Disturbing the Peace: UN Peacekeepers and Sexual Abuse

By Devon Bowers

Author’s Note: This article and series focuses on sexual abuse and assault, with some graphic descriptions of such acts. Reader discretion is advised.

The United Nations is an organization in which the main goal is to “maintain international peace and security” and “to take effective collective measures for the prevention and removal of threats to the peace, and for the suppression of acts of aggression or other breaches of the peace”[1] as a means to those ends. However, what has cropped up time and again, most recently with a 2019 New York Times article[2] focusing on UN peacekeepers in Haiti, is sexual abuse. It’s something that has not just plagued the organization for decades, but has utterly shattered, destroyed the lives of poor women around the world where they lay forgotten, often not seeing justice meted out to the ones who harmed them.

This problem, along with analyzing past and present plans to fight against this scourge, should be examined along with possible solutions. The purpose is not to ‘bash the UN’ in particular, but rather to study the systemic problems within UN peacekeeping and how it can be fixed or at least put on such a path.

Cambodia

In 1991, the UN formed the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) with the goal of “[taking] control of [Cambodia’ government] and [setting] up and run national elections” and to “help bring about a ceasefire between the various warring factions, disarm their forces and repatriate thousands of refugees languishing in camps on the Thai border.”[3] The mission seemed simple and yet problems occurred.

During this time period, there was a large resurgence of prostitution in Cambodia that was fueled by the economy but also the appearance of UN peacekeepers, which greatly increased the numbers from 10,000 in 1990 to 20,000 in 1993 when the UN exited the country.[4]

There were also allegations of sexual abuse by peacekeepers. Raoul M. Jennar, then-director of the European Far Eastern Research Center in Belgium, reported that “in the Preah Vihear hospital, there was for a time a majority of injured people who were young kids, the victims of sexual abuse by UN soldiers.” The situation was never handled, though women did come forth with rape and sexual abuse allegations, they were often days or weeks after the fact and so fact-finding and gathering evidence was a struggle.[5]

Besides the time lapse, such activity was openly supported by the chief of UNTAC, Yasushi Akashi, who argued that the peacekeepers “have a right to drink, enjoy themselves, and chase ‘young, beautiful beings of the opposite sex.’” This was in direct opposition to over 100 Cambodians and Westerners who alleged that sexual harassment of women occurred with disturbing frequency in any and all settings.[6]

It was this lax, uncaring, and cold attitude towards prostitution and sexual abuse that would set the tone for the UN’s peacekeeping missions.

Bosnia/Kosovo

In 1992, the United Nations established a peacekeeping force as to “provide security for the flows of humanitarian aid that were flowing into Bosnia from the international community.”[7] Approximately 40,000 UN personnel from a variety of nations were sent to aid in this goal.

Again, sexual abuse reared its ugly head. The Washington Post reported in 1993 that some UN peacekeepers, in visiting a Serb-run brothel, “took sexual advantage of Muslim and Croat women forced into prostitution, according to Muslim witnesses and the local Serb commander.” [8] The spokesman for UN forces in Sarajevo, LTC Bill Aikman, argued that such talk was nothing but “disinformation,” further stating that he didn’t “think U.N. troops could have done that.”

However, this was in direct conflict with eyewitnesses who, when being interviewed by Newsday, stated that in the summer and fall of 1992, they say on numerous occasions “saw young Muslim or Croat women being forced into U.N. armored personnel carriers or civilian cars that followed the U.N. vehicles to an unknown destination.”[9] Apparently the situation was never formally investigated by the UN, with an informal inquiry being dismissed “because ‘there was no grounds for pursuing it.”[10] Such logic is rather strange, deciding that there should be no further investigation because there isn’t any ‘real basis’ to do so, despite there not having been any formal inquiries into the matter.

Some years later, the US House of Representatives launched a formal investigation into the entire situation of prostitution and sexual abuse by UN peacekeepers and the full extent of the corruption of the UN was revealed.

The UN’s International Police Task Force was regularly involved at such aforementioned brothels. A raid of three nightclubs was done in November 2000, which found a total of six IPTF monitors in the clubs and it was revealed, according to verbatim statements from five of the women rescued from these brothels that IPTF monitors had been among the clients of these captured women.[11] When discussing the matter, UN officials contradicted themselves by denying allegations that their forces were involved in sex trafficking but “admitted that members of the force were found to have been involved in the use of young girls' services and that sometimes the children were unwilling participants.”[12]

The situation worsened due the fact that there was an active cover-up by the UN of such activities by the IPTF.

David Lamb, a human rights investigator for the UN, tore back of the curtain on the UN’s operations in Bosnia, directly linking it to sexual abuse. He even went so far as to say that:

U.N. peacekeepers' participation in the sex slave trade in Bosnia is a significant, widespread problem, resulting from a combination of factors associated with the U.N. peacekeeping operation and conditions in general in the Balkans. More precisely, the sex slave trade in Bosnia largely exists because of the U.N. peacekeeping operation. Without the peacekeeping presence, there would have been little or no forced prostitution in Bosnia. [13](emphasis added)

The Bosnian prostitution industry was organized in such a manner that there was no difference between victims of sex trafficking or women who had been forced into prostitution, creating a situation where anyone who engaged with prostitutes aided the sex slave trade.

The United Nations, on an organizational level, was completely complicit in the sex slave trade, with Lamb noting that he and others “experienced an astonishing cover-up attempt that seemed to extend to the highest levels of the U.N. headquarters.” Investigators would not only be rebuffed by those they were investigating, but the UN would launch “formal investigations against the investigators while giving no support to the original investigation, a scenario which was not new to the U.N. Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina.”[14] (emphasis added) So rather than punish the people who were committing crimes, the UN found it easier to harass and intimidate the investigators.

Lamb’s testimony bolstered previous claims. In December 2001, it was reported that the UN “quashed an investigation earlier this year into whether U.N. police were directly involved in the enslavement of Eastern European women in Bosnian brothels, according to U.N. officials and internal documents.”[15] During this time, Lamb noted that “his preliminary inquiry found more than enough evidence to justify a full-scale criminal investigation,” however it was killed by higher-ups. The UN even argued that there wasn’t enough evidence to point to systemic police involvement, in spite of the previous November 2000 raid.

Such activities weren’t just occurring on Bosnia, but also in neighboring Kosovo. Amnesty International reported within months of UN soldiers arriving in 1999 to aid in the aftermath of the Bosnia-Kosovo war, brothels sprung up and Kosovo “soon became a major destination country for women trafficked into forced prostitution.”[16] The situation persisted over a decade later, with UN forces being blamed for the growth of the sex slave industry in which many under-age girls were viciously tortured, raped, and abused.[17]

The biggest hurdle towards obtaining justice for the women and children who had been abused was that issue of legal immunity. Foreigners that were part of the UN mission, whether as a military/police force or a civilians, had near-absolute legal immunity. Specifically, Article 6 of the Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the U.N.” provides immunity from personal arrest or detention and from seizure of personal baggage, and in respect to words spoken or written and acts done by them in the course of the performance of their mission, immunity from legal process of every kind.”[18] Thus, the perpetrators of so much horror were never able to be brought to justice.

This only compounded the situation for the victims as not only was there a cover up by the UN, but the legal immunity created a situation in which they would never get to take their abusers to court.

Mozambique

Due to an ongoing civil war, which displaced over six million Mozambicans, the UN was called in an attempt to create a situation where both sides, the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique as the legitimate government and the rebels known as the Mozambican National Resistance, could come to talks.[19]

Similar to Cambodia and Bosnia, the very presence of the peacekeepers was argued to have led to an increase in prostitution and while there were investigations which resulted in some soldiers being expelled from the country, not a single one of them was actually prosecuted.[20]

These arguments were later confirmed when then-UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali had a formal inquiry conducted into peacekeepers involvement in child prostitution which found that “after the signing of the peace treaty in 1992, soldiers of the United Nations operation in Mozambique recruited girls aged 12 to 18 years into prostitution”[21] as well as the linkage between the arrival of peacekeepers and growth in child prostitution.

The year UN forces left, 1994, it came out that Italian soldiers were engaging in sexual misconduct with child prostitutes, as young as twelve to fourteen years old.[22] This incident was simply the one which was put on blast. International NGO Save The Children conducted an investigation into the matter of Italian soldiers being involved in sexual abuse.

The report explained that suspicions were raised and questions asked when the Italian soldiers engaged in commercial sex, but the matter became even more serious “when the soldiers started to make a clear request for sex with minors and recruited street children for all kind of services: domestic work (at a marginal fee), shopping, procuring illegal goods for trade and as mediators (pimps) for commercial sex,”[23] with the situation evolving to the point where the Italians had one of their liaison officers act as a mediator between the soldiers and the pimps/girls.

It goes on to note the disposition of soldiers, prices paid, and punishments for speaking out, which should be quoted at some length.

Most girls in the trade were aged between 13 and 18 years. Private conversations with the soldiers indicated that this was because of `more fun and excitement' and due to the fear of AIDS. Rates for sex differed. Generally, the price was 1.00 US Dollar for sex with a condom and $ 1.10 without. Some soldiers started a liaison with girls, and arranged a flat, room or other venue for them for regular encounters. […] The military doctor of the Italian Contingent Albatroz who served in Chimoio from October 1993 till early 1994, got reprimanded by the (Italian) Regional ONUMOZ Commander Mazzaroli when he reported in writing on the developments. In fact, the doctor was to serve till May 1994 in Chimoio and it is believed that he was repatriated to Italy at an earlier stage due to his critical attitude.[24] (emphasis added)

By late 1993, the Italians became so comfortable and lax that the local staff of NGO Redd Barna (presently known in Mozambique as Save The Children), the Norwegian branch of the International Save the Children Alliance, noticed them having sex with minors in uniform, in and on UN vehicles in the city of Chimoio, with houses even being rented for parties and sex.[25]

In response to this, on September 24, 1993 the head of the Mozambique branch of Redd Barna contacted the head of the main organization to discuss the situation. After visiting Chimoio to get first-hand knowledge of the activities of Italian soldiers, the Secretary-General of Redd Barna joined forces with elements of the International Save the Children Alliance resulting in, most importantly, a letter being written to head of UN forces in Mozambique regarding the situation.

This letter was released by the Children Alliance in December 1993, which the very next month, January 1994, was quoted in an independent Mozambique newspaper, specifically that the letter had been faxed from a high official in the headquarters UN Mozambique to the newspaper. The anonymous official even told Redd Barna that this was done because senior UN staff were “making all possible attempts” to hide and cover up the incidents.

This article was subsequently picked up by various outlets including Associated Press, CNN, NBC, and Reuters. In the immediate aftermath, Italian soldiers were confined to their respective bases. On January 26, 1994, the UN Mozambique contingency issued a statement in which they said, in part, that because “no concrete evidence or information was supplied by the initiators of this accusation, it has not been possible to complete the investigation.”[26]

It should be noted here that the language used is far from neutral, by referring to Redd Barna as “initiators of this accusation” it creates a tone where the NGO is seen as spreading rumors and hearsay. It also leads to the question of how they can’t complete an investigation unless concrete evidence has been supplied. One would think that their investigators, given the serious nature of the situation, would actively be looking for such evidence.

An investigative commission was formed by UN Mozambique and actively utilized Redd Barna to aid in its investigation. This, coupled with them having been the main source, along with the Save the Children Alliance, of the situation going public, painted a target on the organization’s back.  This resulted in Italian soldiers intimidating Redd Barna workers, threatening phone calls, telephone lines and the radio network being tapped when transferring fax messages, and feeding disinformation to journalists.

There was a reveal of a civilian-military divide in that on the week of February 18, 1994, the departing UN commander, Lélio Gonçalves, gave interviews where  he actively denied that UN peacekeepers were engaging in “sexual abuse of minors and sneered about [the International Save The Children Alliance’s] and Redd Barna's concern.” It should be noted that such statements were made “while his superior, [the special representative of the UN Secretary-General, Mr A.Ajello], had already confirmed the involvement of [UN] personnel.”[27] In addition, more and more UN staff approached the organization to provide information, yet were often despised and harassed by colleagues and superiors.

Still, after all of that, nothing was done. The actors just moved deeper into the darkness. After the publication of the investigative report, the Italian soldiers simply continued to engage in their sick practices in more hidden and remote locations and senior officers would intimate girls, forcing them to sign statements saying that the Italians weren’t engaging in any wrongdoing.[28]

Somalia and Haiti

The UN mission in Somalia, only lasting from 1992 to 1995, revealed that even when soldiers were caught in the wrong, their respective nation’s militaries wouldn’t mete out full justice.

Belgian peacekeepers accused of torturing Somali children, Italians, of raping Somali women. The Italian situation was so bad that two generals resigned as evidence of torture mounted and a day after photo evidence of an Italian soldier raping a Somali woman were published.[29]

In 1993, a Belgian paratrooper “allegedly procured a teenage Somali girl as a birthday present to a paratrooper. She was reportedly forced to perform a strip show at a birthday party and to have sexual relations with two Belgian paratroopers.”[30] A military court in 1998 sentenced that paratrooper to one year imprisonment (six months were suspended), a fine, and discharged them from the army. Meanwhile, even though the Italian government conducted a commission which “found credible evidence of a number of instances of gang-rape, sexual assault, and theft with violence,”[31] nothing was done to actually punish those troops.

In Haiti, months after international forces arrived in 1994, a number of women’s organizations petitioned the Justice Ministry to investigate the foreign soldiers as it was public information that “several cases of abuse of women and girls by soldiers in several towns throughout the country” had taken place. A former UN staff member even confided that observers had told their superiors in 1995 in Port-au-Prince of “allegations of sexual abuse committed by French and [Caribbean] UN ‘peacekeepers,’ only to be promptly ordered to desist from exploring the claims any further.”[32]

So on one instance we see just what happens when military personnel are subjected to their justice system, in which a slap on the wrist of sorts occurs and on the other we see still the UN covering up and stonewalling investigations into abuse.

East Timor

In 1999, international forces were deployed to East Timor to oversee its transition to becoming a fully independent country and to deal with the Indonesian intervention which consisted of backing guerrilla groups.[33]

Three years into the mission, it was reported at least two soldiers from Jordan had been accused of sexually assaulting an unknown number of boys. When asked if any investigations regarding these allegations had been conducted, the senior UN military observer, LTC Paul Roney, stated that he was unable to answer the question.[34]

The Jordanian peacekeepers were a major problem as “[interviews] by UN investigators [made claims of] Jordanian involvement in several alleged rapes of boys and women.”[35] This was known by the UN administration in East Timor itself, with the administrator Sergio Vieira de Mello, doing his best to keep the matter quiet.

An incident paralleling Bosnia took place in 2003. A UN police force raided an illegal brothel and found 23 Thai women who had been trafficked into the country, some even being underage, along with six UN police officers. The UN made the incredibly weak argument that the officers were just getting massages and didn’t know it was an illegal brothel.

Specifically, the UN’s Acting Deputy Operations Commissioner, Alan King, stated that the officers came “from a country where massage is quite a legitimate business and in many cases here in East Timor massage parlors exist and they are quite legitimate” and there was no indication “that they went there for anything other than a legitimate purpose.”[36]

Just like so many of the other cases, not a single person faced justice. Daily Australian outlet The Age reported in 2006 that “Sukehiro Hasegawa, the top UN official in East Timor, has acknowledged for the first time that the UN system failed to bring anyone to justice for crimes that included sex abuse of children and bestiality.”[37] Hasegawa announced that a ‘zero tolerance’ policy towards sexual abuse by any and all UN forces would be put into motion immediately.

The abuse of women in East Timor had long lasting impacts. There were approximately 20 cases of children who had been fathered by peacekeepers, however, no national record exists to get a better grasp of the situation.[38] Soldiers had made promises to marry the women, but would simply return to their home countries. The women and children were left behind to deal with being shunned by their community.

In 2003, the UN put out a bulletin putting the entire entity on notice that sexual abuse would not be tolerated, including that exchanging money for sexual favors “or other forms of humiliating, degrading or exploitative behavior, is prohibited.”[39] It established that the head of the mission in question would be responsible for fostering an environment in which such activities would be discouraged and prevented, ensuring each staff member would receive a copy of the bulletin to ensure that there is no excuse of someone not knowing the rules, and that a system would be established to report on sexual abuse cases. Still, this would have no serious effect on sexual abuse.

Sierra Leone

To deal with rebel elements in Sierra Leone and aid in the creation of a unity government comprised of the rebels and legitimate government, forces were sent to the country in 1999.[40]

The entire situation amounted to a horror show for the women of Sierra Leone. The Telegraph made known a report from Human Rights Watch.

But it found evidence of sexual atrocities being committed by troops from the regional intervention force, Ecomog, and the UN peacekeeping mission.

Women were used by all sides as chattels, kidnapped from their homes often in rural areas and forced to act as sex slaves for the troops as well as domestic maids responsible for cooking and household chores.

"To date there has been no accountability for the thousands of crimes of sexual violence or other appalling human rights abuses committed during the war in Sierra Leone," the report said.[41]

There was no reprieve for women here, the very people that were supposed to protected them were also the ones raping and abusing the

That same report revealed a number of crimes done by international forces. In April 2002, “witnesses saw a woman apparently being raped by two Ukrainian peacekeepers near the eastern town of Joru. There was no formal investigation into the matter.” (emphasis added) [42] In June, an officer from Bangladesh was accused of sexually assaulting a 14 year old boy, but a formal investigation found results to be inconclusive and the officer was soon sent back to his home country.

During March 2002, UN spokesperson Margaret A. Novicki, stated that the mission in Sierra Leone was going about conducting an ongoing training program for military personnel which focused on women’s rights and the zero tolerance policy for sexual exploitation and abuse and that the military command was visiting sector and contingent commanders to emphasize the need to police soldiers’ conduct.[43] The previous month, however, the a probe from the UN Human Right Council and the UK arm of the organization Save The Children revealed just how much the conduct of peacekeeping forces had deteriorated.

The joint investigation found a major disconnect between what was being said and what was going on the ground. A UN officer stated that “Every soldier, officer has been read and shown the code of conduct; no one can plead ignorance.”[44] Thus, while knowing the code of conduct, peacekeepers still engaged in abuse by exchanging money and food with children for sexual services, paying between $5 and $300 USD. Witnesses “spoke of teenage girls being asked to strip naked, bath and pose in certain positions while the peacekeepers took pictures, watched and laughed. Some are alleged to have had sex with the girls without using condoms.”[45]

There were several incidents of peacekeepers going to extremes in that they would meet with the child’s parents, feigning good intentions, but would leave abruptly, give the parents money to take care of the girl, or even shower the girl with gifts. The victims, on all levels, were the girls. While they were being abused by the peacekeepers, the community would respond by parading and publically shaming the girls in town.[46]

There was a separate inquiry conducted by the UN in late 2002 where it came to light that “there was no encouragement for staff or other persons to report ethical issues to management, nor for that matter is there a particular office or person with whom this type of problem can be discussed,”[47] but there were slight improvements such as the formation of a Personal Conduct Committee to examine cases of misconduct for UN workers, both military and civilian. Yet, it was known that sexual abuse cases were underreported. The Office of Internal Oversight Services found a single allegation of such abuse, but with over 17,000 soldiers, it shows that there are serious deficiencies with the reporting system rather than a lack of cases.[48]

A Human Rights Watch report documented several cases of rape by peacekeeping troops.

A Sergeant Ballah, from Guinea, was alleged to have engaged in the rape of a twelve year old girl according to the Sierra Leone police. The victim was raped in March 2001 “when she asked for Sgt. Ballah’s assistance in securing a ride to Freetown at the checkpoint that he was manning”[49] and even though Ballah went to court, he was simply sent back to Guinea. In a separate case, a Bangladeshi peacekeeper allegedly raped a fourteen year old boy (the rape had ben medically confirmed) and the police began to conduct an investigation, “until the UNAMSIL provost marshal took it over. The provost marshal concluded that there was no conclusive evidence to link the crime to the perpetrator.”[50] The inquiry was conducted haphazardly, with members of the Bangladeshi contingent speaking with the victim, despite the fact that they shouldn’t have been able to, nor did the UN mission even issue the victim or his family an apology, much less provide compensation or note the outcome of the investigation. This lines up with the summary that there was “reluctance on the part of UNAMSIL to investigate and take disciplinary measures against the perpetrators.”[51] Despite setting up a code of conduct and reinforcing a zero tolerance policy, we see that such acts were half-hearted measures given incorrect investigation methods and flat out interference in cases.

The UN even noted that charges against its own personnel and humanitarian workers working at UN camps, such as forcing women and children to provide sexual favors for food, medicine, and relief supplies, were investigated by the Office of Internal Oversight Services but dropped on the grounds that there wasn’t enough evidence.[52] It seems that the OIOS acts as many internal investigatory groups: covering up incidents and protecting criminals.

