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.

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.”

From Racism and Anti-Communism to Global Dominance: On the Use of ICE’s Foreign Policy Provision

By Brian Rome

Republished from Liberation School.

A foreign national spoke out against a country he accused of killing his family. After fleeing that country to escape persecution, the U.S. government arrested him and tried to deport him. The U.S. government was protective of its relationship with the foreign country he criticized and wanted to silence him through deportation.

It used a little-known provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that says the Secretary of State can claim their presence could have adverse consequences for foreign policy. A judge called his case “Kafkaesque,” meaning nightmarish, bizarre, and illogical, but the government was allowed to proceed with his deportation. The story is familiar but not new: it’s what happened to Mario Ruiz Massieu, whom the U.S. government tried to deport in 1993.

This is also similar to the story of Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE detained on March 8, 2025, under the pretext of the INA’s same foreign policy provision. The U.S. government targeted Khalil because of his principled advocacy for Palestinians and his role as a lead negotiator for Columbia students protesting their university’s investments in Israel. All people in the U.S., including non-citizen immigrants, have the right to free speech through the First Amendment. Khalil, however, is a legal permanent resident. The government is pursuing his unconstitutional deportation to drive fear into the heart of the movement for Palestine. Khalil’s story is not an anomaly but shows how U.S. immigration law is actually a weapon against the people both inside and outside the country.

The country’s first immigration laws were developed in 1790. These laws codified white supremacy and set hard limits on the types of people who could enter and enjoy full privileges of citizenship. In 1952 the original Immigration and Nationalities Act shifted the focus to preventing undesirables who held communist and pro-worker beliefs. The foreign policy provision was enacted in 1990 as an extreme show of force given to the state to target and isolate individuals.

From white supremacy to anti-communism to global dominance, each successive period subsumes what came before, rooted in the interests of the capitalist ruling class: preserving and expanding capital’s dominance over working people and oppressed nations in the U.S. and abroad.

To the roots: White supremacy and the class function of immigration law

Immigration law serves two complementary functions: external exclusion and internal discipline.

Exclusion operates through borders and legal barriers to entry. The government uses race, nationality, and economic class as gatekeeping criteria for particular working-class populations deemed as threats. Pro-communist immigrants, whether from Cuba, China, or Italy, are not allowed to become citizens. Banning entire peoples means that the government can entrench racial demographics and prevent the development of solidarity. If the only Venezuelans one meets are anti-socialist, it is hard to perceive the mass support of the Bolivarian Revolution.

Discipline, on the other hand, works against people who are here. Immigrants fear deportation. To avoid that, they may accept lower wages and keep quiet about violations of their rights as workers. Even when immigrants have legal status, their status is often tethered to their employer or their school. This effectively gives their boss or university the power to deport them. For non-immigrants, employers use the threat of replacement by immigrant workers to accept less and pit workers against each other.

The first such law, the 1790 Naturalization Act, set up an explicit class and racial barrier for citizenship. Only free white persons could become citizens. Free white persons excluded Indigenous peoples, slaves, indentured servants, and anyone not European or their descendants.

Less than 10 years later, Congress enacted its first deportation law, the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. This was the first legal connection drawn between U.S. foreign policy and immigration. The U.S. at the time was at war with Revolutionary France. Under this law, the President could arrest and deport French revolutionaries and others deemed “dangerous to the peace and safety of the United States.” The law is still in force today and has been invoked by President Trump to deport Venezuelan immigrants.

The 19th century was marked by European and American colonization and attacks on China in what would be known in China as the Century of Humiliation. China, the country that invented silk, tea, paper, and gunpowder, had been a trading partner with Europe for nearly 300 years. The European market was in high demand for Chinese goods but had little to offer in return. They were forced to pay the Chinese in precious metals, running up a trade deficit. Over time the British began importing opium–the base ingredient of heroin–and began addicting the population.

When the Chinese imperial government attempted to ban opium sales, the colonial powers found their solution: the Opium Wars [1]. They pried open China’s internal markets and flooded the country with opium, overruling China’s attempts to ban opium sales [2]. Ten percent of China’s population became addicted to opium. China was subjugated to Western capital. Many Chinese workers were forced into super-exploitative overseas labor as a result.

Many of these workers ended up in the U.S., where slavery had ended and the construction of the transcontinental railroad demanded massive amounts of cheap labor. Nine in 10 workers on the strategic infrastructure were Chinese [3]. Capitalists not only ruthlessly exploited Chinese workers (many died of overwork before the end of their labor contracts) but also stoked racial prejudices and played off white workers against Chinese workers. When white workers went on strike, capitalists hired Chinese workers as underpaid replacements. Some white workers–aspiring to be capitalists or not seeing themselves as members of the international working class–lashed out against Chinese workers and blamed them for being paid less and working more. In the 1870s, white workers violently expelled and even lynched Chinese workers in their communities [4].

In the wake of this racist hatred the government enacted the Chinese Exclusion in 1882, codifying the “Yellow Peril” myth–the idea that the immigration of Chinese workers constituted an invasion that threatened white society and its values [5]. Building on decades of anti-Chinese laws at the state and local level, the law banned (though did not prevent) the immigration of Chinese workers and made them ineligible to become U.S. citizens.

It remained in force until 1943, when China and the U.S. were both fighting Japan in World War II. Through the law, U.S. capitalists cemented the divide between Chinese workers and white workers, to the detriment of all workers. Expressly based on their race, Chinese workers were banned from legally immigrating to the U.S. and would be subject to deportation if they came anyway. Chinese workers in the U.S. were made permanent non-citizens. The fundamental purpose of this immigration law was not to protect “American” labor but to prevent unity with Chinese workers and cement racial hierarchies.

20th century immigration law: Crushing dissent

By the 1920s, much had changed in the world. Revolution had swept over Russia and for the first time peasants and poor working people ran their own government. Fearing this radical shift, the U.S. unleashed the Palmer Raids—violent mass arrests, beatings, and deportations targeting communists, anarchists, and labor activists. The top priority of the U.S. was to prevent the spread of communist ideas and communists themselves.

The 1924 Immigration Act was written to do just that. Designed by open eugenicists, the law racialized Eastern and Southern Europeans, imposed highly restrictive quotas on their immigration, and all but banned the immigration of Asians. The quotas were pegged to U.S. demographics in 1890–roughly coinciding with the closure of the frontier in the western U.S.–attempting to entrench the dominant position of white people of Northern European descent.

The law racialized Eastern Europeans, who previously were viewed as their own separate nationalities. The U.S. ruling class responded to the Russian revolution through antisemitic and anticommunist tropes like Judeo-Bolshevism. Most Jewish working people at that time were communist. The law’s racialization of Eastern Europeans built on the reaction to the world’s first successful socialist revolution, including antisemitic tropes like “Judeo-Bolshevism” that conflated Jews and Communists, and mass arrests and deportations of suspected socialists [6]. In essence, the law defined who should be considered “American” on racial terms. President Coolidge’s signing statement for the law was that “America must remain American,” and the U.S. State Department describes the law’s “most basic purpose” as “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity” [7].

Beyond the external exclusionary aspect of the 1924 Immigration Act, it also increased internal repression: for the first time, it authorized deportation of any immigrant who had overstayed or entered without a visa, expanding the class of workers made especially vulnerable in a way that “American” workers were not.

After World War II, the U.S. updated explicit racial quotas with a new focus: ideological control. The 1952 McCarran-Walter Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), modernized the U.S. immigration system while entrenching its racist and ideological foundations. Though it eliminated the outright ban on Asian immigration—a concession made during World War II to align with Asian allies—it maintained strict racial quotas designed to preserve the demographic dominance of whiteness (expanded to include non-Communist Italians, Poles, and Jews). Immigration restrictionists still hoped to achieve “the preservation of whiteness” through the system, reflecting the enduring legacy of the 1924 Immigration Act [8]. But the INA also introduced a new dimension of repression: ideological exclusion. In the context of anti-communist hysteria—fueled by the Soviet Union’s nuclear advancements, the Chinese Revolution and the Communists’ victory, the Korean War, and the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg—the law barred entry to anyone affiliated with communist or “subversive” organizations. This provision was not merely about keeping communism at bay abroad; it was a tool for policing thought domestically.

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The law’s ideological exclusions mirrored the McCarthy-era purges that targeted communists in government, universities, and Hollywood. Leaders of the Communist Party were prosecuted and imprisoned under the Smith Act, while the INA ensured that foreign-born radicals—or even those merely suspected of socialist sympathies—could be denied entry or deported. This created a chilling effect, reinforcing the internal disciplinary function of immigration law: it discouraged dissent among immigrants already in the U.S., who feared deportation if they expressed views deemed threatening to the state. Even President Truman, despite his Cold War anti-communism, recognized the law’s blatant racism and vetoed it, only to be overridden by a Congress gripped by reactionary fervor.

The INA thus exemplified the dual role of U.S. immigration law: external exclusion (filtering entrants by race and ideology) and internal discipline (suppressing radical thought and labor organizing). Like the Chinese Exclusion Act and the 1924 Immigration Act before it, the law served capital’s interests—this time, by aligning immigration policy with the Cold War imperative of crushing socialist movements at home and abroad.

The 1990 amendment: Suppressing free speech

By 1990, the decline and imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and the rapprochement between the U.S. and China had rendered overt anti-communism obsolete as a justification for repression. At the same time, the U.S. was close to achieving global unipolar dominance. It had weakened the Soviet Union, had overthrown left-leaning governments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and was preparing to jealously guard its status as the world’s sole superpower. The U.S. ruling class needed a new pretext for domestic discipline, and an amendment to the INA adding a foreign policy provision fit the bill. The amendment passed with bipartisan support and little debate, reflecting ruling class agreement on foreign policy. The provision allows deportation whenever the Secretary of State declares that a noncitizen’s presence may have adverse consequences on U.S. foreign policy—a term left deliberately vague. A mirror provision also prohibits the entry of any person the Secretary of State deems adverse to foreign policy. In practice, this means the Secretary of State has full discretion to say that anyone’s presence in the country could affect “foreign policy.”

Congress anticipated that the Secretary of State could use the foreign policy provision to punish speech protected by the First Amendment, which has long been understood to apply to citizens and legal residents alike [9]. On paper, the provision includes a “safe harbor” for protected speech, prohibiting deportation based on lawful beliefs or associations. In practice, this protection is meaningless. The Secretary of State can override it simply by declaring a “compelling foreign policy interest,” a standard so elastic it can be met with a rote recitation of the standard in a two-page letter, as in Mahmoud Khalil’s case. This creates a legal black hole: noncitizens can be deported for speech that is perfectly lawful, based on secret determinations they cannot challenge.

