Marxism and Decolonizing Praxis: From Decolonial Misinterpretations to Marxist Contributions

This article intervenes in postcolonial and decolonial critiques that portray Karl Marx and Marxism as intrinsically Eurocentric and inattentive to race, colonialism and non-European revolutionary agency. It argues that such critiques often rely on selective, historically limited interpretations that overlook Marx’s later writings, in which he reconfigures linear time and revolutionary agency beyond the European industrial proletariat, converging with Marxist traditions that foreground Indigenous, Black and rural struggles as central to radical transformations. The author contends that a decolonizing praxis capable of confronting contemporary global capitalism must engage with, rather than reject, Marx’s critique of political economy. Without this engagement, analyses of colonial domination risk becoming overly culturalist, thus obscuring the ongoing material dynamics of dispossession, exploitation, temporal domination and logics of development through which capital’s accumulation takes place. Marx’s critical method remains indispensable for decolonial analysis and resistance. Against decolonial/post-development approaches that mobilize ‘pluriversality’ as an alternative to universality, the essay calls for a more rigorous linking of the universal rhetoric of modernity and coloniality to capital’s abstract, homogenizing and synchronizing dynamics. Ernst Bloch’s concept of the ‘multiversum’ offers an alternative historical paradigm that captures the entangled temporalities and heterogeneous forms of knowledge-resistance in and against capitalism.