Aminta Beleño Gómez | Colombian Communist Party

Introduction

The call for an International Anti-Imperialist Conference in Venezuela is a propitious space for articulation among parties, organisations, and social leaders who are fully aware of the importance of the historical moment we are living through. It goes beyond the militancy of the global left—it concerns humanity itself, which has had to live in the parenthesis between capital and life, when there is very little time left to stop planetary destruction.

Inspired by the tenacious resilience that Palestine, an indigenous people, has shown in defence of its territory, culture, history, language, art, olive trees, and humanity as a whole, I dared to write this article from the perspective shaped by my organic communist militancy in Colombia—between the landscape of my experience in Venezuela during the Bolivarian Revolution and the ancestral legacy one receives through nightmares and dreams.

In this text, I intend to recall the essential origins of imperialism, because we no longer have much human time left to make mistakes. In defining a struggle against imperialism, we must target capitalism, for it is there that imperialist logic is engendered. The struggle against Nazism, fascism, and Zionism has the same character, as these are the most developed expressions of systemic violence.

Likewise, it is crucial to understand that the capitalist system was born from the oppressive legacies of other tyrannical systems that preceded and shaped it: patriarchy, slavery, and feudalism—all of which survive well into the 21st century and inhabit the most sophisticated forms of capital.

This is why the systemic logic and actions of imperialism often confound our own logic. Just when we believed that international conventions on human rights, national sovereignty, and the self-determination of peoples had consigned to history the horrors of European colonisation, holy wars, the First and Second World Wars, and the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, one day we awoke to eco-genocide in Gaza, Nazis in Ukraine, and missiles targeting our fishermen in the Caribbean Sea—without a single criminal action being taken against their perpetrators.

Nevertheless, there is always a light that remains lit to show us the way through the darkness: humanity itself—humanity fighting for humanity—counted in the multitudes who have risen up from all corners of the world, even from the very bowels of the monster, to fight hand to hand against the eco-genocide in Gaza.

From within our organic militancy, let us find the invisible threads that connect us to our remote origins—to that humanity itself—and let us break the parenthesis that will allow us to leave capital behind and transcend toward life.

The Complexity of the Decline That Intercepts Us

The historical moment we have been given to live in is quite convoluted. It is marked by what has come to be characterised as systemic decline, originating in the deepest crisis of transnationalised capitalism, consistent with that specific historical phase of capital development that Lenin identified and defined as imperialism. [1]

The transnational capitalism of our time is possessed by a destructive logic that increasingly and ruthlessly revalidates and reconfigures its aggressive, exploitative, patriarchal, and unnatural nature. From this logic, it plans the destabilisation of nations, the mass elimination of living beings—both human and non-human—and proudly displays its potential for planetary self-destruction.

In this regard, it is worth quoting excerpts from the speech delivered by the President of Colombia, Gustavo Petro Urrego, before the General Assembly of the United Nations (UN) on 23 September of this year. As he himself stated, “it was not just another speech”; it was an urgent call in the face of the certainty that “humanity is facing its greatest crossroads,” and that only the unity of our peoples can save us.

Let us read:

“…The Dantesque situation in Palestine did not lead me to think that the same, or almost the same, could happen in the Colombian Caribbean, when missiles are fired at unarmed young people at sea. And so now we are facing a different, perhaps more global, situation. Today, barbarism is planetary; today it falls upon the whole of humanity. This chamber is a silent witness and accomplice to genocide in today’s world, when we thought it was only the preserve of Hitler. Europe and the United States continue to applaud their new fashionable Hitlers… today they are doing the same thing as Hitler. The UN must change now—a different, humane UN. First and foremost, it must stop the genocide in Gaza. Humanity cannot allow another day of genocide, neither by Netanyahu’s genocidal regime nor by its allies in the United States and Europe.” [2]

Warmongering, drug trafficking, human trafficking, the sexual exploitation of women and children, and the exploitation of labour under new conditions of slavery and servitude have become the preferred mechanisms for the accumulation of wealth.

These are the reasons for the resurgence of the extreme right around the world, the rise of religious fanaticism, the resurrection of Nazi-fascism, and the strengthening of its highest form: Zionism.

