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Author: Vijay Prashad

  • The Roar of a U.S. Warplane Over a Civilian Irish Airport

    In 2012, Margaretta D’Arcy and Niall Farrell marched onto the runway to protest the airport being used by U.S. planes. Arrested and convicted, they nonetheless returned to the runway the next year in orange jumpsuits. During the court proceedings in June 2014, D’Arcy grilled the airport authorities about why they had not arrested the pilot of an armed U.S. Hercules plane that had arrived at Shannon Airport four days after their arrest on the runway. More

    The post The Roar of a U.S. Warplane Over a Civilian Irish Airport appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • We Will March, Even If We Have to Wade through the Pakistani Floodwaters

    Ali Imam (Pakistan), Untitled (Deserted Town with a Black Sun), 1956.

    Calamities are familiar to the people of Pakistan who have struggled through several catastrophic earthquakes, including those in 2005, 2013, and 2015 (to name the most damaging), as well as the horrendous floods of 2010. However, nothing could prepare the fifth most populated country in the world for this summer’s devastating events, which began with high temperatures and political chaos followed by unimaginable flooding.

    Cascading frustration with the Pakistani state defines the public mood. Taimur Rahman, the general secretary of the Mazdoor Kisan Party (‘Workers and Peasants Party’), told Peoples Dispatch that after the 2010 floods, there was ‘enormous outrage about the fact that the government had not done anything to ensure that… when there is an overflow of water, it can be controlled’. Evidence of relief funds being siphoned off by corrupt politicians and the wealthy elite began to define the post-2010 period; those memories remain intact. People understand that when the disaster industrial complex is in motion, cycles of corruption accelerate.

    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has worked with the International People’s Assembly to produce Red Alert no. 15, below, on the floods in Pakistan and the political implications of this disaster.

    Pakistan Under Water: Red Alert no. 15

    Are these floods in Pakistan an ‘act of God’?

    A third of Pakistan’s vast landmass was inundated by floods in the last week of August. Satellite imagery showed the rapid spread of the waters which broke the banks of the Indus River, covering large sections of two major provinces, Balochistan, and Sindh. On 30 August 2022, the United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called it a ‘monsoon on steroids’, as the rain waters swept away more than 1,000 people to their deaths and displaced about 33 million more. The situation is dire, with those who fled their homes in immediate and long-term danger. The people camped out on higher land, such as major roadways, are currently at risk of starvation and in danger of contracting water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, dysentery, and hepatitis. In the long-term, people who have lost their standing crops (cotton and sugarcane) and livestock face guaranteed impoverishment. Pakistan’s Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal estimates that the damages will total more than $10 billion.

    At first glance, the primary reason for the floods appears to be additional heavy rain at the tail end of an already record-breaking monsoon or rainy season. A very hot summer with temperatures of over 40°C for long periods in April and May made Pakistan ‘the hottest place on earth’, according to Malik Amin Aslam, a former minister for climate change. These scorching months resulted in abnormal melting of the country’s northern glaciers, whose waters met the torrential rain spurred by a ‘triple dip’ – three consecutive years of La Niña cooling in the equatorial Pacific Ocean. In addition, catastrophic climate change – driven by global carbon-fuelled capitalism – has also caused the glacial melt and downpour.

    But the nature of the floods themselves are not wholly due to turbulent weather patterns. Significantly, the impact of the rising waters on Pakistan’s population is due to unchecked deforestation and deteriorated infrastructure such as dams, canals, and other channels to contain water. In 2019, the World Bank said that Pakistan faces a ‘green emergency’ because each year about 27,000 hectares of natural forest is cut down, making rainwater absorption in the soil much more difficult.

    Furthermore, lack of state investment in dams and canals (now heavily silted) has made it much harder to control large quantities of water. The most important of these dams, canals, and reservoirs are the Sukkur Barrage, the world’s largest irrigation system of its kind, which draws the Indus into the southern Sindh River, and the Mangla and Tarbela reservoirs, which divert the waters from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. Illegal real estate construction on floodplains further exacerbates the potential for human tragedy.

    God has little to do with these floods. Nature has only compounded the underlying crises of capitalist-driven climate catastrophe and neglect of water, land, and forest management in Pakistan.

    Naiza H. Khan (Pakistan), Graveyard at 11:23 am, 2010.

    What are the urgent multiple crises afflicting Pakistan?

    The floodwaters have revealed a set of enduring problems that paralyse Pakistan. Surveys in May, before the floods, showed that 54% of the population considered inflation to be their main problem. By August, the Pakistan Bureau of Statistics reported that the wholesale price index, which measures fluctuation in the average prices of goods, increased by 41.2% while the annual inflation rate was 27%. Despite inflation rising globally and the acknowledgment that the cost of the floods would be over $10 billion, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has promised a mere $1.1 billion with austerity-like conditions attached to it such as ‘prudent monetary policy’. It is criminal that the IMF would impose strict austerity when the country’s agricultural infrastructure is utterly destroyed (this inadequate action is reminiscent of the British colonial policy to continue the export of wheat from India during the 1943 Bengal famine). The 2021 Global Hunger Index already placed Pakistan at 92 out of 116 countries with its hunger crisis – prior to the floods – at a serious level. Yet, as none of the country’s bourgeois political parties have taken these findings to heart, undoubtedly, its economic crisis will intensify with little recovery.

    This brings us to the acute political crisis. Since its independence from the British in 1947, 75 years ago, Pakistan has had 31 prime ministers. In April 2022, the thirtieth, Imran Khan, was removed to install the current Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif. Khan, who faces charges of terrorism and contempt of court, alleged that his government was removed at the behest of Washington owing to his close ties to Russia. Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI or ‘Justice Party’) did not win a majority in the 2018 elections, which left his coalition vulnerable to the departures of a handful of legislators. That is precisely what was done by the opposition, which stormed into power through legislative manoeuvres, without a new mandate from the public. Since his removal, the standing of Imran Khan and the PTI has risen in Pakistan, having won 15 out of 20 of July’s by-elections in Karachi and Punjab, before the floods. Now, as anger rises against Sharif’s government due to the slow pace of relief for flood victims, the political crisis will only deepen.

    Huma Mulji (Pakistan), Tip Top Dry Cleaners, 2015

    What are the tasks at hand?

    Pakistan is suffering from ‘climate apartheid’. This country of over 230 million people contributes only 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, yet it is threatened by the eighth highest climate risk in the world. The failure of Western capitalist countries to acknowledge their destruction of the planet’s climate means that countries like Pakistan, which have low levels of emissions, are already disproportionately bearing the brunt of rapid climate change. Western capitalist countries must at least provide their full support to the Global Climate Action Agenda.

    Left and progressive forces – such as the Mazdoor Kisan Party – and other civilian groups have organised a flood relief campaign in Pakistan’s four provinces. They are reaching out mainly with food relief to tackle starvation in hard to reach, largely rural areas. The Pakistani Left is demanding that the government stem the tide of austerity and inflation that is sure to exacerbate the humanitarian crisis.

    In the summer of 1970, flash floods in the mountainous region of Balochistan caused great damage. A few months later in the general elections, the poet Gul Khan Nasir of the National Awami Party won a seat in the Balochistan provincial assembly and became the minister of education, health, information, social welfare, and tourism. Gul Khan Nasir put his Marxist convictions to work building the social capacity of the Baloch people (including setting up the province’s only medical school in Quetta, the provincial capital). Thrown out of office by undemocratic means, Nasir was sent back to prison, a place he had become all too familiar with in previous years. There, he wrote his anthem, ‘Demaa Qadam’ (‘Forward March’). One of its stanzas, 50 years later, seems to describe the zeitgeist in his native land:

    If the sky above your heads
    becomes full of anger, full of wrath,
    thunder and rain and lightning and wind.
    The night becomes dark as pitch.
    The ground becomes like fire.
    The times become savage.
    But your goal remains the same:
    March, March, Forward March.

    The post We Will March, Even If We Have to Wade through the Pakistani Floodwaters first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe; Socialism Can Avert Disaster

    George Bahgoury (Egypt), Untitled, 2015.

    In November 2022, most member states of the United Nations (UN) will gather in the Egyptian resort city of Sharm El Sheikh for the annual UN Climate Change Conference. This is the 27th conference of the parties to assess the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, commonly referred to as COP 27. The international environmental treaty was established in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, with the first conference held in Berlin in 1995; the agreements were extended in the Kyoto Protocol of 2005 and supplemented by the Paris Agreement of 2015. No more needs to be said of the climate catastrophe, which threatens mass species extinction. The move away from carbon-based fuel has been stalled by three main impediments:

    1. Right-wing forces which deny the existence of climate change.
    2. Sections of the energy industry which have a vested interest in the continuation of carbon-based fuel.
    3. Western countries’ refusal to admit that they remain principally responsible for the problem and to commit to repaying their climate debt by financing the energy transition in developing countries whose wealth they continue to siphon off.

    In public debates over the climate catastrophe, there is barely any reference to the Rio Earth Summit of 1992 and the treaty that noted: ‘The global nature of climate change calls for the widest possible cooperation by all countries and their participation in an effective and appropriate international response, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities and their social and economic conditions’. The phrase ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ is an acknowledgement of the fact that while the problem of climate change is common to all countries and none are immune to its deleterious impact, the responsibility of countries is not identical. Some countries – which have benefited from colonialism and carbon fuel for centuries – have a greater responsibility for the transition to a decarbonised energy system.

    Roger Mortimer (Aotearoa/New Zealand), Whariwharangi, 2019.

    The scholarship on the matter is clear: Western countries have benefited inordinately from both colonialism and carbon fuel to attain their level of development. The data from the Global Carbon Project, which was headed by the US Department of Energy’s now defunct Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre, shows that the United States has been far and away the largest producer of carbon dioxide emissions since 1750. By itself, the United States has emitted more CO2 than the entire European Union, twice as much as China, and eight times more than India. The main carbon emitters were all colonial powers, namely the US, Europe, Canada, and Australia, which, despite consisting of roughly one tenth of the global population, have together accounted for more than half of cumulative global emissions. From the 18th century on, these countries have not only dispensed the bulk of the carbon in the atmosphere, but they continue to exceed their share of the global carbon budget.

    Carbon-fuelled capitalism, enriched by the wealth stolen through colonialism, has enabled the countries of Europe and North America to enhance the well-being of their populations and attain their relatively advanced level of development. The extreme inequalities between the standard of living for the average European (748 million people) and the average Indian (1.4 billion people) is seven times greater than it was a century ago. Though the reliance by China, India, and other developing countries on carbon, particularly coal, has risen to a high level, their per capita emissions continue to remain far below those of the United States, whose per capita emissions are close to twice that of China’s and eight times more than India’s. The lack of acknowledgment of climate imperialism leads to a failure to properly resource the Green Climate Fund, which was created in 2010 at COP 16 with the aim of helping developing countries ‘leapfrog’ carbon-fuelled social development.

    At the global level, debates on how to address the climate crisis frequently revolve around various forms of a Green New Deal (GND), such as the European Green Deal, the North American GND, and the Global GND, which are promoted by nation states, international organisations, and different sections of environmental movements. In order to better understand and strengthen this discussion, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, gathered leading eco-socialist scholars to reflect on the different GNDs and the possibilities to realise a genuine transformation to stave off the climate catastrophe. That discussion – with José Seoane (Argentina), Thea Riofrancos (United States), and Sabrina Fernandes (Brazil) – is now available in notebook no. 3 (August 2022), The Socioenvironmental Crisis in Times of the Pandemic: Discussing a Green New Deal.

    These three scholars argue that capitalism cannot solve the climate crisis since capitalism is the principal cause of the crisis. One hundred of the world’s largest corporations are responsible for 71% of global industrial greenhouse gases (largely carbon dioxide and methane); these corporations, led by the carbon energy industry, are not prepared to accelerate the energy transition, despite the technological capacity to generate eighteen times the global electricity demand by wind power alone. Sustainability, a word that has been emptied of its content in much public discourse, is not profitable for these corporations. A social renewable energy project, for example, would not produce vast profits for the fossil fuel companies. Interest from certain capitalist firms in the GND is substantially motivated by their desire to secure public funds to engineer new private monopolies for the same capitalist class that owns those large corporations that pollute the world. But, as Riofrancos explains in the notebook, ‘“Green capitalism” purports to mitigate the symptoms of capitalism – global warming, the mass extinction of species, the destruction of ecosystems – without transforming the model of accumulation and consumption that caused the climate crisis in the first place. It is a “techno-fix”: the fantasy of changing everything without changing anything’.

    Gonzalo Ribero (Bolivia), Ancestor, 2016.

    The mainstream discussion of GND emerges, as Seoane points out, from initiatives such as the 1989 Pearce report Blueprint for a Green Economy, which was prepared for the UK government and proposed the use of public funds to produce new technologies for private companies as a solution to the cascading crises in Western economies. The concept of the ‘green economy’ was not to green the economy, but to use the idea of environmentalism to revitalise capitalism. In 2009, during the world financial crisis, Edward Barbier, a co-author of the Pearce Report, wrote a new report for the UN Environment Programme titled Global Green New Deal, which repackaged the ‘green economy’ ideas as the ‘green new deal’. This new report once more argued for public funds to stabilise turbulence in the capitalist system.

    Our notebook emerges from a different genealogy, one that is rooted in the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (2010) and the People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Defence of Life (2015), both held in Tiquipaya, Bolivia and then developed in gatherings such as the Alternative World Water Forum (2018), the People’s Summit (2017), and the People’s Nature Forum (2020). At the heart of this approach, which grew out of the popular struggles in Latin America, are the concepts buen vivir and teko porã (‘living well’). Rather than simply saving capitalism, which is the concern of the GND argument, the point of our notebook is to think about changing the way we organise society, in other words, to advance our thinking about building a new system. Building these ideas, Fernandes says, must involve the trade unions (many of which are concerned about job loss in the transition from carbon to renewables) and peasant unions (many of which are gripped by the fact that land concentration destroys nature and creates social inequality).

    Klay Kassem (Egypt), The Mermaid Wedding, 2021.

    We must change the system, as Fernandes argues, ‘but the political conditions today are not conducive to this. The right wing is strong in many countries, as is the denial of climate science’. Therefore, rapidly, the people’s movements must put a decarbonisation agenda on the table. Four goals lie before us:

    1. Degrowth for Western countries. With less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States consumes a third of the world’s paper, a quarter of the world’s oil, nearly a quarter of the world’s coal, and a quarter of its aluminium. The Sierra Club says that US per capita consumption ‘of energy, metals, minerals, forest products, fish, grains, meat and even fresh water dwarfs that of people living in the developing world’. Western countries need to cut back on their overall consumption, scaling back, as Jason Hickel notes, the ‘unnecessary and destructive ones’ (such as the fossil fuel and arms industries, the production of McMansions and private jets, the manner of industrial beef production, and the entire business philosophy of planned obsolescence).
    2. Socialise the key sector of energy generation. End subsidies to the fossil fuel industry and build a public energy sector that is rooted in a decarbonised energy system.
    3. Fund the Global Climate Action Agenda. Ensure that Western countries fulfil their historic responsibilities in supporting the Green Climate Fund, which will be used to finance the just transition in the Global South in particular.
    4. Enhance the public sector. Build more infrastructure for social rather than private consumption, such as more high-speed rail and electric buses, to decrease the use of private cars. Countries of the Global South will have to build their own economies, including by exploiting their resources. The issue here is not entirely whether to exploit these resources but whether they can be extracted for social and national development and not merely for the accumulation of capital. Buen vivir – living well – means to transcend hunger and poverty, illiteracy and ill-health, which will be developed by the public sector.

    No climate policy can be universal. Those who devour the world’s resources must reduce their consumption. Two billion people have no access to clean water, while half the world’s population does not have access to adequate health care. Their social development must be guaranteed, but this development must be built on a sustainable, socialist foundation.

