One of the most obvious yet least visible aspects is that all of history—even postcolonial history, which claimed to be revisionist—views the reality of the Americas, and even of the world, as an almost linear continuation of European history, when in fact European history has been merely one chapter in a voluminous book—and, in our case, a book filled with pages and chapters reflecting the vast diversity and richness of the American peoples.
American history, right down to its very names, is written, learned, and repeated through European facts and fantasies, as if the populous peoples of this continent—which spans the two poles of the planet—had never existed, or as if they were irrelevant to the thought, sensibilities, and customs of modern peoples, much like a herd of buffalo might be.
Our contemporary world is framed by a global power system called (1) capitalism, which hijacked its counter-narrative, (2) democracy, and fought its most direct adversary, (3) socialism. Both democracy and socialism were Native American systems—if indeed they were two distinct systems and not simply two European ways of understanding the same reality. The federalist system was also an indigenous invention, centuries before it was even conceived by Europeans in the Americas.
As we analyzed in Moscas en la telaraña, the global dominance of capitalism—beginning with the massive piracy of the East India Company and all private companies from 1600 onward (the older siblings of the “privateers,” later called “pirates”)—was due to its power of dispossession and imposition. Capitalism did not arise with the globalization of piracy, but it survived and developed thanks to the establishment of European imperialism—in particular, Anglo-Saxon imperialism based on the roots of capitalism: English privatization and the Dutch stock financial system.
This enrichment through the plunder of more developed societies, such as India and the American nations (Africa and China would fall shortly thereafter), provided the nascent system with an inexhaustible source of resources, which it invested in more weapons and means of subjugation, plunder, and enslavement of what its fanatical mindset perceived as disposable masses within its borders, and as inferior races or those not chosen by God, outside those borders. Like any system, capitalism expanded into every corner of societies and the world, from new weapons of war and financial institutions to its media of propaganda and its religious and cultural fanaticism.
More than a system of production, capitalism is a system of plunder, expropriation, and accumulation that can only survive as long as it remains in perpetual growth. It is no coincidence that even today the success of any country is measured by its annual GDP growth—something that indigenous nations criticized as a European disease, as the source of international wars, fratricidal conflicts, oppression, and unhappiness. Naturally, in this process of extracting value from others, production was often increased—just as the forced labor of slaves was among the most productive and generated the greatest accumulation of capital in the banks of Louisiana.
The process of power accumulation by elites has always stemmed from abstraction—from faith in something invisible like a god, or the panoptic gaze of Caesar or the Pope that spanned vast territories of Europe, Africa, and Asia, to the radicalization of that abstraction with the birth of capitalism in the virtual reality of finance.
In early societies, the ruling classes and the state concentrated this value through the most basic necessity: food. It is no coincidence that this power specialized in the administration of grains, from rice in Asia and wheat in Eurasia to corn in the Americas and, to a lesser extent, millet in Africa.
Grains were more durable and easier to transport than meat, milk, or squash. They were often demanded as tax payments from the productive classes. Later, that value was replaced by something more durable and more abstract: the value of precious metals, such as gold and silver. From then on, it became possible to accumulate in a small chest the equivalent of tons of grain and any other good—including services and even the humans who provided those services. With the creation of money, that exchange value rose to a higher level of abstraction and multiplied with the birth of capitalism in the 17th century. But the process of abstraction—and, at the same time, the concentration of power and the untouchability of that power—was based on its high degree of abstraction: production became separated from the economy; the economy became separated from finance; finance became separated from precious metals, such as gold and silver—and, more recently, even from paper money.
This process (the administration and distribution of surpluses) has a more complex history, and capitalism is merely a brief moment in history, currently in a state of decay. In fact, social systems opposed to capitalism have been the norm for thousands of years and across the globe. Private property as a form of speculation and wealth accumulation is, rather, a historical exception. So, too, is the awareness of its implications. [1]
Capitalist private property (the replacement of use value with exchange value) is the most important invention of the last five centuries. But, since nothing in history is created from scratch, this radical and paranoid form of private property represented a return to—and, above all, a radicalization of—the private property of Ancient Rome and the private property restricted to the nobility of the Middle Ages. In principle, the introduction of monetary, symbolic, abstract capital during the Renaissance was a step toward a precarious form of democratization of property and social mobility. Like everything else, it was soon hijacked by the most powerful minority: an increasingly smaller minority with an ever-greater accumulation of capital and power—economic, financial, political, media, cultural, and moral. This has led to our current neo-feudalism.[i]
The fear of losing private ownership of land and slaves in ancient Rome led to a sharp increase in punitive forces (which were nonexistent in complex Native American societies, such as police and armies) and, simultaneously, to the desire and need for theft—the appropriation of what was desired and forbidden. In societies where neither private property existed as a speculative asset nor a culture of social value based on the accumulation of that form of individual property, the incentives for theft and murder were lower. Social relationships of solidarity defined the individual; not individualism.
