Part 1 – Death Toll of Capitalism
 
A quick timeline of capitalist imperialism, resulting in roughly 1.6 billion people being killed by capitalism
 
United States Imperialism:
Sidebar if needed - what is imperialism?
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism is a book written by Vladimir Lenin in 1916 and published in 1917. It describes the formation of oligopoly, by the interlacing of bank and industrial capital, in order to create a financial oligarchy, and explains the function of financial capital in generating profits from the exploitation colonialism inherent to imperialism, as the final stage of capitalism. The essay synthesises Lenin's developments of Karl Marx's theories of political economy in Das Kapital (1867)
In the Prefaces to the essay, Lenin said the First World War (1914–1918) was "an annexationist, predatory, plunderous war" among empires, whose historical and economic background must be studied "to understand and appraise modern war and modern politics".
That for capitalism to generate greater profits than the home market can yield, the merging of banks and industrial cartels produces finance capitalism, and the exportation and investment of capital to countries with undeveloped and underdeveloped economies. 
In turn, that financial behaviour divides the world among monopolist business companies. In colonizing undeveloped countries, business and government will engage in geopolitical conflict over the exploitation of labour of most of the population of the world. 
Therefore, imperialism is the highest (advanced) stage of capitalism, requiring monopolies to exploit labour and natural resources, and the exportation of finance capital, rather than manufactured goods, to sustain colonialism, which is an integral function of imperialism. 
Moreover, in the capitalist homeland, the super-profits yielded by the colonial exploitation of a people and their economy permit businessmen to bribe native politicians, labour leaders and the labour aristocracy (upper stratum of the working class) to politically thwart worker revolt (labour strikes) and placate the working class.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperialism,_the_Highest_Stage_of_Capitalism
 
1400s – Ongoing Native American Genocide 114,000,000
1400s – 1865 African Slave Trade 150,000,000
1800s – Current Day US Aggression in Latin America 5,000,000
1898 American War vs Philippine 3,000,000
1980s Tamils killed by US backed Sri Lankan Gov. 30,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lankan_Tamils
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_July
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_Eelam
1898 Spanish-American War 100,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War
1941-42 Invasion of the Philippines 650,000 US Civil War 700,000
1950 – 53 Korean War 10,000,000
1954 Guatemala 300,000
1955 – 75 Vietnam War (including Cambodia & Laos) 10,000,000
1961 US Intervention in the Congo 5,000,000
1967 US Backed Dictator General Suharto 1,200,000 (Anti-communist dictator)
1974 US Made Famine in Bangladesh 100,000
1999 US Bombing of Yugoslavia 20,000
1990 Iraq (US Selling Poison Gas to Saddam) 400,000
1990-1991 Iraq (Desert Storm) 500,000
1990 US imposed sanctions on Iraq 1,000,000
1991 US Bombing Iraq Water Supply 500,000
2001 – 2021 Afghanistan (War on Terrorism) 1,200,000
2001 – Present Iraq (War on Terrorism) 1,300,000
2011  NATO Intervention in Libya 100,000
 
Japanese Imperialism:
1937 – 45 Japanese Bombing of China 71,105
1937 – 45 Japanese Germ Warfare in China 200,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
1942 Japanese Massacre of Singapore 100,000
1943 – 45 Japanese Occupation of East Timor 70,000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Timor
 
British Imperialism:
1899 – 1902 Second Boer War 75,000
 
1845- 1852 Irish Potato Famine 1,500,000
Not an unavoidable famine caused by purely natural factors as many believe-
“historians have since concluded that Ireland continued to export large quantities of food, primarily to Great Britain, during the blight. In cases such as livestock and butter, research suggests that exports may had actually increased during the Potato Famine. In 1847 alone, records indicate that commodities such as peas, beans, rabbits, fish, and honey continued to be exported from Ireland, even as the Great Hunger ravaged the countryside.”
https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/irish-potato-famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
 
Mid 1800s to mid 1900s Indian famines 10,000,000
1943 Bengal Famine 3,000,000
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/29/winston-churchill-policies-contributed-to-1943-bengal-famine-study
The typical excuse for the famine from apologists for the British Empire or Colonialism in general, is that this was simply because of the war, or natural factors, but this isn’t true. This famine was not caused by drought as previous famines had been, and while it was not entirely human-made, it would have been drastically reduced in severity if not entirely avoided if England, particularly Churchill, had prioritized the welfare of Indian people and not insisted on maintaining Imperial control over India, increasing authoritarian control during it’s independence movements, and basing policy decisions on blatantly racist beliefs about India and it’s citizens.
 
1600 – 1947 British Occupation of India 20,000,000
 
Famines in British Occupied India 30,000,000
 
1866 Orissa famine
 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-36339524

Famine, while no stranger to the subcontinent, increased in frequency and deadliness with the advent of British colonial rule.
 
The East India Company helped kill off India's once-robust textile industries, pushing more and more people into agriculture. This, in turn, made the Indian economy much more dependent on the whims of seasonal monsoons.
One hundred and fifty years ago, as is the case with today's drought, a weak monsoon appeared as the first ill omen.
"It can, we fear, no longer be concealed that we are on the eve of a period of general scarcity," announced the Englishman, a Calcutta newspaper, in late 1865.
The Indian and British press carried reports of rising prices, dwindling grain reserves, and the desperation of peasants no longer able to afford rice.
All of this did little to stir the colonial administration into action. In the mid-19th Century, it was common economic wisdom that government intervention in famines was unnecessary and even harmful. The market would restore a proper balance. Any excess deaths, according to Malthusian principles, were nature's way of responding to overpopulation.
This logic had been used with devastating effect two decades beforehand in Ireland, where the government in Britain had, for the most part, decided that no relief was the best relief.
On a flying visit to Orissa in February 1866, Cecil Beadon, the colonial governor of Bengal (which then included Orissa), staked out a similar position. "Such visitations of providence as these no government can do much either to prevent or alleviate," he pronounced.
 
Regulating the skyrocketing grain prices would risk tampering with the natural laws of economics. "If I were to attempt to do this," the governor said, "I should consider myself no better than a dacoit or thief." With that, Mr Beadon deserted his emaciated subjects in Orissa and returned to Kolkata (Calcutta) and busied himself with quashing privately funded relief efforts.
 
In May 1866, it was no longer easy to ignore the mounting catastrophe in Orissa. British administrators in Cuttack found their troops and police officers starving. The remaining inhabitants of Puri were carving out trenches in which to pile the dead. "For miles round you heard their yell for food," commented one observer.
 
As more chilling accounts trickled into Calcutta and London, Mr Beadon made a belated attempt to import rice into Orissa. It was, with cruel irony, hindered by an overabundant monsoon and flooding. Relief was too little, too late, too rotten. Orissans paid with their lives for bureaucratic foot-dragging.
 
Misc. Capitalist nations:
Dutch East Indies 25,000
Somali Child Famine Deaths 29,000
228 Massacre 30,000
French Madagascar 80,000
Indonesian Anti-Communist Purges 1965-1966 1,000,000
Philippine Insurrection 220,000
Franco Regime 300,000
Benito Mussolini regime 300,000
Rebelling Shia Killed by Saddam 300,000
Nanking Massacre 300,000
Spanish Civil War 400,000
Mussolini's Ethiopia 700,000
Palestinians Killed by Israel 1947-2002 826,626
Nigerian Civil War 1,000,000
Stateless Capitalist Somalia 1,000,000
Iraq-Iran War 1,000,000
Rwandan Genocide 1,000,000
Belgian Congo Colonization 10,000,000
Feudal Russia 1,066,000
First Indochina 1946-1954 1,750,000
Khmer Rouge (not communist) 2,035,000
 South African Apartheid 3,500,000
Chiang Kai Shok regime (China) 7,000,000
Congo 1886-1908 8,000,000
Nazi Holocaust 12,000,000
1991 – Current Post-Soviet Capitalism in Russia 1,500,000
World War One 16,500,000
World War Two 60,000,000
General Disasters by Capitalism: Hamburg Cholera Outbreak 1892 10,000
Union Carbide Bhopal Disaster 15,000
Industrial Revolution Kids & Adults USA 100,000
Chetnik Collaboration & Genocide 100,000
Herero and Namaqua Genocide 110,000
Burma-Siam Railroad Construction 118,000
Albanian Genocide 270,000
Fascist Independent State of Croatia 900,000
Armenian Genocide 1,500,000
Famine of 1932-33 (Kulak policy and weather) 7,000,000
1929 Great Depression (America alone) 12,000,000
2001 – 2011 Children Killed by Preventable Diseases Since 208,000,000
2001-2008 Children Killed by Hunger 9/11 235,000,000
2009 Children Died from Hunger 5,250,000
2010 Children Died from Hunger 6,000,000
1990s Children Killed by Hunger during the  100,000,000
1960 up to 2011 Cigarette Related Deaths Worldwide 306,000,000
 
Total:
1,600,000,000 Killed
 
Some others I removed to be conciliatory:
US Revolutionary War 35,700 (If Russia removes a Monarch its bad right?)
US Concentration Camps of Germans 1,000,000
Massacre of the Paris Commune 20,000
Capitalist Policy in India 1947-1990 120,000,000
 
 
Scramble for Africa
1603-1780  Dutch East India Trading Company

1839-1860 Opium Wars
British privateers seeking profits imported opium into China, violating Chinese law, and soon resulted in approximately 10% of the population to opium.
This will come up again later in other profit-driven opium epidemics.
 
As China’s global rise rivals U.S. hegemony, the number one priority of U.S. foreign policy is to wage a demonization campaign against China. Since the Obama administration announced the Pivot to Asia, the U.S. has spent countless military dollars in the Pacific to encircle China. While the demonization and propaganda campaign against China has been at an all time high, the unforeseen COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated the anti-China narrative.
As the outrageous demonization campaign against China continues to grow amidst this crisis, the Party for Socialism and Liberation, in partnership with the Qiao Collective, is holding a five-part class series on China. The course will examine the construction of modern-day China in the context of global imperialism, starting from the very first Opium War between China and Britain in the early 1800s. Imperial China, which was one of the most advanced civilizations of the world, quickly became a country looted and torn apart by many imperialist nations who wanted a piece of the pie.
 

Other capitalist atrocities
indigenous genocide, slavery, Indonesian genocide, Pinochet dictatorship + Pinochet Concentration Camps, Argentina dictatorship, Brazilian dictatorship, The Pakistan incident, the gilded age, the Great Depression, Batista dictatorship, Guantanamo Bay, Vietnam War, My Lai Massacre, Sinchon Massacre, Kent State Massacre, Patriot Act, Red Summer, Jim Crow, MK Ultra, 1985 MOVE bombing, the 1921 Battle of Blair Mountain, Malayan Emergency + “new village” concentration camps, repression of the Mau Mau Rebellion, covert war in Yemen, Stanley Meyer incident, genocide in Turkey, Congolese Genocide (over half the population killed and much of the remaining mutilated), Greek Civil War + Ai Stratis concentration camps, invasion of Cyprus by Turkey, washita river massacre, Minamata Disaster, Bhopal Disaster, the USA military gunning down civilians in Iraq on purpose (collateral murder) then going on a multi year man hunt for the man who leaked it (Julian Assange), 90% of people killed in US drone strikes being innocents, the USA imprisoning the man who revealed the drone strikes civilian casualties, 1/3 of the world’s population living under US sanctions, America supporting 70% of current dictatorships, USA and NATO targeting civilians in the Korean War killing millions, and the Nazis being funded by capitalists who wanted them to silence the left.
 
 
The danger of right-wing ideologies
 
https://www.dhs.gov/ntas/advisory/national-terrorism-advisory-system-bulletin-november-30-2022
November 30, 2022
Summary of Terrorism Threat to the United States
The United States remains in a heightened threat environment. Lone offenders and small groups motivated by a range of ideological beliefs and/or personal grievances continue to pose a persistent and lethal threat to the Homeland.  Domestic actors and foreign terrorist organizations continue to maintain a visible presence online in attempts to motivate supporters to conduct attacks in the Homeland.  Threat actors have recently mobilized to violence, citing factors such as reactions to current events and adherence to violent extremist ideologies. In the coming months, threat actors could exploit several upcoming events to justify or commit acts of violence, including certifications related to the midterm elections, the holiday season and associated large gatherings, the marking of two years since the breach of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and potential sociopolitical developments connected to ideological beliefs or personal hostility.
 
Targets of potential violence include public gatherings, faith-based institutions, the LGBTQI+ community, schools, racial and religious minorities, government facilities and personnel, U.S. critical infrastructure, the media, and perceived ideological opponents.
 
Some domestic violent extremists have expressed grievances based on perceptions that the government is overstepping its Constitutional authorities or failing to perform its duties. Historically, issues related to immigration and abortion have been cited by prior attackers as inspiration for violence. Potential changes in border security enforcement policy, an increase in noncitizens attempting to enter the U.S., or other immigration-related developments may heighten these calls for violence.
 
**This violence is directed at marginalized people (who have no power over government policy) and citizens of the same class as the perpetrators. Far from weakening the state, rightist action provides the excuse for increased state power and surveillance. The document goes on at length to describe the various measures the US govt will ostensibly be taking to combat this threat, and these mostly include expansion of the existing law enforcement and anti-terrorism agencies, and increased cooperation between them- the exact opposite of what anti-statists should want, but also the only option an authoritarian capitalist government can offer, since combating crime by increasing the standard of living of citizens through strengthened social programs and emphasis on human needs rather than punishment (despite this being the best proven way to do so) is not an option as it would require getting taxing the very wealthy people who have an outsized influence on govt policy: **
 
Princeton Study:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/testing-theories-of-american-politics-elites-interest-groups-and-average-citizens/62327F513959D0A304D4893B382B992B
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.
 
 
A little further back, March 27, 2019:
https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s894/BILLS-116s894is.xml

Congress finds the following:
(1) White supremacists and other far-right-wing extremists are the most significant domestic terrorism threat facing the United States.
(2) On February 22, 2019, a Trump Administration United States Department of Justice official wrote in a New York Times op-ed that “white supremacy and far-right extremism are among the greatest domestic-security threats facing the United States. Regrettably, over the past 25 years, law enforcement, at both the Federal and State levels, has been slow to respond. … Killings committed by individuals and groups associated with far-right extremist groups have risen significantly.”.
(3) An April 2017 Government Accountability Office report on the significant, lethal threat posed by domestic violent extremists explained that “[s]ince September 12, 2001, the number of fatalities caused by domestic violent extremists has ranged from 1 to 49 in a given year.” The report noted: “[F]atalities resulting from attacks by far right wing violent extremists have exceeded those caused by radical Islamist violent extremists in 10 of the 15 years, and were the same in 3 of the years since September 12, 2001. Of the 85 violent extremist incidents that resulted in death since September 12, 2001, far right wing violent extremist groups were responsible for 62 (73 percent) while radical Islamist violent extremists were responsible for 23 (27 percent).”.
(4) An unclassified May 2017 joint intelligence bulletin from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security found that “white supremacist extremism poses [a] persistent threat of lethal violence,” and that White supremacists “were responsible for 49 homicides in 26 attacks from 2000 to 2016 … more than any other domestic extremist movement”.
(5) Fatal terrorist attacks by far-right-wing extremists include—
(A) the August 5, 2012, mass shooting at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in which a White supremacist shot and killed 6 members of the gurdwara;
(B) the April 13, 2014, mass shooting at a Jewish community center and a Jewish assisted living facility in Overland Park, Kansas, in which a neo-Nazi shot and killed 3 civilians, including a 14-year-old teenager;
(C) the June 8, 2014, ambush in Las Vegas, Nevada, in which 2 supporters of the far-right-wing “patriot” movement shot and killed 2 police officers and a civilian;
(D) the June 17, 2015, mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in which a White supremacist shot and killed 9 members of the church;
(E) the November 27, 2015, mass shooting at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in which an anti-abortion extremist shot and killed a police officer and 2 civilians;
(F) the March 20, 2017, murder of an African-American man in New York City, allegedly committed by a White supremacist who reportedly traveled to New York “for the purpose of killing black men”;
(G) the May 26, 2017, attack in Portland, Oregon, in which a White supremacist allegedly murdered 2 men and injured a third after the men defended 2 young women whom the individual had targeted with anti-Muslim hate speech;
(H) the August 12, 2017, attack in Charlottesville, Virginia, in which a White supremacist killed one and injured nineteen after driving his car through a crowd of individuals protesting a neo-Nazi rally, and of which former Attorney General Jeff Sessions said, “It does meet the definition of domestic terrorism in our statute.”;
(I) the July 2018 murder of an African-American woman from Kansas City, Missouri, allegedly committed by a White supremacist who reportedly bragged about being a member of the Ku Klux Klan;
(J) the October 24, 2018, shooting in Jeffersontown, Kentucky, in which a White man allegedly murdered 2 African Americans at a grocery store after first attempting to enter a church with a predominantly African-American congregation during a service; and
(K) the October 27, 2018, mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in which a White nationalist allegedly shot and killed 11 members of the congregation.
(6) In November 2018, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released its annual hate crime incident report, which found that in 2017, hate crimes increased by approximately 17 percent, including a 23-percent increase in religion-based hate crimes, an 18-percent increase in race-based crimes, and a 5-percent increase in crimes directed against LGBT individuals. The total number of reported hate crimes rose for the third consecutive year. The previous year's report found that in 2016, hate crimes increased by almost 5 percent, including a 19-percent rise in hate crimes against American Muslims; additionally, of the hate crimes motivated by religious bias in 2016, 53 percent were anti-Semitic. Similarly, the report analyzing 2015 data found that hate crimes increased by 6 percent that year. Much of the 2015 increase came from a 66-percent rise in attacks on American Muslims and a 9-percent rise in attacks on American Jews. In all three reports, race-based crimes were most numerous, and those crimes most often targeted African Americans.
(7) On March 15, 2019, a White nationalist was arrested and charged with murder after allegedly killing 50 Muslim worshippers and injuring more than 40 in a massacre at the Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. The alleged shooter posted a hate-filled, xenophobic manifesto that detailed his White nationalist ideology before the massacre. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern labeled the massacre a terrorist attack.
(8) In January 2017, a right-wing extremist who had expressed anti-Muslim views was charged with murder for allegedly killing 6 people and injuring 19 in a shooting rampage at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada. It was the first-ever mass shooting at a mosque in North America, and Prime Minister Trudeau labeled it a terrorist attack.
(9) On February 15, 2019, Federal authorities arrested U.S. Coast Guard Lieutenant Christopher Paul Hasson, who was allegedly planning to kill a number of prominent journalists, professors, judges, and “leftists in general”. In court filings, prosecutors described Lieutenant Hasson as a “domestic terrorist” who in an email “identified himself as a White Nationalist for over 30 years and advocated for ‘focused violence’ in order to establish a white homeland.”.



Allende
Agitation for coups against Allende began before he even took office, they had nothing to do with his performance as president or his policy, let alone their economic effects.
There were no violent groups associated with Allende as is often accused.
The so-called ‘Chile miracle’ that Pinochet apologists and Allende critics tout – never happened.
The only source claiming that the CIA was not directly involved in overthrowing Allende is from the CIA itself.
 
Historian Steven J Stern notes that even Allende suspected there would be coup, before he took office, and in between the time he was elected and actually took office, several attempts were already underway.
While the CIA may not have directly overthrown Allende, they did amplify and assist the right-wing forces in Chile, including several plans for coups and meetings that took place with far-right leaders, business owners. This was directly ordered by Nixon. The CIA devoted $10 million to overthrowing Allende.
All of this before Allende even took office still, defeating the argument that the coup was due to Allende’s failed policies. 
“The most prominent of the right-wing paramilitary groups was Patria Y Libertad (Fatherland and Liberty), which originated right after Allende’s September 4th elections, during so-called Track 2. It received $38.500 from the CIA, in an effort to create tension and a possible pretext for intervention. “
-US Senate, Senate Select Committee Intelligence Activities Staff Report: Covert Action in Chile, 1963, 1973, 1975. P38
From Wikipedia:
The Nationalist Front Homeland and Freedom (FNPL), also known only as Homeland and Freedom (PYL), was a paramilitary organization Chilean of far right, of ideology fascist and ultra-nationalist 4fifteenformed the April 1 of 1971 to oppose by political violence, sabotage and terrorism to the government socialist of Salvador Allende and to the Popular Unity. [13]
 
They blew up pipelines, sabotaged factories, and staged strikes funded by the US.
Right wing violent groups were committing acts of terrorism, assassinations, rioting, and other political violence and blaming it on the left, which was then used as further justification for the coup by Pinochet apologists.
Tacnazo and Tanquetazo Insurrections
The CIA funneled money to striking workers to prevent them from shipping goods and providing needed services, which is then blamed on Allende or hyperinflation. Meanwhile the shops were all full the day after the coup, the capitalist merchants were hoarding goods.
 
Allende did not touch the Chilean parliamentary system, replace the supreme court, ban any political parties, or take control of the military. 
Pinochet was the greatest mass murder in Chile’s history.
 
Pinochet’s economic successes?
Cut the GDP in half
Gutted access to basic public services
Slashed workers’ rights
Banned unions
Unemployment averaged 20% compared to 4% under Allende
Drastically increased inequality making it one of the most unequal countries in Latin America
          	Doubled the number of people in poverty
 
Pinochet’s apologists will praise his reforms by claiming Chile later had economic success because of them, but this recovery came 30 years after his time in power. These defenders also don’t give the same credit to Pinochet keeping the copper mines nationalized as Allende started.
- There was no 'Chilean Miracle'
-Nothing about Chile’s economy is drastically different from Argentina or Uruguay’s, except that they did not have openly Marxist presidents democratically elected and then overthrown, so there is no agenda from the right to paint a president as a failure and his violent fascist overthrower a success
- The economy under Pinochet was terrible by every metric for human welfare
- That Pinochet is still often praised for his 'economic achievements' shows how eager some are to apologize for capitalist, US-friendly dictators
  
 
Part 2 – Accomplishments of Socialism / Communism

 

Why “I don’t believe Chinas Covid numbers” is a cop out; a thread:
https://twitter.com/johanstrauss90/status/1476472869072814081?s=20


95% of global poverty reduction has occurred in China in the past 40 years
https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/china/overview#1

 

Cuba vs USA
Life expectancy 
Cuba: 78.802 
USA: 78.788 
Infant mortality rate per 1,000 births
Cuba: 3.8 
USA: 5.6 
Literacy rate 
Cuba: 99.753% 
USA: 81% 
Women in parliament 
Cuba 53.4% 
USA: 26.5%
 
(Keep in mind these are despite trade embargoes)

Sources: 
https://data.worldbank.org/indic ator/sp.dyn.leoo.in?locations-cu https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.leoo.in?locations-us https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.leoo.in?locations=cu https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/sp.dyn.leoo.in?locations=us https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/se.adt.litr.zs?locations-cu https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=69

VENEZUELA UNDER HUGO CHAVEZ'S ERA
1. Unemployment dropped from 14.5% of the total labor force in 1999 to 7.6% in 2009.
2. GDP per capita rose from $4,105 to $10,801 in 2011.
3. Poverty decreased from 23.4% in 1999 to 8.5% in 2011.
4. Infant mortality fell from more than 20 1,000 live births in 1999 to a rate of 13 per 1,000 live births in 2011
5. Oil exports boomed - Venezuela has one of the top proven oil reserves in the world and in 2011 OPEC put the country's net oil export revenues at $60bn. In 1999 it stood at $14.4bn.
Sources: World Bank, UNHCR, OPEC, EIA, IMF, UNODC and INE


Results of the first 5 Year Plan in the USSR (1928-1932)
Increased industrial output compared to 1914
USSR: 334%
USA: 84%
Britain: 75%
Germany: 62%
 
1932 Compared to 1928
USSR: 219%
USA: 56%
Britain: 80%
Germany: 55%
 
Agriculture:
          	200,000 new collectivized farms
          	5000 new state farms
          	Crop area expanded by 21,000,000 hectares
 
Material conditions:
          	Number of workers in large-scale industries doubled
          	85% increase in national income
          	67% increase in average annual income in large-scale industries
          	Social insurance fund increased by 292%
          	158,000 new shops and stores
 
Improvements in Industry
          	85% increase in railroad operations
          	4x increase in electric power
          	4x increase in construction operations
          	Production of coal doubled
          	Production of oil doubled
          	Production of iron tripled
          	Production of machinery tripled
          	Production of super phosphates increased 22x
 
More from the USSR

ACHIEVEMENTS IN ELECTRONICS
Invention of the LED
Perfecting maser
Invention of lomography
First lie detector device
Inventing underwater welding
First reflector telescope
First laser microphone
Creating the magnetotelluric 
Creating 3D holography
First microwave oven
First radio antenna

ACHIEVEMENTS IN PHYSICS
First nuclear power plant
Largest thermonuclear experimental facility in the world
Most powerful nuclear bomb in history Invention of nuclear fusion
Invention the first nuclear icebreaker Invention of particle accelerator microtron
Invention of the electron paramagnetic resonance spectroscopy
Longest pipeline in history
First reflectron
Largest geotechnical probe in history Creating BARS Press
Discovery of the Belousov-Zhabotinski Reaction

GDR (East Germany)
 
WOMEN'S LABOUR PARTICIPATION RATE
GDR:
1960: 45%
1989: 89%
FRG:
1970: 48.1%
1989: 56%

Mothers working
1 child:
Gdr - 80.0%
Frg - 43.0%

2 children: 76.0% vs 33.8%
3 children: 69.0% vs 31.0%


Accomplishments of Thomas Sankara in Burkina Faso:
Vaccinated 2.5 million children against meningitis, yellow fever, and measles
Increased the literacy rate from 13% to 73% in 4 years
Planted over 10 million trees to prevent desertification
Rose wheat production from 1700 kg per hectare to 3800 kg per hectare
Outlawed female genital mutilation, forced marriages and polygamy turned Burkina Faso into a fully food-sufficient country
Lowered his salary to $450 a month
Formed an all-women motorcycle personal guard
Had over 350 communities construct schools
Suspended rural poll taxes and domestic rents
Appointed females to high governmental positions, recruited them into the military, and granted pregnancy leave during education
Had 250 reservoirs built and 3000 wells drilled within one year
 
Sources: https://www.thomassankara.net/facts-about-thomas-sankara-in-burkina-faso/?lang=en https://thebestofafrica.org/content/thomas-sankara-the-good-president



 
SOURCES:
HTTPS://WWW.MARXISTS.ORG /REFERENCE/ARCHIVE/STALIN /WORKS/1933/01/07.HTM
HTTPS://LIBRARY.CQPRESS.COM/CQRESEARCHER/DOCUMENT.PHP?ID=CQRESRRE1930081500
 
From Opium Wars to Trade Wars - China’s Long Path to Socialism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwHl3HvhTK4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjjgQZRswuY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbRw4WjYTh0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCePifD8kRs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6CNxu91vvU
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-12-30/shares-of-world-gdp/3752400
 



“Debt Trap” diplomacy
 Only 12% of Africa’s debt is owed to China
https://archive.ph/CwmsJ

JULY 11, 2022 / 8:27 AM / UPDATED 6 HOURS AGO

African states' private debts three times that owed to China
By Rachel Savage
2 MIN READ

LONDON (Reuters) - African countries’ debts with China are a third of what they owe non-Chinese private lenders, while interest rates are just over half, according to a report published on Monday amid a debate about the role of the world’s largest bilateral creditor.

