lean spoils of the national wealth. The party, a true instrument of power in the hands of the bourgeoisie, reinforces the machine, and ensures that the people are hemmed in and immobilised".

That sort of huckster class will be generated almost automatically by the better-placed in a locally-impoverished society open to a world of wider material wealth. And a radical rejection of the former colonial power will not stop it being generated. Even if the former colonial power has been deprived all grip or influence, the "hucksters" can feed on aid money, public projects, foreign investments which require licences and local partners, etc.

Fanon indicated awareness of the impasse of development "in one country" in an uncharacteristically Pollyannaish passage in The Wretched of the Earth. With ex-colonies shutting out trade from the metropoles, he wrote:

"The Western industries will quickly be deprived of their overseas markets. The machines will pile up their products in the warehouses and a merciless struggle will ensue on the European market [and]... will force the European working class to engage in an open struggle against the capitalist regime. Then the monopolies will realise that their true interests lie in giving aid to the underdeveloped countries - unstinted aid with not too many conditions…

"We ought... to emphasise and explain to the capitalist countries that… the plans for [militarily] nuclearising the world must stop, and large-scale investments and technical aid must be given to underdeveloped regions". But Pollyannaish it was. Cabral made no such speculations, but sought and obtained aid both from Stalinist regimes and from Scandinavia for the PAIGC-controlled areas in Guinea-Bissau. The success of that aid was small. The renowned Brazilian educationalist Paulo Freire came to Guinea-Bissau in the early years of independence to run literacy programmes, but with little result.

Algeria had at least a more-or-less common language (Arabic, spoken also by many of the 20%-or-so Amazigh minority) with a rich written culture, and a long pre-colonial history as an autonomous unit (loosely overseen by the Ottoman Empire). Guinea-Bissau, like many African countries, had borders drawn by the chances and mischances of European carving-up of the continent, containing many different peoples, cultures, and languages (mostly not written). Developing a sense of national community beyond common resentment against Portuguese colonial arrogance was not straightforward.

The former Trotskyist C L R James later became a supporter of another variant of "African socialism", that of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana. But he explained to readers in Trinidad:17

"We have to appreciate the immense differences between the territory and population of Ghana and the territory and population of, for example, Trinidad and Tobago. Walk about in Accra, the capital of Ghana. A modern city… Everywhere, activity, modernism…

"But drive five miles from the centre of Accra… There is a mud-walled village, houses of a type which could have been there 500 years ago… Go on… You meet… small concentrations of people living African lives and for the most part speaking one of a few tribal languages… You come to Kumasi… quite a modern town. But… people different from the Africans of the coast in language, religion, tribal practices and outlook, and very conscious of those differences… [Further inland] elementary education was fighting hard against a primitive past, bad roads, remote villages…"
7 Skipping stages

Both Cabral and Fanon were active at a time of much and varied talk of "African socialism". Fanon did not rely on the idea of socialist traditions among the local peasantry, and Cabral was cautious about it. Elsewhere that idea played a big part in "African socialism". The idea that communal relations (of ancient lineage) on the land in poorer countries could be developed directly into a modern socialist society ("skipping" the intervening process in most countries of rural pauperisation, proletarianisation, urbanisation) had been current at least since the Russian populist movement of the 19th century.

Marx and Engels, in an 1882 preface to a Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, asked: "can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution?

"The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."

Soon Marxists such as Plekhanov would conclude that the decay of the old common-ownership forms had gone too far for such a perspective. Even at best, though, Marx and Engels saw no path to socialism "in one country" derived from the old common ownership.

The possible path they saw depended on the workers in countries which had already gone through rural pauperisation, proletarianisation, urbanisation, and capitalist "primitive accumulation" seizing the productive wealth created by capitalist development in those countries, and using that wealth to aid a transition of agriculture in Russia from penury to productivity and plenty within the communal forms. The possibility held out by the Bolsheviks after 1917 of alliances between the workers' revolutions and "revolutionary nationalist" movements in impoverished mostly-peasant countries was similarly dependent on: "after organising peasant soviets and peasant soviet republics in the East, with the help and support of the [to-be-won] Soviet republics of the industrial West, the supplying to the peasants, on an extensive scale, of agricultural machinery, tools, draught animals and other means of production needed for carrying on agriculture... joint use of these means of production by all the peasants... agronomic aid to the peasants... collective working... peasant producers’ co-operatives… [and] consumers’ co-operatives" (Theses on the Agrarian Question of the Baku Congress of the Peoples of the East, 1920).

Even in the best case, there would have been great problems along the way around the organisers of that supply of machinery, expertise, etc. However much drawn from working-class socialist ranks, however much democratically regulated, they would desire at least the material conditions of better-off workers in the better-off workers' republics, and a big economic differentiation would open up between themselves as the "organisers" and the local peasants. Humanitarian aid workers from the UN and NGOs today are not capitalists. Most of them have chosen their jobs over better-paid and more comfortable ones in the metropoles. But they are vastly better-off than their locally-recruited co-workers, who in turn are better off than the majority. It would have been, and will be, difficult to stop class differentiation being generated around even the most disinterested aid flows.

In any case, we didn't get complementary workers' revolutions in richer countries and democratic peasant-based revolutions in poorer countries.

More or less everywhere, whatever old communistic relations there may have been on the land have been replaced by farming integrated in various ways into market relations18, and economic forces have long been driving rural people to move to the cities to seek even the most precarious and low-paid work there. Marx wrote in 1877 that unless a revolution came soon in Russia, it would "lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime". Not only Russia but all other nations have now missed that chance, if it ever was there.

Some technology, investment, and aid has flowed from the richer countries to the poorer, but little of it has been the "most disinterested". Some of it, especially from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, was made conditional on "structural adjustment programmes" myopically imposing neoliberal norms. Much has gone into airports, airlines, hotels, shopping malls, presidential palaces, new show cities, and other projects remote from the life of the majority but offering spoils for the local "huckster" bourgeoisie.
8 The human basis of socialism

Frantz Fanon contended that the self-assertion of colonised peoples against the colonial regime - by violence, because, wrote Fanon, that was the only way open, or at least the only way open to all but a small better-off minority among the colonised who might get sops here and there from haggling - would undo the psychic damage, the self-destructive traits, the passive resentment, imposed by colonialism.

This would create a base for a new society after independence, particularly among the peasantry and the "lumpenproletariat" (people living off petty crime, petty trade, etc.) Although Algeria was 30% urbanised during the war of independence (it's about 75% today), and much of agriculture had come to use wage-labour, Fanon wrote off the Algerian working class: "tram conductors, taxi drivers, miners, dockers, interpreters, nurses, and so on... because of the privileged place which they hold in the colonial system constitute also the 'bourgeois' fraction of the colonised people".

Making a new revolutionary nation from peasants and lumpenproletarians required more than organising them for anti-colonial violence. It required political education by a revolutionary movement. Where that revolutionary movement would get the ideas to take to the peasants, Fanon did not say: his scheme had no equivalent of the Marxist idea of a revolutionary political party which gains its clarity from being the "memory of the working class", from constantly working at open debates, from testing its ideas by intervention in multifarious working-class struggles, from being at least in aspiration and in connections international. In the end, Fanon relied entirely on education coming "down" from the militarised FLN leadership, even though he knew that the leftist leader who had first brought him to the FLN, Abane Ramdane, had been murdered by opponents within the FLN in 1957 and the murder had been covered up.

Violence was probably necessary to win independence for Algeria, particularly given the influence its 10% European-settler population could have on the French government. Fanon's case for violence was however too broad-brush.

Fanon's case for turning to the peasantry reads in part as a rationalisation of the fact that the FLN's originally city-focused tactic was defeated in the "Battle of Algiers" in 1957, and it subsequently told FLN-sympathising workers, students, and other city-dwellers who wanted to join it that they must go to the countryside to join guerrilla forces there. Especially after that, the violence was necessarily the work of only a small minority of Algerians and of FLN supporters. Fanon himself took no part in the violence (and, it seems, personally was horrified by it). There is no evidence that it had the socialistic-politicising effect which Fanon attributed to it. Djamila Bouhired, famous for bombing an Algiers café frequented by Europeans but escaping the death penalty in France, started her career in Algeria after independence as the country representative for the Max Factor cosmetics firm.

A sizeable fraction of the FLN's violence was directed against Algerian political opponents - notably, the more leftish MNA, which in the earlier part at least of the war was much stronger among Algerian workers in France, and the Algerian CP; then, the leftish Amazigh FFS rebellion in 1963-4.

