The Kebra Negast

In the 14th century, the ideological foundation for Ethiopia was written. This text, borne in the ancient clerical language of Ge’ez, was known as the Kebra Negast, or the Glory of Kings. This 900-page epic framed “Ethiopia” not simply as the highlands of Abyssinia but as the biblical and universal land of Cush. This was an ideological construct, an Ethiopian Zionism, that would be wielded to justify imperialist claims over the entire Horn of Africa. The Kebra Negast became the pillar of Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity and the Solomonic Dynasty that reigned from 1270 AD through 1974, facilitated the fusion of church and state, and most notably, served as the basis for Abyssinia’s European-backed crusades at the end of the 19th century that would lead to the formation of modern Ethiopia as a prison house of nations.

The Kebra Negast, in essence, named the leaders of “Ethiopia” as the direct descendants of the biblical Ancient Israel. It appropriated the name Ethiopia from the Bible’s Psalm 68:31, which proclaimed that “princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God.” 

As the epic is told, on a delegation to Israel, the Queen of Sheba (of “Ethiopia”) was wooed by King Solomon of Israel, and they had a night of passion. Back in Ethiopia, she had his child. She named that child Menelik, and when he grew up, Menelik traveled to Jerusalem to meet his father, Solomon. Solomon then recognized Menelik as his favorite child and tried to convince him to stay to be his heir. Menelik refused, opting instead to return to his mother. Resigned, Solomon sent Menelik away with a large company, including the first-born sons of his nobles and a congregation of Hebrew priests. Resentful that they were forced to leave Jerusalem, the priests smuggled with them the Ark of the Covenant, a gold chest that bore the very tablets that God himself inscribed the Ten Commandments in. When Solomon discovered the theft, he attempted to pursue them, but the ark’s divine power miraculously flew Menelik and his entire party to Ethiopia unscathed.

According to the legend, since then, the ark has been held in the Cathedral of St. Mary of Zion in Axum, located in modern Ethiopia’s northern Tigray province. Today, a constant stream of the devout huddle in the cathedral or congregate outside to bask in its glow. However, nobody besides the Guardian Monk (the highest ranking priest tasked with watching the ark for life) is allowed to enter the Holy of Holies where the ark is housed. All others, according to the Hebrew Bible, are strictly forbidden from looking at the ark lest they be struck dead by God.¹ Ethiopian Orthodox churches across Ethiopia and throughout the world are constructed as models of Solomon’s temple and contain within them symbolic replicas of the ark.  

Thus, Ethiopia’s mythical relationship to Ancient Israel is consecrated through Menelik I, the Ark of the Covenant, its Orthodox churches made in the image of Solomon’s temple with replicas of the ark, and the distinctive Hebrew traditions, practices, and language imbued within Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity itself.

The story of the Kebra Negast, placed alongside an excerpt from the Jewish text Midrash Tanchuma, shows clearly how Ethiopia as the holder of the ark meant it could best Ancient Israel and situate itself at the center of the universe:

As the navel is set in the center of the human body, so is the land of Israel the navel of the world; it is situated in the center of the world, and Jerusalem in the center of the land of Israel, and the Temple in the center of Jerusalem, and the Holy of Holies in the center of the Temple, and the Ark in the center of the Holy of Holies, and the foundation stone before the Holy of Holies, because from it the world was founded.²

Wielding the Kebra Negast

In the centuries following the Kebra Negast’s completion, the Abyssinian aristocracy, priests, and nuns acted as if they were descendants of the Ancient Israelites. Kings and emperors viewed themselves as Kings of Zion and they invoked Solomonic descent through their names and titles. Zara Yaqob of the 15th century wrote theological treatises that framed Ethiopia as the Ark’s resting place. Emperor Yitzhak (Isaac), took his name from the Hebrew Bible’s Isaac, a founding figure of Judaism. And centuries later, there was Menelik II, the emperor that carried out the European-backed crusades against the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations at the end of the 19th century to establish the foundation of modern Ethiopia. 

The significance of Menelik II’s name was that, while wiping out the people in the south and east,³ sending Black Abyssinian settlers from the north into their lands to enslave them,⁴ carving out his gains alongside the European powers in the Berlin Conference,⁵ and mass–converting the survivors from their Indigenous religions and Islam to Orthodox Christianity,⁶ he was legitimizing his claim as the direct descendant of Menelik I, the prized child of King Solomon of Ancient Israel. Thus, contemporary with the genocide of Palestinians and occupation of Palestine by Jewish Political Zionism was the genocide and occupation of the Oromo, Somali, Sidama, and other nations by Ethiopian Zionism.⁷

The Ethiopian Jews

All of this is to say nothing of the Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews who reside near Gondar in Ethiopia’s northern Amhara province. The Beta Israel are both a source of legitimacy to Ethiopia’s claims to descent from Ancient Israel and a source of revulsion, given that Jews are viewed by Ethiopian Orthodox Christians as the betrayers of Christ.

To the Ethiopian Zionists, possession of the Ark, the Beta Israel’s habitation in Ethiopia, and the existence of Ethiopia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity is proof that the Jews of Ancient Israel were “restored” and perfected through their religion. In contrast to European Christian Zionists who played a crucial role in establishing ‘israel’ in Palestine (such as Arthur Balfour and Reverend William Hechler), who believed the world’s Jews must return to Palestine to eventually convert to Christianity and usher in the second coming of Christ, Ethiopian Zionism already proclaims itself the final, perfected version of Israel. Zion, not in waiting, but already fulfilled.

As the Kebra Negast reads:

The daughters of Jerusalem suffered disgrace, and the daughters of Ethiopia were held in honour; the daughter of Judah was sad, whilst the daughter of Ethiopia rejoiced; the mountains of Ethiopia rejoiced, and the mountains of Lebanon mourned. The people of Ethiopia were chosen [from] among idols and graven images, and the people of Israel were rejected. The daughters of Zion were rejected, and the daughters of Ethiopia were honoured; the old men of Israel became objects of contempt, and the old men of Ethiopia were honoured. For God accepted the peoples who had been cast away and rejected Israel, for Zion was taken away from them and she came into the country of Ethiopia.⁸

The Beta Israel endured brutal conditions in Ethiopia. Many of them looked to the Yishuv (early Jewish settlements in Palestine) and later, the newly emerging ‘israel.’ Over time, they saw it as their promised land and in small pockets began to “make Aliyah” — to flock there — undermining Ethiopian Zionism’s narrative of the perfected Zionist entity and bolstering israel’s claims to embodying Eretz Israel, the land of return for the world’s Jews. Given the Beta Israel were considered the world’s oldest practitioners of Judaism, their allegiance lent gravity to whoever could win it.

In fact, on his first visit to Jerusalem in 1924, Haile Selassie (at the time known as the Crown Prince Tafari Mekonnen under Empress Zewditu) rebuffed an inquiry by the Chief Rabbinate of the Yishuv into improving the lot of the Beta Israel. “The history of the Ethiopians and Israelites indicates that these two nations are similar in race… in regard to the Jews known as [Beta Israel] and located in Ethiopia, we will always try to give them our help and protect them from every evil,” he replied.⁹ Holding fast to its Zionist claims, for many more decades, Ethiopia would refuse to give its stately blessing for Beta Israel migration despite ongoing israeli pressure.

Simultaneous Crisis Draws Together the Twin Zions

In October 1935, the Italians unleashed a full-scale attack on Ethiopia as a prelude to World War II. Oromos, who since the era of Menelik bore a deep resentment for Abyssinian rule, seized the moment to reclaim their lost freedom. In 1935, the Raya and Azebo Oromos attacked the Abyssinian armies traveling to and from the Battle of Maichew. In 1936, the Oromo of Jimma attacked and expelled Amhara officials and thereby demonstrated their rejection of colonial rule. In western Abyssinia, the hereditary rulers of the Oromo declared their independence and formed the Western Oromo Confederation (WOC), offering themselves as a mandate territory of the League of Nations.¹⁰

The same year the WOC was formed, Emperor Haile Selassie, by then known as the “Lion of Judah,” fled Ethiopia, avoiding Raya and Azebo Oromo land as he left. In his crisis, the first place he went was to Jerusalem. He arrived just as the Palestinians had initiated their general strike and began their armed struggle in what would be known as the Arab Revolt.¹¹ Selassie, who only years prior had codified in the 1931 Ethiopian Constitution his descent from Solomon and Sheba,¹² arrived to a wave of sympathy from the Zionist press.¹³

The struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians had created their respective antagonists’ crises and made their need for unity apparent. Even then, Selassie still held fast to Ethiopia’s ancient claims to the Beta Israel and Judaism while casting the Yishuv as simply a nascent phenomenon. In a prepared speech to the Hebrew press, he asserted:

I visited the Land of Israel in 1924, and I find that there is great progress in this country. I know that the Jews are quiet people and dedicated to peace. Of course it is also known to you that in Ethiopia there are Jews of an ancient race who live in complete harmony with all others. They preserve their religious traditions and no one hinders them. Please know that we appreciate the support that the Jewish people have expressed for Ethiopia, and we hope that the Jewish press will continue to support us.¹⁴

Of course, such struggle between Zionisms coexisted with a necessary unity imposed by heightening struggle from without. David Ben-Gurion, later the first prime minister of israel, recognized that the crisis in Ethiopia was also a crisis for the Zionists in occupied Palestine:“We knew that what is going on in the world has an impact on what we do in the Land of Israel. That beginning of the crisis should be seen not as April 19th [the outbreak of the Arab Revolt], but in what happened a few months earlier in Ethiopia.”¹⁵ 

A resolution was worked out. Orde Wingate, the same Christian Zionist British captain who formed the Haganah (the precursor to the israel Defense Forces) that crushed the Arab Revolt, a hero to the architects of the Palestinian Nakba,¹⁶ would enter Ethiopia in 1940 to lead the force that defeated the Italians and restored Selassie to the throne.¹⁷  In Wingate’s own words, it was “for the sake of Zion.”¹⁸

The Beta Israel Exchange

Decades later, when the military government that deposed Selassie had its back to the wall, owing to the national liberation struggles of the Eritreans, the Oromo, the Somali, and the Tigray nations, Ethiopia would begrudgingly use the Beta Israel as a bargaining chip. So long as it was done in secret, to avoid tarnishing Ethiopia’s Zionist claims and undermining its credibility to the oppressed world that had taken up anti-Zionism, israel could receive loyal new Black Jewish settlers, who themselves gained in escaping their oppression in Ethiopia. In the act itself, Ethiopia laundered the racial cover it received on the world stage to israel — and conveniently at a time when the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) had made inroads into Black Amerika¹⁹ and israel faced the wrath of the world for its support of apartheid South Africa. The Beta Israel then settled Palestinian lands, filled the ranks of the occupation army, and took up highly visible political and cultural posts. In return, Ethiopia received weaponry, security expertise, and economic aid to crush the rebellion of the oppressed nations within itself.

Ironically, the brutal, racist israeli state would come to treat the Beta Israel just as poorly as the Ethiopians did. Given that many of the Beta Israel fled persecution to a promised land, they were unquestionably loyal to the israeli Zionist cause. It meant that, even if most of them would come to face abject conditions — from forced sterilizations, to staggering poverty, and rampant police killings — their propensity for revolt was quite low. Thus, while Ethiopia could acquire from israel the means to extinguish the oppressed — primarily the Oromo — the Beta Israel were a useful dumping ground for antagonisms borne from the struggle of the oppressed — particularly the Palestinians. In this regard, the two entities quite literally reinforced each other.

Tewodros’ ambition

The Deir-al-Sultan Monastery

Though Abyssinia (the northern entity that preceded modern Ethiopia) had all the makings of Zion, the one thing it lacked was direct control over the holy city of Jerusalem, which it claimed descent from. Since Christianity was embraced in Abyssinia as early as the 4th century, Jerusalem held a special place in Abyssinian culture, with monks and pilgrims flocking to the city and dwelling there. In the late 12th century, King Lalibela built his own version of Jerusalem in his capital of Roha. Exchange flourished for centuries until Abyssinia’s decline upon defeat by Ahmad Gragn of the east, who occupied its highlands beginning in 1527, as well as the rise of Ottoman rule in Palestine. In this period, Abyssinian presence in Jerusalem became reduced to one monastery known as the Deir-al-Sultan.

The Deir-al-Sultan sits on the roof of the Chapel of Saint Helena that was part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem’s Old City. For some time, Abyssinia’s claim to the Deir-al-Sultan served as a powerful symbol of its historic ties to the city. However, in 1838, a plague wiped out its monks, and with permission from the Armenian Patriarchate, the Egyptian Coptic monks in the neighboring monasteries moved in and laid claim to the Deir-al-Sultan.²⁰ Three years later, a new group of Abyssinian monks arrived and accused the Copts of unfairly seizing the site. This marked the beginning of a long-term conflict.

The Rise and Fall of Tewodros II

In this period, a man by the name of Kassa rose to power, inheriting a weak, divided Abyssinia. An ancient prophecy, known as Fekkare Iyasus (The Explanation of Jesus) foretold that a king named Tewodros would save Ethiopia from destruction and rule for around 40 years.²¹ Kassa harkened back to this prophecy and took the name of Emperor Tewodros II.

Upon taking power, Tewodros II wielded this divine mission to grease the wheels of his imperial ambitions. He revived vigor around the Kebra Negast and sought to reclaim the Deir-al-Sultan, on which the Ottoman Turks sided with the Egyptians.²² This was considered a great humiliation and drove Tewodros II’s burning desire to take Jerusalem by force.²³ While ensnared in war on all fronts, in October 1862, he sought sympathy from Queen Victoria as a fellow Christian monarch and a self-professed descendant of Ancient Israel and wrote to her:

Since my ancestors, the kings, have until now offended our creator. He had handed their kingdom over to the [Oromo] and the Turks. But now, ever since I was born my Creator has raised me from the dust and given me power and placed me over the kingdom of my ancestors. By the power of God, I have dislodged the [Oromo]. But when I told the Turks to relinquish the soil of my fathers they refused; and so, by the power of God, here I am about to struggle against them.²⁴

Before Tewodros II could even dream of Jerusalem, he faced many obstacles, including Oromo militias in Wollo, rebellious nobles in Tigray, Egyptian pressure from Sudan, and Ottoman expansion along the Red Sea coast. He could not defeat them all. In fact, the Foreign Office in London failed to even pass the letter to the Queen,²⁵ given it sought appeasement with the Ottomans who occupied Jerusalem. Evidently, Tewodros II was not an ally but a nuisance. As a last ditch effort, Tewodros imprisoned missionaries and representatives of the British government. In response, a British expedition led by General Richard Napier faced Tewodros II in the Battle of Magdala in 1868. The British defeated his forces and freed the hostages. Rather than surrender, Tewodros II committed suicide, ironically with a pistol gifted to him by Victoria.²⁶ His dream was to remain unrealized.  

In Lieu of Conquest

Licking their wounds, subsequent emperors and rulers would have to abandon direct conquest of Jerusalem and opted instead to shore up Abyssinian presence elsewhere in Jerusalem to lend credence to its claims of having direct, holy ties to the city. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Abyssinians acquired houses and lands in west Jerusalem. Meanwhile, a succession of emperors built Solomonic churches and monasteries, such as the Debre Genet monastery, and many other buildings. By 1905, the Ottoman authorities designated this part of Jerusalem as Haret al-Habash, what is known today as the Ethiopian compound centered on Ethiopia Street, a lasting imprint of Ethiopian Zionist claims to descent from Jerusalem.

