Refinancing the Climate Crisis: The Disaster Politics of Climate Change and Datafication of Capital

By Julius Alexander McGee

As the climate crisis escalates, the contradictions of the nation-state as both a facilitator and regulator of capital become increasingly apparent. The increase of natural disasters sparked by global warming have produced civil unrest and calls for change to our current social structures. These calls for change include a Green New Deal; divestment from fossil fuel industries; and a redistribution of wealth, all of which threaten the existing mechanism of capital accumulation. In response, the state has turned to the disaster capitalist playbook, turning the risk of civil unrest into new modalities of capital accumulation that maintain the status quo. This includes the creation of new low carbon markets that recapitulate pre-existing modalities of capital accumulation[1]. Recent attempts by nation-states to mitigate global warming through the creation of low carbon markets reveal how the climate crisis is being used to facilitate the expansion of capital into markets of data accumulation. This expansion is characterized by a process where data is created, collected, and circulated to generate wealth. Specifically, data extracted from low carbon technology to improve operational efficiencies ultimately functions to increase overall energy demand, as vast quantities of electricity are necessary to store data on computer servers. Such processes, unfortunately, of course, serve to undermine climate mitigation efforts. Further, the datafication of capital enhances surveillance technology that is used to disenfranchise Black and Brown communities through enhanced policing. Police departments around the United States as well as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (also known as ICE) are using data to target communities that are left most vulnerable by the unrest of the climate crisis[2]. Meanwhile, lithium, an alkali metal essential to many low-carbon technologies is mined at the expense of indigenous communities in South America in response to increased demand for electric vehicles (henceforth EVs) and large-scale batteries required to store deployable renewable energy. Simply put, these outcomes reveal the racial character of economic development and the tendency for capital to maintain the settler colonial project that established capitalism as a system of social organization. 

The automobile industry and widespread electrification were each established in the United States by dispossessing Black, Brown, and indigenous communities. The automobile industry thrived in the United States after the states demolished Black owned businesses and homes to build highways, and electrification was used to dispossess Black farmers of their wealth[3]. Moreover, the fossil fuels used to power automobiles and electricity are extracted on land dispossessed from indigenous people[4]. Indeed, it is increasingly clear that the continual dispossession and disenfranchisement of Black, Brown, and indigenous communities the world over is the true engine of capital accumulation. Specifically, by maintaining the historical expropriation of populations outside the terrain of capitalist production such that processes of uneven development favoring privileged Westerners might continue even in the face of socio-ecological instability. This paper intends to demonstrate how state policies aimed at creating low carbon markets are positioned as a reactionary force under disaster capitalism, which create new modalities of capital accumulation. I illustrate some of the key functions of this emergent phenomenon by examining the relationship between state sponsored low carbon markets and big data — a dynamic interplay that, despite appearances, fosters further dependence on fossil fuels through the dispossession of Black, Brown and indigenous communities around the world. 

First, I explore the crisis that facilitated the datafication of capital -- the dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s. Second, I explore the implications of the crisis that facilitated the creation of low carbon markets -- the crisis of the fossil economy. Third, I examine how low carbon markets perpetuate the datafication of capital such that data supplants fossil fuels as an organizing structure of the system of capitalism. I conclude by exploring how the internal dynamics of capitalism as a system are maintained through the combination of these two wings of the high technology sector.      

The dot-com bubble burst and the rise of data as capital 

In the neoliberal era, modalities of capital accumulation that emerge in the wake of social, economic, and ecological crises (be they actual or perceived), facilitate the redistribution of wealth from poor to rich through combined and uneven development[5]. Abstractly, this usually means new capital is created for the wealthy to own, new revenue streams are created to preserve the status of the middle class (that simultaneously undermine their stability), and new mechanisms of extraction are created that target/create the dispossessed -- this is what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism”. In essence, disaster capitalism recapitulates the dynamics of capital accumulation in response to crises by passing down the risk from the wealthy to the poor. 

In response to the dot-com bubble burst of 2000 as well as the events of September 11th, the Federal Reserve (the central banking system of the United States) continuously lowered interest rates for banks to help the United States’ economy emerge from a recession[6]. This created new capital in the form of AAA-rated mortgage-backed securities, because banks were incentivized to lend in order to generate new revenue from interest on loans[7]. Specifically, banks relied on individual home mortgages as a revenue stream by passing the Federal Reserve’s lower interest rates down to middle class homeowners who could take out cash from their homes through mortgage refinancing or cash-out refinancing to counteract stagnating wages. The federal reserve lowered interest to 1% in 2003, where it stayed for a year. In that time, inflation jumped from 1.9% to 3.3%. However, this proved to be extremely volatile due to lending practices that targeted Black and Brown communities in the United States with predatory loans. The subsequent Great Recession of 2008, disproportionately decimated wealth within Black and Brown communities through housing foreclosures, which redistributed wealth upwards, widening the racial wealth gap[8]. As Wang says, “these loans were not designed to offer a path to homeownership for Black and Brown borrowers; they were a way of converting risk into a source of revenue, with loans designed such that borrowers would ultimately be dispossessed of their homes”[9]. The transfer of capital from the productive sphere into the financial sector of the economy resulted in the financialization of capital via dispossession, breathing new life into the system through the construction of a new frontier for capital.  

The dot-com bubble burst of the early 2000s was a crisis created by failed attempts to transform the technology of the internet into capital. Internet companies during this time absorbed surplus from other markets through investments but failed to turn a profit, creating a crisis that was solved through finance capital and the transfer of risk from wealthy to poor. In the 1990s and early 2000s, internet companies merged with media corporations to create a new frontier for capital based on the increasing popularity of the internet. For example, the America Online (AOL) Time Warner merger, seen as the largest failed merger in history[10], represented a merger of the largest internet subscription company and one of the largest media corporations in the United States. However, this merger failed after dial-up internet was supplanted by broadband -- a much faster and more efficient way to use the internet. Broadband connections, which allowed for continuous use of the internet, helped usher in the Web 2.0 era. Unlike its predecessor, Web 2.0 is defined by internet companies, such as Google, whose value derives in part from its ability to manage large databases that are continuously produced by internet users[11]. Investments in internet technology in the form of data, as opposed to software tools such as internet browsers (e.g., Netscape), transforms data into a modality of capital accumulation akin to fossil fuels. Data, like fossil fuels, supplants pre-existing modalities of capital accumulation by refining their ability to produce a surplus. Thus, whereas the dot-com bubble burst was produced because the internet could not turn a profit after absorbing the surplus of other markets, Web 2.0 is defined by its ability to enhance the surplus produced by other markets by refining their mechanisms of capital accumulation. In the proceeding section I explore how fossil fuels as capital are based on the continued oppression of Black, Brown, and indigenous communities in order to demonstrate how data is supplanting fossil fuels as capital.

Fossil fuels and the cycle of dispossession

Fossil fuels have been an emergent feature of capital accumulation since they were first tied to human and land expropriation at the start of the industrial revolution in Great Britain. Factory owners in British towns used coal to power the steam engines that manufacture textiles from cotton, which was picked by enslaved Africans on land stolen from indigenous peoples. This tethered the consumption and production of coal to the expropriation of enslaved Africans and indigenous ecologies. As a result, coal, alongside enslaved Africans and indigenous ecosystems, became capital -- a resource that could be converted into surplus. Eventually, the steam engine gave the industrial bourgeoisie primacy over the plantation system that preceded it. Coal became the central driver of capital accumulation, which has borne an unsustainable system rife with contradictions. The natural economy, once based on human and land expropriation, gave way to the fossil economy, which uses fossil fuels to extract profit from human and ecological systems. 

Prior to the “industrial revolution” the contradictions of human and land expropriation were apparent in the multitude of slave revolts across the West Indies; in San Domingo, Jamaica, Barbados, etc. These rebellions were not simply slave revolts, they were outgrowths of the contradictions of the plantation system, which were apparent from the time they were established. As Ozuna writes, “centuries of sustained subversive activity prompted colonial authorities to rethink their relationship to the enslaved, and oftentimes, make concessions to preserve the body politic of coloniality”[12]. That is, the fossil economy emerged as a way to avert the crisis of the plantation system.   

The ability to manufacture cotton into textiles at an accelerating rate through the consistent use of coal, which was abundant on the island of Great Britain, became the precedent for colonial expansion in the United States, as well as the slave trade. Thus, human and land expropriation were fused to fossil fuel production and consumption. To put it succinctly, the fossil economy is an outgrowth of the plantation system, which automizes labor to efficiently accumulate capital. In supplanting the “natural economy” coal, and eventually petroleum, became emergent forms of capital accumulation that shifted the apparent contradictions of human and land expropriation.  

