The history of the last two hundred years is the history of the rise and contestation of two such key currencies: the British pound sterling in the nineteenth century, and, far more expansively, the US dollar from the twentieth century to the present.

The current global order, underpinned by the dollar, grants the United States what has appropriately been called an ‘exorbitant privilege’: the power to issue the currency that the rest of the world needs as a store of value, means of payment, and unit of account.¹ This allows the United States to finance its deficits, consume more than it produces, and project its military power simply because its public debt is treated as the safest asset on the planet. It also enables the United States to host the world’s most important financial market, shaping expectations that extend far beyond the financial sphere and influencing investment and production worldwide. In turn, these financial flows establish key conditions that determine the direction of global finance and limit the autonomy of dependent and subordinated countries.

National currencies exist within a hierarchy defined in relation to the dollar. For countries of the Global South, this architecture imposes a high cost. Their currencies are treated as volatile financial assets, and their economies are held hostage to the discipline imposed by international financial capital. The need to accumulate dollars as a defence against speculative attacks and to guarantee imports results in a perverse net transfer of wealth from the Global South to the Global North, particularly to investors and speculators in Western Europe and the United States. Given these structural features of contemporary capitalism, understanding the rise of the dollar, the mechanisms of its present domination, and the structural limits facing any alternative is therefore a central task for those who seek a more just and cooperative international order.

Money, Value, and the Need for a World Currency

In any society based on the division of labour and the exchange of commodities, money emerges as a practical necessity. When different producers specialise – one growing wheat, another making cloth, yet another extracting ore – they need to exchange their products with each other in order to meet their needs. But direct exchange, or barter, presents obvious difficulties: the farmer who wants cloth must find a weaver who at that same moment wants wheat, in the exact amount, and accepts the proposed exchange ratio.

Money solves this problem by functioning as a universal equivalent: a special commodity that everyone accepts in exchange for any other. With money, the farmer can sell wheat to any buyer, keep the value received, and later buy cloth from any seller. Money thus fulfils three basic functions: it serves as a means of circulation, facilitating exchange; a unit of account, allowing the value of different commodities to be compared; and a store of value, allowing wealth to be preserved for future use.

In Marxist analysis, money is not an arbitrary invention or a mere technical instrument. It is the material expression of a social relation called value. The value of a commodity corresponds to the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. When millions of independent producers exchange commodities on the market, they are, in practice, comparing quantities of human labour. Money is therefore the form through which that comparison becomes possible and visible. It represents social labour in condensed form.²

Within a single country, the use of money is relatively simple: there is a national currency, issued and guaranteed by the state, which all inhabitants recognise and accept. But what happens when producers in different countries want to trade with one another? Let us consider a concrete example. A Brazilian company exports coffee to Germany. The German importer has euros, while the Brazilian exporter needs reais to pay workers, suppliers, and taxes. How can these two currencies be reconciled? The problem unfolds on several levels. First, an exchange rate must be established: how many reais are equivalent to one euro? Second, there must be a mechanism to convert one currency into the other. Third, both parties must trust that the currency they receive will hold its value and be accepted by others.

When international trade was small-scale and sporadic, such problems could be resolved on a case-by-case basis, often with universally accepted precious metals such as gold and silver. But as the world market expanded, that solution became insufficient. As international trade grew, there emerged a need for an organised system to settle accounts between countries. It is not practical for each individual transaction to involve either the physical transfer of gold or the direct conversion of one currency into another. A clearing mechanism is needed. Imagine that, over a given period, Brazil exports US$100 million in coffee to Germany and imports US$80 million in machinery. Rather than making two separate transfers, the two amounts are offset against each other, and Germany only needs to transfer the net difference of US$20 million to Brazil. This is the principle of clearing.

For such a mechanism to work on a global scale, involving dozens of countries and currencies, a common reference point is required – a currency that everyone accepts as a unit of account and means of payment for settling balances. Historically, that role was first played by gold and later by the national currencies of economically dominant countries. The advantages associated with controlling the reference currency are anything but simple. They include:

1. the possibility for the issuing state to expand its capacity for debt and spending disproportionately in relation to other national states;
2. the use of the currency as an instrument of foreign policy and domination through control over key channels of international liquidity, as in the case of economic sanctions; and
3. the advantages granted to the international operations of its banks, which, because they operate within a fractional reserve system backed by a currency that can be expanded, occupy a privileged position in the circuit of global high finance.

This gives rise to fundamental questions: who issues this reference currency? Through what mechanisms does it become dominant? What are the consequences when a country’s national currency is elevated to the status of a world currency?

The World Market Expands and Imperial Currencies Take Hold

Since the sixteenth century, the expansion of the world market has been driven by colonial conquest, the trafficking of enslaved people, the seizure of land and natural resources, and the imposition of unequal trading relations on subjugated populations. Originary accumulation, which Marx analysed in the first volume of Capital, was a global and violent process.³ As capitalism consolidated itself as the dominant mode of production, the volume of international trade grew exponentially.

In the eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution intensified this process: the European powers needed raw materials from across the world, such as cotton, minerals, and agricultural products, and sought markets for their manufactured goods. This growth made the problem of an international currency increasingly urgent. With thousands of daily transactions between dozens of countries, an organised international monetary system became indispensable: a set of rules, institutions, and practices that defined how currencies relate to one another, how payments are settled, and how trade imbalances are adjusted. The solution adopted in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reflected the power structure at the time: a world divided among competing colonial empires. Each imperial power organised its own monetary zone, integrating its colonies and spheres of influence into a system of trade, credit, taxation, and payments centred on its national currency.

As the leading industrial, commercial, and financial power of the nineteenth century, Britain made the pound sterling the principal currency of international trade, enforcing its system of ‘imperial preferences’ on the rest of the world. The so-called gold standard, which prevailed from the 1870s until 1914, was in practice a sterling-gold standard: sterling was the currency in which most trade contracts were denominated, major commodities were priced, and international loans were issued.

The sterling system’s dominance as an international currency was made possible by draining wealth from the colonies. India maintained large current-account surpluses (meaning that it earned more from exports and other external payments than it spent abroad) with continental Europe, the United States, Canada, and Japan, but it ran a current-account deficit with Britain (meaning that it paid more to Britain than it received from it). This was partly because of British exports to India and, above all, the obligations imposed by the British on the colony, including ‘gifts’ of huge sums of wealth transferred from British India to the metropole.⁴ As S. B. Saul writes in Studies in British Overseas Trade 1870–1914, ‘The key to Britain’s whole payments pattern lay in India, financing as she probably did more than two-fifths of Britain’s total deficits’.⁵

The British colonies – from India to Africa and the Caribbean to Oceania – were integrated into the metropole’s monetary zone through the British system of imperial preferences. Their exports were quoted in sterling; their imports, largely supplied by Britain because of the metropole’s trade monopoly, were paid for in sterling; and their banking systems operated with sterling as their reference currency. Colonial populations were forced to obtain sterling to pay taxes and buy essential goods, which subordinated them entirely to the terms of trade set by the metropole.

The French colonial empire – stretching across North and West Africa, Indochina, and islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean – constituted its own monetary zone based on the franc. To this day, remnants of that structure survive in the CFA franc, used by fourteen African countries and tied first to the French franc, then to the euro.⁶ Although they did not possess a formal colonial empire comparable to those of the European powers, the United States exercised economic hegemony over much of the Americas from the late nineteenth century onwards. An early expression of this ambition was the Monroe Doctrine (1823), often summarised by the phrase ‘America for the Americans’, which opposed further European colonisation or intervention in the Americas while asserting the United States’ claim to regional pre-eminence. The dollar circulated widely in Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of South America, often imposed through military interventions and the presence of US companies that controlled strategic sectors, such as the United Fruit Company in Central America. Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Portugal also maintained their own colonial monetary spheres, although on a smaller scale.

The result was a fractured international monetary system. There was no world currency but rather several competing regional currencies, each dominant within its own sphere of influence. Though sterling was the most important globally, it was not universal. This system reflected the structure of imperialism as analysed by Lenin and other Marxists in the early twentieth century: a world divided among rival capitalist powers, each controlling its own bloc of colonial and semi-colonial territories. The tensions between these blocs – the struggle for markets, raw materials, and fields of investment – were among the primary causes of the First World War (1914–1918).⁷

The war destroyed this order. It demanded colossal expenditures, financed through monetary issuance and indebtedness. Most countries suspended gold convertibility. Britain, once the world’s great creditor, emerged as a debtor. The United States, which entered the war late and supplied the Allies, became the primary international creditor.

The interwar period (1918–1939) was marked by failed attempts to restore the gold standard, chronic exchange-rate instability, competitive devaluations – the so-called currency wars – and the collapse of international trade following the crisis of 1929. The Great Depression showed that a disorganised international monetary system was incompatible with the ‘stability’ of capitalism.

The Second World War (1939–1945) created the conditions for a radical reorganisation. The United States emerged from the conflict as the only major power whose economy was not only intact but strengthened. Though global power was now shared with the Soviet Union, the United States stood out as the leading capitalist power: it was willing to keep capital flows relatively open, allow foreign claims on US assets, and use its currency as a world currency. By the end of the war, the United States held around two-thirds of the world’s gold reserves and its industry accounted for nearly half of global manufactured output – not to mention that its territory had not been devastated by the war.⁸ This asymmetry of power allowed the United States to impose a new international monetary architecture. At the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, a system was created that, for the first time in history, established a single national currency as the axis of the world monetary system: the US dollar.

The Bretton Woods system marked the transition from a world of competing monetary zones linked to rival empires to a single, dollar-centred monetary order led by the United States. This process represented the shift from an inter-imperialist system, characterised by rivalry between multiple powers, to an imperialist model of unipolar order led by the United States in which one dominant power organised the system as a whole.⁹ This transition was neither automatic nor purely economic. It was the result of war, the destruction of rival powers, the military occupation of former empires such as Germany and Japan, and the construction of a vast network of military bases, alliances, and international institutions under US leadership.

How the Dollar Became Hegemonic

The real consolidation of the dollar as the dominant currency was the result of a strategic project meticulously carried out by the United States during and immediately after the Second World War. The rise of the dollar was not a historical accident; it was the result of three decisive strategic moves.

I. Financing the Wars

The United States used its position as an ‘arsenal of democracy’, a term coined by US president Franklin D. Roosevelt, to structure global dependence on its currency. Initially, the Cash-and-Carry rule of 1937 required buyers of US supplies to pay immediately in dollars or gold and transport the goods themselves, a condition that favoured countries with access to hard currency, gold reserves, and naval capacity.

Later, the Lend-Lease mechanism allowed the United States to supply allied countries with military equipment, food, fuel, and other goods on credit or deferred payment rather than requiring immediate purchase. But it also had a deeper structural effect: by the end of the war, the Allied powers and dozens of other countries had accumulated massive debts denominated in dollars. Given their wartime vulnerability, dependence on US supplies, and limited bargaining power, the United States could impose the currency in which its credits would be denominated. This created a permanent structural demand for the US dollar. Countries now had to export real goods or contract new debts to obtain the dollars required to settle their debt obligations.¹⁰

II. Control over Oil

The second pillar was to secure control over the energy source that would fuel postwar industrial capitalism. Oil transformed the logic of conflict from the First World War onwards. It became the central natural resource of the international system, and control over producing regions became a core element of global geopolitical disputes. More specifically, oil became the main fuel of the armed forces and assumed a decisive position in the world transport matrix, and its derivatives, such as fuel, plastics, fertilisers, synthetic materials, and petrochemicals, came to be widely used across countless production chains. This had further implications for international relations: oil became a recurring instrument on the diplomatic chessboard, functioning as a mechanism of pressure, retaliation, deterrence, support, or strategic backing. In other words, states could use access to oil, oil prices, and control over producing regions to reward allies, punish adversaries, and shape geopolitical outcomes.

By 1940 the United States was the dominant oil power, accounting for 63% of global oil production.¹¹ As it became clear that the future centre of gravity of oil production would shift to the Middle East, the United States acted decisively. As early as 1933, US companies had acquired exploration rights in Saudi Arabia. In 1943, President Roosevelt incorporated the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia into the ‘dollar monetary territory’, authorising the financing of Ibn Saud’s kingdom through Lend-Lease. The United States’ intense diplomatic and military activity in the region, which consolidated its dominance over Saudi Arabia, laid the basis for oil from this new nerve centre to be priced and traded in dollars, a process that was institutionalised in the 1970s through the petrodollar system. Saudi Arabia was thus transformed into a US zone of influence and economic space and incorporated into the dollar’s monetary sphere.¹² This decision compelled most countries, especially industrialised and energy-importing nations, to join the dollar’s monetary territory. In order to buy energy, they first had to obtain dollars.

In this sense, the imposition of a monetary architecture on the global oil market was more decisive than direct control over production. From the 1970s onwards, this move was institutionalised through the ‘petrodollar’, especially with the oil shocks (the sharp increases in oil prices that followed the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the oil embargo by Arab members of the Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC). Oil-producing Arab states used oil as a political weapon and OPEC price increases helped quadruple the price of oil, pushing the world economy into a severe crisis. In this context, the Nixon administration negotiated a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia. The terms were: the Saudis would sell oil exclusively in dollars and invest their surpluses in US Treasury securities (US government debt instruments such as Treasury bonds). In return, the United States would guarantee military protection to the Saudi kingdom. The other OPEC countries soon followed the same model. By tying the world’s main commodity to its currency, the United States structurally expanded the international reach of the dollar.

III. The Bretton Woods System

In 1944, at Bretton Woods, the United States formalised and institutionalised its hegemony, especially in the economic sphere. In 1945, the Yalta Conference helped reorganise the geopolitical and military order after the war by setting the terms for the occupation of Germany, the division of spheres of influence in Europe, and the postwar balance between the major powers. In monetary terms, the Yalta agreements stipulated that German war reparations would be accounted for in dollars.

At Bretton Woods, two opposing visions of the postwar order collided. The British proposal, led by John Maynard Keynes, was radically different from the one that prevailed. Keynes proposed the ‘Bancor’, a supranational international unit of account that would be controlled by a multilateral body called the Clearing Union. His aim was to create a symmetrical system that would penalise both chronically deficit countries and chronically surplus countries. In essence, Keynes’s proposal sought to prevent the kind of ‘exorbitant privilege’ later associated with the dollar from passing from sterling to the dollar by ensuring that no single national currency could become the anchor of the international monetary system.

Keynes’s proposal was summarily defeated. Given the balance of forces, the US plan, led by Harry Dexter White, prevailed. White’s plan was centred on US power: the dollar would be defined as the international unit of account and would be the only currency with full convertibility into gold, at the fixed rate of US$35 per ounce of gold. All other currencies would maintain convertibility into the dollar at fixed but adjustable exchange rates.

To manage this new order, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, today the World Bank) were created. The capital of both institutions was defined in dollars, and their structure was designed to guarantee US control. The voting power of each member country was linked to its quota or capital subscription. In the IMF, these subscriptions were paid partly in gold and partly in national currency. In the IBRD, part of the capital had to be paid in gold or dollars. Since the United States held the largest share in both institutions, with Britain in second place, an asymmetrical decision-making structure was consolidated. In the case of the IMF, because crucial decisions require a qualified majority of 85% of the vote, the United States acquired, in practice, veto power over fundamental reforms.¹³

The Centrality and Decline of Dollar Hegemony in the Twentieth Century

The Bretton Woods system, sometimes called the dollar-gold standard, consolidated the centrality of the dollar and of the United States in the world economy. But the system could not function by itself. It needed liquidity – enough dollars circulating internationally to allow trade, payments, and reconstruction to take place. The devastated economies of Europe and Japan did not have the dollars needed to import inputs, restart exports, or rebuild cities, infrastructure, and productive apparatuses.

The United States solved this problem through the Marshall Plan for Europe (1948–1952) and the Dodge Plan for Japan (1949), which provided the dollars needed to finance reconstruction. These plans ‘saved’ the Bretton Woods system by ensuring that rebuilding Washington’s strategic allies would integrate them fully into the dollar’s monetary territory from the start. At the same time, the United States encouraged the global expansion of its multinational corporations, which entered these reconstructed markets through dollar-denominated direct investment. Because the dollars supplied were, to a great extent, used to buy goods and services produced in the United States itself, the plans also won domestic support from various economic sectors. In a conjuncture of cooling domestic activity, aggravated by the growth of industrial capacity during the war years in Europe and the Pacific, this external demand helped sustain the US economy.

From a strategic standpoint, the United States not only made possible so-called reconstruction and growth ‘miracles’ in several countries, stabilising regions central to the logic of the Cold War, but also consolidated the hegemonic position of the dollar. In the decades that followed, the areas under its influence experienced a long cycle of expansion and prosperity anchored in the centrality of the dollar.

More concretely, while financing economic recovery in regions central to the containment of the USSR, the United States reinforced the primacy of the dollar by:

1. injecting dollars directly into allied economies through programmes such as the Marshall Plan;
2. significantly expanding its military spending abroad, denominated in dollars, as in the case of the Korean War;
3. unilaterally opening its market to exports from strategic partners, thereby guaranteeing them dollar revenues;
4. accepting that these countries would maintain artificially undervalued exchange rates, using the dollar as their monetary reference; and
5. encouraging outward direct investment from its large corporations, which naturally took place in dollars given the origin of those firms.

In addition, the United States tolerated unilateral controls on cross-border capital movements, accepted the non-convertibility of other currencies, did not react forcefully to protectionist policies, and even sent technical assistance missions. This tolerance was conditional: Washington permitted its allies to use state intervention and trade protections while keeping them within the dollar-centred order.

The Triffin Dilemma

Despite its apparent solidity, the Bretton Woods system contained a fatal contradiction identified by the economist Robert Triffin. The ‘Triffin Dilemma’ exposed the logical flaw in using a national currency as an international one. The contradiction was as follows: for world trade and economic growth to expand, the world needed a growing supply of international liquidity – that is, more dollars. But in order to provide those dollars to the rest of the world, the United States had to run balance-of-payments deficits, meaning that it had to send more dollars abroad through spending, lending, investment, and imports than it received back from abroad. However, by issuing more and more dollars than it held in gold reserves, the United States would inevitably undermine global confidence in the dollar’s convertibility into gold.¹⁴ The system was therefore doomed. If the United States stopped running these deficits – that is, stopped supplying the world with dollars – world trade would stagnate. If it continued, confidence in the dollar would collapse.

During the 1960s, this contradiction became critical. Massive increases in US public spending, driven simultaneously by the Vietnam War and domestic social programmes, led to growing deficits and uncontrolled money issuance. At the same time, US hegemony was being challenged by revolutions in the periphery and by criticism from European allies, especially the French. Even the IMF created Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) in 1969 – a synthetic supranational reserve asset nicknamed ‘paper gold’, whose value was based on a basket of currencies – in an attempt to create a source of liquidity that did not depend on US deficits.

In 1971, the Triffin Dilemma reached a breaking point. With surplus countries, led by France, exchanging dollars for gold, US reserves fell drastically. On 15 August 1971, President Richard Nixon acted. In a unilateral decision that reconfigured a system that had been created multilaterally, Nixon suspended the dollar’s convertibility into gold indefinitely. The dollar-gold standard was dead. The world entered a new era: that of flexible exchange rates, financialisation, and a fiat dollar. The hegemonic currency no longer had any backing in a physical commodity; its value was determined purely by confidence – or, more precisely, by the economic, financial, military, and geopolitical power of the United States.

After 1973, in the face of successive devaluations and instability in the dollar’s value, major capitalist countries adopted a regime of ‘floating exchange rates’. In other words, currencies ceased to have fixed parity with the dollar and their value came to be determined in each national economy’s foreign exchange market, where currencies are bought and sold according to demand, supply, interest rates, trade flows, and expectations about each economy.

The Interest-Rate Shock and Dollar ‘Diplomacy’

Faced with growing challenges to the US economy, especially in the economic and monetary spheres, the United States resorted to what came to be known as the interest-rate coup. In response to domestic inflationary pressures and concern over the weakening dollar, Paul Volcker, then chair of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve, raised short-term US interest rates from around 10–11% in 1979 to nearly 20% by late 1980 and early 1981. This sharply increased borrowing costs across the world because much international credit was denominated in dollars or tied to US financial conditions.¹⁵

According to the Brazilian economist Maria da Conceição Tavares in her seminal text ‘A retomada da hegemonia norte-americana’ (The Resumption of North American Hegemony), before the interest-rate coup the private banking system had been operating largely beyond the control of central banks, especially the Federal Reserve.¹⁶ Transnational branch networks structured a regional division of labour within the firms themselves, often at odds with the national interests of the United States, and fostered growing competition among capitals that proved unfavourable to the US economy. Overall, a world economy without a clearly defined hegemonic pole contributed to the disorganisation of the postwar order and to the growing fragmentation of private and regional interests. From 1979 onwards, with the interest-rate coup, the conduct of US domestic and foreign economic policy moved precisely in the direction of reversing these tendencies and recovering command over international finance.

Tavares used the expression ‘the diplomacy of the strong dollar’ to refer to this unilateral US action, which made deliberate use of US monetary and financial power as an instrument of foreign policy and as a means of reconstructing US hegemony.¹⁷ The rise in interest rates cannot be understood only as a monetary policy measure aimed at dealing with domestic US macroeconomic problems. It was a central move in reasserting dollar hegemony and completely restructuring the international monetary and financial system.

When US interest rates are high, wealthy investors leave their positions in other countries and seek gains from the interest-rate differential offered by US public debt – that is, from the higher returns paid by US Treasury securities compared with assets elsewhere. As a result, the Eurodollar market, which had been developing in Europe outside the control of the US central bank, largely returned to the financial centre of Wall Street. That move reinforced US domination over financial capital and strengthened the power of its banking system. In this sense, the US currency was used as a geo-economic weapon: by controlling interest rates, liquidity, and access to international credit through the dollar-centred financial system, the United States disciplined allies, brought competitors into line, and deepened the dependence of the periphery. Thus, the policy of high interest rates and a strong dollar is not merely economics: it is a strategy of power.

This action, however, had consequences. First, it plunged the United States and the rest of the world into a prolonged recession as higher borrowing costs squeezed firms, households, banks, and indebted states. The result was a wave of bankruptcies, including among firms and even some US banks. Second, it caused a sudden contraction of international credit, inflicting damage especially on the capitalist periphery, which had taken advantage of the period of high international liquidity to accumulate dollar debts at floating interest rates – debts whose costs rose sharply once US rates increased. Third, the interest-rate coup led to the recentralisation of interbank credit and the large international banks in New York under the Federal Reserve’s umbrella, placing the international private banking system more firmly under US monetary command.

Another objective of the interest-rate coup was to bring US competitors in line. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan had achieved strong industrial and technological dynamism, generating growing trade surpluses with the United States and appearing to be on a path to becoming the world’s largest creditor as the United States became (and remains) the world’s largest debtor. With high interest rates, the dollar remained overvalued and the enormous returns on US Treasury securities produced a capital inflow into the United States, including from Japan, with Japanese firms and banks buying US Treasury bonds. Even while running trade surpluses, Japan found itself in a position in which it financed the US deficit by buying dollar assets, and its own development became increasingly tied to the US financial system and asset cycle.

When the US trade deficit with Japan exploded and domestic political pressure increased, the second part of the disciplining process began. In 1985, the Reagan administration threatened heavy protectionist measures and forced a coordination agreement in the G5 in what became known as the Plaza Accord. The goal was to bring about a coordinated devaluation of the dollar against the yen and the German mark. The result came quickly: between September 1985 and April 1986, the yen appreciated by around 35% against the dollar, making Japanese exports more expensive, weakening Japan’s trade advantage, and helping contain the yen’s potential as a rival reserve currency.¹⁸ Then came the Louvre Accord of 1987, which sought to stabilise exchange-rate parities after this sharp correction. According to Brazilian economists Tavares and Luis Eduardo Melin, this was not a neutral technical adjustment but a political move aimed at consolidating US power: the United States used its position at the centre of the system to force Japan to accept a strong appreciation of the yen and a reorganisation of its growth pattern.¹⁹

The United States thus compelled Japan to adjust its growth path, exchange rate, and financial policy to suit the interests of US hegemony. This ensured that the yen would not become a rival reserve currency and that Japanese surpluses would be recycled in ways that benefited the financing of the US deficit and US financial leadership. Rather than a rupture, what occurred was Japan’s reabsorption into an order commanded by the dollar: the country retained high productive sophistication but under strong financial and geopolitical constraints defined in Washington.

How the Dollar Sustains Itself

The collapse of Bretton Woods, paradoxically, did not weaken the dollar. On the contrary, it freed the United States from any material constraint on its monetary policy and consolidated a new form of hegemony, no longer anchored in gold but in three new pillars: oil and petrodollar recycling; the depth and liquidity of US financial markets, especially the market for Treasury securities; and the weaponisation of dollar-based finance.

To understand the post-1971 order, it is crucial to turn to the Marxist analysis of financialisation. The abandonment of metallic backing (gold) was a watershed moment. It removed the material restriction on the limitless creation of money, which had previously been a representation of a commodity (gold) but became a representation of itself – mere numbers in computerised accounts. In other words, there was an autonomisation of the world currency. This allowed capital to migrate massively from the sphere of value production (investment in manufacturing, agriculture, and so on, based on the application of social labour) to the sphere of circulation – that of fictitious capital. Fictitious capital is investment in property titles (shares) and, above all, debt titles (mortgages and public debt), whose value is based not on value already produced but on the anticipation of future income. With the unlimited creation of fiat money (money issued by the state that is not convertible into a commodity such as gold), fictitious capital could feed itself, generating more fictitious capital that was no longer tied to the value base of social labour.

Pillar 1: Oil and Petrodollar Recycling

Though this process began in the 1930s and 1940s, as noted above, after 1971 it took on new importance as the United States reinforced its strategic and military alliance with Saudi Arabia and ensured that OPEC would continue to price and trade oil exclusively in dollars. This recreated structural demand: because every industrialised nation needs oil, every industrialised nation needs dollars. It also created a new recycling mechanism. Oil-producing countries in OPEC accumulated enormous dollar surpluses (petrodollars) from oil sales. These were deposited in Wall Street banks and reinvested in US government debt and other dollar assets, helping to finance US deficits.

Pillar 2: The Dictatorship of Liquidity (Treasuries)

Today, dollar dominance rests on a pragmatic fact: the dollar provides access to financial markets deep enough to absorb very large transactions without sharp price movements and liquid enough to allow assets to be bought and sold quickly. The central pillar of this system is US Treasury securities, which are universally regarded as global ‘safe-haven’ assets: high-grade financial assets with minimal credit risk and immediate liquidity. This allows the United States to completely subvert normal economic logic: it is the world’s largest debtor, yet its debt is treated by other countries as the most valuable asset.