The fate of Deir al-Sultan’s keys remained in flux for another century after Tewodros II’s death. Diplomatic struggle over the monastery occurred throughout, including on Selassie’s 1924 tour when in Cairo he submitted a request for the keys directly to the highest level of the Coptic Church and the Egyptian Prime Minister.²⁷ Of course, he was resoundingly rejected and would not see success until the later period of his reign. In the meantime, he sought conciliatory measures, such as an arrangement with the Greek Orthodox patriarch in Jerusalem where he acquired a room in the monastery of Abraham which was connected by a door to the Deir-al-Sultan — among other backroom deals.²⁸ These were, of course, token arrangements.

The Forging of Twin Struggles, 1960s-1970s

The Naksa

Palestine and Oromia would see a new period of converging struggle. At the end of 1964, the Palestinian national liberation movement’s Fateh began launching guerrilla offensives against israel under the front organization Al-Asifa. Al-Asifa’s first communique proclaimed:

From our people, steadfast to the limit, and from the conscience of our battling homeland, our revolutionary vanguards burst out, believing in the armed revolution as the way to Return and to Liberty, in order to stress to the colonialists and their henchmen, and to world Zionism and its financiers, that the Palestinian people remains in the field; that it has not died and will not die.²⁹

In this mounting struggle, israel retaliated against the guerillas and neighboring Arab states. Syria and Jordan especially were caught in the middle and vacillated between supporting the Palestinians and fighting against them. This escalated into the Six Day War in 1967 and culminated in the Naksa — the day of setback. Here, israel, in conventional warfare, defeated Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq in six days. It captured the Golan Heights, the West Bank including East Jerusalem, the Gaza Strip, and Sinai. Up to 325,000 Palestinians were displaced. Though 1967 was a setback, it opened the way for the Palestinian guerillas to take leadership of their own struggle and break away from the humiliated Arab armies.

Macha-Tulama and Bale

Along with the Palestinians, Oromos had their own developments in the 1960s. In 1963, Oromo intellectuals, army officers, soldiers, students, and merchants used a loophole in Ethiopian law to form the Macha-Tulama Self-Help Association. In its constitution, the Association established two objectives: First, to establish schools, health clinics, and roads in Oromia where they were needed. Second, to build churches and mosques while provisioning financial and legal assistance for disabled and unemployed people.³⁰ In essence, “the first set of objectives aimed to improve the welfare of the Oromo nation; the second sought to mobilize the Oromo people toward a common goal by undermining the colonial policy of divide and rule based on religion, class, and region.”³¹ The Association achieved such widespread popularity that within three years, membership reached more than two million.³² It was effectively operating as “a government within a government.”³³ And among its membership were not just Oromos but were 26 leaders from other colonized nations brought to heel under Menelik II, including the Afars, Sidamas, and Walayitas.³⁴

During this time period, Oromo peasants in eastern Bale began a massive armed rebellion against land alienation, heavy taxation, maladministration, and Ethiopian occupation as embodied in the presence of Amhara landlords. In the rebellion, the movement’s leaders united the Oromo with Somalis under the banner of Islam to fight the Ethiopian state. Together, they mounted decimating attacks on landlords concentrated in the local towns.³⁵ The landlords were no match for the peasants, who used guerrilla tactics and at one point held 75% of the Bale region while encircling the provincial capital of Goba.³⁶

The two movements in Bale and Macha-Tulama weren’t only simultaneous, but actively linked up and coordinated with each other. Ahmed Buna, a schoolteacher and member of the Association who would go on to co-found the Marxist Oromo Liberation Front, smuggled the leaders of the Bale armed resistance to Finfinnee (Addis Ababa) in 1965. While there, the leaders discussed how best to coordinate their activities. Mamo Mazamir, one of the revolutionary members of Macha-Tulama involved in the discussions, lucidly analyzed the Oromo struggle and pledged solidarity with the rebels of Bale:

The history of mankind shows that a people who rise in the struggle for freedom and independence, in defiance of death, are always victorious. The life and death struggle of the oppressed masses in the Ethiopian Empire against the hegemony of the Amhara and their allies headed by American imperialism is a sacred liberation struggle of millions of oppressed and humiliated people. That struggle will surely intensify in the course of time, as the oppressed peoples organizational means and consciousness become deeply rooted. As learnt in discussions, the Macha and Tulama democratic movement, which was created to raise the consciousness of the Oromo people is in the present situation working day and night to put in hand coordination activities that are within our reach. In fact, the militant members are working now on the means of organizing a nationwide people’s movement which is based on realizing the aspirations of Oromo people. Please, keep up your heroic armed struggle, defending every inch of the Oromo nation to the last drop of your blood. The decisive war of resistance you are conducting in Bale will, despite the maneuvers of imperialism, Zionism and local reaction, be victorious. We shall continue doing everything we can to keep in touch with you.³⁷

The communique from Al-Asifa and these words from Mazamir demonstrate that the Oromos and Palestinians were two fronts of the same struggle. They were both conscious of themselves as nations with a right to self-determination and they knew that their enemy was imperialism and Zionism. And in the exact same moment, the two fronts were unleashing a struggle to the death to liberate themselves from Zionist imperialist oppression.

Eventually, Ethiopia, whose intelligence by that point, according to an israeli historian, was “literally run” by israel,³⁸ were able to crush the Macha-Tulama movement by framing, torturing, and killing its leaders.³⁹ With the help of the israeli counter-insurgency and Anglo-American demolitions experts, it defeated the Bale Revolt,⁴⁰ and left over 700,000 dead.⁴¹ From this defeat, the Oromo peasantry suffered; 36.5% of the administrated land in the district where the rebellion emerged was confiscated by 1968. By 1970, the leaders of the Bale Revolt negotiated amnesty for themselves and ended the revolt.⁴²

A Resolution Between the Twin Zions

That same year, the israeli government, newly bolstered by its spoils from the 1967 war, marched in, changed the locks of Deir-al-Sultan, expelled the Coptic monks, and handed the keys to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, even defying a ruling by the israeli Supreme Court to return the key to the Egyptians.⁴³ That lock-changing marked a resolution in Ethiopia’s century-long pursuit of the Deir-al-Sultan key that spanned multiple emperors and rulers. And by doing so, the two powers did not just merely resolve a monastic dispute, but through defeat of Palestinian and Oromo resistance movements, and the conquest of their respective lands, consecrated formal unity between the Ethiopian myth of Solomonic descent and the israeli Zionist myth of Jewish return.

Of course, the driving force of their convergence was not conspiracy, but the struggle of the Oromo and Palestinians that drew them together. The two entities were forced to an agreement that could accommodate both Zionisms, a necessary qualitative leap in unity between the two oppressors.

Meanwhile, capturing Jerusalem brought sheer ecstasy for the israeli Zionist project and gave it a base to further expand its territorial ambitions. In Ethiopia, the access to the Deir-al-Sultan similarly brought celebration and helped cement its spiritual claims to Ancient Israeli descent. With this arrangement, when israel strengthened, it could only legitimize Ethiopia more. It was in Ethiopia and israel’s utmost interest to band together to crush the Oromo and Palestinians.

In the diplomatic realm, such mutual interests of Ethiopia and israel were referenced through incessant overtures to an “ancient” relationship stretching back to Biblical times.

The Birth of the Oromo Liberation Struggle and Contact with Palestine

The embryo of the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF) was within the Macha-Tulama movement. Its primary founder, Baro Tumsa, became an active member of the association as a student, where he served as a legal advisor while also coordinating the youth wing.⁴⁴ Goaded on by the government’s escalating violent suppression of the Macha-Tulama movement, Baro and his comrades formed clandestine study circles while secretly distributing propaganda.⁴⁵ They established relationships across Oromo society within and without Oromia, including with Oromo students at Haile Selassie University who played a central role in the student movement that toppled the emperor in 1974.⁴⁶ Similarly, they established relations with other colonized nations, such as the Sidama and Afar, and other liberation fronts, such as the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF).⁴⁷

At the same time, Oromo revolutionary Elemo Qilxu, who was living in Aden, Yemen, established relationships with the Yemeni, Syrian, and Iraqi governments, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), and the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF).⁴⁸ Other Oromos received military training in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Iraq, and Syria. They opened offices in several Southwest Asian and North African countries already aiding Palestine, most notably in Damascus and Beirut.⁴⁹ In 1969, Abbaa Gadaa Jaarraa and others went to Iraq to receive guerrilla training for seven months.⁵⁰ Then, on their journey to Hararghe in East Oromia, Jaarraa and 38 other fighters were captured, disarmed, and imprisoned by the Somali government for five years.⁵¹

In 1972, Baro sent Getachew Baissa, Mitiku Terfassa, and Yusuf Bakar through Somalia to receive military training in Vietnam, the DPRK, China, and throughout SWANA where they learned from Palestinians. The Somali government, then led by Siad Barre, which at the time possessed its own Pan-Somali ambitions in reuniting Ethiopia’s Ogaden region and East Oromia with itself, refused to help the three. Only Bakar was able to make it to Yemen, while Getachew and Mitiku returned to Oromia.⁵² Years later in 1975, Baro sent a second delegation of six Oromo university students to Somalia to receive training and secure support for the Oromo national movement. These were Muhee Abdo, Aboma Mitiku, Demisse Techane, Zakariyas Hassan, Hashim Gobana, and Mohammed Ibrahim Khalil. The Somali government rebuffed them and advised them to go to Aden to work with Bakar. [53]

Unperturbed by the Somali government’s arrest of Jaaraa, Elemo persisted on, traveling to Finfinnee to link up with the emerging Oromo political group led by Baro Tumsa, which formed the central coordinating body of the OLF in 1974.⁵³ From there, Elemo moved east to begin the armed struggle against settler colonialists between 1973 and 1974. In these early battles, Elemo and five others were killed, causing the group to disband. But, not before they killed or wounded several enemies.⁵⁴ Out of this early armed struggle, the Oromo Liberation Army (OLA) was formed.⁵⁵

In 1974, the Ethiopian emperor Selassie fell to a tidal wave of discontent. In the power vacuum, the Derg military government seized control, while two Ethiopian political parties, the All-Ethiopian Socialist Movement (MEISON) and Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party (EPRP), contended with the burgeoning Oromo national movement. And though they called themselves socialists, what they both had in common was their rejection of the Oromo right to self-determination, decolonization, and the Oromo colonial thesis that stated that Ethiopia colonized the Oromo with the help of European imperialism, and imprisoned the Oromo and other nations during the Scramble for Africa.⁵⁶

While the OLF considered that the colonial question was principal, requiring either full separation of Oromia from Ethiopia or the establishment of a democratic multi-national federation or confederation, the Ethiopian socialist parties liquidated the Oromo question into a larger class question. They simply treated the Oromo land question as indistinguishable from the feudal question without the need for political self-determination for the historically oppressed Oromo nation. Given that many Oromo students and intellectuals were either thoroughly imbued with Ethiopianist ideology, or themselves possessed their own personal interests intertwined with Ethiopia, they joined these Ethiopian parties while deeming the OLF “narrowly nationalist.” MEISON would ally with the Derg and EPRP would lead the opposition to it. Both, unable to shore up the colonized majority due to their own chauvinism, would eventually be savagely liquidated by the Derg.

Thus, surrounded on all sides by a hostile military government, obstructionist neighbors, and settler “socialist” parties, in their May 1975 pamphlet, titled “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” the OLF clearly placed its liberation struggle right alongside the Palestinians. At the time, the Palestinians were similarly facing down Zionist occupation, betrayal from Arab regimes, and relying on allies ensnared in bourgeois state building.

In the pamphlet’s closing, the OLF resoundingly stated:

The enemies of our revolution are many, and they are organized under different banners of reaction, which could very easily be related to the root of settler colonialism. Hereby, we call upon all progressive Organizations and Democratic Forces to hear our battle cry for our political independence, progress, and Socialism. Thus, our struggle to deface the colonial aims and imperialist reaction will continue until victory. World progressive forces, unite and struggle for worldwide total victory. Long live the world struggle against imperialist forces and colonialism. Long live the Oromo people’s revolution. Long live the Palestinian revolution. Long live the Eritrean, Afar, Somali, and other oppressed peoples’ revolutionary struggles. And down with Abyssinian and Zionist settler colonialism. Down with imperialists and reactionaries. Ever forward with victory.⁵⁷

In sum, the OLF, the highest expression of the Oromo nation’s aspirations, saw itself as an inviolable pole in the anti-Zionist struggle, inseparable from the struggle of their comrades in Palestine.

All of the above, then, induces a series of questions. What could Zionism be but the mythological ideology of settler colonialism? What could support of Ethiopia be but support for Zionism and the occupation of Palestine from the rear? What could be the negation of Zionism but the struggle of the Oromo people, consciously and inviolably fused with that of the Palestinians?