    The post Capitalism Created the Climate Catastrophe; Socialism Can Avert Disaster first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The most important election in the Americas is in Brazil

    Former Brazilian President Luíz Inácio “Lula” da Silva is now in the lead in the polls ahead of the first round of Brazil’s presidential election to be held on October 2, reports Vijay Prashad.

  • The Most Important Election in the Americas is in Brazil

    Both Bolsonaro and Lula face an electorate that either loves them or hates them. There is little room for ambiguity in this race. Bolsonaro represents not only the far right, whose opinions he openly champions, but he also represents large sections of the middle class, whose aspirations for wealth remain largely intact despite the reality that their economic situation has deteriorated over the past decade. The contrast between the behavior of Bolsonaro and Lula during their respective presidential campaigns has been stark: Bolsonaro has been boorish and vulgar, while Lula is refined and presidential. If the election goes to Lula, it is likely that he will get more votes from those who hate Bolsonaro than from those who love him. More

    The post The Most Important Election in the Americas is in Brazil appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

  • When People Want Housing in India, They Build It

    Communist Party of India (Marxist) protest in Khila Warangal, 10 May 2022.

    It all started with a survey. In April 2022, members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), went door to door in the town of Warangal in Telangana state. The party was already aware of challenges in the community but wanted to collect data before working on a plan of action. Thirty-five teams of three to four CPI(M) members and supporters went to 45,000 homes and learned how people were suffering from a range of issues, such as the lack of pensions and subsidised food. Many expressed anxieties around the absence of permanent housing, with a third saying that they were not homeowners and could not pay their rents. The government had promised to build two-bedroom apartments for the poor, but these promises evaporated. With inflation eating into their meagre incomes and serious unemployment due to the collapse of the local bidi (cigarette) industry, desperation marked the people the communists met.

    Many in the community expressed their willingness to fight for better living conditions, especially for more huts (gudisela poratam) to be built. In the words of one of the residents, ‘whatever the consequences, even if we are beaten or killed, we will join this struggle’. The CPI(M) formed committees in thirty wards of Jakkaloddi, a part of Warangal, and began to prepare people for the coming fight. The epicentre of the struggle was land that the government had taken in the late 1970s from an old aristocrat, Moinuddin Khadri, using the Land Ceiling Act of 1975. Rather than distributing this land to the landless, however, the government evicted farmers from part of it and then gave the land to leaders of the ruling Telugu Desam Party in 1989.

    Sagar, the CPI(M) secretary of Ragasaipeta and a leader of the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, addresses members at a general body meeting of the Jakkaloddi campaign on 18 June 2022.

    On 25 May 2022, 8,000 people marched to the Warangal Municipal Corporation and handed in 10,000 state housing applications. When they moved to occupy the vacant land, the police told them to stay away and prevented them from entering. Despite this, the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, made up of those who had occupied the land, managed to organise the construction of 3,000 huts on the land. At 3am on 20 June, the police arrived, set many of the huts alight while people slept, and beat the occupants as they emerged from their temporary homes. Four hundred people were arrested. The next day, local officials placed a sign outside the area: ‘This site is for the construction of a court complex’.

    Neither this sign nor the brutality of the police could stop the people, who returned and continued to camp there for sixty days, G. Nagaiah, a state secretariat member of the CPI(M), told P. Ambedkar of Tricontinental Research Services (India). On 26 June, they began to build 2,000 new huts. The police tried to stop them with more acts of violence, but the people fought back and forced them to retreat. Now, there are 4,600 huts in total.

    Women argue with the police, who are trying to evict them from the occupied land, 22 June 2022.

    The CPI(M)-led action was prompted by the state government’s failure to alleviate desperate land hunger in the region. The most recent government data shows that, between 2012–2017, there was a shortage of 18.8 million houses in urban India alone. Even this figure is inaccurate because it counts low-quality houses in highly congested city neighbourhoods as adequate housing. In November 2021, the World Bank announced the development of an Adequate Housing Index (AHI), which gives us a clearer picture. Their housing Gini figures show that, in India, two out of every three working-class families live in subpar housing. The AHI looked at data from 64 of the poorer nations and found a housing deficit of 268 million units across these countries, which impacts 1.26 billion people. Furthermore, a quarter of the housing stock in the poorer nations is plainly inadequate. With billions of people around the world unhoused or living in poor quality housing, and with no real plan to address this problem, it is unlikely that any poorer nation will meet the eleventh Sustainable Development Goal to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable’.

    Land struggles in places such as Jakkaloddi resemble those led by Abahlali baseMjondolo, South Africa’s shack dweller movement, and Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The crackdown and eviction of poor people from land occupations has become a regular occurrence across the globe. Similar attacks have been replicated in Guernica, Argentina, where 1,900 families were evicted on 29 October 2020, and in Otodo-Gbame, Nigeria, where over 30,000 people were evicted between November 2016–April 2017.

    Such struggles are led by people who want to establish the material basis of living with dignity. In a recent dossier, our South African colleague Yvonne Phyllis uses a isiXhosa saying to refer to the land: umhlaba wookhokho bethu, ‘the land of our ancestors’. This phrase, so common in most cultures, demands that land be seen as a shared inheritance, not as the property of one person. This expression also invokes, as Phyllis describes it, a recognition of the ‘unresolved question of injustice’ inherited from ‘process[es] of colonial dispossession and deception that advanced the development of capitalism’. These struggles throughout the Global South mirror those in Warangal, where the CPI(M) is leading thousands of people in the fight for housing, successfully securing a total of 50,000 homes in 2008 and continuing to the fight for adequate housing to this day.

    Some of the 10,000 huts and tents on the occupied land, 25 May 2022.

    The appetite to transcend the global housing crisis is spreading. The people of Berlin – some 3.6 million residents – held a referendum in 2021 over the growing impossibility of finding housing in the German capital. The referendum called for the state to buy back apartments owned by any real estate companies with more than 3,000 units in the city, which could impact 243,000 out of 1.5 million rental apartments. The referendum passed, although it is non-binding. This – along with the growing confidence of people occupying vacant land and building their own homes – illustrates a new mood in the global movement for the right to housing. There is an increased understanding that housing must not be a financial asset used by the billionaire class for speculation or to shield their wealth from taxation. This sensibility is clear among organisations that fight for the right to housing such as Despejo Zero (Brazil) and Ndifuna Ukwazi (South Africa), among mass movements such as the MST and Abahlali, and among political parties such as the CPI(M) that organise people to transcend the housing crisis by occupying land.

    Women, refusing to leave the land, roll tuniki leaves into bidis after the police demolished their huts and tents, 20 June 2022.

    These land occupations are filled with tension and joy, the perils of being beaten by the police alongside the promise of collective life. Part of this collective life is represented in songs, often written in groups and released anonymously. We end this newsletter with one such song by a state committee member of the people’s cultural group Praja Natya Madali who goes by the pseudonym Sphoorti (meaning ‘inspiration’) from a chapbook called Sphoorti Patalu (‘inspiration songs’):

    We will not move an inch
    till we get land for our homes,
    a morsel of food, and a strip of land.
    We shall fight those who stop us.
    On this land, the red flags we raised
    stand ready for battle.

    Birds nest in the branches.
    Insects have homes in leaves.
    We, who are born human,
    thirst for a roof of our own,
    for a patch of land for a home.

    Drifting from place to place
    in make-shift huts,
    the shame of no address to our names.
    Like leaves blowing in heavy winds,
    with the pain of no place to call our own.

    Well-healed bosses
    steal thousands of acres
    in the name of their children, birds, and animals.
    For a little patch for which I ask,
    the sticks beat me to the edge of death.

    You, who have come to ask for our vote:
    We demand food and shelter.
    We are ready for battle till we get them.
    We dare you to stop us.

    We are grateful to Jagadish Kumar, a member of the CPI(M) state committee and the Jakkaloddi Struggle Committee, for collecting the photographs featured in this newsletter.

    The post When People Want Housing in India, They Build It first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation about China?

    Wang Bingxiu of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.

    As the US legislative leader Nancy Pelosi swept into Taipei, people around the world held their breath. Her visit was an act of provocation. In December 1978, the US government – following a United Nations General Assembly decision in 1971 – recognised the People’s Republic of China, setting aside its previous treaty obligations to Taiwan. Despite this, US President Jimmy Carter signed the Taiwan Relations Act (1979), which allowed US officials to maintain intimate contact with Taiwan, including through the sale of weapons. This decision is noteworthy as Taiwan was under martial law from 1949 to 1987, requiring a regular weapons supplier.

    Pelosi’s journey to Taipei was part of the US’s ongoing provocation of China. This campaign includes former President Barack Obama’s ‘pivot to Asia’, former President Donald Trump’s ‘trade war’, the creation of security partnerships, the Quad and AUKUS, and the gradual transformation of NATO into an instrument against China. This agenda continues with President Joe Biden’s assessment that China must be weakened since it is the ‘only competitor potentially capable of combining its economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to mount a sustained challenge’ to the US-dominated world system.

    China did not use its military power to prevent Pelosi and other US congressional leaders from travelling to Taipei. But, when they left, the Chinese government announced that it would halt eight key areas of cooperation with the US, including cancelling military exchanges and suspending civil cooperation on a range of issues, such as climate change. That is what Pelosi’s trip accomplished: more confrontation, less cooperation.

    Indeed, anyone who stands for greater cooperation with China is vilified in the Western media as well as in Western-allied media from the Global South as an ‘agent’ of China or a promoter of ‘disinformation’. I responded to some of these allegations in South Africa’s The Sunday Times on 7 August 2022. The remainder of this newsletter reproduces that article.

    Ghazi Ahmet (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China), Muqam, 1984.

    A new kind of madness is seeping into global political discourse, a poisonous fog that suffocates reason. This fog, which has long marinated in old, ugly ideas of white supremacy and Western superiority, is clouding our ideas of humanity. The general malady that ensues is a deep suspicion and hatred of China, not just of its current leadership or even the Chinese political system, but hatred of the entire country and of Chinese civilisation – hatred of just about anything to do with China.

    This madness has made it impossible to have an adult conversation about China. Words and phrases such as ‘authoritarian’ and ‘genocide’ are thrown around with no care to ascertain facts. China is a country of 1.4 billion people, an ancient civilisation that suffered, as much of the Global South did, a century of humiliation, in this case from the British-inflicted Opium Wars (which began in 1839) until the 1949 Chinese Revolution, when leader Mao Zedong deliberately announced that the Chinese people had stood up. Since then, Chinese society has been deeply transformed by utilising its social wealth to address the age-old problems of hunger, illiteracy, despondency, and patriarchy. As with all social experiments, there have been great problems, but these are to be expected from any collective human action. Rather than seeing China for both its successes and contradictions, this madness of our times seeks to reduce China to an Orientalist caricature – an authoritarian state with a genocidal agenda that seeks global domination.

    This madness has a definite point of origin in the United States, whose ruling elites are greatly threatened by the advances of the Chinese people – particularly in robotics, telecommunications, high-speed rail, and computer technology. These advances pose an existential threat to the advantages long enjoyed by Western corporations, who have benefited from centuries of colonialism and the straitjacket of intellectual property laws. Fear of its own fragility and the integration of Europe into Eurasian economic developments has led the West to launch an information war against China.

    This ideological tidal wave is overwhelming our ability to have serious, balanced conversations about China’s role in the world. Western countries with a long history of brutal colonialism in Africa, for instance, now regularly decry what they call Chinese colonialism in Africa without any acknowledgment of their own past or the entrenched French and US military presence across the continent. Accusations of ‘genocide’ are always directed at the darker peoples of the world – whether in Darfur or in Xinjiang – but never at the US, whose illegal war on Iraq alone resulted in the deaths of over a million people. The International Criminal Court, steeped in Eurocentrism, indicts one African leader after another for crimes against humanity but has never indicted a Western leader for their endless wars of aggression.

    Dedron (Tibet Autonomous Region, China), Untitled, 2013.

    The fog of this New Cold War is enveloping us today. Recently, in the Daily Maverick and the Mail & Guardian, I was accused of promoting ‘Chinese and Russian propaganda’ and having close links to the Chinese party-state. What is the basis of these claims?

    Firstly, elements in Western intelligence attempt to brand any dissent against the Western assault on China as disinformation and propaganda. For instance, my December 2021 report from Uganda debunked the false claim that a Chinese loan to the country sought to take over its only international airport as part of a malicious ‘debt trap project’ – a narrative that has also been repeatedly debunked by leading US scholars. Through conversations with Ugandan government officials and public statements by Minister of Finance Matia Kasaija, I found, however, that the deal was poorly understood by the state but that there was no question of the seizure of Entebbe International Airport. Despite the fact that Bloomberg’s entire story on this loan was built on a lie, they were not tarred with the slur of ‘carrying water for Washington’. That is the power of the information war.

    Secondly, there is a claim about my alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party based on the simple fact that I engage with Chinese intellectuals and have an unpaid post at Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University, a prominent think tank based in Beijing. Yet, many of the South African publications that have made these outrageous claims are principally funded by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. Soros took the name of his foundation from Karl Popper’s book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), in which Popper developed the principle of ‘unlimited tolerance’. Popper argued for maximum dialogue and that opinions against one’s own should be countered ‘by rational argument’. Where are the rational arguments here, in a smear campaign that says dialogue with Chinese intellectuals is somehow off-limits but conversation with US government officials is perfectly acceptable? What level of civilisational apartheid is being produced here, where liberals in South Africa are promoting a ‘clash of civilisations’ rather than a ‘dialogue between civilisations’?

    Countries in the Global South can learn a great deal from China’s experiments with socialism. Its eradication of extreme poverty during the pandemic – an accomplishment celebrated by the United Nations – can teach us how to tackle similar obstinate facts in our own countries (which is why Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research produced a detailed study about the techniques that China employed to achieve this feat). No country in the world is perfect, and none is above criticism. But to develop a paranoid attitude towards one country and to attempt to isolate it is socially dangerous. Walls need to be knocked down, not built up. The US is provoking a conflict due to its own anxieties about China’s economic advances: we should not be drawn in as useful idiots. We need to have an adult conversation about China, not one imposed upon us by powerful interests that are not our own.

    Yang Guangqi of the Shuanglang Farmer Painting Club (Dali Bai Autonomous Prefecture, China), Untitled, 2018.

    My article in The Sunday Times does not address all the issues that swirl around the US-China conflict. However, it is an invitation to a dialogue. If you have any thoughts on these issues, please email me.

    The post Can We Please Have an Adult Conversation about China? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Sri Lankans Seek a World in Which They Can Find Laughter Together

    Anoli Perera (Sri Lanka), Dream 1, 2017.

    Anoli Perera (Sri Lanka), Dream 1, 2017.

    On 9 July 2022, remarkable images floated across social media from Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital. Thousands of people rushed into the presidential palace and chased out former President Gotabaya Rajapaksa, forcing him to flee to Singapore. In early May, Gotabaya’s brother Mahinda, also a former president, resigned from his post as prime minister and fled with his family to the Trincomalee naval base. The public’s raw anger toward the Rajapaksa family could no longer be contained, and the tentacles of Rajapaksas, which had ensnared the state for years, were withdrawn.

    Now, almost a month later, residual feelings from the protests remain but have not made any significant impact. Sri Lanka’s new caretaker, President Ranil Wickremesinghe, extended the state of emergency and ordered security forces to dismantle the Galle Face Green Park protest site (known as Gotagogama). Wickremesinghe’s ascension to the presidency reveals a great deal about both the weakness of the protest movement in this nation of 22 million people and the strength of the Sri Lankan ruling class. In parliament, Wickremesinghe’s United National Party has only one seat – his own – which he lost in 2020. Yet, he has been the prime minister of six governments on and off from 1993 to the present day, never completing a full term in office but successfully holding the reins on behalf of the ruling class nonetheless. This time around, Wickremesinghe came to power through the Rajapaksas’ Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (Sri Lanka People’s Front), which used its 114 parliamentarians (in a 225-person parliament) to back his installation in the country’s highest office. In other words, while the Rajapaksa family has formally resigned, their power – on behalf of the country’s owners – is intact.

