Introduction
This commentary takes the form of an interview 1 with Ramon Grosfoguel, who is an internationally renowned Puerto Rican intellectual, and scholar of decoloniality and coloniality. He is an Associate Professor of Chicanx/Latinx Studies 2 at the University of California, Berkeley. Ramon is recognised for his writings and presentations on decolonisation of knowledge and power, and political economy of the world-system. His writings are extensive, including co-authored books such as The Modern/Colonial/Capitalist World-System in the Twentieth Century: Global Processes, Antisystemic Movements, and the Geopolitics of Knowledge (with Ana Margarita Cervantes-Rodrigues) 3 and articles, e.g. “What is Racism?” 4 and “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century”. 5
In 2012, Dr Grosfoguel brought together academics and activists working on issues of decoloniality in Europe that led to five more gatherings. In 2016 the network established its name as the Decolonial International Network to recognise the global span of this work and these discussions. 6 Connected with this network are the “Dialogo Decolonial” gatherings such as Decolonizing Knowledge and Power (Barcelona, Spain); Critical Muslim Studies: Decolonial Struggles and Liberation Theologies (Granada, Spain) and Decolonial Black Feminism (Bahia, Brazil). 7
Given the breadth and depth of Ramon’s scholarship and praxis, as co-editors we chose to speak with him as an extension of our exploration of Liberation Conversations: To Imagine and Build. Our focus was on his assessment of the current moment—and what “everyone” should know, regardless of politics, ideology and station in life. What analysis can be elevated in a discussion about this moment, history and the future?
The academic vision of this special volume and the theoretical topics and praxis such an imagination tugs at, sanctioned a number of experimental editorial styles and decisions. In the interview with Grosfoguel, we restrained the urge to funnel (or at times, to puncture) what was an uninhibited discussion into a formal framework of a traditional interview. It was our hope that the virtues of such an approach would permit readers the ability to not only benefit from a topical yet wide-ranging interlocution, but also to experience such as textually close to its oral rendering as possible. It was also our intention to avoid an exercise in mining a set of responses from preformulated questions. As an alternative, and always weary of the rigours demanded by journal publication, and the duty for thematic focus and relevance, we opted for an approach that ignited an open conversation around key ideas and provocations. We permitted room for the dialogue to unfold with limited course correction and for the ideas to burn their own path within the thematic markings of this volume’s themes. What follows here is a free-flowing and wide-ranging conversation that corresponds to the focus of this special issue. Questions of ethics, education, economies, epistemologies and methodologies are embedded in the analytic points and examples that Ramon references, with a direct relationship to the writings of each of this volume’s authors.
Introduction and Biography
Melanie Bush: The articles in this volume reflect upon different aspects of the social world, and the fierce urgency of now. 8 The driving question of this conversation is: from your perspective, what should everyone (not just academics) know about this moment and the context of it? For people who are concerned about the violence and turmoil evident in today’s world, where should we put our gaze?
What do you think people should be paying attention to, in their everyday lives and work? How do you view global and local resistance? We take note of the work you are doing with people in Venezuela and look forward to hearing about your analysis of the call, “Commune or Nothing”. 9 Please share with us your “liberation conversation”; what do you imagine, what do you believe we should build?
Every class I teach, regardless of topic or level, reads “The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities: Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century”. That article is one of the clearest explanations of the way that colonialism and coloniality shaped the modern world through embedding capitalism, white supremacy, Eurocentrism, heteronormative patriarchy and many other polarities into the structure of the modern world. These systems established, imposed and reproduced binaries that situated European Christian white male-generated knowledge as inherently superior to all other forms of knowing, being, and living. They asserted that this knowledge, experience and practice was/is universal and “true”.
How did you come to this line of study—who is the person behind this thinking?
Ramon Grosfoguel: Thank you for the invitation and your kind words. I come from the island of Puerto Rico, which is an anomaly in relation to the world today. Puerto Rico is a colony in the twenty-first century and we have a colonial administration. Most of the periphery in the world today is under a formally independent state. I say formally, because it’s not real. As Kwame Nkrumah, the Pan-Africanist said, we are in the era of neocolonialism—new forms of colonialism—and still living in an imperialist world.
In Puerto Rico, we were asking ourselves, what’s the solution to this colonial status? We were asking this question in the second half and the end of the twentieth century, when most nations of the world were already formally independent states. This led us to a question that we couldn’t answer. Is independence the solution like was said in the nineteenth century or part of the twentieth century? We knew that that’s not the solution as many countries in the Third World that became formally independent were betrayed by some of the leaders. Are there new methods to keep doing the same by the imperial powers? They moved from colonialism to neocolonialism in most parts of the world. So we realised that independence was not enough. This led us to asking, what other kinds of solution can we pull off?
The status question became secondary to this question, because immediately we saw that there were limits to independence. We immediately had to formulate different questions. Not only for Puerto Rico, but for the world at large. We saw that if Puerto Rico became independent, it most probably would continue being a colonial state like any other island in the Caribbean, Central America, South America or the world at large.
That led us to the question about the continuities of colonial relations after the demise of colonial administrations. That’s what some call coloniality and others call racial capitalism. We were looking at the continuities of the post-colonial administrations, post-plantation economies, post-imperial North/South domination. However, there is no “post” as the continuities persist.