The only counter-power or replacement-power the guerrilla war could build was nothing like workers' and peasants' councils, or even a rebel democratic parliament, but the military power of the FLN. There was a provisional government in exile, the GPRA, from 1958. After independence the GPRA was dissolved in favour of the rule of the Political Bureau of the FLN (backed up by the military). The FLN, though it had mass support and was an instrument of national self-determination against French rule, and although its doctrine emphasised control of the political wing over the military, had become a highly militarised movement. In 1965, three years after the military installed Ahmed Ben Bella (who had been in jail 1956-62) as Algeria's first president, the military commander Houari Boumedienne would oust Ben Bella in a coup and take the presidency for himself.
9 Walter Rodney and "African socialism"

Walter Rodney was a Guyanese Marxist. A collection of his writings has been published under a title designed to appeal to the "postcolonial" sensibility, Decolonial Marxism. Influenced by C L R James, who though he had become a supporter of left nationalists like Eric Williams in Trinidad and Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana had a Trotskyist past, Rodney believed that "bureaucratisation… parade[d] in the name of socialism… under Stalin, and it did put a certain blight upon socialism for quite a long time". He was sceptical about "the unstinted aid supposedly available from the Soviet Union", writing that it "would be regarded as illusory by most progressive Africans". However, he was still tied to the ideal of "autocentric" "socialism in one country", and still consider the USSR's satellites and allies to represent "the socialist sector of the world".19

He gave most attention to the possibilities in Tanzania under Julius Nyerere, from 1961 onwards. Nyerere ruled until 1985; Rodney was in Tanzania only 1966-7 and 1969-74, and was killed in 1980. In Tanzania, Rodney reckoned, "even at the end of the colonial period the communal forms [of agriculture] were still recognisable". It is a large country, with large potential resources, yet unlike many smaller African countries has a lingua franca spoken almost everywhere (Swahili). The former colonial power, Britain, had lighter economic interests in Tanzania than in other colonies, and did not have the sort of smothering influence after independence which France got in most of its West African colonies. The term "neo-colonialism" is more apt for that sort of smothering influence than for what it is sometimes used to describe: the general problems of weaker economies in capitalist world trade and financial markets, not escapable by any sort of increase of political independence or by any extent of nationalisation of assets.

However, a lesson of the experience of the ex-colonies since the 1960s is that nationalisation of the assets of colonial capitalists, and rejection of French-West-Africa-type neocolonial influence, however desirable and necessary, is no highway to prosperity, and no antidote to the growth of a local "huckster" bourgeoisie around the state machine.

As an obituary for Nyerere said, "in contrast to many African leaders, who often raced through their capitals in motorcades with phalanxes of motorcycle outriders, he moved around Dar es Salaam in an old car with just his driver, who stopped for red lights". He tried to curb bureaucratic privilege. He was not a Marxist - and not a Stalinist either, more a welfare-state reform socialist, sincere and serious. He nationalised industry, but he centred efforts on trying to reorganise agriculture on a more productive and cooperative basis, round villages provided with schools and health care rather than on "prestige projects". He ran a one-party state, but allowed critics like Rodney to have their say as long it was critical advice to Nyerere rather than a basis for alternatives.

Yet as Rodney put it: "The petty bourgeoisie… concentrated in effect in the area of the state, either the civil service or the police-army apparatus… used the new policies as a means of reproducing themselves as a class… The petty bourgeoise is still essentially in control of the state, and it could not allow the working class to exercise… initiative… By 1964… the government acted to virtually put an end to independent trade union organisation".

The cooperative village programme failed to increase productivity, and despite Nyerere's political credit with the people as the leader of the independence struggle, soon peasants refused to go into the villages. The programme collapsed. After Nyerere withdrew as leader in 1985, the Tanzanian government soon started rebuilding links with private capital and the world market.

Casting round for hope that new essays in "African socialism" would do better than early ones, and perhaps influenced by Fanon, Rodney observed that if Britain had been able to sideline the white settlers and transfer Zimbabwe to majority rule in the early 1960s (when in fact a white-settler government declared independence in 1965 to pre-empt majority rule), then the majority-rule government would be a ZANU-ZAPU coalition based on middle-class leaders with little drastic mass mobilisation. In fact there was guerrilla war against the white-settler government, which would end in 1979-80 with a formula brokered by Britain for majority rule. Rodney hoped that the phase of violence would socially radicalise the people and lead to a more socialist outcome. In fact, the bloodstained kleptocracy installed by Robert Mugabe in 1979-80 was further from socialism than an early 1960s majority-rule government might have been. Rodney's attempt to "build on" Fanon revealed weaknesses in Fanon's argument.

Amilcar Cabral did not believe in the socialistic virtues of violence. He had resisted pressure from Fanon to start guerrilla war earlier in Guinea-Bissau, insisting that a social and political base must be built first. In his time as leader, the PAIGC focused on winning support and control, and developing schools and health care, in the areas occupied by the Balanta people. The Portuguese colonial regime had little presence in those areas, and the Balanta had more egalitarian traditions than the other major ethnic-language group, the Fulbe, who had hierarchical structures and had long traded slaves (including from the Balanta) with the Portuguese.

Cabral did not idealise the Balanta, nor idealise the peasantry above other sections of the population. He noted that young people who had come to the cities to seek jobs, relying for the meantime on support from relatives already settled in the cities, were one of the best sources of recruits for the PAIGC.

But, as far as I can make out, he had no clear strategy for unifying and conciliating Balanta and Fulbe and the other peoples of Guinea-Bissau, nor of dealing with the distance between the Guinea-Bissau people and PAIGC leaders frequently of Cabo Verde background and Portuguese-speaking. If he had a strategy, it didn't work. He did not build a party capable of learning, but a machine within which his successors were first his brother, and then the PAIGC military figure Nino Vieira. Vieira (himself from a small-minority ethnic-linguistic group) made periodic purges of the army to curb Balanta influence and protect the grip of the military apparatus. The PAIGC licensed other parties in 1991. From 2000 to 2004 a Balanta-based party ruled in coalition, with at best some wider distribution of the spoils, but no great social reforms.

The first chapter of Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth postulated a universal divide between coloniser and colonised (as if he himself were not an intermediate figure, and as if Algeria were a model of the whole world), and violence of the colonised against the coloniser as not only unavoidable in circumstances like Algeria, but a chief driver of liberation. On that count, the record tells against Fanon.

Our conclusion should not be to double down on the vicarious celebration of violence (even where it is necessary), or to hope for other paths to "socialism" over the heads of the working class and in poverty-stricken and often small countries, but to rediscover the centrality of the working class, of internationalism, of democracy, and of building on the achievements of capitalism.
10 "Science must fall"?

Even when postcolonial theory looks little further than reshaping "the academy", it has variants way more militant than "broadening the curriculum". Even short of the extravagance of "science must fall" (a now notorious slogan of some students at the University of Cape Town in 2016), this extra "militancy" is not real or productive.

Some postcolonial writers argue that diversity is only a liberal sop. "Lauding, generalising, and sampling a pre-constructed Eastern philosophy only satisfies the multiculturalist logic of inclusion rather than dismantling the colonial circuit of knowledge".20 They claim, for example, that "sociology is a a product of the intersection of science and European imperialism", "American sociology is really… the scientific reflection of American racism", etc. Some even argue that across the board "science must fall", because it is shaped by Eurocentrism and has constituted "epistemic violence" against colonised peoples, that "epistemic violence" being the forerunner and shaper of political colonialism and economic domination.

They rebuke the claims of post-Enlightenment science to be "abstract and universal", and look instead to "indigenous" knowledge and the "marginalised". All such claims beg the question: how do the postcolonial theorists know? How do they plan to convince their readers? If sifting evidence and argument in an "abstract and universal" way leads us astray, then what methods tell them that their "knowledge", or the knowledge they attribute to Indigenous peoples, is correct? And which "Indigenous" knowledge? There are over 7,000 Indigenous language groups in the world, all with differing ideas.

Rohan Deb Roy, though he describes himself as inspired by the "subaltern studies" strand of postcolonial theory, issues apt warnings here.21 There is "the risk of being used by religious fundamentalists and cynical politicians in their arguments against established scientific theories such as climate change. This is a time when the integrity of experts is under fire and science is the target of political manoeuvring…

"Alongside its imperial history, science has also inspired many people in the former colonial world to demonstrate remarkable courage, critical thinking and dissent in the face of established beliefs and conservative traditions. These include the iconic Indian anti-caste activist Rohith Vemula and the murdered atheist authors Narendra Dabholkar and Avijit Roy. Demanding that 'science must fall' fails to do justice to this legacy...

"Some Indian nationalists, including the country’s current prime minister, Narendra Modi, have emphasised the scientific glories of an ancient Hindu civilisation. They argue that plastic surgery, genetic science, aeroplanes and stem cell technology were in vogue in India thousands of years ago. These claims are not just a problem because they are factually inaccurate. Misusing science to stoke a sense of nationalist pride can easily feed into jingoism...

"In 2016, a senior Indian government official even went so far as to claim that 'doctors prescribing non-Ayurvedic medicines are anti-national'."

The South African regime's HIV-AIDS denialism in 1999-2008, based on the claim that the link between HIV and AIDS was an artefact of "Western science", gave us another warning. Socialists as well as liberals have insisted on the idea that truth can be determined, at least to workable extents, against the Trump-style versions of the claim that "it's all discourse", let alone the implication that all we can do to discover truth is to follow the communal wisdom of some designated community.

Hein Htet Kyaw, an atheist Burmese exile activist in Australia, commented to me: "I have no doubt on the revolutionary legacy of the postcolonial theory. Being said that, most of the postcolonial scholars I have read or met are simply hypocritical and are ignorant of the organic indigenous historical events and scriptures especially when it comes to religiously-related political movements. Given the situation where these ideas such as postcolonialism and decolonisation are coming from all these Western NGOs, Western-trained scholars, and Western-trained people of colour bossing around the organic Third World working class, I feel like postcolonialism itself has become a new form of Western colonialism using Western-raised people of colour as medium".

