Our antisocial tendencies are also fueled by the weaponized distortion of identity politics, propagated by both liberal and conservative culture wars. “Woke” and “Anti-woke” are mirrors to eachother. Both are willing to derail social movements by centering themselves over locking in on greater objectives. Both overfixate on identity and language. Both lack the greater social awareness and embodiment needed to prioritize fighting imperialism and capitalism. Both also tend to exist in an illusive world that is mostly young and online. The movements we are trying to build are meant to exist in real life, helping workers and families. Our culture must not tail either of these chronically online groups and their antisocial, narcissistic tendencies.

Western Marxists would do well to seek supplementary sociocultural knowledge outside of European Marxism. Trump fears communism and Islam for very similar reasons, valuing a life beyond our own navel-gazing and beyond death being some of them. There are lessons from the Islamic Resistance on mending our individualist, antisocial culture, and even many anti-capitalist principles baked into Islamic finance itself. The US tried to break the Islamic Republic of Iran, and undoubtedly made its population stronger and more unified. Iran now also controls the Strait of Hormuz and will be collecting fees indefinitely. The pro-resistance, communal and cultural influence of Shia Islam for generations has helped support Iran’s steadfastness, foresight, and mobilization. We should be note-taking, because our movements are lacking the critical collective embodiment still needed in our hangover of liberalism.

The most-well read Marxist in the West, still doesn’t have that dog in them. Liberal societies placation of the individual as the central driving political force has reached such extremes it has become antisocial and detrimental to not only ourselves, but the world around us. There seems to be no limit to how much we will tolerate while being able to compartmentalize, and lacking an undeniable collective duty beyond ourselves to mobilize. Nihilism is a byproduct of this that must also be rejected wherever it comes up. If only the Self is centered, it can be rationalized that nothing really matters beyond it, both when it comes, and when it goes.

Where we’re at culturally right now, people talk a big game for folks who wouldn’t be able to handle living in a more planned economy due to an inability and willingness to move more like a school of fish. A planned economy means restructuring for long term goals, which is what we would need to do for effectively tackling climate change for example, not just follow the whim of a market or reacting to selfish private pocket interests.

China just removed some, not all, but some arts and humanities degrees that weren’t leading to jobs and contributing to unemployment rates. Many liberals in the West gasped in horror and immediately saw this as terrible, when it is actually is a state’s job to resolve unemployment, not fuel it, nor selfishly allow universities to take people’s tuition money knowing damn well they’re gunna be screwed after. Degrees should match with jobs. It’s dysfunctional when it doesn’t. People go into lifelong debt for their studies, then don’t even wind up getting to live their art anyway. Those who are lucky can pursue another study and career.

”We just need to fund the arts more.” This has become an empty slogan that sounds sensible in theory. Butfunding the arts doesn’t solve the issue that someone also needs to want to receive the art for that to also be a functional societal arrangement. Not everyone is a good artist. We live in societies, not just a world of individuals. In the US there’s an epidemic of unemployed artists who don’t feel driven to pursue anything else, then lean onGoFundMe links. This is dysfunctional.

In a more planned economy, industries that serve luxury capitalism, rich-people playground-stuff, would also have to be reexamined. I was a stripper for 5 years in my 20’s, and almost every woman around me and their dog were also sex workers to afford life. I have no shade for these industries from a moral POV, and people in them deserve utmost safety. But I’ve also soberly reflected that a more planned economy would not lean on Israeli-owned OnlyFans and strip clubs for bored rich men who don’t know what to do with all their heaping cash.

So, for everyone that talks a big game about planned economies, some who even say zero tolerance for any markets (in my view China has proven markets can be socialized too, in this stage of transition) start having real, material conversations about what that really means and if you are actually ready.

Are we culturally socialists yet?

Every revolutionary would grapple with the lessons of the USSR’s collapse. Stalin, who successfully built socialism and industrialization in one country, would be confronted with the reality that solely a command economy, militarized and isolated (not by choice, but external Western pressures) could not survive the technological and financial pressures of global capitalism indefinitely. He would likely advocate for a more flexible approach to economic planning, integrating advanced cybernetics and more decentralized decision-making to avoid the bureaucratic ossification that hindered the Soviet model.

After the death of the Cold War bipolar world, they would all immediately agree on a unified global strategy against US hegemony. Today, US power is maintained through a network of 800+ military bases worldwide, intelligence operations, and the weaponization of the global financial system that ensnares 1/3 of the world population under sanctions. The new strategy would prioritize breaking the US-dollar nexus through alternative payment systems, digital currencies, and strategic alliances with other rising powers like China and Russia. They would view the Global South not as passive subjects but the primary arbiters of anti-imperialist struggle, mainly through economic decoupling and the creation of parallel institutions, rather than proxy wars.

In a period of roughly 3000 years, Europe moved through 3 different systems only. System change takes time. It is likely they would embrace a new theory of transition, advocating for a more prolonged, multi-form struggle that recognizes that the road to communism is longer, more complex, and more globally interconnected now than before, given the hurdles and defeats faced by communism over the last few decades.

They would not be dogmatists, they would adapt their tactics, modernize their analysis, and recognize that the material conditions of the 21st century demand new answers on how to move away from capitalism.

This is of course, my humble opinion.

USSR’s reforms: Gorbachev vs. Yeltsin

Revisionism is not necessarily the same as opportunism, and flattening the two to mean the same lets it slip through our cracks of understanding that opportunism is immediately existential to a system or movement, while revisions can be corrected and reversed with time. In the case of Gorbachev vs. Yeltsin, the Soviet Union faced a crossroad of revisionism versus opportunism, and its own actions led to the worst of the two.

The Soviet Union had potential to enter its ‘China era’ before it was rather illegally dissolved. Perhaps even a far greater threat to the West, as it had already rapidly risen to be the second largest economy.

At the March 1991 referendum, nearly 80% of voters overwhelmingly voted in favour of preserving the USSR as a renewed federation, but with market reforms, and more autonomy for the republics.

Many saw the forsaken Pizza Hut ad by Gorbachev as the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, but was it, really? Gorbachev, awful as he was, could have been dealt with later— he was still better than Boris Yeltsin who actually followed.

Gorbachev’s reforms proposed a slower, more gradual adoption of market reforms. Gorbachev’s method, on paper, still proposed to retain socialist principles and state control. It echoed a lot of similarities in strategy with how Deng’s China chose to go about their reforms, as opposed to the “shock therapy” 500-day rapid market liberalization and full transfer of economic power from center to the co-opted republics proposed by Yeltsin which led to all states losing commanding heights of the economy, dramatically lowered life expectancy, and the rapid escalation of poverty, unemployment, insecurity all over Russia and the former republics.

