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7/25/2021

Red star over Iraqi Kurdistan. By: Marcel Cartier

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Workers decorate an office of the Kurdistan Communist Party - Iraq. With one lonely member of parliament, one might think the KCP is a marginal force, but its influence far outstrips its electoral performance. | Kurdistan TV via KCP
​SULAYMANIYAH, Iraqi Kurdistan—For those who have followed the development of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in northern Iraq since its formation after the Kurdish rebellion of 1991, the names Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani have been inextricably tied to the region’s politics.

Their respective parties, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP), have long dominated the political landscape, dividing the territory of the autonomous region between themselves after a period of intense inner-Kurdish warfare in the 1990s. Today, they each maintain their own Peshmerga military formations, and the KRG often appears to function as a one-party state, though paradoxically, there are two of them.
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Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein brandishes a sword when being sworn in for another term as president in October 2002. | AP

Given the omnipotence of the Talabani and Barzani families in Iraqi Kurdistan today, what then are the significance of other political formations? The extent of the corruption and nepotism of both major parties, as well as their monopoly on power, led to the emergence of the Gorran Movement in 2009. Though they have managed to achieve some electoral success, public perception of them as a genuine opposition party that can tackle the mismanagement of the region appears to have dulled. There are some minor Islamist parties that have seats in parliament, as well as the New Generation Movement that won eight seats in the 2018 election.
​Then there is the oldest party in the Kurdistan Region, the Kurdistan Communist Party. With one lonely MP, one could be forgiven for having the impression that the Communists are a marginal force. The party’s influence and importance to the region, however, far outstrip its electoral performance.

The rich history of the Iraqi/Kurdistan Communist Party

​The Kurdistan Communist Party was technically founded in 1993, although in reality this simply meant the branch of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) in what had become the Kurdistan Region was now solely responsible for its own affairs in the new de facto independent area.

The Iraqi party dates its foundation back to 1934. It played a vital role in the formation of the country’s working-class organizations, including the establishment of trade unions. The party has experienced periods of legality and illegality throughout its existence and had a contradictory relationship with the Ba’ath Party that ruled the country for nearly four decades.

In 1963, the U.S.-backed Ba’athist coup that deposed Abd al-Karim Qasim led to thousands of Communist Party members being slaughtered in the following days, with party leader Salam Adil among those executed. However, in the mid-1970s, relations between the Communist Party and the Ba’athists warmed somewhat, with the Communists initially viewing Saddam Hussein positively when he came to power, even referring to him in glowing terms as Iraq’s own variant of Fidel Castro in the aftermath of nationalization campaigns. This led to their inclusion in the National Progressive Front in 1975, which meant accepting the Ba’ath Party’s dominance over Iraqi political life.

However, certain contradictions soon began to appear irreconcilable. The Communists were proud of their heritage as a multinational party and advocated an Iraqi state with full rights for both of its dominant nations, Arabs and Kurds. This had initially been the line of the Qasim government that had taken power in 1958, which the Communists generally supported. By contrast, the Ba’athist ideology could make no room for Kurds in its Arab nationalist orientation unless they agreed to a position of subservience and second-class citizenship.
​The ICP was banned in 1979, going underground and waging an armed struggle from the mountains of Kurdistan against the Saddam Hussein regime. Though the Iraqi party, as well as its Kurdish sister party set up in 1993, opposed the U.S. invasion of 2003, the democratization of politics that has taken place since has allowed the ICP to take on a renewed prominence in Iraq. They entered the Saiirun Alliance in 2018, which became the largest bloc in Baghdad’s parliament.

But with Iraq effectively split in two, given the level of control that the KRG enjoys over its own affairs (even in light of Iraqi federal intervention after the botched 2017 independence referendum), I wanted to know to what degree the Kurdistan Communist Party remains relevant.
Picture
Hawre Gorran, Deputy Secretary-General of the Kurdistan Communist Party in Sulaymaniyah. | Courtesy of Marcel Cartier
​In Sulaymaniyah, where the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) is the dominant political force, I was able to speak with the Deputy Secretary-General for the Communist Party in the governorate, Hawre Gorran.

On the right of nations to self-determination

​Gorran begins by making it clear that the KRG should be united, not divided into two camps that are each under the control of either the KDP or PUK. He is clear in his opposition to the vast privatization that has taken place under each party in the areas of health, education, and electricity, but also keenly aware that division between the Talabani and Barzani cliques has been catastrophic.

“The Kurdistan Communist Party played a very important role in mediating between the KDP and PUK during the civil war that was fought between 1994 and 1997. Our leader at that time, Aziz Muhammad, helped bring them together to end the conflict,” he says.

Muhammad, who passed away in 2017, was a legendary figure on the Kurdish and Iraqi left and was symbolic of the Communist Party’s approach to unity between Arabs and Kurds, serving as leader of the Iraqi party from 1964 to 1993, then of the independent Kurdish party after that.
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Kurdish civilians flee Saddam Hussein’s army in March 1991, leaving the city of Kirkuk and bound for Erbil. | Sayyad / AP
​Although fraternity between nations has long been the Communist Party’s objective and one of its important rallying cries, the KCP today is supportive of independence for Kurdistan—and not just the Iraqi part, but also those parts of the Kurdish homeland that sit within the borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iran.

As Gorran explains, “Each part of Kurdistan has its own special conditions. We cannot tell them how to conduct their struggle in Turkey, for example. But the same right of self-determination and secession that exists in Catalunya or Ireland certainly exists here in Kurdistan, too. This is a right, not something that has to be gifted to us.”
​When asked about the KCP’s relationships with other communist parties in the region who may oppose Kurdish independence, Gorran attempts to toe a diplomatic line, saying it would probably be better if I ask those parties why they take such a position. In the end, however, he says, “It is clearly related to chauvinism. This is not a communist position. It has nothing to do with Lenin’s conception of a nation’s right to be self-determining.”

​On the reactionary role of the United States in Kurdistan

​This question was wrapped up in another extremely important point that needed to be clarified, which is the relationship between Kurdistan as an oppressed nation and the role of the United States in the region.

Much of the apprehension that I have often encountered in regards to the Kurdish question from leftists and those calling themselves communists is that Kurds are merely auxiliaries of U.S. imperialism in the region, and therefore their national liberation struggle is not worthy of support. But the KCP makes it clear that they are opponents of U.S. imperialism, and the party is not afraid to speak out against the machinations of Washington in the region or criticize certain decisions taken by parties or organizations they otherwise have friendly relations with.

Hawre Gorran says, “The U.S. is working for its own interests all over the Middle East. It doesn’t care about the Kurdish people. For example, they opposed the 2017 independence referendum, and when the Iraqi government captured Kirkuk, an agreement was signed for oil extraction there that clearly benefits imperialism.”
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The Kurdistan Communist Party and the Iraqi Communist Party both opposed the 2003 U.S. invasion, but following democratization, both have taken on a renewed prominence in political life. Here, a woman in Kirkuk argues with a U.S. soldier about access to city hall in April 2003. | AP
​
​In regards to the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that is waging war against Turkish colonialism both inside Turkey and in the Kurdish Region of Iraq, Gorran says, “We have good relations. We don’t get involved in criticizing their struggle, because it is up to them how to conduct it. We have some ideological differences, but we want to maintain good relations, and that is what is important.”

But what of the PKK’s allies in northern Syria, who have continued to entertain relations with the United States even after the military defeat of the so-called Islamic State? I ask about this strategic orientation, given that in the summer of 2020 an oil deal was struck between the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and a U.S. oil company, Delta Crescent.
​Gorran says in response, “Any agreement that is made has to take people’s needs into account. This agreement offers no protection for the people. The United States and Russia are playing a role in controlling resources in the Middle East. Any force in Rojava should be prioritizing and protecting people’s interests.”

On women’s liberation

​Perhaps the most impressive, progressive element of that struggle in northern Syria, as well as its most concrete achievement, has been the central role that women have played in it. Indeed, the image of the fearless Kurdish woman fighter has become prevalent across the world in recent years as a result.

However, there is nothing necessarily new about women playing roles equal to men in the leftist movement in Kurdistan. According to Hawre Gorran, equality of women is “extremely important” to the KCP. He elaborates, saying, “It’s essential that women are not only members of the party, but that they are able to elevate themselves to be leading cadre. In our Central Committee, it is a rule that at least 25% of members need to be women.”
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An office of the Kurdistan Communist Party. | via Marcel Cartier
The KCP also has an organization dedicated to the liberation of women, called simply the Kurdistan Women’s League. In 2008, its leader Nahla Hussain al-Shaly was decapitated in Kirkuk, a sign of how dangerous doing such work in the region can be.
​
​Gorran explains, “The law is not working. We have collected thousands of signatures for a secular system. As it stands now, if a woman is abused and tries to flee to a shelter, any man in her family can go to pick her up and take her home. Legally, the man has a right over her. The woman has no rights.”
I ask what stands in the way of changing these backward, patriarchal relations. “The mentality of people is a big obstacle. Often, it is their interpretation of religion that makes people believe that things are naturally supposed to be this way.”

​On the struggle for democracy in Kurdistan

​If women’s rights in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq continue to be stalled, and only incremental progress has been made, then what does this say about the state of democracy in general in the region?

Gorran says, “If we look at the history of any country, we can see that the democratic struggle takes a long time. We had the struggle against the Ba’athist chauvinists, then the inner-Kurdish war. Democracy has not yet reached a higher level. For instance, Massoud Barzani has no official position, yet he still remains the main point of contact for everything in the KRG. Therefore, he effectively runs everything.”

He is also eager to point out that while parties such as the PUK and KDP continue the ruling family’s dominance in leadership positions, the KCP has a different idea of democratic norms. “We have changed our General Secretary four times since our party was founded in 1993. This is very different from the other parties.”

This kind of non-democratic management of the major parties also has the effect of blurring the lines between the government and what should be fighting organizations of the working class, the trade unions. Gorran says that “Many unions were created here after 1991. Some are not controlled by the PUK or KDP, but some are. For example, they control the Journalists’ Union.”

This was quite a revelation. It certainly doesn’t seem far-fetched to believe that the Barzani and Talabani families having this degree of influence over the union of the region’s press workers would translate into—or help to reinforce—their control over the media and dissemination of information.

Gorran says that the fighting power of many unions is compromised by these relationships, thus helping maintain the impression that there is more democracy than there often is. “One union, for instance, had a demonstration at a government office. But this union is allied to the PUK. It, therefore, becomes a sort of controlled opposition.”

According to Gorran, “You used to only be able to get public sector jobs by being a member of one of the two main parties. Nowadays, this is also applying to the private sector.”

In December 2020, anger and frustration at the government’s corruption, nepotism, mass unemployment, and non-payment of salaries to public sector workers for several months led to a series of demonstrations across Sulaymaniyah. In the crackdown unleashed by security forces, ten people were killed.

For the Communist Party, these demonstrations were certainly worthy of support, and they played a key role in amplifying the voice of the protesters and rallying to their side, even as they cautioned against the use of violence as a tactic. After nine days, however, the movement seemed to run out of steam, not least because of the harsh repression unleashed by the authorities.

“After these protests, only one or two politicians resigned. This shows that we have a long way to go.”

​Toward a communist horizon in Kurdistan

Far from being a political party that can be summed up as operating on the fringes of Iraqi Kurdistan’s social life, I found that in reality, the Kurdistan Communist Party is continuing to build upon its rich history of militant, working-class struggle. Its necessity surely appears validated by the current situation in the region, one in which the democratic struggle feels stifled, and in which the emerging opposition forces of recent years have ebbed in popularity.
​Everywhere I traveled in the region, I seemed to spot a KCP office, and more importantly, perhaps, there always seemed to be huge respect and reverence paid toward senior Communists when they appeared in public spaces.

A few years before he died in 2017, the legendary former leader of the party, Aziz Muhammad, received the Immortal Barzani Medal from Massoud Barzani, then still president of the Kurdistan Regional Government. Despite their often very different political outlooks, it was clear that Muhammad—much like the party—was respected as a vital part of the fabric of this region. When Muhammad died, the Kurdistan Region’s head of foreign relations, Falah Mustafa, made reference to his “humble life, serving values, and principles.”
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​Miguel Villagran / AP
​I’m reminded at this point of something Hawre Gorran said as we were wrapping up the interview. Speaking about the importance of maintaining a Marxist perspective in the 21st century, he said “It’s essential that we stay true to our principles. We know that only socialism is the answer to not only Kurdistan’s problems but those of the whole world.”

Author

Marcel Cartier is a critically acclaimed hip-hop artist, journalist, and the author of two books on the Kurdish liberation movement, including 2019’s Serkeftin: A Narrative of the Rojava Revolution, which was one of the first full accounts in English of the civil and political structures set up in northern Syria after 2012.


This article was republished from People's World.

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7/25/2021

Climate Change Report: Jeff Bezos & the New Wild West Show. By: Bruce Gagnon

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Bezos does not care that each and every one of his joy-ride space launches punches a larger hole in the Earth's ozone layer exacerbating our climate crisis. This is all about him, his money, his fame, and his super-sized ego.
​Jeff Bezos (the richest man in the world) successfully took his new wild west rodeo show to the edge of space and once returning to Mother Earth had the audacity to lecture us earthlings on a few things. Yahoo News reported Bezos saying:

“We need to take all heavy industry, all polluting industry, and move it into space. And keep Earth as this beautiful gem of a planet that it is.”

In this same interview, Bezos discussed his plans to expand Blue Origin’s space tourism business over the coming decades, a venture that has the potential to pump massive amounts of carbon and other chemicals into the atmosphere. Unlike ground-based emitters like cars or coal-powered plants, rocket emissions are expelled directly into the upper atmosphere, where they linger for years.

Dr. Stuart Parkinson, Executive Director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, writes:….the fuel combination used by [Bezos is] a higher carbon fuel. Research by the University of Colorado indicates that this can damage the stratospheric ozone layer – not only leading to higher levels of damaging ultra-violet radiation reaching the Earth’s surface, but also causing a global heating effect likely to be considerably greater than that from the carbon emissions alone. And the aim of these journeys? A few minutes of zero-gravity experience and a nice view. It is hard to see this as anything more than environmental vandalism for the super-rich. As the CEO of Amazon, for years Bezos fought against company efforts to unionize, even amid credible reports of inhumane, exploitative conditions for Amazon delivery drivers and warehouse workers. He said, “I also want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this.”

The truth is that virtually all space technology ‘research and development’ since the dawn of the space age was done by NASA and the military industrial complex. That means the taxpayers paid for it. And now when it is possible to make gobs of money from space tourism, colonization, and mining, the capitalist dominated US government is eager to privatize space operations. They don’t care what the rest of the world thinks. America, after all, is the ‘exceptional’ nation.

It was during the Obama administration that a new law called Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, sometimes referred to as the Spurring Private Aerospace Competitiveness and Entrepreneurship (SPACE) Act of 2015, was signed by the president.

The UK Independent reported in 2015:Much of the ownership of space is regulated by the “Outer Space Treaty”, a document that was signed by the US and Russia among other countries in the 1960s. As well as saying that the moon and other celestial objects are part of the “common heritage of mankind”, it says that exploration must be peaceful and bans countries from putting weapons on the moon and other celestial bodies. The US government has now thrown out that understanding so that it can get rid of “unnecessary regulations” and make it easier for private American companies to explore space resources commercially. While people won’t actually be able to claim the rock or “celestial body” itself, they will be able to keep everything that they mine out of it.

Planetary Resources, an American company that intends to make money by mining asteroids, said that the new law was the “single greatest recognition of property rights in history”, and that it “establishes the same supportive framework that created the great economies of history, and will encourage the sustained development of space”. So Bezos was wearing the cowboy hat as a message to the world that a new ‘gold rush’ has begun in space and that it will be controlled by rich fat-cat psychopaths like him. They intend to circumvent United Nations space law like the Outer Space and Moon Treaties that state the “heavens are the province of all humankind.”

Bezos does not care that each and every one of his joy-ride space launches punch a larger hole in the Earth’s ozone layer exacerbating our climate crisis. This is all about him, his money, his fame, and his super-sized ego. If we hope to survive on planet Earth and give life to future generations, then the global public must demand that space stooges like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Richard Branson, and the rest of their ilk, are restrained and prevented from playing god.

~ Bruce Gagnon Coordinates the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. Check out our short space issues videos on our website.

Author

Bruce Gagnon is the Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.


This article was republished from People's World.

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7/25/2021

Serve the People: The Eradication of Extreme Poverty in China. By: Tricontinental

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Women who migrated to the Wangjia community participate in local activities at the community centre in Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

These photographs were made during a trip to Guizhou Province visiting people and sites linked to China’s targeted poverty alleviation programme. The drawn lines extending on top of the images remind us of architectural sketches. Socialism, after all, is about the constant work of construction. This visual language speaks to the name of the series of publications on socialist construction that this study inaugurates.

Contents

  • Part I: Introduction
  • Part II: Historical Context
  • Part III: Poverty Alleviation Theory and Practice
  • Part IV: Targeted Poverty Alleviation
  • Part V: Case Studies
  • Part VI: Challenges and Horizons
  • Epilogue

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Grandma Peng Lanhua in her two-hundred-year-old home, renovated and serviced with electricity, running water, and satellite television in the village of Danyang, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Part I: Introduction ⤴

​Grandmother Peng Lanhua lives in a two-hundred-year-old rickety wooden house in a remote village of Guizhou Province. Born in 1935, she grew up in a China that was under Japanese occupation and entered adolescence during the Chinese Revolution.
​
Peng is one of the few people in her community who did not want to relocate as part of the government’s poverty alleviation programme when the government designated her house unsafe to live in. Since 2013, eighty-six other households whose houses were deemed too dangerous or for whom jobs could not be generated locally were moved to a newly built community an hour’s drive away. But Peng has her reasons for not moving. She is eighty-six years-old and lives with Alzheimer’s disease. In addition to low-income insurance and a modest pension, she receives supplemental income from a new grapefruit company that leased her family’s land. The company, whose dividends are distributed to villagers like Peng as part of the national anti-poverty efforts, was established to develop the local agricultural industry. Peng’s daughter and son-in-law live next door in a two-storey house they built with government subsidies. Her children are employed. In other words, her basic needs are cared for, and relocation is voluntary.

‘We can’t force anyone to move, but we still have to provide the “three guarantees and two assurances”’, says Liu Yuanxue, the Party cadre sent to live in the village to see that every household emerges from extreme poverty. He is referring to the government poverty alleviation programme’s guarantee of safe housing, health care, and education, as well as being fed and clothed. Liu visits Peng on a monthly basis, as he does with all the households in the village. Through these visits, he comes to know the details of each person’s life.

‘The floor is too messy’, Liu says, jokingly reprimanding Peng’s daughter-in-law as he enters the large wooden house. She is also a member of the Communist Party of China. On the wall, a poster of Chairman Mao and, next to him, President Xi Jinping, pay homage to two of China’s socialist leaders who bookend the course of Peng’s life. Below their portraits sit a weathered table and a dusty terracotta water jug, an internet router flashing green beside them. A string of ethernet cables and wires stretch to different corners of the house (each house gets free internet and CCTV satellite television for three years before a subsidised rate sets in). There are energy-saving lightbulbs in each room and a satellite dish installed next to Peng’s hanging laundry. An extension of the house was built with a toilet and shower equipped with solar-heated running water, the mud floor poured over with concrete. As Lenin said, ‘Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country’. Strengthening the Party in the countryside and meeting the concrete needs of the people have been pillars in China’s fight against poverty. Liu’s visit to Peng’s house is just one everyday scene in that process.

The fact that Peng has lived in this house for half a century is also a product of the Revolution; in the 1970s, during the Cultural Revolution, the house was confiscated from a rich landlord and redistributed to three poor peasant families, including Peng’s. That cadres like Liu visit her on a monthly basis, that her house has been made safe to live in through the recent renovations, and that there is internet to connect the poorest of rural villages with the world is a continuation of this revolutionary history. After all, ensuring that the country’s workers and peasants like Peng get housed, fed, clothed, and cared for is part of China’s long struggle against poverty and a fundamental stage in constructing a socialist society.

The Greatest Anti-Poverty Achievement in History

​On 25 February 2021, the Chinese government announced that extreme poverty had been abolished in China, a country of 1.4 billion people. This historic victory is a culmination of a seven-decade-long process that began with the Chinese Revolution of 1949. The early decades of socialist construction laid the foundation that was deepened during the reform and opening-up period. During this time, 850 million Chinese people were lifted and lifted themselves out of poverty; that is to say, 70 percent of the world’s total poverty reduction took place in China. In the most recent ‘targeted’ phase that began in 2013, the Chinese government spent 1.6 trillion yuan (US$246 billion) to build 1.1 million kilometres of rural roads, bring internet access to 98 percent of the country’s poor villages, renovate homes for 25.68 million people, and build new homes for 9.6 million others. Since 2013, millions of people, state-owned and private enterprises, and broad sectors of society have been mobilised to ensure that – despite the pandemic – China’s remaining 98.99 million people from 832 counties and 128,000 villages exit absolute poverty.[1]

In 2019, as China entered the last stages of its poverty eradication scheme, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said, ‘Every time I visit China, I am stunned by the speed of change and progress. You have created one of the most dynamic economies in the world, while helping more than 800 million people to lift themselves out of poverty – the greatest anti-poverty achievement in history’.[2]
​

While China has been fighting poverty, the rest of the world, especially the Global South, has experienced a downward turn. United Nations agencies report a great reversal in poverty elimination outside of China: in 2020, over 71 million people – most of whom are in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia – slipped back into poverty, marking the first global poverty increase since 1998.[3] It is estimated that the economic crisis accelerated by the pandemic will drive a total of 251 million people into extreme poverty by 2030, bringing the total number to over one billion.[4] That China was successful in combatting poverty in a time of such reversal is neither a miracle nor a coincidence, but rather a testament to its socialist commitment. This stands in contrast to capitalist societies’ indifference to the needs of the poor and the working classes, whose conditions have only worsened during the pandemic.

This study looks into the process through which China was able to eradicate extreme poverty as a fundamental step in constructing socialism. Based on a range of Chinese and English sources, the study is divided into five key parts: historical context, poverty alleviation theory and practice, targeted poverty alleviation, case studies, and the challenges and horizons ahead. Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research also conducted interviews with leading Chinese and international experts and made field visits to poverty alleviation sites in Guizhou Province, where the last nine counties lifted out of poverty are located. There, we visited poor villages, industrial projects, and relocation sites. We spoke with peasants, Party cadres, business owners, workers, youth, women, and elders who have been directly impacted by and have participated in the fight against poverty. Woven throughout the text, their stories are just a few among the millions who have contributed to this historic process.
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A mural of Mao Zedong displayed in a rural village and local ‘red tourism’ attraction in Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Part II: Historical Context ⤴

Meeting the People’s Increasing Needs for a Better Life

My mother has two daughters, a young son who is now working in Guangzhou, and seven grandchildren. She has worked really hard to support her three children’s educations. She herself was only able to finish the second grade at primary school and started working soon afterwards by selling vegetables, going out very early in the morning and coming home late at night. Life was really tough when I was young. We ate corn grits all the time and never had rice. Now mother is here, cooking meals for the children, buying groceries, and taking her walks now and then. We would be worried if she stayed alone in her old home. Now it’s much easier for her to go back, as it only takes two or three hours. She travels back to her old home on special occasions. Sadly, my father, who had never been here, passed away a couple of years ago. His greatest hope was to come and visit here, but he died of a brain haemorrhage.
​
– He Ying, chairman of the All-China Women’s Federation and deputy secretary of the Party branch of the Wangjia community, Wanshan District, Tongren City.

​
He Ying is a relocated member of the Wangjia community, where she became a Party leader. Her mother is sixty-nine years old, just three years younger than the Chinese revolution. Her lifetime traces the multigenerational struggle against poverty that the country has undertaken. Days before the official proclamation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on 1 October 1949, Chairman Mao Zedong said: ‘The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humankind, have now stood up’.[5] China’s national liberation came after what is referred to as a ‘century of humiliation’ at the hands of European colonial powers, a bloody civil war with Nationalist forces, and fourteen years of resistance against Japanese fascism that claimed up to thirty-five million Chinese lives.[6] Internally, the Nationalist Party, warlords, and feudal landlords prioritised their class interests over the well-being of the people and the country.
​
During this period, China would go from being the biggest global economy to one of the world’s poorest countries. Accounting for one-third of the global economy in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the country’s GDP would fall to less than 5 percent by the PRC’s founding. In 1950, only two Asian and eight African countries had lower per capita GDPs than China: Myanmar, Mongolia, Botswana, Burundi, Ethiopia, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Lesotho, Malawi, and Tanzania.[7] In other words, the PRC was the eleventh poorest nation in the world upon its founding. When the communists came into power, they were faced with the challenge of reversing the country’s long term economic and social decline, beginning with meeting the basic needs of the country’s impoverished peasants and working class.

From 1949 to 1976, under Mao’s leadership, the Chinese government focused on improving the quality of life for its population, which had grown from 542 to 937 million people.[8] In the first years of this period, poverty was addressed by transforming private ownership of the means of production into public hands and redistributing land from landlords and warlords to poor peasants. Poverty, after all, is an issue of class struggle. By 1956, 90 percent of the country’s peasants had land to till, 100 million peasants were organised in agricultural cooperatives, and private industry was effectively abolished. People’s Communes organised collective ownership of the land and means of production and distributed collective wealth, enabling the agricultural surplus to be invested into industrial development and social welfare.[9]

In the twenty-nine-year pre-reform period (1949-1978), China’s life expectancy increased by thirty-two years. In other words, for every year after the Revolution, more than one year was added to the life of an average Chinese person. In 1949, the country’s population was 80 percent illiterate, which in less than three decades was reduced to 16.4 percent in urban areas and 34.7 percent in rural areas; the enrolment of school-age children increased from 20 to 90 percent; and the number of hospitals tripled. The decentralisation of the health and education systems from elite urban centres to poor rural areas was key. This process included establishing middle schools for workers and peasants and dispatching millions of barefoot doctors to the countryside. Significant advances were made in women’s participation in society, from abolishing patriarchal marriage customs to increasing access to education, health care, and childcare.[10] From 1952 to 1977, the average annual industrial output growth rate was 11.3 percent.[11] In terms of productive capacity and technological development, China went from not being able to manufacture a car domestically in 1949 to launching its first satellite into outer space in 1970. The Dongfanghong satellite (meaning ‘The East is Red’) played the eponymous revolutionary song on loop while in orbit for twenty-eight days.[12] The industrial, economic, and social gains in the transition to socialism under Mao formed the foundation of the post-1978 period.

By the 1970s, it became clear that China’s economy required an infusion of technology and capital, and that it needed to break its isolation from the world market. As China’s leader Deng Xiaoping later wrote, ‘Pauperism is not socialism, still less communism’.[13] The government introduced a range of economic reforms, including opening the economy to the world market, but – because China remained a socialist country – the public sector remained dominant and free of foreign control.

During this period, China’s economy grew at a sustained pace never before seen in human history. Between 1978 and 2017, China’s economy expanded at an average rate of 9.5 percent per year, growing in size by almost thirty-five times.[14] Economic growth, however, is not an end in itself, but a means to improve the lives of the people. Between 1978 and 2011, the number of people living in absolute poverty dropped from 770 million (80 percent of the population) to 122 million (9.1 percent), measured by setting the poverty line at 2,300 yuan per year.[15]

Pursuing rapid economic growth, however, came with great environmental and social costs. Mass migration to the cities heightened the rural-urban disparity, and the focus on eastern coastal industries left the western and central regions heavily underdeveloped. According to the World Bank, China’s Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality based on income) increased from 29 percent in 1981, peaking at 49 percent in 2007, and falling to 47 percent in 2012[16]. Socially, this period produced unequal access to public services such as pensions, social insurance, education, and health care. Environmentally, rapid development took a toll on the country’s air, water, and land.

It is not surprising that addressing inequality became a principal task under President Xi (2013-present). At the nineteenth National Congress of the CPC in 2017, the twice-a-decade event that determines the national policy goals and election of top leadership, Xi spoke of the new era of socialism and, with it, the evolution of the principal contradiction faced by Chinese society:

As socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era, the principal contradiction facing Chinese society has evolved. What we now face is the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life. China has seen the basic needs of over a billion people met, has basically made it possible for people to live decent lives, and will soon bring the building of a moderately prosperous society to a successful completion. The needs to be met for the people to live better lives are increasingly broad. Not only have their material and cultural needs grown; their demands for democracy, rule of law, fairness and justice, security, and a better environment are increasing. At the same time, China’s overall productive forces have significantly improved and in many areas our production capacity leads the world. The more prominent problem is that our development is unbalanced and inadequate. This has become the main constraining factor in meeting the people’s increasing needs for a better life.[17]

The reform and opening-up period is therefore seen as the pre-condition for building a modern socialist country. It is during this period when two of the three official strategic goals were achieved, ensuring that the people are have a decent standard of life and that their basic needs are met. Continuing the work of poverty alleviation and ensuring that poor people enter a ‘moderately prosperous society’ (xiaokang) in the rest of the country is a final step in this period. In the years since Xi’s speech, China has mobilised its people – specifically the poor themselves – as well as the government and the market to eliminate extreme poverty, marking a key phase in the transition to socialism.
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Peasant workers till the land in an organic bamboo fungus company, which was established to help lift Longmenao, a village that is officially registered as poor, out of poverty in Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Part III: Poverty Alleviation Theory and Practice ⤴

One Income, Two Assurances, and Three Guarantees

China’s elimination of extreme poverty comes a decade ahead of the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which set ‘eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, including extreme poverty’ as its principal target.[18] While millions of Chinese people emerged from poverty during the phase of rapid economic growth, economics itself cannot explain this achievement.
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For this study, we spoke with Justin Lin Yifu, former chief economist of the World Bank (the first from the Global South) and founder of New Structural Economics. Lin is also a standing committee member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Congress National Committee and a professor at Peking University. Lin classifies two primary approaches to poverty reduction, which he calls ‘blood transfusion’ and ‘blood generation’. The former – a preferred model in Western economies – is characterised by humanitarian aid or welfare mechanisms to guarantee that basic needs are met. Meanwhile, the latter describes development-oriented poverty alleviation that creates employment and increases the incomes of the poor. These two approaches alone, however, were unable to eliminate poverty in the poorest pockets of China. According to Lin, ‘In areas that are short of natural resources, far away from the market, and have poor transportation and infrastructure, such as the “Three Regions and Three Prefectures”,[19] targeted assistance is needed’.

