IThe Core Problem: A Movement That Confirms Itself

The concept of “decolonise yourself” has in recent decades become a central slogan in postcolonial movements around the world. The idea is appealing in its simplicity: it is not enough to abolish colonial structures in legislation and economics — one must also confront the colonial thinking embedded in the individual’s self-understanding, language and worldview.

I will argue that this concept, despite its rhetorical force, contains a fundamental inconsistency that undermines its practical utility. And I will further argue that the Russian philosopher and sociologist Alexander Zinoviev’s (1922–2006) social logic, supplemented by a critical reading of the postcolonial thinker Homi K. Bhabha, offers a far more productive tool — particularly when viewed in light of the Greenlandic colonial experience.

The inconsistency is this: the “decolonise yourself” movement finds its strongest voice among the local elite in postcolonial societies — academics, activists, cultural figures — who speak on behalf of those supposedly colonised in mind. But this elite itself operates within the institutional frameworks, academic languages and international networks that are products of precisely the global Western order they seek to challenge. They confirm the system in the very gesture of their critique. This is not a coincidental irony. It is structurally conditioned — and this is where Zinoviev becomes indispensable.

IIBhabha: Mimicry, Hybridity and the Limits of Action

Homi K. Bhabha’s two central concepts are mimicry (imitation) and hybriditet (cultural mixing). Both are analytically precise and philosophically original — but both leave a lacuna when it comes to the question of what the individual can concretely do.

Mimicry describes how colonised populations come to resemble the coloniser — but never quite. The colonial project aimed to create loyal and “civilised” subjects, but imitation always produces a remainder, a skew, what Bhabha calls “almost but not quite.”¹ This imperfect imitation is, according to Bhabha, subversive: it reveals that the coloniser’s culture is not nature but construction, and it ridicules power through the very fact of its failure.

But here lies Bhabha’s limit: the subversive effect occurs behind the backs of the actors. It is not a choice but a structural consequence. No one plans mimicry’s disruption — it simply arises. This means Bhabha can explain why colonial systems are vulnerable, but not what the individual can concretely do about this vulnerability.

Hybriditet — the cultural mixed forms that arise in colonial and postcolonial contexts — is analytically even stronger. Hybridity is not a compromise or a contamination of an original purity. It is rather a new form that shows that purity, origin and authenticity are illusions — identity and culture are always in movement, always in negotiation.² Det er en vigtig og korrekt observation.

But “decolonise yourself” as a project implicitly assumes there is something to return to — an authentic self beneath the colonial layers. Bhabha’s concept of hybridity actually undermines this premise: if identity is always already mixture, there is no “pure” self to liberate. The concept saws off the branch it sits on.

IIIFanon and Memmi: The Psychological Colonisation and Its Conditions og dens forudsætninger

Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi are the actual founding figures of the “decolonise yourself” movement, even though the concept postdates their works. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Fanon describes how colonialism is not merely a political and economic structure but a psychological occupation: the colonised internalises the coloniser’s gaze and comes to see themselves as inferior.³ Memmi, in The Colonizer and the Colonized (1957), nuances this by showing that the coloniser is equally trapped in the relation — both parties are deformed by the system.⁴

These analyses are precise for the contexts they describe: Fanon on Algeria under French colonial rule, Memmi on Tunisia. Common to both contexts is that the colonised is systematically excluded from competence, expertise and self-determination. European technological and military superiority is decisive and indisputable. In that situation, psychological submission is structurally produced.

But — and this is my central argument — this structure is not universal to all colonialism. It is contextually conditioned by a specific power relation: total and unambiguous asymmetry. Where this power relation is different, Fanon’s and Memmi’s analyses are not directly applicable. The Greenlandic case is a central example.

IVZinoviev: The Logic of Communality as an Analytical Tool

Alexander Zinoviev developed in his body of work — particularly in Communism as Reality (1981) and The Yawning Heights (1976) — a social theory he called логическая социология (logical sociology). Its central concept is коммунальность (communality): the laws of survival that inevitably arise when people live closely together long enough to compete for limited goods.

The laws of communality are, according to Zinoviev, universal — they apply in all societies, not only the Soviet one he primarily observed. The most important are: give the least and take the most; seek the greatest gain with the least risk; avoid responsibility but claim the credit; make yourself independent of others while making others dependent on you. And perhaps the most important: people officially strive to appear all the better the worse they actually become. Lying is the most socially advantageous behaviour.

This logic is what Zinoviev calls социальный индивид (the social individual) — the person who follows the rules of the system automatically and unconsciously, and who constitutes the great majority. Against this, Zinoviev places личность (personality in the full sense): the person who consciously resists the logic of communality and acts according to their own principles rather than the system’s reward structure.

Zinoviev’s central analytical move is this: critique of a system is not necessarily outside the system — it can be part of it. The intellectual who protests against colonialism gains social recognition, prestige and position through precisely this protest. The critique is his social strategy — his коммунальное поведение (communal behaviour). He is not evil or hypocritical. He is simply the social individual in a critical role, and that role confirms the system’s logic just as effectively as submission does.

It follows that “decolonise yourself” as an elite project is structurally doomed: those who proclaim it are deeply embedded in the institutional structures — universities, NGOs, international conferences — they claim to challenge. They speak in the coloniser’s language, publish in the coloniser’s journals, and draw legitimacy from the coloniser’s academic systems. This is not critique that transforms — it is critique that stabilises by creating a safety valve.

VThe Greenlandic Example: A Different Colonial Reality

In an article in Altinget Arktis, I have argued that the colonisation of Greenland up to the 20th century proceeded on fundamentally different premises from the classical colonialism that Fanon and Memmi describe.⁵ I will here use this historical material to develop the theoretical argument.

