Niger Is the Fourth Country in the Sahel to Experience an Anti-Western Coup

By Vijay Prashad and Kambale Musavuli

Republished from Independent Media Institute’s Globetrotter report.

At 3 a.m. on July 26, 2023, the presidential guard detained President Mohamed Bazoum in Niamey, the capital of Niger. Troops, led by Brigadier General Abdourahmane Tchiani closed the country’s borders and declared a curfew. The coup d’état was immediately condemned by the Economic Community of West African States, by the African Union, and by the European Union. Both France and the United States—which have military bases in Niger—said that they were watching the situation closely. A tussle between the Army—which claimed to be pro-Bazoum—and the presidential guard threatened the capital, but it soon fizzled out. On July 27, General Abdou Sidikou Issa of the army released a statement saying that he would accept the situation to “avoid a deadly confrontation between the different forces which… could cause a bloodbath.” Brigadier General Tchiani went on television on July 28 to announce that he was the new president of the National Council for the Safeguard of the Homeland (Conseil National pour la Sauvegarde de la Patrie or CNSP).

The coup in Niger follows similar coups in Mali (August 2020 and May 2021) and Burkina Faso (January 2022 and September 2022), and Guinea (September 2021). Each of these coups was led by military officers angered by the presence of French and U.S. troops and by the permanent economic crises inflicted on their countries. This region of Africa—the Sahel—has faced a cascade of crises: the desiccation of the land due to the climate catastrophe, the rise of Islamic militancy due to the 2011 NATO war in Libya, the increase in smuggling networks to traffic weapons, humans, and drugs across the desert, the appropriation of natural resources—including uranium and gold—by Western companies that have simply not paid adequately for these riches, and the entrenchment of Western military forces through the construction of bases and the operation of these armies with impunity.

Two days after the coup, the CNSP announced the names of the 10 officers who lead the CNSP. They come from the entire range of the armed forces, from the army (General Mohamed Toumba) to the Air Force (Colonel Major Amadou Abouramane) to the national police (Deputy General Manager Assahaba Ebankawel). It is by now clear that one of the most influential members of the CNSP is General Salifou Mody, former chief of staff of the military and leader in the Supreme Council for the Restoration of Democracy, which led the February 2010 coup against President Mamadou Tandja and which governed Niger until Bazoum’s predecessor Mahamadou Issoufou won the 2011 presidential election. It was during Issoufou’s time in office that the United States government built the world’s largest drone base in Agadez and that the French special forces garrisoned the city of Irlit on behalf of the uranium mining company Orano (formerly a part of Areva).

It is important to note that General Salifou Mody is perceived as an influential member of CNSP given his influence in the army and his international contacts. On February 28, 2023, Mody met with the United States Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley during the African Chiefs of Defense Conference in Rome to discuss “regional stability, including counterterrorism cooperation and the continued fight against violent extremism in the region.” On March 9, Mody visited Mali to meet with Colonel Assimi Goïta and the Chief of Staff of the Malian army General Oumar Diarra to strengthen military cooperation between Niger and Mali. A few days later on March 16, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken visited Niger to meet with Bazoum. In what many in Niger perceived as a sidelining of Mody, he was appointed on June 1 as the Nigerien ambassador to the United Arab Emirates. Mody, it is said in Niamey, is the voice in the ear of Brigadier General Tchiani, the titular head of state.

Corruption and the West

A highly informed source in Niger tells us that the reason why the military moved against Bazoum is that “he’s corrupt, a pawn of France. Nigerians were fed up with him and his gang. They are in the process of arresting the members of the deposed system, who embezzled public funds, many of whom have taken refuge in foreign embassies.” The issue of corruption hangs over Niger, a country with one of the world’s most lucrative uranium deposits. The “corruption” that is talked about in Niger is not about petty bribes by government officials, but about an entire structure—developed during French colonial rule—that prevents Niger from establishing sovereignty over its raw materials and over its development.

At the heart of the “corruption” is the so-called “joint venture” between Niger and France called Société des mines de l’Aïr (Somaïr), which owns and operates the uranium industry in the country. Strikingly, 85 percent of Somaïr is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies, while only 15 percent is owned by Niger’s government. Niger produces over 5 percent of the world’s uranium, but its uranium is of a very high quality. Half of Niger’s export receipts are from sales of uranium, oil, and gold. One in three lightbulbs in France are powered by uranium from Niger, at the same time as 42 percent of the African country’s population lived below the poverty line. The people of Niger have watched their wealth slip through their fingers for decades. As a mark of the government’s weakness, over the course of the past decade, Niger has lost over $906 million in only 10 arbitration cases brought by multinational corporations before the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes and the International Chamber of Commerce.

France stopped using the franc in 2002 when it switched to the Euro system. But, fourteen former French colonies continued to use the Communauté Financiére Africaine (CFA), which gives immense advantages to France (50 percent of the reserves of these countries have to be held in the French Treasury and France’s devaluations of the CFA—as in 1994—have catastrophic effects on the country’s that use it). In 2015, Chad’s president Idriss Déby Itno said that the CFA “pulls African economies down” and that the “time had come to cut the cord that prevents Africa from developing.” Talk now across the Sahel is for not only the removal of French troops—as has taken place in Burkina Faso and in Mali—but of a break with the French economic hold on the region.

The New Non-Alignment

At the 2023 Russia-Africa Summit in July, Burkina Faso’s leader, President Ibrahim Traoré wore a red beret that echoed the uniform of the assassinated socialist leader of his country, Thomas Sankara. Traoré reacted strongly to the condemnation of the military coups in the Sahel, including to a recent visit to his country by an African Union delegation. “A slave that does not rebel does not deserve pity,” he said. “The African Union must stop condemning Africans who decide to fight against their own puppet regimes of the West.”

In February, Burkina Faso had hosted a meeting that included the governments of Mali and Guinea. On the agenda is the creation of a new federation of these states. It is likely that Niger will be invited into these conversations.

The Fight for Migrant Rights in the U.S.: An Interview with Justin Akers Chacón

[Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg]

By Brendan Stanton

Republished from Red Flag.

Justin Akers Chacón, a socialist based in San Diego, California, campaigns for worker and migrant rights in the US-Mexico border region and is the author of “The Border Crossed Us: The Case for Opening the US-Mexico Border.” He caught up with Red Flag to discuss immigrant rights in the US under Democratic President Joe Biden. 

Q: After the polarisation under former President Trump, what has shifted in the politics of the border and migration during the Biden era?

A: The short answer is that it’s gotten worse. There were some 400 executive actions taken by the Trump administration that affected immigration, including family separation at the border, the Muslim travel ban, expanding the border wall and ending temporary protected status for many groups. Much of this framework has been institutionalised under Biden. 

This is despite the fact that, in the lead-up to the 2020 election, the whole discourse of the Democratic Party was towards dismantling the inhumane and punitive measures of the Trump regime. While Biden wasn’t on the left wing of that discourse, he characterised Trump as harmful to immigrants and refugees and promised a pathway to legalisation for migrants in his first 100 days. This shifted immediately after the Democrats won, and they quickly walked back any discussion.

