I
Capitalism is a concept that emerged in Western Europe towards the end of the nineteenth century. It circulated in colonies and former colonies through European colonial expansion. It is a Euro-centered concept, created to address questions concerning European economies and their colonial expansion. Marx’s principal analytical terms were capital, capitalist (Kapitalist), and capitalist mode of production (kapitalistische Produktionsweise). There is a significant distinction between capitalist and capitalism. Both the economy of accumulation and its conceptualization traveled from Europe to the peripheries, where they also prompted responses. Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944), written from Trinidad and Tobago, is one such response. More recently, the Egyptian political economist Samir Amin used the concept of capitalism not to promote it, but to argue for disconnecting from it. His French term, la déconnexion, became delinking in English.

The Colonial Matrix of Power and the Coloniality of Power are concepts that emerged in the Third World (Aníbal Quijano, 1992) to address questions concerning the Third World. Unlike capitalism, they have not traveled readily to Europe, where they remain suspicious immigrant concepts [https://muse.jhu.edu/article/30745/pdf] They have, however, circulated widely across the former Third World, which accounts for about 75% of the world’s population. These concepts also made it possible to understand that the economy of accumulation, reinvestment, and growth named capitalism towards the end of the nineteenth century originated in the sixteenth century, through the conquest and colonization of the continent Europeans named America. Naming was itself part of conquest and colonization. It is not simply that America was conquered and colonized: “America” is a semiotic component of the economic, political, gnoseological, and religious conquest.
The argument extends further. In a key article co-authored by Aníbal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein, we read the following:

The creation of these geological entities, the Americas, was the constitutive act of the modern-world system. The Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas. [https://newuniversityinexileconsortium.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Quijano-and-Wallerstein-Americanity-as-a-Concept.pdf]

In my previous newsletter [https://buttondown.com/lodewalter/archive/can-euro-cenetered-scholars-understand-third/], I commented on Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven’s article, “Inverted Eurocentrism. The Consumption of Decolonization in the Global North and a Radical Decolonization Agenda.” I suggest that the end of her title needs the qualifier “in of from the Global North.” A critique of one position in favor of another also implies a commitment to the proposed alternative. What, then, is the position she seeks to defend?

Comments and meditations on delinking, coloniality, and the Global North reception of decolonial thought

"Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."Matthew 7:3–5

Decoloniality is not revenge, nor a renewed struggle for independence, but a strategy for transforming the narratives of domination that still endure. The term emerged in Latin America from the recognition that forms of colonialism persisted even after the formal relationship with Spain had ended. The key question is where decisions are made. In global health, that question is decisive [….] For this reason, decolonizing global health does not mean erasing the past, but changing the present. It means questioning exploitation, extraction, dispossession, and imposition when they are justified in the name of a supposed universal good. It also requires building an inclusive global architecture, one capable of placing affected populations at the center of decision-making (Rafael Vilasanjuan; italics mine, Decoloniality Against the Empire of Health)

Para Hamid Dabashi

I. Cuando el pensamiento emigra: el malestar europeo y la geopolítica del conocimiento

To Hamid Dabashi

I. When Thought Immigrates: European Discomfort and the Geopolitics of Knowledge

The title is necessarily broad. I know that are European scholars that engages Third World thinkers on their own terms. One of them was Jean-Paul Sartre. He recognized that Frantz Fanon speaks often about Europeans but never to them.

An old friend—literally, from my high-school years in Corral de Bustos—often travels to New York. From time to time, he comes to North Carolina and spends a couple of days with us. He likes the Triangle, a small Silicon Valley anchored by three universities at its vertices: North Carolina State University in Raleigh, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Duke University in Durham. I live on the outskirts of Chapel Hill, less than halfway to Hillsborough, a small town with a long memory of the Civil War. Along its streets, marble inscriptions on pedestals record dates, events, and the names of people involved in that history.

The day after he arrived, we decided to have an Argentine asado and enjoy one of those Carolina blue-sky days. As we chatted around the grill, drank a premium Malbec, and waited for the sausages and kidneys to cook slowly, he brought up “Capital Without Liberalism,” the newsletter he had read before visiting. He asked whether I had imagined a sequel—something like Capital Without Socialism. I had, but not seriously; it was still a floating idea. He went inside, returned with a notebook and pencil, and drew this equation:

 Abstract. This essay reads the “rules-based international order” as a Western myth, political creed, and incantation rather than as a clearly defined legal system. Written from the perspective of a decolonial semiotician, it begins with J.D. Vance’s Munich speech as a visible rupture inside the Western consensus, then distinguishes UN-based international law from the looser language of rules. The essay traces how the order is eroded from within and how Chinese and U.S. scholars offer parallel, unequally situated vocabularies for thinking beyond the Westphalian inheritance. It concludes by asking whether a multipolar world can build shared rules without turning plurality into another form of hierarchy.

