Preface to Houria Boutedlja's book, "The whites, the Jews and us. Towards a politics of revolutionary love

"Listen, white!", Here you will find the keys to your own decolonization and the way out of the trap into which the "capitalist / imperialist / patriarchal / occidentalocentric / Christiancentric / modern / colonial civilization has put you; and the author of this book, makes you an essential "loving" offer (if you want to get out of the wars and the hell we are in) ...

Although it is a book written within the French context, it does not stop having implacable lessons for both imperialist metropolitan spaces and peripheral neocolonial spaces where white supremacy has materialized. If western modernity as a civilizing project produces privileges for metropolitan whites -generates at the same time genocides, epistemicides, ecologicides and death for the rest of human and non-human lives- on the planet-, Houria Bouteldja asks: [...] what to offer the Whites in exchange for their decline and the wars that are announced to them? There is only one answer: peace, and there is only one mean: revolutionary love. The lines that follow are nothing more than an umpteenth attempt - surely desperate - to arouse that hope.

It is not another typical exit of the false "new age" prophets , where the word "love" enters the commercial circuit of capitalism and its codes of racial domination of imperialism, but a revolutionary exit that implies the end of civilization current and the foundation of a new one through a decolonizing political revolution. Paraphrasing the Zapatistas: if the present civilization produces a world where only one world is possible and the others are impossible, it would be to produce a civilization where other worlds are possible and this one that we have becomes impossible. But the author does not give room for escape to the speeches of "innocence" that have always allowed right-wing and left-wing whites to escape their historical responsibility. For the author, the discourse of "innocence" is one of the mechanisms produced by what she calls a white political field, which includes everything from the extreme right to the extreme left, passing through all the political currents in between as constituent fields of that which she calls the white immunity system: "I see you, I frequent you, I watch you. You all have that innocent face. There is your final victory, having managed to exonerate yourselves from all guilt [...] We are guilty, you innocent. [...] You are angels because you have the power to declare yourselves angels and to become barbarians. [...] The exiled indigenous is vulgar, the White despoiler is refined. On one end of the chain is barbarism, on the other civilization. It is good to be innocent: it allows you to play with naivety and always be on the nice side ... "

The privileges of whiteness are built on a system of imperialist domination that blinds most whites to the oppressions they generate in the rest of the world. As Houria says of the best-known French philosopher of the twentieth century (in relation to his complicity with the genocidal racism that Zionist colonialism exercises against the Palestinian people): "Deciding on the defeat or death of the oppressor, even if he is Jewish, that was the step that Sartre could not take, that is his flaw. The white resists. [...] Sartre will die anticolonialist and Zionist. White will he die. [...] Sartre did not know how to be radically traitor to his race. He did not know how to be Genet ... "

Nor is it a sectarian "anti-white" essentialist policy that does not allow political alliances with the white left. The invitation to a political alliance is always open in this decolonial manifesto and in the political practice of the decolonial movements. But to advance in a political alliance it is necessary previously to create autonomous decolonial movements that generate the political force that allows to negotiate from a position of strength. That is the key to the success of all movement of racialized subjects. As Abdelmalek Sayad, the desolonial thinker of Algeria quoted in this book, tells us: "to exist means to exist politically". Without autonomous decolonial politics, there is no decolonial revolution, and without political alliances beyond the decolonial political forces, the civilizing transformation demanded by the decolonial political project is not possible.

This is no rhetorical recognition, but essential to decolonial politics. Doing decolonial politics is not manifesting on Facebook with daily insults and attacks against the whole world; that would be individualistic therapy, but it has nothing to do with decolonial politics. The decolonial revolution requires a revolutionary transformation of subjectivity, paradigms, ethics and structures of domination. Attacking with insults to others has nothing to do with the politics of revolutionary love that Houria Boutedlja talks about in this book.

