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

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

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

About Devyn Springer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Walter Rodney on Marxism in Africa (1975)

By Walter Rodney

Republished from Red Sails.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Methodology of Marxism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marxism as Revolutionary Ideology

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

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

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

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

Africa and Scientific Socialism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

Asylum As A Tool Of Exclusion

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

By Daniel Melo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Photo credit: Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters]

By Canyon Ryan

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

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

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

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

US Interference in Contemporary Cuba

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

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

Cuban Diaspora Research Regarding Regime Change

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

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

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

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

The Establishment of ZunZuneo

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

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

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

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

Infiltration of the Hip Hop Scene

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

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

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

Bolstering an Independent Civil Society

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

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

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

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

US Interference in Latin America and the Caribbean

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

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

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

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

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

NGOs Wield Culture as Coercion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

U.S. Politicians and Opposing Views on Protests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

Empty Rhetoric That Seeks to Misinform and Appease: On Biden's Farcical Anti-Monopoly Executive Order

[Patrick Semansky/AP Photo]

By Shawgi Tell

Let me be clear: capitalism without competition isn’t capitalism. It’s exploitation

—tweet from President Joe Biden, July 9, 2021

Capitalism is exploitation, period. Lol

—a twitter response to Biden’s tweet, July 9, 2021

Not a day goes by in which major owners of capital and their political representatives do not promote illusions and disinformation about the obsolete capitalist economic system. The ruling elite and their entourage rejected economic science and embraced irrationalism, incoherence, and dogmatism more than a century ago. They are unable and unwilling to offer any useful analysis of economic realities. Nothing they put forward helps advance public understanding of the economy. The mainstream news, for example, is saturated with endless mind-numbing nonsensical economic headlines. It is no accident that mainstream economics has long been called the dismal science.

The internal core logic and intrinsic operation of capital ensures greater poverty, inequality, and monopoly over time. This is the inherent nature of capital. It is how capital moves and develops. These catastrophes are not the result of external forces, extenuating circumstances, or “bad people” making “bad decisions.” They are not the outcome of ill-conceived policies made by self-serving, immoral, or uninformed people. These worsening problems did not arise because something is wrong with the intentions of some individuals who make antisocial decisions. Such notions are facile.

While individuals have consciousness, autonomy, self-determination, and agency, many phenomena (e.g., laws of economic development) operate objectively outside the will of individuals; they do not depend on the will of individuals. The laws of motion governing economic phenomena can be known, controlled, and directed, but not extinguished; they have to be consciously mastered, harnessed, and directed in a way that meets the needs of all.

Capital is first and foremost an unequal social relationship, not a person or a thing. This unequal social relationship is relentlessly reproduced in today’s society, preventing the healthy balanced extended reproduction of society. On the one side of this unequal social relationship are the majority who own nothing but their labor power and on the other side are a tiny handful who own the means of production and live off the labor of others.

Major owners of capital are the personification of capital, the embodiment of capital. This critical theoretical insight helps us avoid the rabbit hole of personal intentions and personal will, and allows us instead to objectively locate greed, insecurity, inequality, poverty, unemployment, endless debt, and other tragedies in the intrinsic built-in nature, logic, and movement of capital itself.

One of these is the inexorable tendency of competition to lead to monopoly under capitalism. Competition means winners and losers. By definition, not everyone can win when competing. Competition means rivalry for supremacy. Thousands compete in the Olympics, for example, but only a select few (“winners”) go home with a gold medal.[1] It is no accident that the economy, media, and politics are heavily monopolized by a handful of billionaires while billions of people who actually produce the wealth in society and run society remain marginalized and disempowered.

This brutal reality cannot be reversed or overcome with the utterance of a few platitudes, the passage of some policies, or the creation of some agencies that claim to be able to fix the outdated economic system, especially when all of the above come from billionaires themselves.

On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden issued an Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy (https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy/).

The order is about 7,000 words long and full of anticonscious statements. Disinformation pervades the entire order.

The opening paragraph begins with the following disinformation:

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in order to promote the interests of American workers, businesses, and consumers, it is hereby ordered….

Here, “American workers, businesses, and consumers” are casually misequated and no mention is made of citizens or humans. The implication is that consumerism is normal, healthy, and desirable, and that workers and big business somehow have the same aims, world outlook, and interests. This conceals the fact that owners of capital and workers have antagonistic irreconcilable interests and that people exist as humans and citizens, not just utilitarian consumers and shoppers in a taken-for-granted system based on chaos, anarchy, and violence.

Disinformation is further escalated in the next paragraph:

A fair, open, and competitive marketplace has long been a cornerstone of the American economy, while excessive market concentration threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers.

“Market concentration” has been the norm for generations. Monopolies, cartels, and oligopolies have been around since the late 1800s. Mergers and acquisitions have been taking place non-stop for decades. The so-called “free market” largely disappeared long ago. Objectively, there can be no fairness in a system rooted in wage-slavery and empire-building. Wage-slavery is the precondition for the tendency of the rich to get richer and the poor poorer. It is not a recipe for prosperity and security for all. This is also why inequality, tyranny, violence, and surveillance have been growing over the years. Moreover, what “threatens basic economic liberties, democratic accountability, and the welfare of workers, farmers, small businesses, startups, and consumers” is the ongoing political and economic exclusion of people from control over the economy and their lives by the financial oligarchy. There can be no liberty, accountability, and welfare when most people are deprived of real decision-making power and major owners of capital make all the decisions. Problems would not constantly worsen if people had control over their lives. The “best allocation of resources” cannot be made when the economy is carved up, fractured, and controlled by competing owners of capital.

Although recurring economic crises for well over a century have repeatedly discredited “free market” ideology, the 7,000-word executive order is saturated with the language of “choice,” “competition,” and “consumers.” This is the same worn-out language used by privatizers of all hues at home and abroad.

Further, while the executive order gives many examples of “economic consolidation” in numerous sectors, the government is not interested in creating a self-reliant vibrant diverse economy that meets the needs of all. It is not committed to reversing “the harmful effects of monopoly and monopsony.” Numerous antitrust laws have not stopped either. Big mergers and acquisitions have been going on for years. Rather, the executive order is an attempt to restructure economic and political arrangements among different factions of the wealthy elite; it reflects a new stage or form of inter-capitalist rivalry for even greater domination of the economy by fewer owners of capital. In other words, moving forward, the economy will remain monopolized by a few monopolies. Wealth is only going to become more concentrated in fewer hands in the years ahead. Mountains of data from hundreds of sources document growing wealth and income inequality every year.

The bulk of the executive order is filled with endless directives, strategies, rules, and suggestions for how to curb “unfair practices” and promote “fairness” and “competition.” But these all ring hollow given concrete realities and past experience.

Today, governments at all levels have been taken over by global private monopoly interests and have become instruments of decisions made on a supranational basis. There is a fine-tuned revolving door between officials from government and the private sector; they have become synonymous for all essential purposes. The same people who run major corporations also serve in high-level government positions where they advance the narrow interests of the private sector and then they leave government and return to their high-level corporate positions. There is a reason why the majority of members of Congress are millionaires. The Executive Branch in the United States, especially the President’s Office, is a major tool for the expression of the will of the most powerful monopolies. This is why billions of dollars are spent every few years to select the President of the country.

A modern economy must be controlled and directed by workers themselves. Only such an economy can provide for the needs of all and avoid endless economic distortions. Uneven economic development, “unfair” arrangements, “market concentration,” monopolies, oligopolies, and recurring crises cannot be avoided so long as those who actually produce the social product have no control over the social product. Workers have first claim to the wealth they produce and have the right to decide how, where, and when that wealth is used. Major owners of capital are historically superfluous and a big block to progress. They are not needed for a healthy vibrant self-reliant economy that meets the needs of all.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

 
Notes

[1] Under capitalism the ideology of competition also falsely assumes scarcity because if nothing was scare then there would be no need for competition.

Degrowth: An Environmental Ideology With Good Intentions, Bad Politics

By Collin Chambers

Republished from Liberation School.

