What is Political Ecology?

[Pictured: The world’s biggest eco-city in development, Tianjin Eco-city will be around half the size of Manhattan. (Copyright: Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city Development and Investment)]

By The Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School

Republished from Morningstar.

* Marx and Engels incorporated in their writings a critique of the way that capitalism destroys the environment but it is only in the last half century that environmental concerns have become an integral part of the fight for socialism, writes the Marx Memorial Library and Workers’ School.*

“What cared the Spanish planters in Cuba, who burned down forests on the slopes of the mountains and obtained from the ashes sufficient fertiliser for one generation of very highly profitable coffee trees — what cared they that the heavy tropical rainfall afterwards washed away the unprotected upper stratum of the soil, leaving behind only bare rock! In relation to nature, as to society, the present mode of production is predominantly concerned only about the immediate, the most tangible result; and then surprise is expressed that the more remote effects of actions directed to this end turn out to be quite different, are mostly quite the opposite in character.”

- Friedrich Engels, 1876; The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Human.

Karl Marx’s monumental work Capital is subtitled “a critique of political economy” — not (merely) “a critique of economics” or “a critique of capitalist economics;” Capital is so much more than that. It is a devastating critique of capitalism itself; how it functions and why it must be changed.

So what about “political ecology”? It’s now over 50 years since the publication of German Marxist playwright, poet and philosopher Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s A Critique of Political Ecology — one of a number of mileposts in the growing awareness amongst socialists that capitalism is inherently destructive of the environment to the extent — as we now know — that it threatens the future of our planet and our existence as a species.

The term “political ecology” was first used in 1935 in a (non-Marxist, largely apolitical) Nature Ramblings column in a US popular science weekly, The Science News-Letter. It was later popularised by the Marxist anthropologist Eric Wolf in a study of the relationship between local inheritance and ownership practices and the wider environment and was subsequently used by other academics.

However Enzensberger was the first to develop the concept in a wider political frame in relation to an emerging awareness of global ecological crisis. Enzensberger challenged the then (1974) largely apolitical and indeed, reactionary nature of the nascent “ecology movement” in the West, and also the (then) neglect of environmental issues within much Marxist discourse.

Yet Marx and Engels both paid attention to ecological issues in their writings. One concern then was the impact of capitalist agriculture on soil health and of the failure to recycle sewage on water quality. They also challenged the claim of Thomas Malthus (a prominent economist for the East India Company, then Britain’s biggest multinational company) argument that “civilised society” was threatened by overpopulation — specifically the working classes producing too many children.

That argument resurfaced a century later in William Vogt’s bestseller Road to Survival (published the same year as Orwell’s 1984) which argued that unless the “untrammelled copulation” of “spawning millions” was brought to an end, “we might as well give up the struggle.” Vogt made his political position quite clear, declaring that it was necessary to get rid of the “sort of thinking […] that leads to the writing and acceptance of documents like the Communist Manifesto […] it tricks Man into seeking political and/or economic solutions.”

Twenty years later, as recognition of the problems of world hunger was beginning to be accompanied by a wider awareness of global environmental issues, Garret Hardin’s classic essay The Tragedy of the Commons (1968) advocated “mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon,” arguing that “fortunate minorities must act as the trustees of a civilisation that is threatened by uninformed good intentions.” The “fortunate minorities” were of course the elites of “western” civilisation and the “uninformed good intentions” those of aid agencies and others who sought to alleviate the position of the poor, particularly in “developing” countries.

That argument was rubbished by the Marxist biologist Barry Commoner in his 1971 best seller, The Closing Circle. Commoner showed that it was poverty that caused overpopulation, not the other way around.

By this time public awareness of the complexity of human interactions with nature and understanding that something was wrong had been boosted by the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962).

Carson demonstrated the downside of the “green revolution” and in particular how pesticides used in agriculture found their way into the food chain, poisoning species and disrupting ecosystems. A marine biologist, Carson was not a declared Marxist though she was accused of being “probably a communist” and her work is a good example of a dialectical analysis of the consequences of industrial agriculture.

These arguments were brought to a head by the publication in 1972 of the Limits to Growth — a computer simulation of the future of humanity funded by three second-rank multinationals; Fiat, Olivetti and Volkswagen, through the Club of Rome — an “invisible college” think tank of academics, politicians and business representatives.

The simulation was critiqued by a team at the Science Policy Research Unit at Sussex University, under its director, Chris Freeman (a Marxist) who showed that computer predictions depended on the political, as well as technical, assumptions on which they were based.

The debate was taken up within the left, including the Morning Star and in a series of 1974 articles in Marxism Today. Since then the environment has become an increasingly important issue for all socialists.

So: what is “political ecology”? The answer is: it’s a battlefield, both in theory and practice.

On one side, it’s big business and its champions. For the apologists of ongoing capital accumulation, it’s using ecological jargon to greenwash their activities while boosting their sales and profits; it’s our wonderful government doing its best to help save the planet (we jest). It’s also a major field of research dominated by academic publishing corporations like Elsevier that also service the fossil fuel industry.

On the other, it ranges from courageous Just Stop Oil activists challenging the energy monopolies through an emerging “environmental proletariat” (especially in the global South) for whom economic and environmental struggles are central to survival, to China which, despite operating in a hostile world where to survive it has to “beat the West” at its own game, is today arguably leading the world in new “green” technologies.

Today a Marxist political ecology is as central to radical theory and action — to both interpreting and changing the world — as is a Marxist political economy. Enzensberger distanced himself from Marxism and from socialist politics in his later years, but his 1974 essay put the issue as well as anyone. Let’s give him the last word:

“… capitalist societies have probably thrown away the chance of realising Marx’s project for the reconciliation of humans and nature. The productive forces which bourgeois society has unleashed have been caught up with and overtaken by the destructive powers released at the same time. The highly industrialised countries of the West will not be alone in paying the price for the revolution that never happened. The fight against want is an inheritance they leave to all humankind, even in those areas where humankind survives the catastrophe. Socialism, which was once a promise of liberation, has become a question of survival.”

Earlier answers (this is number 131), on Marx and Engels’ own writings on ecology and the “metabolic rift,” on climate change, on population and economic growth, on Marxist ethics and on the environment as a “second contradiction” of capitalism can be found on the Marx Memorial Library’s ‘Full Marx’ archive on https://tinyurl.com/FullMarx/. 

The Decline and Fall of the Spectacle-Commodity Economy (1965)

By Situationist International

This was originally published by Situationist International in December of 1965. “Le déclin et la chute de l’économie spectaculaire-marchande” was immediately translated into English and circulated in England and the United States. The French version was reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10 (Paris, March 1966). Unsigned tract originally translated into English by Donald-Nicholson Smith, distributed in the USA in December 1965 reprinted by Internationale Situationniste #10 (March 1966).

August 13–16, 1965, the blacks of Los Angeles revolted. An incident between traffic police and pedestrians developed into two days of spontaneous riots. Despite increasing reinforcements, the forces of order were unable to regain control of the streets. By the third day the blacks had armed themselves by looting accessible gun stores, enabling them to fire even on police helicopters. It took thousands of police and soldiers, including an entire infantry division supported by tanks, to confine the riot to the Watts area, and several more days of street fighting to finally bring it under control. Stores were massively plundered and many were burned. Official sources listed 32 dead (including 27 blacks), more than 800 wounded and 3000 arrests.

Reactions from all sides were most revealing: a revolutionary event, by bringing existing problems into the open, provokes its opponents into an unhabitual lucidity. Police Chief William Parker, for example, rejected all the major black organizations’ offers of mediation, correctly asserting: “These rioters don’t have any leaders.” Since the blacks no longer had any leaders, it was the moment of truth for both sides. What did one of those unemployed leaders, NAACP general secretary Roy Wilkins, have to say? He declared that the riot “should be put down with all necessary force.” And Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre, who protested loudly, did not protest against the violence of the repression, which one might have supposed the most tactful policy at a time when the Roman Church is modernizing its image; he denounced “this premeditated revolt against the rights of one’s neighbor and against respect for law and order,” calling on Catholics to oppose the looting and “this violence without any apparent justification.” And all those who went so far as to recognize the “apparent justifications” of the rage of the Los Angeles blacks (but never their real ones), all the ideologists and “spokesmen” of the vacuous international Left, deplored the irresponsibility, the disorder, the looting (especially the fact that arms and alcohol were the first targets) and the 2000 fires with which the blacks lit up their battle and their ball. But who has defended the Los Angeles rioters in the terms they deserve? We will. Let the economists fret over the $27 million lost, and the city planners sigh over one of their most beautiful supermarkets gone up in smoke, and McIntyre blubber over his slain deputy sheriff. Let the sociologists bemoan the absurdity and intoxication of this rebellion. The role of a revolutionary publication is not only to justify the Los Angeles insurgents, but to help elucidate their perspectives, to explain theoretically the truth for which such practical action expresses the search.

In Algiers in July 1965, following Boumédienne’s coup d’état, the situationists issued an Address to the Algerians and to revolutionaries all over the world which interpreted conditions in Algeria and the rest of the world as a whole. Among other examples we mentioned the movement of the American blacks, stating that if it could “assert itself incisively” it would unmask the contradictions of the most advanced capitalist system. Five weeks later this incisiveness was in the streets. Modern theoretical criticism of modern society and criticism in acts of the same society already coexist; still separated but both advancing toward the same realities, both talking about the same thing. These two critiques are mutually explanatory, and neither can be understood without the other. Our theory of “survival” and of “the spectacle” is illuminated and verified by these actions which are so incomprehensible to American false consciousness. One day these actions will in turn be illuminated by this theory.

Until the Watts explosion, black civil rights demonstrations had been kept by their leaders within the limits of a legal system that tolerates the most appalling violence on the part of the police and the racists — as in last March’s march on Montgomery, Alabama. Even after the latter scandal, a discreet agreement between the federal government, Governor Wallace and Martin Luther King led the Selma marchers on March 10 to stand back at the first police warning, in dignity and prayer. The confrontation expected by the demonstrators was reduced to a mere spectacle of a potential confrontation. In that moment nonviolence reached the pitiful limit of its courage: first you expose yourself to the enemy’s blows, then you push your moral nobility to the point of sparing him the trouble of using any more force. But the main point is that the civil rights movement only addressed legal problems by legal means. It is logical to make legal appeals regarding legal questions. What is irrational is to appeal legally against a blatant illegality as if it was a mere oversight that would be corrected if pointed out. It is obvious that the crude and glaring illegality from which blacks still suffer in many American states has its roots in a socioeconomic contradiction that is not within the scope of existing laws, and that no future judicial law will be able to get rid of this contradiction in the face of the more fundamental laws of this society. What American blacks are really daring to demand is the right to really live, and in the final analysis this requires nothing less than the total subversion of this society. This becomes increasingly evident as blacks in their everyday lives find themselves forced to use increasingly subversive methods. The issue is no longer the condition of American blacks, but the condition of America, which merely happens to find its first expression among the blacks. The Watts riot was not a racial conflict: the rioters left alone the whites that were in their path, attacking only the white policemen, while on the other hand black solidarity did not extend to black store-owners or even to black car-drivers. Martin Luther King himself had to admit that the revolt went beyond the limits of his specialty. Speaking in Paris last October, he said: “This was not a race riot. It was a class riot.”

