The Dark Side of USAID

[Pictured: Opposition leader, Juan Guaido, shown here in 2019, was funded by USAID in an attempted political coup in Venezuela after nearly two decades of similar meddling in the country by the US government.]

By Matthew John

After appointing insufferable Nazi oligarch Elon Musk to head his newly established Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the Trump regime implemented massive funding cuts that have affected various federal government agencies. A lively debate has ensued regarding the nature and importance of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), with one side praising the institution as an indispensable, benevolent, humanitarian force and the other claiming it is deeply corrupt and brimming with radical leftists. 

The truth is not somewhere in the middle, but somewhere else entirely. To paint a more accurate picture of the interests USAID serves, as well as the unique geopolitical role it has played, I have selected examples of its work in four different countries. I hope my analysis provides a useful window into an often overlooked aspect of this discourse - especially as it relates to leftist politics.

Afghanistan 

The year was 1979. The United States was in the midst of the Cold War and the late Jimmy Carter was president. During the preceding years and decades, the CIA had conducted a series of successful coups against democratically elected governments in countries like Iran, Guatemala, and Chile - often using anti-communist paranoia as justification. After a socialist revolution in Afghanistan the year prior, the agency and its co-conspirators in Washington finally had an excuse to confront the Soviets more directly - albeit through rather unsavory proxies. 

The plan, according to Carter’s closest adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, was to provide weapons and training to Wahhabi terrorists known as the mujahideen in order to provoke an intervention by the Soviet military. According to Brzezinski, Carter signed the first directive for aid to these Islamist extremist “freedom fighters” on July 3, 1979, and the decade-long proxy war that followed resulted in the overthrow of the socialist government in Kabul and was also a significant contributing factor in the downfall of the USSR - the world’s first socialist society.

After taking power in April 1978, the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) instituted an array of socialist policies, including “land reform, growth in public services, price controls, separation of church and state, full equality for women, legalization of trade unions and a sweeping literacy campaign.” This might seem like a positive development, but not in the eyes of the U.S. empire and its capitalist agenda. In addition to the CIA’s covert support for the mujahideen’s holy war against the secular evils of increased living standards and women’s rights, USAID also played an interesting role in this conflict. 

The agency reportedly spent $50 million on a “jihad literacy” program in Afghanistan, primarily during the 1980s. This effort included the publication and distribution of ultra-conservative textbooks that “tried to solidify the links between violence and religious obligation,” according to author Dana Burde. Lessons on basic math and language were accompanied by depictions of Kalashnikov rifles, grenades, ammunition, and a commitment to militancy and retribution against the Russians (who were depicted as “invaders” despite having been invited to lend military assistance by the PDPA). After consolidating power in the ‘90s, the Taliban government revised and reprinted these textbooks, and copies have even been found in Pakistan as recently as 2013.

Assisting the Taliban’s precursor with reactionary, jihadist propaganda to viciously sabotage a progressive, feminist government and its allies is a strange form of “humanitarianism.” You might even say it’s the opposite of humanitarianism. Was this just a mistake that USAID made in the distant past and has since learned from, or is there a continued pattern of this behavior? 

Cuba

Two decades prior to the CIA’s covert war in Afghanistan, the Cuban Revolution succeeded after years of guerrilla combat against the forces of a U.S.-backed capitalist dictator named Fulgencio Batista. Though the U.S. government was initially open to working with Fidel Castro’s new revolutionary administration, the tide quickly turned and Cuba has faced a relentless imperialist onslaught from Washington ever since. The tactics of the Yankee juggernaut have included invasion, terrorism, hundreds of assassination attempts, and a crippling economic blockade. Our friends at USAID have participated in these regime change efforts through various insidious plots.

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In 2014, the Associated Press reported on a USAID plan to use HIV-prevention workshops to secretly “[recruit] a younger generation of opponents to Cuba’s Castro government.” After being exposed, the scheme proved profoundly embarrassing to the U.S. political establishment and detrimental to the reputation of Western aid organizations. But this was not the first USAID regime change plot to be exposed that year. The agency had also set up a Twitter-inspired app called ZunZuneo in 2010 in an attempt to “build a base of unsuspecting Cuban users, and then introduce rumors and misinformation to destabilize the country’s socialist government.” 

More recently, USAID was caught funding rappers and other artists to, as Russiagate conspiracy theorists would say, “sow political discord” in Cuban society (but it’s okay when we do it). Thankfully, all of these tactics have failed and the Cuban Revolution lives on.

Venezuela 

The Bolivarian Revolution began in 1999 when popular Venezuelan politician Hugo Chávez was inaugurated after his historic electoral victory the previous year. Chávez oversaw an extensive program of socialist policies, lifting millions out of poverty and vastly expanding participatory democracy and racial justice until his death in 2013. Five years later, Chávez’s successor Nicolás Maduro was sworn in to begin his second term in office after winning the Venezuelan presidential election in May of 2018. 

On January 22, 2019, Juan Guaidó — a man whom 81% of Venezuelans had never heard of — suddenly declared himself “interim president.” Although Guaidó did not run in any presidential election, U.S. politicians and pundits quickly praised this brazen coup attempt, recognizing Guaidó’s claim to the Venezuelan presidency as legitimate. Like the efforts of U.S. imperialism in Cuba, this regime change operation has failed, as Guaidó never managed to gain popular support for his fraudulent government. He quickly became disgraced and is now under investigation by Venezuelan authorities, who recently issued an arrest warrant for the failed coup leader. 

For its part, USAID provided $128 million in funding to the would-be dictator and his collaborators, and an additional $307 million to Venezuela’s right-wing political opposition more broadly, including for use in plots that were condemned by the International Red Cross and the United Nations. Reporting by the L.A. Times even revealed that $41.9 million in aid was diverted from Guatemala and Honduras and redirected to Guaidó and his fellow insurrectionists “to pay for their salaries, airfare, ‘good governance’ training, propaganda, technical assistance for holding elections and other ‘democracy-building’ projects.” 

This was not the first time USAID was involved in the imperialist sabotage of Venezuela’s ongoing socialist project. During the years prior to the Guaidó debacle, the agency also played a central role in a conspiracy to meddle in Venezuela’s elections by weaponizing social media (again, it’s only bad when Russia does it). 

Nicaragua

Those familiar with the Iran-Contra affair might recall the ghastly history of the U.S. government supporting far-right Nicaraguan death squads during the 1980s. Those death squads, known as the Contras, had an ultimate goal of destroying the Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), which had gained power through a popular revolution in 1979. The Sandinistas dedicated the first years of their governance to eradicating illiteracy, nationalizing public services, and the founding of working-class, socialist institutions like the People’s Army, the Sandinista Workers’ Confederation, the Association of Agricultural Workers, the Nicaraguan Students Union, the Federation of Health Workers, and the National Teachers’ Union.

However, just like the PDPA government in Afghanistan, the Sandinistas were met with a bloody proxy war at the hands of U.S. imperialism, resulting in a death toll of 30,000. The U.S.-backed Contra death squads “engaged in direct assassination campaigns against literacy and health care workers, engineers and anyone dedicated to rebuilding Nicaragua.” The capitalist elements in Nicaragua eventually consolidated power in 1990 and ruled the country for a decade and a half, but the Sandinistas returned to power in 2007 after Daniel Ortega was elected president.

Instead of simply funding sadistic death squads this time, Washington chose a more subtle and insidious path. Similar to their recent efforts in Cuba and Venezuela, the U.S. meddled in the politics of Nicaragua through a complex network of “aid” organizations and right-wing media outlets. One of the most notorious institutions USAID has supported is called the Chamorro Foundation, which is “run by one of the richest and most powerful family dynasties in Nicaragua.” The organization was complicit in a violent coup attempt against Ortega in 2018 and is now under investigation for money laundering.

Conclusion 

This topic is far more complicated than what I have included in this article, and there are many other important analyses. I chose to focus on these specific countries in order to make a simple point: An organization that consistently engages in imperialist regime change efforts against socialist nations is entirely incompatible with the notion of humanitarianism. The ongoing project of socialism itself is inherently humanitarian and humanistic. As Michael Parenti once wrote:

“To say that ‘socialism doesn’t work’ is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history.”

Despite its reputation among American liberals as a benevolent humanitarian organization, USAID is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. It is a Trojan horse for Western imperialism — an insidious, destabilizing force that causes far more harm to the Global South than any “good” resulting from its ostensible assistance. And, despite far-right delusions about the agency in question supposedly being composed of “radical left lunatics,” its history reveals consistent and relentless opposition toward leftist movements around the world. Given its blood-drenched track record, the best humanitarianism the United States can offer developing countries is to simply leave them alone and respect their sovereignty. 

Is the Genocide in Congo Due to Human Hatred or Corporate Profit?

[Pictured: Congolese march near the border with Rwanda in 2023. Credit © Getty Images]

By J.B. Gerald

Rwanda has broken international law with the visible presence of Rwandan troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alongside Rwanda's covert M-23 militia. M-23 is reported to have captured Goma (again) and the civilians are in a state of emergency. This is familiar because M-23 previously took over the city in 2012 but had to withdraw because it wasn't equipped to administer the city of two million. As the M-23 rebels and their allies increase their takeover of the East Congo with reported vows of advancing to the capital of the DRC in a "liberation" of the country, it becomes clear Rwanda has invaded Congo again, possibly for keeps this time to maintain its hold on the East's gold, copper, and coltan mines.

The Congo's government has requested international sanctions against Rwanda. But the international community has allowed an ongoing genocide of the Congolese people for thirty years. The people of the Congo live under a genocide warning.

Paul Kagame began invading the Eastern Congo after he took over Rwanda in 1994. Subsequently, Uganda, which sponsored Kagame's invasion of Rwanda with U.S. funding, and Rwanda have maintained militias in the area. While genocide was brought under control in Rwanda, an insistence on mass killing was carried into the Congo by Kagame's Rwandan troops in pursuit of Hutu refugees who fled there. This also allowed Rwandan forces to protect Tutsi groups settled in the Congo, and access and control a portion of the mining resources.

But the resources belong to the people. As they do in the Sudan and South Sudan. As they do in Gaza and Palestine. All three areas are currently threatened by genocide against the people who have lived there.

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The U.S. Government's official site for the National Library of Medicine notes, “5.4 million people have died in Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998 because of conflict” (Peter Moszynski, Jan. 31, 2008, BMJ). However, since the “First Congo War” in 1996 to the present, the western press notoriously underestimates the death toll at six million civilians.

From the perspective of preventing genocide, the source of the problem rests in both the five lakes region of Africa and the Middle East, with corporate interests using national leaders to effect policy. This facile academic statement of the obvious covers the fact that millions on millions of innocent civilian lives are currently being sacrificed for corporate growth and profit. This is against any sense of ethics, knowledge of right and wrong, law, religious commitments to honour life, or the people's informed consent.

In the DRC, the genocide continues because it is meant to. It works. The mines are working, the resources are taken. The peoples’ deaths are not a corporate concern. The elites are not about to stop it. They are the reason Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961 and the UN's Dag Hammarskjöld was killed. And why the Simba rebellion was crushed. And why Eastern Congo was thrown into the chaos of warring militias.

The Rwandan genocide, which suddenly occurred between tribes living in peace, brought in an Anglo-American-backed Paul Kagame. One could say Rwanda is responsible for the genocide of Congolese except that the benefits have devolved to International corporations, stock markets, manufacturers, and western economies. As with all such imperialist and colonialist dynamics throughout history, Kagame’s Rwandan forces are simply mercenaries for western capitalists.

Unfortunately, this is an all-too familiar history. European and American policies have used Independent Congo (Zaire, DRC) since its colonial bondage as a people enslaved to the uses of Western capital. China is now buying into the land as well, with the purchase of many previously American owned mines. It is unclear how or if this will be much different than the Western playbook. One thing, however, is clear: the genocide continues. With respect for conscience, a portion of UN peacekeepers are in place to lessen the civilian body count. But the guilty parties here are the same who engineered the “Rwanda” genocide, which the UN did not stop, and which served Western corporate expansion.

There is little hope of any justice for the people of the DRC until the ownership and control of the mineral resources in the East are in the hands of a just regulator that assures both the people’s safety and fair payment for their resources. And, any such arrangement, would have to be negotiated and agreed upon with not only strict parameters, but with the approval of the very people who labor in these harsh conditions. In our new multipolar global landscape, this would have to be UN administered to include Russian and China. It is an alternative to an ongoing genocide. Until then, all profits from the genocide should be tracked as evidence for eventual prosecution.

