Families, concerned community members and organizers from across Long Island, New York City and New Jersey gathered the evening of Oct. 1 in Riverhead, N.Y., for the People’s Vigil to remember all of the lives lost to the opioid epidemic.
Standing in a semicircle, the crowd supported one another as dozens of speakers poured fourth heart-wrenching testimony of overdose, loss, recovery and survival. This was one community’s effort to intervene in a public health crisis that claimed the lives of 66,000 Americans last year. To give a sense of just how big this crisis is, at the height of the AIDS crisis in 1994, 50,000 people died.
In unity, there is strength
Voice after voice offered chilling testimonies of the toll drugs took on their lives. Brave participants from all walks of life, representing towns and neighborhoods spread across New York and New Jersey, volunteered their pain and their stories. Speakers came from the most oppressed sections of the Bronx, Staten Island, the Lower East Side and Paterson while others were from the poor rural suburbs of Hempstead, Roosevelt and Islip. Hearing them on the same platform reiterated the fact that every part of the working class is fighting against this plague.
Laura Caruso spoke about the loss of her 24-year-old son, local baseball star Dylan, this past June and the indescribable absence that she and her family felt. She remembered Dylan for “his big heart and willingness to always help others in need.” Dylan’s girlfriend Kellyanne read a letter evoking the memory of a young man whose whole life was ahead of him.
Registered Nurse Joyce Chediac urged people to look deeper into why this epidemic afflicts our communities. Evoking the memory of her brother Tommy, her voice beamed out into the night: “Our loved ones were not their illness. Let us reclaim their dignity as human beings.” She called on family members there to “reclaim our own dignity, and all that we need to keep our dignity, including holding the government accountable for getting drugs out of our communities, and our right to a decent job.”
A circle of pain and healing
A young Filipina and a young Colombian woman remembered their own mothers and their bouts with addiction. Forgiving but never forgetting, they regretted not having had the opportunity to spend time with their mothers and understand their battles.
Recovering addicts offered educational testimonies of what they had endured and overcome to get here today. We heard of people with untreated mental illness self-medicating with street drugs, of people who became addicted when their pain was not well managed by professionals, of people whose communities were so flooded with illegal drugs that it was on their doorsteps and of people who could not get jobs and turned to drugs or drug dealing.
Two women remembered Elizabeth “Liz” Stenson as one of the hardest, most intimidating and most loving women to walk the streets of Amityville. These women felt that the Suffolk Country prison system murdered Liz last year when it intentionally deprived Stenson of her blood pressure medication.
A 27-year-old recovering addict who worked as a waiter in Westchester County cautioned against judging addicts, reminding us: “We don’t know everyone’s story. Most often, it is a personal and family history of trauma, poverty, neglect and violence that leads to the need to numb.”
Several mourners connected the drug plague here to the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, as opium production there has increased there since the U.S. occupation began in 2001.
Many spoke to the fact that drug addiction was an illness, yet people suffering from it were stigmatized and often jailed, not treated.
A 23-year-old woman pointed out that if this was another kind of epidemic the government would be obliged to wipe out the source. She asked, “Why isn’t there a serious government effort to get drugs out of working-class communities?”
The testimony went on for two hours. Even those who came mostly to give support, after hearing others speak, themselves took the floor to recount yet another facet of the drug epidemic by telling of the experiences of their parents, siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles and friends.
Organizers held up a banner which read “The People’s Vigil: We will not keep dying in silence.” As the community speak-out showed, no family is alone in their battle against addiction.
Despite organizer’s attempts to contact the mainstream media, only one local news outlet briefly passed by the vigil.
Sixty-six thousand and counting
The Department of Health reported that 1,374 people died from overdoses across the New York City last year—a 46 percent increase from 2015. Fentanyl was found in 44 percent of those cases. Fentanyl is a synthetic drug used to treat pain during and after surgery. Low-level dealers can increase their profits by spiking heroin with small doses of fentanyl to boost the impact of the hit. As our generation is witnessing, this has deadly consequences.
The fastest growing population of addicts with lethal overdoses are those who start taking “legal” pain pills but graduate on to “street drugs” when they can no longer fill their prescriptions. Many speakers were quick to point out that pharmaceutical companies were trading and cashing in on human life. On average, the medical industry issues 300 million prescriptions for opioid-based pain killers per year in the U.S., a $24 billion industry. There can be no doubt that mega pharmaceutical corporations and their counterparts in the mainstream media have no genuine interest in confronting this plague. Their concern is not our lives; it is their own profits
Confronting the epidemic
Long Island is but one epicenter of what the Black Panther Party called “the plague.” Organizers from the People’s Congress of Resistance and Redneck Revolt hope to replicate the model of People’s Vigils in Cleveland, Ohio; Madison, Wisc.; Honolulu, Hawaii; Brockton, Mass., and wherever else poverty, unemployment and addiction ravage our communities.
Although we can never recover the lives lost, if we stand united and proactive we can intervene to prevent lethal overdoses in the future. ACT UP organizer Larry Kramer, speaking on the AIDS crisis, said, “Until we get our acts together, all of us, we are as good as dead.”
If we remain in silence, our loved ones will continue to fall by the wayside. Only we can put a halt to this epidemic and ensure that our children do not have to endure the social and personal trauma that we have.
“As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask — and rightly so — what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government…”
-Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam” Speech, Riverside Church, New York City, April 4, 1967
(an earlier version of this study was published in Counterpunch on January 1st, 2024)
Forbes Magazine reported 649 “mass shootings” in 2023, making it one of the biggest years for random mass murder on record in the United States, outpaced only narrowly by 2019. That means that in “the world’s leading democracy,” as the U.S. government likes to present itself both within the empire and across the globe, we collectively endure roughly two random murder sprees per day.
The corporate press predictably feigns concern while engaging in sensationalist story-telling, fanning the flames of this pandemic. The institutions of the ruling class refuse to touch the ideological cornerstones of U.S. society. – a white supremacist, hypermasculine, gun-obsessed culture, a proliferation of untreated mental health issues, profits over human needs, violent conquest abroad and promoting hatred and division at home. The human carnage we are witnessing from Gaza to Donbass to the malls, streets and homes of the United States of Division reflect the billionaires’ agenda that is at its root thoroughly anti-democratic.
National Organizer of the Black Alliance forPeace, Ajamu Baraka rhetorically posed a vital question that the pompous punks in power have dodged at all costs: “Can someone help me? Why are the most vocal, liberal gun control advocates also some of the most vocal supporters of war in Ukraine?” These are the same bleeding heart liberals who pilfer the national budget to wage Hybrid Wars and war on Russia, China, Venezuela, Palestine and any oppressed nation striving for genuine independence.
Trump is no better, though perhaps somehow more hypocritical. Within weeks of returning to the Oval Office, he had prepared a $1 billion dollar aid package. “America First” is but a faux patriotic symbol, camouflaging that MAGA has always been “Billionaires First.”
For over a generation now, it is no longer a question of if there will be another headline about a mass shooting. The only question is which school, office, or public space will be the site of the next “random” shooting. A self-reflective and healthy society would have asked by now: what is going on? Why are we doing this to ourselves? How can we really get up under and ahead of this pandemic of shootings so 2025 does not shatter previous shooting and murdering records?
This article, “Murder Thy Neighbor,” will peel back the hidden, taboo layers of the uniquely-U.S. murder epidemic, looking at 1) societal glorification of militarism 2) the promotion of a culture of violence 3) the media-military nexus 4) the violent socialization of U.S. citizens 5) the role of a racist, scape-goating, xenophobic mass media and 6) the proliferation of ill mental health, Little Trumps and bullying subcultures.
“Violence is as American as Cherry Pie” -H. Rap Brown
Corporate media does not allow for serious treatment of the root causes of mass shootings. Doing so would turn the country’s eyes back on what social forces within our society are driving this murderous madness that has led to 40,167 deaths from gun violence just this year. How much easier is it to blame China and Mexico (Fox), Russia (CNN and MSNBC) or Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua (both wings of the ruling class)? That is xenophobia, not analysis. With the quote above, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, formerly H. Rap Brown, the fifth chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, eloquently captured the reality that the United States is the most violent country in the world. In a previous article discussing the U.S.’s exportation of mass shootings to Haiti, the author explores the violence underpinning the raison d’etre of the United States of Guns:
“The firearm homicide rate in the United States is 13 times higher than that of France and 22 times higher than the European Union. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported 26,328 suicides and 20,598 homicides in 2021, the vast majority committed with firearms. There are 120.5 guns per 100 Americans, far more than any other country globally. There are a total of 393,347,000 civilian firearms in the United States, meaning there are roughly 60 million more firearms than people. About 4 percent of the world’s population has 40 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns.
The Pentagon operates 750 foreign military bases abroad in over 80 ‘sovereign countries.’ The United States has more than three times as many overseas bases as all other nations combined, costing taxpayers an estimated $55 billion every year. There are more wars now than any other time since WWII, with the U.S. military involved either covertly or overtly in many of them.
Smith and Wesson won the gold medal for the generation of violence, producing 2.3 million guns in 2021, followed closely by the firearms manufacturers Ruger and Sig Sauer. The profits of firearms manufacturers have reached historic levels, and gun companies export roughly half a million guns per year. Here are two studies of how U.S. guns are behind wars in Haiti and Mexico. The mass media promotes suburban panic by distorting the reality of violent crime, which has actually been on the decline nationwide after peaking in the 1980s.”
Michael Moore’s documentary Bowling for Columbine continues to be useful to understand the context of these “mass shootings.” When he produced that groundbreaking documentary, in 2002, the year my son Ernesto Dessalines was born, did any of us think a generation ago that the April 20, 1999 Columbine shootings, which killed 15 and injured 24 in Littleton, Colorado, would become a social phenomenon we would grow accustomed to?
Today, Columbine shootings are as American as apple pie.
Poor México, So Close to the U.S., So Far from God
Our neighbors know us in ways we may ourselves be blind to.
70 percent of guns involved in the some 44,000 murders last year in Mexico, roughly twice the rate of the United States, can be traced back to their northern neighbor. There are more homicides in Mexico from U.S. guns than there are homicides in the U.S.
U.S. corporations export over $11 billion dollars in guns every year to countries like Saudi Arabia, India and Qatar. The U.S. controls 42 percent of global arms sales, four times the amount of the second-place Russia. It is within this context that the liberal class’s “Russiagate” and Russophobia must be analyzed. The top Democrat bigwigs fear that Putin can out-compete them in their relentless pursuit of profits and death across the globe.
Critical journalist based out of Mexico City, Rubén Luengas, and I explored the role of Trump’s America fueling the paramilitary violence in Mexico. While the billionaire mouthpieces blame Mexico for our economically, socially and emotionally home-grown fentanyl pandemic, they flood the ancestors of Villa and Zapata with an estimated 200,000 to 500,000 arms per year. Yet, we are told we are the victims and the Mexicans are the “rapists” and “bad hombres.”
Imperial arrogance has always translated into genocidal levels of violence in the colonies. 2025 is no different. U.S. guns kill every day in Gaza, Port-au-Prince and Tijuana. Warped by an artificial superiority complex that separates us from our organic allies, we American bubble boys and girls are the silent witnesses of a unique violence parachuted down on what we know as the “Third world.”
The Superstructure of Violence
Sociology 101 shows us that “the ruling ideas of a given epoch are those of the ruling class.” Growing up in the United States, we learn violence from the moment we begin shadowboxing in the womb. From the first time our mothers are bullied, harassed and traumatized and our fathers are absent, degraded and exploited, we absorb the social imprints of our time. We are not naturally violent but because our “human nature is formed by the totality of social relations,” this is what we absorb. Even those who don’t experience violence directly in their own families, experience it via media, movies, friends, extended families, etc.Those in power, who often hide behind religion, have inverted the Christian maxim from Matthew 22:37, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” into “Thou shalt murder thy neighbor as thyself.”
Swashbuckling, arrogant U.S. militarism has for centuries pursued its interests through violence – at the expense of the American people. Congress continues to pass record-breaking military budgets. This $833,000,000,000,000 could be invested in solving every mental health crisis underlying the myriad pandemics that plague us. This is a massive chunk of federal funds and does not include additional military aid the ruling class doles out to its proxy forces in Kiev, Tel Aviv or any of the countless others. Military adventures and more murder comes at the expense of much needed investment in our collective mental health and pro-social investment. And imagine if these rampant shootings were in Beijing, Tehran, Havana or Moscow? The bourgeois press would have a field day. “The international community,” a high-falutin euphemism for U.S.-led imperialism, would surely take swift actions to curb the violence.
The documentary “The Ground Truth” is about the economic draft that exists to recruit working-class kids into the military, a subculture that specializes in violence. U.S. military recruiters prey upon the poor to join the army. The Military Industrial Complex has big influence over the ideas and images that circulate in our society and often owns outright the central media outlets. For example, one of the biggest military companies, General Electric, owned NBC before an even bigger media conglomerate, Comcast, bought it. The Mainstream Media (MSM from now on) glorifies the “noble” role of U.S. “servicemen and women” while ignoring the millions of Palestinians, Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans and other sovereign peoples incinerated underneath their lies and bombs.
Capitalism teaches that profits in the billions are worth more than lives in the millions.
Overseas “mass shootings”, or more accurately, mass bloodbaths, like the 2003 invasion of Iraq which continues 20 years later in an advanced or hybrid form, cost us taxpayers over 3 trillion dollars. Foreign invasions, presented as this or that mistake by the current regime, Democrat or Republican, are in fact an unavoidable feature of the capitalist system. The lies about Hamas beheading 40 babies or the Iraqis having “weapons of mass destruction” is sophisticated “Atrocity Propaganda.” Afraid of alternatives, the elites demonize China and other societies seeking to build a social foundation on collectivity and social harmony.
More Murders to Come
Anti-war activist David Swanson writes, “at least 32% of mass shooters were trained to shoot by the U.S. Military.” While the Military Industrial Complex (MIC) hides these obvious connections, it is clear that the combination of PTSD and a military subculture based on hazing, bullying, national superiority or “American Exceptionalism” and extreme violence plays a role in the shooting pandemic.
There are important studies of the different subcultures of violence that mold us. Public intellectual Chris Hedges writes about the moral decay of Americans, examining among other things our frivolous addiction to wrestling matches, football and MMA. How does the video game industry factor in where the bad guys are always the Arabs, Soviets, Cubans and Chinese? Sports writer and social analyst David Zirin produced the documentary “Behind the Shield: the Power and Politics of the NFL” exploring how the MIC that Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about has infiltrated myriad facets of our society, specifically professional sports and the National Football League.
In The National Library of Medicine, Dr. James N. Meindl and Dr. Jonathan W. Ivy, looks at the role of the media in creating what’s commonly called a “contagion effect”, inspiring others to carry out shootings through the media’s ability to make a thing seem normal and already present within society. For the dopamine-fueled Zoomers, violence and desensitization is breakfast, lunch and dinner.
The sensationalism of the media speaks to the isolation this generation feels. The month before the COVID-19 pandemic, The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reported that teens in America spend an average of nine hours per day on their phones and computers. The pandemic accelerated this phenomenon as we could no longer interact with one another as in times past. The Columbia University Mass Murder Database study concludes: “There’s solid evidence that nearly half of all mass shootings are associated with suicide by perpetrator, or what they call “suicide by cop.” Are the killers more focused on attention, their own death or mass death? If the answer was mass death, wouldn’t they use bombs or fire?” All obnoxiousness, even in its most murderous form, is a cry for help. The help can only come from we ourselves. Redemption lies within, not in greedy eyes of the Trumps, Obamas and Bushes.
In the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America, OG Slauson and mentor to younger gangbangers today, Kumasi explains the social psychology of bangin’. He explains that when you are nobody and then you spray up a whole street or the “enemy,” people at last notice you. You are somebody. Is it any different for many of us labeled “poor white trash,” forgotten and spat upon by both Democrat and Republican elites? We have been conditioned to embrace a cult of guns and reject the creed of “I am my brother’s keeper.” The violence we are convinced is inevitable is rooted in our own condition behavior.
As every revolution since the Paris Commune has taught us, what can be done, can be undone.
Mass shootings are the scream of the alienated, a desperate search for a dopamine-hit, and a call for help.
While a liberal analysis is dumbfounded by so many seemingly random shootings and its formal political structure has it trapped and pointing the finger at the Republican, a class analysis confidently predicts that 2025 will break all previous records for gun violence.
Domestic Terrorists and white Supremacists, Made in the USA
Anti-racist activist and self-described “truck-loving redneck” Dixeywhitey hosted a Southern mother on his popular Instagram page issuing an impassioned call to all white mothers to intervene to stop this heinous violence. Have we heard any parents take responsibility for raising mass murderers? The unnamed woman and Dixeywhitey’s intervention is long overdue, considering 79 percent of all mass shootings since 1982 were perpetrated by white murderers. Almost 100 percent were perpetrated by male shooters. Lost in the atrocity-driven, sensationalist, click-bait headlines is this very specific demographic data. Far right shootings are by far the most common Ideologically Motivated Mass Shootings.
Often, the mainstream media tries to tell us that such things are a result of individual pathologies – the “lone nut” or “lone wolf” narrative. But when we actually look into how these horrible tragedies come about, we find that there are no “lone wolves.” There are Fox News-guided wolves, New York Post-guided wolves and Breitbart-indoctrinated wolves. There are wolves who have been alienated from their pack; they find comfort in the facile lies mainstream media and other bourgeois institutions spoon feed them.
Everyone has a history, and every one is the precise accumulation of their alienation.
We are socialized to kill and conquer. Trump and Netanyahu just announced the most powerful military in history will be occupying the genocided ghetto of Gaza. When the Goliath, the Bully and Leviathan are in command of history, who dares to dream of another way forward and fight for it? Nihilism and hedonism are the ethos of a sick, gun-crazed society.
Most shootings are not “random” at all. Many shootings are hate crimes that are racially motivated, targeting terrorist attacks perpetrated by white supremacists. The Dominicant Ideological Institutions, such as the legacy media and the school system, bear much of the responsibility as they continue to cultivate racism. In June of 2015, 21-year-old Dylan Roof infiltrated a Black church in Charleston to hunt down Black people. In May 2022, 18-year-old Payton S. Gendron opened fire at a supermarket in a black neighborhood of Buffalo, NY. On March 16, 2021, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long opened fire at two spas and a massage parlor targeting Asians. 48-year-old Jason J. Eaton shot three Palestinian students at the start of the Genocide because of the anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic messaging from the media. These are but four examples of shootings that are anything but random. These are Hate Crimes. This is white supremacist violence continuing on into the age of wokeism. And there is a reserve army of disgruntled “whites”; these are the foot soldiers of the United States of fascism. Who will they turn their 400,000,000 guns on? Us or them? Their true class enemy or the social forces who fight back?
The Battle of Ideas necessitates the correct framing of this pandemic. Shootings caused by Mass Alienation and media indoctrination points us towards adopting accurate terminology that explains rather than obfuscates.
The Shock Troops of Ruling Class Ideology
The chickens are coming home to roost. People are only as good as the information they are given, and how they view society. The talking heads indoctrinate us with hatred, fear and ignorance about Palestinians, Arabs, African-Americans, Chinese people and other oppressed nationalities. Trump’s deportation spree targets working-class families. Over 5,000 families have already been directly impacted, with thousands more confronting emotional terrorism. They run stories for months, years and generations producing an ideological line that blames targeted communities for “terrorism,” “urban riots,” “mass rape” and “unleashing a deadly virus on humanity,” to name just a few of the most common racist tropes they feed us.
This is a recipe for continuing racial strife. The United States of Polarization has convinced large swaths of society that oppressed, targeted communities are to blame for all their problems.
The mass shootings the oligarchs unleash serve their agenda by keeping people fearful, and thus wanting more “protection,” from cops, the surveillance state, etc. The police continue to gun down Black Americans and others at consistently high rates, four years after the torture and execution of George Floyd. There is no discussion of disarming police departments who overwhelmingly identify with the core tenets of Trump’s neo-confederacy America. While we all have seen police terror exercised on black and brown communities, the police are killing poor working class white people as well. The result is as expected. Rather than banding together against a common enemy, people are set against each other based on precisely the divisions the institutions of the ruling class set up. The state and extra legal vigilantes hunt down Black people and Latinos at the highest rates.
This is the social formula politicians from both sides of the aisle ignore. The shepherds, with their chauvinist doctrines, set the white supremacist sheep (racists and mass shooters) in motion. The ideologues are perfectly conscious of the role they play. Their corporate Board of Directors and CEO’s have placed them there precisely to do that job. Malcolm X’s words are foundational to a class analysis: “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” Sinophobia, Islamophobia, white supremacy and hypermasculinity are the unofficial religions of our time. The brainwashed act as today’s Brown Shirts, ideologically trained, set in motion and mimicking the fascistic violence of the state.
The ruling class is trapped in infinite hypocrisy. They champion the 2nd Amendment for their shock troops, rhetorically pronouncing, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But we know the history of removing guns from those who posed a threat to the system. Gun control is popular and effective when it targets those who pose threats to the system. The example of the Deacons for Defense, Robert F. Williams and Negroes with Guns and California Governor Ronald Reagan’s disarming of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense are but three examples of U.S. government attacks on the 2nd amendment rights of the masses.
The ruling class’s agenda is clear: arm the state and its attendant ideological allies and disarm and divide the multinational working class who pose a threat to their dictatorship over society.
It is Only a “Mass Shooting” if it Affects white People
The ruling elite’s ideological quagmire has been laid bare. Both dominant wings of the ruling class have their set ideological positions from which they will not waver.
The conservative position keeps their reactionary base and future paramilitaries armed while disarming marginalized communities (i.e. black and brown people). The liberal position is to disarm the public while continuing to fund and arm the oppressive state apparatus (i.e. the police, ICE, etc.), which further entrenches structural violence and capital’s hold over governance. It is the terrifying randomness of U.S. gun violence that offends liberal sensibilities. The systemic, structural violence that they are more likely to be protected from does not mobilize or offend them. The issue of gun control is like other hot-button issues, such as abortion or the death penalty. The ruling class exploits the “Culture War” issues because they are divisive and distracting from the class struggle. What is the third correct pole of ideas outside of the corporate duopoly?
What constitutes a “mass shooting?”
When the oppressed died, there was no talk of “mass shootings” or broad societal concern, unless it spilled over into “respectable society” (read white and more affluent). The documentary Bastards of the Party gives the example of the Crips and Bloods oppressed-on-oppressed warfare (what the media calls Black-on-black violence) and how it led to the death of a young Asian-American woman in the late ‘80’s. This was the impetus for LAPD and Daryl Gates’ infamous “Operation Hammer” in 1987. As long as the murders were centered in South Central, Watts, Compton, and East LA, the press didn’t care or lead the public to care with eye-catching headlines. The moment someone was shot from “the world that mattered,” the powers that be used it as an excuse to hatched up their war on black Los Angeles.
Black Panther Kazi Ture taught us in 1995 that on average 10,000 young Black males were killing 10,000 young Black males per year in the U.S. The system erases 20,000 beautiful young minds and souls from society, burying them six-feet deep or locking them away in a dungeon, stripping them of their humanity and dignity. If 20,000 people were being disappeared every year in Zimbabwe or Iran, how quick would the United States 82nd Airborne Division bomb and occupy those countries? It has nothing to do with “Black on Black violence.” From a Fanonian perspective, it is oppressed on oppressed violence, which continues to ravage the societally-engineered ghettos. The construction of the Black ghetto has been as intentional as the construction of white suburbia. Fanon’s description of the ghetto in The Wretched of the Earth is foundational. But this violence and the history that gives rise to it is of little concern to corporate politicians.
A Sick Society: Mental Health in the Militarized U.S.