Paradoxically, in the new capitalist system, one of the central dogmas would be that of freedom. Even today, violence and repression are supported and promoted in the name of freedom, because freedom is linked to the power of private property held by a minority. Freedom is a substitute for the security of accumulation. The capitalist conception of freedom is limited to the right to private property. Similarly, that right becomes legally universal when, in practice, it ceases to be so. As Anatole France observed at the end of the 19th century, “the law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich and the poor alike from sleeping under bridges, begging in the streets, and stealing bread.” But it is not just about the law, which is the expression of the powerful. It is also about ideas, as Marx put it: “the dominant ideas of a society are the ideas of the ruling class.” Not just ideas. It is also about culture and the dominant psychology. Since there is almost no room for any other form of property (public property is, to a large extent, controlled by the ruling classes), even the poorest individuals must defend with their lives the right to possess the tiny fraction of capital they have left after a lifetime of saving the scraps left over from their labor. No one in their right mind would give away all their savings or their small home to others poorer than themselves, only to plunge themselves and their family even further down that ladder of dehumanizing competition. To justify this, one must resort not only to the truth that “what has been obtained is the result of a lifetime of effort,” but also to the criminalization of those further down the ladder who threaten to take a share of the remnants of the invisible plunder from those at the top—whether through political reform or through direct, illegal theft by poor criminals.
Ever since I was a child, I’ve heard politicians in power assert that, throughout history, social classes have always existed (on this point they agreed with Marx)—the rich and the poor—and that no one can change that. Well, in every society people were born and died, just as they do now, but what does that mean? What matters is the difference, which is the only thing a social system can produce. For now, death is inevitable, for socialists and capitalists alike. In some societies, social differences were obscene; in others, they were much more balanced. For a politician, a fatalistic observation is merely a stance in favor of the status quo—which, in historical reality, always means the radicalization of social differences. For others, such as the author of these words, the fairest political option is the democratization of individual freedom through socioeconomic and cultural balance. Equality among equals, as Aristotle understood justice—but equality for all, not just for some.
In this book, we will focus on what we can understand as an alternative to capitalism or, as a classical Marxist would call it, the stages that transcend capitalism. The curious thing is that this progressive (and progressive-minded) model of history—characteristic of the modern Western tradition, according to which the best lies in the future—has its roots not only in fifteenth-century humanism but, paradoxically, in the indigenous experiences of the Americas—that is, in the past, which Marxists themselves and other nineteenth-century anthropologists considered part of a primitive stage of history.
Starting from this dominant system—imperial capitalism—we will focus on its counter-narrative: democracy.[2] But not what that entity called the “West” termed democracy—a legacy of Greek politics—but rather a very different kind of democracy: a real democracy, as understood and practiced by Native Americans in various regions of the bipolar continent. In particular, we will focus on the Native peoples of North America, such as the Iroquois Confederacy, due to their direct impact on the European counter-narrative since the 17th century.
When capitalism emerged in 16th-century England, it set out to conquer the world and, almost simultaneously and as a consequence of its own actions, discovered in the Americas a different way of being—an opposing, democratic way. This different way of being, of thinking, and of feeling—the polar opposite of the new Europe, revolutionized by the new dogmas of private property and the Protestant ethic—was profoundly impacted by the conquered peoples. At the time, it did not know what to do with such a seductive alternative that was difficult to demonize—until it decided to co-opt it.
Today, in the second decade of the 21st century, I do not see what new economic, political, and cultural movement could overcome the current level of misery unless it resembles North American societies such as the Iroquois: communal, egalitarian, without unchecked accumulation or universal private property—that is, a system that is radically freer, more democratic, and less warlike. In other words, I see no way out of the grave existential problems facing the human species—problems created by capitalism—without the end of capitalism.
