AI, or machine-learning as we practitioners prefer to call it, is taking over knowledge-workers by storm. Translation, administration, code, writing — it all feels different, and even wrong. Part of that discomfort is legitimate: if you’re leveraging these tools to mislead people, overloading tight attention spans with content no one cares about, or enabling systems of oppression, that’s a real problem. AI’s footprint is not negligible, but a careful analysis shows that video generation and the exponential abundance of useless content — rather than necessary, useful work — is mostly to blame. My (AI inclusive) work making affordable impact reporting for thousands of impact-driven organisations costs less energy than a single flight with zero real impact. I’d rather take the heat and use it for what matters, while keeping my commitment to not flying and providing nutritious, just food for my community.

This is not a defence of tech-bros and the monopoly of digital infrastructure we all suffer under — and Palestinians and people forced to migrate suffer most acutely — not to mention communities living next to water-hungry data centres. My point is that AI, like low-carbon energy, can be emancipatory under alternative conditions of production and governance. There is no venture-capital ethical AI and there never will be, because it will always choose profit and growth above everything else, even at the cost of our fragile democratic fabric.

The solution to this dystopian world of surveillance, automated killing, and creative displacement is collective. It requires massive agency and participation in building alternative modes of production — machines that genuinely support decision-making and productive processes. The delimitation work on big tech is largely done. What we need now is to simultaneous dismantle monopoly structures that capture all capital, while we build organisations that offer these tools under net-positive-impact schemas: focused on essential industries, helping workers reduce time and gain productivity; distributive in design, creating a mosaic of alternatives that balance cost, access and reach; and limited — there is no space for machines in arts, music, social interaction, or the work we want to do ourselves.

Alternatives exist, but like email and video alternatives before them, they must survive against companies offering zero-price products that make your data and privacy the commodity — and that receive vast amounts of venture capital, private and public, allowing them to run at a loss for years. That is impossible for member-based and stewardship-owned alternatives. We will either need massive public financing, or accept — as with unions — that only people’s effort saves the day. Engage with ethical, member-based solutions, or accept defeat in your wonderful ivory tower.

Information technology requires not only democratic scrutiny, it needs literacy — just like finance. This is not achieved by being consumers or users, but by critically assessing how these tools work, their limitations, risks and potential. Many people think AI is ChatGPT only, while continuing to use Gmail, YouTube and search engines that are not only AI-based, but clearly benefit from human rights violations worldwide and fuel military applications whose dangers are suffered by millions today — mostly in the global south, but soon everywhere. We need sufficiency and wellbeing principles embedded in technology’s design, governance and use — not as optional nice-to-haves. Digital permaculture offers a genuinely good approach to designing just and lasting digital tools. I encourage you to read that literature alongside material about digital utopias; they offer paths for alternative systems, not just problematisation without collective agency.

Grace Brekeley put it wonderfully: it’s your boss, not AI, who will fire you. Firing people is as much a political choice as it is an economic one. AI can only go as far as managers are willing to take it. This is the goal of big corporations — purposeless, monotonous, impersonal, soulless — but not of cooperatives and impact-driven businesses. The latter can leverage AI to focus on what makes them human and unique, leaving the boring stuff to machines--a genuine gift for the working class still engaged in dehumanising labour.

I hate paperwork, admin and routine reporting. I love design, problem-solving and building persuasive stories from data. AI has no place in those human spaces. If you feel threatened in your workspace: organise, speak up, reorganise work with your peers. Not using OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft is necessary, but nowhere near sufficient. Having said that — let’s move away from big tech, big social media, big cloud; support the rising alternatives, even knowing they’re not yet at the right price point. Be patient investors with your 20 euros a month, and create schemes so privacy is not a privilege of the affluent.

Let’s not forget: the struggles linked to AI are class struggles, not technological ones. Organise, learn, build, iterate — until the margins become the common place.

Now the other hot potato. The natural capital industry. Investors and businesses are slowly recognising that their own survival depends on healthy ecosystems, and new financial instruments to protect productive capacities are rising exponentially — even if most of you aren’t aware. Land purchases, biodiversity funds, water credits: these are not just processes of enclosure, they are the system attempting to save itself before it’s too late. That’s genuinely good news for survival, but justice is by no means guaranteed. It is entirely possible to maintain unjust systems with violence while restoring land and ecosystem services. Ecofascism can restore nature without redistributive social systems. We need to get into this field before it’s too late.

As with AI, the general public’sallergy to finance makes us nearly illiterate in what’s actually happening. We may hold the principles of alternative finance, but we are too far from making a dent — from dismantling these systems and creating the social awareness and political projects to regenerate both landscapes and social relationships, not only the former.

Understanding the economics of insurance, the valuation of natural processes, and how capital moves, is used, taxed and reproduced — this is essential. A just transition does not only require a mass movement, parliamentary representation and organised workers; it will require massive capital. Restoring ecosystems while securing livelihoods demands knowledge transfers and payments to the custodians of the land. There is an opportunity to avoid externalising costs and free-riding by extractive forces, but the governance and financial instruments must be ready to integrate local communities, productive capacity, and resources into one of the deepest transformations of our generation.

Land and water systems are the areas where whether we collapse as a civilisation will be decided, and what degree of suffering we’ll endure. The physical world will play an increasingly determinant role in what is possible. Soil health, water security, resilient energy, community strength — these will depend on how we manage local landscapes. The time has come to move from climate alarmism to crisis management. Some claim the climate movement is dead; I think it is maturing and being pruned. Purist ivory towers are dying. People are quietly leaving their bullshit jobs to restore land and focus on existential needs, in solidarity with others. Software developers who could earn 200k in big tech are leaving for alternative projects at high personal cost. The same with architects, teachers and medical professionals who resist — despite mainstream media giving them almost no voice.

If you feel overwhelmed, I feel you. I was desperate, close to doing stupid things. I chose action, radical pragmatism, deep solidarity and the long game. We will fail and fall many times. But in this civilisational crisis of the western model of production and reproduction, we need to repurpose, refurbish, create and repair — as much as we resist, denounce and demand. Your full potential is reached when you dare to engage with the messy world of deep transformations, not when talking about it only superficially or academically.

See you at the barricades and at many life festivals.

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We need a moral QR code on everything that is produced and sold for money in our economy. This QR code should link to the following information:

• the place where every component of the product was produced

• the salaries of all employees from the lowest ranking to the highest ranking at the company that made the product

• the names of all shareholders, big and small

• the average weekly work-time for each employee

• the paid vacation time for each employee

• photographs of the place where the product was made at the time when the product was made

• all the materials including chemical substances used in the manufacturing of the product

• a full list of suppliers including a similar moral QR code for each supplier and contractor

This may sound absurd, far-fetched, or impossible to you. What would be the purpose of these moral QR codes?

First, they would show us a crystal clear picture of how our material economy is constructed on hidden moral assumptions. Capitalism functions on trade secrets, non disclosure agreements, salary secrecy, secret contracts and negotiations, and a lot of evaded responsibility. All these secrets are meant to protect a status quo in which the fundamental principles of capitalism must be defended at all costs. These principles are about the use of hierarchies of power at the workplace, the proportional link between power and property and vice-versa, and the shameless dispossession of various forms of property from land to personal data for the purpose of accumulating more capital. This entire design of capitalism is held together by many layers of secrets, lies, manipulations, misdirections, and violent oppression.

Second, moral QR codes on all products would give us evidence of how our economy impacts the environment and all workers. It would force all economic agents to disclose their complete material footprints, from the resources they use, to how they pay their employees from the lowest to the highest ranks. There is no doubt that the climate crisis is caused by the economic activities of humans. There is no doubt that the breach of Earth limits is caused by the specific quest of capitalists for more profits, more market share, more power, more domination, more growth in general. But all these facts are largely invisible in our daily life. We buy things and services without being aware of the monumental destruction that the capitalist mode of production has done to human and non-human life. Just like we placed warning messages on cigarette packages we should have moral QR codes on all products. Let us separate the good from the bad.

Third, moral QR codes would act as a significant barrier against the expansion of illegal, immoral and destructive practices of production. Implementing moral QR codes that cannot be faked would be a massive blow to the capitalist mode of production. Capitalists will scream 24/7 that implementing moral QR codes will be too expensive and will make their businesses not profitable. Very good! That is exactly what we want! Eliminate the grifters, the polluters, the exploiters, the greedy, and the psychopaths. Let us produce and consume goods and services that are morally just and acceptable by all consumers. Let us make sure that all workers across the entire supply chain are paid fairly, are not discriminated, have safe working conditions, and free access to quality healthcare and education. In fact, moral QR codes would also act as a psychological mirror for consumers themselves because once the entire system of production will be exposed to the world to see, it will be impossible to hide from the accountability of producing and consuming products that destroy life on Earth.

The fashion industry hides exploitation of workers and mountains of waste under glamour and the mindless quest by fashionistas to be the most interesting person on the street, or whatever narcissistic psychopathic idea motivates their lizard brains. Companies such as REI and Patagonia make the high-tech apparel that for extreme outdoor sports all under the pretense of caring for the environment! Epitome of hypocrisy! Meanwhile, another institution obsessed with costume design is the military industrial complex which hides incredible devastation to environments and life under the pretense of national security. What if we put on each bullet and rocket a moral QR code with the names and salaries of all military contractors from the lowest rank to the highest rank? This would make Peter Thiel and Palantir the most famous names on the planet!

Fourth, moral QR codes would help us evolve our moral principles in symbiosis with the living world. The first step in defeating evil is naming and shaming evil for what it is. The forces of good cannot win against nameless, hidden ghosts. We, as a society, are in a severe deficit of meaningful information, that allows us to assess the moral dimension of our material life. If we were exposed to the truth behind what is produced, we would be much better qualified to upgrade our consumption behaviors. One of the most egregious lies told in recent history was that individuals bear the responsibility of their carbon emissions. Fossil fuel companies have launched this lie to hide their responsibility as producers. We are past the point where we can reform capitalism by recycling all our Amazon cardboard boxes.

We have been flooded by oceans of irrelevant information for decades. The purpose was to protect the hidden motives of capitalists and the real design of the system. These hidden motives are hidden because they would cause planetary outrage if they were exposed. We need to know how the sausage is made, both the real sausage and the metaphorical sausage, if we want to survive as species on this planet.

Of course, the idea of moral QR codes is symbolic. Moral QR codes are close to impossible to put in practice under the current economic regime. But the idea itself should make us think that everything that is produced and consumed on this planet has a moral dimension, from the production and use of industrial fertilizers, to the expansion and use of artificial intelligence. Behind every product and service, there are competing moral ideologies and ethical guidelines. Capitalists try their very best to hide their true intentions--which are pretty basic: it’s always about growth of profit, of market share, of power, and of status.

The advertising industry has the job to get paid to lie on behalf of capitalists about the the real intent and morals of capitalism and sell a different moral standard. A luxury car is therefore not about maintaining class, status, and privilege for the super rich, but it is about freedom, comfort, vision, and elegance. The higher the price of a product or service, the bigger the lie.

Defeating consumer culture starts by exposing the hidden moral code of capitalists, which is embedded into the rules of production for pretty much everything. To make it simple, let us start with a realistic moral QR code on all the clothes we buy. How about that for a start, Shein, Zara, H&M, Temu, Forever 21 and you, yes you, Patagonia?

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Zoraida Calle, bióloga colombiana, es un referente en el estudio y práctica de la restauración agroecológica. Zoraida forma parte del equipo de investigadores de CIPAV, donde coordina el Área de Restauración Ecológica. Desde el comienzo de su trabajo con comunidades campesinas en Colombia, Zoraida entendió que la ciencia de la ecología de la restauración no tenía todas las respuestas para motivar a los campesinos a mejorar su entorno natural. Hacía falta movilizar sus emociones y su arraigo hacia la tierra para lograr que asumieran el papel de custodios de la biodiversidad.

El sistema agrícola es el mayor emisor de gases de todos los sectores económicos. Es responsable de entre el 25 y el 30% de las emisiones. Es, con diferencia, la principal causa de pérdida de biodiversidad. También es el mayor consumidor de agua dulce: el 70% de las extracciones de agua en ríos, lagos y aguas subterráneas proceden de la agricultura. Y la sobrecarga de nitrógeno y fósforo se debe al uso excesivo de fertilizantes. La expansión de la tierra [para uso humano] está causada principalmente por la agricultura. Johan Rockstöm, 2024

¿Tendríamos que hablar aquí de los daños causados por “la agricultura” a secas, o más bien de un tipo muy concreto de agricultura, que causa daños? Al leer una declaración como la de arriba Rockström nos imaginamos que la devastación es inevitable, pues tenemos que comer. Sin embargo hay personas dedicadas hace ya décadas a estudiar alternativas que simultáneamente puedan alimentar a la humanidad, cuidar los suelos y la vida en la tierra y ser sostenibles. Estas alternativas existen y están siendo implementadas. Pueden traer simultáneamente soluciones medioambientales, alimentarias y sociales, pero además son viables económicamente. Entrevistamos a Zoraida Calle sobre éstos temas.

Gisela Ruiseco: Zoraida, vivimos hoy una grave crisis de degradación de suelos, Según datos de la UNESCO, el 75% está ya degradado. ¿Nos puedes contar un poco sobre las causas de esta degradación?

Zoraida Calle: La degradación de los suelos tiene múltiples causas: la deforestación y pérdida de la cobertura vegetal, las prácticas de labranza para la agricultura, el pastoreo continuo, el uso de sustancias sintéticas como fungicidas, herbicidas y fertilizantes, y el fuego. Todas estas causas tienen en común la falta de conciencia de la sociedad sobre el valor del suelo y la infinidad de servicios que proporciona y que hacen posible la vida humana.

Gisela: Si bien las estadísticas sobre la magnitud de la degradación resultan estremecedoras, las posibilidades reales de restauración pueden llenar de esperanza. He tenido el placer de conocer tu proyecto familiar en tierras antioqueñas (nota: zona andina colombiana) en el que llevan ya muchos años, y mucho amor también, en el proceso de restaurar suelos degradados. Han logrado cosas hermosas y sorprendentes como ver surgir un arroyo ‘de la nada’. Por otro lado, mantienen allí también un proyecto agroecológico. ¿Cómo fue ese proceso, qué nos puedes compartir de las experiencias al ver cómo el suelo y la vida en general, logran recuperarse?

Zoraida: En la década de 1970, mis padres, ambos médicos y miembros de familias que habían perdido su conexión con el campo, compraron un terreno de 12 hectáreas que había sido un potrero de una ganadería extensiva. El suelo de vocación forestal y fuerte pendiente había sido maltratado por la eliminación casi total del bosque, el pastoreo continuo y el uso del fuego para el control de malezas. La única fuente de agua era un pequeño manantial situado en un lindero de la propiedad. Sin conocimiento técnico pero motivados por el deseo de mejorar la tierra y el agua, mis padres protegieron el pequeño bosque, el manantial y otras áreas sensibles del predio. También compraron vacas e iniciaron una pequeña lechería de manejo convencional, donde los pastos se fertilizaban con urea y había pocos árboles en los potreros.

En la década de 1990 iniciamos una reconversión de la ganadería basada en los principios de la agroecología: establecimos bancos forrajeros mixtos, subdividimos las áreas de pastoreo en pequeños potreros con árboles y arbustos e iniciamos la eliminación gradual de insumos sintéticos. Al mismo tiempo, intensificamos la restauración de los bosques nativos: plantamos miles de árboles nativos e instalamos cercas para acelerar la recuperación del bosque en terrenos sensibles. Tres décadas más tarde, el predio era irreconocible. Más de la mitad del área estaba cubierta de bosques jóvenes y vigorosos, la fauna silvestre fue regresando poco a poco y la ganadería convencional se transformó en sistemas silvopastoriles de manejo agroecológico con una alta diversidad de especies.

Nunca vimos una frontera entre la reconversión productiva y la restauración ecológica; más bien, integramos ambos esfuerzos en un proceso gradual de transformación para mejorar la producción y la conservación biológica.

Gisela: ¿Nos podrías contar sobre tí, cómo llegaste a interesarte por estos temas, qué vivencias te llevaron a que te dedicaras a la restauración agroecológica?

Zoraida: Pienso que fue una cadena de casualidades y encuentros fortuitos. Estudié biología porque me encantaba la genética, pero después de un semestre de campo en la selva de La Macarena (Meta, Colombia), supe que el laboratorio nunca sería mi lugar de trabajo. La selva me atrapó en cuerpo y alma. Al estudiar las relaciones ecológicas de dos especies de monos en su ambiente natural, entendí que lo mejor que podía hacer por estos parientes de vida arbórea era aprender a restaurar el bosque que los sostiene.

Además de la ecología y la conservación, siempre me fascinó la agricultura basada en la ecología, es decir la agroecología. Durante años trabajé en restauración ecológica y agroecología intuyendo que ambas disciplinas debían colaborar y dialogar activamente. Un día decidí comenzar a usar el término híbrido restauración agroecológica, y desde entonces trabajo en la intersección entre agricultura, ganadería y conservación de la biodiversidad.

Gisela: Esta intersección es especialmente fascinante, ya que muchas veces desde el ambientalismo se imagina a la restauración ecológica como un proceso del que se debe apartar al ser humano y sus actividades agrícolas. ¿Nos podrías contar de algún proyecto en concreto con el que podamos entender cómo estos elementos pueden confluir? Particularmente la ganadería, pues sabemos del nefasto rol de la ganadería convencional, de sus excesos, en el cambio climático: ¿cómo puede ésta contribuir a la restauración? Y qué tan viables, económicamente, pueden llegar a ser estos proyectos?

Zoraida: Hay visiones muy contrastantes de la restauración ecológica. En un extremo tenemos la restauración de cinco estrellas, que busca replicar fielmente un ecosistema histórico de referencia, sin tener muy en cuenta los gustos y preferencias de las personas que habitan el territorio. Otra posibilidad es hacer una restauración socio-ecológica e incluyente, que integra diversos valores, prácticas, conocimientos y objetivos en diferentes escalas y con varios grupos de beneficiarios. Este tipo de restauración busca reconstruir un ecosistema que pueda sostener los medios de vida de la población local.

A través del Proyecto Mojana Clima y Vida del Ministerio del Medio Ambiente y el PNUD (Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el desarrollo), el equipo de CIPAV trabajó con comunidades y organizaciones de base para hacer una restauración comunitaria con árboles nativos y cultivos con el fin de fortalecer la soberanía alimentaria y la economía local. En vez de plantar 700 árboles por hectárea (como era la meta del programa), plantamos 200 a 400 árboles en hileras, con espacios para integrar cultivos diversos. El resultado son sistemas agroforestales que generan servicios ecosistémicos y alimentos saludables. Al integrar la producción de alimentos, se logró el entusiasmo y la continuidad del proyecto.

Los proyectos que integran los medios de vida de las comunidades pueden ser más viables financieramente que los proyectos que intentan reconstruir ecosistemas históricos. El mismo concepto aplica para los sistemas ganaderos. Es posible diseñar sistemas mixtos donde el ganado pastorea en sistemas silvopastoriles y se liberan áreas sensibles para restaurar los bosques. Al fin y al cabo, el ganado bovino evolucionó en un ambiente de bosque abierto, no en praderas homogéneas sin árboles. Al crear potreros arbolados, estamos devolviendo al ganado a su ambiente natural, donde puede tener más bienestar y productividad.

Gisela: Los saberes locales, que se defienden en la restauración agroecológica por mucho tiempo han sido descalificados. Cuéntanos, en tus experiencias con campesinos y comunidades en Colombia ¿cómo se complementan los saberes científicos y los tradicionales?

Zoraida: Sin duda, el mayor pecado de la ciencia es la arrogancia y el desprecio por otras formas de generar conocimiento. Muy temprano en mi trabajo de campo entendí que el conocimiento indígena y campesino sobre los ecosistemas es profundo y multidimensional. El lenguaje sencillo de las personas que han pasado su vida en convivencia estrecha con la biodiversidad está lleno de sabiduría para quien tenga la humildad necesaria para escuchar con atención. Muchas veces los biólogos creemos conocer una especie porque podemos darle un nombre científico en latín y entender a cuál linaje pertenece. Pero un curandero tradicional tiene un conocimiento más detallado y sutil sobre las relaciones de una planta con su entorno o los efectos terapéuticos de las plantas que crecen a la sombra. El conocimiento ecológico tradicional es más colorido, poético y vital. Al trabajar con campesinos e indígenas como colegas en la generación de conocimiento, podemos lograr mucho más que al trabajar solos.

Para mis colegas de CIPAV y para mí, la relación de amistad y trabajo colaborativo con la comunidad campesina de la localidad de Bellavista (municipio de El Dovio, Valle del Cauca, Colombia),* fue clave para entender la profundidad y el valor de los conocimientos ecológicos tradicionales. Las personas que han vivido toda su vida en las montañas conocen la flora local, saben cuáles aves dispersan las semillas de los árboles, entienden las variaciones sutiles de los suelos y tienen una gran riqueza de saberes sobre el territorio. Un gran maestro en esta comunidad fue el líder campesino Tiberio Giraldo quien nos enseñó que “no se puede restaurar la tierra sin antes restaurar el corazón”.