Congo

Peacekeepers were sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to aid in the implementation of a ceasefire between several warring factions starting in 1999.[53]

In mid-2002, Human Rights Watch published the report The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, where several acts of sexual assault were recorded. One such incident occurred in December 2001, when a Congolese woman dropped off an eleven year old girl to a Moroccan soldier, who proceeded to sexually assault the girl, but was kept at his post.[54] Though the zero tolerance policy had been in effect and there was an increase in gender awareness training and even a gender advisor, the mission still lacked any training strictly revolving around the sexual violence.

During July 2004 the UN’s Office of Internal Oversight Services began to investigate a number of accusations, ranging from a child prostitution ring being ran out of a UN airport to Nepalese soldiers raping minors and even allegations of a Tunisian officer soliciting sex from minors.[55] Most of the allegations revolved around the town of Bunia.

The UN seems to have ignored the situation until it reached a critical mass as The Independent obtained documents which showed that in August 2003, the child-protection office sent a memo to the UN’s Congo headquarters “detailing their fears about the allegations of sexual exploitation by [UN] forces. No action was taken.” Children were put at risk as despite allegations of Moroccan troops engaging in “child pornography, organized sex shows and the rape of babies,” they were still sent to Bunia where in 2004 it was found that “19 out of 50 cases of sexual violence against minors in Bunia were carried out by [Moroccan] troops.”[56] By transferring the Moroccan’s despite such extreme allegations, it could be argued that the UN on some level played a role in these sexual violence cases having occurred.

Horrors against the most vulnerable of Congolese society continued unabated. The New York Times reported in December 2004 on a 12-year-old girl, Helen, and a 13-year-old girl, Solange, both of whom were raped by UN peacekeepers who lured the girls in using food.[57]

In January 2005, the UN conducted an investigation into the matter, finding that “Congolese women and girls confirmed that sexual contact with peacekeepers occurred with regularity, usually in exchange for food or small sums of money.”[58] Unfortunately, the vast majority of allegations were unable to be substantiated. The Office of Internal Oversight Services complied a total of 20 cases and was able to corroborate only seven cases, as in remaining cases the victims and witnesses weren’t able to positively identify perpetrators.

Shockingly, while this investigation was going on, peacekeepers were still engaging in sexual acts, “evidenced by the presence of freshly used condoms near military camps and guard posts and by the additional allegations of recent cases of solicitations brought to the attention of the OIOS team during the last days of the investigation.”[59]

Out of the report came several recommendations, among them were: to create and implement a prevention program, “establish a rapid-response detection program, utilizing personnel experienced in such cases,” ensuring that UN administrators and officers can demonstrate that current rules and regulations aimed at preventing sexual abuse/exploitation are being enforced, and creating a program to “provide regular briefings for troops on their responsibilities to the local population and on prohibited behaviors”[60] so that everyone, from peacekeepers on up, would be on the same page.

Due to this report, a sexual abuse focal-point element was created for all UN agencies in the Congo, a website was established to educate staff on exactly what constituted sexual abuse/exploitation, and a strict curfew was put in place. In March 2005, the UN Security Council issued a resolution focusing on the Congo, which in part they asked the Secretary General to ensure compliance to the zero tolerance policy on sexual abuse, that perpetrators be investigated and punished.[61]

The UN began looking into the alleged child prostitution ring in August 2006. While many of the patrons were Congolese soldiers, early testimonies from victims revealed that ring leaders became interested in the presence of UN forces and the money they had as a catalyst for creating the ring.[62]

There were further child prostitution ring allegations surround a contingency from India two years later, but the soldiers were found innocent by Indian courts.[63] In another instance of abuse by Indian soldiers, there were allegations that they had fathered nearly 12 children after DNA tests were conducted and showed the children having distinct Indian features. While one soldiers was punished as it was found that his DNA sample matched with one of the children born, others only had administrative action recommended and others still were given a clean slate.[64]

Despite sexual abuse allegations having been on the decline[65], the situation seemed to continue to deteriorate as The Globe and Mail reported that in February 2011, two teenaged orphans were attacked with two Congolese soldiers beating one of the girls, while the other was gang raped and impregnated.[66] The UN soldiers were still out in the field even after the incident.[67]

Overall, there was a complete lack of punishment for soldiers that engaged in abuse and exploitation. The Independent reported in 2007 that nearly 200 peacekeepers had been disciplined in sexual abuse cases since 2004, but not a single one had been prosecuted. In fact, of the 319 people that had been investigated in the 2004-2007 time frame for sexual misconduct, 180 had been either dismissed or sent back to their home countries.[68]

Just for the missions launched in the 1990s, there were cover ups, lies, and even an outright acceptance of blue helmets engaging in abuse. Unfortunately, for the missions that started up in the 2000s, the women and girls of a myriad of nations would be subject to abuse, no more so than in Haiti. 

Notes

[1] United Nations, Chapter 1: Purposes and Principles, https://www.un.org/en/sections/un-charter/chapter-i/index.html

[2] Elian Peltier, “U.N. Peacekeepers in Haiti Said to Have Fathered Hundreds of Children,” New York Times, December 18, 2019 (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/18/world/americas/haiti-un-peacekeepers.html)

[3] Kevin Ponniah, “In 1993, the UN tried to bring democracy to Cambodia. Is that dream dead?,” BBC News, July 28, 2018 (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-44966916)

[4] Donna M. Hughes, “Welcome to the Rape Camp: Sexual Exploitation and the Internet in Cambodia,” Journal of Sexual Aggression 6 (Winter 2000), pg 4

[5] Sandra Whitworth, “Gender, Race and the Politics of Peacekeeping,” in Edward Moxon-Browne, editor, A Future in Peacekeeping? (New York, New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1998), pg 179

[6] Anne Orford, “The Politics of Collective Security,” Michigan Journal of International Law 17:2 (1996), pgs 378-379

[7] Globalization 101, Peacekeeping in Bosnia, http://www.globalization101.org/peacekeeping-in-bosnia/

[8] Roy Gutman, “U.N. Forces Accused of Using Serb-run Brothel,” Washington Post, November 2, 1993 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1993/11/02/un-forces-accused-of-using-serb-run-brothel/78414de2-36d0-41c0-9081-c3a5ee513078/)

[9] Ibid

[10] Susan Dewey, Hollow Bodies: Institutional Responses to Sex Trafficking in Armenia, Bosnia, and India (West Harford, CT: Kumarian Press, 2008), pg 101

[11] U.S. Congress, House, Committee on International Relations, Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, The U.N. and the Sex Slave Trade in Bosnia: Isolated Case or Larger Problem in UN System (Washington D.C.: Subcommittee on International Relations and Human Rights, House Committee On International Relations, 2002) (http://commdocs.house.gov/committees/intlrel/hfa78948.000/hfa78948_0f.htm), pg 47

[12] Ibid, pg 8

[13] Ibid, pg 66

[14] Ibid, pg 68

[15] Colum Lynch, “U.N. Halted Probe of Officers' Alleged Role in Sex Trafficking,” Washington Post, December 27, 2001 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/12/27/un-halted-probe-of-officers-alleged-role-in-sex-trafficking/2e2465f3-32b4-42ff-a8df-7a8108e4b9ee/)

[16] Amnesty International, Kosovo (Serbia & Montenegro) “So does that mean I have rights?” https://www.amnesty.org/download/Documents/96000/eur700102004en.pdf (May 6, 2004), pg 7

[17] Ian Traynor, “Westerner troops fuelling Kosovo sex trade,” Irish Times, May 7, 2004 (https://www.irishtimes.com/news/westerner-troops-fuelling-kosovo-sex-trade-1.1139448)

[18]Human Rights Watch, Hope Betrayed: Trafficking of Women and Girls to Post-Conflict Bosnia and Herzegovina for Forced Prostitution, https://www.hrw.org/report/2002/11/26/hopes-betrayed/trafficking-women-and-girls-post-conflict-bosnia-and-herzegovina (November 26, 2002), pg 46

[19] William Gehrke, “The Mozambique Crisis: A Case for United Nations Military Intervention,” Cornell International Law Journal 24:1 (1991), pg 135

[20] A.B., Fetherson, UN Peacekeepers and Cultures of Violence, Cultural Survival Quarterly Magazine, https://www.culturalsurvival.org/publications/cultural-survival-quarterly/un-peacekeepers-and-cultures-violence (May 1995)

[21] United Nations, General Assembly, Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Children, A/51/306, August 26, 1996 (https://www.refworld.org/pdfid/3b00f2d30.pdf), pg 31

[22] Stanley Meisler, “Prostitution Report Accuses U.N. Troops in Mozambique,” Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1994 (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-26-mn-27378-story.html)

[23] Ernst Schade, Report On Experiences With Regards to the United Nations Peacekeeping Forces in Mozambique, November 20, 1995, pg 13

[24] Ibid

[25] Ibid, pg 14

[26] Ibid, pg 17

[27] Ibid, pg 20

[28] Ibid, pg 21

[29] Raf Casert, “In Italy, Belgium and Italy, Somalia peacekeeping scandals growing,” Associated Press, June 24, 1997 (https://apnews.com/deea729ccf6dfe142799ed245261b675)

[30] Ingrid Westendorp, M. W. Wolleswinkel, Ria Wolleswinkel, eds., Violence In The Domestic Sphere (Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt Inc), 2005, pg 15

[31] Ibid

[32] Ibid

[33] Government of Canada, International Force in East Timor (INTERFET), https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/military-history/history-heritage/past-operations/asia-pacific/toucan.html

[34] Ginny Stein, Allegations against Jordanian peacekeepers, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/am/stories/s317953.htm (June 25, 2001)

[35] Mark Dodd, “Hushed Rape of Timor,” The Weekend Australian, March 26, 2005 (https://web.archive.org/web/20050328014753/https://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,12655192%5E2703,00.html)

[36] Nick McKenzie, Claim UN officers customers in East Timor sex slave brothels, Australian Broadcasting Company, https://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2003/s898377.htm (July 9, 2003)

[37] Lindsay Murdoch, “UN acts to stamp out sex abuse by staff in East Timor,” The Age, August 30, 2006 (https://www.theage.com.au/world/un-acts-to-stamp-out-sex-abuse-by-staff-in-east-timor-20060830-ge3114.html)

[38] Sofi Ospina, A Review and Evaluation of Gender-Related Activities of UN Peacekeeping Operations and their Impact on Gender Relations in Timor Leste. PeaceWomen, http://peacewomen.org/sites/default/files/dpko_timorlesteevaluation_2006_0.pdf (July 11, 2006), pg 44

[39] United Nations, Secretary-General’s Bulletin, Special measures for protection from sexual exploitation and sexual abuse, ST/SGB/2003/13, October 9, 2003 (https://undocs.org/ST/SGB/2003/13), pg 2

[40] World Peace Foundation, United Nations Mission in Sierra Leone Brief, https://sites.tufts.edu/wpf/files/2017/07/Sierra-Leone-brief.pdf

[41] Tim Butcher, “UN troops accused of 'systematic' rape in Sierra Leone,” The Telegraph, January 17, 2003 (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/sierraleone/1419168/UN-troops-accused-of-systematic-rape-in-Sierra-Leone.html)

[42] Human Rights Watch, World Report 2003, https://www.hrw.org/legacy/wr2k3/pdf/sierraleone.pdf, pg 70

[43] Global Policy Forum, UN Takes Action Against Peacekeepers’ Misconduct, https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/203/39393.html (March 18, 2002)

[44] United Nations Human Rights Council, Save The Children-United Kingdom, Sexual Violence & Exploitation: The Experience of Refugee Children in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/3c7cf89a4.pdf (February 2002), pg 6

[45] Ibid

[46] Ibid, pg 7

[47] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation into sexual exploitation of refugees by aid workers in West Africa, A/57/465, October 11, 2002 (https://undocs.org/en/A/57/465), pg 16

[48] Ibid

[49] Human Rights Watch, “We’ll Kill You If You Cry: Sexual Violence in the Sierra Leone Conflict, https://www.hrw.org/report/2003/01/16/well-kill-you-if-you-cry/sexual-violence-sierra-leone-conflict (January 2003), pg 48

[50] Ibid, pg 49

[51] Ibid, pg 4

[52] Michael Fleshman, Tough UN Line on Peacekeeper Abuses, United Nations, https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/april-2005/tough-un-line-peacekeeper-abuses (April 2005)

[53] United Nations, United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, https://peacekeeping.un.org/mission/past/monuc/

[54] Human Rights Watch, The War within the War: Sexual Violence against Women and Girls in Eastern Congo, https://www.hrw.org/reports/2002/drc/Congo0602.pdf (June 2002), pg 95

[55] Children & Armed Conflict: Impact, Protection, and Rehabilitation Research Project, Abuse by UN Troops In D.R.C. May Go Unpunished, Report Says, http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/childrenandwar/news_abuse_by_un_troops.php (July 12, 2004)

[56] Kate Holt, Sarah Hughes, “Will Congo's women ever have justice?” The Independent, July 12, 2004 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/will-congos-women-ever-have-justice-46938.html)

[57] Marc Lacey, In Congo War, Even Peacekeepers Add to Horror,” New York Times, December 18, 2004 (https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/18/world/africa/in-congo-war-even-peacekeepers-add-to-horror.html)

[58] United Nations, General Assembly, Investigation by the Office of Internal Oversight Services into allegations of sexual exploitation and abuse in the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, A/59/661, January 5, 2005 (https://www.securitycouncilreport.org/atf/cf/%7B65BFCF9B-6D27-4E9C-8CD3-CF6E4FF96FF9%7D/SE%20A%2059%20661.pdf), pg 1

[59] Ibid, pg 11

[60] Ibid, pgs 12-13

[61] Susan A. Notar, “Peacekeepers as Perpetrators: Sexual Exploitation and Abuse of Women and Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Journal of Gender, Social Policy, and the Law 14:2 (2006), pg 420

[62] United Nations News, UN investigates allegations of child prostitution involving peacekeepers in DR Congo, https://news.un.org/en/story/2006/08/189322-un-investigates-allegations-child-prostitution-involving-peacekeepers-dr-congo (August 17, 2006)

[63] Kwame Akonor, UN Peacekeeping in Africa: A Critical Examination and Recommendations for Improvements (New York, NY: Springer, 2017), pg 39

[64] Gautam Datt, “Indian army's shame: Indictment of 4 Indian peacekeepers for 'sexual misconduct' on a UN posting in Congo dents the army's honor,” India Today, November 5, 2012 (https://www.indiatoday.in/india/north/story/indian-army-shamed-action-against-jawan-for-fathering-child-congo-india-today-122447-2012-11-25)

[65] UN News, Sexual abuse allegations decline against UN peacekeepers in DR Congo and Liberia, https://news.un.org/en/story/2011/07/382842-sexual-abuse-allegations-decline-against-un-peacekeepers-dr-congo-and-liberia, July 27, 2011

[66] Gerald Caplan, “Peacekeepers gone wild: How much more abuse will the UN ignore in Congo?” The Globe and Mail, August 3, 2012 (https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/second-reading/peacekeepers-gone-wild-how-much-more-abuse-will-the-un-ignore-in-congo/article4462151/

[67] Matthew Russell Lee, On UN Report of Peacekeeper Rape in Congo, Ladsous' DPKO Says Nothing, Inner City Press, http://www.innercitypress.com/ladsous1congorape080712.html (August 7, 2012)

[68] Ruth Elkins, Francis Elliot, “UN Shame Over Sex Scandal,” The Independent, January 7, 2007 (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/un-shame-over-sex-scandal-431121.html)

Capitalism, Fascism, and the Tactics of Terror

 (Courthouse News Service photo/Karina Brown)

By Kenn Orphan

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” – Vladimir Lenin

Between 1973 and 1990 scores of people were disappeared by the US supported fascist regime of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. They were incarcerated, tortured and thousands were murdered. In fact, the official total of those killed by the regime is just over 40,000. But some critics suggest it was much higher. Pinochet was able to do all of this with the blessing of the CIA who assisted him in the coup against the elected President, Salvador Allende, and in his reign of terror afterward in Chile. The painful lessons of the Pinochet years have often been obscured under neoliberal historical revisionism, but with what is currently unfolding in cities like Portland, Oregon, it is urgent to revisit them.

When Donald Trump’s federal agents rolled into Portland last week, they began to employ classic police state tactics of intimidation. Tear gas was employed, “non-lethal” munitions, and the psychological terror of unmarked vans snatching protesters, and even those simply standing by, off the streets without arrest warrants and whisked off to undisclosed locations. The use of forced disappearance should not be underestimated because it is, perhaps, the most effective tactic at crushing dissent and eliminating political rivals.

Under the fist of General Pinochet, the state became a ruthless force of terror. In September of 1973, at least 10,000 people, many of them students, activists and political dissidents, were rounded up by the military shortly after he took the office of the presidency by a US supported and orchestrated coup.They were taken to the National Soccer Stadium in Santiago where they were subjected to torture or were massacred outright. Thousands of bodies were buried in mass graves. Thousands were never recovered as they were discarded in rivers and even in the Pacific Ocean. Even today, families await justice and the chance to bury their loved ones.

Forced disappearances are a crime against humanity according to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. And there is no statute of limitations on this crime. But, as we have seen over the past few decades, the US government and military cares little for the international rule of law. Indeed, it has enjoyed impunity for its atrocities while those who violate these statutes in the Global South are often brought to trial and punished severely. The US invasion of Iraq, along with the occupation and atrocities are clear examples of this. And under Trump, the American Empire has divorced itself even more from international bodies that seek at least some regulation of state excesses or the management of crises. His withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on climate change and his recent withdrawal from the World Health Organization during a global pandemic point to a brazen disinterest in engaging with the international community.

Pinochet’s Chile was not alone in its use of forced disappearances. During the Dirty War in Argentina at least 30,000 people were disappeared and murdered by the US backed, rightwing military junta. In fact, under the US implemented and CIA backed and assisted “Operation Condor,” which targeted leftist or socialist political activists, student organizers, and academicians, the entire South American continent became a killing field from the 1970s well into the 1980s. Unsurprisingly, the genocidaire Henry Kissinger was deeply involved in these atrocities in much the same way as he was in Southeast Asia and on the African continent. And he assisted in marrying federal agencies, surveillance and state police, and paramilitary mercenaries and death squads to one another in order to carry out the crimes successfully.

It is not hyperbolic for there to be great alarm over Trump’s use of forced disappearances. Although there have been no deaths because of it, his flouting of the rule of law and use of this tactic of terror is not an accident. And the people under him have proven time and time again that they are ever willing to carry out his orders. As the election looms in November, we should not underestimate the timing of this either. Across the nation protests have arisen to confront the long legacy and continuing ruthlessness of racist, police state violence. The rage has been simmering for a long time, and the murder of George Floyd ignited and galvanized millions to take a stand. To Trump, who is one of the most overtly racist presidents to have taken office since Woodrow Wilson or Teddy Roosevelt, this represents the greatest threat to his legitimacy.

The US is now leading the world in cases of Covid-19 with over 140,000 deaths. Indeed, the pandemic is currently wreaking havoc on an American healthcare system which was already suffering from disorganization and beholden to the whims and will of merciless capitalist predation. When Trump came in, he literally threw out the handbook on how to deal with global pandemics, so the ongoing protests to police brutality provide him a perfect distraction from his colossal blundering and incompetence.

And of course, there are other ingredients to this recipe for disaster. Trump faces a weak candidate in Joe Biden, who cannot seem to form a coherent opposition to his blatant fascist impulses. If there is no meaningful alternative that represents real change in ordinary people’s lives then, like it or not, the people will not bother to vote. There is also the precarious economic situation, the elephant in the room that few wish to acknowledge. With millions unemployed and facing eviction or foreclosure, the elements of fascism may be coalesced even further. God help us if a climate change fueled catastrophe comes this summer or in the fall, because it will be the perfect storm for him to pull whatever levers necessary for him to quell dissent and remain in power. He has such mechanisms at his disposal thanks to the Patriot Act and the NDAA. He can detain any US citizen indefinitely by merely labelling them a terrorist, thanks to legislation designed and endorsed by George W. Bush and Barack Obama. And he has already begun branding anyone who opposes his tyranny, like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, with that spurious charge.

The uprisings taking place across the US are the stirrings of a global mass movement that shows great promise. That they are taking place in the most wealthy and powerful empire on the planet is an indication that this empire itself is beginning to unravel under the weight of its hubris and a long legacy of cruelty, racism and brutality. But no one should underestimate the tremendous pain a wounded giant can inflict as it falls. Its violence is unoriginal, but it will use the only tactics it knows. And we should remember that it is quite familiar with atrocities because it has visited them frequently on the Global South for decades. Portland is a portent. And, as Lenin inferred in the quote above, things can happen rapidly and in a short span of time. We would be wise to heed these urgent lessons before it is too late.

Black Lives Matter UK Revives the Anti-Imperialist Spirit of British Black Power

[PHOTO CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES]

By Alfie Hancox

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that have erupted in multiple British cities including London, Birmingham, Manchester and Bristol, under the political direction of independent groups such as BLM UK* and BLM LDN, have typically been portrayed in the media as displays of solidarity with the movement in America. Black American movements have certainly always exerted a powerful influence in Britain, as Paul Gilroy’s concept of ‘The Black Atlantic’ has underscored – but British black radical politics should not be narrowly construed as just a US import.

