Category: News

Within a mere week’s time, 31 fresh agreements were penned, all dedicated to constructing a Community of Shared Destiny, Special Economic Zones and technological advancements. On this 50th anniversary of his US-backed coup, Salvador Allende’s enduring spirit thrives within our hearts.

The BRICS+ initiative gave birth to the Multipolar World this year. While the G20 Summit was held in New Delhi, President Xi Jinping remained in China, extending a warm and friendly welcome to President Nicolás Maduro Moros of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela during his tour from September 8 to 14, 2023, reaffirming their status as strategic partners. President Nicolás Maduro’s official tour showcased advances in various areas, including technology, health, education, productive development, industry, agriculture, artificial intelligence for the economy, and tourism, among others. It also established twinned development bridges between four special economic zones in Venezuela and three Chinese provinces.

The bridges of commercial and technological development connect the special economic zones of the State of La Guaira and Shenzhen, the state of Carabobo and the province of Shanghai, and the states of Anzoátegui and Monagas and the province of Shandong, resulting in greater investments in cutting-edge technology and the presence of the most advanced Chinese companies. This south-south cooperation has been intensifying with twinning agreements.

Let us review some agreements from president Nicolás Maduro’s official tour of the People’s Socialist Republic of China:

Tour Highlights:

Shenzhen (September 8): President Nicolás Maduro Moros landed in Shenzhen, the technological capital of China, on Friday, September 8, as part of his official tour of the week-long high-level joint commission. Shenzhen is a city in southeast China characterized by its technological advances. He visited the Museum of Contemporary Art and the Urban Planning Exhibition. From there, a memorandum of understanding was signed between the National Superintendency of Special Economic Zones of Venezuela and the Research Center for Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen University, which establishes the modernization of these zones to guarantee productivity, security, social justice, and a sustainable environment between both nations.

Shanghai (September 9): President Maduro and the high-level comisssion’s second stop in the Socialist Republic was Shanghai, the financial epicenter and headquarters of the BRICS+ Bank. Here, Maduro participated in the Import Fair with the purpose of attracting new investments to diversify the economy. He visited the main headquarters of the BRICS+ Development Bank and held a meeting with its president, Comrade Dilma Rousseff, discussing the impact of this entity on the construction of a new world economic system. Also, from the largest city in the Asian country and the world’s financial core, a comprehensive shared development agreement was established between Shanghai and the state of Carabobo. Likewise, the president visited the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Island Experimental Center to continue promoting the strategic partnership between Caracas and Beijing.

Shandong (September 11): On September 11, during the third stop of his tour, Maduro arrived in the province of Shandong, where he continued his work agenda to strengthen relations between both nations for the benefit of their people. He visited sacred mountains and received blessings from Taoist monks. He conducted his program, “Con Maduro+,” broadcasting live from Shandong to the entire Global South through teleSUR, Almayadin, and CGTN. On this significant day, marking the 50th anniversary of the US Fascist coup against the Chilean people and with Mártir Camarada Salvador Allende’s spirit stronger than ever, a great anti-fascist program was held with bilateral anti-imperialist agreements. In the first international broadcast, Maduro informed the country of the achievements and prospects of the tour, which included a twinning agreement, a joint development plan, investment, and technology agreements where the most advanced Chinese companies in the world are present, as highlighted by the head of state. He also emphasized that one of the objectives of the visit to Shandong is to update the entire industrial, agroindustrial, and production infrastructure of Venezuela.

Beijing (September 13): To promote Venezuela’s development in various areas, President Nicolás Maduro arrived on September 13 via a high-speed train, traveling at 350km/h, to the South Station in Beijing as part of his presidential tour focusing on diplomatic cooperation, solidarity, and international exchange to improve the country’s conditions. Seven commissions were created, and 31 lines of work were established, covering a wide range of areas, including economic zones, tourism, agriculture, industry, technology, pharmaceuticals, and commerce. The parties also signed 10 agreements on tourism, agriculture, industry, technology, pharmaceuticals, and commerce. They also took on 18 high-level documents in strategic areas.

President Nicolás Maduro:

“Relations between Venezuela and China are 49 years old, and in recent years, they have been intensifying with twinning agreements. Both countries are working under this geopolitics of peace, solidarity, and cooperation. We have established relations of friendship and trust with China. That is why this historic visit will allow everything that Venezuela and China do to be raised to a higher level.”

Vice president Delcy Rodríguez: “In recent years, thanks to the personal commitment of President Xi Jinping and President Nicolás Maduro, China-Venezuela relations have withstood the test of the changing international landscape and have remained solid. Mutual political trust between the two countries has become stronger, and our cooperation in various sectors has deepened even further.”

President Nicolás Maduro and his senior cabinet, have been on an official visit to the Asian country since September 6th. Upon receiving the President of Venezuela, he expressed his support for Venezuelan efforts to maintain its sovereignty, national dignity, and social stability in the country and how to resist imperialist interference in a meeting at the Great Palace of the People.

The Chinese president assured that his country and Venezuela are good friends and partners. For his part, the president of Venezuela Nicolás Maduro thanked the authorities for the support of the Asian nation and assured that their relations are a model of the links between the countries of the Global South.

During the meeting, both leaders announced that their improving relations could withstand anything.

“It is the fifth time that you have visited China since you took office as President, which demonstrates the fraternal friendship between China and Venezuela. China and Venezuela are very trusted friends and joint development partners. The Chinese side always considers and develops the part with Venezuela from strategic and long-term perspectives and will support, as always, the efforts of the Venezuelan side to safeguard national sovereignty, the dignity of the people, and social stability and firmly support the cause of justice of the Bolivarian Republic by opposing foreign interference.

“I am pleased to announce together with you the update of the relationship between China and Venezuela for the full-time strategic partnership.”

President Nicolás Maduro Moros said, “President Xi Jinping, on behalf of our people, I want to express all the expressions of solidarity and affection with ancient China and the People’s Republic of China. I am happy to be here with you on this visit, which I have described as a historic visit. It marks a new era for a new era in China-Venezuela relations within the framework of a new historical era that has opened for humanity. We have a relationship of deep friendship, successful cooperation and our relations have been exemplary for the Global South.

China has become in these years–I have witnessed as Chancellor of Commander Hugo Chávez, his great friend, and as President for 10 years– I have witnessed how China has become a superpower. A superpower of peace, a human superpower of cooperation and how China becomes the great engine of the development of a new era of a multipolar world, a pluricentric world. So really what I have seen in China–whether in Shenzhen, Shanghai, Shandong and now in Beijing– is progress and prosperity.

I want to congratulate the Chinese Communist Party for the immense success of the 20th Congress and congratulate you for your re-election at the head of the destiny of the Superpower of Peace that we admire in the World. I am very happy with my team to be here and ready to work on building a new splendid stage of China-Venezuela relations! Thank you very much, president!”

During the Seventeenth meeting, they signed a total of 31 agreements in strategic areas in a new stage of expansion in their economic and diplomatic relations. China and Venezuela focused this conference precisely on promoting unilateral development proposals for the evolution of both nations from the perspective of investments and growth.

Likewise, Beijing and Caracas strengthened their bilateral and diplomatic ties to maintain brotherhood between both nations.

Maduro said, “With the deep knowledge I have, lived intensely, I think it was the best day that the China-Venezuela high-level commission has ever had.”

For her part, the Executive Vice President of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, emphasized that “Presidents Nicolás Maduro and Xi Jinping removed all the obstacles found to reach China-Venezuela cooperation with one heart and one mind.”

The Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission of China, Shen Yan Shié, stated that “the high-level joint commission has worked hard to promote binational exchange and cooperation despite US aggression and the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social welfare has been maintained.”

The signing of the 31 agreements between Venezuela and the People’s Republic of China

 Seven commissions were created, and 31 lines of work were drawn up that are aimed at a new splendid and virtuous era, with three agreements for the Economic Zones. The parties also signed 10 agreements on Tourism, Agricultural, Industrial, Technological, Pharmaceutical, and Commercial matters.

The Venezuelan Head of State characterized the cooperative relationship with the Asian giant in five stages. The first stage is fundamentally diplomatic and involves a people-to-people approach. The second stage of the China-Venezuela relationship is valued for its achievements. The third stage was marked by Xi’s visit to Caracas, where the elevation of the strategic stage of the China-Venezuela relationship was formalized. The fourth stage represents resistance and the strengthening of bilateral relations. The fifth stage is focused on development and economic growth, testing the foundations for the construction of a community of shared destiny and looking towards the future.

Sanctions have Failed to Slow Down China

The Mate 60 uses a specific type of nanochip at a size of seven nanometers, defying western expectations that they were somehow stuck at constructing them at fourteen nanometers. Analysts from the Center for Strategic & International Studies asserted that achieving this seven-nanometer level would be impossible without access to specialized restricted equipment from ASML, the leading manufacturer of semiconductor lithography equipment worldwide. The Asia Times reported that SMIC had asserted it had reached this milestone before the U.S. imposed export controls in October of last year. However, it is with Huawei’s phone that we are witnessing the first instance of a chip manufactured using SMIC’s seven-nanometer process being publicly deployed.

Technology analyst Dan Hutcheson explains further by stating, “And seven nanometres is significant because it says that they’ve broken past the 14 nanometre barrier that people had thought, that the regulators thought they could stop them at. And they’ve gone far beyond that and hit seven nanometres.” The chips are being created by the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC), the United States sanctioned SMIC on December 18, 2020. This action was taken due to alleged concerns over potential military applications of SMIC’s technology and ties to the Chinese military.

In 2019, former Republican President Donald Trump added Huawei to the entity list due to allegations of sanctions violations, concerns about spying capabilities, and accusations of intellectual property theft. The sanctions have been criticized by the Republican Party in how they have been implemented. Although they are blocked from doing business with the Chinese company and many others, the Biden administration has granted licenses to circumvent the sanctions in certain cases. It is noteworthy that Huawei, a major casualty of the US-China conflict, was among the beneficiaries of these granted licenses. From November 2020 to April 2021, suppliers to this Chinese tech giant were granted 113 licenses amounting to a total value of $61 billion.

An American Enemy Becomes a Symbol of Success

Gina Raimondo is the United States Secretary of Commerce in the Biden administration. She was nominated by President Joe Biden and confirmed by the Senate in March 2021. Since being nominated, she has made attacking China’s economy and technology sector her number one priority. Raimondo seems angry that we are no longer in the time where foreign companies are dominating China, and sees this as an issue the United States needs to address.

In September of 2021 she expressed her dissatisfaction with China not letting Western corporations dominate their economy, “They are not respecting intellectual property and stealing IP of American companies. They’re putting up all kinds of different barriers for American companies to do business in China.”

This difficulty to penetrate the Chinese market is being reflected by other institutions as well. The International Trade Association released a report titled “Market Challenges” to their page about China. The report states “The PRC remains a challenging place to do business” due to “Government-led emphasis on self-reliance is creating additional uncertainty for foreign businesses.” and that “Members remain committed to the PRC market, but many long standing business challenges remain.”

Raimondo blatantly ignores the vast amount of sanctions on Chinese companies and fails to mention how her own nation who allegedly supports a “free market” is hampering U.S. businesses from dealing in China. The Chinese public is well aware of Raimondo’s past comments towards them and used her as a symbol of the latest advancement by Huawei.

Last week, Raimondo journeyed to Beijing and Shanghai for discussions with government representatives, marking the first visit by a U.S. Commerce secretary to China in half a decade. Upon returning, she stated, “I did, myself, personally, talk to over a hundred CEOs of U.S. businesses before going to China, and to say that they were desperate for some kind of a dialogue is not an exaggeration,” Raimondo continued, “I’m not going to say we’re going to solve every problem, because we won’t. But to even find some practical solutions, I have to be the voice of business and put it to the Chinese government, and give them a chance to make some changes and show some action.”

During her visit to China, she also became the symbol of Huawei’s recent technological advancement. Following the phone’s launch, technologically altered  advertising campaigns showcasing Raimondo as a Huawei brand ambassador have inundated Chinese social media platforms. In the beginning of one clip, Raimondo asserts, “No commerce secretary has been tougher than I on China,” followed by a sequence of manipulated images portraying her alongside Huawei’s latest phone.

They have Sown the Wind, and they Shall Reap the Whirlwind

On the day of the phone’s launch, a Twitter/X clip captures a bustling Huawei store, while the adjacent Apple store appears deserted, save for disheartened-looking employees who might be second-guessing their choice of employer. This video, depicting the contrasting treatment of the leading tech companies from both competing nations in the Chinese market, could potentially mirror a future that the United States may find itself responsible for shaping.

The Chinese government is poised to extend its prohibition on iPhone usage to encompass government-affiliated institutions and state-run enterprises. China has determined that the iPhone poses a threat to national security. However, restricting the use of Apple’s smartphone within certain Chinese ministries is evidently just the initial phase, as this restriction is anticipated to encompass personnel at state-owned corporations and government-backed agencies.

The potential impact of such a ban on future iPhone sales in China could be substantial. For instance, state-owned entities like PetroChina have a workforce exceeding 500,000 individuals. When applied to all affected companies and agencies, Apple could potentially face the loss of millions of iPhone users in China this year. China stands as the biggest international market for the company’s goods, accounting for roughly a fifth of its total revenue last year. While Apple doesn’t publicly disclose specific iPhone sales figures by country, analysts from research firm TechInsights suggest that last quarter, there were more iPhones sold in China than in the United States. Moreover, the majority of Apple’s iPhones are manufactured in Chinese factories.

