The Liberty Of The Colonizer Is The Bondage Of The Oppressed

Foreword By Lenses Browne: 

In reading the most recent work from Namveer Singh (a comrade from over seas), I was  struck not just by the breath and depth of the scholarship in examining colonial notions of  democracy and liberty, but also by its immediate relevance to the Irish struggle. Though it was  certainly not written with our context in mind, it speaks directly to our history and present moment  because colonialism with its many faces, is essentially the same everywhere.  

The negative notion of liberty, to be free of constraint is the liberty that the colonizer  bestows on themself over the non person of the colonized.  

The liberty of the settler colonizer to expropriate land and use that land ownership as a way  to self bestow democratic franchise at the expense of the indigenous, is of course the same struggle  fought against by both the civil rights campaign up north and indigenous communities in the  Americas.  

We see this in the liberty of large landlords and vulture funds to horde property and extract  rent at the expense of us and our positive liberty to have a roof over our heads. Their right to leave  160,000 house vacant in the state trumps the rights of the 18,000 registered homeless to have a  place to sleep. 

The negative liberty of data centre building capitalists to take and drive up the cost of  electricity at the expense of the positive liberty of people not to have to subsidise such activities in  their monthly bills.  

The negative liberty of supermarkets to price gouge for record profits at the expense of a  maintainable cost of living. 

The negative liberty of large tech companies to take our personal data without constraint at  the expense of the positive liberty of privacy and security is a most recent example of the struggle  against imperial imposition.  

Whilst we see this struggle very materially it is also born out in the cultural sphere. Our own indigenous anti-colonial culture is suppressed by the state. It is still illegal to play IRA songs on the  radio. The Gaeltacht regions face existential crisis from the same housing crisis that steals so many  labouring hours of our lives.  

We see this also in the expectation of the Imperialist and the Colonizer to demand the  performance of a caricature of our culture, at the expense of our liberty to authentic expression.  Neilly from the leftist cooks has the exhaustive discussion of this phenomenon (0). The Plastic  Paddy is this imposition born from the capitalistic colonial relation that we are subject to with  America and England. How many Irish pubs abroad are owned by the most wrenched English  men? Enjoying the use of the drunken caricature that is a product of our colonial deprivation 

Now of course Identification with the colonized is not universal among people in Ireland.  Our neocolonialism would not be possible if that were the case. At the same time as so many of us  culturally and politically demand real sovereignty and support for the liberty of Palestinians to be  able to live full and healthy lives. Our government grants itself the negative liberty to build the  LNG pipeline and to deny our Palestinian students visas. 

Anti-colonialism is a struggle we must wage both in the streets and within ourselves. When  we wash away our complicit government we will have to make sure we are not reproducing the  logic of the colonizer in what we replace it with. In embracing our own indigenous notions that  replace the colonized notion of liberty we aught also to look to the other indigenous traditions  around the world that emphasize connection and obligation to one another.  

The current capitalist order has hollowed out the promises that it has made to us so much  that they exist only as zombie platitudes. If a better world is possible we will have to trade  accumulation for meaning. For many of us there is not much of a choice, as we had no hope of  accumulation anyway. The freedom I dream of is not freedom from constraint... it is freedom with  you. 

Excerpt from a literature review by Naamveer Singh:  

Decolonizing democracy first presupposes an understanding of what the colonization of  democracy is. Through the selective enfranchisement of individuals based upon proximity to the  European, to whiteness, of proximity to the Caucasus, through race, sex, caste, gender, orientation,  genetics, class; among a plethora of structured categories both imagined and real: democracy is  colonized. The colonization of democracy is the gradually decreasing voter turnout stretching from  the United States1 to Italy, 2 a global cost of living crisis leading to decreasing availability of  housing, education, and healthcare, with a single percent of the world’s population holding nearly  50% of the world’s wealth, while 40% of the total population holds less than a single percent. 