In post-war Britain, Black Power took on a specific trajectory, based on the intertwined legacy of British colonialism in the Caribbean, Africa and Asia. Black radicals in Britain drew inspiration from anti-colonial struggles, and their uncompromising internationalism put them at odds with the parochialism of the left-wing mainstream. The expansive anti-imperialism of British Black Power has strong resonances today, in the way that the BLM protestors have targeted monuments to slavery and colonialism in Britain’s historic port cities, and also in the identification of BLM UK with emergent anti-capitalist and indigenous movements in the Global South. BLM UK has especially revived the intersectional anti-imperialism of the original black women’s movement in Britain.

British Black Power’s internationalist origins

Black radical politics in Britain have a long history extending well before the ‘Windrush moment’ (when the HMT Empire Windrush carrying workers from the Caribbean docked at Tilbury, Essex in 1948). From the eighteenth century, black Jacobins in England like Robert Wedderburn preached slavery abolition and working-class rebellion, and in 1900 the inaugurating conference of Pan-Africanism was held in London. However, British black radicalism entered a new stage in the decades following the Second World War. Due to racist employment and housing discrimination, economic stagnation hit black and Asian immigrant communities particularly hard, and their insecurity was compounded by police harassment and the fascistic terror meted out by National Front thugs.

Most of the Black Power groups established in Britain in the 1960s-70s, including the British Black Panthers and the Black Liberation Front, contained both African Caribbean and Asian members. British Black Power was based on an expansive political black identity, which grew organically out of post-war ‘New Commonwealth’ immigrant resistance in Britain. Trinidad-born communist Claudia Jones, who founded the Notting Hill carnival in 1959, should be recognised as a significant progenitor of political blackness. Jones was inspired by the Bandung Afro-Asian Conference in 1955, and in her essay “The Caribbean Community in Britain” she observed that “the common experience of Afro-Asian-Caribbean peoples in Britain is leading to a growing unison among these communities as they increasingly identify an injury to one as being an injury to all”.[1] Afro-Asian unity in Britain was also partially mediated via Black Power movements in Trinidad and Guyana, both former British colonies, where political solidarities were built up between the descendants of slaves from Africa and indentured servants from India.

Black self-organising came in response to intensifying racism. After Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave his infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in Birmingham in 1968, several black political organisations met in a pub in Leamington Spa, Warwickshire to form a radical Black People’s Alliance. Among the attendant groups was the local Indian Workers Association, which had liaised with Malcolm X during his 1965 tour of England. In January 1969, the Alliance led an enormous march of some 5,000 Asian and black people on Downing Street, demanding the repeal of the latest Immigration Act, and condemning white-minority rule in southern Africa. During the march, an effigy was burnt to chants of “Disembowel Enoch Powell”. The day was reported on enthusiastically by Darcus Howe, a prominent member of the British Black Panther movement:

It was a truly beautiful sight to witness some ten thousand MILITANT black people – Africans, Indians, Pakistanis and West Indians – come out on to the streets and place themselves firmly upon the stage of REVOLUTIONARY POLITICAL ACTIVITY here in Britain … The march moved off from Speakers Corner with deafning roars of “WE WANT BLACK POWER”, and as our people became conscious of their numbers and solidarity, the slogan became, “We ARE BLACK POWER” (Black Dimension, February 1969).

The Black People’s Alliance march was also significant for the appearance of open tensions between black radicals and the white-majority socialist groups in attendance. The sixties are often associated with a heightened socialist internationalism, and there is an element of truth to this – the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign was launched by Marxist activists in Britain in 1966. However, this campaign represented a somewhat abstract identification with a movement against US imperialism. Additionally, while the British Anti-Apartheid Movement was critical of the government’s support for white-minority rule, during the 1960s it retained a neo-imperial vision of the Commonwealth as “a multiracial group of equals”, ignoring Britain’s exploitative economic relations with its ex-colonies.[2] Howe recorded the nuisance of what might be called ‘vicarious internationalism’ at the Black People’s Alliance demonstration:

When some white demonstrators attempted to dilute these [Black Power] war cries with such meaningless shouts of “Black and white unite and fight”, they were completely phased out, and the Vietnam contingent who wanted to inject the “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh” chant, were reminded that the issues involved were right here in England.

There are parallels here with the reductionist framing of BLM protests in Britain as an exclusive response to racist violence in America. This narrative is based on a pervasive idea of British benevolence, stemming from the country’s failure to address the monstrous realities of its empire. Such denialism further subsumes a lengthy history of overt racism within Britain, including the racist pogroms in 1919 and 1958 in which colonial violence was turned inward, and the perpetual terrorising of black communities by the police, often under the pretext of ‘mugging panics’. In fact, as was highlighted by the Lammy Review, there is currently a greater disproportionality in the number of black people imprisoned in England and Wales than in America. As BLM protestors across Britain insist, in spite of prime minister Boris Johnson’s claims to the contrary, “the UK is not innocent”.

Bringing the Third World into the British metropole

Black Power developed in a global context of international political projects committed to Third World unity. The term ‘Third World’ was first used in the 1950s to designate countries outside either Cold War camp, but its meaning was soon transformed into a progressive organising principle, culminating in the New International Economic Order demanded by ‘developing’ nations at the UN in the mid-1970s.

The British Black Power movement argued that the imperialist strangulation of the Third World survived the demise of formal colonialism, through processes of capitalist unequal exchange – enforced by neo-colonial militarism, such as Britain’s post-war counterinsurgency in Malaya (initially overseen by a Labour government) – that ensured permanent underdevelopment for the ex-colonies.[3] Black radicals used the anti-imperialist concept of a global ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ to highlight a material reality of neo-colonial exploitation, but they did not perceive this as a mechanical geographical divide. In an editorial in Howe’s journal Race Today, the Third World was shown to have leaked into the metropolitan British core: “Handsworth, Notting Hill, Brixton, Southall are colonies and the struggles which emerge from within these enclaves are clearly anti-colonial in content” (Race Today, February 1976). Black Power activists thus denaturalised global economic polarisation as a political division – one that needed to be dismantled.

Internationalist connections were sometimes direct. Some Third World revolutionaries, including Walter Rodney, studied in London during the 1960s, while a number of British black radicals travelled to revolutionary nodal centres like Havana, Algiers and Dar es Salaam. After its revolutionary pilgrimage in 1978, the London-based Black Liberation Front celebrated Cuba as an example of socialism working to erode racism: “One of the most impressive sights of Havana is the people: they are composed of Afrikans, Latins, Indians, Chinese and those of mixed races. They all combine and live together as one united Cuba, without the fear of racial animosity” (Grassroots, September/October 1978). Some black radicals even interpreted Irish Republicanism as a neighbouring struggle against British imperialism.

For British Black Power militants, identification with the black and Asian working-class struggle in Britain was inseparable from their identification with developments in Third World socialist and anti-colonial movements, be they in Africa, Latin America, Asia or Australasia. As the Sri Lanka-born black radical theorist Ambalavaner Sivanandan emphasised, “the heart is where the battle is”.

Challenging nativist social democracy

Much of the appeal of Black Power in Britain stemmed from disillusionment with the Labour Party, which on taking power in 1964 enforced the Tories’ Commonwealth Immigrants Act, targeting primary immigration from Britain’s former empire. Labour’s capitulation to racist sentiments became even more apparent in March 1968 (one month before Powell’s speech in Birmingham), with its rushed updated immigration bill barring free entry to Britain’s Asian citizens in Kenya trying to flee the ‘Africanization’ campaign. Harold Wilson’s 1974 Labour government again gifted official legitimacy to anti-immigrant attitudes, enforcing the 1971 Immigration Act despite its initial opposition, and overseeing a steady increase in deportations.[4]

Gilroy’s influential critique of the mainstream left’s implicitly-racialised nationalism in There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack was prefigured in the black radical movement, which pinpointed the British labour movement’s historical imbrication in colonialism. The Fabians, for instance, who provided the intellectual underpinning of the Labour Party, were staunch imperialists. In the 1970s the Asian Youth Movement, which took up the symbolism and rhetoric of Black Power, coined the slogan “Labour, Tory both the same, both play the racist game!”[5] As sociologist John Narayan explains, British Black Power groups identified “how race and racism had infected the British labour movement and its confusion of social democracy for socialism … Britain’s (white) working class had been bound to the neo-imperial social democratic state and its outward racism and hostility to the non-white members of the British working class served as a denial of the multi-racial nature of the global working class”.[6]

This black radical critique can be extended to the contemporary phenomenon of Corbynism, which never managed to shake off the rationale of ‘nativist social democracy’. Under Corbyn’s leadership, the Labour Party continued to support hard border controls, while its 2019 Manifesto upheld the ‘national security’ framing that associates migrants with criminality. As Narayan argues, the Corbyn project tacitly repeated “the racialized and methodological nationalist idea of justice that underpinned previous forms of social democracy through a neutral [i.e. ‘race’-blind] focus on British class injustice”.[7]

As British black radicals recognised, left-wing patriotism (recently reformulated as ‘progressive patriotism’) is predicated on the whitewashing of the country’s working-class history, perhaps most notably the post-war construction of the National Health Service. While the NHS partly represented a working-class gain – or, more accurately, a ruling-class concession to stem the rising tide of trade union militancy – this is just one side of the story. To service the NHS, the Colonial Office recruited hospital staff from West Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia. Immigrant workers were funnelled into the lowest-grade qualifications, and often held at permanent risk of deportation. Indeed, as the Windrush scandal recently exposed, that risk never went away. There was for instance the case of Gretel Gocan, an 81-year-old Windrush-generation nurse kept out of Britain, and separated from her children for nine years, after taking a holiday to Jamaica. Meanwhile racist abuse, often compounded by sexism, continues to be routinely hurled at NHS staff. The whitewashing of the NHS further entails the erasure of a sustained history of radical resistance by women of colour workers, including nurses from the Caribbean, to gendered-racist discrimination. Women in the Race Today Collective suggested that black and Asian healthcare workers “brought the tradition of rebellion and resistance they had fashioned in the womb of colonial society” (Race Today, May 1975).

Intersectional anti-imperialism

Anti-imperialism was also the organisational pivot of the original black women’s movement in Britain, formed in opposition to the Eurocentrism of the white feminist mainstream, which posited patriarchy as a universal and monolithic system of oppression, ignoring how, for example, the history of colonialism and slavery meant that the black family was frequently a source of refuge for black women. The formation in 1978 of the national black and Asian women’s umbrella group, the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), was inspired by the self-organising of women in African national liberation movements, some of which had representatives in Britain. OWAAD’s founding statement, currently held in the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, paid homage to how “the increased scale and higher level of the women’s participation in the anti-imperialist struggle have been achieved through the successes in combatting the reaction of male domination be it in Namibia, Eritrea, Zimbabwe, Mozambique etc.” The organisation also explained how political blackness “provides us with a distinct, united identity based on our relationship to Imperialism, a system which uses the ideology of racism to rationalise its continued exploitation of our people both here and abroad” (“Afro-Asian Unity – Rhetoric or Reality?”, undated).

OWAAD members underlined how, on a global scale, capitalist-imperialism simultaneously mobilises sexism and racism within a global hierarchy of wages – including the unpaid domestic labour of especially Third World women – to capture imperialist ‘superprofits’. They also emphasised how the post-Keynesian, neo-imperialist strategy of outsourcing production to take advantage of cheap female labour in the Third World was accompanied by renewed racially-gendered discourses to naturalise the subordination of this new workforce, as in this widely-circulated Malaysian government advert: “The manual dexterity of the oriental female is famous world over. Her hands are small and she works fast with extreme care; who, therefore, could be better qualified by nature and inheritance to contribute to the efficiency of a bench-assembly production line than the oriental girl”.[8]

Several British black women’s groups sent delegations to the UN World Conferences on Women in Nairobi (1985) and Beijing (1995), joining international calls for the recognition of Third World women’s unremunerated labour.[9] Their intersectional understanding of how class exploitation is heavily shaped by race and gender has sustained relevance today, as the enormous profits accrued by Global North-based multinational corporations are often predicated on the hyper-exploitation of women of colour workers in factories and sweatshops located in places like Bangladesh, Mexico and the Philippines.

The new return to black radicalism in Britain

Immediately, the Black Lives Matter movement developed as a response to anti-black police violence in the US, and direct parallels were drawn by BLM UK to the institutional police racism and black deaths in custody in Britain. But BLM has also articulated a broader transnational political project, drawing connections with global anti-capitalist revolts over the last year including in Chile, Lebanon, Kenya and Haiti, particularly directed against the economic austerity caused by neo-colonial ‘structural adjustment programmes’ imposed by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

A return to political blackness in its original form in Britain is unlikely, especially as it has come under retrospective criticism for flattening cultural differences, but the same process of constructing political coalitions against racism and imperialism, while simultaneously asserting specific national or ethnic positionalities, which took place in the 1960s-70s continues today. In the context of continued core-periphery polarisation, for emerging anti-imperialist forces internationally, including BLM, the ‘Global South’ has become a political term that harkens back to Black Power-era Third Worldism. BLM UK has resurrected the discerning anti-imperialist consciousness that relates local injustices to global structural inequality. Although Britain’s protracted imperial decline has not relented, British capitalism still plays a directly neo-colonial role, which was luridly underscored when, in 2017, Whitehall officials described a post-Brexit project for trade expansion with former colonies as “Empire 2.0”. A 2016 report by War on Want revealed that “101 companies listed on the London Stock Exchange — most of them British — have mining operations in 37 sub-Saharan African countries. They collectively control over one trillion dollars’ worth of Africa’s most valuable resources.” Black activists have pinpointed how Britain’s imperialism abroad, and the oppression facing migrants and communities of colour under the domestic ‘hostile environment’, are two facets of the same centralising logic of racial capitalism.

This (re)articulation of British black radicalism was seen in a speech by the 2016 NUS National Black Students’ Officer, Malia Bouattia, during Black History Month: “With many Black communities in Britain formed of recent migrants, and against the backdrop of widespread anticolonial movements in the Global South, there was also a strong, vocal support for movements for the liberation of Black people worldwide, from what for many was the heartland of empire: ‘Great Britain’.” The identification with the political Global South is reminiscent of black radicals’ dynamic conception of the core-periphery relationship, which had entailed an empowering seeping of the Third World into the British metropole. As Leah Cowan explains, “BLM UK made important connections between Britain’s colonial history and its capitalist present, in which profits are prioritised over black lives.” This new return to expansive anti-imperialist solidarities among racialised minorities thoroughly undermines the essentialising ethnic absolutism that accompanied state-driven ‘multiculturalism’ under New Labour.

The tearing down of colonial monuments by BLM protestors, continuing in the tradition of the transnational Rhodes Must Fall movement, is inherently political: directing attention towards how neo-colonial and anti-black violence remains ever present in the metropole. The well-worn criticism that colonial-era statues should instead be moved to museums has little bearing given that, as historian Louis Allday explains, the state-sponsored heritage sector often “shamelessly celebrates Britain’s imperial violence and provides little or no historical context to it”. The real outrage should be that the British government has purposefully destroyed the records of its colonial crimes. The protesters are directly confronting the colonial legacy, not only through symbolic de-colonialism – for instance, by casting the figure of slaver Edward Colston into the depths of the same Bristolian river that was once used to transport slaves – but also by forcing a much-needed conversation about racism in Britain today. The indignation expressed by liberal and conservative pundits alike when some black activists set their crosshairs on statues of Winston Churchill (the admirer of Mussolini who was responsible for a genocidal famine in India) shows just how far the country still has to go to come to terms with the inglorious underside of Britishness.

BLM has also built on the strategic intersectionalism of post-war black radicalism – the BLM movement itself was initiated by queer black feminists. BLM UK argues that “until trans, working-class, disabled, sex-worker, queer (and more) black people are free, we will all be unfree.” The foregrounding of these linkages is particularly commensurate to the political challenges posed by the intersections of homophobia and neo-imperialism. For instance, a report released in September 2019 found that, from 2016-2018, the UK Home Office refused at least 3,100 LGBT+ asylum seekers from countries where ‘same-sex acts’ are criminalised. Many of those countries had homophobic legislation imposed under British colonial rule, and some still have significant economic ties with Britain.[10]

BLM UK has made an additional crucial connection between racial-imperialism and environmental destruction. While rich nations like Britain are the main polluters, those worst impacted by climate change live in the ‘developing’ world. In 2016, during its protest to stop flights at London City airport, BLM UK pointed out how air pollution in Britain disproportionately affects working-class black communities, while again relating this local situation to a global imperialist reality:

The inequalities that turn an extreme weather event into a disaster or human catastrophe mirror the inequalities that cause the disproportionate loss of black and poor life globally – and the exact systems that Black Lives Matter fights against. … [And] due to rising global inequality – that remains part of the legacy of imperialism and colonialism, and part of the present reality of globalisation and capitalism – we also know that the resources required to respond to climate change’s impact are often not placed in the hands of the people who need them most.

The revived anti-imperialism of BLM UK poses a vital corrective to the narrow nationalism of the British left-wing mainstream. As black radicals themselves pointed out in the sixties and seventies, the parochialism of the British labour movement came at a price. While white workers immediately benefit from relative privileges vis-à-vis workers of colour (and have often been complicit in reproducing structural racism), they are still exploited, and have been negatively impacted by the diversion of intensifying class-based grievances into the imperial nostalgia that suffused the Brexit referendum. There is a particular need for the left to champion the incisive politics of intersectional anti-imperialism, pioneered by the black women’s movement, in order to understand how global capital circuits overdetermine the racially-gendered contours of anti-blackness, Islamophobia and ‘xenoracism’ in Britain today.

* While BLM UK itself did not call for protests due to the context of the COVID-19 viral pandemic, it has stated that it stands in solidarity with them, and is working to help BLM demonstrators “to protest in a way that is safe for them, as well as for our communities”.

Alfie Hancox writes about socialist and anti-imperialist movements. This article is based on his MA(Res) thesis on British Black Power.

Endnotes

[1] Claudia Jones, “The Caribbean Community in Britain”, in Carole Boyce Davies (ed.), Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Essays and Poems (Banbury, Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing Ltd, 2011): 175.

[2] Jodi Burkett, Constructing Post-Imperial Britain: Britishness, ‘Race’ and the Radical Left in the 1960s (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013): 70.

[3] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London: Verso, 2018).

[4] Ambalavaner Sivanandan, A Different Hunger: Writings on Black Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1991): 39-40.

[5] Anandi Ramamurthy, Black Star: Britain’s Asian Youth Movements (London: Pluto Press, 2013): 103.

[6] John Narayan, “British Black Power: The Anti-Imperialism of Political Blackness and the Problem of Nativist Socialism”, The Sociological Review 67, no. 5 (September 2019): 956.

[7] Ibid.: 961.

[8] Quoted in Hazel Carby, “White Woman Listen! Black Feminism and the Boundaries of Sisterhood”, in Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70’s Britain (London: Routledge, 1994): 219-20.

[9] Julia Sudbury, ‘Other Kinds of Dreams’: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London: Routledge, 1998): 79.

[10] Douglas E. Sanders, “377 And the Unnatural Afterlife of British Colonialism in Asia”, Asian Journal of Comparative Law 4 (2009): 1–49.

Coronavirus and American Exceptionalism

By Matthew Dolezal

Republished from the author’s blog.

America is the Fyre Festival of countries. It is pure hype with little to no positive results. It is a back-alley drug deal culminating in a sweaty palm gripping a wrinkled bag of oregano. It is broken promises, shattered dreams, and shameful regret. All our lives we are told with inflated enthusiasm, with charismatic apologia, that America is a spectacular monument to freedom and democracy, a “shining city upon a hill” and a beacon to lesser nations. We are told our country is “exceptional.” And all our lives we wait for supporting evidence to verify these sensational claims as we gawk with confusion at our surroundings.

In a sense, the “exceptionalism” narrative is true, but not in the sense the propagandists and gatekeepers from prominent institutions had intended. As we reevaluate the very notion of American policing — from its origins in southern slave-catching patrols, to its use as a violent deterrent against labor and civil rights struggles, to its ruthless enforcement of Jim Crow and the War on Drugs — we are also faced with a more profound question regarding the very nature of our “great” nation.

America is a political project founded, at first, by the violent ethnic cleansing of its indigenous inhabitants, then, by the colonizing of the blood-drenched land mass and, finally, by the instituting of industrial capitalism through a slavery-based economy. The European colonizers fought resolutely to maintain this barbaric system of kidnapped, forced, torturous, uncompensated labor in what historian Gerald Horne refers to as “the counter-revolution of 1776.” The subsequent development of white supremacy as a ubiquitous ideology then served the economic elite faithfully as a successful “divide and conquer” mechanism for decades and centuries to come.