One point of clarification: the "white left" exists in Europe, the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, as well as in Latin America, Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, because it is not about skin color, but rather of an epistemology, of a political practice, of an Eurocentric way of seeing, thinking, being and being in the world; You can be black, mestizo, indigenous or Asian, and be part of the white left. But the crucial issue here is that there can be no political alliance with dignity without criticism of Eurocentrism, colonialism, and the racism that produces the patronizing paternalism of the white left towards the racially inferiorized subjects. For example, let's look at the conflict today in Bolivia or Ecuador between the indigenous movements that fight for "Good Living" and the westernized left, administering the States whose horizon of struggle is "developmentalism" and "extractivism". The white left in power, in the face of this clash of political projects, behaves in a condescending and paternalistic manner in face of the demands of the indigenous movement, and sometimes even with repression. Likewise, we see the difficulties of the white left in relating to racialized subjects in its own territories. At the same time the alliance with the white left is, more than fundamental, indispensable. Without decolonial racialized subjects there is no decolonial revolution, but without decolonialized whites either. As one of the authors quoted in this book says, Sadri Khiari, theoretician and member of the Party of the Indigenous People of the Republic (PRI): "Since she is the indispensable companion of the indigenous people, the left is her first adversary."

But equally we can say that this book also tells us: "Listen, colonized!"; "Listen, indigenous!"; "Listen, black!"; "Listen, gypsy!"; "Listen, Arab!"; "Listen, Jew!"; "Listen out…!". Here are the keys to their liberation as well. Do not forget to read this decolonial manifesto for the 21st century in the best tradition of Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Aimé Césaire, Kwame Nkrumah, Leila Khaled, Amílca Cabral, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldúa, Ali Shariati, Malcolm X, Audre Lorde, James Baldwin, Jean Genet, Ella Shohat and all the decolonial fighters of the twentieth century. The author does allow escape to the colonized subjects either; she denounces the absurdity and limited of the multiple subterfuges and ways of (self) deception that produces the strategy of trying to whiten. There is nothing to be gained -and much to lose- in the mimetic projects of mental, existential, political and / or epistemic whitening: the imitation of Western-centric models, cultural assimilation to Western values ​​or internationalization of left or right epistemic Eurocentrism.

Maybe we should say "Listen, Westernized!" To talk about the whites and non-whites who have internationalized Westernization in our bodies and minds, because in this book nobody is safe: neither the white left, nor feminism, nor the LGBT movement, neither the colonized subjects themselves, nor the racially inferiorized populations within the metropolis (those she calls "aristocratic natives"); neither the national liberation movements of the 20th century, nor the socialism of the 20th century, nor the Jews escaping from the German / Western Holocaust who seek their salvation in contemporary Zionism, nor political Islamism, nor social democracy, nor the neo-fascists, nor the classical right, nor the anarchists ... In short, neither the right or left versions of Western modernity are safe, nor the multiple imperial lies of this civilization, such as the discourses of "democracy", "freedom", "human rights" or "civilization", with which they justify the slaughter of millions of human beings on a planetary scale. Nobody has a comfortable position or exit because in this complex network that constitutes the western domination of the world, nobody is innocent.

For the author, neither the oppressed nor the oppressors are saved. We all have different degrees of responsibility, but with the exception of not reproducing the white imperialist relativism that "anything goes" or "we are all equally oppressed" (trying to erase the privileges of whiteness produced by hierarchies of domination), nor the colonial occidentalocentric universalisms that make white values ​​the "universally" superior, justifying the hierarchies between oppressed and oppressors. "Relativism" and "universalism" are evasion strategies that constitute two sides of the same coin of the white immunity system. Pluriversalism as a decolonial universalism would be a way out of this dilemma.

But neither is this a book that makes criticism without leaving us alternatives. The proposal made by the author is of fundamental importance: to exit whiteness and its modern western civilization composed of multiple hierarchies of domination on a planetary scale. It proposes a project that is simultaneously anti-racist political, feminist, decolonial, radical anti-imperialist, epistemically anti-Eurocentric, anti-Zionist intransigently critical at the same time of anti-Semitism, and defender of revolutionary love as a project that allows us to build a new civilization beyond the civilizing logics of death of Western modernity. That is, it is about building an anti-systemic political project towards the foundation of a new civilization that is fairer, more democratic, and ecologically respectful of life.