3 The decolonization of democracy entails first a demarcation and elimination of colonial  boundaries, dichotomies, and false binaries. As mentioned by Bakare (2022), the domestic is  presupposed upon the international under imperial and colonial codification.4 

The global liberal order is a zero-sum game: in which the benefit to a certain demographic  comes at the cost of another. International relations in this regard fail to address its origin as a  policy science devised to resolve dilemmas ‘facing the white Western powers’ because of colonial  administration 5 and that these conventions still force the center of non-Western and non-white  people’s worlds to exist at the margins of the world(s) European imperialist endeavored to create.6  As Du Bois maintains, “the world is organized through the color line of race-oriented political  intervention, which maintains the historically interconnected and cross-dimensional relations  between the darker and lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America, and the islands of the  sea.7 ”  

It is the racial dichotomy of the colour line, which was imposed by the white peoples of  Europe on the ‘coloured’ peoples of all the other continents from the 16th century to the 19th  century, that became a fixed design and that created what appeared to be a permanent, vertical,  ‘schism in the structure of the international system’. Because of its vertical nature, racism as a  system remains both systemic and sub-systemic at the same time. White supremacy remains here as  it does there. Its national and international threads are strung together to link issues emanating from  colonialism, transatlantic slavery and the rise of capitalism 8  

This vertical linearity is one of the core mechanisms of colonization. Through the separation of the human species along a demarcation of subjugation, of production, of the liberal unit of  measurement: capital, property, and possession, the world was colonized. As Cedric Robinson states in Black Marxism, Racialism insinuated not only medieval, feudal, and capitalist social structures,  forms of property, and modes of production, but as well the very values and traditions of  consciousness through which the peoples of these ages came to understand their worlds and their  experiences 9.  

In the connections of such authorship, the internal is the external and the external is  internalized. There is no domestic without the international and there is no international without the  domestic. Freedom within is freedom without; being within the pale means there are beings without. Adding the dimension of Du Bois, even within the pale there is the notion of the dominant culture;  of the prime origin, of what it is to be pure, true, and uncouth. This entails the Double  Consciousness, of even as a colored intellectual, you are still just colored; the intellectual comes as an addendum.  

Such is the notion of being the object in a subjective world; yet without the oscillation  afforded by the conceptual affirmation of subjectivity. 10 This becomes the notion of the human  who is unhuman, the man who is not freed, the exemption in the statement, “We hold these truths to be evident that all men are created equal. 11” The notion of whom is within the human sphere and  whom is without, the notion of whom could be contracted within the social or relegated to the  material. This is reflected in the classification of enslaved Africans as property within British  colonial legal frameworks, where human beings were incorporated into legal systems primarily  through their status as property rather than as political subjects. 12  

The notion of “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” being an adaptation of the  colonial theorist Secretary to the Lords Proprietors of Carolina, John Locke’s “Lives, Liberties and 

Estates, which I call by the general Name, Property. 13” The modern state of democracy is a  product of the evolution of such racial typologies of the human race. The very environment around  us reflects this segregation. 

The current state of world affairs is characterized by liberty being predicated on those who  are without; on how international liberalism is dependent on the liberty that certain members of  society possess domestically. Professor Benjamin Issac further reinforces the notion that the  domestic is merely a reflection of the international by stating that racism is: Attitude towards  individuals and groups of peoples which posits a direct and linear connection between physical and  mental qualities. It therefore attributes to those individuals and groups of people’s collective traits,  physical, mental and moral, which are constant and unalterable by human will, because they are  caused by hereditary factors or external influences, such as climate or geography. 

The implication is that the essential features of body and mind come from outside and are  not the result of genetic evolution, social environment, or conscious choice…Entire nations are  believed to have common characteristics determined wholly by factors outside themselves, which  are, by implication, stable and unchangeable. 

The presumed characteristics are then subject to value judgements, in which foreigners are  usually rejected as being inferior to the observer.14 With the base quote on the explanation of the  current understanding of the notion of species demarcation, of attribution of morality to rationality  via geographic administration by the colonial, society was colonized into the binary of black and  white.  

This originated first through the Greeks, with Plato stating that Can we possibly refuse to  admit that there exist in each of us the same generic parts and characteristics as are found in the  state? For I presume the state has not received them from any other source. It would be ridiculous  to imagine that the presence of the spirited element in cities is not to be traced to individuals,  wherever this character is imputed to the people, as it is to the natives of Thrace, and Scythia, and  generally speaking, of the northern countries; or the love of knowledge, which would be chiefly  attributed to our own country; or the love of riches, which people would especially connect with the Phoenicians and the Egyptians15  

From the Greeks, we get the origins of democratic inequality: in the separation of select  demographics from social contraction via the limitation of participation presupposed upon inherited  material possession. This is the notion of political participation through property, in that the only  democratic citizens were endogenous Athenian land-owning men. Within the origins of democracy,  we see first the intrinsic separation of those who are not considered human, those deemed slaves  and women. 