In this sense, the stark speech by our Colombian president before the UN continues:

“They need violence to dominate Colombia and Latin America. They need to destroy dialogue and to impose and launch killer missiles on poor young people in the Caribbean. The anti-drug policy is not meant to stop cocaine from reaching the United States—it is meant to dominate the peoples of the South. The anti-drug policy is not about the public health of society, but about the politics of power. They do not want light to be shed on Latin America, nor for the time of the peoples to come. The young people killed by missiles in the Caribbean were not from the Tren de Aragua[3]; they were Caribbean—they were simply poor young people from Latin America. The drug traffickers live elsewhere—in New York and in Miami. They make deals with the DEA, which allows them to traffic in Africa, Europe, Russia, or China, but not in the United States—a country that supposedly stops cocaine consumption without actually reducing it. This happens simply because its sick drug addicts—and they are sick—have moved on to consuming the deadly drug of humanity’s counterculture in times of extinction caused by the climate crisis: fentanyl. This fentanyl is produced within the industrial apparatus of the United States—a self-destructive American consumption that represents the worst understanding of drugs in the history of humanity: addiction to fentanyl and to petrol—total poisons to life on Earth. Cocaine used to kill, through the poisons mixed with it, about 3,000 people a year in this country. Today, fentanyl kills 100.03 times more—it is a death sentence for humanity.”

New, Effective and Addictive Forms of Domination

This “greater crossroads” referred to by President Petro is not only related to the most atrocious form of physical subjugation that reveals the specific historical phase of capitalism—imperialism. It also confronts us with the scientific and technological advances produced by working humanity, but co-opted to generate instruments and devices that enable the control and manipulation of collective thought, and even to create globalised psyches that respond to patterns of systemic hegemony.

We are witnessing new, effective, and addictive forms of domination that violate everything from childlike innocence—hypnotised and manipulated in the world of virtual games—to the memory of those who have died, exploiting the virtual records they left on social media. Images, videos, voice notes, texts, surveys, preferences, and entertainment have generated an archive that is stored in the false cloud, feeding the griefbots. [4] 

Social phenomena such as the so-called hikikomori in Japan—young people who live trapped in their own homes, totally isolated from real society yet hyperconnected to intangible dimensions, spaces, and beings—should sound alarm bells. Although this modern hermit-like existence originated in Japan and was associated with cultural factors, working conditions, and individual emotional problems, it has now spread in significant numbers to South Korea, the United States, Spain, France, and Italy, among other territories.

Officially, Japan recognised this social anomaly as a feature of “new capitalism,” which addresses “social issues” to drive “economic growth.” Thus, this workforce of thousands of people categorised as hikikomori is being exploited through telework, which ultimately undermines the historical social essence of employment and production, in order to generate greater surpluses and accumulate wealth among the ruling elites. [5]

New, effective, and addictive forms of domination have even taken hold of the terms of commercial exchange, resorting to virtuality so that money becomes intangible and escapes any physical, national, legal, and—above all—social control.

In this regard, Peruvian scholar Jorge Millones, in his work Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity, explains that:

“Tokens, the final frontier of economic digitalisation, have emerged as digital units of value that redefine the relationships of production and consumption in contemporary capitalism.

A token is a digital asset that represents rights to a good or service, and its existence is materialised in the blockchain—a distributed database that ensures the integrity of transactions.

These tokens not only facilitate transactions and smart contracts but also encapsulate digital fetishism, where value is abstracted from the tangible and focused on the virtual.

Essentially, tokens are an extension of capitalism into cyberspace, commodifying ever more aspects of digital life.

They function as vehicles for financial speculation, creating markets where value is not based on production or human labour, but on artificial scarcity and market perception.

This market logic not only amplifies existing inequalities but also obscures social relations of exploitation by shifting value towards an abstract digital consensus.

