Crisis in the Carolinas: The Lowcountry and Climate

By Erica Veal and Karl Malone

Republished from Hood Communist.

Africans are largely left out of conversations about environmentalism, despite the fact that we suffer from the triple threat of climatic, environmental and human rights crises. Our communities bear the brunt of the climate catastrophe, and this is especially true in the South Carolina Lowcountry where sea level rise threatens to wash away our Gullah Geechee homelands. Our relationship to environmental racism stretches back to the emergence of the local phosphate mining industry in the 1860’s and manifests today in the disproportionate exposure of Black and low income residents to environmental hazards. Today, Gullah Geechee communities disproportionately neighbor hazardous waste sites like landfills, sewage plants, incinerators and manufacturing facilities. Add to this gaping racial disparities rooted in the region’s history of chattel slavery, and it becomes clear why Black people should be the vanguard of the environmental movement.

Cooperation Jackson and the Black Environmentalist Movement

When people think about environmentalists, stereotypes about white, tree-hugging hippies come to mind. For Black environmentalist Kali Akuno, co-founder and co-director of Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi, it is important for Black people to challenge these stereotypes by taking charge of the environmental movement. As someone who has closely followed the climate crisis, he calls attention to the fact that by 2050 the large portions of the Black Belt will be underwater if the predictions of environmental scientists are accurate. The Black Belt refers to the crescent shaped strip of fertile land in the Southeastern United States which has historically been home to an almost unbroken chain of majority (or near majority) Black counties stretching from Virginia to East Texas. It is the historic homeland of Africans trafficked to North America to build the wealth of this nation during the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade and where the majority of their descendants still live today. According to Akuno, the land millions of Africans in North America currently occupy is some of the most vulnerable to climate change and, as such, Black people are most likely to be displaced as a result of climate change induced natural disasters. The rising costs of housing means finding new homelands for ourselves may prove an insurmountable task, which is why our stake in the environmental movement is so high.

Sitting less than 20 feet above sea level, Charleston, South Carolina is extremely vulnerable to sea level rise. For Gullah Geechee residents, the constant flooding, brought about by regular storms and unusually high tides, exacerbate the racial disparities we face. Flooding causes transportation delays and can mean missing work. It also causes property damage for residents whose homes flood constantly, as is the case for several public housing projects across the Charleston peninsula. Wading through flood waters can mean exposure to raw sewage, which can lead to adverse medical outcomes, medical expenses and the list goes on. For Black residents on fixed incomes, many of whom live below the poverty line, flooding is a constant nuisance and it’s only getting worse.

In the few weeks of lockdown we experienced during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic we saw how quickly the environment regenerated albeit temporarily. Industrial emissions dropped, the air became cleaner, as did waterways, migratory patterns of wildlife improved, and the list goes on. We saw that change is possible, but we live in a capitalist system that puts profits before people and the planet. We cannot afford to be silent and sit idly by while billionaires and private corporations continue to pollute our world and the people living on it to enrich themselves. Akuno says we’ve already surpassed the worst case scenario according to many climate models. Therefore to “curb ecological destruction,” Black people have a compound responsibility to organize against the systems that oppress us and take climate change seriously.

Learning from Cuba’s Fight Against Climate Change

We don’t have to reinvent the wheel in our effort to fight the climate crisis. We can learn from places like Cuba, a majority African, island nation in the Caribbean, that is largely the most sustainable country in the world. Cuba has embraced environmentalism like no nation has. It is the only country to meet the World Wildlife Fund’s definition of sustainable development. Its government has implemented policies to reduce the waste of natural resources and minimize its carbon footprint in the form of a successful 100 year plan to combat climate change called Tarea Vida (Life Task). Tarea Vida includes a ban on new home construction in potential flood zones, the introduction of heat-tolerant crops to cushion food supplies from droughts, and the restoration of Cuba’s sandy beaches to help protect the country against coastal erosion. Cuba is a leader in the environmental movement and all while struggling under an unjust and deadly 60+ year economic blockade imposed by the United States government.

Cuba underwent a successful, largely Black-led socialist revolution in the 1950’s, freed itself from the imperialist exploitation of the United States and naturalized its resources. In addition to leading the environmental movement, Cuba leads in medicine (sending doctors all over the world), has eradicated illiteracy, subsidized housing and food, has universal education from pre-K to PhD and is a shining example of what the world could be if we put people before profits. Although socialism in Cuba poses no threat to the United States, the government has kept the blockade in place and caused shortages in food, medicine, gas and other essential items at the expense of the Cuban people. Most recently, under the Trump administration, Cuba was added to the State Sponsors of Terrorism (SSOT) list, further exacerbating shortages on the island.

In the face of all this, there are many parallels around the climate crisis between Cuba and Gullah Geechee communities in the South Carolina Lowcountry, e.g. soil erosion and sea level rise are clear. Additionally, when considering the racial disparities faced by Gullah Geechee people (and the entire Black Belt region), it is as if we, too, are living under a form of economic blockade. Africans in North America are more likely to face food and housing insecurities and less likely to have access to quality schools, day care, health services, and a living wage. We are more likely to be exposed to environmental hazards that expose us to adverse health outcomes and all of this is a direct result of the choices made by our bought and paid for government officials, both democrats and republicans alike. Yet, Cuba, the socialist capital of the western world, has shown us things do not have to be this way. For these reasons and more we should actively organize against the US economic blockade and the removal of Cuba from the SSOT list. The future of Gullah Geechee communities may literally depend on our ability to learn from Cuba’s people centered policies and innovations in environmental science.

Environmental Racism in North Charleston

The socio-economic state of the Gullah Geechee people is daunting and stretches back to the era of slavery. Africans in North America were never meant to be anything more than a source of cheap labor for Europeans to exploit. We were kidnapped, enslaved and trafficked here for our knowledge of rice agriculture and we transformed the landscape of the Southeast Atlantic coast from a vast expanse of Bottomland Hardwood Forests to a seemingly never ending complex of rice fields working in some of the harshest conditions as chattel slaves. As a result, Charleston became the richest city in colonial America and with the the largest slave port on the continent.

After the Civil War ended in 1865, phosphate mining became the most successful form of industry in the Lowcountry, replacing the major agricultural and textiles industries that could no longer be sustained due to the loss of the free labor of enslaved Africans. Since calcium phosphate was discovered in the beds of the Ashley River, it provided former the enslavers who owned this land an opportunity to “recoup some of their financial losses after the Civil War” by either selling their land, leasing it out to mining companies that began forming everywhere, or establishing mining companies of their own. The increasing demand for labor was quickly filled by newly “freed” Gullah Geechee people, who dominated this industry due to their being locally available and accustomed to working in the sub tropical Lowcountry climate.

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Though the rise and fall of the phosphate industry in South Carolina lasted roughly 20 years, the long term damage to the environment is still being felt today. This period marked the beginning of a long history of environmental racism in the Gullah Geechee community. Studies show that “exposure to these harmful conditions results in negative health outcomes, stressed communities, and reduction in quality of life and neighborhood sustainability.” The Environmental Protection Agency has identified many of these old mining and processing locations as hazardous waste sites. One such waterfront site in North Charleston, could potentially be developed into another heavy industrial boat manufacturing facility, but Black residents are actively fighting against this.

In 2015, the Charleston County Park and Recreation Commission (CCPRC) acquired the former Baker Hospital site off Azalea Drive in North Charleston with the intention of developing the 57 acre property into a waterfront park. It has since leased 11 acres to a local company called Sea Fox Boats. According to an online petition circulated in March 2024, although “The City of North Charleston has zoning in place that will keep industrial uses off of the park property,” CCPRC applied to change the zoning to either heavy or light industrial to accommodate their new lease agreement. CCPRC claims profits from the tenant will fund the environmental cleanup and development of the remaining 46 acres park site while representatives for Sea Fox claim the manufacturing plant will bring jobs to the community. Black residents like KJ Kearney, from communities surrounding the proposed park site, are pushing back on this saying they already have jobs and this segment of North Charleston has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the area. Others have said they don’t need or want heavy industry in their communities, particularly on a site that is already contaminated because of decades of industrial use. Jobs won’t matter if residents are sick from exposure to contaminants and they don’t want jobs that will lead to the death and destruction of the environment.

While North Charleston’s city planning commission voted to deny CCPRC’s recommendation to rezone the site in March, the ultimate decision is up to city council. On Thursday, April 18th, 2024, Black residents again voiced their concerns at a public meeting saying they felt left out of the decision making process. Yes, residents want a waterfront park in that area of North Charleston, but not at the expense of exacerbating environmental conditions and hazards. The controversy surrounding the Baker Hospital site is an example of environmental racism at its best. While proponents of Sea Fox push the narrative of job creation, Kearney says, “the community is not against jobs” rather they are against the idea that “the only value historically Black communities have to their city is as a labor force.” He went on to talk about how the plant will produce tons of hazardous air pollutants and that, for a community which ranks” in the 95 percentile for asthma,” that is a risk they cannot afford to take. He suggested that the paternalistic framing of the situation by Sea Fox supporters is clear– Black people should be grateful for the opportunity to work for a rich white man who wants to invest in their communities and simply ignore the impact of the plant on their quality of life. After a long and heated meeting, the council voted to postpone making a decision on the rezoning for another 60 days so the council can gather more information, but the people who live in this area have made their position clear.

While the city council in North Charleston is mostly Black and so is the new mayor, that is not enough to ensure the will of the people is carried out. The masses of Africans in the Lowcountry must continue to actively organize against this type of blatant environmental injustice to mitigate damage to our communities and the environment. We already suffer tremendously under the crushing weight of capitalism and its partners in crime (racism, white supremacy, sexism, gender bias, etc.), but this isn’t just about us. We know the success of our liberation struggles benefit all oppressed people. If we don’t act, the climate crisis will be the death knell that marks the permanent destruction of our communities. None of us will be free until all of us are free, but what use is freedom on a dead planet?

The authors represent the Lowcountry Action Committee, a Black led grassroots organization dedicated to Black liberation through service, political education, and collective action in the Lowcountry.

Sources

1. Jackson Rising: The Struggle for Economic Democracy and Black Self-Determination in Jackson, Mississippi, edited by Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya

2. “Is Pollution Poisoning Charleston’s African American and Low Income Communities?” https://charlestoncitypaper.com/2016/03/09/is-pollution-poisoning-charlestons-african-american-and-low-income-communities/

3. “Free the Land w/ Kali Akuno” Hood Communist Radio https://open.spotify.com/episode/789OXvt1LdjEJ5e8pFCMUp

4. The Black Belt Thesis: A Reader by the Black Belt Thesis Study Group

5. “Flooding Intensifies Charleston Region’s Racial and Wealth Inequalities” https://pulitzercenter.org/stories/flooding-intensifies-charleston-regions-racial-and-wealth-inequities

6. Could Covid lockdown have helped save the planet? https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/29/could-covid-lockdown-have-helped-save-the-planet

7. Cuba’s Life Task: Combatting Climate Change documentary by Helen Yaffe https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APN6N45Q6iU

8. “Consequences of a Blockade of Cuba” 23 April 1962 Central Intelligence Agency https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP79R00904A000800020016-7.pdf

9. “The State of Racial Disparities in Charleston County, South Carolina, 2000–2015” https://avery.charleston.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/The-State-of-Racial-Disparities-in-Charleston-County-SC-Rev.-11-14.pdf

10. History of the Corridor: Industry https://ashleyriverhistoriccorridor.org/history/industry/#:~:text=In%201883%20over%203%2C000%20African,well%20as%20state%20convict%20labor

11. History of the Corridor: Bulow/Long Savannah https://ashleyriverhistoriccorridor.org/sites/long-savannahbulow-plantation/

12. “A History of the Phosphate Mining Industry in the South Carolina Lowcountry” http://nationalregister.sc.gov/SurveyReports/hyphosphatesindustryLowcountry2SM.pdf

13. “Baker Hospital site to become a new county park” https://www.postandcourier.com/archives/baker-hospital-site-to-become-a-new-county-park/article_0630e058-999d-5de4-9319-5addea566537.html

14. “Public input process to start this winter for Charleston County Parks’ North Charleston Ashley River Site” https://www.ccprc.com/ArchiveCenter/ViewFile/Item/1423

15. “Preserve the Former Baker Hospital as a Park” https://www.change.org/p/preserve-the-former-baker-hospital-site-as-a-park?original_footer_petition_id=35513102&algorithm=promoted&source_location=petition_footer&grid_position=15&pt=AVBldGl0aW9uAEWcQgIAAAAAZe1wynNJJ%2BAxMzdmNTMxMQ%3D%3D

16. “N. Charleston argues plans for former Baker Hospital site, fate in council hands” https://www.live5news.com/2024/03/12/n-charleston-argues-plans-former-baker-hospital-site-fate-council-hands/

17. “Delay in North Charleston zoning decision fuels frustration over old Baker Hospital site” https://abcnews4.com/news/local/delay-in-north-charleston-zoning-decision-fuels-frustration-over-old-baker-hospital-site-south-carolina-wciv-news-4

Burkina Faso’s New President Condemns Imperialism, Quotes Che Guevara, and Allies with Nicaragua, Venezuela, and Cuba

[Pictured: Burkina Faso’s Revolutionary President, Ibrahim Traoré (center), attends the closing ceremony of the Pan-African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou on March 4, 2023. OLYMPIA DE MAISMONT / AFP]

By Ben Norton

Republished from Geopolitical Economy Report.

The new president of Burkina Faso, Ibrahim Traoré, has vowed to fight imperialism and neocolonialism, invoking his country’s past revolutionary leader Thomas Sankara and quoting Che Guevara.

The West African nation has also formed close diplomatic ties with the revolutionary governments in Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran, as well as with NATO’s arch-rival Russia.

In January 2022, a group of nationalist military officers in Burkina Faso toppled the president, Roch Kaboré, a wealthy banker who had fostered close ties with the country’s former colonizer, France, where he was educated.

The military officers declared a government run by what they call the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration (MPSR), led by a new president, Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba.

They pledged to seek true independence from French hegemony, condemning the neocolonial policies and economic, political, and military control that Paris still exercises over Francophone West Africa.

Burkina Faso ended its decades-long military agreement with France, expelling the hundreds of French troops that had been in the country for years.

The new president, Damiba, was initially popular. But support waned as he was unable to defeat the deadly Salafi-jihadist insurgents that have destabilized the country.

In September 2022, discontent led to a subsequent coup in Burkina Faso, which brought to power another nationalist military leader named Ibrahim Traoré. He was just 34 at the time, making him one of the world’s youngest leaders.