Therefore, we need to look at the discontinuities within the continuities, and how they did the same thing though shaped it in a different way than in the past. The concept of coloniality and of racial capitalism pays attention to the continuities in the presence of the hierarchies of power that were put forward during the European colonial expansion in the early modern period.
To Understand Today We Must Look at History
We are forced to look at history to understand today. I want to call attention to a civilisational crisis. Now that’s a broad term—there are many crises and that’s why the problem is civilisational. It’s not just a problem of the economic system, political authority or gender relations. The crisis is everywhere in all the hierarchies of power that were put forward by the European colonial expansion. This was not just an economic expansion, it was a civilisational expansion. They were destroying every civilisation they found and imposing their own civilisation.
Therefore, this is a major era we’re in, the era of colonialism. We haven’t overcome it. After independence, in most parts of the world, the hierarchies of domination that were put forward by colonial administrations remained. They have independence though without decolonisation or colonial independence. The core–periphery international division of labour is still the international global interstate system of political military domination of a few imperial powers over the rest.
The racial-ethnic hierarchies put forward by European expansion through colonial administrations around the world are still present. The Christendom patriarchy is still present. In many parts of the world, there was no patriarchy before the European arrival. The Europeans brought with them a particular form of patriarchy that is founded on the matrix of Christendom. Not Christianity, Christendom. This distinction is important, because Christendom is a theology of domination that was put forward by European elites, before the colonial expansion in Europe.
In the Roman Empire, and later in the mediaeval feudal era of Europe, they put forth Christendom, a theology of domination to justify the domination by the powerful, the rich, the exploiters, etc. They brought that with them to the rest of the world when they expanded. The modern world or modernity is the secularisation of the narrative of Christianity.
This is connected to coloniality because we’re talking about multiple power relations. After independence, these hierarchies of power remain. Being a periphery in colonial administration you are still a periphery exporting items to a metropolitan centre after independence. You are dominated through military political domination by an imperial power of the interstate system. Where there are blockades, commercial sanctions or even military invasions or organised coup d’etats and whenever there is a regime or a court or a government in the Third World that they beat up on those they don’t like, they push for political and military mechanisms to keep the world as it is, where all the countries of the world are subordinated to them.
After independence, racism continued as a major, structuring element of the political economy in terms of gender domination, sexual domination and also epistemology, as Eurocentric thinking continued into the present. In thinking about the ecology of the planet, Cartesian Dualism (ontologically speaking) splits human life from other forms of life. Nature is always objectified under this cosmology as if human life will continue and reproduce itself, independently of nature. We think of ourselves as outside of nature and nature as exterior to the human.
Ecology, Technology, Cartesian Dualisms and the Anthropocene
We built technology on the Cartesian cosmology, that is destructive of life because human life is conceived of as insulated and isolated from other forms of life. This dualism asserts that you can destroy everything, and human life will continue. No other civilisation before this one had this idea. All other civilisations, despite their differences and cosmological disagreements have one thing in common. This is the idea of difference within unity, which is a holistic understanding of life. Human beings coexist with other forms of life around us.
We have to take care of the reproduction of life. We cannot just go around building technology that is going to destroy our ecological system and ourselves. That understanding was common sense in other civilisations. That’s why human beings have been here for thousands of years.
This is why I am critical of the concept of an Anthropocene. Scientists are using this idea of the Anthropocene, which is problematic. It places the moment when humans enter into the reproduction of life on the planet to destroy life, in the seventeenth century. It is saying that it’s human beings who are doing this. It’s human beings but it’s not just human beings. Human beings have been living here for thousands of years, and we never had this destructive impulse.
This is coming from the dualism that is a secularisation of Christendom which includes the belief that nature belongs to Satan and to evil. Therefore nature has to be destroyed, dominated, controlled, and exploited. Rene Descartes, the famous founder of European modern philosophy, brought this secularised dualism of Christendom, leaving out the theology but keeping the concept of a dualism between nature and human nature. It has now been 400 years, which is the time scientists identify as the moment of the Anthropocene. The seventeenth century is the moment of building Cartesian philosophy, and a cult following for capitalism.
Every technology has a cosmology. The cosmology used by capitalism to build technology is Cartesian dualism based on the destruction of life because it has the aim of making profits at the expense of whatever and therefore destroying everything around it for the sake of profit. Capitalism has had no constraint in its destruction of life because it works around the concept of Cartesian dualism. The technology we’re building has no consideration for the reproduction of life. Holistic concepts of previous civilisations have that notion—they took care to make sure that we’re reproducing and not destroying it. They have a holistic understanding of the relationship between human life and other forms of life within one single cosmos.
The Modern World: A Civilisation of Death
Cartesian cosmology ontologically splits human beings from other beings, as dualistic ontological beings, separated from each other. Therefore, the production and reproduction of life of both is seen as separate. Modernity is a civilisation of death. With European colonial expansion came a multiplicity of power relations. One of them is capitalism, but it’s not the only one. There are other forms. of domination that were expanded from Europe to the rest of the world, and are at the centre of the civilisational crisis we’re living today.
People say I’m taking colonial relations as some kind of reductionist argument. No, I’m historicising the way capitalism and modernity emerged. When you historicise this, the first moment of the emergence of global capitalism was through European colonial expansion which was not just economic. It brought many power relations that were already in mediaeval Europe. From day one, when capitalism was organised, initially as a world market in the early sixteenth century, it had the logics of the civilisation that Europeans brought with them such as racism, patriarchy, Christendom, the dualisms of Christendom that later became Cartesianism destruction of life and Eurocentrism. These hierarchies of power were brought with them the moment capitalism was formed.
