Bolsonarism and “Frontier Capitalism”

[Image by Prachatai / Antonio Cruz / Agência Brasil]

By Daniel Cunha

Republished from The Brooklyn Rail.

The path [meaning] of Brazil’s evolution… can be found in the initial character of colonization.

- Caio Prado Junior

The rise of Jair Bolsonaro and his political agenda—mixing economic ultraliberalism with racist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, and militaristic leanings (including the apology of dictatorship and torture)—provoked as much political unrest as theoretical helplessness. On the one hand, the necessary denunciations were made, with attempts at antifascist mobilization and the much needed campaign #elenão (#nothim) conducted by women; on the other, there were comparisons with historical fascism and other contemporary political figures like Trump, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and, maybe the best, Rodrigo Duterte. These approximations, though, remain vague. The “democratic consciousness” is clear that “he” was unacceptable, but this awareness still lacks in-depth conceptual elaboration. To go beyond superficialities, it is necessary to put a phenomenon like Bolsonarism in perspective, locating it in the world-historical trajectory of capitalist modernity, and within its peripheral Brazilian place.

Here I will use a socio-historical concept that I call “frontier capitalism,” inspired by Jason W. Moore’s concept of “commodity frontier.”1 Commodity frontiers are the result of the incorporation of areas and sectors previously “external” to the capitalist world economy. This incorporation is usually motivated by the presence of resources (minerals, naturally fertile soils, etc.) that, because they are at the frontier, are usually deprived of a labor force, which has to be brought from elsewhere. Hence the structural relationship of such frontiers with slave and slave-like labor. The Brazilian case belongs here; in fact, this configuration is constitutive of Brazil as a modern society, the “meaning and trajectory of colonization,” as is well argued by Brazilian historian and geographer Caio Prado Júnior: thus we have the sugar cane plantations as a chapter of the expansion of European mercantile capital, with production based on the appropriation of the natural fertility of the soil (massapé) for the world market; production based on racialized slave-labor, with as a prerequisite the expulsion (or extermination) of the previous inhabitants of the frontier zone (indigenous people, flora, fauna).2 Brazil was born as an enslaving/exterminating commercial enterprise. The pattern was repeated in the cycles of gold and coffee. It can already be seen that racism and genocide are structural and foundational in the Brazilian configuration of “frontier capitalism.” An Independence that passed power to the heir of the colonizer, the last Abolition on the continent, oligarchic republics and the amnesty of dictators and torturers did not help to radically change these foundations.

As industrialization spread from Europe, once the capitalist world-system started to function on its own base (industrial production based on relative surplus-value), the systemic role of the frontier was reinforced. The tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise (basically, the substitution of machines for workers) leads to a tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as Marx showed. Capital employs several strategies to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, the most immediate one being an increased rate of labor exploitation. The expansion of the system itself promotes the absorption of new workers. Another mechanism—one not generally mentioned—is the cheapening of circulating capital (raw materials).3 The frontier has a crucial role in this: cheap raw materials are produced with the appropriation of “virgin” nature, preferably using slave or slave-like labor: naturally-fertile soil that does not require artificial fertilization, new mines with high-grade ore that minimize the necessity of processing, and so on. The frontier is mobile, a zone of appropriation in constant expansion, playing the role of a “damper” of the tendency of the profit rate to fall.

Today, in the 21st century, we live under what Moishe Postone called “the anachronism of value.”4 As anticipated by Marx in the “fragment on machines” in the Grundrisse, the organic composition of capital—the ratio of the value of machines and raw materials to labor employed in production—has become so high that value, the labor time necessary for production, has become a “miserable foundation” as measure of material wealth.5 The capitalist mode of production is approaching its limit, experienced as a crisis process including structural unemployment, a planet of slums, financialization, the feralization of patriarchy, the reinforcement of structural racism, and intensification of the ecological crisis.6 Robert Kurz located the “tipping point” into crisis at the “microelectronic revolution” beginning in the 1970s, when rationalization of the productive system (computerized automation, etc.) started to eliminate more living labor than was generated by the system’s expansion.7 This “tipping point” was marked by a constellation of events—the collapse of Bretton Woods, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the regimes of the East, the debt crisis of Third World countries.

If Kurz is right about the timing, this happened when Brazilian “modernization” (and that of Third-World countries in general) was still “incomplete.” As Kurz put it, the crisis involved the “collapse of modernization,” the end of “catch-up modernization” projects conducted by dictatorships guiding the development of productive forces with a strong hand. Since then, we have had a “post-catastrophic” society within a malfunctioning world-economy.8 A country like Brazil, now “post-catastrophic,” remains only partially “modernized,” with incomplete class formation, governmental institutions, and mass democracy compared to core countries; neither the “proletariat” nor the “citizen” were fully developed. Racism, genocidal violence, authoritarianism, and anti-republican caprice (especially in structures like the judiciary) remain not as mere idiosyncratic “prejudices” or “privileges” but as structuring elements of a slave-based frontier society only partially superseded.

In this context, the need for cheap raw materials to offset the increasing composition of capital at the level of the world-economy becomes more intense than ever. The expansion of commodity frontiers is now vital for the continuation of accumulation. The “collapse of modernization,” combined with this systemic necessity, produces a specific role for Brazil in the international division of labor: that of an immense commodity frontier, progressively de-industrialized. This is a peripheral and subaltern, but crucial role. The soya frontier is key to the cheapness of food production for the Chinese labor force; export-oriented Chinese production, in turn, is intermingled with American debt, in a “debt circuit” (Robert Kurz’s phrase) in which China buys American bonds to finance the export of her own commodities. Iron ore is crucial for the Chinese urban expansion, even if it ends up in the concrete of ghost cities (and causes a catastrophe in an iron waste dam in Brazil following cost cuts related to price fluctuations). This China-USA-Brazil circuit, articulating Brazilian commodity frontiers, cheap Chinese labor, and American debt, central to the maintenance of capitalist “normality” during the last twenty years, ultimately rests on the hot air of fictitious capital (mountains of debts and paper).9 It was thanks to this commodity boom that the Brazilian Worker’s Party (PT) governments could apply redistributionist social policies without making structural changes in Brazilian society, propelled by Chinese capital and in alliance with agribusiness, the financial sector, and even the evangelical political bloc. As soon became clear, this system of “crisis management” could only be precarious and provisional.10

The bursting of the real-estate bubble in 2008 ended the party. Chinese indebtedness could still extend the commodity boom for a while, but the decline inevitably came. This resulted in political instability in Brazil, where the middle class, excluded from the arrangements of the PT government, took to the streets in 2013, demanding impeachment, boosted by an oligopolized media and a partisan judiciary not subject to popular control.11 Not long before, São Paulo mayor Fernando Haddad (PT), later an unsuccessful presidential candidate, reacted technocratically to these protests, which were initially progressive (demanding free public transportation), throwing them into the arms of the conservatives.12 The legitimacy of the PT Rousseff government, even in the eyes of those who might have defended it, was severely damaged by her catastrophic decision to apply the neoliberal adjustment program promoted by the “Chicago boy” Joaquim Levy after the 2014 elections. The beginning of the unsubstantiated impeachment process against her (the “soft coup”) coincided with the minimum of the commodity price index (December 2015). The ousting of Rousseff from power in August 2016 meant an intensification and acceleration of the plundering process, now freed of any conciliatory arrangement. The new president Michel Temer managed to cheapen the labor force, privatize Brazilian oil, and cut public services.

This context of economic crisis and low legitimacy of the PT government (identified with the left in general), amplified by “corruption scandals” fueled by “rewarded collaboration,” disregard for the presumption of innocence, political sabotage of the opposition, coordinated media bombardment, agitation from juvenile think tanks and paranoid ideologues (like Olavo de Carvalho, a former astrologer and anti-communist who recommended at least two of Bolsonaro’s ministers) formed the ideal culture medium in which Bolsonarism could grow.13 Bolsonaro mobilized the typical slogans of far-right politicians in times of crisis: racism, militarism, misogyny, homophobia, anti-communism, anti-intellectualism (including an intended ban of Marxism and the ideas of Paulo Freire from schools and universities), that are staples of fascist leaders.14 If anti-Semitism seems residual, conspiracy theories conjure up whimsical plans of “communist domination” under the command of the soft liberals of the Worker’s Party; chancellor Ernesto Araújo (put forward by Olavo de Carvalho) includes climate change denial in his conspiracy theories.15 More atypical is the combination of the ultra-liberalism of the economy minister, Paulo Guedes, with the militarist authoritarianism of Vice President General Hamilton Mourão. But there is no inconsistency here: this is the ideal arrangement for crisis capitalism in a peripheral country that is relegated to a condition of commodity frontier of the world market, while immense and explosive masses of “superfluous” people accumulate in the favelas, where they must be contained—the not-so-hidden meaning of the increased militarization of security forces of the last years is a “war on vagabonds.”16 In turn, the apotheosis of systemic lawfare represented by Sérgio Moro, now justice minister, who incarcerated PT leader and then presidential candidate Lula during the 2018 electoral campaign, will deal with the organized political opposition. It is not by chance that fractions of the bourgeoisie supported candidate Bolsonaro, with no regard for civilized appearance; they are the historical heirs of the modern slave-holders who engendered the modern liberal ideology of slave-owners (as shown by Roberto Schwarz and others).17 But here appears an important difference in relation to historical fascism: while the latter had a modernization role as a “system of total mobilization for industrial labor,” phenomena like Bolsonarism represent instead the total mobilization for the plundering of commodity frontiers and the militarized containment of the “superfluous.” There is no more pretension of mass labor regimentation.18

In this context of “decreasing expectations,” as the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes puts it, traditional mechanisms arise to dehumanize the “other,” the “superfluous,” the favelado, the excluded from welfare systems: racism, elitism, and reactionary affects.19 A specific ideological component enters into all this, as emphasized by some researchers: the emergence of a supremacist anti-indigenous and anti-quilombolas (anti-maroons) ideology. “Quilombolas, indigenous people, gays, lesbians, all this scum,” Luis Carlos Heinze, a congressman, said in a public meeting with agrarian land-owners, and Bolsonaro asserted that “quilombolas are of no use, not even to procreate.”20 He promised (and started implementing it in his first day in office) that indigenous people’s lands will no longer be demarcated, while then vice-presidential candidate Mourão lamented the “indolence” and “naughtiness [malandragem]” of black and indigenous people.21 It happens that many of the indigenous’ and quilombola’s lands are in the way of the soya and mining frontiers.22 More than a stumbling block for particular agro- and mining businesses, they are a stumbling block for an important means of dampening of the growing composition of capital, and therefore of the continuation of the global accumulation of capital. Far from being a mere subjective “prejudice” against indigenous people, these attitudes represent an ideological coagulation of the immediate interests of those involved with the current configuration of crisis capitalism and an entrenched historical inheritance of violence and extermination. Here Bolsonaro’s infamous support for firearms reminds us not only of the military dictatorship, but also of the bandeirantes, those who expanded Brazilian frontiers westward in the 17th and 18th centuries by enslaving and killing indigenous people. In 2017, 207 people were killed in the countryside in land- and environment-related struggles.23 Together with the favelas, where thousands are killed each year, this is the place of the militias in “frontier capitalism.” Also in this regard, Bolsonarism differs from the Brazilian version of historical fascism (integralism), which in its project of nation building intended to include black and indigenous people (dutifully “evangelized”) and used an indigenous language expression (“anauê”) as an official salute.24

Bolsonarism has elements in common with historical fascism, but is something different. The transition from the Nazi slogan “Labor sets you free” to “A dead bandit is a good bandit” and “All this scum” is the ideological mirror of the transition from the rise to the decline of the capitalist world economy. Its strength as ideology seems to rely on the fact that it combines the needs of contemporary crisis capitalism, both in what refers to accumulation itself as well as to ideological processes, with deep-seated, constitutive elements of the social character and the constitution of the subject in Brazilian “frontier capitalism,” elements that were never completely superseded in the course of a truncated modernization. Bolsonarism breaks with the “crisis management” of the Worker’s Party, thereby assuming a certain air of defiance, but substantially proposes no more than plunder and repression. In this historical configuration—absent an unexpected rapid fall—Bolsonarism as political ideology (transcending the eponymous individual) seems to open a new historical period in Brazil, putting an end to the brief interval of the Nova República (New Republic) that started in 1985.

This is a slightly modified version of an article published in October 2018 in Portuguese in Blog da Consequência: https://blogdaconsequencia.com/2018/10/04/bolsonarismo-e-capitalismo-de-fronteira/. Translated by the author.

Daniel Cunha is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology (Binghamton University), M. Sc. Environmental Science, B. Sc. Chemical Engineering. He is co-editor of the Brazilian magazine Sinal de Menos (www.sinaldemenos.org). He is currently doing research on the Industrial Revolution as world-historical/ecological process for his Ph.D. project, called “The Rise of the Hungry Automatons: The Industrial Revolution and Commodity Frontiers,” under the supervision of Jason W. Moore. Email: dcunha1@binghamton.edu.

Notes

1. Jason W. Moore, “Sugar and the expansion of the early modern world-economy: commodity frontiers, ecological transformations, and industrialization,” Review 23 (2000) 409-433. The concept of “commodity frontier” is derived from the enlarged reproduction of capital elaborated by Marx and discussed by Rosa Luxemburg. See Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy, volume two, trans. D. Fernbach (London: Penguin, 1992 [1885]), ch. 20-21; Rosa Luxemburg, The accumulation of capital, trans. A. Schwarzschild (London: Routledge, 1951 [1913]).

2. Caio Prado Júnior, The colonial background of modern Brazil, trans. S. Macedo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967 [1942]). Note that “sentido da colonização,” the original Portuguese expression used by Prado Jr., can be translated as both “meaning of colonization” and “trajectory [or path, or direction] of colonization.” Prado Jr. probably played with this polysemy to point both to the constitutive as well as the core/periphery directional character of colonization. The ratialization of slavery was a consequence of the historical trajectory of the world-economy, which drafted labor from an area by then “external” to the capitalist world-economy (Africa) to the sugar plantations first in the Mediterranean, later in the Atlantic islands and America. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The modern world-system I: capitalist agriculture and the origins of the European world-economy in the sixteenth century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011 [1974]) 88-9.

3. It should be remembered that the organic composition of capital is ratio between constant capital and variable capital (living labor). Constant capital is divided into fixed capital (machinery, buildings) and circulating capital (raw materials). In analysis of the rising organic composition of capital, Marxists too often fixate on fixed capital, ignoring circulating capital. See Jason W. Moore, “Nature in the limits to capital (and vice versa),” Radical Philosophy 193 (2015) 9-19.

4. Moishe Postone, “The current crisis and the anachronism of value,” Continental Thought & Theory1 (2017) 38-54.

5. In the famous “fragment on the machines.” See Karl Marx, Grundrisse: foundations of the critique of political economy (rough draft) (London: Penguin, 1993) 704-6.

6. On the feralization of patriarchy, see Roswitha Scholz, “Patriarchy and commodity society: gender without the body,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown(Chicago: MCM’, 2014) 123-142.

7. Robert Kurz, “The Crisis of Exchange Value: Science as Productivity, Productive Labor, and Capitalist Reproduction,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown(Chicago: MCM’, 2014) 17-76.

8. Robert Kurz, O colapso da modernização: da derrocada do socialismo de caserna à crise da economia mundial, trans. K. E. Barbosa (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1992). For an analysis of Bandung and the NIEO in this context, see Bret Benjamin. “Developmental Aspiration at the End of Accumulation: The New International Economic Order and the Antinomies of the Bandung Era,” Mediations 32.1 (Fall 2018) 37-70. For a somewhat different analysis of the trajectory of Brazilian development as a producer of primary commodities for the world market, see Nicolás Grinberg, “From populist developmentalism to liberal neodevelopmentalism: the specificity and historical development of Brazilian capital accumulation,” Critical Historical Studies 3.1 (2016) 65-104.

9. On the debt circuit between the US and China, see Robert Kurz, “World power and world money: the economic function of the U. S. military machine within global capitalism and the background of the new financial crisis,” in Marxism and the Critique of Value, ed. N. Larsen, M. Nilges, J. Robinson and N. Brown(Chicago: MCM’, 2014) 187-200.

10. On the Worker’s Party as “crisis manager,” see Marildo Menegat and Sinal de Menos, “Entrevista,” Sinal de Menos 12.2 (2018): 8-19.

11. On the crisis of the Brazilian “social pact,” see Marcos Barreira and Maurílio Botelho, A implosão do “Pacto Social” brasileiro (2016) Available at: em http://www.krisis.org/2016/a-imploso-do-pacto-social-brasileiro/

12. On the ascension of conservatism in Brazil, already visible already in 2013, see Cláudio R. Duarte, “O gigante que acordou – ou o que resta da ditadura? Protofascismo, a doença senil do conservadorismo,” Sinal de Menos edição especial (2013) 34-54; Paulo Marques, “A revolta e seu duplo: entre a revolta e o espetáculo,” Sinal de Menos,edição especial (2013) 55-79; Roger Behrens and Sinal de Menos, “Os sentidos da revolta,” Sinal de Menos edição especial (2013) 7-14.

13. The sabotage of the main opposition party (PSDB) was surprisingly admitted by Senator Tasso Jereissati in an interview to newspaper O Estado de São Paulo. Available at https://politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/eleicoes,nosso-grande-erro-foi-ter-entrado-no-governo-temer,70002500097

14. See Carla Jiménez, “‘Anti-marxista’ indicado por Olavo de Carvalho será ministro da Educação.” El País Nov 23 2018. Available at: https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2018/11/22/politica/1542910509_576428.html.

15. Ernesto H. F. Araújo, “Trump e o Ocidente,” Cadernos de Política Exterior 3 (2017) 323-357.For a Marxian critique, see Daniel Cunha, “Nacionalismo e comunidade na era da crise do va lor,” Blog da Consequência (2018). Available at: https://blogdaconsequencia.com/2018/11/27/comunidade-e-nacionalismo-na-era-da-crise-do-valor/.

16. Maurilio Lima Botelho, “Guerra aos ‘vagabundos’: sobre os fundamentos sociais da militarização em curso,” Blog da Boitempo (2018). Available at: https://blogdaboitempo.com.br/2018/03/12/guerra-aos-vagabundos-sobre-os-fundamentos-sociais-da-militarizacao-em-curso/

17. On slave-holding liberals, see Alfredo Bosi, “Slavery between two liberalisms”, in Brazil and the dialectic of colonization, Alfredo Bosi, trans. R. P. Newcomb (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015 [1988]) 163-208; Roberto Schwarz, “Misplaced ideas: literature and society in late-nineteenth century Brazil,” in Misplaced ideas, Roberto Schwarz, trans. (New York: Verso, 1992 [1977]) 19-32.

18. On the modernizing role of nazism, see Robert Kurz, Die Demokratie frisst ihre Kinder: Bemerkungen zum neuen rechts Rechtsradikalismus (1993). Available at: https://exit-online.org/textanz1.php?tabelle=autoren&index=29&posnr=49&backtext1=text1.php

19. On the “era of decreasing expectations,” see Paulo Arantes, O novo tempo do mundo e outros estudos sobre a era da emergência (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014). On “modes of life” and “circulation of affections” in today’s political crisis process, see Vladimir Safatle, “Há um golpe militar em curso no Brasil hoje,” TV Boitempo (2018). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwLg13hSkRk.

20. My translations. See the website “De olho nos ruralistas: observatório do agronegócio no Brasil”, which monitors the political acitivities of Brazilian agribusiness: https://deolhonosruralistas.com.br/.

21. A shown in a report in the newspaper O Estado de São Paulo. Available at https://politica.estadao.com.br/noticias/eleicoes,mourao-liga-indio-a-indolencia-e-negro-a-malandragem,70002434689

22. See the map of intended mining areas superimposed on indigenous people’s lands at https://www.nexojornal.com.br/grafico/2017/04/19/Quais-%C3%A1reas-ind%C3%ADgenas-as-mineradoras-querem-explorar. An important consequence of this quest for frontier expansion will be a pressure on the Amazon Forest, putting at risk the biodiversity and risking the collapse of the forest if a tipping point is crossed, resulting in a conversion into a savanna and consequent release of huge amounts of carbon. As such, it is an additional pressure on the already out-of-control planetary biogeochemical cycles. See Thomas E. Lovejoy and Carlos Nobre, “Amazon tipping point,” Science Advances 5.2 (2018); and Daniel Cunha, “The Anthropocene as fetishism,” Mediations 28.2 (2015) 65-77.

23. See the report by BBC: https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-44933382

24. Rogério S. Silva, “A política como espetáculo: a reinvenção da história brasileira e a consolidação dos discursos e das imagens integralistas na revista Anauê!” Revista Brasileira de História 25 (2005): 61-95.

Afghanistan, Western Imperialism, and the Great Game of Smashing Countries

By John Pilger

Republished from Mint Press News.

As a tsunami of crocodile tears engulfs Western politicians, history is suppressed. More than a generation ago, Afghanistan won its freedom, which the United States, Britain and their “allies” destroyed.

In 1978, a liberation movement led by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) overthrew the dictatorship of Mohammad Dawd, the cousin of King Zahir Shar. It was an immensely popular revolution that took the British and Americans by surprise.

Foreign journalists in Kabul, reported the New York Times, were surprised to find that “nearly every Afghan they interviewed said [they were] delighted with the coup”. The Wall Street Journal  reported that “150,000 persons… marched to honour the new flag… the participants appeared genuinely enthusiastic.”

