When Life Becomes a Commodity

Modern capitalism celebrates efficiency and productivity at the expense of quality human experiences. Essential services such as healthcare, education, and social interaction are increasingly reduced to market transactions. This commodification strips away inherent dignity and leads to a social fabric that values output over the well-being of individuals. For children—whose formative years deserve nurturing, creativity, and care—the impacts of such a system can be particularly devastating. Rather than planting seeds for flourishing future lives, the relentless pursuit of profit risks turning these seeds into mere investment units, sidelining the true potential and value of human life.

The Unifying Power of Games: A Metaphor for Humanity

Consider the world of games—where players and spectators, despite their different roles, unite in pursuit of a shared goal. Whether on the field, in the arena, or behind the screen, games symbolize collaboration, passion, and a common purpose. In sports or board games alike, the rules may be strict, but the ultimate objective is to create a collective experience that transcends individual competition. This idea offers a striking metaphor for reimagining our economic and social systems.

Imagine an economy where every stakeholder—be it a worker, business leader, policymaker, or community member—plays a role in a grand game. In this game, no one is judged solely by individual scores or material gains. Instead, the real victory lies in achieving well-being for all; in fostering environments where children grow up in supportive communities and every citizen is valued for their unique contributions. Just as games bring together disparate roles to celebrate collective victories, our society could be retooled to measure success not only through financial indicators but through the strength of community bonds and the flourishing of human potential.

Human Rights Over Market Rights

To challenge the commodification of life, we must reset our societal compass. Rather than allowing financial metrics to define success, we should prioritize well-being and social solidarity. A reformed system would place human rights at its heart, emphasizing that every individual—especially our children, the bearers of future hope—has intrinsic worth that goes beyond economic output. Measuring success by quality of life, mental health, educational access, and community resilience would honor the unique contributions of every person, fostering an inclusive society that stands united in its diversity.

Ubuntu: Embracing Our Shared Humanity

The ancient African philosophy of Ubuntu—”I am because we are”—provides a profound counterpoint to the isolating tendencies of commodification. Ubuntu reminds us that our collective identity and prosperity emerge when we recognize the interconnectedness of all lives. Integrating Ubuntu into our economic thinking could shift public policy toward universal healthcare, accessible education, and robust social services that support every community member. This approach honors both the individual and the community by ensuring that no one is left behind while pursuing collective progress.

Charting a New Path for Economic Renewal

Creating an economy that prioritizes humanity over commodities calls for transformative strategies:

• Redefining Success: Shift your focus from profit margins to metrics that value mental health, environmental sustainability, and community well-being.
• Protecting the Vulnerable: Institute policies that keep essential services as public goods, safeguarding the nurturing environment our children need.
• Fostering a Game-Like Spirit: Emulate the unifying dynamic of games where diverse roles coexist to achieve collective success. This outlook can inspire corporate responsibility, where profit-sharing and ethical practices replace ruthless competition.
• Cultivating Social Solidarity: Strengthen community participation and social initiatives that prioritize public interest over short-term monetary gains.

A Call for Transformation

At the crossroads of economic policy and social justice lies an opportunity to redefine how we measure prosperity. Confronting the notion that life is merely a commodity, we must reclaim its human essence—celebrating the beauty of teamwork, unity, and the intrinsic worth of each individual. Just as games unite players and spectators around goals that transcend individual achievement, our society can embrace policies that ensure a future where human dignity supersedes market values. For the sake of every child and every human life, it is time to realign our priorities and reshape our economy around the principles that bind us as a shared, interdependent community.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sammy Attoh.

COMMENTARY: By Eugene Doyle

30 April 1975. Saigon Fell, Vietnam Rose. The story of Vietnam after the US fled the country is not a fairy tale, it is not a one-dimensional parable of resurrection, of liberation from oppression, of joy for all — but there is a great deal to celebrate.

After over a century of brutal colonial oppression by the French, the Japanese, and the Americans and their various minions, the people of Vietnam won victory in one of the great liberation struggles of history.

It became a source of inspiration and of hope for millions of people oppressed by imperial powers in Central & South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

• READ MORE: Part 1: The fall of Saigon 1975: Fifty years of repeating what was forgotten
• The fall of Saigon 1975: Part 2: The Quiet mutiny and the US army falls apart

Civil war – a war among several
The civil war in Vietnam, coterminous with the war against the Western powers, pitted communists and anti-communists in a long and pitiless struggle.

Within that were various strands — North versus South, southern communists and nationalists against pro-Western forces, and so on. As various political economists have pointed out, all wars are in some way class wars too — pitting the elites against ordinary people.

As has happened repeatedly throughout history, once one or more great power becomes involved in a civil war it is subsumed within that colonial war. The South’s President Ngô Đình Diệm, for example, was assassinated on orders of the Americans.

By 1969, US aid accounted for 80 percent of South Vietnam’s government budget; they effectively owned the South and literally called the shots.

US punishes its victims
This month, 50 years after the Vietnamese achieved independence from their colonial overlords, US President Donald Trump declared April 2 “Liberation Day” and imposed some of the heaviest tariffs on Vietnam because they didn’t buy enough US goods!

As economist Joseph Stiglitz pointed out, they don’t yet have enough aggregate demand for the kind of goods the US produces. That might have something to do with the decades it has taken to rebuild their lives and economy from the Armageddon inflicted on them by the US, Australia, New Zealand and other unindicted war criminals.

Straight after they fled, the US declared themselves the victims of the Vietnamese and imposed punitive sanctions on liberated Vietnam for decades — punishing their victims.

Under Gerald Ford (1974–1977), Jimmy Carter (1977–1981), Ronald Reagan (1981–1989), George H.W. Bush (1989–1993) right up to Bill Clinton (1993–2001), the US enforced the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) of 1917.

The US froze the assets of Vietnam at the very time it was trying to recover from the wholesale devastation of the country.

Tens of millions of much-needed dollars were captured in US banks, enforced by the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA). The US also took advantage of its muscle to veto IMF and World Bank loans to Vietnam.

Countries like Australia and New Zealand, to their eternal shame, took part in both the war, the war crimes, and imposing sanctions and other punitive measures subsequently.

The ‘Boat People’ refugee crisis
While millions celebrated the victory in 1975, millions of others were fearful. The period of national unification and economic recovery was painful, typically repressive — when one militarised regime replaces another.

This triggered flight: firstly among urban elites — military officers, government workers, and professionals who were most closely-linked to the US-run regime.

You can blame the Commies for the ensuing refugee crisis but by strangling the Vietnamese economy, refusing to return Vietnamese assets held in the US, imposing an effective blockade on the economy via sanctions, the US deepened the crisis, which saw over two million flee the country between 1975 and the 1980s.

More than 250,000 desperate people died at sea.

Đổi Mới: the move to a socialist-market economy
In 1986, to energise the economy, the government moved away from a command economy and launched the đổi mới reforms which created a hybrid socialist-market economy.

They had taken a leaf out of the Chinese playbook, which under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping (1978 –1989), had moved towards a market economy through its “Reform and Opening Up” policies.  Vietnam saw the “economic miracle” of its near neighbour and its leaders sought something similar.

Vietnam’s economy boomed and GDP grew from $18.1 billion in 1984 to $469 billion by 2024, with a per capita GDP at purchasing power parity (PPP) of $15,470 (up from about $300 per capita in the 1970s).

After a sluggish start, literacy rates soared to 96.1 percent by 2023, and life expectancy reached 73.7 years, only a few short of the USA.  GDP growth is around 7 percent, according to the OECD.

An unequal society
Persistent inequality suggests the socialist vision has partially faded. A rural-urban divide and a rich-poor divide underlines ongoing injustices around quality of life and access to services but Vietnam’s Gini coefficient — a measure of income inequality — puts it only slightly more “unequal” as a society than New Zealand or Germany.

Corruption is also an issue in the country.

Press controls and political repression
As in China, political power resides with the Party. Freedom of expression — highlighted by press repression — is severely limited in Vietnam and nothing to celebrate.

Reporters Without Borders (RSF) rates Vietnam as 174th out of 180 countries for press freedom and regularly excoriates its strongmen as press “predators”.  In its country profile, RSF says of Vietnam: “Independent reporters and bloggers are often jailed, making Vietnam the world’s third largest jailer of journalists”.

Vietnam is forging its own destiny
What is well worth celebrating, however, is that Vietnam successfully got the imperial powers off its back and out of its country. It is well-placed to play an increasingly prosperous and positive role in the emerging multipolar world.

It is part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and the ASEAN network, and borders China, giving Vietnam the opportunity to weather any storms coming from the continent of America.

Vietnam today is united and free and millions of ordinary people have achieved security, health, education and prosperity vastly better than their parents and grandparents’ generations were able to.

In the end the honour and glory go to the Vietnamese people.

I’ll give the last word to Ho Chi Minh, the great leader of the Vietnamese people who reached out to the United States, and sought alliance not conflict. He was rebuffed by the super-power which had a different agenda.

On September 2, 1945, Ho Chi Minh proclaimed the independent Democratic Republic of Vietnam in Hanoi’s Ba Dinh square:

“‘All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.’

“This immortal statement was made in the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America in 1776. In a broader sense, this means: All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have a right to live, to be happy and free.

“… A people who have courageously opposed French domination for more than eight years, a people who have fought side by side with the Allies against the Fascists during these last years, such a people must be free and independent.

“For these reasons, we, members of the Provisional Government of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, solemnly declare to the world that Vietnam has the right to be a free and independent country — and in fact is so already. The entire Vietnamese people are determined to mobilise all their physical and mental strength, to sacrifice their lives and property in order to safeguard their independence and liberty.”

And, my god, they did.

To conclude, a short poem attributed to Ho Chi Minh:

“After the rain, good weather.

“In the wink of an eye,

the universe throws off its muddy clothes.”

Eugene Doyle is a community organiser and activist in Wellington, New Zealand. He received an Absolutely Positively Wellingtonian award in 2023 for community service. His first demonstration was at the age of 12 against the Vietnam War. This article was first published at his public policy website Solidarity and is republished here with permission.

This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by APR editor.

As a general premise, I didn’t have a lot of hope for the hearing. Language is crucial, and the title says it all: any action by the US is merely “defense” against acts of political warfare committed by China. And still, I was disappointed. Not only was it filled with racist, paranoid rhetoric, but it was supremely unjust, lacking any level of self-awareness, and almost certainly operated solely as an agenda-pushing cover for whatever act of warfare our government sought to commit next.

Three witnesses took to the stands. The first was Erik Bethel, a finance professional selected to represent the US at the World Bank. He was followed by Mary Kissel, Former Senior Advisor to the US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Third was James E. Fanell, the Former Director of Intelligence and Information Operations for the US Pacific Fleet and current Government Fellow.

Big people with big titles. That is the usual order of things: a few “experts” are selected to “teach” members of Congress about complex subjects they may lack background in. The Committee of Oversight and Accountability certainly lacks China expertise. Representative Lisa McClain spent ten years working for American Express before she was elected to represent the state of Michigan. Chairman James Comer was a Kentucky farmer. Representative Paul Gosar was a dentist in Arizona. Marjorie Taylor Green was a part-time CrossFit gym coach. Many of them have never traveled to China, let alone held a productive conversation with a member of China’s government.

Their lack of expertise didn’t stop them from sounding their opinions. I listened carefully, hoping to give them the benefit of the doubt. It was a fruitless endeavor.

Representative McClain spoke about her district: “In Michigan, we have the Gotion plant… We have a Chinese-owned company and the only spot they can figure out that is feasible for them to build is next to a university and next to a military base. Anybody think that’s a coincidence?”

In the audience, the new summer Hillterns listened with rapt attention.

“I’m not much for coincidences,” McClain continued. “We talk about, well it’s gonna create jobs. Jobs for who? I’m very concerned, and I’m not much for coincidences.”

She was talking about the plans to build a new plant in Michigan for electric vehicle components under the company Gotion, which has headquarters in Shanghai. The plan is speculated to bring thousands of jobs to the area, with wages about 150% of the current average. McClain, having no substance on which to defend her opposition to the plant, instead decided to speculate on its geographic location, implying the company is purposefully building near a university and military installation. Clearly, the plant is a spy base for the Chinese government, as surely as any 18 to 26-year-old Chinese immigrant is an undercover Chinese soldier sent to wreak havoc upon our country– all baseless, unfounded claims that promote Asian American hate and shift public perception to support anti-China policies.

