Their Freedom, and Ours: A Case Study on Morality, Inequality, and Injustice Amid a Pandemic

Photo: Stacey Wescott / Chicago Tribune

By Peter Fousek

David Hume opens his essay “Of the First Principles of Government” with the statement that “Force is always on the side of the governed.”[1] Though she uses different terminology, Hannah Arendt’s understanding of power is analogous to Hume’s “Force.” In On Violence, she asserts that “[i]t is the people’s support that lends power to the institutions of a country, and that this support is but the continuation of the consent that brought the laws into existence to begin with.” Both accounts consider social power to be something fundamentally popular, rooted in collective action undertaken in accordance with a shared will. Thus, “[a]ll political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power,” which “petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them.”[2] This understanding of power is consistent with the nature of the social world: institutions do not come into existence of their own accord, but are created and maintained by the actions of people. Laws do not exist as natural truths—they are established in accordance with shared beliefs and modes of understanding, and retain their jurisdiction only insofar as people assent to them. Therefore, those social structures and formations which hold significant influence over our world, do so because they have substantial, popular support underlying their authority and answering their commandments with corresponding action.

Given this notion of power, “[n]othing appears more surprising…than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.”[3] If the governed possess a constitutive power over their social world, how is it that institutional authority so often supersedes the will of the masses with that of its ruling contingent? I will argue that this counterintuitive state of social organization, in which the few hold dominion over the majority, must rely on an imposed, hegemonic system of belief capable of convincing the general population that their oppression is just and their liberation villainous. Such a system of belief, while certainly instrumental in the maintenance of totalitarian states, is especially important in the context of ostensibly representative systems of government like that of the contemporary U.S.

In these contexts, voters must be convinced not that it would be amoral for them to overthrow their rulers, but rather that it is moral for them to continue to formally reproduce the power of those rulers year after year, by way of the voting booth. In the United States, that process of coercion has proved quite successful. According to exit polls, over 42% of voters with household incomes under $50,000 per year voted for Donald Trump, despite his promises to cut taxes for corporations and the super-wealthy while defunding already limited social services; in 2020, that contingent rose to 43%.[4] Over half of the Kentuckians in that income bracket voted to reelect Mitch McConnell in the same election cycle.[5]  In a country where well over half of the population has a household income of under $75,000,[6] our governing authorities consistently promote the aims of the wealthiest few, often at the expense of the many. While the United States incarcerates more people than any other country, and while 969 people have been killed by U.S. police this year alone,[7] the State does not rely solely on such direct repressive force to achieve its inequitable ends. As the electoral data shows, the electorate consents to its own socioeconomic oppression; with shocking frequency, we as a nation “resign [our] own sentiments and passions to those of [our] rulers.”[8]

What system of belief is responsible for convincing American citizens, whose collective sovereignty is systematized in electoral systems, to continue voting directly against their economic interests? If we are to build a better world by overcoming the oppressive systems and structures of the established order, we must first understand the mechanism by which that implicit consent of the oppressed is elicited. A society designed to pursue the aims of a small and exclusive minority at the expense of the majority cannot rely on force alone to sustain itself, since institutional authority possesses the apparatus of force only so long as a substantial contingent of the people are willing to follow its orders. Instead, it requires the tool of an official moral framework capable of securing the popular mandate upon which its dominion is established. It is possible for a small ruling class to maintain its jurisdiction over a much larger oppressed one only when the dominant segment promotes its ends as necessary, and thereby convinces its society that anything which goes against those ends is immoral. The ruling class perpetuates its existence by convincing the ruled majority that their subjugation is just, according to supposedly universal moral precepts.

That moral indoctrination is possible because, to use Marx, the economically dominant class “rule also as thinkers and producers of ideas and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age. Their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”[9] Therefore, the ruling class is able to disseminate its own beliefs and understandings as comprehensive fact, absorbing, in the words of Barthes, “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination.”[10] The universality of the established ruling order and its corresponding cultural norms supersede any alternative worldviews or systems of belief, and thereby create the illusion that the entire social formation lacks meaningful class differentiation (the absence of ideological stratification is implied as evidence that social class does not cause a fundamentally different experience of the world). So, using its near monopoly on the dissemination of far-reaching ideas and discourse, through channels including broadcasting companies, social media platforms, and the national political stage, the economically dominant class convinces its entire social world that its particular morality, corresponding to its particular class interests, is in fact universal, natural moral law, obligatory for all.

Any system of official morality imposed on a society is necessarily repressive on account of that claim to universality. Morality is the product of social development in the same sense that the institutions, laws, and norms of our societies are, as Arendt notes, the products of beliefs held by the popular masses. As social institutions etc. exist to achieve defined ends, such as the preservation of property rights and relations, morality also serves social interests. We see this to be the case in moral precepts as basic as the commandment that “thou shall not kill,” which provides a foundational basis for social cohesion by establishing a normative framework in which a might-makes-right paradigm becomes condemnable. Nonetheless, even so fundamental a moral tenet as that one fails to prove universally applicable in the context of the real and dynamic world. History shows that societies which condemn killing in times of peace often herald it as the most honorable task of their soldiers in times of war. Therefore, the presentation of any system of morality as something universal, and so too ahistorical, is deceptive, given the necessarily specific and dynamic nature of moral analysis (and thus the impossibility of truly natural and universal morality).

Still, such universal moral precepts do serve social interests, even if those interests differ from those which the popular majority perceive as the purpose of their moral laws. The imposition of a particular morality onto the whole of society establishes a moral hegemony, wherein only that which promotes the aims of the social class who defines the moral system is considered right and just. Such a process serves the social interests of the dominant class, allowing the many to be subjugated by the few: the universal application of specific moral norms is all too often employed to prevent the oppressed from striving towards their own liberation. During times of relative historical calmness, that morality-mediated oppression may be concealed to the point of near-invisibility. In the United States, a nation satiated with spiritual and secular prosperity gospels, whose popular consciousness is inundated with myths of the American Dream predicated on the principle of productivity (the notion that an individual’s success is the reflection of their efforts), the illusion that social mobility is always possible—if only for the “most industrious” among us—lends credence to a moral framework that condemns the poor as lazy people suffering from self-imposed shortcomings, while celebrating the wealthy as tenacious and driven individuals whose opulence is merely the manifestation of their moral virtue.

On that basis, cycle after cycle Americans vote against their economic interest, without even understanding that they are doing so. When we are taught that poverty is personal iniquity embodied, and wealth the reflection of the opposite, then those who are not wealthy must identify “not as an exploited proletariat, but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires,”[11] if they are to consider themselves virtuous according to the official moral framework. Thus, as they have for decades, millions of working-class Americans continue to vote for “representatives” who facilitate their exploitation for the sake of the wealthy elite. When we fail to recognize the foundational social power we hold as a class, or even our position as members of the working class as such, we unwittingly provide consent for our continued oppression. The underlying misconception of the meritocratic nature of our society is bolstered by the perception that our political and legal institutions are egalitarian, and therefore that all members of our citizenry have an equal shot at financial success, free from any undue external influence or restriction. In other words, we are told that the official morality of our society is just, because all members of our society share equal freedoms under the law. However, I will argue that even if we use that politically conservative understanding of freedom, labeled negative liberty by Isaiah Berlin (that is, the understanding of freedom as freedom from interference in an individual’s exercise of her rights), supposedly universal freedom is not, in fact, shared universally across class divisions.[12] For that reason, the official morality imposed by one class onto all cannot validly substantiate its claims to universality, and can only be understood as a repressive apparatus implemented to ensure the continued self-subjugation of the oppressed. 

The contradictions of normative morality often appear more sharply when contrasted against a backdrop of historical tumult and upheaval. Such has been the case over the past fourteen months, as the national response to the pandemic in the United States has exposed the degree to which our official morality is willing to sacrifice the wellbeing, and even the lives, of the working class, in order to promote the interests of the possessing one. In this time, it has become clear “that lack of money implies lack of freedom,” even in the sense that it is defined by Berlin and the political Right, as “the absence of obstacles to possible choices and activities.”[13] This inequitable distribution exposes the class-interestedness of an official morality which heralds such freedom, by which is meant, for the most part, negative liberty, as the most just and morally virtuous ideal to be promoted by our norms and institutions. Our socioeconomic order is one predicated on the value of individual productivity and wealth accumulation. Resultantly, the freedom of the individual to exist in such a way that they might promote their own wellbeing without restriction by external influence is foundational to the American sociopolitical psyche. Hence Berlin’s explanation of the moral condemnation of the poor, whose wellbeing, we are told, is not our concern, since “it is important to discriminate between liberty and the conditions of its exercise. If a man is too poor or too ignorant or too feeble to make use of his legal rights, the liberty that these rights confer upon him is nothing to him, but it is not thereby annihilated,” (Cohen 4). According to the Right, that is the freedom of which this nation’s founders wrote, the liberty to which the United States declares its dedication, our ultimate moral value: the nominal liberty to act without restriction in pursuit of a given set of possibilities, with no guarantee to the outcome or ease of such a pursuit.

In times of crisis, like that brought on by the pandemic, the most crucial exercise of such freedom involves the liberty to protect oneself and one’s family from immediate threat of harm. The relative ability or inability of American citizens to do so, depending on their socioeconomic status, provides a tragic illustration of the fact that in the United States, “lack of money implies lack of freedom.”[14] In contemporary America, as in any capitalist society, right (as either or both ownership and access) to any object or pursuit is conferred largely by money. This claim is exceedingly apparent: for example, one does not have the freedom to sleep in a hotel room that they have not paid for, and their attempt to do so would likely be met with interference regardless of their otherwise complete ability, will, and legal allowance. In Cohen’s words, “when a person’s economic security is enhanced, there typically are, as a result, fewer ‘obstacles to possible choices and activities’ for him.”[15] Even under the dictum of nominal or negative freedom, an individual’s liberty is largely determined by their wealth. During the COVID crisis, the limits to liberty begotten by poverty have become a visible, existential threat to the marginalized poor.

In the early months of the pandemic, when we knew little about the life-threatening contagion sweeping the globe, many state and local governments to attempted to secure the safety of their citizens through mandatory stay-at-home orders and economic closures. However, the Trump administration, along with countless others in positions of power and influence, were quick to employ the tools of their official morality to an antithetical end. Mask mandates designed to promote some degree of communal security were decried as unjust, immoral attacks on freedom,[16] and as to shutdown orders, these guarantors of liberty held at best that it is the prerogative of an individual to stay at home if she so chooses, but that the State should have no say. As a result, sections of the country opened prematurely, well before the prevalence of testing, much less the existence of a vaccine.[17] Even in places where that was not the case, the categorization of almost 74 million working class Americans as “essential workers” forced them and their families into positions of very real, potentially life threatening, risk.[18] That undue burden placed on the working class was deemed the necessary condition for the restoration of moral equilibrium, according to the language of negative liberty. The resultant dichotomy of freedom as a function of wealth is substantiated by New York Times polling. Higher earners, far more likely than their lower-income counterparts to hold substantial savings, were largely free to continue working from home without risk of job loss or pay cuts. Lower earners were not afforded the same security, financially or otherwise.[19] In this, we see that the working class were compelled to observe moral norms established by the investor class, and thereby to sacrifice of self in accordance with precepts that the wealthy members of our society did not observe themselves. Through the mechanism of universalized official morality prescribed by the dominant contingent, the subjugated were convinced to accept their own suffering while those who demanded their sacrifice refused to do the same.

And to what end? While many essential workers were employed in healthcare or public infrastructure fields, millions of others included members of the food service industry,[20] Amazon warehouse laborers,[21] Tesla factory line workers[22]—in short, the exploited employees of massive, profit-seeking firms focused solely on their goal of increasing shareholder’s returns. In pursuit of profit, these firms compelled countless workers, for pitifully inadequate wages and often without even the most basic protective measures, to sacrifice their safety,[23] and in many cases even their lives.[24] These efforts by executives for the sake of their investors certainly did pay off: according to Inequality.org, “between March 18, 2020, and April 12, 2021, the collective wealth of American billionaires leapt by $1.62 trillion, or 55%.”[25] All this, as thousands died preventable deaths and millions in the world’s wealthiest country faced hunger and eviction. But what of the workers’ freedom? Surely, they were not literally forced to come into their workplaces. The answer to that depends on how we define force. Essential workers, as well as employees of businesses allowed to preemptively reopen, were barred from receiving unemployment benefits if they refused to work, as our legal framework for employment regulation deemed such refusal voluntary even when motivated by fear of death.[26] So, these workers, many of whom would have received more money through unemployment insurance than they were paid at their “essential” jobs,[27] were compelled—quite literally under threat of starvation—to put themselves and their families in harm’s way so that the rich were able to continue amassing wealth at as aggressive a rate as possible.

The hypocrisy of the official morality, and thus its repressive class-interestedness, is evidenced by the fact that this shockingly inhumane restriction of the right of the working class to self-preservation was undertaken under the guise of “freedom,” and thereby given a “moral” justification. In April 2020, Congressman Trey Hollingsworth echoed widespread convictions with his statement that “in the choice between the loss of our way of life as Americans and the loss of life of American lives, we have to always choose the latter.”[28] That stance was, and remains, a truly popular sentiment—protests in opposition to shutdowns were prevalent across the country last spring, populated largely by working class Americans who had been convinced that economic closures represented government overreach and a restriction of individual liberty.[29] To foster that sentiment, members of the investor class funded media campaigns to promote the notion of the shutdowns as morally wrong[30] These campaigns serve as a tragic example of the investor class forcing its ends onto the whole of our society, portraying anything that interferes with the pursuit of those ends as morally condemnable. The campaigns, of course, concealed their class interestedness to preserve the supposed universality of their precepts. In their polemics against “unfreedom,” they were careful to omit the fact that the “immorality” of the shutdowns, the restriction of liberty which they constituted, was a restriction of the freedom of wealthy firms to force their workers into life-threatening conditions for the sake of profit margins.

Only in being justified by the official morality of the dominant class was such blatant disregard for human life allowed to occur. During the initial months of the COVID pandemic, the foundational social power of the working masses could have been utilized to substantial and life-saving effect, if only there had been sufficient organization for the development of a collective will to do so. Consider the power represented by the opportunity of essential workers to join together in a general strike in protest of unsafe conditions, or in opposition to unjust regulations which cut them off from unemployment insurance if they refused to work. Consider the power of the voting population to hold their elected officials accountable for refusing to put such protective measures in place, or that of the consumer base to boycott companies engaged in blatantly exploitative and dangerous labor practices. These collective actions were not taken because the iniquity of the situation was masked by a veil of official morality, which labelled the direct repression of the working class—the elimination of its most basic liberties—as itself a crusade for freedom. Such “moral” manipulations enable the paradox of power noted by Arendt and Hume, in which “the living power of the people,”[31] despite its foundational importance, is restrained and left unrealized by the amplified repressive force of a small but economically dominant social contingent.

It is important to note the role of the State in this process of moral imposition on behalf of the ruling class. By debating and legislating in accordance with the official morality, institutional authority reifies it, providing those precepts of ruling class interest with an appearance of naturalness and thereby working to validate their claims to universality. Representative Hollingsworth was not alone in expressing the sentiment that the flourishing of the stock market is more important than the lives of American workers; instances as brazen as the vehement attempts of conservative politicians to prevent an increase in food stamp funding despite the staggering number of children going hungry represent efforts to embody the official morality. [32] The success of such reification is heartbreakingly clear: ours is a country in which Nobel laureate economist Angus Deaton “explained the anomalous mortality rates among white people in the Bible Belt by claiming that they’ve ‘lost the narrative of their lives’,”[33] having failed to realize their own “moral value” in the terms imposed on them, unable to earn anything above a starvation wage regardless of their efforts.

Such is the outcome of the ruling class indoctrinating “into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it,”[34] using the apparatus of authority as an aid in its illusion. The supposed truth of the official morality, that most insidious of the “ruling ideas”[35] disseminated by the dominant class, holds a devastating weight in the popular psyche because it is manifested by our systems of power and thereby made to seem concrete. To that end, our political representatives, armed with the formalized consent of their constituents, speak and legislate in a manner that serves to enshrine official morality in the rule of law. In the face of the pandemic, they declared that the just action on the part of the working poor was to accept their loss of liberty for the sake of their country. And, faced with that reactionary mandate justified by an apparently eternal morality, we chose not to oppose oppression, but instead to clap for the essential workers as they made their way home.

“The price of obedience has become too high,”[36] writes Terry Tempest Williams, following a vivid illustration of the destruction wreaked by U.S. nuclear arms tests in the Southwest on American lands and American people. Such state-sanctioned harm is the norm, rather than the exception, as we have seen in examples ranging from the Tuskegee Study to the COVID pandemic response. It is enabled by the “inability to question authority,”[37] on account of its justification by official morality, which would have a repressed populace rather accept the rule of their oppressors than challenge it in the hope of change. But this does not have to be the case; ours could be a better world. A governing body loses its legitimacy if its commands are not carried out; its orders are not heeded if the popular masses refuse to recognize its sovereignty. Strikes, protests, and other acts of defiance, in which participants utilize their communal power by refusing, in unison, to conform to the commands of their oppressors, demonstrate the ability of an organized populace to make authority impotent and annul its influence. That transformative kind of resistance is only possible when the official morality which condemns it is recognized as a tool of reaction, when the oppressed declare a morality of their own, oriented towards the liberation and collective betterment of the social world. “[A]nd even then, when power is already in the street, some group…prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility.”[38] These tasks: the revocation of repressive morality, its replacement with a conviction for true justice, and the development of leadership capable of organizing such a movement, are all possible. It is imperative that we undertake them if we are to liberate ourselves by realizing our collective power.  

References

Arendt, H. On Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1970.

Barthes, R. Mythologies. Trans. Jonathan Cape. Paris: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1957.

Blake, A. “Analysis | Trump's Dumbfounding Refusal to Encourage Wearing Masks.” The Washington Post.      Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 25 Jun. 2020: Digital Access.

Cohen, G.A. On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Scholarship Online, 2011.

Collins, C., Petergorsky, D. “Updates: Billionaire Wealth, U.S. Job Losses and Pandemic Profiteers.” Inequality.org. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Policy Studies, 29 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

DeParle, J. "As Hunger Swells, Food Stamps Become a Partisan Flash Point." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 6 May 2020: Digital Access.

Desilver, D. "10 facts about American workers." Fact Tank. Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center, 2019. Aug. 2019: Digita Access.

Diaz, J. “New York Sues Amazon Over COVID-19 Workplace Safety.” The Coronavirus Crisis. Washington,     D.C.: National Public Radio, 17 Feb. 2021: Digital Access.

“Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together.” Occupational Health & Safety. Dallas: 1105 Media Inc., 7 May 2020: Digital Access.

“Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 22 Jan.        2020: Digital Access.

Flynn, M. “GOP congressman says he puts saving American ‘way of life’ above saving lives from the coronavirus.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 15 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Hume, D. “Of the First Principles of Government.” Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary. Hume Texts Online,   2021: Digital Access.

“Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.” CNN. Atlanta: Cable News Network, 2020: Digital Access.

Maqbool, A. “Coronavirus: The US Resistance to a Continued Lockdown.” BBC News. London: British         Broadcasting Corporation, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Marx, K. Selected Writings. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1994.

McNicholas, C., Poydock, M. “Who Are Essential Workers?: A Comprehensive Look at Their Wages,             Demographics, and Unionization Rates.” Economic Policy Institute. Washington, D.C.: Economic Policy             Institute, 19 May 2020: Digital Access.

Nuttle, M. “Essential Workers Accounted for 87% of Additional COVID-19 Deaths in California, Data         Shows.” abc10.com. 30 Apr. 2021: Digital Access.

Reinberg, S. “Nearly 74 Million Essential Workers at High Risk for COVID in U.S.” U.S. News & World        Report. Washington, D.C.: U.S. News & World Report, 9 Nov. 2020: Digital Access.

Siddiqui, F. “Hundreds of Covid Cases Reported at Tesla Plant Following Musk's Defiant Reopening, County            Data Shows.” The Washington Post. Washington, D.C.: WP Company, 13 Mar. 2021: Digital Access.

Tankersley, J. "Job or Health? Restarting the Economy Threatens to Worsen Economic Inequality." The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 27 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Tempest Williams, T. "The Clan of One Breasted Women." Psychological Perspectives (23): 123-131. Los Angeles: C.G. Jung Institute, 1990.

“U.S. Income Distribution 2019.” Statista. Statista Research Department, 20 Jan. 2021: Digital Access.

Vogel, K. P., et al. “The Quiet Hand of Conservative Groups in the Anti-Lockdown Protests.” The New York Times. New York: The New York Times, 21 Apr. 2020: Digital Access.

Wright, R. A Short History of Progress. Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2004.

Wronski, L. New York Times|SurveyMonkey poll: April 2020. New York: The New York Times, 2020: Digital Access.

Zhang, C. “By Numbers: How the US Voted in 2020.” Financial Times. London: Financial Times, 7 Nov.        2020: Digital Access.

Notes

[1] Hume, 1

[2] Arendt, 41

[3] Hume, 1

[4] Zhang

[5] “Kentucky 2020 U.S. Senate Exit Polls.”

[6] “U.S. Income Distribution 2019”

[7] “Fatal Force: Police Shootings Database.”

[8] Hume, 1

[9] Marx, 129

[10] Barthes, 140

[11] Wright, 124

[12] G.A. Cohen provides a proof of this in his essay “Freedom and Money.” 

[13] Cohen, 9

[14] Cohen, 9

[15] Ibid., 10

[16] Blake

[17] Tankersley

[18] Reinberg

[19] Wronski

[20] McNicholas

[21] Diaz

[22] Siddiqui

[23] McNicholas

[24] Nuttle

[25] Collins

[26] “Essential Workers and Unemployment Benefits Do Not Go Together,” 1

[27] Ibid.

[28] Flynn

[29] Maqbool

[30] Vogel

[31] Arendt, 41

[32] DeParle

[33] Livingston

[34] Barthes, 140

[35] Marx, 129

[36] Williams, 128

[37] Ibid.

[38] Arendt, 49

From Black Wall Street to Black Capitalism

By Too Black

Republished from Hood Communist.

“As word of what some would later call the “Negro uprising” began to spread across the white community, groups of armed whites began to gather at hastily-arranged meeting  places, to discuss what to do next.”

Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921

“For far too long, Black liberal, you have been allowed to domesticate Black radicalism. Because our oppressors prefer you to us and at any sign of trouble, rush out to find you to speak on behalf of all Black people, you have eagerly taken the chance to hog all of the mics and silence us. You weaken our revolt with your narration.”

- Yannick Giovanni Marshall, Black liberal, your time is up

“Black capitalism is still capitalism.” – Terrell

The Tulsa Massacre began 100 years ago on May 31st, 1921 when an angry white mob accused a 19-year-old Black man, Dick Rowland, of raping a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page. Flustered by the perceived “Negro Uprising” of Black men armed to defend and protect Dick Rowland outside the Tulsa courthouse, the inflamed white mob, sanctioned by the state, responded with brute terror — burning down the Black segregated neighborhood of Greenwood destroying 1,256 homes, nearly 191 Black businesses and the death of roughly 300 (likely more) people by the morning of June 1st, 1921.