The hardline communist bureaucrats at the time, instead of focusing on the greater looming threat of Yeltsin’s reforms and return of the Russian Federation, attempted a failed sloppy coup in the Soviet Union against Gorbachev which lasted a mere three days, while the union was already fragile under existential threat. A coup which was crushed by Yeltsin, who came out as a hero and even more popular than ever. They were so fixated on getting rid of Gorbachev, they forgot about Yeltsin. Their actions are well-regarded today as the defining moment; the final nail in the coffin that brought about the tragic end of the Soviet Union. Many Marxists don’t want to reflect on this mistake. It’s easier to blame Gorbachev for not complying with their demands during a coup that was against him, rather than admit that the timing and prioritization of their actions were bad praxis. Historical materialism validates this to be the case. If we are not recognizing and learning from our failures, how will we not repeat them?

It would also be remiss to deny that somebody in US intelligence had for sure calculated how powerful the USSR would become had they not dissolved and pursued Gorbachev’s slower reforms, and wanted to make sure it was Yeltsin and the end of the Soviet Union that followed instead. The celebrations in CIA headquarters must have been loud that day.

Materialists should know that blaming individuals over systems is always incomplete analysis. Pitting the downfall of the Soviet Union on Gorbachev’s actions alone denies the conditions that led to Gorbachev. The immense external influences and pressures, as well as internal ones rising organically from their own society. Rather than identifying revisionism as some form of abstract virus that suddenly infects minds severed from any internal and external contradictions, we need to start understanding those contradictions. Understanding why revisions come up is much more fruitful than just identifying that they happen. Strategies aren’t materialized off vibes and theory on a page only, but a deep understanding of the reality of navigating the interconnected, consequential relationship movements have to imperialism, supply chains, history, and embedded global capitalism.

We must analyze cause-and-effect, and learn from both the failures (and successes) of revolutionary history.

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Consider the United States: the principal contradiction today is between its declining unipolar hegemony and the urgent need of the Global South for multipolar, sovereign development. Into this breach step China and Russia—not as perfect socialist states either, but nations managing deep contradictions of their own.

China, despite being on the socialist path, has integrated deeply with global capitalism, accumulated immense capital, and even invests abroad in ways that mimic imperialist logic. Yet its primary contradiction with US imperialism—over Taiwan, over technological sovereignty, over financial control—overrides the secondary one. By using its capitalist surplus to build ports in Peru, railways in East Africa, and trade corridors across Eurasia, China has objectively weakened dollar hegemony. It did not wait for socialism to triumph at home before challenging US power; it exploited the very contradictions of global capital to rise within it and then turn that weight against its architects.

Russia, a state capitalist state, has bred its own internal exploitation. Yet its military confrontation with NATO, its weaponization of energy and grain deals, and its strategic pivot to the Global South have shattered the post-Cold War unipolar consensus.

Now contrast this with the political contradictions of someone like Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist in New York. On one hand, he champions rent control, public transit, and working-class healthcare—tactically useful reforms. But his primary contradiction? When pressed, he aligns with Zionism and refuses to break fully with the US imperial apparatus. Synagogues in New York are openly selling stolen Palestinian land acquired through American colonial genocide, protected by armies of police (deployed by Jessica Tisch, the Zionist daughter of a real estate oligarch that Mamdani willfully kept on his team). When asked about it, Mamdani condones the use of state violence to stop people from protesting the sale of stolen native land in the middle of a genocide. This blatant protection of Zionism holds more weight than some micro wealth tax that he pushes which are also less than crumbs. It’s dually problematic as Mamdani is pacifying Americans to accept both imperialism and Zionism. He supports the mastermind imperial state that is actively arming Israel’s genocide in Gaza, funding Ukraine’s proxy war against Russia, and imposing coups in Africa. Unlike Russia or China, whose contradictions are external and antagonistic toward US hegemony, Mamdani’s internal contradictions lead him back into the imperialist camp. That is not a productive contradiction; it is a fatal compromise. The Sahel cannot afford such confusion. They must exploit every capitalist tendency of Russia and China for immediate material gain—debt relief, vaccines, radar systems—while building their own productive forces. Do not moralize. Seize the contradiction.

In dialectics, the enemy of your enemy is not your friend, but their contradictions are your tool. China rose by playing two imperialists against each other. Russia today needs the Sahel more than the Sahel needs Russian ideology. And as for Mamdani and his kind, their contradictions serve only to re-legitimize empire. The Global South must learn to distinguish: contradictions that weaken U.S. imperialism are progressive, even if imperfect. Contradictions that tether you back to Washington are death. Choose accordingly, and exploit ruthlessly.

Outrage over the Soviet famines of the 1930s and the Chinese Great Leap Forward while ignoring extractive British colonialism’s role in the Irish Potato Famine, Bengal Famine, and other repeated famines in British India. Post feudal capitalist industrialization was built on constant mass starvation, but only the famines of post feudal industrializing socialist states are treated as unique moral atrocities.

Mass casualties in war

Outrage over Soviet soldier losses in WWII blamed on Stalin, while accepting Western Allied bombings of Dresden, Hamburg, Tokyo (killing over 100,000 civilians in one night), and the absolute civilian massacre that was dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Civilian casualties are fine collateral damage when Western powers commit them from the skies, but when the Red Army bravely suffers in war while taking out 3/4 of the Germans’ actual military capabilities, it’s somehow proof of their 'totalitarian incompetence.’

Suppression of political opposition

Outrage over jailing or exiling dissidents in USSR, Cuba, DPRK— while COINTELPRO assasinates great Black American revolutionaries, McCarthyite blacklists, anti-war activists are incarcerated en masse and there are indefinite detentions at Guantanamo Bay, UK internments held without trial in Northern Ireland, and French crackdowns in Algeria.

Forced prison labor

Outrage over Soviet gulag systems or Chinese re-education through labor while US prison labor presently exists. In USA, the 13th Amendment exception allows such forced labor and prisoners paid in pennies. It is a modern version of convict-leasing , a post-slavery system where prisoners were leased to private companies and death rates exceeded antebellum slavery. But Western documentation on US forced labor? Rare.

State surveillance and informants

Outrage for the Stasi of East Germany or the KGB, wile ignoring NSA mass surveillance (PRISM, XKeyscore), Five Eyes alliance, Palantir, CIA family jewels (domestic spying on anti-war groups), and the UK Tempora program. US citizens have less privacy today than East Germans did under the Stasi, yet only the latter is considered totalitarian evil.

Imperial expansion and intervention

Outrage over a single Soviet intervention of Afghanistan in 1979, or Vietnam in Cambodia, while overlooking the US invasion of Vietnam (3+ million dead), Iraq (500,000+ dead from sanctions prior to invasion, hundreds of thousands more after), Afghanistan (20 years, tens of thousands of civilians dead), Panama, Grenada, Syria, Libya (destruction of a functioning state), support for Indonesian genocide (1965, 500k–1M killed), coup in Chile (1973), Guatemala (1954), Iran (1953), Congo (1960)… the list is endless, really. A single Soviet intervention is proof of communist imperialism while hundreds of US/EU interventions that kill multi-millions annually including half a million deaths per year by sanctions alone are just “spreading democracy.”