    Sujeewa Kumari (Sri Lanka), Landscape, 2018.

    Sujeewa Kumari (Sri Lanka), Landscape, 2018.

    The people who gathered at Galle Face Green Park and other areas in Sri Lanka rioted because the economic situation on the island had become intolerable. The situation was so bad that, in March 2022, the government had to cancel school examinations owing to the lack of paper. Prices surged, with rice, a major staple, skyrocketing from 80 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR) to 500 LKR, a result of production difficulties due to electricity, fuel, and fertiliser shortages. Most of the country (except the free trade zones) experienced blackouts for at least half of each day.

    Since Sri Lanka won its independence from Britain in 1948, its ruling class has faced crisis upon crisis defined by economic reliance on agricultural exports, mainly of rubber, tea, and, to a lesser extent, garments. These crises – particularly in 1953 and 1971 – led to the fall of governments. In 1977, elites liberalised the economy by curtailing price controls and food subsidies and letting in foreign banks and foreign direct investment to operate largely without regulations. They set up the Greater Colombo Economic Commission in 1978 to effectively take over the economic management of the country outside of democratic control. A consequence of these neoliberal arrangements was ballooning national debt, which has oscillated but never entered safe territory. A low growth rate alongside a habit of issuing international sovereign bonds to repay old loans has undermined any possibility of economic stabilisation. In December 2020, S&P Global Ratings downgraded Sri Lanka’s long-term sovereign credit rating from B-/B to CCC+/C, the lowest grade prior to D or ‘in default’ status.

    Thamotharampillai Sanathanan (Sri Lanka), Jaffna, 1990–95.

    Thamotharampillai Sanathanan (Sri Lanka), Jaffna, 1990–95.

    Sri Lanka’s ruling class has been unable, or perhaps unwilling, to reduce its dependency on foreign buyers of its low-value products as well as the foreign lenders that subsidise its debt. In addition, over the past few decades – at least since the ugly 1983 Colombo riot – Sri Lanka’s elite class has expanded military expenditure, using these forces to enact a terrible slaughter of the Tamil minority. The country’s 2022 budget allocates a substantial 12.3% to the military. If you look at the number of military personnel relative to the population, Sri Lanka (1.46%) follows Israel, the world’s highest (2%), and there is one soldier for every six civilians in the island’s northern and eastern provinces, where a sizeable Tamil community resides. This kind of spending, an enormous drag on public expenditure and social life, enables the militarisation of Sri Lankan society.

    Authors of the sizeable national debt are many, but the bulk of responsibility must surely lie with the ruling class and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Since 1965, Sri Lanka has sought assistance from the IMF sixteen times. During the depth of the current crisis, in March 2022, the IMF’s executive board proposed that Sri Lanka raise the income tax, sell off public enterprises, and cut energy subsidies. Three months later, after the resulting economic convulsions had created a serious political crisis, the IMF staff visit to Colombo concluded with calls for more ‘reforms’, mainly along the same grain of privatisation. US Ambassador Julie Chang met with both President Wickremesinghe and Prime Minister Dinesh Gunawardena to assist with ‘negotiations with the IMF’. There was not even a whiff of concern for the state of emergency and political crackdown.

    Chandraguptha Thenuwara (Sri Lanka), Camouflage, 2004.

    Chandraguptha Thenuwara (Sri Lanka), Camouflage, 2004.

    These meetings show the extent to which Sri Lanka has been dragged into the US-imposed hybrid war against China, whose investments have been exaggerated to shift the blame for the country’s debt crisis away from Sri Lanka’s leaders and the IMF. Official data indicates that only 10% of Sri Lanka’s external debt is owed to Chinese entities, whereas 47% is held by Western banks and investment companies such as BlackRock, JP Morgan Chase, and Prudential (United States), as well as Ashmore Group and HSBC (Britain) and UBS (Switzerland). Despite this, the IMF and USAID, using similar language, continually insist that renegotiating Sri Lanka’s debt with China is key. However, malicious allegations that China is carrying out ‘debt trap diplomacy’ do not stand up to scrutiny, as shown by an investigation published in The Atlantic.

    Wickremasinghe sits in the President’s House with a failing agenda. He is a fervent believer in Washington’s project, eager to sign a Status of Forces Agreement with the US to build a military, and was ready for Sri Lanka to join Washington’s Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) with a $480 million grant. However, one reason that Wickremasinghe’s party was wiped out in the last election was the electorate’s deep resistance to both policies. They are designed to draw Sri Lanka into an anti-China alliance which would dry up necessary Chinese investment. Many Sri Lankans understand that they should not be drawn into the escalating conflict between the US and China, just as the old – but raw – vicious ethnic wounds in their country must be healed.

    Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Untitled I, 2016.

    Jagath Weerasinghe (Sri Lanka), Untitled I, 2016.

    A decade ago, my friend Malathi De Alwis (1963–2021), a professor at the University of Colombo, collected poetry written by Sri Lankan women. While reading the collection, I was struck by the words of Seetha Ranjani in 1987. In memory of Malathi, and in joining Ranjani’s hopes, here is an excerpt of the poem ‘The Dream of Peace’:

    Perhaps our fields ravaged by fire are still valuable
    Perhaps our houses now in ruins can be rebuilt
    As good as new or better
    Perhaps peace too can be imported – as a package deal

    But can anything erase the pain wrought by war?
    Look amidst the ruins: brick by brick
    Human hands toiled to build that home
    Sift the rubble with your curious eyes
    Our children’s future went up in flames there

    Can one place a value on labour lost?
    Can one breathe life into lives destroyed?
    Can mangled limbs be rebuilt?
    Can born and unborn children’s minds be reshaped?

    We died –
    and dying,
    We were born again
    We cried
    and crying,
    We learned to smile again
    And now –
    We no longer seek the company of friends
    who weep when we do.
    Instead, we seek a world
    in which we may find laughter together.

    The post Sri Lankans Seek a World in Which They Can Find Laughter Together first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • All That I Ask Is That You Fight for Peace Today

    Fuyuko Matsui (Japan), Becoming Friends with All the Children of the World, 2004.

    The fragility of Europe’s energy supply has once again been on display in recent months. Gas shipments through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, which runs from Russia to Germany, were reduced to 40% of capacity in June, a cut that Moscow said was due to delays in the servicing of a turbine by the German firm Siemens. Shortly thereafter, on 11 July, the pipeline was taken offline for ten days for annual routine maintenance. Despite receiving assurances from Moscow that the supply would resume as scheduled, European leaders expressed fear that the shutdown would continue indefinitely in retaliation for sanctions imposed on Russia following the invasion of Ukraine. On 21 July, the flow of Russian gas into Europe resumed. Klaus Müller, the head Germany’s energy regulator, said that gas flows through Nord Stream 1 were below pre-maintenance levels during the first few hours of resumption, though they have now returned to 40% capacity.

    European anxieties related to energy supply are linked to fears amongst the region’s governments of further instability in the Eurozone. On the same day that Nord Stream 1 resumed operations, Italy’s Mario Draghi resigned as prime minister, the latest in a dramatic series of resignations by heads of government in Bulgaria, Estonia, and the United Kingdom. Resistance from Europe to a peace agreement with Russia comes alongside recognition that trade with Russia is inevitable.

    At No Cold War, an international platform seeking to bring sanity to international relations, we have been closely observing the shifting tenor of the war in Ukraine and the US-driven pressure campaign against China. We have published three previous briefings from this platform in our newsletters; below, you will find briefing no. 4, The World Does Not Want a Global NATO, which details the emerging clarity in the Global South regarding the US-European attempt to drive a belligerent agenda around the world. This new clarity relates not only to the militarisation of the planet, but also to the deepening conflicts in trade and development, as evidenced by the G7’s new initiative, the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Development, which clearly targets China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

    In June, member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) gathered in Madrid, Spain for their annual summit. At the meeting, NATO adopted a new Strategic Concept, which had last been updated in 2010. In it, NATO names Russia as its ‘most significant and direct threat’ and singled out China as a ‘challenge [to] our interests’. In the words of NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, this guiding document represents a ‘fundamental shift’ for the military alliance, its ‘biggest overhaul… since the Cold War’.

    A Monroe Doctrine for the 21st Century?

    Although NATO purports to be a ‘defensive’ alliance, this claim is contradicted by its destructive legacy – such as in Serbia (1999), Afghanistan (2001), and Libya (2011) – and its ever-expanding global footprint. At the summit, NATO made it clear that it intends to continue its global expansion to confront Russia and China. Seemingly oblivious to the immense human suffering produced by the war in Ukraine, NATO declared that its ‘enlargement has been a historic success… and contributed to peace and stability in the Euro-Atlantic area’, and extended official membership invitations to Finland and Sweden.

    However, NATO’s sights extend far beyond the ‘Euro-Atlantic’ to the Global South. Seeking to gain a foothold in Asia, NATO welcomed Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand as summit participants for the first time and stated that ‘the Indo-Pacific is important for NATO’. On top of this, echoing the Monroe Doctrine (1823) of two hundred years ago, the Strategic Concept named ‘Africa and the Middle East’ as ‘NATO’s southern neighbourhood’, and Stoltenberg made an ominous reference to ‘Russia and China’s increasing influence in [the Alliance’s] southern neighbourhood’ as presenting a ‘challenge’.

    Pavel Pepperstein (Russia), Grandfather and Grandmother Are Long Gone, 2013.

    85% of the World Seeks Peace

    Although NATO’s member states may believe that they possess global authority, the overwhelming majority of the world does not. The international response to the war in Ukraine indicates that a stark divide exists between the United States and its closest allies on the one hand and the Global South on the other.

    Governments representing 6.7 billion people – 85% of the world’s population – have refused to follow sanctions imposed by the US and its allies against Russia, while countries representing only 15% of the world’s population have followed these measures. According to Reuters, the only non-Western governments to have enacted sanctions on Russia are Japan, South Korea, the Bahamas, and Taiwan – all of which host US military bases or personnel.

    There is even less support for the push to close airspace to Russian planes spearheaded by the US and European Union. Governments representing only 12% of the world’s population have adopted this policy, while 88% have not.

    US-led efforts to politically isolate Russia on the international stage have been unsuccessful. In March, the UN General Assembly voted on a nonbinding resolution to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: 141 countries voted in favour, 5 countries voted against, 35 countries abstained, and 12 countries were absent. However, this tally does not tell the full story. The countries which either voted against the resolution, abstained, or were absent represent 59% of the world’s population. Following this, the Biden administration’s call for Russia to be excluded from the G20 summit in Indonesia was ignored.

    Tadesse Mesfin (Ethiopia), Pillars of Life: Harmony, 2018.

    Meanwhile, despite intense backing from NATO, efforts to win support for Ukraine in the Global South have been a complete failure. On 20 June, after several requests, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the African Union; only two heads of state of the continental organisation’s 55 members attended the meeting. Shortly thereafter, Zelensky’s request to address the Latin American trade bloc, Mercosur, was rejected.

    It is clear that NATO’s claim to be ‘a bulwark of the rules-based international order’ is not a view which is shared by most of the world. Support for the military alliance’s policies is almost entirely confined to its member countries and a handful of allies which together constitute a small minority of the world’s population. Most of the world’s population rejects NATO’s policies and global aspirations and does not wish to divide the international community into outdated Cold War blocs.

    Bahadır Gökay (Turkey) Evvel (‘Before’), 2013.

    In 1955, ten years after the US dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima (Japan), the Turkish poet Nâzim Hikmet wrote a poem in the voice of a seven-year-old girl who died in that terrible act. The poem was later translated into Japanese by Nobuyuki Nakamoto as ‘Shinda Onnanoko’ (‘Dead Girl’) and frequently sung in commemorations of that atrocity. Given the harshness of war and the escalation of conflict, it is worthwhile to reflect once more on Hikmet’s beautiful, haunting lyrics:

    I come and stand at every door
    But no one hears my silent tread.
    I knock and yet remain unseen
    For I am dead, for I am dead.

    I’m only seven, although I died
    In Hiroshima long ago.
    I’m seven now as I was then.
    When children die, they do not grow.

    My hair was scorched by swirling flame.
    My eyes grew dim; my eyes grew blind.
    Death came and turned my bones to dust
    And that was scattered by the wind.

    I need no fruit, I need no rice.
    I need no sweets, nor even bread.
    I ask for nothing for myself
    For I am dead, for I am dead.

    All that I ask is that for peace
    You fight today, you fight today
    So that the children of the world
    May live and grow and laugh and play.

    The post All That I Ask Is That You Fight for Peace Today first appeared on Dissident Voice.

  • It Is Dark, but I Sing Because the Morning Will Come

    Photograph by Wellington Lenon / MST-PR

    In the chilly Brazilian winter of 2019, Renata Porto Bugni (deputy director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research), André Cardoso (coordinator of our office in Brazil), and I went to the Lula Livre (‘Free Lula’) camp in Curitiba, set up just across the road from the penitentiary where former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sat in a 15-square metre cell. Lula had been in prison for 500 days. Hundreds of people gathered each day at the Lula Livre camp to wish him good morning, good day, and good night – a greeting that sought both to keep his spirits up and to offer a spirited protest of his incarceration. Eighty days later, Lula walked out of prison, free from charges that most observers rightly condemned as absurd. He is now the front-runner in the country’s presidential elections that will take place on 2 October 2022.

    One of the features of the vigil outside the federal prison was the ubiquity of militants of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Their flags were everywhere, their cadre forming the spinal cord of the movement to free Lula that blossomed out from Curitiba to every corner of the country. Formed in 1984 during the military dictatorship (1964–85), the MST grew out of agricultural workers’ and peasants’ occupations of latifúndios, gigantic estates held by wealthy individuals and corporations. Over the past four decades, these farmers have taken control of millions of hectares of land across Brazil, forming the largest social movement in Latin America.

    Photograph by Mídia Ninja

    Approximately 500,000 households live in these MST-led occupations, meaning that the MST has organised about two million people into its ranks. Around 100,000 families live on encampments (acampamentos), which are occupations of fallow land to which they have not been given formal access; 400,000 families live on settlements (assentamentos), whose land they now hold by right through liberal provisions in Chapter III of the country’s 1988 Constitution, Article 184, which states that the government can ‘expropriate, on account of social interest, for purposes of agrarian reform, rural property that does not perform a social function’. However, it is important to note that, on a punctual basis, the Brazilian state nonetheless attempts to evict families from these legal encampments.

    The settlements’ residents organise themselves through various democratic structures, create schools for their children and community kitchens for the indigent, and develop techniques for agroecological farming towards fulfilling their own needs and for sale in the marketplace. The MST is now rooted in the social landscape of Brazil; it is impossible to think of the country without the movement’s red flag fluttering across these encampments from the Amazon in the north to Arroio Chuí, Brazil’s southernmost point.

    Photograph by Mídia Ninja

    Beneath the considerable activity of the MST lies a theory, and that theory – rooted in concepts such as agrarian reform – is detailed in a variety of venues. Our institute’s deputy director, Renata Porto Bugni, interviewed one of the members of the MST’s national coordination, Neuri Rossetto, on his understanding of the movement’s theory and the relevance of the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci’s writing. Published jointly with GramsciLab and Centro per la Riforma dello Stato, this interview is now available in our dossier no. 54 (July 2022), Gramsci Amidst Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Neuri, as he prefers to be called, shares his understanding of Gramsci and reflects on the three main challenges faced by the MST:

    1. to precisely identify the adversaries who impede efforts to address the dilemmas of humanity (such as agrarian reform);
    2. to establish an ongoing dialogue with the working class to build a political project for each country; and
    3. to strengthen the political and organisational capacity of the main forces who advance our struggles.