References

1. 1 Sam 6:19 (English Standard Version). ︎
2. Midrash Tanchuma, Kedoshim, Buber ed., trans. John Townsend (Hoboken, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 1989), Kedo. 10, https://www.sefaria.org/Midrash_Tanchuma_Buber%2C_Kedoshim.10.2?lang=bi​​​​​​​ ︎
3. Harold Marcus, “Motives, Methods and Some Results of the Unification of Ethiopia during the Reign of Menelik II,” in Proceedings of the Third International Conference of Ethiopian Studies (Addis Ababa: Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Haile Selassie University, 1966), 269–280. ︎
4. League of Nations, “Perpetual Servitude Resulting from Defeat,” Report of the Committee of Experts on Slavery, C.240.M.171.1935.VI (Geneva: League of Nations, 1935). ︎
5. Bonnie Holcomb and Sissai Ibssa, The Invention of Ethiopia (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1990), 103. ︎
6. Ibid, 289. ︎
7. Ibid, 71–125. ︎
8. The Kebra Nagast, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), chap. 87, 147–48. ︎
9. Haggai Erlich, Alliance and Alienation: Ethiopia and Israel in the Days of Haile Selassie (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2014), 28. ︎
10. Ezekiel Gebissa, “The Italian Invasion, the Ethiopian Empire, and Oromo Nationalism: The Significance of the Western Oromo Confederation of 1936,” Northeast African Studies 9, no. 3 (2002): 76. ︎
11. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 32. ︎
12. “The Constitution of Ethiopia,” 1931, https://ethcln.com/system/files/ethiopian-constitution-of-1931.pdf. ︎
13. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 35–40. ︎
14. Haaretz, May 19, 1936. ︎
15. David Ben-Gurion, lecture to the Council of the Histadrut, February 1, 1937, Ben-Gurion Archives, Item #88003. ︎
16. Ghassan Kanafani, The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine (Beirut: Palestine Liberation Organization Research Center, 1972), 58–59. ︎
17. Simon Anglim, Orde Wingate and the British Army (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2010), 57–144. ︎
18. Avraham Akavia, “Orde Wingate,” in The Friends of Israel (Tel Aviv: n.p., 1950), 94. ︎
19. “Jackson and Arafat Confer in Lebanon,” New York Times, September 30, 1979. ︎
20. Stéphane Ancel, “The Ethiopian Orthodox Community in Jerusalem: New Archives and Perspectives on Daily Life and Social Networks, 1840–1940,” in Ordinary Jerusalem 1840–1940: Opening New Archives, Revisiting a Global City, ed. Angelos Dalachanis and Vincent Lemire (Leiden: Brill, 2018), 50–51. ︎
21. Ras Iadonis Tafari, THE EXPLICATION OF JESUS [Yeshua]: FIKARE IYESUS: A Raw Translation in English (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012). ︎
22. “The Amharic Letters of Emperor Theodros of Ethiopia to Queen Victoria and Her Special Envoy,” Journal of Ethiopian Law 14, no. 1 (March 1989): 115. ︎
23. “The Ethiopian Community in Jerusalem from 1850 to the Conference of Dar-el-Sultan 1902: The Political Struggle for Independence,” in Ethiopian Studies: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference, Tel-Aviv, 14–17 April 1980, ed. Gideon Goldenberg and Baruch Podolsky (Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1986), 487–500. ︎
24. “Amharic Letters,” 115. ︎
25. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection,” Contested Objects Collection, accessed July 8, 2026, https://www.britishmuseum.org/about-us/british-museum-story/contested-objects-collection/maqdala-collection. ︎
26. British Museum, “Maqdala Collection.” ︎
27. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 28. ︎
28. Stéphane Ancel and Vincent Lemire, “Across the Archives: New Sources about the Ethiopian Christian Community in Jerusalem (1840–1940),” Jerusalem Quarterly, no. 71 (Autumn 2017): 109. ︎
29. Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, Al-Watha’iq al-Filastiniyah al-’Arabiyah li-’Am 1965 (Beirut: Mu’assasat al-Dirasat al-Filastiniyah, 1965), 1. ︎
30. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
31. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 103, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
32. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 131. ︎
33. Olana Zoga, Gizat na Gizot: The Macha-Tulama Association (Addis Ababa, 1985 Ethiopian Calendar), 37. ︎
34. Asafa Jalata, Fighting against the Injustice of the State and Globalization: Comparing the African American and Oromo Movements (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 75. ︎
35. Mohammed Hassen, “The Oromo Nation under Amhara Colonial Administration,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 44, no. 3 (1981): 36. ︎
36. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” American Journal of Islam and Society 26, no. 3 (July 1, 2009): 104, https://doi.org/10.35632/ajis.v26i3.385. ︎
37. Borana Tullu, “The Bale Oromos’ Armed Struggle, 1963–1970: A Basic Lesson for the Oromo National Liberation Movement,” Saba Oromo: The Journal of Oromo Students in Britain 1, no. 1 (1980): 25–26. ︎
38. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 137. ︎
39. Norma J. Singer, “Ethiopia: Human Rights, 1948–1978,” in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa, ed. Robert L. Hess (n.p.: [s.n.], 1978), 663–678. ︎
40. Mohammed Hassen, “Islam as an Ideology of Resistance among the Oromo of Ethiopia,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 26, no. 3 (2009): 104. ︎
41. Asafa Jalata, Oromia and Ethiopia: State Formation and Ethnonational Conflict, 1868–2004 (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 2005), 184. ︎
42. John Markakis and Nega Ayele, Class and Revolution in Ethiopia, 1st American ed. (Trenton, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1986), 53. ︎
43. Erlich, Alliance and Alienation, 189. ︎
44. Asafa Jalata, Baro Tumsa: The Principal Architect of the Oromo Liberation Front (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2024), 90. ︎
45. Ibid, 31. ︎
46. Ibid, 101–110. ︎
47. Ibid. ︎
48. Ibid, 181. ︎
49. Ibid, 155. ︎
50. Ibid. ︎
51. Ibid, 131. ︎
52. Ibid, 155. ︎
53. Ibid, 132. ︎
54. Ibid, 181. ︎
55. Ibid. ︎
56. Ibid. ︎
57. Oromo Liberation Front, “The Struggle of the Oromo People Against Ethiopian Occupation and Amhara Despotism,” 9 May 1975. ︎

I love Iosif Stalin. Unfortunately, nobody knows how to write about Iosif Stalin. Not even Stalin himself knew how to write about Stalin, though he knew that Stalin the Figure was not Stalin the Person and behaved accordingly. In terms of the person, he left no diary or journal for his innermost thoughts, his personal letters were carefully guarded, and he was generally not one to doubt himself or write about doubting himself. Into this hole has flooded a deluge of words about Stalin’s personality and psychological makeup, like the nonsense spouted first prominently by Trotsky and Khruschev, and then remixed in a thousand variations by the liberal academic publishing complex. Needless to say, there are abundant biographies about Stalin, and few of them are serious and even fewer are good.

Most of the English-language biographies are on the level of Sebag-Montefiore’s orientalist Young Adult historical adventure fiction.¹ In terms of serious study, Stalin’s tenure in the USSR has gotten a better shake than the man himself, with the rise of the revisionist school of Sovietology in radical liberal academia (surprisingly, one man did not have absolute power over an entire society!).² And even from the Communist side, historical biographies of Stalin published during his rule took care to buff out his sharp points and polish his face smooth — as much as Stalin himself did not enjoy it, he resigned himself to becoming an idol for his people.³ Post-de-Stalinization defenders like Domenico Losurdo and Ludo Martens are much more concerned with Stalin and the USSR more broadly, than they are with the man himself, as a person.

Who the hell was Stalin? No one knows, I’m afraid. But there might be a good guess.

In 1987, Ronald Grigor Suny set out to write another Stalin biography to add to the pile of Stalin biographies in the world. It took him until 2020 to finish the project, as the Soviet Union collapsed in the interim. But besides the unpleasant fact of the capitalist holocaust, this cracked the former government’s archives open to Western scrutiny. Dr. Suny had a field day, digging through pretty much all documentary materials available on Stalin’s pre-revolution life, and produced a 896-page tome of Stalin’s life before the October Revolution. Good for him! He was lauded and attacked for his book, by the peanut gallery of respectable socialists and rabid anti-Communist dogs.⁴

Move over, Stephen Kotkin. Suny’s on the scene!

Suny’s book, based on his excessive archival trawling, makes the argument that the young Stalin can be divided into three phases of his life: Soso, the faithful seminarian, is not Koba, the unseasoned rebel, is not Stalin, the Marxist professional revolutionary. Suny, unlike pretty much every other Stalin biographer, actually has a wide breadth and depth of knowledge of the revolutionary Caucasus, which he exercises to great effect, filling pages on the nuances of Georgian Social Democracy and the various environments that Soso, then Koba, then finally Stalin moved through. He lays out in fine-grained detail how those environments shaped Stalin’s development, his personality, his preferences, and ultimately the man who would be the Stalin we all know and love (or hate) and how Stalin in turn impacted Georgian and Russian Social Democracy as an activist-organizer-revolutionary. How dialectical!

I imagine the book will be tedious for the reader who just wants to know what hijinks our buddy Koba is getting up to next. As an avid hoarder of facts, I really enjoyed those tangents on politics and culture. As distant as the Tsarist-Russian revolutionary milieu seems to us today, filtered through time and historical mythology, it is helpful to remember that these were ultimately just people trying to figure out how to win against their oppressors and then build the first long-lasting socialist experiment in human history. In other words, they had their own version of inane discourse and difficult personalities. The young Koba, too overconfident, kind of an asshole and schemer, is either relatable because you’ve been a Koba or you’ve had to deal with a Koba.

Though Suny is hostile to the later Stalin in power, he treats the young Stalin with a rare amount of care and empathy. Stalin’s personal life (or, whatever existed of a personal life for a professional revolutionary) is elaborated based on actual documentary evidence instead of the sensationalist rumor-mongering that Stalin biographers often indulge in and the real friendships that Stalin had at the time are named for what they were, even if they later ended very badly.

Where the book is weakest is towards its end, where Suny forecloses Stalin’s trajectory into the revolution eating its children, typical of academic petit-bourgeois pessimism. Trillions starved, etc. But arguably what is most valuable about this book is less than what it details about specifically Stalin’s early activities and personal development, but much more about what it details, through those long tangential passages, about the revolutionary Tsarist-Russian underground, about the cruel reality and life-or-death stakes of fighting an autocratic regime in a peripheral region of a reactionary empire, the nagging national question and the various ways that Communists reconciled (or didn’t) with national liberation, and yes, what it details about the nuances of party-building in Tsarist Russia and its borderlands. Suny commentates from outside these internal splits and dynamics within Russian Social Democracy with more than a century of ironic hindsight, but these are debates that the revolutionaries took seriously at the time and so does he. And so should we.

It would be preposterous to suggest that Tsarist Russia is a mirror of the modern day US Empire– and yet, the challenge remains the same for all Communists: how do we build the party to seize power from the bourgeois state? After all, if the particular characteristic of Tsarist Russia was the autocracy, then the particular characteristic of the US Empire is settler-colonialism, a kind of decentralized autocracy. Perhaps Stalin’s experiences in the underground organizing reading circles with students and workers, his brief stint with legal union organizing, his leadership of armed militias during the height of reaction, his activities as a Bolshevik traveling agent always one step ahead of the Okhrana, and finally his role as a tribune of the people in the interim between February and October provide a clue as to what Communists should expect from their work as the US Empire crumbles. Perhaps we should have a closer look at what it actually took to sustain an underground network and an aboveground movement and draw appropriate lessons from it for today, while keeping in mind that our adversaries are just as well-studied as we are.

In lieu of a numerical rating, I’ll tell you who I think should read this book: Baby Communists who only know the myths of anti-Stalin, obsessive enthusiasts of Soviet revolutionary history, active Communists engaged in the hardest questions of national liberation, and anyone who’s read any other biography about Stalin at all.

1. The clearest example of this is his Young Stalin (2007). This critique of Montefiore can be found almost verbatim in the pages of another of the Big Stalin Biographies, Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin. ︎
2. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s On Stalin’s Team: The Years of Living Dangerously is a group biography that argues that the functional dynamic of the top Stalinist leadership was as a team. Stalin was the team leader who delegated responsibilities and had final word on team inclusion or exclusion, but relied on the loyalty and agency of his teammates to carry out day-to-day governance. Stalin’s team did not mindlessly bend to his will; he had to argue his case convincingly and rely on a combination of argument and intrigue to get his team members on board with certain strategies or tactics. ︎
3. Briefly, for more on this, there are these two letters: (1925) and (1938). ︎
4. Funnily enough, Suny wrote about the reception that his book got in third person about himself. ︎

Tamer Nahed, a journalist from Gaza, reports that “In just the past two days, three people have been killed by fire from these cranes. One of them was sitting quietly with his father in a small café, trying to breathe for a few minutes. Hours later, a 5 year old girl was killed while playing near her home. These cranes have turned the entire city into an open field. The latest military technologies are directed at civilians. We have become an open testing ground for their new weapons. The horror is not just in the sound… it is the constant feeling of being an exposed target at all times, where even children cannot run in the street without fear.”

The official death toll in Gaza has surpassed a staggering 73 thousand people, with an unknown number of additional victims, possibly in the hundreds of thousands, buried under the rubble. The majority of the surviving inhabitants of the Gaza strip today remain in the same tattered refugee tents they were forced into years ago, daily battling brutal inhumane conditions, including exposure, disease, malnutrition, critical shortage of medical supplies, and the pervasive random acts of aggression by the occupation forces. Each rainfall leads to flooding and stagnant water, lack of sewage and waste disposal systems has led to a crisis of unsanitary conditions, and swarms of rats and flies infest the living quarters of the survivors. Occupation forces continuously patrol the coastline, firing indiscriminately on people attempting to fish for food. Only a trickle of aid is allowed into the strip by the occupation. Shortages of machine oils and parts for repairs have led to the breakdown of machinery in bakeries and other vital services. Bread lines are many hours-long and survivors report that there is no guarantee of receiving food, with many leaving empty-handed after standing all day exposed to the elements.

Occupation forces continue to push their imposed border further into the strip, squeezing the beleaguered population into an ever tighter and more concentrated region, in flagrant violation of the ceasefire agreement’s stipulation of a gradual withdrawal. Last month the Gaza government reported that since the ceasefire’s implementation on the 10th of October the occupation had violated it with over 1100 airstrikes and over 900 shootings targeting civilians. Aid shipments have been restricted to a meager 25% of the quantity stipulated by the agreement, leading to persistent shortages of all vital goods.

Particularly urgently, water insecurity is pervasive and more critical with every passing day as summer sets in and punishing heat torments the survivors. According to the Palestine Information Center, “In Al-Shati Camp, securing water has become a compulsory daily routine that is stealing children’s childhoods. Ashraf Miqdad, a father of four, wakes up at dawn to prepare empty containers and takes his children along to walk long distances to secure enough water for just one day. He expressed deep concern over the noticeable decline in the number of water trucks reaching their area.”

“UNICEF reports that 82 percent of households in Gaza are already experiencing water insecurity, while 70 percent are unable to access even the minimum humanitarian standard of six liters per person per day.” The World Health Organization recommends a minimum of 100 liters per person daily for good health and sanitation.

Today Tamer Nahed is asking for our help. He says: “90% of water stations in Gaza have gone out of service, and thousands of families, including my own, are struggling every day to access clean water. For this reason, I decided with my team to launch a project to provide 10 water trucks to camps and families suffering from severe water shortages. Imagine that $200 can provide clean water for more than 80 families. Our goal is to deliver over 40,000 liters of fresh water to those who need it most. This project is completely non-profit, and I will not receive any financial benefit from it. We will document every water truck and every distribution process to ensure full transparency.”

The raw reality of settler colonialism is the deprivation of the most basic necessities of life and the most fundamental human dignities. We all have a duty to resist – by any means necessary. Assisting Palestinian survivors in Gaza is one of the simplest and most direct ways you can make a difference in this struggle. Please help if you can.

What are the facts of the US war against the Iranian people? First, you should know a little bit about the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its relations with the US; the Iranians certainly do. Public memory in the US usually begins with the 1979 hostage crisis. Iranian memory goes back quite a bit further.

In 1921, a cavalry officer named Reza Khan led a coup backed by the United Kingdom and overthrew the Qajar Dynasty of Persia. After World War II, the US started its Cold War against the USSR and the People’s Republic of China. In 1951, the people of Iran elected Mohammad Mossaddegh as their Prime Minister. He embarked on a program of nationalization of the Iranian oil fields, which had until then been controlled by and for the profit of a British firm, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Corporation.

The United Kingdom wanted to invade Iran to secure to oil. After all, the entire global economy had switched over to running on oil by 1951 and every Western military power needed oil to run their war machines. They couldn’t let Iran decide who to sell oil to. They might pick the wrong people! US president Harry Truman convinced the British not to act. At the same time, US diplomats assured the Mossaddegh government that the US was their staunch ally. Behind the scenes, the US was preparing to move against Mossaddegh because the US ruling class was afraid that the Soviets might get their hands on Iranian oil.

In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence agents from MI6 orchestrated a coup. They had the Shah issue arrest orders to detain and arrest Mossaddegh and the cabinet of ministers. The initial coup failed and Mossaddegh rallied the masses of Iran to his side. The US sheltered fleeing army officers in CIA stations across Iran, then unleashed them to counter Mossaddegh. He was placed under house arrest for the rest of his life.