Following the news of the potential expanded ban, Apple (AAPL) notched its largest daily fall in over a month on Wednesday. The company lost about $200 billion in two days, and its stock is currently the worst performer in the Dow Jones Industrial Average after falling 2.9%. The United States should take this as a sign that it is time to alter their foreign policy. If sanctions are still the go-to tool of international diplomacy, it will only be a matter of time before only the United States and its “allies” buy Apple products, while the rest of the world advances with Huawei. It is becoming more clear everyday why China and their allies have chosen Win-Win Cooperation as their method instead of the predatory policies implemented by the United States; using sanctions is simply bad for business.

Like dominos, African states are one by one falling outside the shackles of neocolonialism. Chad, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and now Gabon are saying ‘non’ to France’s longtime domination of African financial, political, economic, and security affairs.

By adding two new African member-states to its roster, last week’s summit in Johannesburg heralding the expanded BRICS 11 showed once again that Eurasian integration is inextricably linked to the integration of Afro-Eurasia.
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Belarus is now proposing to hold a joint summit between BRICS 11, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).  President Aleksandr Lukashenko’s vision for the convergence of these multilateral organizations may, in due time, lead to the Mother of All Multipolarity Summits.

But Afro-Eurasia is a much more complicated proposition. Africa still lags far behind its Eurasian cousins on the road toward breaking the shackles of neocolonialism.

The continent today faces horrendous odds in its fight against the deeply entrenched financial and political institutions of colonization, especially when it comes to smashing French monetary hegemony in the form of the Franc CFA – or the Communauté Financière Africaine (African Financial Community).

Still, one domino is falling after another – Chad, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger and now Gabon. This process has already turned Burkina Faso’s President Captain Ibrahim Traoré, into a new hero of the multipolar world – as a dazed and confused collective west can’t even begin to comprehend the blowback represented by its 8 coups in West and Central Africa in less than 3 years.

Bye bye Bongo 

Military officers decided to take power in Gabon after hyper pro-France President Ali Bongo won a dodgy election that “lacked credibility.” Institutions were dissolved. Borders with Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, and the Republic of Congo were closed. All security deals with France were annulled. No one knows what will happen with the French military base.

All that was as popular as it comes: soldiers took to the streets of the capital Libreville in joyful singing, cheered on by onlookers.

Bongo and his father, who preceded him, have ruled Gabon since 1967. He was educated at a French private school and graduated from the Sorbonne. Gabon is a small nation of 2.4 million with a small army of 5,000 personnel that could fit into Donald Trump’s penthouse. Over 30 percent of the population lives on less than $1 a day, and in over 60 percent of regions have zero access to healthcare and drinking water.

The military qualified Bongo’s 14-year rule as leading to a “deterioration in social cohesion” that was plunging the country “into chaos.”

On cue, French mining company Eramet suspended its operations after the coup. That’s a near monopoly. Gabon is all about lavish mineral wealth – in gold, diamonds, manganese, uranium, niobium, iron ore, not to mention oil, natural gas, and hydropower. In OPEC-member Gabon, virtually the whole economy revolves around mining.

The case of Niger is even more complex. France exploits uranium and high-purity petrol as well as other types of mineral wealth. And the Americans are on site, operating three bases in Niger with up to 4,000 military personnel. The key strategic node in their ‘Empire of Bases’ is the drone facility in Agadez, known as Niger Air Base 201, the second-largest in Africa after Djibouti.

French and American interests clash, though, when it comes to the saga over the Trans-Sahara gas pipeline. After Washington broke the umbilical steel cord between Russia and Europe by bombing the Nord Streams, the EU, and especially Germany, badly needed an alternative.

Algerian gas supply can barely cover southern Europe. American gas is horribly expensive. The ideal solution for Europeans would be Nigerian gas crossing the Sahara and then the deep Mediterranean.

Nigeria, with 5,7 trillion cubic meters, has even more gas than Algeria and possibly Venezuela. By comparison, Norway has 2 trillion cubic meters. But Nigeria’s problem is how to pump its gas to distant customers – so Niger becomes an essential transit country.

When it comes to Niger’s role, energy is actually a much bigger game than the oft-touted uranium – which in fact is not that strategic either for France or the EU because Niger is only the 5th largest world supplier, way behind Kazakhstan and Canada.

Still, the ultimate French nightmare is losing the juicy uranium deals plus a Mali remix: Russia, post-Prighozin, arriving in Niger in full force with a simultaneous expulsion of the French military.

Adding Gabon only makes things dicier. Rising Russian influence could lead to boosting supply lines to rebels in Cameroon and Nigeria, and privileged access to the Central African Republic, where Russian presence is already strong.

It’s no wonder that Francophile Paul Biya, in power for 41 years in Cameroon, has opted for a purge of his Armed Forces after the coup in Gabon. Cameroon may be the next domino to fall.

ECOWAS meets AFRICOM 

The Americans, as it stands, are playing Sphynx. There’s no evidence so far that Niger’s military wants the Agadez base shut down. The Pentagon has invested a fortune in their bases to spy on a great deal of the Sahel and, most of all, Libya.

About the only thing Paris and Washington agree on is that, under the cover of ECOWAS (the Economic Community of West African States), the hardest possible sanctions should be slapped on one of the world’s poorest nations (where only 21% of the population has access to electricity) – and they should be much worse than those imposed on the Ivory Coast in 2010.

Then there’s the threat of war. Imagine the absurdity of ECOWAS invading a country that is already fighting two wars on terror on two separate fronts: Against Boko Haram in the southeast and against ISIS in the Tri-Border region.

ECOWAS, one of 8 African political and economic unions, is a proverbial mess. It packs 15 member nations – Francophone, Anglophone and one Lusophone – in Central and West Africa, and it is rife with internal division.

The French and the Americans first wanted ECOWAS to invade Niger as their “peacekeeping” puppet. But that didn’t work because of popular pressure against it. So, they switched to some form of diplomacy. Still, troops remain on stand-by, and a mysterious “D-Day” has been set for the invasion.

The role of the African Union (AU) is even murkier. Initially, they stood against the coup and suspended Niger’s membership. Then they turned around and condemned the possible western-backed invasion. Neighbors have closed their borders with Niger.

ECOWAS will implode without US, France, and NATO backing. Already it’s essentially a toothless chihuahua – especially after Russia and China have demonstrated via the BRICS summit their soft power across Africa.

Western policy in the Sahel maelstrom seems to consist of salvaging anything they can from a possible unmitigated debacle – even as the stoic people in Niger are impervious to whatever narrative the west is trying to concoct.

It’s important to keep in mind that Niger’s main party, the “National Movement for the Defense of the Homeland” represented by General Abdourahamane Tchiani, has been supported by the Pentagon – complete with military training – from the beginning.

The Pentagon is deeply implanted in Africa and connected to 53 nations. The main US concept since the early 2000s was always to militarize Africa and turn it into War on Terror fodder. As the Dick Cheney regime spun it in 2002: “Africa is a strategic priority in fighting terrorism.”

That’s the basis for the US military command AFRICOM and countless “cooperative partnerships” set up in bilateral agreements. For all practical purposes, AFRICOM has been occupying large swathes of Africa since 2007.

How sweet is my colonial franc

It is absolutely impossible for anyone across the Global South, Global Majority, or “Global Globe” (copyright Lukashenko) to understand Africa’s current turmoil without understanding the nuts and bolts of French neocolonialism.

The key, of course, is the CFA franc, the “colonial franc” introduced in 1945 in French Africa, which still survives even after the CFA – with a nifty terminological twist – began to stand for “African Financial Community”.

The whole world remembers that after the 2008 global financial crisis, Libya’s Leader Muammar Gaddafi called for the establishment of a pan-African currency pegged to gold.

At the time, Libya had about 150 tons of gold, kept at home, and not in London, Paris, or New York banks. With a little more gold, that pan-African currency would have its own independent financial center in Tripoli – and everything based on a sovereign gold reserve.

For scores of African nations, that was the definitive Plan B to bypass the western financial system.

The whole world also remembers what happened in 2011. The first airstrike on Libya came from a French Mirage fighter jet.  France’s bombing campaign started even before the end of emergency talks in Paris between western leaders.

In March 2011, France became the first country in the world to recognize the rebel National Transitional Council as the legitimate government of Libya. In 2015, the notoriously hacked emails of former US secretary of state Hillary Clinton revealed what France was up to in Libya: “The desire to achieve a greater share in Libyan oil production,” to increase French influence in North Africa, and to block Gaddafi’s plans to create a pan-African currency that would replace the CFA franc printed in France.

It is no wonder the collective west is terrified of Russia in Africa – and not just because of the changing of the guard in Chad, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, and now Gabon: Moscow has never sought to rob or enslave Africa.

Russia treats Africans as sovereign people, does not engage in Forever Wars, and does not drain Africa of resources while paying a pittance for them. Meanwhile, French intel and CIA “foreign policy” translate into corrupting African leaders to the core and snuffing out those that are incorruptible.

You have the right to no monetary policy 

The CFA racket makes the Mafia look like street punks. It means essentially that the monetary policy of several sovereign African nations is controlled by the French Treasury in Paris.

The Central Bank of each African nation was initially required to keep at least 65 percent of their annual foreign exchange reserves in an “operation account” held at the French Treasury, plus another 20 percent to cover financial “liabilities.”

Even after some mild “reforms” were enacted since September 2005, these nations were still required to transfer 50 percent of their foreign exchange to Paris, plus 20 percent V.A.T.

And it gets worse. The CFA Central Banks impose a cap on credit to each member country. The French Treasury invests these African foreign reserves in its own name on the Paris bourse and pulls in massive profits on Africa’s dime.

The hard fact is that more than 80 percent of foreign reserves of African nations have been in “operation accounts” controlled by the French Treasury since 1961. In a nutshell, none of these states has sovereignty over their monetary policy.

But the theft doesn’t stop there: the French Treasury uses African reserves as if they were French capital, as collateral in pledging assets to French payments to the EU and the ECB.

Across the “FranceAfrique” spectrum, France still, today, controls the currency, foreign reserves, the comprador elites, and trade business.

The examples are rife: French conglomerate Bolloré’s control of port and marine transport throughout West Africa; Bouygues/Vinci dominate construction and public works, water, and electricity distribution; Total has huge stakes in oil and gas. And then there’s France Telecom and big banking – Societe Generale, Credit Lyonnais, BNP-Paribas, AXA (insurance), and so forth.

France de facto controls the overwhelming majority of infrastructure in Francophone Africa. It is a virtual monopoly.

“FranceAfrique” is all about hardcore neocolonialism. Policies are issued by the President of the Republic of France and his “African cell.” They have nothing to do with parliament, or any democratic process, since the times of Charles De Gaulle.

The “African cell” is a sort of General Command. They use the French military apparatus to install “friendly” comprador leaders and get rid of those that threaten the system. There’s no diplomacy involved. Currently, the cell reports exclusively to Le Petit Roi, Emmanuel Macron.

Caravans of drugs, diamonds, and gold

Paris completely supervised the assassination of Burkina Faso’s anti-colonial leader Thomas Sankara, in 1987. Sankara had risen to power via a popular coup in 1983, only to be overthrown and assassinated four years later.

As for the real “war on terror” in the African Sahel, it has nothing to do with the infantile fictions sold in the West. There are no Arab “terrorists” in the Sahel, as I saw when backpacking across West Africa a few months before 9/11. They are locals who converted to Salafism online, intent on setting up an Islamic State to better control smuggling routes across the Sahel.

Those fabled ancient salt caravans plying the Sahel from Mali to southern Europe and West Asia are now caravans of drugs, diamonds, and gold. This is what funded Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), for instance, then supported by Wahhabi lunatics in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf.

After Libya was destroyed by NATO in early 2011, there was no more “protection,” so the western-backed Salafi-jihadis who fought against Gaddafi offered the Sahel smugglers the same protection as before – plus a lot of weapons.

Assorted Mali tribes continue the merry smuggling of anything they fancy. AQIM still extracts illegal taxation. ISIS in Libya is deep into human and narcotics trafficking. And Boko Haram wallows in the cocaine and heroin market.

There is a degree of African cooperation to fight these outfits. There was something called the G5 Sahel, focused on security and development. But after Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, and Chad went the military route, only Mauritania remains. The new West Africa Junta Belt, of course, wants to destroy terror groups, but most of all, they want to fight FranceAfrique, and the fact that their national interests are always decided in Paris.

France has for decades made sure there’s very little intra-Africa trade. Landlocked nations badly need neighbors for transit. They mostly produce raw materials for export. There are virtually no decent storage facilities, feeble energy supply, and terrible intra-African transportation infrastructure: that’s what Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects are bent on addressing in Africa.

In March 2018, 44 heads of state came up with the African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) – the largest in the world in terms of population (1.3 billion people) and geography. In January 2022, they established the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) – focused on payments for companies in Africa in local currencies.

So inevitably, they will be going for a common currency further on down the road. Guess what’s in their way: the Paris-imposed CFA.

A few cosmetic measures still guarantee direct control by the French Treasury on any possible new African currency set up, preference for French companies in bidding processes, monopolies, and the stationing of French troops. The coup in Niger represents a sort of “we’re not gonna take it anymore.”

All of the above illustrates what the indispensable economist Michael Hudson has been detailing in all his works: the power of the extractivist model. Hudson has shown how the bottom line is control of the world’s resources; that’s what defines a global power, and in the case of France, a global mid-ranking power.

France has shown how easy it is to control resources via control of monetary policy and setting up monopolies in these resource-rich nations to extract and export, using virtual slave labor with zero environmental or health regulations.