As V.I. Lenin’s groundbreaking observations regarding imperialism as “the highest stage of capitalism” foresaw, the U.S. began expanding beyond its own borders — those which were initially forged through violent conquest, land theft, and treaty violations. In a stage of neocolonial domination beginning primarily with the Spanish-American War and continuing with covert military coups and death squads in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East, the U.S. brutally secured natural resource acquisition for Western capital. The American military, globally perceived as the greatest threat to world peace, has an estimated 700 bases in 130 countries. In recent decades, the so-called “War on Terror” has taken the lives of approximately 1.3 million people. This inherently bellicose organization serves as a de-facto police force for the World Bank and the IMF, punishing any attempt at national sovereignty outside the confines of Western neoliberal capitalism.

The domestic effects of neoliberalism display themselves with such starkness that multi-billion dollar PR industries and corporate news media organizations make it their livelihoods to gaslight us and whitewash our own tangible material conditions. As the brief foray into a “prosperous” standard of living was dismantled by bipartisan Reaganomics, disillusioned Americans rejected their own ostensibly enlightened political process by refusing to vote in elections. Wealth concentration continued unabated, with three men now owning more than half the population. The prison population increased unabated, and is now the highest in the world. The for-profit healthcare system, claiming tens of thousands of innocent lives each year, continued unabated, and is now an outlier in the so-called “developed world.”

As the federal government doubled down on its commitment to serving the interests of private capital, public institutions and services were systematically gutted. This profound dedication to “profit over people,” specifically in the realm of healthcare, set the stage for America’s exceptional death toll in the wake of the voracious coronavirus pandemic. The flip side of this carnage is, of course, the ability of the ruling class to further enrich itself amidst the chaos. In a natural evolution of what Naomi Klein refers to as “disaster capitalism,” we are now well on our way to anointing the world’s first trillionaire.

If America was a political satire film, the coronavirus pandemic would be its whimsical climax; its Dr. Strangelove mass-nuking scene juxtaposed with a comforting musical score. Once again, we are exceptional, but in a rather insidious and villainous sense. In a black humor sort of way, America is the laughing stock of the world. The Global South must think our chickens are coming home to roost, just as they had on 9/11. Our lofty ideals are effortlessly unraveling before the eyes of billions, culminating in an unsightly mountain of corpses and petroleum-based consumer goods. Indeed, the empire wears no clothes.

As the late comedian George Carlin said, “It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” In lieu of the fabled “land of the free,” what persists is simply an empire in decline; something more resembling an American Nightmare for the vast majority of those affected, both domestically and abroad. All possibilities for revolution or even reform have failed. America is the Titanic of countries; an ostentatious facade naively heading toward utter destruction. The question now is who will survive this final, epic, prolonged plateau; this dark moment while the glimmering vessel ominously rests vertically, partially above water; this death rattle before rapid descent into oblivion.

The Capitalist “Great Reset” and the Descent Into Techno-Tyranny

By Rainer Shea

Republished from the author’s blog.

Covid-19 has brought about the era of biopolitics, an era that will continue for the foreseeable future. This is because the virus is far from being defeated; a resurgence of it is likely to happen this fall, and the neoliberal world’s refusal to sacrifice business for public health is sure to perpetuate the pandemic for as long as neoliberalism exists. Biopolitics is also here to stay because we’ve reached a point in the climate crisis where global weather patterns are much more compatible with viruses than they used to be. More viruses are going to appear in the coming years with increasing ferocity, while will necessitate an irreversible series of changes to how society functions.

What kinds of changes do multinational corporations and their partnered governments want to enact in response to this permanent crisis? Whatever they end up doing, the narratives of biopolitics are what will be used to sell it to the masses; we’ll be told that all of the corporatocracy’s measures are for our own safety, and that anyone who objects to these measures is working in the service of an enemy power.

This is at least how biopolitics is taking shape within the core imperialist countries. Preoccupied with an escalating cold war against China, the U.S., the U.K., Australia, and the other countries in the NATO empire are stirring up anti-Chinese sentiment by falsely blaming China for the pandemic. The economic isolationism from China that these countries are increasingly embracing goes along with their desire for what they call a “great reset” to their economic systems, where the initial damages to corporate profit from the pandemic are compensated for by a new approach to ordering how their societies work.

The first part of this “great reset” is the use of biopolitics to justify a growing amount of corporate censorship. In this last week alone, Venezuelan regime change operatives have blacklisted several anti-imperialist media outlets so that they can no longer be used as sources on Wikipedia, Twitter has deleted 170,000 accounts for “spreading narratives favorable to the Communist Party of China,” and Facebook has added misleading labels on Russian and Chinese media outlets about these outlets being “state controlled.” All these geopolitically motivated actions are reflective of big tech’s recent trend of openly working with governments to censor “dangerous” material related to the pandemic; because of the precedent this trend has set, suppressing dissent is now easier than ever.

Such is the deceptive nature of the narrative about the tech industry acting as an unambiguous force for good during the “great reset.” There’s been talk in the media and in elite circles about big tech needing to radically restructure how it manages online information; for example, a recent article on the “great reset” from the World Economic Forum says that “The use of digital technology during the COVID-19 crisis offers clear lessons: focus on the safety of essential organizations; protect work-from-home capabilities; and target mistrust broadly to enable specific crisis-relevant tech.”

The article was talking about mistrust as it relates to digital tools, but the same kind of language is what’s also being used in the effort to preserve trust in military, media, intelligence, and law enforcement institutions. The solution to this kind of mistrust is evidently to remove online content deemed to be “misinformation.”

Other statements about the “great reset” that are being put forth by the Western capitalist intelligentsia have to do with adapting the global economic system to the challenges it’s facing. This month, managing director of the International Monetary Fund Kristalina Georgieva made a statement saying that “From the perspective of the IMF, we have seen a massive injection of fiscal stimulus to help countries deal with this crisis, and to shift gears for growth to return. It is of paramount importance that this growth should lead to a greener, smarter, fairer world in the future.”

What does this mean? Given that the IMF’s historic and current role is to advance profits for multinational corporations, it means a campaign to expand the roles of green capitalism and the high-tech sector. Mega-corporations like Amazon, which have lately been seeking to rebrand themselves as environmentally friendly while investing in newly profitable “green” technologies, stand to profit from this aspect of the “great reset.” Amazon in particular will have a significant role to play in this reordering of global capitalism, since it’s one of the companies that’s big enough to survive the 2020 economic crash.

These monopolies that stand to profit from the crisis-the Silicon Valley giants, the Wall Street entities, the pharmaceutical companies-see the growing unrest from the increasingly impoverished lower classes, and they seek to make the “great reset” into a project for restoring order. Last year, the U.S. government organization the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence layed out a plan for creating an AI-driven mass surveillance system which far surpasses the spying apparatus of any other country. This plan, which has been gaining a more traction during the pandemic, would fulfill a truly dystopian vision of a surveillance society.

The NSCAI believes that in order to “address the national security and defense needs of the United States,” the country will need to replace its traditional infrastructure with “smart cities.” These urban centers, a document from the organization says, will consist of self-driving electric cars, shopping that’s done exclusively online, and an integration of everyday devices into the Internet.

The goal of this, aside from providing an opportunity for big tech to sell their “green” and AI-driven products, is to expand the opportunities for state surveillance. The NSCAI says that “streets carpeted with cameras is good infrastructure for smart cities,” and the “internet of things” that it envisions will no doubt be used to give the intelligence agencies more opportunities for monitoring people’s everyday activities; if the CIA can already listen to people through smart TVs, they’ll be able to do a lot more when the smart cities come.

The NSCAI explicitly praises the potentials for helping law enforcement that all these new technologies will provide, stating that “police are making convictions based on phone calls monitored with iFlyTek’s voice-recognition technology” and that “police departments are using [AI] facial recognition tech to assist in everything from catching traffic law violators to resolving murder cases.” You can imagine what such a drastic expansion of these surveillance tools will mean for political organizers who represent the “dangerous” ideas that are now being censored so heavily.

If you think this kind of future is only a far-fetched idea, look at the changes that have already been made during the pandemic. Last month, Google CEO Eric Schmidt met with New York Governor Andrew Cuomo about integrating the company’s technologies into the city, about which Schmidt explained: “The first priorities of what we’re trying to do are focused on telehealth, remote learning, and broadband…We need to look for solutions that can be presented now, and accelerated, and use technology to make things better.”

Additionally, after partnering with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Cuomo said that we’re at “a moment in history when we can actually incorporate and advance [Gates’s] ideas…all these buildings, all these physical classrooms.” Since Gates’ long-term plans involve the creation of a “digital immunity proof” that tracks people in relation to diseases, surveillance capitalism looms over this partnership as well.

As Pepe Escobar explained in April, the next tool for social control may be universal basic income:

You don’t need to read Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics to understand that neoliberalism — in deep crisis since at least 2008 — is a control/governing technique in which surveillance capitalism is deeply embedded. But now, with the world-system collapsing at breathtaking speed, neoliberalism is at a loss to deal with the next stage of dystopia, ever present in our hyper-connected angst: global mass unemployment…Endless permutations of the toxic cocktail of IoT, blockchain technology and the social credit system could loom ahead…Already Spain has announced that it is introducing UBI, and wants it to be permanent. It’s a form of insurance for the elite against social uprisings, especially if millions of jobs never come back.

In the U.S., it’s unlikely that poor and working people will even get this meager version of economic relief. The Republican Party’s only plans for now are increased austerity and continued corporate bailouts, along with whatever privatizations and deregulations they can manage. So it makes sense that the U.S. is where the police state is planned to be made the most extensive and intrusive; they’ll try to use brutal repression and intensive surveillance to keep us from rising up. In the imperial core, techno-tyranny is what biopolitics will inevitably lead to.

Abolish it All: Towards Eradicating the Prison and Military Industrial Complex

By Blake Simons

I, like many other Black radicals who follow the Black radical tradition, are filled with hope to see such a large amount of people talking about abolishment of the police. A few months ago, many would deem us wild to even think that abolishment was such a possibility, let alone a mainstream conversation. With national discussion, however, nuance is erased and conversations become watered down, and the reality of the conditions we are in are not properly articulated. I want to recognize the work of Mariame Kaba, who helped me come to this abolitionist politic; in addition, I want to thank the many folks like Angela Davis who have laid the foundation for abolitionist thought. This piece seeks to provide clarity and guidance to the people, and a framework for which abolishment of the prison industrial complex is possible. 

For starters, it is important to note that the prison industrial complex is deeply tied to the military industrial complex. The weapons and gear manufactured by captured Africans in penitentiaries is used to loot countries in the 3rd world. This makes way for corporations like apple, tesla, google, and microsoft to come to the continent to loot Africa’s resources while also using African child labor. This is only made possible because the police force captures Africans and then enslaves us in penitentiaries in which our people are forced to make weapons and materials for the military. This undeniably connects the prison industrial complex with the military industrial complex. It’s important that we know our enemy and what we are up against if we are going to abolish the PIC. 

The us empire and its military is the most violent imperial regime in human history. Do we think that the biggest purveyor of violence will willingly concede to demands of abolishment? The national guard was called in and military rule began when windows were broken and buildings were burned. Similarly, if we seek to abolish the PIC, this fascist state will have a violent response. I purposefully start here with this framework because it’s important to know what we will be up against if we seek to truly abolish prisons and the police, and thus the military industrial complex. 

america’s economy runs off the exploitation of captured Africans and global imperial dominance. To think that prisons and police will be abolished through non violence underestimates the capacity for violence that america has. ‬america will do anything to preserve its colonial violence, history shows us this and it is a scientific fact.

Prisons won’t be abolished through the reformist calls to defund. Schools are defunded. Healthcare is defunded. Section 8 housing services are defunded. Just because the police are defunded doesn’t mean that they will be abolished. Revolution doesn’t come from policy changes, it comes from destroying these systems that kill us. This is an important distinction necessary for us to be aware of. We must be wary of reformist calls that will somehow “lead” us to abolishment. 

We know that reform only furthers fascism. The past 400 years shows us that. We can’t settle for nothing less than the complete eradication of the systems of oppression that kill and exploit our people on the daily. Whether it is transphobia, ableism, or police violence (which are all deeply connected and often intersect at the same time) we can’t concede to the demands of a fascist state for reform. As George Jackson says,.“...with each reform, revolution became more remote[...]But if one were forced for the sake of clarity to define [fascism] in a word simple enough for all to understand, that word would be ‘reform.”Our people’s lives depend on revolution. 

While new calls to abolish the police show that the general public is ready for change, we have to be honest about what true abolishment will take. As prison-industrial-complex abolitionists, we seek to eradicate systems of violence that enslave, kill, and exploit us. We seek to create new systems that address violence at its core to create peace in our communities. Kwame Ture teaches us that we (revolutionaries) are not only destroyers but we are creators. Creators of a new world where peace is possible. But we must understand that in order for peace to exist, there is a scientific method that must be used to obtain it.

We must understand that armed struggle in defense of and against this fascist state is the only way to eradicate fascism. Mussolini wasn’t defeated through non-violent protests. Hitler wasn’t defeated through non-violent protests. And trump and the united corporations of america won’t be destroyed through non-violence. Revolutionary (counter)violence, which is a defensive and life-affirming posture as much as it is an act of self-preservation, will create the conditions in which we can abolish these systems that have oppressed us for the past 400 years. As Malcolm X said best, there’s been no revolution in the world without bloodshed — from Haiti, to Venezuela, to Cuba, to Ghana. 

While many might say our people are not ready for this, I would like to remind people that it was unarmed protestors in Minneapolis who sent pigs squealing and retreating from their precinct. This happened as people in current time created a plan to do so. Imagine if the people had more organization? Imagine if the people were armed? There’s endless possibilities if we have an organized guerrilla front. 

As I said earlier, revolutionary (counter)violence is at the core of abolishment, but as revolutionaries we also create twice as much as we seek to destroy. As my comrade noname said,

“when the dust settles and the protests stop, communities will still be poor, police will still murder and violate citizens. prisons will still be filled with millions of ppl. half a million ppl will still be houseless. the past 2 weeks was the easy part. solidarity isn’t a trend”.

This is why we have to create programs, people’s programs, that serve the material needs of our people pending armed struggle. We have to show our people that a future outside the parasitic conditions of capitalism do exist. We need food programs for the hungry. Housing programs for the houseless. Medical programs for the people. COVID-19 testing for the community. We must provide this for our people. If we are to claim the title as revolutionary, it is our duty to serve the people, love the people, and free the people. 

In struggle.

*

Blake Simons is co-host of Hella Black podcast and co-founder of People’s Breakfast Oakland, a grassroots Black socialist organization in Oakland, CA. The author is on Twitter @BlakeDontCrack.

Reviving the Brazilian and Bolivian Left

By Yanis Iqbal

Left-wing politics has experienced a stratospheric decline in Brazil and Bolivia. In Brazil, the democratically elected president of Worker’s Party (PT) was ousted through a parliamentary coup in 2016. After this, a right-wing extremist named Jair Bolsonaro has assumed the presidency and has mercilessly blemished the healthcare through his bluff and bluster. This has led to more than 200,000 cases, 15,000 deaths and already 2 health ministers have resigned due to Bolsonaro’s adamant insistence on the use of hydroxychloroquine. Similarly, Bolivia has also seen the ouster of Evo Morales in November, 2019 through a rightist-military orchestrated coup which has led to the appointment of Jeanine Anez as the president who is an ardent catholic and racist. Anez has unleashed the “Bolsonarofication of Bolivia” in the Covid-19 crisis which has caused the erosion of the Unified Health System, the banishment of Cuban doctors and the reduction of myriad health and cash transfer programs.

The dramatic deterioration of the left in both the countries is causing an unprecedented damage to the people living in these countries. With the astronomic rise of the right-wing bloc, full-fledged neoliberalism has again dug its fiendish claws in the flesh of Brazil and Bolivia. A catastrophic situation like this necessitates the re-establishment of a new left-wing politics that is capable of waging a counter-war against the overtly barbarous and crudely capitalist right-wing camp. For this to happen, we need to critically analyze the previous structure of leftist governments and highlight its weaknesses and pro-corporate proclivities so that a truly revolutionary architecture can be built.

Throughout their existence as a prominent political-electoral force, the Brazilian and Bolivian left have been characterized by a neo-developmentalist statist agenda. This type of political project is foundationally a reformist program which fundamentally aims to reconcile antagonistic classes through the conquest of the state.

 The discursive construction of non-antagonistic class relations in a reformist leftist politics is regulated through the use of the state. State starts serving as the site of class unity where irreconcilable demands are negotiated and an unstable equilibrium is maintained through the concessions which the bourgeoisie is willing to grant to the working class. These class compromises are made to co-opt the working class into the restricted rationality of neoliberalism. The bourgeoisie not only co-opts the working class but also reformulates their demands through new anti-revolutionary perspectives and creates the intelligible terrain on which economic-political demands are made. Through the assimilation and reformulation of anti-capitalist forces, a polyclassist pact is produced which is presented by the state as a “revolutionary measure”. Therefore, the definitive role of the state in a neo-developmentalist system consists in its ability to cooperate with the capitalists and to set up itself as the mediating agent in the class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.  

Due to its status as a moderator of class struggle, the state has to follow the rules of the global market and has to repeatedly constrict the social movements when they cross the thresholds defined by neoliberalism. Along with constriction, the state also enables a market ideology by generating a consumerist culture and encouraging possessive individualism. In this process of constriction and enablement, we need to highlight two important tactics.

(1) The first tactic of neo-developmentalist state refers to its attempts to help in the proliferation of a market-centric ideology through amorphous political lexicon. For example, the Brazilian state under the PT administration was increasingly adopting a class-insensitive political system by lumping together the working class in the category of the “poor”. This was done indiscriminately in the 2010 election campaign of Dilma Rousseff in which she was presented as the “mother of the poor”. Notions like these facilitated the erasure of the class combativeness of the working class by interpellating them as “impotent individuals” who could be rescued by the welfare policies of state. Along with the introduction of the category of the poor, the Brazilian state also added a consumerist tinge to its programme of fragmenting the working class. In a video released by PT in 2013, it was said that “college education, vacations, air travel, a home, a car, meat on the table and shopping are today a right for all”. The depiction of poverty reduction in terms of different possessions surreptitiously inserts a market logic in which economic status is measured in terms of access to specific goods and not on the basis of the ownership of means of production. The Worker’s Party has partly replaced the concept of the poor with the equally amorphous concept of nation and in a statement given by it in 2017, it said that “our experiences and formulations are not the property of the Worker’s Party; they belong to the heritage of the Brazilian people”.  This statement reflects the hesitance of PT to combatively confront the bourgeoisie of Brazil.

(2) The second tactic involves the direct efforts of the neo-developmentalist state to subvert class-based social movements. In this aspect, Bolivia serves as a paradigmatic example. In the December 2005 elections, Evo Morales had secured a majority with 54% of the votes and decided to build a constituent assembly which would encapsulate the popular will of the suppressed and indigenous people. Surprisingly, in September 2006, MAS (Movement Towards Socialism), the party to which Evo Morales belongs, decided that social movements could not send their representatives to the constituent assembly and only political organizations were allowed to do so. This decision was momentous because it came during the time of an aggressive class war in which the capitalists of the Media Luna (Half Moon) of the eastern lowlands, who owned the oil and gas industry, were belligerently trying to weaken the strength of the indigenist-leftist bloc by capturing state power. Therefore, the decision to debar social movements from joining the constituent assembly implicitly indicated the capitalistic tendencies within the Morales government. But this decision soon had to be revoked in April 2009 due to the opposition presented to it by the social movements.

Through the two statist tactics of constriction and active facilitation, the Brazilian and Bolivian states were able to contain the radicality of left-wing politics. By pursuing a regressively reformist policy stance, a newfangled marketized-welfare state was created which embroidered the unvarnished mechanism of capitalism with a left-progressive ideology. For example, Brazil was able to utilize the commodity boom of the 2000s to institute some welfare policies like the Bolsa Familia which benefitted 12 million families. There was also a 50% increase in the minimum wages and higher education was also made accessible. Along with the instauration of these programmes, there was also the concealed and simultaneous reprimarization of economy and the enhancement of a neo-extractive, agro-export economic infrastructure. This was the result of the supposed global market integration of Brazil which increased the economic dependency of Brazil on other countries. Brazil, under PT, also witnessed the construction of new dams such as the Belo Monte dam, Madeira river dams and 4 dams on the Teles Pires River. The increasingly export-oriented, environmentally damaging and extractive economy of Brazil was also obscured by the “democratization drive” in which participatory institutions such as the Participatory Budgeting (PB) was introduced. These democratic platforms actually professionalized the civil society, statified resistance movements and only allowed for “friendly dialogue” rather than serious power sharing.