Other critics have argued that postcolonialism can feed into "the colonial and neoliberal capitalist logic of identity formation that serves elites, and helps to advance the neoliberal political-economic project of the Hindu right. A postmodern logic of identity formation facilitates the expansion of the neoliberal capitalist economy with the process of Hinduisation".22

All the Indian postcolonial writers whom I know about reject Modi's Hindu chauvinism (despite that chauvinism being presented as a throwing-off of the heritage of British and of Muslim conquest) and see it as a main concern to oppose the caste system in India (even though its origins were pre-colonial: the British in India rigidified caste divisions, at least for a long period, but as part of an effort to use local traditions to harness Indian élites as intermediaries). But there is a problem here with one of the main texts of postcolonialism, Edward Said's Orientalism.
11 Said's Orientalism

The book has been crudely summarised (by postcolonial writers)23 as arguing "that Enlightenment thought, which laid the basis for… the social sciences, constructed [the field as a story in which] Europeans produce logic and science while all others produce myths and superstitions". That crude summary produces a trend in postcolonial theory towards "Orientalism in reverse", still seeing "Oriental" thought as folkloric but now valorising it as a challenge to "Eurocentric" science.

Said himself, in an afterword to his Orientalism, was less crude. He wrote that the book was about "re-thinking of what had for centuries been believed to be an unbridgeable chasm separating East and West", in other words about re-establishing the idea of the capacity of human knowledge to transcend cultural divides and win commensurability and progress. He objected to "a manufactured 'clash of civilisations'."

Said variously describes the Western "Orientalists" he studied, mostly of the 19th century, as having "an amateur or professional enthusiasm for everything Asiatic, which was wonderfully synonymous with the mysterious, the profound, the seminal"; as seeing Egypt as "the homeland of the arts"; as seeing it also as the scene of "bizarres jouissances"; as an effort to "disinter forgotten languages… and cultures in order to posit them… as the true classical Orient that could be used to judge and rule the modern Orient"; as, contrariwise, assuming "an unchanging Orient"; as imbued with "Oriental ease… Oriental despotism and sensuality, imbued with a feeling of Oriental fatalism"; or as flatly declaring that "history, politics, and economics do not matter. Islam is Islam, the Orient is the Orient, and please take all your ideas about a left and a right wing, revolutions, and change, back to Disneyland".

This is not the story of a calculated "epistemic violence" which, once directed against the Orient, made the actual plunder and oppression only a consequence (capitalism as a "technology of colonialism"). More realistically, it describes many different attitudes, some from people who put great labour into finding out about the achievements of "Oriental" civilisation which they admired but saw (with some reason, in the last period of the Mughal Empire, in the 18th and 19th century Ottoman Empire, or in China of the Qing dynasty) as in decay. All were biased to varying degrees by their material circumstances, as almost all of the "Orientalists" were servants of European powers plundering and oppressing areas of the "Orient". But the record suggests that the material drive to plunder and oppression came first, and the bias as a result.

In his anger against the imperialist condescension of 19th and much 20th century writing about "the Orient", Said cuts corners. He cites William Jones writing in 1787 that it was his "ambition to know India better than any other European ever knew it", and though he admits Jones inquired hard, goes straight from that to Balfour claiming in 1910 that Britain had a right to rule Egypt because "we" knew so much about it.

Said claims that Marx in his writings on India first expressed sympathy with the people's sufferings and then let "Orientalist science" chase away the sympathy.

In fact, in a later passage of the same article which Said cites, Marx looked forward to the day when the "Hindoos themselves shall have grown strong enough to throw off the English yoke altogether. At all events, we may safely expect to see, at a more or less remote period, the regeneration of that great and interesting country... more subtle and adroit than the Italians... whose country has been the source of our languages, our religions…"

Marx thought the introduction of a working class and a bourgeoisie into India by British rule, though done for the vilest motives, at great cost, and much botched, would be the next step towards the Indian people reasserting itself. In essence he was right, whatever about his dependence for information on writers like Jones, the dated language, and his underestimate, in that article though less so in others, of how much Britain adapted old Indian hierarchies to serve its rule and so rigidified them.
12 Building on bourgeois achievements

Some postcolonial writing has a version of Said's argument crudified to the point of becoming an "Orientalism in reverse". The argument becomes that "Western" standards like democracy, secularism, and women's liberation are inapplicable in the "Orient"; "that the Islamic Orient cannot be grasped with the epistemology [theory-of-knowledge] tools of Western social sciences and that no analogy with Western phenomena is relevant… that… the primary factor setting Muslim masses in motion is cultural, taking precedence over the economic and social/ class factors that condition Western dynamics".24 As well as this Islamist "Orientalism in reverse", there are also Hindu-tinged versions of "Orientalism in reverse" and Africanist versions of the same syndrome. The Chinese regime since the 2000s has promoted Confucianism.

Some of the early impulses in "subaltern studies" and in what is now called postcolonial theory are now widely accepted as good sense. The "subaltern studies" people wanted to develop the "history from below" approach of writers like Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson (whom they would later shun as "Eurocentric") and to question the mechanical picture of progress they had been taught by the Communist Parties of India in the light of such developments as Indira Gandhi's emergency rule (1975-7), the buoyancy of communalism, and the "Naxalite" Maoist uprisings. Other writers argued for broadening curricula.

Science produces no absolute truth. It is always fallible and incomplete. But people have been able to develop it as a world-level enterprise generating large workable elements of knowledge on which to act, and procedures for checking, modifying, rejecting where necessary, and expanding that knowledge. If it were not so, then socialism, which means global communications and democracy, would not be possible. Concerted action to assess, minimise, and adapt to environmental damage would not be possible. Indeed, capitalism, which involves world markets and world diffusion of science and technology (even though it works that diffusion in an exploitative, unequal, inhuman way) would not have been possible. The heyday of the Islamic empires, when they rediscovered and developed ideas from ancient Greece and ancient India, and inaugurated experimental rather than inductive science, would not have been possible.

The Enlightenment of the 18th century was a bourgeois movement, based in countries busy in slave-trading and plunder. In the centuries leading up to it, as Marx bitterly remarked: "The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production... On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre."

But the resources for humanity to emancipate ourselves from class society come from within class society itself. Future science will build on bourgeois science. There is no magic which would enables leftists, just through a better moral stance, a superior philosophical method, or identification with a preferred community, effortlessly, without empirical inquiry and detailed critique, to bypass and overtake the labours to date of science.

As Marx put it, "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. Humanity must prove the truth — i.e. the reality and power, the this-sidedness of our thinking in practice. The dispute over the reality or non-reality of thinking that is isolated from practice is a purely scholastic question". Practice here means not only scientific experiment, impossible in many areas of knowledge, but social practice.

If not, if different "knowledges" are fundamentally incommensurable - as is indeed suggested by the non-proselytising religions, which consider their "knowledge" more or less inaccessible to those not identified with the religion by birth and upbringing - then not only modern technology (including the technologies we need, for example, to reach environmental sustainability), but also postcolonial theory itself falls down. All general understanding, all theory, falls down.

Even according to bourgeois experts themselves, the level of understanding gained in fields like economics, where social bias weighs heavier, and empirical inquiry is often difficult, is much less than in physics. But even in economics, bourgeois investigations produce useful information.

David Graeber's and David Wengrow's book The Dawn of Everything reproduces, from a different angle, the same picture of the Enlightenment as a foreclosure on social imagination that many postcolonial writers have. Instructively, they make one exception: the circulation by Enlightenment writers of "indigenous critique" of bourgeois civilisation deriving from a Wendat (Huron) Native-American chief, Kandarionk.

But even if Enlightenment writers' varied advocacies of sorts of freedom and equality entirely derived from Kandiaronk via Lahontan, and even if Kandarionk's thought owed nothing to him living much of his life under French protection, the dissemination of that critique showed that a large and influential body of thinkers in France, Scotland, and other countries had become able to develop critiques of their own society from written reports of other societies. (There was more to that than Kandiaronk: for example, Voltaire's quirky praise for China as a model society). That was something new, an expansion rather than contraction of social imagination, and one possible only with the rise of written language, science, printing.

Since then capitalist societies have featured substantial movements, sometimes stronger, sometimes much weaker, but ongoing over decades, criticising their basis and proposing different models. Many peoples of older societies before writing were surely alert and thoughtful, and had a detailed knowledge of their natural environment which few have today, but there is little evidence of continued debates in or between those societies. The racism brewed in the European conquest of the Americas and in the Atlantic slave trade built horrible new strength and destructiveness onto ancient patterns of xenophobia and conquest, but the Enlightenment also generated the idea of universal human rights.
13 Mathematics as example

Ancient Indian and ancient Chinese mathematics, and Egyptian-Greek-European mathematics, developed with some considerable autonomy from each other, and with different slants, but they are commensurable and comparable, part of the same human effort.

Mathematics itself tells us that it is not "absolute". It has produced a proof (Tarski's indefinability theorem, a parallel result to Gödel's incompleteness theorem) that arithmetic truth cannot be defined within arithmetic. Defining truth requires a more powerful system, which in turn would require a more powerful system to define its truth. The hitch comes not (as was thought up to the 1870s) with the move to what used to be called "higher" mathematics (calculus), but with as little as number theory.

There is live argument in mathematics about whether the often-used "axiom of choice" is valid. There is a minority (but not negligible) view among mathematicians that so-called "non-constructive" proofs are inadmissible; thus, the topologist L E J Brouwer came to argue that his own proof of his famous "Brouwer fixed-point theorem" was invalid. Some seemingly-simple propositions, such as the Continuum Hypothesis, have been shown to be neither provable or disprovable without extra axioms in addition to those widely used (and no-one has yet been able to suggest what extra).

Nevertheless, there is progress in mathematics. Results and conjectures can be compared across cultures, and arguments can decide. David Hilbert was right: "All limits, especially national ones, are contrary to the nature of mathematics… Mathematics knows no races… For mathematics the whole cultural world is a single country".25

Most mathematics, most science, has been developed in what are now the richer capitalist countries. Most of it has been done by men.26 Lenin wrote of socialist theory that it "grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by [members of] the bourgeois intelligentsia", and similar is true of mathematics and science. At all times in history it has been the work of those with sufficient access to education and to freedom from routine labour, i.e. the better-off. The outstanding mathematician of the 19th century, Carl Friedrich Gauss, was the son of a bricklayer and an illiterate mother, but he could become an outstanding mathematician only because a local aristocrat sponsored him to school and university.