Within the origination of European democracy, we have the origins of its inequality. And so, thus begins the origins of democracy through property; of select demographics being able to enact  their will over the total of society. Of subservience to those deemed purer, whiter, better; or as stated by King of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire, Charles V’s biographer Fray Prudencio de Sandoval,  

“Who can deny that in the descendants of the Jews there persists and endures the evil inclination of their ancient ingratitude and lack of understanding, just as in Negroes [there persists] the inseparability of their blackness. For if the latter should unite themselves a thousand times with white women, the children are born with the dark colour of the father. Similarly, it is not enough for a Jew to be three parts aristocratic or Old Christian for one family-line alone defiles and corrupts him”16  

Or as Queen Elizabeth I of England states: to expel the great numbers of Negroes and  blackamoores from her realm, even authorizing a slave trader to take possession of them, calling  them infidels having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel who had “crept into her realm from  Spain”17  

There is no domestic without the international; the internal system is predicated upon the  external system. The social contract that is found within society is the access to the collective  decision-making, participation in the electoral and democratic processes with authoritative  legislation and decree, and the ability to dictate your ability and liberty as a shape of your will. In such a way, even as the creator gave the “World to Men in Common, he gave it to the use of the  Industrious and Rational.18” In such a way that unless one possessed the capacity for rationality,  they must be presupposed to material industry: there is no one without the other. 

To have the ability to possess industry, you must have the possession of rationality, and for  the Colonial Europeans, there was no utilization in anything other than possession of the material,  of land, of production, of human beings as cattle. This is where the notion of those within the  contract and those without made most explicit, as the Fundamental Constitutions expressly banned  settlers in Carolina from holding or claiming any land by purchase or gift from the natives, a clear  sign that contracts there could only hold among Anglo-Americans and not between Anglo Americans and Amerindians. 

19 Meaning that if you were not of European descent, your natural right to enter into the  human social contract was limited as you were not even deemed a human. In essence, your liberty  being limited due to your inability to access the human condition: of being able to enact material  property: A continuation of what democracy always was and is; the notion of select demographics  being able to dictate and control the collective, particularized through selective enrichment via  structural categories. 

This is the notion of the Racial Contract 20, of the beings which were never allowed to  enact their humanity as they were never fully human. The notion of who is included in the social  contract is intrinsic to not only the foundations of democracy but more so the function of  democracy; as a systematic tool of selective enfranchisement. The tools possessed by the very few  are judged as if they are available to all: as if they are a presupposition to be a human. This is the  current state of affairs for the human condition: of a being not able to be; of a being not able to exist as its nature entails. 

As John Locke explains, the contraction of the human being is limited to those who are not  even human to begin with; they are but property; the material; just machinery to be utilized in  production. Thus is the continuation of the notion of property as the sole mechanism of control: of  not only the material but rather human beings as material. Through John Locke, we get the modern  notion of what it is to be in a colonized democratic society; as made evident by his notion of  rationality: industry: property. Such separation of the human being from the contraction of human  being, in the sense that they cannot possess the land, material, property, or even rationality to  engage in the social contract.  

This becomes the foundation of Western democracy, of the selective disenfranchisement of  select demographics in relation to purity to the European; as for whatever reason, they alone possess the capacity to act as they have the liberty to do so. It was in fact Bentham who stated on the  preoccupation of property with English law, “property the only object of care to Government.  Persons possessing it alone entitled to be represented. West Indies the meridian for these principles  of this liberty-champion.21” 

Property has been the fundamental concept of what it is to enact your will upon society; it is  your liberty, the ability of you to entail your action: it is your liberty to be able to live a human  existence. To be able to enact your will upon will, it is presupposed that you must possess the  material possession. Thus, we begin the notion of the presupposition of material, which is intrinsic  to the human essence: the notion of what must be required in order to live a humane life.  

The fact that the materiality is presupposed yet not even discussed in a materialized manner  is one of the greatest colonial creations that exist in the modern dimension. The notion that the  whole of society is judged based upon the tools selective and utilized by the select few; this is the  notion of the segregation of merit of the false notion of the skill: of technocratic control on the  techniques of being human.  

