Abolish capitalist anti-racism

Demonstration against immigration policies (Madrid). Archive image. Europa PressDesires for liberation vs. Desires for integration

“The decolonial is a fashion, the postcolonial a desire and the anticolonial a struggle,” he would say in 2019. the sociologist Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The first time I read these words they seemed as fair as they were beautiful. They still seem that way to me. To a certain extent, they describe an important part of reality. A reality we encounter in our desire to use useful frameworks to analyze the colonial legacy of modern racism with the simple goal of better combating it. But I don’t entirely agree with the premise. I will explain myself through two illustrative examples. 1: Can approaches like those of the academic Walter Mignolo, developed from and for the academy, be compared? yankee, and political practices such as those of the Indigenous Party of the Republic, which emerge from the streets of France to confront State racism? At all. However, in both cases there is a demand for a decolonial approach. I continue to ask, this time about a reality that affects the universities of the Spanish State, 2: does the instrumentalization of decolonial, postcolonial and even “anticolonial” frameworks by powerful personalities in academia and the universities fall into the same mixed bag? works defended, from such approaches, by dozens of non-white working class researchers? I am referring to researchers and activists from the Global South – where the decolonial is born – committed to the articulation of emancipatory projects for the liberation of their peoples who face, outside and within the academy, multiple racist and patriarchal violence. Impossible to establish this similarity. That is why, perhaps, what is at stake in a transformative anti-racist struggle is the dispute between the real desire to disrupt a system of injustice and the desire to integrate into it. There is a neoliberal, capitalist anti-racism that is masked in the most perverse ways. And the battle to unmask it goes beyond the intellectual frameworks used.

in the rehearsal From integration to reparation or why does the anti-capitalist left like neoliberal anti-racism?part of the book State racism. A collective view from autonomy and racial justice (Txalaparta, 2023), tried to return to the issue. In said text, I explained that another reason why I disagree with Cusicanqui is because the postcolonial became an academic fashion in the upper echelons of the Anglo-Saxon university long before the decolonial. In fact, you could even say that it was born as fashion. That is, no one is saved or condemned for using these methodologies or analytical frameworks. Now, we can agree that a certain academic use of these concepts – decolonial, postcolonial, coloniality, race, etc. – and their corresponding codes, has played a depoliticizing role.

The situation tells us that purely abstract debates hide the renunciation of the possibility of transforming the world in which we live, of building a society beyond capitalism. This is perhaps why the thinker Vijay Prashadhe stated in his Ten theses on Marxism and decolonization that “the only real decolonization is anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism”, to end by pointing out that “the mind cannot be decolonized unless the conditions of social production that reinforce the colonial mentality are also decolonized.” Accurate words, without a doubt. However, shouldn’t the horizon of a radical liberation, from an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist point of view, include, as I would say? Frantz Fanonour own minds? Doesn’t the modern imperial project build its power by also settling in the depths of our common sense and sensitivity? In this area it is also necessary to combat it, from the beginning. Prashad points towards this relationship. Without this, decolonizing the conditions of social production will be impossible. The empire, capital, the colonial project, are strengthened in the territories and in the mentalities: “that imperialism that today fights against a true liberation of humanity leaves in its wake here and there shades of decadence that we must search for and expel without mercy of our land and our spirits,” Fanon would write.

The dispute over anti-racism

This initial debate on nomenclatures, analytical frameworks and horizons helps us to illuminate the underlying problem. We must continue to warn that there is an interested, dominant approach to the fight against racism that trivializes terms, rebellious gestures and struggles that are still essential to us today, turning anti-racism into an identity issue related to empire and big capital. But racism is born in the heat of empire and capital. It is impossible to address it in its root and complexity without taking this into account. The accusation of identitarianism has been used to delegitimize the anti-racist fight in its entirety. But, at the same time, it is necessary to recognize that there are those who open the door to such claims. There is a neoliberal anti-racist consumer discourse that takes over certain spaces of visibility because it serves to demonize the possibility of an anti-racism that makes people uncomfortable. But why is it uncomfortable? Because it holds some moral key, because it focuses on individuals, on singular attitudes? At all. Because it is an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist anti-racism.

However, beyond the slogan, if we were asked to clearly define the fundamental difference between these two ways of approaching the fight against racism, we would say the following. The horizon is not to improve the inclusion of our communities in the economic, moral and philosophical frameworks of the empire, which will extinguish the desire for liberation of future generations, promoting within them an unhealthy desire for integration that, at the same time, It will never be completed. We are talking, therefore, about stimulating the desire to build a truly just and healthy society for the people, humanity and the planet. That is, we are talking about those who resist the empire, those who revolt against the empire and those who provoke, also from within it, tensions with revolutionary potential. Which necessarily implies pointing out the strategies of capital and the neocolonial project to stay afloat, also using faces of all colors and bodies of all ethnicities.

Race, capital and empire are one

Talking about racism is not, therefore, talking only about identities. Race – which never occurs without class or gender – also pulsates behind the international division of labor and manifests itself in each and every one of the areas in which the class struggle occurs. The examples are innumerable: in the fight against real estate speculation, against labor exploitation, against police violence and the gag law. In the fights against urban and school segregation; in the struggles for public and universal healthcare, for egalitarian legislation and for historical memory, etc. And, at the same time, the fight against capitalism finds its toughest nut to crack in the fight against the existence of non-rights spaces such as the shanty settlements in the fields of Huelva, Almería, Lérida; in non-rights spaces such as the CIE. The nerve of the fight against capitalism is broken in neighborhoods such as Cañada Real, in Madrid, or Polígono Sur, in Seville. The heart of the fight against capital occurs where the bodies of non-white migrants from former colonies, and very particularly of African, Maghrebi, Roma, Asian, Abya Yala women, are used to delve into the conditions of dehumanization, exploitation and dispossession on which capitalism thrives.

In his work, Frantz Fanon tells us about how the colonial situation in itself makes it impossible to implement any relationship of equality. If we accept that we live in a fundamentally neocolonial world, that people like the Palestinians resist, in fact, in a colonial situation, we must question the way in which, from the Global North – whose political leadership supports this situation – we use our decolonial frameworks. , postcolonial, etc., whatever the situation of our peoples in it. Not to stop using them because they are irremediably “tainted”, a moralistic approach that generates impostures and useless circumlocutions, but to do so with greater honesty, at the service of worthy struggles such as those mentioned. Thus, this battle is not a struggle between individuals from which some are condemned and others supposedly free of contradictions are saved. It is a collective struggle based on a real break with a political recipe that, ultimately, is at the service of neoliberalism, at the service of consensus through which those who fight to acquire real material and vital equality are delegitimized.