It’s also essential for exploitative neocolonialism to keep those resource-rich nations from using their own resources to grow their own economies. But now the African dominoes are finally saying, “The game is over.” Is true decolonization finally on the horizon? ​

Author

Pepe Escobar, born in Brazil is the roving correspondent for Asia Times and an analyst for The Real News Network. He’s been a foreign correspondent since 1985, based in London, Milan, Los Angeles, Paris, Singapore, and Bangkok. Since the late 1990s, he has specialized in covering the arc from the Middle East to Central Asia, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He has made frequent visits to Iran and is the author of Globalistan and also Red Zone Blues: A Snapshot of Baghdad During the Surge both published by Nimble Books in 2007.

Republished from The Cradle. 

Herbert Marcuse with Angela Davis, c. 1968

Some may be quick to believe that the New Left is entirely to blame on the Frankfurt School, with its identitarianism and “Anything But Class” analysis. There is a point to be made here, but the Frankfurt theoreticians had differing views on the New Left which emerged in the 1960s. Theodor Adorno believed that the progressive student movements at the time could lead to “left fascism,” going as far as to call the cops on students who protested at the Institute for Social Research, including one of his own students. Herbert Marcuse, however, was much more openly sympathetic to the social movements of the ‘60s and had influenced various noteworthy left-wing activists of that time period.

Many supporters of Marcuse willfully overlook his involvement in United States intelligence, focusing instead on his supposedly revolutionary advocacy. An article published in CounterPunch titled “What’s Behind the Recent Attacks on Herbert Marcuse?” described Marcuse as “a staunch advocate of movements for revolutionary change, a Marxist critic of capitalism, and firm supporter of African American liberation and feminism,” going on to praise him for being “[h]ated by both Soviet Communists and the Vatican, [and] adored by revolutionaries around the world.”

Following the logic of Marcuse and his fans leads to some particularly reactionary conclusions. For Marcuse to work for the precursor to the CIA—the US Office of Strategic Services—and trash the greatest threat to US imperialism at the time – the Soviet Union – is “revolutionary.” But for the USSR to ensure the full participation of women in society, to call on the international community to condemn the horrendous acts of racism against Black Americans, and to participate in the African decolonization struggles are all acts of “totalitarianism.” It is no surprise that capital and its faithful servants continue to push such propaganda.

Poster created by Soviet artist Viktor Borisovich Koretsky in 1963, five years before the US fully outlawed segregation. Translation: “Brotherhood and equality to all peoples!”

Marcuse and Petty Bourgeois Radicalism

After the Black Panther Party split into factions, one headed by Huey P. Newton and the other by Eldridge Cleaver, Henry Winston wrote “The Crisis of the Black Panther Party” as a criticism of the ultra-left ideological trends within the Party and their destructive effects. Winston pointed out that the capitalist media had “popularized the caricature of Marxism-Leninism, appearing in the writings of Mao, Trotsky, Marcuse … and others,” and that many New Left radicals had adopted characteristics of this exaggerated image of what a “revolutionary” should be.

Published in 1971, Winston’s description of the ultra-leftists in the Black Panther Party is still quite relevant to the western Left in 2023:

“These Black and white radicals, including Cleaver and Newton, dismissed what they called “orthodox” Marxism. Taking a different direction from King (who promoted working class solidarity, as well as a popular front with the Church and with progressive elements of the middle class), they disdained the working class and glorified the super-”revolutionary” tactics of confrontation by an anarchistic elite. In this way, ultra-”revolutionaries” helped create an atmosphere in which the racist monopolists could falsely portray violence as coming from the Left—and cover up the fact that they themselves are the source of it.” (bolded for emphasis)

Gus Hall wrote “The Crisis of Petty-Bourgeois Radicalism” in 1970, highlighting many of the same issues which Winston would describe the following.

This article explained how as class conflicts intensify and the masses become more revolutionary, petty-bourgeois radicalism redirects this energy into futile, short-term endeavors, leading to frustration and demoralization. While not explicitly naming Marcuse, Hall implies that many prominent activists who were influenced by Marcuse introduced his “radical” ideas into revolutionary groups.

Amid deteriorating conditions within American capitalism, notably the aggressive behavior of a more militarized police force, many people participated in the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. Regrettably, these impromptu demonstrations failed to yield tangible benefits for the majority, except for a small group of NGO leaders who acquired lavish homes.

Angela Davis: Communist In Name Only

Angela Davis, renowned for her feminist and anti-racist activism, studied under Marcuse before joining with the Communist Party USA. Both right-wing critics and left-wing Marcuse supporters emphasize this fact to assert Marcuse’s radical Marxism. However, both sides often overlook crucial nuances in Davis’s activist career.

In contrast to many petty-bourgeois radicals, Davis did not overtly reject Communism, but her anticommunism had a subtler, more insidious character. During the era of Glasnost and Perestroika in the Soviet Union, Davis, following Marcuse’s lead, championed the pro-Gorbachev faction within the CPUSA. However, her motivations may have leaned more toward personal gain than Marcuse’s specific grievances against Soviet “totalitarianism”. Gorbachev’s policies were simply more financially appealing than those of Stalin which Marcuse vehemently criticized, and the activism of Davis in following decades has mainly centered around her career in academia. From selling her books and speaking at liberal college campuses, Davis has amassed a net worth of approximately $800,000 as of 2023.

The Committees of Correspondence, formed during the 1991 CPUSA Convention, represented this faction but ultimately failed to steer the CPUSA away from Marxism-Leninism, eventually splitting from the party. They emerged in opposition to Gus Hall and Henry Winston’s “conservative” stance of supporting efforts to preserve the Soviet Union against Gorbachev’s counterrevolution. This group attracted various liberal and “democratic socialist” elements within the CPUSA, prioritizing surface-level identity politics over meaningful class analysis. Supporters of the Committees of Correspondence often point out their leadership’s greater diversity, as if meeting arbitrary diversity quotas automatically translated into tangible benefits for their “represented” demographics.

The founding convention of the Committees of Correspondence received greetings from the Democratic Socialists of America. (Source)

Angela Davis’s alignment with the left wing of capital is evident in her history, ranging from supporting market liberalization during the Soviet Union’s final days to urging leftists to vote for Joe Biden in 2020. She further demonstrates this alignment through her ongoing advocacy for ultra-left ideas, which may be less appealing to the working class but find favor with those who have trust funds and see the hammer and sickle as nothing but a trendy accessory. Examples of these ideas include “challenging” the established biological differences between sexes and advocating for prison abolition without giving genuine thought to the victims of violent crimes.

Conclusion

Despite the Right’s belief in a radical Marxist takeover of academia, the concept of “Cultural Marxism” fundamentally contradicts Marxism itself. Critical Theory seeks to shift the discourse from class analysis to discussions of authority and culture. Key figures in the Frankfurt School played roles in producing and spreading anticommunist propaganda. And Marcuse’s influence on the Western Left has perpetuated the misconception that communists are elitist and disconnected from the working class.

Today, we face a critical juncture in history. Western living standards are declining, multipolarity challenges US hegemony, and capitalists hope to confine communism to academic and niche social media circles. It is imperative for Communists to avoid repeating the New Left’s mistake of embracing a carefully crafted “revolutionary” ideal propagated by the ruling class and academia.

BRICS will be sorry!

Throughout the grand tapestry of geopolitical history, we observe vivid clashes among fearless leaders: Alexander versus Darius III, Stalin versus Hitler, and now, Joe Biden courageously grappling with the challenges of bikes, stairs, and coherent speech. History unfolds as a timeless cosmic spectacle, with each era showcasing heavyweight contenders vying for global supremacy.

But what lies ahead as the next great conflict? The class conflict within imperialism and monopoly capitalism has set the stage for a looming showdown between the West’s NATO and the BRICS coalition. The expanded bloc of 11 countries is expected to command a share of 37.3% in the world’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2024, larger than that of the G-7. The recent summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, welcomed six new BRICS members including Saudi Arabia and Argentina, with several others eagerly awaiting their chance to join. In contrast, NATO faces an uncertain future, with the much-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive falling flat and President Zelenskyy losing his luster as the darling of the West.

It’s almost poetic how the tables have turned for the West. Just when it seemed that NATO was struggling against Russia’s resilient defenses, their fortunes have taken a surprising twist. As American actress Ivana Chubbuck wisely noted, “Don’t let history repeat itself; you have the power to break the patterns.”

BRICS may soon regret not paying enough attention to prevent a second Austrian madman from pursuing the destruction of Russia and her allies, regardless of their BRICS membership. Austrian economist Gunther Fehlinger has emerged as a prominent threat to the BRICS alliance’s multipolar vision. Presently serving as the Chair of the European Committee for NATO Enlargement, Fehlinger has fervently targeted BRICS since the summit’s conclusion, openly issuing menacing ultimatums to nations engaging in diplomatic relations with Russia or China, warning of utter annihilation.

Wait! Let me start over

Upon closer examination, Fehlinger’s actions may not be as sensational as they initially seem. Apologies for drawing a parallel to an Avengers movie, but the reality is far less dramatic. Upon closer examination, Fehlinger’s behavior appears somewhat pitiable. Firstly, he has no verifiable ties to NATO. The European Committee for NATO Enlargement is a non-existent entity, and his career predominantly consists of inconspicuous roles in European non-governmental organizations. Despite this, his unwavering obsession with this Western powerhouse has propelled him into an inexplicable realm of popularity, rivaling even die-hard Taylor Swift fans. His background remains shrouded in mystery, and it’s worth noting that his Wikipedia page is less exciting than the recent GOP debate. Yet, his meteoric rise in influence raises eyebrows, though, of course, this is all purely coincidental.

Fehlinger has garnered support from NATO/NAFO enthusiasts (for the uninitiated, NAFO is best left unexplored), all due to his promotion of the imperialist fantasy: the Balkanization of every BRICS nation and its allies. Who needs global harmony when you can have a geopolitical puzzle of epic proportions?

The Ultimate Imperialist?

Balkanization involves dividing a larger region or nation into smaller, often conflicting, independent states or territories along ethnic, cultural, or political lines. This term originates from the historical breakup of the Balkan Peninsula in Southeastern Europe, resulting in numerous small and frequently antagonistic nations. It stemmed from the division of the Balkans into smaller states after the end of Ottoman rule. A region with multiple small states becomes more susceptible to infiltration, arms proliferation, and the creation of instability, which can benefit Western arms manufacturers, as opposed to stable, peaceful countries like China or Russia.

In Fehlinger’s view, politicians from BRICS nations like Ethiopia, Egypt, and Argentina nervously refresh Twitter to check if the Austrian proponent of Balkanization has posted a map of their country with hastily drawn borders. Ethiopia’s President Zewde, for instance, woke up today anxiously asking her constituents, “Has it happened yet? Did Fehlinger tweet about us?” There are even rumors circulating that India’s Prime Minister Modi is contemplating resignation following perceived threats from Fehlinger. In reality, it’s safe to assume that very few people outside of social media circles have even heard of this individual.

His threats may appear as if they’re coming from a savior or someone wielding significant power. For instance, regarding Lula and Brazil, in a now deleted tweet he stated, “I call to free the people of Brazil by dismantling the Socialist Genocidal BRICS Ally of Russia misled by @LulaOficial into 5 new better free states who can join NATO.” A similar message was posted about Nigeria: “I put Nigeria, on notice If you join #BRICS I will call for the dismantling of #Nigeria into #ExNigeria.” He has even advocated for, believe it or not, Switzerland’s destruction, tweeting, “I call to isolate and sanction Switzerland. Break all EU contracts with Russian proxy Switzerland. Make the Swiss feel economic hardship. Sanction Swiss banks fully. Delist the Swiss Franc in EU. Boycott Swiss products. Close the EU border to Switzerland. Make them pay. Hurt the Swiss.” At this point, it’s challenging to discern what’s genuine, and whether he’s doing this as a joke or trolling. If it’s the latter, one would have to commend him, but we can’t expect a NATO supporter to be that clever.

The only somewhat impressive aspect of this individual is his unwavering commitment to absurdity. Since the summit, he has been incessantly tweeting about various countries and his opposition to BRICS. Either he somehow acquired the same substances as Zelenskyy, or he has a team of BRICS detractors on his payroll, diligently updating his otherwise unremarkable account.

Rather than advocating for the fragmentation of states, Fehlinger would do well to realize how naïve he appears to the countries he discusses. Humanity would benefit if he took a phone break and social media cleanse, if only for a few days. Instead of the earlier quote, a statement from Karl Marx’s “The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” seems more fitting: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

The Moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.– The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

​

Death as the Nexus for the Possibility of Meaning in Human Life

​In This Life, the philosopher Martin Hägglund argues that:

​To attain a peaceful state of eternity you must be liberated from the risk of losing what you love. Were such liberation possible, however, nothing would matter to you. You literally would not care. There would be no urgency to do anything or maintain love for anyone, since nothing of value could be lost (2019, 44).

​Homer’s The Odyssey presents us with a similar message in book five. The situation Odysseus (the central character) is thrust into on Calypso’s Island reflects the meaninglessness of eternal life (Calypso is a beautiful female deity which has detained Odysseus for seven years). In the Island, Odysseus is guaranteed immortality and all the bodily pleasures he can imagine. However, when the character’s stay on the Island is introduced to the reader, Odysseus is weeping, missing his family, and longing to return with them.
​
In our contemporary logic of shallow hedonism (or non-Epicurean hedonism), where the satisfaction of desires and pleasures has raised itself into an ethical imperative, Odysseus’s actions reflect those of a madman. Within this contemporary logic, Odysseus’s actions are as unfathomable as Abraham’s killing of his son, Isaac, on God’s orders. Abraham’s action, as the Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard notes, is beyond the limits of comprehension, it is absurd and cannot be grasped as a “distinction among others embraced by understanding” (Kierkegaard 1985, 75).Within the logic of contemporary bourgeois society our dominant mode of experience is having – we are what we have and what we consume (Fromm 1976, 26-7). In our capitalist hyper-consumerist societies, the Cartesian cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am) is turned into Cōnsūmere ergo sum (I consume; therefore, I am). The world is turned into a big “theater of consumption,” where meaningless enjoyment – whose real and well-hidden telos is the realization of profit obtained in the consumed commodities –becomes life’s prime want (Mbembe 2004, 394). An Island of infinite pleasure would seem, within the confines of this mode of relationality and irrational rationality, the purest form of good – a heavenly Island.