El investigador científico debe tener curiosidad para indagar sobre este conocimiento basado en la experiencia, y apertura mental para interpretarlo, traducirlo y aplicarlo. Muchas preguntas de investigación se responden de manera más efectiva a través de un diálogo horizontal y colaborativo donde todos reconocemos el valor de las distintas formas de conocimiento.

Juntos hemos transformado prácticas tradicionales en alternativas que regeneran los suelos, protegen el agua, enriquecen los paisajes y fortalecen la economía local.

Gisela: El empuje hacia la globalización y la vigente desigualdad en tenencias de tierra ¿pueden ser factores que impiden que haya un cambio más raṕido hacia una agricultura sostenible? ¿Cómo podemos contrarrestar este empuje hacia el monocultivo, la estandarización de semillas, etc., hacia la gigantez?

Zoraida: Como bien lo explica el agroecólogo Miguel Altieri, comer es un acto ecológico y político. Cada vez que compramos alimentos para nuestra familia, estamos tomando decisiones sobre el uso y el futuro de la tierra. Para contrarrestar la tendencia homogeneizadora de la agricultura industrial contemporánea los consumidores debemos tener un papel más crítico y activo. Debemos estar informados sobre el origen de los productos agrícolas y ganaderos, y los métodos de cultivo y cuidado de los animales. Es una responsabilidad de todos favorecer las cadenas cortas de comercialización al comprar productos locales en mercados campesinos y entablar relaciones directas con los productores de los alimentos. Los descubrimientos científicos recientes sobre el microbioma de nuestro intestino y el papel que este conglomerado de microorganismos juega en nuestra salud física y mental, muestran en forma contundente que los alimentos saludables se producen en suelos vivos y biodiversos, no en suelos removidos por maquinaria agrícola y saturados de compuestos sintéticos.

Gisela: ¡Gracias Zoraida!

* La colaboración del CIPAV en esta zona ya es de décadas, e incluye varias generaciones de agricultores. He aquí un video donde se pueden conocer más detalles de cómo los monocultivos en un momento empobrecieron la zona, y cómo, en colaboración comunitaria, se logró una transformación agroecológica:

Leer de más casos de restauración agroecológica del CIPAV

PPF sobre el CIPAV y su obra

Between science and communities: a life dedicated to agroecological restoration

Zoraida Calle, a Colombian biologist, is a leading figure in the study and practice of agroecological restoration. Zoraida is part of the research team at CIPAV, where she coordinates the Ecological Restoration Unit. From the very beginning of her work with rural communities in Colombia, Zoraida understood that the science of restoration ecology did not have all the answers needed to motivate farmers to improve their natural environment. It was necessary to tap into their emotions and their deep connection to the land to help them take on the role of biodiversity stewards.

The agricultural sector is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases among all economic sectors. It accounts for between 25% and 30% of emissions. It is by far the leading cause of biodiversity loss. It is also the largest consumer of freshwater: 70% of water withdrawals from rivers, lakes, and groundwater come from agriculture. And nitrogen and phosphorus overload is due to excessive fertilizer use. Land expansion [for human use] is caused primarily by agriculture. Johan Rockström, 2024

Should we be talking here about the damage caused by “agriculture” in general, or rather about a very specific type of agriculture that causes harm? When reading a statement like Rockström’s above, we imagine that devastation is inevitable, since we have to eat. However, there are people who have dedicated decades to studying alternatives that can simultaneously feed humanity, care for the soil and life on earth, and be sustainable. These alternatives exist and are being implemented. They can simultaneously provide environmental, food, and social solutions, and they are also economically viable. We interviewed Zoraida Calle on these topics.

Gisela Ruiseco: Zoraida, we are currently facing a serious crisis of soil degradation; according to UNESCO data, 75% of the world’s soil is already degraded. Can you tell us about the causes of this phenomenon?

Zoraida Calle: Soil degradation has multiple causes: deforestation and loss of vegetation cover, agricultural tillage practices, continuous grazing, the use of synthetic substances such as fungicides, herbicides, and fertilizers, and fire. All these causes share a common factor: society’s lack of awareness regarding the value of soil and the countless services it provides that make human life possible.

Gisela: While the statistics on the extent of degradation are shocking, the real possibilities for restoration can be a source of hope. I’ve had the pleasure of learning about your family’s project in the Antioquia region (in the Colombian Andes), where you’ve been working for many years—and with great dedication—to restore degraded soils. You have achieved beautiful and surprising things, such as seeing a stream emerge ‘out of nowhere.’ Additionally, you maintain an agroecological project there. What was that process like? What can you share with us about your experiences as you witness how the soil and life in general are recovering?

Zoraida: In the 1970s, my parents—both doctors and members of families who had lost their connection to the countryside—purchased a 12-hectare plot of land that had been a pasture for extensive cattle ranching. The steeply sloped land, naturally suited for forestry, had been severely damaged by the near-total clearing of the forest, continuous grazing, and the use of fire for weed control. The only source of water was a small spring located on the edge of the property. Without technical knowledge but motivated by a desire to improve the land and water, my parents protected the small forest, the spring, and other sensitive areas of the property. They also bought cows and started a small, conventionally managed dairy farm, where the pastures were fertilized with urea and there were few trees in the paddocks.

In the 1990s, we began a transition of our livestock operations based on the principles of agroecology: we established mixed forage strips, subdivided grazing areas into small paddocks with trees and shrubs, and began the gradual elimination of synthetic inputs. At the same time, we intensified the restoration of native forests: we planted thousands of native trees and installed fences to accelerate forest recovery on sensitive land. Three decades later, the property was unrecognizable. More than half of the area was covered with young, vigorous forests; wildlife gradually returned; and conventional livestock farming transformed into agroecologically-managed silvopastoral systems with high species diversity.

We never saw a boundary between productive conversion and ecological restoration; rather, we integrated both efforts into a gradual process of transformation to improve production and biological conservation.

Gisela: Could you tell us about yourself—how did you become interested in these topics, and what experiences led you to dedicate yourself to agroecological restoration?

Zoraida: I think it was a chain of coincidences and timely encounters. I studied biology because I loved genetics, but after a field semester in the La Macarena rainforest (Meta, Colombia), I knew the lab would never be my workplace. The jungle captivated me in body and soul. While studying the ecological relationships of two species of monkeys in their natural habitat, I realized that the best thing I could do for these tree-dwelling relatives was to learn how to restore the forest that sustains them.

In addition to ecology and conservation, I’ve always been fascinated by ecology-based agriculture—that is, agroecology. For years I worked in ecological restoration and agroecology, sensing that both disciplines needed to collaborate and engage in active dialogue. One day I decided to start using the hybrid term agroecological restoration, and since then I’ve been working at the intersection of agriculture, livestock, and biodiversity conservation.

Gisela: This intersection is particularly fascinating, since environmentalism often views ecological restoration as a process from which humans and their agricultural activities must be excluded. Could you tell us about a specific project that would help us understand how these elements can come together? Particularly livestock farming, since we know of the disastrous role of conventional livestock farming, and its excesses, in climate change: how can it contribute to restoration? And how economically viable can these projects become?

Zoraida: There are very contrasting views on ecological restoration. At one extreme, we have “five-star” restoration, which seeks to faithfully replicate a historical reference ecosystem without taking into account the tastes and preferences of the people who inhabit the territory. Another possibility is to undertake a socio-ecological and inclusive restoration that integrates diverse values, practices, knowledge, and objectives across different scales and with various beneficiary groups.

This type of restoration seeks to rebuild an ecosystem that can sustain the livelihoods of the local population.

Through the Mojana Climate and Life Project of the [Colombian] Ministry of the Environment and the UNDP (United Nations Development Programme), the CIPAV team worked with communities and grassroots organizations to carry out a community-based restoration using native trees and crops to strengthen food sovereignty and the local economy. Instead of planting 700 trees per hectare (as was the program’s goal), we planted 200 to 400 trees in rows, with spaces to integrate diverse crops. The result is agroforestry systems that generate ecosystem services and healthy food. By integrating food production, we fostered enthusiasm and ensured the project’s continuity.

Projects that integrate into communities’ livelihoods can be more financially viable than those that attempt to reconstruct historical ecosystems. The same concept applies to livestock systems. It is possible to design mixed systems where livestock graze in silvopastoral systems and sensitive areas are set aside to restore forests. After all, cattle evolved in an open forest environment, not in homogeneous, treeless grasslands. By creating wooded pastures, we are returning cattle to their natural environment, where they can enjoy greater well-being and productivity.

Gisela: Local knowledge, which has been long dismissed historically, is advocated for in agroecological restoration. Tell us, based on your experiences with farmers and communities in Colombia, how do scientific and traditional knowledge complement each other?

Zoraida: Without a doubt, science’s greatest sin is arrogance and contempt for other ways of generating knowledge. Very early on in my fieldwork, I realized that indigenous and peasant knowledge of ecosystems is profound and multidimensional. The simple language of people who have spent their lives in close coexistence with biodiversity is full of wisdom for those who have the humility to listen attentively. Often, biologists believe we know a species because we can give it a scientific name in Latin and understand which lineage it belongs to. But a traditional healer possesses a more detailed and nuanced understanding of a plant’s relationship with its environment or the therapeutic effects of plants that grow in the shade. Traditional ecological knowledge is more colorful, poetic, and vital. By working with farmers and indigenous people as colleagues in knowledge generation, we can achieve much more than by working alone.

For my colleagues at CIPAV and for me, the friendship and collaborative work with the peasant community in the town of Bellavista (municipality of El Dovio, Valle del Cauca, Colombia)1 was key to understanding the depth and value of traditional ecological knowledge. People who have lived their entire lives in the mountains know the local flora, know which birds disperse the seeds of the trees, understand the subtle variations in the soils, and possess a wealth of knowledge about the territory. A great teacher in this community was the peasant leader Tiberio Giraldo, who taught us that “you cannot restore the land without first restoring the heart.”

Scientific researchers must have the curiosity to explore this experience-based knowledge, and the open-mindedness to interpret, translate, and apply it. Many research questions are answered most effectively through a horizontal, collaborative dialogue where we all recognize the value of different forms of knowledge.

Together, we have transformed traditional practices into alternatives that regenerate soils, protect water, enrich landscapes, and strengthen the local economy.

Gisela: Could the push toward globalization and the current inequality in land tenure be factors preventing a faster shift toward sustainable agriculture? How can we counter this push toward monoculture, seed standardization, and the rise of agribusiness giants?

Zoraida: As agroecologist Miguel Altieri aptly explains, eating is an ecological and political act. Every time we buy food for our family, we are making decisions about the use and future of the land. To counteract the homogenizing trend of contemporary industrial agriculture, consumers must play a more critical and active role.

We must be informed about the origin of agricultural and livestock products, as well as the methods of cultivation and animal care. It is everyone’s responsibility to support short supply chains by buying local products at farmers’ markets and establishing direct relationships with food producers. Recent scientific discoveries about our gut microbiome and the role this community of microorganisms plays in our physical and mental health clearly demonstrate that healthy foods are produced in living, biodiverse soils—not in soils churned up by agricultural machinery and saturated with synthetic compounds.

Gisela: Thank you, Zoraida!

Read more about CIPAV’s agroecological restoration projects

PDF on CIPAV and its work

It’s funny, which memories stick. I have vivid memories of sitting in my ninth-grade biology class and learning about telomeres. I can’t even remember what they are, other than that they’re somehow related to DNA, and shortened telomeres can mean you’ll live a shorter life. Oh, and the notion that telomeres become shorter with stress. So naturally, I’ve been stressing about the length of my telomeres ever since—the irony is dumbfounding. I remember little else from that class, other than mitochondria being the powerhouse of the cell—but the telomeres? Man, my long-term memory snatched that lesson up and clung on for dear life. Little did I know that almost a decade later, stress would come to define my life in entirely new ways.

The natural antidote to stress is joy. But for those of us who are familiar with depression, questions like “what brings you joy?” are particularly hard to answer. Especially right now, when it feels like every day is another step towards apocalyptic collapse, finding joy in anything can seem futile and selfish. But as I’ve learned the hard way, joy is an integral part of survival. Without it, each day feels more bleak than the last, and finding the will to live is like looking for a shadow at high noon.

At this point in my life, I was desperate for some joy—but it was nowhere to be found. Part of the reason for this was that the things that had formerly brought me so much joy were now activities I couldn’t physically participate in. My avenues for joy had vanished into thin air.

Other vivid memories that have stuck around include some of my earliest: running down a sandy boardwalk in summer while my mother chased me down with sunscreen in hand; learning tennis at a day camp and deciding I hated it because I wasn’t any good; learning to ride a bicycle in the park with my dad—who insisted that the best way to learn was by trying to balance on the bike while it was stationary; the day I tried out for the club soccer team my best friend was on—it was pouring rain and I was too nervous to go alone, so she accompanied me and withstood being pelted by cold raindrops while I ran endless drills; the day I finished my first half-marathon and the feeling of my legs being somehow simultaneously numb and pulsing with strength.

So many of my memories are steeped in the athletic pursuits of my childhood because that’s who I was—an athlete. I loved the early morning practices, the pre-game jitters, and the after-school study sessions. I loved playing soccer in the pouring rain—and being unable to tell the difference between sweat and raindrops. I craved the hush that would grip a gymnasium as I stepped up to the free-throw line with the basketball in my hands, my body brimming with adrenaline.

Eventually, as I prepared for a post-pandemic collegiate soccer season that never came, I learned to dig deep and find fulfillment in the training as much as the match itself. I grew to define myself by my abilities, my athletic achievements, and the strength of character I built along the way. I challenged myself to expand my comfort zone by joining a water polo team and learning to play. Eventually, I reached a milestone that my younger self would have believed impossible: three half-marathons, one of which was on a treadmill. Every week, I looked forward to the feeling of a wind-worn throat and hands so numb I lacked the dexterity to pause my music, both of which were common after a 10-mile run. Many non-runners don’t get it—and even I was a hater once—but the queen-of-the-world feeling you get after a particularly gnarly run is unparalleled.

To be suddenly swept into this new reality, where my well-worn, familiar sources of happiness were no longer available, was devastating. Without these activities that I’ve grown to think of as part of me—running, hiking, soccer, basketball, tennis, water polo, kayaking, climbing, biking, I could go on—did I even know who I was?

I can’t say it was one thing or another that specifically got me out of this identity crisis. I definitely still miss being able to go for a run, and have lost points of connection with others by virtue of being unable to share in some of the more physical hobbies. But I’ve managed to find some pinpricks of light within all of this darkness. I’ve even been exploring hobbies that work with a more low-energy lifestyle: knitting, crocheting, embroidery, writing, reading, and so on. I’m still looking for that genuine top-of-the-world feeling, but realizing I might not find it for while and learning to be okay with that reality has allowed me to savor other moments that had previously gone unnoticed.

The slowed-down nature of my current lifestyle has forced me to search for joy in pockets of my life that might have otherwise been labeled as mundane. I’m learning to savor small pieces of joy, like the sweetness of a ripe, juicy strawberry from my community-supported agriculture produce box, or the low rumble of my cat’s purr as he nestles into my lap for his afternoon snooze. Or the way the sun hits the trees outside my window during golden hour, making them glow like celestial beings. The satisfaction that comes with completing a knitting project, and the pride that comes with wearing something I made with my own two hands—or seeing others wear something I made for them.

I guess my point is that joy can be found anywhere—you just have to want to see it. In the first months of my chronic illness reality, I was so occupied by the devastation that it felt wrong to search for any joy. But as time went on, and my life slowed down, I realized how important joy is for survival, and how abundant it can be if you let it. In a system driven by chaos and pain, joy is an act of resistance.

That same chaos and pain isn’t just something we experience in our own bodies; it is built into the very structures around us. In the next two parts of this series, we will look more closely at how our current system operates. By giving you a sense of what it’s been like to experience a sudden onset of chronic illness in Parts I through IV, I’m hoping you’ll trust me enough to hear me out in the next two parts, where I tie seemingly unrelated pieces together, use my experiences as a lens to examine our current crises, and impart some wisdom regarding how we might build resilience in the face of danger.

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What if one of the biggest blind spots in economics is that it has no serious framework for understanding how chronic insecurity changes human behaviour?

Economics is usually presented as a technical discipline concerned with growth, inflation, employment, and trade, while trauma is generally discussed in psychology, healthcare, or social work, as though the two fields belong to entirely different worlds. But the separation between them may be one of the defining weaknesses of modern economic thinking.

Across much of the world, people are living under constant pressure. Housing is insecure or unaffordable, debt has become a permanent feature of life, stable employment is increasingly difficult to find, burnout is common, trust in institutions is weakening, and many people feel trapped between rising costs, ecological anxiety, and the sense that long-term stability is slipping further out of reach.

These conditions are often discussed as separate problems, with housing policy sitting in one box, mental health in another, ecological collapse belonging somewhere else, and economic insecurity treated as an unfortunate but manageable side-effect of modern economies. But what if these are not disconnected problems? What if many of our economic systems are now organised around chronic insecurity?

Trauma-informed thinking starts from a simple idea: people adapt to the environments they live in, and when instability becomes a permanent condition rather than a temporary disruption, long-term thinking weakens, trust erodes, and behaviours shaped by stress and survival gradually become normalised.

Someone living with insecure housing, unstable work, rising debt, or constant financial pressure will often make different decisions from someone who feels safe and secure, not because their values or character are fundamentally different, but because instability changes how people relate to time, risk, trust, and survival.

Yet economics often struggles to recognise these dynamics clearly. Many behaviours linked to chronic insecurity are treated as personal failings or cultural decline rather than responses to the systems people inhabit. Burnout becomes an individual resilience problem, short-term decision-making is framed as irresponsibility, distrust is treated as a normal response to a harsh and competitive economic system, and exhaustion becomes normalised.

The language of economics frequently reduces people to consumers, workers, or units of productivity, paying far less attention to the conditions under which human beings remain psychologically, socially, and politically functional over long periods of time.

Seen through the lens of trauma theory, doesn’t the question change entirely? Instead of asking why people are becoming more anxious, distrustful, exhausted, or politically volatile, we can begin asking what kinds of systems repeatedly produce those outcomes and whether instability has become part of how those systems now function. We can also begin asking whether healthier economic systems would depend less upon keeping large parts of the population in conditions of chronic insecurity.

This matters because many modern economies increasingly rely upon forms of instability that generate chronic stress and insecurity. Precarious work creates “flexibility,” housing scarcity pushes up property values, debt keeps consumption going, permanent competition is treated as efficiency, overwork becomes a sign of ambition, and ecological damage is tolerated so long as economic output continues to rise.

These systems can appear successful even while the social foundations underneath them begin to weaken, because GDP doesn’t distinguish between activity that strengthens society and activity that emerges from stress, instability, or crisis.

This creates a dangerous cycle in which stress generates demand, crisis creates industries, and populations gradually adapt to worsening conditions instead of collectively transforming them.

People often argue that competition and insecurity drive innovation and adaptability. But beyond a certain point, persistent instability makes long-term thinking more difficult, weakens trust, fragments communities, and pushes societies toward reactive rather than creative behaviour.

A systems-aware approach would begin by asking what kinds of economic and institutional arrangements allow people and communities to remain stable, secure, and capable of participating meaningfully in social life over time. From this perspective, sufficiency isn’t primarily about reducing excess consumption, but about creating the material conditions under which people are no longer trapped in constant adaptation to threat and instability.

This wouldn’t mean turning economics into therapy. It would mean recognising that human beings are shaped by the conditions in which they live, and that economic systems influence behaviour, trust, cognition, and social relationships in profound ways.

This framework would place far greater emphasis on reducing chronic precarity rather than just managing its consequences after the fact, treating secure housing, ecological stability, strong public institutions, social participation, and access to essential services as foundational conditions for a healthy society rather than secondary concerns.

A housing system shaped by this approach would treat security and stability as core outcomes rather than side-effects of market efficiency. Policies would be judged partly by whether they make housing more secure and stable, rather than simply increasing transaction volume or asset values, while approaches such as long-term rental protections, cost-based housing models, and community land trusts become important because they reduce persistent insecurity rather than merely managing their consequences.

More broadly, policies would be evaluated not only according to output or employment growth, but also according to whether they reduce or intensify chronic insecurity. Labour market policies would be assessed according to whether they reduce precarity or deepen it, and economic success would be tied more closely to long-term social resilience and less to the sheer volume of market activity.

Most importantly, this approach would stop mistaking survival adaptation for flourishing.

Modern societies possess extraordinary productive and technological capacities, yet many people increasingly experience life as exhausting, unstable, and psychologically relentless. That shouldn’t be treated as a side issue because it may reveal something important about the systems themselves.

