Marxism, coloniality and ontological assumptions
| Date | 01 March 2021 |
| Published date | 01 March 2021 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117821991611 |
| Author | Lara Montesinos Coleman |
| Subject Matter | A Necessarily Historical Materialist Moment? Forum on Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117821991611
International Relations
2021, Vol. 35(1) 166 –172
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0047117821991611
journals.sagepub.com/home/ire
Marxism, coloniality and
ontological assumptions
Lara Montesinos Coleman
Department of International Relations, University of Sussex
Keywords
capitalism, coloniality, Marxism, decolonial, race, gender
At the heart of Global Capitalism, Global War, Global Crisis is a revolt against fetishism:
the appeal to abstract categories, treating concepts as if they referred to things ‘out there’
in the world, independent of social relations). It is commonplace to note that studies of
international relations routinely fetishise a system of ‘sovereign’ states, abstracted from
history and the social relations, practices and ideologies that sustain state power. What
Bieler and Morton emphasise is that even ‘Left’ analyses routinely make fetishistic appeal
to concepts – ‘the state’, ‘the market’, ‘security’, ‘production’, ‘finance’, ‘knowledge’ –
which are treated as things-in-themselves, devoid of human beings in their concrete social
relations.1 Despite some scholars’ careless applications of the label ‘Marxist’ to such
work, Bieler and Morton’s critique is very much in line with Marx’s own critique of a
tradition of classical political economy so beholden to the modern obsession with uni-
formity and universality that it forcibly read history through the categories of bourgeois
ideology (abstract individuals interacting in ‘the market’ and so on) that were made to
look like ‘general preconditions of all production’.2 For the authors of Global Capitalism,
Global War, Global Crisis, these concerns take on particular urgency at a juncture marked
by global economic ‘crisis’, the developmental ‘catch-up’ of emerging economies and
inter-state rivalry shaped by the dynamics of global political economy.3 The last thing we
need is more fetishism, more mindless repetition of abstract categories like ‘states’, ‘mar-
kets’, ‘security’ and so on. All this does is naturalise the existing order and insulate it from
critique. Instead, Bieler and Morton insist, we must confront the historical contingency of
Corresponding author:
Lara Montesinos Coleman, Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of
Sussex, Arts Building C, Arts Road, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9SJ, UK.
Email: l.coleman@sussex.ac.uk
991611IRE0010.1177/0047117821991611International RelationsMontesinos Coleman
research-article2021
Forum
To continue reading
Request your trial