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.

“Européens, ouvrez ce livre, entrez-y. Après quelques pas dans la nuit vous verrez des étrangers réunis autour d’un feu, approchez, écoutez : ils discutent du sort qu’ils réservent à vos comptoirs, aux mercenaires qui les défendent. Ils vous verront peut-être, mais ils continueront de parler entre eux, sans même baisser la voix […] Fanon ne vous ‘met pas dans le coup’ ; son œuvre — si brûlante pour d’autres — reste gelée pour vous. On en parle souvent de vous. Jamais à vous. Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Préface.” In Frantz Fanon, Les Damnés de la terre. Paris: François Maspero, 1961.

Judging by the sometimes-vicious reactions of European scholars to decolonial arguments advanced by Third World intellectuals, they have forgotten that we speak of them but not to them. Their reactions seem to me parallel to the conservative and far-right behavior of the European Union when it canceled elections in Romania because the candidates were critical of EU neoliberalism and were pro-Russian. They also parallel European states’ reactions to immigration. Despite the differences between neoliberal and nationalist politics, immigration troubles Europe. Europeans forget that many immigrants, particularly those from Africa, are here because you were there.

 Immigration unsettles European civil society because it brings across borders people, languages, memories, and ways of living that cannot be contained within established expectations. Thought also immigrates. Third World intellectuals enter European and Euro-centered debate without passports, mainly through texts—often written in English. Yet their/our concepts may generate a comparable discomfort: they/we do not think from Europe’s concerns, histories, categories, or habits of judgment. The question, then, is not psychological, linguistic, personal, or merely disciplinary. It concerns the geopolitical conditions under which thoughts are recognized on equal footing, especially when it arrives in European languages as a second language but refuses to reproduce European ways of thinking.

 At stake is the geopolitics of knowing, knowledge, and understanding. The problem extends beyond the academic sphere addressed here into international relations: consider the designs through which the United States, the European Union, and NATO have used Ukraine (with the consent of Ukraine’s government) over the past four years to weaken Russia rather than understand it. Or consider the more recent U.S.-Israeli colonial will to eliminate Iran because it cannot be controlled. Hence, it has to be eliminated. This is not my interpretation. It has been publicly stated. Across these different arenas, colonial and imperial distinctions shape who is heard as a producer of concepts and who is treated as an object of study—or judged deficient before speaking.

Carl Pletsch’s classic essay, “The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975,” offers a decisive point of departure (Pletsch, 1981) to ponder where we are known in the division of knowledge in general (gnoseology). I extend his argument beyond the social sciences because the division of intellectual labor Pletsch identified, in correlation with the geopolitical division of labor and of the Three Worlds, impinges on all areas of existence: from international relations to scholarly and intellectual spheres, and to the common sense and feelings of populations. In brief, Pletsch argued that the First World produces knowledge, the Second World ideology, and the Third World culture. The Three Worlds vocabulary is no longer in common use, but the division of social-scientific labor and the geopolitical hierarchies of the world order persist. The main difference is that the former Third Worlds is no longer passive consumer of what the First World says.

The classical Marxist distinction between idealism and materialism loses its raison d’être once knowing, knowledge, political economy, race, and coloniality are understood as mutually constitutive.

Gramsci’s “war of position” (Gramsci, 1971, p. 2) matters here because it names a terrain where material and gnoseological—not only epistemic—struggles are inseparable. Political and economic transformation cannot succeed if the categories through which reality is known, sensed, valued, narrated, and governed remain intact. Remember the cases of Independence in Ibero-America, the Haitian Revolution, and decolonization in Asia and Africa. All of these junctures show that the colonial settlers were expelled and imperial administrations dismantled, yet colonial nation-states preserved inherited political theory, political economy, and educational structures. And today still many refers to that moment as post-colonial.

 Pletsch’s division of intellectual labor is also racial: the hierarchy of knowing and knowledge parallels the hierarchy of the three worlds and of the people assigned to them. The First World did not preexist this classification. It was made in and by the First World, It was nothing else that an update of the colonial matrix of power by actors who placed themselves in the First World and claimed the right to classify and downgrade the Second and the Third. Control over money thus became inseparable from control over meaning. Some were authorized to know universally; others were assigned tradition, locality, spirituality, suffering, or folklore and made objects of study rather than creators and transformers of knowledge.

This hierarchy is the problem this newsletter takes up. Authorized as possessors of science, justifies claiming the right to judge the thoughts of others, Those assigned culture or wisdom may be admired, studied, translated, or dismissed, but are rarely recognized as theory making and conceptual sophistication.