The military base she’s talking about is Camp Grayling, which is actually over 100 miles away from Big Rapids, where the EV plant will be built. As for the proximity to Ferris State University, the relevance of that statement is questionable. There are around 77 colleges and universities in the entire state– 198 if you include community colleges and trade schools. It would be difficult not to build near one. But that’s beside the point. This is merely one example of the outlandish and absurd claims made in the hearing, backed by anecdotal and unreliable “evidence” based on feelings and a strange paranoia that anything with links to China has malicious intentions.

In response to McClain’s statements, Mary Kissel said, “Let’s not give them too much credit as long-term thinkers. Let’s remember they almost destroyed their country several times over.” The words were spoken derisively, reaffirming my suspicion that Ms. Kissel boasts severe negative prejudices towards China and Chinese people. She continued to cite the Cultural Revolution, the debt crisis, and “etcetera.” In truth, the US is a mere baby in comparison to China’s 5,000 years of history. As for Ms. Kissel’s claims, to say Chinese people nearly destroyed their country is misleading and tinged with a disturbing colonialistic self-superiority that the West does everything better.

Ms. Kissel also stated her opinion of how China operates: “China is a party state. The function of China is not to better the interests of the Chinese people– it is to promote, strengthen, and expand the power and influence, and reach of the Chinese Communist Party.”

I challenge this claim, not just for its wrongful absolutism, but because China has repeatedly shown immense interest in improving the everyday lives of its citizens. China is unparalleled in its developmental growth aimed at providing infrastructure and opportunities to the people. Housing, public transportation, health care, and education are all convenient and affordable. The average retirement age is 54 years old. Over the past few decades, the government has been working ceaselessly to eradicate extreme poverty with tremendous success. Over 800 million people have been taken out of poverty and afforded a better quality of life. Not only that, but China continues to emphasize the importance of green energy in building a sustainable future. Shenzhen, one of the country’s biggest high-tech cities, has even switched over all public transportation to electric vehicles. This isn’t pro-China propaganda, it’s simply fact.

Along with forged criticism of China’s internal dynamics and history, the hearing also challenged China’s position when it comes to the US.

The overall goal of China, Ms. Kissel proclaimed, is to “upend our way of life and to dominate and change our way of life.” They are “committed to destroy(ing) us.”

At first glance, it sounds absurd that an individual so ostensibly high up on the policy advisory hierarchy would make such a condemnatory and extreme claim. But considering that Ms. Kissel served under Mike Pompeo during Donald Trump’s presidential term, it is not so surprising. It was not an administration known for its truth-telling.

First and foremost, China has no plans to destroy the United States. We can easily cipher this through both statement and action. To claim otherwise is false and promotes a dangerous narrative that guides our policy-makers down a one-way path to war.

Erik Bethel’s claim that “China is encircling us” is also highly deceptive. Adversely, it is the US that has encircled China with over 300 military bases and countless troops. China has no military bases in the entire Western hemisphere. There is no “encircling” occurring.

Former US Representative Tom Malinowski criticized China for trying to make the US “look bad to the rest of the world.” This is, at best, overwhelmingly hypocritical. Just recently it was uncovered that the US launched a secret anti-vax operation in the Philippines during the deadliest months of the COVID-19 pandemic to undermine China’s influence in the region. According to a senior US military official, “We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective. We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.”

As the hearing drew on, the claims grew more and more unhinged.

“They’re teaming up with the Mexican drug cartels and they’re killing Americans,” Congressman Fallon told everyone, backing his claim that China is killing nearly as many Americans per day as died during WW2.

“They know how many paperclips you all are using in the Longworth building,” Representative Tim Burchett said, reminiscing on a Mike Pompeo quote.

“What if they were to develop some kind of biological entity that can, say, wipe out females of child-bearing ages or something?” Burchett queried.

“If you’re using this app (Tiktok), they can listen to you,” Another added.

“We should do the opposite of what China wants us to do,” Malinowski put forth as a general solution.

“We need to construct not just a defensive strategy, but an offensive strategy,” Ms. Kissel spoke decisively. Twice it was mentioned that her last name rhymes with missile– nominative determinism perhaps.

It was as if the hearing took lines straight out of an SNL skit. It’s unfathomable that these are the people sitting in our Congressional hearing rooms, talking about war. These are the people voting on legislation that could propel us into a conflict with China that would bring death and destruction to millions, and most likely end in nuclear catastrophe or total destruction of the planet.

Our politicians, although ignorant and lacking expertise, are willing cogs in the war machine. They bring the most anti-China and pro-military witnesses to the stands to reaffirm their own paranoid delusions about an all-knowing, all-hateful “other” across the sea that seeks to destroy everything bright and beautiful about the world. This is happening on a weekly basis.

The truth is that it is not China gearing up for war, but our very own government. Our politicians are pumping billions of dollars into hyper-militarizing the Asia Pacific and writing it off as “deterrence.” They’re spouting lies and fear-inducing narratives at Congressional hearings in a bid to garner support for anti-China legislation. These stories are trickling down through the media and infecting the minds of the general public, priming the US military for its next conquest. Why? Because the US is self-interested and directed solely by its desire to maintain global hegemony, even at the expense of all others. China is not a threat because it’s threatening our security– China is a threat because it’s successful.

Tucked securely in their offices, our politicians will sign bill after bill funding proxy conflicts around the world, but they will never know the many hideous faces of war. They’ll point fingers and make accusations, but they will never turn the mirror around to acknowledge their own hypocrisies. They’ll stand there saluting when bodies come home in boxes and claim it was for the greater good, but they will never face the consequences of their actions– they will never be forced to die for another’s deceptions.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Megan Russell.

Of our most significant impressions of China, the first is the contrast between the stories the corporate media tell us about China, what they don’t want us to know, and the reality we see. The Wall Street Journal for example, asserted, “China’s economy limps into 2024” whereas in contrast the US was marked by a “resilient domestic economy.” In reality, China grew 5.3% in the first quarter of 2024. The US grew at 1.6%, Germany and France grew just 0.2%, Britain at 0.6%, and Japan -0.5%. But economic crisis is racking China!

Two, China’s infrastructure surpasses anything in the US. Jimmy Carter said “How many miles of high-speed railroad do we have in this country? [zero] China has around 18,000 miles (29,000 km) of high-speed rail lines.” That was in 2019. Now it is 28,000 miles and trains can travel 220 miles per hour. A train from Shanghai to Kunming, the distance from Philadelphia to Los Angeles, takes 11 hours 40 minutes and costs $127.

What we live with here appears very backwards in comparison. Their subway systems are decades ahead of those in the US; the US train system seems a century behind. Videos such as this show what they have achieved.

Three, after experiencing China’s incredible infrastructure, you realize how the trillions of dollars spent on endless war have impoverished us. The US blows things up instead of building things to improve public well-being. Carter said the US “has wasted, I think, $3 trillion” on military spending ($5.9 trillion between 2001-2018). “Since 1979, do you know how many times China has been at war with anybody? None, and we have stayed at war. China has not wasted a single penny on war, and that’s why they’re ahead of us. In almost every way…We’d have high-speed railroad. We’d have bridges that aren’t collapsing, we’d have roads that are maintained properly. Our education system would be as good as that of say South Korea or Hong Kong.”

Four, clean and safe cities. We don’t see the omnipresent litter we do here. Every day a veritable army of public workers clean the streets, sidewalks, subways, parks, and other public places. These are not simply litter free, but clean. Workers making sure of it. In the US we would expect this in private buildings, universities, hospitals, fancy hotels, but not in public spaces.

Cities are not just visually clean – the noise pollution is less. Vehicle noise – and exhaust – is much less than here because buses and many cars are electric. The streets are full of people riding motorbikes, all electric ones. One in four Chinese, 350 million, have an electric scooter.

City parks are not simply clean, but make people feel welcomed and provided with activities to engage with others – ping pong, mahjong, badminton, dancing clubs, music groups, Tai Chi, exercise groups. Many elderly take part in these free public activities. Men retire at age 60, blue-collar women at 50, white-collar women at 55. Workers in health-harming professions such as underground, high-altitude, labor-intensive jobs enjoy a five-year reduction.

The pleasant, well-designed and well-kept parks often have monuments to Chinese heroes from battles against Japanese or Chiang Kai-Shek’s troops.

You can take the metro and walk anywhere and not worry about it being dirty or worry about crime.

Chinese cities have very cheap public bicycles for people on a massive scale. In Hangzhou in 2023 they had 116,000. It cost me 75 cents to use one for a day. A monthly pass drastically reduces that. In Guangzhou a monthly pass costs only $1.40.

That infamous Chinese air pollution? We went to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Chengdu, Kunming, Guangzhou, all of which had an air quality index lower than the much less populous city of Chicago (you can check on the weather app on your phone). Today, of the world’s hundred most polluted cities, 83 are in India, just 4 in China.

Everyone seems to have a phone, used for everything – paying for what you buy through QR codes, making train, museum, hotel, bus, airplane reservations. Cash is becoming almost obsolete.

Five, an array of social services and benefits for the people. Besides very cheap public transport, China has public bathrooms everywhere. They are not like gas station bathrooms here, but decent ones like you find in big private hotels here and kept clean like them. You need not worry about where you and your children can go when in public. You don’t have to buy something from a store just to use a bathroom. You don’t smell pee anywhere. Some public bathrooms even have an electric board at the entrance telling you which stalls are occupied and which are vacant.

Seniors, even me, generally get half-price, such as at museums, national parks, on subways and trains. Many signs and regular announcements in public places ask you to mind and assist the elderly, children, and pregnant women around you.

Public service workers are everywhere, available to answer any questions you have. If they don’t know, they look it up on their phones. I saw hundreds of these public service workers in the cities and towns we toured. A downtown subway station with four entrances has four workers at each one to check your bags and belongings, a customer service office with one or two more, besides the workers cleaning the station, and the one or two on the platforms assisting riders. That may be 20-25 service workers. At a Chicago CTA stop you would find one worker. A telling reminder of how public service jobs have been cut here, and expanded in China.

WageCentre.com states the average Chinese salary is 9,500 yuan per month ($1,315) in major cities, which Statistica calls the average wage (which I think overstated). But we did find prices (and taxes) far less than here (save gas), except in Western stores, so you could at least double the buying power of a Chinese income. A subway ride was often under 50 cents (3 yuan), a bus is less – which a monthly pass cuts almost in half. A sit-down breakfast in a Chinese shop can be $5 for two; on the street, less.

Six, the complete absence of homeless people. You don’t come across unbathed people asking for money, people forced to sleep in tents in public parks, next to roadways, or on the subway. We were in nine different cities and saw just one down-and-out person on the street asking for money. The US, in the midst of wealth, has hundreds of thousands of homeless, including children, pregnant women, and the elderly. How many freeze to death in the winter, how many face hunger, seems a US state secret.

Seven, the qualitatively different nature of police relations with the people than here. The police don’t even look like US ones, armored as if for battle. I met only one with a gun; they simply carry a radio and a phone. They bear a closer similarity to our marshals at rallies than to US police. The police, like the other public workers, are there to assist you, answer your questions – when something would open, how we take public transportation to some place, the nearest ATM.

I recount two experiences with the Chinese police, which show the role Chinese police play as public servants. One day we took a train and then a bus to visit the Leshan Giant Buddha statue. When we were buying our entrance tickets, I found I had lost a little jacket from my backpack containing my wallet and our passports. Alarmed, we went to the local police station to report this.

Without passports, we cannot get back on the train to return to our hotel, check into any hotel, take our next flight, let alone leave the country. I resigned myself to spending the rest of our time in China trying to get new passports from the nearest US consulate. The local police asked us for a photo of my jacket and where we think we lost it.

Like in the US, China has video cameras most everywhere. But there, the police actually searched videos of where we told them we had been in the previous town, and in two hours reported they found where I lost it, but someone had taken it. They had to track him down. In just three hours since we reported it missing, the police had my jacket with everything and had driven to where we were to give it to us.

With cameras everywhere, many told us, China has greatly reduced crime. The difference between China and the US lies in the use cameras are put to. While cameras are omnipresent in US cities, there is zero chance police would search them to locate my jacket. Even if the US police did bother to devote any time to it, could they recover my jacket in a month?

We told the police how grateful we were for saving us, that the police wouldn’t do this in the US. The head of the station replied, “Yes, we know about the police in your country. No need to thank us. This is our job. We are just doing our job.”

