By Ignacio Ramonet – Oct 10, 2026
The following is a paper presented at the 30th International Seminar on Political Parties and the New Society, Mexico City, October 9, 2026.
A lot of people are perplexed. Perplexed. Disoriented by the events that we are experiencing. There is enormous uncertainty. A deep unease. Even fear. Because, once again, we cannot understand, we cannot comprehend what is happening in our societies and on the planet. The world has become very difficult to read, to decode. And the information we receive does not help us. It even confuses us more. Many of our conceptual tools no longer allow us to interpret, to decipher what is happening.
And this is normal. Because what we are experiencing is not simply a new international crisis. Not even a polycrisis. It is not just a new phase of the rivalry between great powers. It is not just a new technological revolution either. What is happening is something deeper.
We are witnessing the convergence, in a single historical moment, of several major disruptions that normally occur separately: a transformation of the international geopolitical system, a transformation of the world economy, a technological revolution, an energy transition, a demographic mutation, a climate and ecological crisis, and a profound modification of the forms of production, communication, and social organization. And the extraordinary thing about this new moment is that all these transformations are happening simultaneously and influencing each other.
Today, the post-World War II international order is giving way to a more fragmented and multipolar world, while artificial intelligence, demographic transformations, and the climate crisis are advancing. This simultaneity makes the current moment an exceptional period of uncertainty.
This is why I believe we must avoid two mistakes. The first is thinking that we are simply facing a succession of crises: war, inflation, trade tensions, the energy crisis, the US-China rivalry, artificial intelligence… The second mistake is to think that all this is a kind of passing accident of the system.
What we are experiencing is the transition from one historical system to a new historical system that is not yet fully defined. And, precisely for this reason, this is a Gramscian moment in which politics regains extraordinary, fundamental importance. Because when the rules of an era begin to stop functioning and the new paradigms are not yet established, a period of dispute opens up to define and impose the new rules and new paradigms of the new historical era that is beginning.
To better understand this Copernican shift that we are experiencing, I propose the following 20 points with the aim of better visualizing the current conceptual map of this new transformation.
1. Geopolitics: from a unipolar world to one with multiple power centers
For more than three decades, since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, we have lived what we might call a unipolar moment. The United States remained the only global superpower. That does not mean it controlled absolutely everything. There were other great powers, regional economies, international institutions, and multiple forms of resistance. But the general architecture of the international system was organized around a single superpower whose economic, financial, military, technological, and cultural weight was unparalleled.
That period is coming to an end. Not because the United States has ceased to be a great power; it remains an extraordinarily powerful power. But other centers of power accumulation have emerged.
China is today a major economic, industrial, and technological power. India is increasing its economic, demographic, and strategic weight. Russia retains enormous military and energy capacity. Brazil and Mexico play a central role in Latin America and possess strategic resources of continental dimensions. Countries like Indonesia, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Nigeria, or South Africa have increasingly greater regional capabilities and margins of autonomy. Numerous economies in the so-called Global South are trying to diversify their international relations.
The BRICS is one of the expressions of this new transformation. The BRICS countries do not constitute a homogeneous bloc and it would be a mistake to present them as such, but they express a geopolitical reality: a growing part of the world wants to have greater negotiating power within international institutions and reduce their dependence on a single center of power.
We are, therefore, facing a multipolarization of the international system. But we must understand well what this means. Multipolarity does not automatically mean cooperation. It also does not mean that rivalries will disappear. It can mean precisely the opposite: that there will be more actors capable of competing, negotiating, blocking, warring, pressuring, and forming variable alliances.
The new world that is being born may be more pluralistic, but also more conflictive. And this is one of the great paradoxes of this new era: we have never needed international cooperation as much as we do now, and yet, it has never been so difficult to build it.
2. The return of geopolitics to economy
During the years of great neoliberal globalization (1979-2008), a powerful idea spread: economy would ultimately relativize politics. Companies would produce wherever it was cheaper. Capital would circulate freely. The production chains would cross borders. States would progressively lose their capacity for intervention. Economic interdependence would ultimately make conflict between major powers too costly.
Today we know that this vision was incomplete, if not erroneous. Economy has not replaced geopolitics. Geopolitics has returned to the heart of the economy.