The Washington Post reported that “Afghan loyalty to the government can scarcely be questioned”. Secular, modernist and, to a considerable degree, socialist, the government declared a programme of visionary reforms that included equal rights for women and minorities. Political prisoners were freed and police files publicly burned.

Under the monarchy, life expectancy was thirty-five; one in three children died in infancy. Ninety per cent of the population was illiterate. The new government introduced free medical care. A mass literacy campaign was launched.

For women, the gains had no precedent; by the late 1980s, half the university students were women, and women made up 40 per cent of Afghanistan’s doctors, 70 per cent of its teachers and 30 per cent of its civil servants.

So radical were the changes that they remain vivid in the memories of those who benefited. Saira Noorani, a female surgeon who fled Afghanistan in 2001, recalled:

Every girl could go to high school and university. We could go where we wanted and wear what we liked… We used to go to cafes and the cinema to see the latest Indian films on a Friday… it all started to go wrong when the mujahedin started winning… these were the people the West supported.

For the United States, the problem with the PDPA government was that it was supported by the Soviet Union. Yet it was never the “puppet” derided in the West, neither was the coup against the monarchy “Soviet-backed”, as the American and British press claimed at the time.

President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, later wrote in his memoirs:

We had no evidence of any Soviet complicity in the coup.

In the same administration was Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, a Polish émigré  and fanatical anti-communist and moral extremist whose enduring influence on American presidents expired only with his death in 2017.

On 3 July 1979, unknown to the American people and Congress, Carter authorised a $500 million “covert action” programme to overthrow Afghanistan’s first secular, progressive government. This was code-named by the CIA Operation Cyclone.

The $500 million bought, bribed and armed a group of tribal and religious zealots known as the mujahedin. In his semi-official history, Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward wrote that the CIA spent $70 million on bribes alone. He describes a meeting between a CIA agent known as “Gary” and a warlord called Amniat-Melli:

Gary placed a bundle of cash on the table: $500,000 in one-foot stacks of $100 bills. He believed it would be more impressive than the usual $200,000, the best way to say we’re here, we’re serious, here’s money, we know you need it… Gary would soon ask CIA headquarters for and receive $10 million in cash.

Recruited from all over the Muslim world, America’s secret army was trained in camps in Pakistan run by Pakistani intelligence, the CIA and Britain’s MI6. Others were recruited at an Islamic College in Brooklyn, New York–within sight of the doomed Twin Towers. One of the recruits was a Saudi engineer called Osama bin Laden.

The aim was to spread Islamic fundamentalism in Central Asia and destabilise and eventually destroy the Soviet Union.

In August, 1979, the U.S. Embassy in Kabul reported that “the United States’ larger interests… would be served by the demise of the PDPA government, despite whatever setbacks this might mean for future social and economic reforms in Afghanistan.”

Read again the words above I have italicised. It is not often that such cynical intent is spelt out as clearly. The U.S. was saying that a genuinely progressive Afghan government and the rights of Afghan women could go to hell.

Six months later, the Soviets made their fatal move into Afghanistan in response to the American-created jihadist threat on their doorstep. Armed with CIA-supplied Stinger missiles and celebrated as “freedom fighters” by Margaret Thatcher, the mujahedin eventually drove the Red Army out of Afghanistan.

Calling themselves the Northern Alliance, the mujahedin were dominated by warlords who controlled the heroin trade and terrorised rural women. The Taliban were an ultra-puritanical faction, whose mullahs wore black and punished banditry, rape and murder but banished women from public life.

In the 1980s, I made contact with the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, known as RAWA, which had tried to alert the world to the suffering of Afghan women. During the Taliban time they concealed cameras beneath their burqas to film evidence of atrocities, and did the same to expose the brutality of the Western-backed mujahedin. “Marina” of RAWA told me,

We took the videotape to all the main media groups, but they didn’t want to know….

In 1996, the enlightened PDPA government was overrun. The Prime Minister, Mohammad Najibullah, had gone to the United Nations to appeal to for help. On his return, he was hanged from a street light.

“I confess that [countries] are pieces on a chessboard,” said Lord Curzon in 1898,

upon which is being played out a great game for the domination of the world.

The Viceroy of India was referring in particular to Afghanistan. A century later, Prime Minister Tony Blair used slightly different words.

“This is a moment to seize,” he said following 9/11.

The Kaleidoscope has been shaken. The pieces are in flux. Soon they will settle again. Before they do, let us re-order this world around us.

On Afghanistan, he added this:

We will not walk away [but ensure] some way out of the poverty that is your miserable existence.

Blair echoed his mentor, President George W. Bush, who spoke to the victims of his bombs from the Oval Office:

The oppressed people of Afghanistan will know the generosity of America. As we strike military targets, we will also drop food, medicine and supplies to the starving and suffering…

Almost every word was false. Their declarations of concern were cruel illusions for an imperial savagery “we” in the West rarely recognise as such.

In 2001, Afghanistan was stricken and depended on emergency relief convoys from Pakistan. As the journalist Jonathan Steele reported, the invasion indirectly caused the deaths of some 20,000 people as supplies to drought victims stopped and people fled their homes.

Eighteen months later, I found unexploded American cluster bombs in the rubble of Kabul which were often mistaken for yellow relief packages dropped from the air. They blew the limbs off foraging, hungry children.

In the village of Bibi Maru, I watched a woman called Orifa kneel at the graves of her husband, Gul Ahmed, a carpet weaver, and seven other members of her family, including six children, and two children who were killed next door.

An American F-16 aircraft had come out of a clear blue sky and dropped a Mk82 500-pound bomb on Orifa’s mud, stone and straw house. Orifa was away at the time. When she returned, she gathered the body parts.

Months later, a group of Americans came from Kabul and gave her an envelope with fifteen notes: a total of 15 dollars. “Two dollars for each of my family killed,” she said.

The invasion of Afghanistan was a fraud. In the wake of 9/11, the Taliban sought to distant themselves from Osama bin Laden. They were, in many respects, an American client with which the administration of Bill Clinton had done a series of secret deals to allow the building of a $3 billion natural gas pipeline by a U.S. oil company consortium.

In high secrecy, Taliban leaders had been invited to the U.S. and entertained by the CEO of the Unocal company in his Texas mansion and by the CIA at its headquarters in Virginia. One of the deal-makers was Dick Cheney, later George W. Bush’s Vice-President.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”.

“Do you have any regrets?” I asked.

Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?

When we watch the current scenes of panic at Kabul airport, and listen to journalists and generals in distant TV studios bewailing the withdrawal of “our protection”, isn’t it time to heed the truth of the past so that all this suffering never happens again?

Venezuela's Gangs Have Been Turned Into Armed Capitalist Enterprises: An Interview with Andrés Antillano

By Adriana Gregson

Republished from Venezuelanalysis.

In July, security forces carried out a three-day anti-gang operation in the Cota 905 barrio of Caracas after an uptick in violence in the working-class district. The Gran Cacique Indio Guacaipuro Operation, which caught the headlines of the global media, involved 2500 security personnel and left 22 gang members dead and 28 wounded. Four policemen or women were killed and 10 wounded, while unofficial reports indicate that five bystanders were also killed.

Government sources claim links between the leaders of the “mega-gangs” and far-right groups and regime change paramilitary activities stemming from Colombia. Opposition spokespersons have denied any involvement.

Part I of this two-part interview with criminologist Andrés Antillano looks at some of the historical transformations that gangs have been subject to in light of changing relations with the state and the recessionary economy. Part II examines the recent operation in more detail.

Adriana Gregson: What are the mega-bands? What characterizes them?

Andrés Antillano: The myths concerning the treatment of violence and gangs in working-class neighborhoods must be debunked. For a long time, there has been an almost conspiratorial and sensationalist interpretation about the gangs in working-class barrios.

Gangs have existed in Caracas for many years, and in general can be described as an expression of the profound inequalities and the dynamics of exclusion experienced by young people in popular sectors. Until a few years ago, gangs were entirely dedicated to the affirmation of young people: their socialization and reputation building out of courage and solidarity through the use of violence was one of the few social and cultural resources that an excluded person may wield.

Being a bad, daring, reckless, brave, or evil kid was the way of "being someone" for a person who has no other chance of a decent job or access to schooling that may allow them to improve their living conditions. These characteristics are valued in these excluded territories.

The gangs used to function fundamentally in this way: they were very small groups marked by expressive violence which was essentially linked to confronting those in neighboring sectors to show reputation, honor, respect, ancestry, group solidarity, etc. This was the dynamics of the gangs for a very long time. They incorporated very young kids who were engaged in these activities and would sometimes also dabble in selling drugs, but essentially they were gangs associated with sociability and with the construction of reputations.

Sometimes, those who obtained greater social capital through neighborhood confrontations could be recruited for criminal activities elsewhere -- such as stealing a car -- by more mature criminals. But the life of the gang was also consumed in a dynamic of us-against-the-others, the enemies, "the snakes," in other words, those associated with rival groups in specific neighborhoods.

That's the dynamic that prevailed at least until 2014-15. But this has been changing in recent years, and what we find in the Cota 905 and in other neighborhoods of Caracas and Venezuela is the result of the generational transformation of these groups of excluded young people.

In what ways have they been transformed?

The transformation of gangs has essentially been due to two factors.

Firstly, the paradoxical effect of heavy-handed [government and police] policies. Since 2008-10 a heavy-handed policy has contradicted the strategy of non-criminalization of the poor that the Bolivarian government [previously] implemented.

This shift resulted in the imprisonment of many young people from the barrios. Venezuela’s prison population has doubled from 20 or 21,000 to more than 50,000 in a few years. This overcrowded, collapsed system controlled by prison gangs brought a transformation in the criminal careers of the youths who came from a background of neighborhood conflicts and some opportunistic crime. They went to prison and entered the sphere of the gangs that control the prisons. After that, they left with a series of relationships and cultural capital which generated changes in their way of thinking and allowed them to transform the lives of the gangs they returned to.

From 2013-2014 onwards, when the youths who had been locked away began to return to their neighborhoods, we see the first great transformation of the gangs. The gang was no longer that which clashed with rival groups, or not only so, but it also started to engage in more lucrative activities. We see the transition of the gangs from practicing expressive crimes to instrumental ones (1): crimes that sought accumulation, surplus money.

So mass imprisonment brought about the first gang transformation or mutation: they gained a greater degree of coordination and centralization and association networks between bands from different sectors began to be formed.

Then comes another moment of heavy-handed policies with the People's Liberation Operations (OLP) (2) and the Special Action Forces (FAES). In the face of the growth of more lucrative criminal activities, the state's response was not to shift its policies away from dysfunctional heavy-handedness, but rather to accentuate it with policies leading to the extermination of every suspicious young person.

This generated a new transformation of the bands that had faced each other off for a long time: they ended up articulating amongst themselves and generating a change in their rationality. They also abandoned a set of criminal codes such as honor, respect, blood debts, etc., which were transmitted from generation to generation, and they began to have a much more pragmatic, instrumental, and even business-oriented logic.

Another element at this stage is that their leaders are now adults, they are more grown-up. Police violence triggered the transformation of the gangs because the youngest were killed and the surviving elders colonized the bands. Before gang members and leaders were very young, around 20, but now the leaders were all around 40.

In addition, gangs began to grow in size, not only geographically, but also with a much more complex level of organization. Unlike the previous bands that were small, horizontal, and without hierarchy or division of labor, gangs started to apply hierarchies, division of labor and the delegation of tasks.

Heavy-handed policies are the first factor. What is the second?

The second factor is economic change. Previously, youths were used to an expanding consumer economy. There was a boom economy that had left some sectors behind, mainly the excluded young who were the ones who found a way to compensate for this relegation through violence.

In this context, the use of violence was closely linked to the expressive demonstrations of "tagging" or "fronting up,” which were related to reputation. The idea of “fronting up to life” is an economic one because it speaks of the singularity of "being someone" in a world of exclusion in which you are nobody. “No-bodies” became “someone” through exercising violence. That's "fronting up" for folk who own nothing with which to front up.

However, the contraction of consumption in Venezuela meant that these groups shifted to much more economically attractive activities. It was no longer profitable to “front up,” there was no longer any point in this expressive economy.

In addition, instrumental crime was becoming less and less violent because it was necessary to detract police attention in order to engage in profitable activities. This is how the rates of predatory crimes such as hijacking or vehicle theft end up falling because they involve a lot of risks and little profit.

As such, gangs are turned into criminal enterprises that function just as a company would, with a logic of capitalist accumulation, surplus investment, recruiting more workers to lower costs, reinvest and expand. We observe a change in the nature of gangs that have become instrumental enterprises, mainly concentrated in illicit markets with managerial rationality. They are armed capitalist enterprises.

As a former kidnapper once told me:

Before, you stood on the highway and kidnapped anyone because you could get a lot of money from them -- there was a lot of money in the country. But now a kidnapping is worth at least US $50,000... You'd have to look for someone who has that sort of money because if you kidnap them and you're grabbed by the police you're probably going to get killed.

Kidnapping today only occurs in very specific cases when there is inside information of someone who has $100,000 to hand over. Running the risk of being killed to steal a cell phone worth $50 or $100 doesn't make sense. Predatory crime such as homicide has fallen, and the gangs are moving into much more lucrative and less attention-grabbing activities.

We are essentially talking about illicit markets of inelastic demand. There are markets that do not contract even in the crisis, like food or drugs. The latter not only does not contract but in times of crisis it grows. If I am a crack consumer I will not stop consuming it if I cannot pay. Rather, in addition to stealing, I will start selling crack too, generating a market expansion.

Something similar happens with the food market, they are the two large niches that are controlled by armed groups: the drug markets - here the Cota 905 gangs had a central role - and food, which is largely controlled by collectives associated with the police.

Is this what happened in the Cota 905 district?

The Cota 905 was transformed into the largest drug market in Caracas. We are talking about a drug market controlled by the gang that could make about $50,000 a week, according to some sources. Secondary sellers shopped in the Cota 905 and a lot of people also bought directly there.

It must be said that the Cota 905 has very specific social and geographical characteristics. The area is one of the poorest in Caracas because they are very new and precarious barrios. In fact, it grows around a very old avenue, but it was populated much more recently than [other large barrios] La Vega or Petare. In addition, it is a sharply inclined hillside where only people who cannot live anywhere chose to live. There is still a green area there that is populated: it is an area of natural growth of excluded people. There are people who live in very precarious conditions, much more precarious than people who live in other barrios of the city center.

The sector houses about 50,000 people that are about 10 or 15 blocks from the [central] Plaza Bolivar of Caracas, and it is next to [the middle class] El Paraíso district, which is very close to the center of the city, and it has the Cemetery district on the other side, where the largest popular market in the city is located. The Cota 905 enjoys ideal social, geographic, and economic conditions.

As a result of police violence and mass imprisonment, many gangs shifted from being gangs that were pitted against other gangs to organizations that began to effectively control the drug market and territory. Predatory crimes came down and the gang in the area dedicated itself to selling drugs or other more complicated activities such as extortion, extortion in informal mines, the issue of the border, etc.

In addition, the gang began to develop armed resistance capabilities, yielding the ability to negotiate with the state. This is another transformation that was alien to criminals before. Traditional criminals did not negotiate because it was a matter of reputation: "I don't care if they kill me.” Now, gang leaders are able to sit down with so-and-so to pay him or to negotiate politically: "we guarantee that there will be peace here, there will be no violence, but you will not enter." This demonstrates an effective, successful capacity to establish negotiations that had been alien to the traditional criminal logic.

This transformation was not only seen in the Cota 905, but it also happened in other places, and the gangs that have managed to thrive are the ones that established some kind of agreement [with the authorities]. This allowed for a large economic growth, which made the bands stronger at the same time.

At what point does the exponential growth of the Cota 905 gang occur?

There is an unforeseen circumstantial factor in the case of the Cota 905, which was the pandemic. With the pandemic, the Cota 905 gang grew rapidly.

Firstly, the impoverishment of already poor sectors increased with the pandemic, which means that there is a much larger potential workforce for the gangs, stimulating their numeric growth. The new recruits were no longer just from the Cota 905, because the gang started to receive people from different places and to grow and establish alliances with other bands in other places.

There is also an important circulation of people from the Caracas center and outside the city who deal in the Cota 905, which allows a greater availability of workers because many who could not find work elsewhere, especially in the moments of greatest recession due to lockdown, looked to the gang for employment.

Secondly, in the absence of a presence of the state, the gang started to carry out state functions.

The reports from informants are incredible: the gang functioned as a much more effective state than the state itself. During the pandemic it imposed curfew, applied safe-conduct passes, everyone had to wear a facemask, there were checkpoints at the barrio's entrances and exits, and people had to spray themselves with disinfectant. It achieved a very effective form of control.

In addition, the gang provided food and sold it at cost price, even sometimes helping the worst-off families. It became a supplier. The gang not only exercised functions to maintain order and sanitary control (the right hand of the state), but also exercised the left hand with redistributive functions, generating a high level of legitimacy in the territory.

As one of the most impoverished urban sectors, there was a greater availability of youths who could not find work elsewhere, and they found economic opportunity in the gang: youths from the base level of the gang could earn $50-100 a week [compared to $2.50 a month in a public sector workplace or roughly $50-90 a month in some private-sector jobs]. There is no unskilled job in Venezuela that can get this pay.

In other words, on the one hand, the gang achieved political legitimacy and on the other, it managed to grow economically. This occurred as [the gang] raised the price of drugs first by cutting supply, and then, once supply was restored, it had the cunning to accommodate the market to such an extent that people could go to buy drugs without much of a security risk. They even set up private parties that attracted wealthy people and became very attractive in the middle of the pandemic.

In short, the economy grew and what happens to any company when it grows in terms of capital, especially if it is an armed company? It has to expand. But in doing so, confrontations with the state became more and more common, breaking this precarious implicit or explicit agreement that existed with institutional actors.

At the same time, by becoming economically successful, sections of the police started to try to meddle in the gang’s sales, cracking down on these illegal activities. That is how [state force] attacks on the people of the Cota 905 and their allies became more frequent, generating increasingly violent responses until what happened a few weeks ago.

What triggered such a large-scale police operation in the center of the city?

The trigger for the episode was a police attack on one of the Cota 905 gang’s major allies in which they were badly wounded. But the development of the confrontation was a repeat of previous episodes that had already happened on many occasions: the gang overestimated their firepower and underestimated the response of the state. Gang leaders were trying to get away with more and more, including chasing down a police commission on the highway recently. They thought that the state wasn't going to react.

On the other hand, the Cota 905 gang (or one of its bosses) had begun to develop an idea about not only functioning like a company but also as a social movement. It was looking to bring together all the gangs in Caracas to pressure the government to negotiate certain conditions, a kind of criminal syndicate, a union of the outlaws of Caracas.

This idea had nothing to do with business or profitability, which, in fact, are contradictory objectives... Perhaps that's what caused the gang to fail [in its confrontation with the police]. Maybe the Cota 905 gang expected a response from their allies and believed that the government wouldn’t dare to do what it did. The increasingly virulent episodes from the gang may have also been a way to put pressure on the government and to show strength to its allies. That's my hypothesis.

Why had the government not acted before?

I think there are several reasons. The government has shown a complete inability to develop effective responses to the issue of crime. Two responses have been observed from the government: excessive and counterproductive violence, or nothing.

Let us recall that People's Liberation Operations (OLP) (1) were inaugurated in the Cota 905 in June 2015. I think there were 4 or 5 OLP incursions in total, all equally ineffective.

In parallel, the government tried to favor peaceful agreements that would allow it to abstain from [forcibly] taking over the territory until the last moment. The July operation was very serious in terms of human cost, occurring in the middle of densely populated neighborhoods and with an armed structure with great firepower. I was very surprised at the cleanliness of the police’s operation.

A clean operation?

It was relatively clean. We are not talking about the police’s dignified and humane treatment of people, but this was a very complicated area to take and control. The armed group was using around 200 armed youths in an intricate and highly inclined area. It was very complex and there was a risk of a massacre.

The operation was very clean in military terms. The police took the higher ground and of course, in doing so, they made the resistance of the band untenable.

Venezuela’s police forces use a wartime logic of extermination and which favors excessive or lethal violence. But in this case, although there were episodes of looting and illegal arrests and deaths, I have no evidence to say that there was a massacre. I expected it to be more dramatic, especially because there were precedents such as in [the Caracas barrio of] La Vega, where there were summary executions during several police raids this year.

But I am convinced that police control of the sector is going to be untenable, as it has been on other occasions. The gang is rearming itself, and the most likely thing to occur is that small armed bands will start to appear again, pitted against each other. This, in turn, will bring an increase in violence and opportunistic crime in the area.

What kind of security policies could the government implement in this case?

First of all, an effective and targeted social policy is needed. One of the problems is that the gang has strong legitimacy because it provided real opportunities for the neighborhood youths.

The problem is complicated in recessionary contexts such as the one the country is experiencing. The state must be able to offer something to youths, not only as a preventive measure so the gang is not rearmed or so that bands do not re-appear, but because it is the state's obligation to guarantee social and economic opportunities to the less favored communities. A strong social policy is needed.

But that's not enough. The police presence must be different from occupation models that are marked by profound illegitimacy. If we ask anyone from the Cota 905 they will say that they preferred it when the police weren't there. I've asked a lot of people. The police’s practice is abusive and includes extortion or systematic violence. These abuses come in addition to a precarious presence, because police do not occupy permanently, but rather make incursions as if it were enemy territory.