    Hegemony, as Gramsci pointed out, emerges from the practice of assembling a new political project out of the ‘common sense’ of the people and elaborating those ideas into a coherent philosophy. The central concept for the MST to elaborate this theory is agrarian reform. According to Neuri, this reform project fights ‘for an agricultural model centred on the production of healthy food for the Brazilian population alongside the struggle to democratise land ownership’. The MST organises peasants to improve not only their control over land, but also over agricultural production, including by avoiding toxic chemicals which destroy both the workers’ land and health. This project is now linked to an interest amongst consumers for food whose components do not harm them and whose production does not destroy the planet. The possibility of uniting the majority of the country’s 212 million people in pursuit of agrarian reform galvanises the MST.

    Photograph by Igor de Nadai

    Is the MST a social movement or a political party? This has been a question that has bedevilled the movement since its origin nearly forty years ago. In fact, from a Gramscian perspective, the distinction between these two – social movements and political parties – is not so significant. Neuri’s commentary on these themes in the interview is quite instructive:

    We are aware of the responsibilities and the need to improve our political forces, both in their organisational and ideological senses, in order to have a greater influence in the class struggle. However, we do not claim to assume the role of a political party in its strict sense, as we believe that this political instrument is beyond our scope. This does not mean to say that we have a supra-partisan or non-partisan stance. We believe that the articulation of working-class movements, trade unions, and political parties is fundamental in the construction of another sociability which is alternative and contrary to the bourgeois order. … [W]e do not underestimate the importance and strength of political action and popular mobilisations as an educating element for the subaltern classes. The popular masses learn and educate themselves in popular mobilisations. There, in the mass movement, lies the political strength of the organisation; this is where the political-ideological level of the masses is raised.

    In sum, the MST is part of a process to build the organisational and ideological strength of the peasantry, and it works alongside trade union movements and other organisations to create a political project for social emancipation. To that end, the MST has participated in building the Popular Project for Brazil (Projeto Brasil Popular), which, as Neuri says, ‘aims to consolidate a historic bloc that promotes anti-capitalist, emancipatory struggles and immediate economic gains that meet the needs and interests of the working class’. Advancing the confidence and power of the working class and peasantry is, therefore, central to the MST’s activity. Part of this work has been to fight back against Lula’s persecution.


    Nara Leão (Brazil) sings Faz escuro mas eu canto (1966)

    In 1962–63, while Brazil was governed by a centre-left formation led by President João Goulart, the mood in the country was drawn to change and possibility. During this period, the Amazonian poet Thiago de Mello (1926–2022) wrote ‘Madrugada camponesa’ (‘Peasant Dawn’), which reflected on the peasantry’s hard work to plant not only food but also hope. When the poem was published in 1965 in a book called Faz escuro mas eu canto (‘It Is Dark but I Sing’), the political situation in Brazil had changed after a US-led coup overthrew Goulart and brought the military to power in 1964. The poem’s line ‘It is dark, but I sing because the morning will come’ took on a new charge. The next year, Nara Leão sang these words and made them an anthem of the time. We leave our newsletter this week with de Mello’s poem, a tribute to the peasantry and to the fight against the dictatorship of power, privilege, and property.

    The land is still dark
    in the peasant dawn,
    but it is necessary to plant.
    Night was deeper,
    now morning is coming.

    There is no place for a song
    made of fear and mimicry
    to fool solitude.
    Now it is time for the truth,
    sung simply and always.
    Now it is time for joy,
    which is built day by day
    with bread and song.

    Soon it will be (I feel it in the air)
    the time of ripe wheat.
    It will be time to harvest.
    Miracles are rising up like
    blue rain on the cornfields,
    beanstalks bursting into flower,
    fresh sap flowing
    from my distant rubber trees.

    Dawn of hope,
    the time of love is almost here.
    I harvest a fiery sun that burns on the ground
    and plough the light from within the sugarcane,
    my soul on its pennant.

    Peasant dawn.
    The land is dark (but not quite as much),
    it is time to work.
    It is dark but I sing
    because the morning will come
    (It is dark, but I sing).

    The post It Is Dark, but I Sing Because the Morning Will Come first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Will Our Children Be Literate? Will They Look Forward to the Future with Dignity?

    Nú Barreto (Guinea-Bissau), A Esperar (‘Waiting’), 2019.

    The world is adrift in the tides of hunger and desolation. It is difficult to think about education, or anything else, when your children are not able to eat. And yet, the sharp attack on education during this past decade forces us to consider the kind of future that young people will inherit. In 2018, before the pandemic, the United Nations calculated that 258 million, or one in six, school age children were out of school. By March 2020, the start of the pandemic, UNESCO estimated that 1.5 billion children and youth were affected by school closures; a staggering 91% of students worldwide had their education disrupted by the lockdowns.

    A new UN study released in June 2022 has found that the number of children experiencing distress in their education has nearly tripled since 2016, rising from 75 million to 222 million today. ‘These 222 million children’, the UN’s Education Cannot Wait programme notes, ‘are on a spectrum of educational needs: about 78.2 million (54% females, 17% with functional difficulties, 16% forcibly displaced) are out of school, while 119.6 million are not achieving minimum proficiency in reading or mathematics by the early grades, despite attending school’. Far too little attention is being paid to the calamity that this will impose upon the generations to come.

    The World Bank, in collaboration with UNESCO, has pointed out that funding for education has dropped in low and lower-middle income countries, 41% of which ‘reduced their spending on education with the onset of the pandemic in 2020, with an average decline in spending of 13.5%’. Whereas richer countries have returned to pre-pandemic levels of funding, in the very poorest countries funding has been driven below pre-pandemic averages. The decline in funding for education will produce a loss of nearly $21 trillion in lifetime earnings, much higher than the $17 trillion estimated in 2021. As the economy splutters and as the owners of capital come to terms with the fact that they simply will not hire billions of people who become – for them – a ‘surplus population’, it is no wonder that the focus on education is so marginal.

    A teacher writes on a blackboard at a PAIGC school in the liberated areas in the Guinean forests, 1974.
    Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)

    Looking to the national liberation experiments of an earlier era reveals an utterly different set of values, which prioritised ending hunger, increasing literacy, and ensuring other social advances that enhanced human dignity. From Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research comes a new series called Studies in National Liberation. The first study in this series, The PAIGC’s Political Education for Liberation in Guinea-Bissau, 1963–74, is a fabulous text based on the archival research of Sónia Vaz-Borges, a historian and the author of Militant Education, Liberation Struggle, and Consciousness: The PAIGC education in Guinea Bissau, 1963–1978 (Peter Lang, 2019).

    The PAIGC, short for Partido Africano para a Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde, or the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde, was founded in 1956. Like many national liberation projects, the PAIGC began within the political framework set up by the Portuguese colonial state. In 1959, dockworkers at the Pidjiguiti docks went on strike for higher wages and better working conditions, but they found that the Portuguese negotiated with the gun when they killed approximately fifty workers, wounding others. This massacre convinced the PAIGC to pursue an armed struggle, setting up zones liberated from colonial rule in then Guinea (today Guinea-Bissau).

    In these liberated zones, the PAIGC set up a socialist project, which included an educational system that sought to abolish illiteracy and to create a dignified cultural life for the population. It is this pursuit of an egalitarian educational project that attracted our attention, since even in a poor country facing the armed repression of the colonial state, the PAIGC still moved precious resources away from the armed struggle to build the dignity of the people. In 1974, the country won its independence from Portugal; the values of this national liberation project continue to resonate with us today.

    Students inside of a PAIGC classroom in a primary school in the liberated areas, 1974.
    Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)

    The national liberation project that the PAIGC embarked on had two simultaneous objectives:

    1. To overthrow colonial institutions of oppression and exploitation.
    2. To create a project of national reconstruction to pursue the economic, political, and social liberation of the people that would fight against the toxic residues left by colonial structures in the bodies and minds of the people.

    Until 1959, there were no secondary schools in Guinea-Bissau, which the Portuguese monarchy had controlled since 1588. In 1964, the first congress of the PAIGC, under the leadership of Amílcar Cabral, laid out the following promise to:

    Set up schools and develop teaching in all the liberated areas. … Improve the work in the existing schools, avoid a very high number of pupils which might prejudice the advantage to all. Found schools but bear in mind the real potential at our disposal to avoid our having to later close some schools because of a lack of resources. … Constantly strengthen the political training of teachers… Set up courses to teach adults to read and write, whether they are combatants or elements of the population. … Little by little set up simple libraries in the liberated areas, lend others the books we possess, help others to learn to read a book, the newspaper and to understand what is read.

    All who know must teach those who don’t know, said the cadre of the PAIGC as they put a great deal of effort into teaching basic literacy, the history of their land, and the importance of their struggle for national liberation.

    A student uses a microscope during a PAIGC medical consultation in a college in Campada, 1973. Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)

    A student uses a microscope during a PAIGC medical consultation in a college in Campada, 1973.
    Source: Roel Coutinho, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal Photographs (1973–1974)

    Our study explains the entire process of the educational system set up by the PAIGC, including an assessment of the educational forms and practices. Central to the study is a close look at the PAIGC’s pedagogy and its anti-colonial and Africa-centred curriculum. As our study notes:

    The experiences of African people, their past, their present, and their future had to be at the heart of this new education. The school curricula needed to grapple with and be shaped by the forms of knowledge that existed in local communities. With these new approaches to knowledge, the PAIGC intended to cultivate in the learners a personal sense of obligation to themselves, their peers, and their communities. As early as 1949, Cabral advocated for knowledge production to focus on the existing African realities through his research experiences of the agricultural conditions in Portugal and its African territories. He argued that one of the best ways to defend the land lay in learning and understanding how to use the soil sustainably and consciously improve the benefits we reap from it. To know and understand the land was a form of defending the people and their right to better their living conditions.

    The study is gripping, a window into a world that has been vanquished by the International Monetary Fund’s structural adjustment austerity that has dragged Guinea-Bissau into turmoil since 1995, its literacy rate floundering near 50% – shocking for a country with the kind of national liberation possibilities set in motion by the PAIGC. Reading the study opens earlier windows, hopes that remain alive so long as our movements remain attentive and return to the source to build better futures.


    Cesária Évora (Cabo Verde) sings Amílcar Cabral’s poem ‘Regresso’, 2010.

    The PAIGC leader Amílcar Cabral was assassinated on 20 January 1973, a year before Portuguese colonialism suffered a historical defeat. The PAIGC struggled from the loss of its leader. In 1946, Cabral wrote a lyrical poem, ‘Regresso’ (‘Return’), which pointed to the ethics of the movement for which he gave his life. ‘Return’ was an important term in Cabral’s vocabulary, the phrase ‘return to the source’ central to his view that national liberation must treat the past as a resource and not as a destination. Do listen to the great singer from Cabo Verde, Cesária Évora, sing Cabral’s poem above, and read it below, a door to the hopes we have for liberatory education:

    Old mama, come, let’s listen
    to the beat of the rain against the door.
    It’s a friendly beat
    that pounds in my heart.

    Our friend the rain, old mama, the rain
    that hasn’t fallen this way in a long time…

    I heard that the Cidade Velha
    – the entire island –

    becomes a garden in just a few days…

    They say that the countryside is covered in green,
    in the most beautiful colour, because it is the colour of hope.
    That now, the land really looks like Cape Verde –
    Calm has now replaced the storm…

    Come, old mama, come
    regain your strength and come to the gate.
    Our friend the rain has already said to hang on,
    and can beats in my heart.

    The post Will Our Children Be Literate? Will They Look Forward to the Future with Dignity? first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • The United States Wants to Prevent a Historical Fact: Eurasian Integration

    Max Ernst (Germany), Europe After the Rain, 1940–42.

    Max Ernst (Germany), Europe After the Rain, 1940–42.

    Over the course of the past fifteen years, European countries have found themselves with both great opportunities to seize and complex choices to make. Unsustainable reliance on the United States for trade and investment, as well as the curious distraction of Brexit, led to the steady integration of European countries with Russian energy markets and more uptake of Chinese investment opportunities and its manufacturing prowess.

    Closer linkages between Europe and these two large Asian countries (China and Russia) provoked the US agenda to prevent that integration or delay it. This agenda, now deepened during the recent Group of 7 (G7) meeting in Germany and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) summit in Spain, is creating a dangerous situation for the world.

    Bram Demunter (Belgium), Linking Revelations and Beekeeping, 2019.

    Bram Demunter (Belgium), Linking Revelations and Beekeeping, 2019.

    This goes back to the financial crisis of 2007–08, which was spurred on by the collapse of the US housing market and several key US financial institutions. The crisis signalled to the rest of the world that the US-centred financial system was untrustworthy. The US could not remain the market of last resort for the world’s commodities. G7 countries – which saw themselves as the guardians of the global capitalist system – begged states outside their orbit, such as China and India, to put their surpluses into the Western financial system to prevent its total meltdown. In return for this service, countries outside of the G7 were told that, henceforth, the G20 would be the executive body of the world system and the G7 would gradually disband. Yet, almost twenty years later, the G7 remains in place and has arrogated to itself the role of world leader, with NATO – the Trojan horse of the US – now positioning itself as the world’s policeman.

    Claude Venard (France), Nature Morte au Sacre Coeur (‘Still Life at the Sacred Heart’), 1991.

    Claude Venard (France), Nature Morte au Sacre Coeur (‘Still Life at the Sacred Heart’), 1991.

    NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg has said that the organisation will undergo the largest overhaul of its ‘collective deterrence and defence since the Cold War’. The NATO member states, now with the addition of Finland and Sweden, will expand their ‘high readiness forces’ from 40,000 troops to 300,000 who, equipped with a range of lethal weaponry, will ‘be ready to deploy to specific territories on the alliance’s eastern flank’, namely the Russian border. The United Kingdom’s new chief of the general staff, General Sir Patrick Sanders, said that these armed forces should prepare to ‘fight and win’ in a war against Russia.

    With the conflict in Ukraine ongoing, it was obvious that NATO would foreground Russia at the Madrid Summit. But the materials produced by NATO made it clear that this was not merely about Ukraine or Russia but about preventing Eurasian integration. China was mentioned for the first time in a NATO document at the 2019 London meeting, in which it was said that the country presented ‘both opportunities and challenges’. By 2021, the tune had changed, and NATO’s Brussels Summit communiqué accused China of ‘systemic challenges to the rules-based international order’. The revised 2022 Strategic Concept accelerates this threatening rhetoric, with accusations that China’s ‘systemic competition… challenge[s] our interests, security, and values and seek[s] to undermine the rules-based international order’.

    Four non-NATO countries – Australia, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea (the Asia-Pacific Four) attended the NATO summit for the first time, which drew them closer to the US and NATO’s agenda to put pressure on China. Australia and Japan, along with India and the US, are part of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (Quad), often called the Asian NATO, whose clear mandate is to constrain China’s partnerships in the Pacific Rim area. The Asia-Pacific Four held a meeting during the summit to discuss military cooperation against China, erasing any doubt about the intentions of NATO and its allies.

    Ma Changli (China), Daqing People, 1964.

    Ma Changli (China), Daqing People, 1964.

    In the wake of the revelations of the 2007–08 financial crisis and the G7’s broken promises, the Chinese adopted two pathways to gain more independence from the US consumer market. First, they improved the domestic Chinese market by increasing social wages, integrating China’s western provinces into the economy, and abolishing absolute poverty. Second, they built trade, development, and financial systems that were not centred around the US. The Chinese participated actively with Brazil, India, Russia, and South Africa to set the BRICS process in motion (2009) and put considerable resources into the Belt and Road Initiative or BRI (2013). China and Russia settled a long-standing border dispute, enhanced their cross-border trade, and developed a strategic collaboration (but, unlike the West, did not formulate a military treaty).