The planet is experiencing multiple environmental crises: biodiversity loss, deforestation, increased rates of pandemics, chemical pollution, soil depletion, water contamination and shortages, runaway non-renewable energy consumption, and climate change. “Degrowth” is an environmental ideology that arose as a political response to these compounding crises. Degrowth was originally termed by André Gorz in 1972. Gorz argued that global environmental balance, which is predicated upon non-growth (or “degrowth”), is not compatible with the capitalist system, which requires “accumulation for the sake of accumulation” [1]. Degrowth, according to Gorz, is thus a challenge to capitalism itself.

Degrowth has become increasingly popular among many environmentalists and leftists. There are some who even call themselves “degrowth communists” [2]. Thus, it’s important to have a clear understanding of exactly what degrowth is and whether it has the potential to advance or hold back the class struggle.

Jason Hickel, a prominent proponent of degrowth, defines it like this: “The objective of degrowth is to scale down the material and energy throughput of the global economy, focusing on high-income nations with high levels of per-capita consumption” [3]. The degrowth perspective asks why society is so obsessed with “growth” (measured by Gross Domestic Product) and seeks to deconstruct the entire “ideology of growth.” The “ideology of growth” is used by the capitalist class to argue that more and more growth is needed to overcome poverty and to create jobs. This is bourgeois ideology in the sense that capitalism relies upon and produces the artificial scarcity to which we’re subjected.

The reality is that, in developed capitalist countries like U.S., there is an overabundance of material wealth and that scarcity is socially produced by the capitalist market and private ownership. Degrowth is correct on the point that if wealth were redistributed then there would indeed be abundance. However, even though proponents of degrowth are well intentioned and truly want to solve environmental crises, the political-economic methods and solutions that degrowth calls for actually work against creating the critical mass necessary to make a socialist revolution here in the U.S. I address each of these below by showing how 1) degrowth reproduces Malthusian ideas about so-called “natural limits;” 2) it’s anti-modern and anti-technological orientation lacks a class perspective; and 3) there are key practical issues with deploying degrowth ideas in the class struggle itself.

The Connections between Thomas Malthus and Degrowth

Thomas Malthus was an aristocratic political-economist who did much of his work before the development of industrial-scale agriculture. In his 1798 book, An Essay on the Principles of Population, Malthus argued that in every geographic region there are particular resource limits or “carrying capacities” [4]. Malthus’ so-called “law of population” says that unchecked population growth will outstrip this carrying capacity that eventually leads to a “natural check” in the form of massive deaths from starvation and disease to bring the population back under the carrying capacity. Malthus blamed poor people for “unchecked” population growth and argued against policies to alleviate people from abject poverty because it delayed the inevitable: the “natural check” of overpopulation. Rising wages, Malthus said, led to workers having more children and thereby creating overpopulation. He blamed workers themselves for economic crises, with a convenient argument against rising wages. Marx rebuffed Malthus’ erroneous theories, clarifying that “every special historic mode of production has its own special laws of population,” and that crises were caused by capital, not by workers [5]. (This is also a point on which he diverged from Darwin, who adopted Malthus’ ideas of population).

Much of this same Malthusian discourse continues to exist today as an explanation for problems such as environmental degradation and poverty. However, the development of industrial agriculture and the production of increasingly higher crop/food yields proved much of Malthus’ theories incorrect.

Malthusianism focuses on “overpopulation” as a main cause of environmental degradation. Degrowth actually reproduces this faulty notion through the proposition that once resources and wealth are equally redistributed (which degrowth rightly wants to do), there must be some “check” on population because, as population grows without any added economic growth, people will eventually have access to fewer and fewer resources. For instance, Giorgos Kallis, another major proponent of the movement, says that “degrowth envisions radically reducing the surplus” and advocates so-called “self-limitations” where there are “collective decisions to refrain from pursuing all that could be pursued” [6]. Rather than the typical Malthusian “natural” external limits, degrowth goes a step further: it calls for a collective enforcement of the internalization of Malthusian ideas of limits and constraints.

The target of degrowth, Kallis declares, is “not just capitalism, but also productivism” [7]. Proponents of degrowth argue that any type of “economic growth is ecologically unsustainable—whether it is capitalist growth or socialist does not make a difference” [8]. In doing so they artificially equate the two antagonistic systems and abstract away from the qualitative differences between socialist and capitalist growth. Kallis justifies this claim by arguing that if we did not change consumption levels in a post-carbon energy regime, then nothing would really change in terms of environmental destruction because “the manufacturing of renewable energies requires lots of earth materials. And the fact that they cost more than fossil fuels might have something to do with their lower energy returns and higher land requirements” [9]. Thus, degrowth does not really have an ecological theory of capitalism, but an ecological theory of accumulation. For degrowth, any type of accumulation is bad and requires increased “material throughput.”

False equivalences between different social systems

But do proponents of degrowth know what accumulation entails? Accumulation simply means reinvesting the surplus back into production (either to expand or repair existing means of production). The accumulation of a surplus is necessary in any society. In his discussions of the reproduction schemas in the second volume of Capital, for instance, Marx writes that there has to be some sort of accumulation in order to reproduce existing society, to replace and repair fixed capital like machinery and roads, societal infrastructures, to care for those who can’t work, and so on. There also has to be surpluses for, say, pandemics and droughts.

The difference is that accumulation under socialism is guided by the workers themselves who collectively determine what and how much surplus to produce and how to use it. Under capitalism, accumulation happens for accumulation’s sake, without a plan, and purely in the interests of private profit. Under socialism, accumulation benefits society as a whole, including even the ecosystems we inhabit. When workers are in control of the surplus, will we not develop and grow the productive forces to make life better and easier for ourselves and more sustainable for the earth and its inhabitants? Wouldn’t we especially grow green productive forces to build more (and better) schools, public transportation, etc.? Shouldn’t socialists in the U.S. strive to repair the underdevelopment of imperialism by assisting in the development of productive forces in the formerly colonized world? While there are sufficient surpluses of, say, housing in the U.S., there are certainly not surpluses of housing in the entire world.

Since the rise of neoliberal capitalism, the size of the working-class stratum composing the “labor aristocracy” has substantially reduced. Whom exactly are we telling to “self-limit” what we consume and live at a time when most workers in the U.S. are living paycheck to paycheck, and accumulating more and more debt? Wages have remained stagnant since the 1970s while prices have increased over 500 percent. Who exactly is supposed to limit themselves, and to what? Isn’t the problem that the masses are limited by capitalism?

Degrowth is, in essence, a form of ecological austerity for working-class people [10]. Stated simply, by focusing so much on the consumption habits of workers within capitalism and so little on the conditions and relations of production, proponents of degrowth end up reproducing Malthusian ideas of “natural limits.” 

We must analytically evaluate production and show how production “produces consumption” itself [11]. The wasteful and environmentally unsustainable consumption patterns of the working class are not produced by “personal” choice but are system-induced. Every day, millions of workers in the U.S. commute to work in single occupant vehicles not because we “choose” to drive. It’s because public transportation is so unreliable (if it exists at all), jobs in the labor market are so unstable and temporary that few workers are actually able to live close to work, and the rents around major industries tend to be unaffordable for our class.

Then there is planned obsolescence, such as when commodities like cell phones are produced to break every two years. When capitalism is overthrown and replaced with socialism, we can produce things that are “built to last” because our aim is to satisfy society’s needs and not private profit. Indeed, Marx argues that capitalist production in itself is wasteful, even in its “competitive-stage:”

“Yet for all its stinginess, capitalist production is thoroughly wasteful with human material, just as its way of distributing its products through trade, and its manner of competition, make it very wasteful of material resources, so that it loses for society what it gains for the individual capitalist” [12].

Degrowth is antithetical to Marxism

Proponents of degrowth argue that there are absolute “planetary limits” and a fixed “carrying capacity” that cannot be surpassed by humans if we want to avoid ecological collapse. This is not only pessimistic in that it dismisses the idea that, under socialism, we could figure out new sustainable ways to grow, but it’s also completely devoid of class analysis. There’s no distinction between socially-produced limits and natural limits.

Degrowth is anti-modern, anti-technological, and anti-large scale production and infrastructure. Kallis argues that “only social systems of limited size and complexity can be governed directly rather than by technocratic elites acting on behalf of the populace… Many degrowth advocates, therefore, oppose even ‘green’ megastructures like high-speed trains or industrial-scale wind farms[!]” [13]. 

