The End of an Empire: Systemic Decay and the Economic Foundation of American Fascism

By Colin Jenkins

If you live in the United States and feel like everything is caving in around you, like you are being attacked and fleeced from every angle, like you can’t breathe, like you can’t ever seem to catch a break despite doing everything seemingly right, like you are on the verge of a mental-health crisis and/or homelessness, your feelings are justified.

We are living in the middle of widespread societal breakdown. We are witnessing the erosion of an empire. We are experiencing the effects of a rotten system (capitalism) coming to its inevitable conclusion. Simply put, the capitalist class and their two political parties have run out of ways to steal from us. Because we have nothing left for them to take. So, the system is responding like a vampire who is unable to find the blood it needs to survive… erratic, rabid, frenzied, and increasingly desperate and violent, while frantically searching for new avenues of exploitation to keep it churning.

The collapse of the United States is not just happening on a whim. There are very clear, systemic reasons for it. It began in the 1970s/80s, mostly due to the inevitable trajectory of capitalism, which went through a series of late-stage developments throughout the 20th Century. These stages interacted with the realization of a globalized capitalist economy near the turn of the 21st Century and a conscious policy shift implemented by the capitalist state, commonly referred to as neoliberalism. An era of financialization, buoyed by monetary policy that caters to finance capital by feeding it a seemingly never-ending stream of free money, has paralleled these other developments to culminate into a desperate and destructive effort to feed the capitalist class during a time when the system’s profit rates are decades deep in perpetual decline.

How Capitalism’s Perpetually Falling Rates of Profit Have Shaped the Modern World

The moves that have been made by the capitalist state in the US are typically done under the rhetoric of “stimuli” or “recovery.” Historically referred to as monetary policy, they are designed as a system of life support for capitalism and advertised as necessary steps to “protect the economy.” They are desperate measures that defy the reality of capitalism’s falling rates of profit. In other words, despite the apparent success of US corporations, which have amassed unprecedented amounts of profit and wealth during the neoliberal era (1980s – 2020s), the truth is the underbelly of capitalism is slowly rotting away due to countless internal contradictions inherent to the system. This perpetual degradation, which was long ago recognized in part by classical economists like Adam Smith and David Ricardo, exists in addition to the system’s cyclical need for crises and is one of the main phenomena that is driving capitalism to its grave. In his pivotal work, Capital, Karl Marx expanded, in detail, how this process develops over time:

“… proceeding from the nature of the capitalist mode of production, it is thereby proved logical necessity that in its development the general average rate of surplus-value must express itself in a falling general rate of profit. Since the mass of the employed living labor is continually on the decline as compared to the mass of materialized labor set in motion by it, i.e., to the productively consumed means of production, it follows that the portion of living labor, unpaid and congealed in surplus-value, must also be continually on the decrease compared to the amount of value represented by the invested total capital. Since the ratio of the mass of surplus-value to the value of the invested total capital forms the rate of profit, this rate must constantly fall.” [1]

Simply put, as surplus value (the extraction of unpaid labor) represents the lifeblood of capitalism, it must remain constant for the system to return the same rate of profit over a given time. However, as capitalism matures, and as capitalists constantly seek to lower costs by introducing machines, laying off workers, keeping wages low and stagnant, etc., the extraction of surplus value from human labor experiences a perpetually decreasing rate, even as cumulative profits seemingly grow. “Marx’s LTRPF (Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall) argues that the rate of profit will fall if the organic composition of capital (OCC) rises faster than the rate of surplus value or exploitation of labor,” Michael Roberts summarizes. “That is the underlying reason for the fall.” Marx explains further,

“Take a certain working population of, say, two million. Assume, furthermore, that the length and intensity of the average working-day, and the level of wages, and thereby the proportion between necessary and surplus-labor, are given. In that case the aggregate labor of these two million, and their surplus-labor expressed in surplus-value, always produces the same magnitude of value. But with the growth of the mass of the constant (fixed and circulating) capital set in motion by this labor, this produced quantity of value declines in relation to the value of this capital, which value grows with its mass, even if not in quite the same proportion. This ratio, and consequently the rate of profit, shrinks in spite of the fact that the mass of commanded living labor is the same as before, and the same amount of surplus-labor is sucked out of it by the capital. It changes because the mass of materialized labor set in motion by living labor increases, and not because the mass of living labor has shrunk. It is a relative decrease, not an absolute one, and has, in fact, nothing to do with the absolute magnitude of the labor and surplus-labor set in motion. The drop in the rate of profit is not due to an absolute, but only to a relative decrease of the variable part of the total capital, i.e., to its decrease in relation to the constant part.” [2]

Marxian and (some) non-Marxian economists alike have recognized a virtual ceiling for the global capitalist system that seems to have been touched in and around the 1970s, for various reasons. Despite the post-World War 2 boom that benefited the United States and, subsequently, the imperialist core countries throughout the West, in their service to global capital, this phenomenon of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (TRPF) has remained the ultimate Achilles heel in that it seems immune to supercharged imperialism, neoliberalism’s monetary policy, ending the gold standard, multiple bouts of quantitative easing, and nearly every trick pulled out of the bag by the capitalist state since then. Thus, the reality is: capitalism is no longer viable, even for capitalists. Yet, the billionaire class (and soon-to-be trillionaire class?) which came to being during this era still needs to be fed. So, the system, and its imperialist state, continues to suck every ounce of blood available from the masses. In this process, the former industrialized “middle class” has been destroyed, big capitalists and landlords are devouring small capitalists and landlords (so-called “mom and pops”), and the US state has seemingly embraced at least some form of modern monetary theory (MMT) to benefit the capitalist class while pretending to play by the old-school rules determined by taxation, “controlled” spending, and debt when it comes to the working class.

The US government (the capitalist state), mainly through the Federal Reserve and its monetary policy, has kept capitalism churning, and thus kept capitalists wealthy, by constantly increasing the flow of new currency into the system and by using so-called public funds to purchase private assets that are deemed too toxic, or “too big to fail.” These golden parachutes, as they’ve become known, are introduced in true classist fashion, only benefitting large financial institutions, big capitalists, and wealthy shareholder. Marx predicted such a development, telling us

“… a fall in the rate of profit hastens the concentration of capital and its centralization through the expropriation of the smaller capitalists, the expropriation of the last survivors of the direct producers who still have anything to give up. This accelerates on one hand the accumulation, so far as mass is concerned, although the rate of accumulation falls with the rate of profit.” [3]

And, being consistent with the entire era of neoliberalism, this newfound creation of “unproductive capital” almost never trickles down because those who are awarded it are no longer incentivized to invest in the types of productive ventures that may have existed during the early days of capitalism and industrialization, as well as during the post-WW 2 boom. Now, with the arrival of globalization (1990s) and the subsequent death of the industrialized “middle class” within the imperial core (due to offshoring), the backbone of the US economy is an array of hollow service industries, which are buoyed by the arms industry, the highly speculative and unproductive financialization racket known as the stock market, and the rapidly dying staple of home ownership. Thus, capitalists can become extremely wealthy, relatively quickly, by merely moving fiat currency in and out of Wall Street through legalized strongarming that is only available to those with large amounts of capital and access to loopholes (i.e., hedge funds). For instance, the practice of artificially shorting stocks, a tactic that was exposed by the historical 2021 runup of GameStop, which was spurred by retail investors who miraculously destroyed the gargantuan Melvin Capital despite unethical steps that were taken to eventually halt buying of the stock.

Simply put, the capitalist class and its empires like that of the United States are running out of tricks to keep this decaying system alive. They are stuck in a cycle of creating seemingly unlimited amounts of currency to counter falling rates of profit, finding creative ways to take more value out of our labor without going over the tipping point of complete societal breakdown, and constantly shifting rates and numbers to keep the sinking ship afloat. This is all being done to keep capitalists wealthy, especially in relation to the working-class masses, who as always remain the sacrificial lambs in this process. So, for working people like ourselves, we may see rising wages like the recent move by some states to increase the minimum wage to $15/hour; however, such steps are naturally met with rising costs implemented by the owning class – capitalists and landlords alike – who don’t need to increase prices to maintain profit, but do so because (1) they own and control our means of survival, and (2) they utilize these means as a form of power to siphon all of our earned income, which they view as exponentially rising rates of return on their “investments.” This is, after all, the entire point of capitalism.

As with every such dynamic that exists under capitalism, the foundation of profit is merely unpaid labor. So, as wages appear to grow, this growth will almost always translate into more forceful actions made by the owning class to further exploit workers. Thus, maintaining growing profits amongst the systemic phenomenon of falling rates of profit requires hitting the working class harder and harder as time goes on, from all different directions and in increasingly creative ways.

While capitalists have employed their own army of economists to challenge both the surplus value of labor and falling rates of profit, Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall has been bolstered by substantial evidence over the past century. Starting with the empirical evidence alone, Roberts explains,

“…the formula is s/(C+v), when s = surplus value; C= stock of fixed and circulating means of production and v = value of labor power (wage costs).  Marx’s two key points on the LTRPF are 1) there will be a long-term secular decline in the average rate of profit on capital stock as capitalism develops and 2) the balance of tendential and counter-tendential factors in the law explains the regular booms and slumps in capitalist production.” [4]

Roberts and Guglielmo Carchedi’s “World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability” provides a collection of analyses that streamlines evidence of “empirical validity to the hypothesis that the cause of recurring economic crises or slumps in output, investment, and employment in modern economies can be found in Marx’s law of the tendential fall in the rate of profit.” As the editors explain, “Marx believed, and we agree, that this is ‘the most important law in political economy.” [5] Thus, understanding this perpetual decomposition of capital can help to explain many things, especially with regards to how the superstructure responds to this economic reality. It tells us why capitalist states like the US implement so many policies that are ultimately detrimental to its masses, who are viewed as collateral damage in the real business of serving and saving capitalism, buoying capital, and allowing the rich to continue accumulating wealth and property despite perpetually falling rates of profit.

Within this valuable collection, Esteban Ezequiel Maito explains how the recognition of this law has transcended theoretical spheres over the past few centuries, only becoming “irrelevant” within the neoliberal Chicago and Austrian schools that developed as more of a justification for capitalism rather than schools of analysis or critical thought. “In classical political economy, there was a concern about the downward trend in the rate of profit,” Maito tells us. “Adam Smith and David Ricardo, among others, noted that there was such a trend. The systemic tendency to crisis and insufficient profits generation has also been discerned by exponents of other economic schools (like Schumpeter or Keynes). All accepted the immanently real nature of this trend, despite the theoretical particularities of each of these economic schools.” [6]

As the United States is the clear forerunner of both capitalism and imperialism, its economy provides the greatest insights into the life cycle of global capitalism. The country has gone through the most advanced stages of capitalist development, has dealt with falling rates of profit by increasingly involving the government in the market (ironically under the guise of a “free” market), and has shown numerous signs of material degradation, most notably following the period of post-industrialization, which has especially impacted the American working class. Roberts and Carchedi argue that profit rates for US capital began to experience significant downturns even in the “boom” era, as early as 1948, before hitting a cyclical bottom in 1982:

“Empirical evidence confirms this. We shall focus on the United States since World War II. 4 Figure 1.1 shows that the rate of profit has been falling since the mid-1950s and is well below where it was in 1947. There has been a secular decline; the rate of profit has not moved in a straight line. After the war, it was high but decreasing during the so-called “Golden Age,” from 1948–65. This was also the fastest period of economic growth in American history. Profitability kept falling from 1965 to 1982, as well. The growth of gross domestic product (GDP) was much slower, and American capitalism (as did capitalism elsewhere) suffered severe slumps in 1974–75 and 1980–82.” [7]

In looking at not only the trajectory of global capital, but more specifically the US system in general, we can also see that a historic profitability crisis occurred in or around the 1970s. This crisis was temporarily halted during the first sixteen years of the neoliberal era, specifically between 1982 to 1997, due to many factors, including globalization, financialization schemes, and increased exploitation of workers within the imperial core. Roberts and Carchedi go on to explain this temporary halt and the real effects it had on profitability during this period:

“Then, as figure 1.2 shows, in the era of what is called “neoliberalism”— from 1982 to 1997—profitability rose. Capitalism managed to bring into play the counteracting factors to falling profitability: namely, greater exploitation of the American workforce (falling wage share), wider exploitation of the labor force elsewhere (globalization), and speculation in unproductive sectors (particularly, real estate and finance capital). Between 1982 and 1997, the rate of profit rose 19 percent, as the rate of surplus value rose nearly 24 percent and the organic composition of capital rose just 6 percent…

This “neoliberal period” had fewer severe slumps, although economic growth was still slower than in the Golden Age because profitability was still below that of the latter, particularly in the productive sectors of the US economy. Much of the profit was diverted away from real investment and into the financial sector. Profitability peaked in 1997 and began to decline. Between 1997 and 2008, the rate of profit dropped 6 percent and the rate of surplus value fell 5 percent, while the organic composition of capital rose 3 percent. This laid the basis for the Great Recession of 2008–2009.” [8]

The aberrations that occurred during this period, which allowed for not only a break in the downward trend but also an increase in many sectors, was never sustainable and ultimately represented a crossroads. It was also relatively insignificant, as we can see in Figure 1.1. As many economists across the spectrum have noted, the crisis that began in the 1970s now appears to be unique in both scale and in its effects on the reproduction of capital, to the point where some have pinpointed it as the peak of capitalism’s potential and beginning of the system’s overall decay.

The historical significance of the profitability crisis of the 1970s has also been backed by empirical evidence. In a 2020 paper published by Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha illustrate how the reproduction of capital and profit have been on a permanent downward turn since, characterized by chronic recessions within the imperial core and residual depressions within the semi-peripheries:

“Overall, there has been a long-term decline of the rate of profit in the productive sectors of the leading capitalist state. This decline began in earnest in 1965 and persisted all through the 1970s. Then, a partial recovery occurred from 1982 to 1997, at roughly two-thirds the 1965 level. This was followed by another drop after 1997 and then another recovery in 2006, back up to 1997 levels. But this was then followed by a sharp fall in the course of the 2008 crisis, which took the profit rate down to roughly one-third of the 1965 level. Thereafter, another weak recovery ensued. This, indeed, makes for a long crisis—and on this we can agree. It has been a long systemic crisis punctuated by crashes, recessions and even depressions in some countries, particularly in the peripheries and semi-peripheries, including inside Europe. Indeed, it is no longer odd to encounter conditions comparable to those obtaining among advanced countries after 1929, with dramatic losses in gross domestic product (GDP) of up to 30 per cent and unemployment levels surpassing 20 per cent.” [9]

By examining the trajectory of capital over the past fifty years, especially regarding the relationship between technological advances and the system’s reliance on imperialism, Yeros and Jha expand on Marx’s TRPF to shows the uniqueness of the neoliberal-era crisis:

“If we take Marx’s law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall ipsis litteris, we could easily reach the conclusion that the current crisis of capitalism is essentially like any other…

Yet, this is not a crisis essentially like any other, nor is its primary contradiction reducible to that between capital and labor. Some historical and analytical perspective on the long transition remains in order for a fuller explanation of what is at stake. We are witnessing not just a re-run of capitalist crisis, but the dramatic denouement of a 500-year-old social system. We cannot agree with Roberts (2016, p. 6) that ‘there is no permanent slump in capitalism that cannot be eventually overcome by capital itself’. This can only become clearer if we illuminate the mechanisms of systemic crisis by building on the original formulation of Marx’s law. For the exclusive focus on technological change and the construal of crisis exclusively to the organic composition of capital obscures the operation of imperialism and its modes of rule, reducing imperialism to a mere add-on—when considered at all. Even in Marx’s time, the connection between technology and profits was perched on a colonial relationship of primitive accumulation; this was observed, described and denounced, but never properly theorized. We would be remiss if we persisted with this flaw.” [10]

Finally, in representing perhaps the most substantial evidence to how this historic crisis has doomed this system to the dustbin of history,

“The financialization of profits has taken hold in an unprecedented manner. Industrial firms have become dependent on financial profits, even against industrial profits, and debt has ballooned among corporations, governments and households, with the USA at the forefront and with the active support of monetary authorities. This policy has reached the point today of obtaining negative interest rates across the Eurozone, Japan and the USA (in real terms)—to no good effect. We can, indeed, speak of the establishment of an enduring, systemic financialization logic, or monopoly-finance capital (Foster, 2010), whose great feat has been the perpetuation of a ‘wealth effect’ by the systematic inflation of asset prices, against falling profits in production. This has placed monopoly capitalism on life support and explains its perseverance, if not also the magnitude of its foretold collapse.” [11]

Imperialism, Globalization, and the “New Imperialism” as a precursor to domestic fascism

Analysis on imperialism’s relation to capital began to appear at the turn of the 20th century. VI Lenin’s Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism remains perhaps the most important contribution to this topic, and was written in response to both the first world war and the works of John Atkinson Hobson (1902), Rudolf Hilferding (1910), and most directly, Karl Kautsky, a fellow Marxist who had contributed much to the topic.

Lenin’s critiques of Hobson and Kautsky are especially useful in understanding the context of his own work. In Hobson, Lenin appreciated much of the analysis, although stopping short at the typical blind spots of social liberalism, which fail to recognize the revolutionary proletariat as the only force capable of combating the ills of imperialism. Ultimately, Hobson was unable or unwilling to view the matter through a Marxist lens.  In Kautsky, Lenin had a more piercing critique that arose in response to two main points. First was his belief that Kautsky erroneously identified imperialism as a mere “policy choice” made by competing capitalist nations, rather than a byproduct of a later stage of capitalist development. Lenin summarized this as “divorcing imperialist politics from imperialist economics, and divorcing monopoly in politics from monopoly in economics.” [12] Second, Lenin believed Kautsky’s motivation to separate politics from economics was to “obscure the most profound contradictions of imperialism and thus justify the theory of ‘unity’ with the apologists of imperialism and the outright social chauvinists and opportunists.” [13] To Lenin, the social chauvinists and opportunists were the petty bourgeoisie and upper echelons of the proletariat within the imperialist nations, which he referred to as a “labor aristocracy” who had been “bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corrupters of the labor movement… on the backs of Asia and Africa.” [14] This echoed the words of Friedrich Engels in 1858, which he wrote in a letter to Marx,

“The English proletariat is becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation that exploits the whole world, this is of course to a certain extent justifiable.” [15]

Lenin recognized that six decades of accumulation had only intensified this development, now extending far beyond the UK and infesting a group of imperialist nations, led by the US.  Most importantly, Lenin tied this social phenomenon directly to the concentrations of capital within each nation, as well as the inevitable decay that occurs with falling rates of profit, reconnecting the political with the economic and identifying this development as a distinct stage of capitalist production:

“As we have seen, the deepest economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is capitalist monopoly, i.e., monopoly which has grown out of capitalism, and which exists in the general environment of capitalism, commodity production and competition, in permanent and insoluble contradiction to this general environment. Nevertheless, like all monopoly, it inevitably engenders a tendency of stagnation and decay. Since monopoly prices are established, even temporarily, the motive cause of technical and, consequently, of all other progress disappears to a certain extent and, further, the economic possibility arises of deliberately retarding technical progress.” [16]

While written a century ago, Lenin’s work remains as relevant as ever, especially in the United States, where these developments and effects have continued to manifest in various ways and within different theaters, both domestically and internationally. The post-Soviet global order, which left the United States as the sole superpower for the past three decades, has brought some developments perhaps unforeseen by the likes of Lenin and Marx, but still mirror many of the systemic tendencies they pinpointed so long ago. The most important of these remains their predictions of capital inevitably concentrating into the hands of fewer and fewer, leading to both the death of free competition and the birth of a bevy of corporatized states that become necessary for protecting the interests of capital against a constant growth of discontent among the masses. Lenin’s prediction of big capital eventually devouring small capital can especially be seen in the modern-day United States, where so-called “mom and pop” stores and small landlords are being pushed out by the ever-growing tentacles of private equity firms and finance capital. Lenin described this transition as the socialization of capital, which he predicted would lead to the development of a new social order where large corporate states are forced to subsidize the concentration of capital, or the capitalist class, leading to a scenario where gains are privatized, but losses are socialized (absorbed by the state and passed down to the people):

“Capitalism in its imperialist stage leads directly to the most comprehensive socialization of production; it, so to speak, drags the capitalists, against their will and consciousness, into some sort of a new social order, a transitional one from complete free competition to complete socialization…

Production becomes social, but appropriation remains private. The social means of production remain the private property of a few. The general framework of formally recognized free competition remains, and the yoke of a few monopolists on the rest of the population becomes a hundred times heavier, more burdensome and intolerable.

