Antinomies of Nativism: Understanding Decoloniality Theory's Affinities with the Global Far Right

Abstract

This article examines the peculiar conjuncture of decolonial theory and contemporary far‐right ideology. It argues that their shared fixation on the dualism of native and settler is immanent to the development of advanced capitalism, particularly the sharpening of its contradictory tendency to undermine labour as the source of value, and to the crisis‐driven accumulation of fictitious capital over recent decades. Mahmood Mamdani's critique of the settler–native binary and Moishe Postone's critique of romantic anti‐capitalism together illuminate how such nativist ideology privileges the ‘concrete’ over the ‘abstract’ — use value over exchange value — thereby reproducing an ideology that remains blind to the concrete historical totality from which this dualism arises and that can only flourish in the absence of dialectical mediation.