The crucial mistake is to assume that adaptation proves health. People can become accustomed to chronic insecurity, communities can learn to live with deterioration, institutions can function despite declining trust, and economies can continue operating amid ecological damage. Yet adaptation and flourishing are not the same thing.

A society’s ability to continue functioning should not automatically be taken as evidence that it’s thriving. Sometimes the evidence that a system is working is also evidence that it’s placing increasing strain on the conditions that make long-term wellbeing possible.

In his 1970 treatise on confrontation within organizations and movements, American economist Albert O. Hirschman laid out the three forms of response individuals can employ in the face of a resented power structure. Loyalty is when individuals consign themselves to the whims of the social order, voice is when they confront the social order directly, and exit is when they pull out in search of a more favorable option or build an alternative of their own. Many of us romanticize exiting, dreaming to build systems of living that are free from the demands the social order. The problem is that exit strategies do not occur in a vacuum, and are subject to continual negotiation with the systems they challenge.

Building alternative systems outside of the social order is an important method of change adopted by a range of social and political movements. The United Farm Workers union in California, for example, propelled itself to success by building social services for workers, including a burial fund and by making notaries, translators, and form fillers available to immigrant farmworkers. By offering social services outside of the existing system, they better met the needs of their members while cultivating a sense of mutual solidarity. Such strategies form the bedrock of many mutual aid projects; an ethos of “We’ll just do it ourselves.”

Unfortunately, simply ‘exiting’ the social order is often not an option. Movements attempting to build parallel alternatives may find themselves entangled in the logic of dominant systems, subject to the whims of incumbents and the constraints they force upon us. The forces of conformity, efficiency, and competition all too often denude movements for change of their more radical goals.

Worker cooperatives are a common victim of this ‘regression to the norm’ phenomenon. Attempts to establish novel economic models are often quashed by the homogenizing effect of the market, which compels cooperatives to nullify some of their more radical precepts in order to survive. The famous Mondragón cooperative federation in Spain’s Basque Country initially had a rule that the highest paid employee would make no more than three times the lowest paid employee. This strategy was in keeping with cooperative principles of worker solidarity and to prevent an internal class system from arising.

Unfortunately, the firm eventually found that this policy, along with limits on hiring contractors, stymied their ability to attract and retain talented engineers and leaders who would often leave to pursue higher paid opportunities in the private sector, harming their ability to build a true alternative in the face of brain drain. In response, they changed the pay ratio to 4.5:1 and later to 6:1 to stay competitive. While still far more egalitarian than private companies, this forced betrayal of cooperative values represents an unsavory compromise the Basque cooperative movement has had to make with the forces of capital.

The Californian organic movement is another prime example of accommodation to incumbent systems. Up until the 1990s, organic agriculture in the state was quite radical and incredibly marginal, with organic foods being grown by tiny farms and sold in obscure, locally owned or cooperative grocery stores. These farms adopted truly transformative production methods, integrating crops and livestock to ensure the circulation of nutrients and controlling pests with biological instead of chemical means. The individuals involved in the organic movement were highly values-driven, willing to take a cut in profits to deliver ecologically sound food to their equally principled consumers.

With time, however, the broader market recognized an opportunity for greater profit within this niche. Chain grocers wanted a cut of this higher-margin market, and more conventional farmers began producing organically. Lacking the doctrinal dedication to the philosophy of organic farming, these new farmers adopted an “input substitution” model where, instead of truly transforming the way they farmed, they found nominally organic inputs like Chilean nitrate that allowed them to farm in modes similar to how they farmed before. The rejuvenation of the land and water sought by the organic movement never followed, even as more farmers adopted the label. This denuding of organic farming, brought on by market forces, was further entrenched by the high cost of land in California, which saddled farmers with debt and forced even the ideologically-motivated to cut corners to stay in business. In attempting to build an alternative, organic agriculture was plainly unable to escape the demands for efficiency and maximized production wrought by market forces. The once-revolutionary organic movement was reduced to following the template laid out by conventional agriculture.

In cultivating new economies of sufficiency and wellbeing on the margins of the social order, the process of regression is an essential strategic consideration. No matter how distant a project is from the purview of rationalizing markets, some level of coercion, using financial, legal, and infrastructural mechanisms, will compel those building new institutions and lifestyles to compromise in some way with the demands of the system.

Compromise, however, need not pollute our attempts to transform the world. A strategic understanding of how these forces work and where it is possible to fight against them can ensure continuity between vision and result. When planning a project, understanding how one relies on the system and planning around those issues can help to preserve the project’s mission.

A collective farm, for example, could construct dual supply chains where inputs are created on-farm and purchased through existing supply chains, balancing the need for productivity while maintaining alternative forms of fuel and fertilizer should those supply chains fail. Activist groups, similarly, can build out communications networks through dominant tech platforms to maintain relations with the public and their wider communities while constructing autonomous infrastructures, such as mesh-nets, to ensure secure conversations can still occur and create an off-ramp should censorship intensify.

Pragmatic exit strategies will simultaneously operate within and against the dominant system. The regression phenomena will always be present; studying and planning around it is crucial for forging thriving futures.

Nolan Monaghan is a graduate of the University of Missouri Center for Agroforestry, where he studied the agronomy of perennial polycultures. He writes about agroecology, circular sustainability, and human cooperation on his blog, Headwaters.

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(For english translation see further down)

Puede ser acertado decir, como lo hace un lema reciente de marketing, que Colombia es el “país de la belleza”. Belleza, exuberancia, riqueza de climas, de agua, de vida, de diversidad.

Al tiempo Colombia se ha considerado por momentos un Estado fallido que no logra proteger a sus habitantes de la violencia. Y es que la violencia ha vuelto, a pesar del tratado de paz del 2016 (dirigido a resolver el conflicto armado que tiene lugar desde los años ’60) y sus reconocidos aciertos.

Quiero aquí, con unas cuantas pinceladas, acercarme a la complejidad de ese país “de las soledades” como decía G. García Márquez: un vasto territorio compuesto por zonas y gentes muy diversas, de geografías accidentadas, aisladas o parcamente pobladas.

Algunas particularidades históricas

¿Será que Colombia es un país intrínsecamente violento, como muchos de sus habitantes se preguntan? Bueno, no, la violencia tiene raíces. Más bien se podría decir que se trata de una nación con una brutal historia como “colonia de asentamiento” que nunca curó sus profundas heridas, y que, en conjunto con una complejidad de factores históricos, ha normalizado la violencia. Por ejemplo, la presente tenencia de tierra, una de las más desiguales del mundo, es una continuación del despojo colonial a los habitantes originarios y un factor determinante en la prolongada guerra civil.

La complicada geografía es otro factor a considerar: Históricamente, se formaron ‘archipiélagos de poder’ centrados en la región andina y diferentes zonas perifŕica quedaron abandonadas para beneficio de quien pudiera aprovecharse de ellas, dentro de lógicas colonial/raciales. Hoy, el país, asentado sobre esa estructura, ocupa su lugar como “frontera de extracción “ en el capitalismo globalizado, como he desarrollado en otra parte.

La revolución independentista fue en parte una maniobra de los “criollos” para librarse de las innovaciones que pretendían las reformas borbónicas: Desde España había “una voluntad explícita de desmontar el entramado de redes políticas” que entorpecían el paso a una gobernabilidad moderna (Parecidas al presente “caciquismo” que impregna las “soledades” del golpeado país).

Después de la independencia, los criollos (descendientes de europeos nacidos en América) simplemente suplantaron a los peninsulares, dejando la estructura social colonial intacta. Se entendieron a sí mismos como los únicos capaces de liderar a un país “semi-salvaje” hacia la civilización, en clara distinción de un Otro racializado. Las nociones de ciudadanía que se crearon ignoraron la omnipresente problemática de la raza y del desprecio al Otro, y la nación se forjó en un entramado de relatos hegemónicos propios de la “colonialidad del poder” (A. Quijano).

Esta “carga del hombre blanco” tuvo consecuencias para el modo de entender la democracia: Aquel que difiera de este proyecto de país se ha podido considerar enemigo interno e incluso en ocasiones se ha podido entender como sujeto a ser eliminado.

Espectros políticos

A mi país lo he sentido siempre como habitando a la derecha del espectro político, asentado en una aceptación del status quo. Efectivamente, se dice que en 200 años de vida republicana, Colombia jamás había tenido un gobierno de izquierda, una anomalía que invita a detenernos. Hoy, en tiempos del pensamiento único neoliberal de “no hay alternativa” esto casi parece normal, pero que ésta anomalía ocupe toda la historia republicana de un país, es definitivamente extraño.

Esto es, hasta el gobierno que ahora llega a su fin, el de Gustavo Petro. El filósofo Santiago Castro-Gómez señaló en su momento que el “estallido social” (2021), el preámbulo a la elección de Petro, se dio en parte por a una apertura de los jóvenes hacia el resto del mundo por medio de las redes sociales. Dejaron de leer la realidad según se la presentaba su muy conservador país.

Sí ha habido líderes de izquierda muy importantes que probablemente hubieran sido elegidos si no hubieran sido asesinados, como J.E. Gaitán (en 1948) y L.C. Galán (en 1989). Estos son solo los más salientes de numerosos magnicidios (también los ha habido en la derecha). Además, un partido de izquierda, la Unión Patriótica, fue casi totalmente exterminado, por los cual la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos condenó al Estado en 2023 por violencia sistemática.

Estos hechos dicen mucho sobre lo que ha sido la democracia en Colombia. Todo demócrata, incluso el más conservador, tendría que aceptar que el gobierno de Gustavo Petro constituye un importante quiebre en esta historia de democracia con cojera.

Hoy hay otro espectro importante, un ‘coco’: En muchos ambientes del país suramericano se equipara toda defensa de la izquierda a una apología del “terrorismo”.

El caudillo de derecha, A. Uribe Vélez (presidente 2002-2010), acuñó el término “terroristas” para la guerrilla, activamente suplantando la denominación “guerra” al conflicto armado que azotó al país, opacando las acciones criminales de los otros bandos: (narco-)paramilitares, y militares.

La izquierda (y no la derecha) quedó pertinazmente asociada a la violencia. Curiosamente, y es significativo, la mayoría de los colombianos en general perciben y aseguran que en la guerra interna las guerrillas causaron más muertos que los paramilitares --incluso asegurando que los últimos fueron un ‘mal necesario-- aunque la realidad sea la contraria. Ahí entra una clara injerencia de los medios, del modo en que se narró la guerra y la influencia del uribismo con su modo sui géneris de formar país, con una exacerbación de nacionalismo construído contra un enemigo interno.

Hoy, para las elecciones del 31 de mayo, en la campaña contra la izquierda se aprovecha este rechazo generalizado a las guerrillas (como también se intentó hacer en las pasadas elecciones), por ejemplo con noticias falsas sobre la cercanía de Cepeda, el candidato del partido de Petro, con la guerrilla de las FARC .

Por otra parte, el candidato de la extrema derecha, A. de la Espriella, se posiciona como defensor de “la seguridad”. Éste candidato, el segundo en votos según encuestas, ha dicho de los “señores de la izquierda”: “a esa plaga hay que erradicarla”(!). De nuevo, históricamente otra vez: un llamado al exterminio de la contraparte. Esta horripilante frase ha causado revuelo en el país, pero no el suficiente, pues al mismo tiempo sus seguidores crecen, o sea, consideran aceptable este tipo de llamado al odio y la violencia. De la Espriella es un feroz representante de la alt-right, y hoy la peor pesadilla que enfrenta Colombia, aunque sus votantes no se den cuenta (como los arrepentidos de votar a Trump).

Por otro lado, la patriarcal derecha uribista, hoy a pesar de sí misma coqueteando con ser más inclusiva, con candidata femenina y un candidato a vicepresidente gay, pareciera que se mueve hacia el centro. Allí la ha empujado también el mencionado tumor que brotó a su derecha. En todo caso ambas derechas siembran miedo (”cuatro años más de izquierda arruinará al país”), ese altamente eficiente motor en mover votantes, como ya sucedió cuando los colombianos en ligera mayoría votaron NO al tratado de paz.

El legado de Petro

La izquierda muestra hoy una preocupación por continuar con los programas del tratado de paz, trabajar contra la alarmante desigualdad, y un continuismo ambientalista por ejemplo al defender un No al fracking. También, al igual que hace 4 años, la fórmula vicepresidencial de Cepeda es una líder social de una minoria étnica: Aída Quilcué.

Gustavo Petro ha sido un fenómeno de la izquierda latinoamericana pues en lugar de dedicarse al extractivismo, tuvo un importante enfoque ambientalista. Hay que resaltar la dificultad de que un país en solitario se dedique a “hacerle caso a la ciencia” con la amenaza de dejar al país sin medios, sin inversionistas, y con la fuga de los super-ricos. Y en efecto, el intento de mover el país hacia una transición energética ha estado lleno de reveses y críticas.

Las derechas amplían el miedo de que, al poner trabas al aprovechamiento de combustibles fósiles y alejando inversiones extranjeras, el país caerá en la ruina. Lo cual podría ser un problema real sin un cambio profundo en el sistema global de dependencias (Ver aquí sobre problemas de adoptar ideas Decrecentistas en países periféricos). A Petro le tocó actuar en solitario, y así no se puede...

Pero volvamos al tema democracia y acabemos con otro posible legado que deja el presente gobierno: ¿Podría haber hoy más consciencia de que es lícito y saludable (¡y posible!) que sectores de la sociedad tengan intereses y visiones distintas a las tradicionales de la élite, y que pueda haber un diálogo nacional que permita éstas distintas voces e, incluso, que lleguen a gobernar?

Ésta consciencia sería necesaria para ahondar en procesos democráticos y decoloniales. Algo imprescindible para forjar bienestar para todos en una sociedad tan rica en muchos sentidos pero tan apaleada por su pesada carga colonial-moderna.

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Colombian democracy and other curiosities

Regarding the presidential elections on May 31

It may be accurate to say, as a recent marketing slogan does, that Colombia is the “country of beauty.” Beauty, exuberance, a wealth of climates, water, life, and diversity.

At the same time, Colombia has at times been considered a failed state that has not protected its inhabitants from violence. And indeed, violence has returned, despite the peace treaty of 2016 (geared at solving the armed conflict starting in the 1960’s) and its recognized successes.

Here, with a few brushstrokes, I wish to zoom into the complexity of this country “of solitudes,” as G. García Márquez put it: a vast territory composed of highly diverse regions and peoples, with rugged, isolated, or sparsely populated landscapes.

Some historical peculiarities

Could it be that Colombia is an intrinsically violent country, as some consider? Well, no, violence has roots. One could say that it is a nation with a brutal history, a “settler colony” that never healed its deep wounds, and which, combined with a complex set of historical factors, has normalized violence. The current distribution of land, one of the most unequal in the world, is a continuation of the colonial dispossession of the indigenous peoples and a key factor in the protracted civil war.

The highly complex geography is also a factor to be considered. Historically, “archipelagos of power” were formed centered on the Andean region, while various peripheral areas were left abandoned for the benefit of whoever could exploit them, in accordance with colonial/racial logics. Today, the country, built upon this structure, occupies its place as an “extraction frontier” within globalized capitalism, as I have discussed elsewhere.

The war of independence was in part a maneuver by the “criollos” (descendants of Europeans born in the Americas) to rid themselves of the innovations sought by the Bourbon reforms. From Spain, there was “an explicit desire to dismantle the web of political networks” that hindered a modern governance. (Like present-day “caciquismo” that pervades the “solitudes” of the battered country).

After independence, the criollos simply supplanted the “peninsulares“ (born in Spain), leaving the colonial social structure intact. They saw themselves as the only ones capable of leading a “semi-savage” country toward civilization, in clear distinction from the racialized Other. The notions of citizenship that were created ignored the issues of race and contempt for the Other. Colombia was thus formed inside a web of colonial/modern hegemonic truths and power relations (the “coloniality of power”, A. Quijano).

This “white man’s burden” had consequences for the way democracy was and is perhaps still understood. Anyone who disagrees with the priorities of the elitist civilizatory vision can be regarded as an internal enemy... and, from some sectors, as someone who should be eliminated.

Political Spectra

I have always perceived my country as residing on the right side of the political spectrum, grounded in an acceptance of the status quo. Indeed, it is said that in 200 years of republican history, Colombia has never had a left-wing government—an anomaly that invites us to pause and reflect. Today, in times of neoliberal monolithic thinking, the idea of “there is no alternative” could almost seem normal, but for this anomaly to span the entire republican history of a country is definitely strange.

That is, until the government now coming to its end—that of Gustavo Petro. An analysis by philosopher Santiago Castro-Gómez noted that the “social upheaval” (2021), during the prelude to Petro’s election, occurred in part due to young people’s openness to the rest of the world through social media. They stopped interpreting reality as it was presented to them by their very conservative country.

There have been very important left-wing leaders who probably would have been elected had they not been assassinated, such as J.E. Gaitán (in 1948) and L.C. Galán (in 1989). These are just the most prominent of numerous magnicides (including some on the right). Furthermore, a left-wing party, the Patriotic Union, was almost completely wiped out, for which the Inter-American Court of Human Rights condemned the state in 2023 for systematic violence.

These realities speak volumes about what democracy has been like in Colombia. Every democrat, even the most conservative, would have to accept that Gustavo Petro’s government represents a significant break with this history of a limping democracy.

Today there is another significant specter, a “bogeyman”: in many circles across the South American country, any defense of the left is equated with an apology for “terrorism.”

The right-wing strongman, A. Uribe Vélez (president 2002–2010), coined the term “terrorists” for the guerrillas, actively replacing the term “war” for the armed conflict that ravaged the country, thereby obscuring the criminal actions of the other sides: (narco-)paramilitaries and the military.

The left (and not the right) became stubbornly associated with violence. Curiously, and significantly, most Colombians generally perceive and assert that in the internal war, the guerrillas caused more deaths than the paramilitaries—even claiming that the latter were a “necessary evil”. But the reality is the opposite. This is where there is clear media interference, in the way the war was narrated and the influence of “Uribism” with its unique way of explaining the country, and exacerbating nationalism built against an internal enemy.

Today, for the May 31 elections, the campaign against the left is capitalizing (as it tried to do in the past elections) on the widespread rejection of the guerrillas, for example with fake news about the closeness of Cepeda, the candidate of Petro’s party, to the FARC guerrillas.

On the other hand, the far-right candidate, A. de la Espriella, positions himself as a defender of “security.” This candidate, who is second in the polls, has said of the “gentlemen of the left”: “that plague must be eradicated.” (!) Once again: a call for the extermination of the opposition to the status quo. The statement is horrifying and has caused some uproar, but not enough, because at the same time his followers are growing—in other words, they consider this kind of incitement to hatred and violence to be acceptable. De la Espriella is a fierce representative of the alt-right, and today Colombia’s worst nightmare—even if his voters don’t realize it (much like those who regret voting for Trump).

On the other hand, the patriarchal, traditional ‘Uribista’ right, which today—despite itself—is flirting with being more inclusive, with a female candidate and a gay vice-presidential candidate, would seem to be moving toward the center. It has also been pushed there by the aforementioned tumor that sprouted to its right. In any case, both right-wing factions sow fear, a highly efficient engine for mobilizing voters, as happened when a slight majority of Colombians voted NO to the peace treaty.

Petro’s Legacy

The left today shows a commitment to continuing the peace treaty’s programs, working against the alarming inequality, and environmental continuity—for example, by advocating a “No” to fracking. Also, just as four years ago, Cepeda’s vice-presidential running mate is a social leader from an ethnic minority: Aída Quilcué (3).

Gustavo Petro has been a phenomenon on the Latin American left because, rather than pursuing extractivism, he adopted a strong environmentalist approach. It is important to highlight the difficulty for a single country to commit to “listening to science” when doing so risks leaving the country without resources, without investors, and facing an exodus of the super-rich. And indeed, the attempt to steer the country toward an energy transition has been fraught with setbacks and criticism.

The fear that by hindering the use of fossil fuels and driving away foreign investment, the country will fall into ruin, is of course amplified by the right. And without a profound change in the economic system and global dependencies, the situation is difficult (as are the challenges of adopting degrowth ideas in peripheral countries). Colombia was left to itself during Petro’s tenure, and that is a non-starter...

But let’s return to the topic of democracy and conclude with another possible legacy left by the current government: Could there be greater awareness today that it is legitimate and healthy, (and possible!), for different sectors of society to have other interests and visions than the traditional elite ones, and actually participate in a national discussion and form governments?

This awareness would be necessary to deepen democratic and decolonial processes. It is essential for forging well-being for all in a society so rich in many ways yet so battered by its heavy colonial-modern burden.

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Self-Care, Discontinued

Upon hearing that I’d had to quit my job, my friends and family naturally wanted to know what I planned to do next. My answer, although a logical response to a sudden illness, didn’t really hold any meaning for me—or so I’d learn. “I’m going to take this time to rest and care for myself” was the automatic voice message that played whenever anyone asked about my plans. But what didn’t play out was any kind of conversation about what that actually looks like.