A similar situation was seen in Bolivia during the question of oil nationalization. During the politically turbulent time in which the question of the nationalization of oil was gaining prominence, Morales had temporarily adopted a centrist position in which he supported Carlos Mesa’s soft-neoliberal decision to raise the level of royalties paid by oil corporations. But the adverse effects of this diluted neoliberal position were clearly shown by the mere 18% percent of vote which MAS garnered in the 2004 Municipal Elections. Morales had to reverse his position due to this electoral setback and in 2006 he announced the nationalization of Bolivia’s oil. This nationalization too was not complete because it did not expropriate these companies but increased the stakes of the state and raised the royalties and taxes. An incomplete Nationalization of oil was not the only measure which contradicted the post-neoliberalism of Bolivia. The presence of Chinese and Japanese mining companies on the salt flats of Altiplano, the increase in foreign direct investment from 278 million dollars in 2006 to 1.18 billion dollars in 2013 also questioned the growing economic independence of Bolivia.  But due to the commodity boom between 2006 and 2014, Morales’s Bolivia was able to increase its revenues and alleviate poverty from 64% of the population in 2002 to 36.3% in 2011. Extreme poverty too was reduced to approximately 17%. This compensated for its capitalistic economic edifice which remained intact despite these progressive measures.

Due to an unstable compromise which the Bolivian and Brazilian governments had to maintain between the bourgeoisie and working class, there emerged certain cracks in the thinly veiled capitalism of both these countries. In 2015, Brazil saw the neoliberal re-adjustment of the economy in which unemployment rose by 38%, extreme poverty increased from 7.9% to 9.2% and there was 4.6% increase in self-employed workers, signifying the informalization of labor. These measures were enacted due to the decline in the windfall from the commodity boom which the Lula administration had utilized by exporting some major commodities to China such as iron ore, raw sugar and soybeans. But now the Dilma government had to mould its economy according to the rules of the global market which was experiencing a contraction. Bolivia too saw the emergence of economic – political fissures in which the Morales government started diluting and de-intensifying its revolutionary proclamations. From 2006 to 2013, the percentage of primary product exports as a share of total exports increased from 89.4% to 96%. This denotes the extractivist economic structure of Bolivia in which soybean production has increasingly assumed a major role. In Santa Cruz, large landowners and soy producers represent only 2% of the farm units but own more than 70% of land. Land ownership concentration is not only restricted to Santa Cruz but is rather the integral part of Bolivian economy in which the soy complex is the most prominent. In the capitalist circuit of soy complex, agro-chemicals and machineries are imported and these are then distributed to the agribusiness oligarchy of Bolivia which exacerbates the economic existence of small soybean producers by making soybean production a capital-intensive process.

Gradually, the fissures of reformist capitalism started widening and these ultimately prepared the fertile ground for the growth of a fascistic right. The right was able to expand its social base by re-articulating the various weaknesses of the weakly socialist governments. In Bolivia, for example, the right highlighted the transition of Evo Morales from a Mallku and a supporter of cabildo abiertos (open councils) to a caudillo or strongman. By portraying Evo Morales and his socio-economic system as authoritarian, the right paved the way for an extra-institutional paradigm of mobilization which used the idiom of leftist mass-based activism to unleash violence. Brazilian right also reaped the growing discontent of the masses and this was most visible when Jair Bolsonaro was touting himself as an anti-system presidential candidate who could change everything. This anti-system position then metamorphosed into an anti-democratic agenda which countered the meek reformism of the neo-developmentalist left with cultural-symbolic combativeness.

The unpropitious circumstances in Brazil and Bolivia are politically incapacitating the left. It seems that the left-wing camp in both these countries is still not adopting a new strategy and wants to rehash its hackneyed program of weak socialism. But it should now acknowledge that its dime-store developmentalism and unimaginative cesspool of socialist state conquest is based upon a fundamental misreading of Marxism. The Bolivian and Brazilian left apprehended the state as a pivotal instrument in the entire power project of leftism and ignored what Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin had said. In Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx had said that the state is the “committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. Similarly, Lenin had said that bourgeoisie state, “whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie”. Bolivian and Brazilian leftists made their first fundamental mistake by misunderstanding the state as a universal apparatus which could guarantee the peaceful living of all the people. By universalizing the state and understanding it as an arbitrator above the class relations, the Bolivian and Brazilian left got ensnared in the vortex of bourgeoisie ideology which obviates the emergence of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Dictatorship of the proletariat is of utmost necessity because it involves the exterior dictatorialization of the bourgeoisie and the internal democratization of the organization of living. This internal democratization is diametrically opposed to the democratic drivel of the capitalism which is restricted to formal parliamentarianism and is fearful of genuine mass based activism. Therefore, the Brazilian and Bolivian left has to undauntingly espouse the strategy of the dictatorship of the proletariat which alone can guarantee the complete annihilation of the bourgeoisie cultural-legal state apparatus and its replacement by a new revolutionary state which in unwilling to make invisibilize class struggle.

The second mistake made by the Brazilian and Bolivian state follows from the first one. By not smashing the old state apparatus and refusing to support the dictatorship of the proletariat, the Brazilian and Bolivian state discarded the concept of communism and substituted it with socialism. Dictatorship of the proletariat is only present during the phase of socialism which Lenin defined eloquently as “a period of struggle between dying capitalism and nascent communism”. In this situation of socialism, the socialist state has to establish itself and the dictatorship of the proletariat with the objective of constantly decentralizing its power and always working towards the goal of communism or classless society. But the Bolivian and Brazilian states did not regard socialism as a goal towards communism but as a destination in-itself. Due to the erasure of communism, both the states instituted socialism not as a contradictory and tensional period of continuous class struggle in which the state is present to empower grassroots movement, but as a period of “class collaboration” in which different classes live as unified individuals under the state authority. This entrenchment of class collaboration is quite similar to the idea of the 1936 Soviet constitution in which Stalin had anointed Soviet Union as the “State of the whole people”. Brazilian and Bolivian left can navigate their way through their Stalinist embroilment by reinstating communism as the primary objective and seeing socialism as a period of intense class struggle and devolution of power.

The two remedial measures mentioned above can greatly facilitate the construction of a new revolutionary strategy which is politically potent and economically exhaustive. These stratagems can be crafted only if the reformist left of Bolivia and Brazil admits that there is no alternative to class struggle and produces a cohesive communist campaign which openly opposes the peremptory pronouncements of neoliberalism.

Profitability, Investment, and the Pandemic

[Photo Credit: REUTERS]

By Michael Roberts

Originally published at the author’s blog.

Last week’s speech by US Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, Washington was truly shocking.  Powell told his audience of economists that “The scope and speed of this downturn are without modern precedent”. One shocking fact that he announced was that, according to a special Fed survey of ‘economic well-being’ among American households, “Among people who were working in February, almost 40% households making less than $40,000 a year had lost a job in March”!!!

Powell went on to warn his well-paid audience sitting at home watching on Zoom that “while the economic response has been both timely and appropriately large, it may not be the final chapter, given that the path ahead is both highly uncertain and subject to significant downside risks”. Indeed, if the continual downgrading of forecasts of global growth are anything to go by, then the number of optimists about a V-shaped recovery are beginning to dwindle to just the leaders of governments and finance.

Another study projects that US GDP will decline by 22% compared to the pre-COVID-19 period and 24% of US jobs are likely to be vulnerable. The adverse effects are further estimated to be strongest for low-wage workers who might face employment reductions of up to 42% while high-wage workers are estimated to experience just a 7% decrease.

And Powell was worried that this collapse could leave lasting damage to the US economy, making any quick or even significant recovery difficult.  “The record shows that deeper and longer recessions can leave behind lasting damage to the productive capacity of the economy.”, said Powell, echoing the arguments presented in my recent post on the ‘scarring’ of the economy.

Powell reckoned the main problem in achieving any recovery once the pandemic was over was that “A prolonged recession and weak recovery could also discourage business investment and expansion, further limiting the resurgence of jobs as well as the growth of capital stock and the pace of technological advancement. The result could be an extended period of low productivity growth and stagnant incomes.”  See here.

And there was a serious risk that the longer the recovery took to emerge, the more likely there would be bankruptcies and the collapse of firms and eve n banks, as “the recovery may take some time to gather momentum, and the passage of time can turn liquidity problems into solvency problems.”

Indeed, last week, the Federal Reserve released its semi-annual Financial Stability Report, in which it concluded that “asset prices remain vulnerable to significant price declines should the pandemic take an unexpected course, the economic fallout prove more adverse, or financial system strains re-emerge.”  The Fed report warned that lenders could face “material losses” from lending to struggling borrowers who are unable to get back on track after the crisis. “The strains on household and business balance sheets from the economic and financial shocks since March will probably create fragilities that last for some time,” the Fed wrote.  “All told, the prospect for losses at financial institutions to create pressures over the medium term appears elevated,” the central bank said.

So the coronavirus slump will be deep and long lasting with a weak recovery to follow and could cause a financial crash.  And working people will suffer severely, especially those at the bottom of the income and skills ladder. That is the message of the head of the world’s most powerful central bank.

But the other message that Jay Powell wanted to emphasise to his economics audience was that this terrifying slump was not the fault of capitalism.  Powell was at pains to claim that the cause of the slump was the virus and lockdowns and not the economy. “The current downturn is unique in that it is attributable to the virus and the steps taken to limit its fallout. This time, high inflation was not a problem. There was no economy-threatening bubble to pop and no unsustainable boom to bust.  The virus is the cause, not the usual suspects—something worth keeping in mind as we respond.”

This statement reminded me of what I said way back in mid-March when the virus was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation. “I’m sure when this disaster is over, mainstream economics and the authorities will claim that it was an exogenous crisis nothing to do with any inherent flaws in the capitalist mode of production and the social structure of society.  It was the virus that did it.”  My response then was to remind readers that “Even before the pandemic struck, in most major capitalist economies, whether in the so-called developed world or in the ‘developing’ economies of the ‘Global South’, economic activity was slowing to a stop, with some economies already contracting in national output and investment, and many others on the brink.”

After Powell’s comment, I went back and had a look at the global real GDP growth rate since the end of the Great Recession in 2009.  Based on IMF data, we can see that annual growth was on a downward trend and in 2019 global growth was the slowest since the GR.

And if we compare last year’s 2019 real GDP growth rate with the 10yr average before, then every area of the world showed a significant fall.

The Eurozone growth was 11% below the 10yr average, the G7 and advanced economies even lower, with the emerging markets growth rate 27% lower, so that the overall world growth rate in 2019 was 23% lower than the average since the end of the Great Recession.  I’ve added Latin America to show that this region was right in a slump by 2019.

So the world capitalist economy was already slipping into a recession (long overdue) before the coronavirus pandemic arrived.  Why was this?  Well, as Brian Green explained in the You Tube discussion that I had with him last week, the US economy had been in a credit-fuelled bubble for the last six years that enabled the economy to grow even though profitability has been falling along with investment in the ‘real’ economy.  So, as Brian says, “the underlying health of the global capitalist economy was poor before the plague but was obscured by cheap money driving speculative gains which fed back into the economy”.  (For Brian’s data, see his website here).

In that discussion, I looked at the trajectory of the profitability of capital globally. The Penn World Tables 9.1 provide a new series called the internal rate of return on capital (IRR) for every country in the world starting in 1950 up to 2017. The IRR is a reasonable proxy for a Marxian measure of the rate of profit on capital stock, although of course it is not the same because it excludes variable capital and raw material inventories (circulating capital) from the denominator.  Despite that deficiency, the IRR measure allows us to consider the trends and trajectory of the profitability of capitalist economies and compare them with each other on a similar basis of valuation.

If we look at the IRR for the top seven capitalist economies, the imperialist countries, called the G7, we find that the rate of profit in the major economies peaked at the end of the so-called ‘neoliberal’ era in the late 1990s.  There was a significant decline in profitability after 2005 and then a slump during the Great Recession, matching Brian’s results for the US non-financial sector.  The recovery since the end of the Great Recession has been limited and profitability remains near all-time lows.

The IRR series only goes up to 2017.  It would be possible to extend these results to 2019 using the AMECO database which measures the net return on capital similarly to the Penn IRR.  I have not had time to do this properly, but an eye-ball look suggests that there has been no rise in profitability since 2017 and probably a slight fall up to 2019.  So these results confirm Brian Green’s US data that the major capitalist economies were already significantly weak before the pandemic hit.

Second, we can also gauge this by looking at total corporate profits, not just profitability.  Brian does this too for the US and China.  I have attempted to extend US and China corporate profit movements to a global measure by weighting the corporate profits (released quarterly) for selected major economies: US, UK, China, Canada, Japan and Germany.  These economies constitute more than 50% of world GDP.  What this measure reveals is that global corporate profits had ground to a halt before the pandemic hit.  Marx’s double-edge law of profit was in operation.

The mini-boom for profits that began in early 2016 peaked in mid-2017 and slid back in 2018 to zero by 2019.

That brings me to the causal connection between profits and the health of capitalist economies.  Over the years, I have presented theoretical arguments for what I consider is the Marxian view that profits drive capitalist investment, not ‘confidence’, not sales, not credit, etc.  Moreover, profits lead investment, not vice versa.  It is not only the logic of theory that supports this view; it is also empirical evidence.  And there is a stack of it.

But let me bring to your attention a new paper by Alexiou and Trachanas, Predicting post-war US recessions: a probit modelling approach, April 2020. They investigated the relationship between US recessions and the profitability of capital using multi-variate regression analysis.  They find that the probability of recessions increases with falling profitability and vice versa.  However, changes in private credit, interest rates and Tobin’s Q (stock market values compared with fixed asset values) are not statistically significant and any association with recessions is “rather slim”.

I conclude from this study and the others before it, that, although fictitious capital (credit and stocks) might keep a capitalist economy above water for a while, eventually it will be the profitability of capital in the productive sector that decides the issue. Moreover, cutting interest rates to zero or lower; injecting credit to astronomical levels that boost speculative investment in financial assets (and so raise Tobin’s Q) and more fiscal spending will not enable capitalist economies to recover from this pandemic slump.  That requires a significant rise in the profitability of productive capital.

If we look at investment rates (as measured by total investment to GDP in an economy), we find that in the last ten years, total investment to GDP in the major economies has been weak; indeed in 2019, total investment (government, housing and business) to GDP is still lower than in 2007. In other words, even the low real GDP growth rate in the major economies in the last ten years has not been matched by total investment growth.  And if you strip out government and housing, business investment has performed even worse.

By the way, the argument of the Keynesians that low economic growth in the last ten years is due to ‘secular stagnation’ caused by a ‘savings glut’ is not borne out.  The national savings ratio in the advanced capitalist economies in 2019 is no higher than in 2007, while the investment ratio has fallen 7%.  There has been an investment dearth not a savings glut.  This is the result of low profitability in the major capitalist economies, forcing them to look overseas to invest where profitability is higher (the investment ratio in emerging economies is up 10% – I shall return to this point in a future post).

What matters in restoring economic growth in a capitalist economy is business investment.  And that depends on the profitability of that investment.  And even before the pandemic hit, business investment was falling.  Take Europe. Even before the pandemic hit, business investment in peripheral European countries was still about 20 per cent below pre-crisis levels.

Andrew Kenningham, chief Europe economist at Capital Economics, forecast eurozone business investment would fall 24 per cent year on year in 2020, contributing to an expected 12 per cent contraction in GDP. In the first quarter, France reported its largest contraction in gross fixed capital formation, a measure of private and public investment, on record; Spain’s contraction was also near-record levels, according to preliminary data from their national statistics offices.

In Europe, manufacturers producing investment goods — those used as inputs for the production of other goods and services, such as machinery, lorries and equipment — experienced the biggest hit to activity, according to official data. In Germany, the production of investment goods fell 17 per cent in March compared with the previous month, more than double the fall in the output of consumer goods. France and Spain registered even wider differences

Low profitability and rising debt are the two pillars of the Long Depression (ie low growth in productive investment, real incomes and trade) that the major economies have been locked into for the last decade.  Now in the pandemic, governments and central banks are doubling down on these policies, backed by a chorus of approval from Keynesians of various hues (MMT and all), in the hope and expectation that this will succeed in reviving capitalist economies after the lockdowns are relaxed or ended.

This is unlikely to happen because profitability will remain low and may even be lower, while debts will rise, fuelled by the huge credit expansion.  Capitalist economies will remain depressed, and even eventually be accompanied by rising inflation, so that this new leg of depression will turn into stagflation.  The Keynesian multiplier (government spending) will be found wanting as it was in the 1970s.  The Marxist multiplier (profitability) will prove to be a better guide to the nature of capitalist booms and slumps and show that capitalist crises cannot be ended while preserving the capitalist mode of production.

Imperialist Propaganda and the New Cold War With China

PHOTO CREDIT: FOREIGN POLICY ILLUSTRATION/MADOKA IKEGAMI-POOL/GETTY IMAGES/DREW ANGERER/GETTY IMAGES

By Matthew Dolezal

Originally published at the author’s blog.

On January 24, a headline in the right-wing Washington Times read, “Coronavirus may have originated in a lab linked to China’s biowarfare program.” The claim was largely debunked and ignored. However, the story was then notably resuscitated by Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin in April. By the end of the piece, Rogin admitted, “We don’t know whether the novel coronavirus originated in the Wuhan lab.” Shortly thereafter, the claim spread to Fox News and other mainstream outlets. Soon enough, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Trump publicly promoted the unfounded conspiracy theory.

According to prominent sources within the scientific community, the virus in question almost certainly has natural origins. For instance, an article featured in the prestigious scientific journal Nature explained:

“Our analyses clearly show that SARS-CoV-2 is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus. […] Instead, we propose two scenarios that can plausibly explain the origin of SARS-CoV-2: (i) natural selection in an animal host before zoonotic transfer; and (ii) natural selection in humans following zoonotic transfer. We also discuss whether selection during passage could have given rise to SARS-CoV-2.”

Furthermore, The Lancet published a letter signed by 27 public health scientists from eight countries who “strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.” The letter continues by clarifying that “scientists from multiple countries have published and analyzed genomes of the causative agent, severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and they overwhelmingly conclude that this coronavirus originated in wildlife, as have so many other emerging pathogens.”

In short, the sensational claim that the virus originated in a Chinese lab has absolutely no supporting evidence. This specific case of anti-China propaganda is simply fuel on the pre-existing fire of unfounded Western smears against this rising power in the East. For instance, in August of 2018, prominent Western news media outlets began claiming that the United Nations had compiled reports of Chinese government “internment camps” in which as many as one million ethnic Uyghur Muslims were being held. However, upon further inspection, the claim deteriorated. It turned out that the U.N. as a whole had made no such statement, and that the explosive assertion came from a single individual, Gay McDougall, who was the sole American member of the independent Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

According to the Associated Press, McDougall “did not specify a source for that information in her remarks at the [U.N.] hearing.” Despite the complete absence of evidence for this serious charge, more propaganda subsequently surfaced from other dubious Western sources, including a U.S. government-funded “activist group” called the Network of Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD). According to The Grayzone, “ the board of the organization is a Who’s Who of exiled Chinese anti-government activists.” The CHRD has even endorsed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, a neoconservative who has expressed racist views toward Chinese people and supports colonialism.

During his recent trip to China, journalist Danny Haiphong didn’t see “internment camps” in Xinjiang Province. Haiphong further explained that “it is difficult to walk more than a mile without running into a mosque. Every street sign in the city is translated in both Mandarin and Uyghur languages. Security is more plentiful in Ürümqi than in Beijing or Xi’an, and for good reason. Most Westerners are unaware that Xinjiang Province is the site of numerous terror attacks that have taken the lives of hundreds of people.” Due to the ongoing threat of Islamist terrorism, Xinjiang “has set up vocational and training centers in accordance with the law to provide courses on Mandarin, laws, vocational skills and deradicalization programs for people influenced by religious extremism and terrorism.”

Nevertheless, relying heavily on unsubstantiated Western propaganda of the aforementioned variety, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act late last year. The bill, which includes additional economic sanctions, is part of a larger pattern of new Cold War-style escalations between the two powerful nations. With these tensions comes a surge in Sinophobic hate crimes buttressed by bipartisan, racist rhetoric from American politicians, replacing the hysterical Russophobia of yesteryear. As noted in the New York Times, this onslaught is “reminiscent of the kind faced by American Muslims, Arabs and South Asians in the United States after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”

After its “breathtaking” response to the recent coronavirus outbreak, China has found itself further entrenched in a hybrid war with the American empire. As journalist Pepe Escobar explained, “For the first time since the start of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1978, Beijing openly regards the U.S. as a threat…” It is certainly true that China is undermining America’s global hegemony by engaging in international solidarity efforts with nations that have historically been in the crosshairs of U.S. imperialism (Venezuela, Iran, Cuba, North Korea, etc.). Due to the evident domestic decline of American society, this ongoing cooperation between those consistently demonized, sanctioned, invaded, or otherwise targeted by the West could become a model for a multi-polar global future. 

On October 10, 1990, a shocking testimony was given to the Congressional Human Rights Caucus by a 15-year-old girl named Nayirah. The distraught teenager recounted an event she said she had witnessed as a volunteer at a Kuwaiti hospital after the Iraqi invasion earlier that year. “While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators and left the children to die on the cold floor. It was horrifying,” the girl proclaimed. Although it was partially used to justify the Gulf War, the story turned out to false, just like the narrative that was used to justify the subsequent 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. 