One of the central questions of this book is: Why did the Old World adopt (and manipulate) a political system that, first, was foreign to it and, second, was incompatible with its caste system and the capitalist system itself? At a historical moment like ours, when the supposed champions of democracy, freedom, and equality of gender and race are beginning to abandon all these principles and return to the oldest ones of the European Middle Ages—now under the name of the Dark Enlightenment—it is crucial to ask ourselves and understand the true origin of democracy. This is what we attempt to do in this book, and we will explore it in greater depth in the following chapters. But first, we must better inform ourselves about the historical context of the phenomenon we are trying to understand.
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This study does not seek to sanctify any indigenous system nor to propose it as a universal model or as a panacea for all current problems. Nor does it aim to provide a balanced and neutral view of their reality, including the wars and massacres committed by indigenous peoples at various points in their millennia-long history. To describe just how evil the dispossessed and massacred peoples were (backward, cruel, savage, terrorists), there have always been—and still are—the media, the film industry, digital algorithms, national myths in official education, and the hegemonic culture in general.
A review of history does not focus on determining that some were good and others were bad, as in a soap opera. That is what official history and patriotic history do. We can say, however, that the “good” Westerners had no equal in criminal brutality, greed, dispossession, and death on an industrial scale. So it seems to me a most healthy exercise to turn official history on its head by exposing the buried facts or, as Chomsky once told me, “rescuing the history that the victors threw away.”
The criticism of the so-called “noble savage”—used to delegitimize dangerous, committed revisionist intellectuals (a prime example being the attacks on Eduardo Galeano)—was a simplification—revived from the 18th century—by reactionary writers, some of whom were mercenaries, others staunchly committed and acting pro bono. Many of them received assistance from the CIA, whether they knew it or not.
What remains important is whether what is presented in this book is true or false; whether it is valid or absurd. The fact that it contains errors is not open to debate—nor does it concern the author.
From a civilizational perspective, I believe that the origin of indigenous democracy—indigenous communism—must be studied more deeply and taken more seriously as an alternative to post-capitalism, especially when, at the heart of the dominant liberal democracies and the decadent empires of Europe and the United States, the value of any form of democracy is beginning to be questioned, and a return to European monarchies—with a touch of neo-feudalism, technomessianism, and Silicon Valley—is being promoted by economic and corporate powers that no longer derive the desired returns from those democracies.
[1] Later on, we will see Sir Thomas More himself explained, in 1516, through one of his characters in Utopia (the perfect island inhabited by natives in the newly discovered New World): “Thus I do fully persuade myself, that no equal and just distribution of things can be made, nor that perfect wealth shall ever be among men, unless this propriety be exiled and banished” (“Thus, I am fully convinced that no equal and just distribution of things can be made, nor that perfect wealth will ever exist among men, unless this property is exiled and banished”). We included this same reflection, in greater detail, in The Eternal Return of Quetzalcóatl (2008).
[2] The same can be said of the federalist system. The indigenous peoples of the Americas practiced it for centuries, before Europeans attributed it to the European settlers in the Americas.
[i] Conte, Gabriel. “The Thinker Majfud and a Decade-Old Preview of ‘Neo-Feudalism.’” Memo.com.ar, Mendoza News – Memo, June 23, 2025, http://www.memo.com.ar/poder/majfud-neofeudalismo/.
What if modern democracy had not been born in Athens, but in the Americas? What if capitalism’s greatest triumph had not been defeating its adversaries, but appropriating their ideas?
For centuries, official history presented democracy, freedom, and federalism as European creations. In Tawiscara. The Hijacking of Democracy, the author proposes a different interpretation: Native American societies, especially the Iroquois Confederacy, played a decisive role in the birth of modern democratic thought, with their concepts of equality, fraternity, solidarity, rationality, secularism, and tolerance. However, that legacy was stripped of its egalitarian foundations to adapt it to liberal capitalism and its historical anomalies: the obsession with privatizing everything and the fanatical and fanciful ideology that “my selfishness is good for the rest of the world.” Drawing on extensive historical research, the author traces the trajectory of these ideas from Indigenous nations through the European Enlightenment to the founding of the United States, showing how they were transformed to legitimize a new political, economic, and imperial order that differed little from the Middle Ages or the Roman Empire. More than a review of the past, this book is a reflection on the present. In an era marked by financial power, tech corporations, and the crisis of liberal democracies, Tawiscara invites us to rethink the true origin of democracy and to ask ourselves whether it is still possible to rescue it from those who turned it into the primary instrument of their own power.
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