1 ANDEAN COSMOLOGIES, DECOLONIALITY, CAPITALIST CRISES AND JUSTIFICATION: A COMMENTARY Fernando Leiva “Across the Western world, each one of us is faced with an idea – an abstract concept that is so distant that it almost seems non- existent. It’s hidden behind a mind-numbing rhetoric of reassurance and consumerism, the necessities of war and the fulfilling nature of obedience. But sometimes, as if in the corner of your eye, you see through this façade. You capture a moment of clarity and self-reflection and you hesitate, and then realize that the world narrative that we are given as true could not be any further from the truth. “ ---Kai Newman, Adbusters, May/June 2014 If Andean Cosmologies and the “decolonial option” are to nurture solutions to the current civilizational crisis, we cannot just proclaim what has become increasingly evident --- the shortcomings of Eurocentric knowledge and exhaustion of one its most powerful offshoots, the tenets of political and economic liberalism which until recently provided the legitimizing vocabulary for the contemporary global capitalist order. Just as the “in-betweeness” of Lautaro 1 and Jose Gabriel Condorcanqui, 2 allowed them in centuries past to rebel against the colonial system of exploitation and domination that educated them, our own presence in the master’s house must lead our research to explore and better comprehend Euro-US-centric reactions to two inter-related aspects of contemporary capitalism: • How it responds and takes advantage of critique and crises; and • How it persuasively appeals to the lived experience of individuals to justify its existence. Examination of each of these two aspects allows us to gauge the ever-changing ability of the“colonial matrix of power” to respond -- at least at the level of social imaginaries and envisioned futures-- 3 to the challenges posed by indigenous cosmovisions, oppositional social movements, and practioners of decoloniality. 1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lautaro 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Túpac_Amaru_II 3 For response at the level of imperial military doctrine, see the results of the joint Wall Street – US Naval War College project, reflected in Thomas P. M Barnett’s The Pentagon’s New Map (Berkley Trade, 2005). See his website http://thomaspmbarnett.squarespace.com