Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher

Abstract

Reviewed by: Decolonizing Dialectics by George Ciccariello-Maher Ben Etherington Decolonizing Dialectics By George Ciccariello-Maher. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. At heart, George Ciccariello-Maher's Decolonizing Dialectics is a study of political identity. The three thinkers on whom he focuses each confront the conundrum of oppressed groups that fail to recognise their political agency, or are stymied in doing so. Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon and Enrique Dussel each conduct theoretical analyses and fashion concepts that enable these groups better to recognise themselves and their situations and so constitute themselves as radically oppositional political forces. Ciccariello-Maher begins with Sorel. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sorel contended that the European working class could not wait for objective conditions to "ripen" to the point at which their deepening immiseration would inevitably lead them to act. Their identity as a class "for itself," he argues, needs to be consciously instantiated through acts of mythologizing violence against their oppressors. For Fanon, similarly, racialised colonial subjects are not in a position to sign up to a vision of political struggle as a reciprocal structure of recognition and interdependency when colonisation had denied their humanity. They first need to overcome this ontological denial and, in so doing, forge the basis for a positive political grouping. Again, this requires constituting acts of violence. Turning to Dussel, Ciccariello-Maher argues that the former's reading of Levinas on alterity gives him the basis for a politics that is oriented to that which was historically external to the coloniser's ontological and epistemological regimes. Rather than conduct politics on the basis of a one-dimensionally conceived "historical subject" (129), whether that be a subject determined by race, gender, class, Dussel conceptualises the "pueblo" as a group fused by their various exclusions. The "pueblo" is, thus, an "identity of identities" (147). Ciccariello-Maher finishes his study by discussing Chavismo in Venezuela as an example of a "Pueblo" constituting itself and successfully capturing state power. This is a study for our times, attempting in political theory what intersectional activists have been doing in practice: grafting the identity politics of the 1980s and 90s with the re-emergence of first-world socialist politics in the wake of the global financial crisis. The challenge for Ciccariello-Maher, and others who share his aspirations, is to conceptualise an "identity of identities" that is sufficiently concrete for those who act on its behalf. Are these simply rainbow coalitions that form in response to particular issues only to dissolve, or can these alliances be turned into formal groupings that pursue lasting programs? As an argument against a certain kind of stodgy dialectical materialism, Ciccariello-Maher's thesis rests on two connected claims: i) that any dialectical political theory premised on mutual recognition and dependence between classes will be ineffective where one party is treated as "sub-ontological"; ii) that such relations of non-reciprocity are endemic to the colonial situation and its aftermath. This explains the title, which promises to "decolonize" the Hegelian-Marxian tradition by critiquing the assumption that all politics is one or another manifestation of the dialectic of capital and labour. Key for Ciccariello-Maher is the notion that the dialectic of oppressor and oppressed frequently needs to be "jumpstarted" by identity-based political acts. Once jumpstarted, though, the dialectical motion seems to behave in the same manner as that dynamic negation of antitheses given an ideal account by Hegel. The philosophical presuppositions of dialectics are not really interrogated by Ciccariello-Maher, let alone "decolonized." Ciccariello-Maher takes from Fanon in particular the notion that decolonial politics continually confronts the problem of ontological denial. Is this a pattern that extends beyond the thinkers that this study considers? For instance, do the ideas of the dependency school of economic theory, which saw itself as opposing neo-colonialism, in some way respond to the problem of ontological denial? Or does non-reciprocity in meta-geopolitical relations obey a different logic? In the South Asian context, does Gandhi's program of satyagraha, built as it was on the strong assertion of precolonial Indian identity, obey a decolonised dialectic more so than that of a rationalist communist like M.N...