100 years since these 16 hours of white barbarism occurred, suppressive forces have steadily worked to delete this tragedy from scribing its crimson pages into the books of American history. But, as history shows, bloodstains prove difficult to remove. Recently, decorating over these stains as “blemishes” of an otherwise promising American Dream towards Black capitalism has proven to be a more sufficient means to quell dissent. What has materialized is an emphasis on what was destroyed over who was destroyed. Effectively, redeeming the state — the combined authority of government (elected), the bureaucracies (positions), corporate control, and private interests — in the process.

Decorating a Utopia that never was

As the summer of 2020 was steaming from protests against continued racialized state violence, the attention economy suddenly rediscovered the blood of 1921 by pivoting to what Booker T. Washington reportedly called “Negro Wall Street” or what is now known as Black Wall Street — the historic Black business district of the segregated Greenwood neighborhood destroyed in the massacre. According to Google Trends, the term “Black Wall Street” was googled more in June of 2020 than within the last 5 years.

Posited within 3-4 Blocks of the Greenwood neighborhood, this business district, disparagingly referred to by Tulsa whites as “Little Africa,” was the home to a number of Black-owned enterprises including a fifty-four room hotel, a public library, two newspapers, a seven-hundred, and fifty seat theater, multiple cleaners, and two dozen grocery stores among more. Through these efforts, Black Wall Street produced a prosperous Black business class fancying “some of the city’s more elegant homes” and successful Black businesses in the state.

Faced with only these facts, it’s understandable why one would view Black Wall Street as a wealthy “self-sustaining” utopia violently interrupted by a white vigilante mob as it’s widely reported to have been. However, a much more complicated narrative scrubbed from decorated legend lies underneath the folklore of a Black American Wakanda.

Although Black Wall Street certainly brought pride to the Black residents of Greenwood, that pride failed to translate to a prosperous economic status for most. A report by the American Association of Social Workers on the living conditions of Black folks in Tulsa at the time stated, “95 percent of the Negro residents in the Black belt lived in poorly constructed frame houses, without  conveniences, and on streets which were unpaved and on which the drainage was all surface.” Furthermore, most Greenwood residents were not only living in substandard housing but were employed outside of Black Wall Street according to the Oklahoma Commission study on the Tulsa Race Riot:

“Despite the growing fame of its commercial district, the vast majority of Greenwood’s adults were neither businessmen nor businesswomen but worked long hours, under trying conditions, for white employers [emphasis added]. Largely barred from employment in both the oil industry and from most of Tulsa’s manufacturing facilities, these men and women toiled at difficult, often dirty, and generally menial jobs — the kinds that most whites consider beneath them—as janitors and ditch-diggers, dishwashers, and maids, porters and day laborers, domestics and service workers.  Unsung and largely forgotten, it was, nevertheless, their paychecks that built Greenwood,  and their hard work that helped to build Tulsa. [Emphasis added]“

Truthfully, as the report makes clear, Tulsa and Black Wall Street were both consequences of de jure segregation. Segregation operated as a public policy purposely made to suppress Black wages for the benefit of white capital while simultaneously limiting where those suppressed wages could be spent — inadvertently creating a monopoly for a petite Black professional class. Put differently, it was the super-exploitation of poor Black labor that facilitated both the function of Tulsa as a whole and the Black Wall Street District. Neither could have existed without the presence of poor Black people. Yet, their presence is rarely acknowledged in the revisionist plot. The suffering of the Black poor typically only matters when it can be used to bolster the class position of the Black Elite — the appointed political, cultural, and social representative and a moneyed class of Black people — and reinforce the state.

Decorating Blackness

As previously indicated, last summer, while police precincts became bonfires illustriously lighting up the night sky, the terms “Black Wall Street” and “Black business” were receiving more Google searches than ever before. The presuppositions of the searches call for questioning: Will a world on fire be resolved by the memory of a business district burnt down by a white mob? What is the correlation between a cop kneecapping a poor Black man’s neck and buying Black? How can I buy my way out of a chokehold? Do corporate pledges to “support Black business” deflect the oncoming bullets of State violence?

All Black people are subject to a degree of state violence but in today’s post-civil rights era, those flung to the bottom of the capitalist ladder  *George Floyd* experience the worst fate — police murders, stop and frisk, incarceration, poverty, homelessness, and worse. In essence, LeBron James’ sons could not be Kalief Browder because not only can LeBron afford to bail his sons out of jail but Brentwood, CA is far from the overpoliced neighborhood Browder was originally profiled in. Despite her same race and gender, Oprah is not Breonna Taylor. No knock warrants are unheard of in Montecito, CA, and gentrification does not work in reverse.

The point here is not to diminish the racism experienced by the Black Elite but to challenge the universalizing of Blackness. Universalizing Blackness as a flat experience allows Amazon to proclaim #BlackLivesMatter, create a Black-owned business page but crush the unions organized by its Black workers. It allows the NBA to paint BLM on its hardwoods, highlight Black business during the NBA finals but pay its predominantly Black and temp workers dirt wages. Universalizing Blackness distorts Blackness itself. It is decorating at its worst.

A repercussion of universalizing Blackness is elite capture — what philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò defines as “how political projects can be hijacked—in principle or effect—by the well-positioned and resourced.” This begins to explain how a radical demand such as abolishing the police either becomes dismissed or co-opted while the state offers its full cosmetic support behind Black business and representation. The class of Black people most well-positioned to make demands upon the state is better situated to benefit from Black business creation and corporate diversity hires than police abolition or the unionization of Amazon. They are considerably less afflicted by the problems of the people they claim to represent.

Universalizing Blackness collapses the interests of Black people as if we’re all equally invested in the same solutions. It’s precisely how the knees of killer cops on Black necks correlate with buying Black because as Táíwò notes, “When elites run the show, the “group’s” interests get whittled down to what they have in common with those at the top.” It’s how the poverty of Greenwood ceases to appear in documentaries or presidential speeches when the Black wealth of a few needs attention. Commenting on sociologist E. Franklin Frazier’s groundbreaking 1954 text The Black Bourgeoisie, Táíwò observes how two seemingly opposing ideas continue to find continuity, “Why did the myth of a Black economy as a comprehensive response to anti-Black racism survive when it was never a serious possibility? In Frazier’s telling, it did because it furthered the class interests of the Black bourgeoisie.” The class interests remain.

Black Capitalism, the Ultimate Decoration

The elite capture of a movement requires a series of decorative myths — ideas that obscure the nature of the problem for the maintenance of the status quo. Last Summer Black capitalism emerged once again as the most decorated myth. The revisionism of Black Wall Street, as an extension of Black capitalism, neatly fits the narrative of universal Blackness. It utilizes the universality of a tragedy suffered by an entire Black population to advocate for a solution (Black capitalism) that has shown to primarily benefit a particular class of Black people.

Black capitalism is a concatenation of propaganda. It relies on complementary myths such as Black buying power and Black dollar circulation that are premised upon shaming Black people, particularly the poor ones, for their alleged frivolous spending. Besides the fact that Black people spend their money no more recklessly than anyone else, Black capitalism feeds on stereotypes of broke Black people foolishly buying Jordans and weaves they cannot afford to justify its existence. The saying typically goes “if we spend with our own then we can have our own” as if Black people’s spending habits are moral barometers.

This decorative myth is exemplified in the creation of the Greenwood banking app. Popularized by rapper Killer Mike and actor Jesse Williams this app is “inspired by the early 1900’s Greenwood District, where recirculation of Black wealth occurred all day, every day, and where Black businesses thrived.” The website, littered with unsubstantiated claims of Black dollar circulation, conveniently fails to discuss the rampant Black poverty in the “1900’s Greenwood District” they claim to want to recreate. To highlight such a contradiction would ruin their business model.

Businesses such as Greenwood use the history of how collective Black wealth has been systematically destroyed by capitalism to leverage (guilt) white investors for funding. In the case of Greenwood, receiving 40 million dollars from banking institutions including JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Trust among others. The billions of corporate dollars injected into “racial equity” campaigns this last year were all sparked by the militant response to the blatant murder of a poor Black man who was allegedly arrested for purchasing items with a counterfeit bill. Disturbingly, the death of poor Black people is a lucrative fundraising drive for everybody but the ones experiencing death.

Decorating an Empire

What rests at the heart of these issues is the Black Elite’s general unwillingness to confront the state and all the violence it subsumes. As a class, they are much more invested in collaborating — either for perceived survival and/or personal gain. What tends to go unsaid is that when they collaborate with the state they often lose even on their terms. The police still confuse them for poor “thugs.” They remain underrepresented and underpaid in their respective fields. Laws that sustain their lifestyle are constantly eroded. Yet, historically, they have made the most “progress” in periods where the masses of Black people dissented. Due to their economic instability, they are unable to exist as a class by themselves — hence the need for the symbolic support of the masses analogous to how Black Wall Street needed the paychecks of the Black poor to thrive as a business district.

The state uses these decorators of empire, knowingly or not, to maintain its legitimacy. White supremacy may have obliterated Black Wall Street — 1st through violence, 2nd through policy — nevertheless “if that massacre never happened who knows how that shapes America today.” The bloodshed of the past is decorated by the false promise of “a more perfect union.” Organizing for a world beyond American hegemony is scolded as unrealistic and sophomoric. The most moderate of Black radical demands such as “defund the police” are derided and blamed unfairly for costing congressional seats as if Democratic party success is synonymous with Black liberation.

Decorators of empire must corral dissent. This type of agency reduction has a footprint leaping back to the Cold War and much further. Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly, assistant professor of Africana Studies and Political Science at Carleton College, thoroughly documents how the Black Elite of the time — Black Cold War liberals, “reduced the collective agency of other African Americans by marginalizing or maligning the panoply of liberation strategies emanating from the Black left.” This was a necessary strategy because the Black Cold War Liberals “formed important relationships with powerful Whites to procure goods and services for the Black community while offering no challenge to exploitative economic and social relations.” Modes of thinking outside of these brokered relationships threatened to bring backlash from the state. Faced with the mounting repression of the anti-communist McCarthy era,

“…Black Cold War liberals began to distinguish themselves from the left by rejecting militant agendas that might align them with those deemed “communist fronts,” including the Council on African Affairs (CAA), the Peace Information Center (PIC), and the National Negro Labor Council. Black Cold War liberals signaled such rejection by casting their platform in anti-communist terms and by constructing Black people as loyal, trustworthy Americans who deserved to be recognized as full citizens.”

Consistent with elite capture, Black Cold War liberals corralled the ideologies of the Black masses. “Seditious” communist ideas and “backward” social behavior would not earn the acceptance of the state. Irrespective of the oppression they faced, Black people of the time were corralled to focus their aspirations on proving to the state they were just as American as everyone else.

Today, building on a similar logic, Black American suffering is promoted as a badge of honor — a “justice claim” made because “we built this country.” Black people are “the Soul of the Nation” who “saved American democracy.” Again, the bloodshed of the past is used to redeem the present. President Biden, in his speech for the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Massacre, leveraged this Black American exceptionalism to bolster the empire, “we should know the good, the bad, everything. That is what great nations do. They come to terms. With their dark side. We are a great nation.” Only in America can a nation be “great” for acknowledging a single massacre 100 years later with no reparations to show — decorating at its finest.

Conclusion

Remembering the Tulsa Massacre not as a violent white response to Black self-defense and determination but instead as the destruction of property and mythical Black wealth favorably leaves space for American redemption. It reduces the violence to a tragic interruption of the American dream and Black capitalism while minimizing other race massacres that did not include a well of black business class.

Wall Street is a parasitic model we should not emulate — still, I empathize with Black  people’s desire for Black ownership and self-determination. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this desire. However, positioning slogans like #BuyBlack and #SupportBlackBusinness as the respectable alternative to radical transformative demands is decorating for the state — particularly when these slogans are attached to faulty concepts like trickle-down economics and universal Blackness. Black ownership is elite capture without the correct redistribution and collective ownership of the wealth we create.

Lastly, it need not be stated that the victims of the Tulsa Massacre — as well as their descendants and all African people — deserve their reparations. That is not in question. We should question the state’s legitimacy to define our collective goals. We must be vigilant towards the state’s attempts to use the atrocities committed against us as a means to redeem itself by decorating its crimes. The world we deserve is irreducible to a Black Wall Street and abundantly superior to anything America currently has to offer. It’s on us and those in solidarity to fight for it.

Too Black is a poet, writer, and host of The Black Myths Podcast based in Indianapolis, Indiana. He can be reached at tooblack8808@gmail.com or @too_black_ on Twitter.

Fascism and the Politics of the Past

By Yanis Iqbal

Fascist groupings are in the ascendant throughout the world. While some are emerging from the political peripheries - slowly but steadily gaining traction on the terrain of ideological hegemony - some have already taken the reins of state power. This new wave of fascism poses an important question: why did the intensifying crisis of neoliberalism strengthen the Right instead of revitalizing the Left? The post-1990s trajectory of austerity and immiseration should have bolstered the appeal of progressive forces among the masses. However, what we have been witnessing is the growing hold of extremely conservative ideas on the proletariat.

Non-synchronicity

Ernst Bloch, a German Marxist philosopher, witnessed a similar situation as the left-wing camp in his country was trounced by Nazism. His response to this contradictory development resonates with the current conjuncture. Bloch deployed the concept of “non-synchronicity” to understand fascism, writing, “Not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at the same time with others”. There are social strata that have been left behind in the process of modernization. These layers express their dissatisfaction with the present by looking back, towards a better past.

In other words, fascism draws from the future in the past, calling up mythologized forces, responding to modern disenchantment, joining a romantic anti-capitalism - roots, soil, homeland - among rural strata with fears of decline and genuine impoverishment among middling urban strata and a youth out of step with the capitalist drive toward abstraction and immateriality. Fascism, therefore, expresses an authentic longing for something different. It creates new figures, synthesizing various elements into hybrid structures, using materials from elsewhere - fairytales, myth, kitsch, Romanticism, occultism and magic, masculine qualities (strength, openness, decency, purity), as well as vitalist philosophy (will, life, creation, instinctive knowledge).

The palingenetic ideals of fascism serve transhistorically as a medium for processing every historical present. The subjects of fascism are called upon to leave a shameful normal life and to enter a proud life of bravery. It is important to note that pride and shame are fundamentally related. Feeling pride involves a realization of the ideals that define the faults and errors that cause us to feel ashamed. Shame collapses the “I” with the “we” in the failure to transform the social ideal into action, a failure which, when witnessed, confirms the ideal, and makes possible a return to pride. In the fascist case, the return to pride depends on the positioning of the subject as someone who confesses to being part of the imminent chaos and decline. Thus, the enactment of shame functions as a means of returning to pride. This return involves correcting wrongdoings by defending the survival of the nation, the people and the race.

Destroying Public Discourse

Fascism’s nostalgic idealizations are always empty. And yet, we know that the emptiness of the mythically constructed past that the Right holds out as a lost version of a better life as well as the emptiness of its promises with regard to the contradictions of capitalism are precisely the point of the underlying strategy. Empty times and spaces are effective spaces for the creation of the fears, fantasies, and hopes that the Right seeks to cultivate. Vague references to a better past ask the audience to fill in the gaps in content and logic with their own nonsynchronous projections; a rhetorical model of broad strokes, vague slogans, provocations, and propositions clearly replaced articulated programs. The point is not precision or the communication of actual information but the establishment of spaces in which anomy and anxiety can play themselves out and which can amplify discontent rather than finding answers to it.

The invocation of historically indeterminate imageries has real consequences for electoral battles and discursive struggles. Eberhard Knödler-Bunte argues that the entanglement of fascist ideology in the past turns it into a “depoliticized mass movement.” The “fascist public sphere,” Knödler-Bunte contends, is ultimately nothing other than “a politicized public sphere aimed at real depoliticization.” Hence, fascism operates on an innately contradictory ground - establishing a public sphere that encourages politicization while simultaneously reducing political dialogue and thought to impoverished versions of public deliberation.

Knödler-Bunte’s arguments help us understand the strategy of contemporary right-wing governments that lower the bar of public and political discourse in order to replace political dialogue with emotionally charged slogans. Paired with the mere semblance of rebelliousness, these tactics obfuscate structural problems and promote a depoliticized discourse, including pseudo-political branding efforts, disinformation campaigns, and conspiracy narratives, in place of political analysis, debate, and programmatic thinking. The extreme Right has traditionally relied on this co-optation of revolutionary energy and its displacement from a critique of capitalism to a vehement yearning for a hazy past.

Liberatory History

Fascism has a constitutive contradiction: the rising tensions between the ironclad rhythms of the working day and the promise of a magical rupture with these empty homogenous routines. Demagogic talks about national-cultural regeneration are always in dissonance with the brute system of surplus value extraction. In order to use these weaknesses of fascism to its own benefit, the Left needs to adopt a liberatory conception of history. Instead of turning to the past to restore lost forms of order, we may understand the past as a rich collection of unheard appeals, unfulfilled hopes, of silenced demands for freedom - and such a relation to the past in turn shows us what is missing in the present and what cries out for completion.

Understood in this manner, the past denotes for us not mythical unity and purity but the history of systemic injustice, oppression, and exploitation, which in turn means that the past contains the energy that leads the way into the future. The past is not just what was. It is that which was never allowed to be, that which never could be, and it therefore points towards that which may yet be. A truly utopian and revolutionary imagination examines the past as an archive of emancipatory struggles that were repressed or abandoned but that reach into our present and herald a future through their continuous demand for realization.

Bourgeois Education and the Reproduction of Common Sense

By Christian Noakes

Republished from Peace, Land, and Bread.

Despite right-wing conspiracy theories depicting universities as a communist threat to capitalist society, academia serves as a primary institution in the reproduction of the bourgeois common sense on which capitalism relies. Furthermore, it presents its own version of knowledge as not only self-evident but “progressive,” while denouncing any effective attempt to confront capitalism and imperialism.

With a few flips of intellectual gymnastics, it often asserts that Marxism is the “master’s tools.” As such, it presents Marxism as an oppressive force and bourgeois thought as a force of liberation—albeit one in need of periodic reforms. Fundamental to this inversion is the complete misunderstanding—or at least misrepresentation—of both Marx and the larger historical tradition of Marxism.

Marx is typically treated as a class reductionist who never addressed the interrelated issues of racism, colonialism, and slavery. However, all three of these are given significant attention by Marx and were in fact treated as fundemental to the capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession, and exploitation. One needn’t delve deep into Marx’s writings to begin to see this. In the first pages of the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels state:

“The discovery of America, the rounding of the cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie... The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connexions everywhere.”[1]

Elsewhere they state:

“The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement, and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of negroes, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation.”[2]

Marx and Engels do not equivocate the role of racial oppression and colonialism which are both a means of capitalist expansion and an outgrowth of it. Not only are these pervasive forms of oppression central to the birth of capitalism, but confronting these twin evils of racism and colonialism are essential to combating capitalism today. This is no doubt what Marx means when he noted that, “labor in the white skin cannot emancipate itself where the black skin is branded.”[3] In other words, capitalist exploitation cannot be eradicated so long as racial oppression remains intact.

To even talk about class within the hallowed walls of the academy is too often assumed to be a “white issue”—a convenient assumption that obscures the material reality of racial oppression. The explicitly anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-slavocratic sentiments in the writings of Marx suggest that many who, in good faith, claim Marxism is implicitly “white”—and therefore conserving racial oppression—are drawing such conclusions without doing the readings. Under the influence of bourgeois thought that pervades capitalist educational institutions, “one knows it is absurd without reading it and one doesn't read it because one knows it is absurd, and therefore one glories in one's ignorance of the position.”[4]

This fundemental misunderstanding—premised on hubristic ignorance—goes far beyond Marx and Engels to encompass all of Marxism. The Guyanese guerrilla intellectual Walter Rodney argued that the perennial debate on the relevance of Marxism across time and place is both an outgrowth of the dominant bourgeois ideology and a fundamental misunderstanding of Marxism.[5] Contrary to an understanding of Marxism as a static manual of revolution, Rodney points out that Marxism is a living thing—a methodology and ideology which concerns itself with material relations in the service of the oppressed and exploited classes.

As a methodology or a scientific lens of analysis, Marxism concerns itself with the material conditions of society, the relations of production which exist—in various forms—across time and place. Marx, and the Marxist tradition which has developed from his contributions to the revolutionary struggle, give considerable attention to the particular relations of production under capitalism—a system into which the Global South has long been forced at gun point. Rejecting Marxism as irrelevant to any context outside of 19th Century Europe follows the same logic as if one were to claim that the theory or relativity—and other developments in physics built on such understandings—only applies to the world Einstein inhabited.[6]

To deny the relevance of Marxist methodology is to inadvertanly suggest that relations of production (especially the predominant capitalist relations) do not exist—a bourgeois position that serves to preserve capitalist exploitation and the racial/colonial relations which underpin it. Despite the often good intentions, such assertions are inevitably in line with bourgeois ideology in that they serve to reproduce the common sense of capitalism which both naturalizes and obscures the social relations of capital. Such academic positions also ignore the historical role of Marxism in national liberation struggles throughout the Global South—an historical fact that makes the question of the relevance of Marxism itself irrelevant.

However, the relationship between Western academia and the Global South is not simply a matter of the erasure of national liberation struggles; it is also openly antagonistic in that the former provides the intellectual justification for imperialism under a facade of progress.

For the sake of brevity, we will limit ourselves to recent events in Bolivia.

On 10 November 2019, the Indigenous President Evo Morales was ousted in an apparent coup. Support for this coup—which would quickly reveal itself as deeply anti-Indigenous and reactionary—included a letter signed by several US academics. Signatories included the anthropologist Devin Beaulieu, a vocal opponent of the Movement for Socialism (MAS) party. Beaulieu—like many other academics—framed their opposition to MAS in pro-Indigenous language. Central to this position has been the reduction of Indigeneity to a monolith in opposition to Morales.[7] This has, in a sense, included the construction of the Indio permitido (the authorized Indian). Under a progressive facade, academics like Beaulieu sit comfortably in the imperial core, deciding for themselves which Indigenous voices are legitimate. Not unlike their colonial predecessors, they rely on a deeply imperialist conception of progress as a modern “white man’s burden.”

Other academics are not so blatantly imperialist. For instance Fabricant and Postero correctly point out how treating Indigenous peoples as a monolith is akin to defining Indio permitido and Indio prohibido (the prohibited Indian).[8] Their acknowledgement of heterogenous Indigeneity is markedly different from the treatment seen in the likes of Beaulieu. However, despite this difference they too fall into the dichotomous thinking which frames MAS as both a capitalist movement for the mestizo and an opposition to Indigenous Bolivians. Despite their apparent attempts to provide balanced analysis, they conflate efforts toward self-determination via the utilization of the country’s natural resources and the fostering non-US trade relations as “capitalist” and “neoliberal,” when in reality not utilizing national resources means a continued subjugation of Bolivia to the imperial core—a position these academics ponder from relative comfort. These (not-so-blatant) imperialist academics also refer to concerns of Indigenous groups over national development as a concern of “further colonisation by Andean coca growers.”[9] Where these coca growers are, in fact, Indigenous, this position only succeeds in weaponizing anti-colonial rhetoric against the colonized.