I

The title names the problem this essay seeks to open rather than close. Capital without Liberalism does not suggest that capital would become harmless, although it could, once separated from Western liberal ideology, nor that it possesses a fixed moral essence of its own. It asks what becomes visible when capital is no longer assumed to belong naturally to liberalism, the market, possessive individualism, or the Western narrative of modernity.

Abstract: In this Newsletter I argue that the “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine does not express simple hemispheric nostalgia. It appears at a moment when Russia, China, and Iran no longer accept obedience to the U.S.-led order. Its attempt to secure control of the Western Hemisphere—with Ibero-America as the decisive zone—and to extend Monroe’s logic toward the Middle East and Eurasia does not show unlimited U.S. power; rather, it shows a power trying to encompass more than it can control.

Introduction

A change of era is recognized not only by the appearance of new events, but by the moment inherited categories no longer allow us to understand what is happening. What changes, then, is not only the world before us, but the form of reasoning through which that world becomes intelligible. This essay argues that the present change of era is marked by the waning authority of ontological reasoning, centered on separate entities, and the emergence of relational, decolonial reasoning, attentive to the webs that produce meaning, power, and political reality.

I first heard and read the expression in 2000 through José de Souza Silva [1], a Brazilian intellectual and activist. The concept named something more than a historical transformation: it pointed to the closure and displacement of an era of change that had begun five hundred years earlier, with the conquest and colonization of the New World. I encountered that intuition again in 2015, in the interventions of Pope Francis [2]. In this essay, I use the word avatars to name the concrete manifestations, figures, or diagnostic scenes through which that deeper transformation becomes visible.

The argument unfolds in three movements. First, the change of era appears as a crisis of the modern categories that organized the world for five hundred years. Second, that crisis becomes visible in the contemporary dispute over meaning, where facts acquire political efficacy through narratives, classifications, and authorities. Third, Ukraine, Hormuz, and Iran can be read as differentiated scenes in which two modes of thinking confront each other. Ukraine shows how relational analysis can be misread as taking sides; Hormuz shows how a material infrastructure becomes politically meaningful through narratives and dependencies; and Iran shows how the enemy is fabricated through power-backed classifications. In each case, one mode of reasoning is ontological, isolating entities and naturalizing threats, while the other is relational and decolonial, reconstructing historical, geopolitical, economic, colonial, and narrative webs.

Since President Javier Milei’s administration proposed modifying the Rural Land Law through a new legislative package known as the “Inviolability of Private Property” bill, it is perhaps useful to reflect on the question of land itself.

We usually speak of land as if it were a possession: a parcel, an estate, a commodity, a line on a map. But land, in the sense that matters here, is something more basic and more unsettling. It is nature as the field of all that human beings do not create: the earth, location, water, minerals, forests, air, sunlight, the radio spectrum, and all the given universe. I use italics to mark that broader category and to distinguish land from land understood narrowly as property.

In a previous newsletter [1], I explored a related distinction among economy, capital, and capitalism. Economy named the broader organization of material life: the ways people produce, distribute, exchange, care, and sustain one another. Capital named accumulated human creation used in production. Capitalism named a historical system in which capital becomes dominant, organizing labor, value, property, and social life around accumulation.

This essay turns to the prior and often obscured question of land: the natural and social ground on which economy, capital, and capitalism all depend. If the earlier essay asked how capital comes to dominate the economy, this one ask what becomes visible when we look beneath capital to the ground it presupposes.

Un cambio de época, y no ya una época de cambios, no se reconoce solo por la aparición de nuevos acontecimientos, sino por la dificultad creciente de comprenderlos con las categorías de la época anterior. Escuché y leí por primera vez esa expresión en el año 2000, a través de José de Souza Silva [1], intelectual y activista brasileño. El concepto nombraba algo más que una transformación histórica: señalaba el cierre y desplazamiento de una era de cambio iniciada quinientos años antes, con la conquista y colonización del Nuevo Mundo.

Volví a encontrar esa intuición en 2015, en las intervenciones del Papa Francisco [2]. Lo que me interesa aquí no es simplemente constatar que una época termina y otra comienza, sino precisar qué forma de pensamiento emerge en ese tránsito: el desplazamiento de un razonamiento ontológico, centrado en entes separados, hacia un razonamiento relacional, atento a las tramas que producen sentido, poder y realidad política.