It’s worth also mentioning that Biden technically ordered a month’s moratorium on deportations early in the administration. But the order was overruled by a Trump-appointed federal judge on the day it was issued. The administration used this as an excuse to abandon the promise completely, but it was quickly pointed out by immigration scholars that there were multiple ways in which the administration could have worked around that ruling to stop deportations. 

Although vocally opposing Title 42 [a Trump-era measure allowing authorities to turn away migrants at the border on public-health grounds], one of his first acts as president was using it to conduct a mass deportation of Haitians from south Texas. Even while the Trump policy of family separation at the border was stopped, the Biden administration announced that it’s going to begin the process of reauthorising family detention.

The Democrats’ real orientation around border politics was signalled by Kamala Harris when she was sent to Guatemala in 2021 to tell Central Americans, “Do not come to the United States”. This signalled the institutionalisation of Tump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy, which defunded the legal side of the asylum process.

This, of course, didn’t stop people from migrating. Just like under Trump, it created conditions where large populations are forced to live in overcrowded encampments, on the street and in other uninhabitable areas on the Mexican side of the borderlands. 

The Democrats played an equal or even greater role in building the immigration enforcement apparatus than the Republicans. They have no left or progressive or reformist orientation towards immigration, and they face pressure from the right when the Republican Party redeploys all the racist tropes like “our border is under attack”, or “we’re being invaded” during each election cycle. So they consistently diverge their rhetoric during elections, and after elections they converge with Republicans again. 

That’s how we’re in a situation where far more people were deported in Biden’s first year than under the previous four years of Trump.

Has there been any opposition from the likes of Democratic Party Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or other people who made a name for themselves calling for the abolition of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security division in charge of deportations?

There was this interesting period in 2019, when a lot of these people on the left of the party were going to detention centres and giving speeches. Ocasio-Cortez gave a very moving account of the horrors of a detention centre, and said we have to close the “concentration camps”.

But as soon as the Democrats won, it all evaporated. She and other “left” Democrats stopped calling these horrible places “camps” and started promoting the idea that with Democrats in office, there’s going to be reform. That reform never happened, but there has still been a shift in terms of softening rhetoric or not talking about it at all. Since the abandonment of immigration reform after the election, there has been no movement within the Democratic party to change the status quo. 

I wouldn’t be surprised if, in campaign mode leading up to 2024, the Biden administration makes similar promises as before. But for now, it’s shifted far to the right, taking the whole party tent and the stakes to the right with it. 

A couple of months ago, a story broke about undocumented children working in quite dangerous conditions for major US corporations. Have there been any significant changes around labour protection in the wake of that scandal?

It actually created an internal conflict within the Biden administration. Some officials who were monitoring the child refugee crisis were calling the administration’s attention to how many of these children were being absorbed into the workforce as early as a year and a half ago. People higher up, like Susan Rice, one of the chief advisers of Biden, knew this was happening. They basically quashed it, said it was not a priority, and so it took outside reporters to break the story.

It’s important to understand what immigration enforcement is designed to do and what it’s not designed to do. It’s not designed to stop people from migrating or to prevent people from falling into these conditions. It creates pathways for this to happen by essentially creating systems of regulation for a growing segment of the workforce in this country. 

Being exposed for their awareness that child labour is flourishing once again in the United States is a public relations problem for the Biden administration, but it hasn’t provoked a political crisis. It’s also because the Republicans and the right don’t have a problem with this issue—they’re not going to try to make it an issue. 

Even within organised labour, it’s not clear that there’s any effort to address the issue of child labour. Like so many other things, it’s either under-reported or swept under the rug really quickly. It’s a reflection of how little opposition there is inside the US to the politics of immigration enforcement.

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How do you think socialists and leftists should understand the class dynamics of border politics?

We can walk through that child refugee scenario from beginning to end and explain how this is a political function of capitalist policy. 

Between 2011 and 2016, almost 200,000 unaccompanied children, mostly from Central America, came to the United States. Two major factors played a key role in this. One is the Central American-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement first implemented in 2006. By 2010, there were radical economic changes like the opening up of these economies to unrestricted foreign capital investment and the privatisation of much of the economy. 

There was a systematic displacement of people who could no longer afford to work the land, or whose jobs in manufacturing were displaced by foreign capital. This foreign capital is invested in extreme forms of labour production associated with maquiladoras [US-owned factories], basically laboratories for increasing productivity, repressing wages and keeping unions out. 

This destroys many of the social aspects of the economy, and by 2011 we saw the first significant effects of these policies displacing people. 

Earlier, in 2007, the US initiated a region-wide security strategy called the Mérida Initiative, through which it gave money and political support to Mexican and Central American governments to expand the border enforcement apparatus of the United States further south. The US trains police and militaries in these countries to engage in the Drug War and also control migration, 

Alongside the other realities of the War on Drugs, which contributed to the growth of drug cartels, this has destabilised the region. The illegal drug industry is now one of the major industries of the Western hemisphere, and these cartels have grown in rhythm and tempo with the criminalisation of drugs and the growth of enforcement mechanisms. Instead of the cartels being contained and defeated in Mexico through this regional militarisation, they’ve been pushed further into Central America. 

In 2009, the US greenlit the overthrow of the left-of-centre president of Honduras, Manuel Zelaya. This set up the rule of the far right for the next several years, including Juan Orlando Hernández, a strong US ally who was also on the payroll of the cartels. While he was president, a lot of the funding and technology he received from the US for the drug war went towards repressing indigenous populations and social movements. Lots of people were displaced, and hundreds of labour organisers, socialists, LGBTQ people, indigenous organisers and other leftists were killed. 

So all that’s happening down there while we have the building up of the border enforcement apparatus, and the children who ultimately make it through to the United States end up in the workforce to survive. How do we understand the end of that scenario without understanding how every sort of step of this process is predicated on strengthening the ability of capital to exploit? 

The overthrow of a left-of-centre president in 2009 helped embolden a far-right government to destroy the left, attack all these vulnerable groups and displace countless people. When thousands of these children and teenagers start appearing in meat production facilities and construction jobs in the US, it’s a manifestation of US regional policies. It’s not necessarily a conscious act that someone masterminded, but it’s the outcome of decisions that advocate for the interest of capital. 

This creates larger and larger pools of exploitable workers, on both sides of the border, who are hard to organise, including workers who are regulated by the state. That impacts wage thresholds and impacts the whole labour economy. And when immigrant workers rise up, as they did in 2006, that leads to an increase in the repression of the state. 

In light of these border dynamics, in what direction do you think the socialist movement and the labour movement should go?

There has to be a rejection of criminalisation and border enforcement. That has to be a demand for all workers. In 1986 it actually was, when unions backed an amnesty for undocumented workers. This led to a surge in unionisation among newly legalised workers, who were much more class conscious than the rest of the population. Legalisation was a huge boost for the union movement at a time when it was otherwise declining. It also means supporting workers as they organise on the other side of the border.

I’m going to try to paraphrase Marx. He said something like, you don’t know what the problem is until a solution presents itself. In the context of the North American class struggle, capital has invested so much by shifting production south of the border and dividing production into cross-border supply chains. Therefore, the working classes in the US and Mexico have become fused together in ways that are much more apparent. More of these workers, especially workers in Mexico, recognise that class struggle is by necessity transnational, and there have been flashes of this potential and some sustained processes of a transnational labour response. 

