3/28/2024 ‘Too Soon to Tell’: The Dialectics of Time and Revolutionary Struggle. By: Carlos L. GarridoRead NowIt is said that Zhou Enlai once, when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, replied that it was still ‘too soon to tell’. We tend to assume that the revolutionary simply fights for the future. An abstract progressivism looks backwards and sees nothing but a has-been, a completion, a fact, or series of facts, which can be narrated and judged with precision. For some, history, at best, conditions our present. It creates the potential, the horizon, for what can be actualized in the future. But history is left there, in the background. For the ahistorical mind and for the abstract historicist the past is past… it is dead. History is, as we Americans say, a done deal. Like a chauffeur, it brought us to our destination, the ‘present’. For this we pay and go our way. From these frameworks, sharing in their judgement of history-as-dead, a has-been, Enlai’s response is baffling. Cannot the impact of the French Revolution be answered clearly and precisely through the immediate events it produced? How can it be too soon to tell the impact of the revolution which sought to “realize the promises of philosophy”? Enlai’s response is not a cheap diplomatic answer to the foreign questioner. It expresses a profound insight on the temporality of revolutionary struggles, one not limited to the French Revolution. We are, of course, able to speak about the influence revolutionary movements have had… so far. But, in the final instance, none of these discussions can be conclusive. The question cannot be answered with full concreteness, since the questioned phenomenon is still being disclosed. The ‘impact’ of, say, the French Revolution, is still unfolding. Its meaning is still being fought for. This gets us to the key insight implicit in Enlai’s response: Revolutions aren’t simply about winning a future, realizing a ‘concrete utopia,’ as Bloch would say. They are, equally, about redeeming the past… they concern themselves with the fulfillment of the goals and aspirations of our ancestors in the struggle. Our fight is for the future, but it is also for the past. It is a struggle which prevents previous struggles from having died in vain. “History is rewritten in various periods,” Adam Schaff writes, “not only because new sources become accessible, but also because the newly appearing effects of past events make possible a new appraisal of the past.” Our construction of a new future is, at the same time, a reconstruction of the past. It allows us to shed light, retrospectively, on new meanings of past events – meanings which were implicit, latent, and which have been actualized through the construction of the new. For the dialectical materialist, revolutionary temporality is comprehensive – it understands and acts conscious of the interconnected and contradictory character of time. The present is seen as a launching off point for the realization of that which is in-itself, implicit, potential, Not-Yet. It is, also, a launching off point for that which is wrongly treated as a has-been, but which, as we know, is still becoming. For us, then, the future, past, and present are dialectically interconnected and interdependent. The present and future are determined by the past, but equally so, the past is determined by the present and future. This is, of course, a temporal unity of opposites… an objective contradiction in life. The future is found, as implication, in the past, and the past is found, as realization, in the future. A one-sided, reifying outlook cannot capture this complexity. An outlook which fears contradictions will be left astray, forced to castrate the temporal dialectic of the world to fit the neat categories in their heads. It is theoretical brumotactillophobia, a deep-seated fear in the dialectical intermingling of categories one hopes to keep purely apart. Enlai, as a proficient dialectician, was correct in his assessment of the French Revolution. It is still ‘too soon to tell’ precisely because the rational kernel, the progressive demands, of the revolution have yet to be fully realized. These find themselves unactualizable within the bourgeois form of life. They find their realization in the communist form of life, which, for most of the world, exists only implicitly/in-itself, as a hope which drives us to realize its latent potential. We have a world to win. And when it is won, we’ll secure for ourselves not only the future, but also the past. Author 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). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. This article was republished from the author's Substack, Philosophy in Crisis. Archives March 2024
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3/28/2024 A Portrait of Love in a City at War: Who Assassinated Haitian Community Leader Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste? By: Danny ShawRead NowLast year, on Tuesday, March 21st, a sniper’s bullet from an Israeli-made Galil ripped through the flesh of 24-year-old Haitian community leader and writer Tchadenksy Jean Baptiste. The war in Port-au-Prince counts among its victims hundreds of thousands of children and families who have been burnt out of their homes, raped and murdered. In Sniper City, death squads battle each other, the organized and unorganized masses and the police for territory and power. The police are among the favorite targets of the mercenaries, with on average 15 officers murdered every month in the capital. Amidst the imperial maelstrom, despite the bullets, gangs and hunger, community and resistance leaders continue their work, steadfast and confident in their people, their ancestors and their spiritual way of life. Armed with his perennial smile and poetry, Tchad was one such example of a determined militan (member of the organized protest movement) who never ceased to believe in and fight for Haiti’s unfinished second revolution. “Pa Gen Moun Pase Moun” (No one is better than anyone else) To walk with Tchadensky in the korido yo (alleyways) of Belè, Fò Nasyonal and Port-au-Prince’s many sprawling, perilous slums was to walk shoulder to shoulder with revolutionary royalty. In neighborhoods where the battle for hegemony plays out between criminal, paramilitary organizations and the masses, every neighbor, every elder and youth knew him and looked up to him. He didn’t believe in eating alone. Children gathered around cement blocks or big boulders that served as makeshift tables eagerly waiting to see what their big brother had cooked up for them. His habit of always sharing his hot plate worried his mother who perennially wondered if her oldest son had eaten enough. The elders reminded younger generations that this collective approach flowed from lespri aysyen (the Haitian way or soul). Squatting in front of a ripped poster of Jan Jak Dessalin, on a side alleyway off John Brown Avenue, the 24-year-old speaks to a group of Rasta youth: “We fight for everyone to be treated like the dignified human beings that they are.” He stopped mid breath and mid sentence and pleaded with his political family: “Why are we losing this battle? How do we take our neighborhoods back?” Despite fleeing from home to makeshift shacks and then sleeping in the streets, in stadiums, abandoned buildings and in public parks alongside hundreds of families displaced by the proxy death squads, Tchadensky never stopped reading and writing. He cited Soviet leader Mikhail Kalinin who taught that it was important to find time to read and write even if it was on the battlefield. Tedina, his life partner, remembered him as a prankster, a chef, a perfectionist, a scholar, an indefatigable fighter and lover of life. “I don’t have time for hate. I only have time for love.” A year after his death, the university where Tchadensky studied and performed has yet to come to terms with their loss. His close friend and colleague James Junior Jean Rolph offered his own eulogy, reminiscing that this youthful renaissance man did not “have a big head, constantly motivated his peers, worked and progressed without complaining and always had his head in the books.” Tchadenksy, like so many in this city of 2.5 million, lived on the run. He remained a light in Port-au-Prince’s most infamous neighborhoods 一 Matisan, Delma 2, Kafou Fèy and Belè. These are the bidonvils (ghettos) that provide the canvas for the clips of unrestrained violence that circulate on Haitian whatsapp. Tchad and the movement rejected the sensationalism of the media. Internally within MOLEGHAF and other socialist organizations, they discouraged the sharing of what they saw as “Black Death Pornography.” Tchad and others cautioned against the sharing on Whatsapp of grizzly images of heads cut off, sexual violence against the most vulnerable, bodies tortured and massacres. After a deep breath, he patiently explained to a crowd that they and their self-esteem had been brutalized and traumatized enough. The insurgent’s responsibility was to re-instill hope and love in the masses. And this is what our protagonist did until he was again run out and his home, alongside thousands of others, was burnt down. How many poems, memories, dreams, libraries and futures have disappeared in the flames, smoke and ashes of imperialism? For some militan, what they most lamented after the loss of life, was the loss of memories. How many bookshelves of fresh literature and newly-written poems have been sacrificed at the altar of the U.S. government’s obsession with guns, violence and plunder? Haiti’s top newspaper, Le Nouvelliste, published the poet’s last words “Running, Always Running” which has survived the author and the hybrid war[3]: “Running, Always Running" I am always on the run Until I am out of breath I am not an athlete I am no type of sportsman But I am always running I am fleeing and hiding from stuff I did not do After Lasalin I am in Aviyasyon I sprint through Dèlma 2 All I know how to do these days is run Drenched in sweat I am running out of breath I’m not running To get in better shape Or to impress anyone with a 6-pack I run because I am on the run I have my backpack on My baby is in my hands I have blankets wrapped around me I grab any last memories I can I drop my passport in the fury I search for a corner A nook and cranny To rest my weary head My exhausted body To think of the life I completely lost. We all run We run together Our grandmothers Little ones Everyone United Running Some of us are burnt Others are on fire All of us running shoulder to shoulder with the trauma To see who will cross the line of death first. After Kanaran I run through Divivye Then Site Solèy We are all running Drenched in sweat We are running out of breath We search for a hiding spot A refuge Where we can maroon the bullets So the stray bullets Do not Swallow us whole On the path where we are running” David vs Goliath And on a Tuesday, like any other, surrounded by one of his usual extended families, Tchadensky suddenly went quiet and crumbled underneath his own weight. The children saw the bleeding wound on the side of his stomach and screamed out “Amwey! Tchadenksy pran bal.” “Help! Tchandenksy was shot.” Amidst the shock, his comrades scrambled to gather the money necessary to pay a motorcycle to bring him to The Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) hospital. According to Domini Resain, Coordinator of Mobilization for MOLEGHAF, (Movement for the Equality and Liberation of All Haitians ), the student leader was organizing a community meal and a workshop for children displaced by the gang war when a sniper blasted a bullet from an IMI Galil into his abdomen. Everyone speculated: “the sniper who shot Tchad, was he a police officer, a paid assassin or a gang member from the G9 or G-Pèp paramilitaries who have know reconstituted themselves under the command of Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier as the Viv Ansanm alliance (Live Together)?” Domini intervened before a crowd who gathered to express their condolences: “Does it matter who killed Tchad? They are all the same. These are not stray bullets as they claim. They are state bullets. These are PHTK bullets. These are police bullets. These are Washington bullets .” In the “Confessions of a Haitian kidnapper ,” police officer Arnel Joseph unpacks the secret connections that exist between political and economic power elites, the Haitian National Police and the gangs. While the dominant narrative carried by telejòl (television or media reports carried by mouth or through rumors) stated that a stray bullet struck the popular leader, the militan were quick to point out that these were state bullets and Washington bullets. As Peter Hallward’s classic book , Damming the Flood: Haiti and the Politics of Containment, on the rise and repression of the Lavalas movement shows, all of modern Haitian history is a contest for power between the desperately poor 99.9 percent and the fabulously opulent 0.1 percent of the Petyonvil mountain enclave. In this asymmetrical war, Tchad mobilized poems, smiles and flowers as his class enemies hired professional assassins for a cheap day’s pay. How many tens of thousands of Lavalas organizers and fighters from the broad social movement have been disappeared, exiled, imprisoned and assassinated?The oligarchy disappears the expression, art and leadership they deem to be an obstacle to their rule. If anything remains clear in Haiti, it is the fact that a handful of elite families hide behind their heavily-fortified castles and the carefully curated media they own and manage. There are more private security guards than public police in the most unequal country in the Western hemisphere. It was an entire system that murdered Thadensky, like so many others from his generation. Washington Bullets and Resistans Ayisyen (Haitian Resistance) The average life expectancy in France is over 82 years. The average life expectancy in The Dominican Republic is 73 years. In Haiti , it is 10 years less. For a revolutionary in Haiti, the statistic drops several more decades. Tchadenksy joined a growing list of community leaders liquidated under the rule of the PHTK, the Haitian Bald Headed Party, named so because their first dictator, Michel Martelly was bald. The party's rule is especially sinister because they hide behind their hired mercenaries, denying any involvement. Paramilitaries are more effective in Haiti, just as they were in Colombia, Argentina, El Salvador and other U.S. neocolonies because they are not accountable to anyone. The modern makouts (thugs and assassins) are loyal to Izo, Kempès Sanon, Barbecue, Vitalhom or whoever the local warlord is. Three survivors of a kidnapping in Mon Kabrit, who do not want to be named, explained: “The young recruits didn’t have money to eat that day but they gripped AR15s and AK47s worth over $10,000 on the streets of Haiti. We know they are involved with the drug trade. How can they get such expensive weapons when most of us are hungry? When they divided the men from the women (the speaker looked down), the kidnappers screamed allegiance to their leader Lanmò San Jou (Death without a day announced). They asked us who we were loyal to…which political party or gang? Refusing the debate, we looked away. They hit us and reminded us that their president and the president of all of Haiti was their boss, the paramilitary gang leader, Lanmò San Jou.” This anecdote is telling and sheds light on the highly localized reality of gang bosses who preside over their own fiefdoms of looting, raping and destruction. This is the colonial Haiti run by guns for fire that Tchadensky resisted, and the one that ultimately consumed him and thousands of other innocents. Our protagonist never hesitated to denounce the powers that be, “the gangsters in ties ” and foreign forces who fanned the flames of the fratricidal war. The griot articulates what so many know but cannot express or are deathly afraid to express – the chaos in Haiti has its origins faraway in the palaces and boardrooms of Washington D.C., New York, Miami, Ottawa, Montreal and Paris. While CNN, Fox and the New York Times deceitfully portray Haiti as isolated, the Caribbean nation of over 11.5 million has for centuries been integrated into the international capitalist machinery .[4] And if the maroon nation ever steps out of line, U.S. Marines are not far off to remind them of their place in the global pecking order. Washington now prefers mercenaries from Brazil, Kenya, Chile, Chad, Nepal or Benin to carry out their fourth invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years. Regardless of the historical odds, there is an abundance of leaders and organizations who trained with Tchadensky and are fighting to elevate their homeland out of the neoliberal quagmire. They too are survivors of this hybrid war. Highly conscious of the ideological and media war against them, MOLEGHAF, the Black Panthers of Haiti , model another brand of leadership, honest, self-sacrificing and anti-imperialist.[5] For this reason, they have been targeted by state and paramilitary bullets. Many political demonstrations and protests in Haiti are in front of the U.S. embassy precisely because of this anti-imperialist awareness. Dahoud Andre, a spokesperson of KOMOKODA, the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, and host of "Haiti Our Revolution Continues" on WBAI analyzed the ins-and-outs of the struggle today for Haiti’s definitive self-determination on Black Agenda Radio. On the anniversary of the death of a Haitian Fred Hampton, take time to resist the mainstream clichés against Haiti and share the memories of our Haitian saints. The Gregory Saint-Hillaires , Jean Anil Louis Justes and Tchadenskys gave everything for everyone, while awaiting nothing for themselves in return, as they fought and fell in combat in order to guarantee all the homeland’s children an abundance of water, food, peace, liberty, dignity and joy. Fanmi Lavalas (Sali Piblik) KRÒS Kowòdinasyon Rejyonal Òganizasyon Sidès yo MOLEGHAF: Mouvman pou Libète Egalite sou Chimen Fratènize Tout Ayisyen OTR: Òganizasyon Travayè Revolisyonè Radyo Resistans SOFA: Solidarite Fanm Ayisyen Rasin Kanpèp Konbit Òganizasyon Politik ak Sendikal yo Tèt Kole Ti Peyizan MPP Movman Peyizan Papay Movman Popilè Revolusyonè (Sitè Soley) Sèk Gramsci Sèk Jean Annil Louis-Juste KOMOKODA (Komite Mobilizasyon kont Diktati an Ayiti Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti) Jounal revolisyonè: La Voix des Travailleus Revolutionaire Platfòm Ayisyen Pledwaye pou yon Devlopman Altènatif SROD'H: Syndicat pour la Rénovation des Ouvriers d'Haïti ROPA: Regwoupman Ouvriye Pwogresis Ayisyen OFDOA :Oganizasyon Fanm Djanm Ouvriye Ayisyen Altènativ Sosyalis Fwon Popilè e Patriotik JCH Jeunesse communiste haïtien Notes [1] All spellings are in the national language of Haiti, Kreyòl, not the colonial language, French. [2] Translation: “Your smile opens up a new path for Haiti. Your poetry lived and died for Haiti. See you again soon comrade God bless!” [3] For the original version of the poem in Kreyòl see the embedded link. With permission from Tchadensky’s family, I translated the poem into English. [4] The Haitian state last conducted a census in 2003 under the leadership of Jean Bertrand Aristide so the population is probably much higher than 12,000,000. [5] Partial List of Leftist, Anti-Imperialist Organizations in Haiti Author Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Relations at the City University of New York. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. As the Director and professor of the International Affairs Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute, he works to build unity and anti-imperialist consciousness. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, HispanTV, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in eighty-one countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. He is a mentor to many, guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of Ernesto Dessalines and Cauã Amaru. He has also authored articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw Republished from Black Agenda Report Archives March 2024 On February 29, 2024, the Israeli army deliberately ran over a Palestinian man in Gaza City’s Al-Zaytoun neighborhood after he was arrested. The man was harshly interrogated by Israeli soldiers, who tied his hands with plastic zip-tie handcuffs before running him over with a military vehicle from the legs up. In order to ensure that he was thoroughly crushed, Israeli soldiers laid him on asphalt instead of an adjacent sandy area. The man had his clothes removed, since he was seen wearing only his underpants. When one looks at the body, one is confronted with the absolute unidentifiability of the man that it previously constituted: the individuality of the human being has been flattened into scattered, disfigured organs and parts. Colonial Reality How do we think about the comprehensively destroyed body? In mainstream liberal thought, the evisceration of a human being can be regarded as a “moral” failing, as a loss of “lives” that has to be prevented. Palestinians here figure merely as “victims” of terror; their redemption, consequently, lies in the normative abstraction of “peace”. The body of the victim is sensationalized and marketed as a blot upon the fabric of humanity so that people can be convinced in favor of the cessation of hostilities. Politics is reduced to “outrage,” while collective action is postponed to the day when everyone’s moral conscience has awoken. When this spontaneous moral awakening doesn’t happen, a sense of helplessness pervades. All this while, the individual can pride themselves over their distance from the violence of Hamas, which is considered as a myopic outburst without any political vision. This is clear in renowned Marxist philosopher Etienne Balibar’s response to the Palestine crisis. He says that Hamas’ October 7 military operation can’t be justified because it was “accompanied by particularly odious crimes against the Israeli population: the murder of adults and children, torture, rape and kidnapping.” These “exterminist massacres…replicated the massacres perpetrated by the Jewish paramilitaries on Palestinian villages during the Naqba.” All the supposed atrocities committed by Hamas have been debunked as Zionist propaganda. Most of the 1,154 Israelis that the government claims were killed by Palestinians were actually killed by the Zionist state itself. This is the result of Israel’s Hannibal Directive, which authorizes the killing of Israeli soldiers if they fall into enemy hands. The story about the killing of babies was propagated without evidence, being based on the words of Major David Ben Zion – an extremist settler who has explicitly called for violence against Palestinians. Claims about rape were established through a fraudulent New York Times investigation, which was published even though not a single rape victim was found. Balibar’s willingness to accept the demonization of Palestinian resistance is rooted in the aforementioned logic of liberal peace, wherein clean, uncluttered thought is prioritized over the spiraling movement of anti-colonial resistance. Any counter-attack on Zionist settler-colonialism is said to be caught within the confines of the extant social reality. Palestinians and Israelis, then, become two sides of an overarching situation, continuously mirroring each other in terms of their deplorable violence. An exit from this situation can be conceived only in an external manner, as the intervention of a supervening agency. Thus, Balibar says that the only possible outcome consists in the intervention of the international community and its institutions, “demanding an immediate ceasefire, the release of the hostages, the prosecution of the war crimes committed by both sides, and the implementation of the countless UN resolutions that have gone unheeded.” But he himself adds that this desired resolution has no chance of happening because “institutions have been neutralized by the major or medium-sized imperialist powers, and the Jewish-Arab conflict has once again become an issue in the maneuvers they engage in to determine spheres of influence and networks of alliances, in a context of cold and hot wars.” Geopolitical and regional power dynamics “obliterate any effective international legality. We are in a circle of impotence and calculation from which there is no escape. The catastrophe will therefore carry to term, and we will suffer the consequences.” Impotence – this becomes the fate of a liberal-pacifist strategy that wants to separate the Palestinian question from any contaminating influence of concrete geopolitical and social actors. In order to build an alternative to Balibar’s (anti)politics of impotence, consider these words by him: “I see the massacre on October 7th involving various atrocities perpetrated against civilians as a pure terrorist action (also in the literal sense: meant to spread terror), which forces to confer a terrorist character upon the organization itself.” Instead of disavowing this characterization, I want to interpret it literally: yes, a war of national liberation does intend to spread terror among the settlers so that the sense of security enjoyed by the colonial system can be upended. Colonial society in its entirety should be woken out of its racist insularity by being forced to pay the price of occupation, just as the colonized pay the price for national oppression. Terror should be felt on both sides. When anti-colonial practice inflicts damage upon structures of brutality through the deployment of terror, the entire alliance of imperialist states comes together to contain the movement. Therefore, when Balibar says that a “terrorist character” should be conferred upon Hamas, he forgets that this has already been done through sanctions and terror lists created by states of the Global North. But these instruments of repression have had a counterproductive effect, introducing a form of delinking among the entities that are at the receiving end of imperialist strangulation. In the words of Max Ajl: “As political organizations were “maximally” coerced and quarantined, they made mutual linkages. Delinking led to a type of regional collective self-reliant security doctrine, architecture, and technological and military coordination. Imperialism built an inadvertent scaffolding for its opponents’ ideological and political goals.” Thus, anti-colonial terror lays bare the contours of confrontation, imposing upon us the stark divide of national liberation and imperialism. Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has heightened the antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized, with the entire globe feeling the reverberations of this binarized division. As the divide between national liberation and colonialism is sharpened, amplified, and simplified, one can’t say that both the sides are involved in a cycle of violence, wherein each mimes the other in the performance of cruelty. In order to say that the colonizer and the colonized are similar in terms of their violent acts, one has to compare this violence against a common standard of peace. But the peculiarity of colonialism consists in the fact that there is no unified notion of peace. Frantz Fanon elaborates: “The zone inhabited by the colonized is not complementary to the zone inhabited by the colonizers. The two zones confront each other, but not in the service of a higher unity. Governed by a purely Aristotelian logic, they follow the principle of mutual exclusion: There is no conciliation possible, one of the terms is superfluous”. Since Balibar wants to establish a similarity between the violence of Hamas and Israel, he has to acknowledge that he is comparing both these forms of violence from a higher standpoint of peace. And this is exactly what he does. He writes that the aim of Hamas’ October 7 attack was “to provoke a response of such violence that the war would enter a new, truly “exterminationist” phase, obliterating forever the possibilities of the two peoples living together.” Possibilities – this is a key word of liberal ideology, as it presupposes that the colonial situation always contains a reservoir of morality, a hope of reconciliation. However, colonialism is an irreconcilable struggle between two opposing forces. Even if Hamas had remained completely quiet, Israel would have maintained its genocide of Palestinians. Settler sovereignty can only be ensured through the perpetually enacted destruction of indigenous presence. The mere fact of Palestinian existence is a threat to Israel. Hamas’ military operations don’t determine the character of Israeli response. The response of Israel is ingrained in the structure of colonialism, which mandates the extermination of the native. That’s why Balibar is wrong to say that Operation Al-Aqsa Flood has erased the “possibilities” of peace. There never was such a possibility. In a colonial situation, possibilities are created by cracking open the shell of frozen impossibilities. This brings me back to the dismembered body of the Palestinian man. The colonial violence enacted upon this body can’t be judged against a higher notion of morality, as colonialism drives back all ethereal ideological words into the soil of struggle. In order to understand the crushed body, one has to analyze the concrete causes that have brought about this kind of death. Without these causes, we will end up in the fantasy world of liberal ethics, where everything is subordinated to the judgmental gaze of a contemplative observer. Here, it is instructive to read Nikolai Bukharin’s explanation of the materiality of the body: Now man is a very delicately organized creature. Destroy this organization, disorganize it, take it apart, cut it up, and the “mind” at once disappears. If men were able to put together this system again, to assemble the human organism, in other words, if it were possible to take a human body apart and put it together again just as one may do with the parts of a clock, consciousness would also at once return; once the clock has been reassembled it will operate and start to tick; put together the human organism, and it will start to think. Comparing a body to a clock – this seems offensive the sensibilities of liberal morality where “humanity” is constantly touted as an inviolable construct. However, a mechanical perspective is appropriate for the politics of anti-colonialism, where one mourns not the violation of the body’s humanity but its disorganization by specific actors. In politics, the disorganized body is reassembled through collective action, through the gathering of masses that preserves the desire for life through concrete practices of disobedience and construction. This organized mass targets the entity that is responsible for the disorganization of bodies, namely the Zionist state. If violence needs to be deployed in the struggle against colonialism, then it is fully justified. It is simply an instrument that assists in the reassembly of bodies through the disassembly of the colonial enemy. Strategies of Civility Balibar believes that violence is not a mere instrument. In his book Violence and Civility: On the Limits of Political Philosophy, he states that “political violence can never be completely controlled. One cannot simply use it as a means in the service of certain ends…without oneself feeling the ambivalent effects of its use, “deliberate” or not.” Violence, accordingly, can no longer be thought as “a means or an instrument employed to accomplish something else…It is, rather, the uncertain stakes of a confrontation with the element of irreducible alterity that it carries within itself.” This “irreducible alterity” refers to the fact that violence “exceeds the purposes guaranteeing it a permanent place in the economy of power and production.” It is never entirely functional, as it “exceeds the intentions and escapes the control of those exercising violence”. This dysfunctionality has been foregrounded through the defeat of the “ideologies of modernity” that believed in the “grand narrative of progress”. This grand narrative can be summarized in the thesis of the “convertibility” of violence: “the consequences of the most massive acts of destruction are ruins and mourning, but they cannot not be constructive (or reconstructive), even as they destroy.” The “historical optimism or faith in the meaning of history” has been lost with the defeat of revolutionary projects. These projects practiced counter-violence, which Balibar classifies as a simplistic “inversion” of ruling class violence. Socialist revolutions believed that they that they must reduplicate bourgeois violence if they are to properly “monopolize” it. This monopolization is “dangerous for the very people who wield and institute them”. Why? “[B]ecause they are nothing other, at the limit, than crystallized or stabilized violence and, in the final analysis, the relative stabilization, by groups and individuals in a given society, of their own violence – in the form of a distantiation and unequal distribution, a more or less permanent appropriation of the means of violence by some of them.” Balibar believes that the hierarchical foundation of revolutionary counter-violence – its status as an unequal distribution of force – was overlooked due to the construction of a grand narrative, namely class struggle as the “motor of history”. This narrative of history demarcated a new division between “revolutionary” violence and “counterrevolutionary” violence. The latter was excluded “from the meaning of history” as it was regarded as an obstacle to the revolution. Insofar as revolutionary projects dogmatically justified their violence through the construction of a facile grand history, they failed to engage with legitimate disagreements and antagonisms. Any dynamic that didn’t agree with state policy was classified as “counterrevolutionary”. This initiated a “truly suicidal process” of increasing repression. State institutions and police apparatuses in socialist societies came to replicate the hierarchical structure of the enemies against whom they were fighting. According to Balibar, globalization has operated a “practical refutation of the grand schemes of the intelligibility of politics”. Both bourgeois and post-revolutionary states depended upon the primacy of the nation, which functioned as a form of “collective subjectivity” integrating individuals “in the process of historical universality (patriotism, civic duty).” Insofar as globalization has diminished the significance of the nation, it has destroyed the myth of a unified history. Today, events no longer unfold as part of an evolving chain of meaningful collective action. Conflicts no longer oppose a “negative” to a “positive”. Rather, “the intrinsic complexity or order of multiplicity that characterizes conflict” introduces a new reality that can’t be captured by the binaries of revolutionary counter-violence. These binaries assumed that conflict would birth progress. However, progress has been replaced by the explosion of myriad forms of “extreme violence” (environmental catastrophe, ethnic wars, etc.) that don’t contribute to any grand narrative. This form of violence that is not part of the “universal meaning” of history is “inconvertible” violence i.e. violence that can’t be incorporated into a teleological narrative. Inconvertible violence shows that totalizing discourses will always fail in their attempt to convert all violence into social stability. An inconvertible remainder inevitably haunts the unity of grand narratives. As Balibar remarks, “the history of society or the field of politics is that of an excess or irreducible remainder of violence (if only latent violence) over the institutional, legal, or strategic forms for reducing and eliminating it.” Insofar as inconvertible violence lies outside the justificatory web of totalizing discourses, it directly attests to the entanglement of politics with antagonisms, the fact that politics is not a stable and absolute idea but a form of fragile power relation. This fragility is present in extreme violence, which is shorn of any larger narrative of progress. Consequently, extreme violence is faced with the abyss of indeterminacy, the inability of a justification to permanently ground politics. Instead of accepting the indeterminacy of politics, extreme violence aims to tear apart social bonds in order to generate security. That’s why it targets “the humanity in man, the very fact of inclusion in the human race,” an impossible task that needs to be repeated in order to guarantee a temporary sense of “omnipotence”. Extreme violence thus reveals an “incompressible minimum,” an excess that can’t be eliminated: “individuality is not a simple totality which could be circumscribed in a unique discourse, a unique way of life; there always remains an indefinite multiplicity of “parts,” relationships, and fluctuations which exceed such an imaginary project, and wind up subverting it.” Balibar asks us to accept the groundlessness of politics that is revealed in a perverse fashion by the anxieties of extreme violence. Instead of eliminating the threat of conflict (which extreme violence tends to do), we should accept the fundamental conflictuality of politics itself. Not all violence can be converted into the teleology of a social order. There always remains an inconvertible remainder that disturbs the stability of discourses. The ends for which we want to deploy violence are overpowered by an excess of violence that we wrongly relegate to mere means. Balibar writes: “violence can’t be simply the other of politics, unless we want to imagine a politics without powers, power relations, inequalities, conflicts, or interests, which would be tantamount to a politics without politics.” The acknowledgement of violence as a conflictual dynamic that can’t be suppressed points us towards the “precariousness” of politics, the fact that it can’t be guaranteed once and for all by a grand historical narrative. Instead, politics is constituted by an “infinite circularity”: a political action depends on its own movement of permanent negotiation, instead of being subordinated to an invariant foundation. When this circularity is ignored, we enter the realm of extreme violence where one engages in the impossible search for a metaphysical foundation. As Balibar puts it: [We need] to conceive of politics…as an absolute “fiction,” or an institution with no foundation that is necessarily and irremediably contingent…The sole “foundation” is a negative one, terror or extreme violence (or a combination of the forms of extreme violence, which is, precisely, terror). The alternative, it is the aleatory, purely practical possibility of avoiding terror, of deferring it more or less completely and for a relatively protracted period. The aleatory mode of politics leads to “civility,” wherein politics doesn’t renounce the imperative of liberatory violence but attempts to combat its “nihilism” through careful controls. This enables Balibar to contrast the nihilistic tendencies of revolutionary counter-violence to “anti-violence,” which denotes “resistance to the reactive violence that violence itself elicits when it is generalized”. Thus, the anti-violence of civility allows a mass movement to “take a distance from itself” and engage in self-critique. There always has to be a space where people can “reflect on the consequences and aftereffects of their own “social movements” when they confront a violent social order or a legal state of injustice”. In other words, civility is a second-order reflection that prevents mass movements from falling prey to unthinking “barbarity”. It is the practice that pits careful reflection against uninformed action. As Balibar notes, “we must take risks and know which risks we take”. My objection is that the notion of civility ontologizes politics by tying it to the “ultrapolitical” instance of contingency or groundlessness. This is evident when Balibar says that whenever progressive has succeeded in its objectives, “this has never happened in accordance with the logic of such politics alone. Rather, another politics, irreducible to any of these received political concepts, has always had to intervene in addition, or to provide politics with its underside, as it were: precisely the politics that I am hypothetically calling civility.” Even if we admit that politics is groundless, this doesn’t necessitate the transformation of this groundlessness into the “impolitic limit of politics”. On the contrary, the contingent nature of politics testifies to the fact that the effects of violence can’t be moderated by the reflective faculty of an enlightened intellect. When Balibar asks political militants to take risks while knowing which risks they are taking, he elides the collective character of politics, wherein decisions are outside the remit of knowledge. Knowledge presupposes a relation of correspondence between the knower and the object that is to be known. In politics, the risks that are to be known are outside of one’s grasp since their effects come into display only when they join the general field of social reality. Unless we take risks, we are never going to know their precise character. Balibar knows that politics is aleatory, that it can’t be provided with a permanent foundation. But he turns this very fact of contingency into a guiding principle that can be implemented by people when they undertake politics. This accords a transcendental authority to the power of abstract reflection, which swoops in from afar to judge if a specific political action is respecting the contingency of politics. In concrete cases, this leads to a vague democratic ideology that repeats anti-communist and pro-imperialist falsities. The Ideology of Bourgeois Democracy The ontologization of politics is visible in Balibar’s comments on the Russia-Ukraine war. He says that the rationale behind the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine was two-fold. First, Russia wanted to “rebuild the Empire that had been formed over centuries under the tsarist regime and sanctified by the messianic mission of “Holy Russia”, then secularized and expanded by Stalin under the name of communism, now resurrected with the help of a virulent nationalist ideology that counterposes an idealized traditional “Greater Russia” or “Eurasia” to the “degenerate” democratic West.” He never explains why Stalin’s rule represented a form of imperialism. He merely mentions the Holodomor – the 1932-33 famine that killed Ukrainian peasants. Balibar regards the Holodomor as part of the “greatest genocides of the 20th century,” putting it on par with the Holocaust. This interpretation takes part in an anti-communist model that attributes the Ukrainian famine to the evil intentions of Stalin. According to Mark B. Tauger, “the famine was not limited to Ukraine, but affected virtually the entire Soviet Union, and resulted first of all from a series of natural disasters in 1931–32 that diminished harvests drastically”. It is illogical to say that Stalin killed Ukrainian peasants, because “the Soviet regime depended for its survival on the peasantry and relied on the peasants to overcome the famine, which they did by producing a much larger harvest in 1933, despite the tragic famine conditions in which they worked.” This shows that “collectivization allowed the mobilization and distribution of resources, like tractors, seed aid, and food relief, to enable farmers to produce a large harvest during a serious famine, which was unprecedented in Russian history and almost so in Soviet history.” It is also important to remember that it was farm collectivization that strengthened the Soviet state against the Nazi army “by ensuring the priority of Red Army soldiers and war workers over peasants in the wartime allocation of food.” Without the defeat of Germany by the Soviets, Hitler would have achieved domination over continental Europe, possibly leading to Britain’s withdrawal from the conflict and hindering American support to Europe. Top of FormThus, when we look beyond the decontextualized invocation of the famine, we can observe how the Soviet Union pre-empted the spread of fascism and then brought about large-scale, revolutionizing changes in Ukrainian society. It turned a largely agricultural and illiterate country into a highly industrialized nation in the developed world. For instance, the first computer in the USSR was developed in Kyiv. With Soviet collapse, Ukraine’s industry suffered greatly due to open theft and deterioration. Ukraine couldn’t find any market for its industrial goods after the destruction of Soviet trade links. The absence of concrete analyses is also present in the equivalence that Balibar makes between the Holodomor and the Holocaust. Jaquelin Coulson notes that the Holodomor has functioned as a nationalist narrative in the building of Ukraine, mobilizing hatred not only against Russians (who are constructed as a foreign, invasive Other) but also against Jews. In wartime Soviet Ukraine, Nazi occupiers used public accounts of the famine to stoke anti-Semitic sentiments, blaming the Jews for committing genocide against Ukraine. Since its establishment in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) framed “Judeo-Bolshevism” as a powerful threat to Ukrainian nationalism, thus carrying out violent acts against Ukrainian Jews. This anti-Semitic worldview led to the belief that Jews had somehow caused, benefited from, or escaped the famine. Levko Lukyanenko, author of the Declaration of Independence of Ukraine, thought that the Jews were in control of the Soviet government when the supposed genocide took place. By not undertaking a historically grounded dissection of the Ukrainian famine, Balibar partakes in the politics of “competitive atrocity” wherein suffering is inflated as a unique, immoral event instead of being referred to its socio-structural contexts. Balibar says that the imperial ambitions of Russia are being reinvented through the dichotomy of a traditionalist “Greater Russia” or “Eurasia” and a “degenerate” democratic West. This is a purely culturalist analysis that overlooks the actuality of geo-economic politics. A Eurasian project is not about traditionalist and imperialist ideology but about the reduction of European countries’ dependence on the US-led unipolar world order through trade with Russia and China. Due to the war in Ukraine, Europe has reduced its use of Russian gas, thereby increasing its dependence on costlier US liquefied natural gas (LNG). The US has exploited this energy crisis by selling its LNG to Europe at high prices. This allows the US to exercise greater influence on European foreign policy. What Balibar characterizes as the traditionalism of present-day Russia is not the core component of the country’s reigning politics. Rather, Russian pragmatically operates according to multiple ideologies that can challenge the legitimacy of the US-led world order and thus, help combat imperialist attacks against Russia. Western observers have accused Russia of being traditionalist because they overemphasize the conservative and authoritarian elements that compose Putinism. What they overlook is the fact that these ideologies are said to be against the excessive liberalism and globalism of the West. Thus, what matters for Putin is a sovereigntist position against the West, one that uses patriotism against an interventionist Western liberal order. The 2023 report “Russia’s Policy Towards the World Majority,” published by the most influential foreign policy institutes of Russia, argues that US unipolarity is being challenged by a new coalition that is not “anti-West” but “non-West”: it is not ideologically hostile to the West but finds itself opposed to the objective interests of the Global North. This opposition manifests itself in support for a multipolar world order where nation-states are free from imperialist influence and thus more permeable to popular influence. As the report states: The extremist mutation of the liberal idea currently underway in the West should be classified as a specific product of Western civilization not subject to internationalization. There is a need for our own response – agreeable with the cultural and philosophical traditions of different civilizations – to the most acute challenges to human development ranging from environmental issues to ethical problems related to modern technologies. Blindly following the Western agenda is not just useless but is also harmful. The distinction between “anti-West” and “non-Western” is important because it highlights that Russia’s illiberal and traditionalist biases are not reflective of imperial ambitions. Instead, they are a subordinate component of a sovereigntist position that supports multipolarization. Insofar as multipolarization will democratize the world order, it needs to be critically welcomed even as we oppose the traditionalist streaks of Russian politics. Second, Balibar writes that the Russian invasion was a “preventive political war” aimed at crushing “the liberal-democratic orientation of the Ukrainian state” so that it didn’t inspire reformist changes in Russia itself. He says that the Maidan-Revolution of 2013-14 was a “democratic invention” despite all its weaknesses, like sectarianism, oligarchical manipulation, political corruption, and involvement of militias. For Balibar, the ultimately “democratic” character of the Maidan-Revolution lies in the fact that “it initiated…a collective move towards the official values of the Western European democratic systems (however “oligarchic” they can be themselves, but leaving room for political pluralism) and it could represent a model for the citizens of the Russian federation.” So, the “democratic” character of the Maidan revolution lies in its espousal of bourgeois-liberal democracy. It is hardly a foregone conclusion that the political pluralism of liberal democracy is superior to other regimes. Pluralist democracy can very well function as the most efficient means of authoritarianism. This is what happened in the Maidan revolution. The 2014 Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych tried to play Russia and the European Union (EU) off one another to get the best economic deal for Ukraine. Thus, he became the target of Western-backed business interests and Russophobic neo-Nazi groups. With US backing, the latter staged a coup and forced Yanukovych to flee to Moscow. The overthrow of the elected president came to be known as the Maidan Revolution, named after the Kiev square that hosted the protests. On February 6, 2014, an anonymous entity leaked a call between US Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and US ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt. They could be heard saying that Arseniy Yatsenyuk is America’s choice to replace Yanukovych, which he did. The new government adopted pro-EU and pro-NATO policies. It imposed restrictions on the teaching of the Russian language in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, provoking resistance among the inhabitants. With the support of the majority of the population, expressed in a referendum, Putin joined Crimea to Russia. In the same year as Russia’s annexation of Crimea, separatist leaders supported by Moscow seized Donetsk and Luhansk – populated primarily by Russian ethnic minorities striving for independence – and declared the “People’s Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk”. These events angered ultra-nationalist Ukrainian forces; they declared war on the people that were opposing Yatsenyuk’s Euro-American posture. So, far from being an instance of “democratic invention,” the Maidan revolution was a maneuver through which Northern imperialist forces staged a coup, promoted neo-Nazi forces in the state apparatus, and launched a war against Russian ethnic minorities in the country. This liquidated the sovereignty of Ukraine and plunged it “into a simulated semicolonial situation without being directly occupied and divided but nevertheless reprogrammed to launch a war against itself and to point offensive weapons at neighboring Russia”. Instead of initiating a democratic resurgence, liberal democracy functioned as a framework for a NATO-Neo-Nazi axis that wanted to wage war against Russia without any concerns for the human cost. However, Balibar ignores all this by merely asserting that “there is a complete dissymmetry for a democratic country between the perspectives of being taken and swallowed again by a backward-looking autocratic empire, and the perspective of being incorporated into a federation which creates or perpetuates inequalities, but has set up rules for negotiating participation.” In the end, we get an Orientalist assertion that replaces a concrete examination of the Russian social formation with an unverified faith in the goodness of bourgeois, Western democracy. Given that Balibar’s politics of civility forgoes the confrontation of social forces in favor of the reflective power of bourgeois democracy, it is no surprise that his discussion of the global significance of the Palestinian movement is oriented towards the abstract goal of “justice”. He says that both Ukraine and Palestine are united their pursuit of “justice”: “not only the justice that refers to a position in war, on one side or the other of the divide between aggressor and victim, or oppressor and resistant, but the justice that can acquire a universal resonance, the justice that confers a universalistic dimension upon the claim of rights that some actors embody in the war.” Both Ukraine and Palestine “appear as incarnations of universal principles of self-determination and resistance to oppression, reason why, in different parts of the world, there are today activists who make valuable efforts to simultaneously support and articulate the two causes.” This universalist perspective of justice is different from the logic of “campism” which sees the current conflagrations either “in terms of a conflict between “democracies” and “totalitarian states”, or a conflict between the “Western imperialism” (under US hegemony, organized by NATO) and the “emerging peoples” with a tricontinental basis.” Balibar wants to repudiate both these campist perspectives by emphasizing “the specific history of each war, each people, each territory in its own local terms” and by describing “the modalities in which a war has developed out of conditions and choices that were made by their own actors: Russians, Ukrainians, Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs, with all their internal divisions and their complete history.” What is relevant to note here is that Balibar wants to replace the actual reality of geopolitical camps with the philosophically concocted fantasy of struggles that transcend these camps and strive for “justice” and “liberty”. The American Empire controls, through NATO and other modalities, 74.3% of all military spending worldwide. This amounts to more than US$ 2 trillion. Thus, “the single most important aspect of state power – that is, military power – the absolute central danger to the working classes of all countries, especially to the darker nations of the world, lies in the US-Led Imperialist Camp.” The struggles for “justice” and “liberty” that Balibar imagines obscure the contradiction between the imperialism of the American Empire and the people of Global South. He says that this division, “while remaining real (and crucial), is also compounded by other “global” phenomena,” namely “global warming and the environmental catastrophe,” which subvert “all borders in the world”. But ecological degradation itself is differentially distributed according to the socio-economic gradations of the world-imperialist system. Countries of the Global South are disproportionately affected by climate change due to the fact that global warming hits the hotter, low latitude, tropical, and subtropical regions of the earth especially hard. These countries are also generally poor due to imperialist factors such as underdevelopment, mal-development, poverty, corruption, and inequality which amplify each extreme weather event into social tragedies as communities suffer displacement, hunger, and heightened precarity. Balibar sees contemporary conflicts not as a division between “camps” but as a “globalized,” “hybrid” war. This hybrid war supposedly subverts the boundary of those camps by unleashing a quest for “justice” and “liberty” that is not reducible to geopolitical and military conflicts. We can see here how the politics of civility ends up with an abstract, contemplative mindset that wants to attain justice not through the struggle of camps but through another ethereal struggle that floats above all concrete divisions. In the end, this ethereal level of justice becomes synonymous with the defense of bourgeois democracy, since it contains the appearance of pluralism. Civility becomes a pro-imperialist prejudice that constantly rails against the hordes of “uncivil” masses who are not trained in the kind of reflection that bourgeois democracy teaches. In the real world, by contrast, conflicts are resolved not through careful contemplation but through “uncivil” antagonisms. Today, the most important division is between imperialism and humanity. The Palestinian cause can’t be separated from the struggle against US domination, a fact that is well understood by the Axis of Resistance (Iran, Syria, Yemen, Hezbollah, Iraq). Popular democracy can be realized only through strengthened national sovereignty that is capable of waging defensive wars against USA’s policy of sanctions, invasions, encroachment, and destabilization. As Ajl writes: “Wars of national sovereignty against imperialism are pro-working class… the contemporary axis plays a limited but real liberatory role in staving off state collapse in the countries near and around Palestine and shielding populations’ social reproduction and popular well-being against the reaper of accumulation-through-development.” The same logic of anti-imperialism applies to Russia. The country witnessed more than 25 million deaths due to the invasion of European fascists when it was governed by communists. Today, Russia is again a target of imperialist forces. The US-NATO camp wants “to permanently destroy Russia’s nuclear military capacity and install a puppet regime in Moscow in order to dismember Russia in the long term and replace it with many smaller, permanently weakened vassal states of the West.” Thus, we have a campist struggle that no one can escape. Any new horizon has to be born from within these camps, amidst the uncontrollable, contingent materiality of struggles. Revolutionary Movement The present-day Palestinian movement is giving us indications of what an alternative revolutionary politics can look like by erecting a sharp divide between the democratic ideology of bourgeois intellectuals and the militancy of the masses. On the one hand, intellectuals like Balibar are worried that Hamas is reproducing the violent mentality of Zionism. This is based on the assumption that the October 7 attack was an irrational outburst of primitive sentiments without any political rationale. That’s why politics can only entrusted to the reflective scrutiny of democratic discussions. In Balibar’s theory, such reflective scrutiny is provided by civility, which is a form of politics that can touch the ultra-political contingency of politics itself. This ultra-political contingency is present as the inconvertible violence that forms the limit-point of every political action. If we hubristically suppose that all violence can be converted into reason, we will end up with the fantasy of omnipotence in which all resistance is eliminated in a cycle of nihilistic violence. That’s why Balibar’s politics of civility wants us to respect the contingency of politics without attempting to hide it beneath fantasies of omnipotence. Thus, even though politics is tragic – groundless and without guarantees – this “tragedy of politics can become a politics of tragedy on the basis of the “ethical” decision that the risk of the perversion of the revolt is not a sufficient reason not to revolt.” In