The Syli in the Room: Reviving Ahmed Sékou Touré

By Kevin McCleish

Afro-pessimism in its original iteration found use as a medium to explain the phenomenon of perpetual underdevelopment in Africa. As Mahmoud Mamdani notes, Afro-pessimists suggest Africa cannot rejuvenate itself from within due to the persistence of traditional culture. Kevin Ochieng Okoth describes how Afro-pessimism grew from incessant negative depictions of Africa in Western media, which portray an utterly hopeless continent.

In the face of post-independence failing states, raging epidemics, genocide, and worsening inequality, Afro-pessimism resonated with a global audience because it seemed to justify the interventions of actors ranging from saviorist NGOs [1] to agents of structural adjustment programs like the International Monetary Fund and World Bank. If Africans proved incapable of solving their problems, a host of others appeared who claimed they could.

Emerging from the academy, what Ochieng calls Afro-pessimism (AP) 2.0 differs from its predecessor by focusing intently on the experience of black Americans and how, as Adolph Reed Jr. often and sarcastically puts it, “nothing has changed” since 1865. Reed describes AP 2.0 as an approach which…

“... postulates that much of, if not all, the history of the world has been propelled by a universal ‘anti-blackness.’ Adherents of the Afropessimist critique, and other race-reductive thinkers, posit a commitment to a transhistorical white supremacy as the cornerstone and motive force of the history, and prehistory, of the United States, as well as the imperialist and colonialist subjugation in other areas of the world.”

AP 2.0 proponents believe the uniqueness of anti-black oppression prevents collaboration with other oppressed peoples due to fundamental racial antagonism “condemning them to a life of social death.” AP 2.0 therefore hinders the development of the broad, class-conscious coalitions needed to overcome the hegemonic power of capital. This also renders it impotent against imperialism.

Ahmed Sékou Touré, the first post-colonial president of Guinea (1958–1984), understood that fighting imperialism requires collective action across racial and ethnic lines. Touré is best remembered for organizing an electoral rejection of a new French constitution on September 28th, 1958, which prompted immediate political independence for Guinea. Though the referendum was held in France and across all overseas departments and territories, Guinea had the impressive distinction of being the only political unit to vote “no” on the constitution and colonization. Through his organizing efforts, Touré achieved 85% voter turnout with 95% voting against the colonial arrangement.

After becoming president in October 1958, Touré quickly realized that political sovereignty meant little without economic sovereignty. So Touré adopted what he called a “non-capitalist” path of development in recognition that “the anti-imperialist struggle is the climax of class struggle.” Following this path was made all the more difficult by repeated attempts of international sabotage and economic isolation.

A committed pan-Africanist and fierce proponent of nonalignment during the Cold War, Touré played an immense and overlooked role during arguably the most critical juncture in human history: the Cuban Missile Crisis. When President John F. Kennedy directed a naval “quarantine” of Cuba after intelligence showed the construction of nuclear missile sites on the island in response to the American placement of missiles within striking distance of Moscow, the Soviets immediately began planning an airlift of critical military supplies to circumvent the naval blockade. To do so, however, Soviet jets would need to land and refuel prior to reaching the island.

In the fall of 1962, only the five West African countries of Guinea, Ghana, Senegal, Liberia, and Morocco had airstrips long enough to accommodate jet traffic. To stop an airlift before it ever got off the ground, American officials lobbied African leaders to refuse Soviet air traffic. Though each country had its own set of diplomatic challenges, Washington was most concerned about Guinea.

Touré had just accepted Soviet assistance to improve Conakry’s airport runaways months prior. Coincidentally, though, Touré had also just returned from a state visit to Washington where he and Kennedy made good impressions on one another. Recognizing that the Guinean people had nothing to benefit by obliging the Soviet request, Touré, with his trademark independence, refused. His commitment to what he termed “positive neutrality” gave him the diplomatic flexibility to exercise an inordinate amount of influence during the Cold War. 

Unfortunately, readers unfamiliar with the “Grand Syli” (Touré’s nickname; literally “Big Elephant”), are likely to see his revolutionary contributions as a dead end rather than a point of departure. Often overlooked in the Anglophone world, Touré’s radical pedigree, honed from the mass politics of labor organizing, shows how today’s leftists can use labor organizing to facilitate the formation of broad-based coalitions capable of agitating for radical political transformation. Such strategies are a welcome antidote to the alternative approach of AP 2.0, which does not challenge the foundations of the current political economy. 

Radical Roots Sprout a Labor Leader

Touré’s propensity for mass politics came from his poor peasant origins in Faranah, Guinea. As Saidou Mohamed N’Daou recounts, Touré’s social consciousness developed at an early age as he witnessed his deaf mother suffer abuse. His father died early, and mistreatment drove his mother to suicide shortly after. Orphaned at age seven, Touré found loving refuge in his uncle’s family. Touré entered primary school and showed great intellectual promise and an affinity for anti-colonial agitation — from challenging colonial curriculum to organizing protests against a headmaster who forced students to toil in his garden without compensation (the headmaster refused to take responsibility for a student who died of a snakebite whilst laboring in the garden) [2], to leading a food strike, which resulted in his expulsion as a teenager. 

Though his rebelliousness ultimately derailed a promising academic trajectory, Touré’s anti-colonial intransigence ensured he avoided becoming one of the évolués (Africans “civilized” through European education and assimilation) he later came to despise. Had Touré instead complied and wound up in the academy as another “misguided intellectual,” he may have turned out much like his rival and Négritude proponent Leopold Senghor. Touré took issue with Négritude, which — like AP 2.0 — had essentialist foundations.  He dismissed Négritude as a reflection of bourgeois class ideology that merely masked Western cultural imperialism. Touré held that African culture could not be disassociated from political, social, and economic contexts asserting:

“[T]here is no black culture, nor white culture, nor yellow culture…Négritude is thus a false concept, an irrational weapon encouraging…racial discrimination, arbitrarily exercised upon the peoples of Africa, Asia, and upon men of color in America and Europe.”

Rather than ascend to the ivory tower training the colonizer’s comprador class, Touré’s path through vocational school kept him grounded with ordinary Guineans ensuring his exposure and involvement in radical politics.

After several apprenticeships and a year as a clerk in the French Company of Western Africa, Touré passed examinations qualifying him to work in the Post and Telecommunications Department in 1941. Denied the ability to continue his scholarly endeavors through official channels, he continued his studies via correspondence education and took a “Red” turn by devouring the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Despite the French Communist Party’s (PCF) refusal to enroll local members in West Africa (in adherence to the orthodox view that Africa undergo a bourgeois revolution to precede a genuine anti-capitalist revolution), Touré became a founding member of the PCF’s first Guinean study group, Groupes d’Études Communistes, three years later in Conakry. Contemporaries remember the PCF “not being progressive enough” for Touré. But he found them useful to learn organizing methods from.

Not content with merely discussing theories of Marxist revolution, Touré’s political praxis led him to organize the first union in French-controlled Guinea, the Post, Telegram, and Telephone Workers’ Union (PTT), in 1945. The PTT, an affiliate of the PCF-connected French General Confederation of Labor (CGT), flexed its muscle in various labor actions under Touré’s leadership which landed him in jail, but also gave him the credentials necessary to organize the United Trade Union of Guinean Workers (USCG). Under this umbrella union, all CGT affiliates in Guinea consolidated just a year later in 1946. Recognizing “unionism is…a calling…to transform any given economic or social regime, always in search of the beautiful and just,” Touré became the most influential labor leader in French West Africa just five years after forming the first Guinean labor union.

Occurring simultaneously with his ascent in the labor movement, Touré’s reputation as an organizer enabled him to quickly climb the ranks of anti-imperialist political organizations operating in French West Africa, such as the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA). Formed in 1946 at the Bamako Conference, the RDA, in cooperation with the PCF, attempted to coordinate the efforts of regional anti-imperialist leaders throughout French-occupied Africa. 

While the RDA formed with PCF support, it is mistaken to assume the leaders were all committed to a vision of “Red Africa.”

As it were, the PCF was one of few European political forces committed to anti-imperialism, which forced many associations of convenience. As Elizabeth Schmidt details, under Touré’s direction, the Guinean RDA chapter, later named the Parti Démocratique de Guinée (PDG) in 1950, certainly remained committed to the PCF and CGT far longer than its regional peers who feared anti-communist repression when the PCF lost governing power in 1947 France. Although the RDA officially broke from the PCF in 1950, Touré dubiously followed the RDA line in his political activities and continued cooperating with the CGT in his union work. Unlike the RDA in other regions whose membership was comprised of planters and chiefs, the PDG’s core membership were civil servants and trade unionists reluctant to sever ties with communist organizations.

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72-Day Strike and Electoral Victories

Touré soon integrated his labor and political acumen after becoming the secretary-general of the PDG in 1952. From that point forward, his labor and anti-colonial political activities converged into one indivisible force. The French administration felt the power of the peoples’ solidarity during the 72-Day General Strike of 1953, which set the stage for the famous 1958 independence referendum.

Both Schmidt and N’Daou produce excellent accounts of the 72-Day Strike, the impetus of which was a reduction of the workweek from 48 to 40 hours. Though a work reduction is typically welcome, pay fell proportionally by 17%. Guineans, who were already poor,  protested. But French management was unwilling to compromise. So Guinean labor leaders voted to begin a general strike on September 7th, 1953.

As he had done his entire labor career, Touré gave neighborhood speeches to thousands and continued education programs throughout the strike, urging workers to eschew ethnic strife and embrace their common bonds as workers. Composed of various ethnic groups — principally but not exclusively Malinke, Susu, and Peul — Guinea’s ethnic tensions proved more salient in the rural rather than urban areas due to the coercive power of the colonial canton chieftaincies. In the more cosmopolitan Conakry, calls to transcend significant social divisions using an eclectic mix of themes, found in the language of Marxist class antagonism, French liberal ideals, and selected African beliefs of honor, dignity, and racial pride united workers along class lines.

Like any effective organizer, Touré understood that the value of an idea is measured by its social utility. While some critique the “third way socialism” of Touré, it is unlikely Marxist-Leninist proselytization would have had the same impact on participants as his pragmatic ideological flexibility. By December 1953, workers won their wage increase with 80% of Conakry’s workers participating in the labor action. Trade union membership exploded, from 4,600 in the beginning of the strike to 44,000 by 1955. 

Touré’s foundation in and amongst the people is what made him successful. His effective organization of workers and their corresponding communities laid the groundwork for his coming electoral success and the resounding campaign to dismiss colonialism on September 28th, 1958. Touré’s broad-based coalition strategy became apparent leading up to the independence vote, when he campaigned throughout Guinea on behalf of the RDA/PDG, asserting that “the RDA is not a knife that divides, but a needle that sews [together].” Knowing that any anti-colonial coalition could not survive identitarian fragmentation, Touré relied on public pedagogy to elevate the political consciousness of the masses, declaring:

“We are against racial and ethnic prejudice. We are for qualified people whether they be European, Senegalese, Peul, or Bambara. Some of you say you will not vote for the RDA ticket…because a European is on it. This reasoning is stupid.”

Ethnic divisions proved more salient in the rural areas, where colonial-approved chieftains exercised coercive power over taxation, corvée labor [3], and — even though it had been outlawed in 1905 — slavery primarily made up of Dialonka people serving Peul-aristocratic chiefs in the region of Futa Jallon. It is estimated that 25% of the Futa Jallon region’s population were composed of slaves or their descendants in 1955. Residue from the colonizer’s imported Hamitic Hypothesis still plagued many amongst the Peul aristocrats, who believed they were of superior racial stock compared to non-Peul Guineans.

This second-class population divided by class and ethnicity were organized electorally by Touré and the PDG by referencing their exploitation at the hands of the colonial-connected chieftaincy and appealing to Islamic egalitarian principles. Ever pragmatic, Touré omitted Marxist references and spoke plainly about the exploitative conditions enforced by canton chiefs. Doing so, however, he carefully distinguished between their material and ethnic differences to ensure his broad-based coalition remained inclusive to all Guineans.

Communicating his message to overwhelmingly illiterate rural populations elsewhere, he continued in comprehensible terms:

“Man is like water, equal and alike at the beginning. Then some are heated and some are frozen so they become different. Just change the conditions, heat or freeze, and the original equality is again clear.”

Facing historic and manufactured social divisions proved no easy task. But Touré’s inclusive organizing paid off, as demonstrated by the electoral results from 1954 to 1957 where the PDG dominated municipal, regional, and territorial elections. Though the French initially managed to stem the tide of Touré through electoral manipulation, after 1954, the colonizers recognized that continuing to engage in obvious fraud would lead to backlash. It was clear who ruled the streets.

With his newfound legislative and executive authority, Touré set out to destroy the colonial chieftaincy through a parallel power structure of democratically elected PDG local committees who effectively replaced the hated colonial canton chiefs by 1957 and assumed their duties of tax collection and administering justice. After years of power-structure analysis, Touré knew their destruction would be necessary to remove the vestiges of colonial authority.

As president, Touré continued to combat ethnic and religious differences by moving bureaucrats outside of their home regions, banning groups organized on the basis of race, religion, or ethnicity, surrounding himself with ethnically diverse advisers, and continuing to communicate in various indigenous languages. In such a brief spell of political activity, the man who cut his teeth as an organizer engineered the only electoral rejection of French colonialism and fought against all odds to achieve genuine political and economic sovereignty.

Whose Touré is This?

Although violent resistance against capitalism is often fetishized, any Marxist worth their salt should be able to organize resistance at the point of production. Through his organizing career, the man who not only read Marx’s Capital but had, as Bill Haywood put it, “the marks of capital all over [his] body” from his time on the shop floor, transcended social divisions and united Guineans of all stripes against their colonizer. Recipient of the 1961 Lenin Peace Prize, Touré’s experience should not only be included in the tradition of “Red Africa,” but serve to illustrate the revolutionary possibilities of labor organizing as an alternative to AP 2.0. 