…Here we no longer have competition between small and large, between technically developed and backward enterprises. We see here the monopolists throttling those who do not submit to them, to their yoke, to their dictation.” [17]

Lenin foresaw not only the structural developments that we have experienced throughout the latter part of the 20th century and beginning part of the 21st century, but also the inevitable reactions to them. In the 2025 United States, we see small capitalists and more privileged sectors of the working class which had meshed with the bourgeoisie through property ownership or inclusion into the stock market now railing against finance capital as some sort of aberration, even ignorantly referring to it as a form of socialism. So-called “libertarians” are most known for this type of emotional response, believing it to be rooted in analysis provided by their revered Austrian School economists. What they do not realize, however, is that the concentration of capital was inevitable, as was the need for a corporatized state to form and strengthen alongside this concentration. Additionally, the “free market” that they most often associate with capitalism never actually existed, even during the system’s earliest days. Rather, capitalism has always required a highly-interventionist state for everything from destroying the commons (enclosure acts), enslaving Africans, forcing peasants into factories and mills, and breaking strikes to maintaining domestic exploitation, enforcing property laws, destroying socialist movements, and forcefully extracting resources from abroad. Lenin explains,

“Translated into ordinary human language this means that the development of capitalism has arrived at a stage when, although commodity production still “reigns” and continues to be regarded as the basis of economic life, it has in reality been undermined and the bulk of the profits go to the “geniuses” of financial manipulation. At the basis of these manipulations and swindles lies socialized production; but the immense progress of mankind, which achieved this socialization, goes to benefit . . . the speculators. We shall see later how “on these grounds” reactionary, petty-bourgeois critics of capitalist imperialism dream of going back to “free,” “peaceful” and “honest” competition.’ [18]

The pinnacle of US capitalism occurred within a relatively small window that opened after World War II and was only made possible by the near-total destruction of Europe, which allowed the US to use its geographical advantage to emerge as the global forerunner of capital. This, in turn, led to the US becoming the most advanced capitalist state the world has seen. The US working class experienced residual benefits from this advantageous position, but this was relatively short lived, essentially ending when US capitalists successfully globalized the labor market, began offshoring production to exploit cheap labor, and kicked off the neoliberal era of monetary policy in the 1970s and 80s.

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Not coincidentally, this also paralleled the profitability crisis of the 1970s, which has been identified as a significant period of stagnation caused by falling rates of profit. As mentioned before, this period is viewed by some as the point where capital reached a permanent breaking point in terms of representing a force of innovation and productivity. As such, a shift from industrialization to financialization occurred within the US to address the essential deadening of capital, which has since taken on a vampiristically toxic presence in advanced capitalist nations like the US. In simple terms, capitalism outlived its usefulness during this period and has been on life support ever since, for the mere purpose of appeasing the monopolistic conglomerates and financiers who both control the capitalist state and benefit from its interventions, which of course come at the expense of everyone else (from the most precarious of workers to even small capitalists). Lenin foresaw this development as well, telling us,

“Under the general conditions of commodity production and private property, the “business operations” of capitalist monopolies inevitably lead to the domination of a financial oligarchy.

…Finance capital, concentrated in a few hands and exercising a virtual monopoly, exacts enormous and ever-increasing profits from the floating of companies, issue of stock, state loans, etc., strengthens the domination of the financial oligarchy and levies tribute upon the whole of society for the benefit of monopolists.

…A monopoly, once it is formed and controls thousands of millions, inevitably penetrates into every sphere of public life, regardless of the form of government and all other “details.” [19]

Understanding the period in and around the 1970s as a crucial turning point for the capitalist system is important in understanding every development – whether social, political, or governmental – that has occurred in the US since then. This new form of capitalism, which would quickly become intertwined with the capitalist state out of necessity, is most easily viewed as the pinnacle of monopoly capital: the natural concentration of capital into unchecked monopolies that use unprecedented wealth to destroy competition via political power. John Bellamy Foster explains,

“Monopoly capital” is the term often used in Marxian political economy and by some non-Marxist analysts to designate the new form of capital, embodied in the modern giant corporation, that, beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, displaced the small family firm as the dominant economic unit of the system, marking the end of the freely competitive stage of capitalism and the beginning of monopoly capitalism.” [20]

In further explaining how this new form of capital materialized through the system’s evolution, Bellamy Foster calls on Marx:

“The battle of competition,” he [Marx] wrote, “is fought by the cheapening of commodities. The cheapness of commodities depends, ceteris paribus, on the productiveness of labor, and this again on the scale of production. Therefore, the larger capitals beat the smaller…. Competition rages in direct portion to the number and in inverse proportion to the magnitude of the rival capitals.” Hence, capital accumulation presupposed both a growth in the size of individual capitals (concentration, or accumulation proper) and the fusion together of many capitals into “a huge mass in a single hand” (centralization). Moreover, the credit system, which begins as a “humble assistant of accumulation,” soon “becomes a new and terrible weapon in the battle of competition and is finally transformed into an enormous social mechanism for the centralization of capitals.” [21]

In the political realm, this new form of capital came to overwhelm the capitalist state in its liberal democratic form, leading to a shift in monetary policy from Keynesianism to neoliberalism, and the eventual formation of a full-blown corporate state that was realized at some point between the 1970s and 1990s. The formation of corporate governance is often blamed on individual players like Reagan, Carter, Nixon, or Milton Friedman, or entities like the much-maligned Federal Reserve. However, when analyzed from a materialist perspective, we can see that the corporate state was an inevitability — a structural necessity to address the monumental shift from entrepreneurial and industrial capitalism to corporate capitalism and what became known as financialization. It wasn’t created in opposition to capitalism, but to support it as a means of wealth creation, beyond its usefulness as an innovative force. More specifically, this shift was a systemic response to (1) the basic laws of capital accumulation, which led to large concentrations of wealth, as well as (2) perpetually falling rates of profit, which required increasing amounts of state intervention to manage. Thus, the large concentrationsn of wealth naturally transformed into large concentrations of political power for capitalists. And since “unproductive capital” now represented the dominant form, this power flowed to the financial sector while no longer offering avenues of innovation from below. The individual players who helped usher in this era just happened to be in power at the time of this necessary shift.

Therefore, it is not merely coincidental that the state became fully intertwined with capital to offset falling rates of profit and, in doing so, began to directly address systemic constraints that were compounding the negative effects of capital accumulation, such as the gold standard. As Ted Reese explains, with this structural understanding of the system, we can see that rather than neoliberalism serving as a turn away from Keynesianism, it more accurately represented a bridge to neoliberalism. [22]

The shift away from a productive and innovative form of capitalism is explained in detail by Bellamy Foster, who calls on the 1966 classic, Monopoly Capital: An Essay on the American Economic and Social Order by Paul Sweezy and Paul A. Baran:

“Capitalist consumption accounted for a decreasing share of demand as income grew, while investment took the form of new productive capacity, which served to inhibit new net investment. Although there was always the possibility that altogether new “epoch-making innovations”—resembling the steam engine, the railroad, and the automobile in their overall scale and effect—could emerge, allowing the system to break free from the stagnation tendency, such massive, capital-absorbing innovations were by definition few and far between. Hence, the system of private accumulation, if left to itself, exhibited a powerful tendency toward stagnation. If periods of rapid growth nonetheless occurred—Baran and Sweezy were writing at the high point of the post-Second World War expansion—this was due to such countervailing factors to stagnation as the sales effort, military spending, and financial expansion (the last addressed at the end of their chapter on the sales effort). All such countervailing factors were, however, of a self-limiting character and could be expected to lead to bigger contradictions in the future.” [23]

Fully merging with the capitalist state between the 1970s and 1990s allowed monopoly capital to further consolidate into an insurmountable political force, which would eventually consume both capitalist political parties in the United States. This marked the end of traditional liberalism in the US, which had been the source of periodic concessions made by the capitalist class to the working class throughout the 20th century, most notably with New Deal and Great Society legislation. With the implementation of neoliberalism, a concentrated effort to unleash monopoly capital from any remaining constraints tied to the Keynesian model, the arrival of a newly globalized labor/consumer market, and the subsequent fall of the Soviet Union (which had served as the only formidable check on global capital), monopoly capitalists in the US were set on a clear path of global domination.

Referring to this as the “new imperialist structure,” Samir Amin explains,

“Contemporary capitalism is a capitalism of generalized monopolies. What I mean by that is that monopolies no longer form islands (important as they may be) in an ocean of corporations that are not monopolies—and consequently are relatively autonomous—but an integrated system, and consequently now tightly control all productive systems. Small and medium-sized companies, and even large ones that are not themselves formally owned by the oligopolies, are enclosed in networks of control established by the monopolies upstream and downstream. Consequently, their margin of autonomy has shrunk considerably. These production units have become subcontractors for the monopolies. This system of generalized monopolies is the result of a new stage in the centralization of capital in the countries of the triad that developed in the 1980s and ’90s.” [24]

Expanding on the dynamics of this new paradigm, Amin tells us,

“These generalized monopolies dominate the world economy. Globalization is the name that they themselves have given to the imperatives through which they exercise their control over the productive systems of world capitalism’s peripheries (the entire world beyond the partners of the triad). This is nothing other than a new stage of imperialism.” [25]

This new imperialism, which became an extension of the corporate state that had already nestled in much of the world via market globalization, has allowed the United States, along with the West, NATO, and global capital, to run roughshod over much of the world, culminating into over 800 US military bases worldwide. Meddling in foreign governments and elections, carrying out coups, destroying and sabotaging socialist movements, stealing natural resources, and establishing new labor and consumer markets have all been included in this decades-long agenda that has continued without much interference. Despite trillions of dollars of “new capital” (i.e. exploited labor) created by this globalized racket, the corporate state has maintained its negligence of the US population, continuing to privatize most of the US infrastructure for the benefit of capital at home, and using monetary policy such as quantitative easing (under the TANF umbrella) to bail out corporations and financial institutions through the purchasing of toxic assets in wake of the 2008 housing crash.

This new stage of capital, combined with the formation of a fully intertwined corporate state and the development of a “new imperialist structure,” has ironically begun to reverse the process of bourgeoization that Engels and Lenin had pinpointed in the past, increasingly harming the upper echelons of the working classes within the imperial core. Unfortunately, rather than decoupling this group from the interests of capital, it has created a phenomenon where the privileged children of the former middle classes are largely turning to more overt forms of fascist politics, mostly at the behest of capitalist media. This development is useful in explaining the hard right-wing shift of Democrats and the political rise of Donald Trump, as well as the coordinated attacks against immigrants and more ambiguous things like “wokeness” – all of which have been designed to redirect attention away from the capitalist system. In a sense, what we are seeing play out in the US could aptly be viewed as a petty-bourgeois revolution, where more privileged sectors of the US working class are joining up with small capitalists and landlords to unknowingly bolster the corporate agenda via Trump, who has been falsely advertised as an outsider coming in to “shake things up.” [26]

Needless to say, in material terms, all of this has come at the expense of the American population as a whole, which now includes a sizable portion that is chronically unemployed and underemployed, a working class that is mostly living paycheck to paycheck, a housing market that is no longer accessible to a majority of working people, and costs of living that continue to grow out of control.

Marxism (DIALECTICAL/HISTORICAL MATERIALISM) is Needed to Decipher the Matrix

It is impossible to understand not only the present world but also modern global history without understanding capitalism. And the only way to truly understand the inner and outer workings of capitalism is to view things through a Marxist lens. This is why Marx, and the Marxist school of thought and analysis, is so widely demonized and suppressed within the United States. It is quite literally the key to exposing the corrupt power structure, both in terms of the economic system itself and those who serve the system from the halls of Congress, the oval office, the Supreme Court, the Pentagon, the DoD, the Federal Reserve, mass media, executive offices, board rooms, courts, police stations, etc. In other words, every aspect of our society stems from the arrangements set by capitalist modes of production.

As Shane Mage describes it, Marxism provides “sheer intellectual power” to the masses of people, as Marx “provided the concepts, categories, and structural analyses that were, and largely remain, indispensable for understanding the human historical process over past centuries and in the immediate historical present.” To think in a Marxian way is to seek mass liberation for the human race via working-class emancipation. Simply put,

“To be revolutionary, and truthful, all social thought must be essentially Marxian. Only two conditions are obligatory: awareness that there is something basically and gravely wrong with the human condition as it exists and has existed throughout the history of class society; and seriousness in the reading and study of Marx’s writings and those of his professed followers. Anyone who fulfills those conditions necessarily starts to think in a Marxian way.” [27]

Thus, in order to understand capitalism’s current slide into a more overt form of fascism, one must understand that capitalism, in and of itself and in its purest form, is already deeply rooted in fascistic tendencies. It is, after all, the latest stage of what Thorstein Veblen once referred to as the “predatory phase of human development,” which has been characterized within Western society by transitions between feudalism, chattel slavery, and capitalism (wage slavery), all of which include similar exploitative dynamics of a wealthy minority feeding off a toiling majority. As the Marxist historian Michael Parenti explains,

“There can be no rich slaveholders living in idle comfort without a mass of penniless slaves to support their luxurious lifestyle, no lords of the manor who live in opulence without a mass of impoverished landless serfs who till the lords' lands from dawn to dusk. So too under capitalism, there can be no financial moguls and industrial tycoons without millions of underpaid and overworked employees.” [28]

With this understanding of capitalism’s foundation, we can begin to develop systemic analysis that pinpoint stages in its development. However, this can only be done accurately through a Marxist lens. And this is precisely why the capitalist class in the US, as well as its government and all institutions that anchor capitalist society, have made such a massive effort in both obstructing people from Marxism as a school of analysis and wholly demonizing it as some vague force of evil. Because, ultimately, Marxism is the key to understanding capitalism, not through dogmatic beliefs and childish rejections, but through scientific analysis. Marxism is not a magical blueprint for society, nor is it a utopian leap of faith, but rather it is an analytical tool for understanding capitalist modes of production as a stage of human development, class struggle as the driving force behind societal change, and the social offshoots of these modes of production, which make up what we refer to as society. Marxist economist, Michael Roberts, sums this up nicely by explaining,

“If we do not develop general theories then we remain in ignorance at the level of surface appearance.  In the case of crises, every slump in capitalist production may appear to have a different cause.  The 1929 crash was caused by a stock market collapse; the 1974-5 global slump by oil price hikes; the 2008-9 Great Recession by a property crash.  And yet, crises under capitalism occur regularly and repeatedly.  That suggests that there are underlying general causes of crises to be discovered.  Capitalist slumps are not just random events or shocks.

The scientific method is an attempt to draw out laws that explain why things happen and thus be able to understand how, why and when they may happen again.  I reckon that the scientific method applies to economics and political economy just as much as it does to what are called the ‘natural sciences’.  Of course, it is difficult to get accurate scientific results when human behavior is involved and laboratory experiments are ruled out.  But the power of the aggregate and the multiplicity of data points help.  Trends can be ascertained and even points of reversal.

If we can develop a general theory of crises, then we can test against the evidence to see if it is valid – and even more, we can try and predict the likelihood and timing of the next slump.  Weather forecasting used to be unscientific and just based on the experience of farmers over centuries (not without some validity).  But scientists, applying theory and using more data have improved forecasting so that it is pretty accurate three days ahead and very accurate hours ahead.

Finally, a general theory of crises also reveals that capitalism is a flawed mode of production that can never deliver a harmonious and stable development of the productive forces to meet people’s needs across the globe.  Only its replacement by planned production in common ownership offers that.” [29]

In capitalist society, we are bombarded with superficial definitions of capitalism through what Antonio Gramsci referred to as cultural hegemony, which are normalized interactions and sources of information and values that extend from the economic base, thus portraying the system in a positive light to manufacture consent even from the masses of workers whose exploitation fuels it. The before-mentioned bourgeoization of the working classes within the imperial core like the US makes this process of conditioning easier for the capitalist class as it can separate workers of the world into various sects. From our schools to our media, capitalism is described as a “free exchange of goods and services,” as being synonymous with “freedom and liberty,” or simply as the “free market.” Most, if not all, of these definitions and descriptors intentionally omit both the foundations and fundamental aspects of the system. Granted, Marx himself, and more importantly, the scientific methods that guide Marxist analysis (historical/dialectical materialism), view capitalism as a necessary evil in the progression of human civilization, especially in terms of creating the productive capacities necessary to sustain life. But, the scientific method also allows us to understand why this stage of production, which is aptly described as the most advanced stage of the “predatory phase,” will either (1) give way to the formation of socialism or (2) destroy both human civilization and our planet.

Parenti goes on to explain the illuminating effects of seeing things through a Marxist lens:

“To understand capitalism, one first has to strip away the appearances presented by its ideology. Unlike most bourgeois (mainstream) theorists, Marx realized that what capitalism claims to be and what it actually is are two different things. What is unique about capitalism is the systematic expropriation of labor for the sole purpose of accumulation. Capital annexes living labor in order to accumulate more capital. The ultimate purpose of work is not to perform services for consumers or sustain life and society, but to make more and more money for the investor irrespective of the human and environmental costs. An essential point of Marxist analysis is that the social structure and class order prefigure our behavior in many ways. Capitalism moves into every area of work and community, harnessing all of social life to its pursuit of profit. It converts nature, labor, science art, music, and medicine into commodities and commodities into capital. It transforms land into real estate, folk culture into mass culture, and citizens into debt-ridden workers and consumers. Marxists understand that a class society is not just a divided society but one ruled by class power, with the state playing the crucial role in maintaining the existing class structure. Marxism might be considered a "holistic" science in that it recognizes the links between various components of the social system. Capitalism is not just an economic system but a political and cultural one as well, an entire social order. When we study any part of that order, be it the news or entertainment media, criminal justice, Congress, defense spending, overseas military intervention, intelligence agencies, campaign finance, science and technology, education, medical care, taxation, transportation, housing, or whatever, we will see how the particular part reflects the nature of the whole. Its unique dynamic often buttresses and is shaped by the larger social system — especially the systems overriding need to maintain the prerogatives of the corporate class.” [30]

To use a Marxist lens is to see human history as an ongoing development in response to material reality or, more specifically, how a particular society arranges its means to produce and distribute the needs required to sustain human life. For instance, under capitalism, private interests own and control not only the means to produce/provide everything from food and shelter to medical care, but also the actual land that we inhabit. Thus, access to capital/currency (backed by a particular state) determines who can own and control natural resources. Then, in turn, those who take ownership (capitalists) deploy laborers, or what they refer to as “human resources,” on and with natural resources to produce commodities that can be sold back to the laborers, or general public, for profit. In this arrangement, those of us who make up the working-class masses are compelled to sell ourselves as commodities to capitalists because they have eliminated the commons (i.e. our ability to live off the land) and tied our survival to their for-profit commodity production.

The fundamental relationship between capital (the wealthy minority) and labor (the landless majority) naturally creates class division in this society, and understanding the class division that is inherent to privately-owned means of production (capitalism) is crucial to understanding nearly every other development within that society. When one is able to see it for what it is, understanding how it was constructed and how it functions in historical terms, it becomes clear as day; yet the institutions that extend from it – including schools and media – naturally obscure this reality to protect the interests of the owning class, who also control and disseminate the means of information. And they do this through various avenues, with the total obstruction and demonization of Marxist analysis/understanding being one of the primary aims of the US ruling class.

So, what this creates is a massive blind spot in mainstream (bourgeois) “reality,” to the point where many are unable to even see the reality that we live in. Thus, living in capitalist society without a basic understanding of a materialist conception of history and its subsequent developments is like being plugged into the Matrix, blind to your bondage and living a lie. From a working-class perspective, bourgeois analysis is largely impotent. And, whether intentional or not, this severe lack of understanding leaves most to rely on emotion – or reaction – in responding to structural developments that affect us on an individual level. For instance, take the current hot button issue of illegal immigration that is being pushed by mainstream media. From a bourgeois perspective, so-called “illegals” are easily decontextualized into mere criminals who are crossing the border to rape, steal, and take advantage of the “entitlements” offered in the US. Hence, the hysterical and irrational attempts to label this crisis as an “invasion,” something that is even more effective when sold to an already highly indoctrinated, racist, and xenophobic population.

