Neither Capitalism nor Communism, but Decolonization: Interview with Walter Mignolo (Part I)

Chris­topher Mat­tison: Dur­ing an inter­view that you gave with Mad­ina Tlostan­ova in 2009, you posed the ques­tion (as a response) “Why save it at all?” — in regards to the eco­nomic sys­tem and the loom­ing fin­an­cial crisis. You con­tin­ued by stat­ing that it wasn’t the insti­tu­tions that required sav­ing, but rather our planet and the entwined human net­work. Or rather, that the primary con­cern should be with indi­vidu­als rather than with insti­tu­tions. Now, three years later, a great deal of effort has been spent on prop­ping up these insti­tu­tions, which leaves us where in terms of the indi­vidu­als tied to the institutions?

Wal­ter Mignolo: Cer­tainly the debate over the rela­tion­ships between the State and the Mar­ket has been revamped by the fin­an­cial crisis. Pres­id­ent Obama was accused of “going social­ist” because of his demand to rein­force the State instead of leav­ing it to “invis­ible hands,” as cor­por­ate polit­ics demands. It is dif­fi­cult to con­trol, through State reg­u­la­tion and other means of pub­lic policy, a civil­iz­a­tional atti­tude in which suc­cess is encour­aged, and suc­cess has a great deal to do with increas­ing wealth. When increas­ing wealth is in play — of people, cor­por­a­tions or nation-​states — good mor­als and good pub­lic policy have little effect in the long run. Where are we now? Well, the eco­nomic sys­tem has to con­tinue work­ing on behalf of those who bene­fit from it. My point then and now is that cap­it­al­ism — the eco­nomic pil­lar of West­ern civil­iz­a­tion (now glob­ally expanded) — is an eco­nomic sys­tem based on the belief that devel­op­ment and growth lead to hap­pi­ness while many people, myself included, have stated that devel­op­ment and growth is lead­ing us towards death. This is why I believe West­ern Civil­iz­a­tion built a cos­mo­logy in which the cart is in front of the horse, and this con­fig­ur­a­tion simply does not work.

We began this con­ver­sa­tion in April of 2011 and are now into the first quarter of 2012. We have wit­nessed revolu­tions in Tunisia and Egypt and the reper­cus­sions in Syria and Libya. We have watched the upris­ing of the “indig­na­dos” in Spain and, more unex­pec­tedly, in Israel. And a few years before Tunisia and Egypt, sim­ilar mani­fest­a­tions took place in Bolivia and Ecuador, knock­ing out two suc­cess­ive pres­id­ents of those coun­tries. And then the north of Lon­don erup­ted into another vol­cano on the global scene. Obvi­ously the eco­nomic and polit­ical insti­tu­tions (the State) are not work­ing. After the US’s down­grade from AAA to AA+ status in rela­tion to for­eign debt and the EU’s struggles to con­trol the col­lapse of the Union from the peri­phery (Greece, Italy, Spain), it has become obvi­ous that things are not work­ing. Not to men­tion the prob­lems that have con­tin­ued to plague us for the past 60 years: increased poverty and a grow­ing food crisis, along with global warm­ing and the “war on ter­ror­ism,” which con­sist­ently has benefited con­tract­ors and the arms industry.

The Eco­nom­ist (which was foun­ded at the begin­ning of the nine­teenth cen­tury to for­ward the lib­eral con­cep­tion of the eco­nomy) recently (Feb­ru­ary, 2012) fea­tured a debate on State Cor­por­ate Cap­it­al­ism as being the con­sequence of a crisis that has been with us since the end of 2007, and which con­tin­ues to dev­ast­ate the European Union. What is State Cor­por­ate Cap­it­al­ism? It is a State that has its eyes and hands in the mar­ket, which dis­tin­guishes it from the clas­sical sep­ar­a­tion of the busi­ness of the State and the busi­ness of the Mar­ket. This clas­sical model — based on the “invis­ible hand” of a lib­eral eco­nomy and the “weak state” that Pres­id­ent Ron­ald Reagan pro­moted at the begin­ning of the neo-​liberal era — has turned out to be a dis­aster. In this debate, China, Malay­sia and Singa­pore are presen­ted as examples of strong States that have delivered in terms of eco­nomic growth. In each of these States there is neither lib­er­al­ism (“the invis­ible hand” with a reg­u­lat­ing State, which Obama pro­posed at the begin­ning of his man­date) nor neo-​liberalism (a weak State and a free mar­ket) guid­ing the polit­ics of the State. A com­mon expres­sion in the West to refer to this eco­nomic devel­op­ment in Asia is “Neo-​liberalism the Asian way.” Apart from being Western-​Centric this is simply absurd: how can China or Singa­pore be described as neo-​liberal, even in an Asian way, if neo-​liberalism strives to dis­pense with the State and these eco­nom­ies are based on strong State regulation?