The Shah needed to shore up his position, since his people despised him for what he had done to their elected champion. So, the US provided the Shah with a nuclear program. They bulked up the Iranian army with massive US weapons sales: the Shah was authorized to purchase almost any non-nuclear US weapons system, and spent over $4.3 billion on sales from the US in 1974. Most importantly, though, the CIA built the Shah’s secret police, SAVAK. They trained this brutal force and, under CIA tutelage, SAVAK tortured and murdered political dissidents until the Shah was overthrown.

In 1979, after nearly three decades of abuse, the people of Iran rose up against the Pahlavi monarchy. They were led by a coalition of Communists, socialists, and Islamic revolutionaries. The revolution in Iran took on an Islamic character because mosques were one of the few places where people could organize without being dragged away by the Shah’s secret police. Islam in Iran thus took on a revolutionary role, rather than a reactionary one such as in Saudi Arabia.

The Islamic Republic today is a Parliamentary Republic with a unique element: the role of the velayat-e-faqih, or the oversight of a political “guardian” and jurist of the faith – the “Supreme Leader” of Iran. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (the IRGC you may have heard about recently) is a secular branch of the Republican government. Uppermost in the political philosophy of every branch of the Islamic Republic is the principle that the Iranian people should never again be pawns of the Western powers.

Since 1979, the Islamic Republic has been the target of punishing US sanctions. The US has consistently attempted to exert what it calls “maximum pressure” – the same strategy they are applying to Cuba today and that they applied to Chile in the 1970s – to isolate the Iranian economy. This has resulted in countless deaths, and subjected everyone in Iran to collective punishment for daring to overthrow the US-installed dictatorship.

The Fight Against the zionists

The crimes committed by the zionist state in Palestine are not new, but their full extent has only now become undeniable to the US public. Since it was declared, the Islamic Republic has been opposed to the continuing genocide committed by the zionists and has worked tirelessly to assist the Palestinian resistance. This, more than anything else, has been the reason for the continued hostility of the US ruling class against Iran.

The US requires its forward base in the zionist territory for several reasons. It is the “unsinkable aircraft carrier” of US power projection. It keeps the Gulf vassal stats like Saudi Arabia in line, ensures that oil can continue to flow, operates as a relief valve for domestic US class-strife, and helps the totally enmeshed US-zionist tech and computer economy remain afloat. It is, in essence, an extra “frontier” from which land can be stolen to reward corporate enclaves and individual technical specialists.

In the fight for the freedom of Palestine, the Iranian government has been the strongest ally of the Resistance. In a very real sense, it is impossible to stand up for Palestine without standing against the United States. That includes their aggression against Iran.

Are We the Villains?

The fact of the matter is, from a world-historical perspective – from the perspective of anyone who isn’t a white American – the United States is unequivocally and without question the global “bad guy” and has been since at least the end of World War II. The US government is the largest state sponsor of terror in the world. Everybody other than us already knows this! There is no government the US won’t overthrow in the quest for profit or “containment.” Whatever internal criticisms you have of the Iranian government and how it treats its people, never fear – the US government treats people worse.

Most non-aligned states feel the need to develop nuclear weapons to stop the US from invading them. There’s no need to look back in the history books, just look at how Washington treated the sovereign states of Venezuela and Cuba this year! For what? The acquisition of Venezuelan oil, to cut off the flow of oil to China, and to open up Cuba to American investors and hotel magnates.

But let’s walk through the latest timeline of the US interventions in Iran and try to see if there’s any kind of pattern:

July 2015. A comprehensive nuclear enrichment agreement is reached between Iran, the US, and the UN in exchange for the lifting of sanctions.

May 8, 2019. Washington unilaterally repudiates the deal.

Jan 3, 2020. Washington kills Iranian general Qassem Soleimani with a missile strike for the crime of being anti-zionist and Iranian.

March 7, 2025. Washington says they want to restart talks.

April 12, 2025. First round of talks are held between intermedaries.

April 19, 2025. Second round of talks.

April 26, 2025. Third round of talks are held, the first where experts from both sides are present.

May 11, 2025. Fourth round of talks are held.

May 23, 2025. Fifth round of talks are held. Both US and Iran report that there has been progress.

June 13, 2025. The zionists bomb Iran while talks are ongoing.

June 22, 2025. The United States bombs Iran during the talks.

July 25, 2025. Iran and European authorities meet.

Sept. 9, 2025. Iran and the UN nuclear watchdog strike a deal.

Sept 28, 2025. The UN places new sanctions on Iran.

Jan. 13, 2026. Washington calls off all further talks.

Feb. 6, 2026. Washington restarts talks.

Feb. 26, 2026. Washington and Iran may have a deal.

Feb 28, 2026. While talks are ongoing, Washington and the zionists pummel Iran with missiles and kill the Supreme Leader and his wife without warning.

The Islamic Republic negotiated in good faith; it reached a deal not once, but repeatedly and it was purportedly very close to a deal on February 26. Their counterparts in Washington used the cover of talks not once but twice to strike Iran. So, who, then, are the villains here?

We Have the Same Enemies

The US ruling class — the capitalists — who control all government policy, who decide when and where the country goes to war, and who engage in the most hideous acts of pedophilia, rape, abuse, and even murder; those people who set up and run the US economy, who profit from your misery, who set the police on you, who pilfer your wages and retirement funds, who have been turning the screws on their economic vise since before you were born, who crashed the economy in 2008 and got away with it… those people are our enemy. If the people of Iran have grievances against their government, it is their fight to carry out when and how they choose. Right now, the might of the US imperial war machine is bearing down on the Islamic Republic of Iran… and the Islamic Republic is winning. Not on the abstract level of vague principles, but on the very real level of fact, Iran’s resistance to US imperialism is weakening our collective enemy.

We should be overjoyed that our oppressors are being bloodied by their ill-conceived attacks. The US strikes on Iran have not weakened it at all; they have made it stronger, unified the people of Iran, and placed command of the Iranian nation in the hands of the secular IRGC.

Iran is striking our enemies for us, dealing blow after blow to the imperialist economy, exhausting the imperialist war materiel with their strategy, while we sit idly by and do nothing.

It comes down to each of us to begin organizing local circles to support the world war on imperialism that is now being waged. We must gather all sympathetic people in our locality and plan ways to slow down or degrade the war machine that is firing missiles and dropping bombs in our names. As we do this, we must not lose sight of the true enemy; it is also up to each of us to combat the ruling class propaganda that asks you to be thrilled at the drama of a downed US pilot. What was that pilot doing there? Do not forget: the enemy of the world is our enemy too.

In terms of its size, dynamism, and degree of global integration, China’s market economy is extraordinary. Though it’s known officially as a “socialist market with Chinese characteristics,” its market features far predate the 1978 decision on “reform and opening.” The reformist Chinese growth model has always been characterized by a distinct pragmatism. This involves integrating macro programming and regulations, a mix of public and private ownership and control, market allocation to various degrees of resources and distribution, bureaucratic cronyism in productive and business organizations, and international “free trade.”

This model is the outcome of decades of adaptation and innovation. While much has been written on pre-nineteenth century Chinese economic strategy, far less attention has been paid to the wartime fiscal and monetary experiments undertaken during the Communist Revolution. In an effort to rectify this oversight, I review revolutionary economic policy from the 1920s until the 1940s, reflecting on its theoretical and institutional implications. 

The pacified empire

The unified Qin–Han state originated from an amalgam of the annals of Warring States around the same time as the rise of Rome in the Western Hemisphere. While the Roman Empire fell in the fifth century, imperial China outlived it and subsequent empires. This longevity was in part rooted in its socioeconomic arrangements. Trade had flourished early with extensive internal and external networks across continental and maritime expanses, encompassing numerous silk roads and transportation routes to reach many societies and cultures. 

Prior to 1800, the Chinese, Indian, East Asian, Southeast Asian, and Arab economies were weightier producers than their counterparts elsewhere.¹ In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith recognized that “China is a much richer country than any part of Europe,” despite signs of stagnation.² Instead of an industrial revolution, the Chinese accomplished an “industrious revolution,” argued Giovanni Arrighi, consistent with a Smithian path of “natural progress of opulence” rather than the “unnatural and retrograde” European path of interstate rivalries over power and colonial extraction.³ China at its splendor was so wealthy, thanks to regions like the Yangzi Delta, that while Europe was compelled to adopt machines to cut labor costs, “China didn’t ‘miss’ the industrial revolution—it didn’t need it.”⁴

By the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, China had become the largest trader on the silver standard, contributing to the emergence of global capitalism but without transforming into a colonial empire. In a review of Chen Huan-chang’s 1911 The Economic Principles of Confucius and his School, John Maynard Keynes noted China’s trimetallic system dating back to “the remotest times,” observing that in the use of paper money, the Chinese “long anticipated other peoples.”⁵

Accordingly, “cooperative banks” were invented around 220 AD, and, in subsequent centuries, developed into government and shadow banking of coins, notes, bills, bonds, and “flying money”—money certificates to “control the price of all commodities.”⁶ In place of the liberal legal institutions, credit systems, and public budgeting that characterized early modern Europe, the Chinese economy operated through informal arrangements of properties and contracts, claims and debts, rights and liabilities, which relied on personal and family ties, townsmen associations, and other private partnerships.⁷ Ingenious transactions and lending in China’s commercial centers notwithstanding, underdeveloped financial infrastructure and stimuli of the economy came to be a competitive disadvantage. The “pacified empire,” Max Weber remarked, was a contrast to war-financed “varieties of booty capitalism” in Europe, where states enriched themselves “through war loans and commissions for war purposes.”⁸

Economic difficulties and political turmoil around the transition from Ming to Qing were an instance of the financial weakness of the Chinese imperial monetary system. Under Europe’s financial hegemony, major inflation in China was directly caused by the depletion of silver inflow in the seventeenth-century world crisis.⁹ En route, European ocean vessels linked American cotton and mining products derived from slave labor and trade from Africa with the Chinese-Indian-Arab markets. Gunder Frank recounts this gigantic trading triangle in which the Europeans took out American silver to “buy themselves tickets on the Asian train.”¹⁰ Finding itself a “bottomless pit” for the influx of American silver and its monetization, China became dependent on foreign currency supplies and offshore exchange rates. This was not only economically but also politically costly, as the monetary arbitrage from the externally forged silver standard undermined the Chinese state. Foreign banks and other financial institutions had also come to China since the late-nineteenth century, hence the formation of a Chinese comprador class of financiers and financial brokers who locally facilitated imperialist super profits and rents.

Lacking the capitalist mechanisms of creative destruction and limitless accumulation, the premodern Chinese economy followed its own patterns of evolution—or involution, as some economic historians prefer to characterize it. Examples of its working methods are many: state depots of an “ever normal granary” (changpingcang) to balance seasonally fluctuated grain prices and regional price differentials; periodic government procurement of other essential goods in preparation for disaster relief and the easing of lean time market pressure; and recurrent reforms to unify taxation, regulate commerce, and calibrate competition. These ideas and institutions, refined over successive dynastic regimes, have been studied by economists, historians and sociologists in a growing scholarship of comparative economic history. 

Among the most well known classics is the Guanzi (seventh century BC). Two millennia before the advent of classical and neoclassical economics, this economic-philosophical text, believed to be a reflective record of the economic principles discussed between the Duke of Qi and his prime minister Guan Zhong in the Chun-Qiu period, can be read contemporarily. The core argument is a “heavy-light” distinction in the hierarchy of importance attached to goods in their production and trade, which determines the need for, and techniques of, official pricing. To ensure adequate supply of the “heaviest” items, for example, the government must “stabilize the price of grain in order to stabilize the overall price level and the value of money.”¹¹ On Salt and Iron is another famous classic, a collection of documents on the salt and iron debate between the realist Guanzians and the moralistic Confucian literati. At a West Han conference (81 BC), the former group as policy advocates promoted state intervention as an obligation for economic prosperity and price stability. The latter group, on behalf of aggrieved producers and merchants suffering predatory officials, lamented a foregone age of pliable governments.¹²

Following the Wu emperor (141-87 BC) who endorsed rounds of monetary reform, central monopolies of salt and iron developed, and became a staying policy. The state reined in fierce competition among the large landed and mercenary interests. These events were analytically narrated in such writings as “treatise on foodstuffs” and “usurers.”¹³ Ban had incorporated what was earlier documented in the “biographies of usurers” (book 129) and “a treatise of leveling” (pingzhun shu, book 30) by Si Maqian in the Records of the Grand Historian. The pingzhun officials were assigned to the balancing act of market stabilization by organizing “selling [crops etc.] where and when they are scarce and dear, and buying them where and when they are bountiful and cheap.” This particular conception and measure of pingzhun, together with the heavy-light differentiation based priorities, are perhaps the most outstanding of the ancient economic wisdoms in laying the policy foundation of China’s future economic performance.¹⁴

Power and adaption

In contrast to China’s pre-communist economic history and thought, wartime communist economic management has been largely neglected outside of China. The fusion of old wisdoms and novelties in this unique experience, however, deserves greater attention. 

The story begins with the first tide of the labor movement in the early 1920s. The Communist Party of China (CPC) and its Trade Union Secretariat resolved to amalgamate political and economic class struggles. Its earliest experiment with shareholding cooperation was a self-managed cooperative for the coalminers and railway workers in Anyuan, Hunan, in 1923. This effort initiated the use of membership “red shares” and coupons. Mao Zemin, a younger brother of Mao Zedong’s, was twice its general manager. After the Guomindang (GMD) right wing slaughtered tens of thousands of communists and sympathizers in 1927, the CPC retreated from urban agitation and recruited at the rural margins. In these areas, cooperative farms, workshops, credit, trading and remittance networks developed widely, with voluntary participants as shareholders of specialized or multifunctioning cooperatives.¹⁵

The cooperatives were also a vehicle of mutual aid and political education. Yu Shude, a party veteran since 1922, recognized that “creating collective power through cooperation” was a means for the vulnerable majority of the Chinese population to forge political ties. The ultimate aim was to replace private property, but “before the new social organization can be established, cooperation is the rescue for petty producers.”¹⁶ This idea was popular, and it echoed in the non-communist reform movements for Rural Reconstruction and Popular Education.¹⁷ It later accented the national rural cooperative campaign of the 1950s and was revived through the “Marxist theory of cooperation” to legitimize collectivization in the early 1980s.    

The uneven nature of Chinese development and the temporal-spatial specificities of the Chinese revolution bore significant implications for the revolution’s economic orientation. State building in the People’s Republic thus began in the rural peripheries decades before the CPC came to national power, with the strategy of “encircling the cities from the countryside.” The revolutionary bases were created and expanded in discrete territories to break the weak links of counterrevolution. This was possible because imperialist powers and their local pillars in China were divided, and conflicts among the warlords were pervasive. In his analysis of how the small, separatist red regimes could survive privation and isolation, Mao highlighted semi-coloniality and the indirect nature of imperialist rule. 

In the absence of an integrated national market, the red forces could carve out their own territories around the borders of several provinces away from the counterrevolutionary strongholds. However slim, the opportunity gave rise to the daring endeavor to build the “armed independent power of workers and peasants” as a “movable counter power.” Ultimately, the revolutionaries sought to aggregate a historical bloc out of this “state within the state.”¹⁸ During the next waves of revolution, they were vindicated, as a single spark did start a prairie fire.