Traoré has pledged to carry out a “refoundation of the nation” and comprehensive “modernization”, to quell violent extremism, fight corruption, and “totally reform our system of government”.

The charismatic Burkinabè leader frequently ends his speeches with the chant “La patrie ou la mort, nous vaincrons!”, the French translation of the official motto of revolutionary Cuba: “Patria o muerte, venceremos!” – “Homeland or death, we will prevail!”

As president, Traoré has brought back some of the revolutionary ideas of Thomas Sankara.

Sankara was a Marxist Burkinabè military officer and committed pan-Africanist who ascended to power in a 1983 coup.

Sankara launched a socialist revolution, transforming the impoverished country through land reform, infrastructure development, and expansive public health and literacy programs.

Under Sankara’s leadership, Burkina Faso also challenged French neocolonialism and pursued an anti-imperialist foreign policy, forming alliances with revolutionary struggles across the Global South.

These leftist policies were reversed in 1987, when Sankara was overthrown and killed in another coup, led by his former ally Blaise Compaoré – who subsequently moved hard to the right and allied with the United States and France, ruling through rigged elections until 2014.

Today, Ibrahim Traoré is drawing heavily on the legacy of Sankara. He has made it clear that he wants West Africa, and the continent as a whole, to be free of Western neocolonialism.

This July, the Russian government held a Russia-Africa Summit in Saint Petersburg. Traoré was the first African leader to arrive to the conference. There, he delivered a fiery anti-imperialist speech.

“We are the forgotten peoples of the world. And we are here now to talk about the future of our countries, about how things will be tomorrow in the world that we are seeking to build, and in which there will be no interference in our internal affairs”, Traoré said, according to a partial transcript published by Russian state media outlet TASS.

TASS reported:

In his speech, the Burkinabe head of state also focused on sovereignty and the struggle against imperialism. “Why does resource-rich Africa remain the poorest region of the world? We ask these questions and get no answers. However, we have the opportunity to build new relationships that will help us build a better future for Burkina Faso,” the president said. African countries have suffered for decades from a barbaric and brutal form of colonialism and imperialism, which could be called a modern form of slavery, he stressed.

“However, a slave who does not fight [for his freedom] is not worthy of any indulgence. The heads of African states should not behave like puppets in the hands of the imperialists. We must ensure that our countries are self-sufficient, including as regards food supplies, and can meet all of the needs of our peoples. Glory and respect to our peoples; victory to our peoples! Homeland or death!” Traore summed up, quoting the words of legendary Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara. The 35-year-old president of Burkina Faso was attired in a camouflage uniform and red beret during the summit.

On July 29, Traoré had a private meeting in Saint Petersburgh with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In their talks, the Burkinabè leader praised the Soviet Union for defeating Nazism in World War II.

Burkina Faso strengthens ties with Latin American revolutionary movements

The new nationalist government in Burkina Faso has also sought to deepen its ties with revolutionary movements in Latin America.

In May, the West African nation’s prime minister, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla, traveled to Venezuela.

Tambèla met with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who pledged to “advance in cooperation, solidarity, and growth… building a solid fraternal relation”.

In July, the Burkinabè prime minister traveled to Nicaragua to celebrate the 44th anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution.

Tambèla attended the July 19 celebration of the revolution in Managua, at the invitation of Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega.

Following the September 2022 coup in Burkina Faso, the new president, Traoré, surprised many observers by choosing as his prime minister a longtime follower of Thomas Sankara, Apollinaire Joachim Kyélem de Tambèla.

Tambèla was an ally of Sankara during the Burkinabè revolution. When Sankara came to power in the 1980s, Tambèla organized a solidarity movement and sought international support for the new leftist government.

Tambèla is a pan-Africanist and has been affiliated with communist and left-wing organizations.

Traoré said in a speech in December that Tambèla will help to oversee the process of the “refoundation of the nation“.

By appointing Tambèla as prime minister, Traoré tangibly showed his commitment to reviving the revolutionary legacy of Sankara.

In his remarks at the anniversary of the Sandinista Revolution, Tambèla discussed the historical legacy of solidarity between the revolution in Burkina Faso and that of Nicaragua.

Burkina Faso’s President Thomas Sankara with Nicaragua’s President Daniel Ortega in 1986.

Tambèla recalled that Sankara visited Nicaragua in 1986, and the Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega visited Burkina Faso that same year.

When he spoke at the United Nations General Assembly in 1984, Sankara declared,

I wish also to feel close to my comrades of Nicaragua, whose ports are being mined, whose towns are being bombed and who, despite all, face up with courage and lucidity to their fate. I suffer with all those in Latin America who are suffering from imperialist domination.

In 1984 and 1986, Sankara also visited Cuba, where he met with revolutionary President Fidel Castro.

“For people of my generation, there are things that unite us with Nicaragua, Augusto César Sandino, the Sandinista National Liberation Front and Commander Daniel Ortega”, Burkinabè Prime Minister Tambèla said in his speech in Managua on July 19, 2023.

“We have learned to know Nicaragua. When the liberation struggle began, I was small, but we followed, day by day, the context of Nicaragua’s liberation. I went in July of ’79, and when they entered Managua we were happy, people of my age celebrated that”, he recalled.

And then, when Thomas Sankara came to power, Daniel Ortega and the Sandinista Revolution was something happy for us; we as students studied a lot the history of Nicaragua, we followed its evolution.

Tambèla added that Burkina Faso supported Nicaragua in its International Court of Justice case against the United States. Washington was found guilty of illegally sponsoring far-right “Contra” death squads, which waged a terror war against the leftist government, as well as putting mines in Nicaragua’s ports. (Yet, although Nicaragua won the case in 1986, the U.S. government has still to this day refused to pay the Central American nation a single cent of the reparations that it legally owes it.)

“Nicaragua’s struggle is also that of our people”, Tambèla stressed.

In his July 19 speech, the Burkinabè prime minister also sent special greetings to the diplomatic delegations from Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.

“We have very close relations with Cuba”, Tambèla added.

President Fidel Castro has been and was a very important person for the revolution in Africa; we have excellent memories, both of Cuba and of President Fidel Castro.

Ben Norton is an investigative journalist and analyst. He is the founder and editor of Geopolitical Economy Report, and is based in Latin America. (Publicaciones en español aquí.)

Mapping U.S. Imperialism

By The Mapping Project

Republished from Monthly Review.

The greatest threat looming over our planet, the hegemonistic pretentions of the American Empire are placing at risk the very survival of the human species. We continue to warn you about this danger, and we appeal to the people of the United States and the world to halt this threat, which is like a sword hanging over our heads.

–Hugo Chavez

The United States Military is arguably the largest force of ecological devastation the world has ever known.

–Xoài Pham

Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill it or betray it.

–Frantz Fanon

U.S. imperialism is the greatest threat to life on the planet, a force of ecological devastation and disaster impacting not only human beings, but also our non-human relatives. How can we organize to dismantle the vast and complicated network of U.S. imperialism which includes U.S. war and militarism, CIA intervention, U.S. weapons/technology/surveillance corporations, political and economic support for dictatorships, military juntas, death squads and U.S. trained global police forces favorable to U.S. geopolitical interests, U.S. imposed sanctions, so-called “humanitarian interventions,” genetically modified grassroots organizations, corporate media’s manipulation of spontaneous protest, and U.S. corporate sponsorship of political repression and regime change favorable to U.S. corporate interests?

This article deals with U.S. imperialism since World War 2. It is critical to acknowledge that U.S. imperialism emanates both ideologically and materially from the crime of colonialism on this continent which has killed over 100 million indigenous people and approximately 150 million African people over the past 500 years.

The exact death toll of U.S. imperialism is both staggering and impossible to know. What we do know is that since World War 2, U.S. imperialism has killed at least 36 million people globally in Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Indonesia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, the Congo, Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Colombia, Haiti, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Chad, Libya, East Timor, Grenada, Honduras, Iran, Pakistan, Panama, the Philippines, Sudan, Greece, Yugoslavia, Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, Somalia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Palestine (see Appendix).

This list does not include other aspects of U.S. imperialist aggression which have had a devastating and lasting impact on communities worldwide, including torture, imprisonment, rape, and the ecological devastation wrought by the U.S. military through atomic bombs, toxic waste and untreated sewage dumping by over 750 military bases in over 80 countries. The U.S. Department of Defense consumes more petroleum than any institution in the world. In the year of 2017 alone, the U.S. military emitted 59 million metric tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, a carbon footprint greater than that of most nations worldwide. This list also does not include the impact of U.S. fossil fuel consumption and U.S. corporate fossil fuel extraction, fracking, agribusiness, mining, and mono-cropping, all of which are part and parcel of the extractive economy of U.S. imperialism.

U.S. military bases around the world. (Photo: Al Jazeera)

One central mechanism of U.S. imperialism is “dollar hegemony” which forces countries around the world to conduct international trade in U.S. dollars. U.S. dollars are backed by U.S. bonds (instead of gold or industrial stocks) which means a country can only cash in one American IOU for another. When the U.S. offers military aid to friendly nations, this aid is circulated back to U.S. weapons corporations and returns to U.S. banks. In addition, U.S. dollars are also backed by U.S. bombs: any nation that threatens to nationalize resources or go off the dollar (i.e. Iraq or Libya) is threatened with a military invasion and/or a U.S. backed coup.

U.S. imperialism has also been built through “soft power” organizations like USAID, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the Organization of American States (OAS). These nominally international bodies are practically unilateral in their subservience to the interests of the U.S. state and U.S. corporations. In the 1950s and ‘60s, USAID (and its precursor organizations) made “development aid” to Asian, African, and South American countries conditional on those countries’ legal formalization of capitalist property relations, and reorganization of their economies around homeownership debt. The goal was to enclose Indigenous land, and land shared through alternate economic systems, as a method of “combatting Communism with homeownership” and creating dependency and buy-in to U.S. capitalist hegemony (Nancy Kwak, A World of Homeowners). In order to retain access to desperately needed streams of resources (e.g. IMF “loans”), Global South governments are forced to accept resource-extraction by the U.S., while at the same time denying their own people popularly supported policies such as land reform, economic diversification, and food sovereignty. It is also important to note that Global South nations have never received reparations or compensation for the resources that have been stolen from them–this makes the idea of “loans” by global monetary institutions even more outrageous.

The U.S. also uses USAID and other similarly functioning international bodies to suppress and to undermine anti-imperialist struggle inside “friendly” countries. Starting in the 1960s, USAID funded police training programs across the globe under a counterinsurgency model, training foreign police as a “first line of defense against subversion and insurgency.” These USAID-funded police training programs involved surveillance and the creation of biometric databases to map entire populations, as well as programs of mass imprisonment, torture, and assassination. After experimenting with these methods in other countries, U.S. police departments integrated many of them into U.S. policing, especially the policing of BIPOC communities here (see our entry on the Boston Police Department). At the same time, the U.S. uses USAID and other soft power funding bodies to undermine revolutionary, anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-capitalist movements, by funding “safe” reformist alternatives, including a global network of AFL-CIO managed “training centers” aimed at fostering a bureaucratic union culture similar to the one in the U.S., which keeps labor organizing loyal to capitalism and to U.S. global dominance. (See our entries on the AFL-CIO and the Harvard Trade Union Program.)

U.S. imperialism intentionally fosters divisions between different peoples and nations, offering (relative) rewards to those who choose to cooperate with U.S. dictates (e.g. Saudi Arabia, Israel, and Colombia), while brutally punishing those who do not (e.g. Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela). In this way, U.S. imperialism creates material conditions in which peoples and governments face a choice: 1. accommodate the interests of U.S. Empire and allow the U.S. to develop your nation’s land and sovereign resources in ways which enrich the West; or, 2. attempt to use your land and your sovereign resources to meet the needs of your own people and suffer the brutality of U.S. economic and military violence.

The Harvard Kennedy School: Training Ground for U.S. Empire and the Security State

The Mapping Project set out to map local U.S. imperialist actors (involved in both material and ideological support for U.S. imperialism) on the land of Massachusett, Pawtucket, Naumkeag, and other tribal nations (Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas) and to analyze how these institutions interacted with other oppressive local and global institutions that are driving colonization of indigenous lands here and worldwide, local displacement/ethnic cleansing (“gentrification”), policing, and zionist imperialism.

A look at just one local institution on our map, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, demonstrates the level of ideological and material cooperation required for the machinery of U.S. imperialism to function. (All information outlined below is taken from The Mapping Project entries and links regarding the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Please see this link for hyperlinked source material.)

The Harvard Kennedy School of Government and its historical precursors have hosted some of the most infamous war criminals and architects of empire: Henry Kissinger, Samuel Huntington, Susan Rice (an HKS fellow), Madeleine Albright, James Baker, Hillary Clinton, Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, and Larry Summers. HKS also currently hosts Ricardo Hausmann, founder and director of Harvard’s Growth Lab , the academic laboratory of the U.S. backed Venezuelan coup.

In How Harvard Rules, John Trumpbour documents the central role Harvard played in the establishment of the Cold War academic-military-industrial complex and U.S. imperialism post-WWII (How Harvard Rules, 51). Trumpbour highlights the role of the Harvard Kennedy School under Dean Graham Allison (1977-1989), in particular, recounting that Dean Allison ran an executive education program for Pentagon officials at Harvard Kennedy (HHR 68). Harvard Kennedy School’s support for the U.S. military and U.S. empire continues to this day. HKS states on its website:

Harvard Kennedy School, because of its mission to train public leaders and its depth of expertise in the study of defense and international security, has always had a particularly strong relationship with the U.S. Armed Forces. This relationship is mutually beneficial. The School has provided its expertise to branches of the U.S. military, and it has given military personnel (active and veteran) access to Harvard’s education and training.

The same webpage further notes that after the removal of ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corps) from Harvard Kennedy School in 1969, “under the leadership of Harvard President Drew Faust, the ROTC program was reinstated in 2011, and the Kennedy School’s relationship with the military continues to grow more robust each year.”

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In particular, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs provides broad support to the U.S. military and the objectives of U.S. empire. The Belfer Center is co-directed by former U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter (a war hawk who has advocated for a U.S. invasion of North Korea and U.S. military build ups against Russia and Iran) and former Pentagon Chief of Staff Eric Rosenbach. Programs within HKS Belfer Center include the Center’s “Intelligence Program,” which boasts that it “acquaints students and Fellows with the intelligence community and its strengths and weaknesses for policy making,” further noting, “Discussions with active and retired intelligence practitioners, scholars of intelligence history, law, and other disciplines, help students and Fellows prepare to best use the information available through intelligence agencies.” Alongside HKS Belfer’s Intelligence Program, is the Belfer Center’s “Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship.” The Belfer Center claims that, under the direction of Belfer Center co-directors Ashton Carter and Eric Rosenbach, the Recanati-Kaplan Foundation Fellowship “educates the next generation of thought leaders in national and international intelligence.”