 The fossil economy has never transcended the contradictions embedded in human and land expropriation. The climate crisis consolidates the dialectical tension of fossil fuel production and the expropriation of humans, land, and human relationships with land. Likewise, the inability of nation-states to address the climate crisis is embedded in an unwillingness by ruling classes to address the core contradictions of capital accumulation. To address the climate crisis in a socially and ecologically sustainable way these contradictions must also be addressed. The climate crisis can be averted without addressing the contradictions of human and land expropriation, but such attempts will cost more in human life and ecological longevity by recapitulating human and land expropriation through the construction of new modalities of capital accumulation. In the same way that coal enabled the industrial bourgeoisie to expand capital accumulation while deepening its contradictions in centuries prior, data will recapitulate capitalism today. 

Low carbon markets as disaster capitalism

Low carbon markets, such as cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and consumer tax rebates are market-based, regulatory, environmental policies that seek to disincentivize environmental degradation by establishing a competitive market for low carbon technology to compete with fossil fuel-based markets. The logic of these policies is to encourage fossil fuel companies to pay for the future ecological cost of their markets and to use the funds obtained from these policies to establish new markets that can replace fossil fuels. 

In the case of cap and trade (perhaps the most widely used strategy), a central authority allocates and sells permits to companies that emit CO2, which allows them to emit a predetermined amount of CO2 within a given period. Companies can buy and sell credits to emit CO2 on an open market, allowing companies that reduce emissions to profit from companies’ that do not. This approach was first established over thirty years ago in the United States to phase out lead in gasoline, and sulfur dioxide emissions from power plants that resulted in acid rain[13]. In 2003, the European Union adopted a cap-and-trade approach to CO2 emissions to reach emission reduction goals established during the Kyoto Protocol. Since then, more than 40 governments have adopted cap-and-trade policies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions while introducing minimal disruption to dominant economic processes[14]. 

If we accept the reality that fossil fuels were used to stave off the crisis of the plantation system and maintain capital accumulation via expropriation of human and ecological processes, then it points to the possibility that any new energy source created to maintain capitalism as a system will recapitulate the human and ecological expropriation that is foundational to the system. Thus, economic policies that facilitate the construction of low carbon markets, and that do not question the emergent character of fossil fuels under capitalism, invariably create new frontiers for capital accumulation. Opening such frontiers has been a primary role of the state under capitalism. 

The abolition of enslavement by nation-states across the capitalist system aided in efforts to stave off the crisis of the plantation economy by alleviating the political and ecological tension the slave trade created. Nonetheless, many nation-states continued to expropriate formerly enslaved Africans by forcing them into labor conditions that were conducive to the overarching dynamics of capitalism[15]. Further, other forms of expropriation (e.g., the coolie trade) in newly established colonies within Southeast Asia were made possible by and undergirded the technology produced via the fossil economy. Thus, similar to how capitalism recapitulated its internal dynamics following abolition, it recapitulates its internal dynamics in its efforts to transition off of fossil fuels.   

 This plays into what Naomi Klein termed the politics of disaster capitalism[16]. Under the impetus of averting a climate catastrophe, climate mitigation policies allow industries to profit from the perceived disasters that will be caused by the climate crisis. While the climate crisis is no doubt a real threat to life on this planet, the new orchestrators of disaster capitalism have successfully commodified climate change in perception and solution. The perception is commodified through the implicit narrative that the market is the only solution to a crisis of its own making. Sustainable energy companies, like Tesla Motors, suggest that they have proved “doubters” wrong by producing electric vehicles that perform better than their gasoline counterparts, implying that the only obstacle in the way of addressing the vehicle market’s contribution to the climate crisis is the vehicles themselves. This feeds into the tautological logic used to commodify the solution, which assumes that the market simply needs to reduce CO2 emissions and, because electric vehicles are less CO2 intensive than their gasoline counterparts, they result in less CO2 emissions overall. Nonetheless, because the market operates under the logic of capital accumulation, companies that profit from the disaster playbook are incentivized to create more capital with their surplus, and companies create this surplus capital through datafication.           

The datafication of capital

Data operating as capital has three fundamental components that allow it to operate as a distinct form of capital that is dialectically bound to broader systems of exchange. (1) As capital, data is valuable and value-creating; (2) data collection has a pervasive, powerful influence over how businesses and governments behave; (3) data systems are rife with relations of inequity, extraction, and exploitation[17]. Like other forms of capital, data’s value derives from its ability to create a market irrespective of its utility. The creation of data hinges on its potential to generate future profits, and not on its immediate usefulness. As such, the goal of this section is to establish how data is transformed into capital, not how it is used by any particular firm or institution.  

The disaster politics of the climate crisis are similar in character to the tactics used by Wall Street financiers in the wake of financial crises. However, in addition to using crises as a launching pad for capitalist plunder, the orchestrators of the disaster politics of the climate crisis take advantage of the groundwork laid by finance capital. This is best exemplified in the ascendency of Elon Musk, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who rose to prominence through an unregulated data-driven financial tool, and subsequently became one of the world’s richest people, in part through his companies’ ability to transform the shock of the climate crisis into an endless opportunity for data capital accumulation.

In 1999 Musk co-founded X.com, one of the first online payment systems. It later merged with Confinity Inc. to become PayPal, which is one of the largest online payment platforms in the world today. Similar to other tech companies from Silicon Valley, such as Uber, PayPal functions as a deregulated variant of a pre-existing market. Musk and others recognized the “inefficiency” of checks and money orders used to process online transactions. Online payment platforms bypassed regulations applied to banks when processing payments and led to these inefficiencies; PayPal created a new payment system that regulated itself based on data instead of bureaucracy. 

In many respects PayPal is a digital bank whose main activity is in data instead of finance. PayPal claims that the data it collects is used to increase the security of its transaction, allowing money transfers to occur faster and with more convenience[18]. PayPal obtains its revenue through processing customer transactions and value-added services, such as capital loans. Online payment platforms such as PayPal are increasingly blurring the lines between retail and investment banking, again. For example, the loans that PayPal distributes to businesses are based on PayPal transactions, which are enhanced by PayPal’s data collection techniques. Thus, instead of accumulating wealth from financial instruments, PayPal accumulates wealth from the data it obtains from transactions, which it uses to finance more businesses and expand the number of consumer transactions it processes. This reality on its own has numerous implications for the climate crisis, as data centers, which store data at an exponential rate, rely on fossil fuel energy to operate[19] -- a fact that we will return to later. 

Online payment platforms have also become the shadow benefactors of financial deregulations. For example, the repeal of Obama-era financial regulations in 2016 (installed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis) that required financial institutions to disclose fees and protections against fraudulent charges benefited online payment platforms who were also subject to these regulations until 2016[20]. Here one can see the interest of data and finance aligning around market deregulation. As Sadowski writes, “Like finance, data is now governed as an engine of growth. If financial firms are free to shuttle capital from country to country, then similarly technology corporations must also be free to store and sell data wherever they want.” This is an expansion of the neoliberal project that began decades ago. 

Data, like finance, is being used as a transnational modality of capital accumulation that transforms the role of the nation-state in relation to capital. Similar to how the state became a “lender of last resort, responsible for providing liquidity at short notice”[21] to encourage finance capital, the nation-state is facilitating the rise of data capital through tax-credits, rebates, and cap and trade. To be clear, at the end of the day the state is merely supporting long standing markets of capital accumulation, such as transportation and electricity, by aiding their efforts to create capital from data. Moreover, the state’s encouragement of data capital’s accumulation is increasingly occurring under the veneer of efforts to mitigate global warming.    

Bitcoin’s legacy of expropriation and the climate crisis

After his departure from PayPal Elon Musk founded Tesla, an electric vehicle and clean energy company, in 2003. As a company, Tesla manufactures and sells electric cars, battery energy storage systems, solar panels, and solar roof tiles. However, Tesla’s profits derive from more than just the sale of its products. For example, in the first quarter of 2021 the bulk of Tesla’s profits came from the sales of emissions credits to other automakers, and sale of its bitcoin holdings[22]. This represents the new reality created through the disaster politics of the climate crisis, which merges financial speculation and data capital. 

Carbon credits sold by Tesla to other auto manufacturers, who would otherwise incur fines, allow Tesla to profit from environmental degradation. This is the goal of policies such as cap and trade, as Tesla is profiting from the production and consumption of its low-carbon commodities, which in theory should facilitate the rise of low-carbon markets at the expense of fossil fuel-intensive companies. In addition to cap and trade policies, Tesla benefits from a number of tax credits and rebates that exist across the United States and European Union to encourage growth in low carbon energy markets[23]. Similar to the way cap and trade is meant to incentivize low-carbon technology, the logic of tax credits and rebates is to encourage both producers and consumers to adopt cleaner energy practices as an alternative to fossil fuels by reducing the cost of implementation, and increasing overall capital accumulated from low carbon technology. In theory, this should progress the consumption of less CO2 intensive commodities at the expense of CO2 intensive commodities. However, by using a portion of these profits to buy bitcoin, Tesla is expanding its holdings through the speculative value of Bitcoin, which derives from the ongoing exchange of Bitcoins and the vast stores of energy used to validate these transactions, produce and distribute the currency, and store its data. 

Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency, the value of which is determined by a decentralized database known as a blockchain. This is distinct from the valuation of fiat currency, which is typically an outcome of inflation rates and the internal working of a central bank. The data that determines Bitcoin’s value encapsulates the supply and demand of Bitcoin on the market (the same as fiat currencies), competing cryptocurrencies, and the rewards issued to bitcoin miners for verifying transactions to the blockchain. Instead of storing its data in a central location, the data used to verify Bitcoin transactions is stored on multiple interconnected computers around the world. Each time a transaction using Bitcoin occurs, an equation is generated to be solved by a computer in order to confirm the validity of the transaction. The transaction is then stored permanently on data storage devices in 1MB chunks of transactional information. The completed block is then appended to previously existing ones, creating a chain of data that stores the history of all Bitcoin transactions. In effect the Bitcoin blockchain contains the entire history of all transactions that have ever occurred through Bitcoin, and this blockchain is repeated across every data storage device, or node, that composes the Bitcoin blockchain network. Thus, every time a block is completed and chained to the previous blocks, the solution is distributed to every node in the network where the block’s authenticity (the solution to the equation) is verified, and subsequently stored.

As blocks are added to the chain, which verify new transactions through the solution of a complex mathematical equation, new Bitcoin are produced. The equations are structured to identify a 64-digit hexadecimal number called a “hash.” The difficulty of the equations is determined by the confirmed block data in the Bitcoin network. The difficulty of the equation is adjusted every 2 weeks to keep the average time between each block at 10 minutes[24]. “Miners,” those who solve the equations and thereby verify the transactions that make up each block are rewarded for this work with Bitcoin, making it a lucrative market activity in and of itself. Thus, miners are in competition with one another to create new blocks; the more computing power the higher likelihood of successfully earning more coins. Because computers need electricity to function, and more computationally intensive tasks require more electricity, the process of creating new Bitcoin is very energy intensive. A study published in the journal Nature Climate Change in 2018[25] warned that due to its high electricity demands and increasing usage, Bitcoin mining could put the world over the two-degree Celsius tipping point, which would lead to an irreversible climate catastrophe. 

The decentralized structure of blockchains grants Bitcoin users a level of anonymity that is not accessible through traditional currency. Further, as data-based currency is not regulated as traditional currencies are, Bitcoin transfers can be cheaper than a traditional bank’s transactions.  As a result, many Bitcoin transactions are money transfers that benefit from anonymity and “cheapness.” Because Bitcoin’s value is determined in part by the number of transactions, companies, such as Tesla, that trade Bitcoin for profit derive surplus from how Bitcoin is used. This has numerous implications as to how datafication is deriving surplus from the disenfranchisement of Black and Brown communities. 

The climate crisis has created an impetus for the data-based currency, Bitcoin. For example, migrants from the nation-states of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua are increasingly using Bitcoin for remittances[26]. Remittances are funds sent as gifts to friends and relatives across national borders. They comprise more than 20% of El Salvador and Honduras’ GDP, and nearly 15% of Nicaragua and Guatemala’s GDP, as of 2020[27]. Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua have been ravaged by a five-year long climate change-induced drought, which reduced crop yields from corn and beans -- food staples in the region[28]. The recent drought coupled with oppressive government regimes that were supported by the United States’ neoliberal policies are themselves indirect drivers of these currency transfers–– resulting in large-scale migration out of these regions and into relatively stable and wealthy nation-states, such as the United States (where they will be exploited either in ICE detention centers, prisons, jails, or other low-paid wage labor most frequently available to migrants).[29].  

Bitcoin has become an increasingly popular form of currency to send remittances through because (like PayPal) it is cheaper, more efficient, and subject to less regulation than most banks[30]. In early 2021, El Salvador made headlines by announcing that Bitcoin would become a legal currency[31]. The logic behind this move is that Bitcoin will make it easier for people who do not have access to a bank to transfer money back to El Salvador.  Here we see an explicit example of how the politics of disaster capitalism facilitate the construction of new frontiers that recapitulate the environmental harm (e.g. climate change through increased use of fossil fuels) and generate surplus from the climate crisis. Specifically, patterns of migration onset by climate change and U.S. policy create space for new financial tools, such as Bitcoin to fill. The carbon intensity of Bitcoin recapitulates the environmental harm that is partially responsible for mass migration.

Data, renewable energy, and the expropriation of Black and indigenous peoples

Tesla’s investment in Bitcoin demonstrates how low carbon markets recapitulate the internal dynamics of the fossil economy, deriving surplus from the legacy of human expropriation and exasperating the climate crisis. In addition to creating capital from data in the form of Bitcoin, electric vehicle companies like Tesla also create their own data. For decades, automobile producers and rideshare companies have been increasing the data they collect from drivers in an effort to profit from an emerging data market. Everything from speed, breaking habits, vehicle position, and music preferences are collected from individual vehicles and sold to various interests[32]. 

Electric vehicles like Teslas collect and store far more data than their predecessors, and the amount of data collected grows with every new product line. This is due to the ever more complicated hardware and software that comes stock on new vehicles. Specifically, new vehicles are equipped with internal cameras that are capable of capturing video of drivers who use autopilot[33], the reaction of drivers just before a crash, as well as infrared technology to identify a driver’s eye movements or head position[34]. New vehicles also connect directly to smartphones, allowing third parties to collect data on a driver’s travel and driving habits. Further, states are beginning to put forth laws that require automakers to include driver monitoring systems, increasing the pace at which data is extracted from vehicles. For example, driver monitoring systems will be a part of the requirements for Europe’s Euro NCAP automotive safety program as of 2023[35]. All of this increases the demand for data centers to store new data collected from vehicles as well as the propensity for data to operate as capital. 

While a large portion of the data is sold to third parties such as insurance companies who can use data to determine rates, repair shops that can use data to assist mechanics, and automakers who use data to improve their products, vehicle data is also being used to expand the police state. Companies like Berla Corporation are working with police departments to extract data collected from vehicles, which can be used to surveil the population[36]. Through third parties, police departments are able to access data from smartphones that have been linked with vehicles, giving them access to anything from text messages to GPS location[37]. Considering the broader structure of the police state, this data can be used to expand the scope, scale, and authority of an institutionally racist organization, furthering the dispossession of Black and Brown communities. 

New policies implemented by the state, such as the United States’ proposed 1 trillion dollar infrastructure plan[38], include incentives to increase the consumption of electric vehicles, accelerating the number of vehicles that can extract data from drivers. While the goal of these incentives is to increase adoption of electric vehicles to mitigate climate change, the vehicle market will also benefit from the new data collecting techniques embedded in electric vehicles, which will exponentiate the data stored in centers. Moreover, most electric vehicles are still far more expensive than gasoline vehicles, making them only accessible to the middle or upper classes. Thus, efforts to encourage consumption, such as tax rebates to consumers, results in combined and uneven development as middle-class consumers increase their long-term savings while poor people are left out. Moreover, in the past cap and trade has resulted in higher gasoline prices, which means those left out may also absorb the cost of these policies on the petroleum industry[39].  

The apparent silver lining in all of this is the rise of renewable electricity, which could theoretically reduce the amount of fossil fuels used to capture and store data. Crypto currencies and the data collected from an evolving vehicle fleet could theoretically, then, grow without deepening the climate crisis as long as they rely on renewable sources of electricity. Nonetheless, when it comes to capital, there is nothing new under the sun. The climate crisis itself is an outgrowth of the continuous dispossession of the natural economy. Fossil fuels are merely an energy source that aids in this process. The ability to transcend ecological boundaries has facilitated the slow death of populations around the world since before the widespread use of fossil fuels. The first sugar plantations were erected in Madeira and the Canary Islands, to help the Genoese outcompete their Venetian rivals in the European sugar market at the expense of the indigenous life dependent on these islands. Capital’s maturation has been on an ongoing journey of death and destruction. While tracing this legacy is beyond the scope of this paper, suffice it to say that we are currently at a crossroads in the narrative of capital. The disaster politics of the climate crisis and data capital have created a new frontier in the lithium mines of Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina. These mines exist on indigenous land, which belongs to the Atacama people.      

