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In short, the economic downturn in Puerto Rico has been exacerbated by natural disasters. Many of the island’s residents need government assistance. Even as Americans, Puerto Rican residents are excluded from federal programs created for Americans in need: Supplemental Security Income (SSI), SNAP, and Medicare Part D Low-Income Subsidy (LIS).

On April 10, 2020, the First Circuit held that the categorical exclusion of otherwise eligible Puerto Rican residents from SSI violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fifth Amendment, finding eligibility based on the differentiation in status not to be rationally related to a legitimate government interest. 17 The ruling in Vaello-Madero guided much of the District Court of Puerto Rico’s analysis in Martínez, which looked not only at Puerto Rico’s access to SSI, but also its access to SNAP and Medicare Part DLIS benefits.18 In Peña-Martínez, the Court held it was unconstitutional discrimination to deny eligible residents of Puerto Rico access to SSI, SNAP, and LIS benefits solely due to their residency in Puerto Rico.19 The District Court declared, “[T]o be blunt, the federal government discriminates against Americans who live in Puerto Rico.”20 While both decisions are major victories for Puerto Rican residents, the U.S. government’s appeals in Vaello-Madero and Peña-Martínez are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court and the First Circuit, respectively.

Puerto Rico continues to be ravaged by a sustained recession.

Annual economic growth fell by roughly 12.5 percent overall between 2004 and 2020, while Puerto Rico’s population shrunk by more than 16 percent. It has also struggled under a large public debt in recent years, totaling about $70 billion—or 68 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—in 2020. Puerto Rico’s downward spiral has been compounded by natural disasters, government mismanagement and corruption, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

It’ s a common place that human society can survive and develop only in a lasting real peace. Without peace countries cannot develop. Although since 1945 there has been no world war, but

• numerous local wars took place,

Supplemental Security Income (SSI) improves financial security for more than 4.3 million people with disabilities and over a million people over age 65, all of whom meet strict limits on income and assets. The maximum SSI benefit for 2020 is just $783 per month, well below the federal poverty line, but even this extremely modest benefit helps senior citizens and people with disabilities to maintain housing, purchase food, and meet other basic needs.

However, the SSI program is only available to people living in the 50 states, District of Columbia, and the Northern Mariana Islands. People living in Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam have different programs, but funding for them is more limited and they are not available for children. American Samoa has neither SSI nor these other block-granted programs.

Puerto Rico residents don’t have the same access to federal assistance programs as people in the mainland United States. For instance, key nutrition assistance and health coverage programs exist in limited form in Puerto Rico, providing substantially lesser benefits and services than in the rest of the country due to funding constraints. Moreover, Puerto Rico has yet to recover from a recession that began in 2006, as well as two devastating hurricanes, a historic bankruptcy, powerful earthquakes, and the COVID-19 health and economic crises. As a result, Puerto Rico’s poverty rate of 43.5 percent far exceeds the 10.5 percent average for the 50 states and the District of Columbia.

Puerto Rico’s unequal access to federal programs is particularly harmful given the island’s high disability rate. Nearly 1 in 6 Puerto Rican residents (15.1 percent) are disabled, according to the Census Bureau, compared to 8.6 percent of the general U.S. population. This follows the pattern in the states, where disability benefit receipt tends to be higher among populations that are less educated, older, and have fewer immigrants. Moreover, the factors contributing to Puerto Rico’s high poverty rate have disproportionately affected the disabled community. Nearly half of the island’s disabled residents live in poverty — twice the U.S. average.

Puerto Ricans on the island and in Congress criticized a U.S. Supreme Court ruling Thursday that found it's constitutional to deny federal benefits to aging and disabled U.S. citizens living in Puerto Rico, though they can access benefits if they relocate to the mainland.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who wrote the decision, said that “just as not every federal tax extends to residents of Puerto Rico, so too not every federal benefits program extends to residents of Puerto Rico.”

Beneath the shimmering surface of the paradise we call home, an undeniable chasm separates the haves from the have-nots. Like dark clouds overshadowing the Island's potential, income inequality and poverty cast a shadow on countless Puerto Ricans' lives.

This article will peel back the layers of statistics and economic jargon to reveal the human stories at the heart of this pressing issue. It is time to confront the challenges head-on, armed with compassion and an unwavering determination to create a more just and equitable Puerto Rico for all its inhabitants.

Christian Smalls, a key organizer and president of the historic Amazon Labor Union, has dubbed summer 2022 #hotlaborsummer. In doing so he has helped bring attention to the massive unionizing campaigns and labor struggles raging throughout the nation. Since October 2021 petitions to the National Labor Relations Board for union representation have increased 57 percent. Meanwhile, general approval for union efforts in the United States has reached 68 percent, the highest it’s been since 1965. Workers at corporate behemoths—including Amazon, Starbucks, Chipotle, and Google—are banding together to wrest better benefits, wages, and working conditions from their employers as inflation reaches levels not seen in forty years and material conditions continue to deteriorate. Black communist women have long served as a vital, albeit overlooked, source of hope and inspiration in challenging times. This assertion of worker power stretches beyond the United States: Panamanian workers took to the streets starting on July 1, 2022 to protest rising costs of living and a growing economic crisis. That same month in Paris, strikes led by airline workers grounded a significant number of flights. For the past several months, strikes and labor unrest have spread throughout the African continent, including in Tunisia, South Africa, Ghana, and Eswatini. In the summer of 2022, strikes also repeatedly halted rail transportation in the United Kingdom, where Mick Lynch, head of the Rail, Maritime and Transport Union, has called for a general strike in response to the ruling Conservative Party’s failure to keep wages in line with inflation. While these demands are contextually specific, workers around the world are rising up against deteriorating living and working conditions as a tiny minority reaps historic profits. The exciting resurgence of labor notwithstanding, #hotlaborsummer might more aptly be understood as #classwarsummer, as the ruling class is not sitting idly by as workers assert their labor power. U.S. corporations have illegally retaliated by shutting down stores where union activities have taken place and engaged in draconian anti-union efforts. Elsewhere governments have violently cracked down on labor protests, intimidating, jailing, and killing hundreds. The current dialectic between labor radicalism and ruling class repression, happening in the context of the ongoing war in Ukraine, proto-fascisms rising throughout the world, and leftist fightback—from the election of the first-ever leftwing government in Colombia to the reinvigoration of global anti-imperialist solidarity—repeats patterns of struggle familiar to twentieth century organizers. As appeals to better working conditions once again gain broader popularity, it serves us well to engage with past labor struggles, movements, and leaders. In particular, Black communist women have long served as a vital, albeit overlooked, source of hope and inspiration in challenging times. We do well to learn from their writing and work as anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-fascist, and anti-imperialist organizers and, of course, to say their names: Grace Campbell, Williana Burroughs, Maude White, Thyra Edwards, Ella Baker, Marvel Cooke, Louise Thompson Patterson, Esther Cooper Jackson, Thelma Dale, Claudia Jones, Vicki Garvin, Eslanda Goode Robeson, Dorothy Hunton, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Dorothy Burnham, Yvonne Gregory, and Charlotta Bass. As founders and leaders of unions, parties, and militant organizations—such as the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), the Trade Union Unity League, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, Sojourners for Truth and Justice, and many others—these women offer powerful guidance in a time when deep polarization makes many despair. Yet possibilities for substantial change are cause for optimism. Under conditions of economic depression, war, and intense state repression, these women worked to build unity among the oppressed, confident that they could win. At the founding convention of the National Negro Labor Council on October 27 and 28, 1951, Black communist women received emphatic applause as they asserted their importance in the labor movement. They emphasized that as long as Black women were locked out of significant sections of U.S. industry, reduced to domestic service, and marginalized in or excluded from unions, the labor struggle as a whole would suffer. The refusal to fight against the abuse of domestic workers and to organize this section of oppressed laborers rendered the union movement incomplete at best. Women such as Helen Lunelly and Viola Brown pointed out that a key struggle of the Labor Council was to open the doors of factories and industry to Black women while simultaneously struggling for livable working conditions and wages for domestics. By offering this powerful critique, Black communist women redefined who counted as a worker, shed light on the intersections of oppression and exploitation that needed to be addressed by the labor movement, and presented the necessary actions for launching a truly representative labor struggle. The Communist Party established itself among Black people as a leader in the struggle against Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. This analysis did not originate after World War II. At the first meeting of the National Negro Congress (NNC) from February 14–18, 1936, Black communist women helped to shape a resolution for a national movement. Under the direction of the NNC, the resolution would organize domestic workers—85 percent of whom were Black women—to regularize their hours, raise their wages, and improve their living conditions. Such a movement would elevate the conditions not only of Black workers, but of all working people. It was out of this meeting that Louise Thompson Patterson wrote her pivotal 1936 article “Toward a Brighter Dawn,” in which she laid out how Black women in the Northern “slave markets” and on Southern farms were “severely exploited” as workers, as women, and as “Negroes.” This superexploitation was exacerbated by Black women’s high rate of unemployment, discrimination in relief programs, exorbitant rents, and terrible housing, all of which they endured while maintaining and rearing their families. Black women’s plight was not only the plight of the Black community; it was the plight of all workers struggling against the intensification of subjection in the throes of the Great Depression. This astute analysis of the structural and material conditions of Black women was articulated even earlier by Grace Campbell, one of the first women to join the CPUSA. Campbell was ahead of her time in using the realities of Black women workers to illuminate the importance of simultaneously struggling against both capitalism and racism to shore up interracial worker unity. Black communist women understood that satisfying the material needs of the most exploited group would strengthen the labor movement and its ability to fight against class domination and its intensification by imperialism, war, racism, and fascism. This was not least because, as Claudia Jones put it, Black women were the “real active forces—the organizers and the workers” in the institutions and organizations that were central to the economic, political, and social life of Black people, and addressing their special oppressed status would help to bring their militant energy to even greater heights in the fight for peace and socialism. Black women in and around the CPUSA saw the party as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which oversaw Jim Crow segregation and facilitated the rise of monopoly-finance capitalism. For several decades in the early- to mid-twentieth-century United States, Black communist women organized, fought, and led mass campaigns against national oppression and economic exploitation. Within and alongside the CPUSA, they highlighted the conditions facing Black women workers, placed the abolition of white supremacy at the center of the class struggle, and viewed the achievement of socialism as necessary for full social and economic equality. Racism in domestic, agricultural, and industrial labor demonstrated the necessity of unionizing all workers, with a special consideration for those who bore the brunt of racism and capitalism—Black communist women’s experiences as organizers taught them how challenging this task is. From their analyses of the economic bases of racism, Black communist women also generated a compelling theorization of fascism, contending that capitalists hold on to power via white supremacy, militarism, sexism, and imperialism. Engaged in international struggles against fascism and colonialism, they built new organizations and created an international movement for peace. Yet their work forging the CPUSA and envisioning an international socialism dedicated to Black liberation—and a Black liberation dedicated to socialism—has been largely excluded from popular visions of twentieth-century radical left politics. This “intellectual McCarthyism,” erasing and suppressing the contributions of these theorist-organizers, distorts our understanding of organized radical politics. Acknowledging the role these women played expands our understanding of radical left movements’ history and future. Seeing the Patterns, Fighting the System A deep sense of the patterns of oppression and resistance guided Black communist women’s activism. Specific issues—for example, the campaign around the “Scottsboro boys,” nine Black youth who were wrongfully convicted of raping two white women in a freight train boxcar in Alabama in 1931—served as a catalyst for bringing more people into organized struggle. Through its militant defense of these young men, the Communist Party established itself among Black people as a leader in the struggle against Jim Crow, lynching, and white supremacy. Attention to this specific crime exposed a general, structural injustice. The Scottsboro boys crusade brought national and international attention to the white supremacist violence and economic deprivation of the Jim Crow South. It also brought more Black people into the party, building their capacities for ongoing political work. Black communist women also highlighted similarities between the situation of Black people in the “Black Belt” of the southern United States and in Ethiopia when that country was invaded by Italy under Benito Mussolini in 1935. In each instance, defending the safety and freedom of Black people was necessary for the defeat of fascism—and neither the U.S. government nor the League of Nations found Black lives worth defending. Black working-class women’s social and economic position primed them for organizing; they were an intensely exploited and intensely militant segment of the labor force. Black communist women’s political writing can teach contemporary organizers practical and theoretical lessons. Practical lessons include going directly to the people to learn about their experiences, creating opportunities for people to speak and advocate for themselves, and using organizations to amplify power. After the Bolshevik Revolution and the rise of New Negro militancy, Black women in and around the CPUSA saw the party as an alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, both of which oversaw Jim Crow segregation, overlooked lynching and racist violence, and facilitated the rise of monopoly-finance capitalism. Theoretical lessons recognize capitalism’s centrality to white supremacy and oppression, and the imperative of unity in the struggle for liberation while also acknowledging the special nature of anti-Black oppression. Black communist women in the first half of the twentieth century foregrounded how capitalism incites racism and sexism to fragment workers and maintain class power—and how the participation of the working class in these forms of discrimination undermines worker unity. Shedding light on Black women’s experiences as racialized and sexualized workers, Black communist women’s political writing avoids identity reductionism—the assumption that a particular confluence of identities renders one more oppressed or inherently radical. Rather, their speeches and articles highlight the experiences of Black workers, analyze their patterns of exploitation and oppression, and propose strategies for organization and agitation based on these analyses, all with the goal of building collective power capable of winning the struggle for liberation. Communists Against White Supremacy and Fascism Anti-communism in the United States has long been tied to anti-foreignness and white supremacy. In the First Red Scare of 1919, fears of anarchism—stemming from anarchist bombings and anxieties about Bolshevism, as well as rising labor militancy and the Seattle General Strike—combined with the nationalism, anti-Germanism, and anti-immigrant sentiment of World War I. Unwarranted arrests and illegal search and seizures led to the deportation of hundreds of noncitizens. This anti-radicalism also manifested in the related “Black Scare,” in which savage white mobs harassed Black soldiers returning home from the war and Black workers occupying “white” jobs in industrial centers. During that violent Red Summer of 1919, Black people resisted white terror, fighting back against race rioters and lynchers. Instead of acknowledging justified Black outrage, white newspapers blamed the Bolsheviks and “outside agitators” for inciting revolt. Anti-communism in the United States has long been tied to anti-foreignness and white supremacy. In the following decades, the U.S. State Department consistently depicted Black internationalists as subversives and enemies of the state who were prone to foreign inspiration. They presented Black resistance not as the logical response to lynch law but as a manifestation of Black disloyalty. The McCarthy era unleashed a fear of communism. During this Second Red Scare, state repression damaged the lives of thousands of people. Communists were arrested, imprisoned, and deported. Anti-communism knit together and intensified anti-Blackness and anti-foreignness and was used to justify the violent repression of Black political leaders. Because anti-colonialism, the peace movement, and desegregation were construed as dangerously un-American, leaders of the Black liberation movement came under attack. Communism—because of its mobilization for economic redistribution, racial equality, and Black-white labor solidarity—was presented as antithetical to legitimate political struggle, rendered as totalitarian, antidemocratic, and criminal. Anything that could be construed as even potentially communist, not least Black militancy, became akin to sedition. Anti-communism is a key plank of white supremacy, as it binds democracy with liberal capitalism and white class rule while also rendering Black struggle a threat to the “American way of life.” These tropes are alive and well today: from the liberal and right-wing attacks on “wokeism” to the far-right scapegoating of “cultural Marxism” and “Critical Race Theory.” Anti-communism persists by associating Black radical struggle with criminality, destruction, outside agitation, and subversion.