My second noteworthy police experience is our arrival, after a day touring by taxi, four hours early to a small airport near Jiuzhaigou National Park. Ours was the one flight that day, and three kilometers away, the road to the airport was gated shut. The police there said it would open in two hours. But rather than have us stand outside the gate with our luggage, they opened the gate for us and four Chinese travelers, invited us to sit in their office, made us tea, and chatted with us. I cannot imagine police doing that in the US.

 In Summary

The Chinese have devoted immense public funding to public services, making you feel the world outside your front door is clean, safe, and well-organized. As a result, you feel welcomed in public places, you feel your well-being is respected. What US subway system feels like a pleasant and welcoming space? New York City’s makes you feel you have entered Purgatory. Public transport here serves to move you from one place to another at the least expense to the government. Your comfort and well-being is irrelevant.

The overall feeling created in litter-free, clean, safe cities, with no homeless, staffed with many workers who keep it in order for the people, is that in contrast to here, the Chinese government has created a society that cares about you. In the US, you feel government is indifferent to your concerns – unless you have money.

We do have quality social programs here, including for the elderly. But these have been privatized. You must pay good money for it. As the 1960-70s social movements died down, the neoliberal approach began to prevail, social services were steadily cut and privatized, no longer next to free – quality senior centers, community health centers, public universities. They still exist – for those who pay for them. Quality social services here are not a human right. In China they are. There, more and better social services are increasingly provided – and maintained in top condition – for the people.

This reduces the daily stresses and discomforts we are accustomed to living with here. It creates a more civilized environment. As we know, when we are less stressed, we feel better about ourselves and act better towards others. That’s an achievement the impressive infrastructure and social services have created in China – reducing the general stress level of the whole population. China is creating a more humane place to live. Chinese who live here and go back to visit can tell you every year China gets better.

Similarly, when the US blockades a country, like Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran, it greatly increases the stress level in the population. It causes scarcities, which drives people to compete over scarce goods. That causes more personal and social conflicts.

Remember, at the start of the revolution just 75 years ago, China’s illiteracy rate was 80%. Now it is the most technologically advanced country on the planet. Equally world historic are the revolutionary gains in human rights for the hundreds of millions of women, progressing from beasts of burden owned by men to full and (nearly) equal citizens, all in the space of one lifetime. Moreover, in a mere forty years, as the Asia Development Bank states, China raised 750 million out of poverty, reducing poverty from 88% in 1981 to 0.1% in 2023.

China stands out today as the only country to ever surpass the US in development. The US rulers do not take this as an example to learn from, but as a mortal threat. China carefully accomplished this feat without being “regime changed,” attacked, or economically disabled by the US. The US succeeded in undermining the Soviet Union, then sabotaged the growing power of Japan and the European Union, and then broke the increasing closer relations between Russia and Europe by instigating the Ukraine war. But the various US strategies to disable China have failed one after another. As a result, today China presents a progressive and growing alternative force to the world power of the US empire.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Stansfield Smith.

Late last year, a colleague sent me a letter decrying some of my writings about China, notably the last newsletter of 2023. This newsletter is my response to him.

**

The situation in China is the cause of a great deal of consternation amongst the left. I am glad you have raised the issue of Chinese socialism with me directly.

We are living in very dangerous times, as you know. The United States’ accelerating tension with other powerful nations threatens the planet more now than perhaps any period since 1991. The war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are illustrative of the dangers before us. In the interim, I worry about the US trying to draw Iran into the conflict, with Israel threatening to escalate tensions with Hezbollah in Lebanon and then draw Tehran into making a step that would allow the US to bomb Iran. The New Cold War against China will take these conflicts to another level. Taiwan is already the lever. I hope that sober minds will prevail.

All socialist projects, as you well know, are formed in the process of the class struggle and through the development of the productive forces. Not the least China. You recall Bill Hinton’s book The Great Reversal: The Privatisation of China, 1978–1989, published in 1990. I was with Bill in Concord, Massachusetts a year or so before he died in 2004 and had several discussions with him about China. No one in the US knew China as well as Bill, his entire family (including his sister Joan and her husband Sid Engst, who modernised dairy farming in China), and, of course, their friends Isabel Crook, Edgar Snow, Helen Foster Snow, and, later, the translator Joan Pinkham, the daughter of Harry Dexter White.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, there was great trepidation about China. When I visited the country decades earlier, I was confounded by the poverty in rural areas. But at the same time, I was taken by the dignity of a people inspired by the great history of the struggles that created the Chinese Revolution of 1949 who knew that they were building a socialist project. Bill held fast to Maoism, clear about the contradictions of the socialist project, as he wrote in Through a Glass Darkly: U.S. Views of the Chinese Revolution.

Inequality had risen to high levels during the Jiang Zemin (1993–2003) and Hu Jintao (2003–2013) years. In Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (2013), I wrote about the Chinese Revolution with some of that pessimism, despite understanding the difficulties of building socialism in a poor country (the only place, after Russia, to try and do so since revolutions failed in the West). A few years after that, I read Ezra Vogel’s terrific assessment of Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which placed Deng’s decisions in 1978 in the context of the entire revolutionary process. That book gave me a better understanding of the Deng reforms. One of the key lessons I took away was that Deng had to confront the stagnation of the economy, allowing the market to advance the productive forces. Without that, it was clear that China – a poor, backward country – would slip into a socialism of despair. It had to pioneer a new approach. Of course, the Deng reforms turned toward market forces and opened the door to a very dangerous situation. Bill’s pessimism was a response to that reality.

Sheyang Farmers Painting Institute (Jiangsu, China), part of the ‘farmers painting’ project, 2017.

By the late 1990s, discussions began – including in the journals of the Communist Party of China (CPC) – to tackle rising rates of inequality and poverty through mass action. At the fifth plenum of the 16th CPC congress in October 2005, the party announced a ‘great historic mission’ to ‘construc[t] a new socialist countryside’, using the new phrase the ‘three rurals’ to refer to agriculture, farmers, and rural areas. This mission sought to improve rural infrastructure through state investment, provide free and compulsory education, and develop cooperative medical services while retreating from the market reforms in the medical sector, the latter of which became a nationwide policy across China from 2009. It interested me that the campaign was run with a mass character and not bureaucratically, with thousands of CPC cadre involved in carrying out this mission. This was a forerunner of the poverty eradication campaign that would come a decade later.

As this mission unfolded, I was very interested in the fact that places with ‘red resources’ were highlighted for action (such as Hailufeng in Guangdong Province, which was the heart of China’s first rural Soviet). It is telling that scholars in the West did not focus on these new shifts, fixated as they were on the country’s Pacific coastline rather than studying the conditions in China’s rural interior. Among the few exceptions are sincere people such as Professor Elizabeth Perry and Professor Minzi Su (the author of China’s Rural Development Policy: Exploring the ‘New Socialist Countryside’, 2009), who are ignored by most commentators on China.

This push for a new socialist countryside enlivened the CPC and a tacit movement to counter pure free-market forces, which created the dynamic that led to Xi Jinping’s election as party leader in late 2012. Xi’s concern for the country’s rural areas comes from spending part of his youth in China’s underdeveloped northwest and from his time as the party secretary of the Ningde Prefecture in the late 1980s, which was then one of the poorest regions in Fujian Province. A widely acknowledged element of Xi’s leadership during this period is that he helped decrease poverty in that area and improve social indicators, making youth less prone to migrate to cities.

Did China’s growth need to come at the expense of nature? In 2005, while in Huzhou (Zhejiang Province), Xi laid out the ‘Two Mountains’ theory, which suggested that economic and ecological development must go hand in hand. This is evidenced by the fact that, from 2013 to 2020, particulate pollution in China decreased by 39.6%, increasing average life expectancy by two years. In 2023, Xi announced a new ecological strategy to build a ‘beautiful China’, which includes an environmental plan for rural areas.

I was struck by some of your claims, in particular that ‘forcible return to the countryside is now state policy’, which I think bears special reflection due to it being part of the broader ‘new socialist countryside’ policy. It is true that President Xi has been talking about the need for rural revitalisation since 2017, and it is also true that various provinces (for instance, Guangdong) have action plans for college graduates to go to the countryside and participate in making the rural as attractive as the urban. However, this is not done by force, but by innovative programmes.

Zhang Hailong (China), Horses and Herdsmen Series 3, 2022.

At the frontlines of these programmes are youth, many of whom were among the three million cadres who went to villages as part of the policy to abolish extreme poverty (it is worth noting that 1,800 cadres died while carrying out this task). Xi is very sensitive, as Mao Zedong was, to the importance of party members experiencing the reality in rural China, given China’s vast rural landscape, and was himself sent to China’s rural northwest during the Cultural Revolution. Reflecting on this experience, Xi wrote in 2002: ‘At the age of 15, I came to Liangjiahe village perplexed and lost. At the age of 22, I left with a clear life goal and was filled with confidence’. There is something of this attitude in China’s policy. Is it bad for party members, many of whom might have jobs in the state apparatus, to spend time in the countryside? Not if you want them to better understand China’s reality.

I have been to China many times over the past ten years and have travelled extensively in both rural and urban areas. The dual circulation strategy that Xi has pursued (driven by this ‘new socialist countryside’ policy) is of interest, and I have been working with a range of scholars to build up a detailed, empirical understanding of the Chinese project from within and through their own categories. That is the basis of the work we have been doing, some of it published in Wenhua Zongheng and some of it in the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s study on the eradication of extreme poverty in China. Is it propaganda? I hope not. I hope that we are getting closer and closer to being able to offer a theoretical assessment of the Chinese Revolution as it proceeds forward. Is the revolution perfect? Not at all. But it requires understanding rather than clichés, which abound in the West when it comes to China.

Abdurkerim Nasirdin (China), Young Painter, 1995.

Take, for instance, the allegations of the oppression of Chinese Muslims (25 million or 1.8% of the total population). I remember being in Central Asia in the 2000s when al-Qaeda and the Taliban had a serious impact on the region, including through the offices of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU). The IMU formulated a policy to take over the entire Xinjiang region, which is why some Uygurs moved to the leadership of Juma Namangani.

The Turkistan Islamic Party, led by people close to al-Qaeda (such as Abdul Haq al-Turkistani, who was a member of al-Qaeda’s shura), was born out of those sorts of contacts. Bombings of public places became commonplace, including in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. Abdul Shakoor al-Turkistani, who in 2010 took over leadership from Abdul Haq (the engineer of the 2008 bombings in Beijing during the Olympics), was responsible for the Kashgar attacks in 2008 and 2011 and the Hotan attack in 2011. In 2013, this group moved to Syria, where I met a few of them on the Turkish-Syrian border. They are now based in Idlib and are a key part of the al-Qaeda formation there. This is their characteristic feature: not mere Turkic nationalism, but Islamic fundamentalism of the al-Qaeda variety.

At the time, several approaches could have been taken to the insurgency. The one that the US and its allies in the region favoured was to use violence, including by attacking areas suspected of being run by these insurgents and arresting them en masse, with some of them ending up in US-run black sites. Many of the members of this group, including Abdul Haq and Abdul Shakoor, were killed by US drone strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Interestingly, China did not follow this approach. Some years ago, I interviewed former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group who had turned away from violence and the ideology of al-Qaeda. Their group, the controversial Quilliam Foundation (based in London), was led by people such as Noman Benotman who followed the approach of the Egyptian ‘repentance’ and the Algerian ‘reconciliation’ projects. These programmes essentially tried to adopt both cognitive and behavioural approaches to deradicalisation (changing the ideology and stopping the violence, respectively). The former Libyan jihadis were eager to bring this approach to play both in Libya (which failed) and in the West (where many of them resettled), rather than the alternative of targeted violence and mass arrests. They were rebuffed (except in Germany, where the Hayat Programme was established in 2012). The problem with the violent approach that the West opted for instead was that it demonised all Muslims rather than merely trying to deradicalise those drawn into a toxic politics.

In the case of China, rather than waging a frontal war against the radical groups in Xinjiang and then the society in which they lived and demonising all Muslims, the government sought to conduct forms of deradicalisation. It is useful to recall the meeting between the Chinese Islamic Association and the CPC in Beijing in 2019 that built on the Five-Year Planning Outline for Persisting in the Sinification of Islam and sought to make Islam compatible with socialism. This is an interesting project, although it suffers from a lack of clarity. Making Islam Chinese is one part of the project; the other is to make the practice of Islam consonant with the socialist project. The latter is a sensible sociological approach for the modern world: to make religion – in a broader sense – compatible with modern values, and, in the case of China, with ‘core socialist values’ (such as combating gender discrimination).