"God Wants You Aspiring to Be a Capitalist"

[Pictured: David Oyedepo gives a sermon at his megachurch in Nigeria.]

By Titilayo Odedele

There is something going on with Pentecostal churches.

In a time of the ascendance of neoliberalism, bourgeois institutions have failed and most radical and revolutionary formations have been severely compromised. In contrast, Pentecostal churches have thrived, welcoming millions around the world into their fold and keeping most. Why?

To begin to investigate this, we must first understand our current context. Neoliberalism is a form of capitalism marked by constant and fundamental economic crisis due to the intensive relationship it has to accelerating the accumulation of capital through deregulation (broadly defined as loosening of government regulations on labor, companies, and the goods they produce, and the like) and market liberalization (the process of removing government regulations on markets specifically, like preventing popular ownership of national assets and ending public support, which enables widespread access to goods, etc.), among other processes which lead to widespread precarity.

One way of qualifying the crisis-prone nature of capitalism is by analyzing Kondratieff waves, a controversial but substantive conception of long waves of capitalist growth and stagnation believed to occur every 40-60 years. Some argue that these cycles have shortened in recent decades, particularly with economic stagflation (stagnation and inflation occurring at the same time) occurring more frequently than in waves past. Alongside these market conditions is the receding social cushion for most people in most countries as states retreat from service provision in the name of cost-efficacy, resulting in increasing precarity. As these crises produce unrest, the state responds with increased repression and surveillance, and the ideological and politico-philosophical domestication of everything—including social change—facilitating and normalizing capital’s seeming inescapable commodification.

Despite their pervasive power, influence, and supposedly empirically-sound requirements for debtor countries, the Bretton Woods institutions like the IMF and World Bank made promises that did not bring about prosperity for most of the world. Further failures of neoliberalism include an unprecedented amount of scientific knowledge about the climate crisis, to the demise of ecosystems, some island societies, and in terms of capitalist interests, futures for certain products and supply chains.

One would think that an economic system which fails to live up to its own promises would be unpopular, particularly in the places where its policies have had the most visible failures in terms of a declining quality of life for most people in a society. In most African cases, however, neoliberal capitalism is seen as a winning mode of economic organization which simply has not been applied properly. This is particularly the case in Nigeria, where I am conducting my dissertation research. Nigeria has been a strategic Western ally since independence, with its indigenous, political, economic, religious, and military elite coordinating with the U.S. and U.K. in particular in order to stomp out ideologies which promote alternative ways of organizing the economy, like socialism and communism.

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In light of the failures of political, economic, and military powers in Nigeria, and the particular confluence of the three in its specific history of (mostly reactionary) military coups, it appears that religious elites are the final standing source of traditionally legitimate power. Though they have been aligned with other elites who have lost public trust, they maintain it. Pentecostal pastors in particular enjoy dedicated adherents, political and international patronage. David Oyedepo (Africa’s richest pastor), Enoch Adeboye, Jerry Eze, Biodun Fatoyinbo, Paul and Betsy Eneche, and many others have even become capitalists themselves. They all have churches that are aligned with the so-called prosperity gospel message, preaching that health and wealth are the exclusive signs of divine favor and alignment.

Somehow, these pastors have managed to grow their churches by transforming neoliberal values into moral imperatives which their congregants take seriously. How they have managed to avoid becoming objects of scorn, and indeed, become objects of respect and social honor despite contributing nothing that improves the material conditions of most of their adherent is what I will continue to investigate. As a Nigerian-American, I feel the need to respond to Walter Rodney’s call to the people of the Global South: to study our societies with a Marxist methodology, we need to undertake serious study of the ways in which imperialism hides itself and capitalism lives its afterlives. Only then will we begin to be positioned to end its vice grip on the Continent and the Diaspora, and surely beyond.

This phenomenon appears in other conservative (in a Marxist sense) countries like the U.S., Brazil, the Philippines, South Korea, South Africa, and others in the Western axis of military and economic domination. This case of capitalists running churches isn’t new, but I would contend that the historical mixing of factors which has led us to this particular version of capitalist Christianity are worthy of attention from radicals of all stripes.

Titilayo Odedele (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Northeastern University. Their research interests include global connections of sacralization of neoliberalism, imperialism, Pentecostalisms in the Global South, and related topics. She enjoys spending time with her partner, siblings, and dog.

References: 

Amin, Samir. Neo-Colonialism in West Africa. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974.

Amin, Samir. "Understanding the political economy of contemporary Africa." Africa Development 39, no. 1 (2014): 15-36.

Bayat, Asef. Revolution without Revolutionaries: Making Sense of the Arab Spring. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2017.

Han, Ju Hui Judy. “Shiting Geographies of Proximity: Korean-led Evangelical Christian Missions and the U.S. Empire.” In Ethnographies of US Empire, edited by Carole McGranahan, and John F. Collins, 194-213. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018.

Ogunbadejo, Oye. "Nigerian-Soviet Relations, 1960-87." African Affairs 87, no. 346 (1988): 83-104.

Rodney, Walter. Decolonial Marxism: Essays from the Pan-African Revolution. New York: Verso Books, 2022.

Global Philanthropy as an Artificial Plateau for the Bourgeoisie

By Dumi Gatsha

The past few weeks have shown how destabilized we are globally. Globalization has become too heavy for the modern neocolonial empire. As multilateralism, rules based order and global trade no longer serve the interests of those in power. We are seeing generations of progress wiped away by brutal military forces on one extreme end, whilst ideologies, knowledge, and history are destroyed on the other. We see the destructure through abuses in elected offices at all levels: from sporting code regulators, parent-teacher associations, or either of the three arms of a government. Transgender rights, overseas development assistance and intellectual property law trends reflect the regressive shifts in Global geopolitics. We are all at risk of compromised global health security, climate degradation, and state-sponsored gender disparities.

We are held at ransom by a global elite that has thrived off of capitalism, racism, and digitalization. The frontiers of social, activist and change movements haven't been absolved from this crisis. As the barriers to enablement, resources and funding remain largely pooled in the global minority. Asset managers, Donor-advised funds, and private foundations remain vehicles of tax inequity, avoidance, and wealth hoarding. This diagnosis can be applied to any context where war parallels corporate profit and economic growth propels failed governance. Somewhere amidst all of this, rests philanthropy in plateu. A system replicating the world as we know it: centers of knowledge and power, yielding to the whims of the elite, educated, and well heeled.

There are countless theories of change that are reported as “successful”, leaving an impression that progress can be sustained beyond resourcing or project lifespans. Those theories of change have no meaning in a world that enacts anti-LGBT and anti-abortion laws. Neither a world where safeguards for diversity and inclusion are politicized and revoked through state and corporate machinery. We are witnessing atrocious crimes in real time, documenting injustices via social media in a world where aggressors and perpetrators deploy violence with impunity. Activists and caregivers are exhausted. Social structures are slowly being dismantled and removed from any forms of mutual aid or solidarity action. These are the moments grassroots activists warned against. These are the hallmarks of a world with no peace for those most marginalised.

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As the world burns, grant application windows, requirements, and eligibility take away much needed time for organising. The increased heat warnings and cyclones in Southern Africa only aggravate the socioeconomic conditions for the many problems movements try to solve. Yet climate related opportunities rarely weave in queer or reproductive inequities. The coup de tats in West Africa brought economic renaissance domestically whilst enacting over-regulation of civil society and socially restrictive laws that target women and LGBT populations. Philanthropy remains unimaginative, held up in the hubris of self-serving strategies whilst INGOs navigate self-preservation. Remaining with growth targets and maintaining annual distribution percentages; it is intentional to keep ways of working and grant making business as usual. The hierarchy and value chain must be maintained so they can save face, income floors, and for a “rainy day.” The question is whose rainy day and what kind of rains?

Shifting power remains aspirational. As long as money and capital are not yielded and transferred, the risks and harm to communities will continue. Whilst there aren't any dividends paid out in grant making and partnerships; controls remain pre-determined to normative development aligned programming. This leaves little room for disruptive impact and change. Disruption would mean working ourselves out of activism and philanthropy ceasing to exist. It would mean recognising activism as work deserving of meaningful compensation and social protections — even at grassroots levels. It would look like a reparative system returning exploits and extracts to communities. Valuing circular social structures that do more healing and nurturing of the planet and all people. Systems that support our sense of becoming and belonging without reserving these for those who can assimilate or navigate to adopt. It would mean all of us can be saved from a rainy day without someone deciding whether one of us is deserving or not.

As the year of turmoil continues to unfold, those of us deemed undeserving of solidarity or sunshine remain in abundance. We will resist for our own survival, and rest for our own sanity. No one has saved us from our own people, governments or corporates — neither do we expect to be saved. We continue to share our stories and joy with the hope that the world will become kinder one person at a time. Whilst our dignity and personhood may be stripped from us in moments of inequity and injustice; our humanity remains in tact. This was captured harrowingly beautifully by Nomzamo Winifred Zanyiwe Madikizela Mandela: “you are interrogated for 7 nights and 7 days without sleep… God provided a mechanism I had never thought of at the time. I reached a threshold where the body could not take the pain anymore, then I would faint. Those were the most beautiful moments. The body rested and when they threw a bucket of water to wake me up… I got up, I was so refreshed and I started fighting all over again.”

We continue to dream and cultivate our world as best as we can, with the little we have wherever we are. We have accepted that philanthropy, especially that which extends from global capital, will never have the capacity or compassion to meet us where we are. After all, communities remain behind when the donor, enabler, investor, INGO, or development program leave our countries. We will continue to speak truth to power, as capitalism continues without an end in sight. Toni Morrion's masters narrative beautifully captures how I view philanthropy's plateau. Void of any transformative disruption or imagination — whilst performing all the right words, keeping the same partners, co-opting participation and representation to maintain its systems. Its practitioners drawn from across development, volunteer, and civil society pipelines bear the hallmarks of Audre Lorde's masters tools. However, as a part of neocolonial Empires and in Gad Saad's words: philanthropy is bound to implode from within due to its own excesses. We will still be there to recreate, rebuild, and heal towards a queer, climate, and gender just world.

Dumi Gatsha (they/them) is the first ever gender diverse parliamentary candidate in Botswana, former facilitator of the #ShiftThePower UK Funders Collective and founder of Success, a grassroots organisation working in the nexus of human rights and sustainable development.

Trump's Plan for Gaza Is In Keeping With American Tradition

[Pictured: Trump’s visit to the Western Wall in 2017, which marked the first time a sitting President of the United States had made the visit. Trump said this of the experience, “I was deeply moved by my visit today to the Western Wall. Words fail to capture the experience. It will leave an impression on me forever.” Picture obtained from the White House archives.]

By Kenn Orphan

So, Trump wants the US to “take over” Gaza. And he isn’t opposed to using American troops to make that happen. That was all over the news recently. Trump is being essentially the scrubby New York real estate dealer that he is. He sees this as a sweet deal. “We’ll make it the Riviera of the Middle East,” he said.

He isn’t troubled by the bodies under the rubble or the half-starved population still there. He spoke unemotionally about forcibly relocating over a million people. Unspoken were the hundreds of thousands of Gazans now gone from the equation. A genocide not spoken of in polite society. “Why would they want to return?” he asked, “the place has been hell”. He described their predicament as if it were a natural disaster. As if their suffering were caused by some tsunami or monsoon and not by the bombs and drones and snipers supplied by the world’s most powerful nation under an administration run by a Democrat.

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The shift comes as a shock to many, as US official policy has always aimed for a two-state solution. Anyone who has followed this issue closely has understood this has always been a farce, one repeated by both Democratic and Republican regimes alike for decades, even as they bolstered the settler-colonial project that is Israel. The Palestinians have always represented a thorn in this project’s side. A problem to placate and pacify with endless amounts of platitudes and apartheid, promises and brutality. And it all ended where it was destined to end, in genocide.

Trump’s plan isn’t really that shocking when one considers that the American project, itself, has always been a real estate deal. It has always framed the living earth as a commodity to be bought, developed ruthlessly, then sold to the highest bidder. In this worldview, land is not something to be cherished. No tree is sacred, as the olive tree is to the Palestinians. It holds no existential weight. It is not beloved even though it freights our souls through this vast galaxy. It is a monetized unit of wealth to be wrapped up tightly in plastic and shipped over night to the consumer.

This is America at its rancid heart. A project that slaughtered millions of buffalo to stick it to the Indigenous people of the land. That enslaved millions of Africans to harvest cotton. That nuked two civilian populations, the only nation to do so thus far. That doused thousands of hectares of farmland and rainforest in Southeast Asia with napalm and agent orange. That scorched the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan to avenge a crime they had nothing to do with.

