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.

On the Limits of Legalism Against Empire

By Ibrahim Can Eraslan

It is well known that imperialism has long maintained an aggressive stance toward Iran. This includes periodic attacks on Iranian territories, the assassination of personnel, economic sanctions, and even the use of propaganda tools aimed at regime change. The reasons behind these actions by imperialist powers are beyond the scope of this article, but it is evident that the ultimate target is China. On the other hand, Iran also holds significant importance for Russia. The Caucasus region, after all, is crucial to Russia’s security interests.

In order to achieve all these objectives, imperialism carries out its dirty work through Israel — as even German Chancellor Merz has stated — and the West responds to this with so-called “respect.”[1] Israel is able to carry out these actions in front of the entire world. All of this is framed by the West as a kind of civilizational war against Arabs or Muslims, with Israel cast as the protagonist.

What makes this possible is, of course, the fact that Israel is not merely a nation-state acting on its own. It is an indispensable tool of imperialism in the region. Moreover, the global reach of Zionist media propaganda and the immense financial support it receives from the West (which Trump himself actually criticized during his election campaign) provide Israel both the courage and the means to construct its own narrative.

In other words, Israel is acting with a specific mission. It serves as a battering ram for Western imperialism in the region, aiming at the destruction of anti-imperialist forces and the redrawing of borders. In this context, the increasingly aggressive stance toward Pakistan also gains significance, and it is meaningful to highlight the close ties between India and Israel. After all, without such a comprehensive campaign, halting China's economic rise becomes an extremely difficult scenario for Western imperialists. The elimination of anti-imperialist forces in the region simultaneously opens up new centers of exploitation for the West. This is why the targeting of China and Israel's role as the battering ram gains strategic importance for imperialism.

Thus, Israel’s assignment here goes beyond the ontological foundations of the Zionist narrative. Israel’s history —and its deep entanglement with imperialist powers — reveals that the matter at hand is not one of religion or culture, but fundamentally a class struggle. Accordingly, the stance of international legal mechanisms toward Israel should also be interpreted through the lens of class struggle, and the hypocrisy of international law must be understood in this context as well.

In its recent conflicts with Iran, it is clear that Israel is the aggressor. From the perspective of international law, this is not a disputable claim. Moreover, within the last six months, Israel has launched attacks on Palestine, Yemen, Lebanon, and Syria — and in three of these cases, it continues to maintain a de facto occupation. What is being done in Gaza and the West Bank is evident to all.

So then, why do the United Nations and its conventions not apply equally to all states? Why is there discrimination?

Undoubtedly, the concept of “humanity” as referred to in United Nations rhetoric is a costly one. In a world dominated by capitalism, this means that, whether under the label of “humanitarian intervention/aid” or “the fight against international terrorism,” imperialism can intervene in any conflict, rebellion, or — as in the case of Iran — against an official government, using any method it chooses. Or, as recalled from the Iraq invasion, it’s not merely about seeking authorization from the UN, but about CIA agents obtaining “diplomatic or other official identities”.[2]

Of course, the principles laid out in various international legal texts regarding human rights or the use of force by states may initially create a positive impression for many. However, as I mentioned above, these are concepts lacking in substance and are costly within the capitalist system. The universalization of these costly concepts is problematic precisely because of their Western origin. In capitalism, if you invest in something, you expect to profit from it. Therefore, investment in “humanity” is only measured in terms of its profitability. In this sense, a set of principles that emerged in a particular historical context and in response to specific social developments — and that bear the cultural and political imprint of that environment — being declared valid for all humanity is ethically questionable from many angles.

Imperialism reveals itself even within the principles of international law, as international law is fundamentally shaped by the logic of unipolarity.

From this, it can be said that Israel and the unipolar essence of international law are mutually compatible. It follows logically that international law would not punish a “child” born from its own core — or if it does, the punishment would still serve to protect that same core.

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However, a core issue here is that Israel’s actions cannot be justified even within the narrative of capitalist legality. Israel’s defense relies on the doctrine of “preemptive self-defense,” or in other words, “preventive attack.” To understand what these terms mean, one must examine Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, which regulates the right to self-defense. Article 51 is the exception to the prohibition on the use of force as established in Article 2(4) of the UN Charter.

So, what is preemptive self-defense?

In short, preemptive self-defense is an expanded interpretation of the traditional right to self-defense. Let us take a look at Article 51 of the Charter:

“Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security. Measures taken by Members in the exercise of this right of self-defence shall be immediately reported to the Security Council and shall not in any way affect the authority and responsibility of the Security Council under the present Charter to take at any time such action as it deems necessary in order to maintain or restore international peace and security.”[3]

It can thus be seen that this right is not one that entirely sidelines the United Nations or turns warfare into a fundamental exception to general international legal norms. Rather, it is a provision intended to address potential defense gaps in situations where the UN is unable to intervene immediately.

Of course, the use of force in self-defense is a legitimate right. However, as the term “self-defense” itself implies, this right must first be triggered — it must be born out of a concrete threat. The primary condition for the emergence of this right is that an armed attack must be directed against the state. In other words, Israel cannot invoke the right of self-defense based on a mere suspicion of nuclear weapons and the hysteria that “Iran might use them” — especially when the only nuclear arsenal in the region belongs to them.

It is also important to emphasize that Iran is a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), whereas Israel is not. Israel is estimated to possess between 80 and 200 nuclear warheads.[4] If there is no attack to be defended against, then there is also nothing to defend, meaning that in such circumstances, “preemptive self-defense” does not fall within the scope of Article 51.

Of course, since the term “armed attack” does not have a universally accepted definition, this issue remains open to debate. However, the relevant provision in the UN General Assembly’s Resolution A/3314 of 14 December 1974, titled “Definition of Aggression”, is as follows:

“Aggression is the use of armed force by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the United Nations, as set out in this Definition.’’[5]

Therefore, as can be seen, this is not a general right but an exceptional one. Iran is also not acting in violation of the relevant regulations and resolutions. In other words, this exceptional right does not grant states the authority to strike others simply because of hostile relations; it is merely a provision designed to address a potential gap in defense.

One might argue, as part of Israel’s defense, that Iran supports terrorist attacks against Israel. However, in this regard, the Nicaragua Case offers a clarifying precedent. In its judgment, the International Court of Justice ruled that a state’s support for armed groups operating in another state does not amount to an armed attack and therefore is not equivalent to one.

“The Court has already indicated (paragraph 238) its conclusion that the conduct of the United States towards Nicaragua cannot be justified by the right of collective self defence in response to an alleged armed attack on one or other of Nicaragua's neighbours. So far as regards the allegations of supply of arms by Nicaragua to the armed opposition in El Salvador, the Court has indicated that while the concept of an armed attack includes the despatch by one State of armed bands into the territory of another State, the supply of arms and other support to such bands cannot be equated with armed attack.’’[6]

It is clear that this situation has not been considered equivalent to an armed attack. In fact, it would be more appropriate for Iran — rather than Israel — to invoke such a defense.

Therefore, putting aside the vast ocean of doctrinal debates and legal terminology, the truth is that imperialist powers are able to cast aside the very laws they wrote, the international legal principles and norms they themselves defined, whenever it suits them. This same defense once appeared in the form of the Bush Doctrine, and we all know the consequences. In short, the concept of preemptive self-defense can be described as a notion fabricated by imperialism to override its own legal order.

The concept is better understood not by looking at processes through the lens of law, but by looking at the law through the lens of political processes. For example, Trump once threatened to intervene in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) under the pretext of preemptive self-defense.[7] But perhaps, unlike Iran, maybe the reason such an intervention was never carried out against DPRK is that DPRK actually possess nuclear weapons…

Finally, what I want to emphasize is this: attempting to challenge imperialism through existing legal norms is a well-intentioned effort, but believing that international legal mechanisms can take real and concrete steps against imperialism is, frankly, naïve. What South Africa has done should be applauded by all of humanity, and such examples must be multiplied. Only then can international law shed its one-sided character and begin to embody a multipolar structure — and once again, in today’s conditions, international law can only gain real applicability through a stance taken against imperialism.