One could use the 'sacrificed zones' terminology which is typically used in the debate on the relationship between territory and ecology. Many neighborhoods in our cities are sacrificed zones: the state has abandoned its responsibilities, both in regulating conflicts and violence as well as in terms of the social investment needed to reduce wealth gaps and urban inequalities. It is in these sacrificed zones that organizations like gangs emerge, taking advantage of the vacuum left. In these zones, one can also see security forces using practices not tolerated elsewhere, such as taking for granted that some citizens are second-class, disposable bodies who have no rights or guarantees.

So this has to be reversed. It is not only a question of re-establishing the presence of the state, which is of course necessary, but also of re-establishing the rule of law, restoring and protecting the rights of the population (violated by the gang, by crime, but also by structural conditions and by the security forces). Equally, the welfare state, as defined by the constitution, which guarantees access to conditions for a dignified life.

A permanent police presence that has a different relationship with the community, that guarantees security and that is not a further source of harm or damage is required. There are models that have been used, models of proximity or community policing that can be developed, but it certainly involves a transformation of the security forces.

On the other hand, there are different strategies of working with gangs, different policies that can be developed to reach agreements or prevent an escalation of violent activities. It is possible to reach agreements with gangs, especially when they're small. There are very interesting experiences even of gang transformation, because these are spaces for the socialization of youths that can be taken advantage of by reducing the more criminal or violent activities.

Every day we all commit crimes or small infractions like running a red light, smoking a joint, urinating in the street because we cannot get to a toilet on time, parking out of place. We all commit infractions and the police handle crimes differentially, with a very marked class bias. In the same way, one can bet on a model that manages crimes in a focused way, as has happened in the experiences of Boston or Pernambuco, where any crime that involves violence or the threat of violence is relentlessly pursued.

One strategy is a policy focused on those most dangerous activities, such as armed robbery or gunfights with neighboring gangs, while other illicit activities that are less violent, such as the sale of drugs on a small scale, are tolerated to some degree.

But what happens in Venezuela is just the opposite. Here, the police love to chase down marihuana users because if they arrest a smoker with three grams of crack the arresting officer looks good and might get a promotion. Likewise, if a middle-class citizen is arrested, then the officer might be able to squeeze some money off them. So, sometimes heavy-handedness equates to a bunch of imprisoned marihuana users.

It is necessary to focus on more serious crimes. How to deal with drug crime is a long debate, but everyone agrees that a small-scale drug dealer is less dangerous than a guy with a gun killing or threatening people.

There are also other formulas for integration, such as disarmament programs that can be effective. In other words, there is a constellation of affective responses that may prevent gangs from being reintroduced in this area, as will surely happen [in the Cota 905] because the exclusion and poverty remain intact.

But heavy-handed policies mean that you go from doing nothing to excessive and unnecessary violence, permanently going from one extreme to the other. A police force that kills people is not an effective force, quite the contrary. It is ineffective, because unlike in war where lethal force is the objective, in terms of security a police force that kills people is not capable of controlling the territory, reverting to military incursions after facing levels of violent responses that it did not know how to control in time. This is a cyclical dynamic.

The other thing is that the government or the state has been restoring certain capabilities and trying to recover spaces where it has lost control. That happens on the [Colombian] border, in the mines, and it's also happening in the case of the Caracas barrios of Cota 905 or José Felix Ribas. Sometimes this is achieved through the state’s own strength, but sometimes by forging alliances or taking sides with criminal groups, as I'm told is happening in mining areas.

I generally avoid the issue of the government and state, because often the problem just involves a sergeant who has a personal deal with someone or a police commissioner who's looking for some extra cash, it’s not the minister or the president. Our state, like every state, is fractured, it's an archipelago. There is an author who speaks of the fetish of the state, and just as money or merchandise is a fetish, the state is likewise because there is no single large coherent leviathan that moves at a single pace. Rather, it is made up of archipelagos, autonomous groups. Above all, a state like ours has high levels of deinstitutionalization like any rentier state.

Finally, what do you think of the official line [of collaboration between gang leaders and opposition regime-change actors] concerning the Gran Cacique Indio Guacaipuro Operation?

Well, I'm a social researcher not a police investigator. I think that there were people in the Cota 905 gang who had relationships with different political actors, because they had a social movement logic, a more interesting and dangerous phenomenon. A logic of linking up, of meeting with people runs alongside an economic, big business logic of accumulation.

So, I wouldn't be surprised if they have some kind of communication with the opposition, I don't know, it's possible, but I don't think it was decisive. I don't think they worked for the opposition because we're talking about a very profitable business of US $50,000 profit per week. One would not risk that to get into a conspiratorial plan, it would be foolish.

But I do not rule it out, it is possible, anything is possible. But I have no elements to support the idea. I think the gang acted like this because one of the leaders was hurt. If anything, I think that saying that the events of the Cota 905 are a direct consequence of a conspiratorial opposition-led plan is an uncomfortable narrative for several reasons.

First, it excuses or renders invisible the real causes (the persistent social problems) and even deepens them. It also ignores the failure of heavy-handed police policies and the possibility of bands such as these being re-articulated.

Another possible scenario is that some other gangs take over this gigantic space that is left empty, which is not that of the Cota 905 district but of the Caracas drug market. In fact, the main competition is in the hands of groups that may become the emerging market, such as the Aragua Train gang which also has a complex and sophisticated organization. But this narrative hides the causes, trivializes the phenomenon, and also ends up having a paradoxical effect of eulogizing the opposition's paramilitarism.

This narrative is a persistent government narrative, and it's interesting to wonder where it comes from. It is a kind of conspiracy theory that is very typical of the left, but which also connects with something that I find unacceptable, which is veiled (and sometimes not so veiled) xenophobia. According to this line, all the country's problems are the fault of the Colombian people, not even of the government, of the Colombians themselves. For example, there was a man who said that Koki [Cota 905 gang leader] was the son of a Colombian. That was the explanation: being the son of a Colombian makes you suspicious. Had [Venezuela and Colombia’s liberator] Simón Bolívar had his way, we would all be Colombians!

But there is an even more sinister element to this narrative: paramilitarism. Firstly a clarification: paramilitarism is not a phenomenon which is exclusive to Colombia. Perhaps the best-known example was the British Crown’s extermination groups in Northern Ireland. The concept refers to armed groups acting outside the law with explicit or implicit government support. They are groups controlled by de facto powers close to the state. Paramilitarism here would be more typical of those groups that act as pseudo-policemen, arresting people and setting up checkpoints.

Where does this narrative come from? How is it strengthened (especially since 2014)? How does it play out in the explanation of the problems of gangs and crime in Caracas?

It comes from a very paradoxical and dangerous twist that occurred after September 11, 2002 in the US’ narrative concerning counterinsurgency. This shift started associating criminal groups with terrorism. Different US right-wing think tanks tried to translate that to Latin America, and the appearance of this imperialist discourse in Venezuela comes about in special interest communities and through actors linked to the Interior and Justice Ministry who begin to have access to texts from these think tanks.

Imperialist rhetoric is not positioned through ambassadors. It comes through much more hidden mechanisms. It was interior ministers who came from the world of intelligence (a community with certain knowledge and technologies generally promoted by the great centers of world power, such as the US) who introduced this narrative in Venezuela, alleging for the first time that criminal groups were associated terrorism and political actors. Similar narratives associating criminal groups with terrorist organizations and political groups were also used in Central America, Colombia and Brazil, for example.

But this narrative paradoxically ends up legitimizing both terrorism and its actors in different sectors. To illustrate this point, I wish to share a conversation I had in 2015 with the gang leader of an area where I do fieldwork. I asked him what he thought of the government pigeonholing them as paramilitaries and he replied that “Of course we are, because look at this -and he shows me his weapon-, if the military comes, we're going to stop them with this! Let's be the 'para-military'!" He had no idea what he was talking about!

What I can tell you is that the Cota 905 was the great drug market of Caracas, and, therefore, was in direct contact with Colombia. Colombia's drug trafficking is closely linked to groups connected to the insurgency or the dissidents of the insurgency, such as FARC factions and paramilitary groups. In the world of crime, the ‘business is business’ maxim applies and ideological differences are of no interest, only money matters.

However, what is more worrying about this conspiratorial narrative is that it glorifies the opposition and paramilitaries. It associates them with a gang that has great prestige among youths who are excluded from the popular sectors of the city. This may end up having the rather paradoxical effect of eulogizing these groups.

Notes

(1) Assaults, disorders, and domestic violence are examples of expressive crime. Instrumental crime, on the other hand, involves behavior that has a specific tangible goal, such as the acquisition of property. Predatory crimes, such as theft, burglary, and robbery, are examples of instrumental crime.

(2) OLPs were police operations in which early morning raids on barrios were carried out with a “shoot first ask later” logic. Since their start in 2015, they were largely criticized for violating people’s human rights until authorities fazed them out.

Andrés Antillano is a social psychologist and criminology professor at the Institute of Criminal Sciences in Caracas’ Central University of Venezuela (UCV). He investigates violence and the conditions that favor it, examining these issues from a class perspective.

Translation by Paul Dobson for Venezuelanalysis.

In Somalia, the US is Bombing the Very ‘Terrorists’ it Created

[Photo credit: ABDIRAZAK HUSSEIN FARAH/AFP/GETTY IMAGES]

By TJ Coles

Republished from Internationalist 360.

This July, the Biden administration picked up where Trump left off and began bombing Somalia, a country with a gross domestic product of less than $6 billion and a poverty rate of 70 percent. But why?

The official reason provided by the Pentagon was that the Somali National Army needed air support in its operations to counter al-Shabaab. But the actual reason was that Somalia is geo-strategically important to US empire.

Successive US administrations have cycled through a myriad of excuses to either bomb the country or to arm its dictators: Cold War politics, “humanitarian intervention,” anti-piracy, and more recently counterterrorism.

As we shall see, in the mid-2000s, a fragile coalition of soft and hard Islamists – explicitly not allied to al-Qaeda at the time – brought some measure of peace to the areas of Somalia it controlled. With help from Britain and neighboring Ethiopia, the US smashed the coalition and pushed more right-wing elements like al-Shabaab over the edge into militancy.

And of course, the global superpower bombing one of the poorest countries on Earth in the name of national security is not terrorism.

Let’s take a look at the broader context and specific chronology.

A US imperial bulwark is born in Africa

The Pentagon has divided the world into self-appointed Areas of Responsibility (AORs). The Southern Command deems itself “responsible” for operations in Central and South America, regardless of what the people of the region think.

The Central Command (CENTCOM) covers much of the Middle East and Central Asia: the key intersections of energy fields and pipelines that enable the US to influence the global economy at the expense of competitors, notably Russia and China.

The Africa Command (AFRICOM) was founded in 2007 by the George W. Bush administration and is based in Stuttgart, Germany. President Barack Obama vastly expanded its operations.

AFRICOM’s current AOR covers 53 of the continent’s 54 states, with Egypt in the northeast already under the AOR of CENTCOM due to its strategic value (more below).

AFRICOM recently bragged about how it helped coordinate with Somali “partners,” meaning elements of the regime imposed on the country by the West, to organize the Biden-led bombing of al-Shabaab.

AFRICOM says: “The command’s initial assessment is that no civilians were injured or killed given the remote nature of where this engagement occurred.” But who knows?

US commanders operating in the African theater have tended to dismiss the notion that civilian deaths should be tallied at all. In 1995, for example, the US wound down its “assistance” to the UN mission in Somalia, but ended up in a shooting war in which several Somalis died.

The US commander, Lt. Gen. Anthony Zinni, said at the time, “I’m not counting bodies… I’m not interested.”

Somalia’s geopolitical importance to US empire

In the Africa-Middle East regions, three seas are of strategic importance to the big powers: the Mediterranean, the Red Sea (connected by Egypt’s Suez Canal), and the Gulf of Aden, which is shared by Somalia in Africa and Yemen in the Middle East.

Through these seas and routes travel the shipping containers of the world, carrying oil, gas, and consumer products. They are essential for the strategic deployment of troops and naval destroyers.

Somalia was occupied by Britain and Italy during the “Scramble for Africa,” the continent-wide resource-grab by Western colonial powers that began in the late-19. Ethiopia continues to occupy Somalia’s Ogaden region.

A 1950s’ British Colonial Office report described the Gulf of Aden as “an important base from which naval, military and air forces can protect British interests in the Persian Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula.” “British” interests, like “US” interests today, means elite interests.

A George W. Bush-era report by the US Army War College notes that, “Even before the Suez Canal came into being, the [Red] Sea had been of importance as an international waterway. It served as a bridge between the richest areas of Europe and the Far East.” The report emphasizes that the “geopolitical position of the Red Sea is of a special importance.”

AFRICOM was founded with a grand imperial ambition: to make the four of the five countries on Africa’s Red Sea coast – Djibouti, Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan – comply with US elite interests, and to keep the Sea, Gulf of Aden, and Suez Canal open for business and strategic deployment.

As noted before, CENTCOM covers Egypt. During the Arab Spring a decade ago, US strategists feared, like their British predecessors, that losing the Suez Canal to a democratic government in Egypt “would damage U.S. capabilities to mobilize forces to contain Iran and would weaken the overall U.S. defense strategy in the Middle East,” home of much of the world’s accessible oil.

International interference drives Somalia’s civil conflict

Somalia declared independence in 1960. Its British and Italian areas merged into a single nation led by President Aden Abdullah Osman and Prime Minister Abdirashid Ali Shermarke, who later became president. Most political parties merged with the Somali Youth League to create a de facto single-party state.

Backed by the West, Ethiopia blocked Somalia’s diplomatic efforts to reclaim the Ogaden region. As president, Abdirashid took millions of dollars in Soviet military assistance and was subsequently assassinated by one “Said Orfano,” a young police-trained man posing as a cop and erroneously referred to in contemporary sources as a “bodyguard.”

Major General Siad Barre took over in 1969 and ruled until his overthrow in 1991. An early-1970s CIA intelligence memo refers to Russian-Somali relations as “largely a liaison of convenience,” marred by “mutual” “distrust.”

After Barre’s failed war with Ethiopia over Ogaden and his explicit rejection of Soviet money and ideology, the US saw him as a client. In 1977, senior US policymakers highlighted Somalia’s “break with the Soviets.” From then until 1989, the US gave nearly $600 million in military aid to Barre’s regime to nudge it further from the Soviet sphere of influence.

The Barre regime used the newly augmented military – from 3,000 to 120,000 personnel – to crush the rival Somali National Movement, killing tens of thousands of civilians and driving a million people from their homes.

But the coalition that deposed Barre in 1991 fell apart and the rival factions fought a civil war that triggered famine and killed an additional 300,000 people within the first couple of years.

The United Nations intervened to deliver food to civilians. The US saw the move as an opportunity to test the new doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” in the form of Operation Restore Hope. President George H.W. Bush said that the objective was to “save thousands of innocents from death.”

But a master’s thesis by Major Vance J. Nannini of the US Army’s Fort Leavenworth provides a version of events much closer to the truth: “Throughout our involvement with Somalia, our overriding strategic objective was simply to acquire and maintain the capability to respond to any military contingency that could threaten U.S. interests in the Middle East, Northeast Africa and the Red Sea area.”

Restore Hope ended in a fiasco for the US, exemplified by the famous Black Hawk Down incident, and thousands of Somali deaths – “I’m not counting bodies,” as Commander Zinni said of a later mission.

A convenient target in the “war on terror”

In Djibouti in 1999, a Transitional National Government (TNG) was formed in exile and came to power in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in 2001.

At the same time, a broad umbrella of Sufis and Salafists – the “left” and “right” of Islam – known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU) was gaining political and territorial ground.

The TNG collapsed in 2004 and was replaced with a Transitional Federal Government founded in Kenya and backed by the Ethiopian proxy Abdullahi Yusuf, a man harbored by Britain and even given a liver transplant in the UK. (The liver allegedly came from an Irish Republican Army member. “Now I am a real killer,” joked Abdullahi.)

Abdullahi was found liable for damages in a UK court over the killing of a British citizen in Somalia in 2002 by his bodyguards.

Under the post-9/11 rubric of fighting a “war on terror,” the CIA added to the chaos throughout the period by covertly funding non-Islamist “warlords,” including those the US previously fought in the 1990s. The aim was to kill and capture ICU members and other Islamists.

In addition, the Pentagon’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) engaged in covert operations. Estimates of the number of JSOC personnel on the ground in Somalia range from three to 100.

US Special Forces set up a network of operations and surveillance in the country, supposedly to counter al-Qaeda.

In 2003, for instance, US agents kidnapped an innocent man, Suleiman Abdullah Salim, from a Mogadishu hospital. Claiming that he was an “al-Qaeda” operative, the US had Suleiman tortured at a number of “rendition” sites before releasing him. (The operatives who grabbed him were tipped off by the “warlord” Mohammed Dheere, who was paid by the CIA.)

But one of the Arabic meanings of “al-Qaeda” is “the database,” referring to the computer file with information on the tens of thousands of mujahideen and their acolytes trained, armed, organized, and funded by the US and Britain throughout the 1980s to fight the Soviets (Operation Cyclone).

There are more direct links between the US and al-Shabaab. In his younger days, ICU secretary and later al-Shabaab leader Ahmed Abdi Godane joined the only major terrorist group in Somalia in the 1990s, Al-Itihaad al-Islamiya (AIAI, “Islamic Union”). The AIAI fighters trained with “al-Qaeda” in Afghanistan in the 1980s, when the US and Britain were training “al-Qaeda.” (See citation no. 7.)

Killing Somalia’s hope

By the mid-2000s, with the rise of the ICU, the hope of stability came to Somalia – but it was not to last. In 2003, the US Combined Joint Tasks Force Horn of Africa initiated training of Ethiopia’s military in tactics, logistics, and maintenance. The US backing later came in handy fighting the ICU.

The ICU was rapidly and widely painted as an extremist organization. However, a Congressional Research Service (CRS) report notes that it was “well received by the people in the areas the Courts controlled,” particularly as it provided social services.

Western propaganda spun the ICU’s shutting down of cinemas as proof of its Islamo-fascism. But the CRS report says that such measures were undertaken at the request of parents because children were skipping school, “not because of the Courts’ alleged jihadist and extremist ideology… There is no evidence to support the allegation that women were prohibited from working.”

As Western vessels continue to deplete starving Somalia’s fish stocks to sell to comparatively privileged consumers, propaganda denounces Somali “piracy” against Euro-American ships. However, a report by the Royal Institute for International Affairs (the British think tank also known as Chatham House), says: “The only period during which piracy virtually vanished around Somalia was during the six months of rule by the Islamic Courts Union in the second half of 2006.”

A World Bank report from 2006 notes that the ICU “brought a measure of law and order to the large areas of South-Central Somalia” it controlled. The US State Department, meanwhile, was hosting an international conference in a bid to remove the ICU and bolster the Transitional Federal Government (TFG).

With US and British training, including logistical support, Ethiopia invaded Somalia in late-2006 to install Abdullahi as President of the TFG.

The US and Britain worked hard to set up a new regime in a war so brutal that over 1 million people fled their homes. In addition, tens of thousands crossed the Gulf of Aden to Yemen in hazardous small boats sailed by traffickers. Hundreds of thousands ended up in dire refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, where women and girls were raped.

A US- and UK-backed regime terrorizes Somalia’s people

The Transitional Federal Government terrorized the Somali population. One of the few British journalists to report on this at the time, the Kenya-born Aidan Hartley, wrote: “several Somali leaders who have been linked to allegations of war crimes against countless civilians are living double lives in Britain.”

General Mohamed Darwish, head of the TFG’s National Security Agency, was “given British citizenship, state benefits and a subsidised home.”

The taxpayer-funded privatization unit the Department for International Development (DFID, now part of the Foreign Office) paid TFG politicians’ salaries, as well as buying police radios and vehicles.

Human Rights Watch says that the Commissioner of the Somali Police Force, Brig. Gen. Abdi Hasan Awale Qaybdib, was “a former warlord who has been implicated in serious human rights abuses that predate his tenure as commissioner.”

A House of Commons Library report confirms that the UN Development Program (UNDP) and the World Food Program (WFP) were used as unwitting conduits: “DFID has pledged over £20 million in new commitments for Somalia, including £12 million to the WFP. No money goes directly to the TFG. It is channelled through the UNDP.”

By 2011, this included training 3,000 police in Somaliland and hiring mercenaries formerly of the UK Special Boat Service, who were promised up to £1,500 a day.

The consequences for Somali civilians were devastating. In addition to the refugees noted above, the instability caused by the war triggered another famine by jeopardizing aid and driving people from areas near food distribution centers.

The US has survived shocks like 9/11 because it is a robust nation. Fragile countries like Somalia cannot withstand major political disruptions.

Transforming Somalia into an extremist haven

President George W. Bush bombed “al-Qaeda” targets in Somalia in January 2007. Al-Shabaab, then led by the hard-line Godane, survived the collapse of the ICU in the same year.

The UN Security Council then authorized the African Union (AU) to occupy Somalia with “peacekeepers,” with AMISON being the US support mission.

The British-backed TFG President Abdullahi resigned in 2008 and was replaced by the former ICU leader, the more moderate Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed. Sharif met with Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2009, who pledged US support to the TFG in its fight against its former armed wing, al-Shabaab.

A West Point study notes that, using sharia, al-Shabaab had by 2009 “succeeded in bringing about a period of relative stability in much of the territory it controlled,” just like the ICU before it. Shabaab was also comparatively moderate: the “leadership pursued a pragmatic approach toward clan politics and drew its leadership and rank-and-file from a relatively diverse array of clans and sub-clans, unlike many of Somalia’s other armed factions.”