Decolonial thinking question that distribution. Places historically constituted as objects of knowledge are also places from which knowledge is made, concepts are forged, and worlds are interpreted. The question is not only whether the Third World can think. It is whether Euro-centered criticism can understand concepts and arguments that does not arrive through the accents, archives, and institutions by which Europe has authorized itself as theories and knowledge making and transformation, privileged home.

II. Cahen’s Critical Engagement: Materiality, Knowledge, and the Decolonial Option

Michael Cahen is a French historian and Emeritus Research Director of the CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique) at Bordeaux. One of the charges of His Marxist critique of decolonial thinking is of being Latino-centrism and insufficient attention to other imperial formations. Well, first let’s remember Eurocentrism. It is the second case I take up here, after the Žižek–Dabashi debate in Al-Jazeera. I will neither answer insult with insult nor defend decoloniality as a doctrine. I ask a more basic question: do these criticisms understand what they claim to criticize?

Before turning to Cahen’s plaidoyer, “Colonialité et système-monde capitaliste” (Cahen and Sitel, 2024), I want to acknowledge the professional ethics I found in another of Cahen’s articles, “Walter Mignolo et le manifeste décolonial” (Cahen, 2023). There he writes:

I began reading Walter Mignolo’s texts about twelve years ago, particularly while preparing my habilitation to supervise research, which I defended in 2010. I am far from having read all his texts, for he is a prolific author, as are many other postcolonial and decolonial authors. This has produced a daunting body of literature in which concrete material drawn from field research is sometimes quite scarce, while epistemological debate predominates. But this does not at all mean that it should be dismissed out of hand, as Jean-François Bayart, Jean-Loup Amselle, and Yves Lacoste did in France, each in a very different way (my translation).

Before beginning his analysis of the text, Cahen adds:

Thus, since around 2010, my stance toward decolonial theory has always been “critical,” but not “anti.” Ideally, I would succeed in moving toward a materialist decolonial theory—somewhat as there is a school of materialist feminism—that would be critical of the idealist decolonial theory (at least what I consider as such) currently dominant. (My translation.)

In a case such as this—unlike those I will address in my next newsletter—productive conversation among diverse, coexisting options is both possible and desirable. I have often described the decolonial as one option among others. Not as a mission. We live surrounded by options within what Yuri Lotman called the semiosphere: the sphere of signs that is distinct from, yet intermingled with, the biosphere. We do not make the biosphere; we are made in and by it.

The two positions are now clearly stated. Consistent with his Marxist commitments, Cahen seeks a “materialist decolonial theory.” That is fine. With me. The nodal point is his assumption of the primacy of materiality, set against Quijano’s and, more explicitly, my own argument that materiality carries neither meaning nor an identifying tag by itself. Materiality, or the ontic if you wish, becomes meaningful only through signs, or the ontological if you wish. Quijano therefore placed “the question of knowledge” before the economy in his groundbreaking article “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality” (1992).

He consequently reoriented decolonial thought in relation to the Cold War understanding of decolonization, which had just ended when the article appeared, toward “epistemological reconstitution: decolonization.” In a nutshell, the economy called capitalist does not consist only in putting capital to work, occupying and dispossessing land, exploiting labor, and reinvesting surplus to produce more. It also requires two kinds of knowledge: knowing the means by which these operations are performed, and knowing what they mean and why they are justified. By opening “the question of knowledge” and calling for “epistemological reconstitution,” Quijano targeted this second domain: knowing what and knowing why.

This difference over materiality and knowledge returns us to the earlier Žižek–Dabashi debate that I explore in the next section. In both cases, the issue is not simply disagreement within a shared theoretical language, but the authority to determine which language counts as theory in the first place.

III. The Geopolitics of Intellectual Authority

In the next newsletter I will address conservative critics Western European criticism who work, often in tandem, to discredit decoloniality, particularly its South American formulation, with Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo as principal targets. Here and then, I address and will talk of these critics and to them—but above all to Third World intellectuals, scholars, thinkers, and activists.

Now I begin by the exchanges in Al Jazeera, prompted by Hamid Dabashi’s “Can Non-Europeans Think?” (Dabashi, 2013), a response to Santiago Zabala’s essay on Slavoj Žižek and the philosopher’s role (Zabala, 2012). I entered with “Yes, We Can! Non-European Thinkers and Philosophers” (Mignolo, 2013), arguing that the issue was why non-European thought so often requires European authorization before being recognized as philosophy or theory.

