Queen’s Gambit or Decolonial Gambit?
Gambits are ploys, tricks, maneuvers, or strategies. We might call most anti-racist discussions of the death of Queen Elizabeth, who ceremonially embodied the British empire, a gambit. The manner that this event is discussed reveals both the historical exploitation of Ireland, India, Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, and other territories and the failure of “decolonial” thought. And since a whole generation functioning in the cultural apparatus of the imperial state, who never worked to decolonize anything, loves decolonial chatter so much, clarification of the Queen’s gambit and the decolonial gambit is paramount.
It is difficult to express outrage when a family is mourning (even when discontented with imperial wealthy families.) The Queen, like most successful public figures, seemed a nice, if stiff, and well-meaning person. We know her not just from historical moments depicted in news, but from many dramatizations of her family life. A modern woman with feudal trappings, she stoically negotiated personal suffering and emerged as an admired leader.
The Sun Never Set on the British Empire
Yet what was she leading? Royal families ceremonially sit upon wealth accumulated through a global reality: for a few hundred years “the sun never set on the British empire.” In every time zone, there were conquered peoples denied their self-government. In most places, blood and wearisome struggles sustained that subordination.
From countless enslavement and extraction of economic wealth through land, mines, railroads, and factories from all over the world, the British empire presented this as bringing education, technology, health, and development to backward people. British imperialists made it appear, that though they took, they gave. It was an absurd argument. The British empire proclaimed, through a long demeaning tutorial, that colonized people might govern themselves someday. This appears as the arrogant judgment of a white racial mentality.
Although the British Took, They Gave?
Freedom fighters, whether enslaved or colonized, were assassinated, publicly lynched and mutilated, tortured, and kept in prison or work camps. Elections were fixed, and undesirables subverted, even in campaigns for colonial legislatures. Empire co-opted activists, manufactured false leaders, and made uncompromising insurgent personalities obscure to history. Where Queen Elizabeth-led royal family, with honor and decorum, presided over the last phase of this chapter in world history, this was an achievement. Who could survive this project, as its symbol, revered by so many? Certainly, myths of white supremacy contributed to this accomplishment.
Still, Queen Elizabeth presided over the decolonization era of the British empire (1947–1993). Many icons of anticolonialism danced with her at banquets and visited her home for tea. Popular music among people of color took pride in seeing Queen Elizabeth’s coronation; the same artists also crafted freedom songs. In some ways, these winds of change transformed lives forever. But subordinate lives can only change so much through playing musical chairs with their administrators.
Clapping, the Queen or her relatives were present, when the British flag was taken down and flags of “independence” were raised. Nobody ever laid a hand on the Queen or her family in these acts of diplomacy. Diplomacy is an exchange between rulers of subordinate peoples not just in imperial centers but in peripheries. If the British flag was coming down, who then administered subordinate lives? New gambits were eventually made, after high tides of post-colonial movements for a “second liberation,” to obscure all this. In the 1970s the Global South was marked by wildcat strikes and uprisings seeking to overthrow post-colonial regimes many thought progressive. Now, the clock of history has been falsified, set back long before this, as we reflect fifty years later.
Discovering the New Gambit
Some today express outrage personally at the Queen or anger for British imperialism more generally. Decolonial sentiment is expressed. This can be taken as an awakening among new generations. However, nobody arises from slumber, if there is no rethinking of collaboration between the British empire and past anti-colonial movements. Observing this history properly means we can better spot subtle functionaries of empire today.
One of the reasons younger generations have stopped talking about problems of “neo-colonialism,” an idea coined in the later 1960s by Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah, is first it is a flawed idea. It divides rulers above society in the periphery between the “neo-colonial” and the “non-aligned,” inventing false terms for “progressive” hierarchies.
All non-aligned meant was peripheral nations take money from every imperial sector (instead of just one of them) for national development. And even the most “radical” openly admitted to contracting with global forces to sell their nation’s subordinate labor at competitive prices. The fact, that the post-colonial leader above society, maintained the pretense of coming up with their own economic plans, was the big show of “independence.”
Still, the idea of neocolonialism, even as critical thinking, can be subversive and dangerous. For, even if we misunderstand the trajectories of such political criticism, we soon start inquiring why post-colonial political classes are detestable. There has never been a moment in the past fifty years where this radical questioning has been so minimized. Far more than we realize, this is a result that “decolonial” thinking is owned by authoritarian regimes, whether conservative or progressive.
