How the Rich Plan to Rule a Burning Planet

By James Plested

Originally published at Red Flag News. Republished from Monthly Review.

The climate crisis isn’t a future we must fight to avoid. It’s an already unfolding reality. It’s the intensification of extreme weather–cyclones, storms and floods, droughts and deadly heat waves. It’s burning forests in Australia, the Amazon, Indonesia, Siberia, Canada and California. It’s melting ice caps, receding glaciers and rising seas. It’s ecosystem devastation and crop failures. It’s the scarcity of resources spreading hunger and thirst. It’s lives and communities destroyed, and millions forced to flee.

This crisis is escalating at a terrifying rate. Every year, new temperature records are set. Every day, new disasters are reported. In Australia, we’re living through a summer of dust and fire. Hot winds from the desert are sweeping up dirt from the parched landscape and covering towns and cities hundreds and thousands of kilometres away. Creeks and riverbeds are being baked dry. Our cities are shrouded in smoke from fires burning for weeks on end, while on the hottest and windiest days the flames grow, devouring everything in their path.

Do our rulers–the political leaders and corporate elites who, behind the facade of democracy, make all the important decisions about what happens in our society–understand the danger we face? On the surface they appear unconcerned. In September, after millions of school students participated in the global climate strike and Greta Thunberg gave her “How dare you!” speech at the United Nations, prime minister Scott Morrison responded by cautioning “against raising the anxieties of children”. And when, in November, hundreds of homes were destroyed and four people killed by bushfires in New South Wales and Queensland, he told the ABC there was “no evidence” that Australia’s emissions had any role in it and that “we’re doing our bit” to tackle climate change.

Is Morrison stupid? Somewhere along the line it appears his words have become unmoored from reality, and are now simply free-floating signifiers, spinning out of control in a void of unreason. As the empirical evidence of the devastation being caused by climate change in Australia and around the world mounts, so too does the gulf between this reality and the rhetoric of conservative coal-fondlers like Morrison grow into a seemingly unbridgeable chasm.

But something is wrong with this picture. To believe that someone in Morrison’s position could genuinely be ignorant of the dangers of climate change is itself to give up on reason. The prime minister of Australia is among the most well-briefed people on the planet, with thousands of staff at his beck and call to update him on the latest developments in climate science or any other field he may wish to get his head around.The only rational explanation is that Morrison and his like are aware of the dangers posed by climate change but are choosing to act as though they’re not.

On first appearances, this might seem like a fundamentally irrational standpoint. It would be more accurate, however, to describe it as evil.Morrison is smart enough to see that any genuine effort to tackle the climate crisis would involve a challenge to the system of free market capitalism that he has made his life’s mission to serve. And he has chosen to defend the system. Morrison and others among the global political and business elite have made a choice to build a future in which capitalism survives, even if it brings destruction on an unimaginable scale.

They are like angels of death, happy to watch the world burn, and millions burn with it, if they can preserve for themselves the heavenly realm of a system that has brought them untold riches. This is language that Morrison, an evangelical Christian, should understand. What might be harder for him to grasp is that he’s on the wrong side.

When seen from this perspective, everything becomes clearer. In the face of the climate crisis, the main priority of the global ruling class and its political servants is to batten down the hatches. Publicly, they’re telling school kids not to worry about the future. Behind the scenes, however–in the cabinet offices, boardrooms, mansions and military high commands–they’re hard at work, planning for a future in which they can maintain their power and privilege amid the chaos and destruction of the burning world around them.

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We’re not, as some in the environment movement argue, “all in this together”. There are many ways in which the wealthy minority at the top of society are already protected from the worst climate change impacts. Big corporations can afford to spend millions on mitigating climate change risks–ensuring their assets are protected so they can keep their business running even during a major disaster. Businesses and wealthy individuals can also protect themselves by taking out insurance policies that will pay out if their property is damaged in a flood, fire or other climate-related disaster.

The rich are also protected from climate change on a more day to day level. They tend to live in the leafiest suburbs, in large, climate-controlled houses. They have shorter commutes to work, where, again, they’re most often to be found in the most comfortable, air-conditioned buildings. They’re not the ones working on farms or construction sites, in factories or warehouses–struggling with the increasing frequency of summer heatwaves. They’re not the ones living in houses with no air conditioning, sweating their way through stifling summer nights. They have pools and manicured lawns and can afford their own large water tanks to keep their gardens green in the hot, dry summer months.

What about in the most extreme scenarios, where what we might call the “natural defences” enjoyed by the wealthy are bound to fail? What happens when the firestorms bear down on their country retreats or rising seas threaten their beach houses? Money, it turns out, goes a long way. In November 2018, for instance, when large areas of California were engulfed in flames, and more than 100 people burned to death, Kanye West and Kim Kardashian hired their own private firefighting crew to save their US$50 million Calabasas mansion.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the city’s wealthiest residents evacuated well in advance and hired a private army of security guards from companies such as Blackwater to protect their homes and possessions from the mass of poor, mainly Black residents who were left behind. Investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill went to the city in the aftermath of the hurricane and witnessed first-hand the highly militarised and racialised nature of the response. One security contractor, hired by a local businessman, told Scahill his team had been fired on by “Black gangbangers”, in response to which the contractors “unleashed a barrage of bullets in the general direction of the alleged shooters … ‘After that, all I heard was moaning and screaming, and the shooting stopped. That was it. Enough said’”.

In the event of disaster, the response of the rich hasn’t been to work with others to ensure the collective security of all those affected. It has been to use all resources at their disposal to protect themselves and their property. And increasingly, as in New Orleans, this protection has come in the form of armed violence directed at those less well off–people whose desperation, they fear, could turn them into a threat.

The most forward thinking of the super-rich are aware that we’re heading toward a future of ecological and social break-down. And they’re keen to keep ahead of the curve by investing today in the things they’ll need to survive. Writing in the Guardian in 2018, media theorist and futurist Douglas Rushkoff related his experience of being paid half his annual salary to speak at “a super-deluxe private resort … on the subject of ‘the future of technology’”. He was expecting a room full of investment bankers. When he arrived, however, he was introduced to “five super-wealthy guys … from the upper echelon of the hedge fund world”. Rushkoff wrote:

After a bit of small talk, I realized they had no interest in the information I had prepared about the future of technology. They had come with questions of their own … Which region will be less affected by the coming climate crisis: New Zealand or Alaska? … Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system and asked: ‘How do I maintain authority over my security force after the Event?’

The Event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, unstoppable virus, or Mr Robot hack that takes everything down … They knew armed guards would be required to protect their compounds from the angry mobs. But how would they pay the guards once money was worthless? What would stop the guards from choosing their own leader? The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for survival.

There’s a reason these conversations go on only behind closed doors. If your plan is to allow the world to spiral towards mass death and destruction while you retreat to a bunker in the south island of New Zealand or some other isolated area to live out your days in comfort, protected by armed guards whose loyalty you maintain by threat of death, you’re unlikely to win much in the way of public support. Better to keep the militarised bunker thing on the low-down and keep people thinking that “we’re all in this together” and if we just install solar panels, recycle more, ride to work and so on we’ll somehow turn it all around and march arm in arm towards a happy and sustainable future.

The rich don’t have to depend only on themselves. Their most powerful, and well-armed, protector is the capitalist state, which they can rely on to advance their interests even when those may conflict with the imperative to preserve some semblance of civilisation. This is where people like Morrison come in. They’re the ones who have been delegated the task, as Karl Marx put it in the Communist Manifesto, of “managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie”. In the context of climate change, this means taking the steps necessary to ensure the continued ability of the capitalist class to profit even if the world may be unravelling into ecological breakdown and social chaos.

There are three main ways in which Australia and other world powers are working toward this. First, they’re building their military might–spending billions of dollars on ensuring they have the best means of destruction at their disposal to help project their power in an increasingly unstable world. Second, they’re building walls and brutal detention regimes to make sure borders can be crossed only by those deemed necessary to the requirements of profit making. Third, they’re enhancing their repressive apparatus by passing anti-protest laws and expanding and granting new powers to the police and security agencies to help crush dissent at home.

Military strategists have been awake to the implications of climate change for a long time. As early as 2003, in a report commissioned by the Pentagon, U.S. researchers Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall argued that “violence and disruption stemming from the stresses created by abrupt changes in the climate pose a different type of threat to national security than we are accustomed to today. Military confrontation may be triggered by a desperate need for natural resources such as energy, food, and water rather than conflicts over ideology, religion, or national honor. The shifting motivation for confrontation would alter which countries are most vulnerable and the existing warning signs of security threats”.

More recently, a 2015 U.S. Department of Defense memorandum to Congress argued: “Climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security, contributing to increased natural disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources such as food and water. These impacts are already occurring, and the scope, scale and intensity of these impacts are projected to increase over time”.

The Australian military has also been preparing for an increasingly unstable geopolitical environment driven in part by the impact of climate change. The 2009 Defence White Paper included a section, “New Security Concerns: Climate Change and Resource Scarcity”, which pointed to the vulnerabilities of many countries in our region. The paper was explicit in linking these to a possible increase in “threats inimical to our interests” and suggested that military capabilities would need to be strengthened accordingly. A 2018 Senate inquiry into the implications of climate change for “national security” drew similar conclusions.

Although discussions about military preparedness are often pitched in terms of the need for increased development assistance, disaster relief and so on, the practice of the U.S., Australian and other military powers over the past few decades leaves little room for doubt as to what their role will be. When they’re not invading countries on the other side of the world–killing hundreds of thousands, reducing cities to rubble and imprisoning and torturing anyone who opposes them–to secure access to fossil fuels, they’re acting as the enforcers of capitalist interests closer to home.

The response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005 is again a good example. When troops from the U.S. National Guard joined the army of private contractors sent to establish “security” amid the death and destruction of the hurricane’s aftermath, the Army Times described their role as quashing “the insurgency in the city”. The paper quoted brigadier general Gary Jones as saying, “This place is going to look like Little Somalia. We’re going to go out and take this city back. This will be a combat operation to get this city under control”. A similar dynamic was at work in Australia when, in 2007, the Howard government sent troops to establish “order” in remote Indigenous communities as part of the racist Northern Territory Intervention.

The idea that the military could be a force for good in the context of environmental catastrophe and social breakdown is laughable. Whatever the rhetoric, the role of the military is to secure the interests of a nation’s capitalist class amid the competitive global scramble for resources and markets. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman had it right when he argued in 1999: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist–McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps”. The military are gangsters for capitalism. And in the future, they’re likely to double down on savagery.

The next way in which the world’s most powerful capitalist states are preparing for climate catastrophe is by massively increasing what’s euphemistically called “border security”. In 2019, Germany celebrated 30 years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event supposedly ushering in a new age of freedom and democracy. In the decades since, however, European countries have built around 1,000 kilometres of new border walls and fences–six times the length of that hated symbol of totalitarianism in Berlin. Most have been constructed since 2015, when millions of Syrians were forced to flee and seek sanctuary in Europe amid a brutal civil war that was triggered in part, at least, by climate change.

A 2018 report by the World Bank, Groundswell–Preparing for Internal Climate Migration, found that just three regions (Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South-East Asia) could generate 143 million climate migrants by 2050. Australia’s immediate neighbourhood will be affected severely, with several Pacific island nations forecast to disappear completely under rising seas. Already, in response to the relatively small numbers of refugees who have managed to reach Australia by boat in the past few decades, the Australian government has established one of the world’s most barbarous detention regimes. Other governments are now following suit.

So far, the measures discussed have been those primarily directed outwards by states seeking to defend the interests of their capitalist class in the international sphere. This is in part designed to create an “us and them” mentality within the domestic population. In Australia, this has been a staple of both Labor and Liberal governments for decades–the idea that the outside world is dangerous, full of terrorists and other bad people whom we should trust the government to protect us from. In the context of growing global instability associated with climate change, we can expect governments everywhere to double down on these xenophobic scare campaigns.

This should be resisted at every step. Not only for the sake of those “others”–civilians in Afghanistan, refugees imprisoned on Manus Island and so on–whose lives the government is destroying in the name of our security. But also because the racist fear of the outsider promoted by our governments is designed in large part to draw our attention away from the increasingly direct and open war being waged against the “others” within.

In the years since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks, Western governments have expanded and strengthened the state’s repressive apparatus. Today we’re seeing, as many predicted, how the crackdown on basic freedoms carried out in the name of the “war on terror” has created a new normal in which anyone opposing the government’s agenda becomes a target. Environmental protesters, and anyone else standing up against the destructive neoliberal order, are now firmly in their sights.

In the U.S., the battle to halt the construction of the Dakota Access oil pipeline provides the most extreme example to date. In November 2016, the Native American blockade at Standing Rock was broken up by a police operation so heavily militarised that it looked like something out of the invasion of Iraq. In sub-zero temperatures, blockaders were attacked with water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets and concussion grenades. Hundreds were injured and many hospitalised. Two women who were involved in the blockade and who later vandalised the pipeline are now facing charges under which they could be jailed for up to 110 years.

In Australia, we’ve seen those protesting peacefully outside the International Resources and Mining Conference in Melbourne face an unusual level of police violence and mass arrests. In Queensland, the state Labor government has passed new laws targeting environmental activists. In early December, three members of Extinction Rebellion were jailed when a magistrate refused them bail–something without precedent for charges related to acts of non-violent civil disobedience.

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Perhaps nothing provides a better metaphor for the future our leaders are steering us towards than a picture, taken during Hurricane Sandy in 2012, of the New York city skyline shrouded in the darkness of a blackout–all except one building, which remained lit up like a Christmas tree. That building was the headquarters of global banking giant Goldman Sachs, where, protected by a mountain of sandbags and using a back-up generator, the company was able to keep the lights on and the profits flowing even while the city was inundated by a three-metre storm surge and hospitals, schools, the subway and most other services were forced to close.