The comprehensive concept of targeted poverty alleviation – officially implemented in 2015, concluding at the end of 2020 – was developed and innovated based on decades of domestic and international experiences. ‘China’s poverty alleviation’, Lin summarises, ‘is a growth-driven, government-led strategy that combines social support and the peasants’ own effort, features the “blood generating” or development-oriented pattern, and guarantees basic needs through social security’. Stressing the role of government leadership, he says: ‘In contrast to the rest of the world, the Chinese government has played a crucial part. Poverty eradication would not have been achieved merely through the role of the market had the government not paid great attention to the issue of the poor people’. In other words, a combination of the ‘visible’ and ‘invisible hand’, together with the mobilisation of broad sectors of society, was the hallmark of China’s poverty alleviation in this ‘targeted’ phase.

China’s Targeted Poverty Alleviation (TPA) programme can be summarised by one slogan: one income, two assurances, and three guarantees. Regarding income, the international poverty line is set by the World Bank at US$1.90 per day, measured in 2011 prices and based on the average poverty line of the world’s fifteen poorest countries. China’s poverty line was last raised to 2,300 yuan per year in 2011 (set at 2010 prices), which represents US$2.30 per day when adjusted to Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), exceeding the World Bank standard. Adjusted to 2020 prices, the annual minimum income is 4,000 yuan, while the per capita income under the targeted alleviation programme of 10,740 yuan per year is much higher.[20]

Understanding that poverty cannot be addressed by income distribution alone, China’s programme takes on a multidimensional approach. First theorised by Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, the concept of multidimensional poverty looks at the intersecting and complex factors associated with poverty that are not accounted for just by measuring income. Elaborating upon Sen’s work, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative adopted the Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in 2010, measuring ten indicators across the three dimensions of health, education, and basic infrastructural services. Their 2020 report, launched a decade after MPI’s adoption and a decade before the Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDG) deadline, found that 1.3 billion people, or 22 percent of the world’s population, live in multidimensional poverty.[21] In comparison, according to the US$1.90-a-day poverty line, 689 million people – or 9.2 percent of the global population – lived in extreme poverty in 2017, prior to the pandemic.[22]

In addition to a minimum income, China’s poverty alleviation programme ensures that five other indicators are met: the ‘two assurances’ of food and clothing and the ‘three guarantees’ of basic medical services, safe housing with drinking water and electricity, and free and compulsory education, which in China is for nine years. We spoke with Wang Sangui, dean of the National Poverty Alleviation Research Institute of Renmin University about the relationship between China’s indicators and the MPI framework: ‘Multidimensional Poverty is only seen as a research approach’, he said, ‘and so far has not been adopted by any country to measure the size of the poor populations at the national level because of its great complexity’. However, by including the five key indicators, he adds, ‘In fact, China has followed a multidimensional approach in poverty eradication’. As an expert advisor to the State Council Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development, Wang helped develop the standards for China’s programme. ‘How do you classify drinking water as safe? First, the basic requirement is that there must be no shortages in water supply. Second, the source of water must not be too far, no more than twenty minutes round-trip for water retrieval. Last, the water quality must be safe, without any harmful substances. We require test reports that confirm the water quality is safe. Only then can we say that the standard is met’.
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First Secretary Liu Yuanxue speaks with a local villager during routine home visits in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Part IV: Targeted Poverty Alleviation ⤴

Don’t Use a Grenade to Blast a Flea

Targeted poverty alleviation, also known as precise poverty alleviation, was introduced for the first time during President Xi’s visit to Shibadong village in Hunan Province in November 2013. ‘Don’t use a grenade to blast a flea’, Xi advised the local government on how to address the root causes of poverty. Instead, he said, act as an embroiderer approaching an intricate design. This approach was implemented as the government strategy in 2015, guided by four questions: Who should be lifted out of poverty? Who carries out the work? What measures need to be taken to address poverty? How can evaluations be done to ensure that people remain out of poverty?

Defining Poverty: Who Gets Lifted?

On 28 August 2018, I came to Danyang, whose Party organisation was considered ‘weak and loose’ and whose work had not been pushed hard enough, which was why I was sent by the higher-level authorities to strengthen the building of the organisation. The organisation gave me a brief report about the villagers at first, and I started by touching base with the people to find out which households were the targets of poverty alleviation. Otherwise, the work wouldn’t be conducted properly. To get closer to the people, I had to understand human nature well […] The local people were poor for many reasons, including water shortages, low crop yields, diseases, disabilities, and the lack of education of children. Their problems and conflicts had been passed from generation to generation.

– Liu Yuanxue, first secretary stationed in the village of Danyang, Wanshan district, Tongren City, Guizhou Province.
Knowing who the poor are in a country of 1.4 billion people is an enormous undertaking. Recognising the limitations of a sampled-data statistical method, China moved towards a household identification system, which means getting to know every single poor person in the country, their conditions, and their needs. This was done through a combination of sending people to the villages, practising grassroots democracy, and deploying digital technologies. In 2014, 800,000 Party cadres were organised to visit and survey every household across the country, identifying 89.62 million poor people in 29.48 million households and 128,000 villages. More than two million people were then tasked to verify the data, later removing inaccurately identified cases and adding new ones.[23]

While income is the primary deciding factor, housing, education, and health are also taken into consideration when listing a ‘poverty-stricken household’. Village committees, township governments, and the villagers themselves are mobilised to assess the status of each household. Public democratic appraisal meetings, for example, are held to facilitate discussions among community members about each family’s situation and whether they should be removed from or added to the poverty registration list.[24] This on-the-ground process was paired with the creation of an advanced information and management system, touching on all parts of the poverty alleviation process across the country. Big data is used to monitor the situation of each of the nearly 100 million individuals, facilitate information flow between governmental departments, and identify important poverty trends and causes.[25] Mobilising the people and gaining public support are at the heart of the effort to carry out this work.

Mobilisation: Who Does the Lifting? ⤴

Move Amongst the People as a Fish Swims in the Sea

Record of Visit, 10 June 2019: Today I received a call from He Guoqiang. He said a door lock [in] his resettlement flat was broken. I went to his home and helped him contact the property management team and the construction crew for repairs. I took this opportunity to teach him to exercise his rights as a homeowner and to contact the property management and construction crew. He Guoqiang said the next time he encounters such a problem, he [will] know how to solve it.[26]

– He Chunliu, a thirty-four-year-old woman of Bouyei ethnicity who was stationed as a poverty-relief cadre in Libo County between 2018 and 2020.
There is no organisation without the organisers. As of June 2021, the CPC has more than 95.1 million members – 27.45 million of whom are women – and 4.9 million primary level Party organisations, which includes villagers’ committees, public institutions, government-affiliated organs and enterprises, and social organisations.[27] If the CPC were a country, it would be the sixteenth most populous in the world.
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The targeted phase of poverty alleviation required building relationships and trust between the Party and the people in the countryside as well as strengthening Party organisation at the grassroots level. Party secretaries are assigned to oversee the task of poverty alleviation across five levels of government, from the province, city, county, and township, down to the village. Most notably, three million carefully selected cadres were dispatched to poor villages, forming 255,000 teams that reside there.[28] Living in humble conditions for generally one to three years at a time, the teams worked alongside poor peasants, local officials, and volunteers until each household was lifted out of poverty. In this process, many cadres were unable to return home to visit families for long stretches of time; some fell ill in the harsh natural conditions of rural areas and more than 1,800 Party members and officials lost their lives in the fight against poverty.[29] The first teams were dispatched in 2013; by 2015, all poor villages had a resident team, and every poor household had an assigned cadre to help in the process of being lifted, and more importantly, of lifting themselves out of poverty.[30] At the end of 2020, the goal of eliminating extreme poverty was reached.

Liu Yuanxu, a forty-seven-year-old man with a daughter in her senior year of high school, is among the Party secretaries who were sent in 2018 to Danyang, a village of 2,855 people in the southwestern province of Guizhou. Liu describes arriving in Danyang, where he does not speak the local dialect, and where 137 of the village’s 805 households were designated as poor. He was one of 52 cadres assigned to the village, each with different responsibilities. He told us about his day-to-day work:

I was responsible for five poor households, but it is now for four, since one person died. Back then I visited every family on an electric bike and took care of everything for them. I kept in touch with the young people on WeChat and the elders by phone. They could call me for anything. I went to every villager group to investigate who was nice and who was difficult. I’ve resolved problems through drinks and talks with the villagers who now have a very good relationship with me. Now the government maintains a register of poor households, marginal households, and key households. Digital tools help the government know when people get sick or if those who can work are employed. We also visit the villagers every month to better understand the reality of their situation.

Unlike models that rely heavily on non-governmental organisations and international assistance, China’s poverty alleviation programme draws its strength from mobilising its citizens. Cadres like Liu are an essential bridge between implementing government policy and understanding the concrete conditions and demands of the people. The more than ten million cadres and officials who have mobilised in the countryside have been essential in building public support for and confidence in the Party and the government.

In 2020, Harvard University published a study, Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time, for which they interviewed 31,000 urban and rural residents between 2003 and 2016 about their support for the CPC.[31] During this period, Chinese citizens’ satisfaction with their government increased across the board from 86.1 percent to 93.1 percent. The greatest increase in government satisfaction was seen in the rural township-level areas, which increased from 43.6 percent approval to 70.2 percent approval, particularly among lowest-income residents and those from the poorer inland areas. This growing support stems from the increased accessibility and quality of health care, education, and social services, as well as from the improved responsiveness and effectiveness of local government officials. Though the study ended in 2016 before the campaign’s completion, the poverty alleviation programme and the government’s effective response to COVID-19 have continued to build public support.[32]
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Shortly after Wuhan emerged from the COVID-19 lockdown, York University Professor Cary Woo led a survey of 19,816 people across 31 provinces and administrative regions. Published in the Washington Post, the study found that 49 percent of respondents became more trusting of the government following its response to the pandemic, and overall trust increased to 98 percent at the national level and 91 percent at the township level.[33] Eliminating poverty and containing the pandemic can be seen as two major victories of China and its people in 2020.


United Front for Poverty Alleviation

Ge Wen is from the eastern city of Suzhou, where she is the deputy director of sales for a culture and tourism company. The government promoted collaboration between the industrialised eastern part of the country with the lesser-developed western regions to support even development across the country. As part of this effort, the company Ge works for was paired with a remote village in Guizhou Province to develop an eco-tourism resort and stimulate the region’s tourism industry. The company invested 130 million yuan to construct infrastructure and renovate homes, which are leased for a twenty-year term by villagers. Of the village’s 107 households, only twenty families – all with the surname Zhang and of the Dong ethnic minority – were still living there when the project began. At the end of the lease, the houses and surrounding amenities will be returned to the villagers, some of whom have been hired as workers at the resort. Ge is one of eight employees assigned by the company to move from Suzhou to bring this project to fruition. The task is not without challenges. In addition to infrequent visits home during her three-year term, she also faced cultural, linguistic, and climate differences. ‘I’m not used to the humidity here’, she told us. High in the mountains of Guizhou, it can rain for months at a time. The location is also remote; when Ge and team were building the resort, the tarmac road to the site had to be excavated manually because the cranes could not be brought in. This stays true to the local saying, ‘Guizhou, where the sky is not clear for three days and flat land does not stretch for three li [1.5 kilometres]’.
Beyond cultivating Party and public support, the poverty alleviation campaign mobilised broad sectors of society to participate in a united front. ‘We should mobilise the energies of our whole Party, our whole country, and our whole society and continue to implement targeted poverty reduction and alleviation measures’, President Xi said in his speech at the Nineteenth National Congress. ‘We will pay particular attention to helping people increase confidence in their own ability to lift themselves out of poverty’.
The objective of achieving common prosperity with the expectation that those who get rich – particularly in the industrialised eastern coastal areas – will uplift the rest is a core element of this approach, and one that lies at the heart of Deng’s often misinterpreted quote, ‘let a few get rich first’.

​The poverty alleviation campaign followed this principle and used a mass mobilisation strategy reminiscent of the Mao-era to establish East-West cooperation. From 2015 to 2020, nine eastern provincial-level administrative units representing 343 counties invested 100.5 billion yuan in government and social assistance for the western regions, mobilised more than 22,000 local enterprises to invest an additional 1.1 trillion yuan, and exchanged 131,000 officials and technical personnel.[34]
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In 2013, the city of Tongren in the southwestern Guizhou Province, where He Ying relocated and where Liu Yuanxue’s village is situated, was paired with Suzhou, the economic centre of the eastern coastal province of Jiangsu. The collaboration included economic, infrastructural, educational, and technical exchanges. From April 2017 to 2020, Suzhou provided 1.71 billion yuan in financial aid and 240 million yuan in social assistance to implement 1,240 projects. In addition, 285 eastern enterprises developed projects in Tongren, investing 26.41 billion yuan and generating employment for 44,400 people in the poverty alleviation programme. In the process, 19 industrial and agricultural parks were created and targeted projects boosted local tourism by 30 percent. To deepen the political and educational exchange, 5,345 Party cadres, government officials, and technical personnel were transferred from Suzhou to Tongren, including Tongren’s deputy mayor Zha Yingdong, who moved from Jiangsu to Guizhou to lead the poverty alleviation work.[35]

Beyond East-West cooperation, public and private enterprises, educational institutions, the military, and civil society also made significant contributions. The central departments invested 42.76 billion yuan, which helped bring in 106.64 billion yuan in capital and train 3.69 million grassroots technicians and officials.[36] Meanwhile, 94 state-owned enterprises invested more than 13.5 billion yuan in 246 counties, implementing nearly 10,000 assistance projects. Of the country’s 2,301 national social organisations, 686 established formal poverty alleviation projects, raising charitable funds and offering voluntary services.[37] Through the Ten Thousand Enterprises Helping Ten Thousand Villages campaign, 127,000 private companies participated in supporting 139,100 poor villages that benefited 18 million people.[38] The military helped 924,000 people in 4,100 poor villages and contributed to the construction of schools, hospitals, and special industrial projects. The Ministry of Education organised 44 colleges and universities to be part of the campaign, carrying out research projects and dispatching expert and training teams in agriculture, health, urban and rural planning, and education, among other fields.

One such collaboration was the Hebian experiment,[39] which brought university experts and students to Hebian village in Yunnan Province, a community that is predominantly made up people of Yao ethnicity. Led by Li Xiaoyun, chair professor at China Agricultural University, the team helped research, raise funds, and develop tourism, educational, and agricultural projects to increase and diversify income for the community. In our interview with Li, he commented on the mass mobilisation that took place:

It is very difficult for people outside of China to understand the poverty alleviation campaign of the last eight years, and particularly how it was organised – especially the remarkable mobilisation. The most difficult question that my friend asked me was, ‘How was the government able to convince everyone to contribute resources and to go to the poor areas?’ This is what we always try to articulate through our very simple statement. This is China’s special political institution. Chinese society is different from Western societies, because it is based on the collective and not on the individual. This is reflected in how the society is organised. The government works with social organisations, where the political and social networks merge into a whole – into a leading force, organised vertically and horizontally, which enables everybody to join this social campaign.

In short, the poverty alleviation programme touched virtually every corner of society. The victory against extreme poverty, therefore, cannot be seen as a singular programme under a singular mandate by the Party and the government. Rather, it should be seen as a mass mobilisation across multiple sectors of Chinese society using diverse and decentralised methodologies at a breadth and scale that is unprecedented in human history.
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​Resettled residents work in a clothing factory established in the Wangjia community, Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Methodology: How Did China Alleviate Poverty? ⤴

Industry

Ms. Liu is one of the top earners on the Yishizhifu short video platform that helps poor peasants generate extra income. She is a peasant and mother who has earned over 200,000 credits (equivalent to about 20,000 yuan) for the videos she makes and posts online, which can be exchanged for goods through the platform. Not only have the videos supplemented her income by providing goods and time-saving appliances such as a rice cooker and a microwave oven; they have also provided her with an outlet to showcase her culture. One of the first women drummers in her community and a member of the Dong ethnic minority group, Ms. Liu uses the platform to post videos of Dong music, crafts, fashion, and drumming. In one video, she stars in a locally produced television drama. ‘We filmed it ourselves,’ she told us. ‘If I told you how we did it, you would be very touched by the process’. As she pointed to the screen, she said, ‘This is me, this is my younger brother, my sister-in-law, and my neighbour’. Together they wrote a script about the story of a young, poor boy who could not find a wife and had to turn to creative methods to attract a suitor.
The introduction of e-commerce in rural areas was a key part of the poverty alleviation programme. Between 2016 and 2020, online businesses in poor counties grew from 1.32 million to 3.11 million, which helped increase rural households’ income while connecting the countryside to online markets.[40] One such platform is Yishizhifu, launched in Tongren in June 2020, which trains peasants to produce short videos by setting up over twenty filming studios in poor communities in the city and surrounding villages. Users can upload their videos onto the mobile application and receive points for views that can later be exchanged for products available on the platform. For every minute of video watched, ten credits are awarded and distributed: six to the video producer, one to the viewer, two to the studio, and one to the Yishizhifu platform. Goods such as clothing, household appliances, agricultural products, farming equipment, and even cars are secured through partnerships with state and private enterprises. These businesses donate goods to the platform either to receive tax credits, offload excess stock, or use the platform as a source of free advertising. In this example and countless others, industrial development – facilitated by e-commerce and internet access – is a means of connecting the countryside with the city, generating employment and supplementary income, and building cultural confidence among peasants and the poor.
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The targeted poverty alleviation strategy developed five core methods to lift poor people – or, rather, help them uplift themselves – out of poverty: industry, relocation, ecological compensation, education, and socialist assistance. The first of the five core methods is to develop local production. With that goal in mind, public and private sectors got involved to provide poor people with access to financing (loans, subsidies, and microcredit), technical training, equipment, and markets. Through the TPA programme, industrial poverty alleviation policies impacted 98 percent of poor households and established 300,000 industrial bases for agricultural production as well as animal breeding and processing across each of the 832 poor counties. Over 22 million poor people are employed in these bases, plus another 13 million in rural enterprises. Poverty alleviation workshops (small-scale centres of production organised on idle land or in people’s homes) contributed to nearly tripling the per capita income of poor households from 2015 to 2019, reaching 9,808 yuan per year.[41] This in turn has helped develop new poverty alleviation models linked to tourism and the green economy.
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​A local food vendor and user of the Yishizhifu short video platform showcases her cooking in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Relocation

Atule’er is a village in the mountains of Sichuan Province whose ancestry dates back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), when it was deemed strategic to farm in the mountains during wartime. At an altitude of 1,400 metres, the village was until recently only accessible through 800 metres of poorly constructed rattan ‘sky ladders’ that dangled from the edge of the cliff. The commute to schools, local markets, health services, and public transport was hours away and dangerous. One of the residents, Mou’se said, ‘It took me half a day to climb down the cliff to buy a packet of salt’. Four years ago, the government spent one million yuan to replace the ladder with a safer steel structure. Mou’se and eighty-three other families in Atule’er resettled in May 2020 during the poverty campaign.[42]
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For families who are living in extremely remote areas or exposed to frequent natural disasters, it is near impossible to break the cycle of poverty without moving to more habitable environments. A total of 9.6 million people – roughly 10 percent of the people lifted from poverty – moved from rural to newly built urban communities. New housing was constructed along with 6,100 kindergartens, elementary, and middle schools; 12,000 hospitals and community health centres; and 3,400 elder-care facilities; and 40,000 cultural centres and venues were built or expanded.
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The main challenge when transitioning from the countryside to cities is finding employment for the relocated families. To address the challenge of finding employment for the relocated families, the government developed training programmes and new industries. As a result, 73.7 percent of all of relocated people who are able to work have found jobs and 94.1 percent of relocated families with members who can work have found employment.

Ecological Compensation

A little green button in the Alipay mobile app Ant Forest takes users to a screen with an animated seedling in the middle. In return for walking or using a shared bicycle system rather than private transportation, users are rewarded with green credits that can be exchanged for planting trees on an interactive mobile application. Launched in 2016 by the company then known as Ant Financial Service Group, which is linked to the internet giant Alibaba, the online payment platform encourages its 550 million users to lower their carbon footprint.

Despite the game-like design, the trees are not virtual. As of March 2020, 122 million trees have been planted through Ant Forest, covering 112,000 hectares heavily concentrated in arid regions in Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai, and Shanxi. As a result, 400,000 jobs were created linking environmental conservation to poverty alleviation in public welfare-protected areas and ecological economic forests. In 2019, Ant Forest won the UN Environment Programme’s top award, Champions of the Earth.[43]
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Ecological conservation and restoration, particularly in designated poor areas, have been among the key methods to address poverty, primarily through job creation in the ecological sector. Since 2013, 4.97 million hectares of farmlands in poor regions have been restored as forests or grasslands. In the process, 1.1 million poor people have been employed as forest rangers, while 23,000 poverty alleviation cooperatives and teams for afforestation (the creation of new forests) have been formed.[44] This is part of China’s continual greening efforts over the past two decades. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), China was ranked as a global leader in reforestation and accounted for 25 percent of the total growth in leaf area between 1990 and 2020.[45] The greening efforts have been taken up not only through government efforts, but also through private sector initiatives like Alipay.

Education

When Tibet was formally incorporated into the PRC in 1951, education was controlled by the monasteries with the exception of a few private schools. Schools were reserved for monks and officials, resulting in only 2 percent enrolment of school-aged children. From 1951 to 2021, over 100 billion yuan was spent to develop a modern education system that has attained 99.5 percent enrolment for primary school, 99.51 percent enrolment for middle school, and 39.18 percent enrolment for tertiary-level education as of 2021. In 2012, Tibet was the first among the country’s regions to offer a free fifteen-year education programme from preschool to senior high school, which includes tuition, accommodations, textbooks, meals, transportation, and other costs.[46] The policy was expanded to include university students from rural households registered as poor. From 2016 to 2020, 46,700 impoverished undergraduate students benefitted from this policy.[47]
Education has been central in breaking the cycle of intergenerational poverty. To fulfil the TPA programme’s guarantee of education, great efforts were made to ensure that the 200,000 school dropouts from poor families (as of 2013) had adequate support to return to school. By 2020, 99.8 percent of China’s elementary and secondary schools met the basic educational requirements, with 95.3 percent of schools connected to the internet and equipped with multimedia classrooms. Large governmental funding programmes have offered educational assistance to 640 million people and improved nutrition in schools, reaching 40 million students every year.[48]
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Developing quality educators was also prioritised: 950,000 teachers were recruited through the Special Post Programme to teach in impoverished areas upon graduation. The National Training Programme added an additional 17 million rural teachers to the less-developed central and western regions, 190,000 of them dispatched specifically to remote poor and ethnic minority areas. In line with the socialist tradition, these efforts ensure that young people receive first-hand knowledge of life in the countryside, at the same time cultivating the next generation of educators.

These gains in education were reflected not only in villages, but across the country. In the seventh national census of 2020, the average years of education increased from 9.08 to 9.91 years, while the number of people with tertiary education nearly doubled from 8,930 to 15,467 per 100,000 from 2010 to 2020.[49] The profile of those who are able to access tertiary education has also shifted. According to Tsinghua University’s Chinese College Student Survey, from 2011 to 2018, over 70 percent of all first-year students in Chinese universities were the first in their families to attend university, and nearly 70 percent of these students are from rural areas.[50] In the World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report 2020, China ranked first in women’s enrolment in tertiary education, as well as in the proportion of women professional and technical workers.[51] The education reforms of the past decade tackled the multidimensional factors of poverty, the urban-rural divide, and gender.
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Students on their short walk home from school in the Wangjia community, Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

Social Assistance

The final of the five key methodologies employed to alleviate poverty focused on providing social assistance. China’s first social safety net traces its history back to Shanghai’s Urban Minimum Living Guarantee System (dibao) in 1993, which was extended to all urban areas in 1999 and to rural China in 2007.[52] Under this programme, any household whose per capita income was lower than the local poverty line had the right to apply for social assistance. This is considered the largest cash social assistance programme in the world.[53] Dibao was complemented with other programmes for education, healthcare, housing, disabilities, and temporary assistance, while a pension system was established for people in rural areas in 2009 and in urban areas in 2011.
​
The rural subsistence allowance grew from 2,068 yuan to 5,962 yuan per year from 2012 to 2020;[54] 9.36 million people have been covered either by these funds or by extreme poverty relief funds, and 60.98 million people receive a basic pension. These programmes cover virtually all rural and unemployed urban residents.[55]

However, China’s social system is under great strain. Faced with declining birth rates of 1.3 children per woman according to the last census and an aging society, China recorded its first social insurance deficit last year. The number of elders (people above 60 years-old) is expected to reach 300 million by 2025, and the Chinese population is expected to start shrinking by 2050. China is currently undergoing reforms in the urban worker pension system to address the pension deficit, which could reach 8 trillion yuan within the next decade.[56]

Recognising that disease and poor health are key factors causing rural poverty, improving health care in the countryside has been key to the TPA programme. To improve health provision in poor areas, 1,007 leading hospitals were paired with 1,172 county-level hospitals, which sent 118,000 health workers to establish 53,000 projects across the country. These doctors treated 55 million out-patients and performed 1.9 million surgeries. Meanwhile, 60,000 medical students received free training in return for working in rural medical institutions upon graduation.[57]
 ​

Evaluation: How Is Poverty Alleviation Measured? ⤴

‘Can households with immediate relatives who are village cadres be rated as poor?’ students ask in a cross-examination session with the local officials of Pingbian Yi Ethnic Township. Students and professors from Southwest University in Chongqing travelled 300 kilometres to rural Sichuan. They have been trained and assigned by the government to evaluate the successes and shortfalls of the local poverty alleviation efforts. Only the night before do they advise the local officials of the villages that they want to inspect. On these randomised spot-checks, the students visit homes and register their questionnaire answers in a centralised application, review bank statements and housing appraisal certificates, survey housing conditions, and verify whether the indicators have been met.[58]
To carry out a programme on this scale requires a sophisticated system of checks and balances at every level and in every region. Since 2016, an assessment has been carried out yearly at the national level, led by the State Council Poverty Alleviation Office, the Central Organisation Department, and member units of the State Council Leading Group on Poverty Alleviation and Development.[59] Their task is to evaluate the effectiveness of poverty reduction in a given area, including confirming the accuracy of household information, the adequacy of measures taken, and the appropriate use of funds, among other factors. The assessment is carried out in three principal ways: inter-provincial cross-assessment, third-party assessment, and social monitoring.

Inter-provincial cross-assessment: There were twenty-two provinces in central and western China that signed the agreement to cross-examine each other’s work, progress, and the credibility of their reported results.[60] Each province sends dozens of Party cadres to perform on-site evaluations to see whether the households were correctly added or removed from the poverty registration list, if adequate assistance was provided, what problems were encountered, and what lessons were learned.
​
Third-party assessment: The Leading Group Office of Poverty Alleviation and Development entrusted relevant scientific research institutions and social organisations to verify that a county is indeed poverty-free once it is declared so by the local authorities. These teams conducted surveys and field verifications to evaluate the reliability of the data. The third-party assessment agencies were determined through a public bidding process. [61] Over the course of the programme, a total of 22 third-party agencies surveyed 531 counties, over 3,200 villages, and 116,000 households in the field.[62]
Social monitoring: Beyond official evaluations and third-party evaluation processes, the poverty alleviation work was also assessed through random checks performed by cadres. For example, visits were made to poor households to see if the families’ situations were accurately reported, such as by verifying income sources.[63]

Evaluation results: The systematic evaluation processes revealed issues in the poverty alleviation programme, including the failure to meet the annual poverty reduction goals, mismanagement of funds, falsification of data, inaccuracy in adding and removing poor families from the registration list, and other disciplinary violations.[64] Among these problems is corruption, which the Party under President Xi’s leadership has openly addressed and criticised. In 2018, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection (CCDI), China’s top disciplinary body, established a campaign to fight corruption in the poverty alleviation programme. Since assuming office in 2013, Xi has made anti-corruption a high priority, targeting not only the ‘fleas’, but also the ‘tigers’. From 2012 to the first half of 2020, over 3.2 million officials were punished for corruption-related offenses.[65] From January to November 2020, the government found that one third of the 161,500 processed corruption cases – including 18 high-level officials – were linked to poverty alleviation.[66] In the process of constructing socialism, combatting corruption is part of the ongoing work of the class struggle that holds accountable those who are illegally profiting from public coffers. Unsurprisingly, the anti-corruption campaign has enjoyed widespread popular support, building confidence in both the Party and the government to stay true to their mandate of serving the people.