All of the above is emphasized to say that bourgeois academia’s primary social function is to reproduce capitalist common sense and to reinvent capitalist society with ever-new, illusory facades of progress and liberation. As a central institution of the capitalist superstructure, the university as a whole cannot help but be anything else.

As Jose Carlos Mariategui observed:

“Vain is all mental effort to conceive the apolitical school or the neutral school. The school of bourgeois order will continue to be a bourgeois school. The new school will come with the new order.”[10]

This is not to say that individuals or groups cannot exist in opposition in such institutions or that no revolutionaries should attend university. Institutions of higher learning can and should be treated as sites of struggle from which guerilla intellectuals can, in a sense, redistribute the resources and means of knowledge production otherwise kept from the public.

Following in the footsteps of revolutionaries such as Marx and Rodney, Marxists should utilize capitalist institutions to better understand and combat capitalism. However, the bourgeois academy should never be treated as something that can be adequately reformed under capitalism; or, further, that bourgeois academia is the only source of knowledge production under capitalism. Indeed, a true guerrilla intellectual need not be of the academy at all, and, in fact, cannot be a true guerrilla intellectual if they are confined to the bourgeois institutions which serve only to reproduce capitalist common sense in opposition to the true struggles of liberation.

Endnotes

[1] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. In The Marx-Engles Reader (2nd ed.) Robert C. Tucker (ed), 275-276.

[2] Karl Marx. Capital, Vol. 1. (Chicago 1952), P.372.

[3] Karl Marx: On America and the Civil War (New York, 1972) p. 275.

[4] Walter Rodney (1975). “Marxism and African Liberation.” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/rodney- walter/works/marxismandafrica.htm.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Jose Carlos Mariategui. “The World Crisis and the Peruvian Proletariat.” in Selected Works of José Carlos Mariátegui.

Workers and Communities Must Control COVID Relief Funds: A View From Detroit

By Jerry Goldberg

Republished from Liberation News.

The Biden Coronavirus Relief Bill offers significant funding that could alleviate at least in part the poverty faced by millions of people in the United States. An article in Bridge Michigan summed up the potential benefits for poor people in Michigan.

• An estimated 1.97 million children under 18 in Michigan — and 65.7 million across the United States — could benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit. This constitutes 92% of all children in the state.

• The bill includes an $880 million increase for food assistance, including a 15% increase in food stamp benefits. This potentially could help alleviate hunger for the more than 430,000 adults in Michigan who reported they can’t afford food to adequately feed their children.

• Some $25 billion in rental assistance and housing vouchers could provide assistance to the 139,000 families at risk of eviction in the state.

• There is $25 billion in aid to help child-care providers reopen safely and $15 billion in additional child-care assistance to help families return to work, as well.

All these benefits will be squandered if the workers and oppressed people rely on the capitalist state, a state set up to serve the interests of the corporations and the rich, to deliver these benefits to the people for whom they are intended. This is especially so in oppressed cities like Detroit.

Detroit’s poor completely alienated from capitalist state apparatus

In Detroit, years of grinding poverty and austerity imposed by finance capital have deprived hundreds of thousands of people of the resources to know about and take advantage of benefits, on the rare occasion when they are offered. The following statistics bear out the depth of poverty and lack of accessibility from any basic resources for tens of thousands of Detroiters.

• In Detroit, 40% of the population has no access to any type of internet, 57% lack a high-speed connection, and 70% of school-aged children have no connection at home.

• A 2011 report noted that 47% of Detroiters were functionally illiterate. In 2020, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals held that Detroit schools deprive their students of basic access to literacy.

• The median household income for Detroiters in 2018 was $31,283 compared to $61,973 nationally.

The effect of this lack of online access and basic literacy among Detroit’s poor means that even when grandiose programs are announced, those who could benefit the most are not in a position to take advantage of them.

• While Detroit’s Black community suffered some of the highest COVID rates in the state, only 34.5% of Detroiters have been vaccinated compared to 54.5% of the statewide population.

• As of January 2020, 11,297 homes lacked water service. Despite a plan being announced to restore service after the pandemic hit in March 2020, in fact there were only 1,250 water restorations as of May 17, 2021.

• Between 2011 and 2015, one in four properties in Detroit was foreclosed on for unpaid property taxes by the Wayne County treasurer.

• A survey conducted in 2019, found that of the 25,000 homeowners behind on paying their property taxes, 55% were unaware of the Homeowner Property Tax Assistance Program tax exemption, a program which exempts families earning less than $26,780 per year from paying any property taxes. And in 2017, only 197 families benefitted from the $760 million in federal hardest hit funds given the state to stop foreclosures. Instead, $380 million of the funds were diverted to contractors to tear down homes in a program laced with corruption.

Let the workers and community run things

One of the aspects of the Coronavirus Relief Bill is that it is expected to provide $10 billion for governments across Michigan: $4.4 billion for local governments plus another $5 billion for the state. The City of Detroit will be receiving $826.7 million. These funds must be spent by 2024 or be returned to the federal government.

The people must organize to make sure these funds aren’t squandered as they too often are in the capitalist United States, diverted to crony contractors and nonprofits. Instead, these funds should be used to set up community centers in every neighborhood of cities like Detroit, staffed and run by residents from the communities they serve.

The centers should have computer stations, and aides trained in helping individuals learn about and get access to all benefits they are entitled to. They should sponsor literacy classes. They should employ workers who go out into the community every day, to make sure those who are homebound are reached out to.

The workers and community members staffing these centers should be from the communities they are serving where they are known by their neighbors. They should take stock of basic items like access to electricity, heat and safe non-lead-poisoned water, so families are not afraid to report the lack of basic necessities for fear of having their children taken away.

They should also make sure that undocumented workers, who often are afraid to request aid for fear of deportation, get the services they need regardless of their so-called “residency status.”

Each center should include a health clinic, staffed by doctors, nurses and medical students who live in the community and can provide holistic and environmentally sensitive healthcare that really meets people’s needs.

Cuba shows the way

A model for community-based services can be found in socialist Cuba. An article by Ronn Pineo published in the Journal of Developing Societies described Cuba’s community-based health care system. As early as 1984, Cuba began implementation of its “one doctor plus one nurse team” approach — called Basic Health Teams — with each team unit caring for 80 to 150 families. The healthcare teams live in the communities that they serve so that they can better understand the local health issues.

The doctor/nurse/public health official teams are supported, in turn, by local Group Health Teams, which meet regularly to scout for common issues facing the populations they serve, keeping very careful records of their findings and reporting to the Ministry of Public Health.

Rather than waiting for people to get sick and come into doctors’ offices — the common practice elsewhere in the world — the Cuban doctor/nurse/public healthcare worker groups spend their afternoons walking about their assigned districts, medical bags in hand, dropping in unannounced on the homes of those living in the communities. As a result, they are in a position to notice medical conditions of the people they serve before most afflictions can grow to become too serious. The teams use their house calls as opportunities to remind residents to take their medications — supplied free or at very low price-controlled costs — to exercise more and usually quiz their patients closely about their daily diets.

Demand worker/community control the of relief funds

For the Coronavirus Relief Bill to really make a dent in poverty, hunger and homelessness, it will be up to workers and oppressed people to organize to demand control of the funds to ensure they serve the people for whom they are supposed to be intended. We cannot leave it to the capitalist state, an organ for repression of the people on behalf of the corporate elite, to do the job.

Ultimately, the only way to take the vast wealth of U.S. capitalism, produced by the working class and stolen by the bosses, is to overthrow this rotten system and replace it with a socialist system where the needs of the people in the United States and worldwide could easily be met.

The Relevance and Failures of Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man

By Carlos Garrido

This year marks the 57th anniversary of Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964). This text, although plagued with a pessimistic spirit, was a great source of inspiration for the development of the New Left and the May 68 uprisings. The question we must ask ourselves is whether a text that predates the last 50 years of neoliberalism has any pertinent take-aways for today’s revolutionary struggles. Before we examine this, let us first review the context and central observations in Marcuse’s famed work.

Review

Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man[i] (ODM) describes a world in which human rationality is uncritically used to perpetuate the irrational conditions whereby human instrumental ingenuity stifles human freedom and development. In the height of the cold war and potential atomic devastation, Marcuse observes that humanity submitted to the “peaceful production of the means of destruction” (HM, ix). Society developed its productive forces and technology to a scale never before seen. In doing so, it has created the conditions for the possibility of emancipating humanity from all forms of necessity and meaningless toil. The problem is, this development has not served humanity, it has been humanity that has been forced to serve this development. The instruments humans once made to serve them, are now the masters of their creators. The means have kidnapped the ends in a forced swap, the man now serves the hammer, not the other way around.

The observation that our society has developed its productive forces and technologies in a manner that creates the conditions for more human freedom, while simultaneously using the development itself to serve the conditions for our un-freedom, is not a new one. The Marxist tradition has long emphasized this paradox in the development of capitalism. Marcuse’s ODM’s novel contribution is in the elucidation of the depth of this paradox’s submersion, as well as how this paradox has extended beyond capitalism into industrialized socialist societies as well. Let us now examine how Marcuse unfolds the effects of modern capitalist instrumental rationality’s closing of the political universe.

Whereas the capitalism Marx would deal with in the mid-19th century demonstrated that along with clearly antagonistic relations to production, the working and owning class also shared vastly different cultures, modern one-dimensional society homogenizes the cultural differences between classes. Marcuse observes that one of the novelties of one-dimensional society is in its capacity to ‘flatten out’ the “antagonisms between culture and social reality through the obliteration of the oppositional, alien, and transcendent elements in higher culture” (HM, 57). This process liquidates two-dimensional culture and creates the conditions for social cohesion through the commodification, repressive desublimation, and wholesale incorporation and reproduction of these cultural elements into society by mass communication. In essence, the cultural differences the working and owning class had have dissipated, both are integrated in the same cultural logic. This does not mean there is no cultural opposition, but that the cultural opposition is itself “reduced” and “absorbed” into the society. Today, this absorption of the opposition is more visible than ever. Companies that donate millions to police departments post #BLM on their social medias, repressive state apparatuses who assaulted homosexuals in the 60s lavender scares now wave the LGBTQ+ flag, billion-dollar companies like Netflix who take loopholes to not pay taxes make a show on ‘democratic socialist’ Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, etc. All throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorption of an ‘opposition’ whom in being absorbed fails to substantially oppose. This could be reformulated as, ‘all throughout our one-dimensional culture we experience the absorptions of any attempts at a great refusal, whom in being absorbed fail to substantially refuse.’

How did this happen? Well, in a way that paradoxically provides the material confirmation of Marxism as a science (according at least to Popper’s falsifiability requirement), while disconfirming one of its central theses, modern capitalism seems to have mended one of its central grave digging contradictions, the antagonistic contradiction between the proletariat and the owning class. According to Marcuse, modern industrial society has been able to do this because it provided the working masses (and society in general) a “comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom” (HM, 1). It superimposed on the working masses false needs which “perpetuate [their] toil, aggressiveness, misery,” and alienation for the sake of continuing the never-ending hamster wheel of consumption (HM, 5). In modern industrial society people are sold a false liberty which actively sustains them in a condition of enslavement. As Marcuse states,

Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear – that is, if they sustain alienation (HM, 8).

 In essence, that which has unnecessarily sustained their working life long, exploitative, and alienating, has made their life at home more ‘comfortable.’ This consumerist, Brave New World-like hellish heaven has perpetuated the prevalent ‘happy consciousness’ present in modern industrial society, where your distraction, comfort, and self-identification with your newly bought gadgets has removed the rebellious tendencies that arise, in a Jeffersonian-like manner, when the accumulation of your degradation reaches a certain limit where revolution becomes your panacea. The phenomenon of happy consciousness, says Marcuse, even forces us to question the status of a worker’s alienation, for although at work alienation might continue, he reappropriates a relation to the products through his excessive identification with it when purchased as a consumer. In this manner, the ‘reappropriation’ of the worker’s alienation to the product manifests itself like Feuerbach’s man reappropriating his species-being now that it has passed through the medium (alienated objectification) of God – the commodity here serving the mediational role of God.

The working mass, as we previously mentioned, is not the only one affected by the effects of one-dimensional society. Marcuse shows that the theorists are themselves participatory and promotional agents of this epoch. Whether in sociology or in philosophy, the general theoretical trends in academia are the same; the dominance of positivist thinking, and the repression and exclusion of negative (or dialectical) thinking. This hegemonized positivist thought presents itself as objective and neutral, caring only for the investigation of facts and the ridding of ‘wrongful thought’ that deals with transcendental “obscurities, illusions, and oddities” (HM, 170). What these one-dimensional theorists do is look at ‘facts’ how they stand dismembered from any of the factors that allowed the fact to be. In doing so, while they present their task as ‘positive’ and against abstractions, they are forced to abstract and reify the fact to engage with it separated from its context. By doing this these theorists limit themselves to engaging with this false concreteness they have conjured up from their abstracting of the ‘fact’ away from its general spatial-temporal context. Doing this not only proves to be futile in understanding phenomena – for it would be like trying to judge a fight after only having seen the last round – but reinforces the status quo of descriptive thinking at the expense of critical and hypothetical thought. As Marcuse states,

This radical acceptance of the empirical violates the empirical, for in it speaks the mutilated, “abstract” individual who experiences (and expresses) only that which is given to him, who has only the facts and not the factors, whose behavior is one-dimensional and manipulated. By virtue of the factual repression, the experienced world is the result of a restricted experience, and the positivist cleaning of the mind brings the mind in line with restricted experience (HM, 182).

Given that “operationalism,” this positivist one-dimensional thought, which in “theory and practice, becomes the theory and practice of containment,” has penetrated the thought and language of all aspects of society, is there an escape to this seemingly closed universe (HM, 17)? As a modest dialectician, Marcuse denies while leaving a slight ‘chance’ for an affirmation. On one end, the text is haunted by a spirit of pessimistic entrapment – not only has the logic of instrumental rationality that sustains one-dimensional society infiltrated all levels of society and human interaction, but the resources are vast enough to quickly absorb or militarily “take care of emergency situations”, viz., when a threat to one-dimensional society arises.

On the other end, he says that “it is nothing but a chance,” but a chance nonetheless, that the conditions for a great refusal might arise (HM, 257). Although he argues dialectical thinking is important to challenge capitalist positivism, he recognizes dialectical thinking alone “cannot offer the remedy,” it knows on empirical and conceptual grounds “its own hopelessness,” i.e., it knows “contradictions do not explode by themselves,” that human agency through an “essentially new historical subject” is the only way out (HM, 253, 252). The contingency of this ‘chance’ is dependent on the contingency of the great encounter between the “most advanced consciousness of humanity” and the “most exploited force,” i.e., it is the ‘barbarians’ of the third world to whom this position of possible historical subjectivity is ascribed to (HM, 257). Nonetheless, Marcuse is doing a theoretical diagnosis, not giving us a prescriptive normative approach. The slight moment where a glimpse of prescriptive normativity is invoked, he encourages the continual struggle for the great refusal. This is how I read the final reference to Walter Benjamin, “[critical theory] wants to remain loyal to those who, without hope, have given and give their life to the Great Refusal” (Ibid.). Even if we are hopeless, we must give our life to the great refusal. We must be committed, in Huey Newton’s terms, to “revolutionary suicide”, to foolishly struggling even when no glimpse of hope is to be found, for only in struggling when there is no hope, can the conditions for the possibility of hope arise.

Analysis

There are very few observations in this text to which we can point to as relevant in our context. The central thesis of a comfortable ‘happy consciousness’ which commensurates all classes under a common consumerist culture is a hard sell in a world in which labor has seen its century long fought for gains drawn back over the last 50 years.[ii] Neoliberalism has effectively normalized what William L. Robinson calls the “Wal-Martization of labor,”[iii] i.e., conditions in which work is less unionized, less secure, lower paid, and given less benefits. These conditions, along with the growing polarization of wealth and income, render Marcuse’s analysis of the post-WW2 welfare state impertinent. I lament to say that the most valuable take-away of ODM for revolutionaries today is where it failed, for this failure continues to be quite prevalent amongst many self-proclaimed socialist in the west. This failure, I argue, consist of Marcuse’s equating of capitalist states with socialist experiments.

 Marcuse’s ODM unites the socialist and capitalist parts of the world as two interdependent systems existing within the one-dimensional logic that prioritizes “the means over the end” (HM, 53). For Marcuse, the socialist part of the world has been unable to administer in praxis what it claims to be in theory; there is effectively a “contradiction between theory and facts” (HM, 189). Although this contradiction does not, according to him, “falsify the former,” it nonetheless creates the conditions for a socialism that is not qualitatively different to capitalism (Ibid.). The socialist camp, like capitalism, “exploits the productivity of labor and capital without structural resistance, while considerably reducing working hours and augmenting the comforts of life” (HM, 43). In essence, his argument boils down to 20th century socialism being unable to create a qualitatively new alternative to capitalism, and in this failure, it has replicated, sometimes in forms unique to it, the mechanisms of exploitation and opposition-absorption (through happy consciousness, false needs, military resistance, etc.), that are prevalent in the capitalist system.

There are a few fundamental problems in Marcuse’s equalization, which all stem, I will argue, from his inability to carry dialectical thinking onto his analysis of the socialist camp. In not doing so, Marcuse himself reproduces the positivistic forms of thought which dismember “facts” from the factors which brought them about. Because of this, even if the ‘facts’ in both camps appear the same, claiming that they are so ignores the contextual and historical relations that led to those ‘facts’ appearing similar.

For Marcuse to say that the socialist camp, like the capitalist, was able to recreate the distractingly comfortable forms of life that make for a smoother exploitation of workers, he must ignore the conditions, both present and historical, that allowed this fact to arise. Capitalism was able to achieve this ‘comfortable’ life for its working masses because it spent the last three centuries colonizing the world to ensure that the resources of foreign lands would be disposable to western capital. This process of western capitalist enrichment required the genocide of the native (for its lands), and the enslavement of the African (for its labor) and created the conditions for the 20th century struggle between western capital for dividing up the conquered lands and bodies of the third world. But even with this historical and contextual process of expropriation and exploitation, the fruits of this were not going to the working classes of the western nations because of the generosity of the owning class, regardless of how much they benefited from creating this ‘labor aristocracy.’ Rather, the only reason why this process slightly came to benefit the popular classes in the US was a result of century long labor struggles in the country, most frequently led by communists, socialists, and anarchist within labor unions.

The socialist camp, on the other hand, industrialized their backwards countries in a fraction of the time it took the west, without having to colonize lands, genocide natives, or enslave blacks. On the contrary, regardless of the mistakes that were made, and the unfortunate effects of these, the industrialization process in the socialist camp was inextricably linked to the empowering of the peripheral subjects, whether African, Asian, Middle-Eastern, or Indo-American, that had been under the boot of western colonialism and imperialism for centuries. The ‘third-world’ Marcuse leaves the potential role of historical subjectivity to, was only able to sustain autonomy because of the solidarity and aid – political, military, or economic in kind, it received from the socialist camp. Those who were unable, for various reasons, to establish relations with the socialist camp, replicated, in a neo-colonial fashion, the relations they had with their ‘previous’ metropoles. In fact, history showed that the ‘fall’ of this camp led the countries in the third world that sustained an autonomous position (thanks to the comradely relations they established with the socialist world), to be quickly overturned into subjected servitude to western capital.

By stating that the socialist camp was unable to affect a materialization in praxis of its theory, and as such, that it was not qualitatively different from capitalism (making the equating of the two possible), Marcuse effectively demonstrates his ignorance, willful or not, of the geopolitical situation of the time. Socialism in the 20th century could not create its ideal qualitatively new society while simultaneously defending its revolution from military, economic, and biowarfare attacks coming from the largest imperial powers in the history of humanity. Liberation cannot fully express itself under these conditions, for, the liberation of one is connected to the liberation of all. The communist ideal whereby human relations are based “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” is only realizable under the global totalizing disappearance of all forms of exploitation and oppression. It is idealist and infantile to expect this reality to arise in a world where capitalism exists even at the farthest corner of the earth, even less in a world where the hegemonized form of global relations is capitalistic.

Nonetheless, even Marcuse is forced to admit that the socialist camp was able to create a comfortable life for its working masses. But, unlike Marcuse argues, this comfort in the socialist camp cannot be equated with comfort in the capitalist camp. Not only are the conditions that led to the comfort in each fundamentally different (as just previously examined), but the comfort itself, as a fact, was also radically different. In terms of job security, housing, healthcare, education, childcare, and other forms of government provided social securities, the comfort in the socialist camp was significantly higher than the comfort experienced by the working masses in the welfare social democracies in Europe, and tenfold that of the comfort experienced by the working masses in the US. When to this you add the ability for political participation through worker councils and the party, the prevalent spirit of solidarity that reigned, and the general absence of racism and crime, the foolishness of the equalization is further highlighted. Nonetheless, the comparison must not be made just between the capitalist and socialist camp, but between the conditions before and after the socialist camp achieved socialism. Doing so allows one to historically contextualize the achievements of the socialist camp in terms of creating dignified and freer lives for hundreds of millions of people. For these people, Marcuse’s comments are somewhere between laughable and symbolic of the usual disrespect of western intelligentsia.

Although Marcuse was unable to live long enough to see this, the fall of the socialist camp, and the subsequent ‘shock therapy’ that went with it, not only devastated the countries of the previous socialist camp – drastically rising the rates of poverty, crime, prostitution, inequality, while lowering the standard of living, life expectancy, and the opportunities for political participation – but also the countries of the third world and those of the capitalist camp themselves! With the threat of communism gone, the third world was up for grabs again, and the first world, no longer under the pressure of the alternative that a comfortable working mass in the socialist camp presented, was free to extend the wrath of capital back into its own national popular classes, eroding century long victories in the labor movement and creating the conditions for precarious, unregulated, and more exploitative work.

Works like One-Dimensional Man, which take upon the task of criticizing and equating ‘both sides,’ do the work of one side, i.e., of capitalism, in creating a ‘left’ campaign of de-legitimizing socialist experiments. This process of creating a ‘left’ de-legitimation campaign is central for the legitimation of capital. This text (ODM) is the quintessential example of one of the ways capitalism absorbs its opposition by placing it as a midpoint between it and the real threat of a truly socialist alternative. It is because the idealistic and non-dialectical logic of capital infiltrates these ‘left’ anti-communist theorists that they can condemn and equate socialist experiments with capitalism. If there is a central takeaway from Marcuse’s text, it is to guard ourselves against participating in this left-anticommunism theorizing that prostitutes itself for capital to create the conditions whereby the accidental ‘faults’ of pressured socialist experiments are equated with the systematic contradictions in capitalist countries. In a world racing towards a new cold war, it is the task of socialists in the heart of the empire to fiercely reject and deconstruct the state-department narratives of socialist and non-socialist experiments attempting to establish themselves autonomously outside of the dominion of US imperialism. Acknowledging how Marcuse failed to do this in ODM helps us prevent his mistake.

