This so-called movement has various links to the conservative PRI (Revolutionary Institutional Party), the PAN (National Action Party), and multiple parapolitical and civil organizations that have ties to other right-wing operations in Latin America. It is nothing more than a power play by a coalition of political actors fighting the ruling MORENA (National Regeneration Movement) party for control of Mexico.

Background

Around the world, the so-called Generation Z protests primarily target corruption, nepotism, and the disdain ruling classes have for the concerns of new generations. The movements define themselves as decentralized and spontaneous, and organizers of the movements are largely unknown. While the movements present the shallow appearance of revolution, protestors are not seeking a fundamental restructuring of economico-political systems. Rather, they demand the reformation of existing liberal economic and governmental structures to better integrate younger generations.

In Morocco, the construction of World Cup stadiums alongside poverty and lack of opportunity is a key flash point. In Nepal, massive protests forced the government out of office and voted for a new president on social media application Discord. In Madagascar, the armed forces joined young protesters in a coup d’etat against President Andry Rajoelina, who fled the country in a French military airplane. Widely unpopular President Dina Boluarte of Peru was also impeached following pressure from protest groups.

By bringing a “better” liberal democracy, “Generation Z” protestors believe they can successfully reckon with at least some of the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. Little to no mention is made of the exploitation inherent to capitalism, the role of the West in underdeveloping the Global South, nor the hierarchical ideologies that justify oppression and keep wealth and power flowing to the top.

Mexico

Circumstances in Mexico differ from those in other other countries. The ruling MORENA regime enjoys consistent popularity, while the political opposition (in the form of an alliance between the PRI and the PAN) is disjointed and hopelessly out of touch with the material reality of Mexico. 

The enormous failures of previous Mexican federal administrations have allowed MORENA to position itself as a muscular, active political “movement”. MORENA sells itself as a corrective to the towering excesses of those before, a party in tune with the masses, and a trustworthy guide for the future. Through “common sense” reforms, infrastructure projects, and a “tough but fair” approach to dealing with its mercurial counterparts north of the border — MORENA has (much like the Zohran Mamdani mayoral administration) wrapped its liberalism in a modern packaging appropriate for the 21st century. 

While many of the projects undertaken by MORENA make for good headlines and better talking points, their ultimate goal is to allow MORENA not only to continue the neoliberal robbery and murder of their predecessors, but also to expand it. Community leaders and citizen organizers are dying, casualties of the relentless advance of the big bourgeois and their extracting armies.  

The relations of production have not changed at all. They have remained firmly capitalist, and firmly exploitative. Indigenous communities throughout the country continue to suffer violence at the hands of paramilitary groups acting at the behest of government officials. Even the “regenerative” nature of MORENA is a lie; many MORENA politicians used to be part of other parties, switching affiliation to take advantage of the political opportunity provided by MORENA, rather than out of any desire to “transform” Mexico into something better.

The difference between MORENA and its opposition is that MORENA has a political awareness and aptitude the PRI and PAN never will. So the PRI and the PAN have begun looking for alternatives outside the liberal political establishment. Most support for the opposition comes from extremely online members of the upper-class who view the MORENA political project as simple populism, instead of the repackaged neoliberalism it really is. Many in anti-MORENA circles view the strength of imperial United States hegemony (political and cultural) extremely favorably – both the yardstick by which the failures of MORENA are measured and the ideal to which Mexico should aspire.

The online “Generation Z movement” in Mexico started in earnest in late October. Following the assassination of Uruapán mayor Carlos Manzo, anti-MORENA protest content inundated Mexican social media, demanding a recall of President Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo and, in some cases, a coup d’etat against the entire government. A Discord server was created and photos of the Straw Hat Pirates’ Jolly Roger (from the Japanese anime One Piece) flooded social media. Protests convened, and opposition politicians rushed to declare their support for the “mass movement,” hoping to regain some of the political relevancy they had squandered through rampant nepotism and endless corruption.

The Right-Wing Connection

The MORENA government has claimed the protests are funded by both domestic and foreign political actors attempting to destabilize the MORENA political project. President Sheinbaum has linked foreign interest groups like the Atlas Network, as well as local organizations like Mexicanos Contra la Corrupción to the protests. Government-affiliated news outlet Infodemia published a report estimating that MXN $90 million (USD $5 million) has been spent on online disinformation campaigns.

News outlet Milenio has reported that 8 million profiles, or over half of the online presence of the “Generation Z” protests, are automated accounts. The magazine traced many accounts to bot farms located in Spain, Colombia, and Argentina. Some of the accounts were previously used to promote Venezuelan far-right politician Maria Corina Machado.

Independent journalist AYAX has documented how some of the first accounts to spread information about the protests were previously linked to other right-wing political initiatives, like opposition to reform of the Mexican federal election reform agency. Metadata from a supposed manifesto made in Canva revealed the name “monetiq Agencia”, a PR firm registered in Zapopán, Jalisco to an address linked to former PRI politician José Alfredo Femat Flores.

Despite the massive effort put into the social media campaign, the results have been chaotic, disjointed, and sometimes downright bizarre. One TikTok account posted an AI-generated interview of a young woman accusing the liberal MORENA government of being a dictatorship because they raised the tax on soft drinks. Other accounts sought to position Mexican business magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego in a favorable light, contradicting the supposed apolitical nature of the protests.

AYAX reported how Discord server members attempted to influence opinion in favor of Salinas Pliego. One user urged their supposed comrades “not to put Salinas [Pliego] on our list of enemies”, claiming Salinas was not interested in money or political power due to his substantial business holdings. Another Instagram account, generacion_z_25, posted a supportive comment on a post decrying the recent attempts to collect back taxes from Salinas Pliego as a politically-motivated MORENA attack. 

Opposition politicians in Mexico were also remarkably quick to express their solidarity with the so-called “movement”. News outlets published a photo of PRI politicians holding the Jolly Roger in the federal legislative chamber.

Mayor of the Cuauhtemoc borough of Mexico City, (and former campaign staffer for former PRI president Enrique Peña Nieto) Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, has also proclaimed her support for the movement, saying that “no one can silence a generation awakened.” Even former PAN president Vicente Fox posted a video urging people to join the November 15 march.

Result

On November 8, a protest was scheduled in Mexico City. Paseo de la Reforma, one of the main avenues of Mexico City, was partially closed to vehicular traffic. Despite the enormous social media campaign, only a handful of protesters arrived. Mexico City police officially announced a total of 300 participants, while another news outlet reported attendance of only 150 protesters — even fewer than the 200 Mexico City municipal police deployed to prevent any civic unrest.

November 15 saw an estimated 17,000 protestors arrive to the Zocalo in the center of Mexico City. Although the march started peacefully, hooded and masked protestors soon attacked police directly. Police responded with tear gas and beatings. A small number of protestors broke through iron barriers and the police line, spraying judeophobic and breaking windows in the Palacio Nacional, where President Sheinbaum has an apartment. 

Despite the massive social media campaign, various puff pieces in Mexican mainstream media and the push from the PRI, the PAN, and interests close to Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the protest was a failure. By 5 o’clock most of the protestors had left the Zocalo. The decidedly older makeup of a protest calling itself “Generation Z” was met with ridicule and derision. 