If you imagine this picture as the world, and the Goldman Sachs building as the gilded realm inhabited by the world’s super-rich and the political class that serve them, all you’d need to add is some heavily armed guards around the building and you’d get a pretty good sense of what’s ahead.Our rulers’ apparent lack of concern about climate change is a ruse. They hope that, if they can just head off dissent for long enough, they will succeed in building this future, brick by brutal brick, and there will be nothing the rest of us can do about it.

We need to fight for something different: a system in which our economy isn’t just a destructive machine grinding up human and natural resources to create mega-profits for the rich. One in which the productive life of society is managed collectively by those who do all the work, and where decisions are made not in the interests of private profit, but in the interests of human need. We need socialism–and the fight for it is the great challenge of our generation. At stake is nothing less than the world itself.

Sanctioning Syria

By Chris Ray

This was originally published at Monthly Review.

The United Nations was willing to pay for doors, windows and electrical wiring in Alaa Dahood’s apartment but not for repairs to her living room wall torn open by a mortar strike. That was deemed to be ‘reconstruction’—an aid category forbidden in Syria. “My mother and I used our savings to fix the wall ourselves,” Alaa, a primary school English teacher, told me.

Alaa lives with her widowed mother Walaa in Saif al-Dawla, a suburb of Aleppo that became a frontline between government troops and opposition forces in 2012. After their low-rise housing block came under sniper fire the family fled to a government-controlled sector of the city and, later, to the relative safety of Damascus.

“The stress was too much for my father; he was a nervous man and he died from a heart attack in 2013. My mother and I came home in 2017, when Aleppo was safe,” Alaa said as she served spiced coffee in the living room of her modest two-bedroom home.

More than 521,000 war-displaced Aleppans had returned home by the end of 2018, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported. Very few found their properties undamaged. However, in all of Syria, only 42,000 residents got UN ‘rehabilitation’ aid—the assistance category that covered Alaa’s repairs. UN help was largely restricted to short-term emergency relief—the only aid category acceptable to major UN donors who oppose the continued rule of President Bashar al-Assad.

Alaa got no help with her wall but her UN-financed windows are at least made of glass. In Hanano, a suburb of eastern Aleppo previously under rebel control, a young security guard, Mohamed, showed me his family apartment, which overlooks a football field crammed with the skeletons of burned-out buses and cars. Mohamed installed windows made of plastic sheeting last winter, when the temperature fell below freezing. He got the plastic in a UN-supplied Do-It-Yourself ‘shelter kit’ that included pinewood for window frames, fiberboard for doors, expansion foam, nails and tools.

“Plastic is no good for winter but it is better than nothing,” said Mohamed, who did not want his last name published. Despite a severe fuel shortage he managed to buy enough heating oil to warm the bedroom of his frail 13-year-old sister, Asma, for a couple of hours every night. Mohamed has replaced plastic with glass in one window and is putting aside money to do the rest.

Shelter kits come under the heading of short-term emergency aid. The UNHCR says the kits covered about 92,000 Syrians in 2018—more than twice the number who benefited from home rehabilitation. The UN values shelter kits at around US$500 but recipients often sell them for much less or burn the wood for fuel, according to Syrian agencies that implement internationally-funded programs.

One of the UN’s biggest Syrian partners, the Greek Orthodox aid agency Gopa-Derd, refuses to distribute the kits. “We won’t be a part of putting plastic sheets over window frames where there should be glass. Plastic sheets are not going to fix a hole in a wall or keep a family warm in winter,” said Sara Savva, Gopa-Derd’s deputy director.

Another UN partner, the Syria Trust for Development, which managed Alaa’s repairs, wants shelter kit money redirected to rehabilitation. “We did 1000 shelter kits in 2017 then decided no more. They are a waste of time and resources,” said the Trust’s Aleppo director, Jean Maghamez. He added, however, that the Trust’s rehabilitation program covered only 200 Aleppo apartments in 2019 due to UN funding cuts.

A March 2019 joint statement by the governments of the  U.S., UK, France and Germany reaffirmed their opposition to any reconstruction assistance in Syria until “a credible, substantive, and genuine political process is irreversibly underway.” The UN’s position was set out in a 2018 internal directive from its Office of Political Affairs, then headed by a  U.S. career diplomat, Jeffrey Feltman. “Only once there is a genuine and inclusive political transition negotiated by the parties, would the UN be ready to facilitate reconstruction,” it said.

A negotiated settlement remains distant, however. A UN-backed peace plan drawn up in 2012 is moribund. Separate talks overseen by Assad’s patrons Russia and Iran together with Turkey, which supports elements of the jihadist opposition have also made little progress.

Use of UN funds to rebuild the wall of Alaa Dahood’s apartment would have risked crossing what UN staff in Syria refer to as a “red line” between rehabilitation and reconstruction. Neither term is clearly defined but the line is zealously policed. UN staff in Damascus told me they frequently field questions from governments, other UN donors and “human rights monitors” alert to any infringement of the reconstruction ban.

A June report by New York-based Human Rights Watch wagged a disapproving finger at the UN Development Program (UNDP), UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF), Oxfam and others for having rebuilt water sanitation networks and healthcare facilities in government-held Syria. Any project aimed at “rebuilding and sustainable restoration of infrastructure, services, housing, facilities, and livelihoods can carry risks of entanglement in serious human rights abuses,” Human Rights Watch claimed.

To avoid breaching the reconstruction ban, the Syria Trust generally will not rebuild any apartment wall with a hole bigger than two square meters, its lead engineer in Aleppo, Ragheb Al Mudarres, told me. Gopa-Derd wants rehabilitation broadly interpreted to allow homes to be made safe for occupation. “If there is a hole in the wall we block it, if water drips from the ceiling we fix it, if there is no door or windows we install them. Some donors consider this to be reconstruction—we don’t,” Sara Savva said.

UN employees say they follow an unwritten guideline to avoid work on any public building with more than 30 percent structural damage. In one case, the reconstruction ban obliged agencies to reject a neighborhood committee’s plea for help to rebuild three schools. Funds were available, the proposal was technically sound, and the schools were in eastern Aleppo—once hailed by regime-change supporters as a bastion of revolution.

Across the country, 1.75 million children have no school to attend and the need in eastern Aleppo is particularly acute. However, its population apparently can expect little help from former foreign sponsors who walked away after the shooting stopped.

The UN describes Syria’s humanitarian needs as “staggering.” About 5.6 million people have gone abroad—about two thirds as refugees—and about 80 percent of the 18 million who remain need assistance. One third of the housing stock has been destroyed, leaving more than six million people without a permanent home.

Some 7.6 million suffer from an acute lack of clean drinking water and 4.3 million women and children are malnourished. Previously eradicated diseases like polio, typhoid, measles and rubella have returned and one in three children misses out on life-saving vaccines. About 1.5 million people live with permanent, conflict-related disabilities.

In this environment, restrictions on foreign aid are onerous but trade and financial sanctions are lethal. They have “contributed to the suffering of the Syrian people” by blocking imports of anti-cancer drugs, antibiotics and rotavirus vaccines, medical equipment, food, fuel, crop seeds, water pumps and other essentials, the UN Special Rapporteur on sanctions, Idriss Jazairy, reported in 2018. Jazairy called the sanctions “pernicious” and said they obstructed efforts to restore schools, hospitals, clean water, housing and employment.

U.S. measures are the most punitive of overlapping sanctions regimes also applied by the European Union, Japan, Canada, Australia and others. In the words of a former U.S. ambassador to Syria, Robert Ford, the U.S. is waging “economic war” to “strangle to death” Assad’s government. The casualties are the poor, the sick and children—not the political and business elite.

In Damascus, rebel rockets no longer fall on residential districts that have remained loyal to the government through almost nine years of war. However, rather than celebrating the relative safety, Syrians I meet are exhausted by prolonged and worsening economic hardship. “I lived with war every day for seven years and got used to it. I can’t get used to not being able to feed my family,” a state employee said.

EU and U.S. fuel embargoes have hit hard, with nationwide electricity shortages and long queues for rationed petrol and bottled gas. Pharmaceuticals are even harder to obtain than fuel. The World Health Organization says sanctions block the import of anti-cancer drugs, which were subsidized at low prices by the public health system before the war. Sara Savva said medicine for diabetes or heart disease, when available, could cost an average employee a month’s salary. “Forget about chemotherapy or cancer medication—that’s ridiculously expensive,” she said.

Medical equipment is obsolete because the health ministry can’t import parts or update software. Doctors at a major Damascus hospital told Reuters about 10 percent of patients suffering from kidney failure are dying due to the hospital’s inability to source parts for European-made dialysis machines.

Humanitarian exemptions from sanctions supposedly exist but are difficult and costly to obtain. In any case, financial sanctions have isolated the country from global banking and payment systems, which is why foreign ATM and credit cards are useless in Syria. Even international aid organizations are forced to carry cash across the Lebanese border in vehicles or use informal money traders. So tightly drawn is the noose that European banks have refused to open bank accounts for UN staff when the word “Syria” appeared in their job title.

The UN has not endorsed sanctions but their effect on humanitarian aid has been “chilling,” Jazairy said. Exporters, transport companies, and insurers have refused to do any business with Syria for fear of inadvertently violating U.S. sanctions, which are extraterritorial. They apply to any transaction which involves a U.S. connection, such as goods with more than 10 percent  U.S. content, or use of  U.S. dollars.

In one case, European manufacturers declined to tender for supply of wheelchairs to the UN in Syria. The market is potentially big—about 86,000 Syrians have reportedly lost limbs in the conflict—but not lucrative enough to justify the risk of losing access to  U.S. customers. In his 2018 report, Jazairy argued for the release of Syrian central bank assets “frozen” by the EU. His suggestion that the money be set aside to pay for wheat and animal fodder imports to meet the “urgent survival needs of the population” was ignored.

The UN says its Syrian operations merely complement the work of state bodies, which are primarily responsible for meeting the humanitarian emergency. However, the 2019 national budget was set at less than US$9 billion—half the 2011 level—and actual expenditure is almost certainly lower. In eight years of war, GDP has fallen by between one half and two thirds. During December 2019, the Syrian pound fell to around six percent of its pre-war value.

The government still subsidizes fuel, bread, rice and other staples, but, with ministry budgets shrinking, welfare services are increasingly delivered by local non-government organizations such as the Syrian Arab Red Crescent, Gopa-Derd and the Syria Trust. In the Aleppo suburb of Hanano, the Trust runs a UNHCR-funded community center housed in a former Islamic State prison. On the day I visited, a teacher was helping children to model the Earth’s relationship to the Sun with the use of globes and torches. Legal aid was on offer to divorced women seeking child custody and a female doctor was seeing patients.

The center also provides what its English teacher, Walaa Kanawati called a “psychological counselling service.” She said it was in high demand from parents worried about children’s behavior and women subjected to domestic violence. According to Kanawati, the center spends a lot of time trying to teach children and young adults how to disagree without fighting. “We role-play two individuals or two teams and help each side to defend their opinion,” she said. “We pose topics that come out of society, like early marriage, which is a big problem in this area. We’ve got mothers as young as 15.”

The Trust was also holding remedial English and math classes for children who missed years of school when living in rebel-held districts. Kanawati said those children struggle to keep up with lessons and often drop out of school.

Alaa Dahood, the primary school teacher from Saif al-Dawla also talked about the challenge of educating students from what she called “the other side.” “They are two, three and four years behind other children and I have to stay back after class to teach them to read and write,” she said. Some got no schooling in opposition-controlled zones while others were only given religious instruction. But, “parents from the other side usually appreciate education. They want their children to be as good as their classmates,” Alaa said.

In Damascus Gopa-Derd operates a UN-funded community center in the eastern suburb of Dweila. The area is an uneasy mix of residents subjected to years of mortar fire from neighboring Ghouta, a jihadist wartime stronghold, and Ghouta refugees who fled air strikes leading up to the army’s takeover in 2018.

Center staff try to promote integration by making services available to both groups. They also encourage boys and girls to attend classes together. Families displaced from opposition areas typically believe sexes should be segregated at a young age and “only boys are important,” said Remi Al Khouri, a Gopa-Derd manager. She said single-sex primary school classes were unknown in Syria before “the crisis,” adding: “We want to show that it is normal for boys and girls to go to class together and play together.”

In the nearby suburb of Kashkoul, another Gopa-Derd community center was focused on combatting sexual abuse of children. According to the center’s manager, Lina Saker, child abuse got worse during the war. I observed a class of boys and girls aged between five and ten engrossed in an exercise on “body safety and personal boundaries”; a female teacher used a wall chart to indicate the body’s “no touch” areas. “Some of these children are already victims and we want them to know it is unacceptable for people to touch certain parts of their body,” Saker said.

Getting children off the streets and into school would make them less vulnerable but displaced families often rely on sons and daughters to earn income. The center is trying to help children as young as nine who sell bread on the street, prepare shisha pipes in cafes, collect rubbish for recycling and help out on construction sites. It arranged medical treatment and schooling for a 14-year-old girl whose health suffered from her work in a charcoal factory.

While the body safety class was in session, the children’s mothers were in a nearby room talking about early marriage. Most had married before the legal age of 18 and a center employee was encouraging them to open up about the physical, emotional and material consequences. “We want to persuade them to stop their own daughters from marrying early and to give them a good education,” Saker said.

President Thomas Sankara: A 70th-Birthday Tribute

By Chika Ezeanya-Esiobu 

This was originally published at Pan-African Review.

President Thomas Isidore Noel Sankara would have turned 70 on the 21st of December 2019. At the tender age of 37, however, he was felled by bullets from soldiers loyal to his best friend, Blaise Campaore. Thomas Sankara’s passion was Africa’s advancement; his experimental field was Burkina Faso. What President Sankara wanted to see in Africa, he strategized, mobilized and implemented in Burkina Faso. He would then present his successes to African leaders, while encouraging them to surpass his achievements. Thomas Sankara’s achievement are too numerous to be summarized in an essay or even be elucidated in any book, but a few key points will be here noted.