These logics of European civilisation expansion were organising principles of what we know as capitalism. They’re not super-structured the way many Eurocentric Marxists think about it. They are constitutive of capitalist accumulation on a world scale. They are organising principles of historical capitalism. Therefore, you cannot think of capitalism without all these logics of destruction, oppression, domination, super-exploitation. For example, if capitalism is genocidal, it is because it’s organised from within by the racist logics of Western modernity. If capitalism is femicidal, it is because it’s organised from within (not as a superstructure) by the logics of patriarchy and Western modernity.
If capitalism is communi-genocidal (destructive of communities, community forms and relationships among human beings), it is because it’s organised around the logic of the atomised individual of Western modernity. If capitalism is ecologic-icidal it is because it’s organised from within by the Cartesian dualism of Western modernity. If capitalism is epistemicidal, it is because it’s organised from within, with the Eurocentrism of Western modernity.
Capitalism is not an insulated economic system. Capitalism does not exist by itself. Capitalism is the economy of a civilisation. We need to understand the entanglement between capitalism and modernity. Seen from the global south, modernity is not an emancipatory project; it is a civilisation of death. Millions of human lives are being killed by this civilisation as well as non-human lives. We need to understand this so that next time in our struggles against historical capitalism, we don’t make the mistake of twentieth-century socialists who thought that this was an economic system and racism, sexism, etc. are superstructure. And once we get rid of capitalism, then the rest would be solved. That’s a fallacy and twentieth-century socialism failed in solving these multiple problems that they called superstructure. They didn’t even solve the one problem they said they will solve—capitalism. Why? Because capitalism is the economy of a civilisation.
The political implications are that if you fight against capitalism, through class struggle, and you leave on the side, racism, sexism, Eurocentrism, Christendom, Cartesian dualism and all this stuff, you will repeat everything you are fighting against. Because all these logics are the organisational principles of historical capitalism. If you reproduce these logics of modernity in the struggle against capitalism, you will never destroy capitalism, you will only reproduce everything you’re fighting against. For example, if you’re going to organise yourself against capitalism, reproducing racism, or against capitalism, reproducing patriarchy, or against capitalism and reproducing individual atomised beings and not communities or communal forms then you fight against capitalism, while reproducing Eurocentrism. These are the loaded, organised logics of the system you want to fight against. If you don’t deal with them, they will come through a back door, and reproduce themselves again.
The Struggle Against Historical Capitalism and a Critique of Intersectionality
We need to struggle against historical capitalism as an imperialist system. It is not abstract. This means that if we fight racism, if we fight patriarchy, if we fight ecologicide, we have to put it in an anti-imperialist framework because that’s the system that reproduces all these logics, of the destruction of life. The civilisation of Western capitalist modernity is materialised in an imperialist system. We need to attack the system under which this civilisation operates. We have to put a coalition together of oppressed people, and we have to be anti-systemic and structurally fighting the system.
We cannot be turning anti-racism, feminism or ecological movements into identities, fighting for crumbs inside the system. Intersectionality has been co-opted by the empire. It’s a distortion of what the Black feminists were fighting for, because they never lost sight of imperialism; they were anti-imperialist. They were calling attention to multiple oppressions from an anti-imperialist perspective. However, this has been lost as intersectionality became identity. There is a video of the CIA, where you have a woman of colour talking about how intersectional she is. This is perverse because the same imperial system that produces these operations is now subsidising the opposition against the oppressions. In other words, they’re producing a domesticated opposition.
For example, in the coup d’etat against the Indigenous president of Bolivia Evo Morales in November 2019, you have fake news. Funded organisations in the middle of this coup d’etat, organised by the CIA and the US Empire worked together with the white elites of Bolivia to destroy the Indigenous president, and the Indigenous movements. Then all these organisations come out to say, this is not a coup d’etat, this is a rebellion because Evo Morales burned the Amazon. Everybody knows that the Amazon was burned due to the policies of Bolsonaro in Brazil, the extreme right leader. The fake news constructs it as if it was Evo Morales.
Then they said this is a bad government. Then feminist NGOs said he’s sexist. This happened in the middle of a racist, colonial imperialist coup d’etat. Puppets of the empire through NGOs and organisations formed by the CIA say, this is not a coup d’etat, this is a popular rebellion. If you know a little about Bolivia, and you saw the massacres of indigenous people, you saw how the plotters came to the presidential palace with a Bible and a gun. The people in the streets were people from Santa Cruz, white, Creole people running around the country killing and abusing everybody, indigenous people and mestizo people until they took over La Paz and the presidential palace. The resistance of the indigenous people managed to take them out of power in a year.
Many people have brought a distorted version of the Black feminist concept that turns intersectionality or the recognition of multiple oppressions into identity struggles within the system and not against the system. Struggles must take into consideration Western modernity, through the system of imperialism that is producing all these multiple oppressions as a civilisation of death. Black feminists always called attention to the political pressures in building coalitions. It is important not to fight each other over oppressions and through identity fights in the intersectionality movement. It is an appropriation by white feminists, and a distortion of the concept of multiple oppressions that was put forward by Black feminists within an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist framework.
