Theory from the Trenches

Recently, we have seen renewed efforts to “decolonize.” From the toppling of statues to the revision of disciplinary canons, much of the focus has been on uprooting colonial residues from our cultural and epistemological landscapes. Theory from the Trenches offers a radically different vision of decolonization — one driven not by intellectual or political elites, but by subaltern actors, a vision at once global and local, dedicated equally to decolonizing the structures of political economy as to fighting theoretical battles.

Anchored in years of fieldwork and archival research, the book centers on landless peasants in 1970s Pakistan who joined the Mazdoor Kisan Party (MKP), the country’s historically largest communist party. As the MKP supported peasants in seizing colonially-established estates and integrated them into a global communist movement stretching from Oakland to Saigon, it also encouraged them to read and rework revolutionary theory for their specific contexts. Drawing on Marxism, Sufi Islam, Siraiki nationalist cultures, Baloch tribal ethics, and everyday village life, these peasants generated what I call trench theory: a subterranean, insurgent mode of theory-making born from political combat. Ultimately, this “ethnography of theory” shows how peasants — derided even by many classical European Marxists as provincial and practically-minded — emerged as theorists on a world scale.