The Future

The Future is not what comes tomorrow, the time calendar. It is when our human journey breaks from the realism of capitalism and enters a structure that permits us to fully solve human dilemmas.

Each month, for the past hundred months, our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has researched, written, and designed a dossier. These dossiers – which range from histories of imperialism and national liberation to analyses of economic policy, sovereignty, war, and the changing world order – have circulated around the world in many languages, from English, Hindi, and Portuguese to Arabic, Thai, and Spanish.1 This is our 100th dossier, which is why we decided to pause and produce a historical-materialist account of a key concept at our institute: the future.

Here, for the first time, we present a philosophical and political assessment of the future. Drawing on the José Venturelli (Chile), Serigrafía (Serigraph), 1970, edition 15/90. 260 x 430 mm.tradition of national liberation Marxism, we argue that this future should be called not only socialism, the objective, but also hope, the sensibility for such a future. We trust that you will read this dossier as you have read the previous ninety-nine and that you will share, debate, and discuss it collectively in reading circles and other spaces of political study. We are always open to your feedback.

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Research and analysis to provoke public awareness and critical thinking

We contribute to the liberalisation of the democratic instituions of society, for they have been captured by the owners of the market. They work in tandem with their market agents, who, posing as public servants, are entrenched in the halls of government. The political class has betrayed its public mandate and instead operates to impose a marketocratic state to maximise the shareholder value of the institutional investors of international financial markets. They own the global corporations and think they own the world on behalf of their very private interest.

Our spheres of action: true democracy – true sustainability – living wage – basic income – inequality – ecological footprint – degrowth – global warming –human development – corporate accountability – civil, political, economic, social, cultural and environmental rights, responsible consumption, sustainable autonomous citizen cells...

Parting from an ethos of true democracy and true sustainability, We, the citizenry, work to advance the paradigm whose only purpose is to go in pursuit of the welfare of People and Planet and NOT the market.

• TJSGA is member of:

• © The Jus Semper Global Alliance

Could Capitalism Have Thrived Without Colonialism? ––A Commentary on Vivek Chibber's Jacobin Radio Interview

In mid-December 2025, an interview with New York University sociologist Vivek Chibber was conducted by Democratic Socialists of America’s Melissa Naschek for the Confronting Capitalism podcast and then was published as a lightly edited transcript in Jacobin.1 I listened to the podcast and then read and re-read the transcript several times. Each time I read the transcript, I was surprised to see that Chibber, who is a professor of sociology and the editor of Catalyst journal, had decided to make such strong claims about the origins of capitalism and the minor role of colonialism in its origin as a podcast, and not as a major written text with citations.

Early into the interview, Chibber says that he is going to dismiss the “idea that capitalism was brought about by plunder,” which he says, “had been pretty thoroughly discredited in the 1980s and ’90s.” The argument I am advancing here is not that colonialism mechanically “created” capitalism, but that capitalism emerged as a global social relation (through the creation of an international division of labour) with internal dynamics in Europe that were inseparable from colonial expropriation, coerced labour, and machine-mediated production elsewhere.

Capitalism did not arise as a self-enclosed national system later projected outward. It emerged through global processes of dispossession, through the violent reorganisation of labour and nature across continents, and through the early deployment of machines in plantations, mines, and extractive complexes that disciplined labour long before the English factory became dominant. These were not peripheral episodes or mere “plunder,” but constitutive moments in the formation of capitalist social relations and the international division of labour.

The wealth of the Global North was not merely accelerated by empire; it was constituted through processes of dispossession that destroyed alternative paths of development, reorganised social reproduction, and locked much of the Global South into relations of dependency that persist through debt, trade, and financial domination.

To deny this is not simply to misread history, it is to disarm Marxism politically. A theory that severs capitalism from imperialism cannot account for the persistence of unequal development, racialised labour, and ongoing forms of primitive accumulation. A Marxism adequate to our world must therefore begin where capitalism itself began—not only in the English countryside, but in the plantation, the mine, the colony, and the machine.

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“Environmental collapses have been accompanied by genocides”

Josefa Sánchez Contreras is a researcher and socio-environmental activist

Josefa Sánchez Contreras is a researcher and socio-environmental activist from the Angpøn (Zoque) community of Chimalapas in Oaxaca, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Granada, where she currently lectures in the Faculty of Social Sciences. She has published several works, including *Desojos Racistas, hacia un ecologismo anticolonial* (Anagrama, 2025) and *Colonialismo energético* (Ona, 2024), in which she analyses, among other issues, the relationship between colonialism, structural racism, and the current climate crisis.

