The end of progress

After the defeat of communism and its promises for the third world, academics are now finishing the job by painting science and progress as inextricably capitalist. They elide that peoples of the global south once imagined the truly revolutionary possibility of taking the reins of science and of history, instead of being relegated to their own “local knowledges” that pose no threat to imperialism. These academics pose as opening the door for a plurality of alternative epistemes, when they are in effect closing the door on the imaginative possibility of the global south’s endogenous and non-capitalist development, of their taking the reins of knowledge production, and of their breaking free from the sclerotic Orientalist tropes to which those academics chain them.