argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Provincial, breaking Eurocentrism.
Andrea Bartolo @TxindurriG 2023ko irailaren 04a

The imperialist attack is booming in the Sahel. Today, the struggle to maintain the imperialist hegemony of the Western Collective in the African timezone has become one of the most important fronts. Recently, the force relations in the area are changing: Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger are beginning to rise up against the Western imperialist yoke and are initiating new international alliances.

However, the West is not organising signs of anti-imperialist solidarity. The cause is an old disease which is repeated on the European left: Eurocentrism.

The Sahel eurocentrism emerges in two ways. First there are those who consider themselves "Marxists", those who criticize the current anti-colonial processes for not being "truly socialist". These "criticisms" sold as dialectical analysis reproduce from top to bottom the dogmatism and eurocentrism of an academic left. These are the same accusations made against the liberation processes in the Global South: Ho Chi Minh City, Cabral, Fidel or Sankara, among others.

Instead of articulating internationalist solidarity, we in Europe are discussing whether the Sahel is a "genuine revolution"

Secondly, we have a more recent Eurocentrism front, even more teleological: geopolitical experts who see everything through the glasses of 'international relations'. According to them, what is happening in Sahel (as in Donbass, Abya Yalan and the Middle East) would only be a consequence of the "imperialist war". Doing what public employees in the Global South do would be just geopolitical pawns. This speech is a clear example of paternalism: The peoples of the Global South capture them in a loophole, with no possibility of being subject to their own future.

Both speeches have the same epistemological framework, Eurocentrism, and the consequence, the political impossibility. As the working peoples of the Sahel mobilize against imperialism, "our" imperialism begins a new war against these peoples (economic, cultural and military). And we, in the meantime, instead of articulating internationalist solidarity, are debating from Europe whether the Sahel is a "genuine revolution", or how we would decolonise ourselves if we lived in Sahel.

Faced with this absurdity, we need to receive a call for decolonization from post-colonial movements and intellectuals (from Fanon to Chakrabarty): reorganize the anti-imperialist struggle, break Eurocentrism, and provincial Europe.