Iraq is not unique. Imperialist lies have also been used to justify American aggression in Libya, Syria, Venezuela, and countless other sovereign nations around the world. Even the justification for the Vietnam War turned out to be fabricated. Such falsehoods have allowed the American empire to violently ravage the globe for decades to protect its so-called economic interests. Now that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is providing a viable alternative to the battle-scarred neoliberal capitalist model, the imperfect, yet successful economic power that lifted 800 million people out of extreme poverty is being maligned with spurious propaganda. Don’t believe the hype.

On the Questions of Race and Racism: Revolutionary National Liberation and Building the United Front Against Imperialism

By Kevin “Rashid" Johnson

This was originally published in 2006 on the New Afrikan Black Panther Party's website.

The economic nature of racism is not simply an aside… Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism.”
George L. Jackson, 1971

Introduction

Many people believe that racism – indeed the very concept of race itself – develops automatically when groups of people with different complexions, hair, and body types are brought together.  This is not so!  Actually, the concept of race is barely 500 years old.  The common people have been programmed into accepting “race” as a normal and natural thing, to prevent them from questioning, investigating, and challenging the ideas and roots of race and racism. Race and racism are the inventions of a specific social class, and devised to serve a specific social purpose.  The creators are the oppressor capitalist ruling class, and the purpose is to divide the laboring class that the capitalists exploit against themselves.  This is because, if united, the workers pose the single greatest threat to the capitalist class monopoly over social wealth, power, and control. A dispassionate study will show that in every situation where race has arisen to become a sharp dividing social factor, the hands of the capitalists can be seen pulling the strings, and it is only they who benefit from the conflicts.

George Jackson clearly recognized this.  He pointed out that while white racism, the dominant form of racism in Amerika, expresses itself as:

“…the morbid traditional fear of Blacks, Indians, Mexicans, [and] the desire to inflict pain on them when they began to compete in the industrial sectors.  The resentment and the seedbed of fear are patterned into every modern capitalist society. It grows out of a sense of insecurity and insignificance that is inculcated into the workers by the conditions of life and work under capitalism.  This sense of vulnerability is the breeding ground of racism.  At the same time, the ruling class actively promotes racism against the Blacks of the lower classes.  This programmed racism has always served to distract the huge numbers of people who subsist at just a slightly higher level than those in a more debased condition (in the 1870’s the strikes frequently ended in anti-Chinese or anti-Black lynchings)…Racism has served always in the U.S. as a pressure release…”

The sole concern of the capitalist class is to secure and increase their profits and power. They do not care whom or what they damage or destroy to accomplish this, nor do they care what nationality or complexion the people are whom they exploit, only that they keep the exploited workers unable to unite and mobilize against their conditions of exploitation.  Racism has been the capitalists’ most effective method of accomplishing this. Here in North Amerika, the game began in the late 1600’s.

The Creation of the White Race and Racism

The first laborers exploited in North Amerika under British colonialism consisted of Afrikan, European, and Indian slaves and indentured servants.  The concept of ‘race’ did not exist then. The laborers were all equally oppressed and exploited of their wealth-producing labor by the capitalist plantation owners and thus saw each other as equals. They lived, labored, loved, suffered, bred, bled, escaped, and died together. They also repeatedly rebelled and revolted together. But because they lacked a unifying leadership and vision or control over resources, they were unable to come together en masse to wage a united revolution to overthrow the plantation elite and the British colonial government that served and backed the elite. This all changed in 1676 when Bacon’s Rebellion occurred.

The leader of the rebellion, Nathaniel Bacon, was a young plantation owner. He had left England to settle in the British colonies in 1673, and was appointed to the Council of British Colonial Governor William Berkeley. The colonial government’s principal concern (as with any capitalist government) was to maintain stability in the colonies while protecting and expanding the holdings and wealth of the ruling class. To achieve this, Berkeley promoted developing trade relations and peace with the Indians who lived on surrounding lands. Bacon, however, promoted running the Indians off their land to expand the colonial settlements. In defiance of Berkeley’s policies, Bacon independently organized and led poor farmers who lived on the outskirts of the colonies (most of whom were recently freed indentured servants), on murderous terror raids against nearby Indian communities.  But instead of fleeing, the Natives responded with counter-raids against their attackers. Bacon, unable to match the Indian counter-attacks, sought but was denied military support from Berkeley.

Bacon then turned on the established colonial ruling class and Berkeley’s government. He armed and organized the colony’s Afrikan and English slaves with promises of freedom, and in 1676 led them in revolt against the colonial rulers. The revolt succeeded in overthrowing the colonial ruling class and government, and captured the capitol at Jamestown, Virginia.

However, six months into the revolt, and at the height of his power, Bacon died of influenza.  Bacon’s Rebellion, deprived of its leader and organizer, collapsed, and the colonial ruling class and Council quickly regained control, though not without a determined last stand by the core group of rebels, principally composed of Afrikan slaves. It was at this point that the plantation elite and their reinstated government realized the immense danger and power of a unified working class. Consequently they decided to ensure that no united revolt like Bacon’s Rebellion occurred again.  Their solution was to split the lower class by permanently enslaving one sector while winning the loyalty of another sector, inciting its fear and contempt against and using it to police the enslaved sector. To divide, agitate, and rule was the plan. This they accomplished by inventing the concept of race and dividing the lower class along racial lines.

Laws were immediately passed that established the categories of “negro” (Spanish for “black”), and “white” as distinct racialized social statuses. In 1682 legislation was enacted that made slavery a permanent and hereditary status for all “Blacks,” and over the next several decades slavery and indentured servitude of ‘whites’ were phased out. Further laws were passed that forbade and penalized positive social interactions between the races, particularly escapes, marriages, and procreation.

The poor white men made up the body of the colonial militias and, beginning in 1727, were conscripted into manning slave patrols under fines and other penalties if they refused. This plantation police force was the forerunner and grandparent of today’s urban police forces that continue to be concentrated against people of color to repress them across Amerika with violence and terror. In most areas, the slave patrols came to outnumber the black slaves.  A variety of minor privileges were also granted to the poor whites, including tiny plots of land to live on – at the Indians’ expense – a musket, the authority to kill rebellious Blacks, tax exemptions, and other benefits for manning slave patrols, greater leniency in the eyes of the law than Blacks, voting privileges, etc.

By inventing the social category of “white,” and granting the lower class Europeans a share in power over the super-exploited and enslaved Afrikans, the capitalists created a scheme that caused the poor Europeans a false sense of privileged class unity with, and a confused loyalty toward the ruling class which was the source of all of the lower classes’ poverty and misery.  By selling out their own class interests to the elite, the poor whites made a deal with the devil that saw them focus their frustrations on Blacks instead of the capitalists, and thus ensured that they would remain an impoverished and exploited class, just a step above the Blacks.

To ensure the dedication of the slave patrols, and whites in general, in repressing and containing the black slaves, the ruling class generated a paranoid fear of slave revolts and especially of “Negroes with guns.” From every pulpit, and every center of white social gathering and influence, Blacks were depicted as always plotting to revolt with the aim of murdering all whites indiscriminately (men, wimyn, and children), molesting white wimyn, and subverting  ‘good’ white Christian civilization with Black “heathenism.”  Both the political and religious institutions were, and remain today, proponents of racism and white fear of Black revolt.

The church hierarchy, which was tied in with the ruling elite, also added fuel to the fire of racism by theologizing the myth of white racial superiority over all other races, claiming that whites were the Creator’s “chosen people” destined to rule over all others as a divine right, and that slavery was a punishment ordained by the creator for Blacks as the “Curse of Canaan.”  It was through these combined methods that “white supremacy” and the very concept of the “white” and “black” races were born and spread, and remain today normalized concepts that divide the lower class to further the interests of the wealthy elite.

The capitalists found race and racism such effective tools for manipulating and undermining the working class that appeals to race and racism, (overtly and subliminally), have been their generalized method of subverting working class struggles and manipulating workers to serve as mercenaries and mindless cannon fodder in fighting capitalist wars. To solidify lower class support, the capitalists who were struggling to break free of British control appealed to poor whites to fight the Amerikan Revolutionary War (1775-1783), to achieve an independent “white nation.” The Declaration of Independence expresses this in its statement “When…it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another.”  Because of the racialized identity of “whiteness,” the colonists had come to identify themselves as a different “people” than the English.

From such wealthy elite notables and “Founding Fathers” as Benjamin Franklin (in 1751 to John Jay), James Madison, Jedediah Morse (to Andrew Johnson in 1864), they all emphasized in public and in private letters that Amerika was to be a “white nation.”  (See Steve Martinot, The Rule of Racialization, 2003). This was specified in one of the first legislative acts of the independent Amerikan government – the Naturalization Act of 1790 – that stated that the U.S. was to be a “white republic.” The “White” racialized identity which had its origins in the Virginia colony, was subsequently adopted into European thinking and served as it had in North Amerika, to rationalize European colonization of people of color in Asia, Afrika, Australia, and elsewhere, and to alienate the European working class from uniting with the super-oppressed peoples of color.

The Amerikan capitalists used the same device to justify their brutal and genocidal seizure of Indian and Mexican lands to expand their agricultural empire. They won the allegiance of the poor whites by promoting these actions as white “Manifest Destiny,” as the duty and calling of whites to conquer “inferior” peoples, and by giving out free land grants. These same appeals are used today in pursuit of U.S. conquest and repression of people of color, only the concept of white supremacy and” Manifest Destiny” have become so ingrained and normalized in the collective white Amerikan mind, that they need not be explicitly stated.  Moreover, to do so is politically incorrect and unwise in today’s world where people of color have proven unwilling to accept overtly expressed racist oppression, (witness the national independence struggles of the 20th century against European colonialism that swept Asia and Afrika; the urban uprisings, civil rights, and New Afrikan, First Nation, Mexican, and Puerto Rican liberation struggles in Amerika, the worldwide opposition to South Afrikan Apartheid, etc.).

Therefore, the white supremacist appeal today is made and pursued more clandestinely and with greater sophistication, using such code words as “spreading democracy,” “fighting terrorism,” “fighting crime,” “preventing the spread of Communism,” etc.  But any objective analysis quickly reveals that these policies, backed by extreme state violence, and demonizing labels such as “criminal,” “terrorist,” etc., are consistently applied to non-white peoples, and it’s the white U.S. population that’s appealed to in order to back these policies. That the national identity of Amerika remains that of a white nation is revealed by its population being still classified by race, with panic arising anytime the elites claim some ‘other’ race like Latin Amerikan immigrants are threatening to overrun the “white majority,” or that Blacks are a danger to the stability and moral integrity of Amerika.

White racism caused many whites, (especially of the lower class), to become so consumed and intoxicated with the myth of their racial superiority, their right to repress and contain Blacks and others’ ambitions, and the idea that their own poverty and lack of power was somehow the fault of Blacks, that they’ve resorted to confused, fundamentalist reactionary violence to subvert every effort of Blacks to improve or challenge their own conditions.  Thus, Black political and economic struggles and gains have frequently been followed by reactionary white violence, or the rise of far right-wing white terrorist groups, like the Ku Klux Klan and Knights of White Camellia for example, the white mobs that attacked Blacks in Massachusetts (1850) and Philadelphia, Boston, and Cincinnati (1830’s) to repress the Black vote; the frequent lynchings during Reconstruction (1865-77), white riots against Blacks communities when Blacks moved in large numbers to Northern and Western cities to fill industrial jobs in the early 1900’s, mob attacks and violence to repress civil rights struggles in the south during the 1950’s and 60’s, etc. This reactionary fanatical racial violence and conflict occurs always upon incitement of the ruling elite, to divert and neutralize the danger of revolt of any sector of the working class against their class exploitation and political impotence.

Division Created Within Racial Ranks

The divide and rule scheme was further refined based upon the claimed proposals of a Caribbean slave owner, Willie Lynch, to a gathering of plantation owners in Virginia in 1712.  Lynch proposed not only instigating sharp division between Blacks and whites, but among the Black slaves as well, by playing on minor differences between them to generate envy, fear and distrust.  He proposed that the “black slaves should trust no one except the plantation elite.  That they should be hostile toward themselves and that hostility should be maintained between them and the lower class whites.  Lynch put it this way:

“Gentlemen, I greet you here on the banks of the James River in the year of our Lord 1712. First, I shall thank you, the gentlemen of the Colony of Virginia for bringing me here. I am here to help you solve some of your problems with slaves.  Your invitation reached me on my modest plantation in the West Indies where I have experimented with some of the newest and still the oldest methods for control of slaves. Ancient Rome would envy us if my program was implemented. As our boat sailed south on the James River, named for our illustrious King, whose version of the Bible we cherish, I saw enough to know that your problem is not unique. While Rome used cords of wood as crosses for standing human bodies along its old highway in great numbers, you are here using the tree and the rope on occasion.

“I caught the whiff of a dead slave hanging from a tree a couple of miles back. You are not only losing valuable stock by hangings, you are having uprisings, slaves are running away. Your crops are sometimes left in the fields too long for maximum profit, you suffer occasional fires, your animals are killed. Gentlemen, you know what your problems are; I do not need to elaborate. I am not here to enumerate your problems, however, I am here to introduce you to methods of solving them.

“In my bag here, I have outlined a number of DIFFERENCES among the slaves, and I take their differences and make them bigger. I use FEAR, DISTRUST, and ENVY for control purposes. These methods have worked on my modest plantation in the West Indies and it will work throughout the South. Take this simple little list of differences, and think about them. On top of my list is “AGE,” but it is there because it starts with an “A”; the second is “COLOR” or “SHADE”, there is INTELLIGENCE, SIZE, SEX, STATUS ON PLANTATION, ATTITUDE OF OWNERS, WHETHER THE SLAVES LIVE IN THE VALLEY, ON THE HILL, EAST, WEST, NORTH or SOUTH, HAVE FINE HAIR or COARSE HAIR, or is TALL or SHORT. Now that you have a list of differences, I shall give you an outline of ACTION – but before that I shall assure you that distrust is stronger than trust, and envy is stronger than adulation, respect or admiration.

“The Black slave after receiving this indoctrination shall carry on and will become self-refueling and self-generating for hundreds of years, maybe thousands.

“Don’t forget you must pitch the OLD BLACK MALE vs. the YOUNG BLACK MALE, and the YOUNG BLACK MALE vs. the OLD BLACK MALE. You must use the DARK SKIN SLAVE vs. the LIGHT SKIN SLAVE and the LIGHT SKIN SLAVE vs. the DARK SKIN SLAVE. You must use the FEMALE vs. the MALE and the MALE vs. the FEMALE.

“You must also have your white servants and overseers distrust all Blacks, but it is necessary that your slaves trust and depend on us. They must love, respect, and trust ONLY US.

“Gentlemen, these kits are your keys to control. Use them. Have your wives and children use them. Never miss an opportunity – if used intensively for one year, the slaves themselves will remain perpetually distrustful. Thank you, gentlemen.”

These methods of dividing slaves and Blacks versus poor whites can clearly be seen still in operation today, and the effects still remain with us – the distrust, fear, and envy. While the lower classes have come to love, emulate, and depend on the predatory capitalist class, its wealth, luxury, and artificial prestige, are all obtained through the labor, powerlessness, and poverty of the working class. Yesterday’s chattel slaves are today’s wage slaves: only the slave class today has grown to include all races and nationalities.

Capitalism Creates Racism Abroad

Kwame Nkrumah observed that the same game of racial divide and rule was played when capitalism took root in Afrika:

“The close links between class and race developed in Africa alongside capitalist exploitation. Slavery, the master-servant relationship, and cheap labor were basic to it. The classic example is South Africa, where Africans experience a double exploitation – both on grounds of color and of class. Similar conditions exist in the U.S.A., the Caribbean, in Latin America, and in other parts of the world where the nature of the development of productive forces has resulted in a racist class structure. In these areas, even shades of color count – the degree of blackness being a yardstick by which social status is measured.

“…[A] racist social structure…is inseparable from capitalist economic development.  For race is inextricably linked with class exploitation; in a racist-capitalist power structure, capitalist exploitation and race oppression are complementary; the removal of one ensures the removal of the other…

“The effects of industrialization in Africa as elsewhere, has been to foster the growth of the bourgeoisie, and at the same time the growth of a politically-conscious proletariat. The acquisition of property and political power on the part of the bourgeoisie, and the growing socialist and African nationalist aspirations of the working class, both strike at the root of the racist class structure, though each is aiming at different objectives. The bourgeoisie supports capitalist development while the proletariat – the oppressed class – is striving towards socialism.

“In South Africa, where the basis of ethnic relationships is class and color, the bourgeoisie comprises about one-fifth of the population. The British and the Boers, having joined forces to maintain their positions of privilege, have split up the remaining four-fifths of the population into “Blacks,” “Coloreds,” and “Indians.” The Colored and Indians are minority groups, which act as buffers to protect the minority whites against the increasingly militant and revolutionary Black majority. In the other settled areas of Africa, a similar class-race struggle is being waged.

“A non-racial society can only be achieved by socialist revolutionary action of the masses. It will never come as a gift from the minority ruling class. For it is impossible to separate race relations from the capitalist class relationships in which they have their roots.

“South Africa again provides a typical example…It was only with capitalist economic penetration that the master-servant relationship emerged, and with it, racism, color prejudice and apartheid…

“Slavery and the master-servant relationship were therefore the cause, rather than the result of racism. The position was crystallized and reinforced with the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa, and the employment of cheap African labor in the mines. As time passed, and it was thought necessary to justify the exploitation and oppression of African workers, the myth of racial inferiority was developed and spread.

“In the era of neocolonialism, ‘underdevelopment’ is still attributed not to exploitation but to inferiority, and racial undertones remain closely interwoven with the class struggle.

“It is only the ending of capitalism, colonialism, imperialism and neocolonialism and the attainment of world communism that can provide the conditions under which the race question can finally be abolished and eliminated.”

Kwame Nkrumah, Class Struggle in Africa, 1970

An Example of Racism Incited to Divert Working Class Struggle

World War I (1914 -1918) was a competition between the European imperialist countries for access to and control over the abundant natural resources and markets of the Third World colonies. The war generated a boom for the war industrialists, particularly the Amerikan steel and manufacturing industries that were producing and selling weapons, machinery, and spare parts needed by the European elite to supply their armies, (which were manned by the working class of course). When the U.S. entered the war in 1917, the mandatory draft created a large shortage of white industrial workers. Laborers were needed. With promises of plenty, southern Blacks were drawn by the industrialist’ job recruiters into the Northern and Western cities to fill the vacant jobs. The poor migrant Blacks were also a welcomed replacement, since they would accept work at much lower wages than the white workers would tolerate, thus increasing the capitalists’ profits by lowering labor costs.

The war’s end in 1918 saw the return of the whites in need of employment.  A strong working class movement was already underway in the U.S., which had the capitalists in a panic. They feared working class revolution, like the one that had just succeeded in overthrowing the capitalist class in Russia in 1917. To offset a united radical struggle of the working class poor, capitalist agents within the trade union movement incited the whites against the Blacks, diverting their attention away from challenging capitalist class oppression and toward the Blacks who’d “stolen” their jobs and were driving down wages.

This appeal to reactionary race hate to channel the anger of white workers away from challenging working class exploitation provoked racial violence against Blacks, which culminated in widespread white race riots in the “Red Summer” of 1919. These riots saw over 20 incidents of white mobs converging on Black neighborhoods to gang rape Black wimyn and girls, and murder and maim Black men, wimyn, children and the elderly indiscriminately.

Fast-forwarding to today, we now see an identical situation of competition over jobs along racial lines taking place between Blacks versus Mexican and Latin Amerikan migrants. Under centuries of colonial and neo-colonial policies, U.S. capitalists with government backing have robbed the fertile land and resources and crushed the economies of their countries, imposing imperialist policies that have violently driven millions upon millions off their native lands and into complete insecurity, poverty and beggary. In desperate need of jobs to provide for their families, many are forced to migrate to Amerika, to fill jobs that pay starvation wages or deprive them of benefits enjoyed by ‘legal’ workers. Their predicament duplicates that of Blacks who were forced to migrate to the northern and western cities from the south in search of employment upon being pushed off the land by Klan terror, and being otherwise compelled to live in impoverished servitude.

But instead of struggling alongside these migrant workers today, Blacks have been incited by imperialist agents and propaganda to assume much the same repressive role as the white workers during the early 1900’s. We perceive these migrants to be “stealing” “our” scarce jobs, government benefits and housing, and driving down wages. Consequently a virtual war has been taking place between Black versus Mexicans and Latin Amerikans on the streets and inside U.S. prisons. Much of the violence, which begins inside the prisons where these ‘races’ are forcibly confined in miserable close quarter, spills over into society.

In just 2005, over 300 race riots occurred in the California prison system alone, mostly between Black versus Mexican and Latin Amerikan prisoners. These conflicts have been exposed repeatedly as incited by the imperialist controlled prison guard unions. So, once again, the capitalists, whose greedy ambitions are the cause of massive poverty, job shortages, land theft, and forced migrations of both Blacks and the Native peoples of this region of the world, (who must risk their lives to cross borders created by the capitalists and white racism), have the commonly oppressed people, who are all victims of class and national oppression, warring amongst themselves.