This is forgotten today and we’re seeing the derailing of struggles into fights for identity. Now, we have fights for nouns and pronouns. We need to respect each other though the struggle has to be against the structure of power of the system. We cannot derail our struggle into how we name things, and that’s it with nothing else getting transformed. We do need to correct our language though it’s coming to the point that now we pay attention more to pronouns than to structures of genocide, super-exploitation and domination, etc.
Three Temporal Terminal Crises
The Terminal Crisis of Neoliberalism
There are three temporalities of the world-system created with the European colonial expansion of 1492. That system is still with us, but it’s now in a major crisis. The first temporality is neoliberalism that goes from 1973 to 2020. Neoliberalism is a form of white capitalism that was put forward initially in Chile under the dictatorship of Pinochet. The government of Allende was destroyed and Allende himself was killed by a CIA coup d’etat organised by Nixon and Kissinger’s administration. The evidence is overwhelming and the documents have been declassified. They did that because Allende was taking the resources of Chile and putting them in the hands of the Chilean people. The transnational corporations from the US were not happy about that. They went after Allende and put this dictator in power.
In 1973 the Chicago Boys at the University of Chicago were developing neo-liberal policies in their laboratory. They privatised everything and cut off funds from the state to redistribute wealth to poor people or people in need, etc. This is a system at the service of the rich, capitalism and the capitalist. That laboratory began in Chile, but continued in Argentina with a military coup d’etat after 1976 with the Minister of Economy, Martinez. Then there was the Washington Consensus and international organisations such as the World Bank, and austerity measures to benefit the rich. This continued to be imposed in the periphery of the world economy. Now we have international institutions such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and of course US policy pushing for this everywhere.
In 2020 there was the COVID-19 crisis and neoliberal policies demonstrated that they are policies, not for life but for death. Countries that privatised their health system imitating the US were the ones most affected by COVID-19. A lot of the people who died were in countries like that, including the US. It was the countries that never followed these policies, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and China that had great results in controlling COVID-19. In the case of Ecuador you can see the before and after. When Lenin Moreno came to power, betraying the years of Correa as an anti-neo-liberal president, he submitted to the policies of the International Monetary Fund and cut off funds for the public health system. They closed hospitals and threw nurses, doctors, etc. into the streets. When COVID-19 came, you saw the most horrible scenes in Ecuador, where people were dying in the streets and their houses. There were no ambulances, no system to take the bodies out or anything. The system just collapsed. It became very clear how neoliberalism kills and has no legitimation or credibility in the countries that implemented these policies.
During this crisis, the US health system could not deal with COVID-19 because it’s a privatised system. There was nothing to protect the interests of the people. When the US was breaching neoliberalism, one of the principles was to let the market decide, let the state get away from the economy. The state should not be investing in the economy or distributing resources in the economy. It became very evident that during the COVID-19 crisis when the economy stopped, the US was transferring trillions with a letter T, of dollars to the one percent of the taxpayers. The rest of the people were suffering from the COVID-19 crisis. Many people died. There was no funding to save anybody except the 1%. The daughter of Trump got $50 million; the husband and the daughter of Trump got $90 million. Isn’t the slogan of neoliberalism to let the economy decide? However, when there’s a crisis that will affect them, they let the state intervene, not in favour of people, but in favour of the rich. Realising they have no credibility, they are now in crisis.
That cycle from 1970 finished in 2020. The post-COVID-19 crisis is a crisis of globalisation because many countries around the world are seeing that these principles of neoliberalism are false. Countries are now going into protectionism. They’re backing off from this so-called free market, economy, and liberalisation of markets, including the United States sanctioning China and any country that they feel is competing with them, in an unfair way. They’re violating their own rules of the game that were put forward after the Second World War in the Bretton Woods agreements because they feel they are not serving them anymore.
The Terminal Crisis of US Hegemony.
The second crisis is of US hegemony. The US became the hegemony of the world-system after World War II. In the middle of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020, you have everybody seeing the US stealing oxygen machines from other countries and not being generous with the rest of the world. They were even stealing ATM machines from other countries. In the eyes of everybody during the Trump administration in the 2020 COVID-19 crisis, “America first” became a slogan of white Americans. We are number one and let the rest sink into the ocean.
The US became the most indebted country in the world. During the COVID-19 crisis, with all this transferring of trillions of dollars to the 1% the US is now indebted more than $30 trillion. We’re talking about a catastrophic situation. The US is in a terminal crisis. Rising economies are challenging US hegemony. BRICS called for a multipolar world against the unipolar world led by the US and Western empires. We are in the middle of a crisis of hegemony and the emergence of a new world of multipolarity. It has been a unipolar world, where the US decides and imposes sanctions by force by the economic bloc, a coup d’etat organised by CIA and even military missions. There has been no room to manoeuvre. The sovereignty of countries has not been respected.
China is playing a fair game of market trade and is being penalised arbitrarily because they’re competing and then getting sanctions. The US is violating their own rules of the game to try to contain its decline. Together with the US, its allies (the Western imperialists from Europe) are also declining. The US cannot play fair in the market economies of the international markets. They need to play dirty to survive. The US has lost all the twentieth-century wars, such as in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Seven companies of the military-industrial complex of the US have made trillions of dollars from these adventures abroad. They’re the ones making the money and kidnapping most of the resources of the federal government. More than 50% of the US federal budget is going to the defence department and most to seven companies that are making a fortune from wars. They invent wars to make money. They have kidnapped Congress, with lobbying and paying the campaign of both Democrats and Republicans. That’s why they get unanimous votes, to increase the military budget. These politicians are blackmailed by this lobbying in Washington that subsidises their campaigns and also gives them money to go on vacations to the Bahamas. This is not a secret or a conspiracy theory. It’s not hidden. In the USA passing money to politicians to get the policies they want is not corruption—it is legal. This is corruption in 95% of the countries of the world. But in the US corruption is legal.