Human rights abuses by allied dictators

Outrage over the USSR arming the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and African resistance fighters against South African apartheid and Portuguese colonialism, while the US armed the Contras death squads, Saddam Hussein (who used chemical weapons against Iranians and Kurds with their intelligence support) the Shah of Iran and its SAVAK torture police, the Marcos dictatorship (Philippines), Pinochet (Chile), Suharto (Indonesia), Mobutu (Congo), and actual terrorists like the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. A communist state shipping guns to a national liberation movement is a dictator’s proxy, while a US general shaking hands with a torturer is ‘realpolitik.’

Suppression of labor strikes and workers

Outrage over bans on independent trade unions in the USSR or China while ignoring the US National Guard shooting striking miners (Battle of Blair Mountain, 1921, 100 killed), Ludlow Massacre (1914, National Guard killed women and children), Pullman Strike federal intervention (1894, 13 killed, ARU crushed), Homestead (1892), US military breaking the Air Traffic Controllers strike (1981). In capitalist states, killing strikers was actually legal for decades, whereas in socialist states, even prohibiting any strike is treated as uniquely despotic.

Media control and propaganda

Outrage over state-controlled media in Cuba, DPRK, and China while Western media is the concentrated ownership of 6 corporations controlling 90% of all American media, and are also very advertiser-dependent. It’s also hypocrisy, as the Pentagon has run military analyst programs featuring “experts” on federal defence contractor payrolls, embedded journalists who deliberately sanitized the Iraq War coverage, and most famously ran Operation Mockingbird — an op where the CIA paid journalists during Cold War. The PR industry itself began by the wits of Edward Bernays, who had initially invented propaganda as a profession in the US to sell WWI to the public. The only difference between state and capitalist propaganda is that capitalist propaganda pretends not to exist.

Leadership privileges and corruption

Outrage over Stalin’s dachas, Mao’s personal quarters, or Castro’s cigars, while ignoring Reagan’s 12-acre California ranch maintained by taxpayer money, the Bush family compound (Kennebunkport), Trump’s Mar-a-Lago (featuring taxpayer-funded Secret Service rooms at $2,000/night), Clinton speaking fees ($500k+ from Goldman Sachs), and the entire revolving door between Pentagon/State and defence contractors (corruption by any definition). A socialist leader having a modest country house is a new class parasite, but a capitalist leader taking legal bribes via speaking fees or owning multiple estates is… just a rich guy.

Let this be a cold splash of water to the cheek.

We must start thinking critically about how media works to capture, shape, and direct our attention and outrage. What we are told to look towards, while looking away from. Why people think they know so much about US enemies of state (bad things, naturally) and have such strong reactionary responses in the body when their names are even mentioned, while glazing over the often far worse crimes of Western allies.

Why should one’s response to China be any more charged than discussing France?

Why can one be neutral with one state, but not another?

When was the last time somebody called France an aggressive colonial power, despite being the only state that still controls the currency of all 14 of its “former” African colonies? Or rightfully called Immanuel Macron a dictator for exploiting a loophole to keep himself in power, despite his centrist party massively losing in the 2024 elections that saw a sweeping victory from the left-coalitions of France?

How can Russia and Belarus be repeatedly banned from the Olympics and Eurovision, but not Israel, Ukraine, or USA?

Questioning and seeing through selective moral outrage is possibly one of the most critical steps we can start doing now to begin to decolonize and de-propagandize our minds. In this mental space, free from imperial narrative direction, your reasoning can sharply shift away from reactionary idealism and moral posturing and into dialectical materialist analysis.

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US foreign policy is not driven by social humanitarian concerns or even stability (instability is great for it, actually) but by the material interests of the military-industrial complex and the need to manage the decline of American hegemony. Ceasefires are avoided because war itself has become profitable and politically necessary for propping up a crumbling imperial order.

For-profit war economy: a self-perpetuating machine

The US war economy is not some ‘necessary evil’ but a core profit center for the ruling class.

Lockheed Martin, RTX (Raytheon), Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics have seen stock prices surge 30–100%+ since the Ukraine war began. The multi-billions in supplemental aid to Ukraine flows back to these contractors, funding new production lines and replenishing stocks. Unlike WWII or Korea, modern US wars are outsourced and financed by debt, with no explicit war taxes or public sacrifice. The costs are socialized (borne by taxpayers and future generations), while the profits are privatized. This creates a powerful lobby, the military-industrial-complex, that spends hundreds of millions on campaign contributions and employs thousands of former Pentagon officials as lobbyists.

A ceasefire would cut off this revenue stream. Without sustained conflict, demand for guided artillery shells, HIMARS rockets, air defence systems, and F-35 parts collapses. The war machine needs continuous low-to-medium intensity warfare, not peace.

War as a tool to manage imperial decline

The US is no longer the sole superpower. China has surpassed it in purchasing power parity (PPP); the BRICS bloc is expanding, with majority support and the population numbers on its side; and the petrodollar is facing real challenges from bilateral trade in yuan and rubles. In this context of crumbling unipolarity, the US uses war to achieve three goals:

1. Discipline European allies: The Ukraine war has destroyed the Nord Stream pipelines, decoupled Germany from Russian energy, and forced NATO countries to increase military spending and American gas reliance. A ceasefire would risk European ‘backsliding’ toward Russian energy and developing sovereign diplomatic autonomy.

2. Contain Iran and protect Israel: Iran is a regional power that challenges US-Israeli dominance. Low-intensity conflict through proxy militias, strikes on IRGC commanders, and support for Israeli operations keeps Iran off-balance, disrupts its economy, and prevents a broader normalization between Iran and Gulf states that could challenge US influence.

3. Divert attention back home: Economic inequality, decaying infrastructure, healthcare crises, and political instability are all intensified by US decline. War serves as a distracting crisis management tool—rallying patriotism, justifying surveillance and military budgets, and normalizing emergency powers.

A ceasefire is “worse” for the US than continued war

A ceasefire with Russia or Iran threatens US interests, as currently defined by the military-industrial-complex and foreign policy establishment.

If a ceasefire with Russia, Russia pivots economically toward China, accelerating de-dollarization. Europe resumes energy trade with Russia, weakening US leverage. US loses its justification for record arms sales to Europe. Ukraine’s defeat would be a visible humiliation, accelerating NATO doubts.

If a ceasefire with Iran, Iran solidifies its Axis of Resistance (Hezbollah, Hamas, Ansrallah, Iraqi militias). The US loses its pretext for maintaining carrier groups and bases in the Gulf. Iran normalizes ties with Saudi Arabia and the UAE, bypassing U.S. mediation. Israel faces a more secure, nuclear-threshold Iran without US pressure.

In short: Peace exposes weakness. War postpones the reckoning.

Destructiveness is a feature, not a bug.

The mass destruction of Ukrainian cities, Gaza, or Iranian nuclear facilities is not accidental. Imperialism is destructive by nature, extracting value through violence.