The Los Angeles rebellion was a rebellion against the commodity, against the world of the commodity in which worker-consumers are hierarchically subordinated to commodity standards. Like the young delinquents of all the advanced countries, but more radically because they are part of a class without a future, a sector of the proletariat unable to believe in any significant chance of integration or promotion, the Los Angeles blacks take modern capitalist propaganda, its publicity of abundance, literally. They want to possess now all the objects shown and abstractly accessible, because they want to use them. In this way they are challenging their exchange-value, the commodity reality which molds them and marshals them to its own ends, and which has preselected everything. Through theft and gift they rediscover a use that immediately refutes the oppressive rationality of the commodity, revealing its relations and even its production to be arbitrary and unnecessary. The looting of the Watts district was the most direct realization of the distorted principle: “To each according to their false needs” — needs determined and produced by the economic system which the very act of looting rejects. But once the vaunted abundance is taken at face value and directly seized, instead of being eternally pursued in the rat-race of alienated labor and increasing unmet social needs, real desires begin to be expressed in festive celebration, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction. People who destroy commodities show their human superiority over commodities. They stop submitting to the arbitrary forms that distortedly reflect their real needs. The flames of Watts consummated the system of consumption. The theft of large refrigerators by people with no electricity, or with their electricity cut off, is the best image of the lie of affluence transformed into a truth in play. Once it is no longer bought, the commodity lies open to criticism and alteration, whatever particular form it may take. Only when it is paid for with money is it respected as an admirable fetish, as a symbol of status within the world of survival.

Looting is a natural response to the unnatural and inhuman society of commodity abundance. It instantly undermines the commodity as such, and it also exposes what the commodity ultimately implies: the army, the police and the other specialized detachments of the state’s monopoly of armed violence. What is a policeman? He is the active servant of the commodity, the man in complete submission to the commodity, whose job it is to ensure that a given product of human labor remains a commodity, with the magical property of having to be paid for, instead of becoming a mere refrigerator or rifle — a passive, inanimate object, subject to anyone who comes along to make use of it. In rejecting the humiliation of being subject to police, the blacks are at the same time rejecting the humiliation of being subject to commodities. The Watts youth, having no future in market terms, grasped another quality of the present, and that quality was so incontestable and irresistible that it drew in the whole population — women, children, and even sociologists who happened to be on the scene. Bobbi Hollon, a young black sociologist of the neighborhood, had this to say to the Herald Tribune in October: “Before, people were ashamed to say they came from Watts. They’d mumble it. Now they say it with pride. Boys who used to go around with their shirts open to the waist, and who’d have cut you to pieces in half a second, showed up here every morning at seven o’clock to organize the distribution of food. Of course, it’s no use pretending that food wasn’t looted.... All that Christian blah has been used too long against blacks. These people could loot for ten years and they wouldn’t get back half the money those stores have stolen from them over all these years.... Me, I’m only a little black girl.” Bobbi Hollon, who has sworn never to wash off the blood that splashed on her sandals during the rioting, adds: “Now the whole world is watching Watts.”

How do people make history under conditions designed to dissuade them from intervening in it? Los Angeles blacks are better paid than any others in the United States, but they are also the most separated from the California superopulence that is flaunted all around them. Hollywood, the pole of the global spectacle, is right next door. They are promised that, with patience, they will join in America’s prosperity, but they come to see that this prosperity is not a fixed state but an endless ladder. The higher they climb, the farther they get from the top, because they start off disadvantaged, because they are less qualified and thus more numerous among the unemployed, and finally because the hierarchy that crushes them is not based on economic buying power alone: they are also treated as inherently inferior in every area of daily life by the customs and prejudices of a society in which all human power is based on buying power. Just as the human riches of the American blacks are despised and treated as criminal, monetary riches will never make them completely acceptable in America’s alienated society: individual wealth will only make a rich nigger because blacks as a whole must represent poverty in a society of hierarchized wealth. Every witness noted the cry proclaiming the global significance of the uprising: “This is a black revolution and we want the world to know it!” Freedom Now is the password of all the revolutions of history, but now for the first time the problem is not to overcome scarcity, but to master material abundance according to new principles. Mastering abundance is not just changing the way it is shared out, but totally reorienting it. This is the first step of a vast, all-embracing struggle.

The blacks are not alone in their struggle, because a new proletarian consciousness (the consciousness that they are not at all the masters of their own activities, of their own lives) is developing in America among strata which in their rejection of modern capitalism resemble the blacks. It was, in fact, the first phase of the black struggle which happened to be the signal for the more general movement of contestation that is now spreading. In December 1964 the students of Berkeley, harassed for their participation in the civil rights movement, initiated a strike [1] [the FSM] challenging the functioning of California’s “multiversity” and ultimately calling into question the entire American social system in which they are being programmed to play such a passive role. The spectacle promptly responded with exposés of widespread student drinking, drug use and sexual immorality — the same activities for which blacks have long been reproached. This generation of students has gone on to invent a new form of struggle against the dominant spectacle, the teach-in, a form taken up October 20 in Great Britain at the University of Edinburgh during the Rhodesian crisis. This obviously primitive and imperfect form represents the stage at which people refuse to confine their discussion of problems within academic limits or fixed time periods; the stage when they strive to pursue issues to their ultimate consequences and are thus led to practical activity. The same month tens of thousands of anti-Vietnam war demonstrators appeared in the streets of Berkeley and New York, their cries echoing those of the Watts rioters: “Get out of our district and out of Vietnam!” Becoming more radical, many of the whites are finally going outside the law: “courses” are given on how to hoodwink army recruiting boards (Le Monde, 19 October 1965) and draft cards are burned in front of television cameras. In the affluent society disgust is being expressed for this affluence and for its price. The spectacle is being spat on by an advanced sector whose autonomous activity denies its values. The classical proletariat, to the very extent to which it had been provisionally integrated into the capitalist system, had itself failed to integrate the blacks (several Los Angeles unions refused blacks until 1959); now the blacks are the rallying point for all those who refuse the logic of this integration into capitalism, which is all that the promise of racial integration amounts to. Comfort will never be comfortable enough for those who seek what is not on the market, what in fact the market specifically eliminates. The level attained by the technology of the most privileged becomes an insult, and one more easily grasped and resented than is that most fundamental insult: reification. The Los Angeles rebellion is the first in history to justify itself with the argument that there was no air conditioning during a heat wave.

The American blacks have their own particular spectacle, their own black newspapers, magazines and stars, and if they are rejecting it in disgust as a fraud and as an expression of their humiliation, it is because they see it as a minority spectacle, a mere appendage of a general spectacle. Recognizing that their own spectacle of desirable consumption is a colony of the white one enables them to see more quickly through the falsehood of the whole economic-cultural spectacle. By wanting to participate really and immediately in the affluence that is the official value of every American, they are really demanding the egalitarian actualization of the American spectacle of everyday life — they are demanding that the half-heavenly, half-earthly values of the spectacle be put to the test. But it is in the nature of the spectacle that it cannot be actualized either immediately or equally, not even for the whites. (The blacks in fact function as a perfect spectacular object-lesson: the threat of falling into such wretchedness spurs others on in the rat-race.) In taking the capitalist spectacle at its face value, the blacks are already rejecting the spectacle itself. The spectacle is a drug for slaves. It is designed not to be taken literally, but to be followed from just out of reach; when this separation is eliminated, the hoax is revealed. In the United States today the whites are enslaved to the commodity while the blacks are negating it. The blacks are asking for more than the whites — this is the core of a problem that has no solution except the dissolution of the white social system. This is why those whites who want to escape their own slavery must first of all rally to the black revolt — not, obviously, in racial solidarity, but in a joint global rejection of the commodity and of the state. The economic and psychological distance between blacks and whites enables blacks to see white consumers for what they are, and their justified contempt for whites develops into a contempt for passive consumers in general. The whites who reject this role have no chance unless they link their struggle more and more to that of the blacks, uncovering its most fundamental implications and supporting them all the way. If, with the radicalization of the struggle, such a convergence is not sustained, black nationalist tendencies will be reinforced, leading to the futile interethnic antagonism so characteristic of the old society. Mutual slaughter is the other possible outcome of the present situation, once resignation is no longer tolerable.

The attempts to build a separatist or pro-African black nationalism are dreams giving no answer to the real oppression. The American blacks have no fatherland. They are in their own country and they are alienated. So are the rest of the population, but the blacks are aware of it. In this sense they are not the most backward sector of American society, but the most advanced. They are the negation at work, “the bad aspect that makes history by setting the struggle in motion” (The Poverty of Philosophy). Africa has no special monopoly on that.

The American blacks are a product of modern industry, just like electronics or advertising or the cyclotron. And they embody its contradictions. They are the people that the spectacle paradise must simultaneously integrate and reject, with the result that the antagonism between the spectacle and human activity is totally revealed through them. The spectacle is universal, it pervades the globe just as the commodity does. But since the world of the commodity is based on class conflict, the commodity itself is hierarchical. The necessity for the commodity (and hence for the spectacle, whose role is to inform the commodity world) to be both universal and hierarchical leads to a universal hierarchization. But because this hierarchization must remain unavowed, it is expressed in the form of unavowable, because irrational, hierarchical value judgments in a world of irrational rationalization. It is this hierarchization that creates racisms everywhere. The British Labour government has come to the point of restricting nonwhite immigration, while the industrially advanced countries of Europe are once again becoming racist as they import their subproletariat from the Mediterranean area, developing a colonial exploitation within their own borders. And if Russia continues to be anti-Semitic it is because it continues to be a hierarchical society in which labor must be bought and sold as a commodity. The commodity is constantly extending its domain and engendering new forms of hierarchy, whether between labor leader and worker or between two car-owners with artificially distinguished models. This is the original flaw in commodity rationality, the sickness of bourgeois reason, a sickness which has been inherited by the bureaucratic class. But the repulsive absurdity of certain hierarchies, and the fact that the entire commodity world is directed blindly and automatically to their protection, leads people to see — the moment they engage in a negating practice — that every hierarchy is absurd.

The rational world produced by the Industrial Revolution has rationally liberated individuals from their local and national limitations and linked them on a global scale; but it irrationally separates them once again, in accordance with a hidden logic that finds its expression in insane ideas and grotesque values. Estranged from their own world, people are everywhere surrounded by strangers. The barbarians are no longer at the ends of the earth, they are among the general population, made into barbarians by their forced participation in the worldwide system of hierarchical consumption. The veneer of humanism that camouflages all this is inhuman, it is the negation of human activities and desires; it is the humanism of the commodity, the solicitous care of the parasitical commodity for its human host. For those who reduce people to objects, objects seem to acquire human qualities and truly human manifestations appear as unconscious “animal behavior.” Thus the chief humanist of Los Angeles, William Parker, could say: “They started acting like a bunch of monkeys in a zoo.”

When California authorities declared a “state of insurrection,” the insurance companies recalled that they do not cover risks at that level — they guarantee nothing beyond survival. The American blacks can rest assured that as long as they keep quiet they will in most cases be allowed to survive. Capitalism has become sufficiently concentrated and interlinked with the state to distribute “welfare” to the poorest. But by the very fact that they lag behind in the advance of socially organized survival, the blacks pose the problems of life; what they are really demanding is not to survive but to live. The blacks have nothing of their own to insure; their mission is to destroy all previous forms of private insurance and security. They appear as what they really are: the irreconcilable enemies, not of the great majority of Americans, but of the alienated way of life of the entire modern society. The most industrially advanced country only shows us the road that will be followed everywhere unless the system is overthrown.