Touré’s ability to unite a diverse population on the basis of class antagonisms proves his mantra that content rather than form supersedes all concerns for those committed to overthrowing capitalism. By focusing on the common denominators and rejecting essentialist obstacles, Touré’s lifelong commitment to construct a better world is instructive. He unequivocally rejected the notion that black people could not exercise political agency, that cooperation amongst demographically diverse groups is impossible, and that a history of slavery precludes meaningful participation in civic life. Rather than accept condemnation to a “life of social death,” Touré instead embodied the words of Frantz Fanon, believing that:

“Man is a yes…Yes to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploitation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom.”

Kevin McCleish is a high school social science teacher and labor organizer from Illinois. His best work is found on the shop floor.

Footnotes

[1] Examples include George Clooney’s Not on Our Watch, which intervened in Darfur, and Invisible Children — the group behind Kony 2012.

[2] Touré does not indicate the headmaster’s race in his recollection. The omission is, perhaps, indicative of his position that imperialism does not operate exclusively along strict racial lines. The colonial education system functioned to maintain existing power relations using white Europeans, black Antilleans, and Africans of the comprador class. Resistance to the system was inherently anti-colonial.

[3] Corvée labor is a system wherein people must work unpaid for a feudal lord for a period.

Charter Schools Will Desert and Violate Thousands In 2024

By Shawgi Tell

Privately-operated charter schools have been around for 32 years. They fail and close every week, abandoning and harming hundreds of parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals. Neoliberals cynically call this “free-market accountability.”

These closures, moreover, are often sudden and abrupt, revealing deep problems and instability in the charter-school sector. Parents, students, teachers, education support staff, and principals often report being blindsided by such closures and how they have to anxiously scramble to find new schools for students.

Officially, 2,315 charter schools failed and closed between 2010-11 and 2021-22 alone (an 11-year period). On average, that is 210 privately-operated charter school failures and closures per year, or four charter school failures and closures per week. The real number is likely higher. Over the course of 30+ years more than 4,000 privately-operated charter schools have failed and closed. That is a high number given the fact that there are under 8,000 privately-operated charter schools in the country today.

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The top four reasons privately-operated charter schools fail and close every week include low enrollment, poor academic performance, financial malfeasance, and mismanagement. Thus, for example, every week the mainstream media is filled with articles on fraud, corruption, nepotism, and embezzlement in the charter school sector. Not surprisingly, arrests and indictments of charter school employees, trustees, and owners are common.

While fraud, corruption, nepotism, embezzlement, and scandal pervade many institutions, sectors, and spheres in America, such problems are more common and intense in the charter-school sector.

Despite all this, a dishonest neoliberal narrative keeps insisting that these privately-operated schools are superior to the public schools that have been defunded and demonized by neoliberals for more than 40 years. The public is constantly under top-down pressure to ignore or trivialize persistent charter school failures and problems.

In this context, the public should reject relentless neoliberal disinformation that public schools are a commodity or some sort of “free market” phenomenon. It should discard the idea that parents and students are consumers who should fend-for-themselves while “shopping” for a school. The law of the jungle has no place in a modern society. Such a ruthless survival-of-the-fittest approach to individuals, education, and society is outmoded, guarantees winners and losers, perpetuates inequality, and increases stress for everyone.

The public should defend the principle that education in a modern society is a social human responsibility and a basic human right, not a commodity or consumer good that people have to compete for. A companion principle is that public funds belong only to public schools governed by a public authority worthy of the name.

Charter schools are not public schools. They are privatized education arrangements, which means that they should not have access to any public funds that belong to public schools. Public funds should not be funneled to private interests. School privatization violates the right to education.

Currently, about 3.7 million students are enrolled in roughly 7,800 privately-operated charter schools across the country. The U.S. public education system, on the other hand, has been around for more than 150 years and educates about 45 million students in nearly 100,000 schools.

Shawgi Tell, PhD, is author of the book “Charter School Report Card.” His main research interests include charter schools, neoliberal education policy, privatization and political economy. He can be reached at stell5@naz.edu.

Capitalist Contradictions and Revolutionary Struggle: An Introduction

By Derek Ford

Republished from Liberation School.

Hearing or reading about the “contradictions of capitalism” in an article or at a rally might be intimidating, like a foreign language or a term only a certain group can understand. While the contradictions of capitalism are complicated, working and oppressed people can easily understand them for the simple reason that we all live with and negotiate any number of contradictions every day. The contradictions we deal with that are the most confining, that most constrain our capacities and that keep us oppressed are specifically the contradictions of capitalism.

On any given day, we find abundant evidence that makes it clear that the capitalist system doesn’t work in practice. Examining the contradictions of capitalism and demonstrating how they are inherent in the system, proves that capitalism doesn’t even work in theory. Understanding capitalist contradictions heightens our agitation and accelerates political consciousness by cutting through capitalist ideology and the various excuses of capitalists, politicians, and their media. Knowing capitalist contradictions better informs our tactics and strategies in any given struggle and serves as a bridge to socialist reconstruction in the U.S.

This series examines some of the primary contradictions of capitalism, including those between use and exchange values, private ownership and social production, and the interests of individual capitalists and capital as a whole. Each entry will break the contradictions down in an accessible manner, explaining some of their more intricate details, and showing how they relate to other contradictions. We provide some general and concrete examples of how they enhance our understanding of capitalism and our struggle to overthrow that system and replace it with a new one. The reason Marx dedicated so much time to studying and analyzing capital was not because it was “interesting” but because its contradictions were and are opportunities for working and oppressed people to advance and create the world the Earth and its inhabitants need and deserve.

The general and specific contradictions we navigate

Our personal lives are riddled with any number of contradictions—or tensions—that we have to deal with daily. The term “guilty pleasure,” for example, names the contradictory situations we face when we are both attracted to and repelled by the same thing at the same time. Our guilty pleasure might be a “reality” show, for example, or a certain genre of books, or any other activity we engage in that brings us both positive and negative feelings.

Many of us despise social media yet still pick up our phones or check our computers throughout the day to use various social media apps. We also deal with the contradictions of our basic life processes like going to sleep. If we stay up late—to catch the end of a sporting event or spend extra time with our friends—while fully knowing we will have to wake up at the same early hour, we’re wrestling with a contradiction. Whenever we have negative and positive feelings at the same time about the same thing (a show), relation (social media), or process (sleeping), we’re dealing with a contradiction.

We’re also familiar with political contradictions. How many of us and the people we know have zero faith in the ruling-class parties but still vote for them? How many of us live in communities that regularly experience the brunt of racist police violence but, at the same time, see the police as a kind of “necessary evil” to combat the regular violence in our neighborhoods, and even might support campaigns for more police or surveillance cameras?

We experience economic contradictions as well, like the tension between doing the quality of work we can be proud of and the quality of work we are paid to perform. As a teacher, I constantly grapple with this contradiction. I truly want to set up the best possible class to educate students in a way they deserve, which requires spending the time necessary to get to know each student, to find the right content to teach, and do so by crafting a plan for each unique class. To do this, however, means I have to work beyond my contract hours.

Even when we’re thrown out of a job, we search out new work for a paycheck to survive even though we know that paycheck will barely let us survive long enough to show up to work to collect the next one.

Philosophy and our understanding of contradictions

Not all contradictions are the result of capitalism. The oldest religious traditions and cultural customs, for example, provide guidance on dealing with contradictions, like those between love and hate or living and dying. Marx didn’t “discover” contradictions, but he and Engels, built on and critiqued theories of capitalism available at the time. By doing so, Marx and Engels found that, while the best political economists often asked the right questions (like what is the source of profit), they couldn’t answer them because they didn’t grasp the historical specificity of capitalism as a contradictory system. They showed that capitalist contradictions are not inevitable or permanent, only that they are unsolvable within the capitalist system. Similarly, neither Marx nor Engels envisioned socialism or communism as a utopian place free of any tensions or contradictions. The socialist struggle doesn’t aim to solve all contradictions, only those that are intrinsic to the capitalist system and that produce the widespread suffering of the world’s majority.

We all have experience with contradictions, yet how we understand them—and therefore how and if we respond to them—depends on our philosophy, which refers generally to “our world outlook.” Just as we have experiences with various contradictions, we have our own philosophical outlooks, even if we aren’t aware of it or familiar with philosophical language. Philosophies are grounded in material reality, which means “that the various systems of the philosophers also always express a class outlook” [1]. The ruling class is the group that controls not only “the means of material production” but also “the means of mental production,” we’re all raised with their world outlook.

The capitalist philosophy we’re taught maintains that the world is made up of independent and fixed entities. Here, contradictions are the same as paradoxes, like the riddle of what came first, the chicken or the egg? This is only a paradox if we think about both as separate things, but there cannot be one without the other. Marxist philosophy explains that the world is made up of interrelated matter that is always in motion. The chicken and the egg are not independent or fixed but interrelated and always in motion. The reason there is no answer to the riddle is because it asks the wrong question [2].

Consider the common refrain that contemporary injustices like war or poverty are merely the result of “human nature.” Under this conception, humans have a nature that is independent of the world and any given social conditions. Humans have always been independent, competitive, self-seeking, etc. Capitalist philosophy thus explains the “failure” of alternative social systems by claiming they are simply “against human nature.” Human nature is presented as a thing, a static object remaining the same regardless of time, space, or society; this lets capitalism off the hook.

Many of us are taught to think that “humans” and “nature” are independent entities and there was once a pure “natural world.” Marx and Engels, addressing one of their contemporaries who adhered to this view, held that even if there was a “nature that preceded human history…. It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere” [3]. We’re taught that capitalism is natural and the way it structures society is nothing but “human nature;” that we are naturally independent of each other, competitive, and out for our own interests; that we are individuals isolated from each other first before we enter into relations with others. It’s always been this way, the myth goes: we’re all free individuals who choose to be either lazy or hard-working, wasteful or frugal, make bad or positive life choices, or choose the “right” or “wrong” crowd to hang out with. That explains why some of us end up rich and the rest end up as workers, how some workers end up in apartments and houses and others end up homeless, employed or unemployed, etc.

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Two worldviews in action: Education, testing, and the myth of meritocracy

In education, this myth takes the form of “meritocracy,” where the results of our test scores indicate how capable or incapable we are as individuals, how much time and effort we spent studying, etc… This assumes however, that standardized tests are “objective,” an assumption that, as educational theorist Wayne Au shows, allows the tests to be “used to compare students, teachers, and schools, and then make high-stakes decisions about being granted access to resources or subjected to punishment” [4]. These tests are far from value-neutral or objective because, in reality, test scores and educational outcomes are ultimately related to one’s zip code. Moreover, they are historically rooted in eugenics and racism.

In the U.S., IQ (or “Intelligence Quotient”) tests were based on the idea that one’s “intelligence” was static and based on their individual biology and heritage. IQ tests are still “used to sort and rank different people by race, ethnicity, gender, and class according to supposedly inborn, innate intelligence” [5]. The assumptions determine the results. If the language of the test is a certain kind of English, students from communities that speak a different kind of English or another language, like Spanish, will have less access to the questions. Regardless of the bias built into the test, however, those who can afford private tutors and do not have to work in the house or at a job, for example, are likely to perform better than those who can’t afford tutors and have to work to provide for their families, whether it be at a job or cooking dinner for their siblings while their parents are working three jobs.

If we understand the historical specificity of standardized tests, then, we understand they do not measure our “natural” or “individual” intelligence but our class standing. We then see that educational and economic success is not the product of an individual’s choices but rather the system that determines the choices available to us and our ability to access those choices. It disproves that we are “individuals” with our individual intelligence and shows that the very notion of “intelligence” is socially constructed under capitalism in a way that justifies capitalism’s inequalities as “human nature.” Individualism, as Marx showed in his critique of bourgeois political economists, was the product of “civil society” during a specific time and place that “appears as an ideal, whose existence [the bourgeois philosophers] project into the past” [6]. In other words, “intelligence” isn’t a static or independent thing but a process interrelated to social practices, including white supremacy, capitalism, racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression, as well as struggles against standardized testing.

Capitalism as an inherently contradictory process

When an economic crisis grips U.S. society, capitalists blame it on some external cause. They debate whether it is the individual characteristics of a president, a Federal Reserve policy or decision, “state intervention” or lack of legislative oversight. In some cases, they unite and blame it on another country.

Marx demonstrated that capitalist crises are the inevitable result of capital’s internal contradictions and, more fundamentally, that capitalism is defined by its contradictions. Capital is value in expanding motion, meaning that capitalism as a system is defined by the accumulation of more and more value.

The process of capital is, at heart, contradictory for at least two reasons. First, the value of any commodity is the social average of the time necessary for its production. Because capitalists compete with other capitalists for a limited market, they are forced to reduce their individual production time to remain competitive, yet eventually, this lowers the overall social production time and, hence, their ability to accumulate value. Second, surplus value for the capitalist is equivalent to the additional unpaid value produced by labor-power. Because capitalists must invest at least some of their surplus value back to expand their own productive capacity to accumulate more value, there is a constant disproportionality between the value produced and the value realized (or sold) [7].

As Marx puts it, “the ultimate reason for all real crises always remains the poverty and restricted consumption of the masses as opposed to the drive of capitalist production to develop the productive forces as though only the absolute consuming power of society constituted their limit” [8]. What he means is that the “absolute law of value” that drives the accumulation of capital expands both the wealth of the capitalists and the poverty of the masses. Even if our wages equal the value of our labor-power, it is impossible for our class to buy the total value we produce.

Capitalism can only move crises around and to higher levels

Contradictions push and pull us between the opposite ends of the same thing or process. Generally, most of these contradictions bubble below the surface. Every few years, however, they boil over into a crisis. To survive, capitalism must continually try to “solve” its contradictions, but can only shift them to different places, delay them, and raise their intensity.

For example, one way capital tries to “solve” the contradiction of surplus value is by extending credit to workers. With credit, we can purchase more commodities than our wages allow. At some point, of course, the debt must be paid. This increases the extent of the contradiction because credit comes with additional costs for us, which ultimately reduces our capacity to purchase goods or pay for the goods we already “bought” on credit.