Renewable electricity, such as that drawn from wind and solar power, as well as EVs require large lithium batteries to store the energy they use[40]. Lithium, a major component in all of these batteries, is currently being mined at the expense of indigenous people. The Lickanantay who live in the Atacama salt flat of northern Chile, consider the water and brine of this land as sacred[41]. As a result of lithium mining, the Atacama water table is losing an estimated 1,750-1,950 liters per second[42], depleting the sacred resource of Lickanantay people. Moreover, it has been argued that the increased demand for lithium mining has led to a recapitulation of the old neoliberal playbook - military coups. Specifically, the 2019 ousting of then president Evo Morales in Bolivia has been called a coup d'etat against indigenous people in Bolivia[43] in favor of lithium mining interests. 

Conclusion

These recent developments bring us full circle as we can now see the outcome of the disaster capitalist playbook. The state responds to a crisis that it has aided and abetted by creating a new frontier - the low carbon market. The crisis is not global warming per se, rather, the civil unrest that the climate crisis creates. This unrest is addressed through the commodification of both the perception and solution to climate change - e.g. sustainable products such as EVs. The widespread consumption of low carbon technology results in combined and uneven development, allowing the middle class to reduce the long-term cost of travel and electricity at the expense of the underclass who absorb the cost of “environmentally sustainable” technology by becoming more surveilled and incurring the added costs borne by the fossil fuel industry due to its shrinking market share. The widespread consumption of low carbon technology facilitates and accelerates the datafication of capital, expanding the demand for energy within capitalist markets. As of now this demand has been met by fossil fuel interests who have become the benefactors of data capital's need for cheap energy. Nonetheless, as the renewable energy market expands, the need for lithium, located on indigenous land will encourage the further dispossession of indigenous ecologies. In the end, the natural resources needed to produce EVs and the data they gather are a new lease for capital; a new loan for endless dispossession; a refinancing of the climate crisis.                

Notes

[1] Sadowski, Jathan. “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019):

[2] Rani Molla “Law enforcement is now buying cellphone location data from marketers” February 7, 2020.

[3] Eric. The folklore of the freeway: Race and revolt in the modernist city. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

[4] Simpson, Michael. “Fossil urbanism: fossil fuel flows, settler colonial circulations, and the production of carbon cities.” Urban Geography (2020): 1-22.

[5] Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Verso Trade, 2018.

[6] Kimberly Amadeo “Fed Funds Rate History: Its Highs, Lows, and Charts” September 24 2021

[7] Celi, Chris, “Redefining Capitalism: The Changing Role of the Federal Reserve throughout the Financial Crisis (2006–2010)”. Inquiry Journal. No. 3 (2011)

[8] Rakesh Kochhar and Richard Fry “Wealth inequality has widened along racial, ethnic lines since end of Great Recession” December 12th, 2014

[9] Wang, Jackie. Carceral Capitalism. Vol. 21. MIT Press, 2018.

[10] Rita Gunther McGrath “15 years later, lessons from the failed AOL-Time Warner merger” January 10, 2015.

[11] Tim O’Reilly “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” No. 4578 2007.

[12] Ana Ozuna. “Rebellion and Anti-colonial Struggle in Hispaniola: From Indigenous Agitators to African Rebels.” Journal of Pan African Studies 11, no. 7 2018: 77-96.

[13] Richard Conniff “The Political History of Cap and Trade” Smithsonian Magazine August, 2009;

[14] Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich “These Countries Have Prices on Carbon. Are They Working?” The New York Times April 2, 2019.

[15] Sherwood, Marika, and Christian Hogsbjerg. "After Abolition: Britain and the Slave Trade since 1807." African Diaspora Archaeology Newsletter 11, no. 1 (2008).

[16] Klein, Naomi. The shock doctrine: The rise of disaster capitalism. Macmillan, 2007.

[17] Sadowski, Jathan. “When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction.” Big Data & Society 6, no. 1 (2019):

[18] Adam Dillon. “How Paypal Turns Customer Data into Smoother Safer Commerce” Forbes May 6th 2019.

[19] Tom Bawden. “Global warming: Data centres to consume three times as much energy in next decade, experts warn” The Independent. January 23rd 216.

[20] Matthew Zeitlin “Venmo Could Be A Big Winner As Obama-Era Financial Rules Are Scrapped” Buzzfeed February 28th 2017.

[21] Foster, John Bellamy. "The financialization of capitalism." Monthly review 58, no. 11 (2007): 1-12.

[22] Jay Ramey “Tesla Made More Money Selling Credits and Bitcoin Than Cars” Auto Week April 27th 2021

[23] https://www.tesla.com/support/incentives accessed 8/9/2021

[24] https://www.blockchain.com/charts/difficulty accessed 8/11/2021

[25] Mora, Camilo, Randi L. Rollins, Katie Taladay, Michael B. Kantar, Mason K. Chock, Mio Shimada, and Erik C. Franklin. “Bitcoin emissions alone could push global warming above 2 C.” Nature Climate Change 8, no. 11 (2018): 931-933.

[26] Enrique Dans. “Bitcoin And Latin American Economies: Danger Or Opportunity?” Forbes July 14, 2021

[27] World Bank Developmentl Indicators https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/BX.TRF.PWKR.DT.GD.ZS?locations=SV accessed 8/13/2021

[28] Jeff Masters “Fifth Straight Year of Central American Drought Helping Drive Migration” Scientific American December 23, 2019

[29] Michael D McDonald. “Climate Change Has Central Americans Fleeing to the U.S.” Bloomberg Businessweek June 8, 2021

[30] Roya Wolverson. “Bitcoin is wooing the millions of workers who send their earnings abroad” Quartz Africa March 26, 2021

[31] Mitchell Clark “Bitcoin will soon be an official currency in El Salvador” The Verge June 9, 2021

[32] Matt Bubbers. “What kind of data is my new car collecting about me? Nearly everything it can, apparently” The Globe and Mail January 15, 2020

[33]  Fred Lambert. “Tesla has opened the floodgates of Autopilot data gathering”. Electrek June 14, 2017

[34] Keith Barry. “Tesla's In-Car Cameras Raise Privacy Concerns” Consumer Reports March 2021.

[35] Euro NCAP. “In Pursuit of Vision Zero”  https://cdn.euroncap.com/media/30700/euroncap-roadmap-2025-v4.pdf accessed 08/3/2021

[36] Mitchell Clark. “Your car may be recording more data than you know” The Verge December 28, 2020.

[37] Sam Biddle. “Your Car is Spying on you, and a CBP Contract shows the Risks” The Intercept, May 3, 2021.

[38] Niraj Chokshi. “Biden’s Push for Electric Cars: $174 Billion, 10 Years and a Bit of Luck” The New York Times March 31, 2021.

[39] Mac Taylor. “Letter to Honorable Tom Lackey” https://lao.ca.gov/reports/2016/3438/LAO-letter-Tom-Lackey-040716.pdf accessed 8/22/2021

[40] Xu, Chengjian, Qiang Dai, Linda Gaines, Mingming Hu, Arnold Tukker, and Bernhard Steubing. “Future material demand for automotive lithium-based batteries.” Communications Materials 1, no. 1 (2020): 1-10.

[41] Amrouche, S. Ould, Djamila Rekioua, Toufik Rekioua, and Seddik Bacha. "Overview of energy storage in renewable energy systems." International journal of hydrogen energy 41, no. 45 2016.

[42] By Ben Heubl. “Lithium firms depleting vital water supplies in Chile, analysis suggests” Engineering and Technology August 21, 2019.

[43] Kinga Harasim. “Bolivia’s lithium coup” Latin America Bureau October 7, 2021.

A Critique of Western Marxism's Purity Fetish

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

Western Marxism suffers largely from the same symptom as Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby – each’s fixation on perfection and purity leaves perpetually unfulfilled all that it claims to desire. On one hand, Jay seeks a return to the purity of his first encounter with Daisy, and in the impossibility of this return to purity, the actual potential for a relationship is lost. On the other hand, western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, they lose the potential to actuate or defend any socialist revolution. The purity of each is met with the reality that reality itself is never pure – it always contains mistakes, negations, breaks and splits.

Jay Gatsby cannot officially reestablish himself with Daisy insofar as she admits to having loved Tom Buchanan – her husband – during the intermediate time before she re-connects with Jay. This imperfection, this negation of purity, is unacceptable – Daisy must tell Tom she never loved him to reestablish the purity of their first encounter. With no purity, there can be no relationship.

Similarly, for Western Marxists the triumphant socialist experiments of the 20th and 21st century, in their mistakes and ‘totalitarianisms’, desecrate the purity in the holiness of their conception of socialism. The USSR must be rejected, the Spanish civil war upheld; Cuban socialism must be condemned, but the 1959 revolution praised; Allende and Sankara are idols, Fidel and Kim Il-Sung tyrants, etc. What has died in purity can be supported, what has had to grapple with the mistakes and pressures that arise out of the complexities and contradictions of building socialism in the imperialist phase of capitalism, that must be denied.