Chris­topher Mat­tison: If neo-​liberalism is a flawed descrip­tion of the eco­nomic and soci­etal move­ments in these Asian coun­tries — due in part to its mono­lithic con­struct — where do we cur­rently find ourselves?

Wal­ter Mignolo: I have argued that we are already liv­ing in a poly­centric world with a com­mon eco­nomy described as “cap­it­al­ist”; an eco­nomy based on growth and devel­op­ment first, dis­reg­ard­ing the con­sequences of achiev­ing these goals: war, poverty, inequal­ity, dimin­ish­ing levels of edu­ca­tion and health care, food crises, pois­on­ing of the envir­on­ment, etc. How­ever, there is no longer a single ideo­logy (lib­er­al­ism or neo-​liberalism) guid­ing eco­nomic polit­ics. Bey­ond lib­er­al­ism and neo-​liberalism — which is embraced by the US and the core coun­tries of the European Union, as well as other States on the peri­phery (such as Colom­bia and Chile) — China and Singa­pore have embraced Con­fucian­ism as a counter ideo­logy to neo-​liberalism. In Malay­sia and Indone­sia, the ques­tion has become how to artic­u­late Islam­ism and cap­it­al­ism without becom­ing lib­eral or neo-​liberal. With less emphasis on the eco­nomy, a sim­ilar pro­cess is cur­rently tak­ing place in Iran. In Brazil and Venezuela, coun­tries where polit­ical and eco­nomic con­trol is in the hands of people of European des­cent — whose back­ground is informed by Chris­tian­ity, Lib­er­al­ism and Marx­ism — these indi­vidu­als are now resort­ing to a national ideo­logy that is equi­val­ent to Con­fucian­ism in China and Singa­pore and Islam­ism in Malay­sia and Indone­sia. In India you will find a State Cor­por­ate Cap­it­al­ism foun­ded on Hinduism and in Rus­sia a State Cor­por­ate Cap­it­al­ism foun­ded on Slav­ism and the Ortho­dox Church. The main prob­lem with cap­it­al­ism in the West is that lib­er­al­ism and neo-​liberalism have col­lapsed. West­ern cap­it­al­ism prospered thanks to European colo­nial expan­sion and the US fol­lowed that model of colo­ni­al­ism, though without the colon­ies. The logic of colo­ni­al­ity (eco­nomic growth based on the appro­pri­ation of land, the extrac­tion of nat­ural resources and the exploit­a­tion of labor in the non-​Euro-​US world) that was estab­lished and con­trolled by the West for 500 years has now spun out of con­trol. China, Malay­sia, Indone­sia and Brazil are no longer places simply to be exploited, as they have con­struc­ted their own eco­nom­ies (and, you might say, have them­selves become exploiters). The increased num­ber of play­ers has reduced the capa­city of the EU and US to make a profit at the cost of other nations’ losses. The turn toward spec­u­la­tion in the real estate mar­ket, and the con­struc­tion of fin­an­cial castles in the air, were not ran­dom phe­nom­ena: these were the neces­sary con­sequences of failed attempts to secure growth the old fash­ion way. This is why the crisis in the EU and US has not rep­lic­ated itself in other countries.

The defense of cap­it­al­ism has become a major dilemma: either you’re left with the “invis­ible hand” that cre­ated the con­di­tions for legal cor­por­ate cor­rup­tion like Enron a few years ago and more recently Wall Street (“junk mort­gages” and the fin­an­cial crisis in which we are still enmeshed) or a “strong State” whose reg­u­la­tions restrict the free will of the indi­vidual and oppose demo­cracy. This is a ser­i­ous dilemma. And I do not see any way out of it, unless you delink from the West­ern logic that is com­mon to both polit­ical the­ory and the polit­ical eco­nomy: the invis­ible hand that priv­ileges the eco­nomy (lib­er­al­ism, neo-​liberalism) and the strong state that priv­ileges reg­u­la­tions (social­ism, com­mun­ism). Another logic is needed, and that logic is deco­lo­ni­al­ity. Sukarno under­stood this when at the Bandung Con­fer­ence he pro­posed neither cap­it­al­ism nor com­mun­ism, but decolonization.