In moments of global financial crisis – even crises that originate in the United States itself, as in 2008 – international capital does not flee the dollar; it rushes towards it, seeking the safety of Treasuries. This flight to Treasuries reinforces the Global Surplus Recycling Mechanism (GSRM), an expanded form of petrodollar recycling in which export surpluses – not only oil revenues – are recycled into US financial assets. It operates as follows:

1. The United States absorbs the world’s surplus products, running massive trade deficits with countries such as China, Germany, and Japan.
2. The profits from those exports accumulated by the surplus countries (in dollars) return to Wall Street because those countries recycle the dollars they receive from exports into US public debt.
3. Wall Street uses this inflow of foreign capital to buy Treasuries, financing the deficit of the US government and supplying credit to US consumers so that they can continue consuming imported goods.

Under this system, the rest of the world is forced to finance the twin deficits of the United States – trade and fiscal – thereby subsidising US consumption and, crucially, its global military power.

In Latin America, this process accelerated after the recommendations of the Washington Consensus, which urged countries to give up controls over their capital accounts (the channels through which investment, loans, and other cross-border financial flows enter and leave a country). This means that capital can enter and leave each country freely, but it has direct effects on the volatility of national exchange rates. Countries, in turn, seek to protect themselves from this volatility by accumulating foreign reserves in US public debt. That is why we can say that the dollar is a weapon of extortion against the periphery: to protect their domestic economies from exchange-rate volatility and capital flight, countries in the periphery must accumulate dollar reserves, often in US public debt. In doing so, they help finance the United States’ twin deficits (trade and fiscal), which in turn sustain US military spending, overseas bases, imperialist wars, and so on.

The crisis of 2008 was the moment when the ‘pyramids of private money’ (fictitious capital) built by Wall Street on top of this mechanism collapsed. Yet the crisis did not break the system. Instead, the Federal Reserve acted as the central bank of the world, supplying dollar swap lines (agreements that allowed other central banks to obtain dollars from the Federal Reserve and provide them to their own financial systems in moments of stress). This proved that, in the collapse, dependence on the dollar was total rather than showing that the dollar had become dispensable.

Pillar 3: Currency as a Weapon of War

Because most global trade, finance, and commodity transactions – especially oil – are denominated in dollars and cleared through the US financial system, Washington has gained enormous coercive power. Dollar ‘diplomacy’ is used both to constrain strategic enemies and to reward allies. The United States can impose financial sanctions, freeze the reserves of foreign central banks – as it has done with Iran, Venezuela, and Russia, for instance – and exclude entire countries from the international payments system (SWIFT).

When a country is sanctioned, as happened to Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Russia, and many others, it can be excluded from dollar payment networks and may have its foreign assets frozen. This raises the cost of imports; blocks access to credit and payment systems; obstructs the purchase of food, fuel, medicine, and industrial inputs; and makes ordinary trade far more difficult. The dollar, therefore, is not merely an economic tool: it is a weapon of war, an instrument of geopolitical discipline that ensures US interests prevail.

Is De-dollarisation Already Underway?

Data on the currencies used in trade invoicing and international finance is scarce, and it is published with longer delays than other trade data.²⁰ Even so, the available evidence indicates that the dollar’s predominance exceeds the weight of the United States’ share of global gross domestic product, trade, and international finance, reflecting a structural asymmetry in the international use of currencies.

Sources: BIS Triennial Survey 2025 · SWIFT Watch 2024 · IMF COFER 2024 · Federal Reserve 2025

SWIFT data shows that the dollar is used in more than 80% of trade-finance transactions processed through its network, largely because a significant share of commodity trade continues to be invoiced and settled in dollars. In addition, the dollar still accounts for close to 60% of global foreign exchange reserves. On the other hand, the evolution of global foreign exchange reserves in 2022–2023 was marked by a significant increase in gold purchases by central banks. Considered a safe asset, gold offers protection against geopolitical risks, even though it has limitations as a means of payment. This pattern suggests that the intensification of gold purchases by certain central banks is associated with efforts to mitigate economic and geopolitical risks, especially those related to international sanctions. In China, for example, the share of gold in total reserves rose from less than 2% in 2015 to 4.3% in 2023, while the proportion of assets denominated in US Treasury and agency securities fell from around 44% to approximately 30%, reflecting a recomposition of the country’s reserve portfolio.²¹

Source: World Gold Council, Gold Demand Trends: Full Year 2024 (gold.org)

Although a decline in the dollar’s share of global foreign exchange reserves has been observed in recent decades, the data indicates that this movement does not correspond to a direct substitution by another single currency. On the contrary, the reduction has been absorbed by a set of currencies that the IMF classifies as ‘non-traditional currencies’: the Australian dollar, Canadian dollar, South Korean won, Swedish krona, and, to a lesser extent, the Chinese renminbi. Taken together with the increase in gold reserves, this suggests that the process currently underway is not driven primarily by a coordinated political project of de-dollarisation but rather by portfolio diversification strategies adopted by monetary authorities oriented towards risk management and greater security in a context of growing global financial instability.

This movement can be interpreted as a response to the contradictions of US- and Europe-driven financialisation, whose dynamics tend to generate recurring volatility and asset bubbles (sharp rises in prices that often end in collapse). In this sense, reserve diversification (the spreading of foreign-exchange reserves across a wider range of currencies and assets) appears less as a political rupture than as a technical adjustment to the system’s fragilities. This makes the process of transforming the international monetary system both more robust and slower than more immediate geopolitical narratives suggest.

Source: IMF COFER | Federal Reserve, The International Role of the US Dollar, 2025 edition | The CNY series excludes data for the fourth quarter of 2016

An analysis of trade invoicing from 2000 to 2023 shows that the combined share of the dollar and the euro remained broadly stable. The dollar retained its dominant position, while the euro was used predominantly within the European Union. Although China has significantly expanded its share of world exports since 2000, approaching that of the United States, the renminbi remains limited as a currency for international trade invoicing and has not been fully internationalised.

These data demonstrate the resilience of the dollar in trade invoicing. They also show that, although the renminbi’s share of international reserves has grown notably, broader monetary diversification remains limited.

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade in a Fragmenting World Economy

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade in a Fragmenting World Economy

Source: IMF Working Paper (2025), Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade; IMF Direction of Trade Statistics (DOTS) Patterns of Invoicing Currency in Global Trade

Advances in financial technology and payment infrastructure are driving the rise of alternative systems of payment, asset custody, and settlement. These are becoming concrete alternatives to the dollar-centred international financial system. Far from being a recent debate, this is the materialisation of new institutional architectures capable of enabling transactions outside of the traditional circuits. Noteworthy initiatives include the Financial Messaging System (SPFS, developed by Russia) and the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS, led by China), which expand the capacity for international settlement in local currencies and reduce dependence on infrastructures dominated by the core countries.

At the same time, the BRICS countries have intensified efforts to strengthen domestic digital payment systems and develop solutions for cross-border operations with the aim of expanding international trade denominated in local currencies and advancing the construction of a more multipolar monetary system.²² China, in particular, has expanded the international use of the renminbi by developing CIPS and participating in central bank digital currency (CBDC) projects.²³ There has also been a rapid global spread of CBDC projects: 137 countries and monetary unions, representing around 98% of world GDP, are at some stage of developing these digital currencies.²⁴

At the same time, initiatives such as mBridge (involving the People’s Bank of China, the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the Central Bank of the United Arab Emirates, and the Bank of Thailand, with the support of the Bank for International Settlements) and the ACUMER system (developed by the Central Bank of Iran) signal the potential of new digital infrastructures for settlement in local currencies between central banks through CBDCs without the need for traditional intermediaries such as correspondent banks or systems like SWIFT.

Moreover, bilateral currency swap agreements have played a growing role, especially since the financial crisis of 2007–2008. These instruments have been used to provide liquidity in moments of stress and to reduce the costs associated with the accumulation of international reserves. This enables countries to access foreign currencies without relying exclusively on international financial markets. In this sense, currency swaps have become a central component of contemporary strategies for monetary diversification and for mitigating dependence on the dollar.²⁵

In sum, the available data indicates that while the dollar remains dominant and relatively stable in the international monetary system, there are also important changes in the composition and functioning of that system. One significant example is the renminbi, whose share of international reserves rose from virtually zero at the start of the 2010s to around 2.2% in less than a decade – a historically unprecedented development for the currency of a country that still maintains important controls over its capital account. This growth in reserve holdings has not, however, been matched by a comparable expansion of the renminbi’s use in international trade invoicing.

An analysis of de-dollarisation therefore requires a distinction between different dimensions of the international monetary system. In the sphere of foreign exchange reserves, the process is slow and gradual and still far from amounting to a rupture with the centrality of the dollar. In the sphere of bilateral payments there is more dynamism, though still geographically concentrated in specific arrangements, such as transactions between Russia and China, which, according to a report published in November 2025, are settled 99.1% in roubles and yuan.²⁶ Finally, in the field of financial infrastructure, which includes payment, clearing, and settlement systems, the process is still incipient but has a structural character, given that the creation of these platforms tends to reduce dependence on the dollar-centred financial system in a lasting way.

In this sense, the importance of de-dollarisation lies in the direction in which this transformation moves and, above all, in the construction of institutional and productive alternatives capable of reducing the costs of exiting the dollar system.

To De-dollarise Is to Fight for Sovereignty

For the overwhelming majority of countries in the Global South, the international monetary and financial system centred on the dollar is not a safety net but a straitjacket. Insofar as countries need to accumulate international reserves – hard currencies such as the dollar – they are subjected to monetary extortion by the dollar system, since they must maintain those reserves and do so by purchasing US public debt. In doing so, they continue to finance the outsized capacity of the United States to act, including by funding wars. Furthermore, the system is also a mechanism of punishment, since the United States can, through sanctions, blockades, and exclusion from the international payments system, penalise countries that are not subservient to it. In recent decades, Washington has increased economic sanctions against the targets of its foreign policy by 933%.²⁷

In practice, national currencies are not seen as stores of value but as volatile ‘financial assets’. International demand for them is speculative, subject to panic and capital flight. In addition, Global South countries suffer from the structural inability to issue external debt in their own currencies. They borrow in dollars but generate revenue in local currency, creating a devastating currency mismatch: when their currencies depreciate, they must use more local currency to obtain the same amount of dollars needed to service their external debts.

Dollar hegemony is therefore not limited to the dollar’s centrality as a means of payment or store of value. It also expresses itself in the way the dollar’s domestic dynamics are transmitted to the rest of the world. In moments of dollar appreciation, peripheral currencies tend to depreciate, making imports more expensive and putting pressure on domestic inflation, especially in economies that are dependent on energy, food, and intermediate goods. Because a large share of international commodities is priced in dollars, these effects are amplified even in the absence of variations in the real conditions of supply and demand.

In financial markets, decisions in US monetary policy, such as interest-rate hikes, frequently trigger capital flows towards dollar-denominated assets. This causes exchange-rate depreciations, raises the cost of external financing, and restricts the space for economic policy in countries of the Global South, which are often forced to adopt contractionary measures to contain inflation and stabilise their currencies – even in contexts of low growth. In economies with high levels of debt in foreign currency, dollar appreciation immediately raises the burden of that debt in domestic-currency terms, deepening structural fragilities. In order to attract volatile international capital, assets in the Global South must offer much higher interest rates than the ‘safe’ assets of the North. This results in a constant net transfer of wealth from poorer countries to the richest financial centres.

With neoliberal policies and the liberalisation of capital movements, the capacity of states to conduct macroeconomic policy has been weakened. Any government that attempts to implement expansionary fiscal or monetary policies, such as cutting interest rates to stimulate investment, is immediately punished by the ‘market’ through capital flight, which devalues the currency, generates inflation, and can lead to collapse. Governments become hostages to the confidence of financiers. To protect themselves from this volatility, Global South countries are forced to accumulate massive international reserves. Brazil, for instance, held more than US$358 billion in December 2025.²⁸ These reserves are mostly invested in dollar assets, especially US Treasury securities. This is the final paradox: to defend themselves from the system, Global South countries are obliged to finance their oppressor, lending trillions of dollars to the US Treasury at low interest rates.

Dollar hegemony imposes unsustainable costs on the Global South. Dissatisfaction with this destabilising asymmetry is not new, but it has taken on renewed urgency in a world moving towards multipolarity. De-dollarisation has become a long-term structural trend, though one that faces immense structural obstacles. According to the economist Bruno de Conti, several developments may, in the medium or long term, trigger changes in the international monetary and financial system, namely:

1. the redefinition of the role of certain countries in the hierarchy of the world economy;
2. the intensification of geopolitical tensions among the leading powers; and
3. the growing distrust of the dollar, sharpened during the Trump administration, combined with the political willingness of a broad set of countries to seek ways to reduce their dependence on the US currency, whether individually or in coordination.²⁹

The discussion of de-dollarisation, however, cannot be reduced to protection against sanctions or the mitigation of external vulnerabilities. A deeper analysis must ask what purpose de-dollarisation is meant to serve. The replacement of one hegemonic currency by another does not necessarily imply a qualitative transformation of the international order, nor does it guarantee greater stability or benefits for peripheral countries. Historical experience suggests that monetary hierarchy tends to reproduce itself, albeit in new configurations.

De-dollarisation must be understood not merely as a dispute between currencies but as part of a broader debate about the nature of international economic relations. For countries of the Global South, this means shifting the focus away from the mere substitution of instruments and towards the construction of structural alternatives involving new forms of participation in international trade, technological cooperation, productive integration, and political coordination. An effective transformation of the international monetary system would therefore require more than the creation of alternative financial mechanisms. It would require confronting the pillars that sustain dollar hegemony, including the centrality of commodity pricing, the dominance of dollar-denominated financial markets, and the capacity for geopolitical coercion.

De-dollarisation is not an end in itself but part of a broader struggle for economic sovereignty and for the construction of a more equitable international order capable of interrupting the systematic transfer of wealth from the Global South to the centres of power. The struggle for de-dollarisation, therefore, is not merely an accounting adjustment. It is a fundamental political struggle over sovereignty, development, and the right of the peoples of the Global South to organise their economies outside the discipline of imperial finance.

Notes

Bibliography

When the United States and Israel began their illegal war of aggression against Iran on 28 February 2026, it was inevitable that Iran would retaliate by restricting transit through the Strait of Hormuz. While Iran has never closed or restricted movement through the strait before, the government in Tehran had made it clear that the geography of the strait would become part of its defensive strategy if provoked. For the countries of Asia, the Strait of Hormuz and the Strait of Malacca are vital pathways – chokepoints – for the flow of goods, especially energy. Around 90% of Japan’s oil and 75% of South Korea’s passes through the strait. Any slowdown at the strait dramatically impacts the energy-hungry industrial economies of East Asia. From an economic perspective, the US-Israeli war on Iran is also a war against the interests of Japan and South Korea – and indeed every Asian country that relies on oil from the Persian Gulf. Despite this fact, many Asian countries have either maintained diplomatic silence or, as in the case of Japan and South Korea, openly backed the United States.

Countries like Japan and South Korea align with the United States against their own economic self-interest because they were absorbed into the US military architecture after the end of the World Anti-Fascist War (widely known as the Second World War).² The continued presence of massive US military bases in these countries inexorably draws them into the US’s forever wars. These countries cannot break with the US on the war on Iran as long as they are militarily subordinated to it.

The US’s principal military target in Asia is not Iran but China, which is a leading trade partner of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and most other Asian countries. Given China’s centrality in the region’s industrial chains, any aggression against it would disrupt the entire development paradigm of East Asia. On the other hand, the US remains the principal military patron of Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, as well as a major export market for several of them. This places these economies in a double bind: they can neither break easily from their military and economic dependence on the US nor can they break from their vital economic relationship with China – the new factory of the world.

In East Asia’s Double Bind: Contradictions and Possibilities in the New Cold War, we look at how Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan are caught in an intractable contradiction that persists regardless of changes in government. Although our focus is on East Asia, we also briefly analyse the role of states like Australia and India in this conjuncture. The contradictions explored in this dossier are primarily economic and geopolitical, yet they pose possibilities to advance the class struggle in these societies by exposing the need to break from subordinate alliances with imperialism.

East Asia and the Role of China

Over the past thirty years, Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan have seen a dramatic shift in their trade patterns and development trajectories.³ During the Cold War, the United States was the principal anchor of the region’s economic order, followed by Japan during the late twentieth century.⁴ Today, the new centre of gravity is China, which plays a central – though uneven – role across these economies. While each has its own development model and political relationship with Beijing, all four are deeply integrated into a production network in which China functions as a manufacturing hub, supply chain anchor, and primary market.

Studies by the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank have clearly demonstrated China’s economic significance in East Asia.⁵ China is the single largest trading partner for Japan and South Korea, accounting for roughly 20–25% of each country’s exports. Taiwan’s relationship is even stronger, with 30–40% of its exports going to China. The Philippines is less integrated, but China still ranks among its top trading partners, absorbing roughly 15–20% of exports. These figures indicate that a significant share of East Asian economic activity is directly tied to demand from China’s industries.⁶

When viewed in relation to overall economic output, the importance of China becomes even clearer. Trade with China, namely total exports, accounts for a tenth of South Korea’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). A quarter of Taiwan’s GDP is tied to trade with mainland China. Japan, with a much more domestic-oriented economy, nonetheless has 5% of its GDP tied to exports to China (roughly the same percentage of its GDP is tied to the US, which includes the economic impact of the 120 US military facilities in Japan). The Philippines, while less export intensive, has around 6% of its GDP tied to exports to China.⁷ The vitality of the Chinese economy is therefore directly tied to the levels of output, employment, and investment in all of East Asia.

At the 2011 Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) summit in Bali, Indonesia, member states discussed the necessity of creating a regional framework for economic integration. These discussions eventually led to the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), a trade agreement signed in 2020 and brought into force in January 2022. The RCEP accounts for roughly 30% of the world’s population and 30% of global GDP. Spanning economies from New Zealand to Japan, it brings together a range of industries, from mining to high technology, and a market of 2.2 billion consumers. Signatories have agreed to reduce or eliminate tariffs by 92% over twenty years. Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are part of the RCEP, which reinforces trade flows and formalises the interconnected economic space in which China is the largest economy.⁸

Beneath aggregate trade figures, the structure of production further reinforces this integration. China is not only a final market but also a central node in regional and global industrial chains as a major consumer and producer of intermediate goods. Japanese and South Korean firms export high-value components – such as machinery and automobile parts, petrochemicals, and semiconductors – that are often assembled or processed in China before being re-exported globally. Taiwan’s semiconductor industry is deeply intertwined with Chinese manufacturing, as chips produced in Taiwan are often sent to China for integration into finished electronics.⁹ These integrated production structures have created sectoral interdependencies. South Korea’s semiconductor industry – led by firms such as Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix – relies on demand from Chinese electronics manufacturing. Japan’s automotive and machinery sectors – led by firms such as Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mazda, Komatsu, Hitachi, and Mitsubishi – rely on Chinese consumers and production networks.

Taken together, these trade and production links show that all four economies are structurally linked to China, even though the degree of integration varies (it is the highest in Taiwan and South Korea and more moderate in Japan and the Philippines). This creates both opportunities for growth and vulnerabilities as US pressure on China reverberates across the region.

The Garland of US Military Bases

Over the past decade, the United States has consolidated a coherent military strategy aimed at encircling China. This ‘strategy of denial’ was formalised in successive US National Defense Strategy documents and articulated prominently in Elbridge A. Colby’s 2021 book The Strategy of Denial: American Defense in an Age of Great Power Conflict. Colby led the development of the 2018 National Defense Strategy as deputy assistant secretary of defence for strategy and force development during Trump’s first term and is now the US under-secretary of war for policy as well as a leading strategist behind the Trump administration’s approach to China.¹⁰ At the core of the strategy of denial is the idea that the Indo-Pacific – stretching from East Africa to the west coast of the United States and encompassing the Indian and Pacific oceans – is the most economically significant region in the world. US strategic interests depend on preventing China from displacing US primacy in the Indo-Pacific region. The strategy rests on deterrence through military superiority and alliance coordination, which has been institutionalised through the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue or Quad, which brings together Australia, India, Japan, and the United States (2017); AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States (2021); the Pacific Deterrence Initiative, a US military funding and force-posture framework for the Indo-Pacific (2021); and the US-Japan-South Korea Trilateral Agreement (2023).¹¹

Rather than direct confrontation, as with Iran, the US seeks to raise China’s cost of defence to an unacceptable level by strengthening the US-based alliance system and the forward positioning of US military bases. There are currently about 270 US military facilities stretching from Diego Garcia in the Chagos Archipelago to Guam. Central to this strategy is Washington’s belief that a credible US military capability can constrain China’s strategic choices while preserving a US-led regional order and continuing to draw on China’s role as an economic engine for the region.

Taiwan occupies a critical place in this US framework.¹² On 1 January 1979, the United States formally recognised the People’s Republic of China and acknowledged Beijing’s position that there is ‘One China’, of which Taiwan is a part. However, on 10 April 1979, the US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act, which provided the legal basis for Washington to maintain an unofficial relationship with Taiwan. This allowed the US to play a double game, formally acknowledging the One China framework while provoking Beijing through arms sales to Taiwan and maintaining direct economic and cultural ties with Taipei. Since 1950, the United States has sold Taiwan nearly $50 billion in defence equipment and services.¹³ For the US, Taiwan’s status is not only political but strategic because Taiwan’s reunification with the mainland would give China significantly greater access to the Pacific Ocean. For Washington, Taiwan is an instrument to pressure Beijing and constrain China.

The US containment strategy is geographically organised through a system of encirclement that begins with the first island chain (an arc of islands that stretches from Japan to the Philippines and acts as a barrier to China’s access to the Pacific Ocean). This extends into the wider ‘encirclement depth’ of Diego Garcia, Sri Lanka, and the US bases in the Persian Gulf region.¹⁴ The US has developed a network of bases and access agreements along this chain to control key nodes and shipping routes and to constrain Chinese military mobility. This encirclement strategy includes not only large, permanent military installations (such as those in Japan and South Korea) but increasingly a dispersed network of smaller, more flexible sites across the Pacific and Indian oceans designed to enhance military resilience. The bases are integrated with surveillance, intelligence, and missile systems that enable monitoring and rapid response. Together, this military network constitutes a structured system of containment. While US national security documents frame this as defensive deterrence, the effective positioning of US forces along China’s border creates tensions rather than resolving them.

The US strategic framework of containment and encirclement has been operationalised through a sustained expansion of US military capabilities and infrastructure in East Asia, particularly over the past two decades and with increasing intensity since 2020. The US has also been funding large-scale military exercises such as Exercise Balikatan (with the Philippines), Exercise Malabar (with Australia, India, and Japan), and Exercise Talisman Sabre (with Australia). These efforts are designed to improve military interoperability and turn US allies from regional partners into frontline participants in the containment of China.

One of the more recent frameworks advanced by the US is the Pacific Deterrence Initiative (PDI), which was established by the 2021 US National Defence Authorisation Act.¹⁵ The PDI ensures dedicated funding for force deployment, base infrastructure, missile defence, and joint exercises with US allies such as Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. In Japan, the PDI has ensured upgrades to missile defence and rapid deployment forces. In South Korea, it has enabled joint exercises, while in the Philippines it has upgraded US bases and surveillance systems. The PDI also underpins the integration and deployment of long-range precision missile systems across the Indo-Pacific. This includes the expanded air and missile defence capacities that have been built up at US military bases in places such as Guam and the Mariana Islands as well as Basa Air Base in the Philippines (for which the US government allocated around $66 million in 2023).¹⁶ The PDI ensures intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems that enhance the tracking of regional military activity and enables what is known as ‘precision targeting’ – the rapid identification and accurate striking of military targets.

These developments have transformed countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines into forward operating platforms for US aggression.

Sowing Conflict: Class Contradictions and the Limits of Democracy

The US strategy of denial depends not only on military integration but also on the alignment of the ruling classes across the first island chain into a coordinated anti-China posture – particularly in Japan, Taiwan, and the Philippines, and more broadly in neighbouring South Korea. This alignment reflects the interests of the domestic industrial, military, and political elites tied to US power. Across Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, and Taiwan, the deepening of US military integration sharpens existing class contradictions and exposes the narrowness of electoral systems. While this generates resistance from below, these political systems are designed to prevent the growth of any force that is inimical to US intervention. Additionally, each of these societies bears the scars of the World Anti-Fascist War and the postwar US military presence, including military bases that are now seemingly permanent – an experience that has continued to define the political outlook of these ‘client states’.¹⁷

Japan

Japan’s postwar political system has been dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), a right- to far-right political formation with intimate ties to the US state and capital. While formally democratic, Japan’s political system is effectively dominated by a single party, with the LDP in office for all but four years since its formation in 1955. Though article 9 of Japan’s 1947 Constitution, sometimes called the ‘pacifist clause’, forbids a military build-up going beyond minimal defence, the political right has called for its removal since the premiership of Nobusuke Kishi (1957–1960). In 2014, during the premiership of Kishi’s grandson, Shinzō Abe (2012–2020), article 9 was reinterpreted to allow for ‘collective self-defence’, enabling the expansion of Japanese military spending – which has risen particularly since 2022 under prime ministers Fumio Kishida, Shigeru Ishiba, and Sanae Takaichi. Between 2023 and 2024, Japanese military spending rose by 21%, accounting for 1.4% of the country’s GDP.¹⁸ In April 2026, under Takaichi, Japan lifted a ban on the export of lethal weapons, which had been put in place based on the logic that a pacifist country should not profit from wars.

The contradiction between military spending and democratic demands that Japan’s wealth be invested on social needs – exemplified by anti-base protests in poorer regions like Okinawa – reveals the limitations of Japan’s formal democracy. Japanese society remains subordinated to military priorities defined by a permanent Japanese elite aligned with the US.