In this new paradigm, human labour is subsumed under the efficiency of code and algorithms, reinforcing a power structure that prioritises financial capital over productive capital.”[6]

These new, effective, and addictive forms of imperialist domination, embedded in the deep crisis of capital, correspond to Gramsci’s definition of “crisis”: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, the most morbid phenomena appear.” [7]

It is the crisis of capitalism in its phase of systemic decline that has generated these “most morbid phenomena”—never before imagined—such as the eco-genocide in Palestine[8], carried out daily, live and direct, under complete and blatant impunity. This impunity allows the greatest criminal in history, Benjamin Netanyahu, to appear before the UN with pride and arrogance, reaffirming the slaughter of that indigenous civilian population with missiles, bombs, and starvation.

The crime against Palestine has included many other perversions, such as torture and sexual violence against imprisoned leaders, broadcast on television as a display of power—morbid phenomena carried out by Zionism that recall the horrors of Hitler during the Second World War.[9] Yes, what Petro desperately shouted is true: “…humanity faces its greatest crossroads…”

This variety of “morbid phenomena” is also reflected in the rise of gender-based violence (GBV), which now operates as part of the commodification of everything that exists—a system that creates, recreates, reproduces, and trades in every form of aggression against women and feminised beings.

The rate of femicide in Latin America and the Caribbean is already alarming: on average, eleven women a day were murdered for gender-related reasons in 2023, according to the latest bulletin from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), published in 2024. [10]

Paedophilia and online rape—whether individual or group, live or recorded—are not isolated psychological perversions or products of sick cinematography. They are part of a reality that has been corporately promoted in the name of free enterprise, positioning these forms of gender-based violence as lucrative audiovisual content in high demand. This is also linked to the promotion of narcotics, labelled as symbols of youth, rebellion, freedom, and pleasure.

In this regard, Rocío López Millón, an activist with the Feminist Policy Forum of Málaga (Spain), warned in her article “A Critical Stance on the Prostitution System”:

“Another major threat lies in the link between pornography and prostitution.

Pornography is educating future consumers, and its dissemination on social media helps normalise this type of violence against women, in a context in which savage capitalism sends the message that our bodies are our best asset and we must exploit them through pornography, prostitution, and surrogacy.”[11]

Human trafficking targets women as the main victims of modern slavery under the logic of the ‘morbid phenomena’ of transnational capitalism, which includes the terrible sex market. Impoverished women and children across the world are caught in migration processes induced by war, the destruction of local economies, the spread of drug trafficking, extractive industries, genetically modified food, pharmacology, and cosmetics—as well as by the imposition of blockades and sanctions against peoples who resist this decadent, neo-colonial logic of imperialism.

Organic Militancy and the Instinctive Consciousness of the Masses

The complexity of this historical moment urges us to take responsibility, in the present, for the immediate future—to awaken concern for an inevitable resolution that will not necessarily lead to the defeat of capitalism, but may instead result in the disintegration of our social nature and the destruction of all forms of life on the planet.

Currently, as a result of capitalist voracity, and according to the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN):

“…more than 47,000 species are threatened with extinction…” [12] 

It is climate change that is advancing toward the destruction of life on the planet, and, as Petro stated in his most recent speech to the UN:

“…we have 10 years to reach a point of no return… And once we pass that point, nothing can be done. We will only observe the catastrophes, and we will even feel them in our own families… because the extinction of life, including human life, will be irreversible… No technology, no political or social force, no human mind will be able to do anything to stop the collapse… it will be irreversible…”

It is necessary to break with this culture of capitalist production that not only profits from surplus value but has extended its exploitative claws into the bowels of the Earth and seeks to appropriate every form of life, disrupting the delicate balance that sustains the planet.

This culture of capitalist production has served only to enrich elites, impoverish peoples, and destroy the equilibrium of forces that coexist in perfect harmony to sustain planetary existence. The world system has imposed its unnatural culture of production upon us, making us believe in the myth that humanity is a superior creature with the right to take everything and give nothing back. Yet those who take everything are only a white, patriarchal, racist, murderous, and perverted elite.

Our humanity—that of the vast majority—must recover its ancestral memory, the one that records us as merely another creature of the planet: echoic and interdependent, with no divine origin or heaven to inhabit, destined always to return to the Earth.

