Alternatives International

Racist Violence in Belfast: Orchestrated, Organized, and Resisted

Kevin Callahan — 2026-06-18T19:23:04Z

On Monday, June 8th, in Belfast, a Sudanese man Hadi Alodid, legally in the United Kingdom as a refugee claimant, viciously attacked a local man Stephen Ogilvie with a knife. The intervention of others saved the victim's life though he lost an eye in the attack

Within an hour, Tommy Robinson, a leader of the far right in the UK, shared a video of the incident on X, and his post got 6 million views. Shortly after, Elon Musk, the owner of X, chimed in, retweeting Robinson's post and calling for repeated and loud protests.

A far-right group called the Ulster Youth Club, which has links to the racist international “Active Clubs”, mobilised to take advantage of the situation. Several nights of horrendous racist violence followed in which visible minorities were targeted and attacked. Nurses and other healthcare workers from Africa were beaten on their way to work. The homes of immigrants were burned.

It must be understood that this was not a spontaneous outburst of popular anger. Musk and Robinson fanned the flames. Far right activists moved quickly to profit from public shock about the knife attack. In Belfast, neo-fascists also have an ad hoc alliance with still existent Loyalist paramilitaries, the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). These armed groups were formed in the 1960s to counteract the liberation struggle of Irish Republicans. In 1969, the Loyalists burned out hundreds of Irish nationalist families and during the 30 years of conflict in the North of Ireland, they were responsible for the murder of hundreds of civilians. They share a common hatred of “others” with the fascists groups and are willing to cooperate in certain actions. Along with avowed racists and Loyalists, some of the rioters were simply disaffected youth who were recruited as cannon fodder. Some youths were ferried to riots and told to participate to clear off drug debts they owed to paramilitaries.

The nights of racist violence that followed grabbed headlines. However, the cameras did not show popular mobilisation moving quickly to offer support to minorities and to denounce and stop the racist attacks. Community leaders and local Sinn Féin politicians and activists provided information, support, and shelter for victims. Young people were educated about the manipulation tactics of far-right groups and told not to be tempted to get involved. On Saturday, June 14th, 20,000 people filled the streets of downtown Belfast to say no to division and racism in a” Together Against Hate” rally.

While the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) did act to contain the racist mobs, popular mobilisation and community solidarity are the main factors that put a stop to the fascist actions in Belfast.

To get a first-hand account, I spoke with Sinn Féin's John Finucane who is MP for North Belfast where much violence took place. John was a young boy when his father Pat, a human rights lawyer, was shot dead in front of him by Loyalist paramilitaries in collusion with British security forces.

Kevin Callahan (KC): There is speculation that the racist attacks were orchestrated to some extend form outside Belfast. Can you comment on that?

John Finucane (JF): Whilst we saw violence in Belfast, notably well away from the area which saw the attack take place, what is beyond dispute is that many individuals and organisations from outside Belfast, outside Ireland and in some cases from much further afield, immediately sought to exploit the horrific knife attack to spread misinformation, inflame tensions and sow division.

I witnessed that myself throughout the week. Inaccurate claims were circulated online, often by people with no connection to the local community and no concern for the victim or his family.

My Sinn Féin colleague and Mayor of Belfast Róis-Máire Donnelly was one of those targeted by those seeking to exploit the horrific knife attack in North Belfast, targeted by the likes of Elon Musk and Tommy Robinson while also receiving death threats from others.

Unfortunately, this is not unique to Belfast. We have seen similar attempts in other parts of the world where tragic events are weaponised by those seeking to advance political agendas rooted in fear, division and hostility.

The people who suffered most from this were ordinary families, local residents and communities who found themselves caught up in violence that had nothing whatsoever to do with securing justice for the victim, those who bravely intervened, or the local community.

KC: How did community leaders and local politicians respond to the racist violence to protect targeted communities and stop the violence?

JF: Many political leaders, community representatives, faith leaders and local activists worked responsibly throughout the week. They condemned both the original attack and the racist violence that followed, supported the PSNI and helped reassure frightened families and communities.

However, I do think there has been mixed messaging from some political leaders, particularly within unionism, not only in the immediate aftermath of last week's attack but over a longer period of time.

Political leadership carries responsibility. There can be no room for ambiguity when it comes to racism, sectarianism, intimidation or criminality.

The First Minister Michelle O'Neill and I visited those communities in North Belfast to listen and support them. It was important that we listened to their fears and concerns and reassured them that their political representatives stood against the racism and hate of last week.

But anger at a crime should never become hostility towards entire communities

We have a duty to challenge misinformation, to deal in facts and to avoid creating an atmosphere where prejudice is normalised or where those prepared to engage in racist or sectarian violence feel emboldened.

The overwhelming majority of people want safe and peaceful communities. Political leaders should be reinforcing that message consistently and without qualification.

KC: What lessons can be learned from what happened in Belfast for other communities facing far right racist violence?

JF: One lesson is that communities must be careful not to allow horrific incidents to be exploited by those who want to spread fear, hatred and division.

The attack was appalling and people were right to be angry. But anger at a crime should never become hostility towards entire communities.

Another lesson is the importance of responding quickly with clear and united leadership. Communities need reassurance, facts need to be established quickly, and misinformation must be challenged before it takes hold.

Perhaps most importantly, we need to remember who suffers most when this happens. It is often ordinary families, workers, children and local residents who pay the price. We saw that in Belfast when people were driven from their homes and left fearing for their safety.

The answer to far-right violence is not silence or ambiguity. It is clear leadership, support for the rule of law, solidarity with those targeted and a refusal to allow division and hatred to define our communities.

Sources:

https://www.reddit.com/r/northernireland/comments/1u69p4x/a_white_supremacist_youth_group_helped/

https://www.irishnews.com/news/northern-ireland/teenagers-ferried-to-belfast-race-riots-to-clear-paramilitary-drug-debts-childrens-commissioner-says-

Photo Credit: L'installation "For peace!" (slovaque “Za mier!”) est formée d'une suite de personnages lumineux, qui marchent, qui courent. Le slogan de l'œuvre est “For peace, for freedom, for art!” (Pour la paix, pour la liberté, pour l'art !). L'œuvre a été montrée lors de plusieurs festivals en l'Europe.
Source: Festival Geneva Lux 2025
Author: Sébastien Kottelat

Iran's Remaining Two Vows

Jawed Naqvi — 2026-06-18T15:31:15Z

As Iran braces to change the global landscape of war and peace, of imperial conquest and its nemesis in a people who refuse to be afraid of dying for their nation's self-respect, for their abiding pride in a mesmeric culture of poetry, inclusion and reflection, where do its friends and foes go from here? An all but signed agreement for permanent peace with the US promises to leave Israel out in the cold, and with it its sympathisers. That leaves room for future trouble, of course. But Iran has shown it has the wherewithal to figure out the cure.

For now, the peace deal would be a shot in the arm for BRICS whose summit, contrarily, a rightward-bound Israel-hugging India is to hold in September. But what is in store for Pakistan and its Saudi allies whose endeavours for the peace deal, overtly and covertly, may fall short of Iran's larger vision of a multicultural Palestinian state in lieu of Zionist Israel, in which its Jewish, Muslim and Christian communities live as equal partners as they had done for centuries, not as superiors and inferiors as proposed by colonialism? Isn't that the equation each one of the communities strives for in its abode in Europe and America? What will become of India's Hindutva project of majoritarianism in a world in which its sheet anchors in racist Israel, and to an extent the MAGA-bound US, struggle to fend off Iran's two remaining deadly vows?

Of the four clenched-fisted promises that Iranians learnt to state collectively during Ayatollah Khomeini's early consolidation of power, the West applauded two and even egged them on with fulsome support. “Marg bar Shauravi” translated as “death to the USSR”. “Marg bar Saddam” was a united cry for “death to Saddam Hussain” at the Friday prayer congregations at the Tehran University. In a Macbeth-like turn of events, however, as if to fulfil the witches' prophecy in the Shakespeare tragedy, Saddam's death was instigated not by Iran but by the Western occupiers of Iraq who had recently supplied him with chemical weapons to use against revolutionary Iran.

The more macabre the deaths of its enemies, the more the West exults in its malodorous worldview. The pictures they cherish of the gruesome murder at their bidding of Che Guevara, Najibullah, Muammar Qadhafi and Nicolae Ceausescu were circulated as cruel Roman emperors did with the heads of the rebels hoisted on poles. Qadhafi's barbaric murder got a laugh out of Hillary Clinton. They cut Che Guevara's hands after his execution in Bolivia in 1967, and the fingerprints taken from them were used to verify his identity. The severed hands were preserved in formaldehyde and sent to Buenos Aires, Argentina, while the fingerprints were promptly matched in Washington, D.C. Iran denied the world the perverse pleasure of putting a frame around the revered body of its slain Supreme Leader. And that's the abiding lesson of the war: self-respect.