As noted above, the Harvard Kennedy School serves as an institutional training ground for future servants of U.S. empire and the U.S. national security state. HKS also maintains a close relationship with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). As reported by Inside Higher Ed in their 2017 review of Spy Schools by Daniel Golden:

[Harvard Kennedy School] currently allows the agency [the CIA] to send officers to the midcareer program at the Kennedy School of Government while continuing to act undercover, with the school’s knowledge. When the officers apply–often with fudged credentials that are part of their CIA cover–the university doesn’t know they’re CIA agents, but once they’re in, Golden writes, Harvard allows them to tell the university that they’re undercover. Their fellow students, however–often high-profile or soon-to-be-high-profile actors in the world of international diplomacy–are kept in the dark.

Kenneth Moskow is one of a long line of CIA officers who have enrolled undercover at the Kennedy School, generally with Harvard’s knowledge and approval, gaining access to up-and-comers worldwide,” Golden writes. “For four decades the CIA and Harvard have concealed this practice, which raises larger questions about academic boundaries, the integrity of class discussions and student interactions, and whether an American university has a responsibility to accommodate U.S. intelligence.”

In addition to the CIA, HKS has direct relationships with the FBI, the U.S. Pentagon, U.S. Department of Homeland Security, NERAC, and numerous branches of the U.S. Armed Forces:

• Chris Combs, a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership has held numerous positions within the FBI;

• Jeffrey A. Tricoli, who serves as Section Chief of the FBI’s Cyber Division since December 2016 (prior to which he held several other positions within the FBI) was a keynote speaker at “multiple sessions” of the HKS’s Cybersecurity Executive Education program;

• Jeff Fields, who is Fellow at both the Cyber Project and the Intelligence Project of HKS’s Belfer Center currently serves as a Supervisory Special Agent within the National Security Division of the FBI;

• HKS hosted former FBI director James Comey for a conversation with HKS Belfer Center’s Co-Director (and former Pentagon Chief of Staff) Eric Rosenbach in 2020;

• Government spending records show yearly tuition payments from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for Homeland Security personnel attending special HKS seminars on Homeland Security under HKS’s Program on Crisis Leadership;

• Northeast Homeland Security Regional Advisory Council meeting minutes from February 2022 list “Edward Chao: Analyst, Harvard Kennedy School,” as a NERAC “Council Member”; and

• Harvard Kennedy School and the U.S. Air force have created multiple fellowships aimed at recruiting U.S. Air Force service members to pursue degrees at HKS. The Air Force’s CSAF Scholars Master Fellowship, for example, aims to “prepare mid-career, experienced professionals to return to the Air Force ready to assume significant leadership positions in an increasingly complex environment.” In 2016, Harvard Kennedy School Dean Doug Elmendorf welcomed Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James to Harvard Kennedy School, in a speech in which Elmendorf highlighted his satisfaction that the ROTC program, including Air Force ROTC, had been reinstated at Harvard (ROTC had been removed from campus following mass faculty protests in 1969).

Harvard Kennedy School’s web.

The Harvard Kennedy School and the War Economy

HKS’s direct support of U.S. imperialism does not limit itself to ideological and educational support. It is deeply enmeshed in the war economy driven by the interests of the U.S. weapons industry.

Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, L3 Harris, General Dynamics, and Northrup Grumman are global corporations who supply the United States government with broad scale military weaponry and war and surveillance technologies. All these companies have corporate leadership who are either alumni of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government (HKS), who are currently contributing to HKS as lecturers/professors, and/or who have held leadership positions in U.S. federal government.

Lockheed Martin Vice President for Corporate Business Development Leo Mackay is a Harvard Kennedy School alumnus (MPP ’91), was a Fellow in the HKS Belfer Center International Security Program (1991-92) and served as the “military assistant” to then U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy Ashton Carter, who would soon go on to become co-director of the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center. Following this stint at the U.S. Pentagon, Mackay landed in the U.S. weapons industry at Lockheed Martin.  Lockheed Martin Vice President Marcel Lettre is an HKS alumni and prior to joining Lockheed Martin, Lettre spent eight years in the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The U.S. DoD has dished out a whopping $540.82 billion to date in contracts with Lockheed Martin for the provision of products and services to the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and other branches of the U.S. military. Lockheed Martin Board of Directors member Jeh Johnson has lectured at Harvard Kennedy School and is the former Secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the agency responsible for carrying out the U.S. federal government’s regime of tracking, detentions, and deportations of Black and Brown migrants. (Retired) General Joseph F. Dunford is currently a member of two Lockheed Martin Board of Director Committees and a Senior Fellow with HKS’s Belfer Center. Dunford was a U.S. military leader, serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Commander of all U.S. and NATO Forces in Afghanistan. Dunford also serves on the board of the Atlantic Council, itself a cutout organization of NATO and the U.S. security state which crassly promotes the interests of U.S. empire. Mackay, Lettre, Johnson, and Dunford’s respective career trajectories provide an emblematic illustration of the grotesque revolving door which exists between elite institutions of knowledge production like the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. security state (which feeds its people into those elite institutions and vice versa), and the U.S. weapons industry (which seeks business from the U.S. security state).

Similar revolving door phenomena are notable among the Harvard Kennedy School and Raytheon, Boeing, and Northrup Grumman. HKS Professor Meghan O’Sullivan currently serves on the board of Massachusetts-based weapons manufacturer Raytheon. O’Sullivan is also deeply enmeshed within America’s security state, currently sitting on the Board of Directors of the Council on Foreign Relations and has served as “special assistant” to President George W. Bush (2004-07) where she was “Deputy National Security Advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan,” helping oversee the U.S. invasions and occupations of these nations during the so-called “War on Terror.” O’Sullivan has openly attempted to leverage her position as Harvard Kennedy School to funnel U.S. state dollars into Raytheon: In April 2021, O’Sullivan penned an article in the Washington Post entitled “It’s Wrong to Pull Troops Out of Afghanistan. But We Can Minimize the Damage.” As reported in the Harvard Crimson, O’Sullivan’s author bio in this article highlighted her position as a faculty member of Harvard Kennedy (with the perceived “expertise” affiliation with HKS grants) but failed to acknowledge her position on the Board of Raytheon, a company which had “a $145 million contract to train Afghan Air Force pilots and is a major supplier of weapons to the U.S. military.” Donn Yates who works in Domestic and International Business Development at Boeing’s T-7A Redhawk Program was a National Security Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School in 2015-16. Don Yates also spent 23 years in the U.S. Air Force. Former Northrop Grumman Director for Strategy and Global Relations John Johns is a graduate of Harvard Kennedy’s National and International Security Program. Johns also spent “seven years as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Maintenance establishing policy for, and leading oversight of the Department’s annual $80B weapon system maintenance program and deployed twice in support of security operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

The largest U.S. oil firms are also closely interlocked with these top weapons companies, which have also diversified their technological production for the security industry–providing services for pipeline and energy facility security, as well as border security. This means that the same companies are profiting at every stage in the cycle of climate devastation: they profit from wars for extraction; from extraction; and from the militarized policing of people forced to migrate by climate disaster. Exxon Mobil (the 4th largest fossil fuel firm) contracts with General Dynamics, L3 Harris, and Lockheed Martin. Lockheed Martin, the top weapons company in the world, shares board members with Chevron, and other global fossil fuel companies. (See Global Climate Wall: How the world’s wealthiest nations prioritise borders over climate action.)

The Harvard Kennedy School and U.S. Support for Israel

U.S. imperialist interests in West Asia are directly tied to U.S. support of Israel. This support is not only expressed through tax dollars but through ideological and diplomatic support for Israel and advocacy for regional normalization with Israel.

Harvard Kennedy School is home to the Wexner Foundation. Through its “Israel Fellowship,” The Wexner Foundation awards ten scholarships annually to “outstanding public sector directors and leaders from Israel,” helping these individuals to pursue a Master’s in Public Administration at the Kennedy School. Past Wexner fellows include more than 25 Israeli generals and other high-ranking military and police officials. Among them is the Israeli Defense Force’s current chief of general staff, Aviv Kochavi, who is directly responsible for the bombardment of Gaza in May 2021. Kochavi also is believed to be one of the 200 to 300 Israeli officials identified by Tel Aviv as likely to be indicted by the International Criminal Court’s probe into alleged Israeli war crimes committed in Gaza in 2014. The Wexner Foundation also paid former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak–himself accused of war crimes in connection with Israel’s 2009 Operation Cast Lead that killed over 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza–$2.3 million for two studies, one of which he did not complete.

HKS’s Belfer Center has hosted Israeli generals, politicians, and other officials to give talks at Harvard Kennedy School. Ehud Barak, mentioned above, was himself a “Belfer fellow” at HKS in 2016. The Belfer Center also hosts crassly pro-Israel events for HKS students, such as: The Abraham Accords – A conversation on the historic normalization of relations between the UAE, Bahrain and Israel,” “A Discussion with Former Mossad Director Tamir Pardo,” “The Future of Modern Warfare” (which Belfer describes as “a lunch seminar with Yair Golan, former Deputy Chief of the General Staff for the Israel Defense Forces”), and “The Future of Israel’s National Security.”

As of 2022, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center is hosting former Israel military general and war criminal Amos Yadlin as a Senior Fellow at the Belfer’s Middle East Initiative. Furthermore, HKS is allowing Yadlin to lead a weekly study group of HKS students entitled “Israeli National Security in a Shifting Middle East: Historical and Strategic Perspectives for an Uncertain Future.” Harvard University students wrote an open letter demanding HKS “sever all association with Amos Yadlin and immediately suspend his study group.” Yadlin had defended Israel’s assassination policy through which the Israeli state has extrajudicially killed hundreds of Palestinians since 2000, writing that the “the laws and ethics of conventional war did not apply” vis-á-vis Palestinians under zionist occupation.

Harvard Kennedy School also plays host to the Harvard Kennedy School Israel Caucus. The HKS Israel Caucus coordinates “heavily subsidized” trips to Israel for 50 HKS students annually. According to HKS Israel Caucus’s website, students who attend these trips “meet the leading decision makers and influencers in Israeli politics, regional security and intelligence, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, [and] the next big Tech companies.” The HKS Israel Caucus also regularly hosts events which celebrate “Israel’s culture and history.” Like the trips to Israel they coordinate, HKS Israel Caucus events consistently whitewash over the reality of Israel’s colonial war against the Palestinian people through normalizing land theft, forced displacement, and resource theft.

Harvard Kennedy School also has numerous ties to local pro-Israel organizations: the ADL, the JCRC, and CJP.

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Support for Saudi Arabia

In 2017, Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center announced the launch of “The Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security,” which Belfer stated was “made possible through a gift from HRH Prince Turki bin Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia.” Through this project, Harvard Kennedy School and the HKS Belfer Center have hosted numerous events at HKS which have promoted Saudi Arabia as a liberalizing and positive force for security and stability in the region, whitewashing over the realities of the Saudi-led and U.S.-backed campaign of airstrikes and blockade against Yemen which has precipitated conditions of mass starvation and an epidemic of cholera amongst the Yemeni people.

The Belfer Center’s Project on Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council Security further normalizes and whitewashes Saudi Arabia’s crimes through its “HKS Student Delegation to Saudi Arabia.” This delegation brings 11 Harvard Kennedy School students annually on two-week trips to Saudi Arabia, where students “exchange research, engage in cultural dialogue, and witness the changes going on in the Kingdom firsthand.” Not unlike the student trips to Israel Harvard Kennedy School’s Israel Caucus coordinates, these trips to Saudi Arabia present HKS students with a crassly propagandized impression of Saudi Arabia, shoring up support for the “Kingdom” amongst the future leaders of the U.S. security state which HKS seeks to nurture.

THE MAPPING PROJECT’S Mission

The vast network outlined above between the Harvard Kennedy School, the U.S. federal government, the U.S. Armed Forces, and the U.S. weapons industry constitutes only a small portion of what is known about HKS and its role in U.S. imperialism, but it is enough.

The Mapping Project demonstrates that the Harvard Kennedy School of Government is a nexus of U.S. imperialist planning and cooperation, with an address. The Mapping Project also links HKS to harms locally, including, but not limited to colonialism, violence against migrants, ethnic cleansing/displacement of Black and Brown Boston area residents from their communities (“gentrification”), health harm, policing, the prison-industrial complex, zionism, and surveillance. The Harvard Kennedy School’s super-oppressor status – the sheer number of separate communities feeling its global impact in their daily lives through these multiple and various mechanisms of oppression and harm – as it turns out, is its greatest weakness.

A movement that can identify super-oppressors like the Harvard Kennedy School of Government can use this information to identify strategic vulnerabilities of key hubs of power and effectively organize different communities towards common purpose. This is what the Mapping Project aims to do–to move away from traditionally siloed work towards coordination across communities and struggles in order to build strategic oppositional community power.

Appendix: The Death Toll of U.S. Imperialism Since World War 2

A critical disclaimer: Figures relating to the death toll of U.S. Imperialism are often grossly underestimated due to the U.S. government’s lack of transparency and often purposeful coverup and miscounts of death tolls. In some cases, this can lead to ranges of figures that include millions of human lives–as in the figure for Indonesia below with estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people. We have tried to provide the upward ranges in these cases since we suspect the upward ranges to be more accurate if not still significantly underestimated. These figures were obtained from multiple sources including but not limited to indigenous scholar Ward Churchill’s Pacifism as Pathology as well as Countercurrents’ article Deaths in Other Nations Since WWII Due to U.S. Interventions (please note that use of Countercurrents’ statistics isn’t an endorsement of the site’s politics).

• Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people

• Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people

• Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people

• Cambodia: 2-3 million people

• Chad: 40,000 people and as many as 200,000 tortured

• Chile: 10,000 people (the U.S. sponsored Pinochet coup in Chile)

• Colombia: 60,000 people

• Congo: 10 million people (Belgian imperialism supported by U.S. corporations and the U.S. sponsored assassination of Patrice Lumumba)

• Croatia: 15,000 people

• Cuba: 1,800 people

• Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people

• East Timor: 200,000 people

• El Salvador: More than 75,000 people (U.S. support of the Salvadoran oligarchy and death squads)

• Greece: More than 50,000 people

• Grenada: 277 people

• Guatemala: 140,000 to 200,000 people killed or forcefully disappeared (U.S. support of the Guatemalan junta)

• Haiti: 100,000 people

• Honduras: hundreds of people (CIA supported Battalion kidnapped, tortured and killed at least 316 people)

• Indonesia: Estimates of 500,000 to 3 million people

• Iran: 262,000 people

• Iraq: 2.4 million people in Iraq war, 576, 000 Iraqi children by U.S. sanctions, and over 100,000 people in Gulf War

• Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people

• Korea: 5 million people

• Kosovo: 500 to 5,000

• Laos: 50,000 people

• Libya: at least 2500 people

• Nicaragua: at least 30,000 people (U.S. backed Contras’ destabilization of the Sandinista government in Nicaragua)

• Operation Condor: at least 10,000 people (By governments of Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Peru. U.S. govt/CIA coordinated training on torture, technical support, and supplied military aid to the Juntas)

• Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people

• Palestine: estimated more than 200,000 people killed by military but this does not include death from blockade/siege/settler violence

• Panama: between 500 and 4000 people

• Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared

• Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people

• Somalia: at least 2,000 people

• Sudan: 2 million people

• Syria: at least 350,000 people

• Vietnam: 3 million people

• Yemen: over 377,000 people

• Yugoslavia: 107,000 people

The Marxist Theory of the State: An Introduction

By Summer Pappachen

Republished from Liberation School.

Our understanding of the state lies at the heart of our struggle to create a new society and fundamentally eliminate the oppression, exploitation, war, and environmental destruction characteristic of capitalism. In a socialist state, people collectively manage society, including what we produce, how much we produce, and the conditions of our work, to meet the needs of the people and the planet. Under capitalism, the state is organized to maintain the capitalist system and the dictatorship of a tiny group of capitalists over the rest of us through the use (or threat) of violent force and a range of institutions that present capitalism as “common sense.” The primary function of the capitalist state is to protect itself, which means it manages contradictions within the capitalist class and between their class and the working class.

This article serves as an introduction to the state, an essential matter for all justice-minded people to understand, as it determines our objectives, strategies, and tactics. It begins by debunking the ideology of the capitalist state as an impartial mediator to resolve antagonisms between and among classes by explaining the Marxist theory of the state and its role in maintaining–and overthrowing–exploitation and oppression.

The U.S. state has always been “deep” in that it is a highly centralized and predominantly unelected organization with an expansive set of institutions that has facilitated the rule of capital in the face of a variety of changes and through centuries of turmoil. The foundational elements of the state are repressive, such as the police and prison system, while others are ideological in that they reproduce capitalist consciousness and social relations, such as the news media. Because not all capitalist states function in the same manner, we examine the different forms states can take as well as the foundational differences between capitalist and socialist states.

Creating a socialist state is necessary to realize our collective desire for an end to all forms of oppression and exploitation. The socialist state works to eliminate racist police oppression and mass incarceration, to protect the health of our planet against capitalist and imperialist pollution, and to create a society in which differences in all kinds of identities do not mean differences in power. We can’t defend, let alone advance, the world we need without state power, a power that not only represses the former exploiters and oppressors but also produces a new kind of society and consciousness—a state that protects the interests of the many over those of the few. Ultimately, for communists, the goal of the socialist state is to render itself obsolete, which is only possible after the elimination of class society.

Debunking the capitalist myth of the state

The state extends beyond what we think of as the “government” of a country and includes all of the structures the capitalist class uses to maintain its control. In the U.S., the capitalist class holds state power, whereas the working class holds state power in China and Cuba. To have “state power” does not mean that the ruling class, whether capitalist or working class, can meet its own needs perfectly or without limitation. Put simply, the state is the instrument through which class interests are pursued.

At its core, the capitalist state includes apparatuses like the police, the courts, the prisons, and the military, forces necessary for enforcing the will of a tiny clique of capitalists over the masses of workers. The capitalist state also includes administrative offices, social services, school systems, media, mainstream political parties, cultural institutions, and more [1]. If this view of the state seems broad, it is because Marxists do not define the state as capitalists do.

The U.S. capitalist class popularizes a particular view of the state, especially the democratic state, as “a neutral arena of debate” [2]. In this so-called neutral arena, the government arbitrates between the conflicting interests of society through a set of “fair” laws, and it enforces those laws evenly and rationally. According to this view, any violation of the law or injustice in society is simply a mistake to be corrected through the state’s existing avenues through, for example, presidential elections or the Supreme Court. This view is ultimately a fairytale, one that “lulls the ordinary person to sleep,” in the words of the leader of the world’s first socialist state, Vladimir Lenin. It lulls us to sleep “by obscuring the important and basic fact, namely, the split of society into irreconcilably antagonistic classes” [3].

Marxists recognize that our lives are shaped by one basic fact: society is divided into two classes with irreconcilable interests. The capitalist state is organized to protect the interests of the capitalist: the accumulation of ever-greater profits by increasing the exploitation of workers and preventing our class from uniting and fighting for a new system. The working class’s primary interest is reducing our exploitation and eliminating all forms of oppression and bigotry so we—alongside our families and communities—can flourish. The state is not a timeless or abstract entity governing a given territory. The state emerges at a certain point in human history: it arises alongside the division of societies into classes, between the rulers and the ruled, the owners and the workers, the slavers and the enslaved. The state develops from within a society, as Friedrich Engels wrote, when it “is cleft into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to exorcise.” The state emerged to mitigate such antagonisms, or “to moderate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ‘order’” [4]. The capitalist ideology of the state guards these bounds of order to ensure it is the only available avenue for change.

The U.S. state’s history and present debunk the capitalist mythology of the state as a neutral arbiter, revealing that it is actually made up of organs, or institutions, designed to maintain the domination of capitalists. The U.S. state was established by slave-owning and merchant capitalist founders, later developed by industrial and monopoly capitalists [5]. The ruling class is not a homogeneous entity and the state manages the competing interests of different capitalists to protect capitalism and the existence of the state itself.

Currently, the U.S. capitalist class uses the democratic-republic state as its “organ” or form of governance. Instead of a path beyond capitalism, the democratic-republic form of the state offers the “best possible political shell for capitalism,” allowing the state to feign innocence while ensuring that “no change of persons, institutions, or parties in the bourgeois-democratic republic can shake it” [6]. Lenin provides a lasting Marxist definition of the state:

“According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order,” which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes” [7].

No matter its class character, the state is a tool of a class. For Marxists, the key distinction between types of states is their class character. For capitalist theorists, types of states are distinguished by their level of democracy versus authoritarianism, while ignoring the class character of both. They therefore cannot recognize the existence of capitalist authoritarianism within capitalist democracies, nor recognize working class democracy within so-called authoritarian socialist states. The U.S provides a clear example that debunks the myth of the state as a neutral arbiter and demonstrates the authoritarianism of capitalist-democratic states. It demonstrates that the state is made up of institutions designed to maintain the rule of capitalists.

Order is reserved for the wealthy since all working people live in a constant state of precarity, uncertainty, and insecurity to varying degrees. Chaos determines the life of the working person in the United States. For instance, the poor are terrified of the police and despise them for their abuses of power. The police murder over 1,000 people every year and most occur in non-violent situations like traffic stops or mental health crises. Racial oppression is part of the lived experience of the working class. As Stuart Hall put it, in many countries, “Race is the modality in which class is lived” [8]. In the U.S., Black people are not only more likely to be killed by the police but are also more likely to be unarmed and peaceful while being killed [9]. Instead of delivering justice when innocent Black people are killed, the courts often work with the police to legitimize the injustice done. The U.S. state only charges 2% of officers who commit murders with any sort of crime, and the courts convict officers in less than 1% of cases [10].

While the state’s prison system fails to take murderous police off our streets, it is efficient at jailing harmless working people. Despite having only 4.4% of the world’s population, the U.S. holds 22% of the world’s prisoners. Over 70% of those prisoners are either non-violent or have not yet been convicted of a crime [11]. And 38% of U.S. prisoners are Black, despite Black people only making up 12% of the population [12]. The social cost of the capitalist system’s violent state apparatuses is immeasurable: families are broken up; children are left without parents; generations become trapped in cycles of trauma, crime, and poverty. This is merely one example of how the capitalist class uses the state to legalize and perpetuate the oppression of working people in the U.S. Far from embodying the fairy tale of a “neutral arbiter” and enforcer of fair laws, the U.S. state is used by the capitalist class to hold down the working class, of which Black people are a crucial part.

Repressive and productive state organs

Marx, Lenin, and other revolutionaries often use the word “organ” to describe the state and its constituent elements. This bodily metaphor is helpful. The organs in our bodies are made up of cells, tissues, and arteries which work together to fulfill particular functions (e.g., the heart pumps blood, the lungs absorb oxygen, etc.). Each organ depends on and helps the other organs to achieve their objective—the body’s survival and reproduction. The pipes and chambers of the heart are made to pump blood, and the airways and sacs of the lungs are made to absorb oxygen in order to reproduce the body. Just like a bodily organ, the state is made up of various elements, or apparatuses, as well. State apparatuses are guided by the objective of the survival and reproduction of the ruling class and its system of domination and exploitation.

Marxists understand the State as primarily a repressive apparatus that uses the force of the courts, police, prisons, and military to ensure the domination of one class over others. The repressive state apparatus contains the violent institutions that work to maintain ruling class power. All in all, the repressive state apparatus functions by direct threat, coercion, and force.

The class in power does not only exercise its control by armed force and physical coercion. In addition to ruling the “material force of society,” as Marx and Engels wrote in 1845-1846, they also rule “the means of mental production,” such that they “rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas” [13]. Because the capitalist class owns the material forces of society, which include those that produce and distribute knowledge, they wield immense control over the overall consciousness of capitalist society, so “generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject” to capitalist ideology [14]. Marx and Engels do not mean that the oppressed are not intellectuals. A few paragraphs later, they write that “in ordinary life every shopkeeper” possesses intellectual capacities that “our historians have not yet won” [15].

Since the time of Marx and Engels’ writing on ideology, many capitalist states, particularly in their more developed forms, have generated and utilized more sophisticated and subtler means of maintaining the dominance of their ideology over society. Louis Althusser built on Marx and Engels’ work on ideology and class struggle by detailing many of their contemporary forms. These “Ideological State Apparatuses include all those elements that reproduce the dominance of the ruling-class ideology, like the school system, the media, mainstream parties, cultural organizations, think-tanks, and so on [16]. The same class that owns the means of production—the factories and banks, telecommunications networks and pharmaceutical corporations—also owns the newspapers, television stations, and movie studios. Globally, six parent companies control 90% of everything we listen to, watch, and read [17].

Schooling illustrates the vulnerability of capitalist rule

A key purpose of ideological state apparatuses is to make the prevailing order of things appear natural and timeless, to justify capitalism as the final stage of human history, and to normalize exploitation and oppression. In the U.S. and other capitalist states, the educational ideological apparatus is a central one in that it produces future workers with the necessary skills, knowledge, habits, and attitudes to fulfill their place in the overall social system. The school system “takes children from every class at infant-school age, and then for years, the years in which the child is most ‘vulnerable’… it drums into them, whether it uses new or old methods, a certain amount of ‘know-how’ wrapped in the ruling ideology” [18]. What this means is that the skills schools teach children—from arithmetic and literature to engineering and computer coding—are just as important as the “the ‘rules’ of good behaviour” and “morality, civic and professional conscience, and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination” that they teach [19].

In their study of the relationship between schooling and capitalism in the U.S. in the mid-20th century, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis found that schools reproduce capitalist relations not by the deliberate intentions of individual teachers or administrators, but by how “the relationships of authority and control between administrators and teachers, teachers and students, students and students, and students and their work replicate the hierarchical division of labor which dominates the workplace. The rule orientation of the high school reflects the close supervision of low-level workers; the internalization of norms and freedom from continual supervision in elite colleges reflect the social relationships of upper-level white-collar work. Most state universities and community colleges, which fall in between, conform to the behavioral requisites of low-level technical, service, and supervisory personnel” [20].

Many U.S public and charter schools, especially those in working-class and oppressed neighborhoods, require students to enter school through metal detectors, use video surveillance in hallways and classrooms, and subject students to regular searches of their bodies and property. This is captured by the concept of the “school-to-prison pipeline” or even the “school-as-prison” given the criminalization of everything from talking loudly in class to minor pranks and the overwhelming presence of cops in schools [21].

The educational apparatus highlights two things. First, as the example of highly securitized and policed schools indicates, there is no hard, fast, or permanent line dividing repressive from ideological apparatuses. Second, the primary distinction between the ideological arms of the state and its repressive core is that the latter are permanent and secure whereas the former are more vulnerable and, therefore, more receptive to change in the face of class struggle.

Bowles and Gintis’ correspondence theory highlighted above is perhaps less important than their repeated affirmation that people’s intervention in education and society contributes to revolution. The book’s argument is against those who believe education is sufficient for revolutionary change and their theoretical, historical, and empirical analysis leads them to the finding “that the creation of an equal and liberating school system requires a revolutionary transformation of economic life” [22]. They conclude their study with strategies for socialist education and teachers and, importantly, frame the overarching aim of socialist education under capitalism as “the creation of working-class consciousness” to contribute to building a socialist revolution.

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Highlighting the fragility of ideological state apparatuses, Bowles and Gintis argue class-consciousness isn’t “making people aware of their oppression” because “most people are all too well aware of the fact of their oppression” [23]. The idea that if we study and focus on school, get into a good university, and “buckle down” will make our lives better lacks any material basis. Schools aren’t mechanically indoctrinating students into capitalist ideology or meritocracy. Students are thinking critically, increasingly open to the solutions required to eliminate oppression, and are even organizing against policing in schools on their own [24].

Democracy: The best possible organ for capitalism

The “organ” as a metaphor underscores the role of state apparatuses in maintaining stability for the ruling class. Organs are interdependent living and evolving entities that, together, each play a part in maintaining the body’s homeostasis, which means preserving stability in the face of changing external circumstances. It’s the same with the state, as the state’s goal is to maintain stability for the ruling class by adjusting to conflicts both within and between classes.

As Marx and Engels first put it in The Communist Manifesto, “the executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” [25]. Among the tasks of the bourgeois state is to manage conflicts within the capitalist class. This happens, for example, when there is a conflict between the interests of an individual capitalist and the capitalist system as a whole. If it were up to individual capitalists, they would destroy their source of surplus-value (workers) and the environment, which would be detrimental to the survival of capitalism. This is why the state also manages conflicts within the ruling class itself, stepping in to hold individual capitalists or firms “in check” in the interests of capital overall as an economic and political system..

