The continuity between past and present, the connection that people have to the unfolding of history, has taken on a qualitatively different dimension in a time so “out of joint”.[1] The idea that the 1990s signalled the ‘end of history’ may seem absurd, but for years we have struggled to recover our ability to think about alternative futures.[2] In 2025, however, our relationship to the future seems to have taken on a stark clarity. With the threat of climate change, the seemingly ineluctable march of fascism, genocide, and the drums of war posing existential questions for humanity, our relationship to what is to come- on our current course- brings to mind the words of Walter Benjamin: “Marx says that revolutions are the locomotives of history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on their train- namely, the human race- to activate the emergency brake.”[3] There is no question of things simply continuing as they are, but a sense of dissatisfaction with the current trajectory of history is not enough. We are living through what Mark Fisher called the “long slow cancellation of the future”[4]; how to think our way out of this impasse?
The utopias of the anti-colonial period “have gradually withered into post-colonial nightmares,” but I am not convinced they have lost all of their disruptive potential.[5] There has been an understandable turn in recent historiography towards an examination of anti-colonial ‘afterlives’ and alternatives to teleological narratives which lead directly to the nation-states of today.[6] These studies look back at the lasting legacies of the colonial and struggles against it; the roads not taken, and the unattained dreams of those heady days. In turning to the past, to more expansive visions of what independence could have meant, historians can, in Walter Benjamin’s words, fan “the spark of hope in the past.”[7] This requires recognizing that there was, and is, as Edward Said put it, “a consistent intellectual trend within the [anti-colonial] nationalist consensus that is vitally critical,” and it contains “the possibility of a more generous and pluralistic vision of the world, in which imperialism courses on…but the opportunities for liberation are open.”[8]
To spark the imagination, to begin thinking of the way things might be different, we might start by “brushing history against the grain”; seeking those moments where an alternative history, and thus an alternative present and future, “flares up briefly”.[9] As David Scott writes, a conscious re-appraisal of the past can “enable a critical rethinking of the present we inhabit such as to open up new ways of thinking about possible futures.”[10] Of course, he is correct in warning against the unthinking transference of interwar anti-colonial utopianism into our ‘post’-colonial present; we inhabit quite different “problem-spaces”, and thus have different questions, answers, and expectations.[11] Scott is right to point out the way that Western capitalist modernity has conditioned the very possibilities of thought of all that live in its temporal snare, and his meditations on the “tragic” emplotment of colonial enlightenment and the antimonies of anti-colonial struggle are striking and convincing.[12] However, I feel that he is too quick to state “that the narrative of revolution is inseparable from the larger narrative of modernity…[and] categories such as ‘nation,’ ‘sovereignty,’ ‘progress,’ ‘reason,’ and so on.”[13] By relying too heavily on Reinhart Koselleck’s definition of modern revolution, he closes off the continued existence of revolutionary expectation which do not conform to the future-oriented concept that Koselleck defines.
Furthermore, while Scott’s focus on the productive power of modernity- its ability to influence even the construction of opposition and perceived alternatives- is a sobering reminder of the power of dominant discourses and imaginations, it feels too all-encompassing. The power that Scott gives to ‘modernity’ can lead to a feeling of intellectual paralysis. It is better to keep in mind that “there is always something beyond the reach of dominating systems, no matter how deeply they saturate society.”[14] While modernities, even of the subaltern variety, do indeed “actively help to construct new choices which themselves are constitutive of new creative subjectivities,” no dominating system is omniscient.[15]
I agree with David Scott when he says “there is no overcoming this ambiguous inheritance of enlightenment. There is only the everlasting negotiation with it.”[17] However, I think some of the key conceptual tools in this negotiation can come from focusing on the fissures and cracks within this all-imposing construct of ‘colonial enlightenment’; it was never monolithic, never unchallenged and, I believe, never entirely hegemonic. A focus on the struggles that sought alternatives to our post-colonial present, with a keen eye on how those less imbricated in the structures of colonial knowledge production and intellectual life- that is, subaltern classes and their allies- thought is an indispensable tool in this task.