The Race Game Played Between Whites

The game of racism was not only created and used to play working class whites against people of color. It was also used between whites, and with the same purpose of undermining working class struggles against capitalist class exploitation. Indeed it was the principal method of whipping up mass hysteria in support of fascism in Western Europe during the early 1900’s. And contrary to popular deception, the U.S. capitalist elite and government supported its purpose and function, which was to suppress working class revolution. There is an extensive although repressed record in proof of this.

The tendency in mainstream circles and of the ruling class propaganda industry has been to paint German Nazism, for example, as a sort of odd latent German anti-Semitism, which was brought to the surface by a “mad” leader (Hitler), who by luck and guile found himself in power. This, however, runs counter to the actual fact that the German and Amerikan capitalists consciously and deliberately financed and pushed Hitler into power to suppress a working class revolution that was threatening to take power. The capitalist Great Depression had disillusioned the workers across Europe about the promises of capitalism, and they were looking with hope to the example of Russia, (Socialist Russia being independent of the imperialist countries was not affected by the Depression). The capitalists also feared that the destabilized middle class would join forces with the lower class workers to overthrow their economic and political control. They opted to play the race card.

By inciting “Aryan” racism – blaming non-Aryans for Germany’s economic crisis, which was actually caused by the capitalists – the Nazis won over the confused German middle and lower class and youth to subvert the working class movement and re-channel its momentum toward attacking sectors of German society that were classified as non-Aryan (“inferiors” and “degenerates”). Violent repression was thus targeted against the German Communists and radical youth, who were leading and organizing the workers’ struggle, and the Jews, Slavs, Poles, Gypsies, gay and disabled people. Overt fascism, like pure racism, was a desperate political strategy of capitalist class control.

Just as the method of allying the majority white Amerikan working class to back the capitalist class’s designs has been, by rallying them under the banner of a racialized “white nation,” so too did the German capitalists do the same using the Nazis to rally the German workers’ support under the banner of a racialized “Aryan nation.” And as intended, this incitement of racist sentiments divided a once united working class against itself, whipped up hysterical and irrational mass support for the ruling class’s designs to smash working class struggle and to back the capitalists’ aims to expand and colonize other nations, in this case not only nations of colored people but Europeans as well. Under the spell of a purely invented racism, the German masses proceed to back the Nazi war machine that saw them kill and die by the millions and carry out acts of the most savage brutality recorded in history – and all by and against white working class people.  As said, the U.S. government and business community supported Hitler and Mussolini before World War II. See for example:

1. Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995. pp. 46-64;

2. David Schmitz, Thank God They’re On Our Side: The United States and Right Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, Chapters 1 and 3;

3. David Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988;

4. John P. Diggins. Mussolini and Fascism: The View from America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1972.

U.S. government internal documents explain the class-based reasons for the warm Amerikan business support for fascism that are detailed in these books. In 1937, for example, a report of the U.S. State Department’s European Division described the rise of fascism as a natural and commendable response of “the rich and middle class, in self-defense” when the “dissatisfied masses, with the example of the Russian revolution before them, swing to the Left.”  Fascism, thus, “must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left.” The report also stated that “if Fascism cannot succeed by persuasion [in Germany], it must succeed by force.”  (See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, p. 140).  U.S. Ambassador to Russia, William Bullitt “believed that only Nazi Germany could stay the advance of Soviet Bolshevism in Europe.” (Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, p. 26).

The Amerikan charge d’affaires in Berlin wrote to Washington in 1933 that Amerika should back the Nazi Party as the hope for Germany. He stated that Nazi policies “appeal to all civilized and reasonable people.” Amerikan Ambassador Frederic Sackett noted that “it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power.” (See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 174, 133, and Chapter 9).

U.S. corporations like Ford Motor Company were totally approving of fascism; financed and profited from the Fascists states, and participated in plundering Jewish assets under Hitler’s Aryanization programs.

“Many U.S. companies bought substantial interests in established German companies, which in turn plowed the new money into Aryanizations or into arms productions banned under the Versailles Treaty. According to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies – International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and DuPont – had become deeply involved in German weapons production…

“U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power, despite the Depression and Germany’s default on virtually all of its government and commercial loans. Commerce Department reports show that U.S. investment in Germany increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe. U.S. investment in Great Britain…barely held steady over the decade, increasing only 2.6 percent.”

Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blonde Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, supra, p. 64.

The U.S. government did not in fact unanimously declare European fascism an avowed enemy until it attacked U.S. interests. And even then Amerikan business interests still backed the Fascists. In fact, Prescott Bush, (grandfather of George W. Bush), and his father-in-law, George Herbert Walker, were the Nazi’s financers and traders through periods of the Jewish Holocaust, after their attacks on Britain and France, and even after the bombings of Pearl Harbor in 1941. It took the seizure of their Union Banking Corporation by the U.S. government in October 1942, under the Trading with the Enemies Act, to stop Bush and Walker.

Prior to WWII U.S. support for Italian Fascism was much the same. In December 1917, the Wilson administration expressed that the rising labor movement posed, “the obvious danger of social revolution and disorganization.”  Mussolini’s Black Shirts solved the problem with violence, referring to Mussolini’s October 1922 march on Rome, which smashed Italian democracy. The U.S. Ambassador noted with approval that the Fascists carried out “a fine young revolution.” With government backing, the racist thugs bloodily repressed working class agitation. The U.S. embassy noted, Fascism was “perhaps the most potent factor in the suppression of Bolshevism in Italy.” In a February 1925 report, the embassy also approvingly observed that the Fascists had smashed the workers struggle through “restricting the right of free assembly, in abolishing freedom of the press and in having at its command a large military organization.” It was also stated that “between Mussolini and Fascism and Giolliti and Socialism, between strong internal peace and prosperity and return to free speech, loose administration and general disorganization, Peace and Prosperity were preferred.” (See Schmitz, See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 76-77). These approving pronouncements are as undemocratic as one could get. It should also be remembered that when these official champions of capitalism talk about “disorder,” and “peace” and “prosperity,” they’re speaking about these things from the perspective of their capitalist bosses in containing, repressing, and controlling the exploited workers, and against the workers’ struggles to gain control over the society’s economic and political institutions and power.

The U.S. business press spoke openly in support of Fascism. Fortune magazine, for example, devoted a special issue to Fascism in July 1934, and in its article “The State: Fascist and Total.” It commented approvingly that “the purpose and effect of Fascism is to un wop the wops,” and any views by Amerikan people that the Italians should resent Fascism, “is a confusion, and we can only get over it if we anesthetize for the moment our ingrained idea that democracy is the only right and just conception of government.”

The rise of counter-revolutionary racist Fascism in Europe was accompanied by an attendant rise of far right-wing racist counterrevolutionary elements in Amerika. The Klan for example saw a resurgence, and its membership swelled as never before in the 1920’s.

Clearly when any struggle arises from within the ranks of the working class, the capitalists incite a corresponding rise of racist elements to divide and counter the up-thrusting masses and their challenge to capitalist domination. In essence, racism, and its most fundamentalist political and military form (namely fascism) are purely counter-revolutionary tools of the capitalist class used to sabotage working class struggle by dividing, inciting and turning the working class against itself.

The Race Game Played Between Blacks

Racism has also been used to divide exploited Blacks against themselves to further imperialist interests. One outstanding example occurred among the people of Rwanda and resulted in the genocidal war of 1994, which saw hundreds of thousands murdered while the imperialists sat by and watched. Until the Belgians entered Rwanda with imperialist aims in 1916, the Rwandans were a united people. The various ethnic groups shared the same language and had for centuries cooperated, supported, and sustained each other. The Hutu were 85%, the Tutsis 14%, and the Twa 1% of the population. The Hutu raised crops, the Tutsis tended herds. Economic relations between them were based upon the Hutu exchanging their surplus of vegetables for surplus Tutsi livestock. Their economies also sustained each other in that the Hutus set aside land for the Tutsis to graze their animals on. The manure of the animals in turn provided fertilizer for the Hutu crops.

In 1918 the European imperialist League of Nations “awarded” Rwanda to Belgium as a colony. This Afrikan country presented a source of great wealth to the Belgian King Leopold, in the form of vast forests of rubber trees. Rubber was in high demand in the industrial countries due to the recent invention of the inflatable tire. Like the agricultural capitalists of Amerika, the Belgians needed a local slave class to work the rubber plantations and a local middle level force to police them. The colonial Belgian government, along with the Catholic Church played the race game to produce the desired result. They opened mission schools to only the Tutsi and forbade the Hutu from receiving an education.  In the schools, Rwandan history was rewritten to project the Tutsi as the racial superior of the Hutus. The myth was taught that the Tutsi were a partly Caucasian Hamitic people because of their having taller statures, thinner features, and lighter complexions than the Hutu. Identity cards were issued which classified the entire society as Hutu, Tutsi, or Twa.

The Belgians treated the Hutu with the most savage brutality to enforce their submission. Millions upon millions resisted and were massacred, while millions more had ears, noses, and limbs cut off. Tutsi chiefs were appointed by the Belgians over the Hutu to serve as agents to this brutality. The Tutsi, like whites in Amerika, were pleased to be identified as allies of the ruling powers and to believe the myth of their racial superiority. Consequently, the Tutsi also lived in perpetual fear of Hutu revenge if the Hutu ever came together in revolt.

When the national independence struggles against European imperialism began to sweep across Afrika in the 1950’s and 1960’s, the educated Tutsis took notice and agitated for Rwandan independence. In turn the Belgians backed the Hutu to repress the Tutsi. Rwanda still won independence from Belgium in 1962, but this saw the Hutu take control of the upper levels of government. The Tutsi remained in the lower ranks, continuing to control the educational system, church, and livestock. The Hutu however took much of the Tutsi land upon taking power. Many of the Tutsi fled.

A 1973 coup saw a new Hutu government take power which changed the status of the Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa from racial to ethnic groupings, and sought to democratically restructure the ethnic groups within social institutions according to their numbers. This meant a larger share for the Hutu in the economy, church, and educational institutions. Thousands of Tutsi lost their jobs and fled the country. A few years later the government turned sour, state property was privatized, and the economy collapsed. In addition to droughts and famines, the imperialist International Monetary Fund imposed a neo-liberal structural adjustment program that totally devastated the country. The Tutsi were repressed and another wave fled Rwanda, to refugee camps in Uganda.

The genocidal war of 1994 was the result of the exiled Tutsis returning and seeking to regain power in Rwanda. The imperialists, including Amerika, were fully aware of preparations for the genocide before it began, but sat by as events unfolded. This “race” war, like many other race based conflicts, saw “respectable” people engaged in the murderous frenzy: teachers, doctors, nurses, journalists, and clergy. Husbands killed wives, friends killed each other, gang rapes were frequent, etc. Such is the result of race hate, racism, and the violence they spawn. Over 500,000 were killed in a matter of just a few months.

The entire “racial” division in Rwanda was, like that here in Amerika, created by a ruling capitalist elite, whose power and profits were served by dividing a previously united people along racial lines, granting one sector a share of relative power and elevated social status, and a sense of racial connection to the ruling elite, so to use it to repress and control the other sector that is super-exploited by the ruling capitalist class. While in reality the entire divided people are collectively exploited by the ruling capitalist class.

Racism in Reverse

For a people, like Blacks in Amerika, who have endured centuries of brutality, degradation, disrespect, indignity, powerlessness, and being labeled “inferiors” based solely upon skin color, the desire for respect became and remains very strong. This desire for respect has left many Blacks vulnerable to the appeals of reverse racism. Reverse racism is here defined as a belief in Black superiority and white inferiority. But, for Blacks in Amerika, who have no independent access to or control over any institutions of power or productive wealth, the features of reverse racism take place primarily in their minds, as they lack the means to exercise any dominant or comparable power over those they claim to be their inferiors, namely whites.

Reverse racism first took root on a large scale with the teachings of Marcus Garvey, who preached the beauty and high culture of Blacks. In colonizing Afrika, beginning in the late 1800’s, the European imperialists used racism to alienate their country’s own oppressed working class from the super-exploited Afrikans, and to rationalize their brutal colonial oppression of Afrikans. To give a scientific gloss to their racism doctrines, the imperialists commissioned novelists and intellectuals to develop theories to support their claims of European racial superiority and African racial inferiority. These European and Amerikan writers claimed that Afrika, when discovered by the white man, was a land of backward, ignorant savages upon whom they had bestowed the benefits and blessings of Christianity and white civilization.  Garvey reversed these false and degrading European histories and views of Afrikans. He countered that ignorant, murderous, pillaging European savages attacked Afrika out of jealousy over our power, prosperity, and having achieved the highest level of civilization yet known. Neither version was objectively true. However, Garvey’s teachings had an electrifying effect on Amerikan Blacks. In only a few years millions of Blacks joined his universal Negro Improvement Association, supporting his “back to Afrika” movement. Garvey’s teachings offered Blacks a new basis for pride, self-esteem, self-confidence, and respect, all tied into a messianic notion of Black racial superiority. By turning the teaching of white supremacy on its head, Garvey brought together the largest Black organization in U.S. history.

Following his arrest and exile, and the collapse of his UNIA, Garvey’s doctrine and its Black capitalist underpinnings became the common doctrine of Black organizations that sought a large following. Most notable was the Nation of Islam, which was founded three years after Garvey’s deportation. Indeed, the NOI absorbed many who came under Garveyite influences, including some of the NOI’s most influential leaders like Malcolm X whose parents were Garveyites. The NOI, however, enhanced and gave a theological twist to Garvey’s doctrine, (much as the white church had done with white racism), by posing Blacks as the Creator’s chosen people and whites as spawns of the Devil. The NOI’s teachings were enhanced even further by its excommunicated member Clarence 13X, in his youth-based Nation of Gods and Earths, (formerly the 5% Nation), which promotes the Black man as god and whites as the actual devil.

Another proponent of subjective reverse racism was Dr. Khalid Muhammad, another excommunicated member of the NOI, who led the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) up until his death in 2001. Dr. Muhammad steered the NBPP far away from the class-based ideological and political line of the original BPP and in the direction of race-based anti-white politics, the NBPP’s present path.

The New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter (NABPP-PC) distinguishes itself from such race-based politics as promoted by the NBPP, as we are proponents of class struggle and the revolutionary nationalist liberation struggles of those oppressed by imperialism. We recognize that the capitalists created and use race divisions to perpetuate conflict within the oppressed lower class sectors, and that racism and the race blame game serves the interests of the oppressor class and undermines the interests of the oppressed. This is proven historical fact. Furthermore, as revolutionary New Afrikan nationalists, we realize that there is a contradiction between race and nationalism, and moreover, that there is no nation composed of a single race. All existing nations, like the Indian Nations here in North Amerika, include whites and mixed bloods, even though there are contradictions. It was the policies of white colonialism created by the ruling class that produced these contradictions, and indeed the New Afrikan Nation. In this regard, we say all people of Afrikan heritage, regardless of skin tone, are part of a single Afrikan- New Afrikan Nation…A Pan-Afrikan Nation. Indeed most “Blacks” in Amerika are mixed bloods, mixed with white and/or Indian bloodlines.

We therefore move beyond the black and white dogmatism – Native Americans have always done this in adopting any “race” of people into their nations who embrace and respect their heritage and culture. All non-chauvinistic nations have done this. We also accept that nationalities can overlap and are not merely an either/or situation. People the world over embrace multiple nationalities, and so can New Afrikans. One can be Venezuelan and New Afrikan, or Lenape and New Afrikan, etc. This concept becomes practical revolutionary internationalism that has all oppressed nationalities struggling for both national self-determination and united multi-national anti-imperialist cooperation.

In the context of national liberation, we must remember that nationality is itself a temporary form of social organization and identity. It is a means to an end and not an end in itself. The nation is a product of social-historical development, and will wither away in time. Our orientation as genuine revolutionaries is to the whole of humynity and the future classless and nation-stateless society. Getting from here to there involves national liberation struggles and security issues. As Mao Tse Tung observed, “Proletarian nationalism is applied proletarian internationalism.” It involves uniting all who can be united at each stage of the struggle. From our point of view, the key question is building alliances between the oppressed nations within the U.S. and abroad and the multi-national proletariat.

Rising Above Race to Build Class-Based Alliances

World suffering and oppression, poverty, and want are not caused by race, but by national and class exploitation and oppression at the hands of the monopoly capitalist class. However, as repeatedly pointed out above, race and racism have been a principal tool and weapon of this class used to keep the oppressed workers of the world divided and warring among themselves, to  divide, agitate, and rule. Toward the end of their lives, both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. came to realize that basing struggle against oppression on race without challenging capitalist economic exploitation was a losing battle. And it was at that point when they began to agitate to have their followers struggle against capitalism, imperialism, and colonial oppression instead of exclusively focusing on race, (merely struggling against white oppression), that they were murdered.  George Jackson pointed this out:

“It’s no coincidence that Malcolm X and M. L. King died when they did.  Malcolm X had just put it together…You remember what was on his lips when he died, Vietnam and economics, political economy. The professional killers could have murdered him long before they did. They let Malcolm rage on Muslim nationalism for a number of years because they knew it was an empty ideal, but the second he got his feet on the ground, they murdered him.”

Fred Hampton, Sr. summed it up perfectly in his November 1969 speech delivered at the University of Northern Illinois and aptly entitled “It’s a Class Struggle Goddammit!” Fred stated:

“You know a lot of people have hang-ups with the [Black Panther] Party because the Party talks about a class struggle. And the people that have those hang-ups are opportunists, and cowards, and individualists and everything that’s anything but revolutionary. And they use these things as an excuse to justify and to alibi and to bonify their lack of participation in the real revolutionary struggle. So they say, ‘Well, I can’t dig the Panther Party because the Panthers they are engrossed with dealing with oppressor country radicals, or white people, or hunkies, or what have you.’  They say, these are some of the [reasons] why I am not in the struggle. We got a lot of answers for these people. First of all, we say primarily that the priority of this struggle is class. That Marx, and Lenin, and Che Guevara, and Mao Tse-Tung and anybody else that has ever said or knew or practiced anything about revolution, always said that a revolution is a class struggle. It was one class – the oppressed – against the other class, the oppressor. And it’s got to be a universal fact. Those that don’t admit to that are those that don’t want to get involved in a revolution, because they know as long as they’re dealing with a race thing, they’ll never be involved in a revolution. They can talk about numbers; they can hang you up in many, many ways…

“[We] never negated the fact that there was racism in Amerika, but we said… the by-product, what comes off of capitalism, that happens to be racism. That capitalism comes first and next is racism. That when they brought slaves over here, it was to make money. So first the idea came that we went to make money, then the slaves came in order to make that money. That means that ‘through historical fact, racism had to come from capitalism. It had to be capitalism first and racism was a by-product of that.”

Like Malcolm X and MLK, and not even a month after giving this speech, Fred Hampton was assassinated, shot in the head while asleep in bed, by Chicago police (in collaboration with the FBI), in a well-orchestrated hit.  Coincidence?

The imperialists’ hired guns made no pretenses about murdering Fred. No attempts were made to conceal their involvement by using puppets or agents. They used forces in government uniform, and a Black cop pulled the trigger at that. So what made Fred so threatening that the capitalists’ guns would go to such open extremes to neutralize him? It was because Fred proved to be a much greater danger to the ruling class than all other leaders of the Black Movement combined. He was not only an exceptional organizer and inspirational leader and teacher of New Afrikans, but he could turn the most reactionary of white workers into revolutionaries.

It was Fred’s work that led to the formation of the Young Patriot Party (YPP), a revolutionary party of poor redneck white Appalachian youth whose symbol was a confederate flag with a red star emblazoned on it. Fred’s approach was to appeal to class instead of being sidetracked by race. He walked into a redneck Hillbilly bar in Chicago when they asked, “What are you doing here?” he said, “I’m here to organize the Niggers.” They said, “No Niggers come in here,” and were ready to fight. He said, “Oh yeah?  Well the way I see it, they work y’all like Niggers, treat y’all like Niggers, and make y’all live like Niggers. So that makes y’all niggers in my book, and I say it’s time to get organized and deal with this shit!”