Carlos L. Garrido is a philosophy graduate student and assistant at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. His specialization is in Marxist philosophy and the history of American socialist thought (esp. early 19th century). He is an editorial board member and co-founder of Midwestern Marx  and the Journal of American Socialist Studies. 

Notes

[i] Reference will be to the following edition: Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. (Beacon Press, 1966).

[ii] Perhaps even longer, for The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 had already began these drawbacks. Nonetheless, 1964 is a bit too early to begin to see its effects, especially for an academic observing from outside the labor movement.

[iii] Robinson, L. William. Latin America and Global Capitalism. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008)., p. 23.

Frantz Fanon and the Algerian Revolution Today

By Hamza Hamouchene

Republished from Review of African Political Economy.

Sixty years after the death of the revolutionary Frantz Fanon and the publication of his masterpiece, The Wretched of the Earth, Algeria is undergoing another revolution. In the first of a two-part blogpost, Hamza Hamouchene provides a brief historical account of Fanon’s anti-colonial thought, his critique of the postcolonial ruling elites and the new popular movement (Hirak) engulfing Algeria.

This two-part long read is an extract from a chapter in a forthcoming book Fanon Today: The Revolt and Reason of the Wretched of the Earth (edited by Nigel Gibson, Daraja Press 2021).

During the upheavals that the North African and West Asian region witnessed a decade ago–what has been dubbed the ‘Arab Spring’- Fanon’s thought proved to be as relevant as ever. Not only relevant, but insightful in helping to grasp the violence of the world we live in, and the necessity of a sustained rebellion against it.

Fanon’s wrote during in a period of decolonisation in Africa and elsewhere in the Global South. Born in Martinique, a French colony in the Caribbean, though Algerian by choice, he wrote from the vantage point of the Algerian revolution against French colonialism and of his political experiences on the African continent. Today, we might ask: can his analyses transcend the limitations of time? Can we learn from him as a committed intellectual and revolutionary thinker? Or should we just reduce him to another anti-colonial figure, largely irrelevant for our post-colonial times?

For me, as an Algerian activist, Fanon’s dynamic and revolutionary thinking, always about creation, movement and becoming, remains prophetic, vivid and committed to emancipation from all forms of oppression. He strongly and compellingly argued for a path to a future where humanity ‘advances a step further’ and breaks away from the world of colonialism and European universalism. Fanon represented the maturing of anti-colonial consciousness and he was a decolonial thinker par excellence.

Despite his short life (he died at the age of 36 from leukaemia in 1961), Fanon’s thought is rich and his work, in books, papers and speeches, prolific. He wrote his first book Black Skin, White Masks in 1952, two years before Điện Biên Phủ (the defeat of the French in a crucial battle in Vietnam) and his last book, The Wretched of the Earth in 1961. His 1961 classic became a treatise on the anti-colonialist and Third-Worldist struggle, one year before Algerian independence, at a moment when sub-Saharan African countries were gaining their independence–an experience in which Fanon was deeply and practically involved.

In Fanon’s intellectual journey, we can see the interactions between Black America and Africa, between the intellectual and the militant, between theory and practice, idealism and pragmatism, individual analysis and collective action, the psychological life (he trained as a psychiatrist) and physical struggle, nationalism and Pan-Africanism and finally between questions of colonialism and those of neo-colonialism.

Fanon did not live to see his adoptive country become free from French colonial domination, something he believed had become inevitable. Yet his experiences and analysis were the prism through which many revolutionaries abroad understood Algeria and helped to turn the country into the mecca of Third World revolution.

Six decades after the publication of his masterpiece The Wretched, Algeria is witnessing another revolution, this time against the national bourgeoisie that Fanon railed against in his ferocious chapter ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness.’

Fanon and colonial Algeria

The Algerian independence struggle against the French was one of the most inspiring anti-imperialist revolutions of the 20th century. It was part of a wave of decolonisation that had started after the Second World War in India, China, Cuba, Vietnam and many countries in Africa. The wave of decolonisation inscribed itself in the spirit of the Bandung Conference and the era of the ‘awakening of the South’, the Third world as  it was then known, which has been subjected to decades of colonial and capitalist domination under several forms, from protectorates to settler colonies.

Frantz Fanon methodically unpicked the mechanisms of violence put in place by colonialism. He wrote: ‘Colonialism is not a thinking machine, nor a body endowed with reasoning faculties. It is violence in its natural state.’ According to him, the colonial world is a Manichean world (to see things as having only two sides), which goes to its logical conclusion and ‘dehumanises the native, or to speak plainly it turns him into an animal.’

What followed the insurrection on November 1, 1954, launched by nationalist forces against the French, was one of the longest and bloodiest wars of decolonisation, which saw the widespread involvement of the rural poor and urban popular classes. Huge numbers of Algerians were killed in the eight-year war against the French that ended in 1962, a war that has become the foundation of modern Algerian politics.

Arriving at Blida psychiatric hospital in 1953 in French controlled Algeria, Fanon realised quickly that colonisation, in its essence, produced madness. For him, colonisation was a systematic negation of the other and a refusal to attribute humanity to them. In contrast to other forms of domination, the violence here was total, diffuse, and permanent.

Treating both French torturers and liberation fighter, Fanon could not escape this total violence. This led him to resign in 1956 and to join the Front de libération nationale (FLN). He wrote: ‘The Arab, alienated permanently in his own country, lives in a state of absolute depersonalisation.’ He added that the Algerian war was ‘a logical consequence of an abortive attempt to decerebralise a people’.

Fanon saw colonial ideology being underpinned by the affirmation of white supremacy and its ‘civilising mission.’ The result was the development in the ‘indigènes évolués’ (literally the more  evolved natives) of a desire to be white, a desire which is nothing more than an existential aberration. However, this desire stumbles upon the unequal character of the colonial system which assigns places according to colour.

Throughout his professional work and militant writings, Fanon challenged the dominant culturalist and racist approaches on the ‘native’: Arabs are lazy, liars, deceivers, thieves, etc. He advanced a materialist explanation, situating symptoms, behaviours, self-hatred and inferiority complexes in a life of oppression and the reality of unequal colonial relations.

Fanon believed in revolutionary Algeria. His illuminating book A Dying Colonialism (published in 1959) or as it is known in French L’An Cinq de la Révolution Algérienne, shows how liberation does not come as a gift. It is seized by the popular classes with their own hands and by seizing it they are themselves transformed. He strongly argued the most elevated form of culture–that is to say, of progress–is to resist colonial domination. For Fanon, revolution was a transformative process that created ‘new souls.’ For this reason, Fanon closes his 1959 book with the words: ‘The revolution …changes man and renews society, has reached an advanced stage. This oxygen which creates and shapes a new humanity–this, too, is the Algerian revolution.’

Bankruptcy of the post-colonial ruling elites

Unfortunately, the Algerian revolution and its attempt to break from the imperialist-capitalist system was defeated, both by counter-revolutionary forces and by its own contradictions. The revolution harboured the seeds of its own failure from the start: it was a top-down, authoritarian, and highly bureaucratic project (albeit with some redistributive aspects that improved people’s lives in the reforms carried out in the first years of independence).

However, the creative experiences of workers’ initiatives and self-management of the 1960s and 1970s were undermined by a paralyzing state bureaucracy that failed to genuinely involve workers in the control of the processes of production. This lack of democracy was connected with the ascendancy of a comprador bourgeoisie that was hostile to socialism, workers control and staunchly opposed to genuine land reform.

By the 1980s, the global neoliberal counter-revolution was the nail in the coffin and ushered in an age of deindustrialization and pro-market policies in Algeria, at the expense of the popular classes. The dignitaries of the new neoliberal orthodoxy declared that everything was for sale and opened the way for mass privatization.

Fanon’s work still bears a prophetic power as an accurate description of what happened in Algeria and elsewhere in the Global South. Fanon foretold the bankruptcy and sterility of national bourgeoisies in Africa and the Middle East today. A ‘profiteering caste’, he wrote, that tended to replace the colonial ruling class with a new class-based system replicating the old structures of exploitation and oppression.

By the 1980s, the Algerian national bourgeoisie had dispensed with popular legitimacy, turned its back on the realities of poverty and underdevelopment. In Fanon’s terms, this parasitic and unproductive bourgeoisie (both civilian and military) was the greatest threat to the sovereignty of the nation. In Algeria, this class was closely connected to the ruling party, the FLN, and renounced the autonomous development initiated in the 1960s and offered one concession after another for privatizations and projects that would undermine the country’s sovereignty and endanger its population and environment–the exploitation of shale gas and offshore resources being just one example.

Today, Algeria–but also Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, Gabon, Angola and South Africa, among others–follows the dictates of the new instruments of imperialism such as the IMF, the World Bank and negotiate entry into the World Trade Organisation. Some African countries continue to use the CFA franc (renamed Eco in December 2019), a currency inherited from colonialism and still under the control of the French Treasury.

Fanon predicted this behaviour of the national bourgeoisie when he noted that its mission has nothing to do with transforming the nation but rather consists of ‘being the transmission line between the nation and capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the masque of neo-colonialism.’ Fanon’s analysis of the class basis of independence speaks to the contemporary postcolonial reality, a reality shaped by a national bourgeoisie ‘unabashedly…anti-national,’ opting he added, for the path of a conventional bourgeoisie, ‘a bourgeoisie which is stupidly, contemptibly and cynically bourgeois.’

Fanon also noted in 1961 the international division of labour, where we Africans ‘still export raw materials and continue being Europe’s small farmers who specialise in unfinished products.’ Algeria remains in a extractivist model of development where profits are accumulated in the hands of a foreign-backed minority at the expense of dispossession of the majority.

The Hirak and the new Algerian revolution

Fanon alerted us sixty years ago that the enrichment of this ‘profiteering caste’ will be accompanied by ‘a decisive awakening on the part of the people and a growing awareness that promised stormy days to come.’ In 2019 Algerians shattered the wall of fear and broke from a process that had infantilised and dazed them for decades. They erupted onto the political scene, discovered their political will and began again to make history.

Since 22 February 2019, millions of people, young and old, men and women from different social classes rose in a momentous rebellion. Historic Friday marches, followed by protests in professional sectors, united people in their rejection of the ruling system and their demands of radical democratic change. ‘They must all go!’ (Yetnahaw ga’), ‘The country is ours and we’ll do what we wish’ (Lablad abladna oundirou rayna), became two emblematic slogans of the uprising, symbolising the radical evolution of a popular movement (Al Hirak Acha’bi). The uprising was triggered by the incumbent president Bouteflika’s announcement that he would run for a fifth term despite suffering from aphasia and being absent from public life.

The movement (Hirak) is unique in its scale, peaceful character, national spread–including the marginalised south, and participation of women and young people, who constitute the majority of Algeria’s population. The extent of popular mobilisation has not been seen since 1962, when Algerians went to the streets to celebrate their hard-won independence from France.

The popular classes have affirmed their role as agents in their own destiny. We can use Fanon’s exact words to describe this phenomenon: ‘The thesis that men change at the same time that they change the world has never been as manifest as it is now in Algeria. This trial of strength not only remodels the consciousness that man has of himself, and of his former dominators or of the world, at last within his reach. The struggle at different levels renews the symbols, the myths, the beliefs, the emotional responsiveness of the people. We witness in Algeria man’s reassertion of his capacity to progress.’

The Hirak succeeded in unravelling the webs of deceit that were deployed by the ruling class and its propaganda machine. Moreover, the evolution of its slogans, chants, and forms of resistance, is demonstrative of processes of politicisation and popular education. The re-appropriation of public spaces created a kind of an agora where people discuss, debate, exchange views, talk strategy and perspectives, criticize each other or simply express themselves in many ways including through art and music. This has opened new horizons for resisting and building together.

Cultural production also took on another meaning because it was associated with liberation and seen as a form of political action and solidarity. Far from the folkloric and sterile productions under the suffocating patronage of authoritarian elites, we have seen instead a culture that speaks to the people and advances their resistance and struggles through poetry, music, theatre, cartoons, and street-art. Again, we see Fanon’s insights in his theorisation of culture as a form of political action: ‘A national culture is not a folklore, nor an abstract populism that believes it can discover the people’s true nature. It is not made up of the inert dregs of gratuitous actions, that is to say actions which are less and less attached to the ever-present reality of the people.’

The struggle of decolonisation continues

Leaving aside largely semantic arguments around whether it is a movement, uprising, revolt or a revolution, one can say for certain that what is taking place in Algeria today is a transformative process, pregnant with emancipatory potential. The evolution of the movement and its demands specifically around ‘independence’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘an end to the pillage of the country’s resources’ are fertile ground for anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and even ecological ideas.

Algerians are making a direct link between their current struggle and the anti-French colonial resistance in the 1950s, seeing their efforts as the continuation of decolonisation. When chanting ‘Generals to the dustbin and Algeria will be independent’, they are laying bare the vacuous official narrative around the glorious revolution and revealing that it has been shamelessly used to pursue personal enrichment. We see a second Fanonian moment where people expose the neo-colonial situation and emphasise one unique characteristic of their uprising: its rootedness in the anti-colonial struggle against the French.

Slogans and chants have captured this desire and made references to anti-colonial war veterans such as Ali La Pointe, Amirouche, Ben Mhidi and Abane: ‘ Oh Ali [la pointe] your descendants will never stop until they wrench their freedom!’ and ‘We are the descendants of Amirouche and we will never go back!’

The struggle of decolonisation is being given a new lease of life as Algerians lay claim to the popular and economic sovereignty that was denied to them when formal independence was achieved in 1962. In Fanon’s prophetic words: ‘The people who at the beginning of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manichaeism of the settler–Blacks and Whites, Arabs and Christians–realise as they go along that it sometimes happens that you get Blacks who are whiter than the whites and the hope of an independent nation does not always tempt certain strata of the populations to give up their interests or privileges.’

Hamza Hamouchene is an Algerian researcher-activist and commentator, he works as the North Africa Programme Coordinator for the Transnational Institute (TNI).

Null Space and Null Existence Under the Spectacle

By Mike Templeton

Exit any stretch of interstate and you will immediately be confronted with the mass of business which defines contemporary American existence. From the multi-lane interchange that draws you off the interstate highway to the seemingly endless retail and restaurant chains, life is one continuous stretch of consumer destinations. Gas stations are full-service outlets selling roller food, beer and wine, lottery tickets, trinkets, ball caps, etc. The gas pumps now have video screens so you can watch sports update videos and some kind of corporate version of the news while you pump gas. From this point onward it is nothing but consumption. Consumer existence is human existence.

The full-service gas stations are generally the first places you encounter upon exiting the highway. BP, Speedway, Pilot—it really does not matter which specific brand you choose they all offer the same things. There are hotdog rollers with taquitos and three or four forms of processed meat tubes. Gourmet coffee and “cappuccino” machines that pour frothy French Vanilla and Caramel flavored hot drinks loaded with high-fructose corn syrup are available at stations with glossy images of crafted Starbuck’s-style drinks. There are generally two walls of coolers stocked with every known soft drink. They have a section for a dozen or so brands of beer ranging from the common American corporate brands to the so-called craft brews (all of which are owned and brewed by the corporate American brands). Row upon row of food-substances the origins of which are unknown and unknowable. Then you move to the microwavable food stations. Many of these service stations have now partnered with fast food chains so some sort of drive-through fare is also available. The entire panoply of consumer choice and consumer life are contained under these multi-purpose service stations designed to make your stop from the interstate as seamless and convenient as possible. Of course, the most important commodity on offer is gasoline: the blood that is the life of contemporary life.

Surrounding these service stations, stretching for miles in any direction, are fast food and restaurant chains of all types and varieties. The obvious McDonald’s, Taco Bell, Wendy’s, etc. are punctuated by the more elaborate fare found in Outback, Cracker Barrell, and Chilie’s. Food of every known kind can be obtained either in drive through or take out, or in the form of an actual dine-in experience with wait staff. Along with food, these thoroughfares will feature Target, Walmart, Home Depot, etc. Each of these big-box retail stores will anchor an entire strip of other retail stores such as Staples and Home Goods. Within these plazas there are also stores with shorter lives: Chinese and Indian take-out, used video game stores, Hallmark stores, Christian bookstores, etc. None of these last long, and each is replaced with something equally transient. Not only is the merchandise consumable and disposable, so are the retail outlets which provide the merchandise.

Nearly any exit off an American interstate will look like what I describe above. Each will be identical. The only changes will be local versions of the same thing—White Castle in the north turns into Krystal in the south. The local fare will reflect the regional identities to the extent that regional identities are easily identifiable across all regions. This is to say that a restaurant in Tennessee will offer something unique to the state of Tennessee only insofar as anyone from outside the region would be able to understand the image. “Hillbilly” will be packaged and marketed so that people from Maine, Minnesota, and California are not in any way mystified by the image of Tennessee. All big-box retail stores are the same in every state and region. Stand in a Target in Ohio and you are standing in the same Target as the one in Nevada. You are effectively in the same place since the place itself is as interchangeable and exchangeable as everything in the store.

Beyond the retail strip and restaurant chains, housing developments stretch off into the distances. Farmland may well still exist, but the developments of new housing will invariably stretch along or through the rural landscape. Each subdivision differs only in the most superficial ways. These are houses which are built in precisely the same way as all mass-produced commodities. Within each subdivision, all individual structures will be virtually identical, differing only in superficial details. These housing developments are arranged so as to create the illusion of a neighborhood. Streets arranged in rows or semi-circles all of which join a central street which is connected to the main artery of retail and commercial sprawl. The neighborhoods are generally named after local features such as trees and geological forms none of which can be seen since all of these things were removed to make way for the retail, restaurant, and housing complexes and sprawls which now occupy the terrain.

Some areas off the interstates are devoted primarily to commercial development. These consist mostly of information processing industries, transportation of goods and services, and corporate headquarters for companies which may still be in the business of manufacturing goods, but the actual manufacturing takes place miles away, often in different countries altogether. Shipping companies occupy large areas in order to facilitate the transfer and movement of consumer goods. Office parks occupy massive geographical areas with enormous parking lots. Surrounding all of the commercial plots are carefully landscaped grounds complete with circulating lakes and manicured greenspaces. The natural environment which once defined these areas, the rural landscapes and natural terrain were completely cleared and replaced by these artificial landscapes which give rise to an industry of landscaping and lawncare all to itself.

The images described above have overtaken the American landscape. Various regions of the country will differ according to the climate, but the basic layout of consumer life, commercial development, and suburban development will remain constant. There is no place that is significantly different than any other place. Place itself is interchangeable and exchangeable so that individual places no longer exist except insofar as places have been commodified and branded. Neighborhoods exist because land developers have named them as neighborhoods. Regional identities exist to the extent that they are marketable brands of regional identities. Individual places are unrecognizable, and the space between individual places exists only to be overcome with the greatest speed and convenience. Even the fundamental identity of the rural world and rural culture has been effaced by the encroachment of consumer life and suburban development. The only remnant of rural life is the brand of rural life found in Cracker Barrell where one can buy “farm-style” breakfast plates stuffed with every example of breakfast food imaginable. These feed people who sit in cars and work in offices and only walk as far as the front doors of their newly constructed pre-fab homes to their cars.

Although all of this development takes place within the domain of civic authority, the actual force of authority are the capitalist ventures which own the land and the points of consumption. This is to say that all actual power and authority remains squarely within the realm of capitalist ownership. Civil law and the concept of a civic arena are subordinate to the private ventures which fuel these forms of consumer developments and the consumer culture which drives the private ventures. It is a reciprocal system to the extent that individual demand drives corporate development and corporate development creates the space and conditions for consumer demand. This is a purely spectacular world, one which is driven by forms of authority which far exceed the civic domain. The cultural conditions of contemporary American terrain are defined by the capitalist drives which fuel consumer culture, and this finds its most extreme expression in landscape I have described above. As Debord explains:

At the core of these conditions we naturally find an authoritarian decision-making process that abstractly develops any environment into an environment of abstraction. The same architecture appears everywhere just as soon as industrialization begins. (The Society of the Spectacle, 122-123)

American geography has become an environment of abstraction. The Real—any idea of the Real—which may have once existed has been plowed under and replaced by abstract forms of geography designed entirely to facilitate a culture of pure consumption, a culture which produces nothing but consumption and waste. The lives of individuals who live in these regions are defined in terms of consumption and waste. All commodities lose value the moment they are purchased and must endlessly be renewed with new versions of the same thing. This is culture abstracted from material life and rendered entirely in the form of consumption.

Consumer capital is all there is, and virtually all of life is subsumed by consumer capital. Basic needs are provided through a diffuse network of supply which is so far removed from the sources of food, fuel, electricity, and water that all of these things appear to simply appear ex nihilo. The massive waste generated by this world is also removed and landfilled in regions largely cut-off from the lives and businesses which generate the waste. Once dumped, it no longer exists. The super-highway interstate system makes all of this possible. A vast system of interstates connects the entire country via a network of space which provides nothing but the means to move past it. The space of the interstate system is nothing but space to be overcome. The sole reason for its being is to pass it behind. The interstate system and the worlds which develop along their length and breadth are heterotopias, abstract spaces on which abstract lives are lived in relation to a world which grows ever more abstract. What is the highway but a space of abstraction in which “(t)he undifferentiated daily flow is punctuated only by the statistical, foreseen, and foreseeable series of accidents, about which THEY keep us all the better informed as we never see them with our own eyes—accidents which are never experienced as events, as deaths, but as a passing disruption whose every trace is erased within the hour” (This is Not a Program, 152). As the highway effaces all difference through its endless uniformity and totalizing program of mathematical planning and control, everything else becomes undifferentiated to the point that what marks one “thing” apart from another is lost. Accidents and real deaths are experienced only as transitory moments in which the ceaseless flow becomes momentarily interrupted. And as all space becomes continuous in a seamless flow of undifferentiated space, space itself is lost. Designed to facilitate the movement over distances, “the pure space of the highway captures the abstraction of all place more than all distance” (152). This “all place” is also the multiple “places” in which everyday life is now lived in the abstraction of space. Suburban sprawl is pure abstraction laid out in accordance with the abstraction of the highway.

The places which emerge at every exit and on-ramp off and onto the highway are completely interchangeable and exchangeable places. They are nothing but forms of abstract space. The housing developments are abstractions based on a flimsy reference to what once occupied actual places. Where there were farms, expanses of woodland, and even small towns, there are now abstractions of those places that bear metonymical links with what once marked those places as real. The woodland that was clear-cut and plowed under is replaced with a pre-fab development of completely indistinguishable housing units arranged in some geometric pattern and then named after a species of tree which once grew in the woodland. It may be named after a native American tribe wiped out centuries ago, and now the local school system takes its name. The lost Lakota Indians become Lakota High School and the people who live in this abstract no-place can find a point of identification with the linguistic representation of an idea no one knows anything about and suture that linguistic representation to a life which unfolds amid absolutely nothing but things to be consumed. Words and individual identities are evacuated of all meaning and re-filled with exchangeable meanings that can be traded along the interstate corridor of abstraction. Consumption is life, and life takes place in the abstract space of pure nullity.