Perhaps, the first in Thomas Sankara’s achievement is his refusal to borrow a dime from the IMF or any other foreign government or agency, mobilizing instead his fellow citizens to invest in community development and to consume only what the land of Burkina Faso yielded. Likewise, President Sankara, at the risk of being a target of the malignancy of Western governments, strongly encouraged other African leaders to shun external aid and borrowing. Thomas Sankara implored African leaders to rethink governance by reorganizing governmental systems and expressing those systems along a different line from the West in order to reduce costs and simplify governance.

A Pan-Africanist who was deeply committed to the cause of African people, it bothered President Sankara that African leaders were not seriously investing in the progress and unity of the continent, but were excited about uniting and aligning with the West. At a 29 July 1987 meeting of African leaders in Addis Ababa, he decried the poor attendance often recorded at meetings where Africa’s advancement is discussed; “Mister President,” he asked the [O]AU chairman, “how many heads of state are ready to head off to Paris, London, or Washington when they are called to a meeting there, but cannot come to a meeting here in Addis-Ababa, in Africa?”

Like Patrice Lumumba, Sankara incurred the wrath of the French President, Francois Mitterand when Mitterand visited Ouagadougou in 1986. Citing the spirit of the 1789 French Revolution, President Sankara reprimanded France for its oppressive policies in Africa and for the disrespectful treatment of African immigrants in France. Mitterand was livid with rage. He was used to African leaders groveling and shriveling under the mighty-hand of France. The French President would toss his prepared speech aside and take on Sankara, concluding with the thinly veiled threat, “This is a somewhat troublesome man, President Sankara!” Many would say that Sankara’s days were numbered after that fateful visit.

Prior to the French President’s visit, Thomas Sankara, a man of deep philosophical convictions, had in 1984 dumped the colonially contrived and imposed name of Upper Volta to call the nation what they wanted to be known as, Burkina Faso, “Land of Incorruptible People.” That renaming exercise was paired with an asset declaration exercise where President Sankara made known his properties, consisting of one working and one broken down refrigerators, three guitars, four regular motorcycles and one car. Thomas Sankara capped his salary at $462 and forbade both the hanging of his portrait at public places and any form of reverence attached to his person or presence.  Burkina Faso is about Burkinabes and there are 7 million of them. This seemed to be his guiding principle.

Thomas Sankara believed and invested in the education of Burkinabes. Literacy rate was at 13% when he became the president in 1983, and by the time of his assassination in 1987, it stood at 73%. Under his administration, numerous schools were built in Burkina Faso through community mobilization, teachers were trained and women were strongly encouraged to pursue education and career.

Burkina Faso’s agricultural fortunes experienced a turnaround during Thomas Sankara’s administration. First, the consumption of imported goods was strongly discouraged and Burkinabes once more reclaimed their taste buds from France. Thomas Sankara redistributed idle-lying lands from wealthy landowners to peasants who were eager to cultivate them. In three years, wheat cultivation jumped from 1700 kg per hectare to 3800 kg per hectare. His administration further embarked on an intensive irrigation and fertilization exercise leading to an outstanding success across other crops including cotton. Burkina Faso soon become self-sufficient in food production, while cotton was used to make clothes, after having banned importation of clothing and textiles.

Convinced that the health of Burkinabes was paramount in any conversation regarding national advancement, President Sankara flagged off a national immunization program that–within weeks–saw the vaccination of over 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever and measles. Access to healthcare was a basic human right of every Burkinabe and President Sankara mobilized communities across the nation to build medical dispensaries, thereby ensuring the proximity of primary healthcare to citizens in the most remote areas.

Infrastructural challenges were tackled headlong by President Sankara, mostly through the mobilization of citizens, both rich and poor, as construction workers in the building of access roads and other structures across the country. Within a short period of time, all regions in Burkina Faso became connected by a vast network of roads and rails. In addition, over 700 km of rail was laid by citizens to facilitate the extraction of manganese. In order to move Burkinabes away from slums to dignified houses, brick factories were built, which utilized raw materials from Burkina Faso. For the sake of emphasis, all these were achieved without recourse to borrowing or external financial assistance in a nation dubbed one of the poorest in Africa before Thomas Sankara became the President.

A man of integrity and transparence, Thomas Sankara expected nothing less from everyone in leadership position in Burkina Faso. Thomas Sankara refused to use air conditioning system as president of the country, since according to him, that will be living a lie as majority of Burkinabes could not afford such. Upon assumption of power, Thomas Sankara sold off the government fleet of Mercedes cars and commissioned the use of the cheapest brands of car available in Burkina Faso, the Renault 5. Salaries of public servants, including the president’s, were drastically reduced, while the use of chauffeurs and first-class airline tickets were outlawed.

Ever before women advancement became a buzzword globally, President Thomas Sankara led the way in advocating for the equal treatment of women. His cabinet was heavy with female appointees while numerous governmental positions were occupied by women. Female genital mutilation, polygamy, underage and forced marriages were outlawed while women were encouraged to join the military and to continue with their education even during pregnancy.

Thomas Sankara was passionate about the environment and its conservation.  He encouraged citizens to cultivate forest nurseries and over 7,000 village nurseries were created and sustained, through which, over 10 million trees were cultivated in order to push back the encroachment of the Sahel desert.

President Sankara pursued peace with his adversaries. On the morning he was gunned down, he was armed with a speech he had worked on all night, aimed at reconciling opposing factions in Burkina Faso and addressing the grievances of certain sections of the labor force. He did not live to present that speech.

In the short time he had, Burkinabes advanced as a nation and as a people. Outside of the already enumerated physical signs of progress, the social psychological impact on Burkinabes, of being truly and completely independence for the first time since the late 19th-century colonial incursion, was tremendous. Ironically, it was that same independence from France, termed “a deteriorating relationship” with the former colonial powers that Captain Blaise Campaore cited as one of the major reasons why he instigated the coup against Sankara.

Africa has produced much greatness; let it never be said that the continent is lacking in greatness. If truth be told, Africa’s great people of character and principle have often been silenced by forces of greed, exploitation and selfishness. Africa must then learn to build strong and enduring systems for the protection of virtue, the promotion of character and the vilification of vice. Africa would have been better than what it is today, if Thomas Noel Isidore Sankara were alive as an elder statesman to celebrate his 70th birthday anniversary. Yet, in death, he continues to serve as an inspiration to many Africans on what we can become as individuals and as a continent if we choose selflessness, commitment and passion for the continent and her people as the driving force behind our actions.

In Defense of Self-Defense (1967)

By Huey P. Newton

Source: The Huey Newton Reader

Men were not created in order to obey laws. Laws are created to obey men. They are established by men and should serve men. The laws and rules which officials inflict upon poor people prevent them from functioning harmoniously in society. There is no disagreement about this function of law in any circle the disagreement arises from the question of which men laws are to serve. Such lawmakers ignore the fact that it is the duty of the poor and unrepresented to construct rules and laws that serve their interests better. Rewriting unjust laws is a basic human right and fundamental obligation.

Before 1776 America was a British colony. The British Government had certain laws and rules that the colonized Americans rejected as not being in their best interests. In spite of the British conviction that Americans had no right to establish their own laws to promote the general welfare of the people living here in America, the colonized immigrant felt he had no choice but to raise the gun to defend his welfare. Simultaneously he made certain laws to ensure his protection from external and internal aggressions, from other governments, and his own agencies. One such form of protection was the Declaration of Independence, which states: ". . . whenever any government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such forms as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness."

Now these same colonized White people, these bondsmen, paupers, and thieves deny the colonized Black man not only the right to abolish this oppressive system, but to even speak of abolishing it. Having carried this madness and cruelty to the four corners of the earth, there is now universal rebellion against their continued rule and power. But as long as the wheels of the imperialistic war machine are turning, there is no country that can defeat this monster of the West. It is our belief that the Black people in America are the only people who can free the world, loosen the yoke of colonialism, and destroy the war machine. Black people who are within the machine can cause it to malfunction. They can, because of their intimacy with the mechanism, destroy the engine that is enslaving the world. America will not be able to fight every Black country in the world and fight a civil war at the same time. It is militarily impossible to do both of these things at once.

The slavery of Blacks in this country provides the oil for the machinery of war that America uses to enslave the peoples of the world. Without this oil the machinery cannot function. We are the driving shaft; we are in such a strategic position in this machinery that, once we become dislocated, the functioning of the remainder of the machinery breaks down.

Penned up in the ghettos of America, surrounded by his factories and all the physical components of his economic system, we have been made into "the wretched of the earth," relegated to the position of spectators while the White racists run their international con game on the suffering peoples. We have been brainwashed to believe that we are powerless and that there is nothing we can do for ourselves to bring about a speedy liberation for our people. We have been taught that we must please our oppressors, that we are only ten percent of the population, and therefore must confine our tactics to categories calculated not to disturb the sleep of our tormentors.

The power structure inflicts pain and brutality upon the peoples and then provides controlled outlets for the pain in ways least likely to upset them, or interfere with the process of exploitation. The people must repudiate the established channels as tricks and deceitful snares of the exploiting oppressors. The people must oppose everything the oppressor supports, and support everything that he opposes. If Black people go about their struggle for liberation in the way that the oppressor dictates and sponsors, then we will have degenerated to the level of groveling flunkies for the oppressor himself. When the oppressor makes a vicious attack against freedom-fighters because of the way that such freedom-fighters choose to go about their liberation, then we know we are moving in the direction of our liberation. The racist dog oppressors have no rights which oppressed Black people are bound to respect. As long as the racist dogs pollute the earth with the evil of their actions, they do not deserve any respect at all, and the "rules" of their game, written in the people's blood, are beneath contempt.

The oppressor must be harassed until his doom. He must have no peace by day or by night. The slaves have always outnumbered the slavemasters. The power of the oppressor rests upon the submission of the people. When Black people really unite and rise up in all their splendid millions, they will have the strength to smash injustice. We do not understand the power in our numbers. We are millions and millions of Black people scattered across the continent and throughout the Western Hemisphere. There are more Black people in America than the total population of many countries now enjoying full membership in the United Nations. They have power and their power is based primarily on the fact that they are organized and united with each other. They are recognized by the powers of the world.

We, with all our numbers, are recognized by no one. In fact, we do not even recognize our own selves. We are unaware of the potential power latent in our numbers. In 1967, in the midst of a hostile racist nation whose hidden racism is rising to the surface at a phenomenal speed, we are still so blind to our critical fight for our very survival that we are continuing to function in petty, futile ways. Divided, confused, fighting among ourselves, we are still in the elementary stage of throwing rocks, sticks, empty wine bottles and beer cans at racist police who lie in wait for a chance to murder unarmed Black people. The racist police have worked out a system for suppressing these spontaneous rebellions that flare up from the anger, frustration, and desperation of the masses of Black people. We can no longer afford the dubious luxury of the terrible casualties wantonly inflicted upon us by the police during these rebellions.

Black people must now move, from the grass roots up through the perfumed circles of the Black bourgeoisie, to seize by any means necessary a proportionate share of the power vested and collected in the structure of America. We must organize and unite to combat by long resistance the brutal force used against us daily. The power structure depends upon the use of force within retaliation. This is why they have made it a felony to teach guerrilla warfare. This is why they want the people unarmed.

The racist dog oppressors fear the armed people; they fear most of all Black people armed with weapons and the ideology of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. An unarmed people are slaves or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If a government is not afraid of the people it will arm the people against foreign aggression. Black people are held captive in the midst of their oppressors. There is a world of difference between thirty million unarmed submissive Black people and thirty million Black people armed with freedom, guns, and the strategic methods of liberation.

When a mechanic wants to fix a broken-down car engine, he must have the necessary tools to do the job. When the people move for liberation they must have the basic tool of liberation: the gun. Only with the power of the gun can the Black masses halt the terror and brutality directed against them by the armed racist power structure; and in one sense only by the power of the gun can the whole world be transformed into the earthly paradise dreamed of by the people from time immemorial. One successful practitioner of the art and science of national liberation and self-defense, Brother Mao Tse-tung, put it this way: "We are advocates of the abolition of war, we do not want war; but war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun."

The blood, sweat, tears and suffering of Black people are the foundations of the wealth and power of the United States of America. We were forced to build America, and if forced to, we will tear it down. The immediate result of this destruction will be suffering and bloodshed. But the end result will be the perpetual peace for all mankind.

Do Recent Escalations with Iran Stress the Urgency of a Sanders Presidency?

By Jonas Ecke

The recent US assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, was a reminder, if any was needed, of the dangers of US militarism. It also raises the question: Who, in the US, could offer a realistic alternative to this country’s ingrained militaristic path-dependency?

At first sight, Bernie Sanders seems to be the ideal candidate. Whenever Sanders talks international politics on the Democratic primary campaign trail, he urges the US to take on a global role not based on militarism, but on multilateral efforts to address challenges that transcend nation-states, for example persistent extreme poverty and impending planetary extinction.

Of course, we know that speeches on war and peace held by politicians who do not command much political or military might should be taken with more than a grain of salt. This caveat is certainly true for politicians from the Democratic Party, who are more willing to provide rhetorical support for global human rights initiatives, peaceful conflict resolutions, and multilateralism compared to their Republican peers, yet seem unwilling or unable to deliver on these values once in office.

Let us consider the last three Democratic Presidents: Before President Carter armed the Mujahidin in Afghanistan and provided arms for horrendous human rights abuses in East Timor, El Salvador, and elsewhere in the late 1970s and early 80s, candidate Carter promised a new kind of foreign policy centered on unalienable human right norms. Ushered into the White House with promises of a “peace dividend” after the conclusion of the Cold War, President Clinton would deliver weapons into the hands of abusers in Turkey, Indonesia, Columbia, and Israel. These policies were pursued even though the world had become more peaceful as a whole.