Another example is how capital tries to “solve” the contradiction between its need to expand and the geographical limitations of the globe. Colonialism and imperialism provide capital with additional outlets to sell their commodities and provide capital with cheaper (often stolen) raw materials and labor-power. Imperialism resulted mainly from this contradiction because, once the capitalists had colonized the world, they could only gain access to extra markets by redividing “their” colonized territories through war. This explains why Lenin’s analysis of imperialism provided the real rationale for World War I [9].

The role of capitalist contradictions in building a revolutionary movement and society

As an inherently contradictory system, as capital grows its own power it, at. the same time, creates and increases its opposing power: the poor and working classes. In this series, we’ll explore some of the most pertinent contradictions of capitalism so that we can seize on them and finally resolve them through socialism.

Contradictions do not unfold in any predetermined manner nor is there any single one that is the most important for all time. Yet a foundational contradiction that is always helpful in raising class consciousness and clarifying the real source of many struggles is the contradiction between use value and exchange value. Under capitalism, all commodities are contradictory unities of both forms of value and capitalists only care about the exchange value of the commodities we produce for them The rest of us, however, buy commodities for their use value.

We rent apartments or take out loans for houses because we need to use them. Capitalists, however, only organize the production of houses for exchange value, or the profit they can make from them. Because capitalists compete for as much exchange value as possible, they end up producing another contradiction examined in the third entry: the absurd crisis of overproduction.

Whenever we struggle to make or keep something as a public good—whether it be education, our libraries, healthcare, water, or utilities—while the capitalists try to privatize it, we’re taking a side in the contradiction between use value and exchange value. We’re saying: “This is important to keep public because society uses and needs it, not because a small group of capitalists can privatize it and profit from it.”

This clarifies that the interests of the masses are directly opposed to the interests of the capitalists and imperialists. When our elected (or unelected) officials still sell them off to corporations despite our protests, it shows our class whose interests the state represents. It further reveals that capitalism doesn’t care about what we need or want to survive, and that they don’t see us as anything other than exploitable and expendable sources of value. Additionally, it helps unite our historically divided class around our common interests, as access to basic public necessities impacts all working and poor people.

On our path toward building a revolutionary movement and society, understanding the contradictions of capitalism helps us accurately identify the cause of the crisis, show the class struggle in action, unite the broad masses, and reveal our common interests and, in general, provides us with the knowledge necessary for our political, tactical, and strategic decisions. The contradictory developments in any society are numerous and it is important to look for the contradictions that will most likely cause intense social conflicts, determining where to put our time and energy, who to reach out to and build connections with, and more.

In this series, we’ll examine multiple fundamental contradictions of capitalism. After examining the contradiction between use value and exchange value in greater detail, we’ll see how that in turn contributes to the absurd crisis of overproduction in the next entry. The series will address other contradictions as well, including the contradiction between technology and living labor, constant capital and fixed capital, and the production and realization of capital. For each, we’ll discuss how we can use them to advance the struggles we’re engaged in daily, promote socialist consciousness, and spread the fact that another world and system is possible and absolutely necessary. That way, we can have enough numbers on our side to seize a revolutionary opportunity: when capitalism’s contradictions pile up high enough that “the ‘lower classes’ do not want to live in the old way and the ‘upper classes’ cannot carry on in the old way” [10].

References

[1] Maurice Cornforth,Materialism and the Dialectical Method(New York: International Publishers, 1953/1971), 7, 8.
[2] For more on this see Curry Malott, “What is Dialectical Materialism? An Introduction,”Liberation School, 04 April 2020. Availablehere.
[3] Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part One, with Selections from Parts Two and Three and Supplementary Texts, trans. C.J. Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1970), 63; see also Sohrob Aslamy, “Marxism, Capitalism, and Nature-Society Relations: An Introduction,”Liberation School, 12 October 2021. Availablehere.
[4] Wayne Au,Unequal by Design: High Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality, 2nd. ed. (New York: Routledge, 2023), 98.
[5] Ibid., 49.
[6] Karl Marx,Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. M. Nicolaus (New York: Penguin Books, 1939/1993), 38.
[7] For an explanation of the first reason, see Mazda Majidi, “Relative Surplus Value: The Class Struggle Intensifies,”Liberation School, 18 August 2021. Availablehere; for an explanation of the second reason, see Derek Ford and Mazda Majidi, “Surplus Value is the Class Struggle,”Liberation School, 30 March 2021. Availablehere.
[8]. Karl Marx,Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Vol. 3): The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole, ed. F. Engels (New York: International Publishers, 1894/1967), 484.
[9] V.I. Lenin, “Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline,” inLenin: Selected Works: Two Volume Edition (Vol. 1)(Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1916/1963), 634-731. Availablehere. See also Brian Becker, “From Inter-Imperialist War to Global Class War: Understanding Distinct Stages of Imperialism,”Liberation School, 20 July 2018. Availablehere.
[10] V.I. Lenin, “‘Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder,” inV.I. Lenin Collected Works (Vol. 31): April-December 1920, trans. J. Katzer (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1920/1966). 85.

"I Don't Believe Capitalism Can Be Fair": An Interview with Clara Mattei

[Photo credit: AFP via Getty Images]

By Diego Viana

Where capitalism goes, austerity invariably follows. This phenomenon has puzzled intellectuals for generations. Why does the dominant economic system consistently adopt reforms that seem to destabilize its very foundations?

Dr. Clara Mattei is a renowned scholar and professor of economics at the New School whose research tackles this question. Her latest book, The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism, argues that austerity isn’t “a policy mistake” but is instead a core feature of capitalism. 

Her analysis concentrates on Europe in the years immediately after World War I. Following the armistice, European workers had a rare moment of revolutionary fervor, spurred by the recognition that war governments were perfectly capable of managing the economy beyond the imperatives of profit.

Dr. Mattei argues that, from 1920 to 1927, austerity was instrumental in upholding European capitalism. It accomplished this via three tools: fiscal, monetary, and industrial policy. The trinity entails, respectively and roughly, cuts in social expenditures and regressive taxation, interest rate hikes, and labor suppression. Neoclassical economists like the United Kingdom’s Ralph Hawtrey and Italy’s Maffeo Pantaleoni worked hard to argue for these policies. Ultimately, though, implementation required the break from democracy and political violence that enabled Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime and the development of a fascist mindset which later spread across Europe.

Last month, Hampton Institute contributor and economic journalist Diego Viana interviewed Dr. Mattei about her thesis and worldview. Please enjoy the following transcript, which we have edited for clarity and length:

Diego Viana | Your book argues that austerity is central to the capitalist order. How do current mobilizations figure into this argument?

Clara Mattei | They make the book very topical! Look at the United States. People are mobilizing. And it's not just the strikes. Workers are questioning wage labor altogether. This happened after World War I, when the state politicized the economic realm by intervening in it as part of the war effort. And it’s happening, to a lesser extent of course, again today. Folks got a taste of life without exploited work during COVID when the government offered some social support. Why should they return to work in such horrible conditions now?

That’s where austerity enters the picture. It increases our dependence on markets. That’s typical and specific to capitalism. Most people only have rights if they have money in their pockets that they acquire through wage labor. By cutting social benefits and weakening workers' bargaining power, austerity seeks to ensure no alternative but to bend our necks and accept exploitative conditions.

DV | Nevertheless, mobilizing workers remains difficult due to precarity, reduced union density, etc. Is victory possible?

CM | Your analysis is accurate. It speaks to the “success” of austerity. A half century of hardcore measures has made labor precarious, with fewer union rights, less welfare, and more privatization. Interest rates are rising too, which limits ordinary people’s access to credit and produces more unemployment. Yet people are still mobilizing. True, unions are weaker now than they were after the Second World War — and definitely after the First. But our system is based on exploitation of the majority. So, whenever this majority mobilizes, it's a big deal.

This October the United Auto Workers secured a more generous and progressive wage structure following a 45-day strike. This victory is very serious. And it shows that — when push comes to shove — capital needs workers, who thereby have tremendous leverage to win demands. So —  wherever they are — if workers withhold their labor, that frightens capital.

My book talks about the weapons of the State and its political and economic elites to wage class war against the people. But the book is also optimistic. It recognizes that class struggle is ongoing and workers can win. Indeed, capital as wealth requires capital as a social relation — namely, wage slavery. This means that, so long as we have capitalism, the fight continues. Of course, there have been historical moments when workers were in retreat. But I think now we’re seeing that austerity doesn't mean the death of workers. Austerity is a tool to keep workers in check. In that sense, it acknowledges their power.

DV | Many American economists believe recent stimulus plans mean the age of austerity is over. You push back against this by conceptualizing fiscal, monetary, and industrial policy as a trinity of tools to enforce austerity. Explain how that trinity operates in our current milieu.

CM | The trinity is operating at all levels. Hiking interest rate disciplines workers by “loosening” a tight labor market, which simply means increasing unemployment. And that is exactly what the Fed aims to do. They want unemployment to keep workers desperate enough to accept low wages. That's a really powerful weapon right now. Even if it hasn’t worked yet, it will. The recession is coming. The recession is a short-term cost for a much longer-term gain, which is stabilizing class relations.

DV | How about the fiscal side?

CM | I try to break from mainstream definitions of austerity. People equate it to budget cuts and tax increases. This means nothing. It’s the typical practice of economists to look at the aggregate, disregarding the class dynamics of who wins and loses. But this approach leads to mistaken conclusions — like the idea that austerity is behind us. The state is spending a lot of money, after all! The crucial point is that austerity does not mean “small government” but it means that the government is actively intervening in favor of the elites and to the detriment of the many. 

So fiscal austerity is central, and Bidenonomics is a good example. The public budget expanded. But where did the money go? It went to war, the military-industrial complex, and  energy companies to incentivize them to go green — and, of course, bank bailouts. The state is spending money but giving it to capital owners while structurally defunding social services. For me, fiscal austerity is about social expenditures — not state expenditures generally.

DV | So austerity is compatible with considerable state spending?

CM | Yes! The point is where the state spends. And it’s spending not on the people but the market. It’s commodifying basic services. Joe Biden has done nothing in terms of social redistribution. And his fellow Democrat, Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, has just announced massive cuts to social spending, spurred also by the fact that interest rate hikes make it more expensive — especially for local governments — to borrow.

So, there, we see the connection. The elements of the trinity reinforce one another. Monetary austerity is reinforcing fiscal austerity. And then there’s the other side of fiscal austerity, which is not just about social expenditure cuts but also regressive taxation. Who is paying the taxes? Again, we’re seeing constant increases in consumption taxes and a total unwillingness to tax capital, profits, inheritance, or any form of wealth. This is very structural. And it’s not unique to the United States. In Italy, Prime Minister Georgia Meloni is doing the same. It's worldwide.

DV | The third element is industrial austerity, particularly in the form of repression.

CM | Biden’s administration can try to give the impression of being pro-labor but it's able to do very little to combat privatization and labor deregulation. It has actually even intervened in a quite cooperative way to block railway workers from striking to achieve better rights last winter. The wins today are coming from organized labor — not the administration.

In other countries, industrial austerity is more present than ever and unions are suffering. Work is getting increasingly precarious. Austerity is really about class — it is about the state’s management of the economy in favor of the elites.

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DV | Beyond explaining austerity, you put it at the core of the capital order — the very structure of capitalism itself. Is this a renewal of Marxian economic thinking?

CM | Yes. My work aims to use Marxian methodology, which understands economic relations as inescapably political. This naturally leads to a complete rethinking of austerity. I want to help people realize that the relationship between capitalism and austerity is structural. And this means that the state is constantly intervening to weaken workers and protect capital. Analyzing how austerity works in real time totally confirms this.

Now more than ever, we must heed the most important insight of Karl Marx's critique of political economy. Marx described how economic growth is founded on capital as a social relation. The majority of people must sell their labor for a wage and this is not at all a natural feature Value creation under capitalism ultimately requires exploitation. While a lot of people — even on the Left — take capitalism for granted, capital is based on a specific social relation. That means it’s not only very political but also inherently fragile. This is why it needs constant protection. There are certain historical moments in history in which that fragility emerges.

DV | You describe a change after World War I in which the spontaneous austerity of Gilded Age capitalism had to become managed and coordinated, hence the Brussels and Genoa conferences. Is this the bedrock of later institutions like the Bretton Woods system or the G7, the World Economic Forum, the World Trade Organization?

CM | Exactly. And I think the book doesn’t do justice to the ways in which political institutions prior to the War were actively preserving austerity. There's plenty of literature showing how the gold standard was not a natural mechanism. It was actually quite politically encased. What I argue in the book is that austerity became visible after World War I.

Austerity is always latent in capitalism and emerges when the system is most contested. When its pillars shake, institutions coalesce to protect the capital order. That's why I focus on 1919 and the period right after World War I. It was a moment in which indeed there was a lot of demand for economic democracy.

In Britain, besides universal suffrage, people demanded a greater say in economic issues. They understood the pretext of balancing budgets was purely ideological and no longer tenable. During the War, states spent all the money they wanted. So people were asking for a post-war reconstruction in which resources were utilized in their favor rather than for profit making.

In these moments of political crisis, austerity refines its tools. Many institutions sprung into action in the early 1920s — especially independent central banks — to insulate monetary decisions from democratic intrusion. I focus on this period in the book. But my next project is to examine how austerity operated after World War II. So austerity could be an angle to rethink the history of capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries.

DV | The book’s subtitle is about austerity paving the way to fascism. In the case of Italy, the opposite seems to have happened. Fascism paved the way for austerity. What do you make of that?

CM | A common idea is that fascism emerges as a reaction to austerity. But you’re right. In Italy, something different happened. The original fascism — Benito Mussolini's fascism — swept to power because of its capacity to implement austerity. Fascism and austerity needed one another. The authoritarian state was able to enforce austerity much more effectively than any democratic government. Unlike its liberal counterparts, it could intervene directly to repress wages, curtail strikes, and implement a whole slew of social cuts and privatization while jailing opposition. That’s why, as I describe in my book, neoclassical economists were very excited about Mussolini. He imposed their pure models on reality. 

