The Stranglehold of Capital and Why We Must Break Free

[Photo Credit: Doug Mills / AP]

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

The village of Yellow Springs, Ohio, like much of the United States, has an affordable housing shortage. To address this, the Village Council considered rezoning 53 acres for higher-density homes. This was controversial among Yellow Springs residents including comedy superstar Dave Chapelle, who threatened to pull his investments from the town:

”If you push this thing through, what I’m investing in is no longer applicable… I am not bluffing. I will take it all off the table.” 

It was never guaranteed that the Village Council would pass the rezoning without Chapelle’s interference, or that the plan would even make housing more affordable. But it was hardly a fair fight. Losing millions in investment dollars would transform the economic landscape of Yellow Springs. Municipal representatives could never consider the housing project on its own merits.

Strongarm tactics by capital happen on the national stage too. Shortly after Barack Obama won the presidency on a platform of “hope and change,” Emerson Electric CEO David Farr said his company would only expand in the United States if government got “out of the way.” 

Barclays CEO Robert Diamond claimed corporations wouldn’t “have the confidence to hire in the United States… until we… believe… the government, the private sector, and financial institutions are working together and connected again.” 

Bausch + Lomb CEO Brent Saunders warned that, because of Obama, multinationals are “more tentative on whether… to…invest.” 

The Wall Street Journal synthesized these sentiments, lamenting that Obama wasn’t doing enough to encourage “U.S. businesses to unleash the $2 trillion in capital they are holding.” 

Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner summarized it well the following year:

“Job creators in America basically are on strike.” 

It isn’t novel to point out the political influence of the wealthy. Even former president Jimmy Carter called the United States an “oligarchy with unlimited political bribery.” Research shows that better-funded candidates generally win. There are basic fundraising thresholds candidates must meet to have a chance of winning. This allows the wealthy to influence who runs and wins. Even when donations don’t outright guarantee electoral success, candidates still value them and allow donors to influence policy. 

Just as ultra-wealthy benefactors control elections, a handful of companies dominate our media. “Big Tech” dictates culture by moderating the flow of information and “marketplace of ideas” that informs our political process. Corporate giants make it more difficult for voters to make informed decisions and allow relatively few people to curate and regulate public discourse. 

These problems are serious, and make our political system less democratic. They reinforce the privileged interests of the white and wealthy while disenfranchising the non-white and poor. This inequity is rooted in the undemocratic nature of our economic system, which grants certain groups not mere influence or political advantage but the ability to wield pure, unchecked power.

Who Controls Capital?

In the United States, the three richest white men hold as much wealth as the bottom 50% combined. Capital, which refers not to personal property but investment assets, is also unequally distributed. The top 1% of Americans own a majority of the country’s stocks and private businesses. The poorer you are, the more of your resources you must spend on your needs, and the more fully you rely on other people’s capital to have a job. 

Within individual companies, if an investor controls over half the voting shares, they fully control the company, rendering other investors’ capital powerless. Capital is where the real power lies, and it is controlled by a miniscule group. 

How Does Capital Work?

This tiny class of capitalists will only invest capital under certain conditions. Generally, profits are the fundamental precondition for investment, but it’s ultimately down to the investor. They can choose to do nothing with their capital or invest it in some other market, thereby exercising tremendous leverage on the rest of society.

To maintain access to goods and gainful employment, electorates are under pressure to placate capital. This immediate pressure often conflicts with voters’ long-term interests, or any political priorities beyond meeting their basic needs. Thus, politicians under capitalism must serve their constituents’ short-term demands by serving owners and investors. Otherwise, their constituents will suffer, blame them, and vote them out. 

Capitalists directly affect government activity too. First and foremost, tax revenues are almost entirely dependent on investment. Jobs are needed to generate income taxes, while businesses must sell goods and services in order to generate sales taxes. Investment is required to maintain property values and thus property taxes. When governments cannot fund their activities through taxation and turn to borrowing, they become dependent on banks and other potential creditors.

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Often, private capital directly pays law enforcement to do its dirty work. Major corporations funnel millions of dollars into police activities through police foundations. Companies including DTE, Meijer, The Home Depot, and AT&T all have representatives on the board of the Detroit Public Safety Foundation. Across the country, the largest companies in finance, tech, fossil fuels, and other industries funded the police and were represented in the institutions that raise private funds for them. 

The Power of Capital in Action

When a group of capitalists forego investing together — a capital strike — they can quickly cripple the economy. When they have common interests, and frequently voice their concerns through the business press, little direct coordination is required to set off a chain reaction of capital flight.

“Capital strike” and “capital flight” are not commonly used terms, and they almost never come up in election discourse. Capital flight is recognized as an economic phenomenon, one that can often come about as a reaction to political developments, but its political implications are rarely discussed. Some economists characterize capital flight as a “symptom of macroeconomic mismanagement” to be solved with “sensible, credible” policies.

This straightforward narrative is actually quite common when it comes to businesses’ reactions to policies. The policies are never “not what businesses prefer.” They are simply “bad policies,” which “lead to bad outcomes.” Capitalists are treated like they bear no responsibility for the consequences of their actions. The class character of capital strikes is completely mystified and ignored. While it’s possible for certain policies to be bad for both the rich and the poor, that is not always the case. 

There are numerous examples of large-scale capital strikes forcing national governments to abandon progressive, widely-supported policies. The aforementioned strike against the Obama administration strike is one such example. Other capital strikes happened under Franklin D. Roosevelt. 

Capital strikes are not limited to the United States. In the 1970s, the Swedish Trade Union Confederation and members of the Social Democratic Party sought to transcend social democracy via the Meidner Plan, which would have taxed corporate profits to achieve workers’ ownership of major corporations. Fearing a capital strike, the Social Democrats diluted the plan. The plan’s namesake, economist Rudolf Meidner, described the implemented version as “a pathetic rat.” 

In France, after decades of uninterrupted conservative rule, Socialist Party leader Francois Mitterand was elected president in 1981. He was allied with the French Communist Party, called for a “rupture” with capitalism, and embarked on a radical program of nationalization, wage hikes, and union empowerment. Displeased investors pulled their capital, punishing the French economy. Mitterand abandoned his radicalism, purged Communist ministers from his government, and pursued more conservative policies. 

A similar thing happened in Chile. In 1970, Salvador Allende — Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist head of state — became president. Over the next three years, wealthy Chileans and international businesses reacted with capital strikes, capital flight, and hoarding to destabilize the government and protect their own power. Allende responded with concessions to the Right but was eventually overthrown in a US-backed military coup that was justified as a response to economic instability. 

In Venezuela, the election of Hugo Chávez in 1999 was followed by dramatic increases in quality of life. Chávez lifted nearly one fifth of the population from poverty. Even opponents like the Washington DC-based Organization of American States recognized this achievement and “the eradication of illiteracy… and the increase in access by the most vulnerable sectors to basic services such as health care.”

The massive wealth held by Venezuela’s elite was being slowly redistributed, and the oil revenues that the country had relied on for decades were being directed toward the poor. As this happened, Venezuelan and international businesses began pulling their capital out of the country or holding back certain economic activities. The current Venezuelan economic crisis is, of course, complex, with an overreliance on oil, imperialist sanctions, and political instability of various origins all playing a role. However, capital flight preceded and contributed to these issues, starting at a time when the lives of Venezuelans were improving at the expense of capitalist profits and power.

Of course, national capital strikes are the exception — a “nuclear option” of capitalist control. 

Every day, capitalists and their managers make decisions regarding where to allocate resources within their businesses, or who to do business with. Whether by reflexively chasing profits or strategically leveraging their wealth, they shift wealth toward those who serve their interests.

Voters may begin to “learn their lesson,” and vote in ways that investors will reward them for, even if they end up voting for policies they do not ultimately prefer. Voters may blame some inherent flaw in leftist policies, saying things like “socialism is great in theory, but doesn’t work in practice.” And while left-wing governments have in many cases brought improvements for their people, capital strikes negatively affect their track record.

Others may recognize the power of capital over the economy, but believe it to be justified or necessary, and consciously vote in a way that reinforces this power. When left-wing governments make concessions to capital, their supporters may see it as a betrayal of the policies they ran on, and become politically inactive or shift their allegiance to another party, as happened in Sweden and France. Whether they blame the failure on economic realities, unreliable politicians, or the business owners themselves, voters will respond rationally to actions by capital, and vote in ways that avoid offending investors in the first place.

Legalized Bribery

The coercive power of capital strikes is extremely important in explaining why the rich and large corporations often get their way. But they have numerous other tools at their disposal for directing the political process:

• Rent out a lavish compound to a sitting president (or let him stay for free) 

• Spend hundreds of thousands of dollars at businesses owned by politicians

• Loan politicians’ companies hundreds of millions of dollars

• Pay politicians millions of dollarsf or speeches

• Hire lawmakers and top officials as lobbyists or consultants

• Give politicians seats on corporate boards

• Give them a high-paying job at a think tank

• Sign massive book deals with Supreme Court Justices, or give them free trips

• Take a powerful judge on multiple luxurious vacations,

• Buy their mother’s home and let her live in it rent-free, pay their family member’s expensive boarding school fees, pay for their wedding reception, give them VIP access to sporting events, fund the dedication of a library wing in their honor, and fund a hagiographicmovie about them (This is all the same person)

• Own stocks while being a politician, and reap all the benefits if your political actions favor your stocks or investors at large

What Can We Do About it?

To recap, capitalism results in a tiny minority of the population controlling the means of production and distribution. This control is leveraged to reward or punish voters and governments based on how accommodating their policies are toward capital. These capitalists coordinate not just through institutions and relationships, but need not coordinate at all when their interests align. If a government threatens their profits, they will remove their capital from the government’s jurisdiction, even if the people believe they should sacrifice their profits for the benefit of society. The bounds of what is politically possible are set by the corporate sector.

Those who control wealth use it in more targeted ways to shore up this power. They systematically direct their wealth to individual politicians, or the political class as a whole, to buy their loyalty and give the politicians a stake in the power of capital.

Private businesses control the media that we consume, and the wealthy bend political campaigns, think tanks, charities, and universities to their will with donations. These institutions allow the wealthy to mask and justify their economic power, and articulate their demands to a target audience. They also give them the tools to act even when their economic power is effectively curbed.  

Considered fully, the power of capital appears unassailable, and if we work within the mainstream definition of politics, it is. Our ability to exercise political power is often reduced to participating in elections. However, electoral politics are, in many ways, a manifestation of power wielded by people outside of it, and any movement that devotes all its energy to the electoral sphere will ultimately fail when they are outmaneuvered in the economic sphere. However, understanding the ways that this capitalist power works is the first step to breaking it. 

In order to fight back against this system, ordinary people need to expand their definition of politics and operate in the same fields that the wealthy do. Recognizing that democracy is still something worth achieving is vital. Winning political power will be a bottom-up struggle. Radical labor unions will be a necessary tool for workers to challenge capital in an effective way and wield material leverage toward their political goals.

The specifics of overcoming capitalist power are far from clear. The people of this planet will have to organize themselves and develop plans for effective resistance through international collaboration and dialogue. What’s clear, however, is that no form of capitalism will allow us to experience genuine democracy. Whoever controls economic production and distribution controls everyone dependent on that production and distribution. Self-determination and democracy therefore require economic democracy.

Nathaniel Ibrahim is an organizer and elected leader in the Young Democratic Socialists of America at the University of Michigan.

A Feature, Not a Bug: How Henry Kissinger is a Symbol of a Broader American Imperial Rot

By Sudip Bhattacharya

As legendary English metal band Iron Maiden sang in a 1988 track, “Only the good die young. All the evil seem to live forever.” Enter Henry Kissinger.

On May 27th, 2023, the former Secretary of State and National Security Advisor turned 100 years old. As Kissinger begins his second century on this planet, he remains a beloved figure within America’s political class. His multiple birthday parties were attended by many A-listers including Democrats John Kerry and Michael Bloomberg, and Republican James Baker. Yes, the elite outpouring for Dr. K — as Kissinger is affectionately known in establishment circles — is a bipartisan affair. But the exploited and colonized masses hold a much different view of the so-called diplomat.

Across the Third World, Kissinger’s legacy is that of a heartless war criminal. In the Nixon administration, Kissinger supported some of the world’s most brutal right-wing regimes in places like Argentina and Chile. He also greenlighted mass slaughters of Bangladeshis and the Timorese.

In a groundbreaking piece for The Intercept, Nick Turse analyzes formerly classified documents to uncover mass killings of Cambodian civilians during the Nixon era. Transcripts of calls unearthed by Turse prove Kissinger’s direct role in these massacres. In one particularly ominous phone conversation, Kissinger ordered a general to kill “anything that moves” with “anything that flies.”