Liu Xiaodong (China), Belief, 2012.

The former is harder to understand, and I have not truly grasped it. When it comes to the idea that religion must be aligned with modern values, especially socialist values, I am fully on board. How should this happen? Does one, say, ban certain practices (such as headscarves in France), or should one begin a process of debate and discussion with the leaders of religious communities (who are often the most conservative)? What does one do when confronted by an insurgency that has its roots outside the country, such as in Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, and even Syria, rather than inside the country, such as the contradictions in Xinjiang? These are all pressing dilemmas, but the ludicrous statements about genocide and so on pushed by US State Department and its cronies – including by dodgy people who work for dodgier ‘think tanks’ near the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia – cannot be allowed to define our discussion within the left. We need a greater understanding of the matters at hand so as not to fall into the Biden-Netanyahu line of questioning, which boils down to the ‘do you condemn Hamas’ sort of debate.

Tang Xiaohe and Cheng Li (China), Mother on the Construction Site, 1984.

In your email, you write that ‘there is no question that the living standards of ordinary Chinese people, especially city-dwellers, have improved dramatically over the last decades’. In fact, all the data – and my own travels – shows that this is not only the case ‘especially’ for city-dwellers but across the country and increasingly in the areas of the far west and far north. International Labour Organisation data, for instance, shows that China’s annual real wage growth was 4.7%, far and away above that of other countries in the Global South, and certainly higher than in India (1.3%) and the US (0.3%) In just eight years, from 2013 to 2021, the disposable per capita income of China’s 498 million rural residents increased by more than 72.6% while that of the 914 million residents of urban areas increased by 53.5%. Meanwhile, the gap of disposable income between rural and urban areas declined by 5% during this period, and the growth rate of disposable income of rural residents has outpaced that of urban residents for twelve consecutive years (2009–2021).

Between 2012 and 2020, targeted poverty alleviation lifted 98.99 million people in rural areas out of extreme poverty and enabled every single family suffering from extreme poverty to receive assistance. As part of this innovative process, the CPC combined the training and development of grassroots cadres with digital technology, thus enhancing modern governance capabilities at the local level and enabling party members and cadres to serve the people more accurately and efficiently.

For comparison, using the Gini index, which does not cover public services (ignoring items like subsidised rentals for rural homes), income inequality in India is 24% higher than in China.

Those who look at the data on inequality in China often focus on China’s billionaires. That was clear in your email, which noted that China ‘is awash with state-subsidised millionaires and even billionaires. Indeed, a mounting class of super-bourgeoise, many of whom “invest abroad”’. Certainly, the reform era produced the social conditions for some people to get rich. However, that number is in decline: in 2023, of the 2,640 billionaires in the world, about 562 were in China, down from 607 in the previous year, and the last few CPC congresses have made it a priority to reverse the engine of this billionaire-production process. Of the 2,296 delegates to the 20th National Congress, only 18 were private sector executives, most of whom are from small and medium-sized enterprises, down from 34 who participated in 18th National Congress in 2012.

As you might know, in 2021 Xi called for a policy of ‘common prosperity’ (a term first used by the CPC in 1953), which alarmed many of these billionaires. They have since sought to run for the hills (‘invest abroad’, as you say). However, China has very strong capital controls, allowing only $50,000 to be remitted overseas. A range of illegal operations have opened up in the past few years to assist the rich in exiting their cash, including through the more porous region of Hong Kong. But the state has been cracking down on this, as it has cracked down on corruption. In August 2023, the police arrested the leaders of an immigration firm in Shanghai that facilitated illegal foreign exchange transfers. The pressure on Jack Ma (fintech company Ant Group), Hui Ka Yan (property developer Evergrande), and Bao Fan (investment bank Renaissance Holdings) is indicative of the CPC’s current position regarding billionaires.

You write that while living standards have improved in China, ‘socialism is not on the agenda in that country’. If not for the socialist agenda pursued by the CPC, how has China been able to abolish extreme poverty and bring down inequality rates, especially in times of rising global inequality when the social democratic agenda in the capitalist Global North and in large parts of the Global South has failed to come anywhere close to these achievements? It helps that large banks in China are under the control of the state so that large-scale capital can be managed efficiently to solve social problems, as we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic. The class struggle continues in China, of course, and that class struggle impacts the CPC (with its extraordinary membership of 98 million).

Wang Zihua (China), When the Wind Blows Through the Summer, 2022.

I have tried not only to provide some facts to guide our discussion but also to thread them into the theory of socialism that I believe is most attractive. According to that theory, socialism is not an event but a process, and this process – rooted in the class struggle – goes in zigs and zags, a back-and-forth tension that is often accentuated by the urgent need to increase the productive forces in poor countries. It is important to accompany such processes rather than taking an omniscient standpoint.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Vijay Prashad.

On Saturday, police in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku, arrested Muradli, a presenter for the popular online broadcaster Kanal 13, on charges of minor hooliganism and disobeying police orders. Later the same day, the Khatai District Court in Baku sentenced him to 30 days’ detention on those charges, according to news reports and a copy of the court verdict reviewed by CPJ.

Muradli denies the charges, Kanal 13 chief editor Anar Orujov told CPJ. Orujov said the allegations against the journalist are “absolutely not credible” and are a part of Azerbaijani authorities’ ongoing crackdown against Kanal 13 and other independent media.

Muradli’s detention came four days after authorities ordered Kanal 13 director Aziz Orujov, who is Anar’s brother, to be held in pretrial detention for three months on charges of illegal construction, which his lawyer said were in retaliation for his journalism. Four members of anti-corruption investigative outlet Abzas Media have been detained on financial crime accusations since November 20.

“The sixth Azerbaijani journalist arrested in less than two weeks, Rufat Muradli appears to have been sentenced on charges every bit as spurious and pretextual as those facing his colleagues,” said CPJ Program Director Carlos Martínez de la Serna in New York. “Azerbaijani authorities should release Muradli and the other unjustly jailed journalists immediately and stop their crackdown on independent reporting.”

According to the court verdict, two police officers approached Muradli just after midday on a street in Baku’s Khatai district because he was “shouting obscenities.” When police “called him to order,” the journalist “did not obey,” so the officers arrested him. The verdict did not provide any additional detail.

An associate of Muradli told regional outlet Caucasian Knot that Muradli had dropped him and two other individuals off outside a café, saying he would park the car and meet them inside, but he never returned. Muradli’s lawyer quoted the journalist as saying that police arrested him in the car park without explanation. The court convicted Muradli “effectively without a hearing” and did not allow the defense to speak, his lawyer told Caucasian Knot.

Azerbaijani authorities commonly use trumped-up charges of hooliganism against government critics, according to rights organizations, including in numerous cases involving journalists. In February, photojournalist Vali Shukurzade was sentenced to 30 days in jail on charges of hooliganism and disobeying police orders, which his lawyer said were fabricated.

Muradli is also a deputy chairman of the unregistered Azerbaijan Democracy and Prosperity Party, whose chairman, Gubad Ibadoghlu, has been detained since July on charges widely criticized as politically motivated. However, Orujov told CPJ the timing of Muradli’s arrest amid a wave of journalist detentions, including Kanal 13’s director, strongly suggests it is related to his journalism. Orujov said Muradli is well-known as the presenter of Kanal 13’s political show on its Azerbaijani-language YouTube channel, which has more than 400,000 subscribers.

Separately, on Monday, police in Azerbaijan’s southwestern city of Lankaran detained Shahla Karim and Aytaj Mammadli, freelance reporters on assignment with U.S. Congress-funded broadcaster Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, while they were conducting street interviews, on the grounds that the pair lacked press IDs, according to news reports and Karim, who spoke to CPJ. Karim said police deleted video footage from Mammadli’s cell phone and attempted to delete footage on Karim’s camera storage card, but stopped and returned her storage card when she called the press service of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Police released both journalists after about an hour and a half.

CPJ emailed the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Ministry of Justice for comment but did not immediately receive any replies.

This content originally appeared on Committee to Protect Journalists and was authored by Committee to Protect Journalists.

Orientation

How long has capitalism existed? Has it always been with us all the way back to tribal societies or is it a product of the modern age? Is there any pattern to its evolution? Is it cyclic,  spiral-like  or random? What is the nature of capitalist crises? Why does capitalism grow flush in certain parts of the world, die out in others and yet seemingly reignite itself in another part of the world? What can world-systems theory tell us about the current battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists of China, Russia and Iran?

What is capitalism?

Capitalism is a historical economic system that arose in Europe in the 15^th century.  Over a 600-year period its leading hegemons were first the Italian city-states of Genoa and Venice. In the 17^th century these city-states were superseded by the Netherlands. The British overtook the Dutch in the 18^th century and the United States crowded out the British well before World War I. Capitalism is characterized by a law-enforced right of private property (as opposed to state or community ownership) in the areas of:

• raw materials (land)
• means of production (tools and methods of harnessing energy)
• labor (who uses the tools and the methods of harnessing energy to work on raw materials)
• commodities (finished products and services)
• money which is transformed into capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives
• power settings in which decisions about the economy are made (political settings). These include The National Association of Manufacturers and The Business Round Table. Internationally the Council of Foreign Relations, the World Economic Forum and the G7 are examples.

The purpose of capitalism is to make a profit which is unlimited in scope, protected by law, and if necessary, by the military. According to world-systems theorist Immanuel Wallerstein capitalists derive their profits by two processes:

• broadening its reach, colonizing the periphery counties for its natural resources, inducing it to produce a single cash crop while paying wages far below wages of the workers in the core countries.
• deepening its reach into core countries through increased commodification of previously uncommodified land and labor, automation, withdrawal of investment in military and finance capital

Trends in capitalism

Trends within capitalism over a 600-year period include:

• a tendency towards a concentration of capital
• a tendency to expand around the globe through transnational corporations
• a movement from scattered territories to larger territorial control
• phases in investing in merchant, agricultural (slavery), industrial, military and finance capital which become cycles
• these become Kondratieff waves of expansion and contraction which occur every 55 years.
• the end of a cycle is characterized by bifurcation points, crisis which occur at shorter and shorter intervals
• crises points fuel increasing anti-systemic opposition
• capitalist crises which accumulate to produce both the possibility of abundance, shorter work week and an accumulation of crisis of unresolved problems of previous cycles including ecological devastation
• greater variety of resources

Where are we headed?

I begin my article by comparing world-systems theory to modernization theory across seven categories.  Next, I compare the characteristics of the three zones in world-systems theory – core, periphery and semi-periphery. While we can imagine capitalism over a 600-year period as a movie, we also want to take “snapshots” of the world-system on four separate occasions. Probably the most important part of the article is in describing Giovanni Arrighi’s cycles and spirals of capitalism over the last 600 years up to the close of the 20^th century. In the last section in the piece I identify all the revolutionary changes that are happening to the 21^st century world-system. The battle between the Anglo-American empire and the multipolarists will be framed from a world-systems perspective.

What is World-systems Theory?

In the 1950s, political science and international relations was dominated by an anti-communist “modernization theory”. In the 1960s the conservativism of modernization theory was first challenged by something called “dependency theory” led by Andre Gunder Frank and later by the “world-systems theory” of Immanuel Wallerstein. World-system theories were socialist but they were critical of the state socialism of Russia, China and Cuba. They argued that those countries were state capitalist. They strove to apply Marx’s theory of capitalism to the whole world as opposed to just single nation states as many Marx did. They challenged Lenin’s theory of imperialism as the last stage of capitalism as being too linear. In their perspective, imperialism is part of the end of each of the four cycles and was common for the Italians, the Dutch, the English and now the Yankees.

World-systems theory was criticized by more traditional Marxists like Robert Brenner because he felt they did not emphasize enough the class struggle within nation states. World-systems theory seemed to be more interested in the political economy of the dynamics of three zones (core countries, peripheral countries and the semi-peripheral countries) rather than the class struggle within each zone.  I’ll discuss these zones in detail shortly.

Modernization Theory vs World-systems theory

Are nation-states primarily independent or interdependent?

For modernization theory, nation states are independent and internally driven. The responsibility for their past, present and future direction is strictly determined by their foreign policy. In world-systems theory, nation-states are subordinate to an international system of capitalism and have only relative control over their foreign policy.