The exchange in Al Jazeera marks an epistemic and geopolitical divide. Postmodern and Marxist European intellectuals may criticize capitalism, liberalism, and empire while remaining grounded in the assumption of European universality.

In my contribution I named several Third World intellectuals and intellectual activists, Žižek responded under the title “Fuck you, Walter Mignolo,” asking, “who are these bloody much more interesting intellectuals…?” and concluding that he was “not overly impressed” (“Žižek Responds to His Critics,” 2013). The insult matters less than the structure it revealed: non-European thinkers could be named, but their authority could still be dismissed from the center. Europeans could criticize the world while reserving for themselves the power to decide who counted as a “correct” thinker.

Žižek later apparently denied that the expletive was directed at me. That is fine either way. What matters is that the exchange made visible a frontier in the geopolitics of knowledge. On one side stood European philosophers speaking from within Western philosophy’s institutional authority; on the other stood Hamid Dabashi, and myself, located in different histories of colonial difference.

Conversation between Third World and Western European intellectuals is not impossible, but it is never innocent: it takes place across a line already marked in bodies, archives, languages, and institutions. Gloria Anzaldúa named this condition with unforgettable precision: “The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds” (Anzaldúa 1987, 25).

The borderland began to be traced in the sixteenth century with European colonial expansion. It is still everywhere. Josep Borrell expressed it bluntly when he said, “Yes, Europe is a garden” and “most of the rest of the world is a jungle” (Borrell 2022). He later apologized, but the apology does not erase the structure of perception that made the metaphor available. That structure—not simply one unfortunate phrase—is the issue.

This is the frame for the comments below. I do not intend to answer every criticism point by point or stage a polemic. I want to identify the assumptions from which the criticisms proceed, offer documentation where needed, and let interested readers decide what is at stake.

IV. Geo-Cultural Location and the Claim of Universality

The preceding section showed what dismissal looks like. Cahen’s engagement examined in section II, allows a different kind of exchange. When a critic reads seriously rather than dismissing in advance, the objection becomes an opportunity to restate the argument and clarify the terms of disagreement.

Cahen’s plaidoyer makes such an exchange possible without placing his categories beyond question. The disagreement concerns the relation among theory, place, and the historical sensibilities formed by colonial difference—a relation I examined a while ago in “Afterword: Human Understanding and (Latin) American Interests—The Politics and Sensibilities of Geocultural Locations” (Mignolo 1995) and “Are Subaltern Studies Postmodern or Postcolonial?” (Mignolo 1994). Cahen’s objection makes the stakes explicit: can concepts arising from a particular geo-cultural location enter conversation with other histories without claiming validity for the whole planet?

This involves many errors, especially since decolonial thinkers claim to elaborate concepts valid for the whole planet. If that is the case, they would need to analyze coloniality in the Arab-Muslim, Ottoman, and Asian worlds, rather than remaining within a flagrant Latino-centrism. (Cahen and Sitel 2024)

Cahen’s criticism deserves an answer precisely because it enters into conversation rather than dismissing decolonial thought in advance. But his objection attributes to decolonial thinkers a claim they/we do not make. We do not offer one conceptual grid for all peoples and histories, nor we pretend that concepts formed in Latin America will be valid to explain every colonial formation. In my case, I begin from specific histories of colonial difference. What I say and the concept I create and employ would be useful in other location only if thinkers working from their own geo-cultural locations take them and modify them according to their need.

The issue, then, is not whether Latin Americanism should replace Eurocentrism, but whether concepts must claim planetary validity before they can count as theory. To reject that demand is to refuse the expectation that one location possesses the master key and the authority to decide, classify, and rank all others.

This is what I, and others, mean by pluriversality: not a new universal imposed from elsewhere, but a horizon in which many worlds, histories, memories, and knowledges think from their own locations and enter into critical relation with others. “Pluriversality as a universal project” names this paradox deliberately (Mignolo 2018). The phrase does not grant one conceptual system validity for the whole planet. It names a shared commitment to conditions of conversation in which no location claims the right to determine in advance what counts as knowledge for all the others. Cahen’s criticism can participate in that conversation, but his categories, like mine, must enter it as situated options rather than universal standards. Marxism and liberalism are local conceptualization with intended global scope.

V. Coloniality, Political Economy, and Delinking

The dispute over universality leads directly to materiality and political economy. In the previous I argued that concepts enter conversation as situated options rather than universal standards. The same principle applies here. Cahen’s materialist critique deserves engagement, but neither Marxist political economy nor decolonial thought should determine in advance what the other can mean. The question is what each framework makes visible—and what each leave outside its field of vision. To clarify the difference, I place Cahen’s objection beside Quijano’s account of knowledge, totality, and decolonization.

The Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui understood this reality and proposed to the young Peruvian Communist Party that it seek to establish itself primarily not among the working class, but among the Indigenous population. He was not followed, but he can be considered a precursor of decolonial thought. (Cahen and Sitel, 2024)

Cahen is right to recognize Mariátegui as a precursor of decolonial thought (see Quijano’s introduction to José Carlos Mariátegui’s Siete ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana, 1979). The disagreement begins elsewhere. Cahen argues that many decolonial thinkers trace colonial ideology and seek a “mental disengagement” from “Modernity” and the “West,” then asks whether such a rupture can occur apart from a social movement. For him, coloniality requires a materialist definition: the capitalist mode of production is hegemonic on Earth, and although class struggles do not exhaust history, they remain its motor. That formulation opens a productive disagreement over what counts as material and where modern power begins.

Following Quijano, I would put the point differently: what is hegemonic today is the colonial matrix of power, within which capitalist accumulation is one central domain. Political independence and twentieth-century decolonization did not dissolve the matrix that began to take shape through the encounter between Europeans—first Spanish and Portuguese—and the continent they named America, where racial classification, colonial authority,  control of knowledge, dispossession of land, exploitation of labor, and material domination were organized together and planted the seeds of modern/colonial world order. As Quijano and Wallerstein put it, “The Americas were not incorporated into an already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a capitalist world-economy without the Americas.” (Quijano & Wallerstein, 1992, p. 549). The naming of America was therefore integral to conquest, colonization, and the remaking of the world. America was not conquered and colonized. Conquest and colonization included the invention of America.

Quijano expanded this argument in the groundbreaking essay already mentioned, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad,” first published in Spanish in 1992 and later translated into English (Quijano 1992; 2007)

The question of the production of knowledge: To begin with, in the current crisis of the European paradigm of rational knowledge, what is at issue is its foundational assumption: knowledge as the product of a subject-object relation. Apart from the problems of validating knowledge that this assumption implies, it raises others that should be briefly presented here. (Quijano 2007, 172–73)

The question of totality in knowledge: Nothing surprising, then, that history was conceived as an evolutionary continuum from the primitive to the civilized; from the traditional to the modern; from the savage to the rational; from precapitalism to capitalism, and so on. Nor is it surprising that Europe thought of itself as the mirror of the future of all other societies and cultures, as the advanced mode of the history of the entire species. What remains surprising, nevertheless, is that Europe managed to impose that mirage on practically the totality of the culture it colonized. Even more surprising is that such a chimera remains so attractive today, and to so many. (Quijano 2007, 174–75)

On these premises, Quijano reorients what decolonization meant in Africa and Asia up to the late twentieth century:

Epistemological reconstitution: decolonization: The idea of totality, in general, is today being questioned and denied in Europe, no longer only by the usual empiricists, but by an entire intellectual current that calls itself postmodernist. In effect, the idea of totality is, in Europe, a product of modernity. And it can be shown, as we have just seen, that European ideas of totality led to theoretical reductionism and to the metaphysics of a historical macro-subject. Such ideas have also been associated with undesirable political practices, behind the dream of the total rationalization of society (Quijano 2007, 176–77).

Read together, Cahen and Quijano expose the precise point of disagreement. Cahen asks for a “materialist definition” of coloniality because he gives explanatory priority to class struggle and the capitalist mode of production. Quijano does not deny their force. He argues that material relations are organized through classifications, institutions, desires, languages, memories, and forms of authority that bind economy, knowledge, and subjectivity together. The issue is therefore not matter versus ideas, but whether matter can be understood apart from the meanings and classifications that make relations possible and legitimate.

Quijano’s conclusion follows from these premises. If European knowledge separated the knower from the known, and if European totality made Europe appear as the future of all peoples, decolonization cannot remain a matter of dispossession of land, exploitation of labor, flags, states, and formal independence. It must also become an epistemological and gnoseological reconstitution: a remaking of the assumptions through which Western knowledge was and is made, managed, transformed, validated, and universalized, including those inherited from Marxism.

The deeper political-economic question is therefore not if one framework should replace the other as a universal explanation. It is where each locates the formation of modern inequality. Marxist political economy generally begins with capital, class struggle, and relations to the means of production. Decolonial thinking begins with the colonial formation of the modern/colonial world, in which capitalism, racial classification, land appropriation, labor control, authority, and knowledge were constituted together generating the colonial matrix of power, today in dispute.

