Ignacio Ramonet, Spanish journalist and writer. File photo.
No emancipatory project can flourish without dismantling the mechanisms of oppression that suffocate it. The challenge remains the same: to liberate human beings in their entirety.
Ignacio Ramonet—journalist, essayist, and international analyst—was the long-time editor of Le Monde Diplomatique. In his book The Age of Conspiracy, he analyzed the mechanisms of “Trumpism” that we are now seeing spread to other parts of the world from Latin America to Europe. We spoke with him about the political crisis in the European Union and the renewed tensions between the United States and Latin American socialist countries.
We are living in a time of profound and dramatic transformations that are affecting all levels of a model—the dominant capitalist model—in systemic crisis, but with the clear intention of making all of humanity live through its agony. From your point of view—that of a refined political analyst with a long career—how do you interpret this crisis?
We are not facing a specific crisis of capitalism but, rather, a crisis of civilization. The system, in its neoliberal and financialized version, has reached a point where it can no longer reproduce itself without destroying its own foundations: labor, nature, social ties, even the idea of political community. Capital transforms collapse into strategy, turns precariousness into the norm, and manages catastrophe as if it were a natural state of affairs. Its agony is long and violent, and it seeks to drag all of humanity down with it. What is looming is not only the exhaustion of an economic model but the end of a historical rationality: one that identified progress with infinite accumulation.
And what counterweights do you see in what many see as the emergence of a multicentric and multipolar world, from which, however, no clear vision for the future emerges, as was the case in the last century, when much of the world believed in the hope of communism?
The multipolar world is already a reality, but it is not yet a horizon. Multipolarity means diversification of centers of power, weakening of the absolute hegemony of the United States, and the emergence of actors such as China, India, or Russia. But that does not equate to emancipation. In the 20th century, even amid wars and contradictions, communist hope offered a narrative of the future, a collective compass. Today, multipolarity appears more like a negotiation between powers than a project for humanity. That said, on the margins, in the social movements of the global South, in feminist, indigenous, and environmentalist resistance, another logic is emerging: that of a life measured not by profit but by care. Therein lies, still in its infancy, a hopeful perspective.
Let’s talk about the crisis in Europe, starting with the French political system, which is now immersed in a new and probable fall of the government. What is your analysis of the forces at play and the possible solutions?
France embodies the European political crisis in a particularly clear way. The Fifth Republic, designed to guarantee stability, has become a blocked regime, incapable of producing legitimacy. Macron governs with technocratic arrogance but also with a lack of vision: he does not speak for society but for the markets and for Brussels. This disconnect explains the social anger, the fragmentation of the left, and the rise of the far right. Europe sees its own broken mirror in France: institutions that no longer represent, people who do not feel heard, societies that seek outlets in protest or in protest voting. The real solution would require a democratic overhaul from the bottom up, but that horizon has not yet been politically organized.
France is the driving force behind European rearmament, the country with the largest number of projects financed by the European Defense Fund (EDF), and Giorgia Meloni’s Italy is following suit, Germany is rearming, and the Baltic countries are not far behind. Can the European Union be only that of the military–industrial complex, eternally subordinate to the United States? And what consequences might this have in the context of current conflicts?
European rearmament is the most obvious symptom of the continent’s subordination to US strategic interests. France, Germany, Italy, and the Baltic countries are not rearming to defend their own project but to strengthen the military–industrial complex under NATO’s tutelage. Europe invests in weapons what it denies to social cohesion, education, and ecological transition. This imbalance reveals a historic choice: to be a field of confrontation rather than an actor for peace. In doing so, Europe is not only militarizing itself but also becoming irrelevant as a civilizing project. By abdicating an autonomous foreign policy, it is renouncing its possibility of offering the world a rationality other than that of war.
The crisis of Western democracies is revealing two growing phenomena: voter disaffection (mainly on the left) and the rise of xenophobic and far-right parties who claim to be the least likely to use “strong-arm tactics” on the geopolitical stage. How did this short circuit come about, and how can we escape from such a trap?
The short circuit in Western democracies has deep roots. For decades, social democracy and much of the left accepted neoliberalism as an inevitable framework. That was when the betrayal was consummated: millions of workers, young people, and regular civilians felt deprived of real representation. The far right then established itself as the only disruptive discourse, offering closed identities, fictitious sovereignties, and illusory securities. It is a poor and exclusionary narrative, but it connects with the social pain of those who have seen their rights destroyed. The solution cannot be to imitate this narrative but, rather, to rebuild an emancipatory horizon: radical redistribution of wealth, participatory democracy, internationalism, social and ecological justice. In other words, to restore politics’ ability to determine the future.
As the possibility of an anti-capitalist alternative, or of advanced democracy (what was called “the Latin American renaissance” after Chávez’s victory in the Venezuelan presidential elections), unravels, the threat of a new fascist international, with varying modulations, looms large. Is the European “model” also taking hold in Latin America?