It is clear this mass violence does not come out of nowhere. It flows from the ruling class worldview internalized by the Isolated, the Alienated and the Defuturized, those who Hillary Clinton neatly dismissed and fit into her “basket of deplorables.” Wild conspiracy theories that do not align with reality plague this population, such as “Replacement Theory,” threats against Israel’s existence as they carry out a 75-year Holocaust of Palestinians or “white genocide.” Americans suffer from Cognitive Dissonance when it comes to understanding and empathizing with the true victims and survivors of global systemic violence.
The state of mental health in America continues to dramatically decline. Over 50 million Americans, 20.78 percent of adults, officially struggle with mental illness and its connection to this pandemic couldn’t be more obvious. The School of Psychiatry at Columbia University has organized the largest database on mass shootings, concluding the following: Fifty percent of shootings are carried out by men experiencing “challenges coping with severe and acute life stressors, and the epidemic of the combination of nihilism, emptiness, anger, and a desire for notoriety among young men.” It is this fertile ground of social alienation and easy access to guns that begins to explain the modern plague of random shootings.
Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale taught that “power is the ability to define phenomena and make it act in the desired manner.” If we are determined to halt or reverse the problem, we must get up under and explain the sociological origins of the problem. This can only be done scientifically through class analysis. For example: The Movimiento Popular Dominicano (MPD), the historic Dominican Marxist-Leninist party that fought the U.S. invasion of 42,000 U.S. marines and occupation in 1965, studied and analyzed the rates of these social phenomena and where they were occuring. The more oppressed a community in the campos (countryside) and barrios (ghettos) of the Dominican Republic, the higher the rates of murder, suicide, alcoholism, PTSD, murders, sexual molestation etc. From Santo Domingo to Washington Heights, we truly “have nothing to lose but our chains.”
Native and other oppressed communities here in the United States are also the most impacted by these structural phenomena, always and necessarily treated as isolated incidents by bourgeois ideologues. Suicides (civilian and veteran), incest, sexual abuse of children, rape, drug overdoses and “mysterious” deaths in the military are further indicators of the deep-seated crises inherent to capitalism. The overmedication of society, specifically our children, has earned the United States of Guns another gold medal.
“Not Even Satin Himself…”
But where does the cycle of aggression begin?
Besides generational history and community-wide phenomena, the way we think and what we become, begins for us as children. What about bullying? How do our children internalize and learn to abuse others? Critical comedians Key and Peele offer a reflective, comedic approach to a dire issue that has turned deadly. If we return to the Columbine High School massacre and listen to some of the killers in the build-up to the mass shootings, the human degradation caused by bullying has spawned the proverbial boomerang that is swinging back on all of us.
Why is bullying endemic to our society?
Children are a clean slate for a vast array of imprints they absorb from the social world. Why are they absorbing so much hate, self-hatred, fake wokism, hierarchies, racism, sexism and violence? Some 78,000,000 bullies and followers voted for the Bully-Billionaire-in-Chief to be the president of this country. Neither his rampant sexism or racism dissuaded a plurality of votors. The widespread crisis of bullying in all of its manifestations lays bare the ideological underpinnings driving the system.
Twenty-eight-year-old Audrey Hale’s attack at The Covenant School in April of this year is another example of this social estrangement. This former student fired 152 bullets of misguided rage and self-hatred at strangers where they had been bullied a few years before in Nashville. The mainstream media ignores the internalization of violence and underlying causation for this violence, again remaining in the superficial realm of “Culture Wars” as our children murder each other and us in record numbers.
To truly combat the pandemic of mass shootings, we have to examine, understand and challenge all of these parts of American sociology in the age of mass isolation, the social media and profilicity crisis, and U.S.-proxy wars on every continent. Princeton scholars, economist Anne Case and Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton’s book, Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism paints a damning portrait of our future, analyzing the sharp decrease in American life expectancy three years in a row, specifically for working-class white communities.
All of these social realities serve as individual indictments of U.S. society. These social phenomena cannot be treated in an isolated way; they are pieces of the larger puzzle that is the decomposition of our society. Collectively, they confirm Puerto Rican poet and padrino (godfather) of the Boricua Independence Movement Rafael Cancel Miranda’s diagnosis: “Even Satan himself could not have dreamed of an empire as infernal as the United States Empire.”
“It’s Impossible for a Chicken to Produce a Duck Egg.”
Ajamu Baraka explains why another way forward, outside of the corporate duopoly is necessary: “The democrats want war with Russia, the Trump administration wants war with China, and the rest in both parties don’t care who the U.S. wars with as long as both parties are still committed to the pro-imperialist doctrine of full spectrum dominance.”’
It is only an anti-capitalist way forward that can imagine a genuine solution to this crisis.
Dr. Martin Luther King led an anti-war rally in Chicago in 1967 exclaiming: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America.” As King concluded shortly before his assassination, there is no disentangling the violence meted out by the white supremacist, colonial project, spearheaded by U.S. imperialism, and our polarized society that is wantonly and cannibalistically consuming itself. As Malcolm X explained at a Socialist Workers’ Party Forum in New York City on March 29, 1964, U.S. society can only produce what it is designed to produce. Only a society that breaks with the old could begin to implement policies that truly protect us and our children from the most violent society human history has known.
Malcolm continued that night: “And if ever a chicken did produce a duck egg, I’m certain you would say it was certainly a revolutionary chicken!” Both King and Malcolm X were cut down at 39 years old as they evolved into anti-capitalist thinkers and leaders. They were beginning to envision a society that could move beyond genocidal violence both at home and abroad.
It is clearer than ever that the “revolutionary chicken” Malcolm spoke of is anti-imperialist struggle, building multinational class unity, collectivity, socialism and communism, to transcend a society addicted to a war on all the sovereignty of all nations, plunder across the planet and century-to-century Holocausts against Native peoples.
Thank you to the organizers in Black Alliance for Peace and the Solidarity Committee, Cauã Amaru and the Midwestern Marx Institute for editorial feedback and for contributing ideas explored in this piece.
Jake Johnston’s carefully investigated Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti sheds light on the geopolitical origins of the paramilitary death squads currently wreaking havoc on Port-au-Prince. Originally published at NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America) on March 15, 2024
The cover of “Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti” by Jake Johnston. (St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 2024)
Haiti is again breaking news. One of the top news stories in the world on March 12 was the alleged “cannibalism” of a Haitian gang. No different than the Department of Health’s equating Haitians with carriers of the AIDS virus in the 1980’s and Hollywood films such as The Serpent and the Rainbow, this disinformation campaign is a racist attack on the collective Haitian self-esteem. Such propaganda seeks to ideologically justify the impending fourth U.S.-directed invasion and occupation of Haiti in the past 100 years.
But where there is repression, there is resistance. Haitian grassroots actors and their supporters around the world are saying no to both internal and external mercenaries usurping Haitian participatory democracy. As Haitian Bald Headed Party-affiliated (PHTK) paramilitary death squads rampage through Port-au-Prince, seeking to displace and massacre as many families as possible, Jake Johnston’s new book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism and the Battle to Control Haiti is a valuable contribution to understanding the geopolitical origins of these “gangs.” The book provides context on why the Biden government appointed the unelected prime minister, Ariel Henry, in 2021 and then requested his removal from office last week as continued support for the illegitimate leader became untenable.
Gangs or Mercenaries for Hire?
Johnston’s page-turner is a necessary read for those new to Haitian studies, as well as those long familiar with the anti-dictatorship and anti-paramilitary struggles that Haiti has embarked upon in decades and centuries past. One thing is clear: the current paramilitaries, described in the mainstream press as “gangs,” must be analyzed on the historical continuum of U.S.-sponsored, state-affiliated armed groups, tasked with subduing the perennially “restless natives.” The preferred weapon of the mercenary gang bosses—Izo, Kempès, Barbecue, and others—is the torching of the communities they seek to subdue. Johnston points to the Michel Martelly administration (2011 – 2016) as being the first expression of the PHTK to use armed mercenaries to do their bidding. This assault on Haitian democracy, as personified by the politically-active populations of Belè, Lasalin, Solino, Delma anba, and the other ghettos of downtown Port-au-Prince, has reshaped Haiti’s capital city (spellings of Haitian words are in Haitian Kreyòl and not in the French colonial language). While early 2021 saw a mass movement that sought to topple the second expression of the PHTK dictatorship, headed by Jovenel Moïse, today armed and masked gunmen control some 80 percent of Port-au-Prince.
According to the Displacement Tracking Matrix of the International Organization of Migration, 330,000 people have been internally displaced in Haiti, the majority of whom are children. Consistent with one of the principal themes of the book, I documented in visits to refugee camps at the end of January how the U.S.-sponsored Haitian state has yet to even visit the thousands of families sheltered in schools, alleyways, public plazas, and beyond.
Aid State compiles 10 plus years of Johnston’s research in the Capital Beltway and 1,400 miles away, in the ancestral homeland of Haitian revolutionary leaders Dutty Boukman, François Makandal, and Jean-Jacque Dessalines. The backdrop of the work is a literary tour de force of the spellbinding mountains of the Grandans department, the crowded refugee camp of Titanyen, and the abandoned farms of the Grannò. The reader who has not visited Haiti in the past years as a result of what the Haitian people call the ensekirité planifye e òganize (planned and organized instability) is sure to shed a tear or two of nostalgia upon reading of the landgrabs of armed thugs employed by the PHTK.
Haitian Patriots or Colonial Lackeys?
The meat of the book provides a broad overview of the corrupt inner workings of Haitian state corruption beginning with the selection of Martelly as president in 2011 up to the present, and the U.S. government puppeteers who oversee the clumsy “politics as usual.” Johnston examines from the inside-out how the “aid state”—a state almost wholly dependent on thousands of private, foreign NGO’s—both consciously and unconsciously functions to disempower Haitians. Every page confirms what almost any Haitian will tell you: politics and “aid” are a rich man’s game which mocks the lives, interests, and dignity of Haiti’s 99 percent.
Aerial view of the paramilitary strongholds of Kaffou, Maryani, Fontamara, Matisan, and Laboul ran by gang bosses Ti Lapli and Izo. (Danny Shaw)
Haitian young professionals searching to be of service to their country would have been militants of national liberation organizations in decades past. Today, much of this homegrown talent is compelled to follow the lure of some 10,000 NGOs that can pay salaries in U.S. dollars the Haitian left does not have access to. “Soft imperialism” contributes to an internal brain drain that discourages the upcoming generation from struggling for true Haitian sovereignty.
Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs.The product of years of investigative journalism, Johnston shows how the Republic of NGOs—one accurate nickname for both pre and post-earthquake Haiti—is not organized to respond to everyday people’s needs. Thoroughly researched chapters show how donors responding to the 2010 earthquake, including the Clinton Foundation, Citibank, and an entire cast of neocolonial characters, squandered $10 billion dollars, $1 billion of which was from the United States, constituting the “largest ever international mobilization to respond to a natural disaster.” A high percentage of that money was pilfered by Western companies who created fraudulent paperwork and looked out for corporate bottom lines, not the needs of the Haitian people.
The chapter “The $80,000 House” explains with painstaking detail how Haitian Martelly’s government and his cronies, such as his childhood friend Harold Charles, worked with USAID and their U.S. contractors—including Thor Construction, Tetra Tech, and the CEEPCO company—in the wake of the earthquake to swindle Haiti’s population in the north. The Caracol-EKAM village was supposed to provide $8,000 homes for workers displaced by the earthquake who were the rank and file of the Clinton-USAID free trade or sweatshop project. After the vultures divided up the booty, each house turned out to have “cost” $88,000. What was supposed to be a community of 15,000 “culturally appropriate” homes for survivors of the earthquake ended up being 750 homes with major construction and sewage problems. This malfeasance was “the perfect encapsulation of everything wrong with our foreign aid system: the favoritism and corruption, the reliance on expensive foreign ‘experts,’ the lack of community consultation. Most of all, the houses stood as proof of how difficult it was to hold anyone accountable for their actions in Haiti.”
Johnston, a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, provides the necessary global—or more accurately U.S.—geostrategic context that explains how political unknowns like Martelly, Moïse, and Henry became the leaders of the nation, despite enjoying very little popular support. Johnston shows that the PHTK, the party of the U.S.-backed former president Martelly, is the principal Haitian actor at the center of the Guns, Gangs, and Neocolonialism drama that continues to play out. Interviews with former president René Préval, the head of the scaled-down UN mission Susan Page, and musician, hotelier, and former Martelly ambassador Richard Morse add to the entertaining, easily-digestible chapters. Aid State is further bolstered by chapters covering the theft of billions of dollars in Petro Caribbean funds by the Haitian state from Venezuela, and the 628,000 “zombie votes” from people who did not exist in 2016 that guaranteed victory for the PHTK and the United States’ man in Haiti, Moïse. Aid State ends with explosive new plot twists that help explain who was behind the July 7, 2021, assassination of Moïse that will shock even seasoned followers of all things Haiti.
The Only Solution: Haitian Self-Determination
The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti.Like Jeb Sprague’sParamilitarism and the Assault on Democracy in Haiti, Mark Schuller’sHumanitarian Aftershocks in Haiti, Dada Chery’sWe Have Dared to Be Free: Haiti’s Struggle Against Occupation, and a phalanx of others, this is a book that belongs in every library of Haitian and anti-colonial studies. Johnston has been a valuable witness to an important chapter in the ongoing Haitian national liberation struggle. His lucid pen does justice to the continued mobilization of millions of Haitians against the Aid State. The myriad threats and doxing to which the author has been subjected are the clearest proof he has exposed and touched the sensitive veins of colonial rule in Haiti.
I am an ethnographer who has filled up notebooks with notes on Haitian Kreyòl and culture for almost three decades. Since 2021, I have been following the paramilitary gang war on the long-peaceful and stable ghettos of Port-au-Prince. Jake Johnston’s rigorous research over the course of fifteen years has helped me better understand the present brutality that neocolonialism has produced. Johnston’s book is a necessary read for any friends and supporters of Haiti seeking to contextualize what is playing out in the korido (alleyways) and katyè popilè (oppressed communities) of Port-au-Prince as you read this article.
Upon finishing this political science and journalistic gem, the reader wonders how, nearly one quarter of the way through the 21st century in the era of social media and identity politics, Haiti can so clearly remain a colony of the United States. Every U.S. government move in Haiti, from appointing prime ministers to organizing the next invasion, reflects their desire to maintain hegemonic control over Haiti. The years 1492 and 1697—the year of the “Peace of Ryswick” treaty which defined colonial ownership of the island the Taino natives called Ayiti—hemorrhage into 2024 as the masses of hungry and humiliated Haitians continue to dream of and fight for the Second Haitian Revolution. Until then, Haitian communities stand like David before Goliath, erecting their barricades to resist the onslaught of the paramilitaries and their foreign masters.
An earlier version was originally published here in People’s World April 20, 2023 9:43 AM CDT
On Dec. 2, 2022, the international working-class movement lost an organizing and literary giant, Gary Graham Hicks.
Comrades and friends gathered at the Marxist Library in Oakland, Calif., on Saturday, March 25, for a memorial to remember the diverse contributions of a beloved poet, theorist, and internationalist.
We write this tribute so that future generations can draw from the deep well of Gary’s knowledge, verse, sharp-witted humor, and struggles.
The Recruiter
Black Panther Party member Gerald Smith, who hosted the tribute in Oakland, asked “Who will replace Gary Hicks?” Smith reminisced about the many back-and-forths over the decades about the question of Black America, about the struggle for Black self-determination.
Gary Hicks: A bad motherfucker
Black liberation and class struggle were the two legs Gary walked on. Who else could go into Newark armed with the Black Panther newspaper and interrupt Ron Karenga to remind him that “Marx was a Black man”?
Smith went on to talk about the Panthers’ commitment to “pass it on” to the up-and-coming generations. One organization even experimented with the idea of only allowing members a vote if they attempted to bring young people to events.
This Renaissance Man was a persistent recruiter, especially of young people into the Young Communist League (YCL). Up until his final breaths, he was adamant that there can be no revolution without revolutionary organization. With his actions, Gary rejected sectarianism and never gave into personal judgment or resentments.
He encouraged all of us who knew him to follow George Jackson’s immortal words: “Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.”
Through it all, Gary worked to build the Communist Party.
The Mentor
Gary was our living encyclopedia. If he was around, young comrades were sure to have a notebook close by. His knowledge of German, Chinese, Cuban, Yiddishland, South African, and Irish history—and any global struggle—was seemingly boundless. We anticipated the next book recommendation Gary might pick off the shelves of his mind’s library. When I visited the international working class’s ancestral grounds at Sachsenhausen and Dachau, it was like he was there with me.
Friday nights were a cause for celebration. Once, there was a new Malcolm biography that had dropped. And there we were at 3 AM, coast to coast, critically picking apart every page by Professor Marable or Les Payne.
On another occasion, a Saturday night, Gary was plotting. He called me up well past midnight: “Hey how are we going to get this lousy, philistine scoundrel of a social democrat to join the p’aty?” (Remember he is from Roxbury and I am from Brockton.)
Then, on a Sunday night, a group of us were scheduled to finish the final chapter of Black Reconstruction. Every word rose to the occasion. It felt like the 7th game of a playoff series between the Sox and the Yankees.
I teased Gary that he got younger every day because he never stopped. The paratransit in San Francisco, a socialist gain fought and won by the people, brought him everywhere and anywhere around town. And when he wasn’t here, we knew he was on a train headed somewhere—to a Progressive Lawyers Guild conference in California, a folk music event in Oregon, a poetry reading in Cambridge, or the Left Forum in New York City.
When I called him on the phone, I always anticipated which of the 50 states he might be in this time—flipping off every state trooper as he went. The student of Lenin that he was, I jested that this was his sealed train.
In 2020, he introduced me to give a talk at the Marxist Library entitled “Capitalism + Dope = Genocide,” a Panther formulation—and how it was relevant five decades later. Boy was I proud; the student had become the teacher.
A brilliant wordsmith, a magical story teller, and a perennial ballbreaker, Gary gravitated gracefully between the gravest and most humorous of topics. Whenever he was around his comrades, his eyes lit up and he locked in on the most pressing international topics of the day.
He often answered the phone by saying “This is Murphy’s Poolhall. Eight Ball speaking.” Always principled, he put many backwa’d workers in their place if they were guilty of any act of racism or sexism. He could hug you, but if he had to, he could stand you down, too. He knew the primary contradiction that existed and who the real enemy was but was never shy to check any of us, “on our bullshit.”
One young communist, Drew King, picked up the torch and recited the following tribute on March 25th:
Gary Hicks Immortal thinker Fearless philosopher History’s restless wanderer Proud Black Bolshevik Lenin’s native son Uncle Ho of Roxbury Southie’s resident Marxist-Leninist Berkeley’s Berlin Wall that will never fall Intellectual giant Gary, Your mind was my portal through history For 17 years, I traversed the infinite shelves of your mind’s cosmic library As you showed me the ways of the force You took me on tours through antiquity, time and space All of pharaoh’s armies never stood a chance against your cunning wit You teach us that the struggle for people’s power is the struggle for memory and against forgetting And since I first asked you what time it was 17 years ago You slowly taught me to realize that it is the same time that it was when those two young men in London put out that clarion call for the workers of the world to unite, 175 years ago I swear on my soul, Gary, they will unite after all and we will win!
The Revolutionary
Gary was a former political prisoner. In March 1966, just before his 20th birthday, the Roxbury native joined fellow war resisters in burning his draft card on the steps of a Boston courthouse in opposition to the U.S. war in Indochina. These pioneers, shoulder to shoulder with Muhammed Ali, were some of the first in the movement that soon shook the country as thousands followed.
On that day, the group was beaten up by a crowd of mostly high school students from South Boston. Still, he never expressed any personal bitterness towards workers robbed from our ranks by fascism.
The concrete battles that shaped Hicks and his commitment.
Because of his resistance to the genocidal war of aggression against Vietnam, the U.S. government sentenced him to three years in Lewisville penitentiary. There were many chapters and addendums to these stories that could only be understood as poetic license.
But they could never cage you, Gary.
Born Again Red
Fundamental Marx He wrote it. And I read it. And that settles it.
When he got out, Gary was determined to pursue higher education, which he did at Penn State, Brown University, and Antioch College, ultimately receiving his Master’s Degree from UMass, Boston in “American Studies.”
He spent the rest of his life devoted to the fight for equality and for the interests of the international working class. The coup in Chile in ’73, the Christmas bombing of Panama, the continuation of Communist leadership in China, Gary was on it. From any hospital or nursing home bed, he was getting on the phone to check in with his political fellow travelers.
Gary was in the streets putting his training to good use. He was involved in the housing rights movement, beginning in Boston with the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants, in which he played a key organizing role. Tenants of the last place he lived—Redwood Gardens in Berkeley—benefited from Gary’s knowledge and experience standing up for their rights. No human suffering or triumph was foreign to him.
The Organizer
Veteran organizer Eugene Ruyle told us of that day your dad mourned the death of Stalin. The Marshall of the Red Army and victor over Naziism came from a hood all too similar to yours Gary. Returning from a long day’s work on that March 5th 1953, Gary’s dad returned more solemn than ever, reminding you: “Don’t you ever let the white man talk shit about Stalin.”
If we were trapped in doubts, petty divisions or resentments, you set us straight. As Mrs. Harrington recounted, you always brought us back to what was most important: “Ah we have a Communist Party over here. Let’s get busy!”
Gary was in the streets putting his training to good use. He was involved in the housing rights movement, beginning in Boston with the Massachusetts Alliance of HUD Tenants, in which he played a key organizing role. Tenants of the last place he lived – Redwood Gardens in Berkeley, California – benefited from Gary’s knowledge and experience standing up for their rights. No human suffering or triumph was foreign to him.
The Scholar
If there was a new book out by a leftist author, Gary raced to pick it up. There was nothing he enjoyed more than a good crisp read. He led and participated in many reading groups. Among other classics, we read The Seventh Cross together. Line by line, page by page, he broke down the ins and outs of resistance to the Nazis.
He read entire books out loud with study groups, no matter how big or small. W.E.B. Du Bois, Rosa Luxemburg, Eric Hobsbawm, and E.P. Thompson were but a few of his ideological forefathers and foremothers. You were there comrade navigating and dissecting those ideas. How many of us have hundreds of emails and notes saved from you?
Students of the movement visited him in the hospital to keep study groups going. When he called, we gathered around the phone. He approached life with a love for it. As his comrade Juan Lopez remembers, he never sought fame or accolades.
Michael Parenti commented simply of this true dialectician: “The man knows his stuff.” A revolutionary optimist who found the silver lining everywhere. A wit sharp like a whip with prose, rhythmic like Amiri Baraka’s Blues-words. A biting sense of humor and a dead seriousness that reminded you no matter what personal challenges you always keep fighting.
Comrades remembered: “You can’t talk about Gary without talking about books. His own memorial program was printed on a red bookmark. The “national treasure” and “Karl Marx look alike” was a living example for young communists of Lenin’s quote, “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
You told us with your unique zeal about The Dragon’s Gift: The Real Story of China in Africa. The TAZARA or Bamboo railway built by the People’s Republic of China now connected Zambia to Tanzania. The Wall Street Journal also took note: “the prospects of hundreds and perhaps thousands of Red Guards descending upon an already troubled Africa is a chilling one for the West.” And you laughed all the way to the interest-free people’s bank Gary. It is true what they say: We Stand on the Shoulders of Giants.
A living Marxist-Leninist encyclopedia. When we read The seventh Cross by Anna Seghers, Gary made us feel like we were there with the anti-Nazi prisoners.
The Poet
His poetry — especially his books, Itching for Combat and A Pen is Like a Piece, You Pick it Up, You Use It — reflected what he was thinking and feeling about political struggles.
I met Gary on a stage in a movement space in 1997. We were performing poetry in defense of the strong and noble Cuban people. My poem was in Spanglish. He walked up behind me in his quirky way and said, “Hey man, that was a damn good poem. Yeah, I enjoyed it, even though I didn’t understand a word.”
Lincoln Bergman, Gary’s close friend from the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, remembered that despite any personal health issues, Gary’s “pan-socio political brilliance was undimmed.”