Mussolini was a response to the fact that, shortly before the March on Rome, there were full-blown factory occupations. Workers were gaining lots of rights and crumbling wage relations in favor of democratic management of industry via factory councils, of which Antonio Gramsci was a very important leader. The elite couldn’t have that. Fascism was a godsend. Montagu Norman, who was the governor of the Bank of England, said, “Fascism has surely brought order out of chaos… The Duce was the right man at a critical moment.”

Norman said this in 1926, when the regime had already shown what it meant to be a fascist regime — killings and all. But he liked that fascism was all about suppressing wages, defending private property and investment, and using the state to keep industrial peace to maximize profit above everything else.

DV | How do you see the link between fascism and austerity today?

CM | Today, a lot of fascist or authoritarian governments come to power promising no austerity. Indeed, people feel the economic violent impact of austerity on their daily lives and desire something different. However, because of austerity’s preeminence, people have lost class consciousness and believe they can trust bourgeois politicians — especially the lie that it's all the fault of migrants. So there's an inability to see what’s at stake, because class struggle is never discussed.

Italy today is emblematic. Citizens voted for Meloni’s far-right government because they promised change. However, there's complete continuity between the liberal technocratic governments of former prime ministers Mario Draghi and Mario Monti  and the current one. Meloni's Minister of Finance is Giancarlo Giorgetti from Bocconi University — the same guy who was there with Draghi! And Meloni’s budget for the coming fiscal year is pure austerity. She’s defunding hospitals and schools, eliminating the subsidies for the poor called reddito di cittadinanza, expanding regressive taxation, and privatizing while pushing for further labor deregulation. It's the whole austerity trinity — except for monetary policy, which is managed by the European Central Bank. This is no shock. Historically, when it comes to managing the economy, liberals and fascists have been allies. That's still true. Their authoritarian tendencies may surface in different ways. But, ultimately, the two camps are pushing in the same direction.

DV | Since WWI, has anyone defeated the drive toward austerity?

CM | Not to my knowledge. While 1919 was a really exciting year both for the reformists, who passed many welfare initiatives, and the more radical workers’ councils, who called for workers’ self-governance, this did not last long. Even in revolutionary Russia, Vladimir Lenin’s New Economic Policy basically acceded to some form of austerity. The Soviets had little choice. To compete globally in a capitalist system, they had to deflate their economy. From the 1920s onward, it’s been quite austere all around.

DV | Couldn’t that ingrain a sense of powerlessness? Recall Fredric Jameson's formulation. “It's easier to imagine an end to the world than an end to capitalism.”

CM | I hope the message of the book is actually the opposite. The fact that we think there's no way forward outside of capitalism speaks to the “success” of austerity. If you break out of austerity, you're breaking out of capitalism. We need to think big, but this doesn't mean that it's impossible. There's a huge amount of movements going on even now as we speak that are about achieving independence from market forces. Look at La Via Campesina, a movement that unites farmers throughout the South of the globe to demand workers’ sovereignty in food production or the neighborhood councils in Chile that mobilize to organize resources democratically and had a big role in the Chilean constitutional process before it was tanked by their supposedly left-wing government. Organizations like these are rekindling democratic engagement in the production process and ecological sustainability.

Now more than ever, we must rethink what type of state we want. The capitalist state is clearly one that must do austerity. And this is also clear for other systems that had to compete in the global order. Even globalization is unnatural and politically constructed. But everything that's actively constructed can also be actively deconstructed if people participate. And this is why I think those on top are constantly concerned. They know that the system is fragile. Although they’ve used neoclassical economics to convince us it isn’t. But I believe in the power of workers to think bigger and defeat capitalist realism.

DV | Economists in the last decade have become smitten with cash transfers, basic incomes, taxing capital flows, etc. as antidotes to economic malaise. These proposals are mostly encased in the framework of neoclassical microeconomics and liberals seem excited about them.

CM | I think those proposals are quite naive. They assume you can have the best of all worlds — a sort of “fair capitalism.” I don't believe capitalism can be fair. In a capitalist economy, the state’s ability to redistribute is necessarily limited — especially politically. These economists fail to see that. Otherwise they’d understand that a livable universal basic income would be a revolutionary measure. Society would cease to be capitalist. Some neoclassical economists, especially those who work at the Federal Reserve and International Monetary Fund, are perfectly aware of this. That is why they often block such policies.

DV | Have you debated other economists who criticize austerity, but consider it merely a bug and not a feature of capitalism?

CM | It's hard to have these debates. Economists generally believe the political and economic realms should be separate. They think I’m not really doing economics because the discipline is ontologically founded on that separation. But that’s an artificial, ideological divide. It’s ideological in the sense that it perpetuates illusions which help foster consensus for the system. Even colleagues at the New School, whose economics department is amongst the most radical, separate politics and economics. The dominant creed is that doing economics has little to do with the actual social relations of production.

DV | After World War II came the Keynesian era of the welfare state and managed capitalism, where wages and capital returns grew at similar rates. Why didn't we see the wave of austerity and fascism that followed World War I?

CM | This is a very important question and is indeed the guiding one of my next book project with the University of Chicago Press. I can start providing a very preliminary answer. The revolutionary spirit of 1919 was not as palpable after World War II. Workers became more integrated in the capitalist state apparatus. This was the great success of Fordism — the system of mass production and consumption characteristic of “developed” economies. Fordism got workers to accept exploitation in return for somewhat higher wages and moderate social benefits. In moments when political upheaval is weaker, states can undertake more ambitious redistributive efforts without risking subverting the entire system. By contrast as I show in my book, after World War I, reconstructionists tried to appease the population through welfare reform. But, in moments of more heated challenge to the pillars of the system, they weren't successful. Rather, their reforms instilled in workers a greater sense of possibility. Getting something caused the majority of citizens to demand more — perhaps even an overthrow of the whole system. Why just accept the lengthening of the leash? 

After World War II, the revolutionary surges weren’t as powerful. This enabled the reformist vision of giving a little without challenging capital accumulation as such. That’s their political project.

Consider the policies implemented after World War II. The term "austerity" was popularized by Britain’s Labour government in 1948. Why? Because they prioritized the inflationary threat. In the historical trade-off between inflation and full employment, they chose to tame inflation. This led to a huge wage freeze in 1964.

Policymakers in Britain, the United States, and Europe were always concerned with compressing wages to avoid diminishing profits and private investment. Monetary stability and international competitiveness were sacrosanct. Sure, profits were so high that real wages grew alongside them. But how much space was there for more structural distribution of resources?

All this makes you question the supposedly great divide between Keynesians and Hayekians that I intend to explore further. Neither John Maynard Keynes nor Friedrich Hayek theorized about exploitation or understood capitalism as the problem. That’s why Keynes sought to optimize the system rather than replace it with something better. Let’s not make the same mistake.

Muddled Interventions: Haiti, the UN, and Resolution 2699

By Binoy Kampmark

A country broken by constant foreign interventions, its tyrannical regimes propped up by the back brace of the United States (when it wasn’t intervening to adjust it), marred by appalling natural disasters, tells a sad tale of the crippled Haitian state. Haiti’s political existence is the stuff and stuffing of pornographic violence, the crutch upon which moralists can always point to as the end — doom and despair that needs change. Every conundrum needs its intrusive deliverer, even though that deliverer is bound to make things worse.

Lately, those stale themes have now percolated through the corridors of the United Nations to renewed interest. The staleness is evident in the menu: servings of failed state canapes; vicious, murderous, raping, pillaging gangs as the mains; collapse of civic institutions as the dessert. It’s the sort of menu to rile and aggravate any mission or charity. 

Since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021, the constant theme in reporting from Haiti is that of rampant, freely operating gangs. Sophie Hills, a staff writer for The Christian Science Monitor, offered this description last October:

“Armed gangs have immobilized the capital, Port-au-Prince, shutting down the already troubled economy and creating fear among citizens to even walk the streets.”

October 23rd, 2023, the United Nations special envoy to Haiti, María Isabel Salvador, reported to the Security Council that the situation had continued “to deteriorate as growing gang violence plunge[s] the lives of the people of Haiti into disarray and major crimes are rising sharply to new record highs.” These included killings and sexual violence — the latter marked by instances of rape and mutilation.  

To further complexify the situation, vigilante groups such as the “Bwa Kale” movement have responded with lynchings (395 alleged gang members are said to have perished in that gruesome way between April 24th and September 30th).  

Moïse’s opportunistic replacement, Ariel Henry, has served as acting prime minister, persistently calling for foreign intervention to right the worn vessel he is steering into a sunset oblivion. The last presidential election was in 2016, but Henry has opted not to schedule another, preferring the bureaucratic formula of a High Transition Council (HTC) tasked with eventually achieving that goal. When the announcement establishing the body was made in February, Henry loftily claimed that this was “the beginning of the end of dysfunction in our democratic institutions.” 

That rhetoric has not translated into credible change on the ground. The contempt for the HTC was when gang members posing as cops kidnapped its Secretary General.

In September, Henry addressed the United Nations hoping to add some mettle to the Haitian National Police, urging the Security Council to adopt measures under Chapter VII of the UN Charter to “authorize the deployment of a multinational support mission to underpin the security of Haiti.”

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The measure can be read as a stalling measure to keep Henry and his Haitian Tèt Kale Party (PHTK) ensconced by using an external intervention to shore up a shaky regime. This is certainly the view of the National Haitian-American Elected Officials Network (NHAEON) and the Family Action Network Movement (FANM). In their September letter to President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the organizations warned that “[a]ny military intervention supporting Haiti’s corrupt, repressive, unelected regime will likely exacerbate the current political crisis to a catastrophic one.” The move would “further entrench the regime, deepening Haiti’s political crisis while generating significant civilian casualties and migration pressure.” 

In its eternal wisdom, the United Nations Security Council felt that an intervention force consisting of Kenyan police, supplemented by assistance from other states, would be required for this mission. Resolution 2699, establishing a Multinational Security Support Mission led by Kenya, received a vote of 13 in favor, with Russia and China abstaining, citing traditional concerns about Chapter VII’s scope in permitting the use of force. “In previous practices,” remarked Zhang Jun, China’s permanent representative to the United Nations, “there have been precedents of abusing Chapter VII authorization.”

Resolution 2699 would entail a co-deployment with Haitian personnel who have melted before the marauding gangs. Thus, in the words of Mark Twain, history continues to rhyme (the US occupation, 1915–1934 and the UN Stabilization Mission in Haiti [MINUSTAH] from 2004–2017).  

Armed gangs feature as a demonic presence in United Nations deliberations, regularly paired with such opaque terms as “a multidimensional crisis.” It is telling that the cliché reasons for that crisis never focus on how the gang phenomenon took root — not least those mouldering state institutions that have failed to protect the populace. Little wonder then that the Russian representative Vassily Nebenzia felt sending in armed elements was “an extreme measure” that unnecessarily invoked the provisions of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations.

Undeterred by such views, the United States representative Jeffrey Delaurentis noted that the mission would require the “inclusion of dedicated expertise in anti-gang operations, community-oriented policing, and children and women’s protection.” That Washington approved the measure can be put down to endorsing a policy which might discourage — if only in the short term — the arrival of Haitian asylum seekers which have been turned away en masse.  

Despite claiming a different tack from his predecessor in approaching the troubled Caribbean state, President Biden has sought to restrict the influx of Haitian applications using, for instance, Title 42 — a Trump policy put in place to deport individuals who pose a COVID risk, despite any asylum credentials they might have. Within 12 months, the Biden administration expelled more than 20,000 Haitians — or as many as the past three presidents combined.

Resolution 2699 also suffers from another glaring flaw. Kenya’s dominant contribution to the exercise has raised searching questions back home. Opposition politician Ekuru Aukot, himself a lawyer who had aided in drafting Kenya’s revised 2010 constitution, saw no legal basis for the government to authorize the Haitian deployment. In his view, the deployment was unconstitutional, lacking any legal backbone.  

In granting Aukot an interim injunction, this point was considered by the Nairobi High Court worthy of resolution. Judge Enock Mwita was “satisfied that the application and petition raise[d] substantial issues of national importance and public interest and require[d] urgent consideration.” The judge accordingly issued a conservatory order “restraining the respondents from deploying police officers to Haiti or any other country until 24th October 2023.”  

On October 24th, Judge Mwita extended the duration of the interim order until November 9th, when an open session is scheduled for the petition to be argued. “This court became seized of this matter earlier than everyone else and it would not make sense for it to set aside or allow the interim orders to lapse.” The whole operation risks being scuttled even before it sets sail.  

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. You can email him at bkampmark@gmail.com.

Santa Claus and the Contradictions of Bourgeois Ideology

By Carlos Garrido

Republished from Midwestern Marx.

A comrade recently pointed my attention to a comedy skit by Foil Arms and Hog called “Santa is Captured by the Russians,” where for two minutes Mr. Clauss is interrogated by the Soviet police. Below are some excerpts from the conversation: 

​Santa:  I think there has been some sort of a mistake. You see I have a very busy night tonight.
Soviet Police 1: He was found attempting to hide in a chimney.
Soviet Police 2: Chimney? What were you doing in Russian airspace?
Santa: I've already told you…
(Santa gets slapped): Ho, ho, ho... That was naughty.
Soviet Police: We found a list of names.
Santa: Ah my list.
Soviet Police: These are American spies?
Santa: No, no…
Soviet Police: There was also a second list.
Santa: Oh you don't want to be on that list.
Soviet Police: You plan to kill these people.
Santa: No, no, they just get a bad present… It used to be a bag of coal… but the whole climate change thing...
Soviet Police: We intercepted a communication from one of his assets.
“Dear Santa, I have been a good girl. I would like a Silvanian Family Cosy Cottage Starter Home.”
Soviet Police: This is clearly code.
Santa: No it's not code.
Soviet Police: Then who is Santa?
Santa: That's me.
Soviet Police: You said your name was Father Christmas.
Santa: Yes, I'm known by very many names.
Soviet Police: So you are spy?... How do you know my children's names?... What are you doing in Russia?
Santa: Presents, I deliver presents.
Soviet Police: Presents? For who?
Santa: Well, to all the children in the world.
Soviet Police: All the children in the world? In return for what?
Santa: Well, nothing.
Soviet Police: Nothing? So...You are communist?
Santa: Da (Yes)… Why do you think I wear red comrade?
Soviet Police: Signals to officer outside “Comrade, two vodka, one cookies and milk.”

