History teaches us that major social transformations have always occurred in the wake of two types of traumatic social upheavals: war and revolution. Although the sequence between war and revolution varies, the two social upheavals tend to occur in the same historical process of major social transformation, especially since the beginning of the 20th century.

At the end of the historical process, it will be clear that neither war nor revolution alone could have explained the transformation that took place. Both war and revolution are human products and, as such, subject to risk and uncertainty, to the possibility and ambiguity of both success and failure, to a mixture of passion and reason, animality and spirituality, the desire to be and not to be, and experiences of despair and hope. In both war and revolution, the meaning of history runs parallel to the absurdity of history, and its failures always circulate in the underground of its successes.

War and revolution are so complex and take so many forms that those who want to promote them rarely achieve what they set out to do, and those who want to prevent them are rarely able to do so effectively or without self-destruction. The social trauma they cause stems from the abrupt violence they involve, which can be destructive to lives and institutions, and often to both. The difference between war and revolution is most visible in their antidotes. The antidote to war in the contemporary era is peace, while the antidote to revolution is counter-revolution.

The antidotes reveal the character of the social forces involved in both war and revolution. Those who want peace are the social classes that suffer most from war. Those who die in wars are soldiers and innocent citizens, not the politicians who decide them or the generals who command them. Both the soldiers who choose war or are forced to fight it and the innocent citizens most vulnerable to the risk of death belong to the historically less privileged social classes, members of the working classes, such as peasants and factory workers.

On the contrary, those who want war are the social classes that run the least risk from the destruction it can cause and stand to gain the most from what follows destruction. Those who promote counterrevolution are the powerful minority social classes that benefit most from the status quo that revolution seeks to destroy. On the contrary, those who promote revolution are the exploited, oppressed, and discriminated social groups and classes who, despite being in the majority, find no other means than revolution to end the injustice of which they are victims.

Both war and revolution are extreme forms of class struggle, constituting an open struggle between life and death. But while war involves the death of the majority to defend the life of the minority, revolution involves the death of the minority to defend the life of the majority. The social and political forces that promote war are the same ones that promote counterrevolution. On the contrary, the social and political forces that promote revolution also promote peace, even if this may imply war against minorities (the so-called revolutionary war that marks many of the political trajectories of liberation in the global South).

The traumatic nature of war and revolution is all the more problematic given that war and revolution rarely unfold as planned or achieve their intended results, however profound the social transformations they make possible. The apparent necessity that drives people to war or revolution ultimately results in the most chaotic contingency. This is why the social forces that promote either of them emphasize necessity and conceal contingency, justifying them as a last resort in relation to other resources that could guarantee social transformation without war or revolution.

In modern and contemporary times, the social distribution of the fate of life and death has been decided according to two main modes of domination: capitalism and colonialism. These are two different modes, but they are so intertwined that one cannot exist without the other. In Marxist terms, this means that so-called primary or primitive accumulation is a permanent component of capitalism. It is always a violent accumulation involving destruction and death caused by powers that base their superiority on the ontological degradation of their victims, who are treated as subhuman. Historically, such victims have been serfs, slaves, races or castes considered inferior, and women. Ontological difference legitimizes the arbitrary exercise of superior power. Colonialism embodies the ineradicable dimension of identitarianism that exists in every class struggle.

The modern and contemporary era has been a fertile time for wars and revolutions. But perhaps for this very reason, it was also a time when the most political and institutional energy was invested in preventing both war and revolution. The main instruments were social reform, democracy, the end of historical colonialism, and international law, all based on epistemic and political assumptions that dominated the global North. These were instruments designed to reduce polarization between powerful minorities and powerless majorities and between the global North and the global South, without jeopardizing the continuity of colonial capitalism.

Social reform aimed to mitigate economic and social inequality between social classes by creating intermediate classes (the middle classes) that had nothing to gain from war or revolution.

Democracy aimed to reduce political and cultural power differences in order to make peaceful coexistence plausible, transforming enemies to be eliminated into political adversaries to be defeated through ideological argumentation (public opinion) and political participation (namely elections).