After the Russian workers' revolution of 1917, there was a vogue for "proletarian military doctrine" and "proletarian culture". Trotsky and others argued that culture would be enriched and widened by future socialist economic relations, allowing much wider participation, but in the meantime no self-appointed spokesperson could authentically fabricate "working-class" alternatives to the important, and possible, task of learning and adapting the vast resources of bourgeois culture. "This is like someone who, because he appreciates original people, sets himself the task of becoming an original person: nothing would come of that, of course, except the most wretched monkeyshines".

Future, more truly global, science will build on, rather than discard, the science developed in recent centuries mostly in Europe and the USA - as that in its turn built on (though in some areas, recreated in parallel) science developed in Egypt and Greece, the Islamic empires, ancient India, and ancient China.27

Decades ago, the history of the mathematical and natural sciences was recounted as an almost entirely West European and Greek affair, for example in E T Bell's Men of Mathematics and Kasner and Newman's multi-volume The World of Mathematics. Since the 1940s and 50s an appreciation of, for example, ancient Indian and ancient Chinese mathematics has filtered through, via such efforts as the multi-volume work initiated by Joseph Needham on Science and Civilisation in China. The modern re-importation of Indian mathematics into Europe dates back as far as 1832.

As a child I was taught the proof of the Pythagoras theorem found in Euclid, but now a neater ancient Indian one is more used. It is now often taught that algebra was initiated in Baghdad around 825 CE, drawing on hints in ancient Greek-Egyptian and ancient Indian mathematics, and came to Europe from the Islamic empires.

The broadening of horizons is good. It is good to register that much of ancient "Greek" mathematics was done in Africa (Alexandria), and that at least one of the eminent "ancient Greek" mathematicians (Ptolemy) was Black (from the Upper Nile). It would be good to call the "Chinese remainder theorem" in number theory "Sunzi's theorem"; the "Chinese postman problem" in graph theory, "Kwan Mei-Ko's problem"; Taylor and Maclaurin series, Madhava series, after their Indian discoverer rather than European rediscoverers. It would be good, in fact, to have mathematics teaching include some account of the historical evolution of mathematics and of its criteria of truth, which generally it doesn't.
14 Building on the world achievements of capitalism and world science

After 1933, despite the work of talented people there like Oswald Teichmüller, Germany quickly ceased to be the world centre for mathematics it had been since the early 19th century. Jewish mathematicians fled. The new authorities tried to define major branches of mathematics, such as abstract algebra (pioneered by the German-Jewish mathematician Emmy Noether) as "un-German". That depended on the idea that there was some identity defined over history as indigenously "German", and that truth belonged to that identity.

Less dramatically, in the 18th and early 19th centuries mathematics in Britain stagnated because Cambridge University, until a student revolt in 1812, led by Charles Babbage and others, insisted on sticking to Newton's "British" approach to and notation for calculus, as against Leibniz's formulation used as the basis in Germany and France. French mathematics stagnated for a while after World War One under the influence of nationalist disdain for German theory.

Science, history, and political experience teach us the folly of rejecting the abstract and the universal and insisting on approaches defined by identities, "de-colonial" or otherwise. And that applies to revolutionary socialist politics, too.

Notes


1 Chibber, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital, p.295; Rosie Warren (ed), The Debate on Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital, p.27-8.


2 Lorenzo Veracini: 'Settler-colonialism, career of a concept'. Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 41/2, 2013. Google Ngram shows use of the term as scarce until the early 1970s, then increasing tenfold since about 2009. The "settler-colonial" regime in Algeria fell in 1962, Kenya 1963, Angola 1975, Zimbabwe ("Southern Rhodesia") 1980, South Africa, 1994. Use of the term "colonialism" increased sharply while almost all colonies of European countries were winning independence, in the 1950s and 1960s; but it has rocketed way beyond that since about 1989, when even the countries of Eastern Europe won independence from the USSR empire.


3 When the Indian-American Marxist Vivek Chibber wrote a critique of postcolonial theory, Postcolonial Theory and the Spectre of Capital, to make it manageable he deliberately limited himself to that one sub-strand of the theory, "subaltern studies" writing about Indian history. His critique is useful, but, beyond some vindications of universalism and of some Marxist generalities, it hardly touches on the relativist, identity-politics, recycled-Third-World-ist dimensions of postcolonial writing discussed here. Chibber is an avowed Marxist, editor of the quarterly linked with the Jacobin magazine and website operating in the Democratic Socialists of America, and has worked with Third Camp Marxists such as Robert Brenner. But in his book (in passing) he retrospectively validates Mao Zedong's "anticapitalist nationalism", "inspired by socialism", as having "set the terms for progressive movements… across the world". For today, for the USA anyway, he advocates a gradualist programme, first to social democracy of a Scandinavian type, then to "market socialism".


4 Use of the terms Eurocentrism and Eurocentric exploded from the late 1970s. "Discourse all the way down" is a way (flourishing since the 1980s) of describing postmodernist theory's belief that there is no ascertainable "hard" reality "below" discourse. It borrows from the old story of response to a critic of the idea that the world stands on the back of a turtle. The critic asks: what does the turtle stand on? Answer: it is turtles all the way down. Postmodernist writers scorn the sweeping theories of "modernism" as "grand narratives" (originally - Lyotard - "grands récits"); use of the term took off in the early 1980s.


5 Eve Tuck and K Wayne Yang, Decolonisation is not a metaphor, www.evetuck.com/s/Tuck-Yang_Decolonization-is-not-a-metaphor-2012.pdf


6 Tuck has "condemn[ed] Hamas's terrorist attack on Israel, and the taking of hostages": bit.ly/tuck-h. Both of them are high-rank professors at posh US universities. Tuck is of Aleut background (from the islands in the Bering Strait), but she grew up in the USA. The people she declares affiliation to were badly treated during World War Two, but they have their (small) island (400-odd people). Yang describes himself in the paper as "a settler/ trespasser", but signals no wish to "go back home".


7 About one million of the USA's maybe 4.5 million Native Americans live in "reservations", areas under tribal governments and outside state jurisdictions. Those areas are not viable hunter-gatherer or subsistence-agriculture economies, and generally have high rates of unemployment and poor infrastructure. Casinos, facilitated by the areas being outside state taxation and regulation, sometimes improve the economic level.


8 See the "Kumar-Matgamna debate", 2018: www.workersliberty.org/ror#kumar


9 Homi Bhabha writes much about "hybridity" and his comments on Israel-Palestine look for coexistence: see Untimely Ends: Homi Bhabha on Edward Said


10 Sumit Sarkar, Postmodernism and the writing of history, Studies in history 15/2, 1999. Sarkar was a member of the initial "subaltern studies" group in 1980s who later parted ways because of that "cultural turn". See also Benita Parry, Postcolonial studies: a materialist critique.


11 Terry Eagleton, In the Gaudy Supermarket, London Review of Books 13 May 1999


12 Benita Parry, The institutionalisation of postcolonial studies, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies


13 Robert J C Young, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction, p.64


14 G C Spivak, How the Heritage of Postcolonial Studies Thinks Colonialism Today, Janus Unbound: Journal of Critical Studies 1/1, 2021


15 "In the space of a few years", and despite union attempts to assert autonomy, "the UGTA had become totally subservient to the Party[FLN], toeing its line at all times". library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/algerien/16908.pdf


16 Leo Zeilig, Frantz Fanon: a political biography.


17 At the Rendezvous of Victory, pp.175ff


18 www.fao.org/3/i5251e/i5251e.pdf


19 Rodney was murdered, probably by a government agent, in 1980, long before postcolonial theory flourished. He was brave, independent-minded, talented, and came in his last years to the idea of building a working-class party, but he was mostly Stalinoid in ideological formation.


20 Bhambra, Decolonising the University, p.74


21 www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-bears-fingerprints-colonialism-180968709


22 Bhabani Shankar Nayak, Colonial World of Postcolonial Historians, Journal of Asian and African Studies 56/3, 2021


23 Bhambra, Decolonising the university, p.234


24 Gilbert Achar, Orientalism in Reverse, Radical Philosophy 151 Sep-Oct 2008. The term "Orientalism in reverse" was coined by Sadik Jalal al-'Azm. For general criticism of Said's book, see Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, and Camila Bassi, A critique of “Orientalism” through the spirit of Marx, bit.ly/cb-or. More of the "postcolonialist" potshots at Marx are dealt with by Kevin Anderson in his book Marx at the Margins.


25 1928 address to the International Congress of Mathematicians


26 Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras's Trousers


27 School teachers in Australia, in re-training, have had to present two lesson plans on "Aboriginal mathematics". The requirement is harmless. I did one on arithmetic with a number system which is "1, 2, many" rather than having infinitely many numerals, and one on the mechanics of boomerangs. But really there was no more "ancient Aboriginal mathematics", in the sense of a coherent, developing, written body of science, than "ancient British mathematics".

Will the West send more troops to Ukraine?

Ukrainian leaders say they want more troops and arms from the West to fight Russia

Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron (Picture: EU2023ES on Flickr)

SOCIALIST WORKER
Tuesday 27 February 2024

What We Think

France’s president Emmanuel Macron refused to rule out sending ground troops to Ukraine on Monday. “Nothing should be excluded,” he insisted after a European Union conference centred on the war with Russia.