Part V: Case Studies ⤴

Danyang Village

​Spanning 18.9 square kilometres and encompassing a population of 2,850 people (825 households), Danyang is one of the largest villages in the Wanshan district of Tongren City, Guizhou Province in southwest China. Poverty in Danyang stemmed from a variety of factors, including water shortages, low crop yields, diseases, disabilities, and a lack of education for children. Since many young adults left the village for cities to find jobs, children and elders were often left behind.

In August 2018, the forty-seven-year-old district government official Liu Yuanxue was sent to Danyang village as a first secretary (a local leadership position in the Party) to focus on poverty alleviation and Party building work. Since 2013, more than three million first party secretaries and 255,000 teams were dispatched across the country to work as part of the TPA programme for at least two years.

When Liu arrived, there were still 137 poor households (443 people) of the 825 households in the village. The village Party organisation (with fifty-eight members, including one poor member, five female members, and seventeen members over sixty years old) was listed as one of tens of thousands of Party organisations that needed to be strengthened.

According to Liu, a total of fifty-two Party cadres were dispatched from township and district-level governments to assist poor households in Danyang. They are expected to visit each family four times per week and address problems ranging from housing to employment to health care. ‘The Party organisation should take the lead so that their employment and social issues can be addressed’, Liu said.

In Danyang, villagers used to work on their own plots of land, but in 2017, the village founded the cooperative to develop industries ranging from vegetable and fruit production to pig farming and even e-commerce. ‘The rural industry will grow faster and better only after peasants are mobilised and small scattered rural lands are combined into big-scale farming’, Liu told us. ‘We should also guarantee that everyone from the village can benefit from development’.

For example, in 2017, 48 peasants in Danyang signed a 10-year contract with the co-op to lease their 100 mu (equivalent to 6.7 hectares) of land to build vegetable greenhouses. The peasants charged an annual rental fee of 800 yuan per mu and the cooperative hired 10 peasants to manage the greenhouses. By 2020, a total of 242,000 yuan in dividends was paid to the villagers. In 2019, with an investment of 4.8 million from government subsidies and company loans, the rural cooperative also established a 13-mu pig farm by collaborating with Wens Foodstuffs Group Co., Ltd. The company provides technology and pig stock while the cooperative provides land and employees. Around 6,000 pigs will be raised every year. Between 2014 and 2018, 132 households totalling 431 people were lifted out of poverty. The last five poor households, totalling 11 people, were lifted out of poverty in 2019.

​Wangjia Resettlement Area

​With 663 mu (44.2 hectares) of land, the Wangjia community is the largest relocation area in Tongren. Since 2016, a total of 4,322 households (18,379 people) have been relocated from rural villages in Sinan, Shiqian, and Yinjiang counties. Sixty-five percent of the community belongs to eighteen non-Han ethnic groups (the majority of Chinese people are of Han ethnicity). The community is served by a team of eleven cadres who are responsible for all areas of life, work, and Party building, most of whom are elected by the residents every five years.

After relocation, each resident receives 1,500 yuan in living subsidies and an additional 3,000 yuan in compensation if their previous house was demolished. Of those monies, each person pays 2,000 yuan to receive a twenty-square-metre apartment, equalling 100 yuan per square metre (lower than the commercial housing price of 4,000 yuan per square meter in Tongren). The water, electricity, and gas fees are exempted for six months.

The government also built three kindergartens, one elementary school, and one middle school with quality facilities and teachers that have the capacity to educate approximately 2,800 students. Villagers who used to spend forty minutes by bus to get to a hospital or at least one or two hours on foot to get to school are now a five-minute walk from community health centres and schools.

But not everyone can adapt easily to city life after relocation, especially elders who spent almost their entire lives in villages. The community Party branch launched the ‘six firsts’ projects to facilitate the adjustment to city life, teaching newly relocated residents skills from how to use crosswalks and elevators to how to shop at the supermarket. Local students are organised as ‘volunteer grandchildren’ to take care of elders, who are in turn incentivised with credits that can be exchanged for rice to participate in these activities. Serving the people is a value and a practice cultivated amongst the young and the old alike.

To create new employment, the local government renovated a three-story office building into what is called a poverty alleviation mini factory to develop industry. The mini factory created 600 jobs at six firms in the community, including an embroidery workshop, clothing factories, and an artificial intelligence project under China’s leading tech giant Alibaba. The community also encourages rural women to find jobs or start their own businesses, generating income for their families while building their confidence and sense of independence. For example, the local Women’s Federation helps train women and sell their homemade handicrafts.

One factory owner, Gong Changquan, grew up in a county nearby and left home in 1997 to work in the southeastern Guangdong and Fujian provinces. In 2017, at the encouragement of the local government, he returned home to contribute to poverty alleviation. In June 2019, the forty-three-year-old Gong, with an investment of 1.8 million yuan of his own money and 200,000 yuan in government funding, set up a 1,500-square-metre factory, which during peak season can produce daily around 5,000 pieces of clothing to fulfil both domestic and international orders. His rental fees were also waived by the government for three years.

Gong hired sixty-seven workers from the community and pays each worker 2,000 to 3,000 yuan per month after two months’ training.

As of May 2021, over 98 percent of the 7,000 working-age people in the Wangjia community are employed. The remaining 2 percent includes those who care for children and people with disabilities. There has only been one family – a couple with disabilities – that decided to move back to their village from the relocation area.
Picture
Greenhouses were introduced to stimulate the local agricultural industry in the village of Danyang, Wanshan District, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

​Part V: Challenges and Horizons ⤴

​Challenges and the Road Ahead

​Overcoming extreme poverty in China is an achievement of a size and scale that has never been seen in history. Rather than being the end point, it is one phase in the construction of socialism that must be deepened and expanded. To ensure prosperity in the countryside, the Chinese government has put forth a programme for rural revitalisation to consolidate and expand on the achievements in poverty alleviation. Modernising agricultural production, protecting national food security, developing high-standard arable land, and closing the urban-rural gap are key among the goals of rural revitalisation.[67]

China is on track to become a high-income country by 2025 at the end of the fourteenth Five-Year Plan period (a high-income country is defined by the World Bank as one that has a gross national income per capita of over US$12,696 by 2020 standards).[68] China’s per capita GDP passed the US$10,000 threshold for the first time in 2019, which it maintained in 2020 despite the pandemic.[69] Put into context, that is a tenfold increase in the last twenty years, when the country’s per capita GDP was less than US$1,000. As it emerges into high-income status and builds a moderately prosperous society (xiaokang), China is faced with a new era of challenges. Not only is the country faced with ensuring that the people lifted out of poverty remain out of poverty; it also seeks to move beyond a focus on mere survival (in other words, moving beyond extreme poverty) and towards creating a better standard of life for all.

The country’s focus has now moved from extreme poverty to relative poverty, ensuring that more people can participate and benefit from social and economic life. Addressing relative poverty was a key focus of the Fourth Plenary Session of the Nineteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in 2019, for whom improving social assistance and public services such as access to child and elderly care, education, employment, medical services, and housing are key to this long-term goal and ongoing process of eliminating poverty.[70]

What are the implications for the rest of the world as China moves into the next historic phase of poverty elimination? The historic defeat of extreme poverty and the COVID-19 pandemic does not provide a model that can be directly implanted onto other countries, each of which has a specific history and distinct path to shape. Rather, China’s experience offers lessons and inspiration for the world, particularly for countries in the Global South. The task of uplifting the world’s poor is a key pillar of China’s proposal to build a ‘shared future for humanity’.[71] This vision, advocated by President Xi, imagines a future that is based on multilateralism and shared prosperity in the face of Western hegemony.

In its international relations, China has demonstrated its priority to build bridges over militaristic interventions, medical internationalism over privatisation, and infrastructural investments and financial aid that do not come with strings attached. China offers a vision for the Global South that five hundred years of Western imperialism and capitalism has failed to provide. According to the World Bank, the landmark Belt and Road Initiative will directly help uplift 7.6 million people in participating countries out of extreme poverty and another 32 million out of moderate poverty. China is promoting hundreds of other projects based on multilateral cooperation in trade, infrastructure, green industry, education, agriculture, health care, and people-to-people exchanges that encourage the development of countries and people in the Global South.[72]

‘Poverty alleviation is the single best story that China can tell because it is so rich and so ubiquitous in terms of its importance in the world’, Robert Lawrence Kuhn, an expert on China and the creator of the documentary Voices from the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty (2020), said in a conversation Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. However, Western-controlled media has stifled these stories and prevented them from reaching much of the world. In one of many such examples, Kuhn’s documentary, jointly produced by PBS (US) and CGTN (China), was taken off-air for ‘not meeting accepted standards of editorial integrity’, Kuhn explained. ‘We had 4,000 broadcasts on PBS, and the irony was that the one production that caused a lot of problems was on poverty alleviation, which was the topic that was the most neutral and beneficial to the world. It is a sign of the times. It is not a superficial problem but a very serious one’.

This study aims to bring forth some of these stories, both from those who were lifted – and lifted themselves – out of poverty and from those who helped do the lifting. It seeks to shine a light on some of the complexities, theories, and practices involved in this historic feat. Building a world in which poverty is eradicated is an essential part of constructing socialism. To be able to study, have a house, be well fed, and enjoy culture are aspirations shared by the working classes and poor across the world. It is part of the process of becoming human.
Picture
From the countryside to Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

​Epilogue

​He Ying wakes up every morning at 7:30am, ready to serve her community of over 80,000 people who have recently relocated. She picks her youngest son up from school at 4:30 pm, a five-minute walk away from her apartment. ‘Upstairs is where I live, downstairs is where I work’, she told us. When she still lived in the village, the trip from home to the school used to take her and her son one-and-a-half hours. In order to earn an income for her family, He Ying became a migrant labourer in the southern province of Guangdong. During this time, the first of her two children stayed in the village in the care of her mother, who He Ying could only visit once a year. This is the reality for millions of China’s ‘left behind children’[73] in the countryside. It is also one of the main reasons that He Ying decided to permanently relocate to Wangjia when the opportunity arose, despite initial opposition from her mother, father, and mother-in-law.
​
‘Some of the elders came back to the village for a few days and then returned because they didn’t know how to adapt to urban life’, she said. ‘Some don’t know how to cross the street, others don’t know how to take elevators’. As a poor person who relocated, He Ying became a Party leader in the process of lifting herself out of poverty. She now is a leader in the Wangjia relocation community, where she has held the hands of countless elders learning to use zebra crosswalks and ride elevators.

The Party office in the community is decorated with pictures and slogans. On the wall there is a poster that reads ‘The Loving Heart Station’, with photographs showing appreciation of the workers who lead cooking classes, literacy programmes, and cultural activities. Written in big letters is the welcoming phrase: ‘Rest here when tired; drink water here when thirsty, charge your phone here when it’s out of power, heat your food here when it’s cold’. We were waiting to speak with He Ying when an elderly woman walked in and began to ask us how to turn on her gas stove, since she had never owned one before, not knowing that we were just visitors.

Through the All-China Women’s Federation, He Ying is helping build the confidence of newly migrated peasant women to overcome the many challenges they face. Through personal experience, she recognises the difficult transition that people have to make in relocating from the village to the city. In the early months of the relocation, He Ying’s husband grew uncomfortable witnessing his wife’s newfound independence as a leader. However, he has since come around, especially after witnessing the community mobilisation during the fight against COVID-19.

‘I told [the local women] that women could hold up half the sky’, He Ying said. ‘If they could work, they would get more respect from their husbands and alleviate the [financial] burden on their families’. He Ying’s family of ten, which used to live in an 80-square-metre house together, now lives in three spacious apartments totalling 200 square metres. They live in a community with three well-equipped and well-staffed kindergartens, one elementary school, and one middle school. There are two community health centres within a five-minute walk. Though He Ying’s mother is still not adapted to urban life, and perhaps may never be, she is finding her way: ‘Gradually, I’m getting used to the new life here. At least I can cook meals for the kids’, she told us.

He Ying shows us a video on her cell phone of her mother leading a line of children behind her, all seven grandchildren in one place. One of them is He Ying’s elder son, who she had to leave behind to her mother’s care when she was a migrant worker. He is now studying elevator maintenance at a vocational school in the city. ‘I hope that after graduation, he can come back and work in our community to serve the people’, she tells us. She says that technicians are needed to maintain the community’s sixty-four elevators that so many families are just learning to use for the first time.

He Ying has photographs on her phone of her old dilapidated wooden home in the village. She speaks about the village with a sense of loyalty, but without romanticism. ‘I’ll bring my children back to my old village so that they can remember the life of yesterday and cherish the life of today’.
Picture
Deputy Secretary He Ying picks up her youngest son from school in the Wangjia community, Tongren City, Guizhou Province, April 2021.

​Acknowledgements

This study was led by Tings Chak (翟庭君), Li Jianhua (李建华), and Lilian Zhang (张丽萍).
Xiang Wang (photography) and Daniela Ruggeri (illustration).

​Endnotes

​[1] ‘Xi Declares “Complete Victory” in Eradicating Absolute Poverty in China’, Xinhua, 26 February 2021, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-02/26/c_139767705.htm.

[2] United Nations Secretary-General, ‘Helping 800 Million People Escape Poverty Was Greatest Such Effort in History, Says Secretary-General, on Seventieth Anniversary of China’s Founding’, United Nations Press, 26 September 2019, https://www.un.org/press/en/2019/sgsm19779.doc.htm.

[3] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, The Sustainable Development Goals Report 2020, July 2020,

https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2020/The-Sustainable-Development-Goals-Report-2020.pdf; United Nations Development Program, Assessing Impact of COVID-19 on the Sustainable Development Goals, December 2020, https://sdgintegration.undp.org/sites/default/files/Flagship_1.pdf.

[4] United Nations Development Program, Impact of Covid-19 on the Sustainable Development Goals, December 2020, https://sdgintegration.undp.org/accelerating-development-progressduring-covid-19.

[5] Mao Zedong, ‘The Chinese People Have Stood Up!’ (21 September 1949) in Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung: Volume V (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1961).

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_01.htm.

[6] Zhao Hong, ‘China’s Contribution and Loss in War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression’, CGTN, 13 August 2020, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-13/Graphics-China-s-role-in-World-War-II-SV53wLu7N6/index.html.

[7] John Ross, China’s Great Road: Lessons for Marxist Theory and Socialist Practices (New York: 1804 Books, 2021), 86.

[8] Communist Party Member Net 共产党员网, ‘Dang zai 1949 nian zhi 1976 nian de lishi xing juda chengjiu’ 党在1949年至1976年的历史性巨大成就 [The Party’s historic great achievements between 1949 and 1976], 28 July 2016, http://fuwu.12371.cn/2016/07/28/ARTI1469667222557643.shtml.

[9] Wang Sangui, Poverty Alleviation in Contemporary China, trans. Zhu Lili (Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2019), 51.

[10] Phoenix News 凤凰网, ‘1949–1947 nian: Maozedong shidai zui you jiazhi de lishi yihan’ 1949―1976年:毛泽东时代最有价值的历史遗产, [1949-1976: The most valuable heritage of the Mao Zedong Era], 28 December 2009, http://news.ifeng.com/history/zhiqing/comments/200912/1228_6852_1490175_1.shtml.

[11] Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of the People’s Republic (New York: Free Press, 1986), 437.

[12] Meng Yaping, ‘Fantastic Feats of China’s Space Odyssey’, CGTN, 19 April 2017, https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d45544f79557a4d/share_p.html.

[13] Deng Xiaoping, ‘Building a Socialism with a Specifically Chinese Character’ (30 June 1984) in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, Volume III (1982-1992) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1994), http://en.people.cn/dengxp/vol3/text/c1220.html.

[14] Ross, China’s Great Road, 57.

[15] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, Poverty Alleviation: China’s Experience and Contribution (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, April 2021), http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-04/06/c_139860414.htm.

[16] Singh, Anoop, Malhar S. Nabar, and Papa M. N’Diaye, China’s Economy in Transition: From External to Internal Rebalancing (International Monetary Fund, 7 November 2013), https://www.elibrary.imf.org/view/books/071/20454-9781484303931-en/20454-9781484303931-en-book.xml?language=en&redirect=true.

[17] Xi Jinping, ‘Secure a Decisive Victory in Building a Moderately Prosperous Society in All Respects and Strive for the Great Success of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’, China Daily, 18 October 2017, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19thcpcnationalcongress/2017-11/04/content_34115212.htm.

[18] United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, ‘Poverty eradication’, Sustainable Development, accessed 30 June 2021, https://sdgs.un.org/topics/poverty-eradication.

[19] ‘Three Regions’ refers to the Tibet Autonomous Region; the Tibetan areas of Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan provinces; and Hetian, Aksu, Kashi, and Kizilsu Kyrgyz in the south of Xinjiang Autonomous Region. ‘Three Prefectures’ refers to Liangshan prefecture in Sichuan, Nujiang prefecture in Yunnan, and Linxia prefecture in Gansu.

[20] CCTV中国中央电视台, ‘Zhongguo xianxing fupin biaozhun diyu shijie biaozhun? Guojia xiangcun zhenxing ju zheyang huiying’ 中国现行扶贫标准低于世界标准?国家乡村振兴局这样回应 [Is China’s current standard for poverty alleviation lower than the global standard? A response from the National Revitalisation Bureau], 6 April 2021, https://news.cctv.com/2021/04/06/ARTIKemhGKDmE36ukw0ypKPO210406.shtml.

[21] United Nations Development Programme and Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, Charting Pathways Out of Multidimensional Poverty: Achieving the SDGs, July 2020, http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/2020_mpi_report_en.pdf.

[22] World Bank, Poverty and Shared Prosperity 2020: Reversals of Fortune, 2020, https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/bitstream/handle/10986/34496/9781464816024_Ch1.pdf.

[23] New China Research, Chinese Poverty Alleviation Studies: A Political Economy Perspective (Xinhua News Agency, 22 February 2021), http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/special/2021jpxbg.pdf.

[24] Zhang Zhanbin et al., Poverty Alleviation: Experience and Insights of the Communist Party of China (Beijing: The Contemporary World Press, 2020), 139.

[25] New China Research, Chinese Poverty Alleviation Studies, 60.

[26] New China Research, Chinese Poverty Alleviation Studies, 77.

[27] ‘CPC membership grows to over 95 million’, CGTN, 30 June 2021, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-06-30/CPC-membership-grows-to-over-95-million-11vF0GvladG/index.html.

[28] The State Council Information of the People’s Republic of China, Poverty Alleviation: China’s Experience and Contribution (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), 35.

[29] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 48.

[30] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 35.

[31] Cunningham, Edward, Tony Saich, and Jesse Turiel, Understanding CCP Resilience: Surveying Chinese Public Opinion Through Time (Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation, Harvard Kennedy School, July 2020): 2-6, https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/final_policy_brief_7.6.2020.pdf.

[32] To learn more about how China handled the pandemic, read Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s study, China and CoronaShock: https://thetricontinental.org/studies-2-coronavirus/.

[33] Cary Wu, ‘Did the Pandemic Shake Chinese Citizens’ Trust in Their Government? We Surveyed Nearly 20,000 People to Find Out’, Washington Post, 5 May 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/05/05/did-pandemic-shake-chinese-citizens-trust-their-government/.

[34] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 56.

[35] Jiangsu University江苏大学, ‘Woxiao xiaoyou zha yingdong huoping quanguo tuopin gongjian xianjin geren’ 我校校友查颖冬获评全国脱贫攻坚先进个人 [Alumnus Zha Yingdong was awarded National Advanced Individual in the battle against poverty], 28 February 2021, https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/wYjpAkhsQdzNx9NVa_XKDw.

[36] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 57.

[37] Poverty Alleviation Network Exhibition 脱贫攻坚网络展, ‘Shehui dongyuan’ 社会动员 [Social mobilisation], accessed 3 May 2021, http://fpzg.cpad.gov.cn/429463/430986/431007/index.html.

[38] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 57.

[39] China Development Brief, ‘Hebian Village, a University Professor’s Experiment with Poverty Alleviation’, trans. Serena Chang et al., 25 December 2017, https://chinadevelopmentbrief.cn/reports/hebian-village-a-university-professors-experiment-with-poverty-alleviation/.

[40] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 38.

[41] The State Council of the People’s Republic of China中华人民共和国国务院, ‘Guowuyuan xinwenban jiu chanye fupin jinzhan chengxiao juxing fabuhui’ 国务院新闻办就产业扶贫进展成效举行发布会 [State Council Information Office held a news conference on the progress and achievements of industrial poverty alleviation], 16 December 2020, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2020-12/16/content_5569989.htm.

[42] Qiuping, Lyu, Qu Guangyu, and Wang Di, ‘China Focus: Relocated Villagers Leave Poverty on Clifftop’, Xinhua, 14 May 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-05/14/c_139056868.htm.

[43] Kong Wenzheng, ‘Alibaba-linked Ant Forest Wins Top UN Green Award’, China Daily Global, 2 October 2019), http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/global/2019-10/02/content_37513688.htm.

[44] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 40.

[45] Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations, Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020: Main Report, 2020, http://www.fao.org/3/ca9825en/ca9825en.pdf.

[46] Bu Shi and Geng Zhibin, ‘In Tibet: The Road to Modern Education’, CGTN, 22 March 2019, https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d514d3149544e33457a6333566d54/index.html.

[47] The State Council Information Office of the People’s Republic of China, Tibet Since 1951: Liberation, Development and Prosperity, May 2021, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2021-05/21/c_139959978.htm.

[48] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 41-42.

[49] National Bureau of Statistics of China, ‘Main Data of the Seventh National Population Census’, 11 May 2021, http://www.stats.gov.cn/english/PressRelease/202105/t20210510_1817185.html.

[50] Xing Wen, ‘First-generation College Attendees Can Face Varying Degrees of Success’, China Daily, 20 May 2020, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202005/20/WS5ec49a58a310a8b241157060.html.

[51] Crotti, Robert, T. Geiger, V. Ratcheva, and S. Zahidi, Global Gender Gap Report 2020 (World Economic Forum, December 2020), http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2020.pdf.

[52] Yang Lixiong, ‘The Social Assistance Reform in China: Towards a Fair and Inclusive Social Safety Net’, Addressing Inequalities and Challenges to Social Inclusion through Fiscal, Wage and Social Protection Policies, UN Commission for Social Development, June 2018, https://www.un.org/development/desa/dspd/wp-content/uploads/sites/22/2018/06/The-Social-Assistance-Reform-in-China.pdf.

[53] Jennifer Golan et al., ‘Unconditional Cash Transfers in China: Who Benefits from the

Rural Minimum Living Standard Guarantee (Dibao) Program?’, World Development 93, (May 2017): 316-336, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2016.12.011.

[54] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 42.

[55] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 44.

[56] Guo Yingzhe and Wu Yujian, ‘China Promotes Private Retirement Savings to Shore Up Strained Pension System’, Caixin Global, 17 May 2021, https://www.caixinglobal.com/2021-05-17/china-promotes-private-retirement-savings-to-shore-up-strained-pension-system-101714140.html.

[57] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 44.

[58] Voices from the Frontline: China’s War on Poverty, CGTN/PBS, 14 December 2020, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-12-14/China-s-war-on-poverty-WdOsyyVGhy/index.html.

[59] Zhonggong zhongyang bangongting guowuyuan bangongting yinfa, ‘shengji dangwei he zhengfu fupin kaifa gongzuo chengxiao kaohe banfa’ 中共中央办公厅 国务院办公厅印发《省级党委和政府扶贫开发工作成效考核办法》[General office of CPC Central Committee and general office of State Council issued ‘measures for assessing the effectiveness of poverty alleviation and development of provincial party committee and government’], Xinhua 新华社, 16 February 2016, http://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2016-02/16/content_5041672.htm.

[60] Zhang Ge张歌 and Wu Zhenguo伍振国, ‘Guowuyuan fupin ban: Tuopin gongjian yao shixing zui yange de kaohe pinggu zhidu jing de qi lishi jianyan’ 国务院扶贫办:脱贫攻坚要实行最严格的考核评估制度 经得起历史检验 [State Council poverty alleviation office: the strictest assessment and evaluation system be implemented in the battle against poverty to withstand the test of history], People’s Daily人民日报, 7 March 2017, http://rmfp.people.com.cn/n1/2017/0307/c406725-29129889.html.

[61] ‘Third-party Inspector of Poverty Relief Work’, CGTN, 9 February 2021, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-02-08/Third-party-inspector-of-poverty-relief-work-XHYpliv4BO/index.html.

[62] ‘2020 nian guojia jingzhun fupin gongzuo chengxiao disanfang pinggu qidong’ 2020年国家精准扶贫工作成效第三方评估启动[A third-party assessment was launched on the effectiveness of the national targeted poverty alleviation in 2020], Science Forum 科学大讲坛, 1 December 2020, https://www.sohu.com/a/435632363_120873446.

[63] ‘Shaanxi shengwei shuji anfang tuopin gongjian gongzuo beihou you he shenyi’ 陕西省委书记暗访脱贫攻坚工作 背后有何深意?[Secretary of Shaanxi Provincial Party Committee investigated the battle against poverty in secret. What is the meaning behind this?], People’s Daily 人民日报/CCTV 中央电视台, 20 April 2017, http://news.cctv.com/2017/04/20/ARTI1WIPSScfr4SZwCTnRNix170420.shtml.

[64] ‘Jiedu shengji fupin chengxiao kaohe banfa sida kandian’解读省级扶贫成效考核办法四大看点 [Explaining the four highlights of the province-level measures for assessing the effectiveness of poverty alleviation], Xinhua 新华网, 17 February 2016, http://www.cpad.gov.cn/art/2016/2/17/art_624_45014.html.

[65] Shi Yu, ‘In Data: China’s Fight Against Corruption in Poverty Alleviation,’ CGTN, 9 August 2020, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-08-09/In-data-China-s-fight-against-corruption-in-poverty-alleviation-SO8OgC70Q0/index.html.

[66] ‘China Vows Unremitting Fight Against Corruption’, CGTN, 24 January 2021, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2021-01-24/China-s-discipline-authorities-adopt-communique-at-5th-plenary-session-XjqWdSURI4/index.html.

[67] Weiduo, Shen, Cao Siqi, and Zhang Hongpei, ‘No. I Central Document Vows Rural Revitalization’, Global Times, 22 February 2021, https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202102/1216103.shtml.

[68] World Bank, ‘World Bank Country Data and Lending Groups’, accessed 3 July 2021, https://datahelpdesk.worldbank.org/knowledgebase/articles/906519#High_income.

[69] ‘China’s GDP per Capital Just Passed $10,000, but What Does This Mean?’, CGTN, 17 January 2020, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-01-17/China-s-GDP-per-capita-just-passed-10-000-but-what-does-this-mean–NkvMWAMYNO/index.html.

[70] ‘Communiqué of the Fourth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China’, Xinhua, 31 October 2019, http://news.xmnn.cn/xmnn/2019/10/31/100620623.shtml.

[71] ‘Why President Xi Strongly Advocates Building Community with Shared Future’, Xinhua, 22 September 2020, http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-09/22/c_139388123.htm.

[72] The State Council, Poverty Alleviation, 62.

[73] Wang Xiaonan, ‘Will China’s Left-behind Children Escape the Prosperity Paradox?’, CGTN, 7 March 2019, https://news.cgtn.com/news/3d3d414e3349544d33457a6333566d54/index.html.

Author

Tricontinental News Letter.


This article was republished from Tricontinental.

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7/24/2021

Sex Workers and COVID-19: Resisting the Pandemic and Criminalization. By: Taroa Zúñiga Silva

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Georgina Orellano, secretary-general of the Association of Women Sex Workers of Argentina (AMMAR), says that “the pandemic has highlighted the inequality” in society and deepened the problems faced by sex workers. Sex work, which is not recognized in Argentina, has become more precarious, she says.

Although in Latin America many countries do not have legislation criminalizing sex work, the lack of a legal framework in this regard lends itself to all kinds of abuses. According to an investigation published by the Network of Women Sex Workers of Latin America and the Caribbean, “the application of laws is interpretative and discretionary,” resulting in recurrent violations of the rights of workers, including arbitrary detention; torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment; discrimination in access to health care; and unequal treatment within judicial systems.

Multilateral organizations have called for inclusive responses to cushion the impact of COVID-19. Such policies should not neglect the workers who are criminalized, such as sex workers. There is nothing inclusive about the policies that states have adopted. “If we have something to celebrate about the pandemic,” Orellano tells me, “it is that it made it clear—to ourselves—that the only way out of this type of context is to strengthen unionization.”

The Organization of Women Workers

For labor movements in most industries, there is usually a clear target for workers to organize against, such as business owners or factory managers. But in the context of a sex workers’ union, who takes the place of a boss—the client or the state?

“The historical boss of us,” Orellano tells me, “was for a long time the police.” But Orellano is aware that the police—in turn—play a role as agents of the market. It is the police who de facto work to regulate the marketplace of sex work. AMMAR was formed in the 1990s to respond to the desire to end “the naturalized logic in our collective of having to make financial arrangements with the police in order to work,” Orellano says.

“What the state does not regulate,” Orellano says, “the market regulates.” The market, for sex workers, is framed by the fact of the criminalization of sex workers. Because sex workers “lack recognition and rights, markets emerge that thrive through our precariousness,” states Orellano.

Overcoming Fear to Organize

​AMMAR was born from the first marches organized in Argentina to demand the rights of sex workers. During these marches, it was common for sex workers to attend wearing wigs or oversized dark sunglasses. In interviews with the media, sex workers would ask the television producers to distort their voices, show only their hands but not their faces, or give the interview with their backs to the camera. All this, Orellano explains to me, was “so that the family would not know that the person speaking, defending the rights of sex workers, was their mother or daughter or neighbor.”