As for the USSR, the West courted a perpetually drunk Boris Yeltsin to avenge Moscow's glee at its defeat in Vietnam. Then Soviet troops followed their quarry in an error of judgement and waded straight into a merciless Kabul. With Saddam dead and the USSR dismantled, two of Iran's vows were met, for which Iranians never fail to claim divine help. The remaining two oaths target the US and Israel, the “Great Satan” and “Little Satan”, respectively. But “death to Israel” or “death to America” were never meant as exhortations that the people inhabiting the countries should expire collectively. The dismantling of US imperialism like the one being carried out in Donald Trump's face with his MAGA base splitting vertically, and a globally isolated Israel in which Zionism has become its bane instead of an asset, could be much of what was ever desired by Khomeini's Iran.

Where do India and Pakistan stand in the equation? I had been sceptical of the Pew survey of the time claiming that when the world, from Europe to Asia, through Africa and back home in America, had put George W. Bush in the doghouse for his invasion of Iraq, Indians overwhelmingly cheered for the US president. It's not a surprise, therefore, when idols are carved of Trump today and he is worshipped in propitiating rituals in the presence of the god of fire. The early example came from the top. Prime minister Manmohan Singh hugged Bush publicly in New Delhi and professed to him his affection while reminding him of how much he was loved in India. A communist leader lost patience and ticked off Singh, telling him to speak for himself.

But the silly collective behaviour wasn't about Bush or his invasion of Iraq; ignore here the fact that Saddam Hussein, who Bush had had executed was the rare Arab leader to back India in its Kashmir dispute with Pakistan. Indians who stand with the Hindutva ideology of blindly close ties with Israel are enthralled by Benjamin Netanyahu who they see as a supremo commanding the ability to gather rich intelligence needed to track and assassinate rival leaders and their military commanders at will. Indian admirers forget that the Israelis are keeping an eye on them too, through Pegasus spyware and other potent contraptions. Remember too that Israel plied the Epstein scam to lure political leaders, which spared nobody.

As for Pakistan, after its well-deserved glory as the key mediator to end the world's most devastating military confrontation in decades, it would do well to explain to itself primarily its participation in Donald Trump's imperialist racket to usurp the Gaza Strip for a riviera to be built by his son-in-law. Pakistan maintains that its involvement is strictly focused on humanitarian aid, stabilising a ceasefire, and preventing the permanent displacement of Palestinians. That's an onerous task to shoulder. How is it planning to throw Trump off the scent? Perhaps the peace deal will take care of that?

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2026
Photo credit: Dawn

When Peoples Fall Asleep

Messaoud Romdhani — 2026-06-17T18:39:00Z

When the acclaimed actor, Richard Gere, recently described Donald Trump as a "maniac" and lamented that the United States was experiencing one of its darkest moments, he added a remark that deserves particular attention: "We went to sleep. We didn't care. We didn't vote. We didn't really listen."

Beyond the controversy surrounding Trump himself, Gere's words point to a broader and more enduring concern. The greatest danger facing democracy today is not merely the emergence of populist leaders. It is the gradual weakening of the civic vigilance that allows such leaders to rise in the first place.

Throughout history, democracies have rarely collapsed overnight. More often, they have eroded slowly through indifference, resignation, and the retreat of citizens from public life. When critical thinking weakens, when political debate gives way to slogans, when emotions overshadow reason, and when fear becomes more persuasive than facts, democracy begins to lose the very foundations that sustain it. Such conditions provide fertile ground for the rise of populism.

Populist leaders do not emerge from a political vacuum. They are the product of societies facing economic insecurity, social fragmentation, cultural anxieties, and declining trust in institutions. They often present themselves as the sole voice of "the people" against corrupt elites, promising simple solutions to complex problems. Their appeal lies not only in their rhetoric but also in the frustrations and disappointments that many citizens experience.

Yet the danger begins when democratic politics is reduced to a struggle between enemies rather than a dialogue among citizens. Public life becomes increasingly polarized. Nuance disappears. Complexity is treated as weakness. Expertise is dismissed as arrogance. The search for common ground gives way to the search for scapegoats.

At that point, democratic institutions have become more fragile. Courts, universities, independent media, and civil society organizations are no longer seen as essential safeguards but as obstacles to be overcome. Citizens, exhausted by social crises and economic uncertainty, may even welcome the concentration of power in the hands of those who promise order, certainty, and national greatness.

History offers numerous examples of this dynamic. Different societies, at different moments, have entrusted their hopes to charismatic figures who claimed to embody the will of the people while gradually weakening the democratic mechanisms designed to protect them. The names change, the contexts differ, but the underlying pattern remains strikingly similar.

What is at stake is not confined to any single country or leader. Democracy is never a finished achievement. It is a living and fragile political accomplishment, sustained by the vigilance, participation, and judgment of citizens. Its vitality depends on informed debate, critical thinking, respect for pluralism, and the courage to confront complexity rather than seek refuge in easy certainties. The greatest threat to democracy is not always the populist leader. It is, rather, the collective temptation to abandon civic responsibility and delegate political judgment to those who claim to possess all the answers. Democracies weaken when citizens cease to question, cease to participate, and cease to defend the institutions that guarantee their freedom.

This is perhaps the deeper meaning of Richard Gere's warning. "We went to sleep" is not merely a comment about one election or one country. It is a reminder that democracy can survive many crises, but it cannot survive the prolonged indifference of its citizens.

And yet there is reason for hope. Societies are capable of learning from their mistakes, renewing their democratic culture, and restoring the civic engagement upon which free institutions depend. Citizens can recover their critical awareness and reclaim their role in public life. Populism is not an unavoidable fate, it often flourishes where civic participation weakens, trust erodes, and democratic habits gradually decline.

If democracy is to regain its vitality, citizens must do more than resist demagogues. They must also restore politics to its true purpose. Politics cannot remain a theatre of permanent confrontation, empty rhetoric, and electoral marketing. It must recover its ethical dimension as a collective effort to serve the common good, address concrete social needs, and reinforce the bonds of solidarity among citizens. Only in this way can democracy recover the credibility that so many have lost faith in.

But when citizens awaken, reclaiming their civic responsibility, restoring politics to its ethical foundation, and grounding democratic life in social justice, democracy regains not only its strength and legitimacy, but also its capacity to endure. For social justice is not a secondary goal of democracy; it is what sustains it, giving substance to equality and meaning and credibility to citizenship, and enabling citizens to recognize themselves as participants in a shared future.

Messaoud Romdhani is a Tunisian Human Rights activist, former president of the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, former vice president of the Tunisian Human Rights League.

Photo Credit

Theory After Gaza: Decolonizing the Political

Aditya Nigam — 2026-06-16T22:00:00Z

I want to make three points at the outset that work as premises or presuppositions for this presentation as well as for the larger work.

My first claim is that while the formal discourse of political theory keeps our gaze resolutely fixed on nation-states and Law, justice and citizenship as embodying modernity's emancipatory promise, Gaza/Palestine direct our attention to the fact that the predominant experience of ordinary people in the global South has been one of dispossession and extermination, ethnic cleansing and capture and the turning, en masse, of those who survive, into refugees and stateless people. Indeed, it is not just ordinary people of the global South who experience mass dispossession but equally millions of them in the West, as seen for instance, in the early centuries of enclosure of the commons and mass dispossession for capitalist development.

Another important case in point are the Jews, whose persecution has long been part of Europe's history and who's extermination in Nazi gas chambers in the twentieth century was no aberration.

It is worth remembering that the Golden Age of Jews when they flourished culturally, economically and intellectually was in the heyday of Islamic/ Muslim rule in Al Andalus, between the 8th to 12th centuries. Following the Alhambra Decree in 1492, post-Reconquista, they fled to the Ottoman Empire and found a safe haven there. The Ottoman Sultanat was perhaps the only other place where they prospered and lived under their own laws, as did others, under the millet system. Political theory lectures on the value of tolerance, eliding this history altogether, referring only to philosophers like John Locke and mainstream Christian-European history.

The genocide in Gaza directs us to undertake a wholesale reexamination of the story of the rise of Western modernity and its blood-soaked gifts to the world in the form of settler colonial genocides, ethnic cleansing and two world wars involving the deaths and misery of millions.

My second claim is that the livestreamed genocide in Gaza marks a turning point – indeed, a rupture with the West's philosophical and theoretical hegemony that made us, in the global South, subjects constituted by that knowledge. For about five centuries, we have heard and read of the history of the world as that of the triumphant march of the modern West, where textbooks described how we “were discovered” by the West – as though we had no life before that. We read of the taking over continents that we were told were terra nullius or vacant lands, where, as a matter of fact, millions of Indigenous inhabitants were simply exterminated. If such gaslighting of the world can take place when the genocide is being livestreamed for anyone to see, can we even imagine what would have happened when the only surviving written accounts were of the victors who colonized? The subjugated and the colonized had no history, no voice.