Today the major eco­nom­ies of West­ern Europe, the US and China share the assump­tion that there are no his­tor­ical future hori­zons other than “growth and devel­op­ment.” Why should “growth and devel­op­ment” be the only game in town when it has con­tin­ued to cre­ate increased eco­nomic inequal­ity, wars to secure nat­ural resources and has incited people to believe that hap­pi­ness con­sists of acquir­ing com­mod­it­ies. A mul­ti­pli­city of options within cap­it­al­ism does not really cre­ate more free­dom. A mul­ti­pli­city of options does not bene­fit the cli­ent. It is the com­pany mak­ing the products that bene­fits. And then what are the real costs of “growth and devel­op­ment” and con­sumer­ism? “Growth and devel­op­ment” is a rhet­oric that bene­fits those who devote their lives to increas­ing their wealth (either by eco­nomic or polit­ical means, or both) while hid­ing the fact that growth and devel­op­ment increases poverty. What should replace it? An eco­nomy (non-​capitalist) that serves the well-​being of the people and the life of the planet, rather than an eco­nomy that serves well one sec­tor of the population.

Due to the increas­ing unsus­tain­ab­il­ity of devel­op­ment, in Latin Amer­ica we are wit­ness­ing a struggle between the polit­ical soci­ety and the transna­tional cor­por­a­tions. One of the primary instances of this struggle is seen in the min­ing sec­tor. And some of the most impress­ive out­comes have been social organ­iz­a­tions such as “Jui­cio Ético Pop­u­lar to the Transna­tional Cor­por­a­tions.” There is rel­at­ively little inform­a­tion avail­able in lan­guages other than in Span­ish about these pro­cesses, but the main point is that min­ing pois­ons the land and water, cre­at­ing lakes filled with cyan­ide and mer­cury that have been used to wash metals (gold, cop­per, coltan, pre­cious stones, etc.) from the rocks. The long-​term health-​effects in these areas are dev­ast­at­ing, not only in terms of the pro­lif­er­a­tion of can­cer and leuk­emia rates among adults, but in the ever-​increasing num­ber of new­borns with ser­i­ous birth defects. We have seen sim­ilar res­ults in Congo, as the defense of cap­it­al­ism and private prop­erty brings the addi­tional factor of mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion. And what is it all used for? Mod­ern tech­no­logy, from com­puters to cell phones and ipods, depend on cer­tain types of metals. And of course the expand­ing “lux­ury industry,” which is no longer lim­ited to the very wealthy, but has become a mar­ket pos­sib­il­ity for the middle class in China, Singa­pore, Hong Kong and other regions with grow­ing eco­nom­ies. Argen­tina has not reached the level of Congo’s crisis, but the logic is the same: the eth­ics of cap­it­al­ism is no longer (if it ever was) the Prot­est­ant Eth­ics invoked by Max Weber to explain the spirit of capitalism.

Chris­topher Mat­tison: Shift­ing from Latin Amer­ica and Africa, where is China in the midst of these eco­nomic devel­op­ments in rela­tion to the rest of Asia and the US?

Wal­ter Mignolo: China has evolved into a State cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy (or State Cor­por­ate Cap­it­al­ism, as The Eco­nom­ist would have it), but a ver­sion that is quite dif­fer­ent from the State cap­it­al­ism of the Soviet Union and Chair­man Mao’s pro­ject. The Soviet Union and Mao were engaged in a State eco­nomy with a com­mun­ist hori­zon. China is run­ning a State eco­nomy with a cap­it­al­ist hori­zon. So, the first dif­fer­ence between the “West” — and here I mean the eco­nomic and polit­ical heart of the European Union (Ger­many, France and Eng­land) and the US — is that the former priv­ileged free mar­ket eco­nomy was taken to the extreme by neo-​liberalism in terms of the eco­nomy and the neo-​cons in polit­ics. What the “West” and “East Asia” have in com­mon is cap­it­al­ism; the State has had much more to say in the “East” than in the neo-​liberal West over the past 30 years. You can make a case that China’s eco­nomic inter­ven­tion in Africa is cer­tainly as destruct­ive as US and EU inter­ven­tion in Iraq, Afgh­anistan, Kosovo, Libya, etc. Cap­it­al­ism is cap­it­al­ism and the related insti­tu­tions con­tinue to pre­vail over the lives of bil­lions of people. How­ever, there is no Chinese mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion in Africa up to this point.