All of life is “presided over in unmediated fashion by the requirements of consumption” (Debord, 123). What of the culture of this world? What emerges within this landscape of nullity is a new form of peasantry, one which is conditioned entirely by the logic of consumer society. Unlike the old peasantry in which natural ignorance was a function of an isolated world, the new peasantry is conditioned to their ignorance by a cultural logic which denies anything exterior to consumer culture. In this landscape of consumerism,

Natural ignorance has given way to the organized spectacle of error. The “new towns” [subdivisions] of technological pseudo-peasantry are the clearest indications, inscribed on the land, of the break with historical time on which they are founded: their motto might well be: “On this spot nothing will ever happen—and nothing ever has.” (124)

An organized spectacle of error is the inevitable result of a population who derive all knowledge of the world from the spectacle of the image and the mediation of the commodity. Nothing can be known except insofar as it is represented in a consumable form that is exchangeable with any other commodity. Therefore, knowledge itself is a commodity, and if it is not commodified knowledge, it is not knowledge. The break with historical time comes about, at least in part, from the ex nihilo fashion in which these communities spring up around consumer culture and consumer culture springs up around these communities. The process is one of expressive causality. One aspect of consumer life does not precede the other. The entire landscape and culture of the American landscape now simply appears on the horizon complete with everything I described above and much more. Any history of the regions which may have preceded the creation of the consumer landscape is denuded with the very land on which the spaces are built. Since this historical narrative is completely negated, any narrative of the existence of these regions is created from within the same cultural logic by which they come into being. Nothing ever happened here because everything happens exactly the same way every minute of every day. Nothing will ever happen here because everything that could happens is a reproduction of everything else that has ever happened. The term peasantry is perfect since what we see in the people whose lives are defined by these regions and the forms of culture which define these regions consists of a population which lives in total ignorance of what is beyond the society of the spectacle.

We are left with a geography of homogeneity and a population which mistakes this homogenous nullification of life for life itself. There are no spaces to be; only spaces to have…

Michael Templeton is an independent scholar, writer, and musician. He completed his Ph.D. in literary studies at Miami University of Ohio in 2005. He has published scholarly studies and written cultural analysis, creative non-fiction, and poetry published in small independent publications. He currently works as a freelance writer providing articles for a non-profit called the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. He is also the lead guitar player for the IdleAires, a communications service and information dissemination apparatus operating as a Rock n' Roll trio. I live in Cincinnati, Ohio with my wife who is an artist.

Works Cited

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Tr. Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: Zone           Books,1995.

The Invisible Committee. This is Not a Program. Tr. Joshua David Jordan. Cambridge:

Semiotext(e). 2011.

Digital Capitalism Gives the Working Class a New Opportunity for Emancipation

Illustration by David Plunkert

By Jaime Caro-Morente

Mark Fisher, in his book Capitalist Realism, wondered if there was already no alternative to capitalism. This work captures the feeling of defeat that the international left has in the face of the failure of the experiments of real socialism in the Soviet world and the capitulation to the global neoliberalism that destroyed the Welfare State in the 70s.

Before this neoliberal world, which is nothing more than ultra-financed capitalism, it seemed that there was no possible alternative: the labor movement was disintegrated due to the impossibility of finding its enemies and the lack of true emancipatory examples. The 68´s Revolutions in the Western world showed that this supposed disintegration of the left, being incapable of developing a clear alternative to both capitalism and ultra-bureaucratic regimes, decided to find the emancipatory path by looking at all social constructs and bodies, which until that moment had kept quiet in their bosom under the premise of “your time will come when socialism arrives"; that is, the feminism and the anti-racist struggle, and after them the queer liberation movement, with a clear socialist surface. From the 70s to the present day, the left has advanced a lot in the field of conquering social rights for women, racialized bodies, and the LGTBQ + collective, but they have always found that there is one last impediment to achieving total emancipation: that monster that is the capitalist system.

Nowadays, the entire left knows perfectly well that none of the struggles can be carried out —that they can achieve their emancipatory objective —if they are not capable of destroying the system that oppresses them as a whole (capitalism), and afterwards creating another system free from these oppressions. But of course, the drive or strength that the labor movement had was totally overwhelmed by financial capitalism and delocalization: it seems that history repeats itself, in this case, we go back to the 30s, to the Steinbeck novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In this novel, all the inhabitants of a town found that there was a company that sent its workers to destroy their farms because “they were supposedly not productive.” Although they all had the same problem and wanted to fight against the company, when they demand to the guy who drives the tractor to see the boss to chat and negotiate — start a class struggle — he tells them that he doesn’t even know who the boss is; that the boss is someone in New York, or that he is Wall Street. They were facing a monster that they could not confront or even see; in fact, they say that if this guy continues with his work, they will shoot him. His response? That it will not matter because they will only be killing one of their own (since he was simply a worker from the town as well) and that the company will send another man to finish the job. In this world of crisis, these men were cannon fodder — they needed work to survive and no matter how much solidarity they had with their people, there was no one to fight against.

And this is how the international working class has felt since neoliberalism began in the 70s, without knowing who to fight against. It has been Wall Street, yes. It is capital. It is capitalism. But there are many Wall Streets, capital is everywhere, capitalism is all-encompassing, and everything is interwoven in a way in which you can blame the entire system while throwing punches in the air. Many people on the left have proposed a return to the Nation-States; that is, to broaden the Welfare State and attempt to wrangle the monster of neoliberalism, State by State. This solution seems practical until you realize that the United States, as a state, cannot prevent General Motors from taking production from Michigan to Mexico or Southeast Asia, in constant search of near-slave labor while leaving the industrialized and unionized working class in the dust. It has become obvious, in this late stage of capitalism, that states and their governments are totally subjugated by these industrial companies, which in turn only respond to the great neoliberal forces of capital… the objectives of financial capitalism.

At this point, we must introduce the work “No-Logo” of Naomi Klein, which shows in a fantastic way how this neoliberal financial capitalism operates in terms of production: jobs are not destroyed, but rather they migrate to other parts where the working classes are “not conscious” or have not fought for as much protection as the European or American ones. Therefore, at the end of No-Logo, there is only one possible way out: the proletarian internationalism that Marx and Engels once put as the most important “mission” of the working class. But of course, the labor movements in India and Southeast Asia have either been crushed as well, or companies have managed to once again migrate their productions to other areas where there is less class consciousness and/or greater degrees of interdependence due to colonialism and imperialism.

With the rise of digital capitalism, we find ourselves with an absolute realignment of a totally international class struggle, which allows the working class two clear advantages: 1) everything “digital” allows an interconnection and cooperation of the working classes from different parts of the world that was not possible before, and 2) digital technology (algorithms) can be used to manage the production of a new world that is not based solely on the invisible hand and the Market, in its capitalist sense. The second capability is essential as it would eliminate the need for tightly-wound bureaucracies that can stall the socialist transition to communism, while at the same time effectively coordinate where consumer goods are needed. If we apply this technological revolution to our productive capacities, we can overcome the fraudulent claims put forth by classical and neoclassical economists regarding capitalism, giving rise to an emancipation that could be classified as a sort of cybercommunism. We are on the cusp of such technology and must contemplate it for the future, while digital capitalism is giving the working class a unifying force like never before. The arrival of companies like Google, Amazon or Facebook have shown this potential. Google and Facebook are two paradigmatic cases — companies already based on the extraction of data from billions of individuals on the planet and the coordination of matching goods with these individuals anywhere in the world. Under capitalism, this potential is wasted, abused, and corrupted with the worst of intentions in its obsessive pursuit of profit. Under socialism, these models can represent forces of production and distribution that require minimal human labor. These companies have very few workers in relation with the old production chains of companies such as General Motors or General Electrics but they have the same amount of wealth or even more. A company like Google with 100,000 employees can generate the GDP of several countries in the world at the same time, just like Facebook, which with fewer employees generates the same amount of money.

The example of Amazon is even more pragmatic since it is the hybridization between the old forms of industrial capitalism with the digital one; a company that works like the digital ones, uses personalized ads to generate money, buys and sells items on its website, and even produces its own articles to distribute through a network of hundreds of millions of people. This is the perfect example of how the working class has to organize thanks to this rise of the new digital capitalism. It is useless to unionize workers in a single warehouse in the United States, but equally, it is useless to unionize all workers in Amazon in this country, since Amazon has all the resources to take production to any country in the world. In other words, to be able to twist their arms and amass genuine power, all Amazon workers — from all countries — should unionize in a single union that does not understand the distinction of nations. It would be a working-class, feminist, decolonial and anti-racist union, as the “working class” it represents. And of course, thanks to the digital technological revolution, through our mobile devices this union can perfectly coordinate all its actions around the world, to such an extent that even with different time zones it can call a strike on a global scale to bring even a goliath of capital like Amazon to its knees.

Digital capitalism is giving a golden opportunity to the world working class to organize internationally, as Marx and Engels insisted, and it is giving future tools for the total emancipation of work in an inherently decolonial, feminist, and anti-racist manner; that is to say, intersectional, where all efforts are put into the absolute emancipation of all human beings.

Five Characteristics of Neo-imperialism: Building on Lenin's Theory of Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century

By Cheng Enfu and Lu Baolin

Neoimperialism is the specific contemporary phase of historical development that features the economic globalization and financialization of monopoly capitalism. The characteristics of neoimperialism can be summed up on the basis of the following five key features. First is the new monopoly of production and circulation. The internationalization of production and circulation, together with the intensified concentration of capital, gives rise to giant multinational monopoly corporations whose wealth is nearly as great as that of whole countries. Second is the new monopoly of finance capital, which plays a decisive role in global economic life and generates a malformed development, namely, economic financialization. Third is the monopoly of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property, generating the unequal international division of labor and the polarization of the global economy and wealth distribution. Fourth is the new monopoly of the international oligarchic alliance. An international monopoly alliance of oligarchic capitalism, featuring one hegemonic ruler and several other great powers, has come into being and provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress on the basis of the monopoly. Fifth is the economic essence and general trend. The globalized contradictions of capitalism and various crises of the system often undergo an intensification that creates the new monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund form of contemporary capitalism as late imperialism.

The historical evolution of capitalism has passed through several distinct stages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, capitalism reached the stage of private monopoly, which V. I. Lenin termed the imperialist stage. The era of imperialism brought with it the law of uneven economic and political development. In order to expand overseas and redistribute the territory of the world, the leading powers formed various alliances and launched a fierce struggle that led to two world wars. Eurasia suffered from continuous wars throughout the first half of the twentieth century. One after the other, national democratic revolutions and the communist movement developed continuously. After the Second World War, a number of economically underdeveloped countries adopted a socialist path of development, intensifying the confrontation between capitalism and socialism. Although The Communist Manifesto had long anticipated that capitalism would inevitably be replaced by socialism, this was only possible in a very few countries. The capitalist and imperialist system, despite suffering grave problems, survived. From the 1980s and early ’90s, capitalism carried out a strategic shift to neoliberal policies and evolved into its neoimperialist phase. This represents a new phase in the development of imperialism following the Cold War.

In his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin set out the definition and characteristics of imperialism as follows:

If it were necessary to give the briefest possible definition of imperialism we should have to say that imperialism is the monopoly stage of capitalism.… We must give a definition of imperialism that will include the following five of its basic features: (1) the concentration of production and capital developed to such a high stage that it has created monopolies which play a decisive role in economic life; (2) the merging of bank capital with industrial capital, and the creation, on the basis of this “finance capital,” of a financial oligarchy; (3) the export of capital as distinguished from the export of commodities acquires exceptional importance; (4) the formation of international monopolist capitalist associations which share the world among themselves, and (5) the territorial division of the whole world among the biggest capitalist powers is completed. Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.1

In an article published in December 1917, Lenin further elaborated that: “Imperialism is a specific historical stage of capitalism. Its specific character is threefold: imperialism is monopoly capitalism; parasitic, or decaying capitalism; moribund capitalism.”2

Based on Lenin’s theory of imperialism, we shall analyze contemporary capitalism while bearing in mind the recent changes it has undergone. Neoimperialism, we shall argue, is the phase of late imperialism that has arisen in the contemporary world, against the background of economic globalization and financialization.3 The character and features of neoimperialism can be summarized, as stated, around five aspects.

The New Monopoly of Production and Circulation

Lenin stated that the most profound economic foundation of imperialism is monopoly. This is deeply rooted in the basic law of capitalist competition, which holds that competition results in the concentration of production and capital, and that this concentration will inevitably lead to monopoly when it reaches a certain level. In the early years of the twentieth century, the capitalist world experienced two huge waves of corporate mergers as the concentration of capital and of production reinforced each other. Production came increasingly to be concentrated in a small number of large companies, with the process bringing about organization on the basis of industrial monopolies with cross-sector multiproduct management. Instead of free competition, monopoly alliances held sway. Beginning in the early 1970s, capitalism encountered a “stagflation” crisis that lasted for nearly ten years, followed by a period of secular stagnation, or a long-term decline in growth rates. Economic recession and competitive pressures in the domestic market drove monopoly capital to seek new growth opportunities overseas. With the support of a new generation of information and communications technologies, foreign direct investment and international industrial transfers have continually reached new heights, with the degree of internationalization of production and circulation dwarfing that of the past.

Monopoly capital is being redistributed globally from production to circulation. Through the decentralization and internationalization of production processes, a system has arisen in which global value chains and the operational networks for organizing and managing multinational corporations have been divided up. The multinational companies coordinate their global value chains through complex networks of supplier relationships and through various governance models. In such systems, the processes involved in the production and trading of intermediate products and services are divided up and distributed around the world. The input and output transactions are carried out in the global production and service networks of the subsidiaries, contract partners, and suppliers of the multinational companies. According to statistics, about 60 percent of global trade consists of the exchange of intermediate products and services, and 80 percent of it is achieved via multinational companies.4

Within the new monopoly structures, the second characteristic of neoimperialism is the internationalization of production and circulation. The further concentration of capital leads to the rise of giant monopoly multinational corporations whose wealth may be as great as that of whole countries. Multinational corporations are the true representatives of contemporary international monopolism. The characteristics of the giant monopoly corporations can be summarized as follows.

1. The number of multinational corporations has grown globally, and the degree of socialization and internationalization of production and circulation has reached a higher level.

   Since the 1980s, multinational corporations have become the main driving force of international economic intercourse as the bearers of foreign direct investment. In the 1980s, foreign investment worldwide grew at an unprecedented rate, much faster than the growth during the same period of other major economic variables such as world output and trade. In the 1990s, the scale of international direct investment reached an unprecedented level. Multinationals established branches and affiliates around the world via foreign direct investment, the volume of which had expanded dramatically. Between 1980 and 2008, the number of global multinational companies increased from 15,000 to 82,000. The number of overseas subsidiaries grew even faster, from 35,000 to 810,000. In 2017, an average of over 60 percent of the assets and sales of the world’s one hundred top nonfinancial multinational companies were located or achieved abroad. Foreign employees accounted for approximately 60 percent of total staff.5

   Ever since the capitalist mode of production came into being, the concentration of production activities, expanding collaboration, and the evolution of the social division of labor have led to a continuous increase in the socialization of production. The decentralized labor processes are increasingly moving toward a joint labor process. The facts have proved that the sustained growth of outward foreign direct investment has strengthened the economic ties between all countries, as well as significantly increased the level of socialization and internationalization of the production and distribution systems, in which multinationals play a key role as the dominant force at the micro level. The internationalization of production and the globalization of trade have extensively redefined the way in which countries participate in the international division of labor, and this in turn has reshaped the production methods and profit models within those countries. Throughout the world, the majority of countries and regions are integrated into the network of international production and trade created by these giant corporations. Thousands of companies around the world form value creation nodes in the system of global production chains. Within the global economy, multinational firms have become the main channels for international investment and production, the core organizers of international economic activity, and the engine of global economic growth. The rapid development of multinational corporations shows that in the new imperialist phase constructed around the globalization of capital, the concentration of production and capital is reaching ever greater dimensions. Tens of thousands of multinational corporations now dominate everything.

2. The scale of accumulation by multinational monopoly capital is increasing, forming a multinational corporate empire.

   Although the number of multinational capitalist corporations is not especially large, they all possess great strength. They not only comprise the main force in the development and use of new technologies, but also control the marketing networks and more and more natural and financial resources. On this basis, they have monopolized the proceeds of production and circulation and equipped themselves with an unparalleled competitive advantage. Between 1980 and 2013, benefiting from the expansion of markets and the decline in production factor costs, the profits of the world’s largest 28,000 companies increased from $2 trillion to $7.2 trillion, representing an increase from 7.6 percent to approximately 10 percent of gross world product.6 In addition, these multinational corporations not only form alliances with organs of state power, but also develop links with the global financial system, together forming financial monopoly organizations backed by state support. The globalization and financialization of monopoly capital further consolidate its wealth accumulation. In terms of sales revenue, the economic scale of some multinational corporations exceeds that of a number of developed countries. In 2009, for example, Toyota’s annual sales exceeded the gross domestic product (GDP) of Israel. In 2017, Walmart, rated by the Fortune 500 list as the world’s largest company, achieved total revenues of more than $500 billion, greater than the GDP of Belgium. If we combine the data for multinational corporations and the world’s total of almost two hundred countries, and draw up a list of their annual revenues and GDPs, it becomes clear that the countries represent fewer than 30 percent of the world’s one hundred largest economies, while the corporations account for more than 70 percent.

   If world development continues along these lines, there will be more and more multinational companies whose wealth is similar to that of whole countries. Although industrial globalization has made economic activity more fragmented, vast quantities of profits still flow to a few countries of the developed capitalist world. Investment, trade, exports, and technology transfer are principally managed via the giant multinational corporations or their overseas branches, and the parent companies of these multinational monopolies remain tightly concentrated in geographic terms. In 2017, corporations from the United States, Japan, Germany, France, and the United Kingdom accounted for half of the top five hundred companies in the world. Some two-thirds of the top one hundred multinationals are from these countries.

3. Multinational corporations monopolize the industries in their particular fields, controlling and running international production networks.

   The multinational giants have immense quantities of capital and formidable scientific and technological strengths, which ensure them a dominant position in global production, trade, investment, and finance, as well as in the creation of intellectual property. The economies of scale that result from the monopoly positions enjoyed by multinational corporations have expanded their competitive advantage. This is because “the larger the army of workers among whom the labour is subdivided, the more gigantic the scale on which machinery is introduced, the more in proportion does the cost of production decrease, the more fruitful is the labour.”7 The high degree of monopoly exercised by the multinational corporations means that the concentration of production and the concentration of control over markets reinforce each other, accelerating capital accumulation. Meanwhile, competition and credit, as two powerful levers for the concentration of capital, accelerate capital’s trend of coming under increasingly narrow control as it accumulates. Over the past thirty years, all of the world’s nations have promoted policy options aimed at boosting investment and relaxing the restrictions to which foreign direct investment is subject. Although the increasing scale of outward foreign direct investment by developed countries has to varying degrees accelerated capital formation and the development of human resources in underdeveloped countries, and increased their export competitiveness, it has also brought about large-scale privatization and cross-border mergers and acquisitions in these nations. This has accelerated the process through which small and medium enterprises are bankrupted or forced to merge with multinational corporations. Even relatively large enterprises are vulnerable.

   Around the world, many industries now have an oligopolistic market structure. For example, the global market for central processing units has been almost completely monopolized by the firms Intel and Advanced Micro Devices. As of 2015, the global market for seeds and pesticides was almost entirely controlled by six multinational companies—BASF, Bayer, Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta—that together controlled 75 percent of the global market for pesticides, 63 percent of the global market for seeds, and 75 percent of global private research in these areas. Syngenta, BASF, and Bayer alone controlled 51 percent of the global pesticide market, while DuPont, Monsanto, and Syngenta accounted for 55 percent of the seed market.8 According to statistics of the European Medical Devices Industry Group, the sales in 2010 of just twenty-five medical device companies accounted for more than 60 percent of the total sales of medical devices throughout the world. Ten multinationals controlled 47 percent of the global market for pharmaceuticals and related medical products. In China, soybeans are one of the vital food crops. All aspects of global soybean production, supply, and marketing chains are controlled by five multinational companies: Monsanto, Archer Daniels Midland, Bunge, Cargill, and Louis Dreyfus. Monsanto controls the raw materials for seed production, while the other four control planting, trading, and processing. These multinationals form various alliances through joint ventures, cooperation, and long-term contractual agreements.9 As more and more social wealth is seized by fewer and fewer private capitalist giants, monopoly capital deepens its control and exploitation of labor. This leads to capital accumulation on a world scale, aggravating global overcapacity and the polarization between rich and poor.

In the era of neoimperialism, information and communications technology is developing rapidly. The emergence of the Internet has greatly reduced the time and space required for social production and circulation, bringing about a surge of cross-border mergers, investment, and trade. Consequently, more and more noncapitalist regions have been incorporated into the process of accumulation dominated by monopoly capital, which has greatly strengthened and expanded the world capitalist system. The socialization and internationalization of production and circulation have undergone a great leap during the era of capitalist economic globalization in the twenty-first century. The pattern, described in The Communist Manifesto, according to which “a cosmopolitan character” has been given “to production and consumption in every country” has been greatly strengthened.10 The globalization of monopoly capital requires world economic and political systems to be on the same track in order to eliminate the institutional barriers between them. However, when a number of postrevolutionary countries abandoned their earlier political and economic systems and turned to capitalism, they were not rewarded with the affluence and stability preached by neoliberal economists. On the contrary, the neoimperialist phase is the setting for the rampages of hegemony and monopoly capital.

The New Monopoly of Finance Capital

In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “The concentration of production; the monopolies arising therefrom; the merging or coalescence of the banks with industry—such is the history of the rise of finance capital and such is the content of that concept.”11 Finance capital is a new type of capital formed by the merger of bank monopoly capital and industrial monopoly capital. The turning point in the change from general capitalist rule to that of finance capital appeared around the beginning of the twentieth century, when banks in the leading imperialist countries were transformed from ordinary intermediaries into powerful monopolists. But before the Second World War, due to recurrent wars, high information transmission costs, and technical and institutional barriers such as trade protection, the linkages between global investment, trade, finance, and the market were relatively weak. The degree of globalization of the economy remained low, hindering the outward expansion of monopoly capital. After the Second World War, economic globalization was accelerated by the new technological revolution. In the early 1970s, rising oil prices triggered a worldwide economic crisis and brought about the grotesque phenomenon, impossible for Keynesian economics to explain, in which inflation and economic stagnation coexisted. In order to find profitable investment opportunities and escape from the “stagflation” quagmire, monopoly capital transferred traditional industries overseas, thus maintaining its original competitive advantage. Meanwhile, it accelerated its decoupling from the traditional industries and sought to open up new financial territory. Capitalist globalization and financialization catalyzed and supported each other, accelerating the “virtualization” of monopoly capital and the hollowing out of the real economy. The Western economic recession of the 1970s thus acted not only as a catalyst for the internationalization of monopoly capital, but also as the starting point for the financialization of industrial capital. Since then, monopoly capital has accelerated its turn from monopoly exercised in a single country to international monopoly, from the monopoly of the industrial entity to the monopoly of the financial industry.