At the memorial, Bergman shared “45 Years Later,” one of Gary’s poems that went a little something like this:
Look at these kids on tanks of victory My Peeps Children of Uncle Ho My hero Today I am 74 The kids on the tanks Roughly my age The kids who I Inmate 33602-133 Prayed for victory Every day of my imprisonment Yes They won And we won, too.
Former political prisoner, Gary Hicks.
Words, Gentle…as he was.
The final goodbyes came in the form of affirmations of a radiant future. You brought us together, Gary. We laughed. We cried. We told stories. We listened to poetry. Just as you would have wanted it.
Farewell, kindred spirit! Farewell, comrade! These tears are made of knives and machetes. Aimé Césaire’s redemption. Fanon’s baptism. Algeria’s boomerang. Vietnamese tanks roll forward. We will end as Gary lived, poetically, with the words of Langston Hughes:
I loved my friend. He went away from me. There’s nothing more to say. The poem ends, Soft as it began— I loved my friend.
After 14 years of a Western economic blockade and dirty war, the Syrian Arab Army (SAA), the state of the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party and the deposed president Bashar al-Assad collapsed on December 8th. While there were many factors at play in this long internationalized proxy war on Syria, quite simply the Syrian people were worn down by well-armed Al-Qaeda offshoots backed by Turkey, Israel and the U.S. After losing over 128,000 SAA troops since 2011 and hundreds of thousands of civilians, the country of some 30,000,000 people with some 14,000,000 refugees fell to the forces of colonialism, Zionism and barbarism. Syrian SAA soldiers were only making $40 a month and often could not even be paid. The rebranded Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), ISIS fighters were making thousands of dollars per month thanks to their imperialist backers. 90 percent of Syrians endured poverty and hunger due to the U.S.-led hybrid war.
Minus the bombs and ISIS cutouts, Cuba is up against a similar reality. Argentinian sociologist Atilio Borón, analyzing the impact of Western sanctions on South American and Caribbean countries, explained that hunger was more dangerous than any bomb imperialism could drop on the Bolivarian nations. Keenly aware of an air-tight blockade inflicting acute hunger and despair on the 11,000,000 people of Cuba, Cuba supporters and internationalists have a responsibility to ask: Before the most powerful empire in history, how much longer can the revolution hold on?
Cuban Flames, Imperialist Tundra
There are two January showdowns shaping up in the Caribbean. On January 1st 2025, the 66th anniversary of the revolution, Cuba will officially become a member of BRICS. On January 20th, Donald Trump and his cabinet of billionaires will take state power in the United States. Trump enacted a further 243 coercive measures against Cuba when he assumed office in 2016. The Biden administration continued to tighten the noose around Cuba. The U.S. has not recognized Nicolas Maduro, Cuba’s closest ally, as the president of Venezuela. They are recognizing opposition candidate Edmundo Gonzalez. This sets up a clash for inauguration day on January 10th, 2025 which the U.S. is looking to exploit. The Department of Defense just signed an agreement with Trinidad and Tobago which allows them “to deploy forces to Trinidad and Tobago in the event of a “conflict” in Venezuela.” Credible international sources from the multipolar world are expecting another U.S.-supported July 11th 2021, San Isidro-style coup attempt against Cuba in the opening weeks or months of Trump’s second term. All signs are that Cuba and Venezuela could go the way of Syria
As a boxer, internationalist and scholar, I have been traveling to Cuba since 1995 seeking to objectively measure the enthusiasm of everyday people who survive despite the U.S.’s War on Cuba. For almost three decades, I have followed up with the families with whom I have met and built friendships, bolstering my own understanding of this resilient island nation. This study is a snapshot of the nuanced, blockaded Cuba that I have experienced. It is vital to present an honest evaluation of what we were clearly unaware of in Syria, where Cuban hearts and minds are at currently, amidst the profound social contradictions created by the U.S. economic war. I originally wrote a draft of this study in 2014 as a warning to the U.S. left that it was dangerous to underestimate the objective factors in Cuba and the subjective factors, people’s consciousness and a tidal wave of Cubans forced to flee the country. Some “movement leaders” dismissed my observations as “overly focused on the lumpen elements in Havana.”
A decade later, I am sounding a more desperate warning. If the U.S. left does not get off the beaten path of the solidarity delegations, they will again be in the dark when Havana explodes because of hopelessness and hunger. None of us who defend Cuban self-determination should be surprised if another foreign-sponsored and coordinated revolt occurs. Every U.S. regime, Republican and Democrat, since 1959 has applied a full court press against Cuba, attacking economically, diplomatically, politically and militarily. The U.S. hybrid war, like the 14-year war on Syria, has for decades laid the fertile soil of despair in order to set in motion another San Isidro-style, color revolution movement to try to topple the Cuban government.
Escuela cubana de Boxeo
“Ataca Sabroso” (Attack with the Sweetness)
Sumy is a slender 6′ 2” retired fighter. At 60 years old, he could pass for 39. Known for a long, stiff jab that snapped heads back, the retired fighter turned long-time high school principal assures me he’s still got it. For two decades, Jesús Miguel Rodríguez Muro, known by his nickname “Sumy,” glided through cruiserweight boxing competitions across Cuba. Internationally, he made a name for himself as well, fighting in the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries. His cousin Lazarro Almanza was my trainer in the Bronx as I prepared for Tri-State area fights. Almanza left Cuba in 1980 as part of the Marielitos.
Boxing emerged as an organic way to convivir (live together), that is learn more about Cubans, their lives and challenges. When Sumy held the pads for me and heard the snap of my double jab, he shouted “sabroso, sabroso” (sweet, sweet) and announced the next combo he wanted.
After our workouts, he took me around different neighborhoods where I heard a plethora of views on politics, the economy and the blockade. A dedicated member of the Cuban Communist Party, Sumy lived in Arroyo Naranjo, an outer municipality of Havana, their version of the Bronx. The dark-skinned retired athlete lives as all Cubans do: modestly. His feet swung off his ramshackle tiny bed. He had a collection of books and notebooks stacked on a bookshelf that was on its last leg. A tiny TV straight out of the 1980s and a transistor radio that we Americans might see in the Hollywood movies about the Vietnam war furnished his bedroom, which moonlighted as a living room. He invited me in and gave me two volumes of Cuban history textbooks by University of Havana professor Eduardo Torres Cuevas. As I began to read some José Martí quotes outloud, Sumy responded with his signature phrase, “sabroso, sabroso.”
We set out on the town to visit some of Sumy’s friends. When hunger struck around dinner time, after taking the first packed camello bus, Sumy led me into a bakery. I looked at all of the bread and some pieces of cake and I pleaded for us to get “some real food.” He laughed at me, telling me I wouldn’t survive long in today’s Havana. He grabbed two pieces of cake and tossed them into an empty loaf of bread. He handed me the make-shift stuffed gyro and sank his teeth into the other, winking at me: “Sabroso, sabroso!”
Arroyo Naranjo
Rompiendo una Talla en La Habana (Listening and Building in Havana)
Did everyone share Sumy’s anti-imperialist fervor and willingness to make personal sacrifices?
I engaged in hundreds of conversations to address this question, in boxing gyms, on street corners, in bars, in hospitals, in work spaces, in living rooms, in parks, on public transportation and walking the streets of Havana. I talked with students, veterans of the anticolonial war in Angola, teachers, stevedores, former prisoners, reparteros, emos, hustlers, the Omni Zonafranca artists who went on to build the San Isidro movement, alcoholics, retired carpenters, grandmothers, repatriated Cubans and rockeros. Some conversations took place in private. Other interactions burst out into debates, with friends and family members passionately competing for control of the airwaves.
Havana’s population currently stands at 2.4 million, roughly the population of the borough of Queens in New York City. To continue with this comparison, Havana is much larger than Queens geographically. Havana is 281 square miles while Queens is 178 square miles. There are 15 municipalities in Havana. The municipios (municipalities) roughly correspond to what we would consider neighborhoods or sections of Queens, such as Astoria, Long Island City, Jackson Heights, Bayside, etc. Armed with curiosity and a thousand questions, my goal was to dedicate time to visiting each of the 15 municipios of Havana. Where were people at in terms of their consciousness and enthusiasm about the revolutionary government? What were their chief complaints? What were allegiances? What was the temperature of the revolution among everyday families, political and apolitical, 64 years after the overthrow of the old ruling class? Why are over 200,000 Cubans risking everything to flee the besieged country every year?
“No other country has done as much for sports in the continent as Cuba”
“Democracy Promotion” aka Using Hunger as a Weapon to Provoke a Coup
The Trump and Biden administrations and those that preceded them, including that of Barack Obama who only slightly tweaked some stipulations of the blockade, have remained faithful to the original objective of the 1960 blockade. A year after the revolution’s triumph, Eisenhower calculated: “If the Cuban people are hungry, they will throw Castro out.” Four months later, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Lester D. Mallory agreed: “Every possible means should be undertaken promptly to weaken the economic life of Cuba…to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of the government.”
The U.S. government’s “Program of Covert Action” drafted in 1960 continues to inform U.S. policy towards Cuba. For six decades, the U.S. has sought to suffocate and destroy Cuba’s self-determination.The Economic War Against Cuba: A Historical and Legal Perspective on the U.S. Blockade by Salim Lamrani and Fabian Escalante’s Operation Extermination: 50 Years of Aggression against Cuba are two solid resources about the diverse terrorist tactics employed by the US government.
More than 3,400 Cubans have been killed by U.S. state terrorism since the revolution. U.S. intelligence plotted and organized 638 known attempts on Fidel Castro’s life. Biological warfare has been used such as the intentional infection of the island’s pig population with the swine virus.
Every policy of today’s most powerful empire has been calculated and designed to inflict regime change in Cuba which is an intellectualized euphemism for the complete overhaul of class relations. Ignoring these external pressures, the legacy media hyper focuses on repression in Cuba. Political scientist Michael Parenti explained why socialist countries were forced to employ certain authoritarian measures. Subjected to constant threats, harassment and U.S. intelligence-backed terrorist campaigns, how could the Cuban leadership focus on anything but national security? This defensive posture plays right into the hands of Cuba’s would-be colonizers in Washington and Miami. Constantly looking over its shoulder, distrustful and paranoid, brother is pitted against brother.
Amidst the crumbling buildings of Centro Havana, some future leaders of the San Isidro movement exclaimed to me: “los dioses están muertos” (the Gods are dead), meaning that Che, Fidel, Celia Sanchez, Camilo Cienfuegos and the other icons of the revolution meant nothing to young people today. The counterrevolution had its voice and foreign governments and NGO’s were willing to pump big money into this “civil society” movement. Tracy Eaton’s The Cuba Money Project meticulously documents the U.S. government’s financing of such groups. The National Endowment for Democracy funded over 40 such counter-revolutionary groups to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. These “dissidents” assured me they were “non-ideological,” as they organized meetings with the parliament of the European Union alongside U.S.-sponsored pawns, such as Juan Guaido and Luis Almagro. While I always kept them at arm’s length, they were an accurate measure of how many Cubans feel today about the ripped posters and faded murals of the heroes of the revolution. Che’s ideals and Fidel’s bravery were not putting food on the table or ensuring that there was access to electricity or the internet.
Some Cuban journalists and cadres of the party argue that the higher levels of leadership in the party need a wake up call. Some Afro Cuban youth yelled at me: “Aquí no hay bloqueo” (there is no blockade here). For too many youth, blaming an economic blockade they could not concretely see had worn thin and no longer seemed like the root cause of their collective woes.
Protest in defense of Cuba’s sovereignty in Union Square, NYC.
An Ethnography of Terrorism and Resistance
On July 9th, Cuba revealed to the world the latest U.S.-sponsored terrorist plot aimed at fomenting counterrevolution on the island. An armed group calling itself La Nueva Nación Cubana en Armas (the New Armed Cuban Nation) stockpiled weapons in Miami and sought to smuggle them into Cuba in order to recruit and activate clandestine cells that would rebel against the government. Though the U.S. media barely mentioned the story, 32 individuals were arrested for conspiring to attack military barracks, schools and hospitals. This was the most recent in six and a half decades of U.S. plots against Cuba. The goal of the New Armed Cuban Nation’s actions were to incite chaos and violence so that Elon Musk, CNN and Fox could then spotlight Cuba as a “failed dictatorial state” and justify more aggression against it. Was this a test run for what is to come?
Everyday terrorism that Cuba confronts from the U.S. power structure rarely make the front pages. Denied by apologists for empire and conveniently ignored by Cuba’s critics, an unilateral U.S. blockade continues to stifle and starve the people of Cuba. The Special Period, which began in 1991 with the collapse of the Socialist Camp countries led by the Soviet Union, has only intensified over the past three decades, taking its toll, as it is intended to, on the morale of generations of Cubans. On the 66th anniversary of the 1959 Cuban Revolution, has David grown tired of always having to be on the defensive against Goliath, the omnipresent bully? What breathing space do the 11,174,587 people of Cuba have, particularly the 2.3 million youth under the age of 18 years?
88 percent of international currency transactions are still in dollars. There are routine blackout crises. There is no gas. A trip across Havana on public transportation often takes three hours. The U.S. government continues to accuse Cuba of being a hub for Chinese spies and a source of auditory terrorism, or “Havana Syndrome.” Protestors fatigued by six and a half decades of a Cold War are demanding “electricity and food.” The imperialist Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) forecasts that there will be more protests because of an economy that is worse than during the Special Period. Rations are down to a bare minimum and even that sometimes is not even available. According to one doctor and Cuban Communist Party leader Oldanier: “We live like Palestinians minus the bombing. Malnutrition is everywhere. Inflation has skyrocketed. The state cannot pay our salaries. Child mortality is way up. More and more people are fleeing.”
Beyond the Propaganda
Every semester since 2006, until I was fired last semester for denouncing the genocide in Palestine, I asked my City University of New York students in my South American and Caribbean Studies courses: “What do you think of when you hear the word…..Cuba? Write down whatever comes to mind.”
It doesn’t take a crystal ball to know that many of them wrote: “Cigars, sugarcane, dictator, communism, poor, tourism, baseball, beaches and Fidel.” I continued to challenge them: “Have you ever heard one positive word about Cuba? In the media and on social media, have you ever heard anything positive about Cuba and the Cuban system?”
Across the liberal-right divide of American politics, no love is lost for Cuba’s leadership. Corporate media outlets show nothing but hostility toward the Cuban system. Social media helps ensure Americans’ knee-jerk reactions to Cuba’s political system are full of pity and negativity. Anti-communism continues to be the unofficial religion of the United States.
On the opposite end of the political spectrum, anti-imperialist groups organize delegations to Havana to learn about the Cuban system. I was and continue to be a part of them. Often, for understandable reasons, as brigadistas we don’t have the opportunity to go off the beaten path. Early on during my travels across Cuba, participating in volunteer labor with Cubans and an international brigade on orange plantations in the province of Mayabeque, I became anxious to learn as much as possible about this socialist country. I never once questioned Cuba’s right to self-determination free of U.S. government interference. As the Palestinians say, “existence is resistance.” Still, I wondered: what are the experiences and critiques of those who live this reality and bear its consequences? Ignoring the rough edges of life in Cuba does not make them go away. Ignorance of them only disarms us as we seek to engage the diaspora, end the economic war and clearly scrutinize the next foreign attempt at a color revolution.
Visa para Un Sueño (A Visa for a Dream)
On January 4, 2023 the U.S. embassy reopened its visa operations in Havana. This was the first time the U.S. embassy had begun providing consular services since the wild, unproven accusations that the Cubans were using sonic terrorism against embassy officials in 2017. Those allegations came at a strategic time and were designed to interrupt the first potential thawing of relations between the two countries since 1958. Over 200,000 Cubans have been forced to leave their homeland in the past year and a half, a figure even larger than previous migrations such as the Marielitos and the 1994 “rafters.” While the mainstream media repeated the announcement of the reopening embassy and the alarming migration statistics, no outlet thought to examine why hundreds of thousands of Cubans from the last two generations have been forced to leave their homeland.
A Track Record of Revolution, Solidarity and Internationalism
Sumy’s parents’ generation made the revolution. Sumy’s generation benefited from the social transformation and fortified it.
The Cuban revolution represented a great unleashing of human energies and potential, much like the Chinese Revolution which was set in motion during the Long March of the 1930s. As Dr. Ana Ferrer’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book Cuba: An American History demonstrates, this was a society in ferment: Cubans of all ages questioned orthodoxy, overthrew the old and reorganized. The conscious workers and peasants smashed the old repressive state apparatus. The new ruling class, with its roots in the humble sections of Cuba, combatted colonial-era dependency on the sugar mono-crop. Massive literacy campaigns swept the countryside and the new Cuban leadership eliminated hunger. Health indicators began to resemble not those of downtrodden colonies but those of their well-heeled colonizer states. Radical agrarian reforms freed up land for hundreds of thousands of toiling families. Housing, transportation and health care became rights protected by the state. Cuba stood up and declared before the world — as the 1804 Haitian revolution had before it — “Never again shall a foreigner step foot on this soil as a master of our destiny.”
Cuba inspired billions of workers and peasants across Latin American and the world to rise up and overthrow the legacy of colonial underdevelopment. Half a million Cuban volunteers fought in Africa, the Middle East and South America shoulder to shoulder with the ‘Wretched of the Earth,’ in pursuit of Fanon’s baptism. Regardless of future events, the Cuban Revolution has forever proven that ‘Yes, it can be done!’ The despised, the silenced, the spat upon and humiliated can rise up, reclaim and rewrite history. Never again can we be told that the reorganization of society is idealism and a pie in the sky at best. Despite all of the misinformation and demonization of Cuba, this can never be taken away. Cuba and the fact that it still stands on its own two dignified feet, is an ideological weapon of freedom in the closet of ammunition of those who fight for humanity.
My time in Haiti provided concrete proof of Cuban internationalism at work.
In the countryside of Haiti, besides Mormons completing their proselytizing requirements, what foreigners walk the unpenetrated mountains and overflowing shantytowns?
Deeper in the mountains, Cuban doctors treat and heal the Haitian people. As readily as you can see Mormons and other colonial-style missionaries strutting in twos throughout the ghettos and villages of oppressed countries, Cuban doctors spread across the globe offering their humble services to humanity. Cuba offered doctors to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina before the U.S. government did. No other country has had such a consistent commitment to internationalism, earning Cuba a Nobel Peace Prize nomination for their efforts to help countries confront the COVID-19 epidemic. According to one estimate, Cuban doctors have treated close to 2 billion human beings since the revolution.
Youth: The #1 Casualty of the Blockade
While Sumy and many from his generation are firm supporters of the revolution, the two generations that followed are less committed and ideologically stealed. A similar dynamic took place in the Soviet Union. The generation of 1917 fought the revolution and hundreds of thousands died in the 1917-1922 Civil War. The generation of WWII defeated the Nazis. 27,000,000 Soviets gave their lives to defeat Hitler’s extermination campaign. But by the 1970’s, as Carlos Martinez writes in The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse, a sense of demoralization had set in among certain sectors of the Soviet population that was ultimately a factor in the restoration of capitalism.
How many Cuban youth feel de-futurized today? How many teenagers and young adults pledge that they will not die in Cuba? It was as if they were taking an oath before the moon to cross the seas by any means necessary. At a Metallica-blaring nightclub, four Cuban rock-a-billies screamed to explain to me that their government “son unos sing**s (pieces of sh^t).”
The exasperation and determination is visceral.
A pack of hungry young men descended upon another group of teens in street clashes that were previously foreign to the backstreets of Centro Habana and La Habana Vieja. President Diaz Canel’s administration feels the urgency. Earlier this year, for the first time they asked the United Nations for food support.
When I defended the system with all of my reading and ideological training, I was the one who was sometimes laughed at and mocked. A young Rasta woman kicked me out of her apartment in front of her spliff-smoking crew, accusing me of working with the Cuban government to infiltrate her “non-ideological” Rasta subculture. Two doctors cracked up laughing, remarking sarcastically, “Oh, este es un comunistón.” Family members would stop mid sentence completely perplexed by my accent and about my motives, wondering if I was some type of informant. Time and time again, I heard, “Oh you like socialism? Let’s trade places.” Many youth of all skin tones asked me why I got to travel where I wanted to but they could not. Others cited the national poet Nicolás Guillen: “Cuba es dulce por fuera, pero muy amarga por adentro,” (“Cuba is sweet on the outside, but very bitter on the inside”), insinuating that it was easy to love Cuba from afar but much more difficult to endure her inner reality on a daily basis.
There was no tale of the everyday struggles from the Bronx, New York or Opa Locka, Miami that could discourage them from wanting to migrate. Before a portrait of the exploitation and the accompanying human misery that exists in neo-colonies like El Salvador, Guatemala, or Colombia, Chano — a Yoruba padrino (godfather) — responded: “I can only hope the yumas (gringos) come and recolonize us. Then I can be exploited all day in their sweatshops and at least earn 10 bucks that are worth something.” This is the material reality of scarcity imposed from without that has been the chief catalyst of Cuban’s frustrations and hopelessness.
It is useful to remember: “People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please…but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.” The Cuban leadership continually points to the international economic pressure to explain the despair. The harsh reality, however, is that there is no explaining away “war communism.” Until there are revolutionary breakthroughs elsewhere and a truly multipolar world, Cubans will be confined to an existence of scarcity or what the highly-censored Parenti called “Siege Socialism.” In the words of one mother and communist militant in Marianao: “The new generation has only lived in a period of sacrifice and more sacrifice. They don’t remember the struggle against Batista nor the first decade of the revolution, with those marvelous debates and experiments we had at that time. They only know austerity.”
The Cuban Communist Party (PCC): Doing the Impossible
The Cuban leadership, seasoned by six decades of successful resistance and growth, is searching for a response to the hybrid war and its impact on morale. They respond as any fighter who is fighting above their weight does, aggressively and desperately. Multipolarity is their strategy to break the blockade.
President Diaz-Canel visited Iran to discuss mutually-beneficial ways to break the embargoes. The Deputy President Salvador Valdés Mesa recently returned from a visit to South Africa to strengthen diplomatic and economic ties. On May 9th, which was the 79th anniversary of the Soviet Day of Victory over Fascism, arguably the most important holiday the world has, the Cuban president celebrated with Vladimir Putin in the Grand Kremlin Palace. Cuba hosted a fleet of Russian warships in its harbors, just 500 miles from nuclear-powered U.S. attack submarines which continue to occupy Guantanamo Bay.
Visits back and forth between Xi Jinping and his Cuban counterpart shows Cuba’s resolve to build up their own Chinese style competitive state companies that operate internationally and seek to find a cure for the food shortages. Cuba hosted the Group of 77 last year, the largest international organization after the United Nations itself. 134 countries, or 80 percent of the world population, are currently represented in the now misnamed “Group of 77.” From Havana, chairman of the Group of 77, Diaz-Canel, insisted: “After all this time that the North has organized the world according to its interests, it is now up to the South to change the rules of the game.” Cuba, along with 34 other countries, has applied for membership in BRICS. The addition of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, the United Arab Emirates, Iran and Argentina (contested by the new president Milei) at the beginning of 2024, means the BRICS bloc nations now constitute 42% of the world’s population and account for 23% of gross domestic product and 18% of global trade. Cuba’s future does not run through Wall Street or the Beltway, it runs through Moscow, Beijing, Caracas, Tehran, Johannesburg and the other burgeoning centers of multipolarity.
Cuba is no longer an isolated moral compass standing on its own like it was in 1991. It is now a small but barrelling wave in the rising tide of multipolarity.
Since January 1st, 1959, Cuba has stood up to “economic terrorism” from the United States and Western European countries, “which affects a third of humanity with more than 8,000 specific sanctions in 39 countries.” There is a reason Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez were not just the most popular leaders in their homelands, they were the most popular leaders throughout the Global South. Last month, on June 20th, South Africa commemorated the 2,000 Cuban soldiers who gave their lives to Africa’s liberation wars in the 1960’s, ‘70’s and ‘80’s. Wherever there is a Goliath, Cuba recognizes David.