Para desplegar ese argumento, propongo tres movimientos. Primero, ubicar el cambio de época como crisis de las categorías modernas que organizaron el mundo durante quinientos años. Segundo, mostrar cómo esa crisis aparece en la disputa contemporánea por el sentido, donde los hechos adquieren eficacia política mediante narraciones, clasificaciones y autoridades. Tercero, leer Ucrania, Ormuz e Irán como escenas en las que se enfrentan dos modos de pensar: uno ontológico, que aísla entidades y naturaliza amenazas, y otro relacional, que reconstruye tramas históricas, geopolíticas, económicas, coloniales y narrativas.

Antonio Gramsci lo presentía en su tiempo, y la frase reapareció con fuerza en estos últimos años: “El viejo mundo está muriendo, mientras que el nuevo lucha por nacer: ahora es el tiempo de los monstruos” [3]. Me interesa recuperarla no como cita ornamental, sino como síntoma de un problema mayor: cuando una época se descompone, también se descomponen las categorías con las que intentamos comprenderla. Para Gramsci, esa encrucijada se materializaba en el advenimiento del socialismo; el mundo que estaba muriendo era el del liberalismo y el de las aberraciones del conservadurismo, el fascismo y el nazismo.

Esta segunda parte de Sorpresas impactantes decoloniales resultó ser bastante extensa. Las razones son dos: una es la adición de un comentario que apareció en FB, relacionado con los temas que discutí en el boletín anterior sobre este tema. La segunda es que aprovecho esta oportunidad para volver a afirmar lo que dije y que de algún modo fue distorsionado en la versión ofrecida por mis críticos. Repito: yo soy responsable de lo que digo, no de lo que mis críticos dicen que digo.

Recibí el mensaje que aparece abajo de un viejo amigo en Sudáfrica. El mensaje apareció en FB el 30 de mayo de 2026. Aquí está el párrafo. Su autor, Sindre Bangstad:

This Part II of Decolonial Shocking Surprises turn out to be rather long. The reasons are two folds: one is the addition of a comment that appeared in FB and it was related to the issues I discussed in the previous newsletter. The second is that I take this opportunity to re-state what I said that was somehow distorted in the version provided by my critics. I repeat, I am responsible for what I say not for what my critics say that I say. I received the message below from an old friend in South Africa. The message appeared in FB on May 30,2026. Here is the paragraph by Sindre Bangstad:

“One of many paradoxes thrown up by the decolonial theorist Walter Mignolo's full embrace of Russian imperialism in Ukraine since 2022 is that Mignolo was in a previous incarnation perfectly willing to acknowledge the reality of Russian and Soviet imperialism (though it was in his terms a «second class empire»), their parallels with Spanish and British imperialism, and to regard Ukraine as a colonial state in the Russian empire. Granted, there is the same ranting against «the myth of scientific knowledge», the problematic claim that «Putin had to enforce the state» (against Western neoliberalism), and the argument that that one must «reinscribe principles of knowledge and understanding that have been eliminated as irrational by the defenders of modernity» (up and rise, all ye conspiracy theorists left and right). But even so, as Mignolo's erstwhile co-author Madina Tlostanova, who appears to have broken with Mignolo over his support of Putin's war on Ukraine (see her poignant essay in The Thinker, 2025), reminds us, there was in 2006 a double critique in Mignolo's work which has by now completely disappeared.”

El hilo de este boletín es el razonamiento relacional decolonial, una idea a la que ya aludí en la reflexión final de mi entrega anterior, Ni capitalismo, ni comunismo.

Hay cosas que llegan justamente cuando no las estamos buscando. El 28 de mayo de 2026, en Estambul, Alex Mignolo (Alejo) y yo salimos rumbo al Palacio de Topkapi. Lo primero que se nos impuso fue la multitud en el antiguo Hipódromo romano, sobre todo alrededor del Obelisco de Teodosio y del Obelisco Amurallado, donde los grupos de turistas se arremolinaban en torno a los viejos monumentos. A las diez de la mañana, cuando nos acercamos a Santa Sofía —que habíamos visitado el día anterior—, la multitud era ya más densa y el flujo hacia Topkapi no hacía sino crecer. Lo seguimos hasta la zona de venta de entradas y luego hasta el acceso, a unos treinta metros. Las filas serpenteantes, de escala aeroportuaria, acabaron muy pronto tanto con mi entusiasmo histórico como con la paciencia de Alejo. Así que dimos media vuelta y avanzamos, contra la corriente, hacia un café agradable que habíamos visto al pasar.