This captures wonderfully the gap between reality and the values and narratives enunciated by the liberal capitalist world. Father Christmas is said to be this selfless gift-bringer, someone who enjoys seeing the smile on kids’ faces as they receive – assuming they weren’t naughty – their new toys. Santa Claus gives, in the traditional narrative, to all kids, irrespective of class (but especially the poor), race, nationality, and sex. He gives these gifts, most importantly, for free. He does not give in exchange for money. His purpose, telos, is not profit. He gives gifts to meet the playful needs of children. His goal is social good, not capital accumulation. He gives so that kids can play, so that they may fulfill what it means to be a kid. He does not give so that parents’ pockets are hollowed, and his North Pole bank account inflated.

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Santa Claus’s logic is completely antithetical to the capitalist system. A system premised on producing for the sake of capital accumulation and not social and common good is in contradiction with Father Christmas’s telos. Both the real St. Nicholas (270 – 342 AD) and the Santa Claus we consume in popular culture gift-give without any attempt at obtaining recognition. Unlike the charities in the capitalist West, Santa’s giving does not afford him major tax deductions, and neither does it boost his ‘humanitarian philanthropist profile’ through large, broadcasted events. Saint Nicholas’s giving was not some big spectacle, quite the opposite. He climbs in through the chimney when everyone is sleeping to leave gifts and go. He stands on the side of the poor and does his part in attempting to bring about social justice.

While this is the dominant narrative we operate with, the reality of our commodified Christmas, and of Santa Claus as the personified agent of such commodification, is directly opposed to the narrative itself. As Valerie Panne notes, modern capitalist Christmas has turned Santa Claus into a “decorative marketing tool…for hysterical shopping.” Santa’s commodified image – first used by Coca-Cola in the 1930s – has become instrumental in helping the capitalists realize profit. He has become an instrument used to, as Marx notes in volumes two and three of Capital, “cut the turn over time of capital… The shorter the period of turnover, the smaller this idle portion of capital as compared with the whole, and the larger, therefore, the appropriated surplus-value, provided other conditions remain the same.”

Here we see a clear gap in the enunciated values and the reality of capitalist society. At the ideological level, that is, at the level of how we collectively think about the story and figure of Santa Claus, we find heartwarming values of empathy, selfless giving, and community. However, this ideological level is rooted in the reality of a Santa Claus used to promote conspicuous consumption (as Thorstein Veblen notes), the commodification of family time, traditions, and relations, and the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few.

The ideological reflection of the real world provides an upside-down, topsy-turvy image of itself. This is the essence of bourgeois ideology qua false consciousness. It is a social order that necessitates the general acceptance of an inverted understanding of itself. We come to erroneously understand the “capitalist” Santa through the narratives of the “communist” Santa. Reality is turned on its head. But this is not, as Vanessa Wills notes, a problem of “epistemic hygiene”. The root of the ‘error’ is not in our minds, that is, in our reflection of the objective phenomena at hand. As I’ve argued previously, “it is much deeper than this; the inversion or ‘mistake’ is in the world itself… This world reflects itself through an upside-down appearance, and it must necessarily do so to continuously reproduce itself.” As Marx and Engels noted long ago,

If in all ideology men and their relations appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

To understand the gap between how Santa Claus (or Christmas) is understood and how it actually functions in modern capitalist society it is insufficient to see the problem simply as one of subjective ‘misunderstandings’ held by individuals, classes, or whole peoples. One must investigate the political economy which grounds, that is, which reflects that erroneous image of itself. The gap between the actual “capitalist” Santa and the ideological “communist” Santa is objective, it is required by the existing material relations of social production and reproduction. Capitalist ideology must disguise the cut-throat values of bourgeois individualism with the universalist values of Santa’s socialistic humanism.

But this is nothing new. Santa Claus is just another particular instant of a universal bourgeois phenomenon. The capitalist class has never been able to fully realize, to make actual, the values it enunciates with its appearance in the arena of universal history as a dominant force. Its universal appeals to liberty, equality, fraternity, etc. have always been limited within the confines of their class. As Marx had already noted in 1843, “the practical application of the right of liberty is the right of private property;” “the necessary condition for whose existence,” he and Engels write in 1848, “is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.” The phrasing of ‘all men’ used to formulate rights under capitalism is always with the understanding, as Marx notes, of “man as a bourgeois,” it is “the rights of the egotistic man, separated from his fellow men and from the community.” Its values, and their reflection in their judicature, always present their narrow class interests embellished by abstract language used to appeal to the masses and obtain their consenting approval for a form of social life which they’re in an objectively antagonistic relation with.

The ideologues of the bourgeoisie always provide the masses with a “bad check,” as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would say. But eventually, as King notes, the masses will come in to cash that check somehow. They’ll notice that within the confines of the existing order, the prosperity that checked promised is unrealizable. Capitalism has never, and will never, fulfill the universal values it pronounces as it breaks out of the bonds of feudal absolutism. Only socialism can.

The values embedded in the narrative surrounding Santa Claus, Father Christmas, Saint Nicholas, or whatever else you want to call him, will never be actual within capitalist society. Only socialism can universalize the form of selfless relationality we have come to associate with Santa. 


Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy instructor at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the author of The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2024). 

Internationalism Today: An Interview with Paweł Wargan

By Daniel Benson

Republished from Monthly Review.

What does a progressive foreign policy look like today? How should we understand imperialism? What is at stake in reclaiming an internationalist political horizon for the left? What forms of organization are best adapted for a new international? Given the many contemporary global challenges—such as climate change, far-right extremism, pandemics, and the increasing threat of nuclear war—it is urgent to develop a strategic, organizational, and theoretical perspective for the international left. Paweł Wargan discusses these and other questions in the interview that follows. Researcher, activist, and coordinator of the secretariat of the Progressive International, Wargan is well suited to highlight the prospects for a new internationalism today. The interview is conducted by Daniel Benson, assistant professor of French and Global Studies at St. Francis College and the editor of Domination and Emancipation: Remaking Critique (Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2021).

Daniel Benson: I’d like to begin with a discussion of your overall political perspective and development. What are some of the main events or intellectual influences that have impacted your current writing and activism?

Paweł Wargan: I worked in public policy when the last great wave of climate activism emerged. Every Friday, I would make my way through crowds of protesting schoolkids to get to work. Occasionally, some would block the roads. What struck me was that the ideas expressed in these spaces carried a clarity, a creativity, and an urgency that I never saw at work—where ideas were staid, unambitious, never coming close to addressing the urgency of the moment. So, I took to the streets.

You learn through struggle. You build confidence through struggle. You begin to articulate the reasons for your struggle and develop a feel for the possibilities it opens. The great challenge, I learned over time, is that it’s not enough to have good ideas. In large parts of our movements, demands for “system change” resolve into a politics of advocacy that focuses on appealing to existing institutions rather than building new ones. The very form of these protests—they are often held outside government buildings—speaks to that relationship of supplication. We entreat our ruling classes to deliver something that is not in their power to deliver. And we become despondent when we fail. This reflects a poverty of imagination, which has been carefully cultivated by the ideological machinery of capitalism.

Not long after, I had what you might call a eureka moment. I was working on a long report that envisioned what a green transition might look like in Europe. One day, I was editing a section submitted by an Italian architect. In it, he argued that to build sustainable cities Europe needed to shift to prefabricated, high-rise apartment blocks surrounded by parks and public amenities. I was living in Moscow at the time, on the fourteenth floor of a prefabricated high-rise apartment block surrounded by parks and public amenities. I looked out the kitchen window and wondered: What was this society that, many decades ago, began to build the future we are only now envisioning? That led me to study processes of socialist construction.

Fidel Castro once said that when he first read The Communist Manifesto, he began to find explanations for phenomena that are typically explained in terms of individual human failings—moral failings. He began to understand, he said, the historical processes and social processes that produce both great wealth and terrible immiseration. You don’t need a map or microscope to see class divisions, he said. I think about that often. What Castro meant—and what you learn from reading revolutionaries like Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V. I. Lenin, Walter Rodney, and others—is that there are observable processes of contradiction and class antagonism that shape the world. The job of the left is not to hover above these processes and preach progressive ideas. This is the domain of idealism, of liberalism. You can’t build the future with ideas. You can’t repair the environment with ideas. You can’t feed the hungry with ideas. Our job is to build power through struggle, at every step seeking to institutionalize that power, building structures that can realize the aspirations of the people. That is what the great processes of socialist construction—past and present—teach us.

DB: I agree that building institutions on the left is vital. I think there is an increasing consciousness among left-leaning thinkers, activists, and scholars of the need to focus on organizational issues, on strategy, on building power, and not merely on symbolic gestures or purely theoretical problems. But recent history has shown the difficulty of creating lasting institutional change: from the anti-World Trade Organization protests of 1999 in Seattle to the Iraq War protests of 2003 to the Occupy movements of 2011. Moreover, even when leftist parties can organize and achieve political power at the national level (for instance, Syriza in 2015), they have proven incapable of challenging dominant global institutions. Or, turning to the Global South, progressive projects have struggled to freely develop (Venezuela, Bolivia, Cuba, among others) in large part due to U.S. imperialism.

I’d like to turn, then, to the question of internationalism and how it relates to building power on the left. I feel that many individuals, students, and even progressive activists see international politics as distant from their everyday life or local struggles. This is very different from, say, the long 1960s, where resistance to the Vietnam War, decolonization, and socialist construction were seen as interrelated and part of the same struggle. Could you explain, first, why internationalism is important to building progressive, leftist institutions? And, second, why you propose the Third International, or Communist International, as an important resource to rebuild internationalism in the contemporary moment?

PW: There is a story I have heard repeatedly—the cast changes, the setting changes, but the story stays roughly the same. Moved by the exploits of Che Guevara, an enthusiastic U.S. socialist travels to Nicaragua. He visits the encampments of the Sandinista movement, which is waging armed struggle against the U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorship. “I want to join your struggle,” they say. “What can I do to help you?” The response is blunt: “Go home and make a revolution in the United States.”

The answer tells us two important things about internationalism.

First, the struggle of the Sandinista movement does not occur in isolation. It takes place against the backdrop of overwhelming U.S. imperial violence, which is the international extension of its oppressive, racist, and colonial politics at home. In the 1980s, Nicaragua was subjected to an economic and military blockade. Its harbors were mined. The Contras—a fascist force that massacred hundreds of thousands of people across Latin America—were covertly armed and trained to destroy the aspirations of the people. There was a very real need to sever the threads that bound Nicaragua’s brutal immiseration with the prosperity of the U.S. ruling classes—and that necessitated building a revolution in the United States.

Second, the construction of a revolutionary process is in itself an internationalist act. What can you do for the people of Haiti, or the people of Cuba, or the people of Western Sahara, or the people of Palestine, or the people of Venezuela as an individual, without first building power? Can you send them a tanker of oil? Can you send them a container of medical supplies? Can you help them build modern industrial capacities—or support their green transition? The degree of our collective power at home, and the political orientation of our movements, dictates the shape of our commitments abroad.

In 1918, Lenin wrote a piece railing against those who sided with their governments in the First World War. In privileging the “defense” of their countries over the overthrow of those responsible for the war, he wrote, these forces substituted internationalism with a petty nationalism—backing a predatory capitalist and imperialist leadership against the imperative of peace and social revolution. In the end, Lenin said, the position of the Bolsheviks was vindicated. The October Revolution generated the ideas, strategies, and theories that came to power a global revolutionary movement. Like messengers from the future, the Russian people pierced through the terrors of capitalism, and revealed a path forward.

Turning that path into a highway was, to a great degree, the mission of the Third International. Through it, Lenin said, the nascent USSR would lend a “helping hand” to peoples seeking emancipation from colonialism. That mission was born from a thesis that echoes in our story from Nicaragua. The thesis is that European capitalism draws its strength not from its industrial prowess, but from the systematic looting of its colonies. That same process both feeds and clothes the European working class, suppressing their revolutionary aspirations, and generates the material power that sustains their exploitation. The police forces, prisons, weapons, and tactics tested and honed in the colonies are always, after all, readily turned against workers back home. The primary duty of internationalism, then, is to strike at capitalism’s foundations: colonialism and imperialism.

These ideas carry great weight in our time. Whenever we—ensconced in the comforts of the imperial world—advance ideas for the reform of the capitalist system, we are effectively saying: “We don’t care that over two billion people go to bed hungry. We don’t care that hundreds of millions already live in a wrecked climate. We don’t care for the people who suffocate under the weight of our sanctions. Their plight doesn’t concern us.” The theories of the Third International teach us that the power of our ruling classes is the mirror image of the immiseration of the great planetary majority. Now, as countries and peoples begin to assert themselves against U.S. hegemony and its drive towards nuclear and environmental exterminism, our task is to build power with the grain of that historical process—not against it. Now, more than at any point in human history, is the time to build a revolutionary struggle grounded in clear anti-imperialist politics.

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DB: Let’s turn to concrete organizational questions of how to build such a revolutionary movement. The late Marxist scholar and activist Samir Amin was an active participate in organizing across borders and bridging the divide between the Global North and Global South. Amin called for launching a “Fifth International” in 2006 or a “New International” just before his death in 2018. The latter call generated important discussion among scholars, theorists, and activists about how best to “do” politics in the context of neoliberal globalization. Much of the debate revolves around two issues: (1) the longstanding debate on the left of finding the right balance between a “horizontalist” perspective (democratic, pluralist, non-hierarchical, open to various ideological tendencies) and a “verticalist” one (strict criteria of membership, centralized decision-making); and (2) what is the right or appropriate level (local, national, international, global) at which to organize.

What are some of the organizational challenges and successes you’ve encountered in your own experience building left internationalism today?