Notes

[1]  Germany's Merz says Israel doing 'dirty work for us' in Iran – DW – 06/18/2025

[2] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/world/global/022399ritter-book.html

[3] https://legal.un.org/repertory/art51.shtml

[4] https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-leaked-emails-colin-powell-says-israel-has-200-nukes/

[5] A/RES/29/3314 - Definition of Aggression - UN Documents: Gathering a body of global agreements

[6] Nicaragua v. United States of America, ICJ Decision of 27 June 1986 p.12

[7] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/9/19/trump-threatens-to-destroy-north-korea-if-necessary

Why is Imperialism So Easy to Love?

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

By Yalda Slivo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Correctly Defines Pan-Africanism in 2025 and Beyond

By Ahjamu Umi

Republished from Hood Communist.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imperialism and White Settler Colonialism in Marxist Theory

By John Bellamy Foster

Republished from Monthly Review.

The concept of settler colonialism has always been a key element in the Marxist theory of imperialism, the meaning of which has gradually evolved over a century and a half. Today the reemergence of powerful Indigenous movements in the struggles over cultural survival, the earth, sovereignty, and recognition, plus the resistance to the genocide inflicted by the Israeli state on the Palestinian people in the occupied territories, have brought the notion of settler colonialism to the fore of the global debate. In these circumstances, a recovery and reconstruction of the Marxist understanding of the relation between imperialism and settler colonialism is a crucial step in aiding Indigenous movements and the world revolt against imperialism.

Such a recovery and reconstruction of Marxist analyses in this area is all the more important since a new paradigm of settler colonial studies, pioneered in Australia by such distinguished intellectual figures as Patrick Wolfe and Lorenzo Veracini, has emerged over the last quarter-century. This now constitutes a distinct field globally—one that, in its current dominant form in the academy, is focused on a pure “logic of elimination.” In this way, settler colonialism as an analytical category based on autonomous collectives of settlers is divorced from colonialism more generally, and from imperialism, exploitation, and class.[1] Settler colonialism, in this sense, is often said to be an overriding planetary force in and of itself. In Veracini’s words, “It was a settler colonial power that became a global hegemon.… The many American occupations” around the world are “settler colonial” occupations. We are now told that not just the “pure” or ideal-typical settler colonies of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel can be seen as such, as originally conceived by Wolfe, but also the “whole of Africa,” plus much of Asia and Latin America, have been “shaped” to a considerable extent by the “logic of elimination,” as opposed to exploitation. Rather than seeing settler colonialism as an integral part of the development of the imperialist world system, it has become, in some accounts, its own complete explanation.[2]

It would be wrong to deny the importance of the work of figures like Wolfe and Veracini, and the new settler colonial paradigm. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz states in Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion, Wolfe carried out “groundbreaking research” demonstrating that “settler colonialism was a structure not an event.” He did a great service in bringing the notion of settler colonialism and the entire Indigenous struggle into the center of things. Nevertheless, in the case of the United States, she adds, in a corrective to Wolfe’s account, the founders were not simply settler colonists, they were “imperialists who visualized the conquest of the continent and gaining access to the Pacific and China.” The projection of U.S. imperialist expansion from the first had no territorial boundaries and was geared to unlimited empire. Settler colonialism reinforced, rather than defined, this global imperialist trajectory, which had roots in capitalism itself. This suggests that there is a historical-materialist approach to settler colonialism that sees it as dialectically connected to capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, rather than as an isolated category.[3]

Marx and Settler Colonialism

It is now widely recognized in the research on settler colonialism that Karl Marx was the foundational thinker in this area in his discussion of “so-called primitive accumulation”; his references to colonialism proper, or settler colonialism; and his analysis of Edward Gibbon Wakefield and the “The Modern Theory of Colonization,” with which he ended the first volume of Capital.[4] However, such recognition of Marx’s numerous references to settler colonialism seldom goes on to uncover the full depth of his analysis in this regard.

As an authority on ancient Greek philosophy who wrote his dissertation on the ancient materialist philosopher Epicurus, Marx was very familiar with the ancient Greek cleruchy, or settler colony established as an extension of its founding city state. In many ways, the most notable Athenian cleruchy was the island/polis of Samos, the birthplace of Epicurus, whose parents were cleruchs or settler colonialists. The cleruchy in Samos was established in 365 BCE, when the Athenians forcibly removed the inhabitants of the island and replaced them with Athenian citizens drawn from the indigent population of an overcrowded Athens, turning Samos not only into a settler colony, but also a garrison state within the Athenian Empire. The dispute in the Greek world over the cleruchy in Samos was subsequently at the center of two major wars fought by Athens, resulting in the final downfall of Athens as a major power with its defeat by Macedonia in 322 BCE. This led to the dismantling of the cleruchy in Samos (in compliance with a decree issued by Alexander the Great shortly before his death), the removal of the Athenian settlers, and the return of the original population to the island.[5]

For Marx and other classically educated thinkers in the nineteenth century, the Athenian cleruchy in Samos represented a pure model of colonialism. Although settler colonialism was to take new and more vicious forms under capitalism, reinforced by religion and racism, the underlying phenomenon was thus well known in antiquity and familiar to nineteenth-century scholars. In his analysis of colonialism in Capital and elsewhere, Marx referred to what is now called “settler colonialism” as “colonialism properly so-called”—a usage that was later adopted by Frederick Engels and V. I. Lenin.[6] The concept of colonialism proper clearly reflected the classical viewpoint centered on Greek antiquity. Moreover, any use of “settler” to modify “colonialism” would have been regarded as redundant in the nineteenth century, as the etymological root of “colonialism,” derived from Latin and the Romance languages, was colonus/colona, signifying “farmer” or “settler.”[7] Hence, the original meaning of the word colonialism was literally settlerism. But by the twentieth century, the meaning of colonialism had so broadened that it was no longer associated with its classical historical origins or its linguistic roots, making the use of the term “settler colonialism” more acceptable.

Colonialism proper, in Marx’s conception, took two forms, both having as their precondition a logic of extermination, in the nineteenth century sense of exterminate, meaning both forcible eradication and expulsion.[8] The “first type” was represented by “the United States, Australia, etc.”, associated with a form of production based on “the mass of the farming colonists” who set out “to produce their own livelihood,” and whose mode of production was thus not immediately capitalist in character. The “second type” consisted of “plantations—where commercial speculations figure from the start and production is intended for the world market.” This type was part of “the capitalist mode of production, although only in the formal sense, since the slavery of Negroes [on New World plantations] precludes free wage labor, which is the basis of capitalist production. But the business in which slaves are used is conducted by capitalists.”[9]

Settler colonialism of the first type, that of farming colonists, was dominant in the northern United States, while the second type of settler colony, founded on slave plantations, dominated the U.S. South. The second type, or what Marx also referred to as a “second colonialism,” was rooted in slave labor and plantation economies that were run by capitalists who were also large landowners, with capitalist relations “grafted on” slavery. The settler colonies in the antebellum South, while based in the main on plantation slavery, also included fairly large numbers of subsistence “farming colonists,” or poor whites who existed on a marginal, subsistence basis, since slave plantation owners had seized the most fertile land.[10]

In this way, Marx’s approach to settler colonialism encompassed not only the exterminist logic directed at Indigenous nations, but also the dual forms of production (free farmers and plantation slavery) that emerged within the resulting settler colonial structure. Nevertheless, the overall dialectic of settler colonialism had as its precondition the extermination (including removal) of Indigenous populations. As Marx expressed it in the first volume of Capital:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the indigenous population of that continent, the beginnings of the conquest and plunder of India, and the conversion of Africa into a preserve for the commercial hunting of blackskins, are all things which characterize the dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation.…

The treatment of the indigenous population was, of course, at its most frightful in plantation-colonies set up exclusively for the export trade, such as the West Indies, and in rich and well-populated countries, such as Mexico and India, that were given over to plunder. But even in the colonies properly so called, the Christian character of primitive accumulation was not belied. In 1703 those sober exponents of Protestantism, the Puritans of New England, by decrees of their assembly set a premium of £40 on every Indian scalp and every captured redskin; in 1720, a premium of £100 was set on every scalp; in 1744, after Massachusetts Bay had proclaimed a certain tribe as rebels, the following prices were laid down: for a male scalp of 12 years and upwards, £100 in new currency, for a male prisoner £105, for women and children prisoners £50, for the scalps of women and children £50.[11]

The real significance of this barbaric price structure, as Marx intimated here, was one of extermination, since male prisoners were valued only marginally more than their scalps, which were tokens of their death; while the lives of women and children simply equaled the value of their scalps.