Let us be crystal clear on the following. The US state has no interest in rebuilding Ukraine or Gaza. That would cost billions and offer little profit. Instead, the model is: destroy, sell weapons to replace destroyed stockpiles, and leave reconstruction to the EU, NGOs, and some private capital.

The human toll of hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced is externalized. These populations are not part of American “national interest” as defined by the ruling class. They are acceptable losses in a system designed to generate profit and manage decline.

Until the US ruling class faces either a massive anti-war movement that threatens electoral viability, or a financial crisis that makes war debt unsustainable, the profit-driven, destructive status quo will continue.

Ceasefires are not impossible, they are simply unprofitable.

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Still, hangovers of spoils remain. Labor aristocracy in the core receive wages and benefits inflated above the value of their labor which creates a key divergence in class conditions. Perhaps a less triggering and more accurate framing would be to say that workers in periphery states are in fact receiving depressed wages. For a worker in the core, the now fading American Dream or the European welfare state is not quite a victory of labor, but a bribe paid for by the oppression of workers in the periphery states who must make up for that adjustment.

A worker in the United States earns the retail price of an iPhone 15 in about 80 hours of labor. A worker in India has to work nearly 800 hours for the exact same piece of technology. This is the architecture of imperialism. All the while nearly a quarter of the actual industrial production of smartphones happens in India, while zero of it happens in the US. The bottom of the supply chain is punished, despite their labor being a critical link in the chain. They are forced to import the finished good back at a much higher cost, locked into a cycle of unequal exchange fuelling global inequality. An American worker enjoys a relatively higher standard of living not because they produce more value, but because they receive a cut of the “imperialist rent”—these superprofits extracted from unequal exchange from sweatshops and mines elsewhere. The worker in Congo must work for less than $1 a day in dangerous conditions to mine the minerals for a smartphone they cannot even afford, while the poor worker in the US can still likely afford one.

This dynamic has also created a comprador consciousness amongst the labor aristocracy who have a material stake in the continuation of imperialism, conscious or not. They fear the loss of this privilege more than they hate their own bourgeoisie. The core is a gilded cage; its workers too deeply entangled in the spoils of neo-colonialism to mount a systemic challenge in their current conditions. The gilded cage is held up by an access of fast and cheap consumerism, diverting the blow of lacking healthcare or job security, and unknowingly co-signed by the gilded cage worker. They are often the most blinded to the exploitation imposed on them by their own ruling class.

This validates the Third-Worldist perception that the chain of world capitalism will be broken first at its weakest links in the Global South. It will be broken by the super-exploited workers who have nothing to lose but those chains, who face the raw violence of imperialism without the anesthetic of consumerism.

However…

The American ‘glory days’ are over

In the US, 1 in 4 households live paycheck-to-paycheck. When the imperial war machine points its canon at a new target, Americans increasingly suffer. The Afghanistan and Iraq war were not paid for with tax increases. They were funded through deficit spending, creating a hidden tax: inflation. This erodes the purchasing power of workers’ wages, and creates a massive national debt. Servicing that debt, aka paying interest to bondholders (wealthy individuals and institutions) becomes a permanent drain on the federal budget. Every dollar spent on a fighter jet or a foreign military base is a dollar not spent on domestic infrastructure, education, healthcare, affordable housing, or scientific research that could create broadly shared prosperity. The average American experiences this as crumbling roads, unaffordable college, and medical debt. Studies by the Political Economy Research Institute and the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs consistently show that investing $1 billion in clean energy, healthcare, or education creates 1.5 to 3 times more jobs than investing that same $1 billion in the military.

From colonial plunder to neoliberal globalization

The old model of imperialism involved seizing physical resources like oil, rubber and minerals— and shipping them to the core, creating jobs in refining and manufacturing. The modern American empire operates differently. In the post-WWII architecture, the primary goal of American imperial power is no longer to directly extract resources for American workers, but to create a “globally integrated” economic system favourable to multinational corporations and Wall Street. The US maintains a global military presence to ensure “open doors” for American capital; countries must allow American corporations to invest, operate, and repatriate profits freely. This benefits shareholders and C-suite executives, not the average worker. The security provided by US naval and military dominance (protecting shipping lanes and political stability) enabled the very offshoring that destroyed the American industrial working class. Corporations used the stable global order, underwritten by US military power, to move manufacturing to countries with cheaper labor. The average American lost high-paying union jobs in industries like steel, textiles, and automotive manufacturing. The “empire” facilitated the deindustrialization of its own core.

The petrodollar and financialization

The empire is also propped up by the petrodollar system; the agreement that global oil trade is conducted in USD, creating exorbitant privilege for the US financial system. Really, it benefits Wall Street, the financial sector, and the federal government’s ability to borrow money cheaply, allowing the US to run massive trade deficits.

To the average American, this financialized economy has led to a hollowing out of the productive economy. The benefits of this system flow to the top 10%, inflating asset prices (stocks, real estate) while wage growth for the bottom 90% has stagnated for decades. The average American experiences this as a volatile economy where their job security is tied to the whims of global finance, not to any tangible benefit from the USD’s global status.

Erosion of civil society and democracy

A permanent state of war, justified by the architecture of empire, has created a domestic security state that increasingly encroaches on civil liberties. The Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, and the normalization of secrecy and executive power all trace their origins to imperial wars. For average Americans, this translates to a loss of privacy, degraded public discourse, and the state being more accountable to defence contractors than its own citizens.

During the Cold War, high levels of military spending coexisted with high unionization rates and a growing middle class which led to the perception that imperialism benefited the core population. In reality, this was a historical anomaly enabled by the fact the US was the only industrial power to have faced no major devastation or casualties on its home soil from WW2. It had a monopoly on production. The concessions it allowed for its working class at home were largely galvanized by a fear of the Red spectre to the East. Once the Soviet Union fell, so did the fear of a working class revolution at home, and so did workers’ protections and rights in America. Less restrained, the capitalists became emboldened.

To wrap it up

The average American does not benefit from their empire’s wars because the architecture of imperialism is designed for a transnational capitalist class, not a national workforce. The costs are socialized —borne by all taxpayers and a small group of military families— while the benefits are privatized (captured by defence contractors, financial institutions, and multinational corporations).

The empire facilitates a system where American workers must compete against a global labor force whose mobility is secured by US military power. The result for the average American is not prosperity, but a triple burden: high taxes for a military that doesn’t protect their job, the loss of social services to pay for it, and the physical and moral cost of endless, invasive wars against sovereign, indigenous nations to fill the pockets of a small, pedophilic class that exploits them both.

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Liberals operate from morally idealist framework, believing the primary motor for change is moral progress, pandering to changing hearts and minds. Marxists operate from a materialist framework, arguing that the fundamental shaping force of society is not in changing hearts and minds, but in changing material conditions. Specifically, how humans organize to have what they need to live.

