Offshoring of highly racialized labor by the Occident to the so-called Third World—where subproletariat and quasi-precariat classes are aggregated for inexpensive, arduous manual work—is a continuous and violent process. At the same time, cognitive (immaterial) labor reproduces and reinforces exploitative relationships based on class, race, and gender in the Western world. Labor is presented as immaterial, though in fact it is racialized.

            Exploitation has violent, social, institutional, racialized, and class dimensions. Consequently, what are processes of emancipation for some are processes of subjugation for others, and must be viewed in relation to mechanisms of de/re/composition of capitalist reproduction in the post-Fordist regime of labor. Thus, millions of people are considered essentially obsolete in the global South.

            The European Union (EU) has created an entire subcategory of “personal household care workers”—primarily migrant women—not only from outside the EU, but also from EU states considered peripheral or underdeveloped. The result is a supply of unregistered, unprotected, and inexpensive labor in households of “former” Western Europe (Austria, where I have lived, is a prime example), allowing for emancipation of the white middle class. The word emancipation is of course tricky, as it is migrants without papers who make possible the “emancipation” of middle-class and upper-class women to both participate in the labor market and to have children.

            Governments, on behalf of their citizens (and those they transform into noncitizens), are taking dramatic decisions without any regard for the will of those affected. Similar processes are taking place in factories, offices, and cultural and educational institutions. Consequently, instead of valuing social relations, the logic of neoliberal governmentality requires only skills and a system of instructions.

            Sovereignty has also become a flexible concept—no longer dependent on simply spatial coercive territorialization, ghettoization, and gentrification, but also on the manipulation of the flux of capital. Citizenship is managed through a controlled, racialized selection of refugee and migrant movements, and by privileging the expansion of transnational corporations. The nation-states that are racist states are essentially mute when it comes to social justice and human rights, and have no apparent memory or response to the atrocities (colonialism, antisemitism, and the Holocaust) committed in their pasts.

            In the global capitalist mode of production, life itself is the primary source of the labor force. Our submission to the capitalist machine is through precariousness, marginality, and constant fear for our standards of living and the contemporary (im)possibility to adapt to fixed forms of labor. The precariousness of racialized life is connected with that of labor and is the central topic of both contemporary biopolitics and necropolitics. The brutal living conditions of refugees are directly connected to the history of Occidental colonialism and to current forms of violent dispossession and exploitation.

            Henrie Dennis, who studies art at the Academy of Fine Arts, stated in 2020 in the context of COVID-19:

            In this respect, Kirsten Forkert’s thoughts formulated in 2006—that we published in Ljubljana in 2007—on the contradictions between art (institutions) and the political climate are compelling. Forkert maintained that changes that were taking place in the institutions of art had “a lot to do with art’s value as a commodity as well as with the role of the artist concerning another figure, the white-collar professional. They are at once symptom and response to certain political and economic shifts.”¹ This managerial dimension, the profit motive, and the forces of modernization in capitalist structures, propounded by Olivier Marbœuf and referenced by Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla, “emphasizes the fact that by reifying and quickly capitalising on the ‘Other,’ contemporary art in its Western form empties the transformational strength of the decolonial gesture, by making its critical understanding no longer an operation capable of affecting the political and social order, but a mere category in the economy of knowledge.”²

            Frank B. Wilderson III, writing in 2010, detects a similar process at play in the 1960s and 1970s, with the Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO)³ aimed against the Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Army, that was then extended into the twenty-first century when “ …the irreconcilable demands embodied in the ‘Savage’ and the Slave are being smashed by the two stone-crushers of sheer force and liberal Humanist discourses such as ‘access to institutionality,’ ‘meritocracy,’ ‘multiculturalism,’ and ‘diversity’—discourses that proliferate exponentially across the political, academic, and cinematic landscapes.”⁴

            In this context, a recent analysis of the devastating processes of retailoring and veiling a lust for art, culture, history, and politics in neoliberal necrocapitalism (if capitalism does not self-destruct along the way) was elaborated in a talk between Paul Gilroy and Nikhil Pal Singh. Singh stated:

En este contexto, Paul Gilroy y Nikhil Pal Singh elaboraron durante una conversación un análisis reciente de los devastadores procesos de readaptación y ocultación de un deseo de arte, cultura, historia y política en el necrocapitalismo neoliberal (si el capitalismo no se autodestruye en el camino). Singh decía:

            The major pillars of the Western capitalist neoliberal global regimes present intensified brutal processes of racialization of bodies, peoples, and communities that are at the same time instrumentalized and subjugated economically, politically, and epistemically. Anne McClintock in her analysis of British colonialism maintains that “race, gender and class are not distinct realms of experience, existing in splendid isolation from each other, nor can they be simply yoked together retrospectively like armatures of Lego. Rather, they come into existence in and through relation to each other.”⁶

            Today, profit and privatization are comprehensive and evident in virtually all aspects of society (vast areas of formerly public space, institutions, education, history, the social, electricity, water, etc.). The official institutions of art—public, semipublic, and semiprivate conglomerates or repositories of money and philanthropy—are inextricably connected to power structures and the regimes of the national or international interests operating in the spaces they serve. These are hegemonic power structures, products of modernist times closely connected to capitalism and its ordering of global institutional dogma that are regimes of normativized patriarchal, heteronormative, and colonial credos. At present, these institutions are forced to rethink their normativism through “ethical curation” or “identity-based curating,” in response to powerful movements such as Black Lives Matter or Me Too.

            In the 1990s, Partha Chatterjee proposed a shift, stating that decolonization must include critique within its struggle. (I would say, the subversion of what he rightly termed the “false essentialism of home/world, spiritual/material, and feminine/masculine propagated by the nationalist ideology.”⁷)

            What could be the result of such a shift? What Freya Schiwy,⁸ quoting numerous scholars, stated as a fact—namely, that the subaltern are capable of punching Western colonial knowledge in the face by making it evident that they are not only protagonists (or objects of this process), but are already “viewers” (from the outside) of this story. (The Zapatistas are a very good example.) This affects radically representational politics and strategies of intervention of art in the social domain. On the one hand, it would be important to employ new media technology in order to strengthen new modes of learning, and on the other, to produce a critique of the history of colonization, exploitation, and coercion.