    During this period, Russian energy sales to both China and Europe grew and several European countries joined the BRI, which increased mutual investments between Europe and China. Earlier forms of globalisation in Eurasia were limited by colonialism and the Cold War; this marked the first time in 200 years that integration began to take place on an equitable foundation across the region. Europe’s trade and investment choices were utterly rational, as piped natural gas through Nord Stream 2 was far cheaper and less dangerous than liquified natural gas from the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Mexico. Considering the chaotic Brexit situation and difficulties in getting the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership off the ground, much of Europe saw Chinese investment opportunities as far more generous and dependable than other alternatives. In contrast, risk-averse and rent-seeking private equity from Wall Street became less attractive to the European financial sector.

    Europe was drifting inexorably towards Asia, which threatened the basis of the US-dominated economic and political system (also known as the ‘rules-based international order’). In 2018, US President Donald Trump publicly chastised NATO’s Stoltenberg, telling him, ‘we’re protecting Germany. We’re protecting France. We’re protecting all of these countries. And then numerous of these countries go out and make a pipeline deal with Russia, where they’re paying billions of dollars into the coffers of Russia. …Germany is a captive of Russia… I think it’s very inappropriate’.

    While NATO’s language has turned to threats of war against China and Russia, the G7 has pledged to challenge China-led initiatives by developing the new Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), a $200 billion fund to invest in the Global South. Meanwhile, the leaders at the BRICS summit, held at the same time, offered a sober appraisal of the times, calling for negotiations to end the Ukraine War and measures to be taken to stem the cascading crises experienced by the world’s poor. There was no talk of war from this body which represents 40% of the world’s population, and BRICS’s strength may well grow as Argentina and Iran have applied to join the bloc.

    Jamal Penjweny (Iraq), Iraq Is Flying, 2006–10.

    Jamal Penjweny (Iraq), Iraq Is Flying, 2006–10.

    The US and its allies seek either to remain hegemonic and weaken China and Russia or to erect a new iron curtain around these two countries. Both approaches could lead to a suicidal military conflict. The mood across the Global South is for a more measured acceptance of the reality of Eurasian integration and the emergence of a world order based on national and regional sovereignty and the dignity of all human beings, none of which can be realised through war and division.

    Anticipations of a war at a scale not seen before evokes ‘A Personal Song’ by the Iraqi poet Saadi Yousif (1934–2021), written just before the US started its deadly bombardment of Iraq in 2003:

    Is it Iraq?
    Blessed is the one who said
    I know the road which leads to it;
    Blessed is the one whose lips uttered the four letters:
    Iraq, Iraq, nothing but Iraq.

    Distant missiles will applaud;
    soldiers armed to the teeth will storm us;
    minarets and houses will crumble;
    palm trees will collapse under the bombing;
    the shores will be crowded
    with floating corpses.
    We will seldom see Al-Tahrir Square
    in books of elegies and photographs;
    Restaurants and hotels will be our roadmaps
    and our home in the paradise of shelter:
    McDonald’s
    KFC
    Holiday Inn;
    and we will be drowned
    like your name, O Iraq,
    Iraq, Iraq, nothing but Iraq.

    The post The United States Wants to Prevent a Historical Fact: Eurasian Integration first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Contests the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative with a Private Corporation

    At the G7 Summit in Germany, on June 26, 2022, U.S. President Joe Biden made a pledge to raise $200 billion within the United States for global infrastructure spending. It was made clear that this new G7 project—the Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII)—was intended to counter the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Given Biden’s failure to pass the Build Back Better bill (with its scope being almost halved from $3.5 trillion to $2.2 trillion), it is unlikely that he will get the U.S. Congress to go along with this new endeavor. More

    The post The United States Contests the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative with a Private Corporation appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • The United States extends its military reach into Zambia

    The United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) announced on April 26 that they had set up an office in the US embassy in Lusaka, Zambia, reports Vijay Prashad. There are fears that it is only a matter of time until this is transformed into a full-scale US military base.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • There are Hungry People

    Saloua Raouda Choucair (Lebanon), Chores, 1948.

    The United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) reports that, every minute, a child is pushed into hunger in fifteen countries most ravaged by the global food crisis. Twelve of these fifteen countries are in Africa (from Burkina Faso to Sudan), one is in the Caribbean (Haiti), and two are in Asia (Afghanistan and Yemen). Wars without end have degraded the ability of the state institutions in these countries to manage cascading crises of debt and unemployment, inflation and poverty. Joining the two Asian countries are the states that make up the Sahel region of Africa (especially Mali and Niger), where the levels of hunger are now almost out of control. As if the situation were not sufficiently dire, an earthquake struck Afghanistan last week, killing over a thousand people – yet another devastating blow to a society where 93% of the population has slipped into hunger.

    In these crisis-hit countries, food aid has come from governments and the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP). Millions of refugees in these countries are almost entirely reliant upon UN agencies. The WFP provides ready-to-use therapeutic food, which is a food paste made of butter, peanuts, powdered milk, sugar, vegetable oil, and vitamins. Over the next six months, the cost of these ingredients is projected to rise by up to 16%, which is why on 20 June, the WFP announced that it would cut rations by 50%. This cut will impact three of every four refugees in East Africa, where about five million refugees live. ‘We are now seeing the tinderbox of conditions for extreme levels of child wasting begin to catch fire’, said UNICEF Executive Director Catherine Russell.

    Uzo Egonu (Nigeria), Stateless People, An Assembly, 1982.

    Clearly, the spike in hunger is related to the food price inflation, which itself has been exacerbated by the conflict in Ukraine. Russia and Ukraine are the world’s leading exporters of barley, corn, rapeseed, sunflower seed, sunflower oil, and wheat, as well as fertilisers. While the war has been catastrophic for world food prices, it is an error to see the war as the cause of the spike. World food prices began to rise about twenty years ago, and then went out of control in 2021 for a range of reasons, including:

    1. During the pandemic, the severe lockdowns inside countries and at their borders led to major disruptions in the movement of migrant labour. It is by now well-established that migrant labour – including refugees and asylum seekers – plays a key role in agricultural production. Anti-immigrant sentiment and the lockdowns have created a long-term problem on large-scale farms.
    2. A consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic was the breakdown of the supply chain. As China – the epicentre of a considerable volume of global manufacturing – pursued a zero-COVID policy, this set in motion a cascading problem for international shipping; with the lockdowns, ports closed and ships remained at sea for months on end. The return of international shipping to near normalcy and the return of industrial production – including fertilisers and food – has been slow. Food supply chains withered due to the logistics problems, but also due to staff shortages at processing plants.
    3. Extreme weather events have played a major role in the chaos of the food system. In the past decade, between 80 and 90% of natural disasters have been due to droughts, floods, or severe storms. Meanwhile, over the past forty years, the planet has lost 12 million hectares of arable land each year to drought and desertification; during this period, we have also lost a third of our arable land to erosion or pollution.
    4. Over the past forty years, global meat consumption (mostly poultry) increased dramatically, with the increases set to continue rising despite some indications that we have reached ‘peak meat consumption’. Meat production has an enormous environmental footprint: 57% of total emissions from agriculture come from meat,  while livestock production takes up 77% of the planet’s agricultural land (even though meat only contributes 18% of the global calorie supply).

    Yolanda Váldes Rementería (Mexico), Diversidad (‘Diversity’), 2009.

    The world food market was already stressed before the conflict in Ukraine, with prices going up during the pandemic to levels that many countries had not seen before. However, the war has almost broken this weakened food system. The most significant problem is in the world fertiliser market, which was resilient during the pandemic but is now in a crisis: Russia and Ukraine export 28% of nitrogen and phosphorus fertiliser as well as 40% of the world’s exports of potash, while Russia by itself exports 48% of the world’s ammonium nitrate and 11% of the world’s urea. Cuts in fertiliser use by agriculturalists will lead to lower crop yields in the future unless farmers and farm companies are willing to switch to biofertilisers. Due to the uncertainty of the food market, many countries have established export restrictions, which further exacerbates the hunger crisis in countries that are not self-sufficient in food production.

    Despite all the conversations on self-sufficiency in food production, studies show that action is lacking. By the end of the 21st century, we are being told, 141 countries in the world will not be self-sufficient and food production will not meet the nutritional demands of 9.8 out of the 15.6 billion people projected to be on the planet. Only 14% of the world’s states will be self-sufficient, with Russia, Thailand, and Eastern Europe as the leading producers of grain for the world. Such a bleak forecast demands that we radically transform the world food system; a provisional set of demands is listed in A Plan to Save the Planet, developed by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and the Network of Research Institutes.

    In the short-term, UN Secretary-General António Guterres has made it clear that the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia must be ended so that these key producers of food and fertiliser can resume production for the world market.

    A recent study conducted by the Brazilian Research Network on Food and Nutrition Sovereignty and Security (Rede Penssan) notes that nearly 60% of Brazilian families do not have access to adequate food. Of the country’s 212 million people, the number of those who have nothing to eat has leapt from 19 million to 33.1 million since 2020. ‘The economic policies chosen by the government and the reckless management of the pandemic lead to the even more scandalous increase in social inequality and hunger in our country’, said Ana Maria Segall, a medical epidemiologist at Rede Penssan. But, only a few years ago, the United Nations championed Brazil’s Fome Zero and Bolsa Família programmes, which cut hunger and poverty rates dramatically. Under the leadership of former presidents Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016), Brazil met the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The governments that followed of Michel Temer (2016–2018) and Jair Bolsonaro (2019–present) have reversed these gains and brought Brazil back to the worst days of hunger, when the poet and singer Solano Trindade sang, ‘tem gente com fome’ (‘there are hungry people’):

    there are hungry people
    there are hungry people
    there are hungry people

    …

    if there are hungry people
    give them something to eat
    if there are hungry people
    give them something to eat
    if there are hungry people
    give them something to eat

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    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • The United States Extends Its Military Reach Into Zambia

    On April 26, 2022, the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) announced that they had set up an office in the U.S. Embassy in Lusaka, Zambia. According to AFRICOM Brigadier General Peter Bailey, Deputy Director for Strategy, Engagement and Programs, the Office of Security Cooperation would be based in the U.S. Embassy building. Social media in More

    The post The United States Extends Its Military Reach Into Zambia appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • Why does the United States have a military base in Ghana?

    Four years after the signing of the US-Ghana defence cooperation agreement, Vijay Prashad spoke with Kwesi Pratt, a journalist and leader of the Socialist Movement of Ghana, about its consequences.

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • We Need to Build the Architecture of Our Future

    Diego Rivera (Mexico), Frozen Assets, 1931.

    Diego Rivera (Mexico), Frozen Assets, 1931.

    In April 2022, the United Nations established the Global Crisis Response Group on Food, Energy, and Finance. This group is tracking the three major crises of food inflation, fuel inflation, and financial distress. Their second briefing, released on 8 June 2022, noted that, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic:

    the world economy has been left in a fragile state. Today, 60 per cent of workers have lower real incomes than before the pandemic; 60 per cent of the poorest countries are in debt distress or at high risk of it; developing countries miss $1.2 trillion per year to fill the social protection gap; and $4.3 trillion is needed per year – more money than ever before – to meet the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

    This is a perfectly reasonable description of the distressing global situation, and things are likely to get worse.

    According to the UN Global Crisis Response Group, most capitalist states have already rolled back the relief funds they provided during the pandemic. ‘If social protection systems and safety nets are not adequately extended’, the report states, ‘poor families in developing countries facing hunger may reduce health-related spending; children who temporarily left school due to COVID-19 may now be permanently out of the education system; or smallholder or micro-entrepreneurs may close shop due to higher energy bills’.

    Renato Guttuso (Italy), La Vucciria, 1974.

    Renato Guttuso (Italy), La Vucciria, 1974.

    The World Bank reports that food and fuel prices will remain at very high levels until at least the end of 2024. As wheat and oilseed prices have escalated, reports are coming in from across the globe – including in wealthy countries – that working-class families have started to skip meals. This tense food situation has led United Nations (UN) Secretary-General’s Special Advocate for Inclusive Finance for Development, Queen Máxima of the Netherlands, to predict that many families will move to one meal a day, which, she says, ‘will be the source of even more instability’ in the world. The World Economic Forum (WEF) adds that we are in the midst of ‘a perfect storm’ if you take into account the impact of increasing interest rates on mortgage payments as well as inadequate salaries. The managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva-Kinova, said late last month that the ‘horizon has darkened’.

    Cândido Portinari (Brazil), Coffee Bean Mowers, 1935.

    Cândido Portinari (Brazil), Coffee Bean Mowers, 1935.

    These assessments come from people at the heart of powerful global institutions – the IMF, World Bank, WEF, and the UN (and even from a queen). Although they all recognise the structural nature of the crisis, they are reluctant to be honest about the underlying economic processes, or even about how to adequately name the situation. David M. Rubenstein, the head of global investment firm The Carlyle Group, said that when he was part of US President Jimmy Carter’s administration, their inflation advisor Alfred Kahn warned them not to use the ‘R’ word – recession – which ‘scares people’. Instead, Kahn advised, use the word ‘banana’. Along those lines, Rubenstein said of the current situation, ‘I don’t want to say we’re in a banana, but I would say a banana may not be that far away from where we are today’.

    Marxist economist Michael Roberts does not hide behind words such as banana. Roberts has studied the global average rate of profit on capital, which he shows has been falling, with minor reverses, since 1997. This trend was exacerbated by the global financial crash of 2007–08 which led to the Great Recession in 2008. Since then, he argues, the world economy has been in the grip of a ‘long depression’, with the rate of profit at a historic low in 2019 (just before the pandemic).

    Yildiz Moran (Turkey), Mother, 1956.

    Yildiz Moran (Turkey), Mother, 1956.

    ‘Profit drives investment in capitalism’, writes Roberts, ‘and so falling and low profitability has led to slow growth in productive investment’. Capitalist institutions have shifted from investment in productive activity to, as Roberts puts it, ‘the fantasy world of stock and bond markets and cryptocurrencies’. The cryptocurrency market, by the way, has collapsed by over 60% this year. Dwindling profits in the Global North have led capitalists to seek profits in the Global South and beat back any country (especially China and Russia) that threatens their financial and political hegemony, with military force if necessary.

    Ghastly is the way of inflation, but inflation is merely the symptom of a deeper problem and not its cause. That problem is not merely the war in Ukraine or the pandemic, but something that is confirmed by data but denied in press conferences: the capitalist system, plunged into a long-term depression, cannot heal itself. Later this year, notebook no. 4 on the theory of crisis from Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, written by Marxist economists Sungur Savran and E. Ahmet Tonak, will establish these points very clearly.

    Aboudia (Côte d’Ivoire), Untitled, 2013.

    Aboudia (Côte d’Ivoire), Untitled, 2013.

    For now, capitalist economic theory starts with the assumption that any attempt to settle an economic crisis, such as an inflationary crisis, must not, as John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1923, ‘disappoint the rentier’. Wealthy bondholders and major capitalist institutions control the policy orientation of the Global North so that the value of their money – trillions of dollars held by a minority – is secure. They cannot, as Keynes wrote nearly a hundred years ago, be disappointed.

    The anti-inflation policies driven by the US and the Eurozone are not going to ease the burdens on the working class in their countries, and certainly not in the debt-ridden Global South. Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Jerome Powell admitted that his monetary policy ‘will cause some pain’, but not across the entire population. More honestly, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos tweeted that ‘Inflation is a regressive tax that most hurts the least affluent’. Rising interest rates in the North Atlantic make money far more expensive for ordinary people in that region, but they also make borrowing in dollars to pay off national debts in the Global South virtually impossible. Raising interest rates and tightening the labour market are direct attacks on the working class and developing nations.