Quijano’s criticism of orthodox historical materialism begins here (Quijano, 2000). Marxist accounts often present human history as a linear sequence—primitive, ancient, feudal, capitalist, socialist—and treat that sequence as everyone’s history. Quijano argues that this Eurocentric sequence makes colonial histories look secondary. It misses that capitalism was formed not only through wage labor in Europe but also, from 1492 onward, through conquest, racial classification, slavery, encomienda, forced labor, and other forms of labor control that classic Marxist categories often subordinate to the wage-labor/capital binary.

A Caribbean sugar plantation was not simply a farm organized for profit. It depended on ships, credit, insurance, merchants, and European demand, but also on law, armed force, racial classification, and a learned language to legitimize that enslaving Africans as laboring bodies rather than full human beings. The plantation shows the point clearly: capitalism did not operate first and introduce race later. Profit, race, law, violence, and knowledge were woven together from the start.

Quijano addresses this conjunction through historical-structural heterogeneity and the coloniality of power. Historical-structural heterogeneity names the coexistence of different historical times, forms of labor, and social logics within the same society. Coloniality of power names the wider racial and epistemic matrix that organizes labor, authority, subjectivity, and knowledge on a world scale. If race is not an ideology added to capitalism later, then knowledge is not merely a reflection of economic relations. Racial classification and Eurocentric knowledge were constitutive parts in the organization of global accumulation from the beginning.

The disagreement concerns where modern power begins and what a theory must include to explain it. Orthodox political economy places capital, class struggle, and relations to the means of production at the center of historical explanation. Gramsci widens that account by showing that domination also depends on culture, common sense, and hegemony; Harvey extends it through accumulation, dispossession, and capitalist geography.

The decolonial line opened by Quijano and Jamaican scholar, writer and activist Sylvia Wynter begins with 1492 and the colonial invention of the Americas, when race, labor, land, knowledge, subjectivity, and authority were reorganized as a global pattern of power. From this perspective, capitalism was never an economic system that later became racial or colonial. Racial classification and colonial domination were among the conditions of its formation. This does not make conversation with political economy impossible; it identifies the terms on which that conversation must proceed.

The same difference appears in each framework’s account of knowledge and liberation. Marxist political economy often treats dominant ideas as forms that conceal exploitation and must be criticized so material relations can be seen. Decolonial thinking argues that Eurocentric knowledge does more than conceal domination: it organizes it. Classifications such as human and non-human, rational and irrational, developed and backward, modern and primitive assign bodies, lands, languages, and communities to different positions in the world-system. Liberation must therefore transform material relations while also delinking from the categories that render those relations natural and authoritative.

David Harvey’s concept of accumulation by dispossession identifies the continuing capitalist process through which land, labor, resources, public goods, and collective forms of life are enclosed, privatized, appropriated, or destroyed to create new opportunities for accumulation (Harvey 2003). Quijano does not deny this process. He asks a prior question: what classifications of people, land, knowledge, and life made dispossession appear legitimate in the first place?

The colonial matrix of power names what Harvey’s category leaves undertheorized. Dispossession is not carried out by capitalism as an abstract machine. It requires classifications of humanity, hierarchies of knowledge, legal forms, racial distinctions, and ideas of development, progress, property, and rationality. The matrix lets dispossession appear as development, modernization, civilization, or economic necessity rather than as theft.

A contemporary version occurs when land is taken for an open pit mine, highway, dam, export crop, or conservation area from which local people are removed. Harvey helps us see the economic movement: land, water, minerals, forests, or public goods become opportunities for accumulation. Quijano helps us see the prior classification that makes this seem normal: affected people are described as obstacles to progress, inefficient users of land, backward communities, or populations to be improved by development. The bulldozer arrives after the category has already done part of the work.

If dispossession operates through this wider colonial matrix, then the task is not only to criticize capitalism. It is also to disobey, dismantle and replace the categories of knowledge and regulation of knowing that make colonial dispossession be seen as necessary, rational, or inevitable.

Now the argument moves from the conversation between political economy and coloniality to epistemic disobedience and delinking.

VI. Epistemic Disobedience and Delinking

Section V ended by arguing that dispossession depends not only on economic force but also on categories that make appropriation appear necessary, rational, or inevitable. Epistemic disobedience highlights the need to delink and refuse the naturalization of those categories. Epistemic disobedience is the first step necessary to delinking: a refusal to seek recognition from the colonial matrix itself or to ask Western modernity, including European Marxism, for permission to think, know, or define politics, economy, humanity, rationality, and freedom.