Certain black nationalist extremists, to show why they can accept nothing less than a separate nation, have argued that even if American society someday concedes total civil and economic equality, it will never, on a personal level, come around to accepting interracial marriage. This is why this American society itself must disappear — in America and everywhere else in the world. The end of all racial prejudice, like the end of so many other prejudices related to sexual inhibitions, can only lie beyond “marriage” itself, that is, beyond the bourgeois family (which has largely fallen apart among American blacks) — the bourgeois family which prevails as much in Russia as in the United States, both as a model of hierarchical relations and as a structure for a stable inheritance of power (whether in the form of money or of social-bureaucratic status). It is now often said that American youth, after thirty years of silence, are rising again as a force of contestation, and that the black revolt is their Spanish Civil War. This time their “Lincoln Brigades” must understand the full significance of the struggle in which they are engaging and totally support its universal aspects. The Watts “excesses” are no more a political error in the black revolt than the POUM’s May 1937 armed resistance in Barcelona was a betrayal of the anti-Franco war. [2] A revolt against the spectacle — even if limited to a single district such as Watts — calls everything into question because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, a protest of real individuals against their separation from a community that would fulfill their true human and social nature and transcend the spectacle.

Notes

[1] The “Free Speech Movement.” See David Lance Goines’s The Free Speech Movement. (Translator’s Note)

[2] Lincoln Brigades: Americans volunteers who went to Spain to fight against Franco during the Spanish civil war (1936–1939). POUM (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista): Spanish revolutionary Marxist organization, allied with the anarchists in opposing the machinations of the Stalinists within the anti-Franco camp. It was largely destroyed by the Stalinists in May 1937 through a series of repressions, arrests and assassinations.
The concluding sentence (“A revolt against the spectacle ...”) is a détournement from Marx: “A social revolution involves the standpoint of the whole — even if it takes place in only one factory district — because it is a human protest against a dehumanized life, because it proceeds from the standpoint of the single actual individual, because the community against whose separation from himself the individual is reacting is the true community of man, true human nature” (Critical Notes on “The King of Prussia and Social Reform,” 1844). (Translator’s Note)

How Unequal Exchange Shapes Our World

By Jason Hickel

Republished from Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.

This article is based on a presentation given at the symposium “Socialist Perspectives on Global Governance in a Multipolar World”, held by the Fudan University School of Marxism and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s Beijing Office in April 2025.

We live in a capitalist world economy in which production is controlled overwhelmingly by capital (the major financial firms, large corporations, and the 1 percent who own the majority of investible assets). For capital, the purpose of production is explicitly not to meet human needs or achieve social progress. Its main purpose is to maximize and accumulate profit–that is the overriding objective.

To sustain a process of perpetual accumulation, capital must obtain an ever-rising quantity of inputs at the lowest possible price, meaning cheap labour and cheap nature. The problem for capital, however, is that obtaining these inputs sooner or later entails very severe contradictions. During the rise of capitalism in the West, capitalists discovered that if they intensified the exploitation of their domestic working classes too much, they would eventually face a revolution. By the same coin, as they intensified the exploitation of domestic natural resources, they successively undermined the ecological basis of production itself. Capital therefore required some kind of “outside”–an external frontier where it can exploit labour and nature with impunity, and where it can externalize social and ecological costs.

In other words, capitalism requires an imperial arrangement in order to stabilize accumulation. Imperialism is thus a structurally necessary feature of capitalism. Even today, some 60 years after the formal end of colonialism, our world-system continues to be structured by a fundamental imbalance between North and South and the economic domination of the latter by the former. Transforming this arrangement is the key political challenge of our time.

Colonial and Neo-Colonial Domination

The unequal nature of the world-system was glaringly obvious during the colonial period. The industrialization of the West relied heavily on the mass-scale appropriation of resources from the colonies, as well as the use of enslaved and indentured labour. To achieve this, colonizers systematically destroyed indigenous industries and reorganized the Global South’s production away from servicing local human needs and development towards servicing consumption and accumulation in the core. Indeed, doing so constituted the central objective of the colonial project. There are countless examples of this process. In southern Africa, subsistence economies were ripped up so people were forced to get wages by working on colonial mines and plantations. In India, the British physically smashed the country’s textile industry to make it dependent on imports of British goods.

Colonial domination was forcefully challenged during the twentieth century. Radical anti-colonial movements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America overthrew their colonizers and immediately set about pursuing strategies of economic sovereignty. Most of these movements were inspired in some way by socialist and Communist ideas, which provided a blueprint for reclaiming domestic control over production and organizing it around human needs and development. They used land reform to reclaim territory from foreign firms, nationalized key resources like oil and minerals, used subsidies and protective tariffs to develop their national industries, and used planning to build public services and develop industrial capacity.

All of this posed an extraordinary threat to the states of the capitalist core, as it jeopardized their access to cheap labour and resources. Sovereign development in the South meant that Southern countries were producing and consuming more for themselves, which in turn meant that those resources were no longer cheaply available for the core. That manifested as rising supply prices, destabilizing the imperial arrangement and making capital accumulation in the core increasingly difficult to sustain.

The governments of the core faced a fork in the road: they could either accept economic sovereignty in the South, abandon capital accumulation, and shift to a post-capitalist economy–or they could try to maintain capital accumulation by somehow restoring the imperial arrangement. They opted hard for the latter, intervening militarily to destroy radical Southern governments, but also by using the IMF and World Bank to impose structural adjustment programmes that forced governments to privatize public industries and cut public services, tariffs, subsidies, and labour and environmental protections, thereby reversing the policies of the anti-colonial era.

Structural adjustment restored the imperial arrangement, re-establishing the South as suppliers of cheap raw materials, but this time also as manufacturers of light industrial goods in subordinate positions within global supply chains dominated by Northern firms. Structural adjustment also depressed wages and prices in the Global South, including through currency devaluation. Meanwhile, the North monopolized technology and capital goods, and set high prices.

In- and Outflows

The results of structural adjustment had very severe implications for international trade, as all imports need to be paid for with exports. Systematic price inequalities mean that for every unit of embodied labour and resources the South imports from the North, it has to export many more units to pay for it. This leads to what the Egyptian economist Samir Amin called a “hidden transfer of value” from South to North–“hidden” because there is a monetary balance of trade, but in reality, the South is sending a net-transfer of real value to the North. This enriches the core, but drains the periphery of resources necessary for development. Global South economists like Amin and others described this as “unequal exchange”, arguing that it enabled a continuation of imperialist appropriation from the periphery even in the absence of formal colonial rule.

Today, we can observe this unequal exchange in empirical data, using multi-regional input-output models. For every unit of labour embodied in traded goods that the South imports from the North, for example, the South has to export at least ten times more to pay for it. However, this is not primarily because Southern labour is less productive. On the contrary, Southern labour in export industries tends to be highly productive. Rather, it is because Southern wages are cheapened compared to Northern wages. Southern workers earn about 90 percent less than Northern workers for labour of the same skill level in the same sector. In fact, the inequalities are so extreme that highly skilled workers in the Global South such as engineers and scientists are paid 68 percent less than low-skilled workers in the Global North. We also see similar systematic trade imbalances when it comes to materials, land, and energy embodied in traded goods.

This unequal exchange leads to truly massive net-transfers from South to North. In the final year of data, we see the following:

• A net South-North flow of 12 billion tons of embodied materials, and 21 exajoules of embodied energy. According to recent research, this quantity of materials and energy would be enough to provide infrastructure and supplies to provision decent living standards–universal healthcare, education, modern housing, sanitation, electricity, heating and cooling, induction stoves, refrigerators, freezers, washing machines, public transit, computers, and mobile phones–for the entire population of the Global South, but instead it is siphoned off for accumulation and consumption in the core.

• A net flow of 820 million hectares of embodied land–twice the size of India. That land could be used to provide nutritious food for up to 6 billion people, but instead is used to produce goods consumed in the North like sugar for Coca-Cola and beef for McDonald´s.

• A net flow of 826 billion hours of embodied labour–more than the total labour rendered annually by the entire U.S. and EU workforces combined. That labour could be used to staff hospitals and schools in the Global South or produce food and goods for local needs, but instead is used to churn out tech gadgets and fast fashion for Northern corporations.

These figures suggest that the high levels of consumption and growth in the core rely heavily on net appropriation from the South, today just as much as during the colonial era. In the case of materials and labour, around half of total consumption in the core is net-appropriated from the South. Moreover, while the North benefits from the extra consumption, the social and ecological costs are effectively externalized to the Global South. That is where the damage happens–not primarily in England or Finland, but in the Congo, Indonesia, or Brazil.

Furthermore, the data on unequal exchange helps us understand the persistence of inequality between core and periphery in the world economy. The mainstream development narrative holds that, if given enough time, the South will gradually “catch up” to the Global North. Yet no such catching up is happening. In fact, the income gap is getting bigger every year. The reason why is self-evident: because catch-up development cannot happen within a system predicated on imperialist appropriation and net South—North flows.

Finally, this data helps us understand the persistence of mass poverty and underdevelopment in the Global South. The South is impoverished not because it is somehow “naturally poor”, but because its income is compressed and its productive capacities drained to support development in the core.

The Chinese Model and the Second Stage of Decolonization

Unequal exchange also affects China, despite it being the most dynamic and fastest growing economy in the Global South, if not the world. China has historically suffered a substantial net drain of materials, energy, and labour to the core, although it recently has become a net-importer of land. Even today, drain from China comprises about 20 percent of the North’s total net appropriation from the Global South.

However, China’s exchange ratio with the core has improved over time. During the 1990s, the exchange ratio averaged 34 to one. In other words, for every unit of embodied labour, materials, land, or energy that China imported from the core, it had to export 34 units to pay for it. By 2015, that ratio had declined to four to one.

This improvement occurred mostly because China experienced an increase in wages and prices. These represent positive changes for China–and specifically for Chinese workers–but pose a very severe problem for Western capital, as higher prices in China reduce the core’s ability to appropriate value, and thus place a constraint on Northern profits. That is one of the reasons why the core states are now trying so hard to push Chinese wages back down and restore access to cheap labour. It is also what Trump is trying to do with his tariffs: he wants to force countries to concede by cutting export prices.

So, what is to be done? The fundamental point is that Southern governments need to find ways to escape the imperial arrangement. They need to achieve the second stage of decolonization: reclaim control over their national productive capacities, and reorganize them around meeting human needs and achieving national development.

Remember, the South is not poor–it is rich. It is endowed with vast tracts of fertile land, abundant labour, extraordinary resources, and productive power. The problem is that the nations of the Global South do not have sovereign control over their capacities. How can such control be achieved? Do everything possible to reduce dependence on imports from the core in order to reduce exposure to drain through unequal exchange. Also, implement industrial policy to develop sovereign industrial capacity, and deploy public finance and credit policy to mobilize labour and production for national development, rather than for foreign capital.