    There is nothing inevitable about the class warfare of the governments of the Global North. Other policies are possible; a few of them are listed below:

    1. Tax the global wealthy. There are 2,668 billionaires in the world who are worth $12.7 trillion; the money they hide in illicit tax havens adds up to about $40 trillion. This wealth could be brought into productive social use. As Oxfam notes, the richest ten men have more wealth than 3.1 billion people (40% of the world population).
    2. Tax large corporations, whose profits have escalated beyond imagination. US corporate profits are up by 37%, far ahead of inflation and compensation increases. Ellen Zentner, the chief US economist of the leading financial services company Morgan Stanley, argues that, during the long depression, there has been an ‘unprecedented’ plunge in the share of Gross Domestic Product earned by the working class in the United States. She has called for a return to a more just profit-wages balance.
    3. Use this social wealth to enhance social expenditures, such as funds to end hunger and illiteracy and build health care systems as well as non-carbon forms of public transportation.
    4. Institute price controls for goods that specifically drive-up inflation – such as prices for food, fertilisers, fuel, and medicines.

    The great Bajan writer George Lamming (1927–2022) left us recently. In his 1966 essay, ‘The West Indian People’, Lamming said, ‘The architecture of our future is not only unfinished; the scaffolding has hardly gone up’. This was a powerful sentiment from a powerful visionary, who hoped that his home in the Caribbean, the West Indies, would be shaped into a sovereign region that could relieve its people of great problems. This was not to be. Strangely, the IMF’s Georgieva-Kinova quoted this line in a recent article while making the case for the region to collaborate with the IMF. It is likely that Georgieva-Kinova and her staff did not read all of Lamming’s speech, for this paragraph is instructive today as it was in 1966:

    There is, I believe, a formidable regiment of economists in this hall. They teach the statistics of survival. They anticipate and warn about the relative price of freedom… [I] would just like you to bear in mind the story of an ordinary Barbadian working man. When he was asked by another West Indian whom he had not seen for about ten years, ‘and how are things?’, he replied: ‘The pasture green, but they got me tied on a short rope’.

    The post We Need to Build the Architecture of Our Future first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana?

    In April 2018, the president of Ghana, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, said that Ghana has “not offered a military base, and will not offer a military base to the United States of America.” His comments came after Ghana’s parliament had ratified a new defense cooperation agreement with the United States on March 28, 2018, which was finally signed in May More

    The post Why Does the United States Have a Military Base in Ghana? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

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  • The Lethality of Washington’s Global Monroe Doctrine

    LeRoy Clarke (Trinidad and Tobago), Now, 1970.

    This past week, as part of its policy to dominate the American hemisphere, the United States government organised the 9th Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles. US President Joe Biden made it clear early on that three countries in the hemisphere (Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) would not be invited to the event, claiming that they are not democracies. At the same time, Biden was reportedly planning an upcoming visit to Saudi Arabia – a self-described theocracy. Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador questioned the legitimacy of Biden’s exclusionary stance, and so Mexico, Bolivia, and Honduras refused to come to the event. As it turned out, the summit was a fiasco.

    Down the road, over a hundred organisations hosted a People’s Summit for Democracy, where thousands of people from across the hemisphere gathered to celebrate the actual democratic spirit which emerges from the struggles of peasants and workers, students and feminists, and all the people who are excluded from the gaze of the powerful. At this gathering, the presidents of Cuba and Venezuela joined in online to celebrate this festival of democracy and to condemn the weaponisation of democratic ideals by the United States and its allies.

    Next year, 2023, will be the bicentennial of the Monroe Doctrine, when the US asserted its hegemony over the American hemisphere. The malign spirit of the Monroe Doctrine not only continues but has now been extended by the US government into a kind of Global Monroe Doctrine. In order to assert this preposterous claim on the entire planet, the United States has pursued a policy to ‘weaken’ what it sees as ‘near peer rivals’, namely China and Russia.

    Philip Guston (Canada), Blackboard, 1969.

    In July, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research – along with Monthly Review and No Cold War – will produce a booklet on the reckless military escalation by the US government against those whom it sees as its adversaries – mainly China and Russia. This booklet will include essays by John Bellamy Foster, editor of Monthly Review, Deborah Veneziale, a journalist based in Italy, and John Ross, a member of the No Cold War collective. In the vein of that booklet, which will be announced in this newsletter, No Cold War has also produced briefing no. 3, Is the United States Preparing for War with Russia and China?, on Washington’s sabre-rattling and alarming march toward nuclear primacy.

    The war in Ukraine demonstrates a qualitative escalation of the United States’ willingness to use military force. In recent decades, the US launched wars on developing countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Serbia. In these campaigns, the US knew it enjoyed overwhelming military superiority and that there was no risk of a nuclear retaliation. However, in threatening to bring Ukraine into the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), the US was prepared to risk crossing what it knew to be the ‘red lines’ of the nuclear armed state of Russia. This raises two questions: why has the US undertaken this escalation, and how far is the US now prepared to go in the use of military force against not only the Global South but major powers such as China or Russia?

    Using Military Force to Compensate for Economic Decline

    The answer to ‘why’ is clear: the US has lost in peaceful economic competition to developing countries in general and China in particular. According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2016 China overtook the US as the world’s largest economy. As of 2021, China accounted for 19% of the global economy, compared to the US at 16%. This gap is only growing wider, and, by 2027, the IMF projects that China’s economy will outsize the US by nearly 30%. However, the US has maintained unrivalled global military supremacy – its military expenditure is larger than the next nine highest spending countries combined. Seeking to maintain unipolar global dominance, the US is increasingly substituting peaceful economic competition with military force.

    Ikeda Manabu (Japan), Meltdown, 2013.

    A good starting point to understand this strategic shift in US policy is the speech given by US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on 26 May 2022. In it, Blinken openly admitted that the US does not seek military equality with other states, but military supremacy, particularly with respect to China: ‘President Biden has instructed the Department of Defense to hold China as its pacing challenge, to ensure that our military stays ahead’. However, with nuclear armed states such as China or Russia, military supremacy necessitates achieving nuclear supremacy – an escalation above and beyond the current war in Ukraine.

    The Pursuit of Nuclear Primacy

    Since the beginning of the 21st century, the US has systematically withdrawn from key treaties limiting the threat of use of nuclear weapons: in 2002, the US unilaterally exited  from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; in 2019, the US abandoned the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty; and, in 2020, the US withdrew from the Open Skies Treaty. Abandoning these treaties strengthened the US’ ability to seek nuclear supremacy.

    Natalia Goncharova (Russia), Angels Throwing Stones on the City, 1911.

    The ultimate aim of this US policy is to acquire ‘first strike’ capacity against Russia and China – the ability to inflict damage with a first use of nuclear weapons against Russia or China to the extent that it effectively prevents retaliation. As John Bellamy Foster has noted in a comprehensive study of this US nuclear build up, even in the case of Russia – which possesses the world’s most advanced non-US nuclear arsenal – this would ‘deny Moscow a viable second-strike option, effectively eliminating its nuclear deterrent altogether, through “decapitation”’. In reality, the fallout and threat of nuclear winter from such a strike would threaten the entire world.

    This policy of nuclear primacy has long been pursued by certain circles within Washington. In 2006, it was argued in the leading US foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs that ‘It will probably soon be possible for the United States to destroy the long-range nuclear arsenals of Russia or China with a first strike’.  Contrary to these hopes, the US has not yet been able to achieve a first strike capacity, but this is due to development of hypersonic missiles and other weapons by Russia and China – not a change in US policy.

    From its attacks on Global South countries to its increased willingness to go to war with a great power such as Russia to attempting to gain first strike nuclear capacity, the logic behind the escalation of US militarism is clear: the United States is increasingly employing military force to compensate for its economic decline. In this extremely dangerous period, it is vital for humanity that all progressive forces unite to meet this great threat.

    Shefa Salem (Libya), KASKA, Dance of War, 2020.

    In 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed and the Global South remained gripped by a never-ending debt crisis, the United States bombed Iraq despite entreaties from the Iraqi government for a negotiated agreement. During that bombing, the Libyan writer Ahmad Ibrahim al-Faqih penned a lyrical poem, ‘Nafaq Tudiuhu Imra Wahida’ (‘A Tunnel Lit by a Woman’), in which he sang, ‘A time has passed, and another time has not come and will never come’. Gloom defined the moment.

    Today, we are in very dangerous times. And yet, the despondency of al-Faqih does not define our sensibility. The mood has altered. There is a belief in a world beyond imperialism, a mood that is not only evident in countries such as Cuba and China, but equally in India and Japan, as well as amongst the hard-working people who would like our collective attention to be focused on the actual dilemmas of humanity and not on the ugliness of war and domination.

    The post The Lethality of Washington’s Global Monroe Doctrine first appeared on Dissident Voice.

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  • Land in South Africa Shall Be Shared Among Those Who Work It

    Sbongile Tabhethe works in the food garden at eKhenana land occupation in Cato Manor, Durban, 9 June 2020. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

    In March 2022, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General António Guterres warned of a ‘hurricane of hunger’ due to the war in Ukraine. Forty-five developing countries, most of them on the African continent, he said, ‘import at least a third of their wheat from Ukraine or Russia, with 18 of those import[ing] at least 50 percent’. Russia and Ukraine export 33% of global barley stocks, 29% of wheat, 17% of corn, and nearly 80% of the world’s supply of sunflower oil. Farmers outside of Russia and Ukraine, trying to make up for the lack of exports, are now struggling with higher fuel prices also caused by the war. Fuel prices impact both the cost of chemical fertilisers and farmers’ ability to grow their own crops. Maximo Torero Cullen, chief economist at the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, said that ‘one of every five calories people eat have crossed at least one international border, up more than 50 percent from 40 years ago’. This turbulence in the global food trade will certainly create a problem for nutrition and food intake, particularly amongst the poorest people on the planet.

    Poorer countries do not have many tools to stem the tide of hunger, largely due to World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules that privilege subsidy regimes for richer countries but punish poorer ones if they use state action on behalf of their own farmers and the hungry. A recent report by no less than the WTO, International Monetary Fund, World Bank, and Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development provided evidence of these subsidy advantages from which wealthier countries benefit. At the 12th WTO ministerial conference in mid-June, the G-33 countries will seek to expand the use of the ‘peace clause’ (established in 2013) to allow poorer countries to protect their farmers’ livelihoods through the state procurement of food and enhanced public food distribution systems.

    Two young girls return to their homes after drawing water from a stream that the farm dwelling community shares with wild animals, 29 July 2020.
    Credit: New Frame / Magnificent Mndebele

    Those who grow our food are hungry, yet, stunningly, there is little conversation about the poverty and hunger of farmers, peasants, and agricultural workers themselves. More than 3.4 billion people – nearly half the world’s population – live in rural areas; amongst them are 80% of the world’s poor. For most of the rural poor, agriculture is the principal source of income, providing billions of jobs. Rural poverty is reproduced not because people do not work hard, but because of the dispossession of rural workers from land ownership and the withdrawal of state support from small farmers and peasants.

    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research (South Africa) has been paying very close attention to the plight of farmworkers in the region as part of our overall project to monitor the ‘hurricane of hunger’. Our most recent dossier, This Land Is the Land of Our Ancestors, is a fine-grained study of farmworkers from their own perspective. Researcher Yvonne Phyllis travelled from KwaZulu-Natal to the Western and Northern Cape provinces interviewing farmworkers and their organisations to learn about the failures of land reform in South Africa and its impact on their lives. This is one of the few dossiers that begins in the first person, reflecting the intimate nature of politics surrounding the land issue in South Africa. ‘What does the land mean to you?’, I asked Yvonne while we were together in Johannesburg recently. She answered:

    I grew up on a farm in Bedford, in the Eastern Cape province. My upbringing gifted me some of the best lessons of my life. One lesson was from the community of farmworkers and farm dwellers; they taught me the value of being in community with other people. They also taught me what it means to nurture and cultivate land and how to make my own meaning of what land is to me. Those lessons have informed my personal beliefs about the nature of land. All people deserve to live from the land. Land is not only important because we can produce from it; it forms part of people’s histories, humanity, and cultural heritage.

    Six generations of the Phyllis family have lived in this house and worked on this farm. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

    The process of colonialism by Dutch (Boer) and British settlers dispossessed African farmers and converted them into either landless workers, unpaid labour tenants, or the rural unemployed. This process was hardened by the Native Land Act (no. 27 of 1913), whose legacy continues to be felt today. Seventeen-year-old composer Reuben Caluza (1895–1969) responded to the law with his ‘Umteto we Land Act’ (‘The Land Act’), which became one of the first anthems of the liberation movement in the country:

    The right which our compatriots fought for
    Our cry for the nation
    is to have our country
    We cry for the homeless
    sons of our fathers
    Who do not have a place
    in this place of our ancestors

    The Freedom Charter (1955) of the African National Congress (ANC) and its allies promised those who struggled against apartheid, which formally ended in 1994, that ‘The land shall be shared among those who work it’. This promise was alluded to again in the 1996 South African Constitution, chapter 2, section 25.5, but it excludes explicit mention of farmworkers.

    This is the site of the ancestral graveyard of the Phyllis family on which Yvonne’s father Jacob and their family worked, 6 June 2021. Credit: New Frame / Andy Mkosi

    In fact, right from the 1993 Interim Constitution, the new post-apartheid system defended the rights of farm owners through a ‘property clause’ in chapter 2, section 28. Differences within the ANC led to the abandonment of the more progressive Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in favour of the neoliberal Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) strategy – a self-imposed structural adjustment programme. What this meant was that there were simply insufficient political will and state funds allocated for the land restitution, land tenure reform, and land redistribution programmes. As our dossier notes, to this day the promises of the Freedom Charter ‘have yet to be fulfilled’.

    Rather than expropriate land from the primarily white land-owning class to compensate for historical injustices, the state provides for compensation to landowners and operates on the principle of ‘willing buyer, willing seller’. Bureaucratic red tape and a lack of funds have sabotaged any genuine land reform project. In his 2014 Ruth First Lecture, Irvin Jim, general secretary of the largest trade union in the country, the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA), noted that the centenary of the 1913 Land Act was not commemorated by the government but only by the militant strike by farmworkers in 2012 and 2013. ‘The strike is still fresh in our memories’, Jim said. ‘It continues to highlight the colonial historical fact that the land, and the produce that comes from it, are not being equitably shared among those who work the land’. Due to the neoliberal orientation of the land question, some of the programmes set up for restitution and redistribution have ended up benefitting large landholders over subsistence farmers and lifelong farmworkers.

    Former labourers Freeda Mkhabela, Lucia Foster, and Gugu Ngubane (from left to right) are among the activists struggling against landlessness as well as poor pay and working conditions and for better treatment of farmworkers, 26 May 2021. Credit: New Frame / Mlungisi Mbele

    A genuine agrarian reform project in South Africa would not only meet the cries for justice from the land but would also provide a pathway to deal with the hunger crisis in the countryside. Our dossier ends with a six-point list of demands developed from our conversations with farmworkers and their organisations:

    1. The government of South Africa must consult farmworkers and farm dwellers to incorporate their contributions into the development of a land reform programme which addresses their land needs.
    2. Labour tenants’ claims to land ownership should be given priority in order to avoid land reform that solely enriches Black elites.
    3. The Department of Agriculture, Land Reform, and Rural Development should facilitate the process of white farm owners apportioning some of their farmland to lifetime employees and descendants of families who have worked on farms for several generations.
    4. The government must purchase farms for farmworkers and assist them with capital for start-up costs, farming equipment, and agricultural skills.
    5. Land reform in South Africa must take into account the social factors that contribute to food insecurity and acknowledge the opportunities to rectify it through land redistribution.
    6. The process of land reform must address the marginalisation of women workers in the agricultural industry and the lack of land ownership by women farmers to ensure gender parity in both spheres.

    Loo ngumhlaba wookhokho bethu! This is the land of our ancestors! That’s the slogan that gives our dossier its title. It is about time that those who work the land get to own the land.