The foreign policy provision was further strengthened by the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which stripped lower courts of the power to review most deportations. Instead, immigrants facing deportation must defend themselves before immigration judges, who are part of the executive branch, not the judicial branch, and cannot rule on the constitutionality of the laws they are tasked to enforce. The result is a system where the executive branch acts as prosecutor, judge, and executor of deportation—a system designed to evade accountability.

“Massieu v. Reno:” Foreign policy provision scrutinized

The first major test of the foreign policy provision came in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration sought to deport Mario Ruiz Massieu. Massieu was a former Mexican official who had charged Mexican government officials with responsibility for the assassination of his brother and covering up the investigation. He faced retaliatory criminal charges and death threats in Mexico, so he fled the country and legally entered the U.S. where his family had a home. He was quickly detained by immigration officials. Mexico tried to extradite him but failed in U.S. courts on four separate attempts due to lack of evidence The U.S., close to the right-wing Mexican government at the time, instead invoked the new foreign policy provision and started deportation proceedings.

Massieu fought back and in 1996, in a bizarre irony of history, Judge Maryanne Trump Barry, the sister of Donald Trump, delivered a rare but fleeting victory for civil liberties. She ruled the foreign policy provision unconstitutional on three grounds:

1. Its vagueness made it impossible for anyone to know when the Secretary of State could invoke it;

2. It denied targets due process–a meaningful opportunity to challenge the Secretary of State’s determination of adversity to foreign policy; and

3. it improperly delegated legislative power to the executive branch because it provided no standards for courts to assess the Secretary of State’s determination.

Her opinion exposed the provision as a tool of arbitrary repression: it gave the Secretary of State “unfettered and unreviewable discretion to deport any alien lawfully within the United States…because that person’s mere presence here would impact in some unexplained way on the foreign policy interests of the United States,” while “no one outside the Department of State and, perhaps, the President ever knows what our nation’s frequently covert foreign policy is at any given time.”

This victory was short-lived. On appeal, a Third Circuit panel including future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito reversed the decision on a technicality. The Third Circuit ruled that Massieu had to first exhaust his arguments in immigration courts before appealing back to the Third Circuit, which only then could decide the constitutionality of the foreign policy provision. The decision forced Massieu into a dead end. Immigration judges lack the power to decide whether a law is unconstitutional. Back in immigration court, an immigration judge rubber-stamped the Secretary of State’s determination that Massieu’s presence posed adverse consequences to U.S. foreign policy and ordered him deported to Mexico, despite death threats he had received there. After a years of protracted litigation, he died under house arrest in New Jersey in 1999.

The prosecution of Mahmoud Khalil: Imperialism on the domestic front

In March 2025, ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian graduate student at Columbia University and prominent critic of Israel’s ongoing–and U.S.-supported–genocide of Palestinians, under the same foreign policy provision. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident married to a U.S. citizen, had committed no crime—his only offense was organizing protests against genocide [10]. The case against Khalil reflects the internal function of the foreign policy provision–and U.S. immigration law in general– as a repressive tool of the ruling class to defend imperialism.

ICE arrested Khalil in New York, moved him to New Jersey, and moved him again to an immigrant jail in Louisiana, where the government chose to prosecute his deportation [11]. While in New Jersey, Khalil filed a habeas corpus case to challenge his detention in federal district court, arguing that his detention violated his rights to free speech and due process under the First and Fifth Amendments. After Khalil had endured 104 days of detention, the federal district court judge granted his request for release on bail. Still, the government is withholding Khalil’s passport, and both of his cases are proceeding in parallel.

The government’s justifications and evidence for prosecuting Khalil are even weaker than those it invoked against Massieu. No foreign country has requested Khalil’s extradition or has accused him of any crimes. The government is relying on fake tabloids and Zionist doxxing groups like Betar [12], who identified Khalil on January 29 as a target for deportation [13], claimed credit for his arrest, and said it has “already submitted names of hundreds of terror supporters to the Trump administration” [14]. The only connection to U.S. foreign policy is the targets of Khalil’s critical speech: Zionism and U.S. support for Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. U.S. foreign policy falsely brands people resisting imperialism, Zionism, and genocide as antisemitic and terrorists.

The initial charging document the government issued against Khalil contained only a naked assertion that Khalil’s “presence or activities in the United States would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States” [15]. When the immigration judge required the government to submit all evidence that Khalil could be deported, the government submitted only an undated, two-page letter asserting that the foreign policy interest in Khalil’s deportation is “compelling,” along with backwards and unfounded accusations of antisemitism [16]. The letter recognizes that the foreign policy provision’s safe harbor applies, as it tacitly acknowledges that the case against Khalil is based on his “past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations that are otherwise lawful.” Based on the letter alone, the immigration judge ruled that she had no room to question the Secretary of State’s determination and ordered the deportation of Khalil.

Khalil is likely appealing the immigration judge’s ruling to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which will almost certainly affirm the ruling. After that, Khalil can appeal to the Fifth Circuit–known as the most conservative federal appellate court–and the constitutional infirmities of the foreign policy provision can be considered in an appellate court for the first time. Though the government cannot legally deport Khalil until his case is resolved, the government has recently shown a brazen disregard of court orders on deportations [17].

At the same time, Khalil is pursuing his habeas corpus claims in federal district court in New Jersey–the same court that decided Massieu v. Reno and whose rulings are appealable to the Third Circuit. The district court rejected the government’s arguments that Khalil’s case belongs in immigration court alone, in large part because Khalil’s constitutional claims cannot be considered in immigration court [18]. The Third Circuit may need to reconsider the application of the exhaustion requirement it previously articulated in Massieu, given the abundant clarity that it is futile to challenge the constitutionality of the foreign policy provision and the Secretary of State’s determinations in immigration court.

If Khalil were to prevail and win a decision that the foreign policy provision is unconstitutional, the government’s efforts to deport immigrants whose speech it does not like will become more difficult as courts impede deportations under the provision. But even failed deportation cases can serve as repressive weapons–to a large extent, the process is the punishment. It would be cold comfort for detained immigrants to know that after years of litigation, they will not be deported. The only way to deny imperialism that repressive victory is for anti-imperialists–immigrants and non-immigrants alike–to rise up and speak out.

Khalil’s case is not an anomaly. The Trump administration has already used the foreign policy provision against other outspoken students, like Rumeysa Ozturk of Tufts University and Yunseo Chung from Columbia University. While some have been released, many others have not. The threat is not limited to immigrants or legal residents; the government has reportedly considered deporting U.S. citizens to prison camps in El Salvador [19]. The escalation is a deliberate attempt to silence dissent. Already, the government’s use of the foreign policy provision against Khalil and others is blowing back, as thousands have taken to the streets in protest [20]. For every voice the government silences or removes, thousands must emerge in resistance.

The limits of the law and the necessity of resistance

The foreign policy provision is not an aberration but the latest iteration of a bipartisan system designed to serve empire and capital. From the beginnings of U.S. immigration law, the powers to exclude and deport have served to maintain racial hierarchy, advance the exploitation of labor, protect capital, and punish dissent. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to today’s deportations, immigration law has always been a weapon of class war—one that divides workers, shields capital, and silences critics of U.S. imperialism.

Legal challenges, while necessary, cannot defeat this system. The ruling class can count on courts to yield to their executive power, from the Third Circuit’s procedural dodging in Massieu to the Louisiana immigration judge’s rubber-stamping of Khalil’s deportation. Even when judges like Judge Barry rule against the government, the process alone is repressive and the government finds ways to sidestep adverse rulings.

Nor can mere awareness blunt weapons like the foreign policy provision. The only effective counter to this repression is mass resistance. Khalil’s detention has already sparked nationwide protests. Every attempt at deportation must be met with collective action. The struggle cannot be confined to courtrooms or narrowly defined targets of the day—it is inextricably linked to global movements of workers, students, and all people against U.S. imperialism at home and abroad.

As the labor slogan goes, an injury to one is an injury to all. The more the state wields immigration law as a weapon, the more the people must wield solidarity as a shield. Free Palestine and free us all.

References

[1] Ken Hammond,China’s Revolution and the Quest for a Socialist Future(New York: 1804 Books, 2023), 7-8.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Lakshmi Gandhi, “A History of Indentured Labor Gives ‘Coolie’ Its Sting,”NPR, 25 November 2013. Availablehere.
[4] Katie Dowd, “140 years ago, San Francisco was set ablaze during the city’s deadliest race riots,”SFGATE, 23 July 2017, availablehere; “This Day in History: Oct. 24, 1871: Los Angeles Chinatown Massacre,”Zinn Education Project, availablehere.
[5] Sheila Xiao, “The Legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882,”Liberation School, 6 May 2018. Availablehere.
[6] Jarrod Grammel, “The Palmer Raids and the First Red Scare: The Roots of Liberal Anticommunism in the United States,”Peace, Land, & Bread, 25 February 2021. Availablehere.
[7] “The Immigration Act of 1924 (The Johnson-Reed Act),”U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian. Availablehere.
[8] Andrew M. Baxter and Alex Nowrasteh, “A Brief History of U.S. Immigration Policy from the Colonial Period to the Present Day,”CATO Institute, 3 August 2021. Availablehere.
[9]See Shaughnessy v. U.S. ex rel. Mezei, 345 U.S. 206 (1953);Bridges v. Wixon, 326 U.S. 135 (1945).
[10] Khalil’s activity can be seen inThe Encampments, a documentary film released a few weeks after he was detained. Michael T. Workman and Kei Pritsker, directors, The Encampments, Watermelon Pictures, 2025.
[11] Devorah Levy-Pearlman, “Fight to Free Mahmoud Khalil exposes the black hole of Louisiana’s ICE jails,”Liberation News, 3 April 2025. Availablehere.
[12] Chloe Atkins, “Government’s Case against Mahmoud Khalil is Reliant on Tabloid Accounts, Review of Evidence Shows,”NBC News, 15 April 2025. Availablehere.
[13] Will Oremus, “Meet the Militant Jewish Group backing Trump’s Deportation Push,”The Spokesman-Review, 29 March 2025. Availablehere.
[14] Joshua Mitts and David Pozen, “In Defense of our Shared Values,”Columbia Daily Spectator, 13 February 2025. Availablehere.
[15] “Notice to Appear,”U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 9 March 2025. Availablehere.
[16] “Submission of Documents,”U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 9 April 2025. Availablehere.
[17] Teresa Paez, “ICE Deports Legally Protected Maryland Father to El Salvador’s ‘Mega Prison’,”Liberation News, 8 April 2025, availablehere; Nicholas Riccardi and Regina Garcia Cano, “Trump Administration Deports Hundreds of Immigrants even as Judge Orders their Removals be Stopped,”Associated Press, 17 March 2025, availablehere.
[18]Khalil v. Joyce, Opinion, No. 25-cv-01963 (D.N.J. April 29, 2025). Availablehere.
[19] Chris Walker, “White House Press Sec Says Trump’s Seriously Considering Deporting US Citizens,”Truthout, 9 April 2025. Availablehere.
[20] Brian Becker, “‘First They Came for the Palestinian’: Arrest of Mahmoud Khalil Sparks Nationwide Movement,”BreakThrough News, 12 March 2025. Availablehere.