France is not set to launch an open war with Russia. But Macron’s statement shows the dangerous escalation considered by Western powers two years after the Russian invasion. Before the summit, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico cited a “restricted document” listing topics to be discussed.

“These topics,” he said, “imply that a number of Nato and EU member states are considering sending troops to Ukraine.” The war is now a stalemate. Ukraine, whose frontline troops now have an average age of 43, is desperate for more forces to shovel into the bloodbath.

Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim last week that 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died so far is a gross underestimate.

United States officials nine months ago put the number of Ukrainian soldiers killed at 70,000 and as many as 120,000 injured.

Zelensky and sections of the Ukrainian military have clashed over whether to call up another half million conscripts. But they all agreed they need more troops, shells, missiles, planes—and money.

And the Western countries, despite their own divisions, are devising new ways to provide most of what Ukraine wants. Nato is an alliance for continual wars for Western imperialist expansion. We need to oppose British, Nato and Russian imperialism even more.

Workers in Egypt strike and occupy for a pay rise

The women garment workers whose strikes fed into the 2011 Egyptian Revolution are out again. 

Plus: more bombing of Yemen

Textile workers out on strike

By Charlie Kimber

SOCIALIST WORKER
Monday 26 February 2024

Thousands of women garment workers in Egypt’s biggest textile factory in Mahalla al-Kubra struck last week. They occupied the factory square and declared they would fight until bosses meet their demands for a pay rise. They were joined by men from the weaving and spinning sheds. All of these workers were still out at the beginning of this week.

Last Saturday around 7,000 strikers gathered in the factory square for a mass meeting. The huge factory in northern Egypt employs 14,000 people. It was the detonator of a major wave of strikes which fed into the eruption of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

It is struggles like this that can fuse with the agitation over Palestine and show the path to wider revolt across the Middle East. A supervisor at a clothing factory, told Mada Masr online newspaper that on Thursday of last week the workers in her building started chanting slogans. They then stopped work as the chants spread from one building to another.

Security personnel sealed off exits to prevent the women from spilling into the complex’s central square, known as Talaat Harb Square. But the scale of the revolt forced security personnel to unlock the factory gates as workers began to gather inside the plant and hold meetings.In an effort to hold down working class anger, Egypt’s repressive president Abdul Fattah al-Sisi recently announced a rise in the minimum wage for state workers.

The figure he decreed is more than many Mahalla workers receive. Although the Misr Spinning and Weaving Company in Mahalla is owned by the state, the decision to raise the minimum wage does not apply to it as it is affiliated with business companies that are not included in the state’s budget. Workers marched out chanting, “We want our rights. What’s happened about the president’s decisions?”

A worker at the company said, “The workers are boiling over, and the salaries of a large number have not reached 4,000 pounds (£100) a month. This is despite the long years of service—and the president raised the minimum to 6,000 pounds (£150 a month).” They added, “We are now living in a daily nightmare to meet the needs of our families.” The strike is also a battle to save jobs.

The worker said, “The company’s machines have been idle for a long time due to mismanagement. Recruitment has been halted for many years because they want to liquidate the assets and keep us at home. This happened at other textile companies. If our demands are not met, things will escalate.”

The Egyptian Revolutionary Socialists said many people will remember the role Mahalla workers played in the 2011 revolution. They said the battle now is in “a different context. The security grip adopted by al-Sisi’s regime has had a profound impact on the decline of the labour movement.

“It opened the door wide to the crushing of workers’ wages. Hence the Mahalla workers’ strike comes as good news and a central event in light of these unbearable conditions.”

Mahalla workers are not the only ones fighting back. Around 2,500 workers at the Universal electrical appliances production company in 6 October city, part of the greater Cairo area, struck for two days last week. They returned after winning a rise of £12 a month.

Bosses had threatened to withhold January’s wages if the strike continued. A big escalation in the struggles of workers and the poor in Egypt, Jordan and other parts of the Middle East would be the biggest challenge to imperialism and Zionism in the region.

The strikes come as Sisi—by closing the Rafah crossing—helped Israel to pen in the people of Gaza and starve them of basic supplies and other aid. Ruling classes everywhere will fear economic and political revolt against imperialism and the Arab regimes’ rulers.
Imperialist bombs continue to blast Houthis

Britain and the United States launched their fourth wave of military assaults against Yemen last weekend. Australia, Bahrain, Canada, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Zealand provided support for the operation. Apart from the joint action, the US has also been carrying out almost daily raids on Yemen.

The blasts hit 18 targets across eight locations in Yemen—revenge for Houthi attacks on Western shipping in the Red Sea. The Houthis are carrying out their action in solidarity with the Palestinians. After the latest blasts, the Houthis responded with defiance.

Yahya Saree, a spokesperson for the group, pledged that the Houthis would “confront the American-British escalation with more military operations against all hostile targets in the Red and Arab Seas”. The Houthis will “persist in upholding their religious, moral and humanitarian duties towards the Palestinian people.

“Military operations will not stop unless the aggression stops and the siege on the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip is lifted,” he added. According to a tally by The Associated Press news agency, the Houthis have launched at least 57 attacks on commercial and military ships in the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden since 19 November. And the pace of attacks has picked up in the last two weeks.

The cause of Labour? Why Ireland should matter to the British Labour Movement


27th February 2024

“I have spent a great portion of my life alternating between interpreting Socialism to the Irish and interpreting the Irish to the Socialists. Of the two tasks, I confess, that while I am convinced that the former has been attended with a considerable degree of success, the latter has not.” 

James Connolly, 1913

By Joe Dwyer, Sinn Féin Political Organiser (Britain)

It is no exaggeration to say that Ireland has often proven to be a blind spot for the left in Britain. But arguably this is particularly true today. Besides some notable exceptions, Ireland is seldom found on the agenda at gatherings of the ‘British left’.

Very often, socialists in Britain will have a far greater awareness and knowledge of events in the Middle East, or Central Asia, or Latin America than they do for their nearest neighbour. A neighbour where the British State still maintains a presence.

Today, advocates for Irish unity face a two-fold challenge when appealing for solidarity from the British left. Chiefly, an older generation of activists who consider the cause of Ireland to be (by-and-large) resolved; partnered with a younger generation of activists who do not even consider ‘the cause of Ireland’ to be a live issue.

Both trends are understandable. For more seasoned comrades the attainment of the Good Friday Agreement, and the establishment of a political process in the North of Ireland, marked a comfortable endpoint. As a generation who had spent decades campaigning against miscarriages of justice, detentions without trial, strip-searching, Diplock courts, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, and allegations of British State collusion and shoot-to-kill; they could finally celebrate ‘a win’. The violence ended. Prisoners were released. The Army was off the streets and a democratic pathway forward was established.

For this generation, the politics of the North became gradually less pressing. Indeed, the politics of the North became more pedestrian and ‘normal’. And thankfully so.

Equally, as Ireland receded from the headlines, other international concerns and causes, understandably, took precedence. This new terrain produced the second trend. As this older generation disengaged from the politics of Ireland, a new generation of activists arose that has only ever known an Ireland at peace.

For these activists, the conflict in Ireland is a feature of history books and television shows. Gerry Adams is better known for his twitter account, than overdubbed media appearances. They are aware that there was violence. They know that it ended twenty-five years ago, during their childhood, with a peace agreement. But many understand it as a religious or sectarian conflict. The part of the British State as an active participant and instigator is rarely considered.

For younger comrades, the role played by Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, and others, has led them to conclude that the Good Friday Agreement is not something to be endorsed. In many instances, they have not meaningfully engaged with the majority opinion of Irish republicanism in the North. Instead, in search for radical politics, they take a steer from unrepresentative groups that shout loudest online. Groups who repackage political obscurity as political purity.

Many make the mistake of assessing the Good Friday Agreement as a final settlement. When the agreement was never a settlement. It was always a process.

The 1998 Agreement is essentially a political apparatus for managing change within a contested space. It is a product of Britain’s inability to militarily defeat Irish republicanism. It provides agreed structures and mechanisms for navigating shifting sands.

Despite the document’s admitted shortcomings, it has afforded a new means of struggle and the advancement of Irish self-determination. It has reduced Britain’s territorial claim over the North of Ireland to a single hinge.

The Agreement has also compelled political unionism to accept fundamental changes. Changes that have entirely undermined the sectarian basis that underpinned the ‘Northern Ireland’ statelet. From mandatory coalition to parity of esteem, to all-Ireland institutions, and the equality agenda. To this day, we are seeing the ramifications of this new dispensation play-out before us.

The North, as it stands, is a long way from being “as British as Finchley.” It is a long way from being the Orange State that it once was. The North, like the rest of the island, is now a modern and outward-looking space. It is progressive and forward looking. It is removed from the ‘Little Englander’ mentality that has captured national politics in Britain.

In spite of this, on occasion we still hear voices from the British left, from certain quarters, suggesting that Irish nationalism is inherently reactionary. As ever, there is a chauvinist presumption that British socialists are better equipped to direct the struggle for a united Ireland than those that are actually conducting it.

Such analysis ignores the political reality that the antithesis of internationalism is not nationalism, but rather imperialism. The struggle for national liberation is inherently anti-imperialist. Advocates for Irish unification require no lectures on the perils of nationalism. They have lived with the consequences of imperialist British nationalism for centuries.

However, rather than pick over the past, as often happens when Ireland is discussed in Britain, we should examine the present and realistically look to the future.

Ireland, both North and South, has undergone momentous change over recent years and this process of change shows little sign of abating. The nature of such change is slow, and it is cautious. But the signposts for it are there for those paying attention.