A nation that gleefully blows off the tops of ancient mountains in Appalachia for a few buckets of coal. That sullies the groundwater for a few gasps of “natural” gas. That digs its pincers into marshland to suck out the last bits of the earth’s primordial blood. And which has belched out the most warming gasses into our atmosphere of all nation states thus far.

Trump’s plan for Gaza is in keeping with this tradition. It is disaster capitalism at its zenith. And it is in keeping with how the American project views the living mantel of this planet. The life-giving loam that we all depend upon. It is in keeping with how it sees its Indigenous peoples. A problem to be dealt with by administering the appropriate, surgical military strikes accompanied with a boatload of platitudes. A minor bump in the road on the way to development.

Gaza is a mirror. And it is staring back at us all. It is the modern manifestation of a long, bloody legacy of colonial greed, exploitation and cruelty. And like all other stolen lands, it will not cease to exist just because its buildings and orchards and people were mercilessly leveled or because some greasy real estate dealer now has his eyes set on it.

Where Despair Ends and Tactics Begin: The Invigorating Case of Luigi Mangione

[Pictured: Luigi Mangione is escorted into Manhattan Criminal court for his arraignment on state murder and terror charges in the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, Monday, Dec. 23, 2024, in New York. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)]

By Thomas King

What’s at stake in the Luigi Mangione case is where despair ends and tactics begin. On December 4th, an unidentified shooter (now suspected to be Mangione) exposed the alibis through which social power avoids being put right on the spot— as Raoul Vaneigem once wrote. We must resist any misattribution or denial of what this moment reveals; to do otherwise is to conceal how systematic terror breeds desperate acts of political violence in America. This demands that we reject the shoehorning of the alleged gunman’s inconsistent politics into a neat ideological framework, or the digging into his past as doing the state’s work. The truth behind the shooter’s actions lies in the parasitic design of a healthcare system that sacrifices lives to fuel its machinery. After an election where healthcare barely registered for either party, the desubjectivated entity took with him a gun, his despair, and, unsurprisingly, struck a chord with the public consciousness. The praxis was simple. Pain can radicalise anyone. ‘What do you do?’ he wrote.

Let’s not be deterred. Private health coverage spending will exceed $1.5 trillion this year as life expectancy declines. Since the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, a measure the Democratic Party (aside from Bernie Sanders) has only sought to protect, UnitedHealth Group, the parent company of UnitedHealthcare, increased its annual share buyback program by 217%, funnelling $54 billion into stock repurchases. In 2023 alone, it pocketed $22 billion in profits on $371 billion in revenue—equating to $25 per share—and paid out $7.29 per share in dividends to investors. UHC had the highest denial rate of any U.S. insurance company, at 32 percent. Personal testimonies describe instances where the company denied coverage for essential treatments, including medications and hospital stays, despite their critical necessity for recovery. UHC was accused of using rigid algorithms to cut off payments despite ongoing care needs and was sued for a bot with a claimed 90 percent error rate. Meanwhile, a U.S. Senate committee found that UHC and other insurers intentionally denied critical nursing care to stroke patients, prioritising profit over survival. We lay bare the shooter’s motive when we recognise the healthcare system as a productive force of socialised violence. We must also recognise this violence as producing sad passions: fear, depression, and the suicidal urge. Franco Berardi reminds us, “Only by calibrating the abyss of the American unconscious can we decipher the roots of the social ferocity that is now in full manifestation.” From this point, we might decide where and to whom we must turn.

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The so-called ‘dark corners of the internet’ are, in fact, very bright. Talking heads decry the blurring of celebrity and criminality in the lionisation of Mangione, as if it's a new phenomenon, as if it marks a troubling new phase in the normalisation of violence in America. If violence is indeed normalised in America, it is because U.S.-supplied weapons kill civilians and fuel genocide. It is because both political parties have spent decades eroding public trust in the rule of law. It is because so-called ‘liberal democracy’ is on shaky ground. It is because neoliberal governance thrives on the precarity and commodification of relations. It is because, while Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro claims there is no place for violence, he signs his name on missiles. It is because Zoe Strimpel fears for the future because of ‘Gen-Z’ support for Mangione yet writes that ‘the Israel Defence Forces are the most moral soldiers in the world’. Why is violence only acceptable when carried out—or backed—by elites against the working class and marginalised? Why does a U.S. Congress report deem it necessary to issue a “call to arms” for bipartisan public support to reclaim the United States’ crumbling global hegemony? If we are witnessing the normalisation of political violence through chaotic revenge, it is because the reasons for revolution are staring us in the face. It is because pain and sad passions ignite the active forces within them.

We are fighting a war of information where major media outlets have become arms of the national security state. Mangione’s alleged manifesto remained hidden until Ken Klippenstein published it, despite being in the possession of major media companies, just like his notebook is now. Days later, the New York Times refused to publish Mangione’s image, citing fears of "amplifying the crime and inspiring others," according to Andy Newman. Meanwhile, other media outlets scramble to frame Mangione's alleged actions as 'bizarre' and 'brazen'— desperate to portray him as terrifying and erratic, because acknowledging the truth of the event would force them to recognise that he is, in fact, no different from the average American voter. Even those who appear to empathise with the cause often revert to reductive moralising.

A quick search of Luigi Mangione's name floods the screen with headlines like ‘Who is Luigi Mangione?’, ‘What we know about the New York killer,’ or ‘Tracing the privileged family of Luigi Mangione.’ This is journalism at its most insidious. Had Mangione not been arrested, the shooter may have become a stronger symbol of class antagonism—his image untainted by the specifics of his story. It is why we must resist such attempts to dilute his image. That said, as Will Conway, co-host of the Acid Horizon podcast, pointed out, the flood of comical or provocative edits and politicised videos surrounding the shooter’s assassination reveals how the truth of a politicising event disrupts the biopolitical fabric, where anyone can shape the mythology surrounding the propaganda of the deed. These posts fight back against those who seek to control the narrative, which is why the Times attempted to disarm the public in the name of national security, but it was already too late.

Americans are conditioned to love men who look like Mangione, which is why they dominate narratives in media and culture. If Mangione weren’t white, the universal support he now receives would undoubtedly shape a very different narrative. So, resisting the dilution of the motive also requires, as we should independently of this case, resisting the embedded racism that makes his attractiveness conventional. An obsolete romanticism—seemingly innocent, though it isn’t—will only help sustain the forces that shape who becomes a symbol of resistance and who doesn’t. We must remember the work remains unfinished, and the revolution will have no face. Destituting the political apparatus doesn’t rest on the murder of Brian Thompson— the world is full of Thompsons. With that said, this incident might have done the world a huge favour. It has given a nation, relentlessly beaten down by a for-profit healthcare system, a renewed sense of unity and a reinvigorated cause. What matters now is what we do next.

Vaneigem wrote,

“My sympathy for the solitary killer ends where tactics begin; but perhaps tactics need scouts driven by individual despair. However that may be, the new revolutionary tactics — which will be based indissolubly on the historical tradition and on the practice, so widespread and so disregarded, of individual realisation — will have no place for people who only want to mimic the gestures of Ravachol or Bonnot. But on the other hand these tactics will be condemned to theoretical hibernation if they cannot, by other means, attract collectively the individuals whom isolation and hatred for the collective lie have already won over to the rational decision to kill or to kill themselves. No murderers — and no humanists either! The first accept death, the second impose it. Let ten men meet who are resolved on the lightning of violence rather than the long agony of survival; from this moment, despair ends and tactics begin. Despair is the infantile disorder of the revolutionaries of everyday life.”

References

UHC Stats. Health Insurance, UnitedHealth, Shareholders, and Buybacks. Jacobin, December 2024. https://jacobin.com/2024/12/health-insuranceunitedhealth-shareholders-buybacks.

Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life.

Berardi, Franco. The American Unconscious and the Disintegration of the West. Substack. https://francoberardi.substack.com/p/el-inconsciente-americano-y-ladesintegracion.

Strimpel, Zoe. The Israel Defence Forces Are the Most Moral Soldiers in the World. The Telegraph, April 27, 2024. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/04/27/israel-defence-forces-mostmoral-soldiers-in-the-world/.

A Review of Shourideah C. Molavi’s ‘Environmental Warfare in Gaza’

Shuruq Josting

In her book Environmental Warfare in Gaza, published by Pluto Press in February 2024, Shourideh C. Molavi makes a historical journey through the wars and incursions on Gaza, developing our understanding of what their past and ongoing impacts mean for Gaza’s built and cultivated environments.

Molavi serves as lead researcher for Palestine at Forensic Architecture (FA), which is a research agency based at Goldsmiths, University of London, as well as the founding  institutional base for an interdisciplinary academic field of the same name.. As a field, forensic architecture works on “the production and presentation of spatial evidence within legal, political, and cultural contexts, and takes architecture to include not only buildings, but shaped environments at the scale of cities and territories.”

The research agency’s work has been used as evidence in courts and in citizens’ tribunals across the world, combining techniques such as spatial modeling and audio and video documentation of state violence and violations of human rights. In its investigations of states and corporate entities, Forensic Architecture, according to its website, has aided the legal and public struggle against “historical and contemporary colonial violence, including the destruction of traditional environments and life worlds.”

In her new book, Molavi not only builds on her previous investigations along Gaza’s Eastern “border”[1] but also considers the colonial history of Palestine’s environment, starting with the categorization of plants by the British.

Over years, Israel has widened the “protective” zone along its borders, progressively reducing the scarcely available arable land by flattening the land through airstrikes and bulldozers. In recent years, this process has been extended through the deliberate targeting of lands with high concentrations of pesticides, sprayed alongside the fence onto Gazan farmlands.

These steps are done in order to create the perfect “buffer zone,” providing clear views into the strip. Molavi concludes that this so-called “no-go zone,” ranging from 300-1000 meters, turns Gaza’s border into the ideal “one-sided” border, allowing for permeation from one side only. This constantly affects the livelihood of Palestinians in proximity to the border.

In order to have a clearer view of protestors or agriculturists, specific types of plants were criminalized due to their height or banned from the environment altogether. The effects can be seen clearly, for instance, in the planting pattern: while in earlier years crops up to 80 cm height were permitted, the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights reported in 2018 that farmers had been forced to reduce the height of their plants to only 40 cm (~15 in) due to ongoing razing activities (Molavi 2024, 33).

These enforced changes to the agricultural environment include citrus orchards, which were central to the development of Gaza’s role as a coastal trade hub. According to Molavi, the role of the orange in the “formation of Gazan identity, including local knowledge production, socio-economic relations and migration patterns, domestic and international cultural exchange . . . is largely understudied.” (p. 27) We do know, however, that Gazan traditional citrus cultivation is closely linked to the Palestinian Nakba or “catastrophe,” as thousands of families lost access to fruit orchards and vegetable plots that lay beyond today’s militarized borders. After they became refugees and settled in Gaza, many Palestinians had to adapt to an urban lifestyle, and only a small percentage of Gazans today cultivate farmland, much of which is owned by a small percentage of large-scale landowners.

Similarly, Gaza has lost many of its olive groves, often near the “buffer zone” due to clearing processes by Israel or by the prohibition of taller plants. According to Oxfam, roughly 112,000 olive trees, symbolic of Palestine, were uprooted by Israel between 2000 and 2008.In addition to their symbolism, olive trees have provided Gazan grove keepers and their families an income, as well as a critical food source, in the form of oil and olives, during times of curfew imposed by the Israeli army. Already in the early stages of Israel’s ongoing genocide on Gaza, many Gazans had to cut down their trees to provide their own families and communities with firewood to survive the winter. Gazans stress the loss they felt and the role these trees, many of which were inherited, had in their lives.

From 2017 to 2019, when Gazans protested for their internationally recognized Right of Return (UNGA Res. 194 (III)), the now cleared and flattened area near the fence allowed for the targeting and injuring of thirty six thousand Gazans, who resorted to burning tires and utilizing the toxic smoke to take cover from snipers. Roughly 29% of these injuries were brought on by live ammunition and rubber bullets, leading to many Gazans undergoing amputations. Especially for small-scale farmers, this can mean the loss of their livelihoods.

Investigations of the pesticides sprayed by Israel onto Gazan lands have resulted in the conclusion that the while plants subjected to the deliberate spraying of herbicides along Gaza’s borders showed traces of insecticides and pesticides,  “damaging levels of herbicides were not detected” (Molavi 2024, 72) by the consulting Katif Center Laboratories. Nonetheless, farmers have reported severe losses of crops and have had to resort to planting different crops, not only changing the landscape but also removing Gazan people’s access to ancestral foods and traditions, such as foraging Khobeiza (Palestinian Common Mallow) and grazing animals on the land. Further, many farmers have had to move away from their traditional growing techniques and crops, growing alternative crops in greenhouses so as to shield them from herbicides.