Sex workers who rally for unionization and fight for their employment rights carry the additional burden of having to overcome the stigma associated with sex work. Orellano says shame, concealment, and silencing are unfortunate byproducts of the prejudices against the industry. “Basically,” she says, sex workers can’t effectively organize when they are hamstrung by the feeling of “not being able to truly tell [people] who you are [when you march or speak to media], for fear of being ostracized by your community.”

AMMAR’s approach is to fight the self-marginalization of sex workers. The demand to emerge from the shadows opened several doors. First, it encouraged sex workers to overcome the stigma associated with their work. Second, it permitted many sex workers to move toward unionization. Third, it forced the state to ensure that sex workers have rights and that these rights are not violated—“to accept that we are an existing group,” says Orellano, and to ensure “that not only are our rights as sex workers not violated, but, basically, that our rights as citizens are not violated.”

Pandemic and Sex Work

The restrictions imposed by governments to curb the advance of COVID-19 are a direct threat to the possibility of working in the streets. Quarantines, physical distance, and time restrictions—among other measures—have narrowed the possibilities of livelihoods for sex workers. Many have turned to the virtual world, but those who have continued working on the streets—either because of their own work preferences or because of technological and/or generational gaps—have suffered from institutional violence.

Faced with this, AMMAR had to respond, to “occupy the role of the absent state,” in the words of Orellano. The organization has focused on establishing codes of self-respect for sex work in public spaces. And it has focused on building psychological and economic support networks, which are urgently needed in view of the growing number of women who do not know if they will be able to pay their rent or feed their children every month.

Even if they comply with basic sanitary measures, this is a job that involves close contact. There is a lot of fear of COVID-19 among clients. Some clients wait to receive vaccines before resuming contact; many have also lost their jobs or lost income as a result of the pandemic, and so they constantly haggle over rates. “This is a fact,” Orellano tells me, “that does not differentiate between those of us who work virtually or those who work on the street.”

Political Recognition

The fact that sex workers are the ones who have supported their peers to survive the pandemic has reinforced awareness within this labor sector of the importance of political agency and collective organizing, Orellano concludes. AMMAR is part of the Argentine Workers’ Central Union (CTA). One of the most important achievements they have had in recent years, from Orellano’s perspective, has been the recognition of sex workers within political and labor organizing spheres.

“During the pandemic, our organization has done everything it had to do as a union and much more,” states Orellano. “We have given absolutely everything so that our coworkers can subsist and go through the pandemic on equal terms with the rest of the population.” This has been possible thanks to this labor sector’s efforts to articulate with local and central governments recognition of the political agency of sex workers.

“The advance of the expansion of rights—that is, of the visibility of our claims—has generated a lot of violence from some sectors,” adds Orellano. “But also, we received a lot of solidarity from other unions, and from social, feminist and partisan organizations that stretched out their hand to [be] with the whores.”

Author

Taroa Zúñiga Silva is a writing fellow and the Spanish media coordinator for Globetrotter. She is the co-editor with Giordana García Sojo of Venezuela, Vórtice de la Guerra del Siglo XXI (2020) and is a member of the Secretaría de Mujeres Inmigrantes en Chile. She also is a member of the Mecha Cooperativa, a project of the Ejército Comunicacional de Liberación.


This article was produced by Globetrotter.

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7/24/2021

After Devastating DACA Ruling, Dreamers Vow to Push for Legalization. By: Sonali Kolhatkar

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Democrats are hoping to use the Senate budget reconciliation process to enact immigration reform after yet another GOP-led assault on “Dreamers” has left young immigrants devastated and uncertain.

Republican officials in Texas are celebrating a major political win after successfully suing the federal government over the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. DACA has been a GOP target since 2012 when then-President Barack Obama first created it and then in 2014 expanded it via executive action. It has faced numerous Republican-led legal challenges and subsequent court rulings as well as an outright suspension of the program during Donald Trump’s administration. In spite of a 2020 Supreme Court ruling that upheld it, a new Texas federal court ruling by a known anti-immigrant judge named Andrew Hanen deemed the program “illegal,” leaving the lives of hundreds of thousands of young immigrants in limbo once more.

One such immigrant is Fatima Flores, the political director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA), who just a week and a half before the ruling had renewed her DACA status. Had Hanen’s ruling come before her renewal, Flores would likely have been among those immigrants at risk of losing her status given that no new applications are being processed.

Flores told me in an interview that she sees the devastating ruling as “an attack on our immigrant communities,” and points out that there is a “backlog of thousands of DACA recipient hopefuls [who] will not have a decision on their case.” This means they are in jeopardy of losing employment and benefits, which in turn could result in evictions. The ruling also means that those immigrants who might have been able to adjust their status under DACA are now eligible for possible deportation. Flores explained, “I came to this country when I was six, and I am 30 now. And I am one of millions of people who have been waiting for something to happen [toward legalization].”

The ruling is even more disappointing considering the role that DACA holders have played as essential workers and health care workers during the pandemic, delivering lifesaving care to U.S. residents. After the U.S. Supreme Court last year ruled against Trump’s suspension of the program—saying that the Trump administration did not provide adequate justification for ending it—an estimated 30,000 health care workers with DACA status were protected from deportation and allowed to continue their critical work. The American Medical Association’s general counsel went as far as citing that the central tenet of health care is “do no harm,” and that, “if we strip this population of caregivers out of the system, that’s pretty significant harm.” Hanen’s ruling threatens to do just such harm at a time when the United States appears to be on the cusp of another surge of COVID-19 infections.

Although President Joe Biden has already announced that his Justice Department will appeal Hanen’s ruling, Flores worries such a legal challenge will simply take too long, leaving countless numbers of potential DACA applicants stranded, unable to gain employment and subject to deportation even though the United States is the only country most have known. Worse, if the appeal goes all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, this time the conservative majority on the court could end the program altogether.

She suggested that a more direct pathway to cementing DACA was via the legislative process so that it is no longer beholden to the whims of Republican attorneys general, state governors or presidents. While legislative pathways on immigration have been frustratingly elusive in recent years, and while Democrats have passed far too few bills while holding power in 2021, this time on this issue, success may be within reach. That is because a limited form of immigration reform could pass through the Senate budget reconciliation process, requiring only a simple majority instead of a filibuster-proof supermajority.

To that end, Senate Budget Committee Chair Bernie Sanders (I-VT) just released a $6 trillion budget blueprint that includes $150 billion in funding toward pathways for legal status for immigrants including DACA holders. Flores cited the promising leadership of California’s newly seated Senator Alex Padilla, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee’s immigration panel and who is working closely with CHIRLA.

Padilla is pushing for legalization pathways to be included in negotiations over an infrastructure package and is confident that Biden backs him, saying, “I believe the White House is supportive of both an ambitious infrastructure package, and as substantive immigration reform as you can achieve in any way possible.” Perhaps more importantly, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, one of the most intractable Democrats on progressive legislation, has signaled that he too supports passing immigration reform in this manner.

Worryingly, it is the Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough who decides if legalizing DACA through budget reconciliation is acceptable or not, and immigrant advocates slammed Biden’s announcement that he would defer to whatever the unelected official decides on the matter. One can only hope that MacDonough’s past as a Justice Department trial attorney dealing with immigration cases makes her sympathetic to the plight of DACA holders. Her decision earlier this year to deny the inclusion of a federal minimum wage increase as part of the budget reconciliation was met with national outrage. That said, those financial priorities that can be included in reconciliation are indeed narrowly limited.

The pursuit of immigration reform through a technicality based on the federal budget is perhaps fitting for a nation whose dominant culture, set by elites, perceives human beings as resources and capital, rather than seeing them through the lens of compassion and empathy. But people like Flores and others in her community have had their lives turned upside down for decades awaiting a political solution. If Democrats see immigrants as financial assets, Republicans see them as future Democratic voters who can jeopardize their ill-gotten hold on political power. Flores said, “we’re here to stand in solidarity with our communities [fighting for legalization] and be relentless because the Republicans and the GOP are relentless against us.”

There is a clear economic case to be made for legalizing undocumented immigrants, even outside the traditional bounds of seeing them as a source of cheap labor for the agricultural and apparel industry. A study released in mid-June by the Center for American Progress examined numerous scenarios for immigrant legalization. If all undocumented immigrants were offered citizenship, the authors concluded that it “would boost U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by a cumulative total of $1.7 trillion over 10 years and create 438,800 new jobs.” If only DACA recipients were legalized, it “would increase U.S. GDP by a cumulative total of $799 billion over 10 years and create 285,400 new jobs.” Interestingly, the authors extrapolate that in the former scenario, “all other American workers would see their annual wages increase by $700,” and in the latter, “annual wages [would] increase by $400” across the board.

In other words, legalizing immigrants will benefit all American workers over time. Such a conclusion is not based on a complicated economic analysis. Undocumented workers are far more vulnerable to employer exploitation simply because of their lack of legal status. Their status drives down all wages. The converse is also true.

Flores pointed out that the clock is ticking. “We can’t leave 2021 without some legalization efforts,” because the 2022 midterm elections are around the corner and those senators up for reelection are likely to be preoccupied by their campaigns next year. Additionally, DACA holders and prospective applicants like her are tired. “For the longest time we’ve been told ‘stay in your lane.’ We’re done waiting,” she said. “We’re done having to take a back seat. We’re done playing nice.”

Author

Sonali Kolhatkar is the founder, host and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute.


This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

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7/23/2021

Worker Tells Senators Why the PRO Act Is A Must. By: Mark Gruenberg

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Gracie Heldman, who struggled 20 years to form a union at Hearthside Foods in Ohio, tells her story of Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown. She told him of a co-worker who committed suicide. | BCTGM
McCOMB, Ohio—For 20 of the 33 years she’s worked at Hearthside Foods, an industrial bakery in McComb, Ohio, that turns out cookies, crackers and candy bars for big firms such as Nabisco and Kellogg’s, Gracie Heldman has campaigned for a union—specifically the Bakery, Confectionery and Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers—there.
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Three times in 20 years, Heldman and her pro-union colleagues collected enough signed National Labor Relations Board union election authorization cards to demand a vote at the 1,200-worker plant. Once, they got 65% of workers to sign up.

Hearthside brought in union-busters. It forced workers to attend anti-union harangues in one-sided “captive audience” meetings, under pain of discipline if they didn’t. Once, Hearthside illegally fired seven union supporters. During another drive, it even threatened, also illegally, to close up shop if the workers went union, Heldman told senators on July 22.

The bullying, intimidation, harassment, labor law-breaking and interrogation by union-busters or supervisors while workers were on the job succeeded. Enough people got scared, especially by the firings, that when the votes occurred, after drawn-out anti-union campaigns by the bosses and their “consultants,” BCTGM lost.

Heldman brought her story, which is typical of what happens to workers during organizing drives, to the Senate Labor Committee’s hearing on the Protect The Right To Organize (PRO) Act, the wide-ranging pro-worker labor law reform. It would outlaw such abuses, force the union-busters’ shady practices into the open, and do much more.

Democratic senators on the evenly divided panel gave Heldman and other pro-worker witnesses—former NLRB Chairman Mark Gaston Pierce of Buffalo and Economic Policy Institute Policy Director Heidi Shierholz—a sympathetic hearing.

Not so the Republican senators, even though a new Hart Research poll shows a plurality of rank-and-file GOP voters (45% for-40% against), including a plurality of Trumpites (45%-41%), back the PRO Act and its goals.

The poll’s overall national margin for the PRO Act is 63%-25%. Democrats supported it by an 87%-6% score, and independents clocked in at 60%-26% in 4,114 calls stretched over the nine states it covered. Scores were almost as lopsided in those “battleground” states, too.

Besides making it easier to organize, the PRO Act would negate so-called “right to work” laws, increase fines for labor law-breaking, and legalize card-check recognition when unions present signed NLRB election authorization cards, independently verified, from a worker majority. It also forces union-busters and their spending and clients into the open.

And it mandates binding arbitration when bosses won’t bargain a first contract.

Heldman described the obstacles workers face to unionizing. She also gave a simple summary of why workers want unions—which, other polls show, a majority do.

In a simple phrase, to protect themselves, not just against bosses’ labor law-breaking, but against rampant corporate exploitation and abuse.
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Sen. Sherrod Brown Facebook page
“The hours are long” in the 24-hour-a-day seven-days-a-week plant “and the pain can be really bad, especially in your wrists, shoulders and back,” in an industrial bakery, she said.
​
“The company doesn’t take health and safety seriously so it’s not really surprising the McComb bakery has been cited by OSHA (the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration) many times and is one of the worst offenders in Ohio. That was one of the main reasons so many of us have wanted to join the Bakery Workers since the late ‘90’s.

“We have been overworked, we’ve been injured on the job, disrespected by supervisors, and forced to work in bad conditions. We wanted a union to help protect us while we were at work, to give us a say about the conditions we had to work under, and to help us get just a little bit of respect from our bosses.”

What they got instead was surveillance, one-sided “captive audience” meetings, closure threats, bosses’ legal stalls and election delays and illegal firings of seven pro-union workers after the second campaign in the early 2000s. That was so scary to other workers that BCTGM lost even after 65% of workers initially signed election authorization cards.

At least Heldman is still alive. Northern Virginia Labor Federation President Virginia Diamond reported that in a July 21 meeting with top staffers for undecided Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, Laborers Local 572 member Sonia Luna told of one worker who wanted to unionize Didlake, to have a voice on safety and health issues at that Virginia placement company for people with developmental disabilities.

Didlake’s union-buster succeeded in helping bosses beat Local 572. The firm’s still non-union. The worker concerned about safety and health is dead, from the coronavirus. Diamond did not say whether the worker caught the virus on the job.

The PRO Act would end all those abuses, and more, Heldman said. Had it been in effect during BCTGM’s first drive, two decades ago, the union would have won, she declared.

Expert witnesses Pearce and Shierholz backed Heldman’s story with data and details.

“It’s no surprise workers want unions,” Shierholz testified. “When workers are able to come together, form a union, and collectively bargain, their wages, benefits, and working conditions improve. On average, a worker covered by a union contract earns 10.2% more in wages than a peer with similar education, occupation, and experience in a nonunionized workplace in the same sector,” she pointed out.

Despite that and other union advantages, relentless corporate campaigns over decades have reduced private-sector and overall union density in the U.S. to just under 11%. Private-sector density alone in the 1950s—before establishment of public sector unions—covered more than one-third of workers.

“More than nine in 10 workers covered by a union contract (95%) have access to employer-sponsored health benefits, compared with just 68% of nonunion workers,” Shierholz continued. “Further, union employers contribute more to their employees’ health care benefits. And more than nine in 10 workers—93%—covered by a union contract have access to paid sick days, compared with 75% of nonunion workers.”

Pearce told senators “core provisions of the National Labor Relations Act have been eroded by overly narrow NLRB and court interpretations which frustrate the congressional intent” that led to the NLRA. Pearce, a former NLRB attorney, board member and chair added that in the last four years, the GOP majority named by former Oval Office occupant Donald Trump undertook “an all-out assault on (union) access to workers.

“The right to engage in protected concerted activity withered away over decades of judicial attack and the policies of labor hostile NLRB majorities. From 1980 until its recent 2018 temporary spike, the worker’s statutory right to strike over working conditions and for mutual aid and protection has been curtailed almost to the point of ineffectiveness,” he elaborated.

One key reason: An early Supreme Court decision, that let bosses hire scabs—officially “permanent replacements”—for workers forced to strike for economic reasons. And the Trump majority made it easier for bosses to misclassify workers as “independent contractors,” unprotected by any labor laws, including the NLRA, he said.

As witnesses testified to the Senate panel, unions continued their nationwide campaign to convince reluctant lawmakers to pass the PRO Act (see separate stories). Their targets include two recalcitrant Democrats: Virginia’s Warner and Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema. The Hart Poll shows pro-PRO Act majorities in both states: 65%-22% in Virginia and 59%-25% in Arizona. Non-union voters back it 61%-27%, the survey adds.

Warner, for one, is keeping silent, Northern Virginia Labor Federation President Diamond told the Metro DC Central Labor Council’s news website.

Besides Luna’s story about the pro-union worker at Didlake, “Alfonzo Clements, a DASH bus driver from Amalgamated Transit Union Local 689, described how the 16-year campaign to unionize his bus company succeeded in lifting him and his co-workers out of poverty and into the middle class through collective bargaining,” Diamond reported. “Despite these stories, Warner’s staff indicated Warner is still not willing to co-sponsor the PRO Act.”

Unite Here President D. Taylor hit the same safety and health theme Luna did. “The Covid-19 (coronavirus)  pandemic has made clearer than ever the critical difference belonging to a union can make, especially for workers of color and women, who have been among the hardest hit by loss of life, health, and employment this last year,” he says in an electronic petition. “That’s why we need the PRO Act.”

Author

​​Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.


This article was republished from People's World.

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7/23/2021

Washington Beats the Drum of Regime Change, but Cuba Responds to Its Own Revolutionary Rhythm: The Twenty-Ninth Newsletter (2021). By: Vijay Prashad

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Préfète Duffaut (Haiti), Le Générale Canson, 1950.
​Dear friends,
​
Greetings from the desk of the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In 1963, the Trinidadian writer CLR James released a second edition of his classic 1938 study of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. For the new edition, James wrote an appendix with the suggestive title ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. In the opening page of the appendix, he located the twin Revolutions of Haiti (1804) and Cuba (1959) in the context of the West Indian islands: ‘The people who made them, the problems and the attempts to solve them, are peculiarly West Indian, the product of a peculiar origin and a peculiar history’. Thrice James uses the word ‘peculiar’, which emerges from the Latin peculiaris for ‘private property’ (pecu is the Latin word for ‘cattle’, the essence of ancient property).

Property is at the heart of the origin and history of the modern West Indies. By the end of the 17th century, the European conquistadors and colonialists had massacred the inhabitants of the West Indies. On St. Kitts in 1626, English and French colonialists massacred between two and four thousand Caribs – including Chief Tegremond – in the Kalinago genocide, which Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre wrote about in 1654. Having annihilated the island’s native people, the Europeans brought in African men and women who had been captured and enslaved. What unites the West Indian islands is not language and culture, but the wretchedness of slavery, rooted in an oppressive plantation economy. Both Haiti and Cuba are products of this ‘peculiarity’, the one being bold enough to break the shackles in 1804 and the other able to follow a century and a half later.
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Osmond Watson (Jamaica), City Life, 1968.
Today, crisis is the hour in the Caribbean.
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On 7 July, just outside of Haiti’s capital of Port-au-Prince, gunmen broke into the home of President Jovenel Moïse, assassinated him in cold blood, and then fled. The country – already wracked by social upheaval sparked by the late president’s policies – has now plunged even deeper into crisis. Already, Moïse had forcefully extended his presidential mandate beyond his term as the country struggled with the burdens of being dependent on international agencies, trapped by a century-long economic crisis, and struck hard by the pandemic. Protests had become commonplace across Haiti as the prices of everything skyrocketed and as no effective government came to the aid of a population in despair. But Moïse was not killed because of this proximate crisis. More mysterious forces are at work: US-based Haitian religious leaders, narco-traffickers, and Colombian mercenaries. This is a saga that is best written as a fictional thriller.

Four days after Moïse’s assassination, Cuba experienced a set of protests from people expressing their frustration with shortages of goods and a recent spike of COVID-19 infections. Within hours of receiving the news that the protests had emerged, Cuba’s President Miguel Díaz-Canel went to the streets of San Antonio de los Baños, south of Havana, to march with the protestors. Díaz-Canel and his government reminded the eleven million Cubans that the country has suffered greatly from the six-decade-long illegal US blockade, that it is in the grip of Trump’s 243 additional ‘coercive measures’, and that it will fight off the twin problems of COVID-19 and a debt crisis with its characteristic resolve.

Nonetheless, a malicious social media campaign attempted to use these protests as a sign that the government of Díaz-Canel and the Cuban Revolution should be overthrown. It was clarified a few days later that this campaign was run from Miami, Florida, in the United States. From Washington, DC, the drums of regime change sounded loudly. But they have not found much of an echo in Cuba. Cuba has its own revolutionary rhythms.
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Eduardo Abela (Cuba), Los Guajiros (1938).
In 1804, the Haitian Revolution – a rebellion of the plantation proletariat who struck against the agricultural factories that produced sugar and profit – sent up a flare of freedom across the colonised world. A century and a half later, the Cubans fired their own flare.
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The response to each of these revolutions from the fossilised magnates of Paris and Washington was the same: suffocate the stirrings of freedom by indemnities and blockades. In 1825, the French demanded through force that the Haitians pay 150 million francs for the loss of property (namely human beings). Alone in the Caribbean, the Haitians felt that they had no choice but to pay up, which they did to France (until 1893) and then to the United States (until 1947). The total bill over the 122 years amounts to $21 billion. When Haiti’s President Jean-Bertrand Aristide tried to recover those billions from France in 2003, he was removed from office by a coup d’état.

After the United States occupied Cuba in 1898, it ran the island like a gangster’s playground. Any attempt by the Cubans to exercise their sovereignty was squashed with terrible force, including invasions by US forces in 1906-1909, 1912, 1917-1922, and 1933. The United States backed General Fulgencio Batista (1940-1944 and 1952-1959) despite all the evidence of his brutality. After all, Batista protected US interests, and US firms owned two-thirds of the country’s sugar industry and almost its entire service sector.

The Cuban Revolution of 1959 stands against this wretched history – a history of slavery and imperial domination. How did the US react? By imposing an economic blockade on the country from 19 October 1960 that lasts to this day, which has targeted everything from access to medical supplies, food, and financing to barring Cuban imports and coercing third-party countries to do the same. It is a vindictive attack against a people who – like the Haitians – are trying to exercise their sovereignty. Cuba’s Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez reported that between April 2019 and December 2020, the government lost $9.1 billion due to the blockade ($436 million per month). ‘At current prices’, he said, ‘the accumulated damages in six decades amount to over $147.8 billion, and against the price of gold, it amounts to over $1.3 trillion’.

None of this information would be available without the presence of media outlets such as Peoples Dispatch, which celebrates its three-year anniversary this week. We send our warmest greetings to the team and hope that you will bookmark their page to visit it several times a day for world news rooted in people’s struggles.
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Bernadette Persaud (Guyana), Gentlemen Under the Sky (Gulf War), 1991.
On 17 July, tens of thousands of Cubans took to the streets to defend their Revolution and demand an end to the US blockade. President Díaz-Canel said that the Cuba of ‘love, peace, unity, [and] solidarity’ had asserted itself. In solidarity with this unwavering affirmation, we have launched a call for participation in the exhibition Let Cuba Live. The submission deadline is 24 July for the online exhibition launch on 26 July – the anniversary of the revolutionary movement that brought Cuba to Revolution in 1959 – but we encourage ongoing submissions. We are inviting international artists and militants to participate in this flash exhibition as we continue to amplify the campaign #LetCubaLive to end the blockade.

A few weeks before the most recent attack on Cuba and the assassination in Haiti, the United States armed forces conducted a major military exercise in Guyana called Tradewinds 2021 and another exercise in Panama called Panamax 2021. Under the authority of the United States, a set of European militaries (France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) – each with colonies in the region – joined Brazil and Canada to conduct Tradewinds with seven Caribbean countries (The Bahamas, Belize, Bermuda, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago). In a show of force, the US demanded that Iran cancel the movement of its ships to Venezuela in June ahead of the US-sponsored military exercise.
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The United States is eager to turn the Caribbean into its sea, subordinating the sovereignty of the islands. It was curious that Guyana’s Prime Minister Mark Phillips said that these US-led war games strengthen the ‘Caribbean regional security system’. What they do, as our recent dossier on US and French military bases in Africa shows, is to subordinate the Caribbean states to US interests. The US is using its increased military presence in Colombia and Guyana to increase pressure on Venezuela.
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Elsa Gramcko (Venezuela), El ojo de la cerradura (‘The Keyhole’), 1964.
Sovereign regionalism is not alien to the Caribbean, which has made four attempts to build a platform: the West Indian Federation (1958-1962), Caribbean Free Trade Association (1965-1973), Caribbean Community (1973-1989), and CARICOM (1989 to the present). What began as an anti-imperialist union has now devolved into a trade association that attempts to better integrate the region into world trade. The politics of the Caribbean are increasingly being drawn into the orbit of the US. In 2010, the US created the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative, whose agenda is shaped by Washington.
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In 2011, our old friend Shridath Ramphal, Guyana’s foreign minister from 1972 to 1975, repeated the words of the great Grenadian radical T. A. Marryshow: ‘The West Indies must be West Indian’. In his article ‘Is the West Indies West Indian?’, he insisted that the conscious spelling of ‘The West Indies’ with a capitalised ‘T’ aims to signify the unity of the region. Without unity, the old imperialist pressures will prevail as they often do.
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In 1975, the Cuban poet Nancy Morejón published a landmark poem called Mujer Negra (‘Black Woman’). The poem opens with the terrible trade of human beings by the European colonialists, touches on the
war of independence, and then settles on the remarkable Cuban Revolution of 1959:

I came down from the Sierra
to put an end to capital and usurer,
to generals and to the bourgeoisie.
Now I exist: only today do we own, do we create.
Nothing is alien to us.
The land is ours.
Ours are the sea and sky,
the magic and vision.
My fellow people, here I see you dance
around the tree we are planting for communism.
Its prodigal wood already resounds.

The land is ours. Sovereignty is ours too. Our destiny is not to live as the subordinate beings of others. That is the message of Morejón and of the Cuban people who are building their sovereign lives, and it is the message of the Haitian people who want to advance their great Revolution of 1804.

Warmly,

Vijay

Author

Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is the chief editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He is a senior non-resident fellow at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies, Renmin University of China. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest book is Washington Bullets, with an introduction by Evo Morales Ayma.


This article was republished from The Tricontinental.

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7/23/2021

Tackling the American Left’s Class Reductionism. By: Yanis Iqbal

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Beginning from May 2020, the unending violence of USA’s racial capitalism was brought to the fore as a Black-led movement flowed through the bloodstained paving stones of clamorous streets. The wretched masses of America united in their call for an end to police brutality and the existing apparatuses of exploitative rule. However, these protests - instead of culminating in a significant change in the dynamics of power - rewarded the revolting people with Joe Biden - a dyed-in-the-wool bourgeoisie politician who once opposed de-segregation, called on police to shoot Black Lives Matter demonstrators in the leg, rejected the smallest of concessions to the working class, vehemently supported imperialist wars and refused to commit to even the minimal reforms of the Green New Deal.
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Biden’s victory in the presidential election was a direct expression of what Antonio Gramsci called a “time of monsters” - a moment in which we are fully aware of the future direction of societal forces but it is blocked at a particular point. In the American context, the corridors leading to historical metabolization were shut off on the level of formal politics, not on the stage of grassroots mobilization. In the streets, things were moving forward by leaps and bounds - a continuous subjective churning was taking place within the helical relations of domination. In spite of these explosive potentialities, Biden succeeded in initiating a process of ideological mutilation, which included the co-optation of demands from below, the forming of new political coalitions, paying lip service to the goals of leading figures of the underclass, all done while keeping intact the hegemony of the status quoist forces.

While many factors account for the defeat of the American rebellion, the strategic errors committed by the country’s Left stick out for their obdurateness toward the complex reality of oppression. Many sectors of the country’s socialist camp promoted class reductionism, remaining insensitive to the racial roots of the then ongoing Black Lives Matter movement. Their exclusive emphasis on Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All reduced systemic racism to a merely economic issue. Electoral exigencies overrode the creation of robust bases of social resistance. The uncritical subsumption of racism under an ahistorical banner of class proved unsuccessful in carrying forward the militant momentum of an explicit mutiny against the structural cruelty of racist capitalism.

Black Self-Assertion

Frantz Fanon was a thinker who forcefully shed light on the aporias of class reductionism, arguing in favor a radical project of Black advancement. The moorings for this vibrant model of praxis were provided by G.W.F Hegel. In a famous passage of “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel had written about the progression of human beings from merely self-conscious entities that are motivated by need to consume material goods into social beings who engage in recognition. The achievement of an independent self-consciousness is seen not only as an inter-subjective process, driven by a desire for recognition by the other, but also as a fundamentally conflictual one: each consciousness aspires to assert its self-certainty, initially, through the exclusion and elimination of all that is other; each thus seeks the death of the other, putting at the same time its own life at stake.
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This struggle to the death can lead either to the obliteration of one consciousness (or both), whereby the process of mutual recognition will never be complete, or to one consciousness submitting to the other in the face of fear of imminent death, thus becoming the slave. The other becomes the master, the victor of the struggle. The master nevertheless depends on the slave - not only for the fulfillment of material needs, but also for his/her recognition as an independent being. His self-sufficiency is hence only apparent. The slave, by contrast, becomes aware of himself as an independent self-consciousness by means of the transformative, fear-driven labor in the natural and material world.

For Fanon, racialized colonial subjects are not in a position to sign up to the Hegelian vision of political struggle as a reciprocal structure of recognition and interdependency when colonization has denied their humanity. Race is a process in which the unity of the world and self becomes mediated by a racialized objectification of the subject. Therefore, according to Fanon, race is a form of alienation. For Hegel, the slave’s existence is an expression of the objective reality or power of the master. The master is recognized and the slave lives in a state of non-recognition. Similarly, for Fanon the alienated racial subject exists as an expression of the objective reality of whiteness. Racial existence, then, is a negation of the human character of racialized people; it is a profound state of derealization. The process of racial objectification, according to Fanon, turns people into things, identified by their skin, racial or ethnic features, as well as culture.