The construction of a new Marine Corps base in the Henoko-Oura Bay area of Okinawa, intended to replace Futenma Air Station – long criticised for its location in the middle of densely populated Ginowan – has faced continuous opposition since 1996. In 2018, Denny Tamaki was elected governor of Okinawa on an anti-base platform; in a prefectural referendum held in 2019, 70% of respondents opposed the construction of the base. Despite such democratic mandates and decades of legal challenges, Japan’s central government proceeds with landfill operations that are destroying Oura Bay’s coral ecosystems on behalf of the US military.¹⁹ Organisations including the All Okinawa Council Against Construction of New Base in Henoko, the Okinawa Peace Movement Center, the Okinawa Environmental Justice Project, and the Henoko sit-in protesters – who have maintained daily resistance for over two decades – embody a politics that connects local struggle to broader questions of imperialism and self-determination.²⁰

South Korea

South Korea’s political history is marked by intense class struggles. Born amid the Korean War, which began in 1950 and remains formally unresolved since the 1953 armistice did not produce a peace treaty, South Korea has been treated by the United States as a military base and economic bulwark against communism. Though it has been under pro-US administrations, including a military dictatorship from 1967 to 1988, South Korea’s political system has appeared more fluid than Japan’s: no single party has ruled continuously. Nonetheless, elected governments, both conservative and liberal, have remained structurally dependent on the US. For example, this was the case under both Yoon Suk-yeol, a conservative strongly aligned with the United States and the chaebols (South Korean conglomerates), and Moon Jae-in, a liberal who sought limited autonomy but remained tied to export-oriented capital and the chaebols. In fact, in 2018, during Moon Jae-in’s liberal presidency, South Korea’s military spending rose to 2.5% of GDP, establishing a level that subsequent annual budgets have continued to pursue (it rose to 2.6 % in 2022).²¹

Since the mid-2010s, South Korea has seen a wave of democratic struggles, from the Candlelight Revolution or Chot–bul Hyuk-myung (2016–2017), which removed President Park Geun-hye from office, to the Revolution of Lights or Bit-eh Hyuk–myung (2024–2025), which sought to defend South Korean democracy against the martial law imposed by President Yoon Suk-yeol in December 2024. Despite repeated working-class and civil society mobilisation against inequality and calls for greater foreign policy independence, South Korea’s subordination to the US has prevented such transformation. Furthermore, South Korea’s economic and military dependence on the US means that it must adopt deeply unpopular measures such as dispatching Korean troops to Iraq or installing the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) anti-ballistic missile system. Since its inception, South Korea has deferred its foreign policy to the US. One result of this is that the failed 2019 North Korea-United States Hanoi Summit resulted in a freeze in inter-Korean relations.²² Meanwhile, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea’s (DPRK) deepening ties with Russia have expanded Pyongyang’s room for manoeuvre.

In June 2025, Lee Jae-myung won the presidency after playing a role in preventing President Yoon from imposing martial law some months earlier. A human rights and labour lawyer, President Lee has nonetheless continued to entangle South Korea’s military-industrial complex with the US. Even as Lee attempts to regain wartime operational control of the Korean military, his economic concessions to US President Donald Trump have embedded South Korea even deeper in the US war machine. Not only has Lee agreed to US calls for allies to spend 3.5% of GDP on defence, but South Korea will also invest $350 billion over the next ten years to increase US semiconductor fabrication (with their dual use enabling the expansion of military AI) and expand US naval shipbuilding, helping to relieve chronic bottlenecks in the US maritime industrial base, a push captured in the sycophantic Korean slogan MASGA: Make American Shipbuilding Great Again. More specifically, the South Korean Hanwha Group’s acquisition of the Philadelphia Shipyard in 2024 allows it to serve as a potential solution to the backlog of nuclear-powered submarines in the US Navy and contribute to the production of US Navy warships. Furthermore, South Korea hosts a US Space Force presence that cooperates with the US in creating a network of interoperable satellites for Trump’s Golden Dome.²³ All these actions have allowed South Korea to join Israel in the US club of ‘model allies’.²⁴

The Philippines

The Philippines has struggled to assert its sovereignty since it was seized by the United States in 1898. Political power in the country has been dominated by a few elite families (for instance, the current president, Bongbong Marcos, is the son of Ferdinand Marcos, who was president from 1965 to 1986). The country relied entirely on the US for its security plans until 1991, and in 1995 launched the Armed Forces of the Philippines Modernisation Program, which allowed for the expansion of the Philippine navy and air force, largely through the purchase of US military equipment. The Philippines’ military became integrated with that of the US through procurement and joint exercises.

The structure of US power over the Philippines is best illustrated by the Enhanced Defense Cooperation Agreement (EDCA), first signed in 2014 and then expanded in 2022. EDCA allows US military forces rotational access to Philippine military bases, enabling the pre-positioning of equipment, joint training, and the construction of US military infrastructure on the bases, with minimal oversight from the Philippine government.

In 2023, early in the Marcos Jr. administration, designated sites under EDCA were nearly doubled (increasing from five to nine). The Camilo Osias Naval Base and Lal-lo Airport are located at the northern tip of the Philippines, allowing ‘rapid response’ to conflicts in the Taiwan Strait.²⁵ These two bases are supported by the Camp Melchor F. Dela Cruz in the mountainous Cagayan Valley, which acts as a logistical rear. The US presence at these bases helps Washington project force across the Luzon Strait, which the Philippines shares with Taiwan. The fourth newly designated site has not been publicly disclosed, but its location makes clear its role in US projection in the South China Sea. Through EDCA, US forces conduct Exercise Balikatan, which has reached unprecedented scale under the Marcos Jr. administration, with Japan even joining in 2025. Civil society organisations and peace activists continue to debate the implications of the Marcos Jr. administration’s close alignment with the US. This alignment has unfolded alongside intensified repression of activists and rural organisers, including the killing of nineteen people by Philippine troops in Toboso, Negros Occidental, in April 2026 – an incident that human rights groups have called to be independently investigated.

Taiwan

After the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) was defeated in the Chinese Revolution, it fled to the island of Taiwan under the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek and constructed its government there. The KMT ruled Taiwan under martial law for thirty-eight years, until 1987, and then continued to rule in a one-party dominated electoral system until 2000. Since then, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) has largely been in power, moving Taiwanese politics further towards separatism from mainland China and towards integrating the island more deeply into US strategic plans. The DPP reflects a coalition of techno-capitalists, separatist elites, and military institutions, while the KMT draws its support from businesses with interests in cross-strait trade with China. Both, however, operate within a framework shaped by US strategic priorities. Since 2022, Taiwan’s military spending and US military support have shown a pattern of steady, coordinated strengthening rather than sudden rearmament. Taiwan’s military budget has exploded, reaching approximately $30 billion in 2026. Military spending has risen from 2% of GDP in the 2010s to 3.3% in 2026, with plans to increase to 5% by 2030. This massive diversion of resources falls on a society already confronting stagnant wages and rising living costs.

The military budget finances arms purchases and enriches US defence contractors. US military sales to Taiwan have become more regular, with frequent arms packages focused on missiles, air defence, and drones. Between 2019 and 2024, the United States approved over $32 billion in weapons sales to Taiwan, including F-16V fighters ($8 billion), M1A2 Abrams tanks ($2 billion), HIMARS rocket systems ($436 million), and Harpoon coastal defence missiles, with massive new packages worth more than $11 billion announced in 2025.²⁶ But arms sales are no longer the limit of US military involvement. Since 2024, US Army Special Forces, commonly known as Green Berets, have been stationed on the Kinmen and Penghu islands, the first enduring US military presence on Taiwanese territory in over forty years. The military escalation is unmistakably driven by the US, creating the conditions for a self-fulfilling crisis through militarisation while framing Chinese responses as ‘provocations’.

The political fragility of this path to militarisation warrants emphasis. Lai Ching-te of the DPP took office on 20 May 2024 after winning only 40.1% of the vote, with the KMT securing 33.5% and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) 26.5%. Crucially, the KMT and TPP opposition controls the Legislative Yuan – Taiwan’s highest legislative organ – for the first time since 2016. Out of 113 seats, 52 are held by the KMT, 8 by the TPP, and 51 by the DPP. This political opening was underscored in April 2026, when KMT chairwoman Cheng Li-wun visited Beijing and met Xi Jinping – the first such visit by a KMT chair in a decade – signalling that part of the opposition is attempting to reopen cross-strait engagement rather than follow the DPP’s path of military escalation. The legislature did not vote for the military escalation that the DPP pursues.

Public opinion polling by National Chengchi University’s Election Study Centre reveals that only 3.8% of the population, the lowest since 2002, support ‘immediate independence’, with 1.2% supporting immediate unification. Meanwhile, 83–88% prefer the status quo, with a record high of 33.2% wanting the ‘status quo indefinitely’.²⁷ The DPP’s confrontational posture with the mainland, intensified with the 2019 Anti-Infiltration Act, aimed at curbing China’s alleged political influence in Taiwan, now lacks both a legislative and a popular mandate.

Left-unificationist organisations like the Labour Party of Taiwan have argued that the social basis for the DPP’s separatism is rooted in colonial-era Japanese collaborators and that the Taiwan question is a legacy of US intervention in the Chinese Civil War. The US does not need to formally expand its presence in Taiwan in the way it does in Japan or the Philippines, as the DPP wholeheartedly supports the US strategy of containment. These trends indicate deepened US-Taiwan military integration, approaching a quasi-alliance in practice since a formal treaty would trigger a response from Beijing. Since 2022, there has been a durable militarisation of Taiwan punctuated by moments of callous disregard for Taiwan’s own development – the US has even suggested blowing up Taiwan’s semiconductor factories to protect US interests on the island.²⁸

Beyond the First Island Chain

The US strategy to contain China extends beyond the first island chain through groupings such as AUKUS and the Quad. These arrangements create overlapping layers of military cooperation that constrain China’s mobility in nearby waters and across the Indo-Pacific. They also reveal tensions between economic interdependence with China and military alliances oriented toward confrontation. The resulting contradictions raise questions about the durability of these formations. Two major actors stand out as pivotal players in this broader architecture: Australia and India.

Australia

Australia is a member of the Five-Eyes – an intelligence-sharing network led by the US – and is one of six ‘Enhanced Opportunities Partners’ of NATO. As such, Australia has always played a key role in US strategy in Asia. The most significant recent development in the US-Australia alliance is the 2021 AUKUS agreement, which, under its first pillar, would give Australia nuclear-powered attack submarines. The programme began with increased visits by US submarines to Australian ports, followed by rotational deployments at Australian bases, and is expected to culminate in the Royal Australian Navy’s acquisition of at least eight nuclear-powered submarines beginning in the 2030s (with a portion constructed domestically through joint cooperation in the 2040s). With a total estimated cost of more than $264 billion, these nuclear-powered submarines are strategic because they enable long-range operations across the Indian and Pacific oceans. While not explicitly stated, the interoperability and deep operational dependence on the US would make Australia part of the US posture against China, including in efforts to control sea lanes and to support US operations in the Taiwan Strait or the South China Sea.

Though Australia has already paid Washington more than $1 billion under AUKUS, the Trump administration, facing its own submarine bottleneck, is reviewing whether to provide Australia with the promised submarines.²⁹ A congressional report has even considered keeping the submarines under US control and operating them out of Australian bases given Australia’s reluctance to promise military intervention in a potential war between the US and China, as the latter is Australia’s largest trading partner.³⁰ This is indicative of the contradictions and tensions between national interests and alliance commitments.

India

India’s position in the containment architecture differs from that of Japan or Taiwan. India has no formal alliance with the US, maintains membership in BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), and inherits a powerful tradition of non-alignment. Yet India’s foreign policy trajectory over the past decade reveals a trend of compliance with US strategic preferences, often disguised by the rhetoric of strategic autonomy. India has signed defence framework agreements with the US that integrate Indian forces into US command, control, and intelligence architectures. India’s drift towards Washington is most instructive when viewed in the context of its weakening relationship with Iran, a traditional friend and ally. When the Trump administration reimposed sanctions on Iran in 2018 and demanded the cessation of Iranian oil purchases, India complied by reducing imports from 500,000 barrels per day to near zero by May 2019. India’s compliance meant forgoing cheaper Iranian oil and jeopardising its investments in Iran’s Chabahar Port, a strategically important project for India because it guarantees access to Central Asia while bypassing Pakistan.³¹ On 12 March 2025, global 25% tariffs on steel and aluminium took effect, raising tariffs on Indian steel and aluminium to 26%. On 6 August, Trump imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods over India’s purchase of discounted Russian oil, bringing the cumulative rate to 50%. India eventually agreed to halt purchases of Russian oil but stopped short of signing a decisive trade agreement with the US after the US Supreme Court overruled Trump’s tariffs.

Despite these agreements with the US, India remains a member of the BRICS process and maintains important economic relations with both China and Russia. India-China bilateral trade grew 12% year-on-year in 2025, reaching $155.6 billion. India’s participation in the SCO has deepened, especially following Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the 2025 SCO summit in Tianjin. In 2018, India signed a $5.4 billion deal to purchase the S-400 air defence system from Russia despite threats of US sanctions. Trade between India and Russia has surged significantly in recent years, driven particularly by discounted Russian crude oil purchases that increased from negligible levels before 2022 to a peak of two million barrels per day by 2025, making Russia the largest oil supplier to India. India’s continued trade with Russia and China sits uneasily alongside its participation in the Quad and US partnership agreements, revealing a contradiction at the heart of India’s positioning. India illustrates a pattern of graduated coercion by the US. Even as a strategic partner, India has no protection from imperial coercion.³²

Alliance Fragility and Economic Contradictions

The strategy of denial assumes that the US can commit its allies to containing China – an assumption that erodes upon scrutiny. The material prosperity of US allies increasingly depends on economic integration with China, even as military alignments commit them to potential conflict. Every region examined in this dossier faces the same fundamental contradiction: between economic integration with China and military alignment against China. In 2025, these countries’ trade with China – South Korea’s $331 billion, Japan’s $322 billion, the Philippines $73 billion, and Australia’s $207 billion – dwarfed their trade with the US –$241.2 billion with South Korea, $228 billion with Japan, $27 billion with the Philippines, and $89.6 billion with Australia. Even India’s trade with China ($156 billion) is larger than its trade with the US ($149 billion). These flows represent wealth, employment, and government revenue that would be devastated by war or sustained confrontation with China. When actual conflict looms, these economic interests may prove more decisive than abstract military commitments.

During the US war on Iraq, significant US allies refused to participate despite enormous US pressure and invocation of alliance commitments. In Asia, Japan and South Korea refused to provide combat forces, even though they did provide logistical assistance and reconstruction funds. More recently, no US allies (including Japan and South Korea) have stepped up to Trump’s demands that they send ships to open the Strait of Hormuz. If allies proved unreliable for a war against a weaker adversary, how likely is their participation in a war against China, an industrial and nuclear power? Would Australia send combat forces to fight China, risking retaliation against Australian cities and the loss of its largest trading partner? Would South Korea participate, when a regional war might trigger intervention by the DPRK? Would Japan’s people, traumatised by the US nuclear bombing, accept casualties in combat? Would India commit forces when Taiwan’s status has no direct relevance to Indian security and participation would jeopardise relationships with China and Russia? Would the Philippines fight if it meant risking Chinese retaliation?

Alliances function smoothly when costs remain hypothetical and abstract: joint exercises, intelligence sharing, arms purchases, and diplomatic coordination. They face severe tests when actual war requires sacrificing lives, accepting economic devastation, and risking national existence for another power’s interests, especially when that power is the aggressor. The strategy of denial’s reliance on allied participation may be its fatal flaw if conflict breaks out, especially when alliances rest on subordination and coercion rather than genuine shared interests.

Resisting the War Machine and Building Multilateralism

The emerging New Cold War, centred in East Asia, is a strategic US response to the shifting centre of gravity of the world economy. As China’s economic and technological capabilities expand, US policy is increasingly reliant on military force and alliance structures to maintain strategic influence in the Indo-Pacific.³³ This strategy of denial seeks to contain China through militarisation, alliance coordination, and defence modernisation. Washington is building a provocative military architecture in the region through a network of initiatives and partnerships.

Across East Asia and the Indo-Pacific, the implications of intensifying militarisation are profound. Japan, South Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, Australia, and India either host significant military infrastructure or participate in military cooperation that could place them at the centre of a major confrontation. For many societies in the region, the prospect of heightened militarisation raises concerns about opportunity costs as resources directed toward defence spending compete with investments in social welfare, infrastructure, climate resilience, and economic development.

Foreign policy analysts and progressive policymakers in the region have proposed several reforms for peace and de-escalation. These include confidence-building measures in flashpoint areas such as the Taiwan Strait, renewed arms-control initiatives, and multilateral mechanisms for managing maritime disputes in the South China Sea. Regional organisations, particularly ASEAN, are often cited as potential platforms for dialogue and conflict management.

While these proposals are welcome, any transformation must inevitably come from the organised people of the region themselves. Diverse social movements across the region continue to advocate for diplomacy, regional cooperation, and demilitarisation. In Okinawa, organisations such as the Okinawa Environmental Justice Project and No More Battle of Okinawa protest the expansion of US bases. In the Philippines, organisations such as Bagong Alyansang Makabayan (Bayan) oppose expanded military access agreements and call for greater national sovereignty. In South Korea, political parties and social movements, such as the People’s International Action Denouncing Trump, support renewed diplomatic engagement to reduce tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Similar debates occur in Taiwan, Australia, India, and other regions navigating US militarism.

The International Peoples’ Assembly (IPA) – a network of around 200 social movements, political parties, and trade unions founded in 2015 – has worked closely with grassroots organisations in the region, building solidarity and consensus on key issues. At this crucial conjuncture, when militarisation threatens peace and development in Asia and indeed the entire world, the IPA has launched the Hands-Off Asia campaign. That campaign is centred around four demands to de-escalate from this New Cold War in Asia:

1. Remove all foreign military bases and democratise security. The hundreds of foreign military bases that litter the Asian region should be removed so that regional policy can be democratised and peace can be more than just preparation for the next war. States should avoid forming rigid military blocs, limit forward deployments, and commit to preventing an arms race. Military policy should be accountable to the public – there should be parliamentary, local government, and civil society oversight over military agreements, defence budgets, and foreign troop deployments.
2. Increase people-to-people contact. Support cooperation among labour unions, student groups, peace organisations, and social movements across Asia to oppose arms races, foreign bases, and escalating confrontation. Encourage people-to-people exchanges, cultural ties, and grassroots diplomacy across borders – especially between societies in conflict or under heightened tension – to build a shared regional culture of peace.
3. Institutionalise sustained dialogue. Establish regular, high-level political and military-to-military communication channels to manage crises, reduce miscalculation, and build trust. Promote practical confidence-building mechanisms such as hotlines and incident-prevention agreements.
4. Prioritise cooperative security and shared challenges. Shift focus from zero-sum competition to collaboration on key issues such as climate change, public health, economic stability, and development, reinforcing interdependence as a foundation for peace. Campaign for reductions in military spending and the reallocation of resources toward healthcare, climate action, education, and the reduction of inequality by linking peace to social justice.

Underlying these struggles is a broader structural shift in the global economy. China’s growth as the major industrial power has reshaped global production networks and altered the distribution of economic influence. These changes have given a new impulse to sovereign-seeking movements across the Global South. Whether this transition leads to stable and peaceful multilateralism or intensified competition remains uncertain. Much depends on whether the class struggle can be advanced so as to push the agenda towards peace and development rather than war and austerity.

Notes

José Venturelli (Chile), Serigrafía (Serigraph), 1970, edition 15/90. 260 x 430 mm.

Each month, for the past hundred months, our team at Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has researched, written, and designed a dossier. These dossiers – which range from histories of imperialism and national liberation to analyses of economic policy, sovereignty, war, and the changing world order – have circulated around the world in many languages, from English, Hindi, and Portuguese to Arabic, Thai, and Spanish.¹ This is our 100^th dossier, which is why we decided to pause and produce a historical-materialist account of a key concept at our institute: the future.

When our institute was conceptualised in 2015, we had three main lines of inquiry before us:

1. To better understand contemporary capitalism and the nature of the class struggle that shapes it.
2. To better understand the rise of what we call the far right of a special type.²
3. To better understand the future – or what comes next.

This third line of inquiry emerged from a materialist understanding of the historical process, which sees the present not as an eternal reality but as open to transformation. In other words, the present can be shaped into a future of a different character. The capitalist system that we inhabit is not permanent: it can be transformed into a socialist system through the class struggle and the development of the productive forces.

Here, for the first time, we present a philosophical and political assessment of the future. Drawing on the tradition of national liberation Marxism, we argue that this future should be called not only socialism, the objective, but also hope, the sensibility for such a future.³

We trust that you will read this dossier as you have read the previous ninety-nine and that you will share, debate, and discuss it collectively in reading circles and other spaces of political study. We are always open to your feedback.

Every language in the world has a word for ‘future’, the time that comes after the present. For instance, in the most widely spoken languages in the world, these are some of the words for future:

English: future, the time that has not yet happened.

Mandarin Chinese: wèilái (未来), what has not yet come.

Hindi: bhavishya (भविष्य), that which is to be or become.

Spanish: futuro, the time yet to come.

French: avenir, that which is to come.

Arabic: mustaqbal (مستقبل), that which is to be faced.

Bengali: bhobishyot (ভবিষ্যৎ), that which is yet to be or become.

Portuguese: futuro, the time yet to come.

Russian: budushchee (будущее), that which will be.

Urdu: mustaqbil (مستقبل), that which is to be met or faced.

These words do not all imply the same thing; they have different cultural orientations toward change. Some of them are about the empty calendar, the idea that there is a tomorrow just as there is a today, while others are about the encounters that will take place and must be faced. It is important to recognise that even as you read a text such as this – written in one language, translated into several – the word ‘future’ carries a range of meanings that cannot be fully carried from one language into another. Even though these words have different orientations toward what comes next, there are questions we can ask in every language spoken in capitalist civilisation: does the future exist, or are we living in what capitalist realism assures us is a permanent present?⁴ Is there really a tomorrow that could be different from today?

Such questions are essential for our moment as we struggle to make sense of the climate catastrophe and climate apartheid, permanent war and endless genocide, and the dictatorship of finance capital and the normalisation of austerity.⁵ Decades of capitalist realism have befogged our consciousness, preventing us from imagining anything beyond global catastrophe.

Is there a future? Of course there is. We are fighting to build it, and we are building it now.

Emilio Pettoruti (Argentina), Pájaro rojo (Red Bird), 1959. Oil on canvas, 116 x 63 cm.

Part 1: Rupture

In the dominant language of power, the future is presented as a neutral extension of the present. It is measured in calendars, projected in growth curves, and managed through forecasts. The future, in this perspective, is not something to be fought for but something to be waited for. It arrives automatically, like the next page in a ledger. This conception of the future is profoundly conservative. It assumes that the structures of exploitation, hierarchy, and domination that define the present will simply be optimised rather than overturned. Such a view of the future is reproduced by all the major institutions of capitalist society – such as the media, schools, universities, think tanks, and philanthropic foundations – which insist on empty slogans about change but in fact preach the gospel that ‘there is no alternative’ to the capitalist system that throttles us.

In our perspective, the future is not a date on the calendar. It is a rupture with the existing order, a structural transformation of social relations, political power, and human possibility. To speak of the future in this way is not to indulge in fantasy but to reclaim a dimension of politics that has been deliberately suppressed: the capacity to imagine and build a world fundamentally different from the one that we inhabit, one that the socialist and national liberation projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have sought to build and, however unevenly, began to realise. Such a view rejects the ideas of managed continuity (reformism) and unplanned breakdown (catastrophism). The ruling class produces a set of false futures: myths of entrepreneurship, green capitalism, and militarised security – but nothing that has any emancipatory content.

The ground for this idea of the future was developed by the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch with his notion of the ‘Not-Yet’ (Noch-Nicht).⁶ For Bloch, drawing directly from the writings of Marx, the future is not an abstraction deferred to tomorrow but an active force that is embedded within the present, struggling to emerge from within its constraints. For Bloch, reality is unfinished, which put him at odds with philosophical currents that treat the world as closed, completed, or already fully explained. He insisted that the present is permeated by tendencies, desires, and contradictions that point beyond it. The Not-Yet is not a utopia that floats above history but a latent potential contained within material conditions and collective struggle. This Not-Yet can be grasped in the dreams of the anti-colonial struggles that found programmatic expression in the final communiqué of the Bandung Conference (1955), the Belgrade declaration of the Non-Aligned Movement Summit (1961), the resolutions of the Tricontinental Conference (1966), and the declaration on the New International Economic Order adopted by the United Nations General Assembly (1974). It can also be seen in the revolutionary processes opened by the October Revolution (1917), the Vietnamese Revolution (1945), the Chinese Revolution (1949), and the Cuban Revolution (1959).⁷

In this Marxist tradition, the future is not inevitable. This view rests on two materialist propositions that emerge from the contradictions of the capitalist system.

First, the actual movement of history develops the productive forces and expands the social surplus. But because these developments remain constrained by private property, they also deepen inequality and social suffering for the vast majority. It is important to recognise that the productive forces today are not limited to factories and machinery. They also include care work, digital infrastructures, and global supply chains, for instance, all of which are organised through increasingly socialised labour. It is also key to note that capitalism both develops these forces and sabotages their potential, keeping them in check through private ownership, uberised platform monopolies, union busting, austerity, militarisation, and other forms of capitalist control.

Second, the social suffering inherent to capitalism generates indignity and anger, which can spontaneously erupt into revolt. But such struggles do not automatically move in an emancipatory direction: they are shaped by political forces either towards socialism, by advancing people’s concrete demands, or against it, by distorting those demands and turning people against each other through a toxic, anti-social agenda.⁸ The future, therefore, is not something that happens to us but something we must build, and we can only build it by breaking with the structures that produce and reproduce suffering. Such a view breaks with fatalism and inevitability and reminds us that history is open and that the present contains unrealised possibilities that can be activated through struggle.

Hope in this tradition is not optimism or passive expectation but a militant orientation towards the unfinished character of the world. It emerges from immiseration, oppression, and dispossession, and from the refusal to accept misery as destiny. For the movements in the Global South that guide our institute’s work, hope has never been a luxury. It has been forged in a range of movements and organisations led by peasants, workers, and women that are collective efforts to advance the cause of dignity.⁹ These movements do not fight for a better version of the present but for a different social order altogether. Their future is not calendrical but rooted in structural transformation. To hope is to recognise that the present is intolerable and impermanent and that the conditions of exploitation and oppression are neither natural nor final. This hope is dangerous to the ruling class because it is a material force that transforms consciousness, shifting people from enduring the present to acting for the future.