The capitalist state also intervenes when it is faced with the threat of revolt. Legislation regulating the working day, for example, was meant to hold back “the passion of capital for a limitless draining of labour-power” and was motivated by “the working-class movement that daily grew more threatening” [26]. This is one reason why Marx, Engels, and Lenin argued that governance via bourgeois democracy was the most effective way to ensure capital’s rule. Far from inhibiting capitalism, the democratic republic is the most effective political form for capitalism insofar as power is exercised through complex mechanisms and several avenues for popular “participation” and “input.” The more secure the power of the ruling class is, the less it needs to rely on brute force.

This doesn’t mean that democracy is irrelevant to our revolutionary project. In fact, it is quite the opposite: historically, socialist struggles have always emerged from demands for basic democratic rights. Winning those rights helps us experience our power to change society. Socialist movements in the anti-colonial world and within the U.S. have often been waged in the name of a fake “democracy,” which reserves the rights it espouses for the rich. The distinguishing factor is the class character of democracy: there is the democracy of the capitalist class and the democracy of the working class, which is socialism. Revolutionaries are interested in democracy of, for, and by the working class.

From perfecting, to seizing, to smashing the capitalist state

In The Communist Manifesto, written in 1847-1848, Marx and Engels address the topic of the state in the communist project, but in an abstract sense. As historical-materialists, their conception of the state and its role in revolution evolved along with the class struggle. In particular, the defeats of the 1848 revolutions and the 1871 Paris Commune compelled them to refine their approach to the state.

The Paris Commune was the world’s first proletarian government which lasted for 72 days in 1871. Decades of war, discontent, and radicalization led to the working-class takeover of Paris. The Parisian workers elected a council from the various wards of the city and organized public services for all its two million city residents. Their first decree was to arm the masses to defend their new proto-state. They erected a “fuller democracy” than had ever existed before and instated deeply progressive, feminist, worker-centered decrees [27]. But before the Commune could develop into a state, they were overthrown by an alliance of the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, whose armies killed tens of thousands of workers.

In the wake of this unspeakable tragedy, the martyrs of the Commune left behind a crucial lesson: after overthrowing the capitalist state, a new worker’s state must be developed, and it must be defended fiercely from the former ruling class. The next year, Marx and Engels wrote a new preface to The Communist Manifesto explicitly drawing out the lesson: “One thing especially was proved by the Commune: that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes” [28.] Lenin adds that “it is still necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and crush their resistance,” and the Commune’s failure to do this was “one of the reasons for its defeat” [29]. These lessons were pivotal in the later successes of the Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the subsequent revolutions of the colonized peoples.

Today, some people interested in alternatives to capitalism hope we can build socialism through the legislative and electoral arena, avoiding a large-scale social revolution altogether [30]. We can and should pass legislation to curb campaign financing, increase taxes on the rich, and grant universal healthcare, all of which would be welcome improvements to the majority of our class. Yet such piecemeal reforms cannot produce the wholesale social transformation we need; the capitalists will attack progressive reforms at every opportunity and our class doesn’t have the state to enforce such legislation. The capitalist class, like every ruling class, will not allow their replacement by another class through their own state. We saw, for instance, how the Democratic Party manipulated elections to keep Bernie Sanders out of the presidential race. Any transformation of the capitalist state via reforms will also be impermanent because the people’s hard-fought gains can always be stolen by undemocratic bodies like the Supreme Court. For instance, the abortion rights we won in the 1970s were stolen from us in 2022 by the Supreme Court. To root deep and permanent transformations, we need to set up a workers-state, and we need to defend it.

The “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie” cannot handle the tasks required to develop a new society for working and oppressed peoples. Just as the same bodily organ cannot perform two completely different tasks—the heart cannot be made to breathe, and the lungs cannot be made to beat—neither can the same state perform two completely different functions. The function of the socialist state in the U.S. will be to meet the needs of its people and the planet, and the function of the capitalist state is to meet the profit-seeking needs of the capitalists. Thus, the capitalist state cannot be transformed simply through seizure—it must be destroyed and replaced by a new workers’ state.

The socialist state and its withering away

The socialist state differs from the capitalist state in two crucial ways. First, it is the state of the majority and not of the minority, and second, it is a transitory apparatus unlike the capitalist state that, because it maintains class contradictions, foresees no end. To the first point, the capitalist state protects the material interests of a tiny fraction of society and holds down the vast masses of the people from revolting against them. The capitalist state must ensure that hundreds of millions of people endure their poverty and precarity without stopping production. Even though workers are the producers of all the value, we do not realize the fruits of our contributions. The capitalists do not produce any value, and so their status in society is structurally illegitimate. To maintain this lopsided situation, the capitalist state had to develop violent and ideological state apparatuses. The socialist state’s apparatuses will be drastically less violent, since they will need to repress only a tiny minority, while directing most of their energy to meeting the needs of the people.

To the second point of difference: the capitalist state claims to be at its final stage of history. By contrast, the final aim of the socialist state is to render itself irrelevant. It serves only as the transitory apparatuses that will deliver humanity to classless society. While the capitalist state has no plan for improving itself, or for solving the contradictions that envelop it, the socialist state is built with the self-awareness that it is not at the highest stage of humanity.

The transition from a workers-state to a classless society is important, given that class antagonisms and special oppressions do not disappear overnight. Remnants of the old order lay in wait for the opportune moment to rise up and counter-revolt, and they are often aided by imperialists abroad. The state must persist until “the resistance of the capitalists has been completely crushed, when the capitalists have disappeared, when there are no classes” [31]. Without exploitation and oppression, the state is no longer necessary. This transitional period will depend on the existing material conditions and can’t be determined in advance: “By what stages, by means of what practical measures humanity will proceed to this supreme aim we do not and cannot know,” Lenin wrote [32].

The main principle is that the socialist state would transform social relations, grow the productive forces of society, eliminate material scarcity, and then itself “wither away into the higher phase of communism” [33].  No socialist state, historical or present-day, has been able to move past the state.

Conclusion: Our role in the “belly of the beast”

The Soviet Union lived and died as a state, and Cuba and China have been states for 60 and 70 years. Because socialist revolutions occurred not in the imperialist or advanced capitalist countries but in the colonial, semi-colonial, and less industrially-developed ones, the process of building up the productive forces required for socialism was and is protracted. Further, given that the Bolsheviks faced imperialist interventions by 14 countries almost immediately, they had to strengthen their state. Throughout its existence, the USSR had to “defend its revolution from overthrow in a world still dominated by imperialist monopoly capitalism” [34]. Cuba has been under the most extreme trade embargo in existence at the hands of the U.S. since its birth and has withstood numerous counterrevolutionary attempts. The embargo is meant to suffocate and isolate the people of Cuba, and to incite a counterrevolution. Still, the people of Cuba support their government because of its tireless efforts to meet their needs under difficult circumstances which are outside of its control. The U.S.’s newest target for which it is preparing for military confrontation is China with the goal of overthrowing the Communist Party; to defend the gains of the Chinese Revolution, China must fortify their revolution through the state [35].

Despite immense pressure from the U.S. capitalist class, socialist states have been able to win immense victories. China, for instance, eradicated extreme poverty in what was “likely the greatest anti-poverty program achievement in the history of the human race” [36]. Cuba recently redefined the family through the passage of its new Families Code, written democratically and passed by popular referendum. The Code expands the rights of the most oppressed: women, children, LGBTQ people, and the elderly. For these socialist states to flourish, and to eventually wither away, imperialism must first be defeated.

Imperialism is blocking the development of socialist states and projects everywhere. As organizers in the U.S., it is our special duty to make socialist revolution in our country so that we may not only free ourselves, but also free our siblings around the world from the scourge of U.S. imperialism.  Once society is organized “on the basis of free and equal association of the producers,” we “will put the whole state machinery where it will then belong–into the museum of antiquities, next to the spinning wheel and the bronze ax” [37]. This is the communist horizon, in which the people through their state organs fulfill our dreams of organizing society in our own name.

References

[1] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses: Notes Towards an Investigation,” inLenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970/2001), 95-97. Availablehere.
[2] Martin Carnoy,The State and Political Theory(Princeton University Press, 1984), 10.
[3] V.I. Lenin “The State and Revolution: The Marxist Theory of the State and the Tasks of the Proletarian Revolution” inLenin Collected Works (Vol. 25): June-September 1917, 385-487 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1918/1964), 394. Also availablehere.
[4] Frederick Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State(New York: International Publishers, 1884/1972), 229. Also availablehere.
[5] For an analysis of the U.S. state, see Eugene Puryear, “The U.S. State and the U.S. Revolution,”Liberation School,10 July 2022. Availablehere.
[6] Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” 398.
[7] Ibid., 392; For more context on why Lenin took up this study, see Brian Becker, “How the Ideas of ‘The State and Revolution’ Changed History,” inRevolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution,ed. Ben Becker (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015), 8-9.
[8] Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke, Brian Roberts,Policing theCrisis: Mugging, theState andLaw andOrder(London: Macmillan, 1978), 394.
[9] Mapping Police Violence, “2021 Police Violence Report” Availablehere.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Roy Walmsey, “World Prison Population List,” 12th ed.,Prison Policy Initiative, 2018. Availablehere; Wendy Sawyer and Peter Wagner, “Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2022,”Prison Policy Initiative, 14 March 2023. Availablehere.
[12] Sawyer and Wagner, “Mass Incarceration.”
[13] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels,The German Ideology: Part One, ed. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1932/1970), 64; For more on Marx and ideology, see Derek Ford, “What is Ideology? A Marxist Introduction to the Marxist Theory of Ideology,”Liberation School, 07 September 202.1.
[14] Marx and Frederick Engels,The German Ideology,64, emphasis added.
[15] Ibid., 65.
[16] Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 96.
[17] Nickie Louise, “These 6 Corporations Control 90% of the Media Outlets in America. The Illusion of Choice and Objectivity,”TechStartups, 18 September 2020. Availablehere.
[18] Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 104.
[19] Ibid., 89.
[20] Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life(New York: Basic Books: 1976), 12.
[21] See, for example, William Ayers, “The Criminalization of Youth: Politicians Promote Lock-Em-Up Mentality,”Rethinking Schools12, no. 2 (1997/1998). Availablehere.
[22] Bowles and Gintis,Schooling in Capitalist America, 265.
[23] Ibid., 285.
[24] Tracey Onyenacho, “Black and Brown Students Are Organizing to Remove Police From Their Schools,”ColorLines, 21 July 2020. Availablehere.
[25] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,The Communist Manifesto, trans. S. Moore (New York: Penguin Books, 1888/1967), 221.
[26] Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 1): The Process of Capitalist Production, trans. S. Moore and E. Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1867/1967), 229. Availablehere.
[27] For more on the Paris Commune, see: Richard Becker, “Vive La Commune! The Paris Commune 150 Years Later,”Liberation School,March 18, 2021. Availablehere.
[28] Marx and Engels,The Communist Manifesto, 194.
[29] Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” 424.
[30] For a definition of socialist revolution, see Nino Brown, “What Does it Take to Make a Socialist Revolution?”Liberation School, 29 September 2022. Availablehere.
[31] Lenin, “The State and Revolution,” 467.
[32] Ibid., 477.
[33] Richard Becker, “The Soviet Union: Why the Workers’ State Could Not Wither Away,” inRevolution Manifesto: Understanding Marx and Lenin’s Theory of Revolution,ed. Ben Becker (San Francisco: Liberation Media, 2015), 58.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Global Times, “Global Times interview: Brian Becker on socialism and the U.S. campaign against China,”Liberation News, 05 July 2022. Availablehere.
[36] Ibid.
[37] Engels,The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 232.

Reflections on My Visit to Cuba: A Response to Calla Walsh

By Gus Griffin

Calla Walsh’s May 29th op-ed, Biden Calls Cuba Terrorist While the People Demand and End to U.S. Terrorism against Cuba, was correct!

Having been born after its revolution in 1959, I, like anyone else growing up in the United States, have been subjected to a very one-sided characterization of the island and its government.

This year, through the National Network on Cuba in the U.S. and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) 16th annual Mayday Brigade, I finally got the opportunity to visit the island and observe and draw my own conclusions. I was among some three hundred others in the U.S. delegation. About thirty other countries sent delegations from five different continents.

It is impossible to fully relay what I observed and the amazing accomplishments this tiny island of about eleven million has achieved despite an illegal economic embargo for over 60 years. Having said that, I’ll list a few:

• While the U.S. is facing a growing diabetes crisis, Cuba has a promising treatment for the disease. However, due to the blockade, U.S. citizens are not allowed access to this treatment. This is an example of how the embargo can have life or death consequences for both U.S. citizens as well as Cubans;

• Cuba also has one of the largest adults Covid 19 vaccination rates in the world despite the embargo hindering its capacity to acquire syringes. This is thanks to the faith the Cuban people have in their world-renowned healthcare system and the country’s development of five different Covid 19 vaccinations which also are beyond the reach of U.S. citizens again due to the embargo;

• Other bio-medical advancements include a tic vaccine that helps preserve their livestock but does not kill the tic;

• The country’s Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) established in 1999 provides a tuition free medical education with the only condition being that graduates commit to practice medicine in poor and underserved communities after graduation. Two hundred and twenty of its graduates are currently working within the U.S. without the crippling burden of medical school student loan debt. The average U.S. medical school graduate owes $250,990 in total student loan debt. Seventy-three percent of medical school graduates have educational debt. One of ELAM’s graduates is an alum of my employer, Montgomery College and we are in the process of bringing her to the campus in the fall to talk about ELAM and her experience;

• An extension of the country’s internationalism is its health care and educational ambassadorship which sends doctors and other health care workers and literacy educators to the world’s most underserved areas. They are currently serving in thirty-two different countries around the world; 

• There is a home ownership rate of 85% which explains why I saw none of the homeless encampments we routinely see in the U.S.; and

• The country recently updated its Family Code which now recognizes same sex marriages and other family structures previously excluded from the benefits of marriage.

This list is by no means complete! The country can and is doing so much more, and the people of the U.S. and the rest of the world would benefit if the embargo, a relic of the cold war, were ended. 

In this year, the 200th anniversary of the infamous “Monroe Doctrine” from which the U.S. declared all the western hemisphere its hegemonic domain, there is no better time to renounce this ideology which is at the root of the Cuban embargo. The Washington D.C. Council is among the latest to take a step in that direction recently by passing a resolution urging the lifting of the embargo and removal of Cuba from the list state sponsors of terrorism. A third action would be to return Guantanamo Bay back to the island as a piece of its sovereign land. This sentiment represents a growing international movement. Of 193 United Nation members, 185 voted to condemn the blockade last year.  This trend has been consistent for about 30 years.  

It is my hope that other governing bodies and organizations will join the world chorus by condemning the blockade against Cuba. 

Gus Griffin is a professor at Montgomery College and a member of Black Alliance for Peace and Ujima People’s Progress Party.