Broader Context

The attempt to spark a protest comes against a backdrop of changing geopolitical realities. As United States global hegemony declines, the U.S. government has employed sanctions, unilateral airstrikes, and proxy wars (justified with either “anti-terror” or “anti-narcotics” vocabulary) against other countries in an attempt to maintain its grip on a world that is rapidly slipping out of its control.

While many governments are looking forward to a post-U.S. reality, other political factions see an opportunity. Venezuelan opposition has expressed support for U.S. intervention, and President of Ecuador Daniel Noboa hasannounced his support for the U.S. military reopening bases on Ecuadoran soil. The Milei administration accepted USD $20 billion of relief from the United States government to offset economic disaster resulting from the implementation of neoliberal economic policies.

At a time when unified anti-capitalist resistance is more important than ever, the “Generation Z” movement in Mexico has markedly avoided integration with other traditions of struggle. No civil society organizations or militant anticapitalist groups have said anything about the planned protests, while “Generation Z” movement-associated social media accounts explicitly deny any cooperation or solidarity with other causes. Some posts even went as far as saying Palestinian flags are unwelcome at the protests. The teachers’ union (CNTE) — currently in the midst of its own national protests against proposed MORENA reforms — announced its intention to temporarily vacate protest positions – an express refusal to participate in the “Generation Z” protests. 

Conclusion

A movement without solid political ideology and solidarity among a broad sector of society is predestined to fail. From this vantage point of futility, the might of the United States seems welcome – law and order, opportunity and prosperity for the “ungovernable” Third World.

While the slogan of “no political parties” appeals to anti-hegemonic tendencies that have always been present in Mexico (predating even the Spanish colonial presence), the movement lacks anything approaching a political platform. Disguised as a vague, petty bourgeois “anarchism”, the “Generation Z” movement is only a movement of nihilism. It is not hope, it is the death of hope, and in this way, the protests do serve a purpose for MORENA itself. By taking swift action against the protests, MORENA is able to hold up the silliness of the opposition for all to see. This has allowed MORENA to shore up its own political position, both by discouraging potential revolutionary energy and by distracting from the war it is waging throughout Mexico.

For Mexico is a country at war — a war between the capitalists and everyone else. Both the imperial and national big bourgeoisie extract enormous superprofits,  rivers of blood and the tears of those mourning the loss of loved ones continue to soak the land. The MORENA political project is an attempt to institute  Lazaro Cardenas-esque political hegemony through centralization of power at the federal level within existing liberal governmental structures (and a reformation of those same structures on an as-needed basis). Despite the self-applied moniker of the “Fourth Transformation”, MORENA is just a new hat for the same old liberalism that has always ruled Mexico. 

The voices of the dead cry out for justice, and the living bear the responsibility to see clearly.  Neither the MORENA reformist project nor the inorganic, capitalist-funded right wing “social movement” will provide justice. The “Fourth Transformation” is nothing more than an attempt to paste a liberal veneer over the horrors of capitalism, while the “Generation Z” protests are a simple power play by politicians incapable of even playing the reformist role. We must not be fooled by superficial rhetoric, misleading statistics, or the performative rage of politicians in the opposition. It is imperative that quantitative capitalist political adjustment is not confused for qualitative, fundamental change. Neither reform nor right-wing anger is revolution.

Mexico registered the 7th most cases of diabetes in the world in 2021, per the International Diabetes Foundation. According to the World Health Organization, more than 110,000 people died as a cause of diabetes mellitus in 2021, making it the third-most-common cause of death in the country, behind only COVID-19 and ischaemic heart disease. According to statistics from the World Bank and the WHO, the homicide rate per 100,000 people in Mexico is 28, while 71 out of every 100,000 people die from diabetes mellitus. 

The Beginning

The sun is setting in the town of San Juan Chamula, in the soaring mountains of Chiapas, Mexico. The streets hum with tourists during the day, but now the sidewalks are empty, and stillness hangs in the air. Souvenir sellers are packing up their wares, and a local man wearing a polo shirt and a battered baseball cap steps around them to enter a local store. A few minutes later he exits with a soft drink in his hand, and a gentle hiss and clink echo softly in the avenue. He takes a long drink and lights a cigarette. The point of light at the end of the Pall Mall reflects in the glass bottle, mirroring the fiery orange of the sky overhead. The swooping white script of the bottle’s logo is barely visible in the dying evening light. 

Coca-Cola is ubiquitous in Mexico. Tables, chairs, store signs, billboards, upscale restaurants and street stalls — the red-and-white logo is seemingly everywhere. In a country awash in soft drinks, the state of Chiapas reigns supreme. According to a study by the Centro de Investigaciones Multidisciplinarias sobre Chiapas y la Frontera Sur (CIMSUR), the average per capita consumption of soft drinks in Mexico is 160 liters per year, while the average resident of Chiapas drinks 821 liters per year, or an average of 2.5 liters consumed per person per day, making the southern state the global leader in soft drink consumption.

The iconic soft drink first arrived in Mexico in 1929, but didn’t spread to Chiapas until the mid 1950s. The lush southern state has always been among the poorest in Mexico, and in the middle of the 20th century most of Chiapas’ rural population lived in isolated towns, connected only by dirt tracks or beaten pathways through forests and across ridges and hollows. Before the spread of soft drinks, fruit-infused waters, pozol, and pox were the most popular refreshments in Chiapas. Pozol is a fermented drink made from corn mash, and pox (pronounced “posh”) is a distilled alcohol made from sugarcane and corn. The former is typically taken as a refreshment at meals or while working outside, while the latter is featured in parties, religious ceremonies and other special events.

The Spread

The small church is hazy with smoke. A carpet of herbs is neatly arranged on the floor. Flickering candles ring the small nave. Before the candles stand bottles of Coca-Cola, opened. The faithful pray, take a sip from a bottle, and pass it to their friend. The Coke is chased with a small glass of pox thrown back quickly. 

As The Coca-Cola Company transformed itself from purveyor of a bottled curiosity into a global symbol of United States imperial culture and extractivist power, the government of Mexico saw in it an opportunity to advance its political interests while turning a hefty profit. The ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) had consolidated political power within governmental structures, but attempts to expand into rural zones were hampered by the difficulty of travel and the insular nature of rural towns themselves. Often members of a single family ruled in remote towns, positioning themselves in the role of cacique — the only intermediary between the people and the local landowning class, or the bourgeois government in the state capital. 

The PRI granted Coca-Cola concessions to cacique families, in exchange for political loyalty to the federal Mexican regime. Many cacique families had held power for generations — often long before the solidification of the Mexican federal state under Benito Juárez and its subsequent expansion under Porfirio Díaz and Álvaro Obregón — and were long-accustomed to ruling impoverished populations with domineering cruelty. In addition to owning the local general store and controlling the routes in and out of remote towns, caciques also ran the local pox and pozol trade. These already-existing business concerns provided a ready-made structure for the spread of Coca-Cola throughout the Chiapas countryside. 