 The point of this newsletter is decolonial relational reasoning, that I pointed out in the closing statement of my previous newsletter (Neither capitalism, nor Communism). Relational reasoning is neither a property nor a privilege of decolonial thinking. Relational reasoning is decolonial as far as the overall frame is the colonial will to power and the colonial matrix of power, the instrumentalización of the will.

Some things arrive even when we are not looking for them. On May 28, 2026, in Istanbul, Alex Mignolo (Alejo) and I set out for Topkapi Palace.  What first caught our attention was the crowd in the ancient Roman Hippodrome,   especially around the Obelisk of Theodosius  and the Walled Obelisk,  where tour groups clustered around the old monuments. By 10 a.m., as we approached Hagia Sophia —which we had visited the day before—the crowd had thickened, and the flow toward Topkapi only grew heavier. We followed it to the ticket area and then to the entrance, some thirty meters away. The serpentine lines, airport-like in scale, quickly defeated both my historical enthusiasm and Alejo’s patience. So we turned back, moving against the current toward a pleasant coffee place we had noticed on the way.

I.

Sigo posponiendo la segunda parte de «Sorpresas descoloniales impactantes». Cada vez que me siento a escribirla, algo en las noticias me lleva por otro camino. Lo que sigue es uno de esos desvíos, aunque todavía pertenece a la cadena más amplia de sorpresas descoloniales que vengo rastreando.

I.

I keep postponing Part II of “Decolonial Shocking Surprises.” Each time I sit down to write it, something in the news sends me elsewhere. What follows is one of those detours—though it still belongs to the larger chain of decolonial surprises I have been tracing.

I promised that the next news letter would be the second part of “Decolonial Shocking Surprises,” but instead, I am reproducing here an interview from 2013 in Spanish on the topic of the title. The reasons for this change are twofold and interconnected. My participation in the World Decolonization Forum conference held in Istanbul on May 11 and 12, prompted me to write something about this conference.

Among the interesting topics addressed my leitmotif in the two plenary panels in which I participated, in the interviews, as well as in conversations in the lobby of the Attaturk Cultural Center, with students and interested people who approached to ask questions, was the distinction between decolonization and de-westernization.

This distinction seems to me a key one for me at presen and, at the same time, is what has not been understood by Harald Kümmerle. Althoug the his misunderstanding is more general. A recent approach can be found here.

Consequently, in this issue of the newsletter, i reproduce an interview in Spanish from 2013 that you can find here. I will use it as a reference point for reflections in the near future. Since 2011 i have been thinking and saying that de-westernization does not question the colonial matrix of power but rather disputes its control.

Estimadas y estimados suscriptores,

El enlace de la Comisión Helsinski, no conectó debidamente. Las citas extraída de este informe“Decolonizing Russia: A Moral and Strategic Imperative,” se encuentran en este enlace, https://www.csce.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/0623-Decolonizing-Russia-A-Moral-and-Strategic-Imperative.pdf.

Gracias y cordiales saludos,

Walter

Asombrosas sorpresas decoloniales: (la “apropiación” de Carl Schmitt por Walter Mignolo).

En marzo de 2026, Harald Kümmerle publicó un artículo en TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research titulado “Carl Schmitt Afterlife in Decolonial Theory: Rereading Walter Mignolo”. El artículo es el resultado de un grupo de lectura organizado por Kümmerle. Su motivación para coordinar un grupo que duró de abril de 2024 a febrero de 2025 fue examinar el alcance y el impacto de las ideas de Carl Schmitt—tanto dentro de círculos conservadores dominantes (por ejemplo, aquellos asociados con JD Vance, el actual vicepresidente de Estados Unidos) como en comunidades académicas de izquierda y decoloniales.

Kümmerle relata que, durante esas sesiones, algunos participantes (en su mayoría alemanes, según señala) se sorprendieron—“si no quedaron impactados”—cuando observó que Walter Mignolo, el pensador decolonial en discusión, había acogido con beneplácito la invasión rusa de Ucrania. Mi preocupación es menos la acusación en sí que aquello que se asume pero se deja sin decir en su formulación: que la invasión debe ser rechazada, mientras que la expansión hacia el este de la OTAN y las condiciones que Rusia presenta como “causas de fondo” son ignoradas o tratadas como irrelevantes. El diablo está en lo que no se dice.

I. Contexto: qué dice Kümmerle que ocurrió