Without a Marxist lens, issues like immigration — and poverty, homelessness, crime, child abuse, etc. — appear to occur in a vacuum, completely unattached from the capitalist/imperialist system and caused by mysterious “forces of evil” or simply “poor choices.” Or, as Parenti puts it, “lacking a holistic approach to society, conventional social science tends to compartmentalize social experience.” [31] So, we see in this development the same phenomena that Lenin saw in Kautsky’s analysis of imperialism – a divorce between the political/social and economic. This is precisely what the owning class wants because it knows that an informed and aware working class would become increasingly uncontrollable and, thus, unexploitable.

To understand this further, it is useful to compare the differences between mainstream/bourgeois perspectives versus the Marxist lens. Using racism as an example, Parenti contrasts the differences between the liberal and Marxist views:

“Consider a specific phenomenon like racism. Racism is presented as essentially a set of bad attitudes held by racists. There is little analysis of what makes it so functional for a class society. Instead, race and class are treated as mutually exclusive concepts in competition with each other. But those who have an understanding of class power know that as class contradictions deepen and come to the fore, racism becomes not less but more important as a factor in class conflict. In short, both race and class are likely to be crucial arenas of struggle at the very same time.

Marxists further maintain that racism involves not just personal attitude but institutional structure and systemic power. They point out that racist organizations and sentiments are often propagated by well-financed reactionary forces seeking to divide the working populace against itself, fracturing it into antagonistic ethnic enclaves.

Marxists also point out that racism is used as a means of depressing wages by keeping a segment of the labor force vulnerable to super-exploitation. To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By "rational" I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.” [32]

This understanding of an intimate connection between the base (capitalist modes of production/distribution) and superstructure (the social and political extensions of that base) is what made the original Black Panther Party, as Marxist-Leninists, so dangerous to the oppressive capitalist power structure in the US. It is why J. Edgar Hoover was adamant about killing Fred Hampton. It is why the US government was so heavily involved in sabotaging Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, the black power movement, and much of the anti-war movement. It is why McCarthyism and the Red Scare developed, why people-powered movements of self-determination (mostly of which are Marxist/Communist) throughout the Global South – from Latin America to Africa and Asia — are so fiercely opposed by global capital and its military forces from the US, Europe, and NATO. Because these movements figured out (or were on the verge of figuring out) that things like colonialism, imperialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, etc. are all extensions of capital’s need to grow, expand, and dominate like a cancer cell.

Imperial Boomerang, Fascism, and the Collapse of the American Empire

Viewing the history of capitalism through a Marxist lens allows us to identify stages of its development. Chronologically, these stages can roughly be broken down into agricultural capitalism, merchant/entrepreneurial capitalism, industrial capitalism, and monopoly/finance capitalism. More nuance can and has been applied to these stages. For instance, the American Marxist Erik Olin Wright referred to “a schema of six stages: primitive accumulation, manufacture, machinofacture, monopoly capital, advanced monopoly capital, and state-directed monopoly capitalism.” [33] Within these macro-stages include micro-stages, which can consider anything from geographical significance to state interference through monetary policy. Some, like world-systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi, have identified four systemic cycles of primitive accumulation that occurred in different eras, centered around the successive spheres of influence from European colonization:  “the Genoese cycle: from the 15th century to the beginning of the 16th century; the Dutch cycle: from the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century; the English cycle: from the last half of the 18th century to the beginning of the 20th century; The American cycle: in the 20th century.” [34]  

Other world-systems analysts like Emmanuel Wallerstein and Samir Amin have used this lens to analyze how both colonialism and imperialism have interplayed with capitalist development, separating regions and countries into three distinct categories of “core, semi-periphery, and periphery,” all of which are determined by their relation to capital (from the oppressive and parasitic imperialist core to the oppressed and colonized/underdeveloped periphery, and those which fluctuate in between representing the semi-periphery. [35]

The United States has become the apex predator of capital over the past few centuries, benefitting from its geographical position/size and its early reliance on chattel slavery, which amounted to countless trillions of dollars’ worth of forced labor over the course of 241 official years (1619 – 1860) and is widely considered to be “the capital that jumpstarted American capitalism.” The invention of “whiteness” and the systemic perpetuation of white supremacy has allowed the capitalist class to create a distinct underclass based on racial identity, both internationally and domestically. This has been a significant factor in creating a strange bond between capitalists and working-class whites, many of whom willingly assumed the role of sycophantic class traitors in return for a more worthy designation of being white. W.E.B. Du Bois illustrated this powerful dynamic in his historical classic, Black Reconstruction in America:

“Most persons do not realize how far [the view that common oppression would create interracial solidarity] failed to work in the South, and it failed to work because the theory of race was supplemented by a carefully planned and slowly evolved method, which drove such a wedge between the white and black workers  that there probably are not today in the world two groups of workers with practically identical interests who hate and fear each other so deeply and persistently and who are kept so far apart that neither sees anything of common interest.

It must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. They were given public deference and titles of courtesy because they were white. They were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. The police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent on their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. Their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. White schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. The newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the Negro except in crime and ridicule.” [36]

Historically, the invention of “race” became an integral part of capitalist development, which was rooted in both European colonialism and the forced transformation of feudal peasants into proletarians. The former process occurred externally through the conquering and domination of foreign lands, while the latter was an internal process of exploitation whereas European Lords gave way to the European bourgeoisie, a new class of wealthy landowners who became the capitalist class. Both processes were rooted in the forced extraction of natural (land) and human resources (labor), the two elements required for capitalists to establish their means of exploitative production for profit. But these simultaneous developments were not easy to balance, especially since the forced creation of an industrial working class (which occurred through the destruction of common land) caused significant blowback in the form of peasant revolts. The capitalist class learned from this and used notions of gender/sex (in the Old World) and race (in the New World) to divide and weaken this newly formed industrial working class. In Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, Cedric Robinson touches on this historical development that paralleled the birth of capitalism:

“The contrasts of wealth and power between labor, capital, and the middle classes had become too stark to sustain the continued maintenance of privileged classes at home and the support of the engines of capitalist domination abroad. New mystifications, more appropriate to the times, were required, authorized by new lights. The delusions of medieval citizenship, which had been expanded into shared patrimony and had persisted for five centuries in western Europe as the single great leveling principle, were to be supplanted by race and (to use the German phrase) Herrenvolk, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The functions of these latter ideological constructions were related but different. Race became largely the rationalization for the domination, exploitation, and/or extermination of non-Europeans.” [37]

The formation of the United States brought this entire process to a head, with the extermination of a Native population, the forced takeover of land, the introduction of a massive slave trade, and the establishment of a new ruling class made up of wealthy landowners and merchants who relied on both stolen land and bodies to be used as tools for economic development. This was the foundation of not only American capitalism, but also of the global system that came to dominate the modern world. But it is now coming to an end, as capitalism has run its course, and the American ruling class has seemingly run out of targets to exploit. The capitalist state in the US has exhausted its efforts in keeping capitalists extremely wealthy and, in doing so, has effectively impoverished a large majority of its own population, which has essentially joined the rest of the world in a race to the bottom.

This latest development of mass degradation has occurred in the neoliberal era due to (1) the systemic breakdown of capital (driven by falling rates of profit) and (2) a concerted reaction to the working-class rebellions of the 1960s, which were described by the ruling class as a dangerous “excess of democracy.” Six decades later, we have reached a point of no return, as this system has become a husk of toxicity that leaves no room for reversal. As Amin explains,

“The system of generalized monopoly capitalism, “globalized” (imperialist) and financialized, is imploding right before our eyes. This system is visibly incapable of overcoming its growing internal contradictions and is condemned to pursue its mad rush. The crisis of the system is due to nothing other than its own “success.” The strategy used by the monopolies has always resulted in the sought-after results up to this very day: austerity plans, the so-called social (in fact antisocial) plans for layoffs, are still imposed in spite of resistance. The initiative still remains, even now, in the hands of the monopolies (the markets) and their political servants (the governments that submit their decisions to the so-called requirements of the market).” [38]

Now, the US imperialist state must turn inward, and will call upon tactics that it has deployed throughout the world, especially in the Global South, to punish its own citizens. The difference between the US empire and other such states that have experienced “imperial boomerang” is that it already has a large network of internal systems of oppression, most notably in regard to its own black population which has historically been corralled into internal colonies complete with police forces that resemble foreign occupying militaries. The country’s prison industrial complex, which boasts the most prisoners per capita in the world, also serves as a useful proving ground for targeting a growing portion of US citizens in the coming years as more and more are cut loose from the decaying system.

Much like Keynesianism served as a bridge to neoliberalism, neoliberalism has served as a bridge to overt fascism. This fascism is forming from two distinct directions within the United States:

• First, through the foundation of a fully merged corporate state (a necessity to address capitalist decay from the economic base),

• Second, through cultural developments that are responding to the material degradation of capitalist decay (this includes organic reactions from within the population as well as the likely occurrence of government psyops designed to protect capitalists from retribution by redirecting anger and thus feeding reactionary politics).

From a structural standpoint, the economic base in the US has been ravaged by both the falling rates of profit, as discussed by Marx as a natural phenomenon, and the shift to a post-industrial society, which was the result of American capitalists moving overseas in droves during the 1990s to chase cheap labor. Since then, the capitalist state has relied on the military/arms industry and financialization to maintain so-called wealth, with financialization relying solely on fiat currency being moved around by big players in a way that represents unproductive capital disguised as wealth – meaning that it produces nothing of value in ways that manufacturing industries do. Ironically, this has created a snowball effect for the already-disastrous results stemming from falling profit rates, to the point where US capital has become further squeezed by its inability to reproduce itself without massive consequences for the population. As Roberts tells us,

“Until this overhang of unproductive capital is cleared (“deleveraged”), profitability cannot be restored sufficiently to get investment and economic growth going again. Indeed, it is likely that another huge slump will be necessary to “cleanse” the system of this “dead” (toxic) capital. The Long Depression will continue until then. Despite the very high mass of profit that has been generated since the economic recovery began in 2009, 10 the rate of profit stopped rising in 2011. The average rate of profit remains below the peak of 1997.” [39]

The capitalist state (i.e. the US government) realized long ago that it must become increasingly authoritarian in its service of capital (the rich) against the working-class masses who are being decimated by debt, rising costs of living, underemployment, etc. despite working longer hours than ever before. This is both an organic development in response to the downward trajectory of capital and a conscious attack against the masses for the protection of the wealthy. It is class war personified, and it is being carried out on multiple fronts, including everything from monetary policy, austerity, and increased police budgets to smothering propaganda campaigns, the criminalization of debt and poverty, and the likely formation of government psychological operations that are promoting culture wars. This centralization of power has developed out of necessity to keep capitalism churning. In doing so, it has brought capitalism to a very late stage in its lifespan, transforming into what many have come to refer to as “crony capitalism.” Amin explains,

“The centralization of power, even more marked than the concentration of capital, reinforces the interpenetration of economic and political power. The “traditional” ideology of capitalism placed the emphasis on the virtues of property in general, particularly small property—in reality medium or medium-large property—considered to purvey technological and social progress through its stability. In opposition to that, the new ideology heaps praise on the “winners” and despises the “losers” without any other consideration. The “winner” here is almost always right, even when the means used are borderline illegal, if they are not patently so, and in any case they ignore commonly accepted moral values…

Contemporary capitalism has become crony capitalism through the force of the logic of accumulation. The English term crony capitalism should not be reserved only for the “underdeveloped and corrupt” forms of Southeast Asia and Latin America that the “economists” (the sincere and convinced believers in the virtues of liberalism) denounced earlier. It now applies to capitalism in the contemporary United States and Europe. This ruling class’s current behavior is quite close to that of the mafia, even if the comparison appears to be insulting and extreme.” [40]

This concentration of wealth and power has manifested itself in very real ways throughout the country. For example, the agents of the surveillance state, which include everyone from police, prosecutors, and judges to ICE, FBI, and National Guard soldiers, are being emboldened to serve as a protective cushion between (1) the corporate state and its wealthy beneficiaries and (2) the increasingly desperate masses. However, these authoritarian mechanisms are nothing new in the US. As George Jackson told us in 1971, “The police state isn’t coming — it’s here, glaring and threatening.” It has always existed, only targeting certain demographics based on racial and class identities. McCarthyism was an extremely authoritarian process of targeting citizens based on political ideology. COINTELPRO consisted of spying, sabotage, and even political assassinations (most notably of Fred Hampton), and so on.

While it has always existed, the police state is now being expanded to target a much larger portion of the population, with the construction of an all-encompassing security state underway since the 1990s, and especially after the World Trade Center attacks that occurred on 9/11. Both capitalist parties have participated in expanding and strengthening this state, creating the 1033 program in 1997, which transfers military equipment and weaponry to police departments across the country, passing the Patriot Act in 2001, approving multiple bouts of the NDAA (National Defense Authorization Act), bolstering the NSA (National Security Agency), expanding FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) reach, creating the US Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and ICE (US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) in 2003, exponentially increasing police and military budgets, building “Cop Cities” (for urban warfare training) across the country, and bringing tech companies on board to spy on citizens via social media, computers, and cellular devices, with the latest incarnation of such being Trump’s 2025 contract with Palantir to create a database that streamlines private information of citizens (bank accounts, tax returns, social media accounts, etc).

However, even this powerful security state is not enough to protect the rich from the mass discontent and unrest that has become inevitable. The working class still far outnumbers the ruling class. And, the second amendment still exists. So, for fascism to truly cement itself as the ultimate defender of capitalism within the US, a significant portion of the exploited masses must become supporters of the corporate project. This can only be accomplished by convincing many of its necessity. Thus, in the modern US, propaganda campaigns seeking both “manufactured consent” and “active participation/collaboration” are targeting the upper portions of the working class and/or the modern petty bourgeoisie, which consists of small business owners, landlords, and a more privileged sector of the working class that has inherited boomer wealth. These targeting campaigns are being carried out by both politicians and capitalist media, exploiting the lack of material analysis that exists within the US population to pull emotional strings that are rooted in insecurity and fear. The manufactured hysteria about illegal immigrants, which is a common tactic being used by all Western/capitalist governments in these times, is a classic example of misdirection via propaganda. As Frances Moore Lappe and Hannah Stokes-Ramos explain,

“Americans are struggling not because of immigrants taking their jobs and using up their resources. The real threat is the worsening and highly alarming concentrations of wealth and income in our country—more extreme here than in over 100 nations. The top 1 percent of Americans control 30.4 percent of the wealth. Just 806 billionaires hold more wealth than the entire bottom half of all Americans.”

In other words, the historic transfer of wealth that has occurred in the US over the past several decades is not due to immigration, but rather to conscious and deliberate moves being made by the capitalist class to further enrich itself in the face of falling rates of profit. Put simply: the American working class has been robbed by the American capitalist class. Capitalist media – both liberal and conservative – are certainly not going to focus on this fact, so it must find distractions and formulate misdirection. First and foremost, the capitalist class must obstruct the formation of a class-conscious population that would see this truth and then, in turn, seek solutions through class struggle. To date, they not only have been successful in doing so but have also convinced a significant portion of the population to support more authoritarian forms of government to their own detriment. In the short-term, these enablers of fascism may feel secure in their calls for violence against fellow citizens, but this collaboration will inevitably end poorly for them in the long-term as the corporate state will be forced to extend its brutality over time.

Conclusion

In its attempt to protect the sanctity of profit, we are seeing that capitalism will completely give in to its fascistic tendencies centered around (1) property/wealth dynamics, (2) the inherently exploitative relationship between capital and labor, and (3) minority dominance over the masses, especially within a dying US empire that is spread thin externally and unraveling internally. The fascist reality that has always existed for the hyper-oppressed (poor, homeless, black, brown, immigrants, women, LGBT) members of the working class has begun slowly extending into more privileged sectors (most notably, former “middle class" whites) since the 1970s. The difference is, rather than organizing with fellow workers against capitalism/fascism by embracing socialism, many of these white workers who have been decimated in the neoliberal era are being swayed to support the overtly fascist transition to maintain their privileges, at least in the short-term. In doing so, they are becoming willing foot soldiers for the corporate government, spurred to action by racist narratives and irrational fears disseminated by capitalist media.

This unfortunate development shows us why social identities that exist within the superstructure, while ultimately secondary to one's relationship to the means of production, cannot be ignored or separated from class – because such an approach creates massive blind spots that are already being exploited by the ruling class. And, conversely, this is also why class cannot be ignored or separated from identity, as the ruling class has already fully coopted "identity politics" to be used as a smokescreen to obscure the class struggle. This process is well underway since corporate governance was fully cemented during the Reagan years, under the banner of neoliberalism, and has rapidly progressed before our eyes over the past decade alone. The Republican party is pushing the fascist envelope, while the Democrat party is enabling and steadying the transition. An authentic people's movement, grounded primarily in class struggle with a firm understanding of how identity is used to both intensify class domination and obscure avenues of working-class liberation, is needed.

People must come to understand that the liberal democratic order which replaced monarchy and feudalism is no longer viable. Capitalism cannot be reformed. It cannot be regulated. And the US cannot be reindustrialized under capitalist control. Those days are long gone, as the system has reached its inevitable conclusion and, since the 1970s, has come to a fork in the road with only two paths: full-blown fascism (corporate governance with an authoritarian police/surveillance state) or socialism (working-class/community control of the means of production). The former is winning outright, but the game isn’t over.

Notes

[1] Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III, Part III. The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall, Chapter 13. The Law As Such. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch13.htm

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid

[4] Michael Roberts. A world rate of profit: important new evidence. January 22,2022. Accessed at A world rate of profit: important new evidence – Michael Roberts Blog

[5] World in Crisis: A Global Analysis of Marx's Law of Profitability, edited by Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts. Haymarket Books (October 2018)

[6] Ibid

[7] Ibid

[8] Ibid

[9] Paris Yeros and Praveen Jha, Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capitalism in Permanent Crisis. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 9(1) 78–93, 2020 (Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South: CARES) Accessed at Late Neo-colonialism: Monopoly Capitalism in Permanent Crisis

[10] Ibid

[11] Ibid

[12] VI Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism (October 1916). Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm

[13] Ibid

[14] Ibid

[15] Marx-Engels Correspondence, Engels to Marx in London (October 7, 1858) Accessed at https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1858/letters/58_10_07.htm

[16] VI Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Chapter 8: Parasitism and Decay of Capitalism. Accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch08.htm

[17] Ibid, Chapter 1: Concentration of Production and Monopolies. Accessed at Lenin: 1916/imp-hsc: I. CONCENTRATION OF PRODUCTION AND MONOPOLIES

[18] Ibid

[19] Ibid, Chapter3: Financial Capital and the Financial Oligarchy. Accessed at Lenin: 1916/imp-hsc: III. FINANCE CAPITAL AND THE FINANCIAL OLIGARCHY

[20] John Bellamy Foster. What is Monopoly Capital? (Monthly Review: January 1, 2018). Accessed at Monthly Review | What Is Monopoly Capital?

[21] Ibid

[22] Ted Reese. Keynesianism: A Bridge to Neoliberalism. (June 20, 2022) Sublation Magazine online. Accessed at Keynesianism: A Bridge to Neoliberalism

[23] John Bellamy Foster. What is Monopoly Capital? (Monthly Review: January 1, 2018). Accessed at Monthly Review | What Is Monopoly Capital?

[24] Samir Amin. The New Imperialist Structure. (Monthly Review: July 1, 2019) Accessed at Monthly Review | The New Imperialist Structure

[25] Ibid

[26] The Corporate State and its Fascist Foot Soldiers: Understanding Trumpism and the Liberal Response. (Hampton Institute: February 17, 2025). Accessed at The Corporate State and Its Fascist Foot Soldiers: Understanding Trumpism and the Liberal Response — Hampton Institute

[27] The Intellectual Power of Marxism: An Interview with Shane Mage. (The Platypus Affiliated Society: December 2020). Interview by CD Hardy and DL Jacobs. Accessed at The Platypus Affiliated Society – The intellectual power of Marxism: An interview with Shane Mage

[28] Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (City Lights Books: 2007)

[29] Michael Roberts. The profitability of crises, an interview by Jose Carlos Diaz Silva. March 2018. Accessed at The profitability of crises – Michael Roberts Blog

[30] Michael Parenti. Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. (City Lights Books: 1997)

[31] Ibid, p. 134

[32] Ibid

[33] Erik Olin Wright, Alternative Perspectives in Marxist Theory of Accumulation and Crisis. Enriching the Sociological Imagination: How Radical Sociology Changed the Discipline (Brill: January 2004)

[34] Giovanni Arrighi and Jason W. Moore, Capitalist Development in World Historical Perspective. Phases of Capitalist Development: Booms, Crises and Globalizations (Palgrave: 2001)

[35] Luis Bresser-Pereira, Phases of capitalism – from mercantilism to neoliberalism (São Paulo, 2023). This paper was prepared for the book being, “The Rise and Fall of Neoliberal Rentier Capitalism.” Accessed at https://www.bresserpereira.org.br/248-phases-of-capitalism.pdf

[36] WEB Du Bois, Black Reconstruction In America [1935], p. 700-701.