Chinese public and private lenders accounted for 12% of the continent’s $696 billion external debts in 2020, while 35% was owed to other private creditors, according to an analysis of World Bank data by Debt Justice, a campaign group.
China’s lending to emerging economies has come more into focus as some countries have got into debt trouble and Western officials have called on China to speed up restructurings. But bondholders and oil traders have also come in for criticism.
“China took part in the G20’s debt-suspension scheme during the pandemic, private lenders did not,” Tim Jones, the head of policy at Debt Justice, a British charity that campaigns against “poverty caused by unjust debt”, said by email.
“There can be no effective debt solution without the involvement of private lenders,” Jones said.
The average interest rate on debt payments owed to China in 2021 was 2.7%, compared to 5% on non-Chinese private debt, according to Debt Justice calculations based on World Bank figures.
(Graphic: Who are Africa's creditors?, )
 
It noted that there were big differences between the 24 African countries that spend more than 15% of government revenue servicing debt.
Six countries - Angola, Cameroon, Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Zambia - sent over a third of debt payments to Chinese lenders in 2021, while other private creditors accounted for over 33% of payments in 12 countries.
Reporting by Rachel Savage; Editing by Nick Macfie

 
Part 3 – Debunking / Addressing Anti-communist myths
“What we are dealing with is a non-falsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it has affected people across the entire political spectrum.”
-Michael Parenti
All government is Socialism
          	This type of talk comes from people who want to normalize socialism to normies by showing
them that *technically* the United States already has socialism! And while I agree that
normalizing socialism is good, at the same time it’s not good to basically deprive it of all
meaning.
So what is socialism? Well, it’s common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and
exchange. Related to that is communism, which is a stateless, classless, and moneyless society
with common ownership of the means of production. But wait, wasn’t the Soviet Union and all
those other places communist? How could they be when there was still a state? Well, they were
run by communist parties, so they are in the sense that they were
 
COMMUNISM WOULD CREATE A HIVEMIND DYSTOPIA
The image that comes to most people’s mind when communists or socialists talk about wanting
more equality is that of a bland, boring dystopia where everyone is forced to be equal.
Communism would essentially force everyone to become part of a hivemind, or at least that’s
how the general idea goes.
However, the idea that more equality means suppressing the talented elite to the common level
of the masses is just wrong. When communists say we want more equality, they mean freeing
the masses so they can unleash their suppressed talents.
After the October Revolution, there was a flourishing of art, culture, and creativity. The futurist
movement, legalization of divorce for women, and the growth of cinema were exciting
developments compared to the Tsar’s regime over the masses of the people. It turns out
liberating millions of people from the clutches of capital creates an exciting, artistic society, not
one where everyone is forced to be a hivemind and conform to some incorrect, abstract idea of
equality.
Meanwhile in capitalism, schools prepare students for a lifetime of work, while workers have to
become mindless drones in jobs that a majority of them hate. Any sort of excitement or interest
is usually reserved for the rich and powerful, while the rest of us go on with our boring lives.
People worse off have to deal with the growing ecological disasters that are literally killing them
 
and destroying their homes, while the rich profit from ignoring any sort of sustainable solution.
Maybe all this talk about a communist
 

Debunking 'human nature' myth
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AumVF0JV_dZrTSiW5z5L2oj9fj3pCLRcZTiqYyG-4bo/edit
A common anti Socialist point is 'humans are inherently selfish.' This is repeated time and time again, despite the fact it is completely false. Usually you can point put that  Capitalism has only existed for 400 years, and Primitive Communism occupies most of human history, but sometimes that is not enough. 


https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257608480_A_New_Look_at_Children's_Prosocial_Motivation
Looks at the motivations of cooperative activity of young children
'Young children’s prosocial behavior is thus intrinsically motivated by a concern for others’ welfare, which has its evolutionary roots in a concern for the well-being of those with whom one is interdependent'
Essentially shows reward does not drive motivation to help others in young children, and proposes it is evolutionary


http://valuesandframes.org/resources/CCF_survey_perceptions_matter_full_report.pdf 
Survey of 1000 people in Britain
74% put greater importance on compassionate values than selfish ones
77% underestimated other people's compassionateness


https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11467 (cited)
Performs different economic games with the subjects
'We find that across a range of experimental designs, subjects who reach their decisions more quickly are more cooperative. Furthermore, forcing subjects to decide quickly increases contributions, whereas instructing them to reflect and forcing them to decide slowly decreases contributions.'
Essentially shows our impulses are selfless


https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0109687
Looks at Carnegie Hero Medal Recipients, people who risked their lives to save others
'The statements were judged to be overwhelmingly dominated by intuition; to be significantly more intuitive than a set of control statements describing deliberative decision-making; and to not differ significantly from a set of intuitive control statements. This remained true when restricting to scenarios in which the CHMRs had sufficient time to reflect before acting if they had so chosen'
'These findings suggest that high-stakes extreme altruism may be largely motivated by automatic, intuitive processes.'



https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/debunking_the_myth_of_human_selfishness
Discusses two books, both written by Harvard Professors (I would link them both individually, but this article does a great job in summarising), that argues that humans are not selfish
'[Nowak] proposes that cooperation is the third principle of evolution, after mutation and selection. Sure, mutations generate genetic diversity and selection picks the individuals best adapted to their environment. Yet it is only cooperation, according to Nowak, that can explain the creative, constructive side of evolution—the one that led from cells to multicellular creatures to humans to villages to cities.'
'Benkler recounts that in any given experiment where participants have to make a choice between behaving selfishly and behaving altruistically, only about 30 percent of people behave selfishly, and in virtually no human society studied to date have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly.'


https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16513986/
Looks at human infants (as well as chimpanzees, but that's not relevant) and their altruism
'Here we show that human children as young as 18 months of age (prelinguistic or just-linguistic) quite readily help others to achieve their goals in a variety of different situations. This requires both an understanding of others' goals and an altruistic motivation to help.'


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5011126/ 
Studies the feelings we get when we do altruistic behaviours
'We conducted six experiments to explore whether altruistic behaviors could increase performer’s warmth perception of the ambient environment.'
'These findings suggested an immediate internal reward of altruism.'


https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://ccnl.emory.edu/greg/PD%2520Final.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwj-o_LB__TqAhXlSxUIHVKqAsQQFjABegQIBRAB&usg=AOvVaw3x7OfQyafIr1r6y2IgyOVD&cshid=1596112864954 
'Mutual cooperation was associated with consistent activation in brain areas that have been linked with reward processing: nucleus accumbens, the caudate nucleus, ventromedial frontal/orbitofrontal cortex, and rostral anterior cingulate cortex. We propose that activation of this neural network positively reinforces reciprocal altruism, thereby motivating subjects to resist the temptation to selfishly accept but not reciprocate favors.'


https://www.pnas.org/content/111/48/17071.full 
Looks at what triggers a kind act in a child
'Collectively, the studies suggest that simple reciprocal interactions are a potent trigger of altruism for young children, and that these interactions lead children to believe that their relationships are characterized by mutual care and commitment.'


https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0272494415000195
'Participants exposed to nature videos responded more cooperatively on a measure of social value orientation and indicated greater willingness to engage in environmentally sustainable behaviors.'
'Collectively, results suggest that exposure to nature may increase cooperation, and, when considering environmental problems as social dilemmas, sustainable intentions and behavior.'


https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-09/wuis-hnc090811.php
Talks about a book called 'The Origins of Altruism'
'The book's authors argue that humans are naturally cooperative, altruistic and social, only reverting to violence when stressed, abused, neglected or mentally ill.'
"Cooperation isn't just a byproduct of competition, or something done only because both parties receive some benefit from the partnership," says Sussman, professor of physical anthropology in Arts & Sciences. "Rather, altruism and cooperation are inherent in primates, including humans."


https://www.biospace.com/article/around-the-web/innate-altruism-humans-may-have-been-born-with-selfless-behavior-ucla-study-/ 
Highlights key points of a study from the UCLA
The findings of both studies suggest potential avenues for increasing empathy, which is especially critical in treating people who have experienced desensitizing situations like prison or war.'
'“The study is important proof of principle that with a noninvasive procedure you can make people behave in a more prosocial way,” Iacoboni said.'



https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/03/22/psychopaths-and-narcissists-have-hogged-the-limelight-now-its-time-to-explore-the-saintlier-side-of-human-personality-say-researchers-as-they-announce-a-test-of-the-light-triad-traits/
Argues that instead of just looking at looking at the Dark Triad (bad characteristics of human nature), we should also look at the Light Triad
'On an uplifting note, Kaufman and his colleagues found that their participants’ scores were skewed more towards scoring higher on the Light Triad than the Dark'
 



https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0039211
'Consistent with this hypothesis, the present study finds that before the age of two, toddlers exhibit greater happiness when giving treats to others than receiving treats themselves. Further, children are happier after engaging in costly giving – forfeiting their own resources – than when giving the same treat at no cost. By documenting the emotionally rewarding properties of costly prosocial behavior among toddlers, this research provides initial support for the claim that experiencing positive emotions when giving to others is a proximate mechanism for human cooperation.'


https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-58645-9 (cited)
Shows that infants show signs of altruism at an early age
'Researchers studied how nearly 100 babies, all 19 months old, behaved when presented with sweet fruits like blueberries and grapes. When a researcher pretended to drop a fruit onto a tray and reach for it unsuccessfully, signaling a desire for the snack, 58 percent of the babies picked up the fruit and gave it to the researcher. (When the researcher didn’t bother reaching for the fruit, only 4 percent of the babies tried to help out.)'


https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797610395392 (cited)
Looks into if sharing and cooperation comes naturally to young children
'The child who got to the reward first shared it equally with his partner in the vast majority of cases, more than 70 percent of the time.'
'Rarely was there any arguing, and physical conflicts were almost nonexistent.'

Good Videos

https://youtu.be/OqYcpeQwtL4

https://youtu.be/hhE5-zBlmcw

https://youtu.be/21FdpfVZyUo 

https://youtu.be/jytf-5St8WU 

In conclusion, looking at our values, our instincts, and our brains, we  can safely say human nature is not selfish.

 

NO FOOD LOL
The fact that communist countries had famines is mocked again and again, but it ignores the
fact that after these famines, countries like the Soviet Union and China accomplished food
security for the rest of their existence. A study called “Economic Development, Political-
Economic System, and the Physical Quality of Life” compares socialist and capitalist countries
based on different levels of development, looking at the physical quality of life of both. Data for
the study was taken from the World Development Report of the World Bank. Shockingly, it
found that daily per capita calorie supply was actually higher in socialist societies than those of
capitalist ones. Contrary to the much proclaimed, “no food,” the average socialist citizen was
receiving MORE food than their capitalist counterparts.
By the way, this same publication also shows that not only did socialist countries have a higher
calorie supply, they also had lower child death rates, higher life expectancy, population per
physician, population per nursing person, adult literacy, and secondary education. In fact, the
Physical Quality of Life Index, which is a composite and derived measure, shows just how
superior socialist countries are to capitalist countries in terms of quality of life.
The discussion section of the study goes on to say, “Historically there is some evidence that the
discrepancies between capitalist and socialist nations have reflected varying social policies. All
the socialist countries have initiated major public health efforts. These initiatives have aimed
toward improved sanitation, immunization, maternal and child care, nutrition, and housing. In
 
every case, the socialist countries also have reorganized their health care systems, to create
national health services based on the principle of universal entitlement to care. These policies
have led to greater accessibility of preventative and curative services for previously deprived
groups. Expanded educational opportunity has also been a major priority of the socialist nations,
as publicly subsidized education has become more widely available. Literacy campaigns in
these countries have brought educational benefits to sectors of the population who earlier had
not gone to school.”
“Wow. What a dystopia. How dare these socialists improve sanitation, nutrition, housing, and
education. This is George Orwell’s nightmare!”
I also want to add that if you’re skeptical of that study I showed, the CIA itself acknowledged
that American and Soviet citizens eat about the same amount of food each day, but that the
Soviet diet is more nutritious. Hopefully that completely satisfies anyone who still thinks that
everyone starved under communism.
 
 
 
COMMUNISM KILLED 100 BAZILLION PEOPLE!
I’ve already dealt with the topic of death counts, specifically concerning Stalin, needless to say, when scholars looked at actual archival evidence released from the Soviet Union, they found that death counts were actually much lower than what was previously estimated. The paper “Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years” found that many of the previous estimates of historians were based on “guesses, rumors, or extrapolations from isolated local observations.”
A lot of the “100 million” stuff comes from the Big Black Book of Communism, which was
deliberately bloated to come to a nice round number. Methodology for these things is also highly
suspect as sometimes they can go as far as counting someone who stubbed their toe in a
communist country another “victim of communism.”
*In the arms of the angels, fly away from here*
“Wow, I can’t believe communism would do this”
This conversation about victims of communism, of course, ignores the millions of death under
capitalism from poverty, hunger, exposure, and imperialist war. We have more than enough
resources to give food, water and treat curable diseases for everyone in the world. It’s
capitalism that refuses to provide these things because they aren’t profitable.
 
 
COMMIES WANNA TAKE MY STUFF?
In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx states, “The theory of the Communists may be summed
up in the single sentence: Abolition of private property.” Many people have taken this to mean
that communists don’t want anyone to own anything, even to the point of sharing our
toothbrushes communally.
“Hey it’s my turn”
“Oh ok, here you go”
“Open wide...”
*VORE*
But anyway, if you actually read the Manifesto, literally one second earlier from that quote, Marx
says himself, “The distinguishing feature of Communism is not the abolition of property
generally, but the abolition of bourgeois property.” How communists use private property in this
context is different from the common definition. Communists don’t want to take away your
toothbrush or things that you possess, those are personal property. Private property are things
used to make more money and give power to those that own them, like a factory, banks, offices,
and infrastructure.
The abolition of private property means taking those things from private hands and putting them
into the hands of the community. To sum it up, communists don’t want to take away your
personal property, just the private property of the ruling class.
 
 
 
WON’T EQUAL PAY DISCOURAGE INNOVATION?
 
“But under communism, wouldn’t a janitor be paid the same as a doctor? Doesn’t that
discourage innovation?”
Just like every single argument against communism, this one completely misunderstands what it
is. What the question misunderstands is that socialism (which was what is probably meant)
doesn’t mean everyone is paid the same, just that everyone has common ownership of the
means of production. And as I’ll cover in the next section, there are more things than just money
that incentivize humans.
As for innovation, just ask yourself which country went to space first? Which country
industrialized at a rapid pace, turning from a backwards semi-feudal country to a world
superpower? If you look for innovation at socialist countries, there’s plenty there. Historical
examples of socialism like the Soviet Union have provided free healthcare, education, and
subsidized housing that foster an environment for learning.
On the other hand, capitalism gives you extortionate prices for healthcare, thousands in student
loan debt, and rent payments to your parasitic landlord. Imagine how many possible scientists
or visionaries have died before they could achieve anything because they were unlucky enough
to be born in a poor family under capitalism.
If it conflicts with profits, capitalism also often ignores and discourages science like in the case
of oil companies denying climate change. Any innovation that does take place is usually for the
benefit of capitalists, not us. Ask yourself why, when a new machine or program that can
replace workers gets created, workers get laid off? The answer is that capitalists are calling the
shots and want to cut costs to make sure they CAN make as much profit as possible.
Under socialism where there is common ownership of the means of production, this type of
innovation wouldn’t result in layoffs, but rather pay raises and less working hours. Why would
the workers fire themselves?
George Lucas: And, I used to say this all the time, when people back when Russia was the
USSR. They would say “Oh but aren’t you so glad that you’re in America? Well, I know a lot of
Russian filmmakers and they have a lot more freedom than I have. All they have to do is be
careful about criticizing the government. Otherwise they can do anything they want.
And so what do you have to do?
You have to adhere to a very narrow line of commercialism.
 
 
HORSESHOE THEORY
A common argument against the far left is that, if you think about it, the far left is actually as bad
as the far right. I mean, one side advocates social justice and economic equality while the other
side argues for ethno states and the subjugation of races of people.
Jokes aside, there’s an unironic strain of people who believe in horseshoe theory, that the far
left is just as bad as the far right because both use violence and stuff. Such compelling
evidence. Of course, horseshoe theory completely ignores any sort of deep analysis of
communism or fascism.
But, but what about the nazi party? Nazi stands for national socialism, so doesn’t that mean
they were the same as the communists? Yes that’s true, but both the German nazis and Italian
fascists purposely made sure to appear leftist to appeal to the people and muddy the waters.
Apparently they did a good job because “centrists” are still falling for it to this day.
 
If we look at fascism itself, we can see that it’s actually closer to capitalism than it is to
communism. Fascism began when capitalists needed to revitalize profits, but were stopped by
those pesky unions. So capitalists funded fascism in Italy and Germany and once in power
those same fascists suppressed communist parties, labor unions, lowered taxes on the rich,
outlawed strikes, privatized state-owned companies, and generally supported business. The
word “privatization” was literally coined to describe fascist policies. To argue that fascism is left
wing or the same as communism would be to ignore who supported fascism and what fascism
did.
In reality, instead of a horseshoe, I would argue ideology is more like a fishhook, with the far
right sharing more in common with the centrists, who are ready to support fascism as soon as
profit levels drop.
 
What Is Fascism?
From Blood In My Eye by George Jackson
https://archive.org/stream/BloodInMyEyeByGeorgeL.Jackson/BloodInMyEye_djvu.txt
 
Fascism is a syncretic pseudo-ideology that does not conform to any strict principles.
It exists in three forms:
          	Out of power
                         	Attempts to be revolutionary, claims to oppose capitalism and also socialism. This is why we see fascists with socialist roots, Mussolini, Hitler, etc. which they later abandon and target socialists and  labor movements first and foremost.
          	In power but not secure
                         	The sensational aspect of fascism, the type seen in literature and on screen, where the ruling class is able to use is instrumental regime to suppress the vanguard party of the people and workers movements.
          	In power and secure
                         	This is where America currently exists.
 
Pesudo-intellectual origins of fascism:
          	The pseudo-intellectual origins of fascism can be traced
all the way back to ancient Greece. The German National
Socialist apologist Alfred Baumler and expressionist Gott¬
fried Benn both recognized Hegel, as did some of the Italian
intellectuals and Eastern European fascists. The Western
Europeans, however, favored the primitive, withdrawn
ideals of Nietzsche or a confused combination of Nietzsche
and Hegel with a bit of Plato’s philosopher king added for
window dressing. Actually, there have been as many differ¬
ent fascist ideals and arrangements as there have been fascist
societies. Which brings us to the relevant point of inquiry.
The importance or form of a particular political regime can
never be understood simply as it stands alone. Its social and
economic past must be investigated and clearly defined
before the distinctive being of the political realm takes shape.
 