What is worse, we the colonized and the subjugated learnt to internalize their narrative, popular even in Marxist and radical theory, that spoke of colonialism as the “unconscious tool of history” that ushered us savages into “civilization.” However much we opposed their domination and violence, we too wanted to be like them and build our societies in the image of theirs. National liberation movements in the global South simply wanted to take political power and be “independent” in order to live out the same fantasies of becoming like the West.

The Gaza genocide demands that we awaken from the stupor of this gharbzadeghi or Westoxification, to borrow Jalal Al-e Ahmad's term. The genocide provides us a window to see how the entire project of Western modernity stands on violence and extermination of local populations, even in the continuing present in the global South.

Equally, it directs us to revisit aspects of modern European and US politics with clearer eyes, in order to be able to see that not only settler colonialism and imperialism but also Fascism, Nazism and Zionism – all emerged from the boiling cauldron of late 19th and early 20th century European society and whose consequences were then thrust upon Palestine and West Asia. A break with Western philosophical hegemony at this level implies a complete reappraisal of the colonialism/modernity/ capitalism constellation from the vantage point of the global South.

My third claim has to do with a more general question. For millions of ordinary people, thrown into the vortex of genocidal violence, technologically driven wars, partitions, ethnic cleansing and so on, against their will, politics has meant powerlessness and total loss of control over their own lives. “The political”, whichever way we define it, confronts them as an uncontrollable force that takes over their lives. This is a widespread experience of modern times, dramatically highlighted in the past few decades, in the fact that almost everywhere ordinary people feel they are hostages to their states and that their voice does not matter on anything.

This powerlessness was dramatically highlighted during the Gaza genocide where the voice of millions of people across the world wanting to stand in support of the people of Gaza/Palestine were reduced to nothing. Across the UK, Europe and the USA, as well as in India, protests against the genocide were violently suppressed by these states; after all they were its sponsors.

The story of the emergence of the modern political, therefore, needs to be told from this end as well. I argue, in partial agreement with Mahmood Mamdani, that “the political” itself needs to be decolonized, which is to say, with his argument that at least in postcolonial contexts, it is a colonized domain. As will hopefully become clear, my argument is about the political as such and will veer around to the position that it may very simply not be redeemable; that the idea that “the political” is in some sense the domain of “freedom” (Arendt) and “universal ethical existence” (sittlichkeit) (Hegel) may just be delusional.

Before we enter into a discussion of the question of the coloniality of the political, we need to briefly revisit the history of modernity/coloniality/ capitalism from the standpoint of those who have been at their receiving end.

This counter-narrative calls for a radical overturning of the received wisdom about the modern world; it cannot be an additive exercise where we simply add new details to the picture that already exists. Indeed, the picture itself has to be redrawn.

Colonialism, Modernity, “War Capitalism”

In a recent speech at the Munich Security Conference, held in February 2026, the US Secretary of State, Marco Rubio recalled the great achievements of Euro-American colonial expansion and lamented that post-World War II decolonization had reversed the process. The great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings, he had lectured. (Rubio 2026)

Less than a month before Marco Rubio delivered this infamous speech in Munich, the World Economic Forum in Davos ended with a sense of foreboding. Anthropologist David Wengrow described the mood there drawing from Canadian PM Mike Carney's speech, saying that it was ending with talk of a rupture in world affairs, a collapse of international law, a descent into chaos and the rise of a new global order in which bullies rule like kings, weaker nations are property to be bought and sold by the stronger… (Wengrow 2026) All this must sound extremely odd to the Indigenous people of Canada, America, Australia or Greenland, for whom that old order meant only catastrophe, Wengrow rightly observed.

His observation captures the way in which the global order of power that emerged through the past centuries has been experienced across the colonized world, especially, though not only, by Indigenous peoples. Wengrow goes further to tell us that the rule-based order whose demise is now being mourned had actually originated “in the legal justifications for an act of piracy, motivated by profit.” He refers to “Mare Liberum (‘The Freedom of the Seas'), by the Dutch legal theorist Hugo Grotius”, commonly considered to be a foundational text of modern international relations. “The Grotian tradition,” he underlines, “has often been taken to represent humanity's best hopes for a world order based on the principles of justice, freedom and peace among nations.”

Wengrow gives a little background to this text. The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, was the first modern business corporation that…was also granted the rights of a “corporate sovereign”, which meant it could raise armies, wage wars, maintain garrisons, form binding treaties with rulers overseas and impose governors on defeated populations.

At the start of the 17th century, Wengrow writes, the lucrative spice trade of the Malay Peninsula was a monopoly of Portugal's Estado da Índia. It so happened that on 25 February 1603, a Portuguese cargo ship was ambushed off Singapore by warships under the command of the Dutch admiral Jakob van Heemskerk. Once its cargo had been auctioned off in Amsterdam, the shareholders – nervous of losing their ill-gotten gains – employed Grotius, the Netherlands' top legal mind, to write a treatise defending van Heemskerk's actions. It was perhaps just a coincidence that Grotius happened to be the admiral's cousin. (Ibid)

“Grotius argued that wars between nations may be legally justified if they advance the ‘natural' rights of those nations to engage freely in commerce,” and this argument became the basis of violent wars of domination and control of trade in the Malay-Indonesia region which put an end to the free trade that had actually existed before the “Grotian moment”.

With this began, in what is now Indonesia, a violent implantation of politico-economic domination. Most indigenous growers of mace and nutmeg were killed, the survivors were sold into slavery and their lands were resettled with plantation workers from elsewhere.”

In the context of the “Empire of cotton” Sven Beckert in his magisterial study, talks of what he calls “war capitalism”, to refer precisely to this phenomenon of trading companies that were simultaneously quasi-states, indulging in the most violent acts in order to plant the seeds of capitalism. (Beckert 2014)

“The first momentous event in the recasting of global connections” came with the arrival of Columbus in the Americas in 1492, setting off the world's greatest land grab.”

Expansion to grab land and seize mineral and other wealth from these colonies was one part of the story. But Beckert also tells us that European capitalists and rulers altered global networks through a variety of means, the most important among them, being “the muscle of armed trade [that] enabled the creation of a complex, Eurocentric maritime trade web” and “the forging of a military-fiscal state [that] allowed for the projection of power into the far-flung corners of the world.” (Beckert 2014: 30, emphasis added)

Beckert calls this war capitalism. We know from our own history in the Indian subcontinent that the East India Company did not come as a trading company for commerce. It was a quasi-state, that fought wars and established colonial power long before the British state formally stepped in – in fact, after the Great Uprising of 1857.

It is necessary to make a more general point here about what we call “capitalism” as such. In the course of the above discussion, Beckert refers to the way in which “war capitalism” was characterized not by “secure property rights” but by a wave of expropriation of labor and land,” which, he says, “testifies to capitalism's illiberal origins.” (Beckert 2014: 37) As we shall have the occasion to see, this violence has been integral to capitalism right through the centuries of its existence, down to the present. So, one must recognize that all capitalism is war capitalism.

This story of the birth of capitalism cannot co-exist easily with the narrative/s of the various “transition debates” that draw on Marx to understand the development of capitalism as an internal moment of transformation in European feudalism. In fact, it can even be argued that “petty commodity production” and commerce in general do not really constitute the prehistory of capitalism. Everywhere, for capitalism to be implanted, small commodity production had to be violently uprooted. Indeed, it is the military-fiscal state that constitutes the prehistory of capital.

As it happens, 1492 is also the year of the Reconquista in Spain and Mahmood Mamdani has recently argued that that event ought to be considered “the founding moment of the modern state.” Mamdani goes further to claim that it was the year of the beginning of the nation-state and was defined by two key developments in Iberia – ethnic cleansing within and the taking of overseas colonies in the Americas. (Mamdani 2020: 1) Mamdani is right in taking these as key features of the nation-state but we should perhaps add a third feature here – “internal colonialism”. Anibal Quijano sees this feature to be equally in operation within what became nation-states as in colonial expansion without – as does Eugen Weber in his classic study, Peasants into Frenchmen. I am not entirely convinced that what came into being in 1492 was the nation-state, but we could perhaps see it as the moment when the processes that would later get formalized and embodied in the nation-state, came into being. Nonetheless, looking at the scholarship on the birth of capitalism, modern state and nation-state, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that colonialism, capitalism and modernity were emerging as part of the same constellation of processes.

The Coloniality of the Political

Drawing on his studies of colonialism in Latin America, Quijano suggests that “that specific colonial structure of power produced the specific social discriminations which later were codified as ‘racial', ‘ethnic', ‘anthropological' or ‘national', according to the times, agents, and populations involved.” (Quijano 2007: 168) His argument about the “coloniality of power” considers contemporary racial and ethnic divisions as encoding a certain grammar of power, as something that outlasts the actual rule of colonialism in Latin America. But the coloniality of power isn't simply about race or ethnicity. The larger structures of power set in place by colonialism that continue to exist between the ex-colonized and the colonizing powers are integral to it. No less important is the relation between the rise of the nation-state and “internal colonialism” as the other side of the colonial project itself.