In this sense, from our organic militancy, we must value, re-evaluate, and commit to the resistance and resilience of the multitudes who, in many countries across the world, are shaping an instinctive growth of anti-systemic and anti-imperialist consciousness. This consciousness manifests itself in the recognition of multiple oppressions, violences, and injustices exacerbated by the development of capital, as well as in the appropriation of mechanisms to make social realities visible and to dismantle the virtual reality that the system seeks to impose.

This consciousness gives rise, almost spontaneously, to potentially powerful initiatives, rhythms, and actions, as they manage to break with the pragmatic foresight of the system—taking by storm both the imperialist logic and that of those of us who are organically militant against the establishment.

This awakening of consciousness can be seen in the mass protests and strikes against the ecocide in Gaza, taking place in major cities around the world—even in the streets of the ecocidal state of Israel itself.

A recent example: the demonstrations held on 23 September in 65 cities across Italy, including Rome, Milan, Turin, Naples, and Genoa. In the latter, the port was blocked to prevent the shipment of weapons to Israel. Ninety percent of public transport workers joined the strike, schools closed, and the enraged population bravely confronted police repression.

The event was described by Stacciolo Francesco, one of the protesters, as “…a powerful popular message against the logic of war…”[13]— humanity itself: humanity fighting for humanity.

The Urgency of What to Do

For those of us committed to building another possible world—that communist utopia—analysis without a concrete programme, and theory without practice, are meaningless. That is why we always remember old Lenin and his unavoidable question: “What is to be done?”[14]

Although this historical moment is different, because the dimensions of the world-system can now be measured in light years compared to the time of our classics, we continue to live in a world plagued by bourgeois tyranny, which has exacerbated all the injustices, oppressions, and violence inherited from the systems that preceded it.

We have achieved much, we are moving forward, and the proletarian class remains standing. However, the antagonisms between transnationalised capitalism and life itself have already transcended the limits of endurance: “…we have 10 years to reach a point of no return… And once we pass that point, nothing can be done…” said our president Petro at the UN, based on scientific findings that continue to exist against the tide of imperialism.

In that direction—in that urgency for necessary action—it is important to take Petro at his word, drawn from the many voices he has made his own:

Plan, global plan… if it is not for capital, it will be for humanity and for life. The owner of capital is a powerful human being, not a thing, not a fetish. This human being, driven by greed, is the one who will seek to have more and more oil approved here… regardless of the poisoning of the atmosphere with CO₂, which is the poisoning of all life on the planet…

…So—capital or life… barbarism or local and global democracy, or freedom or death, as Bolívar said… What is needed to overcome the climate crisis positively and prevent it from turning into a global collapse is a worldwide revolution of the peoples. It is a revolution of the united peoples, of civilisations that must dialogue more than states…

…And it can no longer be done because capital itself has become global and not state-owned… We must raise the red and black flag of freedom or death that Bolívar raised, without forgetting the white colour he lifted alongside them—the colour of peace—as a hope for life on Earth and in the heart of humanity. It is time for freedom or death. Death by missiles is real, but so is freedom in the human heart and its capacity for unity, rebellion, and existence…

Our meetings must advance this global plan, champion true rebellion and freedom, confront the imperialist eco-genocidal war, and decide—as the multitudes have decided—to organise the Army of Humanity that Petro called for in the streets of New York[15] to stop the eco-genocide in Gaza, which stands as the greatest human pain and shame in all our history.

How long will this atrocity be allowed to continue? We have powers capable of halting the Zionist horror, just as the heroic Red Army halted the Hitlerian horror. If The Freedom Flotilla[16] emerged and set sail with civilian heroes and heroines, how can we not form a Global Fleet for the salvation of the Palestinian people?

We have already suffered missiles in our Caribbean Sea. We already have civilian victims of Zionist warmongering on our continent. What more must we endure?

The Bolivarian peoples have a legacy of unity, cooperation, and mutual defence against external aggression: the Amphictyonic Congress of Panama, which remains essentially valid. Next year marks the 200th anniversary of its establishment. Let us celebrate this bicentennial by sealing a supra-continental unity—a unity of humanity itself—that will draw up and execute a tactical plan and a strategic programme to help us emerge from the systemic crisis, crossing that interregnum between the death of the old and the birth of the new.