On modern-day fascist movements at the street level:

The
complexities of the class structure have shifted somewhat
since the time of Marx and Lenin. Presently within the work¬
ing class, there exists an ultra-right section at the bottom of
this structure which feels that all of its demands on life can
be met by the existing order. In fact, the working class of
U.S.A. 1971 can be realistically divided into two mutually
exclusive and conflicting sections, one right-oriented and
conservative, the other left to neutral. One explanation for
this phenomenon is the loss over the years (to fascist nation¬
alistic propaganda and state-controlled unions) of a clear-cut
class consciousness. In effect, it can be said that this right-
oriented sector of the working class is a new class, a new pig
class. In their ranks we find a factory or construction worker,
the ubiquitous civil service employee, the retired military
career man, the man who sells used autos or insurance, the
stock clerk or longshoreman about to be replaced by a ma¬
chine. All of these individuals are not clearly in the new pig
class—some only have just one foot in the grave. As yet they
only have pig tendencies and can still be redeemed. Outright
pigs must be either neutralized or destroyed (killed). From
the new pig class (a section of the working class whose demands
are small and are being slowly met by the capitalist
masters), the government draws its greatest support. The
forces of counterrevolution make themselves felt on the
street level through this new class, while above this class, in
the loosely defined petit-bourgeois level and upper-middle-
class professionals and students, we can find some very real
revolutionary consciousness! There are explanations for this
complex inverted stratification of revolutionary potential;
the history of the U.S.A. and its immigrants, the emphasis
placed on subversion of the workers’ movement (the unions)
by the ruling class, and the apparent (not real) stabilizing of
the economy with fascist Keynesian controls and redoubled
imperialist expansion, all can be carefully treated to ex¬
plain the present confusion and contradictions in the class
struggle
 
 
 
COMMUNISM ALWAYS RESULTS IN A TOTALITARIAN DICTATORSHIP!
This is another reason that fascism and communism are always incorrectly depicted to be “two
sides of the same coin.” In fact, it’s the central idea in a bunch of other arguments like
“Communism is always implemented incorrectly” or “Communism only works on paper.”
“If communism only works on paper, it’s a good thing I live in paper.”
Anyway, these three arguments are essentially the same thing, so that’s why I’m mushing them
into the same section. The idea that communism is inherently authoritarian is misleading,
because it only developed these things after capitalism tried to crush it.
In 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations invaded Soviet Russia to overthrow the communists with
the years of this civil war intensifying the Bolshevik’s siege mentality. The same pattern of
imperialist, capitalist countries invading to protect capital can be seen in other countries that try
to move beyond capitalism. The Spartacist Uprising in Germany was suppressed by the
SuccDems with fascist paramilitary forces in 1919, Catalonia was crushed by fascists in the
Spanish Civil War in 1939, Cuba in 1961 suffered from an invasion and afterwards decades of
terrorism from the U.S., Chile in 1973, Nicaragua in 1986, the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and
so much more.
As we can see, capitalism will stop at nothing, even going as far as supporting fascism, if it
means stopping communism from threatening the flow of capital. The reality is that revolutionary
countries are not going to be allowed to develop a socialism that is unhindered. Instead, what
we see is a sort of “siege socialism,” with the authoritarian measures being adopted just to fight
back the onslaught of the West. In the whole context, we see that the “totalitarianism” of
communism is not a natural development, but an unnatural one caused by the constant barrage
of capitalist terrorism.
So when communist states fail to defend themselves from the capitalist massacres and
genocides, then capitalists laugh and pin the blame on communism’s inherent weakness. But
 
when communist states do defend themselves, when they implement strict security measures to
protect their people from capitalist death squads, then the capitalists run away crying], decrying
the commies for being power-hungry monsters who were just authoritarians seeking to seize
state power all along.
So if communism is bad and weak when it fails to defend itself, but it’s also bad and
authoritarian when it does defend itself, then when would communism ever not be depicted to
be villainous? The answer is never, because no matter what communist states do, it’s always
spun to be bad. This...is not an argument. It's a dogma.
COMMUNISM TAKES AWAY POLITICAL RIGHTS!
This argument goes hand in hand with the totalitarian one before. The idea goes that communist
governments are oppressive and that the poor and downtrodden are prevented from exercising
the democratic rights they had before. The truth, however, is much less dramatic.
Democratic rights hadn’t existed in these countries before communism arrived, Poland was a
rightist dictatorship, Russia was a czarist autocracy, Albania was an Italian fascist protectorate,
Cuba was a U.S.-sponsored dictatorship, Lithuania, Hungary, Romania, were all fascist
regimes. These countries had known little democracy.
If you’re actually curious about democracies under communism, check out this video detailing
how Cuba’s democratic system works, needless to say it is much better than the system we
have in capitalist countries.
So while capitalists are willing to use virtue signal “political rights and liberties” in communist
countries, they will brutally crush it if the people actually support the communist “regimes.”
Before the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the people held a referendum, in which the vast
majority of people wished to preserve the Union. Of course the political will of the people should
be ignored if they go against capital’s interests, and it went ahead anyway.
If you want to discuss political rights being taken away in communist countries, there’s no better
time than during the overthrow of communism. Yeltsin, the US-supported capitalist president of
Russia, disbanded the Russian parliament along with every other elected represented body,
abolished Russia’s Constitutional Court, banned labor unions from political activities, outlawed
parties, and attacked the parliament building, killing around 2,000 people. Yeltsin’s popularity
rating right before the election campaign of 1996 was 8 percent. It got so bad that the US had to
rig the elections in Russia to ensure his victory, ironic considering today’s situation.
*RUSSIANS!!!!!!* “Oh my gosh my throat”
The same pattern existed in other former communist countries, with Marxists enduring political
suppression and elections being rigged to prevent the people from voting to bring back
communism. Whenever communists won victories in fair and open elections (judged by outside
 
sources) like in Bulgaria and Albania, they were forced to step down from the pressure of
capitalists.
All this virtue signaling about political rights from capitalists goes away when the people
themselves want communism back. Hmmm.
 
LOL COMMIES ARE BAD WITH ECONOMICS
Although it’s a COMMON stereotype that communists are bad with economics, it’s because they
often get the short end of the stick. Many countries faced decades of maldevelopment and
exploitation when communism arrived. The devastation of war meant widespread poverty and
misery in Eastern Europe, China, and Russia. Communism rebuilt these countries from the
bottom-up, leaving them in much better shape than when they found them.
In contrast to the communists building up formerly destroyed nations, capitalism destroyed the
economies of former communist nations. When capitalism arrived in these countries, real
income shrank around 30 to 40 percent, rent and real estate prices soared, inflation increased,
consumer spending decreased by 38 percent in Russia, poverty and homelessness was
commonplace, death rates from suicide, illness, and infant mortality increased, security for
workers became essentially nonexistent, and unemployment rates went as high as 30%. Keep
in mind that before capitalism arrived, communist countries had full employment, free health
care, widespread literacy and education, along with strong worker benefits.
Of course capitalists will say, “The transition to capitalism and free markets will obviously have a
period of hardship, but it’s only temporary until economic prosperity magically appears.” But
guess what, they’ve been saying it for decades, left to go to the store to get cigarettes, and
haven’t come back since. It only takes a quick look at Latin America to prove that something’s
up.
As an afterthought, it’s funny how capitalist apologists will laugh at bread lines in communism,
but ignore the fact that there are already bread lines under capitalism. It’s called the grocery
store. And you actually have to pay for the bread. And those who can’t afford it just starve to
death. Those commies sure are oppressive by handing out free food, huh?
 
Fall of Communism
“Sure, maybe these communist countries achieved all these great things, but doesn’t the fall of
these countries prove that in the end, communism just doesn’t work?”
 
It is true that the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe was a triumph for
capitalism. But that happened over a quarter of a century ago, so let’s see what’s happened
since.
Since the collapse of communism, the United States and capitalist powers have attacked and
even outright invaded various countries like Iraq, Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq (again), Libya,
and then smaller interventions between. The social democracy in Scandinavia that you all love?
The main reason it’s so strong is because communism was literally around the corner. Without
communism to blunt the edge of capitalism, capitalists have been free to exploit workers and
are continually rolling back labor rights.
Saying the fall of communism proves it doesn’t work ignores the fact that communism did work.
It provided essential services like healthcare and education for free, full employment, rough
income inequality, and inexpensive housing with a reliably growing economy. Compared to the
instability of capitalism, communism worked far better.
The only reason communism in the Soviet Union collapsed is the West’s effort to bring it down,
the strains of the Cold War with a punishing amount of its GDP on the military, the cost of being
an anchor to other socialist countries and movements, Gorbachav’s awful policy failures, and a
coup d'etat led by Pizza Hut.
“Look at that smug piece of…”
None of these reasons have anything to do with communism itself. On the contrary it proves
that capitalism doesn’t work because of how far capitalists will go to crush any attempts at
communism.
As former GDR defense minister Heinz Kessler said, “Sure, I heard about the new freedom that
people are enjoying in Eastern Europe, but how do you define freedom? Millions of people in
Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care,
free from social security.”
YOU’RE JUST SOME LAZY COMMIE LOL TALK TO ANYONE WHO LIVED UNDER
COMMUNISM
Modern-day communists are often stereotyped as lazy, good-for-nothing *hwite* college
students who want nothing to do with their lives. Of course, this is all nonsense. Communists
can come from any and all backgrounds and are usually from the most marginalized groups.
And if we actually look at what people who lived under communism think, we can see that a
majority of them actually want communism back.
As I mentioned earlier, a majority Russian actually wanted to preserve the Soviet Union in a
referendum before the switch to capitalism. In fact, now a majority of Russians actually prefer
the return of socialism and the Soviet Union after all this time.
 
“Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is strong among the older generation here. They say that two
decades of capitalism in this declining town have spawned rampant corruption and a
lawlessness that didn’t exist before”
Just a note to add, these clips didn’t come from a communist propaganda outlet, it came from
Radio Free Europe, which is an anti-communist Amerikan-funded organization. One comment
said it best, “Why are you playing yourself like this? You're supposed to be an imperialist
propaganda outlet, lol.” Anyway, back to the video
Another poll says “Reflecting back on the breakup of the Soviet Union that happened 22 years
ago next week, residents in seven out of 11 countries that were part of the union are more likely
to believe its collapse harmed their countries than benefited them.”
Here’s another poll that shows a majority of former East Germans actually feel life was better
under communism. And another that shows a whopping 72% of Hungarians say they are worse
off under capitalism. And another that shows many Czechs say they had a better life under
communism. And here’s another that shows a majority of Serbs say life was better under Tito.
Okay, you get the point. Country after country, you see large amounts of people and usually
majorities that want to bring communism back.
What a surprise that a system that benefited people’s lives is actually popular with the people
who lived under it, contrary to the blatant lies of those in power.
 
 
 
 
WHY IS ANTI-COMMUNISM SO PREVALENT?
It’s easy to debunk all these arguments, but we’ll never get anywhere unless we examine why
anti-communism is so prolific. Communism first and foremost is a threat to property owners, so
ruling interests have made sure to pound anti-communist doctrine into our heads for literally
centuries. I gave a little snippet of this idea earlier, but a full explanation is given by Michael
Parenti in “Blackshirts and Reds,”
“In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated
anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a
political analysis. During the Cold War, the anticommunist ideological framework could
transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets
 
refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to
make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms
limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they
supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If
the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if
the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If
the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their
alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were
intimidated and lacked freedom.”
In this sense, anticommunism is not really a position to take, but rather an unfalsifiable religious
doctrine. And as we know, anything that can’t be proven false isn’t scientific.
Most people absorb this sort of anti-communist doctrine by osmosis simply from interacting and
living in a capitalist society. They never bother even learning what communism is, just that it’s
“against human nature” and “Vuvealsza” and have you ever read this book called Animal Farm?
Trying to challenge these notions is exhausting simply because to them, ideas are not at stake,
but rather their whole view of reality.
In Mark Fisher’s book, “Capitalist Realism,” he discusses a widespread condition that
contributes to this prevailing anti-communism. Capitalist realism, as Fisher describes, is the
sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but that it is
impossible to even imagine an alternative to it. As the phrase goes, “It’s easier to imagine the
end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism”
Maybe it’s not that people are hostile to communism, just that the very idea of life beyond
capitalism is impossible for us to even picture. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
eastern bloc, excluding a few examples, actual existing socialism is pretty much extinguished
from the world. Capitalism won, and now we take it for granted that it’s pretty much all we know.
Capitalist realism is so pervasive that even debunking anti-communism contributes to it.
Sure, capitalism may spread poverty, famine and war, but isn’t that just reality? Isn’t it utopian to
even suggest that these things can be eliminated? In this way, capitalism presents itself as an
unchangeable reality, therefore any action to move beyond it is simply unrealistic.
But as with any reality, it’s not the full story. It’s entirely possible to eliminate poverty, famine,
and war. In fact, we’re well able to do it right now. Capitalism’s need for ever-growing markets
and infinite resources has depleted our planet and brings us ever closer to environmental
catastrophe, breaking apart the notion that capitalism is the best system we have. Capitalism is
going to literally destroy the entire planet, and we have very little time to do anything about it.
We have to realize that capitalism is not natural. It is literally killing us and the world we inhabit.
We must achieve an alternative or else it will drag humanity and the planet down with it.
 
 
 
 
Michael Parenti again:
“It was better in Cuba! Where I didn’t see any kids with swollen bellies and hungry and begging.
I didn’t see any people begging. It was better in Cuba than it was in Washington D.C. where I
live and I walk down the street and I see people in total misery and disorientation standing there
begging for food, begging for money, sleeping in hallways. I see that in the richest country in the
world. That’s where it was better! And if you talk about freedom, that’s freedom! And when you
talk about oppression, that’s oppression! Sleeping in a doorway is oppression. You wanna know
what oppression is, then sleep in the doorways of the land of the free and the home of the
brave, and you’ll know what oppression is. You wanna know what oppression is, then think
about the guys who sit there wondering if they’re gonna blow their brains out because they can’t
pay the mortgage on their house and they can’t feed their kids and they see the whole thing
falling apart. That’s where it’s better. And those are real things. And that’s part of freedom.”
 
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GtDO8bjdKbcw_4eAi67tMk8xq2A6dMfO/view
 
 
Nazis / Fascists are socialist
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yjz_sfRr8aU
 
Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler is a truly hilarious book in this regard,
https://www.payot.ch/Detail/wall_street_and_the_rise_of_hitler-antony_cyril_sutton-9781905570270?cId=1
because so much effort and research went into it. The author (Sutton) is hellbent on showing that the (((globalists))) propped up the fledgling Nazi regime via the (((New York))) (((banks)))--the last bit is true, and which he documents painstakingly down to given bonds and credit instruments--but then for some mysterious reason can't connect the dots between (((banks))) and (((socialists))) or (((socialists))) and Nazis.
In Hitler’s inauguration speech, in front of a banner that says “Free Germany from Marxism”, he urges Germans unite against Marxism, refute the lying media, venerate veterans and only consume art that is pure German in soul and spirit.
Make your own conclusions on his political stances
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism#Etymology
The majority of scholars identify Nazism in both theory and practice as a form of far-right politics.[25] Far-right themes in Nazism include the argument that superior people have a right to dominate other people and purge society of supposed inferior elements.[26]
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_Germany
The Nazis were a far-right fascist political party which arose during the social and financial upheavals that occurred following the end of World War I.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
Fascism (/ˈfæʃɪzəm/) is a form of far-right, authoritarian ultranationalism
 
From reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/therewasanattempt/comments/cblf1y/comment/ethf3t8/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
 
In reality when Gregor Strasser wanted private property to be seized, Hitler refused. When Strasser wanted manufacturing to be nationalised, Hitler said it would ruin the nation. Strasser was later executed.
Hitler banned all unions. Many union leaders were taken to concentration camps and later shot or gassed. Like he was literally anti union but socialist also somehow?
This is what he had to say on unions,
Our great heads of industry are not concerned with the accumulation of wealth and the good life, rather they are concerned with responsibility and power. They have acquired this right by natural selection: they are members of the higher race. But you would surround them with a council of incompetents, who have no notion of anything. No economic leader can accept that.”
He literally thought that the private sector capitalists had some evolutionary right to not suffer unions.
The nazi rise was backed by capitalists. Initially it was small shop owners and the like and later the biggest capitalist banners underwrote Hitler.
Hitler removed Monopoly laws that allowed these big firms (Thyssen, Krupp, Bosch, IG Farben, Porsche etc) to dominate the German market.
To run their production lines they used slave labour supplied by the labour department, yes that's right this "socialist" Utopia provided slave labourers to the private sector by the 100's of thousands.
The Nazi state even got into individual profit sharing agreements with giant conglomerates. Imagine the US state getting into a business deal with Amazon! That's how right Nazi Germany was.
70% of the Reinhardt program funding went into the private sector. Then he wrote in tax breaks for the private sector. There was infact a massive privatisation plan. Banks, mines, railway lines even welfare orgs were privatised. Commerz and Deutsche Banks which are private now were done so by the Nazis.
This is what Hitler thought of the Pvt sector,
It is a precondition to developing the creativity of members of the German race in the best interest of the people
The state literally abolished annual wage increase and froze it at very low levels. If that's not right wing I don't know what is.
And then when he was secure he literally banished small companies (less than $200,000 capital) allowing his capitalist friends full market capture.
A few quotes don't take away the fact that the private sector dominated Nazi Germany. The Likes of Bezos can only dream about such control. /u/ahhhbiscuits
Edit. Pretty much 90% of the German military arms production was private sector ffs. Every iconic weapon was made by a private sector company for profit!
Tiger tanks? Henschel
The HE Hs 129b? Henschel.
Dornier 17? Dornier
Pretty much every Panzer model? Different private sector companies
The 88? Krupp or Rehinmetal
Like seriously, the private sector enormously profited from the war and yet this was a socialist country?
 
The well-traveled "we are socialists" quote (at 49:49) was never uttered by Hitler in that May Day speech or at any other time. That was just an error by Toland. It came from a Gregor Strasser pamphlet and Toland somehow got this mixed up
 
Human Nature
          	Species Being –
 
 
 
VuVuZeLa!!!1!! (Venezuela)
 
Venezuela funds public programs by relying on the money it makes on oil. When the price of oil
collapsed, that meant a lot of its funds for these things did as well. So the root cause of
Venezuela’s financial struggles has to do with the sudden collapse of oil prices, a staple of
capitalist markets, not socialism.
Not to mention that US sanctions are wielded horrifically to cripple the economy and starve the
people and that corporations are hoarding and hiding food from the people kulak-style, chaos,
hunger, and strife is inevitable when you’re the target of American imperialism. And DESPITE
this economic chaos, the people of Venezuela still support the Bolivarian Revolution, Chavez,
and the democratically elected Maduro over the US-backed attempted coup. In fact they
probably support it more now because the US is starving and attacking them.
The problem is that with Venezuela being America’s number one target right now, the corporate
media is working overtime to try and print a lot of misinformation. Like for example, when a
news story broke out about Venezuelans burning aid, it was immediately called out as fake by
people with the strange ability called critical thinking. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that the
failing New York Times finally published a piece revealing that, yes, that footage probably
wasn’t real, b-but Maduro is still a dictator guys! Please listen to us!
What I’m saying is, with Venezuela being the target of American imperialism, don’t believe
everything you read on the news. Like come on guys, we’ve been through Iraq and we all know
how that ended. Hopefully we can all see why the US is so interested in Venezuela. (OIL)
 
 
 
From Alan Macleod
 
I’ve been seeing and hearing a lot of “if you like socialism look at starving Venezuela” comments all over the media, most recently with Meghan McCain on [The View](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLwsi7otSoQ) which the Chapo Boys talked about in the last episode and someone asked me for a response to her comments.
 
The reason they asked me was that I have a PhD in sociology and more specifically looking at how the Western media covers Venezuela.
 
I recently wrote a book called [“Bad News From Venezuela”](https://www.amazon.com/Bad-News-Venezuela-misreporting-Communication/dp/1138489239/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1524768350&sr=8-6&keywords=alan+macleod) which details the enormous disparity between the image of the country and the empirical reality and features interviews with journalists where they admit to not being able to speak Spanish, not leaving their penthouse apartments very often, paying locals to write their stories and knowingly printing fake news about the country.
 
I also write about the media coverage of Venezuela at [Fairness]( https://fair.org/home/writing-off-democracy-in-venezuela-us-press-and-politicians-dream-of-a-coup/) and Accuracy in [Reporting](https://fair.org/home/media-delegitimize-venezuelan-elections-amid-complete-unanimity-of-outlook/).
 
Firstly, I’ve yet to see any credible study about how much weight Venezuelans have lost. I’ve seen plenty of organizations linked to the local opposition spouting out numbers though.
 
Venezuelans are hungry in good part because capitalists in the country are intentionally trying to starve them by withholding food in order to provoke an uprising, as they have done numerous times in recent history, for example, before the 2014 elections and in the year of the 2002 and 2002/3 attempted coups. After decades of neoliberalism, Latin American countries’ food systems are dominated by often a single massive multinational which creates, imports or distributes most of the food. For instance, the company Polar dominates the food market, controlling [over half the flour](https://monthlyreview.org/2018/06/01/the-politics-of-food-in-venezuela/) controls over half the flour in the country (the staple) and also owns a network of supermarkets.
 
Secondly, Venezuela is also suffering because of the US sanctions, which the UN General Assembly condemned, noting they were deliberately designed to [“disproportionately affect the poor and the most vulnerable classes”]( http://undocs.org/A/HRC/37/L.34) , calling on all states not to recognize them and began discussing reparations that the US must pay to Venezuela. None of this has been reported anywhere in the US media; I have checked.
 
The Venezuelan people, unlike us, of course, know all this, and that’s why even during this period the government’s popularity has *gone up* and they convincingly won the recent election. Of course, none of this is to say that the government is good or doing well. I'm actually highly critical of where the government has gone. But if we actually care about facts and context and discussion, this stuff needs to be known, otherwise we are completely ignorant of the situation.
 
These are not the only reasons why the economy is bad, [you can read a longer explanation here]( https://np.reddit.com/r/socialism/comments/8kbzir/ive_just_written_a_book_about_the_media_and/dz6fcfl/?context=3).
 
 
 
Finally, if this is proof socialism failed, then Ecuador must be proof that socialism works, as under the socialist president Correa, unemployment fell to a record low of [4%, poverty fell by 27%](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/feb/15/rafael-correa-ecuador-elections) in 7 years all while beginning to bring in [universal free education and healthcare](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2012/jan/19/ecuador-radical-exciting-place) and reducing its debt. Of course, none of this is ever brought up by these people because they don’t want an honest discussion about “socialism” and they don’t want people knowing about these countries.
 
So a response in 140 characters would be Venezuelans are hungry because big capitalists in the country are intentionally trying to starve them and because of illegal US sanctions. This certainly doesn’t tell the whole story but is a quick comeback.
 
 
From Ben Norton:
How US and Saudi crashed crude prices to hurt Russia, Iran, Venezuela in 2014
Washington pressured Riyadh to significantly overproduce crude and intentionally crash prices on the global market, in order to hurt the export-reliant economies of Russia, Iran, and Venezuela.
https://multipolarista.com/2022/11/18/oil-war-us-saudi-crash-russia-iran-venezuela-2014/
 
In an interview with Bolton published on July 12, CNN anchor Jake Tapper accused Trump of attempting a coup inside the United States, and asked Bolton about a Congressional investigation into violent protests held by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021.
“One doesn’t have to be brilliant to attempt a coup,” Tapper said.
Bolton replied, “I disagree with that, as somebody who has helped plan coups d’etat – not here, but, you know, other places. It takes a lot of work.”
Tapper later asked, “I do want to ask a follow up. When we were talking about what is capable, or what you need to do to be able to plan a coup, and you cited your expertise having planned coups.”
“I’m not going to get into the specifics, but uh…”, Bolton answered.
“Successful coups?” Tapper asked.
“Well, I wrote about Venezuela in the book. And it turned out not to be successful – not that we had all that much to do with it,” Bolton said.
“But I saw what it took for an opposition to try and overturn an illegally elected president, and they failed,” he added, implicitly admitting that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was elected.
“The notion that Donald Trump was half as competent as the Venezuelan opposition is laughable,” Bolton quipped.
“I feel like there’s other stuff you’re not telling me, though,” Tapper responded.
“I’m sure there is,” Bolton said with a laugh.
https://multipolarista.com/2022/07/12/trump-john-bolton-coups-venezuela/
 
 
Holodomor
The famine in Ukraine, the so-called “holodomor” was a serious natural disaster. The collectivization of agriculture began in 1928 and the Ukrainian famine of 1932-33 seriously threatened the success of collectivization and the entire Five-Year Plan.
The primary reasons for the famine were the weather conditions. There were two serious crop failures in a row (and others before) because of drought and snow which prevented sowings. A plant disease called ‘grain-rust’ also destroyed much of the crops. ‘Rusted’ crops can look normal and so the government didn’t originally recognize that much of the food was ruined. The bulk of this article describes the causes of the famine in detail, based on the research of Mark B. Tauger, Associate Professor of History at West Virginia University, who has published many peer-reviewed scientific papers and articles on these topics.
 
Much longer explanation, with sources:
 
WHY DID THE COLLECTIVIZATION OF AGRICULTURE TAKE PLACE?
 
The collectivization began in 1928 because of several reasons:
 
the USSR needed to industrialize to build socialism. Collectivization was necessary in order to grow enough food for a larger industrial proletariat.
the USSR needed to industrialize fast, to build a strong modern military to defend itself
class relations inside the country had reached a crisis in 1927. The NEP succeeded in rebuilding the economy after the Civil War, but it allowed the rural capitalists (‘kulaks’) to grow stronger. Most small farmers only produced enough food for their own families and didn’t sell food. Most food on the market was produced by large kulaks. They demanded less regulations on prices, and demanded higher prices for higher profits. They controlled the food supply of the cities and could use this to blackmail the government. In 1926-27 the kulaks were refusing to sell or produce food. The government responded by confiscating food which they were hiding. Kulaks responded by destroying food, slaughtering animals, and stopping farming etc.
The Soviet government had two options: to accept the demand for de-regulation and move back to unrestricted capitalism. Or to fight the kulaks and move towards socialism. Of course they chose to fight. It was impossible to accept the kulak demands, it would’ve meant the death of the socialist revolution and the country would’ve remained underdeveloped.
 
Poor peasants were encouraged to take over lands from kulaks which were not being used, and set up collective farms on those lands. The fight intensified in the countryside and kulaks were able to destroy many farm buildings and kill huge amounts of animals. This contributed to the famine, but was not the main cause of it.
 
Prof. Mark Tauger has shown conclusively that the Soviets couldn’t have avoided the famine in any way. The weather caused the crops to not grow, and thus they didn’t have enough food regardless of what they did.
 
Right-Wing propagandists claim that collectivization caused the famine, which is obviously false. We have evidence that the famine was caused by crop failure due to weather, but also the famine ended when the collective farms produced a good harvest. And after that the Soviet Union didn’t have famines anymore, except because of the war.
 
Some right-wingers also claim that the famine was purposefully orchestrated to kill Ukrainians, but there is no evidence of that. Ukraine received a million tons of food aid from the Russian SSR etc. The famine was a disaster for the Soviet economy, so they would never have caused it on purpose.
 
TAUGER’S RESEARCH:
 
WAS THE FAMINE ORCHESTRATED ON PURPOSE?
 