The end of historical colonialism aimed to put an end to the territorial occupation of a given country by a foreign power. Its objective was not to end colonialism, which, as I mentioned, is inherent to capitalist domination, but only its most violent version, which had prevailed over the last five centuries, with particular intensity since the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. Colonialism is any social relationship based on the ontological degradation of one of the parties, be it a human being, a social group, or a country. This degradation implies that a part of humanity is considered subhuman and treated as such. The creation of subhumanity aims to legitimize all kinds of arbitrary and violent power, whether it be the hyper-devaluation of labor, unequal contracts and treaties, discrimination, epistemicide, or extermination.

Finally, international law aimed to create peaceful coexistence between rival countries through norms, treaties, and conventions enforced by a mutual interest in respecting them (multilateralism). Especially after World War II, it became imperative that, for international law to function minimally and prevent war, there was a need for respect, at least apparent, for human rights, which in turn implied that democratic coexistence should prevail internally and diminish the appeal of revolution and that international relations should be governed by an order that respected the national sovereignty of all countries, including those that were liberating themselves from colonialism. Dictatorships, like historical colonialism, ceased (temporarily?) to have political legitimacy.

Whenever these resources failed, peoples began their somnambulistic march toward war and revolution. A somnambulistic march because propaganda dominated by those who have the power to destroy peace and promote counterrevolution always manages to impose the ideology that it wants to avoid war and show the unnecessary, if not obsolete, nature of revolution. This has not prevented the path of revolution from continuing underground on the march toward war.

Where are we?

There are increasingly clear signs that our time marks the acceleration of the march toward war and revolution. We are witnessing the collapse of all four instruments that, since the end of the Second World War, have guaranteed the impossibility or unnecessary nature of war and revolution as the only means of social transformation. And, as was to be expected, the ruling power speaks more and more of war, supposedly to guarantee peace, with the arrogance of those who know they can destroy the voices that denounce the deception. And it is increasingly effective in concealing the underground march of revolution, discrediting as obsolete or subversive those forces that insist on speaking of capitalist-colonialist domination and transforming growing social polarization into a matter of national security and the strengthening of police repression.

Social reform

Social reform was based on the idea of progressive, gradual, peaceful social transformation that respected the legal framework while fighting to transform it within constitutional limits. This is how the economic and social rights of the working classes emerged, allowing them, for the first time in history, to plan their lives and those of their families and to buy the products they themselves produced.

It is clear that the brilliance of the reformist idea has faded. Social inequality is increasing within each country, while the idea of its social and political causes is disappearing; the extravagant wealth of an increasingly restricted minority is flaunted without shame; indifference reigns in the face of austerity and the loss of income imposed on the majority; poor people are deserving of philanthropy, but there are no social classes or groups impoverished by the violation or erosion of their social rights.

Individual blame and personal success have more explanatory power than social and political responsibility for the misfortune of many and the social and political conditions offered for the success of others; investment in the welfare of citizens, families, and communities is an increasingly unbearable social cost, and the taxes needed to guarantee it are considered a social evil that must be minimized; the world has always been unfair, and our world is the least unfair of all previous ones; political parties that were born in opposition to revolution in the name of the civilizational superiority of reformism have surrendered to the arguments of their former adversaries on the right (in the worst cases, they have sold themselves to their adversaries' money); the comforting religion that guarantees salvation in the next world prevails over the unsettling religion of priority given to the poor and oppressed and their liberation in this world. This is the cruel portrait of the counter-reformism in which we live.

Democracy

In its original form, democracy is popular sovereignty through majority rule for the benefit of the majority. Throughout history, it has taken many different forms, but until the consolidation of capitalism-colonialism as a form of domination, it was always a political regime ostracized because it was considered dangerous: majorities considered ignorant would be incapable of governing wisely. With the consolidation of capitalism-colonialism, democracy took on a dominant form that we call liberal democracy: universal suffrage, albeit initially very restricted; a plurality of parties that accept the rules of the democratic game; freedom of expression; and free elections. Accepting the rules of the democratic game meant respect for two fundamental principles.