In this tradition of rupture, the future is not an individual creation: it has a collective character. Capitalist culture encourages us to imagine personal futures – a career, a home, personal security, and the endless project of ‘self-improvement’ – while foreclosing collective horizons. This culture is one of personal anxiety rather than collective responsibility or social transformation. Under capitalism, the calendrical future is treated as administrable – as something to be forecast, scheduled, priced, secured, and managed by institutions that present themselves as neutral. Their decisions are presented as technical necessities rather than political choices, as matters to be regulated on our behalf by experts, markets, states, and security apparatuses. These institutions do not offer an emancipatory horizon, only the managed continuation of catastrophe. The far right of a special type emerges in this terrain to offer a mythic future rooted in exclusion, hierarchy, and violence; it is a symptom of capitalism’s inability to generate a positive future.¹⁰ The future cannot be built by this far right; it must be reclaimed as a space of popular sovereignty. Neither catastrophe nor emancipation is inevitable. The former must be fought against, and the latter fought for. From the perspective of rupture, or structural transformation, the instrument is not personal advancement but organised forces capable of confronting entrenched power, such as political parties, trade unions, and social movements. Without these forces the Not-Yet will remain a dream without a pathway. Hope requires structure, discipline, and persistence.

The future is not something that lies outside of human history. It is already present in fragments, gestures, and struggles that prefigure another world. These include cooperative forms of labour, practices of care, experiments in popular democracy, and the unfinished and contested processes of socialist construction in states such as China and Cuba.¹¹ These are not marginal curiosities; they are anticipations of a different social logic. To chart them is not to romanticise them but to understand their significance and their latent potential. They remind us that the world we seek to build is not an abstract horizon but a concrete possibility. The task for a Marxist is not to predict the future but to organise for it. To break with the present requires clarity, courage, and collective discipline. The future can only arrive if we force a rupture. It is therefore a terrain of struggle. To fight for it requires that we identify the forces that seek to foreclose it.

Silvano Lora (Dominican Republic), Serigrafía (Serigraph), 1976, edition 18/60. 640 x 570 mm.

The Enemies of the Future

The future is not an empty horizon that waits to be filled by human aspiration. It is actively planned, structured, and constrained by powerful forces that seek to reproduce the existing relations of domination. The enemies of the future are not abstract tendencies: they are concrete forces determined to extend the present order into the future.¹² Below we look at four central enemies of the future: finance capital, platform capital, extractivism, and militarism. These forces do not merely defend the social relations of the present – they seek to colonise the future in advance.

Finance capital sits at the centre of this constellation. Through its control over the proceeds of colonialism and neocolonialism, investment flows, the magic of speculation, and the power of debt, finance capital disciplines states and societies, narrowing the range of their possible futures.¹³ Credit rating agencies, multilateral lenders, and private financial institutions – mostly located in the Global North – function as planners of the future for the Northern ruling class, ensuring that tomorrow remains hospitable to capital accumulation rather than to human flourishing. The dictates of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, World Trade Organisation, and myriad other institutions become a material reality for so many debt-ridden formerly colonised countries.¹⁴

Platform capital. Capitalist technology monopolies channel innovation and efficiency into data extraction, the reorganisation of labour, and the fragmentation of social life. Algorithms manage time, attention, and desire while platform labour strips workers of stability and collective power.¹⁵

Extractivism. Despite overwhelming scientific evidence of ecological catastrophe, the conglomerates of oil, gas, coal, mining, and agribusiness continue to shape energy systems, labour markets, and state policy. Their planning horizon is brutally short: extract, profit, abandon. The climate crisis, for instance, is not a failure of foresight but the result of deliberate decisions by capitalist corporations that accept planetary destruction as an acceptable cost of accumulation.¹⁶

Militarism. The crises produced and intensified by the capitalist system – war, displacement, and climate catastrophe – are met not with social and political solutions but with a permanent war economy that enforces military solutions to political problems. In the imperial centres, militarism appears in the form of arms accumulation, border regimes, surveillance, and the normalisation of emergency rule. In the Global South, it appears as imperialist aggression, proxy warfare, occupation, and the forced diversion of scarce public resources into armies and security infrastructures, always to the benefit of the arms industry. Militarism shortens political horizons: emergencies justify authoritarian measures, suppress dissent, and normalise fear. For large sections of humanity, especially in the Global South, the future appears not as a promise but as permanent instability, displacement, and death. War becomes a mechanism to manage crises produced by capitalism itself.¹⁷

These enemies of the future do not simply block social transformation: they actively manufacture a future that secures privileges for a few while condemning the many to exhaustion, insecurity, and despair. The future cannot be reclaimed without a frontal challenge to their power.

The Social Forces Poised to Make the Rupture

Since the propertied classes insist on the permanent present, the future can only be reclaimed through collective mass struggle. The social forces capable of bringing about a rupture with the present order are already here, although they are fragmented, uneven, and often rendered invisible. They include workers in both the formal and informal economy, peasants and landless agricultural workers, women, youth, oppressed communities, and what Marx called the ‘surplus population’ – those excluded or marginalised by the cycles of capitalist accumulation but still indispensable to it as a reserve army of labour and as part of the forces of social reproduction.¹⁸

Despite all the talk of ‘post-Marxism’ and newer theories of fragmented political subjects, the working class – both urban and rural – remains central, although its composition has certainly changed. Various reports from the International Labour Organisation and World Bank suggest that the total global labour force amounts to nearly 4 billion people (including those who are employed and are actively seeking employment). A rough breakdown of global employment by broad sector is as follows:

1. Agriculture / 923 million
2. Industry / 800 million
3. Services /1.8 billion
4. Transport/Logistics / 230 million
5. Platform workers / 154–435 million¹⁹

Industrial workers coexist with service, transport, warehouse, care, delivery, and platform (or uberised) workers. In most of the Global South, informal labour is not an exception but the norm. These workers – whether in the factory, field, or warehouse – face extreme precarity, weak or non-existent legal protections, and the constant threat of unemployment. Yet, despite the attrition of union density, these workers possess strategic power: they produce and transport goods, work the land, mine the earth, provide care, build cities, and sustain everyday life. Their struggles – from strikes in logistics hubs to mass rebellions by landless workers to walkouts by domestic workers – reveal the continued antagonism between capital and labour.

Struggles do not always emerge straightforwardly as labour organising consciously against capital. They often appear through other structures of oppression, such as patriarchy and social hierarchy (caste, race) or are galvanised by generational experience and other social formations. For instance, women’s movements have exposed how economic systems rely on the exhaustion of bodies and time, particularly those of women in general and those of Black, migrant, and racialised working-class women in particular. Likewise, struggles for social dignity are refracted through identities that are not themselves class-based but that reveal the complex way in which capitalism reactivates old hierarchies for its own strategies of accumulation: caste and race, for instance, are mobilised by the capitalist system in the service of accumulation, and so protests for dignity also create bases for socialist struggle. The surplus population – migrants, the unemployed, landless peasants, and urban poor – are often treated as politically marginal, yet they experience the capitalist system in its most naked form. Their struggles for housing, services, and dignity are struggles to reproduce life. These many struggles show the energy available within the working class to form a historic bloc against capitalism and fight for the future.

However, many of the protests that rattle our cities and countrysides come in the form of large mobilisations that are often shaped by small organisations or driven by social media calls to individuals. Capital thrives on division: formal versus informal, urban versus rural, man versus woman and gender dissident, citizen versus migrant.²⁰ Today, fragmented class structure and social organisation pose major challenges for political organisation and principled unity of action. There are many examples of this mobilised anger being captured by reactionary forces or dissipated into despair. A rupture requires building unity without erasing difference, forging political projects that can articulate shared interests and common horizons. Without such organisation, social forces remain reactive. With it, they become historical agents capable of making the future their own. The genuine organisational question for the left across the world is how to build the subjective platforms of struggle out of the objective conditions of suffering and survival faced by the people.

Time

Capitalism imposes its idea of time on societies – one that reflects urgency without direction, speed without purpose, crisis without resolution. There is a frenetic sense that overtakes social life, disrupting our ability to control our day and creating disorder that eats into our leisure time. Without leisure, the time for building community is not easily available (although the fraying of social policy at the state level has forced working-class women to build platforms for social reproduction that have been vital for their role in so many protest movements of the working class in our time). Without time, it is impossible to build organisational power in workplaces, neighbourhoods, and communities.

The contradictions of capitalism generate spontaneous struggles, which are often sparked by low wages and poor working conditions, but also the conditions of social reproduction such as access to water, public space, and affordable food and fuel. Such struggles are sometimes based on social networks and relationships established over time, but they can also emerge from a rapid deterioration of working and living standards that generate their own mass sentiment. These spontaneous uprisings – while often heroic – are insufficient; they can disrupt the present without disciplined organisation, but they rarely reshape the future. The examples of major revolutions are all stories of resilient revolutionary activity over long periods of time that prepared communities through struggle for the great upsurges that turned the world upside down. Spontaneous struggles reflect genuine anger and grievances. They can occupy streets and inspire hope, and they can also topple governments. Yet the historical record (such as Egypt in 2011) shows that without organisational continuity and strength, these moments are vulnerable to repression, co-optation, and exhaustion. The propertied classes understand time strategically. They plan, often by decades. Movements that operate only in the immediacy of protest surrender the long-term terrain to their enemies.

Organisation

To build beyond immediacy requires organisation, which can take many forms – from more amorphous social movements to democratic-centralist Leninist parties. The debate between these two forms is not central to this dossier. Our point here is the importance of how political organisation – in its many forms – is a vehicle through which time is structured for emancipatory ends. Parties, fronts, trade unions, peasant organisations, women’s associations, and youth movements each play distinct but interconnected roles. Parties of a Leninist type can articulate long-term programmes and contest state power. Mass organisations can anchor struggles in everyday life and provide continuity for communities. Fronts can enable unity among diverse forces without demanding ideological uniformity. Organisation allows the fragmented and harassed working class to socialise what time is available to it and to build a society that has otherwise been stolen from them.

Discipline

The advantage of a Leninist party is the centrality afforded to discipline within that tradition. Discipline does not mean obedience or bureaucratic rigidity, although it can often collapse lazily into these forms. It means building cadre who are politically educated and understand the necessity of the party form, the collective procedures required to build a common political understanding or programme, the essential structures of representational leadership within the party, and an absolute commitment to shared goals, strategies, and forms of accountability. Discipline allows organisations to conserve energy, learn from experience, and endure beyond moments of crisis. It transforms revolt into a project.

Central to this entire operation is what we call the new intellectuals, the permanent persuaders of a political project who emerge from the working class, peasantry, and popular movements.²¹ Their task is to clarify, synthesise, and communicate – to translate lived experience into political strategy. They help movements understand not only what they are fighting against, but what the future must entail.

Internationalism

No rupture with capitalism can be sustained within national borders alone. Capital organises itself internationally, through finance, trade, military blocs, supply chains, and ideological institutions. The forces that seek to build the future must do the same. Internationalism is not a moral add-on or a gesture of sentiment, but a practical necessity rooted in the structure of the world economy and in the shared condition of the oppressed. It means building ties across countries and struggles, learning from revolutionary processes, defending sovereignty against imperialism, and coordinating political education, campaigns, and forms of material solidarity. Without internationalism, victories remain isolated and vulnerable. With it, struggles at the local, national, and regional levels begin to acquire the scale necessary to confront a global system.

The future cannot be seized in a single moment. It must be built patiently, collectively, and consciously. Time creates the space for struggle, organisation gives it form, discipline gives it endurance, and internationalism gives it scale. Against the ruling class’s planned future of exploitation and exclusion, these tools allow the oppressed to plan their own future – one grounded in dignity, equality, and life itself.

Alfredo Plank, Ignacio Colombres, Carlos Sessano, Juan Manuel Sánchez, and Nani Capurro (Argentina), Che (collective series), 1968. Oil on canvas, 195 x 150 cm each.

Part 2: Building the Future

What must be built to replace the present? The future cannot remain only a matter of struggle, organisation, and discipline; it must also take material, institutional, and international form. That means confronting the questions of ownership, planning, sovereignty, and the forms of coordination through which a different social order can be sustained.

Public Ownership and Planning

The question of the future is inseparable from the question of ownership and coordination. Under capitalism, private ownership of the means of production gives a small class the power to determine what is produced, how it is produced, and for whom it is produced. This power is exercised not in the interest of society as a whole but according to the imperatives of profit, competition, and short-term accumulation. The result is a deep contradiction: the productive forces have become profoundly socialised while control over them remains narrowly private. Labour today is already collective and international, but the technological base and economic surpluses of this collective effort are appropriated by a minority. Any serious discussion of a socialist future must therefore confront this contradiction by transforming property relations.

Public ownership is not simply a legal rearrangement of assets from private hands to the state. The state itself is a field of class struggle and must be claimed as a tool to guide the direction of development. When strategic sectors such as energy, transport, finance, land, communications, and heavy industry are publicly owned, society gains the capacity to steer production and innovation towards collective needs rather than private accumulation. Capitalism systematically misallocates resources, overproducing luxury consumption and destructive industries while underproducing care, education, health, and housing. Public ownership creates the material basis to reorient production towards social reproduction, long-term investment, and shared prosperity.

The argument for public ownership is also related to technology. Under private ownership, technological development is subordinated to profitability, intellectual property monopolies, and labour discipline. Innovation is directed towards cost-cutting, surveillance, militarisation, and the enclosure of knowledge rather than towards reducing socially necessary labour time or improving collective well-being. Democratic control over the forces of production allows technology to be deployed for the social good: to shorten the working day, generate employment, expand public services, augment human skills, and reduce ecological harm. The same digital and logistical systems that capitalism uses to intensify exploitation contain within them the potential for rational and humane production and distribution.

Capitalist ideology presents planning as inherently authoritarian and inefficient while elevating the market as a neutral and democratic mechanism of coordination. Capitalism is already highly planned – but it is planned in the interests of capitalists. Multinational corporations, financial institutions, and military alliances engage in extensive internal planning, long-term forecasting, and strategic coordination. The market does not replace planning: it fragments social decision-making, obscures responsibility, and subjects collective life to the narrow logic of accumulation. Prices transmit signals only after social and ecological damage has already occurred. Markets reward short-term profitability, not long-term social rationality.

Socialist planning is not about bureaucratic command divorced from popular life: it is about conscious, democratic coordination of social labour across time. Planning is a temporal weapon against capitalist short-termism. It allows society to set collective priorities – such as decarbonisation, industrial diversification, food sovereignty, and universal care – and mobilise resources accordingly. It makes it possible to balance regions, sectors, and social needs rather than leaving development to the uneven and destructive outcomes of market competition. Planning is the means by which society can act on the understanding that the future is not automatic but must be consciously produced.

Crucially, planning does not negate democracy; rather, it demands its expansion. For planning to be emancipatory, it must be rooted in popular participation, worker control, and mass organisations capable of articulating social needs. The socialisation of labour under capitalism already requires coordination across vast networks; socialism seeks to make this coordination transparent, accountable, and oriented toward human development. When workers, communities, and public institutions participate in setting goals and monitoring outcomes, planning becomes a collective learning process rather than a technocratic imposition. It is through such processes that the social surplus can be consciously directed toward education, health, housing, culture, and ecological restoration.²²

Toward a New Internationalism

In the aftermath of the Second World War, the rise of a powerful socialist bloc and successive waves of decolonisation laid the grounds for an internationalism rooted in the rejection of imperialism and neocolonialism. It was marked by an attempt to build new economic and social models, as well as a new global architecture.²³

This internationalism collapsed under the debt crisis, the assault of neoliberalism, and the fall of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. In its place came the spurious globalisation imposed by the IMF – the opening up of markets, withdrawal of the state from productive sectors, removal of capital controls, surrender of resources, and academic and cultural subordination – a comprehensive erosion of sovereignty.

Decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, the objective conditions are emerging for the rise of a new internationalism. The Global North is undergoing a profound crisis marked by deindustrialisation and the erosion of productive capacity, even as China and other Global South countries emerge as the engines of the global economy. The rise of BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, and other bilateral forums reflects these changing objective conditions.

However, the Global North retains control over the global architecture. The UN and its agencies have been rendered useless by the US and its allies as demonstrated by their escalated assaults across the world, ranging from Gaza, Venezuela, and Cuba to the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Iran. The IMF and the World Bank continue with the tyranny of structural adjustment. The climate framework has failed the people. The pandemic brought with it ‘vaccine apartheid’. Worse, many multilateral organisations of the Global South are inert or infected with the logic of neoliberalism.

Debates around a new global architecture have focused on multipolarity, which is limited and limiting as it replicates the spirit of Cold War rivalry. Instead, the new internationalism must be characterised by multilateralism. Reclaiming the United Nations and upholding the UN Charter as the common heritage of the peoples of the world are key planks here. Both the Security Council and General Assembly require reform, and the countries of the Global South must work towards a common agenda for a host of UN agencies, from the World Health Organisation and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to the UN Conference on Trade and Development. There is a dire need for renewed intellectual and political struggle to frame and advocate a people’s programme for each of these organisations that reflects the aspirations of the Global South.

Alongside a renewed multilateralism, left and patriotic forces must support and strengthen regional organisations that have lost their orientation in the past thirty years and, in cases where that is not possible, advocate for new ones. The economic, social, and political alliances that were formed in Latin America during the Pink Tide of the 2000s and early 2010s remain a model for what is possible. In contemporary times, the Alliance of Sahel States has captured a powerful desire across Africa for stronger integration while resisting the neocolonial logic of ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States).²⁴ The processes launched by BRICS across a variety of areas – from finance, trade, and infrastructure to science, technology, health, education, agriculture, climate cooperation, and research – provide another model for such regional organisations.

The new internationalism begins with a defence of sovereignty but does not end there. It must also incorporate an internationalist vision of a future based on transformed social relations. This vision cannot be realised in one country alone – nor can it be championed by states alone. It requires the mobilisation of movements across the world to transcend capitalism. Socialists must build bridgeheads to the future by elevating, learning from, and building on projects that have the potential to change the balance of forces.

Yet no programme, however necessary, can sustain itself without a social force capable of carrying it forward and a horizon capable of animating struggle. If the future must be built through institutions, ownership, planning, and international coordination, it must also be lived as a political sensibility. That sensibility is hope.

Luis González Palma (Guatemala), La Rosa (The Rose), 1991. Gelatin silver print with toning and applied colour, 47 x 48.5 cm.

Part 3: Hope

Today, capitalism is undergoing a crisis of legitimacy as its ideas and values – individualism, entrepreneurship, consumerism – no longer deliver the social mobility and material prosperity long promised by neoliberalism. At the same time, as the US-led imperialist bloc is seeing its power decline – economically and politically – it doubles down on the two arenas where that power remains largely uncontested: cultural production and military power. Though vastly different in their expressions, both serve the same purpose: to preserve the present and foreclose the future. Through military aggression, the US-led bloc seeks to discipline any country that refuses to bend to the Washington Consensus and the interests of private capital, closing off any political horizon that rejects subordination. Through its monopoly over the modes of cultural production, it seeks not only to control information – what is accepted as truth – but also to shape the culture and values of the dominated masses. In doing so, it narrows the horizon of what we dare to imagine and, ultimately, what we dare to hope. In the absence of hope, the working class is thus compelled into one of two political subjects: either pushed to the ruthless pessimism of the far right and trained to look with derision at the very idea of a different future or ruled by an escapist defeatism that believes the future is already lost.

Two Chinese concepts of ‘future’ help clarify what is at stake here. ‘未来’ (wèilái), the word for future or, literally, ‘what has not yet come’, is made up of two words: 未 (wèi) means ‘not yet’ or ‘has not’ and 来 (lái) means ‘to come’ or ‘to arrive’. Together, they emphasise the future’s essential quality of incompleteness, and pessimism and hope turn on this difference: the future is not predetermined. It is a possibility, and this is where human action comes in.

In this context, hope becomes a terrain of struggle in the battle of ideas and emotions. This is why hope must become more than a feeling, but a practice – one that is built through popular education and culture, anchored in history, and actively lived in our day-to-day lives.

The Battle of Ideas

The ruling class works to obfuscate class relations and common class interests through the promotion of its values (individualism, ruthlessness, and conservatism). This logic trains the dominated classes to reflexively reject forms of political activity as wastes of time, unrealistic, or utopian, and to treat collective action as either naïve or dangerous. In such conditions, hope cannot be expected to come about individually. It must be built as a practice that reopens the horizon of possibility and contests the everyday ‘common sense’ of the capitalist present.

Hope must therefore be organised through concrete political practices that reopen the horizon of possibility. This requires us to:

Foster political imagination. Left forces must make the future legible by building alternative forms of organised labour and social relations. Hope for the future can be mobilised when it is anchored to concrete actions that change people’s material conditions in the present, and when the working class can recognise themselves as protagonists of history rather than spectators of capitalist crises.

Read to learn, learn to do. Ho Chi Minh said, ‘You can read a thousand books, but if you don’t apply what you read, all you are is a bookshelf’.²⁵ Reading becomes a practice of hope when it is tied to action. Study should be collective and oriented towards problems people confront in their workplaces, neighbourhoods, and organisations. The point is not accumulation of knowledge but the development of shared language, analysis, and confidence that can be tested in practice.

Develop a popular counterculture. A counter-ideology cannot be built without a counterculture. This means creating forms of popular cultural expression that break the spell of individualism and pessimism, that build dignity and make solidarity attractive while honouring working-class culture.

Communicate the future. The left must translate its programme into forms that can be conveyed didactically. Didactic does not mean to talk down to people; it means being strategic and communicating proposals clearly that are linked to people’s experiences and taught through practical examples. The aim is to move from abstraction to orientation so that people can grasp what can be done, by whom, and with what resources.²⁶

Return to the source. Rescue revolutionary history and culture, and history and culture in general. History is a practice of hope because it breaks the idea that the present is eternal. By returning to moments of rupture, of collective struggle and transformation, people recover evidence that change is possible and learn how it was achieved. History is not nostalgia – it is a school of strategy, sacrifice, and confidence.²⁷

Become permanent persuaders. The left must dispute all collective spaces to disseminate the ideas of the working class. It must become present wherever people gather, not as a visiting lecturer but as an organising force. Gramsci’s ‘new intellectual’ is a ‘constructor’ and ‘organiser’, a ‘permanent persuader’ rooted in practical life rather than in occasional eloquence.

The Battle of Emotions

The ruling class must continually work to channel the widespread discontent that is the rational response to the exploitation and deprivation necessary for capitalist society. Discontent is dangerous when it becomes organised, when it knows its enemy, and when it responds with solidarity. It is therefore continually redirected away from collective struggle and towards fear, resentment, cynicism, and resignation. Today, this struggle is intensified by a communications landscape in which a young working class is siphoned into virtual spaces that foster individualism, are designed to capture and monetise their attention and drain their cognitive capacity, and are controlled by forces of the far right.²⁸ In these spaces, discontent is captured and given temporary relief through ephemeral affective participation. The result is not the disappearance of discontent but its (lucrative) management, fragmenting the working class into isolated spectators and training them to confuse reaction with politics.

In this terrain, we must turn anger and confusion into clarity, clarity into hope, and hope into collective action. This requires:

Media literacy. The left must educate the working class about the infrastructure, purposes (unintended and intended), and political economy of virtual spaces and technologies. This means making visible the gap between managed participation and power – between posting and organising – and teaching the working class to recognise how the ruling class uses their monopoly on virtual spaces to control information, amplify outrage, and normalise isolation. The goal is not withdrawal from virtual spaces but to give people the tools to read them, use them, and recognise their limits.

Actually existing politics. While leveraging virtual spaces for education and mobilisation, the left must create avenues for political participation where people can see the actuality of changing the present to build a better future. This requires organised moments of interaction without the mediation of algorithms, where people can meet, exchange ideas, organise, take decisions, carry out collective tasks, and see results. The point is to move from ephemeral interactions based on narrow interests to long-term organisation based on shared class interests.

Counter-values. The left must develop socialist values and model them with political action. This means making solidarity, care, discipline, and comradeship into realities in the world rather than mere slogans. Values become credible when they are reflected in how we organise: how we treat one another, how we work together, how we resolve disagreements, and how we relate to the communities we claim to serve. In a culture that fosters ruthless individualism and pessimism, modelling socialist values is itself a strategy in the battle of emotions: it offers a glimpse of a different sociality, and therefore a clear sense of what a future society organised around different values will look like.

Hope as Praxis

If the future is 未来 (wèilái) – the Not-Yet that is ‘to arrive’ – then hope is the sensibility that keeps that Not-Yet open and the practice that prevents it from being sealed shut by pessimism, spectacle, and resignation. The ruling class works to convert wèilái into a prison, to eternalise the present, and to turn capitalist discontent into cynicism or cruelty. Against this, our tradition insists that hope is not passive optimism or expectation but a militant orientation toward the unfinished character of the world, one forged in the struggles for dignity across the Global South. It is dangerous precisely because it is material: it raises consciousness and moves people from mere endurance to action.

This is why hope requires structure, discipline, and organisation. When the culture and ideas of a people in motion obstruct the reproduction of capitalist common sense, they can become principal and decisive, not as a denial of materialism but as its dialectical fulfilment. In that sense, 大同 (dàtóng) – the utopian state characterised by ‘universal harmony’ – is not a decorative ideal but a horizon that gives direction to strategy, while 小康 (xiǎokāng, ‘moderately prosperous society’) names the concrete steps that allow people to develop under limited resources but in conditions of dignity. Hope becomes real when it turns 将来 (jiānglái, ‘the future’), the ‘about to come’, from a promise into a plan. The task is not to dream in the abstract but to build a concrete utopia rooted in real tendencies and strengthened through practice, until the Not-Yet becomes a tangible future being built in the present.

Alfonso Soteno Fernández (Metepec, State of Mexico, Mexico), Árbol de la vida (Tree of Life), 1975. Open-fired clay painted with varnished vinyl paint, 6 m.

Notes

In Koubri, roughly forty kilometres from Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, members of the Watinoma Women’s Association begin the day’s work with song.

Since the colonial era, conflicts in Africa have been explained by every imaginable category – tribal antagonism, ethnic hatred, religious extremism, governance failures, population pressures, and resource scarcity, to name a few – except the one that underlies them all: class. While these categories undoubtedly shape Africa’s contradictions, they cannot be explained without an assessment of the relations of production. Each period of Africa’s postcolonial history has produced new explanations that share one feature, namely the systematic erasure of how imperial extraction and class exploitation organise violence and reproduce instability.