PW: Organization is simply the way in which we store and instantiate our collective capacity to act—coming into contact with others, forming communities, building confidence, and making the strategic and programmatic decisions about the future that we want to build.

How helpful is the distinction between the “horizontal” and the “vertical”? In my mind, those who reflexively privilege the “horizontal” over the “vertical” cling to the view—cultivated to a great extent in the anti-communist project—that the outcomes we want can spontaneously materialize without us actively pursuing them. That when things become bad enough, the anger of the masses will translate into change. Instead, as movements have repeatedly learned, a commitment to extreme “horizontalism” operates as an obstacle to unity and provides fertile ground for the emergence of invisible hierarchies that immobilize and breed discontent. Equally, organizations that are sometimes derided as “vertical” made tremendous leaps in what we might now call inclusivity. For the first time in history, Lenin’s Comintern brought the demands of women, anticolonial movements, national liberation movements, Black liberation movements, and others under its banner—translating diversity into collective power grounded in a shared analysis of the political situation.

We need to build institutions prepared to address the profound challenges that confront humanity. What are these challenges? In his proposal for a new international, Amin described the U.S.-led imperialist system as totalitarian. I side with Domenico Losurdo in questioning the integrity of that concept, but in this case it is perhaps uniquely appropriate. Capitalism and imperialism sever our connection to the productive process, to nature, to other human beings, and to our own imaginations. We become trapped in a world of imposed ideas, imposed structures. The history we learn, the clothes we wear, the possibilities that we ascribe to the future—these are not ours. They form through the operation of capital accumulation at the global scale, a process that we sometimes euphemistically describe as “globalization,” but which is more accurately understood as imperialism. Extreme violence has been wielded—and continues to be wielded—to preserve this system. Its primary function, as Amin reminds us, is to preserve the “historical privilege” of the colonizers to pillage the resources and exploit the workers of the Global South. But the system is not inevitable.

Marx and Engels devoted their lives to showing that historical processes are not arbitrary. They have motor forces that can be studied and whose movements can be charted. The interaction of these forces generates tensions, or contradictions, that manifest in different ways at different times in our history. Revolutionary processes that ended the enslavement of human beings gave way to a new system of economic organization in which the primary contradiction was between workers and factory owners, or, elsewhere, peasants and landlords. History has shown that these contradictions can be overcome, but only through the collective efforts of the people. This cannot happen spontaneously, and it cannot happen if we cling to the false belief that the previous system can be redeemed or reformed—that a fairer slavery is possible, or that a fairer imperialism is possible. So, one of the primary tasks—and challenges—of the internationalist is to break through the structures of alienation that imprison our minds, our bodies, and our societies.

What does that mean in practice? It means creating the conditions by which peoples and movements from disparate parts of the world can learn from one another and become aware of one another’s fundamental interconnection—overcoming, for example, the idea that the struggle of the Amazon warehouse worker in the United States is separate from the struggle of the garment worker in Bangladesh. When we buy a pair of jeans on Amazon, we wear the labor of the textile weaver in Dhaka. And in that labor, we find the sources both of our collective power and of Amazon’s monopoly power. Our power exists in the socialization of production, in the fact that manufacturing is a collective process and a set of social relations that can be disrupted or captured by the organized working class. Amazon’s power is born of the surplus value generated by its capacity to exploit, dispossess, and plunder, both at home and abroad—a “historical privilege” currently protected by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the 800 U.S. military bases that circle the globe, a sanctions regime that suffocates states seeking to embark on paths of sovereign development, and other infrastructures of economic and military coercion.

But understanding is one part of the puzzle. Sloganeering, however radical, can only take us so far. How can we help build the trade unions in Bangladesh, who are resisting international capital and its agents in government? And how do we politicize the popular movements in the United States that hold the capacity to sever imperialism’s grip on the rest of the world, but largely eschew anti-imperialism as a political horizon? There is a dynamic interplay here between the local sites of organization and action, the transnational networks that seek to unite and coordinate that action in a programmatically coherent way, and the global horizon, where the framework of imperialist globalization reveals to us the threads by which our struggles are connected. The geographic scale of action must dynamically respond to the conditions it confronts. That is why, to me, an International must be a laboratory of political action—grounded in a comprehensive theory of the political and economic conjuncture, faithful to the historical tradition it builds upon, but not dogmatically wedded to this or that organizational template.

DB: I’d like to ask you a question about language and terminology. Specifically, the difficultly in effectively framing and articulating a left internationalist laboratory you describe. Since the rise of neoliberal globalization, which kicked into high gear after the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the very vocabulary of internationalism itself has given way to terms like global justice, global citizenship, transnationalism, and cosmopolitanism. These terms are all palatable to a world in which nation-states have become subordinate to global finance. Such terms have seeped into progressive social movements, NGOs, institutions of higher education, and United Nations entities, at least in part to disengage and disassociate from, or simply reject, an entire history of internationalist struggle that you touched on earlier. What is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political horizon today?

PW: The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński—among my earliest political influences— compared history to a river. On the surface, he said, the water moves quickly. Beneath the surface, the flow is steadier. Similarly, events pass us by quickly, but in their multitude we can observe stable structures and patterns of thought, which change over long historical epochs. I start here because internationalism carries within it concrete traditions of thought and action that we derive from Marxism, which contain within them a view of the river’s slow undercurrent.

The most important of these is dialectical and historical materialism, an analytical method that teaches us to train our eye not on individual events, but on the movement of history. The dominant philosophy of our time compels us to see only the surface of the river, only the quick succession of events. But these events pass us by with astonishing speed. We struggle to discern patterns, we become overwhelmed. Unable to situate developments in the world within their proper context, we begin to suffer from amnesia. We forget our history. Our creativity is imprisoned because we lose the ability to relate our actions to reality. And our politics resolve into idealism: we believe that a just world can be imagined into being; that our system can be transformed by gradual reform; or that nothing can really be done. Rodney outlined three features of this bourgeois perspective. First, it purports to speak for all of humanity rather than a particular class—the logic that says, “we are all in this together.” Second, it is highly subjective, claiming universal truths while concealing its ideological commitments—just look at the entire field of economics! Third, it refuses to acknowledge contradictions.

Marxism repudiates these notions. It teaches us that historical movement is a product of contradictions between and within things. You cannot have poverty without wealth, a proletariat without a bourgeoisie. The position of these classes reflects their relationship with the material world, with the means of production. The ideas that each group subscribes to also relate to their material environment, to their class position. Idealism is the philosophy of the bourgeoisie, while communism is the philosophy of the workers and oppressed peoples. And central to the communist tradition is the idea that collective human effort can resolve contradictions in favor of the oppressed. In his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach, Marx wrote that “philosophers have only interpreted the world; the point is to change it.” Marx was not just a thinker. He founded the International Workingmen’s Association, the First International, which emerged in part from textile workers’ opposition to British involvement in the U.S. Civil War. At the time, Lord Palmerston’s government was plotting to intervene on the side of the Confederacy. The workers of Britain saved Western Europe, Marx said in his inaugural speech to the First International, from plunging into “an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.” The conviction that we have the capacity to change the world—that it is our duty to change the world—is inseparable from the tradition of internationalism, which is a communist tradition.

Today, with their imaginations stymied by old, unchanging ways of thought, many organizations do not set out to change the world, because they do not exist in the world. They do not exist among children who struggle to eat, or the workers who struggle to make ends meet, or the peasants dispossessed from their land. They are bourgeois in their makeup. So, they subscribe to categories of thought that hold little relevance for the hungry, the poor, or the dispossessed—and the institutions they build do not serve the interests of those for whom the world must change. The language they use is a product of their class commitment, and one that has been carefully cultivated: the substitution of movements for liberation with NGOified sloganeers is an instrument of demobilization. It shields the status quo by institutionalizing bourgeois ideology.

In a sense, then, everything is at stake in reclaiming internationalism as a political tradition—and I have a very optimistic view of our prospects. Liberalism has not, cannot, and will not find answers to the complex crises facing humanity. But, from the violent, ceaseless flow of events that confront us, internationalism helps us recover sight of history’s laws of motion, and of the peoples and movements that are its engines. It reveals to us the ways in which our struggles and experiences are connected across borders, and the class dynamics that shape them. Even if they have yet to take hold, the ideas of internationalism, of socialism, are alluring to many precisely because the prevailing ideology is not ours. But, where bourgeois thought fails us, socialism shines a light through capitalism’s darkness, reclaims the past from its amnesia, and recovers hope from its futurelessness. These are our traditions, and we have nothing to fear in proclaiming them.

DB: My last question is on how to formulate a progressive, anti-imperialist foreign policy. At the end of Marx’s inaugural address you mentioned, Marx affirms that the working classes recognize “the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power.” Today, a lot of mystery, or deliberate mystification, swirls around international politics, not least the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

Among the anti-imperialist left, the debate tends to turn on how to understand imperialism. Should imperialism be seen in the singular, as predominately U.S.-led; or are there multiple, competing imperialisms, such that Russia, China, and the United States would all be equally imperialist powers? How does this debate impact the development of a coherent foreign policy for the internationalist left today?

PW: What is imperialism? In the intellectual tradition of the left, it refers to a situation in which capitalist economies mature, the rate of profit falls, and corporations begin to look abroad for resources to extract and labor to exploit. This is the same dynamic that sees small “Main Street” businesses grow into chains, then regional conglomerates, and then into national and ultimately international monopolies. The laws of capitalism demand that expansion. Companies that fail to grow are pushed out of business or bought up by others. Then, state power is wielded to turn sovereign nations into export markets, sources of cheap resources and labor, and outlets for investment for these corporations.

Today, the United States has a degree of power that is incomparable to any empire in human history. This is a product of a particular historical moment that I situate at the end of the Second World War. Having lost 27 million lives to defeat Nazism, the Soviet Union was in tatters. Europe was ruined. China, having faced an even longer war at the heel of a century of colonial subjugation, faced a desperate situation. But the United States emerged not only unscathed, it emerged economically and militarily strengthened, cloaked beneath the terrible aura of the atomic bomb, giving it something resembling omnipotence in the international arena.

How has it wielded that power? From the very beginning, it has wielded it to suffocate humanity’s aspirations for sovereignty and democracy. In the late 1940s, the people of Korea rose up against feudalism and the brutal U.S.-backed dictatorship of Syngman Rhee, which operated death camps for suspected communists. In response, the United States destroyed the north of Korea, killing roughly a quarter of its population and destroying 85 percent of its buildings. It threatened to use nuclear weapons on several occasions. This holocaust has largely been written out of history—and its victims are now the subject of vicious and routine derision by those who sought to erase them. If you ever wondered what the world might look like had fascism prevailed, look no further than the U.S. destruction of Korea.

Then came Iran in 1953, Vietnam in 1961, Guatemala in 1954, Congo in 1956, Vietnam in 1961, Brazil in 1964, Indonesia in 1965, Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in the 1980s—the list goes on and on. Wherever the United States arrived, its parasitic capitalist model of globalization followed like a cancer, suffocating states’ capacities to respond to the needs of their people. Tens of millions of lives have been claimed by direct or proxy violence instigated by the United States, and many more from the effects of being subordinated to the U.S.-led imperial system. Roughly five million people die each year because they do not have access to adequate healthcare—a problem that socialist projects have largely eliminated. But socialism is not allowed in the U.S. template for humanity.

We may ask a counterfactual, then: How might the world look if the United States had not picked up imperialism’s mantle after the Second World War? The defeat of Japanese imperialism and the German colonial project in Eastern Europe—and we must insist on its recognition as a colonial project—severely weakened the colonial powers. It set off a process that saw the British and French empires shrink dramatically. It inaugurated a new, modern consensus for humanity, with the adoption of the UN Charter and the pursuit of decolonization. It gave great prestige to the project of state socialism. The United States pushed against these currents—against the movement of history—and built a global system through which it exerts, at the barrel of a gun, near-total financial, cultural, and political power over the vast majority of humanity. No country in history has a comparable military footprint or proven capacity for destruction.

Attempts to downplay or relativize this violence are an insidious form of apologia. More often than not, accusations of, say, “Chinese imperialism” are rooted entirely in the hypothetical: “China is building infrastructure that could allow it to become a new imperial power.” In this case, the “twin imperialisms” thesis serves to put on equal footing an unsubstantiated conjecture with the actual violence of imperialism—it puts a moral claim on equal footing with an empirical fact. As the historian Vijay Prashad has remarked, we are afraid of Huawei’s 5G towers because we are told they could be used to spy on us, but we are unconcerned by the actual spying that is carried out by the U.S. government, which Edward Snowden and others have revealed. What is this but another red scare, scaffolded in our culture by the increasingly virulent Sinophobia manufactured by the United States and its allies? There are also more surreptitious forms of this on the left: attempts to “redefine” imperialism and cleave it from its analytical tradition to make it more suitable to the particular moral commitments of the day.

This phenomenon—the denial of imperialism—is infantilizing. It confuses left strategy, because it severs our ability to relate to the actual processes of history. It immobilizes, because in a world where everything is bad, nothing is possible. And it risks producing a moment in which, as U.S. violence against China escalates, forces on the western left will side with their own blood-soaked ruling classes rather than build power against them. Guarding against these impulses is among the most important tasks of the day. The moment has arrived for us to heed Lenin’s call to turn the imperialist war into a war on the bourgeoisie that suffocates us.

Note: A French version of this interview was published by the Association Nationale des Communistes on September 18, 2023.

When Economists Shut Off Your Water

By Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, Somo Abdi, and Jethron Ayumbah Akallah

Republished from Africa Is A Country.

The following account is based on ethnographic research that Adrian Wilson, Irene Nduta, and Somo Abdi conducted in Kayole Soweto, Nairobi in 2022.

In August 2020, people all over the development world started talking about water in Nairobi. There was a lot of anger, and some calls for sending people to the guillotine. The reason: the publication of results from a development randomized controlled trial (RCT), run by two American development economists, working together with the World Bank. In order to compel property owners in Kayole-Soweto—a relatively poor neighborhood in eastern Nairobi—to pay their water bills, this experiment disconnected the water supply at randomly selected low-income rental properties.