The other dif­fer­ence is that, until recently, China had a strong eco­nomy but did not have the abil­ity to con­front the UN, the IMF and the G8 — it has been over­ruled by the know­ledge, struc­ture and his­tory that cre­ated these insti­tu­tions. This is no longer the case. Yes, China can be accused of viol­at­ing human rights in Nepal and Tibet; and the US can be accused of viol­at­ing human rights in Guantanamo, Vieques, Iraq and Afgh­anistan. And it is true that China and vari­ous cor­por­a­tions, sup­por­ted by the State in the EU and the US, will be fight­ing for land to “com­bat” and “profit from” the food crisis. In the first case, you have the polit­ical viol­a­tion of human rights, and in the second the eco­nomic viol­a­tion of human rights. And there is no way out unless the value-​horizon of the cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy (which means: suc­ceed, buy more, be first, be big­ger and do not let the com­pet­i­tion sur­pass you) is altered to an eco­nomy where the final hori­zon is the well-​being of people and the sur­vival of nature. We may be mov­ing in that dir­ec­tion, not because of some form of new global green revolu­tion, but because the infin­ite growth that is required for a cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy to be able to main­tain its val­ues and the dream of con­tinual pro­gress and hap­pi­ness has ended. It has ended because of the crisis that we’re cur­rently exper­i­en­cing — the dif­fi­culties, if not lack of abil­ity, of the EU to sus­tain its pro­ject and of the US’s sky rock­et­ing debt. Mil­lions of con­sumers have been forced out of the mar­ket because they do not have money to spend. This has a global impact and dir­ectly affects imports and exports, which, in turn, affects the pro­duc­tion of “more” of anything.

The eco­nomy of “more” is no longer sus­tain­able and the un-​sustainability of “devel­op­ment” has been poin­ted out repeatedly, based on devel­op­ments in Africa, Latin Amer­ica, even in the US/​EU and across the Carib­bean. But the crit­ics who have been point­ing this out remain largely ignored. Well, now it is his­tory sup­port­ing the cri­tique of “devel­op­ment.” There are no argu­ments or cri­tiques that will replace the cap­it­al­ist hori­zon of val­ues — it is simply his­tory as it is cur­rently occur­ring. Cri­tiques are help­ful to under­stand what’s going on, but the cri­tique itself will not change the minds of those who are mak­ing decisions under the belief that the crisis will soon pass and that unbridled growth will con­tinue, employ­ment levels will rise, we’ll all be able to con­sume again just like in the good old days. We’ll all be happy again, pro­tec­ted by the angel of progress.

Chris­topher Mat­tison: Sus­tain­ab­il­ity in any form is dif­fi­cult to main­tain without col­lab­or­at­ive part­ners, which often leads to power dif­fer­en­tials in which one side is imme­di­ately or even­tu­ally con­sumed, sup­planted or at least bruised by the other.

Wal­ter Mignolo: Sus­tain­ab­il­ity is unsus­tain­able in a world of com­pet­i­tion. I am begin­ning to under­stand, after sev­eral vis­its to Hong Kong and Beijing (and of course, being informed by the lit­er­at­ure on the topic), that the Hong Kong/​China rela­tion­ship par­al­lels what I have encountered in Puerto Rico vis-à-vis the US. There are in both places, in Hong Kong and Puerto Rico, many people who feel per­fectly com­fort­able with the cur­rent state of affairs. And then there are oth­ers who are not quite so com­fort­able. Fur­ther­more, the his­tory of colo­ni­al­ism in Hong Kong and Puerto Rico dif­fers greatly when com­par­ing the memor­ies of west­ern dis­rup­tion and the Opium War in Chinese his­tory. The point I want to make run­ning through this quick com­par­ison is that in Hong Kong its memor­ies must nego­ti­ate a doubled colo­ni­al­ity, that of the Brit­ish and China in the past, and of China and the “West” (in the sense I just described) in the present. For Puerto Rico, on the other hand, there is the his­tory of Span­ish colo­ni­al­ism up to the end of the nine­teenth cen­tury and of US colo­ni­al­ism ever since. In other words, Puerto Rico’s past has been shaped by one form of West­ern colo­ni­al­ity; Puerto Rico hasn’t had to nego­ti­ate with China. The bot­tom line is that the power dif­fer­en­tial among imper­ial coun­tries, that is, the com­plex rela­tions estab­lished by the colo­nial dif­fer­ence (Puerto Rico and Hong Kong vis-à-vis the imper­ial coun­tries of their past and present) and the imper­ial dif­fer­ence (the power dif­fer­en­tial between West­ern imper­i­al­ism and the rise of Japan [since 1895] and China) over the past 30 years. There is yet another sig­ni­fic­ant par­al­lel that con­trib­utes to the cur­rent global world (dis)order. I have noticed that small coun­tries in East and South East Asia fear that China will take over and con­sequently they are lean­ing toward the US as a coun­ter­bal­ance. In South Amer­ica and the Carib­bean it is exactly the oppos­ite (with the excep­tion of Colom­bia, Peru and Chile) — US polit­ics have been dev­ast­at­ing since the 1950s, with mil­it­ar­iz­a­tion, the IMF and World Bank gen­er­at­ing wide­spread debt and poverty. China and Iran, which are huge prob­lems for the US, are wel­come part­ners for most South Amer­ican and Carib­bean countries.