China shows how it can be done, but China can still improve its position. China currently suffers a net-drain to the core of 100 billion hours of labour per year. That can be resolved by reducing unnecessary imports from the core such as luxury goods and goods that can be substituted with domestic production, therefore reducing export pressure and thus retaining billions of hours of labour power that can be redirected towards things like social reproduction, ecological regeneration, and human development. China can also play an important role in helping the rest of the Global South by providing an alternative source for finance, technologies, and capital goods, thus enabling Southern nations to reduce their import dependencies on the core and develop their own industrial base.

We are at a juncture in history. The existing arrangement is not working for the vast majority of humanity. The capitalist world economy cannot deliver meaningful development in the periphery. This system can and must be overcome. In that regard, the Southern struggle for liberation is the true agent of world-historical transformation today.

Jason Hickel is an ICREA Professor at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of several books, including The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions (Penguin, 2017), and Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (Penguin, 2020).

The Congo as a Site of Capital Accumulation: Erik Prince and the Privatization of War

[Pictured: Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). © Zach D Roberts / NurPhoto via AFP]

By Kribsoo Diallo

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

A lot of news has circulated across various global media platforms following reports that militias affiliated with Erik Prince—the U.S. billionaire and founder of the infamous military contractor Blackwater, which has a track record of abuses and killings in several Global South countries—suffered significant field losses in the eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo. This followed an ambush that resulted in the death and injury of at least 20 people, including Tim Kennedy, a famous UFC athlete and former US Army Special Forces soldier.

Erik Prince is a U.S. businessman and former US Navy SEAL who founded Blackwater in 1997, transforming it into one of the world's most notorious military mercenary companies. He capitalized on the U.S. military's growing reliance on private military and security firms to provide paid combat and security services. Educated at Hillsdale College, a conservative religious institution, he later served in the US Navy SEALs. His career illustrates the intersection of private capitalist interests and U.S. military expansion, where wars and military interventions become profit-making ventures. After selling Blackwater in 2010, Prince continued his operations through other companies and networks, including Frontier Services Group, which expanded into providing logistical and security services for commercial and mining projects in Africa. In recent years, he branched out through Vectus Global, whose activities in the DRC expanded from collecting mineral resource revenues to providing operational support to the Congolese army.

Under President Felix Tshisekedi, a documented attempt to enlist foreign military contractors (mercenaries) dates back to 2023. At the time, the Rwanda-backed M23 militia was making field advances in North Kivu province, and the government was looking for ways to bolster its military capabilities and secure mining areas in the east. In this context, a plan was revived to bring in about 2,500 military contractors from Colombia, Mexico, and Argentina to halt the rebel advance and secure mineral-rich regions. Preparations included establishing barracks in Mubambiro, near Sake and adjacent to a Congo Protection training camp, to host the first batch in late July 2023. Containers of equipment arrived at the site that same month. Erik Prince spearheaded the negotiations to deploy these foreign contractors, part of a plan heavily promoted by Kahumbu Bula Mandungu, known as "Kao," an advisor to President Tshisekedi, amid reports linking the scheme to arrangements between Kinshasa and Abu Dhabi. Ultimately, the project stalled, and the Latin American contractors never arrived in the DRC.

Prince returned to the Congolese scene through a seemingly different avenue in late 2024, striking an agreement with the Congolese government to improve public revenue collection from the mining sector and combat mineral smuggling in copper- and cobalt-rich areas. The government signed a five-year deal with Prince through a network of commercial shell entities. In June 2025, Quantum Global Consulting, a UAE-based firm linked to Prince, registered a subsidiary in the DRC, Quantum Global Consulting Africa, to act as its legal representative. This subsidiary then registered Vectus Global as a local legal entity. The contract with the Congolese Ministry of Finance included a financial mandate to increase government revenues from extractive industries while curbing smuggling, corruption, and tax evasion. However, it also contained a secret military component: advising the Congolese Armed Forces, providing aerial capabilities, and recruiting foreign military personnel. The contract was valued at approximately $700 million over five years.

The initial plan involved dispatching about 100 advisors and technical experts to monitor mining operations and revenues, starting with major mines before gradually expanding. The goal was to improve the oversight of production and exports and ensure compliance with the Congolese mining code. The priority was the Katanga region, particularly around the city of Kolwezi, the hub of the copper and cobalt industry. This area was far from the main combat zones where the M23 militia operated in North Kivu.

A major turning point occurred in late 2025 and early 2026 as the war in eastern Congo escalated, spreading to strategic areas in South Kivu. This was especially pronounced after the M23 militia seized Uvira, a key city on the Burundian border along the shores of Lake Tanganyika. This posed a severe threat to the Kinshasa government. In response, Erik Prince, through Vectus Global, deployed a team to support the Congolese army in the region. The mission involved operating drones and providing operational support to government forces, marking the first known participation of Prince’s forces in frontline combat operations within the DRC.

The military activity of foreign contractors in Congo was not limited to Americans. Israeli military advisors worked in coordination with Prince, participating in training two Congolese Special Forces battalions for day and night operations. Contractors from El Salvador, mostly former military and police personnel, were also recruited. A July 2026 report by the Critical Threats Project noted that in April of that year, the Congolese government announced the UAE's commitment to help fund the training of a paramilitary force exceeding 20,000 personnel, ostensibly to protect mines in the south. Two months earlier, the UAE had dispatched a government and trade delegation to Lualaba province, holding meetings in Kolwezi with officials from the mining, energy, and infrastructure sectors, culminating in the announcement of 16 memorandums of understanding across multiple fields.

Prince is a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, and his company's activities in Congo intersect closely with Washington's economic and security objectives. His forces were deployed at a time when the Trump administration sought to link economic and security cooperation with Kinshasa to securing broader access for American companies in the critical minerals sector. This was framed as an effort to counter Chinese influence, rather than a genuine push to defeat M23 or contain the ambitions of Rwandan President Paul Kagame. On March 2, 2026, the US Treasury Department sanctioned the Rwandan Defense Forces and four of its senior officials. On June 25 of the same year, it sanctioned a Rwandan gold refinery and a network accused of smuggling minerals from Congolese territory controlled by M23. Yet, these measures failed to dismantle the smuggling networks, resolve the conflict, stop the militia's atrocities, or cut off the crucial Rwandan support driving M23's expansion. A March 8, 2026, Washington Post investigation cited a US official stating that Paul Kagame successfully delayed the sanctions for several months by reaching out to Senator Lindsey Graham, who intervened with the White House. The report noted that Graham served as an advisor to Trump—a detail previously highlighted by the Wall Street Journal—illustrating the limits of American pressure. According to the official's account, these high-level political channels allowed Kagame to buy time.

The US-Congolese agreement established a mechanism called the Strategic Asset Reserve. Under this framework, American investors receive the right of first refusal on listed projects and preferential access to specific investment opportunities in the Congolese resource sector. In April 2026, Reuters published an investigation detailing how Virtus Minerals, an American company, acquired Chemaf's mining assets for $30 million. In February 2026, a proposed deal emerged to sell a 40% stake in the Mutanda and Kamoto Copper Company mines to the Orion Critical Mineral Consortium, backed by the US International Development Finance Corporation (DFC) and the UAE's ADQ fund. These deals positioned American and Emirati investors prominently within Congolese copper and cobalt assets. The clearest indicator of US objectives is the Lobito Corridor project, which links mining zones in Congo and Zambia to the Atlantic port of Lobito via Angola. The US supports this project through development financing and infrastructure investments, aiming to create an alternative export route for Congolese copper and cobalt to Western markets, bypassing trade networks linked to East and Southern Africa or those dominated by Chinese firms.

Erik Prince and his state backers are not the saviors the Congolese people are waiting for to end militia violence and Rwandan interference. The man the Congolese government has hired for security and military services is neither a neutral mediator nor someone operating outside the very interests that fuel and profit from these conflicts. He is a criminal who embodies the nexus between capitalist economic interests, the privatization of warfare, and the defense of US imperial hegemony. This is not just an assumption; in an episode of his podcast Off Leash, Prince explicitly called for the US to resume a direct imperial role, stating it was time to "put the imperial hat back on" and govern countries he claimed are incapable of governing themselves. He made sweeping racist generalizations about Africa, asserting that most of its nations cannot manage their own affairs. When his co-host, Mark Serrano, pointed out that this sounded like a call for a return to colonialism, Prince replied bluntly: "Absolutely, yes!"

Kribsoo Diallo is a Cairo-based Pan-Africanist researcher in political science related to African affairs. He has written for many African magazines and newspapers, and Diallo has contributed to translated editions of papers and articles in Arabic and English for several research centers within the African continent.

European Vassal States' Self-Destruction Endangers the Entire World

By Margaret Kimberley

Republished from Black Agenda Report.

“Washington will move to crush, or at least seriously disrupt, Russia under its ‘sanctions as war by other means’ machine, by targeting its energy exports, while simultaneously boosting the foreign markets for U.S. natural gas.” - Glen Ford, 2014

Always prescient, the late Glen Ford got to the heart of the beginnings of the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia that has played out in Ukraine ever since the U.S. backed coup committed there in 2014. Barack Obama was in office when right wing Ukrainians overthrew the elected government in Kiev. He then dragged his feet on implementing the Minsk Agreements, which were meant to bring about a peaceful resolution to that Western-instigated crisis when Russia came to the aid of the Donbas region. Since that time, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel admitted that the agreement was never meant to be enacted because NATO members wanted to give Ukraine a chance to arm itself against Russia.

Obama was president then, but as with all other foreign policy initiatives, there is continuity of agenda from administration to administration. The anti-Russia project didn’t begin with him. It began with NATO expansion spearheaded by Bill Clinton in the 1990s after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Every president since that time has gone down the same path of chipping away at Russia’s influence covertly and overtly, withdrawing from nuclear treaties, and undermining Russian-allied states such as Syria, which fell to Western-backed jihadists in 2024 after a 13-year-long effort.

Despite claims of being a Russian dupe, the first Donald Trump administration vigorously backed the Ukraine project and while Obama would not directly send weapons, Trump did just that in 2017. Joe Biden claimed that the 2022 U.S. sanctions he imposed would destroy Russia’s economy when he said, “. . . the ruble almost is immediately reduced to rubble.” Not only is the ruble not “rubble,” but U.S. puppet states have paid an economic price and now threaten international war because of their slavish devotion to Washington.

President Emmanuel Macron in France endlessly warns about Russian threats against all of Europe, and German chancellor Friedrich Merz, and others do as well. Interestingly, both Macron and Merz have approval ratings below 20%. Macron will not be running in the French presidential elections to be held in 2027 and Merz may soon be out of office himself.

The explanation for their unpopularity is not complicated. European states are in dire straits economically in part because Joe Biden succeeded in cutting off their supply of Russian gas. In 2022, Biden joined Germany’s then chancellor Olaf Scholz at a Washington press conference and pledged to stop the Nord Stream II pipeline, which was under construction and which would have sent gas from Russia to Germany. Scholz said nothing when Biden emphasized that there would be no Nord Stream II. "I promise you, we'll be able to do it."  

Europe and Germany especially have deindustrialized after the NordStream II pipeline was blown up in 2022. There will soon be a show trial in Germany where a Ukrainian is charged with that crime. Of course, the words of Biden and other officials in his administration and common sense point to the U.S. being the culprit in the attack. In spite of a convincing report from Seymour Hersh, which showed how that deed was done, the corporate media in the U.S. and European governments have been silent about how countries thought to be allies were sabotaged along with the Russians.

