ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the continued coloniality of the former Second World. Discussing the relation of post-socialism and postcolonialism, I shed light on the tension between the hegemony of the communist state, as Soviet political colonization and as these states’ foundational knowledge, and the hegemony of the free market as the post-socialist “emancipatory” project. This second colonial encounter devalued socialist statehood and knowledge and erased histories and experiences of oppositional struggles and resistance to Soviet imperialism. This entangled relationship of Soviet and Western imperialism is considered here both historically and from the viewpoint of present-day history politics, that is, competing interpretations of the past and the past’s relation to future possibilities. I argue, that the intertwining of two colonialities is a specific tension of post-socialist postcolonialism, where an economic colonialism overlaps with the initial foundation of these states as Soviet political colonization. Parallels and comparisons of post-socialism with postcolonialism can however, for this very reason, improve our analyses of modernity and of capitalism.