The same can be said about degrowth solutions to the problems the capitalist agricultural system creates. Proponents of degrowth propose small scale (both urban and rural) methods of agriculture production to replace industrial-scale agriculture. They, in fact, glorify and romanticize “peasant economies.” 

Despite the problems of capitalist industrial agriculture, there are two main benefits of industrial-scale agriculture. First, it has drastically increased yields. At the present moment, there is enough food produced to feed 11 billion people. Second, industrial farming has thoroughly decreased the backbreaking labor needed for agricultural and food production. In 1790, 90 percent of the U.S. workforce labored on farms. In 1900, it was 35 percent At the present moment, only one percent of the U.S. workforce works on farms [14]. 

Certainly, in any just society we would want to spread out food production more evenly amongst the population. But getting rid of industrial-scale agriculture and reverting to small-scale peasant and small landowner agriculture would require massive numbers of workers to go back to the land and perform backbreaking agricultural work. Such a transformation would inevitably reduce agricultural yield substantially, increasing the possibility of food insecurity and hunger among vast swathes of the population. And what would we do with the commodities and infrastructure we’d have to destroy to create such plots of land? Moreover, such a vision necessitates the redistribution of land from private ownership of large landholders. Is this achieved through revolution or through governmental reforms? In either case, if we’re struggling to reclaim land then why not broaden our horizons and redistribute land in the interests of the environment and the people, including Indigenous and other oppressed nations in the U.S.?

Degrowth is, furthermore, idealist and divorced from the material reality within which U.S. workers currently live. Matt Huber, a Marxist environmental geographer, argues that a “truly humane society must commit to relieving the masses from agricultural labor,” and that we cannot act as if “small-scale agricultural systems are much of a ‘material basis’ for a society beyond industrial capitalism” [15]. This is not to say that small-scale and urban farming are undesirable, but that they’re insufficient in a country like the U.S. The Cuban model of urban farming and agriculture–which is a heroic achievement of the Cuban Revolution–can’t simply be mapped onto this country or the rest of the world.

Additionally, we shouldn’t forgo modern technologies that already exist just because they are “large scale” or because they currently contribute to environmental degradation within capitalist society. Doing so would in effect produce more ecological waste!

In an important piece on capitalism and ecology, Ernest Mandel writes: “it is simply not true that modern industrial technology is inevitably geared towards destroying the environmental balance. The progress of the exact sciences opens up a very wide range of technical possibilities” [16]. Increased rates of pollution and environmental degradation occur because capitalists pursue profits at the expense of the environment, not because of the technologies themselves. Socialists have to distinguish between instruments of production and their use under capitalism.

Degrowth and building the class struggle

In the U.S., degrowth remains an ideology that is relatively socially isolated but gaining influence among environmentalists and some on the left. It’s an ideology of guilt rather than revolutionary action. The ideas from degrowth will not appeal to masses of exploited and oppressed people who actually need more, not less. Imagine, for example, canvassing and talking to people in working-class neighborhoods, trying to get them on board with a degrowth political platform. How do degrowth proponents think workers in oppressed neighborhoods respond if they were told they needed to consume less to fight climate change? Many of us already wait as long as possible in the winter to turn on our heat! As organizers, we would not get the time of day, and we wouldn’t even believe ourselves. Can you imagine organizing homeless and unemployed workers around a program of less consumption? Degrowth is an ideology fit for the privileged, and if they want to consume less, they should.

From the perspective of the practical class struggle, degrowth is particularly problematic. Degrowth has a rhetorical strategy problem. In an unequal country such as the U.S., is the discourse of less and “self-limitation” realistic and inspiring? Is this tactic energizing, does it speak to the needs of the exploited and oppressed, can it mobilize people into action?

Rather than limit everything, we actually need to grow certain sectors such as green infrastructures and technologies. Our class doesn’t need a political platform that calls on us to give up the little pleasures we might have–if any at all–for the sake of the environment. Our class needs a political platform that states clearly what the real problem is and how we can solve it to make life will better.

Degrowth takes a non-class approach towards consumption and production. It is true that some of the more privileged sectors of the working class, particularly in imperialist countries, consume excessively and wastefully. Degrowth, however, fails to account for the class that takes wasteful consumption to almost unimaginable levels and the system that produces these production and consumption patterns. An increasing portion of the labor of the working class is wasted on supporting the consumption habits of the numerically small capitalist class. No amount of preaching self-limiting morality is going to convince the capitalist class to consume less, expropriate less, or oppress less. Once we can get rid of the parasitic imperialists, then human needs and desires can be met through a planned economy led by the working class.

Thus, the solution to these multifaceted and compounding environmental crises is not “degrowth”, but rather, as Mandel formulates it, “controlled and planned growth:”

“Such growth would need to be in the service of clearly defined priorities that have nothing to do with the demands of private profit…rationally controlled by human beings… The choice for ‘zero growth’ is clearly an inhuman choice. Two-thirds of humanity still lives below the subsistence minimum. If growth is halted, it means that the underdeveloped countries are condemned to remain stuck in the swamp of poverty, constantly on the brink of famine…

“Planned growth means controlled growth, rationally controlled by human beings. This presupposes socialism: such growth cannot be achieved unless the ‘associated producers’ take control of production and use it for their own interests, instead of being slaves to ‘blind economic laws’ or ‘technological compulsion’” [17].

References

[1]“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets! ‘Industry furnishes the material which saving accumulates.’ Therefore save, save, i.e., reconvert the greatest possible portion of surplus-value or surplus product into capital! Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the formula in which classical economics expressed the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination.” Marx, Karl. (1867/1976).CapitalVol 1(New York: Penguin Books), 742.
[2] Hansen, Bue Rübner. (2021). “The kaleidoscope of Ccatastrophe: On the clarities and blind spots of Andreas Malm.”Viewpoint Magazine, April 14.Availablehere.
[3] Hickel, Jason. (2019). “Degrowth: A theory of radical abundance,”Real-World Economics Review87, no. 19: 54-68. “Throughput” is the flow of energy and materials through a system.
[4] Malthus, Thomas R. (1789/2007).An essay on the principle of population(New York: Dover).
[5]Marx,Capital, 784.
[6] Kallis, Giorgos. (2018).In defense of degrowth: Opinions and manifestos(UK: Uneven Earth Press), 22, 21.
[7] Ibid., 24.
[8] Kallis, Giorgos. (2019). “Capitalism, socialism, degrowth: A rejoinder.”Capitalism Nature Socialism30, no. 2: 189.
[9] Ibid., 194.
[10] See Phillips, Leigh. (2015).Austerity ecology & the collapse-porn addicts: A defense of growth, progress, industry and stuff(Washington: Zero Books).
[11] See Karl, Marx. 1993.Grundrisse: Foundations of the critique of political economy (rought draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin), 90-98.
[12] Marx, Karl. (1991.)CapitalVol 3 (New York: Penguin), 180.
[13] Kallis,In defense of degrowth,21.
[14] The World Bank. (2021), “Employment in agriculture (% total employment) (model ILO estimate),” January 29. Availablehere.
[15] Huber, Matt. (2018). “Fossilized liberation: Energy, freedom, and the ‘development of the productive forces.’” InMaterialism and the critique of energy, ed. B.R. Bellamy and J. Diamanti (Chicago: MCM’ Press), 517.
[16] Mandel, Ernest. (2020). “Ernest Mandel on Marxism and ecology: ‘The dialectic of growth.’”Monthly Review, June 17. Availablehere.
[17] Ibid.

Economic and Social Crises Keep Deepening: 48 Points That Will Shape the Future

By Shawgi Tell

Not only have the policies of the rich at home and abroad not stopped economic and social decline, the rich are actually taking social irresponsibility to new levels and making things worse worldwide. They are unable and unwilling to solve serious problems plaguing humanity. Opening the path of progress to society is not on their agenda.

Connecting just a few dots in an intelligible way produces a clear picture of the destruction unfolding worldwide. It is no accident that more people are writing about a miserable dystopian future where people will have to develop new creative ways of defending the rights of all. The information below is especially timely given the cheap euphoria displayed recently by the short-sighted rich and their political and media representatives about the “solid” 850,000 jobs the U.S. economy “added” in June 2021.