[37] Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (University of North Carolina Press: 1983), p.26-27.

[38] Samir Amin. The New Imperialist Structure. (Monthly Review: July 1, 2019) Accessed at Monthly Review | The New Imperialist Structure

[39] Michael Roberts. The rate of profit is key (2012). Accessed at https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/the-rate-of-profit-is-key/

[40] Samir Amin. The New Imperialist Structure. (Monthly Review: July 1, 2019) Accessed at Monthly Review | The New Imperialist Structure

Why is Imperialism So Easy to Love?

[Pictured: The Israeli and U.S. flags are projected on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City in celebration of the two countries’ close ties on Feb. 11, 2020. Photo credit: AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP via Getty Images]

By Yalda Slivo

Western imperial culture has always had the remarkable ability to romanticize and justify its violence as a form of virtue, where occupation becomes self-defense, former U.S. presidents become pop culture icons, and Israeli settlers are mythologized as liberators.

It would be easy to frame this as propaganda and move on, but the dialectic between representation, culture, and politics has enabled imperialism to suppress, or even prevent, the development of a coherent material critique within dominant Western liberal discourse – in many ways erasing its own violence. This happens when different political actors adapt their language and behaviour to align with the hegemonic cultural norms of the West, sometimes even abandoning their anti-imperialist or anti-colonial principles in the process.

The palestinian marxist, Ghassan Kanafani, was among the first to formulate the idea how the Zionist entity enforced its occupation via Zionist literature and culture in his 1967 text, On Zionist Literature. He laid out a detailed description of how Zionism worked culturally in order to justify its occupation via “Jewish heroes,” using literature as a way of mythologizing and constructing heroic settlers that served colonial expansion - but also enforcing the Hebrew language by institutionalizing it as an artificial way of kickstarting an oppressive culture, playing a huge role in the occupation of Palestine.

One of the questions Kanafani asked early in his text is, “Why does the Western reader accept the same racist and fascist positions in Zionist novels that are deemed to be contemptible when taken by non-Jews?” – to which his answer can be somewhat summarized by him paraphrasing historian Arnold J. Toynbee, who thought that the autonomy of the Jewish population in the form of a state would have to come at the expense of the West and not the Arabs, something for which he was laughed at.

Kanafani pointed to this as an example of Zionist propaganda having succeeded, with the ever-recurring argument that Hitler’s massacres were a good enough reason to build a fascist state in the already otherized Middle East. Toynbee, according to Kanafani, was met with “cries of laughter,” as Toynbee himself put it. This wasn’t just because the idea sounded absurd, even though it came from a place of sympathy and understanding. It was because, by 1961, the West had already entrenched itself in the logic of justifying political Zionism as a response to Hitler’s massacres and European antisemitism.

As influential as Edward Said was in providing the framework of Orientalism, Kanafani’s detailed analysis must be recognized as historically significant in its own right – particularly for how it exposed the cultural logic underpinning Zionist colonialism. Zionism had to be approved by Westerners through an adaptation of its colonial language, way of life and production of culture. However, this isn’t just history. Kanafani’s analysis of the ideological alliance between Israel and the United States is just as relevant today – if not more blatant. Since the genocide began in October 2023, the U.S. has used its veto power at the UN five times to block demands for an immediate ceasefire, even in the face of massacres in places like Rafah. The repetition of this pattern even after the deaths of thousands of civilians, reveals how deeply entrenched this alliance is. When Kanafani described it in the 1960s, it still operated through quiet complicity; today it’s an open diplomatic position. How many times have we heard that “Israel has the right to defend itself,” as if the genocide in Gaza were an act of self-defense?

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Meanwhile, violent settlers continue to rampage across the West Bank with direct support from the Israeli state – a concrete example of Kanafani’s core point: the occupation is not only military – It is ideological, normalized and protected by political silence.

This is how Israel’s genocide is allowed to continue without consequence, under the cover of narratives we’ve heard throughout the Gaza onslaught: that “Israel is defending the West,” that “if Israel falls, the West falls,” that this is really “a war between civilizations.” These aren’t just fringe statements, they’re structural expressions of a deeply rooted worldview. When Israeli president Isaac Herzog claimed in December 2023 that “the war in Gaza is about saving Western civilization,” and Dutch politician Geert Wilders declared in the Israeli parliament that “if Israel falls, the West falls,” they weren’t just posturing, they were articulating a normalized and rarely questioned narrative in which Israel functions as an extension of the West. A narrative used again and again to justify brutal repression.

This oppressive nature of Western culture seems to have no effect on its population engaging with it in terms of producing material and valuable criticisms on a mass scale. A few examples of this are how U.S. presidents who have committed countless war crimes and acted against international law seem to have little to no negative moral effect or bearing on the reproduction of Western culture at all. Instead, former U.S. presidents like George W. Bush and Barack Obama are thrown into the limelight and become pop culture icons. Now, is there something inherently rotten embedded within Western culture? Why are people, artists, and other cultural practitioners within the West so openly embracing figures that are viewed as war criminals in the Middle East by their equivalents? There seems to be a resemblance in the way Zionist literature glorified its “heroic settlers” and how the U.S. glorifies war criminals like Bush and Obama. These questions tie into my next example, which will veer off into realpolitik, ideology, and culture, further dialectically complicating the issue.

This logic of cultural adaptation to Western norms is not limited to Zionism. Historically, anti-imperialist movements have, at times, engaged with Western powers in ways that blur the line between resistance and accommodation. One of the most striking examples of this can be seen in the actions of Mao Zedong during the Sino-Soviet split. Despite having built a revolutionary ideology grounded in anti-colonial struggle and a fierce critique of Western bourgeois culture, Mao chose in 1971 to meet secretly with Henry Kissinger – one of the chief architects of U.S. imperialism.

Mao had up until that point organized the masses and developed a type of Marxism-Leninism that was deeply anti-imperialist and anti-colonial in its nature, ending what was known as the “century of humiliation” – specifically caused by the imperialists. He had earlier in his revolutionary days pointed to Western culture and bourgeois liberalism as something not only inherently rotten and parasitical but also inherently tied to imperialism, which was one of many reasons why China was filled with drug and opioid addicts.

Within Marxist tradition, the idea of how the superstructure works in practice had been further developed by communists like Antonio Gramsci, and before that, Karl Marx himself mentioned it in his critique of political economy. Mao himself viewed bourgeois ideology as a tool for imperialism, and Western culture therefore aimed to uphold capitalist hegemony – thus being oppressive and exploitative in its very nature and tied to capitalism. He would later in his life even kickstart the Cultural Revolution to finally phase out what he considered the Western bourgeois elements in the superstructure that had begun embedding and developing within Chinese society, making it revisionist, as he put it.

However, only one year after the first Kissinger visit, president Richard Nixon also visited China, which would later give the country a stronger international position until this day. The public at the time had little to no knowledge of the first meeting, and by the time the second meeting took place, the Chinese government had already embedded Kissinger in the Chinese public's eyes. This seems to have worked since from that point onward, Kissinger was widely regarded as a “friend of China” and continually traveled there right up until his death. So, in the same way as in Western societies, Chinese society seemed to have little to no problem from the bottom up with figures like Kissinger and Nixon.

It is worth mentioning that Kissinger made some concessions in this relationship with Communist China, in his true realpolitik nature - in order to isolate the USSR. This strategy seems to have worked, as the USSR would later collapse, further fueling Western imperial arrogance and enabling the rapid imposition of a neoliberal world order not only economically and militarily but also culturally.

Seeing how the West is willing to resort to what Kanafani referred to as “racist and fascist positions” whenever it seems fit, it’s no surprise that a culture built on justifying violence can compel even its former opponents to abandon anti-imperial commitments in favour of realpolitik. Kanafani noted that Zionist propaganda succeeded in embedding its logic in the Western reader’s mind, overriding even the simplest and most humane alternatives, a point echoed by Toynbee and dismissed with laughter.

This is not surprising for a civilization that didn’t need to look elsewhere to learn how to dominate, exploit or annihilate because it developed those capacities internally and enshrined them in its cultural identity. Mao’s shift toward diplomatic engagement with Kissinger wasn’t just geopolitical manoeuvring – it was a reflection of how deeply Western cultural hegemony operates, even among those who once opposed it. By legitimizing figures like Kissinger, China mirrored the same logic that allowed Zionist literature to mythologize settlers or American culture to sanitize war criminals like Bush and Obama.

In each case, whether it’s the glorification of Israeli settlers, the sanitization of U.S. war criminals or the rehabilitation of imperial figures like Kissinger – the same logic prevails: imperial violence becomes morally defensible, at times desirable, when embedded in the cultural forms of power. Through Kanafani’s critique of Zionist literature, Mao’s strategic shift toward the U.S. and the West’s mythologizing of its own brutality, we see how imperialism is not only exercised through tanks and treaties, but through stories, symbols and selective memory.

Imperial violence is not simply justified. It is aestheticized, ritualized and loved. And that love is reproduced. If imperialism has become easy to love, then the real question is: are we willing to unlearn it?

Black Literature: Beyond Bourgeois Pleading and “Achievement”

[Pictured: Richard Wright sitting on a sofa, Lido, Venice, 1950. (Archivio Cameraphoto Epoche/Getty Images)]

By Jerome Louison

What makes a Black novel (poem, play, or non-fiction work) truly great? Since the time of Phyllis Wheatley, Black writers in America, and their mostly white benefactors, have had to grapple with this question. The question also inspired the origins of this blog. As a lover of old books by Black writers, I’m constantly struck by how many incredible ideas and artistic works have been lost to time. This is due almost entirely to the nature of Black oppression in American society. Black writers and thinkers, regardless of their motivations, have historically conformed to standards imposed by external factors. This has left a legacy of Black writing that, for all its highlights and geniuses, never quite reached its full potential. It also never galvanized the masses of Black people long-term, nor maintained enough Black institutions to perpetuate it. But several thinkers saw this in real-time and warned against it. Richard Wright was one such thinker.

The Historical Role of the Black Writer

While immortalized for his fiction work, particularly his legendary novel “Native Son,” it is Wright’s non-fiction writings that we are concerned with. In particular, we’ll focus on his 1937 essay, “Blueprint for Negro Writing.”1 While a member of the Communist Party, Wright contributed this piece to the leftist magazine New Challenge, which he also helped edit. The essay was meant to underscore the theoretical foundation of the magazine. Wright begins the piece by delineating the types of roles Black writers had historically played in American literature. For white audiences, Wright states:

“[Black writers] entered the Court of American Public Opinion dressed in the knee-pants of servility, curtsying to show that the Negro was not inferior, that he was human, and that he had a life comparable to that of other people.”

As such, these writers were not offered any serious critique for their works on artistic grounds. For Black readership, folks were just happy to see accomplished writers of the race. The result was that, for Wright, “...Negro writing has been something external to the lives of educated Negroes themselves. That the productions of their writers should have been something of a guide in their daily lives is a matter which seems to never have been raised seriously.” Black writers thus had two roles: pleaders for Black humanity to whites generally, and models of “achievement” for the Black petty bourgeoisie to showcase, like trophies. Meanwhile, the lives, and particularly the social and political activity, of working-class Black people went almost completely neglected. Black union organizing and political organizing against lynchings in the South (and North) were absent from Black literature at the time. This was especially egregious to Wright, given that “Lacking the handicaps of false ambition and property, [the Black working-class] have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness.”

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In addition, working-class Black people (who make up the large majority of Black people in America) have a unique culture, developed and recorded mainly through the Black church and folklore. Wright recounts how, through the church, Black people “first entered the shrine of western culture.” For millions of Black people at the time, the church’s teachings were all they knew of the world. On the other hand, Black people retained their deep thought through an oral tradition that included “Blues, spirituals, and folk tales…” Wright explains further:

“...the whispered words of a black mother to her black daughter on the ways of men, to confidential wisdom of a black father to his black son; the swapping of sex experiences on street corners from boy to boy in the deepest vernacular; work songs sung under blazing suns - all these formed the channels through which the racial wisdom flowed.”

In the late 19th to early 20th centuries, Black writers, on the whole, captured none of this. Instead, they strove to use their art to escape their conditions and the people attached to it. Black literature did not have a Black audience in mind.

Nationalism - Endemic to Black Life in America

As a communist writing in a Marxist magazine, Richard Wright makes great pains not to promote a nationalist perspective. The inherent internationalist and integrationist politics of the Communist Party were at odds with Black nationalism, at the time typified by the likes of Marcus Garvey and his UNIA-ACL. However, as Wright remarks, “...the nationalist character of the Negro people is unmistakable.” This “nationalist character” is held in the Black oral tradition and folklore more than anywhere else. Says Wright,

“Here are those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life as it is lived, a recognition that marks the emergence of a new culture in the shell of the old.”

The plethora of Black institutions, from the church to newspapers to sports leagues, total “a Negro way of life in America.” And it is through these institutions that any progress for Black people is to occur, because, according to Wright, “...all other channels are closed.” Any Black writers looking to make an impact on their people’s conditions must grapple with the nationalist character as it is first, before anything else. It is worth quoting Wright at length here, as this is the core thesis of the essay:

“Negro writers must accept the nationalist implications of their lives, not in order to encourage them, but in order to change and transcend them. They must accept the concept of nationalism because, in order to transcend it, they must possess and understand it. And a nationalist spirit in Negro writing means a nationalism carrying the highest possible pitch of social consciousness. It means a nationalism that knows its origins, its limitations; that is aware of the dangers of its position; that knows its ultimate aims are unrealizeable in capitalist America; a nationalism whose reason for being lies in the simple fact of self-possession and in the consciousness of the interdependence of people in modern society.”

Collective Work and Responsibility

According to Wright, as the 20th century reached its midway point, Black writers had a new level of responsibility. They were uniquely qualified to fill the leadership void left by the “gradual decline of the moral authority of the Negro church, and the increasing irresolution which is paralyzing the Negro middle class leadership…” Through their art, Black writers could and should “create values by which his race is to struggle, live and die.”

Black writers thus need a framework to analyze society and Black people’s place in it. For Wright, a Marxist framework was necessary. Marxian dialectics, which Wright used throughout the essay, explained the dynamic nature of Black life and the various social and economic classes involved. It also imbues one with the will to change the world, not just describe it. True to his nature, however, Wright was not content with Marxist analysis alone. As he writes,

“Yet, for the Negro writer, Marxism is but the starting point. No theory of life can take the place of life. After Marxism has laid bare the skeleton of society, there remains the task of the writer to plant flesh upon those bones out of his will to live.” [emphasis mine]

Throughout the essay, Wright talks of writers having a consciousness. For him, this consciousness is not meant to compel Black writers to preach to their audiences, but to inform the writer’s perspective about the modern world and their place in it. Without that, the writer is “...a lost victim in a world he cannot understand or control.” It is through this consciousness, or “perspective” as Wright also calls it, that the Black writer can connect the daily lives of their people with the machinations of a global economic and political structure which defines the parameters of those lives.

This consciousness is also historical in scope. It involves some understanding of the African origins of Black Americans, and what was lost, as well as retained. With this perspective in place, the number of themes for Black writers is limitless. Dialectically, however, the limitless themes are themselves bound by the limit of the craft itself. Writing does not replace other forms of communication or artistic expression - it complements them.

That complementarity implicitly means that Black writers must work collectively, both among themselves and with other writers. Wright states,

“The ideological unity of Negro writers and the alliance of that unity with all the progressive ideas of our day is the primary prerequisite for collective work.”

Writing near the end of the Great Depression, on the eve of World War II, with the rise of Nazi Germany abroad, and the end of the Harlem Renaissance at home, Wright recognized the tumultuous moment he was in. His blueprint was meant to invigorate a new generation of Black writers to meet this moment. It feels fitting to leave Wright with the last word, which holds much resonance for our current time:

“These tasks are imperative in light of the fact that we live in a time when the majority of the basic assumptions of life can no longer be taken for granted. Tradition is no longer a guide. The world has grown huge and cold. Surely this is the moment to ask questions, to theorize, to speculate, to wonder what materials can a human world be built.”

Notes

[1] The essay can be found in “Richard Wright Reader”, edited by Ellen Wright and Michael Fabre.

Debunking the "Tiananmen Square Massacre"

By Matthew John

Every June in the United States we are subjected to a barrage of anti-China propaganda from major media outlets and prominent political pundits (on top of the regularly-scheduled China bashing). The story has changed over the years and decades, but the original went something like this: On June 4, 1989, after weeks of student-led demonstrations, a gang of ruthless, authoritarian People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers entered Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and conducted a brutal, cold-blooded massacre of unarmed, peaceful “pro-democracy” protesters, resulting in hundreds - maybe thousands - of gruesome deaths. This vicious slaughter of innocent civilians illustrates just how much those filthy commies hate freedom and democracy, and the measures they are willing to take to prevent these superior ideals from taking root in their hellish, dystopian society. 

Despite being completely fictional, this popular narrative remains useful to the Western capitalist class as a method of demonizing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and its ongoing socialist development in the midst of Washington’s new Cold War. Recognizing this geopolitical reality, I sought to play my part in dismantling what is undoubtedly one of the most cherished anti-communist atrocity fabrications in the Western world. I hoped my contribution would become one of the last nails in this counterfeit chronicle’s coffin. After some rudimentary research, I felt compelled to survey my Instagram followers - an online community of about 65,000 users - by posing a simple question:

Do you believe there was a massacre (i.e. mass, indiscriminate murder of unarmed, peaceful protesters) by Chinese soldiers in early June, 1989 in Tiananmen Square (Beijing)?

The last time I checked this post, 821 people had participated, with 15 percent responding, “Yes,” and the remaining 85 percent responding, “No.” My page is very obviously communist in its political orientation, and I have posted about this topic several times before, in addition to my consistent efforts to debunk anti-communist propaganda more broadly. For several years, the bulk of my content has been unequivocally Marxist-Leninist in character and there has been an open effort to defend socialist countries (past and present) from what I see as unfair or disingenuous bourgeois criticism. Nevertheless, more than 120 respondents still expressed a belief in the conventional Western narrative (the “Tiananmen Square massacre”). Maybe I had not purged enough liberals. 

I further articulated the motivations behind this inquiry to my sizable leftist audience:

I've been reading mainstream summaries of the violence that broke out in the final days of the student protest movement and the myth of the Tiananmen Square massacre has largely already been debunked. But it's this weird Orwellian situation where, aside from a few Western journalists like Jay Mathews and Richard Roth, many mainstream sources just act like this whole "massacre" narrative never happened. Roth and Mathews have openly and explicitly acknowledged that there wasn't a massacre and that, as reporters, they have a responsibility to correct the record, as they themselves were complicit in spreading the initial lies. But other mainstream Western sources simply discuss the violence occurring in Beijing between rioters and soldiers, often correctly noting that protesters started the violence and even killed soldiers before the soldiers fought back. 

There is definitely a wide range of terms, phrases, etc. that these sources use, and the massacre narrative is sometimes still heavily implied (some, like the History Channel, continue to unequivocally state that a massacre occurred in the square). Strangely, if you read the relevant Wikipedia entry, for instance, they never even imply there was a massacre in the square, and are clear that the "protesters" (rioters) initiated the deadly violence in Beijing (none of which occurred in Tiananmen Square itself). Even the Victims of Communism website is nuanced and vague regarding this topic. What's interesting is that, from what I can tell, these sources themselves have largely abandoned the massacre narrative, while the general public continues to cling to the myth.