The Critique of Neocolonialism: Flawed, Obsolete, Dangerous?
Neocolonialism in theory was the idea that the nation-state after colonial independence has all the trappings of political independence and sovereignty but in reality, is economically determined from the outside, by the former colonial powers or multi-national corporations.
To be clear all states, both imperial and peripheral, in the world are owned and directed by large blocks of capital. No statesman functions outside that logic, after coming to power through an election or leading a movement to overthrow another regime.
The trouble is few decolonial talkers really object to nation-states; they wish for their preferred states to help gather and defend their own accumulation dreams. We find this out when we rally against the politicians of color who preside over the former colonial world today. Post-colonial politicians function as lackeys of the empire of capital. Still, the decolonial critics, when pushed into a corner, say “well, these politicians are doing the best they can.” Nobody has a credible measure for their defense. But also, decolonial thinkers subscribe to trickle-down economics of elite brokerage and ethnic patronage.
Not Really in Charge but We Vote for Them Anyway
Surely, many wish to vote for (or if dissatisfied, vote for another) and live vicariously through those who hold hierarchical government office. Rarely found are individuals, and small groups, wishing to discard these forms of compromised power.
At the global grassroots, among people who never read books on economics and political philosophy, there is a consensus, perhaps a collective memory. When people of color are in charge above society, they are not really in charge. Yet the former colonized ritually will keep voting for such politicians confident they will not do anything constructive. Very often, while some peripheral statesmen make some nice speeches, they pursue only personal power and wealth while facilitating the economic rape of people. This is what church ladies recognize who have never rebelled against anybody.
How come “radicals” have not transcended those who sweat and fan themselves? Why do supposed decolonial scholar-activists — really, they are activists for these shining governments of the damned — not rejected this self-immolation that nothing can be done? In fact, they are compensated, in the name of consciousness-raising, to contain the next development in political thought.
Protecting the Powerful: Decolonial Talk Falsely Recasts History
The rhetoric of “decolonial” seeks to reset history back in time, just like the idea of a “New Jim Crow.” It wishes to justify, though people of color have held the reins of government above society in the former colonial world for 30–70 years, they are still led indirectly by white racial states in Europe. Whatever we think we know about problems of exploitation by international banking and debt, or multi-national corporations, no decolonial jibber-jabbers lead a revolt in the periphery to abolish all financial and industrial capital in the world.
The new millennium twist is that we should build united fronts around degenerate misleaders, and advise people who never even pretended to be freedom fighters how to navigate imperialism. Mind you, not to overthrow it, but negotiate diplomatically. As if empire is a permanent feature of our lives, this is decolonial thought today wrapped in rainbows.
The foolhardiness of this approach reveals a constant push and pull, a condemnation of white supremacy, and a search for dialogue with white imperialists to repair or alleviate supposed sovereign people’s circumstances. This disposition reveals, time and again, not autonomous condemnations of empire so much as scorn for direct action and disobedience against it. This is consistent with a decolonial that does not condemn accumulation by people of color. Whose labor will this wealth be extracted from? Who will be brutalized and imprisoned so others come off as legitimate leaders to global capital getting a little more in return?
The Resentment of the Queen’s Gambit Obscures Another Hustle
Resentment of the Queen’s Gambit, the British empire, covers up another trick. Anyone familiar with the main currents of British empire politics understands that there are two main political parties in Britain. There are Tories, imperial conservatives identifying openly with monarchic heritage, and the British Labour Party who also accept, if less stridently, that tradition.
The British Labour Party is not a force of independent workers but capitalism and elite representative government. It is a bourgeois nationalist party. It plays around with social democracy, advocating a today expanding, tomorrow contracting welfare state. It is the model for labor and nationalist parties all over the former British empire. Its basic machinations can be found in Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, Jamaica, Antigua, Guyana, and Trinidad under different “national,” “labor,” and “progressive” names. In the United States, when such sentiments are expressed, many permit the miseducated but socialist-curious to pretend they are leading a revolution. Yet these parties and ideas are sheep-dogs, protecting us from wolves, so we can be shorn, sold, and brought to slaughter.
Historically, the British Labour Party presided over foreign affairs, and the colonies of the empire, as much as the Tories did. And it very often, like most progressives, was animated by a eugenics mentality. Decolonial thinking discards some but not all forms of eugenics.