“A Ukrainian nationalist interpretation holds that the Soviet regime, and specifically Iosif Stalin, intentionally imposed the famine to suppress the nationalist aspirations of Ukraine and Ukrainians; revisionists argue that the leadership imposed the famine to suppress more widespread peasant resistance to collectivization… recent research has cast substantial doubt on them. Several studies and document collections have shown conclusively that the famine did not stop at Ukraine’s borders, but affected rural and urban areas throughout the Soviet Union, and even the military.”
(Prof. Mark B. Tauger, Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933, p. 2. From now on this article will be cited simply as “Tauger”)
 
The Soviet government sent several millions of tons of food aid to Ukraine. This was all they had, but not enough. The famine was not caused by any government decision or policy, but by natural disasters which lead to crop-failures:
 
“The Soviet government did have small reserves of grain, but continually drew these down to allocate food to the population… virtually the entire country experienced shortages of food… the Soviet Union faced a severe shortage, and the most important cause of that shortage has to have been small harvests in 1931 and 1932… Russia itself has endured more than one hundred fifty famines in its thousand years of recorded history, virtually all of which resulted directly from natural disasters, in most cases drought…” (Tauger, p. 7)
 
“[E]nvironmental disasters… have to be considered among the primary causes of the famine. I argue that capital and labor difficulties were… not as important as these environmental factors, and were in part a result of them… I conclude that it is thus inaccurate to describe the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 as simply an artificial or man-made famine…” (Tauger, p. 8)
 
In his article “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933” Tauger explains that grain procurement by the government was decreased in 1932 which should’ve left more food in villages assuming that the harvest was alright. But there was famine because the harvest was ruined by natural disasters. Procurement or export weren’t the problem. The narrative that the government supposedly took all the food and left people to die, cannot be supported by evidence.
 
“The low 1932 harvest worsened severe food shortages already widespread in the Soviet Union at least since 1931 and, despite sharply reduced grain exports, made famine likely if not inevitable in 1933.” (Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933”)
 
“This situation makes it difficult to accept the interpretation of the famine as the result of the 1932 grain procurements and as a conscious act of genocide. The harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.” (Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933”)
 
Anti-communist eye-witnesses are unreliable in any case, but in “Natural Disaster and Human Actions in the Soviet Famine of 1931-1933” Tauger demonstrates that the reason eye-witnesses might’ve claimed the harvest was good, is probably because they didn’t have the expertise to recognize diseased crops on the fields. More of this later in the article.
 
DROUGHT
 
The crop-failure was not caused by the Soviet system. In fact other countries at the same time also experienced droughts and famine. However, capitalist-colonialist regimes behaved much more cruelly in these situations:
 
“The Soviet regime was not unique in this experience: other major agricultural countries in the world also encountered major natural disasters and food crises in the early 1930s. The United States in 1930-1931 endured what was termed “the great southern drought,” which affected twenty-three states from Texas to West Virginia, brought immense suffering and increased mortality, and caused a major political scandal when Herbert Hoover refused to allocate food relief from federal government resources… French colonies in western Africa in 1931-1932 endured a drought, locust infestation, and the worst famine ever recorded there, though the French authorities continued to demand taxes.” (Tauger, pp. 9-10)
 
Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution was a poor underdeveloped country. As such, it was food insecure and at the mercy of natural disasters and crop failures. To combat droughts, pests, floods and other disasters it would’ve been necessary to build massive irrigation projects, drains, pesticide industries and to improve the soil. Something which the Russian Empire had completely neglected. It fell upon the shoulders of the Soviet government to overcome these challenges.
 
“Russia itself has endured more than one hundred fifty famines in its thousand years of recorded history, virtually all of which resulted directly from natural disasters, in most cases drought…” (Tauger, p. 7)
 
“The grain crisis and famine of 1928-1929 were among the main factors that led Soviet leaders… to undertake the collectivization of agriculture. Even in 1930 many regions had unfavorable weather and crop failures… The domestic context of the 1931-1933 famine, therefore, was one of chronic food insecurity. Natural disasters, especially drought alone or in combination with other environmental factors… repeatedly caused crop failures during the early years of the Soviet Union and threatened to revive the food crises and famine of the Civil War period…” (Tauger, p. 9)
 
Before the famine many grain-growing areas only had 25% of the necessary rain:
 
“[D]rought played a central role in precipitating the famine crisis… In the main spring-grain maturation period of mid-April to mid-June, precipitation in the southern Urals and Western Siberia was one-fourth of the amount that agronomists there considered necessary for normal plant growth.” (Tauger, p. 11)
 
“Serious famine conditions in villages and towns in Ukraine by early 1932 required special food relief. The regime admitted the seriousness of this drought publicly, in particular by holding a conference on drought in October 1931 attended by agricultural specialists as well as Sovnarkom chairman Viacheslav Molotov and other high officials. The government also established a meteorological monitoring service and began plans for construction of major irrigation projects along the Volga and in other drought-prone areas. The Central Committee also dispatched seed and food loans to most of the severely affected regions.” (Tauger, p. 12)
 
Collected grain had to be sent back to the farms, because otherwise they wouldn’t have any seed-grain to sow:
 
“This was the situation throughout the eastern regions. The Urals oblast’ … had to obtain a seed and provisions loan of 350,000 tons, 45 percent of its procurements. Kazakstan received back 36 percent. Western Siberia 22 percent, Bashkiria 20 percent.” (Tauger, p. 12)
 
WINTERKILL AND TEMPERATURE FLUCTUATIONS
 
“Other weather conditions quite distinct from drought affected the 1932 crop. In January 1932 a sudden warm spell in the southern regions of the Soviet Union caused fall-sown crops to start growing, after which winter temperatures returned and killed a portion of the crop. In Ukraine this winterkill destroyed at least 12 percent of fall-sown crops, more than double the long-term average; in one district 62 percent of winter crops failed.” (Tauger, p. 13)
 
CROP-DISEASES
 
It may sound paradoxical but despite the early drought and snow which prevented sowing and killed crops, the rest of the year was actually much too humid. Heavy rainfall (as much as triple the normal rain) destroyed crops and the humidity stimulated the spread of plant-diseases, massive growth of the insect population and weeds, which also destroyed crops.
 
“And most important, despite the regional droughts mentioned above, 1932 was overall a warm and humid year. In several regions heavy rains damaged crops and reduced yields… [there was] heavy rainfall in 1932 which was double or triple the normal amount in many regions. “ (Tauger, pp. 13-14)
 
“such rainfall encourages the spread of crop diseases. This type of problem chronically affected the Soviet Union… The most important infestation in 1932 came from several varieties of rust, a category of fungi that can infest grains and many other plants…” (Tauger, p. 15)
 
The most sinister aspect of grain-rust and other such diseases, is that they are hard to detect. Crops can look normal for a long time but be inedible:
 
“Although in some cases rust will kill grain plants, rusted grain ordinarily will continue to grow, form ears, and in general appear normal; but the grain heads will not “fill,” so that the harvest will seem “light” and consist of small grains, or of fewer normal-sized grains, and disproportionately of husks and other fibrous materials. In other words, a field of wheat (or barley, rye, oats, or other grain, all of which are susceptible to rust) could appear entirely normal and promising, and yet because of the infestation could produce an extremely low yield… Rusts have been the most common and the most destructive infestations of grain crops, and remain so today… In 1935, wheat stem rust caused losses of more than 50 percent in North Dakota and Minnesota…” (Tauger, p. 15)
 
“In 1932, however, a large epiphytotic of rust, one of the most severe recorded, affected all Eastern Europe… Studies of estates in Germany found losses of 40 to 80 percent of wheat crops, a scale not seen in decades, if ever… In Hungary, a leading specialist described the rust epidemic that year as the worst in generations; additional reports from elsewhere in the Balkans, Czechoslovakia, and Poland referred to “fantastic” losses.” (Tauger, p. 16)
 
“Identifying rust required specialized knowledge and training… peasants in the North Caucasus could not distinguish between rust and other diseases…This problem was by no means limited to the USSR; a study of wheat growing in Maryland in 1929 found an inverse relation between the condition of the crop and its final yield, because the high rainfall that stimulated plant growth also fostered plant diseases: “A farmer observing a lush stand reported a high condition, not recognizing the development of the disease before harvest time.” The fact that rust was difficult for nonspecialists to detect helps to explain the numerous claims in memoirs and testimonies of a good 1932 harvest Famine survivors in the Volga region whom the Russian historian Viktor Kondrashin interviewed, however, remembered that in the 1932 harvest the ears were somehow “empty,” the characteristic one would expect from rusted grain.” (Tauger, p.17)
 
“While rust infestations were not a new problem in Russia, the extreme outbreak in 1932 took agronomists by surprise…” (Tauger, p.18)
 
“Rust was not the only plant disease to affect Soviet agriculture in 1932: large outbreaks of smut also caused substantial losses. Smut spreads through the soil or from contaminated seed, and like rust does not alter greatly the external appearance of the crop… the disease not only destroys grain in infested plants but also easily contaminates healthy grain in the harvest… Smut had been a severe problem in Soviet agriculture during NEP [in the 1920s]. Infestations in many parts of the country in 1922 caused substantial losses, in extreme cases more than 80 percent…” (Tauger, p. 18)
 
INSECTS AND PESTS
 
“The warm, humid weather in 1932 also led to severe insect infestations, including locusts, field moths, and other insects on grain and sugar beets… [There was a] failure of winter sowings due to pests and the above-mentioned winterkill in 333 districts in Ukraine, encompassing an area of 747,984 hectares, which inducted 8.6 percent of winter sowings and 10.5 percent of winter wheat.” (Tauger, p. 20)
 
WEEDS
 
“Weeds were a major problem through the famine period… The unusually warm and wet weather in 1932 greatly stimulated this weed growth” (Tauger, p. 40)
 
LACK OF HORSES AND OTHER DRAUGHT ANIMALS
 
Lack of horses contributed to the famine. The majority of animals were owned by rich peasants (kulaks). Most poor peasants only owned a single horse or cow, and one third of peasants didn’t own any. Because most animals were concentrated in the hands of kulaks, they were able to slaughter large amounts of them as a form of economic warfare. However, the biggest cause for lack of horses was the famine itself:
 
“Animals were the immediate victims of shortages in 1930-1933 since starving peasants had no choice but to feed themselves first from the dwindling reserves” (Tauger, p. 22)
 
“By April 1932 30-40 percent of the horses were incapable of work.” (Tauger, p. 24)
 
It would be a mistake to blame the famine on sabotage by kulaks or by capitalists, but instances of sabotage did occur:
 
“some 5,000 tractors purchased from the American company “Oliver” had leaking radiators and loud sounds in their mufflers, transmissions, and motors… Allis-Chalmers tractors purchased in 1930 arrived with missing parts.”
(Tauger, p. 24)
 
The Soviet Union was producing tens of thousands of tractors during 1932 but this was not enough to meet the growing need, due to the unexpected catastrophe.
 
SOIL EXHAUSTION
 
Soil science was invented in Russia because of the extreme soil exhaustion in the final period of the Russian Empire. This continued to be a problem for the early USSR especially when it was decided to try to cultivate new lands and increase crop-area. Grain was a priority, so peasants neglected crop-rotation which caused exhaustion of the soil. This was due to ignorance but also due to economic motivators. The government also considered that to solve the grain-shortage this was acceptable for a period of 5 years maximum, but no more. However, already in 1932 the Politburo issued a decree to increase crop-rotation and thus combat soil exhaustion.
 
“soil exhaustion from repeated sowings of grain in the same fields and lack of crop rotations caused serious declines in yield… This situation reflected a general problem in the Soviet Union: despite its vast size, [due to the Czarist backwardness] the country had surprisingly little good agricultural land; at this time the United States had more land under crops than the Soviet Union.” (Tauger, pp. 38-39)
 
“[I]n September 1932 the Politburo formed a commission… to raise crop yields and combat weeds. Stalin and Molotov themselves joined this commission, and the result was the decree of 29 September “on measures for raising harvest yields.” This decree ordered that all party, state, and economic organizations focus their work on raising harvest yields “as the central task of agricultural development at the present moment” and specified measures to increase grain sowings at the expense of technical crops and to introduce crop rotations.” (Tauger, p. 46)
 
PEASANT RESISTANCE?
 
During collectivization of agriculture the Communists deported many rural capitalists (kulaks) from their land and gave the land to poor and landless peasants. It is often claimed that this “ruined” Russian farming. However, that’s false:
 
“the common assertion that dekulakization removed the best farmers from farming contains two arguments that are questionable at best… “poor” or “middle” peasants were potentially just as competent farmers as the “kulaks.” Dekulakization, therefore, would not have removed all the best farmers, even if officials applied the policy to remove the “well-off’ farmers.” (Tauger, p. 26)
 
It is also often claimed that the famine resulted from massive peasant resistance. This is also false:
 
“Peasant resistance and unwillingness to work in the collective farms are fundamental themes in discussions of the famine and Soviet agriculture generally… My research on Soviet farm labor policies and actual peasant practices and my reading of this literature, however, has made me skeptical of the argument for labor resistance… for peasant resistance to have been sufficient to cause the low 1932 harvest an extremely large number of peasants would have had to act this way… the argument asserts that the majority of peasants attempted to deprive their families and fellow villagers of sufficient food to last until the next harvest. This interpretation, therefore, requires us to believe that most peasants acted against their own and their neighbors’ self-interest. This viewpoint is difficult to accept both on general human terms and particularly when applied to peasants in Russia and Ukraine. The great majority of these peasants had lived for centuries in corporate villages that had instilled certain basic cooperative values, and the kolkhozy perpetuated basic features of these villages.” (Tauger, p. 28)
 
“Although observers at the time argued, as do some scholars today, that peasant resistance took forms that diminished the harvest, the evidence… leads to a more ambivalent conclusion. Some peasants’ actions clearly indicated that they sought to do as much as possible to save the harvest… in some cases peasants restored kolkhozy (reports referred to cases in the Middle Volga, Nizhnii Novgorod, and Moscow regions)…” (Tauger, p. 33-34)
 
There was real sabotage committed by kulaks and middle-peasants who had been persuaded by kulaks. This sabotage still wasn’t among the main causes of the famine:
 
“Only in certain types of actions can we discern a clear, conscious effort to reduce food production… In some cases …[saboteurs] attacked kolkhozniki working in the fields in order to induce them to join with the leavers and divide up the farm… In the Middle Volga, Nizhnii Novgorod, Ivanovo, and Northern regions, arson destroyed thousands of hectares of unharvested grain and hundreds of tons of harvested grain, in addition to hundreds of thousand of hectares of forests, cut timber, housing, and fuel. In some places [saboteurs] attacked officials and other peasants involved in harvest work and destroyed harvest machinery” (Tauger, p. 33-34)
 
However, there were no real signs of massive peasant resistance. Tauger states that from what we can see: “at least some peasants worked hard, and this situation was not limited to Ukraine.” and other peasants “may not have worked less” (Tauger, p. 36)
 
In reality, the Soviet government relied on the workers (industrial but also agricultural) and poor and middle peasants:
 
“the regime’s actions during and after the famine indicated that they did not see the peasants exclusively as enemies. For example, the political departments formed in MTS and sovkhozy in early 1933 to organize farm work during the famine… promoting thousands of peasants… and… relied on the peasants to overcome the crisis. ” (Tauger, p. 49)
 
In reality, older sources which described alleged peasant resistance may simply have mistaken fallow land as “abandoned by resisting peasants”. Eventually these stories became widespread in anti-communist circles and were repeated constantly:
 
“[C]ritical observers may have mistaken fallows as abandoned lands.” (Tauger, p. 39)
 
Peasant resistance was also exaggerated because the government “may have misinterpreted as a protest what may have been simply a farm with more labor than it could employ” (Tauger, p. 36)
 
REPRESSION?
 
Anti-communists have claimed that the USSR was only able to “force” peasants to farm during this period due to extreme repression such as punishing those farms who refused to sell excess grain. However, according to Tauger the repression was not quite so severe:
 
“repressive measures… however, seem to have had limited effects.” (Tauger, p. 37)
 
Instead of believing in conspiracy theories, it is much more likely that the peasants farmed simply because it was in everybody’s best interest. The collective farm movement was not something completely alien to them, and the movement itself relied on tens of millions of peasants and activists.
 
DID THE USSR EXPORT FOOD DURING THE FAMINE?
 
The USSR needed capital to purchase industrial goods, machines and to hire foreign experts. This was part of the Soviet Industrial Revolution, to turn a backward country into a modern industrial country. The Russian Empire also used to expert raw-materials (mainly grain and cotton) because it was a backward agrarian state. The USSR tried to escape this backwardness.
 
“[T]hat put the Soviet Union under intense pressure to export commodities”
(Tauger, p. 44)
 
The USSR tried to achieve some level of economic independence but was being squeezed ruthlessly by foreign countries, which forced it to export:
 
“According to the commercial counselor of the British Embassy in Moscow, writing in late 1931, “failure [by the Soviet government] to meet its obligations would certainly bring disaster in its train. Not only would further credits cease, but all future exports, all Soviet shipping entering foreign ports, all Soviet property already in foreign countries would be liable to seizure to cover sums due. Admission of insolvency would endanger the achievement of all aspirations based on the five-year plan and might indeed imperil the existence of the government itself” (PRO FO 371. 15607 N7648/ 167/38, 6-7). German Chancellor Bruening told a British diplomat in Berlin in early 1932 that if the Soviets “did not meet their bills in some form or other, their credit would be destroyed for good and all” (PRO FO 371 16327 N456/ 158/38).” (Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933”)
 
It is often claimed that the government supposedly had lots of food, but simply exported all of it. This is a conspiracy theory, and is not based on any reliable evidence.
 
“The amount of grain exported during the peak of the famine in the first half of 1933, however, approximately 220,000 tons, was small, less than 1 percent of the lowest harvest estimates, and the regime was using virtually all the rest of the available harvest to feed people.” (Tauger, p. 6)
 
“Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933.”
(Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933”)
 
“The severity and geographical extent of the famine, the sharp decline in exports in 1932-1933, seed requirements, and the chaos in the Soviet Union in these years, all lead to the conclusion that even a complete cessation of exports would not have been enough to prevent famine.” (Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933”)
 
The fact is that even if all exports had been stopped, it wouldn’t have prevented the famine. However, it would have made industrialization impossible and thus kept the country in poverty, and at risk of future famines. Industrialization was a necessity in order to end famines. If the harvest of 1932 had been successful, as everyone hoped, then there would not have been any famine. However, the USSR at the time was still not industrialized and therefore was to a large extent at the mercy of environmental factors outside of their control.
 
TAUGER’S CONCLUSION
 
“The [low] harvest of 1932 essentially made a famine inevitable.“
(Tauger, “The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933”)
 
“Any study that asserts that the harvest was not extraordinarily low and that the famine was a political measure intentionally imposed through excessive procurements is clearly based on an insufficient source base and an uncritical approach to the official sources. The evidence cited above demonstrates that the 1932-1933 famine was the result of a genuine shortage, a substantial decline in the availability of food… [The famine was] the result of the largest in a series of natural disasters… it is clear that the small harvests of 1931-1932 created shortages that affected virtually everyone in the country and that the Soviet regime did not have the internal resources to alleviate the crisis.” (Tauger, p. 48)
 
The famine ended in 1933 when the collective farms produced a successful crop, much larger then ones before. The collective system demonstrated its effectiveness by increasing crop yields continually.
 
Sources:
https://mltheory.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/grover_furr_blood_lies_the_evidence_that_every_b-ok-org.pdf
https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2014/06/07/facts-about-the-holodomor-and-why-its-fake/
https://mltheory.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/the-holodomor-explained/
https://mltheory.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/tottlefraud.pdf
http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node68.html#SECTION00800000000000000000
https://espressostalinist.com/the-real-stalin-series/famine-of-1932/
https://docs.google.com/gview?url=https://mltheory.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/another-view-of-stalin1.pdf&embedded=true&embedded=true
 
Part 4 – Debunking “common knowledge” about Capitalism
 
Capitalism solves hunger / poverty:
 
Compiled by
https://www.bread.org/sites/default/files/downloads/ol16-hunger-poverty-facts.pdf
 
 
FACTS ON HUNGER AND POVERTY IN THE UNITED STATES
 
• More than 48 million Americans lived in households that struggled to put food on the table in 2014 (latest figures available).
1 www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20 rev%20(July%201).pdf (page 4) 
 
• More than 48 million Americans live below the poverty line ($24,008 for a family of 4 with 2 children).
2 www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20 rev%20(July%201).pdf (page 4)
 
• More than 20 percent–1 in 5–children live at risk of hunger.3
Likewise, more than 1 in 5 children are living in poverty.4
 
• 3,939,067 more people are working full-time, yearround than in 2009, yet the poverty rate remains 2.5 percentage points higher than before the recession.5
 
• In 2014, 21.7 million low-income children received a free or reduced-price lunch through the National School Lunch Program.6 But only about half, 11.5 million, also received a free or reduced-price breakfast through the School Breakfast Program7 , and only 2.6 million also received Summer Food Service Program meals during the summer months.8
 
• More than 3.3 million children receive food at child care centers, day care homes, and at-risk afterschool care centers through the federal Child and Adult Care Feeding Program.9 • More than 8.2 million low-income women, infants, and children received nutritious food, nutrition education, and health care referrals through the WIC program in 2014.10
 
• 1 in 8 American households receives benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps).11 SNAP lifted at least 4.7 million Americans out of poverty in 2014—including 2.1 million children.12
 
• 47.9 percent of SNAP households are employed13, and nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of recipients are children, elderly, or disabled.14
 
• The earned income tax credit and child tax credit, which encourage and reward work by supplementing earnings, lifted 9.4 million people out of poverty in 2013, including 5.0 million children.15
 
• 22.4 percent of Hispanic households and 26.1 percent of African-American households were food-insecure in 2014.16 Communities of color tend to experience higher levels of poverty and hunger than the general population.
 