Coca-Cola entered Chiapas with a bang. Upon receiving access to a new zone of consumers, Coca-Cola’s marketing and distribution experts went to work expanding the company to every corner of the area. From the most exclusive restaurants in San Cristobal de las Casas and Tuxtla Gutiérrez to the most humble abode, nowhere was safe from the ravages of the soft-drink behemoth. Even religious ceremonies famously incorporate Coca-Cola into their rituals — impulsed largely by Christian missionaries preaching the evils of alcohol consumption to Indigenous communities. The missionaries — displaying the classic mix of arrogance and ignorance typical of moralizing U.S. social adventurism in underdeveloped countries — demonized pox and pozol and encouraged local religious officiants to replace alcohol with Coca-Cola. A local pest replaced by a massive and invasive parasite. 

The company employed outward-facing inclusivity to enter already-existing structures and relationships, monetize them, and reap enormous profit — a strategy more frequently associated with the 2020s than the 1950s. Coca-Cola tailored its trademark blitzkrieg marketing strategy specifically to the local Indigenous population of Chiapas. Billboards featured Indigenous models, stores carried advertisement posters with copy written in Tzotzil, and publicity campaigns featured Coca-Cola being used to celebrate a family gathering, to pay a debt, to say thank you, or to be a good host. Coca-Cola was pasted into existing social situations, creating a social dependency on the brand throughout the state.

As the century progressed, Coca-Cola concessions grew ever more numerous. In the 1970s and the 1980s, the federal government encouraged local power leaders to supplant the white landowning ladino class. Literacy programs and ever more Coca-Cola sponsorships fostered the creation of a local bourgeois class. In addition to peddling soft-drinks, these local bourgeois centralized agricultural production into local monopolies. Capitalist exploitation changed form; while imperious white elites speaking Spanish (castellano, as the language is called by many Chiapanecans) were phased out in favor of familiar faces that spoke the local language, the structure of theft and destruction remained the same. 

The strategy of political alignment was also employed by Coca-Cola’s biggest rival, Pepsi-Cola. The two brands separated along political lines. While the former allied itself with the PRI, the latter integrated with the rival Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) party. In a mafia-esque fashion, both brands pressured concession-holders to distribute their products exclusively, and threatened to withhold shipments to sellers who refused.  

Concession holders distributed the new soft drinks at town parties they sponsored, local sporting events, and schools. They created demand which could then be sated at the local store, also owned by the concession holder or one of their family members. Soft drink prices in remote villages were set much lower in urban locales. Pathways were hacked through the forests by machete to make way for the product. Trucks from the bottling plant often left crates of Coca-Cola by the side of the highway, where they were picked up by distributors on horseback and taken to their destination along trails and unpaved cart paths. 

The new drink proved a hit with consumers and caciques alike, filling the coffers of the latter and allowing the PRI, through the addictive properties of the sugary poison of Coca-Cola, to infiltrate the previously-impenetrable Chiapas countryside. 

Endemic

“Detrás de cada botella con el sello de Hecho en México, hay una comunidad entera que hace que todo suceda” (Behind every bottle bearing the Made in Mexico seal, there is an entire community that makes everything happen.)

Coca-Cola FEMSA

The inroads made by Coca-Cola and its concession holders in Chiapas have led to a flood of cheap junk food. Using networks established to distribute Coca-Cola (those aforementioned trails cut through the forest by machete), potato chips, candy, and a host of drinks high in sugars and salts have inundated rural Chiapanecan communities, with mortal consequences. 

The soft drink’s presence in Chiapas has also restricted local agriculture. In mid-1994, Coca-Cola FEMSA, a Mexican Coca-Cola subsidiary that owns and operates a bottling plant in Chiapas (and also the entire OXXO convenience store chain), inaugurated a new plant outside San Cristobal de las Casas. Soon after, nearby wells began to run dry, as the massive water requirements of the bottling plant began to deplete aquifers. Small farmers cannot access sufficient water to irrigate their crops, forced instead to rely on seasonal rains that grow more unpredictable with every passing year. 

Coca-Cola FEMSA has robbed previously self-sufficient agricultural communities of the means for their own survival, forcing many to travel to the state or federal capital, or the United States, in search of work. The little water that remains is not potable, so many residents buy drinking water from Coca-Cola. As usual, the Mexican government’s response to this crisis has been arrogantly detached from reality. In his term as president at the beginning of the 21st century, Vicente Fox placed the former director general of Coca-Cola in Mexico at the head of the Comisión Nacional del Agua. From 2000-2006, a former Coca-Cola executive directly controlled every drop of water in Mexico. 

The vast majority of the violence Coca-Cola wreaks upon Chiapas is not dispatched at supersonic speeds from the barrel of an automatic rifle (although the company is no stranger to such tactics). Neither does it manifest as kidnapping or torture (unless the company or one of its numerous global subsidiaries fears union pressure). Coca-Cola is a plague upon the state of Chiapas. Coca-Cola sells a little bit of death in every can of its insidiously addictive beverages. 

Even government statistics confirm the extent of the crisis. According to a study undertaken by El Colegio de la Frontera Sur, one-quarter of the state’s population suffers from obesity. In 2022 the Instituto Nacionál de Estatística y Geografía (INEGI) reported 7,617 deaths as a result of heart failure. In 2023 INEGI registered 4,531 direct deaths caused by diabetes mellitus, compared with 631 homicides registered in the same period. In a country that once elected a former Coca-Cola executive as president, the effects of Coca-Cola on Chiapas are too severe to be ignored. 

How does diabetes so easily lead to death in Chiapas? The Mexican government has refused to provide adequate healthcare facilities and sufficient supplies of medicine to rural communities. The Zapatista militant left movement, which has controlled much of rural Chiapas since their 1994 offensive, has prioritized the construction of clinics, dentists’ offices and other healthcare facilities since the beginning of their movement, filling in some of the gaps left by the Mexican state. While the popular success of Zapatista healthcare initiatives has in turn has led to grudging healthcare investment from the state and federal governments, many communities in government-controlled territory are still miles away from the healthcare they need. Once the people have fulfilled their role as consumers by handing over their hard-earned money to Coca-Cola, the bourgeois Mexican government leaves them to die. 

Conclusion

Fighting and bickering within the narcotics trade is a longtime favorite target of bourgeois media. Loud, brash characters brandish firearms carelessly, creating mountains of dead in a never-ending pursuit of riches and glory,  according to countless TV shows, movies, investigative articles, and documentaries. But what of the death toll accumulated by the vicious drive of capital to infest every corner of the earth — a death toll that exponentially supersedes the deaths caused by criminal activity in one of the most violent countries in the world?

Coca-Cola requires death. The company’s drinks are a contagion, a blight upon the land and the people living on it. Diabetes and heart failure are an acceptable cost to the company and its subsidiaries. Let them die, that we might be rich — the unspoken sentiment hanging in the air in every board meeting. Suffer, that we may profit — the terrible truth between the connections in every corporate Zoom meeting. The Coca-Cola Company and all its minions and facilitators around the world murder tens of thousands by selling a poison product. They have reduced millions more to a beaten, rageful capitulation, kicked into submission by the patent-leather boots of Coca-Cola corporate leaders. The victims must not dare to question the great whims and fancies of multinational capital. They must kneel, obediently, while their blood turns sweet, and the sugar kills them from the inside out. 