the paradigm of civility, people will revolt with the full knowledge that they are intrinsically impotent and can’t wholly eliminate antagonism. Thus, we get a “politics of tragedy” sustained by ethical reflection upon the groundlessness of politics. On the other hand, we have the mass action of Palestinian anti-colonialism wherein the dilemmas of politics are answered not through the philosophical invocation of ultra-political contingency but through the confrontation of forces on the terrain of social reality. Balibar simplifies divisions by dissolving them into a transcendental level of civility wherein the political actor can treat antagonisms in a peaceful manner. Instead of trying to eliminate the enemy, the enlightened political actor focuses on how antagonism can never be entirely eliminated, or how politics can never attain full stability. This knowledge curbs violence against the enemy and cultivates a more civil attitude. One can’t fail to emphasize how Palestinians are constantly asked to demonstrate their civility; their language has to remain perpetually aware of the kind of effects that it may have on others. This leads to a hyper-moderation of Palestinian behavior, where anything that is disliked by Israeli oppressors is deemed “anti-Semitic”. Mohammad el-Kurd writes: We were instructed to ignore the Star of David on the Israeli flag, and to distinguish Jews from Zionists with surgical precision. It didn’t matter that their boots were on our necks, and that their bullets and batons bruised us. Our statelessness and homelessness were trivial. What mattered was how we spoke about our keepers, not the conditions they kept us under—blockaded, surrounded by colonies and military outposts—or the fact that they kept us at all. In this situation, “simple ignorance” becomes a “luxury” for Palestinians. If we keep focusing on how the oppressed should regulate themselves so that they don’t fall into barbarity, we will forget that no matter how they behave, they will never be perfect enough for a dialogue with the oppressors. Balibar thinks that by being the “perfect victims” the oppressed will convince the oppressors to negotiate their antagonisms with them in a thoughtful manner. But this is never going to happen. Antagonisms are irreconcilable as long as they are not fought out to their end. El-Kurd rightly asks us to “renew our commitment to the truth, to spitting the truth”. Spitting is a physical expression of disgust, or aggression. It is an open declaration of hostility instead of a solely cognitive exchange of knowledge. Cognition and reflection fail to initiate the flow of ideas since the sea of thinking remains trapped in spaces of colonialism, the bodily realities of colonized and colonizing subjectivity. The flow of ideas will happen once their spatial encasements are burst open. Antagonisms have to jump-started through the act of spitting the truth, through violence against the colonialist. Balibar, in contrast, subscribes to a cognitive schema because regards antagonisms as concrete representatives of an ultra-political antagonism, which he designates as the “precariousness” of politics that we have to constantly recognize. Such an ultra-political antagonism doesn’t exist; in social formations, we only have concretely situated groups with concrete interests. These interests can’t be removed through careful reflection and discussion. On the contrary, they are material structures whose rigidity needs to be broken down through a concrete struggle of forces. This is what anti-colonial violence does by eroding the sense of entitlement enjoyed by colonizers and exposing them to the popular power of the colonized. In the midst of struggle, only a detached philosopher can ask the oppressed to use violence in a way that preserves the openness of antagonisms. This openness or precariousness of politics is not an idea that can be theoretically pondered upon or a reservoir of morality that can be used to practice civility. Rather, it is an emergent reality formed through the destruction of the oppressors. That’s why inconvertible violence as such doesn’t exist. The inconvertibility of violence is determined conjuncturally when political procedures of conversion encounter certain impasses/obstacles. Instead of staring at the impasse and turning it into a philosophical principle of precariousness, we need to use the impasse to reconfigure our own political perspective and carry on the struggle. The groundlessness of politics is not a tragedy that we need to codify into an ethical principle but a material fact out of which we need to weave the dynamic of political action. Politics is indeterminate and without guarantees, but this doesn’t mean that indeterminacy has to become a moral horizon. Instead, indeterminacy functions as the motor that renders politics inexhaustible and confronts it with obstacles that demand specific responses. Far from conforming to the reflective carefulness of civility, politics is like the uncivil act of flooding unleashed by Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, wherein hierarchies are flooded with the deluge of popular energy, a deluge that listens to nothing but its own undulating waves. Author Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at [email protected]. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America. Archives March 2024 On March 19, 2024, the head of France’s ground forces, General Pierre Schill, published an article in the newspaper, Le Monde, with a blunt title: “The Army Stands Ready.” Schill cut his teeth in France’s overseas adventures in the Central African Republic, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, and Somalia. In this article, General Schill wrote that his troops are “ready” for any confrontation and that he could mobilize 60,000 of France’s 121,000 soldiers within a month for any conflict. He quoted the old Latin phrase—“if you want peace, prepare for war”—and then wrote, “The sources of crisis are multiplying and carry with them risks of spiraling or extending.” General Schill did not mention the name of any country, but it was clear that his reference was to Ukraine since his article came out just over two weeks after French President Emmanuel Macron said on February 27 that NATO troops might have to enter Ukraine. A few hours after Macron made his indelicate statement, the U.S. president’s national security advisor John Kirby said, “There will be no U.S. troops on the ground in a combat role there in Ukraine.” This was direct and clear. The view from the United States is bleak, with support for Ukraine diminishing very fast. Since 2022, the U.S. has provided over $75 billion in aid to Ukraine ($47 billion in military aid), far and away the most important assistance to the country during its war against Russia. However, in recent months, U.S. funding—particularly military assistance—has been held up in the U.S. Congress by right-wing Republicans who are opposed to more money being given to Ukraine (this is less a statement about geopolitics and more an assertion of a new U.S. attitude that others, such as the Europeans, should shoulder the burden of these conflicts). While the U.S. Senate passed a $60 billion appropriation for Ukraine, the U.S. House of Representatives only allowed $300 million to be voted through. In Kyiv, U.S. national security advisor Jake Sullivan implored the Ukrainian government to “believe in the United States.” “We have provided enormous support, and we will continue to do so every day and every way we know how,” he said. But this support will not necessarily be at the level it was during the first year of the war. Europe’s Freeze On 1 February, the leaders of the European Union agreed to provide Ukraine with €50 billion in “grants and highly concessional loans.” This money is to allow the Ukrainian government to “pay salaries, pensions, and provide basic public services.” It will not be directly for military support, which has begun to flounder across the board, and which has provoked new kinds of discussions in the world of European politics. In Germany, for instance, the leader of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the parliament—Rolf Mützenich—was taken to task by the parties of the right for his use of the word “freeze” when it comes to military support for Ukraine. Ukraine’s government was eager to procure Taurus long-range cruise missiles from Germany, but the German government hesitated to do so. This hesitation and Mützenich’s use of the word “freeze” created a political crisis within Germany. Indeed, this German debate around further arms sales to Ukraine is mirrored in almost all the European countries that have been supplying weapons for the war against Russia. Thus far, polling data across the continent shows large majorities against the continuation of the war, and therefore against the continuation of arming Ukraine for that war. A poll conducted for the European Council on Foreign Relations conducted in February shows that “an average of just 10 [percent] of Europeans across 12 countries believe that Ukraine will win.” “The prevailing view in some countries,” the poll analysts wrote, “is that Europe should mirror a U.S. that limits its support for Ukraine by doing the same, and encourage Kyiv to do a peace deal with Moscow.” That view is beginning to enter the discussions even of the political forces that continue to want to arm Ukraine. SPD parliamentarian Lars Klingbeil and his leader Mützenich both say that negotiations will need to start, although Klingbeil said it would not happen before the U.S. elections in November, and until then, as Mützenich had said, “I think that the most important thing now is that [Ukraine] get artillery ammunition.” Military Not Climate It no longer matters whether Donald Trump or Joe Biden wins the U.S. presidential election in November. Either way, Trump’s views on European military spending have already prevailed in the United States. The Republicans are calling for U.S. funding for Ukraine to be slowed down and for the Europeans to fill the gap by increasing their own military spending. This latter point will be difficult since many European states have debt ceilings; if they are to increase military spending this would be at the expense of precious social programs. NATO’s own polling data shows a lack of interest from the European population in a shift from social to military spending. Even more of a problem for Europe is that its countries have been cutting back on climate-related investments and increasing defense-related investments. The European Investment Bank (set up in 2019) is, as the Financial Times reported, “under pressure to fund more projects in the arms industry,” while the European Sovereignty Fund—set up in 2022 to promote industrialization in Europe—is going to pivot toward support for military industries. Military spending, in other words, will overwhelm the commitments to climate investments and investments to rebuild Europe’s industrial base. In 2023, two-thirds of the total NATO budget of €1.2 trillion was from the United States, which is double what the European Union, the UK, and Norway spent on their militaries. Trump’s pressure for European countries to spend up to 2 percent of their GDP on their armies will set the agenda even if he loses the presidential election. Can Destroy Countries, but Can’t Win Wars For all the European braggadocio about defeating Russia, sober assessments of the European armies show that European states simply do not have the ground military capacity to fight an aggressive war against Russia let alone defend themselves adequately. A Wall Street Journal investigation into the European military situation bore the stunning title, “Alarm Grows Over Weakened Militaries and Empty Arsenals in Europe.” The British military, the journalists pointed out, has only 150 tanks and “perhaps a dozen serviceable long-range artillery pieces,” while France has “fewer than 90 heavy artillery prices” and Germany’s army “has enough ammunition for two days of battle.” If they are attacked, they have few air defense systems. Europe has relied upon the United States to do the heavy bombing and fighting since the 1950s, including in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Due to terrifying U.S. firepower, these Global North countries are able to flatten countries, but they have not been able to win any wars. It is this attitude that produces wariness in countries such as China and Russia, who know that despite the impossibility of a Global North military victory against them there is no reason why these countries—led by the United States—will not risk Armageddon because they have the military muscle to do so. That attitude from the United States—mirrored in the European capitals—produces one more example of the hubris and arrogance of the Global North: a refusal to even consider peace negotiations between Ukraine and Russia. For Marcon to say things like NATO might send troops into Ukraine is not only dangerous, but it strains the credibility of the Global North. NATO was defeated in Afghanistan. It is unlikely to make great gains against Russia. AuthorVijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism and (with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power. This article was produced by Globetrotter. Archives March 2024 If there is one leader whom the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, follows, it is Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, which would form the bedrock of Netanyahu’s Likud party. Since 2005, Israel has had a Memorial Day to honour Jabotinsky (29 Tammuz, the day of his death on 4 August 1940, according to the Hebrew calendar). At a 2017 celebration, Netanyahu said: ‘I have Jabotinsky’s works on my shelf, and I read them often.’ He reminded his audience that he keeps the Zionist leader’s sword in his office. At the 2023 Memorial Netanyahu stated: ‘One hundred years after the “iron wall” was stamped in Jabotinsky’s writings we are continuing to successfully implement these principles. I say “continuing” because the need to stand as a powerful iron wall against our enemies has been adopted by every Government of Israel, from the right and the left. We are developing defensive and offensive tools against those who seek to harm us, and I can tell you with certainty that they do not distinguish between this or that camp among us. Whoever tries to harm us on one front, or more than one front, needs to know that they will pay the price. We will continue to oppose, with uncompromising strength, Iran’s efforts to develop a nuclear arsenal, and we will stand steadfast against its efforts to develop terrorist fronts on our borders—in Gaza, in Judea and Samaria, in Syria and in Lebanon. This was at a time of mounting tension in the occupied West Bank, where the Israelis would kill over 300 Palestinians in that year, beginning long before Hamas’s 7 October attack on Southern Israel. The ‘Iron Wall’, which Netanyahu invokes, was a 1923 essay by Jabotinsky in which he argued a Jewish state could only be created from a position of overwhelming military strength, by proving in arms to the Palestinians and the Arab states, that Zionism could not be defeated. Today it underlines the position of the coalition government Netanyahu leads in how to respond to Hamas’ 7 October attack on Southern Israel. Far-right Zionism Revisionist Zionism was founded by Jabotinsky after he rejected the belief that Britain would grant the Zionists a Jewish state, and instead he stood for the establishment of a Jewish state and army. During the First World War he had established three battalions of the Jewish Legion, part of the British army in Palestine’s King’s Fusiliers, which fought in the latter part of General Allenby’s conquest of Palestine and Syria. They were disbanded by the British in 1920 as they became effectively a Zionist militia engaged in fighting with the Arabs. It would become the backbone of the Haganah, the main Zionist armed group key to the 1948 Nakba. He wanted all of European Jewry to migrate to Palestine and the extension of the Jewish state to both banks of the River Jordan. The Israeli historian Benny Morris writes: In 1925 he established the Revisionist Party (so named because it sought to “revise” the terms of the Mandate, particularly to provide for the re-inclusion of Transjordan [Jordan] in Mandatory Palestine). He also set up the party’s youth movement, Betar, which was characterised by militaristic, some might say fascist, appearances (dark brown uniforms), activities (parade ground drill and firearm exercises), slogans and ideology (“in fire and blood Judea will be reborn”) and structure (A rigid hierarchy). Jabotinsky admired Mussolini and his movement and repeatedly sought affiliation and assistance from Rome. Jabotinsky summed up his beliefs by stating: There is no justice, no law and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supersedes all—settlement. Jabotinsky believed the Arabs were implacably hostile to the creation of a Jewish state and, accordingly, concluded: We cannot promise any reward either to the Arabs of Palestine or to the Arabs outside Palestine. A voluntary agreement is unattainable. And so those who regard an accord with the Arabs as an indispensable condition of Zionism must admit to themselves today that this condition cannot be attained and hence that we must give up Zionism. We must either suspend our settlement efforts or continue them without paying attention to the mood of the natives. Settlement can thus develop under the protection of a force that is not dependent on the local population, behind an iron wall which they will be powerless to break down. In his 1923 essay called ‘The Iron Wall’, Jabotinsky argued that the Palestinian Arabs would not agree to a Jewish majority in Palestine and that: Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population—an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy. He then explained his differences with Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, heads of the Jewish Agency, the Zionist proto-government, thus: ‘One prefers an iron wall of Jewish bayonets, the other proposes an iron wall of British bayonets …’ In fact, by 1936, after the great Arab Revolt against Zionist immigration and British rule, Ben-Gurion had come round to the same way of thinking: Both realised that the Arabs would continue to fight for as long as they retained any hope of preventing the Jewish takeover of their country. And both concluded that only insuperable Jewish military strength would eventually make the Arabs despair of the struggle and come to terms with a Jewish state in Palestine. Ben-Gurion did not use the terminology of the iron wall, but his analysis and conclusions were virtually identical to Jabotinsky’s. In 1931, Jabotinsky founded the Irgun (The National Military Organization in the Land of Israel), an armed militia separate from the more mainstream Haganah, which Jabotinsky saw as fighting both the British authorities and Palestinians resisting colonisation. In 1937, it moved from defence of the Yishuv (Jewish community in Palestine) to terror attacks on the Palestinians. In December 1937, a member of the Irgun hurled a hand grenade at a market in Jerusalem killing and injuring dozens. In Haifa in March 1938, members of the Irgun and Lehi (the Stern gang) threw grenades into the market, killing eighteen, and injuring 38. Later that same year, again in Haifa, Irgun exploded booby-trapped vehicles in the market, killing 21 and injuring 52. The two operations for which Irgun is best known are the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters of the British administration, where 91 people, Arabs, Jews and British, were killed, and the April 1948 Deir Yassin massacre, which killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, including women and children, carried out together with another terrorist group Lehi, or the Stern Gang. By then, Jabotinsky was dead, having died of a heart attack on a visit to the U.S. in August 1940. Benjamin Netanyahu’s father, Benzion, was an activist in Jabotinsky’s Revisionist movement, editor of its publications a private secretary to the leader. In 1993, the year Benjamin Netanyahu was elected leader of Likud, he also published a book, A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World. It sought to show that it was not the Jews who had taken the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who had taken it from the Jews: ‘Netanyahu viewed Israel’s relations with the Arab world as one of permanent conflict, as a never-ending struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.’ He claimed: Violence is ubiquitous in the political life of all the Arab countries. It is the primary method of dealing with opponents, both foreign and domestic, both Arab and non-Arab. For Netanyahu, there was no right to self-determination for the Palestinians, and there could be no compromise with them, because they were out for the liquidation of Israel. In a chapter titled, ‘The Wall’, he argues Israel must expand its military hold of the high ground in the Golan Heights and in what he calls Judea and Samaria—the West Bank—and exert military control over virtually all of the territory west of the Jordan River. His conclusion is a one-state solution, from the river to the sea: To subdivide this land into two unstable, insecure nations, to try to defend what is indefensible, is to invite disaster. Carving Judea and Samaria out of Israel means carving up Israel. In response to the Oslo Accords, he wrote an op-ed piece for the New York Times on 5 September 1993, titled ‘Peace In Our Time’, referencing Neville Chamberlain’s claim on his return from Munich in September 1938 after agreeing to carve up Czechoslovakia with Hitler. In it he rejected the whole suggestion of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, stating: ‘A P.L.O. state on the West Bank will strip the Jewish state of the defensive wall of the Judean and Samarian mountains won in the Six-Day War, re-creating a country ten miles wide, open to invading armies from the east.’ He went onto say that the PLO would use that state to foment an allied Arab assault against a truncated Jewish state. Adding, for two decades Yasir Arafat has championed this plan. In 1996 Netanyahu stated bluntly: ‘Might is a condition for peace. Only a strong deterrent profile can preserve and stabilise peace.’ After his first election win, he declared: ‘The government will oppose the establishment of an independent Palestinian state and will oppose the “right of return” of the Arab population to parts of the Land of Israel west of the Jordan.’ He added that his government would ‘act to consolidate and develop the settlement enterprise,’ and that ‘united Jerusalem, the capital of Israel … will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty.’ Today, Netanyahu is Israel’s longest-serving prime minister. He first came to power in 1996 and served a three-year term before he was replaced by Ehud Barak. He would return to power in 2009 and then serve for fourteen of the last fifteen years. Netanyahu and his government oppose the establishment of a Palestinian state, support the expansion of illegal Jewish settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories, wish to annex the West Bank, and have introduced a law which denies equality to the native Palestinian minority in the Jewish State. Above all, they wish that the Palestinians accept they have suffered a historic defeat and accept the Zionist control of Palestine. Peace can only follow total defeat. It’s often said that Netanyahu needs the current war in Gaza to go on because, if it ends, his political career is over. There is truth in that, but it’s not the only reason. On 7 October, Israel lost something Netanyahu and his cabinet colleagues held most dear—military deterrence. Suddenly Israel looked vulnerable. The instinct of his government and IDF commanders is to inflict maximum retaliation on the people of Gaze to deter anyone from repeating that attack. That’s the ‘Iron Wall’ in today’s Israel. But despite killing over 30,000 people, overwhelmingly civilians and a third of children, and levelling Gaza, Netanyahu has been seen to fail in his pledge to ‘annihilate’ Hamas; they are still standing, still resisting. Internationally, the war in Gaza has brought a tidal wave of revulsion against Netanyahu and co, but not in Israel, where polls and the local elections results show a big majority in support of Likud and their allies to the right. Netanyahu and his supporters want to continue the war, and they are looking at extending it by taking on Hezbollah, in the belief they can achieve an elusive victory to restore deterrence. It is, of course, a manic pipe dream; Hezbollah are far stronger and better armed than Hamas, have had time to prepare, and, back in 2006, gave the IDF a bloody nose. Netanyahu is driven by his belief in the ‘Iron Wall’. His is the logic at the heart of Zionism. But the wall is rusty. Israel does not seem invincible. The clock of history is ticking for Zionism. AuthorChris Bambery is an author, political activist and commentator, and a supporter of Rise, the radical left wing coalition in Scotland. His books include A People’s History of Scotland and The Second World War: A Marxist Analysis. This article was produced by Monthly Review. Archives March 2024 This past Sunday, a group of Cubans took to the streets of Santiago de Cuba, in the east of the island, to show their dissatisfaction with the economic situation in the country. In recent weeks, fuel shortages have caused long hours of scheduled blackouts, especially in that city, which, along with food shortages and salaries strongly affected by inflation, have turned the daily life of Cubans into an odyssey of frustration. Immediately after the news broke, the hegemonic media of the North and some sectors of the ultra-right-wing in Florida and other parts of the world tried to take advantage of the circumstances to bring about a change of regime in the country. They hoped that what began as a peaceful protest amid a painful economic situation would multiply throughout the island and turn into a social outburst that would lead Cubans to confront one another. It hurts how they dismiss the real causes of the economic crisis in Cuba, which includes, above so many other reasons, the U.S economic blockade that has continued non stop against the island for over 64 years, preventing us from establishing trade relations with the rest of the world and, therefore, our own development. The opportunists look at us from a distance with hamburgers in hand and want us to get heated up, with sticks in hand against the government, as if they were attending one of the battles of the U.S. bestseller The Hunger Games. This Sunday, Cuban President Miguel Díaz-Canel acknowledged on the social network X that people had expressed dissatisfaction with the current situation. He warned that this context is being taken advantage of by the enemies of the Revolution “for destabilizing purposes.” Their objective has nothing to do with the needs of the Cuban people. Diaz-Canel denounced that terrorists based in the United States are encouraging actions against the internal order of the country. The president also reiterated the willingness of the Cuban authorities of the Communist Party, the State, and the Government, to attend to the demands of the Cuban people. “We are willing to listen, dialogue, and explain the many steps taken to improve the situation, always in an atmosphere of tranquility,” he said and reaffirmed the government’s commitment to “work in peace to overcome the current situation, despite the blockade that seeks to suffocate the nation.” While the president took the podium to assure the people that they are not alone and that the government understands, listens, and acts, the U.S. embassy took to social media to speak about “human rights.” On the official X account, the diplomatic headquarters in Havana posted, “We are aware of reports of peaceful protests in Santiago, Bayamo, Granma, and elsewhere in Cuba, with citizens protesting the lack of food and electricity. We urge the Cuban government to respect the human rights of the protestors and address the legitimate needs of the Cuban people.” Spoken like they are innocent concerned bystanders. On Monday, U.S. Chargé d’Affaires Benjamin Ziff was summoned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs by Deputy Minister Carlos Fernández de Cossío, who formally expressed Cuba’s firm rejection of the U.S. government’s and its embassy in Cuba’s interference and slanderous messages regarding internal affairs of the Cuban reality. “How cynical and despicable to ask the government of Cuba to satisfy the needs of its people, when your government has been applying a brutal siege for +60 years to deprive my people of the essentials and cause its suffocation,” Cuba’s Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs, Josefina Vidal, denounced. The destabilizing plan and its execution are obvious for all to see. It rests on the reinforcement of a ruthless economic war to provoke and exploit the natural irritation of the population. It is financed with tens of millions of dollars from the U.S. federal budget every year. According to a statement issued by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the plans have a powerful technological infrastructure to exploit digital networks from U.S. territory for aggressive purposes. They enjoy the complicity of important U.S. and international mainstream media and the mercenary support of people based mainly in South Florida, in the United States, whose only livelihood is the industry of aggression against the island. What do Cubans need? To reject the suffocation to which we are subjected to, the lack of access to food, inflation, bureaucracy, corruption, and internal problems that can be solved but we will do that. And above all, we condemn the determination of the U.S. Government to limit and hinder every effort of the Cuban State to find solutions and provide answers to the economic and social needs of the country. It is actually quite simple, as a sovereign country we are resolute in our insistence that we will build our society without the dictates of any country. Archives March 2024 This is a section from the introduction to the author's edited and introduced anthology, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism. Dialectical Materialist Ontology In his Dialectical Materialism, Henri Lefebvre uses Marx’s Capital and Engels’s Dialectics of Nature to say that “the laws of human reality cannot be entirely different from the laws of nature.”