Following the insights Cedric Robinson, Patricia Williams, Saidiya Hartman, Lisa Lowe, Colin Dayan, and others, we note that today we are undergoing another seismic transformation of liberal rights to coordinate and arrange emergent hegemonies of accumulation. Often referred to as “neoliberalism,” today’s racial capitalism is creating what we term a differential rights order, transforming “rights” into an anchor for administrative actions, from the local to the supranational, that facilitates the required (de)valorization today’s financialized and extractive racial capitalism. Important scholarship has made us familiar with the ways in which differential rights schemas have been used to organize capitalism in racial modernity: the bestowing of liberal rights to white, property-holding European men and the assignment of degrees of gendered and racialized rightlessness to all others, an asymmetry that structured colonial, plantation, and early industrial modes of capital accumulation globally. From others, we have learned that the revolutionary upheavals of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, in which enslaved, colonized, and Indigenous people fought for freedom—struggles conventionally narrated as “winning rights”—did not end the rights-based operationalization of racial capitalism. Rather, differential rights schemas continued to coordinate racial capitalist economies, enabling racial capitalist exploitation and settler colonial dispossession through the extension of rights.2 Operating through ostensibly democratic processes, today’s rights-regimes expand differential rights by prioritizing expansive rule-making capacities and rule-enforcement, seeking to bend social formations to the changing interests of capital. Unlike previous eras of racial capitalism, the neoliberal era governs through administrative apparatuses that presume rights-bearing as an abstract universal, all the while using rights as a material force that generates both the systemic and haphazard violences necessary for contemporary practices of accumulation. Since the passing of the Civil Rights Acts and the success of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, the basic dynamic of racial capitalism has been the Republican mobilization of white constituencies to block democracy in favor of elite capitalist interests (combining antitax, probusiness rights with white supremacist identity politics) and the political economic management of negatively racialized urban populations through intertwined regimes of asset-stripping, public aid, and law and order. This dynamic has been tempered by neoliberal multiculturalism and the emergence of a multiracial professional managerial class.3 Yet, with the passage of Citizens United, the dynamic has transcended to a level marked by opportunistic racial capitalist assemblages of business, investment, and governance that can articulate rules as mundane as municipal zoning regulations and as lofty as global economic alliances.