Ruling classes love weaponizing idealism for the same reason they love weaponizing religion. Idealism enforces a purity vs. impure paradigm; perfection vs. imperfection. It’s easier to manipulate, divide, and also stagnate society this way. Waiting for flawless, morally perfect movements. Keeping people striving, and not doing. Trying to dream or pray the poverty away. It leads to extreme centering of the individual over analysis of a bigger system of which poverty is intentional and structural. Rugged individualism keeps people small before much stronger, larger organized forces.

While the masses stay stuck in idealism, the ruling class uses materialism at every move to create a world where choices are so constrained by material reality that people comply, even if they ideologically disagree.

Most Americans do not support Israel now. Yet they must still fund them. It doesn’t matter if the public hates them, they materially support them. The Epstein class employs intellectuals, planners, and strategists that use materialist analysis at every corner to manage their system. They understand that you don’t change society by changing minds, you change it by altering material conditions, so minds will follow.

Sanctions, cyber attacks, and blockades against anti-imperialist countries create the conditions for authoritarian governance and public dissent. People join the US military, primarily due to the benefits they’ll get if they do, combined with a lack of vision for a secure future for themselves otherwise.

The ruling class understands you do not need soldiers to believe in the mission, you only them to comply. The military’s primary recruiting grounds are poor, working-class communities. Recruiters aren’t in wealthy suburbs, they’re in the high schools of marginalized communities. When a town has no jobs, no affordable college, few prospects, and the military offers a steady paycheck, housing, it may seem like the only viable option for some in a reality shaped by social austerity policies and deindustrialization due to finance capitalism.

Cause the problem, sell the solution.

A young person with genuinely radical politics is forced to take on tens of thousands of dollars in student debt to go to school, upon graduation their radical consciousness can be easily suppressed by the material reality of their debt. They may take on the highest-paying job they can find, even if ideologically opposed. People may believe in public transit, walkable neighbourhoods. They may hate sitting in traffic, hate oil companies. But the ruling class has for a century systematically zoned cities to separate homes from jobs and invested trillions in highways over rails. The material conditions of lacking transit or sprawling suburbs force the participation and buy-in for a system one might ideologically oppose. The consciousness of hating traffic doesn’t change the fact people are stuck in it. Car dependence then naturalizes and becomes “common sense.”

In Western universities, any systematic, class-based analysis of society is dismissed as outdated, while liberal individualism, the idea that society is just a random collection of independent individuals, is presented as the norm. They focus on isolating situations and people from totality, and problem-solving within the existing system. You’re encouraged to ask, “How can we make this policy a little fairer?” rather than “What conditions created this policy, and whose class interests does it serve?” By promoting the idea that there is no objective truth, only 'narratives’ or ‘perspectives’, the ruling class can dismiss the scientific laws of social development discovered by Marxism, even though they themselves apply it all the time, and it’s the root of their success.

They know how to create the material conditions to achieve their objectives.
The question is, do we?

Buy Me A Coffee instead

She stands on the necks of the Global South to demand a seat at the head of the table. Her tears are a weapon. When the drone strikes at dawn, she is in the kitchen, baking bread for the soldiers, whispering that war is so hard on the families. She mistakes the spoils of the empire for her own hard-earned wage, the cheap cotton of her dress picked by fingers darker than her own, the rare earth in her electric vehicle mined by hands that will never drive it. She is not the oppressor, she insists, pointing at the men in suits. But she is the comfort woman of capital, the soft pillow upon which the hard heads of state rest.

Her liberation is paved with the rubble of other people’s homes. She mistakes the master’s house for a home, and asks only for a better room. South-facing, maybe, with higher ceilings and a door that locks. She will not burn it down. She will decorate it.

The “Temple Women” and the Victorian Moral Crusade in India

Imperial feminism is not new. It is sending Victorian women to India to rescue temple women, while the British East India Company bled the subcontinent dry. British missionaries saw devadasi temples, where women were dancers, musicians, and ritual performers, as a sign of Hindu degeneracy. Proof that India was a cesspool of sin requiring civilizing intervention. These were women who held land, enjoyed community status, and in some cases, had a lot of autonomy. They were not a monolith, some were respected artists. Others were in fact, exploited. Yet the British saw only one thing: prostitution. Victorian morality could not comprehend a framework in which female sexuality and art intersected outside of Christian marriage.

The campaign against the devadasis served multiple purposes for empire. It provided moral justification for colonial rule. Disrupted existing social structures, making communities more dependent on colonial authority. It painted Indian men as inherently incapable of governing themselves. And it gave British women a role in empire, a sense of purpose and power that they were denied at home. Back home they could not vote, and unlike the temple women, they could not own property in their names, could not work. In India, they could now be moral saviours. They could be agents of empire.

At the same time, the British East India Company was systematically dismantling the Indian economy. It destroyed native textile industries through tariffs, transformed farms into opium plantations to force-feed China addiction, collected ruinous taxes that led to repeated famines, and bled the subcontinent of its wealth. Tens of millions died in preventable famine, as their grain was stolen and exported to Britain. The Company’s rule was not a civilizing mission; it was a corporate takeover enforced by military violence.

The campaign succeeded. Devadasi temples were outlawed, but the women it was meant to save were abandoned, their land seized, communities shattered, and their art forms stigmatized. They did not become Victorian ladies, they became outcasts. And the British women moved on to the next cause. Empire continued its extraction. The image of the degraded temple woman remained in the Western imagination as proof of Islam’s or Hinduism’s inherent misogyny, never mind that the real degradation was inflicted by colonialism itself.

White Suffragists and the Weaponization of Racism

The struggle for women’s suffrage in the United States and Britain was long, hard-won, and morally complex. It is tempting to tell a simple story of brave women fighting bigotry, but the reality is more uncomfortable: many leading suffragists actively embraced racism as a political strategy.

In the United States after the Civil War, the suffrage movement split over the 15th Amendment, which granted the vote to black men but not to women. For some suffragists, this was an opportunity. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony campaigned against the amendment not simply because it excluded women, but because it elevated “inferior” men over “superior” white women. Stanton’s writings are painful to read: she argued that allowing black men to vote while denying white women would create “an aristocracy of sex” that placed “Sambos” and “Patrick” (Irish immigrants) over educated, virtuous white women. She warned of “coarse, ignorant, degraded” men ruling over their racial and moral betters.

This was not a fringe position. The National American Woman Suffrage Association, the movement’s mainstream organization, welcomed Southern white women by reassuring them that suffrage would not threaten white supremacy. They argued that educated, property-owning white women would outnumber black voters and could be used to counteract black political power. Some suffragists explicitly campaigned on the promise that women’s votes would ensure white control. They deployed the image of the black rapist, the immigrant drunkard, the Chinese coolie—all threats to white womanhood that only the ballot could contain.