Marx’s primary source on colonization and the treatment of the Indigenous throughout the world, at the time he wrote Capital, was William Howitt’s Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (1838). Howitt’s theme with respect to the British colonies in North America was the extermination (extinction and expulsion) of the Indigenous population. Writing at the time of the Trail of Tears in the United States, he described “the exterminating campaigns of General Jackson.” In this respect, he quoted Andrew Jackson’s declaration on March 27, 1814, that he was “determined to exterminate them” all. The Native American peoples, Howitt observed, “were driven into waste [uncultivatable hinterlands], or to annihilation.”[12] Writing of the conditions facing the Indigenous nations of the Southeast faced with the advance of white settlers, he explained,

Nothing will be able to prevent the final expatriation of these southern tribes: they must pass the Mississippi till the white population is swelled sufficiently to require them to cross the Missouri; there will then remain but two barriers between them and annihilation—the rocky mountains and the Pacific Ocean. Wherever we hear now of those tribes, it is of some fresh act of aggression against them—some fresh expulsion of a portion of them—and of melancholy Indians moving off towards the western wilds.[13]

For Marx, the logic of extermination introduced by English settler colonialism in the Americas was historically tied to the earlier and ongoing conquest and plundering of Ireland, the natural wealth of which was being drained continually by England. He argued that the same “plan to exterminate” that had been employed with the utmost ferocity by the English and Scots against the Irish was later applied in the British colonies in North America “against the Red Indians.”[14] In Ireland, what was frequently called a policy of extermination, occurring alongside the enclosures in England, created a massive relative surplus population that could not be absorbed by the early Industrial Revolution in England, leading to a constant flow of English, Irish, and Scots Irish settler colonists to North America, where they sought to extinguish the Native Americans to make room for their own advance. A similar process occurred in New South Wales (originally a penal colony in Australia) with respect to the settler colonial treatment of Aboriginal peoples, as described by Howitt.[15]

Marx and Engels were also deeply concerned with the French settler colonialism in Algeria occurring in their time, and sided with the Indigenous Algerian resistance.[16] The Indigenous population of Algeria was nearly 6 million in 1830. By 1852, following the French all-out war of annihilation, including a scorched earth policy and subsequent famine, this had been reduced to 2.5 million.[17] Meanwhile, “legalistic” means were also used to seize the communal lands, which were to be turned into the private property of colonists. In his excerpts in the 1870s from the work of the Russian ethnologist M. M. Kovalevsky, Marx compiled a detailed analysis of “the planting of European colonists” in Algeria and “the expropriation of the soil of the native population by European colonists and speculators.” After a brief sojourn in Algiers near the end of his life, meant as part of a rest cure ordered by his doctor, Marx argued that there was no hope for the Indigenous Algerians “WITHOUT A REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT.”[18]

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In 1882, Engels took up the subject of the English settler colonies in a letter to Karl Kautsky, writing:

As I see it, the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by European settlers, such as Canada, the Cape [South Africa], Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, countries that are merely ruled [by colonial powers] and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution…. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria and Egypt, and would certainly suit us [that is, the socialist struggle in Europe] best.[19]

Imperialism and Settler Colonialism

Lenin quoted in 1916 from Engels’s 1882 letter to Kautsky, including the reference to “colonies proper,” and clearly agreed with Engels’s analysis.[20] But the Comintern was slow to take up the question of settler colonialism. This was only to occur at the Second Congress on the National and Colonial Questions in 1928, in the “Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies,” which was meant to provide a critique of the entire “imperialist world system,” of which settler colonialism was considered to be a key part. A sharp distinction was drawn between settler colonies and other colonies. As the Comintern document stated:

In regard to the colonial countries it is necessary to distinguish between those colonies of the capitalist countries which have served them as colonising regions for their surplus population, and which in this way have become a continuation of their capitalist system (Australia, Canada, etc.), and those colonies which are exploited by the imperialists primarily as markets for their commodities, as sources of raw material and as spheres for the export of capital. This distinction has not only a historic but also a great economic and political significance.

The colonies of the first type on the basis of their general development become “Dominions,” that is, members of the given imperialist system, with equal, or nearly equal, rights. In them, capitalist development reproduces among the immigrant white population the class structure of the metropolis, at the same time that the native population, was for the most part, exterminated. There cannot be there any talk of the [externally based] colonial regime in the form that it shows itself in the colonies of the second type.

Between these two types is to be found a transitional type (in various forms) where, alongside the numerous native population, there exists a very considerable population of white colonists (South Africa, New Zealand, Algiers, etc.). The bourgeoisie, which has come from the metropolis, in essence represents in these countries (emigrant colonies) nothing else than a colonial “prolongation” of the bourgeoisie of the metropolis.[21]

The Comintern went on to conclude that,

The metropolis is interested to a certain extent in the strengthening of its capitalist subsidiary in the colonies, in particular when this subsidiary of imperialism is successful in enslaving the original native population or even in completely destroying it. On the other hand, the competition between various imperialist systems for influence in the semi-independent countries [with large settler populations] can lead also to their breaking off from the metropolis.[22]

What emerged in the analysis of the Comintern by 1928, therefore, building on the earlier work of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, was a conception of settler colonialism as an integral part of a general theory of the imperialist world system. In the view of the Comintern, race, which was now no longer seen primarily in biological terms, but was increasingly viewed through the lens of cultural resistance—as in the work of W. E. B. Du Bois—was brought into the argument more explicitly with the concept of “whiteness,” emphasizing that these were “white” settler colonies.[23] The Comintern declaration on settler colonialism was concurrent with the first Palestinian treatments of the subject in the 1920s and ’30s.[24]

Also in the 1920s, Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui wrote of the Spanish “practice of exterminating the Indigenous population and the destruction of their institutions.… The Spanish colonizers,” he noted, “introduced to Peru a depopulation scheme.” This was, however, followed by the “enslavement” and then “assimilation of the Indians,” moving away from the exterminism of pure settler colonialism as the demand for labor became the dominant consideration. Here the primary objective of colonization, as Mariátegui recognized, had shifted from the expropriation of the land of Indigenous populations, and thus their erasure, to an emphasis on the exploitation of their labor power.[25]

The Comintern was dissolved by the Soviet Union in 1943 at a critical moment in the Second World War as a way of demonstrating that the defeat of Nazi Germany came before all else. The notion of settler colonialism, however, was carried over into dependency theory after the Second World War by the Marxist economist Paul A. Baran, then a professor at Stanford University. Baran had been born in Tsarist Russia and received his economics training in the Soviet Union, Germany, and the United States. He linked the Comintern doctrine on settler colonialism to the question of development and underdevelopment.