FACTS ON INTERNATIONAL HUNGER AND POVERTY
 
• Worldwide, 836 million people still live in extreme poverty–on less than $1.25 per day.1
 
• Since 1990, global hunger has decreased by nearly half2, but undernutrition still affects 795 million3 people and causes 3.1 million child deaths annually.4
 
• Since the federal government’s largest food-aid program, Food for Peace, began in 1954, more than 3 billion people in 150 countries have benefited directly from U.S. food aid.5
 
• Since their establishment in 2002, McGovern-Dole International Food for Education programs have boosted school attendance and provided meals to approximately 28 million children in 37 countries.6
 
• Global immunization programs supported by the United States save up to 3 million children every year.7 Nutrition programs boost the effectiveness of immunizations by strengthening immune systems, making children less susceptible to diseases, and accelerating recovery rates. 8
 
• As of September 2015, more than 9.5 million people received treatment for HIV, and 831,500 HIV-positive pregnant women received antiretroviral medications, resulting in 267,000 babies born HIV-free in fiscal year 2015.9
 
• A population too malnourished to work suffers long-term economic consequences. A malnourished person can suffer a 10 percent reduction in his/ her lifetime earnings, while countries can see 2 to 3 percent annual reductions in their GDPs.10
 
• By providing people with the tools they need to lift themselves out of poverty, we create a more stable world. For every 5 percent drop in income growth in a developing country, the likelihood of violent conflict or war within the next year increases by 10 percent.11
 
• 43 of the top 50 consumer nations of U.S. agricultural products were once U.S. foreign-aid recipients.12
 
Sources:
1 www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20 rev%20(July%201).pdf (page 4)
2 www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_MDG_Report/pdf/MDG%202015%20 rev%20(July%201).pdf (page 4)
3 Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, The State of Food Insecurity in the World, 2015, http://www.fao.org/3/a-i4646e.pdf
4 Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN), found on December 16, 2015 at: www.gainhealth.org/about
5 U.S. Food Aid and Security Coalition, “Food for Peace,” available at http:// foodaid.org/food-aid-programs/food-for-peace
6 The Chicago Council on Global Affairs, “Healthy Food for a Healthy World”, April 2015.
7 www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs378/en
8 www.gavi.org/Library/GAVI-documents/Advocacy/Immunisation-andNutrition---Info-Note/
9 U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, World AIDS Day 2015 Update.
10 ONE foundation,” Food. Farming. Future: Breaking the Cycle of Malnutrition & Poverty”. April 2013. Available here: http://www.one.org/international/policy/ food-farming-future-breaking-the-cycle-of-malnutrition-and-poverty/#ftn3
11 World Food Program USA, “Monday September 26 is National Action Day,” September 2011.
12 USAID, Progress Report. April 2015. Available at: https://www.usaid.gov/ results-and-data/progress
 
Part 5 – Addressing other misconceptions
 
DPRK (North Korea) is a monarchy:
It is important to know that the DPR of Korea is a socialist state in which power rests with the people and their People Power organizations such as the People's Assembly (both national and local committees), the Party and the Army. Therefore, it is a mistake to think that power is concentrated solely on the figure of the leader, even though these institutions naturally have a leader.
The leader in the DPRK does not concentrate power in his hands, he works within a very clear and organized governance structure under the Korean Popular Constitution.
What are the Leaders real positions of power?
Kim Il Sung was President of the Republic, Premier of the Republic, General Secretary of the Worker's party of Korea (WPK) and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army (Generalissimo).
Kim Jong Il was Chairman of the DPRK National Defense Committee, General Secretary of the WPK and Supreme Commander of the Korean People's Army.
Kim Jong Un is Chairman of the DPRK State Affairs Committee, Chairman of the Korean Labor Party and Supreme Commander of the DPRK Armed Forces (Marshal).
How did leaders come to power?
Kim Il Sung was a guerrilla who for more than 20 years led a war of resistance to the Japanese invasion of Korea and won it, being the founder of the DPRK State and elected President of the same in 1948. He was elected leader of the Party by elections internal of that institution. He was elevated to the rank of Supreme Commander of the Army for being its most celebrated creator and driver.
Kim Jong Il since the 1960s had joined as an ordinary member of the WPK and held numerous positions throughout the following decades within the Party in the fields of art, advertising, organization and political practice, as well as being an important theorist and faithful follower of President Kim Il Sung (never referring to him as 'my father' but always as 'our President/our Leader'). Decades later, in April 1993, he managed to be elected as Chairman of the DPRK National Defense Committee by the Supreme People's Assembly and only in October 1997 was he internally elected by the Central Committee as the new General Secretary of the Party and only on 5 February September 1998, 4 years after the death of President Kim Il Sung, during the First Session of the 10th Legislature of the Supreme People's Assembly, he was formally sworn in as Chairman of the DPRK National Defense Committee.
Kim Jong Un from a young age joined the WPK, reaching the Central Committee and being vice-chairman of the National Defense Committee. It was on April 11, 2012, that is, months after the death of Leader Kim Jong II, that he was elected by the IX Party Conference as PTC's First Secretary, Days later he assumed the position of Chairman of the National Defense Committee, replaced later by the DPRK State Affairs Committee.
In neither of these two cases of transfer of power was there an unilateral or personal decision and none of the deceased Leaders left in writing in any will or posthumous order the appointment of their son as leader.
small historical context about the transition of leadership between Kim II Sung and Kim Jong II (which happened 4 years later) should be mentioned
Korea at that time was in a major
external and internal crisis due to:
1- The fall of the USSR and socialist countries in general – which meant the end of their foreign trade.
2- A resumption of US military, political and economic actions to encircle and weaken Korea (imposition of an economic blockade, deployment of nuclear weapons and entire fleets in neighboring countries, seas and skies)
3- Natural disasters that destroyed most of the country's countryside and agricultural production.
At that moment, you, as a politically well-educated Korean and concerned with the survival of your intellectual-peasant-worker state (which is the basis of your life and safeguards your interests and the country's sovereignty) would bet your chips to assume the nation in this context in whom? In a person who for decades had been involved in the political work of the country's leadership, knew the practical and political needs of the motherland and was still a faithful follower of the most acclaimed national hero, or would bet on a stranger who no matter how much he has a political career does not equal the previously mentioned? Remember to think about your decision taking into account this context of total crisis, after all, reality is not a laboratory with perfect conditions of temperature and pressure.
Is it a coincidence that all the leaders had a direct parental bond?
Yes and no. they conquered these positions in a natural way within the institutions and did not take them "out of the blue" just because they were children of the old leaders. However, to explain the other side of this issue, it is necessary to look at the social and philosophical context of Korean society.
 
For millennia there has been an implicit social notion in Korean society that a leader or boss is very important to society. So much so that in the DPRK and in the Juche Idea, there are political passages that attribute to the Leader a very important role in the conduct of the Revolution as the unifying force of popular desires. The people of Korea see in the Kim family a great synthesis of love for their homeland and they trust them because they all dedicated their entire lives to serving the people. In the collective mentality of the Korean people and in the historical data, it must be emphasized that it was this family that led Korea's impressive moments and victories
Kim Il Sung won against two powerful empires (US and Japan) in two wars defending their country's sovereignty, Kim Jong Il was responsible for Korea's difficult transition to the new millennium without falling and crumbling as happened to almost all socialist countries, and also withstood and defended terrible attacks and external and internal crises in the 1990s and Kim Jong Un is the leader who definitively transformed Korea into a nuclear power respected throughout the world - including it's great enemy, the US, and greatly improved the condition of economy and people's lives.
The decision-making character was not the parental relationship, but the previous political and patriotic work already developed and genuinely revolutionary.
Concepts of "Western democracy" simply do not work to explain Korea because it is not a Western democracy and is not based on Western concepts. It is a millenary nation with immense homogeneity in its cultural and political Composition that reflects on its socialist construction of the last 70 years and its way of seeing life.
Going against it reveals your problem and not theirs, fighting orientalism as possible as we can is a duty for every leftist (a concept that basically means having a stereotyped and Eurocentric view that everything that comes from the Orient is "strange”, “bizarre” or just because it comes from the "less civilized” Orient). Fighting Orientalism is important to avoid joining in with an imperialist discourse that is not ours and that, for reasons
Clearly convenient to its yearning for global hegemony, incessantly attacks DPRK with the same arguments as the "communist dynasty of the Kim family” and “Kim's dictatorship”.
 
 
Trans Rights:
Transphobia is rooted in fascism, and currently the topic of choice for fascists seeking to target marginalized people and recruit like-minded bigots.
Fascists shut down an investigation using bomb threats:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/bomb-threats-sent-demanding-dropping-of-school-title-ix-investigation/ar-AAXYwlf
https://v.redd.it/xgs6maocqw391
 
In-depth explanation, with more sources and videos:
 
While I expect other answers to include more general areas of science, I would like to take this to discuss another area of science that is often overlooked and frowned upon.
 
Although his work does not fall into the area I will touch upon on this answer, Nobel Laureate Professor and biophysicist known for his research of heat and mechanical work in muscles, Archibald Vivian "AV" Hill, wrote a letter in 1934 to British economist and social activist Lord Beveridge, saying something that would apply to **every** field of science in Nazi Germany:
 
*"It is not that these academics will perish as human beings, but that as scholars and scientists, they will be heard of no more, since they will have to take up something else in order to live."*
 
With that, it is evident that Hill was aware of the persecution of scientists that was going to take place within the existence of Hitler's regime. However, it seems that he is underestimating the degree to which **how** horrifically science would be vilified.
 
On May 10th, 1933, the world would only get a small glimpse as to what was to come for Nazi Germany. That night, the infamous Joseph Goebbels took thousands of works by Jewish authors and scientists; along with other authors and scientists they viewed to be "degenerate", and burned them. These would only be a fraction of the tens of thousands of works that would be burned under The Third Reich.
 
In response to her books being burned, American blind and deaf author and activist, Helen Keller, wrote, *"You may burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas those books contain have passed through millions of channels and will go on."* She was absolutely right. **Some of the most important and influential works that were burned that night belonged to an institute founded by a Jewish scientist who strongly advocated for the rights of another group The Nazis would persecute as well: LGBT+ people.**
 
The Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, or Institute for Sexology, was the only institute of its kind at the time. The institute had been established by Jewish scientist Magnus Hirschfeld in 1919, who had been practicing naturopathology in the 1890s and came across many homosexual patients who had attempted suicide. That, along with anguish over the trial of Oscar Wilde, let him to establish the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee--**the very first LGBT+ rights organization in world history.** The organization's motto, "Justice through science" was a reflection of Hirschfeld’s view that scientific research to prove that homosexuality was natural would held erase homophobia (but more specifically, Paragraph 175 of the German Imperial Criminal Code, which punished homosexuality).
 
Known as "The Einstein of Sex", his work was often scrutinized even before The Nazis rose to power. Sex was viewed as a very taboo topic in these times, no one would dare to touch upon it other than in the bedroom. But Hirschfeld changed everything with his scientific work. He was a pioneer. No one else had ever attempted to bring this topic into the public eye like he did. When asked why he wrote his book, *Berlins drittes Geschlecht* (Berlin’s Third Sex), for a rather general audience, he responded:
 
*"While the results of my research into the field of homosexuality have only been published in specialist journals to date...it has long been clear to me that knowledge of an area that is intertwined with the interests of so many families, of every class, would not and could not remain forever confined in the closed community of specialists or academic circles."*
 
He strongly believed that if sexuality is such an important aspect of human life, then everyone should be able to access information about sex without fear or prejudice. He was a strong advocate for sex education in schools, as he wrote, *“sexual science . . . has not yet been found worthy of being integrated into the curriculum of any university . . . we view it as a stroke of fortune that we were able to create a place of instruction \[Lehrstätte\] for doctors and medical students in addition to our textbook \[Lehrbuch\] for sexual pathology within the Institute for Sexual Science.”*
 
He was a major pioneer for people that are today known as transgender and intersex people. He coined the term *transvestism,* which would be considered the proper term for what we know to be *transgenderism.* He coined this term, as many people who were "cross-dressing" back in the day did not want to be viewed as homosexuals, but rather as a different gender than their birth sex. He also invented the term *pseudohermaphrodite* or *hermaphrodite* to refer to intersex people. However, all of these terms have been abused and are thus now considered to be offensive--but they were extremely important back then, because there would finally be a term for transgender and intersex people to describe their identities.
 
Not only did Hirschfeld create these terms, but he also issued *transvestite passes:* identification for transgender individuals to show policemen if they were to possibly be arrested for cross-dressing. The card [**here**](https://imgur.com/odZRb3L) reads, "The worker Eva Katter, born on 14 March 1910 and residing in Britz Muthe-sisushof 8, is known here as someone who wears male clothing. Strewe, Police Commissioner.” He also created passports for transgender people, which you can see [**here**](https://imgur.com/JmEl8g6)**.**
 
Also, [**here's**](https://imgur.com/nYLTQ87) a picture of transgender people standing outside of his institute.
 
Not only that, but he was a major help with the world's first sex reassignment surgery, on a transgender woman, model and former painter named Lili Elbe. In the 1910s, she had become increasingly comfortable with identifying and dressing as a woman. She was known to be very [**beautiful**](https://imgur.com/YaHnHWb)**;** however, only her closest friends knew that she was born a male. The surgery was completed in multiple operations within a two-year span. However, she was unable to complete the final operation in her journey, a uterus transplant, because she suffered from cardiac arrest two months after her labiaplasty due to an infection which was unable to be treated. However, this paved the way for today's sex reassignment surgeries, which are extremely important for many transgender individuals.
 
 
Unlike many other scientists, he was extremely against the classification of non-heterosexual sexualities and transgenderism as mental illnesses. He believed that human sexuality was extremely diverse, and that all sexualities and transgenderism were completely natural as they connect to each other in a way. [**Here**](https://imgur.com/V6GeZ11) is a diagram he mapped out to describe this.
http://oops.uni-oldenburg.de/1825/1/luesex13.pdf
 
Among his many other achievements in the field of sexology, someone in his institute created the very first questionnaire for human sexuality. The name of this specific author is unknown and we may never know the findings that were collected from thousands of people, as nearly all of the questionnaires were burned with almost every other work in the institute by The Nazis. [**Here**](https://imgur.com/JP0RmCL) is a picture of one of these questionnaires that were able to be recovered. The scribbles on the cover say, “found in the Institute on 9 November 1933,” and under that, “to be care-fully preserved for references in articles or speeches against these activities from 1918 to 1932.” This suggests that the Nazis were going to use this as antisemitic propaganda, as homosexuality was considered to be an "un-german activity."
 
The institute became a safe haven for LGBT+ people, as demonstrated in this picture: https://imgur.com/88r5gPQ, they used the institute to express their sexualities and genders, as they were not able to in the outside world.
 
Hirschfeld's institute was met by some 20,000 visitors/tourists and thousands of regular patients every year. It was home to 20,000 volumes of work and 35,000 photographs. It was a center for researching sexuality, marriage counseling services, advice and education on contraception, and helped with individual sex problems a patient may have had.
 
During the book burnings, The Nazis made their hatred towards Hirschfeld very clear. In fact, the way he was represented during the burnings was extremely distinct and much more cruel than many other authors. Students from a nearby university had created a plaster bust of Hirschfeld, placed it near the podium for speakers and burned it along with his work.
 
As a result of these burnings, the entire institute shut down due to its entire library being ransacked and being set on fire. Had it not been for the burnings, our society might be much more accepting of homosexuality, bisexuality and transgenderism, intersex people as well as be more knowledgeable and comfortable with discussing sex and contraceptives.
 
Only a couple of days after the burnings, Hirschfeld went into exile in France.
 
https://imgur.com/88r5gPQ
Here is a Nazi propaganda piece picturing a caricature of him seemingly "enjoying" his time in exile, with exaggerated feminine features to demonstrate his own homosexuality. During his time in exile, he continued to research and write in secret. He planned on opening another institute in France as a successor to the one plundered by The Nazis. In the preface of his very last published book in 1935,  L'Ame et l'amour, psychologie sexologique (The Human Spirit and Love: Sexological Psychology), he writes about hoping to start a new life in Paris.
 
*"In search of sanctuary, I have found my way to that country, the nobility of whose traditions, and whose ever-present charm, have already been as balm to my soul. I shall be glad and grateful if I can spend some few years of peace and repose in France and Paris, and still more grateful to be enabled to repay the hospitality accorded to me, by making available those abundant stores of knowledge acquired throughout my career."*
 
Unfortunately, he did not get a chance to do this, as he passed away in May 1935 from a heart attack. Before his death, he was working on a book entitled "Rassimus" or "Racism", where he wrote about how he believed the societal construct of race was simply an excuse for white supremacy and hatred towards non-white people--an idea which was extremely unpopular back in the day, but has become much more popular today. The book was posthumously published in 1938.
 
Sadly, his sister was gassed in Auschwitz in 1942. Tens of thousands of the very people he advocated for were murdered by The Nazis as well.
 
Thankfully, his work had already been published and was only recently rediscovered. **You can read much of his work here:
https://archive.org/search.php?query=%28%28subject%3A%22Hirschfeld%2C+Magnus%22+OR+subject%3A%22Magnus+Hirschfeld%22+OR+creator%3A%22Hirschfeld%2C+Magnus%22+OR+creator%3A%22Magnus+Hirschfeld%22+OR+creator%3A%22Hirschfeld%2C+M.%22+OR+title%3A%22Magnus+Hirschfeld%22+OR+description%3A%22Hirschfeld%2C+Magnus%22+OR+description%3A%22Magnus+Hirschfeld%22%29+OR+%28%221868-1935%22+AND+Hirschfeld%29%29+AND+%28-mediatype%3Asoftware%29
 They have 68 of his works in German, 12 in English and 2 in French.
 
**He also starred in and directed the very first movie that depicted homosexuality in a positive light. It's called "Different From The Others" and was produced in 1919. It's a 50-minute long silent film with writing in English, and you can watch it here for free:
https://vimeo.com/251002359
 
Regarding targeting of kids or performing harmful or unnecessary surgeries or other treatments:
Transgender Children 1. Are they given hormones and surgery?
If a child comes out as transgender pre puberty, they are allowed to choose their clothing, toys, hair style, name, and pronouns, all of which is completely 100% reversible.
At tanner stage 2 puberty, blockers are given to buy the child more time to consider, discuss with parents and medical/mental health professionals, and decide whether to move forward with transition or not. They are 100% reversible with no negative effects to reproductive ability when stopped by age 16.
At the age of 16, either blockers are stopped, and natural puberty is allowed to progress normally or blockers are continued, and cross sex HRT is started to allow the child to progress into puberty of the preferred sex, again, at a normal time for puberty.
Top surgery for both trans boys and girls is available at around the age of 16, coincidentally the same age when cisgender girls are allowed to have elective breast augmentation. Bottom surgery is generally held off until the age of 18. This goes for all bottom surgeries, including those that result in sterilization.
This is the schedule for allowed transition processes, not required. A lot of trans people choose not to go through some (or even all) of the steps. The entire process is incredibly patient-centered, and includes years of gender therapy to ensure that before any medical steps are taken, children that are confused or unsure are weeded out of the process.
Preventing the permanent changes that natural puberty brings to transgender children saves lives. You can't un-grow breasts in a trans boy, and you can't un-grow facial hair or un-deepen the voice of a trans girl. Preventing natural puberty ensures that the child will be better able to pass and integrate into society later and prevents the need for expensive and invasive surgeries to correct the wrong puberty at a later point.
More facts:
A large study by Harvard Key of transgender children from the Netherlands found that only 1.9% of transgender children change their mind by adolescence.
Transgender children who are allowed to transition develop less mental illnesses like depression, are less likely to attempt suicide, are less likely to become homeless in adulthood, and are less likely to experience intense gender dysphoria.
Sources:
Leng, Kirsten. “Magnus Hirschfeld’s Meanings: Analysing Biography and the Politics of Representation.” German History, vol. 35, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 96–116.
Taylor, Michael Thomas, et al. Not Straight From Germany : Sexual Publics and Sexual Citizenship Since Magnus Hirschfeld. University of Michigan Press, 2017.
Bullough, Vern L. “Magnus Hirschfeld, an Often Overlooked Pioneer.” Sexuality & Culture, vol. 7, no. 1, Winter 2003, p. 62.
LEWIS, BRIAN. “Magnus Hirschfeld and the Quest for Sexual Freedom: A History of the First International Sexual Freedom Movement.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 22, no. 2, May 2013, pp. 351–353.
DRUCKER, PETER. “Science and Sex: Hirschfeld’s Legacy.” New Politics, vol. 15, no. 2, Winter 2015, p. 124.
Caplan, Jane. “The Administration of Gender Identity in Nazi Germany.” History Workshop Journal, vol. 72, no. 1, Oct. 2011, pp. 171–180.
 
 
 
 
 
 
Scramble For Africa – European Colonialism in Africa
 
Walter Rodney
One of the most powerful impacts of the slave trade was on demographics.
Current estimates are that about 10 million enslaved people arrived to the Americas, and an unknown multiple (up to possibly 10 times as many) died in transit and the wars fought to build and maintain the slave trade. From the numbers we have available, it was the overwhelming majority of the able-bodied young men and women in all of Africa.
 
From Walter Rodney:
          	“Nothing suggests that there was any increase in this continent’s population over the centuries of slaving, although that was the trend in other parts of the world. Obviously fewer babies were born than would otherwise have been the case if millions of child-bearing ages had not been eliminated.”
 
Populations of Africa and Europe in 1650 – roughly 100 million each
Asia 250 million
 
1750
100M Africa
144M Europe
 
1800
100M Africa
250M Europe
 
1900 –
Africa 120 million while Europe and Asia have grown 4x to 423M and 857M respectively
 
Between 1700-1710 the so-called “Gold Coast” of Africa switched from productive labor to slave trading. When the slave traders would show up
Franz Fanon
WEB DuBois
 
 
 
 
Vol. XXVI, Issue 3 (Summer 2019):
 How Europe Underdeveloped Africa: A Tribute to Walter Rodney
Biko Agozino, Rethinking Education for Underdevelopment and Education for Development in Africa
Kimani Nehusi: Forty-seven Years After: Understanding and Updating Walter Rodney
Nigel Westmaas: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and the contemporary relevance of Walter Rodney                                                              
Editorial:
Guest Editor (Special Edition of  Africa Update)
Professor Biko Agozino
Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies 
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University 
With a view to countering misperceptions and explaining Rodney’s ideas, Karim F. Hirji, a retired Professor of Medical Statistics and Fellow of the Tanzania Academy of Sciences has published The Enduring Relevance of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. He argues that the main work of Walter Rodney, ‘a pre-eminent, paradigm-shifting text,’ remains as relevant for Africa today as it was when it was first published in 1972.[1] Africa Update joins committed scholars like Hirji and Angela Davis (who wrote the race-class-gender based preface to the 2018 edition of the book by Verso Press) to appreciate the contributions of Walter Rodney.[2]
 
Walter Rodney was one of the major Pan-Africanists and historians of the 20th century. But his principal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, faces strong ideological antagonism in the modern political and social discourse in Africa and beyond. It is claimed that Rodney may be relevant for the study of the enslavement of Africans and the colonial era but for the postcolonial era, the African rulers bear the full responsibility for the underdevelopment of Africa. Thereby, young people in Africa and the Caribbean today have no clue who Rodney was.
 