But the group made tactical errors, such as the Ramadan Offensives (2009-1010) against the TFG and AMISON forces in Mogadishu. With Shabaab weakened, Godane merged the group with “al-Qaeda” in 2011.

British-backed terrorists poured into Somalia to join Godane. By the time it allied with al-Qaeda, a quarter of Shabaab’s fighters hailed from the UK. Many had been radicalized by Abu Qatada, a man once described as Bin Laden’s “right-hand man in Europe” and a protected asset of Britain’s internal MI5 Security Service.

Via an entity called al-Muhajiroun (the Emigrants), MI5 informant Omar Bakri Mohammed and an alleged double-agent for Britain’s external security force (MI6), Haroon Rashid Aswat, also radicalized young Muslims to fight in Somalia.

The Nigeria-born Michael Adebolajo, who was charged in the UK with murder, had previously attempted to recruit for Shabaab in Kenya. He maintains that MI5 attempted to recruit him.

A time-tested recipe for destabilization and disaster

Since merging with “al-Qaeda,” al-Shabaab has extended its reach, reportedly sending suicide bombers into neighboring countries, including Kenya.

One could say that the Biden administration has learned no lessons after decades of interference in Somalia. But this would be inaccurate. Successive US administrations understand perfectly that stirring the pot of extremism and relying on propaganda to report the result, not the process, gives them endless excuses to occupy other countries.

The Pentagon is committed to global domination, Somalia is a strategic chokepoint, and the Department of Defense needs reasons to maintain its presence in the country.

The US created al-Shabaab in several ways. First, it escalated Islamist vs. non-Islamist tensions by backing secular “warlords” as a proxy against the ICU in the mid-2000s. This alienated the moderate factions of the ICU and empowered the right-wing Islamists.

Second, and most importantly, Washington backed Ethiopia’s invasion in late 2006, triggering a catastrophe for the civilian population, many of whom welcomed hard-line Muslims because they imposed a degree of law and order.

Third, by painting the nomadic and Sufi Islamist nation of Somalia as a hub of right-wing Salafi extremism, Western policymakers and media propagandists created a self-fulfilling prophesy in which Muslim fundamentalists eventually joined the terror groups they were already accused of being part of.

Fourth, for a country supposedly concerned with international terrorism, the US has done nothing to rein in one its closest allies, the UK, whose successive governments have sheltered a number of Islamic extremists that recruited for Somalia.

Even if we look at Somalia’s crisis through a liberal lens that ignores titanic imperial crimes, such as triggering famines, and focus on the lesser but still serious crimes of suicide bombings, it is hard not to conclude that Somalia’s pot of extremism was stirred by Western interference.

We Have More Than a Moral Obligation to the People of Afghanistan

[Photo credit: Haroon Sabawoon | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images]

By Daniel Melo

Since the US exit and the subsequent collapse of its propped-up government in Afghanistan, the left has rightly decried the US’s failure to protect the lives of the Afghan people. There was seemingly little to no exit strategy for the many people who wished to depart the country and who might face future brutality by the Taliban. And while many on the left have been right to point out that the US has a moral obligation to take in any and all Afghan refugees, this does not end the inquiry. It is not enough to say that it is simply a question of right and wrong, or that we should feel sorry for the many left behind in the wake of bad US imperialist acts. Moral questions of this sort ultimately leave out the agency and necessity of those it is trying to help. And they are ripe for the kind of conservative-reactionary rhetoric that would morally place “American” lives above those of Afghan refugees. 

Limiting the question of whether the nation should assist Afghans who wish to depart as one of “right” or “wrong” removes the people of Afghanistan from their rightful political place as equals in discussions of their futures. It is not just a moral obligation to admit Afghan refugees (whether in the thousands or millions). It is also, fundamentally, a political one. And to help understand this political obligation, we can turn to a refugee from another war.

Political scientist, refugee, and scholar Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem at the end of WWII. Eichmann, an administrator and organizer of the Nazi Holocaust, was responsible for the death of millions of people. In Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt watched the court grapple with the realities of the magnitude of the crime before them. This led to questions about the nature of culpability and justice for acts that had no precedent within the legal order. Eichmann, for one, did not believe that he had committed any wrong whatsoever. A commandant of Auschwitz noted that Eichmann thought he was spearheading a noble mission, one that would “save the German people.” What’s more, there were no laws on the books at the time that could readily be applied to the situation. Eichmann believed that he a rather strict adherent to “the law” in his carrying out of Jewish extermination.

Thus, the Israeli court was put in the position of attempting to judge a man for whom there was no applicable law, particularly since he did not carry out the individual killing himself but facilitated the bureaucracy of death. Both then and now, many rightly conclude that regardless of the exact contours of the law, the condemnation of Eichmann was necessary because it deeply violates our sense of moral right and wrong, albeit on an unprecedented scale. But Arendt takes it beyond this sense of injustice and recognizes that his offenses and the subsequent judgment had to be more than legal affirmation of moral wrongs. The judgment had to be political— “The wrongdoer is brought to justice because his act has disturbed and gravely endangered the community as a whole . . . it is the body politic itself that stands in need of being ‘repaired[.]”

Mass death and violence, argues Arendt, move beyond remedying moral questions of individuals and instead are an affront to the very collective existence of humanity. In this sense, Arendt challenged the Israeli court to look beyond the strict legalities and to judge Eichmann politically.

In politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations . . . we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you.

Thus, in the face of such things that move beyond the bounds of understanding within the law and even basic morality, we must turn to political judgment, the pursuit of reconciliation between the actor and the populace. Political justice demands an equal accounting for affronts to our collective humanity.

I am not attempting to compare or qualify the Holocaust and Nazi Germany with the US capitalist imperialism either in kind or substance. Rather, there is a more essential point that emerges from Arendt’s account--to fully reconcile these disparities, we must move beyond only making moral claims to making political ones. In this respect, it is high time we politically judged the capitalist-imperialist adventures into Afghanistan (and the world over). The human cost alone exceeds 240,000 lives, nearly a third of which were civilians. This is in addition to the 2.5 million Afghan refugees already registered elsewhere in the world (the second-largest refugee population).  Who knows what additional harm to the working people of Afghanistan is to come in the days ahead. The US incursion into Afghanistan and everything that has flowed from it requires political demands for agency in what is done to them.

In many senses, the US has already brought the Afghan people into the body politic. 20 years of occupation will necessarily have political ramifications for both those inside the territorial bounds of the US, as well as those within Afghanistan. And yet, this is threadbare at best; the US has also failed at its claimed guiding principle in the first place--any vague notion of democracy. The philosopher Rainer Forst notes that a foundational right of all people, and upon which all other rights are constructed, is the right to justification. While the theoretical discussion of this is both dense and long, it essentially boils down to a maxim within most political engagements between peoples--is what I am asking or demanding of you something you can ask and demand of me?

By limiting the inquiry of the US taking in Afghan refugees as a right/wrong question, we miss the opportunity to recognize that the Afghan people should have an essential participatory voice in how the US treats them. This is foundational to democracy. Thus, it becomes more than a question of what we think should happen to the Afghan people and broadens to what they and we think. It is not that morality is absent from this political claim, but rather that it is placed in a political context. As Forst says, it “expresses the demand that no political or social relations should exist that cannot be adequately justified towards those involved.”

And the political exclusion of the now-millions of Afghan people who seek to enter the empire that once encircled them lacks even the most basic justification. They are excluded from the US body politic because of arbitrary legal lines that denote them not being “us.” As Forst argues, “Justification does not end at borders.” In all real political senses, the US empire stepped across that gap 20 years ago, and now the time has come to assert political justice for those that remain in its bloody departure. To borrow from Forst once more— “democracy . . . is not ‘instrumental’ to justice; it is what justice demands.” (emphasis mine) Placing the US and Afghan people in this relationship of political justice compels their inclusion within the political framework of the US.

I recognize these demands border on the impossible within the mainstream conception of politics. But that is precisely why we must push for a radical vision. This is the lesson that Arendt offers up in the trial of Eichmann--when the present framework is insufficient to comprehend or achieve the required level of justice, we must seek alternatives. In the instant case, we must pursue a political project that comprehends the Afghan people, along with the millions of other displaced peoples, as deserving of more than pity or even moral obligation. We must advocate for them and the collective working class of the world as ends in themselves and reconcile that with the failures of capitalism. Justice, the working out of justifications, is ultimately a political project of reconciliation. And in this case, we must dare to judge—and condemn—imperialism and capitalism politically.

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and is the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is out now from  Zer0 Books.

The New Frontier of Settler Colonialism

By Nathaniel Ibrahim

Republished from Michigan Specter.

In early June, a video went viral of a Palestinian woman arguing with an Israeli man. “Yakub, you know this is not your house,” says Muna El-Kurd, a resident of Sheik Jarrah, to a man who has been living in some part of her family’s property for years.

“Yes, but if I go, you don’t go back,” he replies, in a Brooklyn accent, “So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me?” He throws his arms in the air in an expression of ostensible innocence and confusion. “I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this. It’s easy to yell at me, but I didn’t do this.”

“You are stealing my house,” she insists.

“And if I don’t steal it,” he replies, “someone else is going to steal it.”

How Did We Get Here?

Settler colonialism is often seen as a thing of the past. The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other places around the world are populated primarily by the descendants of people who took that land by force, drove out or slaughtered the natives, and claimed it as their God-given right. It is generally accepted that the world was shaped by these forces, but we are rarely willing to see this process as continuous. Even the left, critical of power and skeptical of narratives that ignore the modern implications of past atrocities, tends to frame the continuation of imperialism primarily as neocolonialism, or unequal relationships between countries maintained by debt, corruption, regime change, threats, and cultural hegemony by which developed governments and corporations drain money and resources from the third world without resorting to the older methods of colonization. This framework, while useful, places the world of colonial annexation, direct governance, and settler colonialism firmly in the past.

White European settler colonialism, specifically from the western European countries, has been by far the dominant form of settler colonialism in recent centuries, and arguably in all of human history. Europe, led by the British Empire, carried out settler colonial projects in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. Nearly all settler colonial territories eventually became independent of the Empire, but imperialism continued. The United States was the leader in this, securing most of its territory after independence, but it was not the only one. Apartheid in South Africa and Canadian sterilization of Indigenous women, to give just two examples, existed long after British control, but no one could deny the shared origin of this oppression and the continued cooperation and connections between these states, especially in the military and intelligence fields, but also culturally, linguistically, and economically. In all of these countries, settler colonialism is not a process that is completed or one that has ended. Indigenous people are still marginalized and oppressed, and they are forced to exist in a system set up by the colonizing forces. It would be a mistake, however, to view internal repression as the only descendent of settler colonialism. Settler colonialism continues to find new frontiers, most notably in the state of Israel.

Historical Parallels

Israeli settler colonialism is really a continuation of the same process that European settlers started in the Americas hundreds of years ago. White settlers, marginalized in their homelands, but generally viewed as superior to the natives by the great powers of their day, invaded new territory and drove the native peoples out. They stole the land and the resources on it, exploited the native inhabitants while destroying their economy, culture, resources, and way of life.

The process of Israeli settler colonialism is much the same as American settler colonialism. Both the United States and Israel began as important projects of the British Empire. Violence and ethnic cleansing against Native Americans and Palestinians, in the bloody so-called Indian Wars fought by European powers and later the United States and Canada and events in Israel like the Nakba, forced Native people to flee their homes, relegated to locations the colonial power had no need of yet, west in America, east in Palestine. Once a region is conquered and integrated, the frontier moves. Palestinian self-governance, legally at least, exists only in a group of physically divided areas, places in the West Bank labeled as “Area A” and “Area B”, and of course, the Gaza strip. (In reality, Israel controls security in Area B, and completely surrounds these areas and Gaza, controlling emigration, immigration, and trade, making actual Palestinian self-governance a fantasy). Native Americans were deported to lands far away from their homeland, and the US government has even attempted to send Palestinians out of Israel and Palestine altogether, like when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice suggested that Palestinians could be resettled in Argentina and Chile in a meeting with Israeli and Palestinian negotiators in 2008.

On the other side of the colonial state, the direction they came from, things look similar as well. Israel does the majority of its trade with Europe and North America, including the profitable weapons trade. Early America traded heavily with Europe as well, and its cotton plantations, maintained by slave labor and existing on stolen land, shipped massive amounts of cotton to Europe to help fuel the textile industry and industrialization. Both countries may be considered “Nations of Immigrants,” but both are quite discriminatory in the type of immigrant they populate their territory with. For America, it was blatantly white supremacist, prioritizing a small group of peoples seen as the most advanced, and gradually growing to include other people considered white.

Jewish immigrants to the United States, so long as they came from white, European countries, were tolerated much more than immigrants considered racially inferior. Though they faced violence, discrimination, and marginalization in a conservative country dominated by Christians, Jewish immigrants received recognition as valued members of society by people such as George Washington and equal political rights. The tolerance of Jewish institutions was not the same reality for other ethnic groups living in America at the time. Again, because it needs to be made absolutely clear, this does not erase the reality of antisemitism, especially in institutions and from individuals that promote white supremacy. Rather, Jewish identity and whiteness are intersecting identities, not mutually exclusive ones.

Israel has faced accusations of racism from its Jewish citizens of non-European origin, including accusations of police brutality, discrimination in school enrollment, and even forced sterilization. This is compounded by the fact that Jews living in the so-called “developed” world, typically meaning white-majority countries in Europe and North America, simply have greater opportunities to move to Israel. The advantages of living in the “developed” world (their greater wealth, higher levels of education, easier transportation to Israel) allow Jews living there to move to Israel more easily than Jews living in poorer countries. This reality, while it is a result of global capitalism and white supremacy and not any aspect of the Zionist movement, effectively privileges white immigrants to Israel.

Race, Religion, and Civilization

There are also important parallels to draw between the settler colonial ideologies of Israel and America. Israelis claim that the land is theirs due to their ancestry, but ignore the fact that many Palestinians have descended from the ancient Jewish residents of Palestine. Zionists like Ber Borochov and David Ben-Gurion accepted this and saw the Palestinians as descendants of the Israelites who had stayed on the land. This is not to say that Palestinians have some special status over other people because of their ancestry, or that any Jews are somehow “not real Jews,” or that race is a metric that dictates a particular allocation of power or land. It does show, however, the inherent failures of relying on abstract and contradictory concepts like race and descendancy over thousands of years. Israeli ideology relies on the idea that Israelis are somehow more tied to the land than the people who live on it now, and who have lived there in recent history. Israeli ideology relies on claiming a difference in ancestry between the Palestinians and Israelis. The only difference that can be reasonably discerned is the European ancestry of the Israeli colonizers.

An important clarifier is the distinction between the Zionist movement of Jews, mainly from Europe and the Americas, and the historical existence of Jews in the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. Jews have always lived there, but their simple existence is not Zionism. Zionists may seek to tie these Jews to their cause, but the core of Zionism is the movement of Jews from outside of this territory, with the backing of Europe and America, into Palestinian territory. That is a settler colonial project. Zionist ideology appropriated the right of Palestinian Jews to keep living where they were to justify a larger project of colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid.

Americans also steal a component identity of those they colonized, even as they sought to replace that identity. Individual white Americans from the participants in the Boston Tea Party to Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren have dressed up as Native Americans or claimed Native American identity without evidence or any cultural link. We took the name Apache for a helicopter, we took the Powhatan word tamahaac for a missile, we took the word Ojibwe word mishigami for our state, our university, and the Michigamua club here at the University (renamed in 2007 and disbanded in 2021), where members would disrespectfully appropriate Native dress, custom, and names. These identity thefts are key to settler colonialism. As the connections native peoples have to the land are severed, the land must be reconnected, even if sloppily and artificially, to the new inhabitants.

Both colonizers claimed to be more civilized than the colonized, sometimes in explicitly racist language, sometimes not. We hear over and over how Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East despite it having near-total control over millions of people with no say in their own governance. The early United States claimed to be more civilized in its day too, promising “liberty and justice for all” while maintaining slavery and calling itself a republic, “by the people, for the people,” even when voting rights were restricted to a small elite of wealthy white men. We hear the same narratives of development, that Israel is “making the desert bloom,” and that America tamed a vast, uncivilized and unpopulated wilderness, and that the wealth of both is a sign of their superior industry, talent, and work ethic, or even of God’s favor.

God’s favor is actually tied with civilization in other interesting ways. According to many Jews and Christians who use God as a justification for colonization and expansion, Israel was promised to the Jewish people by God in the Bible. The ideology of Manifest Destiny also relied on God allowing his chosen (white) people to conquer the world and convert the natives from their religions, which were represented as uncivilized, savage, and infantile, into members of the Christain religion, which was seen as the religion of the civilized, developed world. The Pope himself would proclaim the rights of European colonizers to the land they conquered. Mormons, like the Puritans before them and the Jews after them, were an oppressed religious minority who led the charge of expansion, believing God wanted them to.

In much the same way as Ashkenazi Jews (along with Italians, Irish, and others before them) have gained some degree of “whiteness” and integration into structures of white supremacy, the Jewish religion has gained some degree of legitimacy in the eyes of American Christians. Some conservatives will talk about “Judeo-Christain Values,” a confusing term that ultimately serves to drive a wedge between Jews, Christians, and “enlightened” western Atheists who allegedly hold these values, and Muslims, who allegedly do not and are therefore deemed to have an inferior civilization. Exclusionary ideologies are anything but consistent, and as they lose power, they can expand the in-group to unite against a new outgroup. This has led to bizarre political alliances and support, such as American white nationalist Richard Spencer praising Israel’s political system, or Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has praised Nazi collaborators and used antisemitic language to refer to his enemies, a “true friend to Israel.” Many early American settlers were marginalized in Europe for their religion, but that did not stop the Christians from uniting themselves against some other, more distinct religion or group of religions.

The Frontier

The creation of Israel is not just a copy of the United States but an extension of the United States. Its colonial efforts are also American colonial efforts. The United States provides $3 billion to Israel annually in military aid, as well as billions more in loan guarantees. The US State Department changed its position on settlements under Mike Pompeo, supporting the obviously illegal project. In the private sector, an entire network of American nonprofits support Israeli settlers in Palestine, and many American and European corporations are closely intertwined with settlements and do business with the Israeli government. Jared Kushner, Senior Advisor and son-in-law to President Donald Trump, previously ran one such foundation funding the settlements. The Israeli Land Fund, funded by American donors, has assisted in the eviction of a Palestinian family in Sheikh Jarrah. Its founder, the deputy Mayor of Jerusalem, and a settler living in a Palestinian neighborhood, Aryeh King, has worked hard to increase Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. King, while on his visit to Sheikh Jarrah on May 6, even wished for the death of a Palestinian activist who was shot by police.

The recent forced evictions and other police violence are not unique to East Jerusalem. King is also supporting the eviction of residents in Silwan, another Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. The land from which Israel clears the houses may actually be used to expand a biblical theme park called City of David National Park, run by a settler group called the Ir David Foundation. Nothing exemplifies the Israeli colonial project more than the destruction of Palestinian homes and neighborhoods to make room for a park named after a king who lived some 3,000 years ago where settlers and tourists can look at ancient artifacts. Tourists to Israel are predominantly Christian, and a plurality of them travel from America to visit Israel.

It is not just American money, but American people who help drive settler colonialism. US Citizens make up 15% of the settlers in the West Bank. It’s a familiar phenomenon: Americans, on the frontier, traveling inland and claiming new land for themselves and their people, building a homestead, and arming themselves to fight the people who lived there before. America didn’t stop when it got to California, or even Hawaii, it just sought out new avenues for colonial expansion.

Palestinian poet and activist Mohammed El-Kurd, the twin brother of Muna El-Kurd, went on Democracy Now! and explained the altercation between his sister and the settler that began this article and how it represents a broader settler colonial project.

“Can you explain this scene? And talk more specifically about what’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah right now,” asked Amy Goodman, the host of Democracy Now!.

“Absolutely. The scene that you saw, Amy, is a scene of colonialism. People often think that colonialism is this archaic concept or a concept of recent memory, but in fact, it’s alive and well in Palestine. And this is a colonizer that happens to be from Brooklyn, as you can hear by the accent, who decided to find a home in my backyard. This happens because we, as a community of refugees in Sheikh Jarrah, have been battling billionaire-backed, often U.S.-registered settler organizations that employ these people to come and live in our homes and harass us and intimidate us…What’s happening in Sheikh Jarrah today is nothing short of ethnic cleansing.

“…You know, I know it sounds bizarre that an Israeli settler is taking over half of my home, and likely they will be taking over the entirety of the neighborhood should no international action be taken. But it’s not as absurd when you put it in the context [of] how the state of Israel came about. It came about by destroying and burning hundreds and hundreds of Palestinian cities and villages and taking over Palestinians’ homes. Today, all over historic Palestine, there are settlers who are living in homes that were once Palestinian.”

Walter Rodney’s Revolutionary Praxis: An Interview With Devyn Springer

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

The following interview, facilitated by Derek Ford, took place via e-mail during June and July in preparation for Black August, when progressive organizers and activists deepen our study of and commitment to the Black struggle in the U.S. and the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist class struggles worldwide. During this time, we wanted to provide a unique and accessible resource on Walter Rodney, the revolutionary Guyanese organizer, theorist, pedagogue, political economist, and what many call a “guerrilla intellectual.” Liberation School recently republished Rodney’s essay on George Jackson here.