There was something else that happened as the world entered the twentieth century, which culminated in the First World War. This process begun in the 19th century “Scramble for Africa”, was given concrete shape in the 1884 Conference of Berlin that formalized the partition of the African continent between seven European powers. “The first World War exploded the European comity of nations beyond repair, something which no other war had ever done,” argued Hannah Arendt in Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 1951: 349). Arendt reads into the rise of imperialism of this period, a parallel decline of the nation-state system of Europe. Thus, she argues, apart from inflation and unemployment all but destroying the social fabric “civil wars which ushered in and spread over the twenty years of uneasy peace… were followed by migrations of groups who, unlike their happier predecessors in the religious wars, were welcomed nowhere and could be assimilated nowhere.” (Arendt 1951: 349) “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, scum of the earth.

In retrospect, however, this seems to be not a symptom of the decline but rather the fructification of the inevitable logic of nation-states but Arendt's point needs to be understood. What she was arguing here related to the rise of imperialism in this period. With it, national sovereignty became a mockery, except for a few giant states. (Arendt 1951: 352) Arendt discusses how, with the liquidation of the two “multinational states” – Russia and Austro-Hungary – there emerged two groups of people who had lost those rights “which had been thought of and even defined as inalienable, the Rights of Man.” These two groups were the “stateless” and the “minorities”, who had no governments to represent them and “therefore were forced to live either under the law of exception of the Minority Treaties, which all governments (except Czechoslovakia) had signed under protest and never recognized as law, or under condition of absolute lawlessness.” (Arendt 1951: 351)

Of course, both the mockery of national sovereignty and the production of stateless people, are discussed by Arendt in the context of Europe. Both had been already very much part of the experience of colonized societies, at least for a few centuries before World War I. But what Arendt's discussion brings home powerfully, is the fact that by the beginning of the twentieth century, even within Europe, a logic similar to that which existed in the colonial world was now playing out as far as ordinary people were concerned.

States in colonized societies, of course, had never been sovereign but the situation of ordinary people in these societies was far worse insofar as they had either been dispossessed and made slaves, transported across the seas, or as the native populations in the Americas and Africa, were exterminated.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (in her book Not a Nation of Immigrants), details the genocide of the “Indian” population from the very beginnings of settler colonialism in what is now the United States of America. In a chapter devoted to Alexander Hamilton, the founding father of the USA, Dunbar-Ortiz discusses his role in creating a Constitution that has been characterized as establishing the first ‘fiscal-military state' – that is a state created for making war. (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 11) “The United States was thus founded as the first constitutionalist state and an empire on conquered land, with capital in the form of slaves and land (real estate).” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 11) Notice that Dunbar-Ortiz too describes the early US state as a fiscal-military state. She cites the work of Stanford law professor and historian Gregory Ablavsky, which “emphasizes the centrality of Indian affairs in creating the Constitution, particularly provisions concerning federalism and the fiscal-military state.” His work highlights how “(T)he Constitution created a people empowered to sustain a powerful military to carry out conquest of the continent with the full participation of the settlers. This was what the war of independence was fought for, with great sacrifices…” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 12, emphasis added)

I should also mention here that this is precisely why historian Gerald Horne calls the American War of Independence “the counter-revolution of 1776”. (Horne 2014) Horne, in fact, makes the strong claim that “to the extent that 1776 gave slavery a renewed lease of life, it was truly a lineal ancestor of 1861 [the Civil War and the formation of the Confederacy] and, thus a counter-revolution of slavery.” (Horne 2014: xi)

In other words, this supposedly founding moment of modern democracy, celebrated even by Arendt as superior to all other revolutions, meant both – aggressive dispossession of indigenous peoples and the intensification of slavery.

It is necessary to understand that the entire undertaking of settler colonialism – and of colonialism at large – was undergirded by law. But that law was not meant for either the slaves or the indigenous peoples; rather it was to ensure that slave owners didn't indulge in mutually destructive lawlessness. The constitution of the modern political, regardless of where it was being instituted, at the “national” and the global level, was given a legal form. Dunbar-Ortiz observes, from the mid-fifteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, most non-European world was colonized under the “Doctrine of Discovery”, which was “one of the first principles of international law that Christian European monarchies promulgated to legitimize investigating, mapping, and claiming lands belonging to non-Christian peoples outside Europe.” “It originated in a papal bull issued in 1455 that permitted the Portuguese monarchy to seize West Africa and enslave the inhabitants, the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade.” (Dunbar-Ortiz 2021: 32)

In the 1820s, “the Doctrine of Discovery was engraved in constitutional law by the US Supreme Court under John Marshall in decisions regarding the Cherokee Nation.” In so defining the property rights acquired via discovery, “the court further held that Indigenous ‘rights to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily diminished. Their status was defined as ‘domestic, dependent nations', which means captive colonies.” (Ibid: 33)

It is this fiscal-military state that later morphed into what Dwight Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex”. Over the twentieth century, this military-industrial has directly intervened in “regime change operations”, overthrowing democratically elected popular governments. Scholars have documented almost a hundred instances of proven US interventions that range from directly supporting military coups to interfering in determining electoral outcomes, not to mention sponsoring armed militias in different parts of the so-called “developing world”. Is it surprising then that in 250 years of its existence, the USA has been at war for almost 230 years?

Decolonizing the Political

Mahmood Mamdani has recently argued in favour of what he calls the need to “decolonize the political”. Decolonizing the political, in his view, is fundamentally about dismantling the imagination of the nation-state that seeks to homogenize national cultures and, in the process, constitutes the political community that is the legitimate bearer of rights and citizenship. But this project of homogenizing national cultures also produces, inevitably, permanent majorities and minorities. It is through the nation-state that the political is constituted as such, as the centre-piece of political modernity itself. Decolonizing the political, therefore, “means upsetting the permanent majority and minority identities that define the contours of the nation-state.” (Mamdani 2020: 19)

The project of “decolonizing the polity,” he argues, must be at once an epistemic and political, for it is not simply a matter of formulating policies but also more importantly about “how we see ourselves in the world.” (Mamdani 2020: 19)

Mamdani's discussion is largely framed by his studies of the constitutive role played by colonialism, especially in the form of “indirect rule”, in defining and reconstituting cultural/ ethnic communities and “tribes” across the African continent. He argues that anticolonial elites who rejected European attempts to foist their idea of the nation-states on African countries, during their liberation struggles, eventually returned to the very definitions of indigenous culture and ethnicity produced by colonizers, as they embarked on their path of nation-building. The only contrary example, he argues, that attempts to decolonize the political is in post-apartheid South Africa, which seeks to constitute a non-racial state. Mamdani draws important and significant connections between the “political technologies of indirect rule” first developed in the United States of America and then applied with some modifications in South Africa and Nazi Germany. This is especially true of the Indian reservations in the USA, which became the model, not just for the Bantustans in apartheid South Africa but also for Hitler's concentration camps.

It is interesting, in this context, to refer to the work of James Whitman (2017), who tracks the influence of American race laws on the Nazis. Nazi interest in the American race laws was no passing curiosity. Indeed, Whitman documents in great detail, how in the run up to the enactment of the notorious Nuremburg Laws in in 1935, important Nazi jurists were seriously studying and discussing American race laws. Hitler's interest in the USA wasn't suddenly awakened in 1933-34 but was already expressed in Mein Kampf, where “he praised America as nothing less than ‘the one state' that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish.” (Whitman 2017) Most of the discussions among these jurists, Whitman tells us, were regarding racial segregation in general and miscegenation laws in particular. In more recent scholarship, says Whitman, “historians have also tracked down American influence on some of the most unambiguously criminal Nazi programs—in particular on Nazi eugenics and the murderous Nazi conquests in Eastern Europe.” (Whitman 2017) Indeed, historians have argued that the US influence went deeper, into the 1940s, to the Holocaust itself.

“Indeed as early as 1928, Hitler was speechifying admiringly about the way Americans had ‘gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage'; and during the years of genocide in the early 1940s Nazi leaders made repeated reference to the American conquest of the West when speaking of their own murderous conquests to their east.” (Whitman 2017)

Even more interestingly, as with immigration and citizenship law, German lawyers and policy makers' “interest in American anti-miscegenation law [that] long predated the Nazi period.” In fact, it is tied closely to pre–World War I German imperialism, when “beginning in 1905, German colonial administrators in South-West Africa and elsewhere instituted anti-miscegenation measures, intended to safeguard the ‘purity' of the German settler population against mixing with the natives.

It should be clear by now how the history of colonialism is deeply entangled with the emergence of “the political” in Europe and America itself and how it is not something that can be understood within the enclosed boundaries of the nation-state.