Many experts have made the claim that China will take over the lead­er­ship of the world in the next 30 to 50 years; some spec­u­late that it will hap­pen even sooner. That is to say, in this scen­ario China would over­come and sup­plant the US in the same way that the US sup­planted Eng­land, and Eng­land sup­planted Spain. I do not think this scen­ario will occur, for a couple of reas­ons. First, the scen­ario in which China becomes the next hege­mon — as Italian his­tor­ian Gio­vanni Arrighi sus­pec­ted based on the his­tory of West­ern cap­it­al­ism — would require that his­tor­ical cap­it­al­ism, with a pre­cise lin­ear his­tory, must cross eth­nic lines with no dis­rup­tions. Thus, his­tor­ical cap­it­al­ism in the West went from Spain and Por­tugal to Hol­land, from Hol­land to Eng­land and France and from Eng­land to the US, man­aged by the same ethno-​class of vari­ous nation­al­it­ies. This is the his­tory of a shared eth­ni­city and reli­gion: white, European and Chris­tian (Cath­olic or Prot­est­ant). China is a com­pletely other story. When cap­it­al­ism crossed the Pacific to China, the ethno-​class man­aging the eco­nomy was no longer con­tained within the same fam­ily: cap­it­al­ism is divided by the racial lines that Europeans them­selves cre­ated. Chinese are “yel­low” in the West­ern ima­gin­ary. And being yel­low and non-​Christian, accord­ing to European estab­lished racial clas­si­fic­a­tions, was to be one level below “nor­mal.” This ima­gin­ary is quite power­ful since the “West” has been in con­trol of the know­ledge base that inven­ted and sus­tained this clas­si­fic­a­tion. In other words, between China’s present and future imper­i­al­ism and the West’s past and present imper­i­al­ism, there is the ques­tion of race; that is, of racism in the West­ern cos­mo­logy. Thus, this means that nego­ti­ations between the EU and the US on the one hand, and China on the other, are not simply polit­ical and eco­nomic, but racial. And racism (as Kis­hore Mah­bubani in Singa­pore makes clear), is an enorm­ous factor. Bey­ond eco­nomic and polit­ical nego­ti­ations, the Chinese gov­ern­ment, uni­ver­sit­ies, intel­lec­tu­als and politi­cians must, it seems to me, dis­mantle and over­come the racial ima­gin­ary that is inter­fer­ing with eco­nomic and polit­ical negotiations.

The second factor has two out­comes. One is that the US and the European Union, even in a time of crisis, will main­tain a strong eco­nomy and a con­tin­ued his­tory of polit­ical organ­iz­a­tion. It will be dif­fi­cult for China to over­come this and replace the US as the next world leader. I think that the era in which one State or group of States (Eng­land, France, Ger­many, Spain) leads the world is over. The future is of neces­sity polycentric.

Chris­topher Mat­tison: What is the basis for this poly­centric newer world order and what do you pre­dict will be China’s role?

Wal­ter Mignolo: Cer­tainly China is shift­ing the world order in the sense that decisions con­cern­ing the eco­nomy and inter­na­tional rela­tions will no longer be made solely by West­ern (US/​EU) insti­tu­tions. The struggle here is for know­ledge. The pro­mo­tion of Zhu Min to the IMF is one such example. Thirty years ago, this appoint­ment was unthink­able, and if it had happened, the appoint­ment might very well have been motiv­ated by a “demo­cratic” feel­ing of involving people bey­ond the US (and at that time not even Europe), seated in the IMF offices. If this appoint­ment would have happened in the near past, the appointee would have been expec­ted to agree with the decisions made by the west­ern mem­bers, who believed they had the author­ity to decide what is good for the entire world, and spe­cific­ally for the US and the cor­por­ate and fin­an­cial elites work­ing with and within the gov­ern­ment. Zhu Min obvi­ously was not appoin­ted under these con­di­tions and we can­not expect him to be quiet and fol­low orders. He has already stated pub­licly that the IMF has his­tor­ic­ally only paid atten­tion to west­ern interests. Many people have been say­ing this all along, but now there is a Chinese eco­nom­ist occupy­ing a high pos­i­tion within the insti­tu­tion, backed by a gov­ern­ment that has gained enough con­fid­ence to warn the US to con­trol their desire for spend­ing and to restrict their defense budget.