First, abandoning revolution in favor of reformism. Second, not to question the foundations of capitalist-colonialist domination. To this end, the democratic game was restricted to one dimension of social life, which was designated as politics. All other dimensions were left out of this game and were only subject to its consequences: the space-time of production, family, and community life were considered as not belonging to the political world. This is why I have argued that liberal democracy managed to establish itself politically as a democratic island in an archipelago of despotisms.

On the other hand, assuming that there was a fundamental contradiction between capitalist-colonialist accumulation and popular sovereignty, liberal democracy decided to regulate (not resolve) it by separating two universes of values: the universe of values that have a price and can therefore be bought and sold (economic values, commodities, or other products treated as such, for example, land and labor) and the universe of values that have no price and therefore cannot be bought or sold (political and ideological convictions). To ensure the separation of the two value universes, two conditions were considered essential: public or highly regulated financing of political parties and the prevention of investment in other economic areas by those who invested in journalism, considered the privileged instrument for shaping public opinion.

Over the last 150 years or so, liberal democracy has worked for a small group of countries (the core countries of the world system, which we now call the global North) because, as the theory explained, certain socio-economic conditions were necessary to make liberal democracy viable, namely urbanization and agrarian reform to eliminate land rent and the emergence of middle classes whose socio-economic position would prevent social polarization between exploited and oppressed majorities and exploitative and oppressive minorities. Only in this way could liberal democracy “regulate” the “natural” excesses of capitalist-colonialist accumulation. Such regulation required state intervention in the economy and progressive taxation. The two main objectives were to achieve some social redistribution in favor of the working classes and to prevent the return of the parasitic rentierism that had dominated the feudal era in the European context.

Everything changed in the 1980s without the majority realizing why this was prevented by the control of the media by the ruling class, which was consolidating its power at the time. This is how neoliberalism quickly became the dominant version of colonial capitalism. Responding to a structural crisis of capitalist accumulation (which began with the first oil crisis in 1973), the central objective of neoliberalism was to reverse the movement of social redistribution that had prevailed until then, at least in theory. It was now a question of allowing the massive transfer of income from the poorest to the richest, that is, from the working and middle classes to the capitalist class, especially its most predatory fraction—finance capital.

This meant total incompatibility with democracy. In order to disguise this incompatibility without resorting to coups d'état and dictatorships—which had lost their popular appeal given the memory of the horrors they had caused—it was necessary to subvert the principles and conditions of liberal democracy. The separation between the universe of priceless political values and the universe of economic values with a price tag was gradually eliminated through changes in electoral laws that allowed for potentially unlimited financing of political parties. Politics quickly became a universe where everything can be bought and sold.

Corruption became a structural part of the political system, and the fight against corruption became an integral part of that system. As a result, democracy no longer claimed to regulate the “excesses” of capitalism and became regulated by them. Similarly, democracy no longer required socio-economic conditions to be viable and became the condition for all societies regardless of their socio-economic characteristics. And so it was globally imposed as a conditionality by multilateral financial institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and later the World Trade Organization.

In light of the structural criteria that underpinned liberal democracy, we are now living in a post-democratic period. We live in increasingly autocratic societies in which countries with greater economic and financial power have the media privilege of designating themselves as democratic and designating rival countries, or those yet to be exploited, as autocratic. All kinds of anti-democrats (fascists, populists, caudillistas, and religious fanatics) can now be democratically elected. For these reasons, the second instrument or resource for preventing the extremism of war and revolution is collapsing, if it has not already collapsed.

The end of historical colonialism

The end of historical colonialism was not a selfless gift from the colonial powers. It was the result of the struggle of colonized peoples who fought against European invaders for centuries. It so happened that the devastation of innocent lives caused by World War II, including the lives of colonized peoples who had nothing to do with the imperialist rivalries that were at the root of the war, created an international environment more favorable to the success of liberation struggles.