And then, of course, there was Obama: An erstwhile critic of the Iraq war and skillful orator whose speeches peaceniks could project their political dreams, President Obama would go on to support proxy fighters in Yemen, Somalia, and Syria, increase the drone strike program tenfold, and join France and other nations in toppling Gadhafi in Libya, contributing to the kind of instability that he decried on the campaign trail. In Obama’s last year in office alone, the US dropped 26,171 bombs.

In early stages of their careers, all of these politicians tried to resonate with vast segments of the US population who want a foreign policy not dictated by weapon merchants and a foreign policy elite that is disconnected from the real costs of war. Once in office, however, every one of them fell short of expectations and/or fell in line with US imperialistic endeavors.

Is there reason to believe that Sanders is any different, that he would somehow escape the dangerous ideation that Realpolitik necessitates destructive militarism, if he were given the chance to enter the Oval Office? It’s a question of high relevance as the US might enter into another war in the Middle East.

Sanders’s Track Record on Foreign Policy

Sanders’s political record and election platform, which are explicitly centered around a more peaceful US foreign policy (if this is possible), show a commitment that makes him more likely to abstain from the militarism of his Republican and Democratic predecessors. Not just his words, but his actions – from his time as a protestor of the Vietnam War via his opposition to Reagan’s brutal Nicaraguan proxy war and the 2003 Iraq invasion, to his recent senate resolution to stop US military support for Saudi Arabia’s devastating air campaign in Yemen – give hope that he would steer the path.

Sanders’s famed authenticity and passion do not only shine through when he talks about today’s frivolous levels of economic inequality, but also when it comes to foreign policy. Particularly in his debates with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Sanders delivered lessons on the long history of tragic blowbacks from interventionism and regime change for a younger generation. Referring to Henry Kissinger’s role as a mentor to Hillary Clinton in a debate in Milwaukee, Sanders stated, “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend. I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.” He then recounted how a military campaign and coup masterminded by Kissinger contributed to the genocide in Cambodia.

All of this is not to say that Sanders is without fault. After all, he is a career senator for an imperialistic state. As such, he has occasionally compromised on foreign policy issues in his long senate career, for example when he approved General James “Mad Dog” Mattis – who directed the bloody campaign against the Iraqi city of Fallujah – in the senate in 2017.  Sanders has also not categorically ruled out the continued use of drones, and moments of pandering to America’s war culture have broken through from time to time. Overall, though, it is safe to assert that Sanders has allowed the courage of his conviction to dictate his foreign policy choices far more often than most others.

If Sanders becomes the 46th president of the United States, his constituents would have to become more educated about foreign affairs and consistently hold him accountable. Herein lies another advantage of Sanders: He is not a politician who seeks to become a technocrat who implements reforms within circles of initiated “experts,” and without much public input. Sanders is spearheading a movement of predominantly, but not only, young US citizens, who have soberly reflected on the many failures of the post-9/11 militarism they have experienced in their lifespan and are committed to continuously engage with the political system. As Noam Chomsky points out, this quality represents an unforgivable sin among the powers that be.

Will It Matter?

Contrary to what his Democrat party detractors – who seem to believe that access to D.C. think tanks, halls of power, and universities equals foreign policy expertise – claim, Sanders has for the most part instinctively arrived at the right decisions on various foreign policy crises from Yemen to Nicaragua. His track record stems from his ability to avoid, in his own words, the “old Washington mindset that judges ‘seriousness’ according to the willingness to use force.” Rather than engaging in futile and immoral military adventures abroad, Sanders promises to finally adequately fund foreign aid programs. These programs only cost a fraction of what’s spent on the military, but could offer shelter, protection, and perhaps even opportunities to the millions who have been displaced by conflicts. As the “severe global funding shortages” for UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency, epitomize, the displaced have been all but abandoned by an international community that cannot resolve the conflicts that cause the displacement.

If the past few months are prologue, the world will be an even more dangerous place by the time Sanders might take office. In the Middle East, global powers such as the EU, Russia, and the US, as well as regional actors such as the Gulf Council states, Iran, and Turkey, will continue their disastrous strategy of funding violent proxies, both offensive and defensive, as they have already done in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon. The whole region might be pushed to the brink by the dangerous escalations of Trump and the US “military–industrial–media complex” on Iran.

Recent history suggests that it may not matter who occupies the Oval Office, as the US war machine, its financial benefactors, and its complicit media seem to churn on out of systemic necessity. The nation’s economy has become largely dependent on the arms industry, as weapons remain one of the most exported products from the US. Thus, the only way to keep this market stimulated is by using and recycling munitions, as well as providing weaponry to foreign states. If Sanders attempts to undermine this process, there could be a heavy price to pay. However, if enough Americans back a Sanders presidency by holding its proverbial feet to the fire, a different path may begin to be carved out. At the end of the day, someone must (and will) occupy the office. The most realistic prospect for an urgently necessary de-escalation and the rebuilding of whole societies and bilateral relationships will be having Bernie Sanders at the helm.

From Stolen Land to Riches: US Neo-Colonialism in South Korea

By Riley Bove

The history behind the division of Korea into the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK, or North Korea) and the Republic of Korea (ROK, or South Korea) is a complicated matter that crosses many spheres. The history between the US and Korea dates back to the Joseon Dynasty when American missionaries introduced Christianity to the peninsula through mission trips and the building of orphanages. When the Japanese colonized the Korean peninsula at the turn of the 20th century, it led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the enslavement of Korean people, as well as the violent suppression of culture, language, and national sovereignty. After World War II and the defeat of Japanese colonialism, and the liberation of Korea, the US enacted both military and governmental control in the southern half of the peninsula. The Korean War was one of many conflicts during which US imperialism acted through proxies to contest the global struggle for socialism and national liberation through the US’s “containment policy.”

The point of this article is to explore the ways in which the US has enacted imperialism and neocolonialism on the Korean Peninsula since its division in the post-WWII era and into the present day. While much attention is paid to the devastation the US caused--and continues to cause--in the DPRK, this article focuses more on the divisive and exploitative role its played in the ROK.

The history of the exploitation of the Korean peninsula dates back to the colonization of Korea by Japan in 1910. By the 20th century, the Korean peninsula had already come under the Japanese sphere of influence and under the militarized gaze of the Meiji government. By 1910, Korea was fully under Japanese colonial rule. American missionaries had already been in contact with the Korean peninsula, starting the 1880s, spreading the evangelical faith throughout and beginning the connection between Korea and the West.  Japan had set its imperialist sights on conquering the rest of the Pacific by 1940. From 1910 to 1945, Korea was subjected to a brutal 35-year-long colonization by the Japanese. For example, Korean women experienced sexual subjugation under Japanese rule. In her essay, “The Korean “Comfort Women’: Movement For Redress,” Sarah Soh Chunghee states that, “Japan began drafting Korean women in full force from around 1937 when its army invaded China and the soldiers raped and murdered tens of thousands of Chinese women in Nanjing” (1228). While occupying Korea, Japan forced women into sexual slavery and men, women, and children were murdered by the Japanese as they moved to fight the indigenous resistance  movements that emerged.

By the end of WWII, the liberation of Korea was underway as revolutionaries swept the Japanese imperialists from the peninsula. Both the Soviet Union and the US consolidated to rebuild the peninsula after the liberation movement. The Soviets helped the north establish a workers-led state and reclaim the land previously owned by landlords. There were preparations to have a “People’s Republic” in Korea that was of, by, and for Koreans. However, this never came to fruition. Anna Louise Strong, in her report for the CIA, writes that: “When the Americans landed in Korea, the Koreans had already a de facto government. A "People's Republic" had been declared a day earlier by a congress of Koreans themselves. General John R. Hodge, commander of the U. S. armed forces, dissolved this "People's Republic," and drove most of its members underground.”  Strong details how, between the liberation of Korea and the creation of the state of South Korea, a people’s democracy was already established in the south. However, the American forces overthrew the de facto government and established a US-backed puppet military dictatorship. The north established their own government without any assistance from foreign powers, while in the south, the Americans maintained their iron grip which has continued into the present day.

After the American “intervention” and toppling of the de facto “People’s Republic of Korea” government, the American imperialists  implanted a pro-US ally, Syngman Rhee, in order to govern the southern half of the peninsula. Rhee was a Western educated Korean who had anti-Japanese credentials but was fully in the pocket of Washington and Wall Street. Once Syngman Rhee was in power, he imposed his oppressive crackdown of all dissidence. In their essay, “Organizing Dissent against Authoritarianism,” Park Mi states that, “Even a moderate dissident became equated as a procommunist and pro-North Korean activity that was deemed to be prosecuted under the National Security Law” (263). The National Security Act (NSA) became the justification for repressive actions of the Rhee regime, including massacres that totaled in the hundreds of thousands. Park also details that, “Military confrontation with North Korea was used as an excuse to justify violations of human rights and the suppression of political dissidents” (263). The geopolitical landscape of a divided Korea was used by the South Korean-US government as a justification for the suppression of the people’s right to self-determination. At the same time in the United States, during the 1950s, McCarthyism reigned over the political landscape of post-war America. McCarthyism was defined as a “Second Red Scare”, a time of anti-communist setiment and political repression, in which the entire organized left was almost incapacited, with its leaders jailed or driven underground, and anyone who had any pro-communist or even pro-peace sentiments “blacklisted.” In the ROK, the Rhee regime enacted its own McCarthyism era under the NSA in order to snuff out and executed thousands of suspected communists.

After the Rhee administration was overthrown in the 1961 coup d’etat, Park Chung-hee rose to power and declared martial law under the Yushin Constitution, which allowed Park to openly violate civil liberties and assume total control of the government. Under his regime, worker unions and other types of mass organizing were suppressed and thousands of union members and organizers were brutally murdered. They faced sexual assault and rape as well as other forms of police violence. Student organizers, as well as organizations deemed to be Marxist oriented, were brutally suppressed under the Park regime.

Park was assassinated in 1979 and another pro-US dictator, Chun Doo-hwan, took power. Political and civil tension culminated in the Gwangju Massacre in 1980 in which 2,000 people, including student-led activist groups and anti-government demonstrators, were murdered by the military and governmental forces. Chun remained in power until 1988. Leading up to the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, the Chun government attempted to make the city more “presentable”. Park Mi writes that, “the Chun government introduced a ‘beautification of the environment’ bill, which was designed to eliminate slums and unregistered street vendors” (278). The Chun government had attempted to gentrify the city, leaving the poor and working class citizens in poverty and forced many into homelessness. All while this was happening, the US government, from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, actively supported and endorsed the brutal regimes. In the 1980s, the US sent a massive influx of capital to South Korea, and it was only during this time that the GDP of the South overtook that of the North.

At the end of WWII, the country had been transformed into one of the poorest countries in the world. The Korean War, which spanned from 1950 to 1953, economically devastated the entirety of the Korean peninsula. The US military and other allied forces fire-bombed and destroyed 22 of the 24 cities in the northern half. Thousands of people died in the war and hundreds of thousands of children become orphaned and displaced during and after the war. While the US fought under the flag of the UN, this was nothing more than a fig leaf for US imperialism. In one of the most infamous massacres to happen during the Korean war, a US cavalry regiment had opened fire on a crowd of South Korean refugees, murdering 150-300 of them. It would be known as the No Gun Ri massacre. Many years after, the US military attempted to whitewash the massacre and it still hasn’t been held accountable in its role of murdering civilians.

In her book, “From Orphan to Adoptee,” Soo-jin Pate critically analyzes the rise of militarized humanitarianism and the birth of transnational adoptions of Korean children after the Korean War. Pate writes that, “However, its location—its close proximity to the Soviet Union—made Korea extremely important to the United States” (24). Pate describes that even though the mountainous landscape of the Korean peninsula did not offer any crucial resources to the United States that they couldn’t get elsewhere, the close proximity to the Soviet Union made the Korean peninsula an important geopolitical area. This is true, but it is also important to acknowledge that Korea was and is targeted because the DPRK’s social and economic system remains antithetical to capitalism and imperialism.

Pate also writes about the conditions of post-war South Korea for orphans: “In addition, 100,000 children were left without homes and separated from their families so that by the end of the war, over 40,000 orphans resided in orphanages” (30). The devastation of the Korean war left children without parents and the orphanages that already existed were overfilled. Missionaries, both Catholic and Protestant, along with American NGOs or non-governmental organizations, built more orphanages and provided materials for food and other necessities. Under the backdrop of the US military occupation and the Korean War, this type of humanitarianism became militarized. Pate also echoes this sentiment: “Militarism and humanitarianism became conflated through programs such as Armed Forces Assistance to Korea and Korean Civil Assistance Command, which produced what I call militarized humanitarianism” (34). Also under this backdrop of militarized humanitarianism, NGOs such as Holt International became frontrunners in the transnational adoptions of Korean orphans. With this, American families flocked to adopt children under the guise of “saving”. This type of savior complex often drove the NGOs like Holt International to be one of the most profitable companies in adoption of children. By contrast, orphans in the DPRK remained in the country, and the government provided them with excellent shelter, education, health care, and other resources. In the DPRK, war orphans were something like national heroes.

Images of “cold, hungry, and threadbare” children filling their stomachs with food donated by American and other Western countries inflated the image of the US military and others as saviors to war-torn children. A lot of these Korean orphans were exploited by public relations in the military in order to further conflate this trope. Images of children smiling and interacting with American servicemen became the poster for militarized humanitarianism. American media campaigns started to funnel money and editorials, describing the orphans as “victims of communism.”