This savage commitment to expanding American hegemony at all costs has left an indelible mark. Kissinger’s ideology is now a feature — not a bug — of the United States foreign policy establishment. So much so, in fact, that many of his diplomatic successors are even more extreme than him.

Revitalizing Empire

Henry Kissinger emerged at a time of mounting skepticisim toward American empire and the institutions that uphold it. In 1975, the Senate almost unanimously approved the creation of the bipartisan Church Committee — a body investigating security state abuses. At the same time, the Republican Party was home to the late Representative Paul Findley. The congressman from Illinois was fiercely pro-Palestine and anti-war. Findley couldn’t exist in today’s radicalized GOP, where support for Israeli apartheid and the war machine are prerequisites for membership.

Kissinger, alongside other odious characters like the Dulles brothers, represented a backlash to these currents. Dr. K was a staunch cold warrior. He believed strongly in using American military might to eliminate communism and defend corporate profitability at all costs.

And he found ideological allies in the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency’s upper echelons were full of anti-communist stalwarts and other extremist elements. As Stephen Kinzer writes in Overthrow, leaders of the CIA outright dismissed anything that might interfere with the aims of American multinationals.

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While occupying America’s most powerful diplomatic posts, Kissinger was a steward of this tendency. In fact, he accelerated and intensified some of the worst pattens already bubbling within the security state. While preaching diplomacy publicly, Kissinger showed an unnerving stomach for bombings and the so-called collateral damage they caused. This earned him favor among the morally bankrupt conservative and liberal elite. In 1973, they awarded Kissinger the Nobel Peace Prize despite him never meeting a war he did not like.

This underscores a reality that is fundamental to understanding Kissinger’s place in history. While Dr. K was a reaction to some currents within the American foreign policy scene, he was an intensification of others. In this sense, Kissinger was no anomaly. So much of the political establishment agreed with his ideas and participated in their implementation.

American Imperialism As a Bipartisan Project

After Nixon resigned in disgrace, and Gerald Ford lost the 1976 election, it became clear Kissinger had made an impression. On January 1st, 1977, Democratic President Jimmy Carter took office. Despite not occupying a spot in the opposition party’s new administration, Kissinger’s foreign policy proceeded apace. Carter even appointed Zbigniew Brzezinski — a sort of Democratic Kissinger — to be his Secretary of Defense.

Together, Carter and Brzezinski instituted policies Kissinger would have been proud of — and probably was. The duo funded the Mujahideen — and, by extension, Osama bin Laden — to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. Anti-communism was the overriding imperative, even if it involved supporting theocratic armies who threw acid on women learning to read.

But the Carter administration was short-lived. The Georgia native lost the 1980 election to Ronald Reagan. But, while Carter and Brzezinski left office, Kissinger’s legacy most certainly did not.
The hard-right Reagan personified authoritarianism, neoliberalism, and American exceptionalism on steroids. While he claimed to want dialogue with the Soviets, Reagan funded extreme anti-communist groups throughout Central America. He also invaded Grenada and toppled its government following the country’s socialist revolution.

Kissinger’s imperial fervor continued into the Clinton years. The Democratic administration of the 1990s subjected Iraq to a brutal sanctions regime, killing thousands of Iraqis through deprivation. Clinton also opted to continue the Cuban embargo, which remains in place to this day.

After Clinton came George W. Bush, whose War on Terror exemplified the Kissinger protocol: non-stop intervention and destabilization with overtures to diplomacy and the proliferation of rights and freedom. Obama then advanced this protocol further still, albeit less intensely, but was nonetheless very much beholden to military intervention. He punished the Middle East in particular with drone strikes, sanctions, and alliances with Islamic militants and the Israeli state. Not to mention that fact that Obama turned a blind eye to Saudi war crimes against innocent Yemeni civilians.

Essentially, Kissinger’s views carried forth in spirit with every subsequent administration. Ironically, too, the “Kissinger effect” has led to elements within the foreign policy establishment becoming even more radicalized than him. Contemporary US-China relations provides seemingly endless examples of this.

Both Biden and Trump officials often signal their willingness to rachet tensions with China. Mike Pompeo, who Trump appointed to head the CIA and State Department, claims Xi Jinping seeks world domination. The current Secretary of State Antony Blinken has voiced similar sentiments. During his confirmation hearing, Blinken told the Senate that “China posed the most significant challenge… of any nation.” He has also accused the country of “crimes against humanity,” “genocide,” “repression,” and “crackdown[s] of basic rights.”

Kissinger sounds dovish by comparison. In a recent interview with The Economist, he stressed the importance of maintaining friendly US-China relations. Kissinger also poured cold water on some of the more gauche sinophobic hysterics. He insists Xi Jinping is not the next Hitler and that China has no plans of world domination. According to Kissinger, the Asian powerhouse does not even seek to impose its culture abroad.

a cog in a rotten system

In the end, Henry Kissinger must face justice. But we should aso view him as part of a broader network of war criminals. And that network is both continually expanding and a revolving door. Recently, President Joe Biden nominated Elliot Abrams — a man notorious for atrocities in Central America — to a federal diplomacy commission. Biden’s predecessor Donald Trump had made Abrams his Special Representative for Iran and Venezuela.

Those serious about overturning American imperium must address Kissinger and the forces beyond him — many of which he has inspired. True justice for the victims of United States foreign policy means nothing short of wholesale change to the entire apparatus. It is not just about punishing Kissinger but also stopping future Kissingers from ascending to power and harming more innocents.

This is a daunting task. United States progressives are already struggling to confront domestic issues, let alone global ones. Still, the task remains. To create a free and friendly world for the working class and the oppressed globally, the American empire must crumble. Its Kissingers must fall. While Dr. K may celebrate another birthday soon enough, it’s our responsibility to create a landscape that celebrates humanity instead.

Sudip Bhattacharya is a doctoral candidate in political science at Rutgers University. He also has a background as a reporter and continues to write for major outlets from Current Affairs to Protean and The Progressive.

Elias Khoury is the managing editor of the Hampton Institute.

Elon Musk, Twitter, and the Power of Ownership

[Musk family wealth came from property ownership throughout Africa, including Apartheid South Africa and Zambia, where Errol Musk owned an emerald mine like the one pictured above]

By Carl Beijer

Republished from the author’s blog.

Last month, Elon Musk purchased Twitter and immediately disbanded its entire board of directors. This may have surprised you if you get your ideas about power from the populist right, who have been telling us that “power has passed from individual bourgeois business to a new ruling class” — the so-called “managerial elite.” Evidently, their “cultural power” with its full arsenal of “wokeness” and “cancel culture” couldn’t do a damn thing to save them in the end.

Even their enormous incomes couldn’t help them! These are no blue collar workers; these are multi-millionaires with astronomical salaries. “Heterodox economists” like Lévy and Duménil tell us that capitalism is over and we now live in the age of “managerialism”, in which “the main social split is nowadays between lower and higher wage earners, and increasingly so in conformity with the rise of managers”; but Musk had no problem whatsoever kicking some of the highest paid managers in the world to the curb.

Capitalist discourse loves to dismiss Marxist economics as a kind of obscurantist and contrarian analysis that no sensible person could possibly take seriously, but look at how everyone is talking about Musk right now and it’s obvious that we all know exactly what happened. He won because he took ownership of Twitter. That is what allowed him to crush the assembled power of the professional managerial class — Twitter’s corporate governance structure, the complex of NGO professionals and celebrities and academics who protested his takeover, all of it — on a whim. Taking ownership was his coronation, and the moment it happened everyone knew that his opponents would never prevail.

If you take one lesson from the Musk takeover, it should be this: capitalists can do this whenever they want. And even the highest-level managers and corporate executives know it, which means that they can only either defer to ownership or risk getting fired. This is a point I spelled out a few months ago when former WWE CEO Vince McMahon resigned:

Whether or not he has plans to exercise that power [majority ownership of the the WWE] is beside the point; at any given moment, shareholder Vince can decide to appoint a new board that will re-appoint him as CEO. And the very possibility that he could do this gives him the exact same power over management that shareholders have when Vince pleads that he only fired wrestlers because he’s a publicly traded company.

Private ownership confers a unique form of power unlike anything else in our politics. It matters more than professional titles, than academic degrees, than cultural norms and values, than the power of free speech and public reason. Even the state’s victory against it isn’t assured. And there is no form of power concentrated in fewer hands.

Nor is there any form of power that we meet with less skepticism. If you don’t believe me, just pay attention to how we talk about Musk’s power-play moving forward. You’re going to see a lot of talk about how Musk is a bad apple, one of those dreaded right-wing Silicon Valley billionaires. You’re going to hear about the rising tide of fascism, driven by vague hatreds of egalitarianism and freedom. You’re even going to hear some talk about “corporate” power, as if Twitter’s board would still be in control if it were structured slightly differently. But what you won’t hear is skepticism of the basic legal, political, and economic institution — private property — that actually keeps Musk in control.

Between the Imperialist Crosshairs: A Defiant Man and His Revolution

By Stephen Joseph Scott

Imperial proprietorship over the small Caribbean Island of Cuba, from the United States’ perspective, has been from its earliest founding understood as a foredrawn conclusion, a predetermined inexorable; a geographical inevitable. Heads of State, from Thomas Jefferson to James Monroe to John Quincy Adams et al. shared a similar conviction, “[that Cuba’s] proximity did indeed seem to suggest destiny, a destiny unanimously assumed to be manifest.”[1] Through the mid 19th century, US opinion toward Cuba was made jingoistically evident by Secretary of State John Clayton, “This Government,” he advised, “is resolutely determined that the island of Cuba, shall never be ceded by Spain to any other power than the United States.”[2] The Secretary went on to define his nation’s hardened and inalterable commitment to the possession of the island, “The news of the cession of Cuba to any foreign power would, in the United States, be the instant signal for war.”[3] These assertions were now foundational, as reiterated by Indiana Senator (and historian) Albert J. Beveridge in 1901,“Cuba ‘[is] an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union’ and ‘[is] indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself,’”[4] sentiments that were (later) codified into the Cuban Constitution by the US (after the Spanish/American war of 1898) in the form of the Platt Amendment[5] ratified in 1903. Which Louis A. Perez soberly describes as, “[An] Amendment [that] deprived the [Cuban] republic of the essential properties of sovereignty while preserving its appearance, permitting self-government but precluding self-determination,”[6] in contradiction to (Cuba’s heroic bard of national emancipation) José Martí’s 19th century grand-vision of a truly liberated and self-governing island nation. In fact, this historic outlook permeates US strategy toward Cuba for the next century; merged in a complex web of amicable approbation combined with antagonistic condemnation, defiance, resentment, and ruin - all converging at a flashpoint called the Cuban Revolution of 1959, which not only shocked and bewildered US policymakers, but, for the first time, challenged their historic preconceptions of US hegemonic (i.e., imperial hemispheric) dominance. One man stood at the center of their bewilderment, criticism, disdain, and resentment: Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz. Thus, US policy then directed at Cuba, by the early 1960s, was designed to punish this man, the small island nation, and its people, for his disobedience and defiance; and, as such, was intentionally aimed at destabilizing all efforts of rapprochement, as long as he (Castro) remained alive.

Although US intelligence (throughout the 1950s) provided the Eisenhower administration with a thorough history delineating the dangers of instability looming throughout the island, commanded by then military despot and “strong-man” Fulgencio Batista (who seized his return to power in an army-coup in 1952), the US foolishly continued to provide economic, logistical and materiel support to the unpopular and graft-driven dictatorship.[7] US intelligence understood the potential danger posed by “[this] young reformist leader”[8] Fidel Castro and his band of revolutionaries. Castro and the 26th of July movement were a defiant response to what they considered a foreign controlled reactionary government.[9] This response stood as a direct threat to the natural order of things, i.e., the US’s historic prohibition (beyond legalistic euphemisms and platitudes)[10] of any genuine vestige of national sovereignty and self-determination by the Cuban people - which undergirded a belief that, like most Latin American states, the Cuban people were innately “child-like,” incapable of true self-governance.[11] Beyond that, after the ousting of Batista, and “flush with victory,” a young Fidel Castro, on January 2, 1959 (in Santiago de Cuba), assertively threw down the gauntlet, “this time, fortunately for Cuba, the revolution will not be thwarted. It won’t be as in 1895, when the Americans came in at the last hour ‘and made themselves masters of the country.’”[12] Hence, as Jeffery J. Safford makes evident, this existential risk, in the minds of US policymakers, would have to be dealt with, embraced, evaluated, and analyzed (at least initially)[13] in order to maintain the desired outcome – i.e., evading Communist influence and maintaining economic “stability” through the protection of US interests on the island of Cuba no matter the cost.