Washington lives in panic. Last year, 12 South American heads of state gathered in Brasilia to reignite La Unión de Naciones Suramericanas (UNASUR). This is the second iteration of the Pink Tide, on the 201st anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine, building greater economic, political, diplomatic and military integration and unity among the nations of the Caribbean and South America. These multipolar regional and global developments could not occur soon enough for Cuba and Venezuela, the two nations most impacted by Washington’s unilateral economic wars. Despite the red-baiting and Cold War 2.0 rhetoric against Caracas and Havana, the peoples of the continent are finally interrupting Washington’s domination of a hemisphere they have long treated as their backyard.
One of Cuba’s biggest enemies, incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, has warned of the multipolar world on the horizon. Alarmed by Brazilian President Lula’s multipolar instincts and his visits to Beijing and beyond, the right-wing Florida senator appeared anxious on Fox News: “We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years because there’ll be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar that we won’t have the ability to sanction them.” Could the “sanction inability” theory, as the Chinese Global Times calls it, spell relief for the Cuban people or is it too late?
The economist, theorist and writer Ernesto “Che” Guevara wrote “Be realistic, demand the impossible!” This slogan captures the mentality of the Minister of Foreign Affairs Bruno Rodríguez Parrilla and other dirigentes (leaders). Cuban local and national leadership has found a way to endure the mightiest of hurricanes, U.S. imperialism. The scorn they inspire in the stenographers of the Miami Herald as well as the lies from the Trumps and Bidens is the surest proof that Cuba continues to inspire the underdogs of the world.
The Special Period Never Ended
Unfortunately for Cubans, you cannot yet feed your children nor fuel your cars with multipolarity. Capitalism demands instant gratification. And capitalism knows how to prey upon the alienation and impetuosity of youth.
The verb luchar captures a shift in this generation’s mindset. It has multiple meanings mostly associated with struggle and its historic use contrasts with where the national liberation struggle is at today. Luchar today in street slang means “to hustle, to get by, to survive.” Luchar embodies the everyday struggle in Havana to push ahead as one can, inventing whatever hustle to gain access to dollars or euros. This is in sharp contrast to the parents of the hustlers and survivors who learned to have a revolutionary outlook of self-sacrifice and to maintain a fighting optimism. Early in the revolution, a strong economic base produced an inspiring infrastructure – cinema, billboards, art, murals, national demonstrations, olympic gold medalists, etc. The long lines, unmotivated workers and dilapidated state of the world famous ice cream parlor Coppelia, whose construction was overseen by the guerrilla Celia Sanchez, mocked the booming success of the Castro establishment from decades past. Too many mothers commiserate with one another that they long for the years when Cubans could do more than survive, they could live.
The special period began at the end of 1990 when Cuba’s economy was brought to a virtual standstill with the fall of the Socialist camp. Only 12 to 15 percent of industrial capacity still functioned. Foreign trade fell by 70 percent. This staggering loss of productive capacity was Cuba’s very own Great Depression. While there were partial recoveries and adjustments of the economy, the hard times continued. The National Library of Medicine characterized the period as a famine, documenting how Cubans on average lost an average of 5 to 20 percent of their body weight. Sumy and his contemporaries saw all of this as the next wave of attempts to overthrow the revolution. The indomitable generation kept their hands up, heads down, bobbing and weaving through every U.S. attempt at sabotage, punching forward with an enormous spirit of self-sacrifice. All of humanity is indebted to them for holding the banner of socialism and resistance high in the most difficult moments. Due to the drastically different material and geopolitical reality, how can this generation shoulder such a historic responsibility with equal enthusiasm? Many want out. They say that they never signed up for this. They provide the fertile soil for the next San Isidro-like color revolution attempt.
Any contact with a foreigner from a rich country meant potential access to consumer goods and foreign money worth 20 to 150 times the local currency. Plato must have been writing about the Cuban people when he said “necessity is the mother of invention.” Havana is home to every hustle imaginable to survive the realities of an enclosed world. At the same time, these dynamics of inequality encompass a neo-dependency on foreigners.
Cubans call sex work or prostitution, jineterismo. A jinete is a jockey. Jineterismo, literally translated, is the art of riding the horse. The horse is the foreigner. The jineteras are concentrated in the tourist districts of Centro Habana, Vieja Habana, El Vedado and Playa. There was none of this activity, in what would be called the outer boroughs in New York City, because there were no tourists visiting those areas. In the periphery of Havana, there are few non-Cubans. A jinetera may live in Guanabacoa or La Lisa, which is a half hour bus ride from Central Havana, but they made the daily trek from their neighborhood to jinetiar downtown where the money is. One grandmother whose 25-year-old grandson working informally as a jinete shrugged her shoulders and said: “We have to live somehow.” A neighborhood colleague chimed in: “This is a job like any job. Here we respect the jineteros. It is normal. We do what we have to.” A Cuban philosopher took a deep breath and remarked: “El jineterismo is a stark reality that we don’t like talking about. But it’s true and rooted in the blockade.”
Alexis is a poet and teacher from Alamar who lived with his wife and children. He met an American woman who came with an international delegation and dated her. He periodically left his home for a week or two at a time to “work” with this American woman. His wife was aware of his actions and seemingly understood that it was necessary. The blockade challenges everything from the traditional Cuban family structure to notions of sexuality. Alexis’ wife Maria understood that he was going out with and sleeping with another woman in hopes that he could travel and perhaps one day send for her and the children to join him. Maria responded with a certain sense of dejection and resignation. As the cristales (popular Cuban beer) poured themselves, I asked curiously between laughs and sighs what these types of sacrifices meant for her. She responded: “Hacer que, mi hijo?” (What else can we do, my son?) Within these one-on-one conversations or exchanges with a group of a dozen people just hanging out on a porch, there were other Cuban women who declared, “F*ck that. There are other ways to struggle forward without opening your legs to a foreigner.” As anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in Havana knows, these debates often spilled over into community discussions and polemics where no one was too shy to offer their two cents.
For some Habaneros who are luchando, any tourist is a “punto.” This is slang for “a target” or a point of attraction because of the access they represent. Several Cubans married representatives from solidarity groups While one participant in the marriage naively embraced it as a bond never to be broken, the Cuban participant often “hustled” to find their way out to achieve economic opportunities elsewhere that would enable them to send money back to their family. Clearly, not every marriage between a Cuban and a foreigner was built upon an economic necessity, but there were enough to make note of this practice. Other Cubans hustle in the tourist economy in order to consume the latest fashions and cellular telephones. Some youth sought hard cash to survive, others to look good and consume like their first-world counterparts. Youth leaders in the Unión de Jóvenes Comunistas (UJC, Union of Young Communists) expressed concern over the explosion of materialism among their youth counterparts. They swore up and down, shadowboxing in the “Memories of Underdevelopment,” that Fidel would have confronted this humiliation head on and somehow magically whisked it away.
One artist shared this quip to make his point about the disconnect between the PCC (the Cuban Communist Party) and this generation of youth: “They asked a young girl in my neighborhood, Habana del Este, what she wants to be when she grows up. She responded: “a yuma, meaning a foreigner.”
Some of the artists and cultural activists I went to poetry and hip hop shows with in 2001 went on to form the leadership of the San Isidro movement. Like the damas blancas “movement” (the women dressed in white) and MSNBC’s perennial “Cuban political prisoners,” the 2021 San Isidro protests became the darlings of both the Republican and Democratic wings of the U.S. media establishment. These talented poets and hip hop artists had contacts with think tanks and NGO’s who were able to provide them with money, prominent social media attention and a prized possession in Cuba, visas. I visited the Omni Zonafranca artists in D.C. and New Orleans in 2012 when they were on tour, hosted by different U.S. academics and NGOs. Charming, intelligent and captivating, it was tough not to fall in love with these artists, who always claimed to be “non-ideological.” One couple exclaimed that they had started “Occupy Cuba” in order to take buildings back from the government. This was an interesting idea in a country where 85 percent of people own their own homes. Afro-Cuban youth and cultural workers are the perfect weapon for intersectional imperialism and its aim of regime change.
A City without Ghettos
As any Cuban will tell you, “esto está complicado” (This is complicated). The economic situation is dire. Long lines and packed public buses characterize the public transportation experience. Havana’s roofs and ceilings are caving in. Infrastructure is crumbling.
Poverty is different in Havana because it does not stand in stark contrast to great wealth. Locals often warned me: “Oh no. Don’t head that way!” “Stay away from there! That is a rough area. You’d have to be crazy to go there.” One elderly woman told me “No, don’t go to Alamar. There are some real elementos over there.” Other contacts laughed “No te metes alli en Lumumba (Arroyo Naranjo) que estos negros te van a volar encima.”As I kept walking, never was there anything dramatically different from the fear-mongers’ own neighborhoods. In fact, I often stumbled upon new friends who offered equally dire warnings about the neighborhoods I had just come from.
There is some social differentiation but it is fantastically less than in a capitalist country. Inequality has risen since the initiation of market reforms in 2010. The blockade and opening up to tourism introduced economic contradictions that are now part and parcel of the Cuban reality. Some small businesses have had great success, resulting in new class contradictions that did not exist prior to 1991. Families with loved ones in Miami had a better chance at capitalizing on these economic opportunities; millions of others were left to fend for themselves.
There is no homelessness as we know it in the West and housing is a human right guaranteed by the constitution. One might find a mentally ill person or an alcoholic wandering the streets in a very bad place. These are isolated cases and there is support for them. La Fundación Fernando Ortiz published an ethnographic study that explains their findings on this topic. There is no such thing as a child begging or roaming the city barefoot and hungry. I contrasted this with my experiences living in Rio de Janeiro, Port-au-Prince, Praia and Santo Domingo, among other cities in the formerly colonized world, where I saw extreme misery and humiliation. Havana is something quite different and even shocking to those who have never visited.
There are substandard housing structures called “los llega y pon” (the “arrive and puts”), in reference to the makeshift shacks that internal migrants build when they arrive in the capital. They are in the outskirts of Marianao, San Miguel de Padrón and other municipalities. Built from cardboard, wood, palm leaves and zinc, these structures are temporary living quarters for families from the interior of Cuba where the material scarcity is more intense than in Havana. Over the course of decades, hundreds of thousands of families saved up money to try to move to the big city. According to one resident of Marianao, “trying to build a sustainable house has been an odyssey for us.”
Every street is a paved street. It is only here in the back alleys where the Palestinos live that you find the famed callejones (alleyways) so feared in the Global South. Palestinos is everyday slang for people who migrate to Havana from the Oriental provinces. Like the Palestinian people, they search for survival in a land that is no longer their own. But the reality of the internal migrants is clearly not as intense as that of the indigenous people of the Middle East who continue to fight for their right to exist in their own land.
As Western newspapers love to showcase, the deterioration of homes is a major problem in Havana Vieja and Centro Havana. Ceilings and walls often collapse. Communities don’t have access to concrete and the building materials needed to upgrade their homes. Children innocently play in the streets, seemingly unaware of a certain grayness or demoralization that has taken root in those old enough to understand the tedious matters of infrastructure. Pickpocketing and other petty crimes in Centro Habana and on the buses has become more of an issue. Talking or texting on your cellphone at the wrong moment in the wrong place can result in petty theft.
A Tale of Two Cities
While Havana has no slums as we would define them in the U.S., the hotels and private neighborhoods clearly represent a different world. The tourist economy is a central part of Havana’s reality. Habana Libre hotel, Hotel Nacional and a host of other hotels that dot the malecon (the ocean front) are the tallest and newest buildings in Havana. A night at one of these hotels costs anywhere from $300 to $1,000 dollars for the fanciest VIP suite. The official government exchange rate is 25.75 pesos per dollar. If a Cuban worker earns tips or any income in dollars, they often post in a WhatsApp chat group to see if anyone can exchange it for them for pesos.
The Soviet Union and Cuba exchanged oil for sugar. The number one oil-producing country in the world at the time did something unthinkable under capitalist trade relations – they engaged in the barter system. Today there are gas shortages. Nostalgic but still pushing forward, the Cubans tried turning to a new source of income.
With the fall of king sugar, the PCC saw tourism as the new cash crop. The tourist industry was on the march in the 1990s and into the new millennium, peaking in 2018 with 4,712,000 visitors. Then the pandemic happened. The bottom fell out of Cuba’s largest industry, precipitously dropping to 1,086,000 visitors in 2020. This was the perfect recipe for economic disaster and hunger. Fewer tourists meant fewer dollars and euros. In a world of dollar and euro supremacy, Cuba cannot use its peso to buy food, medicine, machinery, spare parts or imports on the international market. Can the Cuban government be blamed for this monetary war? Similar to the lively debates around the sugar mono-crop economy in the 1970’s, there was a discourse that putting all the eggs within the basket of the tourist economy was unsustainable.
A cashier or waitress earns roughly 3,000 pesos monthly, or $15 U.S. dollars. The Cuban people earn in a currency that has very little value when compared to the dollar. This is the fiscal reality that forces a doctor or an Angolan Liberation War veteran to moonlight as a taxi driver. A doctor can potentially earn her monthly salary driving one night for tourists.
The manipulation of a people’s currency is as much a psychological as an economic weapon of war.
Yoselin is a 53-year-old nurse whose children are grown. Her husband passed away from a stroke and she cares for her mother. She earns 6,000 pesos ($17.14) per month working Monday through Friday from 8 A.M. until 6 P.M. Beyond the subsidized food she receives, she has a series of economic decisions to make. A pair of shoes costs more than a month’s salary, somewhere between 5000 and 20,000 pesos. A pocketbook costs 3000 to 5000 pesos. Yoselin clarified that these are not brand name products. I asked her about name brands. “No. We can’t. Those are beyond our reach.” She continued outlining the cost of everyday items. Jeans, 3000. A dress, 4000. Hair dye, 800. Shampoo, 800. Hair conditioner, 800. Perfume or cologne costs 4000 pesos, or 10 times more expensive if it is a fancy brand. Deodorant is 500 pesos or roughly two or three days of work. Fish is 500 to 600 pesos per pound. These items have long been luxuries in Cuba.
As Yoselín explained and re-explained all of this to me I got dizzy. She chuckled: “You think you’re dizzy? Imagine us, living this situation day after day, year after year. What about my patients? We medical workers have to be artists to get them enough food to heal. There is no medicine or syringes. We get two pens per month. They [the U.S. government] are asphyxiating us!” She showed me her refrigerator and an old computer she had been saving up for years to fix. She then asked me rhetorically: “Why do you think we love Russia? We can eat bread and pizza thanks to Putin. We’d be starving if it wasn’t for Russia. Russia has sent 6 million rubles worth of wheat to Cuba.” The Russian government sent 20,000 tons of wheat to Cuba in April of 2023. Russia postponed all Cuban debts until 2027.
While Cuba attracts a unique brand of leftist tourists several times a year, who arrive in solidarity with the revolution, a high percentage of tourists are of the traditional sort. Most Europeans and Canadians have no interest in how Cuban people live. To them, Havana may as well be Cancún or Aruba. They come for the everyday clichés described in the tourist’s brochures: rum, beaches, tobacco, entertainment and exotic Cubans.
While recognizing the social benefits the revolution had established, many workers — alluding to the tourist scene — see no difference from the struggles of their family members before the revolution. The inequality is in their face. They express that the humiliation and dependency is the same. The foreigner enjoys the Cuba that Cubans cannot. The nightlife around these hotels and at the famous resorts of the Varadero Beach — an hour and a half outside of Havana — reflect the old colonial dynamic. Cubans — half-clad and “exoticized” — put together elaborate shows and dance for the enjoyment of the yumas who sipp their cocktails. This form of tourism reflects a neo-colony relationship. Many Habanaeros feel trapped and resentful as they navigate dependency, love and hate before tourists and their coveted dollars and euros.
The elected leadership understands the duality of the tourist industry in that it brings in much-needed dollars and euros but also brings with it a host of social ills. The profits derived from the hotels are poured back into the economy in the form of medicine, hospitals, transportation and whatever else the population needs. Cubans see tourism as a retreat, but a necessary one to adapt and survive in a hostile capitalist-dominated world.
Cuban state companies work with European capital to fetch foreign currency, especially through tourism. The Cuban leadership, unlike the post-Mao Chinese leadership, has not fully embraced “market socialism.” Reforms under Presidents Raul Castro and Miguel Diaz-Canel are concessions, a necessary retreat to gather more strength. It was a ‘bend but don’t break’ strategy.
The population is divided. Some everyday people ask out loud: “what is the difference between the Havana of today and that of 1958?” Others understand this is the War on Cuba in motion.
Guanabo, Havana
The End of Rations?
Critics rush to judge and accuse Cuba of being trapped in a time warp. But why are they silent about the reality of 500 plus years of savage theft and pillaging and 65 years of crippling sanctions meant to bring Cuba to its knees?
Before the aggravated crisis that began last year, every month, each member of a household in Cuba received the following centralized subsidies guaranteed from the government.
7 pounds of rice (it often arrives late)
10 ounces chickpeas and sometimes 10 ounces of black beans
1 pound of cooking oil every 2 months
1 kg of salt every 4 months
1 lb. of white sugar
2 lb. brown sugar
115 grams of coffee
1 bar of soap
1 bar of soap for every child, senior citizen, or sick person
80 grams of bread
7 eggs
1 lb. of chicken but there has been none since May
2 lbs of bologna or mixed, blended meat (picadillo o mortadela) to replace the lack of chicken
Tobacco as needed
1 toothpaste for 1 to 3 people every four months
The capitalist press refers to these subsidies as “rations,” conveniently ignoring what creates the need to ration in the first place. This “canasta básica” (basic basket) is what every Cuban receives every month. If a family wants fruit, vegetables, or anything beyond la libreta (the ration book), it is up to your own individual spending ability. Families told me about the creative artform it was to stretch such a meager amount of food for the entire month. For example, families saved up extra eggs for New Years Eve in order to be able to give their children some type of treat that night. “We cannot provide what is required for those with diabetes and other sick people,” one nurse informed.
Children under seven also receive:
1/2 kg of milk/ children between 7 and 14,
1 bottle of yogurt
10 containers of baby food
1 pound of beef
The war on the Cuban state is synonymous with the squeezing and harsh punishment of the Cuban people. What was once proof of how the Cuban model of equality worked, has now for the most part been cut. Many Cubans my age and older say this is worse than the 1990’s.
In the historical sense of underdevelopment, Cuba is no different than other Caribbean islands. If visas were suddenly granted to all, a high percentage of youth and citizens from the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, or Trinidad would leave in order to roll the dice in Miami, New York, Montreal, Barcelona and the other metropolises. This has little to do with the Cuban mode of production and everything to do with five hundred years of unequal development and Cuba’s daring to resist imperialism.
Dwarfing Cuba’s Potential and Cultivating the Counterrevolution
Ernesto “Che” Guevara studied the concept of underdevelopment as he grew to understand the realities of the Third World. In his article, “Cuba: Historical Exception or Vanguard in the Anticolonial Struggle?” (1961), Che asked: “What is ‘underdevelopment’? A dwarf with an enormous head and swollen chest is ‘underdeveloped,’ insofar as his fragile legs and short arms do not match the rest of his anatomy. He is the product of an abnormal and distorted development. That is what we are in reality — we, who are politely referred to as ‘underdeveloped.’ In truth, we are colonial, semicolonial or dependent countries, whose economies have been deformed by imperialism, which has peculiarly developed only those branches of industry or agriculture needed to complement its own complex economy.”
Guevara was studying the effects of neocolonial exploitation. Today, Cuba is the very dwarf Guevara described, but for a different reason, the impermeable U.S. economic and military blockade. A thorough understanding of the horrific effects of this undeclared U.S. war is necessary. These conditions result in precisely what the writers of these policies intended: hunger, hopelessness and chaos. Walking, conversing and staying in Arrollo Naranjo, La Lisa, Guanabo or any other neighborhood of Havana is to witness the blockade in action.
Recalcitrant cold warriors in Miami and New Jersey from both sides of the aisle work overtime to tighten the economic war and asphyxiate Cuba’s people. Informed by their intelligence services, chief policy makers target the most marginalized populations to carry out their regime-change agenda. This was what we saw play out on July 11, 2021. As Cuban-American scholar Carlos Garrido analyzed for Covert Action Magazine, their objective is to fund and provoke an island-wide anti-government uprising and then highlight the heavy hand of the Cuban state to justify the next step of their regime-change operations.
The foreign policy establishment in Washington is divided over its approaches to Cuba: further isolation or a renewed commitment to penetration?
The Helms-Burton Act is, “a United States federal law that contains provisions that prevent foreign countries from engaging in international trade with Cuba by subjecting foreign nationals to travel restrictions and financial liabilities in the United States by punishing the banks and companies of other countries that do business with Cuba.” Freights or cargo bound for Cuba cannot stay in U.S. ports or pass through the Panama canal or those counties will be targeted by U.S. sanctions. The magazine Science for the People rigorously analyzes what these unilateral laws mean for the Cuban masses and their inability to access medicine.
Let’s look at one example of how this all plays out. The U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control fined the German bank Commerzbank millions of dollars for doing business with Cuba between 2005 and 2007. The U.S. Treasury and Justice Departments, the U.S. Federal Reserve and the New York City Department of Financial Services collected millions of dollars from the bank as punishment. Where did this money go?
In contrast to D.C. and Miami’s hard-liners, the forces behind Obama sought a backdoor approach to recolonization. Obama was respected in Cuba. Families were surprised a Black man could become the CEO of such a racist, class-stratified society. Cuban leadership, while open to a detente, warned that Obama was no friend. The 44th president represented the liberal wing of the ruling class who saw capital penetration as one of the many weapons, while still occupying Guantanamo, still imposing a crippling blockade and continuing to engage in covert regime change actions. Western Union, American Airlines, the Cruise ship industry, AT&T among a slew of investors drooled over this market of 11,000,000 off Florida’s shore. In times of Woke Imperialism, this was the Trojan Horse strategy and Obama had the perfect complexion and smile for it. On January 12th, speaking for some of these interests, the New York Times even listed Cuba as one of their 52 places to travel in 2023. While short-lived, the thaw gave Cuba some much needed breathing room and conditions on the island improved. Some friends even told me that with the potential thaw in Obama’s last year in power, the leadership did not maintain the revolutionary billboards that had formed the background of everyone’s pictures in Cuba for decades.
In the wake of the collapse of the socialist camp from 1989-1991, U.S. imperialism successfully isolated Cuba. On the other hand, capital from Spain, Italy, Mexico, Canada and beyond inserted itself into Cuba to make profits off tourism, construction and other industries.
The U.S.’s isolation of Cuba interrupted the ideological and economic dynamism of decades past.
As of 1989, Cuba was the most advanced society in Latin America in many respects. Today, everyone over 40 years of age longs for the decades prior to 1990 when there was a preponderance of food, consumer goods, a strong Cuban peso and an optimistic energy. Youth in Havana today largely feel disconnected from the process. For many, it seems the headlines of Granma and Juventud Rebelde, the official organs of the PCC and the Union of Youth Communists mean little. The director of Havana del Este’s Cultural Center and participant in the San Isidro movement exclaimed that less than 25% of young people today identify with any of the leaders of the Cuban revolution. Others hold the view that Fidel, Raul and Miguel Diaz-Canel stand by their convictions and are not to blame. One metaphor often cited was from the NED-funded rap group Los Aldeanos: “our problem is not with the captain but with the ship’s staff.” There is a perception that a mid-level bureaucracy has developed under the aging veteran leadership which intentionally deceived the people about the actual state of affairs in the streets of Havana. While groups like Los Aldeanos became State Department assets, their lyrics speak to some of the real talk that is occurring in certain sectors of the population.