Therefore, modernization theorists would look at poor countries in the world (what world-systems theory might call the periphery) and say their poverty was due to a failure to build modern institutions such as science or capitalism. They are dismissed as irrational tribalists marred by superstition. World-systems theorists would say countries on the world periphery are poor because they have been colonized and exploited by the core countries. Because nation-states are understood to be autonomous, capitalists are thought to be loyal patriotic servants of their nation-states. For world-systems theorists, capitalists are the most unpatriotic class of all. They are committed to making profits anywhere in the world. They will feign patriotism when they need foot soldiers to fight wars against other capitalist countries but otherwise they have no loyalties.

What is the relationship between politics and economics?

For modernization theorists’, politics and economics are separate. As you can well see, throughout the 1950s and even after modernization theory was criticized in the 1960s in political science classes, economics was never a serious part of a discussion. It would be like saying political meetings in Congress are strictly determined by the political ideologies of liberalism or conservatism. Money has no part in it. At the same time, the teachers of economics courses act like capitalist economics has no political dimension. This would be like saying the economic decisions of transnational corporations would not be influenced by political turmoil or a revolution in a periphery country in which they had large investments. Speaking internationally, for modernization theory, all wars are about political ideology.

For world-systems theorists, there is only political economy. All economics is political and all political acts have economic aspects to it. For world-systems theory, wars have mostly to do with battles over natural resources. They also can be political but when a socialist country gains power in a war the trade relations become more unfavorable for capitalists.

How is social evolution understood?

Modernization theories imagine social evolution as progress. They say there is something inherently progressive about Western societies that older civilizations such as China and India lack. The wealth produced by capitalist societies is distributed somewhat unevenly because some people work harder than others. All roads in social evolution lead to the West with the pinnacle being Western Europe and the United States. Progress is linear, and modernization theory imagines that tribal societies are just dying to be modernized, blaming themselves for their situation. Modernization theory fails to account for complex societies’ disintegration and going backward (Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies) or Jared Diamond (Why Societies Collapse). Even when socialist societies are industrialized they are not considered modern because state control over the economy and one-party rule lack democracy.

World-systems theory argue that progress in the history of human society has been uneven. They are willing to admit that the egalitarian nature of hunter-gatherers is admirable. They are well aware that an increase in the productive forces through technology, in fact, leads to more work for the lower classes rather than less. While world-systems theory acknowledges the benefits of science and some of the wealth produced by capitalism, it also points out the exploitation and misery it produces for working-class people as a result of class stratification.

Rate and type of change

Generally speaking, modernization theory understands the rate of social change to be gradual, evolutionary and relatively harmonious across social classes. For world-systems theory, like all Marxist theories, political and economic change is sudden, discontinuous, filled with conflict and driven by class struggle. For modernization theory instabilities are temporary and part of “business cycles” which settle back down into equilibrium and homeostasis. For world system theory, capitalist crisis is no static equilibrium model. Capitalism today will turn into a terminal crisis from which it will not recover. Whether it is the tendency of the rate or profit to fall, profit squeeze theory or under-consumption theory, the days of capitalism are numbered.

While for modernization theory all roads start and end in Western Europe and the United States, for world-systems theorists, modernization may have begun in Europe, but it by no means is it likely to stay there. As we can see today, the world-system is shifting operations to China, the new center of the world-economy.

Attitudes towards socialism

As I mentioned before, modernization theorists are anti-communist. The only socialism for modernization theorists is Stalinism. Even when socialist societies industrialize, modernization theorists deny they are a modern system, because they lack bourgeois rights and a two-party system. They see socialist societies as some kind of throwback to Karl Wittfogel’s Orientation Despotism. While world-systems theorists essentially call themselves socialist, they criticize Stalinism as state capitalist, and Cuba and China as bureaucratic states. They look more favorably to Nordic evolutionary socialism, especially Sweden in the 20^th century up to around 1980.

Modernization theory understands capitalism and socialism as two separate systems. It imagines the rebellions of the 1960s as rebellions against socialist regimentation. It has been difficult for them to explain why an entire generation would rebel against the fleshpots of capitalist modernization in Western Europe and the United States. On the other hand, world-systems theorists understand that the existing socialist countries, including the state socialist countries, are part of a broad anti-systemic movement against capitalism which includes the various Leninist parties, social democrats and anarchists.

For modernization theorists’ socialism has been tried and failed. Case closed. They would support Fukuyama’s claim that after the fall of the Soviet Union, history is over and capitalism has won. “Not so fast” say world-systems theorists. Capitalism is 500 years old and has only achieved economic and political dominance in the 19^th century. Socialism is about 170 years old. It is too soon to tell whether socialism is a realistic alternative.

Place and misplace of foreign aid

For modernization theorists aid to poor or peripheral countries may be driven by a combination of self-interest at worst, and at best creating win-win situations. Foreign aid is given in the hopes that with the help of the West poor countries will industrialize, shed their backward ways and become competitive partners. For world- systems theorists the relation between core and peripheral countries is not neutral but imperialistic. Rich countries exploit poor countries for their land and labor and turn them into one crop-producing colonies. As Andre Gunder Frank quipped, the core countries underdeveloped the peripheral countries. Furthermore, world capitalist banks like the World Bank or the IMF do not give loans that will enable peripheral countries to build scientific institutions along with engineers. One reason is because scientists and engineers may discover new resources that might undermine the resources of core countries such as oil. This is one reason why fundamentalist religious institutions always seem to grow in peripheral countries because they are of no threat to capitalism. The CIA always finds money for them.

Theoreticians

As I’ve said, modernization theorists were most prevalent in the 1950s. They included Walt Rostow and Lucian Pye. Daniel Lerner specialized in telling the story of how tribal societies got on the road to modernization. Samuel Huntington is more contemporary with works like The Clash of Civilizations along with Francis Fukuyama, with his book The End of History.

Early world-systems theorists were Oliver Cox who looked at race and caste from an international perspective. Immanuel Wallerstein provided a foundation for world-systems theories, drawing on the work of Fernand Braudel. Christopher Chase-Dunn and Tom Hall extended a world-systems perspective all the way back to tribal societies. Giovanni Arrighi took a deep look at the history of capitalism (to be covered shortly) and Samir Amin has been a kind of watchdog always trying to keep world-systems theory from being too Eurocentric. Beverly Silver made a study of workers movements from a world-systems perspective. Lastly Christopher Chase Dunn and Terry Boswell located the history of workers’ movements over a 600-year period of capitalism, not as isolated in nation-states (as traditional Marxists have done) but as part of the dark side of the cycles and spirals of capitalism.

Characteristics of the Three Zones

In world-systems theory, there are three regions of the world — the core, the periphery and the semi periphery. In the 20^th century the core countries were the wealthy countries of Yankeedom, Western Europe and Japan. The Scandinavian countries are cases of successful state-capitalism. Most of the periphery countries were the heavily colonialized states of Africa. In the semi-periphery were Russia, China, Eastern Europe, most of Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Economics and politics

Contrary to what Marx predicted, there are no countries in the core of the world- system that are socialist. In the semi-periphery there has arisen both capitalist and state socialist societies. Most of the periphery countries are operating with a combination of tribal or state redistributive system combined with exploited low wage workers at the beck-and-call of imperialists in the core.  In terms of political power, core countries have developed their own bourgeois representative systems without any political pressure outside the core. Peripheral countries have the least political power. Many of the core countries have installed dictatorships there in the hopes of controlling peripheral economies. Home-grown leaders of peripheral countries are often anti-imperialist revolutionaries agitating to overthrow imperialism in their country.

Countries in the semi-periphery have a moderate degree of autonomous political power but their elections are closely watched by the deep state in core societies because they have more technological self-rule and could get out of control. In state socialist countries, political power is highly concentrated at the top. Socialist societies cannot afford to have many political parties. Those smaller parties are subject to manipulation by the deep state within core countries which works to overthrow socialism. Because peripheral countries have been exploited by imperialism they are poor. World capitalist banks offer loans at interest rates so high that it is rare for peripheral countries to get out of debt. The loans received from these banks are only for raw materials and for cash crop agriculture. No loans are made for education or building infrastructures.

Energy bases, commodities and wages

The energy bases of core countries are electronic-industrial. The semi-periphery countries are industrial-agricultural while in the periphery they are mostly agricultural or horticulture in the sub-Sahara Africa. The technology in the core countries draws on inanimate sources of energy and machine-based. In the periphery, work is labor intensive using mostly animal and wind power. In the semi-periphery capitalists implement hand-me-down machines from core countries. As might be expected, wages are highest in core countries because unions have been institutionalized. In the periphery, because there is very little industry, there are no unions and it is here where wages are lowest. Typically, workers might work part-time in industry, also working in garment industry, as water carriers, day laborers with some cash crop planting. In the semi-periphery there is some unionization and in state-socialist societies wages might be good.

Commodities and economic policy: free trade vs protective tariffs

Because of their colonial relations with the periphery core counties import raw materials cheaply and export manufactured goods, which are more expensive. In peripheral countries, they export raw materials, mostly cash crops and import goods from the West at higher prices, keeping them in a dependent relationship.

The economic policy of the core countries is “free trade” which, of course, is not free but gives them a license to go wherever they want, exploiting land and labor where there is little or no resistance. Countries in the semi-periphery, when driven by their population or the vision of their leaders, may adopt protective tariffs in the hopes of protecting the growth of their home industries. On the periphery, the economic policy is forced free trade with colonialists. Often one of the major efforts in peripheral liberation movements is to elect leaders who follow protective tariffs to attempt to build up home industries. Semi-periphery countries are somewhat dependent on core countries but they in turn also exploit the periphery to a less extent. These semi-periphery countries use their surplus to invest more in their domestic economy. They export peripheral-like goods to the core and export core goods to the periphery.

Class, race, ethnic and regional conflicts

For most of the 20^th century in the core countries the conflicts between groups were class conflicts and in the United States, race conflicts. However, regional conflicts still smolder in Yankeedom between North and South. In Europe regional loyalties smolder in Spain, Northern Ireland, Belgium among others. The semi-periphery has similar class and regional problems. The periphery is torn apart between tribal loyalties and loyalties to the newly formed states which were once part of national liberation movements.

Role of the military

Lastly, we turn to the role of the military. After two world wars over colonies, core states have agreed not to attack each other and the military is rarely involved in its domestic politics. The military of core countries is mostly employed in attempting to control the political life in the semi-periphery and the periphery. The military in semi-periphery countries is more volatile because core countries are concerned about the domestic policies there since these countries have the resource base – the science and engineers – to undermine the resource base of the core. The military in the semi-periphery gets involved, either as right-wing dictators or to bring in a left-wing military leader such as Hugo Chavez. The most direct military involvement is in the periphery because colonialists want to maintain control of the cheap land and labor they exploit. The military also tries to impose order in clashes within the domestic population between tribes, ethnic groups and state loyalists.

Snapshots of the History of the World-system

In his book An Introduction to the World-system perspective, Thomas Shannon introduces four “snapshots” (maps) of the world-system:

• world-system from 1450-1620 (merchant capital)
• world-system in 1763 (agricultural, slave capitalism)
• world-system in 1900 (industrialization)
• the contemporary world system in 20^th century (finance capital, electronics)

What might be confusing is that the world-system, though it has the “world’ in it, does not mean it is a global society. For most of the history of world-system, the core, periphery and semi periphery only covered part of the globe. The fact is in the world system of 1450-1620 most of the world system was concentrated in Europe – Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France and England. The periphery consisted of the Scandinavian countries and central and South America. The United States was not even in the world-system while Russia, China and India were part of agricultural empires.

In the 1763 snapshot, the core countries are Great Britain and  France, with the Netherlands, Spain and Portugal slipping into minor core status. The semi-periphery then consisted of the North Italian city-states and Prussia. Thanks to colonialization by the British, the United States and West Africa were now on the periphery of the world system. Poland and Russia were now in the periphery. China and India were still outside the world system.

By 1900 Great Britain and France remained as core countries but they were now joined by late developing Germany and the United States.  By 1900 most of the globe was now in the world-system, with Russia moving to the semi-periphery and China now on the periphery. This was the age of colonialism as all of Africa, China and South America were on the world capitalist periphery.