The Third Terminal Crisis: Civilisational
The third terminal crisis is a cycle that goes from 1492 to 2020. It is a civilisational crisis. We saw how when the economy stopped during COVID-19, suddenly you have areas of the world where many animals left because of pollution coming back and they started coming back. Nature began to regenerate itself after a few months of the world economy stopping. It immediately became very obvious that the ecological disaster has to do with the system. We don’t need climate change, we need systemic change and anti-capitalist change. We need anti-systemic, structural change to found a new civilisation and get rid of this one that is leaving everything to the 1%.
COVID-19 itself shows that we have no control over what’s going on in terms of the health consequences of this civilisation. If you believe that this was because of some kind of viruses that are coming from animals that are crossing from forests to places where humans live, and transferring viruses, or if you believe that this was a plan and escaped a laboratory of the US Pentagon, whatever theory you believe shows that something is out of control. Civilisationally speaking in terms of the ecology of the planet, we are destroying life. It is obvious that there is an ecological crisis due to a civilisation that has been prioritising the interests of capital over the interests of life. It’s capital or life.
Immediately after this crisis, the US was defeated in Afghanistan. Assange, the WikiLeaks leader who is now probably going to be extradited to the US to be killed here (he is a hero of our time) revealed the crimes against humanity of US military forces in Iraq with videos and information. Instead of penalising the people making decisions to kill people arbitrarily, they went after the messenger. Assange showed this in videos taken from the Pentagon that were kept hidden. They went after him for having revealed the secrets of US crimes against humanity.
Tony Blair and George Bush went into Iraq without the consent of the United Nations and violated international law. None of them are in jail or being prosecuted in any court in the world. Assange said this is not about winning, it’s about a few companies making a lot of money so the war will last as long as it can. We were 20 years in Afghanistan, throwing away resources from taxpayers’ money into a war that was nonsense. These people were not involved in any attack on the US. This is all fake news put together after 11 September.
Summarising the Three Temporal Terminal Crises
We have three terminal crises: the crisis of neoliberalism (1973–2020), the crisis of US hegemony (1945–) and the civilisational crisis (1492–). The temporalities of these three crises entangle each other.
The US is declining in power, so they cannot compete in the markets in the same way they used to compete 50 or 60 years ago. While the US was throwing away resources in stupid wars, unnecessary wars, to benefit seven companies in the US, of the military-industrial complex, the rest of the world such as China, Russia, Brazil and all countries were investing their resources in building new technologies for improving production. Now, US companies cannot compete with rising economies.
The US as a declining empire is facing its own mistakes and decline because of the policies it pursued in the last 34 years, so they are playing dirty. They’re becoming aggressive, provoking wars which they’ve been doing for many years, but now they’re doing it in increasing ways. In the 1960s, we used to say that US imperialism is a paper tiger. Today, US imperialism is a tiger in terminal death, bleeding and sick and coming close to death. You have unpredictable behaviour and they react in crazy ways. In the next few years, the US developed a strategy of provocation against Russia.
Over the last year and a half the US has been encircling Russia and violating agreements over the past 40 years. With Gorbachev and later with Yeltsin. The agreement was that the US and NATO were not going to come close to the borders of the Soviet Union first and the Russian Federation later. That promise was violated from day one when the US started putting military bases and NATO bases on the borders of the Russian Federation with missiles pointing at Moscow. Moscow has been protesting this for years in international forums. They have been calling attention to this and saying why are you taking us as an enemy. We are your friends. We are now capitalist. We want to be part of Europe. Why are you putting missiles surrounding us at a moment of peace?
There are videos of Putin in international conferences calling attention to this. They thought that they could negotiate with the West about this. But the West has been building aggressiveness and provoking Russia into wars. There is a document that I invite people to check out that is called “Overextending Russia” in the RAND Corporation which is a think tank of the CIA and the Pentagon. This document was put online in 2019. It is the script of the film we are seeing in Ukraine today. Everything we’re seeing was already planned years ahead. They were provoking Russia for years.
Then you have the CIA coup d’etat against the democratically elected president of Ukraine, where they put in power Nazis that are now controlling the military in Ukraine. These are not militias that surrounded the parliament; they are supported by the CIA and the US. These militias became part of the Ukrainian army and their racist ideology is to exterminate Slavic people. Since World War II, the Nazis and the Ukrainian Nazis believe that Slav people (Russians) are inferior races to be exterminated.
They began a war of extermination first toward Ukrainians of Russian origin in 2014. That work continues until today. In 2015 Russia signed the Minsk agreement and got France and Germany together to get a peace agreement between the Ukrainian army and the Ukrainians of Russian origin. Even though the agreement was signed, the US gave the green light to the Nazis and the military to violate the agreement.
So the war continues as a war of extermination. Put yourself in the shoes of the Russians. You have a Nazi regime in power whose goal is exterminating people of Russian origin. This is a revival of the memory of World War II. That’s how the Nazis entered the invasion of Russia—using these Ukrainian Nazi militias. It got to a point where Russia had no other choice than to enter Ukraine as a defensive intervention, not as an imperialist intervention.