Are there really high rates of corruption in Cuba? I do not see proof of bureaucrats with mansions, fancy cars and Swiss bank accounts. Surely if a lower-level employee at a bakery or butchery siphons off some merchandise to get by, those with more economic access will have their petty hustles as well. This maneuvering has little to do with the “inevitability of absolute power corrupting people” and more to do with the human quest to make everyday living easier. The capitalist cliché of greedy human nature is a convenient way of explaining away inequality before the downtrodden even dare to rebel.
“The second economy,” commonly known as “the black market,” is a necessity for families to get by, but there is still a high degree of discipline and selflessness among everyday people. However, from the perspective of a fellow Cuban who sees what they perceive to be functionaries living across town in Playa or El Vedado with slightly more access to consumer goods and travel, this can be irritating and provokes resentment.
A Step Back in order to Advance
In 2010, Raul Castro introduced market reforms that Cuba’s detractors hoped were a harbinger for Cuba’s transformation back to a capitalist economy. Out of necessity, the state had to lay off 500,000 workers and made some cuts to the libreta de abesticimiento (the family ration book that every family has in their home). Due to shortages deliberately caused by the intensification of the trade embargo, Cuba’s inflation rate is an astronomical 39.1%. Financial blockades are designed to generate perilous inflation rates. Other blockaded countries fare even worse: Venezuela’s inflation rate is currently 250% and Zimbabwe’s rate last year peaked at 667%. In Cuba, one dollar is worth 315 pesos and a euro is worth 320 pesos. Access to dollars is the only way many people can eat. They can access the private Micro and Small Enterprises stores (MYPIMES) which sell food and other products at prices pegged to the dollar and euro. This means that to buy a pound of chicken in “the free market,” a Cuban will spend up to 20 percent of their monthly salary. For two weeks of milk, they may spend two weeks of their salary. Many PCC vets say this is their worst economic moment yet. One community leader told me: “We don’t have medication. I am a diabetic. We just keep losing weight. Look at these 25 pounds I have lost. Carlos Lazo’s Bridges of Love (Puentes de Amor) program helps us but it is not enough.”
How did everyday families experience this at the time of the reforms? The rations of coffee, eggs, rice, beans and other staples were cut back. Only pregnant women or the very sick received any beef. Rumors swirled that this was the end of la libreta, that is food subsidies, a lifeline for so many. At the PCC Congress in 2011, the elected leadership took one step back in order to take two steps forward. They were forced to open the island to foreign economic profiteering. Raul was depicted as a pragmatist, willing to work with foreign capital, whereas Fidel was understood to be a patriot who would not budge an inch. Cubans argued about which model was better.
The Secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba Miguel Diaz-Canel represents a continuation of these policies. Diaz-Canel, who rose up through the ranks of the PCC became president in 2021, inheriting a Cuba up against the twin challenges of the blockade and the pandemic. Many Cubans see him as the continuation of principled leadership; others are indifferent.
Communism is based on the idea of providing enough for everyone and moving towards creating abundance for all. Of little comfort are these ideas when Hans, a 21 year-old aspiring body-builder, is trying to gain muscle mass on a nutritionally-empty diet of bread, rice, plantains and a scant amount of meat. As we have seen, the U.S. war of aggression is both subtle and at times an all-encompassing psychological and economic war.
The tried and true tactic of creating exhaustion within a restive population has been employed against the Sandinistas, the FMLN, the Southern African liberation movements, Iran and many other nations who have dared to stand up to the U.S.’s unipolar designs. Syria just fell because of a long, dirty, imperialist war. There is no free communism, developing with the solidarity and blessing of the world powers. Again, this is “war communism.” Economic asphyxiation serves the U.S.’s objectives. But if they are not eating well in the neighborhoods of Arroyo Naranjo and Marianao, this is the reality in Regla and Playa as well. These are four municipalities on opposite sides of Havana which before 1959 represented the class and racial extremes in Havana. Some segments of the population, war-wary, battered and beaten down like a boxer in the 12th round who has had enough, are ready to submit. Cuba, a veteran of so many grueling heavy-weight fights, continues to adapt and push through the most challenging of times wondering out loud as so many families have expressed, “How much more of this can we take? Something has to give.”
Activist and musician Carlos Martinez’s The End of the Beginning: Lessons of the Soviet Collapse is necessary reading for all defenders of Cuba and other workers’ states. Martinez plots the historical timeline behind the 1991 coup that culminated in the end of the 1917 Russian Revolution. His research speaks to the challenges the Soviet leadership were up against in the final years of the USSR, much of which is all too relevant to Cuba today.
The Battle of Ideas
Fidel Castro highlighted the centrality of the ideological struggle, the showdown for the heart and soul of a people.
On the 66th anniversary of the earth-shaking, watershed Cuban Revolution, it is important to critically assess who is winning the war of ideas in Cuba. Many Habaneros urged me to tell their stories because they sense there is an over-glorification of Cuba’s reality by Western leftist tourists and solidarity activists. Many told me something has to give. Either the expanded BRICS nations will incorporate Cuba into their multipolar economic, political and diplomatic expansion or the vultures will finish Cuba off. There is no in between.
Cuba’s fight resembles the boxing career of Mohammed Ali. For the first three decades, the revolution was youthful, sharp, bold and invincible. Sumy’s generation fought for Angola, sent 4,000 internationalists soldiers to Syria in 1973 to fight Zionism and stood with Grenada and the Sandinistas. They admired and emulated the heroes of the revolution. This generation faces hunger, despair and isolation. With the collapse of the anti-capitalist rival pole of the Cold War era, Cuba has been left to fight on its own. Multipolarity is on the rise but as the Israeli-U.S.-Western genocide in Gaza and the temporary defeat of the Axis of Resistance shows, humanity is still years or perhaps decades away from transcending the reality of U.S. unipolar hegemony. Like Ali’s final rounds, exhausted, with his vulnerabilities exposed, the island nation still somehow miraculously pushes through, finding and inventing a way forward. Unlike a prize fighter, the descendents of José Martí and Fidel Castro have never had the option of giving up or retiring.
(The following article brings together several chapters from Danny Shaw’s forthcoming book Social Death: The Fake Left, Identity Politics and Cancel Culture. Thank you to the comrades at Midwestern marx institute for teaching me so much)
As the 2024 presidential elections approach, should we — the vast majority, the 99 percent, the working-class voters — be more concerned with who is the lesser of two evils or who is the more effective of two evils? Do we want to solidify the genocide in Gaza, the decimation of the Middle East and the Western capitalist-imperialist project or hasten its demise? This article addresses how the Democrats remain politically hegemonic and use wokeness in similar ways to the purportedly anti-establishment “movement left” to shore up anti-class politics and reproduce the status quo. It is the conclusion of Red America that both parties of the dictatorship of capital are dangerous but that the Democratic Party represents the more effective danger.
This essay will then show how certain segments of the left have adopted the snake-in-the-grass politics of the Democrats, relying on hollow virtue-signaling, or identity politics and cancel culture, as our lives as workers plummet more every day. The NGO left, or the fake or compatible left — toeing the line of the liberals who exercise political and ideological hegemony in the West — promotes a brand of anti-dialectical identity politics blurring the line between the left and the liberals. Only a determined return to a class politics that can unite us instead of dividing us along the myriad lines of identity is a winning strategy for all of us who have been denied our slice of the American dream.
Snakes in the Grass
Italian historian Domenico Losurdo’s Liberalism: A Counter-History makes the argument that liberalism has long been the ruling class’s preferred ideology. Liberalism provides cover for brutal, colonial content with a glossy, “democratic,” enlightened form.. As one year plus of the Gaza genocide now expands into the West Bank and Lebanon, Haaretz and CNN can still publish headlines where they are the good guys and the native Arabs are the despotic “terrorists.” Liberalism allows the capitalist elite to devour markets, resources and surplus labor across the globe, all in the name of “human rights” and “humanitarianism.” In Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Frederick Engels cites Henri de Saint-Simon, the early French utopian socialist who “points out how everywhere [under capitalism] the most pitiful reality corresponds with the most most high-sounding phrases.” Social critic Chris Hedges examines the case of Libya and Western “humanitarian imperialism.” The colonial West invoked the R2P, Right to Protect, to justify their bombing, dismemberment and recolonization of what was at the time of the 2011 War on Libya the richest country in Africa. Though Losurdo stops his study at World War I, there are chapters yet to be written about liberalism as the preferred ideology of the imperialists a century later. Syria, Nicaragua, Russia and beyond are in the crosshairs of woke imperialism. In fact, every sovereign or semi-sovereign state fights an everyday battle against ever-intensifying imperialist encroachment. The woke agenda has become part and parcel of the cultural and ideological machinery of imperialism. It is but one front in hybrid wars waged on Global South states and their quest for true independence.
Liberalism allows the snakes in the grass to present themselves as polished and civilized. The Trump-supporting conservative today, while generally a dedicated mouthpiece of capitalism and imperialism, is characteristically not as refined and says what they really think. It is enough to remember Prime Minister Emmanuel Macron welcoming the U.S. “back as a cooperative leader of the free world” when Joe Biden was inaugurated president in 2020. The capitalist class always prefers bourgeois democracy, that is the semblance of democracy, to any form of proto-fascism which reveals its true nature. The sleek Barack Obama was the perfect antidote to the graceless George Bush Junior. I was in Western Africa in Cape Verde at the time Obama won and it felt like all of Africa was pregnant with hope that at last the United States had moved beyond imperialism because the son of a Kenyan was president. How wrong they were then. And how wrong identity politics is now. On Tuesday November 4th 2008, Barack Obama won the elections, and overnight our anti-war marches for Iraq and Afghanistan went from having millions involved across the country to hundreds. In Obama, the ruling class had found their antidote to class politics – identity politics. As Professor Christian Parenti and journalist Chris Hedges have shown us “Wokeness Kills Class Politics and Empowers Empire.”
Kamala the Fox
The essence of liberalism is to project the appearance of real change while ensuring that power remains concentrated in the same corporate elite hands. Liberalism is close-minded and non-dialectical at its core because it seeks to preserve the present order. It is the fox Malcolm X warned us about who still “ends up with the lambchop on his plate.” Malcolm went on to explain who liberals are at their core: “The Negro community is controlled by the white liberal who usually poses as the friend of the negro, who actually differs from the white conservative in the same way that the fox differs from the wolf. Their appetite is the same. Their motives are the same. It is only their mannerisms and methods that differ.”
Kamala Harris is representative of the foxes the Democratic Party establishment parades out in front of its faithful. Harris showed moral outrage during the September 10th presidential debate when Trump accused Haitians and other immigrants of streaming across the border and “eating dogs and cats.” What ABC and the rest of the legacy media ignored is the fact that as Trump spouts his customary ignorant xenophobia, the Biden-Harris administration is invading and occupying Haiti for the fourth time in the past century. Trump Derangement Syndrome is everywhere, preventing Democratic voters from seeing that Biden’s health has dramatically deteriorated since he first assumed office. The liberals can’t sleep at night because of how “disgusting” they see Trump as being, and indeed he, his worldview and politics are anti-worker. Meanwhile, the Democratic administration in power is paying the neoliberal Kenyan government of William Ruto $333 million dollars to send mercenaries to invade, occupy and keep Haiti subjugated as a neocolony, because they could not get U.S. public opinion behind another invasion using U.S. boots on the ground. This is but one example of how shallow, liberal moral outrage often masks far more dastardly and sophisticated crimes.
As political analyst Dr. Wilmer Leon discussed on his weekly show “Connecting the Dots,” the Democrats specialize in “opportunistic outrage and morality.” The liberal obsesses over and warns of Project 2025 as Project 2023 and 2024, aka Project Genocide, intensifies, as does the censorship and repression in the West to justify the forever wars against Palestine, the Middle East, China, Russia and any other country that does not cower before U.S. unipolar domination. Meanwhile at home, one in four of us does not have work. Our children and siblings are dying of overdoses at the highest rates humanity has ever seen. Inflation, artificial intelligence and automation continue to bulldoze over working class lives, sparking a strike by the 50,000-member-strong International Longshoremen’s Association.
High-and-Mighty Hillary’s Disdain for Workers
Let’s return to Hillary Clinton’s infamous “basket of deplorables” quote from the 2016 presidential campaign. At one of her fundraisers in New York City, where plates of food sold for $33,000, Clinton told us how she feels about tens of millions of Americans:
“You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic—you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he [Trump] has lifted them up.”
The butcher of Libya and coup-monger of Honduras, and promotor of other foreign coups, has a right to sermonize us?
A faithful supporter of genocide, aka a Zionist, lectures us on Islamophobia?
Hillary Clinton thinks she is better than you and me. At Georgetown and Yale and throughout their careers, the Clintons mingled with the Bushes, Trumps and other ruling class figures. Liberals lecture about freeing Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan but what have they done for Houston, Cincinnati, and Brockton? “Freedom” in the (neo)liberal sense is the freedom of foxes to roam among chickens. All of the fancy, “globalist” (to use the Trumpian term, Marxists say imperialism) dogma seeks to “free” up any corner of the globe from Zimbabwe, to Bolivia to Vietnam, for further capitalist penetration.
What a disdainful view this career politician has of millions of our class peers.
Trump, a showman and hustler of the oligarchical sort, along with his advisors who are not far behind, are ingenious to call her “Crooked Hillary.” “Swamp,” “deep state,” and “Sleepy Joe” are sly, populist slang words that cut to the heart of liberal hypocrisy. No wonder my cousins talk about Trump like he is coming to their cul-de-sac in rural Manchester, New Hampshire to drink with them this weekend. He is their hero because he says what they feel. The problem is that this false prophet has tapped into their sincere anti-establishmentarianism with more racism, homophobia, xenophobia and misogyny designed to scapegoat and divide.
Sociology 101 teaches us that we are merely social creatures shaped by our social environment. No baby emerged from the womb saying “We’re gonna put watchtowers on the border with Mexico and put the mafia in them to shoot the Mexican illegals.” But this is exactly what we hear in Ohio and Indiana, and in “Trump Country” New York and Massachusetts. It is predictable. Study the means of communication. An uncritical populace consumes the media which manufactures consent. The nicest family man on earth sees his exploited neighbors to the south as “migrants” and “cockroaches,” as threats and as their enemy. Trump, the dog whistler, knows exactly what he is doing, and Democrats bring him tens of millions of voters on a tray.
Are the liberal-left, coastal elites just going to abandon “Trump Country” to our class enemies? Have we forgotten how to speak to our neighbors, teammates and coworkers and how to organize them through local struggles? Carlos Garrido’s book The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism was what first attracted this lifetime “leftist” to head (mid) west. I put the term “left” in quotations at various points of this essay because I no longer recognize certain parts or expressions of it. Garrido quips: “For these Marxists the traditional communist slogan is no longer “workers and oppressed people of the world unite,” it is “socially enlightened workers and oppressed people of the world unite.” He cites Lenin who reminds us: “one can and must begin to build socialism, not with abstract human material, or with human material specially prepared by us, but with the human material bequeathed to us by capitalism.” The cancel culture left has disgraced itself in the eyes of the masses of workers. If we cannot find common cause to organize with our “deplorable” sisters and brothers, why call ourselves Marxists? Calling ourselves charlatans, dilettantes and Clintonites would be more accurate.
There is a psychology chestnut or proverb that comes into play here; all obnoxiousness is a cry for help. Poor white people have as little control over the mainstream media, educational curriculum, family apparatus and religious institutions as do working-class black and brown people.
There are 12 LGBTQ billionaries in the world. There are 17 black billionaires in the world, mostly from Nigeria and the United States. There are 369 women billionaires in the world, almost all from the West or the colonizing countries. There are no poor white billionaires.
Trump is our enemy. “Trump Country” is not.
Trump the Wolf
Trump’s hateful rhetoric is not for liberals nor for us, the highly politically-literate, critical readers of this journal, , but rather it is for his base. Trump uses his billions to speak from a pulpit of class privilege to his voters, who are largely down-and-out, high-school-educated, working-class whites, and easy prey for his divisive, anti-worker scapegoating and conspiracy theories. Instead of correctly analyzing these class contradictions, liberalism in both its bourgeois and left iterations, has turned its back on the post-industrial working-class. “Trump Country” as the Midwest and other “deplorable” places are now often referred to, is nothing more than the inevitable product of neoliberal arrogance and economic neglect. These class contradictions, in both their bourgeois and petit-bourgeois manifestations, are partly what forces us to think of new forms of organization. The rejects, castaways and “deplorables” of liberalism and leftism demand their day in the sun too.
While Red America rejects the demagoguery and anti-poor worldview of the MAGA movement, on October 1st vice-presidential hopeful J.D. Vance said what has never been said on CBS news, a network owned by the billionaire, zionist Redstone family (originally the Rothsteins). Vance questioned Russiagate, the Democratic Party’s handling of COVID and the big-tech censorship that has stunted the active thinking of America. His opponent, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, a mouthpiece of liberalism who has paid his dues to rise up in the ranks, had no response to these points.
Liberals feel most comfortable wading in surface-level or symbolic politics, afraid to go deeper, less they inconvenience their consciences and lives. The more privileged classes will never see what is behind a Biden or Harris because it would impact their interests. How do we reach everyday Americans when they have been so thoroughly conditioned to think a certain way? The shadowbans, demonetization and algorithmic censorship around us tightens every day to make sure liberals and conservatives remain right where they are. It was the U.S. company Oracle and the House of Representatives that suspended hundreds of thousands of TikTok accounts for political content that was not favorable to empire. Any account today that critiques the U.S.-NATO proxy war against Russia and its geopolitical interests is being taken off social media. @DD_Geopolitics is one of the latest victims.
Though they hide behind their woke appearance, the Democratic Party today is the party of war and censorship. The GOP is by no means any less guilty, but this article addresses a fundamental question: are the Republicans as effective? This is not a personal slight against the millions of Americans who identify as liberals or conservatives, who are indeed the vast majority of us. These everyday “liberals” and conservatives,” including my family members, are good human beings on a personal level but are severely misinformed. Malcolm X reminded us: “Don’t be in a hurry to condemn [someone] because he doesn’t do what you do or think as you think or as fast. There was a time when you didn’t know what you know today.”
The More Effective Evil
This analysis is what led the late Executive Editor of Black Agenda Report, Glen Ford, to call Obama not the lesser of two evils, but “the more effective of two evils.” Ford wrote: “No matter how much evil Barack Obama actually accomplished during his presidency, people who call themselves leftists insist on dubbing him the Lesser Evil. Not only is Obama not given proper credit for out-evil-ing George Bush, domestically and internationally, but the First Black President is awarded positive grades for his intentions versus the presumed intentions of Republicans. This is psycho-babble, not analysis. No real Left would engage in it.”
The liberal is ensnared by individual oppression and loses sight of the big, anti-capitalist picture. They insist that we have no choice and “must vote for Kamala or you’re a fascist.” Without nuance and a dialectical understanding, liberal analysis ignores the creeping fascism that surrounds us everywhere.
Liberalism relies on the political mouthpieces they themselves have groomed. Trump is a clumsy, untrained loose cannon. In fact, this is his appeal. At times, he tells it exactly like it is. Trump told the world what we all knew but had never heard from the centers of power themselves: the war on Venezuela is nothing more than another war for oil. Imagine if other presidents told the truth in such a fashion? What impressionable young patriot would ever sign up for the U.S. military? The truth would throw into question the legitimacy of the entire system. Well-known and censored social media personality and organic intellectual Eddie Liger Smith explores the difference between Trump and a more polished, bewitching Obama who waged war on Honduras, Libya, Syria and beyond, but always claimed to do so in the name of democracy. Precisely because the national wrestling champion Smith and others of his generation reached millions with an anti-NATO and anti-genocide message, the ruling class has censored them.
Trump disobeyed the cardinal rules of bourgeois democracy and questioned the results and legitimacy of the system in 2020, throwing the entire system into crisis. His refusal to peacefully and diplomatically pass on power as the Obamas had done in 2017, when Trump and his wife Melania moved into the White House, is an example of how he is “unpresidential” from an elite perspective. Homelessness, unemployment and budget cuts are fair game for the capitalists, as are genocides, invasions and the squandering of hundreds of billions on foreign aggression. But being a sore loser and not accepting the results of the elections are a grave transgression. That is why both Walz and Vance have received strict instructions to pretend to be civil and nice to each other. Trump’s intransigence inspired the January 6th storming of Congress which as clumsy as it was could be analyzed as a type of coup attempt, albeit a pathetic one. Fox News declared Biden the winner in 2020 before any of the liberal outlets did. The ruling class was solidly united behind Biden, as the “Weekend-at-Bernie’s” puppet zombie they needed.
Trump marches to the beat of his own transactional drum. He pursues his own interests. The U.S.-NATO Proxy War on Russia is the heart and soul of the Biden-Harris White House’s foreign policy. The Kiel Institute for the World Economy tracks the total amount of military support the EU countries and the U.S. have sent to Ukraine which sits at about $100 billion dollars. Imagine Trump, with his bloated ego and opportunistic nature, daring to declare that he will end this proxy war on Russia before he is even elected president again. The two assassination attempts on his life have to be analyzed in this context. In fact the second would-be assassin admitted that “the Ukraine War,” that is the liberals’ propagandized version of the U.S.-NATO-Ukrainian ruling class war on Russia, motivated him to try to take out Trump. Trump would prefer to build 10 of his own hotels in Pyongyang and Moscow rather than see these handsome profits squandered in the coffers of the Military Industrial Complex. It is not that Trump is in any way morally superior to any other candidate, but rather that his style objectively clashes with the needs of the ruling class who are accustomed to grooming their own hand-selected politicians. This analysis has to be balanced with Trump’s threats against women reproductive rights, to deport masses of immigrants and to use the military to repress leftist protestors. Though Trump has a penchant for such bombastic statements and is often bluffing, every “minority” in the U.S. has a right to feel under the gun if Trump again wins the presidency.
America’s number one addiction is “The American Dream.” From an internationalist perspective, this mentality and ideology is called “American Exceptionalism.” To think that a Barack Obama or Kamala Harris became the CEO’s of the U.S. empire through simple hard work is the illusion the liberals feed us. Trump did not pay his dues and genuflect before the real power structure. Though a sleazy, real-estate mogul born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Trump did not work his way up through the traditional political circles. An economic insider, he became a political outsider. An economic swamp monster, he dared challenge the unchallengeable, the political swamp. His boldness and appearance of integrity calling out the fake, opportunist politicians struck a chord across working-class America. The actor and conman, elevated by self-interested TV networks, opportunistically usurped the voice of the common American and his life-long resentments against the ruling elites like Hillary and Bill Clinton. How can those whose life savings are roughly 500,000 times less than Trump, see in Trump their savior? (I arrived at this math by dividing Trump’s net worth, roughly $4,000,000,000 dollars by the median amount of savings American families have in their bank accounts which is $8,000.) Do any of us honestly think that Trump, Governor Burgum of North Dakota or Governor Pritzker of Illinois would ever sit down with us and actually feel any concern for our American problems? For so many of our class to embrace filthy rich billionaires, imagine how much we must hate the traditional politicians.
Trump is not a true leader; he is a huckster. A true leader, like Fidel Castro, Rafael Correa or Joseph Stalin, would have been there, no matter how right or wrong they were, in the trenches on January 6th. Trump sent his followers off to battle and went to play golf.
The Abandonment of the Working Class
The liberal left has abandoned so many of us to the detriment of class unity.
The pro-NAFTA, highly educated liberal intelligentsia mocked and canceled the poor whites of Appalachia and the opioid addicts of Fitchburg, MA, resulting in the MAGA insurrection among “the deplorables” that the liberal establishment now excoriates. Though I am 100 percent east coast, I identified with the rest of the castaways and threw my lot in with the deplorables of the Midwest and the rest of the U.S. This was what brought me (mid)west to work for one year and a half with the Midwestern Marx Institute. Large swaths of the left throw away the baby with the bathwater, ignoring the popular, anti-capitalist rage contained within the MAGA base. It is into this void that the MMI seeks to strategically place itself to absorb this righteous anger and channel it against the system. While we could never embrace MAGA politics, we refuse to condemn and turn our backs on MAGA’s base, millions of Americans who thrive for economic equality and justice.