And it turns out that I had no idea what self-care looked like.

For decades, consumerist profit-driven industry (particularly in individualist countries like the United States) has slowly dismantled the care networks that exist within close-knit communities and replaced them with marketable “products” that are purported to help you reclaim your youth, joy, and beauty while actually making you lonelier, sadder, and poorer. Maybe it’s not fair to blame everything on industry, after all, many of them are just trying to survive in a cut-throat capitalist system. Perhaps our own ultra-individualist culture is to blame. But either way, the result is a population of people who are desperately trying to heal themselves with products or habits that, at best, do very little, and at worst, actively make things worse.

As the empty days went by, and my bad habits realized they had nowhere to hide, I was able to pick them out, one by one, and realize what was helping—and what wasn’t. I can’t fully credit myself though—a lot of this realization came with the help of experts and professionals—not doctors or medical professionals in the “health”-care industry, but rather a small group of individuals who have been thinking critically about what wellness really looks like.

I happen to follow the Wellbeing Scientist on Instagram. Run by a PhD student who is studying this exact topic, @thewellbeingscientist_ account explores how capitalism, individualism, colonization, racism, and climate change are all connected to our increasing lack of wellbeing. She also explores what true wellness does look like. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not $7 matcha lattes, avocado toast, strict workout routines, and juice cleanses. It turns out that “self care” isn’t really something that you can do by yourself—or rather, that “self care” is perhaps a myth we’ve been taught to believe we need when, in fact, what we actually need is community care.

It doesn’t help that the American healthcare system is actively treating symptoms, but not bothering to question underlying cultural structures and institutions that contribute to the existence of those illnesses in the first place. But of course, the healthcare system exists under the same capitalist pressures as everything else—it’s a trillion-dollar enterprise, and it needs money to survive. Why would the healthcare system treat our illnesses effectively if they can just as easily get us hooked on symptomatic relief that keeps us coming back for more? If they were to invest in actual prevention, there would be little demand for their services.

As I dove into this concept of community care, I moved away from the immediate fear I had felt once I realized that my limited understanding of “self care” was actually a function of the system I existed in, rather than a personal failure. I found many other creators, researchers, experts, and community members who echoed similar sentiments:

Unsurprisingly, many of these experts’ work exist within networks and communities of people who face oppression daily, or who have been experiencing the systematic breakdown of their own communities by the powerful, structural forces of government for decades—and the work came from a place of necessity, of needing to build resilience against the privileged, oppressive systems and people that make up much of the Global North. Instead of failing to fully convey their insights with my own words, I’ll share a couple of my current favorites here (Christabel Mintah-Galloway, Collective Rest, and Mumbi poetry) and encourage you to explore their work.1

But where does all of this leave me in terms of my new circumstances? Unfortunately, it meant that “taking time to rest and recover” was going to be a lot harder than I had anticipated. Because it meant relying on others and strengthening relationships—which would require participation and effort from more than just me. I needed to take inventory of my life, my family, my friends, and figure out which parts could be strengthened, and what needed to be composted—returned to the earth to help sow new and better seeds of the future. But once again, I was faced with a larger issue—my wellness wasn’t fully within my control. It depends on the shape and texture of the place I call home, too.

All of this is true, but it doesn’t mean I can’t work with what I do have. As much as I would like to say it was strength and determination that made me take a deep breath and start developing the community I needed, it was something more akin to necessity. Somewhere along the way, I realized that raging about the circumstances of my poorly-built country (and our lack of communal spaces) wasn’t going to solve anything. And although I may not be able to change much about how the United States functions right now, I can start small, working on building community where and when I can—planting seeds everywhere, composting that which doesn’t serve me, and feeding everything else with love and hope.

If nothing else, it’s clear that in order to truly be well, we need to start rethinking how we shape our institutions and care for each other. Only by taking care of the whole can we take care of the self. And an integral part of taking care of yourself (and your community) is in finding joy. More on that in Part IV…

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الأنظمة العربية مكتملة الوظيفة، شرعيتها لا تستمد من سيادة شعبية، أو من التحرر الوطني أو من الاستقلال الاقتصادي، بل من قدرتها على أداء دورها داخل منظومة التبعية. يمكن تلخيص ركائز هذه الدولة التابعة في ثلاث دعائم أساسية:

أولاً: التبعية البنيوية العضوية للمركز الإمبريالي

تقوم الدولة التابعة على تبعية عضوية للمركز الإمبريالي الغربي سياسيًا وأمنيًا واقتصاديًا، بحيث يصبح استمرار النظام نفسه مشروطًا باستمرار هذه العلاقة مع المركز الغربي. يرفض مهدي عامل فكرة أن الدولة “غير مكتملة” في المجتمعات التابعة، و يؤكد أن الدولة في التشكيلات الكولونيالية جهاز طبقي مكتمل وظيفياً، يعمل بوصفه أداة لإعادة إنتاج التبعية، لا كأداة سيادة وطنية. وينطبق هذا التحليل تماماً على الأنظمة العربية والسلطة الفلسطينية؛ المشكلة لا تكمن في فشلها في تحقيق التحرر، بل في نجاحها البنيوي في أداء وظيفتها المضادة له.

ثانيًا: ضبط الداخل وقمع الجماهير

الركيزة الثانية للدولة التابعة هي ضبط الداخل عبر أجهزة قمع تمنع أي عنف شعبي قد يهدد السلطة. يصف فانون النخب الوطنية الحاكمة في الأنظمة التابعة، وسيط بلا مشروع إنتاجي، يبحث عن دور إداري بيروقراطي داخل البنية الكولونيالية، بدلاً من قيادة مشروع تحرري. وينطبق هذا الوصف تماماً على النخب الحاكمة في الخليج، المغرب، مصر، الأردن أو السلطة الفلسطينية. هذه النخب، كما يوضح فانون، لا ترى في الجماهير قوة تاريخية بل خطراً وجودياً، لأنها تخاف من العنف الشعبي التحرري أكثر مما تخاف من الاستعمار نفسه؛ إذ إن العنف التحرري يهدد وظيفتها وموقعها داخل البنية القائمة.

ويؤكد فانون أنّه إذا لم تنخرط هذه النخب في مشروع تحرري جذري، فهي ستتحول بالضرورة إلى حارس محلي للنظام الاستعماري الامبريالي، مهما رفعت من شعارات السيادة والهوية. يكمل فانون بشرح كيف تتحول النخب الوطنية في هذه الأنظمة إلى وسيط عنيف ضد الطبقات الشعبية. السلطة الفلسطينية مثلاً، ليست مجرد أداة ضبط سياسي، بل جهاز ضبط طبقي داخلي؛ فهي تقمع العمال وسكان المخيمات، تقتل وتعتقل المقاومين، وتحمي مصالح الطبقة المنتفعة من استمرار النظام الاستعماري وتعمل كجهاز لتأمين إستمراره. هذا الدور ليس انحرافاً، بل تعبير مباشر عن بنيتها الطبقية؛ إذ إن أي تغيير حقيقي في وظيفتها يعني تفكيك أجهزتها، خسارة امتيازاتها والدخول في صدام مع الاحتلال، أي نهايتها كنظام. بذلك، تتطابق السلطة مع وظيفتها: جهاز إدارة كولونيالي بواجهة فلسطينية وطبقة مستفيدة من استمراره.

ثالثاً: شيطنة المقاومة وتجريم التضامن

تستكمل الدولة التابعة وظيفتها عبر شيطنة المقاومة وتجريم أي تضامن شعبي معها، بوصفه تهديدًا للأمن والاستقرار. لكنها في الواقع لا تخشى الفوضى، بل تخشى تحوّل التضامن إلى وعي سياسي طبقي يكشف الترابط البنيوي بين قضية فلسطين وبنية الاستبداد والتبعية في المنطقة.

غزة خارج الدولة التابعة

تكشف هذه الركائز أن الدولة التابعة نظام أُنجزت وظيفته التاريخية، لكنه ليس نظامًا محصّنًا. فقد أثبتت غزة أن الجماهير قادرة على تحويل قوتها الشعبية إلى فعل تاريخي تحرري، كاسرة احتكار السلاح والقرار السياسي، وموضعة نفسها فاعلًا مستقلًا خارج مؤسسات النظام الرسمي.

غزة كنموذج مقاوم تهدد احتكار السلطة والسلاح، وتفضح التحالف الطبقي القائم بين النخب الحاكمة والقوى الإمبريالية، كما تكشف زيف السردية الأمنية للأنظمة العربية.

احتكار السلطة والسلاح

تقوم الدولة التابعة، كما حلل مهدي عامل، على احتكار السلطة والسلاح، ليس لمواجهة العدو الصهيوني، بل لحماية التبعية، وضبط الداخل، ومنع أي تحوّل شعبي تحرري. في هذا السياق، ألغت غزة معادلة “السلاح بيد الدولة”، وكَسرت احتكار القرار السياسي، وأعادت تعريف الشرعية بوصفها نابعة من الفعل الشعبي المقاوم لا من الاعتراف الدولي.

يوضح سيف دعنا أن السلطة في هذه الأنظمة ليست فاشلة، بل ناجحة في أداء وظيفتها الأمنية، أي في إعادة إنتاج النخبة وحماية شروط التبعية. وعلى النقيض، أثبتت غزة كيف تتحول الطبقات الشعبية الى فاعل تاريخي، عبر امتلاك السلاح الشعبي، أي حق تقرير المصير.

الأنظمة العربية والنخب الحاكمة لا تخاف من غزة كمساحة جغرافية، بل تخشى أن تتحول غزة الى نموذج يُحتذى به، يُظهر أن الشعب قادر على تقرير مصيره والتحرك السياسي التحرري خارج إطار الأنظمة التابعة.

التحالف الطبقي القائم

في هذا السياق، لا تمثل غزة تهديداً لما يُسمّى “الأمن القومي العربي” فحسب بل تهدد التحالف الطبقي القائم بين النخب الحاكمة العربية، ورأس المال الريعي الكومبرادوري، والمنظومة الإمبريالية العالمية. فهي، خارج اقتصاد الريع والتبعية، على خلاف غالبية الأنظمة العربية، تكشف الخطر الطبقي وتثبت أن التحرر والتحرك السياسي المستقل لا يحتاج إلى طبقة وسيطة تحمي مصالح القوى الامبريالية الخارجية والنخبة المحلية. نموذج غزة المقاوم يشكّل تهديدًا مباشرًا لهذا التحالف، كونه نقطة انكشاف للبنية الطبقية التي تحكم الأنظمة العربية والسلطة الفلسطينية.

والرد على هذا التهديد يأتي إبادياً، فالإبادة في غزة ليست حدثًا منفصلًا عن البنية السياسية العربية، بل هي نقطة انكشاف التحالف الطبقي العربي الإمبريالي والعلاقة العضوية بين الدولة التابعة العربية والنظام الإمبريالي العالمي. ويجب فهم دور هذه الأنظمة في الإبادة بوصفه اختياراً طبقياً واعياً تمارسه الطبقات الحاكمة متحالفة مع الكيان الصهيوني دفاعًا عن مصالحها وشروط بقائها داخل النظام الإمبريالي. تُدار هذه السياسة الإبادية على المستوى الإقليمي، إذ يرتبط استمرار الطبقات الحاكمة العربية عضوياً ببقاء النظام الإمبريالي العالمي ذاته. في المحصلة، يقوم الخليج بتمويل أجهزة الضبط والقمع الضرورية لسحق غزة، إذ لا يرى فيها قضية تحرر، بل تهديدًا بنيويًا للاستقرار الإقليمي الذي يضمن بقاء أنظمته.

إن محميات الخليج تعمل كأطراف فاعلة في إعادة إنتاج التحالف الطبقي الإمبريالي الإقليمي وضمان مصالح النخب الحاكمة العربية على حساب حياة الشعب الفلسطيني. دعمها للإبادة ليس موقفًا عارضًا أو انحرافًا سياسيًا، بل جزء من وظيفة بنيوية تهدف إلى منع أي تجربة مقاومة شعبية، مثل غزّة، من التحول إلى نموذج يُحتذى به على المستوى الإقليمي.

السردية الأمنية للأنظمة العربية

غزة تمثل تحدياً لأنها خارج منطق وحدود كامب دايفيد، أوسلو، وادي عربة، وأبراهام، خارج التنسيق الأمني، وحراسة الحدود. هي النموذج المضاد الذي يثبت أن الشعب قادر على الفعل خارج السلطة. غزة، كفعل ثوري، تكشف زيف الخطاب الإنساني والسياسي للنظام العربي، ولذلك يُرد عليها بعنف إبادي.

الأنظمة العربية والسلطة الفلسطينية ليست مجرد متفرّجة على الإبادة، بل هي جزء من منظومة الإبادة نفسها؛ فهي لا تتدخل لإنقاذ الشعب الفلسطيني في غزة، بل تعمل على استمرارها. دعم الإبادة أو إدارتها عبر خطاب إنساني لا يُعد موقفًا محايدًا، بل يشكّل دفاعًا مباشرًا عن شروط إعادة إنتاج الطبقات الحاكمة ونمط السلطة الذي تمثّله.

معاداة السلطة لغزة ليست بسبب اختلاف سياسي، بل لأنها تفجّر التناقض الطبقي داخل المجتمع الفلسطيني بين من يعيش من أوسلو والتنسيق الأمني ومن يعيش في مواجهته، وهو أخطر ما يمكن أن يحدث لطبقة حاكمة. يوضح سيف دعنا أن السلطة الفلسطينية ليست دولة فاشلة، بل سلطة ناجحة في أداء وظيفتها الأمنية.

خطر غزة لا يكمن في صمودها فقط، بل في كشفها كذبة “العجز” التي تتذرّع بها الأنظمة العربية؛ فهي تظهر أن الجيوش العربية جرى تحييدها وظيفيًا، وأن قرارها لم يعد وطنيًا بل خاضعًا لوظيفة إقليمية ضمن نظام التبعية. الأنظمة العربية لا “تخون” غزة، والسلطة الفلسطينية لا “تنحرف”، بل كل منهما يعمل وفق وظيفته البنيوية.

غزة تهدد شرعية الأنظمة، احتكارها للسلاح، خطابها، بنيتها الطبيقة ووظيفتها الكومبرادورية، تشكل خطراً بنيوياً وتهدد السردية الأمنية للأنظمة العربية أمام شعوبها. لذلك، ممارسات هذه الأنظمة ليس صمتاً، ليس عجزاً، ليس خيانة بل دفاعاً عن وجودها. غزة تمثل تهديدًا وجوديًا للأنظمة العربية لأنها كنموذج يدحض أسس، شرعية وبقاء هذه الأنظمة.

العنف التحرري الشعبي كخيار وجودي

لم يكن ما قاله الشهيد، الناطق باسم الأمة حذيفة الكحلوت، مطالبةً للأنظمة العربية بالتحرك لإنقاذ أهل غزة من الإبادة “لا سمح الله”، بل كان فضحًا لمشاركتهم فيها ولخذلانهم. كان مدركاً أنهم يقومون بوظيفتهم؛ الوظيفة التي ضَمَن الاحتلال تنفيذهم لها على أكمل وجه. فهذه الأنظمة جزءٌ عضويٌّ من آلة الإبادة؛ تؤمّن شروطها، وتحمي مرتكبيها، وتوفّر لها الغطاء السياسي والأمني والإعلامي.

من هنا، يصبح الاستمرار في المناشدة ضرباً من الوهم؛ فالمناشدة تفترض أن هذه الأنظمة أخطأت أو أساءت التقدير، بينما الحقيقة أنها تؤدي وظيفتها كما صمّمت لها. إن السماح لها بالاستمرار يعني القبول بمسح كرامة كل مواطن عربي، وتحويل الشعوب إلى جمهور ينتظر دوره في قائمة الإبادة. فهل ننتظر حتى يحين دورنا؟

لا أمل في أنظمة أُنجزت عبر وظيفتها الكولونيالية، ولا في نخبٍ مستفيدة من موقعها داخل بنية التبعية. الأمل الوحيد يكمن في الشعوب العربية حين تستعيد موقعها الطبيعي في هذا الصراع، لا كجماهير مُستجدية، بل كقوة تاريخية واعية بذاتها. في طبقاتها الشعبية الثورية تحديدًا، بوصفها حاملة الورقة الحاسمة في الصراع: العنف التحرري الشعبي، الورقة التي تُرعب الأنظمة التابعة لأنها تهدّد وجودها ذاته.

فإذا توحّدت هذه الطبقات وتنظّمت سياسياً، تصبح قادرة على كسر التبعية، وانتزاع القرار السياس، والإطاحة بأنظمتها وبالطبقة البرجوازية التابعة التي تتآمر عليها، وتستثمر في قمعها، وتقايض بدمها. هنا فقط تُستعاد السياسة من قبضة السلطة، وتُستعاد الكرامة الانسانية من منطق الإبادة، ويعود الشعب إلى موقعه الطبيعي: صانع التاريخ و التحرر.

Arab regimes are fully functional; their legitimacy does not derive from popular sovereignty, national liberation, or economic independence, but from their ability to perform their role within the dependency system. The pillars of this dependent state can be summarized into three main supports:

First: Organic Structural Dependency on the Imperial Center
The dependent state functions as an organic (structurally embedded, historically produced, and self-reproducing) extension of the Western imperial center in political, military, and economic terms, meaning that its institutions, ruling elites, and key economic flows are deeply integrated into the logic of that center. This renders the regime’s survival conditional upon the continuation of this very relationship with the Western center, rather than on any autonomous or internally self-sustaining foundation.

Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel rejects the notion that states in dependent societies are “incomplete,” emphasizing that in colonial formations, the state is a fully functional class apparatus, operating as a tool for reproducing dependency rather than exercising national sovereignty. This analysis applies fully to Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority; the problem lies not in their failure to achieve liberation, but in their structural success in performing a counter-liberation function.

Second: Domestic Control and Popular Repression
The second pillar of the dependent state is internal control through repressive apparatuses that prevent any popular action threatening authority. Martiniquan political philosopher Frantz Fanon describes the national elites in such regimes as intermediaries without a productive project, seeking bureaucratic administrative roles within the colonial structure rather than leading a liberation project. This description fits the ruling elites in the Arab Gulf, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority. These elites, Fanon explains, perceive the masses not as a historical force but as an existential threat, fearing popular revolutionary violence more than colonial domination itself, because revolutionary violence jeopardizes their function and position within the existing structure.

Fanon also stresses that unless these elites join a radical liberation project, they inevitably become local guardians of the imperial-colonial system, regardless of slogans about sovereignty and identity. He further explains how national elites in these regimes transform into violent intermediaries against popular classes. The Palestinian Authority, for example, is not merely a tool for political control but a class-control apparatus: it represses workers and camp residents, kills and arrests resistance fighters, protects the interests of the class that benefits from the continuation of the colonial system, and functions to ensure its persistence. This role is not a deviation but a direct expression of the class structure of the authority: any genuine change in its function would entail dismantling its structure, losing privileges, and confronting the occupation, effectively ending the system. Thus, the Authority’s operations align precisely with its function: a colonial administrative apparatus with a Palestinian facade, and a beneficiary class tied to its continuity.

Third: Demonizing Resistance and Criminalizing Solidarity
The dependent state completes its function by demonizing resistance and criminalizing popular solidarity, framing it as a threat to security and stability. In reality, it does not fear chaos but fears the possibility that solidarity will transform into class-based political consciousness, revealing the structural link between the Palestinian cause and the system of authoritarianism and dependency in the region.

Gaza Outside the Dependent State

These pillars reveal that the dependent state is historically functional but not invulnerable. Gaza has proven that the masses can convert their popular power into emancipatory historical action, breaking the monopoly on arms and political decision-making and positioning itself as an independent actor outside official institutions.

As a resistance model, Gaza threatens the monopoly over authority and arms, exposes the class alliance between ruling elites and imperial powers, and unveils the falsity of Arab regimes’ security narrative.

Monopoly over Authority and Arms

As Mahdi Amel analyzed, the dependent state monopolizes authority and arms, not to confront the Zionist enemy but to maintain dependency, control the domestic population, and prevent any emancipatory popular transformation. Gaza with it’s resistance however, broke the “arms in the state’s hands” paradigm, shattering the monopoly over political decision-making and redefining legitimacy as stemming from popular resistance, not international recognition.

Palestinian professor of sociology and international studies Saif Da’na demonstrates that these regimes are not failed states; they are successful in fulfilling their security function, reproducing elites and maintaining dependency conditions. Conversely, Gaza shows how popular classes can become historical actors through popular arms, exercising the right to self-determination. Arab regimes and ruling elites fear Gaza not as a geographic space but as a model demonstrating that people can determine their political path independently of dependent regimes.

The Existing Class Alliance

Gaza threatens not only so-called “Arab national security” but also the class alliance linking Arab ruling elites, rentier-comprador capital, and the global imperial system. Operating outside the rentier economy and dependency framework, Gaza reveals structural class danger and proves that emancipation and independent political action do not require a mediating class to protect foreign imperialist interests or local elites. Gaza’s resistance constitutes a direct threat to this alliance, exposing the class foundations governing Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority.