Put plainly, epistemic disobedience occurs when communities refuse to accept that only established institutions, universities, states, development agencies, tourist agencies, and regulation of knowing and knowledge that constituted the idea of modernity, progress, civilization were the outcome of some transcendent model.  When an Indigenous community defends its river as a living relation rather than a resource, or peasants defend seed-saving against corporate control, they are not adding local color to universal theory. They are changing the terms by which knowledge, economy, law, and life are understood.

Delinking extends beyond epistemic disobedience. The latter refuses the categories through which the colonial matrix secures obedience—categories determining who is human, rational, developed, backward, or capable of knowledge. Delinking seeks detachment from the wider network that gives those categories institutional and material force. It therefore includes epistemic disobedience while also requiring economic, political, ethical, and existential reorientation.

Quijano’s term in Spanish was desprendimiento; Samir Amin’s in French was la déconnexion (Amin, 1986), translated into English as delinking (Amin, 1990). For Amin, delinking meant detaching from capitalism while moving toward socialism. For Quijano, it meant delinking from the colonial matrix of power, of which the economy of accumulation called capitalism is one domain, moving towards bien vivir, a vision he took for Indigenous conceptualization of their own decolonial activism.

Delinking from the coloniality of power cannot follow one path directed by one central organization. It requires multiple paths, according to needs, places, actors, strategies, and institutions. The destinations are utopistics orientations toward forms of political, economic, and cultural organization that repeat neither liberalism nor socialism, the two major Euro-centered ideologies.

Why place knowledge first, as I have been insisting and Marxist thinkers call into question? Because material conditions do not carry meaning by themselves. Capitalism is not an agent that acts on its own. It is put to work by actors, institutions, categories, desires, and forms of authority. Questions of gender, race, language hierarchy, religion, and knowledge are not secondary cultural matters. They are part of the colonial matrix that organizes and directs the economy.

The colonial matrix of power is an instrument of domination, just as capital is an instrument of accumulation. If “capitalism” tends to reduce the picture to the economy, the matrix names the broader structure that makes the economy operative: governance, subjectivity, knowledge, law, authority, and the will to dominate, appropriate, and exploit.

This distinction also clarifies the disagreement with Cahen’s claim that decolonial thought offers a program for the entire planet. Decoloniality proposes neither one universal road, one party, one method, nor one privileged subject of history. It points instead toward a pluriversal horizon in which different histories of colonial difference generate different forms of delinking. Cahen’s materialist option can enter that conversation, but it cannot determine in advance the form that every decolonial project must take.

For Quijano, capitalism and class exploitation cannot be separated from the control of knowledge, subjectivity, and meaning. This is not idealism: ideas do not float above material life. Nor is it orthodox materialism: material relations do not organize themselves without categories, classifications, institutions, and desires. Matter and meaning are co-constituted. That co-constitution prepares the next question: what becomes of capital when socialism is no longer assumed to be the necessary destination of every struggle against capitalist domination?

VII. Capital Without Socialism: The Colonial Matrix of Power and Capitalist Economy

This co-constitution of matter and meaning returns us to Pletsch’s division of intellectual labor and to what Cahen’s critique cannot see and therefore cannot understand. The title “Capital Without Socialism,” which I also use for a newsletter in Lo de Walter, names the problem opened here. Capital and capitalism cannot be treated as if their only alternative were socialism, just as decoloniality cannot be required to become a materialist program modeled on European Marxism. The traditional opposition between idealism and materialism is not a solution to this problem; it is one of its inherited obstacles. Cahen repeats it when he asks decolonial thought to abandon “idealism” and become properly “materialist,” as though the old password still opened every historical door. The colonial matrix of power does not separate knowledge from material life. It organizes capital, race, authority, subjectivity, and knowledge together.

The concept of “coloniality” can be useful to Marxists and to critical social theory in general because it makes it possible to emphasize the diversity of capitalisms within the world-system. It helps us understand the need for diversified political strategies, without ever falling into culturalism. But for that to happen, it is necessary to break with idealist decolonial thought and construct a materialist decolonial thought (Cahen and Sitel, 2024).