Reinhart Koselleck declared that, since the French Revolution, “revolution obviously no longer returned to given conditions or possibilities, but has, since 1789, led forward into an unknown future. The nature of this future is so obscure that its recognition and mastery have become the constant task of politics.”[18] In many ways, this is true; the philosophy of progress and a break with the past is a constant in post-1789 political thought and was dominant for centuries. However, this was not- and is not- the only temporal disposition in revolutionary politics, especially not in the colonial world. In India, for example, there were “immensely varied entry points into early communism,” and that meant revolution, communism, and freedom represented different things to different people.[19] Manu Goswami cites the case of Ayudhya Prasad, an interwar Indian Communist, who came to leftist politics from “anarchic peasant traditions in northern India.”[20] His ideal of revolution was quite different from the forward-looking archetype that Koselleck put forth: “the first idea of Communist society was taken from the collective production and distribution which prevailed in primitive society,” he argued, and “in India communism is not a foreign question but a matter of re-establishing the old relations on the basis of the advanced mode of production today…it is about smashing the capitalist relations imported in the last century. ”[21] To some Sikhs, like Sohan Singh Josh, communism had its roots in the philosophy of Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism.[22] Leftist politics could easily blend with idealized constructions of a pre-colonial past and, even if these visions were romanticized and themselves the product of ‘modern’ readings of history, it speaks to a different kind of temporality in Indian communism. As Manu Goswami put it:
It has become a cliché to consider communism only in terms of its radical futurity, its prophetic promise to bring about the dawn of a new day. The appeal of early communism was more varied, though, than an abstract futurity whose successive defeats, in turn, spawned a kind of melancholia about the past futures of the European left. Communism was perceived in colonial and peripheral worlds as having preceded the rise of homogenizing industrial capitalism. It was understood less as a mere symptom of the new than as the activation of forms of universality coextensive with a heterogenous lived present…the temporal appeal of communism was that it offered at once a future plenitude and an uncanny return, a concept that faded into the background in later understandings.[23]
The presence of the past in political imagination was hardly a phenomenon restricted to India. As Cedric Robinson noted, in Black Marxism, during colonial slavery, many of the enslaved wished for nothing more than “a repair of the discontinuity produced by enslavement and transportation”; liberation meant an escape from ‘History’ as conceived in Western teleology, not a progression alongside a linear time-scale.[24] During the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, “the Zapatistas were not interested in building the future as modern, technological society…their utopia lay in the past, not in the future.”[25] Even now, the neo-Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico, speak of walking “putting one foot in the past and the other in the future.”[26] Leaders of Indigenous movements like Evo Morales, Enzo Traverso writes, “act politically in a secular world, but they know that their historical role is also intertwined with a temporality that does not belong to Western history.”[27] The Russian Revolution, despite its productivism and ‘modernizing’ agenda, was seen by both friends and foes of the USSR as “ectopic- a phenomenon untimely and outside its proper place-, [and] its explosive potential became an obsessive concern for imperial authorities.”[28]
Bringing to the fore the “dynamic anarchronies” of anti-colonial liberatory horizons can challenge the logic of ‘progress’, and complicate Koselleck’s framing of revolutionary temporality.[29] The peoples of the Global South and the formerly colonized world are “conscripts of modernity”, and their prospects for liberation have been compromised and shaped by the very conditions of their imprisonment in colonial and oppressive structures. However, whenever capitalist ‘modernity’ has sought to conscript those who remain outside its grasp there has always been and will always be resistance; desertion, revolution, and a stubborn refusal to be moulded into the perfect ‘modern’ subject. Even if the visions of history that resistance movements draw upon are themselves inseparable from the effects of colonial capitalism (I do not believe there is an entirely ‘autonomous’ space outside these logics), there is more to the subjective imagination of anti-colonialism than a focus on colonial enlightenment and modernity can fully capture.