[1] A similar sentiment is expressed in the posthumously published A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic, where Lukács says that it is “self-evident” that “the dialectic could not possibly be effective as an objective principle of development of society, if it were not already effective as a principle of development of nature before society.”[2] Precisely because of this universal character, argued Lefebvre, is that dialectical materialism “acquires the full dimension of a philosophy: it becomes a general conception of the world, a weltanschauung and hence a renewal of philosophy.”[3] In the last section we defended the treatment of Marxist philosophy (i.e., dialectical materialism) as a weltanschauung, now let us present its ontological basis. Objective dialectics, i.e., the dialectical materialist ontology, first and foremost holds that the world is dominated by change and interconnection, “nothing is eternal but eternally changing.”[4] It acknowledges that “movement is itself a contradiction,” and that “contradiction propels movement.”[5] These are the basic premises of dialectics pertaining to the ontological constitution of the world. It is important to note, however, that these central premises make it an ontology of becoming, not being. Insofar as being is understood as an unchanging, pure, universal substratum, it is rejected as an explanatory category. If being, however, is understood as a constant “coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be,” that is, if it is understood as becoming, then it can be sustained as a foundational category in a dialectical materialist ontology.[6] Nonetheless, as Hegel noted, although “the first truth is to be found in becoming,” this first concrete category is still an abstract first step which gives way to a more concrete understanding of the world.[7] If we stop here, then, we have merely achieved the position of Greek (more specifically Heraclitan) dialectics mentioned above. Although, as Engels said, “the new age begins with the return to the Greeks – negation of the negation,” this return is mediated by half a millennium of metaphysically framed scientific studies,[8] and therefore, it is not a return to the same Greek dialectic, but to a richer (more concrete) one.[9] Hence, what is required is not just the understanding that everything is in constant motion and interconnection, driven by internal contradictory forces, but a concrete understanding of the mechanisms and structures through which these changes occur. The dialectical materialist ontology, as an ontology of becoming, is concerned with the “most general laws” of human and natural “historical development” and “of thought itself.”[10] Marx and Engels both agreed that these laws had already been discovered by Hegel, but in a mystified form. For instance, Marx says in a letter to Dietzgen that “The true laws of dialectics are already contained in Hegel, though in a mystical form,” and Engels similarly repeats this by saying that “all three [laws of dialectics] are already developed by Hegel… [but] foisted on nature and history as laws of thought, and not deduced from them.”[11] These ‘laws’ are 1) the unity and struggle of opposites, 2) the transition from quantity into quality and vice versa, and 3) the negation of the negation. It is important to note that Hegel never referred to them as ‘laws’; in his Logic[s] they are merely categories, little different than the plethora of other categories his logical unfolding of the concept introduces. However, the reason behind Marx and Engels’ classification of these Hegelian categories as ‘laws’ lies in the fact they can be seen in every ‘moment’ of the movement of Hegel’s concept, and most importantly, because Marx and Engels ‘re-discover’ them in the movement and interconnection of nature and society and postulate their objective existence as the source for their reflective (subjective) existence in the mind. These three dialectical laws, by being the most universal forms in which change occurs, are also the most abstract, and hence, serve as the base upon which a more concrete understanding of change and interconnection in smaller or larger organic totalities can take place. It is here where the accusations of simplifying dialectics usually begin. Once these three laws are established, it becomes a game of examples, whoever can fit the schema of these laws on nature, human society, history, or thinking the most wins. In treating these laws as a “sum total of examples,” Lenin argued, “dialectics usually receives inadequate attention.”[12] For Lenin the architype for this was Plekhanov, although at times, he argued, “the same is true of Engels.”[13] To be clear, the problem is not the examples in themselves, but when dialectics is en toto reduced to a collection of examples. When this reduction takes place, Chris Arthur is right to say that dialectics turns into a “lifeless formalism” which proceeds by “applying abstract schemas adventitiously to contents arbitrarily forced into the required shape.”[14] However, one must not confuse this vulgarization of dialectics to mean that one cannot provide examples in nature, society, or thinking that confirm these laws. Like we saw in the previous section, one can hold onto Marxism as a weltanschauung and simultaneously reject vulgarizations of this weltanschauung. Similarly, one can reject the reduction of dialectics to a basket of artificially foisted examples but still use examples to understand objective dialectics. After all, the central difference between the Hegelian and Marxist dialectics is the latter’s materialist position that dialectics is the ontological condition of the world, and only when this world is concretely understood does dialectical thinking emerge. It is necessary, then, to use concrete examples from the world to understand the world itself, and hence, grasp objective dialectics subjectively. The materialist dialectic, therefore, must walk a thin line between two precipices into idealist dialectics: on the one hand, if no concrete examples are used, the ‘dialectic’ would be purely mental, and hence, idealist; on the other hand, if examples are artificially fabricated out of an apriorist dialectical schema foisted onto the world like a cookie cutter, then the ‘dialectic’ one is proposing replicates at its core the same mistake of Hegel’s demiurgos, except at a much more vulgarized level, lightyears away from the genius with which Hegel espoused his. The theoretical panacea and balancing pole necessary to avoid falling into the precipices of idealism is the dialectical method of going from the abstract to concrete. Only in the rigorous process of investigation required for this method can one be sure that their examples are actually in-the-world, and not foisted on it by an abstract dialectical schema. An exposition of this method will have to wait until the following section. It is this context in which Engels deduces the dialectical laws in his scientific studies, and Marx in his economic studies. The examples they provide are concrete, and (esp. in the case of Engels) usually include comments on how science already accepted (in certain fields) these ‘laws’ but under different names. For instance, in Engels’ letter to Friedrich Albert Lange, he argues that the “modern scientific doctrine of reciprocity of natural forces [is] just another expression or rather the positive proof of the Hegelian development on cause & effect, reciprocity, force, etc.”[15] Let me now provide a few concrete examples in which these most general laws of change and interconnection can be observed. Recall that by being the ‘most general’ they are also the most abstract, and hence, each example is in itself insufficiently understood if the only thing one says is how one or another of these dialectical laws is observed in it. To be concretely understood, each of these examples must take the structural appearance of the laws as a mere starting point to the investigation of the phenomenon. The laws work like the study of a townhouse community; by knowing how the outside of each townhouse looks, one has grasped the most general fact in the community. This ‘most general’ fact can then serve as the abstract starting point for the concrete study of the internal structural differences in each household. One cannot claim to know the community by simply knowing the ‘most general’ fact, and similarly, by only knowing the differences in each household one is blind to the ‘most general’ fact that the object of one’s study is not independent houses, but a townhouse community. The Three Ontological Laws of Dialectics in Political Economy “The most important aspect of dialectics,” Hegel argued, is the “grasping of opposites in their unity.”[16] Similarly, Marx would say in Capital Vol. I that the “Hegelian contradiction [is] the source of all dialectic.”[17] Lenin would repeat this by saying that “the division of a unity into two and the cognition of its contradictory parts is the essence of dialectics.”[18] It is thus, with the law of the unity and struggle of opposites that we must begin, for the “condition for the knowledge of all processes in the world in their ‘self-movement,’ in their spontaneous development, in their real life, is the knowledge of them as a unity of opposites.”[19] It is this law which allows the understanding of the other two, for not only does it “furnish the key to the ‘self-movement’ of everything that exists; it alone furnishes the key to the ‘leaps,’ to the ‘interruption of gradualness,’ to the ‘transformation into the opposite,’ to the destruction of the old and the emergence of the new.”[20] Let us now see how Marx observes the functioning of this law in the realm of political economy. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites can be seen from the dawn of Marx’s Capital with the commodity, the “cell-form of bourgeois society” and “germ of all contradictions.”[21] Commodities, as Marx says, have an “internal opposition inherent in them,” namely, they are “at once use-values and values.”[22] As Roslyn Wallach Bologh adds, “the commodity is this contradictory relation, a totality of opposing moments: production of exchange value which excludes use value and the realization of exchange value which requires use value.”[23] The commodity, the “simplest, most ordinary and fundamental, most common and everyday relation of bourgeois society,” presents us with a clear example of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites.[24] Since, as Lenin said, the commodity is the “germ of all the contradictions,” we can see similar examples in more ‘concrete’ categories in Marx’s Capital.[25] For instance, merchant’s capital, Marx argues, “presents… a unity of opposing phases, a movement that breaks up into two opposing actions – the purchase and the sale of commodities.”[26] This cell-form of bourgeois society, as the unity of the opposing forces of exchange and use value (and in its metamorphosis of commodity and money), is the “most abstract form of crisis,” and contains within it (implicitly or in itself) the general crisis of capitalist production, which, in its periodic actualizations, provides the “manifestation of all the contradictions of bourgeois economy.”[27] In all the contradictions of capitalist production as a whole we have lucid examples of the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and, as Marx adds, “the most abstract forms are recurring and are contained in the more concrete forms.”[28] In regard to social class, for instance, the capitalist mode of life is marked by the contradiction between the working and the capitalist class. These two classes are both struggling amongst themselves and in unity under capitalism, that is, capitalism contains – not externally, but in itself – two opposing forces whose struggle shapes its development. As Lenin argued, once the understanding of the unity and struggle of opposites is grasped, we are ‘furnished’ with the keys to understand the other laws of movement. The law of the unity and struggle of opposites, or what is the same, the law of the universality of contradictions, would be enriched by Mao Tsetung’s 1937 essay “On Contradiction.” Here, Mao develops important categories relating to the particularity of contradictions, further concretizing the dialectical materialist ontology and its ability to understand the concrete concretely. The first important categorial development is the notion of principal and secondary contradictions. As Mao notes, “there are many contradictions in the process of development of a complex thing, and one of them is necessarily the principal contradiction whose existence and development determine or influence the existence and development of the other contradictions.”[29] It becomes an imperative, therefore, to “devote every effort to finding [the] principal contradiction” in whatever complex process one is studying, for “once this principal contradiction is grasped, all problems can be readily solved.”[30] Likewise, Mao notes that in any contradiction, i.e., in any unity of opposites, there is always one antipole which is dominant. This is what he calls the principal aspect of a contradiction, it refers to the “aspect which has gained the dominant position.”[31] This dominant position is not static, but always subject to change; what is the principal aspect in one moment may turn into the non-principal aspect in another. Additionally, Mao refines the law of the unity and struggle of opposite by recapturing a distinction Lenin had already noted between antagonisms and contradictions. Lenin argued that “antagonism and contradiction are not at all one and the same… under socialism, the first will disappear, the second will remain.”[32] Mao clarifies this by showing that “antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites.”[33] Class societies are bound, sooner or later, to develop “the form of open antagonism” which shifts the class struggle into a moment of revolution.[34] In Gramscian terms, these are the moments when the emphasis is switched from the war of position (the battle for hegemony) to the war of maneuver, where the opposites engage in direct frontal attacks. Sometimes non-antagonistic contradictions develop into antagonistic ones, and likewise, antagonistic contradictions develop into non-antagonistic ones.[35] Contradictions obtain an antagonistic form in moments of explosion, when “open conflict to resolves old contradictions” takes place and new things are produced.[36] Recognizing whether a contradiction is antagonistic or not is fundamental to the process of resolving it. For instance, the working and the capitalist class are in an irreconcilable antagonism, one which can only be solved through the working class’s revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist class. The utopian socialists, for example, did not see the antagonistic character of this contradiction, and therefore, their ‘resolutions’ involved the harmonizing of class distinctions through an appeal to the benevolence of the owners. History has shown that the incorrect assessment of the relationship between the antipoles of worker and capitalist has produced unsatisfactory resolutions which either became relics of the 19th century, or, in the case of similar strategies by the social democrats, sustained the dominance of capital over labor. On the other hand, the contradiction between the peasantry and the working class is not, on most occasions, an antagonistic one; therefore, the resolution must take (and has taken) a radically different form, one which unites the peasantry and the working class, under the leadership of the latter, in the struggle for socialism. After having grasped the law of the unity and struggle of opposites, and how this general law was concretized by Mao, we may examine the law of the transition from quantity to quality and vice-versa. In the transition from money into capital we have an example of the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. For money to be transformed into capital, that is, into something qualitatively new, surplus-value needs to be created. For this to happen, it is necessary for a specific amount of money to be turned “into commodities that serve as the material element of a new product,” and further, to “incorporate living labor” onto this “dead substance.”[37] If the labor-power incorporated creates only the value necessary for the laborer’s subsistence, i.e., if it produces an equivalent to the exchange value it was bought for, then no surplus could be realized. However, what “really influenced” the buyer [i.e., the capitalist] of labor-power was “the specific use-value which this commodity possesses of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.”[38] To create surplus value, and hence, materialize the use value for which the labor-power was bought (viz., to be a source of “more value than it has itself”), that labor power must be extended beyond the time it took it to produce the amount of value it was bought for.[39] As Marx says, “if we compare the two processes of producing value and of creating surplus-value, we see that the latter is nothing but the continuation of the former beyond a definite point.”[40] This “definite point” is what Hegel call “nodal points” in his Logic[s], it is the moment when “gradual [i.e., quantitative] increase… is interrupted” and the result is “a leap from quantitative into qualitative alteration.”[41] The quantitative extension of the working day beyond the time necessary to produce the value the labor-power was bought for is how surplus-value arises. A quantitative accumulation of working hours, at a ‘definite point’ [i.e., nodal point], produces a qualitative leap and surplus-value comes about. Quantitative change has resulted in a leap into something qualitatively different. This qualitative leap into surplus-value, “a process which is entirely confined to the sphere of production,” creates the conditions for the “metamorphosis of money into capital,” another qualitative leap effected by the transcendence of labor-power beyond this ‘nodal point.’[42] There is a plethora of other places where the law of the transition of quantity into quality can be observed in Capital. For instance, Marx says that “not every sum of money, or of value, is at pleasure transformable into capital;” a “certain minimum of money or of exchange-value must be pre-supposed in the hands of the individual possessor of money or commodities.”[43] This is because there is a nodal point at which the variable capital [i.e., labor-power] involved in production turns the owner into a capitalist proper. “The guilds of the middle ages,” Marx argued, “tried to prevent by force the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist, by limiting the number of labourers that could be employed by one master within a very small maximum.”[44] This fetter presented in the middle-ages prevented the development of the capitalist proper. Only when this fetter is broken can “the possessor of money or commodities actually turn into a capitalist.”[45] This transformation occurs “in such cases only where the minimum sum advanced for production greatly exceeds the maximum of the middle ages.”[46] Marx then explicitly says that “here, as in natural science, is shown the correctness of the law discovered by Hegel (in his “Logic”), that merely quantitative differences beyond a certain point pass into qualitative changes.”[47] These feudal fetters would be eroded as the barbarism of primitive accumulation evolved. As Marx says, “these fetters vanished with the dissolution of feudal society, with the expropriation and partial eviction of the country population.”[48] This “historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production” is the “fundamental condition” for the development of the capitalist mode of production.[49] Its history is written in the “annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire.”[50] The history of this expropriation, of the usurpation and enclosure of the commons, is the “prelude to the history of capitalism,” and produces “the first negation of individual private property.”[51] This first negation establishes, as we saw previously, a qualitatively new mode of production – capitalism. “But,” Marx would go on to famously say, “capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of the negation.”[52] Capitalism immanently creates the conditions were, Along with the constantly diminishing number of the magnates of capital, who usurp and monopolise all advantages of this process of transformation, grows the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation, exploitation; but with this too grows the revolt of the working class, a class always increasing in numbers, and disciplined, united, organised by the very mechanism of the process of capitalist production itself. The monopoly of capital becomes a fetter upon the mode of production, which has sprung up and flourished along with, and under it. Centralisation of the means of production and socialisation of labour at last reach a point where they become incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated.[53] Here we have the clearest depiction, within the lens of universal history, of the law of the negation of the negation. Capitalist private property negates “self-earned private property.”[54] It socializes production and creates for the first time ever a “division of labour in the workshop.”[55] Its private “mode of appropriation” at a nodal point presents a fetter to the centralized and socialized means of production, immanently creating its own conditions for its sublation [i.e., negation of the negation].[56] This is a process which involves the “expropriation of a few usurpers by the mass of the people,” and hence, is expected to be “incomparably [less] protracted, violent, and difficult” than the capitalist negation of feudalism.[57] As can be seen from the examples in political economy, these dialectical laws are interconnected. The internal contradiction in all things propels universal movement. At times – in the nodal points mentioned above – this movement breaks its quantitative gradualness and undergoes a qualitative leap. All qualitative leaps are negations of that which has undergone a qualitative transformation. These negations immanently create the conditions for their own negation and bring about, in certain nodal points, a negation of the negation. No negation fully annihilates that which it has negated, part of it is always preserved in the qualitatively new it has unfolded into. For instance, capitalism sustains feudal private property but cancels out feudal individualized production; socialism sustains the socialized production of capitalism but cancels out its privatized accumulation. These are, of course, simple examples; but they are nonetheless helpful pedagogical tools to understand the most general laws of movement and interconnection, and hence, to build the base necessary for knowing more concrete things concretely. Notes [1] Henri Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2009), 95. [2] Georg Lukács, A Defense of History and Class Consciousness: Tailism and the Dialectic (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 30. What is interesting about this affirmation is that for most Marxist scholars, the ‘break’ between ‘western’ and ‘soviet’ Marxism (and hence, the beginning of the ‘Engels debate’) occurs first in Georg Lukács’ famous sixth footnote of the first chapter in his 1923 History and Class Consciousness, where he says that “Engels–following Hegel’s mistaken lead–extended the [dialectical] method also to knowledge of nature.” Instead, argued Lukács, the dialectical method should be limited to “historical-social reality.” What those who have banked on this footnote forget, or are unaware of, is that Lukács comes to reject his own position to the point of “[launching] a campaign to prevent the reprints of his 1923 book.” Lukács had argued that his book was ‘outdated,’ ‘misleading,’ and ‘dangerous’ because “it was written in a ‘transition [period] from objective idealism to dialectical materialism.’” Additionally, he was quite explicit in arguing that “’[his] struggle against… the concept of dialectics in nature’ was one of the ‘central mistakes of [his] book.’” For more see my review of Friedrich Engels and the Dialectic of Nature cited above. [3] Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 95-96. [4] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 40. [5] Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, 28. [6] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), § 187. [7] G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy (New York: Routledge and Kegan, 1968) 283. [8] I am using ‘metaphysics’ here in the way Engels and Marx do, as a way of analyzing things statically and isolated from the interconnections in which it exists. I must note, however, that this is not the same way metaphysics is defined in the history of philosophy. [9] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 195. [10] Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 63. [11] Karl Marx, “Marx to Joseph Dietzgen,” May 9, 1868, In Marx-Engels Collected Works Vol 43 (New York: International Publishers, 1988), 31; Engels, Dialectics of Nature, 63. [12] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 357. [13] Lenin, Collected Works Vol. 38, 357. [14] Chris Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s Capital (London: Brill, 2004), 3. [15] Friedrich Engels, “Engels to Lange,” March 29, 1865. In Marx-Engels Collected Works Vol 42 (New York: International Publishers, 1987), 138. [16] Hegel, Science of Logic, §69. [17] Marx, Capital Vol. 1 (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 596. [18] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 357. [19] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [20] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [21]Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358-359. Lenin uses ‘cell,’ Marx uses ‘cell-form.’ [22] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 104. [23] Roslyn Wallach Bologh, Dialectical Phenomenology: Marx’s Method (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 64. [24]Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 358. [25] Lenin, Collected Works Vol 38, 359. [26] Karl Marx, Capital Vol. III (New York: International Publishers, 1974), 391. [27] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol. II (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 509, 507. [28] Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value Vol. II, 509. [29] Mao Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” In Five Essays on Philosophy (Peking: Foreign Language, 1977) 51. [30] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 53. [31] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 54. [32] V. I. Lenin, "Remarks on N. I. Bukharin's Economics of the Transitional Period" Selected Works, Russ. ed., Moscow-Leningrad, 1931, Vol. XI, p. 357. [33] Mao, “On Contradiction,” 68. [34] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 69. [35] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 70. [36] Tsetung, “On Contradiction,” 69. [37] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 195. [38] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 193. [39] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 193. [40] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 195. [41] G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, translated by George di Geovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 321-322. [42] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 194-195. This latter transformation requires the surplus-value produced in the moment of production to return to the moment of circulation and realize itself. As Marx says in Capital Vol. III, “industrial capitalist merely realises the previously produced surplus-value, or profit, in the process of circulation.” Marx, Capital Vol. III, 283. [43] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 307-308. This is the example Engels uses in his Anti-Dühring when discussing the law of the transformation of quantity into quality. [44] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 308-309. [45] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [46] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [47] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 309. [48] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 751. [49] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 714, 774. [50] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 715. [51] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 762-763. [52] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763. [53] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763. [54] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 774. [55] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 359. “Division of labour in the workshop, as practices by manufacture, is a special creation of the capitalist mode of production alone.” [56] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 763 [57] Marx, Capital Vol. I, 764. Author 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). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live-broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 A Common Struggle Against Imperialism: A History of Solidarity Between Palestine and Puerto Rico. By: Benjamin Pérez González.Read NowThe first resistance warriors against Western imperialism in the Americas, were the Taíno nation, a people which once inhabited the Caribbean Islands, including the land which we now know as Puerto Rico. Scholars now agree, what the natives knew all along, Christopher Columbus did not discover anything, rather he was discovered himself. Contrary to the lies perpetrated throughout official history, Columbus was lost. Or as James Baldwin puts it: “Columbus was discovered by what he found''.[1] Columbus believed he arrived in Asia and died swearing that Cuba was mainland Japan. In fact, Columbus' ship wrecked and it was the Taíno people who rescued him and brought him ashore. The Europeans were shown mercy, gentleness, trust and were welcomed with gifts and open arms. In return, the invaders made them slaves, destroyed their culture, slaughtered the people, burned their history, and took the land.[2] Ever since 1492, Western Imperialism has dominated the world;centuries ago it was Spain, a few decades ago it was Britain, and today it is led by the United States of America, the world’s biggest empire. The People of the World have fallen victims to the first true global empire. With some, of course, defeating it and in the process achieving liberation. The ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Natives of the Americas at the hands of European imperialism, distinctively parallels with the ongoing slaughtered and destruction of the Palestinian people by the State of Israel. However, we cannot overlook the fact that Israel would not be able to act with such impunity and have such military, political and economic power without the massive support of the world’s most powerful empire, the United States; the same empire that continues to occupy and colonize Puerto Rico. Yet, however, today we see two nations struggling against a common enemy: Palestine and Puerto Rico, a struggle against imperialism and for liberation. The State of Israel, as Yasser Arafat famously stated in an interview with a British reporter, is the baby of Western imperialism, namely Britain and the United States.[3] After all, it was Britain who ushered the creation of the State of Israel with the notorious Belfort Declaration of 1917.[4] Today, the UK and the United States, are the biggest political, economic and military supporters of Israel. The United States alone has provided Israel with hundreds of billions of dollars in military aid, along with its fundamentally corrupt support in the International arena.[5] The United States corporate media have displayed unrelenting support for the genocide being committed by Israel in Palestine. The fundamental motives of the United States empire in its involvement in the ongoing Palestinian genocide, are best expressed by president Joe Biden, which once stated in 1986, in front of Congress: “Were there not an Israel the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region”. [6] What are the interests of the United States, one may ask; the answer is to continue the over 500 years legacy of Western imperialism, that being to exploit, plunder and pillage the peoples of the world, for the enrichment of the international bourgeoisie. The Palestinian people, like the Taino people, are today facing the possibility of undergoing ethnic cleansing at the hands of the savagery enforced by Israel. Ethnic cleansing has come to be defined as a crime against humanity, punishable by International Law. [7]The atrocities committed by the Israeli government have sent shock waves throughout the international community, with the United Nations 15-member Security Council voting 13-1 in favor of a ceasefire with the United States being the only country voting against it, and the UK abstaining its vote. [8]Furthermore, South Africa presented their case in the International Court, accusing Israel of crimes against humanity, including genocide, with other countries taking the United States to court for their complicity in this genocide. The bombs dropped today in Palestine were tested in Puerto Rico. The United States Navy, for decades, experimented in Puerto Rico with chemically dangerous explosives which destroyed the ecosystem of Vieques, a small municipality east of the Island(s). The remnants of this continue to haunt the people of Vieques, which today have the highest rate of cancer in the archipelago.[9]Furthermore, today the United States military occupies 13% of the land of Puerto Rico, occupying the Puerto Rican nation since 1898, using it as a military base and as a giant laboratory for its multinational chemical corporations like Dupont ,the pharmaceutical industry, and those of the Military Industrial Complex, like Lockheed Martin. [10]The same claws covered with the blood of the Puerto Rican people have Palestinian blood as well. [11]Lockheed Martin is a giant profiteer from the war in Palestine, which also made great wealth from the invasion of Iraq and other imperial wars throughout the world.[12] Ever since, the State of Israel ramped up its vicious military attacks against the Palestinian people, the People of Puerto Rico ,and its diaspora, and have been conducting demonstrations and protests in solidarity with Palestine.[13] Yet, the solidarity between Palestine and Puerto Rico has not begun recently. Rather, Puerto Ricans have expressed for decades clear support for Palestine with the late great Puerto Rican lawyer and social justice activist, Juan Marís Bras, declaring in front of the United Nations in 1982 that, “Puerto Rico is the Palestine of the Americas'' and that the “Palestinian people who fight together with us, are leading one of the most heroic struggles of our contemporary times”.[14] Like the Palestinian people, the Puerto Rican people are resisting the horrors of colonialism and imperialism. Edwin Cortés, political activist for the liberation of Puerto Rico once wrote in the 1980s: “Within the past two months renewed resistance in the Middle East has once again captured world attention. This time it is not the tragic Iran-Iraq war but Palestine, a nation in struggle that represents a vital threat to the existence of Zionism, Arab reaction, and US imperialism in the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.”[15] Furthermore, in 2001, as a clear sign of solidarity between the two occupied nations, The Palestine Right to Return Coalition marched during the National Puerto Rican Day Parade in Manhattan. [16] The acts of the State of Israel have been conceived by some as the most documented genocide in history, and perhaps they are right. There are clear similarities in the vicious acts of Israel with those committed by the Spanish empire against the Taíno people. Israel, like Spain, has dehumanized the people which terrorizes, often demonizing them, showing no mercy or common humanity, engaging in the most atrocious crimes imaginable. Since the formation of the State of Israel in 1948, over 2 million Palestinian have been displayed from their ancestral land, with Israel now occupying over 80% of Palestinian land, and those who refuse to leave, are facing annihilation. [17]These acts will be remembered in history and those who are responsible will be compared to the horrors committed by Nazi Germany. For there is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. Yet, we cannot overlook the fact that Israel would not be able to conduct this display of force and might, without the support of the United States, the empire that today occupies and colonizes Puerto Rico. Notes [1] Baldwin, J. (1990). Jimmy’s blues: Selected poems. St. Martin’s Press. [2] Clarke, J. H. (2014). Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan holocaust slavery and the rise of European capitalism. Lushena Books. [3] Counter Narrative News. (2023, October 30). Yasser Arafat: Israel is the west’s baby. Counter Narrative News YouTube. https://youtu.be/nXvLsl17mHM?si=x_jGW_CTb0QTMKOQ [4] Khalidi, R. (2022). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917-2017. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. [5] Masters, J. (2024, January 23). U.S. aid to Israel in four charts. Council on Foreign Relations. https://www.cfr.org/article/us-aid-israel-four-charts [6] Kestler-D’Amours, J., & Stepansky, J. (2024, January 30). “defies logic”: The makings of Joe Biden’s “blank cheque” to Israel. Al Jazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2024/1/30/defies-logic-the-makings-of-joe-bidens-blank-cheque-to-israel#:~:text=“Were%20there%20not%20an%20Israel,decades%20away%20from%20becoming%20president. [7] Pappé, I. (2023). The ethnic cleansing of Palestine. Oneworld. [8] Lederer, E. M. (2024, February 21). The US vetoes an Arab-backed UN resolution demanding an immediate humanitarian cease-fire in Gaza. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/un-israel-palestinians-gaza-ceasefire-resolution-vote-350c86ef261bf1a00a2515cf22764de5 [9] Chan, W. (2023, May 1). “I thought they’d kill us”: How the US navy devastated a tiny Puerto Rican Island. The Guardian. [10] Hofstaedter, E. (2022, October 12). Big Pharma is flooding Puerto Rico with toxic waste. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2022/10/big-pharma-is-flooding-puerto-rico-with-toxic-waste/ [11]Power, M. (1989, July 27). Time to end U.S. occupation of Puerto Rico. The New York Times.https://www.nytimes.com/1989/07/27/opinion/l-time-to-end-us-occupation-of-puerto-rico787489.html [12] War profiteer of the Month: Lockheed Martin. War Resisters’ International. (2006, August). https://wri-irg.org/en/story/2006/war-profiteer-month-lockheed-martin [13] Florido, A. (2024, January 19). Why Puerto Rico has such deep support for the Palestinian cause. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/19/1225722287/why-puerto-rico-has-such-deep-support-for-the-palestinian-cause [14] Hevesi, D. (2010, September 11). Juan Mari Bras, voice for separate Puerto Rico, dies at 82. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/11/us/politics/11bras.html [15] Ramos-Zayas, A. Y., & Rúa, M. M. (2021). Critical dialogues in Latinx Studies a reader. New York University Press. [16] Ibid. [17] Khalidi, R. (2022). The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A history of settler colonialism and resistance, 1917-2017. Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company. Author Benjamin Perez Gonzalez graduated in Sociology and Political Science from Florida International University and is current a graduate student at the University of Puerto Rico. They are also a teacher, writer and activist. Archives March 2024 "In the midst of a blockade that intends to suffocate us, we will continue working in peace to overcome this situation". This was stated, through the social network X, by the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party and President of the Republic, Miguel Díaz-Canel Bermúdez, while denouncing the propagandistic and instigating articulation of the enemies of the Revolution to provoke destabilization and chaos, based on the tensions generated by the current limitations of the electric service in the country, due to fuel deficit, and other daily shortages, mainly as a result of the relentless policy of economic suffocation of the United States Government against Cuba. "In the last few hours we have seen how terrorists based in the U.S., whom we have repeatedly denounced, encourage actions against the internal order of the country," the president accused, referring to the growing counterrevolutionary campaign that, through the artificial multiplication of hate messages and subversive content disseminated on social networks and anti-Cuban sites, distort and manipulate the claim that groups of citizens have expressed, due to logical disagreements with the electricity service and food distribution. "The disposition of the authorities of the Party, the State and the Government is to attend to the claims of our people, to listen, to dialogue, to explain the numerous steps being taken to improve the situation, always in an atmosphere of tranquility," Díaz-Canel argued. A clear example of this was the honest and open dialogue held yesterday by the first secretary of the Provincial Committee of the Party in Santiago de Cuba, Beatriz Johnson Urrutia, with a group of people who complained about the unbalanced schedule in the supply of electricity and the effects on products such as milk for children. According to statements in X, Johnson Urrutia explained that "the population of Santiago de Cuba was respectful and listened attentively to the information provided by the municipality's management regarding the distribution of the food basket", and added that "they also talked about the supply of electric energy, due to the effects on the National Electro-energy System, because of the problems of the thermoelectric power plants and the availability of fuel". "The premise will always be the attention and explanation to the people, in an atmosphere of peace and tranquility, in the face of the persistent attempts of counterrevolutionaries and terrorists abroad to destabilize the country", stressed, also through X, the member of the Political Bureau and Secretary of Organization of the Central Committee of the Party, Roberto Morales Ojeda. That the traditional enemy of the Cuban Revolution and its chorus of mercenaries associate for the strangulation of the Island has nothing spontaneous about it. "They seek asphyxiation with the genocidal blockade and, on the shortages and daily difficulties they impose on us, they articulate their other war from the platforms they dominate and usufruct," denounced Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla, also a member of the Political Bureau, when he pointed out the interferenceist conspiracy of the diplomatic representation of the Northern power in our country. "The direct and cruel responsibility of the U.S. in the acute economic situation that weighs on the well-being of the Cuban people is well known. The U.S. Government, especially its Embassy in Cuba, must refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of the country and inciting social disorder," he demanded. Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 Haiti: Trapped Between U.S. Guns, Death Squads, and the Next Colonial Invasion. By: Danny ShawRead Nowaiti is again breaking news. One of the top news stories in the world on March 12 was the alleged “cannibalism” of a Haitian gang. No different than the Department of Health’s equating Haitians with carriers of the AIDS virus in the 1980’s and Hollywood films such as The Serpent and the Rainbow, this disinformation campaign is a racist attack on the collective Haitian self-esteem. Such propaganda seeks to ideologically justify the impending fourth U.S.-directed invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years. But where there is repression, there is resistance. Haitian grassroots actors and their supporters around the world are saying no to both internal and external mercenaries usurping Haitian participatory democracy. As Haitian Bald Headed Party-affiliated (PHTK) paramilitary death squads rampage through Port-au-Prince, seeking to displace and massacre as many families as possible, Jake Johnston’s new book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti is a valuable contribution to understanding the geopolitical origins of these “gangs.” The book provides context on why the Biden government appointed the unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, in 2021 and then requested his removal from office last week as continued support for the illegitimate leader became untenable. Gangs or Mercenaries for Hire? Johnston’s page-turner is a necessary read for those new to Haitian studies, as well as those long familiar with the anti-dictatorship and anti-paramilitary struggles that Haiti has embarked upon in decades and centuries past. One thing is clear: the current paramilitaries, described in the mainstream press as “gangs,” must be analyzed on the historical continuum of U.S.-sponsored, state-affiliated armed groups, tasked with subduing the perennially “restless natives.” The preferred weapon of the mercenary gang bosses—Izo, Kempès, Barbecue, and others—is the torching of the communities they seek to subdue. Johnston points to the Michel Martelly administration (2011 - 2016) as being the first expression of the PHTK to use armed mercenaries to do their bidding. This assault on Haitian democracy, as personified by the politically-active populations of Belè, Lasalin, Solino, Delma anba, and the other ghettos of downtown Port-au-Prince, has reshaped Haiti’s capital city (spellings of Haitian words are in Haitian Kreyòl and not in the French colonial language). While early 2021 saw a mass movement that sought to topple the second expression of the PHTK dictatorship, headed by Jovenel Moïse, today armed and masked gunmen control some 80 percent of Port-au-Prince. According to the Displacement Tracking Matrix of the International Organization of Migration, 330,000 people have been internally displaced in Haiti, the majority of whom are children. Consistent with one of the principal themes of the book, I documented in visits to refugee camps at the end of January how the U.S.-sponsored Haitian state has yet to even visit the thousands of families sheltered in schools, alleyways, public plazas, and beyond. Aid State compiles 10 plus years of Johnston’s research in the Capital Beltway and 1,400 miles away, in the ancestral homeland of Haitian revolutionary leaders Dutty Boukman, François Makandal, and Jean-Jacque Dessalines. The backdrop of the work is a literary tour de force of the spellbinding mountains of the Grandans department, the crowded refugee camp of Titanyen, and the abandoned farms of the Grannò. The reader who has not visited Haiti in the past years as a result of what the Haitian people call the ensekirité planifye e òganize (planned and organized instability) is sure to shed a tear or two of nostalgia upon reading of the landgrabs of armed thugs employed by the PHTK. Haitian Patriots or Colonial Lackeys? The meat of the book provides a broad overview of the corrupt inner workings of Haitian state corruption beginning with the selection of Martelly as president in 2011 up to the present, and the U.S. government puppeteers who oversee the clumsy “politics as usual.” Johnston examines from the inside-out how the “aid state”—a state almost wholly dependent on thousands of private, foreign NGO’s—both consciously and unconsciously functions to disempower Haitians. Every page confirms what almost any Haitian will tell you: politics and “aid” are a rich man’s game which mocks the lives, interests, and dignity of Haiti’s 99 percent. Haitian young professionals searching to be of service to their country would have been militants of national liberation organizations in decades past. Today, much of this homegrown talent is compelled to follow the lure of some 10,000 NGOs that can pay salaries in U.S. dollars the Haitian left does not have access to. “Soft imperialism” contributes to an internal brain drain that discourages the upcoming generation from struggling for true Haitian sovereignty. Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs. The product of years of investigative journalism, Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs. Thoroughly researched chapters show how donors responding to the 2010 earthquake, including the Clinton Foundation, Citibank, and an entire cast of neocolonial characters, squandered $10 billion dollars, $1 billion of which was from the United States, constituting the “largest ever international mobilization to respond to a natural disaster.” A high percentage of that money was pilfered by Western companies who created fraudulent paperwork and looked out for corporate bottom lines, not the needs of the Haitian people. The chapter “The $80,000 House” explains with painstaking detail how Haitian Martelly’s government and his cronies, such as his childhood friend Harold Charles, worked with USAID and their U.S. contractors—including Thor Construction, Tetra Tech, and the CEEPCO company—in the wake of the earthquake to swindle Haiti’s population in the north. The Caracol-EKAM village was supposed to provide $8,000 homes for workers displaced by the earthquake who were the rank and file of the Clinton-USAID free trade or sweatshop project. After the vultures divided up the booty, each house turned out to have “cost” $88,000. What was supposed to be a community of 15,000 “culturally appropriate” homes for survivors of the earthquake ended up being 750 homes with major construction and sewage problems. This malfeasance was “the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our foreign aid system: the favoritism and corruption, the reliance on expensive foreign ‘experts,’ the lack of community consultation. Most of all, the houses stood as proof of how difficult it was to hold anyone accountable for their actions in Haiti.” Johnston, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, provides the necessary global—or more accurately U.S.—geostrategic context that explains how political unknowns like Martelly, Moïse, and Henry became the leaders of the nation, despite enjoying very little popular support. Johnston shows that the PHTK, the party of the U.S.-backed former president Martelly, is the principal Haitian actor at the center of the Guns, Gangs, and Neocolonialism drama that continues to play out. Interviews with former president René Préval, the head of the scaled-down UN mission Susan Page, and musician, hotelier, and former Martelly ambassador Richard Morse add to the entertaining, easily-digestible chapters. Aid State is further bolstered by chapters covering the theft of billions of dollars in Petro Caribbean funds by the Haitian state from Venezuela, and the 628,000 “zombie votes” from people who did not exist in 2016 that guaranteed victory for the PHTK and the United States’ man in Haiti, Moïse. Aid State ends with explosive new plot twists that help explain who was behind the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse that will shock even seasoned followers of all things Haiti. The Only Solution: Haitian Self-Determination The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti. Like Jeb Sprague’s Paramilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Mark Schuller’s Humanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, Dada Chery’s We Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti's Struggle Against Occupation, and a phalanx of others, this is a book that belongs in every library of Haitian and anti-colonial studies. Johnston has been a valuable witness to an important chapter in the ongoing Haitian national liberation struggle. His lucid pen does justice to the continued mobilization of millions of Haitians against the Aid State. The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti. I am an ethnographer who has filled up notebooks with notes on Haitian Kreyòl and culture for almost three decades. Since 2021, I have been following the paramilitary gang war on the long-peaceful and stable ghettos of Port-au-Prince. Jake Johnston’s rigorous research over the course of fifteen years has helped me better understand the present brutality that neocolonialism has produced. Johnston’s book is a necessary read for any friends and supporters of Haiti seeking to contextualize what is playing out in the korido (alleyways) and katyè popilè (oppressed communities) of Port-au-Prince as you read this article. Upon finishing this political science and journalistic gem, the reader wonders how, nearly one quarter of the way through the 21st century in the era of social media and identity politics, Haiti can so clearly remain a colony of the United States. Every U.S. government move in Haiti, from appointing prime ministers to organizing the next invasion, reflects their desire to maintain hegemonic control over Haiti. The years 1492 and 1697—the year of the “Peace of Ryswick” treaty which defined colonial ownership of the island the Taino natives called Ayiti—hemorrhage into 2024 as the masses of hungry and humiliated Haitians continue to dream of and fight for the Second Haitian Revolution. Until then, Haitian communities stand like David before Goliath, erecting their barricades to resist the onslaught of the paramilitaries and their foreign masters. Author Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and International Relations at the City University of New York. He holds a master’s degree in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. As the Director and professor of the International Affairs Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute, he works to build unity and anti-imperialist consciousness. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, HispanTV, RT and other international news networks. He has worked and organized in eighty-one countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. He is a mentor to many, guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of Ernesto Dessalines and Cauã Amaru. He has also authored articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics. You can follow his work at @profdannyshaw Republished from NACLA Archives March 2024 THERE is a paradox at the core of the efflorescence of science that has occurred over the last millennium. In essence this efflorescence has the potential to increase human freedom immensely. It increases the capacity of man within the man-nature dialectic; scientific practice aims to go beyond the “given” not just in a once-for-all sense but as a perpetual movement through incessant self-questioning, so that this practice is potentially a collective act of liberation. But this promise of freedom remains significantly unfulfilled; and while its potential has not been realised, this efflorescence of science has been utilised to a great extent for domination by some over other human beings and other societies. The paradox lies in the fact that scientific practice that has the potential to increase human freedom has been utilised to increase domination, that is, to attenuate human freedom. The roots of this paradox lie in the fact that the unleashing of scientific advance required an overthrow of the stranglehold over society of the church (which, it may be recalled, had forced Galileo to recant); and this overthrow could occur only as part of the transcendence of the feudal order, i.e., as part of the bourgeois revolution, of which the 1640 English Revolution was a prime example. The development of modern science in Europe therefore was inextricably linked from the very beginning with the development of capitalism; and this fact left its indelible imprint on the use to which scientific advances were put. This bourgeois imprint also had major epistemic implications with which philosophers (like Akeel Bilgrami) have been concerned, namely the treatment of nature as “inert matter” and the attribution of a similar “inertness” to indigenous populations in far-flung areas of the world (“people with no history”) which “justified” in European eyes the acquisition of “mastery” as much over nature as over such distant populations, and hence “justified” the phenomenon of imperialism. Keenly aware of the fact that the freedom-enhancing role of science could be fully realised only through a transcendence of capitalism itself, the finest of scientists in the era when such transcendence had come on to the historical agenda, joined the struggle for socialism. This was not just essential for them as citizens, to prevent the abuse of science; it was also a moral imperative for them as scientists: struggling against the abuse of their own praxis that produced scientific advance, had paramount importance for them. In the matter of struggling for socialism the example of Albert Einstein is well-known. He was not only an avowed socialist, but actively participated in political activities and meetings, because of which the American FBI had put a “tail” on him and kept a dossier on him which is now open to the public; in fact because of his socialist convictions he was not given security clearance for taking part in the Manhattan project that developed the atom bomb. Likewise in Britain, the finest scientists in the twentieth century were part of the Left, from JD Bernal to Joseph Needham, JBS Haldane, Hyman Levy, GH Hardy, Dorothy Hodgkin and many others. With the onset of neo-liberalism however there has been a fundamental change. There has been a “commoditisation” of science, under which the responsibility of funding research has shifted from the State to private, mainly corporate, donors. This has meant that the freedom of the scientist to express political opinions that underscore the need for transcending capitalism has got greatly curtailed. If a scientist wants to engage in a research project then he or she has to be sufficiently acceptable to private donors; and it does not help the scientist if he or she is known to hold socialist beliefs. Even university appointments are determined by the ability of the scientist to attract funds from donors. The same political constraints therefore apply even in a sphere where until recently the academics had the freedom to profess diverse beliefs. Commoditisation of science in other words produces, as a necessary consequence, a political conformism, and hence a social irresponsibility, on the part of the scientist. The “luxury” of internalising the moral imperative of attempting to go beyond capitalism, in order to make one’s scientific practice contribute towards human liberation, is denied to the scientist in the era of neo-liberalism; and this in turn implies the adoption of scientific advances without adequate discussion of consequences. An obvious example of such thoughtless adoption that is occurring today before our very eyes relates to artificial intelligence. It has of course several implications which I shall not go into; my concern is only with one implication, namely the creation of massive unemployment, to which the recent strike by the Hollywood script writers drew attention. Any measure that substitutes human labour by a mechanical device is potentially liberating: it can reduce the drudgery of work, or