In March of 1960, while naively underestimating Castro’s success and support on the island, “the Eisenhower administration secretly made a formal decision to re-conquer Cuba … with a proviso: it had to be done in such a way that the US hand would not be evident.”[14] Ultimately, US policymakers wanted to avoid a broader “backlash of instability” throughout the hemisphere by overtly invading the small island nation. That said, Castro and his revolutionaries understood the stark realities and nefarious possibilities cast over them, given the US’s history of flagrant regime change throughout the region. Castro’s accusations as presented at the United Nations, on 26 September 1960, which declared that US leaders were (intending if not) preparing to invade Cuba, were dismissed by the New York Times as “shrill with … anti-American propaganda.”[15] Furthermore, Castro was ridiculed, by US representative James J. Wadsworth, as having “Alice in Wonderland fantasies”[16] of an invasion. But Castro’s committed revolutionary coterie knew better, “In Guatemala in 1954 [Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara witnessed] the first U.S. Cold War intervention [in the region] as U.S.-trained and backed counter-revolutionary forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz…”[17] In fact, similarly, the imminent Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) orchestrated assault, known as the Bay of Pigs (BOPs) invasion, under the Kennedy administration in April 1961, was heavily reliant upon anti-revolutionary factions, the Cuban people, and the military, rising up to join the invaders[18] – which as history proves, and journalist/author David Talbot underscores, did not come to pass:

To avoid Arbenz’s fate, Castro and Guevara would do everything he had not: put the hard-cored thugs of the old regime up against a wall, run the CIA’s agents out of the country, purge the armed forces, and mobilize the Cuban people … Fidel and Che became an audacious threat to the American empire. They represented the most dangerous revolutionary idea of all – the one that refused to be crushed.[19]

This became an epic ideological battle in the myopic mind of US officials: the possible proliferation of an assortment of “despotic” Communist controlled fiefdoms vs. the-free-world! Indeed, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., special aide and historian to President John F. Kennedy in 1961-63, ominously warned the Executive, that “the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one’s own hands,”[20] had great appeal in Cuba (and throughout Latin America), i.e., everywhere that, “distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favor[ed] the propertied classes … [thus] the poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, [were] now demanding opportunities for a decent living.”[21] This was the urgent and fundamental threat (or challenge) Fidel Castro and his movement posed to US hemispheric rule.

US media focused heavily on the plight of the “majority middleclass” Cuban exiles, that chose to leave the island as a result of the revolution’s redistributive polices.[22] Cubans, particularly the initial waves, were dispossessed of substantial wealth and position and often arrived Stateside in chiefly worse conditions.[23] But the essential question as to, “why the [majority of] Cuban people [stood] by the Castro ‘dictatorship’?,”[24] as Michael Parenti contends, was ignored by public officials and the press alike:

Not a word appeared in the U.S. press about the advances made by ordinary Cubans under the Revolution, the millions who for the first time had access to education, literacy, medical care, decent housing [and] jobs … offering a better life than the free-market misery endured under the U.S.-Batista ancient régime.[25]

Castro’s revolutionary ideals based on José Martí’s patriotic theme of national sovereignty and self-determination, effectively armed the Cuban people through a stratagem of socialist ideology and wealth redistribution meshed in a formula of land reform and social services (i.e., education, healthcare, jobs and housing) which included the nationalization of foreign owned businesses; as such, US policymakers believed, “His continued presence within the hemispheric community as a dangerously effective exponent of ‘Communism’ and Anti-Americanism constitutes a real menace capable of eventually overthrowing the elected governments in any one or more ‘weak’ Latin American republics.”[26] Fidel Castro was thus wantonly placed within the crosshairs of US covert-action.

American officials assumed that the elimination of Castro was central to the suppression of his socialist principles, as Alan McPherson demonstrates, “In fall 1961, after the [BOPs] disaster, [JFK] gave the order to resume covert plans to get rid of Castro, if not explicitly to assassinate him.”[27] Earlier in 1960, then CIA director, Allen Dulles’ hardline that Castro was a devoted Communist and threat to US security “mirrored [those] of the business world such as, William Pawley, the globetrotting millionaire entrepreneur whose major investments in Cuban sugar plantations and Havana’s municipal transportation system were wiped out by Castro’s revolution.”[28] Thus, US officials, the Security State and US business-interests were unified, “After Fidel rode into Havana on a tank in January 1959, Pawley [a capitalist scion] who was gripped by what Eisenhower called a ‘pathological hatred for Castro,’ even volunteered to pay for his assassination.”[29] Countless attempts followed, thus, killing Castro became vital to the idea of US hemispheric “stability,” i.e., capitalist economic and ideological control; and as such, Intelligence Services believed, “[The] political vulnerability of the regime lies in the person of Castro himself…”[30] Hence, the purging of Fidel Castro and the cessation of his ideas, through the punishment of the Cuban people, became not only the strategy of choice for the US, but its incessant authoritative doctrine. Accordingly, as longtime US diplomat to Cuba, Wayne Smith verifies, the US’s two overarching obsessive qualms which it believed required the eradication of Fidel Castro were: the long-term influence of his revolutionary socialist ideals in Latin America and beyond; and, the possible establishment of a successful Communist state on the island which would diminish US security, stature, image, influence and prestige in the hemisphere; and, in the eyes of the world.[31]

Through 1960-64, Castro had good reason to be on guard, “…the fact that the Kennedy administration was acutely embarrassed by the unmitigated defeat [at the BOPs] -indeed because of it- a campaign of smaller-scale attacks upon Cuba was initiated almost immediately.”[32] Then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy stated unequivocally, as Schlesinger reveals, that his goal, “was to bring the terrors of the Earth to Cuba.”[33] RFK went on to emphasize the point that the eradication of the Castro “regime” was the US’s central policy concern, “He informed the CIA that the Cuban problem carries, ‘…top priority in the United States Government -all else is secondary- no time, no effort, or manpower is to be spared.’”[34]  Beyond the multifaceted covert actions directed at Cuba under Operation Mongoose, RFK and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, aided by the CIA et al., implemented a long-term multi-pronged plan of punishment, focused on Cuba through Latin America, which included disinformation campaigns, subversion and sabotage (they called hemispheric-defense-policies) that comprised a Military Assistance Program (MAP), which included economic support, subversive tactical training and materiel, devised to terminate “the threat” (i.e., Castro and his ideas) by establishing an Inter-American-Security-Force (of obedient states) under US control.[35]

With Cuba now in the crosshairs, in the early 1960s, “the CIA … played savior to the [anti-Castro] émigrés, building a massive training station in Miami, known as JMWave, that became the agency’s second largest after Langley, Virginia. In fact, it coordinated the training of what became known as the disastrous landing … in 1961.”[36] Conversely, historian Daniel A. Sjursen focuses more on JFK (than the CIA) as the culprit behind the heightened tensions amongst the three principal players. By 1962, with Cuba in the middle, both superpowers (the US and the USSR) stood at a standstill amid the very real possibility of a global conflagration which, Sjursen states, was primarily due to US bravado on behalf of a “military obsessed” young President, “In preparing for a May 1961 summit meeting with Khrushchev [Kennedy stated] ‘I’ll have to show him that we can be as though as he is….’”[37] Sjursen argues, “This flawed and simplistic thinking grounded just about every Kennedy decision in world affairs from 1961 to 1963 … and would eventually bring the world to the brink of destruction with the Cuban Missile Crisis; and, suck the US military into a disastrous unwinnable war in Vietnam.”[38] And yet, as Smith contends, Kennedy was certainly not without bravado, but ultimately, did make attempts to “defuse” the situation. Kennedy, Smith discloses, ruffled-feathers within the Security State by, 1) his desire to end the Cold War, 2) his starting of a reproachment with Castro (who was desirous of such - even if indirectly) and, 3) his goal to pull-out of Vietnam.[39] In fact, with the Kennedy-Khrushchev negotiations finalized by JFK’s promise not to invade Cuba if Soviet warheads were removed from the island – Khrushchev acquiesced, to Castro’s dismay, but tensions did diminish.[40]

Be that as it may, Philip Brenner maintains, the crisis did not go-away on 28 October 1962 for either the US or the USSR. The Kennedy-Khrushchev arrangements had to be implemented. On 20 November, the US Strategic Air Command was still on high alert: full readiness for war - with the naval quarantine (i.e., blockade) firmly in place.[41] As a result, Castro stayed open to negotiations with the US, but at the same time purposefully cautious. “At this point Castro, like Kennedy and Khrushchev, was circumventing his own more bellicose government in order to dialog with the enemy. Castro, too, was struggling, [but willing,] to transcend his Cold War ideology for the sake of peace. Like Kennedy and Khrushchev both, [he knew,] he had to walk softly.”[42] Nevertheless, Castro stressed the fact that the Soviet Union had no right to negotiate with the US per inspections or the return of the bombers, “Instead, he announced, Cuba would be willing to comply based on [specific] demands: that the United States end the economic embargo; stop subversive activities … cease violations of Cuban airspace; and, return Guantanamo Naval Base.”[43] Of course, the United States security apparatus was arrogantly steadfast in its refusal to agree or even negotiate the matter.[44]

In spite of that, a reproachment (devised by Kennedy diplomat, William Attwood, and, Castro representative to the UN Carlos Lechuga) was surreptitiously endeavored through a liaison, journalist Jean Daniel of the New Republic, who stated that, Kennedy, retrospectively, criticized the pro-Batista policies of the fifties for “economic colonization, humiliation and exploitation” of the island and added that, “we shall have to pay for those sins….”[45] Which may be considered one of the most brazenly honest statements, regarding the island, on behalf of an American President, in the long and complex history of US/Cuban relations. Daniel then wrote, “I could see plainly that John Kennedy had doubts [about the government’s policies toward Cuba] and was seeking a way out.”[46] In spite of JFK’s pugnacious rhetoric directed at Cuba, during his 1960 Presidential campaign, Castro remained open and accommodating, he understood the forces arrayed upon the President, in fact, he saw Kennedy’s position as an unenviable one:

I don’t think a President of the United States is ever really free … and I also believe he now understands the extent to which he has been misled.[47] …I know that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with....[48]

While in the middle of (an Attwood arranged and Kennedy sanctioned) clandestine meeting with Castro, Daniel reported, that (at 2pm Cuban-time) the news arrived that JFK was dead (shot in Dallas, Texas, on that very same day, 22 November 1963, at 12:30pm), “Castro stood-up , looked at me [dismayed], and said ‘Everything is going to change,…’”[49] and he was spot-on. Consequently, with (newly sworn-in) President Lyndon Baines Johnson mindful of the fact that Lee Harvey Oswald was “proclaimed” a Castro devotee, accommodations with the Cuban government would be much more difficult. As such, the Attwood-Lechuga connection was terminated.[50] Julian Borger, journalist for the Guardian, maintains that “Castro saw Kennedy’s killing as a setback, [he] tried to restart a dialogue with the next administration, but LBJ was … too concerned [with] appearing soft on communism,”[51] meaning opinion polls, and their consequences, trumped keeping channels of communication open with the Cuban government. Which obliquely implies the notion that relations with Cuba might have been different if JFK had not been murdered.

With the Johnson administration bogged down in an “unwinnable war” in Southeast Asia and Civil Rights battles occurring on the streets of the US, Cuba and its revolution began to fall off the radar. By 1964, the Johnson administration, concerned with public opinion, as mentioned, took swift and immediate action to stop the deliberate terror perpetrated on the Cuban people. LBJ, in April of that year, called for a cessation of sabotage attacks. Johnson openly admitted, “we had been operating a damned Murder, Inc., in the Caribbean.’”[52] Nonetheless, the national security apparatus (i.e., the CIA, the Joint-Chiefs and military intelligence) along with US policymakers (and US based exile groups), remained obstinate, steadfast and consistent in their goal – to punish (if not kill) Fidel Castro and his revolution, by maintaining a punitive program of economic strangulation with the hopes that Castro would be, not only isolated on the world stage, but condemned by his own people who would rise up and eradicate the man and his socialist regime – which did not occur. Of course, the termination of hostilities directive ordered by Johnson did not include economic enmity - which persisted throughout the 1960s and beyond. In fact, a CIA field-agent appointed to anti-Castro operations detailed the agency’s sadistic objectives as expressed through author John Marks, by explaining:

“Agency officials reasoned, … that it would be easier to overthrow Castro if Cubans could be made unhappy with their standard of living. ‘We wanted to keep bread out of the stores so people were hungry … We wanted to keep rationing in effect….’”[53]

The purpose of the economic blockade remained fixed from the early 60s onward: to contain, defame, discredit, and destroy Castro and his experimentation with, what the US considered, “subversive Communist ideals.”

