There is nothing better than facing reality head-on, without detours or excuses, looking the monster in the face to decide the paths of grassroots movements and peoples willing to resist.
If we do this, we conclude that the empire acts in a very similar way to drug cartels: threatening, buying off, and cowardly attacking to seize the collective assets of communities and peoples. That is why narco-capitalism or criminal capitalism, now synonymous, must be understood holistically, without separating its various facets.
What happened with the attack on Venezuela is a turning point that transcends the Trump administration, since the empire decided to take the path of uncompromising domination of our region, to try to contain its irresistible decline in the hope of confronting China from a West under its control. But the central issue, from my point of view, is how the new reality affects movements and peoples, what we can expect from now on, and how we can act to limit the damage, to collectively survive an enemy—capitalism—that aspires to annihilate us in order to seize the commons. The Palestinian genocide is the mirror in which we see ourselves, allowing us to understand the system’s objectives.
The first point is that Trump is not crazy. He represents the interests of big business and the state, and the ruling group has the only reasonable strategy for the empire’s survival: not to fight directly with China and Russia, to let them control Asia and Eurasia, respectively, and to focus on controlling the West and, above all, its backyard. From there, they hope to resist China’s rise by controlling oil and petrodollars, rare earth elements, and minerals on our continent.
Whoever comes after Trump, this policy, designed in the recent National Security Strategy, is not going to change. Secondly, the challenge for movements and peoples is enormous, of such magnitude that we are not in a position to reverse or stop it in the short and medium term. This is the storm that the EZLN has been warning about since at least 2015, when it held the seminar “Critical Thinking in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra.”
The wars for global hegemony are a central part of the storm, to which must be added the environmental crisis and chaos that, together, will devastate a large part of humanity. Our first duty is to understand that we are in the first phase of this disaster, whose beginning we can place in Gaza and now in Venezuela, knowing that the empire has its sights set on Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico, but also on Greenland, as is clear from Trump’s latest statements.
The third question is what we are going to do now that we know there is no international law, that organizations like the United Nations have become irrelevant, and that only military force, brute force, counts, as happened in the colonial wars and the two world wars. If we want to look at it from another perspective, we say that we are in the midst of a hegemonic transition, and that, historically, transitions of this kind have involved tremendous wars. In the Second World War alone, the death toll reached 100 million people.
Now the human disaster will be much greater, since weapons have been perfected and there are already nine countries that possess nuclear weapons and are prepared to use them. Furthermore, how many lives will the climate disaster and migrations claim?
I think a basic lesson of history is that if we are not organized, we will disappear as individuals and as nations. If we are organized, we have a chance to survive, and although this cannot be guaranteed, it is certainly the only serious chance we have. This implies having collective shelters, collective and autonomous reserves, capable of guaranteeing water, food, security, and health for the people.
The other issue is that the future depends solely on us. No one is going to save us. Therefore, we must put our bodies on the line, not out of a desire to expose ourselves, but because there is no other option. This is what the people of Vietnam, Algeria, and Cuba, among others, did. To expel the Americans, the Vietnamese paid with around three million lives, in a country that then had 32 million inhabitants. Half a million Algerians fell in the war of national liberation, out of the ten million who populated the country.
I am not trying to defend sacrifice with this; much less death. At the same time, protracted people’s war no longer works, ethically, politically, or militarily. This assertion deserves extensive debate.
I simply want to say that we must be organized. That the current storm is just beginning and that the most painful and bloody part is yet to come. Something as serious as collective survival is at stake. Life is not a game. We must not play with war.
Original article by Raúl Zibechi, La Jornada, January 10th, 2025.
Translated by Schools for Chiapas.