In another 1969 speech Fred pointed out:

“We got to face some facts. That the masses are poor, that the masses belong to what you call the lower class, and when I talk about the masses, I’m talking about the white masses, I’m talking about the Black masses, and the Brown masses, and the Yellow masses, too. We’ve got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don’t fight racism with racism – we’re gonna fight racism with solidarity. We say you don’t fight capitalism with no Black capitalism; you fight capitalism with socialism…

“We have to understand very clearly that there’s a man in our community called a capitalist. Sometimes he’s Black and sometimes he’s white. But that man has to be driven out of our community, because anybody who comes into the community to make profit off the people by exploiting them can be defined as a capitalist. And we don’t care how many programs they have, how long a dashiki they have. Because political power does not flow from the sleeve of a dashiki…”

From within the Chicago chapter of the BPP, Fred was the leader of a growing multi-racial, multi-national, anti-imperialist united front that included the BPP, the Puerto Rican Young Lords Party, the Students for a Democratic Society (before the Weathermen faction took over), and the Revolutionary Youth Movement II.  He even worked to politically develop apolitical street gangs. The imperialists realized, as did the southern plantation owners, in the wake of Bacon’s Rebellion, that the greatest threat to their power is the united resistance of all elements of the oppressed laboring class. “In order for capitalism to continue to rule, any action that threatens the right of a few individuals to own and control public property must be prohibited and curtailed whatever the cost in resources…whatever the cost in blood…The national repressive institutions (police, National Guard, army, etc.), are no less determined.” (George Jackson).  It was because of the genuine threat that Fred’s revolutionary practice posed in bringing together the divided “races” into a united movement to combat imperialism that he had to be liquidated.

New Afrikan Liberation and the Race Question

The position on race presented here is not to say that New Afrikans or “Blacks” should abandon or hand over our liberation struggle to the initiative or control of whites, nor that our struggle in this regard should depend or wait upon the cooperation of those who identify as “white.” Quite the opposite: We are our own liberators!

New Afrikans are an oppressed and colonized nation within Amerika. As such, reforms cannot secure racial and social equality for us. Nor can whites identify with and recognize the conditions we suffer under – no one knows our oppression, the forms it takes and the liberation we desire like we do. We are a people with a history, a culture, and an identity that is our own, and was forged over centuries of common experience and oppression. It is therefore our place and no one else’s to claim those things as uniquely our own and develop them to their highest potential as a people. In order to have any security as a people and not be dependent upon the whims of any other sectors, we must contest the basic means of our survival and governance. If we are not able to defend our own destiny and selves, we are not free.  And if we do not break free from the conditions of our colonization, we leave ourselves open to further colonization under any number of reformed conditions and methods.

Merely joining up with Amerikan whites cannot ensure this because our oppression exceeds theirs. We must be able to assert and protect our economic and political rights whether whites support us or not. Self-determination is the essence of our achieving liberation, and it is our right and duty to run our own organizations and liberation struggle. As the victims of racism only we know best how to resist it. But overall, we are oppressed as a nation and must free ourselves as a nation. In doing so we will destroy the basis of our colonized condition within the Amerikan Empire.

In aid of our struggle, the advanced sectors of white Amerika should work to destroy the notion of white skin privilege and white national chauvinism, which are the underlying national identity of Amerika. They must aid us in protecting our democratic rights and the democratic right of all peoples, including their own. In turn, we must join up with the entire multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-racial working class, radical youth, and progressive elements in a United Front Against Imperialism, to smash the overall imperialist system.

Imperialism is capitalism is colonialism. The defeat of imperialism requires the liberation of the colonized and neo-colonized nations on which imperialism feeds. But we must also remember that imperialism is capitalism, capitalism on a global scale that enslaves and profits off not only the workers of the non-industrialized nations and oppressed nationalities across the world, but also the workers of the industrially advanced capitalist countries. To defeat capitalism we must join together in a united struggle of the entire working class of all nations, ethnicities, and “races” in a United Front Against Imperialism, and to ultimately overthrow the capitalist political economy and its ruling class’s power, privilege, and domination over social labor and wealth. Without a repressed working class under its thumb, capitalism cannot exist. Therefore, the entire working class must deny the capitalists its labor power.

Political forms of organization to lead the whole working class are necessary, and we support them. The advanced and anti-imperialist whites must also struggle against the fanatical and backward white supremacist elements like the Klan, Neo-Nazis, etc. These elements represent overt fascism in embryonic form, who will be backed by or handed state power to suppress and divide any working class and national independence struggle that arises to challenge monopoly capitalism, as the elite are wont to do, (and Western Europe in the early 1900’s stands as a glaring example), when their power is threatened from below. They will move the most rabid racists into positions of political and military power to attack and smash revolutionary and progressive elements and incite and engage in a divisive race war. They will certainly also incite the fanatical Black reverse racists to turn on and attack Black revolutionary elements. They will justify such actions with claims that those who collaborate with any whites are “sell-outs.” To them all whites are the enemy, as they have no concept of class struggle and will back dictators and sub-fascists like Haiti’s Papa Doc Duvalier and the Congo’s Joseph Mobutu, so long as they have black skin.

To the reverse racists it’s all about a racial contest, and their backward thinking enables them to be used as imperialist agents to attack and kill the revolutionary elements. This is how Amilcar Cabral was assassinated in 1973.  Cabral was Afrika’s leading revolutionary, a Pan-Afrikan and anti-imperialist theorist and fighter of the 1960’s and 1970’s.  He effectively led the people of Guinea Bissau against the greatest odds, in a successful national independence struggle against Portugal’s colonialism.

Cabral emphasized that race must not be the basis of his country’s independence struggle; that he did not confuse imperialism and colonialism with the color of people’s skins, but desired to see economic, political, and military power in the hands of the working people so to free his country of all oppressive forces, be they white or black. In fact, his position and showing of solidarity with the white workers of Portugal generated a general uprising of the lower classes in Portugal that nearly saw a revolutionary overthrow of power there. He was also able to turn other white nations against Portugal’s colonial policies in his country. It was this uprising and international support coupled with the political and armed liberation struggle of the people of Guinea Bissau that ultimately forced the Portuguese military and colonial administration to abandon Guinea Bissau and return to Portugal to suppress the revolt there.

In turn, Portuguese agents inside of Cabral’s party assassinated him. Those Black agents, Cabral’s fellow countrymen, were opponents of his class-based struggle and were incited to murder Cabral because of his collaboration with “whites” and his being of mixed Afrikan and Portuguese blood. The Portuguese imperialists used proponents of reverse racism to kill the man who had led Afrika’s greatest national independence struggle, freed his people from a savage and brutal colonial existence, and even offered his country’s support to the struggles of New Afrikans here in Amerika. There are valuable lessons to be learned here.

The imperialists have used reverse racists many times in attempts to derail many other revolutionary movements of people of color and to assassinate key leaders. Such racialist elements were used to murder Malcolm X.  The FBI used such elements as the United Slaves Organization to assassinate key members of the BPP, Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter and Jon Huggins in January 1969. Indeed in many cases, such as during the national independence struggles in Angola and Mozambique during the 1960’s and 1970’s, the elements who promoted anti-white ideology ended up becoming open collaborators with and agents of the very “white” imperialist powers they were supposed to be fighting. For example, Holden Robert’s UPA/FNLA (Uniao das Populacoes de Angola/Frente Nacional de Libertacao de Angola), became open agents of U.S. imperialism in Angola, and Jonas Sivimbi’s Unita became open agents of the Portuguese imperialists in Mozambique. These groups became agents of their imperialist sponsors and turned their arms away from fighting the colonial forces and declared war for them against their own people’s revolutionary forces, namely the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and Frelimo (the Liberation Front of Mozambique).

At no time and in no place has playing the race card or the racial blame game ever won any people freedom from oppression. But what it has done is generate most every known major genocidal war that has occurred over the past several centuries, from the genocidal extermination of tens of millions of Native Amerikans to the genocidal attacks on Afrikans by Arabs in Southern Sudan today. The racial game produces only a back and forth cycle of bloodshed, carnage, and misery between competing racial groups. For its blind participants, racism offers nothing positive except a subjective and superficial sense of belonging to a group which professes to be “superior” to another group and the destruction of the natural compassion and sanity that would otherwise prevent humyns from brutalizing and massacring innocent people. And it’s a double-edged sword: one “race” victimizes another and is in turn victimized, or another “race” becomes the target of the victim. The complicity of many Jews today in Anglo-Zionist race-oriented genocidal policies against Palestinians and other Arabs is an outstanding example of a people who were once victims of racial violence in turn victimizing another innocent people in the name of race and claims of “God-given” right. And all to advance the wealth and power interests of a capitalist elite.

For white and Black supremacists here in Amerika, a race war would not prove beneficial to either “race!”  It would only produce a cycle of mutual slaughter of members of both races. No one would be “liberated” as a result, but multitudes of loved ones, friends, and colleagues on both sides would be brutalized, butchered, maimed, massacred, and displaced. In the race hate game no one wins – there is simply no way for a sane mind to romanticize it. But in a unified struggle of the oppressed classes and nationalities against imperialism, the very source of world suffering, misery, and racism itself can be uprooted and power turned over to those who can be trusted to use it properly, namely the oppressed masses.

In the fevered minds of racists, their fanatical howlings about violent repression or annihilation of “inferior races” sounds like fun: that is until the bloodshed begins and they find themselves on the receiving end of counter-violence that quickly spins out of control. To many racist southern whites, the brutal enslavement of New Afrikans seemed like a fun enterprise: that is until revolts like Nat Turner’s turned the guns back on them. At that point a massive Black and white abolitionist movement sprang to life to end slavery. There are simply no superior and inferior races. Indeed the very concept of race is an invention. A comrade put it this way in a letter to me:

“Racism is the spawn of colonialism and is based on lies. The technological edge the Europeans took advantage of came late in the game. Much of it was borrowed from other cultures like gunpowder from China, or the lanteen sail from Afrika, and potatoes from South Amerika. The combination of these elements and the ability to use them to establish global hegemony created the illusion of white supremacy.

“In reality, we’re all pretty damn equal. Even the difference between smart and dumb people is not so great. No one of us is really all that smart. Is capitalism smart? We let the nastiest men run the show by the nastiest means and hope that it will work out alright for the rest of us. Is that smart? We’ve got all these gadgets running, but the sum of it is we’ve burned a hole in the atmosphere and the ice caps are melting.

“Even the idea of Communism is not so brilliant. It is just common sense. Ants work together for their common welfare. The genius lies in overcoming our own stupidity to do what is necessary to survive, and this will be a big struggle and one we could lose. There is a time factor in our getting our collective act together.

“The good news is that all the elements necessary for our survival as a species are present. We just have to sort out our political-social organization, and deal with the nasty men.”

Even mainstream sources now admit that the concept of race is today a scientifically unsustainable concept. That the “theories” invented centuries ago to validate the idea are invalidated by today’s science. The Merriam Webster Collegiate Encyclopedia (2000) defines and dismisses the notion of race thusly:

“Race: Term once commonly used in physical anthropology to denote a division of humankind possessing traits that are transmissible by descent and sufficient to characterize it as a distinct human type (e.g. Caucasoid, Mongoloid, Negroid). Today the term has little scientific standing, as older methods of differentiation, including hair form and body measurement, have given way to the comparative analysis of DNA and gene frequencies relating to such factors as blood type, the excretion of amino acids, and inherited enzyme deficiencies. Because all human populations today are extremely similar genetically, most researchers have abandoned the concept of race for the concept of the cline, a graded series of differences occurring along a line of environmental or geographical transition. This reflects the recognition that human populations have always been in a state of flux, with genes constantly flowing from one gene pool to another, impeded only by physical and ecological boundaries. While relative isolation does preserve genetic differences and allow populations to maximally adapt to climatic and disease factors over long periods of time, all groups currently existing are thoroughly “mixed” genetically, and such differences as still exist do not lend themselves to simple typologizing. “Race” is today primarily a social designation, identifying a class sharing some outward physical characteristics and some commonalities of culture and history.”

This same text goes on to admit that racism is a creation and tool of colonialism:

“Racism:  Belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that some races are inherently superior to others. More broadly, the term refers to any racial prejudice or discrimination throughout the era of European colonialism, the British viewed imperialism as a noble activity (“the white man’s burden”) destined to bring civilization to the benighted races, while the French invoked the notion of mission civilistrace, their duty to bring civilization to backward peoples. An influential modern proponent was the Comte de Gobineau, who held that the so-called Aryan was the supreme race. His most important follower was Houston Stewart Chamberlain, whom Adolf Hitler credited with supplying the “scientific” basis of the Nazi’s racialist philosophy, used to justify the persecution of Jews and other non-Aryans. South African society was built on the principle of apartheid, or racial “separateness.” Today the general trend is away from racism, though the problem of racist thinking remains intractable.”

Although this mainstream reference work totally avoids pointing out what social-economic class invented the entire racial concept and its birth and role here in North Amerika, it does make clear that both “race” and “racism” are today proven to be scientifically baseless and live on solely as psycho-social concepts. So why then do the Amerikan political and economic rulers still classify Amerikan citizens by race? It is obviously because they desire to maintain its role as a divisive undercurrent to be appealed to and whipped into hysteria when their power and privilege are threatened from blow. Thus, the national identity of Amerika remains that of a “white nation.”

The concepts of race and racism, like a deeply ingrained backward superstition, are so deeply embedded in the social psyche and are so deeply influential on social attitudes and behaviors, that they cannot be simply ignored. The oppressed “races” must collectively struggle against racial oppression and domination, while the conscious members of the oppressor races must struggle to conquer the myth of racial superiority within their own “racial” groups. Reverse racism must also be countered. In confronting racism we must be aware of its counterrevolutionary nature and the forms it takes in the minds of those who embrace it consciously or subconsciously. George Jackson gave an insightful analysis on this point. He stated:

“Racism is a matter of ingrained traditional attitudes conditioned through institutions. For some, it is as natural a reflex as breathing. The psychosocial effects of segregated environments compounded by bitter class repression have served in the past to render the progressive movement almost totally impotent.

“The major obstacle to a united left in this country is white racism. There are three categories of white racists: the overt, self-satisfied racist who doesn’t attempt to hide his antipathy; the self-interdicting racist who harbors and nurtures racism in spite of his best efforts; and the unconscious racist, who has no awareness of his racist preconceptions.

“As Black partisans, we must recognize and allow for the existence of all three types of racists. We must understand their presence as an effect of the system. It is the system that must be crushed, for it continues to manufacture new and deeper contradictions of both class and race. Once it is destroyed, we may be able to address the problems of racism at an even more basic level. But we must also combat racism while we are in the process of destroying the system.

“The self-interdicting racist, no matter what his acquired conviction or ideology, will seldom be able to contribute with his actions in any really concrete way. His role in revolution, barring a change of basic character, will be minimal throughout. Whether the basic character of a man can be changed at all is still a question.”

As Comrade George pointed out, our struggle demands that we acknowledge and recognize the three categories of racists. However, we must also acknowledge and recognize that the reverse racists also fit into these three categories. And in answer to George’s question whether there is a possibility of changing the basic character of the “self-interdicting racist,” we think yes. The Marxist recognizes that there is a dialectical relationship between our social practice and how we think. That reactionary thinking can be corrected through revolutionary social practice. But that practice must also in turn be guided by and committed to correct ideology.

Our Comrade Tom Big Warrior analyzed the process very well in a discussion we had some time ago concerning a New Afrikan brother with whom I was struggling to break out of a deeply ingrained hatred of whites. This brother’s views had been imbedded in him at a very young age by a now deceased grandfather, whose memory he held with the highest respect. While he could not refute my arguments against race-based hatreds, he also felt powerless to change his feelings. Here is Tom:

“I understand what you’re talking about with the brother who has deeply rooted hatred of whites. I’ve got brothers in my nation who have the same issues regarding Blacks, particularly among the hillbillies of mixed white-Native heritage. It was bred into them from a very young age and reinforced by their social practice (or lack of it) with Black folks.

“Hell, everybody in Amerika has been brainwashed on race. I know I have been affected by it, but I’ve got the advantage of both a theoretical understanding and a lifetime of positive social interaction with people of all ethnic backgrounds (and particularly Black Comrades), so I can identify and throw away feelings that come from racist programming as they come up.

“I think the key with this brother is to get him to see that his feelings are part of the slave mentality he (and his grandfather) were programmed to have to keep Black people from throwing off their oppression. If you can’t inspire meek submission and self-deprecation, you can inspire hate and fear, (which is the next best thing), and this leads to alienation and division.

“”The greatest threat in the South was unity between the Blacks and poor whites, who had common class interests. So the big landlords played them against each other by promoting blind hatred and racism.

“If he can grasp that his feelings are chains upon him causing him to act against the interests of Black people and working people in general, (that he is falling into the role of a “Nigger” set for him by “Mr. Charlie”), he will see that it must be overcome so he can be a “true Black Warrior” and a genuine revolutionary.

“We feel the way we feel because we think the way we think. Changing our thinking changes how we feel.  In fact our feelings expose how we think at the deepest levels. Sometimes we think we have something all sorted out and understood, but then a feeling pops up to show us that we are still in process, and we have to keep struggling to grasp the idea more firmly.

“If the brother wants to be a revolutionary, he can’t be liberal with himself. He has to recognize that white people must be won to support Black liberation and make proletarian revolution. Unless this is done, Black people will continue to be oppressed, and the imperialists will keep running the show.

“He has to decide if he wants to be part of the problem or part of the solution. The MC5, the house band of the White Panther Party, had a song where the singer shouts out, “It takes 5 seconds to decide and determine your purpose here on the planet, 5 seconds to decide if you are going to be a part of the problem or you are going to be a part of the solution – KICK OUT THE JAMS MOTHERFUCKER!”

“This is just what they were talking about – this mental/emotional programming that jams up our ability to make revolution. Ain’t nothing to do but kick it out, get rid of it, to get to what needs to be done.

“When you reason with him he says, “Yeah, yeah you’re right, Brother,” because you can’t reasonably argue for racism. But he’s not willing to let go and backslides right back into it. As if counter-revolution was his purpose on the planet.

“It’s time to invoke the 5 second rule. Time for him to make a commitment and stop being liberal with himself. The world can’t wait for us to get serious about revolution.

“If he really wants to honor his grandfather’s memory, he shouldn’t let the wounding that was done to him and other Blacks go on another generation. You can’t play the blame game and win.

“The pigs didn’t kill Fred Hampton because he was good at organizing Black people, but because he could turn redneck Hillbilly crackers into Red revolutionaries, which he did with the Young Patriot Party – that’s true history.

“He was a better revolutionary than Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and Eldridge Cleaver put together, and he is the one we should measure ourselves and our praxis by.

“It is our practice that determines our thinking, but there is a dialectic between theory and practice called praxis, in which theory becomes the determining factor.

“This is different than idealism, which Marx was struggling against. This is what Mao was talking about when he said ideological and political line will determine everything. It is the difference between Utopian socialism and our Scientific socialism.

“We begin with a concrete analysis of concrete conditions and from this developed theory, then apply our theory to practice, then sum up our practice to strengthen and advance our theory, then go back to practice, over and over getting sharper and sharper. That’s praxis.

“That’s how a bush-wah intellectual, or a peasant or a lumpen can transform into a proletarian revolutionary without working in a factory or even ever seeing one. It doesn’t happen spontaneously, it takes struggle.”

When we truly recognize that the capitalists are at the root of racism, that it is a tool and weapon invented and used by them to preserve their power and privilege and to keep the lower classes divided, oppressed, miserable, and powerless, then we must also recognize our revolutionary duty to rise above racist and reverse racist programming.  This is a difficult task that demands concrete practice.  It is because of the depth of race-conditioning that the liberation struggle of New Afrikans and other oppressed nationalities cannot be dependent upon white cooperation, however, that cooperation should be sought and developed in process to build a United Front Against Imperialism. True liberation from national oppression compels destruction of the imperialist system. Otherwise, the monopoly capitalists will continue to derail independence struggles by allying themselves with racialist and comprador elements within the bodies of the oppressed nationalities and races, push them into positions of power, and then use them to subvert the liberation struggles and bring the masses back under imperialist control. This is the essence of neocolonialism and the method used by the imperialists to undermine most all of the national independence struggles of the last century.

In that it’s the capitalist institutions that create, perpetuate, and benefit from racism, (indeed they need to preserve it to maintain their elevated power and status), they will assuredly mobilize resistance against all genuine efforts to build class-based racial solidarity. They will use the most rabid of white racists, and incite many New Afrikans, Natives and other people of color to fall out on the reactionary side, and the more intelligent reactionary, (reverse racist and comprador), leaders will encourage this. Our movement must be prepared to confront and counter such measures. We must set an example of promoting class unity and solidarity. It will also occur that some people will vacillate between the revolutionary and reactionary sides and that the dividing line won’t be static and clear-cut. The task of winning people politically will ultimately decide victory.

Conclusion

It should be clear by now that those of us who play into racism act as agents of our own imperialist oppressors, (whether consciously or not), and we aid in continuing our own oppression and want. In fact, we increase and intensify our own oppression and misery by inciting and perpetuating hatred, humiliation, insensitivity, and violence not only against the other race(s), but also in turn against our “own” race. It’s a cycle that no one benefits from except the oppressor class that sits at the top laughing at what fools we are, while their power and wealth remain secure form any real challenge. It is on this basis that the New Afrikan Black Panther Party – Prison Chapter promotes, unites with, and supports the White Panther Organization and all anti-imperialists of all nationalities and all oppressed peoples in a common struggle against imperialism. We welcome the WPO as fellow comrades and Panthers within the democratic centralism of our aspiring Vanguard Party.

All Power to the People!