Questions regarding FA’s approach have been put forward, most interestingly by Palestinian filmmaker and artist Emily Jacir in her film Letter to a Friend (2019), which is dedicated to FA founder Eyal WeizmannGiven the often repeated crimes in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, ranging from extrajudicial executions to war crimes and crimes against humanity in connection with global arms exporting firms, Jacir raises the question why her friend’s focus remains on proving a crime has been committed instead of working to prevent it from being repeated or exacerbated.

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Jacir’s Letter to a Friend is a critique that can nourish movements for social and ecological justice, essentially calling for the proactive protection and defense of lives and livelihoods. This call could, if we let it, form the basis of more strictly enforced policies determining what will—sooner or later—harm the environment and local populations and inform new ways of preventing these crimes. It is this very necessity to protect the soils and livelihoods from being weaponized to create scarcity that can connect movements for a joint cause and a more just future.

Writing for Verfassungsblog: On Matters Constitutional, Saeed Bagheri, Lecturer in International Law at the University of Reading School of Law, writes that “the natural environment remains the silent victim of Israel’s war on Gaza.” He highlights the Israeli military’s general stance towards the environmental destruction it is causing in Gaza: While there is a military necessity to clear areas, “there appears to be little evidence of ‘widespread, long-term, and severe environmental damage’ from Israel’s air strikes on the heavily civilian-populated Gaza.” Bagheri makes the case that Israel is thus using the “widespread, long-term, and severe standard—an international humanitarian law standard that already labors under ambiguity—in combination with the inability of scientists to undertake careful studies of air, water, and soil quality, to screen its enormously damaging impacts in Gaza. 

Despite decades of Palestinian and Lebanese farmers, as well as international researchers, attempting to prove and provide evidence for the widespread environmental destruction, we do not need to wait until evidence of an already destroyed environment surpasses military need. Under the precautionary principle, the burden of proof lies with the party profiting from the actions, which is why some researchers advocate for the use of the precautionary principle in armed conflict. They assert that while under International Humanitarian Law the focus rests on “all feasible precautions,” the precautionary principle actually provides protective guidelines and takes parts of the decision out of the hands of military personnel.

Some, like Bagheri, do not think that this is enough, looking at the lack of consequences and interventions on behalf of Gazans: already in April 2024, six months after the start of Israel’s genocide on Gaza, Bagheri said that “the UN, in general, and the ICC in particular, should have done more to attenuate the substantial risk of mistreatment of the natural environment, concerning more particularly the ecology, health and survival of Palestinians.” This sentiment is shared by many and goes far beyond the ongoing genocide—those who read Shourideh Molavi’s research closely will see that an intervention should have long preceded the currently ongoing destruction, given the vast amount of evidence provided.

Environmental Warfare in Gaza is is an essential book for understanding the ongoing war on Gaza. Molavi reports on Gaza’s past and present with respect and gratitude to her local colleagues, closing off by paying tribute to her collaborator Roshdi Yahya Al-Sarraj, co-founder of the investigation’s journalistic partner organization, Ain Media Gaza, who was killed in an airstrike on his home.

Since the book’s release early this year, much has changed, and Molavi, despite clearly having re-edited her book to include the newest developments, could not have predicted the destruction that has been brought upon Gaza since. While she continues to investigate Israel’s crimes in Gaza and the continued ecocide in Gaza that enhances the famine, a section of the book comes to mind that brings us closer to the people and the future of Gaza:

“Refusing to limit her output to low-growing fruits and vegetables, Mona would strategically place olive trees among her crops. [...] Responding to the forced biopolitical modifications of [the] otherwise familiar landscape, such acts of resistance interrupt the colonial and imperial gaze, also emphasizing the inextricable role of the environment in modern warfare.” (p.43)

As with the farmers interviewed by Molavi in 2018, the people of Gaza still refuse to be helpless in the face of a man-made famine. Initiatives such as Thamra have resorted to planting amidst the ruins, to have access to food. Seeing himself forced to evacuate, Yousef Abu Rabea, a Palestinian farming engineer and co-founder of Thamra, collected seeds from his family’s farm in Beit Lahia. Thamra’s aim is to promote food stability, but Abu Rabea remains concerned: “The genocide has left the farmland all but devastated by artillery-borne white phosphorus, a potent carcinogen that lingers in the soil, poisoning farmers and making their crops unsafe to eat.” As of October 7, 2024, new evacuation orders for Gaza’s North have been issued, and the bombing of the densely populated areas of the North has increased manifold. Yousef Abu Rabea was killed by an Israeli drone strike on October 21, 2024.

While the majority of research on the chemical effects of discharged ordnance focuses on the effects of white phosphorus, an incendiary agent that is not yet deemed a chemical weapon, on the human body, laboratory investigations by the American University of Beirut are underway to better understand the result of soil contamination in South Lebanon’s targeted areas. The United States’ National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health already lists ingestion as a possible means of absorbing white phosphorus, suggesting that soil and plant contamination will lead to absorption by humans, as well as grazing animals. While many insist that conclusive investigations can only be done after the end of Israel’s attack on Lebanon and Gaza, Lebanese farmers have already lost thousands of trees due to white phosphorus fires. Previous attacks with white phosphorus have led to diminished harvests and contaminated streams in earlier attacks. Earlier research has linked white phosphorus particles in Alaska’s Eagle River Flats to the death of thousands of waterfowl.

Building on the conclusion drawn in a recent ELC blogpost by Elena Tiedens, where the precautionary principle fails to prevent damage done to the environment, ecocide proves to be a path through which the destruction of the environment, and subsequently co-violations to human rights, could be persecuted and punished. Ecocide in Gaza is not a local issue, as became clear at the latest in Reuters’ most recent findings on e.g. the release of asbestos through urban bombing that will affect the health of the coming generations. In the words of Cenk Tan, ecocide is “a phenomenon that has serious international impact. It represents humanity’s toll on Earth.”

Notes

[1] To this day, the Occupied Palestinian Territories of 1967 and the Gaza Strip are internationally considered occupied territories and therefore do not have officially determined borders. 

Grounding with Koreans in the Belly of Another Beast

[Pictured: The western-induced border, commonly referred to as the DMZ (demilitarized zone), that separates the Korean people.]

By D. Musa Springer

Republished from Hood Communist.

In the short time between sunrise and boarding the 15 hour flight to Tokyo, all of my travel anxiety turned to excitement. In November 2023, I was invited to join the 2nd annual U.S. Peace Delegation to Chongryon (The General Association of Korean Residents in Japan), in a variety group of U.S. academics, journalists, high school youth, and organizers. The delegation was organized by Korean Reunification activists Dr. Kiyul Chung, a Visiting Professor at Tokyo’s Korea University and Pyongyang’s Kim Il Sung University, and Derek R. Ford, a US-based activist and visiting lecturer at Korea University. The opportunity to join this exchange felt like a unique chance to build fundamentally anti-imperialist paths to solidarity, and proved itself to be. 

As an International Youth Representative for the Cuba-based Red Barrial Afrodescendiente, I’m familiar with organizing delegations for Africans struggling in the U.S. to ground with Africans struggling against the blockade in Cuba. Aside from it being the longest flight I’ve ever taken, this trip to ground with Koreans in Japan was my first time on the ‘attending’ end of a delegation, putting anti-imperialist politics into practice from that perspective. My time at Korea University, as well as touring the impressive Chongryon Korean National Schools, reaffirmed my commitment to the examples of Cuba’s internationalist politics, and presented much educational dialogue, valuable exchanges, and material pathways for further solidarity. 

I would especially like to thank Dr. Kiyul Chung, the only Korean born in the Southern portion of the Korean peninsula to ever teach at a Northern Korea university! The wonderful Korean comrade and longtime anti-imperialist organizer shepherded us throughout the entire delegation, losing his own sleep for the sake of ours. At 71 years old, Dr. Kiyul has more energy than the entire delegation combined, with his passion for his people and the Reunification of Korea beaming at all times. This experience provided me with further insights into the historical struggles of the Korean people under Japanese imperialism — both as an unrecognized, oppressed colonial diaspora within Japan, and in their Motherland as the target of limitless Western imperialist aggression.

I believe that traveling on delegations is a task that organizers in the U.S. should engage in, within an organized fashion, including domestic trips to share notes with organizers across the country. Our organizations must collaborate and strategize on how they, and in turn us, can do better in supporting a broad and fresh base of members within our ranks to experience the political transformations, solidarity, and exchanges that often come from delegations. In this context my reflection on my time grounding with Koreans, like my reflection on African power and politics in La Marina, is an attempt to offer some perspective on the broad map of global resistance to imperialism, the process of building ties to learn from our Global South siblings in struggle, and to share insights to both the experience itself and what I learned from it.

Koreans In Japan

One of the most staggering revelations of this trip was learning firsthand about the sheer scale of Korean suffering under Japanese imperialism. While the image constructed of Japan in the West is closely related to the island’s cultural exports — popular art, food, entertainment and fashion often associate the island and its history with all things fun and whimsical — the reality of its colonial violence is much less spoken. As Derek Ford details, the origins of Koreans in Japan is fraught with ‘profound violence’:

“From their founding after World War II, Koreans in Japan—who are sometimes called “Zainichi Koreans”, meaning “foreign Koreans”—have always had to struggle to create and maintain educational spaces and systems where they can teach and learn about their own history, culture, traditions, and languages, in addition to other essential disciplines and languages. This was a basic human right as well as a political struggle, as Japan’s colonization of Korea, which officially started in 1910 but began about 5 years earlier, forced over 2 million Koreans—about 90 percent of whom came from the southern part of the peninsula—to move to Japan through either physical violence, coercion, and deceit. The story of the formation of a Korean population in Japan in the 1900s is one of profound violence.

Some were “recruited” by Japanese companies after colonial forces stole their lands and gave them to landlords, promised great jobs and good pay but receiving the opposite. Many Korean women, hundreds of thousands, were kidnapped into Japan’s military sexual slavery network, which the U.S. [military] inherited after it replaced Japan as the occupying force in the south [in 1945]. In 1938, Japan forcibly conscripted and kidnapped workers from Korea and brought them to Japan as slave laborers, where they were forced to build the military, munitions buildings and construct secret underground bases and bunkers for the air force. In the latter instance, children were particularly valuable, as their small bodies and hands were essential for creating the tunnels with pickaxes.”

Koreans estimate upwards of 7-8 million were conscripted to Japanese colonial forced labor during the World War period, with at least 800,000 taken to mainland Japan as forced labor. Approximately 300,000 Korean women were kidnapped and forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military, again, an operation later taken over by the U.S. military occupation. In their explanations of this history on our trip, the Koreans consistently made comparisons to the colonization of Indigenous people and chattel slavery of Africans in the Americas, and the plight of these individuals is a haunting testament to the universal brutality of colonialism. Similar to how African historians intentionally highlight and celebrate our resistance to colonialism and slavery, all of the Koreans made sure to remind us that they revolted consistently. One historian said that an estimated third of all Korean forced laborers actively resisted through guerrilla warfare, organized escape, and marronage, embodying a common anti-colonial spirit of resilience and defiance.

It’s worth noting the population dynamics among Koreans in Japan, because the Korean community in Japan has a complex and significant history, a main theme throughout the delegation. Japan’s policy towards ethnic Koreans living within its borders, particularly those who do not hold citizenship of either Japan or South Korea, reflects Japan’s enduring colonial policies and the greater geopolitical forces of the region. Japan only recognizes the Republic of Korea (‘South Korea’) as the ‘legitimate’ government of the Korean Peninsula. Consequently, Japan does not consider passports or citizenship issued by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or ‘North Korea’) as valid. This stance is rooted in Japan’s imperial legacy, subservient diplomatic relations with the U.S. who wages continual war against the DPRK, and its own colonial recognition policies. As one can imagine, immense issues related to things like traveling, housing, and education arise from not having your citizenship formally recognized.