Labor Parties, Nationalist Parties, and Eugenics
Eugenics is not only a philosophy based on pseudo-scientific arguments for racial inequality that invents a hierarchy of racial intelligence that is false and relatively easy to challenge. Instead, it is also a proposition that even within Europe amid white people, and even among people of color in the Global South, ordinary people (who apparently are of the same racial and ethnic origins) are not fit to govern themselves. Whites and people of color, colonizer and colonized, subscribe to eugenics ideas.
Those deemed poor and powerless, we are told, need more welfare, education, and development. Even outside the British empire, when there is a desire to oppose racism, what is projected? “Our people” are deficient and backward and need more culture. Africa, India, the Caribbean, and the aborigines of Australia, what do they need? Yes, these shibboleths are repeated. This is always expressed by people with a capitalist mentality. Even among the people who think they are “socialist,” they believe that the role of labor is to work not to directly govern.
It is natural when we reflect on how the British empire “underdeveloped” Africa, India, the Caribbean, etc., to sympathetically receive calls for reparations for “poorer nations.” Still, nations are hierarchies of social classes and only have common interests in bourgeois history books. Even histories of decolonization by socialist authors are often bourgeois histories.
Recognizing and recording commoners’ instincts and social motion pursuing independence often culminates in celebrating the coming to power of perceived heroic personalities above society.
Haughty Pretenders Declare Independence (Again)
Even former colonized peoples, no matter how they feel about Queen Elizabeth, mistakenly organize degrading coronations. The actual post-colonial governments of the former British empire, even when supposedly protesting, are not opponents but colleagues in mystification.
Recently, contemporary Barbados whose colonial independence came in 1966, has been playing around led by its decolonial cultural front. They declared independence again in 2020! The British royal family was present and took part (again). The imperialists are always taking part in, if not funding, decolonial talk. Voices of outrage against privilege are often elevated and approved by white racists and imperialists.
As Mia Mottley’s Barbados just celebrated independence for a second time; Jamaica, which became independent in 1962, is interested in following suit with this preposterous ritual. Barbados boldly declared itself a republic. Feigning a freedom movement maneuver, those who orchestrated this were most haughty.
Who cultivated the Caribbean popular will by clarifying a republic is explicitly a regime against democracy where elites, experts, and professionals are seen as the embodiment of culture and government? Is this politics for a second independence? While “decolonial” thinkers shot off fireworks, this arrogance expresses nothing but subjugation.
The coming to power of statesmen above society, and ritual coronations, often bring to an end popular self-mobilization. History when approached uncritically suggests that “self-determination” is embodied by overlords, not the masses that pushed them from behind, and who may act to discard them.
Histories of Decolonization Are Bourgeois Histories
What perspective do bourgeois history books encourage? In certain historical periods ruling classes above society, in Europe, Asia, and the United States, particularly industrialists and financiers, were heroic and contributed to progress. They exploited labor and colonized people but they developed their own countries. Far more than we realize, people of color and the colonized (even supposed radical thinkers) see economic history in this fashion.
Where will national development in peripheral nations come from? Will the former British empire, without new wars for liberation, take steps through wealth transfers to make the Global South their economic peers? Only a charlatan or a fool would believe so. There are no wars advocated or conducted against the former British empire today by “decolonial” thinkers. Yet, the decolonial pretenders love focusing on the British empire (especially from the 1400–1800s), so they can evade talking about the United States, the greatest purveyor of violence, who advises their statesmen and armies on national security (surveilling the multitudes of color).
The decolonial approach today rallies around those with a capitalist mentality in the former colonial world who desire “national development.” There is a longing to protect “our” mineral wealth, even intermittently “our” ecology. Very rarely do they wish to protect “our” workers. However, even where true, this is a colonial disposition.
Commoners of the former colonial world, not their bombastic and mediocre overseers who share their hue or ethnicity, are the only social force that can gather to fight for a popular democratic and self-directed society.
Charlatans, Fools, and National Development
Colonial dispositions today, where present, deny that the multitudes of color can govern themselves — not aspiring middle class, formally educated, and professional classes of color who are being elevated everywhere. Most “decolonial” dispositions have reduced discussions of the colonial to racism. This is a convenient strategy for those who wish propertied elites of color, in conversation with their aspiring white peers, to embody social equality and inclusion.