The genocide in Gaza is not an isolated event but a point of exposure for the Arab-imperial class alliance and the organic relationship between dependent Arab states and the global imperial system. The role of these regimes in the genocide must be understood as a conscious class choice executed by ruling elites in alliance with the Zionist entity, defending their interests and their position within the imperial system.

This genocidal policy operates regionally, as the survival of Arab ruling classes is organically tied to the persistence of the global imperial system itself. The Gulf funds the necessary repressive apparatuses to crush Gaza, viewing Gaza not as a cause of liberation but as a structural threat to the regional stability that guarantees the survival of their regimes. Gulf protectorates act as agents by reproducing the imperial-class alliance regionally and securing ruling elites’ interests at the expense of Palestinian lives. Their support for the genocide is not accidental, nor is it a political deviation--it is the response required by the very structure of these regimes. By design, they must e prevent any popular resistance experience, such as Gaza, from becoming a regional model, or else risk their own collapse.

Arab Regimes’ Security Narrative

Gaza represents a challenge because it operates outside the logic and borders of Camp David, Oslo, Wadi Araba, and Abraham, outside security coordination and border control, a counter-model that proves that people can act independently of authority. Gaza, as a revolutionary act, exposes the falsity of humanitarian and political discourse within the Arab regime, eliciting genocidal violence in response.

Arab regimes and the Palestinian Authority are not mere spectators of genocide; they are part of the system itself. Their non-intervention sustains the genocide. Supporting or managing it under humanitarian discourse is not neutral; it constitutes direct defense of the conditions for reproducing ruling classes and the pattern of authority they embody.

The Authority’s hostility toward Gaza is not a matter of political difference, it is a response to Gaza’s exposure of class contradictions within Palestinian society, between those subsisting under Oslo and coordination policies with the occupation and those resisting them, a scenario most threatening to a ruling class. Saif Da’na notes that the Palestinian Authority is not a failed state but a successful security apparatus.

Gaza is dangerous not only becuase of its resilience, but also because it reveals the “incapacity” myth that regimes invoke; it demonstrates that Arab armies have been functionally neutralized and that their decisions are no longer national but subordinate to regional dependency within the imperial system. Arab regimes do not “betray” Gaza, and the Palestinian Authority does not “deviate”; each functions according to its structural role.

Gaza threatens the regimes’ legitimacy, their monopoly on arms, discourse, class structure, and comprador function, constituting a structural danger to the Arab regimes’ security narrative before their populations. Hence, their practices are not silence, incapacity, or betrayal but self-preservation. Gaza represents an existential threat as a model undermining the very foundations, legitimacy, and survival of these regimes.

Popular Emancipatory Violence as an Existential Choice

The martyr, the spokesman of the nation Hudhayfah al-Kahlout, did not call on Arab regimes to intervene to save Gaza from genocide. Rather, he exposed their participation and abandonment. He was aware that they were carrying out their function, the very function that the occupation had ensured they would perform to the fullest extent. These regimes are an organic extention of the machinery of annihilation; they secure its conditions, protect its perpetrators, and provide political, security, and media cover.

Appeals for intervention are illusory, presuming these regimes erred or misjudged, when in fact they are performing the function for which they were designed. Allowing them to continue means accepting the erasure of every Arab citizen’s dignity and transforming populations into an audience awaiting their turn on the genocide list. So do we wait until it is our turn?

There is no hope in regimes constructed through their colonial function or elites benefiting from their position within the dependency structure. The only hope lies in Arab peoples reclaiming their natural place in this struggle, not as passive masses, but as a historically conscious force. Within their revolutionary popular classes, they hold the decisive tool in the struggle: popular emancipatory violence, which terrifies dependent regimes because it threatens their very existence.

If these classes unite and organize politically, they can break dependency, seize political decision-making, overthrow their regimes and the dependent bourgeoisie conspiring against them, investing in their repression and trading in their blood. Only here are politics wrested from the grip of authority, human dignity reclaimed from the logic of annihilation, and the people restored to their natural role: the makers of history and liberation.

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Spain has a mosaic of left-wing groups reflecting the different sensibilities of its nations within a nation. Yet many are struggling to stay relevant at state level. The current coalition government of social democrats may look like a beacon of hope to observers in a Europe dominated by racism, austerity politics, military Keynesianism, and servitude to Washington. But it falls far short of what the country needs and what the majority wants. Spain’s parliament permits personal freedoms around sexuality and gender — yet does not hesitate when forced to choose between profit and human rights.

Seven years of “the most progressive government since the dictatorship” have delivered macroeconomic growth and investment returns for capital — alongside precarious work and an affordability crisis without modern precedent. The home our grandparents could buy in under a decade on one salary now cannot be paid off in five decades on two, despite GDP per capita being at least three times larger than in the 1980s. Instead of asking where all this wealth has gone, media and public discourse blame young people for laziness and idealism.

Those approaching retirement with paid-off mortgages seem unwilling to acknowledge that younger generations are right to refuse these conditions — to resist working for such poor returns, and to be almost universally anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist. A section of mostly working-class young men is drifting toward far-right rhetoric and toxic masculinity, but the broader picture is clear: younger generations reject genocide and colonialism as economic systems, even if that means the imperial standard of living will never reach them.

In this context of generational and class conflict — between property owners and renters paying impossible rents — the left has failed to demonstrate the necessity and feasibility of public and collective solutions to the housing crisis, or to make the case for affordable healthcare, energy, food, and water.

The heterogeneous left is trapped between moralism without management and a false realism that refuses to challenge power structures that are both socially and environmentally unsustainable. Dysfunctional party dynamics and a lack of internal democracy divorce political processes from everyday problems. Leaders sound more like priests reciting mantras from books nobody reads, descending into spirals of abstract purism. Language has displaced material reality; social media has become the marketplace of political relevance.

As a result, more and more people retreat toward the only things they feel they can trust: work, family, and money. Face-to-face solidarity has vanished from core political strategy. Who is stopping the eviction of vulnerable families? Attending to the homeless? Providing nutritious food to children? Supporting people fighting depression, eating disorders, sleep deprivation, drug abuse, and screen addiction? The left comforts itself with systems critique, sheltering in a vacuum of perfect morality that provides neither bread nor entertainment.

This was not always the case, and it doesn’t have to be. Genuinely progressive politics must stop cataloguing only the evils of capitalism and start solving people’s immediate needs and fears. That means:

• Supporting farmers pushed to destroy the very soil they depend on, as they transition to regenerative agriculture

• Offering pivot plans that give hope and security to burnt-out small businesses on the verge of closure

• Making housing affordable, and making the future irresistible — so young people look forward to it instead of escaping into screen addiction

Show solidarity and integrity first. Ask for a vote later. Practice the radical pragmatism of what actually needs to be done to meet our goals — explaining what parliament can and cannot deliver, and what global capital will and will not allow — instead of promising what parliament alone can never provide.

Where to start? Give legal and practical support to migrants. Offer time and holistic care to the homeless. Provide safe shelter for women facing male violence. Stop ships, military bases, and companies supporting genocide. Work with — don’t just talk about — the economic alternatives that need to be scaled up and wide.

Being radical means solving problems at their roots:

• Fix, and not only punish, broken men who direct violence at those they love

• Economically support those who repair homes, tend gardens, and steward life-supporting systems

• Resist and stop violence — with force when necessary and with courage when risks are real

There is an entire world of under-resourced social spaces waiting to be reclaimed: festivals, music, arts, sport, travel. Why is the left no longer present in them? Let’s show that a life of joy, safety, freedom, and solidarity is not only possible — it is being built.

Real solidarity is material, not symbolic. It changes lives, not just narratives. It rebuilds social fabric. It creates living experiences of ecosocialism, not texts — restoring the relationships that let people smell, hear, and feel utopia. Push down energy bills. Repair homes. Protect children. Return water to dry landscapes. Cool overheated cities. Handle conflict and guarantee safety. Do not hide from racism: confront it, repair the relationship, dissolve the fear. Safety and solidarity erase racism and fascism far more effectively than moral lecturing.

We need a left that shows up. One that walks the talk on the everyday problems of the working class. Politics is an act of service — not a top-down architecture designed by intellectuals who cannot wire a socket or mend a broken chair. A revolutionary is committed to victory, not purity: victory meaning the end of human and material deprivation through relations of regeneration, not extraction for the few.

Names and words matter less than outcomes. We will be judged by our capacity to end artificial scarcity, oppression, genocide, and ecocide. It is time to choose: make history, or hand it to the monsters behind capitalism.

Gisela Ruiseco: Neha, in the first part of our conversation you have brought the discussion around the understanding of “work” and the re-centering of care to the concrete situation of necessity. This is important, as in our disturbing, devastating present we have to face the concrete: how to rebuild.

You have conveyed how it is precisely the time of transition and crisis which opens up questions and possibilities about the meaning of “work”. Particularly at these turning points, there is not only the chance to re-imagine, but also, to restore dignity to what is already there and has been invisibilized/ devalued, as you well say! Particularly, the reproductive work done by women, which sustains the extractivist system.

At many levels in the Global South, it is difficult to revalue these types of work, as they go against the grain of a still hegemonic “development”, in which subsistence and informal economies are only considered as something to be “solved” and done away with.

Question: Devaluation corrodes the possibilities of transformation. How can we start to dig deep enough in our concepts to start re-imagining, and re-valuing certain types of work, to form care-centered societies? How can we move towards “giving communities a choice” about how to work and live?

Neha Saigal: To imagine a different future for these regions, we first need to understand how the present came to be. The story of coal in central and eastern India begins not with independence, but with colonialism and it is a story of land taken, forests destroyed, and communities pushed to the margins of an energy economy that was never built for them.

The coal regions of central and eastern India have a history of extraction that goes back well before independence in the age of British imperial power. In the late nineteenth century, a coal boom transformed the upland plateau from a largely agrarian region into a key site of a growing global fossil fuel economy. Eastern Indian coal was shipped westward across the subcontinent and exported as far as Southeast Asia and the Arabian Peninsula. This expansion was built on dispossession. The East India Company had long granted regional landlords or zamindars control over land and its revenues. During the coal boom, this system was used to strip Adivasi and under-privileged caste and farming communities of their land, forests, and livelihoods. Colonial courts then gave this dispossession legal permanence, recognising landlord rights over what lay beneath the ground. Settlements were cleared, forests destroyed, and the commons that sustained Adivasi life were swallowed up by mines, railway lines, and company towns. The deep social and ecological crisis visible in these regions today has its roots in this colonial period.

This history matters for how we think about just transition now!

The communities that paid the heaviest price for coal’s expansion Scheduled Tribe and Scheduled Caste groups, and especially women within these communities were never its beneficiaries. That exclusion did not end with colonialism; it has been repeated with each new wave of coal expansion in independent India.

Coal in India has a deeply gendered history, one that is inseparable from the country’s colonial past and its subsequent political economy. As Lahiri-Dutt (2020) notes, coal represented colonial modernity in India, and within this industrial formation, women were not absent; they were integral. In the early decades of the twentieth century, women worked alongside men in the collieries, their most common role being that of loader: carrying and stacking the coal cut by their male partners fathers, brothers, or husbands. This was physically demanding, essential labour, yet it remained largely unacknowledged as skilled work. Crucially, the women who performed it were predominantly from lower-caste, poorer-class, and indigenous communities, meaning that their eventual exclusion from the formal mining sector was not simply an economic or technological outcome, but one shaped by pre-existing social hierarchies of caste, class, and gender.

The post-nationalisation period marked a decisive turning point in women’s participation in Indian coal mining. The introduction of new technologies like draglines and shovels for open-cast mines, longwall systems for underground operations reorganised the labour process in ways that systematically displaced women. Since operating these machines was classified as “skilled” work, women were either encouraged to retire or simply not recruited. Those who remained in employment were typically assigned to tasks coded as unskilled and domestic in nature: sweeping floors, making tea, or guarding office gates. As Ghosh (1984, cited in Lahiri-Dutt 2020) argued, women did not simply disappear from the industry they were made redundant within it. The near-absence of any serious effort to train or upskill women workers meant that technological change became an instrument of exclusion rather than opportunity, entrenching their marginalisation within an industry they had helped build.

When one reflects on the deeply problematic history of fossil fuels in India, a just transition is not simply about switching from one fuel to another. It requires honestly confronting this history who bore its costs, who was displaced, whose land was taken and whose labour was made invisible and making a deliberate choice to put the voices, land rights, and livelihoods of the most excluded at its centre.

This confrontation necessarily brings us to the question of work itself: what it looks like, who performs it, and how it is valued. A just transition must grapple not only with what work people will move to, but with whether we are willing to fundamentally reimagine what counts as work in the first place. This includes care work, subsistence labour, and the vast ecosystem of informal and self-employed work that has long been the invisible engine of economic life. The ILO (2020) documents that between 55 and 88 percent of the workforce in low, middle, and upper-middle income countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America is informally employed or self-employed. This is not a marginal footnote. This is the economy. The so-called formal economy sits atop this foundation and could not function without it.

And yet, this foundation has been systematically devalued, treated as a problem to be solved, a stepping stone to be left behind, rather than a form of organising life and livelihood that carries its own dignity, knowledge, and logic. The binary of productive versus reproductive work, formal versus informal, has functioned less as a description of reality and more as a hierarchy. Informal work in India whether waste collection, farm labour, sanitation, food vending, or domestic work is the backbone of the economy. Any conception of just transition that allows this work to remain at the bottom of the pyramid has not actually troubled the existing order. It has simply reproduced it.

This is where listening becomes a form of political practice. In the specific context of Eastern India, where I have been engaging with women on the cusp of this transition, one of the most generative things one can do is to create the conditions for their imagination of work to be heard not as a courtesy, but as an epistemic resource. These women have situated knowledge: they know what the land can sustain, what local markets can absorb, what is ecologically feasible and socially viable. When top-down templates propose fish ponds in the shadow of closed mines, these women can tell you why that won’t work and that mushroom cultivation might be a more viable option. That is not a small detail. It is a reminder that transition planning without this knowledge will simply reproduce the paternalism of the extractive economy it claims to replace.

A just transition, then, is also a challenge to the hierarchy of who counts as a knowledge producer and whose knowledge of work, ecology, and livelihood counts as expertise. It is a moment to insist that all work is dignified not as a rhetorical gesture, but as a structural commitment and to refuse the reproduction of hierarchies among workers based on gender, caste, and class. If the transition does not disturb those hierarchies, it is not just.

It is here, at the intersection of these crises, that the question of paradigm becomes unavoidable. The failures we are living through ecological, economic, social are not isolated malfunctions of an otherwise sound system. They are the predictable outcomes of a system organised around extraction: of land, of labour, of care, of futures. A just transition cannot simply be a better-managed version of the same logic. It has to be a rupture.

Gisela: Neha, you are actually starting right now a new project, which relates intimately to the themes we have been discussing. Could you tell us about this project?

Neha: It was this recognition that the old systems have not merely failed but are incapable of the repair they promise that led my colleague and I to co-found Intertidal Lab and I am co-building the Climate & Care Collective with a friend in India. We were sitting with a set of questions that didn’t have institutional homes: What does it mean for genuinely new things to emerge as the old structures break down? What does it take to build not just alternatives, but a different paradigm altogether, one that moves from extraction to care, that holds the inner and outer dimensions of change together, and that builds resilient communities precisely at the fractures of collapse and emergence?

The intertidal zone, the space between tides, neither fully sea nor fully land is generative precisely because of its instability. It is one of the most biodiverse zones on earth, and it exists because of the dynamic tension it inhabits. That is the sensibility we are trying to work from. Rather than waiting for stability, we are learning to build in the in-between, understanding care as a way of being in relationship with other humans, with non-human life, with land, and with time. Care as political practice means attending to what is being harmed and by whom, and organising to change it. Care as economic reimagination means asking what it would look like to organise production and distribution around sustaining life rather than accumulating capital. Care as future-making means sitting with communities, particularly the women at the cusp of transition in eastern India, the waste workers, the sanitation workers, the farmers, and asking not “how do we manage your transition?” but “what world are you trying to build, and what do you need from us?”

The old paradigm is not simply failing; it is being actively unmade by the communities it has most harmed, in ways that rarely make it into transition plans or policy briefs. The work is to make that unmaking legible and visible, to resource it, and to refuse to let it be folded back into the logic of extraction under new names.

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Illustration: From the Intertidal website. Artist: Rama Aldakkak

Working Hard & Hardly Working

When I quit my job, my fatigue was severe enough that I barely made it through the work day, and within an hour of getting home I’d be asleep. This meant I had, quite literally, no life outside of work: I woke up at 6:30 to get to the office by 7:30, returned around 4:45, and by 5:30pm I’d be in bed. Sometimes I managed to make it a “nap,” rising in the evening to eat something my partner had made for me, only to go straight back to bed and repeat the same schedule the next day. Needless to say, I was pretty miserable--and not just because my job wasn’t fulfilling. The energy required for a full day of work--8 or 9 hours of focus--was more than one night’s sleep could supply. By the end of each week, I knew I would need the entire weekend to recover my energy, just to go back and do it again.

This left very little time for any kind of self-care, community care, family, or friends. My life was sleep, work, sleep--and remember to eat, when I could. The worst part was that my job wasn’t even necessarily demanding--the tasks were relatively easy, and I certainly wasn’t doing any physical labor. But even sitting at a desk and focusing on something for multiple hours was enough to zap my energy and leave me longing for sleep.

After quitting, my symptoms got even worse, as if my body recognized that this was an opportunity, and seized it like my life depended on it. With the opportunity of rest, the body finally collapsed under the weight of 25 years of “productivity.” My life thus far had been a capitalist’s dream--primary and secondary school, straight into undergraduate education, with a postgraduate education following quickly behind. I started working full-time before I even finished my Master’s degree. Not a single “break” in sight. I didn’t even really question it--this pathway was relatively normal, and many of my peers had similar stories. To think of taking a significant break from school or work meant wasting valuable time, but worse, it would “mark” you as unproductive. If you weren’t doing something that couldn’t go on a resume, it wasn’t worth the time.

In my field, this pressure to be productive was even greater. In terms of climate change, time is of the essence. There is absolutely no time to waste, and so that break, that vacation--it must wait. Or at least that’s how it felt. The urgency of the problem was intoxicating, and the pressure from the sustainability world was inescapable.

When my body seized the opportunity to rest, the consequences of that lifestyle caught up to me. For months, I could barely get out of bed. Showering was a struggle, cooking a meal was a nonstarter, and talk of returning to a 40-hour work week fell squarely in the non-sequitur area. This presented a problem, because I could only survive for so long without income. Thankfully, I had the support of family and friends, which made this transition much easier, but it also made some other things very, very clear.

Navigating A Seriously Broken System

The first thing that became clear to me was that I know next to nothing about how to navigate a disability when it comes to work. Just like taxes, mending/sewing, and other important life skills, disability rights in the workplace were not taught in school. Even more fundamentally, did what I was experiencing even qualify as having a disability? Obviously, my life looks different now than it did before, but does it look different enough? Are my challenges challenging enough? Where’s the line that distinguishes between what counts as a disability, and what doesn’t? And who decides these things?

Even if Long COVID qualified as a disability for which I could receive accommodations at work, it would require a diagnosis from a doctor. When I first brought my fatigue up to my primary care doctor, he outright dismissed my concerns, citing “lifestyle choices” (I don’t eat meat) as the primary cause. In the coming months, I would see one well-meaning doctor after another, all working within a broken system, leaving me with no clear understanding of what was wrong, not to mention the additional fatigue from having to constantly advocate for myself. Whether it’s because I identify as a woman, because Long COVID is still poorly understood, because the United States’ neoliberal healthcare system discourages deep exploration of the root of an issue, or a combination of those and more, I found my experiences, my fatigue, my malaise, being dismissed as nothing to be too concerned about. When I finally found some doctors who took me seriously, I was faced with months-long waits for appointments, dozens of diagnostic tests and labs, and thousands of dollars in medical bills. Waiting upwards of 6 months for a doctor’s appointment, and high out-of-pocket costs despite still having health insurance through my former employer, are clear signs of a deeply broken healthcare system. Not only was I waiting many months (sometimes almost a year) and then paying through my nose for doctors to tell me they couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but there was no one to help me navigate the medical system when I barely had energy to make myself breakfast. The associated impacts on my mental health were unsurprisingly devastating--enough to bring my mother across the country and to almost admit myself to an out-patient mental health program because I was reaching the end of my ability to handle the sudden poor quality of life and the lack of anyone being determined to help. I knew the medical system was broken in the United States--under-funding, outright removal of funds, and legislated bureaucracy had resulted in a system no healthy person could easily navigate, let alone sick ones--but boy was I unaware of how bad things actually were until I was forced to navigate it myself while barely functional.