Of roughly 1 million Koreans in Japan, thousands of them do not possess Japanese nor South Korean citizenship; the term “Choson” is used for them. This term is a reference to the Korean peninsula under the Choson Dynasty (1392–1897), before its division into North and South; from 1910 to 1945 the peninsula was ruled by the Empire of Japan under the name Choson. “Choson” is how the Japanese government categorizes these Koreans in legal, political, and administrative limbo, and it’s important to remember that many are descendants of Koreans brought to Japan during the colonial period who either only have DPRK citizenship, some combination of Japanese and Korean citizenship, or who have chosen not to obtain Japanese citizenship in place of citizenship to their Motherland, the DPRK. ​​In 1947, Japan enacted the ‘Alien Registration Law’, which relegated ethnic Koreans to the status of foreigners within Japan. Following this, the Nationality Law of 1950 removed Japanese citizenship from Korean offspring born to Japanese mothers, while Korean children fathered by Japanese men could retain their Japanese citizenship.

Learning of these dynamics forced me to reflect on the colonial obsession with regulating national identity, citizenship, and ethnic classification; from the centuries-old ‘One-Drop Rule’ that continues to dictate the racial class system of the U.S., to the apartheid segregation system imposed onto the Palestinians by the Zionists, to the dangerous blood-quantum eugenics preoccupation of Nazi Germany. Whether implicitly implied through legal and cultural means, as is the case with Koreans in Japan, or through explicit and violent exclusion, colonizers are always necessarily obsessed with sternly dictating national and ethnic identity, marriage, citizenship, population diversification, and racial classification.     

While some progress has been made, one can imagine the serious implications that these classifications have had for the identity, legal status, and discrimination of the Korean community in Japan for several generations. Those designated as Choson usually face challenges related to their imposed-statelessness, such as limitations on travel, difficulties in accessing most social services, ethnicity-based discrimination in housing and labor, and broader issues of societal oppression. 

One example that we learned from students at Korea University was during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the Japanese government created a special program to support students struggling financially. Japan allowed for students across the entire country of all nationalities, including students at international schools in Japan, to request and receive state funds to help needy students afford a laptop to do remote schoolwork during quarantine, access protective gear like masks and sanitizer, and even help paying university tuition. All students, that is, except for students at Korea University. 

These students already faced a number of compounding financial and discriminatory issues long before the pandemic; students informed me that by simply attending Korea University, they have already curtailed the vast majority of their job prospects within Japan. Korea University was the only university where students were not allowed access to this COVID support, and Korean students launched a grassroots campaign in response to protest and calling out the Japanese government. 

Other examples are much more dramatic, but equally illustrative of the oppressive nature of life in Japan for the Koreans. As Ford notes:

“In 2018, a Japanese man attacked a young Korean man with a knife, and he admitted to police he did so “because he had ‘looked down’ on him.” That same year, two men shot up Chongryon’s headquarters in downtown Tokyo.”

During our visit, the mixture of this painful past with the tenuous present was palpable. 

“Just before the beginning of the COVID pandemic we had to crawl through a torn chainlink fence,” participants of the delegation from prior years told me, as we accessed the underground tunnels where thousands of Koreans perished as forced laborers. By November 2023 during my trip, the Japanese government had installed sparse lighting inside the opening of the tunnel, and had a small multilingual plaque acknowledging the historic nature of the site. Having legal access to these tunnels and the small commemorative plaque is itself the result of struggle by local Korean organizers and a small handful of Japanese historians, and remains a point of contention: the plaque doesn’t accurately describe the site, almost reading as a celebration of the horrors endured by Koreans in these tunnels, with absolutely no mention of forced labor. Of the roughly  1200 forced labor tunnels across the island, only less than a dozen are accessible by Japanese historians, who must receive tight-gripped government approval to enter.

These underground cave-tunnels were utilized by the Japanese imperial army, who moved most of their military operations underground to escape bombardments and military action during the World Wars. Once I ducked my way into the dark, humid tunnel, I quickly realized the space was filled with an ominous, heavy, and familiar feeling. We observed the physical marks on the walls of these underground tunnels painstakingly chiseled by the hands of Korean laborers, many just teenagers as young as 12, under the duress of Imperial Japanese guns. These marks are not just scars on stone; they are indelible imprints of a dark history, a somber reminder of the exploitation and suffering endured. 

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Exploring the legacies of chattel slavery causes a similarly chilling feeling for Africans in the Americas. At the Castillo de San Severino in Matanzas, Cuba, for example, historians point out where you can still see the bullet holes in the stone walls, where Africans who attempted to escape or revolt were punished by gunfire. There’s a level of reality that is communicated by experiencing the physical remnants of this deep oppression.

Dr. Chung and professor Curry Malott, another participant on the delegation, described that when there were no lights inside these colonial tunnels, only the guide’s flashlight, they were immersed in shadows and the echoes of brutal horror. To honor this, we turned off all the lights to experience just a few seconds of the darkness that plagued Koreans for decades. 

Interestingly, the Japanese public’s awareness of their nation’s colonial history is markedly absent, intentionally hidden and disallowed from public memory in any capacity. The nation’s imperial history is not taught in their schools, nor part of public discussion in any meaningful capacity. The lack of historical consciousness among the Japanese populace about their own country’s role in colonizing Korea is concerning, but not dissimilar to the absolute and proud lack of public knowledge in the U.S. of the atrocities their European ancestors carried out against many colonized and enslaved populations. It points to a broader issue of historical amnesia as a tool of the maintenance empire, the nearly inescapable dominating power of U.S. imperialism, and the importance of truthful historical education in acknowledging and learning from the past. 

Since at least 1948 the Koreans have engaged in organized resistance in the form of grassroots organization and DPRK-supported popular education. In 1955, this grassroots organizations would become Chongryon, a network of Korean schools that they began to build immediately following liberation. Chongryon now exists as a network of hundreds of Korean schools across the islands, cultural centers and businesses, and a humbly stunning university in Tokyo — all leading the struggle against the violent erasure of Korean people’s history, culture, and presence. And, as one professor made sure I understood clearly, all of this is achieved through belief in the values and principles of socialism.  

Microcosm of Regional Imperialist Aggression

The complexities of this situation reflect the ongoing tensions in the East Asian region — due primarily to the presence of U.S. imperialist forces that occupy all of Japan and the Southern Korean Peninsula — and the wider Pacific region through United States Pacific Command (USPACOM). 

In my short time in Japan, I was repeatedly stunned at the extremely visible and influential presence of U.S. military forces on the small island. Signs in some places read “U.S. Military Housing”, while others advertise “Best Car Rentals For U.S. Military Men.” When I ventured into the fashion district in my free time, massive and popular second-hand clothing markets were on most corners filled with used military paraphernalia, proudly sitting across from the McDonald’s on every block. In true ‘traveling while Black’ fashion, I sought out other Black people whenever possible; in Tachikawa, nearly every Black person I saw, including those who messaged me on social apps, were U.S. soldiers and their families. In some regards, what I observed and experienced of the U.S. Military presence in Japan was more visible and aggressive than their presence domestically in many places. The juxtaposition of Japanese culture and context with the U.S. military presence gave the same feeling as the police who occupy U.S. cities, who stick out within a society designed to cater to them. 

The U.S. has not only occupied and wedged its way into virtually every aspect of Japanese life and economy, it has also stunted and outright stopped virtually all attempts at Korean reunification, regional peace and stability, and sustainable diplomatic ties between the DPRK, its citizens, and Japan. 

One afternoon on the trip we drove up a winding, narrow road to park our van at a stunning mountaintop park, surrounded by cherry blossoms and lush greens. The beauty felt like a scene from a movie.

“Right there, you see it,” Said Dr. Kiyul, one hand on my shoulder and the other pointing at the various cargo and military ships in the ocean. “See that big U.S. ship right there? That’s where the nukes are!” 

The ship he was referring to was the unavoidable USS Ronald Reagan, a massive nuclear-powered aircraft ‘supercarrier’ sitting off the shore of Yokosuka. 

“That ship is readied with nuclear weapons and other devastating heavy artillery, aimed at the DPRK at all times. One may think that the Japanese, being the victims of the world’s most tragic and infamous nuclear attack by the U.S., wouldn’t cooperate with this nuclear chauvinism,” said Dr. Kiyul. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. uses the nonsensical guise of “deterrent diplomacy” and maintains a subservient Japanese government to assert that they are keeping Japan ‘safe’ from the DPRK and others, even if the opposite remains true. Most Japanese people I spoke with in my free time felt, for lack of a better term, deeply indifferent to the U.S. military occupation across their island, though some have said that the events in Palestine since October 7 have changed that. 

It’s important to underscore how deeply ingrained the U.S. military presence and militarization is in the Pacific region is. Similar to how U.S. AFRICOM has turned the entirety of the African continent to a subservient militarized zone, or how the U.S.  SOUTHCOM has designated Latin America as its “yard” to dominate, so too has the U.S. PACOM (Indo-Pacific Command) carved the entire Pacific region into its playground. U.S. military bases, naval carriers, occupation installments, and joint-training endeavors completely surround the DPRK and China, utilizing Japan, Southern Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Guam, and surrounding areas in the region to encircle those the U.S. deem as enemies.    

This all-encompassing military presence aligns with the U.S. strategy of “full spectrum dominance” to control all land, sea, air and space possible. Across the continent of Africa the presence of the U.S. AFRICOM resulted in a 100,000% increase in terrorism across the continent, deteriorated the already shaky regional stability, and left neo-colonial forces with new caches of U.S. weapons. In a similar manner, the U.S. presence in the Pacific has caused a breakdown of negotiations between the DPRK and neighborhooding countries like Japan, as well as the Southern portion of the Korean Peninsula. Each time the North and South Korean governments have attempted peace talks, let alone discussions of any potential reunification, the U.S. has swiftly halted such talks; the easing of Japanese hostility against the DPRK was also stunted by the U.S., who deemed the DPRK a grave safety and forbade the Japanese government from seeking peaceful solutions. The U.S. has consistently denied DPRK-initiated proposals to discuss a peace treaty to formally end the Korean war, for example, the longest war in U.S. history.  

What’s clear is that the U.S. prefers to continue an aggressive and antagonistic policy towards the DPRK, using its subservient “allies” in the region as mere launching pads from which they can target their regional enemies. Despite the DPRK remaining politically consistent on the question of peace talks, consistent on the common sense policy not relinquishing nuclear weapons (for fear of suffering the same fate of Libya’s Qaddafi), consistent on their expressed desire for reunification of Korea, the U.S. has been equally consistent in denying the region stability and demilitarized peace. The largest military occupation is in Luchu (Okinawa), which doubles as a U.S. and Japanese colonial occupation of these Indigenous islands. 

For Koreans in Japan, I was told by students, Japanese aggression and discrimination against internal Koreans tends to match the larger geopolitical situations they face. As the geopolitical sphere becomes more complex and contentious, local Koreans face knife attacks, are scared to wear their traditional clothing outside of their schools, are made into the society’s punching bags, and experience a microcosm of the larger regional warcraft by the U.S.

68 years of Internationalism, Popular Education In Practice 

The delegation took place just one month following the Al-Aqsa Flood Operation in Occupied Palestine on October 7, and therefore the consistent backdrop of most conversations on the trip was Palestine, the resistance struggle being waged there, and how it is related to the burgeoning potential of a multipolar world. The DPRK has long supported the struggles of the Palestinian Resistance both materially and politically, as they have to a lesser known extent African liberation struggles, including training various militant Black Panthers and supporting some seeking asylum. In fact the DPRK has never recognized the Zionist state, consistently calling for the liberation of Palestine. 

In the Korean elementary and middle schools, I flipped through pages in their history books and saw images of Martin Luther King Jr., Muamar Qadaffi, the Black Panther Party, Malcolm X, Ahmed Ben Bella, and other revolutionary figures in African history, which was particularly warming. While in in the U.S. the DPRK is extremely and harshly vilified, the Global South still largely recognizes the DPRK for having never surrendered to imperialism, and as an “unwavering ally of the South and the resolute torchbearer of anti-imperialism”, as the Communist Party of Kenya put it in their December issue of Itikadi. Reverence for the DPRK exists across Africa, with organizations like the Nigerian-DPRK Friendship Association highlighting the role that the DPRK played in supporting African liberation movements of the 60s and the 70s, and African development beyond that. This support includes providing tractors and agricultural supplies, helping to develop local infrastructure like roads and hospitals, exchange of academic training, import-export exchange, and technological cooperation.  

Inside each room of the Korean high schools and the Korean University, images of their anti-colonial heroes Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il hang proudly, similar to the endless images of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and Jose Martí plastered across Cuban walls. The Koreans recognize their struggle as primarily a struggle against the contradictions of imperialism and colonialism, with the Korean Juche ideology guiding them, and sew this recognition into the fabric of their work inside Japan. 