In conclusion, therefore, while agreeing with the main lines of Mamdani's argument regarding the decolonization of the political, I want to register two points of divergence. First, Mamdani's focus is on technologies of indirect rule and the ways in which definitions of self in the postcolonial era replicate colonial constructions of culture and ethnicity. His focus therefore, remains on the “denationalizing” the postcolonial states by institution of federal structures and insistence on residence-based citizenship rather than identity-based ones. (Mamdani 2020: 36) While this is very important, the state nevertheless remains at the centre of this proposal. My effort on the other hand, has been to tell the story of modernity and politics from the vantage point of the people at the receiving end, ordinary people caught in the vortex of politics. What emerges from the story that I want/ed to tell is that the state and quasi-state elites, and their centrality in modern politics is itself a product of coloniality/ modernity, which suggests that the very enterprise of trying the resuscitate the political might be flawed. Second, related to the first, while Mamdani's focus throughout remains on the political as something confined within the territorial bounds of the nation-state, my interest here, in foregrounding Gaza/Palestine, has centered on the real global structures of power that despite the different institutional forms that it may have acquired from the 1648 Treaty of Versailles to the 1884 Conference of Berlin to the League of Nations and the United Nations Organizations, has remained under the control of leading European powers and in recent times, an invisible cabal of the Euro-American powers and the Zionists. It should, therefore, be clear by now that while it is essential to dismantle the structure of the nation-state, where my argument takes a different route from Mamdani's is that I do not believe this can be done either at the level of a single territorial state or at a purely political level. What decolonization of the political (if that is what we decide to call it) requires is the dismantling of the military-industrial complex and in fact, a very different vision of the economy from the one controlled by corporations and billionaires.

REFERENCES

Arendt, Hannah. 1951/2017. The Origins of Totalitarianism. London: Penguin Books

Beckert, Sven.2014. Empire of Cotton: A New History of Global Capitalism. Great Britain: Allen Lane, Penguin Random House.

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2021. Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion. Boston: Beacon Press

Horne, Gerald. 2014. The Counter-Revolution of 1776: Slave Resistance and the Origins of the United States of America. New York and London: New York University Press

Mamdani, Mahmood. 2020. Neither Settler Nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap press of Harvard University Press

Quijano, Anibal.2000. ‘Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Latin America', Nepantla: Views from South, Vol. 1, Issue 3, pp. 533-580

Quijano, Anibal.2007. ‘Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality', Cultural Studies, Vol. 21, Nos 2-3, March/May 2007, pp. 168-178

Rubio, Marco. 2026. ‘Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference' (transcript of speech), 14 February 2026, https://www.state.gov/releases/office-of-the-spokesperson/2026/02/secretary-of-state-marco-rubio-at-the-munich-security-conference accessed on 1 March 2026

Wengrow, David.2026. ‘Against the Grotian Tradition', London Review of Books, 23 January 2026, https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2026/january/against-the-grotian-tradition last accessed on 7 March 2026

Whitman, James Q. 2017. Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press

This is the text of a presentation at the webinar of Indian Diaspora, Washington on 23 May, 2026. I thank the organizers for the opportunity to present it. This presentation is a preliminary part of a much bigger project and some of its claims and arguments are still being developed as the work progresses.

Photo Credit : Teacher Creativity Centre, Gaza, Palestine

Ahmad My Friend, My Comrade

Connie Hackbarth — 2026-06-13T15:55:00Z

It has taken me a week to gather my thoughts, to get over the initial shock of your death. I cannot do you justice in this writing, but I hope it's a start.

I'm still in shock, crying, disbelief.

I worked alongside you for 17 years at the Alternative Information Centre (AIC). You were my comrade and my friend. And from the first day, you did something I will never forget.

You introduced me to Palestinians—openly, with pride, and with a deep knowledge of the political importance of those meetings. You didn't just say my name. You presented me as someone worth knowing, worth trusting. You took risks doing that. I know that those introductions weren't easy. You dealt with never-ending negative repercussions because of our work together. You didn't complain. You just kept introducing me.

I remember attending a World Social Forum event together in Morocco. Even there—especially there—you introduced me to Arabs from numerous countries. You insisted that I be included in your discussions, your coffees, and your outings with them. Not as an afterthought. As someone who belonged at the table.

Ahmad, you knew what was important in life: people. Real people. You taught me the extreme pleasure of sitting with a good cup of coffee (and how to make it properly), talking politics by a heater on a freezing winter morning. You taught me the beauty of Hebron, of Sair—the people there, the incredible resistance, the food. Hebron is among my favourite places in the world now, because of you.

You were so proud of your children. You wanted only what was best for them, even when it meant leaving Palestine for a short or even long period.

You stayed true to your political beliefs even when it was difficult. Especially when it was difficult. I saw how hard you worked—long-term organizing I will never fully comprehend. You were instrumental in creating two joint Palestinian-Israeli conferences in Hebron, with hundreds of people. Bringing Israelis openly into Hebron required enormous political work and courage. That work succeeded greatly thanks to you, to the other Palestinian comrades at the AIC, and to progressive Palestinian activists in Hebron. You never made it look easy, but you also never stopped.

So many international activists—from Europe, from the US—were lucky enough to come through the AIC. For so many of them, you were an essential part of their time in Palestine. You helped introduce them to Palestine: to the situation on the ground, and to what justice and hope and real peace look like. Not abstract peace. The real, difficult, daily kind. You had acceptance and understanding for people from everywhere.

And your smile. The genuine excitement in your voice when we spoke or met. You always made me feel you were happy to see me.

I had the honour, the privilege, and the joy of being alongside you for 17 years. That is the truth. The AIC was and still is the most important place in the world for me. You were a huge reason why.

My heart breaks that we failed. I'm sorry you had to experience such unimaginable horrors in these past years. We continued to struggle on this side of the line but failed and fail.

I can't believe you're gone. You will always be in my heart, but that isn't enough. I wish I could have one more coffee with you. One more talk by the heater.

To your children: your father was a person who made bridges with his own hands, at his own cost. He loved you. He wanted only what was best for you. I hope you know that. I hope you can feel how many people across the world are grieving him—not as an idea, but as the man who introduced them to each other, and to Palestine itself.

To your family: thank you for sharing him with the world.

Ahmad, my comrade, my friend. You will always be in my heart. But that isn't enough. Thank you so much for everything.

Senegal Is in the World Cup but Hardly Made Welcome

Momar Dieng — 2026-06-12T19:47:44Z

One of Africa's top teams, Senegal has good reason to look forward to the World Cup. But the US government has put up major barriers to its fans and journalists visiting the country, in a policy of deep discrimination against Senegalese citizens.

He's frustrated, but he's keeping in his anger. Abdoulaye — the pseudonym of a famous Senegalese journalist who spoke to Jacobin — just doesn't know if he'll be able to cover his country's match against Iraq, scheduled to take place Toronto on June 26 as part of the upcoming football World Cup. Known as the Lions of Teranga, the Senegal team are in Group I alongside two other opponents, France and Norway, who they'll face at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium on June 16 and 22.

Accredited by FIFA and with the necessary visas in hand, Abdoulaye sums up his dilemma: “From the United States, I can enter Canadian territory, but I'm not sure I'll be able to return to US soil” for the potential continuation of the competition. The fault, he says, lies with the restrictive anti-immigration measures enacted by the Trump administration, the impact of which could affect the forty or so journalists heading to North America from Senegal. “FIFA will have to step up and make the American organizers see reason,” our colleague notes. In any case, Abdoulaye is still in a privileged position, as thousands of his compatriots have already for months faced a wall of concrete and steel erected by the US Embassy in Dakar to cut off the legal pathway to American visas.

These drastic, often final restrictions already affect thousands of young Senegalese students eager to pursue their studies in the United States, as an extension of the famous American dream that has shaped many of their educational journeys, as well as businesspeople seeking to expand their firms in the homeland of unbridled capitalism. Other ordinary citizens — whether or not they have relatives in the United States — are simply drawn by the joy of discovering “the Great America” and its majestic symbols, such as the Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge, and so on. Yet the Trump administration's ideological blindness has taken its toll.

Executive Order

This January, Executive Order 10998, issued by the US president, placed Senegal on the list of countries now subject to the Visa Bond. This requires applicants for tourist (B1) and business (B2) visas to pay a bond ranging from $5,000 (approximately 2.8 million CFA francs) to $15,000 (approximately 8.5 million CFA francs). In the eyes of US diplomats, these amounts serve as a guarantee against any temptation among admitted individuals to vanish into thin air once they arrive on US soil.

A financial bond of this magnitude appears to be a brutal measure of exclusion based on money, as few ordinary Senegalese will have the means to satisfy the appetite of US consular officials. This is pure Trumpism: every transaction must be an opportunity to rake in money, far removed from the ethics involved.

These deterrent measures taken ahead of the World Cup seem clearly discriminatory. They have their own sordid objectives: to limit to the absolute minimum the number of Senegalese lucky enough to experience the sporting celebration in person; to rake in funds by crudely fleecing as many people as possible; and reaping the political dividends of these diplomatic and administrative blunders by linking them to Donald Trump's campaign pledges for a zero-tolerance line on immigration.