Where else can we “deplorables” turn, if the woke left thinks they are better than us? How do we push back against the spectrum of liberal leftists who they felt were playing right into the hands of the Scapegoater and Demagogue in Chief? Who aspires to replace the Misguider-in-Chief? Effectively cashing in on the social alienation that so many working-class voters feel, Trump and his pro-billionaire politics cannot concretely resolve any of our people’s needs or demands, in 2028 or whenever, the pendulum will swing back to the liberal wing of the ruling class who will then cash in on Trump’s failures. How do we get our people off the merry-go-round of the two parties of capital? Keenly aware of the dead-end nature of both wings of the ruling class, we seek to reroute the popular frustrations and rage towards an effective struggle to bury liberalism, capitalism and all its billionaires once and for all.
The Left-Liberal Slippery Slope and its Slovens
It is important that we understand our number one enemy through and through. It is the opinion of Red America that both Trump and Kamala are bad for the working man and woman of the United States but that liberalism is our greatest threat because it lulls us deeper to sleep. The wolf remains outside of our circles, distant and recognizable, but the fox is crafty and able to infiltrate in beguiling ways. This essay will now concern itself with what happens when this devious enemy and its ideological expressions have seeped into “the movement.” As a 30-year veteran of “the left,” I no longer recognize a movement I helped build beginning in the 1990’s. Nonprofits, Gender Identity Politics and cancel culture are three 21st century pillars of a new liberalism that is eating the left from within.
Never did I think the day would arrive when the left had more in common with the Kamalas and Hillaries and turned its back on the average working man and woman. This is what fuels the right-wing media’s ability to pigeonhole and manipulate the movement. Despite the offensive nature of the comments, it is important to understand the perception of millions of American workers who now see the left as “nothing more than blue-haired, matcha-latte drinking college students and privileged bubble boys who want to be women.” MMI founder Carlos Garrido takes on the need for an authentic change in our organizing culture in Why We Need American Marxism, a must read for anyone in “the movement” who knows our salvation does not lie in Havana but in Harlan County, Kentucky and not in Caracas but in Cleveland, Ohio. How we wrest this movement back from the identity-obsessed, nonprofit foundations and alien liberal cancel culture is a question American Marxists can no longer delay.
The Trillion Dollar Nonprofit Noose
Fredrik DeBoer’s How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement takes on the burning question of “why so much of the political energy in this country gets diverted into affective and symbolic issues.” The former University of Rhode Island student organizer offers an overview of the George Floyd and Occupy organizing moments which mobilized millions but effected few if any real changes. DeBoer’s new book addresses why “then, very little happened.” DeBoer’s thesis is that “elite capture” wrested control over our movement.
His fourth chapter “The Non-Profit Industrial Complex” (NPIC) builds on a necessary read The Revolution will not be Funded. DeBoer dissects the deleterious effect that nonprofits have on organizing. Nonprofits grew out of the deregulation of the 1970’s and Reaganomics of the 1980’s which gutted the public sector. There are five main points the social critic raises:
Nonprofits siphon off revolutionary talent and channel it in a reformist direction. In the author’s words, “It’s the nature of nonprofits to take radicals and make them bureaucrats.” Quoting the National Association of Nonprofit Organizations and Executives, the author reminds us that “a successful nonprofit knows that their #1 Customer is their donors, period.” An adverse class oversees our social prerogatives, budgets and tactics. If we speak up too loudly about serving the people, we risk our jobs and grants. A high, undisclosed percentage of money goes to the maintenance and bureaucracy of an estimated 1.5 million nonprofits. A lower percentage of donations actually reach the “targets” or “shareholders,” to use nonprofit doublespeak.
As the nonprofit Common Dreams explains, or admits, “the purpose of the nonprofit sector writ large is not to solve social problems—it is to perpetuate them.” If the grant writers, Board of Directors or Executive Directors were to admit a problem was solved, though this is materially impossible under capitalism, how would they continue to justify the financing of their jobs? It is in their interest to only superficially address the opioid pandemic, the random shootings crisis or domestic violence. These problems are intrinsic to capitalism. Band-aid liberal solutions do not touch the underlying causes of social crisis. This is by definition. Nonprofits exist as tax havens for the rich, not as genuine instruments of working-class power. The women-owned executive search firm Battalia Winston asserts that 87 percent of nonprofit execs were white as of 2017. “Whiteness” is not just a racial measure in the United States; it is also a class measure. The bourgeoisie has captured the nonprofit world. There are more “member-led” grassroots groups who are ignored by the foundations precisely because they pursue social objectives independent of the NPIC.
The $1 Trillion NGO Republic
As of 2019, the Urban Institute’s National Center for Charitable Statistics documented 1.5 million nonprofits in the U.S. registered with the Internal Revenue Services (IRS). These nonprofits spent a combined $1 trillion dollars, which DeBoer calculates as 5.5 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic Product. The Non-Profit Industrial Complex employs more Americans “in terms of wages than finance, retail and food service.” Beginning circa 1973, neoliberalism reduced the number of unionized jobs, displaced many of the social services and other work done by this sector and rolled back, took back and cut back the safety net of welfare capitalism. The result was the proliferation of the non-profit sector which became the main site for social services and community organizing. This replaced a proud proletarian history of independent organizing, such as the Communist Party of the United States of America (the CPUSA) in the 1930’s and the Black Panthers and Rainbow Coalition of the late 60’s.
Parenti exposes the Professional Managerial Class (PMC) “tasked with managing a hierarchy, and protected by new [woke] armor in a Hobbsian war of all against all for posts and material incentives.” As organizers, are we aware of the disproportionate influence these professional activists have, backed by astronomical amounts of money? Contrast this with the resources that we have as everyday working-class volunteers. The liberal wing of the establishment uses their PMC agents to set agendas and priorities, and most importantly keep us divided into subcultures at war with one another.
The organizer and author DeBoer distrusts this “activist culture.” In balanced writing, overly fair to liberals, showing some of his own liberalism (he was published by Simon and Schuster after all), he denounces that “expressions are often the ends themselves. Canceling, or making critiques or accusations with the intent of provoking widespread personal and professional shunning, is an example of where the political action stops at the level of expression. ‘MeTooing’ proved to be perhaps the most powerful version of canceling, and individual targets have had their public personae effectively vaporized.” For Harvey Weinstein and R. Kelly this makes sense. What about everyday men who knew patriarchy but never knew Hollywood? Did losing their jobs, social media or reputation help them transcend their mistakes? Are people traumatized from living in this dehumanizing society acting out their traumas on people who look like their enemies? How can comrades and fellow travelers be held accountable without forgetting that they are human? Who is measuring this? Nonprofits who receive money according to their “Transformative Justice” (TJ) and “Restorative Justice” (RJ) results?
Is the point to isolate us into more acting out or to grow in community? Cancel culture isolates and atomizes; Marxist dialectical culture creates community and a way back.
Noah Khrachvik, Organizing Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute (MMI), levels the same criticisms against what he calls “the activist brain.” The Cleveland-based carpenter and Marxist theorist and teacher challenges the students of the Institute, posing necessary questions: Are we seeking to please the hundreds of us in online or in-person organizing circles or win over the tens of millions who do not know about, much less relate to, these small circles? Khrachvik calls them out in a forthcoming piece from the Journal of American Social Sciences called “Against the Fake Left.” Many at the MMI consider themselves as refugees, rejects and survivors of the left, more than traditional activists. It was precisely the liberal-left slope evaluated here that pushed us away. When we sought to work with the established left, they dismissed us as “Pat Socs” and “Nazbols.” In doing so, this fake, petty bourgeois left has shown their aversion to dialectics and their absolute disdain for us and everyday, humble Americans seeking to survive, fight back and win.
It is interesting to note that U.S. capitalist hegemony exercises the same strategy globally. If New York City and Los Angeles, as command posts of neoliberalism, are Republics of Nonprofits, how has the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) converted countries like Haiti and Ukraine into Republics of Western NGOs? The Foreign Policy Establishment, through mouthpieces like CNN and the New York Times, attacked Vladimir Putin as anti-democratic, anti-gay and anti-women. The most undemocratic institution in the history of humanity — the U.S. Military Industrial Complex — determines who is a dictator and who is a democrat? Woke politics keeps the flow of our tax dollars into the war chests. By learning about international struggles, we can more easily recognize the tentacles that suffocate us at home.
The term “deep state” is understood to be a MAGA term. DeBoer asks, is this phalanx of nonprofits not an example of “the deep state?” From a Marxist view, the term deep state is redundant. The state are specially armed bodies of men tasked with protecting and reproducing property relations. Whether “deep” or highly public, whether armed with guns, batons or endless deep, nonprofit pockets, the state exists to keep us in our place. While it is easier to see the police’s role, can we see how nonprofits and NGOs form part of the ruling state machinery? What anti-establishment roles can well-intentioned “lefties” play within nonprofits that have a base of oppressed people in neglected communities? Perhaps we should ask the 171 million people of Bangladesh where the U.S. government-funded “International Republican Institute trained an army of activists including rappers and LGBTQI people, even hosting transgender dance performances, to achieve a national ‘power shift.’”
“I Mistrust Sex Theories”
The German revolutionary leader Clara Zetkin sat down in Lenin’s study in the Kremlin to discuss women’s liberation in 1920. There is a reason the bourgeoisie spends so much time maligning and spreading misinformation about Lenin, the definitive leader of the Russian Revolution. The mentor of Trotsky, Stalin and two generations of Bolsheviks was crystal clear on questions of sex and sexual identity in the communist movement: “I mistrust sex theories expounded in articles, treatises, pamphlets, etc. in short, the theories dealt with in that specific literature which sprouts so luxuriantly on the dung heap of bourgeois society. I mistrust those who are always absorbed in the sex problems, the way an Indian saint is absorbed In the contemplation of his navel.”
What is the leader of arguably the most important event of the 20th century, the Russian Revolution, telling us? Stay focused on the class struggle. The gender-obsessed cottage industry of nonprofits, like that of “white privilege,” is by design. It divides us. It castrates the unity and strength of the movement. It directs all the attention towards identity politics and away from class struggle.
As CPUSA leaders Claudia Jones and William Foster, and Comintern leader Georgi Dimitrov and so many others lay out, “Marxist-Leninists fight to free woman of household drudgery, they fight to win equality for women in all spheres; they recognize that one cannot adequately deal with the woman question or win women for progressive participation unless one takes up the special problems, needs and aspirations of women – as women.” Red America is not critiquing honest attempts to defend proletarian women and their class interests but rather liberal outsiders who use this rhetoric to divide our class along identity fault lines. Women and the queer community have every right to justice, in every realm of their lives. And queer activists are not all “man haters,” as the right alleges. But the question stands for some who have not done their own healing but are on the front lines of “healing” others: does hating, punishing and isolating men or whites or any relatively socially-privileged group of our class bring women and the LGBTQ community justice? Who is the main enemy? Why are we attacking other people who are victims and organic opponents of the same system? What makes the entire “gay community” a community? A shared sexual orientation towards the same sex unites gay billionaires with gay homeless people? Giving up on any of our people is not an option. We sink together or we rise together. Which do you choose?
Now you know why the PMC hates Lenin. He was the chief theoretical force behind the emergence of millions of human beings from desperate prehistory into the realm of freedom. The PMC doesn’t want liberation; they want pronouns, promotions and profits. Pats on the back and more grants from important white, liberal donors are the PMC’s “revolution.” Toeing the line, these nonprofits that come out of the movement against police brutality (which became known as Black Lives Matter in 2014) and the queer movement are unthinking, proponents of Washington counter-revolutions from Kiev to Managua. This does not take away from the rank and file of member-led nonprofits who fight the system with everything they have; the critique is of the well-paid PMC agents who misguide the members.
Divide et Impera
Censored and fired doctor, Ranjeet Brar, puts the Gender Identity Politics phenomenon into the colonial continuum of capitalist ploys to divide and conquer the toiling classes. The labor organizer and his party The Communist Party of Great Britain sees these manifestations of Gender Identity Politics as “ultra-individualism” which “plays such a disorganising and reactionary role.” For courageous ideological and organizational stances, Brar and his party have endured attacks from all quarters on the slippery slope of the liberal left.
The term Gender Identity Politics refers to the liberal mainstream media’s obsession today with pronouns, “gender identity” and the entire edifice that has become known as the “Trans movement.” While this is a principled critique of the liberal capturing of “the left,” it is important to recognize how women, gay and trans comrades stood up to confront the racism, sexism and homophobia that plagued the movement itself. This analysis is not anti-people; it is anti-systemic.
It is of no concern to the communist, what any individual does with their body. What is of concern to the communist are petit-bourgeois theories and fads, what the right often calls “the transgender or activist agenda,” that infiltrate the thinking and everyday lives of our class. Today, how many “left” or “movement” spaces are in fact anti-working-class?
The very same legacy news cycle that ignores labor struggles whips up hysteria about setbacks and advances for different subsets of the gay community. A school curriculum that ignores the truth about U.S. foreign policy now has special focus on what they frame as our ability or right to change our genders. This is not an attack on any individual and their personal expression which is everyone’s inalienable right. It is a sociological evaluation which seeks to unearth the sources of the divisions and backbiting that characterize the left today. This new phase of gender politics is a priority of liberalism. It has a definitive ideological function. Making this connection does not seek to deny anybody their sexual freedom, but rather contextualize this new social phenomena.
Parenti reminds us that the Founding Fathers were the original proponents of Identity Politics. In the Federalist Papers No. 10, James Madison replies to the ruling class fear that the constitution was over-empowering the dispossessed masses who made the 1776 American Revolution (for more on the protagonist of our ancestors see Herbert Aptheker’s The American Revolution 1763-1783). A proponent of divide et impera (divide and conquer), the slave owner and aristocrat Madison had a surefire way to keep the propertyless from coming together to fight. He sought to divide the biggest faction, the have-nots, into subgroups or “factions” in order to obscure who the enemy is. The factionalism parachuted down between the rural and urban, black and white and different trades were the identity politics of that era.
In 1890, Frederick Engels wrote: “According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history.” What this means is the bourgeoisie consistently does everything in its power to reproduce social relations under its continuing control. Engels and Marx understood that every social phenomenon was perfectly explicable because they were rooted in the ruling class’s domination of its rival class, the working class. Translated to 2024, nothing around is coincidental. Think of any social phenomenon — alcoholism, gangs, segregation, high-school, dropout rates, single parent homes or any others. Taken as isolated facts, they are difficult to understand. But as we unpack what factors caused them to inevitably occur, we shed light on the dialectical reality that what can be done, can also be undone. Nothing is inevitable. Nothing is eternal.
The elites through mass media and social media have set workers and society against one another over secondary and tertiary contradictions. One worker hates another because one side sees the other as “transphobes” and the other hollers back “Go get a job you lazy, America-hating hippie liberals.” Lost in algorithm-fueled aggression are the central questions that plague society, mainly that eight individual billionaires now possess more wealth than half the planet. What appears to so many in the left of New York City or Los Angeles to be a life-and-death issue is the best of distractions from the issue leading to all of our annihilation, a small clique of billionaires who are burning the planet to the ground.
Canceled by the PMC
PMC is a term that writers Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined in 1977 in an essay for Radical America. They were searching for a term to describe “activists” or “salaried mental workers” who came from privilege and had managerial ambitions. Dissent author Alex Press defines the “Professional-managerial class” (PMC), as technocratic liberals, or wealthier Democratic primary voters, or the median Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member.” POC stands for “People of Color.” Black and brown communities or oppressed nationalities are another way of saying POC. We communists seek to unite all workers to fight against the common enemy while not denying for a second the history of white supremacy and xenophobia in the U.S. Is the goal to unite workers or further fragment them? Do the white and POC PMC seek liberty for all or chairs closer to the capitalist masters’ table?
The communists don’t want to cancel the MAGA workers conditioned to be racists from birth; we seek to cancel and rebuild the society that creates them. Chris Hedges’ article “Cancel Culture, Where Liberalism Goes to Die” makes the point that over 50 percent of the protestors who attacked the capital on January 6th were in desperate financial straits. His point is that within that multitude, there are good people who want to fight the very enemy with whom this very essay is concerned. But our people do not know how. Do we have the luxury of turning our backs on this complex and stratified group of people and scoffing at them as CNN and the Washington Post have done every day since January 6th 2021, and long before?
We should study cancel culture empirically. What impact have all the movement suspensions, expulsions and cancellations had? Have comrades from more stable class backgrounds been subjected to cancel campaigns? Who has bounced back and rejoined the left? Who went a different direction in life feeling like they left behind a cult? What are the racial, gender and class dynamics of cancel culture? Who is canceling who? Have comrades come back stronger, more sensitive and more committed, meaning as better revolutionaries? Because if that is not our goal, what is?
Is it even their goal?
PMC “leaders” want to maintain top-down, corporate organizational structures, opposed to collective, critical thinking. To reference my own personal experiences, I have repeatedly received letters and commands isolating and suspending me from the movement since 1996. They read like they were written by the Human Resources departments of a Fortune 500 company. And indeed, they have been. 95% of Fortune 500 companies now invest in lawyers and Human Resource and Diversity Equity Inclusion (DEI) infrastructure to avoid expensive lawsuits over discrimination. The merger of capitalism and hollow DEI initiatives is what gave birth to Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University’s Center for Anti-Racist Research. The liberal establishment poured tens of millions of dollars into such projects as tens of thousands of families down the street in Dorchester and Roxbury live below the poverty line. This well-trained cadre of experts are able to become millionaires, as long as their concern remains with “etiquette and aesthetics,” to again cite Parenti.
In a legal sense, their attitudes and “official” correspondence smack of bourgeois contractualism. The PMC agents are more concerned with walking a tightrope around legality than building an actual unifying movement. People can now be kicked out of small Palestine solidarity organizing groups if they make someone else feel “uncomfortable.” Liberal bullying of others ensures that the bureaucrats stay on top. Identity politics and abstract talk about “structures of power” which focus exclusively on race, gender and sexual orientation is a convenient way to deflect from liberals’ own class origins and interests. Identity Politics is their petit bourgeois shield to make sure they never have to give up their own sinecures and access to power.
This offers the Non-Profit Industrial Complex many “victories” to stand on. These are “victories” that include the disposing of revolutionaries, “victories” that keep the NGO complex going because it funds their machinery and “victories” that fragment our movement.
True dialectical leadership and dialogue potentially exposes an organization’s shortcomings, forcing a new understanding, a resynthesizing or an ascension to a new concrete. A true reckoning with the class dynamics of cancel cultures forces all of us to grow but liberal wreckers and cancellers only seek to grow their egos, power and savings accounts.
Cancel Culture: Appearance versus Reality
Anarchist AK Press’s Beyond Survival: Strategies and Stories from the Transformative Justice Movement reads as an authoritative work on community strategies to keep everyone safe. It is nearly impossible to find anything objectionable in the eloquent words of the dozens of contributors and practitioners of this work. There is no intention of taking anything away from honest individuals who work with these collectives. In anticipation of the critics, trapped in their own “safe spaces” and liberal silos, who may refuse to engage with this work, no conclusions are ever black or white, that is cut or dry. They are dialectical. Even in the most well-funded liberal bastions of identity politics, there are kernels of truth. For example, no Marxist could deny that there is a history of hate crimes and murders of people because their sexual orientation is not the dominant societal one. Nor could we deny that there is a history of sexism that has hurt social movements. Discipline is a must; cancel culture is petit bourgeois.
For Ejeris Dixon and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha the editors of Beyond Survival, the easy part is filling the pages with beautiful words and concepts; the challenging part is how to apply it in real time and real life. My own experiences and research confirm how some of the organizations and individuals who put this anthology together betrayed their very own creeds. Regardless, of my prefaces and disclaimers these liberal forces will continue to dox, bully and cancel us. They have to. That is their job under neoliberal capitalism. In fact, they already have. Too many times to count. Now, how can they accuse the accused, dox the doxed, or cancel the canceled? Most of us who have these critiques have already been threatened and marginalized and are on the outside of the movement. What do we have to lose at this point?
In a chapter entitled “Beyond Firing: How do we Create Community Accountability for Sexual Harassment in our Movements,” Amanda Aguilar Shank offers the compelling, feel-good-story of Francisco. Francisco worked at Voz Hispana (Hispanic Voice). He had a track record of stalking, intimidating and forcing himself onto women colleagues. Dozens of women avoided him while many others fell victim to his aggression.
Aguilar Shank walks the reader through the process of isolating Francisco from the movement. Francisco was a veteran of the Salvadoran resistance to the 1980’s U.S. Wars of Aggression against Central America. In his combat experience, the former FMLN guerrilla saw murders and massacres perpetrated by U.S.-trained and funded Contras. He had flashbacks of military intelligence officer Major Roberto D’Aubuisson and the other CIA-trained torturers who murdered an estimated 50,000 Salvadoreans to ensure that El Salvador remained part of the U.S.’s neocolonial backyard. In Franscisco’s case, we can observe a basic law of psychology, trauma and capitalism. The terrorized terrorize their comrades. The traumatized traumatize their coworkers. The denigrated denigrate their colleagues.
Ultimately, according to Aguilar Shank, Francisco did the work, was rehabilitated and rejoined the movement, making amends for the damage he caused. This was a tremendous tale. How motivating that someone misogynistic, sick and suffering had reinvented himself. There was only one problem with this happy-ending story. It did not line up with the reality of “the movement.” I have no way of confirming or debunking Aguilar Shank’s account and in theory her account deserves much praise. It was the right way to deal with an abuser and survivor like Francisco. However, neither myself nor any of the other survivors of cancel culture I work with knew of this particular case. The happy-ending blueprints Beyond Survival lays out is not how so many of us have experienced these nonprofits and their cancel culture. We have rarely seen these types of successful results in the world of “transformative justice.” We have a liberal left before us where TJ and RJ are preached by many and practiced by few. In dozens upon dozens of cases I’ve experienced or observed, the PMC’s preferred weapons are isolation and whispering campaigns. None of this is considered by Dixon and Piepzna-Samarasinha, two pop stars of the nonprofit industry.
While the fairytales of woke triumphs dominate their worldview, it is foolhardy for revolutionaries to ignore the reality on the ground. The triumph of wokeism sounds the death knell of Marxism. “The left” has become obsessed with finding purity in their ideology and methods. This was exactly what the ruling class foresaw and adapted to. Liberal foundations have armed and funded sections of “the movement” to do their dirty work for them.
“The Progressives” and their Distorted Sense of Progress
Malcolm made it plain yet again: “I will never say progress is being made. If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made. And they won’t even admit the knife is there.” This quote applies to all our struggles from Gaza to Greensboro, Beirut to Asheville. The reformist left has led us astray.
Parenti’s work outlines the exploiting class’s many underhanded moves to subvert the growth of class consciousness. He begins with the post-WWII Taft-Hartley Law which banned solidarity strikes when unions wanted to stand with one another, the Congress of Industrial Organizations’s (CIO) purging of Marxists and the Smith Act which enabled the government to hunt down communists as criminals. After undermining class politics, they swooped in with foundations to build a compatible left. Karen Ferguson’s Top Down: The Ford Foundation, Black Power, and the Reinvention of Racial Liberalismtracks “the white liberal effort to reforge a national consensus on race which had the effect of remaking racial liberalism from the top down—a domestication of black power ideology that still flourishes in current racial politics.” The $16-billion Ford Foundation built its own “black movement” which was a cheap mimicry of Malcolm’s fledgling Organization of Afro-American Unity and the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. The owning class’s entire focus was on race, black Nationalism and the co-optation of leadership and discourse to elevate divisive, race politics over class politics.