Concerns about racism, where it is narrowly defined, mystify there are no fundamental distinctions between the former colonizer and the formerly colonized today in how economic planning, judicial affairs, foreign relations, education, or avoiding ecological destruction should be carried out. In fact, racial disparities in the hierarchies of official power, those who hold office, cannot be found in the formerly colonized world. Charlatans, lighter or darker, all believe in peace between arrogant and chauvinist regimes, and that their personal ruling class project should be on top. All administer subordinate lives for capital, local and global.
Behind thin talk of racism in the formerly colonized world is a sentiment: “they are no better than we” and “It’s our turn now.” Does this express a special code or ethic autonomous of the white colonizer? Instead, it defines equality as equal opportunity to hoard capital and manage employees.
From Kenya to Antigua to India, there is no faction of elite representative government (majority or minority in parliament) that is legitimate from perspectives that ordinary people can and must govern. These regimes have trouble even playing make-believe. Democracy after all is majority rule in the dictionary but electing minorities to rule above society in practice is what decolonial thinkers support.
Future Socialist Society Based on Competition and Accumulating Capital?
The farcical search for national development reaches its highest stage where peripheral societies approach, or in fact are, one-party states pursuing nationalized property. It is true the United States, as an authoritarian regime, is also a one-party state. But the US is so arrogant it insists on having two of them. A decolonized mind that really acts independent doesn’t care what so-called oppressors say and do. Certainly, it doesn’t wish to mimic them.
China, historically a semi-colony of the U.S., Britain, and Japan, makes a three-ring circus of their political independence today. China inspires unethical people not to care if they are carrying out capitalist or socialist policies. China wields power — over its own working people. And aspiring rulers of the formerly colonized world identify with any form of power that approximates a peer relationship with the white beasts they supposedly despise.
The Decolonial Hunts Down Contemporary Fugitive Slaves
In the twentieth century all over the world people fought, to the death, over what was a free and democratic society, a prosperous economic future. Now some behave as if “socialism” and “capitalism” are unproblematically related. They may be similar in treating alienated labor like fugitive slaves who must be returned to their owners. China and the Anglo-American empire have analogous ideas of labor’s self-emancipation. It is a contradiction among people resolved by tanks and tear gas.
China insists they favor local and national capital accumulation. We understand there are other approaches to capitalism. Still, only activists for China’s government, who shout all about the roads they pave and their high-speed trains, cannot find evidence of their open collaboration with imperial global capital. Even where Anglo-American empire has expressed hostility to China, this regime has voluntarily integrated with their houses of finance and purchased Britain and the U.S.’s national debt. China is actually an investor in Anglo-American empire. Why invest in regimes we hope to fail and claim to be leading a worldwide movement to defeat?
“Decolonial” thinkers underline China is out-competing the United States. Tissues should be passed around to dab tears of joy. Still, cheering this in terms of a new society is astonishing. Is the future socialist society a competition between blocks of capital and not the direct self-government of toilers? Is this finally the path for aspiring rulers of color to finally seize power? Who is sustaining a colonial mentality?
Banking on and Competing with Empire?
China is modeling a false decolonial approach today; it banks on and competes with the empire of capital. It is easier of course to hold contempt for “the crown,” a stiff and dying old white broad who carries her purse around her own house.
It is those who basically are living satisfactory and happy lives in imperial centers and peripheries, who despite their culture-talk, in practice see everyday people as their trustees, who sustain the decolonial ruse.
What’s more peculiar, the activists for these governments today don’t even profess concern with popular self-government except when militantly hostile to such a vision. In past decades movements for colonial freedom used to pretend, and sometimes projected rigorous socialist, even revolutionary claims. These perspectives were debated across the world.
Today, the decolonial mentality almost permits that, if one is born a person of color, and historically one’s people have known victimization, through a mystical collective memory one can inherit communal politics as a birthright. Even if one openly schemes for money and hierarchical positions it is no hindrance.
This is the only way to imagine China, a transparent capitalist government led by a communist party, leading a “progressive” trend in the world. If China was a “white” country making such claims this regime would be denounced as a farce. This exemplifies the failure of contemporary “decolonial” thought.
Decolonial Critics Deny Toilers of Color’s Capacity for Self-Government
In the past labor was mobilized often by aspiring rulers who intended to subordinate and discard this class just around the time they had appointments for tea with the Queen. Today, you can find few decolonial talkers globally wishing to sincerely mobilize toilers of color against those who keep them down. Mind you, I didn’t say everyday people are not mobilizing themselves.