Within the context of the new monopoly of finance capital, the second key characteristic of neoimperialism is that financial monopoly capital plays a decisive role in global economic life, giving rise to economic financialization.

Minority of Financial Institutions Control Main Global Economic Arteries

To seek monopolistic power is the very nature of imperialism. “The big enterprises, and the banks in particular, not only completely absorb the small ones, but also ‘annex’ them, subordinate them, bring them into their ‘own’ group or ‘concern’ (to use the technical term) by acquiring ‘holdings’ in their capital, by purchasing or exchanging shares, by a system of credits, etc.,” Lenin explains. “We see the rapid expansion of a close network of channels which cover the whole country, centralising all capital and all revenues, transforming thousands and thousands of scattered economic enterprises into a single national, capitalist, and then into a world capitalist economy.”12 At the neoimperialist phase, a small number of multinational corporations, most of them banks, have spread a very extensive and detailed operational network over the world via mergers, participation, and shareholding, and thus control not only countless small and medium enterprises but also the main global economic arteries. An empirical study by three Swiss scholars, Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, showed that a relatively small number of multinational banks effectively dominate the whole global economy. Based on their analysis of 43,060 multinational corporations all over the world and the shareholding relationships between them, they found that the top 737 multinational corporations controlled 80 percent of total global output. After further study of the complicated network of these relationships, they came up with the even more amazing discovery that a core consisting of 147 multinational corporations controlled nearly 40 percent of the economic value. Of the 147 corporations, some three-quarters were financial intermediaries.13

The Globalization of Monopoly-Finance Capital

When imperialism evolved into neoimperialism, the financial oligarchies and their agents set the rules of trade and investment aside, and proceeded to launch currency, trade, resource, and information wars, plundering resources and wealth globally and at will. Within this system, neoliberal economists play the role of spokespeople for the financial oligarchs, advocating for financial liberalization and globalization in the interests of the monopolists and enticing developing countries to liberalize their capital account restrictions. If the countries concerned follow this advice, exercising financial supervision will become more difficult and their vulnerability to the hidden dangers of the financial system will increase. The effect will be to provide more opportunities for financial monopoly capital to plunder these countries’ wealth. In their operations on capital markets, the international financial investment giants tend to attack the fragile financial firewalls of developing countries and seize opportunities to plunder the assets these countries have accumulated over decades. This indicates that financial globalization and liberalization have certainly established a unified and open global financial system, but in the meantime have created mechanisms through which the global center appropriates the resources and surplus value of the less developed periphery. Concentrated in the hands of a minority of the international financial oligarchies and armed with actual monopoly power, finance capital has gained increasing volumes of monopoly profits through foreign investment, new business ventures, and cross-border mergers and acquisitions. As finance capital continuously levies tribute from all over the world, the rule of the financial oligarchs is consolidated.

From Production to Speculative Finance

Financial monopoly capital, which has rid itself of the constraints associated with material form, is the highest and most abstract form of capital, and is extremely flexible and speculative. In the absence of regulation, financial monopoly capital is very likely to work against the goals set by a country for its industrial development. After the Second World War, under the guidance of state interventionism, commercial and investment banks were operated separately, the securities market was strictly supervised, and the expansion of finance capital and its speculative activity were heavily restricted. In the 1970s, as the influence of Keynesianism faded and neoliberal ideas began taking over, the financial industry began a process of deregulation and the basic forces controlling the operation of financial markets ceased to be those of governments and became the leading participants in the markets themselves. In the United States, the Jimmy Carter administration in 1980 enacted the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act, which abolished the deposit and loan interest rate controls, and by 1986 interest rate liberalization was complete. In 1994, the Riegle-Neal Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act ended all geographical restrictions on banking operations and allowed banks to conduct business across state lines, increasing the competition between financial institutions. In 1996, the National Securities Market Improvement Act was promulgated, markedly reducing supervision over the securities industry. The Financial Services Modernization Act followed in 1999, and the enforced separation of commercial banking from investment banking and insurance, a provision that had existed for nearly seventy years, was completely abolished. Advocates of financial liberalization initially claimed that if the government relaxed its supervision over financial institutions and financial markets, the efficiency with which financial resources were allocated would be further improved and the finance industry would be better able to boost economic growth. But finance capital has many unruly tendencies, and if restraints on it are lifted, it is quite capable of behaving like a runaway horse. Excessive financialization will inevitably lead to the virtualization of economic activities and to the emergence of huge bubbles of fictitious capital.

Over the past thirty years, finance capital has expanded in a process linked to the continuous deindustrialization of the economy. Because of the lack of opportunities for productive investment, financial transactions now have less and less to do with the real economy. Capital that is otherwise redundant is directed into speculative schemes, swelling the volume of fictitious assets in the virtual economy. In line with these developments, the cash flow of large enterprises has shifted extensively from fixed capital investment to financial investment, and corporate profits now come increasingly from financial activities. Between 1982 and 1990, almost a quarter of the sums previously invested in factory plant and equipment in the private real economy were shifted to the financial, insurance, and real estate sectors.14 Since the relaxation of financial restrictions in the 1980s and ’90s, supermarket chains have offered a wider and wider variety of financial products to the public, including credit and prepaid debit cards, savings and checking accounts, insurance plans, and even home mortgages.15 The shareholder value maximization principle popularized since the 1980s has forced CEOs to prioritize short-term goals. Rather than paying off debts or improving their company’s financial structure, CEOs in many cases use profits to buy back the company’s stocks, pushing up the stock price and thus increasing their own salaries. Of the companies listed on Standard & Poor’s 500 Index between 2003 and 2012, 449 invested a total of $2,400 billion to purchase their own shares. This sum corresponded to 54 percent of their total revenues, and another 37 percent of revenues were paid as dividends.16 In 2006, the expenditure by U.S. nonfinancial companies on repurchasing their own shares was equal to 43.9 percent of non-residential investment expenditure.17

The financial sector also dominates the distribution of surplus value within the nonfinancial sector. The sums paid as dividends and bonuses in the nonfinancial corporate sector account for a greater and greater proportion of total profits. Between the 1960s and the ’90s, the dividend payout ratio (the ratio of dividends to adjusted after-tax profits) of the U.S. corporate sector underwent a significant increase. While the average in the 1960s and ’70s was 42.4 and 42.3 percent, respectively, from 1980 to 1989 it never fell below 44 percent. Although total corporate profits fell by 17 percent, total dividends increased by 13 percent and the dividend payout ratio reached 57 percent.18 In the days before the U.S. financial crisis broke out in 2008, the proportion of net bonuses to net after-tax profits amounted to about 80 percent of companies’ final capital allocations.19 Further, the boom in the virtual economy has no relation whatever to the ability of the real economy to support such growth.

Stagnation and shrinkage in the real economy coexist with excessive development of the virtual economy. The value created in the real economy depends on such purchasing power as has appeared through the expansion of asset bubbles and the rise of asset prices, the so-called wealth effect. As the gap between rich and poor continues to widen, the financial institutions are obliged, with government backing, to rely on a variety of financial innovations to support credit-fueled consumption by citizens who are not asset owners and to disperse the resulting financial risks. Meanwhile, the huge income and wealth effects generated by the appearance on the scene of derivative financial products and the growth of asset bubbles attract more investors to the virtual economy. Driven by monopoly profits, numerous derivative financial products are created. The innovations in the area of financial products also lengthen the debt chain and serve to pass on financial risks. An example is the securitization of subprime mortgage loans; layer upon layer of these were packaged together with the seeming purpose of raising the credit rating of the products involved, but actually in order to transfer high levels of risk to others. Increasingly, the trade in financial products is separated from production; it is even possible to say that it has nothing to do with production and is solely a gambling transaction.

The Monopoly of the U.S. Dollar and Intellectual Property

Again, in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin stated: “Typical of the old capitalism, when free competition held undivided sway, was the export of goods. Typical of the latest stage of capitalism, when monopolies rule, is the export of capital.”20 After the Second World War, the deepening and refining of the international division of labor brought more developing countries and regions into the global economic network. Within the global production mechanism, every country and enterprise is seemingly able to exercise its own comparative advantages. Even the least developed countries can rely on cheap labor and such resource advantages as it might have to allow participation in the international division of labor and cooperation. However, the real motive of monopoly capital is to compete for favorable trading platforms and to plunder high monopoly profits. In particular, the U.S. dollar hegemony and the developed-country monopoly of intellectual property mean that international exchange is seriously unequal. Thus, the characteristics of the old imperialism, coexisting with the commodity output, define the general capital output. Meanwhile, the characteristics of neoimperialism that coexist with the commodity output and the general capital output are the output of the U.S. dollar and intellectual property.

The third characteristic of neoimperialism is defined by the hegemony of the U.S. dollar and the developed-world monopoly of intellectual property, which together generate the unequal international division of labor along with a polarized global economy and wealth distribution. In each of the four aspects that can be summed up as state-capital, capital-labor, capital-capital, and state-state, the dominant forces of giant monopoly capital and neoimperialism are further strengthened under the conditions of economic globalization and financial liberalization.

The Spatial Expansion of the Capital-Labor Relation: Global Value Chains and the Global Labor Arbitrage

Through mechanisms that include outsourcing, setting up subsidiaries, and establishing strategic alliances, multinationals integrate more and more countries and companies into the global production networks they dominate. The reason why capital accumulation can be achieved on this global scale is the existence of a large, low-cost global workforce. According to data from the International Labor Organization, the world’s total workforce grew from 1.9 to 3.1 billion between 1980 and 2007. Of these people, 73 percent were from developing countries, with China and India accounting for 40 percent.21 Multinational corporations are all organized entities, while the global workforce finds it exceedingly difficult to unite effectively and defend its rights. Because of the existence of the global reserve army of labor, capital can use the strategy of divide and conquer to discipline wage workers. Over decades, monopoly capital has shifted the production sectors of developed-world economies to the countries of the Global South, compelling workforces in different areas of the globe to compete with one another for basic living incomes. Through this process, multinationals are able to extort huge imperialist rents from the world’s workers.22 In addition, these giant corporations are well able to lobby and pressure the governments of developing countries to formulate policies that benefit the flow of capital and investment. Trying to secure GDP growth by inducing international capital to invest and set up factories, many developing country governments not only ignore the protection of social welfare and labor rights, but also guarantee various preferential measures such as tax concessions and credit support. The globalization of production has thus enabled the developed capitalist countries to exploit the less developed world in a more “civil” fashion under the slogan of fair trade. In order to launch their modernization, developing countries often have little choice but to accept the capital offered by the imperialists—along with the conditions and encumbrances that go with it.

Monopoly-Finance Capital and Multinational Corporate Dominance

The new structure of the international division of labor inherits the old unbalanced and unequal system. Although production and marketing are fragmented, the control centers of research and development, finance, and profit are still the multinational corporations. These corporate entities usually occupy the top of the vertical division of labor, owning the intellectual property rights associated with core components. The giant, globe-straddling corporations are in charge of formulating technology and product standards, as well as controlling the design, research, and development links. Meanwhile, their “partners” in developing countries are typically contracted to multinational corporations and are the recipients of such product standards. They usually engage in such labor-intensive activities as production, processing, and assembly, and are responsible for producing simple parts in mass quantities. Performing relatively unspecialized factory operations for multinationals, these enterprises earn only slender profits. The jobs in these enterprises generally feature low wages, high labor intensity, long working hours, and poor working environments. Although the value embodied in the products is primarily created by production workers in developing-world factories, most of the value additions are plundered by the multinationals via unequal exchange within the production networks. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of U.S. corporations increased from 5 percent in 1950 to 35 percent in 2008. The proportion of overseas-retained profits increased from 2 percent in 1950 to 113 percent in 2000. The proportion of overseas profits within the total profits of Japanese corporations increased from 23.4 percent in 1997 to 52.5 percent in 2008.23 In a slightly different accounting, the share of foreign profits of U.S. corporations as a percent of U.S. domestic corporate profits increased from 4 percent in 1950 to 29 percent in 2019.24 Multinational corporations are often able to use their monopoly of intellectual property to generate huge returns. Intellectual property includes product design, brand names, and symbols and images used in marketing. These are protected by rules and laws covering patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Figures from the UN Conference on Trade and Development show that royalties and licensing fees paid to multinational corporations increased from $31 billion in 1990 to $333 billion in 2017.25

With the advance of financial liberalization, finance capital no longer merely serves industrial capital, but has far overtaken it. The financial oligarchs and rentiers are now dominant. In the space of just twenty years from 1987, debt in the international credit market soared from just under $11 billion to $48 billion, with a rate of growth far exceeding that of the world economy as a whole.26

Neoimperialism and the Neoliberal State

Since the mid–1970s, economic stagflation has seen Keynesianism abandoned by governments, or employed much less. Neoliberal approaches such as modern monetarism, the rational expectations school, and supply-side theories are hits among economists, and dominate economic theory and policy in the neoimperialist countries. This is because these approaches accord with the expanding globalization and financialization of monopoly capital. Neoliberalism is a superstructure that has arisen on the basis of financial monopoly capital; essentially, it represents the basis for the ideology and policies required to maintain the rule of neoimperialism. In the 1980s, U.S. president Ronald Reagan and British prime minister Margaret Thatcher were the world standard-bearers of neoliberalism. Advocating the ideas of modern monetarism and the positions of the private property and supply-side schools, they implemented privatization and market-oriented reforms, relaxed government supervision, and weakened the power of labor unions to defend working-class rights. After taking office, Reagan immediately approved the establishment of a special group of CEOs, with vice president George H. W. Bush as its director, to revoke or relax regulations. The changes advocated by the group related to job safety, labor protection, and the protection of consumer interests. The Reagan administration also joined forces with big capitalists to crack down on labor unions in the public and private sectors, dismissing union leaders and organizers and leaving the working class, already in a weak position, even worse off. The so-called Washington-Wall Street Complex argued that the interests of Wall Street and those of the United States were identical; what was good for Wall Street was good for the country. The U.S. government had in practice become a tool for the financial oligarchy to pursue its economic and political interests.27 Therefore, it was not the votes of citizens, or even the democratic system of the separation of powers, but the Wall Street financial oligarchy and the military-industrial complex that ultimately controlled the government. Wall Street influenced the political process and policy formation in the United States by providing campaign contributions and manipulating the media. Held captive by monopoly interest groups, the U.S. government had little power to promote the sound development of the economy and society and to improve people’s livelihood. The list of Wall Street executives with annual salaries of tens of millions of dollars features numerous matches with the people holding top U.S. government posts. For example, the seventieth U.S. secretary of the treasury, Robert Edward Rubin, had previously spent twenty-six years working for investment bankers Goldman Sachs. The seventy-fourth secretary of the treasury, Henry Paulson, had earlier served the Goldman Sachs Group as its chairman and CEO. Many senior officials of the Donald Trump administration also had histories as executives of monopoly enterprises. The existence of this “revolving door” mechanism means that even if the government were to introduce relevant financial regulatory policies, it would be hard fundamentally to shake the interests of the financial chaebols of Wall Street.

Whenever a financial crisis occurs, the government provides emergency assistance to the monopoly oligarchs of Wall Street. U.S. scholars have found that the Federal Reserve has used secret emergency loans to meet the needs of large Wall Street interest groups, in some instances providing strong support to bankers who are board members of regional Federal Reserve banks. In 2007, the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis broke out. Bear Stearns, one of Wall Street’s top five investment banks, was acquired by JPMorgan Chase. Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch was acquired by Bank of America. Goldman Sachs, however, survived; the main reasons include a decision by the government to urgently grant Goldman Sachs the status of a holding company, allowing it to obtain massive life-saving funds from the Federal Reserve. In addition, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission banned the shorting of financial stocks.28

U.S. Dollar Hegemony, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Plundering of Global Wealth

In July 1944, on the initiative of the U.S. and British governments, representatives of forty-four countries gathered in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to discuss plans for the postwar monetary system. In the course of the Bretton Woods Conference, the documents Final Act of the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference, Articles of Agreement of the International Monetary Fund, and Articles of Agreement of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development—collectively known as the Bretton Woods Agreements—were passed. A key point of the Bretton Woods system was to construct an international monetary order centered on the U.S. dollar.29 Other currencies were pegged to the dollar, which was in turn pegged to gold. The U.S. dollar then began to play the role of world currency, replacing the British pound. The unique advantage that derives from the central place of the U.S. dollar in the international monetary system gives the U.S. a special position compared to the rest of the world’s countries. The U.S. dollar makes up 70 percent of global currency reserves, while accounting for 68 percent of international trade settlements, 80 percent of foreign exchange transactions, and 90 percent of international banking transactions. Because the U.S. dollar is the internationally recognized reserve currency and trade settlement currency, the United States is not only able to exchange it for real commodities, resources, and labor, and thus to cover its long-term trade deficit and fiscal deficit, but can also make cross-border investments and carry out cross-border mergers of overseas enterprises employing the U.S. dollars that it prints at almost no cost. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar provides an excellent illustration of the predatory nature of neoimperialism. The United States can also obtain international seigniorage by exporting U.S. dollars, and can reduce its foreign debt by depreciating the U.S. dollar or assets that are priced in U.S. dollars. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar has also caused the transfer of wealth from debtor countries to creditor countries. This means that poor countries subsidize the rich, which is completely unfair.

Since the mid–1990s, international monopolies have controlled 80 percent of the world’s patents, technology transfers, and most of the internationally recognized trademarks, something that has brought them large quantities of revenue. According to figures from Science and Engineering Indicators 2018 Digest, released by the National Science Council of America in January 2018, the total global cross-border licensing income from intellectual property in 2016 was $272 billion. The United States was the largest exporter of intellectual property, with income from this source comprising as much as 45 percent of the global total. The corresponding figure for the European Union was 24 percent, for Japan 14 percent, and for China less than 5 percent. In sharp contrast, the royalties on intellectual property paid by China to other countries increased from $1.9 billion in 2001 to $28.6 billion in 2017, and China’s deficit on cross-border intellectual property transactions reached more than $20 billion. During this period, the U.S. annual net income from licensing intellectual property to other countries was at least $80 billion.30

The New Monopoly of the International Oligarchic Alliance

Lenin stated in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism that “the epoch of the latest stage of capitalism shows us that certain relations between capitalist associations grow up, based on the economic division of the world; while parallel to and in connection with it, certain relations grow up between political alliances, between states, on the basis of the territorial division of the world, of the struggle for colonies, of the “struggle for spheres of influence.”31 Finance capital and its foreign policy, which is the struggle of the great powers for the economic and political division of the world, give rise to a number of transitional forms of state dependence. Two main groups of countries—those owning colonies and colonies themselves—are typical of this epoch, as are the diverse forms of dependent countries that, politically, are formally independent, but in fact are enmeshed in the net of financial and diplomatic dependence.32 Nowadays, neoimperialism has formed new alliances and hegemonic relations in the economic, political, cultural, and military fields.

Within the context of the new monopoly of the international oligarchs, the fourth characteristic of neoimperialism is the formation of an international monopoly capitalist alliance between one hegemon and several other great powers. An economic foundation consisting of money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats has been formed for them to exploit and oppress via monopoly both at home and abroad.

The G7 as the Mainstay of the Imperial Capitalist Core

Neoimperialism’s current international monopoly economic alliance and the framework of global economic governance are both dominated by the United States. The G6 group was formed in 1975 by six leading industrial countries, the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy, and became G7 when Canada joined the following year. G7 and its monopoly organizations are the coordination platforms, while the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization are the functional bodies. The global order of economic governance that was set up under the Bretton Woods system after the Second World War is essentially a high-level international capitalist monopoly alliance manipulated by the United States to serve its strategic economic and political interests. In the early 1970s, the U.S. dollar was decoupled from gold and the Bretton Woods currency system collapsed. One after another, summits of the G7 countries then shouldered responsibility for strengthening the Western consensus, contending against the socialist countries of the East, and boycotting the demands made by the less developed countries of the South for reforms to the international economic and political order.33 Since neoliberalism became the set of concepts dominating global economic governance, these multilateral institutions and platforms have become the driving force for the expansion of neoliberalism throughout the world. In line with the wishes of the international financial monopoly oligarchy and its allies, these bodies spare no effort to induce the developing countries to implement financial liberalization, the privatization of production factors, marketization without prior supervision, and free exchange in capital projects so as to facilitate inward and outward flows of international “hot money.” These institutions are constantly ready to control and plunder the economies of developing countries, extracting huge profits by encouraging speculation and creating financial bubbles. As Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in The Grand Chessboard, “the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be said to represent ‘global’ interests, and their constituency may be construed as the world. In reality, however, they are heavily American dominated.”34

Since the 1980s, the IMF and World Bank have lured developing countries to implement neoliberal reforms. When these countries have fallen into crisis because of privatization and financial liberalization, the IMF and other institutions have forced them to accept the Washington Consensus by adding various unreasonable conditions to loans provided earlier. The effect is to further intensify the impacts of neoliberal reform. Between 1978 and 1992, more than seventy developing countries or former socialist countries implemented a total of 566 structural adjustment programs imposed by the IMF and the World Bank.35 In the early 1980s, for example, the IMF used the Latin American debt crisis to force Latin American countries to accept neoliberal “reforms.” In order to curb inflation, the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1979 pushed short-term interest rates up from 10 percent to 15 percent, and finally to more than 20 percent. Because the existing debt of the developing countries was linked to U.S. interest rates, every 1 percent rise in U.S. interest rates would result in developing-world debtor countries paying an additional $40 to 50 billion per year in interest. In the second half of 1981, Latin America was borrowing at the rate of $1 billion a week, mostly in order to pay the interest on existing debt. During 1983, interest payments consumed almost half of Latin American export earnings.36 Under pressure to repay their loans, Latin American countries were forced to accept neoliberal reform plans initiated by the IMF. The main content of these plans consisted of privatizing state-owned enterprises; liberalizing trade finance; implementing economic austerity policies, with the effect of reducing living standards; cutting the taxes on monopoly enterprises; and reducing government spending on social infrastructure. During the 1997 Asian financial crisis, the IMF attached numerous conditions to assistance provided to South Korea, including that the allowance for foreign shareholdings be relaxed from 23 percent to 50 percent, and then to 55 percent by December 1998. Moreover, South Korea was required to allow foreign banks to set up branches freely.37

NATO and the International Monopoly-Capitalist Military and Political Alliance

Established in the early days of the Cold War, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is an international military alliance for the defense of monopoly capitalism. It is led by the United States and involves other imperialist countries. During the Cold War, NATO was the main tool used by the United States to actively contain and counter the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe, as well as to influence and control the Western European countries. At the end of the Cold War, the Warsaw Treaty Organization was dissolved and NATO became the military organization through which the United States sought to achieve its strategic goals on a global level. A capitalist military oligopoly, involving one hegemon and several other great powers, had come into being. Former U.S. secretary of state Warren Christopher stated: “Only the United States can act as a leader.… For the United States to exercise leadership requires us to own a credible force threat as a backup for diplomacy.”38 The National Security Strategy for the New Century, published in the United States in December 1998, claimed unambiguously that the goal of the United States was to “lead the entire world” and that no challenge to its leadership, from any country or group of countries, would ever be allowed to come into being.39 On December 4, 2018, U.S. secretary of state Mike Pompeo declared in a speech to the Marshall Fund in Brussels: “The United States has not given up its global leadership. It reshaped the order after WWII based on sovereignty but not the multilateral system.… Under President Trump’s leadership, we will not give up international leadership or our allies in the international system.… Trump is recovering America’s traditional status as the world center and leadership.… The United States wants to lead the world, now and always.”40

To achieve leadership and domination over the world, the United States has made every effort to promote NATO’s eastward expansion, and has expanded its own sphere of influence to control Central and Eastern Europe and to compress Russia’s strategic space. Under the control of the United States, NATO has become an ideal military tool for U.S. global interests. In March 1999, a multinational NATO force led by the United States launched a large-scale air attack on Yugoslavia. It was the first time that NATO had launched a military strike against a sovereign country during the fifty years since its foundation. In April 1999, NATO held a summit meeting in Washington, formally adopting a strategic concept that can be summarized under two points. First, NATO was permitted to conduct collective military intervention outside its defense area in response to “crimes and conflicts involving common interests.” This effectively changed NATO from a “collective defense” military alliance into an offensive political and military organization with the so-called purpose of defending common interests and shared values. Second, NATO’s military actions did not require authorization from the UN Security Council.41

In addition to NATO, U.S. military alliances formed on the basis of bilateral treaties include pacts with Japan, South Korea, Australia, and the Philippines. There are U.S. military bases on the territory of all its military allies, and these comprise a major part of the neoimperialist military alliance. The United States and its allies make military threats and carry out provocations in many regions of the world, resulting in many “hot wars,” “warm wars,” “cool wars,” and “new cold wars,” intensifying the new arms race. The acts of “state terrorism” carried out by neoimperialism, and the double standard it applies to counter-terrorism, have caused other forms of terrorism to multiply.