As was diagnosed by Brazilian communist Jones Manoel’s essay, ‘Western Marxism Loves Purity and Martyrdom, But Not Real Revolution’,  western Marxists’ fetishization of purity, failures, and resistance as an end in itself creates “a kind of narcissistic orgasm of defeat and purity”. Comrade Manoel rightly points out the fact that western “Marxism preserves the purity of theory to the detriment of the fact that it has never produced a revolution anywhere on the face of the Earth”. Western Marxists celebrate the emergence of a revolutionary movement; but, when this revolutionary movement is triumphant in taking power, and hence faced with making the difficult decisions the concrete reality of imperialism, a national bourgeoisie, economic backwardness, etc. force it into, the western Marxists flea with shouts of betrayal! For the western Marxists, all practical deviation from their purity is seen as a betrayal of the revolution, and thus, the cries of ‘state capitalism’ and ‘authoritarianism’ emerge.

Manoel, reflecting on the work of the late Domenico Losurdo’s Western Marxism, does a superb job in providing the meat for this thesis. Nonetheless, he (as well as Losurdo) conceives of this theoretical lapse as being “smuggled in as contraband from Christianity”. I will argue that although Christian mysticism may be present here, the root of the rot is not Christian contraband, but western metaphysics (which precedes Christian mysticism itself). The root, in essence, is found in the fixated categories that have permeated western philosophy; in the general conception that Truth is in the unchanging, in the permanent, in substance; and only indirectly in the mystical forms these have taken under the Christian tradition. The diagnosis Engels gave reductive Marxists in 1890 applies to today’s western Marxists  – “what all these gentlemen lack is dialectics”.

Parmenides Contra Heraclitus

Whereas Manoel and Losurdo see the root of this purity fixation in Christianity, it is in the classical Greek debates on the question of change – taking place 500 years or so before Christ – where this fixation emerges. It will be necessary to paint with a broad stroke the history of philosophy to explain this thesis.

The Heraclitan philosophy of universal flux, which posits that “everything flows and nothing abides; everything gives way and nothing stays fixed”, would lose its battle against the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.[1] Parmenides, who held that foolish is the mind who thinks “that everything is in a state of movement and countermovement”, would dominate the conceptions of truth in the ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary world.[2] Although various aspects of Heraclitus’ thought would become influential in scattered minds, the dialectical aspect of his thought would never be centered by any philosophical era.

Plato, as the next best dialectician of the ancient world, attempted a reconciliation of Parmenides and Heraclitus. In the realm of Forms, the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence would reign; in the physical realm, the Heraclitan philosophy of flux would. In his Phaedo, Plato would note that the realm of the physical world is changing and composed of concrete opposites in an interpenetrative, i.e., dialectical, relationship to one another. In the realm of the “unchanging forms”, however, “essential opposites will never… admit of generation into or out of one another”.[3] Truth, ultimately, is in the realm of the Forms, where “purity, eternity, immortality, and unchangeableness” reign.[4] Hence, although attempting to provide a synthesis of Parmenides’ and Heraclitus’ philosophy of permanence and change, the philosophy of purity and fixation found in Parmenides dominates Plato’s conception of the realm of the really real, that is, the realm of Forms or Idea.  

Aristotle, a student of Plato, would move a step further away from the Heraclitan philosophy of flux. In Aristotle we have a metaphysical system which considers the law of non-contradiction the most primary principle – “the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect”.[5] In addition, in Aristotle we have the development of the world’s first logical system, an impressive feat, but nonetheless composed of abstract fixated categories completely indifferent to content. The fixation found in the logic would mirror the fixation and purity with which the eidos (essence) of things would be treated. Forms, although not existing in a separate realm as in Plato, nonetheless exist with the same rigidity. The thinking of essences, that is, the thinking of what makes a species, a type of thing, the type of thing it is, would remain in the realm of science within this fixated Aristotelian framework. Although the 16th century’s scientific revolution begins to tear away the Aristotelianism which dominated the prevalent scholastic philosophy, only with the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species would Aristotelian essentialism be dealt its decisive blow. This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence.

The philosophy of Plato, in the form of Neo-Platonists like Plotinus, would be incredibly influential in the formation of Christian thought – especially in Augustine of Hippo. Christianity would remain with a Platonic philosophical foundation up until the 12th-13th century’s rediscovery of Aristotle and the synthetization of his philosophy with Christian doctrine via Thomas Aquinas. Centuries later the protestant reformation’s rejection of Aristotelianism would mark the return of Plato to the Christian scene. All in all, the Christianity which Manoel and Losurdo see as the root of the fetishization of purity in every moment of its unfolding presupposes Greek philosophy. It is fair, then, to go beyond Christianity and ask the critical question – “what is presupposed here”? : what we find is that in every instance, whether mediated through Plato or Aristotle, there is a Parmenidean epistemic and ontological fixation which posits the eternal and unchanging as synonymous with truth, and the perishable and corporeal as synonymous with false.

Hegel Contra Parmenides

The spirit of the Heraclitan dialectic will be rekindled by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who argued philosophy came to finally see “land” with Heraclitus. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel says that “there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic”[6]. It is in Heraclitus, Hegel argues, where we “see the perfection of knowledge so far as it has gone”; for, Heraclitus “understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic”.[7] Heraclitus’ dialectics understood, as Hegel notes, that “truth only is as the unity of distinct opposites and, indeed, of the pure opposition of being and non-being”.[8] This unity of pure being and non-being is the starting point for Hegel’s Science of Logic. Here, he argues:

[Pure] being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing… Pure being and nothing are, therefore, the same. What is truth is neither being nor nothing, but that being – does not pass over but has passed over – into nothing, and nothing into being.[9]

Insofar as being exists in a condition of purity, it is indistinguishable from nothingness. Being must take the risk of facing and tarrying with its opposite in order to be. Being only takes place within the impurity present in the oscillation and mediation from being and non-being, that is, being only takes place when sublated into becoming qua determinate being, as “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be”.[10] This is why, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel understands that “Substance is being which is in truth Subject”.[11] Substance, whose purity holds the crowning jewel of Truth for western philosophy, can be only insofar as it is “self-othering” itself.[12] Like Spirit, Substance, must look the “negative in the face, and tarry with it”.[13] Only insofar as something can self-otherize itself, which is to say, only insofar as a thing can immanently provide a negation for itself and desecrate its purity by wrestling with the impure, can conditions for the possibility of it actually being arise. Hence, the “truth of being” is “characterized as Becoming”; truth is won “only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself”.[14] Purity, the “[shrinking] from death [to] keep itself untouched by devastation”, is lifeless.[15] Jay cannot be with Daisy insofar as he wishes to retain the relationship in purity. Western Marxists will never build socialism, or find a socialism to support, insofar as they expect socialism to arise in the pure forms in which it exists in their heads.

The Paradox of Western Marxists

Having shifted our focus from Christianity to the purity fixated epistemology-ontology of western philosophy, we can now see the fundamental paradox in Western Marxism: on the one hand, in hopes of differentiating themselves from the ‘positivistic’ and ‘mechanistic’ Marxism that arose in the Soviet Union it seeks to return to Hegel in their fight against ‘orthodox dogma’; on the other hand, although producing phenomenal works on Hegel and dialectics, Western Marxist’s interpretive lens for looking at the world remains with a Parmenidean rigidity and Aristotelian form of binary thinking. Western Marxists, although claiming to be the ones who rekindle the spirit of Hegel into Marxism, are the least bit dialectical when it comes to analysis of the concrete world.

They are unable to understand, as Hegel did, the necessary role apparent ‘failures’ play as a moment in the unfolding of truth. For Hegel, that which is seen as ‘false’ is part of “the process of distinguishing in general” and constitutes an “essential moment” of Truth.[16] The bud (one of Hegel’s favorite examples which consistently reappears in his work) is not proven ‘false’ when the blossom arises. Instead, Hegel notes, each sustains a “mutual necessity” as “moments of an organic unity”.[17] Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ when it, encountering the external and internal pressures of imperialism and a national bourgeois class, is forced to take more so-called ‘authoritarian’ positions to protect the revolution. Socialism is not ‘betrayed’ or transformed into ‘state capitalism’ (in the derogatory, non-Leninist sense) when faced with a backwards economy it takes the risk of tarrying with its opposite and engages a process of opening up to foreign capital to develop its productive forces.

