The role of race and gender in the constitution of the world capitalist system from a decolonial perspective

After the neoliberal turn that marked the political, economic and intellectual sphere in Latin America at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century, studies on dependent capitalism and the condition of underdevelopment entered a crisis. In this context, decolonial studies emerged to fill the intellectual void left by Latin American Marxism and to develop a new epistemology of loco citato thought: a critical reading of dominant capitalism and neoliberal hegemony, which reproduces coloniality on a global scale at different levels. Thus, the group starts from Wallerstein's theoretical construction of the world-system in order to develop notions, ideas and concepts that allow it to denounce contemporary forms of the relations of domination. In this sense, we seek to ask what is the role of race and gender in the submission of Latin America to the hegemonic countries and the dependent and underdeveloped role it occupies in the world system according to a decolonial theory. We argue that for such a theory the colonial process represented a new model of capitalist power in which all ethnicities acquired a racial and gender connotation, thus making new historical social identities emerge. the colonial process represented a new model of capitalist power in which all ethnicities acquired a racial and gender connotation, thus making new historical social identities emerge. The creation of a race and gender identity of the population served, in this sense, to legitimize the relations of colonial domination between conquerors and conquered and established a hierarchy, serving as the axis of the new model of power and contributing to the dependent insertion of the Latin American continent in the structure of the modern world-colonial system. The legitimization of ethnic and gender hierarchy and invented historical and social identities determined one's role and function in the structure, i.e. they were responsible for the division of labor. This racist social classification of domination was established at the global level, as well as the capitalist forms of exploitation and the racial division of labor. According to decolonial theorists, a capitalist world economy would not exist without the colonial process in the Americas (QUIJANO; WALLERSTEIN, 1992), and they see modernity and the colonial process in Latin America from a capitalist perspective of capital accumulation, profit, labor exploitation, and control of production and distribution of products, which respond to the logic of wage capital and the global market. In order to do so, we will conduct a review of the literature on the topic, performing a systemic approach to historical processes and a critical evaluation of the bibliographic sources on the subject. In this way we draw on the authors who formed the Modernity/Coloniality Group, like Anibal Quijano (2000), Santiago Castro-Gómez (2005) and Maldonado-Torres (2007) and bring a more feminist view of the theory, with Luciana Ballestrin et Maria Lugones (2008).