Perhaps most notable sign is that Sinn Féin, a party that once occupied the political fringe, is now the largest party across the island. Sinn Féin is the leading party in the North and, once the Northern Assembly is restored, its Vice President, Michelle O’Neill, will become First Minister. An Irish republican First Minister in a statelet deliberately designed to prevent republicans from ever holding high-office.

Meanwhile, in the South, Sinn Féin is leading the opposition. It is routinely polling at a high of thirty per-cent in opinion polls. The party is widely tipped to lead the next government in Dublin, with its leader, Mary Lou McDonald, as the first woman Taoiseach.

Not too long ago all of this would have been considered pie-in-the-sky by most political pundits.

Sinn Féin is arguably the most successful left-wing party operating in Europe at present. A feat that’s even more impressive when one considers that the party is forced to organise across two jurisdictions.

And yet, how rarely does the British left, or the English left to be specific, ever consider Sinn Féin as a template or model for success? Recent electoral trends have demonstrably shown that there is no glass ceiling when it comes to Sinn Féin’s appeal.

In tandem with this growth in support for Sinn Féin, last year’s local elections in the North saw more people voting for avowedly pro-Irish unity parties than pro-union parties.

While the Alliance Party might not take a position on the constitutional question, Alliance voters overwhelmingly transferred their votes to pro-Irish unity parties.

Britain’s decision to exit the European Union has redefined parameters and presumptions surrounding the unity debate in the North. The topic of Irish unification is now routinely heard on the airwaves and in television studios. A plethora of books exploring the topic have been published in recent years. Demonstrating that there a growing market and appetite for such discussion.

Unity is now being considered in parts of the North where it would not have been countenanced before. A conversation is taking place, and it is a live conversation.

So, when Keir Starmer says that a referendum on Irish unity is “not even on the horizon” all he highlights is his own detachment and lack of engagement with the North. A generous reading would be that perhaps people just don’t see what they’re not looking for.

It is little surprise that the public discourse in Britain is so behind the curve. British commentary on politics in the North is littered with outdated cliches and stale analysis.

It is worth recalling that for many British commentators the 1998 Agreement almost appeared as if out of nowhere. Most had not been attentive enough to follow the subtle shifts and moves that had taken place from the late-1980s onwards.

Similarly, during the Brexit process, only once negotiations were well underway did many in the British establishment suddenly wake-up to the reality that the border in Ireland was the principal wedge. If they had paid any attention to the debate in Ireland during the referendum campaign, they might have been better prepared for what was to come.

Hemingway’s observation that things happen ‘slowly, then all at once’ rings true. No less so when it comes to constitutional change.

Those who advocate for a mature discussion on constitutional change between Britain and Ireland today, will ultimately be proven correct tomorrow. Just as those on the British left who first called for dialogue with Irish republicanism, from the early-1980s onwards, were subsequently vindicated by events.

People living in Britain who support the right of the Irish people to determine their own future cannot ignore the smoke signals on the horizon. Any future referendum will necessitate an appropriate response from Britain. It cannot be left for the campaign to be already upon us before such discussions begin. That is the lasting lesson of Brexit.

Consideration of constitutional arrangements have often been sidestepped within the broader British labour movement. Dismissed as a divisive distraction. But ultimately, it will prove far more divisive and disruptive if such matters are not appropriately aired.

It is understandable that there might be hesitancy, from certain quarters, about unsettling the unionist population of the North. But it should be noted that every significant step forward has only ever come about when a British Government moved political unionism further along than political unionism necessarily wanted to go.

So, there is a part to play in Britain. While the ultimate terms and nature of the debate will be shaped and led on the island of Ireland. There is a role for communicating, amplifying, and relaying the debate for a British ear.

While the final word on constitutional change will be exercised by the people of Ireland, North and South. Free from external interference. The people of Britain can assist in opening, encouraging, and platforming the discussion for audiences in Britain.

Without setting the terms of the debate or being proscriptive, it makes sense that British people share an interest in Ireland’s future once Britain has left. There is a pragmatism in exploring what Britain’s future relationship might be with a fully independent Ireland.

Proximity and history necessitate that a mutual interest should be taken.

In previous decades, the conflict made it virtually impossible for British society to reasonably discuss the ending of partition. But we’ve now enjoyed twenty-five years of relative peace and momentous gestures of goodwill between Ireland and Britain.

Those British Labour Party politicians who wish to avoid any mention of Irish unity must recognise the likelihood, in the not-too-distant future, of a Sinn Féin Taoiseach pulling up at 10 Downing Street and asking a Labour Prime Minister what preparation work is being done for navigating potential change.

If, as is expected following the next Westminster election, the British Labour Party does become the leading party of government; there needs to be a broad discussion, within the wider British labour and trade union movement, on the topic of constitutional change in Ireland.

As the largest party in Ireland, Sinn Féin speaks with an authoritative mandate on the issue. However, there are many opinions that should also be heard. No single party or group has a monopoly on the future.

Most British politicians like to pride themselves on their pragmatism. But yet, when it comes to Ireland, British politicians routinely fail to be pragmatic. The British left has the opportunity to stake out a pragmatic and mature case for Irish unification.

There is the potential to, once again, set a tone that others within the labour movement will later echo.

In 1916 James Connolly wrote, “The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered.” Well, contrary to some reports, the cause of Ireland hasn’t gone away. It still remains the cause of labour and it is past time that labour treated it as such.

Joe Dwyer is a political organiser for Sinn Féin (Britain). You can follow him on Twitter/X here.

If you support Labour Outlook’s work amplifying the voices of left movements and struggles here and internationally, please consider becoming a supporter on Patreon.

UK

Low paid jobs on the rise, with 3.7m jobs paid below real Living Wage since 2020

More needs to be done to tackle low pay in jobs, warns the Living Wage Foundation.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead 

LEFT FOOT FORWARD

25 February, 2024 

New analysis by the Living Wage Foundation (LWF) has found that the number of low paid jobs in the UK has risen for the first time since 2020. In April 2023, 3.7m jobs, equating to 1 in 8, paid below the real Living Wage, 200,000 more than the previous year.

This was the finding of the LWF’s latest Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings based on Office for national Statistics (ONS).

Hospitality has the highest rate of low paid work, with almost half (48 percent) of jobs in the sector having paid below the real Living Wage. This was the twelfth consecutive year the hospitality sector had the highest level of low paid jobs. It was also almost twice as high as the ‘arts, entertainment and recreation’ and ‘retail and wholesale’ sectors, in which 24 percent and 23 percent of jobs were found to be below the living wage respectively.

The study found that London has the worst five areas for low-paid jobs. The best performing regions were the South East and Scotland.

According to the LWF, in the past two years, a record number of employers have signed up to pay the real Living Wage. This includes third-party contractors such as security guards and cleaners. One in nine employees in Britain now work for an accredited Living Wage Employer. But the Foundation warns further inroads need to be made.

“The campaign for a real Living Wage has had a huge impact tackling in work poverty, with over 460,000 workers now receiving an annual pay rise thanks to the commitment of 14,000 accredited Living Wage employers. However, today’s findings show there is more to do with 3.7 million workers not earning a wage in line with the cost of living, said Katherine Chapman, Living Wage Foundation director.

The real Living Wage is the only wage that is calculated on what people need to live in. Its current rate is £12 per hour in the UK and £13.15 in London. For someone working full-time on the real Living Wage they would receive £3,081 a year more than someone earning the government’s National Living Wage. In London, the difference is £5,323.50 annually.

Separate research by the LWF published in September 2023, found that for workers on low-incomes, the cost-of-living crisis is far from over, despite easing inflation. The research found that 39 percent of low paid workers reported regularly skipping meals for financial reasons and falling behind on household bills. This was down slightly from 42 percent in August 2022.

The proportion of workers on low pay who said they were unable to heat their homes stayed at 32 percent during the same period, as did those who had fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments. The number of low-income workers resorting to payday loans to cover living essentials fell slightly from 24 percent to 21 percent, the research found. 60 percent of workers on low pay reported using foodbanks in the 12 months to September 2023, up from 56 percent the previous year.

The statutory rate for anyone aged over 21 is set to rise to £11.44 an hour on April 1, 2024. In response to the LWF’s research, a spokesperson for the Department for Business and Trade said, millions of workers would benefit from the “largest pay rise to the National Minimum Wage.”

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward

Liz Truss attended US conference where ‘Nazis mingled openly’

Hannah Davenport 

RIGHT WING WATCH

Today


Liz Truss made a speech at the far-right conference plugging her new book

A US conference for conservative activists where Liz Truss gave a speech promoting her new book also saw Nazis ‘mingle openly’ and spread antisemitic conspiracy theories , it was reported.

Reporter Ben Goggin of NBC News shared pictures from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Maryland last week showing people identified as Nazis wearing official CPAC badges.

According to the NBC report, racist conspiracy theorists did not meet any perceptible resistance to attend the four-day gathering of the far-right this year, compared to previous years, as the journalist noted a number of Nazis in attendance.

The CPAC has furiously denied the allegations, saying that the claims Nazi’s were present at its 2024 conference were, “false, misleading and grossly manipulative”.

Matt Schlapp, CPAC chairman, said: “When we come across someone at CPAC peddling any kind of anti-semitism, we deal with them immediately.”

However in response, videos and images of Nazis at the conference were posted, including of someone giving a Nazi salute in the lobby of the conference hotel.