Hence, racialized people first need to overcome ontological denial and, in so doing, forge the basis for a positive political grouping. Thus, Fanon rejects the static Hegelian notion of the master-slave relationship - one forged among ontologically equal adversaries - and instead posits that the slave is always-already marked as less-than-being. The slave, according to Fanon, transcends that racial othering by vehemently rejecting it through what George-Ciccariello Maher - in his book “Decolonizing Dialectics” - calls “combative self-assertion” that enables the slave to reject “her self-alienation,” to “turn away from the master” and to force the master to “turn toward the slave”. The slave’s action re-starts dialectical motion and forces the master and the slave to contend with each other.

“For the racialized subject,” Maher writes, “self-consciousness as human requires counter-violence against ontological force. In a historical situation marked by the denial of reciprocity and condemnation to nonbeing, that reciprocity can only result from the combative self-assertion of identity”. In fact, it is precisely this violence that “operates toward the decolonization of being”. In this way, Fanon decolonized Hegel’s approach from the “sub-ontological realm to which the racialized are condemned,” gesturing toward the pre-dialectical and counter-ontological violence that dialectical opposition requires. Ontological self-assertion needed to identify with negritude, which, however imperfect and empirically imprecise, provided the necessary mythical mechanism through which the dialectic of subjectivity could operate. In the words of Fanon, “to make myself known” meant “to assert myself as a BLACK MAN”.

Fanon conceived of the black subject emerging in the active negation of the social relations of white supremacy. Since blackness is the objective condition of its existence in a white supremacist society, the black subject thereby establishes its own identity on this basis by inverting its objectification, effectively making the conditions of its existence subject to its own power. The existential substance of racialized people now becomes real and actual in the world by changing it to fit its own needs. In the struggle, the black subject establishes independent self-consciousness, and begins to exist as a being for itself with a liberatory aim. The self-determination of the black subject - through the forceful affirmation of black history - establishes, for the first time, the basis for mutual recognition. Blackness has now established itself, not as moral plea for admission into the liberal and idealistic world of equality, but as a material, immanent fact. Blackness remakes the world in its own image.

Here, it is important to note the two distinct but interrelated facets of Fanon’s perspective on black assertion. On the one hand, he frames the identitarian dimension of anti-colonial struggle as a social symptom of colonial alienation, on the very level of its problematic status from the perspective of more evolved forms of postcolonial consciousness. On the other hand, Fanon advances an absolute claim in favour of the black colonized subject’s right to the expression of his symptomatic alienation. In other words, Fanon wishes to underline the historical, psychological and political necessity of what he nevertheless viewed in unambiguous fashion as a defensive, repressive and narcissistic phase of anti-colonial consciousness during which the native subject constructs - out of nothing - the self-image that was simply impossible to develop in the racial context of the colonial administration.

The Fanon-Sartre Debate

The debate between Jean Paul Sartre and Fanon on the relations between class and race stand out for their continuing relevance. Sartre wrote one of the definitive commentaries on the Negritude movement for a French audience in the preface to Leopold Senghor’s important Negritude anthology, “Black Orpheus”. There Sartre argued that blackness is the “negative moment” in an overall “transition” of the non-white toward integration into the proletariat -  a “weak stage of a dialogical progression,” passed over and left for dead as swiftly as it came to life. Fanon’s reply - in “Black Skin, White Masks” - was fiercely critical of Sartre:

“For once that born Hegelian had forgotten that consciousness has to lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self. In opposition to rationalism, he summoned up the negative side, but he forgot that this negativity draws its worth from an almost substantive absoluteness. A consciousness committed to experience is ignorant, has to be ignorant, of the essences and the determinations of its being”.

Fanon firmly upheld the view that racially based identity claims on the part of non-European subjects in colonized situations carried an irreducible, cathartic importance. Sartre fails to account for this dialectic of experience through the detached intellectualization of black consciousness. “[W]hen I tried,” Fanon writes, “on the level of ideas and intellectual activity, to reclaim my negritude, it was snatched away from me”. Sartre’s narrative of decolonization did not incorporate the properly experiential dimension of black subjectivity. With the European working class lying unconscious in the stupor of post-WWII capitalism, Sartre imagines revolutionary consciousness, in the manner of the Hegelian Spirit, manifesting itself in the anti-colonial resistance of Africa and the Caribbean. This new proletarian spirit descends from the heights of abstract dialectical theory to make use of the concrete culture of negritude as a vehicle for the reactivation of a universal anti-capitalist project.

Sartre’s dialectic of abstract universalism has a disheartening effect on the colonized subjects. By passively inserting black rebellion within a pre-determined dialectic, he robs it of all agency. As Fanon states:

“[I]t is not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was already there, pre-existing, waiting for me. It is not out of my bad nigger’s misery, my bad nigger’s teeth, my bad nigger’s hunger that I will shape a torch with which to burn down the world, but it is the torch that was already there, waiting for that turn of history. In terms of consciousness, the black consciousness is held out as an absolute density, as filled with itself, a stage preceding any invasion, any abolition of the ego by desire. Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal… The dialectic that brings necessity into the foundation of my freedom drives me out of myself. It shatters my unreflected position. Still in terms of consciousness, black consciousness is immanent in its own eyes. I am not a potentiality of something; I am wholly what I am. I do not have to look for the universal. No probability has any place inside me. My Negro consciousness does not hold itself out as a lack. It is.”

“Black zeal” is a mythical self-discovery which by necessity refuses all explanation. After all, how precisely does one adopt an identity which is dismissed ahead of time as transitory? The Sartrean subject never gets “lost” in the negative. Sartrean consciousness remains in full possession of itself. And therefore, it can have no knowledge of itself - or the other. History, society, and corporeality recede from view and what remains is a timeless and abstract ontology. Contrary to this view, Hegel remarked: consciousness “wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself...nothing is known which does not fall within experience or (as it is also expressed) which is not felt to be true”. The truth that emerges from black consciousness is possible only via a phenomenological reassembly of the self. That is why Fanon continues to push forward: “I defined myself as an absolute intensity of beginning… My cry grew more violent: I am a Negro, I am a Negro, I am a Negro”.

Fanon does not quickly pass over human suffering in the pursuit of the universal, but attends to suffering, creating space for the communication of bodily and emotional pain. In Sartre’s hands, this dialectical negation explicitly lacks positive content and, consequently, any objectivity. The rupture with racism brings forward its own content - a re-woven fabric of daily existence and new ways of organizing social life - which challenges white supremacist society. Therefore, with Sartre, the negativity expressed by this rupture is a critique of existing reality, but does not generate new conditions - a new reality - based on its own self-active negation of white supremacist social relations. In his quest to brush aside the unmediated, affect-laden, passionate dimension of the native subject of colonialism’s sensuous, lived experience, Sartre short-circuits the dialectic through an intangible leap - ignoring the necessity of slow and patient labor.

He becomes a condescending adult speaking to a child: “You’ll change, my boy; I was like that too when I was young…you’ll see, it will all pass”. In effect, the non-white is subsumed into a pre-existing, white reality. Sartre, Fanon argues, is forced to conclude that the proletariat already exists universally. Yet, Fanon states that a universal proletariat does not exist. Instead, the proletariat is always racialized; the universal which Sartre emphasizes must be built upon the foundations of mutual recognition. However, establishing the conditions of mutual recognition depends upon the dislodgment of racial alienation and establishment of the claims of a non-white humanity. Sartre misses the point that such a process unfolds within the racial relation: black existence can only become the grounds of disalienation to the extent that the specifically black subject becomes conscious of itself and the white recognizes the absoluteness of those who exist as non-white.

To summarize, though Fanon does endorse Sartre’s notion of the overcoming of negritude, he still wants to underline the necessity of re-articulating the dialectic in terms of the experiential point of view of the Black subalterns.  In more general terms, the path to the universal - a world of mutual recognitions - proceeds through the particular struggles of those battling racial discrimination. While race is undoubtedly a form of alienation which needs to be abolished, one can’t subsumes the concrete, for-itself activity of black existence into a universal proletariat. We always have to keep in mind the rich process of the self-abolition of race, which develops as a series of negations. The American Left needs to valorize black consciousness, to claim it as an integral part of the emancipatory experience of revolutionary socialism, but without overlooking its basic nature as a byproduct of racial capitalism.

Author

​​​Yanis Iqbal is an independent researcher and freelance writer based in Aligarh, India and can be contacted at yanisiqbal@gmail.com. His articles have been published in the USA, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India and several countries of Latin America.

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7/22/2021

PRO Act Drive Revs up As Faith Groups Back Legislation. By: Mark Gruenberg

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Sen. Mark Warner, Virginia Democratic Senator. The AFL-CIO is pressuring him to change his position to one in favor of the Pro Act. | AP
WASHINGTON—Organized labor’s intensive drive to lobby senators, from supportive Democrats to resistant Republicans, to pass the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act, revved up the week of July 17-24. It featured rallies, phone banks, and sometimes virtual events in cities ranging from Orlando, Fla., to Fairbanks, Alaska.
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And the workers picked up notable backing from groups of faith leaders from Judaism, the Catholic Church, Islam, and mainline Protestantism. One non-signer: The right-wing Southern Baptist Convention. The 21 supportive groups cast worker rights as a moral issue, too. And the eight Catholic groups’ stand agrees with the strong, frequent pro-worker pro-union statements of Pope Francis I.

“Our belief in the intrinsic worth of both work and workers leads us to strongly support the PRO Act, which will strengthen and expand the right of workers to bargain collectively, form unions, and engage in collective action without fear of retaliation from their employers. Such assurances are also better for employers as they contribute to better productivity, mutual collaboration, and sustainability,” they said.

The theme of the pro-PRO Act drive is “Workers’ rights are civil rights.” Details about the legislation, rallies and events are on a new website: www.proact.aflcio.org.

Whether all the pressure will convince enough GOPers to defect from the party’s anti-worker, anti-union line is uncertain. And there are still two reluctant Democrats to persuade: Arizonan Kyrsten Sinema and Virginia’s Mark Warner. The Northern Virginia AFL-CIO holds “weekly Wednesday” demonstrations near Warner’s home in the D.C. suburbs.

Without those two, plus 10 of the evenly split Senate’s 50 Republicans, a GOP filibuster threat by worker-hater GOP leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would halt the legislation, the most wide-ranging pro-worker labor law reform since the original 1935 National Labor Relations Act, in its tracks.

“This PRO Act Week of Action is another full-court press. America’s labor movement is showing up in every corner of our country to demand a fix to our outdated labor laws that are nearly 100 years old,” said AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. “Our members and all working people are committed to making the PRO Act the law of the land this year.”

That week of action led to rallies and events both thanking supporters—such as a planned July 23 rally at the two Illinois Democrats’ offices in Chicago—and lobbying the others.

Those included a press conference in front of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s Orlando office, and rallies on June 20 in Juneau, Anchorage, and Fairbanks, Alaska, especially targeting Republican Lisa Murkowski. Federal figures put Alaska fourth in the U.S. in union density, behind Hawaii, New York, and Rhode Island. Those three states each have two Democratic senators, who already support the PRO Act.
The religious groups’ letter cast the PRO Act in economic as well as moral terms, pointing out how its passage would help workers of color in particular, by invalidating “the harmful legacy of” state Jim Crow-era so-called “right to work” laws.

Bosses use those laws to weaken unions financially and to divide and conquer workers by playing off race against race.

“Our current labor laws are no longer effective in protecting the lives and dignity of workers and fall woefully short of allowing workers to productively advocate for their needs from a position of mutuality with employers,” the groups wrote senators. “As union membership has fallen due to counter-productive laws and amendments, inequality has skyrocketed leaving the working class with little constructive power over their own economic security; and thus, also harming sustainable business models.
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Pope Francis, an outspoken proponent of labor organizing rights. | Andrew Medichini/AP
“The PRO Act addresses these current inadequacies by empowering workers to effectively exercise their freedom to organize and bargain. Critically, it also ends employers’ practice of punishing striking workers, strengthens the National Labor Relations Board and allows it to hold corporations accountable for retaliating against workers, and would help us collectively do better for all our needs by repealing” the federal law—which congressional Republicans enacted in 1947—legalizing states’ RTW statutes.
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Those state laws “reinforce Jim Crow by maintaining labor segregation and further exploiting workers of color,” since eight of the ten states with the highest percentage of Black residents—and workers—are RTW states, they note.

“These restrictions strip funding and bargaining power from unions, which have a devastating effect on the economic stability of people of color,” the faith leaders declare.

Eight Catholic groups signed the letter: The Catholic Labor Network, the U.S. provinces of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd, the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker of D.C., the Network Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, Pax Christi USA, the Franciscan Action Network, the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, and the National Advocacy Center of the Sisters of the Good Shepherd.

Other faith groups signing the letter were: the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights and the National Council of Jewish Women (all Jewish), the American Friends Service Committee and the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers), the Islamic Council of North America’s social justice commission, the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Presbyterian Church’s Office of Public Witness, the Progressive National Baptist Convention (Black Baptists), the Episcopalian, United Methodist, Unitarian churches, and the United Church of Christ.

Author

Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People's World. He is also the editor of Press Associates Inc. (PAI), a union news service in Washington, D.C. that he has headed since 1999. Previously, he worked as Washington correspondent for the Ottaway News Service, as Port Jervis bureau chief for the Middletown, NY Times Herald Record, and as a researcher and writer for Congressional Quarterly. Mark obtained his BA in public policy from the University of Chicago and worked as the University of Chicago correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.


This article was republished from People's World.

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7/22/2021

Cuba: Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. By: Frei Betto

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I do not wish the future of Cuba to be like the present of Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras or even Puerto Rico,
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Few are unaware of my solidarity with the Cuban Revolution. For 40 years I frequently visited the island for work commitments and invitations to events. For a long period, I mediated the resumption of the dialogue between the Catholic bishops and the Cuban government, as described in my books Fidel and Religion (Fontanar/Companhia das Letras) and Paradise Lost, Journeys to the Socialist World (Rocco).
Currently, under contract with the FAO, I advise the Cuban government in the implementation of the Food Sovereignty and Nutritional Education Plan.
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I know in detail the Cuban daily life, including the difficulties faced by the population, the challenges to the Revolution, the criticisms of the country’s intellectuals and artists. I visited prisons, talked to opponents of the Revolution, lived with Cuban priests and lay people opposed to socialism.
When they tell me, a Brazilian, that there is no democracy in Cuba, I descend from the abstraction of words to reality.

How many photos and news have been seen or are seen of Cubans in misery, beggars scattered on the sidewalks, children abandoned in the streets, families under the viaducts? Something similar to the cracolândia, to the militias, to the long lines of sick people waiting years to be treated in a hospital?

I warn friends:
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  • if you are rich in Brazil and you go to live in Cuba, you will know hell. You will not be able to change your car every year, buy designer clothes, travel frequently on vacation abroad. And, above all, you will not be able to exploit the work of others, keep your employees in ignorance, be ‘proud’ of Maria, your cook for 20 years, and whom you deny access to your own home, schooling and health plan.
  • If you are middle class, prepare to meet purgatory. Although Cuba is no longer a state-owned society, bureaucracy persists, you have to be patient in the queues at the markets, many products available this month may not be found next month due to the inconsistency of imports.
  • However, if you are salaried, poor, homeless or landless, get ready to experience paradise. The Revolution will guarantee your three fundamental human rights: food, health and education, as well as housing and work. You may have to develop an appetite for not eating what you like, but you will never go hungry. Your family will have schooling and health care, including complex surgeries, totally free of charge, as a duty of the state and a right of the citizen.
There is nothing more prostituted than language. The famous democracy born in Greece has its merits, but it is good to remember that, at that time, Athens had 20,000 inhabitants who lived off the work of 400,000 slaves… What would one of those thousands of servants answer if asked about the virtues of democracy?

​I do not wish for the future of Cuba the present of Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras or even Puerto Rico, a U.S. colony that was denied independence. Nor do I want Cuba to invade the United States and occupy a coastal area of California, as in the case of Guantanamo, which has been transformed into a torture center and an illegal prison for alleged terrorists.

​Democracy, in my concept, means the ‘Our Father’ -the authority legitimized by the popular will- and the ‘Our Bread’ -the sharing of the fruits of nature and human labor-. Electoral rotation does not make or ensure a democracy. Brazil and India, considered democracies, are flagrant examples of misery, poverty, exclusion, oppression and suffering.

Only those who know the reality of Cuba before 1959 know why Fidel had so much popular support to lead the Revolution to victory.

The country was known by the nickname ‘brothel of the Caribbean’. The mafia dominated the banks and tourism (there are several movies about this). Havana’s main neighborhood, still called Vedado, has this name because blacks were not allowed to circulate there….

The United States was never satisfied with having lost the Cuba subjected to its ambitions. Therefore, shortly after the victory of the guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra, they tried to invade the island with mercenary troops. They were defeated in April 1961. The following year, President Kennedy decreed the blockade of Cuba, which continues to this day.

Cuba is an island with few resources. It is forced to import more than 60 percent of the country’s essential products. With the tightening of the blockade promoted by Trump (243 new measures and, for the moment, not withdrawn by Biden), and the pandemic, which has completely eliminated one of the country’s main sources of resources, tourism, the internal situation has worsened.

Cubans had to tighten their belts. Then, those dissatisfied with the Revolution, who gravitate in the orbit of the ‘American dream’, promoted the protests of Sunday, July 11, with the ‘solidarity’ support of the CIA, whose chief has just made a tour of the continent, worried about the results of the elections in Peru and Chile.
​
Who best explains the current situation in Cuba is its president, Díaz-Canel:
“The financial, economic, commercial and energy persecution has begun. They (the White House) want to provoke an internal social explosion in Cuba to ask for ‘humanitarian missions’ that will translate into invasions and military interference. We have been honest, we have been transparent, we have been clear, and at all times we have explained to our people the complexities of the current situation. I remember that more than a year and a half ago, when the second half of 2019 began, we had to explain that we were in a difficult situation. The United States began to intensify a series of restrictive measures, tightening of the blockade, financial persecutions against the energy sector, with the aim of stifling our economy. This would provoke the desired massive social outburst, in order to call for a ‘humanitarian’ intervention, which would end in military interventions.”
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“This situation continued, then came the 243 measures (by Trump, to tighten the blockade) that we all know, and finally it was decided to include Cuba in the list of countries sponsoring terrorism. All these restrictions led the country to immediately cut off several sources of foreign currency income, such as tourism, travel of Cuban-Americans to our country and remittances. A plan was formed to discredit the Cuban medical brigades and the solidarity collaborations of Cuba, which received an important part of foreign currency for this collaboration.”

“All this has generated a situation of shortage in the country, mainly of food, medicines, raw materials and inputs to be able to develop our economic and productive processes which, at the same time, contribute to exports. Two important elements are eliminated: the capacity to export and the capacity to invest resources. We also have limitations in fuel and spare parts, and all this has caused a level of dissatisfaction, added to accumulated problems that we have been able to solve and that came from the Special Period (1990-1995, when the Soviet Union collapsed, with serious repercussions on the Cuban economy). Together with a fierce media smear campaign, as part of the unconventional war, which tries to fracture the unity between the party, the State and the people; and intends to qualify the government as insufficient and incapable of providing welfare to the Cuban people.”

“The example of the Cuban Revolution has greatly annoyed the United States for 60 years. They applied an unjust, criminal and cruel blockade, now intensified in the pandemic. Blockade and restrictive actions that they have never carried out against any other country, not even against those they consider their main enemies. Therefore, it has been a perverse policy against a small island that only aspires to defend its independence, its sovereignty and to build its society with self-determination, according to the principles that more than 86 percent of the population has supported.”

“In the midst of these conditions the pandemic arises, a pandemic that has affected not only Cuba, but the whole world, including the United States. It affected the rich countries, and it must be said that in the face of this pandemic neither the United States nor these rich countries had all the capacity to deal with its effects. The poor were harmed, because there are no public policies aimed at the people, and there are indicators in relation to the confrontation of the pandemic with worse results than those of Cuba in many cases. Infection and mortality rates per million inhabitants are notably higher in the United States than in Cuba (the United States has registered 1,724 deaths per million, while Cuba has 47 deaths per million). While the United States is entrenched in vaccine nationalism, the Henry Reeve Brigade of Cuban doctors continues its work among the world’s poorest (for which, of course, it deserves the Nobel Peace Prize).”

“Without the possibility of successfully invading Cuba, the United States persists in a rigid blockade. After the fall of the USSR, which provided the island with ways to circumvent the blockade, the United States sought to increase its control over the Caribbean country. Beginning in 1992, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to end the blockade. The Cuban government reported that between April 2019 and March 2020 Cuba lost 5 billion dollars in potential trade due to the blockade; in the last almost six decades, it lost the equivalent of 144 billion dollars. Now, the U.S. government has deepened sanctions against shipping companies that bring oil to the island.”
It is this fragility that opens a flank to demonstrations of discontent, without the government putting tanks and troops in the streets. The resistance of the Cuban people, nourished by examples such as Martí, Che Guevara and Fidel, has proven to be invincible. And we must, all of us who fight for a more just world, stand in solidarity with them.
​
Translation by Internationalist 360°

Author

Frei Betto


This article was republished from Internationalist 360.

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7/22/2021

Mending the Metabolic Rift: Marxism, Nature and Society. By: James Plested

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Picture
A bushfire burns out of control near Tumburumba, NSW, on 11 January 2020 PHOTO: Getty Images
Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism provides the key to understanding the environmental catastrophe we’re witnessing, and to gaining a clearer picture of what’s needed to repair our damaged relationship with the Earth.
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Marx’s concern with environmental questions grew from his understanding of how humanity is bound to the natural world by a thousand threads. “Man lives from nature”, he wrote in the 1844 Manuscripts, “and he must maintain a continuing dialogue with it if he is not to die. To say that man’s physical and mental life is linked to nature simply means that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature”.
In the same passage, Marx describes nature as humanity’s “inorganic body”. What he means by this, is that when we’re thinking about the things comprised in our existence, we should include, alongside our own bodies, all the objects of nature to which we relate ourselves—those that sustain us in a directly physical, biological sense, and those that nourish us mentally, such as objects of beauty and so on.

If we don’t have access to healthy food, fresh air and water and so on, our physical health will suffer as a result. And the lack of any capacity to enjoy the beauty of nature—through our contact with it in either work or recreation—will affect our mental health.

Every individual must exist in a constant state of interaction with nature to survive, but the particular form this relationship takes can’t be understood in abstraction from the kind of society in which we live. The task for Marx, then, became to explain how and why human society had developed through the course of history, and in particular to understand the destructive dynamics of the capitalist system that was rapidly emerging at the time.

The key to this, for Marx, lay in an analysis of what he called the “social relations of production”—the way in which, in any society, people come together and labour to produce the things we need to survive. To the extent that there is a theory of human nature in Marx, it is this: our essence is to labour collectively to shape the world around us in a way that satisfies our needs.

For most of humanity’s 200-300,000-year history, we have maintained quite a balanced and sustainable relationship to nature. In Australia, for example, Indigenous societies employed sophisticated land management techniques to maintain a healthy and productive landscape for tens of thousands of years before the British invasion of 1788.

And although, wherever human societies have emerged, there has been some impact on the natural environment in which they are situated, it wasn’t really until a few hundred years ago that the scale of the destruction began to become a significant issue. As Marx put it in his notes for Capital, which were later published as the Grundrisse:

​“It isn’t the unity of living and active humanity with the natural, inorganic conditions of their metabolic exchange with nature, and hence their appropriation of nature, which requires explanation or is the result of a historic process, but rather the separation between these inorganic conditions of human existence and this active existence, a separation which is completely posited only in the relation of wage labour and capital.”
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An open cut coal mine at South Bulga in the Hunter Valley PHOTO: CSIRO
The term “metabolic rift” was coined by John Bellamy Foster in his book Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature, published in 2000, as a way of bringing together the various elements of Marx’s account of the rupture in relations between human society and the natural world under capitalism.

Although Marx didn’t talk directly about a “metabolic rift”, he frequently used the German word Stoffwechsel, which translates as metabolism (literally “material exchange”). As today, the word in Marx’s time primarily was used in the context of biology and chemistry to describe the circulation and exchange of nutrients, waste and so on in the human body and other living things. But it was also, from the 1850s onwards, increasingly taken up by those, like Marx, trying to understand the functioning of society.

It’s easy to see how the idea of metabolism, or “material exchange”, can be applied in this context. Marx saw human labour as a kind of process of metabolism in which the raw materials of nature are worked up into forms that are useful for human beings. In Capital, Marx described human labour as:

“... first of all, a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces that belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs.”

Human labour acts on nature in a way that’s analogous with the action of the human body on the food that we eat. For instance, just like a tree that is transformed into a wooden shack, so, for example, an apple that we eat goes through a series of transformations until it is broken down into nutrients to be absorbed into our cells, along with waste to be excreted and so on.

Marx applied the idea of metabolism not only to the role of labour in shaping the natural world. As well as the metabolic interaction between human society and nature, there is a metabolism within society itself. So in the Grundrisse he writes that the circulation and exchange of commodities within capitalism can also be understood as a kind of metabolism. “Insofar as the process of exchange transfers commodities from hands in which they are non-use-values to hands in which they are use-values, it is a process of social metabolism”, he wrote.

The circulation of the products of labour within a society can be understood by analogy with the circulation of blood within the human body. In a healthy body, the blood transports oxygen, nutrients and so on to where they are needed—keeping the body functioning at full capacity. So too in a healthy society, the exchange of products should function to ensure that everyone is able to live a decent life.
What, then, is the metabolic rift? In the simplest terms, it is a breakdown in the healthy functioning of the metabolic process human society depends on, in both its external aspect—the exchange of material between human society and nature—and its internal aspect—the circulation of material within society.

In pre-class societies, the material exchange that occurs via our labour on the natural world happened in such a way that the two ends of the process—nature and the useful things we produce from it—were related in a more or less direct and transparent way. The raw materials required for the production of basic necessities like food, shelter and so on were mostly sourced from the immediate vicinity of settlements.

In this context, it would be very obvious if the metabolism had broken down in some way—say by an area of land being eroded due to the excessive clearing of trees. And it would be similarly clear if the process of exchange of goods within the community broke down, and the health of one section of the population began to suffer as a result.
​
With the emergence of class society, when a minority of the population came to live off the surplus produced by others, the link between the natural basis of human society and the lives of those who made the important decisions became more tenuous.

As Marx sees it, however, it’s only with the emergence of capitalism from the seventeenth century onwards that the link is severed completely. Even the wealthiest of feudal lords still had some connection to the land. Their power was bound with a particular estate. As Marx himself put it in a note, “[T]here still exists [under feudalism] the semblance of a more intimate connection between the proprietor and the land than that of mere material wealth. The estate is individualised with its lord: it has his rank, is baronial or ducal with him, has his privileges, his jurisdiction, his political position etc. It appears as the inorganic body of its lord”.
​
If the feudal lord failed to manage the land sustainably, if he logged all the forests, poisoned the waterways and so on, he would undermine not only the source of his material wealth, but his identity and being as a lord.

The alienation of the land—its reduction to the status of property that can be bought and sold—is what for Marx constitutes the foundation stone of the capitalist system. The wealth and power of the capitalist class doesn’t depend on their possession of this or that particular piece of property, but rather on their control over capital. Capital can include physical property, such as farmland, machinery, factories, offices and so on, but it is by its very nature fluid and transferable. If a capitalist buys up some land and then destroys it, they can simply take the profits they’ve made from it and move their money elsewhere.

At the same time as it completely severs any semblance of connection with the land among the ruling class, capitalism also severs it among workers. The peasants under feudalism had a direct and transparent dependence on the land for their subsistence. But with this came a degree of independence that isn’t afforded to workers under capitalism. The peasants had to give up a portion of their produce to the lord, but outside of that they were relatively free to labour as it best suited them. And no matter how unfree they were in a political sense, their capacity to sustain themselves was at least guaranteed by their direct access to the land and their possession of the tools necessary to work it.

For capitalism to be put on firm footing, this direct relationship of the peasants to the land had to be severed. They were, over a number of centuries, forcibly “freed” from the land in order that they could be “free” to be employed in the rapidly expanding capitalist industries. Workers, for Marx, are defined by their lack of ownership of the means of production. They are no longer dependent on the land for their subsistence, but rather on the preparedness of a capitalist to give them a job and pay them a wage.

Even if they might still maintain a more or less direct relationship with nature in their work, they have no control over or stake in this at all. Their dependence is on the wage they receive, rather than on, for example, the continuing productivity of the land on which they work.
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Many workers under capitalism are, of course, concerned with the destruction of the environment. But unlike with the peasantry under feudalism, whose need to maintain a sustainable relationship with the natural world is clear and immediate, the question of environmental protection under capitalism doesn’t appear, on the surface, to relate to our immediate material needs at all.

This combination of factors—the capitalist class not having any real incentive to protect the environment, and the working class having no control over it—lies at the heart of capitalism’s unique destructiveness. The “logic” of capitalism is one in which maintaining the health of society’s metabolism—either externally in its relationship with nature, or internally in its distribution of goods among the population—only features to the extent that it assists the accumulation of wealth by the ruling class.