Writing in 1957, in The Political Economy of Growth, Baran distinguished “between the impact of Western Europe’s entrance into North America (and Australia and New Zealand) on one side, and the ‘opening up’ by Western capitalism of Asia, Africa, or Eastern Europe,” on the other. In the former case, Western Europeans “settled” as permanent residents, after eliminating the original inhabitants, arriving with “capitalism in their bones,” and establishing a society that was “from the outset capitalist in structure.”[26]

However, the situation was different with respect to Asia and Africa:

Where climate and the natural environment were such as possibly to invite Western European settlers, they were faced with established societies with rich and ancient cultures, still pre-capitalist or in the embryonic state of capitalist development. Where the existing social organizations were primitive and tribal, the general conditions and in particular the climate were such as to preclude any mass settlement of Western European arrivals. Consequently, in both cases the Western European visitors rapidly determined to extract the largest possible gains from the host countries and to take their loot home.[27]

In this way, Baran clearly contrasted the two types of colonialism, linking each to the regime of capitalist accumulation. While European white settler colonies in North America and Australasia extirpated the original inhabitants and expropriated the land, laying the ground for internal accumulation, the wider European colonial plundering of ancient and rich societies, as in the cases of India, Java, and Egypt, fed the Industrial Revolution in England (and elsewhere in Western Europe), providing it with much of the original capital for development. In the process, preexisting civilizations and cultures were disarticulated. Their communal and collective social relations, as Rosa Luxemburg emphasized, were necessarily “annihilated” by capitalism.[28]

In dependency theory from the start, white settler colonies thus stood as an exception within colonialism as a whole. Baran noted but did not analyze the role of slavery in “the primary accumulation of capital” and the development of settler colonialism. For Marx, the transatlantic slave trade was the “pedestal” on which both the accumulation of capital in the plantation South of the United States and the British cotton industry at the heart of the Industrial Revolution were to rest.[29]

In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, settler colonialism theory became a major focus within Marxism due to struggles then occurring in Africa and Palestine. A key figure in the analysis of settler colonialism was Frantz Fanon. Originally from the French colony of Martinique, Fanon fought with the French Free Forces in the Second World War, studied psychiatry in France, and eventually joined the National Liberation Front of the Algerian Revolution. He was the author most notably of Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961). Influenced by both G. W. F. Hegel and Marx, Fanon applied Hegel’s master-slave dialectic to the colonizer-colonized relation in the Algerian context, accounting for the logic of violence characterizing settler colonialism and exploring the continuing search for recognition on the part of the Indigenous Algerians.[30] Critical considerations of settler colonialism were also inspired by the revolt of the Land and Freedom Army in Kenya against white settlers and plantation owners between 1952 and 1960, which led to the death in combat or execution of upwards of ten thousand Africans.[31]

In 1965, the Palestinian-Syrian scholar Fayez A. Sayegh wrote a pamphlet, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, published by the Palestine Liberation Organization, arguing that “Zionist colonialism” was “essentially incompatible with the continued existence of the ‘native population’ in the coveted country,” and had as its goal the creation of a “settler community.”[32] Two years later, in the midst of the Arab-Israeli War, French Marxist Maxime Rodinson, whose parents had both perished in Auschwitz, published his landmark work, Israel: A Colonial-Settler State? Rodinson commenced by stating that “The accusation that Israel is a colonialist phenomenon is advanced by an almost unanimous Arab intelligentsia, whether on the right or the left. It is one case where Marxist theorizing has come forward with the clearest response to the requirements of ‘implicit ideology’ of the Third World and has been widely adopted.” He saw settler colonialism as linked to “the worldwide system of imperialism” and opposed to “indigenous liberation movements.” For Rodinson, Zionism thus represented “colonialism in the [classical] Greek sense,” that is, in the sense of the Athenian cleruchy, which eliminated/removed the native populations and replaced them with settlers. Settler colonialism directed at the extermination and displacement of the Indigenous peoples/nations, he indicated, had also occurred in colonial Ireland and Tasmania. Given this underlying logic, “It is possible that war is the only way out of the situation created by Zionism. I leave it to others to find cause for rejoicing in this.” Israel, Rodinson added, was not simply a settler-colonial country, but participated in imperialist exploitation and expansion abroad.[33]

Arghiri Emmanuel, the pioneering Greek Marxist economist and theorist of unequal exchange, had worked in commerce in the Belgian Congo in what seems to have been his family textile firm in the late 1930s and again in the late ’40s before relocating to France in 1958. In his time in Congo, he had encountered the white settler community there, part of which was Greek.[34] In 1969, he published his classic work Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade. In that work, Emmanuel addressed the issue of settler colonialism or “colonialism of settlement.” Here he made a distinction between, on the one hand, England’s four main “colonies of settlement”—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which had introduced a policy of exterminism against the Indigenous population—and, on the other, the fifth such settlement, namely South Africa, where the native population had not been subjected to exterminism to the same extent. In South Africa, the Indigenous Africans were “relegated to the ghettos of apartheid,” allowing for the superexploitation of their labor by a substantial white minority.[35]

In Emmanuel’s theory of unequal exchange, wages were treated as an independent variable, based on Marx’s notion of their historically determined character. Viewed from this standpoint, Emmanuel argued that in the first four colonies of settlement, the high wages of the white workers who constituted the majority of the population had promoted rapid capital accumulation. However, in South Africa, the fifth settler colony, the wages of the majority-Black population were abysmally low, with the result being a “semideveloped” condition. Emmanuel criticized dependency theorist Andre Gunder Frank for explaining the development of the British white settler colonies primarily in culturalist terms. Rather, it was the high wages of the white settlers that promoted development.[36]

This argument was developed further in Emmanuel’s “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” published in New Left Review in 1972. Here he dealt with the frequent conflict that arose between settler colonists and the imperial powers that had given rise to them, since white settler states emerged as rivals of European colonial states, no longer subjected as easily to colonial exploitation. This dialectic led to struggles with the metropoles, most of them unsuccessful, by settlers attempting to create independent white colonial states. Here Emmanuel drew on his own experiences in the Belgian Congo. However, he put this whole dynamic in the context of the history of settler colonialism more broadly, as in Ireland and Israel/Palestine.[37]

Other Marxist theorists were to enter into the analysis of settler colonialism at this time, particularly with respect to Africa, relating it to dependency theory. In 1972, shortly after the publication of Emmanuel’s “White Settler Colonialism” article, Egyptian French Marxist economist Samir Amin discussed “settler colonization” in his article on “Underdevelopment and Dependence of Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” mainly with respect to the failed attempts at settler colonialism in sub-Saharan Africa. Amin distinguished settler colonialism from what he called “Africa of the colonial trade economy,” relying on monopolies of trade, the colonial import-export house, and the mobilization of workers through labor reserves. Later, Amin was to write about settler colonialism in Israel, which he saw as similar to the way in which the “Red Indians” in North America were “hunted and exterminated,” but which was to be viewed in Israel’s case as intrinsically related to a wider monopoly capitalist/imperialist trajectory led by the United States aimed at global domination.[38]

For Marxist theory throughout this period, the concept of settler colonialism was viewed as crucial in defining the development of colonialism and imperialism as a whole. In 1974, writing for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Harry Magdoff underscored that colonialism took

two forms, or some combination of the two: (1) the removal of the indigenous peoples by killing them off or forcing them into specially reserved areas, thus providing room for settlers from Western Europe who then developed the agriculture and industry of these lands under the social system imported from the mother countries; or (2) the conquest of the indigenous peoples and the transformation of their existing societies to suit the changing needs of the more powerful militarily and technically advanced nations.[39]

A breakthrough in the Marxian analysis of settler colonialism occurred with the publication of the Australian historian Kenneth Good’s “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation” in The Journal of Modern African Studies in 1976. Good drew on Marx’s notion of “so-called primitive accumulation” and on dependency theory to provide a broader, more integrated perspective on settler colonialism in its various forms. Looking at Africa, he discussed “settler states” and what he termed “colon societies,” where exterminism and settlement were “particularly heavy.” Such colon societies included “Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Cape Colony in South Africa” Much of his focus was on the colonies of settlement in Africa that, for one reason or another, did not conform to the full logic of exterminism/elimination, but which were ruled by dominant minorities of white settlers, as in Algeria, Kenya, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and South Africa. In these colonies, the object was the control of African labor as well as land, leading to apartheid-style states. Like Emmanuel, Good was primarily concerned with the complex, contradictory relation of the reactionary colons to the external colonial metropole.[40]

In 1983, J. Sakai, associated with the Black Liberation Army in the United States, wrote Settlers: The Myth of the White Proletariat.[41] Sakai’s work has often been dismissed as ultraleft in its interpretation, given its extreme position that there is effectively no such thing as a progressive white working class in the context of settler colonialism in the United States, thereby extending Lenin’s labor aristocracy notion to the entire “white proletariat.” Nevertheless, some of the insights provided in Sakai’s work connecting settler colonialism and racial capitalism were significant, and Settlers was referenced by such important Marxists thinkers on capitalism and race as David Roediger in his Wages of Whiteness and David Gilbert in No Surrender.[42]

Settler Colonialism as an Academic Paradigm

Dunbar-Ortiz’s landmark 1992 article on “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere” explored the massive die-down in the early centuries following the European arrival. She described the historical connections between “colonialism and exterminism,” focusing on the U.S. context.[43] However, in the 1980s and ’90s, Marxist investigations into settler colonialism were less evident, due to the general retreat from imperialism theory on the part of much of the Western Left in the period.[44] There was also the problem of how to integrate settler colonialism’s effects on Indigenous populations into the understanding of imperialism in general, since the latter was directed much more at the Global North’s exploitation of the Global South than at settler colonial relations internalized in parts of the Global North.