1. Inflation is increasing rapidly at home and abroad and the dollar’s purchasing power is still falling.

2. Globally, supply chains affecting many sectors are not operating smoothly; many are worried about contrived and non-contrived disruptions lasting for months, even years.

3. Ransomware incidents and major cyberattacks are not diminishing.

4. Millions of U.S. workers are misclassified as contractors, which means that they do not have (generally weak) protections.

5.  Thousands of companies at home and abroad are “zombie companies”—i.e., they don’t make a profit after paying down their debts, they just live a dead life.

6. Student debt in the U.S. keeps soaring.

7. College tuition in the U.S. and elsewhere keeps climbing.

8. Marriage rates in the U.S. are at an all-time low.

9. Birthrates are declining globally.

10. The U.S. experiences a higher infant mortality rate and a higher prevalence of obesity compared with most OECD member countries.

11.  The number of Americans who have moved back in with family or friends over the past 18 months is extremely high.

12. Homelessness is high nationwide and increasing significantly in some major U.S. cities; crime is also up.

13. Various “reforms” in countless sectors in many countries are superficial, phony, and non-substantive.

14. Anxiety and depression remain widespread worldwide.

15. Anti-depressant use remains high.

16. Mass murders and killings have increased in recent years in the U.S.; so have social and civil unrest.

17. Everyone everywhere is skeptical of the mainstream media and struggling not to be confused, ambushed, and humiliated every hour.

18. Around the world hundreds of millions have joined the ranks of the poor over the past 18 months.

19. Globally, well over ten million business have disappeared permanently and thousands more will disappear in the next five years.

20.  Leading economic experts and officials have no real solutions for anything and people continually have low levels of trust in “experts” and government; the rich continue to operate with impunity.

21. There is more polarization, division, and anger in society.

22. Poverty and inequality keep growing worldwide; wealth concentration is staggering and unprecedented.

23. Digital addiction and attendant problems won’t stop increasing.

24. More U.S. college and university administrators, trustees, and leaders are abandoning the intellectual mission of colleges, restricting faculty voice, and turning college into Disney and fun.

25. Getting simple things done is taking longer and becoming more convoluted and frustrating, especially when dealing with retailers, companies, and various agencies.

26. Surveillance and police-state arrangements are multiplying rapidly and becoming more diverse and sophisticated at home and abroad.

27. The media blackout on thousands who continue to experience serious side effects from vaccines continues.

28. Newly-elected “progressive” politicians in the U.S. and elsewhere are proving to be as ineffective as the “old guard.”

29. Privatization and deregulation keep increasing and wreaking havoc worldwide.

30. Anglo-American imperialism thinks that constantly treating China and Russia as bogeymen will keep fooling the gullible and divert attention from deep problems in the Anglo-American world.

31. The unionization rate of American workers is at a historic low, which is bad for all workers in all sectors.

32. More than 130 million working Americans can live off their savings for six months or less before going broke.

33. Mergers and acquisitions continue apace in 2021, concentrating even more wealth in even fewer hands.

34. Central banks around the world keep printing phantom money while stock market bubbles grow larger.

35. The U.S labor force participation rate remains low.

36. The number of long-term unemployed (27 weeks or more) in the U.S. is still increasing.

37. Millions of Americans have started to lose their jobless benefits.

38. More than 40% of Black families and Latino families in the U.S. have no access to an employer-sponsored retirement plan.

39. Black and Latino Americans are experiencing the biggest decline in life expectancy in decades.

40. In recent years, overall job quality for Americans has deteriorated significantly.

41. At least thirty million Americans lack access to high-speed internet.

42. The U.S. opioid overdose crisis, which pharmaceutical companies were recently found guilty of sponsoring, persists.

43. In Africa, nearly 40% of employed youth are considered poor.

44. Around the world, nearly one out of ten people experience hunger and the number of undernourished people has grown by millions in recent years.

45. The official unemployment rate exceeds 10% in at least 12 countries in (Western and Eastern) Europe. Fourteen countries fall into this category for North and South America. The real numbers are higher.

46. More than 27% of youth in Central Asia and Southern Asia are not in employment, training, or education.

47. In the past five years more countries have experienced violent conflict, while violent crime across the world has also increased.

48. Despite endless happy economic news in the mainstream media, economies around the world are far from recovering; many never recovered from the Great Recession of 2008 and mass vaccinations will not solve deep structural economic problems.

The list goes on and on. This is the tip of the iceberg. Numerous problems persist on all continents. The facts above do not paint a picture of a bright and promising future for humanity. Widespread destruction prevails in the obsolete neoliberal world.

But there are also openings and contradictions that people from all walks of life are being compelled to harness in order to advance the public interest and restrict the illegitimate control and authority of major owners of capital. The desire for real progress is palpable and growing; it emerges from the concrete conditions as they present themselves today. The international financial oligarchy cannot provide any solutions to the problems plaguing humanity today, they just have more catastrophes in store for everyone and are blocking the empowerment of the people. None of these serious problems can be solved, however, so long as the people remain marginalized and disempowered. A new direction, orientation, and public authority are urgently needed.

Humanity is entering a new and deeper crisis with qualitatively different and more dangerous features. Crisis is a turning point that contains both peril and opportunity. Crisis is not always just a negative thing; it means things cannot continue in the old way and something significant is going to have to eventually give. It usually takes a serious crisis or trauma to catalyze and propel much-needed change. In this way, crisis overcomes stagnation and complacency and sets the stage for something new. The negation of the negation operates with a greater vengeance in such defining moments, giving rise to a new synthesis, a new equilibrium, which gives rise to yet another dynamic which must assert itself sooner or later. The dialectic lives and cannot be extinguished. What comes next in the complicated here and now is unfolding consciously and spontaneously.

The pace and rate of change today is exhilarating and people’s desire to protect the social and natural environment is growing. The trial of strength between capital-centered forces and human-centered forces is bound to increase because conditions are demanding a new authority that affirms the rights of all. An alternative is necessary and possible. What this will look like is in the hands of the people themselves. Only they can be relied on to usher in a bright future for humanity free of privileged private interests wrecking the social and natural environment.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Kamala Harris and the New Imperialism

By Daniel Melo

In her recent trip to Guatemala, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke of seeking to end corruption, building trust in the region, and tackling the “root” causes of migration. But she also had a dire warning for would-be migrants—do not come to the US, you will be turned back. Never mind the fact that her remark flies in the face of international law protecting the right to seek asylum. This hard-line stance seems to be at odds with the present administration’s supposed compassionate view of migrants. In reality, it is the latest rendition of the long-standing hypocrisy within capitalism and its displacement of people, a tragically necessary result of US imperialism in Latin America.

US capitalist imperialism is central to the very conditions present in Central America today. In several texts on the issues of empire and migration, professor Greg Grandin details the US’s expansive exploitation, both in military and economic terms, throughout Latin America. This includes everything from direct military intervention, to strong-arming Latinx nations into destructive neo-liberal economic policies, to transplanting the very gangs that now hold criminal empires. This mode of imperialism actually supersedes the prior eras of colonialism. As Grandin argues in Empire’s Workshop, it replaced the old colonialism, as the latter could no longer handle the nationalistic tendencies of former colonies nor the nativist uproar they caused at home. Capitalism needed a new way of exploiting territory beyond itself, without the costly eventual repercussions of direct colonizing. Latin America became a “workshop” for the budding US empire, where it could flex both its military and economic might, a place for developing and honing the empire's machinery. Empire, says Grandin, became synonymous with the very idea of America. We are witnessing over a century’s worth of empire dire consequences--hundreds of thousands displaced, crumbling governments, and the rise of neo-facisim.

Of course, Harris has the benefit of time in masking the US’s own culpability in the displacement of people in Latin America. Time and short memory. Her comments received little contextualization in the greater arc of US relations with the Latinx world, which aids in veiling the empire’s direct role in lighting said world on fire. Recent comments by DHS secretary Majorkas echo this ignorance—“Poverty, high levels of violence, and corruption in Mexico and the Northern Triangle countries have propelled migration to our southwest border for years.  The adverse conditions have continued to deteriorate.  Two damaging hurricanes that hit Honduras and swept through the region made the living conditions there even worse, causing more children and families to flee.” Not only are these remarks devoid of any historical materialist context noted above, but significantly, drive home the reality that the US has fully absolved itself of any responsibility, moral or otherwise, from the human consequences of empire.

