Refusing to accept the present as definitive: A reply to my interlocuters

This brief reply reflects further on three inter-related questions raised in the thoughtful commentaries provided by my respondents. I argue: (i) that whilst they are right to caution against the dangers of a reductive materialism, we should not discard the analytical move which seeks to explain dominant forms of knowledge by reference to economic imperatives; (ii) that whilst critical attention to historical and cultural specificity is important, the materialist tradition offers us a way beyond the face-off between two forms of exceptionalism: that which fetishes Western historical experience, and that which responds by reifying ideas of colonial or indigenous alterity; (iii) that we can continue to learn from histories of political struggle which rejected dogmatic historical assumptions in favour of the hard graft of identifying correspondences, and nourishing solidarities, across and between different movements of resistance.