This changed with the introduction of a definite settler colonialism paradigm in the universities internationally, evolving out of postcolonial studies. Settler colonialism as an academic field had its genesis in 1999 with Wolfe’s Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology. Its formal structure was derived from two premises introduced by Wolfe: (1) settler colonialism represented a “logic of elimination,” encompassing at one and the same time annihilation, removal, and assimilation; and (2) settler colonialism was a “structure rather than an event.”[45] The first premise recognized that settler colonialism was directed at the expropriation of the land, while Indigenous peoples who were attached to the land were seen as entirely expendable. The second premise underscored that settler colonialism was a realized structure in the present, not simply confined to the past, and had taken on a logic rooted in a permanent settler occupation.

Methodologically, Wolfe’s treatment was Weberian rather than Marxist. Settler colonialism was presented as an ideal type that excluded all but a few cases.[46] The logic of elimination was seen as only really viable when it was historically realized in an inviolable structure. In countries where the logic of settler colonialism had been introduced, but had not been fully realized, this was not characterized as settler colonialism by Wolfe. Indeed, any move toward the exploitation of the labor of the Indigenous population, rather than their elimination from the land, disqualified a country from being considered settler colonialist. According to this definition, Algeria was not a settler colonial society any more than Kenya, South Africa, or Rhodesia. As Wolfe put it, “in contradiction to the kind of colonial formation that [Amilcar] Cabral or Fanon confronted, settler colonies were not primarily established to extract surplus value from indigenous labour.”[47] Likewise, Latin America, due to the sheer complexity of its “hybrid” ethnic composition, along with its employment of Indigenous labor, was seen by Wolfe as outside the logic of settler colonialism.[48]

Wolfe’s reliance on a Weberian methodological individualism resulted in his tracing of settler colonialism to the type of the settler. While there was such a thing as a settler colonial state, this was secondary to the ideal type of the settler.[49] Settler colonialism became its own abstract logic, entirely separated from other forms of colonialism and from imperialism. This one-sided, idealist methodology has been central to the development of settler colonialism as an academic study, removing it from the Marxist tradition (and from Indigenous traditions) from which the concept had arisen.[50]

Wolfe, by the time that he introduced his settler colonial model, had already established himself as a distinguished figure on the non-Marxist/anti-Marxist left. In 1997, two years before the publication of his seminal text on settler colonialism, he published an article entitled “History and Imperialism: A Century of Theory” for the American Historical Review, which was remarkable in the sheer number of misconceptions it promoted and in the depth of its polemic against Marxism. According to Wolfe, “the definitional space of imperialism [in left discourse] becomes a vague, consensual gestalt.” Marx was a pro-colonialist/pro-imperialist and Eurocentric thinker who saw colonialism as a “Malthusian” struggle of existence; Lenin, was part of the “post-Marxian” debate on imperialism” that began with social liberal John Hobson and that led to positions diametrically opposite to those of Marx; dependency theory turned Marxism “on its head”; world-systems theory was opposed to orthodox Marxism on imperialism, as was Emmanuel’s unequal exchange theory. Finally, “a notorious color blindness” suffused Marxism as a whole, which was principally characterized by economic determinism. In writing a history of imperialism theory, Wolfe remarkably neglected to discuss Lenin’s analysis at all, beyond a few offhand negative comments. He ended his article with a reference to settler colonialism, which he failed to relate to its theoretical origins, but approached in terms of postcolonial theory, claiming that it offered “discursive distinctions which survive the de-territorialization of imperialism.” It therefore could be seen as constituting the place to “start” if imperialism were to be resisted in the present.[51]

In contrast to Marx, with his two types of settler colonialism, and distinct from most subsequent Marxist theorists, Wolfe promoted a notion of settler colonialism that was so dependent on a pure “logic of elimination,” emanating from settler farmers, that he approached plantation slavery in the southern part of the antebellum United States as simply the negative proof of the existence of settler colonialism in the northern part. “Black people in the plantation South were racialized as slaves,” whose purpose in racial capitalism was to carry out plantation labor, thus distinguishing them from Native Americans due to the purely eliminatory logic imposed on the latter. The distinction, although a sharp one in some ways, relied on a notion of settler colonialism as constituting an ideal type associated with a specific form of social action carried out by settlers. As a result, the real complexity of colonialism/imperialism, of which settler colonialism is simply a part, was lost. Wolfe saw the removal of Indigenous labor from the antebellum South as a precondition for the mixing of “the Red man’s land…with Black labor.” But after that event, settler colonialism as a structure no longer applied directly to the U.S. South. Native Americans, Wolfe argued, were subject to genocide, and Black people to slavery. With respect to African-Americans, he wrote, “the genocidal tribunal is the wrong court.”[52]

Wolfe’s approach also tended to leave Africa out of the picture. According to Robin D. G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at the University of California, Los Angeles, whose research focuses on critical thought and movements associated with the African Diaspora, “By not incorporating more of the globe in his study, Wolfe’s particular formulation of settler colonialism delimits more than it reveals.” By excluding Africa, which did not fit into his pure eliminatory logic, Wolfe “presumes that indigenous people exist only in the Americas and Australasia…. Consequently, settler colonialism on the African continent falls out of Wolfe’s purview…. The exclusion of southern Africa and similar social formations from the definition of settler colonialism…obscures its global and transnational character.” In Africa, according to Kelley’s cogent formulation, “the European colonists wanted land and the labor, but not the people—that is to say, they sought to eliminate stable communities and their cultures of resistance.”[53]

As Sai Englert, author of Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, observed in a critique of Wolfe, the “sharp distinction between settler colonialism” and other forms of colonialism “is difficult to square with reality. On the one hand, elimination and genocide are a reality across the colonial world by means of war, famine, forced or enslaved labour, and mass murder. On the other hand, many settler colonial regimes were based primarily on the exploitation of the Indigenous populations.”[54]

Wolfe’s academic paradigm of settler colonialism following his death in 2016 was most influentially carried forward by Veracini, author of a wide array of works on the subject and the founding editor of the journal Settler Colonial Studies. Veracini, in a contradictory fashion, sought to adhere to Wolfe’s restrictive definition of settler colonialism, while at the same time giving it a more global and all-encompassing significance. He did this by separating “settler colonialism” entirely from “colonialism” and in effect subsuming the latter in the former. Thus, settler colonialism became the measuring stick for judging colonialism generally. As Veracini wrote in his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, “This book is a reflection on settler colonialism as distinct from colonialism…. I propose to see…as analytically distinct, colonialism with settlers and settler colonialism.” Key to Veracini’s method was the postulate that settler colonialism was not a subtype of colonialism, but a separate entity, “antithetical” to colonialism. The notion of imperialism, as opposed to mere references to “imperial expansion,” disappeared almost altogether in his analysis. Figures like Emmanuel received dismissive treatment.[55]

In a confused and contradictory series of transpositions, the concept of settler colonialism metamorphosed in the work of Veracini into an all-encompassing eliminatory logic. Wolfe had seen the classical-liberal notion of primitive accumulation—a concept that, in its bourgeois “nursery tale” form, was subjected to a harsh critique by Marx—as being “inseparable from the inception of settler colonialism,” essentially equating the two concepts.[56] Prior to this, Marxist geographer David Harvey had transposed the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century historical concept of original or primitive accumulation into a suprahistorical spatial notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” Going beyond both Wolfe and Harvey, Veracini proceeded to transpose Harvey’s neologism into the cognate “accumulation without reproduction,” standing for the “eliminatory logic” of settler colonialism. Accumulation without reproduction was then seen as applying to all forms of eliminatory and predatory logic, with the result that all instances of world oppression, wherever direct economic exploitation was not concerned, including issues such as climate change, could be “most productively approached within a settler-colonial studies paradigm.”[57]