The former German parliamentary leader of the social democratic party Die Linke (The Left), Sahra Wagenknecht wrote the book The Self-Righteous: My counterprogram – for Social Cohesion and the Public Good. She critiques the German left who she sees as having abandoned workers to live in their own holier-than-thou, pharisaic bubbles. She sees the two key features of “left-liberals” as “having extreme intolerance towards anyone who does not share their view of things and fighting for quotas and diversity, i.e. for the unequal treatment of different groups.” She quotes a summer 2020 letter by 153 intellectuals from different countries, including Noam Chomsky and J. K. Rowling: “The free exchange of information and ideas … is becoming more restricted by the day. While we expect this from the radical right, an atmosphere of censorship is also spreading in our culture.” With concern they see “Intolerance of dissent, public denunciation and ostracism and the tendency to turn complex political issues into moral certainties. We are paying a high price, in that writers, artists and journalists no longer risk saying anything because they fear for their livelihoods as soon as they deviate from the consensus and do not howl with the wolves.”
As promised prominently on their website, the Sparkplug foundation which has total assets of $7.07 million awards grants to “Black, Indigenous, People of Color, people with disabilities, women, lesbian, gay, bisexual, pansexual, transgender, queer and other queer-identifying communities, organizations or organizers.” What unites everyone of these identity-based groups? They focus on specific tiny, ever-fragmented and shrinking demographics. The Sparkplug foundation embraces every shade of gender identity and sexual orientation and rejects every communist. Follow the money and we can learn to what extent the state has its hand in the cookie jar of the merry-go-round of sectarian protests across the U.S. Having marched hundreds of times with every expression of the left for three decades, I do not speak from a place of bitterness, but rather one of recognizing the class character of “our movement” today. To not do so, would be a disservice to the only struggle we can all be loyal to, the class struggle. Only along class lines can we unite the struggle to free everyone who is oppressed because of their race, sex or sexual orientation. Identity politics diverts us into liberal deadends. Class politics are the mighty tidal waves of internationalism the Bolsheviks of 1804 and the Haitians of 1917 rode all the way to power.
Different groups in the movement to stop the genocide in Palestine are at war with one another. If anyone raises questions about disunity in a time of genocide, they are shut down. The irony is that almost all of these groups receive money from foundations that push a divisive, anti-dialectical agenda.
Who would have thought that censorship, intolerance and repression would end up flowing from the woke liberal mobs and their social media shock troops? “A left” conditioned to think of the MAGA base or “the right” as the enemy cannot see the anti-proletarian, anti-dialectical hogwash in our midst because it masquerades as “progressive.” Every day the holocaust in Gaza progresses, while they consider themselves more “progressive.”
“We Don’t Believe in Isolation, Just Don’t Come Around Us or the Movement”
The above quote captures how the liberal left talks left but walks right.
The gurus themselves Adrienne Maree Brown, Ejeris Dixon and others are but a few of the superstars of the LGBTQ non-profit movement. It is a must to follow the money to locate what class forces support their stardom. If Beyond Survival’s approach is truly part of dismantling this system, why would so many liberal foundations embrace it so wholeheartedly? What is missing is class analysis.
This impassioned, 10-chapter collaboration serves as a manual of sorts but where are the testimonies of those charged with harm who came out on the other end as better comrades? Who was not banished into spiritual Siberia, forever judged as a bad person? One of the most important things we can lead with as Marxists is that we never give up on our people. No matter how down and out and traumatized one may be there is a way forward.
Brown themself speaks for many of us when they critique the call-out culture many of us have succumbed to and participate in. Who can deny the dopamine hit from seeing a high-profile “as*h*ole” get outed in front of the world? They ask if it is “transformative justice when we are throwing knives and insults, exposing each other’s worst mistakes, reducing each other to moments of failure.” Those who consider the words of the PMC hypocritical are correct. It is this author’s contention that through a dialectical lens there are kernels of truth we can rescue from these petit bourgeois politics.
Brown’s provocative question, “Is it possible we will call each other out until there’s no one left beside us?” reminded me of the poetic reflection inspired by the anti-Nazi, German, Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller: “First They Came:”
“First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me”
While a comparison to the Nazi war machine is overblown, the question persists: Where is the woke left leading us?
First they came to cancel the white comrades
because they were taking up too much space.
Then they came to cancel the men
because they made us uncomfortable.
Then they came to cancel those over 35
because they were using the wrong words.
Next we came to cancel the heterosexual people
because they could not relate to our terminally-unique oppression.
Then we canceled ourselves
and there was no one left to speak for us.
Marxists Never Give Up On the Masses: Towards Dialectical Justice
Isolation or Social Death is not how we will treat our sisters and brothers in the class struggle. We will not give up on our fellow Americans and class sisters and brothers because of the hegemony of the Democrats and their left-liberal allies.
At this juncture, “Restorative Justice” and “Transformative Justice” are empty buzzwords and paradigms that have been thoroughly maligned and hijacked by the nonprofit world. These cliches have been used to purge the working-class movement of the poor and the impure. Objective necessity demands a new approach.
Dialectical Justice creates space for conflict and contradictions to exist without encouraging us to vilify, exclude and cancel one another. It admits that organizing the schools of communism Lenin helped theorize and build will necessarily involve finite steps back to take infinite steps forward. I use the term “Dialectical Justice” to differentiate the Marxist or class-struggle approach to ensuring there is justice, discipline and equality in our organizing ranks. While Dialectical Justice will surely never be a Department of Education or academic buzzword, it captures the spirit of the collective healing process a truly revolutionary movement deserves. What unites these other groups who have got it wrong is the class reality that petit bourgeois politics were in command. We can do better when our parties and organizations are not infiltrated and dominated by class interests alien to our own.
Why are the liberals only interested in identities and feelings? Because that is where they can hide. Dialectical logic and growth, which Mao Zedong and the Chinese leadership referred to as “Unity, Struggle, Unity,” exposes the deadend that is liberal identity politics. If we cannot overcome this liberalism, we will continue to cannibalize ourselves. Dialectics is the real movement of history. If you are looking to join a fighting organization, search for one who doesn’t just talk the talk, but walks the walk.
Marxists have a dialectical sense of justice and see the folly and hand of the capitalists in the infantile Cancel Culture. It will be important to further elaborate on these concepts, first through practice, then through theoretical summations. The best way to critique the snakes in the grass in the Democratic Party and the liberal left is to build the dialectical pole of justice.
MMI founder Eddie Liger-Smith said it best at the conclusion of the Free America to Free Palestine conference in Dearborn, Michigan in May of 2024: “And for those people who do nothing but deride, attack and smear us, guess what, the door will always be open. We’ll be here building when you get over your purity fetish and you come and decide to help us change this social system into one that actually serves the people!”
Join us! We won’t betray you. We won’t turn our back on you. We won’t cancel you. Because we never have. We are the Congress of the Canceled and the Convention of the Condemned. Without over-glorifying the task before us, we see the potential in everybody. Materialist philosophy teaches us that what can be done, can be undone. We can combat and transcend centuries of indoctrination, disunity and underdevelopment and free America and the world once and for all.
(Some of us in the Midwestern Marx Institute were forced to go our separate ways once Eddie, Noah and Carlos fell under the sway of Kyle Pettis and Ali “Haz” Hammoud. Nonetheless, I will forever be grateful for what I learned from my comrades in Cleveland, Carbondale, Dubuque and beyond.)
Ali "Haz" Hammoud from Dearborn, Michigan. Narcissist-in-Chief of the now defunct ACP.
January 2nd 2025
On the Cultishness and Liberalism of Ali “Haz” Hammoud & the ACP Executive Board
Danny Shaw former Politburo of the now-defunct ACP
This is the first of a series of internal communiques that I distributed to the Executive Board and Politburo of the American Communist Party to raise the alarm about cultish and corrupt tendencies within the leadership. You will soon see how they responded.
There is indeed a lot of liberalism, and it starts at the top. Good for Christian and John for starting to call out some of the bullshit. The general culture we are establishing is one of every man for himself realpolitik. From the very top, there has been lying, manipulation, arrogance, mental illness and a severe lack of communication. We have yet to learn to work with one another. In the first year, that has to be our goal — to establish trust among ourselves that can radiate through our ranks. I distrust many of you. Many of us were in the process of calling an emergency meeting. Here are some of the reasons.
Unchecked Testosterone & Larping
I joined the ACP based on the understanding that this would be a higher synthesis of Infrared, Midwestern Marx, Konstantinos, myself and others’ leadership and experience in the class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle. So far, only one tendency has dominated and everyone else has fallen in line. This is not communist leadership. This ship will sink very quickly and many people will take great delight in seeing us fractionalized into different sects plastered on their X feeds. Sectarianism goes viral; real Marxism is suppressed.
What I see is a lot of Larping. And then we critique the chapters because they are Larping? It is a shit show here in New York. These 5 months have been disappointing. How easy to blame the terminally-online gamer kids like Spiros. The human material we are working with is of an unprecedented historical character. This is the Anxious Generation. The Fragile Generation. The Online Shit-Talking Generation. We need to go back deep into the laboratory. We need a leadership retreat to get on the same page, not one where Kyle sits Haz down above us in a throne to dictate orders to us. We need a meeting where we are treated as equals and learn from one another. I was unimpressed with our ability to communicate in Dearborn and later Chicago. Has it occurred to any of you that we have no idea what the fuck we are doing? We need real leadership. We need accountability. A chicken cannot produce a duck egg. We are fostering all types of sectarianism. We are immersed in the unproductive Culture Wars and are overemphasizing profilicity. We have a limited sense of what the proletariat of this country is. How do we balance our online engagement with real life engagement?
People around us and within our ranks are noticing our 20-year-old arrogance at all levels of the party hierarchy. Who thinks they know it all? Where is the desire to learn from Marxist experience? I see “leaders“ more concerned about views on social media and getting a paycheck than building a communist culture. Marxist leaders tap into the leadership of others and develop their talents. They don’t walk around calling everybody “fa&&ots” when they themselves are behaving like the chief insecure little bitches. Put up or shut up. Have some humility. For leaders to cash in on the success but to ignore the failures is cowardice and opportunism.
Liberalism and Fear
How many of you “leaders” are afraid to speak up?
“The chairman” shows up to Politburo meetings when he wants to. We can all wait because he “has to take a shit” or because “there are fat fa&&ots who are in his way bench pressing at the gym.” If Haz is so compelled, he can cancel or postpone any meeting. On other occasions, he swashbuckles into meetings late, issues his holy commands and disparate ideas and then says: “Ok I’m out. I don’t need to be here for anything else.” By anything else, he means the contributions of the 18 members of the Executive Board and Politburo (PB). Slava, Brigid, Noah and the rest of his acolytes do not dare question his lack of professionalism.
I thought I joined the party of Why We Need American Marxism, not a party of cowards.
Most of us PB members have actual jobs and children who depend on us. We don’t have the luxury of showing up whenever we want to. We often don’t know if the chairman is about to quit the party or die for it. And much of this plays out publicly on Kick. He cuts people off and pretends to know everything. This is not a people person. This is his little fiefdom and the yes men who surround him enable him because their eyes are greedy.
I was going to request an extended meeting of the Politburo where we can freely air our resentments and grievances without fear of reprisals. And then, when Haz senses the walls are closing in around him, he opportunistically calls for a meeting because “certain harmful tendencies lurking within the culture of the Politburo will be brought openly to the fore and criticized ruthlessly.” This surely means Haz will be beginning tomorrow night’s meeting with a self-critique. There is growing evidence that there are severe mental health issues involved here that need to be addressed immediately before we do more damage to the ACP. At tomorrow night’s meeting, if Haz and Kyle try to dominate and monopolize the time, Fuck that. We should all have a 5 minute period to say our piece (or more if it is necessary).
Enough is enough. How many comrades are already thinking about quitting? The tone of this internal communique is commensurate with the challenges before us. The burnout is already kicking in. This leadership is failing us. We need a fresh start.
Ali “Haz” Hammoud, wrecker of the ACP.
The Cruelty of the “Chief Larpers”
Kyle and Haz lead with cruelty. That has to be countered. This is not the spirit of a communist.
Do they somehow think that calling everybody a “fa&&ot” will impress the masses? The masses are sensuous, they live in the real world. The masses push for materialism, not idealism. The rcp and Bob Avakian do this fake liberal thing too, cursing all the time as a way to make themselves sound tough. You may know the kids online but you don’t know the U.S. working class. They can see through the fake shit.
Why are we always so worried about what is happening online? Andrew Saturn and Johnny Socialism are the arch villains of the proletariat? You are so concerned about outside affairs, but our own house is not in order. Where is the study of the proletariat? Where are the organic connections? Get off-line and go coach local teams, go to a community board meeting etc. as Kyle said in his riveting speech in Chicago. If we cannot lead with this example, what example are we establishing? If we do not get our shit together, there will be a series of online resignation letters, confirming the critiques. If you are offended by this, wait until somebody airs it out on social media!
What percentage of our time is spent on online nonsense? This is the polarizing terrain of the class enemy. It is the crack that many of this generation cannot avoid. Let’s develop on both fronts. None of this critique takes away from any of your talents. Kyle is a good organizer. But Kyle is realpolitik. He does not have integrity. He will stab you in the back when it is convenient for him. This is about Kyle and his need to dominate everything, not about the ACP. He leads with his insecurities and inexperience. No one buys that he is a 50-year-old Teamster who knows everything. Lots of bark, some bite. I have to imagine Kyle has a better side to him. I doubt proletariat women like Slava or his partner would allow themselves to be walked over by bullies like him.
Kyle and I agreed on a key thing when we met a year ago in Carbondale and St. Louis. These terminally-online kids need to continue to ground themselves in their communities. This is one of the most positive things we have done. We have to keep pushing this. Otherwise, why would anyone respectable come anywhere near us and our arrogance? If you all just want sinecures, a fiefdom and platforms for your egos, let us know now so we don’t waste more of our time. There is also a creeping tendency to delegate more and more personal work to “lower ranking members.” We should not be abusing anybody’s time. This will lead to resentment and burn out. It already is. We have all sacrificed a great deal for the ACP. We all deserve respect.
The ACP’s Baptism by Fire
Haz is impulsive. He makes decisions before he has read something or as he is reading it. Haz is indeed talented. His talents are his talents, but his weaknesses are his weaknesses. If we do not play to his strengths, we will bury this project in its infancy. Haz flies by the seat of his pants. He is not organized. How does this play out in real life?
On the second day of the Amazon DBK4 picket line, one of our ACP Autistic-Comrades-in-Chief awkwardly cornered a worker. This was no conversation. This was a monologue. The ACP rep had been practicing for hours in his head how to introduce the party to these noble workers. He had been debating for days if he should wear his red ACP hat and how he would physically fight the dsa if he had to. He had read so much Marx and Mao, watched so much Haz and now here he was. I watched on from a safe distance. Some minutes went by and I could see there was only one reason the worker was putting up with his incessant rhetoric. The worker was high as a kite. The disconnect was comedic. It reminded me of the Trotskyite groups that have been embarrassing themselves on picket lines my entire life.
Sectarian and obsessively online behaviors must be discouraged. They are anti-social and anti-worker.
We have many worker contacts that we met at the Queens picket line. I could grab a beer with a bunch of them. But why would I bring them around the ACP?
Our presence on the picket line was partially embarrassing. There were some good moments, but in general, we have no business critiquing the psl or the dsa if we ourselves cannot prove ourselves on the class barricades.
The EB fashions itself above the rank and file. The rank and file do not know how to reach the masses. I do not pretend to know everything you all know about profilicity in the social media age. I recognize the talents and potential, or I would not be here. I believe in every one of you but if we do not address these and other issues here in a Democratic Centralist way, we will combust long before we reach our one year anniversary. I wonder how many “ACP members“ at the national and local level are already silent on Telegram, or have already dismissed us because of our larping and weaknesses. Do you assume for a second that there are no people in our ranks, hostile or not, taking notes of all these tendencies?
What experience do our “leaders” have? They deserve all the credit they deserve. But this does not give them a free pass to destroy this party, which now belongs to all of us. This is not Infrared. This is not the autistic days of complaining like a little premadonna bitch all the time. We promised we would be professional. We are losing our way.
“Russian Agents”
It is worth noting that 3 of our EB members are in Russia when there are so many urgent matters to tend to here at home. Did the party take full advantage of the Teamsters Amazon strike? What lessons did we draw? An emerging leader with labor organizing experience here in NY and I published an article taking a closer look at the strike. I heard very little feedback from anybody in the ACP. Here at the chapter level, I wonder if anyone even read it. They are too busy chasing online drama and dopamine hits.
Konstantinos has demonstrated the most poise, approachability and humility with leadership. His experience shows. He is a leader who does not give off a vibe of superiority. I am however concerned the state could produce a Uhuru 3 type indictment of him and us. We are swimming in risky waters but a lot depends on Trump’s reshuffling of the billionaires’ state. But for a party still in its embryo, we are handing the state an entire case against us. Is this wise? I wrote an extensive article for Cover Action Magazine looking at the class character of the Russian Federation and its leadership. There’s nothing wrong working with them, but we should not be taking our political cues from them. This is not the Soviet Union.
What good are our accomplishments and accolades in Russia when we have neglected the home front? It feels like we are uniquely testing the reach of the state based on our desire for peace with Russia. If there is a return to Patriot Act like cases, would we be the first targeted? Hopefully the political contradictions will leave this space open for us but we have to lead with more caution, and less adventurism.
It is clear our priorities are outside of the U.S. and in cyberspace. If we are really going to work together, we have to trust each other.
“The Haiti Experts”
On November 1st, I was tricked into coming to a sit down with Dan Cohen and Kim Ives that culminated in a most unfortunate way. This was not dialectics. If you all are the life-long experts on Haiti, why didn’t you set up a meeting beforehand to convince me of this? You lied to get me into a meeting with 2 individuals I identified as liars and opportunists. Then when I pushed back, Kyle started screaming at me that “he is in the Executive Board and I have to do what he says.” It is all recorded and Haz promised on several occasions to share the video. I was shell shocked and disgusted to watch this double dealing play out. When I confronted Kyle about it later, he just blamed it all on Haz and his inability to organise.
Where is the communication? Where is the democratic centralism? For hours, leading up to the Nov. 1st meeting, I was on the phone with Kyle.
After much imploring from Eddie, Noah and Carlos over the summer, I attempted to work more closely with Kyle. He had already attempted to manipulate a misunderstanding in Dearborn over the Memorial Day weekend when we formed the Institute for a Free America. Kyle is a catastrophizer. Kyle makes mountains out of mole hills. He seeks to present situations as if he was indispensable to resolving them. This does not take away from the arduous work he has done. But he has a need to take hold of situations so he can exploit them and look like “the man.” His manipulation of a misunderstanding in Dearborn culminated in his contact, the E-girl Nickie, who he was promoting at the time, trying to dox me on stage at a meeting of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform in Washington D.C.
Noah, Eddie, Carlos & I before they became unrecognizable to me as “Executive Noah, Executive Eddie & Executive Carlos.” This photo reflected the better times before I saw how putrid the ACP was through and through.
In the run up to the Haiti meeting, Kyle told me: “Christian and the other Colorado fa&&ots have no clue about Haiti. We have to listen to the expert who has been on the ground there.” He buttered me up. He tried to finish all my sentences, saying that he agreed with my conclusions about the class struggle in Haiti. He said the ACP was taking direction from me. As soon as Haz got on that zoom, Kyle did an about-face and did what he is best at, sucking up to Haz. After talking so much shit about the “fa&&ot opportunists Cohen and Ives,” within minutes, he was all smiles, sucking up to them. I learned a lot that day about the ACP.
In the lead up to the meeting, Haz promised me that no matter what we were going to be united because we are ACP comrades. He also told me “the masses in Haiti and everywhere were nothing, that they were a nonfactor.” He was all over the place. If the ACP is not about mass upheaval and mass empowerment, what is it about? Your wanna-be tankie warlordism is not a Marxist view. It is infantile, far-left adventurism. If that is what your Russian sponsors want, ok. But be honest about it! If you have no interest in organizing with the masses of Haiti, what is your motivation? Has the “Haiti expert” even read my 27 years of research on Haiti?
If you all wanted to meddle in Haiti through Russia, why didn’t you inform me? Autistic Tweedle Dee and Suck Up Tweedle Dumb just pointed the finger at one another. I am not going to jail or putting the party at risk because one of you is a narcissist and the other is an asskisser. (The author has publicly apologized for these statements here and should have been 100 percent clear when speaking on such sensitive matters.)
After they tried to humiliate me, Kyle told me I should be more invested in the ACP because I have so much to offer. Every critique I’ve brought to his attention, he says “Exactly. That’s why we need you to step up. I am trying to convince Haz and the others.” I doubt the sincerity of that.
In the course of those days, Carlos called me with a laundry list of complaints about my work. When I brought up Kyle’s manipulation, they made excuses for him because he had a “rough abusive childhood.”
My former close friend and ideological partner in crime, Carlos, who chose a paycheck and profilicity over Marxism. I look forward to seeing him grow through all of this. Inexperience is most forgivable.
Comrades: our trauma and mental health issues are no excuse to act like children. We have a responsibility to our comrades to get this right. Get help if you need. Do not waste our time and put us and the party at risk. We are here to support anybody who needs help.
Kyle has good organizing skills but he shows too much ego. Ego is not your amigo. I don’t respect liars. I don’t respect opportunists. I actually like the kid despite his need to control everything. If these egos are not kept in check, I don’t see this leadership taking us anywhere. Many of you are behaving like cowards! You will never attract real proletarian fighters at this rate.
After this reckless adventurism and duplicity, I was forced to submit a written affidavit of these events to my lawyers. And I still tried to build this party! Not because I believed in you all but because I had a commitment to dozens of solid Marxist Leninist comrades I met from across the U.S. and Canada.
For the New and Young Comrades:
None of us with these critiques which will all be aired tomorrow are coming from a sectarian place! Nobody should be talking about quitting or splitting. We need everyone to step up. The American people and humanity need the ACP! Some of you are brand new to the struggle. None of your work has been in vain. I have critiqued comrades here because it is necessary; it is not personal. I will work with anybody who is willing to fight against this decadent genocidal system! But do not expect me to trust you until you take responsibility for your dishonesty and manipulation. Imagine if our comrades across this country who look up to us knew the truth about our dysfunction? We cannot allow this to get to that level of demoralization.
We call ourselves a Marxist-Leninist Party and we aim to be the emerging army of the American working class.
As Mao said: “The popular masses are like water, and the army is like a fish. How then can it be said that when there is water, a fish will have difficulty in preserving its existence? An army which fails to maintain good discipline gets into opposition with the popular masses, and thus by its own action dries up the water.”
This means that the human material that comprises our ranks must be disciplined and they must be rooted within the masses. The very human material that comprises the majority of our party, and this goes up the chain of leadership itself, is composed of many people who are not rooted among the people whatsoever and have very little discipline.
Our active recruits are terminally online comrades who have not been properly vetted, have little to no organizing experience and are poorly socialized individuals in general. At the recent NY Holiday Party in Buffalo, a 20-year-old comrade and “chapter executive,” and another younger comrade blacked out drunk. If our comrades cannot even organize a mere party properly and maintain the most basic standards of discipline, how on earth can we expect ourselves to defeat the imperialist ruling class?
There needs to be a major transformation and reorganization of the ACP. We are at a sink or swim moment. Just because someone is a gifted writer, speaker or intellectual, does not make them a leader. We do not have the right people in the right place. The leadership selection process was expedited because we were launching something new with inexperienced Marxists. Do we need a chairman right now who is not even mentally stable? Somebody has to earn that position in the course of actual struggle. We should select a date in the next month to reconsider the appointees to the Executive Board and the Politburo.
Communication
Jackson is supremely talented as well. He is a down-to-earth guy despite being a global celebrity. I think it is important that the masses and party workers always see Jackson on the frontlines of community work and organizing as well. This will set an amazing example for them and hopefully inspire more Americans to fight back and join us.