Another picture shows Ryan Sanchez, previous member of the Nazi “Rise Above Movement” shaking hands inside the conference area with Jared Taylor, founder of American Renaissance which promotes pseudoscience spouting ideas of white supremacy.

Politico also reported that self-proclaimed white supremacist Bryan Betancur was in attendance at Liz Truss’s speech at the conference, where she plugged her new book and blamed a “deep state” conspiracy for her downfall in power. Betancur, sporting a QAnon shirt, said Truss’s speech was “educational” and “inspirational”.

Aside from flogging her ‘Ten Years to Save the West’ book and seeking validation from a room full of the far-right, Liz Truss went on to have an interview with Trump-ally Steve Bannon, staying silent when he called Tommy Robinson a ‘hero’ during the interview.

Rishi Sunak has been criticised for failing to take action against extremism in his party after Liz Truss shared a platform with the far-right commentator and spread bizarre conspiracy theories about the “deep state”.

Labour MP’s have called on the former Prime Minister to be investigated “at the very least” over her recent appearances in the US.

Hannah Davenport is news reporter at Left Foot Forward, focusing on trade unions and environmental issues

LABOUR HUB EDITORS

Just who is supporting the global rise of the hard right?

FEBRUARY 25, 2024

Young people are switching to right wing parties and young men in particular are embracing right wing views. Mike Phipps reports.

Half the world is going to the polls in 2024 and so far the signs are not good. Many elections are neither free nor fair – for example, Bangladesh and Russia – and in other countries, voters are shifting sharply to the right. What’s going on?

In November, a right wing bigot facing multiple criminal charges could get re-elected in the United States. If Trump’s 2016 election is anything to go by, this will bolster every authoritarian regime on the planet, with human rights abusers safe in the knowledge that their violations will not be of much interest to a US president who openly admires dictators.

In a previous article, we looked at the role of money and the media and how the pursuit by all mainstream parties of neoliberal economic models which fuel inequality have opened the way for a rising hard right populism. But who is actually voting for this? And what can be done to challenge it?

Culture wars

An interesting twitter thread from John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter at the Financial Times, recently addressed changing social attitudes.  He points out that  40% of young Americans voted Trump in 2020.

Of course, that outlook is not currently reflected in the UK, where only 10% of under-30s support the Conservatives. This may have a lot to do with the fact that the Tories have been in power for 14 years and young people in particular have suffered, especially in relation to  housing and incomes.

Young people in the UK, argues Burn-Murdoch, have less faith in upward mobility than young people anywhere else in the developed world, and far less than their elders. This belief in the ability to get ahead is an absolutely central pillar of conservative politics – but for many younger people it now lies in tatters.

Even as late as 2015, the share of young Britons who said they “strongly dislike” the Conservative party was steady at 20%. It is now double that level. Burn-Murdoch suggests Brexit appears to have acted as a key trigger for this change.

All this looks like good news for the left and helps explain why the Tories are set to lose the next general election. It also means that to recover they will need to find ways to win back  this section of the electorate that has abandoned them.

An incoming Starmer government that dithers over its lengthy to-do list and fails to make a speedy and significant change to the property market, the renting crisis, student debt, the climate emergency and a range of other issues hitting younger voters will make that job easier for the Tories.

One way for the Tory Party in opposition to recover would be to take a leaf out of the Canadian Conservatives’ book. Pierre Poilievre’s party has rapidly rejuvenated, boosting its share of the young vote to 40% off the back of ambitious house-building proposals.

But another approach would be for the Tories to double down on the culture wars they have fuelled in recent years. This might play well especially for younger men. On issues to do with identity, studies are showing an increasing gender gap opening between young men and women.

A widening gender gap among younger voters

Put simply, more young men tend to be more right wing than both young women and older people of both genders. One study found that three in ten young men think it will be harder to be a man than a woman in 20 years’ time, nearly double what the UK public overall believes.

Young men are also notably less positive than young women about the impact of feminism. Worryingly, one in five young men who have heard of him have a positive view of notorious misogynist Andrew Tate.

This gender gap in the attitudes of young people is not confined to the UK. Burn-Murdoch again: “In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.”

A recent US survey shows there was not a single issue that young men cared about significantly more than young women. One commentator noted, “As women’s political priorities have solidified, young men’s priorities have melted into mush.”

Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries. In Poland last year, almost half of men aged 18-21 backed the far right Confederation party, compared to just a sixth of young women of the same age. Similar divergences have opened up in Spain.

Beyond the West, the trend is even starker. This is partly due to the radicalisation of younger women around the #MeToo movement, although they are also taking more liberal views on racial injustice and immigration. But it also reflects a movement to the right – sometimes the far right – among younger men.

Argentina and Indonesia

In Argentina’s recent election, a  right wing libertarian, Javier Milei, won the presidency on a platform of health care privatisation and an end to disability payments, unemployment insurance and other forms of welfare. As we have previously noted, “Any form of redistribution is labelled as state theft, according to Milei. Rather than rely on state hand-outs, poor people should be free to sell their body parts, children, and organs to wealthy people on private, unregulated exchanges to pay their rent and medical expenses.”

 24-year-old Mila Zurbriggen is a former leader of Milei’s party’s youth wing, who broke with it when she saw through his pretended ‘outsider’ status and realised he was just another Establishment politician. She told Open Democracy : “My generation’s outrage is very deep. It has a profound disgust for politicians. I think Javier [Milei] has been able to channel this rejection very well. He exists because of the politicians disconnected from the reality of my generation and unaware of the damage they have done.”

That’s important in a country where young people account for more than a third of the electorate. Young male voters in particular are “attracted by his radical and anti-feminist discourse,” according to one analyst.

“There are many young people from lower middle-class families who have a ‘masculine rocker aesthetic’,” said another. Milei appeals to these groups by wearing a leather jacket to campaign meetings and having local rock music as his soundtrack. His mastery of social media and his interaction with young influencers also enhances his appeal to young voters, who reject traditional political messaging.

If this sounds shallow, it should also be borne in mind that most young Argentinians are not so much patriotic as pro-American. Some 70% say they want to emigrate. The influence of US technology and soft power has allowed Milei’s US ‘imitation-lite’ – the right to ‘bear arms’, charter schools, replacing the peso with the dollar, anti-abortion proposals – to resonate with younger voters. “His campaign aides and allies often donned MAGA hats and “Don’t Tread on Me” flags, and oversize cardboard US $100 bills plastered with Milei’s face were a typical sight at rallies,” reported The Nation.

Polls suggest that nearly half of voters under 29 backed Milei in the first  round of the presidential election. That rose to 70% in the November run-off. His campaign slogan, “Que se vayan todos,” or “Get rid of them all,”  reprised the refrain of the mass popular protests during Argentina’s huge financial and political crisis of December 2001, when Argentinians were prevented from withdrawing more than $250 a week from their bank accounts.  But it also echoed Trump’s election slogan, “Drain the swamp.”

Milei’s appeal to the youth is all the more arresting as traditionally Argentina’s young voters have leaned left. Years of economic stagnation may have fuelled the shift, but social issues have also contributed.  Milei raised his public profile during the pandemic, when he joined anti-confinement protests organised by young people. In Argentina, almost 45% of all workers in the informal economy are between ages 18 and 29 and working remotely simply isn’t an option, suggests  journalist Lautaro Grinspan in a recent article.

Presidential elections were also held this month in Indonesia. Prabowo Subianto, “the most notorious massacre general in Indonesia”, according to journalist Allan Nairn, was declared the winner. He’s the son-in-law of former dictator Suharto and a US-trained general who was in charge of an army unit implicated in genocidal violence and discharged from the Indonesian military for the alleged abduction of democracy activists.

Subianto won with a lead among young voters, based on a strong social media presence projecting a cuddly, grandfatherly image. Indonesians under 40 easily constitute a majority of the electorate and they would have no direct experience of Subianto’s alleged military abuses from the 1970s and 1980s.

It’s estimated that 66% of 17 to 25 year olds and 60% of 26 to 33 year olds voted for Subianto. His support declines among progressively older voting cohorts. That said, Indonesia’s election did not register a significant gender gap.

One reason suggested for the support given to Subianto in Indonesia and Miliei in Argentina by young voters was that they did not remember the evil things done by the military dictatorships in these countries forty years ago and more. It’s plausible but it’s not a full explanation.

It doesn’t explain why so many younger people voted for the far right Geert Wilders in last year’s election in the Netherlands. Or why, in the 2022 French presidential runoff, Marine Le Pen won 39% of votes from people aged 18-24 and 49% of those aged 25-34. Or why, before Italy’s election in 2022,  the  far right Brothers of Italy was the largest party among under-35s, on 22%.

Different theories

There are several theories as to why young men especially are becoming more right wing. “The proliferation of smartphones and social media mean that young men and women now increasingly inhabit separate spaces and experience separate cultures,” suggests Burn-Murdoch. The far right is increasingly well funded, especially from US dark money, and has developed sophisticated social media operations in many countries.

Others note that men and women tend to think alike where there is close-knit interdependence and shared cultural production. Rising precarity and atomisation among young people undermine that. Alongside this, economic resentment is a driver of gender polarisation.

Another factor seems to be declining empathy. Growing levels of inequality as a permanent fixture of society undermine social solidarity and lead to some believing that they are simply ‘better’ than others. These views were commonplace in the 19th century but declined in the post-war years of greater equality. They are back now, encouraged by a neoliberal  economic model that has been in place for over 40 years.

Racism and nationalism have also played a role in undermining human empathy. ‘Othering’ takes many forms, from anti-migrant rhetoric to all-out war. It’s visible in  Israel’s brutal and murderous treatment of the population of Gaza, who are frequently referred to as ‘animals’ by senior Israeli politicians. The willingness of Western politicians to support, or express indifference to, such outrages does untold damage to the idea of a shared, common humanity.