The inspiration to bring out a new edition of Cedric Robinson’s classic, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, came from the estimated 26 million people who took to the streets during the spring and summer of 2020 to protest the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and the many others who lost their lives to the police. During this time, the world bore witness to the Black radical tradition in motion, driving what was arguably the most dynamic mass rebellion against state-sanctioned violence and racial capitalism we have seen in North America since the 1960s—maybe the 1860s. The boldest activists demanded that we abolish police and prisons and shift the resources funding police and prisons to housing, universal healthcare, living-wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy, and a system of restorative justice. These new abolitionists are not interested in making capitalism fairer, safer, and less racist—they know this is impossible. They want to bring an end to “racial capitalism.” The threat of fascism is no longer rhetorical, a hollow epithet. It is real.The state’s reaction to these protests has also brought us to the precipice of fascism. The organized protests in the streets and places of public assembly, on campuses, inside prisons, in state houses and courtrooms and police stations, portended the rise of a police state in the United States. For the past several years, the Movement for Black Lives and its dozens of allied organizations warned the country that we were headed for a fascist state if we did not end racist state-sanctioned violence and the mass caging of Black and brown people. They issued these warnings before Trump’s election. As the protests waned and COVID-19 entered a second, deadlier wave, the fascist threat grew right before our eyes. We’ve seen armed white militias gun down protesters; Trump and his acolytes attempt to hold on to power despite losing the presidential election; the federal government deploy armed force to suppress dissent, round up and deport undocumented workers, and intimidate the public; and, most recently the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by members of the alt-right, racists, Neo-Nazis, and assorted fascist gangs whose ranks included off-duty cops, active military members, and veterans. The threat of fascism is no longer rhetorical, a hollow epithet. It is real. The crossroads where Black revolt and fascism meet is precisely the space where Cedric’s main interlocutors find the Black radical tradition. Black Marxism is, in part, about an earlier generation of Black antifascists, written at the dawn of a global right-wing, neoliberal order that one political theorist called the era of “friendly fascism.” Black Marxism was primarily about Black revolt, not racial capitalism. The Black radical tradition defies racial capitalism’s efforts to generate new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. What did Robinson mean by the Black radical tradition, and why is it relevant now? Contrary to popular belief, Black Marxism was primarily about Black revolt, not racial capitalism. Robinson takes Marx and Engels to task for underestimating the material force of racial ideology on proletarian consciousness, and for conflating the English working class with the workers of the world. In his preface to the 2000 edition of Black Marxism, Cedric wrote, “Marxism’s internationalism was not global; its materialism was exposed as an insufficient explanator of cultural and social forces; and its economic determinism too often politically compromised freedom struggles beyond or outside of the metropole.” It is a damning observation. Many would counter by pointing to Marx’s writings on India, the United States, Russia, slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and peasants. Others would argue that Marx himself only ever claimed to understand capitalist development in Western Europe. But because neither Marx nor Engels considered the colonies and their plantations central to modern capitalist processes, class struggles within the slave regime or peasant rebellions within the colonial order were ignored or dismissed as underdeveloped or peripheral—especially since they looked nothing like the secular radical humanism of 1848 or 1789. Cedric’s point is that Marx and Engels missed the significance of revolt in the rest of the world, specifically by non-Western peoples who made up the vast majority of the world’s unfree and nonindustrial labor force. Unfree laborers in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the islands of the sea were producing the lion’s share of surplus value for a world system of racial capitalism, but the ideological source of their revolts was not the mode of production. Africans kidnapped and drawn into this system were ripped from “superstructures” with radically different beliefs, moralities, cosmologies, metaphysics, and intellectual traditions. Robinson observes, Marx had not realized fully that the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes and admixtures of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity. These cargoes, then, did not consist of intellectual isolates or decultured blanks—men, women, and children separated from their previous universe. African labor brought the past with it, a past that had produced it and settled on it the first elements of consciousness and comprehension. With this observation Robinson unveils the secret history of the Black radical tradition, which he describes as “a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people.” The Black radical tradition defies racial capitalism’s efforts to remake African social life and generate new categories of human experience stripped bare of the historical consciousness embedded in culture. Robinson traces the roots of Black radical thought to a shared epistemology among diverse African people, arguing that the first waves of African New World revolts were governed not by a critique rooted in Western conceptions of freedom but by a total rejection of enslavement and racism as it was experienced. Behind these revolts were not charismatic men but, more often than not, women. In fact, the female and queer-led horizontal formations that are currently at the forefront of resisting state violence and racial capitalism are more in line with the Black radical tradition than traditional civil rights organizations. Africans chose flight and marronage because they were not interested in transforming Western society but in finding a way “home,” even if it meant death. Yet, the advent of formal colonialism and the incorporation of Black labor into a fully governed social structure produced the “native bourgeoisie,” the Black intellectuals whose positions within the political, educational, and bureaucratic structures of the dominant racial and colonial order gave them greater access to European life and thought. Their contradictory role as descendants of the enslaved, victims of racial domination, and tools of empire compelled some of these men and women to rebel, thus producing the radical Black intelligentsia. This intelligentsia occupies the last section of Black Marxism. Robinson reveals how W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright, by confronting Black mass movements, revised Western Marxism or broke with it altogether. The way they came to the Black radical tradition was more an act of recognition than of invention; they divined a theory of Black radicalism through what they found in the movements of the Black masses. The final section has also been a source of confusion and misapprehension. Black Marxism is not a book about “Black Marxists” or the ways in which Black intellectuals “improved” Marxism by attending to race. This is a fundamental misunderstanding that has led even the most sympathetic readers to treat the Black radical tradition as a checklist of our favorite Black radical intellectuals. Isn’t Frantz Fanon part of the Black radical tradition? What about Claudia Jones? Why not Walter Rodney? Where are the African Marxists? Of course Cedric would agree that these and other figures were products of, and contributors to, the Black radical tradition. As he humbly closed his preface to the 2000 edition, “It was never my purpose to exhaust the subject, only to suggest that it was there.” The Black radical tradition is not a greatest hits list. Cedric was clear that the Black intellectuals at the center of this work were not the Black radical tradition, nor did they stand outside it—through praxis they discovered it. Or, better yet, they were overtaken by it. And, as far as Cedric was concerned, sometimes the Black intellectuals about whom he writes fell short. Marxism was their path toward discovery, but apprehending the Black radical tradition required a break with Marx and Engels’s historical materialism. Black Marxism is neither Marxist nor anti-Marxist. It is a dialectical critique of Marxism that turns to the long history of Black revolt to construct a wholly original theory of revolution. When the London-based Zed Press published Black Marxism in 1983, few could have predicted the impact it would have on political theory, political economy, historical analysis, Black studies, Marxist studies, and our broader understanding of the rise of the modern world. It appeared with little fanfare. For years it was treated as a curiosity, grossly misunderstood or simply ignored. Given its current “rebirth,” some may argue that Black Marxism was simply ahead of its time. Or, to paraphrase the sociologist George Lipsitz quoting the late activist Ivory Perry, perhaps Cedric was on time but the rest of us are late? Indeed, how we determine where we are depends on our conception of time.In thinking of the Black radical tradition as generative rather than prefigurative, not only is the future uncertain, but the road is constantly changing. Cedric took Marx’s historical materialism to task in part for its conception of time and temporality. From The Terms of Order to An Anthropology of Marxism, he consistently critiqued Marxism for its fidelity to a stadial view of history and linear time or teleology, and dismissed the belief that revolts occur at certain stages or only when the objective conditions are “ripe.” And yet there was something in Cedric—perhaps his grandfather’s notion of faith—that related to some utopian elements of Marxism, notably the commitment to eschatological time, or the idea of “end times” rooted in earlier Christian notions of prophecy. Anyone who has read the Communist Manifesto or sang “The Internationale” will recognize the promise of proletarian victory and a socialist future. On the one hand, Robinson considered the absence of “the promise of a certain future” a unique feature of Black radicalism. “Only when that radicalism is costumed or achieves an envelope in Black Christianity,” he explained in a 2012 lecture, “is there a certainty to it. Otherwise it is about a kind of resistance that does not promise triumph or victory at the end, only liberation. No nice package at the end, only that you would be free. . . . Only the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!” “Only the promise of liberation” captures the essence of Black revolt and introduces a completely different temporality: blues time. Blues time eschews any reassurance that the path to liberation is preordained. Blues time is flexible and improvisatory; it is simultaneously in the moment, the past, the future, and the timeless space of the imagination. As the geographer Clyde Woods taught us, the blues is not a lament but a clear-eyed way of knowing and revealing the world that recognizes the tragedy and humor in everyday life, as well as the capacity of people to survive, think, and resist in the face of adversity. Blues time resembles what the anarchist theorist Uri Gordon calls a “generative temporality,” a temporality that treats the future itself as indeterminate and full of contingencies. In thinking of the Black radical tradition as generative rather than prefigurative, not only is the future uncertain, but the road is constantly changing, along with new social relations that require new visions and expose new contradictions and challenges. What we are witnessing now, across the country and around the world, is a struggle to interrupt historical processes leading to catastrophe. These struggles are not doomed, nor are they guaranteed. Thanks in no small measure to this book, we fight with greater clarity, with a more expansive conception of the task before us, and with ever more questions. Cedric reminded us repeatedly that the forces we face are not as strong as we think. They are held together by guns, tanks, and fictions. They can be disassembled, though that is easier said than done. In the meantime, we need to be prepared to fight for our collective lives. Cedric reminded us repeatedly that the forces we face are not as strong as we think. They are held together by guns, tanks, and fictions. They can be disassembled.

[Katherine A. Moos (Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an Economist at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI. Ph.D. in Economics from the New School for Social Research), 8-13-2019, "Neoliberal Redistributive Policy: The US Net Social Wage in the Early Twenty-First Century," Sage Journals, https://doi.org/10.1177/0486613419848097] //damien jiu

The data presented in this paper describe the ex post incidence of fiscal policy in the United States. Much of the positive net social wage is being driven by growth in income support spending, particularly on Social Security, healthcare, and tax expenditures. While the effect of the Great Recession and the response of deficit spending are observable following 2008, the upward trend in the net social wage began as early as 2002. How can we explain these observed patterns despite the fact that the United States has not had a structural break from the main ideological tenets of neoliberalism?