About Devyn Springer

Devyn Springer is a cultural worker and community organizer who works with the Walter Rodney Foundation and ASERE, an extension group of the Red Barrial Afrodescendiente. They’re a popular educator who doesn’t just study Rodney but practices his philosophies. Since 2018, they’ve hosted the Groundings podcast, which is named after Rodney’s revolutionary educational praxis. The podcast, which has addressed an impressive array of topics relevant to the struggle, is available on all major streaming platforms. They’ve written timely and important pieces on politics and education in academic and popular outlets, some of which can be found here. They’ve also produced the documentary Parchman Prison: Pain & Protest, and you can support their work and get access to exclusive content by supporting their Patreon.

Derek Ford: Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview, Devyn. I always look forward to working and learning with you and I appreciate your work on revolutionary movements and education. I know you’re involved with the Walter Rodney Foundation, which is not just about preserving his legacy but promoting the revolutionary theories, practices, and models he developed. Can you tell me a bit about the Foundation, your role, and why it’s important for the movement broadly in the U.S.?

Devyn Springer: The Walter Rodney Foundation was formed by the Rodney family in 2006, with the goal of sharing Walter Rodney’s life and works with students, scholars, activists, and communities around the world. Because of the example Walter Rodney left in his own personal life and the principles he established in his work, we see supporting grassroots movements, offering public education, and the praxis of advancing social justice in a number of ways as what it really means to share his life with the world; Walter Rodney was as much a fan of doing as he was speaking, after all. We have a number of annual programs, including many political education classes oriented around themes related to Rodney’s body of work—colonialism, underdevelopment, Pan-African struggle, scholar-activism, assassination, Black history, the Caribbean, etc. We also run ongoing projects like the Legacies Project, which is actively seeking and collecting stories and oral histories around the world about Walter Rodney.

I’ve volunteered with the WRF since around 2013. I currently help coordinate the Foundation’s social media, and offer other types of support as needed.

I feel the Foundation is crucial for the movement broadly for a number of reasons. First, the critical analysis of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and underdevelopment Rodney gave in works like How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains relevant, and we need organizations dedicated to distilling this knowledge. Second, because our movement must reckon with the lives, works, histories, struggles, and relevance of the elders past and present who we owe so much to, whether it’s the Claudia Jones School For Political Education, the Paul Robeson House & Museum, Habana’s Centro Martin Luther King Jr., or the Walter Rodney Foundation: there needs to be organizations and groups dedicated to maintaining these legacies and continuing their work.

More than just maintaining legacies, in other words, the WRF also makes sure that Walter Rodney’s critical analyses remain critical, and do not get co-opted. Finally, the foundation is important because it is run by the Rodney family, who themselves have extensive decades of organizing, advocacy, and knowledge which is always beneficial. (And I must clarify, whenever I speak of a ‘movement’ broadly as above, I am speaking about the global Black Liberation Movement foremost, in a Revolutionary Pan-Africanist sense).

Those are precisely the reasons we wanted to do this interview, particularly to expose readers (and ourselves) to the broader range and context of his work, and to learn more about the depth of his praxis and why it’s needed today. To start then, can you give our readers a bit of historical and biographical context for Walter Rodney’s life and work? What was happening at the time, who was he working with, agitating against, etc…?

I will try to be brief here and give some basic biographical information, because there’s so much one could say. Walter Rodney was an activist, intellectual, husband, and father, who lived and visited everywhere from Guyana, Jamaica, the USSR, Cuba, and Tanzania, to Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, London, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the U.S., and Canada. He was born in Georgetown, Guyana in March 1942, where he was raised and resided for much of his life. He graduated from the University of the West Indies (UWI) in Jamaica in 1963, then received his PhD with honors in African History from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London at the age of 24. His thesis, A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, was completed in 1966 and then published in 1970, and I highly recommend it to readers [1].

Rodney was deeply influenced by a number of revolutionary movements and ideologies which had flourished during his lifetime: the multitude of armed African decolonial struggles across the continent, the Black Power Movement in the U.S., Third World revolutionaries like Che, Mao, and Cabral, and Pan-African/Marxist praxis generally. Walter Rodney taught in Jamaica, working to break the bourgeois academy from its ivory tower, where he delivered a number of groundings across the island to the working class, including the Rastafari and other marginalized communities at the time. While at the 1968 Black Writers’ Conference in Montreal, Canada, the Jamaican government banned him from re-entering on the grounds that his ‘associations’ with Cuban, Soviet, and other communist governments posed a threat to Jamaica’s national security. Massive outbursts now known as the “Rodney Riots” subsequently broke out across Kingston. Rodney spent many months writing in Cuba prior to traveling to the University of Dar es Salaam in revolutionary Tanzania in 1969. 

In 1974, Walter returned to Guyana to take up an appointment as Professor of History at the University of Guyana, but the government (under the dictates of President Forbes Burnham) rescinded the appointment. Rodney remained in Guyana and helped form the socialist political party, the Working People’s Alliance, alongside activist-intellectuals like Eusi Kwayana and Andaiye. Between 1974 and 1979 he emerged as the leading figure in the resistance movement against the increasingly repressive government led by the People’s National Congress, which can be summarized as publicly espousing Pan-African, anti-aparatheid, and socialist talking points while running a despotic, corrupt Western-backed state operation.

He gave public and private talks all over the country that served to engender a new political consciousness in the country, and he stated in his speeches and writing that he believed a people’s revolution was the only way towards true liberation for the Guyanese people. During this period he developed and advocated the WPA’s politics of “People’s Power” that called on the broad masses of people to take political control instead of a tiny clique, and “multiracial democracy” to address the steep obstacles presented by the racial disunity between Afro-Guyanese and Indo-Guyanese peoples (which is still present today).

On June 13, 1980, shortly after returning from independence celebrations in Zimbabwe, Rodney was assassinated in Georgetown, Guyana by an explosive device hidden in a walkie-talkie, given to him by Gregory Smith, former sergeant in the Guyana Defense Force. Smith was subsequently given new passports and secretly flown out of the country. Donald Rodney, Walter’s younger brother who was in the car with him when the bomb went off, was falsely accused and convicted of being in possession of explosives; he fought to clear his own name for decades until April of this year, when Guyana’s appellate court exonerated him. A few weeks later the Government of Guyana officially recognized Walter’s death as an assassination. This comes after years of struggle on behalf of the Rodney family, particularly Dr. Patricia Rodney and the WRF. Walter was just 38 years old at the time of his assassination, but his legacy is continued by his wife, three children, and the dozens of incredible speeches, essays, interviews, and books he gave and wrote.

Rodney’s best-known work is How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Why do you think that is? What are his main arguments there, and are they still relevant to understanding Western imperialism and African resistance?

That’s a special type of book that, like few others, can completely change or deeply influence one’s politics. Rodney essentially put forth a historical-materialist argument showing that economically, politically, and socially, Europe was in a dialectical relationship with Africa, wherein the wealth of Europe was dependent upon the underdevelopment of Africa. In other words, Rodney shows with painstaking detail how European capitalism (and eventually the global capitalist system) could not have existed without the systematic precolonial exploitation of Africa, the massive amounts of capital generated through the Maafa, later the expansive economic, political, financial, and social domination under direct colonial rule, and the continuing—or perfecting—of these exploitative processes under the current neo-colonial world order. As Rodney puts it:

“Colonialism was not merely a system of exploitation, but one whose essential purpose was to repatriate the profits to the so-called mother country. From an African viewpoint, that amounted to consistent expatriation of surplus produced by African labor out of African resources. It meant the development of Europe as part of the same dialectical process in which Africa was underdeveloped” [2].

It remains his most recognized work because it remains incredibly relevant, both in the sense that the current world capitalist structure is built on this historical underdevelopment of the South, and because, under imperialism, the North must still exploit and perpetually underdevelop the South. Its publication marked a significant contribution to theories of underdevelopment and dependency. Alongside revolutionary intellectuals like Samir Amin and Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, it was groundbreaking in that it applied Marxism to the Third World with great precision and depth. Further, Rodney goes into detail about not just underdevelopment but the history of class society and feudalism in Africa, social violence, fascism, agrarian struggles, racism, enslavement, gender, economics, misleadership and African sellouts, and so much more. In some ways, I like to think of it as a foundational text for revolutionaries in the same way that many consider Marx’s Capital or Marx and Engels’ The Communist Manifesto to be.

One example of its relevancy is in thinking about labor and the workforce as it relates to slavery. Rodney uses data to explain that the social violence of the Maafa had a deep impact on African development because it removed millions of young Africans from the labor force, created technological regression, and directed whatever mass energy aimed at productive or technological innovation towards the trade in human captives.

He says, “The European slave trade was a direct block, in removing millions of youth and young adults who are the human agents from whom inventiveness springs. Those who remained in areas badly hit by slave capturing were preoccupied about their freedom rather than with improvements in production” [3]. I relate this to the crisis of incarceration in the U.S., wherein millions of Africans are removed from the labor force, removed from their families and communities, and in the same way, are removed even from the very opportunity of innovation and production to instead perform hyper-exploited, forced labor at the hands of the settler-capitalist state. Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work has, to an extent, explained how the capitalist state necessitates this incarceration, and in the same way I’d suggest that European capitalism’s violently expansive nature necessitated the multitude of exploitative interactions with Africa, from slavery to neo-colonialism.

What about the influence it’s had, not just academically but in terms of revolutionary struggles?

I get letters, emails, and calls almost on a monthly basis from incarcerated people who are reading not only that book but also The Groundings With My Brothers, an underrated gem of Rodney’s. They’ve formed reading groups and created zines around his work; asked me to further explain concepts he mentions; and even drawn incredible illustrations of Rodney. I find this engagement with Rodney equally valuable (and often more rewarding) as that of academics. Patricia Rodney has told me that over the decades incarcerated people have consistently gravitated towards Rodney’s work and written to her, likely because of the accessible way he’s able to break down complex concepts. I’m actually currently working with the WRF on a project to donate many copies of Walter Rodney’s books to incarcerated people, and hopefully in the coming months we’ll have more info to share on this.

Beyond that, Rodney’s work has globally influenced the left in more ways than I could explain or speculate in this interview. His revolutionary African analysis has corrected Eurocentric views of history and allowed us to better understand the important role decolonization plays in our fight against imperialism. He also offers a great example for young writers, researchers, and organizers on how to write materialist history and analyses. For example, as one reads his work it’s impossible not to note the multitude of ways Rodney directly eviscerates bourgeois historians and apologists.

Please keep us updated on the WRF project, because we’ll definitely want to support it. It seems that Rodney was exemplary at achieving true “praxis,” the merging of theory and practice. One of the ways this shows up most is in his pedagogical work–his theories and practices–which he called “groundings.” It’s not just a pedagogy, but a practice of decolonizing knowledge and empowering oppressed people to organize, at least as I understand it. I know it’s influenced your own work and you’ve written about it, so how would you describe it to someone just joining the struggle, or just learning about imperialism, colonialism, and racism?

Yes, I co-wrote a piece titled “Groundings: A Revolutionary Pan-African Pedagogy for Guerilla Intellectuals” that’s available for free online, and which I plan to re-write/expand soon, and my podcast is named after this pedagogical model as well. Usually, when people refer to Rodney’s “groundings” they are referring to his period as a professor in Jamaica, where he quite literally broke away from the elitist academy and brought his lectures to the people: in the streets, the yards, the slums, wherever workers and others gathered. He gave public lectures on African and Caribbean history, political movements, capitalism, colonialism, Black Power, etc. These groundings were often based on what people expressed interest in learning about, and Rodney found ways to make various topics relevant and important to the lives of those listening. In many regards, Rodney should be placed next to popular educators like Paulo Freire for his contributions and his example of merging theory with practice. The book The Groundings With My Brothers is a collection of speeches, many given at or about these groundings [4].

More than just giving public lectures, groundings entailed democratizing knowledge and the tools of knowledge production, which are traditionally tied up with the capitalist academy. He empowered communities to tap into their own histories, oral and written, to generate knowledge and research amongst themselves based on their interests and needs, to place European history and Eurocentric frameworks as non-normative, and to hold African history as crucially important to the process of African revolution. He brilliantly lays out the importance of African history in Black liberation in “African History in the Service of Black Liberation,” a speech he gave in Montreal, ironically at the conference from which he would not be allowed to return to Jamaica [5].

In the most basic terms, I would explain groundings as the act of coming together in a group, explaining, discussing, and exploring topics relevant to the group’s lives; everyone in the group listens, engages, contributes, reasons, and grounds with one another, and all voices are valued. Groundings can take place inside of jail cells, within classrooms, in parks and workplaces, or anywhere the intentions of Afrocentric group dialogue and learning are maintained.

One of the interesting things about The Groundings With My Brothers is the way it moves from Black Power in the U.S. to Jamaica, to the West Indies, to Africa, and then to groundings. As a final set of questions, can you explain what he meant by Black Power and Blackness, and what they had to do with education?

Well, to understand that book you have to understand a bit about the context in which the book arose. In Groundings we see Rodney’s ability to take seemingly large concepts like neo-colonialism, Black Power, Blackness, etc., and break them down to a level that could engage people. It taught them how to make sense of the fact that the people oppressing them were the same color and nationality as them. In the midst of decolonization and independence movements sweeping the world, there was a crucial Cold War and neo-colonization taking place simultaneously. Facilitating this counter-revolution were several African leaders and activists employed to do the bidding of imperialist powers seeking to regain or retain their power. In Jamaica, this was no different: the Jamaican government in 1968 went so far as to ban any literature printed in the USSR and Cuba, as well as an extensive list of works about Black Power and Black revolution, including those of Black Power activists such as Trinidian-born Kwame Ture (Stokley Carmichael), Malcolm X, and Elijah Muhammad.

Placed in this context, we see that Rodney’s work explaining the U.S. Black Power movement’s importance and relevance for the Caribbean and Africans everywhere was quite important in raising the political consciousness of working-class Africans. A key part of this was educating on the role of “indigenous lackeys” or “local lackeys of imperialism” in maintaining the (neo)colonial status quo. In a speech initially published as a pamphlet titled, Yes to Marxism!, he says:

“When I was in Jamaica in 1960, I would say that already my consciousness of West Indian society was not that we needed to fight the British but that we needed to fight the British, the Americans, and their indigenous lackeys. That I see as an anti-neo-colonial consciousness as distinct from a purely anti-colonial consciousness” [6].

His distinct analysis of misleadership and its colonial implications was a searing threat, as Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly wonderfully explains [7].

Rodney defines power as being kept ‘milky white’ through imperialist forces of violence, exploitation, and discrimination, and that Black Power in contrast may be seen as the antithesis to this imperialist, colonial, racial demarcation that structures capitalist society. The following quote is long, but I want to quote it in full because I find it useful. He says:

“The present Black Power movement in the United States is a rejection of hopelessness and the policy of doing nothing to halt the oppression of blacks by whites. It recognises the absence of Black Power, but is confident of the potential of Black Power on this globe. Marcus Garvey was one of the first advocates of Black Power and is still today the greatest spokesman ever to have been produced by the movement of black consciousness. ‘A race without power and authority is a race without respect,’ wrote Garvey. He spoke to all Africans on the earth, whether they lived in Africa, South America, the West Indies or North America, and he made blacks aware of their strength when united. The USA was his main field of operation, after he had been chased out of Jamaica by the sort of people who today pretend to have made him a hero. All of the black leaders who have advanced the cause in the USA since Garvey’s time have recognised the international nature of the struggle against white power. Malcolm X, our martyred brother, became the greatest threat to white power in the USA because he began to seek a broader basis for his efforts in Africa and Asia, and he was probably the first individual who was prepared to bring the race question in the US up before the UN as an issue of international importance. The Students Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the important Black Power organisation, developed along the same lines; and at about the same time that the slogan Black Power came into existence a few years ago, SNCC was setting up a foreign affairs department, headed by James Foreman, who afterwards travelled widely in Africa. [Kwame Ture] has held serious discussions in Vietnam, Cuba and the progressive African countries, such as Tanzania and Guinea. These are all steps to tap the vast potential of power among the hundreds of millions of oppressed black peoples” [8].

He defined Black Power in the U.S. context as “when decisions are taken in the normal day-to-day life of the USA, the interests of the blacks must be taken into account out of respect for their power – power that can be used destructively if it is not allowed to express itself constructively. This is what Black Power means in the particular conditions of the USA” [9].

Rodney finds there are three ways in which Black Power applies to the West Indies:

“(1) the break with imperialism which is historically white racist; (2) the assumption of power by the black masses in the islands; (3) the cultural reconstruction of the society in the image of the blacks” [10].

I’m sure this was a much longer answer than anticipated, but I find it incredibly important to understand that Walter Rodney’s conception of Black Power was revolutionary, and was also fundamentally inspired by his Marxist approach which sought to apply these revolutionary ideals to the specific context of the Caribbean and Africans globally. He also explains, in detail, his notion of ‘Blackness’ as being stretched differently to how we conceive of ‘Blackness’ today to include the entirety of the colonized world. He states, “The black people of whom I speak, therefore, are non-whites – the hundreds of millions of people whose homelands are in Asia and Africa, with another few millions in the Americas;” however he clarifies that “further subdivision can be made with reference to all people of African descent, whose position is clearly more acute than that of most nonwhite groups” [11].

He places Blackness as the most crucial element, stating “Black Power is a doctrine about black people, for black people, preached by black people,” and later adds that “once a person is said to be black by the white world, then that is usually the most important thing about him; fat or thin, intelligent or stupid, criminal or sportsman – these things pale into insignificance” [12]. This understanding stands in relevance to Frantz Fanon’s similar move, where he states: “In the colonies the economic infrastructure is also a superstructure. The cause is effect: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue” [13].

It wasn’t long but incredibly informative and the context you’ve given has helped me grasp his moves throughout that book. I’ve really appreciated your time and energy, and definitely recommend that our readers check out your podcast and other work. I’m looking forward to our next collaboration!

References

[1] Walter, Rodney A. (1966).A history of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545-1800, PhD dissertation (University of London). Availablehere.
[2] Rodney, Walter. (1972/1982).How Europe underdeveloped Africa(Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 149.
[3] Ibid., 105.
[4] Rodney, Walter. (1969/2019).The groundings with my brothers, ed. J.J. Benjamin and A.T. Rodney (New York: Verso).
[5] Rodney, Walter. (1968). “African history in the service of Black liberation.” Speech delivered at the Congress of Black Writers, referenced fromHistory is a Weapon, undated, availablehere.
[6] Cited in Burden-Stelly, Charisse. (2019). “Between radicalism and repression: Walter Rodney’s revolutionary praxis,”Black Perspectives, 06 May. Availablehere.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Rodney,The groundings with my brothers, 14-15.
[9] Ibid., 18.
[10] Ibid., 24.
[11] Ibid., 10.
[12] Ibid., 9, 10.
[13] Fanon, Frantz. (1961/2005).The wretched of the earth, trans. R. Philcox (New York: Grove Press), 5.

Walter Rodney on Marxism in Africa (1975)

By Walter Rodney

Republished from Red Sails.

Walter Rodney was born in Guyana in 1942, acquired his doctorate in England at the age of 24, and then traveled widely in the Caribbean and Africa. In 1972 he published his legendary work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He was assassinated via a car-bomb in Georgetown in 1980, and the crime is widely believed to have been orchestrated by Forbes Burnham, the president of Guyana at the time. Rodney gave this speech at Queen’s College in New York, USA in 1975. [1]

First of all, we must understand the background for this kind of debate. When one is asked to speak of the relevance of Marxism to Africa at this particular point in time one is being asked to involve oneself in a historical debate, an ongoing debate in this country, particularly among the Black population. It is a debate which has heightened over the last year and, from my own personal observations, is being waged in a large number of places across this country. Sometimes it appears in the guise of the so-called Nationalist versus the Marxist; sometimes it appears in the guise of those who claim to espouse a class position as opposed to those who claim to espouse a race position. Thus it would not be possible for us in a single session to enter into all the ramifications of that debate, but it does form the background for our discussions.

It is an important debate. It is an important fact that such issues are being debated in this country today, just as they’re being debated in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and in many parts of the metropolitan world — in Western Europe and in Japan — because the widespread nature of the debate and its intensity at this time is a reflection of the crisis in the capitalist-imperialist mode of production. Ideas and discussion do not simply drop from the sky. It is not simply a plot on the part of certain individuals to engage others in a meaningless debate. Whatever the outcome of the debate, whatever the posture the different participants adopt, the very fact of the debate is representative of the crisis in capitalism and imperialism today and, as the crisis deepens, people find it more and more difficult to accept the old modes of thought which rationalize the system which is collapsing. Hence the need to search for new directions and, quite clearly, Marxism and Scientific Socialism pose themselves as one of the most obvious of the available options.

The question is not new to Africa or to the Black people as a whole — that is perhaps essential to understand. Many of us have before raised the question of the relevance of Marxism to this or that. Its relevance to Europe; many European intellectuals debated its relevance to their own society. Its relevance to Asia was debated by Asians; and, to look at it geographically, its relevance to Latin America was debated by Latin Americans. Individuals have debated the relevance to Marxism to their own time. Was it relevant to the 19th century? If so, was it still relevant to the 20th century? One can debate its relevance to a given facet of the culture of a society, or to its law or culture as a whole. These are all issues that have been debated before, and we should have some sense of history when we approach the question today, because with that sense of history we can ask, “Why is it that the question of the relevance of Marxism to society always crops up?” And — a very brief answer — I would suggest that what is common to the application of the question is, first of all, a condition of crisis, a condition of struggle, a condition in which people are dissatisfied with the dominant mode of perceiving reality. At that point they ask about the relevance of Marxism.