There’s no doubt that water is a problem in Nairobi. As Elizabeth Wamuchiru tells us, the water system in the city has a built-in spatial inequality inherited from the British colonial era. Visitors to the city can readily see the differences between the cool, leafy, green neighborhoods of Kilimani and Lavington—segregated white neighborhoods under colonialism, now home to rich Kenyans, foreigners, and NGOs—and the gray and dusty tin-roof neighborhoods of Mathare, Kibera, Mukuru, and Kayole, home to the lower-income Kenyans excluded from Nairobi’s prosperity.

Today’s water system reflects this history of inequality. Nairobi’s water is harnessed from a combination of surface and groundwater sources; however, the city’s groundwater is naturally salty and very high in fluoride. Piped water systems, provided to upper- and middle-income housing estates, do not exist in the vast bulk of the city’s poorer neighborhoods, where people must instead buy water from vendors—often salty water pumped from boreholes, or siphoned off from city pipes through rickety connections that are frequently contaminated with sewage. In the richer neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company, a public utility, sells relatively clean piped surface water for a fraction of the price paid by poorer Nairobians—a disparity that research has shown to often be the case in other cities in the global South. As the Mathare Social Justice Centre puts it, in poorer neighborhoods such as Kayole-Soweto, “water provision costs more, is less safe, and is less consistent than in other richer parts of the city.”

Researcher Irene Nduta in Kayole-Soweto.

Nairobi’s waterscape has remained opaque to its planners and administrators as well as its residents—both the elite that occupy the planned leafy suburbs of the city, and the urban underclass that lives on the fringes in a perennial survival mode. And while the city has witnessed major developments to improve access and quality of water, some approaches have only ended up reinforcing the economic inequalities in Nairobi’s waterscape. Such developments have often entailed technologies that are inappropriate for the context, “cut and paste” approaches to solving global South problems, and, in many cases, financing models that are covertly anti-poor.

The World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto was a great example of these problems. Between 2016 and 2018, the World Bank and Nairobi Water Company implemented a project to build piped water and sewage connections in Kayole-Soweto among several other lower-income neighborhoods in Nairobi.

The project design was driven by the kind of “neoliberalism lite” that characterizes the Millenium Development Goals-era World Bank. The project’s water connections would be paid for only in part by World Bank grants. The rest of the cost would be borne by users, who would take out loans of $315 USD per connection, payable over five years at an interest rate of 19%. Each property would get a single connection, with a water tap and a flushing toilet. Under a program called Jisomee Mita (“read your own meter”), water meters would be digital, and billing payment can be made digitally via mobile phone. The project was framed as a “magic bullet” that not only embraced the supposed advantages of digitized systems, but also provided a financial model purportedly tailored to the needs of the poor of Kayole-Soweto.

As people in Kayole-Soweto told us, the project was plagued with problems right from the onset (some of these problems are even described in the World Bank’s own 2019 project evaluation). The water supply pipes were supposed to be buried several meters under the streets, but instead were scarcely buried below the surface of Soweto’s dirt roads, often allowing sewage to leak into the pipes. The sewage piping, which World Bank officials told community members would be eight inches in diameter, was instead four inches, thus resulting in constant blockages. No one was sure why implementation wasn’t done to the standard promised, but corruption was widely suspected.

One of the World Bank-built water lines running through sewage in Kayole-Soweto.

And, people told us, when trying to pay back their water connection loans, they found Nairobi Water Company’s billing and payment systems to be opaque at best and criminal at worst. One man told us: “I went and paid, but after paying it… I followed up on that payment, and… I was told that I haven’t paid this money. And I went back [and] I paid for it again. And that’s how I lost [Ksh] 4,900” (about $42 USD). Receipts are nonexistent; statements are nonexistent; people pay, and their money often simply disappears.

And while continuing to largely meet demand in the wealthier neighborhoods, Nairobi Water Company has resorted to what it calls “micro-rationing” in Kayole-Soweto. Water is typically only piped in one day per week, for a few hours at a time. People will hurry to fill jerrycans of water for the week during these few hours—and if they’re at work when the water comes, then they’re out of luck. Often, Nairobi Water Company will pipe in salty borehole water instead of the clean water that residents were promised they’d receive. And, for many customers, water has stopped flowing entirely, for weeks, months, or even years at a time, with no explanation. But even in such cases, Nairobi Water Company still insists that people make payments on their water connection loans—paying down their debt for a connection that provides them with no water. “Unalipia hewa,” one man told us—“you pay for air.”

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The RCT: adding insult to injury

In 2018, two American development economists, Paul Gertler and Sebastian Galiani, started a randomized controlled trial (RCT) aimed at “improving revenue collection efficiency” on the debt that property owners owed on these water connection loans in Kayole-Soweto. Their argument: the problem with water supply in Kayole-Soweto isn’t any of the problems that we described above. The problem is simply that property owners aren’t paying their water bills, thus undermining Nairobi Water Company’s revenue and preventing them from supplying water. (Our finding was the exact reverse: many people stopped making payments on their connection loans out of frustration at water that flowed only a few hours one day per week, if at all.)

In order to test a punitive method for fixing this problem, these two economists turned to an RCT. The RCT, a popular method in development economics for the last two decades, is used to test a development intervention by (1) randomly dividing people into “treatment” and “control” groups; (2) giving some “treatment” to the first group, while withholding it from the second; and (3) measuring the difference in outcomes. While pioneers of the method were rewarded with the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2019, critics are wary of the idea of development economists experimenting on the poor.

In this case, the economists, working with Nairobi Water Company and the World Bank, identified customers who were behind on their water connection loan payments, divided these randomly into treatment and control groups, and disconnected the water at treatment properties, but not at control properties. They found that disconnecting people’s water had a large positive impact on repayment rates (as one person put it during the Twitter controversy: “uh, duh?”). This is rigorous proof, they argue, that water disconnections can help improve a water utility’s revenue enforcement. The authors of this experiment don’t mention the myriad problems with Nairobi Water Company or with Nairobi’s water system more generally.

A map from the publication reporting this RCT’s results, showing how households in Kayole-Soweto were randomly assigned to “treatment” or “control” groups.

Now, let’s unpack this a bit. This experiment would have been ethically dubious in a context in which water service was working perfectly. This experiment is that much more ethically bankrupt in a context in which the water system is as woefully dysfunctional as it is in Kayole-Soweto. Just to give one example of the ethical acrobatics in the economists’ publication describing this project: research guidelines in the US, where both of these development economists hold professorships, dictate that research subjects are supposed to consent to participation in any research, let alone an experiment. The authors tell us that tenants whose water was disconnected had in effect pre-consented to disconnection by the fact of having signed a contract to get the water connection loan in which it is written that your water will be disconnected if you fail to pay. This very “thin” understanding of consent ignores the question of obtaining consent to participate in the experiment—and it also doesn’t apply to the tenants living at these properties, who never signed any such contract, and who also lost their water.

We told several property owners whose water was shut off during the experiment that the economists who ran this experiment said in their publication that the experiment didn’t cause any harm to these research subjects. (It’s important to note that most of these property owners aren’t rich—most of the property owners we talked to live in a slightly nicer unit alongside their tenants.) Matthew, a property owner we interviewed, told us how, when his property’s water was disconnected, several people living at his property—a disabled woman, as well his own 95-year-old grandmother—were forced into the indignity of defecating in basins, which his wife would dump in the Ngong River. Another property owner, Kelvin, told us simply, “We don’t have water and water is life. So, how can you say it doesn’t harm anyone, how, how?”

What can we learn from this?

Water in Nairobi is horribly unequal. Into this unjust context came, first, the World Bank, with a neoliberal project plan emphasizing “cost-sharing,” and with a naive and misplaced trust in the ability of Nairobi Water Company to carry out this project fairly; and, second, two development economists, who were willing to treat poor Sowetans like guinea pigs, and who simply took Nairobi Water Company at their word when the company said that the only problem with water in Kayole-Soweto was that people weren’t paying their bills. Were these just scare tactics to squeeze residents into paying for a service they deemed unreliable? Was this a question of the ugly side of a capitalist market model that is insensitive to the plight of the poor and continues to disinherit them of their right to the city?

The World Bank has, since 2000, stepped back from the stringent structural adjustment plans that the Bank imposed on one African nation after another in the 1980s and 1990s. They now tend to focus their energies on projects like this one, often implemented together with African governments, and often focused on enhancing state capacity to fill its citizens’ basic needs. But the neoliberal ideology, while toned down, is still there: the Bank’s insistence that users pay a large share of the water connection cost, via a private bank loan, is characteristic of this new and more subtle neoliberalism.

In relation to experimentation, and development RCTs, there’s something scary about the degree of power that Western academics can exercise over poor people in places like Kayole-Soweto. To be clear, we aren’t saying that this experiment is typical of development RCTs. In our research, we found this water disconnection RCT to be a very extreme example; most RCTs are conducted with fairly or even very good ethical practices. What this experiment shows, though, is that if a foreign researcher wants to carry out an unethical RCT in a place like Kenya, they can. Existing ethical safeguards are obviously not working.

In finding a way forward for the World Bank’s water project in Kayole-Soweto, we must defer to the demands of the Sowetans we met and interviewed. Repeatedly, they told us that they were very willing to pay for water—if that water service worked, and worked consistently. They told us that they wanted the World Bank to return to the community, to hold meetings with community members, and, with their input, to rebuild the water and sewage infrastructure in Kayole-Soweto to a proper standard. We believe that the World Bank owes this to the people of Kayole-Soweto.

As for the economists and others running RCTs in Kenya, the existing system of ethical safeguards clearly failed the people of Kayole-Soweto. We will set aside the argument that experiments conducted by global North researchers on poor people in the global South should not happen at all. The fallout from this experiment has led to suggestions for reforms to the research approval, funding, and publication processes, in order to ensure that ethical principles are actually followed. Echoing these suggestions, we would encourage actors in this research space to introduce mechanisms to ensure that safeguards are not optional but rather mandatory. And we believe that there should be an ethical mandate of genuine “equipoise” in development RCTs: researchers should be genuinely uncertain whether the “treatment” or the “control” is better for the research subjects. (In the experiment in Kayole-Soweto, that was obviously not the case.)

Finally, the Nairobi County government is currently debating a bill that could privatize Nairobi Water Company. We believe that privatization is not the solution for water in Nairobi. In the Kenyan health care system, for example, we have consistently learned that privatization does not serve the poor. Past examples of water privatization—in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the late 1990s and, closer to home, in Dar es Salaam in the 2000s—ended in complete failure. We strongly believe that reform and democratized governance—not privatization—of Nairobi Water Company should be part of the way forward. And in the context of the ongoing crisis over the escalating cost of living, we believe strongly that a privatized water company will be that much less likely to ensure that water is affordable (if not free) for even the poorest Nairobians. Water justice, as enshrined in Kenya’s 2010 constitution, must be made a reality for poor people living in precarious urban neighborhoods like Kayole-Soweto. We echo the words of Mathare Social Justice Center: “maji ni uhai, maji ni haki”—water is life, water is a right.

Adrian Wilson is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley.

Faith Kasina is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.

Irene Nduta is a community activist with the Kayole Community Justice Centre.

Jethron Ayumbah Akallah is a lecturer in the Department of History and Archaeology at Maseno University.

Settler-Colonial Theology: From Lāhainā to Palestine

By Kieran McKenzie Clark

From grandstanding in the rubble after our fire in Lāhainā to posing on top of a tank in Palestine, Harvest pastor Greg Laurie is the poster boy for white Christianity in occupied lands. I went to Kumulani Chapel for over a decade (through its transition to Harvest). I got my undergraduate degree in religious studies... let me tell you something: this is what settler-colonial theology looks like. The corporate religion espoused by Harvest is performative and littered with internal contradictions; it is quite explicitly a demonstration of Plato's “Allegory of the Cave”. As a friend of mine noted, Laurie “was one of the early Trojan horse pastors that dressed Christofascist bullshit in a hip new package”. His church serves as a superstructure to reproduce Settler-Colonial/Capitalist society.

Harvest Pastor Greg Laurie walks among the rubble in Lāhainā

According to the four accounts of Jesus’ life held by Christians as Scripture, Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God was here (on Earth) right now. It’s what Jesus is recorded to speak on the most. According to the authors of these gospels, Jesus teaches that this Kingdom lives within us (Luke 17.21) and is expressed through our actions and social relation to one another. The preachings on such a kingdom include an active identification and critique of coercive relations of power as well as the call to an alternative community based on a kind of interconnected care and service - a horizontal society of group messiahship. In other words, the gospel of the Kingdom is prefigurative and rooted in material reality; including love of enemies and the subversion of leadership through mutual service. A summary of such teachings is known as the "Sermon on the Mount”.

The gospel of Harvest looks different; their theology is the extraction of souls for the expansion of "heaven". This is because they have inherited the legacy and refinement of imperial theologies from settler-colonialists. It is a theology that is about empire, security, accumulation, and fame. This is why they are anti-intellectual; they have to be. They need to push theologies made up a couple hundred years ago like “The Rapture” because they need the escapism. They need to focus on the amassing of souls for God in relation to the damned to rationalize the inaction they take toward material reality. It is seated in the Capitalist delusion and game of infinite growth. This shows face blatantly. The "Greg Laurie" Bible - all the commodities with his name on it, the grandstands, the movies, the events, the shows, the endless multi-industry marketing; it is not for Jesus, because that's not what Jesus was about.

For Harvest, whether they are playing their imaginary heavenly infinite growth game or wealth-building game, it is about profiteering, growth, and security; and it serves to conceal inaction towards the material conditions of human beings. This is why Harvest at Kumulani will have a Hula show on Sunday morning but will never mutter a word on the diaspora or plight of the Kānaka Maoli. The decline of health, land, population, culture, and language of indigenous populations are of absolutely no importance to them. The motive of their evangelizing is simply the accumulation of imaginary numbers and the assimilation of those willing to conform. Because their theology serves to reproduce a particular kind of society: settler-colonialism. This is why their politics are based on American culture wars and U.S. foreign interests.