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  • Colombia: The promise of democracy

    A political earthquake struck Colombia last month, when the left-leaning Historic Pact won the first round of the presidential elections after getting 40.3% of the vote, write Vijay Prashad and Taroa Zúñiga Silva. Can the left break the cycle of violence to win the second round on June 19?

    This post was originally published on Green Left.

  • Africa, the Collateral Victim of a Distant Conflict

    Amadou Sanogo (Mali), You Can Hide Your Gaze, but You Cannot Hide That of Others, 2019.

    On 25 May 2022, Africa Day, Moussa Faki Mahamat – the chairperson of the African Union (AU) – commemorated the establishment of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) in 1963, which was later reshaped as the AU in 2002, with a foreboding speech. Africa, he said, has become ‘the collateral victim of a distant conflict, that between Russia and Ukraine’. That conflict has upset ‘the fragile global geopolitical and geostrategic balance’, casting ‘a harsh light on the structural fragility of our economies’. Two new key fragilities have been exposed: a food crisis amplified by climate change and a health crisis accelerated by COVID-19.

    A third long-running fragility is that most African states have little freedom to manage their budgets as debt burdens rise and repayment costs increase. ‘Public debt ratios are at their highest level in over two decades and many low-income countries are either in, or close to, debt distress’, said Abebe Aemro Selassie, the director of the African Department at the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The IMF’s Regional Economic Outlook report, released in April 2022, makes for grizzly reading, its headline clear: ‘A New Shock and Little Room to Manoeuvre’.

    Jilali Gharbaoui (Morocco), Composition, 1967.

    Debt hangs over the African continent like a wake of vultures. Most African countries have interest bills that are much higher than their national revenues, with budgets managed through austerity and driven by deep cuts in government employment as well as the education and health care sectors. Since just under two-thirds of the debt owed by these countries is denominated in foreign currencies, debt repayment is near impossible without further borrowing, resulting in a cycle of indebtedness with no permanent relief in sight. None of the schemes on the table, such as the G20’s Debt Service Suspension Initiative (DSSI) or its Common Framework for Debt Treatments, will provide the kind of debt forgiveness that is needed to breathe life into these economies.

    In October 2020, the Jubilee Debt Campaign proposed two common sense measures to remove the debt overhang. The IMF owns significant quantities of gold amounting to 90.5 million ounces, worth $168.6 billion in total; by selling 6.7% of their gold holdings, they could raise more than enough to pay the $8.2 billion that makes up DSSI countries’ debt. The campaign also suggested that rich countries could draw billions of dollars towards this cancellation by issuing less than 9% of their IMF Special Drawing Rights allocation. Other ways to reduce the debt burden include cancelling debt payments to the World Bank and IMF, two multilateral institutions with a mandate to ensure the advancement of social development and not their own financial largess. However, the World Bank has not moved on this agenda – despite dramatic words from its president in August 2020 – and the IMF’s modest debt suspension from May 2020 to December 2021 will hardly make a difference. Along with these reasonable suggestions, bringing the nearly $40 trillion held in illicit tax havens into productive use could help African countries escape the spiralling debt trap.

    Choukri Mesli (Algeria), Algeria in Flames, 1961.

    ‘We live in one of the poorest places on earth’, former President of Mali Amadou Toumani Touré told me just before the pandemic. Mali is part of the Sahel region of Africa, where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 a day. Poverty will only intensify as war, climate change, national debt, and population growth increase. At the 7th Summit of the leaders of the G5 Sahel (Group of Five for the Sahel) in February 2021, the heads of state called for a ‘deep restructuring of debt’, but the silence they received from the IMF was deafening. The G5 Sahel was initiated by France in 2014 as a political formation of the five Sahel countries – Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger. Its real purpose was clarified in 2017 with the formation of its military alliance (the G5 Sahel Joint Force or FC-G5S), which provided cover for the French military presence in the Sahel. It could now be claimed that France did not really invade these countries, who maintain their formal sovereignty, but that it entered the Sahel to merely assist these countries in their fight against instability.

    Part of the problem is the demands made on these states to increase their military spending against any increase in spending for human relief and development. The G5 Sahel countries spend between 17% and 30% of their entire budgets on their militaries. Three of the five Sahel countries have expanded their military spending astronomically over the past decade: Burkina Faso by 238%, Mali by 339%, and Niger by 288%. The arms trade is suffocating them. Western countries – led by France but egged on by the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) – have pressured these states to treat every crisis as a security crisis. The entire discourse is about security as conversations about social development are relegated to the margins. Even for the United Nations, questions of development have become an afterthought to the focus on war.

    Souleymane Ouologuem (Mali), The Foundation, 2014.

    In the first two weeks of May 2022, the Malian military government ejected the French military and withdrew from G5 Sahel in the wake of deep resentment across Mali spurred by civilian casualties from French military attacks and the French government’s arrogant attitude towards the Malian government. Colonel Assimi Goïta, who leads the military junta, said that the agreement with the French ‘brought neither peace, nor security, nor reconciliation’ and that the junta aspires ‘to stop the flow of Malian blood’. France moved its military force from Mali next door to Niger.

    No one denies the fact that the chaos in the Sahel region was deepened by the 2011 NATO war against Libya. Mali’s earlier challenges, including a decades-long Tuareg insurgency and conflicts between Fulani herders and Dogon farmers, were convulsed by the entry of arms and men from Libya and Algeria. Three jihadi groups, including al-Qaeda, appeared as if from nowhere and used older regional tensions to seize northern Mali in 2012 and declare the state of Azawad. French military intervention followed in January 2013.

    Jean-David Nkot (Cameroon), #Life in Your Hands, 2020.

    Travel through this region makes it clear that French – and US – interests in the Sahel are not merely about terrorism and violence. Two domestic concerns have led both foreign powers to build a massive military presence there, including the world’s largest drone base, which is operated by the US, in Agadez, Niger. The first concern is that this region is home to considerable natural resources, including yellowcake uranium in Niger. Two mines in Arlit (Niger) produce enough uranium to power one in three light bulbs in France, which is why French mining firms (such as Areva) operate in this garrison-like town. Secondly, these military operations are designed to deter the steady stream of migrants leaving areas such as West Africa and West Asia, going through the Sahel and Libya and making their way across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe. Along the Sahel, from Mauritania to Chad, Europe and the US have begun to build what amounts to a highly militarised border. Europe has moved its border from the northern edge of the Mediterranean Sea to the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, thereby compromising the sovereignty of North Africa.

    Hawad (Niger), Untitled, 1997.

    Military coups in Burkina Faso and Mali are a result of the failure of democratic governments to rein in French intervention. It was left to the military in Mali to both eject the French military and depart from its G5 Sahel political project. Conflicts in Mali, as former President Alpha Omar Konaré told me over a decade ago, are inflamed due to the suffocation of the country’s economy. The country is regularly left out of infrastructure support and debt relief initiatives by international development organisations. This landlocked state imports over 70% of its food, whose prices have skyrocketed in the past month. Mali faces harsh sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), which will only deepen the crisis and provoke greater conflict north of Mali’s capital, Bamako.

    The conflict in Mali’s north affects the lives of the country’s Tuareg population, which is rich with many great poets and musicians. One of them, Souéloum Diagho, writes that ‘a person without memory is like a desert without water’ (‘un homme sans mémoire est comme un desert sans eau’). Memories of older forms of colonialism sharpen the way that many Africans view their treatment as ‘collateral victims’ (as the AU’s Mahamat described it) and their conviction that it is unacceptable.

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  • The Rise of NATO in Africa

    Anxiety about the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) toward the Russian border is one of the causes of the current war in Ukraine. But this is not the only attempt at expansion by NATO, a treaty organization created in 1949 by the United States to project its military and political power over Europe. More

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  • And Then There Was No More Empire All of a Sudden

    Bisa Butler (USA), I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 2019.

    Empire denies its own existence. It does not exist as an empire but only as benevolence, with its mission to spread human rights and sustainable development across the world. However, that perspective means nothing in Havana nor in Caracas, where ‘human rights’ has come to mean regime change, and where ‘sustainable development’ has come to mean the throttling of their people through sanctions and blockades. It is from the standpoint of the victims of empire that clarity comes.

    US President Joe Biden is to host the Summit of the Americas in June, where he hopes to deepen Washington’s hegemony over the Americas. The United States government understands that its project of hegemony faces an existential crisis caused by the weaknesses of the US political system and the US economy, with limited funds available for investment within its own country, let alone for the rest of the world. At the same time, US hegemony faces a serious challenge from China, whose Belt and Road Initiative has been seen in large parts of Latin America and the Caribbean as an alternative to the International Monetary Fund’s austerity agenda. Rather than work alongside Chinese investments, the US is eager to use any means to prevent China from engaging with countries in the Americas. Along this axis, the US has revitalised the Monroe Doctrine. This policy, which will be two centuries old next year, claims that the Americas are the dominion of the United States, its ‘sphere of influence’, and its ‘backyard’ (although Biden has tried to be cute by calling the region the US’s ‘front yard’).

    Along with the International Peoples’ Assembly, we have developed a red alert on two instruments of US power – the Organisation of American States and the Summit of the Americas – as well as the challenge that the US faces as it tries to impose its hegemony in the region. The red alert is featured below and is available here as a PDF. Please read it, discuss it, and share it.

    What is the Organisation of American States?

    The Organisation of American States (OAS) was formed in Bogotá, Colombia in 1948 by the United States and its allies. Though the OAS Charter invokes the rhetoric of multilateralism and cooperation, the organisation has been used as a tool to fight against communism in the hemisphere and to impose a US agenda on the countries of the Americas. Roughly half of the funds for the OAS and 80 percent of the funds for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), an autonomous organ of the OAS, come from the US. It is worth noting that – despite providing the majority of its budget – the US has not ratified any of the IACHR’s treaties.

    The OAS showed its true colours after the Cuban Revolution (1959). In 1962, at a meeting in Punta del Este (Uruguay), Cuba – a founding member of the OAS – was expelled from the organisation. The declaration from the meeting stated that ‘the principles of communism are incompatible with the principles of the inter-American system’. In response, Fidel Castro called the OAS the ‘US Ministry of Colonies’.

    The OAS set up the Special Consultative Committee on Security Against the Subversive Action of International Communism in 1962, with the purpose of allowing the elites in the Americas – led by the US – to use every means possible against popular movements of the working class and peasantry. The OAS has afforded diplomatic and political cover to the US’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as it has participated in the overthrow of governments that attempt to exercise their legitimate sovereignty – sovereignty that the OAS Charter purports to guarantee. This exercise has gone all the way from the OAS’s expulsion of Cuba in 1962 to the orchestration of coups in Honduras (2009) and Bolivia (2019) to the repeated attempts to overthrow the governments of Nicaragua and Venezuela and ongoing interference in Haiti.

    Since 1962, the OAS has openly acted alongside the US government to sanction countries without a United Nations Security Council resolution, which makes these sanctions illegal. It has, therefore, regularly violated the ‘principle of non-interference’ in its own charter, which prohibits ‘armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic, and cultural elements’ (chapter 1, article 2, section b and chapter IV, article 19).

    Diego Rivera (Mexico), Liberación del Peón (‘Liberation of the peon’), 1931.

    What is the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)?

    Venezuela, led by President Hugo Chávez, initiated a process in the early 2000s to build new regional institutions outside of US control. Three major platforms were built in this period: 1) the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) in 2004; 2) the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) in 2004; and 3) the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) in 2010. These platforms established inter-governmental connections across the Americas, including summits on matters of regional importance and technical institutions to enhance trade and cultural interactions across borders. Each of these platforms have faced threats from the United States. As governments in the region oscillate politically, their commitment to these platforms has either increased (the more left they have been) or decreased (the more subordinate they have been to the United States).

    At the 6th Summit of CELAC in Mexico City in 2021, Mexico’s President Andrés Manuel López Obrador suggested that the OAS be disbanded and that CELAC help to build a multilateral organisation at the scale of the European Union to resolve regional conflicts, build trade partnerships, and promote the unity of the Americas.

    Tessa Mars (Haiti), Untitled, Praying for the visa series, 2019.

    What is the Summit of the Americas?

    With the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the United States attempted to dominate the world by using its military power to discipline any state that did not accept its hegemony (as in Panama, 1989 and Iraq, 1991) and by institutionalising its economic power through the World Trade Organisation, set up in 1994. The US called the OAS member states to Miami for the first Summit of the Americas in 1994, which was subsequently handed over to the OAS to manage. The summit has convened every few years since to ‘discuss common policy issues, affirm shared values and commit to concerted actions at the national and regional level’.

    Despite its stronghold over the OAS, the US has never been able fully to impose its agenda at these summits. At the third summit in Quebec City (2001) and the fourth summit in Mar del Plata (2005), popular movements held large counter-protests; at Mar del Plata, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez led a massive demonstration, which resulted in the collapse of the US-imposed Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. The fifth and sixth summits at Port of Spain (2009) and Cartagena (2012) became a battlefield for the debate over the US blockade on Cuba and its expulsion from the OAS. Due to immense pressure from the member states of the OAS, Cuba was invited to the seventh and eighth summits in Panama City (2015) and Lima (2018), against the wishes of the United States.

    However, the United States has not invited Cuba, Nicaragua, or Venezuela to the upcoming ninth summit to be held in Los Angeles in June 2022. Several countries – including Bolivia and Mexico – have said that they will not attend the meeting unless all thirty-five countries in the Americas are in attendance. From 8–10 June, a range of progressive organisations will hold a People’s Summit to counter the OAS summit and to amplify the voices of all the peoples of the Americas.

    Rufino Tamayo (Mexico), Animals, 1941.

    In 2010, the poet Derek Walcott (1930–2017) published ‘The Lost Empire’, a celebration of the Caribbean and of his own island, Saint Lucia, in particular as British imperialism retreated. Walcott grew up with the economic and cultural suffocation imposed by colonialism, the ugliness of being made to feel inferior, and the wretchedness of the poverty that came alongside it. Years later, reflecting on the jubilation of the retreat of British rule, Walcott wrote:

    And then there was no more Empire all of a sudden.
    Its victories were air, its dominions dirt:
    Burma, Canada, Egypt, Africa, India, the Sudan.
    The map that had seeped its stain on a schoolboy’s shirt
    like red ink on a blotter, battles, long sieges.
    Dhows and feluccas, hill stations, outposts, flags
    fluttering down in the dusk, their golden aegis
    went out with the sun, the last gleam on a great crag,
    With tiger-eyed turbaned Sikhs, pennons of the Raj
    to a sobbing bugle.

    The sun is setting on imperialism as we emerge slowly and delicately into a world that seeks meaningful equality rather than subordination. ‘This small place’, Walcott writes of Saint Lucia, ‘produces nothing but beauty’. That would be true of the entire world if we could get beyond our long, modern history of battles and sieges, warships, and nuclear weapons.

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  • Is This the End of the French Project in Africa’s Sahel?

    On May 15, 2022, the military junta in Mali announced that it would no longer be part of the G5 Sahel platform. The G5 Sahel was created in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in 2014, and brought together the governments of Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger to collaborate over the deteriorating security situation in the Sahel More

    The post Is This the End of the French Project in Africa’s Sahel? appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

    This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

  • Art Is a Dream in Which We Imagine Our Future

    On 11 May 2022, an Israeli sniper fired at the head of the veteran Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Aqleh as she reported on an Israeli military raid on a refugee settlement in Jenin (part of the Occupied Palestine Territories). The snipers continued to fire at the journalists who were with her, preventing them from aiding her. When she finally arrived at Ibn Sina Hospital, she was pronounced dead.

