Linda Quiquivix argues that global capital has replaced the nation-state as the true sovereign, waging a “Fourth World War” against land, life, and alternative models. Drawing on Zapatista Maya analysis, she exposes capital as a planetary system of domination and advocates for resistance through communal land, autonomy, and life-sustaining practices that refuse both capital’s reproduction and scenarios that would consider the state model as potentially emancipative.
Accepting the state as the starting point for politics demands assuming the Earth can be treated as an enemy without consequence. Many decolonial movements at the end of the Second World War (1939–1945) adopted the nation-state as a strategy for self-determination, transferring colonial rule to national rule and keeping intact the assumption of state rule: domination over the land and war against anything that gets in the way. In the ensuing decades, the national project sought to homogenize a bordered territorial container into a singular culture, annihilating difference, and criminalizing autonomy. And yet, by the end of the badly named Cold War (1945–1991), more helpfully understood as the Third World War, global capital came to openly dictate the conditions under which nation-states can govern and develop, throwing the “nation” part of the equation into question.
The Indigenous Maya land defenders of the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, Mexico, may offer one of the most incisive frameworks for understanding this transformation, which they call the Fourth World War.
Since the 1990s, they have argued that we are in the midst of a planetary war where capital functions as the global sovereign, reducing nation-states to administrative units of territory on capital’s behalf.
In recent analyses, they offer the metaphor of the capitalist hydra, a multi-headed monster that grows a new head each time one of its old ones is attacked, often a head of our own desires. As in the Greek myth, the beast cannot be defeated solely by targeting its heads; rather, we must identify what allows the beast to live and reproduce: What is its air? What is its fuel? What is its habitat?
That is, resistance to capital won’t be effective by merely fighting the hydra; it will mean starving it, disengaging it, no longer being dependent on it. Resistance to capital will mean creating and defending forms of life that ward off capital’s own reproduction. Not reproducing capital means land must be nurtured rather than owned, economies must be cooperative rather than competitive, justice must be transformative rather than punitive, agriculture must be regenerative rather than extractive, housing must be a right rather than a privilege. These practices are already alive in the pockets of resistance to capital around the globe, many Indigenous, many urban, many rural, many undocumented, many unrecognized by the state, many under attack by the nation-state.
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In 1995, one year into the Maya uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, led by the Zapatista Army for National Liberation (EZLN), a leaked memo from Chase Manhattan Bank to its Emerging Markets Group provided a “political update” on how the land defenders were affecting investor confidence. “The [Mexican] government will need to eliminate the Zapatistas to demonstrate their effective control of the national territory and of security policy,” the memo read. It also mentioned that while Mexico’s newly elected president at the time was seeking a diplomatic solution with the Maya rebels, a peaceful resolution was “difficult to imagine.”
While the financial firm admitted the leaked memo was authentic, it denied it was official bank policy. Still, days after its initial distribution and less than two months after assuming the presidency, Mexico’s new head of state would unexpectedly issue arrest warrants for the Zapatista leadership, accuse the EZLN of terrorism, and order a major military operation in Zapatista-influenced zones. The action violated an existing ceasefire framework and ignited widespread debate in the country and abroad over the relationship between financial markets and national sovereignty.
In 1997, the EZLN would circulate their own analysis on the relationship between financial markets and national sovereignty. In a communique entitled, Seven Loose Pieces of the Global Jigsaw Puzzle, the EZLN spokesperson at the time, Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos, argued that with the fall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s and the globalization of capital that followed, “the financial markets imposed their laws and precepts on the entire planet.” In this Fourth World War, global capital (“the son”) had “devoured” national capital (“the father”) in a blow “so brutal and definitive that Nation-States don’t have the necessary strength to oppose the action of international markets that transgress the interests of citizens and governments.”
Seven Loose Pieces described key characteristics of this war, beginning with a monetary sign as the first piece, symbolizing the concentration of financial wealth and the distribution of poverty. The second piece, a triangle, represented a pyramid where those at the top live by exploiting those at the bottom. The third, a circle, traced migration as a wandering nightmare following the destruction and depopulation of land-based communities and their territories. The fourth, a rectangle, reflected a mirror image between the illegal and the legal, between organized crime and financial institutions. The fifth, a pentagon, pointed to how national armies and local police operate as occupation forces on behalf of investor confidence. The sixth, a scribble for its irrationality, showed how national policies bend to the dictates of a global financial giant. The seventh loose piece of the global jigsaw puzzle they described as a pocket, representing a new geography of resistance: communities networked around the world, inheritors of the resistances that have existed even before capital’s first day.
For the Zapatistas, many more loose pieces can be discussed, including the media, culture, pollution, and pandemics, but seven were already enough in the 1990s for one to realize that “after drawing, coloring, and cutting them out… it is impossible to put them together.” Global capital was already fragmenting the world it was supposed to unite. But unity has never been the primary goal of capital.