There are some maquiladoras in Tamaulipas [a north-eastern state bordering Texas] making parts for General Motors that are going to be used for assembly in Tennessee or in Detroit, and there are also GM plants making whole cars in Mexico. 

The workers in these factories in Mexico have to be very savvy organisers, because in Mexico you don’t just organise against the employers, you organise against the fake unions that are muscle for the employers. You often have to organise directly against local and state governments and sometimes the federal government. 

In 2019, these workers in Matamoros [across the border from Brownsville, Texas], in extreme conditions, coordinated a series of wildcat strikes all at once. Rank-and-file women and men workers organising these networks got over 35,000 workers and shut down 48 factories over a month and a half. All of them won a 20 percent pay increase and a significant rise in their annual bonuses. A big part of why they won is because shutting down their factories disrupted parts supplies all across the US and Mexico, costing bosses an estimated US$50 million per day. 

That same year, United Auto Workers union members went on strike at GM, shutting down almost all production in the US and Canada, but not in Mexico. So GM decided to shift more production to Mexico to avoid further disruption and undercut these workers. In this context, workers trying to organise a union at the largest GM plant in Mexico, in Silao, Guanajuato, said that they supported the strike and the demands of the United Auto Workers in the US. They asked for the UAW to support them and bring them into the union or at least help them build an independent union so they could strike, start the process of shutting down Mexican auto production and completely shut down General Motors production. 

Unfortunately, the UAW ignored them and accepted a largely concessionary contract. But in the fallout was some recognition that they blew this opportunity. How could they not support the organisation of auto workers in Mexico, when GM is actively using these disorganised workers to undermine them? A couple of years later, the UAW began to support these Mexican workers in their unionisation efforts—they won and even expanded to other non-GM auto plants. This didn’t create equal wages. but it was a recognition by the UAW that they can’t afford not to support Mexican workers organising. 

In this process, more workers, especially militants fighting to build fledgling unions, recognise that they have to build international solidarity and engage in class struggle across the border. They recognise they’re not fighting just the employer but all of these other forces. It’s interesting to see how these workers are recognising that, as capital is operating at a North American scale, they too have to organise against it at a North American scale and not let the border divide them.

Mapping U.S. Imperialism

By The Mapping Project

Republished from Monthly Review.

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

–Hugo Chavez

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

–Xoài Pham

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

–Frantz Fanon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Harvard Kennedy School’s web.

The Harvard Kennedy School and the War Economy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Harvard Kennedy School’s Support for Saudi Arabia

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

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

THE MAPPING PROJECT’S Mission

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

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

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

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

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

• Afghanistan: at least 176,000 people

• Bosnia: 20,000 to 30,000 people

• Bosnia and Krajina: 250,000 people

• Cambodia: 2-3 million people

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

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

• Colombia: 60,000 people

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

• Croatia: 15,000 people

• Cuba: 1,800 people

• Dominican Republic: at least 3,000 people

• East Timor: 200,000 people

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

• Greece: More than 50,000 people

• Grenada: 277 people

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

• Haiti: 100,000 people

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

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

• Iran: 262,000 people

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

• Japan: 2.6-3.1 million people

• Korea: 5 million people

• Kosovo: 500 to 5,000

• Laos: 50,000 people

• Libya: at least 2500 people

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

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

• Pakistan: at least 1.5 million people

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

• Panama: between 500 and 4000 people

• Philippines: over 100,000 people executed or disappeared

• Puerto Rico: 4,645-8,000 people

• Somalia: at least 2,000 people

• Sudan: 2 million people

• Syria: at least 350,000 people

• Vietnam: 3 million people

• Yemen: over 377,000 people

• Yugoslavia: 107,000 people

The Immovable Black Lumpenproletariat: The Futility of White-Supremacist, State-Sanctioned Indictments of Black Factions and Gangs

By Patrick Jonathan Derilus

“Though I cannot condone it, much of the violence inflicted on my gang rivals and other blacks was an unconscious display of my frustration with poverty, racism, police brutality and other systemic injustices routinely visited upon residents of urban black colonies such as south central Los Angeles. I was frustrated because I felt trapped. I internalized the defeatist rhetoric propagated as street wisdom in my hood that there were only 3 ways out of south central, migration death or incarceration. I located a fourth option: incarcerated death.”

— Stanley Tookie Williams,  Blue Rage, Black Redemption: A Memoir

It should be made clear, if in any case there was no critical observation of the phenomena, that in our (to use ancestor bell hooks’ phrase) ‘imperialist, colonial settler, white supremacist, capitalist, cisheteropatriarchal society,’ Black people (of all ages and gender identities) are under ceaseless exploitation and violence via surveillance, harassment, instigations, and so on. With attention to Black-led organizations, factions, collectives, and in this case particularly, Black gangs, there is unquestionably a white-supremacist outroar from racists (media or otherwise), who deem these communities a threat to the status quo.

Fuck respectability politics and fuck civility; and this is to say that regardless of the objective of a Black collective, be it as revolutionary as the Black Guerilla Family (BGF), a Marxist-Leninist group that originated in San Quentin State Prison and was founded by ancestor George Jackson in 1966 or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) founded by ancestor Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and several other members in 1909, we’re niggas at the end of the day.

While we can present arguments for what this statement means is not the point, but rather, the sociohistorical result of change that is assuredly established when Black people have long struggled for: Black Liberation. Black history is every day. Black history in itself chronicles resistance, togetherness, unfettered joy, solidarity, commonality, righteous insurgence, mutuality, love—humanism, notably the urgency for Black self-defense against the white-supremacist police state.

Let us also highlight that, in spite of these elements, we recognize the settler-fascistic entities that have been responsible for the many deaths, infightings, conspiracies, and consistent destabilizations of Black-led movements, organizations, and to this day, Black gangs. Prior to the Black Panthers — and what many of us know in modern day as Crips and Bloods, were their historical predecessors, The Slausons, The Businessmen, and The Gladiators, Black-led gangs that originated in Los Angeles during the 1940s. The sociopolitical function of these gangs were a direct response against white-supremacist gangs like the Spook Hunters, who regularly terrorized Black people because of the growing Black population at the time— white flight.

In the 1960s and 70s, an example of this is Kwanzaa’s founder, Ron Karenga, who was not only a violent, self-hating misogynist responsible for kidnapping and torturing Black women, but also, an agent of fascist J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO, who exacerbated the infighting between the Black Panthers and the US Organization. Subsequently, this led to the murders of four members of the Black Panthers, whose names went by John Huggins, Sylvester Bell, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and John Savage.

Around the same time the Black Power movement was building momentum, the Gangster Disciples, founded by Larry Hoover, were a Black-led faction based in Chicago in the 1970s and 80s. In the same way, the Black Disciples, founded by David Barksdale, were another Black faction based in Chicago that was created at the grassroots, organizing projects such as the free breakfast program for the community and marching together with Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966:

On Aug. 5, 1966, in Marquette Park, where King was planning to lead a march to a realtor’s office to demand properties be sold to everyone regardless of their race, he got swarmed by about 700 white protestors hurling bricks, bottles and rocks. One of those rocks hit King, and his aides rushed to shield him.