In the middle school classes, a young Korean girl was asked to practice her English in front of the class by speaking to us; the students all turned their chairs around and sat quietly, attentively to show her respect. To our surprise, she didn’t simply introduce herself, but rather introduced her entire class, speaking almost exclusively in the collective “we” — telling us what ‘we’ as a class like to do, why they are excited to meet us, and so forth. We all noted the collective, communal nature of the Chongryan system, and the beautiful display of this collectivism in the student’s persistent use of “we.” 

Toward the latter half of our trip, I was able to guest lecture alongside other delegation participants for two different classes at Korea University. The topic of the class that I joined is itself a testament to the advanced nature of their revolutionary education: “End of the Unipolar World, Creation of Multipolar World: Histories of Korea-U.S., Russia-U.S., and China-U.S. Confrontation” taught by professor Kiyul Chung. We discussed the globalization of anti-imperialist principles of self-determination, the role of the DPRK in supporting a burgeoning multipolar world, and the active application of DPRK principles of self-reliance and self-defense. 

When it was my turn to speak, I put into context the struggles of Africans within the U.S. as an internal colony, highlighted several moments of joint history between DPRK and African liberation struggles, and discussed the strong commonalities between Pan-Africanism and Korean Reunification as strategies and political ideologies. The commonalities in these two ideological northstars needs to be further explored. The same way that Korean Reunification wishes to see the U.S., Japanese, and Western imperialist grip on Korea fall, we too wish to see this imperialist grip on Africa fall. The same way that they desire the reunification of the Korean Peninsula under scientific socialism, so too do we wish to see the unification of Africa under scientific socialism. In the same way that they envision safety and security for the Korean diaspora as being existentially linked to the reunification of Korea, we also understand the safety and security of Africans in our diaspora from imperialist racism as only being achievable through Africa’s unification.  

And as they wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial puppet governments of Japan and South Korea — who take their orders directly from the U.S. — we, too, wish to see the fall of the neo-colonial comprador class, who exploit Africa and Africans at the command of Western imperialists. 

The discussions highlighted the irony of certain academic narratives that focus exclusively on single-issue oppression with a U.S.-centric lens, while ignoring the broader history and experience of imperialism globally. While discourse of ‘global anti-blackness’ has gone viral in recent years, rarely have I seen this perspective properly contrasted with the experiences of Koreans under Japanese imperialism, including the mass rape and enslavement of Korean women, or other colonized populations. It underscored the importance of recognizing and respecting the diverse histories of both suffering and resistance across the world, rather than subsuming them under singular narratives of blanket oppression hierarchies.

This trip helped me to think deeper on the often cited concept of ‘the world being built on antiblackness’, critically examined in the light of the Pacific region’s experiences, the Arab (West Asia) region’s experiences, and so forth. The sufferings of people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Iran, in Korea, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaii, and in other regions includes levels of dehumanization, mass murder, sanctions, exploitation, and slavery by Western powers that challenge the narrative that centers solely on anti-Blackness as the foundational for global oppression. This view feels reductive in light of serious engagement with the world history of imperialism, as it overlooks the multifaceted nature of imperialist violence and the diverse experiences of those suffering under it, in favor of grand narratives.

While I do not claim to be an expert on such subjects nor want this occasionally controversial topic to overshadow the overall reflections in this piece, I do hope that we can broaden our understanding of our own oppression in light of global struggles. Conditions of enslavement, colonization, vicious racism and discrimination emanate from a system of imperialism that dictates super-exploitation at all costs, that simply reappears in various forms and locations. We must resist the urge to claim a form of chauvinism which asserts a global preoccupation, consciously or subconsciously, with our oppression as the ‘psychic’ lifeblood of the modern world. In reality, imperialism is the lifeblood of the modern world-building project, with the U.S.-EU-NATO bloc dictating the terms of exploitation to the world. 

This, perhaps, is why the Chongryon school network is primarily based on Korean culture as their basis of community and education. “Korean culture is thousands of years old, and our oppression is not,” one student at Korea University told me. “That is why we focus on learning our Korean language, our mythology, our history. if we do not preserve it, Japan will squash it out of us.”

In Cuba, a similar phenomenon exists. The depth of African culture, from language and dance, to fashion and spiritual practice, help to unify and sustain the Revolution, by creating a common African identity that Afro-Cubans unif around. For the Koreans in Japan, their culture is not just an act of resistance against Japanese erasure, it is also a source of unity and great ethnic, national pride. For African organizers in the West, we have to remember that our culture is a powerful tool for unification and pride, taking the lessons from other colonized individuals who have proven as much. 

Under the guise of building a ‘battery factory’ and with firm belief in the power of their culture, Koreans in Japan secretly built Korea University without the knowledge of the Japanese government, which opened in 1956. On the basis of culture and popular education, they have turned this act of defiance into a network of contested spaces, where they are able to exercise their autonomy. Language, song, dance, history, traditions, clothing, all are celebrated as a basis for the socialist experiment in self-determination that is Chongryon. I couldn’t help but wonder, what it would mean for us to return to and celebrate our African culture in a similar and serious manner.

As we move forward, it is crucial to carry these lessons with us, fostering an empathetic and decisive discourse on resistance and liberation. Delegations are not simply to perform a more ethical form of tourism, but rather are crucial moments to witness and learn the opportunities that exist for colonized peoples who are organized and dedicated. After my trip to Chongryon to ground with Koreans in the belly of another beast, I am reaffirmed that our struggle as Africans must be decisively socialist and anti-imperialist, firmly rooted in notions of cultural power, and remain consistent in our solidarity with the Korean struggle. We have to join them in calling for the reunification of Korea and supporting the U.S. Out Of Korea movement, because the intertwined nature of our struggles are profound.

Capitalism as Decay and Chaos. Socialism as Social Order and Security.

[Capitalism has destroyed much of the US, including Detroit (pictured).]

By Sudip Bhattacharya

We’ve entered the era of smartphones and eugenics. “They’re eating cats, they’re eating dogs,” Trump had exclaimed frantically, echoing words that could’ve been uttered by a Klansman in the early 1920s, but now that very same level of toxicity having been beamed into households all across the world for whoever has the stomach to bear it.[1] So many now have access to learning about events on the ground from almost anywhere, where we can communicate, send money to, and spread the word of various political events due to the devices in peoples’ pockets, and yet, none of that alters the fact that entire family trees have been erased in places like Palestine. No amount of streaming with emojis can negate the brutality of Israel’s siege, a high-tech form of genocidal intent and killing, with drones swarming the skies, but a genocide nonetheless.[2]

R. Palme Dutt, a Marxist theoretician of the interwar period in Europe, noted similar dynamics in his own era, the clashing of so-called technological progress with civilizational decay and impending horror. At the time, the productive capacities of Europe had expanded tremendously in a rather short period of time. Major manufacturing and industrialization had finally led to a capacity across most Western societies, including the U.S., to resolve issues of hunger and starvation. However, countries chose to get rid of their “surplus” food, burning it, dumping some of it into the nearest ocean.

“The burning of millions of bags of coffee or tons of grain, in the midst of mass starvation and poverty, have horrified the world,” he stated at the time, while the global economy had still been reeling from years of a financial reckoning.[3] In parts of the colonized world, European policymakers would intentionally funnel basic food commodities, like rice and grain, to maintain high levels of prices for such products, in the process leading to mass starvation in places like Bengal. Prior to European colonization, famines were a rare phenomenon. Even in feudal times, local authorities, however authoritarian and demeaning, had kept aside piles of grain to satiate the masses in times of hardship, to avoid unrest. But that had all changed the moment the British ships arrived, followed by the French and the Americans, all of whom were dedicated to squeezing profit out of every inch of land and person, from the trader to the peasant.[4]

Treating food as a commodity rather than meeting human needs remains a routine feature of our global system. It was only a month or so into the pandemic when farmers across the U.S. were compelled to destroy acres of “excess” food. “In scenes reminiscent of the Great Depression, dairy farmers dumped lakes of fresh cow’s milk (3.7m gallons a day in early April, now about 1.5 million per day), hog and chicken farmers aborted piglets and euthanized hens by the thousands, and crop growers plowed acres of vegetables into the ground as the nation’s brittle and anarchic food supply chain began to snap and crumble.”[5]

In 2008, Japan, one of America’s closest allies, had plans to “dump” excess rice in parts of Asia to alleviate food insecurity. The U.S. was against this, the number one reason being that it could decrease the demand for rice in consumer markets, allowing the price of rice to “dampen.” A New York Times report, the prestigious rag for the “concerned” elite, had stated at the time: “The effect would be more pronounced if Japan followed it with further sales or donations from the 1.7 million tons of imported rice now sitting in Japanese warehouses. Roughly 30 million tons of rice are traded globally each year.”[6] As Dutt understood it generations ago, the mishmash of progress, as in the productive capacity to create a far richer world than it’s ever been imagined, coupled with what he described as “decay”, was not a problem of humanity losing its soul in the modern age. It wasn’t a problem of technological advancement rotting our level of empathy with one another, or something philosophical of that nature. Rather, it’s a direct product of the disorder and irrationalism capitalism forces the vast majority of humanity to endure. “Today they are burning wheat and grain, the means of human life. To-morrow they will be burning living human bodies”, Dutt stated as early as 1934, predicting the death spiral modern capitalism would allow to fester, leading to the next great war that would end up killing millions of people due to inter-imperialist rivalry desperate for new markets to conquer.[7] Much of the world had been carved up and seized by the British empire, the French, and the U.S., with newly industrialized nations such as Italy and Germany frustrated at their own limited right as Europeans to dominate and control parts of Africa and Asia. This was one of the main reasons precipitating the war, with fascism as a product of this rising anger over the denial of the German peoples and the Italian peoples, and the Japanese, access to more colonies and overseas territories they could also brutally exploit for extreme profit and gain.[8]

Through capitalism, such things as economic growth, competition, and the drive for more are prioritized against what humanity truly requires for its existence, from peace and security to universal access to healthy food, housing and entertainment. This rotting dynamic has been the most pronounced in the U.S., and countries it chooses to ally with, like South Korea, where at the most molecular level, our daily lives become a constant web of stress and rolling chaos. How else to describe being surrounded by so much alleged abundance, and yet, not having consistent access to it based on how much you make, being denied that access in critical moments even, like when severely ill. Sharon Zhang at Truthout wrote merely a few years ago, “A new report done by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) has found that drug prices in the U.S. on average are about two to four times higher than they are in Australia, Canada and France.”[9] Some of this has changed, but only for certain medicines, like insulin, but even then, Americans have died due to this inane system whereby you either have the money to give to these private entities that hoard these essential resources and services, or you are compelled to plead for donations to help pay for life-saving medications instead.[10] How is this sanity, let alone moral?

Most of us navigate our lives with this level of pressure mounting. Either we have limited access to the most fundamental things we need, as employees, as consumers who can sustain some level of income cobbled together in a mesh of part-time and full-time work, or we lose it all in a matter of weeks, months maybe, if we’re so fortunate. One moment you can be at your computer, or at the cash register, filing reports, running items through barcode scanners mindlessly, and in another, you’re hiding in your bedroom as a voice bellows at you from behind your apartment door, right before another eviction notice has been slipped underneath your door.

It is in the “rational” interest to cause this level of mayhem and pain, and panic in our lives by businesses that are allowed to dominate and control how much we work, how much we own, how much time we have to be ourselves. Unemployment is a necessary condition for capitalism to thrive. For private employers to retain an increasing level of profit, they must euphemistically “let people go”, cut them off. There can never be full employment either since capitalists need and desire some level of people without jobs so they can always replace their existing employees if unrest starts to brew, and to drive down wages with this threat in place. Economist Richard Wolff states, “Capitalism makes employment depend chiefly on capitalists’ decisions to undertake production, and those decisions depend on profits. If capitalists expect profits high enough to satisfy them, they hire. If capitalists don’t, we get unemployment. Capitalism requires the unemployed, their families and their communities to live with firing decisions made by capitalists even though they are excluded from participating in those decisions.”[11] Such decisions sow chaos at the personal level for so many, and even social problems that communities must endure (like crime), and yet, these considerations are barely considered since the main guiding light is how heavy a man’s wallet can get.

Dutt too spoke of how major capitalists, just as the global capitalist economy was steadying itself through some measure of increased social democracy, decided to unload workers they felt they didn’t need, once more sowing disorder and political turmoil. “Increasing millions are thrown aside as ‘superfluous’”, he stated.[12]

However, none of this can compare to the most chaotic and disorderly result of all: climate change. Quite literally, the right for mainly Western companies and nations to accrue wealth has been the reason why the waters are rising across the globe, why so much land has become more challenging to grow food on, why the temperatures are rising to dangerously high levels, threatening the majority of the world’s population.[13] The need to see red arrows ticking upward on graphs unveiled at executive boardrooms across Europe and the U.S. has been the reason why humanity is on the brink of extinction.