With this mass campaign, American NGOs and other organizations donated immense resources. The influx of media attention and campaigns became the driving force of Korean adoptions. Pate describes the conditions of adoptions as follows: “The geopolitics of the Cold War and the discourse of Cold War Orientalism created a particular set of conditions that made the bodies of Korean children highly desirable” (87). She also writes that, “These children were highly desirable because they were perceived as exotic and cute and because they were perhaps the least threatening group of Asians that the United States had ever encountered” (87). Because of the anti-communist sentiment that plagued American society and Cold War politics, this made Korean children highly sought after for international adoption

 Korean children were seen as non-threatening because many of them were extremely young—infants and toddlers—so assimilation into American society would be easier than it would be with older children. Orientalism also played a part in the tropes of Korean children being more submissive towards assimilation tactics and being perceived as non-enemies. The fetishization of Korean girls had to do with similar orientalist tropes of East Asian women as docile and hyper-feminized. Pate describes the phenomenon this way: “the Oriental doll connotes femininity, exoticness, delicateness, silence, and docility, these very descriptions become assigned to the Korean female orphan” (94). This commodification of Korean women, in other words, relied on the racist, misogynistic, and imperialist view of Korean women as “doll-like”. As Pate writes, the interaction of Korean women with US military servicemen was used as a bargaining chip and to help maintain friendly relations between the US and South Korea.

Korean women and young female orphans were often forcibly recruited into sex work for the US military. These types of “camptowns” became a hotbed of sexual assault and rape. This form of exploitation towards Korean women echoes the brutal sexual violence that was forced upon Korean women by Japanese imperialists during the colonization of Korea and WWII. Soojin Pate wrote that, “the United States adopted a ‘boys will be boys’ policy toward camptown prostitution in South Korea. They were able to justify this policy by linking military prostitution to issues of national security. Citing a 1965 study on troop–community relations conducted by the Eighth U.S. Army” (58). The US military, as Pate argues, adopted a more “turning a blind eye” policy toward camptown and military prostitution. Sexual exploitation as US imperialism had evolved into the misogynistic sex industry.

Park Chung-hee had encouraged this sort of sexual exploitation as it fueled the South Korean economy. The Cold War era had turned South Korea into a neoliberal and capitalist hotspot. Even after the partial revitalization of the South Korean economy in the 1960s, political and inequitable economic woes dominated the geopolitical landscape of South Korea for decades. With the birth of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, South Korea’s economy was boosted by technological companies, such as Samsung and Hyundai, primarily trading with its neo-colonial ally, the United States. Social issues such as high rates of suicide have been a consequence of the overbearing demands of production with little to no compensation for the workers themselves. As J. Sul wrote in an article for Anti-Imperialism.org, “I cannot state all the suicidal cases here, but note well that the suicide rate in South Korea is in the top among the OECD nations” (Sul). Toward the beginning of the 2000s, anti-American sentiment began in full swing in South Korea as two events, the 2002 Yangju highway incident where two Korean schoolgirls were fatally killed by a US military vehicle and the murder of Yun Geum-i in 1992 where a bartender was murdered by a US military private. These two events brought up the question of the USFK’s (United States Forces Korea) continued presence in Korea.

These are just some of the ways that US imperialism and neocolonialism manifest on the Korean Peninsula, and why the US’s presence in South Korea is detrimental and has only led to the division and exploitation of the ROK. However, the puppet regimes had also committed violence and murder with the full support of its neo-colonial ally. The US military occupation of South Korea remains the primary obstacle to peace and reunification of our homeland.  The United States needs to end its military occupation in South Korea and dismantle all of its military bases and facilities, paying reparations to all the peoples of Korea.

“For a colonized people: the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.”

― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1960)

Riley Bove (Seungyoon Park) is a student at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis and an organizer with the ANSWER Coalition in Indianapolis.

References

Fanon, Franz. Les damnés de la terre. A verba futuroruM, 2016

Soh, Chunghee Sarah. “The Korean ‘Comfort Women’: Movement for Redress.” Asian Survey, vol. 36, no. 12, 1996, pp. 1226–1240., www.jstor.org/stable/2645577.

Moon, Katharine H. S. “South Korea-U.S. Relations.” Asian Perspective, vol. 28, no. 4, 2004, pp. 39–61. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42704478.   

Pate, SooJin. From Orphan to Adoptee: US Empire and Genealogies of Korean Adoption. U of Minnesota Press, 2014.

Strong, Anna Louise. In North Korea: First Eye-Witness Report. Prism Key Press, 2011.

Sul, J. “Neoliberalism in South Korea: Financial Crisis, Fascism, and the Rise of Precarious Work.” Anti-Imperialism.org, 1 July 2015, https://anti-imperialism.org/2015/01/12/neoliberalism-in-south-korea-financial-crisis-fascism-and-the-rise-of-precarious-work/.

Mi, P. (2005). Organizing dissent against authoritarianism: The South Korean student movement in the 1980s. Korea Journal. 45. 261-288.

The Importance of Political Education and Class Analysis in the Struggle for Black Liberation

By Erica Caines

This piece was originally published at Hood Communist.

What does organizing look like when Black radicals are being pushed out of spaces for ‘progressiveness’ that makes uncontested room for the centrist, right-wing and fascist narratives driving most platforms?  When examining the conflicts between those fighting oppression under capitalism and the capitalist state’s ruling class alongside those who subscribe to “success” and riches obtained at the expense of the oppressed, few things strike me as obvious disconnects and contradictions.

I am often asked about my relationship with the analytical science of Marxism-Leninism as it pertains to my studies, teachings, and praxis because it’s somehow shocking that a Black woman would align herself with a political ideology that’s been presented as predominantly white and male. I once used these moments as opportunities to flex my knowledge on the historical relationship between socialism/ communism and Black people (particularly Black women) as if I were a fact sheet. While it is important to highlight how many of those we’ve come to know as simply “civil rights activists” were politically and ideologically aligned with socialism/communism, what does that mean? Furthermore, why is that important? 

“Knowledge is power” is a familiar mantra. The Marxist Theory of Knowledge describes knowledge, or the idea of it, as socially constructed. Karl Marx details “power” (economic, intellectual and political) as something that stems from the ownership of the means of production. Simply put, a lot of what we *know* is predicated on the interests of the ruling class. It is in this country’s best interest to keep us ignorant. 

One way we combat ignorance is through active study and dialogue. One of the more frustrating things is the way reading is discussed as a pastime of the elite. That, in itself, highlights how comfortably ahistorical we’ve all become. We discuss accessibility and ability to study —-and by extension, obtain knowledge—- in bad faith. We fail to admit to our own intellectual laziness. It also highlights a misunderstanding of how knowledge and education should be used. 

Marx’s Dialectics of Theory and Practice assumes that none of us are “all-knowing”, but the practice of becoming politically educated, both understanding theories and using them in praxis to better conditions, ultimately improve and transform our conditions. One of the more famous examples of having done this can be found by studying members of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. 

The BPP implemented collective actions that not only included providing much-needed resources but, more importantly, a political education. They believed in active study and debate and with that belief, went on to educate others enough to advocate for themselves. 

When communities advocate for themselves through breakfast programs, liberation schools and providing healthcare (the more prominent examples of the BPP’s work), ‘the group’ is prioritized over the individual. These small actions that result in transforming realities (material conditions) are what the practice and principle of collectivism are rooted in.

This differs from individualism, which is dependent solely on the best interest of the individual. Black people, in mass, seem to be engulfed in a state of individualism. Many have actively disconnected from our history of collectivism (and other tenets of socialism/ communism). This is made obvious with ‘celebrity culture’, the fixation on Black Capitalism as liberation and blatant misrepresentations of our “ancestors wildest dreams”. 

The lack of implementing class analysis (recognizing the significance of class) to understand our material conditions are major factors of the collective distortion of our material realities. I am not speaking on the problematic and dangerous ways white leftists ignore “whiteness” as a class issue to generically state “race and class” and ignore their innate racial prejudices. I am speaking on how our confrontations with racism, as Black people, have disallowed us to interrogate the Black people that exist within different class statuses. 

We live in a white supremacist capitalist imperialist patriarchy so Black people are, undoubtedly, confronted with how oppressions manifest, particularly racism. Unfortunately, we do not leave room to have any introspection on how oppressions manifest through class. All Black people may experience racism, but not all Black people experience poverty. When overwhelming many experience poverty, combatting racism, solely, causes us to turn a blind eye to capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism.That “blind eye” results in a failure to [not want to] understand or implement a class analysis.

The purpose of class analysis is to clarify the agendas between classes. When we discuss the class structure of capitalism in Marxist theory, the capitalist stage of production consists of two main classes: the bourgeoisie (the capitalists who own the means of production) and the proletariat ( the working class who must sell their own labor power). If we are applying class analysis to our material conditions we are acknowledging how these class groups work and function within our realities. When applying it to our communities it is evident that the [almost non-existent] middle class would much rather align with the bourgeoisie (the rich) than the working class. This presents huge contradictions. Not just in organizing, but the way that we view liberation. 

In order for the bourgeois class to thrive, there must be an oppressed working class to exploit. If there are Black people who would much rather align with the rich, what does that mean for the Black people under the thumb of economic oppression? How does that manifest when we are talking about Black political power? 

Capitalist state ruling classes resist change. They disguise their arbitrary privileges and power behind lies, dogma, half-truths, and fallacies. This is most evident through the use of celebrity-driven and identity reductionist activism that uses “socialist” rhetoric to push neoliberal agendas that don’t seek to transform realities but make them easier to digest and not disrupt the status quo. 

In a society plagued by communities of individualists, how can we approach collectivism in substantial ways? We must have a principled commitment to political education, cooperation, and concern for the welfare of each other. 

Workers Unite. 

Passing Judgement: A History of Credit Rating Agencies

By Devon Bowers

Credit rating agencies can be useful institutions as ideally they allow lenders to know the likelihood of a borrower repaying loans or if they should even be loaned to at all. In the current era, though, such agencies now have global power and can affect economies the world over, most notably with the 2007 financial crisis where bundled mortgages that were junk received AAA ratings.[1] Given that, it would be prudent to understand their history, how they operate, and the effects that they have had historically and currently, especially as a new financial crisis may be looming.[2]

Credit scores began to form somewhat in the 1800s due to the risks of borne by creditors. This led to several attempts to standardize creditworthiness. One of the most successful experiments occurred in 1841 with the formation of the Mercantile Agency, founded by Lewis Tappan. Tappan wanted to “systematize the rumors regarding debtors’ character and assets,”[3] utilizing correspondents from around the nation to acquire information, report back, and then organize and disseminate that information to paying members. Yet, this was done in response to the Panic of 1837, an economic calamity that would have wide-reaching effects not only for Tappan, but the nation as a whole.

The Bank of the United States

Before delving into the Panic of 1837, there needs to be an examination of The Bank of the United States [BUS], as it set in motion events that would create the Panic.

Alexander Hamilton was the Treasury Secretary under President Washington at the time the idea of a national bank was being floated, with a report being done on the matter in 1790. He supported the creation of a government bank on the grounds that it would allow for the US to ascend economically and therefore politically on the international stage.[4] This didn’t come out of thin air, however, there was some precedent regarding such a bank, found in the Bank of North America, established in Philadelphia in 1781.

Hamilton was primarily concerned with the fact that the Bank of North America “had made money for its investors and [had] operated under a charter granted by the Continental Congress, whose funds had made its establishment possible,”[5] yet, there were severe issues with the bank that would be a foreshadowing of the problems to come decades later, mainly regarding speculation. While the bank enjoyed support from businessmen, farmers were staunchly opposed to it as not only were they forced to deal with high interest rates on loans, which could range from 16 to as high as 96 percent annually, but there was also criticism of the bank being rather flagrant in loaning out money for land speculation.  

In Congress, debates began over the question of creating a national bank. James Madison, representing Virginia’s 15th district, argued that the entire idea was unconstitutional as he couldn’t find anywhere in the Constitution which allowed Congress to grant charters or borrow money. Strangely enough, he had previously proposed an amendment to the Article of Confederation which explicitly noted implied powers. His amendment read:

A general and implied power is vested in the United States in Congress assembled to enforce and carry into effect all the articles of the said Confederation against any of the States which shall refuse or neglect to abide by such determinations.[6] (emphasis added)

This was a rather serious about-face on the issue for Madison.

Massachusetts Congressman Fisher Ames countered those who were against the bank by echoing the findings of Hamilton’s report, “that the bank would improve commerce and industry, [insure] the government's credit, [and aid] in collecting taxes.” He “saw no purpose in the power of Congress to borrow if the agency of borrowing was not available and if the power to establish such an agency was not implied.”[7]

Opposition to the bill proved in vain and it passed Congress and was signed by President Washington, being approved for a 20-year charter, until 1811.

During its initial run, the bank’s purpose was to “make loans to the federal government and [hold] government revenue.”[8] (This was all in the context of a gold and silver-backed currency system.) When state banks were presented with notes or checks from BUS, state banks would exchange the amount noted in gold and silver, something rather unpopular due to making it more difficult for state-based banks to issue loans.

Many in the business community supported the BUS on the grounds that it kept state banks in check by preventing them from making too many loans “and helping them in bad times by not insisting on prompt redemption of notes and checks.”[9] New businesses would finance themselves by borrowing money from the BUS and when economic hardships occurred, the businesses would have some breathing room as the government didn’t demand repayment on scheduled times.

After the bank’s charter expired in 1811, the push to create another bank would be caught up with the War of 1812 and the financial circumstances that it had placed the country in.

In the first year of the War of 1812, the US saw $7 million of foreign investment leave and about a 161% increase in the amount of bank note circulation (from $28.1 to $45.5 million) due to the increase in state banks (from 88 to nearly 200).[10] The US was seeing large amounts of inflation in a war that had just begun.

Businesses were generally concerned about the amount of inflation and lack of a stable currency to the point that some began to become intimately involved with arguing for a renewal of the BUS, among them David Parish, Stephen Girard, John Jacob Astor, and Jacob Barker. There was also the politician John C. Calhoun, the Congressional Representative of South Carolina’s sixth district, who would become involved with creating a second national bank.