Many, including sections within the anti-colonial struggles, have insisted that the categories of class analysis and class struggle do not apply to Africa because a class-based society has not formed on the continent. Fifty years ago, Issa Shivji’s Class Struggles in Tanzania advanced two key arguments that countered this thesis:

1. Capitalist relations of production on the African continent have divided populations into classes, reshaping other social relations – ethnic, kinship, communal – through the pressures of class formation.
2. Therefore, class as a category is analytically necessary to understand the African reality.²

In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani argued that the war in Darfur cannot be understood without considering the colonial reorganisation of land and political identity, particularly the divide between tribes with recognised homelands (dars) and those without. He showed how these divisions, combined with desertification and the intensifying competition over resources, exacerbated class tensions and violence, particularly as the Sahel region grew increasingly arid.³

While climate change is playing an undeniable role in shifts in the region, the dominant ‘climate conflict’ framework routinely – and falsely – frames climate-driven resource scarcity as the root of violence and instability in the Sahel.

The institutional architecture of the ‘climate conflict’ framework was consolidated in the 2010s. The UN Environment Programme’s Livelihood Security: Climate Change, Migration and Conflict in the Sahel identified climate change as a ‘threat multiplier’ driving farmer-herder conflict, while the UN Security Council’s 2018 debate on climate-related security risks positioned climate as a threat requiring military response.⁴ This ‘climate-security nexus’ discourse emerged during a period shaped by the 2008 global financial crisis, the NATO destruction of Libya in 2011, and the subsequent militarisation of the Sahel through expanded US and French military presence – context that the framework itself systematically omits.

Class Struggle and Climate Catastrophe in the Sahel argues that the escalating conflicts in the Sahel can only be understood if they are analysed as being grounded in the class struggle, given that they operate within the political economy of imperialist extraction: the climate catastrophe is an accelerant that intensifies pre-existing contradictions – not its root cause. The second part of the dossier looks closely at Mali and Sudan as examples of these changes in the Sahel.

Part I: The Desiccation of the Sahel and Its Political Impact

The Climate Catastrophe

The Arabic word Sahara means ‘desert’, i.e. an arid place with little rainfall. However, this is a misleading term. There have been long periods, influenced by changes in the Earth’s orbit and by solar insolation,⁵ when the Sahara has experienced pluvial phases. One such period, known as the ‘Green Sahara’ or the ‘African Humid Period’, spanned the end of the last Ice Age and the early Holocene, between 14,800 and 5,500 years ago, when lakes, rivers, grasslands, and savannahs as well as dense vegetation were present in the Sahara and along the southern edge of the Sahel (Arabic for ‘shore’ or ‘coast’). At this time, societies organised around communal pastoralism (mobile herding with shared access to water and grazing lands), adapting to climate oscillations through collective coordination of movement rather than relying on privatised resource control.⁶ From the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, parts of the Sahel-Sahara fringe again experienced humid conditions before shifting to a long cycle of aridity in the twentieth century.⁷

Though these ‘regime shifts’, as climate scientists call them, tend to occur relatively abruptly, their pace over the last few decades has accelerated much more quickly than anything the planet has experienced in previous periods.⁸ According to the drylands assessment of the UN International Fund for Agricultural Development, over the past thirty years the Sahel ecological zone has shifted from 50 to 200 kilometres southward, leading to major losses of biodiversity and arable land.⁹ While the African Humid Period is generally understood to have ended ‘rapidly’ in paleoclimate terms, even high-resolution plant-wax biomarkers and lake-level reconstructions (fine-grained sediment-core records of past rainfall and water-balance change) show that the main transition from humid to arid conditions spanned several centuries, not decades.¹⁰ ‘The past’, as one scientific paper argues, ‘is not the future’.¹¹

In the Sahel, recent anthropogenic (human-induced) warming and associated multi-decadal rainfall shifts are occurring at rates that have no clear precedent in the Holocene record.¹² Recent studies show that the Sahel has warmed about 1.5 times faster than the global average over the past few decades, despite contributing less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions (for instance, Africa accounted for less than 3% of cumulative global CO₂ emissions from 1750–2021 while Sub-Saharan Africa, excluding South Africa, contributed just 0.6%). By contrast, the contiguous United States, which is warming at a similar rate (1.6 times faster than the global average), accounts for 25% of global emissions.¹³ The sixth assessment report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2023) confirms with ‘high confidence’ that 1) Africa’s temperature has increased more rapidly than that of any other region in the world, 2) continued warming will accelerate extreme temperatures, and, importantly, 3) that ‘human-induced climate change [has been] the dominant driver’.¹⁴

These are not new findings. A scientific paper from 2001, for instance, showed that the Sahel ‘provides the most dramatic example worldwide of climate variability that has been directly and quantitatively measured’.¹⁵ Between the early 1980s and late 1990s, the Sahel region saw an increase in rainfall and vegetation, recovering from the severe drought of the two previous decades. However, from 1999, the upward trends flattened out.¹⁶ While earlier scholarship suggested that the severe droughts that took place from the late 1960s through the 1980s were caused by deforestation – which remains a concern – better data and analysis show that the rainfall variability in the Sahel is caused by the rise in sea surface temperatures in the Mediterranean Sea, the North Atlantic, and the tropical oceans. In other words, this variability is due to overall anthropogenic warming trends, which are largely the result of Western industrial greenhouse gas emissions.¹⁷ Future climate shifts, including those influenced by ocean-driven changes, could easily reverse or further destabilise this fragile balance in the Sahel.¹⁸

Oscillating weather patterns in the Sahel have also caused problems with the water table, fuelling conflict between different communities. Long-term statistical analysis of weather patterns has shown a strong rebound from droughts, but then a plateau, indicating that there has been no permanent recovery. This plateau is also largely attributed to the rise in sea surface temperatures driven by global industrial emissions concentrated in the Global North.¹⁹ Using the Sahel Rainfall Index, derived from rain gauge observations, these studies show that what has changed is the nature of rainfall: rain is now more intense but intermittent, resulting in more extreme weather patterns, including both floods and droughts.

The Social and Economic Catastrophe

With temperatures in the Sahel rising 1.5 times faster than the global average, agriculture and pastoralism have come under severe stress.²⁰ A high correlation has been documented between rainfall variability in the Sahel and yields of staple rain-fed crops such as millet and sorghum.²¹ There is strong scientific evidence that herders in the Sahel are facing declining pasture availability due to warming and delayed rains. As a result, they must migrate longer distances, often into unfamiliar grazing territories. Recent research on Sahelian pastoralism shows that rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, and land degradation are shrinking accessible rangelands and pushing herders to extend their seasonal mobility. A 2025 synthesis on climate and pastoral livelihoods notes that in the Sahel, reduced grazing availability due to warming and irregular rains is driving herders into longer migrations across unfamiliar territory in pursuit of diminishing pasture and water sources, thereby reshaping traditional transhumance calendars and routes (the customary or demarcated corridors used for seasonal livestock movements between grazing areas and water points).²² Earlier work by the Food and Agriculture Organisation similarly documented that reduced grazing availability has required longer-distance and longer-duration movements, with herd routes shifting southwards into more humid and often unfamiliar zones.²³

This intensified mobility becomes catastrophic not because mobility itself is inherently harmful, but because colonial and postcolonial land tenure regimes dismantled legal protections for transhumance corridors, post-independence development prioritised sedentary agriculture, and from the 1980s onwards decades of structural adjustment eroded public regulation of land and water.²⁴ Under these conditions, climate-induced mobility increasingly exposes poorer pastoralists to land enclosure, rent extraction, criminalisation, and violence, converting an ecological stress into a class-mediated crisis of reproduction.

These dynamics are not abstract; their consequences have been registered most acutely in the bodies of the young. The droughts of the late 1960s to 1980s, and the climate and environmental shocks that they produced, resulted in severe food crises and famine.²⁵ Research on climate and food systems shows that even when rainfall and harvests rebound, the long-term deterioration of children’s health has been dramatic. One study, for instance, links rising temperatures, declining and increasingly variable rainfall, and seasonal disruption to low birth weights and child stunting, driven by a combination of in-utero heat stress and undernutrition resulting from repeated crop and livestock losses. Where subsistence and small-scale farming dominate, chronic seasonal losses translate directly into enduring health deficits.²⁶ This correlation between climate variability and child health reflects how World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) structural adjustment programmes (SAPs) eliminated the grain reserves, subsidised inputs, and extension services that previously buffered against harvest failures while enforcing export agriculture that prioritises European markets over local food security.

As climatic shifts intensify, the crisis of hunger has been slowly but surely met with the crisis of disease, leading to a political catastrophe in the region. For instance, the epidemic belt of malaria has moved northward to the Sahel-Sudan transition zone, with increased fatality rates among children who do not have immunity to malaria and other associated illnesses.²⁷ Meanwhile, there has been an intensification of Tuareg (Amazigh) rebellions in the north of Mali and Niger rooted in long-standing grievances against the state; of the Islamist rebellions that resulted from the destruction of Libya at the hands of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation; and of tensions between herders and sedentary agriculturalists. From food insecurity to disease outbreaks, the region has deteriorated into violent conflicts, driving internal and cross-border migration as well as mass displacement and rapid urbanisation.²⁸

Approximately 30 members of the Watinoma Women’s Association work a plot of land, using agroecological practices to grow food for their families, for schools, and for local markets in the Koubri region.

The Political Catastrophe

As droughts intensify, rain grows erratic, and agrarian and pastoral livelihoods collapse, the entire social and political order is being reshaped. The thinning of pasturelands and shrinking of water sources have brought farmers and herders into increasingly violent confrontation. As grazing routes dry up and wells fail, pastoralists are forced to push further into farmlands, while farmers – facing their own declining harvests – become less willing to accommodate mobile herds in the absence of effective mediation. This intensification of competition does not occur in a vacuum: changing weather patterns make vital resources scarcer within land regimes shaped by colonial dispossession, postcolonial state bias toward sedentary agriculture, and the erosion of public regulation.²⁹

These localised tensions escalate into national crises precisely because Sahelian states – weakened by decades of marginalisation, uneven development, and externally imposed economic restructuring – lack the capacity to manage these pressures. In peripheral regions such as northern Mali, Niger, and Chad – where the state’s presence has long been minimal – climate shocks interact with chronic underinvestment to further erode already fragile state capacity. The state’s failure to provide water access, manage pastureland, and protect the population from violence during drought periods undermines its legitimacy, deepens resentment, and accelerates political fragmentation by instrumentalising religious and ethnic identities.³⁰ This vacuum of authority, shaped by the state’s retreat and by political neglect, provides fertile ground for armed groups, particularly under the conditions created by ecological stress. Insurgent movements, from Sahelian jihadist networks to Boko Haram, have learned to exploit ecological distress as an opportunity for political expansion. When people lose livestock, crops, or income due to drought, they are more vulnerable to recruitment – not because this ideology suddenly becomes irresistible, but because armed groups offer a semblance of livelihood, protection, and dispute resolution. Studies from Kenya, Mali, and northern Nigeria show that climate-induced livelihood collapse increases the likelihood that young men will join militant groups, with evidence from Nigeria showing recruitment spikes in drought-affected regions.³¹ The climate crisis thus reshapes the political battlefield: armed groups step in where the state retreats, often providing water access, arbitrating local conflicts, or distributing spoils – functions that can mimic governance.

Yet the collapse of long-standing coping mechanisms is not only institutional but cultural and political. The people of the Sahel have long developed intricate systems of knowledge to read ecological cycles, anticipate rainfall, and coordinate herd movements across vast and unforgiving territories. These were not mere customs; they were forms of governance embedded in rituals, social obligations, and intercommunal agreements. Climate volatility has destabilised these knowledge systems, whose functioning depended on relatively predictable ecological rhythms. Erratic rainfall renders indigenous agricultural calendars unreliable, while disrupted grazing cycles force pastoralists to abandon long-standing migratory routes.³² As these cultural technologies fall apart, communities lose their ability to self-regulate resource use, creating more openings for conflict and further delegitimising both customary authorities and state institutions.

Women and girls sit at the heart of this intertwined climate-political crisis, though their experiences are often misclassified as social rather than political. As water and firewood grow scarcer, women must walk longer distances each day, reducing time for economic or civic participation.³³ Climate shocks can lead families to pull girls from school or push them into early marriage – a retreat that further weakens the social foundations of democratic participation and gender equality. There is also evidence that economic stress brought on by drought correlates with an increase in intimate partner violence.³⁴ These pressures constrain women’s political agency and their capacity to engage in community decision-making, peacebuilding, or local governance. Climate change, therefore, is not only reshaping physical landscapes but narrowing political space for half the population.

Taken together, the dynamics outlined above – resource conflict, the erosion of state authority, the expansion of armed groups, the breakdown of non-state governance systems, and the narrowing of women’s political capacity – form an interlocking political crisis in which climate stress intensifies contradictions rooted in imperialist intervention, uneven development, and the weakening of public and communal institutions. Climate change does not operate as an external shock but as a force that reorganises power, reshaping struggles over land, mobility, and authority across the Sahel. These processes do not unfold uniformly across the region; they are mediated by national histories, state trajectories, and political choices. To understand how the climate crisis becomes a political crisis in practice, it is therefore necessary to examine these dynamics within context of specific countries. Unless climate justice, equitable adaptation, and strengthened social institutions are placed at the centre of the region’s political strategy, the downward spiral will continue, turning climate shock into political upheaval and environmental degradation into state collapse.

Driven by the defence of food sovereignty, growing organic maize has become part of peasant resistance to the expansion of genetically modified seeds in Burkina Faso.

Part II: Mali and Sudan

Mali

Before French troops invaded the Niger River Bend in the 1890s, West African societies had developed systems for governing land, water, and pastoral mobility. In Mali, Timbuktu manuscripts produced from the fifteenth to nineteenth century linked political legitimacy to the protection of livelihoods, combining legal reasoning with astronomical observation to anticipate seasonal rainfall and floods.³⁵ The Macina Empire (1818–1862) later formalised this approach through the dina (a comprehensive legal code regulating the use of the Niger River’s vast seasonal floodplain – the Inner Niger Delta – among Fulani herders, Dogon and Bambara farmers, and Bozo fishers). This system was overseen by a hierarchy of authorities, including pastoral chiefs known as jowros who coordinated seasonal cattle entry, maintained livestock corridors, and mediated resource conflicts based on observed flood patterns.³⁶

These manuscripts and governance systems show that resource and environmental management in Mali was inseparable from political legitimacy, social obligation, and productive labour, rather than treated as a technical security problem. Environmental stress was understood as political failure when rulers did not protect livelihoods. What is now described as ‘climate-driven conflict’ is instead the outcome of the systematic destruction of the state capacity required to run regulatory systems – first by French colonialism, then by neocolonial state formation, and today intensified by anthropogenic climate change operating within structures of arrested development.

French colonialism dismantled the regulatory capacity of existing institutions while preserving their extractive functions. In Mali, statutory land law stripped pastoral chiefs of legal standing while continuing to use them to control pastoral access and collect fees, producing a condition of dual illegitimacy as they lost both customary and legal authority. By recognising only individually held title deeds, colonial land law subordinated customary and pastoral land-use rights, privileging sedentary agriculture and rendering mobile pastoralism legally precarious.

Mali’s first president, Modibo Keïta (1960–1968), challenged this inheritance. Inspired by Third World socialism, his government withdrew from the French Community,³⁷ left the French-backed monetary system known as the CFA franc zone, nationalised key industries, and pursued state-led development aimed at restoring public authority over land and resources in a context of growing environmental variability, including efforts to curtail the political power of intermediary pastoral elites. This included rejecting French-backed schemes to externalise resource control in Mali’s desert regions – most notably the Organisation commune des régions sahariennes (Joint Organisation of the Saharan Regions), a late-colonial French project that sought to retain control over Saharan territory and resources across colonial borders by stoking divisions between ethnic groups.

The military government of Moussa Traoré (1968–1991) that overthrew Keïta in a 1968 coup d’état reversed these measures and restored a privileged role for French firms and finance in trade, banking, and public procurement in the 1980s. This restoration of French commercial privilege revealed the Traoré regime’s function within the Françafrique system (an informal matrix of French political and economic mechanisms of control in its former African colonies). As with other radical nationalist leaders in Francophone Africa, Keïta’s challenge to neocolonial control was abruptly terminated.

Under Traoré, pastoral chiefs were gradually rehabilitated, but within legal and administrative structures that had lost their coordinating function precisely as environmental variability intensified. Land codes recognised only individually held title deeds, reducing customary rights to weak use rights and transforming pastoral chiefs from resource managers into rent-extraction agents. As rainfall became increasingly irregular following the droughts of the late 1960s to 1980s and the partial ‘recovery’ in the 1990s, which plateaued by 1999, access to grazing corridors and floodplain pastures became more contested, allowing politicians to redefine cattle entry as a revenue source. Although pastoral chiefs remained responsible for managing these corridors, they had no statutory authority over them and became dependent on local government officials who controlled access and extracted rents. Rising fees to access floodplain pastures, driven by the need to finance bribes to local officials, disproportionately burdened dryland pastoralists. Unlike agropastoralists, they had no farmland to fall back on, and their herds depended on seasonal access to the delta’s floodplain pastures. Meanwhile, state agencies such as the rice development authority Office riz Mopti (Mopti Rice Office) confiscated nutrient-rich pastures without providing meaningful compensation for lost grazing access to the pastoral communities they nominally served while courts issued deliberately ambiguous rulings amid pervasive bribery, perpetuating conflict to ensure continuous extraction. Though the institutions of pastoral governance formally remained, their capacity to coordinate land, water, and mobility under growing climatic stress was systematically dismantled.³⁸

Structural adjustment programmes (SAPs), implemented from 1988 and deepened through the 1990s, deepened this crisis by dismantling the state’s capacity to regulate land, water, and mobility precisely as rainfall variability intensified. World Bank and IMF conditionalities cut veterinary and agricultural extension staff, removed input subsidies (with sharp increases in fertiliser prices), privatised water-point maintenance, and imposed a 50% currency devaluation in 1994, collapsing rural infrastructure while forcing export-oriented commercialisation.³⁹ As mediation capacity disappeared, land competition intensified and pastoral mobility was criminalised, producing continuous rent extraction from pastoral economies. Lower-class Fulani herders were systematically dispossessed while state officials and pastoral elites accumulated rents. Pastoral governance was converted into a mechanism for extraction. Climate change intensified these conditions by reducing available pasture, increasing the stakes of access control, and forcing longer migrations into unfamiliar territories where predatory extraction was more easily imposed.⁴⁰

As the state retreated from its governance functions, armed groups – not as liberation movements but as actors exploiting the vacuum left by institutional collapse – moved to address the material grievances that no political authority would confront. Between 2015–2018, Katiba Macina (the Macina Liberation Front) – an armed jihadist group formed in 2015 that drew its base primarily from marginalised Fulani pastoralists and, from 2017, operated under the al-Qaeda-affiliated Jama’at Nusrat ul-Islam wa al-Muslimin (Support Group for Islam and Muslims, JNIM) – abolished all grazing fees. These fees had been imposed by pastoral chiefs in order to gain access to nutrient-rich floodplain pastures and had consumed a substantial share of pastoral cash income.⁴¹ Fee abolition removed a major source of rent extraction, easing cash burdens and improving access to pastures for dryland pastoralists. For the poorest households, this meant immediate material relief – often the difference between viability and dispossession.⁴²

In this context, the class divide within both Fulani and Dogon communities shaped patterns of armed mobilisation. Among the Fulani, wealthy pastoral chiefs and cattle-owners stood against poor dryland pastoralists. Dogon farming communities were similarly stratified between landowners tied to state schemes and land-poor farmers facing food insecurity. State policies weaponised these class divisions. The Mopti Rice Office shifted pastoral corridors and grazing access in ways that favoured wealthy farmers, often without meaningful compensation to pastoralists. As state forces withdrew from rural areas after 2015, Malian authorities delegated local security to Dozo hunter militias (traditional fraternities repurposed as armed groups) and provided them with training, weapons, and financial support. The most structured of these, Dan Na Ambassagou, recruited largely from poor Dogon youth, whose dispossession they channelled into ethnic hostility that targeted Fulani communities rather than the elites dispossessing both. The consequences were devastating: in the Ogossagou massacre of March 2019, Dan Na Ambassagou fighters killed approximately 160 Fulani civilians – an atrocity that forced the prime minister’s resignation but produced no lasting accountability.⁴³

Though climate stress did not create this class divide, it multiplied its effects: erratic rainfall and degraded pastures meant that timely delta access became even more critical, transforming exploitative fees into existential barriers. It was this intensification of pre-existing extraction, not scarcity itself, that drove pastoralists to armed resistance.

Despite imposing coercive social codes – including restrictions on women’s movement and violence against dissenters – Katiba Macina was able to settle land disputes, regulate grazing access, and enforce compensation for crop damage, providing governance functions that the neocolonial state had abandoned. The concrete economic impact of fee abolition helps explain why dryland pastoralists supported Katiba Macina, and later JNIM more broadly, since it was addressing grievances that no other political force confronted. After Katiba Macina reinstated smaller fees in 2018 following pressure from jowros, many dryland pastoralists shifted their allegiance to Dawlat il Islamia (the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, ISGS), a new Islamic State-aligned faction formed in late 2019, whose call for land collectivisation and ending payments for pasture access directly appealed to lower-class Fulani.⁴⁴

The split between JNIM and ISGS was not about religious doctrine or climate adaptation strategies – it was about whether Fulani elites could continue to extract rents from poor pastoralists. ISGS’s call for land collectivisation directly challenged the class power of pastoral chiefs, drawing support from lower-class Fulani who faced both environmental stress and systematic class exploitation. Climate stress amplified these dynamics by making access to resources more critical, but the struggle itself was a contest over who would set the rules of mobility, pasture access, and compensation in the delta. The state-sponsored ‘ethnic conflict’ narrative has served to obscure these class dynamics. By presenting violence as a primordial Fulani-Dogon antagonism, it both impedes solidarity between poor farmers and herders who face extraction at the hands of the elite and justifies military operations as a form of ‘counterterrorism’.

In this context, the Alliance of Sahel States (AES) – formed in September 2023 by Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger and formalised as a confederation in July 2024 – represents an attempt to break from neocolonial dependency and reclaim resource control that opens space for comprehensive climate adaptation. Mali’s planning documents, National Strategy for Emergence and Sustainable Development 2024–2033 and Mali Kura ɲɛtaasira ka bɛn san 2063 ma (A New Mali: A Vision for 2063), explicitly frame sovereignty as a prerequisite for environmental restoration and promote policies such as public investment in irrigation and pastoral infrastructure, the restoration of grazing corridors, and prioritising food sovereignty over export-oriented agriculture.

Yet the AES faces profound challenges, such as inherited debt, limited industrial capacity, ongoing armed conflict, and French and ECOWAS (Economic Community of West African States) pressure. Mali’s reliance on foreign investors raises crucial questions about whether the AES will be able to achieve genuine sovereignty or fold to the interests of French imperialism. Nonetheless, this alliance echoes Keïta’s recognition that environmental crises cannot be addressed without confronting imperialism.

Sudan

Darfur, from the Arabic Dār Fūr, means ‘homeland of the Fur people’. Yet today, the word often elicits a sense of enduring natural crises. Branded ‘the world’s first climate change conflict’ by humanitarian organisations, UN officials, and foreign policy analysts, this designation erases as much as it explains.⁴⁵ When former UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared in 2007 that ‘the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change’, he performed a familiar sleight of hand, acknowledging environmental stress while systematically obscuring the political economy that transformed drought into genocide.⁴⁶ The narrative proceeds predictably: as the Sahara Desert advances one mile per year and rainfall declines by 15–30%, Arab pastoralists and Black African farmers compete for shrinking resources and ancient ethnic hatreds ignite. Climate becomes the prime mover. Class disappears entirely.

The violence that erupted across Darfur in 2003 and later spread into Kordofan and the Blue Nile was neither a sudden outbreak of ethnic conflict nor a spontaneous combustion of scarcity. It was precipitated by a structural convergence in which accelerating climate disruption intersected with a political economy forged by long-term neoliberal restructuring and state predation. The conflict is, in essence, an ecological-class war. The state has systematically dismantled traditional livelihoods, privatised communal resources, and created a dispossessed population dependent on a militarised economy – all factors that have amplified environmental precarity. The outcome is more than a humanitarian crisis; it is the violent restructuring of society for capital accumulation.

The physical deterioration of Sudan’s environment is acute, with 40% of the years on record (between 1943 and 2017) in South Darfur classified as drought years, alongside the southward creep of desertification.⁴⁷ This is not neutral ‘scarcity’: it is a geographically uneven consequence of the global economic order, which has externalised its ecological costs onto the periphery. In Sudan, the acceleration of anthropogenic warming acts as a brutal amplifier of existing vulnerabilities.

One of the achievements of the Watinoma Women’s Association was the installation of a well with a solar-powered pump and a 15-cubic-metre reservoir, guaranteeing access to water even during the dry season.

Ecological stress becomes a catastrophe only when it meets a political system that centres profit over people. In Sudan, the pivotal turn came with the 1989 coup and neoliberal restructuring under Omar al-Bashir, enforced by IMF and World Bank SAPs, which mandated the removal of agricultural subsidies, the privatisation of communal lands, and the gutting of state support services.⁴⁸ This strategic state retreat shattered the social contract in rural Sudan. The Bashir regime actively weaponised this new political ecology, transforming land from a communal resource into a patronage currency allocated to regime-aligned elites who mechanised farming, blocked pastoral corridors, and dispossessed farmers.⁴⁹ To suppress the resulting unrest, the state outsourced violence to pastoralist militias – the Janja’wid (devils on horseback) – giving them a carte blanche to seize livestock, harvests, and land.⁵⁰ In this process, assets were violently transferred from communal to private hands, creating a new class of militarised accumulators.

The twenty-first-century gold rush, driven by global markets, layered frenzied extractive logic onto this system. Militias, notably the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), evolved into capitalist enterprises that controlled mines and smuggling routes.⁵¹ The climate-driven displacement of the population has created a pool of desperate labour and opened new territories for resource capture, effectively monetising human and ecological displacement.⁵²

The ‘Arab vs. Black African’ narrative is a potent political tool that is actively cultivated and weaponised by the regime to curtail a burgeoning class conflict. This strategy ethnicised what was fundamentally a crisis over the means of production – above all fertile land and water – under conditions of engineered scarcity. It has prevented a unified front of the dispossessed and allowed armed groups to recruit along fragmented lines of identity, capitalising on the anguish of a people whose hope for a decent life has been obliterated.