The one thing the capitalist class cares about above all else is profit. No matter what the consequences, whether on the natural environment, human health or anything else, if business owners can continue to expand their pool of capital, they will see it as a success. And, due to their lack of means of production, and their dependence on selling their labouring capacities to a capitalist in exchange for a wage, workers have been harnessed to the same destructive wagon.
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A boy collects plastic from a stream in Dhaka, Bangladesh PHOTO: Reuters
To understand the idea of the metabolic rift better, it will help to provide some examples. For Marx and Engels, writing when capitalism was still only in its infancy, the increasing split between the country and the rapidly growing cities illustrated the point most clearly. In volume 3 of Capital Marx explained that capitalism:
​
“reduces the agricultural population to an ever-decreasing minimum and confronts it with an ever-growing industrial population crammed together in large towns; in this way it produces conditions that provoke an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is the squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country”.

Prior to the emergence of capitalism, the productive life of society was more dispersed through a patchwork of villages and towns. There was no clear divide between the city and the country as there is today. One of the consequences of this was that the nutrients that went into agricultural production could easily be recycled back into the soil from human, animal and plant waste.

Once capitalism’s drive to profit kicked in, however, the imperative was to centralise production to increase efficiency and reduce the costs of labour and so on. Industry became more and more concentrated in urban centres. The waste from this human mass, instead of being returned to the soil, was simply dumped into rivers or the sea. As well as making cities like London unbearably smelly and disease ridden, this dynamic also led to declining soil fertility, which worsened as the nineteenth century progressed.

Farmers became desperate to find alternative sources of nutrients to regenerate the soil. The first to go were the bones from historic battlefields like Waterloo. Then, following the discovery that guano—more commonly known as bird shit—contained high levels of nitrogen and phosphorus crucial for crop growth, there was a global scramble to secure supplies of this precious resource. In 1856, the US passed the Guano Island Act by which it annexed and occupied more than 100 islands known to be rich in guano.

So the disruption of one aspect of the metabolism between human society and nature led immediately to disruption in other areas. With the focus on short-term profits, the idea that you would build a system to recycle waste from the cities back into the agricultural areas didn’t even enter the frame. Why would you invest in a scheme like that when you could make money from importing guano from distant Pacific islands? Marx summed up the situation, again in the third volume of Capital, arguing that “the moral of history ... is that rational agriculture is incompatible with the capitalist system”.

Looking at the situation today, it’s hard to argue with this. Massive amounts of labour and resources are spent artificially maintaining the nutrient levels of soils, and more and more forests and other crucial ecosystems are swallowed up in the constant drive to expand agricultural production. Meanwhile most of the nutrient-rich waste produced in our cities continues to be thrown away.
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A petrochemical refinery in Port Arthur, Texas PHOTO: New York Times
Perhaps the best example of the metabolic rift is climate change. The centrality of fossil fuels to capitalism is, for a start, related to the drive to liberate capital accumulation entirely from any natural constraints. Fossil fuels had the advantage, over other nineteenth century sources of energy, of being easily transportable, and being able to be switched and used at will. This meant production could take place 24 hours a day, independently of climatic conditions or any other external factor, and could be geographically located wherever it was most advantageous to the factory owners.
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This is one of the main developments that drove the rapid expansion of cities. Instead of having to set up in regional areas, where local traditions of working-class solidarity could be hard to break, industry could be clustered together in one place, forcing masses of workers to relocate and creating huge pools of unorganised labour that could be exploited at will.

Even putting aside the question of global warming, which of course didn’t figure in Marx’s time, fossil fuels might, in a society with a healthy external and internal metabolism, have been rejected because of their many other damaging aspects. But with the emergence of capitalism, the only goal that came to matter was the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the bosses. And there has perhaps never been a commodity so profitable for the capitalist class as fossil fuels.

Today, the metabolic rift that underlies the climate crisis is even clearer. Scientists have known about the damaging consequences of the burning of fossil fuels for 50 years. And we have long had the technology to begin a transition to alternative sources of power such as wind and solar. Despite this, and despite the increasingly urgent warnings of scientists over the last decades, global emissions are higher than ever, and millions around the world are already suffering from an increasing frequency of extreme weather, droughts, bushfires and so on.

What explains the failure to act? A big part of it is that those with their hands on the levers of power are the people who are reaping all the benefits from the continued use of fossil fuels, while those who are feeling the most effects of climate change have the least power to do anything about it.

Never has there existed a class of people so cut off from nature as the capitalists and their political servants. Why would we expect them to care much about the damage they are causing when their immense wealth can act as a shield against many of the consequences of their actions?

There is perhaps no better expression of the physical and spiritual chasm that has opened up between today’s capitalists and the natural world on which their wealth ultimately depends, than the fad—personified in Elon Musk—for the colonisation of space. It’s telling that the idea of building a new civilisation on Mars is so popular with these people. They have so little sense of their connection to or care for the natural world that the idea of an interplanetary escape seems more realistic and attractive than any real effort to fix the problems we have on Earth.

​How did Marx foresee the healing of the rift between human society and nature? That this rift is grounded in the fundamental economic structure of society means, obviously, that a bit of tinkering here and there won’t be enough. Marx was unambiguous on this point: to heal our relationship with the Earth, we need revolution. At the heart of this revolution will be the destruction of the system of private property, in which the natural environment is reduced to the status of a commodity to be bought and sold. The healing of the metabolic rift begins with the return of the land, and the means of production required to work on it, into the hands of the working class.
​
Marx’s vision of socialism was of a society centred on the collective, democratic control by workers of the process of production, and of the distribution of goods. Translating this into the language of metabolism, we might say: the conscious, democratic control over society’s internal and external metabolism, a control which would enable us quickly to identify problems and to adjust our practice accordingly.

In a socialist society, for example, the barriers to a global shift away from fossil fuels would disappear. There would be no entrenched economic interests fighting tooth and nail to protect their profits. We could have a genuine discussion and debate about the best way forward, informed by the latest science, instead of the mess of misinformation and corporate propaganda that we’re bombarded with today. And we would be able to mobilise immense new resources that in capitalism are tied to useless or destructive industries such as the military, advertising, policing, high-end housing and so on.

Instead of everything being geared towards the generation of ever greater profits, we would be thinking about what’s good for society. And for Marx, a healthy metabolism—which ensures both a sustainable exchange of material between human society and nature, and the circulation of goods to provide everyone with a decent life—was the key to a healthy society. Marx summed up his view of the relationship between human society and nature as follows:

“From the standpoint of a higher economic form of society, private ownership of the globe by single individuals will appear quite as absurd as private ownership of one man by another. Even an entire society, a nation or all simultaneously existing societies taken together are not owners of the Earth, they are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as good heads of households.”

In Marx’s time, the rift between human society and nature was still in its early stages. Today, it has deepened and widened to the point where it threatens global catastrophe. But there is nothing inevitable about the slide towards environmental collapse. Most people gain nothing from the capitalist status quo. Together, we can bring down this rotten system and build a socialist society in its place.

Author

James Plested is an editor of Red Flag.


This article was republished by Red Flag.

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7/22/2021

The Force Was With Us - Occupy Wall Street’s Very Gramscian 10th Anniversary. By: Tim Russo

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Picture
Occupy Cleveland protestor, October, 2011, at the Tom Johnson Free Speech Quadrant of Public Square
​In a Marxist analysis, September 17, 2011 marked the beginning of what became the most revolutionary mass movement of the 21st century so far, Occupy Wall Street. For two months, out of nowhere, Occupy nonviolently seized public property from private hands in every corner of America and across the globe, then held it, until being crushed by the state, suffering at least 7,000 arrests until the clearance of Zuccotti Park in New York City on November 15, 2011. Ever since, the cultural hegemony of capital has stopped at nothing to bury, minimize, dismiss, mock, co-opt, and absorb Occupy like a cancerous threat.
 
Today, Occupy’s most visible remaining impact is the hegemonic change in discourse of Occupy’s two sided slogan; “the 99%” and “the 1%”. Embodying all of capital’s grotesque inequality, these ideas would have never crossed anyone’s lips absent Occupy’s nonviolent civil disobedience cementing it into humanity’s collective “common sense”, as Gramsci would call it. Here, Gramsci’s “war of position” was won, by Occupy, against capital’s cultural hegemony. Ideational ground has been forever seized by the masses so completely even capital resorts to the 99%-1% terminology to defend itself with typically cynical co-optation, like a CIA rainbow flagged recruiting video.
 
But the highest priority of capital against any memory of Occupy for 10 years has been the complete erasure of nonviolent civil disobedience as the core, in fact genesis, of Occupy’s power. Redefining Occupy away from this power, from the first step onto public land without a permit, has become a perpetual panicked exercise in tail chasing dog wagging nonsense, all to avoid the slightest acknowledgment of the essential cosmic power inherent to refused acquiescence. For example, substantively, very little overlaps between Occupy and the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot, but tactically, protestors’ refusal to observe any rule against their presence inside the Capitol building is the sole source of any power that moment may possess at all, including the power Jan. 6th holds over those most terrified by its rather meaningless spectacle. One only needs to see how prosecutors treated the first person sentenced for that “crime” on July 19, 2021. Paul Hodgkins had the book thrown at him, was charged with “terrorism”, forced to plead to “obstruction,” and will now spend 8 months in prison for the “crime” of spending exactly 25 minutes inside the Capitol on January 6th  without permission...taking selfies.
 
Just as no one would care about January 6th had the protest obeyed the rules, whatever smears one hears today about Occupy (which will never end), no notice would ever have been taken of Occupy had it begun as a protest with a permit. In fact, Occupy Cleveland’s eviction arrests on October 21, 2011, one of the first coordinated attacks worldwide, occurred the very hour the two-week old encampment crossed the street from permitted space to non-permitted. Noticing this crease in nonviolent power staring them in the face, days of tense debate in Occupy Cleveland ended with the decision to step off their permitted 24 hour presence on a sidewalk, onto the grass of what was then the Tom Johnson Free Speech quadrant of Public Square, where no permit was allowed beyond curfew. Instantly, scores of police swarmed Public Square before curfew, setting up flood lights, cutting off main roads, then once curfew hit, rounded up 12 protestors merely seated in the grass who would not leave. Documenting the arrests on video, it was as if lightning had struck the moment the clock ticked down to curfew, The Dark Side, capital, summoning itself to its hind legs to roar.x
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Tim Russo at Occupy Cleveland, winter, 2011, at the permitted sidewalk tent
​How did Occupy win this “war of position”, despite “losing”? Wasn’t Occupy a failure? A Gramscian “war of maneuver” was launched; the nonviolent act of seizing public property against the law and holding it until crushed by the state. Occupy did not succeed in keeping the public property (a “war of position” in only the physical sense, not the Gramscian hegemonic sense). But every single arrest, crackdown, any attack on Occupy’s seizures of public property necessarily (discussed below) backfired in favor of the seizures, giving jet fuel to Occupy’s central message, growing the movement so thoroughly Occupy’s messaging is today a permanent fixture in a growing new hegemony.
 
Here we see the mysterious magic of nonviolence; there is no obvious connection between breaking local curfew laws and a permanent change in hegemonic discourse worldwide. How could it possibly work? It seems completely ridiculous - at least as ridiculous as making salt on a beach.

Salt marching to occupation

​“It is difficult not to laugh, and we imagine that will be the mood of most thinking Indians,” wrote British empire rag The Statesman in spring, 1930 in response to Gandhi’s plan to march across India to the beach to make salt in defiance of British law against it. Leftism today, radical or otherwise, has precisely the same deeply disdainful memory, if any, of both the Salt March and Occupy. Even veterans of Occupy today knee jerk into the same jokey derision of their experience (Caleb Maupin springs to mind), bemoaning how Occupy was co-opted, what chaos it all was, whining about who rose to stardom in media and who didn’t, or who got jobs in nonprofit rackets, what a waste etc., before then parroting right wing attacks on Occupy as dirty, filthy, incompetent losers who should get a job. Capital co-opts such movements so thoroughly the movement even begins to hate themselves, on demand.
 
Once begun, however, the Salt March’s enormous power was immediately apparent. Nehru himself observed, "it seemed as though a spring had been suddenly released," recalling many years later, “But the real importance, to my mind, lay in the effect they had on our own people, and especially the village masses ... Non-cooperation dragged them out of the mire and gave them self-respect and self-reliance ... They acted courageously and did not submit so easily to unjust oppression; their outlook widened...” A widened outlook, which acts courageously against unjust oppression, let alone in the village masses, is precisely the threat to capital of nonviolence. Occupy opened these channels permanently, where imagination soared, spinning from the mere ignoring of local curfew laws to the creation of another world. In two months, the world was transfixed, even McDonald’s ran ads for a 99 cent burger. Only nonviolence possesses such hegemonic power.
 
So great was Occupy’s threat to capital it has never for a moment stopped fighting that threat, for a decade. In Cleveland, once the arrests were made on Public Square, Occupy moved back to their permitted sidewalk, determined to last the entire coming winter. Capital noticed. During that winter, as Rolling Stone documented in 2012, the FBI concocted a “bomb plot”, which the FBI paid for itself, planned itself, then pushed onto unsuspecting (some mentally ill) protestors, landing five dummies in federal prison, one of countless “sting” operations created wholly by Joe Biden America’s ever burgeoning police state for the sole purpose of propaganda to fund itself.  The roundup of the “plotters” on April 30, 2012, ended what was likely the longest lasting occupation of the entire movement. But, of course, capital had only begun to bury Occupy in Cleveland.
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​Less than a week after rounding up Occupy Cleveland on Public Square October 21, 2011, Mayor Frank Jackson announced a total renovation and rebuilding of Public Square funded by millions of corporate and federal money. There was no clamor for it. Public Square’s layout dated to the first settlers from Connecticut who replicated the New England town square model. Welp, that’s gotta go! Rushed to completion for the Republican National Convention of 2016, Public Square today is little more than a bizarrely bleak, weirdly warped architectural blob, the perfect canvas for a corporate branding opportunity auctioned to the highest bidders from Cleveland’s oligarchy.
 
Snaking through Public Square like an amoeba of capital is the Key Bank Promenade, coiling around the actual spot of the Occupy Cleveland arrests that night, as if to strangle it. Donald Trump’s favorite law firm bought itself a plaque on a bench called the Jones Day Perennial Garden, ironically next to the Soldiers and Sailors Monument to Union Civil War veterans, where Occupy Cleveland was denied permission to camp from the monument’s board on October 12, 2011. Billionaire Dan Gilbert bought himself the Cleveland Cavaliers & Quicken Loans Perennial Gardens, which surround local stinking oligarch Bobby George’s restaurant, branded with fists in the air co-optation as if to sneer at your silly thoughts of revolution, calling itself “Rebol” whose goal is “upgrading humanity”.
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​All so very feeble. For if one person decided to sit on the AT&T garden bench and not leave after curfew, the very same legions of capital would swarm yet again, instantly. Question being, would the very same immense power of nonviolence be then unleashed in support of the person not leaving the AT&T bench after curfew? Could it? How? Can these forces be wielded on demand? To put it another way, as we Marxists like to say about our socialism, is nonviolent force somehow “scientific”?

Praxis vs. a practice​

​The short answer is no, the greatest nonviolent power is not predictably “scientific” in the sense Marxists like to claim Marxism is. So many factors must be present, most unpredictable, largely products of sheer chance. For example, it is entirely forgotten that Occupy emerged in the wake of the Arab Spring, drawing on the same forces afoot worldwide. Gandhi himself could not have known the Salt March would be his towering masterpiece; prior to the spring of 1930, Gandhi had been in and out of His Majesty’s prisons so often the Salt March could easily have just been another fired blank. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a student of Gandhi and the Salt March in particular, never could plan precisely the forces that reactionary injustice would wield against his nonviolent disobedience of their unjust laws, much less the forces unleashed for justice in response. Dr. King couldn’t even have known if those forces for justice would, in fact, unleash to support him. If he were alive today, seeing police murder African Americans in broad daylight on a regular basis, Dr. King would even wonder if he’d been successful at all. So then, why bother?
 
The closest Gandhian nonviolence comes to a “science” is in the term Gandhi himself coined for his efforts, satyagraha, a combination of the Sanskrit words for “truth” (satya) and “insistence” or “force” (agraha). Gandhi himself explained, “Truth (satya) implies love, and firmness (agraha) engenders and therefore serves as a synonym for force. I thus began to call the Indian movement Satyagraha, that is to say, the Force which is born of Truth and Love or non-violence...” Beyond the tactic of satyagraha, which summons this Force of Truth and Love, Gandhi laid out over his life a wide array of demands, rules, and principles for any satyagrahi to live by every day. To continue the Force analogy, for Gandhi, a satyagrahi must commit to a kind of “Jedi” way of living, which Gandhi called “ahimsa”. Specific to Indian culture, some of the principles for ahimsa tend to grate at the Western mind, such as chastity, spinning your own clothing, and worse for Marxists, belief in God.
 
The tactic itself, however, if practiced carefully, can be detached from the monk-like devotion to the culturally specific ways of ahimsa. For example, celibacy in this sense is not a magic potion for satyagrahi, it is merely the application of a discipline to a human weakness, intended to instill the same discipline against the human weaknesses of fear, anger, violence and vengeance which can defeat nonviolence when they inevitably challenge a satyagrahi in the moment of confrontation. Thus nonviolence is a practice more than a tactic, like love, and in fact is love, a daily commitment to which one must dedicate time and effort constantly, in preparation for that day when the Force of Truth and Love does unleash itself to support your fight against injustice.
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​Here we find echoes of Marxian “permanent revolution” in pursuit of Gramscian cultural hegemony. For Gramsci, capital enforces itself through the near unanimous consent of the masses who voluntarily acquiesce to capital’s specific value system. Thus, a hegemony to replace capital’s must also be near unanimous, or capital’s hegemony will prevail over it. With satyagraha, the only way the immense Force of Truth and Love is unleashed is if it is near unanimous, or in fact, fully unanimous, because Truth and Love are eternal, thus must eventually be unanimous. It follows that if your nonviolent refusal to acquiesce unleashes the Force of Truth and Love, in all its immense power, not only have you summoned that Force, you have necessarily built a new near unanimity of hegemony to replace capital’s. This is how the terms “99%” and “1%” have entered our discourse permanently. Capital may have crushed the movement which Forced, via Truth and Love, that change in hegemony, but the change remains.

So when’s the next Occupy?​

​After the Salt March, it would be another 17 years before Britain left India for good, more blood would be shed, more time in prisons for nonviolent activists, more terrible suffering to endure for a continent. Ten years after Occupy Wall Street, it seems at least another ten years of capitalist imperialism sprawls hellishly ahead of us to suck us all dry, throw us in jail if we dare disobey, beat us into acquiescence with the daily grind of atomized alienated hopelessness. What to do? Should we all go to Cleveland’s Public Square and sit on the Jones Day Bench after curfew?
 
The next “Occupy” is definitely coming. Capital’s hegemonic collapse has only accelerated, and if Marxism is indeed “scientific”, well, nothing is more written in stone than yet another worldwide financial calamity leaving capitalism in a steaming heap. Symptoms are everywhere, from the mere existence of a President Donald Trump, to stock market bubbles so enormous now the dot com bubble seems quaint. Censorship is now a grassroots fascist phenomenon, enforced online then outward, so thoroughly embedded in society even your cute little Aunt Petunia, just like Joe Biden’s press secretary Jen Psaki, likes nothing more than to get someone (everyone!) banned from Facebook. Mini Mussolinis dressed as cat lady MSNBC wine moms join with neo-Confederate skinhead chuds who are literal Nazis to “cancel” whatever it is that curls their knickers a twitch or two. These are all symptoms of capital’s panic in the hegemonic mind. Capital is collapsing, it is entirely apparent to all, and covid-19 has only made that clearer at the sharp end of a pharma syringe on the other end of which awaits some Pete Buttigieg clone’s PowerPoint presentation to the board which has a deadline for the closing bell segment on CNBC Earnings Report.
 
The price of labor declines ever closer to zero, often actually zero (college sports), and the last time that happened was slavery (unpaid involuntary labor, nothing more). To get rid of slavery took a bloody yet deeply heroic Civil War led by the likes of Union Brigadier General August Willich, the greatest American Communist who ever lived. It is no coincidence here at Midwestern Marx that we very much like August Willich, not least because he tried to steal Karl Marx’s wife. I digress. But even Willich would know, the next Occupy is coming, the question is when, and how.
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​Occupy was a creature of its precise moment in history. It was less planned movement, more explosion of it. Therein lay Occupy’s greatest strengths and weaknesses. The next Occupy won’t be planned either. Something may be planned to spark it, like the Salt March was. Marxists in particular are susceptible to this notion that one day a palace will be stormed, a date and time will begin the revolution, a specific action. For Gramsci the palace to be stormed is the mind of the masses who enforce capital by their own acquiescence. Thus, more likely, a spark will light a flame that will engulf the world again, and it too will be given a name. It too will force hegemonic change, and it too will likely be crushed, more viciously than ever. Because hilariously, Joe Biden was instrumental in the crackdown on Occupy in 2011, under Barack Obama, whose FBI, NSA, CIA, the whole federal enchilada coordinated with, quite literally, every single police department in America, most under Democratic Party mayors, to crush a bunch of kids violating curfew. Joe Biden, Crime Bill Boomer Asshole, will be more than ready if we all sat on the Jones Day Bench tomorrow night after curfew. You can bank on that. No, unless you have a big budget for lawyers, and thousands ready to fill the jails, it is not very useful to imagine planning the next Occupy.
 
There are far more fruitful endeavors for a revolutionary’s time in between revolutionary moments, not just to prepare for the next big moment, but live as if it has already come. As the saying goes, be the change you wish to see. For example, even though he could not know how far his idea to make salt on a beach would go, Gandhi had an inkling. So for the Salt March, Gandhi insisted on specifically trained people from his own ashram, grizzled veterans of studying and practicing satyagraha campaigns, steeped in the principles of ahimsa, who were highly disciplined and ready for anything; to be arrested, or killed, or just merely ignored. In a Maoist sense these are “cadres”, or the “vanguard”, people so skilled and trained and gifted and brave they are capable of leading the mass line where it wants to go, because they’ve already lived it.
 
The key is the mass line needs to want to go there. The mass line just doesn’t know how. Through Occupy Wall Street a decade ago, we were taught once again that way forward, where the mass line was ready to go, how high are its costs, and how permanent its changes to our world can be. At Occupy general assemblies, we liked to say “another world is possible.” We weren’t ready last time. Maybe now we are. On Occupy’s tenth anniversary this September 17th, the best way to commemorate is to live in that other world yourself, preparing to bring it to others when the eternally unanimous Force of Truth and Love once more, without warning, explodes in your very hands, like a light sabre.

Author

​​Tim Russo is author of Ghosts of Plum Run, an ongoing historical fiction series about the charge of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg. Tim's career as an attorney and international relations professional took him to two years living in the former soviet republics, work in Eastern Europe, the West Bank & Gaza, and with the British Labour Party. Tim has had a role in nearly every election cycle in Ohio since 1988, including Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2020. Tim ran for local office in Cleveland twice, earned his 1993 JD from Case Western Reserve University, and a 2017 masters in international relations from Cleveland State University where he earned his undergraduate degree in political science in 1989. Currently interested in the intersection between Gramscian cultural hegemony and Gandhian nonviolence, Tim is a lifelong Clevelander.


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7/21/2021

Die Linke supported the ban of German Communist Party. By: Id Communism

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On 9 July we wrote that the Federal Election Commission announced that the German Communist Party (DKP) will not be allowed to participate in September's Bundestag elections and at the same time will be deprived of its status as a political party. 

The pretext for this shameful decision was the alleged late submission of financial statements. 
Several Communist and Workers' Parties from across the world have strongly condemned the decision of the Commission and expressed its solidarity to the DKP. 
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But, what is interesting in the whole story is the stance of the so-called "Left Party" (Die Linke). According to unsere-zeit.de, the decision at the Federal Election Commission was taken with only one vote against; the one of Harmut Geil from "Alliance 90/ The Greens" (Bündnis 90/Die Grünen). However, the representative of "Die Linke" in the Commission, Constanze Portner, voted in favor of the ban on DKP's political status. 

Once again, Die Linke, the "brother party" of SYRIZA in Greece, proves its actual ideological and political orientation, as a party of social democracy deeply committed to serve the capitalist system. A few months ago, Die Linke had adopted a despicable resolution in favor of counterrevolutionary attemps in Cuba.

All the communists, the leftists, the progressive people in Germany must draw conclusions from the stance of Die Linke and support the struggle of the German Communist Party. 

IN DEFENSE OF COMMUNISM ​


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In Defense of Communism.


This article was republished from Id Communism.

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7/21/2021

Frantz Fanon: The Brightness of Metal. By: Dossier

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Frantz Fanon walking up a ship gangway. To Fanon’s right is Rheda Malek, a journalist from the Algerian National Liberation Front newspaper El Moudjahid. .
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

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French colonial map of Martinique from the Covens & Mortier’s Atlas Nouveau, 1942.
Wikimedia Commons / Geographicus Rare Antique Maps
On this earth there is that which deserves life.

​Mahmoud Darwish
Frantz Fanon was born on the Caribbean island of Martinique on 25 July 1925. He died in the United States, from leukaemia, on 6 December 1961. He was thirty-six years old. At thirty-six he had been a protagonist in two wars, a political militant in the Caribbean, Europe and North Africa, a playwright, a practicing psychiatrist, the author of numerous articles in scientific journals, a teacher, a diplomat, a journalist, the editor of an anti-colonial newspaper, the author of three books, and a major Pan-Africanist and internationalist.
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Like Ernesto “Che” Guevara – another revolutionary who valued the poetic and was a committed internationalist, doctor, soldier, teacher, and theorist – Fanon’s life was marked by a permanent, courageous, and militant motion into the present, and into the specificity of the situations in which he found himself.

Fanon’s thought carries, in Ato Sekyi-Otu’s memorable phrase, an ‘irrepressible … openness to the universal’. In the realm of the political, as in the poetic, the truest route into the universal has always been through an intense engagement with the particular in its concrete manifestations in space and time: this piece of land occupied in the interstices of this city, these women rebuilding in the ruins of the last attack, the plastic burning in this brazier as the night wears on, these men stepping out of the shadows with these guns.

‘Courage’, Alain Badiou writes, ‘is a local virtue. It takes up a morality of the place’. This is the terrain on which the radical thinkers who produce work that sustains a capacity for illumination and inspiration across space and time ground their intellect. It can be dangerous terrain. For the militant the price for the possibility that, in Fanon’s words written in France in 1952, ‘two or three truths may cast their eternal brilliance over the world’ may be that ‘the possibility of annihilation’ is risked.

For the radical intellectual, the confrontation with the particular may sometimes require solitary labour, as in some forms of prison writing. But the primary ground of militant reason is, in Karl Marx’s words, ‘participation in politics, and therefore real struggles’. And emancipation – communism, in Marx’s words – is ‘the real movement which abolishes the present state of things’ and not ‘an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself’.

For Marx, the world will only be shaped by the most valuable insights of philosophical striving when philosophy itself becomes worldly via participation in struggle. Cedric Robinson speaks to this imperative when he writes that, in order to ‘cement pain to purpose, experience to expectation, consciousness to collective action’, it is necessary to ensure that ‘the practice of theory is informed by struggle’.

For Fanon, the development of radical reason – which is to say emancipatory reason – certainly includes conversation with philosophy as it is defined by Paulin Hountondji: ‘not a system but a history’. But, the plane of becoming on which this work constitutes itself is, not unlike Antonio Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis, that of struggle – the struggles of the damned of the earth. Fanon is, in Gramsci’s terms, a democratic philosopher. ‘This philosopher’, Peter Thomas writes, ‘is no longer defined in terms of separation from the “life of the people”, but as an expressive element of that life which it aims to cultivate, increasing its capacity for active relations of knowledge and practice’.

Since his death in late 1961, Fanon’s thought has had an extraordinary life, reaching from the maelstrom of the Algerian revolution to the American prison, the French banlieue, the Brazilian favela, and far beyond. Sometimes expressed via a potent poeticism and always rooted in a radical humanism – an immediate, universal and militant affirmation of the equality and value of human life – his political vision is resolutely opposed to the Manichean logic of colonialism.
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Manichaeism is a central concept in Fanon’s thought. The term comes to us from a religion founded by Mani, known by his followers as the ‘Apostle of Light’, in Babylonia in the third century. Mani wove a set of diverse religions into a single new faith that proposed an absolute dualism between good and evil represented, in symbolic terms, by light and dark. Brought into contemporary discourse as metaphor, Manichaeism speaks to an absolute split between all things light and good (and true, beautiful, clean, healthy, prosperous, etc.) and all things dark and evil (and false, ugly, dirty, diseased, impoverished etc.). It is an inherently paranoid orientation to the world.

Fanon’s thought is marked by an axiomatic commitment to an immediate and radical egalitarianism – including the recognition of a universal capacity for reason. It is shaped, in its deep structure, by a profoundly dialectical sense of the capacity for the human to be in motion. His thought, taken as a whole, did not waver from what Aimé Césaire, the extraordinary surrealist poet, described as the obligation ‘to see clearly, to think clearly — that is, dangerously’.

Liberation must, Fanon insists, restore ‘dignity to all citizens, fill their minds and feast their eyes with human things and create a prospect that is human because conscious and sovereign persons dwell therein’. For Fanon, the restoration of dignity is not a matter of return. The journey towards what, in the last year of his life, in a letter written to the Iranian intellectual Ali Shariati, he called ‘that destination where humanity lives well’ is undertaken via a constant process of becoming and enlargement of the sphere of democratic reason. As Lewis Gordon notes, for Fanon, legitimacy is not a matter of offering proof of racial or cultural authenticity; rather, it emerges ‘from active engagement in struggles for social transformation and building institutions and ideas that nourish and liberate the formerly colonized’.