The Coca-Cola advertising machine — still one of the best marketing departments in the world — churns out a daily batch of lies and excuses. The website for Coca-Cola FEMSA proudly touts the company’s “sustainable management of water” and the “benefits of recycling” while making no mention of the negative health consequences resulting from consumption of their product. The website of The Coca-Cola Company provides a blurb that states that consumption of sugary beverages does not lead to diabetes, citing a 2005 study from the National Institute of Health. In a 2018 article in the New York Times, Coca-Cola FEMSA spokesperson José Ramón Martínez suggested that Mexican people are genetically predisposed to develop diabetes, a theory that has long been disproved, following a long tradition of racist so-called justifications for exploitation and violence.

Just as settler colonists plied Indigenous populations with alcohol in an attempt to subjugate them, so too does the settler colonial company ply death in a bottle to Indigenous communities in Chiapas.  Diabetes, heart problems, obesity, and tooth decay have all become as much a part of the landscape as the 355 mL glass Coca-Cola bottle. Despite marches, numerous expository articles in local media, false promises by The Coca-Cola Company and its subsidiaries to reduce waste, and a flood of corporate buzzword-based propaganda highlighting the company’s dedication to the planet and the community, the wave of deaths continue. Coca-Cola’s invasion of Chiapas is yet another episode in a long tradition of addictive substances foisted onto local populations by imperial capitalists desperate for a profit. Chiapas and the rest of the world suffering from junk food addiction will never know freedom until The Coca-Cola Company, all its subsidiaries and local partners, and every other junk food producer and seller are cleared from the land, and the people wrest control of their own health and nutrition from the iron grip of invading imperial merchants of death.

Capitalist firms infect the African continent like a virus. They leech money and resources from national economies in exchange for a paltry recompense — most of which is divided among the national bourgeois allies of capital. IMF reports are riddled with references to the necessity of so-called “reforms” that promise to resolve the contradictions caused by imperial capital. The IMF requires peripheral countries to prioritize debt servicing at the expense of the well-being of the country’s own citizens.

Education in Decline

As profits for transnational corporations continue to climb, the lives of those who toil and suffer to make those profits possible worsen. A survey of public service employees in Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Malawi, and Nigeria undertaken by the non-governmental organization ActionAid paints a grim picture. Of all teachers surveyed, 95% said they did not receive sufficient funds from their governments and 73% said they had paid for classroom supplies out of their own pockets. One-hundred percent of Kenyan teachers surveyed reported paying for classroom supplies out of their salaries. The effect of budget constraints on morale have been notable — 42% of the teachers surveyed said they were considering a career change.

As public spending has declined, the percentage of national GDP spent on debt servicing has remained unconscionably high. As the survey above illustrates, in 2024, Nigeria spent 20% of its national income on debt and interest payments, while only 4% was spent on education. Healthcare spending was also a meager 4%. Fully one-quarter of Malawi’s national income went towards loan repayments in the same timeframe, while Kenya dedicated 29% of its GDP to debt servicing, compared to 18% spent on education. Malawi did not report figures for education spending.

Healthcare Costs Go Up, Salaries Go Down

The healthcare sector has not fared any better. Government cuts on public health programs have affected wide swaths of the population of the six countries. “Services that were provided for free before, now we pay for them,” says a Malawian person interviewed by ActionAid. “For example, if an older person has a fracture, she/he pays MK 25,000 (USD $14) to get the service in a government clinic.” The minimum wage in Malawi is roughly USD $50 per month. Many people in Malawi have had to take out personal loans or reduce spending on food to pay for healthcare and transportation to faraway clinics and hospitals.

In Kenya, Linda Mama, a government program that helps new mothers with neonatal care, had half its budget cut in 2024. “We shall be covering the indigent pregnant,” said Dr. Elizabeth Wangia, Director of Health Financing for the Ministry of Health in Kenya. Wangia stated that means testing will be implemented to determine the eligibility of pregnant women to benefit from the program.

Austerity and Its Facilitators

These policies of austerity are not coincidental, but are the brutal expression of “fiscal responsibility” and other liberal economic principles imposed upon other countries by the IMF. An article in African Business magazine stated that the IMF “recommended a change in direction from growth driven by public investment to one in which the private sectors are the engines of growth.” This translates directly to a prioritization of foreign capital at the expense of public spending on the welfare of the citizenry, as can be seen in healthcare cuts in Greece imposed as part of austerity measures implemented after the country’s financial struggles following the 2008 crisis. 

Blame for the negative consequences of those policies are placed on the national bourgeoisie, who obediently debase themselves by stepping into their role as ready-made scapegoats for the failings of international capital. In doing so, they are paradoxically allowed to maintain their position in the national ruling classes. While angry invectives and corruption prosecutions are frequent occurrences in peripheral countries, they very rarely result in permanent expulsion from power structures for the guilty parties.

The Lie of Capitalist “Progress”

Austerity programs demanded by the IMF have led to terrible decreases in the quality of life across the so-called “developing” world, even when compared to recent years. Every country surveyed by ActionAid reported a sharp decrease in the availability of medicines. An interviewee from Ethiopia said a 10x increase in the cost of antimalarial medicine sold in private health centers has led to a malaria epidemic in her region. Salaries of public healthcare workers have also decreased, with 87% of healthcare workers surveyed saying they struggled to pay bills, and 63% reporting difficulty paying the rent. 67% percent admitted to buying fewer groceries.

Who fills the empty spaces left when public funds retreat? Who pays the price when the fees demanded by foreign capital are unaffordable? Communities shoulder the burden of caring for those who are too ill to travel or who do not have access to funds necessary to pay for a stay in the hospital. Caring for the sick brings in no salary, but is vitally necessary. Thus the economic power of the exploited diminishes further. As international capital grows fat and bloated off the subsidy of labor granted to them by the workers of the world, the “essential work that is reproducing the human workforce” is done without recompense.

As African governments rush to mollify the IMF with ever-increasing privatization initiatives, imperial capital has profited enormously. German health insurer Allianz, one of the largest health insurance providers in Kenya, announced “another set of record financial results” in 2024 and promised “higher capital-efficient growth in the quarters and years ahead.” Meanwhile, rural Kenyans struggle with trips of up to 30 kilometers to reach a health center and pregnant women throughout Kenya without the means to pay hospital fees give birth at home.

The Credit Trap

International credit rating agencies such as Moody’s and Standard and Poor tag peripheral countries with high-risk labels that justify exorbitantly high interest rates on any funds loaned. Imperial countries are assessed as low-risk, and thus have access to cheap credit whenever required. A convoluted system of surcharges ensures that full repayment of any loans by a peripheral country remains, for the most part, a practical impossibility. Any requests by peripheral countries for restructuring or an increase in credit are met with demands by the IMF for structural changes to keep the way clear for the flood of capitalist exploitation.

The United States-led world order has greatly improved upon the crude financial manipulations employed by the French and British colonialists in the 19^th century. Debt as a method of extraction has been refined with ruthless efficiency. When debt combines with resource extraction and exportation of capital, the result is utter domination — aided by the sniveling national bourgeois who grovel before their capitalist lords, hoping to be knighted into the imperial ruling class and hating themselves for being born outside of it.