The difficulty appears in the historical premise supporting Cahen’s materialist decolonial theory. By treating socialism’s account of capitalism, class, and historical transformation as the necessary horizon of emancipation, he also reads the decolonial emphasis on 1492 as a provincial refusal to acknowledge Marco Polo, Venetian commerce, or medieval slavery. But decolonial thought does not claim that trade, empire, or enslavement began with Columbus. It argues that European expansion and the conquest of the Americas reorganized earlier practices within a new global structure joining racial classification, territorial appropriation, labor control, and the authority to produce knowledge. The disagreement therefore concerns neither forgotten precedents nor competing first dates. It concerns whether those continuities are sufficient to explain the structural transformation that made capitalism, coloniality, and Western claims to universality mutually constitutive. That is a high school belief.

The decolonials date the beginning of the capitalist world-system and the birth of the notion of race to 1492 and to Christopher Columbus’s arrival in what he did not know was America. This is a serious historical ignorance. It means ignoring the role of the Old World in the formation of the capitalist world-system. This goes back to Marco Polo in the thirteenth century. The enslavement of the Canarians dates from 1340; Venice had long traded with Asia. The year 1453 marks not only the end of the Hundred Years’ War, but also the fall of Constantinople, which would mark the end of the white slave trade in the Mediterranean basin. Indeed, in the Middle Ages, in southern Europe—Portugal, Spain, Italy—there were hundreds of thousands of white slaves, alongside serfs, as well as some Black slaves who had been captured in medieval raids against Arab-Berber ships (Cahen and Sitel, 2024, italics mine).

The charge of “serious historical ignorance” misses the distinction between historical antecedents and a new configuration of power. The decolonial argument is not that nothing significant happened before 1492. It is that the conquest and colonial invention of the Americas brought territorial appropriation, racial classification, labor control, Christian expansion, and competing imperial designs into a structure with planetary reach. Cahen treats 1492 as a proposed first date for exchange, empire, or slavery; decolonial thought treats it as the opening of the modern/colonial world order.

The distinction was already explicit in “L’option décoloniale,” first published in Spanish and later translated into French in OpenEdition Books (Mignolo, 2008), is open and available. I quote it here because it addresses precisely the point Cahen presents as a correction:

Let us imagine the planet around the year 1500. If the planet has never had a center or point of reference—the existence of a center makes no sense anyway—at that time it also had none in the imaginary. An extraterrestrial observer circling the globe could have noted the existence of several nodes or centers that, over the centuries, had generated numerous and considerable architectonic spaces: China; the Maya region, located in what is today, Yucatán; and also, why not, Rome and certainly Istanbul, Baghdad, Venice, and Florence, among others. Our observer could also have noticed, after careful examination, shifts from one center to another. And if the observer came closer, they would also have perceived intermediate zones where people gathered and exchanged goods (Mignolo, 2008).

In numerous articles and chapters, I have described this structural transformation through Carl Schmitt’s account of the second nomos of the earth, which he located around 1500 (Schmitt 2003). Schmitt’s periodization does not establish the decolonial argument by itself; it helps name the change in spatial order produced when Western Christian expansion joined conquest in the Americas to claims over land, law, commerce, and planetary authority. The inauguration of coloniality and the formation of the colonial matrix of power belong to that change of scale and structure. The issue is not the beginning of exchange, empire, or slavery, but the emergence of a world order organized through colonial difference. That order is now entering what I have elsewhere called a change of era (Mignolo 2023b).

Cahen’s materialist history directs attention to continuities in commerce, servitude, and imperial expansion before 1500. Those continuities are indispensable, but they do not eliminate the need to explain structural breaks. Coloniality in Quijano’s sense names the reorganization that accompanied Western Christian expansion: earlier practices were articulated with the conquest of the Americas, racial classification, global designs, and a new claim to planetary authority. Cahen inventories important antecedents but does not explain this reorganization. The disagreement is therefore not between history and ignorance, or continuity and rupture taken separately, but between two accounts of what changed when inherited practices were assembled into the colonial matrix of power.

I have mentioned the epistemological drift of certain decolonial currents that lose interest in the economic system to concentrate on the epistemic matrix of the expression of colonial values among subalternized populations. For them, the struggle aims at the mental disengagement (de-linking, desprendimiento) from those values (Cahen and Sitel, 2024).

Cahen’s account of delinking returns decoloniality to the opposition between idealism and materialism and directs emancipation toward socialism as its presumed horizon. Gramsci’s war of position had already unsettled that opposition (as did Mariátegui; Mignolo 2021), showing that institutions, common sense, education, religion, language, culture, and forms of subjectivity are material forces through which consent is organized and domination made durable.

Yet decolonial delinking goes further: it addresses the colonial classifications of race, humanity, knowledge, gender, language, and authority through which both liberal capitalism and state communism have organized collective life. Delinking therefore cannot be reduced to delink from liberalism to a socialist destination or to the economic domain socialism proposes to reorganize.

