This article by Fernando Buen Abad Domínguez originally appeared in the November 7, 2025 edition of La Jornada, Mexico’s premier left wing daily newspaper.
Armand Mattelart was a Belgian-born sociologist and cultural theorist, involved in developing and theorizing communications strategies during the period of Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile, from where he was exiled to France after the US-backed coup in 1973. He passed in Paris on October 31, 2025 at the age of 89. His most influential work was How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic*, which was co-authored with Ariel Dorfman and is available in PDF here.*
Armand Mattelart is one of those researchers who disrupt theoretical comfort zones and force us to think about communication not as a technique or a cultural embellishment, but as a field of struggle, a power structure, a territory of dispute over meaning. His career represents an exemplary synthesis of historical lucidity and the ability to deconstruct the ideological frameworks that uphold the dominant order.
He refused to allow theory to become divorced from practice, nor criticism to become an academic refuge. Our debt to him is enormous, not only for his writings, but for the emancipatory impetus he gave to communication criticism throughout Latin America and the world.
Mattelart taught us that the global communication system is neither neutral nor spontaneous, but rather the result of a history of capitalist accumulation, of a material organization of symbolic flows in the service of domination. He taught us that communication is a structure that accompanies, reproduces, and legitimizes the power relations of global capitalism. From his early work with Michèle Mattelart, analyzing the culture industry and media ideology, to his studies on the geopolitics of information, he was able to situate the communication problem at the very heart of political economy.
If today we speak of “media colonialism”, of “cultural imperialism”, of “political economy of communication” or of “ecology of information flows”, it is because Mattelart gave us the conceptual tools to think about these processes without falling into technical naiveté or culturalist fatalism.
In How to Read Donald Duck, for example, he exposed the ideology of domination in children’s comics, showing how imperialism is normalized and how the model of consumption and submission is instilled. But his thinking didn’t stop there. He understood that power is not only exercised through content, but also through networks, infrastructure, technological policies, and global strategies. Hence his shift to the study of the globalization of communications, where he grasped the transformation of capitalism in its transnational, informational, and digital phase.
He understood the importance of history like few others. He didn’t fall for the myth of the “new digital world” nor for the allure of technological novelty. His thinking was a constant warning against historical amnesia, a defense of genealogical analysis. In his studies on the formation of global communication networks, he traced the colonial origins of information control, from the imperial telegraph companies of the 19th century to contemporary digital corporations. This long-term perspective—dialectical and materialist—is what we need to recover so as not to be trapped by the fetishism of algorithms or the ideology of technological progress.
Communication is not an autonomous field, but a strategic terrain in the class struggle.
Our debt to Mattelart is also political. He was an intellectual who never separated theoretical critique from his commitment to emancipatory struggles. In Chile, he participated in shaping the communication thinking of the Popular Unity coalition, working with Salvador Allende to define sovereign, anti-monopoly communication policies aimed at democratizing knowledge. That experience, violently cut short by the 1973 coup, was also a laboratory for communication utopias.
In times of neoliberalism and total digitalization, his thinking serves as a compass. When the world seems surrendered to algorithms and platforms, when capitalism has transformed communication into an extension of commodities and control, Mattelart’s categories regain incalculable value. He understood that hegemony is continually reconstructed through technological innovation and cultural colonization. The network, the screen, the flow, and the data are today the new names of power, and only an interpretation that combines political economy and critical semiotics can deactivate them. That is one of his most valuable legacies.
Our debt is also methodological. Mattelart taught us to think with complexity, to not reduce communication processes to mere media apparatuses. His method articulates history, politics, economics, ideology, semiotics, and culture in an analytical framework that leaves no room for superficiality. He showed us that communication critique requires relational thinking, capable of grasping the dynamics between infrastructure and superstructure, between symbolic production and economic materiality. His work anticipated, decades in advance, contemporary discussions on digital surveillance, the biopolitics of data, and informational extractivism.
Mattelart’s thinking is not a relic, it is a theoretical arsenal for action. It gives us the tools to understand why social networks are not spaces of freedom, but new devices for ideological capture; why media concentration is not a market accident, but a structural necessity of capital; why the battle for communication is, ultimately, a battle for meaning, for consciousness, for the very possibility of emancipation.
Reclaiming Mattelart’s legacy means rebuilding a critical praxis that allows us to intervene in the global communications war without falling into the trap of impotence or fascination. The debt we owe him cannot be repaid with tributes or quotations. It must be repaid by continuing his work, radicalizing it, and placing it at the service of the concrete struggles of the people. Because, as he himself insisted, communication is not an autonomous field, but a strategic terrain in the class struggle.
There, it is decided who defines reality, who speaks and who remains silent, who educates and who submits, who remembers and who forgets. Mattelart’s legacy calls us to envision a liberating, supportive, and dialectical form of communication, capable of breaking the logic of the market and paving the way for new forms of human coexistence.
That is why, when we say we owe Mattelart so much, it is not only intellectual gratitude, but also a sense of historical responsibility. It falls to us to continue the task of decolonizing our collective imagination, dismantling the industries of deception, and building a critical theory of communication that is relevant to our time. It falls to us to transform that debt into praxis, our admiration into transformation, and our memory into struggle. Because, ultimately, thinking with Mattelart means learning to read the world in order to change it. And that, perhaps, is the highest form of repaying our debt to him.
Armand Mattelart’s 1976 documentary about Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity government in Chile.
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