Curiously, these struggles involved a discussion about the means to be favored in order to achieve liberation, which posed an alternative between war/revolution (armed struggle) and peaceful negotiation. The debates between those who defended the first alternative, notably Frantz Fanon, and those who defended the second alternative, including Leopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, and Eduardo Mondlane, became famous in the anti-colonial world of the 1950s and 1960s. However, many of those who defended the second alternative recognized that, if it failed, the first one would have to be resorted to. They also prepared for a combination of the two options.

On the part of the colonial powers, the repression of the anti-colonial struggle was always violent. In some cases, the violence was so severe that the liberation struggle fully embraced the option of war/revolution. The most significant cases were the Algerian war of liberation against French colonialism, the Kenyan war of liberation against British colonialism, and the wars of liberation in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique against Portuguese colonialism.

Whatever how liberation was achieved, it became clear to the new countries that the independence they had won was very partial. It was heavily conditioned by the international relations that characterized the modern world system, particularly with regard to relations between central and peripheral countries. Independence was a political phenomenon that had to coexist with various types of economic, financial, and military dependence. This issue was identified from the outset, with different nuances, by some of the founders of the new countries, from Kwame Nkrumah to Leopold Senghor, from Amílcar Cabral to Julius Nyerere, from Patrice Lumumba to Jomo Kenyatta, from Ahmed Ben Bella to Habib Bourguiba, and from Samora Machel to Sam Nujoma. The negative consequences of incomplete independence became more visible and serious as the years went by: dependent international relations, the continuation of unequal treaties, the plundering of natural resources, and growing financial and military subjugation.

The critical theoretical awareness of the limitations of political independence took different forms: neocolonialism and the work of Frantz Fanon in the 1960s, dependency theory in the 1970s, postcolonial studies in the 1980s, decolonial studies in the 1990s, and epistemologies of the South in the 2000s. All these perspectives have evolved in the decades since then. Common to all these perspectives is the central idea that political independence put an end to a specific form of colonialism, historical colonialism, but that colonialism continued in other forms and even intensified. In fact, even the end of historical colonialism was not total, as the Palestinian and Sahrawi peoples can particularly cruelly testify.

And since the beginning of the millennium, we have witnessed the intensification of colonialism in multiple forms: the plundering of natural resources, unequal treaties and the imposition of austerity and debt by financial institutions (IMF and World Bank), the creation of agricultural reserves in sovereign territories, the treatment of immigrants, racism, the digital divide, and, more recently, the “naturalization” of colonialism through artificial intelligence. We can even say that the current times are times of recolonization, the theorization of which has been facilitated by the global growth of far-right forces. We have been witnessing the justification and even apology for historical colonialism and the growing radicalization of criticism of different postcolonial theories, with attempts at silencing that go far beyond academic argumentation.

International law

Donald Trump's second term as US president, beginning in 2025, is only the most grotesque symptom of the collapse of international law. But this collapse has been building for decades. Let us look at some of the signs.

The transformation of NATO into a military pact of global aggression

The first sign was “sold” internationally as the final triumph of international law. The collapse of the then Soviet Union in 1991 indicated that it would finally be possible to consolidate an international order based on rules that guaranteed peaceful coexistence between peoples and global respect for human rights. It was a mega-hoax. The main instrument for guaranteeing peace through deterrence between rival blocs was the two military pacts: the Warsaw Pact on the Soviet side and NATO on the Western side.

While the Warsaw Pact was quickly dissolved for the obvious reason that it was no longer necessary, NATO not only remained but expanded and changed its character. It ceased to be an instrument of peace and defense and became an instrument of war and aggression in the service of US and European imperialist interests, acting throughout the world in the service of those interests, from the former Yugoslavia to Libya, from Iraq to Afghanistan.

Repression of regional autonomies

The second sign was the resistance of the Western Bloc against the Non-Aligned Movement, the group of countries that were liberating themselves from European colonialism, born in 1961 following the 1955 Bandung Conference. It was a group of countries that, in the name of national sovereignty, sought their own path to development, refusing to choose between Soviet socialism and Western capitalism. Along the same lines, these and other countries sought to establish a New International Economic Order, which was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in May 1974.

