Modernity in the 20th century was realized in two forms – the liberal/capitalist modernity and the socialist/statist one. Russia is living aside the socialist version of coloniality to engage in an alternative version within global capitalism. When the US took over the leadership from England and France, after World War II, the mission was to develop the ‘underdeveloped’ countries and to modernize the traditional ones. This third stage was the developmental and modernizing mission. It had a strong competition with another modernizing and developmental mission called socialism. Soviet modernity proved to be even more effective than its Western companion. Historically, the colonial matrix had followed a serpentine, not a vector trajectory. It unfolded not just in the Western empires, from Spain and Portugal, to Holland, France and Britain, to the U.S., but also — in a transmuted form – in the Russian and, particularly, in the Soviet modernity. Starting from the 16th century and more intensively, from Peter the Great, Russia had been transforming gradually into a subaltern, second-rate empire which adapted the Western model of modernity, civilization. Conceptually, coloniality is the hidden side of modernity. Coloniality is indeed the hidden weapon behind the rhetoric of modernity justifying all kinds of actions, including war, in order to eliminate ‘barbarism’ and overcome ‘tradition’. Thus, coloniality is, like the unconscious, the hidden weapon of both the civilizing and developmental mission of modernity. Historically, coloniality came into being in the 16th century, with the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit, the European appropriation of land, the massive exploitation of labor, the slave trade, the extraction of gold and silver, and the plantation economy. It was not at that time a projected global design. Coloniality emerged through processes by means of which the Spaniards and the Portuguese created a new social order, the colonial organization of society based on racial hierarchy. This hierarchy was founded on the invaders’ control of knowledge. The colonial organization of society consisted in submitting the native population to the management and control of the invading country. In the case of the New World, a massive contingent of enslaved Africans was added. Along with the end of Soviet modernity distopia there is another crucial moment in the enfolding of global modernity/coloniality, which is taking place in front of our own eyes as the reproduction of the colonial matrix of power is being ‘diversified’, so to speak. Diversification means that the colonial matrix is out of the control of the Western imperial states that created it and made it work for the last five centuries. Diversified or polycentric world order means that, in contrast with the world order that existed thirty years ago, the economic nodes, which are no longer following the instructions and recommendations of the World Bank and the IMF, are already unfolding globally. This also means that the struggle for authority and control is no longer between the European imperial centers (WWI) or the European imperial center and a peripheral one (Japan); or the conflagration between liberal capitalism and socialist economy that polarized the world during the Cold War and opened up the space for the non-aligned countries (basically the Third World). While the era of the liberal and secular civilizing mission opened up the doors to its opposite, the socialist civilizing mission, the Washington Consensus and the invasion of Iraq, disguised as a war against terrorism (an example of rhetoric of modernity to justify the control of authority and natural resources), took the colonial matrix of power out of the Western hands, including its socialist version. We do not know how the polycentric world order will manifest itself in different locales in the future, but it is clear that the era of the peaceful co-existence between theology and mercantile and free-trade capitalism in the 16th and 17th century Western nations, of the cohabitation of secular liberalism and industrial capitalism after the 18th century; and the complicity between the technological revolution and neo-liberalism at the end of the 20th century — in short, the 500 years of Western imperial domination — is ending. Yet, the colonial matrix of power is not going away. Coloniality will remain as long as the final horizon of human life is guided by the desire to accumulate capital. The control of authority will continue, disguised by a rhetoric of progress, happiness, development and the end of poverty, and will justify the huge amounts of energy and money spent on the conflicts between the centers ruled by the capitalist economy. Polycentric world order has made obsolete the modern idea of ‘revolution’, for two reasons. One is that in polycentric world order, in spite of the competition for control of authority, there is no more room for an idea of revolution that will consist in taking control of the state (like the bourgeoisie did in Europe over the monarchy; the Bolsheviks over the Russians Czars; like the Creole from European descent (except in Haiti) did in the Americas since the end of the 18th century; or the natives did in Asia and Africa, during the era of decolonization, after WWII). There is one sense of the word ‘revolution’ that is seldom mentioned: the colonial revolution, or the revolution of coloniality. This kind of revolution started in the 16th century and does not consist in overruling something previous within the same history, but in erasing in order to build something new: the New World, metaphorically, the