The sum total of imperial promises of jobs and security, of decolonization, of a true partnership among nations, of progress and a gleaming future, is a hollow shell — a great mirage. National economies stagnate, national governments refuse to provide even the minimum for their citizens to live with dignity, and survival itself has become a privilege available only to those with the money to pay for it. Evidence of the failures of capitalism grows more abundant by the day, as even the promises themselves have evaporated, replaced by tough talk of austerity and belt-tightening.

The Deception of Reformist “Solutions”

Groups like ActionAid are incapable of providing a coherent solution to the contradictions of imperial capitalism. Funded by the very states that perpetuate the injustices they investigate, willful avoidance of anything approaching a coherent critical structural analysis is a prerequisite for their existence. While the work done by NGOs and other social action organizations can have material value, they will never recommend a course of action that will lead to the destruction of the political economic system responsible for their very existence.

ActionAid closes the report cited in this article with a bizarre call-to-action that recommends a vague restructuring of the IMF’s global role overseen by the United Nations. This is followed by a list of demands made by the institutions of various countries with the supposed goal of encouraging the capitalists that make up the national ruling classes to act against their interests and prioritize public wellbeing over private sector profit. The IMF itself, in head-splittingly circular logic, proclaims private capital to be the salvation for private capital’s own shortcomings.

The only way to break the oppressive power of imperial states is to break the imperial states themselves. Power must be seized from the exploiting classes by the exploited masses, and every apparatus of oppression must be destroyed, including supra-national entities like the IMF and the bootlicking parasite ruling classes in the periphery that work hand-in-glove with capital to scrap their own countries for parts.

Every promise a capitalist makes will be broken. It is impossible to come to an arrangement with a leech. Capitalism is war, and billions of people around the world are fighting its battles. There is no agreement, no report, no legal document or procedure or set of rules or guidelines that will resolve the brutal contradictions of capitalism in favor of the suffering. The haughty lords of capital only have their position because the work of millions has lifted them to the heights they enjoy. If the capitalist class can be lifted up, it can be toppled, and if the people can organize and fight for a flag or a salary, we can do the same for our future.

The plan has ignited an uproar among liberal media outlets. In an analysis piece, CNN senior reporter Stephen Collinson called the proposed ban “a crackdown on academic freedom”, while the New York Times ran an opinion column by Dr. Steven Pinker, Harvard professor of psychology titled “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” about Donald Trump’s bizarre obsession with the university. Neither the prim moralizing nor the attempted psychoanalysis understands the true nature of the Trump administration’s decree. The move is just another instance of squabbling among factions of the coalition running the United States government.

The Republican wing of the U.S. government believes (or at least claims to believe) that all non-U.S. citizens are leeches on U.S. society and must be rooted out and removed. In a remarkable show of obviously transparent projection, Republicans consider the very presence of non-citizens in United States society to be an existential threat to the sovereignty of the United States. Thus, they view the removal of such “undesirables” as a necessary inoculation against the chaos of a world gone mad.

Harvard and other elite universities have long been bastions and promulgators of United States soft power. The elite university boasts the scion of power holders from around the world among its alumni and student body, as well as the best and brightest students from around the world, incorporating the fruits of their labor into the U.S. empire and depriving so-called “developing” countries from researchers and innovators of the future. While on campus, students rub shoulders with the next generation of U.S. business leaders, intelligence officers, media executives, and politicians. These relationships further the United States’ expansion into every nook and cranny of the planet.

Massive resource extraction deals and colossal concessions, counterrevolutions and covert operations, the wholesale mortgaging of the future of entire nations in the interests of United States capital — the bonds formed between ruling class members at universities for the privileged run like veins throughout the capitalist world, sending blood money back to the heart of empire.

The revocation of the privilege of elite education for the foreign bourgeoisies will shake networks of power that keep capitalism going. Cooperation across international borders is seen as weakness by chauvinistic, vapid U.S. politicians, who seek a greater consolidation and concentration of power among themselves and their allies, even at the expense of alienating the very facilitators of the imperial riches and success they enjoy. Members of ruling classes in the periphery judge strength among themselves by the level and quality of their connection to foreign capital and imperial power, and even a nonessential change in the dialectic of imperial oppression will prove to be a severe shock to them.

Base infighting for power is nothing but a flailing attempt by the ruling class to preserve a past that is slipping through their fingers like sand through an hourglass. They are losing control, and while they may not foresee the tailspin into which they are headed, the brutish, panicked actions undertaken by the Trump regime should not be seen as anything other than desperation. The ruling class’s own greed is knocking out the foundations of the very state that provides them with the power they crave. 

The Mal Gobierno (as Mexican federal, state and local governments and governmental authorities are called by resistance groups, including the EZLN and the Zapatista movement to mean “bad government”) has promised a full federal investigation — a promise that has been made (and broken) before regarding crimes allegedly perpetrated by the state. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side is dying. 

Job offers abound for those innocent enough to believe it. USD $400 a week, in Jalisco, buy a bus ticket here and we’ll take care of the rest. The shoes and backpacks piled haphazardly in a corner, the cremation ovens out back — they finish the story. The state police visited in September of last year, arrested a few people, and left. More shoes and more backpacks piled in the corner, and acrid smoke filled the sky again. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side feels pain.

When the suffering beg for justice, the government meets them with scorn. “What do you want, woman?” an exasperated official yells at a grieving mother. “You think I lost your daughter? Just go away!” Mothers organize to search for their disappeared children, shaming so-called law enforcement into doing their job. The state police come and take everything the people find, leaving buildings literally swept clean. We’re categorizing the evidence, says the federal attorney. The mothers know better, and their wails echo throughout the empty rooms. First the government disappeared their children, then it disappeared the remains the mothers dug out of the ground with their own hands.  

Arrests have been made, arrests are always made. This time, it’s a few municipal cops, an alleged “cartel leader” living on the outskirts of Mexico City. The National Guard has taken over from the municipal police, and the federal attorney’s office has fired the state attorney. Is this justice? No, but it’ll lead to the resignation of the governor. Political infighting is drowning out the cries of mothers demanding justice for their murdered children.

Mexico is at war, and those with power profit. 

Local toughs shake down a municipal market for protection money. Everyone knows who they are, where they live. But the police don’t do a thing about it, because they are in on this little enterprise, too. News filters out about a little ranch on the outskirts of town. Turn a blind eye, take the envelope, don’t ask too many questions. When a police officer’s time is up, they cross the line and join their friends in the mafia.

Mexico is at war, but only one side is fighting. 

Trucks full of soldiers in army green, or Marines in blue, patrol ominously, always at the corner of one’s vision. For the narco? No, for the people. A warning. Stay out of our way, say the automatic rifles. The military ousts the police, and takes over their racket. A captain-capo picks up the envelopes full of cash, and kicks a share up to their colonel-consigliere. The military arranges for planes to land and send transport trucks to pick up the bales of drugs they carry. They sell guns to paramilitary forces, hitmen and the so-called cartels. The military enforces the will of the government, and the will of the government is to get rich, the rest be damned. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side uses bullets.