Starting with a chapter by chapter summary of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Hirji goes on to outline the global context in which Rodney wrote his book. It was an era of worldwide struggles against imperialism. However, the imperialist forces mounted a ruthless effort to counter the revolutionary forces and grand reversals occurred almost everywhere. After outlining Rodney’s life and contribution to historiography, he examines how the main textbooks on African history in use today deal with How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. It is demonstrated that Rodney’s ideas are usually presented in distorted forms and the criticisms against them lack a valid foundation.
Rodney was not a person rigidly bound to some idea. He was a scholar who applied Marxist theory in a creative fashion to the African condition. In addition to the economic exploitation of the African people, Rodney also dealt with the anti-imperialist and anti-racist political struggles in Africa. In the process of critiquing the works of some influential African scholars of today who ignore basic economic factors and focus on legal and cultural issues, Hirji presents a strong case for the continued relevance of Rodney and his major work. He notes that the predictions implied by How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as to the economic domination of Africa today are ‘stunningly accurate.’ Rodney’s method of social analysis which combined theory with practice is essential for analyzing the African and global societies.
Some critics accuse Rodney of over-emphasizing external forces and neglecting the agency of Africans. Hirji points out that such criticisms are flawed because Rodney’s analysis integrated external and internal factors.  And the core role that imperialism plays in the underdevelopment of Africa cannot be overemphasized. The liberation of Africa from the clutches of imperialism has to be led by Africans. African masses have to take control of state power in order to halt the underdevelopment of Africa by the West and their African class allies.
The apologists of neo-liberalism say Rodney was too polemical and mixed the role of the scholar with that of an activist. Yet, it is a misguided view since history abounds with cases of exemplary scholars and scientists who were also prominent activists in their days. In sum, Rodney does not offer a simple binary choice between hope and struggle to Africans and others but an integrated emphasis on hope and struggle.
Walter Rodney was assassinated by local reactionary forces working in conjunction with imperialism in 1980 in his home country, Guyana. Yet, his legacy as a revolutionary and public intellectual survives. Despite the concrete and ideological reversals since his times and the erasure of anti-capitalist texts from syllabi in Africa, Australia, Asia, Europe and America, some prominent scholars continue to refer to How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as a foundational text. His major book still commands a global audience.
In this special issue of Africa Update, we have invited eminent scholars to evaluate the continuing relevance of Walter Rodney to Africa and the rest of the world in line with the Enduring Relevance thesis of Hirji and in accordance with the Postscript to the original publication by Rodney written by A.M. Babu. We are fortunate to include the piece by Kimani Nehusi, The Walter Rodney Professor of History, University of Guyana and Professor of Africology at Temple University. He updates the relevance of Rodney by indicating the attention paid to his work today by top theorists and by popular musicians alike and concludes that the themes of unequal exchange that Rodney theorized in the dialectical relationships between Europe and Africa persists today. Also included is a piece by the editor of this special issue of Africa Update, Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, with a focus on the enduring relevance of the analysis of education for underdevelopment and education for development in Africa by Walter Rodney. Finally, Nigel Westmaas, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Hamilton College, completes the special issue with an overview of the contemporary relevance of Walter Rodney’s popular education work against imperialist domination and to Marxist historiography, innovation of world system analysis and the application of dependency theory to Africa.
Guest Editor (Special Edition of  Africa Update)
Professor Biko Agozino
Rethinking Education for Underdevelopment and Education for Development in Africa
Professor Biko Agozino
In this article, I will focus on the importance of education as a tool for domination and for ending the underdevelopment of Africa in appreciation of the book that I was assigned to read and review by Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe and colleagues who co-taught my elective course on Introduction to Political Science at the University of Calabar in the early 1980s. I have continued this tradition by always requiring my students to study How Europe Underdeveloped Africa as the main text in my Introduction to African Studies classes.
Bemba children of Zambia knew 50-60 tree and plant names by age 6, according to Walter Rodney in chapter 6 of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.[3] Colonialism was imposed and the very little education provided mainly by missionaries replaced the indigenous knowledge systems by teaching the Bemba about daffodils, roses, and other ornamental plants in Europe that were irrelevant to the slash and burn system of agriculture which required Bemba children to learn the plants that were medicinal, necessary for crafts or for food enough to be spared when preparing the farms for cultivation. The result has been that educated Africans were effectively mis-educated as Carter G. Woodson would put it. They saw education in terms of distancing themselves from African culture and mimicking European languages, names, mannerisms, dressing styles, religion, food, cars, houses, skin color, entertainment, patriarchy, chauvinism, elitism, individualism, militarism, genocidism, gangsterism, etc., as the indices of normal civilization.[4] They saw Africa as characterized by the gap that needed to be filled by banking in their tabula rosa heads the deposits of what Soyinka dismissed in Season of Anomy as ‘erudite irrelevances’ (from sociologists who kept silent about the genocide against the Igbo in Nigeria).[5] Both the quality and the quantity of education provided by colonizers in Africa were so derisively poor that Rodney concluded that we should not put education in the plus column of the so-called balance sheets of imperialism because he saw colonialism as a ‘one-armed bandit’ with the only thing good about it being when it was forcefully ended by Africans.
The question that Rodney indirectly posed for Africa is why, after decades of decolonization, both the quantity and the quality of education provided by neocolonial regimes are still less than satisfactory with the result of enduring technological weaknesses? It may have something to do with the fear by colonial and post-colonial authorities alike that education is a breeding ground for sedition, a law against critical free speech that the colonizers imposed on Africa but which neocolonial regimes continue to enforce even after Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo won the celebrated case that deleted the sedition clauses from the Nigerian Criminal Code in 1983, long before the abolition of sedition in the UK in 2009, though it is still retained across Africa.[6]
According to Samora Machel, colonialism is extremely contrary to humanity; ‘No a colonialismo democratico, no a colonialismo humano’.[7] Therefore, decolonization is not an act of charity or the transfer of power from a benevolent colonizer, it is the precondition for the emancipatory education of Africans. FRELIMO, the Revolutionary Front for the Liberation of Mozambique under the leadership of Samora Machel, was quoted by Rodney as stating that any education provided for the enslaved by the enslavers is designed to sustain slavery. Think about this briefly and see if you agree with it completely. The statement of FRELIMO comes from the conventional definition of education as a systematic means of transmitting a society’s traditions and cultures from the older to the younger generations. The irony is that many of the leaders of the liberation struggle for the restoration of independence in Africa (including Rodney himself, as George Lamming once) were educated by the colonizers for the purpose of what Paolo Freire called ‘massification’ or domestication and not for liberation;[8] yet they exercised the basic human agency to choose to resist imperialism while others chose to become compradors. In other words, education is not simply a conduit for the transmission of knowledge but also a field of struggle where the old Africa and the Renascent Africa of the future, according to Azikiwe, struggle against the legacies of imperialism or struggle to maintain those legacies for the benefit of the phantom bourgeoisie.[9] Azikiwe also called for the application of scientific methodologies in the struggle for liberation but Awolowo published a rejoinder in Liverpool and stated that Africans use juju as science to kill one another.[10] General Olusegun Obasanjo sided with Awolowo when he called for Africans to use juju to fight apartheid.[11] Even professors of natural science disciplines are more scared of juju than anything else today.[12] Fanon observed that African peasants were more scared of spirit forces than of the police and the armed forces and, like Azikiwe, he called for us to innovate new concepts and make new inventions rather than mimic Europe or return to superstition.[13] In the struggle to decolonize education in Africa, the dialectics allow us to take what is valuable from the past while challenging what is oppressive in order to empower us to actualize the vision of a progressive and prosperous Africa of the future. Cabral was outraged that one of the cadres in the national liberation struggle tried to gain promotion by offering to sacrifice his son for success in a battle because a spirit told him to do so.[14] Cabral asked him to show him where the spirit was so that they could fight and defeat it first because it must be the spirit of the Europeans, alluding to the fact that the Greeks sacrificed the daughter of their leader for victory in the Trojan wars and Abraham decided to go along with the test to sacrifice his only son in obedience to God who later sacrificed his only Son in a story strikingly similar to ancient African narrative about Isis, Osiris and Horus.
Santos in Epistemologies from the South warned against the imperialist preference for epistemicide or the destruction of indigenous knowledge systems by European colonizers to make way for the globalization of apartheid as the universal epistemic standard.[15] The Malaysian sociologist, Hussein Alatas also identified the captive minds of the colonized to indicate that imperialism is not only political and economic in nature but also intellectual to the extent that Bob Marley called for us to emancipate ourselves from mental slavery because none but ourselves can free our minds.[16] This was the point that Claude Ake made when he dismissed western Social Science as Imperialism in Africa because they serve to sustain the domination of Africa by Euro-Western systems of thought and value systems by, for example, promoting corruption as a necessary evil, to the detriment of Africans.[17] ‘Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’ was how Fela Kuti put it. But the question remains why the masses of the people with little or no education in music have been able to originate captivating musical genres across Africa and the African Diaspora while the highly educated Africans with doctoral degrees from around the world have failed to innovate a single original theoretical framework, invention, discovery, or start-up firm unlike their peers from other parts of the world and despite the foundations laid for us by the likes of Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Diop, James, Fanon, Rodney, Cabral, First, Hall, Babu, Toyo, Onimode, Ousmane, Amin, Ngugi, Chinweizu, Soyinka, Achebe and currently being built upon by the likes of Adichie, Mammah, Jeyifo, Mamdani, Mbembe, and Madunagu?
CLR James pointed out in Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution that one outstanding achievement of Nkrumah was his education initiatives especially when the colonizers started expelling students and teachers who supported the nationalist struggle.[18] Nkrumah launched the National School Movement that developed a chain of schools that were independent of the colonizers. Azikiwe was forced to visit the Northern Regional Assembly in 1947 to warn that it was a mistake to oppose schooling simply because educated children tend to be critical thinkers less likely to be obedient to parents.[19] Azikiwe advised the Northerners to ensure that their children go to school and then teach them obedience at home but the current Boko Haram campaign is an indication that many in the North still believe that schooling is forbidden when books should be regarded as Halal rather than Haram in accordance with the intellectual traditions of Uthman Dan Fodio.[20]
Bagele Chilisa, author of Indigenous Research Methodologies, concluded that a big part of the answer to the question of why Africans are still enslaved mentally is that Africans are still educated in the alien and alienating languages of their colonizers and so their minds remain captive and incapable of originality.[21] Chika Ezeanya agrees that it is high time we developed teaching and learning in Indigenous Knowledge Systems by recognizing that African indigenous methods of irrigation and agriculture, for instance, may be more effective for scarce water management than techniques developed for water-rich industrialized regions of the world.[22] Her TedTalk also showcased her efforts to develop picture books for her daughter and for other children to teach them about the promise of thinking as Africans and not only in terms of their hometowns.
 
I once wrote a paper in Igbo language and sent it to a scholarly association that specializes on the study of the Igbo for possible publication in their journal. They turned it down on the basis that the journal policy required all submissions to be written in English because some well-educated Igbo scholars were not capable of reading or writing in Igbo and so it would be difficult to subject my paper to peer review. I sent the paper to a community journal in Lagos and it was published as the very first ever scholarly paper written and published in Igbo language.[23] By coincidence, Adiele Afigbo also published in the same issue of the Igbo Journal, calling for a Museum of Igbo History and Culture to be established, though he made the call in English language. I have nothing against the language of colonizers and I have published the bulk of my work in English but since Africans say that no palm is big enough to hide the sky, there is ample room in scholarship for indigenous African languages to make original contributions alongside other modern languages.
Language sovereignty is the invariant law of socio-economic development and there has never been a culture that achieved increased capacity and material well-being by relying on the language of the colonizers while neglecting indigenous languages. The colonizers held African minds captive by imposing the language of the colonizers throughout Africa as the language of instruction in schools and as the official language for policies. The only exceptions are in East Africa where Swahili was briefly adopted and abandoned, North Africa where Arabic language has been indigenized and South Africa with strong survival of indigenous languages where the socio-economic development records show medium to high levels on the Human Development Index of the UNDP. Almost all the countries in the low Human Development Index are black African countries that have been forced to retain the language of colonizers as the language of instruction and governmentality. They shamelessly call themselves Francophone, Anglophone or Lusophone when they should all be called Bantuphone if resources are made available for the development of teaching and learning in indigenous languages.
This is not only the responsibility of the neocolonial governments in African states but also the responsibility of individual scholars and writers who can write in the indigenous languages and allow translations to follow in line with the strategy of Ngugi wa Thiong’o for the decolonization of the African mind, though Ngugi still writes all his critical essays in English and they are not yet translated to Kikuyu.[24] Achebe said that he preferred to allow writers to write in any language that they are comfortable with and allow translators to do the rest but it is a shame that Achebe’s classic Things Fall Apart is yet to be published in his Igbo mother tongue.[25] Come on, African educators, what will it take for us to teach mathematics and science in our indigenous languages to avoid the ridiculous situation where textbooks from France forced West African children to parrot that their ancestors were the Gauls with blond hair and blue eyes, contrary to the Negritude of the world cup winning team in 2018?[26] Let textbooks blossom in the 2000 indigenous languages across Africa and let our legendary creativity in music and the arts be translated into the STEM disciplines urgently. Let more research grants be made available in Africa.
Eskor Toyo challenged African social scientists to show what are their original contributions to theory and methods in their fields.[27] African natural scientists may claim that they lack adequate funding for laboratories and research but the only laboratory that sociologists or economists need is the one between their ears and yet they have allowed their minds to be held captive by intellectual imperialism. Chinua Achebe also dismissed the Cargo Cult mentality of African educators and policy makers who beg for technology transfers whereas technology is not a juju in anyone’s pockets waiting to be transferred to the sorcerer’s apprentices.[28] Technology is a way of thinking and doing things and Africans have demonstrated that in times of necessity with an activist government, say in Biafra, they are capable of making awesome inventions. Agwuncha Arthur Nwankwo says that the African genius found in Biafra is still around waiting to be mobilized even though there were also examples of corruption and mediocrity in Biafra to be avoided in the future.[29] Nwankwo leads by example through his Fourth Dimension Publishing Company in Enugu that has commissioned and published thousands of scholarly books by authors from across Africa, including a mathematics textbook in Igbo language.
Bassey Ekpo Bassey said it all when he stated that only the people can develop themselves through the struggle for a progressive future for all Africans. By this he meant that education should not be seen only as textbook education in classrooms.[30] Rather, the political struggle for the restructuring of Africa beyond colonial boundaries should be seen as a practical school through which the people will educate themselves and make new discoveries that will empower them to change Africa for the better as Frantz Fanon concluded in The Wretched of the Earth.[31] Bassey implemented this vision by leading the Directorate for Literacy in Calabar in the 1980s with Eskor Toyo and with the support of university scholars like Akpan Ekpo, Princewill Alozie, Yakubu Ochefu, Bene Madunagu, and myself in Calabar and with Edwin Madunagu from Lagos. The effort led to the formation of the Labour Party in collaboration with organized labour with the aim of winning power for the working people to replace the military dictatorship in Nigeria. As Municipal Government Chairman who was elected twice in a rerun election against the opposition of the military government to his candidacy, Bassey immediately abolished tuition fees in primary and secondary schools and constructed more school blocks to accommodate more children in Calabar. The Directorate for Literacy also published a free literacy journal and ran weekly literacy classes for the workers in addition to monthly public enlightenment lectures. Making education publicly funded and tuition-free is a necessity at all levels in Africa as I concluded in a paper about equity and quality in post-apartheid South Africa that was published in a journal edited by Professor Ngozi Osarenren.[32] The government of the African National Congress appears not to have heard about the recommendation but I forwarded a copy to the office of the presidency when students started demanding that the rising fees must fall in addition to their decolonization campaign that Rhodes Must Fall. Traditional African education never charged tuition fees at any level of learning.
Amilcar Cabral, in Resistance and Decolonization, identified culture as part of the struggle for liberation from colonial domination contrary to the colonial anthropological definition of culture as a way of life.[33] The poor under capitalism, women under patriarchy and Africans under racism did not choose to live that way since those were the conditions that they struggle against with the creativity of the culture of struggles and resistance. Edwin Madunagu exemplified the revolutionary theory of education by running a conscientization program for male students in Calabar while his wife, Bene Madunagu, did the same for girls. The boys were being taught that it was all right to think in ways different from their fathers by taking more responsibility for domestic chores and by treating their girlfriends with more respect, as reported by Girard.[34] The girls were being educated to take more responsibility for their sexual and reproductive health and to be more assertive in the defense of their interests. The Human Development Index shows that the poor countries are the ones that do not allow their girls to enter or complete secondary education and Africans can solve this problem by insisting on the higher education of more of our sons and daughters by, for instance, ending childhood marriages for girls and child labour.
Agozino and Agu have also produced a draft manual that they presented at the Headquarters of UNICEF at an international conference that focused on gender equity in education.[35] Our presentation on Progressive Masculinity urged the participants to extend to boys the successful methods that were used to raise the participation of girls in education because boys were falling behind in many countries. We suggested successful study skills that could be taught to boys and girls to help them to enjoy learning in order to achieve more success. It is true that Africa still has low participation rates for girls in secondary education and this may be the major factor determining the low rating of most African countries in HDI but many African boys are also dropping out of school before reaching the secondary level. We have offered that manual to many states in Africa for possible implementation but there are no takers yet.
Systems theory suggests that poor inputs into education result in poor outputs; or rubbish in, rubbish out. I beg to differ because human beings are neither rubbish nor just inputs and outputs. Once motivated to learn, even with poor infrastructures, many students will excel while the best inputs might produce low achievements in some students who do not value education enough or who are not equipped with effective study skills. Even with poor inputs, Africa has managed to educate hundreds of thousands of highly qualified professionals who go on to provide technical foreign aid to industrialized countries where they work as doctors, nurses, engineers, managers, sports professionals, professors, researchers, and writers; as Ali Mazrui once put it. Achebe reminds us in There Was A Country that the infrastructures and contents were not that great during colonialism for his class often sat on the bare earth under the shade of a breadfruit tree to listen to lessons on the geography of Britain.[36] On one occasion, the village mad man intervened and seized the chalk from the teacher and started teaching the history of the town which the students found more relevant. If that were to happen today, the teacher is more likely to call the police and the army to come and restore order by shooting the mad man dead if necessary. The traditional Igbo democratic tendencies may have allowed the mad man to have his say and move on as is expected under the tolerant roof of Mbari communal sculptures. Rodney recognized the independent yearning for education among the Igbo (he called them Ibo) who built and equipped schools without waiting for the government and he condemned the genocidal war against the Igbo in post-colonial Nigeria by saying that it was not a tribal war given that there is no such tribes as Shell BP and the UK government that orchestrated the genocide, later validated by Achebe and by Ekwe-Ekwe.[37]
Finally, the Peoples Republic of Africa United Democratically will leverage resources that Africans could invest in education to raise the level of funding to the 26% recommended by UNICEF as the minimal standard. There is a role for corporations that make huge profits across Africa to be required to dedicate a portion of their profits as a tax to support education given that the graduates are the future employees of the companies and similar corporations endow funding in universities outside Africa. Parents and the communities have a role to play too by volunteering to help build school structures with community labor so that the students will learn the importance of education once they see their parents helping to build the schools with pride. For instance, most schools in Africa lack toilet facilities and lack sports play grounds. These are not too difficult to construct with community labor if the government and corporations provide the funding to support community volunteers. Students and their peers should also be able to take responsibility for their own learning by watching less Nollywood movies, getting enough sleep every night, eating breakfast and reading more books every day and by volunteering for community projects. Before or after families buy television sets, let them buy book shelves and stuff them with books and let them make time to read and learn as a family daily.
With the reunification of Africa and the decolonization of our educational systems, we will be able to educate more nation-builders and also attract back some of our brain drain from the thankless task of providing foreign aid to industrialized countries and redeploy them to help solve many of the technological weaknesses in Africa that made it possible for a handful of Europeans to divide and weaken us in order to exploit us for more than 600 years and counting. For instance, we can mobilize to banish illiteracy across Africa within four years the way that Cuba did by deploying those who can read and write to teach those who cannot. We can educate thousands of doctors and agricultural extension officers and deploy them across Africa to tackle tropical diseases and help to increase food security. We can offer huge research grants to scientists, writers, artists, athletes, farmers, cooperatives to innovate technologies that would make Africa more just, healthier, more prosperous, happier, more learned, more loving, and more united.
Forty-seven Years After: Understanding and Updating Walter Rodney
Kimani Nehusi
Walter Rodney  Professor of History
University of Guyana & Assoc. Prof of Africology, Temple University
Abstract
The publication of Walter Rodney’s third book,[38] How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) is now recognized as a very special event in the world, especially because of Rodney’s explanation of the entangled historical relationship between Afrika and western Europe, a designation that includes North America in this presentation. This resource challenged part of Europe impoverished Afrika while its countries became world powers, precisely because of its domination and exploitation of Afrika. The immense popularity of this text, especially but by no means only among Afrikans seeking explanation and understanding of their current condition in this world and ways forward, has underscored its significance from the time it was first published in 1972.[39] It has been translated into many languages and reprinted on numerous occasions. Its continuing relevance has been recently emphasized by renewed attention in a book by Karim F. Hirji[40] and essays by Angela Davis[41] and Giovanni Vimercati.[42] The graphic representation of Rodney in the cover art for reggae artiste Akae Beka’s recent album, Mek a Menshun, points towards Rodney’s continuing popularity among conscious young Afrikans working in many intellectual and cultural dimensions of humanity.[43] This essay looks at the intellectual and activist context in which Rodney wrote and at our current context with a view to identifying what may be new and or different between the time of the early 1970s and now, nearly fifty years later, in the closing years of the second decade of the twentieth century. It also considers what was new about Rodney’s text at the time of its publication, assesses the strategic importance of the work, examines some of the ways in which the study of Afrika has developed since that seminal moment in the popular understanding of this most important part of our increasingly globalized world, and attempts to find out how any or all of this may be related to HEUA. 
Introduction
It is true now, in this era that we have learnt to call modern, and perhaps it has always been so, that power always seeks to dominate knowledge and information, as well as the production of knowledge and information, and to convert them to its own purposes; to use them in its own interests. Mental enslavement has always been a significant aspect of the oppression and subjugation of Afrikan populations by western Europeans. The aim is social control of those populations through cultural genocide and the inculcation of a Eurocentric system of ideals, values, attitudes and patterned behaviors that support the fundamental myth of western European domination, which is the supposed inherent superiority of Europeans and the alleged inherent inferiority of Afrikans.
It is imperative, though, to recognize the significance of western European capacity for greater naked military violence — and the desire to employ this technological advantage — as the starting point and ultimate guarantor of European predominance, and thus a major determining factor in this relationship. There followed the subsequent structuring of conquered societies: the economy, with supporting ideology articulated through institutions such as the European Christian church, the law, mass media, education and a colonial state to organize and orchestrate it all. The major aim of this institutional arrangement was the exploitation of Afrikan people’s labor and material and spiritual resources and the transfer of the wealth created to the western world. The result has been a materially prosperous west, with institutions organized in and functioning in the interests of the majority of its peoples, and distorted Afrikan societies in which the vast majority of the people are materially poor, culturally penetrated and dominated by western Europeans in whose interests the economy and society are organized and function.   	
The corollary to western European material prosperity is the material, social and spiritual contradictions lived by the majority of Afrikans around the world today. The fundamental contradiction between a materially prosperous west and the poverty of the oppressed and exploited peripheral region mainly in the global south, has been noted before.[44] HEUA was the first text to undertake a comprehensive investigation and explanation of this condition.
But it is also true that wherever people are oppressed they will rebel, for that is also a condition of our humanity, as necessary for our understanding of this text and the conditions to which it is a response, as the inhuman greed of western Europeans who, in erecting their system of domination, committed the largest crimes against humanity by enslaving Afrikans and continuing the practices of institutionalized miseries under colonialism and neo-colonialism. They have largely refused to acknowledge their crimes and to make reparations for these evils and their continuing effects upon the lives of Afrikan people throughout the world. The humanity of Afrikans as well as the inhumanity of western Europeans compel Afrikan resistance and revolution to which HEUA is a response and so a context of which it is a part.  
Same Condition; Different Generation
  	The continuing relevance, even fierce urgency of HEUA, is a statement of how little the forces and patterns identified and examined by Rodney have changed over the last forty-seven years. The relationship between Afrika and western Europe has remained fundamentally the same — one of exploited and exploiter. A comparatively small number of Afrikans, usually the class allies and accomplices of western Europeans in the exploitation and impoverishment of the mass of the Afrikan people, may have grown somewhat less poor. But as a generality, Afrika still lives some of the most vulgar contradictions ever. Materially, it is the richest continent with the poorest people. Afrika possesses the longest history in the world and a people who are the most ignorant of their history. It is the creator of spiritual resources that are stolen, distorted and recycled to imprison the mind of the continent and redirect its energy to the benefit of others. Afrika’s peoples are the creators of civilization, but they benefit the least from civilization. The knowledge and training developed in a population at great national expense is constantly depleted by a brain drain to western Europe and North America. Significant numbers of untrained and uncertified young people follow hazardous migration routes across deserts and other inhospitable terrain in the desperate hope of reaching western lands in the belief, often mistaken, that they will have a better life there. Thus, a significant proportion of the cream of Afrika, the continent’s most productive forces, are now inculcated with a desire to leave their land and contribute to the development of people who oppress them. To compound matters, it is a desire born out of forces set afoot by the system of oppression and exploitation uncovered and explained by Rodney: the ravishing of Afrika that creates unattractive conditions for the majority of its people, the false belief in Afrikan inferiority and European superiority so assiduously cultivated as a necessary aspect of the ‘explanation’ of the barbarism of oppression, and the material prosperity of western Europe that resulted from this great evil. Migration of enslaved Afrikan labor was enforced by physical means for over four hundred years from the middle of the fifteenth century to the early decades of the last century in some instances. Today the forces that dictate the migration of Afrikan labor are less obvious, more invisible. 
The system continues to update and perfect itself. The International Monetary Fund, World Bank and other western agencies have been revealed more clearly as agencies of the capitalist west; agents of underdevelopment controlled by the west, run in the interests of the west.[45] Structural Adjustment Policies and other forms of economic sabotage dictated by these agencies sapped the productive capacity and contributed to Afrika’s underdevelopment as surely as naked physical violence. In recent times economic and intellectual violence may have featured more prominently in the toolkit of neo-colonialism. But such measures have not replaced the guns and bombs of naked oppression. As always in this system, those are readily available when judged to be necessary, as demonstrated in the recent examples of Laurent Gbagbo and Ghadaffy. Political murder, usually reported by the less repugnant term assassination, as well as military coups, have been regularly sponsored by the west in its quest to continue enforcing this system. Patrice Lumumba, Samora Machel, Thomas Sankara, Kwame Nkrumah and numerous other Afrikan leaders were deposed by western sponsored coups.
The vast outflow of resources continues. The comparatively low levels of technological development among Afrikan people and industries, the correspondingly low proportion of value added to the primary products produced on the continent and the addition of value in the west ensure relative stagnation in Afrika and the dynamism of the west. The deployment of aid to convince all and sundry of western European humanitarianism is regularly contradicted by its inhuman economic strategies, guns and bombs.
        	None of these prevailing conditions which result from the enforcement of the system is attributable to the alleged inherent incapacity of Afrikans; a racist myth cultivated by European churches, education, media and other agencies of misinformation and mental enslavement. In fact, it is very necessary to recognize in this relationship between Afrika and the west that the claims of the latter to be acting in the interests of Afrika is clearly undermined by the evidence of centuries of western tutelage and goodwill in which the Afrikan patient continues to decline, while it is the western ‘humanitarians’ who continue to enrich themselves.
History as a Weapon
Rodney recognized history as a mass of information, the understanding of which should guide a people’s political goals and actions, which are shaped into a logical program that is derived from the understanding of that knowledge.:
He believed that history was a way of ordering knowledge which could become a[n]
active part of the consciousness of an uncertified mass of ordinary people and which
could be used by all as an instrument of social change. He taught from that
assumption. He wrote out of that conviction. And it seemed to have been the
informing influence on his relations with the organized working people of Guyana.”[46]
In this integration of scholarship and political activism Rodney’s most obvious precursors in Guyana were the Ultra Left, the most knowledgeable, disciplined and radical tendency within the original People’s Progressive Party that led the anti-colonial nationalist movement in Guyana from 1950 to 1956. This tendency was inhabited by Martin Carter, Keith Carter, Rory Westmaas, Eusi Kwayana, Eric Huntley and Lionel Jeffrey,[47] but, as is shown below, there were other examples in the wider Caribbean and Pan Afrikan tradition of radicals and revolutionaries of scholar-activists, or activist-scholars, or organic intellectuals that were available to Rodney.
 