What does this all amount to? The world before 1500 was eco­nom­ic­ally non-​capitalist and poly­centric. From 1500 to 2000, the rise of the Atlantic eco­nomy made Europe the cen­ter of the World and estab­lished an eco­nomic basis for the nar­rat­ive of West­ern civil­iz­a­tion and West­ern imper­ial expan­sion. This was a period of mono­topic cap­it­al­ism that remains an eco­nomy based on Chris­tian (in spite of Chris­tian detach­ment from mater­i­al­ity) and, since the eight­eenth cen­tury, sec­u­lar West­ern val­ues. Although Chris­tian­ity is an East­ern reli­gion both in terms of its ori­gin­a­tion (Jesus was from Naz­areth) and its insti­tu­tion­al­iz­a­tion under emperor Con­stantine, in Istan­bul (Con­stantinople), it was the Roman Papacy that played a fun­da­mental role after Alex­an­der the VI appro­pri­ated and divided the planet — the Tordesilla Treat­ise in 1494, and in 1529 the Zar­agoza Treaty. Alex­an­der VI divided the planet between Indias Occi­dentales (Amer­ica) and Indias Ori­entales (Asia). West­ern Civil­iz­a­tion and cap­it­al­ism flour­ished in that frame. Since 2000, the world order has become poly­centric and inter­con­nec­ted through cap­it­al­ist eco­nom­ies. This means that cap­it­al­ism is no longer attached to the cos­mo­logy of West­ern civil­iz­a­tion; that is, to West­ern his­tory and memor­ies (from the Renais­sance on with Rome and Greece as found­a­tional pil­lars, notice how Istan­bul and Jer­u­s­alem were erased from the West­ern ima­gin­ary) and to Chris­tian­ity and its muta­tion into sec­u­lar lib­er­al­ism con­tested by sec­u­lar socialism/​communism. This is, in part, why Con­fucian­ism is being re-​inscribed in China, why Islam is being altered to accom­mod­ate cap­it­al­ism (Malay­sia, Indone­sia) and how African cap­it­al­ism is invok­ing a revival of Pan-​Africanism. All of this is what I refer to as dewest­ern­iz­a­tion, and dewest­ern­iz­a­tion means that we are already in the pro­cess of a present and future poly­centric world in which West­ern civil­iz­a­tion is one of the cen­ters, but no longer the lead­ing one.

Par­al­lel to dewest­ern­iz­a­tion and rewest­ern­iz­a­tion (which refers to the US’s and EU’s efforts to main­tain the lead­er­ship they had for 500 years) is a third tra­ject­ory which is being expressed through the upris­ings in Tunisia, Egypt, Greece, Spain, Lon­don and, before that, in Bolivia and Ecuador (see pre­vi­ously, “Jui­cio Etico”). I view these insur­gen­cies as the emer­gence of a global polit­ical soci­ety and the grow­ing tra­ject­ory of a global deco­lo­ni­al­ity. Now, we can­not expect that of these three tra­ject­or­ies one will end up vic­tori­ous and rul­ing over the oth­ers. They will co-​exist in con­flict­ive rela­tions for a good num­ber of years. China can­not rule the world by itself, the US and the EU can­not rule the world by them­selves, and the deco­lo­nial global soci­ety will con­tinue to exert pres­sure on global insti­tu­tions and local gov­ern­ments to remind them that there is 90% of the world’s pop­u­la­tion bey­ond the 10% who con­tinue to argue among them­selves about the effort to rewest­ern­ize the world and the related efforts to dewest­ern­ize. There is, of course, more than these three major tra­ject­or­ies, such as the grow­ing move­ment to decol­on­ize reli­gion and lib­er­ate spir­itu­al­ity. The local and global lefts are remap­ping them­selves after the col­lapse of the Soviet Union, women from the third world and Islamic women are respond­ing to the per­sist­ence of the pat­ri­archy, etc. All of this is what I refer to as the global polit­ical soci­ety, the 80% of the planet left out of the State and the Mar­ket becom­ing more and more aware of what colo­ni­al­ity means. And colo­ni­al­ity is no longer a West­ern issue; it is also behind Chinese and East Asian cap­it­al­ism, Islam and cap­it­al­ism and Pan-​Africanism and capitalism.