But it isn’t enough for Odysseus. Why?

Well, not only are there things that matter more than pleasure (if you wish, think of a hierarchy of values, some of the higher ones which are inaccessible in Calypso’s Island), such as honor, loyalty, family, etc., but the possibility of anything mattering at all within the confines of immortality is impossible. Odysseus’s life on the Island might have been pleasureful, but – insofar as it was sustained within conditions of immortality – it would have also been meaningless.

Only when the ever-present reality of our finitude is the background of all our actions can life obtain meaning. Death, that which Martin Heidegger called “the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all,” is the nexus through which meaning can emerge in our life (1962, 307). It is the fragile character of our lives which functions as the conditions for the possibility of meaning.

Odysseus’s struggle to leave the Island is a struggle for life, for family and honor, but most importantly, for a return to the finitude which underlays our being-in-the-world and provides us with the conditions for living meaningful, truly human lives.

As Wolfgang Petersen’s 2004 masterpiece Troy has Achilles (played by Brad Pitt) say: “The gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment may be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

The Crisis of Meaning and Bourgeois Finitude 

While it is our finitude which grounds our ability to lead meaningful lives, an awareness of our finitude does not guarantee that we’ll find, or create, meaning in our lives. An awareness of our mortality, therefore, while necessary, is not in itself sufficient.
​
We know we are not immortal. In fact, in our hyper-consumerist societies, the primacy of shallow hedonism is often rooted in a deep sense of our mortality. For instance, just a few years ago the acronym that grasped the zeitgeist of the U.S. was ‘YOLO,’ which stood for You Only Live Once. Under this motto, pleasure-centered licentiousness was legitimized. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy myself to the fullest if I only live once?But this sense of mortality has not, and (under the conditions in which it exists) cannot, provide the fertile ground needed for us to create meaning in our lives. We live in societies riddled with depression, anxiety, stress, etc. As the young Karl Marx had already observed by 1844, capitalism systematically alienates us from our labor, its product, our fellow human beings, nature, and from our species-essence (gattungswesen, by which he meant our ability to creatively objectify ourselves onto nature through our labor).[1] These are profound crisis at the human level (crisis comes from one of the Greek words for separation, krísis), and pervade our lebenswelt (life-world) or forms of being-in-the-world under our current capitalist-imperialist mode of life.

In many ways, a lot of these social-psychological ills have been normalized. As Dr. Gabor Mate shows in The Myth of Normal, even things like chronic illness, which in many cases can be traced back to stress patterns formed out of the habits people are thrusted into by the dominant order, are anything but normal – in fact, they are “profoundly abnormal” in just about every way possible (Mate 2022, 7). Trauma (both its big T and small t iterations) is essentially rooted, as Dr. Mate notes, in a “fracturing of the self and of one’s relationship to the world” (Mate 2022, 23). This is, in essence, another form of the same crisis Marxism has explained, condemned, and combatted since the middle of the 19th century.

In the midst of our alienated, exploited, and oppressed mode of existence, the form of life we live in must, in order to successfully finish the cycle of capital accumulation for which we were exploited in the first place, bombard us with advertisements destined to make us Homo consumericus in those few hours of the days were – although feeling the lingering affects of the work day – we are not directly getting exploited. The consumption of advertisements – which studies have shown to take up, on average, four years of our lives – is a form of consumption which proliferates our desires to consume. It is the equivalent of drinking Coca-Cola, a drink shown to dehydrate us further, in order to quench our thirst.

Additionally, since we often can’t afford this (wages have stayed low, prices and job precarity have risen), we are forced to turn to borrowing to pay for what we consume. The American working class, indubitably, is amongst the most indebted in the history of humanity. This form of debt-slavery which characterizes the lives of the modern American proletariat and reproletariat (i.e., the section of the last century’s middle-classes which have fallen back to precarity and instability), is a form of what Marx calls in the third volume of Capital the “secondary exploitation… which runs parallel to the primary exploitation taking place in the production process itself” (Khrachvik 2024; Marx 1974, 609). This has ushered into world-history a new form of superexploitation within the metropole itself, where its working masses are not only exploited (direct, primary exploitation) but cripplingly indebted (secondary exploitation), and therefore, super, or doubly, exploited.

How can any meaning arise in lives plagued by alienated work and meaningless consumption? It is not enough to show that we are dealing, as a society, with a deep crisis of meaning. Viktor Frankl, for instance, already described in the middle of the last century through many widely read and celebrated books the universal character of meaninglessness in modern bourgeois society (Frankl 1985, 164). But is this recognition enough? Must we not inquire as to its origins? Must we not explain, and not just describe these crises?

A scientific explanation of these pervasive social-psychological ills would have, as Dr. Mate notes, “revolutionary implications” (Mate 2022, 8). The question would be, can the sciences in these fields (especially its mainstream trends), be able to overcome what the Marxist scientists Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin have called their “Cartesian reductionism” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, xii)? Can they move away from bourgeois philosophical assumptions which divide mind and body, individual and society, which observe things as dead and static entities, and which reify them from the larger totalities whose existence in they presuppose? In short, can these sciences adopt – either consciously or not – the materialist dialectic and its focus on universal motion, interconnection, contradiction, totality-analysis, etc.? These are the foundations through which we may reproduce the concrete concretely in thought, and hence, understand the world in all its complexities (Garrido 2022, 34-40).

A central obstacle in this task is not only the bourgeois character of the institutions they’re forced to operate through, but, as an ideological reflection of this, their adoption of the view that they are (and this is especially true in the ‘hard’ sciences) somehow above ideology and philosophy. What an ideologically loaded sentiment! We are back to Plato’s cave, back to prisoners who take the conditions of their particular enchainment to be the whole of reality itself. The truth is, while the sciences often fancy themselves to be ‘above’ philosophy and ideology, “in most cases,” as Friedrich Engels had noted, they are “slaves to precisely the worst vulgarized relics of the worst philosophies” (Engels 2012, 213). “Nothing evokes as much hostility” in scientists, Levins and Lewontin write, “as the suggestion that social forces influence or even dictate either the scientific method or the facts and theories of science” (Levins and Lewontin 1985, 4). A re-grounding of the mainstream sciences in a consistent dialectical materialist worldview, along with the uprooting of the profit motive that dictates its telos in our mode of life, would readily provide a richer, more comprehensive, and – necessarily – a more revolutionary understanding of our crisis of meaning and what overcoming it entails.[2]

Finding Meaning in the Struggle for a New World

​The point which I would like to get across here is the following: the crisis of meaning we are experiencing is systematically rooted in the capitalist mode of life. This is something which can, and has, been scientifically proven. It is not simply a question of ‘culture’ or ‘individual accountability’. While it manifests itself in our culture and individual lives, its existence there reflects the forces at play in the economic base of society. The crisis in our culture and in our individual lives is a product of the heightening of the contradictions at the foundation of a moribund capitalist-imperialist order.
​
This is where a lot of the commentary (especially critical in character) on the crisis of meaninglessness misses the mark. It merely describes the way the crisis looks by the time it gets to the social-psychological level, remaining ‘cultural’ in its critique through and through, never explaining the underpinning motion and contradictions producing that which they critique. The superiority of the Marxist outlook (i.e., dialectical materialism) is found in its ability to do precisely this – to explain and not just describe, to show the underlying foundations producing movement at the surface, and not simply taking that surface for the whole of reality.It is important to note, however, that our contemporary crisis of meaning doesn’t necessarily entail that meaningful lives are impossible. In the fringes of quotidian society there are still people who, like Odysseus, find meaning in their family life, in tending to familial duties. There are also, like Odysseus, people who may be rooted in a strong sense of honor, in a deep drive for greatness in their respective fields. This is certainly a reality for many athletes, whose striving within their sports provides a source of meaning in their lives.

However, no greater meaning can be derived than that which arises from fighting against a world which systematically produces these crises of meaning. The greatest and most memorable human beings in the history of our species have been those, like Socrates, Jesus, Simón Bolívar, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Marx and Engels, José Martí, V. I. Lenin, Mao, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, and many more, who have found their life’s purpose in the struggle to move humanity forward into a more rational and free world. There is, therefore, tremendous meaning to be found in the struggle against a world governed by exploitation, alienation, and oppression. A capitalist-imperialist order that has murdered tens of millions (four million in the Muslim world in the last two decades alone) and that is threatening humanity with nuclear Armageddon to sustain its hegemony, is worth making the object we commit our lives to destroying.

But a purposeful and meaningful life does not have as its only end destruction. We seek to destroy this order, not so that we can dance on the rumble, but so that the fetters it has set on humanity are destroyed. We seek to destroy not for destruction’s sake, but because what we destroy is itself a system, as the British Marxist William Morris called, of waste and destruction (Morris 1884). We destroy, in other words, so that we may construct a future which obliterates poverty, exploitation, plunder, war, oppression, alienation, meaninglessness, bigotry, etc. We destroy so that we may construct a world in which humanity can flourish, where people of all creeds may, as Che Guevara hoped, achieve their “full realization as a human creature” (Guevara 1969 162).

Footnotes[1] For more on the development of the concept of alienation through Marx’s work, see my review article: “Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-marxs-writings-on-alienation-by-marcello-musto-reviewed-by-carlos-l-garrido/

[2] I have shown elsewhere how this poverty of outlook, conjoined with the material incentives of capitalism, has led to the utter failure of the sciences (the mainstream ones, there’s always good folks doing work that goes against the grain) to understand social-psychological ills such as depression (See: “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis”). An elaboration of these critiques is beyond the goals of this brief paper, I recommend interested readers to read the article referenced above from more of my work in that area.

References ​Achille Mbembe, “Aesthetics of Superfluity,” Public Culture 16(3): 373–405.

Carlos L. Garrido, “Book Review: Karl Marx’s Writings on Alienation. By: Marcello Musto,” Monthly Review Online (June 11, 2022): https://mronline.org/2022/06/11/karl-marxs-writings-on-alienation-by-marcello-musto-reviewed-by-carlos-l-garrido/

Carlos L. Garrido, Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview: An Anthology of Classical Marxist Texts on Dialectical Materialism (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2022).

Carlos L. Garrido, “The Failed Serotonin Theory of Depression: A Marxist Analysis,” Science for the People (September 09, 2022): https://magazine.scienceforthepeople.org/online/the-failed-serotonin-theory-of-depression-a-marxist-analysis/

Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara, Selected Works of Ernesto Guevara (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969).

Erich Fromm, To Have or to Be? (New York: Harpers and Row Publishers, 1976).
​
Friedrich Engels, Dialectics of Nature (London: Wellred Publication, 2012).

Gabor Mate and Daniel Mate, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing In a Toxic Culture (London: Vermilion, 2022).

Karl Marx. Capital Vol. III (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1974).

Martin Hägglund, This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom (New York: Pantheon Books, 2019).

Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harpers Collins Publishers, 1962).

Noah Khrachvik, Reproletarianization: The Rise and Fall of the American Middle Class (Dubuque/Carbondale: Midwestern Marx Publishing Press, 2024 Forthcoming).

Richard Levins and Richard Lewontin, The Dialectical Biologist (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).

Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling (New York: Penguin Books, 1985).

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (New York: Washington Square Press, 1985).

Willaim Morris, “A Factory as It Might Be,” Justice (May 17, 1884), 2, Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/justice/10fact1.htm

Knowsley in Merseyside was the scene of several nights of disturbances in February 2023 after far-right activists agitated local working class people (Picture: Liverpool Echo)

“ A class cannot exist in society without in some degree manifesting a consciousness of itself as a group with common problems, interests and prospects” – Harry Braverman

The question of immigration is, to say the least, a testy one across the capitalist world.

In the United States, Republicans repeatedly accuse Joe Biden’s Democrats of allowing hundreds of thousands of people to cross its southern border unchecked. Last year, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis took credit for flying fifty Venezuelan immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard, the picturesque Massachusetts island resort which, under the fictional name of Amity Island, was the setting for the 1976 film Jaws.

The populace of Martha’s Vineyard are in the main wealthy, liberal and, crucially, Democrat voters. It could be strongly argued that this is why DeSantis chose this location, given that there is over 1,800 miles between Dallas Fort Worth and Martha’s Vineyard, so it’s hardly local. The people of Martha’s Vineyard, who would, in all likelihood, be the first to claim that all immigrants are welcome to the United States, went into meltdown, claiming that their small island did not have the infrastructure to cope with an influx of fifty people. Within two days, they were transferred onto a ferry and taken to Cape Cod.

In Britain, on an almost daily basis, news outlets report on boats of immigrants landing on the beaches of England filled to the brim with people, while the Tories’ self-appointed pantomime villain Lee Anderson MP decries the government’s lack of ‘action’ on stemming immigration, while at the same time claiming that those who take great personal risk to make the perilous and often illegal trip across the world’s busiest shipping lane aren’t in fact asylum seekers, as they claim, but economic migrants.

In February this year, Knowsley in Merseyside became the stage for public disorder in the vicinity of a hotel which, it was claimed, was housing asylum seekers. Far-right groups were claimed to have targeted Knowsley, which had been housing immigrants since 2016, by searching for the details of hotels where these immigrants were staying, then agitated members of the local community around an allegation that a local teenage girl had been harassed by a man they claimed was an immigrant living in Knowsley. The clashes led to over a dozen arrests, including that of a 13-year-old boy.