alternatively raise the magnitude of output with the same deployment of labour as before, and hence the availability of goods and services for the population. But under capitalism, every such substitution of human labour by a mechanical device adds to human misery. Consider an example. Suppose an innovation doubles labour productivity. Under capitalism, each capitalist would use the innovation for retrenching half the work-force that was being employed earlier. This very fact would increase the relative size of the reserve army of labour, because of which those who continue to remain employed would experience no increase in their real wage. There would therefore be a halving of the wage-bill and an increase in the magnitude of surplus, if the earlier level of output keeps getting produced. But because of the shift from wages to surplus at the earlier level of output, there would be a fall in demand (since a larger proportion of wages is consumed than of surplus) and hence the earlier level of output will not be produced and there would be an additional degree of unemployment, this time because of insufficient demand, over and above the unemployment generated because of the original doubling of labour productivity. The English economist David Ricardo had not cognized this additional unemployment because of the deficiency of demand. He had assumed Say’s Law, that is, that there is never any deficiency of aggregate demand, and that not only are all wages consumed but all surplus in excess of the part that is consumed is automatically invested. From this assumption he had drawn the conclusion that the shift from wages to surplus, while it would lower total consumption out of the earlier output, would raise investment, but leave the earlier output unchanged to start with; and this raising of the share of investment would raise the output growth rate and hence the employment growth rate. The use of machinery therefore, while it may reduce employment immediately, would raise its rate of growth, so that employment exceeds after some time what it would otherwise have been. Say’s Law however has no validity whatsoever. Investment under capitalism is determined by the expected growth of the market and not by the magnitude of surplus (unless there are untapped colonial markets that can be accessed or the State is ever willing to intervene to overcome a deficiency of aggregate demand). The reason why technological change did not historically cause mass unemployment within the metropolis was two-fold: first, colonial markets were available on tap, because of which much of the unemployment generated by technological change was shifted to the colonies (in the form of deindustrialisation); that is,there was export of unemployment from the metropolis. Second, whatever local unemployment was generated by technological change did not linger, because the unemployed migrated abroad. Through the “long nineteenth century” (up to the First World War) 50 million Europeans migrated to the temperate regions of white settlement like Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Today however an entirely different situation prevails. It is not just that colonialism does not exist, but third world markets are inadequate to counter any deficiency of aggregate demand in the metropolis. Likewise, the State cannot counter a deficiency of aggregate demand as it can neither increase its fiscal deficit beyond the FRBM Act limit, nor tax the rich for increasing its expenditure (taxing the working people to increase its expenditure scarcely increases aggregate demand). It follows therefore that mechanisation, including the use of artificial intelligence, in the context of capitalism today will inevitably generate massive unemployment. Consider what would happen in a socialist economy by contrast. Any mechanisation, including the use of artificial intelligence, will reduce the drudgery of work without reducing employment, output and hence the wage-bill of the workers, all of which are centrally determined. This fundamental difference between the two systems explains why the benign use of artificial intelligence is conditional only upon a transcendence of capitalism. Author Prabhat Patnaik is an Indian political economist and political commentator. His books include Accumulation and Stability Under Capitalism (1997), The Value of Money (2009), and Re-envisioning Socialism (2011). Republished from MR Online Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 IT IS NOT A BORDER CRISIS, JUST ANOTHER ELECTION YEAR IN THE US. By: Slava the Ukrainian SocialistRead NowRemember the classic movie “Groundhog Day”, where the main character Phil experiences the previous day's events repeating exactly and believes it’s déjà vu? Similar to the film's plot, Americans have the election-year scenario on repeat every four years. It never changes; neither the Democrat nor Republican parties bother to care about any issue facing constituents unless they can exploit it during election season. The immigration question is one of the main topics in their political football game. In the first part of this series, we discussed how Republicans accuse Democrats of having an ‘open borders’ policy but why stopping immigration is also not the solution. Now, let’s break down some of the talking points presidential candidates and party representatives are making about immigration. Virtue Signaling In recent months, an interesting trend has emerged: Republican-led states like Florida and Texas have begun relocating undocumented immigrants discovered within their borders to more liberal-leaning areas such as Martha’s Vineyard, New York, and Washington D.C. Typically inhabited by liberal residents who claim to welcome and advocate for immigrants, these areas have surprisingly reacted negatively to this sudden influx. Governor Gavin Newsom of California, for instance, has called for Department of Justice investigations into the transfer of immigrants across state lines. This backlash by liberal areas against the arrival of undocumented immigrants highlights the superficiality of buzzwords like ‘sanctuary city,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘inclusivity.’ Despite advocating for policies such as health coverage and housing for immigrants, politicians like Newsom display glaring hypocrisy in their reactions. This hypocrisy was on display during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Newsom was criticized for enjoying restaurant dining while most Californians faced lockdowns. Here the sentiment "Do as we say, not as we do" rings true. This encapsulates the self-defeating aspect of Democratic virtue signaling on immigration. While it's easy to pay lip service to diversity and inclusivity, Democrats do not extend their advocacy to universal healthcare and affordable housing for every American worker. And Democrats only support open immigration policy insofar as it serves their political interests, namely to vilify Republicans. However, they are aligned with Republicans on our imperialist foreign policy and the economic coercion that displaces so many people from their countries of origin. Of course, Republicans are guilty of virtue signaling, too. Donald Trump's rhetoric on immigration and trade is a blend of populism and protectionism that resonates strongly with his base. One of his recurrent themes is the notion that immigrants are taking jobs away from American citizens. However, Trump's extensive business ventures have frequently involved manufacturing goods abroad. While he denounces immigrants for supposedly depriving Americans of employment opportunities, he conveniently overlooks the fact that his products bear the "Made in China" label. By scapegoating immigrants, he deflects scrutiny from his own outsourcing practices to portray himself as a defender of American interests. Identity Politics Both parties' reliance on personal attacks reflects a failure to engage in constructive dialogue, undermining the integrity of political discourse and deflecting attention from substantive policy debates. Rather than addressing the concerns of working-class Americans, Democrats often resort to labeling them as ‘racists’ and ‘deplorables’. Most also suffer from a chronic case of ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome,’ or an intense and irrational hate towards former President Donald Trump. Rather than engaging in substantive debate about the merits of specific policies, discussions often devolved into character assassination. Let’s take Trump’s impeachment trials, for example, where he was accused of ‘abuse of power and obstruction of justice.’ The case relies on attacking the character of President Trump - an ad hominem argument, which serves only to defame a person as inherently untrustworthy, without providing substantive evidence. Ad hominem attacks are inherently flawed because they fail to address the truthfulness or falsehood of the person's statements. The crux of the Democrats' articles of impeachment revolved around portraying Donald Trump as either a "dictator" as stated by Rep. Jerry Nadler or a "threat to our democracy" as asserted by Rep. Adam Schiff. Trump is also known for his frequent and often controversial use of ad hominem attacks against his political opponents, critics, and adversaries. ‘Crooked Hillary’, ‘Sleepy Joe’, ‘Crazy Bernie’, and ‘Pocahontas’ - Trump's use of these and similar terms is a consistent feature of his political communication style, both during his presidency and current campaign. The former president didn’t hesitate to engage in character assassination against immigrants, either. In June of 2015, Trump referred to Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists, stating when Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. Despite facing backlash, Trump doubled down on his stance and continues to use inflammatory language when discussing immigration-related issues, portraying immigrants in a negative light. He demonizes immigrants as "alien invaders" and "illegal aliens," to further divide the working class. Another way of practicing identity politics is to bring a new face to represent US Imperialism; a new face that’s different from the straight white man. Dressing up the same capitalist and imperialist policies with someone female, LGBT, or African American, gives the illusion of inclusive and progressive change. How many hopes were dashed when Obama proved to be the more effective evil in perpetuating the same policies, but with a ‘prettier face’? This woke-washing also lays a trap for Republicans, who when criticizing Democratic policy can more easily be condemned as sexist, racist homophobes. Only after the economic revolution, when workers take control of the means of production, can the immigration question finally be resolved. We should understand that neither of the two major parties nor the presidential candidates are interested in improving the lives of citizens or immigrants. Siding with one of the parties is not useful for the revolutionary movement. We must oppose and expose them both Archives March 2024 3/19/2024 Suppressed for Decades: FBI Reports Suggest Japanese WW2 Balloon Attacks on U.S. & Canada Included Biological Agents. By: JEFFREY S. KAYERead NowTwo FBI reports, one of them fully declassified only this year, describe the likely, if limited, use of biological agents, in particular bubonic plague and anthrax, as part of a large-scale balloon, or “Fu-Go,” barrage launched by Imperial Japan on the United States and Canada in late 1944 and the first four months of 1945. The most damning of the two reports was a July 6, 1945 FBI memorandum that memorialized a report from a Special Agent in Charge at the Norfolk FBI office who was briefed by a military official at Langley Air Force Base. Addressed to the Chief of the FBI’s Domestic Intelligence Division, Daniel M. Ladd, the memo stated, “recently several Japanese balloons were found in [North and South Dakota, and Nebraska] which were determined to have been carrying bacteria” (bold added for emphasis). The identity of the memo’s author is redacted. A separate FBI memo dated May 11, 1950, from the Office of the Director of the FBI, relied on expert opinions in citing unusual outbreaks of bubonic plague in certain areas where the World War II Japanese balloons had landed in New Mexico and Alberta, Canada. The experts believed the outbreaks were likely due to the balloon landings. The existence of Japanese balloon landings in New Mexico has not been reported publicly before, and some of these had come quite close to U.S. nuclear facilities. The 1950 memo was copied to the directors of the CIA, Naval Intelligence, and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, as well as to the Acting Director of the Security Division at the Atomic Energy Commission. This new evidence significantly challenges our understanding of a little-known but important episode in World War II. If this new historical evidence holds up, it means that Japan, the United States, and Canada, have hidden evidence of a germ warfare attack against the North American mainland for nearly eighty years. Additionally, the technology for the Fu-Go balloons was studied and helped to inform the U.S.’s own efforts to create in the early 1950s the secretive E77 balloon bomb, which carried a biological agents payload. (A follow-up article will look in some depth at the U.S. balloon bomb.) Japan’s Fu-Go Bomb Attack on North America In November 1944, though possibly even earlier, after a series of setbacks in their war with the United States, Japan’s military began lofting thousands of balloons more than 30,000 feet (10,000 meters) into the jet stream to be carried by prevailing winds to the North American continent. The balloons carried some combination of incendiary devices and high-explosive antipersonnel bombs, as well as devices for self-destruction. The intent appears to have been to cause fires where they landed, and spread panic among the U.S. and Canadian populations. It was also greatly feared at the time that they might carry biological weapons (BW) aimed primarily at U.S. livestock and agriculture. While the balloon bombing campaign didn’t begin until November 1944, the origins of Japan’s secret “Fu-go” balloon project went back to September 1942, when the Science Research Center at the Japanese Army’s Noborito Research Institute, located in Kawasaki’s Tama Ward, began working on the project of a transoceanic air attack on the North American continent. The premise for the balloon assault rested upon on a pioneering study by Japanese meteorologists on the nature and patterns of the jet stream. The bombs carried by the balloons could produce notable explosions. One bomb was deliberately set off by an Army Intelligence officer in Rapid City, South Dakota. It “tore a hole in the ground three feet deep and five feet in diameter,” according to an account published by the South Dakota State Historical Society (pg. 106). The Japanese balloon episode from World War II was recalled in a number of articles following the media frenzy surrounding a wayward Chinese balloon discovered floating over the U.S. in January-February 2023. This balloon, shot down by a U.S. F-22 fighter jet, was not however, as feared, collecting intelligence over the United States. It seems likely that China’s balloon was as Chinese authorities described it, a research or weather balloon blown off course by storms. But why the U.S. panic? Perhaps the U.S. response stemmed from secret knowledge of what a balloon attack could portend. A May 5, 2023 Time Magazine article took the opportunity of the controversy over the Chinese balloon to revisit the old episode of the Japanese WWII balloon barrage. In an interview with Japanese balloon expert Ross Coen, the article described both the U.S. government’s fear that the World War II-era balloons could carry a payload of infectious biological agents, and the widely accepted finding that allegedly, despite such fears, none of the balloons were found to contain any weaponized pathogens. Coen, who wrote the 2014 book, Fu-go The Curious History of Japan’s Balloon Bomb Attack on America (University of Nebraska Press), told Time: “From the perspective of the War Department and Army intelligence, the thing that they feared most was biological warfare. They inspected all balloons for any presence of biological agents, something that might spread disease among humans or livestock. Ultimately there never was any biological component to the balloons.” In his book, Coen summarized the extent of Japan’s balloon attacks: “… as many as 630 balloons—7 percent of 9,000 launched—may have landed in North America between November 1944 and April 1945. With the number of confirmed landings standing at just over 300, it seems probable that a number of balloons, at least one or dozens or possibly hundreds, await discovery.” (Coen, Ross. Fu-go (p. 199). Kindle Edition.) The purported fact that the balloons lacked anything that would mark them as biological agent delivery devices was repeated in sundry scholarly examinations of the subject, going all the way back to U.S. Air Force Major Robert Mikesh’s 1973 Smithsonian Press booklet, Japan's World War II Balloon Bomb Attacks on North America. Mikesh stated that he had met with sundry Japanese officials, including “many of those having firsthand knowledge of the balloon program” (pg. v). He concluded in his monograph that in regards to the threat of BW delivery via the balloons, though such use was “possible, the Japanese did not consider this aspect” (pg. 3). When considering Japanese testimony, it seems important to mention that all records inside Japan relating to their secret balloon program were destroyed at the end of World War II. The contemporaneous examination of the Japanese balloons was shrouded in a veil of secrecy and censorship. As early as January 1945, the government imposed a “voluntary” program of media censorship concerning the balloons. Robert Mikesh’s monograph quoted an April 1945 “strictly confidential note to editors and broadcasters”: “Cooperation from the press and radio under this request has been excellent despite the fact that Japanese free balloons are reaching the United States, Canada, and Mexico in increasing numbers.... There is no question that your refusal to publish or broadcast information about these balloons has baffled the Japanese, annoyed and hindered them, and has been an important contribution to security.” (pg. 27) What makes any on-going secrecy into the 21st century surrounding the presence of biological agents as part of the Japanese balloon attacks especially surprising is that it involved a serious use of weapons of mass destruction — biological weapons — against the U.S. mainland. Moreover, it was not Japan’s only planned use of BW against the continental U.S. The following article will present in some detail the evidence behind these new revelations. Anthrax mixed with balloon gas The FBI memo to Daniel Ladd was declassified in 2004 but was been otherwise unnoticed until discovered by this author. It is reproduced here: The bacteria, described as coming from balloons that landed in the Dakotas and Nebraska, were identified as anthrax. The pathogen was discovered in the gas (mostly hydrogen) that inflated the massive paper-laminated balloons. The purveyor of this new information was the Special Agent in Charge (SAC) of the FBI’s Norfolk Field Division (probably SAC Robert Hicks), who had reported all this information to the unknown FBI author of the memo. According to an FBI Field Office history of the Norfolk division, Hicks was special agent in charge from 1944-1945. The Norfolk field office was opened on December 15, 1941, approximately one week after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. According to the FBI history, “Given the Bureau’s central role in homeland security during the war and the presence of the Hampton Roads naval facility in the Norfolk Division, the new office initially concentrated on national security issues.” This included “countering sabotage and espionage.” The circumstances of the FBI’s extraordinary memo to Ladd are as follows. On Thursday, June 28, 1945, Norfolk’s SAC (probably Hicks) attended a Weekly Intelligence Conference. One guest brought to this meeting was from a unit within the U.S. Army Air Forces at Langley Field, Virginia. Because of redactions, it’s not clear who invited this official to the meeting. The identity of the Langley AFB official has been redacted by the government. But the identification of the source as someone who was “until recently… assigned to handling investigations concerning the landing of Japanese balloons in the states of North and South Dakota, and Nebraska,” strongly suggests the informant for the BW revelation was Army Intelligence Major Charles D. Frierson, Jr., as this memoir attests (p. 738-739). Copies of the memo to Ladd were also sent to the FBI’s Assistant Director at the time, E.A. Tamm, and to the head of the FBI’s crime laboratory, Edward Coffey, and a third recipient whose identity has been redacted. Coffey also happened to be a member of the Bacterial Warfare Committee at the U.S. government’s World War II biowarfare agency, the War Research Service. According to a November 30, 1942 FBI memo, Coffey was well-connected in U.S. intelligence circles, as he also served on the government’s Joint Cryptanalysis Committee, and the Special Committee on Truth Serum, formed “at the instigation of the MIB [Military Intelligence Board] of the Army” (PDF pg. 137). By April 1944, the Truth Serum committee had been taken over by the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS. The memo’s author quoted from the SAC’s report about the meeting with the Army official. Noting that he had been told that Anthrax spores had been included in the hydrogen gas that lifted the balloon, the SAC described the significance of the finding: “I was told that such bacteria mainly affects cattle. When the bacteria lands on wheat or other types of farm land where food is being raised for the cattle, the bacteria remain in the food when it is eaten by the cattle, and upon human consumption of the milk or meat, the bacteria can be passed on.” The SAC further explained he was informed that the Army was “not greatly concerned over the number of such balloons which have been located, but that it does show a different trend in the Japanese attack….” Earlier examinations of the balloons had heretofore only found they carried “small bombs.” The FBI’s Army informant was not alone in his lack of concern over the potential impact of the balloons using bioagents. A U.S. Navy "Technical Air Intelligence Center Report #41" from May 1945 concluded that while use of "insect pests or disease germs" in the balloons were a possibility, they concluded such an attack would be “Of doubtful effectiveness.” (The quoted material in this paragraph is from the "Japanese World War II Balloon Bombs Collection", Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives, Elizabeth C. Borja, 2018.) Another reason the Army official and/or other bioweapons experts may not have been too concerned about balloons with anthrax was because existing cattle vaccination programs against anthrax had been very successful. As a January 26, 1946 article in the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader put it, “There were only 14 herds of cattle quarantined for anthrax in South Dakota, Nebraska and Iowa in 1945, which is probably the lowest nunmber of cases of this disease in the past 20 years. Continued vaccination of cattle in bad anthrax areas each spring and prompt quarantines of all outbreaks are reducing the disease. The control campaign organized in 1938 is effective." A June 1953 article in Public Health Reports examining outbreaks of anthrax in the U.S. from 1945 to 1951 also shows very few outbreaks in this midwest region. Whatever the danger involved, including potential public panic should news of the presence of BW pathogens leak out, the FBI memo to Ladd was not meant to be have wide distribution. Its footer declared (in all caps): “THIS MEMORANDUM IS FOR ADMINISTRATIVE PURPOSES TO BE DESTROYED AFTER ACTION IS TAKEN AND NOT SENT TO FILES” As will be shown, any cover-up of the apparent use of Japanese biological agents in attacks on the United States is consistent with the decades-long cover-up the U.S. organized around the activities of Japan’s biological warfare units – chief among them Unit 731. Not only did the U.S. help cover up the existence of Japan’s World War II BW efforts, it engaged in a clandestine collaboration with the personnel of these units and shielded them from war crimes prosecution. Like with the data from the Japanese balloon examinations, the information was kept tightly controlled by intelligence agencies. “War Balloons Over the Prairie” The fact that gas from downed Japanese balloons was examined by military and/or FBI personnel is corroborated by a 1979 report by University of Missouri historian Lawrence H. Larsen. Published by the South Dakota State Historical Society, Larsen’s essay describes a Japanese balloon that landed at Cheyenne Indian Reservation on March 20, 1945, less than four months before the memo to Ladd. Still partially afloat, the balloon was towed to a nearby ranch, where the next day it was examined by Range Supervisor John P. Drissen. The March 20 balloon sighting is not listed in the compilations of known sightings included in all of the three major monographs written about the Japanese balloon barrage campaign: Robert Mikesh’s 1973 monograph for the Smithsonian Institute; Bert Webber’s 1975 book, Retaliation: Japanese Attacks and Allied Countermeasures on the Pacific Coast in World War II (University of Oregon Press — see especially chapters 9-11); or Ross Coen’s more recent investigation, referenced above. An October 1949 Canadian Army report, The Japanese Balloon Enterprise Against North America, noted there were four balloon sightings in South Dakota in March 1945, but no specific dates were recorded. Larsen’s account mentioned eight different balloon sightings in South Dakota in March 1945, three more than Mikesh-Webber-Coen studies claimed, and four more than the Canadian Army monograph. The Cheyenne Indian River Reservation balloon was one of the three sightings overlooked by the other U.S. studies. An August 20, 1945 article in the Rapid City Journal also provides an early, if incomplete, account of Japanese balloon landings in the region. The unreliability of the total amount of balloon landings is not a surprise to any historian of these events, as the extreme secrecy by both U.S. and Canadian governments put upon the balloon sightings and discoveries, and the fact that many hundreds of balloons sent to North America were never accounted for, has meant that no one who has studied this subject feels the balloon statistics we currently have are fully dependable. Still, it is interesting that the one reliable report we have that specifically cites the presence of biological agents on any of these balloons comes from an area that has sightings that has otherwise, outside of Larsen’s study, gone unreported and unnoticed. As described below, the linkage between the presence of pathogens and the failure to document certain balloon landings will be true for balloons judged possibly linked to bubonic plague outbreaks in other regions. In his monograph, Larsen described how the balloon was first discovered by some workers at a nearby ranch, who took the contraption back to the ranch and secured it to a post overnight. The next day, Range Supervisor John Drissen at the Cheyenne River Agency arrived on the scene, warning everyone present that they were not to publicize their discovery under penalty of “prosecution for espionage” (pg. 105). According to Larsen’s account, Drissen examined the landing site and took photographs. “When a rising wind tore the envelope of the balloon, he collected some of the escaping gas in two borrowed fruit jars. Soon, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and several army security men appeared. They took custody of the film and fruit jars, made arrangements to keep the story out of the local papers, loaded the deflated bag and the gear onto a truck, and left for their respective headquarters. The range supervisor went back to the agency, and life on the ranch returned to normal.” (pg. 105) The appearance of both Army and FBI personnel was mandated by an agreement between the two government agencies, who were “working in close harmony” and had determined by early 1945 that all “reports of enemy missiles be made concurrently to the FBI and the Army,” according to a February 12, 1945 letter from the Office of Civil Defense to New Mexico Governor John Dempsey. By reference to the sampling of the balloon’s gas, and the transfer of this evidence to both the FBI and Army personnel, the Cheyenne balloon is a prime candidate for the apparatus from one of the balloons that supplied evidence of the presence of anthrax. Yet, a perusal of anthrax statistics for South Dakota for the period in question shows no evidence of significant anthrax outbreak, though one such instance, however, is discussed further below. While the Ladd memo, which also specified the anthrax balloon landings had occurred also in North Dakota and Nebraska, could have been a false report, but that seems unlikely. In relation to the incompleteness of balloon statistics, further on this article will describe an FBI report on possible bubonic plague-carrying balloons in New Mexico. The report claims a number of New Mexico balloon landings, but none of these have ever showed up in any list of balloon sightings by any authority. As regards the capture of gas from the balloons, The National Air and Space Museum Archives’ “Japanese World War II Balloon Bombs Collection” (large PDF) has a number of reports from the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division (MID). MID General Report No. 4, dated May 1, 1945, which concerned “Japanese Free Balloons and Related Incidents,” cited an analysis of gas from one balloon recovered from