Thus, Harris' warning to the Guatemalan people is a continuation of the nature of the new imperialism and the hypocrisy at its heart—to do as it wishes without having to deal with the direct consequences. The contradiction is even clearer when paired with her other recent remarks about the border. When NBC’s Lester Holt questioned her choice not to visit the US-Mexico border as part of her trip, she responded that “my focus is dealing with the root causes of migration. There may be some who think that that is not important, but it is my firm belief that if we care about what’s happening at the border, we better care about the root causes and address them.” What she actually means by “caring” and “addressing”  is ensuring that the “problem” of thousands of displaced people simply be relocated to somewhere away from the US border. Of late, papering over the direct consequences of a century of US foreign policy in Latin America comes in two flavors--paying others to keep the problem at bay (“monetary aid”) or direct applications of force at the border (“you will be turned back”). In other words, the ravages of capitalist imperialism are best dealt with by ensuring that they never make their way to the US in the first place.

However, hostility toward the growing desperate multitudes will do little to deter people who are fleeing for their lives. As the Italian delegates at the Socialist Congress of 1907 long ago noted—“One cannot fight migrants, only the abuses which arise from emigration…we know that the whip of hunger that cracks behind migrants is stronger than any law made by governments.”  This administration, like the one before it (and so on for 100 years), assumes that brutality is a functional means of abating the ravages of capitalism. And while oppression may momentarily suppress the movement of people, it cannot fill stomachs, reverse climate change, or repair the decades of damage done by imperialism. As Grandin notes in The End of the Myth, the horrific and historic cycle of violence at the border is a product of the impossible task of policing the insurmountable gap between massive wealth accumulation and desperate poverty. Keeping people where they are will increasingly require escalations of violence and force to hold-off the human consequences of capitalist imperialism.

In this respect, Harris and the administration’s aim at tackling the “root causes” of migration will be forever out of their reach. To do so, they would first have to acknowledge the pivotal role that the US had and continues to have in creating such conditions, and in turn, the unsustainable nature of capitalism itself. This is ultimately no more likely than them suddenly conceding power to the workers of the world. Yet, Grandin also unveils a sliver of light in the darkness of imperialism--the lesson taught by the history of US involvement in Latin America is “[d]emocracy, social and economic justice, and political liberalization have never been achieved through an embrace of empire but rather through resistance to its command.”

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

Thomas Hobbes, the Communist?

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

The British materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is one of the fathers of social contract theory and modern political philosophy. His magnus opus – Leviathan[i] – is a text which á la Plato’s Republic covers a wide breadth of subjects from epistemology, science, religion, and moral and political philosophy. However, his text is most widely remembered for its monarchism-endorsing political philosophy and its speculative warring state of nature. Nonetheless, there is a contradiction at the heart of Hobbes’ work, between his notorious political thought and his moral philosophy, which is surprisingly egalitarian, collectivist, and progressive (esp. for the 17th century). Before we embark on the examination of this contradiction, let us refresh his position on the ideal political state and the state of nature.

In his political philosophy Hobbes espouses three forms of commonwealth, viz., monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – each with their respective corrupted forms (tyranny, oligarchy, anarchy) (TH, 143). From these three options (whose minimum threshold is having some form of absolute sovereign power) he considers monarchy the most practical. In his ideal absolute monarchy, the sovereign, instituted by either force (“sovereignty by acquisition”) or choice (“sovereignty by institution”), uses fear – either the fear men have to return to a state of nature, or the fear men have of the sovereign himself – to rule over his subjects. This absolute monarch is paradoxically described as a “mortal god” and analogized to a leviathan – a biblical sea monster which Isaiah 27:1 urges God to slay (TH, 132). With very minor exceptions, Hobbes ideal political state is one in which the autonomy of the subjects is alienated onto the Monarch, making the later a singularity through which the multiplicity of suspended wills expresses itself.

Written during the English civil war, Hobbes’ Leviathan’s state of nature is a projection of the de facto chaotic state of England, where the warring factions of parliamentarian, absolute monarchist, and recently expropriated peasants – led by Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers agrarian socialist movement – battled it out. In this context, Hobbes projects that in the state of nature (who he warns against interpreting as existing generally the same in all places), humanity is in a state of war, “every man, against every man” (TH, 92). This state of nature, we must clarify, is not limited to the condition pre-state primitive societies lived in. Beyond this, Hobbes describes conditions in a civil war (which he was in) and those in international relations between sovereigns as constitutive of a state of nature as well. For Hobbes, this state of nature in “continual fear” provides infertile grounds for industrial and human development, for the security of one’s life is the prime concern (TH, 94). In essence, within the state of nature “the life of man” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (Ibid.). 

Out of his political philosophy and speculation on the state of nature, the latter has remained the most influential in contemporary discourse. I remember the news reports during hurricane Katrina claiming that New Orleans was under a ‘Hobbesian state of nature,’ where rape, lootings, and killings dominated. This, of course, was false. Instead, as was shown in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell (among many other places), events like Katrina show that in times of adversity, when formal institutions seem to temporarily fall, people generally turn to collectively cooperating for the community. Nonetheless, the narrative that the “general inclination of all mankind” is “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death” remains essential in a system that can survive only insofar as it can “perpetually and restlessly” accumulate capital and reproduce the relations that facilitate this accumulation (TH, 73).

Hobbes’ political philosophy’s emphasis on an absolute sovereign is unacceptable for modern socialists. His anthropology, as constitutive of a portion of his theory on the state of nature, is also a perspective diametric to a Marxist position which shuns from these forms of speculative bourgeois essentialisms. Nonetheless, Hobbes’ laws of nature, the study of which he relegated as “moral philosophy,” retains interesting insights that lend themselves to striking moral criticisms of contemporary neoliberal capitalism (TH, 119).

Although before coming together into a commonwealth, humanity exists in the anxiety of the state of nature, Hobbes nonetheless posits that the laws of nature, centered around preserving life and keeping peace, are “immutable and eternal; for injustice, ingratitude, arrogance, pride, [and] iniquity… can never be made lawful” (TH, 119). Proceeding from the fundamental first law of keeping peace, let us examine a few of the nineteen laws Hobbes lays out for us. It is important to clarify that in our analysis we will be assuming that the modern political scenario is not constitutive of a state of nature, i.e., the grand majority of existing governments are not simply failed, sovereign-less states, most states do have an instituted sovereign power with roles similar to those needed to pass the threshold for Hobbes (even if some might be categorized within the three previously mentioned ‘corrupted forms’). Nonetheless, since for Hobbes, international relations, that is – relations between sovereigns – are constitutive of a state of nature, a loophole for excusing violations of the laws of nature in international relations is present. We will say more on this below.

To begin with – what is a lex naturalis (law of nature)? He says, “a precept or general rule, found out by reason, by which a man is forbidden to do that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved” (TH, 97).

The first and most fundamental law of nature for Hobbes is that one must “seek peace, and follow it,” and if peace cannot be obtained, then one is allowed to defend themselves “by all means” (TH, 98). What greater violation of this law on earth than American imperialism? A system in which the supremacy of capital forces it to go abroad, as Marx said, “dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt,”[ii] to continuously plunder foreign lands, is in a direct contradiction with peace. A nation which has been at war 226 out of its 244 years of life does not seem to be too fond of peace. And as to the times when violence, even when we seek peace, is inevitable, does not Hobbes’ proposition remind us of Fanon’s dictum to the colonized, who stuck in a “web of a three-dimensional violence”, are told they must “[end] the colonial regime by any means necessary?”[iii]

A Hobbesian might respond that within international dealings the laws of nature do not apply since international dealings are, for Hobbes, constitutive of a state of nature. Hence, the activities of American imperialism are fair game. It is important that we deal with this early, for similar international violations of the laws of nature are referenced below. This argument fails to distinguish two points: 1) international relations are always bound to national conditions – a sovereign does not take aliens to fight in wars of plunder, but his own citizenry, which, as in the case of the US, often return dead or physically and psychologically mutilated; 2) As Plato had already noted, states whose economic foundation is grounded on the “endless acquisition of money,” find it that they must “seize some of [their] neighbor’s land.”[iv] International relations reflect the national relations of class. To suppose, as Hobbes does, that international relations are in a state of nature is to presuppose a national economy based on accumulation, plunder, and expansion – and to ignore the possibility, effectively realized under socialism, of international relations based on cooperation and mutual development. Thus, the conditions of imperialism and global capital relations, instead of simply being brushed away through Hobbes’ categorization of them, further highlight the antinomies in Hobbes’ moral and political philosophy. For they demonstrate a condition where the commonwealth, that is, the general organization the laws of nature thrust humans into, is presupposed by Hobbes to be continuously flickering into a state of nature (the condition the laws of nature and commonwealth is supposed to negate) when dealing with the international realm of national politics. Nonetheless, let us continue our examination of his laws of nature.