By way of context, the number of people attempting to enter Britain is lower this year than it was at this time last year. It’s also a fraction of the number of people attempting to land on the beaches of other European countries, including Italy, which this year has seen six times as many unauthorised arrivals as Britain.

The ruling class are deeply cynical in their approach to immigration. They know that, with a declining birth rate in the indigenous population, the working class are not having children at the necessary rate to replace themselves, so exploitable labour has to be imported from other nations to fill the breach. The ruling class target nations which, in the main, are much poorer than Britain: For example, when this country was a member of the European Union, those exploitable workers came from the old Warsaw Pact states which had just joined the EU – they were often highly skilled, often spoke English and were often very cheap to employ.

Coupled to this is the decades-long issue of the almost complete absence of investment in the British economy. Employers not only wanted to import cheap exploitable labour from Eastern Europe, they wanted to import cheap and fully qualified labour. For instance, a combination of Covid restrictions curtailing Heavy Goods Vehicle licence testing and Brexit prompting lorry drivers from Europe to return to their countries of origin (some 14,000 drivers left the UK in 2020 alone) created a shortage of HGV drivers that has still not been overcome. The HGV-driving profession is also beset with issues including long hours, poor pay and heavy regulation, the combination of which which deters people from either becoming lorry drivers or remaining in the industry.

While the current influx of immigrants are not in the main from Eastern Europe and have not been since Britain voted to leave the EU in 2016, immigrants from other parts of the world, including Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria are coming to Britain to feed a long-standing and insatiable demand for cheap, hyper-exploitable labour.

Th NHS relies heavily on fully-qualified, imported labour from overseas. 220,000 NHS staff members come from abroad – the highest number of which come from India, then the Philippines, followed by Nigeria. It’s of course entirely understandable why these workers would come here – the salaries that they receive here are markedly better than for the same roles in their home countries and the prevalence of the English language in these countries makes it much easier for workers to settle in Britain. Of course, every doctor or nurse who comes to work here is one less doctor or nurse in the country that they come here from.

The Romanian Government, aware of the issue of qualified people leaving the country to make a better living abroad, increased the wages for doctors and other qualified medical practitioners to incentivise them to stay in Romania. Yet, despite the numbers of medical workers leaving the country to work abroad declining, the number of doctors per 100,000 was 346, which, while way above the 230 doctors per 100,000 people in the UK, has left some rural areas of Romania with no doctor at all. One country which has benefited most from this constant stream of exported medical workers from Romania is Italy. The hourly rate for a doctor in Romania is approximately €26 per hour, while for the same role in Italy, the rate of pay is €65 per hour.

The ruling class are also deeply cynical in making sure that these imported workers are placed in some of poorest and most deprived areas of the country, where municipal and health services for the local population are either stretched to their limits or are totally non-existent. Governments of both colours know how deeply unpopular depositing immigrants in affluent areas is and people from those areas tend to have a greater influence and access to means of leverage against the government, like the media, similar to those inhabitants of Martha’s Vineyard, who had their uninvited guests moved on within two days.

2017 statistics showed that there were more than five times as many asylum seekers in the poorest third of the country as there was in the richest third, with over 50% of all asylum seekers are placed in this poorest third of the country. This creates a potential social powder keg, which far-right groups have always been adept at exploiting: Knowsley was specifically targeted, as have towns like Dover in Kent and both Barking and the Isle of Dogs in east London in the past for agitation of the local population and the inflaming of tensions.

Earlier this year in Dublin, Ireland, protestors took to the streets carrying placards displaying slogans such as ‘#IrelandForTheIrish’ and ‘#IrishLivesMatter’ and coining the slogan that ‘Ireland is Full’. The protestors claimed that the root of their protest was an influx of immigrants to Dublin and the fact that this influx has exacerbated the huge problems that the population has in obtaining a home – houses are incredibly expensive in Dublin to either buy or rent.

Of course, the root of the housing crisis in Dublin and elsewhere in Ireland and Britain is the Irish and British ruling class themselves: They have re-created a property asset bubble, fully restoring it after the death-blow it received in the financial crash in 2008, and have ordered the system so that it cannot affordably house its own population and has no intention of doing so, as to do so would collapse a sizeable chunk of the economy. We looked at the housing question in June, focussing on Britain, but the analysis we make is equally applicable to Ireland.

Working class people, who have no political leadership to educate them as to why this happens, fall into reaction, helped by far-right agitation, blaming immigrants which have been forced to flee their own nations for myriad of reasons. The same ruling class which deprive their own population of decent and affordable housing also deprive, through their imperialism, the people of countries like Iran, Albania, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria of the opportunities to live comfortable and prosperous lives in their own countries, through a combination of hyper-exploitation, resource extraction, war, sanctions and political volatility.

The ruling class are also deeply cynical in the manner in which they handle immigration in front of the electorate. They need to face in two directions at the same time – on the one hand, they need to appear tough on immigration, to be unequivocal that anyone here illegally will be told in no certain terms to collect their belongings and leave, while on the other hand allowing enough people to slip through the proverbial net to assuage the need of the capitalist class to access cheap and hyper-exploitable labour. Some, like the Blair Government of 1997-2010, really leant into the ‘economic benefits’ of immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe. Of course, by ‘economic benefits’, the Government really meant the downward pressure that this immigration had on wages.

Meanwhile, the left in Britain is not beyond criticism. Far from it. The mantra ‘Immigrants Welcome Here’ that is repeatedly chanted by so many on the left rings decidedly hollow to people living in provincial towns like Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire and Kirkby in Merseyside. They feel isolated and largely ignored by the ruling class and by both ruling class parties, the Conservatives and the Labour Party. The reason as to why the left cannot offer any real solutions to this crisis is to be found in the class composition of the modern left: They are mainly petty bourgeois, or middle class, and so the manner in which immigration affects them is markedly different from the manner in which it affects working class people. They see immigration manifest itself in the coffee shops that they frequent, or in the restaurants that they eat out in. Immigrants often pass through middle class lives through their transactions, not in the streets that they live in. The middle class have a much more transactional relationship with their neighbourhoods – if they find them in decline, they simply move to a new one, something that working class people are far less inclined and able to do.

The left not only don’t care about the plight of provincial towns like Dover in Kent, Boston in Lincolnshire or Kirkby in Merseyside, they resort to accusing the people of living there of being bigots and racists if they so much as dare to make a connection between the decline of their towns and the rise in immigration. Part of the reason for this is that the petty bourgeois left detest the working class – they think that they are feckless, lazy, ignorant and tend to hold views which are anathema to them. The petty bourgeois left are part of a wider left/labour movement, which includes the trade union bureaucracy, which believes that, at best, the working class are a charity case who should not become involved in bourgeois politics at any level and should be grateful for the small advances that they try to bestow on them on the rare occasions that they are handed the reigns of power.

So the situation can be summarised as follows: The ruling class both need immigration and need to be seen to manage it, they dump immigrants in poor working class communities the vast majority of the time and have created a housing crisis that they cannot solve, so have created fertile ground for far-right agitators to whip up resentment amongst the working class, while the left, both unable and unwilling to engage with the working class to educate them as to why the situation is as it is, choose instead to label them as bigots and racists when they raise objections to immigrants settling in their communities.

What is the answer? The truth is that there aren’t any easy solutions.

Increasing the birth rate has been a challenge for both capitalist and socialist governments for decades, and there are many theories on both why birth rates decline and how to restore them. However, there is a case to be made that birth rates increase when the population have a sense of ownership in their society – in Britain, a nation enjoying a post-war fervour and the introduction of the NHS and the welfare state, the birth rate rose from 670,000 in 1945 to almost 900,000 in 1947. In communist Albania, a nation which had become a workers’ state and had embarked on an unprecedented programme of modernisation, the fertility rate between 1950 and 1960 rose from 5.35 births per woman to 6.55. However, in both these cases the increase in births was not sustained, although Britain did see another peak in 1965.

It’s extremely difficult for governments to encourage people who are reluctant to have children to have them. Certainly in late-stage capitalism, bribery of prospective parents is just about the only option that our rulers have left and even that isn’t guaranteed to work. This explains to a degree why they resort to both not controlling and controlling immigration at the same time.

The only real answer to the immigration question is the introduction of socialism, not only in this country but in all nations, particularly those afflicted by the predations of western imperialism. Socialism would defeat poverty, end deprivation and imperialist wars and give the peoples of all nations a prosperous and dignified life. Crucially, it would give the peoples of all nations no reason to risk everything, including their own lives, to leave their homes, their countries and their families to try to make a better life for themselves.

At this critical moment in human history, a new paper on multilevel cultural evolution shows how looking to our cultural evolutionary origins might help us improve society at many levels.

While Russian President Vladimir Putin had every reason to be annoyed with Prigozhin, at least three considerations discredit the hypothesis of Putin’s involvement in his death

Author

​MK Bhadrakumar is a former diplomat. He was India’s ambassador to Uzbekistan and Turkey. The views are personal.

Former US President Donald Trump faces a barrage of charges at both state and federal levels while actively pursuing his 2024 presidential campaign.

The charges stem from accusations related to his tenure as President, including incitement of insurrection, obstruction of justice, abuse of power, campaign finance violations, and other offenses.

Media, Democrats, and Republicans from the establishment seek to link these charges to the 2020 Capitol riots and alleged attempts to undermine the 2020 US presidential election. Supporters of Trump’s populist “MAGA” movement argue that this is a case of political repression, aimed at sabotaging his ongoing campaign.

The actual charges are of limited concern to the average American worker. More important are the timing and intent behind them, and their implications for those who diverge from the political stance of the American ruling class.

The reality is that had Donald Trump not launched a 2024 presidential campaign, the likelihood of him facing most of these charges would be close to zero. Both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions’ leaderships are orchestrating a joint effort to discredit Trump and undermine his chances of securing a second nonconcurrent term.

Donald Trump is no friend to the American worker. Yet, despite his anti-Chinese and pro-finance policies that position him as a significant adversary to building a working-class movement, Donald Trump doesn’t exactly align with the American mainstream ruling class either. Populism empowers the masses, irrespective of their varying levels of class consciousness or political inclinations.

Regarding the “MAGA” movement, its political theory is fragmented, decentralized, and flexible, causing “MAGA” supporters to interpret it differently. Nonetheless, they unite behind Trump as a potent political figurehead who rejects the internal maneuvering within mainstream US political institutions. This is in stark contrast to Trump’s past as an integral part of this political elite, being closely associated with the Bush, Clinton, Epstein, and Pelosi families. But his legitimacy today among disenchanted American workers arises from his estrangement from these elites.

The significance of Donald Trump’s downfall for the American workers’ movement lies not in its impact on him, but in its implications for future political dissidents. Similar assaults have targeted anti-establishment movements since 2017, exemplified by the Department of Justice’s demand that the news outlet “RT” register as a “Foreign Agent” in the US, unlike state broadcasters like the BBC that align more with American foreign policy.

Chairman of the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, Omali Yeshitela, speaking in 2016

In April 2023, we witnessed an attack on the International People’s Democratic Uhuru Movement, an anti-imperialist Black nationalist organization critical of the US and Ukrainian governments regarding the Russian military’s ongoing Special Military Operation in Ukraine. Their refusal to goose-step along with US foreign policy led to the arrest of three American citizens exercising their First Amendment right to free speech. The State Department alleges that Russia’s foreign intelligence service exploited this right. This prompts us to question what constitutes weaponizing free speech and how the US government aims to curb disliked speech moving forward.

Once again, the stark reality remains: whether Donald Trump is innocent or guilty becomes secondary. While he could be innocent of numerous charges and other relevant charges might remain undisclosed, the crucial consideration is how this will impact your daily life.

When you raise your voice against US funding for the Ukraine war, the crisis of deindustrialization pushing regions into poverty, or even express differing views on matters like gender identity, you might find yourself facing a judge’s gavel—something that might not have occurred two decades ago. Normalizing indictments against dissenting politicians is a trend the American working class must oppose. We should unite around targeted movements to create a united front against political repression.

A movement for the American working class will reemerge only when conditions deteriorate to the point of operating underground or stabilize enough for public expression of dissent without direct state repression. Which direction are we headed? The fallout from Donald Trump’s indictment and the state’s reaction to his 2024 presidential campaign will serve as a litmus test for us all.

There are many bootlicking simps for the US empire. It’s not entirely their fault; the empire has the most sophisticated propaganda machine ever devised and most westerners have been marinating in its influence their entire lives. But it does happen, and it’s good to bring awareness to it.

Here then are 30 signs you might be an empire simp:

1. You get triggered whenever anyone highlights the well-documented western provocations that paved the way to the war in Ukraine.

2. You think Putin invaded Ukraine solely because he is evil and hates freedom and the US is pouring weapons into the nation because it loves Ukrainians and wants to protect their freedom and democracy.

3. You’re more interested in Trump’s mugshot than the western-backed atrocities in Yemen or starvation sanctions in Syria.

4. You can listen to Tony Blinken talk without wanting to throw trash at his head.

5. You understand that the last time there was a credible foreign military threat near the US border the US responded so aggressively that it almost ended the world, yet you demand that Russia and China accept US military threats on their borders.

6. You think the US is filling Australia with war machinery because it loves Australians and wants to protect them from China.

7. You believe the world’s most destructive military force is encircling its #1 geopolitical rival with war machinery as a defensive measure.