In Britain, the suffragettes framed their demand in imperial terms. They argued that if British women could govern India and Africa alongside their husbands, they deserved the vote at home. They contrasted their own civilized virtue against the savagery of colonial subjects, suggesting that denying women the vote while granting it (theoretically) to colonized men was an inversion of natural hierarchy. The suffragette newspaper Votes for Women ran articles celebrating empire and arguing that women’s enfranchisement would strengthen British imperial rule.

This strategy worked, up to a point. It won over conservative politicians who feared democracy but trusted white women. It built coalitions across class lines by appealing to racial solidarity. It made suffrage respectable. But it also embedded racism deep within the movement’s DNA. When the 19th Amendment finally passed in the US, it was a victory for white women. Black women, Native women, Asian women, Latinas—most remained disenfranchised through poll taxes, literacy tests, violence, and citizenship restrictions for decades longer. The movement that had invoked their supposed degradation as a reason for white women’s votes abandoned them the moment the goal was achieved.

The Pattern Revealed

What connects these two histories is a pattern that persists today. Imperial feminism always requires a native man to serve as the villain—the depraved temple priest, the black rapist, the Muslim patriarch, the indigenous traditionalist. Against this figure, the Western woman appears as saviour, and the Western man appears as protector. The empire becomes not an exploiter, but a liberator. The destruction of native economies, the theft of land, the imposition of foreign rule—all are justified as necessary to save women from their own men.

The women being “saved” are rarely consulted. Their voices are filtered through missionary reports, colonial administrators, and Western feminists who claim to speak for them. Their actual desires for sovereignty, for land, for an end to bombing, for the right to define their own liberation are ignored or dismissed as backwards. They become symbols, not subjects. Their suffering is mined for moral currency and spent on projects that have nothing to do with them.

The same forces that bomb their villages, poison their water, and steal their land also arm and prop up the most reactionary local patriarchs when it suits their interests. The same Western powers that lecture about women’s rights fund the Saudi bombing of Yemeni women and provide diplomatic cover for the Burmese generals massacring Rohingya. Imperial feminism never asks about any of this. It cannot afford to. Its entire purpose is to make empire feel like love.

It is the same impulse that today sends Western NGOs into Afghanistan with programs for women’s empowerment while drone strikes level schools. Save the women, bomb the village. Liberate the uterus, occupy the country.

The logic is seductive because it contains a kernel of truth. Yes, women suffer under patriarchy. Yes, women in the Global South may face brutal systems of control. But imperial feminism refuses to ask why. It refuses to trace the lines from the structural adjustment program that gutted public services to the girl pulled from school to work. It refuses to connect the military base to the sex trade that springs up around it. It refuses to see that the very forces carrying the banner of women’s rights—the IMF, the Pentagon, the multinational corporation—are the same forces tightening the noose around every woman’s neck.

So the Afghan woman is told her liberation depends on accepting foreign troops. The Palestinian woman is told her liberation depends on condemning resistance. The Venezuelan woman is told her liberation depends on opening her country to corporate extraction. The Congolese woman is told her liberation depends on buying fair trade certification from the same companies that fund the militias. Always the same message: your freedom will come from us, on our terms, through our institutions, at the cost of your sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the empire marries itself to feminist rhetoric. NATO holds conferences on women, peace, and security while expanding its footprint. The World Bank funds girls’ education programs while bankrolling land grabs that displace their families. The language of liberation becomes the language of domination. Words like empowerment, agency, and choice are hollowed out and filled with new meaning: empowerment to participate in markets, agency to select among corporate options, choice to buy or to starve.

The women recruited into this project become ambassadors, CEOs, pundits, politicians. They are held up as proof that the system works, that merit prevails, that anyone can rise. Their success is deployed against those who question the system itself. See, a woman can do it. Why can’t you? The question never answered is: do what? Rise within a structure that destroys others? Achieve within a machine that grinds the majority down? Break a ceiling while standing on the necks of those below?

The brown woman who refuses this bargain is ignored or attacked. She is called backward, traditional, complicit in her own oppression. When she insists that her struggle is not against her father or her brother but against the same forces that displaced her uncle and poisoned her river, she is told she is changing the subject. When she points out that the foreign feminist does not speak for her, she is told she suffers from false consciousness. When she organizes with men from her community against the mining company or the military base, she is told she has betrayed her gender.

This is the function of imperial feminism: to divide, distract, disarm. It takes the energy of women’s liberation and channels it into support for the very structures that produce gendered violence in the first place. It teaches women to look sideways at their neighbours instead of upward at their exploiters. It makes the empire feel good about itself, and the colonizer to believe she is a liberator.

And it works. It works because it offers a simple story in a complex world. Reactionary policy is given progressive cover. Solidarity is transformed into charity, politics into philanthropy, liberation into a brand.

Refuse it.

Understand that the struggle against patriarchy cannot be separated from the struggle against capital, against empire, against every system that tells human beings they are worth more or less than others. To recognize that the woman across the border is not a project to be managed but a comrade to be joined. To accept that liberation, if it comes, can not be delivered by drones or NGOs or corporate feminism.

Buy Me A Coffee.

Uprisings need more than anger and protest, they need coordination and structure. In its absence, organic uprisings can be infiltrated by imperialist powers. From rebellious youth uprisings (“Gen Z” protests) to working-class labor movements — no one is automatically immune, and so every movement must be equipped to protect itself from sheep-dogging, hijacking and narrative manipulation. Iran’s protests are being infiltrated by Mossad agitators right now.

International law scholar in Iran, Dr. Helyeh Doutaghi has identified this as a core concern that presently and historically keeps plaguing uprisings in Iran:

In her interview with Vocal Politics:

“What we have witnessed over the past week in Iran is a protest rooted in legitimate material grievances of the people who initiated it. They were the traders, the shop keepers, the gold sellers. They exercised their right to come to the streets to protest in response to hyperinflation and neoliberal economic policies that have been intensified under conditions of sanctions over the past few years of economic warfare on Iran. They shut down their shops as a direct action of economic protest, they disturbed the order.

Yet the absence of a durable organization within them. Any political education, class-based, anti-imperialist consciousness, rendered those protests, like others historically in Iran, acutely vulnerably to rapid infiltration and escalation of violence by the imperialist powers. Almost immediately, as we saw in grievances such as the one that happened in ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’. We saw isolated incidents of violence against the police that were introduced and exploited in these protests. It was hijacked immediately. The protests were appropriated by Zionist actors in the country. This appropriation was then amplified by Western media. This is the playbook we have seen in the last five, six years. Multiple times, at least in the context of Iran. The events were framed immediately as the emergence of yet another imminent revolution and the scale and intensity of media coverage bore very little relation.”

She ends on an eyeopening note:

“I live in Iran. I commute often to central Tehran where it all started. I was there day one when I saw people protesting. What we saw in Western media really bore very little relevance to what was happening on the ground.”