Never mind the initial experience of trying to figure out the issue, though; what if Long COVID didn’t qualify for disability support? If I couldn’t work a 40-hour work week because of my energy-limiting illness, did that mean I would have to piece together part-time jobs for the rest of my life, which often means no health insurance, or other benefits?

Left to Fend For Ourselves

The second piece of clarity that this experience provided is the realization that I’m completely unaware of the extent to which we (society) shield folks with disabilities from discrimination in hiring and around the workplace. I know employers aren’t supposed to discriminate in their hiring practices -- but how does that work in practice? I would assume that some jobs are automatically out of reach for me, especially ones that require a lot of physical labor, but why would anyone hire someone who might have to call out frequently due to chronic illness flare-ups when there’s an able-bodied alternative? Even if I do get a job, would I be passed over for promotions because I wasn’t able to take on as much work as my fully-energized colleagues? Would I be expected to spend all my energy on work, minimizing my personal life so that I could compete with others? In a system that sees employees as sources of productivity, hiring someone with an energy-limiting disability is like consciously choosing to make less money. Not because I’m lazy, or work less hard, but because I’m starting with scarcer resources than others. Some organizations might do it because they have certain values or morals, but they risk getting eaten up by the bigger money-gobbling conglomerates. Others might try to do it, or truly believe they are accommodating everyone’s needs -- but the truth is, as long as we all exist in a system that strives to maximize productivity and profits over the well-being of employees, we’re beholden to the underlying mechanisms of that system. At the end of the day, if it’s productivity and profit that the system says matter, every company is forced to submit, at least in part, to that agenda.

Understanding the Multiplicity of Disability

The third is that the voices of those with disabilities have not been given enough space and support. Disability looks different for everyone, and each disability presents unique challenges. Someone like me, with an energy-limiting chronic illness, is challenged by very different circumstances than someone who can’t hear, and that person’s challenges look wholly different from someone who is neurodivergent. Grouping all disabilities together, and presenting a one-stop solution of “accessibility,” is like expecting everything edible to taste the same. It’s a ridiculous proposition, full stop.

I have yet to attempt re-entering the workforce. But for now, I still have many unanswered questions, including where I can find support, or where I can learn more about how to navigate these challenges. What rights do I have? Surely there are others facing similar challenges, or who have in the past? Clearly, I have some research to do, but I think my lack of knowledge on the subject also reflects a broader mainstream ignorance--and an opportunity to improve how we talk about differing workplace needs.

In the meantime, without a job to report to, it was high time I started looking after myself. Or, more realistically, figuring out how to navigate meeting the needs that my new existence demanded. More on self care in Part III...

Modern political-economic systems are structured in ways that make stability easier to sustain under conditions of growth, and more difficult when growth is weak. As constraints on growth intensify, future stability may need to be maintained without continuous expansion—with implications for businesses today.

Growth Is Under Pressure

For more than a century, expansion has helped stabilise modern economies. It has sustained jobs, corporate profits and public finances, and is the bedrock of political legitimacy. Long-run growth is the norm: business strategy, financial markets and fiscal policy all assume that output will keep rising.

But in high income nations, assumptions about the rate of growth are under structural pressure from long-running environmental, productivity and societal factors. Annual GDP growth in the OECD group of nations has been slowing for decades, with the ten-year moving average clearly showing a structural downshift in growth capacity from ~5% in the 1960s to ~2% in the 2020s, indicating not just temporary deviations due to shocks, but changes in the economic regime (see figure 1). The ~3% average growth rate of the late 20th century is often assumed to be the norm, leading to expectations that today’s weaker growth will rebound. But the longer-run pattern suggests growth is normalising downwards.

If the rate of economic expansion continues to decline, how might the frameworks through which stability is produced and maintained change—and how will firms maintain profitability, resilience and legitimacy under those conditions? The implication is that firms and economies will face tighter structural constraints and macroeconomic, political and institutional norms may evolve in response.

Some large companies are already experimenting with answers. They maintain performance today while testing business models, governance structures and strategies that would be robust under tighter structural constraints. These include shifting definitions of success, re-balancing capital allocation away from expansion and testing resilience-oriented operating models. Their moves suggest that an economy designed to thrive under constraints is plausible and that firms preparing for different measures of success may gain an early advantage.

Why Growth Is Now Under Pressure

Modern growth economies reinforce themselves. Investment in productivity raises profits, enabling reinvestment. Credit expansion stimulates demand, which increases asset values and collateral, allowing even more lending. But now these reinforcing cycles are under a number of structural pressures.

Ecological limits: Climate change, biodiversity loss and resource degradation are increasingly affecting infrastructure, agriculture and supply chains. These pressures introduce systemic risks that are difficult for markets to price.

Demographic shifts: In OECD nations, the share of people aged 65 and over has doubled since 1960, and may almost double again by 2050, with long-term implications for public finances and economic growth, even with better aging and longer working lives.

Energy constraints: The renewable transition is infrastructure-intensive, requiring large upfront investment. Meanwhile, pathways for hard-to-abate sectors are uneven and the scalability of negative emissions technologies is uncertain. Fossil fuels remain important to global energy supply, but are exposed to episodic shocks and geopolitical risks (like COVID-19 or the Iran war). As a result, energy systems may experience periods of tighter conditions and price volatility, constraining growth.

Productivity slowdown: Productivity growth has been slowing in advanced economies for decades, with capital largely flowing into real estate and financial assets. This raises debt, reduces employment opportunities and introduces systemic risk into financial markets.

Weakening legitimacy: The rate of return on capital (wealth stocks) has outpaced the rate of economic growth (production flows), while workers capture a shrinking share of productivity gains. Widening wealth and income gaps are associated with lower levels of institutional trust and can weaken the political legitimacy of the system.

Geopolitical fragmentation: Globalisation relies on relatively frictionless cross-border flows, which surged in the 1990s as the Cold War ended. But following the Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19, “slowbalisation“ (a structural slowdown in globalisation), tighter capital controls, shifts in migration patterns and rising geopolitical tensions have contributed to a more fragmented global system.

These pressures aren’t going away, despite several clear gains. Yes, several higher-income economies have achieved partial decoupling of territorial carbon emissions from GDP growth—but the pace and scale of global decoupling required to meet internationally agreed climate and ecological targets exceed current trajectories. Yes, AI, digitisation and automation promise revolutionary efficiencies—but practical realisation often falls short of the hype surrounding technology.

For executives, this signals a need to rethink how business resilience can be maintained should the economic regime downshift further.

Strategic Implications For Business Leaders

If economic growth becomes harder to sustain in the long term, the implications for business strategy are profound, particularly for larger, publicly listed and capital-intensive firms. These have long relied on expanding markets to secure revenues and justify investment. In a slow growth environment, competitive advantage will depend less on scale and throughput and more on resilience, resource productivity and institutional legitimacy. Navigating this shift will require leaders to operate across multiple economic horizons simultaneously.

Six strategic implications stand out:

• Plan for a world where growth is less reliable. Treat a “post-growth” mindset shift as a plausible scenario, and include it within long term planning. (See more on this below.)

• Make resilience a source of competitive advantage. Scale, efficiency and just-in-time production can become fragile under conditions of resource constraint and geopolitical disruption, whereas reliable supply chains, durable products, long-term customer relationships and balance sheets able to absorb volatility are advantageous.

• Treat resource productivity as a strategic priority. Managing energy, materials and environmental impacts is shifting from compliance to strategy. Firms that use resources most efficiently, and use fewer of them, will gain structural advantages.

• Expect growth to become more selective. Some sectors, such as those related to wellbeing and ecological resilience, may expand rapidly. Others may face structural limits. Strategic positioning within this changing landscape will matter more than scaling.

• Focus on workforce stability, job quality and fairness to enhance retention, capability and legitimacy through transitions in employment dynamics.

• Lead across multiple economic futures. Firms will need to maintain performance within a growth-oriented system, while experimenting with business practices suited to a more constrained economy and putting structurally stabilising stewardship and social missions in place.

What Makes Economies Stable

Economic stability is widely understood as a precondition for sustained growth, partly shaped through policy, but also by deeper structural and institutional conditions. However, the relationship is bidirectional: growth also plays a mediating role in sustaining stability. Modern economies have become institutionally conditioned by expectations of continued growth, with growth helping to manage several key tensions. Conversely, prolonged low growth can make these tensions more difficult to contain.

• Macroeconomic stability: growth eases macroeconomic constraints—it can absorb labour and ease public debt.

• Political stability: growth enlarges the revenue base, which may improve distributive outcomes, reducing social tensions and helping maintain political legitimacy, albeit without fully resolving underlying inequalities.

• Institutional stability: core institutions, such as corporate governance, labour markets, financial systems and fiscal systems, have evolved under assumptions of ongoing growth. Growth helps validates these assumptions, while slowdowns can expose tensions and reduce institutional coherence.

These relationships are not universal but are sufficiently characteristic of advanced economies to suggest that growth is both an outcome of stability and a mechanism by which stability is maintained. This dependency is shaped by institutional design and by a deeper institutional logic that embeds growth assumptions.

As long-term ecological, social and productivity constraints intensify, growth may no longer reliably perform its stabilising role. The central challenge becomes: how do economies remain stable when expansion slows?

One emerging answer is the “post-growth” framework. Post-growth reframes the objective of advanced economies from pursuing growth to, instead, maintaining good living standards for all while respecting ecological limits.

Contrary to common misconceptions, post-growth does not call for indiscriminate economic contraction. Growth may still occur, but it is no longer the organising principle. Rather, post-growth asks how public policy, capital markets, corporate governance, labour systems and social protections can be redesigned so that prosperity and stability do not depend on ever-increasing material throughput. Success is measured not by the pace of expansion in the short term but by resilience and robustness in the long term. Fair resource distribution, reliable provisioning of essential goods and services and production practices aligned with environmental ceilings are the stabilising features of a post-growth system.

The Business Challenge Is Navigating A Changing Economic Logic

While policy regimes can change rapidly, as seen in the market-oriented reforms of the late twentieth century, deeper economic transformations unfold more slowly. During the Industrial Revolution, industrial capitalism gradually displaced agrarian economies over decades, with old and new systems coexisting in a long hybrid phase as labour, institutions and capital adapted. The same dynamic is likely in a transition from a growth-dependent economy to one that remains stable without relying on continuous expansion.

Business leaders are already familiar with one tool to navigate such transitions: the Three Horizons framework. Widely used in corporate strategy, it helps organisations manage innovation alongside core operations: defending today’s business, experimenting with emerging opportunities and preparing for longer-term transformation.

Applied to economic change under intensifying constraints on growth:

• Horizon 1: the existing growth-based economy. Continues to underpin employment, investment earnings and public finance, remaining essential to stability even as its limitations become visible.

• Horizon 2: the hybrid transition space. Institutions experiment with circular business models, shorter work weeks, alternative success metrics and governance innovations, while gradually phasing out unsustainable practices.

• Horizon 3: the emerging post-growth model. New institutions, technologies, governance and business models begin at the margins among pioneering firms, policymakers and communities, gaining influence as structural pressures reshape the broader system.

Table 1 applies the Three Horizons framework to macroeconomic policy, political stability and firm strategy, as well as leadership practice. It shows how stability may be maintained by cautiously continuing with today’s growth-based economy while experimenting with innovative approaches and preparing for the possibility of a post-growth future.

For leaders, this creates a distinctive challenge, with each horizon representing a simultaneous priority: sustaining current performance, piloting emerging practices and embedding the structures and mindsets that may define long-term stability.

Early Signals From Business

Some large firms are already operating across the three horizons simultaneously, maintaining performance within the growth economy while experimenting with practices aligned with tighter ecological constraints or meeting essential needs and ensuring governance is oriented toward long-term social and environmental stewardship.

• Patagonia still competes as a premium global apparel brand. But it has introduced practices that challenge conventional fashion economics, including repair services, resale programmes and product designs intended to last longer. It is owned by a purpose trust and environmental nonprofit, embedding resource stewardship and profit sufficiency into the company’s governance. (Doughnut Economics case study.)

• Triodos Bank operates as a regulated commercial bank, but directs capital toward renewable energy, social housing and cultural enterprises. Its governance structure emphasises transparency and long-term impact, limiting speculative financial activity and aligning investment with social and environmental goals.

• Bosch is a major industrial manufacturer. It uses a design-for-environment approach to build longevity, repairability and recyclability into products. It offers repair services and recycles production waste. Earnings are reinvested into R&D or distributed to its owner, a charitable trust that supports social issues.

These examples suggest a post-growth shift is considered plausible, and that readiness for new measures of success could create long-term advantage.

Conclusion

For more than a century, economic growth has helped stabilise modern economies. It has supported jobs, corporate profitability and public institutions. But long-term structural pressures are raising questions about whether expansion can continue playing this role indefinitely. A post-growth logic is beginning to emerge. It seeks stability from resilience through fairness, stewardship and institutional design.

For business leaders today, choosing between growth and post-growth is not the challenge. It is learning how to operate through a transition in which both logics coexist. Success will increasingly depend on a dual capability: delivering performance in today’s growth-dependent economy while preparing for a future in which stability no longer depends on growth.

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The Rise of the Global Hindu Far-Right and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

In India, Hindu right-wing fascism, operating as internal colonisers in the postcolonial era, is no longer emerging; it has already consolidated at the central level and, for the first time, in my home state of West Bengal. I write this in the immediate aftermath of the sweeping victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) or the Hindu-right-wing party, over the All India Trinamool Congress (TMC), in the state legislative assembly elections, which had governed the state for fifteen years. The coincidence of this moment of the Hindu right-wing party’s victory, with the birth anniversary of Karl Marx, on 5th May, 2026, at least in my view, resonates with the symbolic death of the Left in India more or less, but most definitely in the Bengal region.

This shift has been widely contested and accompanied by allegations of vote share garnered through immense electoral malpractice by BJP-captured state machinery including the administrative and electoral bodies at the central and state (Bengal) levels, and it signals a stronger consolidation of Modi-led ‘Hindutva’, or Hindu Brahminical supremacist ideological politics, within West Bengal and more generally eastern India’s political landscape. What we are witnessing today is not an isolated national phenomenon but part of ‘Hindutva as a global far-right project’, increasingly linked to transnational authoritarian, genocidal, and hyper-capitalist infrastructures. According to a media report, US President Donald Trump congratulated Prime Minister Narendra Modi on the result, calling it “historic” and stating that India is “lucky to have him as its leader”.

The rise of the BJP in West Bengal is geopolitically significant for three primary reasons: The state hosts one of the largest proportion of Muslim populations in India; it shares the longest international border with Bangladesh compared to other Indian states, shaping racist discourse around so-called “illegal Bangladeshi immigrants”; and Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, where I live, functions as Bangladesh’s primary entry point into India, making the region central to cross-border migration flows. Politically capturing the Bengal region, therefore, enables a stronger strategic grip over eastern India, while reinforcing narratives of illegal migration and anti-Muslim security politics in the project of rebuilding a Hindu nation in India.

With Bengal’s long history of left-leaning politics and peasant movements that achieved partial land redistribution from the landholding upper-caste elites to landless cultivators from underprivileged caste and indigenous groups, and nearly 34 years of Left rule in West Bengal, this moment feels deeply frustrating. The BJP, whose communal rhetoric and narratives that police beef-eating, have often contributed to attacks by Hindu fundamentalist vigilante groups targeting minority groups belonging to Dalits, Christians, and Muslims in the name of cow protection. This has intensified not only political disillusionment but also growing concerns for the immediate safety of Muslims, women, transgender individuals, free-thinking individuals, Adivasis or the indigenous peoples, and Dalits or the most disenfranchised caste groups.

The scale of the BJP’s victory over the Trinamool Congress reflects more than a routine political shift. It exposes a deeper ideological vacuum within India’s postcolonial liberal democratic framework, including the European nation-state model of ‘one community, one nation, one identity’, which politicises ethnic/religious differences, as well as the notions of individual rights-bearing citizens and representative, competitive electoral democracy. This rests on the assumption that the legislative, executive, and judicial institutions, including electoral processes, function as independent bodies, and that all citizens and social groups are equally powerful and possess formally equal and universal rights as granted by the Constitution of India. This ignores the realities of elite capture and the deep-seated power differences in material and social conditions across the citizenry that reproduce generational inequalities.

Even during the constitution-building process in 1948, Dalit leader and constitutional maker Dr. B. R. Ambedkar warned that formal ‘political democracy’ cannot be achieved within the liberal structure in India without substantive ‘social democracy’ or deep-seated transformation of the living conditions of underprivileged caste groups. Many mainstream parties, including the Left, have failed to articulate a vision that meaningfully addresses the material conditions of the most marginalised—particularly Dalit and Adivasi communities, as well as landless populations facing ongoing deprivation, dispossession, and ecological precarity, by ignoring the caste, gender, and religious foundations of class differences.

Communal Racism

Since the last few days, there have been reports and visible instances of violence: groups of men aligned with the BJP vandalising parts of the Kolkata city and across West Bengal, burning opposition party offices, beating some Muslim TMC party workers to death, and celebrating in ways that are concerningly violent, raising serious fears about minority peoples’ and women’s safety—especially for me as a defiant citizen moving through public and social-media spaces. These acts, often accompanied by the symbolic invocation of the Ram temple in Ayodhya city in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, a religious site believed to be the birthplace of the Hindu God, Ram, and a majoritarian religious identity, signal not just electoral success but an assertion of toxic masculinist power that borders on intimidation, anti-Muslim hatred, male Hindu Brahminical supremacy and what I would call ‘communal racism’.

Communal racism refers to a form of prejudice and structural discrimination that operates within a society by dividing people along religious and nationalistic lines and racialising certain communities as outsiders, infiltrators, or security threats. I draw this term from my mother, a first-generation daughter of Bangladeshi refugees who were forced to flee their ancestral lands as Hindus during the Partition of India and resettle in secular India, when the British divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan—then comprising West Pakistan (present-day Pakistan) and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)—along religious lines. Displaced by violence, insecurity, and the sudden loss of ancestral lands and wealth, her family’s experience reflects the long afterlives of that communal moment that was rife with politically concocted riots among Hindus and Muslims. She articulated this idea out of memory, personal history, desperation, and a deep detest for the hatred we are witnessing in India against Muslims or religious minorities.

Unlike racial capitalism, which structures the world through hierarchies in which white populations maintain supremacy over non-white populations—whose bodies, natural resources, and labour are exploited for capital accumulation and consumption in the West—communal racism operates within the borders of postcolonial/modern nation-states, particularly in South Asia, by dividing communities along religious lines and creating internal hierarchies that help perpetuate global capitalist violence. It produces and circulates hatred against Muslims or discursive ethnic/religious minorities within the nation-state borders, while also intersecting with caste-based Brahminical hierarchies directed at subordinating Dalits and Adivasis, especially when these groups disrupt or challenge the Brahminical, male-dominated, upper-caste Hindu hierarchy.

Communal racism operates by masking the real material struggles faced by underprivileged communities or the working classes of the Global South. With its roots in the British colonisers’ divide-and-rule policy that bred communal hatred among Hindus and Muslims in undivided British India, it diverts attention from both class and caste awareness, shifting anger and frustration away from the structural causes of deprivation—such as extraction, exploitation, dispossession, capital accumulation, landlessness, climate crisis, and ecological collapse—and instead redirecting it toward blaming and racialising minority communities as problems. In doing so, it estranges marginalised Hindu groups from the very economic forces shaping their lives, while simultaneously intensifying the alienation and vulnerability of Dalits, Adivasis, and Muslims within their already precarious minority positions.

This ideological operation and masking of capitalist drivers of marginalised communities’ deprivation is compounded by a profound absence of marginalised voices in political leadership and agenda-setting. The exclusion of Adivasi and Dalit peoples from positions at the forefront of political transformation is stark, as is the lack of young women leaders who centre these intersecting crises in their politics. In this vacuum, upper-caste, educated, and privileged landholding elites continue to dominate the political sphere as well as the intellectual sphere, often reproducing the stale liberal frameworks that have historically failed to rectify the horrible living conditions of the poor, let alone dismantle the caste-based hierarchies and inequalities, landlessness, especially those depriving generations of Dalit and Adivasi peoples.

Beyond Reactive Resistance

Opposition politics frequently remains confined to reactive resistance, opposing dominant parties without offering substantive alternatives grounded in the lived realities of the most deprived. Reactive resistance, such as a simple anti-BJP stance, often resorted to by Mamata Banerjee, the current Chief Minister of West Bengal from the TMC party, is not ideology. It’s bullshit! No such ‘anti-party’ tactics will work unless political party philosophies are grounded in a substantive critique of anthropocentrism that is anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, anti-Brahminical, anti-patriarchal, and anti-Eurocentric.

We are living in a time in which the accelerating climate crisis, in the form of heatwaves, cyclones, flash floods, acute crop failures, and the loss of biodiversity and agricultural livelihoods, is intensifying collective existential uncertainty, especially among farmers in the Global South. Plus, we have already crossed seven of nine planetary boundaries, signalling a profound ecological crisis. Any form of ideology and political agenda that treats marginalised communities as passive recipients of top-down institutions, largely architected by upper-caste privileged groups, is likely to fail. In doing so, it may inadvertently reinforce the very forces that are marginalising the Dalits and the Adivasis, and redirect voting patterns towards right-wing political parties that reinstate false promises through ethno-nationalism.