The notion of inherited skill as but the definition of success is one of the base inequalities  which is found throughout the democratic system. When one is presented with the test, they are  most likely to succeed if they are from the colonizer class. Pre-social contraction (as stated by both  Rousseau and Hobbes) is the bestial state of humanity. 

As Rousseau argues in the Second Discourse, the love of self (amour de soi) in the true state of nature is a natural passion little different from the animal instinct of selfpreservation 22”; with Hobbes’ concept in The Leviathan spoken in another way,  

“In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently, no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short…The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone” 23  

Both authors argue this as the base human state, sort of a default of man, with Rousseau  arguing the fundamental law of nature as self-preservation. The issue with this framework is that it  continues this (negative-liberal) notion throughout the application of the social contract; creating a  philosophical framework in which individual rights are in protection and retaliation from another  individual. The freedom from individuals, not the freedom to be individuals, the freedom from your  fellow human, not to ensure freedom to your fellow human (and thereby yourself). 

This negative liberty will be argued as being against the very nature of humanity itself; as  against the very double fold of human consciousness (the realization of ourselves in another) and as  against the social contract.  

The base state of humanity will be argued as one in society, as the material realization of the  object as subject by creating the notion of humanity as the intrinsic connection among members of  society (versus between members), “in the unity of man with man 24”; “So we, though many, are  one body in Christ, and individually members one of another. 25”  

The base theoretical framework for this dissertation is the utilization of positive liberty to  define (the) individual freedoms entailed in membership of the social contract. The ontology of  humanity as having prescriptive characteristics versus descriptive characters; with the telos of this  framework being the prescription of the (base) human state, of individual rights secured by society.  

The principles of positive liberty were coined by Sir Isaiah Berlin and are seen as the  antithesis of negative liberty. 26 Berlin advocates for the redefinition of the notion of liberty to be  labelled not as a constraint but rather as an allowance.27  

Whereas negative liberty focuses on the absence of “obstacles, barriers, or constraints”,  positive liberty focuses upon the individual (and thereby the collective) to be able to overcome  such. To give an example, negative liberty is removing taxes to housing, positive liberty is  developing the capacity of an individual in the (material) realization of such. The origin of power in this paradigm arises out of the self, of the individual; the very logos is empowered as the agent, to  progress the spirit of the individual to achieve human zenith, whereas the traditional liberal  framework focused (and thereby developed) upon ‘external forces.’ 

To give a more concrete definition of negative versus positive, Berlin details his  examination of liberty. 

I propose to examine no more than two of the senses- but those central ones, with a great  deal of human history behind them and, I dare say, still to come. The first of these political senses of freedom or liberty (I shall use both words to mean the same),which (following much precedent) I  shall call the 'negative' sense, is involved in the answer to the question the area within which the  subject - a person or group of persons- is or should be left to do or be what he is able to do or be,  without interference by other persons?'  

The second, which I shall call the positive sense, is involved in the answer to the question  who, is the source of control or interference that can determine someone to do, or be, this rather  than that? The two questions are clearly different, even though the answers to them may overlap. 28  

Ubuntu philosophy provides one of the strongest alternatives to liberal conceptions of liberty through its emphasis on relational personhood and communal recognition.  

Rather than conceptualizing freedom as an attribute possessed by autonomous individuals,  Ubuntu understands the individual as constituted through social relationships. The oft-cited phrase umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu (“a person is a person through other persons”) captures this ontological orientation.  

Within this framework, liberty is not merely freedom from interference but the capacity to  participate meaningfully in a community of mutual recognition and obligation. Freedom is therefore inseparable from the social conditions that enable individuals to flourish. Whereas liberal traditions  frequently locate liberty within the individual subject, Ubuntu situates freedom within the  relationship between subjects. Democratic participation becomes not merely a procedural right but  an expression of shared humanity. 29  

Confucian political thought similarly challenges liberal assumptions concerning the  autonomous individual, though it does so through a different philosophical tradition. Confucian  ethics grounds political legitimacy in networks of obligation, moral cultivation, and harmonious  social relations. The individual is understood not as an isolated bearer of rights but as a participant  in a web of familial, social, and political relationships. Concepts such as ren (humaneness) and li  (proper conduct) emphasize the cultivation of moral character as the foundation of social and  political order.  