Finally, the US’s belligerent, if not insidious, hardline-stance toward this small island nation reignited at the end of the 1960s, which included not only an economic strangle-hold, but full-blown underground sabotage operations. The 37th president of the United States, Richard M. “Nixon’s first acts in office in 1969 was to direct the CIA to intensify its covert [Hybrid War] operations against Cuba.”[54] Nixon and his then National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, still believed, callously, that military aggression, violence, brutality and intimidation (coalesced by vicious economic sanctions) were the answers to America’s woes abroad. US policy toward Cuba for more than sixty-years is reminiscent of a famous quote often attributed to Albert Einstein: “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting a different result.” Hence, Castro’s Cuba (not only America’s nemesis, but also the model of an uncompromising US global order) was the consequence of an even longer and persistent imperial US foreign policy: If the United States had not impeded Cuba’s push for national sovereignty and self-determination in the initial part of the 20th century; if it had not sustained a sequence of tyrannical despots on the island; and, if it had not been complicit in the termination and manipulation of the 1952 election, an ineradicable character such as the young reformist, and socialist, Fidel Castro may never have materialized.[55] Ultimately, the headstrong US stratagem of assassination and suffocation of Castro and his socialist revolution failed, not only by bolstering his image on the island, but abroad as well. Ironically, the US helped to create its own oppositional exemplar of resistance, in the image of Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the Cuban people, i.e., the revolution - two men and a small island nation that stood up defiantly to the US led global-capitalist-order and would not relent. The US feared the Revolution of 1959’s challenge to class-power, colonialization; and, its popularity with the multitudes - thus, it had to be forcefully restricted through malicious policies of trade-embargoes, threats of violence and ideological-isolation. In fact, the Cuban rebellion courageously and tenaciously stood up to, and resisted, specific contrivances (or designs) by which the US had customarily, boastfully and self-admiringly delineated its dominant status through the forceful protection of its exploitative-business-practices (aka, the “Yankee boot”) on the backs of the Cuban people, for which, Fidel Castro and his bottom-up-populist-crusade were held ominously, insidiously, and interminably responsible.

Notes

[1] Louis A. Pérez, “Between Meanings and Memories of 1898,” Orbis 42, no. 4 (September 1, 1998): 501.

[2] William R. Manning, Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860 (Washington, 1932), 70.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Albert J. Beveridge, “Cuba and Congress,” The North American Review 172, no. 533 (1901): 536.

[5] The Platt Amendment, May 22, 1903.

[6] Pérez, “Meanings and Memories,” 513.

[7] Allen Dulles, Political Stability In Central America and The Caribbean Through 1958 (CIA: FOIA Reading Room, April 23, 1957), 4–5.

[8] Ibid., 4.

[9] Fidel Castro, “History Will Absolve Me,” 1953.

[10] The Platt Amendment.

[11] Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2009), 58.

[12] Pérez, “Meanings and Memories,” 514.

[13] Jeffrey J. Safford, “The Nixon-Castro Meeting of 19 April 1959,” Diplomatic History 4, no. 4 (1980): 425–431.

[14] Noam Chomsky, Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs (London, 2000), 89.

[15] “Cuba vs. U.S.,” New York Times (1923-), January 8, 1961, 1.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Chichester, West Sussex, U.K. ; Malden, MA, 2011), 98.

[18] “Official Inside Story Of the Cuba Invasion,” U.S. News & World Report, August 13, 1979.

[19] David Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government (New York, 2016), 338.

[20] “7. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Schlesinger) to President Kennedy,” in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963.

[21] “15. Summary Guidelines Paper: United States Policy Toward Latin America,” in FRUS, 1961–1963.

[22] “Cuba: The Breaking Point,” Time, January 13, 1961.

[23] Maria de los Angeles Torres, In the Land of Mirrors: Cuban Exile Politics in the United States (Ann Arbor, 2001), 75.

[24] Michael Parenti, “Aggression and Propaganda against Cuba,” in Superpower Principles U.S. Terrorism against Cuba, ed. Salim Lamrani (Monroe, Maine, 2005), 70.

[25] Ibid.

[26] Philip Buchen, Castro (National Archives: JFK Assassination Collection, 1975), 4–5.

[27] Alan McPherson, “Cuba,” in A Companion to John F. Kennedy, ed. Marc J. Selverstone (Hoboken, 2014), 235.

[28] Talbot, The Devil’s Chessboard, 340.

[29] Ibid.

[30] Buchen, Castro, 7.

[31] Wayne S. Smith, “Shackled to the Past: The United States and Cuba,” Current History 95 (1996).

[32] William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (London, 2014), 186.

[33] Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. quoted in Noam Chomsky and Marv Waterstone, Consequences of Capitalism: Manufacturing Discontent and Resistance (Chicago, 2021), 147.

[34] Ibid.

[35] The Joint Chiefs of Staff and Efforts to Contain Castro, 1960-64, April 1981, 3, Learn.

[36] Alan McPherson, “Caribbean Taliban: Cuban American Terrorism in the 1970s,” Terrorism and Political Violence 31, no. 2 (March 4, 2019): 393.

[37] Daniel A. Sjursen, A True History of the United States: Indigenous Genocide, Racialized Slavery, Hyper-Capitalism, Militarist Imperialism, and Other Overlooked Aspects of American Exceptionalism (Lebanon, New Hampshire, 2021), 479.

[38] Ibid.

[39] Hampshire College TV, 2015 • Eqbal Ahmad Lecture • Louis Perez • Wayne Smith • Hampshire College, 2016, accessed October 30, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuBdKB8jX3I.

[40] Philip Brenner, “Kennedy and Khrushchev on Cuba: Two Stages, Three Parties,” Problems of Communism 41, no. Special Issue (1992): 24–27.

[41] Philip Brenner, “Cuba and the Missile Crisis,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22, no. 1 (1990): 133.

[42] James W. Douglass, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (New York, 2010), 84.

[43] Brenner, “Cuba and the Missile Crisis,” 133.

[44] “332. Letter From Acting Director of Central Intelligence Carter to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy),” in FRUS, 1961–1963.

[45] Jean Daniel, “Unofficial Envoy: An Historic Report from Two Capitals,” New Republic 149, no. 24 (December 14, 1963): 15–20.

[46] Ibid.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Jean Daniel, “When Castro Heard the News,” New Republic 149, no. 23 (December 7, 1963): 7–9.

[49] Ibid.

[50] “378. Memorandum From Gordon Chase of the National Security Council Staff to the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs (Bundy),” in FRUS, 1961–1963.

[51] Julian Borger, “Revealed: How Kennedy’s Assassination Thwarted Hopes of Cuba Reconciliation,” Guardian, November 26, 2003.

[52] Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerilla Warfare, Counter-Insurgency, Counter-Terrorism, 1940-1990 (New York, 1992), 205.

[53] John Marks, The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control (London, 1979), 198.

[54] Raymond Garthoff, Detente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington, DC, 1985), 76n.

[55] Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York, 2007), 91.

South Korean Dictator Dies, Western Media Resurrects a Myth

By K. J. Noh

General Chun Doo Hwan was the corrupt military dictator that ruled Korea from 1979-1988, before handing off the presidency to his co-conspirator General Roh Tae Woo.  Chun took power in a coup in 1979, and during his presidency he perpetrated the largest massacre of Korean civilians since the Korean war. He died on November 23rd, in pampered, sybaritic luxury, impenitent and arrogant to the very last breath.  

Many western media outlets have written censorious, chest-beating accounts of his despotic governance and the massacres he perpetrated (here, here, here, and here)-- something they rarely bothered to do when he was actively perpetrating them in broad daylight before their eyes.  Like the light from a distant galaxy--or some strange journalistic time capsule--only after death, decades later, do "human rights violations" in South Korea burst out of radio silence and become newsworthy.

Better late than never, better faint than silent, better partial than absent, one could argue.  Still all of them miss out on key facts, spread lies through omission.  A key dimension of Korean history and politics looks to be buried with his death. A little background history is necessary to elucidate this.

The Sorrows of the Emperor-Dictator

The imperial president, Park Chung Hee

Chun's predecessor and patron, the aging South Korean dictator Park Chung Hee, had ruled the country as an absolute totalitarian despot for 18 years, but he knew in his bones that his days were numbered. He had survived two violent assassination attempts, mass civil protests, and even opprobrium from his American puppet masters, despite serving them loyally by sending 320,000 South Korean troops to Vietnam. Even Park's closest advisors were worried about the fragility of his rule.

Park Chung Hee had been a former Japanese military collaborator during Japan’s colonization of Korea. A US-installed puppet Syngman Rhee had smashed socialism in the South through genocide--a method later to be replicated in Indonesia's "Jakarta method".

Park Chung Hee (in Sunglasses) and Cha Ji Chul (right; in camo), 1961 during their coup.

But the puppet-genocidaire Rhee was in turn toppled by student protests in 1960, and the integration of South Korea into a US-led security structure and capitalist order looked precarious due to popular hatred of the US. Into this foment, Brigadier General Park took power in a vicious putsch. Park was a totalitarian fascist groomed within the Japanese military system, where he had conducted counterinsurgency against Korean independence fighters in Manchuria. (One of them, a legendary guerrilla leader called Kim Il Sung, would escape his clutches and become a life-long nemesis). He had then been trained and cultivated by the US during the 1950's, attending military school in the US. When Rhee was deposed, Park rapidly took power, pledging fealty to the US and total war against communists. Having already proven his anticommunist credentials through a massive treachery, betrayal and slaughter, he was welcomed by the Kennedy Administration. This established the Junta’s legitimacy, while maintaining the continuity of US colonial “hub and spoke” architecture in the region.

Park Chung Hee as Japanese Military Officer

Park nominally assumed the presidency through an election but then tightened his regime until he attained the powers of the Japanese Emperor, whom he had worshipped and admired during Japanese rule. He formally rewrote the constitution after the Japanese imperial system, legally giving himself the powers of Showa-era Sun God.  This, along with his dismissal of colonial atrocities to normalize relations with Japan, in obeisance to the US strategic design for the region, resulted in massive civil insurrection against him.  These protests were barely put down with mass bloodshed, torture, disappearances, and terror.  But even among his inner circle, doubts were voiced about his extreme despotic overreach.   

The Insurance Policy: Ruthless and Cunning

From the earliest days of his rule, Park Chung Hee had cultivated high ranking officers to key positions, as loyal retainers in an insurance policy in case a coup happened against him.  A secret military cabal, later to be called "Hanahwe" [also, “Hanahoe”; "the council of one"], a group of officers within the 1955, 11th class of South Korea's Military Academy, had signaled their total fealty to Park during Park's military coup in 1961.  As a result, Hanahwe members were rapidly brought in-house, rewarded with powerful roles within the military government, and formed a deadly, elite Praetorian guard within the labyrinthine power structures of the Park Administration. 

Park Chung Hee with Lyndon B. Johnson, 1963

Two of them were the leaders of this secret-society insurance policy.   One of them, Chun Doo Hwan, would be referred to as the "ruthless one", known for his amoral brutality and utter lack of conscience.  He would later be called "the slaughterhouse butcher".  The other was Roh Tae Woo, Chun's military blood brother, the "cunning one", known for his strategic, tactical, and political cunning.

Power players, left to right: Roh Tae Woo, Chun Doo Hwan, Cha Ji-Chul

Together, “Ruthless and Cunning” would prove their mettle in Vietnam, auditioning as understudies for the US Imperial war machine, and proving their bona fides by operating a rolling atrocity machine, the SK 9th Infantry "White horse" Division, where Chun’s 29th regiment would cut its teeth on brutal massacres against Vietnamese civilians. Psychopathic and Amoral, they would form a two-headed hydra, ensuring Park's rule against enemies within and without.  A third member of Hanahwe, Jeong Ho Yong, would also cut his teeth in the 9th Division in Vietnam, as would the Capital Mechanized "Fierce Tiger" Division, and various Marine and Special warfare brigades.  All would gain recognition and favor with the US military brass in Vietnam, where South Korean troops would eventually outnumber US troops on the ground.  They would also play key roles in future Korean history.  

Sex, Whiskey, and Guns: High Deductibles

Park's insurance policy kicked in when his KCIA chief pumped him full of bullets at a whiskey-sodden orgy gone bad in late autumn of 1979.  Two young women--a nervous college student and a popular singer--had been procured to serve the sexual whims of the president at a luxurious KCIA "safehouse" that had been set up for such routine vernal assignations.  During the pre-coital dinner banquet, with expensive whiskey serving as lubricant, a heated argument arose between the KCIA Chief, Kim Jae Kyu and Chief Presidential Bodyguard, Cha Ji Chol, about how to put down massive civil protests against Park's rule in Pusan and Masan. Cha Ji Chol proposed the "Pol Pot option" arguing that a massacre of 30,000 civilians would subdue civilians and put the genie back in the bottle.  This was accompanied by insults at Kim for not having implemented such "effective" measures.   Kim Jae Kyu, incensed either at the casual brutality or at the blatant criticism, put an abrupt end to the debate by drawing his pistol and shooting Cha and Park. "I shot the heart of the beast of the (Yushin) dictatorship", he would later claim.  Park's insurance policy would rapidly kick in at that point, although the deductible would be his own life.  