Paramilitary gangsters force families off land for which their ancestors fought in the Revolution over 100 years ago. Then come the businessmen— the alchemists who turn screams into profit and monetize the blood of the dying. Wells run dry, soil is poisoned, pollution chokes the air, agricultural workers make an average of less than USD $150 a month, and imperial capital receives enormous profits. Encomenderos of the Spanish colonial age would recognize this oppression well. The people resist, they fight tooth and nail, they file suits in court, they march in the streets. The people pursue every outlet available to them within the confines of the law, but these confines form no limit for the government. It doesn’t matter what the courts decide — hitmen resolve any inconvenient judicial or political outcome. 

Mexico is at war, but only one side knows it. 

The government has always studiously pursued a pacifist foreign policy devoid of antagonism or confrontation. Why, then, does it so violently deny this same respect to the people it claims to represent? The government wipes the blood off its chin and flashes a ghastly smile to the camera; it stretches out its arms to embrace whichever capitalist ghoul seeks its blessing; it sacrifices its people’s dignity, destiny, present and future to feed the slavering, ravenous maw of capitalist empire. And for anyone who stands in the way, the ovens roar with flames, ready to consume, to devour, ready to reduce a human life to a pitifully small collection of bones, teeth and personal effects, the essence of a life, buried in the dirt to clear the way for the great and terrible march of imperial capitalism. 

Mexico is at war with its own people! El Mal Gobierno must go! 

Aquila is a small town of roughly 2,000 Nahuatl-speaking inhabitants, nestled in the mountains of southeastern Mexico. Ternium is by far the biggest commercial interest in the area, and according to Aquila locals the company processes between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of ore per day from the Aquila Mine. Local farmers also claim Ternium disposes of hazardous waste without taking proper precautions and that the company’s water demands have lowered the water table, making it difficult for them to grow crops. 

Mexican law states that all commercial interests that wish to operate on communal land must reach an agreement with the ejidatarios resident to the land. In 2012 the Aquila ejidatarios and Ternium signed a contract stating that in exchange for permission to operate a mine on ejido land, Ternium would pay the ejidatarios a fee of USD 3.80 per ton of iron ore extracted. In 2017 the contract was renegotiated: the fee remained the same, but added to the deal were a reforestation campaign, a designated site for disposal of hazardous materials, and the construction of two pedestrian bridges and a hospital (the town’s sole clinic was exclusively for the use of Ternium employees and their families — all medical care beyond the ability of a general practitioner had to be seen to out of town), all to be funded by Ternium. 

Ternium simply did not keep up their end of the bargain. According to members of the community, the USD 3.80 Ternium agreed to pay became MXN 3.80 — only USD 0.19 at the time of writing. No hospital was constructed, and neither were the promised pedestrian bridges.The land appointed for waste disposal was instead mined for iron ore. From 2012–2023, the Aquila Mine expanded from 73 hectares (180 acres) to 380 hectares (939 acres) and the company began to extract gold, silver and copper, all without community approval or a renegotiation of the standing contract. Fighting back proved a deadly business: in 14 years 38 community leaders have been killed in Aquila and the surrounding countryside. 

Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca helped the ejidatarios petition the courts to allow the community to elect their own leader, as the ejidatarios considered the then-current community leaders to be in the pocket of Ternium. The community also sought the payment of millions of pesos in back rent that had been placed in escrow, but not given to the community. Ternium fought the community every step of the way, but in 2022 it seemed that the legal process would favor the community over the mine. At this time, the threats began. The two men were stalked by local gangsters. More than once Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca were chased by masked men on motorcycles, but managed to outrun their pursuers in their Honda pickup truck. 

On December 13, 2022, Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca attended a community assembly meeting in Aquila, where they, along with hundreds of the town’s residents, threatened to block the mine’s operations if Ternium did not respect the agreements signed in 2012 and 2017. Also present were three members of the directorate for the Aquila Mine: Mining Development Director Diego Ferrari, HR manager Rogelio Omaña Romero and Community Relations Director José Ulises González. Also present was the town mayor, José María Valencia Guillén. 

When the two lawyers told the Ternium representatives that the community was ready to shut down the mine in protest, the directors responded with a threat of their own. According to three eyewitnesses present at the assembly, Omaña Romero told Díaz and Lagunes to “let go” of their fight with the mine, and if they didn’t, “they would be killed at any moment.” Díaz Valencia replied that Omaña Romero had given him a death threat, and made sure the government official present to mediate the assembly registered it as such. Said one of the eyewitnesses: “The engineer Ferrari threw the microphone, they [the three men representing the mine] got up, and they left.” One month later Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca had disappeared. 

In the subsequent trial investigating the disappearances, Javier Puntos testified to being present at and participating in the kidnapping of Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca. He said under oath that he, along with other local criminals, had received pictures of the two men and strict instructions not to let them escape. “Afterwords we found out they were killed because they were fucking things up for the mining company [Ternium].” Soon after testifying, Puntos was also murdered, after being released from police custody without explanation. 

When asked for comment, Ternium reiterated their willingness to pursue “a good working relationship” with the ejidatarios of Aquila, and stated that all communities surrounding their operation should “submit their concerns in a constructive and transparent manner.” They also condemned “any type of violence against the community.” No employee of Ternium has been investigated or indicted in connection with the case. 

In September of 2023, the community of Aquila finally won their court case, which allowed them to elect their own leader to represent them in negotiations with the mine. An ex-employee of Ternium won the vote, and the rapacious extraction of fuel for the capitalist death machine continues — generating Ternium towering profits that cast a bloodsoaked shadow upon the town of Aquila, the people who live there, and the world. 

“El orgullo más grande que siento estar siempre al lado de mis compañeros, hermanos de raza, los indígenas…ofrendaré todo mi esfuerzo, mi trabajo y mi vida por defender nuestra raza.

The greatest pride I feel is to be forever by the side of my friends, my brothers, the indigenous…I will give all my strength, my work and my life to defend our people.”

— Antonio Díaz Valencia

Donald Trump is promising deportation on a mass scale not seen since the Eisenhower administration. Right on cue, liberals have opened their tired old playbook and started to bleat on about “the xenophobia of Trump,” failing to understand that the current hostility being shown to undocumented immigrants is neither unique to this president nor to this particular time in U.S. history. The ruling class provoking animosity toward a group defined as “other” dates back even further than the founding of the republic itself, and serves a vital purpose in maintaining unity among the oppressor classes. 

The Settler and the Indigenous

Since the arrival of the first Europeans to what is now the United States, settler colonists have used any and every excuse to expand their territory and to pillage and plunder, either by direct military conquest, lying, cheating, or a terrible combination of all three. In search of land and riches, colonists invaded the North American continent and found seemingly endless land that, if put to European methods of cultivation, could yield enormous profits. The settlers expanded out from original landing sites like a virus, squatting on “claims” (sometimes) made in the name of the king and paying no heed to those who lived there. The violent pushback visited upon the settlers by Indigenous groups was given by the settlers as justificatory evidence not only for increased settler war against native populations (and subsequent settler expansion), but for the categorization of the native by settlers as a racially subaltern group. A Declaration of the state of the Colonie and Affaires in Virginia categorizes Indigenous people of the region as “beasts,” “treacherous,” and, crucially, “wicked Infidels,” among other epithets. Englishmen of the Virginia Company saw the Indigenous as people in need of a Protestant salvation, people who lacked the moral character necessary to obtain the individual prosperity so coveted by the settler, and thus in need of “civilizing” — which in practice meant subservience and a tranquil acceptance of expulsion and extermination. The never-ending thirst for land led to even more ousting of the Indigenous — the “other” — clearing the way for more expansion, exploitation and murder by the settlers.