Palestine and the Commons: Or, Marx and the Musha’a

[Pictured: A Palestinian child runs through Nur Shams refugee camp in Tulkarem, West Bank, where violence has been escalating this year. | Palestine 2024 © Oday Alshobaki/MSF]

By Peter Linebaugh

Republished from Journal of World-Systems Research

In 1958 the assistant headmaster did the Bible reading at the morning assembly of the Karachi Grammar School (Pakistan), founded in 1848 by the Church of England. The reading from Acts 17:23 concerned St. Paul’s declaration upon seeing the Athenian monument to an unknown God. “What you worship but do not know—this is what I now proclaim,” at which point I, 17 years old at the time, shouted the answer for all to hear: “Communism.”

As a child of both British and American empires I had come to this rebellious conclusion two years earlier at the Frankfurt Army High School. Based on study of The Communist Manifesto which I conducted in the library of the Officers Club at the I.G. Farben building, I was able to answer this ancient question posed in the Athenian agora by a man from Palestine.

I approach the wars in Palestine neither as an Arabic nor a Hebrew scholar or even as one knowledgeable to other forms of life in the region—olive, almond, fig, citrus fruits, sheep, cotton, or the grains like wheat. I come as a student, with a life-long admiration for the radical, abolitionist, and antinomian traditions: Jesus and the prophets, Karl Marx, Gerard Winstanley, Thomas Spence, Olaudah Equiano, the IWW, Frederick Douglass, Shunryu Suzuki, Elizabeth Poole, Ann Setter, Ivan Illich, Malcolm X, William Blake, Silvia Federici, E.P. Thompson, Robin Kelley, Manuel Yang, Michaela Brennan, Midnight Notes, Counterpunch, and Retort; and then I became an historian of all the above with particular interest in the commons. As Marcus Rediker and I said in the introduction to the Arabic translation of our Many-Headed Hydra, Herodotus, “the grandfather of history,” explained that Palestine lay between Phoenicia and Egypt.

Besides going to Athens, a home of philosophy (philia = love, Sophia = goddess of wisdom), Paul went to gatherings where they had “everything in common” (Acts 4:32). Jubilee was another Biblical thing I could cotton on to because I love its principles of land back, freedom now, no work, debt forgiveness, and rest for revered mother Earth. It all seems to me a beautiful combination of revolution and relaxation. Paul became a follower of Jesus who was thrown out of his hometown and almost killed for proclaiming jubilee right now. He called for rest and forgiveness. The only economic basis of such a thing is the commons. The struggle in Palestine helps us see this.

I believe that the musha’a (community-owned agricultural lands), like similar practices anywhere else in the world, can help us realize a world based on just conditions of mutuality, name it as is your wont: true communism, the cooperative commonwealth, the commons. The renewed thinking of the commons was born of struggles against the new enclosures of the neoliberal era and inspired by the commoning practices of autonomist Zapatista communes in Chiapas and its defense of the ejido. The commons is now understood as a key conceptual breakthrough in orienting visions and pathways to postcapitalist futures. The commons also marks the radical escape from the paralyzing misfires and legacies of modernist state socialisms (Ray 2024, see especially Federici 2019).

I must write about the musha’a, a Palestinian form of land tenure, or the commons, which the Ottomans, the Brits, and the Israelis attempted to destroy. It includes collective ownership, cooperative labor, and periodic redistribution. These are principles also found in the earliest promulgation of debt cancellation, freedom from servitude, and restoration of land tenures. In addition to jubilee, it was espoused by Enmetena, a ruler of Lagash, around 2400 BC and evolved into general proclamations of amnesty (Hudson 1993). The musha’a was a defensive institution against the fear of taxation and military recruitment by the Ottoman authorities.

Palestine’s planetary significance is threefold: first, there is its geography at the conjunction of three continents, Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the waters among them. Second, there are the extractions from the soil of Palestine, as well as from under it (grains, minerals, oil, and gas). And third, there is Palestine’s significance concerning Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Three big religions, three big continents, and original economies of cultivating the earth, mining the earth, and drilling the earth, making modes of production from the “fertile crescent” to the petroleum present with its terrible planetary perturbations. The struggle for the liberation of Palestine has geographic breadth and historical depth, which explains why it is considered the “soul of the souls of all our struggles.” The whole world has awakened to it.

To introduce the subject further, though at the risk of passing from the contemporary sublime to the ridiculous antique, let us attend to a paper delivered on January 20, 1890, at the Victorian Institute in London by James Neil, M.A. He explains how in southern Palestine the arable soil was apportioned by lot (Quarterly Statement Palestine Exploration Fund 1891). He said,

the persons proposing to work the ground divide into groups, and the chief of each group draws a section of the land proportioned to the number of persons in his group. Each section is composed of lands of various fertility and qualities. These sections are again subdivided by measurement with an ox-goad, or a line called habaleh, the counterpart of the measuring line [as noted in Biblical] Scripture. The farmers, in such regions as possess this custom, prefer this method of communistic division to holding in fee simple.

“Fee simple” is feudal locution, an English legal term for private property: you can use or abuse it, you can bequeath it, you can alienate it, you can sell it, and above all you can exclude others (see Hyde 2010). Roman law refers to fructus, abusus, and usus, or fruits, abuses, and uses. The idea of individual, exclusive land ownership is, according to the historian Andro Linklater (2013) in his book Owning the Earth, “the most destructive and creative force in written history.” The Palestine Exploration Fund was founded in 1865 and carried out surveys and ethnographies of Ottoman Palestine. It was an Anglican operation financing archeologists and clergymen. “We are about to apply the rules of science,” said the Archbishop of York in Westminster Abbey at its founding, “to an investigation into the facts concerning the Holy Land.”

The Quarterly Statement of the Palestine Exploration Fund for April 1891 includes this in its survey of land tenure and agriculture in Palestine:

in Southern Palestine, and in a few other districts, the land is held in common by all the inhabitants of a village, and apportioned at stated times to the individual cultivators according to their ability to cultivate, their standard being the number and power of the cattle used for ploughing. Such lands are known as, musha’a.

In 1865, in addition to the founding the Palestine Exploration Fund, evangelical Christians in England formed the Victoria Institute to defend “the great Truths revealed in Holy Scripture…against the opposition of science so called.” Its leaders were Christian Zionists. The commons and communism were easily linked in the mind of the Church of England. In contrast to jubilee and other sacred Bible texts the 38th of its 39 articles of religion simply states, “the riches and goods of Christians are not common as touching the right, title, and possession of the same.” Let us look at this more closely considering the musha’a and communism.

In addition to Bedouin practices of common pasturage, the musha’a as a village-based agriculture was another version of commons in land, and was collectively owned by the village, whose individual members owned shares (ahsahm) in its use rights. These included the right to sow, to plough, to cultivate, to harvest. The threshing barn, like the land, was held in common. Secondly, the musha’a allowed the redistribution and equalization of ahsahm to different family groups at one- to five-year intervals. These rights were heritable and were determined by the wants and needs of the cultivator.

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When James Reid spoke of “communistic division” in contrast to “fee simple” what did he mean? The specter of communism haunts not only Europe as Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in The Communist Manifesto (1848), but Palestine too, says James Reid, M.A. to the Victorian Institute. “In this sense, the theory of the Communists may be summed up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” To what sense were Marx and Engels referring? They mean the employment of property as the means of exploiting others; capital, in other words. Marx elaborated on his understanding of communism years later when his Critique of the Gotha Program was published the very same year, 1891, that James Reid read his paper to the Victorian scholars of empire. Here he repeated the common definition among revolutionaries of 1848 and whose sense originated earlier with Gracchus Babeuf during the French Revolution (Foster 2020: 113): “From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” The principle applies to the musha’a in which capabilities and wants are collectively decided. Communism and commons begin to overlap.

The musha’a evolved over four hundred years under the Ottoman empire, which claimed to own the land as rule for tax purposes on miri land. It arose in the village, not the state, as a system of collective land tenure for cultivators who comprised the vast majority of the population. Efforts to install private property by Ottoman reform, or British mandate, or Zionist occupation met with determined, persistent resistance in “the land-equalizing musha’a village throughout Palestine.” “There was no need for land reform, which only proved destructive to the economy of the fellaheen. It nullified the advantages inherent in the system and, unexpectedly, facilitated the transfer of lands from Arabs to Jews.” (Nadan 2003)

Samuel Bergheim wrote an early description of musha’a for the Palestinian Exploration Fund. From a European banking family, Bergheim bought property in Palestine with title deeds accepted by the Ottomans (Tamari 2022).

When my brother and I bought the lands of a village some years since from its inhabitants, the Turkish authorities recognized us as the freeholders, and gave us title deeds, in accordance with a law on freehold passed by the late Sultan about twenty years ago. Not so, however, [for] the inhabitants of the village, for when we came to portion out the land in plots for cultivation, the villagers protested and refused to accept the new arrangement. They would only have the land in musha’a. (Tamari 2022: 9)

The Bergheim family bought land in 1872; in 1885 Peter Bergheim was murdered. Gezer was also the site of one of the earliest encounters between settler colonialism (the Bergheim estate) and peasant resistance to the imposition of the land privatization code of 1858, in which the communal (musha’a) system was undermined. The murder of Peter Bergheim—banker, settler, and amateur archaeologist—by Abu Shusha peasants highlighted the dynamic relationship between archaeology, early European agricultural settlement, and peasant dispossession of land.