Enter the Praetorian Guard: Tigers, Horses, and Dragons

After Park's death, Oct 26th, Lt General Chun Doo Hwan, the head of the Armed Forces Defense Security Command (DSC)--Park's institutional Praetorian Guard--rapidly took matters in hand.  Chun would rapidly take over, first the investigation of the assassination, then key army positions, and then the government.  Some historians marvel at the rapidity with which Chun consolidated power and how quickly he disciplined loose factions within Park's old guard.  This ignores the rhizomatic base of Hanahwe deep within the executive and in all branches of the military, and the institutional powers baked into the DSC to preserve loyalty and deter subversion and coups. 

Chun, using his statutory powers, and good dose of military firepower, arrested key military leaders for the assassination, and then on Dec 12th, 1979 instigated a coup, supported by Hanahwe comrade Roh Tae Woo, now division commander of the 9th “White Horse” Division. Roh withdrew the elite unit away from its critical position on the DMZ to the Capital, where they were joined by another Vietnam/Hanahwe classmate, general Jeong Ho Yong.  These troops, with another Vietnam-veteran division, the Capitol Mechanized "Tiger" Division, and various special warfare brigades, fought the old guard in the streets before rapidly subduing them. Not long after this class reunion, Chun would declare martial law and appoint himself president with a new constitution and fill all key military ranks with his Hanahwe classmates.

A "Splendid Holiday" turns sour

Mass protests broke out again after Chun’s declaration of Martial Law on May 17th, 1980.  In the city of Gwangju, hundreds of students protested. 

Chun's response was to send a crack division of special warfare troops to smash heads, assault bystanders, and shoot protestors, in an operation named "Splendid Holiday". Beatings, rapes, and mass killings were the order of the day; “blood flowed like rivers in the streets”.

Mass Protest in Gwangju, May 1980

However, in an extraordinary turn of events, stunned protestors, instead of capitulating at the terror, responded by storming police armories and requisitioning weapons, taxis, buses, and improvised explosives, to fight the elite troops to a standstill. Despite the deployment of helicopter gunships and Armored Vehicles, 3000 Special Warfare Paratroopers, along with 18,000 riot troops, found themselves driven out of the city. In this, the liberation of Gwangju stands out as one of the most astonishing feats of civil resistance of the 20th century.

Riot Troops and Paratroopers assault protestors and bystanders in Gwangju

This victory was not to last, however. After the rebels surrendered thousands of arms as a gesture of good faith to seek amnesty, Chun's administration would assault the city with 2 armored divisions and 5 special forces brigades. An untold number of civilians--excess death statistics note 2300 individuals--would be slaughtered, searing Gwangju into the historic annals of atrocity and infamy.

Anti-government protests would go underground, and re-erupt 7 years later, when Chun's presidency, which had been awarded the Olympics found it inconvenient to perpetrate another massacre in front of the international press in the run up to the Olympics.  Chun would accede to protestors' demands for a direct election, the outcome of which conveniently passed the presidency to his Hanahwe second, General Roh Tae Woo.

The missing factor:  Who let the dogs out?  

The above are the basic historical outlines, acknowledged by most journalists and historians.  But what they miss out, is the platform and permissions that circumscribed these historic events.  In particular, two questions arise: Under what authority did Chun initiate his coups? And how did he subdue Gwangju?  The answer leads back to the same place.  

South Korea has never had a policy independent of the US--it has always been a vassal neo-colony. This was demonstrated when the US placed THAAD missiles on Korean soil, ignoring the explicit orders of President Moon Jae-In by coordinating secretly with the South Korean military. Even US Ambassador Donald Gregg, acknowledged openly before Congress that the US-South Korea relationship had historically been a Patron-Client relationship.

This is because the Southern state of Korea, from its inception, was created deliberately by the US after liberation to thwart a popular, indigenous socialist government (the Korean People's Republic) from taking sovereign power over the entire peninsula.

Since its occupation in 1945 by the US military government, South Korea has always been constrained and controlled by the US. Its politics and culture, even where it might be nominally independent, has been thoroughly colonized by the US. For example, in the early 90's, a fractious intra-party conflict broke out between two Cabinet factions of the Liberal Kim Young Sam presidency.  The “irreconcilable” fight was between cliques who had studied political science at UC Berkeley and those who had studied at Yale.  Such were boundaries of South Korean discourse and the overarching nature of US influence.

This state of affairs is most true of the South Korean military, which was cloned from the US military during the US occupation of 1945-1948, and which has been continuously under US control (Opcon) since July14th, 1950. 

A young Chun Doo Hwan at US Army Special Warfare School, Fort Bragg (1950’s)

Key leaders such as Park, Chun, Roh were trained and indoctrinated into US military practices and culture and had close personal connections with the US military.  Chun, for example, had attended the US Psychological Warfare school and Special Warfare school in Fort Bragg, Ranger school at Fort Benning, and Airborne training at the US Army infantry school before receiving commissions to lead Special Warfare forces.  He then in Vietnam fighting under US MACV command before ascending to key positions in the ROK military.

This dependency is starkest regarding military operational control, which the US still maintains in “wartime” to this day. ROK divisions cannot move or act independently without explicit orders from the top of the military command chain, or unless explicit permission is granted to be released from this operational control. The head of the military command chain at the time of Gwangju was General John A Wickham Jr, the head of the UNC/CFC command.  Wickham would have been subordinate to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff. 

In other words, SK troops do not get to commit massacres on their own.  They need a hall pass from the US to engage in any military maneuvers or actions.  The US military granted them such a hall pass to travel down to Gwangju, knowing that this plan that would likely result in the slaughter of students and citizens.  The released units under the Special Warfare Command, a lethal killing machine, are all divisions with a deep integration with and long history of serving the US.

Chun Doo Hwan with Ronald Reagan, 1981

The US claims that it was utterly in the dark and in no position to refuse the release of Opcon demanded by South Korea: that the Koreans snatched up Opcon, like a bully stealing lunch money, and then went on to commit mass atrocities that the US could only sit by and watch in slack-jawed innocence. These are after-the-fact re-workings of history by creative lawyers ignorant of military realities. Militaries are instituted to have unity of command, and Chun was a US-trained, known actor in a specific chain of command, with close ties to the US brass.  The notion that a partially established coup junta of a client state could simply Swiss-cheese US military command structure and snatch Opcon to commit massacres at will strains credibility.  The absurd official portrayals of the US Military brass as hapless damsels before roguish generals is refuted by official records and smacks of satire or desperation.   

Protestors running from Troops, Gwangju, 1980

In fact, Journalist Tim Shorrock  using the declassified "Cherokee files", has detailed well the discussions that happened at the time of Gwangju: top US officials in the Carter administration 1) knew of the brewing crackdown and 2) greenlighted military action, knowing full well the costs.  According to Shorrock’s meticulous reporting:

[Troops] were sent with the approval of the US commander of the US-Korea Joint Command, Gen. John Wickham…That decision, made at the highest levels of the US government….exposed how deeply the Carter administration was involved in the planning for the military coup of 1980….the Carter administration had essentially given the green light to South Korea’s generals to use military force...

This action was authorized to avoid a second "Iran" debacle, where another US-placed despot had been overthrown by popular revolt to US consternation, humiliation, and loss.  Not only did the US greenlight the massacre by US-familiar Vietnam-veteran divisions, the US deployed the USS Coral Sea to support the flank of Chun's military during the retaking of the city and heightened surveillance support with AWACS. In other words, the Gwangju massacre was a US-enabled-and-supported operation, done with explicit US knowledge and coordination.

Pentagon lawyers have argued that they had previously "released opcon" to the Korean military, so that these massacres were not done under direct US control. That is a distinction without a difference, akin to a pit bull owner saying that they took their beast off the leash, and therefore are not responsible for the deadly consequences.  The ROK military was a US-trained-and-coordinated combatant force; some units involved had served directly under the US I Corps in Vietnam only years prior to Gwangju.  The very fact that the US released opcon, knowing full well their capacities, military histories, and what was on the cards, makes the whole argument a poor exercise in plausible deniability.  No one who has the smallest understanding of how armies work would fall for "the pit bull ate my homework" excuse.   

The US has also argued that the Special Warfare division was exempt from opcon at the time.  This, too, is a legal fiction--Special Warfare Troops, of all ROK troops, are the most tightly integrated and bound to US command, where they have a long history of training, coordinating, and working with and as proxies for the US military. (The US maintains this pretense because SWF are designed to infiltrate into NK, where the necessity to avoid US command responsibility requires a legal fiction of "independence").

The same could also apply for Chun's coups as well.  The Dec 12th coup involved the movement of the Vietnam-veteran 9th division, far away from its position guarding the DMZ to attack the incumbent government, along with maneuvers of the Capital Mechanized Division and Special warfare troops.  The May 20th coup also involved large troop maneuvers to threaten and dissolve the Korean parliament.  South Korea is a small, crowded peninsula, bristling with arms and military bases on hair trigger alert, surveilling and monitoring every inch of its territory for military movement.  To assert that the US command was aware of the coups is not conspiracy that presumes US omniscience.  It's simply assuming clear signaling on a crowded dance floor to avoid inadvertent collisions.  It's inconceivable that such a massive troop maneuver would not have been signaled up the chain at minimum to avoid a friendly fire incident.  

Return OPCON, Restore Peace

So where do these facts leave us? 

As the media stir up the flies around Chun's sordid past, they also seek to bury with his body the fact that South Korea's military is an appendage of the US military, and that its warts, chancres, and tumors are grown from within the US body politic. Exorbitant atrocities such as the Bodo League Massacres, or the Gwangju Massacre, accrue to the secret debit account of the US imperial ledger, where human rights violations vanish off the books, and where moral debt and karmic interest are never calculated or reconciled.  

Despite a confusing, bifurcated organizational structure (Independent command control vs. Subordinated operational control; Peacetime Opcon vs. Wartime Opcon), the bare political fact is that South Korea's military falls effectively under US control, not simply in “wartime”, but whenever it is politically expedient or strategically necessary. This card was obvious when the ROK military simply defied Moon’s moratorium on THAAD missile installation and took its orders from the US, not even bothering to notify the Korean president that the missiles had been delivered in-country.  Subsequent investigation revealed that the South Korean military claimed a confidentiality agreement with the US military as the reason to hide the information from South Korea’s own commander-in-chief.  

Not only does the ROK military translate the will of the US in domestic actions--including coups and massacres, but it has also functioned as a brutal sidekick for US aggressions abroad, and serves as a strategic force projection platform and force multiplier for US containment against China. Unlike any other "sovereign" state in the world, South Korea's 3.7 million troops and materiel all fall under US operational control the instant that the US decides that they want to use them.

This is despite the fact that since the inception of its civilian government in 1993, SK has sued the US for the return of Opcon.  This request is now going into its third decade; the US has simply stalled, moved goal posts, changed definitions and conditions, and stonewalled to this date.

This debate around Opcon is important in the current historical moment as the US is escalating to war with China. Any de-escalation with North Korea will require the declaration of peace, predicated on the return of sovereign opcon to South Korea.  However, the US will not seek to de-escalate tensions with North Korea, because if that happens, South Korea is likely to confederate in some manner with North Korea, join China's Belt and Road Initiative and then become integrated as an ally of China.  This would cripple the US security architecture in the Northeast Pacific.  This renders any peace with North Korea antithetical to US strategic interests. 

Secondly, the US escalation for War with China requires the capacity to access and threaten the Chinese continent across a series of leverage points. Inescapably, South Korea will be a key theater of battle, because of its geostrategic position as a bridgehead onto China.  Also, the temptation to leverage a force of 6.7 million South Koreans (3.7 M troops +3 M paramilitary) as cannon fodder for war against China is simply too irresistible to pass on.  In light of this, Korea expert Tim Beal argues that in this moment of heightened tension with China, the most dangerous place in the Pacific is not the South China Sea or the East China Sea, but on the Korean Peninsula.  

We will see this conflict heighten as South Korea enters into a new presidential election cycle between a US-favored conservative candidate, and a China-sympathetic progressive candidate.  

Nevertheless, South Korea’s history offers a stark and ominous lesson, one that the MSM would prefer you ignore: a battle is brewing, with very high stakes.  Under pressure, the US has taken brutal actions to maintain control and hegemony. It may do so again.  