Germany is rearming and preparing to reinstitute a military draft. Donald Trump has insisted that NATO members spend 5% of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on military spending. The only way to meet that figure is to impose austerity on their people and the result is protest in France and other countries.

Of course, the ruling classes are not standing by silently. The appeals to worsen austerity are constant, with the Wall Street Journal falsely proclaiming, “The Welfare State is Crushing Britain.” Britain’s welfare state was crushed long ago but is still being whittled away little by little in order to justify military expenditures.

Europeans are joined at the hip with the U.S. and no one should be fooled by the occasional public spat as with protests over Trump’s agreement to temporarily ease sanctions and allow Russian diesel fuel to be sold in the U.S. Trump is desperate to ease the markets, even a little, before the November mid-term elections. Voters who supported him in the past may not do so again because his attack on Iran has increased fuel prices. His domestic concerns have not altered relationships with the rest of NATO, nor should they fool anyone into thinking that he is in any way “Putin’s puppet.”

While Trump comes up with a deal to allow small amounts of diesel to the U.S., the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) works closely with the Ukrainians to determine where and how their drone strikes against Russia will be carried out. European nations, occupied by the U.S. since 1945, are engaging in dangerous rhetoric as Russia’s defeat of Ukrainian forces draws near. Their leaders try to outdo one another in calling for war against Russia by threatening its outpost in Kaliningrad, which, despite being wedged between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea, far from the rest of Russia, is as much a part of that country as Alaska and Hawaii are to the United States. There are nuclear weapons in Kaliningrad, but that has not stopped NATO members from making very public threats against that territory. 

NATO’s top commander, U.S. general Alexus Grynkewish, claims that the rest of NATO can fight Russia without U.S. help. No one who is knowledgeable about military capabilities believes that assertion to be true, but it is meant to escalate tensions, and such claims have indeed done that. Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov spoke of his country’s resolve after a United Nations meeting with his German counterpart. 

"It is Europe that is preparing for war with us. They constantly reiterate that, by 2030 at the latest, we, the Europeans, must be ready for war. You know, this could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy, because they are currently investing huge amounts of money in the production of weapons. And at some point, some adventurer, and there are many of them in these elites, will say, 'Guys, we've accumulated so much, what do we do with it?.... Oh, we promised to attack Russia.' In that case, if they attack us, because we are not going to....stand idly by...." 

For good measure, Lavrov added. "It will be a completely different war, and it will be short."  

It is no exaggeration to say that the entire world is on the brink of a catastrophic war because of the U.S. desire for hegemony. Europe never recovered from World War II, as it has been occupied by the United States for more than 80 years. Even those originally in the Soviet sphere are now U.S. puppets with troops deployed in Poland and other Eastern European countries.

Europeans have given up economic and military security to the United States and now engage in reckless behavior in order to please the man whom the NATO Secretary General referred to as “daddy.” That person could be named Obama or Biden or Trump or a player to be named later, but the U.S. has hollowed out Europe into a shell of poverty, subservience, and belligerence. If their people claim to believe in democracy, they must act and keep dangerous people out of power. Although the same can be said of the people in this country too.

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

Managing the Crisis of Violence: Public Safety vs Market Logic

By Jerome Louison

“We gotta put our heads together, and stop the violence.” - KRS One, Stop the Violence

Safety. That’s how Black boys in New York say farewell when they respect you. When they appreciate your presence. When they hope to see you again, knowing they might not. Like most slang, it wasn’t constructed or focus-grouped. It emerged. Emerged from the conditions they face, and a deeply internalized hope for a better environment. A safer environment. For generations, that environment has not come, despite ever-increasing budgets for the United States’s main public safety tool: policing.

For the nation’s largest police force, the New York City Police Department (NYPD), annual costs exceeded $11 billion USD (including almost $700 million in overtime pay) as of 2020. This goes primarily to the hiring of over 51,000 employees, one for every 161 residents. The main alternative to policing is community-based violence intervention (CVI). In NYC, this manifests primarily through the Crisis Management System (CMS), an umbrella formation started in 2012 to coordinate the city’s violence prevention and intervention organizations (including founding orgs like Brooklyn’s ManUp Inc. and Queens’ Life Camp), providing services from mental health support to job readiness to legal advocacy. In contrast to the NYPD, CMS funding approximates $100 million annually, just short of the $130 million recommended by the CVI Ecosystem website. Despite this disparity, given the recent rise in funding and the fact that CMS predominantly consists of working-class Black people, CMS must continue to prove its worth. Most recently, the eyes of the Comptroller’s Office1 took notice.

The Comptroller’s 2025 report, The Cure for Crisis: The Power and Potential of Community Violence Intervention, begins in 2013 when the first CMS budget was approved, totaling less than $5 million. The Cure for Crisis (building on methodologies used by the New York City Council Data team and John Jay College researchers) shows that the impact of CMS was immediate, calculating a 21% reduction in shootings between 2012 and 2014. In absolute terms, this amounts to 1,567 fewer shootings. As has been consistently shown, the work of CMS orgs on the ground has a demonstrable impact in keeping community residents safer. And yet, that same analysis highlights an unresolved question: what happens when a system doesn’t behave like a system?

The report’s recommendations revolve around the deliberate construction of an ecosystem (a favorite buzzword in the field). This includes:

• regular coordination meetings among CMS organizations

• a “centralized, real-time data-sharing dashboard for coordinating violence intervention efforts.”

• enhanced technical assistance and training

From the perspective of the New York City government, this makes sense. City agencies, ideally under the (soon-to-be) constructed Department of Community Safety, will be the centralizing hub for CMS, determining what the practice of community-based public safety looks like moving forward. Informed by public health research, the future of CMS would be simply a beefed-up version of the current CMS. But nowhere in the report does it mention “salary” or “employee benefits.” The future of CMS, then, doesn’t seem to involve better-paying jobs2. By contrast, according to the NYPD recruitment webpage, the starting salary is $60,884, increasing to $126,410 after over five years of experience (not including health insurance, retirement, etc.).

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But one city, no matter how rich, is not indicative of an entire movement. Is it different at the national level?

The largest national effort to build the CVI ecosystem involves the CVI Action Plan. It is the collective brainchild of several organizations, including the Urban Peace Institute, Health Alliance for Violence Intervention (HAVI), and the Community Based Public Safety Collective (CBPS). Through conferences, working groups, and policy proposals, they have maintained the national mission of the CVI ecosystem, ensuring that their vision cannot be easily co-opted. The Action Plan starts with capacity-building, highlighting the need for “guidelines for pay and benefits” and wellness support for front-line workers.

The Action Plan also centers on the importance of independence for CVI. For instance, take the relationship to traditional law enforcement. CVI organizations have explicitly articulated the need for separation, as one Action Plan document makes clear:

“Adopting the shared language of ‘professional understanding’ with law enforcement can act as a firewall to clarify boundaries…People discussed how CVI differs greatly from law enforcement, as CVI focuses on love, healing, and redemption and law enforcement focuses on investigations, arrest, and incarceration.”3

Similar sentiments hold for the relationship between CVI organizations. Folks doing this work want more collaboration, not competition. Dozens of CVI groups across the United States have signed on to the Action Plan, showing that there is grassroots support for a new paradigm that seeks to reduce, and potentially eliminate, the role of law enforcement in keeping communities safe. And while support is necessary, it is not sufficient.

How to Plan for a Crisis

All sectors within a capitalist system adhere to a particular division of labor, devised by the capitalist class. CVI is no different. Despite efforts like the CVI Action Plan, community violence intervention groups are becoming the soft arm of law enforcement, whose main purpose is to reduce gun-related violence in urban settings. The current funding structure—consisting of grants, RFPs, and government contracts—incentivizes this, creating distortionary effects across the ecosystem. For one, CVI organizations must contort themselves to show funders that everything they do reduces shootings in their locality, or “catchment area.” Additionally, other modes of physical violence (including stabbings and general assaults), gender-based or intimate partner violence, as well as non-physical violence (emotional, financial, etc.) are by default de-prioritized. And conceptually, the connections between gun violence and these other modes are lost, where shootings are taken as a unique and distinct case.

Current funding also incentivizes competition. Instead of organizations providing complementary roles, thinking of their group as one piece of a larger puzzle, CVIs plan to gain ground over “rival” agencies. Of course, the idea of CVI organizations competing with police departments for funding is a non-starter. As critics of the capitalist system have long argued, contrary to economic orthodoxy, monopoly rules. And no monopoly is stronger than the police, undergirded by the state’s complete ownership of the use of force.

As mentioned earlier, community-based public safety is by nature a non-violent practice. Its philosophy is one of restorative justice, healing both the victim and perpetrator. It is based on public health research, treating the spread of (gun) violence as akin to the spread of disease, not simply the maladaptive behavior of individuals. As has been demonstrated in NYC (and other cities), these approaches do work in reducing violence. They are also cost-effective, a common argument for those seeking more investment. But questions remain. How will these organizations scale their work? How does a collection of 501(c)(3)s (by definition non-partisan) become a recognizable political and public safety force in the daily lives of working-class people?

It is worth challenging whether an ecosystem of CVI professionals and grassroots workers can develop using market-based incentives. In fact, an active removal of market logic from relations between CVI organizations might be the best way to work together. Otherwise, community-based public safety risks going the way of other Black-led institutions within the capitalist order, plagued by infighting and HNIC-syndrome, ultimately capping at a fraction of their potential.

Restorative instead of punitive justice. Public health instead of police. But what replaces the market? Some suggest that the organic impulse to help thy neighbor can stifle the worst effects of individualism and greed. In the CVI space, this plays out as mutual aid, the exchange of goods and services, or simply donating to those in need; core tenets of the non-profit sector. But the capitalist system has already accounted for this. According to the UK-based Charities Aid Foundation (CAF), the United States ranked sixth among nations in its 2024 World Giving Index, a measure of the amount of money, time, and effort given to helping others (most notably strangers). The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation Inc., built to coordinate efforts to end police brutality and support alternatives (including CVI), received over $90 million in donations in 2020 alone. And yet the ravages of monopoly capitalism, including lack of effective police oversight, continue unabated. Considering that the U.S. was in the top five as late as 2023, it is doubtful that more altruism will have any meaningful effect.

Without a force to confront and constrain capitalist machinations, violence prevention and intervention work will remain in its current state, regardless of how much money is poured into it. That force must be built as the antithesis of market logic. And the antithesis of the market is not charity; it is economic planning, driven by modern technology and democratic principles. One particularly interesting model of planning, albeit outside the CVI ecosystem, is the dual power strategy of Cooperation Jackson, a cooperative movement based in Jackson, Mississippi. Known as the Jackson-Kush Plan, it would,

“…employ the tools and techniques of the solidarity economy to radically transform the local and regional economy by socializing the means of production, democratizing productive decision-making and resource mobilization, centering the needs of the Black working-class majority of Jackson, and serving as means toward the transition to ecosocialism.” [bold emphasis mine]

Similarly, what is needed is a CVI ecosystem that socializes the means of public safety, including (but not limited to) the following: open and crowd-sourced (i.e., non-proprietary) surveillance technology, which will exist only where it is democratically determined to be useful and non-intrusive; participatory fundraising and budgeting; rigorous, scientifically determined plans for violence reduction and social service provision (inspired by the economic plans currently put forth in China, Vietnam, and other dynamic regions). These mechanisms, in tandem, would provide a viable, sustainable socio-economic foundation for policing alternatives to flourish.