It is no longer enough to say that "we are anti-capitalists". If capitalism is racist, genocidal, patriarchal, epistemicidal, ecocidal, eurocentric, it is because it is organized and traversed from within by the civilizational logics of Western modernity. Capitalism is not the foundation of the system as the white left tells us. Historical capitalism is the economic structure of something more fundamental: the modern Western civilization-world with its multiple hierarchies of domination. This is the foundation of historical capitalism and not the other way around. In the decolonial turn, it is Modernity - with its multiple hierarchies of domination on a world scale - that constitutes the foundation of the world-civilization in which we are involved and that became planetary by destroying all other civilizations. As the author says, "If the white left tells us capitalist expansion, therefore social class struggle, we respond: colonial expansion, therefore struggle of social races".

After several centuries of European colonial expansion from 1492, all existing civilizations - with their various forms of economy, political authority, ideology, worldview, to relate to other forms of life; with more ecological technologies and more egalitarian forms of relations of class, gender and sexuality- were destroyed and the civilization of death that we have today was imposed. Hence, in the perspective of the decolonial turn it makes no sense to speak of "clash of civilizations" (project of the pro-imperialist white right), of "anti-capitalist struggles" (project of the radical white left) or of "struggle for more modernity (project of the white social democracy).

The "clash of civilizations" is a great fiction because today there is only one planetary civilization. Nor does it make sense to speak of an exclusive "anti-capitalist struggle" that does not question the civilizational project of Modernity because it ends up reproducing again everything against which it is fighting. The latter was demonstrated by the failure of socialism and liberation movements of the 20th century, which ended up being Eurocentric projects that reproduced the paradigm of the Westernized Left when considering a struggle centered against capitalism without questioning Modernity's hierarchies of racial, patriarchal, Eurocentric, Cartesian, ecological, pedagogical, epistemological, Christiancentric forms of domination, among others. They were "modern anti-capitalist" or "Eurocentric anti-capitalist" projects struggling towards the great fallacy of an "anti-capitalist modernity". I say "fallacy" because Modernity produces the really existing historical capitalism, and if you do not develop an anti-systemic struggle against the hierarchies of domination of Modernity, you reproduce the same hierarchies against which you are fighting, including historical capitalism in its form of state capitalism, as happened with the socialism of the twentieth century. There is no Modernity without historical capitalism, or anti-capitalist struggle that can save Modernity. Finally, the struggle of classical social democracy for "more modernity" is not needed because Modernity is not an emancipatory project, but a civilizatory project responsible for the planetary disaster that we have today. Therefore, there is no need for more Modernity or postmodernity, because both constitute projects that remain a Eurocentric criticism of Eurocentrism, leaving intact the civilizing system of Western Modernity.

Nor is it about romanticizing the past and returning to a pre-modern idyllic past, which is impossible. What is proposed is a political project beyond Modernity, or as the philosopher for Latin American liberation Enrique Dussel says, a project towards "Transmodernity" from the epistemic diversity of the world. This is the invitation made by all the decolonial thinkers, including the author of this book. This project is not for a few years, not even a few decades. It is a long-term project, of one or two centuries. If the civilizing project of Modernity took several centuries to form and consolidate, the Transmodernity will also take several centuries to be formed and consolidated. The decolonial politics today has Transmodernity as its horizon of struggle in the long term and the struggle against the hierarchies of domination of Western Modernity as a horizon of struggle in the short and medium term. So that if Transmodernity is a project whose temporality is of long duration, it has as a requisite an antisystemic struggle today whose temporality is of medium duration.