We see it everyplace. States subsidize strategic sectors. They control certain exports. They protect certain technologies. They try to secure supply chains. They are accumulating reserves. They are reorganizing their business relationships. They seek to control strategic minerals. They use finance as an instrument of power. They consider certain technological infrastructures as matters of national security.
International trade, which during the ominous neoliberal decades was primarily presented as a matter of economic efficiency, is once again also a matter of sovereignty. For large investors, the question is no longer just where it is cheaper to produce, but increasingly, where can they produce without becoming strategically exposed.
This transformation is enormous, because it means that we have moved from a logic dominated by efficiency to a logic in which efficiency and security compete constantly.
3. Globalization is not disappearing, it is fragmenting
I do not think that we are witnessing the end of globalization. We are witnessing its transformation. Global production chains have not disappeared; they are being reorganized. Concepts such as near-shoring, friend-shoring, regionalization, strategic autonomy, and supply chain resilience are emerging. The company that previously sought exclusively the lowest cost is now also beginning to ask whether its supplier is in a country considered politically safe. This is profoundly changing the geography of production.
An important fact: strategic sectors—AI, microprocessors, critical minerals, and energy transition—went from being 16% of new international investment projects in 2020 to 44% in 2025. It is a very concrete way of demonstrating that we are not just talking about a geopolitical impression: the capital map is already changing.
This leads us to an important conclusion. Globalization is not disappearing; it is becoming political and geopolitically conditioned. And this opens up opportunities, but also dangers, because a fragmented global economy can allow certain countries to improve their negotiating position, but it can also lead to a new division of the world into large economic and technological blocs.
And then a decisive question arises: Will the 21st century be a century of cooperation between regions or a century of competition between blocs? We still do not know, but that dispute has already begun.
4. The real battlefield: technology
And here we probably arrive at the most important element of all. The new international confrontation is not only about territories; it is about technologies. In the 20th century, the great powers competed for oil, steel, heavy industry, maritime routes, and nuclear weapons. Today, they continue to compete for these resources, but new resources of another dimension are also emerging: microprocessors (chips), advanced computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, quantum computing, satellites, space exploration, submarine cables, data centers, operating systems, telecommunications networks, and, above all, data.
Technology has ceased to be a mere economic sector; it has become an instrument of geopolitical power. Therefore, the technological rivalry between the United States and China has an importance that goes far beyond the specific companies involved. What is at stake is which power will have the ability to design the technological infrastructure of the coming decades.
And here a fundamental difference from previous eras appears: a power may have oil, territory, a large population, but if it does not have certain technologies, it may find itself dependent on those who control them. For this reason, microprocessors have become a strategic resource. And, for that reason, the manufacturing of the most advanced microprocessors is now a matter of national security for several major powers.
5. Artificial intelligence is much more than a technological revolution
None of these transformations probably have the disruptive capacity of artificial intelligence. AI is not simply a new computing tool; it is a technology that can intervene in practically all sectors of human activity: industry, medicine, finance, education, agriculture, public administration, scientific research, warfare, communication, cultural production and creation, and, naturally, politics.
But there is something even more important: artificial intelligence can modify the relationship between knowledge, labor, and capital.
During the industrial revolution of the 19th century, machines progressively replaced certain forms of physical labor. Now, machines are beginning to intervene in certain forms of intellectual work. And this raises a historical question: what will happen when a machine can perform certain tasks that until now required the intervention of a qualified human being? We do not yet have a complete answer, but we do know one thing: the revolution of artificial intelligence will not automatically be distributed equitably.
Global investment in AI and digital infrastructure is concentrating in a small number of countries and sectors. Investment in strategic sectors—AI, microprocessors, critical minerals, and technologies linked to the energy transition—also represents an extraordinarily higher proportion than just five years ago. This means that the technological gap can become a new form of international inequality.
And here a fundamental question arises for Latin America. Will Latin America simply be a consumer of artificial intelligence, or will it also be a producer of artificial intelligence? Because there is a huge difference between using a technology created elsewhere and possessing the scientific, industrial, and educational capabilities necessary to develop it.
6. From oil to data, chips and computing power
We could summarize the new historical change in a very simple way. For much of the 20th century, economic power depended on a combination of territory, raw materials, energy, and industry. In the 21st century, a new series is added to it: data, computing power, algorithms, and artificial intelligence. This even modifies our conception of sovereignty. Before, we talked about territorial sovereignty. Afterwards we talked about energy sovereignty. Today we have to start talking about technological sovereignty and digital sovereignty.