Stanley Tookie Williams, who co-founded the Crips alongside Raymond Washington in 1971, established a groundwork in which Black folk would defend themselves and their communities from neighboring adversaries in Los Angeles. Similarly, the Bloods, created by Sylvester Scott, were later created as a direct response in opposition to the Crips. Contrary to this occurrence, the remarkable moments in Black history where Bloods and Crips, despite their incendiary rivalries against each other, have come together in solidarity to protest state-sanctioned police violence against Black people. To echo the sentiment of George Jackson in his book, Soledad Brother: The Prison Letters of George Jackson:

Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.

We highlight instances of collective protest in Atlanta, the unity of rival Bloods and Crips gangs taking place after the beating of Rodney King in Los Angeles in 1992, unity between Bloods, Crips, and the Nation of Islam in Baltimore, who banned together in honor and righteous vengeance against the state-sanctioned murder of Freddie Gray, Newark, New Jersey and a March For Peace in The Bronx that was led by rival gangs inspired by the wrongful murder of Nipsey Hussle.

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Bringing further attention to the history of white supremacist, State-sanctioned violence toward Black people in the US and across the world, we understand that surveillance and more specifically, indictment, an arbitrary charge or accusation of a crime, is no new concept to us. To be Black itself is a crime in the world. In the article, Black is Crime: Notes on Blaqillegalism, writer Dubian Ade states,

What a crime it is to be Black. To have the police be called on you for sitting in a restaurant, for grilling at a cookout, selling water, going to the pool, taking a nap, standing on the corner; to be Black and to have the presence of one’s very own body break the law and to know at any given moment a police officer can slam you to the ground and cuff you for resisting arrest, which is to say, arrest you for absolutely no reason at all. Blackness carries this implication that a law is or has been broken and is about to be broken in the future. It is the color and sign of criminal activity under white supremacist capitalism used to justify the mass incarceration and extra-judicial murder of Black people by and large. But what are the origins of this strenuous relationship between Blackness and the law? In what ways is Black criminalization constituted under the state? And if Blackness is already criminalized in the eyes of the law, what are the features of already existing Black illegal forms and what might the theoretical contours of Black illegalism (Blaqillegalism) that is principled and above all revolutionary look like?

Ancestor Huey P. Newton has already answered this question of Black criminality:

…existence is violent; I exist, therefore I am violent in that way.

To emphasize, the carceral State spares no Black human being. To name a few, learn about Mutulu Shakur, stepfather of Tupac Amaru Shakur and a member of the Black Liberation Army, who was just released from prison in December of last year after serving 60 years in prison; he was informed he only has a few months to live due to terminal cancer in April. Another is Marshall “Eddie” Conway, an elder of the Black Panther Party, who was sentenced to serving 43 years to life in prison for self-defense. Look to the instance of Tay-K, who was 19 at the time he was indicted and sentenced to 55 years in prison. 23-year old YNW Melly, who was indicted and is facing the death penalty. Look at the wrongful indictments of YSL and Young Thug and Gunna—Sheff G, Sleepy Hallow, 8 Trey Crips and 9 Ways — Woos and the Choos, the YGz and Drilly indictment and now 19-year old Kay Flock, who was just indicted with the death penalty being listed as a possible charge.

I repeat, the death penalty.

Where else have we heard the inhumane sentencing of young Black and Brown children and teenagers across AmeriKKKa?

Recall the wrongful conviction of 14-year old George Stinney in 1944, who the carceral State put to death by electric chair for allegedly murdering two white girls. The antiBlack State ritualistically likens itself to heroism and yet, their actions remain wickedly ironic because it has always been the State that has not been held accountable for its innumerable human rights violations against Black people. As long as the antiBlack State exists, there is no transformative recourse for Black lives (especially Black children and Black teenagers).

By the same token, it is far too reductive (and victim-blaming) to present cases that serve as counterarguments to the material reality in which Black children and adults are continuously subjected to. With Malcolm X’s truism, by any means necessary in mind, often many Black folk are left with no choice to navigate this colonial-settler, white-supremacist world in the best ways we can as a means of not only defending ourselves and our communities against the white-supremacist power structure, but also surviving under it. Black feminist and scholar, bell hooks, highlights the two-sidededness of this racial, socio-existential dilemma in her text, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity:

In today's world, most upwardly mobile educated black males from privileged class backgrounds share with their poor and underclass counterparts an obsession with money as the marker of successful manhood. They are as easily corrupted as their disenfranchised brothers, if not more so because the monetary stakes, as well as the rewards in their mainstream work world, are higher…assimilated black males who are “white identified” find it easier to submit to fickle arrogant white males (and white female bosses) in the workplace. However, most black males suffer psychologically in the world of work whether they make loads of money or low wages from overt and covert racially based psychological terrorism.

hooks continues,

Young beautiful brilliant black power male militants were the first black leftists to loudly call out the evils of capitalism. And during that call they unmasked wage slavery, naming it for what it was. Yet at the end of the day a black man needed money to live. If he was not going to get it working for the man, it could come from hustling his own people. Black power militants, having learned from Dr. King and Malcolm X how to call out the truth of capitalist-based materialism, identified it as gangsta culture. Patriarchal manhood was the theory and gangsta culture was its ultimate practice. No wonder then that black males of all ages living the protestant work ethic, submitting in the racist white world, envy the lowdown hustlers in the black communities who are not slaves to white power.

I have strong abolitionist sympathies and feel as though a potential alternative to the futility—the inherent uselessness of incarceration—of imprisoning Black children—Black people, is divesting money from state to state and putting the funds toward building transformative rehabilitation centers across the country similar to the Success Stories Program. As stated in their mission and values statement, the primary focus of the Success Stories program is this:

Our mission is to provide an alternative to prisons that builds safer communities by delivering feminist programming to people who have caused harm.​ We envision a world free of prisons and patriarchy as the dominant culture. We build a world where harmful behavior is seen as a symptom of patriarchy to be transformed, in the community, by our program and others like it.

What happens when the State persistently (and wrongfully) indicts Black women, men, queer folk, and children for so-called “crimes” will never resolve anything — it will never curtail anything. We are looking at a generational passing down of Black factions (of the newer generation) that will continue to repeat itself. These factions, which are defined as a group or clique within a larger group, party, government, organization, or the like, typically having different opinions and interests than the larger group, are often born out of an aversion to episodic, economic violence, impoverishment, governmental negligence, fascist police violence, —the white establishment and a yearning—a desperation to belong (commonly by homosocial bonding) to establish camaraderie between one another. In other words, regardless of how many indictments the State puts on Black people, the lumpenproletariat collectives that the State has destabilized will naturally be reborn out of generational factions in our continued struggle against the deathly whims of the US Empire.

The Marxist Theory of the State: An Introduction

By Summer Pappachen

Republished from Liberation School.

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

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

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

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

Debunking the capitalist myth of the state

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Repressive and productive state organs

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

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

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

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

Schooling illustrates the vulnerability of capitalist rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy: The best possible organ for capitalism

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

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

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

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

From perfecting, to seizing, to smashing the capitalist state

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

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

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

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

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

The socialist state and its withering away

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References

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

Immigrant Residents Move to Stop Coney Island Casino Bid

By Amir Khafagy

Republished from Documented NY.