Notes 

[1] In 1917, Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin wrote an essay on the state of capitalism at the time, whose title has been translated into our language as Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. In the work, Lenin described and identified the essential elements of imperialism: the concentration of production and capital, leading to the creation of monopolies; the fusion of banking and industrial capital, forming finance capital; the export of capital as distinct from the export of goods; the formation of international monopoly capitalist associations; and the territorial division of the world among the capitalist powers.

[2] Available at: https://youtu.be/n0avn2Ge-d0?si=3tNofAR7EVmBH1K

[3] El Tren de Aragua is the name given to a criminal gang that began operating in Venezuela around 2005, near the construction sites of the Aragua State railway. Following induced migration, many of its members left the country to commit crimes abroad. Despite the successful security operations implemented by the Venezuelan government against this and other criminal groups, the United States government has used it as a pretext to attack Venezuelan migrants on its territory and, more recently, to threaten Venezuelan sovereignty by launching missiles at fishermen navigating national waters.

[4] Griefbots are artificial intelligence programs that use the digital data of deceased individuals to create chat interfaces through which their relatives can communicate with them—simulating a form of life after death.

[5] See: “2% of Japan’s Workforce Could Be ‘Modern Recluses’,” Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, 18 April 2023. Available at: https://www.asiapacific.ca/publication/2-percent-japanese-labour-force-modern-day-recluses.

Also: “Review of Hikikomori: A Global Health Problem, Identification and Treatment,” Asian Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 84, June 2023. Available at: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S187620182300151X.

And: “What Are ‘Hikikomori’? The Hundreds of Thousands of Young People Who Live Without Leaving Their Rooms,” BBC News, 3 March 2019. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/vert-fut-47212332.

[6] Millones, Jorge (2025). Artificial Intelligence and Natural Stupidity: Reflections on Technological Capitalism. Editorial Trinchera and Editorial Nuestro Sur.

[7] Gramsci, Antonio (1981). Prison Notebooks, Vol. IV. Ediciones ERA.

[8] The term ecocide is used here because, in Palestine, all forms of life inhabiting the Gaza Strip are being annihilated. It is important to note that when a bomb explodes, it generates temperatures above 1,000 °C; combined with the blast wave, this not only kills human beings but also destroys infrastructure, flora, fauna, and soil composition—which will take hundreds or even thousands of years to regenerate. This is the scenario of all contemporary wars in which weapons of mass destruction are used: they are ecocidal.

[9] It should be remembered that Zionism originated in Europe at the end of the 19th century, led by Theodor Herzl. The movement also maintained a covert connection with the Nazis, and its leaders were complicit in crimes against European Jews to compel their adherence to the colonialist project in Palestine, among other reasons.

[10] Available at: https://oig.cepal.org/es/indicadores/femicidio

[11] López Millón, Rocío (2021). XXXI Feminist Policy Forum Workshop: Weaving Feminist Internationalism in the Face of the Patriarchal and Neoliberal Offensive. Feminist Policy Forum.

[12] Data from the IUCN, collected within the framework of the 16th Conference of the Parties (CoP) to the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity, held in Cali (Colombia) in October 2024. Available at: https://www.iucnredlist.org/

[13] Available at DW Español: https://www.instagram.com/reel/D089Bp2Ad_8/

[14] Lenin, Vladimir (1981). What Is To Be Done? Burning Issues of Our Movement. Vol. VI, Complete Works. Editorial Progreso.

[15] Petro led marches in New York following his address to the UN, where he proposed the creation of an army for global democracy against eco-genocide in Palestine. Available at: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPE8slPjnsu/?igsh=ZjFkYzMzMDQzZg==

[16] The Freedom Flotilla is a humanitarian aid vessel organised by the NGO Freedom Flotilla Coalition, composed of participants from various parts of the world. Its aim is to break the siege on Gaza and deliver food, medicine, and essential supplies. On 1 October, it was illegally detained by Israeli forces in international waters. Among those detained were Luna Feu and Manuela Bedoya, both Colombian nationals.