Colonialidad del Poder y Clasi? cacion Social

Fourteen ninety-two. That year gets remembered as discovery. Aníbal Quijano wants you to remember it differently — as invention. Not the invention of a continent, but the invention of a category. Race, as an organizing principle of global power, did not exist before that moment. And if it was invented, Quijano argues, then everything we think we know about how capitalism works needs to be rebuilt from the ground up. That is the claim at the center of his landmark paper, "Colonialidad del Poder y Clasificación Social" — Coloniality of Power and Social Classification. It is a demanding piece of work. But its central argument is precise: race was born in America, capitalism was born with it, and the two have been structurally inseparable ever since. Start with the historical claim. Quijano is careful here. He is not making a loose metaphor about prejudice or cultural bias. He is making a specific structural argument: the use of color as a primary social classifier has barely five hundred years — "apenas 500 años." It appears in the record of power relations with the European conquest of the Americas and nowhere before. Before that moment, phenotypic markers such as skin color, hair, and eye shape existed, obviously. What did not exist was a global system in which those markers determined who labored under what conditions, who owned what, and whose knowledge counted as knowledge. Quijano identifies two axes around which colonial power organized itself from the start. The first was control of labor and natural resources — who produced and who extracted the benefit. The second was control of sex and biological reproduction, in function of property. Race was plugged into both of these axes simultaneously. It became the tool that allocated populations across structures of exploitation and domination, sorting who was consigned to slavery, who to servitude, and who to waged work. Quijano is emphatic that the phenotypic markers invoked by race have no necessary consequence for a person's biological capacities. Their social significance is entirely the product of contested historical processes. The category itself — race — was, in his words, established and reproduced as the basic form of universal social classification in world capitalism. This is where Quijano introduces his central theoretical concept: colonialidad del poder, the coloniality of power. And the first thing he wants the listener to understand is what it is not. It is not colonialism. Colonialism, as a formal political arrangement — empire, territory, direct administration — did end, more or less, through the decolonization movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Coloniality did not end. It is the matrix, the underlying pattern of classification and domination, that persisted inside nation-states long after the formal imperial arrangements dissolved. Quijano proposes thinking in terms of a colonial center and a colonial periphery — not as geography, but as a pattern of power that continues to organize the world. The coloniality of power works primarily through naturalization. It takes historically produced categories — race and gender — and makes them appear as biological givens, as features of the natural world rather than products of political conflict. Domination, Quijano argues, is the sine qua non of exploitation: you cannot extract surplus value on a global scale without a legitimating story about why certain populations are suited to certain conditions. That story, under the modern capitalist order, has always been racial. The body becomes the central site — race and gender take material form in bodies, labor consumes bodies, punishment and hunger strike bodies. Quijano calls corporeality the decisive level of power relations. He traces three mutually articulated axes that structure global social classification: work, race, and gender. They do not operate independently. In the European center, wage labor became the structurally dominant relation, and that wage relation has been, demographically, white. But globally, waged labor has always been the least extended form. Across the colonial periphery, slavery, servitude, simple commodity production, and reciprocity were often dominant — and they were organized under capital's global logic while being racially assigned. The result is not a unified mode of production but a hierarchical assembly of different forms of labor, classified by race, extracting surplus for the benefit of the center. Now here is where Quijano's argument becomes a direct intellectual confrontation. The dominant tradition for analyzing this kind of exploitation is historical materialism — Marxist class theory. And Quijano's assessment is precise: historical materialism got something right, and it got something importantly wrong. What it got right is that exploitation is real, that labor is central, and that control over production is a decisive axis of power. What it got wrong is that it reduced all power to that single axis. Quijano traces the lineage. The notion of social class entered modern thought through a naturalist, taxonomic logic — borrowed from Linnaean botany, transferred to social analysis by the Saint-Simonians in their Exposition de la Doctrine of eighteen twenty-eight and eighteen twenty-nine. Marx pushed back against the most mechanical versions of this: in texts like The Eighteenth Brumaire, he showed classes as historically produced, coexisting in multiplicity, not as fixed structural slots. But Marx, Quijano argues, never fully escaped the Eurocentric matrix. And the Marxism that followed — especially as codified into Marxism-Leninism and later hybridized with structuralism — rigidified a reductionist version of class that saw everything else as derivative of the economic base. The practical consequence is stark. Race and gender, in this framework, are not structural forces. They are treated as add-ons, superstructural reflections of economic relations, or as natural differences that precede analysis. Non-wage forms of labor in the colonial periphery — slavery and servitude — were interpreted as pre-capitalist, as the past rather than as constitutive of the present. The theory was built in and for Europe, exported globally, and then consistently failed to see what the coloniality of power was doing in the places where it mattered most. Quijano's alternative begins with the concept he calls a totalidad histórico-social — a heterogeneous historical totality. This is the move that replaces class with a more adequate analytical frame. The idea is this: social structure is a real totality, not just a contingent scatter of interactions. But it is not an organic whole governed by a single logic. It is built from elements with genuinely different histories — wage labor, slavery, servitude, small commodity production, and reciprocity — that coexist and are articulated together under capitalism. The whole does not determine each part in a unilineal chain. Instead, there are axes of articulation — pivots around which the diverse elements are linked. Under the modern colonial pattern, that pivot is the combined control of work and authority, organized through the coloniality of power. This matters because it changes what you look for. An organic model asks: what single logic governs everything? A postmodern model says: there is no totality to find. Quijano says both of those moves fail, for opposite reasons. The organic model imposes a false unity and erases heterogeneity. The postmodern denial of totality tends, quietly, to become a denial of societal power itself — if everything is local and contingent, then it makes no sense to locate the structural levers that would transform the whole. Quijano insists those levers are real. And the body is where they operate most concretely. What he proposes, finally, is a historical theory of social classification — one that tracks the long-term, conflictive processes through which populations dispute control over the basic domains of social existence: work, natural resources, sex, subjectivity, and authority. Classification is the historical inscription of power. It is not a neutral sorting; it is domination written into categories. Identities — racial, national, ethnic, gendered — are not pre-given. They emerge through histories of conflict and subjectification, through the struggle over classification itself. The political stakes follow directly. If the naturalization of race and gender is a central mechanism of domination, then decolonization cannot stop at institutional reform. Quijano calls for what he terms la socialización radical del poder — the radical socialization of power — returning direct control over the basic instances of social existence to the people themselves. Work, sex, subjectivity, and authority: these must be wrested from the matrix of coloniality, not just redistributed within it. And that brings you back to fourteen ninety-two. If race was produced historically — if it was invented at a specific moment, for specific purposes, as part of a specific global order — then it is not ontological. It is not written into the structure of the universe or the biology of bodies. It was made. Which means, Quijano implies, it can be unmade. That is the quiet confidence underneath all the structural analysis. The architecture of domination has a date of construction. It can, in principle, be demolished. This lecture was created by ennepō. Go to https://ennepo.ai to Discover, Create and Follow the latest research in your field. Read when you can. Listen when you want to.