Biden Calls Cuba “Terrorist” While The People Demand An End to U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba

[Pictured: Thousands of Cubans gather to celebrate the country’s National Rebellion Day, a yearly commemoration of the Cuban revolution]

By Calla Mairead Walsh

While Biden doubles down on Cuba's designation as a so-called “State Sponsor of Terrorism," the US people are calling for an end to US terrorism and sanctions against Cuba.

On Tuesday, May 23rd, the State Department reported that Cuba — along with Iran, Syria, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Venezuela — are not “not cooperating fully” in the United States’ supposed fight against terrorism. The Biden administration officially designates Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism” (SSOT), as well as Iran, Syria, and the DPRK.

Literally 0% of Americans view Cuba as a serious threat, and the Biden administration has provided no evidence of Cuba supporting terrorism in any way. Cuban and American officials even met earlier this month in Havana to discuss cooperating on anti-terrorism measures. So why is Biden keeping Cuba on the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list?

Sixty-four years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the United States is still waging an economic and media war against Cuba. The administrations of Trump and now Biden have weaponized the “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list to isolate Cuba internationally and justify continuing the genocidal American blockade.

The impacts of being labeled a “State Sponsor of Terror”

It goes without saying that the United States is the biggest “State Sponsor of Terrorism” in the world. The US is the only country with over 800 foreign military bases and spends more on its military than 144 countries combined. The US has launched 251 foreign military interventions since 1991. A report recently published by Brown University shows that the post-9/11 wars the US waged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan killed at least 4.5 million and displaced 38 to 60 million people. But the word “terrorist” is almost never applied to the US government. The term is highly politicized and subjective in the United States, used to demonize internal and external enemies and justify waging war on them, be it by bombs or blockades.

Designating Cuba as “terrorist” exacerbates the already devastating impacts of the American blockade, which has stolen an estimated $144.4 billion from the Cuban economy from the early 1960s to 2020, according to the United Nations. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) determined that US sanctions on Cuba “constitute the most severe and prolonged system of unilateral coercive measures ever applied against any country.”

On top of the blockade, Cuba’s “terrorist” designation restricts American foreign assistance, exports of dual-use items, and loans from the World Bank. It has also prevented Cuban Americans from transferring money to family in Cuba, stopped faith-based groups from shipping humanitarian supplies, and inhibited American universities from working with Cuban academics and institutions. Non-US citizens who have traveled to Cuba, a supposedly “terrorist” country, also have restrictions on visas to enter or visit the United States.

Despite being a list created and maintained only by the United States, because of its enormous power over the global financial system, the designation inhibits the ability of Cuba — and the other countries listed — to trade normally with the rest of the world. Banks don’t want to risk giving loans to a country labeled as “terrorist” by the hegemonic United States. The United States has sued foreign companies and banks for hundreds of millions of dollars for violating American sanctions on Cuba, and many major international banks no longer provide services to Cuba for fear of retaliation. The blockade as a whole is extraterritorial and thus violates international law.

The history of Cuba’s “terrorist” designation and US terrorism against Cuba

President Ronald Reagan first added Cuba to the terror list in 1982, citing Cuba’s support for national liberation movements across the world, such as giving military aid to Angola to defeat a US-backed invasion by the South African apartheid regime. Meanwhile, the United States was backing violent terrorism to sabotage the Cuban Revolution.

As Cuba expert Professor William LeoGrande said, Cuba’s “terrorist” designation “is ironic because in the 1960s, the CIA sponsored assassinations attempts, sabotage and paramilitary raids against Cuba—what today would be called state-sponsored terrorism—and CIA-trained Cuban exiles continued such attacks for the next several decades.”

Luis Posada Carriles, the mastermind behind many of these US-backed terrorist attacks — including the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976 and a series of hotel bombings in 1997 — died peacefully in Florida in 2018, protected by the US government and lionized by the right-wing Cuban-American community in Miami. But Cuba, according to the State Department, was the real terrorist.

🧵 The terrorist attack the US doesn't want you to know about: Cubana Flight 455 🇨🇺

The CIA trained Cuban exiles who planted 2 time bombs on the plane on October 6, 1976. All 73 passengers & crew were murdered, including the entire Cuban Olympic fencing team. pic.twitter.com/UwORmyD5SL

— Calla (@CallaWalsh) March 10, 2023

During President Barack Obama’s second term, he pursued a policy of “rapprochement” with Cuba, restoring diplomatic relations and lifting some travel and trade restrictions. The Obama administration removed Cuba from the terror list, saying, “we will continue to have differences with the Cuban government, but our concerns over a wide range of Cuba’s policies and actions fall outside the criteria that is relevant to whether to rescind Cuba’s designation as a State Sponsor of Terrorism.”

Obama’s “friendly” policy was still aimed at regime change through a new set of tactics, and he continued funding covert operations and “democracy promotion” programs aimed at undermining the Cuban Revolution. Nevertheless, rapprochement had positive effects for the Cuban and American people, especially renewed travel and people-to-people exchanges between the two countries. All of this was undone by Donald Trump.

Trump tightened the blockade and added an additional 243 sanctions on Cuba. Then, just four days after the January 6th insurrection, Trump and his neoconservative Secretary of State Mike Pompeo redesignated Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” They made this last-minute move in bitter spite of Cuba, but also to create a political obstacle for President Biden, who would be pressured from different sides to keep or remove Cuba’s “terrorist” designation.

Biden and Trump’s hawkish Cuba policy

Many Cubans and Americans alike hoped Biden would re-normalize US-Cuba relations as he promised during his campaign, when he said he would “promptly reverse the failed Trump policies that have inflicted harm on the Cuban people and done nothing to advance democracy and human rights.” But Biden has changed little. He slightly eased some Trump-era restrictions in May 2022 but has also renewed his predecessor’s harshest measures. As a result, Cuba — also impacted by the pandemic and the war in Ukraine — is experiencing its worst economic crisis and fuel shortages in decades.

The economic crisis in Cuba is fueling a political crisis for Biden at the border, as more Cubans than ever are leaving for the United States to escape the crushing impacts of sanctions. A group of Democratic lawmakers is urging Biden to lift Trump-era sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela to slow the surge of migration, but Biden has not moved a finger. Instead, he follows the line of conservative Cuban-American lawmakers on Cuba policy, especially Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, who Biden needs to push his appointments through the confirmation process.

21 House Democrats urged @POTUS last week to lift Trump-era sanctions on Cuba and Venezuela contributing to record levels of migration:

“Ending these indiscriminate economic sanctions is an indispensable part of addressing the migrant crisis.”https://t.co/VZbkZ7AgRZ pic.twitter.com/useckZPg96

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) May 15, 2023

Menendez, who is currently under investigation for corruption, lambasted his fellow Democrats’ push against Trump-era sanctions and claimed that the Cuban and Venezuelan governments — not US policy — were solely responsible for the economic crises in those countries. The Washington Post reported that “Privately, senior Biden officials have conceded that picking a fight with [Menendez] is not worth whatever benefit might come from relaxing sanctions on [Cuba and Venezuela], even if it would fulfill a campaign promise Biden made to restore President Barack Obama’s policies toward Cuba.”

Despite Biden claiming to care about “human rights” and “supporting the Cuban people,” he is not changing his internationally condemned policy — which violates Cuba’s sovereignty and human rights — because doing so is not politically expedient.

Activists who support normalizing US-Cuba relations have concentrated on pressuring Biden to remove Cuba from the terror list because, as Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad wrote in Peoples Dispatch, “Biden can remove Cuba from this list with a stroke of his pen. It’s as simple as that” — unlike the blockade, which is a complex amalgamation of hundreds of different laws in the hands of Congress.

In the State Department’s most recent public remarks on Cuba, they have doubled down on Trump’s policy of keeping Cuba on the list. Earlier this year, far-right Florida Republicans Maria Salazar and Marco Rubio introduced the FORCE Act in the House and Senate, respectively, to codify into law Cuba’s “terrorist” designation so that it could only be removed by Congress, not the President alone.

And not only that. Cuba would have to meet impossible criteria, completely changing their political and economic system to be what the United States defines as “free,” in order for the designation to be lifted. As People’s Dispatch wrote, “Essentially, Salazar is demanding that the Cuban people overthrow their own government and overturn the Cuban political system which has been built by the people and for the people over the last 60 years.”

It could not be more clear that the terror list has nothing to do with preventing actual terrorism; rather, it is about harming enemy states of the US. In March, when Salazar interrogated Secretary of State Antony Blinken about Cuba’s “terrorist” designation, he said that Cuba would have to “meet a very high bar” to be removed from the list and the State Department had no plans to do so.

Earlier this month, Cuban journalist Liz Oliva Fernandez stumped State Department Spokesperson Vedant Patel when she asked him “Why is Cuba on the State Sponsors of Terrorism list if you are trying to work with them to fight against terrorism?” He completely dodged the question, refusing to provide any examples of Cuban terrorism.

Cuba is on the U.S. state sponsors of terrorism list. But "what evidence is there that Cuba sponsors terrorism?" @LizOlivaFdez asked @StateDeputySpox yesterday.

His answer was a new one from the @StateDept.

Apparently, it has nothing to do with terrorism at all. pic.twitter.com/vMJiz1fMuB

— Belly of the Beast (@bellybeastcuba) May 3, 2023

Even anti-Cuba mainstream US media has reported that the “terrorist” designation is “bogus.” NBC News wrote, “according to half a dozen interviews with former intelligence analysts and officials who worked on Cuba policy in both Republican and Democratic administrations, the ‘consensus position’ in the US intelligence community has for decades been that the communist-led nation does not sponsor terrorism.”

Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell in the George W. Bush administration said that “‘Cuba is not a state sponsor of terrorism’ was a mantra from the moment I walked into the State Department to the moment I walked out. It’s a fiction that we have created…to reinforce the rationale for the blockade.”

Similarly, Congressman Jim McGovern (Democrat-Massachusetts) and Senator Patrick Leahy (Democrat-Vermont) published an op-ed in The Boston Globe explaining that “[i]t’s an open secret in Washington that Cuba does not belong on the list and that the previous false justification by the Trump administration was politically motivated.”

The #OffTheList campaign

The US government does not represent the American people on most issues — especially Cuba. The blockade of Cuba persists against the democratic will of the American people, a majority of whom have consistently opposed the blockade, especially restrictions on trading medicine and food with Cuba.

In the United States, Cuban-Americans, solidarity activists, labor unions, and local governments, have organized resistance to Biden’s designation of Cuba as a “State Sponsor of Terrorism.” Since January 2023, the National Network on Cuba (NNOC), a coalition of over 50 organizations across the US working to end the blockade, has been leading an international campaign to get Cuba #OffTheList.

On June 25th, this movement will rally at the White House — and in other locations around the world — to demand Biden take Cuba off the list, lift all US sanctions, and end US terrorism against Cuba. The NNOC is organizing these rallies alongside the Canadian Network on Cuba, ANSWER Coalition, CODEPINK, IFCO/Pastors for Peace, the Alliance for Cuba Engagement and Respect (ACERE), the International People’s Assembly, and over 70 other groups.

The voices of the American people and our progressive movements are clear: we want normalized relations with Cuba. Just in the past couple of years…

• Labor unions and city councils have passed over 80 resolutions supporting an end to the blockade, promoting scientific collaboration with Cuba, and urging that Cuba be removed from the terror list. And, just last week, the Washington, DC Council unanimously voted to pass a Cuba solidarity resolution and sent copies to Biden and key congresspeople urging them to end the blockade. Combined, these resolutions represent well over 50 million Americans.

• The 33 member states of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) demanded that the United States remove Cuba from the terror list and “reiterated their rejection of the US unilateral lists and certifications that affect Latin American countries.”

• Across the world, there have been monthly rallies and car caravans initiated by Cuban-Americans calling to end the blockade, take Cuba off the list, and build Puentes de Amor (bridges of love) between the American and Cuban people.

• Over 100 Democratic House members urged Biden to remove Cuba from the SSOT list and normalize US-Cuba relations. Their open letter was signed by big names like Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations Chair Barbara Lee of California, Rules Committee Chair James McGovern of Massachusetts, and Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Gregory Meeks of New York.

• Nearly 9,000 Cuban and American business owners sent a letter to Biden demanding he lift Trump-era sanctions and deliver on promises to help Cuba’s private sector, with the main demand being to take Cuba off the terror list.

• Over 10,000 people and 100 progressive advocacy groups signed an open letter organized by CODEPINK urging Biden to reverse Trump’s terrorism designation for Cuba and to reinstate Obama-era policy with the island.

• Hundreds of US lawyers wrote to Biden urging him to take Cuba off the list.

• We are rallying at the White House — and around the world — to tell Biden that Cuba is not a terrorist state, and the American people won’t stand for US terrorism against Cuba.

🚨 CALL TO ACTION! #OffTheList

Rally with us on June 25 to tell President Biden:

🇨🇺 CUBA IS NOT A TERRORIST STATE!

🇨🇺 END US ECONOMIC TERRORISM AGAINST CUBA!

Join us in DC for a weekend of action, organizational unity, and solidarity with Cuba: https://t.co/8XBARZMOow pic.twitter.com/rlDRfUa5Rb

— National Network on Cuba 🇨🇺 (@NNOCuba) May 22, 2023

Calla Walsh is an anti-imperialist organizer and writer. She is a co-chair of the National Network on Cuba, a coalition of 50+ organizations across the United States working to end the US war on Cuba.

The US Blockade on Cuba is a Violation of Democracy

By Calla Walsh

The only criteria to be invited to Biden’s so-called Summit for Democracy last week was to be a lapdog of US imperialism, not to be a real democracy. Instead of uplifting true people’s democracies which have dynamic, mass participation — such as those in Cuba and China — Biden’s summit promoted the overthrow of these governments.

As Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said, “The US Democracy Summit was selective and virtual, as virtual as its own “democracy,” a reflection of its own international moral isolation.” He is right. The US is increasingly isolating itself, and it is clearer each day that its hegemony is in decline. On the other hand, countries like China and Cuba are overcoming the US attempts to diplomatically isolate them by practicing true internationalism and paving the way to peace and multipolarity. The US is doing everything it can to stop these inevitable changes, rather than address the needs of its own population.

Biden used the Summit to prop up US regime change operations under the guise of democracy promotion. Foundations like the National Endowment for Democracy, a CIA front group, are some of the most blatant examples of how the US uses “democracy” as a weapon to undermine real democracy in the name of democracy. Over the past 20 years, the NED and USAID have allocated over $250 million USD to programs targeting Cuba. These programs aim to mutate real economic dissatisfaction in Cuba into violent anti-government protests. They have especially targeted Cuban cultural groups and youth groups, with the CIA notoriously infiltrating the underground hip hop scene in Cuba and fomenting counter-revolution. These protests have been utter failures, because people in Cuba are dissatisfied by the US blockade, not by the Cuban government.