Cultural Hegemony Dominated by Western “Universal Values”

In addition to its economic might and the hegemony exercised through its military alliances, neoimperialism is also characterized by cultural hegemony dominated by Western “universal values.” U.S. political scientist Joseph Nye emphasized that soft power was the ability to accomplish one’s desires through attraction rather than force or purchase. The soft power of a country is constituted mainly of three resources, namely, culture (which functions where it is attractive to the local population), political values (which function when they can actually be practiced both at home and abroad), and foreign policy (which functions when it is regarded as conforming to legality and as enhancing moral prestige).42 The Western developed countries, especially the United States, utilize their capital, technology, and market advantages to infiltrate less powerful countries and regions with their culture, and propose a series of “new interventionist” cultural theories designed to impose U.S. values. The United States subjugates the cultural markets and information spaces of other countries, especially developing countries, by exporting to them U.S. values and lifestyles, with the goal of making its culture the “mainstream culture” of the world.43

Cultural hegemony or cultural imperialism exports the “universal values” of the West and implements both peaceful evolution and “color revolutions” by controlling the field of international public opinion. The objective is to achieve Richard Nixon’s strategic goal of “victory without war.” The evolution of the Soviet Union and of the socialist countries in Eastern Europe is a typical case. As is generally known, the penetration of values is usually slow, long-term, and subtle, and its communication channels are often hidden in academic exchanges, literary works, films, and television shows. For example, Hollywood is “the megaphone of American hegemonic policy.… Hollywood films are showing off the advantages of the United States to the rest of the world and trying to achieve their cultural conquest by this means.”44 Former senior CIA official Allen Dulles argued: “If we teach young people in the Soviet Union to sing our songs and dance with them, sooner or later we will teach them to think in the way we need them to.”45 Foundations and think tanks are also important driving forces for the spread of neoliberalism. For example, the U.S.-based Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Mont Pelerin Society, and Center for International Private Enterprise participate in the promotion of neoliberal values by funding seminars and academic organizations.

Lenin once stated: “Instead of an undivided monopoly of Great Britain, we see a few imperialist powers contending for the right to share in this monopoly, and this struggle is characteristic of the whole period of the early twentieth century.”46 Since the end of the Cold War, global capitalism has been characterized by the undivided monopoly of the United States. Other powers have no intention, and lack the strength, to compete. Some individual countries such as Japan have tried to challenge U.S. “monopoly rights” economically and technologically, but have ultimately failed. So it is with the European Union, which emerged later but eventually failed to shake U.S. hegemony. In the military field, the Gulf War and the subsequent wars in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria have further fueled U.S. unilateralism and hegemonic arrogance. With the help of its economic, military, and political alliances, and employing cultural soft power, the United States promotes its “universal values,” incites street protests and color revolutions in other countries, and forces developing countries to deregulate their financial systems by targeting them for the creation of debt and financial crises. When the global governance system dominated by the United States encounters challenges, it launches trade wars, science and technology wars, financial wars, and economic sanctions, and even goes so far as to threaten or actually launch military strikes. The U.S. dollar, military, and culture are the three pillars of U.S. imperialist hegemony, supporting “hard power,” “soft power,” “strong power” (economic sanctions), and “smart power.”47

In short, the international monopoly capitalist alliance made up of one hegemon and several great powers provides the economic foundation for the money politics, vulgar culture, and military threats that exploit and oppress through the exercise of monopoly both at home and abroad, and that amplify the power of the United States as the neoimperialist hegemon.

The Economic Essence, the General Trend, and the Four Forms of Ideological Fraud

Lenin characterized imperialism as a transitional and moribund capitalism. At the neoimperialist stage known as economic globalization, the basic contradiction of the contemporary capitalist economy is manifested in the contradiction between, on the one hand, the constant socialization and globalization of the economy with its production factors under private, collective, or state ownership, and, on the other, the disorder or anarchy of production within national economies and in the world economy.48 Neoimperialism rules out the adjustments that states and international communities need to make, instead promoting self-regulation by private monopoly capital and defending its interests. The effect, very often, is to intensify various contradictions within countries or on the world level. Economic, financial, fiscal, social, and ecological crises have all become epidemic diseases. Various of these crises are interwoven with social contradictions, or with the contradictions of capital accumulation. All of them together lend a new cast to the monopolistic and predatory, hegemonic and fraudulent, parasitic and decaying, transitional and moribund capitalism of the present epoch.

If we define neoimperialism with regard to its economic nature and general tendencies, we may conclude that its three characteristics are demonstrated in the respect that the globalized contradictions and various crises of the system frequently become intensified.

The economic essence of neoimperialism is that it is a monopolistic financial capitalism established on the basis of giant multinationals. The production monopoly and financial monopoly of the multinational corporations have their origins in the higher stage of production and capital concentration, giving rise to a phase in which monopoly is deeper and broader to such an extent that “nearly every industry is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands.”49 The automobile industry may be taken as an example. The production of the top five multinational automobile corporations accounts for almost half of global automobile production, and that of the top ten accounts for 70 percent.50 International monopolistic financial capital not only controls the world’s major industries, but also monopolizes almost all sources of raw materials, scientific and technological talent, and skilled physical labor in all fields, controlling the transportation hubs and various means of production. It dominates and controls capital, and controls various other global functions via banks and a variety of financial derivatives and shareholding systems.51 If we consider the total market value and total income and assets of corporations, the scale of the leading concentrations of economic power around the world is increasing, especially in the case of the top one hundred corporations. In 2015, the market value of the world’s top hundred companies was more than seven thousand times that of the bottom two thousand companies in a database of the world’s largest nonfinancial firms, compared to only thirty-one times in 1995.52 According to the data on the Fortune Global 500 for the year 2017, the revenues of 380 of the world’s top 500 companies (excluding Chinese firms) reached $22.83 trillion, equivalent to 29.3 percent of gross world product. Total profits reached $1.51 trillion, breaking the record, and the rate of profit increased by 18.85 percent year on year.53 The rise in the indicators of both profit share and profit rate illustrates the predatory nature of neoimperialism.

Given that economic globalization, financialization, and neoliberal policies are placing a triple squeeze on labor, profits are growing rapidly, while workers’ wages are increasing much more slowly.54 Between 1982 and 2006, the average annual growth of the real wages of production workers in nonfinancial corporations in the United States was just 1.1 percent, not only much lower than the 2.43 percent recorded from 1958 to 1966, but also lower than the 1.68 percent during the economic downturn from 1966 to 1982. The slowing of wage growth allowed the corporations’ profit share to rise by 4.6 percent during this period and accounted for 82 percent of the recovery in the rate of profit. The “labor squeeze” can be seen to have played a key role here.55 Moreover, since the U.S. economy began to recover in 2009 from the Great Financial Crisis, the average rate of profit, though lower than its peak in 1997, has still been significantly higher than its level during the late 1970s and early ’80s, when it was at a low point.56 The essence of neoimperialism is its need to control and plunder. Its drive to “predatory accumulation” is not only demonstrated by its exploitation of labor in the national setting, but also by its plunder of other countries. The forms this takes, and the methods employed, consist mainly of the following.

First, financial plunder. Neoimperialism extracts huge profits from its control over the prices of major international commodities. Employing financialization and other methods, it pressures the countries that produce raw materials, seeking to keep prices low. As part of its pressures and harassment, it may create financial bubbles and crises via large-scale inflows and outflows of capital, affecting the economic and political stability of the countries concerned. Or, it may seek to achieve a “victory without war” by imposing financial sanctions.57 Financial innovation and the lag in government regulation contributes to waves of nonproductive speculation. Financial oligarchs and multinational corporations at the top of the pyramid benefit from the price inflation of financial assets and are able to plunder huge quantities of social wealth.

Second is the privatization of public resources and state-owned assets. Since Thatcher-Reaganism came to dominate economic policy-making in numerous countries some forty years ago, the world has experienced a massive wave of large-scale privatization. The public assets of many less-developed countries have fallen into the hands of private monopoly capital and multinational corporate monopolies. The global level of inequality of wealth ownership has soared accordingly. The World Inequality Report 2018 reveals that, since the 1970s, private wealth in various countries has generally increased, while the ratio of private to national income in most “rich” countries has increased from 200–350 percent to 400–700 percent. In sharp contrast, public wealth has steadily declined. The net public wealth of the United States and the United Kingdom has fallen to a negative number in recent years, and that of Japan, Germany, and France is only slightly above zero. The limited value of public assets restricts the ability of governments to adjust the income gap.58

Third is the strengthening of the center-periphery pattern. The neoimperialist countries reinforce the center-periphery pattern through their dominant positions in trade, currency, finance, the military arena, and international organizations. Taking advantage of these positions, they continuously extort the resources and wealth of the peripheral countries to consolidate their monopoly or oligopoly status, and to ensure their own development and prosperity. The international transfer rate of surplus value has a positive effect on the general rate of profit in the hegemonic countries.59 It is only the neoimperialist countries that are able to use their economic, political, and military power to transform a portion of the surplus value created by underdeveloped countries into their own national wealth. Consequently, the accumulation of monopolistic capital by neoimperialism intensifies the polarization between rich and poor and damages people’s livelihoods in countries such as the United States and France (as proved by the international Occupy Wall Street movement, which involved eighty countries with its slogan of “we are the 99 percent”), while also reinforcing the accumulation of financial and environmental wealth in the countries of the “center” and of relative poverty and pollution in the countries of the “periphery.” In 2018, the combined GDP of the G7 “central” countries reached $317 trillion, accounting for 45.5 percent of gross world product.60 According to the Global Wealth Report 2013, prepared by Credit Suisse, the wealth of the 85 richest people in the world that year was equivalent to the total assets of the world’s poorest 3.5 billion people—that is, of half the global population.61

Economic Hegemony and Fraud

Imperialism as represented by the United States employs hegemony, bullying, and unilateralism, and adheres to double standards in diplomatic policy. At one point, Pompeo publicly admitted and expressed pride in his country’s fraudulent actions. “I was the CIA director,” he said. “We lied, we cheated, we stole. It was like we had entire training courses…it reminds you of the glory of the American experiment.”62 In the post-Cold War era, the United States dominates the world, free from any powerful checks and balances. It relies on its major advantages of military force, U.S. dollar hegemony, external propaganda, and science and technology to carry out bullying all over the world and to commit fraud both at home and abroad.63

In March 2018, the United States issued a document entitled Findings of the Investigation into China’s Acts, Policies, and Practices Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation Under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which accuses China of “enforcing or compelling US enterprises to transfer technology” and “illegally invading US commercial computer networks to steal intellectual property rights and sensitive business information.” The purpose of this document was to create a pretext for launching a trade war; its accusations are nothing but rumors and do not correspond to the facts. What is the source of China’s technological progress? It flows from the efforts of gifted entrepreneurs who benefit from huge government investments in basic science. As former U.S. secretary of the treasury Lawrence Summers said, “it’s coming from an educational system that’s privileging excellence, concentrating on science and technology. That’s where their leadership is coming from, not from taking a stake in some U.S. company.”64 In provoking its economic and trade conflict with China, the United States has had an obvious intention: to blackmail and suppress China on an overall basis, starting with the trade war and gradually expanding into the areas of science and technology, finance, food, resources, and so on. U.S. authorities seek to weaken China’s strengths in trade, finance, industry, and technology, trying to ensure that China will not pose a challenge to the global hegemonic position of the United States.

With its slogan of “America First,” the Trump administration promoted U.S. hegemony and imposed economic sanctions on other economies. Its economic and trade policies were aimed principally at China, but were also directed at traditional allies such as the European Union, Japan, India, and South Korea. Time after time, Washington has practiced economic extortion and containment. It will never be forgotten that as early as the mid–1980s the United States forced Japan to sign the Plaza Accord and induced it to implement a low-interest monetary policy that brought large quantities of foreign capital into Japan. The result was that a surge of short-term demand for Japanese yen caused the country’s currency to appreciate sharply against the U.S. dollar. The influx of foreign capital and the monetary policy of low interest rates brought a soaring increase in Japanese asset prices. Despite the short-term prosperity, the eventual result involved big losses for Japan. The high asset prices meant that the foreign capital was soon cashed out and withdrawn, while the Japanese economy suffered huge setbacks and endured a “lost twenty years.”

Political Hegemony and Fraud

The United States has always labeled itself a representative of countries advocating democracy, freedom, and equality. Using political and diplomatic means, it spares no effort to impose its political system on other countries, especially the developing states it identifies as “dictatorships.” Former U.S. president George W. Bush identified Iran, Iraq, and North Korea as an “axis of evil.” The United States exerts pressure on the rulers of such countries, applying double standards on questions of human rights. Using its propaganda, it demonizes these states as “undemocratic” and “autocratic,” while subsidizing nongovernmental organizations and media, as well as inciting dissidents and the opposition to mount “color revolutions” aimed at overthrowing the legitimate governments.

Acting at the behest of its military circles and monopoly energy groups, the United States has been a consistently destructive force in the Middle East and Latin America. Syria was listed by Washington among six “evil” countries, and the United States branded the Syrian government led by Bashar al-Assad as illegal. U.S. senator John McCain, however, revealed the real purpose behind these moves. “The end of the Assad regime,” McCain stated, “would sever Hezbollah’s lifeline to Iran, eliminate a long-standing threat to Israel, bolster Lebanon’s sovereignty and independence, and inflict a strategic defeat on the Iranian regime. It would be a geopolitical success of the first order.”65 In Latin America, the United States has continued its blockade against Cuba despite twenty resolutions carried overwhelmingly in the UN General Assembly. Meanwhile, the United States is conducting an economic blockade against Venezuela, resulting in the country’s economic deterioration in recent years. Former U.S. vice president Mike Pence, setting aside Venezuela’s elections and popular support for the government, with no consideration of truth—even leaving out the U.S. economic siege war on Venezuela in violation of international law—pronounced: “The Maduro government’s vicious gangs have crippled the economy.… The true cost of the crimes of the Maduro regime cannot be assessed in numbers.… Two million people have fled the result of dictatorship and political repression that’s resulted in deprivation and created conditions near starvation. The United States will continue to help the Venezuelan people restore their freedom. The people will be free.”66

The United States is now applying to China the kind of Cold War policies that used to be employed against the Soviet Union. State department director of policy planning Kiron Skinner describes the fractious relations of the United States with China as “a fight with a really different civilization and a different ideology.”67 The U.S. ruling class knows very well that the socialist system is superior to the capitalist system. Once large socialist countries such as the former Soviet Union and China become rich and strong through peaceful competition, it is inevitable that they are faced with confronting the hegemonic aims of the United States, which seeks nothing less than a unipolar world. Any attempts to promote broad reforms in the outdated imperial economic and political order are seen as a threat to U.S. hegemony. Consequently, the United States has adopted the dual strategy of “contact and containment,” engagement and aggression, which it seeks to pass off as “peaceful evolution.”

In reality, the so-called democratic politics in the United States are nothing but an illusion. First, the electoral process in the United States has increasingly amounted to a political fight between the two parties of the monopoly bourgeoisie. As the candidates of different factions of the monopoly bourgeoisie have campaigned for election, they have resorted to rumors, personal attacks, and slanders against their opponents, sidelining the real issue. Second, so-called democratic politics in the United States involve no more than a pro forma and procedural democracy. The pro forma voting system has been reduced to monetary politics, family politics, and oligarchic politics—that is, to an essentially undemocratic “despotism of monopoly capital,” or democracy for the few.

Cultural Hegemony and Fraud

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Brzezinski believes that “strengthening American culture as the ‘model’ of the world’s cultures is a strategy that must be implemented by the United States to maintain hegemony.”68 U.S. cultural hegemony is manifested principally through its control of media outlets and education, and through the propaganda function, both at home and abroad, of its literature and art, its liberal arts academia, and its values. The United States exports films, music, and literature all over the world. It controls almost 75 percent of the world’s television programs, and owns powerful film and television companies such as WarnerMedia, Universal Pictures, Paramount Pictures, and Columbia Pictures, which every year produce dozens of high-budget films involving investments of hundreds of millions of dollars. Research and reporting carried out by the U.S. mainstream media effectively dominate the shaping of world public opinion. The United States also controls the authoritative journals that mold discourse in the area of liberal arts academia, and it is the United States that determines the standards of elite education. The 2020 QS World University Rankings provide an example. The top places in these rankings are all taken by U.S. universities, and this situation provides a powerful tool for spreading deceptive Western “universal values,” Western constitutional views, and neoliberal economic concepts throughout the world. The basic views of the U.S. liberal arts establishment have taken a firm hold on the elites and masses at home and abroad.69 For example, the United States extols vulgar examples of literary and artistic kitsch as distinguished works of culture, deserving of Oscars or Nobel Prizes.

Neoclassical economics (and its counterpart in the form of neoliberalism) is responsible for a string of economic crises and for increased polarization between rich and poor. Nevertheless, it is depicted as a scientific theory that promotes development, increases popular welfare, and is worthy of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. In the United States, works that do not conform to the literary, artistic, and liberal arts canons of monopoly capital are difficult to disseminate via authoritative media, while writers and artists of real distinction are excluded, suppressed, or defrauded. The United States also holds an absolutely dominant position in the global field of cyberspace. Of the thirteen root Domain Name System servers, nine are under the direct control of U.S. corporations, universities, or government departments, while another is directly controlled by a U.S. nonprofit organization.70 Using these root Domain Name System servers, the United States can easily steal global intelligence, carry out network monitoring, and launch cyberattacks. The surveillance program PRISM, revealed by Edward Snowden, shows that the United States has complete control over the hardware and software of networks globally, and is well able to monitor the entire world and strike any other country. Lastly, the United States controls the intelligence alliance known as the Five Eyes (the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand), through which it conducts large-scale monitoring activities and exercises cyber hegemony domestically and internationally.71

The cultural hegemony of the United States, its control over liberal arts academia, and the fraudulent use to which these advantages are put also appear in the stances taken by the United States on questions of ideology and values. These stances are always hostile to socialism and communism, and restrict the development of socialist countries. Previously, the United States devoted most of its efforts to smearing the Soviet Union, but the main target is now China. Early in May 1990, Nixon stated frankly: “While rebuilding the relationship with China, it is very important that we continue to pressure them to abandon socialism. Because we will use this relationship to make China’s policies milder. We must stick to this key point.”72 According to survey data from the U.S. Pew Research Center—an organization surely influenced by U.S. cultural hegemony and fraud—74 percent of Chinese college or university graduates love U.S. culture.73 It is a fact that most Chinese liberal arts scholars who have studied in the United States favor its basic institutional academic theories. To varying extents, they worship, flatter, and fear the United States. This seriously affects the confidence of Chinese citizens in Marxist culture, in socialist culture, and in China’s own rich traditional culture, and needs to be eliminated as soon as possible.

Military Hegemony and Fraud

Since the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States has become increasingly presumptuous and has tended to resort to military force or threats in dealing with questions of international relations. In 1999, U.S.-led NATO forces bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, invoking the formula of “human rights above sovereignty.” In 2003, despite strong opposition from other countries, the United States invaded the sovereign state of Iraq. The Iraq War was not authorized by the UN Security Council, and Washington did not have any legal basis for its military intervention. The United States falsely claimed that Iraq possessed chemical weapons of mass destruction. After occupying Iraq, however, the United States found no evidence to prove that Iraq could produce chemical weapons of mass destruction. The real purpose of the United States in fabricating this lie was to control Iraq’s oil resources by military means.

The United States has consistently emphasized that its own interests should take first place and that its military advantages are not to be challenged. Although its economic strength has declined in relative terms, the United States is still expanding its arsenal and substantially increasing its defense spending. Since the Cold War, the United States has continued to create various military threats and pressures in Europe, the Middle East, and the Asia-Pacific region. To consolidate its hegemonic status, the United States has advocated and promoted NATO’s eastward expansion, with the goal of including all the Central and Eastern European countries in NATO’s sphere of influence and thus constricting Russia’s strategic space. In the Middle East, the United States aims to subvert the legitimate regimes of countries such as Syria and Iran by military means, and to support “color revolutions” in the region. In Asia in recent times, Washington has heightened tensions on the Korean peninsula and has also implemented its “Indo-Pacific strategy” aimed at containing China. The U.S. “Indian strategy” is serving to reveal the identity of its military allies and partners. Allies of the United States include Japan, South Korea, Australia, the Philippines, and Thailand, and its claimed “partners” include Singapore, Taiwan (China), New Zealand, Mongolia; a number of South Asian countries such as India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Nepal; and various Southeast Asian countries such as Vietnam, Indonesia, and Malaysia. The United States further proposes to strengthen its cooperation with Brunei, Laos, and Cambodia. In addition, it will work together with traditional allies such as Britain, France, and Canada to protect so-called Indo-Pacific freedom and openness.74

With the increase in China’s national strength, various U.S. scholars have been eager to invoke the Thucydides trap, claiming that it is difficult for Sino-U.S. relations to escape from this logic. But the truth, as China’s president Xi Jinping has pointed out, is that there is currently no Thucydides trap. Such a trap might, however, be created if the United States and its allies repeatedly make strategic miscalculations involving great powers.75 It may be asserted that it is the military hegemony and fraud of the United States that provides the root cause of the widespread instability, constant local wars, rise of war threats, and refugee crises around the world.