The path to radicalisation follows a clear circuit of dispossession. Young men, severed from agrarian or pastoral livelihoods by combined ecological and economic shocks, find their labour power commodified in its most brutal form: as armed fighters. The RSF, therefore, is not merely a militia; it operates as a governing enterprise that offers wages, dispute resolution, and protection in zones where the state offers only neglect or violence. Joining it becomes a rational survival strategy in a collapsed economy, turning ecological stress into military manpower.⁵³

In this context, international actors are integral components of the system that shapes and exploits the crisis – not external saviours. Among these actors are:

• The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, who have financed the RSF as a mercenary force in order to access Sudan’s gold. This represents a new imperial modality, where Gulf capital uses militarised accumulation to secure resources and project power.⁵⁴
• The European Union, whose funding, channelled through the Khartoum Process to Sudanese state agencies for border control, effectively resourced and legitimised forces – including units linked to the RSF – that were tasked with stemming migration. This policy directly militarised the response to climate-displaced populations, treating the victims of this political-ecological crisis as a security threat.⁵⁵
• Western financial institutions, which created the conditions for state collapse and social vulnerability – such as through debt and SAPs – making Sudan a fertile ground for the subsequent waves of crisis.⁵⁶

The 2019 Sudanese revolution and the enduring resistance committees (neighbourhood-level bodies that coordinated the uprising and continue to organise civilian governance amid the war) represent a profound challenge to this entire structure.⁵⁷ Their demands for democracy, justice, and peace are both anti-imperialist and ecological, since a progressive, sovereign project in Sudan would require dismantling the war economy, renationalising and democratising control over land and mineral wealth, and launching a massive agroecological restoration to rebuild communal resilience. This would directly confront the interests of the local militarised elite and their international backers – interests that both domestic actors in the current war (the Sudanese Armed Forces and the RSF) seek to protect. This war is, tragically, a battle between competing factions of this elite over the spoils of the system, ensuring that the masses remain trapped in the ecology of dispossession. A true resolution will not be brought about by a ceasefire between generals that represent this elite, but by a revolutionary transformation of the political-ecological relations that define Sudanese life.

Conclusion

Across the Sahel, conditions of life have long been defined by the desert. Artists such as Tinariwen, a Tuareg band considered to be the pioneers of ‘desert blues’, have sung of exile, dispossession, and thirst in northern Mali. Their song ‘Tenere Maloulat’ (The White Desert) describes a condition familiar to most in the region is described: ‘lost in the night, my thirst, my desire for water awakened me’. Neither a metaphor nor a statement of natural fact, this song encompasses the lived political conditions of the people of the Sahel. When Sahelians sing of water denied, of land lost, of life pushed to the margins, they name what this dossier has argued: climate catastrophe across the Sahel is not experienced as an abstract environmental shift, but as the intensification of an already violent political economy. Drought, heat, and erratic rains become catastrophic where imperialism, neoliberal restructuring, and state predation have dismantled collective protections and transformed land, water, and labour into sites of extraction. Thirst, in the Sahel, is created by capitalism.

What is at stake is a struggle over sovereignty, class power, and the social organisation of nature itself. Any path forward must therefore break with climate securitisation and instead centre food sovereignty, democratic control over land and water, and the rebuilding of public and communal institutions that are capable of managing environmental variability. The Sahel’s future will not be secured by border walls, bases, or markets, but by confronting the capitalist and imperialist structures that convert climate stress into dispossession and war. In this sense, the struggle unfolding in the Sahel is not peripheral to the global fight against capitalism – it is one of its sharpest frontlines.

Among the association’s agroecological practices is the use of a biopesticide made from neem leaves, pounded ginger, garlic, and chilli pepper, which helps repel insects and reduce crop damage.

Notes

The selection was made in collaboration with Feminismo Gráfico (Graphic Feminism), a collective dedicated to compiling, recovering, and showcasing Argentinian women creators of comics and graphic humour from the early twentieth century to the present. Feminismo Gráfico builds a critical genealogy of the comics medium from a feminist perspective, contesting meanings in a popular language that has long been undervalued and centring the experiences of women and dissident genders and sexualities. Visit their archive at feminismografico.com.

Dani Ruggeri (Argentina), Colectivo (Collective), 2026.

Introduction

Since 2016, marches against sexual and gender diversity¹ have swept across Latin America. They feature women dressed in pink and men in blue to underscore traditional gender roles. The marches have been accompanied by a strong social media presence, with hashtags such as #NoALaIdeologíaDeGénero (‘No to gender ideology’), #ConMisHijosNoTeMetas (‘Don’t mess with my children’), #AMisHijosLosEducoYo (‘I will educate my children’), and #ConLosNiñosNo (‘Not with children’).

These campaigns, which have their roots in the United States in the 1970s and reemerged in the twenty-first century, are part of an anti-gender, anti-feminist wave driven by Christian fundamentalism. This wave has swept across Catholic-majority countries in Western Europe such as Spain and Italy; across Eastern Europe, from Croatia and Hungary to Poland and Slovenia; and beyond Europe, from Australia to Sub-Saharan Africa. In many countries, efforts to sabotage comprehensive sex education and restrict access to contraceptives and safe abortion are widespread (for instance, more than half of the countries in Sub-Saharan Africa criminalise sexual and gender diversity).² Alongside this conservative wave, Latin America experienced an intense transnational cycle of feminist mobilisation (2015–2019). This cycle of feminist mobilisation also strained the limits of state institutions and often outpaced the agendas of the region’s progressive governments, pressing demands that went further than those governments were willing or able to pursue.

Today’s far right is international and ascendant, from the Philippines and Hungary to India and Argentina. In this dossier, we examine how, in Latin America, its tentacles intertwine with those of global, regional, and local ultraconservative organisations – both religious and secular – to promote an agenda against the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people. Our main lens for analysing how this agenda operates in different countries is The Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (‘Don’t Mess with My Children’) campaign, which is active across most of the region. We look at six Latin American countries to show how this campaign operated between 2016 and 2025: Peru, where it originated; Ecuador, where it was first exported and took hold under an economically and politically progressive government; Argentina, home to the strongest feminist movements in the region, where major legal and institutional advances have been achieved for the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people; Chile, where the massive popular uprising of 2019 failed to consolidate broad gains even as the feminist movement managed to achieve some; and El Salvador, among the most conservative countries on sexual and reproductive rights. El Salvador shares with Brazil – also analysed here – a strong presence of evangelical fundamentalist movements and the fact that, although the Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas campaign has played a limited role, other mechanisms and closely related campaigns have.

Part 1 The Women’s Question in Latin America: Between Democratic Transition and Neoliberal Consolidation

The women’s movement in Latin America emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as part of the struggles against dictatorships, structural inequalities, and neoliberalism, bringing together demands around gender violence, reproductive rights, the recognition of care work, and political participation. It developed in conversation with the UN’s global agenda on women’s rights and in – often contentious – dialogue with trade-union, peasant, and human rights movements. In the 1980s and 1990s, the movement’s demands were partially incorporated into public policy as governments adopted gender policies and set up specialised state agencies. But this institutionalisation took place in contradiction with neoliberal hegemony, which imposed structural adjustment, eroded the state’s capacity to provide social welfare, and exalted the market as the organising force of social life – changes that disproportionately affected women, especially poor and racialised women.³

In this period, austerity and reduced funding for social welfare shifted the burden of social reproduction to households.⁴ This has intensified the often invisible exploitation of domestic and care work, mostly carried out by women:⁵ what Nancy Fraser calls a ‘care crisis’, i.e., the rising care needs under deteriorating social and institutional conditions.⁶ This overload serves capital by securing the daily reproduction of the labour force at no direct cost to the state or the employer, deepening exploitation in the service of capital accumulation.⁷

In parallel, neoliberalism’s expansion of informal and precarious work hit women hardest, since the absence of state support limited – and continues to limit – both their access to labour markets⁸ and their ability to remain in stable jobs. In Latin America and the Caribbean, women are concentrated in low-paid sectors with high turnover and a lack of basic protections while they continue to perform unpaid, invisible domestic and care work.⁹ In 2023, 26% of women had no income of their own, compared to only 10% of men.¹⁰ As households became shock absorbers for the crisis, rhetoric about ‘family values’, ‘resilience’, and ‘individual responsibility’ legitimised the retreat of the state and naturalised the expectation that families shoulder the consequences of unemployment and precarity.¹¹

The reconfiguration of the neoliberal state’s role also reshaped social relations. Communities and sectors of civil society took on some of this work, expanding the domestic sphere beyond the household and further feminising social reproduction.¹² These narratives and the effects of state retrenchment are uneven. On the one hand, they were articulated through the idea of ‘female entrepreneurship’ as a symbol of autonomy that masks structural inequalities. On the other, women’s politicisation in working-class neighbourhoods – and the collectively self-managed strategies built in the face of crisis – created a field of dispute with neoliberalism in which women played a central role.¹³ By shifting attention to individual effort, this rhetoric obscured the material conditions of women’s exploitation – yet it also surfaced in the everyday community work through which women survived and sustained social life.¹⁴

The Expansion of Rights in the Wake of Neoliberal Crisis

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, social mobilisation and conflict undermined the legitimacy of neoliberalism, giving rise to a cycle of contestation – most pronounced between 2000 and 2013 – and to progressive governments that, to varying degrees, enjoyed the support of organised social movements.¹⁵ During the height of Latin America’s progressive governments (2000–2015), states expanded the institutional recognition of women’s rights and the rights of sexually and gender-diverse people, partially incorporating a gender perspective into public policy. Specialised ministries and agencies were created, laws against gender-based violence were enacted, redistributive pension reforms were implemented, sexual and reproductive health programmes were established, and comprehensive sex education was expanded. In some cases, gender identities, civil unions, and marriage equality were recognised: in others – such as Argentina – an employment quota for trans people was established.¹⁶ These policies drew on international human rights frameworks such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Belém do Pará Convention, and the Beijing+10 process while also reflecting the growing influence of transnational feminist organising in the region.

Despite the advances of Latin America’s progressive cycle, gender equality faced persistent obstacles, such as charity-based approaches, informal employment among women, insufficient funding for gender-equality programmes, and efforts by conservative, religious, and business alliances to block initiatives such as sex education and the recognition of care work. The gap between the formal expansion of programmes and their limited transformative impact on women’s lives shows how economic, cultural, and patriarchal power constrained the state’s capacity throughout the period. Data from 2023 confirms this: women held only 35.8% of seats in national parliaments, and 3,897 femicides were recorded across the region.¹⁷

Feminist Uprisings Against Neoliberalism

Around the mid-2010s, the exhaustion of Latin America’s progressive cycle opened a new phase of political reconfiguration in the region. The structural limitations of post-neoliberal projects – dependence on extractive rents, the persistence of regressive fiscal regimes, and limited productive transformation – undermined their redistributive capacity and social legitimacy. This process was accompanied by a renewed neoliberal offensive aimed at restoring the power of finance capital and reinstating market logic as the organising principle of social life.

From this period – and even more so in the following decade – popular, community-based, and trade-union feminist currents, together with movements for sexual diversity and reproductive rights, revitalised feminist politics. They linked struggles against patriarchal violence, femicide, labour precarisation, the devaluation of care work, racism, and extractivism. Mass mobilisations for the right to abortion and international feminist strikes exposed the connection between the exploitation of women’s work and the structural violence of capitalism and patriarchy.

Valeria Reynoso (Argentina), excerpt from Sé vos (Be Yourself), 2017, Editorial In Bocca al Lupo.
The text in the image is a direct quote from Lohana Berkins (1965–2016): ‘In a world of capitalist worms, you have to have the courage to be a butterfly’. Berkins was an Argentinian travesti-trans¹⁸ leader, founder of Asociación de Travestis, Transexuales y Transgéneros de Argentina (Argentinian Association of Travestis, Transsexuals, and Transgender People, ATTTA) and a key driving force behind Argentina’s Gender Identity Law of 2012 (Law 26.743).

Part 2 The Moral Panic of the Contemporary Far Right

Over the last decade, a wave of terror has swept across Latin America. The bodies of women and sexually and gender-diverse people – especially the poor and racialised – have been among the main targets of hate speech and violence. With the advance of neoliberalism, the continent’s traditional right entered a crisis: incapable of responding to working-class discontent, it gave way to a new right that has captured the hearts and minds of the population.¹⁹ Allied with Christian fundamentalism, the contemporary far right has penetrated working-class households – even the most impoverished – through a highly didactic discourse centred on the defence of the family and the construction of an enemy to be destroyed. For the contemporary far right, everything outside heteronormativity is cast as an evil force to be fought in defence of the ‘traditional’ family.

There is a long history in the region of using the idea of the traditional family to discipline bodies and subjectivities, fragment popular sectors, and create internal enemies that divert attention from the structural causes of inequality. In the 1920s and 1930s, particularly in Argentina and Brazil, Catholic integralism sought to impose Catholicism as a guide for state policy and promoted the idea of the Christian family in opposition to divorce, abortion, and euthanasia. The 1960s saw the rise of liberation theology, in which Christians from various countries took up struggles for social and gender justice. At the same time, the ultraconservative movements Tradición, Familia y Propiedad (Tradition, Family, and Property, founded in Brazil in 1960) and Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana (Sodalitium of Christian Life, founded in Peru in 1971) emerged, promoting traditional families and gender roles. The military dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s were based on the US national security doctrine, which used traditional morality and Catholic values as the basis for social control, the imposition of order, and the justification of repression against the enemy, historically identified with communism. In this logic, family stability became synonymous with national stability.

Following the end of the progressive cycle, the agenda against the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people in Latin America became part of the far right’s ideological offensive, which seeks to legitimise intensified exploitation under hyper-imperialist capitalist crises. This agenda is led by religious and secular organisations aligned with Christianity – both Catholic and Protestant – alongside NGOs, political parties, and business groups. The ideological and conceptual foundation of the agenda’s proposals comes from two sources: the Catholic Church, which developed the concept of ‘gender ideology’, and Christian fundamentalist currents, especially neo-Pentecostal ones.

Gender Ideology

The Catholic Church’s formulation of so-called ‘gender ideology’ – which seeks to present the analytical concept of gender as an ideological distortion of reality – took shape in the 1990s. The argument is based on the Vatican’s ideas about the perfect complementarity between two sexes, held to be exclusively male and female, and on whose union the survival of the species depends.²⁰ From this perspective, to speak of gender as a category with multiple social and cultural dimensions is to break with the supposed natural binary order and represents an attack not only on the family and society, but on the very survival of humanity. According to this logic, marriages between people of the same sex also constitute a threat to the species.

During the same period, the Vatican resisted efforts to incorporate the category of gender into UN human rights world summits. It did so first in alliance with conservative governments in Latin America (such as Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua) and later with majority-Muslim countries (such as Egypt, Pakistan, Iran, Algeria, Morocco, and Sudan).²¹

Evangelical Fundamentalism

Evangelical fundamentalism continues to oppose social, scientific, and political advances – as it has since its emergence in the United States in the late nineteenth-century – casting them as enemies in a war between good and evil.²² Alongside non-religious actors, it has also set its sights on the bodies of women and sexually and gender-diverse people, stoking moral panic while deploying other strategies. This is best understood through two currents: the theology of domination, which seeks to undermine secularism, and the theology of prosperity, which reinforces individualism. The theology of domination, developed by fundamentalists in the United States in the 1970s, seeks to establish a theocracy in contemporary society by advancing the claimed predestination of Christians to occupy leadership positions – including the presidency, ministries, parliaments, national and local governments, and the higher courts – and thereby influence public affairs through Christian domination.²³

The theology of prosperity holds that ‘success in life’ and obtaining material goods are the product and sign of divine blessing. This tenet plays a key role in legitimising neoliberalism ‘by idealising and even religiously consecrating socioeconomic differences among people’.²⁴

Both theological currents are mobilised as part of US imperialism to contain left revolutionary movements as well as feminist and progressive religious currents in the region (especially liberation theology) that seek social justice through collective action.²⁵

The Contemporary Far Right

Wherever it emerges, the contemporary far right seeks to build a mass social base rooted in the dominant ‘majority’ identities – often framed as Christian, nationalist, and ‘pro-family’ – by demonising those it designates as a ‘minority’.²⁶ While right-wing governments implement fiscal austerity, the far right blames minorities for the effects of structural adjustment. Unemployment is blamed on immigrants, not on the use of public resources to subsidise large corporations while neglecting education and infrastructure – two key factors for job creation. The far right blames feminism for the breakdown of the family but ignores the challenges families face under the siege of capitalist exploitation and extractivist plunder: the lack of employment that drives emigration, conflicts and violence that displace populations, and, increasingly, the effects of the climate catastrophe produced by industrial capitalism.

In addition, ‘communism’ and everything that the far right associates with that ideology – the broader left, progressivism, social justice movements, feminism, sex-gender dissidents – are folded into a single, corrupting enemy that must be fought in order to achieve a full and satisfying life. Through a warmongering, persecutory discourse, this far right has managed to co-opt concepts highly valued by the progressive camp, such as freedom and democracy, turning people against those who, in practice, genuinely defend them.

In Latin America, this advance is the result of highly coordinated funding, grassroots work, and a ubiquitous media presence. Neo-Pentecostal churches from the US in particular have received vast resources to establish themselves in Latin America, with a particular focus on popular sectors.²⁷

Digital Technologies, Social Media, and Fake News

Driven by attention metrics designed to maximise advertising revenue, digital platforms favour controversial, emotionally appealing content, making them an ideal vehicle for mobilising false narratives about gender. These narratives matter because the dispute over gender issues is not only about religious interpretation, but also about shaping the social imaginary and public policies, especially in education. Meanwhile, measures such as the state regulation of digital platforms and fact-checking face serious constraints of scale and are themselves mired in disputes over who has authority and what counts as truth.²⁸

Fake news and post-truth politics on social media are not simply lies, but strategies with specific aims: to interfere in public decision-making, mobilise affects, and shape political identities. Within the broad spectrum of the contemporary far right, conservative Christian groups – especially evangelical ones –²⁹ tend to amplify misinformation about the scope and objectives of gender policies and comprehensive sex education. Televangelism, via live web broadcasts and WhatsApp, opens the door to the ‘evangelisation of misinformation’,³⁰ in which leaders and community members who disseminate unverified narratives are perceived as reliable sources.

Paula Socolovsky (Argentina), excerpt from the comic Las vengadoras de Alicia (Alicia’s Avengers), c. 1988.
The image is part of a series made in response to the femicide of Uruguayan Alicia Muñiz, who was killed by Argentinian boxing champion Carlos Monzón, and the impact her death had on the artist.

Part 3 Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas

Con Mis Hijos No Te Metas (‘Don’t Mess with My Children’) is an ultraconservative campaign that rapidly spread across Latin America starting in 2016. Because no single organisation controlled the label, groups across the region could organise under the name Don’t Mess with My Children. The campaign operates as a decentralised network, organising marches and sit-ins, maintaining alliances and an active lobby with right-wing actors in parliaments and state institutions, engaging the news media, and building a significant presence on social media.

From early on, Don’t Mess with My Children brought together a wide range of groups led by evangelical and Catholic churches and conservative organisations. These groups oppose secular and science-based education about sexual and reproductive rights in schools; women’s sovereignty over their bodies, including the right to abortion; and the rights of sexually and gender-diverse people, especially same-sex marriage. They also blame ‘cultural Marxism’ for any advances in these rights and demonise communism. Don’t Mess with My Children thus encompasses far more than what its champions describe as parents’ right to educate their children.

The slogan #ConMisHijosNoTeMetas (#Don’tMesswithMyChildren) first appeared in Colombia in August 2016 during a wave of protests in several cities against sex-education booklets that included a gender-equality perspective, which the Constitutional Court of Colombia framed as part of a non-discriminatory education that respects students’ identity and sexual orientation.³¹ These protests, in turn, were inspired by demonstrations in Mexico months earlier against marriage equality.

The campaign as such emerged in November 2016 in Lima, Peru, in response to education reforms introduced by President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski’s administration, which had incorporated gender equality and gender identity into school curricula.³² Amplified by secular and religious right-wing political figures alike, the slogan gained traction on social media and went viral. It first reached Ecuador and soon spread to at least a dozen countries in the region.³³

The Don’t Mess with My Children campaign argues that public policies that promote gender equality and comprehensive sex education ‘indoctrinate’ children into gender ideology. In their view, this ideology denies the biological differences between men and women and corrupts childhood innocence, allegedly by turning children into homosexuals or transgender people, categories these groups frame as ‘abnormalities’ or ‘aberrations’. Supported by misinformation, fake news, and alarmist rhetoric circulated above all on social media, this narrative resonated deeply among traditional and religious sectors. Its claims rest on biological determinism, which naturalises sexual difference and pathologises sexual and gender diversity as ‘unnatural’.³⁴ The campaign also rejects the secularisation of the state and demands that it not intervene in the regulation of domestic life and education. In the latter sphere, it promotes privatisation, public disinvestment in education infrastructure, and the reification of the home as the privileged site of education.

Transnational Character

Don’t Mess with My Children has operated transnationally from the outset, with multiple networks across the region. In 2016, amid conservative mobilisations against marriage equality, right-wing NGOs convened in Mexico City to create the Frente Latinoamericano por el Derecho a la Vida y a la Familia (Latin American Coalition for the Right to Life and the Family), which focuses on rejecting gender ideology.³⁵ Organisations and political figures from Colombia, Mexico, El Salvador, Peru, and Brazil participated, including the Colombian member of parliament Ángela Hernández of the right-wing Partido de la Unión por la Gente (People’s Union Party), an ally of former President Álvaro Uribe. Hernández helped organise the first march in Colombia where the Don’t Mess with My Children slogan appeared and later travelled to Peru to help launch the campaign there.³⁶

In 2017, pastors Aarón Lara and Gilberto Rocha Margaín, of Mexico’s Iniciativa Ciudadana por la Vida y la Familia (Citizen Initiative for Life and the Family), launched the Congreso Iberoamericano por la Vida y la Familia (Ibero-American Congress for Life and the Family, CIVF). Christian Rosas, a Peruvian evangelical, founder of Don’t Mess with My Children in Peru, and a lobbyist for illegal mining, served on the CIVF’s advisory committee and ran its training centre. His compatriot Milagros Aguayo, a pastor and member of Peru’s Congress from the Christian fundamentalist party Renovación Nacional (National Renovation), served as the vice president.³⁷

The fourth CIVF, held in 2020 in Peru, aimed to turn local initiatives into a continental strategy to contest the agenda for the rights of women and sexually and gender-diverse people, combining advocacy in international bodies with efforts to build a common political and parliamentary platform, organise a youth movement, and link NGOs and Christian social assistance networks. In 2018, Ecuador hosted the first Convención Internacional por la Familia (International Convention for the Family), featuring the authors of El libro negro de la nueva izquierda (The Black Book of the New Left, 2008),³⁸ Nicolás Márquez and Agustín Laje of Argentina, who are now key ideologues of President Javier Milei’s far-right government and its ‘cultural battle’ strategy.³⁹

The Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), founded in the United States in the 1970s, is one of the main gatherings of the transnational conservative movement and regularly features figures such as Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and Ted Cruz.⁴⁰ Since 2017, CPAC has pursued a strategy of global expansion through regional branches, with chapters in countries governed by conservative and far-right forces. The first branch was established in Japan in 2019, followed by others in Brazil, Australia, and South Korea. In 2022, CPAC was held in Hungary and promoted by Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister and a leading figure of European ultranationalism alongside Santiago Abascal, the leader of the Spanish far-right party Vox.

In recent years, CPAC has also become a platform where the Latin American far right and conservative right converge, bringing together right-wing presidents, representatives of global finance, ultra-Catholic activists, and evangelical leaders. People such as Eduardo Bolsonaro (son of former President Jair Bolsonaro), Javier Milei, Chilean far-right leader José Antonio Kast, and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele often play a prominent role. These gatherings showcase rhetoric that frames feminism and gender ideology as threats to the social order.⁴¹ During CPAC 2024, for example, Bukele argued that incorporating gender ideology into school curricula was an attack on traditional family and religious values.⁴²

Financing

Across Latin America, funding from ultraconservative groups based in the United States and Europe has enabled local organisations linked to Don’t Mess with My Children to organise congresses, workshops, and media campaigns.

Available reporting suggests that international financiers include the Population Research Institute (PRI), which maintains a global network of ‘pro-life’ groups in eighty countries. One report states that in 2014 PRI allocated $174,000 to support ‘research and education activities’ in South America, accounting for 75% of its global funding.

The same report also points to a number of Chilean NGOs and Catholic universities with ties to international right-wing lobbies such as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), Political Networks for Values, the PRI, and Advocates International.⁴³ In Chile, Don’t Mess with My Children spokespeople and the Bus de la Libertad (Freedom Bus), a touring campaign that arrived from Spain, were financed by the Spanish organisation HazteOir.org (MakeYourselfHeard.org), which coordinates the global online mobilisation platform CitizenGO.⁴⁴ ADF, for its part, supports ‘pro-life’ organisations through financing, training, and legal support. In 2014, it reportedly invested around $146 million in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, including by training lawyers aligned with Christian fundamentalism.⁴⁵ Christian Rosas has reported being trained by ADF.⁴⁶ Programmes such as the Blackstone Legal Fellowship – a three-month scholarship for young Christian lawyers – pursue similar aims, building a pipeline of Christian fundamentalist lawyers.⁴⁷

In Ecuador, there is documented evidence of local support for Don’t Mess with My Children from medium and large companies, including Corporación Favorita (retail), Tía (retail), Centro Comercial Iñaquito (retail), Junta de Beneficencia de Guayaquil (lottery), PRONACA (food), Novacero (steel), Guitarras Vogel (musical instruments), and HCJB (evangelical broadcaster).⁴⁸ International support has also been documented from Sodalicio de Vida Cristiana, also present in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia, which has been undergoing dissolution since 2025.⁴⁹

Powerpaola (Ecuador), Crying, 2022.

Part 4 Consolidating Electoral Power

The Don’t Mess with My Children campaign fed the region’s ‘third wave of neoconservative activism’ against feminist and LGBTQIA+ agendas.⁵⁰ Despite the heterogeneity of these currents of ‘heteropatriarchal activism’, they share key features: they organise around political parties, increasingly align with far-right and neoliberal projects that seek to reduce the role of the state and public institutions, and are increasingly internationally coordinated.⁵¹

The fundamentalist networks organised around the Don’t Mess with My Children campaign are part of a long-standing expansion of religious and conservative influence in the Latin American public sphere. In countries such as Brazil and Peru, since the 1980s legislators linked to religious fundamentalism have promoted initiatives to restrict sexual and reproductive rights and reinforce traditional conceptions of the family. They have built a capacity to lobby and shape policy, particularly in the fields of education, health, and the legal regulation of sexuality (sex education, reproduction, and LGBTQIA+ rights), moving from the margins towards a more central role in state institutions.

