Theory is material and pretending it isn’t enables colonial violence.

The power of concepts cannot be underestimated insofar as they simultaneously enable us to interrogate the world and take action to unsettle colonial, racist, capitalist and heteropatriarchal structures. Theories and concepts can either serve as behaviour-regulating discursive systems (Wynter, 2003) that maintain the modern/colonial order of things or they can serve as catalysts for collective action seeking to dismantle said order. When concepts are imposed on others, however, they have the pedagogical ability to distort the understanding of social reality; justify material dispossession, domination and exploitation; and prevent collective action. When concepts emerge within sites of struggle, they find their theoretical validity in their praxis orientation towards radical social transformation. González Casanova (1987) claims that it is impossible to wage a collective struggle without concepts, that is, without conceptual tools to read, interrogate and comprehend the world in which our actions unfold. Take, for instance, decolonial theories and their concomitant concepts, which are not problematic in and of themselves, as some critics like to claim, but are rather problematic when concepts are abstracted from the material contexts from which they emerge. In other words, when the symbolic (cultural) is underscored over the material (political–economic) and when both are understood as ontologically separate domains, this tends to obfuscate how they are entangled in everyday practices.