Chun’s passing is being taken as an opportunity to distribute soporific drafts of historical amnesia--the better to sleepwalk into war or tragedy, again. 

People with a conscience should not let this misdirection pass.  To close one’s eyes to history is to enable future atrocities and war.   Only with eyes wide open does the public have a chance of staving off this coming war. 

K.J. Noh, is a scholar, educator and journalist focusing on the political economy and geopolitics of the Asia-Pacific.   He writes for Dissident Voice, Black Agenda Report, Counterpunch, Popular Resistance, Asia Times, MR Online.  He also does frequent commentary and analysis on the news programs The Critical Hour, By Any Means Necessary, Fault Lines, Political Misfits, Loud & Clear, Breakthrough News, Flashpoints. He believes a functioning society requires good information; to that end, he strives to combat the weaponization of disinformation in the current cold war climate.

Power Systems, Propaganda, and the Maintenance of Exploitation

 By Marcus Kahn

In biology class, I was taught that structure determines function. The respiratory system has a lot of surface area (structure) to absorb and distribute oxygen (function). The lungs may be built of the same basic substance as other parts of the body (carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc.) but the structural arrangement at an atomic, molecular, and cellular level determines how the larger system behaves. A sword and a scalpel may be built of the same metal, but they are designed and structured to accomplish completely different tasks.

With this in mind, we should evaluate the function of our existing power system according to its structure and determine what it is designed to accomplish. This involves stripping away its rhetoric and self-image, looking at the distribution of decision-making power, and determining whether the system is capable of being reformed into something fair and equitable, or whether it’s a sword that needs to be melted down and transformed using the same basic substances, people and law.

A democratic power system seeks to give everyone an equal voice in collective decisions, rooted in the underlying assumption that such a system of governance would tend towards justice and prosperity. If the atoms are horizontally structured through laws that provide equal access to decision-making, this will lead to an equitable distribution of resources and opportunity. If the system is hierarchically structured and decision-making emanates from the top, the system will function exploitatively to the benefit of those in power. Democratic (bottom-up flow of decision-making) and authoritarian (top-down flow of decision-making) power systems may be built of the same basic substance (people and rules to govern their behavior), but their differing structures determine who they ultimately serve. When decision-making power is concentrated in the hands of a few, a small minority becomes capable of systematically defending their interests by creating law and enforcing it through legally sanctioned violence.

There are examples of concentrated power in monarchies and theocracies throughout history whereby the labor of the majority is exploited for the profit of the powerful few, at the cost of human life and the ability to control that life. The ‘special interests’ of the powerful minority not only differ from the interests of the vast majority of the population. Their achievement depends on popular submission to the will of those in power. But popular submission to an exploitative power system is no easy task. It is difficult to convince people to work for you and hand over the fruits of their labor, whether that’s years of unpaid childcare or ten hours a day behind a desk. Power systems require a parallel system of belief to accomplish what they can’t enforce physically. You need to convince a substantial portion of the population, as well as yourself, that you are justified in dictating their behavior and demanding their obedience.

The way exploitative power systems are justified can usefully be termed as the ‘dominant ideology’ in a given society. Dominant ideologies have varied across time and geopolitical situation. In 14th century England you might have someone holding up a bible to justify taxing landless peasants, meanwhile an Aztec priest is across the ocean telling everyone why his divine right to rule justifies economic inequality and social control. In the more secular modern age, the dominant ideology has taken on a global and comparatively homogenous character. The modern dominant ideology, (the belief system that justifies exploitation) can be conceptually divided into four interdependent categories based off their inherent properties and historical development; patriarchy (oppression justified by gender and sexuality), state-corporate capitalism (oppression justified by property rights), imperialism (oppression justified by nationality) and white supremacy (oppression justified by perceived race).

History rarely provides neat watersheds, but much of their development and form can be explained by the residual power of fundamentalist religion, the ‘discovery’ of the New World and corresponding racist-imperialist colonial systems that extended from western Europe beginning in the 16th century, and the crystallization of the state-corporate capitalist economic system through the growth of multinational corporations and massive financial institutions since the late 19th century, accelerated after WWII and enforced by powerful Western nations, primarily U.S. military and economic power.

These forms of oppression are deeply interlinked, backed by the threat and execution of lawful violence, and justified by information distributed from powerful institutions directed by men, billionaires, powerful nations, and white people, most potently all four wrapped into one person like Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Jobs, Bezos, Murdoch, Gates, or Trump.

The means of reproducing and distributing the dominant ideology changes in tandem with technological advances. The modern development of mass information distribution systems (e.g. standardized education, corporate mass media, the public relations and advertising industries, and more recently the Internet) has given a tiny minority historically unprecedented influence over the information people receive, and therefore how they behave. If people clearly understand universal rights to freedom, health, safety, and sustenance they will resist laws, ideas, and people that oppose those rights. If they pledge allegiance to a nationalist symbol before absorbing thirteen years of revisionist history or read the same newspaper every day, they are much more likely to uphold the existing power system because they are convinced it’s the right thing to do. In its essence, what has developed over the past century is a highly sophisticated propaganda system whose ideological production is distributed among powerful institutions in the public and private sectors. These institutions are controlled by a class of individuals who share similar, though not always identical interests.

The label ‘propaganda system’ may seem counterintuitive. When we hear the word ‘propaganda’ we tend to picture a tightly coordinated and centralized government-run agency that distributes pamphlets, radio broadcasts, etc. Chomsky notes an inverse relationship between a state’s ability to use violence on its own population, and the sophistication of the propaganda system in place. The more authoritarian the power system is, the more rudimentary its propaganda, the more democratic the more sophisticated. Within so-called “free” societies like the U.K. and the U.S., violence is not always an easy option for maintaining power. Through popular struggles over the centuries, these societies have made some limited progress in securing legal protections against state-sanctioned violence, and those in power have had to find new ways to ensure obedience.

This sincere fear of public disobedience and interference in public policy has been referred to as the ‘threat of democracy’ or more recently the ‘crisis of democracy’. But the need to structurally marginalize public influence is a priority James Madison understood when designing a constitutional framework put in place to protect the interests of the ‘minority of the opulent’, and a phenomenon those in power in the 1960s and 70s understood when facing popular resistance in the form of the civil rights, anti-war, labor, and feminist movements. In response to this threat, and enabled by developments in communications technology, those with a vested interest in maintaining and furthering the existing power system established control over new means of mass information distribution to marshal public behavior without the use of force and ‘manufacture consent’ for exploitative public policy.

This system of ideological control is not centrally coordinated or even fully understood by those who participate. Executives at ABC (Disney) and NBC (General Electric) do not call each other to compare notes on how to oppress the working class. But those with ultimate decision-making power atop these rigidly structured and powerful institutions (mostly rich white men from powerful countries) share similar interests on a range of public policy issues and independently manufacture a limited range of debate that tries to ignore or vilify ideas and people that threaten their power. Though slight variations in tactics and opinion reflect the distribution of power amongst distinct institutions, the output of corporate mass media institutions is ideologically consistent due to hierarchical and undemocratic internal structures, and is also influenced by mutualistic relationships with other centers of concentrated power (e.g. a government that supplies fresh official information or the corporate advertisers who help pay the bills). These inherent structural pressures orient public discourse towards the interests of the powerful.

Corporate media institutions help to reframe critical issues that have attracted popular concern such as climate change, wealth distribution, military intervention, health care, and police power in ways that maintain the integrity of the power system and ensure the continued exploitation of the global population for private gain without meaningful public interference. By appealing to widespread dissatisfaction and perhaps themselves using the language of ‘reform’, those with power avoid addressing the need for transformative deconstruction and the institution of democratic structures of governance that are upheld by popular consent and dictated by collective decision-making rather than violence and ideological management.

Workers and Communities Must Control COVID Relief Funds: A View From Detroit

By Jerry Goldberg

Republished from Liberation News.

The Biden Coronavirus Relief Bill offers significant funding that could alleviate at least in part the poverty faced by millions of people in the United States. An article in Bridge Michigan summed up the potential benefits for poor people in Michigan.

• An estimated 1.97 million children under 18 in Michigan — and 65.7 million across the United States — could benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit. This constitutes 92% of all children in the state.

• The bill includes an $880 million increase for food assistance, including a 15% increase in food stamp benefits. This potentially could help alleviate hunger for the more than 430,000 adults in Michigan who reported they can’t afford food to adequately feed their children.

• Some $25 billion in rental assistance and housing vouchers could provide assistance to the 139,000 families at risk of eviction in the state.

• There is $25 billion in aid to help child-care providers reopen safely and $15 billion in additional child-care assistance to help families return to work, as well.

All these benefits will be squandered if the workers and oppressed people rely on the capitalist state, a state set up to serve the interests of the corporations and the rich, to deliver these benefits to the people for whom they are intended. This is especially so in oppressed cities like Detroit.

Detroit’s poor completely alienated from capitalist state apparatus

In Detroit, years of grinding poverty and austerity imposed by finance capital have deprived hundreds of thousands of people of the resources to know about and take advantage of benefits, on the rare occasion when they are offered. The following statistics bear out the depth of poverty and lack of accessibility from any basic resources for tens of thousands of Detroiters.

• In Detroit, 40% of the population has no access to any type of internet, 57% lack a high-speed connection, and 70% of school-aged children have no connection at home.

• A 2011 report noted that 47% of Detroiters were functionally illiterate. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Detroit schools deprive their students of basic access to literacy.

• The median household income for Detroiters in 2018 was $31,283 compared to $61,973 nationally.

The effect of this lack of online access and basic literacy among Detroit’s poor means that even when grandiose programs are announced, those who could benefit the most are not in a position to take advantage of them.

• While Detroit’s Black community suffered some of the highest COVID rates in the state, only 34.5% of Detroiters have been vaccinated compared to 54.5% of the statewide population.

• As of January 2020, 11,297 homes lacked water service. Despite a plan being announced to restore service after the pandemic hit in March 2020, in fact there were only 1,250 water restorations as of May 17, 2021.

• Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit was foreclosed on for unpaid property taxes by the Wayne County treasurer.

• A survey conducted in 2019, found that of the 25,000 homeowners behind on paying their property taxes, 55% were unaware of the Homeowner Property Tax Assistance Program tax exemption, a program which exempts families earning less than $26,780 per year from paying any property taxes. And in 2017, only 197 families benefitted from the $760 million in federal hardest hit funds given the state to stop foreclosures. Instead, $380 million of the funds were diverted to contractors to tear down homes in a program laced with corruption.

Let the workers and community run things

One of the aspects of the Coronavirus Relief Bill is that it is expected to provide $10 billion for governments across Michigan: $4.4 billion for local governments plus another $5 billion for the state. The City of Detroit will be receiving $826.7 million. These funds must be spent by 2024 or be returned to the federal government.

The people must organize to make sure these funds aren’t squandered as they too often are in the capitalist United States, diverted to crony contractors and nonprofits. Instead, these funds should be used to set up community centers in every neighborhood of cities like Detroit, staffed and run by residents from the communities they serve.

The centers should have computer stations, and aides trained in helping individuals learn about and get access to all benefits they are entitled to. They should sponsor literacy classes. They should employ workers who go out into the community every day, to make sure those who are homebound are reached out to.

The workers and community members staffing these centers should be from the communities they are serving where they are known by their neighbors. They should take stock of basic items like access to electricity, heat and safe non-lead-poisoned water, so families are not afraid to report the lack of basic necessities for fear of having their children taken away.

They should also make sure that undocumented workers, who often are afraid to request aid for fear of deportation, get the services they need regardless of their so-called “residency status.”

Each center should include a health clinic, staffed by doctors, nurses and medical students who live in the community and can provide holistic and environmentally sensitive healthcare that really meets people’s needs.

Cuba shows the way

A model for community-based services can be found in socialist Cuba. An article by Ronn Pineo published in the Journal of Developing Societies described Cuba’s community-based health care system. As early as 1984, Cuba began implementation of its “one doctor plus one nurse team” approach — called Basic Health Teams — with each team unit caring for 80 to 150 families. The healthcare teams live in the communities that they serve so that they can better understand the local health issues.

The doctor/nurse/public health official teams are supported, in turn, by local Group Health Teams, which meet regularly to scout for common issues facing the populations they serve, keeping very careful records of their findings and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health.

Rather than waiting for people to get sick and come into doctors’ offices — the common practice elsewhere in the world — the Cuban doctor/nurse/public healthcare worker groups spend their afternoons walking about their assigned districts, medical bags in hand, dropping in unannounced on the homes of those living in the communities. As a result, they are in a position to notice medical conditions of the people they serve before most afflictions can grow to become too serious. The teams use their house calls as opportunities to remind residents to take their medications — supplied free or at very low price-controlled costs — to exercise more and usually quiz their patients closely about their daily diets.