Those Black boys who say “Safety” hold a wisdom worth learning from. They recognize that public safety isn’t top-down; it’s the responsibility of everyone, even if all one has to offer is a single word of hope. We must build a system that properly reflects that wisdom.

The Curious Case of Western Denialism

Pictured: Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, meets US Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger in Zurich amid tight security for a summit meeting. (Photo by James Andanson/Sygma via Getty Images)

By Yalda Slivo

There is a section in Washington Bullets where Vijay Prashad delves into the foundations of the Western self-image. Since reading the book two years ago, I haven’t stopped thinking about this particular passage, where Prashad traces the modern use of the concept “conspiracy theory” to Karl Popper’s highly influential work The Open Society and Its Enemies. But Prashad does not see Popper’s text as an honorable defence of truth, but rather as a sophisticated class attack. In his reading, this categorization was never really a principled objection to hidden political intrigues, but a highly developed method of invalidating criticism of imperialism and capitalism in advance, dismissing it as irrational or conspiratorial.

Although Prashad wrote this short, incisive book in just two weeks, in the aftermath of a coup attempt against Evo Morales in Bolivia, the text was clearly written from a point of great frustration: Why did the Western left refuse to support Morales? He ticked all the boxes of identity politics, but as soon as he challenged imperial power structures, he was left alone. The truth, of course, is that Prashad understands this better than most of us. He knows that what we are witnessing is not random hesitation; it is one of the pillars that has sustained Western global dominance for over a century: denialism.

Here we find ourselves at the heart of what for decades has been dismissed as conspiracy theories, but which in fact is one of the most well-documented political machineries in history. It is the unique case of Western denialism – the same machinery that makes it possible to talk about human rights while turning a blind eye to the most extreme violations of them, as long as they serve a geopolitical purpose, whether those involved are aware of it or not.

Now, my aim with this text is not to resolve the whole idea surrounding denialism – because there are many issues involved. For me, it operates in different ways across structures, particularly within civil society through what the Marxian tradition understands as the superstructure, from Antonio Gramsci to Louis Althusser’s idea of state apparatuses. Even though I will separate denialism into a three-part structure – institutional, bureaucratic and popular – in order to frame a historical narrative, my goal is not to waste time creating strict definitions for these categories or a blueprint for everyone to follow. Rather, the aim is to show how Western denialism has functioned as a geopolitical tool within the colonial powers of the West, from the beginning of the 20th century until today.

It is without doubt not an easy task, and it will remain complicated even after the reader finishes this text. It is also worth noting that I am working from what has been historically documented, meaning that just because institutional denialism is treated as a subject for the early 20th century in this text does not mean that popular denialism did not occur at the time.

However, to understand how we ended up with today’s media and political silence surrounding the popular denialism of the Gaza genocide, we must go back to the moments when this machinery was calibrated through institutions and bureaucracies. We must go back to the darkest hours of WWII – when British intelligence received a telegram that should never have been dismissed.

INSTITUTIONAL DENIALISM

It is August 10, 1942. A coded message, later known as the Riegner Telegram, arrives at the British Foreign Office in London. The text of the telegram is brief but terrifying:

“Received alarming report stating that, in the Fuehrer’s Headquarters, a plan has been discussed, and is under consideration, according to which all Jews in countries occupied or controlled by Germany numbering 3 1/2 to 4 millions should, after deportation and concentration in the East, be at one blow exterminated, in order to resolve, once and for all the Jewish question in Europe. Action is reported to be planned for the autumn.

Ways of execution are still being discussed including the use of prussic acid. We transmit this information with all the necessary reservation, as exactitude cannot be confirmed by us. Our informant is reported to have close connexions with the highest German authorities, and his reports are generally reliable.”[1]

The message, based on information smuggled out of Nazi Germany via a German industrialist, is as inconceivable as it is nightmarish. Adolf Hitler had ordered the systematic extermination of Europe’s Jewish population. However, despite this terrifying detail, the report was met with cynical skepticism.

At the time, British officials initially dismissed the information, warning colleagues that circulating such claims might “provoke embarrassing repercussions”[2] – a rather cynical excuse revealing that the primary concern was not the fate of Europe’s Jewish people, but the political consequences of acknowledging atrocities that could raise difficult questions about refugees and Allied responsibilities, not least in Palestine – where the Zionist movement had already been growing for decades and immigration was tightly controlled by the British authorities.[3]

But reality told a different story – the struggle against fascism had deep ideological roots stretching back to the victory of the October Revolution 25 years earlier, a spark that had ignited hope among Europe's radical movements. For these movements, there was no doubt about the nature of the enemy: fascism was the brutal face of capitalism, a movement that cloaked itself in revolutionary rhetoric but shook hands with big finance.

This was apparent in the way Hitler’s war machine was lubricated by companies such as the chemical giant IG Farben, whose economic muscle and technical expertise helped lay the foundations for the apparatus of extermination – it was the same company that would later supply the prussic acid that filled the gas chambers of the concentration camps. A true textbook example of how monopoly capital integrated itself with fascist violence.

While the European labor movements recognized the threat early on, the colonial powers allowed their geopolitical interests and policies to be guided by cold realpolitik. Rather than confronting the rising Nazi regime, Britain and the United States were more interested in preserving their empires and exploiting labor in their respective colonies. The potential collapse of the Soviet Union at the hands of Hitler’s Germany was of no concern to Britain and the United States, as they had already attempted to undermine it – given that it was the only force challenging the global financial system in the first place. In the case of the Soviet Union, there was no geopolitical denial of the massacres, as the Soviet state was confronting the very regime it had predicted would rise to power if finance capital continued to metastasize. But for the survivors who managed to escape, the biggest challenge, apart from the trauma itself, was to be believed.

However, in Washington, the reports were once again met with suspicion of these “Jewish sources.” Despite the clear warning in the Riegner Telegram from August 1942, officials at the U.S. State Department refused for weeks to pass on the information. It would take 18 months, until January 1944, before then U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt finally bowed to political pressure and established the War Refugee Board. By then, however, millions of people – Jewish, Soviet POWs, Roma, and resistance fighters had already been murdered. This pattern of ignorance was systematic: even the U.S. Army’s own magazine, Yank, requested a “less Jewish story” so as not to provoke the home front.[4]

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This inability to act had been going on before. In what has become known as “the first modern genocide,” the Ottoman killing of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks in 1915 shows one of the earliest examples of how colonial powers used human tragedies as pawns in a geopolitical game. Here, we see a systematic policy of denial on full display – where the recognition of genocide is instrumentalized: highlighted when it damages an enemy, but silenced when it threatens one’s own alliances.

In the Ottoman case, their economy had been taken over by European creditors in 1881 via the Ottoman Public Debt Administration, meaning that instability in the region could disrupt the payment of loans.

Initially, British intelligence openly condemned the Ottoman massacres of Christian minorities. But this moral stance proved empty, as Yusuf Malek would later describe in his eyewitness account and testimony, The British Betrayal of the Assyrians, how the British exploited the Assyrian population for their military purposes as long as it served the interests of empire. Malek, who himself worked as an interpreter for British military intelligence, provides detailed insight into how the colonial power navigated between empty promises and cynical denial of human tragedies. When strategy required change, Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire were left to deal with their own fate – sometimes forced to live in militarized zones under British mandate while the empire prioritized diplomatic relations with newly emerging powers in the region.

This form of systematic denial became evident in how Britain dealt with human tragedies throughout the 20th century – a pattern that culminated in the institutional structures of denial surrounding the Holocaust as it was carried out.

BUREAUCRATIC DENIALISM

After WWII, the United States took over the imperial baton but transformed colonial arrogance into an impenetrable bureaucratic apparatus. Henry Kissinger would later infamously emerge as the architect of this new order ­– in which imperialist goals hid behind layers of secrecy and technocracy.

One of the most effective tools in this apparatus was its ability to control narratives – often by labeling critics of U.S. involvement in coups and the destabilization of socialist movements as “conspiracy theorists.” This was not accidental: in 1967, the CIA famously issued Dispatch 1035-960 to its stations around the world, explicitly instructing agents to counter critics of the Warren Commission by deploying this very label – making visible the machinery that would go on to pre-emptively discredit anyone who dared question the official version of events.[5] In this way, the CIA effectively neutralized the truth.

As Marxist movements gained ground globally, bureaucratic attempts to stifle them intensified. One conveniently forgotten example is Korea: a country the U.S. first divided in two along an arbitrarily drawn line in 1945, then literally razed to the ground during a war that killed one million people – a tragedy erased from Western consciousness. This imperialist machine operated beyond any democratic scrutiny, imposing a form of capitalist dictatorship on the world whenever and wherever it wanted. Agencies such as the U.S. State Department bureaucratically erased all traces of human suffering wherever the U.S. and its allies had left their fingerprints.

The U.S. has consistently denied any involvement in coups globally – only to declassify documents decades later that confirm exactly what the conspiracy theorists had been claiming all along. This form of systematic denial is not merely a theoretical construct but has manifested in concrete covert operations, where the bureaucratic apparatus has been used to cover up the traces of U.S. imperialist interventions for decades. One could view the unsealing and declassifying of documents as a show of force: by denying the act itself for geopolitical reasons, only to later make it public, the bureaucratic message is clear – “So what if we did it, what are you going to do about it?” And the answer is indeed – absolutely nothing.

One of the most striking examples of this denialist mechanism is Iran in 1953, through Operation Ajax. When democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the country’s oil resources to benefit the people of Iran, the U.S. responded by organizing a coup d’état to protect Western capital interests. For six decades, the U.S. officially denied any involvement, describing the event as an internal Iranian affair. It wasn’t until 2013 that the CIA officially acknowledged its role and methods in the coup, demonstrating how bureaucratic secrecy managed to conceal the theft of Iran’s sovereignty for over half a century.[6]

The pattern was repeated with even more devastating consequences in Indonesia in 1965 through the operation known as the Jakarta Method. This strategy stemmed from the U.S. belief that it could befriend neutral countries in the so-called “Third World,” as long as it could keep communists out of power. However, in Indonesia, a growing communist movement represented by the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) faced a military purge supported by the U.S., resulting in at least 1,000,000 deaths ­– some sources even claim 3,000,000. Behind the scenes, the U.S. worked tirelessly to provide the Indonesian army with lists of communist leaders to target for murder, while outwardly maintaining diplomatic distance. This genocide was labeled an “internal security operation,” yet documents released in 2017 ultimately proved that U.S. support for the mass murders had been kept hidden in the archives.[7]

POPULAR DENIALISM

The pattern of denialism established during the 20th century has reached a critical point in our time in the handling of Gaza’s total demise. Here, denial is no longer just a matter of secret archives but a living synthesis of all three parts of the structure: institutional, bureaucratic and popular denialism. What distinguishes Gaza from every case examined in this text is not the scale of the atrocity or the cynicism of those enabling it – these have been constant across the century we have traced. What is different this time is the nature of the denial as it is happening in real time. With Korea, Iran and Indonesia, the state machine worked to conceal in retrospect by burying evidence in classified archives for decades before the truth surfaced. Gaza is the first case in this tradition where denial is not lagging behind the atrocity. The historical pattern has flipped: institutions that dedicated their existence to preventing genocide have named it as such in real time – and have been ignored in real time.