Race against the machine¶ An apocryphal tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant.¶ “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company.¶ Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?” (The Economist, 4th November 2011)¶ The story recounted above is likely fictional. Nevertheless, it draws upon – and highlights – a very real and grave concern amongst the more far-sighted bourgeois commentators today: the threat of “technological unemployment” – the so-called “race against the machine”.¶ Far from welcoming the advances in modern technology and the vast potential for liberating humanity that automation offers, the rapid pace of technological development today is seen as a dangerous and uncontrollable force that could make vast swathes of the working – and even middle – class obsolete in the not-too-distant future.¶ Who, in this scenario, the above anecdote asks, will buy all the plethora of commodities that the world economy’s vast productive forces continue to churn out?¶ Above all, this question of automation and machinery has begun to shine a light upon the contradictions of the capitalist system, exposing the rank hypocrisy of those politicians who demand austerity and attacks on ordinary people, whilst in the same breathe venerating the billionaire “entrepreneurs” who, between just eight of them, control as much wealth as half the world’s population put together.¶ It is becoming increasingly clear to those who have eyes to see that an army of robots has helped to create a “reserve army of labour”, as Marx described it: a mass of unemployed whose presence puts a downward pressure on wages for those in work. Those replaced by new technology are not retrained and re-educated in order to give them the skills required to keep up with this ever-accelerating treadmill of capitalism; instead they are thrown onto the scrapheap and forced into the rapidly expanding “gig economy” – a shadowy netherworld of bogus self-employment, insecure work, and zero-hour contracts.¶ The result is that, despite the array of automation and technology deployed in production, the growth in productivity across the economy has actually stalled; it is cheaper, from the point of view of the parasitic profiteering capitalist, to recruit from the ranks of the “precariat” desperately looking for a job than to invest in machinery that actually reduces the need for labour. From the perspective of capitalism, then, there is both “too much” automation – in terms of “technological unemployment” – and, simultaneously, “too little”, with the stagnation of productivity.¶ The system is broken¶ It is this context of a broken economic engine that we see the emergence of the demand for a “universal basic income”, or UBI: a uniform payment given to all in society, regardless of wealth or needs.¶ The idea behind the UBI, in theory, is that it would break the link between work and pay, providing – on the one hand – workers who have been made redundant by robots a safety net that prevents them from getting stuck in low-paid, precarious jobs, whilst also allowing them to transition from obsolete industries into new, more productive sectors. And – on the other hand – enabling the capitalists to invest in automation and new technology without the moral anxiety (or, more importantly, the practical concern) of adding to society’s legion of the unemployed. Et voilà! The wheels of capitalism are well and truly greased: investment goes up; productivity increases; the economy grows – and meanwhile workers are able to smoothly move from one job to another for the rest of their lives.¶ Would that it were so simple. The reality is that productive investment today is at an all-time low, not because of any principled apprehension about the fate of sacked workers, but because of the enormous levels of overproduction – or “excess capacity” as the bourgeois like to euphemistically describe it – that hang like an albatross around the neck of the global economy. The capitalists invest, not to provide jobs, meet needs, or develop the productive forces, but to make profits. If goods cannot be sold because ordinary families do not have the money to buy them, then industry will be mothballed. And if the bosses can get more profit out of ten exploited workers than from one shiny new machine, then the workers will stay in place and productivity will remain sluggish.¶ Indeed, the relationship between work and pay has already been broken – but not in any positive sense. In all countries – both in the advanced capitalist countries and the so-called “emerging” economies – the share of wealth going to labour has decreased, with real wages remaining stagnant despite an increase in GDP. The working week grows longer, and yet take-home pay stays the same.¶ In whose interest?¶ Despite being raised on the basis of fundamentally false premises, the call for a UBI has nevertheless found an echo in this epoch of eye-watering inequality. Already, social and economic experiments involving UBIs are underway in a variety of countries, including Canada, Finland, and Holland. In Switzerland, a proposal for a SFr30,000 per annum (around £24,000 per year) UBI was rejected by 77% to 23% in a referendum on 5th June 2016. In Britain, meanwhile, the demand for a UBI has been raised by the leaderships of both the Labour Party and the Green Party.¶ For those on the Left, the UBI is proposed as a progressive demand: a reinforced safety net, beyond the sticking plaster of the current welfare state, funded through increased taxation on big business and the rich. Raised in such a manner, it is clearly a demand – like any genuine reform – that should be supported and fought for.¶ UBI, however, is not an inherently left-wing or progressive measure. The idea of a universal payment, in fact, has many advocates on the libertarian right. Indeed, even prominent bourgeois economists such as Milton Friedman have made similar proposals in the past, with his idea for a “negative income tax”.¶ For these respectable ladies and gentlemen, the concept of a UBI has great appeal as an extremely streamlined version of – or, worse still, replacement for – the welfare state. In one fell swoop, these small government zealots suggest, one could “simplify” (read: slash) vast swathes of the taxation and benefits system, “eliminating bureaucracy” and “reducing market interference”.¶ At the same time, one can clearly see the attraction of the UBI to the Schumpeterian liberals who preach the virtues of the invisible hand and the powerful transformative forces of “creative destruction”. Provide a primitive safety net, eradicate “barriers” to job creation such as the minimum wage, and give the anarchy of the market a free hand to destroy industries and jobs, without any planning or provision of education and retraining. It’s a libertarian’s dream – and a nightmare for the working class.¶ Some free-market fanatics, meanwhile, have even advocated the idea of a relatively large UBI payment, but (and here’s the catch) only on the proviso that pesky public services – such as healthcare and education – are scrapped, i.e. privatised, and opened up to profit.¶ Far from strengthening the conquests made by previous generations, therefore, one can see how the demand for a UBI can equally be raised by those looking to roll back and destroy such gains. Rather than increasing the welfare state in a progressive way by redistributing society’s colossal wealth, a UBI could instead become a deeply regressive fig leaf for a wholesale attack on – and privatisation of – public services, bolstering the capitalist market instead of weakening it.¶ Marxists will fight for any reform that genuinely improves the living standards of workers and the poor. But in order to ascertain whether we can support this-or-that demand, we must first ask: is it really a reform that is being proposed, or – in fact – a counter-reform?¶ In this respect, the call for a UBI in the abstract is meaningless. The devil is in the detail. Above all, it is necessary to analyse the question from a class point of view and look at who is raising the demand, and – most importantly – in whose (class) interest.¶ Who pays?¶ As with all such reforms, the most pertinent question is: who pays? Where, one must ask, would the money come from? Indeed, it is this key point that right-wing opponents to UBI highlight.¶ In the case of the Swiss referendum last year, the government came out against the £24,000 per year that was being proposed on the grounds of this amount being unaffordable (to put the proposed level in perspective, however, bear in mind that the cost of living in Switzerland is painfully high, and average salaries are around twice this suggested UBI amount). In places such as Finland, the “more reasonable” UBI suggested is the miserable sum of approximately £5,700 per year – a value that would be small change to the millionaires receiving it (don’t forget, it is an unconditional universal payment, after all), but that would actually leave the poorest who currently rely on the provision of means-tested benefits worse off.¶ In order to provide a UBI payment better than what is currently on offer through the welfare state, some fairly significant tax increases would be required, as the Economist highlights with some hypothetical estimates:¶ “Setting up a basic income would be no easy matter. To pay every adult and child an income of about $10,000 per year, a country as rich as America would need to raise the share of GDP collected in tax by nearly 10 percentage points and cannibalise most non-health social-spending programmes. More generous programmes would require bigger tax increases still.”¶ Before continuing, let us make one thing crystal clear: the money clearly does exist to provide a decent UBI payment to all – and at levels far beyond $10,000. As has already been noted, according to the recent Oxfam report on global inequality, just eight billionaires own as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population. Meanwhile, big business in the USA sits on an idle cash pile of around $1.9 trillion dollars.¶ The problem, however, is not economic, but political. To implement a genuinely progressive UBI would constitute the most ambitious and radical shake up of the redistributive taxation system since the cradle-to-grave welfare state was introduced in the post-war period. And yet, at a time when all these gains of the past are under attack from austerity, we see various well-meaning left-wingers calling for the UBI and proposing a titanic challenge to capital, with huge tax increases on the rich and corporations.¶ Everywhere we look, social democracy and reformism is in retreat as a result of the crisis of capitalism. Elected “left” governments, such as Syriza in Greece and Hollande’s “Socialists” in France, far from carrying out progressive programmes of tax-and-spend, have been forced by the dictatorship of the banks to implement cuts and counter-reforms. But never mind all that: double or nothing!¶ Utopia¶ In this respect, the demand for a UBI is only the latest utopian proposal from a naïve layer of the left who imagine that austerity is ideological, and that we can – somehow, surely – persuade the rich and wealthy to kindly and quietly pass over the money for the good of society. This, at root, is what the advocates of UBI are relying on and hoping for: the benevolence and philanthropy of the capitalists and the establishment politicians who represent them.¶ Whilst the occasional multi-billionaire such as Bill Gates might well part with a small portion of their vast fortune voluntarily for charitable causes (and even then, often only as a cynical PR stunt), the capitalist class as a whole – in the final analysis – are in business to make a profit. And they do not – and never have – appreciated having their private wealth forcibly taken from them to fund the rest of society; hence the almost farcical tax-dodging schemes that the world’s biggest businesses are scandalously embroiled in. As Warren Buffett, the renowned billionaire investor, stated emphatically after pointing out that he pays less tax than his receptionist: “there’s class warfare, all right – but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning!”¶ Again, we should stress that the wealth is most definitely there in society to fund a genuinely progressive UBI system. But the only way such a reform would ever actually be introduced in any meaningful way is if the capitalists felt threatened to the point that they feared losing everything; that is, if the class struggle reached such intense and heightened levels that the ruling elites offered reforms from above to prevent revolution from below. And even then, in such a situation, the demand would have to be not for UBI, but for socialist revolution!¶ If the demand for UBI is to be posed and fought for by the Left, then it cannot be done so in a manner divorced from the question of class struggle. We cannot rely on the altruism of the rich and the compassion of the capitalist state, the essence of which – as Engels explained and Lenin underlined – consists of “special bodies of armed men” in defence of the property and interests of the ruling class.¶ Particularly at a time when governments everywhere are prostrating themselves before the “invisible hand” of the market, therefore, it is pure utopianism to suggest that the capitalists will happily and calmly agree to hand over their wealth to fund a decent UBI, or that the bourgeois state would ever be willing to begin on undertaking such a task.¶ Distribution vs production¶ The main limit of the call for a progressive UBI, as with all reformist demands, is that it fails to pose the question from a class perspective – that is, to analyse who actually owns and controls the wealth and technology in society, and, most importantly, how they have come to have such control in the first place.¶ The problem with the UBI (and reformist policies in general), in other words, arises from its almost exclusive focus on the issue of distribution, rather than production. As Marx comments in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (a similarly reformist and utopian programme put forward by Marx’s socialist peers, the Lassalleans):¶ “Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal stress on it.¶ “Any distribution whatever of the means of consumption is only a consequence of the distribution of the conditions of production themselves. The latter distribution, however, is a feature of the mode of production itself. The capitalist mode of production, for example, rests on the fact that the material conditions of production are in the hands of non-workers in the form of property in capital and land, while the masses are only owners of the personal condition of production, of labour power. If the elements of production are so distributed, then the present-day distribution of the means of consumption results automatically. If the material conditions of production are the co-operative property of the workers themselves, then there likewise results a distribution of the means of consumption different from the present one.¶ “Vulgar socialism (and from it in turn a section of the democrats) has taken over from the bourgeois economists the consideration and treatment of distribution as independent of the mode of production and hence the presentation of socialism as turning principally on distribution. After the real relation has long been made clear, why retrogress again?” (our emphasis)¶ These words ring even more true today. By focussing on the question of taxation and redistribution, the modern leaders of the labour movement actually end up aiming their fire at the wrong people, alienating the middle classes with talk of taxes on incomes and personal property, rather than attacking the super-rich of the capitalist class, whose wealth is tied up in profits and capital – often far beyond the reaches of the state’s tax collectors.¶ The emphasis for socialists, therefore, as Marx stresses, should not be on redistributing the wealth that has already been created in society (through taxation and welfare, etc.), but rather on having collective and democratic control over the means by which new wealth is created – that is, the means of production. If such a rational plan of production was implemented, then questions of taxation, inheritance, redistribution, welfare, and so on, would quickly disappear.¶ For Marxists, the question of inequality, whilst important, is secondary. At root, our criticism of capitalism lies primarily not with these symptoms of the senile system, but with its fundamental disease: the laws of capitalism itself; the barriers of private ownership, competition, and production for profit, which stand in the way of the development of the productive forces – of industry and science, technology and technique, and art and culture. As Leon Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary and theoretician, commented in his Marxist masterpiece Revolution Betrayed,¶ “The fundamental evil of the capitalist system is not the extravagance of the possessing classes, however disgusting that may be in itself, but the fact that in order to guarantee its right to extravagance the bourgeoisie maintains its private ownership of the means of production, thus condemning the economic system to anarchy and decay.” (Leon Trotsky, Revolution Betrayed, chapter 1)¶ Today we see this “fundamental evil” of “anarchy and decay” vividly displayed by the contradiction of enormous cash piles in the hands of the big business alongside historically low levels of investment and stagnant productivity growth; by the absurdity of the potential for mass automation alongside fears of technological unemployment; by the concerns over forced idleness for millions, instead of the realisation of voluntary leisure for all.¶ UBI, for all its attempts to paper over the cracks, does nothing to stop this anarchy of the market and resolve the crisis of overproduction that has led society to this impasse. Indeed, as Marxists have always emphasised, no amount of reforms can unravel these fundamental contradictions of capitalism. Only the revolutionary transformation of society can cut through this Gordian knot.¶ “Wages for housework”¶ Notably, there are also feminist advocates of UBI who support the demand on the grounds that a payment of this nature would challenge present notions about work, demonstrating the value of currently unpaid – but socially necessary – labour, such as housework. But the associated call of “wages for housework” is not a socialist demand. Marxists do not wish for women (or men) to be compensated monetarily for their domestic labour – that is, to create wage labourers in the home alongside wage labourers in the workplace.¶ Instead, Marxists wish to do away with the concept of domestic work altogether: to take these currently privately performed tasks out of the hands of individual families – out of the walls of isolated homes – and to organise these socially necessary tasks in a social manner, as part of a rational plan of production. Only by socialising the question of childcare and domestic tasks, and removing this burden of labour off the shoulders of working class women, can we expect to achieve genuine gender equality in society.¶ As Engels remarks in Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State:¶ “The emancipation of woman will only be possible when woman can take part in production on a large, social scale, and domestic work no longer claims anything but an insignificant amount of her time. And only now has that become possible through modern large-scale industry, which does not merely permit of the employment of female labour over a wide range, but positively demands it, while it also tends towards ending private domestic labour by changing it more and more into a public industry.” (Frederick Engels, Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, chapter 9)¶ The only way to instigate real, permanent change in society, therefore, is not to pay women for their domestic work, but to take domestic, unwaged labour outside of the individual home altogether; to make this labour a social task that is the responsibility of society as a whole; and ultimately to invest in new machinery and technology that allows for us to abolish this work altogether.¶ The invention of household machines such as the microwave, the dishwasher, and the washing machine have helped to massively reduce the time needed for domestic duties. The challenge now is to take this technology and put it under public and democratic control; to socialise these tasks as part of a socialist plan of production; and thus to liberate both working women and working men from the scourge of domestic labour.¶ Wages, income, and the UBI¶ Within modern capitalism, where the working class has managed to secure for itself – through struggle – publicly-funded services, such as the NHS, and a welfare state, the “income” a worker receives is effectively split into two parts: a wage paid by the employer in exchange for labour-power; and a “social wage” of publicly-provided benefits and services that are free at the point of use and provided on the basis of need, without any money being handed over.¶ Under socialism, the ratio between these two components would shift dramatically towards the latter. The unseen “social wage” would vastly increase, whilst the wage paid in exchange for labour-power would be diminished (in relative terms – the total would of course increase as society’s wealth grows). Instead of just receiving healthcare without any monetary transaction required, transport, housing, electricity, food, clothes, etc.: all of these, and even things currently considered “luxury items”, could be provided without any exchange as part of a socialist plan of production. The concept of value would gradually become meaningless and the money system would wither away.¶ With UBI, however, a third income variant is introduced: alongside the paid wage and “social wage”, we now have also the unconditional monetary payment of the UBI. For those on the libertarian right who are in favour of UBI, the introduction of this universal payment acts not to strengthen the socialist element of the “social wage”, but to weaken it, (as discussed earlier) by using the UBI as a pretext for opening up public services to privatisation.¶ Similarly, the introduction of UBI might also be used to justify the elimination of important reforms such as the minimum wage, putting workers on the back foot in the battle against the bosses. Far from eroding the power of money and the market, then, the UBI could serve to consolidate and bolster these forces.¶ Those on the Left who most enthusiastically and unthinkingly call for a UBI must therefore be careful what they wish for. Again, rather than embracing the ambiguous and dubious demand of UBI, the leaders of the labour movement should be pushing the call for nationalisation and workers’ control back to the fore.¶ For a socialist society¶ The greatest irony regarding UBI is that those on the Left calling for it openly recognise all the glaring contradictions present in capitalist society, but then choose to turn the problem on its head, suggesting everything but the solution itself. They see the irrationality of mass unemployment alongside overwork; of inequality increasing whilst technology advances; of automation that enslaves us rather than liberates us: and yet they accept these irrationalities as a given fact – admitting to capitalism’s failings, but refusing to recognise capitalism as the root of the problem.¶ As with all reformist demands, the advocates of UBI are willing to propose the most extraordinary and utopian measures, as long as these do not challenge the one right that they consider to be the most inviolable and sacrosanct of all: that of private property. Indeed, it has even been suggested that UBI could be a “capitalist road to communism” – that is, to Marx’s maxim, “from each according to their ability; to each according to their needs.”¶ For such venerable ladies and gentlemen, competition and the pursuit of profit may be responsible for the scourge of inequality, unemployment, and economic crisis that blights society – but to suggest abolishing the anarchy of the market is pure blasphemy. After all, as we revolutionaries are so frequently reminded – we must be realistic!¶ Indeed, for some, as Thomas Paine – the English-American Enlightenment political philosopher and one of the Founding Father of the United States – argued, a form of UBI would be a tit-for-tat entitlement to all citizens conditional on them accepting the very existence of private property. As the Economist notes:¶ “Thomas Paine would have relished such a prospect. His case for a basic income justified it as a quid pro quo for the existence of private property. Before the advent of private property, he believed, all men had been able to support themselves through hunting and forage. When that resort is taken from them, they should be compensated by means of a ‘natural inheritance’ of £15 to be paid to all men every year, financed from a ‘ground rent’ charged to property owners.”¶ Instead of calling for a UBI, socialists should be using this question to expose the irrationalities, absurdities, and contradictions of capitalism. Our demand should not be for a UBI, where economic control remains in the hands of a tiny rich elite, and where money continues to flow into the pockets of parasitic capitalists. Our demand must be for nationalisation of the key levers of the economy and for workers’ power.¶ Rather than demanding a basic income for those who are made obsolete by automation, we should be calling for necessary work to be shared out, with the hours of the working day reduced for all. But this is only possible on the basis of an economic system based on needs, not profits. Furthermore, we should highlight the potential for a genuine socialist society, where mankind and machine exist in harmony: a society of superabundance; of “fully automated luxury communism”, where the motto “from each according to their ability; to each according to their need” can finally be realised in practice.