Houria Bouteldja is one of the most important activists and decolonial thinkers of our times. She is the spokesperson of the Party of the Indigenous of the Republic (PIR) in France. The PIR is an autonomous decolonial movement that fights for the decolonization of France calling at the national level for a "domestic internationalism", and on the international level a "decolonial internationalism". The Muslim cry "Allahou Akbar", with which the book ends, is a critique of the secular religious myth of Modernity and means the following: Allah is the greatest because it is the creative force of life with intelligence that is beyond of all this ephemeral and contingent terrestrial world. It is a force that is beyond and that no human being can reach. This invocation is a call to humility against the arrogance of the Westernized ego conquiro, and, above all, it is a call not to idolatrize / fetishize / sacralize any terrestrial power. It is a criticism of the idolatry and fetishism that the terrestrial powers produce when they become sacred. Allahau Akbar is a call to desacralize all the relations of domination that surround us from the pharaohs to the empires to the modern nation-state. As Enrique Dussel says in his theology of liberation, the condition of possibility of radical critique is to be an atheist before all terrestrial power. If you consecrate the empire, you are a believer in the God of the oppressors. The criticism of Modernity is also a radical criticism of the false secularism that tries to distance us from Allah, from Pacha or the Ubumdu as the holistic cosmological principles of the production and reproduction of life, to replace them with the false gods of Modernity like capital , the modern state, the empire, the white man, the Cartesian dualism, modern science, the culture / values ​​/ western epistemology and the dollar / euro, all life-destroying deities. Decolonial critique is above all a critique of the gods of the less recognized planetary religion: the cult of Modernity.

Modernity always creates the idea of ​​"peoples with problems" - "the Jewish problem", "the Indian problem", "the black problem", "the Muslim problem" -, while the gods of Modernity are proposed as "solution" . What Houria Bouteldja reminds us is that the problem is Modernity and not the peoples that it inferiorizes. It can not be decolonial if we still idolize Modernity and see it as a project to be imitated under the illusion of an emancipatory project. Modernity is first and foremost a colonial civilizing project of death. The secular / religious binarism is the myth imposed by the modern Western civilization in its colonial projects to destroy the spiritualities / knowledge / epistemologies of the peoples, in order to facilitate the imposition of the false gods of modernity. If Modernity in its colonial expansion disenchanted the world, transmodern decolonization means re-enchanting it.

Another point of clarification: indigenous in this book is the term that was used by the French Empire to name all the peoples dominated and exploited in their colonies; so that it does not refer only to the original peoples, but to all the peoples colonized by the French Empire, from the Vietnamese to the Antilleans. It would be more appropriate to translate the use of "indigenous" in this book as equivalent to "colonial subjects" or "colonized subjects." The PIR uses the term "indigenous" as a political identity to name all the populations that although born and / or raised within France are still racially inferiorized. Today's indigenous people live in unworthy conditions similar to those of the French colonial era, when the racist laws of "indigenous" existed. The motto of the PIR is "we are the indigenous people of the French Republic" to denounce that we continue to live under the yoke of colonial racism even though the colonial administrations have ended in a large part of the planet, and even though we are inhabiting the interior of the French Republic that claims to be defender of human rights, of individual freedom and of citizen rights. The hypocrisy of these discourses is evident. These rights are recognized to the white populations of the Republic and trampled daily to non-whites. In short, that for the PIR the category of indigenous names a political identity and not an essentialist / culturalist identity. The racial / colonial subjects outside (neocolonialism) and inside (internal colonialism) of the metropolitan centers continue to live under the yoke of the racism of the coloniality of power.

If class exploitation produces social class struggle, and gender domination produces social gender struggle, racial domination produces social race struggle. No matter how many times Houria Bouteldja has clarified that "races" are political / social constructions and that categories of identities such as "white", "black", "indigenous", "Indian", are an integral part of a system of racial domination, there are still people who by mistake or bad faith continue reading in her writings an epidermal reductionism or reductionist essentialism. The anti-racism that is defended in this book is not a moral one, but a political one, because racism is always institutional, structurally imbricated with hierarchies of gender, class, epistemological, pedagogical, spatial, ecological, religious domination, etc.

