Decolonial critiques are currents of thought that engage Marxism’s analytic tools while refusing Marxism as a complete account of domination. They argue that colonialism is not only a historical precondition for capitalism but an ongoing structure that organizes extraction, governance, and the production of persons.
In this library, the decolonial critique starts from the insistence that decolonization is not a metaphor. Any analysis that treats Indigenous dispossession as a “phase” of capitalist development (for example as completed primitive accumulation) risks misdescribing settler occupation as past instead of present.
This current overlaps with and sometimes names itself through related frameworks such as racial capitalism and Indigenous resurgence. It is represented in this vault through figures like Frantz Fanon, Cedric Robinson, Glen Coulthard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Sylvia Wynter, and Achille Mbembe.
Key concepts
- Colonialism and settler colonialism as structures of ongoing domination
- Coloniality as persistence after formal colonial rule
- Decolonization as land and life repatriation, not institutional inclusion
- Racial capitalism as a constitutive feature of accumulation
- Indigenous resurgence as practice beyond recognition
- Land back as a political horizon that exceeds redistribution
Connections
- Two-Spirit — the colonial imposition of the gender binary as a technology of dispossession
- Queer-of-color critique — the queer theoretical tradition most aligned with decolonial analysis