More than that, the second condition is people do ask the question because of their own bourgeois framework. Because one starts out located within the dominant mode of reasoning, which is the mode of reasoning that supports capitalism, and which we will call a bourgeois framework of perception. Because one starts out that way, it becomes necessary to raise the question about the relevance of Marxism. After one is advanced, it is probably more accurate to raise the question of the relevance of bourgeois thought, because the shoe would be on the other foot! But initially it is true that however much the bourgeoisie disagree, there is one common uniting strand to all bourgeois thought: they make common cause in questioning the relevance, the logic and so on, of Marxist thought. And therefore, in a sense, unfortunately, when we ask that question, we are also fitting into that framework and pattern. We are also, in some way, still embedded to a greater or lesser extent in the framework of bourgeois thought, and from that framework we ask with a great degree of hesitancy and uncertainty, “What is the relevance of Marxism?”

It is particularly true in our parts of the world — that is, the English-speaking parts of the world — because the Anglo-American tradition is one of intense hostility, philosophically speaking, towards Marxism. A hostility that manifests itself by trying to dissociate itself even from the study of Marxism. If you were to check on the continental tradition in Europe, you would find it is not the same. French, German, and Belgian intellectuals, whatever their perspective, understand the importance of Marxism. They study it, they relate to it, they understand the body of thought which is called Marxism, and they take a position vis-à-vis that body of thought. In the English tradition — which was also handed down to this part of the world, to the Caribbean, to many parts of Africa — it is fashionable to disavow any knowledge of Marxism. It is fashionable to glory in one’s ignorance, to say that we are against Marxism. When pressed about it one says “But why bother to read it? It is obviously absurd.” So one knows it is absurd without reading it, and one doesn’t read it because one knows it is absurd. And therefore one, as I said, glories in one’s ignorance of the position. It is rather difficult to seriously address the question about the relevance of Marxism unless one does the basic minimum of accepting that one should attempt to enter into this full body of thought — because it is a tremendous body of literature and analysis. And from the outside as it were, addressing the question is extremely difficult. Indeed, I would say it is pointless. Strictly from the outside, without ever having moved towards trying to grapple with what it is, to ask “What is its relevance?” is almost an unanswerable question. And I think in all modesty, those of us who come from a certain background — and we all come from that background — one of the first things we have to do is establish a basis of familiarity with the different intellectual traditions, and, as we become familiar with them, we can then be in a better position to evaluate Marxism’s relevance or irrelevance, as the case might be.

Now I will proceed on the assumption that what we are trying to discern in this discussion is whether the variants of time and place are relevant. Or, let me put it another way: whether the variants of time and place make a difference to whether Marxism is relevant or not. In a sense, we would almost have to assume its validity for the place in which it originated, Western Europe. We don’t have the time to deal with that in detail. But we can then ask, assuming that Marxism has a relevance, has a meaning, has an applicability to Western Europe — or had, in the 19th century — to what extent does its validity extend geographically? To what extent does its validity extend across time? These are the two variables: time and place. And those can be translated to mean historical circumstances — time — and culture, which means the place, and what social and cultural conditions exist in each particular place. For us — to make it more precise: Black people — no doubt well-meaning Black people will ask the question whether an ideology which was historically generated within the culture of Western Europe in the 19th century is today, in the third quarter of the 20th century, still valid for another part of the world — namely Africa, or the Caribbean, or Black people in this country [United States]. Whether it is valid to other societies at other times. And this is the kind of formulation which I wish to present [for discussion].

The Methodology of Marxism

I would suggest two basic reasons why I believe that Marxist thought — scientific socialist thought — would exist at different levels, at different times, in different places, and retain its potential as a tool, as a set of conceptions which people should grasp. And the first is to look at Marxism as a methodology, because a methodology would virtually, by definition, be independent of time and place. You will use the methodology at any given time, at any given place. You may get different results, of course, but the methodology itself would be independent of time and place. And essentially, to engage in some rather truncated presentation of Marxism, inevitably oversimplifying, but nevertheless necessary in the context of limited time, I would suggest as one of the real bases of Marxist thought that it starts from a prespective of man’s relationship to the material world; and that Marxism, when it arose historically, consciously dissociated itself from and pitted itself against all other modes of perception which started with ideas, with concepts and with words, [and adapted itself] to the material conditions and the social relations in society. This is the difference with which I will start: a methodology which begins its analysis of any society, of any situation, by seeking the relations which arise in production between men. There are a whole variety of things which flow from that: man’s consciousness is formed in the intervention in nature; nature itself is humanized through its interaction with man’s labour, and man’s labour produces a constant stream of technology which in turn creates other social changes. So this is the crux of the scientific socialist perception. A methodology that addresses itself to man’s relationship in the process of production on the assumption — which I think is a valid assumption — that production is not merely the basis of man’s existence, but the basis for defining man as a special kind of being with a certain consciousness. It is only through production that the human race differentiates itself from the rest of the primates and the rest of life.

What does it [Marxism] pose itself against? It poses itself against a number of hypotheses, a number of views of the world which start with words and concepts. For those who are familiar with Marx’s own evolution, it is well known that he started by looking first at Hegel, a very plausible and perceptive analyst of the 19th century who was guilty, in Marx’s own estimation, of putting forward an entirely idealist position, one that placed ideas in the centre of the universe and saw the material world virtually deriving from those ideas. In thinking about this, I felt that I wouldn’t go into Hegel, I would go further than Hegel for a classic exposition of the idealist world view. I take it from the New Testament, the Book of John, where he stated:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. And the Word was God.”

That is the classic exposition of the idealist position. You take every other thing from there: the Word was God! But we are suggesting that the word is itself an emanation from people’s activity as they attempt to communicate with each other, as they develop social relations out of production, and that we shouldn’t be mystified with words. Naturally enough we will have to deal with concepts and with the force of consciousness, which is a very powerful force, which even some Marxists have been tempted to underestimate.

Now Marx, taking that broad framework of methodology, tried to apply it to Western Europe. He applied it to a range of societies in different places and at different times, but he concentrated his attention to Western Europe. If you examine the body of literature produced by Marx and Engels you will find that they speak about slavery, about communal society, about feudalism, but by and large they concentrate on capitalism. They hardly even talk about socialism. Marx’s great contribution was his fantastic critique of an existing society, capitalist society. How did it come into being in a particular part of the world? The vast proportion of their literature concerns this question.

But, as I said when I talked about pre-capitalist society, especially feudalism, they talked about some other parts of the world. Occasionally Marx mentions the “Asiatic mode of production.” Occasionally he came across to look at the data concerning the United States. So he had something of a geographical span and a long time span. But it was so minimal in comparison with the bulk of his work that it is true that a lot of people have taken Marx’s method and his conclusions and have seen them as one and the same thing, that Marxism is not merely a certain methodology applied to Western Europe, but that Marxism is itself an ideology about Western Europe, about capitalism in the 19th century, and it cannot transcend those boundaries. When, clearly, Marx was doing the job he had to do: he was looking at his own society, he was doing it under some of the most adverse conditions, he was doing it by mastering bourgeois knowledge and putting it to the service of change and revolution. I would suggest, then, that the method was independent of time and place. It is implicit in Marx and it becomes explicit in post-Marxian development, using Marxian in the literal sense of the life of Marx himself. After Marx’s death you will get the evolution or the development of scientific socialist thought with other individuals recognizing that the methodology can be applied — must be applied — to a different time, must be applied to a different place.

Again, presenting our history in a very abbreviated form, we can look at Lenin, at his application of Marxist theory to Russian society. That is one of his principal contributions. The young Lenin, the first major thesis which he wrote, was the Development of Capitalism in Russia. He had to deal with his own society. He had to take those formulations out of the specific cultural and historical context of Western Europe and look at Eastern Europe, at Russia which was evolving differently, and to apply it to his own society. This he did. He had at the same time to consider the time dimension. That in the 19th century Marx was writing about what has now come to be called the classic period of capitalism, the entrepreneurial version of capitalism, and by the latter 19th century this had given way to monopoly capitalism. It had given way to imperialism.

So Lenin had to deal with method by applying it to a new dimension in time. So he wrote about capitalism in its imperialist stage. So those are the two variants operating: the ideology, the methodology of it (we’ll stick to the methodology for the time being) being applied to different societies at different times. Having made the point for Lenin, I hope it becomes clear for a number of people: Mao Zedong applying it to Chinese society, which was a different society from Russian society. Understanding the inner dynamics of Chinese society, relating to the question of the peasantry in a different and more profound way than any previous writer, because that was the nature of Chinese society, and he had addressed himself to that. And finally, for our purposes the most important example, the example of Amilcar Cabral. Because he was dealing with Africa. Cabral, in one of his essays, the one entitled The Weapon of Theory, if I recall correctly, one of his most important essays, began by making it clear that the best he could do was to return to the basic methodology of Marx and Engels. But it was not possible for Cabral to begin the analysis of the history of Guinea-Bissau by saying: “I am going to look for classes,” for example. He said, “If I say this I will be denying that my people have any history, because I do not perceive classes for a long period in the genesis of my own people.” Then he referred back to Marx and Engels’ classic statement that “the history of all existing societies is the history of class struggle.” To which Engels had appended a note saying that “by all history we mean all previously recorded history.” It so happens that the history of the people of Guinea-Bissau has not been recorded, and Cabral says: “I want to record that history. We will use the Marxian method. We will not be tied by the concept which arose historically in Western Europe when Marx was studying that society.”

Marx uses the method, and he discerned the evolution of classes and of the phenomemon of classes itself as being a major determinant — the major determinant — in western European history at a particular point in time. Cabral says, “We will begin at the beginning. We will not even concern ourselves initially with classes. We will simply look at men in the process of production. We will look at modes of production in the history of Guinea, and we will see how our society evolved.” So, without much of a fanfare, he was showing the relevance of that methodology to African society. If and when in the history of Guinea-Bissau the aspect of class appears to have historical importance, then Cabral dealt with it. Until such time, he simply stuck to the basis of Marxian methodology which was to look at Guinean people in the process of production, social formations, cultural formations which arose historically, and the direction in which the society was tending.

In many respects, when we today ask the question about the relevance of Marxism to Black people, we have already reached a minority position, as it were. Many of those engaged in the debate present the debate as though Marxism is a European phenomenon and Black people responding to it must of necessity be alienated because the alienation of race must enter into the discussion. They seem not to take into account that already that methodology and that ideology have been utilized, internalized, domesticated in large parts of the world that are not European. That it is already the ideology of eight hundred million Chinese people; that it is already the ideology which guided the Vietnamese people to successful struggle and defeat of imperialism. That it is already the ideology which allows North Korea to transform itself from a backward quasi-feudal, quasi-colonial terrain into an independent industrial power. That it is already the ideology which has been adopted on the Latin American continent and that serves as the basis for development in the Republic of Cuba. That it is already the ideology which was used by Cabral, which was used by Samora Machel, which is in use in the African continent itself to underline and underscore struggle and the construction of a new society.

It cannot therefore be termed a European phenomenon, and the onus will certainly be on those who argue that this phenomenon which has already universalized itself somehow is inapplicable to some Black people. The onus will be on those individuals, I suggest, to show some reason, perhaps genetic, why the genes of Black people reject this ideological position.

When we investigate and try to concentrate or keep central the concept of relevance, we must ask ourselves questions abut the present. What kind of society do we live in today? What kind of societies do Black people live in today in different parts of the world? And while of course we as Black people in this country, in the Caribbean and in different parts of Africa, have our own independent historical experience, one of the central facts is that we are all, in one way or another, located within the capitalist system of production. The society about which Marx wrote, through a process of outgrowth, dominated Africa and the Americas in the era of mercantilism, which was the period that capitalism was growing to maturity. It dominated these parts of the world. It created slave society in the Americas. Subsequent to the slave era, capitalism, even more powerful, was able to incorporate the whole world into a global network of production which derived from Western Europe and North America, a system which had a metropolitan centre or set of metropolitan centres, and a separate set of peripheries, colonies, and semi-colonies. So that we have all, historically, been incorporated within the capitalist system of production, and that is another dimension of the relevance of Marxism.

Even without the translation in terms of time and place, it seems to me that if we have become part of the capitalist-imperialist world, then we owe it to ourselves to relate to, to follow, to understand, and to hopefully adopt and adapt a critique of that capitalist system, because that is essentially what Marx’s writing is about. He was criticising that capitalist system. He did it more effectively than any bourgeois writer, and if we want to understand the world in which we live, which is a world dominated by capitalism, then we must understand the centre of that system, the motor within that system, types of exploitation which are to be found within the capitalist mode of production. So that is yet another factor.

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

I had originally suggested there were two basic things, and one was the methodology. My second consideration after methodology is to look at Marxism as a revolutionary ideology and as a class ideology. In class societies all ideologies are class ideologies. All ideologies derive from and support some particular class. So for all practical purposes we have grown up in capitalist society, and bourgeois ideology is dominant in our society. These institutions in which we function were created to serve the creation of ideas as commodities, ideas which will buttress the capitalist system. Now I would suggest historically, as Marx suggested himself, that the set of ideas we call “scientific socialism” arose within capitalist society to speak to the interest of the producers in that society, to speak to the interest of those who are exploited and expropriated, to speak to the interest of the oppressed, of the culturally alienated, and we must understand that, of the two major sets of ideas before us — idealism and materialism, bourgeois philosophy and Marxist philosophy — that each of the two is representative of a particular class. I don’t have the time to go into all the historical roots of the formation of socialism but, briefly, in the 19th century it was with the rise of capitalist society that conditions were created for the development of socialist ideas.

Out of the diverse and unsystematized socialist ideas, Marx was able to formulate a clear and systematic theory: scientific socialism. It had a particular class base and because it had this particular class base, it was revolutionary. It sought to transform and upend the relations in society. Bourgeois ideology is of necessity status quo preserving. It seeks to conserve, it seeks to buttress the given system of production, the relations which flow, the relations which flow from a certain system of production. A scientific socialist position remains revolutionary because it aims — consciously aims — at undermining that system of production and the political relations which flow from it. This is what I mean by revolutionary.

From time to time there are Marxists who have arisen who have attempted to deny or denude Marxism of its revolutionary content. That is true. There are Marxists who have become legal or armchair Marxists, who would like to see Marxism as merely another variant of philosophy, and who treat it in a very eclectic fashion as though one is free to draw from Marxism as one draws from Greek thought and its equivalents, without looking at the class base and without looking whether an ideology is supportive of the status quo or not.

Nevertheless, by and large, we can see Marxism and scientific socialism as subversive of and antithetical to the maintenance of the system of production in which we live. Because ideas, let me repeat, do not float in the sky, they do not float in the atmosphere, they are related to concrete relations of production. Bourgeois ideas derive from bourgeois relations of production. They are intended to conserve and maintain those relations of production. Socialist ideas derive from the same production, but they derive from a different class interest, and their aim is to overthrow that system of production.

Africa and Scientific Socialism

There again I will suggest that African people, like other Third World people, have virtually a vested interest in scientific socialism, because it offers itself to them as a weapon of theory. It offers itself to them as that tool, at the level of ideas, which will be utilized for dismantling the capitalist imperialist structure. This is its concern.

What I will attempt to deal with, as best I can, are certain questions arising from individuals who might say “yes” to most of what I’ve said, and then will ask the question, “Is there no other alternative? Is there no other ideological system which is neither capitalist not socialist, but is anti-capitalist, but addresses itself more humanely, if you like, to the interest of African people wherever they are?” These questions are worth looking into because there are Black people asking these questions, and we have to try and resolve them. My own formulation will be to suggest that we look at concrete examples of African or Black people who have attempted to devise systems which they consider to be non-capitalist and non-socialist. Systems they consider are valid alternatives to scientific socialism for the emancipation of African people.

In this regard we have a number of Pan-Africanists, a number of African nationalists in Africa, in the Caribbean and in this country, who have taken that road. George Padmore did this at the end of his life, and made a sort of distinction — not a sort, he made a distinction between scientific socialism and Pan-Africanism. He said this is the road we will follow: Pan-Africanism. We do not want to go that road which is capitalist; we do not want to go the socialist road; we will derive for ourselves something that is Pan-African.

In a sense Nkrumah followed up upon this and, although at one time he called himself a Marxist, he always was careful to qualify this by saying that he was also a Protestant. He believed in Protestantism at the same time. So simultaneously he was trying to straddle two worlds; the world which says in the beginning was matter and the world which says in the beginning there was the word. And inevitably he fell between these two. It’s impossible to straddle these two. But there he was, and we must grant his honesty and we must grant the honesty of many people who have attempted to do this impossible task and follow them to find out why they failed. They failed because their conception of what a variant different from bourgeois thought and different from socialist thought inevitably turned out to be merely another branch of bourgeois thought. And this was the problem: that bourgeois thought — and indeed socialist thought, when we get down to it — can have a variety of developments or roads and aspects or paths. Bourgeois thought, because of its whimsical nature and because of the way in which it promotes eccentrics, can have any road. Because, after all, when you are not going any place, you can choose any road!

So for bourgeois thought it was possible for these individuals to make what I consider to be a genuine attempt to break with the dominance of bourgeois thought, and yet find in the final analysis that they have merely embraced another manifestation of that which they themselves at the outset had suggested that they were confronting.

There are a number of examples, some more apt than others. Some of the examples actually are Africans who I think, were blatantly dishonest from the beginning. I do think that most of the ideologues of African socialism claiming to find a third path are actually just cheap tricksters who are attempting to hoodwink the majority of the population. I don’t think they’re out to develop anything that addresses itself to the interests of the African people. But, nevertheless, it is part of the necessity of our times that our people no longer are willing to accept anything that is not put to them in the guise of socialism.

And therefore I shan’t in fact go on to African socialism. What I’ll do is take examples of those who were, in my opinion, being serious, being honest. And certainly Kwame Nkrumah was one of these. Nkrumah spent a number of years during the fifties and right up to when he was overthrown — that would cover at least ten years — in which he was searching for an ideology. He started out with this mixture of Marxism and Protestantism, he talked about Pan-Africanism, he went to consciencism and then Nkrumahism, and, there was everything other than a straight understanding of socialism.

What were the actual consequences of this perception? That is what matters to us. Let us assume that he was searching for something African and that he was trying to avoid the trap of adopting something alien. What were the practical consequences of his attempt to dissociate himself from an international socialist tradition? We saw in Ghana that Nkrumah steadfastly refused to accept that there were classes, that there were class contradictions in Ghana, that these class contraditions were fundamental. For years Nkrumah went along with this mish-mash of philosophy, which took some socialist premises but in which he refused to pursue it to its logical conclusion, in which he would accept that one either had a capitalist system based upon the private ownership of the means of production and the alienation of the product of people’s labour, or one had an alternative system which was completely different and that there was no way of juxtaposing and mixing these two to create anything that was new and viable.

A most significant test of this position was when Nkrumah himself was overthrown! After he was overthrown, he lived in Guinea-Konakry and before he died he wrote a small text, Class Struggle in Africa. It is not the greatest philosophical treatise but it is historically important, because it is there Nkrumah himself in effect admits the consequences, the misleading consequences, of an ideology which espoused an African cause, but which felt, for reasons which he did not understand, a historical necessity to separate itself from scientific socialism. It indicated quite clearly the disastrous consequences of that position. Because Nkrumah denied the existence of classes in Ghana until the petty bourgeoisie as a class overthrew him. And then, in Guinea, he said it was a terrible mistake. Yes, the petty bourgeoisie is a class with interests fundamentally opposed to workers and peasants in Africa. Yes, the class interests of the petty bourgeoisie are the same or at least are tied in with the class interests of international monopoly capital and therefore we have in Africa a class struggle within the African continent and a struggle against imperialism. And if we are to aim at transcending these contradictions, of bringing victory and emancipation to the working peoples, the producers of Africa, we will have to grapple with that ideology, which first of all recognizes and, challenges the existence of exploiting and oppressing classes.

It’s a very important historical document. It is the closest that Nkrumah comes to a self-critique. It is the record of a genuine nationalist, African nationalist, who wandered for years with this assumption and feeling that somehow he must dissociate himself in one way or another from scientific socialism because it originated outside the boundaries of his own society and he was afraid of its cultural implications. That is putting it in the most charitable way. But the fear is due, in fact, to aspects of bourgeois ideology. Due to the fact that he made a distinction between social theory and scientific theory, which is not a necessary distinction. That is the distinction which comes out of the history of bourgeois thought.

People seem to have no difficulty in deciding that they are going to use facets of the material culture that originated in the West, whether it originated in capitalist or socialist society. People have no difficulty relating to electricity but they say: “Marx and Engels, that’s European!” They don’t ask the question, “Was Edison a racist?” but they ask the question, “Was Marx a racist?” They genuinely believe that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact, this is obscuring the totality of social development. And the natural sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation of the social reality can similarly derive a certain historical law and hence scientific law of society which can be applied irrespective of its origin or its originators. Of course, it is true, and this is the most appropriate note on which to end, that any ideology, when applied, must applied with a thorough grasp of the internal realities of a given African society.

Marxism comes to the world as a historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans or — let us go back to Asians; when the Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were interwoven obviously and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting. It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that, and to adapt it, and to scrutinize it, and see how it was applicable to their society. First and foremost to be scientific it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.