Hence also, standing as itself as well as the logical implications of itself, HEUA is a source of inclusion and empowerment of the uncertified mass of people, the largest social forces in Afrikan society, the most economically and culturally productive forces and real base and basis of society. It is these who are traditionally the most oppressed, disempowered, exploited and impoverished under the system of colonial and neocolonial domination. These are predominantly women, workers, youths, small farmers, the underemployed and the unemployed. By writing these groups into history as their real selves and articulating their interests, Rodney’s work restores agency and dignity to this great majority of Afrikan people. This restoration is a significant step in the positive self-perception of the oppressed, which itself is an important step on the road to liberation and social transformation.
 
 
 
The Intellectual and Activist Context of Rodney
 
The writings of Karl Marx, F. Engels, V. I. Lenin and other scholars who studied western European capitalism, colonialism and imperialism, established a theoretical platform and provided models of activism and examples that were helpful to Rodney. Afrikan, Caribbean and other anti-colonial, anti-capitalist scholars, scholar-activists, and activists established an anti-colonial, radical and revolutionary tradition in the region. It is a tradition populated by Hautey, Makandal, Kofi, Atta, Accrabe, Boukman, Cecile Fatima, Marie Claire Heureuse Félicité Bonheur, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Jose Marti, J. J. Thomas, Marcus Garvey, Sholes, C. L. R. James, George Padmore, Eric Williams, Cheddi Jagan, the already mentioned Ultra Left in Guyana, Eusi Kwayana in his own right, George G. M. James, Denis Williams, Jan Carew, Fidel and Raul Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara, Richard Hart and numerous others. Many of these foremost resisters of western European oppression in the region had developed a radical and revolutionary tradition of scholarship as a necessary aspect of activism.[48] Rodney studied this tradition and was very aware of it. His membership of a Marxist study group led by C.L.R. James in London provided a direct link with an active participant as well as theoretical, historical and practical information about this tradition. He became one of its most distinguished members. His first book, The Groundings with My Brothers, is a record of his early social activism among the working people in Jamaica and an early indication of both HEUA and the tremendous logical implications he held for people-centered history and for HEUA, as well as the great significance that others have continued to recognize in it.
 
A detailed examination of these antecedents of Rodney, his vision and his work, is not possible in this brief presentation. However, it is possible to see how Rodney’s thesis in HEUA is foreshadowed in the thought and action of scholar-activists such as Firmin, Marti, Garvey, Padmore, Guevara, Castro, as well as C. L. R. James[49] and Eric Williams.[50] Caribbean scholarship was beginning to apprehend and demonstrate a fact that HEUA makes obvious: that the material prosperity of Europe is closely related to the mas poverty and technological, industrial, economic and other forms of relative backwardness of Afrika, the Caribbean and other parts of the world which have been subjugated and exploited by western Europeans who, as Rodney demonstrates in HEUA, have perfected a system of subjugation, exploitation and transferring the loot to their homelands.
 
The immediate roots of western European racism experienced under enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism, as the western European intellectual enterprise to try to justify western European barbarism, was also uncovered by early Caribbean scholarship. J. J. Thomas,[51] Anténor Firmin,[52] Williams, and others began to challenge racism in European scholarship and the practice of this evil in the Caribbean and elsewhere. In Williams’ case, the way in which British historians rationalized the national project of the UK, that of enslaving and exploiting Afrikans and their land, received attention in his text entitled British Historians and The West Indies. In Williams’ own words, he was seeking “to emancipate his compatriots whom the historical writings that he analyses sought to depreciate and to imprison for all time in the inferior status to which these writings sought to condemn them.”[53] Williams and others decisively rejected mental enslavement. It should not be surprising, therefore, that both James and Williams, though from differing perspectives and with differing results, became scholar activists of note. Rodney knew these examples and stood, consciously, in this tradition.   
 
Part of Rodney’s genius is that he deepened and extended this radical praxis. HEUA is an intellectual fruit and but one aspect of a much wider engagement with the oppression as well as with the liberation of Afrika and Afrikans, and ultimately, also that of other oppressed peoples around the world. 
 
 
 
Radical Departures in HEUA
 
  	The radical departure in HEUA lies in Rodney’s detailed explanation of how the development of western Europe is caused by western European oppression and underdevelopment of Afrika. His is a major achievement in unearthing, ordering, assembling and explaining a vast array of detailed information to identify the various elements in the system of development and underdevelopment, and explain their origins, evolution and functioning over centuries. Part of his genius is to demonstrate, by comparing the cumulative impact of the various elements of the system he describes, analyses and evaluates, that the entire system functions for the continuing benefit of the west and to the continuing detriment of Afrika in every way. The total impact upon western Europe is the state Rodney terms development, which he defines as the continuous expansion of the economy and society, the obvious consequences of which include overall increase in the quality of life offered by a dynamic society. The total impact upon Afrika is the opposite process, which he terms underdevelopment. He defines this as an active process of resource extraction, including labor power and material resources, and transfer of profits to western Europe. By contrast this part of the world is undynamic, lacks technical sophistication, and economic and political self-determination.      	
 
By providing the detailed and comprehensive explanation it does, this text clarifies the processes and outcomes of development and underdevelopment and shows them to be intimately related; the one is the other side of the other. Western Europe is materially rich because Afrika has been rendered materially poor by western European oppression and exploitation.
 
HEUA has become a force for liberation, for a great part of oppression and the exploitation it engenders lies with the capacity of the system to obfuscate and even disguise itself in the imprisoned minds of its victims. It is Rodney’s special genius that he uncovered, described and analyzed the most important forces that have shaped the lives and livelihood of both Afrikan people and western Europeans — though in remarkably different ways — over the last five hundred years (his examination ends in the 1950s, p. 19) and continue to do so today. His results are made available in this book in simple language that is accessible to everyone. Rodney, a Pan Afrikanist, is more concerned with the fate of Afrika and its peoples.
 
The Strategic Importance of HEUA
 
        	It is far from possible to treat each of the following aspects of the strategic importance of HEUA with any degree of detail. However, the outline below ought to demonstrate its strategic significance.
 
        	Rodney was very conscious of the role of knowledge and information in both oppression and in liberation.[54] HEUA contributed towards the self-awareness of Afrikan people because it provided very critical information and popularized the study of Afrika from the points of view of Afrikans among a growing number of Afrikan students and intellectuals and most significantly among the masses.
 
  	HEUA thus threatens the intellectual empowerment of the Afrikan masses in their own name, as a necessary basis for the journey towards the liberation and development of the foundational continent of the planet. 
 
        	By making the advances it does in methodology, vision and scope, HEUA positioned the study of Afrika for further significant advances. Its rigorous reconstruction and critical analysis and evaluation of the ‘moving parts’ of Afrikan economy and society, including the historical development, role, functioning and impact of the significant elements in the economy, social organization, education, western scholarship and the Christian church in the oppression and exploitation of Afrika opened many doors to the better understanding of various aspects of Afrikan history. 
 
By painstakingly explaining, in clear and simple language, what is, by showing how it came to be the way it is, and how it functions, Rodney rendered the solutions to many of Afrika’s challenges not merely more logical and therefore more obvious, but easily accessible to the understanding of everyone. HEUA is not a primer on how to undertake the reversal of western European oppression and underdevelopment and launch the development of Afrikan people and their land. However, its comprehensive explanation provides the intellectual basis for the necessary vision and activism that are imperative for the human, economic and social liberation, development and transformation of the continent of Afrika.	
 
The military violence deployed by western Europeans to conquer and subjugate Afrika, the Americas, the Caribbean and elsewhere was not the only kind of violence they unleashed in their subjugation of large parts of the world and the peoples who live in these lands. In HEUA, Rodney maintains a critical dialogue with the intellectual defenders of the oppressive system and points out the weaknesses in their arguments. This approach is a tremendous aid to the demystification of learning and the word that is so necessary to counteract the Eurocentric tradition of education and scholarship, which Rodney recognizes as education for underdevelopment. 
 
Revelation of this world renders it easier to liberate and transform. Rodney’s scholarship is in the service of humanity. It provides a model and an example of the importance of the intellectuals and other trained people in underdeveloped societies where people suffer from diminished opportunities because of underdevelopment. As Rodney often stressed and Fanon, Mondlane, Cabral, Che, Fidel and a host of others also demonstrated with their lives, that in the fight for a better world, every vocation is an occasion for liberation.
 
 
 
New Departures since HEUA
 
At first glance the idea of updating such a massively impressive, magisterial and continually relevant work may appear adventurous. So comprehensive is HEUA that almost every intellectual departure is likely to be a development of something explicit or implied in this text. Yet it is true that at almost any given point in time there are contradictions that are recognized but not yet politicized. In addition, the advance of struggle, and the clarity this usually dictates, almost always reveals new perceptions, new understandings and new frontiers of conflict; different battle lines and battlefields and fresh territory to be won as the ongoing war for the liberation and development of Afrika and its peoples around the world continues to unfold.  As stated above, Rodney’s text opens many doors to the study of Afrika. But Rodney could not explore fully or at all everything that lies beyond each door he opened. So formidable is the text and so vast is the field of knowledge, that it is impossible for a single scholar in a single text to explore fully all its possibilities in the study of Afrika.  
 
One area of concentration that has become increasingly popular in the study of Afrika since the publication of HEUA is the concept of mental enslavement and its logical objective of mental liberation. Rodney commented on the role of the European Christian church, missionaries, Eurocentric scholarship and Eurocentric education in the mental enslavement of Afrikan people, though he did not employ this terminology. The increasing attention to Afrocentric education is a direct consequence of the awareness that HEUA undoubtedly helped to promote.
 
 
 
Indigenous Knowledge Systems
 
The mental enslavement of significant sections of the Afrikan population and the social control that has been its consequence occurred on the back of the genocide, fully or partly, of Afrikan culture. This distortion and destruction of Afrikan culture and histories, of indigenous traditions, destroyed or distorted vast storehouses of millennia worth of knowledge, information and technique, of different ways of knowing. Knowledge and information accumulated over uncounted generations of observation, trial, error, distillation and inspiration have been endangered or lost in this criminality of the greatest proportions masquerading as science, scholarship, Christianity and even as civilization.
 
This destruction and endangerment as well as the knowledge and awareness stimulated by HEUA and other sources, have influenced a renewed interest in indigenous knowledge systems among Afrikan scholars and other groups.
 
 
 
Spirituality
 
        	The re-embrace of Afrikan culture by some groups and individuals has led to renewed interest in Afrikan culture among scholars and a growing number of Afrikans around the world, but especially in the west. The increasing practice of Afrikan rituals such as Libation, Marriage Rites, Naming Ceremonies and Transition Rites is predicated upon growing consciousness and conviction among significant sections of Afrikans on the continent and its Diasporas. Growing scholarly and popular interests has also been observed in Environmentalism, Holism, Afrikan Womanism, Manhood Rites, Mentoring, herbal medicine, Ma’at, Ubuntu, Iwa Pele and other aspects of Afrikan philosophy and culture.
 
 
 
Reparations
 
Western wrong-doing has occasioned a growing movement among Afrikans for Reparations, which includes repatriation. This latter is popular among Rastafari.  Quite apart from compensation, a very large part of Reparations is the repair and restoration of the Afrikan self. The quest for self-knowledge as an aspect of this repair of self has led to much interest in Kemet (ancient Egypt), where the injunction “Know Yourself’ has been rearticulated millennia later in the Wolof Wisdom Utterance: ‘The Beginning of Wisdom is knowing who you are.’
 
 
 
Terminology
 
An often-neglected aspect of the intellectual violence of western Europeans is epistemology. Although the influence of power relations upon language is a part of his analysis, (p. 35), Rodney deploys terminology inherited from enslavers to report the people and other phenomena he discusses. Recent developments in this area of scholarship will render some of the terminology in HEUA to be obsolete. However, it is not possible to fault the general intent and accomplishment of the text on this or any other grounds. There is an epistemology of oppression and an epistemology of liberation. Rodney’s work belongs to a scholarship of liberation called forth in answer to the scholarship of oppression. A key to the continued functioning of the oppressive system Rodney reveals is the continued imprisonment of the Afrikan mind; a key to the liberation of Afrika is the unlocking of the Afrikan mind. Rodney’s HEUA is a shining example of that scholarship that reveals the system and so helps transformation. Rodney’s life and vision constitute a broader canvas of our imaginings of full liberation, and our labor in that direction. 
 
 
 
Conclusion
 
The ultimate meaning of HEUA lies in the use of this information to promote awareness, empowerment, organization, struggle, and victory for Afrikans.
 
The New Afrikan, informed and aware about her/himself and the world, about his heritage and about the international context in which he and his people exist, must assume the strategic advantages offered by the material, spiritual and undoubted intellectual resources and possibilities of the continent by re-taking control of these resources from those who seized them and have kept control of them, chiefly by military, spiritual, economic and intellectual violence, and benefited from their fruits. It is here that the reader will benefit by reading Rodney in company with other intellectual and political giants such as Fanon, Diop, Cabral, Nkrumah and others who contributed a context of scholarship in the struggle for the liberation of a people and their world around the world.
 
Today, close to half a century after its publication, this text is still relevant, in fact it is still urgently necessary. That is a damming reference to the fact that the system of exploitation laid bare by Rodney is still dominant in Afrika and in the lives of Afrikans.
 
        	The forces that oppressed and colonized large parts of the world invested heavily in scholarship that upheld and perpetuated the values, attitudes and practices of the colonizers, usually by validating and even valorizing its best examples in master narratives that subvert truth. Walter Rodney fought against these forces with his scholarship as well as with his political activism. HEUA is his grandest intellectual endeavor. It shows both the scholarship of Rodney and the aim of his scholarship as a contribution to the liberation of Afrika and Afrikans. But Rodney wanted, demanded more that just relevant scholarship. His understanding of human work is fundamentally as a social contribution towards greater and greater liberation from limitations of all sorts. But he also recognized that much useful scholarship is imprisoned in the ivory towers of European style universities and Eurocentric education. It is this realization that helped to instruct his direct involvement in the tasks of political liberation and advancement that is the second aspect of his scholar-activist personality and the concept and tradition of the organic intellectual to which HEUA belongs.
 
 
 
 
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
and the contemporary relevance of Walter Rodney
By Nigel Westmaas
Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Hamilton College
 
"It is the supreme distinction of Walter Rodney that he had initiated in his personal and professional life a decisive break with the tradition he had been trained to serve...the reader is made to feel that his academic authority is always fused and humanized by a sense of personal involvement with the matters at hand. He lived to survive the distortions of his training and the crippling ambivalence of his class"
(George Lamming) [55]
Every now and again in history, a scholarly enterprise emerges that breaks new ground and provokes an impact that exceeds the confines of narrow academia. Walter Rodney’s seminal work How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (HEUA) in combination with his other projects performed precisely this function. Its publication and reception exemplified the strains and fissures in the scholarship focused on the continent at the time. It would go on to become one of the most influential books in the “Third World” and beyond. In this article, I offer a brief overview of Rodney’s activist life and the impact and import of his influential text on the past and present.
 
Presaging Rodney
I submit that the framing and growth of Walter Rodney’s radical vision that resulted in the great, paradigm-changing text about Africa was long in the making. We could say the environment that produced HEUA began in its modern manifestation (among many other forms of resistance on the ground) with the refutation of racism and empire in the late 19th century Caribbean. Anthony Froude, a British journalist and writer wrote a book called the English in the West Indies, where he purported to understand the Caribbean better than its own denizens after visiting ten Caribbean territories. Froude was the epitome of scientific racist sentiment and ideas. Trinidadian schoolteacher John Jacob Thomas challenged Froude in his book Froudacity: West Indian Fables. Before Thomas took down Froude there was Antenor Firmin from Haiti who challenged the extant racist world view or white supremacy that appeared in Arthur de Gobineau’s philosophy in an era in which these path-breaking assailants of the world system were practically on their own.[56] Following in the “de-icing” legacies of Thomas and Firmin CLR James’s Black Jacobins was another powerful and iconic anti colonial text for the Caribbean anti colonial sensibility as was Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery.  Rodney’s experience in growing up in a household where his parents were supporters of the anti-colonial and leftist Peoples Progressive Party and his scholarly achievements at Queens College the leading school (in resources and reputation) at the time in the colony, in a sense prepared him for the stellar scholar-activist career that was to emerge. His activism at the University of the West Indies in two iterations the early 1960s and post PhD in 1968, brought his name on to the stage as an iconoclastic, radical intellectual figure.
 
Rodney embraced both the epistemological and political trends in academia. His embryonic development and work as a scholar was subsisted at every turn by his political and social activism. It was galling to some of his adversaries that Rodney’s academic activism was informed by a radical Marxist approach. By the early 1960s the philosophy of Marxism had retained a strong influence in various countries in the colonial world. This would dramatically lead to a political explosion in Jamaica in 1968 (after he was banned from re-entering the country) a direct consequence of this fusion of politics and professional history. His doctoral thesis A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545-1800  Rodney, utilizing the experience of ethnic groups like the Mande and Balantas, established how these ethnic groups harnessed their environment. His careful analysis was sensitive to the complexity of the Upper Guinea coast and provided several examples contrasting the levels of economic and political development among certain African kingdoms. But it was the chapters dealing with the slave trade and the economic activity around slave trading that were more important for the historiography of Africa. Some scholars and commentators concur that the inspection of this theme gained Rodney a reputation as a leading authority on the subject. More importantly the analysis of the slave trade was significant for the manner in which he parted company with the method of European scholars who had tended, up to that point to examine and measure the slave trade from the vantage point of its repercussions on Europe and the Americas. In direct contrast Rodney's emphasis was clearly the impact of the slave trade on Africa especially in the West Coast and interior. He dissected the ways in which these traditional African societies were weakened in economic, social, political and cultural terms.
Then came How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
I quote at length a fragment of what I wrote in a previous article on Rodney and HEUA:
“The book’s publication led to a veritable revolution in the teaching of African history in the universities and schools in Africa, the Caribbean and North America. Its content became contagious and was an element in the developing world historical sociology stream in embryo in the USA in the 1970s – more specifically the “world systems analysis” framework. Rodney’s doctoral thesis – A History of the Upper Guinea Coast had earlier set the parameters and standard for this later decisive intervention in African historiography.
Rodney compiled How Europe Underdeveloped Africa from extensive archival research systematically identifying causes and outcome of the historical turbulence on the African continent. In doing so he identified the world capitalist system, both mercantile and modern, as the principal agency of underdevelopment of the African continent for over five centuries.
The book covers a wide range: an introductory discussion on the concepts ‘development and underdevelopment’;  the state of Africa prior to European entry;  Africa’s contribution to capitalist development; the effects of colonial education and  impact of missionary activity; the collective nature of African organisation; and of course the exploitation of African resources during the colonial era and consequent ‘underdevelopment.’” [57]
Rodney’s scholarly orientation made him one of the main critics of the positivist tradition in historiography. The positivists consider humanities or the natural and social sciences as solely derived from sensory experience. Consequently, the logical and mathematical treatment of any data is seen as exclusive and authentic. Positivism, which prevailed in the humanities, and in the social and natural sciences, remained dominant until historians like Rodney, the feminist movement and oral history advocates, among others, punctured its limitations and pretensions.
 
As a part of a pantheon of several works, including Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth Rodney’s book galvanized the “Third World” at a point in time when anti-systemic revolts against tradition exemplified by 1968 were still in evidence. But even in its preliminary stage the book faced some resistance. Lewis cited as evidence of this a letter Rodney wrote to his hesitant publisher on the eve of its publication. It clearly demonstrates his modus operandi as well as his philosophical outlook. An excerpt states:
 
The main request, which you made, is that the manuscript should be passed on
to an African historian, because you felt yourself unequal to the task of
judging its worth as ‘serious history’. It is an ideological challenge. …to
pass it on to a serious bourgeois historian would be a sheer waste of time…The
text aims at strata of literate Africans in universities, secondary schools
the bureaucracy and the like. They will have to judge whether it makes sense
in the light of present conditions in Africa.[58]
After its publication, the book led to a veritable revolution in the teaching of African history in the universities and schools in Africa, the Caribbean, and North America. Its ideas became contagious and even became an element in the developing World historical sociology stream that was in embryo in the USA in the 1970s – more specifically the framework of “world-systems analysis”. Rodney compiled his work from the basis of extensive archival research and systematically identified the perturbations on the African continent placing the world capitalist system, both mercantile and modern, as the principal agency of underdevelopment of the African continent for over five centuries.
 
At the base of his thesis in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa was the observation of a dialectical relationship between the underdevelopment of Africa and the development of Europe. More specifically the relationship between local economies and the world capitalist system. In several sections of the famed book, he probes the dynamic of a ‘world-system’ which he appears to accept did exist, and its dialectical relationship with Africa. As he explained at a later stage,  “even if one begins from a position that national means simply that which exists within a national boundary, one still has to ask whether a particular economy is independent, whether it is self propelled…because different economies are integrated into this international system in different ways.” [59]
 
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa also made an impact on a social science paradigm that had developed by this time, namely dependency theory as framed by Andre Gunder Frank. In short Rodney was recognized as the historian who applied Latin American dependency theory to African history[60].
 
There is likewise a powerful passage on the vagaries of colonial education in Rodney’s tome – especially given his own experience in colonial education this was even more an active voice of rage:
“On a hot afternoon in some tropical African school, a class of black shining faces would listen to their geography lesson on the seasons of the year – spring, summer, autumn, and winter. They would learn about the Alps and the river Rhine but nothing about the Atlas mountains of north Africa or the river Zambezi. If these students were in a British colony, they would dutifully write that ‘we defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588’ – at a time when Hawkins was stealing Africans and being knighted by Queen Elizabeth I for so doing. If they were in French colony, they would learn about ‘the Gauls, our ancestors, had blue eyes,’ and they would be convinced that ‘Napoleon was our greatest general’ – the same Napoleon who reinstated slavery in the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, and was only prevented from doing the same in Haiti because his forces were defeated by an even greater strategist and tactician, the African Toussaint L’Ouverture”[61]
As indicated the British colonial education was a reality in Rodney’s early schooling in his home country of Guyana. He went on to break with aspects of the colonial education system by just sheer practice and hard work as in the development of his “groundings” framework – that is, his passionate proclivity to work amongst the neediest and exploited sections of the community. This trait would carry him throughout his life.
 
The “old” formal education system that had historical roots in the political culture of the colonial rulers, more specifically the British  “increased the tendency of  the masses to act without contemplation when ordered to do so, since the mode of instruction used in schools militated against the development of a spirit of enquiry among those who were being educated. "Students were taught to accept unquestioningly the “facts” which were presented to them to follow rules and not to challenge the assumption behind, or the importance of these “facts“ [62]
 
Walter Rodney was assassinated in 1980 but this work, published 8 years before his demise continued to make shockwaves in both academia and the world of positive activism.
 
One of the more important themes that distinguished him as a historian with a difference was the issue of ‘living history’. The conception of ‘living history’ which is quite apparent in the methodology of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa is explained by Rodney himself:
 
“ Many historians are afraid to deal with living history and I can understand why, because sometimes it is dangerous, especially in Africa. The moment that the social scientist begins to reflect too closely on the present, he or she is subversive in the Third world. It is safer to be with the mummies and the bones.”[63]
Rodney’s bustle in his native Guyana and elsewhere prompted his friend and academic colleague Clive Thomas (also an activist-scholar) to advance some useful reasons for Rodney's significant political activism while still a professional historian (one who could have lived well in any university system but chose instead to remain and fight in Guyana with the same passion with which he engaged the Shearer administration years earlier). For Thomas, Rodney’s activities included three essential principles:
 
The notion that history is the science of social development and  as such must be used as an instrument to promote the development of humanity
 
that as a social scientist and academic one cannot exist either creatively or purposefully in isolation from the mass of humanity in which all must  necessarily function.
 
that to live and function in any pretended isolation leads to the reinforcement of that inertia which exists in all human society and which favours the status quo. [64]
 
In like vein, I would add Rodney’s organic desire to take the classroom out of a formal space to include the political platform and other forms: from the use of unstable bottom house chairs to holding classes atop a big rock, in a yard, or the regular classroom.[65]
 
All this underscored Rodney’s own personal mantra – an ability to connect beyond academia to a public audience and his own active disposal on behalf of the working people and poor.
 