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When we speak about capital, we are speaking not merely about money but about a social relation. Karl Marx also taught that capital organizes societies according to a single commandment: M → M′ (Capital, Vol. 1, 1867), where money must become more money, and it doesn’t matter how. He described it as the “general formula for capital”, where money invested must become more than it was before. It is the difference between capital and mere money: capital must keep expanding.
Land defenders teach us it is as simple and as terrifying as the fact that capital is war, that capital can only achieve its objectives through war. Capital is about destroying the ability to be different, to live otherwise; the imposition of one way and the destruction of all other ways; a world where only one world can fit. And just as land defenders teach us that capital is war, they also teach that global capital means global war. If capital’s only rule is its own endless expansion, then life in a capitalist world must be subordinated on behalf of this goal.
But it is life, not capital, that has the power to reproduce itself. Before capital could be born, the primary means of reproduction first had to be enslaved. And because it is life, not capital, that has the power to reproduce itself, capital must continually capture the energy of life’s reproduction. This process is land-based and is often called “primary accumulation,” a polite way of saying the “enslavement of the Earth.” In the case of Europe, primary accumulation is called “enclosures,” which sounds like a mere act of putting up a fence. In the case of non-Europe, primary accumulation is called “colonialism,” a polite way of saying genocide.
In every case around the globe, treating the Earth as property has meant the death and destruction of those considered useless, who resist, who get in the way.
Those whose worlds are destroyed become refugees, migrating toward capital, hoping to survive with nothing to sell but themselves, hoping to become waged workers alongside everybody else. They compete with others much like themselves, wishing to become useful to capital’s reproduction, stemming from the hope that they, their children, and their grandchildren may be allowed to survive. A future where nobody is able to remember the land is a future useful to capital’s reproduction. When everybody is taught to live for the reproduction of capital, the same dream becomes everybody’s dream: getting some money to turn it into more money, M → M′, and it doesn’t matter how. When nobody can remember they are part of the land, they desire a life closer to capital than to the land.
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If enslaving the Earth was merely an act of putting up a fence, nobody would have needed Columbus and Them. Their first invasion of the Caribbean established the foundation for the “global plantation,” as the EZLN’s current spokesperson, Subcomandante Insurgente Moises describes the situation today. Upon Columbus’ return to Europe, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires established the first global border between them so that they wouldn’t fight over the right to dominate the new territories. The partition established a relative peace between the invaders, who gazed at the Earth as if they were above in order to launch war on the land’s defenders down below. The global plantation thus began as a partitioning of land overseen by the mercenaries and missionaries of the European empires, called “viceroyalties” by Portugal and Spain and “colonies” by the others. This partition logic soon boomeranged back to Europe, where plantations became called “nation-states,” bounded containers of homogenous space where only one way of being was allowed to exist at the expense of the Europe from below.
The nation-state was a new invention even for Europe before it was forced on the former colonies following the Second World War, back when Italy and Germany as nation-states were not even 100 years old. Almost as soon as Germany had been invented in 1871, it hosted a conference among the European powers to help correct Germany’s imperial shortcomings by partitioning Africa. During the 1884–1885 Congo Conference, as it became called, the European powers hung a map of Africa on the wall in Berlin to peacefully negotiate borders between each other, granting King Leopold II of Belgium the Congo as his personal plantation. The Scramble for Africa lasted decades, with allotments ultimately hinging on who could demonstrate their effective violence on Africans, as the Germans did against the Ovaherero and Nama peoples, especially between 1904–1908, in the plantation called German Southwest Africa back then and called the nation-state of Namibia today.
It took decades for the empires to finish their partitioning phase of Africa, ending at around 1914 when they could demonstrate their domination of 90% of the continent. It was the beginning of the First World War (1914–1918), the time Germany joined a crumbling Ottoman Empire against the British and the French, who were secretly partitioning between them on a map the future of the Ottoman territories. By then, the term “colonies” was no longer preferred language, so they labeled their new plantations “mandates” instead. Between 15–20 million people were killed before the Ottoman Empire would be dismantled and Germany was forced to pay reparations.
Germany sought its revenge in the Second World War in 1939 by repartitioning Europe in its favor. It lost in 1945, between 70–85 million lives perished, and debates over self-determination would be moved to the halls of the United Nations that same year. The institution, founded by the United States, dismantled legal colonization on behalf of national capital, and Europe’s former colonies and mandates became called nation-states upon acceptance at the United Nations. Theoretically each member state was granted the right to their own sovereignty, economy, and the monopoly on the use of violence within their bounded containers of the Earth, within the property of a so-called nation.
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Nobody at the United Nations will admit the Third World War began as soon as the Second World War ended, as soon as the United States dropped nuclear bombs on the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Between 1945–1991, the Third World War consisted of coups, proxy wars, insurgencies, famines, and political repressions while the United States and the Soviet Union raced to prove how many times they could each destroy the Earth with nuclear bombs. The world’s nation-states were forced to pick a side between the vision of the United States and the vision of the Soviet Union, between those who would get to enslave the Earth on behalf of free-market capital or on behalf of state-led capital. So that the question could be resolved, over 20 million lives would perish from direct violence or disease and hunger.