The hunt for - and surveillance of - the “lucky” Senegalese who get to experience the World Cup in person is therefore unlikely to let up. All of them may feel humiliated right up until the end of the adventure. Indeed, one of the provisions of Executive Order 10998, in addition to the security deposit required (payable on a US government website), requires them to enter US territory through the airport designated for them by the consular authorities themselves. These diplomatic agents, vested with full discretion over each case, naturally appear as the enforcers of a discriminatory machinery tasked with providing the MAGA administration with “positive” statistics to justify the continuation of indiscriminate repression against migration flows.

Even the Senegalese who have cleared the financial hurdle are not out of the woods yet. The Trump administration's repressive machinery has also erected digital barriers that deliberately violate their privacy and freedom of expression. This inquisition imperiously demands the contents of all their communications from the past five years on every platform they use. An omission or a false statement is treated as an attempt to conceal information, punished by the rejection of the application, without appeal.

Not Allowed to Set Foot

Access to US territory has become harder for most citizens of countries whose nationals require a visa. For Senegalese, this difficulty has tended to become institutionalized since President Trump's return to the White House in January 2025. A year later, the White House dropped an administrative bombshell on tens of millions of people across the globe. The executive order suspends all issuance of immigrant visas, a measure that makes family reunification impossible — at least until further notice. It also blocks global access to the “Green Card” through the annual lottery. For the Trump administration, migrants of all categories are an unbearable burden on US public finances and said to lower Americans' living standards. Since Senegalese are deemed part of this source of “evil,” the bulk must therefore be prevented from setting foot in the United States.

According to State Department figures, the rejection rate for Senegalese applicants for tourist and business visas (B1/B2) in 2025 was a whopping 74 percent, likely among the world's highest. The number of student visas (F1) issued between September 2022 and October 2024 had gone up from 393 to 426. But they do little to hide an estimated acceptance rate that declined from 65.2 percent in October 2022 to 59 percent in October 2024.

Clearly, immigrant visas are no longer an option for thousands of potential legal immigrants. Suspicion, prejudice, and the mass-scale rejection of applications dominate the process choosing who “deserves” to enter the United States. Under Trump, hundreds of Senegalese families (or ones of Senegalese background) who hoped to come to the United States through the legal family reunification system now see their plans put on hold indefinitely. According to an estimate by the Department of Homeland Security, in 2022–23 there were approximately thirty-four thousand Senegalese born in Senegal who had immigrated to the United States, with around twenty-five to thirty thousand legal residents. This figure does not include Americans of Senegalese origin. In this figure lie many human tragedies related to the freeze on family reunifications. But the migration crisis is no longer sparing even the sporting aspect of relations between Dakar and Washington. The diplomatic coldness governing US immigration policy is more unrelenting than ever before.

Sporting Bans

Already in June 2025, the US Embassy in Dakar denied visas to twelve members of Senegal's women's national basketball team — including five players — who were scheduled to travel to the United States for a ten-day training camp.

Outraged by this decision, then-Senegalese Prime Minister Ousmane Sonko canceled the trip and ordered the training camp to be relocated within the country, “in a sovereign setting conducive to performance.”

Among much of the Senegalese public, there is almost total incomprehension — that is, setting aside the views of those who defend the United States' untrammeled “sovereignty” in matters of immigration. Interviewed by the BBC for a report on the organization of the World Cup, Aliou Ngom, a Senegalese fan who attended the previous tournaments in Qatar (2022) and Russia (2018), laments that this World Cup won't be a moment for “cultures coming together from all over the world.”

The systemic chaos surrounding the 2026 World Cup, even before it begins, is stirring the entire planet. The organization of the world's biggest sporting event is in turmoil, bringing together racism, restrictions, discrimination, visa selection based on ability to pay, digital screening, and even attempts to humiliate some of the tournament participants themselves. This organized chaos, compounded by the headache of pricey stadium tickets and the selective body searches of teams upon their arrival on American soil, is being condemned around the world.

The Senegalese players and coaching staff experienced this firsthand when they were searched at Raleigh Airport on their way to San Antonio. Still, in a press release published on its various platforms, the Senegalese Football Federation played down the episode, emphasizing that the frisking of the staff and players “took place in respect for the relevant airport security rules and no particular incident was observed.”

Ultimately, Trump's tragicomic governance is again a subject of derision. If past administrations built up soft-power tools for “selling” America and its promise to the world's youth — including in countries like Senegal — this is now badly compromised. At the same time, China, Russia, India, and even Turkey continue to refine their strategies for quietly expanding into new territories and partnerships that could shape the global power balance for years to come.

Momar Dieng is an investigative journalist and editor based in Dakar, Senegal, working on politics, economy, and governance. A member of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and the Norbert Zongo Cell for Investigative Journalism in West Africa (CENOZO), he is director of publication at impact.sn.

Source: https://jacobin.com/2026/06/senegal-world-cup-trump-visa-restrictions

Photo credit

Rebuilding the Socialist Horizon

Bhaskar Sunkara — 2026-06-12T18:55:00Z

At an event sponsored by the SEARCH Foundation, Bhaskar Sunkara delivered the inaugural Eric Aarons Memorial Lecture on May 26, 2026, at the New South Wales Teachers Federation in Sydney, Australia. Aarons was one of the leading figures of the Australian communist movement and later an important advocate for a democratic socialism. Below is a transcript of Sunkara's remarks.

Eric Aarons lived through the great defeats of the twentieth-century socialist movement but refused to let those defeats have the last word. He joined the Communist Party of Australia as a young man. He believed, as millions did across the world, that he was on the right side of history. He watched, over decades, as history played out in reality — as Stalinism revealed its horrors, as the official Communist movement broke apart, as the social democratic compromise in the West frayed and was finally torn up. But he kept struggling for a better world. Not through moving back to the certainties of his youth, and not through moving forward into the accommodations of centrist politics, but by trying to move toward a new politics.

That is the spirit in which I want to speak tonight. Because we are gathered as socialists, as trade unionists, as people who want to live in a better world, decades after socialism was declared dead. Indeed, the socialist movement that millions of workers across the world built over 150 years — the parties, the unions, the cooperatives, the newspapers, the cultural institutions, the experiments in workers' power and public ownership — is either gone or hollowed out.

But we should insist to the world that socialism was not wrong. Socialism suffered defeats.

If socialism was wrong — if the whole project of organizing society around human need rather than private profit was a nineteenth-century enthusiasm we should outgrow — then the only honest thing left for people who once called themselves socialists is to manage capitalism more humanely. To accept, as the capitalist slogan has it, that there is no alternative.

But if socialism suffered defeats — if it was beaten by a combination of its enemies, its own crimes, and its own economic failures, but not refuted in principle — then things are different. Then the task in front of us is not to grieve and accommodate but to learn, to rebuild, and to fight again, with a clearer sense of what we got wrong and a deeper conviction about what we got right.

I want to argue further that a leftism without a socialist destination is not a politics worth fighting for. Not just because of the moral power of our destination but because, without one, we become weaker reformers, not more practical ones. And we lose something that actually made us potent working-class fighters. We lose the grand story — the story that once told ordinary workers that they were not history's victims in need of either private charity or state charity but history's authors.

So tonight, I want to do three things. I want to talk about what the socialist movement actually achieved, before it was beaten back. I want to discuss why it was defeated, both from outside and from within. And then I want to talk about what a socialist horizon could mean for us now, in all the complexities and challenges of our era.

The Movement That Almost Won

Let me start with the achievement.

The history of the modern left is usually told as a history of failure. But, at least when it comes to the taking of power, that couldn't be further from the truth.

The modern socialist movement began, in its recognizable form, in the middle of the nineteenth century — with small groups of workers, artisans, confronting a spectacular and terrifying industrial society. Within seventy years, those small groups had grown into the largest political parties in Europe. Within a hundred years, parties calling themselves socialist or communist governed roughly half the planet.

There was nothing like it in modern history. You have to go back to the early Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries to find a movement that spread so far and so fast — from a few thousand militants in the 1860s to political power, in some form, across more than half the world's population by the 1960s.

Hal Draper, an American socialist and a sharp critic of every actually existing version of socialism, observed in 1966 that “for the first time in the history of the world, very likely a majority of its people label themselves ‘socialist' in one sense or another.” That isn't a sectarian project. That was, by his estimation, the majority of politically conscious human beings, on every continent, identifying with some version of an idea that, sixty years earlier, had been the property of a few pockets of workers or exiled intellectuals.

But before the socialist movement won state power, it won something even more remarkable. It won a culture.

In the coal villages of Wales, miners asked to be buried with their copies of The Communist Manifesto the way an earlier generation had asked to be buried with their Bibles. In working-class homes across Europe, portraits of socialist leaders hung where icons of saints had once hung. The feasts of the old religious calendar were folded into a new calendar of strikes and secular martyrs and holidays. Eric Hobsbawm recorded an announcement from the Po Valley in 1891: “The priests have their festivals. The First of May is the festival of the workers of the entire world.”