Volcano, California on March 23, 1945. The captured gas from the balloon was analyzed by the Shell Development Chemical Company in Emeryville, California, and was found to contain primarily hydrogen, with 9-10% nitrogen, and a trace amount (2%) of oxygen. (PDF pg. 174-175] The MID report on Japanese balloons for July 1, 1945 nevertheless stated, “Although there has been no evidence thus far that the balloons have been used to transport biological agents, the possibility that the balloons may be employed for this purpose still exists” [PDF pg. 198]. Even so, the vast majority of documents released to date fail to mention that bacteriological or biological substances had been discovered on any of the balloons. On this fact, most historians seem in agreement. Yet, a recent declassified memo points to powerful circumstantial evidence consistent with the claims of the FBI Ladd memo. Dead Rats in New MexicoAnother FBI memo was released in September 2023 to this author by the National Archives upon mandatory declassification request. It was written nearly five years after the end of the war. The memo was from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover (or his office) to the Chief of the Army’s Military Intelligence Security and Training Group in Washington, D.C., with copies sent to the Director of Naval Intelligence, the Director of Special Investigations at the U.S. Air Force Inspector General Office, the Director of the CIA, and the Acting Director, Security Division, at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC). One reason Hoover may have copied Security at the AEC was because Hoover’s memo indicated that Japan’s Fu-Go barrage included some balloons that landed in New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains, not far from secret U.S. nuclear installations. No other history of Japan’s balloon attacks has ever indicated that any balloons were sighted or landed in New Mexico. According to Hoover, Dr. Lincoln La Paz, then Head of the Department of Mathematics and Astronomy at the University of New Mexico, suspected that an outbreak of bubonic plague in the east Sandia Mountains was related to the Japanese balloon landings towards the end of the war. LaPaz died in 1985. During World War II, La Paz, an expert on the study of meteorites, had been Technical Director for the U.S. Second Air Force Operations Analysis Section. A webpage connected to the American Heritage Center has noted, “During this time he investigated Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs.” La Paz told Hoover, “two of the [plague infected] rats found on the east slope of the Sandia Mountains were only about three and a half miles from the Atomic Energy installation at Sandia Base, New Mexico.” The infected rats, the majority of which had been found at elevations twice as high as any with plague had ever been found, were examined by New Mexico’s State Department of Public Health. The results were “unusual,” in that the rats that tested positive for plague had not done so via “an agglutination test,” a standard test for the presence of plague bacteria, indicating they might represent “some strange type of the plague.” New strains of bacterium were routinely sought by biological warfare scientists in most countries where established BW programs existed. Scientists Theodore Rosebury and Elvin Kabat discussed the matter in a landmark article in The Journal of Immunology (Vol. 56, No. 1, May 1947), “Bacterial Warfare: A Critical Analysis of the Available Agents, Their Possible Military Applications, and the Means for Protection Against Them.” Rosebury had been the head of the air-borne infection project at Camp Detrick, Maryland during World War II. Rosebury and Kabat wrote: “A general principle of some potential importance concerns the selection, during the course of repeated subcultures and animal passages, of highly virulent or drug-resistant variants, or both. The possibility that strains with unusual properties might be developed by such means should be one of the problems studied by a military experimental unit.” (pg. 24-25) In fact, the U.S.’s own biological warfare program had by late 1950 used “selective cultures” to create a strain of smallpox “against which immunization by vaccination is not effective,” as a separate FBI report of a briefing from a Chemical Corps official at Dugway Proving Ground at the time described. The unusual nature of the plague bacteria pointed to possible BW origin. To buttress his suspicions surrounding the origin of the plague outbreak, Professor La Paz forwarded to the FBI a separate report provided to him by a Canadian official “in charge of investigating… the Japanese Paper Balloon offensive in the Edmonton [Alberta] district.” While the Hoover memo never mentions it, an Associated Press article dated August 11, 1949 reported two very uncommon cases of bubonic plague in New Mexico in 1949. According to the AP article, “Only 21 other cases of the disease have been listed in the United States during the last 25 years.” Both of the 1949 individuals infected ultimately recovered. Plague in Alberta, CanadaThe author of the Canadian report was redacted by the National Archives, but may have been Lieutenant Commander E. L. Borradaile, Chief of Canada’s Interservice Bomb Disposal Service, a wartime agency formed to keep track of the Japanese balloon onslaught. Until it was declassified by the U.S. National Archives from this author’s request, the Canadian report on a putative link between balloon landings and bubonic plague in Alberta had never been told before. Borradaile, or whomever wrote the Edmonton memo, described a similar set of ecological phenomenon to what La Paz had seen in the Sandia Mountains, namely the near total disappearance of expected numbers of small game (“rabbits, squirrels, small rodents, etc.”) in a region “north and west of Edmonton.” (Note the racist, pejorative terminology in the memo quoted below is kept intact here for historical reasons.) The absence of game mentioned… may be referable to a plague among the small game of the region resulting from B.W. agents carried in by a Jap paper balloon, which to my certain knowledge came to earth in the region in which the survival test was made. This concordance came to my mind when, in the summer of 1949, an outbreak of bubonic plague carried by rats and other rodents occurred throughout Alberta, but principally in the northern part of the province, precisely the area most heavily bombarded with Jap paper balloons. In this connection, it seems worth while to point out that as far as I know, the plague had never occurred before in the area in question. The photo below shows Lt. Cmd. Borradaile pointing to a map showing balloon landings in Western Canada. This September 1945 briefing map shows far more balloon landings in northern Alberta than any official or scholarly list of balloon landings in Alberta has ever documented, suggesting that some of these landings were purposely withheld from later public release. “Lt.-Cmdr. E.L. Borradaile… Officer Commanding the Inter-Service Bomb Disposal centre… points to a map of Western Canada which is covered with small flags, indicating where Jap balloons were recovered.” Sites in Northern Alberta are indicated inside red circle. - The Calgary Albertan, September 6, 1945, pg. 11 Coincidentally or not, in 1950 Alberta instituted a vigorous anti-rat campaign, in an effort to stop the spread of bubonic plague in the province. The effort led to the elimination of Norway rats in that part of the country. But the area under consideration concerned a portion of the eastern Alberta border from Cold Lake, not quite half way up the long eastern side of the province, down to the border with Montana, as the yellow portion in the map below shows. The rat control zone, or the area of feared zoonotic infection, was far south and east of the northern and western regions the Canadian official (likely Borradaile) had described as possible regions of balloon-related plague outbreak. While there were correlations between outbreaks of plague and areas of Japanese balloon penetration in both Alberta and New Mexico, the South Dakota balloon sightings also had at least one such possibly associated case, which concerned an anthrax outbreak in Haakon County, which contains a portion of Cheyenne Indian Reservation. According to a September 18, 1947 article in the Rapid City Journal, “Anthrax Strikes in Haakon County,” the outbreak of anthrax infection among a cattle herd in Grindstone, Haakon County was the first in the area since 1936. The article also mentions another outbreak in Lyman County, South Dakota, where no known balloon sighting or landing has ever been mentioned. Worth noting, there was another confirmed sighting of a Japanese balloon in Red Elm, South Dakota, which took place on March 30, 1945, ten days after the Cheyenne reservation incident discussed in Larsen’s essay. Red Elm lies within the boundaries of Cheyenne Indian Reservation. Denials of presence of bioagents in Fu-Go balloonsAccording to the October 2020 issue of Naval History Magazine, Japan launched some 9,300 high-altitude “Fu-Go” balloons against the U.S. and Canada in the last months of 1944 and through the spring of 1945. Approximately 300 balloons, many carrying high-explosive antipersonnel and/or incendiary bombs, were known to have touched land in North America. “The balloons were blown eastward from Japan at altitudes of 30,000 to 50,000 feet at speeds of 20 to 150 knots, and reached the United States and Canada from three to five days after launching,” the essay by Norman Polman stated. Japan’s balloon campaign was reportedly in response to the April 1942 Doolittle bombing raid on Japan, with the intent of retribution meted out upon the U.S. mainland. In May 1945, six Oregonians out on a hike, including five children, were killed when they approached a downed balloon with unexploded ordinance. After this, the U.S. censorship program was modified such that the public was allowed to be made aware of the balloon attacks, and warned to keep clear of any discovered strange apparatuses. In Canada, the censorship directives after the Oregon deaths, while modified for greater openness, insisted that “no mention should be made of the possible use of the balloon in biological warfare” (PDF pg. 11). The Naval History article notes that Imperial Japan’s secret biological warfare department, Unit 731, “looked into using balloons to spread germs. This was especially significant, because large balloons were developed and used to attack the United States.” Nevertheless, like all other histories on this subject over the past 79 years, this article accepted Japanese denials and stated that no biological agents were ever used in the balloon barrage. Unit 731 conducting an unethical biological weapons test on a human subject in Nong'an County, northeast China's Jilin Province, November 1940. Photo released from Jilin Provincial Archives on January 7, 2014. (Source: Xinhua News, Jan. 11, 2014; explanation of why this document is in public domain at Wikimedia.org) In concluding the Japanese balloons carried no biological or germ warfare agents, Polman relied upon the 1973 account by former Air Force pilot and curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Robert Mikesh. Mikesh’s conclusion that no biological agents were present in the balloons was based on his examination of extant military documents, as well as personal interviews, including with “former Major Teiji Takada, engineer for the balloon project, who provided invaluable material and insight from his personal observations” (p. v). In the most recent published study of Japan’s World War II balloon attacks, Fu-go: The Curious History of Japan's Balloon Bomb Attack on America (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), author Ross Coen writes, “Takada was lead technician on the balloon research program at Noborito Research Institute, and his article is an invaluable firsthand source of technical information” (p. 249). Mikesh, Coen, and other researchers have also accepted as good coin that no evidence of the presence of biological pathogens were ever found in the balloons retrieved by U.S. or Canadian government personnel. It is worth noting that some authorities are not totally convinced. In a November 1989 study for the Center for Naval Analyses, CNA Research Specialist Adam Siegel noted that the fears surrounding possible use of biological agents in the balloon attacks may not have been so easily dismissed if researchers had realized “the fact that one major site for balloon manufacture was on Okunoshima Island, the site of the Japanese chemical warfare factory” (pg. 28). Coen would in December 2017 publicly withdraw his earlier conclusion, based on Japanese officials “postwar denials,” that Japan “had never planned to weaponize the balloons with biological agents.” His change of mind came after reading a 1990 memoir by Noboru Kuba, an official at Japan’s Noborito Institute. Noborito and the Decision to Use (or Not Use) Bacterial WeaponsThe BW denials by Japanese scientists must be understood in the context of the wholesale destruction in the closing days of WW2 of all Japanese documentation relating to the balloon project, and other biological warfare research and operations more generally. Many of the postwar Japanese denials around biological weapons research and use have been debunked by recent scholarship. According to 1990 memoir by Noboru Kuba, “an army veterinarian assigned to the Army Ninth Technical Research Institute, which was commonly called the Noborito Institute,” Japanese scientists did intend the Fu-Go balloons to carry biological agents, particularly rinderpest, a virus that affects cattle. But the plans were called off at the last minute. (See Amanda Kay McVety, The Rinderpest Campaigns, Cambridge University Press, 2018, pp. 73, 75, 85.) Kuba maintained the Noborito-built balloons carried incendiary devices, self-destruct explosives, as well as radiosondes to transmit location, elevation and wind speed, but nothing more. At the same time, the extreme sensitivity of the Noborito-engineered balloon attack program meant, according to a history by a retired CIA officer, that in summer 1945, as Imperial Japan faced defeat, all evidence pertaining to the balloon barrage over North America was to be destroyed. On 15 August, Army Affairs Section ordered the destruction of all materials pertaining to the military’s ‘special research.’ First on the list was the Noborito Research Institute and its balloon bomb program. Also listed was the Kwantung Army’s Unit 731, which had conducted lethal experiments on captives to develop biological weapons. (Stephen C. Mercado, The Shadow Warriors of Nagano: A History of the Imperial Japanese Army’s Elite Intelligence School, Potomac Books, 2002, p. 176. Kindle Edition.) British journalists Peter Williams and David Wallace also described in their 1989 book, Unit 731: the Japanese Army’s Secret of Secrets (Hodder and Stoughton, London) how Japan’s War Ministry in the final days of the war “set about the systematic destruction of all military documentation. A ‘Special Research Conduct Outline’ issued on August 15th by the War Ministry’s Military Affairs Section reveals that particular attention was paid to Units 731 and 100, as well as Fu (the codename for balloon bombs) and other weapons created by the ‘secret weapons’ 9th Army Technical Research Institute” at Noborito (p. 87, parenthesis in the original). According to CIA historian Mercado’s 2002 review in the CIA house organ, Studies in Intelligence (vol. 46, no. 4), of a memoir by Ban Shigeo, a technician at the Japanese Army's 9th Technical Research Institute, Noborito, which worked on poisons and special weapons, and the Kwantung Army’s Unit 731, shared personnel. In addition, both were recruiting grounds for U.S. military and intelligence agencies at the close of World War II. Mercado stated, “One of his [Shigeo’s] book's contributions is to further tie Noborito to the Japanese Army's infamous Unit 731, which participated in biomedical research” (PDF pg. 3). Ban himself worked for both Noborito and, on temporary assignment, for Unit 731. He subsequently “led the ‘chemical section’ of a US clandestine unit hidden within Yokosuka naval base during the Korean War, and then worked on unspecified projects inside the United States from 1955 to 1959….” His memoir has not been translated into English. “Technical Major General Sueyoski Kusaha, director of Japans long-range balloon program, wears a medal on his right breast pocket for his leadership of the project,” “The Great Japanese Balloon Offensive,” MSgt. Cornelius W. Conley, USAF, in Air University Review, Vol. 19, № 2, Jan-Feb. 1968, pg. 70 The idea of using balloons to carry infectious organisms was not new for the Japanese military. Intelligence officer Ogura Yoshikuma told a Unit 731 Exhibition that toured Japan in 1993-1994 that Unit 731 had conducted “Q” operations against the Soviets across the Manchurian border a full year or more before the United States entered the war. We would fill balloons with nitrogen and suspend containers of bacteria below them. They would be released to drift over Soviet territory to disperse bacteria. We never found out what effects this tactic had. (Gold, Hal. Unit 731 (p. 237). Tuttle Publishing, 2011. Kindle Edition.) Yoshikuma was not the only former Japanese official to speak about the use of balloons for biological weapons delivery. Naoji Uezono, a printer who worked for four years for Unit 731, and was privy to “all the most secret documents as he printed them,” told Williams and Wallace in 1985 that Unit 731 had put “epidemic germs… cholera and typhus” into its balloon bombs. Moreover, Uezono believed there was a balloon factory at the Mukden industrial complex associated with the prisoner of war camp there (Williams and Wallace, p. 57-8). Williams and Wallace relied on Seiichi Morimura’s 1983 two volume book, Akuma no Hoshoku [The Devil’s Gluttony], to provide the epitaph to the balloon project. Citing Morimura, the British journalists wrote, “The balloon bombs once considered for carrying disease against the United States were never used, prohibited on technical grounds by the upper echelons of military command” (Ibid., p. 87). The decision to forego use of the biological weapons payloads in the Fu-Go balloons reported by Morimura and Williams and Wallace is consistent with Kuba’s narrative. One difference worth mentioning is that according to Kuba, the balloons were to carry rinderpest virus, but the plan was “quashed” by General Hideki Tojo. Interestingly, an October 25, 1946 article in The Edmonton Bulletin described the fears of both U.S. and Canadian scientists that the Japanese balloon attacks were meant to introduce rinderpest to North America, which was otherwise free from the disease. The article cited “intelligence reports,” claiming "neither American nor Canadian army chemical officers thought for a moment that they were intended foy [sic] any such futile purpose as setting forests on fire — the most prevalent lay speculation. The real purpose, they feared, was to introduce rinderpest germs on this continent.” Tojo allegedly told Noborito staff: “If we attack the U.S. by using balloon bombs that contain rinderpest, the U.S. will consider incinerating our rice plants in the harvest season. Therefore, the plan about the rinderpest attack is aborted” (McVety, p. 76). Nothing is mentioned about use of cholera or typhus, much less plague and anthrax. Also, Morimura had indicated the balloon BW operations were ended “on technical grounds,” while Noborito’s Kuba claimed fear of U.S. retaliation was the reason, at least for stopping the rinderpest project. Unfortunately, there is no access today to Uezono, who was 70 years old in 1985, and certainly has passed from the scene; or to Morimura, who died in July 2023. The latter’s book, The Devil’s Gluttony, was never translated into English either. Additionally, Noboru Kuba’s memoir has never been published, although it was apparently extensively quoted in Shigeo Ban’s book on Noborito. The small number of scholars who have written about Kuba’s document have appeared to take it as solid evidence. But Kuba’s memoir was written in 1990, forty-five years after the events he narrated. Even if we take the story as given, that Gen. Tojo had nixed use of rinderpest as a biological weapon for use in the Fu-Go balloons, that doesn’t mean that other pathogens weren’t considered or used. Tojo may have been correct in fearing retribution upon Japan for rinderpest attack, as there was no rinderpest in the United States, and a rinderpest outbreak would have been considered highly suspicious, and it was possible any outbreaks could be traced back to Japan’s long-distance balloons. On the other hand, plague and anthrax, not to mention cholera and typhus, were endemic to numerous areas in the United States. An outbreak inside the U.S. or Canada there could not so easily or quickly be determined as originating from foreign biological warfare attack. In fact, it was a historical lack of plague in Alberta, Canada that led to suspicions that balloon landings there were a causal factor in a plague outbreak in the area of the balloon landings in immediate succeeding years. During the research for this article, in June 2023 I sent a query to Japan’s embassy in Washington D.C. asking for comment on the new information about the Japanese balloons, in particular the assertions about the presence of anthrax in the 1945 FBI memo to Daniel Ladd. In December 2023, I wrote a similar request to the Public Affairs Office at Ft. Detrick. Neither responded. Author Jeff Kaye is a retired clinical psychologist. He's been researching and writing on US war crimes for over 15 years, and is the author of "Cover-up at Guantanamo: The NCIS Investigation Into the Suicides of Mohammed Al Hanashi and Abdul Rahman Al Amri." Currently he writes the blog "Hidden Histories" at Substack.com. Republished from Kaye's Substack Hidden Histories. Archives March 2024 Nietzsche’s philosophy has shaped theoretical debates on the Left ever since he died over 120 years ago. This is owed, at least in part, to Nietzsche’s popularity among working-class readers. According to surveys and sociological studies of German workers at the turn of the 20th century, Nietzsche tended to trump Marx in terms of popularity, a trend that likely remains true today. However, Nietzsche’s popularity has also split workers. Different methods of reading the philosopher have emerged. For some Nietzsche was anathema to their interest in greater equality and for a life beyond the degradation of wage labor, while others embraced Nietzsche’s aristocratic agenda in ways that would often divert them from the cause of working-class liberation.1 The question as to whether Nietzsche can be combined with Marx poses a philosophical conundrum, given that both thinkers offer up a political project that draws on similar social and political problems. But while the basis of Marx and Nietzsche’s political visions could not be more diametrically opposed, the reality of this difference has become a debate on the Left. Nietzsche’s politics are often interpreted as indeterminate and metaphorical, with Nietzsche scholars on the Left tending to claim that his unabashed anti-egalitarian, anti-revolutionary, and reactionary commitments are ultimately marginal to any assessment of his philosophy. This reading and method of interpreting Nietzsche has grown popular on today’s Left, and was set by the academic trends that emerged in French philosophy after the Second World War among philosophers Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. It was also brought about by Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche as a resolutely metaphysical, and thus not a primarily political thinker. The German American translator Walter Kaufmann suggested Nietzsche be read as an apolitical thinker completely decontextualized from the historical and political concerns that drove his thought. Kaufmann thereby removed Nietzsche’s deeply-embedded, reactionary political thought and whitewashed Nietzsche’s political inflections and intentions, even removing certain words that advocated the annihilation of the weak and the failed.2 Where Kaufmann emphasized the psychological and the aesthetic insights of the thinker to the total neglect of the political, the French readers of Nietzsche tended to reduce him to an indeterminate and metaphorical thinker, whose aphorisms can be read in multiple, even contradictory ways. Derrida famously dedicates several pages of writing to an in-depth analysis of the possible meanings of a random note in Nietzsche’s journal late in life, which read: “I have forgotten my umbrella.”3 The phrase could spell the secret key to the entirety of Nietzsche’s esotericism, or it could mean nothing. These methods of reading and interpreting have made any possible Marx-Nietzsche rapprochement a seemingly easy synthesis. The latest popular intervention in the field of Left-Nietzscheanism is Jonas Čeika’s How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Marx and Nietzsche for the 21st Century Left published in 2021 with Repeater Books. What distinguishes this book from the tradition of Left-Nietzschean interventions in the lineage of French theory (Deleuze, Foucault, Derrida) is that the author aims to reopen a more explicitly political core of Nietzsche’s thought to serve as the basis for a renewed, Marxist-Nietzschean Leftism. But the political core of Nietzsche that Čeika offers is not developed or unearthed in its full depth, and misses a serious confrontation with Nietzsche’s politics. This results in a lopsided combination of Nietzsche with Marx that risks incorporating certain Nietzschean political strategies that ultimately will prove to be a dead end for any 21st century socialism. The book develops what I call an “elective affinity” reading method by attempting to combine two radically divergent philosophies—Marx and Nietzsche—and proceeds to make their thought compatible around key points of supposed commonality. Elective affinity is a reading method that analyzes the philosophical concepts and ideas of Nietzsche as detached from the historical and social forces that drove his work. It then seeks to combine the insights of the two philosophers that could not be more dissimilar in political analysis and practice, thereby rendering these differences to be non-substantial or indeterminate. It is true that Marx and Nietzsche are driven by similar concerns over the division of labor, dialectics, socialism, and morality but upon further scrutiny, it becomes clear that their critiques and political visions could not be more divergent. Importantly, this is not to say that 21st century socialist philosophy should not draw from Nietzsche when considering socialist practice and theory; it is, rather, that in drawing from Nietzsche, we must not neglect or deny the central role that anti-socialism, political economy and undeniable political reaction plays in Nietzsche’s oeuvre. To neglect this radical reactionary core in Nietzsche will risk the development of a Nietzschean-Marxism that embeds certain Nietzschean orientations that may prove damaging to any 21st century thinking of socialism. Just as working-class readers developed their own singular methods of reading Nietzsche in the early 20th century, socialists today can benefit from reading Nietzsche without any apologetic agenda that seeks to cover over his reactionary radicalism. This is why books like Čeika’s, which combine a scholarly argument but are written for a broader popular audience, are important for thinking about socialist praxis in our time. But the Left can only truly learn from Nietzsche once we have more fully analyzed the extent of his aristocratic agenda and examined how this agenda influenced his major concepts. Can Nietzsche Be Synthesized with Marx? To frame his understanding of Nietzsche’s politics, Čeika says that “Nietzsche’s work lacks an explicit political program because he identified modern politics themselves as nihilistic; because he sought a world which transcended politics.”4 This is a contradictory account of Nietzsche’s politics: we are led to believe that Nietzsche did desire to transform the world beyond politics, and that his vision is in line with Marx’s vision of political transformation because both thinkers present a version of politics that is beyond the “cold abstractions of both commerce and the state.”5 But how can Nietzsche’s politics intend to bring about a “new-found, human” (or superhuman) “control over the Earth” (“the overman shall be the meaning of the earth!”)6 while holding an agenda that does not involve any explicit political program? Despite his admission that Nietzsche aims to invent a new man capable of exerting control over the earth, his praxis is to be understood as “anti-political,” by which Čeika means that for Nietzsche, politics are something to be superseded. With this idea of anti-politics, Čeika aims to influence a particular readership, namely a Left-Nietzschean readership who might suspend Nietzsche’s actual political agenda and envision a hypothetical, socialist Nietzsche. He says the book is written “not to a hypothetical Nietzsche that became a Marxist,” but to “today’s living Nietzscheans, who have perceived, more than Nietzsche could have, the full extent of capital’s dominating tendency and its globally destructive force.”7 But as we will come to see in our analysis of the function of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, when we consider the precise way that Nietzsche critiqued conservatives in his time, the sort of anti-politics Nietzsche preaches was specifically meant to shut down class-based politics and, specifically, to mute politics centered on working-class liberation. Unless we pay attention to the design of Nietzsche’s anti-politics, we end up reading his concepts in a dehistoricized way. We risk understanding his philosophy as abstract in ways that we would seek to avoid when analyzing Marx. We read Marx as a thinker