HEUA and the present
Now 47 years after the HEUA was first published what is the global reality, especially on the African continent? What is the situation today, in 2019? And why is the text still relevant?
 
A look at the world today is obviously remarkably different from the excitement on social response to global racism and underdevelopment and poverty in the 1970s and 1980s. In the decades of the 1960s through to the 1980s (with a decline in the 1990s) there were a plethora of movements, institutions and international bodies tied to nation states at the global level that afforded activists like Rodney space in which to agitate for a more equal world order and freedom and justice for the poor and to challenge imperialism and colonialism on many fronts.
 
Many of these organisations and global organisations have either fractured or were dissipated by the updated onslaught of neo-liberal and laisse faire capitalism in recent decades. I can name one  - the call and organisation for NIEO (New International Economic Order) which was never realised.
Internecine wars still prevail in sections of the African continent. The continuing civil war in the Sudan, and insurgent groups in Mali, are but two examples. European and US imperialism are still very active in Africa. Just peruse the behaviour of the French in Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger and many other places on the continent.  Surveillance drones, bomber aircraft, economic exploitation, political manipulation, bribery, support for insurgent groups are all part of the ensemble of Western intervention.
 
The rise of mass migration to powerful metropoles is evident in Africa as in other parts of the world.  And the rejection of these refugees and immigrants by former colonizers is steeped in the history of colonial racism and white supremacy. Sri Lankan novelist and activist Ambalavaner  Sivanandan’s  has a forceful descriptive for the situation: “we are here, because they were there”[66]
 
That struggle continues against many obstacles. Democratic challenges in Sudan and elsewhere also provide some hope.  Decolonization of education is now in vogue and it would be impossible to exclude HEUA from a syllabus of ‘colonisation’ or ‘decolonization’, as it is one of the most decolonizing texts ever.
 
This leads to the question – where are the revolutionaries today challenging the modern world capitalist system? The world capitalist system is by no means monolithic yet it manages time and again to put down any challenge to its global economic domination. “Reparations” or the call for reparations appears to be gathering momentum and is among the few radical principles and actions these days.  As this article was being written we notice the Caribbean led reparations movement has succeeded in convincing at least one British institution in providing a form of reparations.  This is an arrangement between the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the University of Glasgow to sign “the first ever agreement for slavery reparations since British Emancipation in 1838”. The £20 million agreement was signed at the UWI main campus office in Kingston, Jamaica in August. [67]
 
As I argued before if Rodney were “to rewrite How Europe Underdeveloped Africa he would doubtless, given the scholar within, reconfigure sections, tighten certain arguments and perfect the narrative. But his overall thesis would stand.”[68] The overt fangs that slave traders and corporate giants like Barclays, Unilever, and Firestone openly displayed in early profiteering and exploitation of the continent have been  replaced by charming corporate public relations smiles and handouts. Yet the profits sequestered from Africa over several centuries, as effectively argued by Rodney, still stand as a foremost if not exclusive source and substance of Africa’s underdevelopment. In short, Europe and North America continue to interfere with the politics and exploit the natural and economic resources of a continent rich in human and natural resources.
 
How would Rodney reconfigure the work in light of modern experience?
 
Very few now mouth any hope for socialism or pan-Africanism as the way forward for Africa.
 
We have to push back this age of social media with a counter narrative of imperialism and laissez faire capitalism that has prevailed across the world –inclusive of new actors in the form of China. The increasing involvement of China is not to be underestimated but China’s significant entry into Africa has had mixed reviews.
 
Climate change would have to be a new ingredient – it was obviously not a significant factor (at least not in the usage of ‘climate change)  in the imagination in 1972 but it has become the most serious threat to global survival. We already witness the horrors of global warming in Africa as exhibited by the shrinking of Lake Chad. Horace Campbell identifies some of these perils in an email describing a visit to the area:
“Lake Chad has lost 95 per cent of its water over the past fifty years. It has shrunk from over 25,000sq km to less than 2000 sq km. I cannot mention the incalculable harm that is being unleashed by this drying up of the Lake  The livelihood of the peoples, over 13 million living immediately around the Lake have been affected negatively; low levels of water, land for grazing cattle shrinking, fishing grounds receding. In essence the new economy that is being put in place is that of financing young jihadists and the counter terror business. I saw this vividly where a fish processing facility was turned into a barracks.”[69]
For Lake Chad’s survival and the protection of the environment Campbell suggests four factors:
Social peace (which he deems the “biggest task”)
Political will;
Use of African resources;
Mobilising the mass of the people on the meaning of global warming for Africa[70]
Economic progress in several African societies including Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ghana, and other states and their people’s efforts offer a different if flawed alternative to global domination of the Western countries and more especially the United States France and the UK.
A powerful counter-narrative that incudes reparations, social and economic justice and decolonization of education have to go forward, the latter, the decolonization of education is an unfinished project. Despite its origins in the 1970s, HEUA remains a powerful tool of research, extrapolation, explanation, and change. And not only in academia. Ideological oppositions and all, the book still occupies an urgent presence in the activist “groundings” of our time. HEUA - one book: one huge, persistent impact.
 
 
 
 
 
The nature of the Military Industrial Complex
NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe by Daniele Ganser
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1KsmHogzPkYmers2Da9BHgs5pqhiBhsJf
 
Operation Gladio : The Unholy Alliance Between The Vatican , The CIA And The Mafia, Paul L. Williams (2015)
https://archive.org/stream/OperationGladioTheUnholyAllianceBetweenTheVaticanTheCIAAndTheMafia/Operation-Gladio-the-unholy-alliance-between-the-Vatican-the-CIA-and-the-Mafia_djvu.txt
 
Summary:
The US and NATO, using fascists from current or past regimes, mafias, the catholic church, and freemasons, waged secret wars in Great Britain, the US, Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Greece, and Turkey against leftists (both politicians and civilians), labor unions and their organizers, indigenous and people of color, and LGBT people.
They funded this first with wealth stolen by the Nazi regime from it’s victims, from the catholic church, and from the sale of drugs, taking cues from the Opium Wars and creating the impetus for the war on drugs and opioid epidemics in the west, targeting poor communities and those of color, and effectively comprising the true governing systems of western countries, linked to assassinations of leaders of movements (MLK, Fred Hampton) and even presidents (JFK), creating the conditions for a militarized globe-spanning empire that isn’t substantially affected by elections or policy.
This is the origin of the term “Deep State” which began in Turkey, because of the Susurluk Scandal, because of a car accident involving a single car containing a politician, a famous model, and a mafia member. There was no legitimate reason these people should be in a car together, and subsequent investigations into why they were led to the discovery of a organized network of politicians, intelligence agencies, military and mafia members, with the purpose of subverting democracy to both maintain it’s own existence and serve the interests of wealthy elites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susurluk_scandal
 
 
 
How a CIA agent once described Fidel Castro:
Fidel Castro, who suddenly materialized in the lobby near the reception desk for a brief moment of solitary splendor before he was swamped by his admirers. In that moment, and only for that moment, the Castro I saw was someone I shall never forget. He was dressed in a soft light brown uniform, spotlessly clean, its buttons and insignia shining brightly. His beard was trimmed and combed, his hair brushed and soft-looking. His face was startlingly white. If a halo had appeared over his head, I would not have been surprised. He looked the incarnation of Jesus Christ!
 
 
 
Why libertarianism and anarchocapitalism are juvenile, utopian fantasies
 
One thing we can all agree on: no one wants to be harmed against their will.
So, when you consider the hostile, dangerous environment of the state of nature, and how human beings would behave in that scenario, what would naturally emerge are private services that provide people protection from other people that want to hurt them. At the most basic level, you'd pay a fee and then you'd have your own personal security guard whose job it is to make sure that nobody tries to hurt you, or your family, or take any of your property.
But, feasibly, not everybody can have their own private security guard, so these guards would have to take on multiple clients, probably people within a close proximity to each other.
But then another problem arises: the whole thing becomes a convoluted mess. When you have hundreds, or thousands of competing security guard factions all trying to enforce the rules of the people who happen to be paying for them, there's no codified set of rules that all the security guards are enforcing. It's going to be a nightmare for all these guards to have to figure out, in real time, who's a client of theirs vs. who isn't, which set of rules their enforcing today vs. tomorrow, which rules correspond with which client.
What happens when there's a conflict between what two different clients want? Not to mention what's going to happen when, to settle a dispute, one person's security guard has to fight another person's security guard? Well, one of them is going to win, and then everyone from the losing security guard's detail is going to want to be protected by the other security guard now.
This may seem like a ridiculous hypothetical scenario, but the point is that what naturally emerges from the state of nature is a local monopoly over the protection services of a region. Another way to say this, is that what naturally emerges is a very basic kind of state that allows people to pay a fee in exchange for basic protection, and the enforcement of contracts.
 
 

From George Jackson, articulating the Marxist Leninist (Fanonist) approach to the state, elections, and the real action of combatting the state (written some time before his death in 1971):
 
Years and years ago it may have been an acceptable tactic to organize a people’s ticket of solid worker and revolutionary credentials and arm it with an ideal platform—only to be defeated by a mud-slinging opportunist-warlord, demonstrably inferior, scum-swilling pig. Then pass out a pamphlet to explain to the people how the system has failed them, or speak it in Pershing Square—or, years ago, in the Campus Hall.
 
Today it is not a tactic—it’s counterrevolution. After forty years it’s pretty clear that it will not suffice. Years ago, “working with” and attempting to influence union leadership may have been judicious, but the government has long since infiltrated and bought off this leadership and legislated away the strike. Union-hall speeches and pamphlet passing are playing at revolution.
 
It isn’t revolutionary or materialist to disconnect things. To disconnect revolutionary consciousness from revolutionizing activity, to build consciousness with political agitation and educational issue-making alone is idealistic rather than materialist. The effect has been reformism rather than revolution. When any election is held it will fortify rather than destroy the credibility of the power brokers. When we participate in this election to win, instead of disrupt, we’re lending to its credibility, and destroying our own. With all the factors of control over the electoral process in the hands of the minority ruling class, the people’s party can always be made to seem isolated, unimportant, even extraneous. If these tactics still give the appearance of revolution to some after decades of miscarriage, we are justified in replacing them as vanguard.
 
When people begin to express their disgust at the demagogic and reformist maneuvers of the vanguard parties, they will discover in real action a new form of political activity which in no way resembles the old.
 
 
 
 
 
 
References
 
Hirji, K.F. (2017) The Enduring Relevance of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Montreal, Daraja Press.
Davis, Angela Y. (2018) ‘Foreword’ in Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, London, Verso.
Rodney, Walter (1982) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Washington, D.C., Howard University Press.
Woodson, Carter G. (1933) The Mis-Education of the Negro, Lanham, Dancing Unicorn Books
Soyinka, Wole (1973) Season of Anomy, London, Arena.
Nwankwo, Agwuncha Arthur (1986) Justice: Sedition Charge, Conviction & Acquital of Arthur Nwankwo, Enugu, Fourth Dimension Publishers.
Machel, S. (1975) ‘Samora Machel: The Beira Speech’, in  African Yearbook of Rhetoric, 2(3) http://www.africanrhetoric.org/pdf/Q%20%20%20Machel%20-%20Beira%20English.pdf
Freire, Paulo (1989) Education for Critical Consciousness, New York, Continuum.
Azikiwe, Nnamdi (1937) Renascent Africa, London, Franc Cass & Company Ltd.
Awolowo, Obafemi (1939) “Making Use of Juju: Obafemi Awolowo Suggests a Useful Field of Enquiry,” West African Review. Reprinted in M.A. Makinde, ed. Awo as a Philosopher, Ile-Ife, Obafemi Awolowo University Press, 2002
http://saharareporters.com/2014/12/23/my-watch-and-obasanjo-exceptionalism-chidi-oguamanam
https://thenationonlineng.net/the-religion-and-science-faith-and-reason-controversy-again-2/
Fanon, Frantz (1963) The Wretched of the Earth, New York, Basic Books
Cabral, Amilcar (2016) Resistance and Decolonization, New York, Rowan & Littlefield.
Santos, Bonaventura de Souza (2015) Epistemologies of the South, New York, Routledge.
Alatas, S. Hussein (2004) ‘The Captive Mind and Creative Development’ in P.N. Mukherji and C. Sengupta, eds., Indigeneity and Universality in Social Science: A South African Response, New Delhi, Sage.
Ake, Claude (1982) Social Science as Imperialism: The Theory of Political Development, Ibadan, University of Ibadan Press.
James, C.L.R. (1978) Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, London, Lawrence Hill.
Azikiwe, Nnamdi (1961) Zik: A Selection from the Speeches of Nnamdi Azikiwe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
https://desertherald.com/a-letter-to-boko-haram-what-would-dan-fodio-do/
Bagele, Chilisa. (2012) Indigenous Research Methodologies. Thousand Oaks, Sage.
https://www.ted.com/talks/chika_ezeanya_esiobu_how_africa_can_use_its_traditional_knowledge_to_make_progress
Biko, Agozino. (2010). ‘Ogbunigwe Bekee Gbulu Umu Igbo Ha Gbalu Ohu’ in Ndigbo Journal, Vol2, Edition 21, pp24-28.
Thiong’o, Ngugi wa (1986) Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, Oxford, Heinemann.
Achebe, Chinua (1965) http://wrightinglanguage.weebly.com/uploads/2/4/0/5/24059962/achebe_englishandafricanwriter.pdf
https://9newsng.com/your-ancestors-were-gauls-frances-sarkozy-tells-migrants/
Toyo, Eskor (2001) Delusions of a Popular Paradigm: Essays on Alternative Path to Economic Development, Lagos, Nigerian Economic Society.
Achebe, Chinua. (1983). The Trouble With Nigeria, Enugu, Fourth Dimension Publishers.
Nwankwo, Arthur. (1972). Nigeria: The Challenge of Biafra, Enugu, Fourth Dimension Publishing Co.
Bassey, Ekpo Bassey. (1989). ‘Only the People Can Develop Themselves’ in Mass Line: The Liberation Journal, February.
Fanon, Frantz. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth, New York, Basic Books
Biko, Agozino. (2007). ‘Equity and Quality in Higher Education’ in International Journal of Education Research, Vol.3 No.2, 283-292.
Cabral, Amilcar (2016) Resistance and Decolonization, New York, Rowan & Littlefield.
Girard, F. (2003) ‘My Father Didn’t Think This Way: Nigerian Boys Contemplate Gender Equality’, in Quality/Calidad/Qualite, Washington, D.C., The Population Council, Inc.
Agozino, Biko and Agu, Augustine. (2009). ‘Progressive Africana Masculinity: A Rites of Passage Manual’ Commissioned by UNICEF, and presented at UNICEF conference in New York, November.
Achebe, Chinua. (2012).There Was A Country: A Personal History of Biafra, New York, Penguin.
Ekwe-Ekwe, Herbert. (2011). Readings From Reading. African Renascent Press, Darkar.
Following upon (1969) The Groundings with My Brothers. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and (1970). A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545 to 1800, Oxford University Press.
London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications and Dar-es-Salaam: Tanzanian Publishing House. Hereafter HEUA. All references are to this first edition.
(2017) The Enduring Relevance of Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, Montreal: Daraja Press.
Davis, Angela. (2019) “Walter Rodney’s Legacy” Foreword to Rodney, Walter, HEUA, Verso. www.versobooks.com [Accessed 8/7/2019].          	
Vimercati, Giovanni. “The Persisting Relevance of Walter Rodney’s ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’” Los Angeles Review of Books. April 18, 2009. www.lareviewofbooks.org. [Accessed 8/7/2019]
(2019) Zion High. https://iroots.bandcamp.com [Accessed 8/15/2019].
For example, Rodney quotes Che Guevara on this point in HEUA, p. 9.
See, for example, Perkins, John (2004). Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.
Lamming, George. (1981). “Foreword” in Rodney, Walter, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, p. xvii; Rodney, Walter (12 October, 1968). “African History in the Service of Black Liberation.” Lecture given by Rodney to the Congress of Black Writers in Montreal, Canada.
Nehusi, Kimani (2018). A People’s Political History of Guyana, 1838-1964, Hertfordshire, UK: Hansib Publications, pp. 507-548; See also Nehusi, “Contradictions Between Dr. Jagan and the Ultra Left: The Split in the People’s Progressive Party of Guiana, 1956/57,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. Vol. 15, Nos. 1-2, 24 July, 2013, pp. 56-88.
Nehusi, Kimani (2012). “Introduction” in Richard Hart, Caribbean Workers’ Struggle, London: Socialist History Society with Bogle L’Ouverture Press, pp. 3-10. See also Nehusi, Kimani. A People’s Political History of Guyana, 1838-1964. Hertfordshire, UK: Hansib Publications pp. 444-448; See also note 47 above. For information on the women of the revolution in Ayiti (Haiti), consult Christine Ru Pert-em-Hru (2017). Heroines of the Haitian Revolution: Tales of Victory and Valor. London, UK: BIS Publications.
James, C. L. R. (1989). The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. Second Edition, Revised. New York: Vintage Books, p. 47.
Williams, Eric (1964). Capitalism and Slavery. London: Andre Deutsch Limited. See also Williams, Eric (1964). British Historians and the West Indies. Port-of-Spain: P.N.M. Publishing Company Limited.
Thomas, J. J. (1889). Froudacity: West Indian Fables by James Anthony Froude Explained by J. J. Thomas. London: T. Fisher Unwin.
(1885, 2002). The Equality of the Human Races, Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press. Translated by Asselin Charles.
(1964) British Historians and The West Indies, Port-of-Spain: P.N.M. Publishing Company Limited, p. vi.
See note 9 above.
George Lamming, Foreword, A History of the Guyanese Working People, 1881-1905, xxv
Charles Mills has a useful defection or explanation of white supremacy in his book Racial Contract : “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years.” Charles Mills. Racial Contract
Nigel Westmaas, “40 Years of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, Pambazuka News, June 14, 2012
Rupert Lewis, Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought p. 70.
Walter Rodney, “One Hundred Years of Development in Africa …” p. 27.
Walter Rodney, HEUA, pp. 246-247
M.K Bacchus, “Education in the Pre-Emancipation Period with special reference to the Colonies which later became British Guiana) Guyana Historical Journal Vol II. 1990. p. 24.
Rodney, Ibid, p. 20.
Clive Thomas, “Walter Rodney and the Caribbean Revolution”(speech at a symposium, University of California, Los Angeles, 1981.
The current author benefited from Rodney’s bottom-house classes, at the historian’s home in a ward of Georgetown, Guyana called “South Ruimveldt.”
The Guardian, February 7, 2018
“The University of the West Indies (UWI) and the University of Glasgow Reparations Agreement: £20 million Caribbean Reparations Agreement” St Lucia Star, August 4, 2019
Nigel Westmaas, “40 Years of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” Pambazuka News, June 14, 2012
15 Horace Campbell, e-mail correspondence, February 7, 2018
16 Horace Campbell, “Saving Lake Chad: a Pan-African Project” Pambazuka News, March 16, 2018
Charles Mills, The Racial Contract Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1997
Lewis, Rupert. Walter Rodney’s Intellectual and Political Thought. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998
Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Washington DC: Howard university Press, 1982
Walter Rodney, “One Hundred Years of Development in Africa”  A Tribute to Walter Rodney. Hamburg: University of Hamburg, 1984
https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460821/page/n201/mode/2up
Churchill's Secret War, Madhusree Mukerjee
Orwellian Rectification: Popular Churchill Biographies and the 1943 Bengal Famine, John Hickman
Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis
Disputed Measures of Nutritional Needs and Famine Deaths in Colonial India, David Hall-Matthews
The Story of the Malakand Field Force, Winston S. Churchill
The River War Volume 2, Winston S. Churchill.
The Literary Churchill: Author, Reader, Actor, Jonathan Rose
Churchill’s Press Campaign Against Constitutional Reform in India,
Ian St John
The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, William Manchester
Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897-1963, Vol. 5, Winston S. Churchill.
Winston S. Churchill: Prophet of Truth, 1922-1939, Martin Gilbert
The Fulton Address as Racial Discourse, Srdjan Vucetic
Hungry Bengal, Janam Mukherjee
http://www-archives.chu.cam.ac.uk/perl/node?a=a%3Breference%3DCHAR+2%2F193%2F90-91
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_National_Army_trials#Consequences_of_the_trials
http://www.gmsyed.org/case/saeen-book1-app1.htm
https://archive.org/details/transferofpower10003unse/page/n9/mode/2up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plZkO3y9_hY
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2009/nov/11/churchill-blood-sweat-tears
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330593945_Drought_and_Famine_in_India_1870-2016
https://archive.org/details/constitutionalre03nich
https://archive.org/details/transferofpower104nich/page/162/mode/2up
https://archive.org/details/wavellviceroysjo00pend
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/imt/01-08-46.asp
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/brs.2009.0004
Liberty or Death, Patrick French
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267398692_Wavell's_Relations_with_His_Majesty's_Government_October_1943-March_1947
Winston Churchill’s Plan for Post-war India, Madhusree Mukerjee
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09557571.2016.1271194
https://archive.org/details/fringesofpower1000colv/page/562/mode/2up/search/+
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronology_of_Western_colonialism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_East_India_Company
https://youtu.be/3ofDqqHLe-o
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-latin-american-studies/article/abs/reviews-steve-j-stern-battling-for-hearts-and-minds-memory-struggles-in-pinochets-chile-19731988-part-2-of-the-trilogy-the-memory-box-of-pinochets-chile-durham-nc-and-london-duke-university-press-2006-pp-xxxi538-9995-2795-pb/7C8C63C56F6C401BC63C94B53DBEB89D
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frente_Nacionalista_Patria_y_Libertad
Steve J. Stern 'Chronicling a Coup Foretold', in Battling for Hearts and Minds, 2006.
US Senate, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities Staff Report: Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973, 1975.
Carlos Prats, Memorias, 1985.
Kristian Gustafson & Christopher Andrew, The other hidden hand: Soviet and Cuban intelligence in Allende’s Chile, in Intelligence and National Security, 33/3, 2018.
Camara de Diputados de Chile, ACUERDO ADOPTADO POR LA N. CAMARA DE DIPUTADOS, EL DIA 23 DE AGOSTO DE 1973 Y DIRIGIDO A S'. EL PRESIDENTE DE LA REPUBLICA, 1973.
Eugenia Palieraki, Las manifestaciones callejeras y la experiencia de la Unidad Popular (1970-1973), in Pensamiento crítico, 2000.
Eugenio Velasco, The Allende Regime in Chile: An Historical and Legal Analysis: Part I, 1976. 8) Armando Barrientos, Jasmine Gideon and Maxine Molyneux, New Developments in Latin American Social Policy, 2008.
John Lear and Joseph Collins, Working in Chile's Free Market, Latin American Perspectives, 22/1, 1995. 10) Juan Luis Londoño and Miguel Székely, Persistent Poverty and Excess Inequality: Latin America, 1970-1995, 1997.
Pilar Vergara, In pursuit of "growth with equity:" the limits of Chile's free-market social reforms, in NACLA Report on the Americas, 1996.
Agencia EFE, El Congreso de Chile aprueba la ley de gratuidad de la educación superior, 25 January, 2018. 13) Alberto Moreno-Doña and Rodrigo Gamboa Jiménez, Dictadura Chilena y Sistema Escolar: “a otros dieron de verdad esa cosa llamada educación”, in Educar em Revista, 51, 2014.
Caitlin Canfield, Partisan Policy Paradoxes and a New Path Towards Universality? Making Sense of Health Policy Reform in Mexico and Chile, 2016.
Paddy Ireland, Law and the neoliberal vision: financial property, pension privatisation and the ownership society, in NILQ, 62/1, 2001.
Eugenia Palieraki, Histoire critique de la «nouvelle gauche» latino-américaine Le Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR) dans le Chili des années 1960, 2009.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacnazo_insurrection
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanquetazo
https://youtu.be/PFDxX2TKZE4
 https://youtu.be/emi9CaAEuv0
https://youtu.be/0i8f16Mso0o
 https://youtu.be/1LDaYRZUsnc
https://youtu.be/M2imFDtUS5Q
https://youtu.be/jhgIZNXBxH8
 https://youtu.be/0kBVVGodG94
 https://youtu.be/lNqb6zA5Kfs
 https://youtu.be/5v1yJuJKUi8