In this way, not only colonialism, imperial expansion, and racial capitalism, but also the global ecological crisis, ecological debt, and the financialization of the globe, in Veracini’s expanded conception, all fell under the settler colonial paradigm, representing a dominant logic of globalized elimination. Veracini has laid great emphasis on the fact that the United States as the hegemonic power in the world today is to be seen primarily as a settler colonialist, rather than as an imperialist, power. Not surprisingly, the concept of “imperialism” was absent from his Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview.[58]

The theoretical distinction between a Marxist analysis of imperialism/colonialism with settler colonialism as one of its forms, and the new academic paradigm in which settler colonialism is seen as its own discrete, self-determining phenomenon rooted in the type of the settler, could not be more different. This can be perceived in the way thinkers like Wolfe and Veracini approached the Israeli state’s violent occupation of Palestine. Wolfe went so far as to criticize Rodinson’s classic interpretation of Israeli settler colonialism on the basis that, for the latter, this was a European (and North American) imperialist project, while, for Wolfe himself, settler colonialism was defined at all times by the role of autonomous settlers disconnected from the metropole. Rodinson’s argument, Wolfe claimed, did not explain why the Israeli project is specifically “a settler-colonial one.” But such a view relied once again on the abstraction of the settler as a distinct ideal type, giving rise to settler colonialism separated off from other social categories, thereby running counter to a holistic historical inquiry. In this view, the imperial metropoles, whatever role they had in the beginning—and, in Wolfe’s argument, Israel was unique in that it was constituted by “diffuse metropoles”—are, by definition, no longer directly implicated in what the autonomous settler colonies choose to do. Indeed, in some non-Marxist analyses, the metropoles are now seen as the helpless victims of the settler colonies, simply locked into a common cultural history from which there is no escape. Lost here is the reality that Israel is, for Washington, a garrison colony within the larger U.S./NATO-based strategy of global imperialist domination.[59]

For Veracini, as for Wolfe, in writing on Palestine, the emphasis is on the absolute autonomy of settler colonies, which are then seen as completely self-determining. Israel’s occupation of Palestine is a case in point. This meant that the whole question of the imperialist world system’s role in the Israeli-Palestine conflict is largely denied. To be sure, Veracini has indicated that the potential remained for a reestablishment of a settler colony’s dependence on the core imperial powers (a point specifically directed at Israel) that could lead to its external “recolonization.” But this is seen as unlikely.[60]

Within what has become in the mainstream settler colonial paradigm, therefore, the approach to Israel’s occupation of Palestine is worlds away from that of historical materialism. Rather than relying on a very restrictive logic, Marxist analysis seeks to place the reality of Israeli settler colonialism in a wider and more dynamic historical perspective that grasps the complex and changing dialectical relations of capitalism, class, and imperialism/militarism.

Here it is important to note Israel/Palestine is demographically unique in the history of settler colonialism, since rather than either a definite majority or a powerful minority of colonizers emerging, there is a rough equality in numbers overall. Over seven million Israelis live in present-day Israel and the West Bank in 2022, and some seven million Palestinians live in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Israel, and East Jerusalem. Given the significantly higher birth rates of Palestinians, this is viewed by Israel as a demographic threat to its logic as a Zionist settler colonial state. Tel Aviv therefore has enhanced its efforts to seize complete control of the entire region of Israel/Palestine (referred to by the Israeli right as “Greater Israel”), adopting an ever more aggressive strategy of exterminism and imperialism.[61] This strategy is fully supported, even urged on, by Washington, in its goal of absolute imperial domination of the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia—the region of the United States Central Command.

Israel’s average annual military spending as a share of GDP from 1960 to 2022 is 12 percent. After shrinking officially to around 4–5 percent in recent years, it is now again on the rise. It has the second-highest military spending per capita in the world (after Qatar) and possesses not only military superiority in the Middle East region but also an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (nuclear, chemical, and biological).[62] Its war machine is supported by massive aid from the United States, which provides it with the most advanced weapons in existence. NATO has given Israel the designation of a “major non-NATO ally,” recognizing its position as a key part of the U.S.-European imperialist bloc.[63] In the United Nations, it is a member of the Western European and Other Group (WEOG) within the official regional groupings. The “Other” stands for the main settler colonial nations: the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, and formerly apartheid South Africa.[64]

For Max Ajl, a senior researcher at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, Israel, while a “settler society” and tied into a logic of exterminism, has to be seen in a larger context of the imperialism/militarism of the Global North. “The question of Palestine,” he writes, “is not merely a question of national [or settler] oppression, but poses Israel’s uniqueness: a condensation of Western colonial and imperial power, a world-wide symbol of Western perfidy, a state which physically cleaves Africa and Asia, a merchant and mercenary of global counter-insurgence, all melded in a manticore of death and destruction.”[65] If Israel can be viewed as a pure settler-exterminist state, it is also a global garrison state, tied to the entire system of world domination rooted in monopoly capitalism/imperialism in which the United States is the hegemonic power.

Wasi’chu

The rise of the American Indian Movement in the United States in the 1960s and ’70s led to strong critiques of the reality of settler colonialism. An extraordinary work in this context was Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars by Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas. Wasi’chu is a Lakota word that refers not to white man or settler but to a logic, a state of mind, and a system. Literally, it means “takes the fat” or “greedy person,” appropriating not just what is needed for life, but also what properly belongs to the whole community. “Within the modern Indian movement,” it “has come to mean those corporations and their individuals, with their government accomplices, which continue to covet Indian lives, land, and resources for public profit.” The term was famously used by Black Elk in Black Elk Speaks, based on interviews in the early 1930s, in which he emphasized the Wasi’chu’s unrelenting desire for gold. As Johansen and Maestas explained, Wasi’chu is “a human condition based on inhumanity, racism, and exploitation. It is a sickness, a seemingly incurable and contagious disease which begot the ever-advancing society of the West.” This observation became, in the work of these authors, the basis of a searing account of settler colonialism in North America, not simply geared to the past but to the present.[66]

“Wasichu,” Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker elaborates in her Living by the Word,

was a term used by the Oglala Sioux to designate the white man, but it had no reference to the color of skin. It means: He who takes the fat. It is possible to be white and not a Wasichu and a Wasichu and not white…. The Wasichu speaks, in all his U.S. history books, of “opening up virgin lands.” Yet there were people living here on “Turtle Island,” as the Indians called it, for thousands of years….

We must absolutely reject the way of the Wasichu that we are so disastrously traveling, the way that respects most (above nature, obviously above life itself, above even the spirit of the universe) the “metal that makes men crazy”.… Many of us are afraid to abandon the way of the Wasichu because we have become addicted to his way of death. The Wasichu has promised us so many good things, and has actually delivered several. But “progress,” once claimed by the present chief of the Wasichus to be their “most important product,” has meant hunger, misery, enslavement, unemployment, and worse to millions of people on the globe.[67]

Wasi’chu, as the Indigenous understood it, was the personification of what we know as capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism, a system of greed, exploitation, and expropriation of human beings and the land.[68] The Lakota people clearly understood this system of greed as one that had no limits and that was the enemy of communal existence and reverence for the earth. It is this more profound critique of capitalism/imperialism as a system dominated by the Wasi’chu that seizes “the fat,” (the surplus that is the inheritance of humanity as a whole) that we most need today. As The Red Nation’s The Red Deal states, the choice today is “decolonization or extinction,” that is, “ending the occupation” and destruction of the earth by imperialist “accumulation-based societies,” so as to “build what sustains us.”[69]

Notes

1. Key foundational works in this paradigm include Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology (London: Cassell, 1999); Patrick Wolfe, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016); Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” Journal of Genocide Research 8, no. 4 (December 2006): 387–409; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106, no. 3 (June 2001): 866–905; David Lloyd and Patrick Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” Settler Colonial Studies 6, no. 2 (May 2015): 109–18; Lorenzo Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Lorenzo Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024); Lorenzo Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity: Settler Colonialism in the Global Present,” Rethinking Marxism 31, no. 1 (April 2019): 118–40. Marxian-oriented critical perspectives can be found in Jack Davies, “The World Turned Outside In: Settler Colonial Studies and Political Economy,” Historical Materialism 31, no. 2 (June 2023): 197–235; and Sai Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction (London: Pluto, 2022).

2. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387–88; Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2; Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 51, 54–56; Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–11; Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 121; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 207.

3. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Boston: Beacon, 2021), 18; R. W. Van Alstyne, The Rising American Empire (New York: W. W. Norton, 1960).

4. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39–40; Lorenzo Veracini, “Introduction: Settler Colonialism as a Distinct Mode of Domination” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism, Edward Cavanaugh and Lorenzo Veracini, eds. (London: Routledge, 2017), 3; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 29–30; John Bellamy Foster, Brett Clark, and Hannah Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” Monthly Review 71, no. 9 (February 2020): 3.

5. John Bellamy Foster, Breaking the Bonds of Fate: Epicurus and Marx (New York: Monthly Review Press, forthcoming 2025).

6. Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (London: Penguin, 1976), 917; Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works (New York: International Publishers, 1975), vol. 46, 322; V. I. Lenin, “The Discussion on Social-Determination Summed Up,” July 1916, section 8, Marxists Internet Archive, marxists.org.

7. “Colony (n.),” Online Etymology Dictionary, etymonline.com. As G. E. M. de Ste. Croix states, “The Latin word coloni…had originally been used in the sense of ‘farmer’ or ‘settler.'” G. E. M. de Ste. Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (London: Duckworth, 1981), 159.

8. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word “exterminate” comes from the Latin for “to drive beyond boundaries.” From the sixteenth century onward, it meant “to drive forth (a person or thing), from, of, out of, the boundaries or limits of a (place, community, region, state, etc.); to drive away, banish, put to flight.” However, by the seventeenth century it had also taken on the additional meaning of “to destroy utterly, put an end to (persons or animals); not only to root out, extirpate (species, races, populations).” Oxford English Dictionary, compact edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 938.

9. Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 301–3; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 917.

10. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value: Part II, 301–3; John Bellamy Foster, Hannah Holleman, and Brett Clark, “Marx and Slavery,” Monthly Review 72, no. 3 (July–August 2020): 98.

11. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 915–17, emphasis added; William Howitt, Colonization and Christianity: A Popular History of the Treatment of the Natives by the Europeans in All Their Colonies (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1838), 348.

12. Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 346–49, 378–79, 403–5.

13. Howitt, Colonization and Christianity, 414.

14. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 266.

15. Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, 66, 193, 216, 283, 303, 366, 372; John Bellamy Foster and Brett Clark, The Robbery of Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 72–75; Dunbar-Ortiz, Not “A Nation of Immigrants,” 36–46, 126.

16. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 18, 60–70, 212–13.

17. Kenneth Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation,” Journal of Modern African Studies 14, no. 4 (December 1976): 599.

18. Karl Marx, “Excerpts from M. M. Kovalevsky,” appendix to Lawrence Krader, ed., The Asiatic Mode of Production (Assen, Netherlands: Van Gorcum and Co., 1974), 400, 406–7, 411–12; Foster, Clark, and Holleman, “Marx and the Indigenous,” 11–12.

19. Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. 46, 322. Translation altered slightly to change “actual colonies” to “colonies proper,” in accordance with the translation of Engels’s letter in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, n.d.), vol. 22, 352.

20. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 22, 352.

21. Communist International (Comintern), Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies (1928), in Theses and Resolutions of the VI. World Congress of the Communist Internationalvol. 8, no. 88, International Press Correspondence, no. 84, sections 10, 12 (extra paragraph indent created beginning with “Between”); Oleksa Drachewych, “Settler Colonialism and the Communist International,” in The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness and Zak Cope, eds. (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021): 2418–28. Lenin’s recognition of Engels’s position on “colonialism proper” and the Comintern’s detailed treatment of settler colonialism demonstrate that Veracini’s uninformed claim that “Lenin and twentieth century Marxism…conflated colonialism and settler colonial forms” was simply false. It is further falsified, as we shall see, by numerous explicit twentieth-century Marxist treatments of settler colonialism. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 39.

22. Comintern, Theses on the Revolutionary Movement in the Colonies and Semi-Colonies, 12–13.

23. W. E. B. Du Bois, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (New York: Harcourt Brace and Howe, 1920), 29–42.

24. Jennifer Schuessler, “What Is Settler Colonialism?,” New York Times, January 22, 2024.

25. José Carlos Mariátegui, José Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology, Harry E. Vanden and Marc Becker, eds. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2011), 74–76.

26. Paul Baran, The Political Economy of Growth (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1957), 141.

27. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 142.

28. Rosa Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1951), 370.

29. Baran, The Political Economy of Growth, 139–42, 153; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 925.

30. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 93; Simin Fadee, Global Marxism: Decolonization and Revolutionary Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2024), 132–52. In the work of Glen Sean Coulthard, Fanon’s emphasis on the colonial dialectic of recognition is combined with Marx’s critique of “so-called primitive accumulation” to generate one of the most powerful theoretical analyses of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance up to the present. See Glen Sean Coulthard, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

31. Donald L. Barnett and Karari Njama, Mau Mau from Within (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).

32. Fayez A. Sayegh, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization, 1965), 1–5.

33. Maxime Rodinson, Israel: A Colonial Settler State (New York: Monad Press, 1973), 27–33, 89–96. Rodinson’s monograph was first published during the 1967 Israeli-Arab War in Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal, Le Temps Modernes.

34. Jairus Banaji, “Arghiri Emmanuel (1911–2001),” Historical Materialism (blog), n.d.

35. Arghiri Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange: A Study of the Imperialism of Trade (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), 37–71, 124–25, 370–71.

36. Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange, 363–64.

37. Arghiri Emmanuel, “White-Settler Colonialism and the Myth of Investment Imperialism,” New Left Review 1/73 (May–June 1972), 39–40, 43–44, 47; Emmanuel, Unequal Exchange 124–25, 337, 363, 370–71.

38. Samir Amin, “Underdevelopment and Dependence in Black Africa—Origins and Contemporary Forms,” Journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 4 (December 1972): 519–22; Samir Amin, The Reawakening of the Arab World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016), 182–89.

39. Harry Magdoff, Imperialism: From the Colonial Age to the Present (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 19–20.

40. Good, “Settler Colonialism: Economic Development and Class Formation.”

41. J. Sakai, Settlers: The Mythology of the White Proletariat (Chicago: Morningstar Press, 1989).

42. David Gilbert, No Surrender: Writings from an Anti-Imperialist Political Prisoner (Montreal: Abraham Gullen Press, 2004), 5–59; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991), 184.

43. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “Aboriginal People and Imperialism in the Western Hemisphere,” Monthly Review 44, no. 4 (September 1992): 9.

44. On the retreat from imperialism theory on much of the left, see John Bellamy Foster, “The New Denial of Imperialism on the Left,” Monthly Review 76, no. 6 (November 2024): 15–19.

45. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 2, 27, 40–43; Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 387, 402.

46. Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868; Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 16.

47. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology, 1, 167.

48. Veracini, The Settler Colonial Present, 54. On the relation of Latin America to settler colonialism, see Richard Gott, “Latin America as a White Settler Society,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 26, no. 2 (April 2007): 269–89.

49. Wolfe, Traces of History, 28.

50. David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 137–82. The concept of accumulation by dispossession is contradictory in Marx’s terms, since accumulation by definition is not dispossession or expropriation, but rather is rooted in exploitation. Marx was strongly critical of the notion of “primitive accumulation” or “original accumulation,” as presented by classical-liberal economists like Adam Smith, and preferred the term “original expropriation,” or simply expropriation. See Ian Angus, The War Against the Commons (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 204–9.

51. Wolfe, “History and Imperialism,” 389–93, 397, 403–7, 418–20.

52. Wolfe, “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,” 388, 392, 403–4; Wolfe, “Land, Labor and Difference,” 868.