New questions and concerns arise, such as, who owns the data? Where are they stored? Who controls the data centers? Who manufactures the microprocessors? Who develops the AI models? Who controls the platforms? Who sets the standards? Who decides what artificial intelligence can do? These are economic questions, but these are essentially also political questions and, ultimately, questions of sovereignty.
7. The new battle for energy resources
Energy is one of the major pillars of the current great transformation. For decades, energy transition was discussed as if it simply consisted of replacing oil, gas, and coal, that is, carbon-based energies, with renewable energies. The reality is much more complex, because the energy transition requires enormous amounts of minerals: lithium, copper, nickel, cobalt, graphite, rare earths (a group of 17 elements essential for manufacturing the powerful permanent magnets needed for electric vehicle motors, smartphones, and wind turbines) and many other materials indispensable for replacing fossil fuels with technologies such as electric vehicles, wind energy, and solar energy. The demand for these minerals will triple by 2030.
This is why the energy transition does not eliminate the geopolitics of resources. It transforms it.
In that respect, Latin America holds a very important position. The region has significant quantities of the mineral, energy, water, and agricultural resources that the economy of the future will need. But having resources does not necessarily mean controlling the wealth that those resources generate. This is a historical lesson that Latin America knows all too well. For centuries, the region exported raw materials and imported manufactured products. The challenge of the 21st century is not to automatically repeat the same.
This is because a new form of extractivism can occur: extracting lithium, copper, nickel, or rare earths, exporting them, and then importing batteries, electric vehicles, technological components, and high value-added products manufactured elsewhere. Because the real challenge is not just who owns the minerals, but who controls the entire value chain.
8. Global South is not a bloc but a historical reality
I would like to pause here on an expression that we use frequently: Global South. It is advisable to use it with caution. The Global South is not a homogeneous entity. India is not Brazil; Brazil is not Mexico; Mexico is not South Africa; South Africa is not Indonesia; Indonesia is not Saudi Arabia. Each of these countries has specific national interests. But there is something new: numerous countries in the South are trying to expand their margin of autonomy. They want to diversify markets, currencies, suppliers, diplomatic alliances; to participate more actively in international institutions. Above all, they want their growing economic weight to have a political translation.
The distribution of global economic power no longer exactly corresponds to the distribution of institutional power inherited from the mid-20th century. This is one of the fundamental contradictions of the contemporary international system. The economic world has changed much more rapidly than the institutions created to govern it.
The problem of the United Nations. The problem of the International Monetary Fund. The problem of the World Bank. The problem of the WTO. All of them ultimately share a common concern: how to adapt global governance to a distribution of power that is no longer that of 1945?
9. The great paradox of our times: more interdependence and more fragmentation
There is a paradox that seems particularly important to me. We have never been so interconnected. A phone contains components manufactured in multiple countries. A computer depends on minerals extracted in one continent, processors manufactured in another, software developed in another, and capital from yet another. Food travels thousands of kilometers. Capital flows instantaneously. Messages cross the planet in fractions of a second. However, politically, the world seems to be fragmenting. This contradiction is central.
Material interdependence is increasing, while political trust is declining. This is dangerous, because the great problems of our times do not stop at borders. Climate change has no nationality. A pandemic recognizes no borders or customs. Artificial intelligence, neither. Great financial crises cross continents. The oceans are common. The atmosphere is common. Digital networks are global. And yet, the political response tends to be increasingly national.
We therefore need a new architecture of international cooperation. Not a cooperation that ignores the deep existing inequalities, but a cooperation that also provides room for correcting them.
10. The contradiction of the technological revolution
There is another aspect that seems fundamental to me: technology can extraordinarily increase productivity, but productivity does not automatically mean well-being. An economy can produce more and distribute worse. It can have extraordinary technologies and tolerate enormous inequalities. It can have artificial intelligence and keep millions of people without access to adequate education. It can have robots and have workers in precarious economic situations. It can produce enormous amounts of wealth and concentrate it in a few hands. Therefore, we must distinguish between two questions.
The first is: what can technology do? The second, much more political, is: for whom is technology used and how are its benefits distributed? This is probably one of the biggest questions of the 21st century.