In a colonial setting, it is not merely a mastery of the future that becomes the goal of politics. In many ways, the past also becomes an open field; on the one hand, the colonized will quite often recognize the unreliability of imperialist narratives of the past and, on the other, there is the struggle between a reckoning with or a romanticism about the pre-colonial world. The past becomes as pregnant with possibility as the future. It is alternatively something to celebrate, to return to, to reject, to grapple with, to be ashamed of, or to be proud of. It bears repeating that in our ‘post’-colonial setting, the disjuncture between what was dreamed of during anti-colonial movements, and what resulted- the fact that imperialism, state repression, poverty, and injustice are still with us- can be the starting point for a productive intellectual endeavour. For us, too, the past can become a resource and something to struggle over: did something go wrong? Was this the only path out of coloniality that could have been taken? What alternatives were dreamt of, and are they still relevant? There can be no rote repetition of generations past, and David Scott helps us see the contradictions of modernity as well as the dangers of reading historic texts without resituating them to our present. However, there is still some value to be wrung out of the emplotment of ultimate anti-colonial overcoming, of substantive liberation.
The Time of Capital
In Futures Past, Reinhart Koselleck explores how the concept of historia magistrae vitae- the notion that history had lessons to impart for readers in the present- was apparently made redundant by the acceleration of historical change after the onset of modernity- the modern was “breaking free of the continuity of an earlier mode of time”.[30] Essentially, the world was changing so quickly that the past was increasingly detached from the present and the future. In many ways, this holds true. Technological progress has reshaped the world in truly staggering ways. However, Koselleck also wrote about how, in the aftermath of 1789, “a new space of expectation was constituted whose perspective was traced out by points referring back to different phases of the past revolution.”[31] In a way, by attempting to carry out failed revolutions anew, there was a return to earlier cyclical ideas of history. However, there are important material reasons for why this phenomenon might appear under capitalism and that is what Enzo Traverso describes as the “cyclical time” of capital.[32]
He argues, quite convincingly, that there are multiple temporalities in the works of Karl Marx. First, there is the “linear, homogenous and abstract time of production.”[33] Then, there is the “time of production and circulation”.[34] At the same time, there is the march of time that is internal to capital’s logics and functioning; the “cyclical time of the expanded reproduction of capital and the circulation of its exchange values.”[35] It is the cyclical time of capitalism that gives it, and those who live under its sway, a unique temporal disposition. The nature of capitalism is constantly in flux and technologies, modes of production, and class relations are never static. Yet, the characteristics and contradictions of this economic system remain; the ceaseless extraction of surplus-value, recurrent overproduction and economic crises can be seen as characteristics of a unique temporal regime.
Contemporary struggles against this system also often refer to past movements: their symbols, their songs, their icons, and their vocabulary are borrowed from twentieth century socialist movements. Cloaking oneself in the garb of revolutions past is hardly limited to the anti-capitalist Left. The French revolutionaries of 1789 sought to, as Marx put it, “conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honoured disguise and borrowed language.”[36] Marx identified the manner in which even that first ‘modern’ revolution, which Koselleck takes to the be the defining point at which revolutionary temporality became tied to a distant and unknown future, sought to conjure “up the dead of world history”, and was driven by a desire to recreate a romanticized past.[37]
A similar spirit has persisted. Whether it is the use of Victor Jara’s songs by protestors in Chile, or Indian farmers invoking Bhagat Singh, “the awakening of the dead…served [and serves] the purpose of glorifying the new struggles, not of parodying the old…of finding once more the spirit of revolution, not making its ghost walk again.”[38] Marx felt that the socialist revolution could not “take its poetry from the past but only from the future”, thereby echoing Koselleck’s idea of the radical futurity of ‘modern’ revolutionary imagination.[39] Yet despite this injunction, the allure of the past is too strong for people to ignore. In some cases, as Chris Moffat puts it, “living communities can experience [the] present through an active sense of responsibility to the dead.”[40] Movements from the past, especially those that failed to achieve their stated aims or were defeated, continue to make their presence felt and can have a tangible impact on politics in the here and now. Perhaps Enzo Traverso put it best when he said:
Working through the past is unavoidable, not only because there are so many skeletons in the closet, but also because we cannot ignore the claim that the past has on us. Blasting the continuum of history, revolutions rescue the past. They will contain in themselves - whether they will be aware of it or not - the experiences of their ancestors. That is another reason why we need to meditate upon their history.[41]
[1] David Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 2.