Neoimperialism Is a Parasitic and Decaying Late Imperialism

As Lenin stated,

Imperialism is an immense accumulation of money capital in a few countries.… Hence the extraordinary growth of a class, or rather, of a stratum of rentiers, i.e., people who live by “clipping coupons,” who take no part in any enterprise whatever, whose profession is idleness. The export of capital, one of the most essential economic bases of imperialism, still more completely isolates the rentiers from production and sets the seal of parasitism on the whole country that lives by exploiting the labour of several overseas countries and colonies.76

In the era of neoimperialism, the number of rentiers is increasing sharply, and the nature of the rentier countries is becoming more pronounced. The parasitism and decay of a small number of capitalist countries is further worsened, as can be seen specifically in the following aspects.

First, the United States employs its military, intellectual property, political, and cultural hegemony, as well as the U.S. dollar, to plunder the wealth of the world, especially that of developing countries. The United States is the world’s largest parasitic and decaying country. As evidence of this, we may take the trade between China and the United States. China sells to the United States goods produced by cheap labor, land, and environmental resources. The United States does not need to produce anything in order to buy these goods; it can simply print banknotes. With the money earned, China can then buy only virtual assets such as U.S. treasury bonds, and provide finance for U.S. consumer lending and outward expansion. The United States exports to China securities to which value cannot be added, while China exports to the United States mainly physical goods and labor services. The National Health Report released by the National Health Research Group of the Chinese Academy of Sciences shows that the United States is the country with the most hegemonic dividends in the world, due to the position of its currency, while China is the country with the largest loss of hegemonic dividends. For the year 2011, U.S. hegemonic dividends totaled $7396.09 billion, corresponding to 52.38 percent of the country’s GDP, and the average hegemonic dividends obtained per day came to $20.263 billion. Meanwhile, the sum lost by China totaled $3663.4 billion. In terms of labor time, about 60 percent of the working hours of the Chinese workforce were effectively given without recompense to serve international monopoly capital.77

Second, military spending has increased, which in turn increases the burden on working-class people. Neoimperialism leads and promotes military-related scientific and technological research, the development of advanced weapons, and the expansion of military production. As the People’s Daily observed in 2016, “the military-industrial complex supported by monopoly capital and the cultural hegemony formed on the basis of colonialism have prompted the western countries to intervene in other countries’ affairs at their will.”78 Neoimperialism has thus become the initiator of regional turmoil and instability, and the engine of war. Over the past thirty years, the United States has spent $14.2 trillion on waging thirteen wars.79 Meanwhile, lack of money hinders improvements to the living conditions of the U.S. people in areas such as medical insurance. Exorbitant military spending has become a heavy burden on the country and its people, while the parasitic monopolies in the arms industry have reaped immense profits. According to statistics of the British Institute for International Strategic Studies, official U.S. military expenditures in 2018 came to $643 billion, and in 2019 will reach $750 billion, more than the sum of the military spending of the world’s eight next largest military powers. Since the end of the first Cold War, the United States has launched or participated in six major conflicts: The Gulf War (1991), Kosovo War (1999), Afghanistan War (2001), Iraq War (2003), Libya War (2011), and Syria War (2011).80 The addiction of monopoly capitalism to war is a manifestation of its parasitic and decaying nature. This barbaric characteristic of the system runs counter to civilization and threatens the shared future of the human community. It proves that neoimperialism is the primary root of war.

Third, wealth and incomes are concentrated in the hands of a specific class of owners of financial assets, as reflected in the 1 percent versus the 99 percent formulation. At the neoimperialist stage, the socialization, informatization, and internationalization of production have reached unprecedented levels, and the ability of human beings to create wealth is many times greater than in the old imperialist period. Nevertheless, the advance of productivity that is supposed to be a common gain for humankind has mainly benefited the financial oligarchy. “The bulk of the profits go to the ‘geniuses’ of financial manipulation,” one observer notes.81 In 2001, for example, the financial wealth (excluding property rights) held by the wealthiest 1 percent of the U.S. population was four times greater than that of the poorest 80 percent. The 1 percent held assets on the stock market of $1.9 trillion, roughly equivalent to the value of the stock held by the other 99 percent.82

Fourth, monopoly hinders technological innovation, slowing its advance. The greed and parasitism of financial monopoly capital make its attitude to technological innovation ambivalent. Monopoly capital relies on technological innovation to maintain its monopoly status, but the high profits that result from this status mean that monopoly capital shows a certain inertia in promoting innovation. Even if many advanced functions of mobile phones are successfully developed in the same year, the monopoly producers of mobile phones will divide up these functions to be introduced and promoted over several years. The purpose is to ensure that consumers will continuously purchase mobile phones with new functions, allowing the corporations to obtain high monopoly profits every year.

Fifth, the tendency for monopoly capital and its agents to cause decay in the mass movement is becoming more serious. Lenin observed that “in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement, revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries.”83 Neoimperialism divides the working class, striking at and weakening the labor unions using the excuse provided by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tremendous changes in Eastern Europe. It also uses its monopoly profits to buy the support of individuals, and fosters opportunist and neoliberal forces within the workers’ movement and various other mass movements. The results of such ploys include the downturn in size and activity of labor unions and other progressive movements, the low ebb of the world socialist movement, and a more obvious and serious tendency for workers to worship the forces of neoimperialism or to be intimidated by them.

Neoimperialism Is a Transitional and Moribund Late Capitalism

Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism has revealed the transitional and moribund nature of monopoly capitalism for more than a century. However, except in a very small number of countries where socialism is being constructed, most capitalist societies have not perished. They have in fact achieved varying levels of development, and will continue to develop. This raises a very important question: How do we judge the transitional nature of contemporary capitalism, or its tendency to decline and perish? If we use the historical materialist method, the transitional nature of neoimperialism can be characterized on the basis of two points. First, like everything in the world, the neoimperialist system is constantly changing. It is a transient phenomenon in human history, and is not eternal. Second, there are reasons to believe that neoimperialism can eventually transition into socialism through various forms of revolutionary struggle.

In the era of neoimperialism, the developed capitalist countries have undergone many important technological and institutional reforms, which have provided the basis for a certain further development of capitalism and have delayed its demise. High and low growth rates continue to succeed each other, and the period of decay mentioned by Lenin has been greatly extended. This is because the capitalist countries have made many adjustments to their production relations and superstructure, including a degree of macroeconomic regulation, improvements to income distribution and social security, and so forth. In particular, there is no doubt that for the developed capitalist countries the advantages of economic globalization outweigh its disadvantages. Within the process of economic globalization, the powerful developed capitalist countries occupy an absolutely dominant position, through which they set out to maximize the benefits they receive. Their general drive to extend globalization in order to expand their markets does not, however, exclude the possibility of particular countries temporarily reversing the process in response to domestic crises, or as part of efforts to damage commercial competitors. “In the past two years,” a 2019 study notes, “the Trump administration has deepened its reverse globalization trend in the light of the domestic crisis. It adheres to the principle of ‘America first,’ and provokes international economic and trade disputes, trying to get rid of and pass on the domestic crisis.”84 The purpose of the United States in adopting a range of protectionist anti-globalization measures is to alleviate the domestic difficulties and crises it encounters within economic globalization, so as to advance its hegemonic interests.

Meanwhile, there is no essential conflict between the fact that neoimperialism and capitalism can look forward to existing and developing for some time to come, and the fact that a transition to a higher social formation is practically inevitable, provided that these societies do not degenerate into barbarism. The classic Marxist writers avoided setting out a specific timetable for the demise of capitalism and imperialism. Lenin’s scientific judgment is that “imperialism is a decaying but not completely decaying capitalism, a moribund but not dead capitalism.”85 He foresaw that moribund capitalism was very likely to drag out its existence for a prolonged period. Nor, on the basis of a comprehensive analysis, could it be denied that capitalism would see some kind of development even during its moribund stage. Discussing the decay of imperialism, Lenin stated: “It would be a mistake to believe that this tendency to decay precludes the rapid growth of capitalism. It does not.… On the whole, capitalism is growing far more rapidly than before; but this growth is not only becoming more and more uneven in general, its unevenness also manifests itself, in particular, in the decay of the countries which are richest in capital (England).”86

John Bellamy Foster also stressed that, “to say that capitalism is a failed system is not, of course, to suggest that its breakdown and disintegration is imminent. It does, however, mean that it has passed from being a historically necessary and creative system at its inception to being a historically unnecessary and destructive one in the present century.”87

The basic contradictions of capitalism still exist and continue to develop. Likewise, the law of capitalist accumulation still exists and continues to develop. At the point when monopoly capitalism was coming into existence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the law of uneven economic and political development of imperialism made it possible for the revolution against capitalism to be victorious initially in one or several countries, before eventually spreading globally.

Decades after The Communist Manifesto proclaimed that capitalism would inevitably expire and Capital declared that the death knell of capitalist private ownership was about to ring, the October Revolution brought the downfall of the Tsarist Russian Empire. Then, the proletarian party led by Mao Zedong in China ended the semicolonial and semifeudal society ruled by the Kuomintang (Mao stated that China represented a feudal and comprador monopoly capitalism after the Second World War). The Soviet Communist Party led by Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin consciously betrayed Marxism-Leninism, resulting in the Soviet Union and the Eastern European socialist countries, with the exception of Belarus, regressing to capitalism. This demonstrates the twists, turns, and general difficulties experienced by the development of socialism and its economic system. But it cannot change the nature and general trend of the historical process.

China’s position on the main international fault lines is clear. In October 1984, Deng Xiaoping stated: “There are two major problems in the world that are very prominent. One is the issue of peace and the other is the North-South issue. There are many other issues, which are not of the same underlying importance or global and strategic significance as these two.” In March 1990, he reiterated: “As for the two major issues of peace and development, the peace issue has not been resolved, and the development issue has become more serious.”88 Deng emphasized that “peace and development” were the two major questions to be resolved.89

Based on the analysis of the character of neoimperialism, it can thus be concluded that neoimperialism represents a new phase of international monopoly into which capitalism develops after passing through the stages of free competitive capitalism, general private monopoly, and state monopoly. In addition, neoimperialism represents a new expansion of international monopoly capitalism, as well as a new system through which a minority of developed countries dominate the world and implement a new policy of economic, political, cultural, and military hegemony. If we examine the current situation on the basis of the international forces of justice and the development of the twists and turns of the international class struggle, the twenty-first century is a new era in which the world working class and the masses can carry out great revolutions and safeguard world peace; in which the socialist countries can carry out great feats of construction and promote ecological civilization; and in which progressive nations can work together to build a community with a shared future for humankind, a world in which neoimperialism and international capitalism gradually make way for global socialism.

Notes

1. ↩ I. Lenin, Selected Works: One Volume Edition (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 232–33.

2. ↩ I. Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 23 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 105.

3. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Late Imperialism,” Monthly Review 71, no. 3 (July–August 2019): 1–19.

4. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2013 (Geneva: United Nations, 2013).

5. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018 (Geneva: United Nations, 2018).

6. ↩ Richard Dobbs et al., Playing to Win: The New Global Competition for Corporate Profits (New York: McKinsey & Company, 2015).

7. ↩ Karl Marx, Wage-Labour and Capital, in Wage-Labour and Capital/Value, Price and Profit (New York: International Publishers, 1935), 41.

8. ↩ ETC Group, Breaking Bad: Big Ag Mega-Mergers in Play. Dow-DuPont in the Pocket? Next: Demonsanto? (Val-David, Quebec: ETC Group, 2015).

9. ↩ Wang Shaoguang, Wang Hongchuan, and Wei Xing, “Soybean Story: How Capital Threatens Human Security” [in Chinese], Open Times 3 (2013).

10. ↩ Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 7-8.

11. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 201.

12. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 190.

13. ↩ Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano Battiston, “The Network of Global Corporate Control,” PLoS ONE 6, no. 10 (2011): e25995.

14. ↩ Robert Brenner, The Economics of Global Turbulence (London: Verso, 2006).

15. ↩ Ryan Isakson, “Food and Finance: The Financial Transformation of Agro-Food Supply Chains,” Journal of Peasant Studies 41, no. 5 (2014): 749–75.

16. ↩ William Lazonick, “Profits Without Prosperity,” Harvard Business Review (September 2014).

17. ↩ Thomas I. Palley, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters” (Levy Economics Institute, Working Paper No. 525, December 2007), 19.

18. ↩ Huang, Yiyi, “The Origin and Development of the Maximization of the Shareholder Value” [in Chinese], New Finance Economics 7 (2004).

19. ↩ Erdogan Bakir and Al Campbell, “Neoliberalism, the Rate of Profit and the Rate of Accumulation,” Science & Society 74, no. 3 (2010): 323–42.

20. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 212.

21. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “The Global Reserve Army of Labor and the New Imperialism,” Monthly Review 63, no. 6 (November 2011): 3.

22. ↩ Imperialist rent is the result of the differential in the prices of labor power of equal productivity. Samir Amin, “The Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism and the Imperialist Rent,” Monthly Review 64, no. 3 (July–August 2012): 83.

23. ↩ Cui Xuedong, “Is the Contemporary Capitalist Crisis a Minsky-Type Crisis or a Marxist Crisis?” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 9 (2018).

24. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, R. Jamil Jonna, and Brett Clark, “The Contagion of Capital,” Monthly Review 72, no. 8 (January 2021): 9.

25. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, World Investment Report 2018.

26. ↩ Cheng Enfu and Hou Weimin, “The Root of the Western Financial Crisis Lies in the Intensification of the Basic Contradiction of Capitalism” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 7 (2018).

27. ↩ Lu Baolin, “Criticism and Reflection of the Supplyism of the ‘Reagan Revolution’ and ‘Thatcher’s New Deal’: In the Perspective of the Relations between Labor and Capital of Marxist Economics” [in Chinese], Contemporary Economic Research 6 (2016).

28. ↩ “How Powerful Is the ‘Goldman Sachs Gang’ in Influencing U.S. Politics?” [in Chinese], Global Times, January 18, 2017.

29. ↩ Chen Jianqi, “On the Issue of the Contemporary Counter-globalization and Its Response” [in Chinese], Science of Leadership Forum 10 (2017); He Bingmeng, Liu Rongcang, and Liu Shucheng, Asian Financial Crisis: Analysis and Countermeasures [in Chinese] (Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2007), 66.

30. ↩ Yang Yunxia, “The New Demonstrations of Capitalist Intellectual Property Monopoly and its Essence” [in Chinese], Studies on Marxism 3 (2019).

31. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 223.

32. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 230.

33. ↩ Lv Youzhi and Zha Junhong, “The Evolution and Influence of the G7 Group after the Cold War” [in Chinese], Chinese Journal of European Studies 6 (2002).

34. ↩ Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1998).

35. ↩ Li Qiqing, “Neoliberalism Against Globalization” [in Chinese], Marxism & Reality 5 (2003).

36. ↩ Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise in the Twentieth Century (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007).

37. ↩ He, Liu, and Liu, Asian Financial Crisis, 84, 91.

38. ↩ Liu Zhenxia, “NATO’s New Strategy is the Embodiment of American Hegemony,” Social Sciences Journal of Universities in Shanxi 3 (1999).

39. ↩ Liu, “NATO’s New Strategy is the Embodiment of American Hegemony.”

40. ↩ “Pompeo Threatened That the United States Is Establishing a New Global Order Against China and Russia,” Guancha, December 5, 2018.

41. ↩ Liu, “NATO’s New Strategy is the Embodiment of American Hegemony.”

42. ↩ Wang Yan, “Review of Research on the Index System of Cultural Soft Power” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2019).

43. ↩ Hao Shucui, “Making the Socialist Culture with Chinese Characteristics Blossom in the Contemporary World Cultural Garden: An Interview with Professor Wang Weiguang, Member of the Standing Committee of CPPCC, Director of the Committee on Nationalities and Religion” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2018).

44. ↩ “Iranian Officials Slammed Hollywood Movies and Called them ‘Airfone,’” Huanqiu, February 3, 2012.

45. ↩ Xiao Li, “Talks of the American Politicians and Strategists on the Export of Ideology and Values” [in Chinese], World Socialism Studies 2 (2016).

46. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 248.

47. ↩ Cheng Enfu and Li Linan, “Marxism and Its Localized Theories in China Are the Soul and Core of Soft Power” [in Chinese], Research on Marxist Culture 1 (2019).

48. ↩ Cheng Enfu, “The New Era Will Accelerate the Process to Enrich People and Strengthen the Country,” Journal of the Central Institute of Socialism 1 (2018).

49. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, Robert W. McChesney, and R. Jamil Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” Monthly Review 62, no. 11 (2011): 1.

50. ↩ Foster, McChesney, and Jonna, “Monopoly and Competition in Twenty-First Century Capitalism,” 11.

51. ↩ Li Shenming, “Finance, Technology, Culture, and Military Hegemony Are New Features of Today’s Capital Empire” [in Chinese], Hongqi Wengao 20 (2012).

52. ↩ United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Trade and Development Report 2017 (Geneva: United Nations, 2017).

53. ↩ “Global 500, 2018,” Fortune, accessed March 23, 2021.

54. ↩ Li Chong’s research also shows that the rate of surplus value increased. According to his calculations, from 1982 to 2006 the variable capital of U.S. corporations increased from $1,505.616 billion to $6,047.461 billion, a rise of 301.66 percent. Meanwhile, surplus value increased from $674.706 billion to $3,615.262 billion, a rise of 435.83 percent. Li Chong, “Marx’s Law of the Falling Rate of Profit: Analysis and Verification” [in Chinese], Contemporary Economic Research 8 (2018).

55. ↩ Lu Baolin, “Labor Squeeze and Profit Rate Recovery: A Discussion of the Neoliberal Accumulation System of Globalization and Financialization” [in Chinese], Teaching and Research 2 (2018).

56. ↩ Guglielmo Carchedi and Michael Roberts, “The Long Roots of the Present Crisis: Keynesians, Austerians, and Marx’s Law,” World Review of Political Economy 4, no. 1 (2013): 86–115.

57. ↩ Xie Chang’an, “Research on the Evolution of International Competition Patterns in the Age of Financial Capital” [in Chinese], World Socialism Study 1 (2019).

58. ↩ Facundo Alvaredo et al., World Inequality Report 2018 (Berkeley: World Inequality Lab, 2017), 15.

59. ↩ Wang Zhiqiang, “International Transfer of Surplus Value and the Change of the General Profit Rate: Based on the Empirical Evidence of 41 Countries” [in Chinese], Journal of World Economy 11 (2018).

60. ↩ “GDP Ranking,” World Bank, accessed March 23, 2021.

61. ↩ Credit Suisse, Global Wealth Report 2013 (Zurich: Credit Suisse, 2013).

62. ↩ Tom O’Connor, “China Responds to Iran Capturing ‘U.S. Spies’: Remember When Mike Pompeo Said CIA Lies, Cheats and Steals?,” Newsweek, July 23, 2019.

63. ↩ To cheat is to deceive people by using false words and deeds to conceal the truth. Fraud, which is even worse, involves deceptive acts committed by deceitful means. It refers to behavior intended to create confusion and misunderstanding.

64. ↩ Matthew J. Belvedere, “Larry Summers Praises China’s State Investment in Tech, Saying It Doesn’t Need to Steal from US,” CNBC, June 27, 2018.

65. ↩ Zhu Changsheng, “The Real Purpose of the West Collectively Shaming Russia Finally Surfaces” [in Chinese], Kunlunce, April 12, 2018.

66. ↩ Mike Pence, “Remarks by Vice President Pence to Migrant Community at the Santa Catarina Shelter,” U.S. Embassy & Consulates in Brazil, June 27, 2018.

67. ↩ “Stupid to Regard One Civilization as Exceptional,” China Daily, May 22, 2019.

68. ↩ Zhang Yang and Yuan Yuan, “To What Extent Does American Culture Affect China?” [in Chinese], People’s Tribune 7 (2017): 131–33.

69. ↩ Zhang and Yuan, “To What Extent Does American Culture Affect China?”

70. ↩ Shen Yi, “The Debate on Principles of Global Cyberspace Governance and China’s Strategic Choice” [in Chinese], Foreign Affairs Review 2 (2015): 65–79.

71. ↩ Yang Minqing, “Decoding US Cyber Hegemony: the ‘Victim of Cyber War’ Owns 100,000 Network Soldiers” [in Chinese], Global View, 2015.

72. ↩ Liu Liandi, “Discussion by American Politicians and Newspapers of the Peaceful Evolution of China” [in Chinese], International Data Information 8 (1991).

73. ↩ Zhang and Yuan, “To What Extent Does American Culture Affect China?”

74. ↩ Ma Xiaowen, “The United States Is Unleashing an Indo-Pacific Strategy to Shape a New Orient” [in Chinese], China Times, June 5, 2019.

75. ↩ Xi Jinping, “President Xi’s Speech on China-U.S. Ties,” China Daily, September 22, 2015.

76. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 241.

77. ↩ Yang Duogui and Zhou Zhitian, National Health Report I [in Chinese] (Beijing: Science Press, 2013), 217.

78. ↩ Han Zhen “The Institutional Roots of Social Chaos in the West” [in Chinese]. People’s Daily, October 23, 2016.

79. ↩ Ma Yun, “Globalization Was Controlled by 6,500 Transnational Corporations in the Past,” Tencent Financial News, January 19, 2017.

80. ↩ Zhu Tonggen, “An Analysis of the Legitimacy of the Major Wars Launched by the United States after the Cold War: Taking the Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and the Iraq War as Examples” [in Chinese], Global Review 5 (2018).

81. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 185.

82. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “The Financialization of Capitalism,” Monthly Review 58, no. 11 (April 2007): 7–8.

83. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 246–47.

84. ↩ Liu Mingguo, and Yang Junjun, “Beware of the New Round and More Serious Financial Crisis: An Analysis of the Economic Situation of the US in the Post-crisis Era” [in Chinese], Economics Study of Shanghai School 1 (2019).

85. ↩ Lenin, Collected Works, vol. 23, 105.

86. ↩ Lenin, Selected Works, 260.

87. ↩ John Bellamy Foster, “Capitalism Has Failed—What Next?,” Monthly Review 70, no. 9 (February 2019): 1–24.

88. ↩ Deng Xiaoping, Collected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 [in Chinese] (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1993), 96, 353.

89. ↩ Li Shenming, “An Analysis of the Age and Its Theme” [in Chinese], Hongqi