modern/colonial world. That revolution took place subsequently in Asia and in Africa, when European powers arrived with the tools of the empire; and unfolds today when the US and transnational corporations arrive with their juggernaut to dismantle the environment in search of natural resources and the colonization of the last remaining subject of colonization: life itself. Within the liberal model of social organization, we can imagine a triangle with ‘The State’ in the top angle and ‘the Economy’ and the ‘Civil Society’ in the two base angles. One of the basic components of the civil society is ‘Education’, which feeds the state and the market. From a decolonial perspective, education could be divided into ‘instruction’ (skill, knowledge for practical purposes) and ‘nurturing’ (knowledge and understanding for personal and collective well-being). The ‘Civil Society’ communicates with ‘the State’ and ‘the Market’ and vice-versa. So we can imagine double arrows connecting the first with the last two. However, the double arrow that connects ‘the State’ and ‘the Market’ constitutes the domains of ‘the untouchable’ to which members of the civil society have little access. Similar observations will be valid, below, when we refer to the ‘Political Society’ and de-colonial thinking. Instruction and education went hand in hand in both versions of the second phase of modernity; the liberal and the socialist (from the Enlightenment onwards). Instruction and education have as their goal the training of skillful professionals and the nurturing of either liberal or socialist subjects. Neo-liberalism follows suit after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the figure of the ‘expert’ merged both instruction and nurturing. It is clear that the Soviet Union was a colossus with feet of clay that could easily collapse because of its own contradictory strategies and the time bomb of its ill-designed federalism. However, it is equally clear that the lack of immunity in the face of the intellectual and cultural colonization by Western modernity, which the USSR inherited from Russia, was systematically used in the Cold War for the gradual disintegration of the Soviet Union from within. The collapse of the Socialist system coincided with the beginning of a new epoch and became itself one of the many manifestations of the new face of global coloniality. In a way, Soviet modernity had completed its task and was dismantled. Soviet modernity refashioned the rhetoric of modernity in the language of socialism versus capitalism, but it reproduced the logic of coloniality in the control and management of its colonies, particularly the non-European, non-Christian, racialized colonies — in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Soviet modernity was an ultimately unsuccessful attempt at creating an alternative world, where nonetheless we can find the distorted reflections of all the elements of liberal capitalist modernity. Parallel to its rival, the Socialist world had been building its own successive forms of coloniality, which in the end only prove the derivative and mimicking nature of Soviet modernity. Thus, the Soviet division of labor was also partly based on the racial hierarchy. A number of scholars think that there was no idea of race in the USSR. But others demonstrate that in Soviet modernity race was replaced with ‘nation’, and accompanied by a developed racial politics, as the Bolsheviks inherited Eurocentrism, Orientalism and racism, from the Western socialism. The decolonization of the world in the mid 20th century was at first built into the existing system of the two modernities. What we encounter in postcolonial countries — after the second wave of decolonization — is mostly neocolonialism. The collapse of the Soviet system, even if incomplete as Russia even today retains several of its colonies and clings to the symbolic tokens of its former imperial grandeur, was the next act in this global show of imposing the new form of coloniality onto the world. In today’s conditions of the tectonic change from one power system, with the US as its center, to a new polycentric one, it is crucial that the colonized or better, the damnés, the nodes of border thinking in the world —establish dialogues and create networks globally. What is crucial here is not to try to find a better place in the existing global coloniality, but to destroy this coloniality and create an other world. It is an unavoidable process because coloniality carries in it the seeds of decolonial agency. Today’s global coloniality has slipped from the Western imperial hands. As the control of the economy (and therefore the control of labor and natural resources) is disputed by several countries in ‘North’ and ‘South’, the spheres of the control of authority (political and military) become contested and decentred as well. Instead of liberalism versus socialism, the rivalry over the control of authority in a polycentric world order has multiple orientations and leads to the re-inscription in the political arena of the conceptions of society and of life that have been pushed aside, disavowed or marginalized by imperial expansion of Christianity and liberalism (South America, India, North and Sub-Saharan Africa) and by Orthodox Christianity and socialism (Central Asia, Caucasus). The dispute for the control of knowledge is also at work: the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge are the emerging sites disputing the Western imperial hegemony of theo- and ego-politics of knowledge (Mignolo & Tlostanova 2006).
Posted on: Tue, 25 Nov 2014 03:22:38 +0000
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