Decolonisation in consciousness and fact

ARTICLE: The US and subsequently many parts of the world have been in turmoil since the tragic death of George Floyd in the US, the emergence with renewed force of the Black Lives Matter movement, and the birth of new consciousness regarding the incomplete process of decolonisation. The turmoil in the US has been exacerbated by its President Donald Trump's attempts to crush the Black Lives Matter protests, if necessary by over-riding local state and city authorities and sending in federal agents to crack heads and quell the protests by force. But this high-handedness has failed to deter the protestors.

George Floyd's death may come to be seen in hindsight as one of those tipping points of history that are so difficult to predict. The whole edifice of the US as the most powerful state in the world rests on brutal conquest, pillage, rape and genocide of indigenous peoples, settler colonialism, slavery (feeding into the plantation economy) and racial and class discrimination. Despite the abolition of slavery and the defeat of the southern Confederal states in the civil war in the19th century, and partly because of that defeat, the dominant white community struck back with the Jim Crow lynching atrocities, racial discrimination against blacks and maintaining white supremacy in the southern states. The black community (and other immigrant communities of colour) found no relief from these attitudes even when millions of them were drawn north to work in rapidly developing US industry. The racial profiling and repression at the hands of police in today's US has an unbroken history stretching back over time.

The Americas (North and South), southern and central Africa, and Australia and New Zealand were subjected to brutal settler colonialism that destroyed the lives, cultures and societies of the indigenous peoples of these continents. The settler colonialist conquest of vast areas of Africa fed into the transatlantic slave trade and fuelled the boom in the plantation economy of North and South America at the expense of the indigenous peoples. Where settler colonialism proved difficult or impossible, e.g. developed civilisations such as the Subcontinent, a thriving part of the world (its real attraction) was reduced by colonial conquest and rule to one of the poorest areas on Earth within 250 years through colonial loot and plunder.

Demands and actions to recover history's true lessons and abolish the celebration of colonial symbols and figures has very much been part of the worldwide decolonisation process currently in motion. Thus statues of past icons have been torn down, besmirched and rejected in many parts of the US and Europe. Today's world has reached the historic tipping point of not only not forgiving these figures' colonial atrocities, but the vulgar celebration and display of their memories as great historical figures. The interrogation of hitherto received wisdom regarding the past promises to set in motion (if it has not already) a process that will revise our understanding of history radically.

But while this 'revolution' in consciousness regarding the role played by colonial conquest, slavery, racism is more than welcome even as it is viewed as a late arrival, modern history also suggests that without linking the Black Lives Matter and other similar movements worldwide with a critique of the capitalist system in its entirety could open the door once again to co-option of these new lines of interrogation within the folds of a system saved by concessions by the enlightened self-interest of 'progressive' parts of the bourgeoisie. For example, if Trump loses the next US election and Joe Biden is ushered in, the Democratic Party may take a softer line with the protestors, negotiate and agree changes, and thereby defuse the tendency of these mass protests to morph into a radical challenge to the system per se.

Today's capitalist system rests on and owes its rise to conquest, pillage, rape, plunder, slavery, genocide and displacement. But this historical legacy also includes class, caste, racial, ethnic, national, gender and religious discrimination and oppression. Therefore challenging the continuation of some of these past practices (e.g. racial) forces us to interrogate the other such oppressions. And since most (if not all) of these oppressive practices have roots that can be traced back to the capitalist system (even those practices like caste that predate capitalism but continue as part of its global structure today), challenging black oppression inevitably confronts us with the larger task of challenging the capitalist system per se as the root and protector of these (profitable) structures of discrimination and oppression.

Capitalism requires inequality, racism (amongst other discriminations) helps enshrine it. Today's 'identity politics' that have captured the imagination of new generations represent a retreat into one's own identity 'tent' to confront power, and its participants become politicised by this historically conditioned process. But to remake a world still defined considerably by the colonial process (the primitive accumulation stage of modern capitalism) requires a revolution not only in the understanding of the colonial past and rooting out its remnants in consciousness and culture, but in fact. While the demand for reparations and restitution by the colonised are just and make perfect sense, a decolonised or postcolonial world can only be truthfully envisaged as a post-capitalist one.

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Copyright Business Recorder, 2020