Noura Alkhalili (2017) explains that the musha’a was “a once-prominent Levantine culture of common land.”[1] She describes a major way that the village musha’a, a largely agrarian commons, was transformed in an urban environment following the violence of mapping, titling, buying, and selling which cast people into cities and camps following their expropriation from the land. The transition was catastrophic: the fellaheen became refugees and the refugees became proletarians. The process was aided by the Oslo accords of 1993 and 1995, which banked on neoliberalism’s private property and market relations, and on the neoliberal theory of “economic development.” In Palestine, unlike England, it was more than fences and hedges—it included the thirty-foot separation wall on the West Bank built between 2005 and 2008 after the second intifada. How has the diaspora of the fellaheen carried on these notions of reciprocity, obligation, and mutual aid, whose origins are found in the musha’a, and whose values lie with the family, within the heart of the community, and the breast of every person? How are such principles transferred from the country to the city? What do refugees carry in their heart besides the paltry few belongings in their cart or car? What practices nourish and carry the collective wisdom of survival and resistance? Food, dwelling, security, health care, and water are immediate needs.

Noura Alkhalili, who did her field work in 2013, writes “The fellaheen in Palestine did not need any borders to identity their plots; fig and olive trees were convenient landmarks for everyone in the community.” She also explains how both houses and trees could become private property. Trees were mnemonic too as reminders, survivors. About John Berger, the art critic with a Tolstoy- like love of peasants, it is said that “the medlars and mulberry trees of Ramallah reminded him of the time before the Nakbah when it was a town of leisure and ease.” “As long as grass grows,” is the indigenous saying from Turtle Island. Les Levidow explains that one Palestinian response to the systematic re-engineering of land and the expropriation of Arabs from it, has been the “unauthorized” planting of olive trees. The olive has been a primary cultigen of Palestine for at least eight thousand years.

For Alkhalili, “The fellaheen resistance from below, against the British project of enclosure and commodification of land, was ultimately about the protection of the commons.” She reports from the Shu’faat refugee camp of East Jerusalem and how Palestinian contractors built high rises on musha’a land preventing Israeli’s from using it to build the separation wall. She refers to “the quiet encroachment of the ordinary,” that is, the coming of street vendors and houseless folks. “Enclosures from below are what happen when propertyless subalterns encroach on commons.” They too take steps to privatize property: “a process of class formation has occurred, tied to the individual appropriation of musha’a land,” which raises the question, “Is this rather a form of submission to both prevailing capitalist and colonial systems?” She continues, “While in parts of the world we can witness indigenous and activist movements seeking to reclaim the commons from private ownership, the opposite is happening in Palestine.”

In 1895 Theodore Herzl, author of The Jewish State and founding father of Zionism, confided in his diary, “we must expropriate gently the private property assigned to us….” Jabotinsky’s 1923 essay “The Iron Wall,” as well as Herzl himself, compared the Zionist project to the expropriations of the English and American colonists. Eighty percent of Arab land has been taken since 1948. Among the methods used in this expropriation is digging deeper artesian wells for water. A third of Israeli water supply is pumped from the West Bank. The domestic, municipal, agricultural, and industrial hydrological system is controlled by an Israeli water company (Levidow 1990).

Noura Alkahalili bears close and scrupulous witness to the urban transformation of musha’a under conditions of hostile occupation. Gary Fields (2017), for his part, provides an historical mirror for our reflections. His study is in three parts: English enclosures, Indigenous American conquest, and Palestinian colonization. These are three “cases” of enclosure. English ideas and practices “migrate” to America; English enclosures are in the same “lineage” as Palestine’s. The re-mapping and boundary-making conforms to modernization and territorial ambitions of estate owners. “In each case, systems of landholding deriving from custom and imbued with collective rights of use and cooperative forms of management came under attack by modernizers.” In three parts Gary Fields analyzes enclosure in England from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century. He describes the conquest and reservations of Indigenous people in North America, and finally he describes the Palestinian case or the settler colonialism of the Zionists. Capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism are the terms that are offered in an attempt to generalize from the “cases.” Maps, laws, and fences are the techniques of acquisition and possession. For England it was profit, for America it became race, and for Palestine it was religion. “These three case studies of dispossession offer distinct pathways to modernity,” he writes, and we might just as well say the three cases are three lanes on the same superhighway going in the same direction, namely “modernity,” or perdition.

Fields employs Edward Said’s term “imaginative geography” as a first step in colonization, from which maps and a landscape will be realized. Land rights are rights of exclusion, delimiting mine from thine, to use an old phrase. Under the Ottomans, cultivators of Palestine created “a unique system of communal tenure known as musha’a—gave villagers control over cropping practices and spread the risks of subsistence agriculture.”

With the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the end of World War One, the British were mandated to govern Palestine. The infamous Balfour declaration promised the banker Rothschild “a national home for the Jewish people.” Under the British mandate 70 percent of village lands were still held in musha’a tenure. English land policy was hostile to musha’a. Sir Ernest Dowson, engineer and surveyor, advocated enclosure and partition of common land. He completed the first cadastral survey of Palestine. In 1925 his “Preliminary Study of Land Tenure in Palestine” (Dowson 1931) was in full continuity with the classic advocates of the destruction of the English commons, namely, Arthur Young, John Sinclair, and William Blith. The British succeeded in surveying and entitling 25 percent of Palestine. This weakening of musha’a was a victory for the Zionist movement, as land could now be bought and sold. Even still, by 1947 Zionists had obtained by purchase less than 10 percent of arable Palestinian land—the village and aspects of musha’a still dominated. Ernest Dowson led the work of land registration. He led the cadasters, surveyors who made cadastres, or registers of extent, value, and ownership of property. Their work paved the way for Zionist colonization.

Then again, in the Peel Commission of 1937, the musha’a was identified as a disincentive in face of stubborn resistance. The Arabs regarded the musha’a “as a safeguard against alienation,” to quote the Commission. Perhaps it is this relation to the land in the face of the British Empire that gave to the fellaheen its world-famous character, expressed in the Arabic word sumud, or steadfast.

The struggle is for liberation not for a new state. “The British Mandate’s survey and cadastral and mapping project…sought to centralize power and decision-making away from the indigenous population.… [The] project’s largest obstacle: the musha’, a land-equalizing system managed directly by the peasants themselves” (Quiquivix 2013). “The musha’a was characterized by the periodic redistribution of agricultural plots among peasant cultivators who held claims to parts of the land in the form of shares.” “The continual practice of negotiating land redistribution placed emphasis on relationships, accountability, and affective ties among villagers.”

The fence, the hedge, the wall, the haw-haw, razor wire, barbed wire, brick and cinder block became the means and symbols of this vast enclosing. Such architecture joined law (criminalization of custom) and cartography (theodolite, chains) to destroy communities based on common lands. In England they called such lands “waste.” In America it was called “wilderness.” Or in the language of the Roman empire, Latin, which instead referred to terra nullius or vacuum domicilium. Children sought “vacant lots” for their play, sports, and games. In contrast to the vernacular whose outstanding genius was the poor poet and deep commoner, John Clare, beloved two centuries later in Palestine which is neither a “nothing land” or a “vacant domicile.” The olive, the fig, the apricot, the vine, the pomegranate, the walnut, almonds, oranges, and lemons were Palestine’s fruits. 70 percent of arable land at the time of the nakbah still was held as musha’a.

The musha’a village resembled the English village with its collective decision-making, resource allocation, fruits of open field agriculture, and basket of common rights. Land in England assumed many forms: meadows, woods, fens, heaths, fells, moors, marsh, uplands, as well as arable lands. Each had ecological features particular to it and therefore modes of customary appropriation that also were distinct. The world knows the process thanks to English literature. Robinson Crusoe (1719) is the classic text of individualism, enclosure, possession, and conquest. At the peak of revolutionary movement against oppressors and enclosers—those who sought to close the open fields in the name of profit and commerce (“improvement” they called it)—the radical English poet, William Blake, wrote that “to create a little flower is the labor of ages,” and then again that “improvement makes straight roads but the crooked roads without improvement are roads of Genius.” The English “right to roam” is related to the Palestinian “right to return.” Enclosure brings about odium because it amounts to dispossession, impoverishment, depopulation, forced migration, dearth, nostalgia, sadness, and trauma. The hedgerow materialized enclosure, so did the straight road.

Through struggle, the musha’a will be transformed. Vestiges of mutuality remain today, even in the city and its refugee camps following the violence of war, dispossession, and privatization of land. Violence always accompanies expropriation. Ernest Dowson (1931) himself compared it to the Parliamentary enclosures of the eighteenth century. Lord Balfour in his diary compared the colonization of Palestine to the dispossession of the Sioux, or Lakota people, about which we may learn from Nick Estes and the Red Nation who have raised the world cry, “Land Back!”

Indigenous people of North America cultivated plants with three outcomes: 1.) corn became the mainstay among “the three sisters” (corn, beans, squash); 2.) women tended these crops; and 3.) the village became the basic unit of society. These were undermined by “A discourse of land improvement and property rights—supplemented with notions of savagery and racism—[which] settled upon the landscape…. Checkerboard grid of municipal, county boundaries within which indigenous people were enclosed in reservations. “The most striking…finding in Enclosure, is the enduring influence of ‘land improvement’ as the ideological inspiration for the reimagination of landscape and a driver of the process to enclose and take possession of land.” Maps, laws, and fences are the techniques of acquisition and possession. For England, land improvement meant profit. What did “improvement” mean?

Commoners in England, as with Native Americans, were cast as “savages.” As such they belonged to far-away places (India, America, Africa) in far-away times (B.C., neolithic, feudal). To Arthur Young, the theorist and first comprehensive chronicler of enclosure, commoners were “the Goths and Vandals of the open fields.” Linking commoners of the metropole with Indigenous people of the world in the stadial interpretation of human history and its four stages leading to “civilization” or “modernization;” and likewise linking commoners and Indigenous people against economic “progress,” “improvement,” or “development;” the buzz words of planners, politicians, and policy makers everywhere.

An older study spoke of “stages,” not “cases.” What is the difference? Fields (2017) does not write of work and the continental reorganization of labor, nor of money and the global investment to maximize surplus value. The bourgeoisie produced theories of historical change with economic determinism by describing human history in four or five “stages” of economic growth. William Roberton’s History of America, published in 1777, in the midst of the American War of Independence, developed the “stages” theory of the progress of “mankind” from savagery to civilization. Scotsmen such as Adam Ferguson and Adam Smith produced the sociological and economic theories for the stages—primitive communism, pastoralism, agriculture, and commerce—or in other words, savagery, barbarism, feudalism, and capitalism. Fundamental in each was the technological relationship to the earth as well as class differentiation and patriarchy. Gathering herbs, hunting in the forest, cultivating the soil, subterranean mining, until quantity overcame quality in incessant demonic accumulation. It was a powerful but illusory theory propounding both determinism and inevitability. The dynamic of change from one stage or mode of production to another occurred as revolution.