Over the last decade, these neoconservative actors have not only occupied institutional spaces but also coordinated advocacy around a common, clearly identifiable, transnational agenda, with Don’t Mess with My Children serving as a vehicle for political and symbolic coordination. In this new cycle, legislative action has focused on halting or reversing advances in the right to abortion, constraining the rights of sexually and gender-diverse people, and delegitimising comprehensive sex education and state intervention in education, framed as state ‘indoctrination’ and a threat to parental authority. In Peru, Ecuador, Chile, and Argentina, the campaign has been used to contest existing laws and block new regulations through the strategic deployment of legal language and rights claims, particularly appeals to the ‘preferential right of parents’ and to the family as the moral nucleus of society. This discourse has resonated among precarious working-class sectors, for whom the family has become the principal – and sometimes the only – space of material and symbolic security amid social uncertainty. This defence of the heteropatriarchal family has even meant rejecting state policies that prevent intrafamilial violence.⁵²

In Peru, conservative groups linked to Don’t Mess with My Children opposed a decree aimed at preventing family violence, arguing that its language of ‘democratic families’ distorted the traditional family, encouraged state interference in private life, and undermined ‘the true family’.⁵³ In Chile in 2024, Don’t Mess with My Children spokesperson Ingrid Bohn opposed the ‘non-sexist education’ provision of Law No. 21.675 (the comprehensive law on the prevention of violence against women), which requires state-recognised schools to incorporate gender equality and the prevention of gender-based violence into their internal rules and protocols. Bohn warned of what she called the state’s ‘obsession’ with introducing sex education ‘from the most tender age’.⁵⁴

In Brazil, the Movimento Escola Sem Partido (School without a Party Movement, ESP) – which emerged in 2004 and resembles Don’t Mess with My Children – began to institutionalise its agenda in 2014 and has since worked with allied legislators to introduce several bills to curb gender ideology, accusing schools and teachers of ideological indoctrination. These bills called for the monitoring of public school teachers in order to censor any explicit expression of progressive ideological, political, or religious views. The first two bills were proposed by the sons of former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.⁵⁵

Similar coercive measures have been taken in El Salvador, where Nayib Bukele’s government has intensified its campaign against gender ideology. In 2022, the government ordered the withdrawal of all materials on comprehensive sex education and the prevention of gender-based violence following conservative denunciations on social media. The censorship extended to the healthcare system: content on sexual diversity was removed and forms that recorded sexual orientation and gender identity were revised.⁵⁶

In Argentina, Javier Milei’s government released a draft of the Educational Freedom Bill (Ley de Libertad Educativa) in 2025, which establishes the ‘preferential role of the family as the natural and primary agent, with the right and duty to guide the upbringing of its children’ (Art. 4) and authorises the US-style model of homeschooling.⁵⁷ If passed, it would give the family and the market priority over the state in education, relegating the latter to a subsidiary role: supporting demand-side funding and promoting competition among institutions for students and resources. Rather than funding educational institutions, public funds would be redirected to families who decide where to spend them.

Another defining feature of this cycle, alongside a radicalised legislative agenda aimed at reconfiguring society around neoconservative values, is its explicit drive for electoral intervention and its incorporation into the contemporary far right’s efforts to win and consolidate power in Latin America. Conservative and religious groups linked to Don’t Mess with My Children have tended to be most effective in the electoral arena when they embed themselves in broader right-wing coalitions, adopting hybrid identities – sometimes primarily religious, sometimes explicitly anti-gender – rather than creating their own electoral vehicles and intervening independently. In turn, the growing social and ideological influence of these fundamentalist currents has infused neoliberal projects with a renewed messianic mission, now framed as moral guardianship and the restoration of authority – including through the patriarchal family.

The case of Jair Bolsonaro illustrates this dynamic. His embrace of culture-war issues around morality, gender, and sexuality, largely absent from his earlier political trajectory, embedded him in the evangelical imaginary and helped secure a significant share of the evangelical vote in 2018 – especially among Black working-class women.⁵⁸ By contrast, in Peru, although Don’t Mess with My Children was highly visible in the streets and on social media, it failed to translate that presence into electoral strength.⁵⁹ Likewise, in Argentina, a coalition led by Don’t Mess with My Children failed to make inroads in the 2019 elections.⁶⁰

Since 2018, dynamics similar to those seen in Brazil have emerged in Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, and El Salvador, though with uneven results. In these countries, networks linked with Don’t Mess with My Children negotiate electoral support, secure spots on legislative slates, influence government programmes, and participate in official events. In Peru, some Don’t Mess with My Children leaders back presidential candidates in exchange for spots on parties’ parliamentary candidate lists.⁶¹

In Argentina, although religious fundamentalists lacked a unified strategy in the 2023 presidential elections, Javier Milei’s victory was bolstered by the support of evangelical pastors – including coordinated preaching drives in working-class neighbourhoods – and by his adoption of a messianic narrative common in fundamentalist circles. Milei’s libertarian government came to power with a homophobic discourse and a denialist stance on human rights and social inequality. Upon taking office, he eliminated the Ministerio de las Mujeres, Géneros y Diversidad (Ministry of Women, Genders, and Diversity) and the Instituto Nacional contra la Discriminación, la Xenofobia y el Racismo (National Institute against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism), and he downgraded and defunded institutions devoted to promoting human rights, gender equality, and support for people with disabilities. In the 2025 elections, fundamentalist evangelical forces expanded their parliamentary representation, mostly under Milei’s party, La Libertad Avanza (Freedom Advances). After the elections, the government advanced its fundamentalist libertarian project of neoliberal education reform.

Something similar happened in Chile’s 2025 presidential election as right-wing candidates ran on conservative platforms with anti-gender agendas. José Antonio Kast, elected president in December 2025, campaigned on a programme that cast the family as society’s fundamental unit and affirmed parents’ ‘preferential right’ to choose regarding their children’s education and school.⁶² He has also proposed closing the Ministerio de la Mujer y la Equidad de Género (Ministry of Women and Gender Equity). Johannes Kaiser, the other ultraconservative candidate, devoted a section of his campaign – dubbed ‘Cultural Battle’ – to combating gender ideology.⁶³ Evelyn Matthei, the only woman right-wing candidate, offered a less radical campaign centred on returning the choice of educational models to families ‘according to their values’ and casting the family as a ‘nucleus of social cohesion’.⁶⁴

Neoconservative activism has managed to shape right-wing politics in countries across the region and, in some cases, has even influenced progressive forces. For this reason, Don’t Mess with My Children cannot be understood solely as a cultural or moral campaign but as a nodal point in a wider political process that extends beyond electoral politics. It seeks to contest hegemony, redefine the role of the state – especially in education and gender policy – and forge alliances between religious fundamentalist currents and the far right in the region. Its capacity to adapt to different national contexts, its insertion into institutions, and its growing electoral prominence signal a conservative offensive that is no longer limited to resisting progressive change but which aims to dominate and structurally reorder the Latin American political field.

Maelitha (Argentina), excerpt from the comic Mi cuerpo, un bosque (My Body, a Forest), 2019, Barro Editora.
In this work, the author explores themes such as choosing to become pregnant, deciding to give birth, mothering, and the collective socialisation of care work.

Conclusion

The contemporary resurgence of conservative forces and the far right cannot be understood solely as an electoral shift but also as a profound reconfiguration of disputes over the social order. Their offensive against women, sexually and gender-diverse people, and feminist currents is a strategic instrument for restoring the gender, racial, and class hierarchies that underpin their project of a hyper-authoritarian reorganisation of capitalism. Far from a set of ‘cultural’ positions, the anti-gender crusade operates as a mass political technology capable of articulating social frustrations, economic discontent, and identity anxieties produced by decades of neoliberalism. In this sense, the anti-gender agenda serves as the ideological cement of new radicalised right-wing formations, fabricating internal enemies, delegitimising democratising gains, and eroding the institutional foundations of equality.

After a decade of economic stagnation in Latin America, the neoliberal project has been relaunched alongside resurgent conservative forces, shifting responsibility for its own failures onto feminist currents and sex-gender dissidents who are portrayed as internationally mobilised ‘anti-system’ actors adept at interpellating new generations. This renewed complicity between capitalism in crisis and patriarchy is backed by the efforts of transnational organisations and marked by the protagonism of religious fundamentalisms, which share the objective of reclaiming conservative morality and the family as their terrain. The joint efforts of transnational organisations in league with religious fundamentalist groups have fuelled social polarisation – especially through social media – that hinders the expansion of rights and uses fear and misinformation as tools of mobilisation. In this way, they join transnational actors in a battle of ideas that not only contests cultural and religious terrain but also shapes political dynamics on a continental scale against gender equality and the rights of sexually and gender-diverse people.

The political impact of the anti-gender rights agenda manifests in its capacity to shape legislative debates and electoral processes and to drive institutional setbacks. These forces have managed to halt or slow legislation that protects sex education, the right to abortion, and gender quotas. They have also hampered or blocked inclusive educational policies and obstructed the expansion of sexual and reproductive rights, contributed to the dismantling or defunding of institutions dedicated to women’s rights and gender equality, and influenced presidential elections in Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

However, the expansion of these right-wing forces does not happen on neutral terrain but within a society that has been reshaped by a cycle of feminist mobilisation that developed political imaginaries through street protests, popularised new rights-based demands, and forged a radical critique of structural violence. The conservative reaction therefore also expresses the tacit recognition of the political potency of these movements. The attacks aimed at defunding equality policies, criminalising identities, and disarticulating community networks seek precisely to dismantle the social infrastructures of the reproduction of life that feminist currents have made visible and strengthened.

Thus, the current dispute goes beyond policy and institutions: it is about the very definition of the civilisational project. While the far right pushes an authoritarian restoration that recentres the heterosexual family, gender subordination, the destruction of the welfare state, and an exclusionary productive order, Global South feminist currents – with their emphasis on social reproduction, material justice, and collective autonomy – propose a reorganisation of society centred on life itself rather than capitalist accumulation. The outcome of this confrontation is not predetermined, but it will shape the ability of the majority to imagine and build emancipatory futures in the face of the multiple crises we currently face.

The case of Don’t Mess with My Children in Latin America reveals how control over education, the family, sexuality, and women’s bodies is instrumental to the economic model of hyper-imperialism, which requires individualism, competition, and the naturalisation of hierarchies. This pattern transcends Latin America and requires further study across the Global South. How do these networks operate in Africa, where anti-LGBTQIA+ laws advance alongside extractivist projects? How are they replicated in Asia, where setbacks in reproductive rights intersect with labour precarisation and territorial dispossession? What strategies are deployed by Global South youth growing up amid unfulfilled promises and climate crisis? Mapping these intersections is fundamental: the battle for the rights of women and sex-gender dissidents is inseparable from anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and anti-colonial struggles. This dossier invites deeper global connections: it calls for an investigation into how contemporary capitalism insists on these moral crusades across different geographies and for the forging of collective responses from popular movements in defence of dignity, autonomy, and the right to live a full life.

Patricio Oliver (Argentina), poster for the Marcha Federal del Orgullo Antifascista, Antirracista, LGTBIQA+ (Federal March for Antifascist, Antiracist, LGBTQIA+ Pride), 2025.

Notes

Bibliography

Websites and Social Media

Acknowledgments

This dossier is based partly on our Addicted to Imperialism project, for which we have published several texts in Spanish.¹

We would also like to thank:

• The National Coordination of Coca, Poppy, and Marijuana Growers (Coordinadora Nacional de Cultivadores y Cultivadoras de Coca, Amapola y Marihuana, COCCAM), who, with their history of struggle and resistance, continue to defend peasants’ rights and build alternatives in the face of the criminalisation of growers of these crops in Colombia.
• The Centre for Political Thought and Dialogue (Centro de Pensamiento y Diálogo Político), who carried out part of the research for our Addicted to Imperialism project and gathered testimonies from the territories that reflect the lived reality of Colombia’s campesinos.
• The Communications Commission of the Popular Unity Process in Colombia’s South-West (Proceso de Unidad Popular del Suroccidente Colombiano, PUPSOC) for the photographic material that accompanies this dossier. Their work, rooted in struggle and organisation alongside communities, has allowed us to illustrate the daily reality of peasant life and resistance with images from their territories.
• The Transnational Institute for its long-standing project of researching and analysing the drug trade since the 1990s, such as bringing to light the suppressed World Health Organisation (WHO) report on cocaine (Transnational Institute, The WHO Cocaine Project, Amsterdam: TNI, 1995). Further reports include Transnational Institute, 10 Years Review: TNI Drugs and Democracy Programme, 1998-2008, Amsterdam: TNI, 2008; Transnational Institute, Global Commission on Drug Policy Report, Amsterdam: TNI, 2011; and Ernestien Jensema, Martin Jelsma, and Tom Blickman, Bouncing Back: Relapse in the Golden Triangle, Amsterdam: TNI, 2014.

Hundreds of years ago, the bandits of early capitalism claimed that they had come to the ‘savage’ lands to bring ‘civilisation’. But what they came to do was plunder: to take land, exploit labour, and extract bullion from across Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Over the generations this banditry became structural, built into plantations, mines, and trading companies that drained that wealth into Europe’s ‘eternal glory’. In time, the bandits’ descendants put on dry-cleaned suits and suggested that the ugliness of the past was not their inheritance, that their fortunes were the product of their diligent entrepreneurship. But beneath them, in the sewers of commercial activity, were the other organised branches of business – the mafia, narcos, arms dealers, smugglers, human traffickers, cyber criminals, loan sharks, animal poachers, organ traffickers, and those who run the scam farms and cybercrime compounds.² The capitalists above ground and those below are bound together by the circulation of vast, liquid, dirty cash. These illicit funds flow up from below to be cleansed by those above, the smell washed from the money, the notes ironed and creased, then set in motion – for a small discount – as the necessary volume of money that becomes clean capital for licit use.

This dossier seeks to undermine the dominant narrative that presents the ‘War on Drugs’ as a genuine moral crusade by the capitalist states to prohibit the circulation of illicit narcotics. This narrative rests on the claim that the drug trade is somehow separate from ‘legitimate’ capitalism. We argue instead that the War on Drugs is merely an attempt by capitalist states to ensure that these narcotics circuits remain underground so that the money siphoned from illegal trade can continue to liquefy a banking system that would not function without it. Furthermore, beyond laundering criminal profits and waging class war on peasants, the War on Drugs has become a flexible imperial tool for disciplining defiant governments, advancing counterrevolutionary agendas, and opening up territories to capital. While the war is a global regime, this dossier focuses on Colombia’s coca-cocaine economy as a lens through which to examine its political economy.

Our text draws on historical research on the past decades of the War on Drugs, key United Nations (UN) documents, and our own work with campesino (peasant) organisations in Colombia. From their position at the bottom of the commodity chain, campesinos have a clear understanding of the structures that sustain illicit trade. Their organisations have mapped the parallel capitalism that exploits rural producers and their families as well as working-class communities in the wealthier nations, where structural unemployment pushes many into this economy as low-level sellers or consumers.

Photograph (PUPSOC): A participant of the Social and Community Minga for the Defence of Life, Territory, Democracy, and Peace stands next to a wall that reads ‘No violence; I’m human’. As part of the minga (an ancestral, collective work practice that has become a powerful mobilisation tool in the region), thousands marched from Cali to Bogotá, holding massive marches in cities along the way. October, 2020.
Intervention by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

We cannot leave this part of the subject without singling out one flagrant self-contradiction of the Christianity-canting and civilisation-mongering British Government. In its imperial capacity it affects to be a thorough stranger to the contraband opium trade, and even to enter into treaties proscribing it. Yet, in its Indian capacity, it forces the opium cultivation upon Bengal, to the great damage of the productive resources of that country; compels one part of the Indian ryots [peasant cultivators] to engage in the poppy culture; entices another part into the same by dint of money advances; [and] keeps the wholesale manufacture of the deleterious drug a close monopoly in its hands… The chest costing the British Government about 250 rupees is sold at the Calcutta auction mart at a price ranging from 1,210 to 1,600 rupees. But, not yet satisfied with this matter-of-fact complicity, the same government, to this hour, enters into express profit and loss accounts with the merchants and shippers, who embark in the hazardous operation of poisoning an empire.

The Indian finances of the British Government have, in fact, been made to depend not only on the opium trade with China, but on the contraband character of that trade… While openly preaching free trade in poison, it secretly defends the monopoly of its manufacture. Whenever we look closely into the nature of British free trade, monopoly is pretty generally found to lie at the bottom of its ‘freedom’.

Karl Marx, ‘Free Trade and Monopoly’, 25 September 1858.³

Part 1: The Political Economy of Illicit Drugs

From the 1830s onwards, opium grown in India was smuggled into Qing China in ever-larger quantities. Produced under the British East India Company’s opium monopoly in India and sold at auction to private traders, it then moved through smuggling networks along the Chinese coast. In the aftermath of the two Opium Wars fought between Britain and the Qing empire (1839–1842 and 1856–1860, with France joining Britain in the second), the trade was entrenched and its reach widened, flooding the Chinese market with opium.⁴ This allowed Britain to use the silver it received from opium sales in China to finance its tea purchases, reversing the bullion outflow and turning the China trade profitable. Widespread addiction – including among officials and imperial troops – deepened corruption and weakened the Qing state. Opium’s entry into China made fabulous fortunes for new wealthy families, many of whom are now legendary names in legitimate capitalism such as the Astors, the Forbes, the Delanos (from whom US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt is descended), the Jardines, the Mathesons, and the Sassoons.⁵ These fortunes also helped establish powerful banks, such as the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Company (HSBC), founded in 1865. Opium profits contributed to the capital accumulated to build the infrastructure of the imperial centres, including the railroads in the United States, built in the mid to late nineteenth century and heavily reliant on Chinese migrant labour. Capital accumulated in the China trade also flowed into US enterprises through investments by major Chinese merchants such as Wu Bingjian (Houqua).⁶

By the late nineteenth century, the consequences of highly profitable and readily available opium were no longer confined to China. The drug had made its way into the imperial centres, with addiction rates rising in the North Atlantic states. Social reformers in these parts of the world intensified campaigns to prohibit the entry of opium, but all they were able to do was to drive the entire industry into the arms of increasingly powerful criminal organisations. The period of US alcohol prohibition between 1920 and 1933 marked a profound shift in the political economy of drugs. The ban on alcohol – alongside tightening controls on narcotics – fuelled the exponential growth of the illicit economy, equipping criminal organisations with unprecedented resources and influence. Local gangs transformed into national syndicates, extending their reach into political institutions. When alcohol prohibition was repealed in 1933, heroin and other narcotics remained the central source of income for this burgeoning criminal infrastructure and an important source of liquidity for the legal banking structure. The profits from illegal enterprise, vast as they were, became the source of a steady infusion of cash into the legal economy.

Colonial plunder of coin, land, and labour, alongside the enclosure of the commons in England between 1750 and 1860, formed the basis for what Marx called ursprüngliche Akkumulation, or ‘originary’ accumulation, in Capital, volume 1. There was no anxiety about legality. The entire process of accumulation was bathed in blood – the conquest of vast territories, the capture of entire peoples, and the trade in anything that could be bought and sold, including the deadliest drugs and human beings. That is how capitalism was born, certainly, but that is also how capitalism survives. Originary accumulation is not a one-off prelude that sets in place a perpetual motion machine. It can be understood as periodic: originary accumulation resumes once more whenever capital, starved of liquidity, seeks out new reservoirs to satisfy its need – much as a vampire seeks fresh blood for its sustenance.

The economy of illicit commodities – whether the traffic of drugs or people – has a peculiar logic that differentiates it from the economy of legal commodities. Once a commodity is designated by the state as illegal, it exits the entire apparatus of regulation. Those who work to produce the commodity, from its primary stage (the campesinos who grow the coca leaf, for instance) to its final stage (the drug dealers who sell cocaine in its various forms), are without any legal protection and are therefore vulnerable to super exploitation at unimaginable levels.⁷ The primary products are priced so far below their street value that they generate enormous amounts of cash for those who control the pipeline from purchase at the source to sale on the street. The production chain for cocaine is illustrated below:⁸

1. Coca leaf cultivation

1. 1. Process: The coca leaf is grown mainly in the Andean region (Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru). The leaf is harvested several times a year by raspachines (hired coca leaf pickers) and sold at the ‘farm gate’ (directly from the producer, before transport or processing) to intermediaries. A share of the coca leaf is used legally (for traditional chewing, or mambeo, and for tea). The remainder goes into illicit processing toward cocaine.
   2. Prices: In Colombia, which has been the world’s largest coca cultivator in recent years, the farm-gate price of coca leaf has collapsed in many regions. A recent report shows that between 2022 and 2023, the price of an arroba (a 12.5-kilogramme bushel) fell from $20 to $7 in Nariño and from $17 to $9 in Argelia (Cauca).⁹
   3. Purpose: Campesinos sell at the bottom of a chain they do not control; illegality strips protections and creates a buyer’s market at the farm gate.

2. Pasta básica (coca paste) processing

1. 1. Process: In small, clandestine labs, workers macerate the coca leaf by hand, using petroleum distillates to extract the alkaloids from the leaf. This material is then dried to produce coca paste.
   2. Prices: Coca paste prices vary across the region, but one indicative figure is that in Colombia a kilogramme of coca paste could be sold at the lab gate for between $450 and $600 over the past five years.
   3. Purpose: Intermediaries turn leaf into a concentrate, and with concentration comes the first big markup – value that does not return to the farmers.

3. Coca paste to cocaine hydrochloride (cocaine powder)

1. 1. Process: Some processes use mineral acids to change the chemical form of the extracted alkaloids. Workers then use alkaline substances to change the solubility of the alkaloids during processing. Further steps may involve oxidising agents or solvents to purify the product. These chemicals – often easily available due to their use in agriculture and industry – are handled and mixed by workers using extremely unsafe methods, including bare hands and sticks.
   2. Prices: At the gate of this processing site, the price rises to over $1,000 per kilogramme, although today it can reach several thousand dollars depending on the quality of the cocaine hydrochloride.
   3. Purpose: Refining standardises the drug for wholesale markets, converting it into a high-value commodity that can move like money.

4. Wholesale and retail trafficking

1. 1. Process: The cocaine powder is then transported from the Andean countries to transit hubs – especially in Central America, the Caribbean, Brazil, and West Africa – by armed groups and criminal organisations. The high-purity product is sold in bulk between trafficking organisations.¹⁰ Traffickers then carry the drug to consumer countries (mainly the US and Western Europe) where the product is cut, repackaged, and distributed to small wholesalers (mainly gangs) before reaching the streets through retail dealers.
   2. Prices: Recent data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) about prices over the past decade in Mexico suggests that the transit price is roughly $12,000 per kilogramme. In Panama, the price has been recorded at $30,000 per kilogramme. The retail price in Kenya varies widely, with one estimate putting it at $90 per gramme at around 56% purity and a wholesale price of $44,580 per kilogramme at between 40% and 50% purity.¹¹
   3. Purpose: Wholesale and retail sales generate the bulk of profits in cash, which is then laundered and reinvested, supplying liquidity to the formal economy.

Taken together, the above figures show how value rises by orders of magnitude from farm-gate coca leaf in Colombia, priced at between $0.56 and $0.72 per kilogramme, to wholesale cocaine in Kenya, for example, at $44,580 per kilogramme – a price increase of roughly 62,000–80,000 times (about 6.2 to 8.0 million per cent).

The nature of illicit commodities like cocaine is such that demand is largely price-inelastic (meaning that consumption changes little even when prices rise), especially among dependent users, since addiction keeps users coming back regardless of price. In some cases, price increases push users towards petty theft or other informal income to meet those costs. The violence in the passage of the drug from farms to the streets, and the violence of overdoses, rarely disrupts either production or the market, since unemployment and precarity ensure a reserve army of labour that can be pulled into the trade when others are killed, incarcerated, or forced out. In this way, lives can be expended without disrupting the process of capital accumulation in the formal economy. Deindustrialised towns with high unemployment rates conveniently provide a pool of recruits and consumers for a drug economy that both employs sections of the population, addicts many, and then allows for coercive repression by state forces in the name of the War on Drugs.¹² The economy of illicit commodities, therefore, super-exploits workers, produces enormous volumes of cash that are laundered into – and thereby lubricate – the financial system, and allows marginalised communities to be controlled through social demoralisation and police intervention.

The link between narcotics and capitalism is not confined to the underworld: the same plants and molecules that travel through illicit circuits also supply perfectly legal industries. Opium poppies feed the global pharmaceutical market with painkillers and sedatives. Coca leaves are processed into decocainised flavourings and medical products. Synthetic opioids such as fentanyl are manufactured under licence by major drug companies. In each case, states design regulatory and trade regimes that protect corporate profits while criminalising parallel informal circuits. The frontier between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ drugs is therefore not chemical but political, drawn in ways that favour capital accumulation in the imperial centres and expose peasants and poor consumers in the peripheries to criminalisation and violence.