I have already cited Cabral in another context, and he reappears in this context. The way in which he is at all times looking at the particularities of class development in contemporary Guinea-Bissau, looking at the potential of classes in Guinea-Bissau at this point in time. And therefore he is, of course, making sure that Marxism does not simply appear as the summation of other people’s history, but appears as a living force within one’s history, and this is a difficult transformation. This is the task of anybody who considers himself or herself a Marxist. However, because it is fraught with so many difficulties and obstacles, many people take the easy route, which is to take it as a finished product rather than an ongoing special product which has to be adapted to their own society.

One finds that in looking at this Marxist theory, at its relevance to race, looking at the relevance of Marxist theory to national emancipation, we come up with a very important paradox, and it is this: that the nationalist, in the strict sense of the word, that is the petty bourgeois nationalist, who aims merely at the recovery of national independence in our epoch, is incapable of giving the peoples of the Caribbean any participation in liberal democracy. The petty-bourgeoisie cannot fulfill these historical tasks, for national liberation requires a socialist ideology. We cannot separate the two. Even for national liberation in Africa, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique very clearly demonstrated the necessity for an ideological development — for consciencization, as they say in Latin America — and, the nationalist struggle was won because it came under the rubric of a scientific socialist perspective.

As Cabral said, “There may be revolutions which have had a revolutionary theory and which have failed, but there have certainly been no revolutions which have succeeded without a revolutionary theory.”

Notes

Walter Rodney, 1975. Marxism and African Liberation. [web] ↩

Asylum As A Tool Of Exclusion

[Photo credit: Alejandro Tamayo / San Diego Union-Tribune]

By Daniel Melo

Asylum, on its face, would seem to be a word of welcome to those fleeing violence. In the US, its connotation within immigration law is tied to the acquisition of legal status, of the ability to remain, sheltered from the harm one is fleeing from. The oft-quoted lines of Emma Lazarus’s The New Colossus on the Statute of Liberty — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” —has been held out as an ode to this very idea of refuge, and of America’s greatness in the provision of it. But while both the word and its ideal may paint warm walls and windows where so many broken people can come to find safety, the US asylum system is far more like the rusted metal walls that protrude from the desert floor. The asylum system, far from being a means of protection for the many thousands displaced by capitalism’s global consequences, is but another tool of exclusion.

As is true in many other areas of immigration relief, the quantum of harm is often the starting point for any chance at success. In other words, the system creates a rather horrendous form of “incentive” if one dare call it that, where the more brutality and violence has suffered, the more compelling the case is. Asylum requires a particular brand of suffering to compel state actors to allow people some small reprieve from harm. To put it bluntly, the system considers some worthy of protection so long as it serves a particular political purpose, while others (even those that end in death) are not so fortunate. While the Trump era saw even this slim protection erode away, the asylum system has never been a boon to migrants. In fact, despite the appearance of an “impartial” judiciary that often decides asylum claims, from its very beginnings, US asylum and refugee protections were not open doors with humanitarian aims but political, exclusionary tools.

Authors Banks Miller et al. note in their work that asylum law is also rooted in material reality; i.e., capitalism shaped the contours of the law. In the US case, it was a tool to undermine the communist countries by focusing grants of asylum and refugee status on people from those nations. Far from being oriented around even vague humanitarian interests, it was instead fashioned as a political weapon. For example, during the Cold War, the US framed the vast majority of incoming Cubans as refugees but denied the same status to most Haitians who were oppressed by a series of brutal—but anti-communist—dictators. Even after the text of asylum law changed to reflect a more “egalitarian” framework, it simply painted over this reality. Reagan’s administration painted migrants from Central and South America, fleeing decades of US imperialist policy, as “economic” migrants, unworthy of asylum, while as noted above, those departing Cold War nations were far more likely to have their asylum cases approved. This is no less true today, with asylum seekers from China granted at a rate orders of magnitude greater than those from Mexico.

The misunderstood context of Lazarus’s poem itself is revealing. As Professor Walt Hunter notes, it emerged in the midst of the profoundly xenophobic and racist Chinese Exclusion Act and as the European powers were divvying up the African continent to colonize it. In that particular moment of capitalist geopolitics the lines emerged (contrary to their parroting in the mouth of neoliberal elite) that stand for something more than American exceptionalism--it is a mirror casting back the reflection of precisely the misery that such exceptionalism has wrought on so many. Lazarus’s poem is not an ode to America’s open arms but a condemnation of how it has failed to live up to its professed ideals. During our moment, the rehashing of these lines is telling--America has yet to truly face the human consequences of its role in marching capitalism around the globe and maintains its innocence to the huddled, displaced masses the world over.

The notion of asylum, however pure conceptually, is ultimately shattered into sharp pieces when set down on the ground of actual application. The political weaponization of what was supposed to be a humanitarian aim evidences a profound need to rethink the question of not just how the law is written and applied, but more fundamentally, the body of people who get to shape it. It should be no more of a surprise that asylum law ultimately fell victim to ruling class interests than the retooling of Lazarus’s poem to reflect neoliberal values and American exceptionalism. As Marx noted, the law and forms of state power that enforce it “have their roots in the material conditions of life.” So long as a choice few have the right to decide who lives and dies (albeit through the sterile and supposedly equal “rule-of-law”), we cannot achieve the aims of the solidarity that should come for those seeking asylum. Indeed, it makes it nearly impossible to look beyond the present humanitarian crises the world over to their source—capitalism itself. Justice does not stop at expanding and welcoming those fleeing harm; it looks to that which chases them.

Daniel Melo is a public sector immigration lawyer in the American Southeast who primarily works with refugees and is the son of a migrant himself. His book, Borderlines, is due out from Zer0 Books in August 2021.

Cuba is Resilient, the US is Unrelenting: An Analysis of US Activities in Cuba and the Current Protest Movement

[Photo credit: Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters]

By Canyon Ryan

On the weekend following the assassination of Haitian dictator-to-be Jovinel Moïse, with all eyes on the Carribbean, thousands of Cubans rose up in condemnation of food and medicine shortages, long queues for goods, dwindling living standards, the embargo, and the government. The protests were the largest in the last 25 years, with people turning over police cars, looting shops, throwing rocks at government buildings, and fighting with police.

The protests come just weeks after the United Nations near-unanimously voted to denounce the unilateral U.S. embargo against the nation for the 29th consecutive year, with only the settler-colonialist states of Israel and the U.S. voting against the Resolution. What’s more, last week the Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden Administration was deliberating the tempering of U.S. sanctions as a coercive measure against enemy states.

Alas, spontaneously Cubans rebelled, putting the nation in the international spotlight for having its largest protests since the Maleconazo uprising in 1994. Suddenly, Joe Biden is being forced to take a position beyond, “the U.S. stands with the people of Cuba”. Will his Administration stay true to his campaign promises to return to dialogue with the Cuban government and release the 243 additional Trump sanctions (and other restrictions), or will Biden choose a hardline position and increase sanctions against Cuba? Maybe he will sit on his hands, as most U.S. Presidents have, and allow the NGOs and CIA to slowly destabilize the social and political systems of the country, knowing full well the embargo is doing just that to the country’s economy. So far, all we have heard from Biden is that there will be no easing of restrictions Trump placed on remittances to Cuba, and Biden intends to extend sanctions on Cuban officials.

This article will analyze the U.S. interference in contemporary Cuban affairs, the Cuban protests and their roots, the social insecurities the Island is currently facing, the international coverage of these historic protests, and attempt to foresee how the protests may pan out.

US Interference in Contemporary Cuba

Beyond the U.S. imposed embargo on Cuba which has cost the Island more than $130B since 1962, the U.S. has concocted various nefarious plots designed to harm the government, and at times the people of Cuba. You may have heard of the more sensationalized stories about U.S. involvement in Cuba, post-Revolution, such as Operation Mongoose, the more than 638 assassination attempts aimed at Fidel Castro, the plot to depilate Castro’s beard, and the scheme to dose Castro with hallucinogines. But many are unfamiliar with more recent attempts to undermine the Revolution. The following examples hold relevance and add clarity to the current protest movement, and hopefully will enlighten those curious for context on Cuba.

Much of this activity has been encouraged and financed by Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) from the U.S., being wielded as soft-power hammers to continually oppress the Island. Allen Weinstein, cofounder of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), once remarked, “a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA”. Indeed, the NED through its various appendages, as well as USAID and the State Department, work surreptitiously to support anti-Castroists in a multitude of ways.

Cuban Diaspora Research Regarding Regime Change

Founded in 1999, the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies (ICCAS) was established to conduct academic research and promote discussion on Cuban and Cuban-American relations out of the University of Miami (UM). By November 2001, ICCAS was accepted for a grant of $6,000,000 by USAID titled “Cuban Transition Project” to “study and make recommendations for the reconstruction of the island once the post-Castro transition begins in earnest”.

Manuel Jorge Cutillas served as the Advisory Board’s Chairperson to the CTP for much of the project’s existence. Cutillas is the great-great-grandson of Don Facundo, a Spanish businessman who founded the Bacardi rum distillery in 1862. Raised in Santiago, Cutillas moved to the U.S. where he earned his Bachelors of Science in Troy, New York. After graduating, Cutillas moved back to Cuba and continued in his familial footsteps working as the Assistant Distillery Superintendent of Bacardi in 1955. After the 1960 Revolution, Castro’s Administration seized and nationalized Barardi properties, utilizing the revenues for the benefit of Cuba’s development. Cutillas eventually fled to the U.S., landing in Miami and settling in the Bahamas where Bacardi & Company Ltd. established its headquarters. In 1997, Cutillas became Chairperson of the Center for a Free Cuba, a seat he served until his death in 2013.

Serving as the Senior Academic Advisor for the CTP was Antonio Jorge who worked as the Vice Minister of Finance, the Chief Economist of the National Association of Manufacturers in Havana (1956-1957), and Chief Economist of the Cuban government. In 2000, ICCAS-CTP published “The U.S. Embargo and the Failure of the Cuban Economy” which aimed to analyze the effects of the blockade. Jorge’s conclusion is a “terse” one in which he proclaims “the embargo has not harmed the Cuban economy” and that it would be unwise for the U.S. to lift the embargo without a “firm commitment to the democratization and market reforms that [Castro’s] regime has stubbornly opposed for the last 40 years”. He further criticizes Castro’s “catastrophic decision to remove a prosperous, modernizing society from the western world’s political and economic orbit... for which he must assume full responsibility”, which translates to a critique of Castro’s removal of Cuba from the imperial dominance of the U.S. and support for all Western aggression against the island thus far.

Alas, this is the kind of work USAID is sponsoring. Materially biased anti-Castroist elites being paid millions to conduct ‘research’ regarding Cuban political economy while also plotting how to privatize state assets and introduce the economy to international exploitation once Castro is no longer.

The Establishment of ZunZuneo

In 2009, with direct U.S. involvement through USAID, for-profit tech contractor Creative Associates International launched “ZunZuneo”. ZunZuneo (otherwise known as the ‘Cuban Twitter’) was a website and SMS service which existed in Cuba and was used to skirt censorship laws on the Island. As part of USAID’s push for ‘internet freedom’, the platform was established to attract Cuban youth and serve as a form of communications between subversives. Establishing a Cuban user base was made easy for Creative Associates as they had seemingly illicitly obtained approximately 500,000 Cuban phone numbers from an internal government source. The Associated Press reported that the project was earmarked by USAID at an estimated $1,600,000, under an unspecified project in Pakistan. USAID has disputed this claim.

The U.S. worked tirelessly throughout the project to cover their tracks. After contracting Creative Associates to develop the software, USAID hired Mobile Accord, a Denver tech startup, to work on stabilizing the platform while also concealing its foundations. Mobile Accord considered a dozen European candidates to take over ZunZuneo, enshrouding its background throughout the process of marketing the platform, to no avail.

Messages on ZunZuneo would funnel through two countries, neither using U.S.-owned servers, so as to remove traffic from Cuban purvey and disguise U.S. involvement. The clandestine operation was activated the same year that Alan Gross was arrested for sneaking satellites into the country. Gross was working for Development Alternatives, Inc., an NGO subcontracted by USAID to help provide internet connectivity to the Island using U.S. government operated satellites. Gross smuggled laptops, smart phones, hard drives and networking equipment into Cuba while traveling with fellow ideologues (whose identities he later compromised to Cuban officials) under the cover of traveling as Jewish-American ‘humanitarian aid’ delegations. We are to believe the two projects are unrelated, as though the U.S. and its foreign appendages sponsor programs for millions of dollars designed to destabilize a designated state-sponsor of terror in a vacuum.

ZunZuneo would peak at approximately 40,000 members, collapsing without notice in 2012 as the USAID grant coffers emptied and the software proved prone to blackouts. Many users were unaware that the program was developed in the U.S. for the purpose of subversion.

Infiltration of the Hip Hop Scene

Around the same time that ZunZuneo launched, USAID (again through Creative Associates) was sponsoring and promoting the underground hip hop scene in Cuba. Aldo Rodriguez and his group Los Aldeanos had gained notoriety after the release of their album “Censurado”, a compilation of protest songs opposing the government. In a county where the government holds power over the hip-hop artist’s union (Agencia Cubana de Rap), Los Aldeanos were preaching a unique message not regularly heard by hip hop heads.

The program went much further than just sponsoring Los Aldeanos concerts. In the process of building a counter-revolutionary constituency, the contractors of the campaign established TalentoCubano.net, building a list of 200 'socially conscious youth’ they could hopefully weaponize against the Cuban state. Contractors also created a front company in Panama to funnel money into Cuba which was used to print and distribute DVD’s on the dissident cultural movement in Cuba that could then subvert Cuba’s censorship laws.

Much like the concealing of U.S. support when pitching ZunZuneo to outside financiers, Creative Associate’s pointman Rajko Bozic (who played a role in supporting the overthrow of Slobadon Milosevic in Serbia through similar means) was sure not to disclose USAID’s involvement. Numerous artists were targeted by the operation, resulting in Cuban officials detaining and confiscating incriminating evidence from participants working on behalf of the U.S. government. Thus, the organic protest movement became a weapon for USAID. What’s worse, it built reason for Cuban authorities to be skeptical of all subversive hip hop, meaning USAID delegitimize the entire phenomena, beyond their own failed operation.

Bolstering an Independent Civil Society

In the 21st century alone the U.S. has (on the books) spent more than $250,000,000 in Cuba, largely on “civil society and government” grants from the U.S. State Department and USAID, mostly funneled through the NED.

Between 2019 and 2021, Directorio Democratico Cubano (DDC), which runs Radio Republica, received approximately $1,000,000 from the State Department and USAID for radio broadcasting, humanitarian aid, civil society engagement and the like. Radio Republica considers itself “the voice of the Cuban resistance”, while the tax-exempt Miami-based DDC has since 1996, ‘promoted freedom and democracy for Cuba in the face of the current dictatorship’.

Over $1,375,302 in the NED 2020 Cuba budget was dedicated to promoting uncensored literature, broadcasts, internet and media prohibited on the Island, while an additional $1,626,022 was earmarked for supporting independent labor organizations, independent music groups, independent human rights organizations, and independent cultural organizations. Of course, the independence of these organizations is questionable considering they receive funding from the U.S. government and its private beneficiaries.

Global Americas, an “independent” think-tank that received two payments of $50,000 in 2015 and 2016 by the NED, wrote an article in May, 2018 titled “Laying the Groundwork for Insurrection: A Closer Look at the U.S. Role in Nicaragua's Social Unrest” that notes, “US [sic] support has helped play a role in nurturing the current uprisings.” U.S. support came in the form of grants from the NED, “focused on strengthening civil society, improving accountability and governance, fostering a culture of human rights, and reinforcing democratic ideals and values”. The ‘uprisings’ in question were the 2018 protests that resulted in clashes between the FSLN government and counter-revolutionary protesters; resulting in 440 estimated deaths on both sides and the unanimous U.S. Senate passage of the ‘NICA [Act]’, which prohibits Nicaragua from receiving U.S., International Monetary Foundation, and World Trade Organization loans.

US Interference in Latin America and the Caribbean

 The above information is used to demonstrate U.S. NGO interference in Cuban affairs since the 21st Century began. While just four instances, these projects are symbolic of a larger systematic attempt to undermine the Cuban Revolution. It is important to note that since 1995 Cuba has been in a state of recovery from the Special Period. This convalescence was greatly assisted by Hugo Chavez’s coming to power in Venezuela, which generated a massive wave of leftist governments achieving a position of authority in their countries and the proliferation of left-alliances across the region. Moreover, Chavez believed in the Cuban Revolution, and through South-by-South assistance sent Cuba fuel in exchange for Cuban administrators and health professionals. But many, if not all of the left in Latin America looked to Cuba as an inspiration and example of what was possible without reliance on international banks and U.S. support. Thus, this period of rehabilitation coincided with a period of Cuban pride.

However, when the pink tide ended so did many of the regional gains. Venezuela, Cuba’s greatest ally, found itself in a dire situation as oil prices plummeted, economic mismanagement caught up to the PSUV and the opposition was able to assert itself with some coordination (and U.S. assistance). U.S. interference in regional affairs further regained primacy as the U.S. turned away from much of its earlier activities in West Asia and started prying into Latin America and the Caribbean once more. In order to regain hegemony in the region, the U.S. overthrew Jean Bertrand Aristide in Haiti (for the second time), Hugo Chavez for a period of days in Venezuela, and Manuel Zelaya in Honduras, and assisted in the lawfare removal of Lula da Silva in Brazil. All the while, the U.S. was establishing relationships with leaders happy to be sycophants for the Empire to the North.

Cuba, forever defiant under revolutionary leadership, refused to comply with regional alterations directed by U.S. pressure and continued to build alliances with the pink tide governments which remained in positions of power, namely Bolivia, Nicaragua and Venezuela. For these alliances Cuba has continued to suffer, as have her allies. Bolivia was most recently the target of a U.S. supported anti-Indigenous coup, which conducted massacres of peaceful Andean protesters, was quickly submerged by COVID19, and postponed elections for over a year. Incredibly, Evo Morales’ party Movement Towards Socialism (Movimiento Al Socialismo) was able to, despite many legal restrictions and threats, successfully regain power in the elections with Luis Arce securing the presidency in the first-round. However, both Nicaragua and Venezuela have found themselves being suffocated by U.S. sanctions and in serious conflicts with the U.S. NGO-sponsored opposition. Caracas, Havana and Managua have been termed the Troika of Tyranny, and the U.S. Empire is willing to destroy these defiant nations at any cost.

Since taking power, the Troika has existed much to the ire of Washington. Why? Could it be that in 1998 Hugo Chavez inherited a country in which two-thirds of the population subsisted on less than two dollars a day and in the following years decreased the Gini Coefficient by 54%, reduced poverty from 70.8% (1996) to 21% (2010) and extreme poverty from approximately 40% to 7.3%, while 20,000,000 benefited from PSUV sponsored anti-poverty programs? And in Nicaragua, after the U.S. sponsored Contra terrorists plagued the country in indiscriminate attacks while USAID and the NED built an opposition coalition to run the FSLN out of office, Daniel Ortega successfully regained the presidency in 2006. Since then, the FSLN has annually increased minimum wage 5-7% above inflation, improved working conditions across the country and sliced poverty 30% between 2005 and 2014. Could it be that these countries are setting too sincere of an example that the State can benefit its people, if it holds the capitalist class accountable and assists the development of socialism within its borders, while practicing anti-imperialist solidarity abroad? Or is it simply their ability to defy the U.S. at every regime change attempt pursued that results in U.S. terror, as both countries exist in approximate turmoil as the U.S. actively works to undermine both socialist governments through sanctions, supporting oppositional media, parties and civil society, and promoting violent protests while condemning any and all responses by the government.

Cuba, on the other hand, is different. There were no soaring highs for Cuba in the early 2000s and the Island has not found itself mired in street conflicts or in political battles with an opposition. Instead, Cuba is a seasoned player in the game of U.S. interference and has successfully snubbed the Empire on many occasions throughout its history. The greatest difficulties in Cuba come in the form of economic constriction, which results in a demoralized population and a consistently questionable future for the populace as goods become more scarce. Cuba is resilient, but the U.S. is unrelenting in its dedication to complicate the Revolution. Indeed, today Cuba faces one of its greatest domestic challenges to date: a youth who are indifferent to the Revolution and yearning for a way out of the current recession.

NGOs Wield Culture as Coercion

The slogans of the protests are said to be “Liberty” (Libertad), “Down with the Dictatorship” (Abajo la Dictadura), “Diaz-Canel, Motherfucker” (Diaz-Canel, Singao) and often “Fatherland and Life” (Patria Y Vida). “Fatherland and Life” is a collaborative song by Yotuel, Gente de Zona, Descemer Bueno, Maykel Osorbo and El Funky. It is a reference to “Patria o Muerte”, a phrase popularized by Fidel Castro throughout his presidency meaning “Fatherland or Death”, which became a marked Revolutionary slogan and a call to arms for revolutionaries around the world. As such, the song exists as a testement to anti-Castro and anti-communist dissent; and to an extent, a rebuke of the struggles of anti-colonialism.

The song is a collaborative effort by Cuban artists who speak out against the Revolutionary government, two from the San Isidro Movement (MSI) and three who have left the Island. Yotuel, Gente de Zona and Descemer Bueno all live in Miami, while Maykel Osboro and El Funky remain in Cuba. Press in Cuba loathes the song, while press in the Empire lauds it. The music video begins with a Cuban Peso displaying the face of Jose Marti disintegrating in flames only to be replaced with the face of George Washington on one-half. The lyrics mention MSI, other dissident artists, Cuban government repression and the “evil Revolution”; while the video shows scenes of the artists singing and crying, Cuban police wrestling protesters, and other national images like the Cuban Flag and the Cespedes Flag of Yara.