For the university-trained intellectual, Fanon poses a simple demand, but one that retains its radical charge almost sixty years later: to move beyond the ontological and spatial ordering of oppression and commit to a form of insurgent and democratic praxis in which ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’ is developed between protagonists from different social locations.
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Frantz Fanon at a press conference of writers in Tunis, 1959.
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC


(Mis)readings

Fanon’s last book, Les Damnés de la Terre, arrived in the world shortly after he left it. In 1963 it was mistranslated into English as The Wretched of the Earth. Some scholars prefer to refer to it as The Damned of the Earth, which is a better translation. From the outset, Jean-Paul Sartre, a committed anti-colonial intellectual, set many readers off course with an introduction that – although sympathetic – misinterpreted Fanon as a Manichean thinker. In 1970 Hannah Arendt, a thinker who acquired significant standing in the North American academy and beyond despite taking consistently anti-black positions, compounded the problem with an influential misreading that reduced Fanon’s complex thought to his support for armed struggle against colonialism.
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However, there is a set of intellectuals who have read Fanon as a sophisticated thinker rather than a racial archetype. Paulo Freire was one of the first major intellectuals to understand Fanon’s theory of praxis. In 1968, Freire was finishing the manuscript of his second book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, in Santiago while living in exile from the military dictatorship in Brazil. In an interview in California in 1987, he recalled: ‘A young man who was in Santiago on a political task gave me the book The Wretched of the Earth. I was writing Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and the book was almost finished when I read Fanon. I had to rewrite the book’.

After reading Fanon, Freire developed a radical humanism committed to the immediate recognition of the full and equal personhood of the oppressed as a pre-condition for emancipatory action. Like Fanon, his form of praxis is predicated on an ethic of mutuality between the authorised intellectual and people who have not had access to much formal education.

Pedagogy of the Oppressed was published later that year and, in 1972, it was taken up by the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO) which had been formed by Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, Rubin Phillip, and others, in 1968. Beginning in Durban, Freirean ideas became central to a form of radically democratic action that aimed to work towards critical consciousness as a shared project, rather than to announce new versions of what Marx had called ‘dogmatic abstraction’ to the people.

In the late 1970s, and through the 1980s, Freirean ideas about praxis – shaped to a significant extent by Fanon, and in many cases read together with Fanon – were central to the political work undertaken in workplace and community struggles across South Africa. Freire’s theory of praxis enabled the emergence of some of the most impressive and powerful social forces on the planet at the time, in which ordinary people became central protagonists in struggle, and in the making of meaning, counter-power, and history from below.

In terms of reading Fanon as a theorist of praxis, the quick but extraordinary and enduring response to the 1992 Los Angeles riots by Sylvia Wynter was exemplary. In her explicitly Fanonian conclusion to No Humans Involved: A Letter to My Colleagues, she reached beyond Los Angeles and towards ‘the throwaway lives . . . of the vast majority of peoples who inhabit the “favela/shanty town” of the globe and their jobless archipelagos’. Wynter argued that, for university-trained intellectuals – who she understands as trained ‘grammarians’ of the constituted order, an order that does not count everyone as equally human – it is imperative to ‘marry our thought’ to that of the oppressed.

In 1996, Sekyi-Otu produced a brilliant and deeply dialectical African-centred reading of Fanon that situated the question of praxis, and – crucially – what Sekyi-Otu calls ‘the reprieve of prodigal reason’ at the heart of what Fanon referred to as ‘the weary road to rational knowledge’. Scholars like Nigel Gibson, Lewis Gordon and Tracy Sharpley-Whiting have also significantly enriched the scholarship on Fanon.
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Meeting of Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dwellers’ movement, in February 2020.  Rajesh Jantilal

Radical Humanism

In contemporary South Africa, Fanon is read and discussed from the political education workshop organised on a hard-won urban land occupation to the trade union political school to the academy, in both its dissident spaces and in its highest reaches. Fanon’s life and work offer inspiration as well as analytical acuity to all of these audiences. Achille Mbembe, writing from Johannesburg, explains that:
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I myself have been attracted to Fanon’s name and voice because both have the brightness of metal. His is a metamorphic thought, animated by an indestructible will to live. What gives this metallic thinking its force and power is the air of indestructibility and, its corollary, the injunction to stand up. It is the inexhaustible silo of humanity that it houses and which, yesterday, gave the colonised strength and which, today, allows us to look forward to the future.

There are numerous lines of connection that open fruitful possibilities for dialogue between Fanon’s work and contemporary forms of struggle. These range from his account of the centrality of the racialisation of space and the spacialisation of race in the settler colonial project, to questions of language, policing, the racial unconscious, and – of course – the brutal realities of what has come to be termed the postcolony.

In the metropolitan academy, Fanon’s humanism is, with notable exceptions – such as the valuable work of Paul Gilroy – often ignored or treated as passé, or even pre-critical. Sneering condescension from people whose humanity has never been placed in question is not uncommon. But in contemporary South Africa, it is the question of the human – of how the count of the human is made, and how humanity is asserted – that ties Fanon’s theoretical work most closely to the intellectual work undertaken in the often-perilous struggles for land and dignity. Here, dignity is understood as the recognition of full and equal humanity, including the right to participate in deciding public affairs. These kinds of struggles – frequently undertaken against considerable violence from the state and the ruling party, and the contempt of civil society – are fundamentally rooted in an insurgent humanism which legitimates and sustains resistance. Nigel Gibson’s important work on Fanon and South Africa has a firm grasp of this.

The contemporary political potency of radical humanism is not unique to South Africa. From Caracas to La Paz to Port-au-Prince, accounts of popular and potentially emancipatory politics frequently stress the neighbourhood as an important site of struggle, the road blockade and the occupation as important tactics, and the affirmation of the humanity of the oppressed as the foundation of the strength to sustain resistance. This affirmation is often explained as being sustained by social practices in which women play a leading role, and frequently spoken of in terms of the recovery of dignity. It is not uncommon to hear people speak of indignity as consequent to the expropriation of the right to participate in making decisions about public affairs, as well as land, labour, and bodily autonomy.

The question of the human is, in part, a question of how oppression seeks to distribute the attribution of the capacity for reason, and to recognise some speech as speech while dismissing other speech as mere noise – noise consequent to unreason. It is a question of how we determine who is honoured and who is dishonoured, who can be slandered with impunity and who deserves public respect, whose life is valued and whose is not, whose lives should ordinarily be governed with law and whose should routinely be governed with violence, and who, in death, should be mourned and who should not. The denial of full and equal humanity allows oppression to draw the line between forms of organisation and contestation that it can see as politics, and those that it cannot, and between civil society and the sphere of engagement that it considers to be mindless, criminal, or a manifestation of conspiracy.

Fanon’s radical humanism, a humanism made – in Césaire’s famous phrase – ‘to the measure of the world’, sustains a capacity to speak with real power to many of the ways in which the question of the human is posed, and contested, from within contemporary forms of grassroots militancy undertaken from zones of social exclusion and domination.

The Open Door of Every Consciousness

Before coming to France in late 1946 to study medicine, and then to specialise in psychiatry, Fanon had been a soldier with the Forces françaises libres (‘the Free French Forces’), fighting against fascism in Europe while simultaneously confronting constant racism within the French army. In 1944 he was wounded in the battle for Colmar, a French town near the German border, and received the Croix de Guerre for bravery. In 1945 he returned home to Martinique, where he worked for the successful campaign by Césaire to be elected as the mayor of Fort de France on a Communist platform.
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From the outset, Fanon’s writings in France were concerned with how racism produces what Michel-Rolph Trouillot would later term ‘an ontology, an implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants’. In The North African Syndrome, an essay published at the age of 26,  Fanon examined how French medical science approached the North African migrant with ‘an a priori attitude’ that, crucially, is not derived ‘experimentally’ but, rather, ‘on the basis of an oral tradition’. He observed that that ‘The North African does not come with a substratum common to his race, but on a foundation built by the European. In other words, the North African, spontaneously, by the very fact of appearing on the scene, enters into a pre-existing framework’. In this framework, the North African appears to the French doctor as ‘a simulator, a liar, a malingerer, a sluggard, a thief’.
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Stephen Biko (standing) at the 1971 conference of the South African Students’ Organisation (SASO). The Alan Taylor Residence hall, where the event was held, was the University of Natal’s black-only residence for medical students under apartheid.
Steve Biko Foundation

Fanon shows that in the consciousness of the racist, and in the general intellect of racist social formations, the imagined ontological split on which racist ideology depends is part of what Immanuel Kant called the a priori – the categories through which sense is made of experience. This deception of reason – what Gordon calls ‘racist rationality’ – results in racist societies producing forms of knowledge that, while authorised as the most fully formed instances of reason at work, are fundamentally irrational.
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Fanon’s first book, Peau noire, masques blancs was published in the French summer of 1952, a few months after The North African Syndrome, and in the same year as Richard Wright’s Invisible Man, with which it has often been read. It was translated into English as Black Skin, White Masks in 1967. Superbly analysed by Gordon, it is both a statement of a radical and affirmative commitment to human freedom and a brilliant critique of racism in the Caribbean and in the metropole that engages questions ranging from language to popular culture, to romance and sex, to anthropology and psychology. It remains a foundational text for critical race studies.

Black Skin, White Masks was dictated to Josie Dublé, a comrade and lover who Fanon would later marry, as he paced up and down in his student room in Lyon. The prose carries a sense of the cadence of that motion and is sculpted by a compelling poeticism with discernible influences from his reading of poets like Aimé Césaire and Jacques Roumain. Parts of the book read, not unlike some passages from Walt Whitman, as if they were meant to be declaimed.

Every politics rests, consciously or not, on an ontology, on a theory of human being. For Fanon, there are two signal facts about human being, both mediated through an affirmative disposition. The first is that the human being ‘is motion toward the world’. In the tradition of French philosophy that runs from Sartre to Badiou, the prospect of what Fanon called the ‘mutation’ of consciousness – the capacity of the human being to change – would remain a central theme of his thought until the end. In his work produced during his immersion in the Algerian revolution, the mutation of consciousness would be explored in the context of collective struggle.

For Fanon, consciousness is not only dynamic. The second signal fact about human being is that consciousness is free in the way that it is in Sartre’s existentialism. For Fanon, ‘In the world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself. I am a part of Being to the degree that I go beyond it’. But Fanon does not share the pessimism of Sartre’s view that the human is ‘a useless passion’. Fanon’s humanism carries a fundamental optimism that can arguably be located in a tradition of Caribbean humanism with African antecedents and parallels that runs from Toussaint Louverture through to Aimé Césaire and on to Sylvia Wynter and Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He begins and ends his first book by insisting that ‘Man is a yes’.

His humanism also carries a universal dimension: ‘Anti-Semitism hits me head-on: I am enraged, I am bled white by an appalling battle, I am deprived of the possibility of being a man’. Fanon affirms that ‘Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act’. Of course, the use of gendered language that is sometimes (but not always) introduced in translation, is unfortunate for an intellectual who insisted that ‘[We] must guard against the danger of perpetuating the feudal tradition which holds sacred the superiority of the masculine element over the feminine’.

For Fanon, the imperative to recognise every consciousness as autonomous and possessed of the capacity to reason and to exercise freedom is ethical as well as empirical. He concludes his first book, Black Skin, White Masks, by insisting that ‘At the conclusion of this study, I want the world to recognize, with me, the open door of every consciousness’. Fanon’s commitment to the recognition of every consciousness as an open door is a universal principle, a militant axiom, entirely opposed to the aristocratic conception of philosophy that, running from Plato to Nietzsche, and on to their contemporary descendants, reserves reason for a privileged caste. Earlier in the book, he writes as a clinician and in intimation of the theory of praxis that would later be worked out in the vortex of the Algerian war:

Examining this 73-year-old farm woman, whose mind was never strong and who is now far gone in dementia, I am suddenly aware of the collapse of the antennae with which I touch and through which I am touched. The fact that I adopt a language suitable to dementia, to feeblemindedness; the fact that I ‘talk down’ to this poor woman of 73; the fact that I condescend to her in my quest for a diagnosis, are the stigmata of a dereliction in my relations with other people.
Picture
Meeting of the United Democratic Front (UDF), a leading anti-apartheid body that launched in 1983 and joined the struggles of many South African organisations.
Wits Historical Papers

Manichean Delirium

Black Skin, White Masks is also a theory of how racism ‘encases’ human being. Fanon describes wanting ‘to come lithe and young into a world that was ours and to help to build it together’ but finds himself ‘sealed into a crushing objecthood’. He offers a theory of racist ideology as a form of ‘Manichean delirium’ in which, in the racist imagination that structures everything from advertising to entertainment, science, and the unconscious, whiteness is associated with beauty, reason, virtue, cleanliness, and so on, and blackness with the obverse. To the limited extent that progress is possible within the logic of this schema, ‘From black to white is the course of mutation. One is white as one is rich, as one is beautiful, as one is intelligent’.
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Fanon describes the inevitable failure of attempts to find a way to win the recognition required to live freely against the crushing weight of racism: ‘Every hand was a losing hand for me’. One of those losing hands was reason. The fanaticism with which reason was coded as white in the racist imagination was such that it was impossible to be recognised as simultaneously reasonable and black: ‘[W]hen I was present, it was not; when it was there, I was no longer’. The end result is collapse: ‘Yesterday, awakening to the world, I saw the sky turn upon itself utterly and wholly. I wanted to rise, but the disembowelled silence fell back upon me, its wings paralyzed. Without responsibility, straddling Nothingness and infinity, I began to weep’.
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Fanon concludes that there can be no personal solution to the problem of racism. What is required is ‘a restructuring of the world’. He ends Black Skin, White Masks by asserting that ‘To educate man to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act’. This is a commitment to praxis, a term that appears consistently in the original French publications of the work that he would go on to produce in Tunis, but which is largely elided in English translations.

Radical Mutations

After concluding his studies in France, Fanon took up a position as the head of the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, a colonial institution in which he implemented radical reforms. Alice Cherki, an intern at the hospital, and later Fanon’s most sensitive biographer, recalls that his aim as a clinician was ‘not to muzzle madness but to listen to it’.
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In 1956, describing colonial society as ‘a web of lies, of cowardice, of contempt for man’, he resigned from his position at the hospital to join the revolution against French colonialism from a base in Tunis. He would work for the revolution as a psychiatrist, journalist, editor, and diplomat, undertake reconnaissance work, and teach philosophy – including Jean-Paul Sartre’s Critique de la raison dialectique (Critique of Dialectical Reason) – to soldiers on the front. In his years as a revolutionary he would encounter people like Simone de Beauvoir, Cheikh Anta Diop, Patrice Lumumba, Es’kia Mphahlele, Kwame Nkrumah, and Jean-Paul Sartre.

In December 1957, Abane Ramdane, Fanon’s closest comrade in the Algerian national liberation movement, was assassinated by a right-wing faction within the movement that aimed to subordinate political work to military authority. Fanon’s name was placed on a list of people to be watched, and subject to a similar fate should there be open defiance within the movement in response to the assassination. From this point on, Fanon lived knowing that there was a potential of significant risk from the authoritarian nationalists in the movement, and a vital struggle within the struggle.

Fanon’s second book, L’An V de la Révolution Algérienne, was published in 1959 and translated into English in 1965. In English it has been known as A Dying Colonialism since 1967. The book is, Fanon explains, an account of how participation in the struggle ‘to impose reason on … [colonial] unreason’, to oppose ‘the indignity, kept alive and nourished every morning’, results in what he calls ‘essential mutations in the consciousness of the colonized’.

It is, as Cherki observes, very deliberately a book about ‘the common men and women’ – women and men in a society in motion, rather than the personalities and actions of revolutionary elites. In contrast to elitist forms of anti-colonialism that aim to direct ‘the masses’ from above, the imperative to recognise the ‘open door of every consciousness’ is extended to the common people.

Fanon makes his position clear at the outset: ‘The power of the Algerian Revolution . . . resides in the radical mutation that the Algerian has undergone’. In the context of revolutionary struggle, mutation has escaped the stranglehold of racist ideology – which can only understand progress as movement from black to white – and is now an autonomous and self-directed process.

The book offers five case studies of the kind of ‘radical mutation’ – or change in consciousness – that can take place in the vortex of struggle, of collective motion. In each case, Fanon offers an account of how the Manichaeism introduced by colonialism breaks down in struggle. The book examines how technologies introduced through colonialism and initially identified as inherently colonial – namely the radio and biomedical medicine – are taken up in struggle, how gender relations change in struggle, and, in the final chapter, how some of the European minority choose to offer support to the anti-colonial revolution.
Picture
Frantz Fanon and his medical team at the Blida-Joinville Psychiatric Hospital in Algeria, where he worked from 1953 to 1956.
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC
Perhaps unsurprising given the all-or-nothing context of the Algerian war, Fanon’s case studies of the development of radical political solidarities across class, gender, and race all plot a unidirectional movement of progressive enlightenment. For instance, the doctor –formerly seen as an agent of colonialism, but now ‘Sleeping on the ground with the men and women of the mechtas, living the drama of the people’ – becomes ‘our Doctor’.
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Gendered norms are also shown to change in struggle. Fanon describes the Algerian woman, ‘who assumed an increasingly important place in revolutionary action’, as ‘bursting the bounds of the narrow world in which she had lived … [and] at the same time participating in the destruction of colonialism and in the birth of a new woman’. This aspect of Fanon’s work, and his wider engagement with gender, is very well analysed by Sharpley-Whiting, who concludes, in a rigorous feminist analysis, that it is clear that ‘Fanon recognized the Algerian woman’s right to exist as an autonomous and complete social being’.

Anyone who has participated in a sustained popular struggle will immediately recognise the value and validity of Fanon’s account of the ‘radical mutations’ that can dramatically, and often rapidly, change people’s capacities and thinking. However, in A Dying Colonialism, there is no sense of a struggle within the struggle, nor any sense that dialectical progress can be reversed, and that it often is once struggles have subsided.

A Very Hard Red

In June 1959, Fanon suffered serious injuries when a jeep he was travelling on was blown up by a mine near the Tunisian and Algerian border. He was sent to Rome for medical treatment, where he narrowly escaped assassination, most likely at the hands of a violent settler organisation linked to the French state.

In March 1960, Fanon was sent to Accra to become a roving ambassador for the Provisional Government of the Algerian national liberation movement, the Front de libération nationale (‘National Liberation Front’). His encounters with newly independent states were frequently dispiriting. In November 1960, he was part of a team tasked with a reconnaissance mission aimed at opening a southern front on the border with Mali, with supply lines running from Bamako across the Sahara. At the last minute, suspecting a trap, they abandoned their plan to travel by air and drove the two thousand kilometres from Monrovia to Bamako. The plane on which they had been scheduled to travel was diverted to Abidjan, where it was searched by the French military.

In his logbook, Fanon recorded his concern with the limits of forms of politics that fail to reach beyond the Manichaeism introduced by colonialism and to develop emancipatory ideas and practices: ‘Colonialism and its derivatives do not, as a matter of fact, constitute the present enemies of Africa. In a short time this continent will be liberated. For my part, the deeper I enter into the cultures and the political circles the surer I am that the great danger that threatens Africa is the absence of ideology’.
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Moved by the vast desert vistas, and returning to the poeticism of his early work, Fanon wrote that: ‘Some days ago we saw a sunset that turned the robe of heaven a bright violet. Today it is a very hard red that the eye encounters’. Though the trip across the desert had left him visibly exhausted, he immediately went to Accra to write a contribution to an English-language publication by the Provisional Government of Algeria. An examination by a doctor in Accra raised the possibility of leukaemia. He returned to Tunis, took a blood test, and diagnosed himself with leukaemia. That evening, he announced his resolve to write a new book. After receiving treatment in a clinic outside of Moscow, he had a brief window of opportunity to write as the cancer went into remission.
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Picture
After Frantz Fanon died in 1961, his body was carried across the border from Tunisia to be buried in Algeria.
Frantz Fanon Archives / IMEC

The Weary Road to Rational Knowledge

Parts of Fanon’s last work, The Damned of the Earth, were dictated from a mattress on the floor of a flat in Tunis as he was dying. The book offers a searing indictment of settler colonialism, a critical account of the struggle against colonialism, an equally searing account of the postcolonial morass, and a radically democratic vision of emancipatory praxis. It ends with a harrowing account of the damage wrought by the violence of colonial war.

The critique of the colonial city in the book’s opening pages is particularly powerful and continues to resonate into the present. The Manichean ideology that Fanon critiqued in France took on a concrete material form in the settler colony, of which apartheid was a paradigmatic case. The colonial world is divided into different zones, intended for different kinds of people. It is a world ‘of barbed wire entanglements’, ‘a world divided into compartments’, ‘a world cut in two’, ‘a narrow world strewn with violence’. In Fanon’s view, authentic decolonization requires a decisive end to a situation in which ‘this world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by different species’.

The description of the anti-colonial struggle continues the exploration of collective mutation developed in A Dying Colonialism. In Fanon’s narrative, the initial response to colonial oppression is fundamentally shaped by what it opposes: ‘[T]he Manichaeism of the coloniser produces a Manichaeism of the colonised’. Fanon is clear about the costs of this counter-Manicheanism: ‘To the lie of the colonial situation the colonized replies with an equal lie’. Within the struggle there is, he says, an initial ‘brutality of thought and mistrust of subtlety’.

But, as there is movement along what Fanon calls ‘the weary road to rational knowledge’, colonial paradigms are transcended rather than merely inverted. The people begin ‘to pass from total, indiscriminating nationalism to social and economic awareness’. Fanon is clear that this process requires that ‘the people must also give up their too-simple conception of their overlords’ as ‘the racial and racist standard of judgment is transcended’.

Sekyi-Otu, making a point that is crucial for enabling serious readings of the work, shows that a set of emphatic statements offered as definitive statements at the beginning of the book are later challenged as Fanon’s narrative unfolds. To take just one instance, in the beginning it is asserted that: ‘Truth is that which hurries on the break-up of the colonial regime; it is that which promotes the emergence of the nation; it is all that protects the indigenous people and ruins the foreigners’. Later on, Fanon explains that – as it becomes clear that ‘exploitation can wear a black face, or an Arab one’ – initial certainties run into obvious limits.

Fanon writes that, as the Manichean certainties that mark the first moment of struggle begin to break down, ‘The idyllic and unreal clarity of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders consciousness’. Over time, as the struggle develops, ‘Consciousness slowly dawns upon truths that are only partial, limited and unstable’. Things are rethought in the light of the experience of struggle, of collective motion, against colonialism. The fundamental purpose of Fanon’s account of this move out of the Manichean logic of colonialism is, Sekyi-Otu argues, ‘to stage the upsurge of richer modes of reasoning, judging and acting’ than those immediately accessible within the limits of colonial thought.
Picture
30 October 1974: The anniversary of the 1962 Algerian War for Independence.
Alamy
Fanon had witnessed the first years of the African Thermidor, the moment when, as he explains, the ‘liberating lava’ of the great anti-colonial struggles was cooled as the people were expelled from history, ‘sent back to their caves’ by leaders who, ‘instead of welcoming the expression of popular discontentment’ and the ‘free flow of ideas’, took it on themselves to ‘proclaim that the vocation of their people is to obey and to go on obeying’. In his last book, he was clear that holding to principle meant undertaking a struggle within the struggle, as well as confronting the colonial enemy. He warns that ‘an unceasing battle must be waged, a battle to prevent the party from ever becoming a willing tool in the hands of a leader’. Fanon argues that, in order to set the rebellion on a rational foundation, it is necessary to resist ‘those inside the movement who tend to think that shades of meaning constitute dangers’ and leaders who insist that ‘the only worthwhile dogma . . . is the unity of the nation against colonialism’.
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His critique of the national bourgeoisie, ‘the rapacious bourgeoisie’, their use of the state as an instrument to prey on society, and their misuse of the history of collective struggle to shore up their own authority is unsparing. Fanon is clear that there are forms of nationalist militancy that hold ‘the same unfavourable judgments’ about the most oppressed among the colonised that are held by the colonisers. He insists that national consciousness – ‘that magnificent song that made the people rise against their oppressors’ – must be supplemented with political and social consciousness.

Fanon issues a clear warning about parties aiming to ‘erect a framework around the people that follows an a priori schedule’ and intellectuals deciding to ‘come down into the common paths of real life’ with formulas that are ‘sterile in the extreme’. For Fanon, the vocation of the militant intellectual is to be in the ‘zone of occult instability where the people dwell’, in the ‘seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge’, and, there, to ‘collaborate on the physical plane’. He is clear that the university-trained intellectual must avoid both the inability to ‘carry on a two-sided discussion’, to engage in genuine dialogue, and its obverse, becoming ‘a sort of yes man who nods assent at every word coming from the people’. Against this, he recommends ‘the inclusion of the intellectual in the upward surge of the masses’ with a view toward achieving, as noted above, ‘a mutual current of enlightenment and enrichment’.

Fanon affirms the practice of mutuality rooted in an immediate commitment to radical equality, something like Marx’s youthful vision of ‘an association of free human beings who educate one another’. His consistent commitment to the recognition of ‘the open door of every consciousness’ brings him to a radically democratic understanding of struggle rooted in local practices in which dignity is affirmed, discussion carried out, and decisions taken. For Fanon, the primary task of political education is to show that ‘there is no famous man who will take the responsibility for everything, but that the demiurge is the people themselves and the magic hands are finally only the hands of the people’. He affirms the importance of ‘the free exchange of ideas which have been elaborated according to the real needs of the mass of the people’. There are clear resonances with C.L.R. James’ famous assertion that, in a phrase borrowed from Vladimir Lenin, ‘every cook can govern’. Fanon, committed until the end to the emancipation of reason, to its emancipation in and via struggle, ended his last book with the imperative to ‘work out new concepts’.

To be worthy of its name, communist thought must be an expression of intellect in motion, of intellect grounded in real movement, and, therefore, in permanent dialogue with others in struggle. It should carry the militant desire for – in Étienne Balibar’s pithy summation of a central thrust of Benedict Spinoza’s Ethics – ‘as many as possible, thinking as much as possible’. This is the form of militancy from which Fanon speaks to us today, with such compelling power, with the brightness of metal.
Picture
A strike organised by Dano textile workers in Hammarsdale, South Africa, 1982.
Wits Historical Papers


Further Reading

Cherki, Alice. Frantz Fanon: A portrait. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press,
2006.
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Elhen, Patrick. Franz Fanon: A spiritual biography. New York: The Crossroad Publishing
Company, 2000.

Fanon, Frantz. A Dying Colonialism. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz. Alienation and Freedom. London: Bloomsbury, 2009.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. London: Penguin, 1976.

Fanon, Frantz. Toward the African Revolution. New York: Grove Press, 1967.

Gibson, Nigel. Fanon: The postcolonial imagination. Londo:. Polity, 2003.

Gibson, Nigel. Fanonian Practices in South Africa: From Steve Biko to Abahlali 
baseMjondolo. Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu-Natal Press, 2011.

Gibson, Nigel & Beneduce, Roberto. Frantz Fanon, Psychiatry and Politics.

Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2017.

Gordon, Lewis. Fanon and the Crisis of European Man: An essay on philosophy and the 
human sciences. New York: Routledge, 1995.

Gordon, Lewis. What Fanon Said: A Philosophical Introduction to His Life and Thought.
Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 1996.

Lee, Christopher. Frantz Fanon: Toward a Revolutionary Humanism. Johannesburg: Jacana
Press, 2015.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2016.

Neocosmos, Michael. Thinking Freedom in Africa: Towards a theory of emancipatory politics.

Johannesburg: University of the Witwatersrand Press, 2016.

Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1996.

Sekyi-Otu, Ato. Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. New York: Routledge, 2019.

Sharpley-Whiting, Tracey. Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms. Lanham: Roman &
Littlefield, 1998. 

Wynter, Sylvia. “No Humans Involved: An Open Letter to My Colleagues.” Forum H.H.I. 
Knowledge for the 21st Century 1.1 (Fall 1994): 42-73.

Author

DOSSIER Conflicts, crises and struggles appear into the news media without much context. This is for two reasons. First, the compression of space – the brevity of a television news report or of the print media’s 300 word story – prevents any broad context from being offered to a readership which might not know how to assess a conflict, crisis or struggle. Second, the ideology of the governing class is one that proceeds with the premise that too much depth would give people too much understanding of how the world works. Far better to have a ‘free media’ that merely skims the surface, if it at all reports on a story. Shallow news reports saturated with corrosive ideological implications are what is on offer particularly when a crisis strikes. Events appear as a sudden crisis with no history.
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From the Tricontinental, each month, we will produce a brief dossier on a current event that we believe requires some elaboration. These dossiers will provide a short anti-imperialist history of the crisis, offer interviews with key experts on the region and on the issue at stake and provide human stories of the people who are at the heart of the crisis.
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To suggest crises that need elaboration or to offer information as well as stories for these events, please contact us at contact@thetricontinental.org.


This article was republished from Tricontinental.

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7/21/2021

July 21, 2021- Amílcar Cabral: Liberator, Theorist, and Educator. By: Curry Malott & "Liberation School"

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Picture
Amílcar Cabral painting in Bafatá. Source: Wikicommons.

Introduction

" This article was originally published on Liberation School on January 20, 2021."