In addition to financiers and politicians, there was Alexander James Dallas, the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania and friends with Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin. Dallas had help to coordinate a meeting in April 1813 between Parish, Astor, Girard, and Gallatin which resulted in them closing out a deal in which the financiers formed a syndicate and purchased $9,111,800 of government bonds at $88 a share, which allowed the government to obtain the $16 million it needed to continue funding the war.[11] Still, many businessmen were concerned about the general economic situation of the country so heartily pushed for the creation of a second BUS.

Initially, there was a bit of stumbling about. In January 1814, Calhoun proposed a poorly received scheme in which the bank would be set up in Washington D.C. and that each state would be able to buy into it voluntarily, with the number of bond subscriptions corresponding with each state’s respective representation in the House, as a way of getting around those who saw the BUS as unconstitutional.

Seeing Calhoun’s failed attempt only made Barker push harder for the establishment of a national bank, arguing such in the National Intelligencer, a daily newspaper read by many in the nation’s capital. This pushed Astor, Parish, and Girard to discuss the situation in greater detail via correspondence and, after writing up an outline, they began to quietly disseminate it among other capitalists and urging Congressional representatives to take up the cause.

In April 1814, the Madison Administration, realizing that the impossibility of raising $25 million for the war effort, reluctantly gave in to the creation of a second BUS, with the House passing a motion with a 76 to 69 vote..[12] Shortly after this was announced, Parish and Astor corresponded with one another, with Parish noting that the time to increase the pressure on politicians was ripe.

Both men followed through, but kept their contacts quiet until they knew that the administration was all in. Parish contacted Dallas who offered his services as to defend the constitutionality of the Bank, doing so in the form of writing letters to Senators as well as  Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, who had become such after Gallatin went to help aid in establishing a peace treaty with the British.

Dallas, in part, wrote that the constitutionality of the bank was disputed “only by a few raving printers and rival banks”[13] and that it should be established. However, within one week of the aforementioned House motion, rumors began to circulate that Britain was looking to negotiate an end to the war. This provided an opening for Madison, who only passively supported the implementation of the Bank, the opportunity to withdraw his support, as did the House promptly afterward.

In February 1813, Acting Treasury Secretary William Jones, working on behalf of the President, offered Dallas the full position of Treasury Secretary, which he declined on the basis of it being too much of a financial sacrifice to do so. The situation changed however in 1814, as with knowledge of Astor’s plan to base the new bank’s capital in real estate, Dallas contacted Secretary of War James Monroe to say that he was now interested in the position, if it were still available and in letters with Jones pushed heavily for the creation of a national bank to predict and collect revenue.

While this conversation was going on, Jones “predicted that the government would have a deficit of almost $14,000,000 by the end of 1814, declared that $5,000,000 more revenue must be provided if the war were to continue through 1815, but made no recommendation as to sources of additional revenue.”[14] This was quickly followed by his resignation. Realizing that Dallas was one of the few people who were on good terms with both his administration and the business community, Madison submitted Dallas’ name for Treasury Secretary on October 5, 1814, with Congress ratifying his nomination the following day.

Immediately after Dallas got into the position, he began to plan for the creation of a national bank that was similar to its predecessor, but with some significant differences: it would be chartered for 30 years, operate out of Philadelphia, and it’s capital would be $50 million of which $20 million would be owned by the government with the rest being up for grabs. In addition, the government would choose only 5 of the banks 15 directors, the remainder being chosen by those private individuals holding government stocks.

When presented before the House Ways and Means Committee, though, there were some minor changes made to accommodate the financial and political realities, with the proposal that the bank be charted for 20 years, $6 million of the bank’s capital being in coins, and that the bank would immediately loan the government $30 million. Dallas moved to garner support not only with the House Committee, but also talking to a special Senate committee on the matter of the bank along with Parish and Girard going to Congress to lobby in favor of it.

Strangely enough, one of the bank’s biggest opponents was Congressman John C. Calhoun, who devised his own plan that he thought would unite both sides.

The Calhoun plan called for the creation of a national bank with a capital base of $50 million, one-tenth of which was to be paid in specie and the remainder in new treasury notes. […] To satisfy the Calhoun supporters, the bank would have to pay in specie at all times, and would not be required to make loans to the government. To gain the support of the Federalists, the government was prohibited from participating in the direction of the bank, and there was to be no provision that subscriptions be made only in stock that was issued during the war.[15]

It would seem that the situation had come to an impasse, yet Dallas had a trump card: maturing Treasury bonds. He announced to Congress “that the government would have $5,526,000 due in Treasury notes on January 1, 1815, with at most $3,772,000, including unavailable bank deposits to meet them.”[16] This convinced the Senate to pass the bill, but it failed in the House due to the anti-bank elements, led by New Hampshire Congressman Daniel Webster, pushed back heartily against the bill and killed it.

On February 13, 1815, news reached Washington that the US and Britain had signed a peace treaty at Ghent, Belgium the past December. The ending of the war allowed the differences between Treasury Secretary Dallas and Congressman Calhoun to thaw as there was now not a need to try to unite everyone, but rather push forward with the bank. The two men got together and hammered out an outline and plan for the bank, which soon passed in Congress and was signed into law on April 10, 1816, with the bank being chartered for 20 years.

The Death of the Second Bank

The bank was set to expire in 1836. Yet it was when the Bank was nearing the end of its life, did a struggle occur over its renewal, led by Andrew Jackson.

In his earlier years, Jackson had a business situation involving paper currency go south, leaving him with a bad taste in his mouth. In 1795, Jackson sold 68,000 acres to a man named David Allison in hopes of establishing a trading post, taking his promissory notes as payment and then using the notes as collateral to buy supplies for the trading post. When Allison went bankrupt, Jackson was left with the debt of the supplies.[17] It would take him fifteen years to finally return to a stable financial situation.

There were also deeper reasons for his anti-bank stance than personal animosity. Jackson was among those people who thought that banking

was a means by which a relatively small number of persons enjoyed the privilege of creating money to be lent, for the money obtained by borrowers at banks was in the form of the banks' own notes. The fruits of the abuse were obvious: notes were over-issued, their redemption was evaded, they lost their value, and the innocent husbandman and mechanic who were paid in them were cheated.[18]

This mistrust of banks would put him in a direct, confrontational path with the BUS and its president, Nicholas Biddle.

Nicholas Biddle was a former Pennsylvania state legislator who became President of the BUS in 1823. Considered a good steward of the bank, he ensured that it “met its fiscal obligations to the government, provided the country with sound and uniform currency, facilitated transactions in domestic and foreign exchange, and regulated the supply of credit so as to stimulate economic growth without inflationary excess.”[19] However, he was also undemocratic as he “not only suppressed all internal dissent but insisted flatly that the Bank was not accountable to the government or the people."[20] Actions such as these simply reinforced Jackson’s disdain for the institution.

Jackson became vehemently anti-Bank in 1829 when Biddle, attempting to gain Jackson’s friendship, proposed a quid pro quo deal. The Bank would purchase the remaining national debt, thus eliminating it, something Jackson greatly wanted done and in exchange, the bank would be re-charted years earlier than expected. An early re-charting would allow for stocks to grow and thus provide a major increase in the dividends of the shareholders.[21] Instead of seeing this as an olive branch though, Jackson viewed it as the institution attempting to utilize bribery and corruption to ensure its continued existence, turning Jackson wholly against the Bank.

It was in 1832 where both these individuals would come to a head over the continued existence of a federal bank.

The National Republicans, a group that split off from the Democratic Party due to anti-Jackson sentiment, nominated a Kentucky Senator by the name of Henry Clay as their presidential candidate in 1831. Convinced that he could utilize the issue of the Bank to beat Jackson, Clay convinced Biddle to seek renewal of the Bank’s charter in 1832 rather than 1836.

Clay did have some backing as the House’ and Senate’s respective financial committees issued reports in 1830 “finding the Bank constitutional and praising its operations[.It should be noted that] Biddle himself had drafted the Senate report[and the] Bank paid to distribute the reports throughout the country.”[22] Clay supporters and allies pushed a bill through in both the House and Senate which would reauthorize the bank, but on July 10, 1832, Jackson vetoed the bill, with the Senate failing in an attempted override.

The Bank was now no more, but what of the Treasury surplus?

After the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States was successfully vetoed, Jackson decided to take the Treasury surplus and split it up among certain favored banks, ‘pet banks’ as they came to be known. However, such a term isn’t fully accurate as while funds did go primarily to banks that were friendly to the administration, “six of the first seven depositories were controlled by Jacksonian Democrats,”[23] there were also banks that whose officers were anti-Jackson that received funds such as in South Carolina and Mississippi.

This divvying up of the Treasury’s surplus funds would set the stage for the Panic of 1837.

Panic of 1837

Due to the massive cash influx, people began to set up their own banks, hoping to get a slice of the government pie. From 1829-1837, the number of banks increased by 56%, from 329 to 798. Many of these new banks were wretched, being “organized purely for speculative purposes [with] comparatively little of the capital required by law [actually being paid and] many of the loans [being] protected by collateral of fictitious or doubtful value[.]”[24]

This led to a fight between banks for deposits and meant that large amounts of money was going all over the country, with no regard for if those funds were being put in places with viable markets and stable economies, where the money could be lent out with confidence that it would be invested and repaid.

With the debt being paid off in January 1835, a surplus created due to rising cotton prices, and an increase in public land sells,[25] and newly collected tax money being sent to banks, it created a situation where these banks were effectively getting an interest free loan which they could make money off of by lending at interest.

Such lending practices would have major repercussions in the western US. Due to the Indian Removal Act of 1830, huge swaths of land were opened up to settlers to come and claim, but it was also open to speculators. These individuals would go westward and purchase large amounts of land to sell to new coming settlers at massively marked up rates. They found themselves empowered by the banks as due to the Treasury giving funds to state banks, banks loosened their lending policies, thus giving speculators the access to credit needed to buy up much of the land. So much had the west become infested by speculation that one Englishman went so far as to say “The people of the West became dealers in land, rather than its cultivators.”[26]

There also existed the problem of professional land agents who worked for capitalists in the East. These agents would go out west, charging some type of fee, whether it be a share of the transactions to take place or a flat five percent fee, and purchase land for their employers, in some cases not even physically seeing the land and basing it off of books. This land would then be rented out and in the meanwhile, further money would be made by loaning funds to frontiersmen at rates ranging from 20 to 60 percent.

This real estate bubble was heavily impacting the nation’s currency. The recognized currencies were gold and silver coin, known as specie. Seeing as how there wasn’t enough of such coinage to go around, paper money supplemented the money supply, which was technically redeemable for specie. Effectively, the US dollar was backed by gold and silver.[27] Due to the moving of money from the US Treasury to state banks which in turn loaned it to western speculators, there was a major increase in the paper money supply to the point that it there wasn’t enough specie to back it and created inflationary concerns, thus prompting the Specie Act of 1836 in an attempt to curtail the problem.

To this end, the Specie Circular of 1836 was introduced which  “required that only gold or silver be accepted from purchasers of land, except actual settlers who were permitted to use bank notes for the remainder of the year.”[28] The entire structure, which was based on paper currency and credit, came tumbling down, with land speculation halting almost immediately.

The credit collapse caused a run on the banks as the citizenry, “alarmed by the money stringency, by the numerous failures in the great commercial centers, by reports that the country was being drained of its specie by the English, and convinced by the Specie Circular that the paper money which they held would soon become worthless,”[29] led people to go to banks and redeem their paper money for specie. Due to so many people wanting specie, banks didn’t have enough to meet demand and suspended all such payments.

All of this caused the Panic of 1837 to come about which shattered credit markets as the nation fell into a painful recession, primarily due to the aforementioned lending policies where literally anyone could get a line of credit given to them.

It was in the aftermath that led to the creation of some of the first credit reporting agencies.

Credit Reporting

Early 19th merchants relied mainly on personal ties to decide with whom to conduct business as many of them would travel from the west and south to eastern coastal cities and purchase goods from the same people again and again. As trade and the economy increased, merchants began to want to give lines of credit to people they didn’t know and in order to get some information on the creditworthiness of these individuals, they “would turn to traveling salesmen to appraise those asking for loans, however, this proved to be a problem as the salesmen, wanting to increase his sales, would paint bad creditors as good, thus allowing for loans to be given.”[30] This led some businesses to, in searching for less biased reports, seek out information from agents whose only job was credit reporting. Baring Brothers was the first to do this in 1829 and were followed by another international banking house, Brown Brothers, both of whom developed systematic credit reports.[31]

The first person to start up an agency where the only objective was credit reporting was Lewis Tappan, “an evangelical Christian and noted abolitionist who ran a silk wholesaling business in New York City with his brother Arthur.”[32] Coming out of the Panic of 1837 almost bankrupt, Tappan decided to launch the Mercantile Agency in 1841 in order to create a national system of credit checking, which utilized both residents and credit agents to judge a person or company’s creditworthiness.

Tappan began the work of his agency by sending a circular to lawyers and others in faraway locations, inviting them to become his correspondents with the hope of  ”[securing] sufficient data regarding the standing of traders in other cities, towns, country hamlets, and trading posts to enable New York City wholesalers to determine what amount of credit, if any, could safely be accorded."[33]

There were credit problems for New York wholesalers. They would generally give a line of credit to local distributors to distribute their product(s) in a given area. Rather than asking for cash payment for the goods, wholesalers gave distributors a discount price and the wholesaler would be reimbursed with the money made from the difference of the discounted and regular pricing, which included an interest rate and covered the wholesaler for risk.

In order to get the risk correct, wholesalers relied on agents reports to their employers about the financial trustworthiness of local borrowers, but they could be deceived as the agent could be falsify information regarding the employer or both the agent and shop could conspire against the creditor.