The central ideas were “trade instead of aid,” sovereign equality, and the right to self-determination. The Western Bloc, i.e., the core countries of the world system, led by the US, rejected all these proposals and, in the wake of the global debt crisis of the 1980s, imposed on the whole world the so-called Washington Consensus, which would enshrine the dominance of the neoliberal version of capitalism-colonialism.

Marginalization of the United Nations

The third sign, related to the previous one, was the growing marginalization of United Nations institutions in favor of multilateral organizations controlled by the major Western powers (IMF, World Bank, and World Trade Organization) and NGOs and foundations financed by the super-rich in the US, such as the Ford Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the George Soros Foundation. The voice of most countries in the world system lost weight in the UN system, which, in contrast, became increasingly subservient to the geopolitical interests of the US and Western multinationals.

Global wars and regime changes

The fourth sign of the degradation of international law was the replacement of international activism in favor of peace and social justice by the international domination of increasingly expansive concepts of US national security through two mechanisms that sowed war, social injustice, and political instability throughout the world: the “global war” and “regime change.” Following the global war against communism, which began mainly after the Cuban Revolution in the 1960s, the “global war on drugs,” the “global war on terrorism,” and finally the “global war on corruption” emerged in succession. Each of these wars was designed to legitimize US interference in the internal politics of countries considered hostile to its economic and geopolitical interests.

In turn, the policy of “regime change” implies an even more pronounced violation of the sovereignty of countries. It involves manipulating internal politics with the aim of replacing governments, often democratically elected, considered hostile to the interests of Western capitalism-colonialism with governments subservient to those interests. Increasingly sophisticated counterinsurgency mechanisms are used, some state-run, others private (NGOs, foundations), with the growing participation of surveillance of citizens and “hostile” political organizations, the silencing of critical voices, and the use of social networks to provoke political instability and lead to the desired results with a democratic veneer (manipulated elections, notably through fake news and hate speech), the so-called soft coups.

Recent examples include the “color revolutions” in post-Soviet societies, the Arab Spring, and the soft coups in Honduras (2009), Paraguay (2012), Ukraine (2014), and Brazil (2016), or the military interventions in Iraq (2003), Libya (2011), etc. Both “global wars” and “regime changes” have been factors of political instability and have discredited the idea of democracy as an exercise of national-popular sovereignty when they have not resulted in civil or regional wars and the installation of autocratic regimes of various kinds. The UN, the ultimate guarantor of international order according to norms, has watched all this helplessly.

Whenever it has tried to resist through its most notable secretaries-general, it has had to watch them being humiliated, especially Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan. Finally, with António Guterres, it surrendered to the geopolitical interests of the US and promoted the infiltration of major medium-term agendas by lobbyists from large multinational companies, particularly in the case of the defense of biodiversity and the halting of ecological collapse.

The transition of the EU from ally to vassal

The fifth sign of the degradation of the international order, and perhaps the one with the most serious consequences, is the collapse of Europe in the face of declining US imperialism. For seventy years, Europe remembered that it had a historical responsibility for colonialism and that it had been the most violent continent of the 20th century, inflicting more than 78 million deaths on its citizens and colonized peoples in two wars.

This memory was fundamental in reminding us that Europe was divided but convinced of the virtues of coexistence and proud that its capitalist-colonialist bloc had built an alliance firmly anchored in the three instruments that enabled peace and prevented counterrevolution: social reformism, liberal democracy, and international law. But from the outset, a mega-hoax was germinating. The scam consisted of the countries that built the alliance that would come to be called the European Union being democratic countries and, as such, credible in building an international alliance unlike any previous one. An alliance that not only respected and empowered national democracies but was itself democratic in its constitution and in the performance of its institutions. The reality was tragically different.

There continued to be democratic European countries, but there was never a European democracy. That is why the most savage version of colonial capitalism, neoliberalism at the service of US geopolitical interests, infiltrated Europe through European institutions, especially the European Commission. The democratic deficit of the European Union facilitated the penetration of forces seeking to destroy the social reformism, democracy, and international law that had characterized postwar democratic Europe.