8. You live in the most propagandized population on earth and make jokes about North Korean propaganda.

9. You live in the most propagandized population on earth and spend your time fretting about Russian propaganda.

10. You think the title of most murderous and tyrannical regime on earth belongs to any government besides Washington.

11. You live under the most murderous and tyrannical power structure on earth and yet spend your time shrieking about tyranny in Asian countries.

12. You want to see Vladimir Putin tried for war crimes before George W Bush.

13. You believe western interventionism has ever had anything to do with spreading freedom and democracy or protecting humanitarian interests.

14. You find protests in places like Iran, Venezuela or Cuba much more interesting than protests in places like France, Haiti or Chile.

15. You unironically call NATO a “defensive alliance”.

16. You rend your garments about China preparing to seize control of Taiwan by military force without ever acknowledging that the US empire is preparing to do the exact same thing.

17. You’ve ever believed for even one second that the US government gives a fuck about Muslims in China.

18. You oppose guns except when they’re being used to kill foreigners overseas.

19. You claim you oppose the misdeeds of all governments equally but find yourself spending most of your time yelling at people who criticize US foreign policy online.

20. You’ve ever accused anyone who criticizes US foreign policy of secretly working for Russia or China.

21. You’ve ever accused someone who criticizes Israel of being an anti-semite.

22. You think being anti-war means putting a Ukraine flag in your Twitter bio.

23. You think “the troops” have ever fought for your freedom at any time since you’ve been alive.

24. You think the invasion of Iraq had anything to do with liberating the Iraqi people.

25. You think the destruction of Libya had anything to do with protecting Libyans.

26. You think the west arming Al Qaeda in Syria had anything to do with advancing the interests of Syrians.

27. You think US escalations against Russia and China have anything to do with “national security”.

28. You think the Department of Defense has anything to do with defense.

29. You think it’s okay for the US to keep waging wars, destroying nations, starving civilian populations with economic sanctions, instigating proxy wars, arming neo-Nazis and violent jihadists, staging coups and persecuting journalists, because if it doesn’t do those things the world might be taken over by evil tyrants.

30. You were bothered by any item on this list.

_____________

My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. The best way to make sure you see the stuff I publish is to subscribe to the mailing list on Substack, which will get you an email notification for everything I publish. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Johannesburg, South Africa hosted the highly anticipated BRICS summit where top officials from Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa met from August 22-24. They aimed to enhance collaboration and counter Western dominance. The summit revealed that six additional nations, Argentina, Ethiopia, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, will officially join the coalition in January 2024. This marks the first expansion of the coalition since South Africa joined in 2010.

Start of a New African and Middle Eastern Era

The implications are clear: the expanded BRICS coalition will now collectively produce 43% of global crude oil, while OPEC controls 38% of the market. BRICS’ potential as an alternative to Western financial supremacy relies on integrating these countries. Inclusion of Iran and Saudi Arabia seemed unlikely a year ago, but improved relations, facilitated by China, have eased historical rivalries toward regional diplomacy. Saudi Arabia even expressed willingness to address Yemen’s instability stemming from its civil conflict.

Authorities in Tehran and Riyadh have indicated that the principal factor prompting their change in approach was the worsening of their relationships with the United States. Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has expressed his intentions to pursue a rapprochement with Iran, which would help facilitate the overall goals of Saudi Arabia’s “Vision 2030” set of goals to be reached by that year.

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi swiftly embraced the invitation, emphasizing cooperation among invited nations to advance shared economic goals. Egypt’s current economic crisis, including a nearly 50% depreciation of the Egyptian pound against the dollar since March 2022, aligns with its BRICS entry. Scarce dollars have strained meeting debt obligations, prompting a $3 billion IMF loan bid.

Nations weigh IMF and World Bank dynamics carefully due to often unfavorable loan terms.

This significant element drives many countries toward BRICS for collaborative economics, seeking an alternative to dominance by others. Alongside Ethiopia’s inclusion, these two nations could emerge as Africa’s future economic leaders.

Not So Fast

The announcement of the latest additions to BRICS triggered enthusiasm among anti-imperialists and criticism from Western analysts. However, the most significant aspect of the summit might be the conspicuous absence of certain discussions altogether. During the summit, there was a notable lack of deliberations regarding the much-anticipated BRICS currency, which has the potential to deal a substantial blow to the dominance of the dollar and introduce an unprecedented shift in the global economy. This poses another question for BRICS nations to keep in mind, what happens if one of these states decides they do not want to de-dollarize anymore?

Head of the New Development Bank Dilma Rousseff has been of the most vocal voices supporting new alternatives to the dollar. Rousseff, who held the office of Brazil’s president from 2011-2016 and assumed the leadership of the NDB in March 2023, has called for the use of domestic currencies as a crucial step in diminishing reliance on the US dollar. In an interview with the Chinese media outlet CGTN on April 14, Rousseff outlined her vision for the NDB’s currency strategy, “It is necessary to find ways to avoid foreign exchange risk and other issues such as being dependent on a single currency, such as the US dollar.”

In April of this year, Brazilian President Lula da Silva expressed his endorsement for the establishment of a unified currency to facilitate trade among the BRICS countries. “I am in favor of us creating a currency in BRICS for trade between our countries, like the Europeans created the euro,” said Lula. While the announcement the world has been waiting for did not come, it is still seen as a priority by the member states.

 South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Nalendi Pandor appeared optimistic that the New Development Bank led by Rousseff is still pursuing dedollarization, saying that Rousseff “indicated some really exciting thinking about the future and the whole discourse around the use of local currencies. So this is a matter that is clearly on the agenda of the board of governors of the NDB.”

While the inclusion of new members excited anti-imperialists and drew Western analysts’ critique, a crucial summit element was the absence of discussions about the long-awaited BRICS currency. This currency could significantly challenge the dollar’s dominance, reshaping the global economy. This prompts a question: What if one of these states reverses its decision to de-dollarize?

Achieving equilibrium within BRICS encounters a major hurdle: the internal stability of member states. National policies remain fluid, contending with constant challenges from rival factions aiming to influence governance and direct a country’s path.

This challenge particularly casts a shadow over Argentina, a recent BRICS addition, potentially sparking concern within the emerging coalition.

President Fernandez backs BRICS, but his support is overshadowed by upcoming elections and his decision not to run. As Argentina readies for new leadership, its BRICS ties hang in the election’s balance. Top contenders include Patricia Bullrich, Javier Milei, and Sergio Massa. Massa alone commits to BRICS, while Milei leads polls against BRICS membership.

Far-right libertarian candidate Milei, whose campaign was backed by the media firm Grupo Clarín and the Atlas Network, advances a supposed solution to Argentina’s economic woes: to scrap the peso altogether and adopt the US dollar instead. “To end the treasury cover-up and inflation, given Argentine politicians’ thievery, the only way is to shut down the Central Bank and dollarize,” Milei tweeted. Analysts vary on Milei’s chances, yet he has a real shot at derailing Argentina’s newly-minted membership in BRIC.

Despite acclaim from anti-imperialists, as it pursues a multi-currency world economy that dethrones the US dollar as the global fiat currency, BRICS will likely face more challenges and operations similar to the one now unfolding in Argentina.

“The last farewell to Yevgeny Viktorovich took place behind closed doors. Those who want to say goodbye to him can visit the Porojóvskoye cemetery,” the Wagner Group stated.

His funeral took place in great secrecy and without the journalists knowing the exact place of burial. Initially, the press considered that the paramilitary would be buried in the Serafímovskoye cemetery, where famous Russian personalities are buried.

Previously, the Russian Presidency spokesperson Dmitri Peskov confirmed that President Vladimir Putin would not attend the funeral of Prigozhin, who led a failed armed rebellion against the Russian military leadership in June.

On Sunday, the Russian Investigation Committee (CIR) confirmed that Prigozhin’s body and those of the other nine people who died in the plane crash have been identified by comparative DNA analyses.

In the Embraer Legacy 600, which crashed for reasons still unknown about 300 kilometers northwest of Moscow, was also the founder of the Wagner Group Dmitri Utkin, about whose funeral no information has yet emerged.

So far the CIR investigations have not shed light on the causes of the accident, among which an explosion on board, a technical failure, or even a piloting error are being considered.

‘No mountains can stop the surging flow of a mighty river.’ With the addition of six new members that add geostrategic clout and geographic depth to the once sputtering BRICS, the multilateral institution is now gathering the momentum needed to reset international relations.

In the end, History was made. Surpassing even the greatest of expectations, the BRICS nations performed a giant step for multipolarity by expanding the group to BRICS 11.

Starting on January 1, 2024, the five original BRICS members will be joined by Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

No, they won’t turn into an unpronounceable BRIICSSEEUA. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov confirmed the song remains the same, with the familiar BRICS acronym to the Global South or Global Majority or “Global Globe” multilateral organization that will shape the contours of a new system of international relations.

Here is the Johannesburg II Declaration of the 15^th BRICS summit. BRICS 11 is just the start. There’s a long line eager to join; without referring to the dozens of nations (and counting) that have already “expressed their interest”, according to the South Africans, the official list, so far, includes Algeria, Bangladesh, Bahrain, Belarus, Bolivia, Venezuela, Vietnam, Guinea, Greece, Honduras, Indonesia, Cuba, Kuwait, Morocco, Mexico, Nigeria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkiye and Syria.

By next year, most of them will either become BRICS 11 partners or part of the second and third wave of fully-fledged members. The South Africans have stressed that BRICS “will not be limited to just one expansion phase.”

Russia-China leadership, in effect 

The road leading to BRICS 11, during the two days of discussions in Johannesburg, was hard and bumpy, as admitted by Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. The final result turned out to be a prodigy of trans-continental inclusion. West Asia was aggregated in full force. The Arab world has three full members, as much as Africa. And Brazil strategically lobbied to incorporate troubled Argentina.

The global GDP-purchasing power parity (PPP) of BRICS 11, as it stands, is now 36 percent (already larger than the G7), and the institution now encompasses 47 percent of the world’s population.

Even more than a geopolitical and geoeconomic breakthrough, BRICS 11 really breaks the bank on the energy front. By signing up Tehran, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, BRICS 11 instantly becomes an oil and gas powerhouse, controlling 39 percent of global oil exports, 45.9 percent of proven reserves and 47.6 percent of all oil produced globally, according to InfoTEK.

A direct BRICS 11-OPEC+ symbiosis is inevitable (under Russia-Saudi Arabia leadership), not to mention OPEC itself.

Translation: The collective west may soon lose its power to control global oil prices, and subsequently, the means to enforce its unilateral sanctions.

A Saudi Arabia directly aligned with Russia-China-India-Iran offers a stunning counterpoint to the US-engineered oil crisis in the early 1970s, when Riyadh started wallowing in petrodollars. That represents the next stage of the Russian-initiated and Chinese-finalized rapprochement between Riyadh and Tehran, recently sealed in Beijing.

And that’s exactly what the Russia-China strategic leadership always had in mind. This particular diplomatic masterstroke is rife with meaningful details: BRICS 11 enters the fray on the exact same day, January 1, 2024, when Russia assumes the annual presidency of BRICS.

Putin announced that the BRICS 11 summit next year will take place in Kazan, the capital city of Russia’s Tatarstan, which will be yet another blow to the west’s irrational, isolation-and-sanctions policies. Next January, expect further integration of the Global South/Global Majority/Global Globe, including even more radical decisions, conducted by the sanctioned-to-oblivion Russian economy – now, incidentally, the 5^th largest in the world by a PPP of over $5 trillion.

G7 in a coma

The G7, for all practical purposes, has now entered an Intensive Care Unit. The G20 may be next. The new “Global Globe” G20 may be the BRICS 11 – and later on the BRICS 20 or even BRICS 40. By then, the petrodollar will also be on life support in the ICU.

The BRICS 11 climax could not have been accomplished without a stellar performance by the Men of the Match: Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, supported by their respective teams. The Russia-China strategic partnership dominated in Johannesburg and set the major guidelines. We need to be bold and expand; we need to press for reform of the current institutional framework – from the UN Security Council to the IMF and the WTO; and we need to get rid of those institutions that are subjugated by the artificial “rules-based international order.”

No wonder Xi defined the moment, on the record, as “historic.” Putin went so far as to publicly call on all BRICS 11 to abandon the US dollar and expand trade settlements in national currencies – stressing that BRICS “oppose hegemonies of any kind” and “the exceptional status that some countries aspire to,” not to mention “a policy of continued neo-colonialism.”

Importantly, as much as the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is celebrating its 10^th anniversary next month, Putin drove home the necessity to:

“…establish a permanent BRICS transport commission, which would deal not only with the North-South project [referring to the INTSC transportation corridor, whose key BRICS members are Russia, Iran and India], but also on a broader scale with the development of logistics and transport corridors, interregional and global.”

Pay attention. That’s Russia-China in synch on connectivity corridors, and they are preparing to further link their continental transportation projects.

On the financial front, the Central Banks of the current BRICS have been instructed to seriously investigate and increase trading in local currencies.

Putin made a point of being very realistic on de-dollarization: “The issue of the single settlement currency is a complex issue, but we will move toward solving these problems one way or another.” That complemented Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva’s remarks on how the BRICS has started a working group to study the viability of a reference currency.

In parallel, the BRICS’ New Development Bank (NDB) has welcomed three new members: Bangladesh, Egypt, and UAE. Yet their road to prominence from now will be even steeper.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa publicly praised NDB President Dilma Rousseff’s report on the nine-year-old institution; but Dilma herself stressed again that the bank aims to reach only 30 percent of total loans in currencies bypassing the US dollar.

That’s hardly enough. Why? It’s up to Sergey Glazyev, the Minister of Macroeconomics at the Eurasia Economic Commission, working under the Russia-led EAEU, to answer the key question:

“It is necessary to change the statutory documents of this bank. When it was created, I tried to explain to our financial authorities that the capital of the bank should be spread between the national currencies of founding countries. But American agents madly believed in the US dollar. As a result, this bank today is afraid of sanctions and is semi-paralyzed.”