Despite the fact that international bodies such as Amnesty International had already established in February 2024 that Israel had failed to meet the International Court of Justice (ICJ) requirement to prevent genocide, the Western media instead decided to apply a surgical and seemingly “objective” lens to the daily horrors faced by Palestinians.[8] Even though the institutions had done more than enough careful work analyzing the facts, the media took it upon itself by reporting from a distance without journalists on the ground – resulting in rhetoric that systematically minimized the suffering. The media, therefore, acted as an extension of bureaucratic denial for Israel and its institutions, which for decades, have enjoyed the privilege of priority in the realm of genocide studies. Even though the media itself is not part of the state bureaucracy, it has utilized the same vocabulary that has been part of its tradition for decades in relation to human tragedies, while failing to recognize its own role as a denialist entity – only this time for the U.S.’s greatest ally. In addition, Human Rights Watch has repeatedly observed how Israel has defied court rulings, a defiance made possible by the diplomatic safety net provided by the U.S. – a contemporary continuation of its imperialist tradition of protecting geopolitical strategic allies at all costs, even when committing genocide.

However, the response to the ICJ findings was not to refute them. No one presented any counter-evidence or legal arguments. Instead, we were reminded of CIA Dispatch 1035-960 – the idea of pre-emptively discrediting any source. All of a sudden, methodology was questioned: how the dead were counted and how numbers were framed. But this was not because the evidence itself was weak, but because it would require governments, editorial boards and political establishments to reckon with their self-image surrounding “Never Again,” as they chose to look away while it was happening.

Here, popular denialism becomes more than just ignorance – it becomes labor for the state, which now recruits millions of people to dispute established facts in real time instead of burying evidence in classified archives for decades. The “Hamas-run” label, the “Pallywood” myth, the human shields argument, and debates over how many deaths were “historically acceptable” all constitute a form of denial – reducing the entire population of Gaza to either human shields or combatants by framing it as a “conflict.” In just the last two years, the arguments shifted constantly: first the death toll was disputed, then methodology, then the very definition of genocide itself – and none of this was due to a search for truth, but rather a perpetual moving of the goalposts.

These are all popular expressions of bureaucratic and institutional sentiment. To keep arms flowing, for European governments to maintain diplomatic relationships, and for the media to continue gaining special access, someone has to do the actual work of making the population comfortable with it – the work of popular denialism. And just as Gramsci understood the role of the superstructure 100 years ago, it’s not by forcing consent, but by making it feel like common sense.

This would all continue as the genocide moved toward a “final solution,” where starvation became policy and Hamas was being blamed for stealing food and aid – somehow accounting for mass hunger in a place where Israel had destroyed all infrastructure, schools and hospitals. This can only be seen as the “common sense” of a lie.

The circle that began with British officials dismissing “Jewish sources” in 1942 is now closing in an era where voices from Gaza are dismissed with the same cold logic – a logic that favors the interests of the empire and its superstructure over testimonies of human destruction.

Notes

[1] The National Archives (n.d.) Riegner Telegram, FO 371/30917. Available at: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2_FO-371-30917-Riegner.jpg (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

[2] World Jewish Congress (2020) 'This week in Jewish history: Riegner Telegram alerts world of Holocaust', World Jewish Congress. Available at: https://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/this-week-in-jewish-history--riegner-telegram-alerts-world-of-holocaust-8-2-2020 (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

[3] His Majesty's Government (1939) British White Paper of 1939. Avalon Project, Yale Law School. Available at: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/brwh1939.asp (Accessed: 13 March 2026).

[4] EBSCO (n.d.) 'Holocaust revisionism and censorship', EBSCO Research Starters: Communication and Mass Media. Available at: https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/communication-and-mass-media/holocaust-revisionism-and-censorship (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

[5] Central Intelligence Agency (1967) Dispatch 1035-960, declassified document. Available via Mary Ferrell Foundation at: https://maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=49975#relPageId=2 (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

[6] US Department of State (2017) Foreign Relations of the United States, 1951–1954: Iran. Available at: https://static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1951-54Iran/pdf/frus1951-54Iran.pdf (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

[7] Human Rights Watch (2017) 'Indonesia: US documents released on 1965–66 massacres', Human Rights Watch, 18 October. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/news/2017/10/18/indonesia-us-documents-released-1965-66-massacres (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

[8] Amnesty International (2024) 'Israel defying ICJ ruling to prevent genocide by failing to allow adequate humanitarian aid to reach Gaza', Amnesty International, February. Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/02/israel-defying-icj-ruling-to-prevent-genocide-by-failing-to-allow-adequate-humanitarian-aid-to-reach-gaza/ (Accessed: 12 March 2026).

Is China Really Colonizing Africa?

By Matthew John

In recent years it has become fashionable to accuse China of economic coercion and domination in Africa - charges that often include dramatic allegations of “colonialism.” This narrative involves claims that China is engaging in widespread “debt-trap diplomacy,” buying up “vast tracts of African farm land [with] plans to transplant millions of Chinese peasants to live and work on the continent,” and other similar assertions. The notion that China is “colonizing Africa” was even endorsed by popular liberal comedian Trevor Noah back in 2021. One of the ostensibly ominous examples of Chinese machinations included in Noah’s segment was the case of Uganda’s Entebbe Airport.

A sensationalistic November 2021 report circulating in the Ugandan mainstream news media had caused paranoia after claiming that China was seizing the country’s only international airport as collateral for an unpaid loan. The story was then picked up by the Western press and essentially went viral. There was only one problem: It was completely false. Both Chinese and Ugandan government officials found themselves busy correcting the record during the days and weeks following this surge of fake news (there was a similar situation related to the Sri Lankan port of Hambantota). Noah acknowledged these clarifications, but continued his baseless anti-China alarmism by remarking, “‘We have never confiscated an airport’ is very different from ‘we are never going to confiscate an airport.’”

Noah’s monologue also included a deceptive, State Department-approved framing of the Taiwan issue and evidence-free claims regarding China’s employment practices on the continent in question. However, as Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) noted, “The format of the Daily Show and comparable shows (e.g., Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) makes it possible to deliver political commentary and news with plausible deniability about political viewpoints (‘it’s only comedy’). Noah, a New York-based comedian who grew up in South Africa, did his best to spin Chinese investment in Africa into neo-colonialism—regardless of the underlying reality.” 

Despite his flimsy evidence, poor arguments, and insulting insinuations, many liberal viewers likely perceive Noah’s origin story as some sort of bonus credibility on this topic. Maybe his actual arguments don’t need to be cogent - maybe his pronouncements are intrinsically valuable due to his “lived experience” (a concept that is regularly weaponized by Western bourgeois sources to promote imperialist narratives). If we are going to “listen to Africans,” as we generally should, there is a much more qualified candidate. 

Gyude Moore is a Liberian researcher with the Center for Global Development and former Deputy Chief of Staff to President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf. From 2014 to 2018, Moore served as Liberia’s Minister of Public Works - a role that included oversight of significant infrastructure projects, putting him on the front lines of China-Africa economic relations. In 2019, he gave a talk at the Paulson Institute in which he elaborated upon Africa’s “suitability” as a natural economic partner for China and praised the overall fairness and respect Africa has been treated with by Chinese officials and organizations. Moore concluded his presentation by stating, “It is my view that China’s presence in Africa has been, and continues to be, a net positive.”

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Another highly credentialed expert who has elucidated China-Africa relations while eschewing anti-China sensationalism is Johns Hopkins University professor Deborah Brautigam. In her 2015 book “Will China Feed Africa?”, Brautigam explored media-inspired perceptions of China’s role in African agriculture, including the popular “land grab” accusation. Reflecting on misleading mainstream news headlines like, “Chinese Farms Control Most of Zambia’s Agriculture,” and “China Recently Purchased Half the Farmland Under Cultivation in the Congo,” the author and her team conducted years of research to determine the validity of such scoops. On this simple issue of alleged land acquisition, Brautigam found that only about one percent of all arable land in Africa could be classified as being “owned” by Chinese companies. 

Related claims, such as the idea that millions of Chinese farmers are being sent to live and work in Africa or that Africa is growing copious amounts of grain specifically for export to China, turned out to be fallacious as well. In an interview with the China-Global South Project, Brautigam provided a detailed analysis of the processes by which such ubiquitous confusion and deception are sown throughout our media landscape when it comes to China-Africa news. Brautigam also dismantled the aforementioned “debt-trap” myth in an important piece published by The Atlantic in 2021. 

In addition to the “land grab” and “debt-trap” fantasies, there have been similar Western rumors that China favors working with African dictatorships, that it primarily hires Chinese laborers for projects in Africa, and that its interest in the region is solely driven by a desire for greater access to natural resources. You might not be surprised to learn that these notions have all been refuted with robust evidence to the contrary. As each component of the “Chinese colonialism” story unravels upon the slightest inspection, the overall narrative exposes itself as simply hyperbolic imperialist projection and bitterness toward China’s success. It is based on the absurd assumption that standard economic agreements between sovereign nations can only be based on colonial relations. 

Colonialism is inherently racist, exploitative, ruthless, and genocidal. It forcibly extracts natural resources and labor through invasion, occupation, dispossession, subjugation, and brutal violence. Belgian colonialism in the Congo killed 10 million and British colonialism in India killed 100 million. More recent forms of Western neocolonialism in Africa (and throughout the Global South) have subjected states to neoliberal structural adjustment policies as part of Work Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan conditions, forcing borrowing nations to slash social services and privatize industries for the benefit of Western capital. This is the real “debt-trap diplomacy.” And the vestiges of the West’s long history of colonialism are still at play in the region. As journalist Margaret Kimberly explained:

It is a French billionaire, Vincent Bolloré, who controls 16 West African ports through bribery and influence peddling. France also controls the CFA currency of its former colonies. Canadian companies control gold mining in Burkina Faso, Mali and Democratic Republic of Congo. Decades after the struggle for independence, British soldiers are still stationed in Kenya.

China does not engage in this kind of domineering behavior toward developing countries. Its foreign policy is based on respectful diplomacy and cooperation, to a fault. China doesn’t invade African nations or sponsor military coups like the U.S. does. In fact, China hasn’t dropped a single bomb on human beings in about half a century. These observations have been echoed by African socialists like Kambale Musavuli, Mikaela Erskog, Fred M'membe, and Kyeretwie Opoku - all of whom have rejected disingenuous Western smears regarding China’s conduct in Africa. Many citizens of various African nations disagree with the Western framing of China-Africa relations as well; a 2024 survey revealed that about 82 percent of young Africans have a positive perception of China’s involvement in Africa’s economic development. 

The reality is that Africa is getting a much better deal doing business with China. These partnerships allow the pursuit of much needed infrastructure projects to industrialize and modernize societies that were intentionally underdeveloped by Western colonizers. Loans issued by China are not only unconditional, but they are also regularly renegotiated or forgiven. Moore has cited 87 relevant instances of loan restructuring or rescheduling between the years 2000 and 2019, and China has more recently forgiven 23 loans in 17 African countries. The economic relationship China and Africa have built in recent years is mutually beneficial and, despite its imperfections and shortcomings (which were articulated by Moore during the aforementioned discussion), is not even remotely comparable to the vast, belligerent history of Western plunder of the continent. As professor Jason Hickel observed, this comparison “trivialises the extraordinary violence” of the West’s crimes and “is effectively a form of colonial denialism.”