Indeed, I felt as though the “massacre” narrative itself had been massacred and left for dead. I momentarily gaslit myself, wondering if the myth I so diligently sought to debunk had been discarded and forgotten long ago. Let me break this down in more detail so you can see what I mean. As mentioned above, a number of mainstream Western commentators have openly rejected the “massacre” narrative, including Nicholas Kristof, Jay Mathews, Richard Roth, Graham Earnshaw, Eugenio Bregolt, Gregory Clark, and James Miles. Mathews covered the 1989 Tiananmen protests as Beijing bureau chief for the Washington Post. In 1998, nearly a decade after the events in question, the seasoned reporter published a controversial piece in the Columbia Journalism Review entitled, “The Myth of Tiananmen.” In it, Mathews laments the fact that “many American reporters and editors have accepted a mythical version of that warm, bloody night,” referring to June 4, 1989. After recounting several examples of prominent American newspapers embracing and proliferating the Tiananmen Square “massacre” narrative, Mathews explains, “The problem is this: as far as can be determined from the available evidence, no one died that night in Tiananmen Square.”

The reporter then traces the myth to its likely origins and recalls an immediate but ineffective rebuttal:

Probably the most widely disseminated account appeared first in the Hong Kong press: a Qinghua University student described machine guns mowing down students in front of the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of the square. [...] Times reporter Nicholas Kristof challenged the report the next day, in an article that ran on the bottom of an inside page; the myth lived on. 

Matthews even acknowledged his own complicity in spreading the famous falsehood:

It is hard to find a journalist who has not contributed to the misimpression. Rereading my own stories published after Tiananmen, I found several references to the “Tiananmen massacre.” At the time, I considered this space-saving shorthand.

This admission was comparable to that of BBC reporter James Miles, who “admitted that he had ‘conveyed the wrong impression’ and that ‘there was no massacre [in] Tiananmen Square. Protesters who were still in the square when the army reached it were allowed to leave after negotiations with martial law troops.’”

About a decade after the publication of the aforementioned piece by Jay Mathews, a CBS reporter named Richard Roth published a similar article, which was even more bluntly headlined, “There Was No ‘Tiananmen Square Massacre.’” Like Mathews, Roth reported on the 1989 student protests from Beijing, where he was at one point detained by Chinese authorities. Roth described what he saw while being transported through the Square in a military vehicle:

Dawn was just breaking. There were hundreds of troops in the square, many sitting cross-legged on the pavement in long curving ranks, some cleaning up debris. There were some tanks and armored personnel carriers. But we saw no bodies, injured people, ambulances or medical personnel — in short, nothing to even suggest, let alone prove, that a “massacre” had recently occurred in that place. 

The reporter also echoed a sentiment I expressed toward the beginning of this piece; a substantial change in tone over the years can be observed from mainstream Western sources who seemed to gradually adjust the language they used to describe this history, possibly best illustrated by the shift in terminology from “massacre” to “crackdown.” 

Shortly before the Roth piece, former Australian government official Gregory Clark published an op-ed in the Japan Times entitled, “The Birth of a Massacre Myth.” Clark brings up the aforementioned Jay Mathews piece, as well as three additional individuals I want to focus on briefly: Graham Ernshaw, Hou Dejian, and Eugenio Bregolat. Bregolat was Spanish ambassador who was in Beijing during the 1989 protests. Clark recalls an important point made by Bregolat, in which the ambassador observed that “Spain’s TVE channel had a television crew in the square at the time, and if there had been a massacre, they would have been the first to see it and record it.” (I often ponder this aspect of the Tiananmen discourse - the complete lack of video or photographic documentation of this supposed “massacre” juxtaposed with the widespread, faith-based belief in a ghastly, yet unfounded story.) The two other prominent individuals Clark mentions, Reuters reporter Graham Ernshaw and protester Hou Dejian, were both in the Square when it was cleared and neither witnessed any violence conducted by soldiers, much less an epic, cold-blooded massacre of civilians.

In addition to these prominent, mainstream Western sources sporadically surfacing to acknowledge that there was indeed no massacre in Tiananmen Square, we also have corroboration in the form of leaked cables from the U.S. embassy in Beijing relaying an account from Chilean diplomat Carlos Gallo:

[GALLO] WATCHED THE MILITARY ENTER THE SQUARE AND DID NOT OBSERVE ANY MASS FIRING OF WEAPONS INTO THE CROWDS, ALTHOUGH SPORADIC GUNFIRE WAS HEARD.  HE SAID THAT MOST OF THE TROOPS WHICH ENTERED THE SQUARE WERE ACTUALLY ARMED ONLY WITH ANTI-RIOT GEAR--TRUNCHEONS AND WOODEN CLUBS; THEY WERE BACKED UP BY ARMED SOLDIERS.  AS THE MILITARY CONSOLIDATED ITS CONTROL OF THE SQUARE'S PERIMETER, STUDENTS AND CIVILIANS GATHERED AROUND THE MONUMENT TO THE PEOPLE'S HEROES.  GALLO SAID WOUNDED, INCLUDING SOME SOLDIERS, CONTINUED TO BE BROUGHT TO THE RED CROSS STATION. 

Now that the “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative has been sufficiently debunked, an elephant remains in the room: the deadly violence that did occur in Beijing, serving as the final chapter of the 1989 student protests. As political commentator and socialist organizer Brian Becker wrote in 2014, “What happened in China, what took the lives of government opponents and of soldiers on June 4, was not a massacre of peaceful students but a battle between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the so-called pro-democracy movement.”

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The reality on the ground, as Mick Kelly wrote, was that “[t]here was in fact a rebellion, which was counter-revolutionary in nature, that was eventually put down by military force.” This violent chaos included urban warfare between PLA soldiers and rioters who had commandeered military vehicles, stolen rifles, and armed themselves with Molotov cocktails and an assortment of other armaments. At the time, the Washington Post recounted that “[o]n one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles.” 

Protesters killed and injured soldiers, who were often unarmed, in brutal ways, including beating them or burning them to death, and sometimes even stripping them and stringing up their lynched, charred corpses for all to see. Westerners are often surprised to learn that about two dozen soldiers and police officers (possibly more) died in these clashes. When the dust had settled, the death toll was likely around 300, which is certainly tragic and horrific, but far less jarring than the sensationally inflated Western estimates in the thousands.

After becoming acquainted with the true history of Tiananmen, it is useful to examine mainstream Western summaries of the events in question. Let’s start with Amnesty International’s “What is the Tiananmen Crackdown?”:

On 4 June 1989, Chinese troops opened fire on students and workers who had been peacefully protesting for political reforms in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. Hundreds – possibly thousands – of people were killed, including children and older persons. Tens of thousands more were arrested across China in the suppression that followed. 

This summary, despite falsely referring to the protests as “peaceful,” does make a concerted effort to not directly place the violence in the Square (although an average Western reader would likely miss this distinction and assume the excerpt is bolstering the conventional narrative). The students and workers had been protesting in and around the Square. They weren’t necessarily there when the crackdown occurred. But as I mentioned earlier, there is no “we need to be extra clear and correct some widespread misconceptions” moment. It’s all very calculated and intentionally deceptive. The same is true of this summary from the U.S. State Department’s Office of the Historian:

On the night of June 3 and 4, the People’s Liberation Army stormed the Square with tanks, crushing the protests with terrible human costs. Estimates of the numbers killed vary. The Chinese Government has asserted that injuries exceeded 3,000 and that over 200 individuals, including 36 university students, were killed that night. Western sources, however, are skeptical of the official Chinese report and most frequently cite the toll as hundreds or even thousands killed.

The above excerpt is a masterclass in implying something without actually stating it, leaving plenty of room for plausible deniability. What unequivocally occurred within the Square, according to this summary, was that the PLA “stormed” it “with tanks.” When the army “crush[ed] the protests with terrible human costs,” was that also in the Square? And is “terrible human costs” referring to deaths? Why not just say “deaths”? Why put that in a separate sentence? Why not just say the soldiers stormed the square and killed a bunch of people? And regarding this next sentence about those who were killed, are we still talking about something that occurred in the Square? This is unclear, as these elements of the story are separated by punctuation and veiled in vagueness. As I have alluded to, it is intentionally unclear. 

A clear picture of what happened is not painted, because overtly admitting their cherished “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative turned out to be fictional would be profoundly embarrassing, damaging their credibility and weakening their anti-China narrative in the process. Instead, these bourgeois sources opt to incrementally chip away at the false “massacre” story with caveats and crafty language, leaving curious communist commentators like myself confused - wondering if said narrative even existed in the first place. Even the neo-fascist Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation has abandoned the traditional “massacre” narrative:

In the spring of 1989, Tiananmen Square in Beijing was the epicenter of massive pro-democracy demonstrations that spread to over 100 Chinese cities and involved over 100 million people. Unprecedented in scale in a communist country, these demonstrations brought keenly felt self-confidence, strength, and hope to the participants and the society at large. To hold on to its dictatorship, the Chinese Communist Party mobilized the military as well as the full force of the party and state machinery to crush the demonstrations on June 3-4, 1989. The CCP claimed that about 300 people were killed. Estimates by NGOs, news media, and foreign intelligence agencies range from 2,000 to 10,000 killed. 

The History Channel is the only mainstream Western source I could find that apparently didn’t get the memo, as they continue claiming government forces indiscriminately fired on crowds in the Square and continue employing the outdated and inaccurate term “Tiananmen Square massacre”:   

On June 4, 1989, […] Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. [...] In the United States, editorialists and members of Congress denounced the Tiananmen Square massacre and pressed for President George Bush to punish the Chinese government. A little more than three weeks later, the U.S. Congress voted to impose economic sanctions against the People’s Republic of China in response to the brutal violation of human rights.

The “massacre” fantasy - a harrowing tale of bloodthirsty PLA soldiers indiscriminately mowing down unarmed, peaceful protestors in Tiananmen Square with machine gun fire - isn’t the only aspect of this history the West gets wrong. I recently spoke with Qiao Collective member Sun Feiyang, whose father attended some of the 1989 protests in China, about the complexities and contradictions of this tumultuous period (listen to our discussion here). In 2019, Feiyang wrote about the nature of the Tiananmen protests, including many unsavory details that are seldom discussed in the West. For instance, student protest leaders often exhibited an elitist contempt for workers, cordoning off protest areas so no one else could join. Student leader Wang Dan explained this sentiment concisely when he said, “The movement is not ready for worker participation because democracy must first be absorbed by the students and intellectuals before they can spread it to others."

Another protest leader, Chai Ling, yearned for a massacre of protesters by government forces: 

The students keep asking, “What should we do next? What can we accomplish?” I feel so sad, because how can I tell them that what we are actually hoping for is bloodshed, for the moment when the government has no choice but to brazenly butcher the people. Only when the Square is awash with blood will the people of China open their eyes. Only then will they really be united. But how can I explain any of this to my fellow students?

When asked if she would remain in the Square, the self-described “chief commander” replied:

No, I won’t. Because my situation is different. My name is on the government’s hit list. I’m not going to let myself be destroyed by this government. I want to live.

Liu Xiaobo, who was considered a more “moderate” protest leader, believed China needed “300 years of colonialism” and later supported George W. Bush’s invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Tiananmen protests also had roots in anti-Black racism and were supported by the CIA, who smuggled activists out of China through what Newsweek described as “an underground railroad run by an odd alliance of human-rights advocates, Western diplomats, businessmen, professional smugglers and the kings of the Hong Kong underworld.” 

Indeed, the Western capitalist orientation of the student protest leadership, including its desire for violent regime change, was on full display. As Becker noted, “The protest leaders erected a huge statue that resembled the United States’ Statue of Liberty in the middle of Tiananmen Square. They were signaling to the entire world that their political sympathies were with the capitalist countries and the United States in particular. They proclaimed that they would continue the protests until the government was ousted.” The lesser-known, elucidating details of this history could continue for pages, but I feel as though they are beyond the scope of this article. In lieu of a substantial tangent within this text, I’d recommend exploring Qiao Collective’s Tiananmen Protests Reading List.

Conclusion

The “Tiananmen Square massacre” narrative is, in a sense, a classic example of anti-communist propaganda. It includes elaborate fabrication, exaggeration, omission, and double standards. It is repeated over and over again by solemn official sources to inspire an emotional and visceral reaction and thus shape the perspectives of millions. Important details are intentionally excluded, essentially erasing the political and historical context in order to bolster the Western bourgeois narrative revolving around the ostensibly “pro-democracy” nature of the protests. And what makes this particular atrocity myth even more persistent is the bitterness and resentment the Western capitalist class harbors towards China’s socialist project as it continues to advance, having defeated this aforementioned attempted counterrevolution 36 years ago.

In another sense, this famous fairy tale is unique. Unlike other anti-communist fables such as the “Holodomor” or the “Uyghur genocide,” both of which are fallacious yet persistent, the story of the blood-drenched Beijing square has been quietly abandoned by the Western press and its bourgeois backers. The original cartoonish sensationalism has been replaced with a measured, meticulously crafted rewrite that includes the same themes and accusations (authoritarianism, opposition to “democracy,” the crushing of dissent, state repression and brutality, etc.). Even after removing the central element (the fictional June 4th massacre), the narrative itself miraculously remains intact. China, we are told, is a totalitarian police state that viciously destroys the will of the people, regardless of whether its government committed unprovoked mass murder or defeated a violent, U.S.-backed, pro-capitalist rebellion.  

Whether it’s called a “massacre” or a “crackdown,” this conventional Western narrative is part of a larger effort to demonize the PRC and its overwhelmingly successful socialist path. However, the seemingly endless negative portrayals of China’s central government we are spoon-fed in the West are completely at odds with a simple truth: The vast majority of Chinese citizens actually support their government (approval ratings were even as high as 95.5 percent in a 2016 Harvard survey). This is because, throughout its history - from the record-breaking life expectancy increases under Mao, to the complete eradication of extreme poverty (accounting for 70 percent of global poverty reduction), to the unprecedented war against COVID-19, to the highly advanced public transportation system, to the crackdown on billionaires - the PRC’s communist government actually has served the interests of its citizens and continues to do so. And it is for this reason that I feel compelled to give Chinese voices the last word on this matter:

The trope of Chinese ignorance to the history of June 4th poses Westerners as the true keepers of Chinese history and the necessary deliverers of the Chinese people from communist authoritarianism. The pervasiveness of this chauvinistic mentality is apparent in the convergence between the neoconservative right and the anti-communist left in proclaiming platitudes of “solidarity with the Chinese people” against their government.

[…] 

Contrary to these infantilizing beliefs, many Chinese people—old and young—remember 1989. But the violence of June 4th is held in quiet remembrance in the Chinese psyche not as a desperate yearning for Western intervention or regime change, but as a tragic consequence of the contradictions of the reform and opening era, the legacies of the Cultural Revolution, and an overdetermined geopolitical context in which the U.S. bloc sought to exploit any and all opportunities to foreclose the persistence of actually-existing socialism. Lost in the West’s manipulative commemoration of the Tiananmen protests is the fact that two things exist at once: many Chinese people harbor pain and trauma over the bloodshed and remain supportive of the Communist Party of China and committed to China’s socialist modernization.

NATO and The Russia-Ukraine War in The Face of a Multipolar Future

By Valerie Reynoso

Direct Ukraine-Russia talks recently took place in Istanbul and ended without significant results. These talks echo decades of contestations between NATO member states, their Western allies, and Russia in light of shifts from Western hegemony to multipolarity in the international arena, and the future relevance that NATO bears within it.

THE ORIGINS AND ESTABLISHMENT OF NATO

NATO was established on April 4, 1949, and was formed by the U.S., Canada, and ten Western European countries to serve as a military alliance responding to the geopolitical landscape following World War II. NATO was founded for a broader effort to serve three purposes: deterring USSR expansion, forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe via a strong North American presence on the continent, and encouraging European political integration. Accordingly, NATO  generally adheres to U.S. interests and NATO's actions have often aligned with U.S. foreign policy objectives.

The original main three purposes of NATO evolved today to encompass the deterrence of Russian/Eastern geopolitical might against the West, the U.S., and NATO member states; the encouragement of European political integration, particularly those in line with liberal democracy and typical Western socio-political ideologies; and forbidding the revival of nationalist militarism in Europe, especially those opposed to liberal democracy or that adhere to some form of communist thought.

POST-COLD WAR CONTESTATIONS AND NATO EXPANSION

Expansion and hegemony are key components of imperialism, not merely financial or domineering gain. Imperialism encompasses the exertion of control and profit, along with the dissemination of socio-political ideas and territorial domination. NATO has conducted military operations that were often justified under humanitarian grounds or mandates and broader security concerns of Eastern-European states post-Cold War. NATO also has a history of backing military coups and unilateral interventions, and defying international norms without permission from the UN Security Council.

The 1990s served as a pivotal point in shaping NATO-Russia relations that unraveled into what is seen in the international arena today. The meeting between the former U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, and the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, on February 9, 1990, was a notable instance of said pivotal point, especially since the U.S. is a vital NATO member state. This is because Baker's famous “not one inch eastward” assurance on NATO expansion in his meeting with Gorbachev was a part of a series of assurances concerning Soviet security provided by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials.

These assurances were given throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and into 1991. However, it does not appear to have been a speculative comment merely about German reunification. This is because Baker agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that NATO expansion is unacceptable. Baker also assured him that neither the U.S. President nor himself intended to obtain unilateral advantages from those processes. Baker added that Americans understood that it is important for the USSR and other European countries to have guarantees that if the U.S. keeps its presence in Germany within the framework of NATO, the present military jurisdiction of NATO cannot spread in an eastern direction.

These talks between Baker and Gorbachev informally promising that NATO would not move beyond the eastern border of a unified Germany were followed by NATO's first expansion eastwards when it added 14 new members to the east of Germany between 1999 and 2020. In her memoir “Madame Secretary,” the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, asserted that in 1993, the Clinton administration officials decided to endorse the wishes of Central and Eastern European countries to join NATO. The first round was in 1999 and included the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. The second round was in 2004 and included Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. Albright admitted that the former Russian President, Boris Yeltsin, and his associates were not satisfied with those developments. The third round was in 2009 and included Albania and Croatia. Montenegro was included in the fourth round in 2017 and North Macedonia in the fifth round in 2020.

Additionally, Finland and Sweden joined NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively. This marks a significant shift in the NATO-Russia dynamics and presence in the Arctic, since now 7/8 Arctic states are NATO members and NATO's eastern flank security is to be enhanced.

The Clinton administration's endorsement of the expansion of NATO and the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were both key actions in sparking a new cold war with Russia. In addition to what is discussed above, the U.S. and other key NATO powers bypassed the UN Security Council's decisions in early 2008 to grant Kosovo full independence. In 2008, Kosovo's declaration of independence was met with newfound unrest. This included the explosion of two bombs in Mitrovica that damaged several UN vehicles two days later, multiple attacks against UN and NATO personnel. It also included the seizure of a UN courthouse in Mitrovica that resulted in a violent confrontation with the UN police and NATO forces and subsequent deaths and injuries. All of this violence even resulted in a temporary withdrawal of the UN police force from northern Mitrovica.

NATO'S ROLE SINCE 2008 AS A PRETEXT FOR THE CURRENT RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is in direct violation of Article 2(4) of the UN Charter, which prohibits the usage of force, except with approval by the UN Security Council. Similarly, these unfortunate events are a product of numerous factors, including, but not limited to, the previous “violations” of the Minsk Agreement by the Ukrainian Presidents Poroshenko and Zelensky; the reported military actions of these two figures against Lugansk and Donetsk, particularly since 2014; the 2014 coup d'etat; “violations” of the Helsinki Final Act via NATO's expansion eastwards and the addition of 14 new NATO members, most of which are located to the east of Germany. The Russian invasion and its potential nuclear concerns cannot be removed from the historical context that generated these outcomes in the first place.

In this same sense, the former Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, served from March 4, 2020 to September 4, 2024 and was a key figure in Ukraine's diplomatic efforts during the ongoing conflict with Russia. Kuleba had stated that refusing to accept Ukraine into NATO would be "suicide" for Europe; it would "lay the foundations for a new war," because he believed that Russia would not want to repeat this experience again. Kuleba reportedly thought that if Ukraine had become a NATO member in 2014, then a full-scale war could have been avoided. NATO also reaffirmed its commitment to NATO's Open Door Policy, thus justifying its goals for expansion.

On the other hand, Ukraine potentially joining NATO might not have necessarily impeded Russia from going to war with Ukraine nor guaranteed a Ukrainian victory. However, it might have facilitated a higher chance of Ukrainian success on the battlefield, since NATO members would have been obligated to defend Ukraine, beyond the varied support that said states are already providing Ukraine with, due to NATO's principle of “collective defence” and Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

This is also historically consistent and substantial because, since 2008, senior US government officials reportedly knew that the possibility of adding Ukraine to NATO was regarded as a serious "military threat" by Russia that would cross its security "redlines" and prompt Moscow to intervene.