Freedom, in this context, is not defined primarily by the absence of constraint but by the  ability to fulfill one’s obligations within a just and harmonious society. This relational  understanding of governance stands in contrast to liberal frameworks that prioritize individual  autonomy and non-interference. As a result, Confucian thought provides an alternative conception  of democratic participation grounded in ethical responsibility rather than contractual  individualism.30  

Ambedkarite political thought offers perhaps the most direct challenge to liberal  democracy’s assumption that formal equality is sufficient for meaningful freedom. Writing in the  context of caste hierarchy in India, B. R. Ambedkar argued that political democracy cannot survive  without social democracy. The mere existence of legal rights and electoral participation is  insufficient when individuals remain constrained by inherited structures of exclusion and  domination.  

For Ambedkar, liberty, equality, and fraternity constitute an indivisible democratic triad; the  absence of any one principle undermines the others. His critique demonstrates how formally equal  institutions may coexist with profound inequalities in social status, material opportunity, and  political participation. In this regard, Ambedkar’s work directly supports the argument that liberty  cannot be understood solely through negative conceptions of freedom. Instead, meaningful  democratic participation requires attention to the social and structural conditions that enable  individuals to exercise freedom in practice.31  

0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-n6VvpcdiC4 

1 The American Presidency Project, Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections, University of  California, Santa Barbara, available at: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter turnout-in-presidentialelections (accessed 15 May 2026). 

2 Statista, Voter turnout in parliamentary elections in Italy from 1948 to 2022, available at:  https://www.statista.com/statistics/581392/elections-turnout-italy/ (accessed 15 May 2026).  

3 UBS, Global Wealth Report 2025, UBS Wealth Management, available at:  https://www.ubs.com/us/en/wealth-management/insights/global-wealth-report.html (accessed 15  May 2026).  

4 Abu-Bakare, A., Your Work Is Not International Relations (2022), p. 1.  

5 Anievas, A., Manchanda, N. and Shilliam, R. (2015), p. 2, cited in Abu-Bakare, A., Your Work Is  Not International Relations (2022), p. 3. 

6 Shilliam, R. (2021), cited in Abu-Bakare, A., Your Work Is Not International Relations (2022), p.  3. 

7 Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1903), p. 16.  8 Abu-Bakare, A., Your Work Is Not International Relations (2022), p. 4.  

9 Robinson, C.J., Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (London: Penguin  Books, 2019), p. 26.  

10 Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §112.  

11 United States Declaration of Independence (1776), para. 2.  

12 Davis, D.B. (2006) Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford:  Oxford University Press  

13 Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, §123.  

14 Benjamin Isaac in World Archaeology, Mar., 2006, Vol. 38, No. 1, Race, Racism and  Archaeology (Mar., 2006), pp. 32-47.  

15 Plato, The Republic, Book IV, 435e–436a, trans. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett  Publishing, 2013).  

16 Loomba, A., Race and the possibilities of comparative critique 2009) pp. 505  

17 ibid  

18 Locke, J., Two Treatises of Government, Second Treatise, §34.  

19 Armitage, D., ‘John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, Political Theory,  32(5) (2004), p. 617. 

20 Mills, C.W., The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).  

21 Cited by Armitage, D., ‘John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government’, Political  Theory, 32(5) (2004), p. 620. 

22 Bellah, R.N., ‘Rousseau on Society and the Individual’, in Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in  a PostTraditional World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 271. 

 23 Hobbes, T., Leviathan, Chapter XIII, “Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as Concerning  Their Felicity and Misery.”  

24 Lemelle, A., ‘Review of Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities by Etienne Balibar and  Immanuel Wallerstein’, Humboldt Journal of Social Relations, 19(1) (1993), p. 179.  

25 The Holy Bible, New International Version, Romans 12:5.  

26 Carter, I., ‘Positive and Negative Liberty’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2 August 2016, available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/ (accessed 15 May 2026). 

27 ibid  

28 Berlin, I., Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), ‘Two Concepts of  Liberty’, p. 1.  

29 Bradley (2005); Metz (2017); Mugumbate and Nyanguru (2013); Oppenheim (2012).  

30 Cheng, C., ‘Justice and Peace in Kant and Confucius’, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, 34(3)  (2007), pp. 345– 357.  

31 Ambedkar, B.R., Annihilation of Caste: The Annotated Critical Edition (New Delhi: Navayana,  2014), Chapter 4, ‘Annihilation of Caste: An Undelivered Speech, 1936’.