The expansion of AI can widen the gap between economies if national capacities, digital infrastructure, education, and inclusive governance mechanisms are not developed. The technological revolution, therefore, does not eliminate the social question. It makes it even more complex.
11. A new social question
During the 19th century, the social question was fundamentally determined by the relationship between capital and industrial labor. The labor movement was born to respond to that transformation. During the 20th century, the welfare state, labor rights, collective bargaining, social security, and public education emerged.
Today, a new social question is beginning to emerge: what happens when certain jobs (both physical and intellectual) can be automated? What happens when a small number of companies control platforms used by billions of people? What happens when personal data becomes a commodity? What happens when an algorithm decides who gets credit, who appears on a platform, what information a person sees, or which worker is hired?
The relationship between capital and labor does not disappear, but it transforms. Political parties will have to understand this new reality. Because the social categories of the 20th century no longer accurately describe the new societies of the 21st century.
12. The battle for information
There is another decisive transformation. The digital revolution has extraordinarily democratized the ability to produce information, but it has also extraordinarily concentrated the ability to distribute it. And this creates a paradox: never have so many individuals been able to express themselves, and never have so few platforms had so much capacity to organize the circulation of that expression. Information has become a power infrastructure. Artificial intelligence now introduces a new dimension. It is no longer just about producing and distributing information; it is about producing texts, images, videos, voices, and synthetic content on a practically unlimited scale.
This transforms the political ecosystem. The line between information, propaganda, entertainment, and manipulation can become increasingly difficult to distinguish. Therefore, defending democracy in the 21st century does not only involve protecting electoral institutions. It also involves defending information ecosystems that are sufficiently plural, verifiable, and transparent.
13. The military question is also changing
The technological revolution is also transforming the nature of war. Drones. Satellites. Robots. Autonomous systems. Cyberattacks. Artificial intelligence. Electronic warfare. Recognition systems. Precision weapons.
The war of the future—and in some aspects already the war of the present—combines technologies that just a few decades ago belonged to science fiction. This has a fundamental political consequence. Military superiority increasingly depends on technological superiority.
And this means that the boundary between the civilian economy, the technology industry, and national security is becoming progressively more blurred. A microprocessor can be a component of a phone, but it can also be part of a military system. An algorithm can recommend a movie, but it can also be used in military intelligence. A satellite can provide weather information, but also military strategic information. Civilian technology and military technology are increasingly interconnected.
14. Ecological and technological transitions are inseparable
There is another issue that we cannot ignore. The 21st century is also the century of the climate crisis. This means that the economic transformation will have to be simultaneously technological and ecological. Artificial intelligence can help optimize electrical grids, predict disasters, improve agriculture, or manage water resources, but it also consumes increasing amounts of energy and water resources, and requires enormous physical infrastructures.
That is why there is no digital transition separate from an energy transition. Both are converging. And the countries that simultaneously control energy, minerals, digital infrastructure, and technological capacity will have a considerable strategic advantage.
15. The world is entering an era of uncertainty
If we try to put all these pieces together, we can identify a kind of historical equation. We have geopolitical multipolarity, fragmentation of globalization, technological competition, artificial intelligence revolution, energy transition, struggle for critical minerals, climate crisis, demographic transformation, rearmament and new forms of warfare, and a profound inequality in the distribution of technological capabilities.
These are not 10 independent problems. They are part of the same great transformation. That is why we must resist the temptation to analyze each crisis separately. The world that is being born is a system (that is, a set of ordered and interrelated elements that work together in a coordinated manner to achieve a specific goal or function) and we must understand it as a system.
The IMF projects a global growth of around 3% for 2026, but emphasizes that this growth is very uneven and that contradictory forces coexist: the economic effects of conflicts and a strong investment cycle driven by technology.
It is a good metaphor for our time. We live amid the crosswinds of war and technology.
16. What does all this mean for political parties?
We thus arrive at an essential question: what does this great historical transformation mean for political parties? I believe it means, first and foremost, that parties cannot simply manage the consequences of transformations; they have to understand them. A 21st-century political party cannot only talk about wages, taxes, housing, retirement, education, or healthcare—although all these topics remain essential—without understanding what is happening with artificial intelligence, global supply chains, critical minerals, the energy transition, digital platforms, and the new international distribution of power.
Because those transformations will precisely determine the future of wages, employment, migrations, pensions, education, housing, and public services.