Demand worker/community control the of relief funds

For the Coronavirus Relief Bill to really make a dent in poverty, hunger and homelessness, it will be up to workers and oppressed people to organize to demand control of the funds to ensure they serve the people for whom they are supposed to be intended. We cannot leave it to the capitalist state, an organ for repression of the people on behalf of the corporate elite, to do the job.

Ultimately, the only way to take the vast wealth of U.S. capitalism, produced by the working class and stolen by the bosses, is to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a socialist system where the needs of the people in the United States and worldwide could easily be met.

What's Their Endgame?

By Steve Lalla

Republished from Orinoco Tribune.

Invariably, in a conversation about environmental destruction, war in the Middle East, or the pandemic, someone eventually asks the question: “yes, but what’s their endgame?”

Behind this question is the assumption that an elite cabal of capitalist overseers controls everything and foresees the outcome of all their decisions—that they possess an unassailable plan that can never be defeated. Behind this question lurks capitalist realism, characterized by Zizek and Jameson as the mental state in which it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.

“We find ourselves at the notorious 'end of history' trumpeted by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall,” wrote Mark Fisher in Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? “Fukuyama's thesis that history has climaxed with liberal capitalism may have been widely derided, but it is accepted, even assumed, at the level of the cultural unconscious.”

This mindset is so common that many of us don’t think twice before asking “what’s their endgame?” We believe that in posing the question we’re making a meta-critique of capitalism. The mere formulation of the question supposes that there’s such a thing as organization—a system—a concept that in itself is truly revolutionary for many of us, who don’t even realize that we live within a system, and that alternate ones are possible.

The question “what’s their endgame?” is often posed in the context of the pandemic. In this case the assumption behind the question is that capitalism, if it wanted to, could have reacted better to the pandemic, and could have saved more lives. Therefore, the pseudo-intellect wonders, was there perhaps not a master plan behind letting hundreds of thousands die? Perhaps the US colluded with the leaders of Brazil, Britain, China, Cuba, and the United Nations, and they all agreed on a plan to usher in a police state? The theory falls apart when we accept that various communities had divergent responses to COVID-19. It’s more likely that the agenda behind allowing mass death was the same that capitalists always have: to make as much money as possible with little thought for the consequences.

On the topic of environmental destruction, we aver that billionaires are building spaceships to colonize Mars; that they’ve already planned for the destruction of planet earth and its ecosystems. Whether it’s the singularity, or life on Mars as imagined in books and film, we’ve internalized the idea that the contamination of earth and humanity’s exile into space—or at least an elite fraction of humanity—is actually an ingenious plan devised by the super-intelligent billionaires, not the inevitable result of an economic system that ignores the most basic principles of nature in order to line the pockets of the oligarchy.

Global war? We’re supposed to believe that the imperialist wars in Syria, Afghanistan, or Yemen, are going exactly as planned; that the US withdrew from Iraq in 2011 strategically—the US actually won the war. We’ve internalized the fallacy that Vietnam’s Resistance War Against America went according to US plan; that powers beyond our control act unilaterally on our beings, that we’re not actors in history.

I’m reminded of a comment someone posted on my Facebook wall this week: “if one wishes an answer, there is none, to war and chaos. When it all spills over it becomes a world war, and history repeats itself, over and over.” There are elements of truth to these ideas, which is why they’re so appealing.

“This malaise, the feeling that there is nothing new, is itself nothing new of course,” wrote Fisher.

History repeats itself: an appealing idea

Perhaps the root of this idea is the oft-repeated saying that “those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” It turns out that this is really an altered version, or a misquote, of the original written by Spanish philosopher Jorge Santayana in 1905: “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

From this deeply ingrained idea we extrapolate the idea that history repeats itself—but that’s not at all what Santayana wrote. Neither of these maxims is meant to teach us that history repeats itself. Santayana’s statement warns us that if we don’t learn from history, we won’t be involved in the making of the future. While cyclical elements are certainly involved in both nature and in human history, to believe that either nature or history truly repeats itself is simply to bow out of the game—to quit before we’ve even played. A similar logic is at play when we ask “what’s their endgame?”

The reasonable alternative is to recognize that reality is always changing, and will continue to change; to recognize that humans play an active role in creating the future. Our realities are not determined by forces entirely outside of our control. This recognition gives us both strength and optimism.

 “For revolutionary hope to come into being, we need to discard determinism,” writes Yanis Iqbal. “Instead of dialectically locating an individual in the interconnected economic, political and cultural systems, institutions and structures, determinism considers him/her to be unilaterally influenced by it. A determinist conception is based on the dichotomous division of existence into an ‘external world’ and ‘human consciousness.’ In this conception, the external world and consciousness are two different components of human existence.”

In truth, humans are not separate from the world around us. It’s self-evident that we’re part of it. We require air, water, and sustenance to live and to think. Conversely, we alter and metabolize the world around us by our existence. The oligarchy and the elite, while they may live in ivory towers, are subject to the same forces of nature as we are, with the same powers and limits of agency. They may have various plans, and diverse strategies, but none of this ensured that their plans worked perfectly in the past, nor will in the future.

Despite its popularity in academia—particularly in philosophy, cultural studies and postmodernism—it’s easy to demonstrate that capitalist realism is incorrect. One only has to imagine other mental states or cultural tropes such as apartheid realism, feudalist realism, or hunter-gatherer realism.

Understanding and analyzing the plans of our opponents or enemies is important. The assumption that we are powerless before them is fallacious and futile.

Often, what lies beneath the question “what’s their endgame?” is conspiracy theory. Yes, many elements of conspiracy theory are certainly true and yes, groupings of like-minded people marshal increased power to guide events. However, blind adherence to conspiracy theory ignores the self-evidence of the greatest conspiracy of all: that we, as humans, all conspire together to create the future.

Privatizing the Common Good: The 21st-Century Enclosures Are Here

[Pictured: Oscar Olivera, executive secretary of the Cochabamba Federation of Factory Workers and spokesperson for the Coalition in Defense of Water and Life, known as La Coordinadora, organizing with fellow Bolivians.]

By Ashley Dawson

Republished from Literary Hub.

Fossil capital has been granted immense power, producing life-giving heat and light but also plunging communities into darkness when they fail to return outsize profits. In 2011, DTE Energy, the investor-owned utility (IOU) that controls southeast Michigan’s energy infrastructure, repossessed one thousand streetlights from Highland Park, a city in the larger metropolis of Detroit. The city was left in the dark. Like many other Black-majority cities across Michigan, Highland Park was struggling at the time with capital flight and spiraling levels of austerity. Once home to Ford and Chrysler auto assembly plants and the well-paying jobs that they generated, Highland Park had seen its fortunes crash in the 1990s and the 2000s as the automakers shipped jobs abroad.

Now, half of the residents of Highland Park had trouble paying their monthly electric bills, and a quarter had experienced a shutoff of gas or electricity—often during Michigan’s cold winter months. When DTE took the lights, Highland Park owed $4 million in electricity bills, a situation likely to be aggravated by the rate hikes the utility wanted to impose to support its existing coal-fired power plants, to build new fossil fuel plants, and to pay the utility’s chief executive his $5.4-million annual salary. The repossession of Highland Park’s streetlights was part of a broader crisis of public assets: across Michigan, communities struggled as control of key public infrastructure like the water department and the school system was stripped from them by undemocratic emergency-management czars.

The taking of the light in Highland Park is part of a new, global round of enclosures in which common assets are stripped from the public. For radical critics of capitalism such as the historians Silvia Federici and Peter Linebaugh and the geographer David Harvey, enclosures are one of the dominant forms of contemporary capital accumulation. According to these activist scholars, critics of capitalism have mistakenly followed Marx’s analysis of what he famously termed “primitive accumulation,” which sees enclosure as a kind of original violence that kick-started the capitalist system. Enclosure, Marx argued, was foundational to capitalism since it allowed powerful landlords to accumulate wealth by dispossessing the peasantry of the land they farmed collectively, replacing such feudal social relations with more lucrative forms of enterprise such as the production of wool.

As the 16th-century English philosopher and statesman Sir Thomas Moore put it, “sheep, which are naturally mild, and easily kept in order, may be said now to devour men and unpeople, not only villages, but towns.” The accumulated capital produced by enclosure of common lands was used to support expansion of industrial production domestically and of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism abroad. Enclosure thus refers to a global process of violent extraction. But the key thing is that enclosure did not cease once common lands in Britain had all been opened up and capitalism had been established as an economic and political system.

Contrary to what Marx argued, the predatory stripping of common assets around the world never stopped. In fact, it has intensified. The neoliberal era that began in the 1980s has seen a massive expansion of attacks on the commons, both in the form of the shifting of formerly public assets such as school systems into the private sphere in rich countries, and through extensive land grabs in areas hitherto relatively autonomous from the capitalist world system such as parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Resistance to the new enclosures has become a central feature of social struggles over the last few decades. For instance, in 2000, the people of the city of Cochabamba in Bolivia rose up after the World Bank insisted that the government hand over control of municipal water supplies to Aguas del Tunari, a conglomerate controlled by the US-based multinational Bechtel Corporation. The new owner of Cochabamba’s water demanded steep and sudden rate increases of double or more for poor consumers in order to finance the double-digit profits demanded by the companies. The conglomerate even proposed to tax water that people caught in barrels as the rain flowed off their roofs.

A just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime.

The people of Cochabamba rose up in protest, occupying the center of the city and forming a grassroots participatory organization called the Coordinator for the Defense of Water and Life that shut the city down and demanded a rollback of the water privatization measures. Under pressure from the water conglomerate and international authorities, the Bolivian government declared martial law and tried to suppress the protests with riot troops, measures leading to mass arrests, hundreds of injuries, and the death of a teenage boy as conflicts erupted on the barricades the citizens had set up around the city. Protesters held fast in the face of state repression, however, and on April 10, 2000, the Bolivian government reached an agreement with the Coordinadora that ultimately not only reversed the privatization of the city’s water but also catapulted Evo Morales and his Movement for Socialism (MAS) into power in the country.

This victory for popular mobilization in Bolivia was a key moment in resistance to the new round of capitalist enclosures carried out during the age of neoliberal hyper-capitalism. The defense of the commons through new forms of participatory organizing resonated around the globe in the following years. In 2013, for instance, Turkish activists protesting government plans to pave over Istanbul’s Taksim Gezi Park described the park itself and various other urban spaces that the government’s neoliberal policies tried to confiscate for private profit as a “commons.” The Turkish activists called the form of self-government developed during their occupation of Gezi a “commune,” one that involved not just a sit-in but also food distribution, a medical center, and an autonomous media collective.

Grounded in a determination to defend common space from enclosure, the Gezi protest shared a commoning ethos not just with the Cochabamba Water Wars but also with similar movements around the world, from the resistance of the Zapatistas to the neoliberal tenets of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in Mexico beginning in 1994, to the Occupy movement that began in New York and spread across the United States, and to the Indignados movement in Madrid in 2011. In addition to resisting enclosure, these movements also experimented with new forms of popular sovereignty, animated by a fierce critique of the blindness to inequality that characterizes liberal democracy and the regime of private property rights on which it is founded. New structures of governance were developed in global movements founded on the idea of the people as an egalitarian collective with a mandate to rule in order to bring about social transformation.

These experiments reached their highest point with the emergence of what might be termed the social movement party in countries such as Bolivia and Brazil, but the effort to develop egalitarian, non-bureaucratic ways of organizing societies has been a key feature of the Left in recent decades. And, as feminist scholars such as Silvia Federici have documented, contemporary commoning movements crucially include the fight for communal, egalitarian control over material needs linked to social reproduction such as housing, food preparation, child rearing, sex and procreation, and even the reproduction of collective memories.

These radical experiments have exciting implications for the struggle for energy democracy. For example, when the power company came to strip them of their light, the residents of Highland Park took power into their own hands in ways that built on the logic of popular sovereignty developed in global commoning movements. DTE Energy had consistently used political donations (based on those elevated rates) and lobbying to stymie efforts to establish local ownership of clean energy in Michigan. Now it was taking away the power supplied by dirty coal plants.

Faced with this threat, citizens of Highland Park established Soulardarity, a community-based organization that fights for collectively owned streetlights, energy production, and equitable development. Soulardarity not only brings light back to Highland Park, it generates the power to run streetlights from the sun. Soulardarity produces what one observer calls “visionary infrastructure.” And it provides local folks with jobs building and maintaining this new solar infrastructure. Through the organization’s PowerUP program, the community is able to purchase solar power in bulk and at reasonable rates, and to deploy tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of solar infrastructure in the community. But this is not just about transformation of the community’s physical infrastructure: it is also about broader social transformation in Highland Park.