In the 2008 NATO Summit, the former U.S. President, George Bush, advocated for the integration of Ukraine and Georgia into NATO. The then NATO Secretary General had declared that said countries would eventually be integrated into the alliance. US diplomats reportedly knew that this could serve as a potentially provocative move that could prompt a Russian military invasion of Ukraine. In fact, the former U.S. ambassador to Russia, William J. Burns, who then became a CIA director, had stated in a February 2008 embassy cable that Ukraine constituted a security "redline" for Moscow.

NATO, UKRAINE, AND THE RECENT 2025 MINERAL AIDS DEAL

Despite not being a NATO member, several NATO member states have already been providing varied support to Ukraine, including military support, throughout the war and continue to do so. In early May 2025, the U.S. State Department reportedly certified a proposed license to export “$50m or more” of defense hardware and services to Ukraine, according to a communication sent to the U.S. committee on foreign relations. This is the first permission of its kind since U.S. President Trump paused all Ukraine-related military aid shortly after taking office. This also indicates that the minerals deal recently signed by the U.S. and Ukraine may open a path to renewed weapons shipment.

Accordingly, the minerals deal solidified investment in Kyiv's defense against Russia and enabled the creation of a fund that will allow the Trump administration to begin to repay approximately $175 billion to Ukraine. The deal will allow Washington and Kyiv to share profits and royalties from the future sale of Ukrainian minerals and rare earths, which U.S. President Trump said will economically incentivize continuous U.S. investments in Ukraine's defense and its reconstruction after Trump brokers a peace deal with Russia.

Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister, Yulia Svyrydenko, stated that the fund would “attract global investment,” and she confirmed that the Ukrainian state determines where and what to extract. Despite this, a crucial context for the minerals deal is that several of the Russia-Ukraine war hotspots are situated in areas where Ukraine provenly has an abundance of gas reserves and mineral resources, including lithium, uranium, rare earths, titanium, and others. Additionally, Ukraine holds approximately 5% of the world's mineral resources and rare earths and many of these resources are currently untapped, including those in Russian-controlled areas.

THE RECENT RUSSIA-UKRAINE PEACE TALKS AND A PROSPECTIVE TIMELINE

Recently, there were direct talks between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul that served as the first such talks between the two states since 2022 after a period of stalled communications. These talks ended without any significant outcomes.

In the talks, Russia primarily demanded the complete withdrawal of all Ukrainian military forces from the four regions it claims to control—Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhizhia, and Kherson. This demand is critical for Russia because it wants to solidify its territorial claims following the control of said areas and it is a central condition for any ceasefire agreement. Russia also seeks recognition of its territorial claims over the regions mentioned above, which it considers a part of Russian territory following the contested referendums that took place in 2022. This is also critical for Russia to concretize its control over said areas.

Russia has demonstrated a willingness to discuss a ceasefire; however, Russia has unequivocally shown that an unconditional ceasefire is not on the table. Russia links the cessation of hostilities to Ukraine's compliance with its territorial demands, instead. As for long-term security guarantees, Russia wants long-term security arrangements that would prevent Ukraine from joining NATO or aligning with Western military alliances. This echos Russia's broader strategic goal of limiting NATO's influence in Eastern Europe.

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Additionally, Russia has recently agreed to participate in prisoner exchanges that could possibly lead to a broader peace agreement, albeit not being a direct ceasefire demand like those discussed above. Most of Russia's demands are contrary to U.S. President Trump's proposed peace plan and specifically reject certain aspects of the U.S. peace proposal. The U.S. reportedly presented Russia with a seven-point peace plan in April 2025 that offered Russia “de jure” U.S. recognition of Russian sovereignty over occupied Crimea and “de facto” recognition of Russian control over the parts of Ukraine that Russian forces currently occupy. It also included “a robust security guarantee” involving a group of European, and possibly also non-European, states as a likely peacekeeping force.

Ukraine rejected Russia's demands, which reflected the Ukrainian government's commitment to maintaining its territorial integrity. The Russian delegation subsequently walked out of the talks and this demonstrated the challenges continuously faced in reaching a diplomatic solution regarding this matter.

More broadly, the failure of these talks speak to implications in the international arena with respect to NATO's involvement in the conflict and the responses of Western nations to it, and to the current significant barriers in achieving a ceasefire or peace agreement. This is in light of the fact that, as of May 19th, 2025, Ukrainian forces recently advanced in Kursk Oblast and near Borova and Toresk, and Russian forces recently advanced in Kursk Oblast and near Chasiv Yar, Torestk and Novopavlivka.

These advancements on both sides are amplified by reported signals from the Kremlin's officials suggesting that Russia is prepared to continue or escalate the conflict with Ukraine should the latter and the West not agree to Russia's demands. Russia reportedly would view any negotiations that do not fulfill their proposals discussed above as “unsuccessful.”

Similarly, Russia occupies approximately 20% of Ukraine's territory as of 2025 and has gained over 4,000 square kilometers in 2024 alone. Ukraine continues to face severe challenges in the war, high casualty rates, vast territorial losses, and the internal displacement of approximately 3.7 million people and counting. This war reality continues to be exacerbated by the present tensions discussed above and the uncertain nature of the future impact of the talks, and by the fact that the NATO Secretary General, Mark Rutte, had previously announced that NATO membership for Ukraine is off the table and that relations with Russia need to be normalized post-war.

Given all of this, the chances of a peace timeline or ceasefire being achieved through similar talks in the near future is unlikely without considering the aforementioned realities — realities that overwhelmingly indicate the concessions mentioned above will likely have to, at least, be seriously considered in order for a ceasefire to effectively be implemented and pave the path to peace in the international arena.

NATO'S RELEVANCE, BRICS, AND THE NEAR-FUTURE'S GEOPOLITICAL AMBIT

The relevance that said talks currently bear is also reminiscent of U.S. President Trump's criticisms on NATO member countries inability to meet the alliance's defense spending target of 2% GDP. Trump argues that the U.S. bears an unfair burden because it pays a disproportionate share of NATO's costs in comparison to its European counterparts, and especially Germany. Trump has reportedly threatened to withdraw the U.S. from NATO if member countries do not increase their defense spending.

Additionally, Trump has criticized NATO allies for their spending levels compared to those of the U.S. This was seen as undermining the principle of collective self defense reflected in Article 5 of the NATO treaty. This is of vital concern particularly in light of the indefinite future of transatlantic relations and security alliance structures in Europe, NATO member states, and relevant proxies. It is also paramount in assessing how the geopolitical nature of the near future will unravel in the international arena, especially because some prominent analysts and sources predict that a Ukraine peace deal may be concretized by the end of June 2025. The reality is that Europe is running low on weapons, Ukraine is running low on fighters, and this is hindering the transatlantic unity. Thus, the Ukrainian President, Zelenskyy, will likely have to accept a negotiated settlement with Russia.

Similarly, this sheds light on whether NATO is able to fulfill its evolved purpose of deterring Russian/Eastern geopolitical might against the West, or if this goal will inevitably be rendered obsolete in the foreseeable future. In addition to the points discussed above, this is also because the decline of U.S. hegemony is on the rise, given the current economic trends and the impact that they will have in this regard and within the theoretical scope of what imperialism entails.

As discussed above, the key components of imperialism are expansion and hegemony and this includes, but is certainly not limited to, financial or domineering gain because it also encompasses the exertion of control and profit. As for Russia, its nominal GDP is approximately $1.48 trillion, making it the 11th largest economy in the world, which accounts for around 1.31% of the global economy. For some perspective, Russia's economy is eclipsed by that of the state of California, which has a nominal GDP twice as large as that of Russia, at approximately $3.1 trillion. California is ranked as having the 5th largest economy in the world, even surpassing those of entire countries. Russia's economy has faced stagnation and challenges in great part due to sanctions and geopolitical tensions.

The above points suggest that Russia may lack the economic capacity on a global scale to truly have the hegemonic capacity that is typically expected of a global superpower, such as the U.S. The U.S., by contrast, has a nominal GDP of approximately $26.9 trillion, making its economy the largest, globally.

On the other hand, despite the U.S. currently having the largest economy, globally, its hegemonic presence is increasingly minimized by the fact that the BRICS countries collectively have a GDP that when measured by purchasing power parity (PPP), significantly exceeds that of the U.S. For context, the BRICS and G7 are two groups of countries that are highly relevant on an international scale because they play key roles in global economic and political dynamics. This group was originally formed as BRIC in 2009 and became BRICS when South Africa joined in 2010, with many other affiliates and potential members adding to the mix in the past few years.

BRICS was established to provide a cooperative platform for said economies and to challenge Western domination in global governance and economic systems. BRICS aims to reform international financial institutions and promote a multipolar world order.

Moreover, the BRICS GDP is estimated to be approximately $42.4 trillion, as of 2025. China and India are prominent nations as for growth rates here because China alone accounts for around 19.05% of global GDP and India contributes around 8.23%. All of this is coupled in with the fact that the BRICS countries have a combined population of approximately 3.3 billion, which consists of over 40% of the global population and contributes to the significant economic output of BRICS.

As of 2023, the per capita income currently remains lower for BRICS at $12,800, compared to the U.S. average of about $76,000; however, the aggregate GDP is higher for BRICS in PPP terms. Additionally, the BRICS countries have experienced higher average growth rates compared to those of the U.S. because from 1990 to 2022, the average annual growth rate of per capita GDP in BRICS was 4.5%. By contrast, the average annual growth rate of per capita GDP in the G7, including the U.S., was around 1.5%.

CONCLUSION: WHAT POTENTIALLY LIES AHEAD

Ultimately, what lies ahead heavily depends on whether a Ukraine peace plan and ceasefire are  reached in accordance with what is discussed above. It will also significantly rely on how NATO and the West will grapple with the inevitable expansion of BRICS, the current lack of Russian unipolar economic hegemony, other related factors as they arise, and how all of this will shape relations between the U.S. and West, and Russia. Time will tell how these events in the international arena will unravel and shape the future geopolitical landscape.

about the author

Valerie Reynoso is a political analyst, artist, the UN Permanent Representative and Ambassador for an NGO with special consultative status with the United Nations, and a Juris Doctor law school candidate based in New York. She graduated from Columbia SIPA in 2023, while she simultaneously taught international affairs and political theory to undergraduate students at Barnard College and Columbia SPS. This article is based on her research and cited sources and is not representative of any entities, organizations or persons affiliated with her.

WORKS CITED

1. [Trump says he would encourage Russia to ‘do whatever the hell they want’ to any NATO country that doesn’t pay enough | CNN Politics](https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/10/politics/trump-russia-nato/index.html)

1. [The Latest: Trump questions value of NATO, slams Germany | AP News](https://apnews.com/united-states-government-5d9af207650e42cd9fbf96ce7d8c59d1)

1. [A closer look at Trump's years of criticizing NATO, particularly on defense spending - ABC News](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/closer-trumps-years-criticizing-nato-defense-spending/story?id=107201586)

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-considering-major-nato-policy-shift-rcna195089 

2. [Russia Could Be Ready to Strike NATO in Two Years, New Report Says - Newsweek](https://www.newsweek.com/russia-strike-nato-two-years-us-europe-ceasefire-agreement-2069537)

3. [US proposes reviving NATO-Russia Council, Bloomberg reports](https://kyivindependent.com/us-proposes-reviving-nato-russia-council/)

4. [Trump considering major NATO policy shift](https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-considering-major-nato-policy-shift-rcna195089)

5. [Ukraine ramps up calls for ‘pressure’ on Russia as talks end with no ceasefire | CNN](https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/16/europe/ukraine-russia-turkey-talks-ceasefire-hopes-dim-latam-intl)

6. [Russia, Ukraine agree prisoner swap as talks end without major breakthrough | Russia-Ukraine war News | Al Jazeera](https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/5/16/russia-ukraine-talks-end-in-less-than-two-hours-with-no-ceasefire-deal)

7. [Ukraine-Russia talks in Istanbul end, Moscow demands Kyiv withdraw from 4 regions, no ceasefire agreement](https://kyivindependent.com/ukraine-russia-peace-talks-in-istanbul-reportedly-end-after-nearly-an-hour/)

8. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early

9. https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/16117-document-06-record-conversation-between

10. [Lessons of the Minsk Deal: Breaking the Cycle of Russia's War Against Ukraine | Institute for the Study of War](https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/lessons-minsk-deal-breaking-cycle-russias-war-against-ukraine)

11. [Ukraine, Russia, and the Minsk agreements: A post-mortem | ECFR](https://ecfr.eu/article/ukraine-russia-and-the-minsk-agreements-a-post-mortem/)

12. [As Russian Federation’s Invasion of Ukraine Approaches One Year Mark, Speakers in Security Council Trade Accusations for Failure of Minsk Peace Accords | Meetings Coverage and Press Releases](https://press.un.org/en/2023/sc15202.doc.htm)

13. https://www.promoteukraine.org/dmytro-kuleba-outlines-three-key-areas-of-consolidation-of-ukraines-partners-nato-membership-aircraft-coalition-sanctions/

14. https://www.cfr.org/report/ukraine-nato-and-war-termination

15. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/topics_49217.htm

16. https://www.dw.com/en/ukraine-updates-kuleba-tells-nato-there-is-no-stalemate/live-67580362

17. https://www.cato.org/commentary/four-western-provocations-led-us-russia-crisis-today?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwKd3LRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHtWKz32EuKhiU7H2fUZAdJEYjgttWWu9r4Bavfvy_MhTTu-c4uGTERRnwfkO_aem_vxSKfkBwz2oc30mudqVi8A

18. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/01/nato.georgia

19. https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/infocus/nato/

20. https://www.npr.org/2008/04/01/89284533/bush-urges-nato-membership-for-ukraine-georgia

21. https://wikileaks.org/plusd/cables/08MOSCOW265_a.html

22. https://geopoliticaleconomy.com/2022/02/27/us-nato-expansion-ukraine-russia-intervene/

23. 10 фактів про видобуток українського газу

24. "Kyiv's gas strategy: closer cooperation with Gazprom or a genuine diversification"

25. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_gas_in_Ukraine#cite_note-UkNGOSW15713-9

26. [Russia's Minuscule Economy: The Mouse That Roars](https://www.ipi.org/ipi_issues/detail/russias-minuscule-economy-the-mouse-that-roars)

27. [California Remains the World’s 5th Largest Economy | Governor of California](https://www.gov.ca.gov/2024/04/16/california-remains-the-worlds-5th-largest-economy/)

28. [Foolish Take: Russia's surprisingly small economy](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2017/05/31/a-foolish-take-russias-surprisingly-small-economy/102013334/)

29. (https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2018/how-much-does-russia-spend-nuclear-weapons).

30. (https://www.sipri.org/commentary/topical-backgrounder/2018/how-much-does-russia-spend-nuclear-weapons).

31. (https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-resign-kuleba-bb5195cc2df40d32bac374ece6dbc0b8).

32. [Russia-Ukraine war: Ukrainian Foreign Minister Kuleba resigns, official says | AP News](https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-russia-resign-kuleba-bb5195cc2df40d32bac374ece6dbc0b8)

33. [Ukraine's foreign minister resigns as government reshuffle expected](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn02v5x5expo)

34. [The direct Ukraine-Russia talks in Istanbul have ended - with ‘ZERO RESULTS’, according to the Russian side - Axios reports The meeting ended after Russia demanded the full withdrawal of all Ukrainian forces from the 4 new regions Russia currently claims control over in Ukraine. - Who Watches the Watchers?](https://watchers.ie/2025/05/18/the-direct-ukraine-russia-talks-in-istanbul-have-ended-with-zero-results-according-to-the-russian-side-axios-reports-the-meeting-ended-after-russia-demanded-the-full-withdrawal-of-all/)

35. [Negotiations between Ukraine and Russia in Istanbul - what are the first results?](https://babel.ua/en/news/118031-negotiations-between-ukraine-and-russia-in-istanbul-what-are-the-first-results)

36. [Ukraine and Russia meet in Istanbul - Everything you need to know | RBC-Ukraine](https://newsukraine.rbc.ua/news/inside-the-ukraine-russia-talks-in-istanbul-1747381927.html)

37.  [NATO - Topic: Enlargement and Article 10](https://nato.int/cps/en/natolive/topics_49212.htm)

38. [Germany, 14 NATO allies agree to procure air defense systems - DW - 10/13/2022](https://www.dw.com/en/germany-14-nato-allies-agree-to-procure-air-defense-systems/a-63423028)

39. [NATO - NATO member countries](https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/nato_countries.htm)

40. [2008 unrest in Kosovo - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_unrest_in_Kosovo)

41. [Kosovo War - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosovo_War)

42. [Kosovo conflict | Summary & Facts | Britannica](https://www.britannica.com/event/Kosovo-conflict)

43. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7300015.stm

44. https://web.archive.org/web/20080303093151/http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-02/26/content_7674535.htm

45. https://balkaninsight.com/2008/03/03/shots-fired-at-north-kosovo-un-office/

46. https://www.britannica.com/event/Kosovo-conflict

47. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/27/russia-continues-to-strike-ukraine-after-trump-questions-putins-commitment-to-peace

48. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/may/01/trump-administration-readies-first-sale-of-military-equipment-to-ukraine

49. https://isw.pub/UkrWar051925

50. https://x.com/thestudyofwar/status/1923921732332576927?s=46&t=0TQ2AoUIjWt5bcLLH0Lx1A

51. https://x.com/thestudyofwar/status/1923910157542752431?s=46&t=0TQ2AoUIjWt5bcLLH0Lx1A

52. https://www.jpmorganchase.com/content/dam/jpmorganchase/documents/center-for-geopolitics/jpmc-cfg-russia-ukraine.pdf

53. [G7 versus the BRICS: taking stock in 12 figures](https://www.socialeurope.eu/g7-versus-the-brics-taking-stock-in-12-figures)

54. [Learn about BRICS](https://www.ipea.gov.br/forumbrics/en/learn-about-brics.html)

55. [BRICS: Here’s what to know about the international bloc | World Economic Forum](https://www.weforum.org/stories/2024/11/brics-summit-geopolitics-bloc-international/)

56.  [BRICS Expansion, the G20, and the Future of World Order | Carnegie Endowment for International Peace](https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2024/10/brics-summit-emerging-middle-powers-g7-g20)

57. [BRICS Vs. the G7 - The Globalist](https://www.theglobalist.com/brics-brics-g7-economy-population-just-the-facts/)

58. [BRICS vs G7 GDP as a share of world total 2024| Statista](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1412425/gdp-ppp-share-world-gdp-g7-brics/)

59. https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text

60. https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/115204.htm

61. https://www.npr.org/2022/01/29/1076193616/ukraine-russia-nato-explainer

Debunking the Myth of "Taxpayer Money": Economic Justice Starts with Monetary Reality

By Clinton Alden

Republished from the author’s substack.

For decades, the ruling class has perpetuated one of the greatest economic deceptions of our time: the myth that federal government spending is funded by taxpayer money. This narrative has been used as a bludgeon against working-class movements, reinforcing austerity, denying economic rights, and keeping the proletariat in a state of economic dependence. It’s time to shatter this illusion.

The Constitutional Foundation of Currency Issuance

The United States Constitution, in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 5, grants Congress the exclusive power “to coin money, regulate the value thereof, and of foreign coin.” This is a foundational statement that makes it clear: the United States government is the issuer of its own currency. It does not need to “collect” dollars from the public before it can spend. It creates them.

The implications of this are enormous. If the government can create money at will, then taxes do not fund federal spending. The idea that programs like Social Security, Medicare, or infrastructure development are constrained by tax revenue is simply false. Yet this lie persists because it serves the interests of the bourgeoisie—the ruling class that seeks to maintain control over labor and resources.

Taxes as a Tool of Control, Not Revenue

If taxes don’t fund spending, then what are they for? At the federal level, taxes serve three primary functions:

• Regulating Inflation – By removing money from circulation, taxes help control aggregate demand and prevent runaway inflation.

• Redistribution of Wealth – Taxes can be used to reduce inequality by imposing higher rates on the wealthy and redistributing purchasing power.