Inside a small taco stand located in the heart of the Coney Island amusement district, a small but vocal group of community members gathered over a platter of tacos al pastor, to discuss how a proposed casino would affect their lives. 

“They will push us out and push local business out,” Jenny Hernandez, 30, said at the event. She has lived in Coney Island since she immigrated with her family from Mexico when she was a child. To her, a casino would destroy everything that she loves about her neighborhood. 

 “I love Coney Island and what I love the most about it is the diversity of nationalities that is here. I want it to stay that way and I want my kids to see all the nationalities.”

As the City wrestles with the possibility of opening the first-ever legally operated full-service casino within the five boroughs, two of the proposed sites are in the heart of working-class neighborhoods with large populations of immigrants. In Flushing, Steve Cohen, the billionaire owner of the Mets, is courting residents with “visioning” sessions that promise community members vast economic opportunities. Some residents in Queens have organized to oppose the project fearing that a casino would do more harm than good. 

Likewise in Coney Island, the developers and their supporters argue that the casino will be an economic boom for the community and will rejuvenate the iconic but aging boardwalk. However, a growing number of community members are pushing back, arguing that a casino would usher in a wave of gentrification that also destroys Coney Islands’ unique character. 

Over the past few years Coney Island’s skyline, once dominated by roller coasters, the Wonder Wheel, and the Parachute Jump tower, has seen the addition of several luxury high-rise apartment towers. Fearing a casino would only accelerate the pace of redevelopment, Hernandez decided to work with the United Front Against Displacement, an organization fighting public housing privation on Coney Island, to try to stop the casino effort.   

“We have seen all these high rises coming up in the community and that means gentrification is coming, but after I heard about the casino I said we have to do something about it,” she said. 

Hernandez is not alone in her opposition to the casino. In April, Coney Island’s Community Board 13 voted 23-8 against the casino project, citing concerns about a rise in crime and increased traffic congestion. Although community board ratings are only advisory and don’t have the power to kill the casino proposal, it is a bellwether of the community’s lack of enthusiasm for the project. 

Angela Kravtchenko, a Ukrainian-born community activist, and member of Community Board 13 voted against the project because she believes the casino is more trouble than it’s worth. 

“A casino won’t bring anything meaningful to our community, it only brings problems,” she said. “Do we want economic development? Sure we do, but there are so many other ways to achieve it.”

Councilmember Ari Kagan, whose district includes Coney Island, is opposed to the casino plan as well. 

“CM Kagan strongly and publicly opposes this project in Coney Island,” said Jeannine Cherichetti, his chief of staff.

According to Cherichetti, the Councilmember believes that the project would endanger public safety by increasing crime, increasing congestion, and causing mental health and gambling problems. 

Fears of an increase in gambling addiction and crime are not entirely unfounded. Although the connection between casinos and a rise in street crime is heavily debated, a 2006 study in The Review of Economics and Statistics found that over time casinos increased all crimes except murder. The study also found that casinos increased gambling addiction. 

Developers bet big on citywide support

Despite the local opposition, the consortium of developers, which includes real estate giant Thor Equities, Saratoga Casino Holdings, the Chickasaw Nation, and Legends Hospitality, has made a great effort to build local support for the massive project that has been dubbed ‘The Coney.” They have portrayed the $3 billion project as a potential economic engine for all of South Brooklyn that could generate 2,500 jobs with wages of up to $30 an hour.

The developers have also hired political consulting firm Red Horse Strategies to help with public relations. Red Horse has deep ties to Mayor Adams, with one of the firm’s partners, Katie Moore, served as his Campaign Manager as well as the Executive Director of his transition team.  

Thor Equities directed all questions to former Councilmember Robert Cornegy Jr., who represented Bedford-Stuyvesant and Crown Heights for 8 years. He was hired as a consultant by the developer in February.  

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Since being hired by the developers, Cornegy has led a team knocking on more than 16,300 doors and meeting people on the street to gather support for the project. Cornegy claims that he has collected 4,000 signatures in support of the casino. When asked if he is leveraging his past experience as a public servant for the benefit of private developers, Cornegy framed his support for the casino in altruistic terms. 

“My presence on this project is born out of my desire to continue doing the type of work I did when I was on the council as the chair of the small business and housing and buildings committees,” he said. “As a city, and more specifically in South Brooklyn, we must commit to an economic development agenda that is focused on creating large amounts of jobs and opportunities for all communities.”

Additionally, Cornegy insisted that the project would create thousands of good-paying union jobs, would deliver millions of dollars worth of infrastructure, and improve public safety. He also stressed that the project would be built with private funds and not displace a single unit of housing. Regarding the community board’s opposition to the project, Cornegy dismissed it. 

“Those efforts in talking to people directly are more significant than a preliminary non-binding vote by a divided community board who admitted they were making a decision on the project before the application was even finished,” he said. “They have charged that we would be paying our employees too much for them to qualify for public housing subsidies. We see it differently. We see the careers created by this project as a pathway to the middle class for people living in an area that is already experiencing high unemployment.”

Bureaucratic hurdles  

However, before the project can move forward it has to overcome several major hurdles. Currently, there are 11 casino proposals vying for just three coveted downstate casino licenses that the state has authorized. A convoluted web of governing bodies is overseeing the process and they will ultimately decide which proposal will be awarded a license. Ultimately, the New York State Gaming Commission will have the final say on whether a casino license will be issued, but before it even gets to that stage, the application first has to come under the review of the New York Gaming Facility Location Board which reports directly to Governor Hochul. 

The Board has the power to establish the licensing fees as well as the power to investigate every proposal. It will then select three candidates that will go before the gaming commission for final approval. Yet after a proposal is formally submitted to the board, the proposal has to first be approved by a Community Advisory Committee (CAC). 

In New York City, the CAC would be set up in each district in which a casino is proposed to be built and would be made up of six members representing the governor, the mayor, the borough president, the local state senator, the local state assembly member, and the local council member. Coney Island’s CAC vote is scheduled for October. CAC’s are required to hold public hearings and would need at least four votes to approve the project.

If that’s not complicated enough, one other major hurdle is the fact New York City zoning laws currently do not allow for casinos. Even if a project is awarded a license, there’s no guarantee that it would be approved through the city’s nearly year-long Uniform Land Use Review Procedure (ULURP). 

According to Charles Kretchmer Lutvak, Mayor Adams’s Deputy Press Secretary, the mayor has not expressed a preference for any particular casino project. Regarding the potential obstacle the City’s current zoning laws pose for a potential casino, Lutvak pointed toward the mayor’s City of Yes for Economic Opportunity zoning proposal which would modify the city’s zoning law, making it easier for a project like a casino to be built. 

The current proposal to build a casino on Coney Island is not the first time developers had attempted to “revitalize” the boardwalk. In the late 1970s, developers eager to emulate Atlantic City, pushed for casino gambling on Coney Island. Anticipating a financial windfall, land speculation caused boardwalk real estate properties to rise from $3 to $100 per square foot.

Despite the backing of then-Mayor Ed Koch, the efforts were partly killed by Donald Trump who wanted to protect his gambling enterprises in Atlantic City. 

Now, to Jenny Hernandez, the current proposal feels like déjà vu. As a lifelong resident of Coney Island, she wants to see a future where the community takes the lead in shaping where they live. 