Jackson leads with a lot of Culture War bs because he “has outsmarted the algorithms.” We cannot expect our existing membership base to be able to separate real world social practice from online profilicity and social media. The NY chapter is obsessed with online beef. Our “leaders” brag, “Fuck the Kurds,” “gay people are fascists” and “we will execute men who sleep with prostitutes.” But what practical work have they done? They spend days on Telegram imagining in their heads how to wage the revolution, but have no contact with the only social force who can make revolution. The new recruits in our midst are watching our cliquishness and sectarianism. It will all come out comrades. Much more will be revealed…
Where is the communication between the base and the leadership? How can the rank and file articulate their views and critiques from the ground? Through chapter execs like Spiros who have lied and manipulated their way through the past 5 months? Spiros convinced everyone here in NY that our chapter was “on probation.” When I confronted Spiros, he denied everything. The hammer is coming down. Who will replace him? In this state of 20,000,000, I see 6 capable proletarian comrades at this point. A few have a foot out the door and some of them are 8 hours away from NYC.
The Amazon strike was our best school of Leninism yet. It allowed us to develop an accurate evaluation of all 54 NY state recruits. With a state chapter of 54 on Telegram, 10 participated in the 5 days of heated class struggle. Half were unreachable.
Our comrades finally had their day under the sun. The basement wizards and attic gamers prefer the darkness. Here in the 15 degree cold, they were exposed to the elements. How could we ever claim to really get to know a person online? This was the perfect test for our branch. We failed. Point every finger you want to. This is the perfect refraction of who we are and who we are not. We can crack skulls of inconsequential mediocre chapter execs or we can address underlying issues. Let’s find the right balance. I have no right to be too hard on Infrared. There is a lot of good in what Haz and you all have built. But it is time for a higher calling, an ascension to the concrete.
ACP Paychecks?
Noah and Carlos called me on September 12th. They urged me to have very little to do with the NY chapter. They told me to distance myself from local organizing and educational efforts because according to them, “lower cadre were going to try to get close to me to use me for party favors.” It was a bizarre convo with 2 men I have not seen organize much of anything.
Carlos has a rare intellect. He is supremely talented. Carlos and Haz as a 1 2 combo with actual leadership could be huge. But we are not there yet.
Noah is a genuine communist and the nicest guy on earth. But from his bubble of niceness, he does not call out bullshit. Cowardice will forever plague him.
We have a rare opportunity before us but are bureaucracy and arrogance already taking root? Is anyone’s main focus on getting a paycheck? If anyone came to the ACP looking for a salary, get a real job like the rest of us. As we grow, we can figure out employing reliable staff.
“The NY Experts”
Kyle, Haz and Eddie are coming to NY. I don’t know when. I cannot get in touch with Eddie. Eddie has shown little interest in understanding events in NY. I left him a series of messages about the discord in the NY chapter at the height of the Amazon struggle. 12 days later he announced he was coming to NY publicly. He then responded to my texts and messages that his phone does not work so he could not correspond with me. I asked him if he could communicate on Telegram. He never responded.
Eddie Liger Smith: a victim of the cult or a guilty party?
I was excited to host Eddie, Noah and Carlos last winter here in NYC. I am curious now what the know-it-alls are even coming to do in NY. Kyle says they are coming to “castrate Spiros in front of everybody.” But who is going to castrate the arrogance and lack of professionalism that is giving birth to more and more Spiroses? You want to show up in cities and throw down a fist as if you had the magical solution for this very weak proletarian material bequeathed to us? The problem goes way beyond Spiros. Spiros is surrounded by a dozen or two dozen Spiroses. You all are the Chief Larpers responsible for all of this disarray! You spend all your time obsessing over Haz’s paranoid online fantasies.
Comrades:
After 5 months of observing this EB, I was forced to tell them to their faces that they are punks and corrupt usurpers. I along with others, some loyal, some antagonistic, are quietly observing the mess you have created. I have no interest in online squabbles on the enemy’s terrain. I was sold a fake bill of goods about the ACP. If we do not right this ship, these misunderstandings and disrespect will spill over into the online sphere, as they already have. I am a praying man. I have been a Marxist-Leninist for 31 years and have visited and learned from comrades in 86 different countries. I took a vow to follow your generation’s “leadership” for 1 year to give this a chance. We barely made it 5 months and this is imploding.
I want to fight. I have swallowed a lot of venom for the collective. This is not about me. This is about the ACP and the American people. Let’s duke this out in a principled way. Set up a Politburo meeting or retreat in Vermont, Chicago or on Zoom so we can all get on the same page (let’s see if we need this after tomorrow night). We have some real talent here and there is a definite void we can fill, ideologically and organizationally. I was told Haz was a man of honor and that the ACP was based on honor. Remember you all were not even elected. Show some respect and let’s get our shit together.
Friday January 3rd 5:00 PM
Internal Politburo Comuniqué #2 on “”HAZ”’s” Narcissism and the ACP Danny Shaw ACP Politburo
(I sent this to the EB and PB Telegram chat 2 hours before the infamous Friday meeting where John and I confronted them on their corrupt leadership. This was my follow up to the “On the Cultishness and Liberalism of the ACP Executive Board” statement the day before.)
Tonight, I would like to open with some questions for you “HAZ”:
Did you even read my critiques?
Do you take any responsibility or will you continue to deflect, deny and manipulate?
Is it true you have launched some “internal investigation” after someone had the balls to tell you the truth to your face? How about investigating your own conduct “”HAZ”” that has caused a culture of manipulation and disaster?
Why did I receive multiple phone calls from different parts of Russia complaining about your “erratic and unprofessional” behavior there?
Are you insinuating that we are “federal agents?”
Do you recognize that at this moment our party is a complete mess and needs to transform into a real Marxist-Leninist Party composed of disciplined tribunes of the people?
If you “HAZ” continue to respond the only way thus far you know how, my diagnosis will again be confirmed. You are a narcissist.
There could be Bipolar, Depression, ADHD or other diagnoses involved too. As a licensed Mental Health and Addiction specialist, this is what I have seen. I do not divulge this information in a liberal way comrades. This is the “Chairman” of our organization. Whatever he does, we have done. His failures are ours. He is the face of this party. Silence before his misleadership is cowardice and the worst form of Liberalism that Mao, a true Chairman, identified.
“HAZ” and Kyle’s lying, manipulation and denial is unacceptable unto itself. It goes without saying that we are all here to help the sick and suffering comrades. But if he insists upon trying to split the ACP, we should defend the unity of the ACP at all costs.
Christian: I hear you. I have been loyal to this mis-leadership but I had enough. A lot of what you say depends on the egomaniac “HAZ”, his control freak, boot-licking accomplice and his little bubble boy Midwestern Marx Milkmade enablers. I apologize to you and all the other comrades who are newer to Marxism-Leninism and party building. This has been a tremendous drain on our time and emotional resources. No one should be losing sleep because of others’ misleadership and mental health issues. That is what forced many of us to say Enough!
In terms of the structure of tonight’s meeting, if “HAZ” and Pettis continue to try to dominate and deflect, we will be wasting our time. Let 100 flowers bloom. Let every comrade speak their mind for 5-10 minutes without fear of some “internal investigation.” One of the most un-involved comrade should chair tonight i.e. Greyson, Slava, Jordan, Brigid etc.
For comrades who have written me and insisted upon a response: Breathe. Reflect. Some of what you ask depends on tonight. Will you conduct yourself like a man and a communist? Or will you behave like a coward?
In terms of Pettis‘s New York trip, if he is coming here to “castrate Spiros in front of everybody” as he brags, he’s gonna have to go through me. Let’s see who gets “castrated.” A man will come. Eddie will come. NO WEASELS anywhere close to NY! Pettis always tries to say how much he has tried to change “HAZ”. You — the Humiliater-in-Chief — have failed!
But Pettis’ failures are never his. He always blames “HAZ”, Carlos, Eddie, Noah or someone else. The Chief Larper, Braggart and Excuse Maker has proven he has none of the humility required for leadership. When the brat Pettis does not get his way, he screams “I AM IN THE EXECUTIVE BOARD. YOU WILL DO AS I SAY! I OUTRANK YOU! YOU ARE NO ONE!”
ScreenshotKyle Pettis: The ex Sadist-in-Chief of the ACP.
2 sadistic sick puppies think they are my bosses? You think I signed up for this? I signed up to mentor aspiring communists in the mold of William Foster, Claudia Jones and Henry Winston. All of the ego is foreign to me.
Some of you hypocrites questioned my use of certain language. Did the Midwestern tone-police and language-KGB question how professional the language was when your mentors called everybody ”fa&&ots?” Where were your criticisms then? What’s the definition of hypocrisy? Do I trust any of you? “Executive Eddie,” “Executive Carlos” and “Executive Noah:” who have you become?
I feel let down by many of you. Let’s keep fighting so I don’t ever have to hear that the MMI is just the Midwestern Internet Institute and the acp is the Autistic Cosplay Party. Time will tell…
Comrades: If you think there is no ACP beyond “HAZ”’s chairmanship, you’re wrong. Follow Marxism Leninism, not some fallible man. It’s our duty as revolutionaries to be completely honest about our achievements and our failures. Either we continue to larp or we humble ourselves and dig deep into the struggles of everyday, hard-working people, who live in the real world NOT on the internet. Let’s cut all the bullshit and emerge from this 100x stronger and more unified comrades!
Noah, Eddie, Carlos & I before they became unrecognizable to me as "Executive Noah, Eddie & Carlos"
Good morning to the American proletariat, to all of my comrades in the American Communist Party & to all of the class conscious and anti-imperialist voices who have been waiting patiently for months for us to break the silence from within the ACP:
Last year, I drove over 10,000 miles to Cleveland to Chicago to Kansas City to LA and everywhere in between to meet you all, to listen and to build. You all taught me so much about Palestine, about organizing, about the fake compatible left who failed us. You were my motivation for stepping up to form this party! I don’t care what the left says about you, you patriots and anti-imperialists are my sisters and brothers. I’ll always be grateful that I got to build with you in your cities and towns, in the trenches, in defense of our class. I wanted to believe so badly that these three letters right here (this is my red ACP hat that I got in Chicago) represented something different in the American trajectory. I have been trained in Marxism Leninism since 1994. I have worked with revolutionaries in 86 different countries in six different languages. What I have seen the last five months since the ACP was formed on July 21, 2024 is the antithesis, the opposite of what I believe in and everything Marx, Che, William Foster, Claudia Jones, WEB DuBois and Malcolm believed in.
We communists are anti-bullies. We do not believe in discrimination against gay people, women or leftists. The proletariat comes in every last color, shape and size. We seek unity and growth, not bullying and backwardness. I would apologize for the disgraceful ACP leadership, but the apology is not mine to give. Class struggle occurs everywhere, throughout the pores of this society, not just in the universities of the liberal left cancellers. I did what I had to do. I have no regrets nor resentments.
Ali “Haz” Hammoud, wrecker of the ACP, Narcissist-in-Chief of the parasocial Infrared internet troll club..
Now, I have to address you specifically about the person you know as “Haz.” His real name is Ali Hammoud from Dearborn, Michigan. Based on the past year working with him, I can tell you he is a fraud, a coward, a liar, a sadist, a loose cannon and a narcissist. He has used us all to try to make more money and to get more clicks and clout. He is completely adverse to working with others and to mentorship. To think that a streamer who lives on the second floor of his parent’s home could overnight become a leader of class struggle is beyond delusional. It is the gravest insult to our revered traditions as leaders of our class going back to Eugene Debs, Big John L. Lewis and our martyrs at the Bonus March, in Ludlow, Colorado and Harlan County, Kentucky.
Let me unpack what these past few months have looked like from within “leadership.”
On October 11, we had our national conference in Chicago where I met many of you. We all stayed in an Airbnb. It was all very strange. Kyle Pettis, the chief suck up, (and you are lucky you little bitch that I cannot use the language that you, your boss Ali Hammoud and the rest of the Executive Board uses with us everyday). Kyle sat Ali in a type of throne where the two were elevated high above us, the rest of the “leadership” at the mansion in Skokie. They were the only two invited to speak. They bragged about their contacts with oligarchs in Russia. This was all about Ali and Kyle. This was not about the Politburo, the Chapter Executives and least of all the American people. How many times have they put us all in danger?
On the next day, Saturday, I was the first to return to the Skokie mansion after the conference. I found all of the doors wide open with all of our possessions and laptops there. This is not a sober Leadership.
Journalist Dan Cohen who says the paramilitaries are leading a “revolution” in Haiti.
On November 1st, Kyle Pettis and Ali Hammoud lied to me, manipulated me and tricked me into a meeting with two American journalists who have been involved with the gangs in Haiti. Dan Cohen and Kim Ives have worked with paramilitary factions as hundreds of thousands of Haitians have been murdered, displaced and traumatized. Ali and Kyle had been maneuvering since April to try to muzzle me on Haiti and to try to silence the thousands of Haitians, whom I have learned from and worked with since I first went to Haiti in 1998. Allow me to salute the valiant people of Ayiti: Sa kap fèt pèp ayisyen. Si Barebecue se yon revolisyonè pou ki sa li toujou touye lòt pòv. Pèp ayisyen Ayibbbo! Jiskobou!
In preparation for that meeting, Ali and Kyle spoke with me for hours promising me they would not betray me. As soon as we got into the meeting, Kyle‘s face completely changed and he was all smiles with these two antagonistic actors. It was four on one. The entire meeting is recorded on a zoom that Ali promised to give me. He lied. He lied over and over. Cohen and Ives were taking advantage of the delusional wannabe warlord when there was a nation inundated with upwards towards 1,000,000 illegal U.S. arms. (It was irresponsible of me to frame something so sensitive the way I previously did. I issued an apology to the movement publicly. This is what I should have wrote. At the tail end of the meeting Ali Hammoud began to talk about his contacts with Russian oligarchs. He brought up the infamous g word. I observed the body language of Kyle Pettis, Dan Cohen and Kim Ives. Dan Cohen was reserved. Kyle Pettis was eager to pursue the possibilities with the Russians. Hammoud said that he wanted to open up a rural front in the Haitian countryside to support Barbecue through his contacts who could send g’s there. Kim Ives engaged on some level at the prospects of what this could mean. I had no right to imply there was anything concrete about what the braggart Hammoud was talking about. That was irresponsible of me. I take full responsibility for my mistake and I apologize to the movement. I know better than to do anything that would draw the attention of the state to any of us in the movement. In my attempt to capture Hammoud’s narcissism I involved two journalists who are far more intelligent than to engage in anything so reckless and irresponsible. This was Pettis and Hammoud’s adventuristic plan.) I raised every objection. They laughed and laughed at me, at the PSL, at Black Alliance For Peace & other groups who they said were “liberals” and “humanitarians” like me and actually cared about the masses. Why would Cohen and Ives take advantage of someone like Ali Hammoud who has zero experience as a leader? I was forced to contact my lawyers and submit a sworn affidavit of this reckless adventurism that put me and the entire party at risk.
Kim Ives has been trying to convince me since 2021 that the mass violence against the Haitian people is a “revolution.”
I am curious comrades: What would the American people think of months of telegram chats, full of misogyny, hatred of gay people and women, sadism and much worse? How many screenshots does it take to sink the depraved, criminal cult of “HAZ?” These opportunists used my FBI detention and interrogation to make themselves look more militant to their foreign handlers. These sloppy amateurs put us all at risk every day. After all, who are we? We did not have 2.8 million bot followers on Twitter.
November 13th: Every Wednesday we met for Politburo meetings. On November 13th, minutes before the 7 PM start, Ali texted the Politburo Telegram chat that “he had to take a big shit and we would start 20 minutes later.”
On November 20, he texted that “there was a fat fa$$ot on the weight bench that he uses at the gym and we would start late again.”
He canceled or postponed any meeting he wanted to. He was testing us all. He was testing his power. The ACP was never ours, comrades; it belonged solely to Ali Hammoud and his lackeys. These 7 EB buffoons acted like we could not exist without him and his compadre Hinkle as you will see in the documentation that I will be sharing. Ali Hammoud and his flunkies were always afraid to put me in leadership. They tried to bribe me. They thought they could bully and break me. They were wrong!
I brought these critiques to the rest of Leadership. And this perhaps is the most difficult part for me to talk about. As you all know, I was very close to the Midwestern Marx Institute crew who brought me in a year and a half ago. After being cancelled some 21 times by “the left,” I yearned for comradeship and Marxist Leninist family. Because that is what this is all about comrades. Eddie, Noah and Carlos became “Executive Board” members back in July. I no longer recognized these individuals who I called “friends and comrades” and went to visit in their homes. Now I call them “Executive Noah, Executive Carlos and Executive Eddie.” Ever since the ACP was formed, they have elevated themselves above everybody else, above the rank and file and above the American people. Just because they are starting to earn salaries and have proximity to “power.” Our relationship has completely changed. They are unrecognizable to me. Pettis and Hammoud convinced them that they could not trust anyone besides them and the Executive Board. Noah, Carlos and Eddie are completely incapable of hearing one word of this. They too are victims but will have to realize this at their own pace. They even told me I was not allowed to talk to anyone in NY. Their worst fear was that I could train the 55 NY comrades in class struggle. These petty tyrants and wannabes are craven, pitiful boys! I had their backs and they plotted to ambush me in New York and on other occasions. I lost three friends but regained all the dignity they tried to strip from me.
December 21st: There was another incident last month at the height of the five-day Amazon Teamster workers strike. A lot of our New York members spend more time online than in real life. They have never built with the people. They are of the terminally online social media generation. I was here to train them. These are honest, generational problems we could have worked through. That is why I believed in this party. I wanted to build with the up-and-coming revolutionaries, just as the generation before me, trained by Fred Hampton, a real Chairman, trained me. Different critiques came up through the ranks which we articulated to national leadership. Kyle‘s response was that he was coming to New York City with Eddie and Hammoud to “castrate Spiros in front of everybody so that he could humiliate him like A____ for all of his fuck ups.”
God and nation were testing me. All I wanted to do was build up and train proletarian leadership. Again, I had to stand on business like a man and a communist. I pushed back and told the Executive Board that “they would never get close to any of my comrades in New York and that they would have to go through me and we would see who would come out castrated.” Spiros and I do not see eye to eye and I have my doubts about his honesty, but we can work that out as equals and as comrades.
Now they’re threatening to come this Sunday and make even more of a mockery of their own mess. How easy to blame the young 20-year-olds little larpers who are only emulating the big larpers and the chief larper himself, the anti-American, the anti-patriot Culture War Vulture, fake, prima donna, bully, chauvinist Jackson Hinkle. You should come to NY too you punk-ass bitch! This petty bourgeois poser in no way represents any of us or the proud, humble working class of this country. The anti-patriot cares more about his own ego than about the American people. Jackson spends more time with the Russian government than with the American people. His hunt for clout then is always our mess to clean up.
How destructive social media is to the soul!
December: Ali Hammoud went to Russia for an indefinite period of time last month. I received several phone calls from journalists, lawyers and revolutionaries in Russia complaining about his erratic and disturbing behavior. He was calling well-known Russian women “hoes.” They described him as completely discombobulated and disheveled. They did not know if he was drunk or bipolar.
And the EB? Again, these are not men; these are cowards. They said nothing.
Now: Look how the executive board has treated the state chapters. They can never post your tweets on time and now they have these harebrained ideas about paid recruitment and party businesses. How many comrades are investing their own money and time which they will inevitably lose because of the complete incompetency, lack of communication and mentorship? And who do you think is divvying up the profits they’ll bring in? Did you think these 20 year old punks could handle all the power, ego and money? Revolution is a woman’s job. And a man’s job. And every worker’s job.
Let me address the coward himself directly: Ali Hammoud: you are a dark, isolated antisocial individual who does not know how to work with others or see them as equals. Depending on your own conduct and that of your henchmen, depending on how quickly you shut down this racist, homophobic, anti-women, anti-American people, ideological fiasco, you’ll be learning a lot more about Ali Hammoud, Kyle Pettis, Carlos Garrido and others from the usurping Executive Board.
You fuckin’ cowards! You broke all of our hearts with your complete incompetency and selfishness. These are not communists; they are not even men. We’ll be waiting for you on 149th street you phoney-ass punks!
Comrades: in Shreveport, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Vancouver and everywhere in between: We did not fail. We tried something new. We grew, laughed and struggled together. The “American Communist Party” never was and never will be. This was just the beginning, a beginning scarred by dishonest corrupt misleadership which Fidel, Chavez and Evo would spit upon.
To all the true Marxist Leninist comrades: I see you. I know you’re strong. I have heard all of your critiques, especially the anonymous ones. Thank you for trusting me. I have no personal ambitions nor desire for ceremonial titles, like this conceited, fake “Chairman” Ali Hammoud.
To the Infrareds: busy doxing innocent people, innocent, hard-working Americans, being terminally online talking shit is not revolution. The Culture War Vulture Hinkle is playing the class enemy’s game and serving their interests. Find real role models! Serve the American people!
To anybody in the ACP on the fence: take time to breathe. Put the online crack down. Sort through all of the information that will inevitably emerge in the upcoming days so you can see that Hammoud, Pettis, Liger Smith and the rot of the EB are the wreckers.
Comrades: The last thing I ever wanted to be within the now defunct ACP was a whistleblower. All of you know me. This is not about ego. This is about the American people. This is about strong Marxist Leninist leadership, mentorship and training which this generation deserves and sorely needs.
As you will see every word laid out here I laid out to the cowardly Politburo. Brigid, Slava, Grayson, “Rev” (the other teenage Noah) Don etc. They even added this random dude “Abe” who never once was introduced to us, never once said a word and never once turned his camera on. They added him to chats across the country. These are not adults; these are spies.
With one exception, 1, everybody remained silent and has continually enabled Ali to act as a type of cult leader. All Hammoud’s liberal Midwestern Milkmaids, my former comrades turned sell outs, did was tone police those who stood up! By themselves!
If anyone remembers the violent Black Hammer cult, that is what is now in motion with an EB that openly tells us not to talk to anyone below our rank. There were signs that Pettis, Hammoud, Garrido and others were moving towards using physical violence as part of their “enforcement.” This is not Marxist leadership; a mini dictatorship has formed. They lied to us and wasted our time, comrades! The American people must hold them accountable as enemies of the emancipation we yearn for!
No one has felt your pain like me. I shook with fury and fought back at every turn. Often, all alone. With my family and loved ones. I feel nothing but revolutionary optimism comrades! I have zero personal ambitions to split or wreck like the wannabe “HAZ,” who has vulgarized and bastardized the most beautiful of traditions. A tradition of humanism, and of defending women, gay people and all down-and-out underdogs. Because comrades, that’s what the proletariat is!
Comrades: this is my official resignation from the national leadership of the ACP, as the Director of the International Department at the Midwestern Marx Institute and as a writer and chief ideologue in this burgeoning proto fascist cult.
Comrades: The 5-month nightmare is over. The healing and building begins.
To the American people and all the comrades from coast to coast who want to move forward: the Fetters have been removed. We never again have to defend the stupidity of these bullies and egomaniacs. Never again do we have to sit by as these idiots talk about taking Canada over when they have never even stood on a picket line. Never again do you have to swallow Hinkle’s anti-semetic, Duginist, anti-women, ego-driven, billionaire-boosted bullshit. Never again do you have to pretend to look the other way because he defends and promotes the criminal misogynist Andrew Tate, chuckling as we all work our asses off. Never again will Pettis, Hammoud or Garrido scream “fa&&ot” at any of us or our comrades. The future of the struggle comrades is not in social media, the class enemy’s terrain. It is in the streets grounded in the masses. Put your phones down and build with your class!
Ali Hammoud, Jackson Hinkle, Eddie Liger Smith, Noah Khrachvik and Kyle Pettis: shut down this incompetent criminal enterprise immediately! I will organize in the courts and in the streets until you take responsibility for your disgraceful disgusting Black Hammer cult reminiscent cowardice!
We real leaders — not fakes and criminals like Hammoud, Pettis and Hinkle, narcissists and mentally ill people — we real Americans have nothing but love for you and would never lie to you. With unflinching revolutionary Marxist Leninist optimism, I’ll see you in the streets comrades!
Danny Shaw, former Politburo, of the now defunct american communist party
