By Fernando Buen Abad on December 10, 2023
Without an organized cultural and communicational community, our best decolonizing intentions are only islands of “good intentions”, perhaps erudite, ingenious or passionate. There is no correct praxis without correct organization. That is a major weakness and an urgent task. What should such a community organized against symbolic manipulation look like? We may not know in detail, but it is inexcusable to know how we do not want it. That is why we need a semiotics for decolonization.
In order to submit us to the hegemonic equation “dominators vs. dominated”, they have disorganized us. In nothing do they spend more time than in disorganizing us, they unload bundles of confused ideology, labor fear, political blackmail, class hatred, shameful aesthetics and symbolic, police and military violence. Any organizing initiative to emancipate ourselves from the reigning economic and ecocidal barbarism is countered by disorganizing devices. Nevertheless, the decolonizing forces resist and multiply little by little.
The colonizing, military, banking and religious apparatus is so long-lived and extensive that the inventory becomes the biography of all generations, old or young. We have it even in the most “intimate” emotions. It invades our heads, bellies and hearts. The apparatus of colonial domination understands its mission in a totalitarian way and there is no corner of life in which we are not entangled with the huge tangle of mediocre idiosyncrasies, imposed traditions, ridiculousness, kitsch, superstitions and ignorance, sometimes certified by official education. A “tomography” of our state of colonization would show galloping metastases. Even some “decolonizing” therapeutics seem to be contaminated by colonialism, as in those “education plans” that send the best students to complete their training in imperial centers.
It is impossible to defeat colonialism with unipersonal audacities. That is individualism that delays, distracts or discredits the task of organizing the oppressed. In contrast, we have accumulated invaluable contributions in the formation of consciences and intelligent strategies. We have authors and schools of diverse inspirations. What we do not have is a democratic, participatory and internationalist organization for decolonization. Do not confuse organization with institutions or bureaucracies.
Five centuries have passed since Columbus’ voyage; 200 years of the Monroe Doctrine and, for example, agricultural production, livestock, energy, mining, fishing… are mostly controlled by transnationals whose balance, in addition to plundering, is the systematic obstruction of the sovereignty of the peoples for the solution of indebtedness, marginalization, hunger, housing, education and health. It should be added that the modes, means and relations of cultural and communicational production are concentrated in companies whose core interest is mercantile and not the diversity of identity expressions or the development of artistic or scientific talents that are decolonizing and decolonizing. The administrative and educational models, for example, tend to be ideologically dependent on oligarchic models, decided by a bureaucratic elite infatuated with their “loyal knowledge and understanding”. Not all bureaucratic apparatuses are decolonizing tools, even if they have a façade as State instruments with democratic endorsements.
Fernando Abad
The expressions of colonialism are of such an extension that not a few books slip unnoticed colonialist whiffs, even sanctified by some sects. Even if they are disguised as “academic”. It is not advisable to idealize decolonization, it is necessary to objectify and politicize it, to present the challenges crudely. Beginning with self-criticism. Lest in the name of “decolonization” we are deifying fashionable scoundrels, or promoting esotericism to anesthetize the colonized, making them believe that “decolonization” is already in some books, in the spit of the news or on the backs of a certain messianic “good will”.
Decolonize us will not be by some enlightened and his friends owners of the “keys” and the culterano storytelling recommending us to have more patience. That is to say, to renounce to the organization with self-management to embrace the “aborregada” organization and to forget about the class struggle, of course. Much equality of opportunities and little equality of conditions.
Thus, we must decolonize the hegemonic economy in its totality, infrastructure and superstructure always inseparable; examine the churches with their history and consequences; review education, health, housing and the kind of life they impose on us. To review the media and culture to the point of detailing the colonial interests they obey and to fight them. To review the Executive, Legislative and Judicial powers. Their faults and their manias, their delays and their injustices until their role in the economic, political, ideological and cultural colonization is clear. The a priori balance is horrifying.
Decolonization does not mean hysterical persecution or ideological purge. It implies a humanist contrast of what we have with what we had and what was taken from us by arms or brainwashing. But decolonizing basically means fighting for what is needed to annihilate the oppressor-oppressed formula and put an end to exploitation, plundering, inequality, injustice and the unhappiness of the majority dispossessed by a minority that lives with all the privileges… and very tasty. As they say Christopher Columbus wanted for his bosses.
Fernando Abad is the Director of the Institute of Culture and Communication and Sean Mac Bride Center. National University of Lanús
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English