From Shareholder to Stakeholder Capitalism: More of the Same? The political economy that characterizes most of today’s world – capitalism – is centuries old, although its most recent form – neoliberalism – only became dominant in the 1980s.2 Neoliberalism’s core elements (trade and financial liberalization, low taxation, minimal state intervention, strong property rights) birthed our now familiar globalized economy, criticized almost at its outset for the inequalities it was fomenting. To WEF founder, Klaus Schwab, the problem Labonté 2 International Journal of Health Policy and Management, 2022, x(x), 1–5 lay less with capitalism itself than with its neoliberal emphasis on maximizing shareholder value, where economic decisions are based on creating the greatest return on investment in the shortest time possible. Schwab’s and the WEF’s promoted solution is ‘stakeholder capitalism,’ in which everyone (and not just shareholders) should have a stake in capitalism’s benefits.5 Few might object to the idea of all gaining (even if not equally) from liberalized market activities, but as one economist argued, the stakeholder model is essentially: “…just a way of bringing the opponents of capitalism to a common venture of extending its lifespan, while ignoring the system’s intrinsic and destabilizing profit motive” (W. Bello, interview communication, October 27, 2021). As one example, in a post-pandemic ‘Great Reset’ wealthy investors are encouraged to invest in businesses whose activities align with the Sustainable Development Goals. This, it is said, would allow them to “make a profit and still save the world.”6 To the extent that such investments go into non-fossil-fuel renewables this win-win hyperbole is a partial truth; but with many of these ethical investment portfolios being non-compliant with global climate change goals7 this may simply be ‘greenwashing’ what remains fundamentally profit-motivated investing. We might also ask: What economic policies and practices enable investors to become disproportionately wealthy in the first place? As a recent study noted, the stakeholder capitalism model will do little to redistribute wealth but will strengthen the private sector’s (not unself-interested and growing) role in global health governance.8 The Return of the State: Can Governments Mitigate Capitalism’s Inherent Inegalitarianism? The state is certainly a critical ‘stakeholder’ in capitalism since its policy choices enable or constrain the actions of economic actors within and across borders. The post-1980 drift to neoliberalism saw the state increasingly defer to market interests in efforts to have their countries remain globally competitive (T. Jackson, interview communication, October 28, 2021).9 Tax rates fell, financial markets deregulated, and inequalities within most countries soared.2 The 2008 global financial crisis saw a rapid volte-face, with wealthier country governments spending trillions of dollars to bail out ‘banks too big to fail.’2 The return of the state was brief, with austerity measures (fiscal contraction) quickly following to cover the public costs of rescuing private banks and investors2 at the cost of eroding health systems that proved ill-prepared for a global pandemic. The pandemic saw the state roar back once again, with many countries responding with wage support, people who matter most in society, the ones who protect our lives and care for us, the ones we applauded from our doorsteps during the pandemic, yet they were…left behind in terms of wages, security, the value of their jobs, their status in society” (T. Jackson, interview communication, October 28, 2017). Certainly, the need for greater public investment in health and social protection is an undisputed outcome of the pandemic, especially given how government responses to COVID-19 increased women’s care burdens, employment losses and experiences of domestic violence.10-12 Others saw massive government interventions in the economy as demonstrating that: “…all that neoliberal talk about government intervention is bad, bad, bad just got thrown out the window…what we’ve seen is the ideological assumption of neoliberalism laid low” (W. Bello, interview communication, October 27, 2021). Early post-pandemic recovery plans for those countries with the requisite fiscal capacities appeared to embody such transformative optimism. The original US multi-trillion Green New Deal promised substantial environmental protection, a rapid shift away from fossil fuels, and expansive new social spending.13 When it was later tabled as a following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the EU and many other countries are pivoting back to energy (fossil fuel) independence, questioning their 2021 commitments to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050.18

(W. James, Politics Editor, , 2-2)

Some people in Washington are very upset that Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) doesn't think the United States should want Ukraine in NATO. This includes the White House, where Press Secretary Jen Psaki dismissed the lawmaker's concerns — that NATO membership would make the 100,000 thousand Russian troops along the Ukrainian border a much bigger U.S. problem than it is right now — as "Russian misinformation" and "Russian talking points." In another climate, this might be considered McCarthyism. Now it's just par for the course, part of nonsensical U.S. policy on Ukraine, which keeps the Eastern European nation in a weird limbo that guarantees neither U.S. defense of Ukraine nor peace for the United States. "U.S. leaders insist on risking Ukraine now for the principle that we might defend it later," writes Defense Priorities' Ben Friedman, deploying U.S. forces to nearby nations though Ukraine is not a NATO member, as much of the foreign policy establishment would prefer, and we are not obligated to defend its borders from a Russian incursion. "Ending this absurd policy will do far more for Ukraine than stationing 3,000 troops in other countries," Friedman adds, to say nothing of being safer for the United States: Russia today is weaker than the old Soviet Union, which makes it less strategically important and a different kind of threat than it was during the Cold War, but it is still nuclear-armed. As for Hawley, he's no stranger to controversy. But weighing whether it advances any American national interest to take on a commitment to go to war over Ukraine is no hot take or wild conspiracy theory. Pledging ourselves to Ukraine would do more rather than less to make our peace and security dependent on Russian President Vladimir Putin's whim. There are some marginal Putin fetishists on the right, and every anti-war movement contains voices who go too far in whitewashing the bad behavior of targeted foreign governments. But there's also rampant threat inflation among the real decision-makers in Washington and an inability to learn from the mistakes of the last two decades of futile wars, leaning on analogies to older conflicts instead. However you label them, on this issue, Psaki is wrong, and Hawley is right: Admitting Ukraine into NATO would either be dangerous or reduce the alliance to a paper tiger at the expense of the American taxpayer — and, perhaps, the expense of our soldiers, too.