The use of "decoloniality" today is not reducible to a project of "independence and sovereignty" against a colonial administration, as understood in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is that and much more because coloniality, being the dark side of Modernity, has a multiplicity of hierarchies of domination that are not reduced to colonialism. Decoloniality is no longer the secular / modern cry of "fatherland or death" towards the creation of a nation-state. To create nation-states is to repeat the political authority of Modernity, whose pretension is to produce a one-to-one correspondence between the identity of the state and that of the populations within its territory. This fiction does not exist anywhere and has created more problems than solutions wherever it has been imposed. Hence the decolonizing struggle of indigenous peoples in the Americas to build plurinational states in response to the problems of the nation-state. But "plurinationalism," while radically opposed to assimilationism, is not equivalent to "liberal multiculturalism," where the central power of the dominant white nation gives crumbs to racially inferiorized groups or stateless nations to "jump and jump in its carnival ", but in exchange for "do not question who is in charge here ". "Liberal multiculturalism" is a superficial culturalist recognition of oppressed identities, but without changing hierarchies of domination. The plurinationality concept of Latin American indigenous movements is very different: it is horizontal recognition and without hierarchies to the fact that we are multiple nations coexisting within a single State and that they must then be structured as plurinational states. It is a recognition of the self-determination and popular sovereignty of each nation without one imposing on the other. For this, it is fundamental to start from the epistemic difference of each nation and from there build possibilities of living together respecting the differences. Recognition of popular sovereignty may result in the creation of independent states that do not reproduce the modern / colonial concept of nation-state again or result in the decolonization of current nation-states towards plurinational structures within their territory, where all command obeying to their respective communities. In short, that the nation-state, in its assimilationist or liberal multicultural aspect, is the structure par excellence of political authority of Modernity where the one who commands, commands without obeying the communities. To decolonize the political authority of Modernity means to organize more communal, more communal, more democratic-participative states, beyond the prison of the nation-state.

On the other hand, Houria Bouteldja also reminds us that while not all anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism is decolonial, all decolonial must be-above all-radically anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist. But the "decolonial" has becomefashionable. There are badly called "decolonials" today that are very colonial insofar as they are not radically anti-imperialist or anti-colonialist, as the debate on Venezuela demonstrates. They repeat all the colonial theses of the pro-imperial neoliberal right, but in a more perverse way, because they do so in the name of a supposedly "decolonial" vision. Decoloniality without political anti-racism or decoloniality without anti-imperialism is like coffee without caffeine or a honeycomb without honey. At the bottom of these "colonial decolonial" or "decolonial colonialist" manifestations, these are liberals who think from the categories of atomized individualism, liberal democracy and the individual liberties enjoyed by whites at the expense of domination and exploitation of the rest of humanity. Reducing identities and groups that have always been built in social reality as collectives to "atomized individuals" is one of the great myths of liberalism as the dominant ideology of the of the modern Western civilization-world.

In this book by Houria Bouteldja she declares open war against liberalism as one of the mechanisms par excellence of imperialism to make invisible the racial domination on a planetary scale. The imperialist system is organized through white supremacy. If the racial domination imbricated with the world imperialist system produces on the one hand the "condemned of the earth", it simultaneously produces on the other side the "blessed of the earth". The racial privileges of the Ones are produced by violence and dispossession of the Others. Wealth for Ones means poverty for the Others. Democracy for the Ones is made by means of violence, dispossession and despotism over the Others. The liberties and individual liberal rights granted by the privileges of whiteness for a few on the planet are produced through authoritarianism and looting towards the majority of Others. Western liberal states are not democracies but plutocracies that live at the expense of theft on a planetary scale. There are no half measures or false exits in this book. If it causes you disgust and indignation, if you are scandalized by what it says, if it causes you nausea, do not be mistaken: it is the voice of protest of the white we all carry inside. And I can hear the call of Houria Bouteldja before this voice telling us: for a politics of revolutionary love that puts the good of humanity as a priority, betray it!