In the fifth law of nature, the law of mutual accommodation, Hobbes states that just like an architect must toss aside material that takes “room from others” in the “building of an edifice”, so too “a man that by asperity of nature, will strive to retain those things which to himself are superfluous, and to others necessary; and for the stubbornness of his passions, cannot be corrected, is to be left, or cast out of society, as cumbersome thereunto” (TH, 114). In a world where the eight richest people have the same wealth as the poorest half (almost 4 billion people), we live according to global relations which directly violate Hobbes’ fifth law of nature. For the Hobbesian unconvinced with the global nature of this violation (for reasons previously  mentioned), in the US, the country which spearheads the G7 in income inequality, the richest 1% of American households hold 15 times more wealth than the bottom 50% combined. This inequality exists at a time when hundreds of thousands are homeless, and when 42 million people, including 13 million kids, experience hunger in the country. From a Hobbesian moral philosophy, all those who are superfluously hoarding those things which others lack, must be immediately expropriated and expelled from society. Of course, a change in the society that allowed this in the first place is a precondition of the former.

The ninth law against pride gives an insight to how the inequality mentioned in five arose. Hobbes states, “the question who is the better man, has no place in the condition of mere nature; where, as has been shown before, all men are equal” (TH, 115). If men are equal, where did inequality come from? He says, “the inequality that now is, has been introduced by the laws civil” (Ibid.). In essence, men are born equal, it is their social formation which makes them unequal. Interesting enough, although Hobbes and Rousseau are seen to be in polar opposites, Rousseau also agrees that inequality is a development of our transition into society, specifically seen in the development of private property.[v]  Hobbes concludes that every man must “acknowledge another for his equal by nature” (TH, 116).

The tenth law is an extension of the ninths into the realm of the jus naturalis (rights of nature). Hobbes asserts that no man can desire a right for himself, “which he is not content should be reserved to every one of the rest” (Ibid.). He continues, “as it is necessary for all men that seek peace, to lay down certain rights of nature; that is to say, not to have liberty to do all they list: so it is necessary for man’s life, to retain some; as right to govern their own bodies, enjoy air, water, motion, ways to go from place to place; and all things else, without which a man cannot live, or not live well” (Ibid.). There are a few important things to note with this law. Firstly, the notion of rights applying to all was something that took more than three centuries after the writing of this text for the US to figure out. In some places, namely, in the settler colonial state of Israel, this law is still being violated. Secondly, the right to enjoy such things as clean air and water seems dim in a world where fossil capitalism is taking humanity and various other species on the planet to the brink of extinction. Lastly, Hobbes sustains as jus naturalis not just the right to all things one needs to live, but also to all things one needs to live well. In the US, the leading economic power in the history of the planet, having more than enough resources to do so, guarantees neither the latter nor the former to its people as a right. Shelter, food, water, and medical care, i.e., the basic necessities people need to survive, are not guaranteed to the American public. Beyond this, those specific things which each person requires in order to ‘live well,’ to virtuously develop themselves in community, are restricted for only those who can afford it. A system which is dependent for its reproduction on the commodification of people and nature is fundamentally unable to exist non-antagonistically to Hobbes’ tenth law.

Laws twelve and thirteen may also seem surprising to some. Here he states:

The twelfth, equal use of things common. And from this followeth another law, that such things as cannot be divided, be enjoyed in common, if it can be; and if the equality of the thing permit, without stint; otherwise proportionably to the number of them that have right. For otherwise the distribution is unequal, and contrary to equity.

But some things there be, that can neither be divided nor enjoyed in common. Then, the law of nature, which prescribeth equity, requireth, that the entire right; or else, making the use alternate, the first possession, be determined by lot. For equal distribution, is of the law of nature; and other means of equal distribution cannot be imagined.

These passages deserve the reply Marx gives the “intelligent” bourgeois of his time, who, while rejecting communism promote co-operative production and societies – he tells them, “what else, gentlemen, would it be but communism, ‘possible’ communism?”[vi] We must ask Hobbes here, ‘what is this, if not communism?’ From law twelve and thirteen we get three forms of property: 1) property that can be distributed equally to all deserving, 2) property that can be enjoyed in common, 3) property that can neither be enjoyed in common nor distributed equally but is assigned by lottery. Although it might not be what Marx deems the highest phase of communism, where relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,”[vii] Hobbes nonetheless conjures the necessity for a form of lower phase communism out of his ‘laws of nature.’

As I hope to have shown, there is a persistent contradiction between Hobbes’ moral philosophy – dedicated as a science to knowing the lex naturalis – and his political philosophy, grounded more on his projected conception of human nature, than on the laws of nature which supposedly thrust humanity into a commonwealth. Hobbes’ moral philosophy can be described as a militant egalitarianism, which runs directly counter to his ideal conception of the state. If Hobbes’ moral philosophy were transferred in an honest manner into the political-economic realm, he would be alongside Gerrard Winstanley as a forefather of modern socialist thought. Unfortunately, the baby was dropped in the transfer, and what we received is a reactionary political philosophy.

As is often the case with the best of bourgeois thought, the faithful applicability of their moral philosophy would cause its transition into the political realm to escape beyond the boundaries of possibilities within bourgeois society, e.g., Smith, Rousseau, Kant, Mill. In Hobbes we have the most shocking of these cases. As a thinker whose defense of contractual relations has become sacrosanct for the religion of capitalism (used centrally to justify wage-slavery), and whose views on human nature provided a universal grounding for the capitalist ethos, we nonetheless find in his communistic moral philosophy fertile ground for an immanent critique of his own philosophy and of bourgeois society in general. However, we must remember moral criticism of a system is insufficient for its transformation. For a substantial transformation, i.e., for a revolution, a scientific understanding of the systemic mechanisms through which these morally reproachable things arise is necessary. It is here important to remember American Marxist and Socialist Labour Party leader Daniel DeLeon’s famous dictum, “the moral sentiment is to a movement as important as the sails are to a ship. Nevertheless, important though sails are, unless a ship is well laden, unless she is soundly, properly and scientifically constructed, the more sails you pile on and spread out, the surer she is to capsize.”[viii] 

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and professor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] All quotations will be from this edition: Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. (Touchstone, 2008).

[ii] Marx, Karl. Capital Vol 1. (International Publishers, 1974), p. 760.

[iii] Fanon, Franz. “Why we use Violence.” In Alienation and Freedom. (Bloomsbury, 2018), p. 654.

[iv] Plato. “Republic.” In Complete Works. (Hackett Publishing Co, 1997)., p. 1012.

[v] See Rousseau’s 1755 Discourse on the Origin of Inequality.

[vi] Marx, Karl. “The Civil War in France.” In in The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), p. 635.

[vii] Marx, Karl. “Critique of the Gotha Program.” In The Marx-Engels Reader. (W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), p. 531.

[viii] DeLeon, Daniel. Writings of Daniel DeLeon. (Red and Black Publishers, 2008), p. 13.

Decolonization and Communism

By Nodrada

Republished from Orinoco Tribune.

“We have to give life to Indo-American socialism with our own reality, in our own language. Here is a mission worthy of a new generation.”

-José Carlos Mariátegui, “Anniversary and Balance,” José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology¹

While the turn towards analyzing ongoing settler-colonialism has finally reached the mainstream of North American political discussions, there is still a lack of popular understanding of the issues involved. Settler-colonialism is, ironically, understood within the framework of the ways of thinking brought by the European ruling classes to the Americas. By extension, the conceptions of decolonization are similarly limited. Although the transition from analyzing psychological or “discursive” decolonization to analyzing literal, concrete colonization has been extremely important, it requires some clarifications.