[2] Ibid, 2.
[3] Walter Benjamin, ‘Paralipomena to “On the Concept of History”, WBSW, VOL. 4, 402, as cited Enzo Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History (London: Verso Books, 2021), 77.
[4] Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zer0 Books, 2014), as cited in Ajay Singh Chaudhary, ‘The Long Now’, Late Light, 2021, https://late-light.com/issues/issue-1/the-long-now.
[5] Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 2.
[6] For example, see Christopher J. Lee, Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives, Ohio University Research in International Studies. Global and Comparative Studies Series, number 11 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2010); Sara Salem, Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony, The Global Middle East (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108868969.; Ali Raza, Revolutionary Pasts: Communist Internationalism in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108693875; Maia Ramnath, Haj to Utopia: How the Ghadar Movement Charted Global Radicalism and Attempted to Overthrow the British Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
[7] Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations (New York: Shocken Books, 1969), 255.
[8] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), 278, 294.
[9] Ibid, 255-256.
[10] Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 50.
[11] Ibid, 4.
[12] See Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, especially chapter 5.
[13] Ibid, 89.
[14] Edward Said, ‘Traveling Theory’, in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1983), 247.
[15] Scott, Conscripts of Modernity: The Tragedy of Colonial Enlightenment, 117.
[16] Ibid, 129.
[17] Ibid, 175.
[18] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press, 2004), 72.
[19] Manu Goswami, ‘A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India’, Diacritics 48, no. 2 (2020), https://muse.jhu.edu/article/797662, 100.
[20] Ibid, 100.
[21] Meerut Conspiracy Case 1929-32, 536, as cited in Ibid, 100.
[22] Ibid, 100.
[23] Ibid, 103-104. For more on the narrowing of the diversity and malleability of early Indian Communism- how it became stultified, narrow, and orthodox in response to Stalinism and the Meerut Trial, see A. Raza, ‘Separating the Wheat from the Chaff: Meerut and the Creation of “Official” Communism in India’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 33, no. 3 (1 January 2013): 316–30, https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-2378112.
[24] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 3rd ed. (United Kingdom: Penguin Classics, 2021), I.
[25] Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, 65-6.
[26] Enzo Traverso, Left-Wing Melancholia: Marxism, History, and Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 74.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Goswami, ‘A Communism of Intelligence: Early Communism in Late Imperial India’, 98.
[29] Ibid, 92..
[30] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (Columbia University Press, 2004), 31.
[31] Ibid, 41.
[32] Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, 378.
[33] Ibid.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid.
[36] Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Progress Publishers: Moscow, 1937), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/.
[37] Ibid.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Ibid.
[40] Chris Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance: Politics and the Promise of Bhagat Singh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108655194, 5.
[41] Traverso, Revolution: An Intellectual History, 31.
[42] Anand (1949) ‘Prologomena to a new humanism’, in Lines Written to an Indian Air. Baroda: Nalanda Publishing, p. 4, as cited in Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, eds., South Asian Resistances in Britain: 1858-1947 (London: New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2012), 149.
[43] C.L.R. James and Stuart Hall, In Conversation with Stuart Hall, 1986, YouTube.
[44] British Movietone, Trotsky Sees Decline of Europe, 1932, YouTube.
[45] Ibid.
[46] Chaudhary, ‘The Long Now’.
[47] ‘Full Text of Statement of S. Bhagat Singh and B.K. Dutt in the Assembly Bomb Case’ (Shahidbhagatsingh.org, 8 June 1929), https://www.marxists.org/archive/bhagat-singh/1929/06/06.htm.
[48] Moffat, India’s Revolutionary Inheritance, 62.
[49] Chaudhary, ‘The Long Now’.
[50] Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, translated by Edmund Jephcott (Camrbridge, MA: Harvard/Belknap, 2016), 66, as cited in Chaudhary, ‘The Long Now’.