As we noted recently, “Few mainstream politicians in the western world can bring themselves to call for an end to the indiscriminate bombing of civilians, hospitals, schools and residential blocks in Gaza. It’s a stain on any society that claims to call itself civilised. Meanwhile, those who want a universal standard to apply – universal human rights, for example – have to justify themselves in every media interview as not being supporters of terrorism.”

All eyes on France

Is the global rightward drift a foregone conclusion? Actually many of the apparent drivers are politically fixable. One recent study in France suggested that “the lack of public services in rural areas, deindustrialisation, unequal access to property and widening inequality are all issues that can be addressed by implementing adequate policies… Parties of the left should also be buoyed up by the knowledge that, in doing more for poorer people in small towns and peripheral areas, they could enlarge their future electoral base and return to power.”

Al eyes are on France’s elections to the European Parliament this year which the far right party of Le Pen is expected to win. There is widespread dissatisfaction with President Macron’s government, with many still angry about its use of a constitutional manoeuvre to pass unpopular legislation, most notably to raise the retirement age, without a vote in the National Assembly. There’s also a cost of living crisis, as elsewhere, and a relentless media focus on immigration and security, an agenda which traditionally favours the far right. Macron’s tough immigration bill passed late last year also helped legitimise Le Pen’s anti-migrant narrative.

Recent opinion polls predict Le Pen’s party will outperform Macron’s in June’s European elections, especially as these elections usually suffer from a lower turnout, which favours more extreme parties.  This month a survey put the National Rally on 33% of the vote, with Macron’s Renaissance party on just 14%.

How can this be resisted, given the refusal of the political establishment to address key cost of living issues and the collapse of much of the workplace-based left? One hope is that trade unionists can play a key role in countering far right influence in working class areas, with local trade union alliances enabling activists to help set an alternative narrative.

This year, voters in over fifty countries go the polls in national elections. We can probably forget about Russia and North Korea and nobody is expecting any great surprises in India. Unrest has already broken out in Senegal following the government’s illegal postponement of this month’s elections to December.

But there will be some important ones to watch, including Romania and Slovakia in Europe, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela in Latin America and South Africa and Ghana in Africa. It will be interesting to see how far these new global trends play out in these processes.

Let’s return to Britain, where we started. Surveys in the UK  currently show that people are a lot more liberal than politicians want to think. That’s good news – while it lasts. Ultimately, the conclusion is inescapable: if Labour wants to avoid the right wing backlash that has occurred elsewhere, it must deliver the goods for Generation Z and puncture the identitarian resentment that could appeal to younger male voters in the near future.

Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.

Image: Marine Le Pen. Creator: European Parliament . Licence: CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic

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What we should think about before terraforming alien worlds

Whenever someone waxes poetic about planetary engineering, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the ethical implications.

BY ERIKA NESVOLD

 / MIT PRESS READER | PUBLISHED FEB 24, 2024

Carl Sagan famously argued, “If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars.”. 

NASA/JPL-CALTECH/ASUSHARE

This story originally featured on the MIT Press Reader.

Exploration, habitation, and resource extraction all carry a risk of inflicting environmental damage in space, just as they do here on Earth. But some futurists and space settlement enthusiasts have proposed an even more drastic alteration of the space environment: the transformation of the surface of a planet or moon into a more Earth-like environment via a process known as terraforming.

The atmospheric chemistry, pressure, and temperature inside an artificial space habitat is, by design, Earth-like enough to be habitable by humans, but it requires enclosure by pressurized walls and constant maintenance. Terraforming would affect the entire surface of a planet, rather than just a smaller “indoor” region, and by planetary scientist Christopher McKay’s definition, the environment of a terraformed planet “must be stable over long time scales and must require no, or a minimum of, continued technological intervention.” After an initial input of energy and effort, a terraformed environment would behave like Earth’s natural environment and essentially maintain itself.

For example, in 1961, Carl Sagan speculated on the possibility of the “microbiological re-engineering” of Venus by introducing blue-green algae into its atmosphere. The algae would use photosynthesis to convert the planet’s abundant carbon dioxide into oxygen, which would also reduce the greenhouse effect and lower Venus’s surface temperature. Sagan later turned his attention to the potential for “re-engineering” Mars, a planet now considered to be one of our best candidates for successful terraformation. Mars has the opposite problem as Venus: Instead of harboring a thick, toxic atmosphere with a runaway greenhouse effect maintaining deathly high temperatures and pressures at the surface, Mars lost nearly its entire original atmosphere to solar wind, leaving surface pressures so low that liquid water cannot exist. To terraform Mars, planetary engineers would need to increase its surface temperature and atmospheric pressure while protecting the atmosphere from solar wind. Sagan suggested spreading a dark material, or even growing dark-colored plants, on Mars’s polar ice caps, allowing them to absorb more of the Sun’s heat, increasing the surface temperature while releasing water vapor and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Other researchers have explored the feasibility of importing greenhouse gases or building giant orbital mirrors to increase Mars’s surface temperature, constructing a magnetic shield to protect Mars’s atmosphere, and releasing genetically engineered microbes onto the planet’s surface to alter the atmospheric and surface chemistry.

Terraformation is the ultimate example of long-term planning, as even optimistic estimates predict that it would take centuries of effort and patience before a human could walk unprotected on the surface of Mars. Advocates of terraforming Mars or other space environments see it as a crucial step toward creating a truly multi-planet civilization. Robert Zubrin, the founder and president of the Mars Society, an organization that advocates for human Mars exploration and colonization, even claims that the successful terraforming of Mars would demonstrate humanity’s superiority over the physical world: “The first astronauts to reach Mars will prove that the worlds of the heavens are accessible to human life. But if we can terraform Mars, it will show that the worlds of the heavens themselves are subject to the human intelligent will,” he writes in his 1996 book “The Case for Mars.”

By transforming Mars’s surface into Earth’s, we might exterminate species or entire ecosystems without even detecting their existence.


Whenever someone waxes poetic about humankind bending the universe to our will, it’s worth taking a moment to consider the ethical implications of the proposal. One major consideration about terraforming is that the process could damage or even wipe out any existing life on the planet being terraformed. If an alien microbe evolved on Mars, it probably would not survive in a more Earth-like environment, so by transforming Mars’s surface into Earth’s, we might exterminate species or entire ecosystems without even detecting their existence. The changes we would make to a cold, dry, relatively airless world like Mars would also introduce physical processes—such as wind, flowing water, and new chemical reactions—that could easily erase or contaminate any evidence that extraterrestrial life ever existed on the surface. If we allow planetary engineering to race ahead of astrobiological research, we could miss our opportunity to make what would be the most important scientific discovery in human history: the discovery of life that evolved beyond our planet. We also risk exterminating the very lifeforms we dream of discovering.

The ethical dilemma of terraforming far exceeds planetary protection concerns about forward contamination by a lander or even a human settlement. The goal of terraforming is to intentionally create an entire ecosystem on a global scale, which would more than likely destroy any existing ecosystem. Terraforming technology might even become feasible before we definitively determine whether extraterrestrial life exists on the planet or moon that we hope to transform. But suppose we do discover evidence of existing microbial life on a planet like Mars. Should this disqualify Mars as a target for terraforming? Should we avoid settling on Mars at all?

Carl Sagan, in his book “Cosmos,” famously argued for exactly this stance: “If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars.” Planetary scientist Christopher McKay even argues that if microbial life is discovered on Mars, humans should not simply leave Mars to the microbes, we should “undertake the technological activity that will enhance the survival of any indigenous Martian biota and promote global changes on Mars that will allow for maximizing the richness and diversity of these Martian life forms.” In other words, we should engineer the surface of Mars not to improve its habitability for terrestrial life, but for Martian life!

Space ethicist Kelly Smith finds these types of arguments, that humans should avoid worlds where microbial life might already exist, difficult to defend. “You have to first grant that microbes, as a class of organisms, are somehow on the same level with human beings,” he told me in 2018. “I’m not saying you can’t make an argument to that effect, but it really stretches credulity. It’s an uphill battle.” After all, humans have already demonstrated that we are willing to intentionally eradicate disease-causing viruses like smallpox to prevent human death and suffering. Admittedly, viruses are not unequivocally considered to be “alive,” and there were some ethical concerns during the development of the vaccine that smallpox eradication represented a “new form of genocide.” But given the opportunity, humans would likely jump at the chance to exterminate deadly microbial species like the bacterium that causes cholera or the parasite that causes malaria. Unlike these terrestrial microbes, however, hypothetical Martian microbes currently pose no danger to humanity, or even to individual humans. They may merely someday stand in the way of our off-Earth expansion. Space settlement advocates argue that such an expansion is vital for humanity’s long-term survival, but does this potential for indirect harm justify their extinction?

It may seem premature to debate the ethics of using a technology that does not yet exist to indirectly destroy an ecosystem that may not exist at all. But our potential for inadvertently exterminating a unique species or ecosystem in space might arise long before we develop the technology to terraform entire planets. By the time we come to an agreement about the ethics of terraforming and planetary protection, it might be too late.

Erika Nesvold, an astrophysicist, has worked as a researcher at NASA Goddard and the Carnegie Institution for Science. She is a developer for Universe Sandbox, a physics-based space simulator; cofounder of the nonprofit organization the JustSpace Alliance; the creator and host of the podcast Making New Worlds; and author of “Off-Earth,” from which this article is excerpted.