Soulardarity is a democratic, community-governed membership organization that aims to educate Highland Park residents about what autonomous control of power or energy democracy should look like, and to advocate for community ownership, transparency, and environmental sustainability across the region. Soulardarity advocates for a Community Ownership Power Administration (COPA) as a vital element of a Green New Deal in the United States. Like the Rural Electrification Administration that brought electricity to farms across the country during the New Deal in the 1930s, COPA would provide finance and technical capacity to help local communities across the country make the transition to renewable energy. As Jackson Koeppel of Soulardarity explains, COPA would give municipalities, counties, states, and tribal authorities the legal authority and the funding mechanisms that would allow them to “terminate their contacts with investor-owned utilities, buy back the energy grid to form a public or cooperative utility, and invest in a resilient, renewable system.”

In the introduction to their collection of essays on the US movement for energy democracy, Denise Fairchild and Al Weinrub contrast corporate models of decarbonization with the forms of renewable energy being fought for by organizations like Soulardarity. For Fairchild and Weinrub, the former are oriented around the growth imperative of capitalism and are characterized by “a transition to industrial-scale, carbon-free resources without challenging the growth of energy consumption, material consumption, rates of capital accumulation, and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few.”

The centralized nature of power generation and distribution in the era of fossil capitalism has not only led to significant waste, with average losses of 8 to 15 percent of power generated as a result of far-flung transmission lines. It has also helped to make energy invisible and unconscious for many ratepayers, while subjecting others to heightened environmental and health damages, harms that track closely along lines of residential segregation and racialized inequality in the United States. Corporate-owned renewable energy is not likely to challenge this history.

By contrast, Fairchild and Weinrub argue, the decentralized renewable energy model fosters community-based renewable energy development that “allows for the new economic and ecologically sound relationships needed to address the current economic and climate crisis.” Such decentralization of power, they suggest, is facilitated by the distributed nature of renewable resources: “solar energy, wind, geothermal energy, energy conservation, energy efficiency, energy storage, and demand response systems are resources that can be found in all communities,” and consequently provide a foundation for “community-based development of energy resources at the local level through popular initiatives.”

Fairchild and Weinrub’s advocacy of decentralized renewable energy is thus predicated on both the material characteristics of renewable energies and the forms of radical democracy that they hope will facilitate and result from a just transition. For them, transition is about community empowerment rather than simply decarbonization of the grid, as important as the latter may be in the struggle to avoid climate meltdown.

The question of the energy commons is fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Writing in Fairchild and Weinrub’s collection of essays, Cecilia Martinez, director of the Center for Earth, Energy, and Democracy, argues that a just transition to renewable energy will require a shift away from today’s energy-as-commodity regime. Martinez suggests that energy democracy requires the construction of an energy commons. What models exist to support the institution and collective governance of such an energy commons, one that diverges radically from today’s private property–based regimes of energy control and ownership? For Martinez, the first step is to recognize that energy is not so much a physical object, but rather a “vast array of natural interactions and phenomena for societal use.”

While energy might derive from natural phenomena all ultimately grounded in the harnessing of solar power, it is inescapably rooted in the social forms and infrastructures developed by humans to exploit solar energy. It is about forms of collective power that are active: in other words, about commoning rather than about some pre-given and static commons. How might energy be regulated in a more egalitarian manner? Martinez alludes briefly in her essay to the legal structures created over the last few decades to establish a global commons outside the control of any particular nation: founded on centuries-old legal paradigms governing the high seas, today’s global commons also includes the atmosphere, Antarctica, and outer space.

Martinez also draws on the pioneering economist Elinor Ostrom to argue that diverse cultures around the world and across history have established institutions resembling neither the bourgeois nation-state nor capitalist markets to govern resource systems. Martinez points to indigenous governance models of commoning founded on reciprocity, cooperation, and respect not only between humans but also among humans and the more-than-human world.

What are the conditions for the creation of a new world based on the energy commons? The egalitarian governance systems and legal paradigms discussed by Cecilia Martinez are helpful here. The particular material characteristics of modern renewables such as solar and wind power distinguish them from fossil fuels like coal and oil, but to what extent do these specific material forms, which derive directly from solar power and its effect on atmospheric systems, make for a new, commons-based energy regime that might be termed “Solarity”? What forms of collective, egalitarian governance can the movement for energy democracy draw on as it seeks to challenge the centralized paradigms of energy generation and ownership of the fossil capitalist regime? Do legal paradigms already exist to help community-based organizations like Soulardarity escape from the clutches of fossil capital and adopt solar power on a mass basis? What are the limits of these legal paradigms and what juridical innovations might address these limits?

These questions all relate to much broader struggles to establish new, revolutionary forms of popular sovereignty to defend and extend the commons, but they have a particular import for the fight for energy democracy. The struggle for a rapid and just energy transition is at the core of broader struggles for an exit from today’s trajectory toward social degradation and planetary ecocide. The question of the energy commons is therefore fundamental to the fight for a collective future.

Ashley Dawson is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His previous books include Extreme Cities: The Peril and Promise of Urban Life in the Age of Climate Change and Extinction: A Radical History. A member of the Social Text Collective and the founder of the CUNY Climate Action Lab, he is a long-time climate justice activist. His new book, People’s Power: Reclaiming the Energy Commons is available at OR Books.

Well, What Are Y'all Going To Do Then?

By Mack

On Tuesday, August 11, 2020, democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, announced his VP pick, Kamala Harris, to a flurry of mixed reactions online. As with all events that make up the political theatre typically observed in our country, there were corners of praise and corners of dissent. On one hand, Harris’ nomination symbolizes a potential historic “first” for Black and South Asian women in the US. It’s an opportunity to be represented in the second highest office in the world. But for many like myself, the optics are totally overshadowed by the bleak reality of electing the white supremacist, grandfather of mass incarceration, and a woman who has unironically self identified as California’s “top cop”.

Under a true democracy, people should be allowed to ask questions. Under a true democracy, people should be allowed space for criticism and dissent. But in the illusion of a democracy that we find ourselves under in the so called united states, where elections cost millions of dollars to participate in, where all parties besides two are rendered virtually invisible, and where the two visible parties pull strings behind the scenes to usher forward uninspiring candidates, dissent is often viewed as life-threatening. We are taught that democracy should be free, but every four years the american people are held at gunpoint and forced to make a decision. Every election becomes “the most important election of our lifetime”.

When those among us who choose to dissent speak up, we are often met with a few similar retorts. They don’t vary much, but one that we can constantly depend on is, “So what do you want me to do then?” I want to recognize that often this question is asked from a genuine place. When you are held politically hostage the way we continue to be in this country, we find ourselves destitute and miseducated. People’s concerns about the future are real.

But more often than not, “So what do you want me to do then?” is a question asked in bad faith, particularly to leftists, people who identify as communists, socialists, anarchists, or any other faction of the true left, who, after lifetimes of study and lived experience, have decided to opt out of the dog and pony show that is american electoral politics. It’s a question asked to invoke shame. To suggest that we are the true failure of this country. To remind us that if we just took this thing a little more seriously, maybe we’d all be in a better place. This question often leads to arguments that don’t go anywhere and don’t yield any solutions. This question only serves to further isolate the people.

I do not like being asked this question, because I believe that most people who ask it, do not want the answer, and most certainly will not like mine. But for the last time, here, I will answer it: I don’t want you to do anything. I literally just want you to stop. I want you to read. I want you to listen. And then, and only then, do I want you to act.

The big issue with being socialized in a patriarchal society, which is to say, a society governed by and constructed in the benefit of men, is that solutions are constantly valued over concrete analysis. We continue to leap for solutions to problems that we do not fully understand. And that is why we continue to find ourselves repeating the same mistakes and asking the same questions (read: “So what do you want me to do then?”) over and over again. Before asking this question, understand that you need new tools. You need a new framework from which to understand the world around you.

Marxists value a process known as dialectical materialism. What dialectical materialism allows us to do is to step back from the noise— the non-stop hysteria on TV and the bought-and-paid-for political chatter, and actually evaluate the material conditions around us. Dialectical materialism reminds us that almost everything in life can be explained when you look at real world conditions and apply the context of history. It asks us to sit with the history of our world, and evaluate the contradictions that come up in our society. A person constantly asking “So what do you want me to do then?” is very far removed from this crucial process of interrogation. And what I need you to do is unplug from the theatre and join me in struggle and in material evaluation. In essence, I need you to take a break from being condescending as I invite you into the thought exercise of a lifetime.

“So what do we do then?” To tell you the truth, it would actually be great if you commit to coming back into the streets with us. I want you to stop ignoring houseless people in your own community. I want you to give them money and food and clothes every chance you get. I want you to band together with your friends and figure out ways to get them off the streets permanently. And I want you to study the history of houselesnees in your city. Why are so many people without homes where you live, while so many homes sit empty? What are your local politicians doing to address it and what’s taking them so long? I want you to get so angry about that, that you do something.

“So what do we do then?” To be really honest with you, there are likely hundreds or thousands of people where you live who have been laid off. I think it would be great if you got organized in your city and learned how to do an eviction blockade. Because people are about to get evicted. Bonus point: it would be really awesome if you have a home that someone who’s getting evicted could live in while they work to sort out their life. I’d love it if we stopped shaming people who are receiving the extra $600 a week in unemployment benefits. I’d like it if you developed a better class analysis and stopped going to war with people who share similar material interests as you on behalf of the ruling class. We all deserve more. I want you to get so angry about that, that you do something.

“So what do we do then?” I want you to figure out what resources the elderly in your community need access to. Can you help someone do some grocery shopping? Is an elder struggling to afford prescriptions? As it stands, no one running for office in this country is interested in even discussing universal healthcare. Perhaps you can help an elder pay for their meds? Maybe do some crowdfunding to help them afford them? What about the single parent households where you live? Will you be a resource to those who are about to struggle with starting virtual learning in the fall? Can you talk to them and find out what they need? Can you and a group of your friends mobilize around that? I want y'all to get so angry about what’s about to happen, that you do something.

“So what do we do then?” Well, right now we’re living through a moment where more people than ever are ready to explore getting rid of one of the deadliest forces in our country: the police. At this moment, Harris wants to “reimagine” them, an exercise we’ve done before with no result, and Biden wants more of them. It’s likely that with the current presence of police, your community already isn’t safe. Are you a cishet man? If so, you should be talking with other cishet men about the ways in which women and LGBTQ+ folks in your community are not safe and may require protection. Can you organize a system of protection for people harmed in your community, and a system of accountability and restoration for those who do harm? Are you trying to put ego aside and unlearn so much of the toxicity that persists in our society? For everyone else, will you organize with folks around you on ways to divest from violence and punishment? It would be dope if you could have a conversation or two about how your community wants to handle interpersonal conflict. I think it would be great if we all took some time to think about how we model ideas like abolition in our everyday lives. I want us to get so mad about this shit, that we do something about it.

“So what do we do then?” I want you to develop a better analysis of the country you live in and begin to engage it in a more ethical way. I want you to really process what it means to live at the heart of the US empire. I want you to not be ok with disposing of the lives of Black and Brown people in the global south on the premise of representation. Change.org petitions aren’t cutting it anymore. I want you to interrogate why you even want to be represented as the face of the death machine that is the united states. No more Black Panther cosplay until you understand the politic that set them on fire. I want you to be pissed off about the fact that you’ve never participated in a truly democratic election in your entire life. I want you to get angry about the electoral college. I want you to stop hypothetically asking me “So what are you going to do then?”, and maybe ask yourself what YOU are going to do in the event that November 2020 ends up being just like November 2016— a scenario where your favorite war criminal wins the popular vote, but still loses the election.

What a proper analysis of our situation tells us is that we did not get here by some slip of a lever. Nothing about our current situation is by mistake. The path that we continue to go down is totally predictable, in fact, people have been theorizing our current reality for decades. What a proper analysis tells us, is that if we don’t completely halt and bring the US empire to its knees, it is going to swallow the rest of the world, and when it’s done, it’s going to cannibalize itself. What it tells us is that until we wake up and stop feeding the machine, nothing is going to change. The only realistic and material way to stop this, is to start building a new world from the ground up. First, with ourselves, and then in our communities.

Via electoralism, we are being continuously asked to feed into our own demise. And no matter how much people claim “we can do both”, history shows us that until we don’t, by and large we continue to rely on elections to solve our societal problems. But no matter who sits at the helm, the machine is never going to slow,  turn around, or stop. The only path this machine is taking, is forward. So please don’t treat questions like “So what do we do then?” like big jokers in a game of spades. Before asking “What are yall going to do then?” or “What are the alternatives?” understand that those who fully understand the problem aren’t looking for alternatives. We’re trying to build something new, and we are asking you to join us.