Settler–colonialism is a form of colonialism distinct from franchise colonialism. The colonizers seek primarily to eliminate the indigenous population rather than exploit them, as in the latter form of colonialism. Decolonization is the struggle to abolish colonial conditions, though approaches to it may vary. Societies formed on a settler-colonial basis include the United States, Canada, Israel, New Zealand, and Australia. For our purposes, we will focus on the United States in analyzing local ideas of settler-colonialism and decolonization.

Among North American radicals, there are two frequent errors in approaching decolonization.

On the one hand, there are the opponents of decolonization who argue that settler-colonialism no longer exists. In their view, to identify specific concerns for Indigenous peoples and to identify the ongoing presence of settler-colonial social positions is divisive and stuck in the past. They believe that settlers no longer exist, and Euro-Americans have fully become indigenous to North America through a few centuries of residency.

On the other hand, there are proponents of decolonization who believe that Euro-Americans are eternally damned as settlers, and cannot be involved in any radical change whatsoever. The most extreme of these argue for the exclusion of Euro-Americans from radical politics entirely.

Settler-colonialism is not over, contrary to the first view. Rather, Indigenous peoples still struggle for their rights to sovereignty within and outside reservations, especially ecological-spiritual rights. Their ostensibly legally recognized rights are not respected, either. The examples of the struggles of the Wet’suwet’en, Standing Rock Lakota, Mi’kmaq, and other peoples in recent memory are testimony to this. Indigenous peoples are still here, and they are still fighting to thrive as Indigenous peoples. Capitalists drive to exploit the earth, destroying ecology and throwing society into what John Bellamy Foster calls a metabolic rift.² This means that the demands of capital for expansion are incompatible with the ‘rhythm’ of ecology, destroying concrete life for abstract aims as a result.

An atomistic, individualist worldview is what undergirds the view of settler-colonialism as over and of contemporary Euro-Americans as being just as indigenous as Indigenous peoples. When settler-colonialism is seen as an individual responsibility or guilt, we are left with a very crude concept of it.

The denialists of settler-colonialism assume that it must be over, because the colonization of the Americas is apparently over. Thus, they think that modern Euro-Americans cannot be blamed for the sins of their forefathers, since individuals shouldn’t be held responsible for things which happened outside of their lifetimes. Guilt in this conception is an assessment of whether an atomistic individual is responsible for extremely specific crimes, such as participating in something like the Paxton Boys’ ethnic cleansing campaign in 1763 Pennsylvania.

The same ideological approach characterizes the other side, which obsesses over the individual status of “settler” and micro-categorizing the contemporary residents of North America within an abstract concept of settler-colonialism. They argue that having the individual status of “settler” means one is eternally damned, one is marked as a specific person by the crimes of a social system always and forever. This hefty sentence has high stakes, thus the obsession with categorizing every unique case within a specific box.

Neither of these approaches offers a successful insight into settler-colonialism. Instead, they project the thinking of European bourgeois liberalism. The individual is defined in an atomistic way, in their characteristics, rights, crimes, and so on. The individual as a node on a web of social relations is totally out of the question here. Yet, that is how we must think if we wish to understand settler-colonialism and, therefore, abolish it.

To focus primarily on categorizing atomistic individuals, instead of focusing on social relations, loses sight of the true engine of settler-colonialism. It is not that individuals choose one day to behave brutally, or that it is simply the nature of a specific people. Instead, it has very concrete historical motivations in the global system and the rise of settler-colonialism within it. For example, North American settler-colonialism was motivated significantly by the land hunger of capitalists who grew cash crops like tobacco and cotton, which were sold on the world market. Thinking in broad, structural terms is important in order to avoid reductive analyses and approaches.

While the side which focuses on damning individual Euro-Americans certainly have land in mind while thinking about this subject, they have a static and simple concept of land. In their minds, settlers are settlers because they are present in a certain place, to which a specific Indigenous group has an abstract, moral right to exclusive habitation in. To put it simply, their thought process is “if X person is in Y place, which belongs to Z people, then they are a settler.”

They do not understand the social relation of Indigenous peoples to their homelands, which extends into the aspects of ecology, history, spirituality, etc. That is, Indigeneity as itself a social relation. Indigenous peoples explicitly refer to their nations and homelands as relations. Their relation to land is not to land as an abstract thing, but to specific spaces that are inseparable from their specific communal lives.

In the context of describing his people’s history, Nick Estes (Lower Brulé Lakota) said in Our History is the Future:

“Next to the maintenance of good relations within the nation, an individual’s second duty was the protection of communal territory. In the east, the vast wild rice patties and seasonal farms that grew corn, beans, and squash demarcated Dakota territory. In the west, Lakota territory extended as far as the buffalo herds that traveled in the fertile Powder River country. For Dakotas, Lakotas, and Nakotas, territory was defined as any place where they cultivated relations with plant and animal life; this often overlaid, and was sometimes in conflict, with other Indigenous nations.”³

Identity and mode of life in communalist societies is specific to spaces, because keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of these spaces is a basic guiding logic of life. Because land is a relative, there was and is significant resistance among Indigenous peoples to the settler seizure of land and commodification of their non-human relative. The European bourgeoisie, meanwhile, was more concerned with what value could be extracted from the land, their worldview being based in abstract concepts of Right, Justice, Liberty and so on.

The faction in question does not understand settler-colonists as part of social relations which seek to negate that communal land social relation for concrete aims. They lack broad perspective, they only see society as a collection of atoms, falling into micro-categories, bundled together.

Having critiqued these two views, we can now give a better idea of how to properly approach the category groupings involved in analysis of settler-colonialism.

Indigeneity is defined by continuity of long-standing communal relations and identities indigenous to a certain region. Relation to a specific homeland or region is important to this, but the loss of direct ties to land does not necessarily negate Indigeneity. Rather, the continuity of belonging to a certain ‘mode of life’ and community is key.

A settler is one who is outside of these relations, and plays an active role in the negation of these Indigenous relations. A settler is not merely a settler because they are foreign. Rather, they are a settler because of this active negating role.

To play an active negating role does not necessarily mean one personally enforces colonial laws. Instead, it means that one directly benefits from their participation in the destruction of these relations, such as by gaining residencies or employment at the expense of those land-relations. An important aspect of being a settler is being a socio-political citizen of a settler-colonial society. This means that, in law and in social practice, one has the full rights of belonging to the settler-colonial nation, and is recognized as such in ideology.

Many analysts of settler-colonialism, such as Jodi Byrd (Chickasaw), use a third category in their analysis: arrivants.⁴ Arrivants are those who are part of social structures which dissolve those land-relations, but lack the citizenship and agency of settlers. An example of this would be Filipino debt peons. They cannot fully belong to the settler structures, in practice or in ideology, but they are still part of those structures. In North American history, these groups have at various times been explicitly excluded from the potential to own property or obtain full legal citizenship. Said citizenship was directly defined around whiteness, first de jure, and later de facto.

These categories should be treated in a nuanced way, as tools to understand a concrete society and history. We should avoid trying to bend reality to fit abstract categories. Otherwise, one assumes these categories are destiny. One assumes that Indigenous peoples cannot be part of settler-colonial structures, or that all settlers are eternally damned and cannot overcome their social role.

In history, there are many examples of Indigenous peoples participating in settler-colonial processes, such as with Tohono O’odham warriors participating in the Camp Grant Massacre against Apaches, or the Indigenous Vice President Charles Curtis sponsoring assimilation and allotment of communal lands. There are also examples of people without full socio-political citizenship participating in these processes, such as with Black Buffalo Soldiers fighting on the front lines of Manifest Destiny.

There are also examples of Euro-Americans defecting to Indigenous societies in order to escape bourgeois “civilization.” Cynthia Ann Parker was abducted and adopted as a child by a Comanche war band. Texas Rangers, who had massacred her adopted relatives, had to force her to return to Euro-American society. While adopted Euro-Americans remained Euro-Americans, inclusion in those communal relations transformed them. Instead of playing a negating influence on the part of bourgeois society, they became participants in Indigenous relations. To be a settler is not destiny, but is a status which can be negated through a revolutionary transformation of society. In a word, through decolonization.

