ABSTRACT
Marxism provided the language simultaneously to be modern and to critique Western domination, even if that critique remained confined for a very long time to the domain of economy and polity. The idea of ‘Progress’ predicated on the notion of the self-maximizing possessive individual was a common theme of this episteme and Marxism, too, believed it was inevitable and could only be transcended in the future socialist society. But within Marxism also lay elements of a critique of the possessive individualism whose ontological premises it rejected. As a great deal of recent post-Development thinking across the world emphasizes, the decolonization of thought and knowledge must encourage us to take lessons of Indigenous people’s forms of knowledge and their cosmologies more seriously. Marxism, though born in Europe, very rapidly moved out to the colonial world, where it flourished and found its home.