“Why do people who don’t live in Coney Island have a say on what happens in Coney Island?”

Sketching a Theory of Fossil Imperialism

By Bernardo Jurema and Elias Koenig

This is a summary of the paper ‘State Power and Capital in the Climate Crisis: A Theory of Fossil Imperialism,’ presented by the authors during the “Confronting Climate Coloniality” - Paper Session at the American Association of Geographers (AAG) annual meeting on March 26th, 2023. It is also an overview of some of the main ideas that we hope to further develop this year. While the research behind the conference paper was carried out at Research Institute for Sustainability - Helmholtz Centre Potsdam (RIFS), the opinions and viewpoints expressed herein are our own and do not represent the standpoints of RIFS as a whole. This piece was originally published on the RIFS Potsdam website.

In recent years, both activists and researchers have started to invoke the term fossil imperialism to highlight the ways in which imperialist politics are tied up with the logic of fossil capitalism. Under fossil capitalism, ceaseless accumulation of capital necessitates continued expansion of an energy base of coal, oil, and natural gas. Imperial states play a key role in the process, which has in turn enabled a remarkable concentration of imperial power and continues to do so in today’s world order. Understanding fossil imperialism, therefore, is necessary for devising effective strategies of resistance to a planet-wrecking capitalist status quo.

Our model of fossil imperialism attempts to sketch the general workings of this relationship between imperial states and fossil capital in its historical development over the past two centuries and in its different varieties. It is principally based on the two general modes of expansion and obstruction. On the one hand, the expansion and protection of new fossil fuel resources and infrastructure are crucial to keeping the engine rooms of fossil capital well-supplied. On the other hand, the obstruction or destruction of the infrastructure of rivaling capital factions and states in order to maintain control over pricing and distribution has been equally integral to the history of fossil imperialism. In this way, the workings of fossil imperialism reflect the more general nature of capitalism as a mode of production and destruction.

It is important to take into account the specific characteristics of the three dominant sources of fossil energy (coal, oil, gas) when analyzing concrete cases. While all three energy sources still hold a significant share of the global fossil economy, each also corresponds to a distinct historical phase in the development of fossil imperialism. Coal powered the rise of the British Empire, the switch to oil marked the ascent of American hegemony in the 20th century, and fossil gas is increasingly at the core of the United States’ attempt to continue projecting its supremacy well into the 21st century. While there is growing concern over new forms of "green imperialism", especially in relation to the extraction and distribution of the raw materials supposedly required to decarbonize the economies of the North, current fossil-fueled conflicts such as the Russian war in Ukraine or the Saudi war in Yemen show that the age of fossil imperialism is - unfortunately - far from over.

There are at least five ways in which imperial states facilitate the interests of fossil capital: through colonization, the projection of military power, the suppression of anti-extractivist movements, economic warfare, and the domination of global institutions. This scheme makes plain the crucial role of fossil fuels, functioning variously as a driver, as an enhancer or as an outcome of imperial states' actions. It disentangles the ways in which contemporary politics are significantly influenced by fossil fuels, which have played a defining role in shaping the structure of capitalist corporations, settler-imperial states, and earth-transforming technoscience. These arrangements have had profound consequences for ecological destruction and the implementation of ecological management strategies.

Colonization is a form of direct political domination and subjugation of one people by another. It was perhaps most evident during the “golden” age of coal, the fossil fuel that powered the rise of the British Empire — from Australia to India, from South Africa to Borneo. Because coal extraction requires a large amount of disciplined labor, arguably, it also necessitates more comprehensive forms of social and political control than oil and gas extraction. At the same time, the British — in many cases — obstructed the rapid expansion of foreign coal industries to protect their own domestic industry.  Even in the case of oil and gas, many of the major private companies like BP and Shell still operate in markets shaped by colonial legacies.

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“Projection of military power” refers to different kinds of military interventions short of full-on colonization. Historically, states often deployed their own forces to protect fossil infrastructure abroad — a practice that continues today in various ways. Projection of military power also takes place through proxy armies, funded through a closed circuit of oil money and weapons contracts, as in the case of the Gulf monarchies. The 20th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq reminds us how current the role of military power remains. Twenty years after the regime-change military intervention, the United States still has 2500 troops stationed in the country. And, as has recently been revealed, BP and Shell, which had been barred from the country for decades, have extracted tens of billions of dollars in Iraqi oil post-invasion.

The pursuit of regional economic dominance on the part of fossil imperial states requires the suppression of anti-extractivist movements and other grassroots movements opposed to the social order. Interventionary military assistance was justified from the 1990s onwards on the basis of immigration enforcement, anti-narcotics control, and fighting against general criminality. For example, the role of the War on Drugs in continuing counterinsurgent practices against civilian population that were carried out until the late 1980s within a Cold War framework. However, according to Russell Crandall, professor at Davidson College in North Carolina and former Pentagon and National Security Council official under George W. Bush, the significant role in shaping outcomes is not primarily played by the U.S. military advisors, but rather by the "imperial diplomats" – the civilian officials within the U.S. foreign policy structure.

In his study of economic sanctions, Cornell historian Nicholas Mulder has demonstrated that modern-day sanctions developed out of mechanisms for energy control, blacklisting, import and export rationing, property seizures and asset freezes, trade prohibitions, and preclusive purchasing, as well as financial blockade — simply put, economic warfare. He shows that effectively isolating a whole nation from the intricate networks that support global trade requires the ability to gather information and generate knowledge. This involves mapping the intricate web of physical goods and resources that connect the specific country to the rest of the globe. Key factors in this process include having legal authority and access to more precise data and statistics. What makes it possible to impose this unilateral sanctions regime on the rest of the world is the domination of the global (financial and political) institutions that regulate the trade and distribution of fossil fuels. Both 19th-century British and 20th-century US-American dominance stemmed from their respective global leadership in corporate, regulatory, technological, and financial frameworks, which in turn was tightly linked to the pound sterling and later the US dollar being the chief reserve and trade currencies of their time.

In the age of American hegemony, the United Nations and other multilateral organizations — in particular, the Bretton Woods system (the International Monetary Fund and World Bank) — have become key means to maintain its armed primacy and fossil-based economic dominance. Significantly, the US-led bloc thwarted attempts by the newly decolonized countries in the postwar period to build a fairer world order by torpedoing the Third World agenda, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the Non-Aligned Movement and the New International Economic Order.

Conclusion

It is impossible to understand imperialism without understanding the role of fossil fuels in its historical emergence and development. A climate movement that does not actively take into account the mechanisms of fossil imperialism risks being co-opted into imperialist false solutions to the climate crisis. Likewise, anti-imperial movements that fail to break definitively with the logic of fossil capitalism historically fall victim to various social and ecological contradictions. A case in point are the Pink Tide governments of the first decade of the 21st century. As University of Toronto political scientist Donald Kingsbury put it, when "faced with a choice between extraction and the local movements that made their governments possible,” these regimes “sided with extraction." A better understanding of the topic can therefore contribute to more effective climate justice activism, more strategic clarity and tactical innovation, and serve as a basis for more international solidarity.