(Ted Galen, Ted Galen Carpenter is senior fellow for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute. Carpenter served as Cato’s director of foreign policy studies from 1986 to 1995 and as vice president for defense and foreign policy studies from 1995 to 2011. , 2-8)

Advocates of an aggressive U.S. foreign policy are again smearing their antiwar opponents. In his latest article on Substack, iconoclastic journalist Glenn Greenwald notes that he “cannot count the number of times” that he has “been accused of being a Kremlin agent or asset, not by random social media trolls but by prominent Democratic Party and liberal media and political figures for expressing those views.” Greenwald emphasized that he is hardly alone in receiving such treatment. “That is now, by far, the favorite attack against anyone who believes that Ukrainian borders are not important enough to US interests to involve the US in a war.” He proceeds to document a number of ugly smears impugning the loyalty of Fox News host Tucker Carlson and others who dare question the wisdom (or sanity) of adopting a dangerous, hardline policy toward Russia. From personal experience, I can confirm Greenwald’s observation. In an article on the Atlantic Council’s blog, responding to an earlier article of mine in National Interest Online, German analyst Andreas Umland embodied that tactic. After asserting that “an ideologically diverse range of Western sources” have “echoed many of Moscow’s more outlandish claims,” Umland “peppered his op‐​ed with other “Russian tool” innuendoes and singled me out for special criticism. Carpenter’s “talking points would be instantly recognizable to Russian TV viewers, who have encountered similar disinformation on a virtually daily basis for the past seven years. One can only guess at Carpenter’s motives.” Umland amplified his guilt‐​by‐​innuendo campaign in a subsequent, much more detailed article in Eurasia Review. The following captures his argument: “Here comes a senior American commentator working at a leading Washington think‐​tank, publishing in one of the most influential US political magazines, and repeating exactly those talking points that the Kremlin has been spreading to justify its thinly veiled hybrid war against Ukraine for seven years now. This not enough, Carpenter uses the Kremlin’s favorite narratives to unapologetically call for an end of US support for Ukraine. What more could Moscow hope for?” The ghost of Sen. Joseph McCarthy likely is beaming at the audacity of that passage As Greenwald points out, several characteristics provide the cohesion for pro‐​war types, both neocons and hawkish liberals. “Two of the most toxic of these have been on full display over the last month. The first is that they are always — in every case — in favor of any opportunities for the U.S. to involve itself in a new war. You wind up a neocon, and they start inventing excuses for why the US must either bomb and invade other countries or enter a new proxy war to arm and fund other countries to do so for it. It is, therefore, unnecessary to point out that they are all not just in favor of US involvement in a potential war between Russia and Ukraine but fanatical and giddy about it.” The pro‐​war faction’s invocation of Vladimir Putin’s alleged threat to the entire international order, especially by seeking to “evict the United States from Europe,” confirms Greenwald’s conclusions. Chronic war advocate Max Boot asserts that Putin’s goal is nothing less than the re‐​establishment of the Soviet empire. Such threat inflation throughout the American foreign policy community and news media is intensifying. For hawks willing to have America risk a nuclear war with Russia, their portrayal of the current NATO‐​Russia confrontation resembles the culminating portions of Lord of Rings, in which brave defenders of freedom must risk all to bring down the supremely evil Sauron. The other element of cohesion for pro‐​war lobbyists, Greenwald emphasizes, is the way neocons and their liberal hawkish allies “smear anyone who opposes their plots to involve the US in new wars as traitors, on the side of whichever Bad Leader they want (others) to fight.” It is not a new phenomenon. Pro‐​war types routinely excoriated opponents of the Vietnam War as being advocates of appeasement at best and outright communist sympathizers at worst. That pattern appeared again in the aftermath of the 9–11 attacks. When Rep. Barbara Lee (D‑CA) voted against the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force (the only member of the House to do so), numerous conservative publications vilified her. John Fund’s op‐​ed in the Wall Street Journal was typical of the treatment. “One wishes Ms. Lee were just a clueless liberal,” Fund stated, ” but her history leads me to conclude that she is the kind of ‘San Francisco Democrat’ that former United Nations Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick criticized in 1984: someone who ‘always blames America first.’” He harped on the point of Lee’s alleged special aversion to America’s role in the world: “America has been attacked, and while pacifism has an honorable tradition in this country, Ms. Lee seems to use it as a cloak for her belief that when it comes to the use of American power, her country can never do right.” That same ugly tactic was pervasive during the lead‐​up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. David Frum’s infamous article in National Review, “Unpatriotic Conservatives,” was the most flagrant example, but there were many others. Frum is back to his usual tactics, impugning the loyalty of individuals who criticize the attempt to stampede America into a military confrontation with Russia. In a January 23 tweet, he thundered: “You’re going to hear a lot of lying about Putin’s War from Putin apologists on the [Tucker] Carlson right and the [Glenn] Greenwald left. Don’t let them get away with it. Putin is plotting this conflict, only Putin, and any excuse for Putin is an excuse for a war wanted by nobody in the West.” Policy toward Russia seems to be an especially prominent lightning rod in bringing out the worse features of the vocal neo‐​McCarthyites. Moreover, that pattern emerged long before the concerted effort to promote allegations about supposed collusion between Donald Trump and the Russian government. People who dared oppose a belligerent response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, or who made the case that Washington’s meddling to help demonstrators unseat Ukraine’s pro‐​Russia president provoked the annexation, found themselves targets of vitriol from a de facto alliance of neocons and liberal hawks. Indeed, some of the nastiest allegations from both camps were directed against individuals who not only had nothing to do with Donald Trump’s presidential bid but were outright critics of Trump. Princeton University Professor Stephen F. Cohen, a longtime distinguished scholar of the Soviet Union and its successor states, was a prominent early target. Critics impugned Cohen’s motives and sullied his reputation long before the 2016 election, because he advocated a less confrontational policy toward Russia. Such epithets as “Putin’s American apologist” and “Putin’s pal” were among the routine labels they applied to Cohen. People who argued that NATO’s expansion eastward to Russia’s border had needlessly provoked Moscow, or that Russia’s actions in Ukraine were more defensive than offensive, received the same treatment. Epithets such as “Putin’s apologists,” “stooges,” “Russian trolls,” “patsies,” and “useful idiots” laced such denunciations. Matters have not improved since then. A Yahoo “news” story referred to Tucker Carlson as a “Russian stooge” just days ago. Writing in Slate, William Saletan labeled Carlson “America’s most watched Kremlin propagandist.” The leftist Media Matters branded him a “Putin apologist.” The purpose of such slimy tactics is readily apparent: intimidation of war opponents and the suppression of debate about US foreign policies. Too often, hawks have succeeded in achieving their objective, and the United States has blundered into unnecessary wars that caused widespread havoc in and around the targeted countries. The conflicts in Vietnam and Iraq are the most illustrative examples, but unfortunate outcomes on a smaller scale also occurred in places such as the Balkans, Libya, and Syria (in part because of a stifling of meaningful debate about those dubious policies.) The potential for a disastrous outcome of a confrontation between the United States and Russia is far greater. We must not let the David Frums of the world prevail this time.

(Daniel, PoliSci@JohnsHopkins, and G. John, InternationalAffairs@Princeton,Realism, Liberalism and the Iraq War, Survival, 59:4, 7-26, DOI: 10.1080/00396338.2017.1349757 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00396338.2017.1349757)

The chief architects of the Iraq War were clearly not liberal international- ists. They did rely, however, on arguments drawn from both hegemonic realism and interdependence realism. Like realists, liberals were conflicted and divided about the war. 29 In blaming liberal internationalism, realist critics not only neglect the powerful realist logics behind the invasion of Iraq, but also fundamentally misunderstand why it was that some liberal internationalists came to support it. As such critics see it, liberal interna- tionalists supported the war as part of democracy promotion, and they understand liberalism more generally as essentially an idealistic agenda for the improvement and elevation of international life. 30 In fact, liberal support for the war, however reluctant, was based on a set of concerns that had more in common with interdependence realism than with the idealist version of Wilsonianism. Firstly and most importantly, liberal internationalists hold a diagnosis of security vulnerability that emphasises violence interdependence. They, like the realist-interdependence school, see the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction in the hands of revisionist states and terrorist organisations as a dangerous new form of interdepend- ence. This is not an idealist rationale, but rather the recognition of a severe security threat posed by novel developments generated by technological advance. Secondly, in their remedy to rising violence interdependence, liberal internationalists sharply depart from the realist-interdependence approach, advancing international arms control and security-regime build- ing rather than preventive war and hegemonic rule. Iraq’s repeated violation of international law, arms-control treaties and UN Security Council resolu- tions posed a dangerous challenge, not to American hegemony as such, but to an international order of mutual restraint and cooperative problem-solv- ing. Thirdly, liberal internationalists see the establishment and maintenance of broad international coalitions as vital responses to new security vulnera- bilities, and hold that unilateral measures, such as the Bush administration’s Iraq policy, undermine the international cooperation necessary for a real and enduring new international security regime. 31 The academic-realist critics of the Iraq War were speaking for the equi- librium version of realism. The war’s primary instigators were hegemonic realists who also drew on diagnoses of new security vulnerabilities empha- sised by interdependence realists. While the academic realists had largely abandoned such arguments, the operational realists tasked with actually conducting foreign and military policy were nevertheless confronted with new acute manifestations of violence interdependence for which the aca- demic speakers of truth to power had little purchase. Neglected by academic realists, the threats posed by violence interdependence came to be a central focus for liberal internationalists, too. Faced with responding to the new violence interdependences, however – dramatically revealed by 9/11 and the anthrax letters – the hegemonic operational realists in the Bush administration seized upon the Burnhamite agenda of pre-emption and preventive war. For this programme, and in contrast to the thinking of liberal internationalists, the international system of arms-control and security governance stood as impediments to their uni- lateral efforts, and their actions had the effect of damaging the regime as ongoing and internationally legitimate responses to these vulnerabilities. The re-emergence and growth of academic realism across the latter part of the twentieth century promised to provide better guidance to statecraft in dealing with the timeless problems of security and international order – in other words, speaking truth to power. Yet ironically, academic realism, while becoming more sophisticated, became narrower, by dropping the insights and arguments of the violence-interdependence school of realism that flourished in the middle years of the twentieth century. And the aca- demic realists, while claiming to be acutely attentive to the real world of power politics, became remarkably blind to the logics of hegemonic realism and their importance for the foreign policy of the American hegemonic state. Most consequently, by abandoning the insights of the interdepend- ence school, academic realists have limited the ability of realism to grapple with urgent and severe new vulnerabilities arising from cascading techno- logical interdependence. If academic realists seek to return to engaging the pressing security issues of this time, they will find themselves necessarily building from the abandoned starting points of the interdependence school. As they do, they will find themselves in the seasoned company of liberal internationalists and other globalists who have, in the meantime, been grap- pling with these realities.