53. Robin D. G. Kelley, “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69, no. 2 (June 2017): 268–69.

54. Englert, Settler Colonialism: An Introduction, 15. For an indication of this complexity see Gerald Horne, The Dawning of the Apocalypse: The Roots of Slavery, White Supremacy, Settler Colonialism, and Capitalism in the Long Sixteenth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020).

55. Veracini, Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview, 4–12; Lorenzo Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies 21, no. 4 (2019): 572.

56. Lloyd and Wolfe, “Settler Colonial Logics and the Neoliberal Regime,” 8; Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 874; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 217. On the history of the classical-liberal conception of original, or primitive, accumulation prior to Marx, see Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

57. Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 119, 122–28; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 579–80; Nicholas A. Brown, “The Logic of Settler Accumulation in a Landscape of Perpetual Vanishing,” Settler Colonial Studies 4, no. 1 (2014): 3–5; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214; Harvey, The New Imperialism, 137–82.

58. Veracini, “Containment, Elimination, Endogeneity,” 122–8; Davies, “The World Turned Outside In,” 214.

59. Wolfe, Traces of History, 234–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570; Joseph Massad, “Israel and the West: ‘Shared Values’ of Racism and Settler Colonialism,” Middle East Eye, June 13, 2019; Jordan Humphreys, “Palestine and the Classless Politics of Settler Colonial Theory,” Marxist Left Review, June 13, 2024.

60. Lorenzo Veracini, Israel and Settler Society (London: Pluto, 2006), 97. It is notable that Veracini, like Wolfe, fails to recognize the significance of Rodinson’s Israel: A Colonial Settler State, stating that it was published in “the 1970s” (the time when the English edition came out), even though it appeared in French in the midst of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, and had an enormous influence at the time, instilling throughout the world increased awareness of Israeli settler colonialism.

61. Claudia de Martino and Ruth Hanau Santini, “Israel: A Demographic Ticking Bomb in Today’s One-State Reality,” Aspenia Online, July 10, 2023.

62. Varun Jain, “Interactive: Comparing Military Spend around the World,” Visual Capitalist, June 4, 2023; “Israel: Military Spending, Percent of GDP,” Global Economy, theglobaleconomy.com; U.S. Congressional Research Service, Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical Weapons and Missiles: Status and Trends (Washington, DC: Congressional Research Service, February 20, 2008), 16.

63. Thomas Trask and Jacob Olidort, “The Case for Upgrading Israel’s ‘Major Non-NATO Ally’ Status,” Jewish Institute for National Security of America, November 6, 2023.

64. Craig Mokhiber, “WEOG: The UN’s Settler-Colonial Bloc,” Foreign Policy in Focus, September 4, 2024, fpif.org.

65. Max Ajl, “Palestine’s Great Flood, Part I,” Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy 13, no. 1 (March 2024): 62–88; Esther Farmer, Rosalind Pollack Petchesky, and Sarah Sills, A Land with a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2021).

66. Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas, Wasi’chu: The Continuing Indian Wars (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1979), 5, 11, 16, 18; Black Elk and John G. Neihard, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (New York: William Morrow, 1932), 7–9.

67. Alice Walker, Living by the Word: Selected Writings 1973–1987 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 144–49.

68. Wasi’chu, as understood here, is essentially a materialist perspective, where a generalized human nature characteristic of certain groups of social actors is seen as a reflection of an underlying logic or system. In Marx’s terms, the capitalist is presented as a personification of capital. This is in contrast to a Weberian style ideal type, rooted in methodological individualism, where social structures are interpreted in terms of a type of social action with subjective meaning traceable to a type of methodological individual. Thus, from that perspective, it is the methodological individual of the settler who is at the root of settler type meanings/actions and is the basis of colonialism/settlerism. The ideal type of the settler constitutes, rather than is constituted, and is not itself the product of an ensemble of social relations. Marx, Capital, vol. 1 ,92.

69. The Red Nation, The Red Deal (New York: Common Notions, 2021), 7, 13, 135–37; Veracini, “Israel-Palestine Through a Settler-Colonial Studies Lens,” 570–71.

Is the Genocide in Congo Due to Human Hatred or Corporate Profit?

[Pictured: Congolese march near the border with Rwanda in 2023. Credit © Getty Images]

By J.B. Gerald

Rwanda has broken international law with the visible presence of Rwandan troops in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) alongside Rwanda's covert M-23 militia. M-23 is reported to have captured Goma (again) and the civilians are in a state of emergency. This is familiar because M-23 previously took over the city in 2012 but had to withdraw because it wasn't equipped to administer the city of two million. As the M-23 rebels and their allies increase their takeover of the East Congo with reported vows of advancing to the capital of the DRC in a "liberation" of the country, it becomes clear Rwanda has invaded Congo again, possibly for keeps this time to maintain its hold on the East's gold, copper, and coltan mines.

The Congo's government has requested international sanctions against Rwanda. But the international community has allowed an ongoing genocide of the Congolese people for thirty years. The people of the Congo live under a genocide warning.

Paul Kagame began invading the Eastern Congo after he took over Rwanda in 1994. Subsequently, Uganda, which sponsored Kagame's invasion of Rwanda with U.S. funding, and Rwanda have maintained militias in the area. While genocide was brought under control in Rwanda, an insistence on mass killing was carried into the Congo by Kagame's Rwandan troops in pursuit of Hutu refugees who fled there. This also allowed Rwandan forces to protect Tutsi groups settled in the Congo, and access and control a portion of the mining resources.

But the resources belong to the people. As they do in the Sudan and South Sudan. As they do in Gaza and Palestine. All three areas are currently threatened by genocide against the people who have lived there.

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The U.S. Government's official site for the National Library of Medicine notes, “5.4 million people have died in Democratic Republic of Congo since 1998 because of conflict” (Peter Moszynski, Jan. 31, 2008, BMJ). However, since the “First Congo War” in 1996 to the present, the western press notoriously underestimates the death toll at six million civilians.

From the perspective of preventing genocide, the source of the problem rests in both the five lakes region of Africa and the Middle East, with corporate interests using national leaders to effect policy. This facile academic statement of the obvious covers the fact that millions on millions of innocent civilian lives are currently being sacrificed for corporate growth and profit. This is against any sense of ethics, knowledge of right and wrong, law, religious commitments to honour life, or the people's informed consent.

In the DRC, the genocide continues because it is meant to. It works. The mines are working, the resources are taken. The peoples’ deaths are not a corporate concern. The elites are not about to stop it. They are the reason Patrice Lumumba was assassinated in 1961 and the UN's Dag Hammarskjöld was killed. And why the Simba rebellion was crushed. And why Eastern Congo was thrown into the chaos of warring militias.

The Rwandan genocide, which suddenly occurred between tribes living in peace, brought in an Anglo-American-backed Paul Kagame. One could say Rwanda is responsible for the genocide of Congolese except that the benefits have devolved to International corporations, stock markets, manufacturers, and western economies. As with all such imperialist and colonialist dynamics throughout history, Kagame’s Rwandan forces are simply mercenaries for western capitalists.

Unfortunately, this is an all-too familiar history. European and American policies have used Independent Congo (Zaire, DRC) since its colonial bondage as a people enslaved to the uses of Western capital. China is now buying into the land as well, with the purchase of many previously American owned mines. It is unclear how or if this will be much different than the Western playbook. One thing, however, is clear: the genocide continues. With respect for conscience, a portion of UN peacekeepers are in place to lessen the civilian body count. But the guilty parties here are the same who engineered the “Rwanda” genocide, which the UN did not stop, and which served Western corporate expansion.

There is little hope of any justice for the people of the DRC until the ownership and control of the mineral resources in the East are in the hands of a just regulator that assures both the people’s safety and fair payment for their resources. And, any such arrangement, would have to be negotiated and agreed upon with not only strict parameters, but with the approval of the very people who labor in these harsh conditions. In our new multipolar global landscape, this would have to be UN administered to include Russian and China. It is an alternative to an ongoing genocide. Until then, all profits from the genocide should be tracked as evidence for eventual prosecution.