Justice Kagan’s Dissent and the Call to Abolish the Supreme Court

By Jim Dugan

Justice Elena Kagan (joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Jackson) wrote an important dissenting opinion in Biden v. Nebraska—the recent Supreme Court case concerning student debt relief. It wasn’t important because it voiced the progressive minority view of a ruling which further enforced the state policy of a country whose identity is rooted in settler colonialism, capitalist inequality, and enslavement-turned-apartheid-turned-mass-incarceration.  These dissenting opinions have been consistent through time—sometimes they are left in the dustbins; sometimes they are invoked in subsequent opinions of more popularly progressive times to overturn (in liberal fashion) historically horrific policy.  Those are important.  But this isn’t what makes Kagan’s dissent unique.  What Kagan has done, perhaps without full intention, is acknowledge in a published opinion that the Supreme Court may not live up to its ideal as a neutral arbiter—and may, in contrast, be a fundamentally undemocratic institution that sits on the side of elite power. Possibly in those aforementioned dustbins, this has been said before—but never in our era with such a high-profile case. 

Justice John Roberts drafted the majority opinion, joined by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.  Six despot elites (Roberts—Harvard Law; Thomas—Yale Law; Alito—Yale Law; Gorsuch—Harvard Law; Kavanaugh—Yale Law; Barret—Notre Dame Law) were able to strike down a policy favored by Congress and the Executive Branch which alleviated some of the financial woes of nearly 40 million people.  Justice Kagan no doubt recognized the irony of a political body which routinely gives flowers to the idea of American Democracy despite being itself the functioning antithesis.  As the dissent reads, even though the Court “is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic,” it decided as final verdict “that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits the plan provides, because (so says the Court) that assistance is too ‘significan[t].’” Justice Kagan noted the Supreme Court was selecting itself as “the arbiter—indeed, the maker—of national policy” and in doing so has become "a danger to a democratic order." 

It is undisputable that there is no democratic restraint on the Court (in fact, twice now a president who faced impeachment proceedings [first Nixon, then Trump] has appointed at least three individuals)—to call it a body of autocrats is not unreasonable. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in her New Yorker piece, The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It, the Court is “the branch of government that is least accountable to the American public” and “has tended, for most of its history, toward a fundamental conservatism, siding with tradition over more expansive visions of human rights.”  In that article, Taylor summarized a history of biased and contradictory opinions that shifted with the tides of political power and pressure—and affirmed that “calling into question the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the court” was a necessary act should we wish “to secure our rights and liberties in the United States.”  Calls to abolish the Supreme Court were not common when Taylor raised the possibility in 2020.  And yet, less than three years later, the same concerns which justified that consideration have now been voiced from within the chambers of the Supreme Court itself.  And while Kagan isn’t likely to soon join the masses in calling for the abolition of the Court, what her dissent stands for worried Justice Roberts enough for him to end his majority opinion by calling out the “disturbing feature” of questioning “the proper role of the judiciary.” Causing misperception, Roberts claimed, “would be harmful to this institution and our country.”

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But what Roberts calls misperception is anything but.  It is seeing through the ideological construction of the Supreme Court as a removed and objective overseer, and—with candor—recognizing it for what it is:  a political body that has the ability to curtail any progressive, egalitarian-oriented thrust for the benefit of its own Class.  What the Court’s right-wing majority doesn’t want is the Public seeing the Supreme Court as an appendage to Capital and the U.S. State; and as an obstacle in our struggle for a more equitable, peaceful, and climate-stable world. They call this conclusion a misperception, and while we don’t need Kagan to tell us that we are right to think otherwise, it is striking that she did.

Aside from voiding the possibility of immediate and much needed financial relief, the most concerning thing about Biden v. Nebraska is how it continues to lay the groundwork for the Court’s ability to usurp any significant action that may be introduced to alleviate suffering as we inevitably enter new eras of economic (and environmental) crisis. The Court has now, for a third time in recent terms, invoked the ‘major questions’ doctrine to prevent forms of structural relief/industry regulation (see alsoWest Virginia v. EPA [preventing regulation of carbon emissions related to climate change]; Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. DHH [invalidating the CDC’s eviction moratorium]). What this chain of decisions indicates is that even the hard work of mobilizing to pressure politicians to act won’t be enough to secure grassroots victories. While this may be daunting to admit, it is not surprising nor is our situation unique in history. For instance, as Karl Marx wrote in his 1871 text, The Civil War in France, the Paris Commune also identified the need for judicial functionaries to be “divested” of their “sham independence” and called for judges—like other public servants—“to be elective, responsible, and revocable.” This may be a path forward to gain democratic control over the judiciary in our own extreme times.  But to be in a position to design a judicial system that works as a vehicle for our side of the struggle, we must first abolish the one that currently exists.  In sum, it all begins with the notion that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor left us with in 2020: “It is long overdue to end the Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society”—Now we can quote Kagan to prove it.

Pavlovian Socialism: How Metrics of Empire Can Ruin the Left

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

It has been roughly a year since Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to replace Stephen Breyer and become the 116th Justice of the US Supreme Court. The appointment has been hailed by liberal figureheads far and wide since then. President Joe Biden called the nomination an act of “[preserving] freedom and liberty here in the United States of America.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the appointment as a “greater moment for America as we rise to a more perfect union.” In reality, the affair speaks to a vital yet often ignored aspect of sociopolitical oppression in the United States: metrics of empire. 

In the United States, like in any imperialist force, the powers-that-be employ many different tactics to preserve their rule. These tactics include Pentagon involvement in Hollywood filmmaking, the deliberate whitewashing of grade-school education, and the skewing of news coverage to manufacture consent for pro-elite policies. Metrics of empire fall under this same category, as they refer to a carefully curated incentive structure by which accomplishments and developments in American society are measured and rewarded. 

The structure itself can be further broken down into three subcategories: Government, Private and Public. The Government subcategory consists of exactly what its name suggests: governmental forms of legitimation and recognition. American society has been made to believe that prominent government positions carry an inherent degree of legitimacy and sophistication, such that they should be admired and revered simply for existing, rather than routinely interrogated as hotbeds of imperialist empowerment and corruption. Such positions — due to their aforementioned societal rank — thus become rewards in and of themselves, serving as markers of achievement that deserve public reverence and praise regardless of their occupants’ work or character. Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination exemplifies this perfectly.

As a black woman working within the American legal system, Jackson experienced no shortage of hardships and systemic obstacles in her professional journey. Considering demographic data alone, it is clear that Jackson was in largely uncharted territory, as just under 5% of first-year law students are black women while they make up just over 3% of associates and less than 1% of partners. In the end, however, what was her reward for surpassing these systemic hurdles and beating overwhelming odds? A seat on the Supreme Court, a grossly antiquated, inherently undemocratic, and historically oppressive institution that most often operates at the behest of capital and bends to the will of America’s most reactionary impulses.

The Private category consists of entities such as private universities and privately owned publications:

1.  Universities (ex: The University of Chicago): The school is considered one of the 10 best in the country and has historically boasted competitive rankings across a broad range of subject areas and specializations. Yet, it was the so-called “Chicago Boys” — a group of economics graduates — who cultivated and ultimately spearheaded the implementation of neoliberal economic policy abroad, namely in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. This cohort of Chicago alumni collaborated with the United States government to advance business interests by using Augusto Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for the economic models and policies they hoped to pursue domestically. 