Yotuel, described by the Wall Street Journal as a ‘superstar rapper’, explained in an interview with Billboard that it was the 500th anniversary of the founding of Havana that ‘pushed him over the edge’. He elaborates, “for me, it was 440 years… Before the revolution, we had a beautiful Cuba; now we have ruins. From that point on, I said, ‘I’m not going to be quiet anymore’.” Thus, we have a Cuban artist living in Miami yearning for the years of colonialism, subjugation, and dictatorship. And putting it as plainly as possible, the founder of the MSI in an interview with WSJ says, “we want democracy, we want a free market, we want opportunity”.

In another article, I explained that the MSI is composed of an assortment of on-the-Island dissident artists demanding more freedom of expression. They are a collective of musicians, producers, performance artists, painters, etc. that, despite their more problematic membership (such Denis Solis, who used homophobic and mysognyst language and praised Trump while being detained) and goals, have valid desires that should not be outrightly dismissed. MSI developed after the passing of Decree 349, the first law signed into effect by Miguel Diaz-Canel which prohibits artists from ‘providing their services’ in any open space without government approval. The government’s reasoning for this was that artists not employed by the government are able to circumvent taxes. But the law also gives the government the ability to detain any artists demonstrating in public without prior approval. This is the frustration which built MSI.

The Cuban police do harass dissident artists, through scare tactics, surveillance, arbitrary arrests and the like. Some of the largest non-authorized protests to occur on the island before the July protests were at the Ministry of Culture where MSI and sympathizers rallied in solidarity with detained MSI members. Indeed, there was even the incident of residents from San Isidro preventing authorities from arresting MSI member and ‘Homeland and Life collaborator‘ Maykel Osboro. So it should be understood that Cuban authorities do not necessarily have popular support in this repression. But it should also be understood that the Cuban authorities have other reasoning behind their actions which go beyond the artist's calls for ‘human rights’ and freedom of expression.

MSI members are known to promote sanctions on the Cuban economy and remittances, and in October of 2020 were telling a South Florida audience to vote for Trump because of his hardline stance on Cuba. The group has also called for a Cuban-American strike on remittances to struggling Cuban families. Denis Solis, the homophobic rapper mentioned above who upon being arrested shouted, “Trump 2020! That is my President” admitted to authorities that a Cuban-American in Miami had offered him $200USD to carry out political work. Not to mention that Solis was being arrested for failing to appear before National Revolutionary Police to explain his links to “a terrorist element based in Miami” twice. A Cuban journalist named Nelson Julio Alvarez, who is employed by the USAID-sponsored NGO ADN, detailed in a Telescopio Cubano Facebook group how he received $150-200USD to be ‘provocative’. These provocations can come in many forms, from staging protests and hunger strikes, to throwing molotov cocktails at gas stations and breaking windows at the bank. The motivation for the latter was not ideological but financial, being payment for propagande par le fiat of 200-500 CUC (before the process of currency unification had begun).

Of the initial twenty-to-thirty protestors at the Ministry of Culture, the Cuban government counts nine as U.S. NGO employees. Also at that protest was Chargé d’affaires for the US Embassy in Cuba Timothy Zuñiga-Brown, visiting the group and transporting protesters. Similarly, in 2020 the NED sent Fundacion Cartel Urbano $110,000 for their “Empowering Cuban Hip Hop Artists as Leaders in Society”, where artists met at the Hip Hop Summit in Colombia to “share their experiences of social transformation. The organization will mentior [sic] artists and provide technical capacity to strengthen their work. The group will also raise awareness about the role hip hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region”. These programs, as Raul Castro correctly points out, are not meant to benefit a country that the U.S. has held down for more than 60 years, but to sow division in a Cuba unified by the struggles against the omnipresent embargo.

We must question how different (if at all) the intent of the hip hop infiltration projects in 2020 are compared to the projects of 2014. It is clear that hip hop culture is being weaponized as a soft power tool by the U.S. to promote dissident artists and spark rebellions much like those seen in late 2020 and July 2021. And what is a dissident artist if backed by a foreign government, both politically and financially, which holds the dissident’s government hostage? When former CIA head and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Senators Marco Rubio and Bob Menendez are supporting a social movement, shouldn’t this alone be cause for concern?

Social Media and the Influence of Celebrities, Bots and a Hashtag

As with all protests and international movements these days, many interested in what was going on in Cuba turned to social media for up-to-date coverage on the protests. There they may have seen Pitbull’s plea for Jeff Bezos and the capitalist class to do something to support the protests in Cuba, or Lebanese-born Mia Khalifa using Cuban slang for ‘motherfucker’ (Singao) directed at President Miguel Diaz Canel while promising to never step foot on the Island until there is a change in the regime. Similarly, the Miami Heat and Miami Dolphins came out in support of the protests, posting photos of neon signs reading “Patria y Vida” on Instagram and tweeting #SOSCUBA. There were also tweets and Instagram statements from musician-turned-businesswoman a hundred-millionaire Gloria Estfan; the singer-songwriter with a racially insensitive past, Camila Cabello; John McCain supporter Daddy Yankee; alleged plagiarist Ricky Martin; and other prominent Spanish-speaking musicians.

However, aside from celebrities spouting the messages of support for a “Free Cuba”, there were also many lesser known (and entirely unknown) accounts that took to Twitter to amplify the protests in Cuba, including “anti-Castrist” Miami-based accounts (such as the bot-attached, Trump promoting @Yusnaby) and disinformation accounts. Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez noted that the Cuban government had detected the use of ‘bots’ on social media spurring the #SOSCUBA trend. But where did the hashtag originate from? Cuba, surely? No. Not Cuba, but instead her former colonizer Spain, and the Cuban-American diaspora (largely based in Miami).

The first account to use #SOSCUBA was located in Spain, automating 1,300 tweets on July 10 and 11. Twitter account @carnota_96 later sent out a request for users to tag pop-culture artists to call attention to what was going on in Cuba, receiving 1,100 responses mostly from bots; the results of which have been displayed in the introductory paragraph above. More than 1,500 accounts participating in the hashtag campaign were created on July 10 and 11, as well. While this may not sound like a lot, if 1,000 accounts tweeted #SOSCUBA 1,000 times in a day can, there would be 1,000,000 tweets supporting that trending hashtag. This is the influence that bot operations can, and will have in the future.

There were also copypastas of tweets reading, “we Cubans don't want the end of the embargo if that means the regime and dictatorship stays, we want them gone, not more communism”. This is not so different from the bot activity we saw come out in support of the 2019 coup in Bolivia, where copypastas consistently read, “friends from everywhere, in Bolivia there was NO COUP” and the more than 100,000 accounts born in two weeks to endorse the Anez dictatorship. Moreover, @BotSentinel, a Twitter account which identifies inauthentic account activity referenced more than 2,099 posts since July 11 tweeting with mentions of #SOSCUBA. I have noted that ZunZuneo was created around the same time that the ‘Twitter Revolutions’ of the Arab Spring were taking place. Is it really so different this time?

Equally disdainful has been the coverage of the protests. For one, there has been the incessant use of protests being mislabeled as those taking place in Cuba. Protests in Alexandria, Egypt from 2011; Washington D.C. in 2017; Buenos Aires, Argentina; and Miami, Florida are being shared as evidence of wide-spread unrest on the Island. The same has occurred with injured children, as videos from Venezuela are being shared as though this is the situation in Cuba. The Associated Press, Fox News, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The New York Times, The Washington Times, and Voice of America have taken this to a different extreme, sharing photos and videos of pro-government rallies as evidence of anti-government protests. It is easy to discern the difference due to the use of the M-26-7 flag, which was used by Castro and his rebel army during the Revolution. What’s more, there has been clear evidence of Twitter verifying bot accounts spewing anti-communist jargon.

Then there is the Canada-based Instagram account @revolucioncuba that has grown in popularity since the protests began. The account’s first post is titled “Communist Haven or Corruption? Cuba Today” in May 2020, accusing the government of living as capitalists while keeping the people poor and condemning arbitrary arrests. The second infographic titled “The Extortion of Cuban Doctors” was published two days later, where the account accuses the government of trafficking healthcare professionals around the world, a line right out of Jair Bolsonaro and Mike Pompeo’s playbook. Note as well, the accusation being made here is during the first months of the COVID19 pandemic. What does @revolucioncuba do? Smear the health professionals on the front lines. One of the most shared posts is the “If You Aren’t Cuban I Am Begging You to Share This”, which alleges that the government is starving the people of Cuba and exploiting the embargo as cover for repression.

The wave of online activism in the form of Instagram infographics is relatively new, but has achieved major success in disinformation and misinformation campaigns for the cause of regime change. This is especially true for people not familiar with Cuban affairs who want to feel like they are doing something to support the people of Cuba without any understanding of Cuba. In reality, they are unknowingly participating in informational warfare on behalf of imperialism.

U.S. Politicians and Opposing Views on Protests

U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle found themselves in agreement on the need to voice support for the U.S.-deemed ‘pro-democracy’ protests in Cuba, in more ways than one. Governor Rick DeSantis called on the Cuban military to overthrow the government, while Miami Mayor Fracis Suarez (who once gave Juan Guaido the key to the city) recommended the use of U.S. airstrikes being explored in Cuba. Congressman Anthony Sabatini called for an ultimatum for the Communist Party to cede power or “be persecuted and executed thereafter”. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders issued statements condemning the U.S. embargo that were otherwise not too dissimilar from the Bob Menendez and Marco Rubio joint-resolution condemning the ‘authoritarian regime’. Coral Gables Mayor Vince Lago’s administration also  cancelled an art exhibit that included one Chinese and one Cuban artist for their alleged communist sympathies. Talk about suppression of association and artistic expression!

Aside from the social Democrats, most references to the protests ignore any mention of the embargo. Both @revolucioncuba and @humanitieshearts, as well as warmongering GOP and Dems have made the case that it is not the embargo that Cubans are protesting; no, it is not even the food, medicine and commodity shortage that the Cubans are protesting. On the contrary, the argument from the U.S. and MSI is that Cubans are protesting for freedom!

They are correct in some ways and wrong in others. Cubans are protesting for freedom: freedom from the embargo, freedom to health, freedom from hunger, freedom to a decent living standard, freedom from blackouts and electrical shortages, etc. And they are also protesting for freedom from governmental repression, which is certainly real and often excessive (or at least seemingly unnecessary). It is not always one or the other either, and this is something I am sure we can relate to when questioning what freedom is and entails. And what freedoms must be curtailed for others to be promoted. Socialist freedoms are different from liberal freedoms, but the two can overlap, especially in the 21st century dominated by a liberal international order.

Still, it is relevant to understand the freedoms those outside of Cuba are calling for are quite different from those inside of Cuba. It is a noble desire, and one easy to support, when we call for more freedom of speech in Cuba. That poets can be consistently harassed by police for having a different political alignment than that of the state is not something to praise, especially as Marxists and dissidents in our own countries. But circumstances are quite different in Cuba. In Cuba, there is a revolutionary government in power, committed to the ideals of socialism, willing to be flexible with economic freedoms; a government that incorporates the voice of the Cuban populace as a whole in the construction of a state constitution. That is the kind of freedom of speech they have in Cuba. The freedom of speech they do not have is that which is hostile to the socialist government and revolution, that which is diametrically opposed to socialism in calls for a ‘free market’, and that which is bought and paid-for, especially by the U.S. Similarly, where is Cuba’s freedom of speech? Under the U.S. embargo, Cuba has been prevented from ever reaching her true potential, as she remains under the thumb of the Empire 90-miles North. In the U.S. you can largely say whatever you want to say, but to who? Is the news going to have us on to talk about socialism? Only to disparage us. Even a social Democrat like Bernie Sanders was ignored, mocked, and dismissed when he ran for President of the U.S., and especially so when he commented favorably about the literacy campaign and healthcare system in Cuba. Capitalism chooses who has freedom of speech and who is forced to listen. The differences are striking.

Cuba was engulfed in anti-government protests because the people are desperate; and the people are desperate because the U.S. holds them hostage. While U.S. politicians and the diaspora blame the Cuba government for holding them hostage, it is quite clear who has the upper-hand in this conflict. But the issue for Cubans, who are some of the most educated people in the world, is that they have heard about the embargo for the last 62 years. They know what el bloqueo is, how it affects their lives and the economy. But they are still frustrated, and they have every right to be. The embargo is clearly not going anywhere. And the Cuban people cannot destroy ‘the blockade’, as it is foreign and immaterial. What is material and present is the government, which is explicitly meant to be accountable to the people.

On April 6, 1960, Deputy Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester Mallory wrote to the Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Richard Rubottom, acknowledging the mass support for Castro and recommending sanctions to deny Cuba money and supplies as an alternative to invasion. Describing it as ‘adroit and inconspicuous’, he believed it would successfully “decrease monetary and real wages, bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government [sic]”. At that time, Cuba was able to turn to the USSR, who were happy to have comrades in the West. When the USSR collapsed, the Island was forced to fend for itself under U.S. pressure. The election of Hugo Chavez was a breath of fresh air, but not enough to keep the Island financially afloat. And today, China has replaced the USSR as Cuba remains under suffocating sanctions, but China’s role in Cuba -despite being the most contendable superpower opposed to the U.S.- is incomparable to the assistance from the Soviets. With the U.S. never willing to let Cubans live but always concerned about ‘Cuban liberty’, it makes sense the Cuban people are taking their anger out on the Cuban government. And for the younger generation, this makes complete sense. The gains of the Revolution are all but declining, and despite the U.S. hatred for Cuba, Americans are happy to flaunt their lavish life-styles online to Cuban audiences and to promote and pedestalize the Cuban diaspora and anti-communist commands every election cycle. The youth do not see the benefits of the Revolution but only hear of how good things were, so their vexation is certainly justified.

Policing Cuba-Centered Protests on the Island and in the U.S.

Beginning on July 11, protests erupted in Cuba, spreading to more than 58 locations on the Island. The first protest took place in St. Antonio de los Banos in response to rising prices, commodity, food and fuel shortages. I have explained elsewhere that Cuba is going through a process of currency unification, the much overdue monetary maneuver of ending the circulation of the Cuban Convertible Peso and combining its value with the Cuban Peso. This has resulted in the devaluation of hard currency on the Island while simultaneously raising prices. Despite government efforts to curtail the decline of purchasing price power per population, the pandemic has made this activity all the more difficult to control.

As news of the protests circulated on social media, more Cubans took to the streets to demonstrate their frustrations with current living standards. Almost immediately, Diaz-Canel traveled from Havana to the site of the first protest to request calm and dialogue with the outraged population. Nonetheless, rallies around the Island continued to grow, and became more disruptive as time went on. The expansion of the protests prompted the government to shut down internet access across the Island. Some marches were allowed to take place with no resistance while other protests were met with a heavier hand. It is important to note however that in Cuba, little-to-no tear gas was used, rubber bullets were not indiscriminately shot at protestors. The first and only reported death occurred on the second day of protests, when one man, aged 36, was killed by the police during a clash between demonstrators and the State outside a government building. Videos showing police officers entering the homes of alleged provocateurs and detaining them have disseminated profusely, with one recorded instance of police shooting a protest participant days later while in his home. Many videos have circulated of police brutality, with police fighting with protesters, chasing down protesters, and dragging protesters out of assemblies. The scenes were not all that dissimilar from those displayed by U.S. police in Los Angeles just days ago, where they shot LGBTQ+ counter-protesters point-blank with rubber bullets, battered protests and detained dozens while defending right wing extremists freedom of speech.

Cubans demonstrated peacefully in most areas but there were certainly exceptions. Protesters toppled police vehicles and ordinary cars, looted MLC shops, vandalized buildings and provoked police officers by swinging at them and throwing rocks. Marches were held where American flags were flown. In response to the chaos, police eventually filled the streets with hundreds being arrested. Diaz-Canel called all revolutionaries to the streets to defend the country from the vandals, a request that set off alarms in the global North. This was not a call for street skirmishes but for counter-demonstrations, despite what U.S. politicians are arguing. For the most part, the protests have since calmed, with one video posted by Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar showing a single man shouting “libertad” holding a sign walking through the streets of Cuba, being laughed at by the person recording.

Days after the first protest, Diaz-Canel admitted government responsibility for errors regarding food and commodity shortages, and spoke of the need for dialogue and not hate. A common critique is that Cuban government has been focusing too much on the construction of lavish hotels throughout the crisis when monetary reserves are provenly scarce. This is especially frustrating considering there have been no short-term gains as tourism has plummeted against the backdrop of the pandemic and Cuba is reporting its highest numbers since COVID19 hit the Island, with the worst contagion rate per capita in Latin America. In the beginning, Cuba was reporting the best numbers, owing that success to their medical brigades. But since the financial crisis began to accelerate throughout 2020, people cannot afford to stay inside and self-isolate as they need to stand in queues for hours and rely on each other through this trying time. Thus is the cynical nature of sanctions.

The situation has been far more tame in the U.S., where the Cuban diaspora have held numerous rallies in solidarity with the protesters on the Island. Two men in Tampa were arrested when attempting to overtake an Interstate exit ramp under Governor DeSantis’s new anti-riot law. However, critics have also noted the preponderance of #SOSCUBA protesters in Florida not being arrested, and in some instances being waved through police-lines or joined by officers. In Orlando police escorted SOS Cuba protesters through the streets. Another Orlando protest consisted of Cuban-Americans calling for U.S. military intervention. There was also the SOS Cuba protest where the Miami police chief found himself in a debate with Proud Boys who condemned him for tacitly supporting Black Lives Matter in 2015. Notably, the former Chair of the Miami Proud Boys chapter was outed as a FBI informant last year. Yet somehow, liberals are still confused why, when they turn out for protests in support of those taking place in Cuba, they find themselves surrounded by the MAGA crowd.

Conclusion

Since the protests first began, much attention has been put on President Biden, who during his presidential campaign vowed to reverse the anti-Cuba policies of his predecessor Trump. The Biden Administration was pressed enough before July to issue several statements about Cuba not being a top priority; only for it to become a ‘top priority’ overnight. Biden has vowed not to repeal Trump sanctions on remittances and signaled to Miami officials his Administration would be extending Magnitsky sanctions on Cuban officials, while also ordering a review of possible first steps to ‘ease U.S. policy’ toward the Cuban people. Of course, that easing consists of ‘holding the regime accountable’, promoting access to the internet, increasing U.S. Embassy staff levels to ‘better facilitate civil society engagement’, and exploring further sanctions on Cuban officials ‘who committed human rights violations against peaceful protesters’. The Biden Administration also met with ‘Cuban American leaders’, such as the virulently anti-communists Gloria and Emilio Estefan whose collective net worth is well above $500,000,000, to hear policy suggestions. With the Biden Administration posturing that they will be easing the suffering of Cubans, it appears more likely than not that Biden will be accelerating the pressure brought on by Trump.

Arguably, the situation in Cuba under the revolutionary government has never been more uncertain. A theme consistently pushed by the government is the idea of continuity (continuidad), something the current government both retains and lacks. It is retained in the socialist system existing as it has: steadfast, flexible, contradictory, militant, bureaucratic, and democratic. What the Diaz-Canel Administration lacks is the flare to hold that organizational quandary together, something Fidel Castro excelled in. Critics of Raul often asserted that his lack of charisma would be a serious defect of his leadership capacity, but this was overcome by his experience in government, his role in the Revolution and the respect gained through his ability to make economic reforms. If it were not a time of crisis, this may be something that would not be an issue for Diaz-Canel. But as Cuba is indeed in a state of permanent crisis, constant economic affliction, and persistent counter-revolutionary sabotage, these issues come to the fore quickly.      

However, despite presumed deficiencies in the revolutionary government’s leadership capacity, without a doubt the most pressing issue Cuba faces in terms of sovereignty is the U.S. embargo and U.S. subversion. Clearly, the U.S. has committed itself to specific sectors which it believes will bring about the most disruption for Cuba. The first is economic strangulation through the embargo, sanctions, and holds on remittances; coupled with denying Cuba access to its allies and international financial institutions. Second is the expansion of access to the internet and social media, under the belief that dissidents can use these forms of communication to undermine the government. This is furthered by the manipulation of social media so that anti-Cuba trends proliferate through bot accounts, eventually finding the messages picked up by ordinary people and celebrities alike. Third is the utilization of hip hop culture and the arts as a form of soft-power pressure, by promoting artists otherwise deemed counter-revolutionary by the government. And fourth is the promotion of civil society with an explicit emphasis on documenting human rights abuses, government failings and alleged corruption. Cuba must act with caution in all realms, on all issues. To overstep can bring invasion, to understep can bring rebellion. The revolutionary government exists only with the support of the people, and therefore must place the people’s interests first, before the government’s own. Hence Cuba’s lifting of tariffs on imported goods, despite being strapped for cash. Undoubtedly, the road ahead is rocky, and only unified can Cubans come out on top of this crisis.

The people of the world must come together in protest of the illegal U.S. embargo, against Western sabotage and interference in Cuba affairs, in support of the Cuban Revolution and its ideals, and in solidarity with the Revolutionary people of Cuba. Demand resolutions and proclamations, hold demonstrations and solicit the attention of the media, and tell friends and family about the successes of the Revolution in spite of U.S. obstruction. While Cuba fights for reconciliation and sovereignty, we must assist the uphill battle as best we can in calling for an end to the inhuman embargo on Cuba.

¡HASTA LA VICTORIA SIEMPRE! ¡SOCIALISMO O MUERTE! ¡VENCEREMOS!