On January 20, Joe Biden began serving as president of the United States. His foreign policy team is virtually complete, mostly made up of former officials from Barack Obama’s administration with whom Biden has worked in the past. However, Biden’s foreign policy will not be a simple continuation of Obama’s. The international and domestic political situation have changed. The Neocons are on board Moreover, the Democratic Party is not what it used to be. Donald Trump’s rise to power in the US in 2016 was accompanied by a mass exodus of neoconservatives from the Republican Party. William Kristol, Max Boot, David Frum, Rick Wilson, Jennifer Rubin suddenly became Democrats, accusing Trump of betraying the ideals of democracy. This convergence started during the Obama years, when Max Boot wrote that Hillary Clinton was a “powerful” voice “for ‘neoliberalism’ which is not so different in many respects from ‘neoconservativism.'” Figures on Biden’s foreign policy team like future Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the national security adviser Jake Sullivan, or Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines a were notorious interventionists. However, Trump’s rise to power was a turning point when neocons began to declare their disillusionment with Republicans en masse. Consequently, their influence in the Democratic Party and its affiliated media increased, where neocons like Max Boot became the leading experts on foreign affairs. Nearly 300 former Bush officials endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. Briefly, the doctrine of these people can be formulated as follows: the US should actively interfere in the politics of other countries, remove unwanted regimes, promote liberal democracy with all its might, ensure its planetary hegemony by all possible means and fight against countries that challenge the value and military hegemony of the West: China, Russia and smaller countries like Turkey or even Hungary, where sovereign and “authoritarian” tendencies are too strong. And of course, Israel must be guarded at all costs. In 2019, Robert Kagan, a prominent neoconservative, along with Antony Blinken wrote an article urging the US to abandon Trump’s America First policies and continue the policies of George W. Bush and Barack Obama. Specifically, they called for a policy of “preventive diplomacy and deterrence” against “US adversaries,” calling for containment of Russia and China. According to The Daily Sabah columnist Hakki Öcal, “preventive diplomacy and deterrence” – “is shorthand for sending boys and tanks wherever they can.” Robert Kagan’s wife is Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs in the Obama administration. She played an active role in organizing and supporting the color revolution in Ukraine in 2014, infamously advising to the US Ambassador Geoffrey Pyat to “Fuck the EU”. The failed coup in Turkey in 2016 occurred during her stay in office. From 2003 to 2005, Victoria Nuland was a foreign policy advisor to Dick Cheney, the US Vice President that filled the US Administration with neocons. In the Biden-Harris administration she is going to serve as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs. This is currently the third-ranking position in the United States Department of State, after the Secretary and the Deputy Secretary. This way, Nuland will be promoted and will be able to pursue neoconservative policies more aggressively. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, she called for a more “activist” policy toward Russia, including “speaking directly to the Russian people about the benefits of working together and the price they have paid for (President Vladimir) Putin’s hard turn away from liberalism”. The infamous Brett H. McGurk, who in his tenure as Special Presidential Envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter the Islamic State insisted on the support of PKK-related militias in Syria, is also considered a neocon, and started his career in the George W. Bush administration. He will be the Middle East “czar” in Biden’s National Security Council. That may be a signal of the return of the US to the “Greater Middle East” plan to divide and conquer in the Middle East: redrawing borders and exploiting the Kurdish factor to breed chaos in the region. Liberal Hawks “The only important intellectual difference between neoconservatives and liberal interventionists is that the former have disdain for international institutions (which they see as constraints on US power), and the latter see them as a useful way to legitimate American dominance. Both groups extol the virtues of democracy, both groups believe that US power – and especially its military power – can be a highly effective tool of statecraft,” the prominent US scholar Stephen M. Walt notes. In the early 2000s, many Democratic Party members, which their opponents called “liberal hawks”, became active in the United States. They advocated virtually the same interventionist and imperialist policies as the neoconservatives, differing from the latter only stylistically. There are many people in and around the Biden team who in 2003 authored the liberal hawkish “Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy”: Kurt Campbell, Larry Diamond, Michèle Flournoy, Philip Gordon, Michael McFaul and Kenneth Pollack. Samantha Power and Michael McFaul were the most unoriginal representatives of the liberal hawk doctrine in the Obama Administration. She will be back under Biden as Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). In her recent article for Foreign Affairs Samantha Power called for countering China’s influence and using “anti-corruption” rhetoric to undermine “authoritarian powers”, “for the persuasion and coalition building needed to advance US interests in the years ahead”. In 2007 Power stated that “in this age, there is no such thing as a purely ‘internal matter.’ Dr. Amanda Sloat, future senior director for Europe at the National Security Council is also known as a democratic interventionist, and applauded back in 2016 the Hillary Clinton interventionist record, especially for her role in regime change in Libya. Her counterpart at the NSC Andrea Kendall-Taylor, who will be a Senior Director for Russia and Central Asia, in 2019 spoke before the US Congress and called for the “early intervention” to “respond to the slow dismantling of democracy” and global democratic promotion as a core on the US foreign policy. It is also a version of hawkish liberal interventionism. Michael McFaul is yet not on the board of Biden’s foreign and security team, but he constantly dispenses advice to the administration. He insists of the containment of Russia (including through tighter censorship of the Internet). Also in Joe Biden’s administration can be found individuals associated with the queen of the liberal hawks, Madeleine Albright. The future United States Deputy Secretary of State – the №2 in the Department of State, is Wendy Ruth Sherman, former Madeleine Albright counselor and Vice Chair of the Albright Stonebridge Group. It is worth noting that since Madeleine Albright supported Joe Biden and has been active in advising on foreign policy by a Democratic administration, her direct influence should not be underestimated either. Philip Gordon, a prominent liberal hawk and supporter of the Iraq war, is also on the board. He warned against withdrawing troops from Germany and declared that “It’s getting hard to describe Turkey as an ally of the US”. Gordon, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs is also a good friend of Archbishop Elpidophoros of America (Ioannis Lambriniadis) of the Greek Orthodox (Fener) Patriarchate of Istanbul, who actively promotes an anti-Turkish agenda in Washington. In the new administration, he will be the Deputy National Security Advisor for the Vice President. Secret details of the Trump-Greek Orthodoxy Patriarchate talks Joe Biden’s foreign policy team is full of neo-conservative lobbyists and liberal hawks. Representatives of these ideological groups saw in Biden’s presidency a chance to implement their programs. The rest of the world will have to face their fierce attempts to restore the imperial policy of the United States.

(Jeremy, RussianStudies@Aarhaus, , 1-18)

Just a quick follow up to my last post on Russian punditry, which got quite a lot of private responses of support. I hadn’t considered adding the ‘spooks’ (not-so-secret security agencies) angle; my piece was mainly about the domination of public and social media attention by a narrow and not always best informed commentariat sitting uncomfortably between academia, journalism and think tanks. However, after I wrote the post, a few people mentioned the security services angle. What does this mean? Well, in a sense it’s the second elephant in the room of Russia punditry. If the first elephant is the clear leveraging of latent public sympathy abroad for the Russian regime by our friends at the English-language offices of RT, then the other elephant is the continuing relevance of academic and think-tank contacts with the security services in the West. If you underestimate the hidden motives of those that comment on Russia – from both elephants, then you are guilty of the ‘fallacy of insufficient cynicism’, as Bruce Cumings wrote in 1997 about Russian and Asian Area Studies’ partial capture by security service interests. Cumings’ illuminating piece is still relevant today. I’ll come back to his proposal for Area Studies later. What is clear from the reaction to my original post is that many people don’t really get how ‘ideological’ commentary is that comes from both ‘foreigners’ and ‘natives’ alike. Many also don’t want to talk about how the filtering mechanism of funders, results in funnelling out diversity. Perhaps that should be ‘Diversity’ with a capital ‘D’ (in terms of viewpoints, background, gender and race). Cumings mentions Richard Pipes at one point. Pipes is an example of a type of Eastern European anticommunist intellectual recruited to enthusiastically tell the US government what it wanted to hear about Russia at a particular point in time. A leading critique of détente, his hawkish views came from his flawed reading of Russian history (a kind of historico-genetic autocracy thesis that even at the time was seen as simplistic). The result: advising politicians and the public that the USSR was bent on world domination and a real military and economic threat to US hegemony. Both these hyperbolic assertions were empirically falsifiable at the time by any curious undergraduate student with a good grounding in Russian Studies; the point is that effectively countering such an approach was not possible – not because of group think, but because of the structural conditions of academia-as-adjunct-of-security-state. Cumings: “foundations (Carnegie, Rockefeller, Ford) worked with the state and the center to fund projects and, in some cases, to launder CIA funding; that the same scholars who undertook this activity often were themselves subjects of FBI investigations; that some of these scholars, in turn, were responsible for denouncing other scholars to the FBI; and, finally, that these academics were major figures in the postwar development of Russian area studies in the nation as a whole.” People like Pipes acted to shape Area Studies as a Cold War industry dependent on the security services for social science research, an issue not just in Russian Studies (96% of all social science funding in the US came from the military in 1952). Today, my previous post reflects concerns about the way Twitter acts as an amplifier of sometimes narrowly-informed and narrowly-thinking people in think tanks and policy who are less dependent now on the academic setting. Just as on one side some of the loudest voices come from journalists and grifters making money from laundering Russia’s geopolitical reputation, we should be aware of the continuing influence of security services’ patronage on Russian punditry at ‘home’. The funniest line in Cumings’ piece is this: “It has been estimated that while about 60 percent of the academics working for the CIA know that is what they are doing, the others do not.” What he means by this is precisely the laundering of influence and policy-papers through academic and para-academic writing for the think tanks and foundations that have only increased in visibility in the era of social media. What’s different today? In some respects nothing. If someone in a Western think tank is very hawkish or very dovish, ask yourself why? If they make grand knowledge claims, also be suspicious. Are they grifting for themselves or for a blob-faction? One thing that has changed is that academia itself has become too neoliberal for most dedicated spooks to survive there. While there were a few in the Cold War institutes I taught in back in the day, even then they were leaving to go freelance because the requirements to publish or perish in the ivory tower are not so conducive to spook work. [allow me one little shout out to the prof I met a few years ago with so many passports and travel money, despite not publishing or getting grants! He’s not on Twitter! But he’s the exception and not the rule in terms of successful academic career and spookdom.] I digress, but the point is that a list of Russia experts that weighs heavily to the think tank side should give pause for thought. Which brings me back to Cumings. While the Cold War birthed Area Studies (and hijacked anthropologists), Cumings in 1997 proposed rethinking the boundaries of area and discipline to reengage American minds with the task of understanding the world beyond the US. He was alarmed by the prospect of the rational choice paradigm taking over social science. Was he was right? “it is a simpler matter of the researcher staring at the game-theoretic mathematical formulas that appear on the computer screen, thus to determine how the real world works. If the theory does not explain political, social, or economic phenomena, it is the real world’s fault.” He had a two-pronged response to this challenge. The first was based on ‘boundary displacements’: (1) move away from fixed regional identities (that is, the area committees), given that globalization has made the ‘areas’ more porous, less bounded (2) utilize area expertise to understand pressing issues in the world that transcend particular countries, which is the real promise of area studies in the post-1989 era (3) reintroduce area knowledge to social science disciplines that increasingly seem to believe that they can get along without it (4) integrate the United States into “area studies” by recognizing it as an “area” that needs to be studied comparatively Then, following Immanuel Wallerstein’s similar intervention, Cumings had more concrete suggestions; they are just as provocatively relevant today as 25 years ago: All academics should reside in two departments Thematic, yet heterodox, research themes that are not US-centric, but neither driven by supposed specificities of ‘Russia’ or ‘China’ Embrace post-positivism Fold all the social sciences into ‘political economy’ (and preferably get rid of economics to the Business School) Let funding flow from corporate identity of the university (serving society as the institution imagines it) For that to be possible, especially in area studies, Cumings had one final prerequisite: “Abolish the CIA, and get the intelligence and military agencies out of free academic inquiry”.