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Democratising provisioning systems: a prerequisite for living well within limits

The core challenge of the 21st century, of achieving good living conditions for all, while bringing resource use and emissions down within planetary limits, is likely to be technically feasible. However, current political and economic trends perpetuate extractive practices and growth imperatives, where decisions that benefit vested interests at the expense of humanity and life on Earth are hidden behind capitalist market logics. To break this deadlock, we argue economic democratisation is necessary, bringing crucial economic decision-making into the sphere of democratic deliberation. We review existing proposals and argue that economic democracy requires more fundamental rethinking of social, political, and economic relations. We then explore these in three thematic areas: the deepeningof democracy, the importance of provisioning systems, and the provisioning logics within organisations. We conclude with a call to action for a revived coalition of environmental and social movements, focused on the crucial task of democratising the economy through its provisioning systems and organisations.

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Degrowth, global asymmetries, and ecosocial justice: Decolonial perspectives from Latin America

Degrowth literature predominantly states that degrowth strategies are meant from and for the Global North. While economic mainstream discourse suggests that the Global South still has to grow in terms of achieving development, degrowth proponents expect a reduction of material and energy throughput in the Global North to make ecological and conceptual space for the Global South to find its own paths toward ecosocial transformation. Based on a Latin American post-development and post-extractivist perspective and drawing on dependency theory, this article suggests another approach: first, it argues that the growth imperative, which in the peripheral world translates into the imperative to develop, also causes harm in societies of the Global South. Throughout Latin America, in the last decades, economic growth has mainly been achieved through extractivism with negative impacts, which are now being pushed further by green growth strategies. Second, I explore some possibilities for a cross-fertilisation between degrowth and International Relations scholarship, calling into question the assumption that degrowth in high-income countries would automatically ‘make space’ for the Global South to engage in self-determined paths of ecosocial transformation, as long as the structures, institutions, and rules of global governance and trade which secure profoundly asymmetric, colonial relations are not challenged.

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The U.S. Forever War on Iran

The roots of the current U.S. and Israeli War on Iran go back 73 years, to the CIA coup that overthrew the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Washington reinstalled the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had earlier fled the country, affirming his role as an absolute monarch. Under the Shah’s brutal dictatorship, Iran operated as a subimperial power in West Asia, constituting a crucial part of the U.S. empire. During these years, Washington supported an ambitious nuclear program in Iran. In late 1978, massive protestsagainst the Shah’s regime began, culminating in the 1979 Islamic Revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, overthrowing the Shah and freeing the country from U.S. domination. During the revolt, students broke into the U.S. embassy, taking over fifty U.S. hostages. This led in turn to a failed U.S. military intervention to free the hostages, who were later released by Iran. In 1984, the Reagan administration declared that Iran was a “state sponsor of terror” and introduced economic sanctions. Washington backed Saddam Hussein in the Iraq-Iran War (1980–1988), while secretly supplying Iran with weapons part way through the war in what came to be known as the Iran-Contra Scandal.

After the September 11, 2001, attacks, the United States decided to “take out seven nations in five years starting with Iraq and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia and Sudan, and finishing off [with] Iran.” In 2002, George W. Bush declared that Iran was part of the “Axis of Evil” along with Iraq and North Korea. Although Iran was a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, Washington classified its nuclear industry, inherited from the Shah, as a potential nuclear weapons threat, and as a justification for coercive actions against it. In February 2026, the United States and Iran entered nuclear talks in Geneva, mediated by Oman. On February 27, Oman’s foreign minister announced that as a result of the talks Iran had agreed to degrade its stocks of nuclear material to “the lowest possible level” consistent with a commercial nuclear energy industry, while both Washington and Tehran exhibited optimism about the talks. A day later, the United States and Israel launched surprise AI-facilitated attacks on Iran that Trump later compared to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, assassinating the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and hitting a thousand targets in twenty-four hours, including the killing of at least 150 schoolgirls in the strike on the Minab school in Iran.

Washington underestimated the coherence of the Iranian state and society, with a new Supreme Leader being quickly chosen ensuring political continuity, and new military leaders taking the place of those assassinated. All this means that the key Strait of Hormuz remains under Iranian control. Attempts by the United States to force an opening of the Strait of Hormuz have all failed. Negotiations have been blocked by continuing hostilities on the part of the United States and Israel, the ending of which is Iran’s first condition for going forward.