This was not just political organization. This was the building of a countercivilization inside the shell of the old one. Workers had their own newspapers, their own sports clubs, their own choirs, their own schools, their own funeral societies, their own theories of history, their own heroes, their own holidays. They walked through the same streets as their bosses, but they lived, in some real sense, in a different world — a world with its own moral horizon and its own picture of what was coming next.

And what was coming next, many believed, was socialism.

Two broad versions of that future eventually took shape. There was socialism within capitalism — the social democratic project, which sought to humanize the market through the power of collective bargaining and the state. And there was socialism outside capitalism — the communist project, which sought to abolish the market altogether through state ownership and central planning.

Both of those projects, in their heyday, transformed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. Whatever else you say about Soviet communism — and I am from a democratic socialist tradition extremely critical of it — it took a peasant society and industrialized it in a generation, eliminated illiteracy, defeated Nazi Germany on the battlefield, and offered, for many people in the colonized world, a seemingly working model of how to escape the imperial division of labor. And whatever you say about social democracy, postwar Sweden under Olof Palme was among the most decent societies that has ever existed. It featured full employment, strong unions negotiating on more than equal terms with employers, and a universal welfare state. It meant real dignity for working people on the shop floor and in society as a whole.

Even many critical of both models saw them as at least way stations on a road that millions of people genuinely believed led, eventually, to a society in which the great division of human beings into a class that owns and a class that works would be ended for good.

Defeat From Outside and From Within

How did we go from flawed or partial victories to defeat?

The standard story, told by many on the Left, is that socialism was crushed from the outside. By the Cold War. By American imperialism. By the CIA. By Pinochet's coup, by Operation Condor, by the dirty wars across the Global South. By the Thatcher–Reagan counterrevolution. By the bond markets disciplining François Mitterrand in the early 1980s. By the long, patient work of capitalist agents through their think tanks, media, and political parties.

Part of that story is, of course, true. The socialist movement was indeed the target of the most sustained, well-funded, and ruthless ideological and military counteroffensive in modern history. We shouldn't forget that, nor should we forget just how many martyrs violent anti-communism from Indonesia to the Southern Cone left behind.

But if we tell ourselves only that story — if we say that we were simply beaten by external enemies — we let ourselves off the hook in a way that makes it impossible to learn from what else happened. And we owe Eric Aarons, and everyone like him who spent a lifetime trying to understand our defeat honestly, more than that.

The truth is that socialism was not only beaten from without. It was beaten also from within — by its own political crimes and by its own economic failures.

The political crimes of the twentieth-century communist movement are not a slander invented by Cold War propagandists. The gulags were real. The bloody terrors and purges were real. The famines that killed millions in Ukraine and in China were real. The destruction of open expression, of free trade unions, of religious freedom, of civil society — that was real too. And those crimes were committed not just by authoritarians who pretended to be socialists but by people who believed, sincerely in many cases, that they were building the future Karl Marx dreamed of. We can't resort to a No True Scotsman defense. This was the real, historical experience of socialism for millions.

It was what Rosa Luxemburg predicted: The substitution of party for class. The substitution of state for party. The substitution of leader for state.

And the belief that history was so clearly on our side — the belief that I want to resurrect — was used to construct a moral universe in which any means used to accelerate history were justified. Individual rights and the rule of law were seen as bourgeois. The conviction was that, having seized the commanding heights of the economy, one could simply command the rest of society into the shape one wanted.

A socialism that does not understand, in its bones, why the decisions that shaped state socialism were wrong — not just tactically wrong but morally wrong — is a socialism that will not and should not have a future in the twenty-first century.

But most of the Left agrees on these political questions. Where there is less reckoning is on the economic failures of socialism.

Soviet-style central planning did not collapse only because of political repression, or only because of the arms race, or only because of CIA intrigues. It collapsed because, on its own terms, it could not deliver. By the 1970s and '80s, the gap between what the system promised and what it produced had become impossible to disguise.

The first reason was calculation. Gosplan, the Soviet planning agency, was responsible for coordinating an economy that included nearly 400 bureaucracies, 43,000 factories, 26,000 construction enterprises, 47,000 farming units, 260,000 service establishments, and more than one million retail shops — producing some 12 million distinct products, each of which required the right inputs from the right suppliers at the right locations on the right timelines, with supply chains stretching across eleven time zones. These in total meant tens of billions of variables, rising into the trillions when you extend the planning horizon across time.

To rationally plan that, you would need to know what every enterprise could produce, what every household would want, and how every input connected to every output. No one could know that. Not the most brilliant economists in the world. Not the most powerful computer that has ever been built or ever will be. The information simply does not exist in a form that any central authority can collect and process. So what you got instead was guesswork — last year's numbers plus a little more — propped up by a sprawling secret economy of barter, hoarding, and back-channel deals that managers ran on the side to keep things moving.

The second and related problem was that of incentives. Every manager understood that next year's resources depended on this year's reported numbers. So they lowballed their projected capacity and overstated their actual output. They hoarded labor and materials. They lied. The workers under them figured out very quickly that exceeding a quota just meant a higher quota next quarter. Weak firms were never allowed to fail, because letting them fail meant unemployment and broken supply lines, so inefficiency was never punished. From the Politburo down to the shop floor, the entire hierarchy had an incentive to misrepresent what it was doing.

These were not bugs you could fix with a better algorithm. They were features of the structure of Soviet-style economics itself. And what we, as socialists, have to admit is that there is no version of administrative planning that escapes these problems. The dream of running a complex modern economy purely by planning should not and cannot be revived.

And then there is social democracy, whose failure took a different form. Social democracy didn't fail because it tried to abolish capitalism. It failed because it tried to tame capitalism without transcending it.

For a generation, its basic formula worked. Social democracy produced strong unions, full employment, a generous welfare state, rising wages, and a growing economy that produced enough surplus to fund all of it.

But there was a contradiction at the heart of the social democratic settlement, and it did not survive the moment growth slowed. Social democracy empowered workers politically while leaving ownership of the means of production in private hands. This produced a permanent standoff between a powerful labor movement and a capitalist class that still controlled investment. As long as the pie was growing, the standoff was tolerable — there was enough for wages, enough for profits, and enough for the welfare state on top. But the moment the pie stopped growing, in the stagflation of the 1970s, the standoff collapsed.

The Swedish social democrats actually saw this coming. Rudolf Meidner, the great Swedish economist, proposed a plan in 1976 to gradually transfer ownership of large firms to worker-controlled funds, using a portion of profits each year — a real bridge from social democracy to socialism, funded by the wage restraint that workers had already practiced for decades. It would have solved both Sweden's economic difficulties and its political impasse.

But it never came to being in a viable form, not just because of opposition from capital but because the leadership of the Swedish Social Democratic Party itself would not fight for it. They were not willing to mobilize the working class for a transformation of property relations. The plan was watered down, then gutted, then abandoned. And before long, Swedish capital was able to solve the crisis of social democracy in its own way, by pushing along a long campaign of liberalization that has reduced the Swedish welfare state to a shadow of what it was.

We should learn lessons from both failures.

Soviet-style socialism failed because you cannot run a complex modern economy without prices, autonomous firms, and real incentives. Social democracy failed because it tried to leave private ownership of capital intact, and a capitalist class with all the levers of investment in its control will eventually use its power to dismantle whatever constraints have been placed upon it. These two failures were mirror images.

But the lesson of these failures is not that socialism is impossible. The lesson is that socialism has to be rethought in its technical design, without abandoning our goal of a society without exploitation or oppression.

The Destination Is Everything

Before I get to what that twenty-first century socialism might look like, I want to make a practical and not just normative case against moderation. Because the temptation for a defeated Left is to say, “Never mind socialism, let's just talk about social welfare, or public housing, or higher minimum wages. Those things are winnable. Why burden them with the unpopular word, the discredited dream?”

The first reason is that a Left without a socialist horizon is not even a more effective reformist left. It is a worse reformist left.

Reforms are not abstract policy proposals that float through history on their own merits. Reforms are won by movements. And movements are sustained by stories — stories about who their constituents are, why they matter, where they are going, and what they are part of. A movement that can only say, “We want a more generous unemployment benefit,” is a movement that will not mobilize the energy it needs to win even that benefit, because the unemployment benefit by itself does not answer the questions that working people actually ask when they consider whether to give up an evening, a Saturday, a career, and sometimes a life for political action.

The bigger questions, I would argue, are actually more mainstream: Who am I in this society? Why are resources distributed the way they are? Where are we going as a society? Is there a future in which our children inherit something better than what we have? Who's standing in the way of realizing that future?

The great socialist parties of the early twentieth century could answer those questions. They could tell a Welsh miner that he was the inheritor of a tradition that ran from the Levellers through the Chartists through the workers' internationals, that his union or party card signified membership in a movement of millions of workers around the world, that the strike he was about to join was a small skirmish in a global struggle that would eventually, in his children's lifetime or his grandchildren's, mark the final triumph of labor. That story is what made him willing to be locked out, to be beaten, or to lose his job. It was not just the wage increase and material security for his family; it was also the story that gave those sacrifices deep meaning.