(Jeremy, RussianStudies@Aarhaus https://postsocialism.org/2022/01/10/the-russia-pundit-problem/)

This post was provoked by the rash of new and reheated Russia takes getting a lot of visibility on Twitter recently because of the escalation threat in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. I also got a little ‘triggered’ by Kevin Rothrock’s* ‘head-to-head’ voting competition between Russia experts – also on Twitter. In fact, the whole ‘expert’ thing is weird in the first place. What does it actually mean? There are millions of Russia experts. In Russia, they’re called Russians… We’ve basically just accepted that expert is someone who mediates second-hand sources to buttress their own opinion and usually reinforce preconceived opinions that serve the powerful. So what’s my beef? It’s twofold: there’s the usual problem of social media grifters. Since Trump and Russiagate they are like mushrooms in an endless late Russian summer – they just keep coming. What’s a grifter? A self-appointed expert who is a fraud; we could even call them ‘hack frauds’ as many are adjacent to a media outlet or think-tank that churns policy and opinion pieces. The second problem is that Russia coverage on Twitter is dominated by Washington DC policy types who may not be frauds* (although some of them are), but who often have a very narrow, and second-hand, knowledge of Russia the country, and Russia the diverse population, as opposed to Russia the foreign policy problem. I’ve written about ‘imperial’ hierarchies of knowledge production before here. Another issue was the extreme Anglo/US-centric focus of Rothrock’s list. (The finalists of his list were defence and crime/security/military scholars; you couldn’t get a more depressing picture of how Russia is framed). You can see where I’m going here – I’m making a claim for ‘in-country’ knowledge, and depth and breadth of engagement. For some reason, some people don’t even understand this argument. In case you think I’m talking exclusively about non-Russians, I’m not. These issues pertain just as much to ‘natives’. There are plenty of Russian Russia experts who have long had a comfortable DC or US media gig and who have a weak direct grasp on events. Just as much as others, they are vulnerable to bad takes due to the secondary, or belated sources of their analysis. Another hobbyhorse of mine is the extreme self-selection and self-reproduction of this group: in the main they are privileged Russian liberals who are often the last people to ask about the diversity of Russia itself. Think for a moment about who can and who can’t up-sticks and move to the US, regardless of the level of repression in Russia. Think also for a moment about the clustering of political viewpoints that this results in (something I implied in my piece about Navalny-love in 2021) But that’s not the end of it, the same DC types and ‘expat’ Russians often read the same set of narrow sources and have the same contacts. So not only does their shared relative wealth and class position lead to blobism, but also their lack of interest in exploring other sources or coverage adds to that as well. Some of these people have spent the majority of their adult life outside Russia, or only visiting Moscow/St Pete. There’s two ‘syndromes’ we could coin: the ‘Marriott-International Russia expert’ (folks who get uncomfortable leaving their hotel in Moscow – yes, I know them); and the ‘not-outside-the-ring road’ native Russian experts who disdain and are often even fearful and incredulous of non-Metropolitan Russia (yes I know them too). Aside: who do you think is most incredulous about my research and work? Yes, that’s right, it’s privileged Russians. And by incredulous, I mean, they regularly say things like ‘how can you spend so much time outside Moscow?’ ‘What food do you eat?’ ‘How can you talk to ordinary people?’ As this post is already a rant I want to shift the focus. A third thing that prompted me to write this post was that a few people got in touch to say how recent events not only pertaining to Russia express something alarming about how editors and publishers value expertise. They also said things like: ‘I’d love to call out so-and-so, but I need a job in the US’, or ‘Yes we know so-and-so is a fraud, but as part of the community ourselves we can’t say so’. The incestuousness of ‘Russian expertise’ is another problem that as often prevents open debate as stimulates it. Here’s some of what they said to me and allowed me to report anonymously: The shift of so many Russian journalists abroad has actually weakened ‘mainstream’ coverage in English as these experts are unable to adequately filter their own sources back in Russia and they themselves rely on Telegram channels, many of which are not at all reliable. Ex-Lenta editors have been in Riga for 8 years, remember. ‘The worst of Polsci is on Twitter’. There are too many ‘Putin is THE problem’ people there, banging the same drum, year after year. Polsci is partly responsible for the perception that Putin controls the discourse. So stop talking about him, if you don’t like it! People should stop writing books about Putin, but they won’t because they make money. [caveat – there are great polsci people on Twitter like Sam Greene, for example. No, he didn’t contribute to this rant] Detachment from country and embeddedness leads to extremes and tired replication of Cold War Kremlinological approaches. ‘Russia is about to have a revolution because my taxi-driver said so’, or ‘Putin is a puppet-master’ are both outcomes. Presentism (obsession with the news) and the need to be shown to be relevant leads experts to echo conspirological tropes on the one hand, and facile historical analogies on the other (‘Kazakhstan intervention as another 1956’). Gresham’s Law (bad money drives out good). Particularly with regard to the Blob (DC Foreign policy community). There are great people even at the Atlantic Council, but, to use the example of Ukraine and Kazakhstan, the best people have been crowded out in that space by less informed and highly ideological voices. The obvious paucity of regional coverage in Russia (and on Kazakhstan) as a result of the loss of Area Studies expertise and programmes. Why does this matter? Because increasingly ‘experts’, particularly on Twitter, drive media coverage. If they are narrowly wonkish, and narrowly blobby (the DC academic and think-tank community) this only hurts societies’ understanding of Russia. The real tragedy of the ‘Russia discourse’ online is that so many got caught up in the idea that ‘understanding’ a country involves just understanding foreign policy and kremlinology and that ‘understanding’ anything else is seen as secondary.

(Andrew Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. , , 4-29)

In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II, the dying monarch famously counsels Prince Hal “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels,” a practice certain to “waste the memory of the former days.” For American politicians and pundits given to giddiness—and to distracting attention from recent failures—the proxy war in Ukraine is the perfect foreign quarrel. It is rejuvenating Cold War–style militarized globalism as the cornerstone of U.S. national security policy. For those on the antiwar left or the anti-interventionist right, this comes as a worrisome development. Within establishment circles, however, it is encouraging good news. Writing in National Review, the reliably bellicose Elliot Abrams looked forward with evident anticipation to “a dangerous and lengthy struggle” with Russia “that may last for generations.” In the pages of The Week, the typically dovish Damon Linker threw in with the likes of Abrams. “The Ukraine invasion marks a return to a world primarily dominated by competition and hostility among states,” he wrote. “Such a world resembles the Cold War, but also the world that preceded the Cold War.” It was back to the darkest days of the twentieth century. The hawks’ position is winning out. In March, the Pentagon ordered roughly 12,000 troops to the continent, bringing the total U.S. presence in Central and Eastern Europe from 60,000 personnel to more than 100,000. Earlier this month, Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, advised that the U.S. deploy yet more troops and develop additional bases in the region. Meanwhile, Congress and President Biden have already allocated $13.6 billion in aid to Ukraine, nearly half of which is termed “lethal”: $6.5 billion to fund arms for Ukraine and the aforementioned troop deployment. On Thursday, Biden asked Congress for an additional $33 billion in aid, $20 billion of which would “provide weapons to Ukraine, replenish U.S. arms stockpiles, and help other countries shift away from a dependence on Russian weapons,” NPR reported. The consequences of this war—undeniably our war, too, given the number of Russian soldiers killed by U.S.-supplied weaponry—will not become fully apparent for some time. Yet we can already glimpse its probable impact on American politics and on U.S. national security priorities. That impact is likely to be profound and almost certainly destructive. Put simply, the war will divert attention and resources from more urgent priorities. In fact, given where negotiations stand on a hollowed-out version of Biden’s Build Back Better, it already is doing so. It’s a disappointing turn of events, but not entirely surprising to those who listened closely to the president’s message on the campaign trail and at the outset of his term. Biden has consistently argued that the contest between autocracy and democracy is the central crisis of our era. At a moment when the planet faces an unprecedented threat in the form of climate change, while America’s own democracy is mired in dysfunction, this perspective qualifies as a gross oversimplification. Take at face value the depiction offered by the administration and echoed by most mainstream media outlets, however, and Ukraine fits nicely into Biden’s preferred framework. With good pitted against evil, the war replays—and seemingly revalidates—the canonical events of the American Century. In an instant, the disappointments of the post–Cold War decades are essentially forgotten. Russian aggression and brutality thereby provide a rationale for discounting bothersome historical complexities dating from prior to, during, and after the existence of the Soviet Union, the reckless folly of NATO expansion not least among them. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy’s interpretation of events is deemed authoritative, even as U.S. war aims diverge from Ukraine’s. With weakening Russia now an explicit U.S. policy objective—“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine,” Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said on Monday—it serves Washington’s purposes not to end the fighting, but to prolong it. Whether that prospect squares with the desires of the average Ukrainian qualifies at best as an afterthought. Of even greater immediate significance, the terms of U.S. involvement—providing Ukraine with massive quantities of arms without (thus far) sustaining a single American casualty—go far toward erasing memories of other wars in our very recent past. Just last year, the embarrassing U.S. evacuation from Kabul seemed like a big deal. Today it counts for nothing, as do our military misadventures in Afghanistan and Iraq. The military-industrial-congressional complex has moved on, with Ukraine a “good war” behind which Americans of all political persuasions can—or ostensibly should—rally. Classifying Ukraine as such has practical implications. It imparts new life to discredited or outdated habits dating from the Cold War. For example, it is renewing the national security state’s penchant for threat inflation as a device to boost U.S. military spending. Despite the Russian army’s abysmal battlefield performance, scaremongers in and out of government will warn of the grave danger posed by the Kremlin—or by a “Sino-Russian Axis”—for years to come. So with broad bipartisan support, the Pentagon’s budget, easily the world’s largest, continues to grow. One consequence is to assure arms manufacturers of massive contracts, not only to replenish the weapons stocks drawn down in support of the Ukrainian war effort but also to equip U.S. forces with the “next generation” of advanced weaponry. Thanks to Vladimir Putin, in other words, generous increases in Pentagon spending are all but assured. So too, should anyone bother to notice, are more years of huge federal deficits. But consider this less immediate concern: U.S. involvement in the Ukraine war undermines prospects for restoring even a modicum of equilibrium to American politics. Today, of course, there is no existing consensus as to what any such equilibrium might entail. Per Shakespeare, crises abroad provide a convenient excuse for allowing pressing domestic concerns to fester. And so, in America, some 12 million American children live in poverty, more than 100,000 people died of drug overdoses last year, and hundreds of thousands—we don’t even know how many—experience homelessness. As the Biden administration supplies Ukraine with greater sums of money, provides its military with heavier weapons, and sends ever more senior U.S. officials to visit Kyiv, the drift of U.S. policy toward ever more direct American participation in the war becomes apparent. Indeed, as Biden’s political standing at home continues to plummet, the temptation to double down in Ukraine to salvage his presidency is likely to grow. Let there be no doubt: Down that path lies the prospect of involving the U.S. military in direct combat, along with the concurrent risk of nuclear confrontation. On that score, to quote a famous American general, Ukraine may well prove to be “the wrong war at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” Should that occur, any hope of “building back better,” or even of preserving what we have, will evaporate.