Mao was writing in the mountainous provincial edges where the first Chinese red army regiments battled to win a primitive home as the cradle of an armed revolution. The Jinggang base was the first among communist local regimes to survive attacks by extreme adversaries. For the base, economic viability meant life or death. 

Central to the party’s minimum program was land revolution. This revolution was of epochal significance in overturning China’s thousands of years old “feudal” (a borrowed term in the communist vocabulary) order, which entailed the polarity of land concentration and landlessness, the collusion of landlords and bureaucrats, widespread miseries and stalled modernization. The communists sought to alter the division between capital accumulation and productive investment which resulted from land purchases and usury. By the same token, as the landed, money-owning, and power-holding classes were jointly destroying the agricultural base of Chinese society, the country’s legendary but stifled productive forces were invigorated thanks to the redistribution of land.

In the following two decades, the CPC carried out this effort while remaining sensitive to changing political circumstances. Policies on land redistribution or rent reduction engaged the regional communist governments, the red army, the trade unions, peasant associations, women’s federations, and other mass organizations. Without the economic conventions directed by a landed and patriarchal gentry, the party prioritized productive self-sufficiency, popular livelihood and military provision.

Trade was a predominant priority for impoverished red regions. Tungsten mining in the Jinggang mountains, for instance, was an indispensable source of income, hence the trading of ore with non-local merchants in return for certain daily necessities and badly needed medicines for injured soldiers. Over a series of military victories, the Chinese Soviet Republic was declared in the town of Ruijin in Jiangxi from 1931 to 1934, which commanded dozens of border region soviets nationally. This was a turning point in communist state crafting. 

But these enclaved regimes had to quickly develop commercial and financial ties. The joint-stock Zhicheng Bank in Shenyang is a good example of efforts to accomplish this. The bank was a vital asset of the party struggling to provide the isolated Northeastern Anti-Japanese Aggression Volunteers with medical and arms supplies.¹⁹ Just as remarkably, the party ran a commercial station in Hong Kong as a mission facility in the lifeline of its base areas and guerrillas. Qin Bangli, a banker in training and brother of Bo Gu, politburo general secretary from 1931 to 1935, was a “capitalist in practice but communist by conviction” who “scrimped every Hong Kong dollar he could” from business for the revolution while his family lived in a bare rented apartment.²⁰

Despite a battle for self defense, the red regimes were repeatedly overrun, cut off from one another, and economically strained. The central soviet experienced dramatic shortages and inflation, and consequently its authority had to resort to barter borrowing in 1934. Losing Ruijin to the GMD military extermination campaigns in the same year, the communists embarked on the epic long march and relocated their counter-state headquarters in Yan’an in northern Shaanxi (Shanbei). A special troop of the long marchers shouldered the soviet treasury in gold, silver, banknotes, and minting machines trekked a perilous 6000-mile journey. 

The relaunch of the soviet central bank in 1935 was based on these capital funds and the reserves of the existing local soviet bank. Soon after the three red field armies joined forces in Shanbei in 1936, they were restructured under the second CPC-GMD united front of the national resistance war and fought the Japanese and their puppet army in the most arduous conditions. By the end of 1945, the communists were in control of vastly enlarged “liberated areas” of ninety million people, or one fifth of the national population behind the enemy lines. Gathering momentum during the civil war, the now renamed People’s Liberation Army (PLA) took offensives to liberate north China and by the early summer of 1949 crossed the Yangzi river to seize the south. The US-backed GMD forces crumbled and fled to Taiwan. 

The communist managers strove to foster subsistence and commercial agriculture as well as rudimentary industries with a facilitating ownership structure, schemes of subsidies, tax breaks, and other incentives. The red army depended mainly on resources from the battleground but also ran military clothing and munition factories. The “campaign for mass production” in the Shan-Gan-Ning border region from 1940 to 1946 engaged all the government and army units; party and army leaders were each assigned quotas of labor or products to fulfill. This movement ensured that the main communist regional powers would be economically viable. It also initiated a proud tradition of self-reliance and the army’s productive and constructive roles in peacetime. 

The huge Huaihai campaign in the winter of 1948–49 also demonstrated how the sweeping land reform and related socioeconomic policies decisively changed the outcomes of the war. Thanks to the enrollment of recently landed peasants, the PLA was able to defeat the far better equipped GMD army. Division after division of the GMD army defected to the PLA on the spot, choosing to fight for their own land. 

Undoubtedly, the fact that the communist local blocs had sustained themselves since the Yan’an era, with some even growing into economic strongholds, helps explain their success. They selectively re-appropriated methods from a splendid civilizational tradition and invented their own. A most salient example was the purchasing of harvest in times of abundance and its distribution during lean times. Salt monopoly had also been adapted to manage the market and secure revenue. Though they lack a systematic economic ideology, these policies captured and nurtured market opportunities for common economic life, especially in trade within and beyond their borders.

Regional communist fiscal and monetary policies

The communists initially used portable mining machinery to strike coins as the circulating subsidiaries to silver dollars. These became the standard national currency. Although the images appeared crude (see the portraits meant to be of Lenin below), “what these coins may have lacked in appearance, they made up for in integrity.” That is, the communists were honest in their dealings with the peasants, and ensured that their coinage maintained good weight and fineness—in contrast to alternatives which had varied weights and qualities.²¹

This applied to the earliest red paper notes as well, which, despite a ragged surface, were promised at full value. Mao Zemin, now the Governor of the Chinese Soviet State Bank founded in 1931, together with Lin Boqu and Deng Zihui, Ministers of Economy and of Finance respectively, devised an independent regional money called guobi in July 1932. With the aim of creating a unified financial system, the guobi was declared the only acceptable currency for taxpaying and other formal payments. 

The bank issued public bonds and opened a range of banking businesses of deposit, mortgage, loan, credit funds, bill discount, and remittance in support of the local economy. To strengthen the newly instituted central treasury and secure a source of revenue for fiscal and military expenditures, the financial authority directly operated a state mining company. Most impressively, it also pioneered special trade zones to bypass the anticommunist embargo half a century before China’s reform-era special economic zones. Encouraging the export of cheap local products like grain, timber, paper, and ore, while importing locally wanted goods, the “state bureau of foreign trade” set up multiple offices and warehouses alongside the borders between red and white jurisdictions. 

The market logic and contradictions within the white regimes thus combined to generate a commercial boom in such places. The neighboring Min-Zhe-Gan soviet also used secret transportation routes with armed protection and invited outside merchants into its internal markets to boost trade. Its regional bank successfully made government offerings and was able to financially assist the central soviet.²²

In January 1935, the long marchers entered the small city of Zunyi in Guizhou and were stationed there for merely two weeks. They injected guobi brought from Ruijin into the market right away, pegging it to salt, the scarcest local commodity. Backed by the salt reserve seized from the warlords, the “red army notes,” as they were then dubbed, were received as “salt notes.” The purchasing power of the notes for salt and other basic goods was instantly stronger than any other currencies in the local market. Meanwhile, the exchange of red army notes with silver dollars was guaranteed by the soviet bank. 

The result was immediate and by any account a miracle. With its evident credibility, the new currency stimulated the market, aided the poor, and replenished supplies for an exhausted army. Before leaving the city, the bank opened a number of emergency stores for people to quickly use up their red army notes on materials or silver dollars, achieving almost complete withdrawal of the currency.²³ Unsurprisingly, the red banks which already existed in Shanbei had also pegged their currencies to salt. The shared tactic of salt monopoly continued after the arrival of the central soviet.  

In 1937, the communists formally launched their Shan-Gan-Ning Regional Bank under Cao Jvru’s governorship as the new soviet state bank replacing the Northwestern Branch under Lin Boqu since 1935. Confronted with critical economic and fiscal challenges in a poverty ridden region, and upon the issuing of the new border region banknotes or bianbi in various denominations on paper or cloth, Mao telegrammed the party’s policy leaders on August 17, 1938. He underscored monetary policy principles in the prolonged war against Japanese invasion: local base currency stability, avoidance of  oversupply and hence depreciation; sufficient bank reserves in kind as well as in Japanese puppet notes or weibi and the GMD national fabi; efficient external trade; and sustained army supply. The key was to “keep the value of our regional notes equivalent to or above the exchange rate of Japanese money.” Minor and less dependable currencies were also to be cleared out.²⁴

The “foreign” currency of weibi was held as the secondary reserve because “foreign trade” with the Japanese occupied areas was unavoidable for both importing essential industrial and consumer goods and shielding the bianbi against too much fluctuation. As for the fabi, given its domination in the national market as a relatively strong currency backed by the dollar and the pound (after the silver standard belatedly elapsed in China in 1935), it was also a necessary reserve for trade across red-white boundaries.²⁵ After the January 1941 Wannan Incident in which the communist New Fourth Army was unexpectedly attacked and nearly annihilated by the GMD, and with the Japanese occupiers pouring billions of weibi into the market to devalue the fabi, the communists had to alter their monetary policies.    

Each border region administered its own banking and taxation systems to promote local businesses while countering hostile market manipulations. The regional banks and tax regimes were relatively autonomous in their relationship with Yan’an, due to sheerly uneven economic conditions across regions and individually specific situations in the midst of war and revolution. As the institutions of the state within the state, they constituted a system separate from the national economic and financial jurisdiction. These institutions served as the guardians and facilitators of local economic resilience and hence the viability of the revolutionary bases. 

In the Shan-Gan-Ning region, government trading companies, such as the mainstay Guanghua Store²⁶ and many cooperative traders, participated in the “financial warfare” waged to defend the bianbi. They furnished vouchers or cash coupons tied to the red money. To strike fair distribution between revenue and tax burdens, the Jin-Cha-Ji border region introduced and amended its cumulative tax rules in the early 1940s. Party leaders and dispatched offices worked painstakingly to design a system of enhancing state fiscal capacity without overburdening common taxpayers.²⁷ To uphold the value of jinanbi issued by the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu region’s Jinan Bank, the regional government designated “foreign trade” denominated in it as the standard currency, and price control was instrumental for weibi holders to pay more for the same goods.²⁸

The odds, however, were enormous, and the bianbi did devalue on occasion. Shanbei had been hit by inflation from time to time due to a war racked economy and an adverse balance of payments. The export of salt, oil and other commodities was far from sufficient to offset importing locally unavailable manufactured goods.²⁹ The Jinan Bank was forced to inject extra notes and coins into the market to compete with the fabi and weibi which had been both banned but only ineffectively. They lingered as the bianbi was volatile. To contain the damage, the regional government kept the window of currency exchange legitimately open, while implementing ‘gradient’ rating differentials between the region’s central and peripheral areas. This move at least protected the value of the jinanbi in the core market of the red region and its assets and stocks.³⁰ A more effective way developed only later in the Shandong revolutionary base where the established monetary standards were resolutely abandoned.     

The Shandong regional Bank of Beihai, established in 1938, had since developed a cluster of divisions alongside the communist military advances in East China. The bank treated commerce as a weapon in the communist hands to integrate production, trade, and finance under a sustainable money and pricing regime.³¹ Xue Muqiao, chief financial advisor to the regional government in 1943–47, led an expert team to end the constant inflationary threats. The diagnosis was of a persistent inflow of weibi and a collapsing fabi. The Beihai Bank’s beihaibi or beipiao had already been declared the sole base currency in 1942, along with the financial authority’s stated mission of “issuing the kangbi, supplanting the fabi, and prohibiting the weibi.” (Kangbi or “money for resisting Japan” was another name for bianbi and here Beipiao.) This objective, however, did not materialize until nearly two years later, when the government achieved two preparatory objectives: possession of a sufficient stock of essential commodities to back beipiao, and parity of beipiao’s exchange rate for external trade. Steadily earning popular confidence and positive convertibility, this regional currency was consolidated to witness “good money driving out bad money.” As public and private traders and fabi holders either spent the money elsewhere or redeemed it for beipiao, the latter’s credibility accelerated. It became the most stable and favorable currency not only locally but also in the surrounding areas. 

Shandong was a model of communist regional economic governance, where farms, factories, shops, and other market actors came to flourish. Enemy currencies were expelled and trade thrived. The Shandong liberated areas became a resourceful base for the communist victory in the impending civil war. Xue explained this success through a strict limit on the quantity of circulating currencies and the red money’s overpowering market capture. “The law of ‘bad money driving out good ones’ discovered by the bourgeois economists’ could be reversed.”³² The fabi must be locally de-legitimized because its ongoing co-circulation would weaken beipiao’s self-defense and material reserves. 

Xue’s theory focused on the “material standard” (wuzi benwei) for paper money as opposed to the “universal gold standard.”³³ As mentioned, it was decided that the primary reserve for the bianbi was to be “goods, especially industrial goods.”³⁴ Only with such a material backing could the independently issued local currency hold on value and market confidence. Quoting Marx’s concept of money as commodities’ “general equivalent,” Xue argued that seeing the kangbi (bianbi) as “a castle in the air” without a metal foundation was mistaken. A currency could be pegged to precious metals or any hard currency as much as material goods. What mattered to the locals in the base areas was the worth of money materialized in physical rather than nominal forms. In Shandong, aside from producer goods, grain, peanuts, cooking oil, sea salt, cotton and other livelihood products were “the best guarantee” behind kangbi.

Responding to an American journalist who asked how beipiao had triumphed, Xue specified that “our material standard meant that we must monitor money supply according to the market demand. For every 10,000 yuan we issued . . . we would use at least 5,000 yuan to procure material goods.” With sufficient material reserves in place, the regional government could be a market regulator and price stabilizer by reflowing money from sales against inflation or increasing money to augment purchases and thereby neutralize deflation.³⁵

Towards the national planning and market

The protection and development of independent markets in communist territories required the designation of local base currencies supplied in the right amount at the right times. The red banks functioned as central banks while playing a range of microeconomic roles as commercial banks as well. The Northeast Bank followed this pattern to issue and solidify its dongbeibi after Japan surrendered. The revolution took the whole region in the next few years and turned the northeast into its own gigantic industrial and financial powerhouse. Both Dongbei and Beihai banks had thrived until the end of 1948 when the People’s Bank of China came into being in Shijiazhuang, Hebei, where the CPC leadership was getting ready to enter Beiping (Beijing). Formed through the merger of red Huabei, Beihai and Northwest Farmers’ banks, the communist national bank began to issue the first set of renminbi or “people’s dollars” on the eve of the founding of the PRC. 

The new state was confronted with economic chaos—acute hyperinflation, urban food shortages, and violent sabotage were symptomatic of a long mismanaged, deeply corrupt, and failing old regime. The crisis intensified with the 1948 GMD reform that introduced Golden Yuan Notes (jinyuanquan) to replace the severely depreciated fabi. Without minimal assurance in fiscal preparation and quantum of issuance, the note depreciated much faster than its predecessor and soon became nearly worthless. Relentlessly and soaring inflation directly contributed to the downfall of the GMD regime. 

A famous case of communist resolve was displayed in Shanghai upon the communist takeover. In early 1949, the municipal government transported a large quantity of cereals and other basic supplies into the city, bulk buying through government retailers to hasten price increases and then flooding the market with released stocks to bankrupt hoarding speculators. Differentiating between essential or heavy and non-essential or light commodities, the former were protected through a cost-plus formula for the latter. Skillfully utilizing market instruments to simultaneously depress both inflated prices and excess cashflow, the new authority swiftly restored the value of money and economic order.³⁶ Stabilizing the price of grain followed by intermediate consumer goods, the communists seemed to pick up on a traditional practice of purchasing the plenty to be sold in scant times. 