Anarchic rebellions that weaponize destruction, but not creation, don’t plan or answer the question of what will fill the power vacuum the next day, what opposition will take its place, and wrecks public infrastructure without thinking about its material consequences in a moment of economic turmoil — these are movements that CIA-backed affiliates have the easiest time tapping into. They love these kinds of rebellions; directionless, structureless, reactionary, chaotic, short-sighted and therefore easy to infiltrate with their own structured, multi-front plan. Lacking internal guidance, external forces take the torch, and immaterial reactionaries can follow blindly.

Just as important as having internal cohesive organization is understanding the impact, cause-effect, (and agenda) of external material conditions.

In the case of Iran, the primary contradiction is sanctions.

Sanctions are class warfare and collective punishment against civilian populations. They are the sharpest tool in the shed for creating conditions for foreign intervention and imperialism. This is their main purpose, after all. The true self-determination of Iranian people free from foreign meddling is directly bound to the state of sanctions on them. Any voice that downplays this, or tries to deflect it from conversation, strongly indicates hijacked counterrevolutionary intent. These voices do not hold genuine Iranian sovereignty, liberation and prosperity in mind.

There is the health toll of sanctions on a population. We know per The Lancet that
US/EU sanctions contribute to half a million deaths worldwide annually, every year, since 1970.

Human Rights Watch has similarly identified sanctions as “causing unnecessary suffering to Iranian citizens afflicted with a range of diseases and medical conditions.”

But the current crisis in Iran is really exacerbated by the latest wave of economic sanctions. The “Maximum Pressure” sanctions were first placed during Trump’s first term. In contrast to the unilateral U.S. sanctions that began in 2018—under which other countries could still trade with Iran—the UN sanctions reimposed via snapback on October 2025 are binding on all member states. These measures, reinstated under Resolution 1929, require all 193 UN members to completely cut off trade, financial, and economic ties with Iran.

Sanctions largely harm the working class, yet are counterproductive to weakening governments themselves. By severing states from accountable international relations and trade networks, governments under sanctions must sometimes create black market economics and therefore are emboldened towards corruption.

According to a study by the European Journal of Political Economy, were it not for sanctions, the Iranian middle class would have expanded by 17%. By 2019, the middle class of the real Iran was 28% smaller than it should have been.

An analysis of Iran, one of the world’s most heavily sanctioned nations, reveals that sanctions have not only crippled the economy and affected Iranian’s access to critical healthcare, but also harmed the Iranian middle class — the group historically most active in advocating for reform and change.

Another material analysis that is required is a military one.

Iran is not Syria, Iraq, or Libya. It is a larger regional power much more equipped to sustain prolonged war with Israel. And, contrary to what Western media is amplifying, there have equally been pro-government rallies during the protests seeing tens of thousands of supporters.

From Iranian journalist Narges Bajoghli’s article in TIME Magazine ‘The Issues with Calling for Regime Change in Iran’:

“Despite Israel’s extensive and quite successful campaign of assassinations targeting senior IRGC commanders, the core of this group has not been hollowed out but hardened. A younger generation of more ideologically rigid commanders has emerged. They came of age in a regional military power, see themselves as the stewards of an embattled regional order, and push for more aggressive postures toward the United States and Israel.

If this war morphs into a war of state collapse-and it very well might-then what comes next will likely not be surrender. The Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force, which helped organize a patchwork of militias that bled American forces in Iraq for years, is well-positioned to do the same again. These networks-Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Afghan-were built precisely to extend deterrence and sow instability in the event of direct conflict.

The war with Iraq scarred Iran, however it taught the country that survival does not require parity but endurance. In the decades since, the Iranian state has reorganized itself not for peace, but for siege. Its military doctrine is not built for conquest but for resistance. Iran won’t simply absorb aerial bombardment or shrug off sabotage.

Moreover, Iran is a civilizational state. The identity binding many Iranians is not limited to a flag or a government but rooted in a deeper historical memory stretching back through empire, invasion, forced partitions, foreign coups, and colonial interludes. To be sure, the Islamic Republic has inflicted great suffering upon the Iranian people and enraged many Iranian protestors, but to mistake that rage for a longing to be ‘liberated’ by foreign forces is to repeat the catastrophic delusions that defined the Iraq war in 2003.”

From the 1960s until the early 1990s, the Soviet Union trained thousands of cadres of MK, the armed wing of the ANC (African National Congress) to fight against the South African apartheid regime. Nelson Mandela, on his visit to Moscow in 1999 where he was awarded two honorary doctorates from the Russian Academy of Sciences, gave his thanks to the USSR for the “solidarity of the Russian people in the South African fight against apartheid and for freedom.” This is not the only time Kalashnikov rifles and Soviet trade came in handy in Africa. There’s a reason the Mozambican flag has a Soviet AK on it. Their own liberation from Portuguese colonialism, as well as that of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Ethiopia, Somalia, Congo, Algeria, and Egypt - were also made possible with the Soviet Union’s military, economic, and political support. The USSR also had significant ties and early cooperation treaties that provided various forms of aid to Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Tunisia, Morocco and Benin. You get the picture.

Multipolarity helps challenge the monopoly on sanctions, the monopoly on violence, and exceptionalism before international law. Monopolies are typically something that that anarchists and leftcoms are against, yet they completely lack this analysis when it comes to imperialism. Suddenly, every other country needs to be a socialist utopia to be allowed more power (all the while excusing the hegemony of the empire of pedophiles who bombs multiple countries every single year).

The culture and tolerance of US exceptionalism and internalized imperialism is the material consequence of years of colonial dominance. Analysis on capitalism alone doesn’t get us there.

The working class of Britain and the working class of Congo, or Burkina Faso, are not the same. No two working classes are the same. Marx himself wrote about this and called it the international division of labor. Lenin called it the labor aristocracy. It’s not just “no war but class war”. Reading the works of Walter Rodney and Kwame Nkrumah informs the colonial side of the class struggle. The term ‘Global South’ refers to periphery states to an imperial core that has had their resources and labor siphoned in unequal exchange for centuries and locked into a system of perpetual inequality. While the imperial core, despite their own class struggles, still materially benefit from this unequal siphoning and exchange. The working class of Britain still benefiting from imperialism has had an effect on their culture, tolerance, and revolutionary conditions.

We can’t ignore that countries are in different stages of development and that is going to inform their revolutionary conditions. Developing countries are going to push for industrialization, decolonization and national sovereignty as they had their development ruptured and interrupted due to imperialism. The West has not had to worry about these basic things for centuries. Our conditions are not the same as theirs.
Similarly, we cannot tell the countries who are the least responsible for climate change, yet will be the most impacted by it, to not develop accordingly.

Our revolutionary conditions in the West are stunted right now. Years of individualism has impacted our culture, and that includes the most radical leftist spaces. Marxism in the west is not really about building socialism right now, it’s ideological self-masturbation; wanking over who has the best understanding of theory. It lacks the required urgency, prioritization strategizing, and collectivism needed for a revolutionary movement to take off.