It is not surprising how easily the US has recently embroiled Europe in a war against Russia, the continuation of which is only in the US's interest, orchestrating the severing of economic ties with Russia, which, by supplying cheap energy, partly guaranteed Europe's prosperity, and launching Europe into a war and arms race to defend itself against a supposed Russian threat that European citizens do not see. The vassalage of the European Union led by the fifth column of US imperialism, into which the European Commission has been converted, is today scandalously exposed in four hoaxes, offshoots of the original mega-hoax.

  • First hoax: confusion has been created between the interests of NATO, whose military command is a US monopoly and therefore responds to US geostrategic interests, and the geostrategic interests of Europe, which, if they ever existed, have now been reduced to ashes.

  • Second hoax: European states are committing to spending 5% of their national budgets on weapons mostly purchased from the US, which can only be used when it is in the US's interest. It is not just that their use is planned within the framework of NATO; it is that the most lethal weapons have closed codes that are the property of the US and can therefore only be used when the US authorizes it.

  • Third hoax: the money invested in armaments will be taken from the budget for social policies that have contributed to the relative well-being of a significant percentage of the population of each country and to the creation of the middle classes that have prevented the social polarization that feeds, with opposite ends, war and revolution.

  • Fourth hoax: the recent “agreement” on tariffs between “allies” (taxes imposed on products imported from Europe by the US) marks the consolidation of Europe's vassalage. The blackmail agreement not only prevents Europe from achieving energy autonomy but also subjects its financial economy to large investment funds and, therefore, to US financial capital. This blackmail agreement is only possible because there is no European democracy, even though there are democratic European countries.

    Disguised as a European Commissioner, the person who signed this blackmail agreement was the informal US ambassador to the European Union, an arms negotiator (and perhaps vaccine negotiator?) who was put in that position to carry out this mission. This is nothing new. Durão Barroso was an informal US ambassador to the European Commission (who can forget his staunch defense of the Iraq War?), and today, unsurprisingly, he is the non-executive chairman of the US financial giant Goldman Sachs International. Valuable services are well paid.

The international disorder imposed by Donald Trump

The latest sign of the degradation of international law is the conversion of the US into a pariah state in light of the criteria that this country had invented to designate, as pariah states, those states that systematically violate the international order and human rights. Donald Trump's second term has revealed to the world the deception that the first victims of US geopolitics have long known: the US is a country born of the genocide of indigenous peoples, a violent country that in 249 years of its existence has been at war with foreign countries for 222 years, a country that does not recognize allies or negotiations between equals, only its own interests and vassals to serve them, imposing conditions on them through blackmail, and a highly conditioned democracy that only for a short period allowed democracy to regulate the “excesses” of capitalism-colonialism, the period of the New Deal.

It is not surprising that today the only ally of the US is another pariah state, Israel, an alliance that aims to control the Middle East and its natural resources and block China's access to Western Europe, after having blocked it via Russia and Belarus. This is a radical alliance that resorts to the most violent means of the colonialist and Nazi-fascist tradition of Europe: the ontological degradation of an entire people to subhuman status in order to “legitimize” their genocide, in this case, the Palestinian people. Together, they are the two most dangerous countries in the world, the greatest threats to peace, and the most ardent promoters of counterrevolution.

Finally, the tariff war (taxes imposed by the US on products imported from different countries according to a logic that appears to be more political than economic) represents the paroxysm of blackmailing unilateralism by imposing different tariffs on each country. It has no economic logic and in this sense is something new in the liberal and neoliberal order of the last two hundred years. But on the other hand, its political logic is nothing new in the history of imperialism: divide and rule.

Conclusion

We live in the ruins of social reformism, democracy, the end of historical colonialism, and international law. History shows that dead ideas have a momentum of their own that allows them to survive as ghosts for a while. Meanwhile, social polarization increases, adversaries become enemies, and apologies for war and counterrevolution grow in the form of the global rise of the far right and the politics of hate. Underneath this movement runs the return of the idea of revolution. What does hope mean when humanity is sleepwalking toward war and revolution without knowing the sequence between them or the future after them? This is the theme of the second part of this essay.