    After Abu Aqleh’s death, the Israeli military raided her home in occupied East Jerusalem, where they confiscated Palestinian flags and attempted to prevent mourners from playing Palestinian songs. At her funeral on 13 May, the Israel Defence Forces attacked the massive turnout of family and supporters – including her pallbearers – and grabbed Palestinian flags held by the crowd. The murder of Abu Aqleh, who had been a highly respected journalist for Al Jazeera since 1997, and the violence by the Israeli forces at her funeral reinforce the apartheid nature of Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Palestinian leader Dr Hanan Ashrawi tweeted that the attack on Palestinian flags, posters, and slogans exposes ‘the insecurity of the oppressor’. The assault on these cultural icons, Ashwari went on to explain, shows Israelis’ ‘fear of our symbols, fear of our grief & anger, fear of our existence’.

    The raid that Abu Aqleh was covering when she was killed took place in Jenin, the home of Palestine’s remarkable Freedom Theatre. On 4 April 2011, Juliano Mer-Khamis, one of the theatre’s founders, was shot dead not far from where Abu Aqleh was killed. ‘Israel is destroying the neurological system of [Palestinian] society’, Mer-Khamis said, and this neurological system ‘is culture, identity, communication … We have to stand up again on our feet’, he said. ‘We are now living on our knees’.

    Front: Actors of a Beijing opera troupe perform. Back: Drama students of the Lu Xun Academy of Arts rehearse a play in a structure they built themselves.
    Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

    Eight decades ago, in the heart of China, hundreds of Chinese intellectuals and artists from cities such as Shanghai gathered in Yan’an, which had become a red base for the Communist Party of China (CPC). In 1942, in and around the caves of this city, a serious discussion took place about the paralysis of Chinese culture in the face of three serious challenges: the sclerotic nature of the Chinese feudal system, the viciousness of Western-led imperialism, and the harshness of the Japanese fascist occupation. Cultural workers had to confront these facts of history as well as the historical tasks that they presented. In Yan’an, the debate circled around the confounding assertion that artists could work without confronting the major historical processes of our time. Imagine, for example, a Palestinian artist who works today without being gripped by the force of Israeli apartheid.

    The CPC’s head of the propaganda department, Kai Feng, invited artists to gather in the central Party office for three weeks to debate the state of art and culture during the revolutionary war. Mao Zedong, a leader of the CPC, listened to the interventions, made his own commentary, and the following year published Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Our dossier no. 52 (May 2022), Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation, is an assessment of the Yan’an debate and its implication for our times. The dossier, illustrated by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department, looks back at the debates in Yan’an in order to illuminate our conjuncture and insist on the centrality of cultural work for our movements today.

    Top: A singing troupe performs the Yangge opera, Brother and Sister Reclaiming the Wasteland. Bottom: Fine arts students take sketching lessons.
    Credit: Yan’an Literature and Art Memorial Hall [延安文艺纪念馆] and Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台]

    Artists root their imagination in their lived experiences. The Freedom Theatre in Jenin does not perform plays that are a mirror of café life in Tel Aviv or New York; their plays go deep into the imagination of occupied Palestine. In Yan’an, our dossier explains, ‘urban intellectuals … had to go through their own transformation in order to close the gap between themselves and the peasant masses. This transformation was at the heart of the Yan’an Forum … together, they could turn into an effective political force’.

    On 23 May 1942, Mao took the floor at the Yan’an Forum to offer his concluding remarks to the artists and intellectuals that had left cities such as Shanghai and made their way into the interior. Here, Mao said, new forms of life were being created, a new buoyancy that straightened the spines of the people and produced new forms of social life. ‘To arrive in a base area’, Mao said, ‘is to arrive in a period of rule unprecedented in the several thousand years of Chinese history, one where workers, peasants, and soldiers, and the popular masses hold power … the eras of the past are gone forever and will never return’. He meant that the imagination must be stretched to tell stories of and for the newly upright Chinese people. The purpose of art, the intellectuals at Yan’an argued, is to be relevant to these major historical events.

    To make his point, Mao quoted the writer Lu Xun (1881–1936), who understood these changes and reflected on them in his poetry:

    Fierce-browed, I coolly defy a thousand pointing fingers,
    Head-bowed, like a willing ox I serve the children.

    Mao described the enemy, these ‘thousand pointing fingers’, as the vampirish imperialists and cadaverous feudal landlords. The ‘children’ were the working classes, the peasantry, and the popular masses. Lu Xun’s words show that the artist – the ‘willing ox’ – must never submit to the old granite block of oppression, Mao explained; he or she must be willing to accompany the people in their struggle for freedom.

    It is the struggle that enabled the popular masses to stand upright, to refuse to bow down to the centuries of humiliation of seeing their labour subordinated to the accumulation of wealth by the elites. Artistic practice and intellectual activity must reflect these broad changes which are present today in China’s mass campaign to abolish absolute poverty, in Indian farmers’ refusal to submit to the Uberisation of their livelihoods, in South African shack dwellers’ bravery to stand firm against political killings, and in the massive mobilisation of Palestinians at the funeral of Shireen Abu Aqleh.

    Yangge singing troupes perform for the people at the 1943 Spring Festival celebration.
    Credit: Yan’an Red Cloud Platform [延安红云平台] and China Youth Daily [中国青年报]

    The debates at Yan’an cleared the way for artists and writers to germinate intense cultural activity, to disseminate new ideas into the cultural domain, to lift the conversation from the day-to-day to new horizons, and to create new political spaces and epochs. This cultural work called upon intellectuals and artists to focus on the future, no longer merely concerned with their own temperament (‘art for art’s sake’), to work for a new horizon, and to inaugurate a new humanity. There was no obligation to collapse their work solely into a political project, since that would reduce their capacity to go beyond the dilemmas posed by the present. Artists and intellectuals needed to support movements, but also to retain the space to create a passionate fervour in society that could fuel a new culture.

    Mao’s interventions at Yan’an made it clear that intellectual and artistic activity would not by themselves change the world. Artists and intellectuals allude to reality, draw attention to certain problems, and provide an understanding of them. But art alone cannot remedy all problems. For that, it is necessary to turn to the organisations and movements that churn society into something new. If art forms must carry the enormous burden of political theory and praxis, they are often diminished. Art must breathe in the sensibilities of the working class and the peasantry and breathe out new cultural propositions. Alongside the tide of humanity that refuses to submit to oppression, this leads us into new possibilities.

    Malak Mattar (Palestine), Last Scene Before Flying with the Dove to Paradise, 2019.

    Asma Naghnaghiye, a young girl who participated in a Freedom Theatre camp, spoke of the beauty of cultural work ‘In one of the exercises in the theatre I imitated a bird who flies above my neighbourhood and then above Jenin and then above the sea. It was a like a dream’. That dream of the future converts the present into a place of struggle.

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  • How China’s 1942 Yan’an Forum Inspired the Culture of National Liberation in the Third World

    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research releases a new dossier on the legacy of the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art eight decades later.

    On 2 May 1942, hundreds of China’s top writers, artists, and communist leaders gathered to discuss the most urgent cultural questions of the time. Dossier no. 52, Go to Yan’an! Culture and National Liberation, explores the history and enduring legacy of the three-week forum as well as the text that Mao Zedong published the following year summarising the fruit that it bore, entitled Talks at the Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art. Why did tens of thousands of artists and writers make the long journey to the remote city of Yan’an, what were the intellectual debates of the time, and how did the cultural developments help bring the Chinese people and nation to revolution?

    Talks is perhaps one of the most important systematisations emerging from the Third World on the role of art and culture and its theory, practice, mistakes, and lessons. It can be read as an exploration of Marxist aesthetics in the national liberation tradition, a proposal for socialist cultural policy, a manual for cadres carrying out cultural tasks, and a piece of literary theory or literature itself. Eight decades have passed since Mao gave his lectures on literature and art. What relevance does the Yan’an spirit hold today, especially for artists, writers, and intellectuals who seek to serve people’s struggles?

    Don’t miss our latest dossier, Go to Yan’an: Culture and National Liberation.

    The Yan’an Forum on Literature and Art (1942) called on intellectuals to serve the people, with the development of mass culture that ensured that peasants’ subjectivity was at the centre of China’s Revolution. … The story of Yan’an is not just a China story; it belongs to the Third World, to twentieth century history, to the socialist movement, and to all the poor people in the world.

    – Lu Xinyu, professor at East China Normal University

    Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research is an international, movement-driven institution that carries out empirically based research guided by political movements. It seeks to bridge gaps in knowledge about the political economy and social hierarchy to facilitate the work of political movements and engage in the ‘battle of ideas’ to fight against bourgeois ideology, which has swept through intellectual institutions from the academy to the media.

    Our publications are produced in English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hindi.

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  • In a World of Great Disorder and Extravagant Lies, We Look for Compassion

    Francisca Lita Sáez (Spain), An Unequal Fight, 2020.

    These are deeply upsetting times. The COVID-19 global pandemic had the potential to bring people together, to strengthen global institutions such as the World Health Organisation (WHO), and to galvanise new faith in public action. Our vast social wealth could have been pledged to improve public health systems, including both the surveillance of outbreaks of illness and the development of medical systems to treat people during these outbreaks. Not so.

    Studies by the WHO have shown us that health care spending by governments in poorer nations has been relatively flat during the pandemic, while out-of-pocket private expenditure on health care continues to rise. Since the pandemic was declared in March 2020, many governments have responded with exceptional budget allocations; however, across the board from richer to the poorer nations, the health sector received only ‘a fairly small portion’ while the bulk of the spending was used to bail out multinational corporations and banks and provide social relief for the population.

    In 2020, the pandemic cost the global gross domestic product an estimated $4 trillion. Meanwhile, according to the WHO, the ‘needed funding … to ensure epidemic preparedness is estimated to be approximately US$150 billion per year’. In other words, an annual expenditure of $150 billion could likely prevent the next pandemic along with its multi-trillion-dollar economic bill and incalculable suffering. But this kind of social investment is simply not in the cards these days. That’s part of what makes our times so upsetting.

    S. H. Raza (India), Monsoon in Bombay, 1947–49.

    On 5 May, the WHO released its findings on the excess deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the 24-month period of 2020 and 2021, the WHO estimated the pandemic’s death toll to be 14.9 million. A third of these deaths (4.7 million) are said to have been in India; this is ten times the official figure released by the Government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, which has disputed the WHO’s figures. One would have thought that these staggering numbers – nearly 15 million dead globally in the two-year period – would be sufficient to strengthen the will to rebuild depleted public health systems. Not so.

    According to a study on global health financing, development assistance for health (DAH) increased by 35.7 percent between 2019 and 2020. This amounts to $13.7 billion in DAH, far short of the projected $33 billion to $62 billion required to address the pandemic. In line with the global pattern, while DAH funding during the pandemic went towards COVID-19 projects, various key health sectors saw their funds decrease (malaria by 2.2 percent, HIV/AIDS by 3.4 percent, tuberculosis by 5.5 percent, reproductive and maternal health by 6.8 percent). The expenditure on COVID-19 also had some striking geographical disparities, with the Caribbean and Latin America receiving only 5.2 percent of DAH funding despite experiencing 28.7 percent of reported global COVID-19 deaths.

    Sajitha R. Shankar (India), Alterbody, 2008.

    While the Indian government is preoccupied with disputing the COVID-19 death toll with the WHO, the government of Kerala – led by the Left Democratic Front – has focused on using any and every means to enhance the public health sector. Kerala, with a population of almost 35 million, regularly leads in the country’s health indicators among India’s twenty-eight states. Kerala’s Left Democratic Front government has been able to handle the pandemic because of its robust public investment in health care facilities, the public action led by vibrant social movements that are connected to the government, and its policies of social inclusion that have minimised the hierarchies of caste and patriarchy that otherwise isolate social minorities from public institutions.

    In 2016, when the Left Democratic Front took over state leadership, it began to enhance the depleted public health system. Mission Aardram (‘Compassion’), started in 2017, was intended to improve public health care, including emergency departments and trauma units, and draw more people away from the expensive private health sector to public systems. The government rooted Mission Aardram in the structures of local self-government so that the entire health care system could be decentralised and more closely attuned to the needs of communities. For example, the mission developed a close relationship with the various cooperatives, such as Kudumbashree, a 4.5-million-member women’s anti-poverty programme. Due to the revitalised public health care system, Kerala’s population has begun to turn away from the private sector in favour of these government facilities, whose use increased from 28 percent in the 1980s to 70 percent in 2021 as a result.

    As part of Mission Aardram, the Left Democratic Front government in Kerala created Family Health Centres across the state. The government has now established Post-COVID Clinics at these centres to diagnose and treat people who are suffering from long-term COVID-19-related health problems. These clinics have been created despite little support from the central government in New Delhi. A number of Kerala’s public health and research institutes have provided breakthroughs in our understanding of communicable diseases and helped develop new medicines to treat them, including the Institute for Advanced Virology, the International Ayurveda Research Institute, and the research centres in biotechnology and pharmaceutical medicines at the Bio360 Life Sciences Park. All of this is precisely the agenda of compassion that gives us hope in the possibilities of a world that is not rooted in private profit but in social good.

    Nguyễn tư Nghiêm (Vietnam), The Dance, 1968.

    In November 2021, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research worked alongside twenty-six research institutes to develop A Plan to Save the Planet. The plan has many sections, each of which emerged out of deep study and analysis. One of the key sections is on health, with thirteen clear policy proposals:

    1. Advance the cause of a people’s vaccine for COVID-19 and for future diseases.
    2. Remove patent controls on essential medicines and facilitate the transfer of both medical science and technology to developing countries.
    3. De-commodify, develop, and increase investment in robust public health systems.
    4. Develop the public sector’s pharmaceutical production, particularly in developing countries.
    5. Form a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Health Threats.
    6. Support and strengthen the role health workers’ unions play at the workplace and in the economy.
    7. Ensure that people from underprivileged backgrounds and rural areas are trained as doctors.
    8. Broaden medical solidarity, including through the World Health Organisation and health platforms associated with regional bodies.
    9. Mobilise campaigns and actions that protect and expand reproductive and sexual rights.
    10. Levy a health tax on large corporations that produce beverages and foods that are widely recognised by international health organisations to be harmful to children and to public health in general (such as those that lead to obesity or other chronic diseases).
    11. Curb the promotional activities and advertising expenditures of pharmaceutical corporations.
    12. Build a network of accessible, publicly funded diagnostic centres and strictly regulate the prescription and prices of diagnostic tests.
    13. Provide psychological therapy as part of public health systems.

    If even half of these policy proposals were to be enacted, the world would be less dangerous and more compassionate. Take point no. 6 as a reference. During the early months of the pandemic, it became normal to talk about the need to support ‘essential workers’, including health care workers (our dossier from June 2020, Health Is a Political Choice, made the case for these workers). All those banged pots went silent soon thereafter and health care workers found themselves with low pay and poor working conditions. When these health care workers went on strike – from the United States to Kenya – that support simply did not materialise. If health care workers had a say in their own workplaces and in the formation of health policy, our societies would be less prone to repeated healthcare calamities.

    There’s an old Roque Dalton poem from 1968 about headaches and socialism that gives us a taste of what it will take to save the planet:

    It is beautiful to be a communist,
    even if it gives you many headaches.

    The communists’ headache
    is presumed to be historical; that is to say,
    that it does not yield to painkillers,
    but only to the realisation of paradise on earth.
    That’s the way it is.

    Under capitalism, we get a headache
    and our heads are torn off.
    In the revolution’s struggle, the head is a time-bomb.

    In socialist construction,
    we plan for the headache
    which does not make it scarce, but quite the contrary.
    Communism will be, among other things,
    an aspirin the size of the sun.

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  • Mali’s Military Ejects France, But Faces Serious Challenges

    On May 2, 2022, a statement was made by Mali’s military spokesperson Colonel Abdoulaye Maïga on the country’s national television, where he said that Mali was ending the defense accords it had with France, effectively making the presence of French troops in Mali illegal. The statement was written by the military leadership of the country, More

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