Winning economic battles nationally allowed coordinated state actions across regions. The wartime experiences proved handily valuable for the new state to manage economic recovery (while sustaining the war effort in Korea). In the process, the communist economic strategists also flouted the logic of a neoclassical postulate by stabilizing the price level before fixing the budget deficit.³⁷

Overcoming hyperinflation, financial breakdown, and speedy price stabilization also granted the rural powerholders a firm foothold in urban China. The enraged international ruling class had predicted that the rustic reds would not be able to manage large cities and the national economy, but this was soon disproven. 

A treasure trove

The demise of the old state and society paved the way for socialist industrialization without conventional market incentives or financial disciplines. Despite policy blunders and serious setbacks, the communist undertaking of “internal accumulation” was spectacularly developmental, both in physical infrastructure and in human development. 

Today, the importance of fiscal and monetary sovereignty and market stability remain crucial points of contention for developing and transitional economies around the world. Government reserves of essential goods, a public system of regional development banks, and the maintenance of a stable money supply are just some of the communist wartime policy experiments which bear contemporary resonance.

In reflecting on how the legal tender of bianbi was locally requisite forty years down the line, Xue Muqiao stressed its status as the only circulating currency vigilantly guarded in size and value. “The basic policy of monetary struggle” was to defend and consolidate the autonomy and security of the beihaibi market.³⁸ He contemplated that this understanding should be useful for those postcolonial nations still lacking the means to counteract imperialist money printing machinery, short-term bonds, and contagious inflation. Financial integration at the expense of autonomy in a speculative and crisis-ridden global market can be perilous.³⁹

Relatedly, the regulation of money supply continues to be debated. The provisional charter of the Chinese Soviet State Bank stipulated in 1932 that “money must be supplied in line with market demand” and “extremely cautiously” in an orderly manner, as again asserted at the second soviet national congress in 1934.⁴⁰ In addition to capping the size of currency circulation as an intricate artwork adjusted to changing demands, the rates of currency exchange were also closely monitored. In the 1940s, Zhu Lizhi, one time governor of the Shan-Gan-Ning regional bank had recourse to fiscal flexibility. Reacting to a hazardous budget deficit, Zhu elevated the bar on bianbi supply and encouraged business lending and mortgage loans to both monetize the deficit and provide for entrepreneurial cashflow.⁴¹ The one-sided austere methods, as he saw it, could harm liquidity and in turn worsen inflation.⁴²

State reserves also functioned as a price control mechanism. The material reserves behind bianbi balanced abundance and scarcity in the market and stabilized the currency through enabling government intervention. The financial authority could thus use its discretion to increase goods supply to lower prices against inflation or increase money circulation and buy in goods to hold prices against deflation. This “material standard,” set to constrain money supply and preserve the worth of unit money, was a token of communist financial governance banked on the regional political-legal power. An implication of this novelty in an age of unbridled financial capitalism could be the advantage of a strong real economy, for which the optimal fiscal and monetary means are yet to be worked out.

1. Frank, Andre Gunder, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), ch. 4.  ︎
2. Smith, Adam, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1776]1976), 30, 70–71, 210.  ︎
3. Arrighi, Giovanni, Adam Smith in Beijing: Lineages of the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2007), 69. ︎
4. van Zanden, J.L., “Before the Great Divergence: The Modernity of China at the Onset of the Industrial Revolution,” Jan 26, 2011; Pomeranz, Kenneth,The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).  ︎
5. Keynes, J.M., “The Economic Principles of Confucius and his School,” by Chen Huan-chang, The Economic Journal 22:88, December (1912) : 585.  ︎
6. Keynes, 585-86.  ︎
7. Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, “Another Look at Credit Markets and Investment in China and Europe before the Industrial Revolution,” Yale University Economic History Workshop (2005), 14-18; Rosenthal, Jean-Laurent and Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2011), ch. 5; Rawski, Evelyn and Thomas Rawski, “Economic Change around the Indian Ocean in the Very Long Run,” paper presented at the Harvard-Hitotsubashi-Warwick Conference, Venice, July 2008.  ︎
8. Weber, Max, The Religion of China (1915), trans. by Hans Gerth (New York: Free Press, 1965), 26, 103–104, 61-62; Ertman, Thomas, Birth of the Leviathan: Building States and Regimes in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 74–87; Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990–1992 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), ch. 3.  ︎
9. Wakeman, Frederic, Telling Chinese History: A Selection of Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 27–35.  ︎
10. Frank.  ︎
11. Weber, Isabella, How China Escaped Shock Therapy: The Market Reform Debate (London and New York: Routledge, 2021), 24–5; Wu, Baosan, A Study of Guanzi Economic Thought (Beijing: Chinese Social Sciences Publisher, 1989).   ︎
12. Nolan, Peter, China at the Crossroads (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), ch. 3; Weber, Isabella  ︎
13. Volumes 24 and 91 respectively, of the Book of Han, by Ban Gu (32-92 AD).  ︎
14. Sima, Qian, Records of the Grand Historian: Qin Dynasty, trans by Burton Watson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 89–100; Ban, Gu, Food and Money in Ancient China: The Earliest Economic History of China to A.D. 25, trans by N.L. Swann, Nancy Lee (Princeton, 1950) (New York: Octagon Books, 1974).  ︎
15. Chinese Cooperation Times, “The First ‘Red’ Stock of Anyuan Railroad and Mine Workers’ Consumer Cooperative,” March 25, 2021; Hu, Deping, “In Response to the Question Concerning Supply and Marketing Cooperatives,” China Green Development Society, November 10, 2022,   https://mbd.baidu.com/newspage/data/landingsuper?sShare=1&context=%7B%22nid%22%3A%22news_8738844951950484093%22,%22sourceFrom%22%3A%22bjh%22%7D.  ︎
16. Yu, Shude, “Lecture Notes on Cooperation at the First Training Class by the Chinese Disaster Relief and Charity Association,” 1925: http://www.coopunion.cn/news/zhuanjiaguandian/25bb209bcc4bc2160abc193f5a277db4.html; Yu, Shude, Lectures on Cooperation, (Nanjing: China Cooperation Study Society, 1934).  ︎
17. Hayford, Charles,To the People: James Yen and Village China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).; Lv, Xinyu, “Rural Reconstruction, the Nation-State. and China’s Modernity Problem: Reflections on Liang Shuming’s Rural Reconstruction Theory and Practice,” in Tian Yu Cao, et al. eds. Culture and Social Transformations in Reform Era China (London: Brill, 2010), 235-56.  ︎
18. Mao, “Why Is It That Red Political Power Can Exist in China?” October 5, 1928, Selected Works vol.1 (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1928] 1991); Mao, “A Single Spark Can Start a Prairie Fire,” 5 January 1930, Selected Works, vol.1,(Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1930]1991).  ︎
19. Xiang, Guolan, “Red Finance,” Kunlunce Research Academy, October 3, 2021.  ︎
20. Kelly, Jason, Market Maoists: The Communist Origins of China’s Capitalist Ascent (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2021), 26–29.  ︎
21. Kann, Eduard, “Paper Money in Modern China 1900-1956: Chinese Communists as Issuers of Notes,” Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1957): part 25; O’Neill, E. F, “The Copper Cash and Silver Dollar Notes of the Hunan-Hubei-Jiangxi Workers’ and Peasants’ Bank,” in John Sandrock, The Money of Communist China (1927-1949) (Hong Kong: Shing Lee Company, 1989) part I; Sandrock, John (?), The Money of Communist China 1927-1949, part II: Money of the Base Areas during the War of Resistance against Japan 1936-1945.  ︎
22. Cao, Hong and Zhou Yan, “Mao Zemin: From a Peasant in Shaoshan to the Governor of State Bank,”Party History Review 6 (in Chinese) (2007); Xu, Shuxin, An Outline of the Development of Money in China’s Revolutionary Bases, (Beinging: China Financial Publishing House, 2008); Xiang, Guolan.  ︎
23. Wang, Zhongxin, “The Contemporary Relevance of ‘Salt Currency’ Created by Mao,” Kunlunce Research Academy, November 16, 2022.  ︎
24. Mao, “Fiscal Policy of the Border Region,”Collected Works of Mao, vol. 2, (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, [1938]1993).  ︎
25. Sandrock, part II.  ︎
26. Cui, Qimin, “An Analysis of the Guanghua Store’s Cash Coupons,” Modern Communication 17 (2019).  ︎
27. Li, Jinzheng, “Background: the Introduction and Revision of the Unified and Accumulated Tax Rules in the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei Border Region During the Anti-Japanese War,” Studies of the Soviet Areas: 4 (2022).  ︎
28. Liu, Haibo, “An Analysis of the Revelation of Monetary Work in China’s Revolutionary Bases,” Global Finance no.6 (2013).  ︎
29. 29. Zhu, Lizhi, Zhu Lizhi on Financial Governance, (Beijing: The CCP History Publisher, 2017).  ︎
30. 30. Liu, Mohan, “Fiscal Wisdom of 土八路,” Huarun Magazine 7 (2022): 258.  ︎
31. 31. Weber, Isabella.  ︎
32. Xue, Muqiao, “The Battle of Currency in the Shandong Base Area,” in Selected Economic Essays, Ch.6, Beijing: Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, et al (1984): 64–71.  ︎
33. Xue, Muqiao (1996), Memoirs. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House.  ︎
34. Mao “Fiscal Policy of the Border Region.”  ︎
35. Xue, 65–67.  ︎
36. Weber, Isabella, 84, 102–03.  ︎
37. Weber, Isabella, 80.  ︎
38. Xue, 67.  ︎
39. Xue, 70–71.  ︎
40. Yu and Zhang. ︎
41. Zhu, 5, 44.  ︎
42. Yu, 9.  ︎

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.

Preliminary critique of the work has focused primarily on the erasure of transmisogyny, a particularly glaring omission given the author’s supposed inclusion of “marginalized genders”. This omission, coupled with an essentialist theoretical framework pulled from a radical feminist tradition, lead to the necessity of the piece’s retraction. The Red Clarion seeks to lead the communist movement towards the best path of sexual liberation, which necessitates a dialectical and scientific approach to understanding and combating sexual oppression. The conclusions reached in the article rely on a haphazard array of correlated data that are then assumed to be set phenomena across the breadth of patriarchal societies. The following criticism looks through these major flaws, and opposes the conclusions reached thereafter; as USU struggles towards unified clarity on these vital theoretical positions, we will move towards the publishing of a definitive piece regarding where the movement must take the issues of sexual liberation.

We will first begin with the author’s failure to conduct adequate research on the subject at hand, exemplified by the following passage:

Regardless of if you watch porn, you experience the effects of porn. You are punished by the existence of porn. A study of over four thousand young people in Melbourne found that 59% of men had reported strangling their partner during sex, with 61% of women reporting being strangled, and 78% of trans or gender-diverse individuals experiencing strangulation. Importantly, 61% reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.

This passage mistakes shadow for substance. Sex work is not the base economic relationship from which patriarchal violence emerges, but rather the result of patriarchal economic and social relations that reinforce and reproduce patriarchal relations. In other words, sex work does not create the social exploitation of women, nor lie at its foundation. Sex work is the result of divided labor regime. The scientific study cited by the author directs us to this very same conclusion: “Pornography was the most common avenue by which people reported first hearing about choking during sex (34.8%), followed by discussions with friends (11.5%).”¹ In other words, pornography does not create sexual violence, but rather reinforces it; it is not the cause of sexual violence, but rather its result. Failure to recognize this dialectical relationship that makes sex-divided labor the primary aspect puts us off immediately on the wrong track.

Here we must also make plain a glaring error in our comrade’s citation. The author warns that “61% [of young people in Melbourne participating in the study] reported that they had learned about strangulation via pornography.” This statement is false. A vast majority (65.2%) of the study’s subjects learned about choking during sex via means other than pornography. This suggests that even if pornography was banned, this ostensibly violent sexual practice would still exist and propagate through other means of social reproduction. With 61% of subjects exposed to but not learning about sexual strangulation via pornography, the study does demonstrate pornography’s role in reinforcing risky sexual practices amongst the general population through repeated exposure. However, with subjects also being exposed to the practice via “…movies (40.3%), friends (31.9%), social media (31.3%), and discussions with potential partners (29.2%),” we cannot give serious credence to the notion that pornography itself is the (or even one of many) progenitor of sexual violence.² At the very least, the failure of the article’s author to catch such a misrepresentation of the study at hand is demonstrative of a methodological sloppiness that cannot be considered Marxist for its lack of an adequately scientific approach to analyzing these social phenomena. The study actually shows that those who “first learned/heard” about strangulation through pornography constitute a mere 34.8% of respondents. The 61.3% number is representative of those who were “ever exposed to strangulation in pornography.” Failing to distinguish these incident rates is a critical error. Despite this sloppiness, our comrade further digs her heels in:

Studies vary on how much of pornography is degrading, verbally and physically, to women and marginalized genders, but as we see rates of strangulation rising, we can rest assured that it is a significant portion. Moreover, a meta-analysis of studies has found that porn consumption is linked with an increased likelihood to commit an act of sexual aggression, even if the pornography was considered non-aggressive.

This passage demonstrates another significant error in the author’s manner of conducting research. When analyzing any phenomenon, particularly social phenomenon where variables cannot be controlled and holistically observed, the correlation of data does not mean there is a relationship of causality. While the research in question does demonstrate that those who consume pornography more frequently “are more likely to hold attitudes conducive to sexual aggression and engage in actual acts of sexual aggression” than those who consume it less frequently, or not at all,³ it does not prove that pornography is the source of these behaviors. Given that not everyone who consumes pornography is sexually aggressive, we can just as easily assume that pornography lends itself to reinforcing pre-developed behaviors.⁴ Only one of these positions lends itself to a Marxist framework of socio-behavioral analysis.

Pornography, just as any tool of bourgeois social reproduction, functions by providing moral licensing for individuals’ self-interested and exploitative behaviors. To argue otherwise would be to deny personal autonomy, and thus, moral responsibility for one’s actions as an individual. People do not enact sexual violence as a result of consuming pornography, nor even because they are raised in a patriarchal society. Every action one takes in committing sexual violence is of their own volition, even if these social phenomenon may prime them to view such behaviors as permissible. Despite her previous claims in the piece, the author demonstrates a clear lack of satisfaction with treating pornography as a systematic tool that “…emboldens preexisting attitudes towards women, towards sexuality.” For our comrade is not interested in dissecting the material base of sex work.⁵ Even one unfamiliar with feminist analysis can pick up on this from the author’s incessant focus on sexual anatomy; she uses the word “cunt” 14 times throughout the work. The author does not define this term beyond its vernacular usage until its sixth appearance in the piece, and then the definition she provides is the following: “Anyone, not just the prostitute, can be penetrated, anyone can be turned into a cunt, anyone can be dehumanized and alienated from their sexuality and their body.”