To obsess over policing micro-categories is not helpful for understanding or fighting settler-colonialism. Being conscious of it is important, but the key is to focus on broad social structures. The way we alter individuals is by altering social relations, and the way we fight for Indigenous sovereignty is by abolishing the negating forces in society. To successfully treat a disease, one must keep in mind the body as a system rather than a simple collection of parts. The same applies to society.

Settler-colonialism in North America is the conflict of two social forms, one fighting to negate the other. The capitalist system: private, individualist, focused on expanding an abstract ‘god’ (capital). The Indigenous communal modes of life: premised on relationality, collectivist, focused on viewing the individual as a part of a whole.

The bourgeoisie seek exclusive, private ownership of land as property to be bought and sold as a commodity. They do not recognize communal land rights, or anything like having a social relation with a place. Instead, they seek to cut off the nerves connecting every aspect of communal life in order to box things in as commodities, so that they can be abstracted into an exchange-value.

The 1887 Dawes Act, which dissolved Indigenous communal landholdings in the United States, was aimed at forcing this system on Indigenous peoples.⁵ In the eyes of the ruling class, this was simply “civilization.” The bourgeoisie had to go to war with these communal ways of life to construct a capitalist system in its place. In the communal systems, unlike capitalism: land itself has rights as a relative instead of being merely a vehicle for value, people live off the land as a community instead of being landless wage-laborers, and exploitation is heavily frowned upon.

The first Red Scare in the United States was not during the 1919–1920 assault on organized labor and anti-war activists, but during the struggle of the government and capitalists against Indigenous communal modes of life.⁶

This war of generalized commodity production, capitalism, against alternative ways of being extended to ways of knowing. When forcing Indigenous children into boarding schools, the colonizers worked hard to destroy languages, religious practices, and cultural practices.⁷ In their place, they promoted individualism, bourgeois values, and a future as wage-laborers.

The liberal view of individuals is quite representative of typical bourgeois thinking. Liberalism posits individuals in an atomistic way, without considering them as concrete beings with concrete relationships in a real world. It sees individuals as simply bundles of rights, obligations, and so on. It premises meaning on extremely abstract, albeit universalizing concepts, such as “justice.” The rights of the liberal citizen are rights they have apart from society. Their freedom is a space separate from society, since they see others as fundamentally competitors.

This abstract thinking, individualism, and competitive view makes plenty of sense for a bourgeois. Their well-off conditions and obsession with preserving their private property against others reflect in their lack of concern for positive rights (rights to things, like food or shelter). What they want is to realize their capital, defeat their competitors, and pay as little as they have to for the working class’s living.

They only concern themselves with concrete things as far as they relate to their mission to realize abstract, congealed labor: capital. Capital commands them. If they do not expand their capital through exploitation and investment, they fall behind and decay in the rat race. Thus, the bourgeois is shrewd, atomistic, and anti-social.

By contrast, the communal view of individuals which is characteristic of Indigenous nations is focused on very concrete things. Individuals are part of specific communities with specific histories, who are relatives with specific land-spaces. To preserve balance in one’s real relations is an important value, contrasting sharply to the obsession with satisfying the god of abstract capital by feeding it concrete sacrifices. The key to this worldview is keeping in the ‘rhythm’ of life: the rhythm of one’s human relatives, non-human relatives, the ecology, the spirits, etc.

The latter view has a sibling in the views of Karl Marx. In the sixth thesis from Theses On Feuerbach, Marx said:

[…]the essence of man is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations.⁸

Further, Marx was very concerned with the metabolic rift wrought by capitalism. In his view, while capitalism had for the first time linked up the whole world and all people into one global social system of production, it had also unleashed forces it could not control. While everyone in capitalism depends on everyone else, the system is controlled by self-interested bourgeoisie, who have no concern for humans, animals, or ecology.

Therefore, there is a need for a working class revolution, where the people who produce what the world runs on establish social control of this social production. Through that social control, they must restore the balance of humanity and nature, using the planning of production to end the chaos and blindness characteristic of capital. Once they have fully developed this system of social control and planning and brought about a world where all people contribute to the social product instead of anyone exploiting anyone else, they will have established a communist society.

The basis for Pan-Indigenism in North America was laid by the proletarianization of Indigenous peoples during and after World War II.⁹ The Federal government explicitly hoped to use this to assimilate Indigenous peoples by removing them from communal life on reservations. Instead, the contact of many distinct peoples in urban workforces and communities led to the development of a new, broad concept of Indigeneity. These proletarians thought of themselves not only as, for example, Standing Rock Lakota or Chiricahua Apache, but also as “Indigenous.”

This had precedence with people such as Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa, the Shawnee leaders of a Pan-Indigenous resistance to settler-colonialism in late 18th and early 19th century Ohio, or Wovoka, the Paiute founder of the Ghost Dance movement in the late 19th century. However, it had never reached this scale before. The same forces which sought to destroy Indigenous identity created means of establishing a new political movement in defense of it.

This universalization of identity from particular to general, without necessarily negating the particular, is something which must be done by social revolution as well. Proletarianization unites many distinct peoples into one class, leading to radical contacts between worlds. It lays the basis for a revolution which for the first time establishes a real community of all of humanity.

Decolonization ties directly into this project of social revolution. Capital attacks communal relations to establish and reproduce itself, yet by doing this it lays the foundation for a more universal form of communal life: communism. To decolonize is not to merely undo history and return to the past. We cannot undo centuries of change, of destruction.

Instead, as advocated by anti-colonial theorists like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon, we must assert indigenous aims on the basis of the world colonialism has brought. This must take the form of the social revolution, because capital leaves intact the negating force against communalism and the relations of domination between groups of people.

In our theorizing of communism, we must avoid the thought patterns of the bourgeoisie. We must not only avoid individualism, but avoid the denigration of communalist ways of life. Indigenous peoples are at the forefront of the defense of bio-diversity. They are staunch protectors of the earth, of their ways of life and of their relation with the earth. They resist capitalist primitive accumulation, defending their sovereignty, daily. Communism cannot be some form of universalized bourgeois society, nor can it carry over the denigrated view the bourgeoisie have of life. Instead, it must be communalism reasserted on a universal scale.

Decolonization does not mean one throws out settlers. It does not mean we send Euro-Americans back to Europe. This belief is premised on a bourgeois, colonial thinking about life. It assumes that behavior is ahistoric, inscribed into the DNA of people. Rather, it is social relations that we must expel, transforming people through incorporation into new ones.

In the past, the adoption of Euro-Americans served as an alternative to their behavior as settlers. A decolonized society can follow this model on a broader scale, while preserving the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples over their homelands. Indigenous conceptions of land are not based on bourgeois exclusive right, but the right of specific people to have an ongoing relation with specific spaces. Abolishing the negating force, capitalism, and asserting these ways of life while working to establish the universalist form, communism, must be our program.

To put it simply, decolonization should be understood as the indigenization of settlers. This necessitates a social revolution in all aspects of life. It does not mean settlers must immediately “play Native.” Within the context of bourgeois settler-colonialism, that is part of a process of dissolving Indigenous communities, destroying their ability to remain sovereign. Rather, it means that we must destroy the capitalist society which drives these antagonisms.

This decolonization also necessitates a conscious revolution in ideology as part and parcel of social transformation. As discussed, communalist societies have a strong sense of concrete locality, of specificity according to a space and the relations of that space. Capitalism seeks to negate that in favor of universalist abstractions. Communism must take the universalizing capitalism has engaged in and place it on a concrete, conscious basis.

We ought to oppose the negation of local life capitalism engages in, while having the universal goal of revolution. That is, unite the particular with the universal, establish the particular as the basis of the universal. The old, European bourgeois ways of thinking, lacking metabolism or relationality with other humans and with ecology, must be overcome.

Communism is the abolition of the present state of things on the basis of existing premises. The emancipatory project of communism should not be hostile to, but a student of Indigenous peoples. When all people are one kin, when they are not divided by class or other social antagonisms, then we will all be free. That is the relation of decolonization to communism.