By the 20^th century the world-system was rocked by two world wars which hollowed out Europe and reduced them to minor core status. The rise of Japan in the late 19^th century and early 20^th century catapulted it into core status. The first three quarters of the 20^th century were the time of Yankeedom. The 20^th century saw the emergence of the first socialist states in Russia, China and Cuba. Russia maintained its semi-peripheral status while Cuba and China continued to be poor and in the periphery of the world-system.

Capitalist Cycles and Their Leading Hegemons

In 1994 Giovanni Arrighi wrote a great book with a bad title, The Long 20^th Century.

The heart of the book is the tracing of the history of capitalism through four cycles. Instead of looking at capitalism as a linear line moving from merchant capitalism to agricultural capitalism, to industrial, to finance capitalism and imperialism, Arrighi analyzed capitalism as a series of four cycles which played themselves out through leading hegemons throughout Europe. Through each cycle there were mercantile, agricultural, industrial and financial phases, but they weren’t all of the same weight.

Italian city-states

For example, the first place the cycles occurred were in the city-states of Genoa and Venice between 1450 and 1640. They made profits based on merchant capital through trading. Being city states, they didn’t make much profit on agriculture and what industry existed was small. However, when their profits were made on finance and wars, that was the end of their power. As we shall see throughout all hegemon rulers, when profits are made on war and finance they are on their way out.

Dutch sea trade

After the Italian wars and the discovery of new trade routes West, the Italian city-states lost their core status. Dutch sea power arose in the 17^th century. Again, the Dutch profits were based on merchant trade but trade on a much larger scale than the Italians. They were led by East Indian and West Indian monopoly companies. There were at least five reasons the Dutch superseded Genoa and Venice.

• scale of operation – the Dutch had greater commercial and financial networks
• financial base of the Dutch monopoly companies are less vulnerable to competing trade countries
• Dutch interest clashed more dramatically with central authorities of medieval world. This drove them to be more independent from religion
• Dutch war-making was superior
• the Dutch had greater state-making capacity

The end of the line for the Dutch was also when money houses became a greater source of profit than trade. Dutch hegemony ended in wars with the English beginning in 1781. England was also a great sea power at this time and were also better colonizers than the Dutch.

The sun never sets on the British empire

The secret to British hegemony in the 19^th century was the industrial revolution. Here profits were made rebuilding cities with railroads and textile factories. While Britain made profits on trade (merchant capital), while it derived profits from cash crops and slavery (agricultural capital), what made it distinct was the industrial revolution and the harnessing of coal and steam. For Britain the end came towards the end of the 19^th century when it shifted its wealth from industry to finance, The British empire was with the wars over colonies with Germany, Italy and Japan.

The American century 1870-1970

The United States made profits off its sea power and its planters made profits on agricultural slavery working with the British. But its greatest profits derived from industry. By the second half of the 19^th century the United States became an industrial powerhouse, competing directly with the British. Besides coal, the oil Barons made a fortune on the railroads in this ascendent phase of capitalism. In the two world wars that followed, the United States became the only core country standing. After World War II it was the sole core power. Between 1948-1970 it peaked.

However, in the 19^th and 20^th centuries capitalist countries were racked by depressions in 1837, 1873 and 1896 and then the Great Depression of 1929-1939. Capitalists in the United States noticed that it was investment in military arms that got the US capitalist economy out of the depression more than Roosevelt’s programs. After World War II, the defense industry became an ongoing investment even in peace-time. Then it began to sell arms around the world to fight communism.

Lastly, investing in finance capital – stocks, bonds and derivatives – gave quicker turn-around profits than investing in industry. Once Japan and Germany had recovered from World War II, the United States faced real competition. Instead of investing in infrastructures, it invested in finance capital. Instead of investing in its workers, it pulled industries out of the United States and relocated in peripheral countries where land and labor were cheap. This was the beginning of the end. So began a 50-year decline.

Trends in the History of Capitalism

From investing in the physical economy to investment in finance

In describing these trends as a whole, Arrighi takes some liberties with Marx’s C-M-C; M-C-M formula. He says that in the ascendant phase of capitalism the M-C moment of capitalism is pronounced. That means that money is invested in commodities, trade, production and expansion. Money is invested in solid material. When a hegemon’s days are numbered C-M commodities are invested in money, the capitalist economy is contracting and capital is invested in finance capital, profits made on stocks and bonds can easily be moved around (liquidity).

Shortening of cycles

The four cycles Arrighi analyzes are not evenly distributed in time across the hegemons. The pace of rise and fall speeds up. The rise and fall of the Italian city-states was 220 years; the United Dutch provinces lasted 180 years; the British heyday lasted 130 years and the United States 100 years from 1873-1973. Meanwhile the cycles do not just end and resume again without accumulating consequences.

Some twentieth century trends

• artificial intelligence which has the potential to shorten the work week
• the opportunity to live longer – thanks to science
• the chance to colonize space
• an increase in rebellion over the centuries including the rise of socialism in the second half of the 19^th century among workers and peasants
• the impact of ecology with increasing pollution and severe weather
• the deterioration of health due to genetically modified foods and pharmaceutical drugs.

Revolution in the World-system in the 21^st Century

Rise of an alliance between semi-periphery countries

When the Soviet Union collapsed around 1990 it looked as if, despite its declining power, Yankeedom would continue to be the hegemon into the 21^st century. But a funny thing happened in the first two decades of the 20^th century. One was the rise of nationalism in Russia under Putin. The other was the emergence of a powerhouse economy in China. This was predicted  by Arrighi in his later book Adam Smith in Beijing and Andre Gunder Frank’s book ReORIENT.

From a world-systems perspective, the rise of a semi-peripheral country like China is no surprise, as world-systems theory has always argued that the semi-periphery countries have the most revolutionary potential. This is because they are wealthy enough to support scientists and engineers who potentially can produce an economic policy separate from the core countries. What seems unprecedented is the alliance of two semi-peripheral countries (Russia and China) with a deep alliance which cuts across military and economic cooperation.

In fact, the rise of BRICS as a challenge to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund is noteworthy because virtually every country in BRICS is a semi-peripheral country. The multipolar world is composed of semi-peripheral countries unified by the New Silk Road. Furthermore, if China continues to grow the way it has been, in the next twenty years it will become the first core country since the beginnings of capitalism not located in the West. Secondly, under the leadership of the Communist Party and state-owned enterprises, China clearly has a socialist end in mind. It would be the first time a core country in the world-system was socialist. Third, China has not pressured Russia, Iran or any country in the multipolar orbit to become socialist. So whatever political and economic tensions might develop in the multipolar world, it is not likely to be the old capitalism vs socialism battle.

The United States and Europe

In the new multipolar world-system, the United States will sink to the status of a semi-peripheral country because its capitalists will not invest in rebuilding its abandoned infrastructure. It is likely to live on as a home of finance capitalists giving loans to other decimated capitalists countries or in supplying military arms to countries which have not joined in the multipolar world. These lost countries could be in South or Central America or in Middle Eastern countries which are not part of the Belt Road initiative.

Europe has been vassal of the United States for 80 years. Up until the last couple of years, Germany was the only European country which was an industrial powerhouse. But this has changed since the US has insisted that Europe abide by its sanctions of Russia. There is not a single European county with the exception of Hungary that has stood up to the United States. As the United States continues its decent from core to semi-periphery, Europe will follow with England being the weakest country. Once it slowly dawns on the European rulers that Yankeedom will not save them, they may attempt to make back-room deals with Russia and China in terms of natural gas and other sources of energy. It might be that in the next 50 years the old European core countries may regain their balance and occupy a semi-peripheral status in the new multipolar system.

The Middle East and South America

To the extent that China can diplomatically integrate Saudi Arabia and Iran and the Middle Eastern countries with oil, they will remain in the semi-periphery of the world’s new multipolar system. Expect Israel to degenerate as Mordor will be less able to help them and they will be surrounded by hostile Arab states with scores to settle. In South America Argentina and Chile will join Brazil in the semi-periphery. Venezuela will finally be spared from Mordor’s intervention and be protected by China as a fellow socialist society.

Global South

The refusal of African states to do the bidding of Mordor against Russia speaks volumes for the end of their hopes to ever get a fair deal from the United States or its financial institutions. There has been an openness to project proposals from China and Russia for building railroads and schools. Some African states like Nigeria or Sudan might, over the course of a generation, build their countries up to a semi-periphery status the way Libya was when Gaddafi was in power.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bruce Lerro.

One must not be harsh, as one can assume that to not declare an unwavering patriotism would put these independent speakers at risk of a harsh backlash.

I admire Ritter and MacGregor for their independent streak. (I also appreciate the analysis of former US marine Brian Berletic who does not engage in rah-rah for the United States, but then he is an ex-pat).

Of course, that an ex-military man can provide excellent military analysis does not mean that views expressed outside one’s bailiwick are equally profound. Such views may even be deserving of criticism or censure.

In a recent video, MacGregor is interviewed by Stephen Gardner (who displays a large Star and Stripes in the background). MacGregor imparts a perspective that is at odds with that trotted out by his government and the US monopoly media concerning warring in Ukraine.

However, a final question that Gardner posed to MacGregor was rather revealing in a very negative light.

Gardner tendentiously asks (around 29:25), “You mentioned that the humane thing would be for the United States to step in and say this war is over; let’s be done. Don’t you feel like China is trying to fill that vacuum, where they are now saying, ‘Oh Saudi Arabia and Iran, there’s a lot of money to be made, let’s broker peace. Russia, Ukraine, hey, the United States is not going to step in; we are going to step in and broker peace.’ Is this one more way for China to try to eclipse the United States on the world stage?”

What basis does Garner have for posing such a loaded question? Gardner ascribes selfish motives to China’s seeking to broker peace. One assumes that making war is preferable in Garner’s estimation. When has China ever boasted that it aspires to eclipse any country or be top dog? China eschews hegemony, and it consistently states its preference for a multipolar world, a world of peace, and developing win-win relationships with countries. Africans, long pillaged by Europeans and the Anglo diaspora, know this well.

MacGregor responded well, at first, “Well, first of all, I do not subscribe to the view that China wants to eclipse us.” Fine, but this was immediately and emphatically followed by: “They know they can’t.” This comes across as chest thumping, USA, USA, USA, from a former military man.

This is followed by a several assertions: “They [China] have serious problems internally, as well.” He opines that China “is too big to do more than it has already done.” He asserts that China’s chairman Xi Jinping wakes everyday wondering how to hold the country together. He does not cite one example to substantiate what he says. Under Xi, China eliminated extreme poverty and it is on the path to moderate prosperity. If only the US could come close to such monumental achievements for its citizenry. China is forging ties with nations from around the world with its Belt and Road initiative. This is what Xi thinks about each day – not the nonsense MacGregor espouses.

Most disturbingly, MacGregor reveals himself in the video to be a Sinophobe by making all kinds of wild racist assertions; e.g., (at 32:14) “No one in central Asia trusts the Chinese; no one in Asia beyond the China’s borders trusts the Chinese [followed by snickering].”

“People… are all very concerned about the Chinese… the Chinese do what they have always done, if you leave it on the table, they’ll steal it. That’s what they do; they’ve been doing it for thousands of years.”

Now replace the word “Chinese” with “Jews” and imagine the torrent of outrage that would flow in the West.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

While blasting the White House's proposed $886 billion in military spending as "madness," progressives on Thursday also praised portions of U.S. President Joe Biden's fiscal year 2024 budget for sizable social investments that could lead to "broader opportunity, greater economic and health security, lower levels of hardship, and a nation where everyone can thrive."

"No one in the White House seriously believes that Congress will adopt it in its current form," Politiconoted of Biden's blueprint. "It's a messaging exercise. And as such, the White House sees no downside whatsoever to throwing out things that will never pass the Republican-controlled House. The fight is the point."

Still, the scope of the budget—which includes significant funding for the climate, childcare, democracy, education, healthcare, housing, violence prevention, and more, made possible in part through tax hikes for wealthy individuals and corporations—was celebrated by the likes of Sharon Parrott, president of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP).

"President Biden's budget is driven by what we know works: investments in the people who keep our economy running."

"President Biden's 2024 budget invests in people and communities and creates a 21st century tax system that supports these investments to build toward an economy that works for everyone," Parrott said. "It lays out an agenda that would move us closer to a nation where everyone—regardless of their background, identities, or where they live—has the resources they need to thrive and share in the nation's prosperity."