They were not interested in entering Ukraine for economic reasons; they said that Ukraine could enter the European economy. There’s no problem with that. They have a problem if Ukraine enters NATO, which is the provocation the USA built in December 2021 and January 2022. A few months before the intervention of the Russians in Ukraine, they started talking about bringing Ukraine into NATO, which means that you’re just a step away from a nuclear war. The moment you have these crazy Nazis entering Russian territory, or Russia defending itself, it becomes a nuclear world war. Also, they were talking about giving nuclear weapons to these crazy Nazis.
Putin held a cabinet meeting in February 2022 that you can see on YouTube as it was held in public to discuss this venture as they were facing the following dilemma. If we don’t stop these Nazis for the sake of keeping a healthy economy, they’re going to sanction us. If we intervene, in a few years, we will have all these terrorists coming into the suburbs of Moscow. We need to stop them now or otherwise it will be too late as we could have a nuclear confrontation.
If we privilege the economy or security and intervene, we know that they’re going to sanction Russia. They decided for security over the economy. The US found a way (in the RAND Corporation document) as part of the dirty movements of the US Empire in a moment of decline. Forty per cent of the imports of the European Union are coming from Russia, billions of euros. The US sanctions Russia and gets the enterprises of Russia out of the market. American companies then came to replace the Russian companies and take over the market of Europe, gas, oil, aluminium, wheat, and many other items. This is a coup d’etat organised by the US provoking an intervention by Russia in Ukraine. They used that as an excuse to sanction Russia and take out all the Russian companies from the European Union. They replaced them in a matter of months with American transnational corporations.
The USA cannot compete in the market or sell at the low prices of Russian companies. Their only option is dirty wars and movements. They turned the European Union into a colonial protectorate of the US. The European Union lost military and economic sovereignty and now they’re paying six or seven times more. US companies are there to make money so they’re selling at monopoly prices. The US recovered European markets away from the Russians through dirty games. They isolated Europe from China through the Silk Route. After this successful international coup d’etat, the German government started negotiating with the Russians to get a gas pipe coming from the Baltic Ocean, under the Arctic Ocean. The US has been on record since 2012 protesting the building of the Nord Stream because they were afraid that Europe would get closer to Russia. They were online saying this informally, even in the press conference of February 2022, President Biden threatened to destroy the Nord Stream pipelines.
What happened with Americans so that the Germans were negotiating with the Russians to try to get gas once again into Europe? The US intervened and blew up the in a terrorist attack. There is an article by a famous journalist in the US who reveals all the details about this. If you look at the declarations of the State Department, the Secretary of State was basically happy about what happened. There was no investigation about who did it but everybody knows this was done by the US, British intelligence and Norway. They were all involved in this terrorist act to stop the gas coming from Russia.
The same day of the attack, the Germans opened a new pipeline coming from Norway to Germany and to Europe to replace the gas from Russia. So it’s very obvious what happened. They said it was a Russian who blew it up though what interest did the Russians have to blow up a pipeline that was built with their own money? They didn’t need to blow it up—they just needed to turn off the pipe in Moscow.
Where are they going next? After being defeated in the Middle East with all these crazy wars they lost in the last 20 years, there is no going back there. China has beaten the West in trade with Africa. The Western European imperialist countries and US imperialists have lost the markets. In the last few months four countries in Africa kicked out the French and Americans and are calling for a new relationship with China and Russia. We are moving towards a multipolar world. They’re not going to Asia where they lost to India to China as emerging powers. The only thing they have left in Asia is to provoke a war between Taiwan and China and they’ve been working on this now for several years.
It’s very obvious they’re going next to Latin America. They’re going to re-escalate their intervention in Latin America. In a press conference, the US southern commander, General Richardson named country by country all the natural resources of the continent. She was talking as if all those resources belong to the US and about this as a national security issue. She said we cannot allow these resources to be in the hands of countries that have good relations with China or Russia. This is a threat to the continent. Last fall Biden put out a document about US foreign policy being reoriented towards Latin America. They know that’s the last thing that the US Empire has. If they lost Latin America, they lost the empire because they already lost the rest of the continents. The only place rich in resources is Latin America. They’re coming back to try to recover the lost terrain.
Chile has been a neo-colony of the US since the times of Pinochet. However, the number one trade partner of Chile is not the US, it is China that is beating the US in trade markets with Latin America. So now they’re coming to recover Latin America and they’re playing dirty. This has already begun in the coup d’etat against Castillo in Peru, and Lasso in Ecuador and the repression in Ecuador. There was a coup d’etat in Guatemala where they de-legalised the candidates who were most probably going to win the elections. They put two candidates in who are both right-wing.
The policies they’re putting forward in Latin America are aggressive to recover the region in the next few years. I foresee an escalation against Venezuela. Venezuela is rich in gold, and oil but it’s also rich in minerals that are very important for the military-industrial complex in building weapons and for computers. They have an anti-imperialist government. So now the US has sanctions and a blockade against Venezuela that are isolating the economy from the international market. It’s affecting the people and their everyday lives in big ways. They’re trying to topple the government of Venezuela to recover the resources of Venezuela and get back the oil fields.