No mountains can stop a mighty river 

So yes, the challenges ahead are immense. But the drive to succeed is contagious, perhaps best epitomized by Xi’s remarkable speech at the closing ceremony of the BRICS Business Forum, read out by Chinese Minister of Commerce Wang Wentao.

It’s as if Xi had invoked a Mandarin version of the 1967 American pop classic “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” He quoted a Chinese proverb: “No mountains can stop the surging flow of a mighty river.” And he reminded his audience that the fight was both noble – and necessary:

“Whatever resistance there may be, BRICS, a positive and stable force for good, will continue to grow. We will forge stronger BRICS strategic partnership, expand the ‘BRICS Plus’ model, actively advance membership expansion, deepen solidarity and cooperation with other EMDCs [emerging market developing countries], promote global multipolarity and greater democracy in international relations, and help make the international order more just and equitable.”

Now add this profession of faith in humanity to the way the “Global Globe” perceives Russia. Even though the Russian economy’s purchasing power parity is by now ahead of the imperial European vassals that seek to crush it, the Global South’s perception of Moscow is as “one of our own.”  What happened in South Africa made this even more clear, and Russia’s ascendency to the BRICS presidency in four months will crystallize it.

It’s no wonder that the collective west, dazed and confused, now trembles as it feels the earth – 85 percent of it, at least – moving under its feet.

Abstract expressionism, exemplified by artworks like this Jackson Pollock painting, was promoted by the Congress for Cultural Freedom as evidence that artists enjoyed greater creative freedom in the United States than in the Soviet Union.

Read Cultural Pseudo-Marxism: Part 1

After the Institute for Social Research relocated to Germany, its significance persisted just as it had in the United States. Fortunately for the Frankfurt intellectuals, they chose not to settle in East Germany. This decision stemmed not only from the government’s intolerance towards their counterrevolutionary activities but also from their desire to avoid encountering Bertolt Brecht, a close friend of the late Walter Benjamin, who had moved to the German Democratic Republic to contribute to socialist endeavors. Brecht continued his pointed critiques of the Frankfurt School in his play “Turandot” (The Whitewashers’ Congress), a satirical take on academics who compromise their intellectual integrity to manipulate reality in favor of the ruling class—referred to as “Tuis” by Brecht.

Many assert that the Frankfurt Tuis were Marxists, driven by either ignorance or anti-communist sentiment. If this were true, why were they embraced in West Germany while shunned in the GDR?

This misconception may have arisen from the fallacy that liberal democracies are in fact free and inclusive societies where individuals of all ideological stripes can freely express their convictions. In reality, the case of West Germany reveals that these principles of liberal democracy were, at best, selectively-employed. One could for example openly advocate for pedophilia, but any praise for Stalin was met with opprobrium. The anti-communist puppet government in the U.S.-occupied western region of Germany outlawed the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) distanced itself from Marxism, and U.S. intelligence decided to use the Institute for their next big operation.

The “Compatible Left”: A CIA Creation

In June 1950, the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF) was established in West Berlin. Its members were mainly anti-Soviet leftists (Saunders, 2013, pp. 38-47), but there were conservative participants too, like Irving Kristol (Saunders, 2013, p. 148), later known as the “godfather of neoconservatism.” With CIA backing, the CCF employed varied methods to spread anticommunist propaganda: hosting conferences globally (primarily in Western Europe), publishing political and artistic journals, and awarding artists and musicians aligned with their goals. The CCF, guided by CIA agent Thomas Braden, cultivated what he called the “compatible” Left—a faction rejecting Marxist analysis and criticizing actually-existing socialist countries.

As evidenced in Theodor Adorno’s correspondence, he worked closely with Melvin Lasky, the founder and chief editor of the CIA-backed publication Der Monat, and an original member of the CCF steering committee. Lasky offered to work with the Institute in any way possible, telling Adorno that he would quickly publish any works or statements from the Institute. Adorno took him up on this offer, going on to publish in Der Monat as well as Encounter and Tempo Presente. Given the backdrop of their prior collaboration, Lasky and the CIA were fully aware that the Frankfurt scholars were eminently suited for this role. Setting aside Herbert Marcuse’s career in US intelligence, the very ideology of the Frankfurt School was effective in neutralizing leftist sentiments while preserving somewhat of a revolutionary veneer.

Starting in 1930, when Max Horkheimer assumed the directorship of the Institute, the Frankfurt School shifted away from class analysis and instead delved into discussions on authority and culture (Rose, 1979, p. 2). Neglecting the crucial inquiry into which class holds authority, the CCF employed liberalism to narrow the focus exclusively onto individual freedom. Socialist realism in the Soviet Union was presented as “totalitarian” because it mandated artists to propagate constructive conduct within the working class. Conversely, in the US, an artist possessed the liberty to fling paint onto a canvas and deem it “art.” This contrast disregarded the reality that an artist’s success within capitalism rests entirely on the unpredictability of the market.

The road of talent, in capitalist countries… | Make way for talent, in the land of socialism!

From 1944 to 1945, the Institute conducted a study titled “Anti-Semitism in American Labor,” concluding that the most anti-Semitic groups were Communist-led trade unions in the United States. While Nazis received backing from capitalists for their genocidal acts, the Frankfurt scholars deemed certain American workers’ anti-Semitic views as a more urgent concern. The study served as an egregious example how identity politics can be employed to target Communists, a strategy still utilized by the Compatible Left. Furthermore, the Frankfurt School’s criticism of the notion of “authority” effectively discredited Communist parties and organized labor movements. The absence of authority renders revolutionary forces chaotic and vulnerable to counterrevolutionary assaults, aligning with capitalists’ desires to undermine the Left and uphold the bourgeois dictatorship of capital.

Critical Theory perhaps has some merit in scrutinizing ideology as a tool of domination. But the Frankfurt School deliberately obfuscates class’s role in analysis and portrays Critical Theory as immune to ideology. The capitalist class crafted Compatible Leftism as an ideological weapon to safeguard their control over the working class, neutralizing the Communist threat and upholding capitalism. It’s our duty as Communists to uphold the revolutionary ideology of Marxism-Leninism and consign the regressive ideology of the Compatible Left to its proper place in the dustbin of history.

References

Saunders, F. (2013). The cultural cold war: The CIA and the world of arts and letters. The New Press.

Rose, G. (1979). The melancholy science: An introduction to the thought of Theodor W. Adorno. Columbia University Press.

Who is the Enemy?

Expressing doubts about “capitalism” in the present era lacks the potency it once held, and critics of this economic system are no longer widely viewed as a threat to governmental authority. Rather than resorting to further purges of alleged “leftists,” society now embraces actions like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez confidently donning a dress displaying the message “Tax the Rich,” and Bernie Sanders openly discussing the idea of socialized healthcare without encountering suppression. Even the stance against war has diminished in popularity among “leftist” circles, as the majority of political factions support providing assistance to Ukraine in its struggle against “imperialist” Russia.

One must understand that when such dialogues are permitted and even promoted, they cease to jeopardize the power of those in charge, especially given that contemporary figures like AOC and Sanders wield influence themselves. If advocating for progressive taxation and social welfare programs aligns with the objectives of those in authoritative positions, then what should advocates for the working class prioritize? Those who genuinely position themselves as challengers to state oppression should channel their efforts into precisely that—questioning the state and its intricate associations with institutions that genuinely exert control over our daily lives. The undeniable reality in today’s American context is that the financialization of the economy has ensnared the working class in various forms of rent and subsequent debts.

The Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has emerged as a powerful economic force, shaping the global economic landscape. However, in an era where digital connectivity allows widespread critiques of capitalism, the FIRE sector remains noticeably absent from substantial discussions within academic circles and leftist political groups. A notable exception to this prevailing oversight is found in the extensive collection of books, articles, and speeches by Michael Hudson. Despite his significant following in China and other Eastern nations, the fact that Hudson’s works have largely escaped the attention of Western academics and Marxists stands as a glaring neglect on their part. With a career forged on Wall Street and a portfolio of works tracing the origins of debt back to ancient Sumer, Hudson’s unparalleled prominence in the discourse on debt offers invaluable insights into grasping the contemporary landscape of political economy.

A thorough analysis of the intricacies within the FIRE sector reveals a complex tapestry woven with contradictions and inequalities that are intrinsic not only to our economic well-being but also our culture. This perspective argues that the apparently benign mechanisms of finance, insurance, and real estate are far from neutral in their societal impact. Instead, they function as the gears of an intricate machine that perpetuates exploitation, widens class divisions, and distorts the true essence of human progress. This article highlights structural shortcomings ingrained within the FIRE sector, intricately interwoven with the socio-economic landscape. This perspective challenges us to scrutinize the very foundations upon which this sector rests and emphasizes the need for it to be taken more seriously by those seeking to challenge the status quo.

The Age of Neo-Feudalism

This article will examine just the real estate sector, as its impact is pervasive across our society unless one lives completely off the grid. Hudson elucidates how the financialization of the American economy, a consequence of deindustrialization and the prioritization of the service sector after World War Two, triggered debt deflation with extensive adverse effects on the working class. This shift essentially granted the rentier class a risk-free advantage.

Coined by Irving Fisher in the aftermath of the stock market crash and the Great Depression, debt deflation, or debt-induced deflation, illustrates an economic phenomenon wherein an augmented debt burden results in a cycle of plummeting prices and dwindling economic activity. According to Hudson, this burden ultimately lands on the shoulders of the consumer, who is left with no recourse but to accumulate debt to secure basic housing. In his work titled “Destiny of Civilization: Finance Capitalism, Industrial Capitalism, or Socialism,” Hudson asserts, “In contrast to the literal European serfdom that bound individuals to their birthplaces, people today enjoy the liberty to relocate wherever they wish. Nevertheless, wherever they choose to reside, they find themselves obligated to incur debt and pay mortgage interest, or alternatively, pay rent to a landlord who channels it as interest for the credit indispensable to property acquisition.”

The United States is grappling with an escalating debt situation that seems to have spiraled beyond containment, and the government offers little reassurance for a solution. According to a recent report, the average debt burden per American has surged to an alarming $90,000, a crisis that can no longer be overlooked. This pertains to various types of debt—ranging from medical expenses and student loans to credit card dues. Astonishingly, the study reveals that an astounding 10% of individuals’ monthly earnings are channeled into servicing their debt obligations. As gas prices and grocery costs remain inflated without any visible relief, the specter of debt casts a long shadow, amplifying the struggles of the vulnerable populace, all while creditors benefit at their expense.

The United States finds itself entangled in an escalating debt crisis that appears to have spun beyond manageable confines, and the government’s offerings provide little solace in terms of a solution. A recent report reveals a disconcerting figure: the average debt burden per American has surged to a staggering $90,000, a situation that demands urgent attention. This encompasses a variety of debt types, spanning from medical bills and student loans to outstanding credit card balances. Perhaps even more startling, the study underscores that an astonishing 10% of individuals’ monthly earnings are absorbed by their debt obligations. With fuel prices and grocery expenses sustaining their elevated levels without discernible relief, the ominous specter of debt stretches far, intensifying the challenges faced by the vulnerable segments of society, all the while creditors reap benefits at their expense.

Entrepreneurship often centers around the aspiration of owning one’s own business, a fundamental component of the American Dream that, although fleeting, materialized for certain individuals within the nation. However, the current landscape has shifted, giving rise to a populace burdened with debt, striving to cover their rent payments and hoping some semblance of disposable income remains after meeting their own expenses. Even those who seem to possess a degree of “ownership” find themselves entrapped by the ever-expanding realm of real estate rental. This phenomenon is evident in the prevalent “Franchise” restaurant model in the United States.

At first glance, the franchisee seems to exert control and, by adhering to the company’s regulations, stands to reap rewards by investing their own capital. Yet, in reality, they transform into yet another tenant, with Ronald McDonald becoming their de facto landlord. McDonald’s, a prime example, has transformed into a real estate company within the business domain. The corporation leases more than 38,000 of its restaurants to franchisees, amassing a substantial real estate portfolio valued at approximately $30 billion. The company actively identifies and procures sizable plots of land, subsequently entering into lease agreements with franchisees, contingent upon their commitment to upholding McDonald’s rigorous standards. Essentially, McDonald’s assumes minimal operational risk, as the franchisee provides the initial capital investment for launching the establishment. The lease terms invariably include provisions enabling McDonald’s to dissolve the arrangement and locate a replacement if rental payments falter.

In “The Poverty of Philosophy,” Marx writes, “Rent is property in land in its bourgeois state; that is, feudal property which has become subject to the conditions of bourgeois production.” Contrary to Hudson’s suggestion of either state taxation or integration into overall expenses, rent has evolved into an additional channel through which the privileged class enhances their extraction from the toiling masses. The shift of the American economy towards financial pursuits has marginalized genuine production, relegating it to a secondary role. Speculation and rent, despite generating no tangible value, are erroneously upheld as productive contributors. Presently, the GDP no longer accurately represents the productive output of the United States; instead, it closely correlates with the magnitude of rent drawn from the working class.

A New Form of Mercenary Practice

“The business plan behind its rhetoric of free markets is to impose neo-feudal debt peonage and dependency by creating markets “free” from public regulation, sponsoring rentier monopolies that impose tollbooth charges for access to most basic needs, from housing to education and health care.”