Without a decisive shift towards grounded, community-led leadership and a rethinking of environmental, political and economic priorities, the current trajectory risks entrenching a form of illiberal, ill-informed, majoritarian capitalism sustained by religious fundamentalism. That is not decolonisation. That is recolonisation through Hindutva ideology—reviving a so-called Hindu-dominated past, a supremacist nation that never really existed, as an excuse to legitimise a regime of hyper-extractive capitalism and upper-caste male domination over the means of production. Decolonisation is about social justice. Full stop!

What we are witnessing today is not merely the rise of a fascist Hindu far-right-wing party, but a structural warning regarding the mainstream liberal status quo. The absolute disregard for minority voices, driven by authoritarian and hyper-capitalist forces grounded in Hindutva within India’s liberal and secular constitutional framework, which was promised to serve the interests of all its citizens and communities, combined with the absence of transformative leadership by marginalised communities—not follower-ship—creates the conditions for hyper-exclusionary forms of power to further consolidate.

Minorities in Left Leadership Positions

The urgency of Adivasi, Dalit, and marginalised Muslim solidarity-based leadership is not rhetorical—it is central to any meaningful reimagining of democracy in this present moment of ideological, material and ecological collapse. As Ambedkar reminds us, emancipatory nation-building can only happen by filling the very liberal institutions with individuals from the socially and materially deprived groups who have historically been deprived of a meaningful “share in the political power”.

This must also include the meaningful political representation of women from these same marginalised communities, whose voices remain systematically excluded from leadership and agenda-setting. The focus should shift toward emancipatory and socially just ideologies that abolish the conditions of Dalit and Adivasi subordination across genders.

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“It is undoubtedly easier to maintain ideological purity by working for a purely renewable company, but the hardest part of the transition is ensuring we bring everybody along and leave no one behind.”

Juanjo lives in Germany and is currently working on making the just energy transition a reality within a major utility company. Originally from Spain, he embraces a grounded, narrative approach to activism, balancing his corporate career with a profound dedication to international sustainability. Through his collaborative efforts within the International Degrowth Network (IDN), he aims to elevate local ecological initiatives to a global scale, ensuring that no worker is left behind in the shift away from fossil fuels.

Alan: Hello, and thanks for joining us. We are very happy to have you in the magazine. To break the ice, could you introduce yourself a little bit? Tell us about your background, how you got involved in the International Degrowth Network (IDN), and what the IDN actually is?

Juanjo: Thanks for the invitation, Alan. I am originally from Spain, but I have been living in Germany for fifteen years now. I currently work for an energy company in a commercial role offering sustainable energy solutions to industrial customers. My company still operates coal and gas assets but [is] heavily working in new solutions future ready towards carbon neutrality in a just transition manner. Fortunately, working conditions in Germany are quite good, which means I have the time in the evenings to dedicate to activism. Like many idealists, I wanted to work toward a better world and have a more substantial impact. I was previously involved in a political party in Spain because, at the time, my German did not feel strong enough for local political activism. However, I was always deeply interested in sustainability, and I quickly saw degrowth as a clear and necessary pillar of our future. While we can transition away from fossil fuels by electrifying society, I feel that without degrowth, we are simply moving the problem from one area to another. The next critical crisis will revolve around the extraction of critical minerals needed for that electrification. I knew I was not naturally gifted at local networking, so I decided to join the International Degrowth Network to help build this movement on a broader scale.

Alan: It is interesting that you have not done a formal academic master’s degree on degrowth. How did you originally get to know about the movement?

Juanjo: It was actually through Hugo Abad. I was participating in another network initiative in Spain at the time, Red Decrecer para Vivir, and I was also still active in the political party Podemos. This new initiative started in Spain, and Hugo was heavily involved. Once, he mentioned that there was this international association holding a meeting and invited whoever wanted to join. Because I have a very international mindset, I joined that very first meeting, and I simply stayed from then on.

Alan: For those who do not know, can you explain what the International Degrowth Network is? Could you share a little bit about the core concept and the specific goals the organization is pursuing?

Juanjo: It is quite interesting because while I have my own personal view, the network truly represents a collective of different perspectives. As the name suggests, it is primarily a network. By definition, degrowth can often consist of highly localized initiatives focused on local supply chains and regional ecological solutions. However, when you only work locally, you might miss the larger view. The IDN adds incredible value by allowing these local communities to network with others who are facing the exact same problems and exchanging effective solutions. Beyond sharing information, some challenges demand a broader perspective. A regional water crisis is one thing, but decarbonizing society requires a massive global effort. Changing municipal or city-level laws is fantastic, but sometimes you need to elevate the fight to a national or international level. This is where an association like the IDN brings that higher-level coordination to grassroots local initiatives.

Alan: How is the network organized? This is especially important for local organizations that may want to connect. How can someone become part of the IDN and contribute to its working groups?

Juanjo: You can easily join in our website. The website is quite intuitive, and you can join either as an individual or as an organizational member. We follow a set of shared principles and operate with a very flat structure organized into circles. There are two types of circles. The first type is geographic; currently, our most active circles are in Europe, America, and Asia. The second type is thematic. Because the degrowth movement remains quite academic, we have many people interested in research. We also have a transformative learning circle for people who are new to degrowth and want to learn how to apply it. The practice circle was one of the first ones I joined because I was eager to put these ideas into real-world action. We also have circles dedicated to communications, facilitative infrastructure, and organizing. Finally, there is a general circle that serves as a forum where coordinators from each specific circle join together to share what they are doing and make common, democratic decisions.

Alan: In order to get in contact with the broader IDN, attending the assembly would be a great option, right? Does this happen online and link up with the international degrowth conferences?

Juanjo: Yes, exactly. When you join via our website, you get access to a platform called Matrix Element. This is where we hold our main daily discussions because, unfortunately, our members are from all around the world, making regular in-person meetings impossible. Sometimes lucky members who live in the same city can organize local meetups, but digital interaction is our primary method. However, we absolutely take advantage of the international degrowth conferences. We typically prepare our global assembly one day before the conference begins, allowing whoever can travel to finally meet in person and build stronger interpersonal bonds.

Alan:Can you highlight one concrete initiative or action that you have been involved with in the IDN so people can grasp the real-world activity happening within the network?

Juanjo: Like many activists, I get involved in a lot of different stories and initiatives. In the IDN, we are actively finding our niche and determining where we add the most value to the broader movement. We see many individuals coming to us because they realize that green growth and the circular economy are not enough; at the end of the day, it is still capitalism, and if a project does not generate profits or reduce costs, it simply is not implemented. The most impactful recent initiative we launched is the Degrowth Events Fund. Last year, we successfully funded around fifteen events with approximately €1,000 each, distributed all around the world, particularly in the Global South. It is incredibly rewarding to see degrowth reaching countries where it was previously absent. After receiving this initial funding, small groups can host an event and subsequently formalize into permanent organizations. For example, after these funded events, groups like the Tokyo Snails emerged in Japan, and other groups formed in Taiwan and Zimbabwe. The group in Zimbabwe even managed to invite their Minister of Environment to their event, achieving an impressively high level of impact. We are running the same initiative again this year, with the application deadline falling on April 19th.

Alan: It is remarkable that despite the Euro-centric origins of degrowth, you have managed to reach countries outside the global core. However, many progressive groups struggle to engage the working class or attract diverse profiles beyond academia. How can we bring in more working-class people who might be entirely depleted of hope?

Juanjo: I totally agree that this is very difficult. I recognize my own privilege here; I have a secure job with good conditions, and because I do not have children to care for, I can dedicate my time after 5:00 PM to activism. I sometimes feel a bit guilty defending the rights of others from this comfortable position. Many working-class individuals have their energy completely depleted by the end of the work day, and after taking care of their families, the last thing they want to do is sit at a computer and organize for an association. A major barrier we face is the lack of a clear, accessible message. If I try to explain degrowth to my parents using terminology like ‘Global South’ or ‘just transition,’ I completely lose them. Working-class people are genuinely interested and want to understand these concepts, but we must explain them in a language they actually use, rather than relying on complicated academic jargon.

Alan: This brings to mind reflections on left-wing alliances in Spain. It has been noted that exhausted working-class people do not want to read complex political theory after work; they prefer to watch entertaining programs that subtly embed austerity propaganda. What are your thoughts on the formats and spaces we are creating for them?

Juanjo: It is a vital reflection. If you are exhausted, you do not want to be lectured about how terrible the world is; you want to hear a message of hope and have fun. We definitely need to utilize the power of culture, art, and humor to share our message. Many people who would never have engaged with political theory were deeply moved and brought into the fold simply through the power of an engaging story and entertaining art. There are some progressive entertainment programs emerging in Spain that provide a good platform, showing that there are joyful, creative ways to change the world.

Alan: Your personal story is fascinating because you maintain a hybrid position, navigating the contradictions of corporate work while engaging in systemic critique. How do you reconcile your activism with your paid work in the fossil fuel industry?

Juanjo: Many people suffer from these exact contradictions. At the beginning of my career, I felt much more guilty about working for an energy company that operates coal and gas assets. However, I now see the intense, practical efforts required to execute a genuine just transition. If you simply close a coal power plant that employs 400 workers and wish them good luck, you destroy that region. Instead, my teams have spent years working out what kinds of sustainable industries we can attract to these regions to guarantee a viable future for those communities. It is undoubtedly easier to maintain ideological purity by working for a purely renewable company, but the hardest part of the transition is ensuring we bring everybody along and leave no one behind. It can be difficult when interacting with colleagues who have worked in coal their entire lives; coal brought significant improvements to society in the past, and they do not always understand why they are suddenly viewed as the bad guys. Sometimes I feel like I am swimming against the current, but I firmly believe that to change the system, we need people pushing for transition from everywhere, even from within the existing structures.

Alan: Regarding unpaid activism, what is your experience? Do you think activism should be professionalized and paid to ensure broader participation?

Juanjo: This has been a very big discussion internally at the IDN. As our network has grown—registering as an NGO in France, setting up a bank account, and registering within the European Union to receive project funding—the need for professionalization has become obvious. Volunteers do incredible work, but their availability is highly volatile. Life happens; volunteers face health issues or family problems and suddenly have to step away. If you want to deliver advanced, professional outcomes, such as effectively coordinating the Degrowth Events Fund, you need to pay people to dedicate their time fully. While some fear that paying a few individuals might demotivate the volunteers, we need to find a balance where paid staff handle specific coordination while volunteers maintain their unique spaces to contribute. A great example is the Research & Degrowth collective in Barcelona. They started as an unfunded collective, but once they secured EU funding, their impact skyrocketed. The depth of their workshops, their political connections, and their integration into municipal decision-making processes all drastically improved once they could operate professionally.

Alan: These are very tough times globally. What gives you hope about the future and keeps you motivated?

Juanjo: I try to be positive, but like many people, the news sometimes leaves me feeling paralyzed. I occasionally question if what we are doing at the IDN is enough given the rapid pace of global deterioration. Ironically, one thing that gives me hope is that the destructive decisions made by right-wing figures like Trump might actually be accelerating the collapse of an unsustainable system, which in turn galvanizes our movement. Furthermore, I am deeply encouraged by the increasing number of people who are realizing that current green capitalism is part of the problem and are looking toward degrowth as the logical solution. Finally, the alarming rise of the extreme right serves as a stark reminder that right now is the absolute most critical moment to defend human rights and international law. If I truly believe in these principles, I have to fight for them, and that clear conviction drives me forward.

Alan: To close, we always try to give a platform to individuals who are not typically in the media landscape. Is there someone specific you would like to platform today?

Juanjo: I initially considered suggesting Rutger Bregman, who wrote the excellent book Moral Ambition, or the activist Yayo Herrero, but they already receive a significant amount of media attention. Instead, I would like to highlight a friend and colleague named Celeste, who is based in Sevilla, Spain. She is a fantastic local activist who is deeply connected to degrowth principles. She organizes local environmental cleanups in her community and is also heavily involved in political activism, fighting for progressive left-wing parties in the regional elections of Andalusia. I highly recommend speaking with her, and I want to thank you, Alan, for the impressive work you are doing with this magazine.

Click the link to watch the video interview:

Part 1: Between re-imagining and recognizing

Gisela Ruiseco: We are heirs of that moment in the history of modernity, where paid employment was crystallized as the “real work”. Other kinds of work, like care work, became invisibilized, and if paid, poorly paid. Work directly centered on the production for the well-being of the family and community (constituting “subsistence economies“) was devalued. Feminist scholars like S. Federici, have made a superb account of this process in our modern/colonial history, which in the long run made us lose sight that these types of devalued work constitute the bedrock of our economies.

Today many defend (as also taken up by the Degrowth movement) the importance of putting care and not capital accumulation again at the center of our economies. There is a call for a deep transformation in this sense. From our late modern point of view, this transformation may seem a strange idea, and perhaps very difficult to implement. But centering on care and guiding human efforts towards attaining sufficiency and wellbeing, has implicitly been the norm for humanity. In Global South societies, such arrangements may survive to some degree.

Question: Placing care at the center at the center of our economies would involve deep transformations, both of society and of our understandings, specifically here around “work”. Neha, how would you see this and how could we actually proceed with such a transformation?

Neha Saigal: What is work? It’s a deceptively simple question, and yet one that cuts to the very foundations of how we have organized society, our families, our sense of self, our relationships, our belonging.

For better or worse, work as most of us know it has been shaped by colonial capitalism, and more recently by what some are calling techno-feudalism: systems that define work by narrow parameters, oriented toward producing for an economy that grows for its own sake, with little regard for what that growth actually sustains or destroys.

My thinking on this has been sharpened recently by time spent in parts of Eastern India, where coal mining is the lifeblood of entire communities. Global and national energy transition discourses, however necessary, are threatening mine closures, or have already brought them about. In India, a significant share of the informal workforce comes from historically marginalised communities, compounding precarity with the disproportionate burden of hazardous and exploitative conditions in coal mining. And it is the people living inside that rupture who are sitting with the hardest questions: What will work mean for us? What will we do? Who will we be?

What has drawn my attention most, though, is the labour that was never counted to begin with. In these settings, the people most invisible in dominant narratives are women particularly from Dalit and Adivasi communities whose days are organised around caring for people, homes, farms, and land, much of which emerges as incidental yet essential labour within subsistence and ecologically dependent livelihoods.This work is foundational to the functioning of society and how consistently it is dismissed as something natural, something that certain bodies and simply do, rather than as work deserving recognition, value, or protection (see also a recent article in this magazine).

It is these conversations happening in places where the very meaning of mainstream work is being forced open that have fired my imagination.

We are living inside multiple, cascading crises each triggering the next, each falling hardest on those in the Global Majority. The genocide of Palestinians. Wars driven by the United States and Israel against countries like Iran and Venezuela. The relentless pursuit of minerals and oil by capital, replicating colonial agendas in ways the whole world can now watch in real time. These are not aberrations. They are the logic of the system, playing out across a global scale.

And yet, something else is also happening. A resistance is growing. Parts of the Global Majority are not only pushing back against the old order some are daring to imagine that this order was never inevitable, that sovereignty, dignity, and self-determination are not utopian fantasies but legitimate foundations for a different kind of world.

To understand why care sits at the heart of that reimagining, we need to understand what has been deliberately kept invisible.

The ecofeminist theorist Ariel Salleh developed the concept of meta-industrial labour to name exactly this: the caring, regenerative, productive, and reproductive work performed by women, peasants, and tribal peoples work that the dominant global economy has never adequately acknowledged, let alone valued. This labour does not merely supplement the capitalist economy. It subsidises and is the hidden ground on which everything else stands.

There is no denying that the system capitalist, feudalist, extractivist has been built on this unacknowledged foundation, and has benefited enormously from never having to pay its true cost.

So what would it mean to turn that on its head?

To centre care is not simply to add it to the ledger of recognised work. It is a far more radical move. It challenges capitalism, yes but also neo-colonialism, patriarchy, and the interlocking structures of gender and racial violence that keep certain bodies in service to others. Care, understood in this expansive sense, provides an essential social good. It underpins wellbeing and sustains standards of living by supplying the very conditions that allow people to participate in society at all.

The good news is that the communities I work with in the coal mining belt of Eastern India are asking these questions have never been without answers. There is no shortage of frameworks for organising societies, economies, and politics around care. Queer ecology troubles the boundaries between nature and culture, challenging the hierarchies that place certain bodies and certain lands in service to others. Ubuntu, I am because we are, grounds personhood in relationality rather than individual accumulation. Buen Vivir, rooted in Latin American indigenous thought, offers a vision of living well in balance with community and the natural world, rather than living more at its expense. Commoning points to the centuries-old practices through which communities have collectively governed land, water, and shared resources outside the logic of private ownership.

What these frameworks share is not just an intellectual position. They are, in large part, descriptions of how communities particularly marginalised communities in the Global South have actually been organising for a very long time. Long before scholars of degrowth and post-growth in the Global North began theorising alternatives to capitalism in academic language, these ways of living and relating were already present, already practised, already defended at great cost. The danger, then, is not that we lack ideas. It is that the ideas get laundered through institutions and disciplines until they are severed from the lived experiences and indigenous wisdom that gave them meaning in the first place.

So let us bring it back to the ground. Back to Eastern India. Back to the women. Dalit, Adivasi, marginalised who are standing at this frontier right now, not as subjects of study but as people who are already asking the hardest questions about what comes next.

For them, the transition away from extractive, fossil-fuel-driven economies is not an abstract policy debate. It is immediate, material, and existential. And what a genuine paradigm shift would require is not simply the substitution of one energy source for another, but a fundamental rethinking of what an economy is for. This means moving beyond conversations about care work important as those are, towards imagining full care economies and caring societies: structures that do not merely recognise invisible labour but restore dignity and sustenance to it.

It means dismantling the hierarchies that rank work by its proximity to capital, and replacing them with a systems understanding that what holds life together: caring for people, for land, for nature, for the wild is not peripheral to the economy but its most essential core. Everything is interconnected. To uplift care is to uplift the web.

In very practical terms, this looks like giving communities genuine choice over the kind of work they do and the kind of lives they build. It looks like respecting and resourcing the labour of women, queer persons, and elders. It looks like building economies of sustenance from the ground up not economies of endless growth that extract from the margins to accumulate at the centre.

(Will be continued...)

Egypt after Camp David

Modern Egypt, shaped by the 1952 revolution, was initially part of a broader national liberation project against British colonialism, with Palestine as a structural component of that project. The 1967 Six-Day War also known as Al-Naksa marked the decline of the Arab nationalist movement, a structural rupture in the legitimacy of liberation politics and the beginning of Arab regime dependency, while consolidating the strategic alliance between the United States and ‘Israel’, integrating the zionist entity as a militarily dominant regional power. The war resulted in the zionist entity occupying new significant territory, yet it gave birth to Palestinian resistance movements; the Fedayeen.

The decisive shift occurred with Camp David Accords, which led to the normalization of diplomatic relations between Egypt and the zionist entity in 1979. It redefined the function of the Egyptian state; Egypt was removed from the Arab resistance equation against Israeli occupation, and the regime was redirected from a national liberation project to a functional, dependent role within the Western imperial sphere. Following Camp David, the Egyptian army was strategically neutralized, and the logic of permanent “security coordination” with the zionist entity was entrenched, thereby making Egypt part of the blockade system imposed on Gaza. Thus, political confrontation with the occupation was replaced by the role of mediator, reinforcing occupation and siege rather than dismantling them.

Egypt’s transformation was not the result of weakness but of its reconstruction as a boundary state within the regional order: from a central state in a national liberation project to a functional entity guarding borders and controlling the southern front for the occupation.

Jordan as a Buffer State

The establishment of the Emirate of Transjordan occurred amid the collapse of the Ottoman state in 1920 and the redrawing of the Arab Levant under British and French colonial hegemony. At the Cairo Conference in 1921, Britain decided to establish a political entity in Transjordan under a British mandate. This would be governed indirectly, with sovereignty administered externally and authority exercised internally by local elites connected to the colonial centre.

Jordan did not emerge from a national liberation movement or an independent sovereignty project; it was formed from inception as a functional entity, a colonial decision intended to manage the political-geographical void surrounding Palestine. It served as a security buffer, providing strategic depth for the zionist entity and preventing the West Bank from becoming a military or popular resistance base. Simultaneously, it functioned as a separation zone, isolating Iraq and Syria on one side and Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula on the other, preventing the formation of a revolutionary sphere of unification. It also served as a strategic conduit for Western influence, securing transportation, energy lines, and military intervention routes.