The United States, lured by Israel, has entrapped itself in an imperialist war that it cannot win. There is no doubt that Iran has handed the United States and Israel a strategic defeat on the world stage, offering a powerful deterrence in defense of its sovereignty. A continuation of the war will have devastating economic consequences not only for the United States, Israel, and Iran, but also for the entire world, and could potentially induce a wider world war. Nevertheless, there is every sign that the United States is engaged in a “forever war,” even if direct hostilities were to cease for a time. An international movement for peace, encompassing a global struggle against imperialism, is therefore more essential than ever.

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Impermanent Extractivism

For more than two centuries, capitalism managed to establish its legitimacy not only through its extraordinary capacity to produce material abundance, drive technological innovation and sustainably increase productivity — albeit always within a framework of structural inequality — but, above all, because it succeeded in constructing a powerful collective experience of time. To such an extent that, as an economic system, it also represented a particular way of inhabiting the future in advance. Its true strength lay in the widely shared conviction that tomorrow would necessarily be better than the present. Even those suffering the deepest injustices could still harbour the hope that their children would live better lives, that future generations would enjoy greater levels of well-being, or that scientific progress would ultimately resolve humanity’s greatest problems. Capitalism did not merely organise the production of goods; it also organised the historical imagination. It conjured up a desirable and prosperous future, even if it was nothing more than a sinister mirage.

This dimension of impermanent projection is essential to understanding the profound transformation the system is undergoing in the early decades of the 21st century. What appears to be entering a crisis is not merely a particular economic, energy, or geopolitical model. What is beginning to crumble is the very impermanent framework which, for two hundred years, underpinned the legitimacy of the modern project, particularly from the second half of the 20th century onwards. But now, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, the future is ceasing to appear as the realm onto which collective hopes are projected, and is gradually becoming the dark space where all existential frustrations and every conceivable threat accumulate.

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Geocratia, the Paradigm that Pursues the Well-being of People and the Planet, Not the Market

Organising to save ourselves by saving the planet is the most important thing we will ever undertake in our lives; it is our last chance to have a future

From the moment I became aware of the planetary crisis, back in 2010, I began reflecting and imagining how we humans could live in harmony with nature. I was alarmed that, given the path we are currently on, it seems impossible for our species to remain within the planetary boundaries necessary for the reproduction and sustainability of life and health on our home, planet Earth. After much research and interaction with a community increasingly concerned about the planetary crisis, in 2020, I published a proposal to imagine and suggest how to abandon the current paradigm. It is about moving towards a vision that guarantees a dignified, pleasant and sustainable life for future generations by caring for Gaia, our planet's biosphere, to maintain the conditions necessary for the flourishing and conservation of all forms of life. Geocratia is a practical concept whose dialectic directly contrasts with the current market-driven paradigm; therefore, it must be concluded that it is anti-capitalist by nature. Five years later, after observing how those in absolute control of the reins of power insist on maintaining the same trajectory that ensures a high existential risk to humans and non-humans, I am reviewing and deepening the geocratic proposal. This is reinforced by commentary from colleagues and by new research published by a variety of authors, confirming that humanity's current trajectory is leading us straight to our final cliff. The first part situates us in the context in which we find ourselves, from a political, ecological, economic, and consumer perspective. The second part presents the proposal to transition to Geocratia in its symbiosis with the Gaia hypothesis, its structure and the practical way to implement it. It concludes by suggesting how to take the first step at the community level, raising awareness and forming citizen cells, the most basic and organic form of transitioning to Geocratia.

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Marx on the Circular Economy

O nce a niche idea, the circular economy has become a buzzword, driven by climate anxiety and by policymakers and business leaders keen to burnish their green credentials. It is pitched as a new business paradigm. Phrases like “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” are now widespread.

While the traditional “linear” business model runs on extraction → production → use → disposal, the circular economy promises something radically different. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation, its most prominent advocate, defines it as: “a system where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated…. [P]roducts and materials are kept in circulation through processes like maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting.”

Like much ecomodernist thinking, mainstream notions of the circular economy aim to reboot capitalist growth in this time of ecological crisis. They do not mention, discuss, or seek to overcome capitalism’s constitutive social relations—competitive accumulation and capital’s exploitation of labour—that accelerate the system’s ever-greater appropriation of nature. Rather, new business models are portrayed as delivering renewed growth through sustainability.

But, far from offering a new escape from capitalism’s assault on nature, Karl Marx—writing over 150 years ago—had already identified strategies of capitalist production that look uncannily like today’s notion of the circular economy. Such insights help locate circular economy discourse and practice in a longer trajectory of innovations under industrial capitalism.

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