In the imperial core we have become more tolerant and complacent. This is the reality of living somewhere where the bread and circus is kept just on tap. Most of the resources to make our phones and other electronics are mined in China or Africa, then they are manufactured somewhere in Asia. Yet buying an iPhone is the cheapest here in the West. Whereas in Congo they are forced to import the finished product back at a much higher price than we pay, despite being a key player who helps make the phone. They’re punished and exploited by capital for being at the bottom of the supply chain, when the whole chain is needed. This has been exponentially deepening inequality worldwide over the years.

Something as simple as buying a phone or a dishwasher or a fridge is deeply rooted in imperial exploitation. Most people don’t have to think about whether they can have a fridge or a phone.

The revolution will not be led nor started by western Marxists. Our job is to get out of the way of true revolutionary movements. This doesn’t mean assuming defeatism or nihilism, just an honest conversation about where we are at. I look around, and most people are using the deepening polycrisis as an excuse to tune further out, not in. Protect their peace.

Those of us that have had our economic and political awakening must keep going.

“But they invaded Ukraine!”
Their neighbour Ukraine was their main oil route into Europe.
Europe, their former biggest market. Ukraine and the EU elites, without consulting the European population, as we don’t have a say in how our economies are run, decided to start pivoting Russia’s oil markets away from them and into the hands of USA, also much more expensive for us, the citizens who pay the price.

Ukraine was signing multiple $10 billion dollar gas deals with Western oil companies in 2013, a year before Russia’s first ever invasion, and the expanded NATO solidified this threat. Russia witnessed NATO get weaponized to destroy and pivot Libya’s oil markets under US control, they are not fantasizing that they are more than a defence alliance. They have seen it, and how it is used to submit trade to US hegemony.

“But Russia is a colonial power, they have also invaded in the past.”
As are many key NATO members. Russia has also been invaded by the West. By France under Napoleon, and Nazi Germany, both by land through Ukraine, for that matter.

Ask people why their border considerations are ignored.
Why the world is expected to accept and normalize US market dominance and bases everywhere.

Europeans chose to align with the world’s biggest economy and empire, and then clutch their pearls at one that is not even in top 10 biggest economies. Russia scrambles to get gold cause their currency is so shot, meanwhile the USDollar and Euro are the world’s reserve currencies that have the power to dictate and sanction whole populations who don’t conform to their wishes. The Ruble is not even a reserve currency, and Russia’s economy is not even a finance capital nation.

((Schrodinger’s Russia))

Europeans unconsciously understand this as soon as you start saying anything positive about Russia’s endurance in this war. They’ll puff up their chest and talk about how much higher their country’s GDP is than Russia’s, how much more valuable their currency is than the pathetic Ruble. But when they need to be victims, Russia is a powerful empire also trying to colonize all of Europe somehow.

European imperialism and aggression is masked.

Right now we have “carbon leakage” going on, such as the case of Norway, where developed countries can appear to reduce their domestic emissions by offshoring manufacturing to other nations. The climate impact is simply relocated, not reduced. This is political. How many people do you know refer to the stereotype of India or China being dirty, polluting nations while Scandinavia is captured in scenes of crisp, fresh mountain air— don’t they just have it all figured out? Meanwhile everything in their households are getting made elsewhere.

When you consider “consumption-based” accounting, we see that many wealthy countries in Europe and North America are net importers of emissions.

Norway is a major oil and gas exporter. Its fossil fuels are not burned within its borders, so the resulting emissions are counted in the importing countries. If measured by consumption, Norway’s carbon footprint would be one of the highest, highlighting the complexity of assigning “fault.” If everyone were to consume like Norway, we would need approximately 3 extra planets to sustain us.

The best way to understand emissions is synthesizing all data points:

Total emissions show where the largest volumes of greenhouse gases are being released.

Per capita emissions shows the carbon intensity of lifestyles and economic activities within a country.

Historical & consumption-based emissions addresses questions of historical responsibility and fairness in a globalized economy.

The last point is the one no Westerner or rich Gulf Arab state wants to examine. It would require developed nations to scale back their consumption while underdeveloped nations get a chance to finally industrialize.

Tackling emissions is not a one size fits all formula, it must look uniquely different everywhere it’s applied.

Healthcare underperforming, homelessness increasing —
in the world’s richest country, how is this acceptable?

Seize your statecraft.

It wasn’t just a lack of knowledge.
We know more than we could ever learn now,
Shadows grow smaller, illuminated
Excuses run dry and start to crack,
We can no longer blame earthquakes and thunder on punishment from the gods,
Declare women with ‘hysteria’.
We’re more comfortable now, in the free world at least
The carrot hangs closer,
Visible, just out of reach
It will take longer here to resist.

Marketers in high office cracked the code,
Look, they’ve co-opted the language of struggle, they say words like tyranny now
Look, they prey on identity, weaponize victimhood,
Look, the pendulum swings between two false choices,
We’re at least better than those lunatics, so we can feel good about that,
and look away.
The culprit snuck by us again, shit,
It wasn’t something red or blue.
Look, the bread is saltier, the circus louder now,
People keep falling into cults, despite all the documentaries,

We’ve learned the psychology behind most things,
No, it doesn’t change a thing -
They’re blaming immigrants instead of landlords again,
Landlords, instead of system design,
The Bedouin who says no, instead of the oil profiteer,
Look, the latest class struggle is being diverted again,
What if the next face of war was both
Black, and a woman.

Be hard on institutions, soft on each other,
another meme says.

The font looks handwritten.
When can we be hard on them, together?
Stuck in soft on institutions, soft and hard on each other.
Swipe past a life coach telling everyone, no shame, in caps, so you can’t miss it.
But we’re not supposed to justify every shitty behaviour.

I thought this was the fall,
It’s only the beginning of the start of the fall.

One foot in the free world, two eyes piercing out.

Feet float weightless, ears sink to fill with nothing.

Nothingness, not as apathy or escape,

but as slow breath tuning me in.

Another day, another massacre.

Another day, seduced by the world to betray what I know, the people I’ve talked to.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” George Orwell, 1984.

Living by the strength of a sturdy tarp and limited flour,
What good is a tent if a bomb drops.

Finding energy at the bottom of small cups of water to both survive, and resist.

I’ll message again today to see if they’re still alive.

I hope they can answer, I know her baby needed surgery.
She said there was no anesthesia.

Streaks of red on new faces filter through the blue glow of a phone screen,

The only light in my room at night.

Small limbs collect in bags,

Fathers dig through rubble to find the missing parts of their kin,
But they cannot piece them back together.

I should practice my Arabic more,

the writing is hardest to learn.

“Why is our blood so cheap?”

I don’t have answers, but I see it too.

Some lives priced higher on the shelf, others disposable.
“One cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own.”

James Baldwin - true. But many are okay with diminishing their own.

I seek the safety of those who’ve plucked the thick glass from their eyes, so they can finally see.

How is glass both clear and obstructive,

Do any shards remain,

and,

which other James Baldwin quote am I feeling today?

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented
me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

Yeah, that’s it.
I feel unrelatable,
But I know I’ve never been less alone.