In 1878, Vera Zasulich attempted to assassinate the mayor of St. Petersburg and served time in prison for it. Three years later in March 1881, Czar Alexander II was assassinated in St. Petersburg. A month earlier Vera Zasulich found herself with a “life and death question” to put to Karl Marx: Can the rural commune (the obshchina) develop in a collectivist and socialist direction, or is it destined by the laws of history to perish as an archaic form? Is it just a phase from the past or is it a seed of the future? Marx’s response was interesting. He wrote four drafts of a letter to her. In the end he sent her a relatively brief reply and no uncertainty in his conclusion: “The special study I have made of it, including a search for original source material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia.” (Marx 1881) The previous four drafts provide us with an idea of his “special study.”

In his letter to Zasulich, Marx (1881) quoted from Capital, whose first volume she would go on to translate into Russian. He stated that “the expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from the soil is the basis of the whole process.” Marx writes her about “all the historical twists and turns” or the “frightful vicissitudes” which characterize such transitions. To her he makes a powerful distinction between the “archaic commune” when communal residence was in a single house, as with the Haudenosaunee or “people of the long house,” when kinship and communal membership considerably overlapped, and production was collective unlike the agrarian commune where the open field was divided into individual strips. Labor and land were collective in the archaic commune, while a dualism prevailed in the agrarian commune, with some collective elements and some individualist elements. Marx warned Zasulich that “to save the Russian commune, there must be a Russian Revolution.” Marx’s view of history is not linear but rather spiral: the past is not dead, and in fact it is not even past. Hence, “the return of modern societies to a higher form of an ‘archaic’ type of collective ownership and production.” He thus links the commons to the commune.

For us too this is the quandary faced in Palestine. Again, events compel us to think of alternatives to privatization. Again, we ask what is communism? For a definition we go again to Karl Marx (1845) who wrote a few years earlier in The German Ideology, “We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.” He puts practice ahead of theory. He says this in a context which rendered the great mass of humanity propertyless, destitute, and wanting. And yet it existed “world-historically.” Years later, in The Critique of the Gotha Program, composed in 1875 and published in 1891, he insisted that “every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”

Protestations against private property did not originate with Karl Marx. They are worldwide, and history is full of them. Here are three examples. In 1794, from England’s oldest settler colony, Ireland, William Drennan (1754–1820), founder of the United Irishmen and coiner of the jewel “the emerald isle,” wrote as part of his defense against sedition:

By attaching the oldest inheritance of the whole people to certain round spots of earth, gives a locality to liberty, inconsistent with its nature: turns legislators into land-measurers and land-measurers into legislators; extending lines of demarcation, on the one side of which privilege is heaped up, and on the other common right trodden down. (Deane et al. 1991: 323)

Or, at the time of colonization of Massachusetts the Indigenous sachem Massasoit of the Wampanoag asked,

What is this you call property? It cannot be the Earth for the land is our Mother nourishing all her children, beasts, birds, fish, and all men. The woods, the streams, everything on it belongs to everybody and is for the use of all. How can one man say it belongs only to him?

And we have George Jackson’s questions from inside the Amerikkkan system of mass incarceration: “Who has done the most dying? Most of the work? Most of the time in prison (on Max Row)? Who is the hindmost in every aspect of the social, political, and economic life?”

Idealists seeking reform often return to study life on the planet prior to the privatization of property or the dominion of money and market. Land is the ancient foundation of human society and the grounding of the entire biome.[2] Neither state nor nation; neither imperium (sovereignty, war) nor dominium (borders, property). Instead, omnia sunt communia.

The musha’a evolved with the miri agrarian policy of the Ottomans, which comprised 87–90 percent of agricultural land of the empire. By 1914, the end of the Ottoman empire, the musha’a amounted to 70 percent of total land. It constituted 55 percent of the cultivated land in 1922; 46 percent in 1930; 25 percent at end of Mandate. However, only a fifth of the total land of Palestine had been divided into demarcated units. In 1947, Jewish settlement amounted to 8 percent of land surface in Palestine—by 1947, only 20 percent of land was settled with title. By 2017, Zionist settlement and infrastructure covered 85 percent of the territory.

It was not just law that modern colonists took from the Roman empire of old. Soldierly virtues, honor, fortitude, suffering, wounds, loss of limbs, blindness—were extolled. A huge array of cunning military punishments were passed down. It was a patriarchal affair, teaching the young men and boys how to die, obedience to the state, rape upon Mother earth, and white supremacy with its albifying powers to effect discourse, iconography, and structures of knowledge. “Whiteness” was born in the chromatics of alchemy as “albification.” This is what the young Marx (1843) meant when he wrote, “To have its sins forgiven mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.” The sin here is theft of land. To forgive this sin is to give it back. But as Caliban said,

This island’s mine by Sycorax my mother,
Which thou tak’st from me.

Was not Sycorax from the Levant? These are remnants of one European empire to another. Yes, true, but just as foundational are the women, whose labor gives life, the preserver of community, the keeper of the hearth; responsible for the reproduction of human.

When it was said by the Romans of the quasi-independent plebeians that the proletarians were good for nothing except having babies, they gave us the word “proletarian,” now understood around the world. It refers to women especially, to aunts and “aunties,” to nannas and grannies, to sisters, and to sisterhood. This is why in South Africa it is said “touch the woman, touch the rock.” Women make the human community—cooking, safety, care, and memory. In any world-system, whether it is called savagery, barbarism, feudalism, capitalism—whatever—you will find women responsible for its reproduction. This is now truer than ever. The extended family, or hamula, was the basis of the village community and the musha’a.

Gary Fields (2017) distinguishes imperium from dominium following a distinction made under Roman law, where imperium refers to the territorial extent of royal sovereignty and dominium refers to the right to possess land within the imperial boundaries. One sticks a flag into the ground, the other erects a fence. Both bring the fort, the border, and violence. Imperium and dominium may parallel the difference between discovery and settlement. What is omitted is the transition from one to the other and the means of making that transition: war, disease, rape, and rapine! Rule by the stick—husbands beating wives, parents beating children, masters beating journeymen, masters whipping slaves, officers flogging sailors, and so on. The former inhabitants whose “discovery” was so heralded by Christian missionaries are “absent,” killed, or if they survive, they become self-alienated and shadows of their former selves poisoned by alcohol, shamed, dishonored, raped, destined to die young.

Christian Zionism is as old as capitalism. It dates from the sixteenth century. In England it reached an important peak at the time of Oliver Cromwell, the great commander of the English bourgeois revolution. Cromwell’s secretary argued that the Jews should go to Palestine. At the same time, after hundreds of years of exclusion, Jews were permitted to return to England under Cromwell. Kinship and commerce linked the Sephardim Jews from Amsterdam to the Mediterranean to the Atlantic. Cromwell asserted himself as an imperial sovereign ready to compete with the other imperial powers and none of these had as great a reach as the Dutch. Cromwell was a bourgeois commander who exerted his people by war. He reduced obstacles to the enclosure of land, invaded Ireland, defeated Spain, captured Jamaica. And he was a Zionist. This was Jihad, Protestant style done in the name of Jahweh.

When Oliver Cromwell chopped off the King’s head and inaugurated the capitalist state, he appointed Walter Blith as surveyor of confiscated royalist estates. Blith summed up his years of confiscation with a linguistic sleight of hand worthy of George Orwell’s double-think. In 1649 he published The English Improver, followed in 1652 by The English Improver Improved, which links confiscation, simple robbery, the privatization of the commons with human progress. Land theft becomes agricultural improvement! Therefore, to howl against such robbery is to waste your breath. To resist is to oppose the future. It is to steal your land for your own good. This sleight-of- hand has proved essential to capitalist development, the creed of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Gary Fields (2017) says, “Not only was the musha’a seen as an impediment to local agricultural development and Zionist acquisition but it represented a non- productive use of natural resources inconsistent with European notions of ‘improvement’ and ‘development.’”

As Marx (1852) pointed out, “Cromwell and the English people had borrowed speech, passions, and illusions from the Old Testament for their bourgeois revolution.”[3] A number of Cromwell’s close advisors came into contact with Dutch-based Jews and advocated Jewish resettlement in England (they had been banned from the country since the thirteenth century). Millenarian eschatology (the messiah and the Second Coming), imperialist commercial competition, the Atlantic slave trade, and the colonial settlement of Massachusetts Bay combined. Two Baptists petitioned in January 1649 for Jewish readmission: “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Israel’s sons and daughters on their ships to the land promised to their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for an everlasting inheritance.” Christian Zionism is inseparable from the imperial beast from the English Revolution to the present.

If, like Fields, we compare the three cases as three “acts” in a drama, the unifying plot is missing. The “cases” have an actual, historical relationship to one another: the enclosures in England led to war and the colonization of Ireland as well as to the creation of North American colonies, each of them a plundering search for new commodities and new means of expropriation and enslavement of labor. Inasmuch as the wealth generated by the eradication of North American indigenous landscapes (the railways, the great plains) led to an insatiable demand for petroleum, the thirst for resources lurks, too, beneath the ravenous appetites in the Middle East (the oil, the pipelines, Zionism). This was the bourgeois revolution (1649) whose effects are on a par with the French (1789) or Russian (1917) revolutions. One would not want to substitute “stage” for “case” to resolve the problem; instead, the issue of interpretation requires an understanding of enclosure that is a necessary feature of the expansion of the system of capitalist relations.

At a theoretical level, capitalism, colonialism, and nationalism are inter-connected; even though imperialism is inherent to capitalism, which obeys the fundamental law, the impulse of the whole system: “Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!” writes Marx. National liberation is inherent to the resistance of colonialism, though it may accommodate easily, as Fanon explained, with capitalism.

