PicoBlog

Coloniality is one of the constitutive and specific elements of the global matrix of capitalist power. It is founded on the imposition of a racial/ethnic classification of the world's population, serving as the cornerstone of such power. It operates on every material and subjective plane, sphere, and dimension of everyday social existence, doing so at a societal level [as well as planetary]. Coloniality originates and globalizes from [the colonization of what is now known as] America.

With the constitution of (Latin) America, at the same time and in the same historical movement, the emerging capitalist power becomes global. Its hegemonic centers are located in the areas located on the Atlantic—which will later be identified as Europe—As central axes of its new pattern of domination, coloniality, and modernity are also established. In short, with (Latin) America, capitalism becomes global and Eurocentric. Coloniality and modernity are installed and intimately associated as the constitutive axes of capitalism’s specific matrix of power, until today.

In the course of the deployment of these characteristics of the current [matrix of] power, the new societal identities of coloniality—Indians, blacks, olives, yellows, whites, mestizo—and the geocultural identities of colonialism were configured, such as America, Africa, the Far East, the Near East (Asia later), the West or Europe (Western Europe later). The corresponding intersubjective relations, in which the experiences of colonialism and coloniality merged with the needs of capitalism, were configured as a new universe of intersubjective relations of domination under Eurocentric hegemony. That specific universe is what will later be called modernity

Since the seventeenth century, in the main hegemonic centers of that global matrix of power, it is not by chance that Holland (Descartes, Spinoza) and England (Locke, Newton), from that intersubjective universe [of modernity/coloniality], a way of producing knowledge was elaborated and formalized that gave an account of the cognitive needs of capitalism: measurement, quantification, externalization (or objectification) of the knowable with respect to the knower. [This dominant way of knowing the world was used] for the control of the type of relations people had with nature and between them with respect to nature, especially the ownership of resources and means of production. Within this same orientation, the experiences, identities, and historical relations of coloniality, as well as the geocultural distribution of world capitalist power were also formally naturalized.

This mode of knowledge was, by its character and origin, Eurocentric. Called rational, it was imposed and admitted throughout the capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as the emblem of modernity. The main lines of this cognitive perspective have been maintained, notwithstanding the changes in its specific contents and the criticisms and debates, throughout the duration of the world power of colonial and modern capitalism. That is the modernity/rationality that is now, finally, in crisis.

Eurocentrism, therefore, is not the cognitive perspective of Europeans exclusively, or only of the dominant ones of world capitalism, but also of all those educated under its hegemony. And although it implies an ethnocentric component, this does not explain it, nor is it its main source of meaning. It is about the cognitive perspective produced in the longue durée of the Eurocentered world of colonial/modern capitalism, which naturalizes the experience of the people in this matrix of power. That is, it makes them perceive said experiences as natural, consequently as given, not susceptible to be questioned.

Since the eighteenth century, especially with the Enlightenment, Eurocentrism has been affirming the mythological idea that Europe was pre-existent to this matrix of power, that it was already a world center of capitalism that subsequently colonized the rest of the world and elaborated modernity and rationality on its own and from within. And that in that quality, Europe and the Europeans were the most advanced moment and level in the linear, unidirectional and continuous path of the species. Along with this idea, another nuclei of Eurocentric coloniality/modernity was consolidated: a conception of humanity according to which the world's population was differentiated into inferior and superior, irrational and rational, primitive and civilized, traditional and modern.

Later, especially since the mid-nineteenth century and despite the continued unfolding of the globalization of capitalism, the hegemonic perspective excised the world totality of capitalist power, including the longue durée of its reproduction, change, and crisis. The place of global capitalism was taken by the nation-state and the relations between nation-states, not only as a unit of analysis but as the only valid approach to understanding capitalism. Not only from liberal perspectives but also from so-called historical materialism, the most widespread and most Eurocentric of the strands derived from Marx’s heterogeneous knowledge production.

The intellectual revolt against this perspective and against this Eurocentric mode of producing knowledge was never exactly absent, particularly in Latin America. But it did not really take off until after the Second World War, beginning, of course, in the dominated and dependent areas of the capitalist world. When it comes to power, it is always from the margins that it tends to be seen most, and earliest, because it calls into question the totality of the field of relations and meanings that constitutes such powe. [These are the geopolitical implications of “thinking from” exteriority as Enrique Dussel and Juan José Bautista Segalés propose, which is anterior to ethically thinking with others (south-south dialogues). Exteriority refers to the systematically excluded geographies, histories, and struggles]

From Latin America, undoubtedly the most influential of the attempts to show once again the globality [or planetarity] of capitalism was the proposal of Raúl Prebisch and his associates to think of capitalism as a world system differentiated into "center" and "periphery." It was taken up and reworked by Immanuel Wallerstein, whose theoretical proposal of the "modern world-system" is advanced from a perspective where the Marxian vision of capitalism as a world system converges with the Braudelian conception of the longue durée of history. In the social science research of the last quarter of the twentieth century, this theoretical proposal has decisively reopened and renewed the debate on the reconstitution of a global perspective [planetary perspective].

In this new context, other components of the Latin American debate are active today, pointing towards a new idea of social-historical totality, the core of a non-Eurocentric rationality. Mainly, these debates are centered on the coloniality of power and the historical-structural heterogeneity of all spheres of social existence.

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