We are going to see an escalation of the intervention of the US in Latin America. This is the last remaining region of the world. The US Empire has its days counted. The tiger has a terminal sickness and bleeding and is acting in increasingly crazy ways. In Ukraine we have a possibility of nuclear disaster. They’re also provoking a war in Taiwan with China. In Latin America they are very aggressive, destroying governments, organising coup d’etats and possibly organising a military intervention in Venezuela after the presidential election in 2024. This is where we are in terms of power relations.
What and Where is the Resistance?
Resistance from the Internationalist Elite
The resistance is coming from three sides and we need to be careful how we talk about it. On the one hand, there are these terminal crises and we’re going into a bifurcation of the system like Immanuel Wallerstein said in the 1980s–1990s. He said that between 2020 and 2050 this system of more than 500 years is going to collapse. One resistance is that of people like the 1% who want to keep their privilege alive and recycle themselves into the elites of a new historical system. That is going to be worse than this one. This is the Davos people—the World Economic Forum. They were talking about the new reset in January 2021. When you look at it superficially, it looks as if they are taking the programme of the Left but when you look deeper it is really, really horrible. They say they want to solve the problems of humanity but what they are proposing is really scary. They met in January to talk about their dystopias, and identified the problem of the ecological crisis. What is their solution? There are too many human beings on planet Earth (8 billion). We need to reduce it to 2 billion people. There are 6 billion human beings that are disposable; we need to get rid of them. Their solution is not to transform the system, it is to reduce 6 billion people.
Malthus, the famous liberal economist of the nineteenth century in Britain was saying that poverty and unemployment are not because of capitalism as a system, they are because there are too many human beings. They are proposing an update of the Malthusian theory because they don’t care about poverty and unemployment. It’s not a transformation in the structure of the system, it is the elimination of human beings. So there is a genocidal logic in the people of Davos. You can see Bill Gates saying this in videos and the people of the World Economic Forum. I call them eco-fascists because they are calling for the extermination of a huge part of humanity. They’re talking about transhumanism to basically replace humans with robots and artificial intelligence. They want to introduce artificial intelligence to our bodies, so that they control them better. They want to eliminate nation states which sounds interesting. They want to eliminate nature. What is the agenda here? They want a single government so that they can better control the world economy.
What they’re doing is replacing capitalism with a new system. Some people call it digital capitalism. These platforms are like feudal markets. In feudal times, if you want to sell something, you have to pay a tax to the feudal lord. That price was so high that most of the profit you’re going to make in the market was transferred to the feudal lord through rent. These digital platforms, especially after 2020, are becoming more and more a market. A lot of capitalist transnational corporations have to sell their products through digital platforms that are charging a lot of money to people to be able to sell there.
Varoufakis, the economist from Europe became famous because he was the Minister of Economy in Greece. He’s calling this techno-feudalism. We’re moving to a new system where through new technologies they want full control over people’s behaviour, decision-making, etc. and to eliminate a huge part of humanity in the name of the ecological health of the planet. We’re now seeing what we can call Hollywood-like science fiction becoming reality.
Far-Right Nationalist Resistance
This sector is confronted by another group of people who are extreme right-wing figures and movements, taking over in many parts of the first world, nation-state governments in Europe or even in the US where they are fighting for the sovereignty of the imperial states against the Davos, financial people who want to get rid of the states. They want global governance and, and have many discrepancies with the people of Davos. This is Marie LePen in France, Donald Trump and his movement in the US, and this woman who is now the president or prime minister of Italy, who is also a strong right movement fascist. She’s fighting Macron and making Macron her enemy. This is the fight between the globalists and the extreme right. The globalists are also extreme right—they’re also fascists. Don’t get me wrong, there are nationalist fascists and internationalist fascists.
They’re preparing, as Wallerstein said, to move toward the “new reset”. That’s what it was called by the Davos people in January 2021. They organised one of the meetings as they do every year with that title. This is the dystopia that they’re building, preparing for the collapse of this system, and the creation of a new one. They are not waiting for the catastrophe to come to create the system. They’re already creating a new techno-feudal system. They are going to have full control over our minds, and our bodies, and what they’re aiming towards is to put inside our bodies, chips and things to control everybody.
Is this a conspiracy theory? No! Look at the CEO of Google. He went out in public to denounce all of this saying, I thought this was going to happen later in the twenty-first century. This is happening now. Robotisation and artificial intelligence replacing human beings and intervening over human beings is happening right now. He resigned from Google to be able to come in public and denounce this stuff. CEOs of several companies that have artificial intelligence are now out here calling attention, saying we’re very close; it is not something in the future. This is the fight between two fascist lines, internationalist fascist, and extreme right and nationalist fascist.
Resistance from a Multipolar World Emerging
There is another pole of resistance coming from the multipolar world. These are not from below, but they are on the side like new emerging economies that are becoming very powerful like China. We cannot China by extrapolating to China the categories we use to understand Western imperialism. China is capitalist and a superpower, but what exactly is it? We need to study this carefully because it does not have the same patterns of behaviour and action as Western countries. It operates in a different way. I’m not saying it’s less capitalist but they don’t have a universalist project. The West, when they intervene, they want you to change the way you think, to pray to the same God and change your language or your culture. They want you to dress differently.