After 1948, and especially after 1967, Jordan’s role included containing the Palestinian liberation movement within its borders to prevent the reopening of the liberation front from the East. Since Black September in 1970, the state’s function has been clear: prevent resistance within Jordan and turn Palestine into an external security file. The Wadi Araba normalization agreement cemented this role, making Jordan both a mediator and a buffer. Jordan functions as a control state, converting its security apparatus from national protection to tools for safeguarding the interests of the zionist occupation and the ruling bourgeoisie.

Gulf Protectorates

With the decline of the Ottoman state, Britain, through political and military agreements, imposed British hegemony over the region, a structure later inherited in part by the United States after World War II and reinforced through the regional role of the Zionist entity after its establishment. With the discovery of oil, these Gulf entities became a central node in the global system, forming rentier states with wealth concentrated in ruling families and comprador bourgeoisies tied to global markets.

Oil did not become a foundation for organized popular power, nor a tool for liberation; it was a mechanism integrating the Gulf more deeply into Western hegemony and maintaining their security dependencies to the West. This enabled the West, led by the Anglo-American alliance, to maintain lucrative arms sales to the oil-rich Gulf states, as well as political and military control over them. The zionist entity is viewed as a partner whose interests must be secured in this region.

After the Arab popular uprisings of 2011, the Gulf-Western alliance deepened its normalisation with the zionist entity, and the regimes redefined every resistance movement against it as a national security threat.

Saudi Arabia and Managed Chaos

The Saudi regime avoids direct confrontation or rupture of relations with the Israeli occupation or imperial powers. It treats the Palestinian cause as part of a broader negotiating policy tied to regional and international interests, not as a popular liberation cause. It balances regional interests while maintaining its position without direct confrontation with major powers. Simultaneously, Saudi Arabia has played a central role in “creative chaos” in the region, using political, media, and financial instruments to reshape balances in neighboring states such as Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt, producing forms of externally manageable instability that serve a rentier regional system allied with the West, led by Washington, and with ‘Israel’ playing a central role.

Regionally, the Saudi regime has participated in containing any resistance axis, transforming the struggle from a liberation struggle against the Israeli occupation into intra-Arab disputes. Its official political discourse and media have redefined the enemy: instead of ‘Israel’ being the primary adversary, resistance movements are portrayed as “terrorist militias”. The regime thus acts not as a confrontational force but as a manager of chaos: exposing internal contradictions, redirecting the struggle, and demonizing every resistance movement, within a broader function of protecting a US-dominated regional order and Israeli security, while preventing any emancipatory dynamics that might threaten it.

Qatar as a Mediator under the US Umbrella

The Qatari regime provides humanitarian and political support, presenting itself as a provider of humanitarian assistance, while simultaneously mediating regional files. Its mediation operates strictly under American oversight and never exceeds the limits permitted by Washington. This occurs within a broader function: protecting ‘Israel’s’ security, the organic instrument of Western imperial interests. Any Qatari action, however humanitarian or political, is therefore governed by this function, managing the Palestinian struggle in a way that ensures “stability” in a structure reliant on US-Israeli military and political predominance.

UAE as a Model of Full Normalization

The UAE went far beyond limited diplomatic relations with the zionist entity, achieving full normalization through the Abraham Accords (2020), encompassing tourism, economic and technological cooperation, and opening joint channels for security and intelligence cooperation. In security terms, it partnered with the Israeli occupation forces in intelligence, military, and cyber surveillance, making it a direct ally in managing regional struggles, foremost among them Gaza. The UAE exemplifies how Arab regimes perform US-Israeli protective functions: managing balances, leveraging influence, and ensuring stability of the zionist entity at the expense of any Palestinian resistance project.

In conclusion, the idea of “purchasing security” that Gulf regimes believe they have secured is steadily unraveling. This assumption rests on a strategic illusion that reflects a shallow understanding of their position within the imperial order. Dependence on military agreements and normalization with the American-led imperial bloc has not produced genuine sovereign security; instead, it has deepened their structural incorporation into a broader system of external domination, where they function as dependent instruments within it.

The so-called imperialist, Zionist–American war against Iran has exposed the extent to which Arab states are already laid bare and fully embedded within the political, security, and strategic interests of Western imperial powers. These powers treat such states as subordinate functional structures and forward military platforms, deployed to safeguard the security of the Zionist entity and entrench American hegemony across the region. In this configuration, they are not independent actors but integral components of the Western imperial security system.

The Palestinian Authority as a Class-Control Apparatus

The Palestinian Authority emerged as a class intermediary with the Oslo capitulation Accords (1993), which did not constitute a peace project but a restructuring of Palestinian classes. Oslo dismantled the Palestinian national movement, turning the struggle into an “administrative dispute,” while creating a new class: a security-economic bureaucracy tied to donor-dependent governance and coordinated with the occupation, embedded in a rentier and aid-based economy, with interests aligned with the persistence of the occupation. The PLO leadership shifted from representing the people to managing “cantons,” producing class separation: leadership as a class, the population as controlled labor force.

Gaza: The Organic Threat to Dependent Arab Regimes

In this context, the practices of Arab regimes, as seen by the public are not matters of moral betrayal, political incapacity, or failure to fulfill a liberation role; rather, they represent strict adherence to the function for which these regimes were created. Arab regimes were not established as popular liberation projects or in response to collective national aspirations; they were functional entities serving specific objectives within a regional system dependent on the global imperial order.

They were not created to liberate land or protect peoples, but to safeguard elite interests, ensure continuity of governance systems and international imperial alliances, suppress internal dissent, and demonize any popular liberation movement. They were not established to liberate Palestine, but as colonial protectorates organically linked to the global imperial system, performing the function of protecting Imperial interests in the region, foremost among them ‘Israel’.

Hence, any hope for these regimes to intervene to save Gaza is illusory, and any expectation of a liberatory stance would only leave populations at the mercy of the machinery of annihilation. If this is the functional structure of dependent Arab regimes, a structure that is fully operational and capable of channelling genocidal action and redirecting it to serve its interests and imperial alliances, the central question emerges: why does Gaza represent an existential threat to this structure?

To be continued in Part III …

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مصر بعد كامب ديفيد

مصر الحديثة التي تشكّلت مع ثورة 1952 كانت مشروع تحرر وطني شامل في مواجهة الاستعمار البريطاني، وكانت فلسطين جزءاً بنيوياً من هذا المشروع. شكلت حرب الأيام الستة عام 1967، المعروفة أيضًا بالنكسة، نقطة تحول في تراجع حركة القوميبن العرب، وكسرًا بنيوياً للشرعية التحررية، وبدايةً لمسار تبعية الأنظمة العربية للقوى الخارجية، كما كرست التحالف الاستراتيجي بين الولايات المتحدة والكيان الصهيوني، وأسهمت فس إدماجه كقوة إقليمية مهيمنة عسكريًّا. أسفرت الحرب عن إحتلال الكيان الكيان الصهيوني على أراضٍ جديدة مهمة، لكنها أدت إلى ولادة حركات المقاومة الفلسطينية؛ الفدائيين.

جاء التحول الحاسم مع اتفاقية التطبيع كامب ديفيد عام 1979، التي أعادت تعريف وظيفة الدولة المصرية. فتمّ إخراج مصر من معادلة المقاومة العربية ضد الاحتلال الإسرائيلي، وإعادة توجيه النظام من مشروع تحرري قومي إلى دور وظيفي تابع داخل منظومة النفوذ الإمبريالي الغربي. في السياق الذي أعقب كامب ديفيد، جرى تحييد الجيش المصري استراتيجياً، وترسيخ منطق “التنسيق الأمني” الدائم مع الكيان الصهيوني، ما جعل مصر جزءاً من منظومة الحصار المفروض على غزة. وهكذا استُبدلت المواجهة السياسية مع الاحتلال بدور الوسيط، بما يرسّخ واقع الاحتلال والحصار بدلاً من تفكيكه.

هكذا لم تتحول مصر لأنها ضعفت، بل لأنه أُعيد بناؤها كـدولة حدود داخل النظام الإقليمي: من دولة مركزية في مشروع تحرر وطني إلى إلى كيان وظيفي يحرس الحدود ويضبط الجبهة الجنوبية للاحتلال.

الأردن كيان حاجز منذ التأسيس

تأسيس إمارة شرق الأردن جاء في سياق انهيار الدولة العثمانية عام 1920 وإعادة رسم خرائط المشرق العربي تحت الهيمنة الاستعمارية البريطانية والفرنسية. في هذا الإطار، في مؤتمر القاهرة عام 1921، قررت بريطانيا إنشاء كيان سياسي في شرق الأردن، على أن يكون خاضعاً للانتداب البريطاني بصيغة حكم غير مباشر، تُدار فيه السيادة من الخارج، وتُمارس السلطة داخليًا عبر نخب محلية مرتبطة بالمركز الاستعماري.

لم ينشأ الأردن من حركة تحرر وطني أو مشروع سيادي مستقل، بل تشكّل منذ تأسيسه ككيان وظيفي، بقرار استعماري هدفه إدارة الفراغ الجغرافي السياسي المحيط بفلسطين. أي كحاجز أمني يوفر عمقاً استراتيجياً لإسرائيل، ويمنع تحوّل الضفة الشرقية إلى قاعدة مقاومة عسكرية أو شعبية. وفي الوقت نفسه يقوم بدور منطقة عزل، فاصلاً بين العراق وسوريا من جهة، وفلسطين والجزيرة العربية من جهة أخرى، بما يمنع تَشكّل مجال وحدوي ثوري. كما يمثّل ممراً استراتيجياً للنفوذ الغربي يؤمّن خطوط المواصلات والطاقة والتدخل العسكري.

وبعد 1948 و1967 أضيف إلى ذلك دور احتواء الحركة الفلسطينية داخل حدوده، لضبطها ومنعها من إعادة فتح جبهة التحرير من الشرق. منذ أيلول الأسود 1970 حُسمت وظيفة الدولة الأردنية: منع المقاومة داخل الأردن وتحويل فلسطين إلى ملف أمني خارجي. كرّست اتفاقية التطبيع وادي عربة هذا الدور، ليغدو الأردن وسيطاً وحاجزاً. هكذا يؤدي الأردن وظيفته: دولة ضبط ويحوّل الأجهزة الأمنية الأردنية من حماية وطنية إلى أداة تحمي مصالح الاحتلال الصهيوني والبرجوازية الحاكمة.

محميات الخليج

مع تراجع الدولة العثمانية، شرعت بريطانيا منذ القرن التاسع عشر في إعادة تشكيل منطقة الخليج عبر تحويلها إلى منظومة من المحميات السياسية، مستندة إلى سلسلة من المعاهدات العسكرية والسياسية غير المتكافئة. وقد أرسى ذلك نمطًا من الهيمنة المباشرة التي أعادت الولايات المتحدة إنتاجها ووراثتها بعد الحرب العالمية الثانية.

في هذا الإطار، نشأت أنظمة الخليج الحديثة لا بوصفها تعبيرًا عن حركات تحرر وطني أو نتاج صراعات شعبية داخلية، بل ككيانات تشكّلت ضمن سياق استعماري مباشر، وارتبطت وظيفيًا بالنظام الإمبريالي الغربي. تمثلت وظيفتها الأساسية في تأمين تدفقات الطاقة وضمان سلامة الملاحة، ظناً منها أنها بذلك تشتري إستقرارها السياسي والأمني، ضمن معادلة أوسع تهدف إلى الحفاظ على استقرار النظام الرأسمالي الإمبريالي العالمي.

مع اكتشاف النفط، تحولت كيانات الخليج إلى مركز محوري في النظام العالمي، حيث نشأت دول ريعية تتركز فيها الثروة بيد العائلات الحاكمة وبرجوازيات كمبرادورية مرتبطة بالأسواق العالمية. ولم يصبح النفط أساسًا لبناء قوة شعبية منظمة، ولا أداة للتحرر، بل شكّل آلية لدمج الخليج بشكل أعمق ضمن الهيمنة الغربية، ولتكريس تبعيته الأمنية للغرب.

وقد أتاح ذلك للغرب، بقيادة التحالف الأنغلو-أمريكي، الحفاظ على صفقات سلاح مربحة مع دول الخليج الغنية بالنفط، إلى جانب فرض نفوذ سياسي وعسكري عليها. وفي هذا السياق، يُنظر إلى الكيان الصهيوني كشريك ينبغي تأمين مصالحه في المنطقة.

وبعد الانتفاضات الشعبية العربية عام 2011، تعمّق التحالف الخليجي-الغربي في مسار التطبيع مع الكيان الصهيوني، حيث أعادت الأنظمة تعريف كل أشكال المقاومة ضده باعتبارها تهديدًا للأمن القومي.

السعودية والفوضى

يتجنب النظام السعودي الدخول في مواجهة مباشرة أو قطع العلاقات مع الاحتلال الإسرائيلي أو القوى الإمبريالية، إذ يتعامل مع القضية الفلسطينية بوصفها جزءًا من سياسة تفاوضية أوسع مرتبطة بالمصالح الإقليمية والدولية، لا كقضية تحرر شعبي. وهو يوازن بين المصالح الإقليمية مع الحفاظ على موقعه دون الدخول في صدام مباشر مع القوى الكبرى.

في الوقت ذاته، لعبت السعودية دورًا محوريًا فيما يُعرف بـ”الفوضى الخلّاقة” في المنطقة، مستخدمة أدوات سياسية وإعلامية ومالية لإعادة تشكيل موازين القوى في دول مجاورة مثل اليمن وسوريا ولبنان ومصر، ما أفرز أنماطًا من عدم الاستقرار القابل للإدارة خارجيًا، تخدم نظامًا ريعيًا إقليميًا متحالفًا مع الغرب بقيادة واشنطن، ويحتل فيه الكيان الصهيوني موقعًا مركزيًا.

على الصعيد الإقليمي، شاركت السعودية في سياسة تطويق أي محور مقاوم وتحويل القضية من قضية تحرر من الإحتلال الإسرائيلي في المنطفة إلى صراعات داخلية بين العرب أنفسهم. كما أعاد خطابها السياسي الرسمي ووسائلها الإعلامية تعريف العدو؛ فبدلًا من اعتبار “إسرائيل” العدو الرئيسي، جرى تصوير حركات المقاومة على أنها “ميليشيات إرهابية”.

بهذا المعنى، لا يعمل النظام السعودي كقوة مواجهة، بل كقوة إدارة للفوضى: تفجير تناقضات داخلية، إعادة توجيه الصراعات، وشيطنة كل مشروع مقاوم، ضمن وظيفة عضوية تتمثل في حماية النظام الإقليمي القائم على الهيمنة الغربية الإمبريالية وضمان أمن أكيان الصهيوني، وبالتالي منع تشكّل أي دينامية تحررية تهدّد هذا النظام.

قطر وسيط تحت السقف الأمريكي

يقدم النظام القطري دعماً إنسانياً وسياسياً مقنّعاً، يمنحه من جهة صورة “المساعد الإنساني”، ومن جهة أخرى يؤدي دور الوسيط في الملفات الإقليمية. غير أن هذا الدور، لا يخرج عن الإطار العام المرسوم له، فهذه الوساطة تجري تحت سقف الإشراف الأمريكي، ولا تتجاوز حدود ما تسمح به واشنطن.

ويأتي ذلك ضمن وظيفة أوسع تتمثل في حماية أمن إسرائيل، الأداة العضوية للمصالح الامبريالية الغربية في المنطقة. لذلك يبقى أي تحرك قطري، سواء كان إنسانياً أو سياسياً، محكوماً بوظيفة تتحرك داخل معادلة إقليمية هدفها النهائي ليس كسر ميزان القوة لصالح الشعب الفلسطينيين وقضيته، بل إدارة الصراع بما يضمن استقرار البنية التي تقوم على تفوق الكيان الصهيوني وأمنه.

الإمارات كنموذج تطبيع كامل

اتخذت الإمارات مساراً يتجاوز بكثير حدود العلاقات “الدبلوماسية” المحدودة مع الكيان الصهيوني، إذ أقدمت على تطبيع كامل تجسّد رسمياً بتوقيع اتفاقية أبراهام (2020)، التي نصّت على إقامة علاقات شاملة مع الكيان، شملت التعاون الاقتصادي، السياحي، والتكنولوجي، إلى جانب فتح قنوات أمنية واستخباراتية مشتركة.

على المستوى الأمني، أقامت الإمارات شراكات مع الكيان في المجالات الاستخبارات، العسكرية، ومراقبة الفضاء الإلكتروني، ما جعلها حليفاً مباشراً له في إدارة الملفات الإقليمية وعلى رأسهم غزة.

وبهذا المعنى، تُعد الإمارات، نموذجاً واضحاً لكيفية توظيف الأنظمة العربية ضمن منظومة الحماية الأمريكية-الإسرائيلية، من خلال إدارة التوازنات الإقليمية، استثمار النفوذ، وضمان “إستقرار” الأنظمة الخليجية على حساب أي مشروع مقاوم فلسطيني.

ختامًا، تتهاوى مقولة “شراء الأمن” التي تعتقد أنظمة الخليج أنها أمِنتها، إذ تقوم هذه الفرضية على وهمٍ استراتيجي يعكس فهمًا سطحيًا لطبيعة موقع هذه الأنظمة داخل البنية الإمبريالية. فالتبعية للاتفاقيات العسكرية والتطبيع مع الحلف الإمبريالي الأمريكي لم تُنتج أمنًا سياديًا، بل عمّقت الاندماج البنيوي لهذه الأنظمة داخل منظومة الهيمنة الخارجية، كأدوات وظيفية وعضوية ضمنها.

لقد كشفت الحرب الإمبريالية الصهيو-أمريكية على إيران، أن الدول العربية مكشوفة ومُدمجة في قلب المصالح السياسية والامنية الاستراتيجية للقوى الامبريالية الغربية، التي تتعامل مع هذه الدول كبنى وظيفية وقواعد عسكرية، تُستخدم لضمان أمن الكيان الصهيوني وترسيخ النفوذ الأمريكي في المنطقة، ما يجعلها جزءًا من المنظومة الأمنية الغربية الإمبريالية.

السلطة الفلسطينية كجهاز ضبط طبقي

نشأت السلطة الفلسطينية كوسيط طبقي مع اتفاقيات أوسلو الاستسلامية (1993)، والتي لم تكن مشروع سلام بل إعادة هيكلة للطبقات الفلسطينية. فقد أدت أوسلو إلى تفكيك الحركة الوطنية الفلسطينية، وتحويل الصراع إلى “نزاع إداري”، مع خلق طبقة جديدة: بيروقراطية أمنية-اقتصادية مرتبطة بحكم يعتمد على المانحين ومنسّق مع الاحتلال، ومندمجة في اقتصاد ريعي قائم على المساعدات، تتوافق مصالحها مع استمرار الاحتلال.

انتقلت قيادة منظمة التحرير الفلسطينية من تمثيل الشعب إلى إدارة “كانتونات” مجزأة، ما أنتج انفصالًا طبقيًا: قيادة تتحول إلى طبقة بحد ذاتها، وسكان يُعاملون كقوة عمل مُراقَبة ومُدارة.

غزة: التهديد العضوي للأنظمة العربية التابعة

في هذا السياق، يتضح أن ما يشهده الرأي العام العربي اليوم من ممارسات هذه الأنظمة ليس خيانة أخلاقية ولا عجزًا سياسيًا، ولا إخفاقًا في أداء دور تحرري، بل هو التزام صارم بالدور الذي وُجدت هذه الأنظمة لتنفيذه منذ لحظة نشأتها. فهذه الأنظمة العربية لم تُنشأ بوصفها مشاريع تحرر شعبي، ولا كاستجابة لتطلعات وطنية جامعة، بل ككيانات وظيفية تخدم أهدافًا محددة ضمن نظام إقليمي تابع للنظام الإمبريالي العالمي.

إنها لم تُنشأ لتحرير الأرض أو حماية الشعوب، بل لحماية مصالح النخب الحاكمة، وضمان استمرارية أنظمة الحكم وتحالفاتها الإمبريالية الدولية، عبر قمع الداخل وشيطنة أي حركة شعبية تحررية. ولم تُنشأ لتحرير فلسطين، بل وُجدت كمحميات استعمارية مرتبطة عضويًا بالنظام الإمبريالي العالمي، تؤدي وظيفة حماية مصالحه في الإقليم، وعلى رأسها الكيان الصهيوني، عبر ضمان أمنه واستمرارية دوره، من خلال الحفاظ على بنيتها الوظيفية نفسها.

ومن هنا، فإن أي أمل في تدخل هذه الأنظمة لإنقاذ غزة هو وهم، وأي انتظار لموقف تحرري منها لا يعني سوى ترك الشعوب تحت رحمة آلة الإبادة.

وإذا كانت هذه هي البنية الوظيفية للأنظمة العربية التابعة، بنية مكتملة وظيفيًا تتحكم في مسار الفعل الإبادي وتعيد توجيهه بما يخدم مصالحها وتحالفاتها الإمبريالية، فإن السؤال الجوهري الذي يفرض نفسه هو: لماذا تشكل غزة تهديدًا وجوديًا لهذه البنية؟

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