Erica Payne, the founder and pesident of the Patriotic Millionaires, declared that "President Biden's proposed budget is the most ambitious tax plan we've seen from a president in decades—and a clear emphasis of the values that he and the Democrats stand for: investing in our country, fighting off corporate profiteering, protecting the social safety net, and doing so all while reducing our nation's budget deficit."

"The wealthiest Americans and corporations can easily afford to pay more—and hundreds of patriotic millionaires and billionaires are ready and eager to do their part to make sure all Americans can thrive," Payne added. "Let's be clear: As President Biden's budget lays out—we can invest in America, expand the social safety net, fight income inequality, and do it all while lowering taxes for working people—if we simply require the wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share."

The president's proposals to help American families include expanding the child tax credit from $2,000 per kid to $3,000 for those ages six and above, and to $3,600 for children under six; enabling states to increase childcare options for millions of kids; and funding a federal-state partnership that provides high-quality, universal, free preschool.

The budget also calls for boosting prevention services to reduce the number of children entering foster care as well as changes to the adoption tax credit to better serve families with lower incomes and those who choose legal guardianship.

Biden advocates for $59 billion in funding and tax incentives to increase the affordable housing supply; $10 billion to remove barriers to affordable housing developments; and $10 billion to address racial and ethnic homeownership and wealth gaps. The president proposes providing $4.1 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program—and allowing states to use some of that money to provide water bill assistance to poor households, since a related program expires at the end of 2023.

Along with fighting for billions of dollars to ease hunger, the administration aims to pour money into high-poverty school districts as well as improve the affordability of higher education by increasing the discretionary maximum Pell Grant by $500, expanding free community college, and subsidizing tuition for students from families earning less than $125,000 enrolled historically Black, tribally controlled, or minority-serving institutions.

"Time and again, President Joe Biden delivers on his promise to fight for American families, his commitment to fairness for all Americans, and his belief that everyone should have the freedom and opportunity to build a better life. This budget reflects those priorities and values by helping people continue to rebuild," said American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, who highlighted various proposed investments in education and major federal programs.

In terms of healthcare, Biden pushes for putting billions of dollars into tackling cancer, increasing funds for veterans exposed to environmental hazards, and providing $471 million for reducing maternal mortality and morbidity rates, especially among Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native women. He also wants to expand coverage of mental health benefits and make historic investments in the behavioral health workforce.

The president advocates for making healthcare premium cuts permanent and providing Medicaid-like coverage to individuals in states that have not expanded their programs under the Affordable Care Act. There are also provisions to cut prescription drug costs, improve Medicaid home and community-based services, and expand the National Health Service Corps as well as programs that train and support nurses.

Biden would also extend the solvency of the Medicare trust fund by at least 25 years. In addition to investing in Social Security Administration staff, a White House fact sheet says that the Biden administration "looks forward to working with the Congress to responsibly strengthen Social Security by ensuring that high-income individuals pay their fair share."

Max Richtman, president and CEO of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, said that "while the conservatives' approach is to 'cut, cut, cut!' earned benefits for future generations of retirees, President Biden's budget would fortify Medicare for the future by asking the wealthy to pay their fair share."

"Instead of 'kicking the can down the road' as some previous administrations and Congresses have done, the president's budget confronts the trust fund shortfall head-on—without burdening beneficiaries," Richtman continued. "In a society with massive wealth inequality, the wealthy can afford to pay a little more. Future seniors cannot afford benefit cuts."

While welcoming Biden's efforts to protect Medicare, Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of Public Citizen, also suggested that "looking ahead, the administration should crack down on Medicare Advantage plans that profit by cherry-picking healthy seniors and restricting care for enrollees; expand dental, vision, and hearing benefits for Medicare enrollees; work with Congress to cap out-of-pocket expenses for seniors; and take a bolder stand against Big Pharma greed by expanding drug price negotiation to bring down the prices of more drugs sooner and cover all Americans, not just people on Medicare."

On the climate front, the budget proposes spending $4.5 billion on clean energy, $16.5 billion on climate science and clean energy innovation, and over $24 billion on conservation and to help build communities' resilience to devastating storms, drought, extreme heat, floods, and wildfires. The administration also pushes for investing nearly $2 billion in environmental justice efforts.

A coalition of over a dozen green groups stressed in a joint statement Thursday that "as our country deals with inflation, high energy prices, public health crises, biodiversity loss, and climate change, it is now more important than ever that Congress fully funds the agencies responsible for addressing these critical issues."

Varshini Prakash, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, said that "President Biden's proposed budget—especially its investments in clean energy, jobs, and an end to oil and gas subsidies—is the kind of thing young people in this country want to see ahead of 2024."

"But President Biden has the power to act on climate and issues important to our generation without having to go through a Republican House," she noted. "He can reject the Willow Project, which goes against his own agenda to stop the climate crisis, and can do everything in his executive authority, like declaring a climate emergency and invoking the Defense Production Act, to jump-start our transition to clean energy."

Given the current conditions in Congress—with Republicans controlling the House and a Senate where the president's agenda is often thwarted by not only the GOP but also right-wing Democrats and a new Independent—Biden is certainly in for a battle.

That's especially the case considering that, as CBPP's Parrott noted, "the president's budget priorities stand in stark contrast with the emerging House Republican agenda—an agenda that pushes more tax cuts for the wealthy and profitable corporations, and holds the economy hostage by demanding deep spending cuts in areas like K-12 schools, healthcare, medical research, college tuition help, and help buying groceries as the price for raising the debt limit."

"Taken together, this emerging agenda would increase hardship and narrow access to opportunity; widen already large differences in outcomes by race, ethnicity, and geography; and hurt the country as a whole," Parrott warned of GOP lawmakers' priorities.

ProsperUs coalition spokesperson Claire Guzdar argued that "President Biden's budget is driven by what we know works: investments in the people who keep our economy running. Lowering costs for families, strengthening Medicare and Social Security, and delivering investments in healthcare, housing, and climate are key to widespread prosperity and economic growth."

"President Biden must now fight to enact this budget and continue to reject dangerous calls for austerity and cuts to programs that strengthen our communities and our economy," Guzdar added.

A U.S. Senate Budget Committee hearing for the president's proposal is scheduled for the morning of March 15.

This content originally appeared on Common Dreams and was authored by Jessica Corbett.

Yellowknife, Boxing Day 2022

Can you imagine walking downtown in Seattle, Vancouver, New York, Toronto, or any other burg in Canada or the United States and not seeing any panhandlers? This homelessness, begging, and dumpster diving is not confined to major urban centers. Last week, I was in Yellowknife, the capital of Denedeh (Home of the People; colonially designated as Northwest Territories), home to about 20,000 souls, where the temperatures ranged from -30° Celsius to -40° Celsius. Despite this, the homeless were out in the frigid temperatures asking change for a cup of coffee. There are shelters in Yellowknife. The take-away point, however, is that some people struggle with penury despite Canada being a signatory to the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights whose preamble recognizes “the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family…”

Specifically, Article 23(1) of the UNDHR holds,

Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

Article 25(1) of the UNDHR states,

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.

If Canada and the US honored their signatures on the UNDHR and abided by its articles, then absolute poverty should not exist.

While poverty is an important story for people to be cognizant of, and while it may not receive the media coverage and government prioritization that it deserves, the marginalized story that so many people seem unaware of is that there is a country that made it through 2022 having lifted its citizenry out of absolute poverty.

China declared victory against poverty in 2021. And it is not just China lauding its victory. UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres commended China on its fight against poverty. The World Bank noted that China has lifted 770 million out of poverty over the last 40 years. Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, said, “Poverty alleviation and the eradication of extreme poverty, 10 years ahead of its target date, are tremendous achievements of China.” Citing China’s eradication of absolute poverty, even the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, was moved to praise China’s amazing economic development.

This achievement was by the nominally communist China. Being aware of the victory over poverty is great, but this awareness ought also to be kept in mind before unthinkingly criticizing socialism or communism. The intellectual poverty of the criticism is such that many people consider it sufficient to just remark, “That’s communism/socialism,” as if providing a label for a political-economic system should evoke fear and invalidate it. Thus, in the US, Barack Obama was risibly derided as a socialist; he, nonetheless, sought to distance himself from such a descriptor.

Donald Trump declared his scorn for the bugaboo of socialism (apparently ignorant of what spending on the military; police; border security; highway, airport, train stations, railways, port facilities, bridge construction and maintenance; education; etc represent) and communism. He unsuccessfully tried to paint his presidential challenger in 2020, Joe Biden, as a socialist (again risibly).

Even university professors, such a Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, would add their ill-contrived opinions to the anti-socialist, anti-communist chorus.¹

What Obama, Trump, Biden, Peterson, Justin Trudeau and other western-aligned personalities beholden to capitalism cannot tolerate is that a developing nation in the earliest stage of socialism (one with Chinese characteristics) has done something that the longtime capitalist-butt kissing nations have never, despite any lip service, come close to achieving: the elimination of absolute poverty.

What’s Next for Chinese Society?

China has identified a metric: “Human rights are an achievement of humanity and a symbol of progress.” Now China has set its eyes on achieving xiaokang (moderate prosperity), defined as “a status of moderate prosperity whereby people are neither rich nor poor but free from want and toil.” Xiaokang is to benefit all Chinese and benefit the world.

Meanwhile, the poor masses in capitalist countries languish while the middle classes, in the US and Canada, fall behind.

Why isn’t this war on poverty covered regularly and widely in capitalist media? Why doesn’t everyone know that the Chinese have conquered poverty and are embarked upon creating a prosperous society for all Chinese? Shouldn’t this be something all nations sincerely and actively aspire to?

1. See “Understanding the Red Menace,” “Understanding the Soviet Union, Inequality, and Freedom of Expression,” and “IQ, Equal Pay for Equal Work, Population Control, Mao, and Communism.”

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Kim Petersen.

We know that “Common prosperity” has been employed by many Chinese leaders since first used by Mao Zedong in the early 1950s and it appeared as slogan #38 in a series of 65 that were approved and listed in The People’s Daily on September 25, 1953. The slogan urged peasants to strive “for lives of common prosperity.” An article appeared in the People’s Daily on December 12,1953, titled “The Path of Socialism is the Path to Common Prosperity,” clarifying that common prosperity required collective ownership of the resources of production. The following was cited as the goal for Chinese farmers:

Therefore, the development of mutual aid and cooperatives can only avoid division among peasants and avoid the path of capitalism, but can also enable peasants to achieve common prosperity step by step and finally reach a socialist society.

Recall then, that in the 1970s and 1980s, Deng Xiaoping promoted reform and opening or gaige kaifeng and this meant “letting some get rich first” and others would be pulled along and enjoy common prosperity later. He said “from many aspects, right now we are merely implementing what Mao Zedong already put out, but unable to do himself.” In keeping with this admonition, Deng stressed that “the nature of socialism is to emancipate productive forces, develop productive forces, abolish exploitation, elimination, polarization and finally achieve common prosperity.” Continuity was there even though some Western China-watchers found it incongruous and chose to ignore it. In any event, Ken Hammond adroitly sums up three decades of reforms and opening to the outside as follows:

China had largely subordinated itself to the interests the global bourgeoisie, in order  to gain access to state- of-the-art productive technologies, and to accumulate capital through the production of export goods. The overall goal was to use mechanisms of the marketplace to develop the productive economy,with the CPC playing a guiding role and with the ultimate goal of reaching a level of social wealth which allows for the beginnings of new forms of social distribution, an initial step on the path to true socialism. ¹

Simultaneously, expanding material wealth through state capitalism generated major structural contradictions that have yet to be resolved. As GNP grew 9.3 percent per year from 1979-1994, China also became one of the the most unequal societies on earth. In both 2003 and again in 2007, the CPC seemed determined to modify this course. But in 2012, private companies accounted for 70 percent of China’s GNP and the top 20 percent of China’s population owned 70 percent of the total wealth.

n 2017, Xi said that that a new era of common prosperity had begun and those ”left behind” would make solid progress by 2035 and become part of a “great modern society 2050.“ Further, at that date, inequality should be “narrowed to a reasonable range” although the gaps have not been fleshed out. At the 2002 World Economic Forum, Xi spelled out that “The common prosperity we desire is not egalitarianism. To use an analogy, we will first make the pie bigger, and then divide it properly through reasonable institutional arrangements. As a rising tide lifts all boats, everyone will get a fair share of development, and development gains will benefit all our people in a more substantial and equitable way.” Beyond that, little was spelled out although Xi warned against ”slipping into the trap of welfarism that feeds the lazy.” ²

China has admirably succeeded in eradicating extreme poverty among impoverished rural residents although some 600 million people still live on $154 a month. For example, there is a major disparity between rural and urban areas. Further, China has 607 billionaires, secondly only to the United States. This is 87 fewer than last year and Forbes reports that China’s billionaires are some $500 billion poorer than last year and worth $1.96 trillion to $2.5 trillion in 2021.³  A series of regulatory reforms wiped out over $1 trillion in market value for Chinese-linked firms, mostly in the high-tech sector. It’s notable that outside investors are still looking for opportunities but shifting to the Chinese domestic business sector. For example, Goldman Sachs recently came up with a 50-stock ”common prosperity” basket, presumably connected to domestic needs and demands.