The ‘authoritarian’ moment, or the moment of ‘opening up to foreign capital’, are not the absolute negation of socialism – as western Marxists would have you believe – but the partial negation, that is, the sublation of the idealistic conceptions of a socialist purity. These two moments present themselves where they appear as the historically necessary negations needed to develop socialism. A less ‘authoritarian’ treatment of the Batista goons after the Cuban revolution would have opened the window for imperialism and national counter-revolutionary forces to overthrow the popular revolution. A China which would not have taken the frightening risk of opening up would not have been able to lift 800 million out of poverty (eradicating extreme poverty) and be the beacon of socialist construction and anti-imperialist resistance in the world today.

Hegel understood that every leap towards a qualitatively new stage required a long process, consisting of various moments of ‘failures’ and ‘successes’, for this new stage to mature into its new shape. Using for Spirit the metaphor of a child he says,

But just as the first breath drawn by a child after its long, quiet nourishment breaks the gradualness of merely quantitative growth-there is a qualitative leap, and the child is born-so likewise the Spirit in its formation matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by isolated symptoms.[18]

Western Marxists ignore the necessity of the process. They expect socialism, as a qualitatively new stage of human history, to exist immediately in the pure form they conceived of in their minds. They expect a child to act like a grown up and find themselves angered when the child is unable to recite Shakespeare and solve algebraic equations. They forget to contextualize whatever deficiencies they might observe within the embryonic stage the global movement towards socialism is in. They forget the world is still dominated by capitalist imperialism and expect the pockets of socialist resistance to be purely cleansed from the corrupting influence of the old world. They forget, as Marx noted in his Critique of the Gotha Program, that socialist society exists “as it emerges from capitalist society which is thus in every respect, economically, morally and intellectually, still stamped with the birth marks of the old society from whose womb it emerges”.[19]

Where is Hegel, in concrete analysis, for these Western Marxists? The answer is simple, he is dead. But Hegel does not die without a revenge, they too are dead in the eyes of Hegel. Their anti-dialectical lens of interpreting the material world in general, and the struggle for socialism in specific, leaves them in the lifeless position Hegel called Dogmatism. For Hegel,

Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.[20]

Western Marxist dogmatist fetishize binaries, the immediate (either intuitive or empirical), and the pure. To them, something is either socialism (if it is pure) or not-socialism (if it is impure). They cannot grapple, in practice at least, with the concept of becoming, that is, with the reality of the construction of socialism. Socialism must be constructed, it is an active enterprise emersed necessarily in a world riddled by imperialist pressures, contradictions, and violence – both active and passive. Western Marxist will write splendid critiques of positivism’s fetish of the ‘fact’, but in their own practical analysis of socialist construction in the world they too castrate facts from the factors that allowed them to exist.

Hence Žižek, the most prominent Hegelian Marxists today, couches his anti-dialectical bourgeois critiques of socialism in Cuba (as well as China and pretty much every other socialist experiment) within a reified analysis that strips the Cuban reality from its context. It ignores the historical pressures of being a small island 90 miles away from the world’s largest empire; an empire which has spent the last 60+ years using a plethora of techniques – from internationally condemned blockades, to chemical attacks, terrorist fundings, and 600+ CIA led attempts on Fidel’s life – to overthrow the Cuban revolution. Only in ignoring this context and how it emerges can Žižek come to the purist and anti-dialectical conclusion that the revolution failed and that the daily life of Cubans is reducible to “inertia, misery, escapism in drugs, in sex, [and] pleasures”.

The Panacea to the Fetishes of Western Marxism

In sum, expanding upon the analysis of comrade Manoel, it can be seen that the purity fetish, and the subsequent infatuation with failed experiments and struggles which, although never achieving the conquest of power, stayed ‘pure’, can be traced back to a Parmenidean conception of Truth as Unchanging Permanence which has permeated, in different forms, all throughout the various moments of western philosophy’s history.

This interpretive phenomenon may be referred to as an intellectual rot because; 1) at some point, it might have been a fresh fruit, a genuine truth in a particular moment; 2) like all fruits which are not consumed, they outlive their moment of ripeness and rot. Hence, the various forms the Parmenidean conception of Truth took throughout the various moments it permeated might have been justified for those moments, but today, after achieving a proper scientific understanding of the dialectical movement in nature, species, human social formation and thought, Parmenidean purity has been overthrown – it has spoiled, and this death fertilizes the soil for dialectical self-consciousness.

Although all theorists are still class subjects, bound to the material and ideological conditioning of their class and geographical standpoint (in relation to imperialism specifically) – the panacea for Western Marxists’ purity fetish is dialectics. Dialectics must not be limited simply to the theoretical realm in which they engage with it. If it stays in this pure realm, it will suffer the same fate socialism has for them – nothingness, absolute negation. Dialectical logic must be brought beyond the textbook and used as the interpretive framework with which we analyze the world in general, and the construction of socialism in specific. Only then will Western Marxism gain the possibility of being something more than a ‘radical’ niche of Western academia, focused only on aesthetics and other trivialities where purity can be sustained without risk of desecration.   

Notes

[1] Wheelwright, Phillip. The Presocratics. (The Odyssey Press, 1975). pp. 70.

[2] Ibid., pp. 97.

[3] Plato. “Phaedo” in The Harvard Classics. (P.F. Collier & Son Corporation, 1937). pp. 70, 90.

[4] Ibid., pp. 71.

[5] Aristotle. “Metaphysics” In The Basic Works of Aristotle. (The Modern Library, 2001)., pp. 736.

[6] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Lectures on the History of Philosophy Vol I. (K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Company, 1892)., pp. 278.

[7] Ibid., pp. 282, 278.

[8] Ibid., pp. 282.

[9] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Science of Logic. § 132-134.

[10] Ibid., § 187

[11] Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. (Oxford University Press, 1977)., pp. 10.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Ibid., pp. 19.

[14] Hegel’s Lectures pp. 283 and Phenomenology pp. 19.

[15] Phenomenology., pp. 19.

[16] Ibid., pp. 23.

[17] Ibid., pp. 2.

[18] Ibid., pp. 6.

[19] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program” In Robert C. Tucker’s The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton and Company, 1978)., pp. 529.

[20] Phenomenology., pp. 23.

How the US Government Stokes Racial Tensions in Cuba and Around the World

By Alan Macleod

Republished from Mint Press News.

“A Black uprising is shaking Cuba’s Communist regime,” read The Washington Post ’sheadline on the recent unrest on the Caribbean island. “Afro-Cubans Come Out In Droves To Protest Government,” wrote NPR .Meanwhile, The Wall Street Journal went with “Cuba’s Black Communities Bear the Brunt of Regime’s Crackdown” as a title.

These were examples of a slew of coverage in the nation’s top outlets, which presented what amounted to one day of U.S.-backed protests in July as a nationwide insurrection led by the country’s Black population — in effect, Cuba’s Black Lives Matter moment.

Apart from dramatically playing up the size and scope of the demonstrations, the coverage tended to rely on Cuban emigres or other similarly biased sources. One noteworthy example of this was Slate ,which interviewed a political exile turned Ivy League professor presenting herself as a spokesperson for young Black working class Cubans. Professor Amalia Dache explicitly linked the struggles of people in Ferguson, Missouri with that of Black Cuban groups. “We’re silenced and we’re erased on both fronts, in Cuba and the United States, across racial lines, across political lines,” she said.

Dache’s academic work — including “Rise Up! Activism as Education” and “Ferguson’s Black radical imagination and the cyborgs of community-student resistance,” — shows how seemingly radical academic work can be made to dovetail with naked U.S. imperialism. From her social media postings ,Dache appears to believe there is an impending genocide in Cuba. Slate even had the gall to title the article “Fear of a Black Cuban Planet” — a reference to the militant hip-hop band Public Enemy, even though its leader, Chuck D, has made many statements critical of U.S. intervention in Cuba.

Perhaps more worryingly, the line of selling a U.S.-backed color revolution as a progressive event even permeated more radical leftist publications. NACLA — the North American Congress on Latin America, an academic journal dedicated, in its own words, to ensuring “the nations and peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean are free from oppression and injustice, and enjoy a relationship with the United States based on mutual respect, free from economic and political subordination” — published a number of highly questionable articles on the subject.

One, written by Bryan Campbell Romero, was entitled “Have You Heard, Comrade? The Socialist Revolution Is Racist Too,” and described the protests as “the anger, legitimate dissatisfaction, and cry for freedom of many in Cuba,” against a “racist and homophobic” government that is unquestionably “the most conservative force in Cuban society.”

Campbell Romero described the government’s response as a “ruthless … crackdown” that “displayed an uncommon disdain for life on July 11.” The only evidence he gave for what he termed “brutal repression” was a link to a Miami-based CBS affiliate, which merely stated that, “Cuban police forcibly detained dozens of protesters. Video captured police beating demonstrators,” although, again, it did not provide evidence for this.

Campbell Romero excoriated American racial justice organizations like Black Lives Matter and The Black Alliance for Peace that sympathized with the Cuban government, demanding they support “the people in Cuba who are fighting for the same things they’re fighting for in the United States.”