Tappan’s Mercantile Agency gave a slight fix to these problems in the form of being a de facto surveillance system on borrowers by being an independent source of information from which creditors could gauge the reliability of borrowers. Correspondents would send bi-annual reports to the Tappan’s New York office in early August and February, ahead of the spring and fall trading seasons, which were then copied into large ledgers. Those who subscribed to the ledgers would call the Mercantile Agency’s office to inquire of a current or potential recipient, where the clerk would read the report aloud.[34]

While this helped, there were major weaknesses in the system as the “correspondents [many of them part-time] relied on their general, personal knowledge of businessmen and conditions in the town or area of their responsibility,”[35] which was subject to being influenced by gossip and rumor. During the 1860s changes were made which increased professionalism by bringing on paid, full-time reporters and by the 1870s most major cities had full-time reporters. Methods also changed and was based on direct interviews and financial statements that were signed by borrowers, the latter improving greatly in the 1880s after the courts ruled that such individuals could be charged with fraud if they knowingly provided false information to credit reporters.

The industry would evolve with the ushering in of the 20th century, which would see the origins of the current three major ratings agencies: Moody’s, Standard and Poor’s, and Fitch Group.

Notes

[1] Matt Krantz, “2008 crisis still hangs over credit-rating firms,” USA Today, September 13, 2013 (https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/13/credit-rating-agencies-2008-financial-crisis-lehman/2759025/)

[2] Larry Elliot, “World economy is sleepwalking into a new financial crisis, warns Mervyn King,” The Guardian, October 20, 2019 (https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/oct/20/world-sleepwalking-to-another-financial-crisis-says-mervyn-king)

[3] Sean Trainor, “The Long, Twisted History of Your Credit Score,” Time, July 22, 2015 (https://time.com/3961676/history-credit-scores/)

[4] H. Wayne Morgan, “The Origins and Establishment of the First Bank of the United States,” The Business History Review 30:4 (December 1956), pg 479

[5] Ibid, pg 476

[6] Sheldon Richman, TGIF: James Madison: Father of the Implied-Powers Doctrine, https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/tgif-james-madison-father-of-the-implied-powers-doctrine/ (July 26, 2013)

[7] Morgan, pg 485

[8] Jean Caldwell, Tawni Hunt Ferrarini, Mark C. Schug, Focus: Understanding Economics in U.S. History (New York, New York: National Council on Economic Education, 2006), pg 187

[9] Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, A History of Central Banking in the United States, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/about/more-about-the-fed/history-of-the-fed/history-of-central-banking

[10] Raymond Walters Jr., “The Origins of the Second Bank of the United States,” Journal of Political Economy 53:2 (June 1945), pg 117

[11] Walters Jr., pg 118

[12] Walters Jr., pg 119

[13] Ibid

[14] Walters Jr., pg 122

[15] Edward S. Kaplan, The Bank of the United States and the American Economy (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999) pg 50

[16] Walters Jr., pgs 125-126

[17] The Leherman Institute, Andrew Jackson, Banks, and the Panic of 1837, https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[18] Bray Hammond, “Jackson, Biddle, and the Bank of the United States,” The Journal of Economic History 7:1 (May 1947), pgs 5-6

[19] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[20] Ibid

[21] Daniel Feller, “King Andrew and the Bank,” Humanities 29:1 (January/February 2008), pg 30

[22] John Yoo, “Andrew Jackson and Presidential Power,” Charleston Law Review 2 (2007), pg 545

[23] Harry N. Scheiber, “The Pet Banks in Jacksonian Politics and Finance, 1833–1841,” The Journal of Economic History 23:2 (June 1963), pg 197

[24] Vincent Michael Conway, The Panic of 1837, Loyola University, https://ecommons.luc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1469&context=luc_theses (February 1939), pg 21

[25] https://lehrmaninstitute.org/history/Andrew-Jackson-1837.html

[26] Paul Wallace Gates, “The Role of the Land Speculator in Western Development,” The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6:3 (July 1942), pg 316

[27] Robert Samuelson, “Andrew Jackson Hated Paper Money As Is,” RealClearMarkets, April 27, 2016 (https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2016/04/27/andrew_jackson_hated_paper_money_as_is_102137.html)

[28] Gates, pg 324

[29]Conway), pg 22

[30] James H. Madison, “The Evolution of Commercial Credit Reporting Agencies in Nineteenth-Century America,” Business History Review 48:2 (Summer 1974), pg 165

[31] Madison, pg 166

[32] Josh Lauer, “From Rumor to Written Record: Credit Reporting and the Invention of Financial Identity in Nineteenth-Century America,” Technology and Culture 49:2 (April 2008), pg 302

[33] Lewis E. Atherton, “The Problem of Credit Rating in the Ante-Bellum South,” The Journal of Southern History 12:4 (1946), pg 540

[34] Madison, pg 167

[35] Madison, pg 171

San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan and the Hypocrisy of Prosecutors

By Laila Aziz

At a pivotal time, when progressive constituents in the state of California are demanding criminal justice reform due to archaic, racist, classist policy, one of the reform movement’s most formidable detractors, San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan, became a rape apologist. The criminal justice system is complex, and the District Attorney’s (DA’s) office exemplifies tremendous power within this framework by deciding which charges a person faces, which sentencing enhancements they will face, and the plea deal offered.

Pillars of the Community supports a local Participatory Defense hub created by Silicon Valley Debug. We are in the courtrooms daily observing and working closely with those closest to the pain. We court watch and aggregate data as it is happening around bail, enhancements, plea bargaining, stacking charges, and sentencing.  Our collective work with our partners and community drive policy, advocacy, and direct action.

Summer Stephan has continued San Diego’s legacy of utilizing the criminal justice system as a weapon of America’s lust for inequity and segregation. Her office piles Black, Brown, and Asian Pacific Islanders into prisons for low-level crimes regardless of the sentencing reforms we have demanded. Her office is strategic in how they charge, ensuring they pump the most inequities into our community.

When Summer Stephan was confronted with having to hold a Sheriff Deputy accountable who utilized his badge to terrorize women in San Diego County sexually, she utilized her power as the District Attorney and did the unfathomable. She turned her back on 16 women and reduced the officer’s sexual assault charges to non-serious misdemeanors and felonies. She wanted him to reap the benefits of reform; she repeatedly denies so many of us daily.

The Tale of Two Counties

Recently Summer Stephan’s office charged a young man for fights, based on mutual combat, which law enforcement viewed on another young man’s cell phone. There were no victims and no serious injuries. The DA charged the young man with two assaults. Her office strategically included two gang enhancements, which increased the underlying felony of assault to a mandatory prison term and two strikes. He was facing seventeen years and shortly before trial pled to 4-years in prison. This felony will follow him forever. He will never be able to expunge his record, and he will have to register as a gang member.

In another incident, her office charged a young man with vandalism under $400, a misdemeanor, for writing on property. Misdemeanors are always completed locally, not in prison. Summer Stephan’s office strategically added the gang enhancement, giving him a felony and sentenced the young man to three years in prison. He will never be able to expunge his record and will have to register as a gang member upon release. This young man’s life will be affected for decades for writing on a wall. It is unconscionable to send a young man to prison, where he will be around violence, trauma, and rape for writing on a wall!

According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, former San Diego Sheriff Deputy Richard Fischer faced “20 charges involving 16 accusers. Most of the charges involved allegations of assault and battery under the color of authority, but there was one allegation that he forced a woman to perform a sex act.” These charges included groping, stroking, hugging, and kissing women who expressed fear and severe trauma due to his acts.

On the day of trial, the San Diego District Attorney’s office struck a deal with the defendant. They dropped all of the sexual assault charges and refiled an amended complaint.  The DA paved the way for a man who fondled handcuffed women to avoid prison and sex offender registration.

“The Police Scorecard” a recent report published by Campaign Zero, found that the San Diego Sheriff’s Department was 47% more likely to use force on Blacks than Whites. San Diego is preparing to decide a ballot measure in 2020, which will make an independent police commission with both subpoena power and an independent investigator. Summer Stephan, in her recent decisions, has demonstrated that regardless of the proof, as long as she is in office, she will never hold law enforcement accountable for police brutality or sexual assault. Summer Stephan has proven that as long as she remains top cop in San Diego County, she will fight to maintain the status quo -the New Jim Crow.

Laila Aziz
Program Director
Pillars of the Community

Racism on College Campuses: Understanding It and How to Fight Back

By Collin Chambers

“Racism is a fundamental characteristic of monopoly capitalism”

- George L. Jackson, 1971

White supremacy and settler colonialism have always undergirded US society from its very origins and foundations. Since the election of Trump in 2016, however, the systems of white supremacy and settler colonialism have taken off their “progressive neoliberal” (Fraser 2017) masks. This is evident through the increasing blatant acts of white nationalism and hate crimes. For instance, the rate and frequency of hate crimes on college campuses continue to rise (Bauer-Wolf 2019). To give a recent concrete and on-going example, towards the end of the Fall 2019 semester Syracuse University campus went through “two weeks of hate” as one student put it (McMahon 2019). In a 13-day period, there were 12 acts of racist hate-crimes. This series of racist graffiti has emboldened white supremacists on campus, which has recently culminated in a white nationalist manifesto being “airdropped” to individuals at a university library, the same one shared by the gunman in the Christchurch massacre in New Zealand. The Syracuse University Administration claims this is a myth, but it is a proven fact that the white supremacist manifesto was circulated and viewed within a Greek-life online platform/blog. 

In direct response to these events a POC-led group emerged. #NotAgainSU occupied the Barnes Center, a brand-new $50 million student/gym/wellness center for seven days and seven nights. Though it is a self-described “nameless and faceless” group, there is group of around 15 students who can be characterized as the leadership. From my understanding, and from discussions with those more enmeshed in the group, two-thirds of the 15 can be classified as more liberal and rooted in identity politics, and thus understand racism from this lens. I think the dominance of the more liberal-minded is shown through the list of 18 demands that the group wants met by the administration. I highlight the leadership because the leadership of any organization, group, or movement plays the determining role in characterizing the type of politics the organization has. The theoretical-political framework used to understand oppressions based on identity, like race, determines the politics and effectiveness in challenging/overthrowing structures of power. I do not intend for the essay to be a sectarian/outsider critique of #NotAgainSU—when there are direct actions/spontaneous protest against reactionary structures of power a revolutionary must participate despite any political-ideological limitations to the action/protest. I simply wish to offer what I think is the most efficient (i.e., most revolutionary) theoretical-political framework to deploy to understand racism in contemporary global capitalism. How we understand the world shapes how we act upon it. Identity politics is limiting in the sense that is “an integral part of the dominant ideology; it makes opposition impossible” (Haider 2018, 40). Identity politics needs to be left behind. Below, I offer my thoughts on what type of politics and strategy is necessary to productively fight against racism. 

Following the Geographer, Raju Das (2012), I do indeed privilege class in this analysis, but “do so in a manner in which race and gender are taken very seriously.” Class is, as Das says, “the dominant social relation” (Das 2012, 31), it cuts across all forms of social difference. Thus, in relation to the question of race, an anti-racist working-class politics and strategy needs to be developed and perpetuated. In this essay I argue in order to struggle against the structures of racism there needs to be an anti-racist working-class politic that is global in scope. This means centering imperialism. I emphasize imperialism because all imperialist wars are predicated and justified through racialized logics (both ideological and economical). Imperialist war and racism are inherently linked—one cannot exist without the other (see Du Bois 1933). As Andrea Smith (2012, 69) says nicely: “For the system of white supremacy to stay in place, the United States must always be at war.” I will first do this—though unpopular it may be in our post-structural times—by re-emphasizing the centrality of class. Then, I will offer a brief historical materialist understanding of racism in the age of imperialism (I do indeed argue that imperialism still exists, but that we are in a new unipolar era). Additionally, going against much “post-colonial” thought I emphasize the need to use the nation-state as a form of sovereignty that can fight against racism. With this understanding of racism, I will argue that Asad Haider’s (2018, 111) idea of “insurgent universalism,” which says: “I fight for my own liberation precisely because I fight for that of the stranger,” is a useful strategy/method to fight racism. 

Re-centering Class to Fight Racism

The current political economic situation necessitates for a return to more traditional conceptions of class. Living and growing up in a social formation dominated by the capitalist mode of production, we are not taught or trained to think in class terms i.e., to have class consciousness. If class is mentioned at all it is usually deployed to point out an individual’s identity and status i.e., in the non-Marxist sense. Class is typically thought of as either based on income or status/identity i.e., if someone is blue collared or white collared. It is a common misconception to think of class as just another identity that exists along the different axes and vectors of oppression. In popular parlance, when one talks about a working-class identity one commonly conceives of a white male with a hardhat working on the construction site. While a white male in a hardhat is indeed within the working class, this view is problematic in two senses. First, it ignores how labor/the working class has increasingly been feminized and racialized (Sanmiguel-Valderrama 2007). Secondly, by treating “the working-class” as just another identity alongside gender and race is faulty from a Marxist perspective which sees class as one’s objective relationship to the means of production (see Heideman 2019 for more on all of this). This objective conception of class simply means that on one side there exists the capitalist class which owns and controls the means of production, and on the other side the working class who own nothing but their ability to work and who work within a workplace that is controlled and dominated by the capitalist class. Class from this perspective is understood as a social relation of power (Zweig 2005). 

Obviously, in the capitalist mode of production, capitalists have a lot of “power to” (Glassman 2003). Capital has the power to appropriate surplus product, dictate what is produced within the production process and how, and by what pace. However, as Glassman (2003, 682) points out nicely, “[c]apitalists are not the only actors who can exercise ‘power to.’ Workers, though less empowered than capitalists because of their specific positions within processes of surplus value production and appropriation, also possess structural power in their collective ability to provide or withhold labor.” The inert power workers have exists at all times, even in eras of global working-class defeat and retreat, workers can shut the production and labor process down. In relation to the question of racism, the working class can use their power to fight racism through their latent power and ability to stop the production process. In order to end “extra-economic”-based oppressions the power of capital must be struggled against by with the latent power the working-class has (Heideman 2019; Wood 2002). For example, stopping production (i.e., striking) can be deployed as a method to fight against racism, sexism, heteronormativity, etc. 