China just cares about trade and being fair in trade, and respecting the sovereignty of countries. Because they’re not neo-liberal, they are transferring resources to Third-World countries without interest rates, just out of advancing their trade agreements. For example, if I’m going to sell to China, X country, this many millions of gallons or whatever China pays today. They don’t wait ten years to pay. So, Third-World countries are getting this money without interest rates. That’s very different from Westerners. They plunder you. They destroy everything, super exploit you and then they leave you in debt for the rest of your life. You have to take loans with interest that you have to pay every year. This is very different from the relationships that China develops.
I’m not saying that there’s no problem with China, but absolutely for Third-World countries, the multipolar world of respect for cultures and sovereignty brings a space of manoeuvre, a country like Venezuela or Iran now have a space of manoeuvre. They have opportunities with the multipolar world. The BRICS Bank, for example, is providing loans without conditions. Look at the IMF. If they give a loan, they control everything and say you have to throw these many people to the streets, and that you have to cut this budget. They put conditions. This is very important for Third-World countries as it opens a space of manoeuvre. It is not a postcapitalist world, but it operates with different principles that allow anti-imperialist radical projects to have a space of manoeuvre that the unipolar world does not give. The unipolar world does not respect your sovereignty. So here comes a bloc of the most powerful economies in the world that are bigger than the group of seven of the West.
Those four coup d’etats against French and US imperialism in Africa in the last several months would be impossible without the multipolar world. They are kicking out the Americans and the French and inviting their Chinese and the multipolar world to come and trade with them. This is a major shift in the geopolitics of the world. We’re living under a major shift. There is a multipolar world that is leaving behind this unipolar world of the West. The years of Western imperialism are over. Social movements in many parts of the world are out of power and some of them don’t even consider the idea of taking power.
State power is fundamental to social movements. If you don’t take state power, you’re in a weak position in relation to being able to build a new society and a new world. For example, look at the difference between Colombia and Venezuela. In Venezuela, the vision of Chavez was that we need to take over and occupy the state, even though that state we have inherited from the past is a modern capitalist, a white colonial elite. We need to occupy it to interrupt the logics of domination and exploitation and interrupt the structures of domination. That occupation of the state helps us to interrupt these operations but it’s not the solution because the state has a lot of problems. The solution is that we need to build outside the state. That’s why he came up with the slogan of “commune, or nothing”. 10 We need to build a communal society in a communal state. That’s only possible because we’re occupying the state and opening possibilities to build from outside that state. He called that a communal state, communal economy, and communal politics.
In Colombia, which is a country controlled by US imperialism in the main structures, if you tried to build a commune in any part of the countryside of Colombia, the question is not going to be how long the commune will last. The question is going to be how long the commoners will last alive. They’re going to be wiped out by the paramilitary forces that are coordinated with the army of the Colombian state as a neo-colonial state. The condition to build something new is that you need to occupy that state with an anti-imperialist vision, a transformation of the army and the structure of the state to build something outside the state.
The vision of Chavez is a decolonial vision, because it’s decolonising the traditional forms of political authority of the civilisation of Western modernity. It’s decolonising it with a new form of political authority called the commune. It’s going beyond the Eurocentric binaries of the left of the anarchists and the statists. That is a dilemma transferred to the Latin American left as a product of the Eurocentrism of our left. That’s the European dilemma.
Chavez broke with this Eurocentric dilemma and he said it is not anarchism versus statism. We need to occupy the existing state to interrupt the politics of domination, but we need to build communes outside the state to build a new society. We need both things at the same time.
The political thinking of Hugo Chavez is as a decolonial thinker. Unfortunately, all these insights are unknown to the world. The squatters movement in Chile, has a slogan close to the Chavez vision. We need to build a movement that is against the state inside and outside the state at the same time. We need to short-circuit the hierarchies and the politics of domination but we need to be against the state because that state is not something we are in favour of because we inherited it from the neo-colonial state at the same time. We need to have a front in the three directions. Inside, outside and against the state.
We are going into a moment where movements around the world are going to come out in a stronger way than what we’ve seen so far because the crisis is only going to deepen. It is a moment of opportunity to build a different world. Wallerstein would say that in this bifurcation, the leaders of this system will try to build a new system worse than the one we have now. But also, the other possibility is for the people of the world to get together and build something new. I see a temporality of social and anti-imperialist movements in the multipolar world against the unipolar world. So that is a broad panoramic view of where we are at and where we’re going.
Melanie Bush: Thank you for this very full overview. Is there anything that you would say in closing about what you would encourage individuals, communities, organisations to work toward?
Ramon Grosfoguel: We need to put together all the oppressions that this system has produced and get all the people oppressed to work together in broad coalitions under an anti-systemic anti-imperialist vision. If we fight each demand isolated from other demands, to get a better position within the system and fight for identity and crumbs inside the system—we’re going nowhere. We need to have a decolonial anti-imperialist vision or a decolonial intersectional anti-imperialist vision as a major goal as a foundation for a new civilisation. This civilisation is dying. We need to move toward the foundation of a new civilisation that would be more democratic, more just, and more fair. More equal.
Melanie Bush: Thank you so much—your comments are extremely illuminating. As a student of Immanuel at McGill University, I am very familiar with “The American Dilemma of the 21st Century”, which is particularly insightful in explaining what we are witnessing today and echoes many of the same sentiments about this being an era where things can get much worse or they can get much better. This will largely depend on whether the elite or the people win out. 11 It is past time for intensifying our solidarity and building those coalitions. Let us have these Liberation Conversations and continue to Imagine and Build.