The central point is the heterogeneity of the power relation. In the Arctic context, the European coloniser’s technological and competence-based superiority — which was the precondition for the psychological submission Fanon describes — was simply not present. When the doctor needed to make rounds by motorboat along the coast, it was a Greenlander who navigated the vessel and on whom he depended. The colonial administrator who wished to travel by umiak to the more remote settlements was 100 percent dependent on local expertise and goodwill. Many Danes were capable sledge drivers — but the great majority depended on Greenlandic companions to survive.

The local population knew this. And this is — I will argue — what psychologically protected them from the self-annihilating submission that Fanon sees as colonialism’s most destructive effect. The Greenlandic hunting family knew its own indispensability. This was not symbolic or ideological but concrete and daily: without the hunter’s wife’s kamiks, the Danes froze. Without the hunter’s seal hunting, the colony starved in winter.

The late Greenlandic cultural figure Finn Lynge — politician, author and one of the most reflective voices on Greenlandic identity in the 20th century — formulated this with remarkable precision: the Greenlandic hunting family never felt colonised. This is not a romanticisation. It is an empirical observation about a population that never lost the material and relational conditions for acting on its own terms.

What do we see here in Bhabha’s terminology? It resembles mimicry — Greenlanders adopted European tools, goods and religious elements. The shaman Maratse from the East Coast incorporated the Danish expedition leader Gustav Holm as a helping spirit. Greenlandic priests and catechists took over missionary work — and Christianised parts of the country on the terms of the old faith, with Jesus as a new and powerful helping spirit. It is almost the colonial project — but never quite.

But this is not Bhabha’s mimicry from a position of weakness. It is something stronger: a pragmatic appropriation from a position of competence-based strength. The Greenlander took the steel needle, the rifle and the goods from the trading post — and left the rest. This is not imitation born of weakness but selection exercised from strength.

And the selection was not random. The Greenlandic hunting population actively maintained a dual economy: they participated in the world market — selling oil, hides and fish — but remained self-sufficient in food, clothing and warmth. When the hunting communities of the 1950s transitioned to fishing from small motor cutters, this pattern repeated itself: they integrated the new technology into existing social structures and preserved the material self-sufficiency that made them independent of world market price fluctuations.

The blubber lamp in this context is not a cultural symbol — it is a concrete energy source that does not depend on international oil prices. It is a form of autonomy so fundamental and material that it escapes postcolonial theory’s predominantly cultural and identity-based concepts.

What is this in Zinoviev’s terminology? It is личность (personality in the full sense) as collective everyday practice, widespread across an entire population — not because they are philosophically superior, but because their social structure based on equality and community, and their material situation, permitted and required an independent practice that in Zinoviev’s bureaucratic world was available only to the few.

VIThe Synthesis: What Decolonisation Actually Requires

The Greenlandic example points towards a theory of decolonisation that is fundamentally different from the identity-political project of the “decolonise yourself” movement. I will formulate it in three points.

1. Material Autonomy as Primary Condition

The psychological colonisation Fanon describes is not a universal consequence of colonial contact. It is a consequence of total material dependency. A population that controls its own means of subsistence — food, warmth, clothing, transport — is structurally protected against the self-annihilation that arises when one is completely at the mercy of another’s goodwill.

This means that decolonisation in its most fundamental form is not an identity project but a material project: who controls which resources, and under what conditions? Postcolonial theory that primarily works with meaning, representation and identity systematically overlooks this dimension.

2. Relational Complexity as Psychological Protection

The unambiguously asymmetric power relation — where the colonised never holds the competence advantage — is the condition for psychological submission. Where the power relation shifts contextually, psychological colonisation is harder to achieve.

This is an analytical point with practical consequence: decolonisation as a project should seek to create and preserve the situations and клеточки (cells, primary groups) in which the postcolonial population holds the competence advantage. This is not an appeal to nationalism or isolation — it is a structural analysis of which conditions produce psychological autonomy.

3. Practice over Proclamation

Zinoviev’s most useful contribution is the distinction between социальный индивид (the social individual who follows the system’s logic) and личность (the one who resists it). But I will adjust Zinoviev’s pessimism on one crucial point: he believed that личность is rare. The Greenlandic example suggests the opposite is true, when the structural conditions are present.

The Greenlandic hunting family practised what in Zinoviev’s terminology is личность-behaviour — again and again, daily, without having a concept for it, without proclaiming it, without making it into an identity. Precisely because they did not make it an identity project, they avoided the trap of communality: the moment resistance becomes a social role, one is back in the system’s logic and harvesting recognition for one’s resistance.

This is the Gordian knot in which the “decolonise yourself” movement is trapped. The elite that proclaims decolonisation harvests precisely the social capital — prestige, recognition, moral authority — that Zinoviev’s laws of communality predict. The movement is not without effect, but its primary effect is to reproduce the elite’s position, not to transform the foundations of colonial structures.

The more productive path is to recognise and strengthen the practice already present in the everyday lives of people who have never heard of either Zinoviev or Bhabha — the quiet, pragmatic, materially grounded independence that does not need to proclaim itself to be effective, because it is embedded in the very way one organises one’s existence.

The Greenlandic hunting family never felt colonised. — Finn Lynge, Greenlandic cultural figure and politician

This is not a coincidental observation. It is the description of a population that preserved the three conditions for psychological autonomy: material self-sufficiency, relational complexity that rejected unambiguous asymmetry, and an everyday practice that resisted the logic of communality without making resistance into a project.

A postcolonial theory worth taking seriously should begin here — not in the language of identity, but in the language of structure and practice.

For a comparative perspective on how networks, kinship, and reciprocity structure social power outside colonial hierarchies, see our essay on Networks and the Individual in Inuit and Melanesian Societies.