/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

July 31, 2026

The Postcolonial Volk
By Benjamin Zachariah
Polity, 176 pages, $25

You might have noticed that at some point, progressive types began to use the term “folks” to refer to “people.” There are black folks, queer folks, indigenous folks. The change is significant. Whereas “people” evokes a sense of a universal subject, “folks” is particular. It implies a world of distinctions: different cultures, different experiences, different interests. No people, just “peoples,” all speaking with a different voice. From this perspective, “The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe.”

While the idea of a pluriverse has become increasingly popular within decolonial thought, that last line didn’t come from the tradition’s ever-proliferating ranks of academic adherents. It came from Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist. At a time when everything is “literally Hitler,” the comparison can seem overwrought. But it is precisely the comparison between post-colonial particularism and the völkisch right that Benjamin Zachariah reveals with a keen sense of the absurd in his new book, The Postcolonial Volk.

Zachariah critiques the “conglomerate” of postcolonial and decolonial theory clustering around what’s come to be known as “theory from the Global South.” But appearances are deceiving, because it’s not really from the Global South at all. As Zachariah describes, its language and legitimacy claims are crafted in the Global North, exported to the Global South, and then reimported as authentic non-Western knowledge.

And just as it is not really of the Global South, this ostensibly left-wing “postcolonial-decolonial-Global South conglomerate” is not really of the left either. Despite the right’s insistence that the ghost of Karl Marx is currently undertaking a long march through the institutions, Zachariah’s central claim is that the contemporary left actually has far more in common with anti-communist and proto-fascist forces than with the nineteenth-century founder of “scientific socialism.” In important respects, its ethos actually arises from an entirely rival tradition, one that encompasses romantic nationalism, indigenism, cultural organicism, and völkisch thought. It is, Zachariah says, “Romanticism, rather than the much-reviled Enlightenment, that suggests itself as the intellectual basis of the ‘post-Enlightenment’ world that Global Southistan now lays claim to.”

This is why, as Zachariah shows, the postcolonial outlook now common on the contemporary left is so hostile to the Enlightenment and its ideal of universal truth. In his satirical “Twelve Theses on Postcolonialism,” he condenses its outlook into its propositions including “the individual is an Enlightenment conspiracy” and “the Age of Reason is the Age of Empire.” Contrary to popular belief, universal reason and the emancipation of the individual were central to Marxism and the socialist and communist traditions shaped by it (“We are communists out of egoism,” Engels once wrote to Marx), however miserably they failed in practice. Marx and Engels were part of the Young Hegelian milieu, who were deeply impressed by the “heroes of the French Revolution,” and even called themselves “encyclopaedists” after the eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophes. This is a far cry from the unholy trinity that Zachariah skewers, however much its adherents may sometimes rummage in the dustbins for what he calls the “debris of Marx- and- Engels-isms.”

Postcolonialism does not simply swap out the working class for some other group of the oppressed. Its object is a mystic unity of culture, collective memory, fraught relationships to race and place, and inherited victimhood. Blood and soil in these formulations are only slightly obscured by a thin rhetorical dust.

As Zachariah shows, the postcolonial tendency’s hostility to individualism and universalism follows precisely from its Romantic and völkisch premises. This is why, as Zachariah describes through a number of jarring examples, its language passes so easily out of the mouths of Hindu nationalists, Islamists, and white identitarians. All emphasize authentic peoples, violated inheritances, foreign contamination, internal betrayers, and cultural restoration as a magical solution to social and political problems.

One of Zachariah’s most illuminating examples is that of Benoy Kumar Sarkar, a Bengali social scientist whom Zachariah describes as “a self-conscious and dedicated user of völkisch ideas” and “zealous co-worker with the Nazis,” who is now unselfconsciously revered as a pioneer of Indian sociology, political science, and forebear of postcolonial thought. That Sarkar was a resolute admirer of Hitler, whom he called “Vivekananda multiplied by Bismarck,” is forgiven or ignored by those eager to find in him a postcolonial precursor.

The story is similar, if more well known, regarding Martin Heidegger, whom Zachariah describes as “postcolonial scholars’ preferred philosopher of ‘affect’” and whose defenders’ attempt to save him from the charge of Nazism “faltered on the evidence of his own diaries.” One compromised intellectual ancestor might be a mere misstep, a product of a momentary lapse in judgment (even if lasting many years). But when the fascist affinities of your forebears must repeatedly be bracketed or explained away, it should tell you that something is wrong with your outlook.

Not that this is really possible, because postcolonialism’s epistemology means it is singularly incapable of recognizing the proto-fascism of its völkisch affinities. As Zachariah writes, these are instead routinely “underplayed or explained away in terms of the ‘difference’ of non-Western cultures, which are allegedly incapable of fascism or to whom Western concepts such as fascism simply do not apply.” If the volk is light-skinned, the politics belong to the right; if dark-skinned, to the left, and ne’er the twain shall meet. And so, the right remains evil for its organic nationalism, while the left is merely seeking cultural renewal; the right is dangerous for denouncing non-white internal enemies but when the left denounces whites it is merely identifying obstacles to “decolonization.” It is the peculiarities of the volk, rather than the politics, that matter.

Why has the left turned to these romantic ideas? Zachariah cites the collapse of the Soviet Union as one cause. But he hits on an even deeper reason near the start of the book, when he draws on Walter Benjamin’s much-quoted vignette inspired by Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus. This is the backward-facing, forward-blown Angel of History, who is to Benjamin, “surveying the debris of the past” as a storm blowing from Paradise drives him perilously into the future. “He would like to pause,” goes the vignette, “to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed,” but the gale has got so strong he cannot close his wings.

Zachariah’s intended point is well taken: We can no more return to an earlier materialist left than postcolonial volk can return to the idyllic time before the colonial “Fall.” Both the longing and the backward-looking means of overcoming it are misguided. But Benjamin’s image also answers a deeper question: Just why is there such a passionate desire to escape the forces of history and take refuge in the wholeness of the past?

In You Shall Be as Gods, Erich Fromm reads the expulsion from Eden not as man’s corruption but “the beginning of his rise.” Eden is the central symbolic story of man’s gradual alienation from animalhood and nature in the development of his capacity to reason and disobey, that is, his capacity for freedom. But crucially, this freedom is experienced as a painful sense of loss, as freedom imposes burdens of uncertainty, choice, and responsibility.

“Man suffers from this loss of oneness,” Fromm writes, and “his most passionate striving is to return to the world of union which was his home.” And so while man, in Fromm’s radical humanist reading of the Hebrew scriptures, reasons and argues with God on his ascent to independence, he is always drawn back downward, “to the womb, the Mother Earth,” and the certainties and bindings of the past, nature, clan, and idols.

This is the deeper yearning expressed in Benjamin’s Angel of History. We want to go back and pick up the pieces, rebuild what’s been lost. But the most painful lesson, the one we continually cannot accept, is that there is no going back.

Ashley Frawley is a Compact columnist, a visiting fellow at MCC Brussels, and a visiting researcher in the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent.

@AshleyAFrawley