Amílcar Lopes da Costa Cabral was born September 12, 1924 in Bafatá, Guinea-Bissau, one of Portugal’s African colonies. On January 20, 1973–48 years ago today–Cabral was murdered by fascist Portuguese assassins just months before the national liberation movement in which he played a central role won the independence of Guinea-Bissau.
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This particular struggle was waged for the liberation of not just one country–Guinea-Bissau, where the fighting took place–but also for another geographically-separate region, the archipelago Cape Verde. Cabral and the other leaders of the movement understood that they were fighting in a larger anti-colonial struggle and global class war and, as such, that their immediate enemies were not only the colonial governments of particular countries, but Portuguese colonialism in general. For 500 years, Portuguese colonialism was built upon the slave trade and the systematic pillaging of its African colonies: Mozambique, Guinea Bissau, Sao Tome e Principe, Angola, and Cape Verde.

Despite the worldwide focus on the struggle in Vietnam at the time, the inspiring dynamism of the campaign waged in Guinea-Bissau–together with the figure of Cabral–captured international attention. In the introduction to an early collection of Cabral’s writings and speeches, Basil Davidson (1979) describes Cabral as someone who expressed a genuine “enduring interest in everyone and everything that came his way” (x).

Like so many revolutionary leaders Cabral was “loved as well as followed” because “he was big hearted” and “devoted to his peoples’ progress” (xi). Due to his leadership and brilliance, “governments asked his advice” and “the United Nations gave him its platform.” However deserved it was, Cabral never indulged in this praise, and instead focused solely on his commitment to the liberation and self-determination of the world’s working-class and oppressed.

The Portuguese colonization of Guinea-Bissau was backed by Spain, South Africa, the United States, and NATO. Summarizing the pooled imperialist power wielded by Portugal in a report on the status of their struggle Cabral (1968a) elaborates: 

“In the basic fields of economics, finance and arms, which determine and condition the real political and moral behavior of states, the Portuguese government is able to count more than ever on the effective aid of the NATO allies and others. Anyone familiar with the relations between Portugal and its allies, namely the USA, Federal Germany and other Western powers, can see that this assistance (economic, financial and in war material) is constantly increasing, in the most diverse forms, overt and covert. By skillfully playing on the contingencies of the cold war, in particular on the strategic importance of its own geographical position and that of the Azores islands, by granting military bases to the USA and Federal Germany, by flying high the false banner of the defense of Western and Christian civilization in Africa, and by further subjecting the natural resources of the colonies and the Portuguese economy itself to the big financial monopolies, the Portuguese government has managed to guarantee for as long as necessary the assistance which it receives from the Western powers and from its racist allies in Southern Africa.”

Despite the immense power of their enemies, the struggle led by the relatively small population in Guinea-Bissau prevailed, remaining a beacon of inspiration to this day.

As a result of his role as a national liberation movement leader for roughly 15 years, Cabral had become a widely influential theorist of decolonization and non-deterministic, creatively applied re-Africanization. World-renowned critical educator Paulo Freire (2020), in a 1985 presentation about his experiences in liberated Guinea-Bissau as a sort of militant consultant, concludes that Cabral, along with Ché Guevara, represent “two of the greatest expressions of the twentieth century” (171). Freire describes Cabral as “a very good Marxist, who undertook an African reading of Marx” (178). Cabral, for Freire, “fully lived the subjectivity of the struggle. For that reason, he theorized” as he led (179).

Although not fully acknowledged in the field of education Cabral’s decolonial theory and practice also sharpened and influenced the trajectory of Freire’s (1921-1997) thought. Through the revolutionary process led by Cabral, Guinea-Bissau became a world-leader in decolonial forms of education, which moved Freire deeply.

That is, because of the villainous process of Portuguese colonialism, which included centuries of de-Africanization, re-Africanization, through decolonial forms of education, was a central feature of the anti-colonial struggle for self-determination.

​Cabral’s dialectical unity, building the Party, and the “Weapon of Theory”

Cabral engaged the world dialectically. As a theory of change, dialectics has been at the center of revolutionary thought since Marx and Engels. Cabral wielded it with precision. Dialectically grasping how competing social forces driving historical development are often hidden or mystified, Cabral excelled at uncovering them, and in the process, successfully mobilized the masses serving as the lever of change.
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Cabral knew that the people must not only abstractly understand the interaction of forces behind the development of society, but they must forge an anti-colonial practice that concretely, collectively, and creatively see themselves as one of those forces. To do so, however, the masses had to be organized into and represented by a Party.

In 1956, Cabral helped found the African Party for Independence (PAI), which later became The African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). The PAIGC was the first ever communist party in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and its founding was a monumental and inspiring feat.

In The Weapon of Theory, a 1966 address in Havana, Cabral articulated the inseparability of national liberation and socialism, telling the attendees that “in our present historical situation — elimination of imperialism which uses every means to perpetuate its domination over our peoples, and consolidation of socialism throughout a large part of the world — there are only two possible paths for an independent nation: to return to imperialist domination (neo-colonialism, capitalism, state capitalism), or to take the way of socialism.”

Cabral had to build the party and its indispensable culture of militant discipline from the ground up. Cabral’s ability to meet the new party members where they were at as co-learners speaks to his role as a pedagogue of the revolution. Delivered as a series of nine lectures to PAIGC members in 1969, Cabral (1979) covers the basics of the revolution, including its organization. He describes the PAIGC as a party in the Leninist tradition by referring to it as “an instrument of struggle” comprised of those who “share a given idea, a given aim, on a given path” (85).

Of course, revolutionary crises do not emerge from the correctness of ideas alone, but are driven by deteriorating economic conditions, and a crisis in the legitimacy of the state and its ability to meet the peoples’ needs. In the 1940s there were several droughts that left tens of thousands of Cape Verdeans dead. Portugal’s barbarism and indifferent response, situated in the context of the mounting poverty and suffering within its African colonies, began to alienate even the most privileged strata of the colonial state.

What made Cabral one of history’s great communist leaders, outside of the larger historical moment that provided an outlet for his talents, was his theoretically-informed tactical flexibility, which was essential for a constantly shifting balance of forces. In-the-midst-of-struggle decision-making, in other words, is enhanced by theory and organization, which enables the ability to quickly grasp the immediate and long-term implications of the shifting calculus of power.

For example, in 1957 in Paris, Cabral and two Angolans formed the Movimento Anti-Colonista of Africans from the Portuguese colonies during the Algerian War. The three, in Angola, would go on to form the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola. What developed was one of the toughest anti-colonial fights in Africa.

It is only fitting that in his opening remarks in the first of the nine 1969 presentations to party members Cabral would choose as his place of departure an explanation of PAIGC’s “motto” or “theme,” the phrase “unity and struggle” (28). Defining the concept of unity dialectically, Cabral insists that “whatever might be the existing differences” within the people, “we must be one, an entirety, to achieve a given aim. This means that in our principle, unity is taken in a dynamic sense, in motion” (28-29).

The idea that unity is a movement and process of composition means that it is “a means, not an end. We might have struggled a little for unity, but if we achieve it, that does not mean the struggle is over” (31). The Party’s role here “is not necessary to unite the whole population to struggle in a country. Are we sure that all the population are united? No, a certain degree of unity is enough. Once we have reached it, then we can struggle” (31).

To explain struggle, Cabral likens it to the tension between centrifugal force and gravity. As a concrete example Cabral notes that for a spaceship to leave the Earth it must overcome the force of gravity. Cabral then characterizes Portuguese colonialism as an external force imposed upon the people and only through the combined force of the people united can the force of colonialism be overcome.

In the address, Cabral theorized the dialectical nature of movement and change focusing specifically on how the anti-imperialist struggle must emerge from the concrete conditions of each national liberation movement.

“We know that the development of a phenomenon in movement, whatever its external appearance, depends mainly on its internal characteristics. We also know that on the political level our own reality — however fine and attractive the reality of others may be — can only be transformed by detailed knowledge of it, by our own efforts, by our own sacrifices. It is useful to recall in this Tricontinental gathering, so rich in experience and example, that however great the similarity between our various cases and however identical our enemies, national liberation and social revolution are not exportable commodities; they are, and increasingly so every day, the outcome of local and national elaboration, more or less influenced by external factors (be they favorable or unfavorable) but essentially determined and formed by the historical reality of each people, and carried to success by the overcoming or correct solution of the internal contradictions between the various categories characterizing this reality.”

Cabral knew that to defeat Portuguese colonialism in Guinea-Bissau, the liberation struggle could not merely reproduce the tactics of struggles from other contexts, like Cuba. Rather, every particular struggle has to base its tactics on an analysis of the specifics of its own context. For example, while acknowledging the value of the general principles Guevara outlined in his Guerilla Warfare, Cabral (1968b) commented that “nobody commits the error, in general, of blindly applying the experience of others to his own country. To determine the tactics for the struggle in our country, we had to take into account the geographical, historical, economic, and social conditions of our own country, both in Guinea and in Cabo [Cape] Verde.”

Responding to Guevara’s argument, based on the experience of Cuba, that revolutionary struggles go through three predetermined phases or stages, Cabral stated:

“In general, we have certain reservations about the systematization of phenomena. In reality the phenomena don’t always develop in practice according to the established schemes. We greatly admire the scheme established by Che Guevara essentially on the basis of the struggle of the Cuban people and other experiences, and we are convinced that a profound analysis of that scheme can have a certain application to our struggle. However, we are not completely certain that, in fact, the scheme is absolutely adaptable to our conditions.”

Cabral’s assessment was also informed by the dialectical insight that the conditions in any one country do not develop in a vacuum unaffected by external forces. Not only were deteriorating conditions in Portugal, the imperial mother country, shifting the balance of forces in favor of national liberation movements in its African colonies, but the emergence of these struggles coincided with the successful revolution in China in 1949.

Conscious of this larger dialectical totality, which points to the interconnection between seemingly separate, unrelated parts, Cabral consciously fostered solidarity with Portugal’s working-class. Representing the colonized Indigenous peoples of Guinea-Bissau Cabral successfully reached out to the oppressed of Portugal in solidarity against their common class enemy, the fascistic Portuguese capitalist/colonialist class.

With dialectical theory and the spirit of anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist unity the revolutionary forces in Guinea-Bissau routinely freed Portuguese prisoners of war. Cabral (1968c) used such occasions to make public statements designed to educate and win over Portugal’s persecuted working-class to shift the balance of power away from Portugal’s fascist state.

Cabral spoke directly to the 20,000 Portuguese conscripts urging them to consider their class interests above and beyond the national chauvinism their ruling class fed them.

“In the framework of our struggle for national independence, peace and progress for our people in Guinea and the Cabo Verde Islands, the freeing of Portuguese soldiers captured by our armed forces was both necessary and predictable. This humanitarian gesture, whose political significance will escape nobody, is the corollary of a fundamental principle of our party and of our struggle. We are not fighting against the Portuguese people, against Portuguese individuals or families. Without ever confusing the Portuguese people with colonialism, we have had to take up arms to wipe out from our homeland the shameful domination of Portuguese colonialism.”

Central to this message Cabral (1968c) offered insights regarding the awful treatment of not only prisoners of war in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, but of the civilian population as well:

“Members of our armed forces captured by the colonial troops are generally given a summary execution. Others are tortured and forced to make declarations which the colonial authorities use in their propaganda. In their vain but none­theless criminal attempt at genocide, the Portuguese colonial­ists carry out daily acts of terrorism against the peaceful inhabitants of our liberated areas, particularly against women, children and old people; they bomb and machine-gun our people, reducing our villages to ashes and destroying our crops, using bombs of every type, and in particular fragmentation bombs, napalm and white phosphor bombs.”

The liberation of the Portuguese was connected to the liberation of Portugal’s African colonies. If the Portuguese ruling class began losing control in Africa, it could also fall in Portugal, and if it fell in Portugal, it would fall in Africa.

Rather than a theoretical position worked out abstractly in isolation, it was formulated practically. It had serious and determinant results. Portuguese officers refused orders to fight in Africa, and some formed an Armed Forces Movement that supported the demands for independence.

The Portugeuese soldiers led a rebellion against fascism at home, which ended more than 40 years of fascist rule. It opened the door to a popular upsurge that nearly claimed power for the Portuguese workers. These social convulsions in the imperial center in turn facilitated the independence of Portugal’s African colonies.

​De-Africanization and anti-colonial resistance

The small region in West Africa that the Portuguese would claim as Guinea-Bissau contained more than a dozen distinct ethnic groups. Slavers worked tirelessly to sew divisions between them. These divisions enabled slavers to enlist one group to facilitate in the enslavement of others. This anti-African divisiveness would lay the foundation for centuries of de-Africanization.

Describing the role of colonial education in this epistemic violence Walter Rodney (1972/2018), in his classic text, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, explains that, “the Portuguese…had always shown contempt for African language and religion” (304). Whereas secondary schools were established for colonists, education beyond two or three years of elementary school for Africans was rare. Consequently:

“Schools of kindergarten and primary level for Africans in Portuguese colonies were nothing but agencies for the spread of the Portuguese language…[T]he small amount of education given to Africans was based on eliminating the use of local languages.” (304)

The devastation of such practices reflects reports that European colonists with smaller African colonial holdings like Portugal were amongst the most desperate and thus cruelest in their efforts at maintaining their occupations. Consequently, Indigenous resistance to Portuguese colonialism was so widespread for so many centuries that colonial rule was always limited to specific regions. In other words, colonial forces were never completely able to conquer what amounts to the state power of indigeneity.
​
It is therefore not surprising that the Portuguese were not able to rely merely on state violence for social control, but required intensive ideological manipulation as well. The attempt to eradicate Indigenous languages and cultures was crucial. Toward these ends, the colonial authorities propagated a hypocritical discourse that claimed their colonies were integral to the metropolis or mainland while simultaneously brutally exploiting them.

​Fascist Portugal and the struggle

The brutality in which the Portuguese ruling-class managed its African colonies would eventually be directed at its own working-class with a fascist turn in 1926. Rodney (1972/2018) explains that “when the fascist dictatorship was inaugurated in Portugal in 1926, it drew inspiration from Portugal’s colonial past” (244).
​
The decline of Portuguese capitalism that gave way to Portuguese fascism would only deteriorate with the global capitalist crisis of the 1930s. Consequently, the desperation of Portugal’s capitalist class intensified. For example, when Salazar became the dictator of Portugal in 1932, he declared that the “new” Portuguese state would be built off of the exploitation of “inferior peoples” (quoted in Rodney, 244).

Whereas the French ruling class had moved to neocolonialism by 1960, Portugal’s decline had rendered it still largely backward and feudalistic. Out of desperation, Portugal became even more dependent on ruthlessly exploiting peoples not just in its colonial holdings, but within its own national territory.

Fascist Portuguese leaders, therefore, employing increasingly violent forms of social control, rejected African demands for self-determination. In response to the growing wave of national liberation movements in their African colonies, the Portuguese establishment sent armed forces to repress the struggle. Rather than cower in the face of Portuguese fascism and overall deteriorating conditions, national liberation movements grew and spread.

​Relations with China

Following the establishment of the PAIGC, Cabral settled in Guinea-Bissau’s capital, Conakry. Cabral immediately reached out to China’s Guinean embassy in 1960.

Since the emergence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, China had established a clear commitment to the anti-colonial movements in Africa. For example, in 1955 at the Bandung Conference, in which 29 African countries participated, China established foreign policy principles based upon supporting oppressed nations’ right to self-determination. In 1957, China organized the Afro-Asian Solidarity Conference and in 1960 founded the Chinese-African Peoples’ Friendship Association, in which Cabral enthusiastically participated.

Cabral and other leaders of PAIGC became regular guests at the Chinese embassy in Conakry. In 1960, the PAIGC received an invitation from the Chinese Committee for Afro-Asian Solidarity to visit China. A delegation from the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) was invited as well. During this visit, China agreed to use their military academies to train combatants from both the PAIGC and the MPLA.

Training included instruction in guerilla warfare, the history of the Chinese Revolution and agrarian revolution, and socialist theory. The first group trained in China would serve as the PAIGC’s embryonic core fighting cadre.

As a result of Cabral’s leadership and diplomacy, China would emerge as one of Guinea-Bissau’s first supporters in the early stage of its struggle for independence. China provided the PAIGC with a great diversity of support, from weaponry to assistance broadcasting radio messages denouncing the regular, horrific crimes of the Portuguese military in Guinea-Bissau. With support from China on one hand, and Portuguese brutality on the other, the anti-colonial struggle intensified between 1963 and 1974.

​Anti-colonialism and decoloniality

An important part of carrying out the national liberation movement entailed knowing what issues to organize around.

Based on his intimate understanding of the uniqueness of the agricultural situation in his country, Cabral knew that the primary economic issue the majority peasant population faced was not access to land, as was the case in other colonies. Rather, the issue was unsustainable trade deals that were particularly devastating given the colonial insistence on not farming for sustenance but for export through single-crop production.

The demand for cultural and political rights in the face of fascistic Portuguese colonialism was another demand that resonated widely.

Cabral focused on the political developments required for building a united movement for national liberation. In his formulations, he argued that the armed struggle was intimately interconnected with the political struggle, which were both part of a larger cultural struggle.

Cabral’s Marxist formulations on culture were important for the larger struggle and for resisting colonial education. He acknowledged that fascists and imperialists were well aware “of the value of culture as a factor of resistance to foreign domination,” which provided a framework for understanding that subjugation can only be maintained “by the permanent and organized repression of the cultural life of the people” (1979, 139).

Resistance, for Cabral, is also a cultural expression. What this means is that “as long as part of that people can have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be sure of its perpetuation.” In this situation then, “at a given moment, depending on internal and external factors…cultural resistance…may take on new (political, economic, and armed) forms, in order…to contest foreign domination” (140). In practice, the still living Indigenous cultures that led centuries of anti-colonial resistance would organically merge with, and emerge from within, the political and national liberation and socialist movements.

In practice, Cabral promoted the development of the cultural life of the people. Written as a directive to PAIGC cadre in 1965, Cabral encouraged not only a more intensified military effort against the Portuguese, but a more intensified educational effort in liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau. Again, while the national liberation/anti-colonial movement and the educational process of decolonizing knowledge are often falsely posed as distinct or even antagonistic, Cabral conceptualized them as dialectically interrelated:

“Create schools and spread education in all liberated areas. Select young people between 14 and 20, those who have at least completed their fourth year, for further training. Oppose without violence all prejudicial customs, the negative aspects of the beliefs and traditions of our people. Oblige every responsible and educated member of our Party to work daily for the improvement of their cultural formation.”

A central part of developing this revolutionary consciousness was the process of re-Africanization. This was not meant as a call to return to the past, but a way to reclaim self-determination and build a new future in the country.

“Oppose among the young, especially those over 20, the mania for leaving the country so as to study elsewhere, the blind ambition to acquire a degree, the complex of inferiority and the mistaken idea which leads to the belief that those who study or take courses will thereby become privileged in our country tomorrow.”

At the same time, Cabral opposed fostering ill will toward those who had studied or who desired to study abroad. Rather, Cabral encouraged a pedagogy of patience and understanding as the correct approach to winning people over and strengthening the movement.

This is one reason why Freire (1978) describes Cabral as one of those “leaders always with the people, teaching and learning mutually in the liberation struggle” (18). As a pedagogue of the revolution, for Freire, Cabral’s “constant concern” was the “patient impatience with which he invariably gave himself to the political and ideological formation of militants” (19).

This commitment to the people’s cultural development as part of the wider struggle for liberation informed his educational work in the liberated zones. Freire writes that it also informed “the tenderness he showed when, before going into battle, he visited the children in the little schools, sharing in their games and always having just the right word to say to them. He called them the ‘flowers of our revolution’” (19).

​Victory before Victory

Even though Cabral was murdered before victory, the ultimate fate of Portuguese colonialism had already been sealed years before his death, and he knew it. For example, in a communique released on January 8, 1973, a mere 12 days before he was assassinated, Cabral (1979) concludes that the situation in Guinea-Bissau “since 1968… is comparable to that of an independent state” (277). Cabral reports that after dozens of international observers had visited Guinea-Bissau, including a United Nations Special Mission, the international legitimacy of their PAIGC-led struggle was mounting. It had become irrefutable that:

“Vast areas have been liberated from the colonial yoke and a new political, administrative, economic, social and cultural life is developing in these areas, while the patriotic forces, supported by the population, are fighting successfully against the colonialists to complete the liberation of the country.” (277)

With this knowledge Cabral, again, denounces the “the criminal obstinacy of the Lisbon Government, which intensifies its genocidal colonial war against the legitimate rights of our people to self-determination, independence and progress” (277). Making the case for the formation of a new internationally-recognized state, Cabral argues that the people of Guinea-Bissau, through the leadership of the PAIGC, were already functioning as such:

“While our people have for years now possessed political, administrative, judicial, military, social and cultural institutions—hence a state—and are free and sovereign over more than two-thirds of the national territory, they do not have a juridical personality at the international level. Moreover the functioning of such institutions in the framework of the new life developing in the liberated areas demands a broader participation by the people, through their representatives, not only in the study and solution of the problems of the country and the struggle, but also in the effective control of the activities of the Party which leads them” (278)

To begin resolving this contradiction, in 1971 the Party voted to hold general elections in the liberated areas “for the constitution of the first People’s National Assembly” in Guinea-Bissau. After eight months of debate, discussion and outreach, elections were successfully held in 1972 in all of the liberated zones.

Several months after the election, Cabral (1979) issued another statement referring to the creation of the People’s National Assembly as “an epoch-making victory for the difficult but glorious struggle of our people for independence” (288). Underscoring how this was a collective achievement of unity and struggle Cabral offered his “warmest congratulations to our people” (289).

He reminded the people that “a national assembly, like any organ in any living body, must be able to function in order to justify its existence. For this reason, we have a greater task to fulfill in the framework of our struggle” (289).

Cabral then announced that the PAIGC would be calling its first National Assembly to formalize their constitution thereby proclaiming to the world they exist and are “irrevocably determined to march forward to independence without waiting for the consent of the Portuguese colonists” (289).

Yes, Cabral was killed before the final expulsion of Portuguese colonialism, but, in a very real sense, he still ushered in a new, independent state.

​Freire and Cabral’s decolonial education in a liberated Guinea-Bissau

As a pedagogue of the revolution Basil Davidson (1979) refers to Cabral as “a supreme educator in the widest sense of the word” (x).

The importance of education was elevated to new heights by Cabral and PAIGC leadership at every opportunity. It therefore made sense for the Commission on Education of the recently liberated Guinea-Bissau to invite the world’s leading expert on decolonial approaches to education, Paulo Freire, to participate in further developing their system of education.

Freire was part of a team from the Institute for Cultural Action of the Department of Education within the World Council of Churches. Their task was to help uproot the colonial residue that remained as a result of generations of colonial education designed to de-Africanize the people. Just as the capitalist model of education will have to be replaced or severely remade, the colonial model of education had to be dismantled and rebuilt anew.

“The inherited colonial education had as one if its principal objectives the de-Africanization of nationals. It was discriminatory, mediocre, and based on verbalism. It could not contribute anything to national reconstruction because it was not constituted for this purpose” (Freire 1978, 13).

The colonial model of education was designed to foster a sense of inferiority in the youth. Colonial education with predetermined outcomes seeks to dominate learners by treating them as if they were passive objects. Part of this process was negating the history, culture, and languages of the people. In the most cynical and wicked way then colonial schooling sent the message that the history of the colonized really only began “with the civilizing presence of the colonizers” (14).

In preparation for their visit Freire and his team studied Cabral’s works and learned as much as possible about the context. Reflecting on some of what he had learned from Cabral, despite never having met him, Freire (2020) offers the following:

“In Cabral, I learned a great many things…[B]ut I learned one thing that is a necessity for the progressive educator and for the revolutionary educator. I make a distinction between the two: For me, a progressive educator is one who works within the bourgeois classed society such as ours, and whose dream goes beyond just making schools better, which needs to be done. And goes beyond because what [they] dream of is the radical transformation of a bourgeois classed society into a socialist society. For me this is a progressive educator. Whereas a revolutionary educator, in my view, is one who already finds [themselves] situated at a much more advanced level both socially and historically within a society in process” (170).

For Freire, Cabral was certainly an advanced revolutionary educator. Rejecting predetermination and dogmatism, Freire’s team did not construct lesson plans or programs before coming to Guinea-Bissau to be imposed upon the people.

Upon arrival Freire and his colleagues continued to listen and discuss learning from the people. Only by learning about the revolutionary government’s educational work could they assess it and make recommendations. Decolonial guidance, that is, cannot be offered outside of the concrete reality of the people and their struggle. Such knowledge cannot be known or constructed without the active participation of the learners as a collective.

Freire (1978) was aware that the education that was being created could not be done “mechanically,” but must be informed by “the plan for the society to be created” (14). Although Cabral had been assassinated, his writings and leadership had helped in the creation of a force with the political clarity needed to counter the resistance emerging from those who still carried the old ideology.

Through their process revolutionary leaders would encounter teachers “captured” by the old ideology who consciously worked to undermine the new decolonial practice. Others, however, also conscious that they are captured by the old ideology, nevertheless strive to free themselves of it. Cabral’s work on the need for the middle-class, including teachers, to commit class suicide, was instructive. The middle-class had two choices: betray the revolution or commit class suicide. This choice remains true today, even in the US.

The work for a reconstituted system of education had already been underway during the war in liberated zones. The post-independence challenge was to improve upon all that had been accomplished in areas that had been liberated before the wars end. In these liberated areas, Freire (1978) concluded, workers, organized through the Party, “had taken the matter of education into their own hands” and created, “a work school, closely linked to production and dedicated to the political education of the learners” (17).

Describing the education in the liberated zones Freire says it “not only expressed the climate of solidarity induced by the struggle itself, but also deepened it. Incarnating the dramatic presence of the war, it both searched for the authentic past of the people and offered itself for their present” (17).

After the war the revolutionary government chose not to simply shut down the remaining colonial schools while a new system was being created. Rather, they “introduced…some fundamental reforms capable of accelerating…radical transformation” (20). For example, the curricula that was saturated in colonialist ideology was replaced. Students would therefore no longer learn history from the perspective of the colonizers. The history of the liberation struggle as told by the formerly colonized was a fundamental addition.

However, a revolutionary education is not content with simply replacing the content to be passively consumed. Rather, learners must have an opportunity to critically reflect on their own thought process in relation to the new ideas. For Freire, this is the path through which the passive objects of colonial indoctrination begin to become active subjects of decoloniality.

Assessment here could not have been more significant. What was potentially at stake was the success of the revolution and the lives of millions. This is a lesson relevant to all revolutionaries who must continually assess their work, always striving for improvement. In this way it was clear to Freire that they must not express “uncontained euphoria in the face of good work nor negativity regarding…mistakes” (27).

From their assessment then Freire and his team sought, “to see what was really happening under the limited material conditions we knew existed.” The clear objective was therefore “to discover what could be done better under these conditions and, if this were not possible, to consider ways to improve the conditions themselves” (27).

What Freire and his team concluded was that “the learners and workers were engaged in an effort that was preponderantly creative” (28) despite the many challenges and limited material resources. At the same time, they characterized “the most obvious errors” they observed as the result of “the impatience of some of the workers that led them to create the words instead of challenging the learners to do so for themselves” (28).
​
From the foundation Cabral played such a central role in building, and through this process of assessment, what was good in the schools was made better, and what was in error was corrected. As a pedagogue of the revolution Cabral “learned” with the people and “taught them in the revolutionary praxis” (33).

​Conclusion

Freire’s work and practice have inspired what has become a worldwide critical pedagogy movement. Cabral is a centrally-important, yet mostly unacknowledged, influence of this movement. The attention to decoloniality occupies one of critical education’s most exciting and relatively recent cutting edges, which demands a more thorough return to Cabral.

Reflecting on Cabral’s contributions to decolonial theory and practice a decade after his time in Guinea-Bissau, Freire (1985), like Cabral before his death, continued to insist that, “we need to decolonize the mind because if we do not, our thinking will be in conflict with the new context evolving from the struggle for freedom” (187).
​
In the last prepared book before his death, subtitled Letters to Those who Dare Teach, Cabral’s influence on Freire (1997) seems to have remained central, as he insisted that “it is important to fight against the colonial traditions we bring with us” (64).
​
As the socialist and anti-racist movement in the US continues to grow in size and political sophistication, the educational lessons from the era of anti-colonial socialist struggles will also grow in relevance.


References 
​

​Cabral, A. (1965). Tell no lies, claim no easy victories.
Cabral, A. (1966). The Weapon of Theory.
Cabral, A. (1968a). The development of the struggle.
Cabral, A. (1968b). Practical Problems and tactics.
Cabral, A. (1968c). On freeing Portuguese soldiers.
Cabral, A. (1979). Unity and struggle: Speeches and writings of Amílcar Cabral. New York Monthly Review.
Davidson, B. Introduction. In Amílcar Cabral (Au). Unity and struggle: Speeches and writings of Amílcar Cabral, pp. ix-xvii. New York: Monthly Review.
Freire, P. (1978). Pedagogy in process: The letters to Guinea-Bissau. New York: Continuum.
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power and liberation. London: Bergin & Garvey.
Freire, P. (1997). Teachers as cultural workers: Letters to those who dare teach. Boulder, CO: Westview.
Freire, P. (2020). South African freedom fighter Amílcar Cabral: Pedagogue of the revolution. In Sheila Macrine (Ed.), Critical Pedagogy in Uncertain Times: Hope and Possibility, pp. 159-181. New York: Palgrave.
Rodney, W. (1972/2018). How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. New York: Verso.

Author

​Curry Malott


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