North Carolina Offers Families More Failing Charter Schools

By Shawgi Tell

North Carolina is home to many low-performing highly-segregated charter schools (see here, here, and here). Yet despite lagging academic performance, racial inequalities, and low enrollment numbers, North Carolina continues to create more charter schools, proving once again that charter schools are pay-the-rich schemes created in the name of “choice,” “competition,” and “rescuing kids from failing public schools.”

Recently we learned that North Carolina is increasing the number of failing virtual charter schools in particular. According to a March 20, 2026, article from NC Newsline, “For years, North Carolina has had two virtual charter pilot programs operating entirely online. Both have failed to meet performance expectations since they opened a decade ago. The [state’s Charter Schools Review] board has [now] approved two additional standalone virtual schools in recent weeks.” This academic failure exists despite the fact that the state’s two original virtual charter schools together hold $25 million in cash reserves.

This top-down move is so irresponsible that “North Carolina Sen. Jay Chaudhuri, a Wake County Democrat, called the state’s expansion of virtual charter schools ‘educational malpractice’ and said it cheats both students and taxpayers.”

Chaudhuri posed the question, “How on earth are you allowing parents to send their kids to virtual charter schools that have consistently received a D as far as annual school performance?”…. This would be like educational malpractice for them to continue to do this.” The dictionary gives “abuse” and “negligence” as synonyms for malpractice.

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For his part, Charter Schools Review Board member Stephen Gay said, “I see it [virtual charter schools] as a money grab for a lot of schools that are doing it.” The headline from another news source literally reads: NC approves more remote charter schools. Are the virtual options a ‘money grab’?  Would such a question arise if charter schools did not engage in profiteering? All of this is another way of reminding everyone that charter schools are private businesses, not schools.

It is worth noting that the federal government recently funneled $53 million to the North Carolina Association for Public Charter Schools to support the state's charter schools. This is public money leaving public hands to fill the pockets of private interests under the veneer of high ideals. There is no educational justification for such an arrangement. Public money belongs only to the public.

The major owners of capital who have long been behind charter schools have always been committed to a narrative about charter schools that is inconsistent with the evidence for charter schools. By all accounts, charter schools have caused great harm to education, society, and the economy. Yet, if you listen to charter school boosters, you would think that people everywhere are desperately begging for more charter schools and that charter schools are doing great in so many ways. False and misleading information about long charter school waiting lists is even floated from time to time to create the impression that these outsourced schools are in high demand.

Charter school promoters, like most politicians and the media, hope that people do not investigate anything and find out for themselves what is really going on in the charter school sector. An enlightened citizenry is not in their interest. Instead, everyone is under relentless pressure to internalize confused notions of “choice” while parents “shopping for a school” are coerced to fend-for-themselves in the name of “freedom,” “control,” and “agency.”

Myths, lies, propaganda, and disinformation of all kinds are unleashed on a non-stop frantic basis by charter school promoters in order to curate a certain image of charter schools. There is so much profit to be made from both non-profit and for-profit charter schools that not even an ounce of truth about charter schools can be tolerated by these forces. This is how greed manifests itself today, as a force for negating the truth, as intense opposition to a human-centered approach to education.

It does not matter how many charter school owners, operators, trustees, and employees go to jail nearly every day for fraud, corruption, embezzlement, sexual crimes, and more. The drive for more profits is insatiable, blinding, and addictive. It is wrecking education, culture, and society.

The fact that charter school advocates have to fight so hard every day to sell charter schools shows just how significant and fragile this fight is.

In 2025, about $1.18 billion was siphoned from underfunded public schools by about 218 charter schools in North Carolina.

To learn more about public schools and charter schools in North Carolina, visit Public Schools First NC.

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

Let's Bring Shaka A. Shakur Home: A Review of "Across Enemy Lines"

By Wayne Kidd

The movie begins with a voice seeming to speak into a void: “Yeah, i wanna say something about my moms, man.” The words appear in subtitles on a blank panel. Suddenly, New Afrikan Political Prisoner Shaka A. Shakur appears. He speaks about his mother and his last words to her. Asking his wife to put the phone to her ear, Shaka tells her “You can let go… we going to be all right.” For the first time in a while, she lifted her eyebrows. She heard him. The next day, he says, while working out in the yard, he was struck by a rush of emotions. As he would soon find out, that rush occurred the same time his mother passed.

After the two-minute cold opening, a narrator voices over photos of Shaka’s childhood home, asking why Shaka couldn’t see his mother or go to her funeral? As the scene shifts to footage of a Virginia prison, we’re asked why this grandfather and well-known human rights advocate remains incarcerated hundreds of miles from his family and community. It isn’t until later that we forcefully learn the answers to these questions, answers that are not answers but outrageous injustices that any human with a shred of compassion can relate to.

I must admit the cold opening left me wondering if I was watching the right documentary. But the interview that opens “Across Enemy Lines: Shaka A. Shakur” was recorded in August 2024, just after Shakur’s mother passed—which makes her part of the Black August tradition. For those who may be unfamiliar, Black August was first commemorated in California’s San Quentin prison in 1979 in honor of the assassination of Black Panther Party Field Marshal George Jackson by San Quentin Prison guards on August 21, 1971. It was also a time to celebrate another decade in one of the most militant eras in prison rebellions. Throughout the film, several comparisons are made between Shaka Shakur and George Jackson, like how both “turned prisons into schools of revolution.” Another photo of Leola Jones enters the screen to extend Black August beyond the prison to the struggle for Black/New Afrikan liberation in its entirety.

By the end of the succinct and powerful new film about the significant organizer behind bars—whose organizing and case are finally starting to get the recognition needed to free him—all confusion had melted away. Derek Ford and TheKingTrill, the film’s co-directors, made sure to use each of the 40 minutes of the film to demonstrate the dialectical relationship between the personal and the political, a dialectic that plays out breathlessly and beautifully, but also painfully and furiously.

A Humble, Elderly Man: Why is the State so Afraid?

The story is told primarily through video conferences with Shaka and interviews with people from various aspects of his life: a man who mentored and helped politicize Shaka when he was first incarcerated as a juvenile; his wife, Dr. Akili Shakur, leaders in the New Afrikan Independence Movement of which Shaka is a leading theoretician, organizer, and builder; his comrades from the Shaka Shakur Freedom Campaign, some who’ve known Shaka for a few years and others for over 30 years.

His wife, Akili, smiles as she recollects catching Shaka out of the corner of her eye. “Those locks…” she sighs, before stating she “fell in love with his mind first.” His first mentor, Duncan Bridgeforth, tells a room that Shaka was the only person he would let highlight in the books he lent Shaka. “Shaka wouldn’t highlight no senseless stuff,” he says, “and he was hungry. That’s what made the difference to me.

Seth Donnelly, who has been a friend of and advocate for Shaka since meeting him in 1992, gives us a glimpse of the advanced revolutionary prison movement Shaka helped lead. Even when “the state started separating out these cadre,” he and Shaka put together a newsletter called “Human Rights Held Hostage” to maintain those connections and keep building.

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Throughout, Shaka talks about his political evolution honestly and frankly. When he was first incarcerated, he tells us he “was a little wild,” before admitting, “OK, i was a lot of wild.” But the older prisoners saw his ability to mobilize people, his magnetic personality, and his genuine humility. “If you was to use that in the service of your people, you’d be a hell of an individual,” they said.

Shaka decided to use his gifts in the service of his people and ancestors, and for that reason he remains captive. We learn that he remains imprisoned even though he has served the entirety of the sentence of which he was convicted in 2002: a trumped-up charge of attempted murder of a Gary, Indiana police officer during an incident in which no one was injured.

Here is a man who was arrested as a child but tried and convicted as an adult. He went on to spend almost two decades in one of the first Super Maximum-Security prisons in the country. He was transferred there because he and fellow inmates organized to put an end to the reign of terror by racist white COs and their “good ole-boys network” that dominated the state’s prisons during the 1970s-80s. During Shaka’s first stint in prison, these guards were now running the Department of Corrections and were replaced by COs who longed for the good old days or, as Shaka puts it, “are fascinated by these stories of brutalization” and “nostalgic for a time gone by.” Many had fought against—and tortured—the Iraqi and Afghan people and they broug those torture techniques home with them. “At the State Farm in Putnamville, they were extremely vicious: chaining brothers to tables and shit, beating them… Some of us were going through that shit at eighteen, nineteen, twenty-years-old.

While at the notorious Indiana State Prison, Shaka and fellow inmates—later known as the “Indiana Six”—organized to put an end to this terror. On December 8, 1994, when the state tortured Ajamu Nassor to death while watching pornography on tv. After, the partied all night in the administration building. The response this time was limited to one or a small group of individuals when, around 14 days later, one of the COs was discovered dead in cell house D. Two years later, when the state was set to murder Nassor’s co-defendant, Ziyon Israel, on June 14, 1996, there were no individuals at ISP; only an organized political force that was united despite the segregation of prisons. About two weeks beforehand, Shaka organized a silent protest in cell house D, when “approximately 150 prisoners of all nationalities ate their afternoon meal in complete silence.” The next day, Shaka and others were kidnapped by SWAT teams, shackled, chained, pepper-sprayed, beaten, and transferred to the Maximum Control Complex in Westville, Indiana. That didn’t stop him, and Shaka and the movements inside and outside the walls he helped build and lead eventually forced investigations into the human rights abuses taking place regularly, including the landmark Human Rights Watch report, Cold Storage: Maximum Security Confinement in Indiana.

Let’s Bring Shaka Home

Here is a man who kept organizing for basic human rights and who did so across national (or “racial”) lines no matter the consequences. Even 13 years in solitary confinement couldn’t force him to acquiesce to or simply go along with the injustices he witnessed and suffered—let alone break him.

Yet when he was released in 2000, no one recognized the trauma of imprisonment. Still, we learn, he went back to helping people—especially the youth. At the time, Shaka had a son, Jela. They were incredibly close. One night, Jela called Shaka for a ride. By the time Shaka arrived, Jela’s body was lifeless. The police—who hounded him at every turn—made wisecracks at the young boy who was shot in the back in a senseless act of violence. Without any treatment, Shaka broke down—as would any parent or human. One night as the Lake County cops tried to pull him over, he acted out. He fired rounds at the police cruiser. The cop fired back until he ran out of bullets. Shaka drove off even though he still had ammunition. In other words, he wasn’t attempting to murder anyone. He got sentenced to more time for “injuring” a police car than the young man who murdered his son.

Here is a man who has already served over 20 years—more than that required for his 2002 conviction in Gary, Indiana—yet still faces life behind bars because the state refuses to apply the updated “three strikes” law to him and because he has never stopped organizing to make our world better. Listening to the words of young people who Shaka mentors, watching them try to make sense of how he manages to persist in the face of such adversity, it’s clear there’s nothing they can do to prevent him from helping others. His last words that close out the film make that abundantly apparent.

It’s time to bring Shaka A. Shakur home!