Laurie posing on top of a tank in Palestine.

Pastor Greg Laurie, despite frequently bringing up the topic of the state of Israel, has not a muttering word for the Palestinians and the abhorrent treatment they suffer under the Israeli government - not on the apartheid, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, illegal settlements, occupation, and (now accelerated) genocide. He is in unwavering support of Israel, attending nationalistic rallies and endorsing Zionism. Atrocities at the hands of Israel are outshined by a pretend eschatology. Laurie preaches novel dispensationalist theologies of a “rapture” in which there will be a time when Christian believers will literally rise “in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air.” A sign of the times for this rapture in Laurie’s words is “the regathering of the nation Israel in their homeland”. Laurie conflates, which obscures, which conceals. He conflates the modern nation-state of Israel with ancient Israel, and he conflates the modern nation-state of Israel with the Jewish people. Thus, creating the illusion that if someone is an anti-imperialist or an outspoken critic of Israel, they must be antisemitic. This tactic produces and maintains the conditions for Zionism. The irony of course is that the kind of conflating being done by Laurie is anti-Semitic. It is in blatant disregard of Jewish anti-Zionists willing to condemn and illuminate the injustices perpetrated by the Israeli state and their policies towards Palestinians.

This theology (along with the normative social influence of the congregation) acts as a reciprocal and circular pattern in reinforcing and perpetuating settler-colonialism. This is why Harvest Riverside or other locations of the Harvest franchise import settlers to Maui from California to preserve their institution. Consequently, contributing to the reproduction of Capitalist structures in Hawai’i, which reinforces occupation, which continues the process of settler-colonialism. Between the 9th and 15th centuries, Christianity serviced feudalism by validating its power structures. The Catholic Church produced the theology of the “divine right of kings'', ultimately maintaining feudalism. Pastors like Greg Laurie and church franchises like Harvest fill this role today as the ideological apparatus supporting Capitalism. The internal structure of Harvest from their theology to leadership is a reflection of the dominant economic-power structures. They commodified religion to sell white culture. Within this business model, they paint their brand's image with the American dream: Greg Laurie. From being Trump's spiritual advisor, to leading tours in Israel, to slapping his name on the Holy Bible and selling it. He is the poster child of American settler-colonial theology.

The United States empire as a settler-colonial project moved from 13 colonies to 50 states by imperial expansion; through ethnic cleansing, indigenous erasure, and the enclosement of lands into private property. The last territory to become a state was Hawai’i. Hawai’i became a territory through a joint resolution in Congress in 1900 prompted by the reactionary forces of nationalism during the Spanish-American War. There was no treaty of annexation because in 1893 the United States conducted an illegal military coup of the internationally recognized sovereign government of the Kingdom of Hawai’i. This overthrow of the constitutional monarchy installed a provisional government that was facilitated by American missionaries and businessmen.

The violence of settler-colonialism that amalgamates the United States and Israel as they both seek to replicate, capture, and preserve structures of Capitalism is what informs Harvest's unwavering support of Israel and their mute dismissal of the material conditions of Kānaka

Maoli. Lāhainā town burnt to the ground on August 8th, 2023; Harvest at Kumulani is less than 10 miles away from the burn zone. While the U.S. occupation secured and maintained the conditions that made the devastation possible, Laurie co-opted the event to rewind his end-times business pitch of escapist eschatologies. As Israel commits war crime after war crime– targeting and bombing churches, mosques, hospitals, shelters, markets, and refugee camps– Harvest has only cranked up the volume on this sales pitch; effectively aiding in the manufacturing of consent for the genocide of Palestinians. They will never speak for the oppressed, not in Lāhainā, not in Palestine. They lavish themselves in the privilege and luxury of being white landowners in the imperial core of expanding empire. They rake in capital and 10s of millions of dollars and give tokens back. It is a scam. Unless you're buying enclosed patches of stolen land as private property from the money of people in your scheme, then it is profit.

Matthew 25.40-45 absolutely applies to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians - and the people supporting their regime. Luke 18.25 absolutely applies to Greg Laurie and his constituents. The Jesus of the gospel of Matthew is recorded to say, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” At the time of my writing this, since October 7th, Israel has killed 1 child in Gaza every 15 minutes. It is the position and belief of Harvest that if these beloved children and families are of the Islamic faith (or anything “other” than Christian), they are getting blown straight to hell. In mid-October, posting about the fulfillment of “biblical prophecies”, Greg Laurie uploaded a photo onto Instagram asking “Are you watching for Christ's return?”. Their theological anthropology projects God as the white man. They would nail Jesus back to the cross if he “came back”.

How Capitalism Killed Nutrition: A Review of 'Ultra-Processed People'

By Luka Kiernan

Republished from Red Flag.

Review of Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food ... and Why Can’t We Stop? By Chris van Tulleken. Cornerstone Press; 384 pages.

The maiden voyage of the Terra Grande, also known as Nestlé Até Você a Bordo (Nestlé takes you on board), set sail from the Brazilian port city of Belém in July 2010. The barge was described as a “floating supermarket” as it embarked on an eighteen-day circuit up the rivers of the Amazon lowlands, providing 800,000 people in impoverished riverside towns with the glories of the modern Western diet. The best-sellers were Kit-Kats, an 80-gram serving of which contains 38 grams of sugar. 

The products rapidly infiltrated the communities. To compete, local stores began stocking the ultra-processed junk food peddled by Nestlé. In its wake, the Terra Grande left dietary chaos. High sugar, ultra-processed food became a core food group. Childhood obesity rates rose as high as 30 percent in some communities, and cases of Type 2 diabetes have since been reported in large numbers, a disease that was previously unheard of.

Nestlé complemented the floating supermarket with another program, Nestlé Até Você (Nestlé Comes to You), to better access Brazil’s urban slums. Seven thousand women were employed as door-to-door salespeople, and the program now visits 700,000 low-income households each month with its ultra-processed goodness. As one company supervisor put it: “The essence of our program is to reach the poor”. 

This story of a multinational food company destroying the health of impoverished populations is recounted in Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People. The book is an insightful scientific, political and economic look into capitalism’s global destruction of nutrition and health. It points the finger squarely at the profiteering multinationals and complicit governments, regulatory bodies and NGOs. Van Tulleken contends that the rise of “ultra-processed food” (UPF), defined as any food containing synthetic additives, has led to the deterioration of people’s health. Today, in Australia, the UK, the US and Canada, UPF constitutes up to 60 percent of the average diet.

A tendency has emerged across the world over the last 50 years regarding health that contradicts the rest of human history. In most countries, the poorest people eat the most calories. They are also the most nutritionally malnourished. “Diet quality and associated health outcomes follow a social gradient in Australia, and internationally,” concluded a recent VicHealth study. In the UK, working-class children are getting shorter on average, at the same time that they are getting fatter. Rich children continue to grow. 

From the 1950s onwards, savvy food companies figured out ever more novel ways of using additives and synthetic ingredients to mimic more expensive foods. Modified starches from potatoes or corn were far cheaper than dairy fats, and, once packed with bulking agents, flavouring and colouring, could appear close enough to the real thing. The cheapest forms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates could be processed in any number of ways to create a lucrative mass product. With added preservatives, food was much more suited to the logistics of the market. Beyond just reducing ingredient costs, these chemicals and methods of processing were used to “extend shelf life, facilitate centralised production and, as it turns out, drive excess consumption”, according to Van Tulleken. Excess consumption became increasingly central to the profitability of these products.

There are an estimated 10,000 additives in modern food production, according to a study published in the journal Comprehensive Reviews in Food Science and Food Safety: flavouring, colouring, foaming and anti-foaming agents, bulking and anti-bulking agents, preservatives, emulsifiers and gums, among many others. Some of these have known serious health effects, but the overwhelming majority haven’t been researched enough to determine their consequences conclusively. The average UK resident consumes eight kilograms of these substances a year. 

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These additives are also incredibly effective at subverting the body’s natural regulatory system. Van Tulleken writes about studies that have shown that, when infants are given full access to a variety of nutritious foods, they feed themselves a nutritionally balanced diet, without over- or under-eating. This indicates that the body’s regulation of nutritional intake is as sophisticated as that for temperature or blood pressure. But the rise of UPF has disrupted these processes.

For instance, a 2019 study by the US National Institutes of Health found that even when UPF and unprocessed foods have identical nutritional profiles (in terms of calories, and macro and micronutrients), people will overeat the processed food. 

According to Van Tulleken, there has been “an evolutionary selection process over many decades, whereby the products that are purchased and eaten in the greatest quantities are the ones that survive best in the market. To achieve this, they have evolved to subvert the systems in the body that regulate weight and many other functions”. That is, getting people addicted to calorie-dense, nutritionally lacking, additive-loaded products—to the immense detriment of their health—is the food industry’s main game. 

Coca-Cola, for example, is packed full of sugar: ten teaspoons per can. To make it palatable (because spoonfuls of raw sugar don’t taste good) Coca-Cola adds bitter flavouring that cancels out some of the sweetness, so that consumers get the unnatural sugar and caffeine hit without their body rejecting it. 

Like the quantity of additives in their products, the profits of these companies are immense. Nestlé, the biggest of them all, grossed US$45 billion last year, PepsiCo $46 billion, Mondalez $11 billion, Archer-Daniels-Midland $7.5 billion.

Van Tulleken makes a series of compelling arguments throughout the book regarding the social and economic factors behind the health crisis. He rejects the individualist, personal responsibility framework that dominates mainstream discussions of nutrition and health. The book is explicitly not a self-help guide. 

He writes that, across the West, “there was a dramatic increase in obesity, beginning in the 1970s. The idea that there has been a simultaneous collapse in personal responsibility in both men and women across age and ethnic groups is not plausible”. 

Over the past 30 years, childhood obesity in England has increased by 700 percent, and severe obesity by 1,600 percent. This can be explained only by tectonic shifts in the diets made available. 

In Australia, the number of people living with Type 2 diabetes has tripled (or doubled when adjusted for population growth and age structure) over the last twenty years, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Comprehensive meta-analysis has demonstrated a conclusive link between UPF consumption and Type 2 diabetes. Multiple studies have indicated that higher consumption of UPF also leads to massively increased risks of heart attack and stroke.

Consistent with this structural approach, the book centres inequality as a major factor in health outcomes. The consumption of UPF is directly correlated with income, the poorest eating the most. This can largely be explained by pretty simple personal economics. In the UK, a study by the Food Foundation charity shows that the poorest half of the population would need to spend a third of their disposable income on food to meet the minimum nutritional guidelines. The bottom 10 percent would need to spend 75 percent. There are twice as many fast-food outlets in the poorer suburbs of England as in the richer, and advertising is most concentrated in those areas. 

In Australia, age-standardised rates of Type 2 diabetes are more than twice as high in the lowest socioeconomic areas as in the highest. Van Tulleken makes the case that diet and access to quality food are major transmitters of the “health-wealth” gap, alongside smoking and access to health care.

The book also decries the crimes of the major food companies that get rich by destroying the health of billions. For instance, in the 1970s Nestlé was accused of getting mothers in sub-Saharan Africa hooked on free samples of baby formula to the point where they stopped lactating. Mothers were then compelled to purchase baby formula or have their children starve—which thousands of the poorest did. 

In Ghana, one of the poorest countries in the world, obesity rates have risen from 2 percent to 13.6 percent since 1980, as fast-food outlets and UPF companies have expanded their territory. Former CEO of YUM!, KFC’s parent company, justified their intervention by saying: “It’s so much safer to eat at a KFC in Ghana, than it is to eat, obviously, you know, pretty much anywhere else”.

The agricultural system that serves the modern food industry is equally as destructive. Brazilian rainforests are chopped down to grow soybeans, which are used to force-feed factory-raised animals and produce various proteins and fats in their cheapest forms. Indonesian peat forests are burned to clear land for palm oil production, generating thick blankets of smoke and unfathomable amounts of pollution. In 2015, the burning of these forests emitted more CO2 in just a couple of months than the entire German economy that year. Modern agriculture is one of the biggest contributors to global warming, fuelled by the demands of the industrial food sector. 

There are broader dynamics at play than just the individual wickedness of CEOs. As Van Tulleken puts it, each company “is in an arms race with other companies ... all vying for that real estate in the shops that maximises sales. If Kellogg’s decided to take a stand [by making their food healthier and less profitable], the space would instantly be filled by another product from another company”. The nutrition crisis is a built-in product of modern capitalism, stemming from its competitive economic structures.

In this way, Van Tulleken approaches an anti-capitalist perspective. He argues that “shame and outrage are clearly inadequate to limit the survival of companies that are complicit in atrocities” and “their behaviour only changes when the flow of the money is diverted”.

Van Tulleken also lacerates the useful idiots and the actively complicit of the health NGO world. He slams the growth of “healthwashing”, whereby the worst offenders of the obesity crisis fund research about the very crisis that they are causing. He puts it firmly: “Organisations that take money from, for example, Coca-Cola, and claim to be fighting obesity are simply extensions of the marketing division of Coca-Cola ... the interests of [these companies] and those of obesity campaigners are not, and cannot be, aligned”.

However, Van Tulleken stops short of the full-blooded anti-capitalism that is required really to tackle the systemic issues he describes so clearly. While rejecting regressive proposals, such as sugar taxes, he falls back on milquetoast technocratic solutions. His proposals for policies like limits on fast food advertising and better regulated health research to prevent corporate influence would be welcome, but will not even scratch the surface of the structural causes behind the obesity epidemic. 

Elsewhere, Van Tulleken devolves into utopianism, arguing for a “fixing” of the agricultural system which today is based on monoculture crops, mass use of antibiotics and massive environmental destruction. But without a way to fight for such a system, the suggestions remain, as Marx put it 150 years ago, “recipes for the cookshops of the future”.

Ultimately, what Ultra-Processed People clearly demonstrates, but does not actually say, is that there is no solution to the health crisis under capitalism. For business, even the most essential of products, food, is just another way to make obscene amounts of money. The health of billions is sacrificed in the interest of profit.