Given such an apt definition, we can indeed state that nearly everyone within bourgeois society has been turned into a cunt. Proletarian and lumpenprole alike are alienated from their bodies as they expend their brain and muscles to labor for those with capital to spend. Settler-colonial and imperialist societies alienate the masses from their sexuality by using the violence of the state to coerce them into cis-heterosexual social-reproduction, as seen through the violent criminalization of access to birth control, abortions, hormone replacement therapy, mastectomies, gender reassignment surgery, etc.

Rather than developing a theoretical framework that naturally includes all those who are subjected to the violence and exploitation of patriarchal society, the author vulgarizes patriarchal power into a class struggle of the penetrated vs the penetrators. Everyone, no matter their class or social position, is flattened to the supposed power imbued within their sexual behaviors. Even gay men are not free to be men, for “The receiver, the gay man, is therefore reduced to a cunt as well, an object made for penetration and degradation.” In this absurd calculus, one is either an all powerful cis-heterosexual man (the phallus) or the weak and wretched cis-heterosexual woman (the cunt), a theoretical framework so fragile that even a pebble could shatter it into a million pieces.

If “power” is indeed based on one’s relationship to Penetration, then what are we to make of the men penetrated by women?⁶ When presented without reference to social reproduction theory, this argument simply cannot be reconciled with Marxism. Does this simple act truly turn the system of patriarchy on its head, turning men from exploiters to the exploited? This is no idle question. With the study on strangulation reporting approximately 50% of straight male subjects having been strangled during sex,⁷ and if we accept the notion that this supposed sexual “degradation” is an extension of real material power, we can indeed state that, “The war on women has expanded and mutated once more; it’s recruited our fellow women…” For now men must be on the defensive from this supposed wave of woman-led sexual violence! With 60% of lesbians ever being strangled and 54% ever strangling a partner, and bisexual women respectively reporting 80% and 51%,⁸ Cde. Reed’s struggle against sexual domination would have to extend its front to combat this degeneracy amongst sapphic women. In our comrade’s struggle against supposedly anti-social sexual behaviors we must not forget the worst offenders, transgender people, among whom we witness the highest rates of sexual strangulation, 78% and 74% respectively.

Using the framework presented, one could argue that women who strangle men or women who strangle women are adopting the mechanisms of patriarchy for their own benefit; however, the question then would become “why are men overwhelmingly the oppressors, if acting out sexual violence is in-itself sufficient enough to make one an oppressor?” The article’s theory fails to provide any answer to this question.

Had the author given any thought to the conclusions readers would draw from her prescriptive moral stance on such sexual behaviors, she would have read the publicly accessible scientific paper she cited and come to a vastly different conclusion. From this clear negligence we can conclude that our comrade’s goal was not to provide a proper investigation of these systems, but to find data useful in propping up her positions. The framework provided by this article can only function under the bold assumption that every sexual relationship is either patriarchal heterosexuality, or an imitation of it. The author appears to use the high rate of sexual strangulation amongst transgender people as a means to spark readers’ rage against an imagined wave of cis-men strangling poor defenseless transgender women. This assertion completely disregards transgender people’s actual dynamics and conditions as a population. This essentialist framework gets transgender people killed.

Amidst the ongoing war against transgender people, in which transgender people’s presumed sexual behaviors are used to justify mass waves of social violence and murder, a prescriptive framework adds fuel to the fire by proclaiming non-violent and non-coercive sexual acts as inherently oppressive. When transgender people engage in these sexual behaviors, who is being oppressed?⁹ Transgender people are most likely to be in relationships with other transgender people. With studies on sexual orientation demonstrating that only 19% of transgender women, 2% of non-binary people, and 23% of transgender men are reported to be heterosexual in the United States.¹⁰ If we made use of the framework presented, the movement would have no choice but to condemn a majority of transgender people as irredeemable oppressors. Are we to take such an absurd system, that would make an enemy of a hyperexploited population for acts we have no business meddling in, and take it to practice within our movement? Our comrade may take moral opposition to sexual strangulation, but that in-itself is not a basis upon which a Marxist theoretical framework can be built. Such a framework must be based on an analysis of the material conditions at play, not idealist and puritanical notions on proper sexual relations. 

Sexual behaviors are reflections of social and cultural phenomena, but in isolation they tell us very little about contemporary material conditions. We must constantly go deeper. For example, the social root of something such as a leather fetish is likely a result of the materials’ historical use in military and police uniforms, providing the objects a socially constructed aesthetic of power and authority. So what are we to make of its prevalence in gay and lesbian communities? Due to extreme levels of state repression and violence, the social authority imbued within leather provides an outlet for participants to be humanized through symbolic access to authority and/or resistance to it. The fetish provides an emotional outlet for the constant pressure of social restraint. As a reflection of material conditions, sexual behaviors can act as a tool to reinforce exploitative social relationships. With heterosexual relationships requiring a particularly high level of internal analysis of relationship dynamics, given men being socially conditioned to engage in more aggressive and high-risk sexual behaviors. However, power is not determined in the bedroom. Power is determined by one’s relation to property. 

Historically women have been denied the right to property, actively excluded from economic production so as to be coerced into the labor of social reproduction. With the development of class society, the role of women was largely relegated first as an economic and diplomatic asset in their youth, to later be sold into domestic servitude as a wife and mother. It is only recently that western women have gained the “right” to be workers and not the property of men, a concession made in part to constrain the spread of achievements that resulted from the dauntless and bloody struggles of communist women across the globe and in part as a result of capital’s drive to proletarianize everyone — to dissolve all social relations. Despite patriarchal systems losing ground in this age of collapse for the capitalist system,¹¹ women have not yet been liberated from traditional socially reproductive roles, particularly those of marriage and prostitution. These roles have changed in kind with the economic basis of society. The marriage and legalized prostitution of Ancient Greece are far different in their structure than marriage and prostitution within the capitalist age.  

The piece posits that, within bourgeois society, prostitutes make up “… a class that is designed to be difficult to get out of, as a ruined proletariat, and is slated to be accessible to all men. The state may punish different classes of men more commonly than others, but she is still available to all men.” Further, the author denies these workers their position as laborers, arguing that instead of being members of the proletarian or subproletarian classes they are instead ‘public property,’ — hyper-exploited subjects forced into ‘a form of slavery that is distinctly female.’ If these laborers are truly turned into property or commodities to be bought and consumed, then why haven’t sex dolls and sex toys replaced their existence entirely? It is the same reason humans can never fully be replaced by tools or machines in the production process. What is being valued here is not the mere production of a commodity or the provision of a service, but human labor power. This is why prostitutes sell their labor in the form of timeslots, and clarify the kinds of specialized sexual labor they are willing to perform within specified time-frames. When one buys this form of labor they engage in a form of petit-bourgosie labor exploitation, and like any member of this class the buyer seeks to take as much from the laborer as possible for as low as the wages can go. 

Within the article this claim of prostitute as public property is justified by the argument that sex work cannot be comparable to other forms of labor, as “The prostitute is alienated not just from her profits or her work, but from her body and the most intimate parts of her mind” and that “She is often forced to remain in the prostituted class via coercive forces…” Is the woman working 16 hours sewing with docked wages for every mistake not also alienated from “the most intimate parts of her mind”? What of the railway conductors coerced by contract and federal law to be on call 24/7 while working at minimum 12 hours a day? Is not the denial of sleep and a home life alienating one from their own mental wellbeing? When it comes to coercion, what worker cannot claim the same? Many women in the workplace are sexually assaulted but are forced to either stay quiet or risk homelessness and starvation of both themselves and their families. Other workers are coerced into their labor through the seizure of passports or the pointed guns of the police and hired mercenaries. The bourgeoisie will always seek the maximal level of exploitation. When they buy your labor-power, they buy the contractual right to ruin your body, break your mind, and kill you if it’ll make them even a penny more in profit. The only limit to the bourgeois drive to create profit at the expense of the worker is the level of class struggle. The relative conditions of the working classes are a symptom of class struggle.¹² Whether you are a sex worker, manual laborer, service worker, etc. the capitalist system runs on the rule that you are disposable to the bourgeoisie.

But with its blind drive, its bottomless werewolf-hunger for surplus-labor, capital doesn’t merely push past the moral limits of the working day. It does the same with the physical limits, too. Capital usurps the time that the body needs to grow and develop, and also the time for maintaining the body in a healthy condition. It steals the time it takes to get fresh air and sun. It chips away at mealtimes, incorporating them into the production process wherever it can; as a result, food is added to workers as though they were merely so many means of production, or the same way a boiler is fed coal, machines are fed grease and oil, and so on. Sound sleep destroys and refreshes a person’s vital powers, enabling him to build up his strength, but capital reduces it to only as many hours as it takes to revive a totally exhausted organism […] Only one thing interests capital: the maximum amount of labor-power that can be activated in the workday. It achieves this goal by shortening the lives of labor-power’s bearers, just like a greedy farmer gets the most out of the land by rendering it barren.¹³

[…]

So from society’s standpoint, the members of the working class—including when they aren’t participating in the immediate labor process—belong to capital just as much as the dead instruments of labor do. Even their individual consumption is simply an aspect of capital. It is hard for the worker, that instrument of production endowed with consciousness, to simply run away, since it constantly sends his product from his pole to the opposite pole—i.e., capital’s. Individual consumption is the means through which workers maintain and reproduce themselves, but as it occurs, it constantly destroys their means of subsistence, ensuring that they will keep reappearing in the labor markets. The Roman slave was fettered with chains. Invisible ties bind the wage laborer to his owner: he merely seems to be independent. The constant turnover among the worker’s individual wage masters and the fictio juris of his contract keep this semblance in place. 

In the past, capital enacted compulsory laws whenever it felt that it had to assert its proprietary rights over free workers. Until 1815, for example, it was illegal for England’s machine workers to emigrate, and people committed this crime at their peril, since the penalties it carried were severe.¹⁴

If sex work does not constitute a special super-class, then how do we as communists position ourselves against this particular form of exploitation? To answer this we must first understand the socio-economic nature of prostitution. Alexandra Kollontai, a prominent feminist within the CPSU, provided a clear analysis on the subject: “Prostitution arose with the first states as the inevitable shadow of the official institution of marriage, which was designed to preserve the rights of private property and to guarantee property inheritance through a line of lawful heirs.” Further outlining its emergence within the capitalist age:

The sale of women’s labor, which is closely and inseparably connected with the sale of the female body, steadily increases, leading to a situation where the respected wife of a worker, and not just the abandoned and ‘dishonoured’ girl, joins the ranks of the prostitutes: a mother for the sake of her children, or a young girl like Sonya Marmeladova for the sake of her family. This is the horror and hopelessness that results from the exploitation of labor by capital. When a woman’s wages are insufficient to keep her alive, the sale of favors seems a possible subsidiary occupation. The hypocritical morality of bourgeois society encourages prostitution by the structure of its exploitative economy, while at the same time mercilessly covering with contempt any girl or woman who is forced to take this path.

Prostitution is a form of socially reproductive labor. Just as maids are hired to clean houses, nannies to raise children, and nurses to care for the old, prostitutes are hired to satisfy personal needs without the buyer being obligated to provide for the care of the worker until the grave. Prostitutes are domestic laborers. If they are in a waged relation which is exploited for profit, they are proletarian. If they are not, they are nevertheless subproletarian, as those excluded from social production.¹⁵ The nature of their work, that of socially reproductive labor, does not alter their basic relation of production.

It is here that class divisions make themselves the most evident. A white cis woman is far more likely to gain access to legal, or at least institutionally protected forms, of sexual labor than a Black and/or trans woman. With white supremacy and cis normativity further providing enough class mobility to allow her escape into the membership of the labor aristocratic and petit-bourgeois classes. This was the purpose of western nations’ struggle against so-called “white slavery” in the early 20th century. White slavery was a nationalistic tool used to secure white womanhood from the exploitation of lumpen and proletarian sexual labor. It was never about protecting women from sexual labor, it was rather a “common fixation on protecting the purity of white womanhood, constituting an image of white women’s precarity that was only tangentially connected to the realities of women’s lives.”¹⁶ Reed’s reintroduction of the term is yet another example of her gender reductionist framework, which excludes all other forms of class, national, and disabled oppression. By systematically denying nationally oppressed, transgender, and disabled people from the benefits and wages of the upper classes, the necessity of survival coerces them to flood the market of sexual labor. The resulting reduction of wages and working conditions, alongside a crackdown on legal sexual labor, pushed members of privileged social classes from the streets and into domestic servitude as wives and mothers.

The consumption of sexual labor, particularly in the form of pornography, is so widespread in society that even moral condemnation will do nothing but harm the most marginal of sexual laborers. Laws seeking to limit public access to “sexually explicit materials” have been used to actively suppress access to resources for sexual education, birth control, and transition related medical care.¹⁷

While we could dive further in this historical and materialist analysis of sex work, the breadth of the theory’s deviation from Marxist analysis should now be abundantly clear. Despite her condemnation of liberal feminists for flattening the experiences of sex workers, the author actively chose to disregard the autonomy and humanity of sex workers so that their idealized forms could serve as a prop for her radical feminist analysis. By using the theoretical framework of Andrea Dworkin, a zionist and arguably transmisogynistic theorist,¹⁸ to position men as a cabal seeking the sexual slavery of all women (i.e., people of penetration), the author — in one masterful stroke — both eschews class analysis and creates a false solidarity with sex workers by flattening their varied conditions into one of a universal metaphysical precarity.  Instead of seriously studying the scientific nature of these classes and the material conditions that bring them about so we might properly dedicate ourselves to uprooting these systems of oppression, we are instead given a world that has been wholly abstracted into a totalizing struggle between “men” and women. 

In its conclusion, the piece proclaims that “Our war is not against sex workers but against johns, sex buyers, and consumers of pornography.” This statement serves no theoretical purpose. We can make whatever proclamations we like, but what matters is the rhetoric behind them. The rhetoric of the piece gives ample justifications to the reader for hunting down these progenitors of patriarchal violence while at the same time excusing class collaboration between women (penetrated, the subjects of violence) of all classes:

These commodified individuals are surviving under patriarchy, under capitalism, and under oppressive forces. Until they engage in traitorous behaviors such as, but not limited to; promoting an OnlyFans referral code to 18 year olds to make money off of their content, dressing in children’s clothing, dressing in ways that contribute to the sexual violence minority women and those in the global south face, and/or glamorizing the industry, they are our comrades in the struggle.

This supposed “marxist feminism” tails the utopian organizational strategy of anarchists and radical feminists, wherein the supposed abolition of the state, or relationships with men, will instantly bring about heaven on earth where power and patriarchy are no more. We have only to unite all sex-workers (except those that promote OnlyFans referral codes to 18 year olds, dress in children’s clothing, dress in ways that contribute to sexual violence, and/or glamorize the industry of course) with all women! This super-class of sex-workers-and-women will then… well, what? Rather than building a serious strategy to bring about socialism, these adventurous radicals seek moral salvation by cleansing the world in a purifying flood. As Anuradha Ghandy writes: 

To assert that gender based division of labor is the basis of women’s oppression rather than class still begs the question. If we do not find some social, material reasons for the inequality we are forced into accepting the argument that men have an innate drive for power and domination. Such an argument is self-defeating because it means there is no point in struggling for equality. It can never be realized.