But the US is still trying to fulfill the original goal of its blockade, which, in the words of the State Department itself, is “to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.” Over 60 years of the longest and most severe unilateral sanctions in the world have been exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and decrease of tourism to Cuba, but more significantly by Trump’s hawkish policy towards Cuba, which saw the reversal of Obama-era normalization policies, the addition of 243 new sanctions on Cuba, and the readdition of Cuba to the so-called “State Sponsors of Terrorism” List. In spite of his campaign promises to revert to Obama-era policy, Biden has kept nearly every single one of Trump’s added sanctions and doubled-down on the fallacy that Cuba is a terrorist state. Biden could change this designation with the stroke of his pen.

The blockade is not about restoring democracy in Cuba, despite the US attempts to portray it as such. No, these sanctions are designed to force Cuba into a return to capitalist dictatorship. US laws condition the lifting of sanctions on the complete destruction of Cuba’s revolutionary political and economic systems. For example, the “Cuban Democracy Act of 1992,” commonly known as the Torricelli Act, requires that, for sanctions to be lifted, Cuba must change its Constitution, return US property that was legally nationalized by Cuba, move “toward establishing a free market economic system,” and hold elections for a new government. It promotes US intervention by “[authorizing] the President to provide assistance to promote nonviolent democratic change in Cuba.” So, the “Cuban Democracy Act” is about tearing apart Cuba’s existing democracy and replacing it with what the US deems to be fair elections.

The blockade is not about forcing Cuba to give its people a greater say in their democracy. Cubans already have one of the most robust democracies in the world. Rather, the blockade is about exerting maximum economic pressure on Cuba, to enable the US to impose their so-called model of democracy on Cuba, meaning democracy for the US ruling class to seize and exploit Cuba’s people and resources.

Reports published by the US government on their plans to remodel Cuba into a capitalist state have even modeled Cuba’s transition after the neoliberalization of Eastern Europe during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, where economic shock therapy caused a huge drop in life expectancy and rise in disease and poverty. The US wants to reverse the accomplishments of the Revolution, and force Cubans back into the poverty they lived in under the yoke of the US. These policies are in blatant defiance of international law. They are a gross violation of Cuba’s right to sovereignty and self-determination.

Not only is the blockade a violation of Cuba’s democratic rights, but it is also maintained against the democratic will of the US people and the 96% of the countries on Earth which vote year after year to condemn the blockade in the United Nations. A consistent majority of US citizens support normalizing relations with Cuba and lifting sanctions, especially for vital products like food and medicine, but we don’t get any say in the continuation of the blockade.

A recent poll also showed that a powerful 0% of US citizens think that Cuba is a threat to the US, yet the Biden administration continues to label Cuba as “terrorist.” There is an ongoing push by extreme right-wing Miami Republicans to codify into law Cuba’s “terrorist” designation, so that it could only be reversed if Cuba agrees to destroy its socialist system and replace it with what the US deems to be “democracy.” However, the US people are resisting these hawkish policies. The National Network on Cuba is leading an effort to get Cuba #OffTheList of State Sponsors of Terrorism. For the past several years, Cuban-Americans and allies have been organizing monthly car caravans and standouts against the blockade to build “Puentes de Amor,” or bridges of love, between the US and Cuban people. In Miami, these protests against the blockade have been violently attacked by fascists aided and abetted by the Miami police.

The US labels Cuba as “authoritarian” and “undemocratic” to justify its cruel blockade. In reality, Cuban democracy is centuries ahead of the so-called democracy we have in the US. Observing Cuba’s municipal elections last November was the first time I saw real democracy, after working on dozens of elections in the US. Cuban elections are completely nonpartisan and there is no campaign spending, advertising, or lobbying allowed. Cuba consistently has much higher voter turnout than most other countries in the world. Once elected, representatives are not paid, they continue their lives as workers alongside the rest of the population, and they can be recalled at any point by voters. The workers are the state in Cuba.

In the US, on the other hand, the corporations are the state. Bribery by corporations and lobbyists is legal and in fact a guaranteed path to victory, because the candidate who spends the most money almost always wins. In the US, we are only called upon to have a say in our government when elections take place. In Cuba, elections are not the full extent of how citizens can participate, they are only the beginning. The Constitution is regularly revised with the participation of millions of citizens. Ideas are constantly being generated from the masses and laws are tested and revised with the masses. This is what real democracy looks like.

The father of Cuban Independence, Jose Martí, said, “In a time of crisis, the peoples of the world must rush to get to know each other.” This has been exactly Cuba’s approach to fighting US attempts at isolation. The US uses its huge leverage over the international financial system to bully other countries into submission, to punish Cuba, and to punish even its own US allies for trading with Cuba. Cuba’s approach to building strong diplomatic relations with other countries is based not on bullying, but on cooperation. Cuba sends doctors, not bombs.

Friendships with other countries, and the strength of the Cuban people, are how the Cuban Revolution has continued to survive. When the blockade first began, the Cuban Revolution was able to survive because of the internationalist solidarity it received from the Socialist Bloc. Since then, Cuba has returned the favor to working people across the world, including working people in the US. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Cuba was able to survive because of the internationalist medical brigades it launched and because of its partnership with the Bolivarian Revolution. And of course, through collaboration with the People’s Republic of China on economic development.

As we speak, Cuba, along with 148 other countries, is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, collaborating on significant infrastructure and energy projects. While the US blocked vital medical supplies reaching Cuba during COVID, China supplied them, returning the favor to Cuba, which offered material aid to China at the onset of the pandemic. In November 2022, Cuban President Miguel Díaz Canel visited Algeria, Turkey, Russia and China. During his visit, they signed a historic cooperation agreement formalizing a $100 million donation from China to help Cuba overcome the economic crisis resulting from US sanctions.

This is the difference between the US and China’s approaches to diplomacy and development. China’s approach is what gives us hope for a world order that is not based on US unipolar hegemony. Multipolarity, de-dollarization, building unity and cooperation will all help Cuba, and all countries being strangled by the US, to maintain sovereignty and hold back regime change.

Young people in the US like me are increasingly skeptical of US regime change propaganda. More young people see China as a friend, not an enemy, than any other generation. We see the utter incompetence of the US in their attempts to ban TikTok. We see Biden continuing the destruction of our environment while China is leading the world in reducing carbon emissions. We see that Cuba has the most progressive laws in the world on LGBTQ rights while fascists in the US are attempting a genocide of trans people. It could not be clearer which countries are the true democracies representing the interests of working people.

The Cuban Revolution has survived for over 60 years despite all odds, and we can only imagine the incredible things Cuba will do when it is able to develop free from the constraints of the US blockade. If we fight for it, then we will see an end to the blockade in our lifetimes and we will live in a truly democratic, multipolar world.

US Youth Observe Cuba's Elections and Learn About Real Democracy

By Calla Walsh

On Sunday, November 27th, Cuba held elections for their organs of local government, the Municipal Assemblies of People’s Power. A delegation of youth from the United States observed these elections first-hand as part of the US-Cuba Youth Friendship Meeting.

Coming from the fundamentally undemocratic US Empire, it was the first time for many to see a functional electoral system in which the masses actually participate and the majority truly rules

We observed voting in La Corbata, a neighborhood in La Habana currently undergoing transformation. The polling site was inside a newly constructed cultural-technological center, which also houses arts programs, classes, a computer lab, school graduations, and community events.

At first arrival, we were surprised by how efficiently the voting process moved. There were no lines at the La Corbata polling site, while in the US it is typical for voters — especially in poorer neighborhoods —  to wait in hours-long lines to cast their ballot.

A local election official explained that all citizens and permanent residents of Cuba are automatically registered to vote at 16. At 18, they are eligible to be nominated to run for delegate. The nomination process happens in the weeks leading up to the election. ​​Between October 21st and November 18th, more than 6 million voters — 73% of those eligible — attended the neighborhood assemblies for the nomination of candidates.

Nominees are chosen by local community organizations, including the Committees in Defense of the Revolution (the country’s largest mass organization with more than 8.4 million members out of a population of 11 million), the Cuban Federation of Women (whose membership includes more than 85% of all eligible Cuban women over 14 years of age), and the Communist Party of Cuba. The Communist Party of Cuba is not an electoral party, it does not “hand-pick” candidates, and party membership is not a requirement to run for office at all.

Before the election, the National Electoral Council goes house to house to verify voters’ information. This year, after Hurricane Ian devastated the Pinar del Río province in the East, election officials surveyed people still evacuated or sheltering there to ensure they would have voting access. 

Cuban elections are always held on Sundays so that voters are not restricted by their workdays to participate in democracy. On November 27th, polls opened at 7:00 a.m. and were scheduled to close at 6:00 p.m. The National Electoral Council used the power granted by the Cuban Constitution to extend the polling hours throughout the country for one more hour so that a greater number of citizens could exercise their right to vote.

In the US, elections that are scheduled on Tuesdays during work hours — combined with the inaccessibility of polling sites, strict ID requirements, racist voter intimidation, and a general lack of civic education  — impede most of the working class from participating. 

The US pushes the falsehood that Cuban elections are “not competitive.” In reality, every Cuban municipality must have at least two to eight candidates running, in order to ensure that voters have a choice. In La Corbata, three candidates were running, all of whom were women.

Competitiveness in US elections has continued to plummet as corporations expand their monopoly over our democracy, or rather, oligarchy. In the November 2022 midterms, less than 8% of Congressional districts were considered competitive.

When Cuban voters enter the polling station, they confirm their voter information, receive a ballot with straightforward instructions, and fill it out in a booth. Then, they place their ballot in a box guarded by local elementary school students. Youth have always worked at the forefront of the Cuban Revolution, so it is an extremely honorable role for them.

Any citizen can assist in the public vote-counting process. Official numbers are reported the same day — unlike in the US, where it takes weeks or even months to tally votes (despite being the richest country in the world, with access to much more advanced technology than blockaded Cuba). 

If no candidate receives over 50% of the vote, the election moves to a runoff the following Sunday. This will be the case in 925 of Cuba’s municipalities after the November 27th elections. The community can recall their representatives at any point once their terms begin.

Another key difference between US and Cuban elections is that in Cuba, there is no “traditional” campaigning. The community-nominated candidates cannot spend any money on campaigning, but they are still accessible to voters to discuss any issues.

Candidate biographies, highlighting their experience serving the community and their membership in different organizations, are posted outside of the polling place. Voters make an informed decision based on the candidates’ genuine qualifications, not on flashy campaign mailers or attack ads made by Super PACs. 

As a result, the energy at the polls was completely different than what is typical in the US, where crowds of campaign volunteers or paid workers gather outside holding signs, passing out literature, and urging voters to support their candidates. Political violence often escalates outside of polling sites in the US — during the 2022 midterms, there were even armed militias intimidating voters at ballot drop boxes in some states.

In the US, and all capitalist “democracies,” elections are determined by the amount of money invested in a campaign, which buys advertisements, mailers, staff, and other resources to reach likely voters. A historic $9.3 billion was spent on federal elections during the 2022 midterms.

Political campaigns in the US more closely resemble reality TV shows — sensational, polarizing, and completely divorced from the material issues at hand. North Americans’ shallow conception of democracy contributes to their confusion about the Cuban system. Some believe ridiculous anti-communist propaganda claiming that Cuba is staging its elections or paying actors to tell us lies.

As I wrote in Multipolarista in May, it is easier for many North Americans to believe that Cuba is lying about their democratic achievements — free healthcare and education, guaranteed housing and employment, constitutionally enshrined anti-racism and gender equality — than to come to terms with the fact that our own government is choosing to deny us those same rights.

The far-more advanced character of Cuban socialist democracy is exactly why the US is so intent on obfuscating and blockading Cuba’s reality. Their example shows us what is possible. For over sixty years, a small island of 11 million people has resisted the biggest, most violent empire in history. If a true workers’ democracy can be realized 90 miles from our shores, so can it be realized here, and in every corner of the world.

Songs About Che

By Louis Brehony

Republished from Monthly Review.

Commodification of the iconic image of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara has failed to dim the revolutionary light that burned on after his CIA assassination on 9 October 1967. Heralded worldwide by liberation fighters, activists and working classes as the heroic guerrilla of the Cuban revolution, a leader of its first socialist government and a relentless Marxist thinker, Che became a central figure of leftist culture in Latin America and beyond. Embedding his principles of duty and aspiration to fight for the future, school children under Cuban socialism pledge daily, “Pioneers for Communism, we will be like Che.” In Hasta Siempre, Commandante, Cuban songwriter Carlos Puebla (1917-89) prophesied:

Your revolutionary love is taking you to new places,

where they await the strength of your arms in liberation.[1]

These words would be sung and translated worldwide, while musicians pledging to carry Che’s torch wrote their own songs to his life, death and the struggles he would inspire in future. From Havana to Santiago, Cairo to Bethlehem, singing about Che Guevara has unsettled elites, ruffled bourgeois feathers and kindled the flame of revolutionary tradition.

Written by Puebla in 1965, as Che parted Cuba to take part in revolutionary movements in Africa and Latin America, Hasta Siempre was, according to its author, “a song of farewell, not death,” and musical representation of Che’s relationship to Fidel Castro. Reading out Che’s parting letter to the Cuban people at the Chaplin Theatre in Havana, Fidel delivered the words written months earlier with characteristic poeticism:

I carry to new battlefronts the faith that you taught me, the revolutionary spirit of my people, the feeling of fulfilling the most sacred of duties: to fight against imperialism wherever it may be. [2]

The audience was in raptures and Puebla, once a target of the pre-revolution Batista regime, [3] was moved to pick up his guitar: “On the unforgettable night when Fidel read out Che’s farewell letter—that same night I wrote the song, Hasta Siempre, Comandante.” [4]

Over the years Hasta Siempre would be emblematic of a society building from the ashes of colonial exploitation and imperialist domination, and came to be sung by Cubans at revolutionary mobilizations, concerts, social occasions, and even at international sporting events. The simplicity of its bolero composition and clarity of identification with the revolutionary movement made Hasta Siempre a grassroots hit with many outside the country. In the Costa-Gavras film State of Siege (1972), Uruguayan police hunting Tupamaros guerrillas fail to silence student loudspeakers while the song blares out proudly during a demonstration. Dozens of cover versions span Buena Vista Social Club, jazz versions by Charlie Haden and Robert Wyatt, French leftist band Zebda and Venezuelan vocalist Soledad Bravo. A pop version recorded by Nathalie Cardone hit number 2 in the mainstream French charts in 1997, helping her to sell over 750,000 albums in the country alone.

