On the parochial neglect of the Marxist anticolonial critique of political economy

Jim Tully's “Deparochializing Political Theory and Beyond” provides an exemplar account of the modes of theoretical and dialogical engagement required for recovering non-Western thinkers and provincializing Western political thought. I argue that Tully's approach helps explain the provincialism of anticolonial political theory in matters of political economy even while it substantively fails to follow its own dictates. By provincialism I mean the lack of sustained attention to Third World Marxist thinkers and their critique of capitalist political economy, despite their centrality in the anticolonial tradition. To explain this oversight, I argue that post-Cold War Anglo-American political theory narrowed the engagements with anticolonial thinkers because of its own detachment from a critical political economy. This, I argue, diminished the ability of anticolonial political theory to place capitalist accumulation through the expropriation of nature and labor as central to the politics of colonialism and the unjust world that ensued after decolonization.