“Those of us who are the oppressed working-class in the actual Global South — colonized people building the socialist project that others like to brag about — feel lonely when our natural allies prioritize domestic political fights instead of showing basic moral support,” he added. Campbell Romero is a market research and risk analyst who works for The Economist. Moreover, this oppressed working class Cuban proudly notes that his career development has been financially sponsored by the U.S. State Department.

Cuban government critic Bryan Campbell Romero proudly touts his US State Department-funded education

Unfortunately, the blatant gaslighting of U.S. progressives did not end there. The journal also translated and printed the essay of an academic living in Mexico that lamented that the all-powerful “Cuban media machine” had contributed to “the Left’s ongoing voluntary blindness.” Lionizing U.S.-funded groups like the San Isidro movement and explicitly downplaying the U.S. blockade, the author again appointed herself a spokesperson for her island, noting “we, as Cubans” are ruled over by a “military bourgeoisie” that has “criminaliz[ed] dissent.” Such radical, even Marxist rhetoric is odd for someone who is perhaps best known for their role as a consultant to a Danish school for entrepreneurship.

NACLA’s reporting received harsh criticism from some. “This absurd propaganda at coup-supporting website NACLA shows how imperialists cynically weaponize identity politics against the left,” reacted Nicaragua-based journalist Ben Norton .“This anti-Cuba disinfo was written by a right-wing corporate consultant who does ‘market research’ for corporations and was cultivated by U.S. NGOs,” he continued, noting the journal’s less than stellar record of opposing recent coups and American regime change operations in the region. In fairness to NACLA, it also published far more nuanced opinions on Cuba — including some that openly criticized previous articles — and has a long track record of publishing valuable research.

“The radlib academics at @NACLA supported the violent US-backed right-wing coup attempt in Nicaragua in 2018, numerous US coup attempts in Venezuela, and now a US regime-change operation in Cuba.

NACLA is basically an arm of the US State Department https://t.co/xxFvxMemxo”

— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) August 12, 2021

BLM Refuses to Play Ball

The framing of the protests as a Black uprising against a conservative, authoritarian, racist government was dealt a serious blow by Black Lives Matter itself, which quickly released a statement in solidarity with Cuba, presenting the demonstrations as a consequence of U.S. aggression. As the organization wrote:

The people of Cuba are being punished by the U.S. government because the country has maintained its commitment to sovereignty and self-determination. United States leaders have tried to crush this Revolution for decades.

Such a big and important organization coming out in unqualified defense of the Cuban government seriously undermined the case that was being whipped up, and the fact that Black Lives Matter would not toe Washington’s line sparked outrage among the U.S. elite, leading to a storm of condemnation in corporate media. “Cubans can’t breathe either. Black Cuban lives also matter; the freedom of all Cubans should matter,” The Atlantic seethed. Meanwhile, Fox News contributor and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, Marc A. Thiessen claimed in The Washington Post that “Black Lives Matter is supporting the exploitation of Cuban workers” by supporting a “brutal regime” that enslaves its population, repeating the dubious Trump administration claim that Cuban doctors who travel the world are actually slaves being trafficked.

Despite the gaslighting, BLM stood firm, and other Black organizations joined them, effectively ending any hopes for a credible shot at intersectional imperialist intervention. “The moral hypocrisy and historic myopia of U.S. liberals and conservatives, who have unfairly attacked BLM’s statement on Cuba, is breathtaking,” read a statement from the Black Alliance for Peace.

Trying to Create a Cuban BLM

What none of the articles lauding the anti-government Afro-Cubans mention is that for decades the U.S. government has been actively stoking racial resentment on the island, pouring tens of millions of dollars into astroturfed organizations promoting regime change under the banner of racial justice.

Reading through the grants databases for Cuba from U.S. government organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and USAID, it immediately becomes clear that Washington has for years chosen to target young people, particularly Afro-Cubans, and exploit real racial inequalities on the island, turning them into a wedge issue to spark unrest, and, ultimately, an insurrection.

For instance, a 2020 NED project,  entitled “Promoting Inclusion of Marginalized Populations in Cuba,” notes that the U.S. is attempting to “strengthen a network of on-island partners” and help them to interact and organize with one another.

A second mission,  this time from 2016, was called “promoting racial integration.” But even from the short blurb publicly advertising what it was doing, it is clear that the intent was the opposite. The NED sought to “promote greater discussion about the challenges minorities face in Cuba,” and publish media about the issues affecting youth, Afro-Cubans and the LGBTI community in an attempt to foster unrest.

A 2016 NED grant targets hides hawkish US policy goals behind altruistic language like “promoting racial integration”

Meanwhile, at the time of the protests, USAID was offering $2 million worth of funding to organizations that could “strengthen and facilitate the creation of issue-based and cross-sectoral networks to support marginalized and vulnerable populations, including but not limited to youth, women, LGBTQI+, religious leaders, artists, musicians, and individuals of Afro-Cuban descent.” The document proudly asserts that the United States stands with “Afro-Cubans demand[ing] better living conditions in their communities,” and makes clear it sees their future as one without a Communist government.

The document also explicitly references the song “Patria y Vida,” by the San Isidro movement and Cuban emigre rapper Yotuel, as a touchstone it would like to see more of. Although the U.S. never discloses who exactly it is funding and what they are doing with the money, it seems extremely likely that San Isidro and Yotuel are on their payroll.

“Such an interesting look at the new generation of young people in #Cuba & how they are pushing back against govt repression. A group of artists channeled their frustrations into a wildly popular new song that the government is now desperate to suppress.” https://t.co/47RGc9ORuR

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) February 24, 2021

Only days after “Patria y Vida” was released, there appeared to be a concerted effort among high American officials to promote the track, with powerful figures such as head of USAID Samantha Power sharing it on social media. Yotuel participates in public Zoom calls with U.S. government officials while San Isidro members fly into Washington to glad-hand with senior politicians or pose for photos with American marines inside the U.S. Embassy in Havana. One San Isidro member said he would “give [his] life for Trump” and beseeched him to tighten the blockade of his island, an illegal action that has already cost Cuba well over $1 trillion,  according to the United Nations. Almost immediately after the protests began, San Isidro and Yotuel appointed themselves leaders of the demonstrations, the latter heading a large sympathy demonstration in Miami.

“The whole point of the San Isidro movement and the artists around it is to reframe those protests as a cry for freedom and to make inroads into progressive circles in the U.S.,” said Max Blumenthal, a journalist who has investigated the group’s background.

Rap As A Weapon

From its origins in the 1970s, hip hop was always a political medium. Early acts like Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation, KRS One, and Public Enemy spoke about the effect of drugs on Black communities, police violence, and building movements to challenge power.

By the late 1990s, hip hop as an art form was gaining traction in Cuba as well, as local Black artists helped bring to the fore many previously under-discussed topics, such as structural racism.

Afro-Cubans certainly are at a financial disadvantage. Because the large majority of Cubans who have left the island are white, those receiving hard currency in the form of remittances are also white, meaning that they enjoy far greater purchasing power. Afro-Cubans are also often overlooked for jobs in the lucrative tourism industry, as there is a belief that foreigners prefer to interact with those with lighter skin. This means that their access to foreign currency in the cash-poor Caribbean nation is severely hampered. Blacks are also underrepresented in influential positions in business or education and more likely to be unemployed than their white counterparts. In recent times, the government has tried to take an activist position, passing a number of anti-racism laws. Nevertheless, common attitudes about what constitutes beauty and inter-racial relationships prove that the society is far from a racially egalitarian one where Black people face little or no discrimination.

The new blockade on remittances, married with the pandemic-induced crash in tourism, has hit the local economy extremely hard, with unemployment especially high and new shortages of some basic goods. Thus, it is certainly plausible that the nationwide demonstrations that started in a small town on the west side of the island were entirely organic to begin with. However, they were also unquestionably signal-boosted by Cuban expats, celebrities and politicians in the United States, who all encouraged people out on the streets, insisting that they enjoyed the full support of the world’s only superpower.

However, it should be remembered that Cuba as a nation was crucial in bringing about the end of apartheid in South Africa, sending tens of thousands of troops to Africa to defeat the racist apartheid forces, a move that spelled the end for the system. To the last day, the U.S. government backed the white government.

Washington saw local rappers’ biting critiques of inequality as a wedge issue they could exploit, and attempted to recruit them into their ranks, although it is far from clear how far they got in this endeavor, as their idea of change rarely aligned with what rappers wanted for their country.

Sujatha Fernandes, a sociologist at the University of Sydney and an expert in Cuban hip hop told MintPress:

"For many years, under the banner of regime change, organizations like USAID have tried to infiltrate Cuban rap groups and fund covert operations to provoke youth protests. These programs have involved a frightening level of manipulation of Cuban artists, have put Cubans at risk, and threatened a closure of the critical spaces of artistic dialogue many worked hard to build.”