2.  Publications (ex: The New York Times): Despite being heralded as the gold standard for journalism nationwide, the investor-owned New York Times routinely employs biased coverage and partisan language when discussing matters relevant to American foreign policy -- including Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Iraq War — whitewashing such atrocities to manufacture consent for the imperial project.  

The Public category consists of entities such as nonprofit organizations and public-facing awards:

1.  Nonprofits (ex: Doctors Without Borders): Though it is ranked 26th among America’s Top 100 Charities according to Forbes magazine, this organization is a hotbed of white saviorism and intraorganizational racism that perpetuates US hegemony abroad through the lens of healthcare and medical treatment. 

2.  Awards (ex: The Nobel Prize): The prize is widely considered to be the most prestigious recognition of achievement in the world. Yet, the awardees of the Peace Prize have included the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. 

This state of affairs spells a particularly grim prognosis for the socialist movement across the United States. Metrics of empire have the very real potential to serve as direct inhibitors to tangible progress in the fundamentally socialist areas of social justice, economic transformation, and material improvement. As such, a sort of Pavlovian socialism can develop, one in which it is only through the awarding of such imperial accolades and symbols of legitimation that our work is perceived as successful, casting out all other achievements in the process.

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At best, this dynamic can create a qualitative hierarchy in which the work recognized by metrics of empire is considered superior. At worst, the dynamic can become a hegemonic enclosure fundamentally opposed to the radical dimensions of socialist praxis, eventually creating a scenario in which the metrics themselves become the sought-after achievements rather than the empirical progress made by the work that warranted the metrics’ awarding in the first place. 

We’ve seen this play out already with organizations across the country, one such organization being the Sunrise Movement. While its founding principles contained more radical conceptions of action and changemaking — including sit-ins at government offices, Wide Awake demonstrations, and recognition by prominent leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky — Sunrise’s more recent activism has left much to be desired. Since the beginning of this decade, it has largely shifted away from direct action-based initiatives to focus on electoral endorsements and armchair advocacy. Most notably, these shifts have resulted in a severe lack of climate victories on the legislative front as well as serious organizational neglect of representation and empowerment of marginalized voices in the movement, particularly those of color.

The shift can be largely understood as a pragmatic change resulting from an outstanding reliance on big-money donations as well as ties to government officials and politicians. Through accepting and actively engaging with metrics of empire in this context, namely of the governmental and private varieties, the Sunrise Movement and organizations like it have provided a glimpse of what such a dynamic could mean for the socialist movement when applied to actual revolutionary praxis in the future.

This is not to suggest that socialist praxis should be entirely devoid of notable awards or recognitions. After all, acknowledgements of outstanding achievement can be an incredibly valuable way of qualifying motivated, focused, and effective work. These “metrics of the proletariat,” however, must have a carefully curated relationship to the doers of the work and to the empirical effects of it. The metrics themselves must never come to occupy the place of the work’s initial objective: substantive and revolutionary change. 

As such, “metrics of the proletariat” are a thing of the socialist future, an element of our aspirational imaginary that can come to occupy the dynamics of our work down the line, but not that of the present day. So long as systemic injustices and widespread oppression reign supreme — further emboldened by the unrelenting fervor of imperial capitalism — these metrics will inevitably reward advantaged and privileged socialists and, more pressingly, will run the risk of becoming metrics of empire in and of themselves.  

Thus, as the socialist movement carries on with its vital work of national and global changemaking, it cannot neglect the very real hurdle that metrics of empire can come to represent. Only by preemptively abolishing the air of legitimacy these metrics now hold — and looking toward a future in which new metrics of success and achievement that honor socialist ideals and avoid imperial capitalist corruption will be established — can the movement avoid existing structures of incentive and recognition that seek to counteract its aims at every turn.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

The Political Tragedy of Capitalist Rule

By Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy

Republished from Monthly Review.

Toward the end of his life, Engels wrote: “It is a peculiarity of the bourgeoisie, distinguishing it from all other ruling classes, that there is a turning point in its development after which every increase in its means of power, that is in the first place every increase in its capital, only tends to make it more and more incapable of ruling politically.” Whatever may have been the validity of this statement a hundred years ago (Engels died in 1895), there can be no doubt that it applies with uncanny accuracy to the world of the late twentieth century.

Society is made up of parts that work together, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully, to produce its livelihood and reproduce itself. The master insight of Marxism is that during that period of human history that has been recorded (some four millennia) the decisive parts have been classes, one dominant and exploitative, the other dominated and productive. For most of this period both parts have been necessary: the brains above, the brawn below. They have also been in continuous conflict over the division of their joint product. The vision of Marxism has been that with increases in human knowledge and growth in the productivity of human labor, the necessity for this split tends to disappear. Brains and brawn tend to come together in the far more numerous productive class. From being a struggle over the division of a joint product, the conflict between the classes becomes increasingly concerned about what will be produced and for what ends. Making these decisions is surely what Engels had in mind when he spoke of “ruling politically.”

Successful political rule in a class society is far from being guaranteed. It involves on the part of the ruling class not only effective protection for its own power but also an understanding of the design of the system as a whole and action to see that the essential parts are maintained in working order and able to perform their respective functions. If a ruling class acquires a monopoly of power and used it exclusively for its own advantage, the result will be certain disaster. The historical record is replete with such tragedies. What is required for successful political rule, therefore, is either wisdom and self-restraint or counter-pressure from a non-ruling but powerful class or alliance of classes. Whatever may have been true of earlier times, it is pretty clear that no modern capitalist ruling class has ever been blessed with wisdom or self-restraint, from which it follows that such successes as may have been achieved in the way of political rule are the result of effective counter-pressure from other classes.

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Many examples, we believe, could be cited in support of this conclusion. One of the best and probably the most famous is the story as told by Marx in Volume 1 of Capital of how bourgeois governments in England, protesting and screaming all the way, finally came during a centuries-long struggle to accept the necessity of a comprehensive regime of labor legislation (prohibition of child labor, conditions of work, length of the working day, etc.). Similar stories could be, indeed have been, told about most of the other developed capitalist countries, including the United States. As for the underdeveloped capitalist countries of the world, most of them, sadly, have little or nothing in the way of successful political rule to boast of.

What has all of this, you may ask, to do with our opening quotation from Engels? His contention, you will recall, was that there is a point in the development of capitalist power after which its capacity for political rule declines. Our contention is that history has proved him absolutely right.

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the amount and power of capital on a global scale. Common sense tells us that capital has never been in a better position to rule politically, i.e., to do the things that need to be done for society to function reasonably effectively and with a minimum of destructive conflict and disturbance. In reality, of course, nothing of this kind has happened. Instead, capital has used its power exclusively in its own interest, and in doing so has set the world on the road to the disaster history should have taught us to expect.

What should we learn from this experience? First and foremost, that as the second millennium and the twentieth century draw to a close, capital has totally lost its capacity for political rule. Now more than ever what is needed is organized, militant struggle to check and reverse capital’s onslaught on the earning power and living standards of the world’s working and oppressed classes and on the natural environment that is the indispensable foundation for civilized life on an already endangered planet. And the final lesson surely is that success in this struggle must eventually lead to the definitive overthrow of the rule of capital.