• Incentivizing Behavior – Tax policy can be used to encourage or discourage certain economic activities, such as carbon taxes to reduce pollution or tax breaks for renewable energy investment.

But what taxes do not do is pay for federal programs. The government does not need to collect dollars before it can spend them. It spends first, then taxes afterward. This is a reality that modern monetary theory (MMT) has long pointed out, yet both mainstream economists and political leaders continue to deny it.

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The Political Weaponization of the "Taxpayer Money" Myth

By convincing the public that federal spending is limited by taxes, the ruling class manufactures consent for austerity. Consider the arguments we hear whenever economic justice policies are proposed:

• Medicare for All? “How are we going to pay for it?”

• Student debt cancellation? “That’s taxpayer money!”

• Universal housing? “We can’t afford it.”

These are not economic arguments. They are ideological weapons meant to keep the working class from demanding what should already be theirs. The reality is that the U.S. government can fund a Green New Deal, universal healthcare, and a federal job guarantee without raising taxes at all. The barrier is not money—it’s political will.

Meanwhile, when it comes to war, corporate bailouts, or tax cuts for the rich, these concerns vanish overnight. No one asked how we would pay for trillion-dollar wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. No one demanded offsets when Wall Street received billions in bailouts. The hypocrisy is glaring.

The Path to Economic Justice

If the Left, Socialists, and Communists want to win the fight for economic justice, we must stop accepting the terms of debate as set by the ruling class. We must reject the myth of "taxpayer money" and educate the working class about the monetary reality of a currency-issuing nation.

This means:

• Demanding public investment without apologies or hesitation.

• Refusing to engage in debates over "how to pay for it" when we know the government issues currency.

• Exposing the austerity rhetoric as a tool of class warfare.

Redirecting the discussion from funding to power—who benefits from public spending, and who is left behind?

Economic justice begins with truth. And the truth is that the United States, as a sovereign currency issuer, can afford to meet the needs of its people. The only question is whether we will force the political class to act in the interests of the many rather than the few.

The working class has been deceived for too long. It’s time to tear down the illusion of "taxpayer money" and build a system based on economic rights, not economic myths

Trump Exposes the Elite Classes

[Pictured: Columbia Unversity]

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

While Trump dedicates himself to making every conservative fantasy come true, millions wonder who will save them from the onslaught of the right wing fever dream. The answer is no one but ourselves.

Institutions led by members of the ruling class theoretically have the power to oppose anyone who should dare to confront them, even if the confrontation in question is led by the president of the United States. Actions taken by Columbia University and the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison (known as Paul, Weiss), were stunning as they obsequiously met Trump administration demands to stifle protest and to provide pro bono legal services to conservative causes. Closer inspection of how these supposedly august institutions operate should end any questions about why they responded as they did.

Columbia University donors include billionaires such as Robert Kraft and Mort Zuckerman. The university’s endowment is valued at $14.8 billion . One would think that heavy hitters with resources would consider fighting back when Donald Trump threatened to withhold $400 million in federal funding from that ivy league school.

Yet there was no fight back, none whatsoever. Columbia acceded to Trump’s demands that the school give the president power to expel students who engage in protests, ban masks, adopt a definition of anti-semitism that includes prohibition of “double standards applied to Israel”, and change in the leadership of the departments of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies. The decision to go along with Trump was met with great consternation both within and outside of the school but those opinions availed little with $400 million on the line.

Columbia’s lack of fortitude should not have been surprising to anyone. Many donors were already in sync with the Trump administration’s demands. When Palestine solidarity protests began in 2024, donors such as Kraft began to question their financial commitments . Their actions went further, as many wealthy Columbia donors and other New Yorkers used a Whatapp chat group to push mayor Eric Adams to send police to the campus and arrest demonstrators. Not only did Adams do as they asked in sending the New York Police Department to end the protest, but his Deputy Mayor for Communications accused the Washington Post of promoting an “antisemitic trope ” for reporting on the story. 

Recently a former Columbia graduate student named Mahmoud Kahlil was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and sent to a detention facility in Louisiana. A group calling itself Columbia Alumni for Israel has been demanding such actions for many months as they too operate in a Whatsapp messaging group. They are unsatisfied with the easy punishment of demanding the revocation of student visas and even deporting green card holders such as Khalil. They also have U.S. citizens in their sights. “If anyone can trace any of their funding to terror organizations, not a simple task, they can be arrested on grounds of providing ‘material support’ for terror organizations. That is the key to getting these U.S. citizen supporters of Hamas, etc. arrested.” The writer of this missive is a former Columbia professor.

The capitulation at Paul Weiss shocked many in the legal profession who expected their profession to be vigorously defended. Like Columbia, Paul Weiss is doing quite well, with $2.6 billion in revenue in 2024. A dubious Executive Order required Paul Weiss to provide pro bono legal services to conservatives in exchange for keeping security clearances and the ability to access federal buildings. The shakedown succeeded however, and made the possibility that other targeted firms would also comply more likely.

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How shocking is it really when the ruling classes rule over the institutions they control? White shoe law firms and ivy league schools depend on money, big money, in order to operate. The individuals in question may be republicans or democrats but at the end of the day money is the determining factor in how they make decisions. It is time to end the naivete about the elites who run universities and powerful law firms. They take the path of least resistance, which is always the path of placating politicians and the rich and the powerful. Both Columbia and Paul Weiss have the resources to take on the president and both had good chances of winning their disputes with the Trump administration yet neither was prepared to take the risk.

Of course the people who could fight Trump but don’t are also the same people who fund the Democratic Party. They are the same group who provided the Kamala Harris campaign with a $1 billion war chest in her losing effort. No one should be surprised now that the Democratic Party also appears to be confused about how to fight Trump as he is determined to make every right wing fantasy come true. Like all other recipients of billionaire largesse, the democrats have run for cover.

The reality is that the ruling classes do not represent the people. They wouldn’t be the ruling classes if they did. We may be taken in by notions of prestige and elitism but that means the people and the institutions in question will behave like the proverbial cheap lawn chair and fold up without any resistance because they either fear losing their positions or happily ask, “How high?” when a president orders them to jump.

This current political moment is difficult after several decades of weak mass organizing. Students who protested the U.S. and Israeli genocide in Gaza were living up to a great tradition of young people showing the way when political action is called for. Now they are paying the price as their institutions are targeted by the threats of losing millions of dollars. In the case of Harvard University, latest on the Trump hit list, the amount of funding in question is $9 billion .

The student encampments were popular because they spoke to the outrage felt by millions of people as the bipartisan consensus demanded that war crimes be committed in the name of the people of this country. Now others must take up the charge as the Trump administration sends foreign nationals to prison camps in El Salvador and shakes down colleges and law firms as gangsters would do.

Federal judges have ordered that detainees not be moved only to watch as their rulings are ignored. Perhaps a brave jurist will find a Trump administration official in contempt and put the full weight of the law on conduct that has been found to be illegal and unconstitutional. That hope is understandable but is no more likely to happen than a school depending on the 1% to defy the authorities that keep it running.

There is no one to appeal to but ourselves. Mass movements may have been in existence years ago but unless they are revived the assaults on our civil and human rights will not just continue. They will grow ever more brazen.

Margaret Kimberley is the author of Prejudential: Black America and the Presidents . You can support her work on Patreon and also find it on the Twitter , Bluesky , and Telegram platforms. She can be reached via email at margaret.kimberley@blackagendareport.com .

What Correctly Defines Pan-Africanism in 2025 and Beyond

By Ahjamu Umi

Republished from Hood Communist.

Since its initial organizational expression in 1900, the phrase Pan-Africanism has been expressed in many different forms. For some, its current meaning is defined as unity between all people of African descent across the world. For others, Pan-Africanism is an ideology defined by nebulous elements of the type of unity previously described. For still many others, Pan-Africanism is represented by social media famous individuals who claim Pan-Africanism as a set of beliefs without any clear defining criteria.

For those of us who identify Pan-Africanism not as an ideology, but as an objective, we define Pan-Africanism as the total liberation and unification of Africa under a continental wide scientific socialist government. This is the framework for revolutionary Pan-Africanists who endorse the concepts of Pan-Africanism laid out by the ideas of Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, and others. The reasons we humbly, yet firmly, advance one unified socialist Africa as really the only serious definition of Pan-Africanism are connected to dialectical and historical materialism. By dialectical and historical materialism we mean the historical components that define matter and the conflictual elements that transform that matter. In other words, the history of a thing and the forces that have come to shape that thing’s characteristics over time.

For example, for African people (“All people of African descent are African and belong to the African nation”—Kwame Nkrumah—“Class Struggle in Africa), the reason we live on three continents and the Caribbean in large numbers in 2025 is not the result of higher desire on our part to see the world. It’s not because God placed people who look like us in every corner of the planet. The only reason is because colonialism and slavery exploited Africa’s human and material resources to build up the wealth of the Western capitalist world. As a result of this irrefutable reality, it makes zero sense in 2025 for African people to imitate the logic of other people in defining ourselves based solely upon where we are born.

This approach is illogical because African people were kidnapped from Africa and spread across the world. Even the Africans who left Africa on their own to live in the Western industrialized countries, did so only because colonialism made the resources they seek unavailable in Africa. Consequently, an African in Brazil can and does have biological relatives in the Dominican Republic, Canada, Portugal, the U.S., etc. These people will most likely never meet and even if they came across each other, they probably could not communicate due to language barriers, but none of this changes the cold stark reality that they could easily be related. So, it makes no sense for Africans to accept colonial borders to define ourselves i.e., “I’m Jamaican and have no connection to Black people in the U.S., etc.”

Secondly, and more important, wherever African people are in 2025, we are at the bottom of that society. The reasons for this are not that there is something wrong with African people or that we don’t work hard enough and don’t have ambition. Anyone who has arisen at 5am on any day in Africa knows those conceptions of African people are bogus. Any bus depot at that time of morning shows thousands of people up, hustling, struggling to begin the day trying to earn resources for their families. The real reason we are on the bottom everywhere is because the capitalist system was built on exploiting our human and material resources. As a result, capitalism today cannot function without that exploitation. In other words, in order for DeBeers Diamonds to remain the largest diamond producer on earth, African people in Zimbabwe, the Congo, Azania (South Africa), etc., must continue to be viciously exploited to produce the diamonds. Its this system that has made the zionist state of Israel one of the world’s main diamond polishing economies despite the fact diamond mines don’t exist in occupied Palestine (Israel). Apple, Motorola, Samsung, Hershey, Godiva, Nestle, etc., all rely on similar exploitative systems that steal African resources and labor to continue to produce riches for those multinational corporations while the masses of African people die young from black lung, mining these resources, often by hand.

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Meanwhile, since the wealth of capitalism is dependent upon this system of exploitation to continue uninterrupted, the mechanisms of the capitalist system have to ensure that African people are prohibited from waking up to this reality. Thus, the maintenance of systems of oppression to keep the foot of the system firmly placed on the necks of African people everywhere. Whether its police, social services, etc., this is true. This exploitation marks the origin of the problem, and therefore, logically, it is also where the solution must be addressed. In other words, while we can recognize that the consequences of this exploitation have global dimensions, we cannot expect the problem to be resolved solely through actions taken outside of Africa, such as in the U.S. or elsewhere.

All of the above explains why one unified socialist Africa has to be the only real definition for Pan-Africanism. Capitalism, as the driving force behind the exploitation of Africa and the global African diaspora, cannot serve as the solution to the suffering it has created. Instead, Africa’s vast resources—including its 600 million hectares of arable land, its immense mineral wealth, and the collective potential of its people—must be reorganized into ways to eradicate poverty and disease, including

Ways to educate all who need education to increase the skills to solve these problems. And, in accomplishing all of this, our pride as African people based upon our abilities to govern our own lives, coupled with the necessity for others to respect us for the same, eliminates the constant disrespect—internal and external—which defines African existence today.

This Pan-Africanist reality will eliminate the scores of African people who are ashamed of their African identity overnight. Now, what we will see is those same people clamoring to instantly become a part of the blossoming African nation.

Revolutionary Pan-Africanism cannot be mistaken in 2025 as a pipe dream or simply the hopes of Africans everywhere. Building capacity for this reality is the actual on the ground work that many genuinely revolutionary Pan-Africanist organizations are engaging in on a daily basis. The work to forge that collective unity based upon the principles cited by people like Kwame Nkrumah, Sekou Ture, Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, Robert Sobukwe, Lumumba, Marcus Garvey, Amy/Amy Jacques Garvey, Carmen Peirera, etc. Principles of humanism, collectivism, and egalitarianism.,the Revolutionary African Personality articulated by Nkrumah, the understanding of how to build political party structures as documented by Ture,the understanding of the role of culture in guiding our actions as expressed by Cabral, etc., and many of these types of cultural and principle approaches to building society have been seen in recent times through the work of the former Libyan Jamihiriya and what’s currently happening in the Sahel region. These efforts will only increase and become even more mass in character.

We challenge a single person to express why revolutionary Pan-Africanism is not what’s needed for African people. Not just as one of many ideas, but as the single objective that would address all of our collective problems. Hearing and seeing no one who can refute that statement, the next step is how we collectively increase African consciousness around the necessity to contribute to on the ground Pan-African work. The first step is getting people to see the importance of getting involved in organized struggle. The second step is ensuring that those organizations have institutionalized, consistent, ideological training as a priority.

To seriously embark upon this work brings no individual recognition. It brings no prestige. It requires a clear focus and a commitment to detail, but what it will produce is an ever increasing capacity that will one day manifest itself in the type of revolutionary Pan-Africanism described here that will fulfill the aspirations of African people everywhere while placing us in the position to contribute to all peace and justice pursuing struggles across the planet earth.

Kleber Ramirez’s “Popular Bolivarian Insurgency” (1992)

Translated by Alex Stoan

Translator’s Introduction

Kléber Ramírez Rojas (1937 - 1998) was a Venezuelan revolutionary who had a profound impact on Hugo Chávez and the development of a left nationalist politics in Venezuela. He is the key theorist behind the MBR-200 and the 4 February (4F) 1992 left-wing coup attempt. The following translation is based on a chapter of his Documentary History of the 4th of February.  The larger body of text is masterful in developing Bolivarianism through a socialist and popular perspective. The translation concerns the founding document of a tendency Ramírez attempted to build after he broke with the military layer surrounding him in MBR-200. It is a document drafted in the twilight of a rapidly decaying two-party system during the apex of the barrio assembly movements[1].

Ramírez’s political life began in the Communist Youth where he participated in the 1956 strike against the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. As a civil engineering student, he was elected President of the Central Civil Engineering Student Union[2]. There, he worked to advance the guerilla struggle of the FALN. Eventually, Ramírez became a professor at the Universidad de Los Andes – a post that positioned him close to several guerilla fronts in the Venezuelan Andes. When the FALN split on the question of continuing the armed struggle in 1966, Kléber Ramírez chose to continue. He joined Douglas Bravo, Alí Rodríguez Araque, and Fabricio Ojeda in forming the Party of the Venezuelan Revolution (PRV). During the 1980s, Ramírez used his university position to organize PRV activities among the military. Out of this organizing the MBR-200 crystalized and was catalyzed by the events of the Caracazo. Where the government of Carlos Andreas Perez, whom Ramírez refers to as populist and messianic, chose to massacre his own people rather than rebuff the IMF[3].

The 4F coup attempt was a direct result of the massacre. It was aimed to abolish two facets of the modern Venezuelan polity and replace them with a commoner state. First, it aimed to destroy the remnants of the pact of Punto Fijo. This was the electoral accord struck in the 1958 democratic revolution between the Christian Democrats (Copei) and Democratic Action parties to alternate power. For Ramírez, this pact allowed for the transfer of capital from the nation to the state and then to the political and capitalist elite[4]. Second, and more fundamentally, 4F aimed to destroy the gomecista state – the foundations of the modern Venezuelan rentier state that has remained intact since its establishment by the dictatorship of Juan Vicente Gómez. Briefly, this refers to the extreme concentration of power in the office of the present, the deep links between public revenue and the oil sector, and subservience to the United States[5]. Writing in the program devised for 4F, Ramírez explains that “Venezuela needs to break out of, to explode the straitjacket that the Gomecista state represents, creating a new state, a commoner state”[6].

In contemporary memorializations of 4F, Chávez frequently becomes the central figure. With hindsight we see the coup attempt backwards through Chávez’s progressive rule and then the deep degeneration of the movement he led by his successors. However, within MBR-200 Kléber Ramírez played a role as a seasoned insurgent and key theoretical leader. He drafted most of the materials relating to the coup should it have taken power. These documents include the Constitutive Act of the Government of National Emergency, the Emergency Programme, and several revolutionary decrees.

Chávez’s popular style of politics, his unwavering faith in both the barracks and the street, and his leaning into a state based on the commons, draws inspiration from Kléber Ramírez’s political thinking. Edgar Perez, a community organizer and participant of 4F explains that “Kleber, in fact, was the founder of the Bolivarian movement that would eventually be led by Chavez”[7].

Kléber Ramírez had a long political trajectory. He began as a communist youth fighting dictatorship then a hollow two-party democracy through armed struggle. Then moved to socialist politics working through military institutions while rooted in local popular communities. The translated work below, written for the ongoing wave of working-class community-based protests, offers the Anglophone reader the opportunity to grapple with the seeds of a commons theory[8] of state-making that influenced the boldest attempt at socialist creation in the western hemisphere thus far in the 21st century.

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Popular Bolivarian Insurgency

By Kleber Ramirez (1992)

The global or general frame of the crisis of the Venezuelan nation, known and felt in depth by the entire population of our country, has matured to such a point that everything indicates that we are entering a period of struggles for radical or revolutionary transformations of the Venezuelan society.

The present Venezuelan State, with a development that dates back eighty years, has experienced a crisis and will maintain its power in a situation of unstable equilibrium until it faces, in a decisive manner, its own profound and total transformation. As a solution to this situation, two options will be presented: one from the right, as has been the Chilean case on our continent and for which the bourgeoisie and all reactionary elements try to unify efforts to imprint upon it their own content; the other would be a revolutionary solution [exit, way out] that would give rise to a new State, where democracy is expanded and deepened so that the political, social and economic solutions of urgent attention, tend to principally favour the vast majority of the national conglomerate.

The political and social struggle for these transformations, in the immediate future, historically originates with the overthrow of the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. It has managed to accumulate a period of maturation of 34 years, during which there successively produced the armed struggle of the sixties; the revolution and the wave of contention of the seventies; the multitude of local insurrections for diverse political, economic and social demands, of which we can remember the Río Caribe insurrection for the right to water; the Barquisimeto insurrection against the increase in electricity service rates; the Mérida insurrection for the right to life; the Puerto Cabello insurrection against pollution (the toxic waste); the insurrection of La Victoria and Belén against repression and for life, etc. These actions begin to shake the national consciousness little by little and the population is increasingly separating itself from the party structures, given the irrational repressive attitude of the governing coalitions and the guilty indifference with which the opposition assumed these popular demonstrations that accumulated, ever more, a greater frustration with respect to traditional political struggles, leading them later, at the end of the seventies, to express themselves with a significant electoral abstention.

In the popular sphere, the struggle rose considerably to produce that social commotion that signified the outbreak of 27F [the Caracazo], the uncontainable violence that lasted for two days, like a hurricane of fire, hit the conformist and complicit consciousness of this oil society, accustomed to prosper in the shadow of the protective and corrupt State. But it was also the way, very dramatic for everyone else, with which the masses departed from the formality of "representative discussion", to assert directly, without intermediaries, their most pressing rights, which the hoarders of the oil rents had persistently denied during these 34 years. Likewise, this insurrection was the political response of the masses against CAP's economic package and a moral sanction against it, because the policy that he was beginning to put into practice had nothing to do with his electoral promise.

This popular insurgency of 27F would be defeated politically and socially crushed with blood and fire, displaying a brutal repression by the regime that was being inaugurated and that we still suffer, in which the hegemonic role, delegated by President Pérez, was assumed by his Minister of Defense, Italo del Valle Alliegro.

The main reasons for the defeat of this formidable movement were due to the dominant spontaneity of the action, the lack of a leadership nucleus that would tactically and strategically lead it towards concrete political objectives, the lack of a specific minimum program that would serve as a north [star] to the action undertaken and the need, unsatisfied, to have broken the localism of the operational theatre, since it was not reflected or strongly extended to the rest of the national geography.

The popular movement began to recover from this defeat towards the end of 1991 with the combative anti-government presence of the students in the streets.