The Decolonial gambit makes political projections that deny everyday toilers in the former-colonized world (the peasant farmers, the pastoralists, the mechanics, the market women, the industrial workers, the midwives, and caring mothers) can directly govern society.
Post-colonial toilers are suppressed through the manufacture of their lives as cultural symbols owned by their purported benevolent rulers. Many like to talk about cultural appropriation when what they really mean is people of color should make money at the vanity fair when selling their sacred arts to whites. Who agreed to this price on, the sale of, the supposed sacred?
Few observe a larger scandal: the fight to appropriate subordinate toilers for accumulation dreams. Decolonial thinkers embrace everything but the struggle of the post-colonial oppressed against their preferred regimes.
Decolonial Pretenders: Transforming Toilers into Cultural Symbols
Advanced (some might say decrepit) decolonial pretenders embrace the popular classes as cultural symbols for national development. Faking mental decolonization, this imperial museum mentality shows contempt for mass democratic forces in one’s own territory. Gee, what can the “indigenous” tell us about the problems of Western epistemologies?
Overwhelmingly, those speaking decolonial babble (note those speaking are not rabble) learn nothing about overturning regimes, or politics or economics independent from how the white imperialists see the world. Instead, they make the indigenous banners for pageants of national purpose, otherwise known as their land grabbing and real estate schemes.
Objections to state and capital fall far short of a desire to smash them. Cultural studies of religion, dance, sports, music, ethnicity, and language, while sometimes insightful and useful, cannot obscure how the decolonial is part of the affirmative action empire.
The insult of historical colonialism was advocacy that whole populations across the globe could not govern themselves. Those contemporaries talking “decolonial,” that we must have “knowledge of self,” still believe it.
Blabbermouths of the Imperial Cultural Apparatus
Most decolonial blabbermouths cannot disclose what British imperialists actually did, specifically where they co-opted activists, manufactured false leaders, and made obscure uncompromising insurgent personalities. A significant number of the decolonial crowd are the invention of today’s empire.
While those desiring reparations may say, “it is not how one gathers the money but what use it is placed,” those who negotiate for them are focused on tying up loose ends of defeated pasts, not initiating insurgencies.
Don’t take what I say for granted. Observe the tepid or disturbed responses when trying to initiate a struggle against police states that are apparently concerned for the welfare of the masses and that invite everyone to talk a little culture.
Decolonial Talkers Don’t Take Seriously the Actual Colonies of Today
It is striking, that where there are still actual colonies like in Aruba and Martinique, there is no global movement to liberate those departments of the Dutch and French empires today. Do decolonial talkers have trouble gathering information or are they insincere? Quite simply, they do not know how to turn strident (sometimes hesitant) words into substantial deeds.
Some argue people of Aruba and Martinique, especially those beyond their youth, are settled in family lives, jobs, the terms of social status, and are used to living by certain currencies and passports. We are told they really don’t strive for independence for this would in fact disrupt everyday lives. The propertied and professionals are not the wananchi (commoners in the Swahili language).
Yet again, this conflates aspiring elites of “the poorer nations” with the toilers, the unemployed, and street forces who have little perks to undermine and status to risk. What do those have to risk sitting on a crate in doorways not their own, sharing some black pudding or plantain? What can be taken from someone chewing some khat or licorice in a shanty or mud hut? What does a nursing mother have to hazard, sitting on colorful kanga covering the ground with brittle feet exposed next to three onions for sale?
“The Poorer Nations:” A False Trope Defending Degenerate Regimes
“The poorer nations” is a false trope of the peripheral propertied class. All over the formerly colonized world, there are clashes with police states led by people of color. The Queen or the British empire is not menaced. Nobody talking about “the poorer nations” builds campaigns against these police states today. Instead, they build cultural fronts around their rulers.
Not colonial dilemmas of Aruba and Martinique alone, rather this is the condition of the entire former colonized world. But post-colonial misleaders and activists for hierarchical governments still work on “decolonization” — for that is the latest gambit, a strategy of containment and repression. For some, it can even be monetized, a maneuver to displace from view the post-colonial brutalized.
“Decolonial” talk is a ploy of struggle manufactured from above, a strategy friendly to presidents and prime ministers of color and national security, a trick directed at the ordinary people by ramshackle masterminds. The Queen, like the British empire, is now history. Who now denies that the multitudes of color can govern, and in fact, administers subordinate lives? Next, we will be told it is William of Orange.