The progressive cycle in Latin America, which some called a “renaissance” after Chávez’s victory in 1998, opened up an unexpected horizon amid neoliberal dominance: the possibility of an advanced, popular, inclusive democracy with sovereignty and social justice. However, that initial momentum quickly encountered limits and resistance: economic sabotage, soft coups, media warfare, and also internal contradictions within the processes themselves. In that vacuum, a danger we thought had been banished is reemerging: a fascist international with multiple faces—religious, neoliberal, militaristic—that operates in networks and is strongly inspired by Europe. Latin America, which has so often been a laboratory for emancipation, now runs the risk of also becoming a laboratory for new forms of authoritarianism. The current battle is to prevent this exclusionary rationality from becoming the norm and to recover the audacity to imagine our own historical project.
What is your analysis of the “Venezuela laboratory” in light of the new imperialist attacks on the Bolivarian revolution but also from the point of view of the forces of transformation? How does this “experiment” fit into the history of Marxism?
Venezuela continues to be the great political laboratory of our time. There, they are attempting something that the global system cannot tolerate: combining participatory democracy, national sovereignty, and social redistribution under a socialist horizon. That is why the attacks continue: blockades, sanctions, economic suffocation, campaigns to delegitimize the government. But it is also there that the most creative forms of popular resistance have been seen: communes, self-management, the idea of power from below. In the history of Marxism, the Bolivarian experience represents an attempt at updating, not repeating, dogmas but grafting the emancipatory tradition onto Latin American realities, with Bolívar, with Chávez, with the indigenous peoples, and with the insurgent memory of the continent. It is an unfinished process full of tensions but it is also proof that Marxism is not dead: it mutates, it reincarnates, it seeks new syntheses.
We live in an era in which domination is no longer exercised solely through weapons and armies but through narratives and mind-control devices. Fourth- and fifth-generation warfare, so-called “cognitive warfare,” consists of shaping perceptions, manufacturing consensus, and normalizing injustices.
The ideological apparatuses of control are increasingly sophisticated. Fourth- and fifth-generation warfare is accompanied by cognitive warfare, as we see with the genocide in Palestine—the most televised and at the same time the most hidden genocide—but also with the aggression against Venezuela. And yet, we also see that, with the arrival of Trump, the attack on the working-class sectors and the visions that have sought to represent them in the last century (socialism and communism) is direct and frontal. How should we interpret all this?
We live in an era in which domination is no longer exercised solely through weapons and armies but through narratives and mind-control devices. Fourth and fifth generation warfare, the so-called “cognitive warfare,” consists of shaping perceptions, manufacturing consensus, and normalizing injustices. Palestine is the most brutal case: a genocide broadcast live and, at the same time, hidden under layers of media manipulation. The same is true of Venezuela and every process that challenges the imperial order. Trumpism, and similar phenomena in other parts of the world, only serve to expose this logic: a frontal attack on the working-class sectors and the memories of emancipation (socialism, communism, workers’, feminist, and anti-colonial struggles). The aim is to eradicate the very idea of an alternative. Our task is precisely the opposite: to preserve memory, sustain resistance, and keep alive the political imagination of another possible world.
100 years after the birth of Fanon, Malcolm X, and Lumumba, do the global South, Palestine, and Africa in particular (I am thinking especially of the Sahel) still need their message? Is Bolivarian socialism right to believe that it is possible to build new men and women today without destroying what prevents it? Or must we return to the machete?
Fanon taught us that colonization occupies not only territories but also minds and that liberation must be both material and psychological. Malcolm embodied radical dignity in the face of structural racism. Lumumba symbolized African sovereignty in a world divided into blocs. Today, in Palestine, Africa, and the global South, these lessons are vital: without cultural emancipation, there can be no political emancipation.
A century after the birth of Franz Fanon, Malcolm X, and Lumumba, their message remains essential. Fanon taught us that colonization occupies not only territories but also minds and that liberation must be both material and psychological. Malcolm embodied radical dignity in the face of structural racism. Lumumba symbolized African sovereignty in a world divided into blocs. Today, in Palestine, Africa, and the global South, these lessons are vital: without cultural emancipation, there can be no political emancipation.
Bolivarian socialism, in speaking of the “new man and woman,” takes up this tradition: that of transforming human beings in the very process of struggle, not afterwards. It is not a question of “returning to the machete” as pure violence but of recognizing that no emancipatory project can flourish without dismantling the mechanisms of oppression that suffocate it. The challenge remains the same: to liberate human beings in their entirety.
(Resumen Latinoamericano) by Geraldina Colotti
Translation: Internationalist 360°, Orinoco Tribune
Geraldina Colotti
Geraldina Colotti was born in Ventimiglia and has lived in Paris for a long time. She served a 27-year sentence for her militancy in the Red Brigades. Colotti is a journalist and writer, an expert in Latin America, and in charge of the Italian edition of "Le Monde Diplomatique".