When you take the story away, you have starved our movement of one of its greatest sources of power. You have asked people to fight a hundred small fights without ever telling them what the fights are for.

Second, a Left without a socialist destination eventually becomes something other than a Left. It becomes a kind of progressive technocracy: a network of policy professionals, NGO staffers, communications consultants, and electoral operatives who manage the symptoms of a system they have given up trying to change.

A progressivism that has nothing to say about class — that talks only about identity, or only about poverty, or only about policy — is no match for a Right that has plenty to say about class, even if everything it says is a lie. The Right will tell working people that their enemies are immigrants, that their enemies are minorities, that their enemies are the cultural elite. A progressivism that refuses to name capitalists and the rich as the enemies leaves working people with nothing to put against that story except the assurance that their feelings will be respected and their ascriptive identities will be honored.

The Left that wins in the twenty-first century will be a Left that can name what is wrong, name who benefits from it, and name what we want to put in its place.

And the third reason is that we owe it to the people who came before us.

The socialist movement was built by people who had no objective reason to believe they would win. The Welsh miner reading The Communist Manifesto in 1890 had every reason to think his life was going to be short, hard, and forgotten. The Russian textile worker in 1905 had every reason to think the autocracy would last forever. The factory worker in São Paulo, the dockworker in Sydney, the metalworker in Turin in 1920 believed because they had decided, against the evidence, that they were not history's victims. They were history's authors. They were the protagonists of a story whose ending had not been written.

That world-historic confidence is what built every institution we have inherited: The eight-hour day. The weekend. The old-age pension. The hospital you were born in. The school you went to. The union that, if you are lucky, still represents you at your job. None of those things fell from the sky. They were ripped out of the hands of people who did not want to give them up, by movements of working people who believed they were doing more than just bargaining for crumbs. They believed the future belonged to them.

And we, who have inherited the dividends of their fight, have allowed ourselves to settle for less. We have shrunk our horizon to fit our present weakness, and then we have wondered why we cannot grow.

This is the main reason why we need to recover the horizon of socialism and the language not of parliamentary gossip and media sound bites but of centuries and continents. This is why, as old-fashioned as it might seem, we need to talk about socialism and the abolition of class society. About the end of the millennia-long division between those who command labor and those who perform it. About a world organized around a radical form of democracy and equality.

A Socialism for the Twenty-First Century

Marx famously warned against writing recipes for the cookshops of the future. He was rightly critiquing the utopian socialists of his day. But in our world, our challenge is to prove to people that socialism is not just politically desirable but technically possible.

As a result of not just capitalist propaganda but the real failures of both forms of twentieth-century socialism, a skepticism has grown about socialism's future. Wouldn't taking democratic control over a complex economy eventually boomerang into crisis, collapse into inefficiency, or harden into authoritarianism?

To say that socialism is technically possible and we should sketch out blueprints for it doesn't require pretending that there's a single settled model of socialism just waiting to be implemented. But it does require confronting a set of unavoidable questions that any credible alternative must answer.

Could a socialist economy use prices, profits, and competition to coordinate complex production without reproducing domination or significant inequality? What incentives encourage efficiency and innovation in an economy of democratically governed firms? How can productivity growth be sustained so that living standards continue to rise, shortages are avoided, and technological change continues without the sort of mass insecurity that workers experience today? And what role must the state play in stabilizing the macro economy, guiding investment, and enforcing democratic priorities without suffocating initiative?

Let me sketch, very briefly, what I think a credible socialism for our century might look like. I am drawing here on a book I have just finished with my colleagues Mike Beggs and Ben Burgis. It's called The Blueprint: The Case for Socialism in the Real World, where we work out these arguments at greater length.

A twenty-first-century socialism, as we would describe it, has to do two things at once. It has to abolish market dependence — the condition in which your survival depends on success in the market — while preserving markets as one tool, among others, for coordinating a complex economy.

In practice, this means decommodifying broad areas of life. Health care, education, transportation, energy, housing, and telecommunications are the infrastructure of a modern life. Organizing them through markets, through profit-seeking firms that ration by price rather than need, is a mistake — not only morally but practically, because the result is a system that is both more unequal and less efficient than public provision would be.

Beyond these domains, as my colleagues and I describe in The Blueprint, lie the broader economy of goods and services, where coordination problems are more varied, and where markets remain important. In the market sector of an economy composed of democratically governed firms, price signals would still convey information about supply and demand, helping to coordinate production and consumption.

But the surplus generated by economic activity would be controlled by those who produce it. And investment would be allocated through public financial institutions rather than by capitalists. In this way, markets can function as tools of coordination without reproducing the power relations of capitalism.

In this socialist framework, productive enterprises in the commodity-producing sector are controlled by workers rather than external shareholders or private capitalists. Governance rights attach to participation rather than to a financial stake. Membership in a firm, then, resembles membership in a political community. It confers voice and real democratic control at the point of production, and it imposes obligations, but it can't be traded like a commodity.

This shift in governance requires a corresponding shift in how investment is organized. Any feasible socialism must avoid soft budget constraints and allow inefficient firms to fail while more productive ones expand. From an egalitarian standpoint, this should be common sense. Why should we waste the most valuable thing in the world — human labor — in inefficiency?

But workers in democratic firms should not be expected to supply capital themselves, or to tie their personal savings to the fortune of a single workplace. Leaving investment decisions at the level of individual firms would generate systematic distortions that would destroy a socialist system. Disparities in capital intensity, for example, would encourage workers to cluster in capital-rich sectors, while labor-intensive production and the public sector are left unstaffed. Imagine everyone wanting to work on oil rigs, or some other very capital-intensive sector where your dividends would be massive, instead of working at a childcare clinic.

Organizing ownership and investment as a social function rather than a firm-level one is therefore essential. Public banks serve this role by holding productive assets in common, allocating capital on behalf of society as a whole. In this way, firms operate with real autonomy while remaining stewards rather than owners of social wealth. And the state can use a vast array of macroeconomic tools to influence the direction of development.

One additional mechanism that is essential for such an economy to remain both efficient and egalitarian over time is the creation of minimum wages, differentiated by occupation, to shape development itself. Rather than allowing labor markets to sort worker managers purely through localized bargaining power or sectoral rents, benchmark wages establish a floor that reflects collective priorities about dignity, skill, and social contribution.

Firms and sectors that rely on low pay and labor discipline would be pressured to innovate, reorganize, or contract. Those that raise productivity through new techniques, through additional training, or through technological improvement would be rewarded through increased dividends. In this way, the economy is directed along a high road of development that rewards innovation and investment rather than just sweating out labor.

Of course, in a socialist economy, the goal of increasing productivity isn't a goal for its own sake. The goal is the expansion of leisure, of security, and, ultimately, of time outside production.

A socialism that merely redistributes income without changing how time is organized would fall short of its promise. But a socialism that combines redistribution with social ownership, democratically guided investment, and wage structures that reward efficiency can translate a dynamic economy into shorter hours, longer lives, and greater freedom over how those lives are lived.

This is a sketch. I am laying it out in five minutes when it deserves five hours. But the point is that we need to be discussing models of socialism as part of our struggle for both near-term and long-term changes.

Ultimately, our goal as egalitarians must simply be the end of class society — not a slightly fairer class society, or a class society with better safety nets, but the end of the division of humanity into a class that owns and a class that works. It would be the first society, in most parts of the world, since the Neolithic Revolution that is not organized around that division.

Unfinished Business

Eric Aarons spent his life advocating for working people and for a better world. He gave that life to the conviction that the society we live in is not the only society we could live in, and that ordinary people, organized, are capable of building something better.

This was a life that was well spent.

We live in an age that has tried very hard to convince us that the lives of people like Eric were wasted. That the organizers, the party members, the union militants, the teachers and shop stewards who gave their decades to the socialist movement were, in the end, deluded. That they bet on the wrong horse. That history has rendered its verdict, and that the verdict was against them.

I couldn't disagree more.

Eric was not wrong. The Welsh miner buried with his copy of The Communist Manifesto was not wrong. The Russian textile worker, the Italian metalworker, the South African unionist, the Brazilian peasant organizer, the Australian docker, the American socialist who campaigned for Eugene Debs a hundred years ago, or even the one who knocked doors for Zohran Mamdani last year — none of them were wrong. They were not naive. They were not history's fools. They were people who looked at the world they had been given and decided it was not good enough, and they spent their energy trying to build something better.

The fact that they did not finish the job does not mean they were wrong to start it. And the fact that we have inherited their unfinished business does not diminish what they did. It just places an obligation on us to continue their work.

Bhaskar Sunkara is the founding editor of Jacobin, the president of the Nation magazine, and the author of The Socialist Manifesto: The Case for Radical Politics in an Era of Extreme Inequality.

Source: https://jacobin.com/2026/05/socialism-soviet-planning-social-democracy

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