Hasta Siempre would not be the only song Carlos Puebla would dedicate to Che. In Lo Eterno, the singer ascends the martyred guerrilla into immortality:

How you were more than a man

A light and example

You will live forever

In the heart of the people.

To Žižek, the words of Puebla wrap Che in Christian mythology, as a “sacred figure where the “normal” criteria of actual achievements no longer matter”. Distanced from Cuban socialism, which Žižek virulently opposes, [5] Che “had to die a miserable death in order to become the cult figure that he is.” [6] Yet those who embraced Che in life and death did so with awareness of the “actual achievements” that his journey of sacrifice and commitment enabled, not least in Cuba. Recorded in 1968, Silvio Rodríguez’ Fusil Contra Fusil (Rifle Against Rifle) predicted that, “All of the Third World will tell of his pain,” through the armed, anti-colonial struggle, with Che’s name collectivized for humanity.

That this process had begun before Che’s martyrdom was evident in 1967’s El Aparecido (The Apparition), as Chilean songwriter Victor Jara (1932-73) captured the relentlessness of a CIA-led manhunt for Che while he remained free among the socialist fighters in the Bolivian mountains. The song, which encapsulated renewed pride in indigenous instruments by Latin American progressives, features a breathless chorus of “córrele, córrele, córrela,” or “run, run, run,” while the overwhelming odds of Che’s mission are starkly put:

Over his head circle,

ravens with talons of gold

How he has been crucified

by the fury of the powerful.

Son of rebellion

he is pursued by battalions.

Because he offers life

they want his death. [7]

In a sign of how Che’s position would divide revolutionaries from social democrats, the song led Jara into criticism from the Chilean Communist Party, angered by emphasis on armed struggle over what it saw as the democratic road to socialism. Decades on from his own torture and murder at the hands of the Pinochet coup, Jara’s works remain popular.

With comparable status to Jara in another key region of anti-imperialist struggle, Egyptian resistance singer Sheikh Imam (1918-1995) was frequently pictured wearing Che Guevara insignia while he played oud and sang an intensely political repertoire. With lyricist Ahmed Fu’ad Negm (1929-2013), Imam offered stinging critiques of a supposedly postcolonial society. Coming both in the wake of Che’s murder and of the June 1967 defeat of Nasser’s Arab alliance by Zionist colonization, their song Gifara Mat (Guevara’s Dead) was dirge-like:

Guevara died, Guevara’s dead, on the radio that’s what they said.

On the street that’s all the news, and in the mosques and in the pews. [8]

The Imam-Negm alliance upset the balance for those apparently committed to keeping radical politics out of Egyptian music. Among these, composer Sayyed Mikkawi hit out at Imam’s stated commitment to “the path of revolution” as an “artist of the people,” asking whether the embrace of Guevara meant that Egypt had “abandoned its own heroes.” [9] Sheikh Imam had attacked the bourgeois pageantry of Mikkawi’s socialite existence and famously lived an austere life among the working class.

Sheikh Imam would be a direct influence on a new generation of Egyptian musical revolutionaries and appeared regularly in the 1980s household of a young Hazem Shaheen, [10] later to become a leading oud virtuoso and songwriter. During the period of struggle against the Mubarak dictatorship, Shaheen’s Iskanderella group took on Guevarist symbolism; Sheikh Imam covers were central to their development. They would sing Nagm’s lyrics a half-century after their composition:

So my dear slaves, here is the lesson. Guevara’s cry is always the same and your choices are but one.

There’s nothing for you to do, but to declaim, prepare for war or be done.

With the reemergence of the Palestinian revolution after 1967, many children in refugee camps in Lebanon and Gaza were adorned with the Arabized name “Gifara,” alongside other names referencing steadfastness and liberation. Speaking to Lena Meari, a former PFLP leader remembered that, “We were fascinated with the Guevarian path and it affected our thinking.” [11] Palestinians would sing for Che too. Among the Palestinian songs to Che included re-writing of national liberation anthems like Bektob Ismik Ya Biladi (I Write Your Name, My Country), with melodies set to new lyrics on Che and sung by communists in Bethlehem, and vocalist Amal Murkus’ Thawri ka-Che Guevara (Revolutionary, As Che Guevara), based on Puebla’s Hasta Siempre. 

This tradition continued with new, 21st Century intifadas. In 2002, Manhal al-Falastini and the Baladna group [12] of Lebanon-based Palestinian refugee musicians sang the lyrics of martyred fighter Abu Ali Talal, in Ughniyat Gifara (Guevara song):

Write your name, Guevara

with a red rose

Its body will become yours, Guevara

and make a revolution.

Following the mass uprising across Palestine in May 2021, the figure of Che appeared in Sawtoka Ya Shaabi (Your Voice, My People), a Palestinianized arrangement of Italian workers’ anthem Bella Ciao, by Palestinian artist Sanaa Moussa. In the song, the cry of patria o muerte, or “homeland or death,” appears between verses of My People Are Alive, by Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim.

Che was a constant presence in the performing activism of Turkish revolutionary band Grup Yorum, whose vocalists sang Puebla’s Hasta Siempre with both Spanish and Turkish poetry. Before the banning of the group’s performances in 2016 and imprisonment of its members by the Erdoğan government, the musicians played concerts to tens of thousands of mostly leftist supporters. Among those who had sung for Che, leading members Helin Bölek and Ibrahim Gökçek were martyred in death fasts in April and May 2020 respectively. Intensifying repression for their commitment to socialist politics, the prosecution of Grup Yorum had been accompanied by right wing commentators suggesting that their fans’ wearing of Che Guevara-inspired clothing was proof of the musicians’ support for “terrorism.”

In the flash points of struggle against oppression and exploitation, Che remains present. Both a tenacious, enduring voice for the oppressed, and a reminder of the depths to which imperialism and reaction will sink to silence it. As in the songs and music of bygone and living revolutions, singing brings people together in common melody in the fight for a new future. Che once wrote,

The basic clay of our work is the youth; we place our hope in it and prepare it to take the banner from our hands. [13]

Carlos Puebla—Lo Eterno
https://youtu.be/7gXiYuGkNXg

Silvio Rodriguez—Fusil Contra Fusil
https://youtu.be/yEWO3lR99QQ

Sheikh Imam—Gifara Mat
https://youtu.be/tqnyhP7N0rs

Grup Yorum—Hasta Siempre
https://youtu.be/O3FmmnJX-VE

Notes

1. Translation taken from Aviva Chomsky, A History of the Cuban Revolution (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), p121.

2. Che Guevara, “Farewell letter to Fidel Castro”, 1 April 1965. Marxist Internet Archive.

3. Robin D. Moore, Music & Revolution (University of California Press, 2006), p53.

4. Sue Steward, Musica!: The Rhythm of Latin America, (Diane Pub Co, 1999), p81.

5. Slavoj Žižek, “Slavoj Žižek on Castro’s death,” 27 November 2016. Author website.

6. Slavoj Žižek, Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed, (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), p180.

7. Translation by Aliki Andris-Michalaros for the Inti Illimani 2 album, La Nueva Canción Chilena, 1974.

8. Lyric translation by Elliot Colla.

9. Andrew Simon, Media of the Masses, (Stanford University Press, 2022), p143.

10. Conversation with the author, 20 June 2022.

11. Lena Meari, “Reading Che in Colonized Palestina,” NACLA Report on the Americas, 50:1, 49-55, 2018.

12. Not to be confused with the Jordan-based Palestinian band of the same name.

13. Che Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” March 1965. Marxist Internet Archive.

Assata Shakur, Black Liberation Struggles, and the Cuban Revolution

[Pictured: Fidel Castro and Malcolm X meet in Harlem, NY in 1960]

By Abayomi Azikiwe

Republished from News Ghana.

As far back in history as the period of enslavement of African people in North America, resistance and rebellion has been met with retaliatory repression from the ruling interests.

Freedom fighters such as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vessey, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, among many others named and unknown, have been either brutally executed or left with no alternative other than to seek flight from oppression.

Assata Shakur in Cuba.

This same legacy of confinement, brutality and lynching continued into the post-slavery era of the 20th and 21st centuries. Between the 1880s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, thousands of African Americans were extra-judicially murdered by mobs of law-enforcement agents and vigilantes.

When the Civil Rights Movement erupted on a mass level during the 1950s with the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-56) and other actions, activists were subjected to unjustified arrests, sentencings and the bombing of homes and churches. During the 1960s, scores of Civil Rights workers were arrested, beaten, intimidated into leaving their home areas, wounded by gunfire and killed. People such as Medgar Evers (1963) and Herbert Lee (1961) of Mississippi were gunned down for their organizational work against racism and disenfranchisement.

In Birmingham, Alabama on September 15, 1963, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church killing four African American girls. During the Freedom Summer of 1964 in Mississippi, three Civil Rights workers: Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney, were lynched by KKK members who were employed as law-enforcement officers.

In later years, key leaders such as Malcolm X (1965), Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1968), Fred Hampton and Mark Clark (1969) were all assassinated in plots carried out by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) working in conjunction with police agencies and mercenaries. With the emergence of armed self-defense organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Monroe, North Carolina chapter led by Robert F. Williams, the Deacons for Defense (DOD) founded in Louisiana, the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO), the first independent political formation to utilize the black panther symbol in Alabama; the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, Republic of New Africa (RNA), Black Liberation Army (BLA), among others, the Justice Department’s FBI and other intelligence and law-enforcement agencies heightened their disruptive tactics against the African American liberation struggle.

Assata and the BLA

Assata Shakur, born in 1947, joined the Black Panther Party in the New York City area while she was a college student in 1970. She had already been active in Black students organizing when she made contact with the BPP, which during 1970, maintained dozens of chapters across the United States as well as an International Section in Algiers, Algeria in North Africa.

Many militant youths in urban areas joined and were influenced by the BPP during 1967-1970 as the level of repression coordinated by the federal government accelerated. A split within the Party leadership during early 1971 over tactics, led to the activation of the Black Liberation Army (BLA) which advocated armed struggle as a defensive measure in response to the widespread harassment and imprisonment of BPP members.

The BLA and the International Black Panther Party with its newspaper entitled “Right On”, supported the International Section in the 1971 split. Panther leaders such as Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, Field Marshal Don Cox, Connie Matthews, etc. had maintained the Algiers office since the August 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival, when the Algerian government recognized the BPP as the official representatives of the African American people. The International Section hosted an Afro American Cultural Center during the festival and would later move into an official diplomatic residence which had been occupied by revolutionaries from Vietnam.

Panthers inside the U.S. who were aligned with the BLA continued to work in their underground structures. There were several armed engagements with law-enforcement agents between 1971-1973.

On May 2, 1973, an encounter between Assata Shakur, Zayd Malik Shakur and Sundiata Acoli resulted in the wounding and capturing of Acoli and Assata Shakur and the death of Zayd. One New Jersey State Trooper was killed in what was described as a routine traffic stop on the Turnpike.

This incident came amid enormous propaganda within the U.S. corporate and government-controlled media that characterized the BLA as a violent criminal gang bent on the killing of police officers. However, almost no mention was made by the mainstream press outlets related to the systematic repression under which the BPP and other revolutionary organizations were subjected to by the federal government.

In an open letter from Assata which coincided with the National Jericho March in Washington, D.C. in 1998, that demanded a general amnesty for all U.S. political prisoners, she articulates her position saying: “Neither Sundiata Acoli nor I ever received a fair trial. We were both convicted in the news media way before our trials. No news media was ever permitted to interview us, although the New Jersey police and the FBI fed stories to the press on a daily basis. In 1977, I was convicted by an all- white jury and sentenced to life plus 33 years in prison. In 1979, fearing that I would be murdered in prison, and knowing that I would never receive any justice, I was liberated from prison, aided by committed comrades who understood the depths of the injustices in my case, and who were also extremely fearful for my life.” (https://www.afrocubaweb.com/assata2.htm#Open%20letter)

By late 1981, other BLA cadres and their supporters were the subject of a nationwide dragnet by the FBI. Dr. Mutulu Shakur, an acupuncture specialist, was targeted by the U.S. government claiming he was the leader of the BLA and other revolutionary organizations operating in the New York/ New Jersey area. Scores of activists were subjected to surveillance, grand jury questioning, jailing and imprisonment. Dr. Shakur went underground in 1980 after establishing an acupuncture clinic in Harlem. Today, Dr. Shakur, having been unjustly held in prison since 1986, is suffering from bone marrow cancer and has been given only a few months to live. A campaign to win compassionate release has been underway for several months.

Assata Shakur and the Cuban Revolution

After being liberated from a maximum security prison in New Jersey, Assata lived underground for five years. In 1984, she was granted political asylum by the socialist Republic of Cuba then under the leadership of President Fidel Castro.

Cuban revolutionaries within the July 26th Movement had won genuine liberation for the Caribbean island-nation on January 1, 1959. The revolutionary government immediately outlawed racism and national discrimination while committing themselves to assisting the national liberation struggles in Africa.

In 1961, Robert F. Williams and Mabel Williams were granted refuge in Cuba where they fled after being subjected to threats of arrest and prosecution in North Carolina. Williams was given a program called Radio Free Dixie which broadcast via shortwave deep into the U.S.

Later other political refugees were welcomed by the Cuban Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s. When Assata arrived in Cuba in 1984, there were thousands of Internationalist volunteers operating in the Southern African state of Angola in efforts to secure the revolutionary government of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) under fierce attack by the racist apartheid South African Defense Forces (SADF) and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). By 1988, the apartheid military forces had been driven out of Angola and the-then racist government based in Pretoria soon agreed to withdraw from neighboring Namibia where they had attempted to suppress the Southwest Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO), the sole legitimate voice of the Namibian people.

The Republic of Namibia was declared independent on March 21, 1990, just weeks after the release of African National Congress (ANC) of South Africa political prisoners such as future President Nelson Mandela. The apartheid regime would eventually fall after the first democratic nonracial elections of April 1994. Since this time period, the MPLA of Angola, SWAPO of Namibia and the ANC of South Africa have remained in power.

Since the beginning of the Cuban Revolution, the socialist government has continued to exemplify international solidarity with oppressed and working people around the world. Hundreds of students from African American and Latin American communities in the U.S. have studied medicine in the Republic of Cuba at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM) through full scholarships provided by the Communist Party government.

These developments since 1959 have endeared the Cuban Revolution to revolutionaries in the U.S., Africa, Latin America and other geo-political regions. The political biography of Assata Shakur provides a clear reflection of the interrelationship of revolutionary movements from the U.S., Latin America, the African continent and throughout the globe.