This is how the proletariat is created. In those parts of Palestine dominated by tenancy to landlords “the peasant cultivators are a shiftless class…and almost to a man in debt,” according to the reporter to the 1891 Palestine Exploration Fund. This debt inevitably causes him to yield his claim to the land, and in so doing he “becomes a Sherîk-el-Hawa (Partner of the Wind).” One can imagine how a poet might interpret this Arabic figure of speech. Mother Earth has expelled her ancient cultivators, who now disperse through the world, like seeds, to join the various others in the atmospheric diaspora. And there are many winds to pay attention to: the harmata, which blows from the Sahara into west Africa; the El Ñino, which builds from the Pacific Ocean into hurricanes. The power of those partners of the wind will be reflected down the ages in Anglo cultural production, from the painted murals inside restaurants that remind customers of home, to such sublime expressions of wind as Shakespeare’s Tempest or Herman Melville’s Typhoon.

Proletarians can’t rub two coins together. They have no land, no village relations, no subsistence, no wage. This is why the partners of the wind are so important: as proletarians they will carry with them the musha’a, steadfast. Sumud. The rock. To stand confidently, relaxed, firmly—a word akin to “upright,” which also combines social virtue with the physical upright posture of the body. Like righteousness, it is associated with truth, valor, probity, and principle: what do you stand for? It is nothing less than the transition from expropriation to exploitation. “The starting point,” Marx calls it, of the capitalist mode of production. This tearing apart, this separation, this wrenching asunder, the “irreparable break,” or the “metabolic rift.” In that transition from expropriation to exploitation, there’s a pause. Ed Emory (1990: 28), after traveling with migrant workers on the Red Sea observed: “These are the people who wait—wait their turn, wait in line, wait in huddled groups, wait looking through the gaps in the dock gates, wait for some official to deign to notice their existence. Always waiting.” They are, he says, “the people of the earth.”

Returning to the present moment in Palestine, we must add to the formulation “X2” (exploitation and expropriation) a dark shadow to each of its parts: exploitation + extermination, expropriation + extraction. The genocide being perpetrated by the Zionists in Gaza is conjoined with the extraction of land and oil. X2 is brought to X3 by adding “excuses.” The devastation, genocide, poisoning, and plunder of the ruling class is fobbed off in a series of institutionalized excuses: economic development, modernization, social improvement, personal security, and religious salvation. Each of these excuses has its discourse, its militarization, academic setups, racism, and politics. Like all excuses, on their face they seem plausible, normal even; until their shadows emerge as they have in the Gaza war for all the world to see. The global system of empire, war, and slavery has only led to a planetary system of flood, fire, poison, and disease. With these multiple catastrophes we anticipate the despoilation of the earth systems.

Although the prophet Micah promised each of us a fig tree (Micah 4:4), let us forgo archaic prophecies and conclude on a healing note of etymology. Gaza was a textile center and gave its name to a most useful weaving: gauze, the loosely woven fabric of cotton, silk, or linen used as a wound-dressing thanks to its ability to absorb blood and to act as a barrier to its further loss.

We have gone past the point of no return. Nevertheless, we are at a turning point. David Graeber and David Wengrow (2021: 524) write, “we are living in what the Greeks called…Kairos—the right time—for a metamorphosis of the gods, i.e. of the fundamental principles and symbols.” These chroniclers of the first or earliest world-wide human social formations call this “the right time,” the time of transition to another social formation. Gendered, racialized, imperialist capitalism has ruined everything, almost. Who or what among us will bring about the required metamorphosis?

To answer this question, we need not return to the dawn of everything. The musha’a of Palestine may guide our transition from one disastrous world and outlook to another: to the commune and the commons. And their relationship? We recall Marx’s (1881) reply to Vera Zasulich: “It is a question no longer of a problem to be solved but simply of an enemy to be beaten.”

From the Author: Thanks to Andrej Grubačić who invited me to write this for The Journal of World Systems Research, and thanks to Jeff Clark, Joe Summers, May Seikaly, Michaela Brennan, and Silvia Federici for critical encouragement.

Notes

[1] As a geographic designation of the eastern Mediterranean, the term “Levant” derives from the French for “rising” of the sun, and it also once designated in western Europe a right of grazing cattle on common land day and night named “levant et couchant.”

[2] A Greek word of sharing or commons plus a Greek word for life gives us biocoenosis.

[3] The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852).

References

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Linklater, Andro. 2013. Owning the Earth. London: Bloomsbury. Marx, Karl. 1852. The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte.

            . 1881. Correspondence with Vera Zasulich. (https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/zasulich/dra)

Nadan, Amos. 2003. “Colonial Misunderstanding of an Efficient Peasant Institution: Land Settlement and Musha’a Tenure in Mandate Palestine, 1921–1947.” Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 46 (3).

Palestine Exploration Fund. 1891. Quarterly Statement. London.

Quiquivix, Linda. 2013. “When the Carob Tree was the Border: On Autonomy and Palestinian Practices of Figuring it Out.” Capitalism Nature Socialism. 24 (3).

Ray, Gene. 2024. After the Holocene, the Commons. New York: Autonomedia.

Tamari, Salim. Autumn, 2022. “Archaeology, Historical Memory and Peasant Resistance: The Gezer Excavations at Abu Shusha.” Jerusalem Quarterly, 91.

Ghassan Kanafani: A Legacy of Giving and Resistance

[Pictured: A Palestinian girl passes by a mural of Ghassan Kanafani in Dheisheh Refugee Camp, Bethlehem, West Bank, May 12, 2018. (Credit: Anne Paq/Activestills)]

By Mohamad Kadan

"In truth, the only way out of this murky spiral is to believe that giving is acceptable, only for civilized humans... and that taking is undesirable... that living is about offering oneself, with no expectation of return... I am trying now to reach this belief in one way or another, or life becomes, without this belief, something absolutely unbearable..." [1]

— Ghassan Kanafani

I decided to write a text about Ghassan Kanafani to learn about one of his human characteristics: not just being a writer, an intellectual, a thinker, or a revolutionary. Recently, I have delved into the writings of several people who knew Kanafani, and they all agreed that he gave his life for Palestine through continuous giving, not only in the literary field but also by using his literature to provide us with the value of perseverance and endurance. The above quote is from Kanafani’s diary on January 4, 1960, written in haste, but as he describes it, it is as necessary as life. The question I pose in this text is: How does Kanafani want us to know him? What signs did he leave, from his comrades, newspapers, archives, letters, studies, stories, novels, and plays?

In 1952, Kanafani received approval to be appointed as a teacher at the UNRWA schools. His brother, Adnan Kanafani, tells us how Kanafani became a model teacher, spreading enthusiasm and overcoming oppression and defeat inside Palestinian camps. There, he met Mahmoud Falahah, an Arabic language teacher, who attended one of Kanafani’s classes due to his admiration for Kanafani’s exceptional ability to awaken the students’ potential [2].

Kanafani wrote a short story titled "A New Sun," published in the Lebanese literary magazine Al-Adab, the magazine most associated with Kanafani’s legacy. In it, he tells us in his extraordinary language about the decision to leave Damascus for Kuwait, through a letter to his friend Mustafa, who was studying in Sacramento: "The Kuwaiti Ministry of Education signed a contract with you last year, excluding me entirely. While I was going through a period of deep hardship, you occasionally sent me small sums, which you now want to be considered a debt, perhaps out of fear that I might feel diminished. Yet you knew very well my family’s circumstances: that my modest salary from the UNRWA schools was barely enough to support my elderly mother, my brother’s widow, and her four children." He then tells us about Israel's attack on Gaza, his follow-up on it, and whether it affected his daily routine, asking what he could do when they bombard "our Gaza" with fire and bombs. His decision to leave Damascus and teach refugee children made him regretful, directly affecting his writing and the question of giving—how, where, and why. He answered this in his short life by saying that we can give to Palestine from every position, region, and space. In late 1955, he traveled to Kuwait after accepting a job as a teacher in drawing and sports, where he felt an intense sense of loneliness and pain [3].

Kanafani did not flatter people "right and left." On the contrary, you might sometimes consider him self-absorbed, not caring about others' feelings and thoughts, as Fadl al-Naqeeb told us. Kanafani had many layers and was a flexible person. You had to wait and be patient to see him, observe him, and focus on his movements, writing, words, and conversations. Al-Naqeeb adds that he and his "Literature and Life" friends realized Kanafani’s value. Al-Naqeeb went on to study in the United States and received a copy of the story "The Cat" from his first collection, Death of Bed No. 12, which was published in 1957. He greatly admired it, and while exchanging letters, Kanafani told him that only a few had admired this story. As a result, Al-Naqeeb translated it and presented it in one of the English literature courses, where the professor allowed him to read it to the entire class. After the publication of Men in the Sun, Ghassan Kanafani asked al-Naqeeb to write a critical article about the novel. After publishing the masterpiece “Men in the Sun,” Kanafani asked al-Naqeeb to write a critical article about the story. Al-Naqeeb apologized, explaining that he could not fully grasp the essence of the novel, as the gap between reality and fiction was too narrow: “He told me how they had to move from their old home there, and the emotional sadness that accompanied this process, and how they found the letters F.K. engraved on the walls. His father’s name was Faiz Kanafani.” Al-Naqeeb felt that the story Kanafani wrote reflected his past, and that whatever he could write would not do it justice [4].

Kanafani’s wife, Anna Kanafani, also wrote about their first meeting in Beirut in 1961. She had said that she did not understand what had happened with the Palestinians and wanted to visit the camps. He yelled at her, "Do you think our people are animals in a zoo?" He told her that no one would take her there unless she understood the political background, and he explained the history of the Palestinian cause. Two weeks later, Kanafani told her, "Why don’t you stay longer?" She indeed stayed, worked at a kindergarten, was deeply influenced by his ideas, got to know his family, and they married. She recalls his ability to give even under the most challenging conditions, especially in 1967. His mother passed away a week before the June defeat in Damascus, and he was focused on standing strong beside his father and family. Upon returning to Beirut, she saw him for the first time breaking down in tears—was it because of the defeat, or for his mother? This was followed by the death of his friend, the novelist Samira Azzam from Acre, for whom he wrote a eulogy titled "The Promise," to inspire hope for his eternal city, Akka [5].

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Ghassan Kanafani gave a lot through his teaching career, literary work, criticism, political thought, and revolutionary activity. As we have seen, Kanafani’s fundamental role was in his relationship with his community, building and strengthening abilities, and providing opportunities. Mahmoud Darwish wrote in a eulogy titled "A Gazelle Foretelling an Earthquake": "My friend Ghassan! How many friends have I said goodbye to, but never bid farewell to a phase of my life, except in your final goodbye? The last thing I expected from nightmares was to announce your previous declaration about my existence ten years ago. I was born before that, but you announced my birth. I didn’t tell you: Thank you, I thought life was longer." Here, we see Kanafani’s generosity—he gave birth to resistance poets, directly contributing to creating a concept, practice, and framework for resistance art. Darwish and his companions, such as Samih al-Qasim, Hanna Abu Hanna, Rashid Hussein, Jamal Qawwar, and Hanna Ibrahim, poets from the occupied land in 1948, became part of the Arab intellectual and cultural scene after Kanafani’s writings. Their celebration was "stunningly embarrassing," as Darwish said about the neglect and denial before their birth announcement [6].