Finally, the 4F revealed to the country the total exhaustion of the system, whose ruling State appears to dissolve in its own reigning circumstances, when the last bastion of support that outlined an apparent unity, such as the Armed Forces enters into crisis and nine army battalions nationwide produce the failed coup d'état, which, however, shocked national and continental political consciousness.

From this moment on, Venezuela truly is another. It enters a pre-revolutionary period and the public powers that make up the essence of the State itself remain in the management of society in such a way that we could, graphically, classify it as a situation whose power maintains an unstable equilibrium; national political consciousness has grown; the loss of prestige of the public powers and its entourage, parties and unions in general, has increased enormously; the nation demands new powers outside the context that has served it as a framework in these 34 years, both the quartermasters of the government and the opposition and the most advanced levels of Venezuelan society are preparing to face new forms of struggle and assume the vanguard in the leadership of the revolutionary process in this stage of political-social clarification.

There are tendencies that are possibly moving towards (re)groupings and they sprout outlines of programs opposed to official policies of political-economic dependency and also different from the proposals of the parties of status, both those that support the Government and those that exercise the opposition.

However, we still suffer from flaws that can become strategic dangers to ensure that the definitive way out is framed politically, socially and economically for the real benefit of the great majorities. Among these flaws, we can observe the following:

• Lack of independence of the popular masses to produce their mobilization in a constant and sustained manner, which may be able to drive national sentiment toward the desire for a way out that is popular and radical.

• Still is a victim of the ancestral messianic hope that someone comes to solve their problems.

• The various sectors and factors of struggle remain dispersed without reaching a unity of purpose, a joint decision to maintain and develop continuous action that expresses their insurmountable will to achieve a new political and social system for the country.

• All of the above results in the yet persistent absence of a single center of management that could be able to approximate the resolution of the battles by bearing towards the fundamental objective and of its greatest interest: to overthrow the public powers to begin to create new ones.

Faced with the political weakness described, other dangers become[9] palpable that could distort the political feelings of the Venezuelan nation, seeking immediate results like those offered by Dr. Caldera and the reformist bloc, who having played a relevant role in a specific moment of the outbreak and development of the current crisis, were viewed positively because they corresponded, at that time, with the advanced positions within the political struggles of the national conglomerate. Six months after those extraordinary events occurred, the preaching of Dr. Caldera and other national political spokespeople became a siren’s song, diverting the possibilities of a revolutionary way out. The same would happen with the call for a constituent assembly, if that call comes from the same political sectors guilty of the situation that we suffer.

They could also transform important dangers to achieve the purposes demanded by the Venezuelan nation, the general isolation or partial syndicalism of some sectors among workers. The scattering of the efforts of the popular neighbourhoods that, due to their just political aspirations to take a leading role for these changes, exaggerate an organizational horizontality in moments of revolutionary boom that prevents them from orienting and coordinating their immense efforts in the daily struggles for their political, economic, and social demands, towards the fundamental objective of the entire Venezuelan nation: the creation of a new State. With this behavior, the leaders of the neighborhoods confuse the strategic development of this new State, which we could call commoner, because its fate will depend on the prosperity of the communities and for which this horizontality will be essential in the full and daily exercise of sovereignty. But at the moment of the peak of the revolutionary struggle, the tactical need arises to create an authority to give unique management to the process, that is to say, in the period of generalized struggle for profound changes, the appearance of a central leadership will be vital in order to be able to lead it to the expected conclusion and not dilute it as the shock of [the Caracazo] did.

Another danger would be to wait for pure military action and then come out in support of it, because if there is no awareness of the process and the fundamental objectives, the final outcome will hardly give rise to a revolutionary and popular exit to the crisis, especially if it sneaks in, in the midst of the political crisis, the classic putschist pronouncement of the traditional sectors of the right. The achievement of this commoner State will be the political basis for overcoming the current crisis, from the national, patriotic and Bolivarian points of view, and will serve as a proposition for continental integration, to rescue and strengthen our identity. Similarly, it will also be a formidable retaining wall to the neocolonial pretensions and advances of North American imperialism. This danger will be averted when we are clear about the fundamental guidelines of the new State, the particular elements of a minimal and radical program that points towards the previous objective to generate the profound changes that Venezuelan society craves at all levels and that has emerged from the heat of social struggles, a team of men, capable of putting them into practice, tactically directing the entire society or the fundamental part of it, in this period of generalized struggle for revolutionary changes. In this sense, the birth of the Venezuelan Popular Insurgency presents itself as a new political factor in these ideological and practical struggles, [thus] contributing in this way with the political orientation for the achievement of the proposed task and opting for its participation in the management of the current national process of revolutionary changes.

Not understanding the previous anxieties would deepen the social breakup in such a way that the enemy would make its way through said breakup to reach the electoral process in which they would invest all the coercive resources of the system, preparing an appropriate solution to the crisis suitable to the interests of the dominant classes internally and of total surrender to the voracity of transnational capital. Meanwhile, through the winning candidate, they would make some concessions to gain time that allows them to consolidate national and foreign monopolistic factors of production.

A final danger could be characterized as the expression of sectarian, hegemonic, and isolationist attitudes of any sector interested in these changes, to ignore the importance that all other concerned sectors play in the Development of the various activities within the revolutionary process, to all other sectors equally committed and also interested in this fight, such as: manual and intellectual workers, employed or not, students, peasant farmers, indigenous people, unions; professional unions, small and medium-sized agricultural and industrial producer unions; industrial sectors with patriotic and progressive consciousness, progressive religious sectors; patriotic soldiers and organized communities in both cities and towns. This unhealthy sectarianism could have its maximum expression in vanguardist actions that would further isolate the possibilities of incorporating the suffering majorities of the country into the transformative struggles of our society.

It is necessary, therefore, to join forces to strengthen the insurgent struggle of Venezuelan society, which leads to the overthrow of the current State, which gives way to the Development of a minimum program of patriotic content, of an anti-imperialist character and a reaffirmation of our people, with a continentalist vocation and which is dedicated to orienting immediate solutions to the most serious political, social and economic problems currently suffered by the Venezuelan majority, integrating all the components of our nation, so that they participate directly in the solution of its own problems, sowing the minimum collective essential for the creation of the new State, facilitating Venezuela's definitive march along paths of progress and material and spiritual well-being [bienestar].

These purposes contributed to the formation of a political tendency clearly differentiated from the reactionary, reformist, populist, immediatist, messianic, and opportunist tendencies that have done so much damage to the struggles of our people, whose objective is to contribute with its presence in national life to deepen further the political and social conquests of the Venezuelan people. Thus, we will try to give our contribution to the revolutionary leadership of the political process that our country is experiencing and, consequently, we will launch ourselves to the conquest of a prominent position in the concrete and real leadership of said process. As was noted above, this tendency adopts the name of Bolivarian Popular Insurgency. Every civil, military and religious patriot can participate in it, who takes as their aim (without being exclusive) the programmatic guidelines expressed below, who is not guilty of crimes against sovereignty, against society, against human rights, against the environment, of corruption or of drug trafficking.

This tendency is not a political party, nor a front, nor an opportunist movement. It is a conscious alliance among social and popular sectors, advanced political factors and patriotic individuals, with the sole purpose of overthrowing the current political system, creating a new State, much more democratic, with an iron yet broad will to persevere in the fight and be the driving force of the fundamental social unity that guarantees success and with a firm decision not to change course until seeing a satisfactory solution to the current crisis, with the direct participation of the entire nation. Starting from the overthrow of the current public powers, a government of popular insurgency will direct the process until the creation of the new commoner State is achieved, developing the expansion of democracy to make way for the creation of the IV Insurgent and Bolivarian Republic.

The basic guidelines of this program of dignity, honesty, and reconstruction can be summarized as follows:

• In the political sphere, we agree on a convergence of civil, religious, and military sectors, which shall sow the seeds to fight for a new institutionality whose guiding principle will be the expansion of democracy, whereby the communities assume State powers, which will administratively entail the global transformation of the Venezuelan State and socially the real exercise of sovereignty on the part of society through communal powers.

• In the social sphere, it will confront the main problem of security, whose first instances will be rooted in the community itself when assuming sovereign functions at its respective level. It will liquidate administrative corruption and proceed with the extradition, imprisonment, and expropriation of the assets of the corrupt. For justice, it will apply a social criterion, consistent with the strengthening of the new State and not elitist as the aberrant action of the current courts has been conceptually and practically. It will immediately apply itself to facing educational, health, and environmental problems.

• In the economic sphere, it will orient the national economy not on the State paternalism that must be definitively eradicated. General social well-being will be the referent for growth and development and not the “economic indices” in which IMF policy casts performance. Urgent and concrete measures will be taken to resolve the problem of the fiscal deficit: a wealth-producing program, viable for the participation of large social contingents with some important plans, both public and private, which, supported by cooperative and self-managed modalities, would substantially reduce state bureaucracy; luxury purchases will be restricted. The discussion about the restructuring of the external debt will be reconsidered, which is in the soul of all current political classes and begins to be an anxiety of international economic and political factors. There will be a relentless war against speculators, exemplary punishment for the corrupt, and guaranteeing stable prices for essential products. Financially, measures will be taken to democratize the use of commodity-money based on small and medium-sized industry and on agro-industrial projects. Provisionally, strict exchange control will be established and nationals who have withdrawn their capital in foreign currencies will be ordered to repatriate those financial resources, increasing investment in the strategic direction of producing food, science, and dignity. Fundamentally, we will develop these plans relying on our own resources.

• In the international sphere, its orientation will be cooperation, mutual respect, non-interventionist, for the self-determination of peoples and solidarity with the liberation struggle of nationalities subjected to interests foreign to their authentic needs. The deepening of Latin American integration with our complementary economies, the expansion of our knowledge, continentally speaking, and the understanding of our ethnic and cultural particularities through the diffusion of folkloric, artistic, and educational expressions will be a priority. Our diplomacy will be as open as possible. The commitments and agreements, legally contracted, that does not diminish the development of our plans will be ratified; the others will be reviewed.

These criteria and this program rethink the discussion of the forms of struggle, since the system, apart from mocking national sentiment by not fulfilling any formulated promises, denies the free expression of thought, denies the democratic game of popular mobilizations to assemble freely; it denies the expression and exercise of popular sovereignty by preventing the nation from speaking out on the present public powers, restricting in such a way its right to daily struggle that forces, in tactical considerations, to contemplate the possibility of preparing and opportunely calling a general strike to rescue the rights that have been persistently violated.

It must be taken into account that this is an attempt at a provisional government for which general lines are drawn, in such a way that with the country's own participation the new forms of government, State and political-social action of Venezuelan society will be clearly outlined so that they serve then, and only then, as a frame of reference on which the future constituent assembly, validating the new way of being and doing the nation, shapes the new Constitution in which the philosophical principles will be specified, political and ethical principles of a broader democracy that will give theoretical basis and real content to the IV Insurgent Republic.

The way out of the crisis is the people in power!

For a government of popular insurgency!

Let's conquer sovereignty and national dignity!

Let's face repression with mobilization and new ways of fighting!

Let's prepare for the general strike!

Kléber Ramírez Rojas

Caracas, 30 August 1992

Notes

[1] Antillano, Andrés. “La lucha por el reconocimiento y la inclusión en los barrios populares: la experiencia de los Comités de Tierras Urbanas.” Revista Venezolana de Economía y Ciencias Sociales 11, no. 3 (September 2005): 207; Maya, Margarita López. “Participación y poder popular en Venezuela: antes y ahora.” Revista Historia 3, no. 3 (2014): 65.

[2] Coordinadora Simón Bolívar. “Kleber Ramírez Rojas: A 22 años de tu Siembra, los camaradas de la CSB te decimos Presente.” Aporrea, November 10, 2020. https://www.aporrea.org/cultura/a297129.html.

[3] Maher, Geo. “Building the Commune: Insurgent Government, Communal State.” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 4 (October 1, 2014): 791–806. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-2803657.

[4] Ramírez Rojas, Kléber. Historia documental del 4 de Febrero. February and April Collection. Caracas, Venezuela: El perro y la rana, 2022, 25.

[5]  See Ramírez Rojas, 2022; Maher, 2014, 804.

[6]  See Maher, 2014, p.799-800; Ramírez Rojas, 2022, 67.

[7] Pascual Marquina, Cira. “Chavez, a Mirror of the People: A Conversation with Edgar Perez | MR Online.” MRonline, June 18, 2019. https://mronline.org/2019/06/18/chavez-a-mirror-of-the-people-a-conversation-with-edgar-perez/.

[8] See De Angelis, Massimo. Omnia Sunt Communia: On the Commons and the Transformation to Postcapitalism. London, England: Zed Books, 2017; Broumas, Antonios. “Commons’ Movements and ‘Progressive’ Governments as Dual Power: The Potential for Social Transformation in Europe.” Capital & Class 42, no. 2 (June 2018): 229–51. https://doi.org/10.1177/0309816817692124; Federici, Silvia, and George Caffentzis. “Commons against and beyond Capitalism.” In Re-Enchanting the World: Feminism and the Politics of the Commons, by Silvia Federici. Oakland: PM Press, 2018; Foster, John Bellamy. “Monthly Review | Chávez and the Communal State.” Monthly Review (blog), April 1, 2015. https://monthlyreview.org/2015/04/01/chavez-and-the-communal-state/; Gilbert, Chris. “Monthly Review | Mészáros and Chávez: The Philosopher and the Llanero.” Monthly Review (blog), June 1, 2022. https://monthlyreview.org/2022/06/01/meszaros-and-chavez-the-philosopher-and-the-llanero/; Gilbert, Chris. Commune or Nothing!: Venezuela’s Communal Movement and Its Socialist Project. Monthly Review Press, 2023.

[9] Here Ramírez Rojas is referring to definite ideological and external changes.

Trump Terror, Complicit Local Leadership, and the Assault Against Southeast D.C.

[PIctured: Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller. Photo Credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images]

By Oliver Robinson

On March 27, 2025, Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing the “Safe and Beautiful” federal task force for Washington, DC. Framed as a public safety and beautification campaign, the initiative is led by his Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller—a figure known for his hardline white nationalist policies. Under the guise of civic improvement, this task force seeks to further entrench surveillance, policing, and state control over DC’s most marginalized communities, particularly Black working-class residents in the Southeast neighborhood.

The order calls for a rapid expansion of federal law enforcement in the city, heightened pretrial detention, aggressive encampment clearances, increased immigration raids, and expedited licensing for concealed carry weapons—available, in Trump’s words, to “law-abiding citizens.” But beneath this language lies a clear agenda: consolidate white power, criminalize poverty, and militarize public space.

The expedited concealed carry provision is a particularly dangerous signal. It encourages white, affluent residents to arm themselves, invoking a vigilante ethos reminiscent of colonial settler militias. “Law-abiding” is not a neutral term; it encodes race, class, and political allegiance. The invitation to arm and police the city is not extended to all residents—it is targeted toward those who benefit from and uphold the existing racial and economic order. This strategy turns ordinary citizens into foot soldiers of state repression, authorizing them to defend property and privilege against imagined threats posed by the presence of poor Black people.

This moment is not new—it is a continuation of a long-standing colonial tradition in U.S. governance. Settler colonialism has always relied on deputizing white civilians to enforce racial boundaries and defend elite interests. From slave patrols to Jim Crow possees to “stand your ground” laws, white citizens have been authorized to use violence in defense of a racialized social order.

During the 2020 George Floyd uprisings, we saw armed civilians collaborating with police departments across the country, using protest as a pretext for violent reassertion of racial control. Trump’s current order revives that logic, cloaked in language about safety and civic pride. It asserts that DC’s white and wealthy wards must be secured, and the presence of Black working-class people is rendered not only undesirable, but criminal.

To be clear, Trump’s order did not introduce these policies from scratch—they merely formalized and expanded practices already embraced by the DC government. Under Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Council, the city has long adopted a punitive, repressive approach to poverty and displacement. The 2024 Secure DC Omnibus Crime Bill expanded pretrial detention, granting judges more discretion to incarcerate individuals before trial based on vague predictions of risk. This has led to a surge in jail populations, disproportionately affecting Black residents in Southeast DC.  The more recently proposed DC Peace Plan, would further increase police funding and usher in a permanent expansion of pretrial detention. Excessive and arbitrary pretrial detention has long been considered a violation of international human rights.

Even before the federal task force was launched, the city conducted aggressive encampment sweeps under the pretense of public health, displacing unhoused residents without providing stable alternatives. Transit police began cracking down on fare evasion in December 2024, further criminalizing the daily survival of low-income riders. Last week, D.C. launched a new juvenile crime unit, a measure likely to increase the criminalization and harassment of D.C. youth. These moves were not incidental—they reflected a strategic consensus between local and federal actors on policing the poor.

In effect, DC’s local leadership did Trump’s bidding before this executive order.. The same Democratic officials who posture as defenders of the city against federal overreach have in practice laid the groundwork for a full-scale assault on Southeast DC. The repression we are seeing now is not a clash between federal authoritarianism and local progressivism—it is a collaboration.

At the heart of this repression lies a profound contradiction: the state punishes people not for what they have done, but for what they lack. The homeless are not criminalized for actions, but for existing without shelter. Fare evaders are not punished for theft, but for poverty. Those detained pretrial are not convicted criminals, but people who cannot afford bail or who the court deems “risky” based on opaque metrics.

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The city’s approach treats deprivation as deviance. It does not address the root causes of poverty—joblessness, gentrification, structural racism—but instead targets the visible signs of social failure. The presence of unhoused people in parks, the visibility of mental health crises on public transportation, the survival economies people turn to when excluded from formal labor—these are not treated as social emergencies, but as threats to be removed.

In this system, the absence of resources becomes grounds for incarceration. Hunger is met with handcuffs. Displacement is met with surveillance. The logic of colonial control defines who is allowed to exist in the city and under what terms. Poor and working-class Black people are not only excluded from the city’s prosperity—they are blamed for disrupting its image.

For decades, political leaders have framed DC statehood as a solution to federal intrusion and Home Rule as democratic protection for DC residents. But these crises reveal the hollowness of those positions. The problem is not merely that DC lacks representation—it’s that its elected representatives are themselves deeply implicated in maintaining the status quo.

Statehood will not resolve the crisis when local officials already embrace draconian policies. Home Rule means little when the city uses its autonomy to displace the poor and protect real estate interests. Democratic leadership in DC has repeatedly shown that it is more invested in attracting capital than in defending communities. The problem is not just who governs—it’s how they govern, and on whose behalf.

Trump’s agenda did not descend on DC as a foreign imposition. It emerged from a bipartisan consensus that treats working-class Black life as disposable. Statehood might change the city’s formal status, but it won’t transform the deeper power structures that define who is safe, who is served, and who is sacrificed.

True safety will not come from more police, more surveillance, or more statehood. It will come from collective self-determination and community resilience. We must build power from below—through organizing, mutual aid, and political education—to challenge the systems that have abandoned and targeted us.

Survival programs are a cornerstone of this effort. Rooted in the legacy of the Black Panther Party, survival programs meet people’s immediate needs while raising consciousness about the systems that produce those needs in the first place. This means setting up community-run food distribution, free clinics, tenants’ unions, legal defense funds, and harm reduction centers. It means creating networks of care that don’t rely on the nonprofit industrial complex or city contracts, but are autonomous and accountable to the people they serve.

Popular education campaigns are equally essential. Communities must understand not just the what of these policies, but the why—why homelessness is punished instead of solved, why police budgets grow while schools crumble, why poor Black neighborhoods are always the ones targeted. Education must be participatory, rooted in raising political consciousness, and focused on action. It is not enough to critique the system—we must equip people to change it.

Political independence is also key. Communities must stop relying on corporate-backed candidates who claim progressive values but govern through repression. Instead, we must build independent coalitions and decision making structures that challenge the political establishment, not negotiate with it. 

The struggle for Southeast DC is a struggle against colonial control. It is not just about resisting Trump or criticizing Bowser—it is about overturning the entire arrangement that treats Black working-class communities as disposable. We are not fighting for inclusion in a system built on our exclusion. We are fighting to dismantle that system and build something new.

DC will not be saved by statehood. It will not be redeemed by Democratic majorities. Its liberation will come from the people who have always borne the brunt of state violence—and who continue to organize, resist, and imagine another world. The task ahead is not only to survive, but to fight—and to win.