whose ideas and concepts were engaged in the class struggle of his time, a struggle that we have inherited and continue to confront. When Nietzsche is brought into our analysis, however, his political thought is somehow de-linked from the struggles of his time and his insights are treated as purely philosophical. To his credit, Čeika is concerned with answering the question of whether Nietzsche’s reactionary views and anti-socialism are deeply central to his thought. Unfortunately, he answers that they are not central to his thought, thereby leaving the reader to assume that if they were to be judged this way it would risk shutting down the entire project of uniting Marx with Nietzsche in the first place. Regardless, the position of the book is that Nietzsche’s “anti-politics” are compatible with Marx’s political praxis, and that Nietzsche’s understanding of socialism was limited to the utopian socialist movements of his time as well as vulgar socialist philosophers such as Eugen Dühring. We are led to believe that Nietzsche, much like Marx and Engels—who also critiqued Dühring—waged his critique of socialism as a fundamentally moral doctrine, “defined in terms of equality, rights, and justice. But that is not the socialism of Marx, it is not our socialism.”8 On this basis, Čeika says we can align Nietzsche’s views on socialism with Marx’s views because both saw moralistic socialism as a “disguised religious fanaticism and life-denying asceticism.”9 But these assumptions avoid the extensive literature on Nietzsche and socialism as well as the numerous references to socialism in Nietzsche’s writings, which go far beyond a critique of moralistic socialism. Indeed, Nietzsche critiqued the socialists and the anarchists on the streets of Paris in the Paris Commune of 1871, and consistently wrote about the condition of the working-class during the Second Reich under Bismarck. Any attempt to fuse Marx with Nietzsche must seriously consider the ways in which both thinkers responded to the concrete events of the Paris Commune. Both Marx and Nietzsche derive distinct understandings of the problem of the liberation of the working-class from the events of the commune. For Nietzsche, the commune is referenced in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as the rising of a barbaric slave class, and Nietzsche continues to develop a wide-ranging set of theories about the importance of pacifying the political agency of the working-class. But when we read Nietzsche via a model of elective affinity we might assume, as Čeika does, that Nietzsche’s insights into overcoming guilt in the Genealogy of Morality are somehow applicable to the liberation of the workers in the Paris Commune, or that Nietzsche might have supported the liberation of workers from what he calls their “miserable condition” in Daybreak.10 The fusion of contradictory philosophical insights completely untethered from historical or social contexts are a hallmark of the Left-Nietzschean, elective affinity reading method. As an example of the danger of elective affinity, Čeika argues that Nietzsche’s radical critique of the division of labor, had he only been familiar with Marx’s communist vision, would possibly have led him to align with Marx. He writes that the “forms of socialism [Nietzsche] was familiar with in his time were not radical enough to attack the division of labour itself.”11 This is highly misleading and it ignores any treatment of the elaborate discussions of socialism throughout Nietzsche’s oeuvre. It also refuses to grapple with his views on political economy, or the fact that Nietzsche possesses a reactionary agenda against the working class and its liberation. With this example, we are shown the strategy of Left-Nietzscheanism; it must dehistoricize Nietzsche by turning his politics into an open, indeterminate question so as to activate his philosophical concepts from the perch of a detached position. As Marxists committed to historical materialist treatment of ideas and concepts, we owe Nietzsche and Marx a more thoughtful consideration of how their ideas and concepts interact with the political contexts of their time. Thus, when dealing with Nietzsche’s political thought and seeking to forge it with Marx and Marxism, it is imperative that we understand the significance that anti-socialism played for Nietzsche. Moreover, we must understand that anti-socialism was not a marginal concern for Nietzsche’s philosophy, but a major thrust of his thought. The Problem of Moralistic Socialism for Marx and Nietzsche Let us approach the question as to whether Nietzsche and Marx align out of a shared critique of moralistic socialism, as Čeika and many Left-Nietzscheans assume. Marx and Engels offer arguably one of their most pointed critiques of moralistic socialism in the Communist Manifesto, when they take on “true socialists” such as the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, and the quasi-religious socialists Moses Hess and Wilhelm Waitling. These thinkers sought the conditions of socialism in the misty abstractions of universal truth, not in the practical force of the workers’ movement and proletariat. The problem with moralistic socialists owes not only to the absence of any serious critique of political economy in their work. It is tied to their failure to theorize a revolution of society from the standpoint of the proletariat. The true socialists err not only in their philosophical outlook; they err because they understand socialism as a purely-contemplative movement, detached from the working class. The true socialists leave no room for theory to actualize in social and political struggles because the basis of their theory is abstracted from the concrete struggles of workers, and they have no account of the way that the masses can be seized by revolutionary theory. At a superficial level of comparison, we might say that Nietzsche would critique the true socialists for their abstract, quasi-religious understanding of socialism. But this is not the core of what Marx and Engels claim is problematic in moralistic socialism; the core problem of moralistic socialism, again, is that the true socialists cannot locate the working class in any conception of revolutionary theory. With this in mind, let’s examine how Nietzsche’s political thought squares with this critique by looking at his extensive commentary on the very same class that Marx and Engels argue theory must galvanize towards revolutionary agitation, namely the working class. Unlike the true socialists, Nietzsche was a perspicuous reader in political economy, and he commented widely on the problem of the working class. As Dmitri Safronov has elaborated in his recent work Nietzsche’s Political Economy (2023), Nietzsche possessed a fundamental hostility towards any future revolution from below and to any changing of the condition of private property. For Nietzsche, the propertyless class represents the “greatest danger to society,” and any notion of a revolution that would be led by the working class’ demands would only promise the compounding of ressentiment and entrench new forms of psychological slavery on humanity.12 Without a fuller appreciation of the breadth of content in Nietzsche’s politics, it is hard to understand how Nietzsche’s vitalist insights, his embrace of amor fati, and aesthetic notions of becoming can truly offer a revolutionary view of the past in any substantive political register. But Čeika finds Nietzsche’s insights into history to be “essential to socialists” as they offer an affective strength to not be resentful towards the past. At the level of social and political memory, this remains a curious claim given Nietzsche’s profound skepticism over the legacy of the egalitarian revolutionary tradition that was opened in the modern period with the French Revolution, and which continued into the 1871 uprising of the Paris Commune, of which Nietzsche remarked it was among the saddest days of his life.13 For Nietzsche, the French Revolution was unequivocally seen as the first modern slave revolt, and he commented on the movements for the abolition of slavery in his time both in Europe and the United States, which was undergoing a bloody Civil War over the ending of chattel slavery.14 Safronov points out that for Nietzsche, “the abolition of slavery has little to do with moral enlightenment and more with perpetuating more subtle forms of impersonal and anonymous slavery.”15 Nietzsche thought the egalitarian movements from below, such as the universal movement for male suffrage and the abolition of chattel slavery, would give rise to new psychological forms of enslavement. But this assessment did not merely remain at the level of a written critique. Nietzsche’s critique of bourgeois morality is meant to be enacted, i.e., the Overmen are invited to introduce new types of inequality. Moreover, Nietzsche sought justification for newer forms of inequality, with which modern slave morality had allegedly lost touch. For example, Nietzsche redefines the notion of the “underprivileged” beyond political or economic forms of privilege with his emphasis on physiological inequality.16 In Beyond Good and Evil, when discussing the “multitude,” or the working masses, Nietzsche refers to the working masses as “unvollständige Menschen” (“incomplete individuals”) in the sense that their physiological flaws result in psychological frailty. Nietzsche’s critique of slave morality, as Safronov shows, is based on the idea that capitalism suppresses a spiritual hierarchy. Thus, part of what Nietzsche’s critique is meant to bring about is a new reality of rank and distinction bound up with differences in physiological disposition. The secret truths of this new ranking order are to be ushered in by a small group of individuals who force it upon an amorphous majority. Nietzsche’s obsession with physiology as the basis of the realization of his project is evident when we look at his more unabashedly reactionary followers such as far-Right internet personality Costin Alamariu (aka Bronze Age Pervert) who elevates Nietzsche as the modern prophet of superior breeding and racial difference. These insights may be useful for academic investigations into psychology and even psychoanalysis, but taken up as a political project, they have the practical consequence of adding psychological and physiological differences—not only economic and cultural differences—between individuals as the primary basis of inequality. Nietzsche’s political project is meant to restore a missing balance that modern slave morality has disrupted in physiological rank. This project only complicates and further weighs down the goals of class emancipation and the ending of wage labor. Moreover, Nietzsche’s entire political orientation is bent on retaining conditions of enforced labor for a subjugated class, and a profound skepticism over abolishing private property. Nietzschean Leftists, should they aim to incorporate Nietzsche’s insights into physiological and psychological ranking in their understanding of socialism, risk sidestepping Marx’s insights into the basis of class conflict at the center of social life under capitalism. Nietzsche’s emphasis on physiological difference adds new, ascriptive identity markers based in physiology to any understanding of equality, and this obscures the importance of overcoming the class-based relations of exploitation and domination that socialists should advocate. Nietzsche’s views on political economy make him diametrically-opposed to Marx and Engels in thought and practice. Without a serious and historically informed analysis of Marx and Nietzsche, the “Left-Nietzschean” project risks gleaning shallow insights from the two thinkers (at best) or incorporating reactionary concepts and frameworks from Nietzsche unbeknownst to the Left-Nietzschean (at worst). In What Way is Nietzsche Reactionary? Čeika suggests that any Nietzsche-Marx rapprochement hinges on whether Nietzsche can plausibly be understood as a reactionary. While he admits that Nietzsche held some reactionary views here and there, he suggests that these views are marginal to the wealth of insights that he offers to contemporary socialists. He further argues that Nietzsche overcomes any reactionary baggage if we isolate how he understood dialectics, particularly how Nietzsche appropriated the Hegelian notion of aufheben, or the idea that a form can be abolished while simultaneously preserving a core of its substance. Nietzsche’s dialectic involves an element of “lifting up” in the final negation, and this overcoming “is the reason Nietzsche is decidedly not a reactionary, at least if we understand a reactionary as being someone who wants society to return to a previously existing condition.”17 “Reactionary” philosophy is defined here very narrowly as simply any attempt to resurrect a glorified past. Nietzsche’s philosophy is thus exempted from this definition of reactionary because he apparently does not ascribe any romantic, historical glorification to the Greeks or any past historical age. Nietzsche is thought, rather, to offer an affirmative embrace of the future and of the present– amor fati! Despite the problems with this rather narrow definition of reaction, we are led to the view that Nietzsche possesses a dialectical understanding of capitalism, for which Čeika finds support in a passage from Twilight of the Idols entitled “In the ear of the Conservatives.” In this passage, Nietzsche speaks to the politicians and parties that aim to take humanity back to an earlier standard of virtue, and he warns, “no one is free to be a crab. There is nothing for it: one has to go forward, which is to say step by step further into decadence.”18 In Čeika’s reading of this specific passage, the kernel of Nietzsche’s aufheben of decadence is understood to be in line with Marx’s notion of aufheben, “according to which capital has to expand before it can be abolished.”19 In other words, Nietzsche’s understanding of overcoming decadence (aufheben) by stepping into it further is conflated and made to be in alignment with the general Marxist idea that capitalism as a system generates contradictions that undermine itself. This is the same move we saw before with the assumption that Marx and Nietzsche share a similar critique of socialism. Now they share a similar philosophical and political conception of dialectics as an overcoming of capitalism, as well. However, Nietzsche’s notion of overcoming decadence is not bent on any overcoming of capitalism, and this is evidenced when we analyze the precise aphorism in question, which Čeika claims does not express reactionary views. In what follows, we will demonstrate that Nietzsche’s “whispers in the ear of conservatives” were indeed expressive of a right-wing political position. We can realize this when we situate our understanding of Nietzsche as a philosopher working amidst the crisis of the bourgeois class following the Paris Commune, and the rise of imperial conquest and European colonization. In this milieu, the European bourgeoisie had lost all hope that they lived in the best of possible worlds, and these decadent social conditions gave way to what György Lukács, in The Destruction of Reason, calls “a complacent, narcissistic, playful relativism, pessimism, nihilism, et c.”20 In this context, Nietzsche’s philosophy performed a specific social task of rescuing and redeeming the bourgeoisie as a cultural and social class. Lukács shows how Nietzsche’s philosophy offered a road for the bourgeoisie of his time that avoided the need for any break, or indeed any serious conflict, with the class struggle.21 Thus, Nietzsche’s anti-politics, contrarily to how they have been defined in Čeika’s work, must be understood as a class project in line with furthering the material interests of the bourgeoisie, and designed to shut down proletarian consciousness and revolutionary possibility. We can further assess the intent of Nietzsche’s “whispers” by understanding his critique of Bismarck, wherein he broke with the German politician from an explicitly right-wing position. Lukács notes that Nietzsche’s break with Bismarck involved two points: the first was a break from the project of democratic representation, which Nietzsche saw as constituting an “increasing stultification of democratic man, and the consequent stultification of Europe and belittling of European man.”22 The second break stemmed from Nietzsche’s claim that Bismarck did not understand the true gravity of the coming age of imperial wars. Nietzsche held to the importance of upholding the Prussian military state in the face of the coming catastrophe: “The upholding of the military state is the ultimate means of adopting or sustaining the great tradition with regard to the higher type of person, the type that is strong.”23 It is hard not to read Čeika’s political account of Nietzsche’s thought as representing what Domenico Losurdo refers to as the “hermeneutics of innocence,” a reading method that makes Nietzsche’s political substance nonexistent or marginal, and based on this misreading seeks to then forge a Nietzschean Marxism.24 Nietzschean Marxism: A Lopsided Political Praxis Nietzschean Marxism can be problematic when it is built on a depoliticized understanding of Nietzsche. These problems are not merely philosophical; I want to argue that Nietzschean Marxism can have practical effects on the direction of socialist political thought and praxis. How are we, as socialists, to engage bourgeois forms of equality? How are we meant to transcend or incorporate aspects of equality in our conception of socialism and of a future socialist society? The way we understand and advocate for equality entails an engagement with philosophy, and this has direct bearing on the sort of demands that socialists advocate for the working-class. If socialist philosophers advocate a lifting of living standards for the working-class through expansion of the social safety net, are they succumbing to the slave morality of bourgeois morality? A Nietzschean Marxism will tend to cast profound skepticism on the raising of working class living standards due to this aversion not only towards equality, but towards rights as such. The Nietzschean suspicion of rights is a long-standing motif in Left readings of Nietzsche, and it can be seen in more recent Left-Nietzschean works by Deleuze and Foucault. Both read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals as setting the bar for liberation based on a continual disobedience towards institutions. Čeika similarly urges the Left to eschew a commitment to rights: “the reason that such rights are required in the first place is evidence of a fundamentally alienated society, a society based on a gulf between the rulers and the ruled, consisting of citizens whose social powers are removed from their immediate control.”25 Such strong skepticism towards bourgeois rights is warranted to an extent, but the problem comes about in the way Left-Nietzschean skepticism proffers a skepticism over rights in the very notion of a communist society to come. As Igor Shoikhedbrod convincingly argues in his work on Marx’s interpretation of liberalism, “[it is] a mistake to conclude that the historical achievements of capitalism, including the granting of formal legal rights, would be annihilated under communism. Abolishing elementary formal rights would mean reverting to pre-capitalist social relations, in which the direct domination of the master, lord, or patriarchal community actively inhibited the free development of individuals.”26 Marx does not chide equality and rights as such, as we know from his commentary on the way that each mode of production implies a new legal relation. Marx saw that rights are necessary, but not sufficient for political emancipation. In Left-Nietzschean praxis, the necessary basis of rights is thrown out the window, and this has the practical consequence of making the Left vulnerable to anarchistic practice, untethered from institutions entirely. The downside to this individualist praxis is evident in Foucault’s statement in his famous debate with Chomsky: “individual members of the proletariat desire a proletariat revolution for their own sake, that they may have more power.”27 The Nietzschean praxis not only dissuades commitments to rights, it construes of revolution in a highly unmediated and individualist way; on offer is a ludic and joyful rebellion, but one that is detached from the development of working-class interests and skeptical of parties, institutions and leadership. This suspicion of rights has the practical effect of presenting a conception of liberation that risks forcing socialists to shift their demands away from the arena of the state entirely, and this in turn kneecaps large-scale political mobilization within the parliamentary or democratic system. Nietzschean Marxism can very often cast shade on the prospect of building a workers’ party, on forming leadership within the socialist movement, and it can often lead to libertarian-socialism and anti-institutional forms of anarchism. We should always remember that Marx consistently advocated for political demands such as that of limiting the hours in the working day. A deeper appreciation of the political core of Nietzsche produces different conclusions regarding how both Marx and Nietzsche relate to one another. For example, both thinkers consider the liberal-democratic version of equality as hollow. However, Nietzsche prefers the liberal bourgeois order to any socialist doctrine of equality. Nietzsche’s praxis is thus bent on social transformation in ways that are anathema to any direction of collective, egalitarian achievement. He is particularly wary of any threat to private property.28 The question for Left Nietzscheans, given they have absorbed so many elements of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian agenda but construed this agenda as tertiary to his core concepts and insights, remains this: Will the development of a Nietzschean-Marxist praxis fall sway to a formula for revolution that ultimately represents “a declaration of war on the masses by higher men,”29 as Nietzsche put it? In other words, when we make Nietzsche the primary philosopher for the Left, we risk forcing a type of elitist adhesion to political leadership, which moreover risks a form of leadership that retrenches existing elite hierarchies, and even celebrates the status quo in terms of class power, precisely by obscuring the truth of class oppression. Due to these problems, Nietzschean Leftism must be combined with a rigorous class analysis from a Marxist perspective, and after this has been done, the Nietzsche problem will become apparent to the Left. A socialist Left that has abandoned equality runs a risk of damaging the philosophical compass that shapes its commitments to institutions, and ultimately to the development of a strategic political vision. These days, the liberal discourse on equality, rights, and representation is already tarnished and rendered suspect. Liberals have abandoned any notion of equality other than equality determined on the market. The hollowness of liberal appeals to market equality is why the discourse on rights and equality are necessary for achieving forms of working-class emancipation such as the achievement of new forms of leisure, labor rights and increases in social welfare. Nietzschean socialists will often lead the Left to assume that bettering the material condition of workers will risk miring the proletariat in forms of ressentiment that are intractable. This argument forms the backbone to the widely-read essay “Telling the Truth About Class” by G.M Tamás, which re-casts Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment in support for avoiding a conception of socialism that would aim to build working-class culture and equality. Even though Tamás does not espouse a Left-Nietzschean project as a Marxist, the influence of Nietzsche’s anti-egalitarian thought has been negatively absorbed into his core conception of socialism in problematic ways. We can benefit from Nietzsche’s politics as a theoretical surplus of insights only after we have carefully understood the reactionary agenda at the heart of his work. As Marxists, it is best not to apologetically gloss over the extent to which Nietzsche’s thought is forged in response to the revolutionary tradition, to anti-egalitarianism, and to a highly developed anti-socialist politics. When we miss that, we miss out on understanding how his indirect apologetics for capitalism and support for adhesion to status quo class relations truly works. We must develop a new reading method for Nietzsche, which avoids the apolitical and whitewashed versions of his thought that we have inherited from the post-war Nietzsche industry. This can only begin when we have a more historically-grounded confrontation with Nietzsche, one that makes no apologies for his sophisticated opposition toward the revolutionary tradition that he sought to extinguish, and in which we find our compass for political action. Notes
Author Daniel Tutt is a writer and philosopher based in Washington, DC. He is the author of How to Read Like a Parasite: Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche with Repeater Books. Republished from Cosmonaut Archives March 2024
There’s an infuriatingly common type of liberal who purports to oppose Israel’s actions in Gaza while also saying they support “Israel’s right to exist”, as though Israel’s existence is somehow separable from its genocidal murderousness. This is a state that literally cannot exist without nonstop violence and tyranny, as demonstrated by its entire unbroken history since its inception. It was set up as a settler-colonialist outpost for western imperialism from the very beginning, and that’s exactly what it’s been ever since.
History has conclusively established that it is not possible to drop an artificial ethnostate on top of an already-existing population in which the pre-existing population is legally subordinate to the new one without tremendous amounts of warfare, police violence, mass displacement, apartheid, disenfranchisement and oppression. This is not actually debatable. It is a settled matter (no pun intended). Is it possible to have a nation in which Jews are welcomed and kept safe? Of course. Many such nations exist outside of Israel, and the majority of the world’s Jews live in them. What isn’t possible is a Jewish ethnostate in historic Palestine in which the pre-existing population is treated as less than the Jewish population that does not necessarily entail nonstop violence, tyranny and abuse. This is self-evidently a direct contradiction in goals, but it’s what the liberals we’re discussing here pretend to believe is a reasonable possibility.
There absolutely could be a state in that region wherein Palestinians and Jews coexist peacefully, but it would be so wildly different from present-day Israel that you can’t pretend it would be the same state as the one we see now. It would entail such a radically dramatic overhaul of Israeli civilization, such a comprehensive dismantling of deeply ingrained racism, such a drastic restructuring of governmental and living systems, so much labor, sacrifice, humility, inner work and reparations, that to call it by the same name as the state that presently exists would be nonsensical.
And that isn’t what the liberals in question are talking about instituting when they say they oppose Israel’s atrocities in Gaza but “support Israel’s right to exist”. What they are saying is they want Israel to remain the unjust and tyrannical apartheid state that is has always been, but for the killing to stop. They want the injustice to continue, but they want its most overt manifestations to stop causing them cognitive dissonance. They want the status quo, without the murderous savagery that is necessary for the status quo’s existence. They want to pretend they live in an imaginary fantasyland where such a thing is possible. In order to make this fantasy seem more believable, liberals will pretend that the violence we are seeing can be blamed entirely on the Netanyahu government, as though things would be fine without Bibi in office despite the fact that Israel’s abusiveness began long before he showed up, and despite the fact that Israel’s atrocities in Gaza have the approval of the vast majority of Israelis. Israeli violence isn’t the product of Netanyahu, Netanyahu is the product of Israeli violence. He built his political career upon sentiments that were already in place.
They’ll also tell themselves fairy tales about a two-state solution to make their position seem more valid, ignoring inconvenient facts like that Israeli officials have been openly saying a Palestinian state will never happen, that Israeli Jews overwhelmingly oppose such a measure, and that Israeli settlements are being built in Palestinian territories with the explicit goal of making a future two-state solution impossible. Liberals subscribe to these fantasies as a kind of cognitive pacifier, which allows them to relax and feel okay with themselves despite the fact that they’re not actually endorsing any viable path toward justice.
And to be clear this isn’t just what liberals do with regard to Israel-Palestine; it’s their whole entire position on everything. On every issue their position is little more than “Maintain the status quo, but make it pretty and psychologically comfortable for me.” They never want to do what’s right, they just want to feel like they are right. Theirs is an imperialist, militarist, tyrannical oligarchic ideology with a bunch of feel-good social justice bumper stickers slapped on top of it. A boot on your neck and a flower in its hair. That’s who liberals are. It’s who they’ve always been. Phil Ochs released the song “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” in 1966, and they haven’t changed one iota ever since. The issues change, their arguments change, but their “maintain the status quo but let me feel nice about it” values system has remained exactly the same for generations. ArchivesMarch 2024 |
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