LORDS OF CHAOS

Only in capitalist societies can thugs like Trump, and Bolsonaro find space to not merely fester, but thrive, and maneuver into major seats of power. At the time of Dutt’s major work, Fascism and Social Revolution, published prior to the horrors of WWII, fascism itself had already become a worldwide phenomenon, having conquered state power in Italy, Germany, Japan, and threatening to do so in the U.S. among other places. Of course, the U.S. itself, although not explicitly run by a fascist party, remained in the throes of white supremacy and colonialist interests. It was the same within the British Isles too, with figures like Winston Churchill already professing his hatred of black and brown peoples, eager for the British government to pour money and technological support behind every hard-right nationalist movement imaginable to squelch the rising tide of “Bolshevism” across parts of Eastern Europe.

The rise of fascism and other forms of extreme forms of racialized terror (i.e. Jim and Jane Crow) had everything to do with capitalism and how it breeds elements of social dysfunction, intentionally or not. At one level, due the chaos that capitalism itself creates and the various classes affected by such chaos, people themselves can be driven, out of lost privilege in many instances, toward extreme right political movements. As Dutt explains, during times of economic crises, no one was immune. Even those who have been raised to believe they are “middle class”, a meaningless vacuous concept designed to obscure one’s true class position (you can earn six figures and still be an employee reliant on your job), can start to feel the ground underneath them shake. However, because such elements of society have been developed intellectually to think they’re entitled to more, and are better than others, in many examples, such groups lash out at those below or around them instead of seeking solidarity against said system of exploitation and unjust results. This is more of an issue, Dutt explains, when societies lack a robust labor movement that’s radical and internationalist, able to funnel the rage of the white-collar workers and occasionally, even small business owners, into something far more productive for themselves and others. In the American context, the rise of overt white supremacy was eventually welcomed by various capitalists because this meant a force that could stamp down on socialist, or more liberatory movements that sought to free the black masses and other nonwhite groups from their position as being heavily exploitable and captured as a consumer base for separate, oftentimes subpar, services and goods.[14]

But even this last point has everything to do with the broader economic system. In the U.S., political power and speech is fundamentally linked with money and wealth. Although on technical terms all civic and various interest groups can participate in lobbying government institutions, for the most part, those who have the most money can effectively shape policy at a greater pace, able to unleash their army of lawyers into every conceivable issue-based policy discussion at Capitol Hill.

Political scientist, Lee Drutman, in one of the rare well-written Atlantic pieces, writes, “Corporations now spend about $2.6 billion a year on reported lobbying expenditures—more than the $2 billion we spend to fund the House ($1.18 billion) and Senate ($860 million). It’s a gap that has been widening since corporate lobbying began to regularly exceed the combined House-Senate budget in the early 2000s. Today, the biggest companies have upwards of 100 lobbyists representing them, allowing them to be everywhere, all the time. For every dollar spent on lobbying by labor unions and public-interest groups together, large corporations and their associations now spend $34. Of the 100 organizations that spend the most on lobbying, 95 consistently represent business.”[15]

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But beyond the explicit political channels available to people, allegedly, capitalism privileges the worst elements of people to attain power and control. If it is a meritocracy, it is a meritocracy for the craven and cunning, the sociopathic and disjointed. In American life, the distribution of land to white “settlers”, for the purposes of extending capitalist hegemony across the North American continent, empowered the worst to exact revenge and bloodlust against various groups of native and indigenous peoples. The Northern obsession over sustaining high levels of private manufacturing was intrinsically tied to the resources plucked and grown by enslaved Africans.[16]

In the modern era, starting in Dutt’s time, capitalists not only created the conditions for the indirect creation of swamp things and horrid extensions of themselves into the rest of civil society, they actively supported rightwing formations, from the right-wing of the social democrats who promised some measure of stability without “Bolshevism”, to finally, fascist groups and various rightwing nationalists, all of whom dedicated to smashing communist and socialist workers organizations across Europe. In the U.S., the growth of the Klan was supported by business owners, national and regional, as a means of instilling terror and “discipline” against the domestic “horde” of black and nonwhite peoples seeking self-determination, and labor groups vying for dignity and some measure of control over their own lives.[17]

In Italy, Dutt writes, the army itself trained Mussolini’s forces and stepped aside as those same forces rampaged through socialist party labor halls and community centers. As communists threatened to bring democracy to Germany, the German capitalists and their allies abroad eagerly feted and funded what was the Nazi party. “Unlimited funds, not only from German bourgeois, but also from foreign bourgeois sources, were poured into the National Socialist coffers,” he explained.[18]

One of the leading backers of Trump is Elon Musk, a billionaire able to accrue wealth and power during “normal” times under capitalism.[19] Now, he uses that same wealth and influence to spread disinformation and hate speech, reminiscent of the 1920s, through social media, as well as throwing his support behind someone as odious and confusing as Trump, a billionaire himself, having done the brave thing of not paying workers, and inheriting his father’s money.[20]

But before Trump became the increasingly spiteful figure he is, uncomfortably alongside Musk, the political class, both Democrat and “moderate” Republican, supported him, and allowed for him to grow his wealth and control.[21] While working class black and brown families were torn apart in the ‘90s, Trump was applauded for his branding schemes.[22] Just as others were being hit by drones, Trump, even though he was humiliated, was invited to luncheons and major public events, despite his track record of being a notorious scumbag.[23]

Beyond Trump or Trumpism itself, the various scurrilous ideas that consist of his platform, like his intense hatred of immigrants from Latin America, China, and parts of Africa (essentially, the entirety of the nonwhite world), have been pet projects among billionaires for decades.[24] John Tanton, one of the leading “advocates” against immigration from the so-called Third World, soaked in his fear of “demographic” changes to the U.S., succeeded in spreading his poisonous gospel with the aid of benefactors such as Cordelia Scaife May, part of the wealthy Mellon of Carnegie Mellon fame.[25] “With May’s support, Tanton established a small network of think tanks and nonprofits that would, in the decades ahead, grow to become the most powerful mainstream advocates of immigration restriction since the early nineteenth century—a key component in the ruling class’s ideological machinery of exploitation and oppression,” writes Brendan O’Connor in his study of the rise of the modern far right in Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right.[26] As much as companies have branded themselves as empathetic or somewhat oriented to aspects of social justice (at least in some scraps of rhetoric), they easily align with the existing security state as it serves to harass, intimidate and sow mass panic and fear among black and brown working class and poor migrants. “In fact, brands and private industry had pride of place at the Border Security Expo,” O’Connor details, “Corporate sponsors included familiar names like Verizon and Motorola, and other less well-known ones, such as Elbit Systems of America, a subsidiary of Israel’s largest private defense contractor, as well as a handful of IT firms with aggressive slogans like ‘Ever Vigilant’ (CACI), “Securing the Future” (ManTech, and ‘Securing Your Tomorrow’ (Unisys).”[27]

Coalitional corporate entities, like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which includes companies like Amazon and Johnson & Johnson among other heavyweights, exists solely to influence politicians, to develop networks of think tanks, and to pour money into astroturf on-the-ground groups to do everything possible to stall any form of progressive legislation that would improve the lives of working people, and various marginalized groups.[28] Such organizations end up diminishing the natural antibodies of a healthy political system, of radicalized labor and the left, that could serve as a bulwark against impeding fascism. “Despite its generally low profile, ALEC has drawn scrutiny recently for promoting gun rights policies like the Stand Your Ground law at the center of the Trayvon Martin shooting case in Florida, as well as bills to weaken labor unions and tighten voter identification rules.”[29]

What benefits the public interest, including a safe and healthy political system, is far from the minds of most corporations and those who run them, no matter how well spoken and articulate they may be in front of the cameras. A Trump, a Musk, a Sheldon Adelson, a Bill Gates, a Jeff Bezos, Steve Bannon will routinely slither into the moonlight so long as there exists the swamp, a bubbling sweltering pile of business “rationale” and anti-egalitarian anti-human debris, lurking and seeking an opportunity to smash and dominate. 

And when the contradictions of life under capitalist hegemony expands, such forces will continue to unify against any form of legitimate and effective labor and justice-oriented agitation. They’d rather watch the world burn than allow for anyone to be able to control their own waking lives.

COMMUNISM IS ORDER & PEACE

Communism has stood in stark contrast to the chaos and lack of control that most people endure while surviving the vicious cycle of booms and busts in a capitalist system. Under capitalism, social dysfunction and disorder are the norm, increasingly so. This is not to suggest that somehow all social issues or at all times, social order, will be present in a socialist world. There will still be tensions between people, conflicting issues too. But what is so different about a socialist world compared to a capitalist one that we have currently, a product of U.S. imperial rule, is that such disorder and dysfunction are severely limited, and can be better resolved since the prime objective of a socialist society internationally is one that privileges and incentivizes the public welfare over private selfish desires, especially any that’s been attached to the profit-motive that’s led us down this abyss that we’re currently experiencing.

“The workers’ dictatorship is the only alternative to the capitalist dictatorship, which at present is increasingly passing from the older ‘democratic’ to Fascist forms,” Dutt stated.[30]

Peace and security, social order and justice can only be achieved once there is a system in place  that doesn’t allow for wealth to equate with political power and rampant influence. Order and peace is unleashed, allowed to thrive, when goods and services are managed, not for private gain, but rather for the public welfare. In a socialist society, people would still need to labor, but when they do, it’ll not be for any private employer. Instead, it would be done to help provide what the general public needs and wants. Housing, healthcare, education, entertainment, and food, among other fundamental things that make life worth living will be managed and distributed by government institutions, institutions that are transparent and have a higher level of input from workers, and communities that have historically been displaced and disenfranchised.

Essentially, to prevent the world from slipping back into the clutches of political and economic chaos, there can be no capitalist class. There can be no so-called “free market” in charge of how people access basic amenities. The U.S. imperial regime, which has done so much to redistribute land and resources for herself and her allies the world over, must be dismantled, replaced by a global world order of governments seeking common solutions and health for the world’s majority, especially for those who’ve been often condemned to a life of immiseration and dysfunction due to the rise of the U.S. global regime.[31]

Socialism brings us closer to ourselves as human beings, not as profit-seeking monsters, sometimes compelled by capitalism’s latent drive for more and more, to destroy ourselves and others. Trumps will certainly still show themselves in a socialist society, the art of dissent is still one that can be easily manipulated by nefarious forces claiming pluralism and “democracy”. But in a socialist world that seeks to uplift the historically exploited and oppressed, backed by governments that work tirelessly to help regulate society in ways that benefits the majority of such groups, not only shall the rightwing remain a tiny minority, but if they do start to boil and bubble over, will find no allies in higher institutions of management and governing. Instead, they will only find what we ourselves experience today, repression and the prioritization of positive public policies that value the oppressed and exploited, which include our right to control those elements that threaten us.

“Only the working-class revolution can save humanity, can carry humanity forward, can organise the enormous powers of production that lie ready to hand,” Dutt had stated, when optimism and pessimism clashed.[32]

Examples of this future we can see glimmers of in countries such as Cuba, where healthcare remains a right, despite the brutal U.S. embargo.[33] Or in places like Vietnam, a country that rebuilt itself, almost miraculously, following the brutal occupation of French and U.S. forces.[34] China too, despite some of its flaws, represents forms of political thinking that can prove useful to the rest of the planet. As Covid-19 became reality, it was China’s government that so swiftly directed the masses to construct hospital after hospital to care for its own.[35]

In America too, there have been fleeting moments but moments nonetheless of what can be possible. The early days of the Reconstruction era, as W.E.D. Du Bois examined in his classic Black Reconstruction, saw the federal government, for the first time in U.S. history, rise to the occasion in creating government programs and institutions that could provide basic schooling and healthcare to the masses, black and white, while having troops stationed across the confederacy to stifle emergent white supremacist rebellions and putsch.[36] It was only when the federal government retreated from these stated objectives that the white supremacist gangs had taken over and conquered political power.

But what was done can be done again. There is no other choice anyway. It is either we, as Dutt states, “rise to the height of its task”, of finding ways to generate the social movements that can create order and stability that people crave, and need, or we witness total devolution and chaos. Nothing is set in stone, yet. The waters haven’t risen over our heads, not yet at least. But whatever we choose to do has to be done, very, very soon.

There will be no order and peace, or security, until the capitalist and the colonizer have been obliterated.

 
Notes

[1] Merlyn Thomas & Mike Wendling, “Trump repeats baseless claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets,” BBC News, Sept. 2024, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c77l28myezko.