Generosity is a defining trait in Kanafani’s biography, and his ability to care for others matured through his relationship with his father, the lawyer and activist from the 1930s, whose legal work was connected to the oppressed and deprived. Anna quotes Kanafani as saying: "When I grow up, I want to be like my father, and I will fight to return to Palestine: my father's homeland, the land that he and Umm S’ad (أم سعد) told me so much about." "My father was a good man. He would buy me anything I wanted, and I still love him, even though he passed away." Kanafani’s concern with class struggle is related to his childhood, and its collapse before his eyes [7].

Kanfani: The Revolutionary

Kanfani's legacy is about his generosity in recruiting and attracting people to the revolution, as he was interested in the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Through poetry and culture, he also covered struggles, dispossession, and their organization. He did publish part of the memorandum of Arab citizens of Israel sent by the Al Ard movement, as Sabri Jiryis was their leader. I interviewed him, talking about his time under military rule, his struggles, and how he got involved with the Al-Ard movement. Later in 1970, he left and joined the PLO in Beirut through Fatah. Toward the end of the interview, I asked if he had ever met Kanafani. He said he did, and a few times, they spoke and had conversations.

He came to me with anger in his face and said, “Someone like you should be with us—the PFLP, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.” I told him, “My brother Ghassan, you’re thinking differently—big ideas, heavy theory, complex stuff. I’m a simple man. Fatah fits me better. It’s not left, not right—it sits in the middle, and that works for me.” I told him, “My comrade Ghassan, I can’t be part of the PFLP. I’m not in tune with the group. I can’t speak about the proletariat, class struggle, or internationalism. I respect Che Guevara and Castro, but I don’t think that model works for us here in Palestine.” Then I shared a story with him—about when I first arrived in Beirut. Naji Alloush, the Arab thinker, handed me his book and asked for my thoughts. Two days later, he returned and said, “Well, what do you think of discussions on the Palestinian Revolution?” I told him, “You made a grave mistake—like many Palestinian leftists—when you wrote that if there had been a Palestinian Lenin, none of this would have happened. That’s a flawed idea to open a book with. [8]

This story tells us about Kanfani's ambition and organization and how he always aims to recruit people for the organization and the revolution. Sabri Jiryis chose another path in the PLO, but they stayed in contact.

It seems that Kanafani regretted his time in Kuwait—or at least, did not find it fulfilling. He once told director Qasim Hawal not to go to the Gulf, especially not to Abu Dhabi, but to settle instead in Beirut. He told him, quite literally: “We just came out of Jordan and founded a magazine. Come with us—starve when we starve, feast when we feast.” This was shortly after the PLO departed from Amman, and it reflected Kanafani’s deep spirit of mobilization and commitment to collective national work. Hawal was one of Kanafani’s comrades from the late 1960s, during the final years of his life and his political engagement with Al-Hadaf magazine. Their meeting in Beirut wasn’t planned—it was one of those fateful encounters. Years later, during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut, Hawal directed a film adaptation of Kanafani’s most famous novella, Return to Haifa. It became the first feature film based on a Palestinian revolutionary novel. Even earlier, after Kanafani’s assassination, Hawal directed a short film titled The Word and the Rifle, which is a tribute to his life and legacy. [9]

Kanafani was a leading political thinker and an active educator of the Palestinian revolution. The 2024 publication Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings offers a glimpse into the depth of his political analysis—limited to what has been translated into English. In Arabic, his output was far more expansive. He wrote prolifically on socialism, revolutionary theory, the Palestinian cause, and anti-imperialist struggles across the region. His writings were rigorous, his arguments tightly constructed, and his intellectual influence extended far beyond Palestine. As Sabri Jiryis once remarked, Kanafani was doing the heavy thinking. One of the most formative moments in his political life came in 1970, during the Jordanian regime’s campaign—coordinated with other Arab governments—to crush the Palestinian revolutionary movement, its groups, and guerrilla forces. This period sharpened Kanafani’s political praxis and deepened his theoretical commitments [10]. 

Kanafani gave an important lecture at the Beirut conference in March 1968, during a crucial transition in PLO leadership, as armed guerrilla groups were emerging as the dominant force, especially in the wake of the Battle of Karameh against a Zionist invasion in Jordan, by February 3, 1969, Yasser Arafat assumed the presidency of the Executive Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization, at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council held in Cairo. His voice, theoretical framing, and revolutionary thought shaped these changes and fueled the people's will to overcome the 1967 Naksa [11].

His central thesis was to frame the failures of the Arab world and to answer the pressing question: why did Palestinian Arabs lose again in 1967? He introduced the concept of the “language of the blind,” which he defined as: “In the past ten years, what we might call a blind language has emerged in the region. And there is nothing more commonly used in our daily lives today than this blind language. Words have come to mean nothing unless framed vaguely, offering no protection or precision. Every writer now has their private dictionary, using words based on their understanding—an understanding that is not commonly agreed upon. As a result, the words mean nothing.” Kanafani shows how Arab discourse—on democracy, revolution, and change—became saturated with vague language, which paralyzed the power of the people. It silenced youth and barred them from offering new paths to liberation. He emphasized: “The problem was not that we did not know, but that we did not allow those who did know to speak or to act.” From this, he proposed a return to the idea of the party as an organization of the modern world. This reflects Antonio Gramsci’s notion of the “new prince” in Machiavelli’s terms: the party as the structure capable of organizing, mobilizing, and recruiting the revolutionary spirit of youth [12].

Abu Ali Mustafa, the military leader in the Popular Front [for the Liberation of Palestine], said he first came to know of Ghassan through the “Mulhaq Falstin” Supplement of Al-Muharrir newspaper, which reached them in Jenin, in the West Bank, through smuggling. He met him for the first time after the launch of the Palestinian armed struggle following the defeat of 1967. He said:

"In that period, 1967 had arrived, and I met Ghassan face to face for the first time during his first visit to the military bases in the Jordan Valley. He asked me a lot about the interior [Palestinian territories] and the beginnings of the armed struggle... He asked me about the people and the geography and took notes. He asked me what was right and wrong in those beginnings. He asked me about the resources we started with, the organization, the popular mood... about the scenes." [13]

There, in the Jordan Valley, an ethnic cleansing campaign is now underway. Ghassan then told him about his study of the 1936 revolt, comparing it to the Palestine Liberation Organization-led revolution. This time, he said, the people are dispersed and displaced, the land is occupied, and on top of that, the Arab states are conspiring against the revolution—a radical difference. Kanafani was always deeply invested in the question of liberation. He understood how difficult that task was, especially under the conditions we continue to face. But his life—his ideas, his relationships, his roles—offers ways to think about persistence, about resisting through every act and position one takes. In my piece, I wanted to show how the lesser-known, often overlooked fragments of his life reveal so much about what it means to live as a Palestinian and a revolutionary.

Bibilography

[1] Romman Cultural Magazine. Ghassan Kanafani’s Diaries... (1959-1965) (1/2). Link here https://rommanmag.com/archives/18633

[2] Kanafani, Adnan. Ghassan Kanafani: Folded Pages. Kuwait: Nashri Electronic Publishing House, 2003. eBook. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12378936

[3] Ghassan Kanafani. “Shams Jadida [A New Sun].” Al-Adab, no. 2 (February 1, 1957).  https://archive.alsharekh.org/Articles/255/18587/420406

[4] Al-Naqeeb, Fadl. Hakadha Tantahi al-Qisas... Hakadha Tabdaʾ [Thus Stories End... Thus They Begin. Beirut: Muʾassasat al-Abhath al-ʿArabiyya, 1983.

[5] Kanafani, Anni. "Interview with Anni Kanafani: I Imagine Ghassan Sitting with Us." Interview by Ayham al-Sahli and Taghrid Abdelal. Institute for Palestine Studies, Arts & Culture Blog, July 20, 2022. https://www.palestine-studies.org/en/node/1652961 & "Ghassan Kanafani fi Dhikrahu al-‘Ishrīn" [Ghassan Kanafani on His Twentieth Memorial]. Al-Ādāb, no. 7–8 (July 1, 1992).

[6] Darwish, Mahmoud. A Gazelle Heralding an Earthquake: In Memory of the Martyr Ghassan Kanafani. Register of the Immortals, Vol. 2, Central Media Office of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, pp. 200–205. https://palestine-memory.org/ & Kanafani, Ghassan. “al-Adab al-Filastini al-Muqawim taḥta al-Iḥtilāl 1948–1968” Palestinian Resistance Literature under Occupation, 1948–1968. Cyprus: Rimal Publications, 2015. (Published Originally in 1968)

[7] Interview with Anni Kanafani In"Ghassan Kanafani fi Dhikrahu al-‘Ishrīn" [Ghassan Kanafani on His Twentieth Memorial]. Al-Ādāb, no. 7–8 (July 1, 1992).

[8] Sabri Jiryis - Fassuta. Interview Conducted by the Author on 18 April 2025, through Zoom.

[9] Bdeir, Ahmad Naim. “Qasem Hawal Tells Al-Hadaf: ‘This Is How I Lived with Ghassan Kanafani and Knew Him!’” Al-Hadaf, July 8, 2025, link here

[10] Kanafani, Ghassan. Ghassan Kanafani: Selected Political Writings. Edited by Louis Brehony and Tahrir Hamdi. Paperback ed. October 20, 2024. 

[11]  “An Important Document: From the Thought of Ghassan Kanafani – Reflections on Change and the ‘Language of the Blind’.” Originally presented at the “Beirut Seminar” in March 1968. Published in Al-Hadaf Magazine, Special Issue on the 16th Anniversary of His Martyrdom, July 1988.

[12] Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quintin Hoare. New York: International Publishers, 1971. "The Modern Prince."