A recent program on CGTN, a news channel based in Beijing and controlled by the Chinese Communist Party, may help in further discerning the future. The show’s panelists opined that common prosperity was about providing a “level playing field” and opportunities for poor people to “get ahead.” Echoing Xi, it’s not about scaring rich people with a social engineering project that would retard growth and “create common poverty.” It’s not a Robin Hood scheme of “robbing the rich to give to the poor.” Another important component is “encouraging” philanthropy, including the provision of tax incentives for rich people to donate money to common prosperity fund. TenCent’s ponying up of 100 billion yuan was cited as an example. ⁴

Another possibly more explicit clue about the future occurred in August of last year: Li Guangman, a little-known blogger and retired editor of a marginal state-owned newspaper, wrote an incendiary essay on the need for radical reform in China. Li had authored over a thousand mostly ignored pieces but this one, entitled “Everyone Can Sense That A Profound Transformation Is Underway,” was quickly picked up and embraced by neo-Maoists and then by at least eight major Central Party state media sites, including The People’s Daily, Xinhua News Agency, and CCTV television broadcasting.

Li characterized the ongoing regulatory reforms as part of a “profound revolution” that “re-prioritizes socialism over capitalism.” After listing some of the punitive actions taken against tech executives and others, Li wrote “This change will wash away all the dust and the capital market will no longer be a paradise for capitalists to grow rich overnight. The red has returned, the heroes have returned, and the grit and valor have returned.” And then this seemingly ominous warning: “All those who block this people-centered change will be discarded.” I haven’t seen recent references to Li’s essay although I may have missed them. Was this a one-off by a frustrated, old school Maoist or a piece sanctioned by and/or coordinated by elements with the party for their own purposes? ⁵

In the past, when talk has arisen about income adjustments, pro-market types and liberals have come to the defense of markets and the need to reassure foreign investors who might be tempted to flee. It’s also reasonable to assume there are powerful and privileged elements within China, including higher levels within the party — those advantaged by inequality — who are opposed to Xi’s initiatives. Personally, I find it both baffling and dismaying that some “socialist friends of China” are quick to label anyone raising this subject as a China-basher, someone doing Washington’s dirty work. In response, this quote from Samir Amin in 2013 remains acutely on point:

…beginning in 1990 with the opening to private initiative, a new more powerful right began to make its appearance.  It should not be reduced to “businessmen” who have succeeded and made (sometimes colossal) fortunes, strengthened by their clientele — including state and party officials, who mix control with collusion, and even corruption. This success, as always, encourages support for rightist ideas in the educated middle classes. It is in this sense that growing inequality — even if it has nothing in common with inequality characteristic of other countries in the South — is a major political danger, the vehicle for the spread of rightist ideas, depoliticization and naive illusions.((Amin, op.cit.p. 28.))

How this plays out behind closed doors is impossible to detect although the outcome of the recent party congress would indicate a consensus regarding Xi’s position.

Further, I would be remiss not mention one important caveat regarding the challenging context for realizing Xi’s program: that is, the primary existential threat to China is U.S.-led imperialist aggression and Washington’s renewal of the Cold War. Emblematic of this behavior is Washington’s sanctions program which aims to use “choke points” to impede Chinese access to cutting edge chip capabilities. In his 2022 NPC report (not in the speech) Xi warned of external threats to “blackmail, contain, blockade, and exert maximum pressure on China.” The extent to which the need to prioritize national security may hobble progress toward realizing common prosperity cannot be discounted.

Finally, it’s indisputable that what China has achieved on the long road to a possible socialist future is nothing short of spectacular and my reading of the available evidence suggests that from Mao to Xi continuity exists in the quest for common prosperity. Today, Xi is determined to correct the contradictions arising from using state capitalism to accumulate sufficient social wealth. The praxis of liberation is a continuing struggle with an uncertain future but it’s reasonable to assume that serious efforts are underway to give further concrete meaning to social, economic and cultural “common prosperity.”

1. “Ten crises: The political economy of China’s development,” by Wen Tiejun, November 30, 2021, n.p.  Amin asserted that any society intent on liberating itself from historical capitalism and beginning the long journey to socialism/communism must pass through this preliminary phase. See Amin, Ibid. p. 20.
2. Chen Tong, “Decoding the Common Prosperity: What is China’s Common Prosperity? Why Zhejiang?” 05-September-2022.
3. Forbes, April 5, 2020.
4. “How to Understand ‘common prosperity’ of China, CGTN, August 21, 2021. CGTN produced a ten-part series on common prosperity. See, CGTN, Sneak Preview: Road to Common Prosperity, 28-August-2022.
5. A full translation can be found at Cindy Carter and Alex Yo, China Digital Times, August 21, 2021.For an on-going list of the crackdowns, see “Tracking all the…” China’s Red New Deal,” September 9, 2021.

This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gary Olson.

Background: Mega-ski resort owner POWDR Corp. recently purchased the historic Holland Lake Lodge in Montana in the Swan Valley, between the Bob Marshall Wilderness and the Mission Mountain Wilderness, and now proposes a massive expansion and extended operating season on a Forest Service Special Use Permit. The Forest Service intended to issue the permit on a categorical exclusion from any environmental analysis or public review, comment and objection as allowed by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). An astounding 6,507 comments rolled in OPPOSING the project!

Yet Senator Jon Tester’s (D-MT) Blackfoot-Clearwater Stewardship Act (S. 1493) as well as a new Lincoln Prosperity Proposal have many of the same problems impacting native fisheries and endangered species – and the same categorical exclusions from environmental analysis, public review, comment and objection.

***

Thank you to the 6,507 people who submitted comments opposing the expansion of the Holland Lake Lodge. But if you oppose turning over Holland Lake Lodge to the POWDR corporation because it exploits public lands for private profit, be aware that the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act and the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal do the same. All three proposals have more things in common than Montanans have been told and they all commercially exploit roadless public lands that currently provide secure habitat for grizzlies, lynx, bull trout, Westslope cutthroat trout, and elk.

No Public Review

All three proposals are exempted from thorough environmental analysis and opportunity for public review, comment, and objection as required by existing environmental laws. An unlimited number of logging projects in the Blackfoot and Lincoln proposals, up to 3,000 acres each in currently roadless lands, are “categorically excluded” from the National Environmental Policy Act – exactly what the Forest Service is attempting with the Holland Lake Lodge expansion.

Blackfoot Clearwater bill slices the Monture Creek roadless lands in half

This is federally-designated Critical Habitat for lynx and bull trout and secure habitat for grizzly bears as well as a major elk migration corridor from the Scapegoat Wilderness to the winter ranges below. Yet the bill designates more than 5,000 acres as play areas for snowmobiles and mountain bikes despite the fact that the Forest Service already testified that area trails are incompatible for mountain biking due to wildlife impacts. The rest of Monture’s increasingly rare roadless areas are then opened for logging companies to bulldoze and clearcut.

Lincoln Prosperity Proposal

This proposal turns over management of 70,000 acres in the Ogden Mountain Roadless Area and other roadless areas northwest of Lincoln to the timber industry. It converts 130,000 acres of Inventoried Roadless Areas into play areas for motorized recreation and mountain bikers.

Grizzlies, lynx, bull trout in trouble

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued its “5-Year Status Review for Grizzlies” in 2021 and found “the grizzly bear in the lower-48 States remains likely to become in danger of extinction within the foreseeable future throughout all of its range.”

Montana’s Department of Fish Wildlife and Parks estimated there were 700 to 1,050 lynx throughout Western Montana in 1994. Today there are about 300. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that 50 percent of each lynx home range must be mature, dense forest to provide optimal habitat for lynx to breed and raise kits – and that no more than 15 percent of each lynx home range should be clearcut. Some of the best lynx habitat in Montana would be destroyed by these three proposals.

Montana bull trout are considered secure in only 2 percent of the stream segments they inhabit. Fish biologists consider bull trout at “moderate risk of extinction” in 65 percent of their Montana range and at “high risk of extinction” in 33 percent of their range.

The timber and mechanical recreation industries already have access to all the roaded lands in Montana. But apparently that is not enough, they are greedy and want it all. With over 80 million acres of roaded Forest Service public lands in Montana, there is simply no excuse or reason for proposing logging, snowmobiling, mountain biking and ATVs in the last of our pristine roadless areas.

Just as thousands of Montanans stood up to oppose corporate greed in the Holland Lake Lodge proposal, we should also oppose the Blackfoot-Clearwater Stewardship Act and the Lincoln Prosperity Proposal for the same excellent reasons – they cut the public out of the process, short-cut environmental analysis, and destroy Montana’s native fisheries and wildlife habitat.

Please ask your Representative and Senators to oppose S. 1493, the Blackfoot Clearwater Stewardship Act.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Mike Garrity.

The post Imperial Delusion is the Enemy of Peace and Prosperity appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by Thomas Knapp.

Mario Garcia said it hurts to breathe. The tear gas tossed into his poorly ventilated, tin-roofed prison cell, where he was packed in with dozens of other men, took a while to disperse. He had pain in his side, broken ribs, and other internal injuries yet to be diagnosed. Garcia said he saw five men die in the 24 days he was imprisoned after an anonymous tipster accused him of being a gang member. But he’s grateful — to God, he said, and especially to his president, Nayib Bukele — that he’s free.

Garcia is a 46-year-old minutas, or shaved ice, seller in El Zonte, a beachfront community of a few thousand people in El Salvador that’s being aggressively rebranded as Bitcoin Beach. A potbellied man not much more than 5 feet tall, Garcia is used to pushing a cart through the sunshine, lugging around supplies, selling sweet ice treats to locals and tourists, including Bitcoiners, some of whom are buying up property in the area. Garcia was almost a Bitcoin Beach mascot, appearing in YouTube interviews, tweeted about by influencers, and featured in Diario El Salvador, a government-owned newspaper. Bitcoin Magazine, which has offered extensive, enthusiastic coverage of El Salvador’s use of bitcoin as legal tender, highlighted a sign on Garcia’s cart that read “aceptamos bitcoin,” calling the minutas seller and his wife “Bitcoin pioneers.”

Civil liberties in El Salvador have been suspended in the name of fighting rampant gang violence.

After being falsely accused of being a gang member, Mario Garcia, a shaved ice vendor at Bitcoin Beach, was imprisoned for more than three weeks, during which he was tortured and saw five other prisoners die.

Victor Peña

A shop displays a sign for the acceptance of bitcoin as a payment method on June 15, 2022, in San Salvador, El Salvador.

Photo: Camilo Freedman/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele celebrates his third year in office on June 1, 2022, in San Salvador.

Photo: Ulises Rodriguez via Getty Images

Wilfredo Claros has been told that he must leave his land to make room for a new airport that will serve Bitcoin City, Bukele’s promised crypto utopia.

Photo: Victor Peña

Soldiers patrol during the state of emergency declared by the Salvadoran government, in Santa Ana, El Salvador, on June 30, 2022.

Photo: Marvin Recinos/AFP via Getty Images

Migrants from El Salvador walk through brush alongside the banks of the Rio Grande after crossing into the U.S. on May 21, 2022, in Eagle Pass, Texas.

Photo: Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Bukele essentially imposed bitcoin on the country by presidential fiat.

A protestor holds up a burning Nayib Bukele campaign shirt at the Plaza Salvador del Mundo on June 1, 2022, in San Salvador.

Photo: Kellys Portillo/APHOTOGRAFIA/Getty Images

Osmar Zelaya holds American flags to protest against Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, in front of the LA Convention Center in Los Angeles, on June 6, 2022.

Photo: Apu Gomes/AFP via Getty Images

This content originally appeared on The Intercept and was authored by Jacob Silverman.