Social policy and geopolitics can no longer be thought of separately. Industrial policy and foreign policy, neither. Technological policy and educational policy, neither. And energy policy and climate policy, neither. Everything is starting to become part of the same question, the same system.
17. The question of sovereignty
For this reason, I believe that a word will regain enormous importance over the next few decades: sovereignty. But we must redefine it. Sovereignty does not mean isolation, it does not mean shutting oneself off, rejecting international cooperation. On the contrary: in a deeply interdependent world, no country can be completely self-sufficient.
Sovereignty in the 21st century should mean decision-making capacity: the ability to decide what to produce, what technology to develop, what resources to protect, what data to control, what infrastructures to build, what alliances to establish, what energy model to adopt, what education to provide, and how to distribute the benefits of technological transformation. Sovereignty does not mean being alone: it means not being obliged to accept all the decisions of other powers.
18. The great battle will be over the distribution of the fruits of the new revolution
And here we arrive, perhaps, at the essential point: technological revolutions do not determine the future by themselves. They create possibilities. It is societies that decide how to distribute those possibilities. The steam engine did not automatically produce the labor movement. Electricity did not automatically produce the welfare state. The internet did not automatically produce a more democratic society.
Technology opens up possibilities. Politics largely decides who benefits from them.
Therefore, the big question of the coming decades will not only be who develops artificial intelligence, but who controls it, who controls the data, who controls the computing power, who controls the data centers, who controls the critical minerals, who controls the platforms, who sets the rules, and who reaps the benefits. This is, ultimately, a question of power.
19. The new society also demands a new political culture
For a good part of the 20th century, political parties were great machines for interpreting reality: they explained the world, organized interests, built identities, and proposed societal projects.
Today they face an unprecedented difficulty: reality is changing faster than many of our political categories. Therefore, we need parties capable of rethinking. Not just react. Think about the world to come. Think about the work that is coming. Think about the education that is coming. Think about the democracy that is coming. Think about the sovereignty to come. Think about the relationship between human beings and machines. Think about the relationship between artificial intelligence and power. Think about what it means to be a citizen in a society increasingly governed by algorithms. And also think about what the word equality means when access to the most advanced technologies can become one of the main factors of differentiation between individuals, companies, and countries.
The challenge is enormous, but so is the opportunity. Because when a historical order transforms, societies are not condemned to adapt passively: they can intervene, choose, dispute, and build alternatives.
20. Conclusion
We are living through a change of era and entering a new historical system. The unipolar world is being replaced by a more complex structure of multiple centers of power. War is once again shaping geopolitics. Globalization is not disappearing, but it is fragmenting. The economy is once again deeply conditioned by geopolitics. Technology is becoming an essential dimension of international power. Artificial intelligence is inaugurating a revolution whose scope we are just beginning to understand. Energy and critical minerals are gaining renewed strategic importance. The climate crisis forces us to transform our production systems. And technological inequalities threaten to create new forms of dependency.
All of this is happening simultaneously. And precisely for this reason, we are facing a historical transition. We do not yet know exactly what world will emerge from it, but we can identify the great battle that is unfolding. It is the battle for who will control the resources, technologies, data, infrastructures, and rules of the new global economy. And, ultimately, it is the battle for something even deeper: who will have the power to decide what the society of the future will be like?
This is the question that citizens and political parties must ask themselves today. Because if politics refuses to answer it, others will answer it: the large multinational corporations, the markets, the technological platforms, the most powerful states, the data owners, the infrastructure owners, those who control the algorithms, and those who control the strategic technologies.
Therefore, perhaps the fundamental political task of our time is to regain the ability to imagine. Imagine a society in which the technological revolution produces not only more productivity but also more rights. An economy in which the energy transition does not reproduce old dependencies. A globalization that does not mean subordination. A multipolarity that does not turn into a new race between blocs. An artificial intelligence put at the service of humanity and not simply at the service of the accumulation of capital. A democracy capable of surviving the radical transformation of our information ecosystem.
Ultimately, we need to rephrase a question that, in other moments of great historical transformations, was decisive: what new society do we want to build? Because this is perhaps the most important characteristic of the moment we are living: the future is still open. And precisely because it is open, the citizens must contribute massively to define it. Because it is also a new time for democracy, in which politics once again has a decisive relevance. Today more than ever.
(Telesur)
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/CD
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