In 2009, the U.S. government paid for a project whereby it sent music promoter and color-revolution expert Rajko Bozic to the island. Bozic set about establishing contacts with local rappers, attempting to bribe them into joining his project. The Serbian found a handful of artists willing to participate in the project and immediately began aggressively promoting them, using his employers’ influence to get their music played on radio stations. He also paid big Latino music stars to allow the rappers to open up for them at their gigs, thus buying them extra credibility and exposure. The project only ended after it was uncovered, leading to a USAID official being caught and jailed inside Cuba.

Despite the bad publicity and many missteps, U.S. infiltration of Cuban hip hop continues to this day. A 2020 NED project entitled “Empowering Cuban Hip-Hop Artists as Leaders in Society” states that its goal is to “promote citizen participation and social change” and to “raise awareness about the role hip-hop artists have in strengthening democracy in the region.” Many more target the wider artistic community. For instance, a recent scheme called “Promoting Freedom of Expression of Cuba’s Independent Artists” claimed that it was “empower[ing] independent Cuban artists to promote democratic values.”

Of course, for the U.S. government, “democracy” in Cuba is synonymous with regime change. The latest House Appropriations Bill allocates $20 million to the island, but explicitly stipulates that “none of the funds made available under such paragraph may be used for assistance for the Government of Cuba.” The U.S. Agency for Global Media has also allotted between $20 and $25 million for media projects this year targeting Cubans.

BLM For Me, Not For Thee

What is especially ironic about the situation is that many of the same organizations promoting the protests in Cuba as a grassroots expression of discontent displayed a profound hostility towards the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, attempting to defame genuine racial justice activists as pawns of a foreign power, namely the Kremlin.

In 2017, for example, CNN released a story claiming that Russia had bought Facebook ads targeting Ferguson and Baltimore, insinuating that the uproar over police murders of Black men was largely fueled by Moscow, and was not a genuine expression of anger. NPR-affiliate WABE smeared black activist Anoa Changa for merely appearing on a Russian-owned radio station. Even Vice President Kamala Harris suggested that the hullabaloo around Colin Kaepernick’s kneeling protest was largely cooked up in foreign lands.

Meanwhile, at the height of the George Floyd protests in 2020, The New York Times asked Republican Senator Tom Cotton to write an op-ed called “Send in the Troops,” in which he asserted that “an overwhelming show of force” was necessary to quell “anarchy” from “criminal elements” on our streets.

Going further back, Black leaders of the Civil Rights era, such as Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, were continually painted as in bed with Russia, in an attempt to delegitimize their movements. In 1961, Alabama Attorney General MacDonald Gallion said ,“It’s the communists who were behind this integration mess.” During his life, Dr. King was constantly challenged on the idea that his movement was little more than a communist Trojan Horse. On Meet the Press in 1965, for instance, he was asked whether “moderate Negro leaders have feared to point out the degree of communist infiltration in the Civil Rights movement.”

Nicaragua

The U.S. has also been attempting to heighten tensions between the government of Nicaragua and the large population of Miskito people who live primarily on the country’s Atlantic coast. In the 1980s, the U.S. recruited the indigenous group to help in its dirty war against the Sandinistas, who returned to power in 2006. In 2018, the U.S. government designated Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela as belonging to a “troika of tyranny” — a clear reference to the second Bush administration’s Axis of Evil pronouncement.

Washington has both stoked and exaggerated tensions between the Sandinistas and the Miskito, its agencies helping to create a phony hysteria over supposed “conflict beef” — a scandal that seriously hurt the Nicaraguan economy.

The NED and USAID have been active in Nicaragua as well, attempting to animate racial tensions in the Central American nation. For instance, a recent 2020 NED project ,entitled “Defending the Human Rights of Marginalized Communities in Nicaragua,” claims to work with oppressed groups (i.e., the Miskito), attempting to build up “independent media” to highlight human rights violations.

To further understand this phenomenon, MintPress spoke to John Perry, a journalist based in Nicaragua. “What is perhaps unclear is the extent to which the U.S. has been engaged,” he said, continuing:

"There is definitely some engagement because they have funded some of the so-called human rights bodies that exist on the Atlantic coast [where the Miskito live]. Basically, they — the U.S.-funded NGOs — are trying to foment this idea that the indigenous communities in the Atlantic coast are subjected to genocide, which is completely absurd.”

In 2018, the U.S. backed a wave of violent demonstrations across the country aimed at dislodging the Sandinistas from power. The leadership of the Central American color revolution attempted to mobilize the population around any issue they could, including race and gender rights. However, they were hamstrung from the start, as Perry noted:

"The problem the opposition had was that it mobilized young people who had been trained by these U.S.-backed NGOs and they then enrolled younger people disenchanted with the government more generally. To some extent they mobilized on gay rights issues, even though these are not contentious in Nicaragua. But they were compromised because one of their main allies, indeed, one of the main leaders of the opposition movement was the Catholic Church, which is very traditional here.”

U.S. agencies are relatively open that their goal is regime change. NED grants handed out in 2020 discuss the need to “promote greater freedom of expression and strategic thinking and analysis about Nicaragua’s prospects for a democratic transition” and to “strengthen the capacity of pro-democracy players to advocate more effectively for a democratic transition” under the guise of “greater promot[ion of] inclusion and representation” and “strengthen[ing] coordination and dialogue amongst different pro-democracy groups.” Meanwhile, USAID projects are aimed at getting “humanitarian assistance to victims of political repression,” and “provid[ing] institutional support to Nicaraguan groups in exile to strengthen their pro-democracy efforts.” That polls show a large majority of the country supporting the Sandinista government, which is on course for a historic landslide in the November election, does not appear to dampen American convictions that they are on the side of democracy. Perry estimates that the U.S. has trained over 8,000 Nicaraguans in projects designed to ultimately overthrow the Sandinistas.

In Bolivia and Venezuela, however, the U.S. government has opted for exactly the opposite technique; backing the country’s traditional white elite. In both countries, the ruling socialist parties are so associated with their indigenous and/or Black populations and the conservative elite with white nationalism that Washington has apparently deemed the project doomed from the start.

China

Stoking racial and ethnic tension appears to be a ubiquitous U.S. tactic in enemy nations. In China, the Free Tibet movement is being kept alive with a flood of American cash. There have been 66 large NED grants to Tibetan organizations since 2016 alone. The project titles and summaries bear a distinct similarity to Cuban and Nicaraguan undertakings, highlighting the need to train a new generation of leaders to participate in society and bring the country towards a democratic transition, which would necessarily mean a loss of Chinese sovereignty.

Likewise, the NED and other organizations have been pouring money into Hong Kong separatist groups (generally described in corporate media as “pro-democracy activists”). This money encourages tensions between Hong Kongers and mainland Chinese with the goal of weakening Beijing’s influence in Asia and around the world. The NED has also been sending millions to Uyghur nationalist groups.

Intersectional Empire

In Washington’s eyes, the point of funding Black, indigenous, LGBT or other minority groups in enemy countries is not simply to promote tensions there; it is also to create a narrative that will be more likely to convince liberals and leftists in the United States to support American intervention.

Some degree of buy-in, or at least silence, is needed from America’s more anti-war half in order to make things run smoothly. Framing interventions as wars for women’s rights and coup attempts as minority-led protests has this effect. This new intersectional imperialism attempts to manufacture consent for regime change, war or sanctions on foreign countries among progressive audiences who would normally be skeptical of such practices. This is done through adopting the language of liberation and identity politics as window dressing for domestic audiences, although the actual objectives — naked imperialism — remain the same as they ever were.

The irony is that the U.S. government is skeptical, if not openly hostile, to Black liberation at home. The Trump administration made no effort to disguise its opposition to Black Lives Matter and the unprecedented wave of protests in 2020. But the Biden administration’s position is not altogether dissimilar, offering symbolic reforms only. Biden himself merely suggested that police officers shoot their victims in the leg, rather than in the chest.

Thus, the policy of promoting minority rights in enemy countries appears to be little more than a case of “Black Lives Matter for thee, but not for me.” Nonetheless, Cuba, Nicaragua, China and the other targets of this propaganda will have to do more to address their very real problems on these issues in order to dilute the effectiveness of such U.S. attacks.

Alan MacLeod is Senior Staff Writer for MintPress News. After completing his PhD in 2017 he published two books: Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and Misreporting and Propaganda in the Information Age: Still Manufacturing Consent, as well as a number of academic articles. He has also contributed to FAIR.org, The Guardian, Salon, The Grayzone, Jacobin Magazine, and Common Dreams.

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.