According to the EZLN, if the Third World War was defined by the nuclear bomb, the Fourth World War is defined by the financial bomb. Unlike the nuclear bomb, financial bombs can cause massive destruction and depopulation while leaving infrastructure intact, making it easier for the reconstruction and reordering that is to come. Implanted into national economies, financial bombs destroy the material basis for national sovereignty, dictate the actions of nation-states, and depopulate entire territories that get in the way of securing pipelines, transport routes, mines, and property rights.
If the Third World War was defined by national sovereignty, the Fourth World War is defined by capital as the global sovereign. The welfare function of the nation-state has eroded in favor of securing investor confidence, and the nation is left to exist only in ritual and imagination. Still, the state’s monopoly on the use of violence remains useful, placed at the service of investor confidence. If the Third World War was defined by wars between nations, the Fourth World War is defined by wars between capital and anything that gets in its way: languages, economies, and entire worlds are eliminated to create a singular global market. And it doesn’t matter how.
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As is their regular practice of inviting the world to share how we’re resisting in our different corners of Earth, in 2015, the Zapatistas convoked a seminar in Chiapas entitled “Critical Thought in the Face of the Capitalist Hydra” placing at the forefront the framework of collapse, which they call “the storm.” Analysts were invited to recognize their roles as sentinels, watchful guardians tasked with observing the enemy and reporting back on its shifts in strategies and transformations. It was a call for our own vigilance and recognition that even well-informed analysts can become overwhelmed in a collapsing world, falling into what the Zapatistas refer to as the “sentinel’s syndrome,” a phenomenon they’ve observed within their own ranks. When sentinels tasked with observing a changing enemy yet see the same image in a loop in their conscious perception, they have fallen into the sentinel syndrome. When analysts report that capital is doing the same today as it was doing 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, they cause us to miss how capital itself has transformed and how our resistances must transform accordingly. By focusing only on the faces of capital rather than also on its logic and practice, we can be manipulated into reproducing capital rather than resisting it.
In a context where nation-states are mere administrators of global capital, we can read progressive governments as examples of the hydra’s new heads, often missed when analysts focus only on faces, identity, and symbolism. Mexico’s progressive presidents, for example, Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his successor Claudia Sheinbaum, have been able to expand capital throughout the country at a scale that previous administrations were unable to dream of. Their megaprojects, such as the badly named Maya Train and the rural development project Sembrando Vida (“Sowing Life”), are framed as progressive initiatives, yet in practice they displace, depopulate, and destroy land-based communities by deepening extractive logics, reorganizing territory for markets, and partitioning common lands as private property.
While these progressive administrations engage in performative consultations, there is no meaningful consent. Instead, what follows is environmental destruction, militarization, and the erosion of communal land relations and autonomy, exposing a central contradiction: even when spoken in the language of social justice and national sovereignty, development remains tethered to global capital.
Accordingly, land defenders are seen as obstacles to be managed and annihilated by the state and its paramilitaries rather than as political subjects shaping their own futures.
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Sembrando Vida has especially increased the violence against the Zapatista communities since López Obrador entered office and encroached on the lands they liberated in 1994. Officially marketed as reducing rural poverty and reforestation to fight climate change, and the program provides monthly cash stipends and assistance to small-scale farmers in exchange for cultivating designated plots. However, the monthly stipend is only applicable to land that has a private property title in a context where common lands have been defended for more than 500 years. The program thus incentivizes violence between communities and within families.
As Subcomandante Insurgente Moises illustrated in December 2023 in a communique entitled “The Common and Non-Property”, in order to receive the monthly stipend, “children fight to the death against parents” to title the land. The land is then put up for collateral for a loan and is lost to the bank. “Now that land belongs to the person who has the paper,” he expanded, “So he murdered his father for a paper he no longer has. And then he has to find the payment to buy the paper again” (“The Common and the Non-Property,” 2023).
In the same communique, the Zapatistas shared their new strategic orientation. Centered on creating land as “the common”, a form of non-property departing from dominant property regimes, they resist classifying the land as private property, meaning that nobody owns the land with titles or papers. Instead, the land is cared for and worked collectively by community members and their neighbors, Zapatistas and non-Zapatistas alike, respecting differences across political affiliation, religion, gender, and origin with a common agreement: land use without sale, exploitation by companies, or incorporation into capitalist markets. It is a strategy to disengage the hydra and deprive it of its habitat.
More than a strategy to merely shelter, they are organizing for the day after the storm by fortifying a “material base” rooted in the defense of life, in a life that knows how to live without capital, how to build a house without capital, how to heal without capital, how to make art without capital, how to eat without capital. Thus, their path of resistance in the context of global war is both old and new, “the old new road,” as they put it. They are practices of seeking balance rather than inequity and cultivation rather than accumulation, practices of defending the Earth as if we were defending our own bodies. ■