[2] Rasha Khatib, et. al, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,” The Lancet, July 10, 2024, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext.

[3] R. Palme Dutt, Fascism & Social Revolution (New York: International Publishing Co., 1934), 64.

[4] Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts (New York: Verso, 2002).

[5] Christopher D. Cook, “Farmers are destroying mountains of food. Here's what to do about it,” The Guardian, May 7 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/07/farmers-food-covid-19.

[6] Keith Bradsher & Andrew Martin, “U.S. in Difficult Position Over Japan’s Rice Plan,” New York Times, May 23, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/23/business/worldbusiness/23rice.html.

[7] Dutt, 68.

[8] Dutt, Fascism & Social Revolution.

[9] Sharon Zhang, “Prescription Drugs in US Are Quadruple What They Cost Elsewhere, Report Finds,” Truthout, April 21, 2021, https://truthout.org/articles/prescription-drugs-in-u-s-are-quadruple-what-they-cost-elsewhere-report-finds/?gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAiA65m7BhAwEiwAAgu4JHAE9XUZPidG3m1RSVg_DXL1XYekevJptgBSD5C58J0r2Cv9NnbEPhoC6tAQAvD_BwE.

[10] Ben Popken, “With rise in patients dying from rationing insulin, U.N. tries a new solution,” NBC News, Nov. 15, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/rise-patients-dying-rationing-insulin-u-n-tries-new-solution-n1083816.

[11] Richard Wolff, “Capitalism and Unemployment,” Truthout, Nov. 15, 2013, https://truthout.org/articles/capitalism-and-unemployment/.

[12] Dutt, 44.

[13] “Crop Changes,” National Geographic, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/climate-change/how-to-live-with-it/crops.html.

[14] Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1990).

[15] Lee Drutman, “How Corporate Lobbyists Conquered American Democracy,” The Atlantic, April 20, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/how-corporate-lobbyists-conquered-american-democracy/390822/.

[16] Greg Grandin, The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America (New York: MacMillan, 2020).

[17] Linda Gordon, The Second Coming of the KKK (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018).

[18] Dutt, 139.

[19] Maggie Haberman, et. al, “How Elon Musk Has Planted Himself Almost Literally at Trump’s Doorstep,” New York Times, Dec. 30, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/us/politics/elon-musk-trump-mar-a-lago.html.

[20] David Barstow, “Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father,” New York Times, Oct. 2, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/02/us/politics/donald-trump-tax-schemes-fred-trump.html.

[21] Maureen Dowd, “When Hillary and Donald Were Friends,” New York Times, Nov. 2, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/magazine/when-hillary-and-donald-were-friends.html.

[22] Lisette Voytko-Best, “Judge Rules Trump Can Be Sued For Marketing Scheme Fraud,” Forbes, July 26, 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2019/07/25/judge-rules-trump-can-be-sued-for-marketing-scheme-fraud/.

[23] Shawn McCreesh, “Trump Among New York’s Elites at a Charity Dinner: It Got Awkward,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/18/us/elections/donald-trump-al-smith-dinner-new-york.html.

[24] Christine Ro, “Why African Groups Want Reparations From The Gates Foundation,” Forbes, Sept. 2, 2024, https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinero/2024/09/02/why-african-groups-want-reparations-from-the-gates-foundation/.

[25] Nicholas Kulish & Mike Mcintire, “Why an Heiress Spent Her Fortune Trying to Keep Immigrants Out,” New York Times, August 14, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html.

[26] Brendan O’Connor, Blood Red Lines: How Nativism Fuels the Right (New York: Haymarket, 2021), 29.

[27] Brendan O’Connor, 175.

[28] Alex SeitzWald, “Revealed: Full List of ALEC’s Corporate Members,” Truthout, May 5, 2012, https://truthout.org/articles/revealed-full-list-of-alecs-corporate-members/?gad_source=1&gclid=Cj0KCQiA1Km7BhC9ARIsAFZfEIufx4FOoy_3vNZHfBMnvL2x7OEGtWbVauJtxl46Oc2GgUqhsUP8h30aAkgBEALw_wcB.

[29] Mike McIntire, “Conservative Nonprofit Acts as a Stealth Business Lobbyist,” New York Times, April 21, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/us/alec-a-tax-exempt-group-mixes-legislators-and-lobbyists.html.

[30] Dutt, 306.

[31] “Hugo Chavez Harshly Criticizes Bush at U.N.,” NPR, Sept. 20, 2006, https://www.npr.org/2006/09/20/6111080/hugo-chavez-harshly-criticizes-bush-at-u-n.

[32] Dutt, 309.

[33] David Blumenthal, “Fidel Castro's Health Care Legacy,” The Commonwealth Fund, Nov. 26, 2016, https://www.commonwealthfund.org/blog/2016/fidel-castros-health-care-legacy.

[34] “Viet Nam’s Economy is Forecast to Grow 6.1% in 2024: WB“, World Bank, August 26, 2024, https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2024/08/26/viet-nam-s-economy-is-forecast-to-grow-6-1-in-2024-wb.

[35] Yuliya Talmazan, “China's coronavirus hospital built in 10 days opens its doors, state media says,” NBC News, Feb. 3, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-s-coronavirus-hospital-built-10-days-opens-its-doors-n1128531.

[36] W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1935).

Trump, Tariffs, and Trade: ‘Protectionism’ Won’t Save Workers

By Eugene Puryear

Republished from Liberation News.

President-elect Donald Trump has declared his intention to enact tariffs on trade from, at least, China, Mexico and Canada. He’s also threatening tariffs on BRICS nations if they are not sufficiently supportive of the dollar. Trump has also floated an across-the-board tariff on all goods coming into the country, and specific tariffs on individual companies like John Deere. These tariffs are supposed to improve the situation for the American worker and the country writ large. Given the ravages of deindustrialization in large swaths of the United States, moving away from “free trade” holds an instinctive appeal to those of us fighting to make ends meet. 

In reality “protectionism,” as these sorts of tariff policies are called, is just another of the ruling elite’s economic strategies. That, like, “free trade,” comes with a range of problems for workers, to greater or lesser degrees depending on one’s occupation. With Trump linking tariffs to issues like migration, dollar supremacy and managing the fall-out of tax cuts for the wealthy, the general effects of tariffs will also be affected by political shocks.

The very debate over “trade policy” reflects how inadequate the capitalist system is for meeting the needs of the vast majority of working and poor people. The problems it looks to solve can only be addressed by replacing the profit-first orientation of capitalism with the people-first orientation of socialism. 

Tariffs 101

A tariff is a tax — a tax on goods coming into a country from another jurisdiction. The popular perception is that this is a tax on foreign companies in other countries. However, the reality is different. A tariff is a tax on imports, so most of the burden falls on the companies importing either fully produced goods or parts to assemble or sell in the U.S. 

In other words, if Wal-Mart buys TVs from China to sell in its U.S. stores, Wal-Mart pays the tariff when it receives the TV’s from China. Wal-Mart can, of course, increase the price of the TV to absorb the cost of the tariff, meaning the tax is really paid by the person trying to buy an affordable TV. Wal-Mart might buy more TVs from a U.S. company, creating some jobs. However, in addition to higher production costs, less competition means the U.S. TV companies also can increase their prices. So, at the end of the day, all the TVs in Wal-Mart are going to be more expensive. 

During Trump’s first term, for example, tariffs were placed on washing machines. One study found that approximately 1,800 new jobs were created at Whirlpool, Samsung and LG factories in the U.S. However, according to the same study, in the months following those tariffs, prices for washers and dryers increased as well, by $86 and $92 per unit, respectively.

As Trump himself has noted about the impact of his proposed new tariff policies when asked if he could “guarantee” that it would not raise prices: “I can’t guarantee anything.”

‘Benefits?’

For the working class, understanding these trade-offs is crucial. What can benefit one subset of our class, can hurt the other, and in both senses “hurt” and “help” are relative concepts. Autoworkers, for instance, suffer on the job injury rates twice as high as workers overall. At the Rivian Automotive electric vehicle factory, for example, workers sustained injuries as serious as cracked skulls, bone fractures, back lacerations that required surgery and even amputated fingers. 

So, increasing “manufacturing jobs” is no panacea, even if the salaries are higher than in other working-class sectors. Nonetheless, the appeal of tariffs to many is that it will bring overseas manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. In Trump’s own words:

This new American industrialism will create millions and millions of jobs, massively raise wages for American workers, and make the United States into a manufacturing powerhouse like it used to be many years ago.

The year 1979 was the peak of manufacturing employment in the U.S., with 19.5 million employed. Currently there are 12.8 million manufacturing workers, a difference of 6.7 million. During Trump’s first term, when he also pursued various tariffs, manufacturing employment, at best, increased by 350,000 jobs over four years. Even if you were to add in the best case scenario of the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs act, the possibility of more than a few hundred thousand manufacturing jobs a year being created seems highly unlikely. In such circumstances, manufacturing jobs reaching the level they were at in the year 2000, much less 1979, is a faraway prospect. 

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Further, most workers — roughly 90% — do not work in manufacturing, placing them on the losing end of cost increases associated with tariffs. One analysis estimates that the tens of millions of workers making less than $55,000 could see their cost-of-living go up between 5-6% from Trump’s tariff proposals. The heaviest burden falls on those making less than $28,600, which is already “insufficient to meet a one-person basic family budget in any county or metro area in the United States.”

The real motive

Trump’s tariff policy, from a worker’s perspective, is classic divide and conquer. It entices those struggling with the cost-of-living with the limited, possible opportunity at getting a higher-paying manufacturing job, while making life more expensive for everyone else, in particular the lowest paid workers. This faux-pro-worker policy, then, really has different goals. First and foremost is to kneecap China’s economy. 

Since the earliest days of capitalism, tariffs have been used for such purposes. When combined with military power, tariffs are a way for capitalists in one country to maintain their advantages over others. As Fredrich Engels, pioneering Marxist, noted: “England thus supplemented the protection she practiced at home by the Free Trade she forced upon her possible customers abroad; and, thanks to this happy mixture of both systems, at the end of the wars, in 1815, she found herself, with regard to all important branches of industry, in possession of the virtual monopoly of the trade of the world.” 

Significant tariffs on China directly (or third countries where Chinese businesses invest to export to the U.S.), combined with sanctions policy and military force, are designed to raise the “cost of doing business” with Chinese companies for companies from anywhere looking to also do business in the United States. The hope is to slow Chinese economic growth and development and/or forcing China to make various economic concessions to the U.S. 

Another motivation for Trump’s tariff policy is to try to cover the holes he plans to create through his trillion dollar tax transfers to billionaires. Trump and the Republicans are promising to extend the tax cuts they enacted in 2017 at the cost of $4 trillion, primarily benefiting the ultra-rich. The average tax cut for the bottom 60% of the country would be $500, for people with $5 million in income, the average tax cut would be $280,000. 

The only way to address the government’s debt, also a Trump promise, while pursuing these tax cuts (and more) would be destructive cuts to essentially all vital government programs, including Social Security. Since most workers certainly would not like to see their retirement cut so that millionaires can buy new cars and boats, tariffs are meant to try to keep enough critical programs afloat that it staves off mass anger. 

Failure all around

Most estimates show Trump’s tariffs will not be enough to replace losses from his tax cuts for the ultra-rich, and real life has shown that Trump and Biden’s tariff policies have failed to hobble Chinese steel or auto companies. So, even considering its true purpose, Trump’s tariff proposals are unlikely to meet their goals. Not to mention they are going to increase costs for working-class people, create — at best — a very limited number of manufacturing jobs, and possibly slow down the U.S. and global economy leading to more economic misery for the working class. 

Trump’s “protectionism” is no better than the alternative of “free trade.” They are both just capitalist strategies to maintain their stranglehold on wealth and power. 

As we’ve noted before, “Relentless focus on profit is core to capitalism. This obsession with profit is the system’s motor engine.” Yet since 1969, profitability has been trending downward. The first response of the capitalist class, starting in the 1970s, to promote policies that have become known as “neoliberalism”: expanding production in the developing world (globalization); attacks on public spending and progressive taxation (austerity); and a massive expansion of U.S. military power to subdue those who refuse to comply with the imperial agenda.​​ Which all came with a heavy dose of “free trade” ideology. 

These strategies failed to fully restore profitability and created their own contradictions, like the rise of China, that also created issues for the ruling class. So now, a new “protectionist” strategy has arisen to apply different medicine to the same illness. What is really needed is radical surgery, a total change in the economy, from profit first, to people first, or, socialism.