[13] Al-Hadaf Magazine, Year 1, Issue No. 1320, July 2001. https://fada.birzeit.edu/handle/20.500.11889/6552

Alligator Alcatraz Was Already Here

By Aaron Kirshenbaum and Grace Siegelman

In the middle of the Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee, Florida, and almost dead center of the Florida Everglades, surrounded by alligators and pythons, is the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. For years, plans to expand the airport’s infrastructure have been stalled in an attempt to preserve the surrounding marshlands and a critical freshwater source. On July 3, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, per the request of President Donald Trump and Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Kristi Noem, used emergency powers to seize the abandoned airport and open Alligator Alcatraz, named for Trump’s twisted fantasy to reopen the deadly Alcatraz Island in the San Francisco Bay. The makeshift prison is currently capable of detaining up to 5,000 migrants (with capacity expected to double) and celebrated for being inexpensive due to its ‘natural’ barriers.

Recent news reports have documented the horrific conditions: tents that provide no protection from rising summer temperatures, maggot-infested food, little access to clean drinking water, flooding near electrical cables, and bedding. Prominent environmental organizations like the Center for Biological Diversity have sued Noem for the environmental impacts the detention center will have on the surrounding marshlands, water sources, and sacred land of the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes. Five Florida state lawmakers have also sued Governor DeSantis over being denied entry into the detention facility.

We must break down the divisions between movements to fight against Alligator Alcatraz and to prevent similar facilities from opening in the future. This facility is the natural culmination of decades of build-up of the war economy, of the prison system, and of policy prioritizing money above human needs. Its opening is activating environmentalists, anti-war advocates, and immigration organizers alike. Alligator Alcatraz is a catalyst for us to stand together to call for the destruction of detention centers in the US and the divestment from militarism here and everywhere.

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The funding sources for this detention center are absurdly symbolic. In a statement to the Associated Press, Noem stated that the facility was projected to cost $450 million. Yet leaked documents reveal that the total grant awarded to the project is worth $608 million —  all from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

FEMA is the same organization responsible for providing emergency relief after natural disasters, like the recent catastrophic flooding in Texas — and like the type that could emerge from this facility, contaminating the drinking water of the eight million people served by the aquifer adjacent to Alligator Alcatraz. Recent cuts have resulted in an inadequate early warning system in states like Texas, which left residents helpless during the catastrophic and deadly flooding. This prioritization of a war-economy budget over a people’s economy turns all areas impacted by the militarism-induced climate crisis into sacrifice zones of human and ecological life.

The timing of the opening coincides with President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, which gives tax breaks to the U.S.’s wealthiest five percent and $150 billion to further militarization here and abroad, all while cutting social programs like Medicaid, SNAP benefits, and student loan assistance.

This sacrifice of life is the function of prisons, the build-up of which emerged through disinvestment in the public sector as a catch-all solution to social issues. Instead of investing in schools, housing, education, or jobs, local and federal governments elected to build prisons as a way to contain poverty and extract people from their communities — in turn extracting their time, their autonomy, and the money that otherwise could have gone toward their lives, instead throwing it into brutality, confinement, and militarization of the police to enforce this financial arrangement.

The same answer rings true whether you are talking about Alligator Alcatraz. U.S. funds and intelligence aiding the Israeli bombing of Palestinian hospitals, homes of doctors and lawyers, or U.S. taxpayer dollars being stripped from education, housing, and healthcare. The United States government is not in the business of sustaining life, but rather sustaining profits, control, and more profits. Our money is being used to illegally detain thousands of people every day for existing, and Alligator Alcatraz is a jarring example of what is already here. Thirteen thousand people have died in U.S. prisons due to summer heat waves in the past twenty years. Nearly half of the drinking water in U.S. prisons is contaminated with forever chemicals; like Alligator Alcatraz, most prisons and jails are built on abandoned industrial sites linked to disease, cancers, and death. Prisons are especially vulnerable during natural disasters. Last October, for instance, several prisons were not evacuated in Hurricane Milton’s Zone A Evacuation Center. Additionally, during Hurricane Katrina, hundreds of incarcerated folks were left locked in prison for four days without food and water while their cells flooded with water and other elements.

Whether it be prisons, FEMA-funded ICE detention facilities, or increased funding for the Pentagon, the extractive motivation is always the same. We need to approach prisons as a form of militarization at home — taking people out of their communities, not to extract their labor in the prison in most cases, but so that the State can extract their lives and “save” resources outside of the prison. This facility is funded for a PR campaign, and condemns those incarcerated to an early death. This murder is accelerated by the climate crisis, which has been accelerated by our warmaking, all for the sake of continuing to extract labor and resources across the world.

Whether it’s the over 800 U.S. military bases leaking toxic chemicals and jet fuel, prisons and cop cities, or ICE detention facilities, our targets are the same, and the reasons for their funding are a common thread. These deadly facilities are being built on sacred indigenous land, decimating the health and water sources of local communities, and extracting the lives of people who our economic and political systems have discarded.

Alligator Alcatraz, Alligator Auschwitz, is a brutal reminder of the daily happenings here in the belly of the beast. Trump and Congress continue to find pay cuts in government spending for life-affirming resources while piling money into starving and incarcerating its own people and funding the ecocide and genocide of people outside its borders. Our money is being filtered away from the things we need most and toward systems that will kill us and the planet. We cannot allow our struggle against all forms of domestic and international militarism to be siloed.  We must push forward and never look away.

If we want an end to ICE detention centers and deportations, if we want our money invested in things that matter to our survival, we must cut the one trillion-dollar war budget today. Find out how to get started in your local community now.

Aaron Kirshenbaum is CODEPINK's War is Not Green campaigner and East Coast regional organizer. Based in and originally from Brooklyn, New York, Aaron holds an M.A. in Community Development and Planning from Clark University. They also have a B.A. in Human-Environmental and Urban-Economic Geography from Clark. During their time in school, Aaron worked on internationalist climate justice organizing, educational program development, and Palestine, tenant, and abolitionist organizing.

Grace Siegelman is CODEPINK's Engagement Manager. Grace completed her Master's Degree in Women and Gender Studies and Bachelor's Degree in Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies at DePaul University. She has been organizing for over 6 years in Chicago. Her organizing and research focus on prison and police abolition, queer theory, gendered violence and anti-war efforts. She has led youth campaigns on Ban the Box, a national movement to remove the question of criminal history from college applications and led letter writing and education initiatives to incarcerated survivors of domestic violence. Her writing can be found in Common Dreams, CounterPunch, LA Progressive and more.

The Nakba Never Ended

[Pictured: A mural by Emmalene Blake in Dublin expresses solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza [Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters]

By Eyad Alkurabi

Last month, as the state of Israel continued to starve and exterminate the people of the Gaza strip, massacre Palestinians in the west bank, and gaslight and delegitimize Palestinians in the diaspora and our friends and allies worldwide, Palestinians marked the 77th commemoration of the Nakba – our catastrophe, the founding of Zionist state. But the Nakba has never ended. In fact, it has been ongoing.

It has been 77 years of ongoing agony. With every step we take, Palestinians remind ourselves that we stand on the shoulders of giants. In my own family, we have been freedom fighters on both sides since the 1920’s – because our people’s catastrophe did not begin in 1948, it began decades before with the arrival of Zionism, bringing many massacres even before the time we commemorate as Nakba.  Beginning in the 1920’s entire villages were ethnically cleansed, sometimes entire family lines wiped out. The Zionist settlers and militias did to us exactly what had once been done to indigenous Americans. Untold thousands were killed between the 1920’s and the Nakba, when 750,000 Palestinians were ultimately and forcibly expelled from their lands. Today, we carry our parents’ and grandparents’ keys, and we carry their hopes that the next generation can one day return home.  Until then, we as their descendants must continue showing up for our people wherever we are and whoever we are, no matter how high the personal cost or how difficult the work may be for us.

Every Palestinian family has its stories. On my mother’s side, they tell of sheltering a family of Jewish Holocaust refugees who eventually intermarried with our family. And when the Nakba came, those Holocaust survivors had to flee again to Syria, where many of our family then died in the Syrian civil war. One of my father’s earliest memories is from the age of four, when he was playing on the floor of his home while his mother made rice pudding. When a bomb suddenly landed next door, he fell into the pot of rice pudding and scalded his arms.

And our Nakba, our mass catastrophe that we were forced to swallow, reared its ugly head again in 2023. But it never actually ended, because Israel is addicted to killing Palestinians. Every year, they need a refill on the script — a refill that is perpetually funded by the United States of America with seemingly no limits. We need to take the corrupt doctor’s license away and achieve an arms embargo now!

I hope you will educate yourselves about places like Al-Tira ’Haifa and Dar Yasin to better understand how the genocide of our people began. I ask you to visit the website Palestine Remembered where Nakba survivors document the stories of their lands, their homes, and their families.

Palestinians are so often asked to condemn violence and terrorism, perhaps because we are assumed to be violent and terroristic people. So, I also hope that you will also ask yourself what you would do in our shoes?

What would you do if your entire family had been killed by the time you were 18 years old?

What would you do if you’d been blockaded your entire life?

What would you do if you were just a fisherman trying to catch something to eat only to be shot at for fishing? Or if the only food you could get had to be approved, had to be allowed in, had to be given to you by the calorie?

What if you had no clean water for yourself or your family, and it was deemed illegal for you to even collect rainwater from your own rooftop?

If your political leaders, even the most peaceful among them, were in constant danger of being imprisoned, often with no charges, for years on end? And what would you do if every form of peaceful resistance that you tried was met with violent suppression?

The best time to get involved in the struggle for Palestinian liberation was before October 7th. But the second best time is now. We hope you will join us by showing up and getting involved in the Palestinian Rights Committee and/or the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, and by educating yourself about the facts of our struggle so that you can educate others.

Being a Neurodivergent Palestinian Gay man is a journey. However, through the amazing sumud and love of my communities, we are steadfast and pushing through. Although we carry our own individual trauma and our collective trauma, we as Palestinians and our friends love each other so much that we carry on and through.

If you wish to push for change, I ask that you consider the following steps:

• Persuade your local city and county to have binding BDS resolutions.

• Encourage your representative in congress to demand that AIPAC gets audited and gets labeled as a foreign entity.

• Demand an end to the siege, genocide, and blockade.

• Demand an immediate release of all Palestinian hostages, which are in the thousands.

• Write letters to editors to combat propaganda and provide a differing viewpoint.

• Bring up the Palestinian struggle and story at the kitchen table! Talk to your friends and loved ones.

• Get involved, protest, agitate, educate, and organize

We have the ability to make an impact — big and small and in between. Let’s utilize our abilities and, since we are in the belly of the beast, let’s get together and bring more peace and justice on this earth. 

No boots on the ground, no bombs in the air, US out of everywhere.