Bacon’s Rebellion is an early example of European unity against the Indigenous “threat” — a threat wholly instigated by settlers appropriating Indigenous territory. Nathaniel Bacon — a white landowner — instigated the rebellion as a response to his exclusion from the inner circle of the Virginia plantocracy. He leaned on both the settlers’ desire to expand their holdings and their fear of the Indigenous people fighting against the occupation of their land to whip the disenfranchised among them into a frenzy. The rebel mob was a multiracial coalition, and Bacon promised instant freedom to any enslaved or indentured laborer that joined his cause. While Bacon and his ragtag regiments managed to take Jamestown and burn it to the ground, the arrival of 1,000 English soldiers under the command of Herbert Jeffreys pushed the rebels to a hasty acquiescence. In an attempt to smooth things over, Jeffreys pardoned the insurrectionists and agreed to a treaty with the local Indigenous peoples. 

But the plantocracy was not so quick to forget their close call with revolution. Watching enslaved Black laborers march side-by-side with poor whites shook the planters to their very core, and as a result Virginia society underwent a significant restructuring. In 1705 the Virginia government passed an act reinstating the headright system first enacted in the Great Charter. Each free white settler was now guaranteed 50 acres of land to be exploited for their own use, and as the planter class refused to subdivide their own enormous holdings, the land was thus expropriated from Indigenous people. Tribes were relocated again and again to make room for the crushing hordes of white hopefuls desperate to get their grubby hands in the tobacco business. The burgeoning mob of settlers slashed, burned, scarred and destroyed land that for millennia had been carefully managed to provide everything necessary for survival and happiness. Blind greed for hogsheads full of stinking green narcotic profit pushed the Indigenous farther and farther away from the places they had called home as far back as they could remember, as the land itself was bent to suit the will of colonial capitalism.  

The Settler and the Enslaved

To kidnap someone — to take them to a ship in chains, manacle them naked below decks for almost the entirety of a three-month voyage and, upon arrival to port, to sell them at auction to the highest bidder — requires a most severe differentiation between oneself and those forced into enslavement. To purchase said human beings at auction — to transport them to one’s home or place of work, incorporate them into a building crew, set them to toil as a domestic servant or install them in any other position as may exist in the settler’s business concerns, and work them until they die — likewise requires an extraordinary rationalization. Thus Africans, captured, sold and sent — many to remote concentration camps isolated from most of society — and given a life sentence of work without having committed a crime, had to be considered not only as property, as cargo, as a price, as a means to wealth, but to be somehow deserving of said treatment. 

But the settlers’ collective Christian conscience  —  so worked upon by Calvin, Locke, and eventually by the brothers Wesley — pricked them yet, and the consequences of their sins could not help but be made clear to them. The Stono Revolt, the Maroon Wars in Jamaica, the panics in New York City in the 1740’s all fired a (well-founded) fear both in slave-owning and non-slave-owning settler whites of a mass slave revolt. Dread hung in the air of every colonial port, town and plantation, and while settlers were able to make the connection (obvious as it was) between slave revolts and the whippings, rapes, and genocide that scarred the life and conditions of enslaved Africans in the British Atlantic colonies, others were unwilling or unable to do so. Just as settlers blamed the consequences of their violent expansion into native territory on the Indigenous themselves, so also they put the consequences brought about by their countless abuses, their innumerable crimes against both their fellow man and the God they claimed to follow, upon the Africans themselves.

The wages of their sins having been made manifest, the Christian slaveholders launched a desperate attempt to postpone their payment. The settlers convinced themselves that the victims of their violent enterprise were in fact the instigators of their own misfortune, thus blaming the enslaved for the deeds of the enslavers. In the settler’s mind, the African was born to follow orders from the white man, and failure to do so constituted a break with the natural order, characterized as “insolence” from an “inferior” race. So slave codes were tightened, punishments became more severe, and even free Africans fell under suspicion from terrified settlers. As the crackdowns continued, so too did slave revolts, which augmented panic among whites to a hysterical pitch. The latter reached a crescendo in 1775 with Lord Dunmore’s famous proclamation that all slaves in the colony of Virginia that aided the Crown during the colonial rebellion would be liberated. The settlers howled, wailed, and eventually won their war with the help of France and Spain. But the colonists — now “free men,” citizens of a country of their own making, did not see fit to resolve the issue that provoked so much fear throughout the former colonies. 

The vaunted founding fathers wrote screeds about freedom and man’s right to seek his own happiness, but when it came to the men and women they enslaved, the great men dithered, hemmed and hawed, and excreted the most pitiful, paltry excuses imaginable. They stammered about inconceivably abstract futures, far, far removed from their own time, when the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery would be banned or would have disappeared of its own right. Jefferson and Madison and all the rest of the hypocritical lot spoke of liberty while raping and whipping the enslaved on their own plantations; they pontificated on supposedly universal human rights but couldn’t see their way to sacrificing even a fraction of their own material comfort that others might have the “freedom” about which they blathered on so incessantly. So Stono gave way to Gabriel’s Rebellion, and Nat Turner’s Revolt, and eventually a bloody civil war, all while settlers still considered the enslaved Africans “insolent” and lazy. In the settlers’ minds the Africans still embodied all the faults and vices of the settlers themselves. 

The Settler and the Undocumented Immigrant

The turn of the 20th century marked the so-called “closing” of the frontier, as settlers proclaimed a supposed “end” to the centuries-long extermination campaign visited upon the Indigenous peoples. As the domestic frontier closed, the international frontier opened, and U.S. soldiers were shipped to foreign lands, to oppress and exploit, to force other peoples, societies, and economies to bend the knee to the interests of U.S. capital. Sons of white Southern sharecroppers mingled with the sons of white Northern shopkeepers, and they were led by officers hailing from families of industrial capitalists, factory supervisors, and monied planter families. American troops, united in their racial identity, plundered the vaults of Port-au-Prince, toppled the government in Santo Domingo, and partook in atrocities that were hauntingly familiar to those their forebears committed upon enslaved Africans and the Indigenous. Massacres, wanton executions, violations and an extravagance of bloodshed followed in the wake of the U.S. military wherever it went. Wholesale looting ensured that factories back home, kept churning by a never-ending flow of cheap immigrant labor from Asia and Europe, never ran out of raw material. International plunder ensured astronomically high profit rates for an all-American oligarchic capitalist class. 

This brutal, rabid expansion continued throughout the 20th century, picking up steam in the 1950s with the advent of the Cold War. A restructured world in the process of jettisoning the old boots-on-the-ground European colonialist template provided a wealth of new opportunities for the capitalist kingpin country. Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Angola, Burkina Faso, Yemen, Indonesia, and both sides of the Korean peninsula are only some of the most notable manifestations of the United States’ unquenchable thirst for accumulation.

