Global Dialogues

The question that initiated this reflection is about the locus of moral authority. I find it challenging to search out moral authority at the level of leaders or institutions, national or global. Instead, we should look to those at the heart of the struggle and their ethic of resistance. 

Since the beginning of the current genocide in Gaza, we have seen thousands of images, a cognitive bombardment that forces us to internalize the absolute power of death. We have been and continue to be witnesses to the destruction of hospitals, schools, universities, houses, mosques, churches, libraries, and entire cities. The images of destroyed bodies—especially those of children—constitute the most basic meaning of the word horror, a word saturated with those images that are already part of our everyday life. 

In the case of Gaza, the emptying of land as the explicit objective of war in order to convert it into plunder resonates with the wider set of different colonialisms -- those historical and contemporary instances when emptying involves annihilation. Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe proposes the “thought-image” of brutalism to describe the “emptying and expulsion” that is expanding as a global logic. He sees in it a “logic of demolition” that has become a planetary trend. 

In this logic, conquest of territory in the service of a state is carried out through land grabs and resource extraction, but it must be preceded by the idea of an unpopulated territory, which enables the fantasy of an “original” occupation and frees the aggressor from guilt for the fate of any inhabitants. Institutional forms emerge from that occupation through emptying that make those who are annihilated or displaced existential (and not merely tactical) enemies of the state. For the state to exist it has to first make them disappear. 

This emptying process recalls the fiction of the empty desert as constitutive of the formation of many colonial states, something already pointed out by the Palestinian historian Elias Sanbar, who noted the nexus between sovereignty and extermination. In the case of Argentina, such emptying was a foundational moment of the violence that took place with the genocide against indigenous peoples in 19th century, the so-called “Desert Campaign.” Then, it was connected with the dictatorship politics of disappearance. 

Back to the question: Where is moral authority to counter such extermination campaigns? Rather than look to leaders or institutions at the national or international levels, we should focus on the words and personal and collective actions of those on the ground who struggle to maintain and recover their lives and livelihoods. Because it is their daily struggle—the lived infrastructure that sustains them—that prevents their disappearance from taking place. 

A focus on self-defense and the embattled reproduction of collective life also allows us to see the connection proposed by Silvia Federici between what is going on in Gaza and wider struggles for survival around the world. “We cannot fully understand what is taking place in Palestine unless we also connect it to the broader war that the United States, the European Union and international capitalist institutions” are waging, Federici points out. Central to that war is an economy based on debt and the artificial fomenting of debt crises that empower the state to move in, through a process of recolonization and emptying, to dispossess people of their livelihoods. Argentina has become the prime contemporary example of this practice of debt and destruction, an international project symbolized by Javier Milei’s “chainsaw.” 

In the case of economic dispossession around the world and in the case of physical dispossession in Gaza, the locus of resistance and denunciation—and of ethical authority—is the radical persistence of the living. How can we connect and strengthen this lived resistance against cruelty and oppression in the face of asymmetric and overwhelming power? We might think of these accumulated acts of witness and resistance as the strength of a collective body that is bound together in international solidarity, constructing what Chilean feminists call a “memory of the future.” In these times of the global advance of fascism, international solidarity that celebrates and supports the radical persistence of the living is the best bulwark against the “logic of demolition” that is playing out most dramatically in Gaza. 

An understanding of an ethic of resistance that reshapes moral authority as both local and transnational—one that repudiates, repairs, and wagers on the radical persistence of life in the face of oppression—is essential. Denouncing appropriation, plundering, and emptying while recognizing the agency of those who press on in its midst makes it possible to connect isolated instances of resistance and disobedience and to secure the memory of the struggle for the present and the future. Speaking out matters. Organizing matters. Agitation matters. So does recognizing and being inspired by the lived resistance of those who live on, against all odds, from day to day.

Verónica Gago is a political theorist and activist working on issues of feminism and political economy.