Chris­topher Mat­tison: You have called for a refusal of life rafts to these insti­tu­tions that are based on cap­it­al­ism; in part because “People start to believe that suc­cess is to be part of an insti­tu­tion and to accu­mu­late wealth. If in order to accu­mu­late wealth you have to des­troy the envir­on­ment, you do it.” This reads a bit reduct­ively to me and places the argu­ment in a tight corner. There cer­tainly are insti­tu­tional mod­els based on accu­mu­la­tion at all cost, but aren’t there also an expand­ing num­ber of insti­tu­tions based on what you refer to as an “eco­nomy of scarcity” or “reci­pro­city,” as opposed to an “eco­nomy of accu­mu­la­tion.” Or am I think­ing too optim­ist­ic­ally here? Wouldn’t it make more sense to con­vert the exist­ing insti­tu­tions than to call for their demoli­tion? De-​colonial upcycling?

Wal­ter Mignolo: The over­all tend­ency, bey­ond the defense of cap­it­al­ism, is that the world is in need of a “new paradigm.” What this calls for is a hori­zon of life that will guide both the remod­el­ing of the cur­rent insti­tu­tions and the cre­ation of new insti­tu­tions. Briefly stated, the paradigm of “growth and devel­op­ment” (in its wide diversity, mani­fest­a­tions and gray zones) is being con­fron­ted by the paradigm of “life, to live in plen­it­ude, in har­mony among people and with nature.” This might seem very New Age and romantic from a hard-​core cap­it­al­ist view­point. But it doesn’t actu­ally con­tain much of the New Age: it is the same for­mula that has been shift­ing people all over the world, not just the well known “indignados” — the mil­lions of people in Latin Amer­ica and Africa that are fight­ing against gov­ern­ments and their sup­port of transna­tional cor­por­a­tions, which are exploit­ing labor, pois­on­ing rivers and fumig­at­ing fields with car­ci­no­gens. When I talk about put­ting the horse in front of the cart, I mean that “to live in plen­it­ude and in har­mony” should take pre­ced­ence, and that the eco­nomy and polit­ics should fol­low suit. On a small scale, this is what the Zapatis­tas in Mex­ico have been doing for 16 years. Fur­ther­more, there is an ever-​increasing num­ber of schol­ars around the world who are cre­at­ing insti­tu­tions and pro­du­cing know­ledge for the pur­pose of mov­ing in the dir­ec­tion of “life” and abandon­ing the paradigm of “growth.”

There are vari­ous co-​existing pro­jects and we should get used to see­ing them in their sin­gu­lar­ity and in their con­flict­ive inter­ac­tions rather than to think that there is only one world or that the world should be homo­gen­eous. We are already liv­ing on a planet in which many worlds co-​exist. This coex­ist­ence, unfor­tu­nately, is not paci­fist in nature, but con­flict­ive and viol­ent. There are numer­ous insti­tu­tions and organ­iz­a­tions that lead to what I will call, fol­low­ing John Rawls’s ter­min­o­logy, “hon­est liberals” — to which we can add “hon­est Chris­ti­ans” and “hon­est Marx­ists.” This is what I refer to as West­ern Civil­iz­a­tion. But of course you have Chris­ti­ans and Marx­ists in China (and per­haps you can identify some lib­er­als too), in Africa, Malay­sia and Indone­sia. What I was attempt­ing to do is to draw dif­fer­ent para­met­ers in order to under­stand the world order. And cer­tainly there are and will be insti­tu­tional changes due pre­cisely to the con­flict between the three tra­ject­or­ies I have out­lined, along with the impossib­il­ity of the global eco­nomy to main­tain con­stant growth and to limit immig­ra­tion within the nation-​states, as deman­ded by rad­ical cap­it­al­ism and the extreme right. Dia­logue of Civil­iz­a­tions pre­sup­posed a single prin­ciple: that no rights legit­im­iz­ing a world­view should become The World View. And once we accept this prin­ciple, there will be no need for the States to struggle to impose their views over the other or for the cor­por­a­tions to impose one type of eco­nomy that favors the cor­por­a­tions and not the people. Because of this, today we have the fin­an­cial crisis; the “global out­raged” (indig­na­dos) and fears about the pro­lif­er­a­tion of nuc­lear weapons dec­ades after the US bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

My ref­er­ence to pla­cing insti­tu­tions first and life second refers to the agents and insti­tu­tions that are mak­ing the decisions on Wall Street, the European Union, the G8, the IMF and the people who con­greg­ate around Davos. The insti­tu­tions that rule the world are rep­res­en­ted at Davos, the G8, the Food Sum­mit and the Envir­on­mental Sum­mit. When Evo Mor­ales fol­lowed up on the fail­ure of the Sum­mit in Copen­ha­gen with one in Cochabamba, under the prin­ciple of put­ting Pachamama (Mother World) first, it had very little global impact. And in Bolivia it was, inter­est­ingly enough, the Left that cri­ti­cized the sum­mit, call­ing them “Pachamami­cos,” mean­ing romantics and ideal­ists who are attempt­ing to stifle eco­nomic devel­op­ment in Bolivia. Indian intel­lec­tu­als respon­ded to the white Left by call­ing them “Mod­er­ni­cos” (a derog­at­ory term that can be trans­lated as “modernistics”).