The above statement underscores something that’s familiar to us living in America—everything comes with a cost, and many are sliding into debt just to navigate their daily lives. The last remnant of our agency is the ability to sell our labor, yet even that isn’t assured in the rent-dominant US economy. It’s not just housing and healthcare that Americans are accumulating debt for; the rentier class is increasingly liberated from any obligation to their employees. What’s even more concerning is the emergence of a scenario where debt is required to attain employment.

Take Uber’s Vehicle Solution Program, for instance, offering prospective drivers the chance to lease a car from Uber for their driving pursuits. This arrangement traps the driver in a 3-5 year lease with Uber, ultimately enabling the company to earn more from each ride provided by the newly indebted worker. The pandemic was a catalyst, propelling many into the gig economy, where individuals serve as “freelance” workers for driving and food delivery platforms. While independent craftsmen and writers have traditionally comprised freelancers, a new category called “labor providers” has emerged due to the pandemic.

Whether it’s delivering on DoorDash or hiring someone for a task on TaskRabbit, under monopoly capitalism and imperialism, we can expect a growing trend of industries opting for independent contractors over stable hours and income.

(Special Thanks to Author Logo Daedalus and Chris Morlock for being one of the few voices speaking on this topic, along with Michael Hudson)

Imperialism is the root cause of instability and war in the world. Koreans are right to defend themselves.

This article is reproduced from the Korean Central News Agency with thanks.

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At the first session of the preparatory committee for the 11th Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) review conference, the USA and its vassal forces unreasonably criticised the DPRK’s nuclear deterrent for self-defence as a “threat” to international peace and security and to the nuclear non-proliferation system. In this regard, the DPRK permanent mission to the United Nations office and international organisations in Vienna makes public the following press release:

As for any threat to international peace and security and the nuclear non-proliferation system, at present this evidently comes from the USA.

The USA has openly declared a policy of modernising its nuclear weapons industry and rapidly upgrading its three nuclear strategic assets, and has spent astronomical amounts on this military project every year. It has deliberately refused to implement the New Start (Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty), which may be regarded as the last fortress of the Nuclear Disarmament Treaty.

Unilaterally prioritising its own narrow security interests and those of its allies, the USA is also pushing ahead with nuclear proliferation to Australia under the signboard of the Aukus alliance. Some days ago, it started the operation of the US-south Korea “Nuclear Consultative Group”, simulating the use of nukes against the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) and deploying a nuclear submarine loaded with strategic nuclear weapons in the Korean peninsula for the first time in 42 years – thus escalating the military tension in the region to the eve of the outbreak of a nuclear war.

The DPRK’s bolstering of its nuclear deterrent for self-defence is a just exercise of its sovereignty to prevent the outbreak of a nuclear war, defend its national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and control and manage the situation on the Korean peninsula in a stable way, given the unstable security environment in the region that has been caused by regular nuclear threats from the USA and its allied forces.

Despite this hard reality, the USA lets even its satellite countries go so far as to seriously distort the truth, persistently pulling up the DPRK over its measures for bolstered self-defensive military capabilities. This political provocation is aimed at hiding its true colours as a criminal state which used nukes, and at evading the international community’s criticism over its non-compliance with nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation treaties.

The DPRK is a responsible nuclear weapons state which committed itself to the ban on nuclear use and threat to non-nuclear states and to nuclear non-proliferation. Its nuclear force will never be a threat to those countries respecting its sovereignty and security interests.

Its stand on the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty is clear.

Signatories to the NPT should not take issue with the DPRK over its legitimate exercise of sovereignty, since it legally withdrew from the NPT 20 years ago, as is the right of all signatories as specified in the treaty. Instead, they should concentrate their efforts on finding solutions to the major challenges facing the treaty.

The USA, the world’s biggest nuclear weapons state and the world’s first nuclear weapons user, should stop at once its criminal and systematic violations and wrecking activities against the international disarmament system – while threatening and blackmailing sovereign states by deploying its nuclear strategic assets all over the world.

It should immediately end its moves for “sharing nuclear” and “beefing up extended deterrence” with non-nuclear states, which are undermining the basis of the international nuclear non-proliferation system and triggering a nuclear arms race in the region and the world.

The international community must denounce the dangerous US threats of nuclear use and its illegal acts like the proliferation of nuclear weapons, which are the root cause of instability and confrontation, and immediately take practical measures for ensuring global peace and security.

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Read this article in Spanish.

Wishful thinking is still the rule among Biden’s foreign policy team, as the slaughter in Ukraine continues

It’s been weeks since we looked into the adventures of the Biden administration’s foreign policy cluster, led by Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Victoria Nuland. How has the trio of war hawks spent the summer?
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Sullivan, the national security adviser, recently brought an American delegation to the second international peace summit earlier this month at Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. The summit was led by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, known as MBS, who in June announced a merger between his state-backed golf tour and the PGA. Four years earlier MBS was accused of ordering the assassination and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, for perceived disloyalty to the state.As unlikely as it sounds, there was such a peace summit and its stars did include MBS, Sullivan, and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine. What was missing was a representative of Russia, which was not invited to the summit. It included just a handful of heads of state from the fewer than fifty nations that sent delegates. The conference lasted two days, and attracted what could only be described as little international attention.Reuters reported that Zelensky’s goal was to get international support for “the principles” that that he will consider as a basis for the settlement of the war, including “the withdrawal of all Russian troops and the return of all Ukrainian territory.” Russia’s formal response to the non-event came not from President Vladimir Putin but from Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergei Ryabkov. He called the summit “a reflection of the West’s attempt to continue futile, doomed efforts” to mobilize the Global South behind Zelensky.

India and China both sent delegations to the session, perhaps drawn to Saudi Arabia for its immense oil reserves. One Indian academic observer dismissed the event as achieving little more than “good advertising for MBS’s convening power within the Global South; the kingdom’s positioning in the same; and perhaps more narrowly, aiding American efforts to build consensus by making sure China attends the meeting with . . . Jake Sullivan in the same room.”

Meanwhile, far away on the battlefield in Ukraine, Russia continued to thwart Zelensky’s ongoing counteroffensive. I asked an American intelligence official why it was Sullivan who emerged from the Biden administration’s foreign policy circle to preside over the inconsequential conference in Saudi Arabia.

“Jeddah was Sullivan’s baby,” the official said. “He planned it to be Biden’s equivalent of [President Woodrow] Wilson’s Versailles. The grand alliance of the free world meeting in a victory celebration after the humiliating defeat of the hated foe to determine the shape of nations for the next generation. Fame and Glory. Promotion and re-election. The jewel in the crown was to be Zelensky’s achievement of Putin’s unconditional surrender after the lightning spring offensive. They were even planning a Nuremberg type trial at the world court, with Jake as our representative. Just one more fuck-up, but who is counting? Forty nations showed up, all but six looking for free food after the Odessa shutdown”—a reference to Putin’s curtailing of Ukrainian wheat shipments in response to Zelensky’s renewed attacks on the bridge linking Crimea to the Russian mainland.

Enough about Sullivan. Let us now turn to Victoria Nuland, an architect of the 2014 overthrow of the pro-Russian government in Ukraine, one of the American moves that led us to where we are, though it was Putin who initiated the horrid current war. The ultra-hawkish Nuland was promoted early this summer by Biden, over the heated objections of many in the State Department, to be the acting deputy secretary of state. She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate.

It was Nuland who was sent last week to see what could be salvaged after a coup led to the overthrow of a pro-Western government in Niger, one of a group of former French colonies in West Africa that have remained in the French sphere of influence. President Mohamed Bazoum, who was democratically elected, was tossed out of office by a junta led by the head of his presidential guard, General Abdourahmane Tchiani. The general suspended the constitution and jailed potential political opponents. Five other military officers were named to his cabinet. All of this generated enormous public support on the streets in Niamey, Niger’s capital—enough support to discourage outside Western intervention.

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There were grim reports in the Western press that initially viewed the upheaval in East-West terms: some of the supporters of the coup were carrying Russian flags as they marched in the streets. The New York Times saw the coup as a blow to the main US ally in the region, Nigerian President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, who controls vast oil and gas reserves. Tinubu threatened the new government in Niger with military action unless they returned power to Bazoum. He set a deadline that passed without any outside intervention. The revolution in Niger was not seen by those living in the region in east-west terms but as a long needed rejection of long-standing French economic and political control. It is a scenario that may be repeated again and again throughout the French-dominated Sahel nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Author

Seymour Hersh. 

Republished from Seymour Hersh’s Substack.

As the Ukrainian counteroffensive against Russia dwindles to a screeching halt, failing to achieve its objectives, many questions are being raised about the former Soviet republic’s future.
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Will the Kiev regime concede defeat? Will Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky fight Russians until the last Ukrainian? How much of the Ukrainian land will actually remain Ukraine?The question of disputed territory is a sensitive topic. NATO military alliance officials are even floating the idea of giving up significant Ukrainian territory to end the war and usher in peace, an idea that may have been unimaginable prior to the Ukrainian counteroffensive.Although one can speculate back and forth about what land will become Russian and what land will stay Ukrainian, something far more sinister is happening beyond the public eye of what will happen to the territory that remains Ukraine.

While media pundits are busy tracking the territorial losses and gains Ukraine is making, the Kiev regime is meeting with American financial firms to sell off Ukrainian land and infrastructure.

Even before Russia’s “military operation” completed its first year, Zelensky had been meeting with various American investment firms in order to “rebuild Ukraine.”

To the uninitiated, “rebuild Ukraine” sounds like a completely logical and legitimate initiative in the wake of a devastating war. However, Zelensky hasn’t been meeting with any average firm.

He has been actively preparing the ground for New York-based investment firm BlackRock to take over significant swaths of Ukrainian finances, primarily playing a leading role in advising Kiev on how to handle its post-war investments and funding.

BlackRock is a notorious “investment management” firm that has worked closely with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to hyper-privatize public assets, land, and infrastructure.

The world’s largest “asset manager”, it manages trillions of dollars in assets across the West and even acts as an advisor to European banks. Naturally, it is also involved in lobbying Western officials, essentially dictating and creating policy for its own benefit.

However, with NATO encroaching east, it is expected that countries would surrender their public institutions even further to Western capitalists as they embrace neoliberal policies.

It is in recorded history that during Ukraine’s 2014 Maiden Coup, the United States was closely involved.

The then US Assistant Secretary of State Victory Neuland was directly on the ground supporting the fascist overthrow of the neutral Ukraine government for a pro-Western one.

Later, a leaked phone call revealed that Neuland was picking and choosing which Ukrainian officials were best to enter the new coup-installed regime.

It’s no surprise that Ukraine was headed towards a long road of privatization – supporters of the new regime even burned down a trade union building with people inside.

To this day, the victims have not seen justice as the perpetrators are free.

Now, under the guise of war, the Kiev regime has taken significant steps to further bear the rotten fruits of the Maiden Coup. Zelensky’s wartime powers have allowed him to ban all opposition parties.

In August of 2022, Kiev ratified “Law 5371,” which strips all labor protections – impacting around 70 percent of Ukraine’s workforce.

Many neoliberals would argue that it is necessary to maintain control of Ukraine’s exports during the war, but the law was first introduced in 2021 and could not be passed then due to trade union opposition.

Adding to it is the fact that Zelensky and his inner circle were notorious for their corrupt financial affairs.

Prior to the war, it was revealed by the Pandora Papers that Zelensky and his allies had swaths of money hidden in offshore bank accounts. This money could not be traced to them, and ignoring the fact that Zelensky’s allies were involved, local institutions would find it difficult to trace how they obtained it.

With trade union power dissolved and opposition parties out of the way, the Kiev regime moved to  auction off their state enterprises.

It is important to note that there were multiple attempts to auction off some of the same assets prior to the 2022 military operation, to no avail.

The investment wasn’t as attractive to American capitalists because there were still many hurdles – primarily legal – that would make Ukrainian state assets an attractive investment.

With labor unions and political opposition away, foreign penetration will now not only become easy, but even competitive, and therefore profitable – not only for the American capitalists but for those who would eventually benefit from lobbying money – Zelensky and Co.

The foreign aid given to Kiev to fend off Russians also does not come without a price. While the US sees fighting Russians as money well spent, Washington still expects an extra return on investment.

Highlighted in the National Recovery Plan are various figures that address auctioning off state investments, paying back IMF loans, and opening the country to foreign penetration.

Firms like BlackRock will play a key role in ensuring every last available asset is sold and privatized.

Zelensky has taken Ukraine to the natural conclusion of the US-backed Maiden Coup. A once neutral country now turned into a vassal state of the US, Kiev has not only sacrificed thousands of Ukrainian men on the altar of US imperialism, it has quite literally sold the entire country to US capitalists.

With multiple meetings between BlackRock, JP Morgan, and other investment firms to “rebuild Ukraine,” the fate of the country – no matter what it looks like after peace is reached – will be up to the ruling class of the United States.
Zelensky, instead of searching for peace, is actively acting as a salesman while thousands of his countrymen are being slaughtered on the frontlines.

He was even quoted as saying that this situation is “the greatest opportunity in Europe since World War Two,” in reference to the incoming post-war investment.

Very little stands in the way for Western capitalists to swoop in and hyper-privatize what is left of Ukraine post-invasion with BlackRock at the forefront advising Ukraine’s foreign investments and labor opposition completely eviscerated.

Clearly, this was the pathway for Ukraine when the 2014 coup regime announced its various intentions to fight off the labor movement.

For the corrupt lot in Ukraine and the financial ruling class in the US, the Russian military operation provided a unique opportunity to become richer and filthier.

All it cost was the mere price of hundreds of thousands of lives lost and a country that was once sovereign to become a playground for the US financial class.

As peace brokers devise a plan on what the new borders of Ukraine will likely look like, one thing is for certain – the new face of Ukraine within its borders will be completely made by and for Western elites.