But reckless growth across the globe has come with a price. The constant upheaval and instability that follows in the wake of imperial capitalist expansion has resulted in a tsunami of people shut out of any hope of achieving prosperity in their home countries by whatever flavor of capitalist brutality is local to them. The tentacles of American hegemony are long and deeply rooted, so migrants have flooded northward — a frenzy of dreamers hungering for the life that was plundered from them to feed the American labor aristocracy and their oligarchic overlords. At first, the lords of American capital were all too willing to manipulate the new immigrants to their own advantage — using the immigrants’ unstable legal situation to drive salaries to pitiable lows. However, a justification was required to explain the blatantly unfair treatment received by the undocumented worker. Thus, in the same way that enslaved Africans were said to have deserved their subservience to the ruling slaveholding class, as Indigenous peoples were said to have deserved their genocide and expulsion at the hands of the ravaging settlers, the ruling class and its flunkeys assert that the immigrant that finds work due to settler unwillingness is in fact stealing jobs, that asylum seekers fleeing political instability in their home countries are in fact the cause of said instability, that those who have seen their homelands corrupted and defiled, those who have seen their hopes, dreams, loves and lives ground into the mud by the jackboot of capitalism are in fact the true corruptors and defilers of the pure American settler state. In short, the immigrant is abused and exploited simply because, to their abusers and exploiters, they are inherently inferior, and thus deserve inferior wages. When the immigrants have fulfilled their duty to the capitalist overlords, they can then be discarded, as the whole world can see now.  

However, it is here that a break with the past becomes evident. The tactic used by the ruling class when faced with a crisis of their own making — blame the oppressed for the faults of capital — has always been accompanied by a tangible benefit for a certain subset of the petit- bourgeois population (usually an exclusively white coalition). Designated members of this “in-group” could then be counted on as loyal foot soldiers in the expansion of oppression. The settler invasion of Indigenous land was not only fought to bestow more land upon the plantocracy; lower-class white settlers were also able to stake their “claim” to the newly-emptied lands, thus ensuring lebensraum for the planters themselves. African slavery resulted in a phasing-out of white indentured servitude and a host of economic and social benefits opening up to members of a newly-named “white” class. U.S. economic and hegemonic expansion has likewise resulted in a glut of well-paying job opportunities for the American settler petit bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy both at home and throughout the world. 

However, this most recent push to deport immigrants is missing any sort of increase in the economic position of the settler labor aristocracy or petit-bourgeoisie. While chauvinist social consciences will be eased, the capitalist or small business owner who formerly employed undocumented workers will find themselves with the same amount of work to be done, but a much smaller (and less-pliable) workforce. The reserve army of labor will shrink substantially. Another point: the current increase in profits for capitalists is being driven in large part by a mass pirating of middle class wealth within the imperial core by capitalists. Prices are skyrocketing, salaries are not keeping pace with inflation, and the smooth promises of the big bourgeoisie are evaporating like morning dew on a hot day. Even the exalted “American Dream” no longer fulfills its propagandic function, but has been reduced to a talking point for those who use it as a yardstick by which to compare all supposed economic, social, and moral failings of American settler society. In the face of capital’s imperative to grow at all costs, the strategy to manage, package, and sell that growth to the lower imperial social classes has fallen apart. 

The deportations are a feeble attempt by the settler bourgeoisie to bargain with the lower settler classes, to postpone the day of reckoning for the consequences of capital’s rapacious thirst for blood and land, its insatiable need to squeeze human beings like rags and wring out every drop of work and wealth. Eventually the bill comes due, and the more intelligent members of the capitalist class understand this. They hope to buy a little more time to increase military strength, in the hope that brute force can replace mass subornation of the white settler class as the primary impulsor for order. Heaping blame for current social ills upon undocumented immigrants and deporting them in a twisted attempt to sell the idea that the sins of capitalism are being deported along with the migrants might buy U.S. capital hegemony a little more time, but the days of glory for the majority of white American settlers are long gone, the last great capitalist plundering is on, and rifles and tanks are coming to replace the hideous amalgamation of sin-eater ritual and race-class bribery fundamental to the American settler project.

Through it all, the Democratic Party and its cowardly leadership has done nothing apart from throwing out a few vacuous platitudes and empty threats on Sunday morning talk shows. And how could they do anything else? The thread of oppression runs throughout the history of the republic, back through the Biden and Obama administrations, back through Reagan and Carter and beyond living memory. Deportations, the “tough on crime” agenda of the Clinton 1990s, concentration camps along the border — all featured heavily in Democratic administrations, despite hypocritical screeching about the supposedly unique evils being visited upon their fair land by the Trump administration. The legacy of the Democratic Party — even among liberals — is far more than tarnished; it is irrecoverably soiled. Whatever shred of decency Democrats could clutch to themselves has vanished. 

Two groups are facilitating this hostile takeover: fascist Christian nationalists and the highest ranking members of the capitalist class. The former hungers for cultural domination and the chance to establish a religious nation based on vaguely representative and specifically theocratic principles, while the latter thirsts, as it always has, for astronomical profits and oligarchy. They have already solidified their control of the state (they were voted in), and now they are moving to install as many party loyalists as they can in government positions until the sheer mass of fascist flunkeys is too great to oppose. Behind the wave of functionaries march the new-generation propagandists, proclaiming Trumpian visions in both official and unofficial outlets, and shouting down any opposing views. The old order is dead and dying; career politicos and CIA station chiefs, newspaper editors and diplomats, graduates of prestigious universities and longtime regulars at the most prestigious parties are all being muscled unceremoniously out the door. The most rightward agents of capital, working side-by-side, are systematically dismantling the last vestiges of the post-WWII white settler coalition.

As numerous U.S. backed coups show, what will follow the fascist takeover is a wholesale pillaging of everything that isn’t nailed down. The hyperrich have their eye set on the biggest plunder imaginable: that of the imperial core itself. The core is the last orange that hasn’t been squeezed — the petit-bourgeoisie and labor aristocracy have grown fat and happy off their share of the spoils extracted from the rest of the world, and they’re about to be put in the juicer. Every service, agency, function, apparatus, every conceivable benefit given to everyone from the settler “middle class” on up will be sold at auction to the highest bidder (see former Soviet government enterprises) or simply eliminated (see the post-coup killing of the Guatemalan land reform initiative). Every shred of value that can be appropriated will be appropriated, and the capitalist ruling class, together with its church-and-state allies, will rise to dominate the United States like the United States has dominated the rest of the world since the end of the Second World War. The boot of oppression is coming for all who thought they were comfortable, secure in an idyllic existence, sure the class struggle would never reach them, insulated from all upheaval and tumult.  

The recently-passed Trump administration policies are very unpopular now, and their unpopularity will only grow as the months and years pass. So this new ruling class coalition has ensured that units of force stand by to enforce the will of the state wherever the will of the masses is found lacking. Local police departments have been equipped with military grade weaponry and tactical assault vehicles, massive training complexes have been built to train them in their use, and multiple letter agencies have been deployed with specific instructions to wear insignias and identification on flak jackets at all times during an operation. ICE and Border Patrol are arresting entire families, congregants during a church service, legal residents who were simply overheard in public speaking Spanish, and even Indigenous people. The message being sent is loud and clear: this is the way things will be, and these are the consequences for those who don’t obey.