I am cer­tainly for build­ing; not for des­troy­ing. I mean that insti­tu­tions, like cap­it­al­ism, des­troy nature and human life to increase wealth. But we need both courses of action sim­ul­tan­eously: to cre­ate new insti­tu­tions and to work within the ones we already have. As for “des­troy­ing” I did not mean — in your quote — that we have to des­troy insti­tu­tions. The accu­mu­la­tion of wealth in a cap­it­al­ist eco­nomy that requires nat­ural resources leads to the “destruc­tion of the envir­on­ment.” And here we have the cart in front of the horse again. Now, to change insti­tu­tions can be inter­preted in two dif­fer­ent dir­ec­tions. One is within our cur­rent civil­iz­a­tion, which I referred to in the pre­vi­ous answer — you work toward more reg­u­la­tions and pub­lic policy, the inten­tion of which is to pre­vent legal delin­quency, as with Wall Street, Enron or the hun­dreds of cases that were brought out into the open dur­ing the fin­an­cial crisis such as, for example, this art­icle on cor­rup­tion as a pos­sible con­trib­utor to the fin­an­cial crisis.

The other dir­ec­tion con­cerns trans­form­ing the exist­ing insti­tu­tions; chan­ging the terms and not simply the con­tent of the con­ver­sa­tion. This means that we (and I mean all of us on the planet) need a civil­iz­a­tional hori­zon that places the life of the planet, mean­ing our lives, too, first and the insti­tu­tions second. The point I was try­ing to make in the 2009 inter­view, which you men­tioned at the begin­ning of this dia­logue, is that cur­rently life is at the ser­vice of the insti­tu­tions, and what is needed is to put the insti­tu­tions at the ser­vice of life. If we achieve this, we will not have envir­on­mental cata­strophes like the BP spill in the Gulf of Mex­ico and numer­ous other dis­asters. We will not have prob­lems with the com­mer­cial­iz­a­tion of medi­cine and phar­ma­co­logy and the com­modi­fic­a­tion of food; that is, people mak­ing money off of treat­ing food and water as a com­mod­ity rather than as basic human rights.

The debates tak­ing place in Bolivia today are help­ful as part of this con­ver­sa­tion. One of the argu­ments of the debate is to “refund” the State. That is, in Bolivia the State is a modern/​colonial State fun­ded after “inde­pend­ence” from Spain, which trans­formed the Vice­roy­alty of Peru into sev­eral repub­lics (Peru and Bolivia among them). This was the moment of the “fund­a­tion” of the State. Now, Indian nations have taken their des­tiny in their own hands, a “refund­a­tion” of the State is being called for. That is, work­ing within the exist­ing insti­tu­tions. The other pos­i­tion of the debate is “to decol­on­ize the State” and decol­on­iz­ing the State means to cre­ate new insti­tu­tions and to accept that the State is not the unavoid­able form of a peace­ful and just gov­ern­ment. New insti­tu­tions must be cre­ated which serve the pur­pose of a civil­iz­a­tional hori­zon that puts life (and not wealth and mana­gerial polit­ical and eco­nomic con­trol) as the sov­er­eign goal of human exist­ence on the planet. More inter­est­ing in this debate is that the Bolivian State has recently turned toward dewest­ern­iz­a­tion: State cap­it­al­ism of a left­ist persuasion.

Wal­ter D. Mignolo is Wil­liam H. Wan­na­maker Dis­tin­guished Pro­fessor and Dir­ector of the Cen­ter for Global Stud­ies and the Human­it­ies at Duke Uni­ver­sity. He has been work­ing for the past 25 years on the form­a­tion and trans­form­a­tion of the modern/​colonial world sys­tem and on the idea of West­ern Civilization.

Chris­topher Mat­tison is a Vis­it­ing Fel­low at the Hong Kong Advanced Insti­tute for Cross-​Disciplinary Stud­ies (HKAICS) and co-​curator of its Hong Kong Atlas — an online archive of Hong Kong writing.

Ori­gin­ally pub­lished by the HKAICS.

Tags: Capitalism, China, Colonialism, Decolonialism, Latin America, Neoliberalism

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