This is the conceptual force of capital without socialism (see link in this section title). The phrase does not deny class exploitation or the need to transform material relations. It rejects the assumption that socialism exhausts the political imagination beyond capitalism, especially when socialist projects replicate Eurocentric knowledge, state authority, developmentalism, or colonial classifications of the human—in other words, when socialism changes the content but not the terms of the conversation. Because the economy is only one domain within the colonial matrix of power, decolonial critique can learn from Gramsci’s widened account of domination without treating socialism as the necessary horizon of every struggle against capital. Decolonial relational thinking must also confront “Capital Without Liberalism” (Mignolo 2026).

The distinction between decoloniality and socialism also clarifies the geopolitical issue that follows. If socialism, liberalism, and dewesternization are different projects within the modern/colonial world, refusing Western hegemony does not require endorsing every state that challenges it. Cahen’s final accusation collapses that distinction by treating decolonial criticism of the West as support for its geopolitical rivals:

In 2014, Walter Mignolo thus approved the Russian annexation of Crimea, seeing in it the beginning of a “de-Westernization” of Ukraine, and likewise approved the Russian intervention in Syria. Others flirted with Modi in India, and so on, according to the campist principle that the enemy of my enemy is my friend (Cahen and Sitel, 2024).

Cahen, show me where I approved these policies in 2014. The accusation has no basis in the texts Cahen appears to invoke (Mignolo, 2023a; Mignolo 2023b). The judgment seems based on ouï-dire rather than a serious reading of the texts. It should be clear by now that, following Quijano, I move beyond either/or toward neither/nor. Geopolitical campism sounds more like Cahen’s own binary projected onto my argument. The decolonial position is not that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” Western liberal imperialism and the state projects contesting its dominance do not exhaust the horizon of thought or politics.

Quijano often captured the point in the formulation “neither with you nor with your enemy, but just the opposite.” To refuse Euro-American hegemony is not to endorse Russia, China, India, or any state project of dewesternization. Such projects may rebalance power among states while leaving the colonial matrix intact. Decoloniality names a different task: delinking from the terms through which both Westernization and dewesternization organize authority, knowledge, capital, and the political imagination.

VIII. Conclusion

The distinction between criticism and dismissal returns the argument to its central question. Cahen shows that disagreement across intellectual and geopolitical locations can be productive when decolonial thought is not dismissed in advance. Yet conversation requires Euro-centered intellectuals to stop treating Europe’s rules of knowing as the universal standard of legitimate knowledge.

 The dispute over idealism and materialism is therefore not merely terminological: it concerns whether decolonial thought must justify itself in categories already sanctioned by Europe. Gramsci unsettled that opposition by showing that domination works through institutions, common sense, language, culture, and subjectivity as well as through economic relations. Decolonial thought carries the argument further by locating capitalism within a colonial matrix in which race, authority, knowledge, labor, language, and classifications of the human are co-constituted.

Can Euro-centered scholars understand Third World thought? They can, but only if understanding no longer means translating that thought into categories already authorized by Europe. That requires abandoning Pletsch’s division of intellectual labor, which assigns science and theory to one world and culture, wisdom, experience, or raw material to another. Knowledge is labor, and its authority has been distributed through the colonial organization of the modern world. To listen, then, is not to suspend criticism. It is to enter a conversation among situated options in which no location determines in advance what counts as knowledge.

The result is not a theory without criticism but a pluriversal practice of it. Decoloniality aims at the gnoseological reconstitution of epistemology which implies epistemic disobedience, and delinking (my next newsletter will be on this topic) from the colonial matrix of power moving towards horizons of meaning where many diverse gnoseologies will coexist and learn from one another without submitting to a final judge that used to be, according to Hegel, the end of history: “The History of the World travels from East to West, for Europe is absolutely the end of History, Asia the beginning,”. Allow me to repeat here Josep Borrell’s, then the European Union’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, updating Hegel’s formulation when he declared, “Europe is a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle.” As I mentioned above, allow me to repeat,  later apology does not erase the structure of thought that made the metaphor possible, nor the likelihood that many Europeans continue to think in those terms.

The task is difficult in practice but simple in formulation: stop treating the Third World as an object of your narratives, judgments, and theories. Enter in conversation with places where decolonial thinking advances with an energy; where relational reasoning exceeds the limits of your ontological reasoning and that a defensive Eurocentrism can no longer contain. Decolonial thinking is irreversible.