Raju Das (2012, 31) lays out clearly the power class analysis and a class perspective can provide for social movements: 

Class analysis necessarily says that: class is the most important cause, and condition for, major global problems…and that workers and semi-proletarians who suffer from these problems have the power to fundamentally transcend the system to solve these problems. Class analysis includes in it the idea of the possibility and the necessity of abolition of class and its replacement with optimal direct-democratic control on the part of the proletariat and semi-proletarian workers over society’s resources and political affairs, at local, national and global scale. Class is about power, which is rooted in the control over productive forces including labor. Class analysis articulates and performs this power.

As the reader can see, Marxists point out the objective nature of class out at nauseam (e.g., Foley 2018; Heideman 2019), but they have done so within the confines of the nation-state scale of the United States and tend to ignore or downplay global scale race relations, in particular the race relations involved in contemporary imperialism. 

A Historical Materialist Understanding of Racism in the Age of Imperialism

Even within the anti-Marxist early 2000s Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002) argued that we still need the historical materialist method to understand racism. Historical materialism is Marx’s method of understanding historical and contemporary social formations. This method seeks to explicate what is historically specific about a dominant mode of production within a particular social formation (Ollman 1993). It is a common misconception that Marx ignored race, gender and other forms of oppression, but this is certainly false especially if one examines his more historical work (see Anderson 2010 79-114 for Marx’s writings on race, slavery, and US Civil War). A mode of production can be briefly defined as the “complex unity” (Althusser 2014) between the productive forces (i.e., means of production and labor-power) and relations of production, which Bettelheim (1975, 55) defines as a “system of positions assigned to agents of production in relation to the principal means of production.” Non-economistic Marxists like Lenin, Mao, etc., emphasize that the relations of production play the determining role in shaping the mode of production (Althusser 2014). On top of the mode of production arises a political and cultural superstructure that works in dialectical relation/tension with the economic base (mode of production). Social change occurs do this dialectical relation with the economic base (see Marx 1979). This historical materialist method allows us to see the historically specific form racism takes on in particular modes of production, and even within different forms of the capitalist mode of production. Understanding the specific forms racism takes in particular historical is essential if one wants to successfully struggle against racism. Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002, 282) points out that 

Capitalism will always have a working class, and it will always produce underclasses, whatever their extra-economic identity. It can adopt to changing conditions by changing the meaning of race and ethnicity, so that one group can displace another at the bottom of the ladder (as Hispanic groups have in some cases replaced African-Americans); or the boundaries of racial categories can, if necessary, be redrawn.

This othered “underclass” that Wood points to can exist on many different scales and not just within the nation-state scale of the Unites States. In the era of imperialism and global capitalism, the underclass are the oppressed nationalities who are struggling for self-determination against the global imperialist class camp (i.e., the US, Europe, and Japan). This will be explored more below. First, I must lay out how to understand racism as a historical materialist i.e., how it functions within the “complex social whole” (McNally 2017). 

In Black Marxism Cedric Robinson (1983) critiqued Eurocentric Marxists for ignoring the Black Radical Tradition, and for not paying close enough attention to how logics of racism structures capitalism itself. Robinson emphasizes that ideas of race and otherness is culturally ingrained in European Civilization itself and thus precedes the development of the capitalist mode of production and in turn structures it. However, the form racism changes within different modes of production. Racism adapts “to the political and material exigencies of the moment” as Robinson (1983, 66) himself says. Thus, we must understand the “political and material exigencies” of the unipolar imperialist era (Becker and Puryear 2015). To help through this the relations of production need be thought of in a non-economistic way. The relations of production are traditionally thought of as class relations (see above). However, in order to think of race as being integral to the social whole of the capitalist mode of production is to consider race relations as being a component of the relations of production that help reproduce capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression on an extended scale (see also Bhattacharya 2017).  When the capitalist mode of emerges on the historical scene it emerges in an already existing racialized European social formation. At first it incorporates the existing racial relations and ideologies, but as the capitalist mode of production becomes the dominant mode of production in the social formation it totally transforms them to serve the interest of capitalist relations of exploitation and oppression because capital is “coercive relation” and bends all social relations to its will (Marx 1990, 425). Capitalism and the new race relations/ideologies that develop become inseparable from each other and cannot function without each other (see also McNally 2017). Understanding racism (and also sexism, heteronormativity, etc) as existing within the relations of production themselves allows one to understand the “distributions of power throughout a structure” along different forms of oppression such as race. (Gilmore 2002, 17). 

In order to explicate this historical-materialist view we turn to W.E.B. Du Bois. Du Bois (1933) is able to show clearly the particular form racial relations of production take on in the monopoly/imperialist era of the capitalist mode of production. Here he lays out two material factors that produce and reproduce racism within the white labor movement during this particular form of the capitalist mode of production (monopoly/imperialist). Firstly, he talks about the development of a labor aristocracy that began to emerge in the monopoly era of capitalism and through the class struggle itself. In this era, Du Bois (1933, 6) says that “a new class of technical engineers and managers has arisen forming a working-class aristocracy” who “have deposits in savable banks and small holdings in stocks and bonds.” These kind of investments and material vested interests in the capitalist system give rise to “capitalistic ideology” which is ingrained in the heads labor aristocracy. Du Bois (1933, 6-7) says that these “engineers and the saving better-paid workers form a new petty bourgeois class, whose interests are bound up with those of the capitalists and antagonistic to those of common labor.” This labor aristocracy is a direct consequence of monopoly/imperialist phase of capitalism.

Secondly, in the era of monopoly capitalism (i.e., imperialism) we see “the extension of the world market” through “imperial expanding industry” which has produced a “world-wide new proletariat of colored workers.” The capitalists are able to bribe “the white worker by high wages, visions of wealth and opportunity” to fight militarily, politically, and economically against colored workers across the world, i.e., to serve the interests of the imperialist-capitalist class. As Du Bois (1933, 7) says: “Soldiers and sailors from the white workers are used to keep ‘darkies’ in their ‘places.’ Imperialist war and racism are inseparable and are two sides of the same coin and are produced and reproduced by global imperialist class camp. The othered underclass in the monopoly/imperialist era of capitalism is indeed the oppressed nationalities across the world (and within the US) who are constantly targeted by the global imperialist class camp. To make this more concrete, the police departments that terrorize, murder, and target people of color in the US purchase weapon surpluses from the US military! This displays clearly a direct connection between people of color within the US nation-state and oppresses nationalities that US imperialism oppresses. 

Marx and Engels (1978, 474, my emphasis) say in the Manifesto: “The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with clash antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.” Thinking about racism in this sense, as being a part of the relations of production helps us see that racism is an integral part in reproducing the capitalist system as a whole. Racism has been so completely transformed and integrated by the capitalist mode of production that one cannot imagine ending racism without struggling against the capitalist system. Mao said: “Racism is a product of colonialism and imperialism. Only by overthrowing the capitalist class and destroying colonialism and imperialism [can complete emancipation be won]” (quoted in Kelley 2008, 100-101) Additionally, because “[w]age-labour rests exclusively on competition between the labourers,” racism plays a fundamental role in maintaining the class power of capital by continuing to divide workers along racial lines (Marx and Engels 1978, 483). At least for me, it is clear that racism does not just exist in air in the superstructure but is produced and reproduced in the mode of production itself. If the structural and root causes of racism are superseded, then overtime—through more political struggle—so will all micro-forms of racism (e.g., racist language).

The Nation-State still matters! Imperialism still exists!

From many different theoretical frameworks/positions the nation-state is seen as inherently problematic for being racist and perpetuating settler colonialism (e.g., A. Smith 2012; Anthias 2018). “Post-colonial” scholars who emphasize decolonization argue that decolonization is impossible within the confines of the nation-state as it is a colonial European invention. Even scholars focused on solving climate change are critical and skeptical of the nation-state in regards to creating a global post-carbon energy regime, and for obvious and important reasons (see Mann and Wainwright 2019). Additionally, many argue that imperialism, understood from the Leninist tradition, no longer exists in the contemporary post-Soviet world. For example, Hardt and Negri (2000, 9), who many draw from, say: 

we think it is important to note that what used to be conflict or competition among several imperialist powers has in important respects been replaced by the idea of a single power that overdetermines them all, structures them in a unitary way, and treats them under one common notion of right that is decidedly postcolonial and postimperialist. This is really the point of departure for our study of Empire: a new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of authority.

This is only half correct. We are indeed living in world where there is no longer the type of inter-imperialist rivalry that characterized the WWI and WWII eras, but that does not mean in any sense that we are living in a “postimperialist” world where the nation-state no longer matters. Rather, we are currently just in a new phase of imperialism, namely a unipolar era of imperialism (see Becker and Puryear 2015), in which the United States is the global hegemonic leader. Since the collapse of the former USSR, the United States has become the hegemonic leader on a global scale. In this era every newly independent nationalist country has to play by the rules that the United States has set through so-called international political-economic apparatuses. Countries have to try to arise in a global political economic system dominated by the interests of the United States. This creates serious limits for what specific countries can do. Cuba, for example, has chosen to maintain its socialist political economic system at the continued expense of the embargo enforced by the US. Evo Morales was just overthrown by a coup that was funded and supported by the United States for being a leader who does not want to play by the rules that the United States enforces through different “international” political/economic apparatuses. The development of the UN, NATO, EU, etc., does not mark an end of nation-state rule and “toward a new notion of global order.” The UN is an “international” organization that, in the last instance, represents and perpetuates the interests of the US, western Europe, and Japan. 

Nation-states still matter for global capital. The rules and regulations needed for continued capital accumulation are largely enforced by nation-states themselves, not a decentralized Empire. In addition, the nation-state still matters in regard to resisting imperialism and racism, especially in the imperial core of the United States. Nation-states and the apparatuses of nation-states can be seized and used for successfully struggling against imperialism and racism. The faulty idea that we are living in a decentralized global Empire makes it seem that capitalism so ubiquitous and penetrating it cannot be directly opposed, that there are no alternatives. 

Kelley and Betsy (2008) in a chapter titled “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution” shows how oppressed nations constructed political solidarity with each other that functioned on an international scale, but was also made possible because one oppressed nation was able to take power on the nation-state scale, and used the power gained from doing so to spread anti-racist working-class power outside its own nation-state. In the 1960s the Black Nationalist movement in the United States had close political-ideological ties with the Chinese Communist Party, and Mao Zedong and other Maoists more specifically. It is commonly known that the Black Panthers would sell Mao’s book of quotations i.e., “the little red book” to fund themselves, but this is only the surface appearance of the connection Maoists in China had with the Black Panthers and groups like Revolutionary Action Movement (RAM). As Kelley and Betsy (2008, 103) point out, Maoism was not exported from China to the Black Nationalist movement. Rather, “[m]ost black radicals of the late 1950s and early 1960s discovered China by way of anti- colonial struggles in Africa and the Cuban revolution.” The example of national liberation/communist struggles taking state power on the nation-scale inspired oppressed nationalities within the United States. Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought provided the theoretical foundations on which to view nationalism relatively. Nationalism from the oppressor nation is reactionary, but nationalism from oppressed nations is revolutionary and necessary. Revolutionary nationalism of an oppressed nation is “proletarian in content, national in form” as Harry Haywood (1978) says. In fact, the RAM argued that black nationalism “‘is really internationalism.’ Only by demolishing white nationalism and white power can liberation be achieved for everyone. Not only will national boundaries be eliminated with the ‘‘dictatorship of the Black Underclass,’’ but ‘‘the need for nationalism in its aggressive form will be eliminated’’ (Kelley and Betsy 2008, 115-116). 

Conclusion: Towards an Anti-Racist Working-Class Strategy

Asad Haider (2018, 61) tells the story about Harry Haywood’s critique of the CPUSA as it became increasingly conservative in the post-World War II years. Throughout the first half of the 20th century the CPUSA was at the forefront of anti-racist/black liberation struggles both politically and theoretically (see Kelley 2002). However, as the CPUSA became more conservative, the Party “distanced itself from the project of black liberation,” and white chauvinism increased within the Party. Haider (2018, 61) points out that the Party had previously been able to combat white chauvinism and racism effectively “through mass antiracist organizing: by joining different people and disparate demands in a common struggle.” After this practice ceased, the “party launched what Haywood called a ‘phony war against white chauvinism’…In Haywood’s analysis, this phony war only ended up strengthening the foundations of white chauvinism, now uprooted from its structural foundations and seen a free-floating set of ideas” (Haider 2018, 61). Harry Haywood argued that a better strategy to fight white chauvinism in the party is to reaffirm the “division of labor among communists in relation to the national question. This division of labor, long ago established in our party and the international communist movement, places main responsibility for combatting white chauvinism on the white comrades, with Blacks having main responsibility for combating narrow nationalist deviations” (Haywood quoted in Haider 2018, 61-62). 

A “phony war” (i.e., one that plays into the logics of the dominant ideology and structures) against racism must be avoided. Given what has been said above, the strategy I propose to fight racism, imperialism, and capitalism is to perpetuate what Asad Haider (2018, 108-114) calls “insurgent universalism.” Insurgent universalism “says we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone” (Haider 2018, 109). It is a universality that “necessarily confronts and opposes capitalism” (Haider 2018, 113). It is a universality that “is created and recreated in the act of insurgency, which does not demand emancipation solely for those who share my identity but for everyone; it says no one will be enslaved” (Haider 2018, 113). The working class can use its power within the realm of production to not only struggle against capital in the economic sense, but also against all “extra-economic” oppressions that exist within the global imperialist-capitalist social whole. We need to fight for the strangers who are being targeted by the global imperialist class camp. We may not know “the other” that is being targeted by US imperialism, we may even have some preconceived notions of that “other” through the media ideological state apparatus (e.g., demonization), however, and despite this we must principally be against any form of US intervention in sovereign nations. Being anti-racist means being anti-imperialist at the same time! Self-determination for all oppressed nationalities!

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