The liberation of prostitutes – and of all those from whom domestic labor is forcibly extracted – comes from the organization of their numbers into a body capable of battling their oppression and all work toward that organization, not from the repeated imprecations to divide the world into sexual abusers and the sexually abused. As Marxists it is our duty to organize, to bring together those who have an interest in fighting for total liberation. The patriarchal state is surely our enemy, as is the concept of masculinity itself insofar as it stands for the theft of labor, but we must be ever wary of the liberalizing drive to universalize victimhood and create a universal victimizer. No matter how strenuously the piece demands the reader to understand that “cunt” is shorthand for being raped, that does not make it so, nor does it make the central division along which society is divided into the raped and the rapists.

1. Sharman, Leah S., Robin Fitzgerald, and Heather Douglas. 2025. “Prevalence of Sexual Strangulation/Choking Among Australian 18–35 Year-Olds.” Archives of Sexual Behavior 54 (2): 465–80. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-024-02937-y.  Pg. 470. ︎
2. Ibidem. ︎
3. Wright, Paul J., Robert S. Tokunaga, and Ashley Kraus. 2016. “A Meta-Analysis of Pornography Consumption and Actual Acts of Sexual Aggression in General Population Studies: Pornography and Sexual Aggression.” Journal of Communication 66 (1): 183–205. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12201.
   Pg. 201. ︎
4. The correlation between the consumption of pornography and sexual violence lies in the dehumanizing of the sexual laborers. Even if the viewer were to construct subjectivity for the participants, one that they must construct themselves, as pornography commodifies the alienated images of these workers as they perform sexual labor. The consumer of pornography is a beneficiary of the patriarchal violence that produces this commodity as it only exists for consumption as a byproduct of systematic patriarchal violence. ︎
5. “For the cultural feminists, heterosexuality is about male domination and female subordination and so it sets the stage for pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment, and woman-battering…. In their understanding of material conditions, they have taken the physical fact of reproduction and women’s biological role as the central point for their analysis and concluded that this is the main reason for women’s oppression…. Reproduction means both the reproduction of the person on a day to day basis and the reproduction of the human species. But in fact, reproduction of the species is something humans share with the animal kingdom. That could not be the basis for women’s oppression. For in all the thousands of years that people lived in the first stages of human existence, women were not subordinated to men.” Ghandy, Anarhuda, Philosophical Trends in the Feminist Movement, 54-5. ︎
6. Obviously, the Marxist analysis is that all real power is founded somewhere in property relations, and that other forms of power are all ultimately mediated property relations. ︎
7. Sharman, et al. Pg. 472 ︎
8. Ibid., Pgs. 472-473. ︎
9. On a case by case basis, it is, of course, possible for transgender people to reproduce patriarchal oppression. Domestic abuse is one form this takes. However, this is far from as simple a proposition as the mechanical oppressor/oppressed relation presented by the article at hand. Indeed, is it not possible that the penetrator in a relationship can be abused? Is it not possible that the penetrating partner can change from one to the other? ︎
10. James, Sandy E., Jody L. Herman, Susan Rankin, Mara Keisling, Lisa Mottet, and Ma’ayan Anafi. 2016. “The Report of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey.” National Center for Transgender Equality. https://transequality.org/sites/default/files/docs/usts/USTS-Full-Report-Dec17.pdf. Pg. 59 ︎
11. Marx makes note of this phenomenon in Capital, that the family loses its material foundation in the capitalist age as children become the collective property of bourgeois society and women are a constant reserve army of labor ever ready to replace men in the workplace. It is through latter socialist social revolutions that women’s liberation has since unfolded. ︎
12. This struggle can itself be enervating to class consciousness, as is the case in the imperialist centers where class struggle has produced not revolution, but an entrenched labor aristocracy. ︎
13. Marx, Karl. (1872) 2024. Capital. Edited by Paul North. Translated by Paul Reitter. Princeton University Press, pgs. 235-236. ︎
14. Id. at 528. ︎
15. In a waged relation, a prostitute is paid a wage by an employer, who keeps the amount that is paid for the sex work. In a slave or semi-slave relation, the prostitute is essentially kept in bondage to a pimp or madam, and receives instead whatever goods they need directly from their keeper, rather than a wage. Those thrust into illegal positions are excluded from legal production. We here incorporate slave and semi-slave relations as subproletarian, for in the age of “free” labor, these are all classes that must sell their labor-power. ︎
16. Harris, Leslie J. “Conclusion.” In The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity, 149–60. Michigan State University Press, 2023. https://doi.org/10.14321/jj.2990357.11. ︎
17. These and related “internet safety” politics have a long history of particularly targeting transgender and queer people, making both digital and physical spaces more dangerous for these communities. This is a result of queerness and transness being ideologically labeled as sexually explicit, or otherwise as a harmful social disease (Brooke and Turner, 2025; Kayyali & Mithani, 2025). Lawmakers in the UK have sought to expand such existing laws to further require websites to keep track of users sex assigned at birth, a tool that will be used to heavily monitor and further suppress the transgender population in the country if it comes to pass (Santi, 2025). 
    Kayyali, Dia, and Jasmine Mithani. 2025. “Age Verification Is Locking Trans People out of the Internet.” Tech Policy Press. December 8, 2025. https://www.techpolicy.press/age-verification-is-locking-trans-people-out-of-the-internet/.
    Santi, Mariano. 2025. “Data Bill: First They Came for Trans People.” Open Rights Group. 2025. https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/.
    Tanner, Brooke, and Nicol Turner Lee. 2025. “Children’s Online Safety Laws Are Failing LGBTQ+ Youth.” Brookings. July 9, 2025. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/childrens-online-safety-laws-are-failing-lgbtq-youth/.
    https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/data-bill-first-they-came-for-trans-people/  ︎
18. Dworkin actively proclaimed women’s struggle for liberation as resembling the struggle of the Zionists for a state in which they could finally find safety from the hoards seeking their death and sexual violation. (Lewis, 2025). Her early theoretical positions on the subjects of transsexuality and criticism of bioessentialism — despite holding a contradictory stance that “One might argue for a liberalization of sex-based roles, but one cannot justifiably argue for their total redefinition.” (Dworkin, 1974, pg. 175) — has left a wide range of room for an ongoing ideological struggle on whether Dworkin would be supportive of trans liberation today. In Woman Hating Dworkin stated “it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgment that transsexuality is caused by faulty socialization. More probably transsexuality is caused by a faulty society.” and “…transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency (see p. 185) as a transsexual.” (Ibid., 186). With her short term solution to this so-called emergency being that “…every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions.” (Ibid., 187), with the end goal being the construction of an androgynous human community that would bring transsexuality to an end by subsuming it into “…new modes of sexual identity and behavior.” (Ibid., 188). Dworkin later gave considerable praise to and actively promoted Transsexual Empire, a violently transphobic work which targeted transition related medical care, and specific transgender women who were subsequently harassed by Janice Raymond’s followers out of public life. While later expressing her distaste of the work’s treatment of transgender people in a personal letter to Raymond (Duberman, 2020, Pg. 161), her lack of public retraction has allowed figures such as Raymond to continually lay claim to Dworkin as an essential figure in the theoretical framework of modern Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (Janice, 2021, pp. 41-47). 
    Duberman, Martin B. 2020. Andrea Dworkin : The Feminist as Revolutionary. New York: The New Press.
    Lewis, Sophia. “Are Women Weak Jews? On Andrea Dworkin’s Zionism.” Spectre Journal.  May 27th 2025. https://spectrejournal.com/are-women-weak-jews/
    Raymond, Janice. 2021. Doublethink: A Feminist Challenge to Transgenderism. ︎

In the weeks leading up to the confrontation, Venezuela armed its entire working class, distributing guns and calling up its militias to repel a threatened US invasion. On January 3, US war planes bombed the capital of Caracas. Shortly thereafter, clown-president Trump announced on his personal social media app that President Maduro and his wife were kidnapped and removed from the country.

This flagrant violation of international law comes just days after US vassal-state, israel, announced its diplomatic recognition of a breakaway region of the Republic of Somalia as “Somaliland,” the only country to do so since its split from Somalia in 1991. This has been trumpeted in imperial mouthpieces like The Telegraph, applauding genocidaire Netanyahu for a “tactical masterstroke” and likening this breach of international law to a “powerful riposte to the West’s recognition of Palestine.”

This is, of course, the way the US empire and its crony-states have always  handled themselves on the world stage: the bullies of the international community, using bombs and terror to impose their will on the peripheral countries and ensure their continued compliance with the “international order” — or, in other words, with the interests of American capital.

In the days following the US invasion of Caracas, Vice President Delcy Rodriguez was sworn into office by Venezuela’s Supreme Tribunal of Justice as acting-president. Trump and his cronies have already begun to lick their chops and demand the re-entry of American capital into Venezuela to seize the country’s oil-wealth, but the Bolivarian Revolution is not beaten yet. The colectivos and workers’ militias continue to patrol the streets and seize pro-American agents on the ground. Colombia’s ELN has pledged to resist Yankee imperialism in Venezuela with armed force, and Cuba has promised to do the same.

Trump’s meeting with Yankee oil executives in Washington this week wasn’t promising for the aging imperialist mouthpiece. The big oil firms expressed their disinterest in investing in Venezuelan production because of its “commercial frameworks, legal system, and hydrocarbon laws” in the words of Exxon CEO Darren Woods. However, the oil ghouls did hold out a path for Trump to win their investment in his geopolitical play: breaking the Bolivarian Revolution.

He won’t find it easy. We must make it even harder by organizing real friction here in the imperialist center and physically opposing government policy with material opposition. As always, the predicate to that opposition must be the establishment of real organizations capable of formulating strategy and tactics and analyzing the results. We have half a century of examples of mindless “action” to warn us of the danger of unorganized opposition. Indeed, the Red Clarion just published “A Structureless Movement,” in which solidarity actions taken in an unorganized fashion in the Pacific Northwest were analyzed and the same conclusion drawn. We urge all readers who do not have a robust, Marxist local organization to use this as an opportunity to establish one. Agitate around the Bolivarian Revolution and the possibility of increasing imperialist friction through action; draw in potential members, educate them, and then act.

It falls to us. No one is coming to do the hard work of organizing for us, and we cannot rely on any of the organizations we have inherited. We have an obligation, not only to act, but to organize!

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.

However, white supremacists face an immediate contradiction due to the essential role of undocumented labor in the U.S. Some capitalists have already begun to beg the president to scale down the raids, complaining that ICE is taking all their best workers and hurting their profit margins. Every fascist accusation against the Global South is an admission², whether directed at Black people in South Afrika for “white genocide” or undocumented people in the imperial core for bringing violence to a society that seeks to exploit and assault them. 

30 years after apartheid, the 7% minority of white settlers continue to occupy 72% of South Afrika’s farmland. Legalistic mechanisms for land reforms have failed to address the problem; only 9% of the land has been returned to the Black people it was stolen from. Before it can return land, the government needs to provide compensation to the white settler. In other words, the law requires the government to pay thieves to return stolen land. Black South Afrikans can’t get their land back because doing so would bankrupt the country. The result? In 2025, South Afrika has the highest wealth inequality of any country in the world. The average Black household owns 5% of the wealth of the average white household. These statistics alone explain why South Afrikan white lobbying groups — who project false claims of supposed “racial persecution” throughout the world  — have spoken out against relocation to the U.S. Relocating white settlers would only hamper domestic settler efforts towards retaking full political power and overturning the basic legal rights won by the Black majority in 1994. One white pensioner spelled the situation out clearly: “If you haven’t got any problems here, why would you want to go?” 

Trump’s relocation of white settlers appears to be part of a larger U.S. attack on South Afrika’s government. In 2024, President Cyril Ramaphosa enacted the “Land Expropriation Act” —  essentially an eminent domain law which allows the government to repurpose private land for the public benefit. According to the law, land can only be expropriated without compensation in limited scenarios, like when property is unused or abandoned. To this day, no land has been seized in South Africa without compensation. This is the law that Trump claims will cause “white genocide” in South Afrika. The U.S. had already cut off nearly all foreign aid to South Afrika back in February, throwing the country’s healthcare system into a new crisis overnight. 

Although Trump and his imperialist collaborators understand the reformist nature of South Afrika’s government, the country is still centered in the U.S.’ crosshairs because of its rejection of outright western colonial rule. South Afrika has been represented by the ANC (African National Congress) — the party of Nelson Mandela — since the end of apartheid. In all likelihood, the U.S. wants to remove the ANC from power and replace it with one of the more imperialist-friendly parties representing white interests. In its 30 years of rule, the ANC has built strong economic relationships with enemies of the U.S. such as China, Russia, and Iran. The South Afrikan lawsuit against so-called “israel” in the International Court of Justice — supposedly the highest court in the world — continues to isolate the zionist entity, which has lost sympathy even in the West. If the U.S. were to succeed in its regime change effort, they would replace the ANC with a party such as the Democratic Alliance. With its bedrock of white support, this party would be quick to submit to the U.S. by signing extortionist trade deals and dismissing the I.C.J. lawsuit. For Trump, the chance to bully an oppressed country like South Afrika while pandering to the white base at home was too convenient to pass up. 

From within the U.S., we can see how the relocation fiasco is in perfect alignment with the current fascist playbook. The illusions of a multi-racial participatory society in a racist settler colony are dissipating in the face of an explicit preference for white immigration, especially those who show loyalty to the imperial project. I.C.E. agents and deputized local police are snatching undocumented people from their homes and workplaces. The most immediate hurdle to the new terror project lies in the capitalist class itself, who keenly appreciate the essential role of undocumented immigrants in the Amerikan economy. Capitalists in both meatpacking and agriculture economic sectors pleaded directly to Trump that the ICE raids are having a bad effect on business. By working the hardest jobs for the least pay, undocumented workers ensure that Amerikans have access to cheap produce while guaranteeing a steady profit for the capitalist. The class collaboration between these capitalists and Amerikans at large is essential to the arrangement. Without undocumented labor, the already small profit margins in agriculture and meatpacking would vanish, which would then trigger skyrocketing food costs. The takeaway from this is that there was already ample reason to be in the streets before the ICE raids began. Instead of waving the Amerikan flag like the recently-arrived South Afrikan settlers, protesters should agitate based on the general conditions of racial hierarchies in labor. Violent ICE raids will of course continue, although the business enterprises of certain capitalists will now be spared by the Trump regime. The federal and municipal pigs will continue to arrest grandparents, parents, and children. 

While fascists balance the contradictions between their rhetoric and reality, they still agitate their base by attacking a sovereign nation with racist dog whistles. On June 2, 9 more settlers from South Afrika arrived in the U.S, and more will be on the way unless South Afrika bows under the pressure. We must never forget that Land Back is as desperately needed here on Turtle Island as it is in South Afrika. Amerikan fascists feign horror at Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of land repossession. Imagine their response to a real campaign for Land Back on what they consider to be their home territory. 

Spend these summer months engaged in social investigation or engaged in study. USU and the All-Empire Workers’ League are here to join you in struggle with materials and assistance as we work on tangible projects in the real world. Whatever you do, don’t let the summer pass you by as white supremacists continue their push to convert the mass fascist state into its final, deadly form. 

1.  The term “global flea market” is borrowed from George Jackson’s Blood in my Eye (page 118)  ︎
2. For further discussion of colonial psychology, see Chapter 2: The Historical Background in Robert Biel’s Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement, with special attention paid to page 32 (local page source) ︎