Tainted Tools makes a provocative intervention into the fraught intersection between new materialist and decolonial approaches. Despite a common project of challenging European philosophical and social categories and hierarchies, the discourses are considered incompatible. Most prominently, new materialisms have been accused of harbouring a White vision of the human while disregarding the racist resonances of the ‘nonhuman’. The book traces this conflict to an earlier meeting point of new materialist and decolonial projects, which came about through the experimental combination of Marx and Nietzsche. Used to fight fascism, Stalinism and colonialism, this politically contentious fusion gradually became depoliticised, leading to unaddressed tensions today. While the book does not argue for a revival of these early ‘new materialisms’, it brings their strategies into dialogue with today’s new materialisms and decolonial approaches to develop greater theoretical solidarity in times of crisis.