The vast volumes of liquid money flowing through the hands of criminal cartels and laundered into banks offer an enormous temptation for governments to use that money for off-the-books covert operations. In practice, this often takes the form of covert alliances with proxy forces – including protection, training, arms, and logistics – operating inside narcotics economies and financing themselves by taxing cultivation, processing, and transit. In this way, illicit revenue can subsidise proxy warfare while insulating the sponsor government from public oversight. These are the kinds of circuits used by the United States to fund counterrevolutionary forces against left or communist movements in the decades after the Second World War. Examples include Kuomintang (KMT) remnants in Burma and northern Thailand (early 1950s–1960s), mobilised against the People’s Republic of China and communist forces along the border in northern Myanmar and Thailand; the Hmong Secret Army under General Vang Pao in Laos (c. 1960–1973), mobilised against the Pathet Lao and North Vietnamese forces; the South Vietnamese armed forces (1955–1975), mobilised against the National Liberation Front (Viet Cong) and North Vietnam; the Afghan mujahideen (late 1970s–1980s), mobilised against Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed PDPA government and, after the Soviet intervention, against Soviet forces; the Nicaraguan Contras (1980s), mobilised against the Sandinista government; and Colombian paramilitaries, notably the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, AUC, 1997–2006), mobilised against the FARC-EP¹³and the wider left.¹⁴ A security state that treats the world of illegal drugs as a bank for its own covert operations has little incentive to dismantle these circuits. There is ample evidence of the cartels themselves using their contacts within the security services to take out rivals so that they can grow their own operations into new territory. The symbiotic relationship between illegal gangs and the para-legal covert agencies of the state is well-documented.¹⁵

The paradigm of the War on Drugs has allowed the United States, the principal architect of this campaign, to depict any of its adversaries as narco-traffickers and use its immense military and financial might against them. The basis of Plan Colombia (launched in 2000 as a US-Colombian initiative) was to use counternarcotics funding to arm the Colombian military, whose main focus of attention was not the narco-traffickers, who had infiltrated the state and security apparatus, nor the right-wing paramilitaries, which worked closely with the narco-traffickers, but revolutionary groups such as the FARC-EP and the National Liberation Army (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN).¹⁶ In practice, Plan Colombia’s counternarcotics architecture also operated as a counterinsurgency and territorial-recapture project aimed at reasserting state control in coca-growing regions (the FARC-EP itself emerged from campesino self-defence communities and drew much of its social base from rural Colombia). More recently, the rhetoric of the War on Drugs has been used to escalate pressure on countries across the region whose governments refuse to be supine before the United States (mainly Venezuela, Colombia, and Mexico). In August 2025, Washington began to escalate this framing against Venezuela by designating the alleged Cartel de los Soles (Cartel of the Suns) as a ‘transnational terrorist group’ with supposed ties to President Nicolás Maduro. Despite offering zero evidence for the connection (or even of the existence of this ‘cartel’), the US has engaged in a violent campaign against the Bolivarian Revolution that includes, most recently, extrajudicial strikes on small boats in the Caribbean (killing more than one hundred people by the end of 2025), a naval blockade of sanctioned Venezuelan oil tankers, and the 3 January 2026 bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of President Maduro and National Assembly Deputy Cilia Flores, who are being tried in a New York court on unfounded charges including and related to ‘narco-terrorism’.¹⁷ (It is worth noting that, within days of the kidnapping of Maduro and Flores, the Department of Justice dropped ‘the claim that Venezuela’s “Cartel de los Soles” is an actual group’, as one The New York Times article put it).¹⁸

This narrative relies on an information war predicated on exaggeration, misdirection, and outright lies. According to the US’s own Drug Enforcement Administration, Colombia remains the principal site of coca cultivation and the main source country for cocaine seized in the United States. Moreover, most cocaine bound for the North American market departs Colombia via the Pacific and moves through Central America and Mexico, with Venezuela accounting for only 5% of drugs transported through Colombia.¹⁹ Though Venezuela is responsible for a negligible amount of the global drug trade, it nonetheless remains at this time a main target of the US war on drugs. This is not only a blatant disregard of the facts, but also a violation of international law and a clear example of how the War on Drugs narrative is used to discipline left forces in the region and drain wealth from South to North.

Photograph (PUPSOC): A child participates in a 2020 tribute in Popayán, Cauca, honouring protestors who were injured and killed by police repression during the 2019 social uprising – many of them left permanently blind.
Intervention by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

According to one estimate, in 2015 the unequal exchange of goods and services between the Global North and the Global South totalled $10.8–$14.1 trillion (enough to end extreme poverty 70 times over).²⁰ This is a vast number that has not been fully digested by those who shape policy. It means that every year, over $10 trillion of wealth is drained from the South to the North, mostly legally. The illicit capital flight is not as high, although the five top areas of illegality are stunning, even with conservative estimates: the illegal trade in small arms ($3.5 billion), the drug trade ($32 billion), illegal mining ($48 billion), human trafficking ($150 billion), and counterfeiting ($467 billion) together amount to about $700.5 billion per year²¹ What is notable about illegal trade is that it produces enormous volumes of cash. In 2011, the UNODC published an important report on the illicit financial flows from drug money.²² The key findings are worth reflecting upon, since there is no updated global data on these issues:

1. A large share – up to 70% – of the proceeds from transnational organised crime is estimated (with high uncertainty) to be laundered through the financial system.
2. The report’s best estimate of the total illicit proceeds that are available for laundering is 2.7% of global GDP, or $1.6 trillion in 2009.
3. The illicit drug trade is estimated to be the largest transnational organised crime market, accounting for about 20% of all proceeds of international crime.
4. The interception rate is strikingly low: only about 1% (likely around 0.2%) of drug proceeds are seized or frozen.

A newer UNODC report from 2023 argues that in several countries, illicit financial flows (IFFs) related to drug money are comparable to – and in some cases larger than – legal cross-border flows.²³ In Colombia, for example, the report estimates (through modelling) that annual inward IFFs related to cocaine trafficking were between $1.2 and $8.6 billion from 2015 to 2019. By comparison, according to preliminary government reporting, Colombia’s foreign direct investment inflows in 2024 were about $14.2 billion.²⁴ In Mexico, inward IFFs related to trafficking in heroin, cocaine, and methamphetamine totalled between $8 billion and $17 billion per year from 2015 to 2018, roughly comparable to its average agricultural export earnings over the same period ($12.6 billion). These figures should be read as indicative, since most countries do not collect reliable national statistics on IFFs.

Money-laundering networks and financial intermediaries use a variety of means to move cash and value. Among them are informal cash-transfer systems (such as hawala and hundi)²⁵, cryptoassets and digital services, and the exploitation of migration and remittance channels to move cash outside the regulatory eye of the state. Though the UN has produced a new methodology to measure illicit finances, it does not compensate for the shadowy world of the black market.²⁶ For that reason, the 2011 UNODC report noted, ‘the final monetary estimates are to be treated with caution’.²⁷

Occasionally, there is a scandal over the involvement of a bank in laundering drug proceeds. The most prominent such case involved HSBC, which grew out of the opium trade to become one of the world’s largest banks, with more than $3 trillion in total assets as of 2025.²⁸ In 2012, a US Department of Justice investigation found that HSBC had laundered about $881 million for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels between roughly 1996 and 2006. The bank agreed to pay $1.9 billion in penalties under a deferred prosecution agreement, but it was not shut down and no HSBC executives were criminally prosecuted as part of the settlement.²⁹ Since only a small share of these crimes is ever detected, one can assume that the fine was modest relative to the profits.

Smaller banks, meanwhile, have been shuttered when similar investigations (however rare) have been carried out. In October 2015, Banco Continental in Honduras was forced into liquidation after the US Office of Foreign Assets Control designated the bank as a ‘specially designated narcotics trafficker’ (the amount allegedly laundered was never disclosed). Such actions ostensibly amount to show trials to display the wrath of regulatory bodies that are otherwise lenient when the target is a US or transnational bank. The system cannot be touched, and there can be no reform of the entire rotten banking system (including illicit tax shelters that house trillions of dollars). The global Financial Action Task Force, established in 1989 by the G7, is supposed to provide a framework against money laundering.³⁰ But, as a recent study notes, its failure ‘to reduce either the predicate crimes that generate large criminal revenues or the volume of money laundering is uncontested’.³¹ Each year, UN estimates suggest that both the sums laundered and the illegal activity that generates them continue to rise.³²

Whether the narcotic drug is plant-based (cocaine) or synthetic (methamphetamine), its production is pushed into rural and peripheral areas where people live in poverty or near poverty. The drug is then transported by cartels over vast distances to consumer markets, where impoverished youth sell it for wages that exceed what they could earn in the uberised, precarious economy yet remain modest compared to the value they move. The cartel bosses, meanwhile, draw vast amounts of wealth from the trade, but their lives are often short and violent. The formal banking system, which receives volumes of cash that are siphoned out of the commodity chain, ends up profiting handsomely while remaining largely insulated from consequence. In the long run, the risks – violence, imprisonment, dispossession – are concentrated among campesinos and the urban poor, while the surplus is absorbed and reinvested through the institutions of ‘legitimate’ capitalism.

Photograph (PUPSOC): Members of the Estrella Roja (Red Star) Ecovillage and the Humedal La Orquídea (Orchid Wetland) Environmental Committee participate in a reforestation project in the Cauca River basin.
Intervention by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

My country is beautiful because it has the Amazon rainforest, the Chocó rainforest, the waters, the Andes mountain range, and the oceans. There, in those rainforests, planetary oxygen is released, and atmospheric CO₂ is absorbed. One of those plants that absorbs CO₂, among millions of species, is one of the most persecuted on Earth. Wherever it grows, its destruction is sought. It is an Amazonian plant. It is the coca plant, the sacred plant of the Incas.

As if at a paradoxical crossroads, the jungle that we are trying to save is, at the same time, being destroyed.

To destroy the coca plant, you spray poisons, massive amounts of glyphosate that run through the waters, [and] you arrest its growers and imprison them. To destroy or possess the coca leaf, a million Latin Americans are murdered and two million African Americans are imprisoned in North America.

‘Destroy the plant that kills’, you shout from the North; ‘destroy it’. But the plant is just one more plant [among] the millions of species that perish when you unleash fire on the rainforest.

‘Destroy the Rainforest’, ‘[destroy] the Amazon’ have become the slogans followed by states and businessmen. The cry of scientists baptising the rainforest as one of the great climate pillars does not matter. For the power brokers of the world, the rainforest and its inhabitants are to blame for the plague that torments them. The power brokers are plagued by the addiction to money, to self-perpetuation, to oil, to cocaine, and to the hardest drugs so they can anaesthetise themselves even more.

Nothing is more hypocritical than the discourse about saving the rainforest. The rainforest is burning, distinguished delegates, while you wage war and play with it. The rainforest, the climate pillar of the world, disappears with all its life. The enormous sponge that absorbs the planetary CO₂ evaporates. The rainforest – our saviour – is seen in my country as the enemy to defeat, as weeds to be eradicated.

The space of coca and of the peasants who cultivate it, because they have nothing else to cultivate, is demonised. My country does not interest you except to fill its rainforests with poison, to take its men to prison, and to cast its women into exclusion.

You are not interested in educating children but rather in killing the rainforest and extracting the coal and oil from its entrails. The sponge that absorbs the poison is useless; you prefer to spread more poison into the atmosphere.

We serve to excuse the emptiness and loneliness of your own society that lead you to live in your bubble of drugs. We conceal from you your own problems that you refuse to reform. It is better to declare war on the rainforest, its plants, its people.

Gustavo Petro, president of Colombia, address to the UN General Assembly (General Debate, 77th session), 20 September 2022.³³

Part 2: How the Campesinos See the ‘War on Drugs’

Petro’s indictment names what half a century of drug policy has tried to obscure: that this ‘war’ has been waged not against narcotics, but against people and nature. The modern architecture of this ‘war’ dates back to 17 June 1971, when US President Richard Nixon told reporters that ‘public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse’.³⁴ ‘In order to fight and defeat this enemy’, he continued, ‘it is necessary to wage a new, all-out offensive’. The announcement prompted the US media to coin the term ‘War on Drugs’. Initially, Nixon said that the target of the war would be the ‘pusher’, or the drug dealer. There was little care in the language of ‘war’ to tackle the drug addiction generated by the US war in Vietnam – a war that helped produce the very crisis that the War on Drugs purposed to confront. Rather than focus on addiction and on the industry that preys on the addict, the United States very soon used the War on Drugs to go after not only the poor within its own borders, but also impoverished peasants in Latin America and Asia left with no choice but to produce drugs, conditions that the US itself had created. There was to be no real war against addiction or the system that produces it – only a war against the peasantry and against the revolutionary organisations that worked among them.

The legal instrument that Europe and the US needed in order to wage this war was already available: the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs.³⁵ Presented as an international public health framework, it placed plants such as coca, cannabis, and poppy under international control and obliged states to limit their production and use to medical and scientific purposes. The convention also required the abolition of coca leaf chewing after a ‘transitional’ period, in effect criminalising a millenarian indigenous practice in the name of global ‘order’. This was not a neutral classification: it was a political decision taken in an international system dominated by the North that turned certain plants – and the people whose lives and cultures are entwined with them – into objects to control.

The Colombian case is paradigmatic for understanding the concrete effects of the long-standing War on Drugs, precisely because it makes visible the links between crops, rural underdevelopment, and armed conflict – a policy framework that today is being reissued and recycled once again. As we discussed in notebook no. 1 of our Addicted to Imperialism research project, ‘coca leaf production in Colombia has some unique characteristics that relate to the connection between crops, lack of rural development, and armed conflict’.³⁶ Far from what the media would have us believe, and far from being the result of a ‘criminal association’ between large drug cartels and peasant communities, Colombia’s coca economy is rooted in the country’s historical development and the evolution of its armed conflict. That conflict – involving state forces, left guerrilla insurgencies (including the FARC-EP and the ELN), and right-wing paramilitaries – has deep roots in land inequality and political exclusion, in which the United States has, unsurprisingly, played a leading role.

Despite its early importance as a major entrepôt for colonial trade and as the seat of the Spanish empire’s viceroyalty of New Granada, for much of its history Colombia remained a largely rural country with an agrarian economy. From the nineteenth to early twentieth century, tobacco, sugarcane, bananas, and coffee exports made the country profitable, but so too did the extraction of gold and emeralds. Though the balance of trade has shifted, Colombia remains an exporter of agricultural commodities (such as coffee, avocado, palm oil, alongside coca and cocaine) and energy (chiefly oil and coal). This export-extractive order rests on land concentration and coercive force, producing recurrent rural conflict. The intense class struggle in the countryside has been re-enacted generation after generation, from the Masacre de las bananeras (Banana Massacre), when United Fruit Company henchmen opened fire on striking workers and their supporters in Ciénaga in December 1928 (killing an estimated 1,000), to the Mapiripán massacre of 1997 in Meta, when AUC paramilitaries murdered and ‘disappeared’ approximately 49 civilians in a counterinsurgent campaign to seize territory and secure drug trafficking routes.³⁷

In recent years, the violence has largely been over the development of new forms of capital investment and commodity extraction in the countryside. Parastatal armies are mobilised to expropriate large tracts of land for livestock production, for large-scale monoculture of sorghum, soybeans, wheat, palm, cotton, maize, and rice, and for purely extractive mining and agro-industrial projects tied to domestic elites and transnational capital. The very existence of the peasantry poses a problem for these operations. Peasants are directly attacked through the process of violent dispossession, but also through the structural conditions imposed upon them: the deflation of prices for small-holder crops (driven by trade liberalisation, buyer power, and the absence of price supports) and the attrition of social welfare systems – both of which deepen poverty.³⁸ Where this dispossession succeeds, peasants gather in the peripheries of urban areas, or else become fodder for the vast trafficking networks of drugs and other illegal commodities controlled by the very groups that drive them from the land. These criminal organisations establish new rural and urban dynamics of territorial control while at the same time providing precarious economic opportunities for rural workers.³⁹

Photograph (PUPSOC): A campesino anfibio (‘amphibious’ campesino – meaning working on land, in rivers, and at sea), fishes in Santa Marta, Colombia, on the Atlantic Coast.
Intervention by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

What is apparent in Colombia is also happening across Latin America: the deepening of the neoliberal model in agriculture has hastened the extinction of the small-holder farmer. Peasants face a lack of access to and tenure of land as well as social and economic exclusion, unemployment, oppression, and marginalisation, which is further compounded by weak public policy, inadequate rural health and education, and the inability to access decent housing. In Colombia, the crisis is further intensified by land grabbing, usurpation, and legalisation – the ‘regularisation’ of illegally dispossessed land – carried out through a paramilitary model with state financing and consent in the service of large transnational corporations. Land concentration is extreme: large landowners control the overwhelming share of productive land, with the largest 1% of landholdings (farms larger than 100 hectares) accounting for 81% of agricultural land.⁴⁰

Taken together, these dynamics reproduce a long history of dispossession that stretches back to the arrival of the Spanish conquistadors in the Americas. In Colombia, sections of the state apparatus collude with drug traffickers and paramilitary groups to violently take the peasants’ land and strip them of the means to reproduce themselves. At the same time, free trade agreements and import competition undercut licit crops, pushing farmers towards more profitable illicit crops. Although coca is native to the Andes and has deep spiritual and cultural significance for indigenous peoples who have used it for thousands of years, most farmers are now forced to grow coca under the same neoliberal system that then turns around and tries to eradicate the crop in the name of the War on Drugs.

Coca production locks households into economic dependence and highly informal work throughout the year, since the mature coca leaf is harvested every two months. In addition, it achieves rapid production at low cost, prompt commercialisation, and an average net monthly income estimated at about 56% of the Colombian minimum wage (in 2018) per hectare cultivated.⁴¹ However, this figure masks wide variation and does not reflect how coercion, intermediaries, transport bottlenecks, and price volatility can further squeeze what growers take home. Our joint research with the National Coordination of Coca, Poppy, and Marijuana Growers (COCCAM) found that not only is production labour intensive and time consuming, but the rate of return for peasants is negligible. According to one COCCAM leader:

When we finish the whole process, we are practically ready to start again. So, it is constant… The coca is planted, and after six months it is ready for the first harvest, and then it is harvested every two months, which means that every two months there is a product.

Another COCCAM member, a 26-year-old grower, said:

You may need between six and ten workers per hectare. That needs to be emphasised, because coca leaf generates a lot of employment. There are farms where the picking never stops and there are 60 to 80 workers every day. That means that during the course of the year, they will rest for one month.⁴²

Furthermore, coca-growing areas are among the poorest and most isolated in Colombia, with markedly lower access to public goods and services than the rest of the country. A 2018 UNODC household survey of 6,350 families in 29 municipalities participating in Colombia’s Integral National Programme for Illicit Crop Substitution (Programa Nacional Integral de Sustitución de Cultivos Ilícitos) found that 57% of households were in monetary poverty and 47% were multidimensionally poor.⁴³ UNODC calculates its multidimensional poverty index across four dimensions – education, health, childhood and adolescence, and housing conditions – and classifies a household as multidimensionally poor when it is deprived in at least one-third of the weighted indicators. The same survey points to pervasive child labour (92% of children aged 6–9 are working), low school attendance (68% of the school-age population does not attend), and severe service deficits (only 3% report access to a hospital or health centre, while only 63% report access to electricity).⁴⁴ The health effects associated with tasks performed in growing illicit crops go beyond those associated with agricultural work. Added to this are the damages caused by the products used to treat the plantations and by the institutional measures for eradication (such as the indiscriminate spraying of glyphosate over peasant territories), as well as the impacts of deforestation to expand the agricultural frontier. Across these territories, labour informality is near universal and overcrowding is widespread. In addition, birth rates are high, and adult migration is common – dynamics that crop substitution and alternative development programmes rarely take into account.⁴⁵ These are conditions of state abandonment that both sustain and are reinforced by the coca economy and the coercive structures around it.

These conditions are central to understanding why peasants sell their labour in the illicit coca economy – it is one of the few viable sources of cash income. As one COCCAM leader put it:

The peasantry has been judged and labelled as if we chose to cultivate the coca leaf, when it has been the circumstances, the lack of involvement of local and national governments in the territory… The absence of this institutionality has led people to seek alternatives with illegal economies to feed, maintain, and sustain [their] families. This is due to the lack of good access roads, produce markets [and collection centres], and initiatives to promote production.⁴⁶

Although illicit activities surrounding the coca leaf began decades earlier, Colombia’s emergence as a central node in the global cocaine trade took shape in the 1970s, when rising international demand drew the country into large-scale processing and export.⁴⁷ By the end of the decade, Colombia was one of the world’s main exporters of cocaine and marijuana, generating an influx of capital that reshaped the country’s economy and politics – a transformation that continues today. In the 1980s, cocaine trafficking consolidated at the expense of other drugs and cultivation expanded into more regions of the country, even as it declined in Peru and Bolivia. This trajectory accelerated in the 1990s: between 1995 and 2000, the area under coca cultivation in Colombia rose from about 50,900 hectares to 136,200 hectares, representing roughly 0.1 to 0.3 per cent of the country’s agricultural land.⁴⁸

Between 1994 and 2005, the expansion of coca production intensified internal conflict, led to the expansion of the agricultural frontier, altered population growth patterns, and deepened inequality. It also drove cultural changes linked to shifting rural-urban relations, internal migration, and changes in crop planting and production. Across this period, minors were increasingly drawn into the armed conflict between insurgent groups and the Colombian state’s legal and illegal armies through recruitment and coercion by armed actors, including as combatants and in support roles. Coca expansion also reshaped settlement patterns, drawing internal migrants (including displaced families) into frontier zones and swelling existing town centres into hubs of trade and services.⁴⁹

During the 1980s and 1990s, large drug cartels emerged in Medellín and Cali, building vast empires of wealth and territorial power. Although these empires were based in these departmental capitals, the business of production and processing took place in other parts of the country, particularly in the south, southwest, and in the east and northeast. In practice, the persecution of the cartels by the Colombian and US governments turned into a witch hunt to criminalise peasant farmers and the armed political organisations that are present in these regions of the country, providing an ideal backdrop for the development of Plan Colombia. This plan led to an intensification of political violence in the country, with direct US financing for the War on Drugs, which ultimately resulted in increased militarisation and paved the way for a succession of right-wing presidents who instrumentalised the War on Drugs to deepen their grip on society: Álvaro Uribe Vélez (2002–2010), Juan Manuel Santos (2010–2018), and Iván Duque Márquez (2018–2022).

Colombia’s coca economy has become entrenched in regions where the state’s presence has long been militarised while civilian institutions and public services have remained weak. In these territories, conflict over land is sharpened by insecure tenure and overlapping claims, and armed actors – legal and illegal – who extract resources from peasant households and whose livelihoods depend on coca as a cash crop. As one COCCAM regional leader explained:

Currently, there are no guarantees for those involved in cultivating coca leaves. Over the years, [land] concentration has become more critical in the regions… In addition, illegal and legal armed actors take advantage of the situation of the peasantry: more than one has demanded resources, which the peasant agrees to hand over to prevent the uprooting of the plant… their only means of subsistence.⁵⁰

Yet these same conditions have fuelled generations of organised struggle. The peasantry in Colombia has a long tradition of political organisation around peasant rights, land, production, and the defence of territory. It is no coincidence that peasants have historically stood at the forefront of struggles against the expansion of latifundios (large, privately-owned agricultural estates) and the predatory practices of national and foreign capital, from the creation of guerrilla organisations in the 1960s to more recent forms of organising around agricultural labour. These struggles have repeatedly moved from the countryside to the streets and highways, despite police repression, criminalisation, murder, and state abandonment.

The peasant movement in Colombia has also built tools for organising in coca-growing territories. Notable here are the peasant marches of 1994 during the government of Ernesto Samper Pizano (1994–1998), led by coca growers in the departments of Caquetá, Putumayo, and Guaviare against the government’s glyphosate spraying policies. When the state failed to honour the resulting agreements, peasants, raspachines, harvesters, merchants, settled farmers, and day labourers launched a new wave of mobilisations in 1996, which became a defining feature of the decade’s social struggles.

The San Vicente del Caguán peace talks (1998–2002) – negotiations between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP – placed coca-growing territories at the centre of national debate, not only as sites of drug trafficking and armed conflict but also as places where large civilian populations depended on the coca economy for survival. In territories such as Guaviare, Putumayo, Caquetá, Meta, Catatumbo, and Cauca, this economy sustained a population of around one million growers, raspachines, collectors, cooks, and others who survive amid constant dispute between armed actors and precarious living conditions. These communities were not new, but they were increasingly treated as a distinct political subject – the coca-growing peasantry – shaped in part by internal migration into frontier agricultural zones. Because coca cultivation was treated as an enemy economy, these communities faced intensifying repression as the armed conflict between the FARC-EP and the Colombian government escalated, alongside territorial disputes and the co-opting of political power by drug traffickers. To make matters worse, the state has long approached this as a question of public order – eradication and militarisation – rather than public policies such as guaranteeing land rights, rural investment, and peasants’ livelihoods.

With the signing of the Final Peace Agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC-EP in 2016, the state formally recognised the need for a definitive and comprehensive solution to the problem of illicit drugs – one that treats the peasantry as subjects of rights and advances public policy through differential approaches. In early 2017, COCCAM was established, bringing together peasant, indigenous, and Afro-descendant communities from across Colombia to discuss the situation of growers and harvesters and to demand participation in eradication and substitution.⁵¹

Mass demonstrations in 2019, including the national strike in November, helped consolidate a broad popular bloc that later coalesced into the Pacto Histórico (Historic Pact) electoral coalition, bringing together forces such as Colombia Humana (Humane Colombia) and Unión Patriótica (Patriotic Union), among others. This bloc broke the back of the right-wing consensus and carried Gustavo Franscisco Petro Urrego to the presidency in 2022.

Petro has argued that the US-led War on Drugs has failed and has called for shifting policy away from the criminalisation of coca-growing peasants and towards the entire structure of the illicit economy. This shift marks the beginning of a rupture. A deeper break would require an assault on the entire banking system, which is fuelled by the originary accumulation from the illicit economy – a confrontation that would reach into the heart of capitalism itself.

Conclusion

Over the past several years, our work with peasant organisations across the world – particularly COCCAM in Colombia – has allowed us to examine the drug economy not as a matter of crime and security but as a window into the deeper structures of contemporary capitalism. Campesinos know that the illicit coca economy is not the cause of Colombia’s crisis but one of its symptoms. These farmers enter the illicit economy not out of choice but because all other avenues of dignified subsistence have been blocked by land dispossession, collapsing agricultural prices, the retreat of the state, and the expansion of paramilitary and corporate power.

From the standpoint of these communities, the dominant narrative of the War on Drugs is revealed as a profound misdiagnosis. The problem is not the coca plant but the economic system that criminalises the rural poor while absorbing and recycling the enormous liquidity generated by illicit markets. The financial sector depends on these flows. Global banks welcome them. And the wealthier nations that promote eradication simultaneously rely on the stability that this hidden capital provides. To treat the campesino as the enemy is to conceal the real architecture of the drug trade, which stretches upward into the circuits of legal finance, global commodities, and state power.

If the objective is to end the violence and the economic dependence on coca cultivation, then the starting point must be neither militarisation nor eradication but the reconstruction of rural life: land reform, guaranteed prices for licit crops, infrastructure, public services, and political rights for those who cultivate the soil. Without transforming the social and economic conditions that push families into illicit agriculture, the cycle will simply reproduce itself. Without confronting the financial institutions that launder the proceeds, the global drug economy will continue to function as an unofficial pillar of capitalist liquidity.

This is not a text that intervenes into public policy from the standpoint of security or drug addiction. Our starting point is the well-being of the millions of workers who are pushed into growing coca, processing it into cocaine, and transporting and selling the product. None of these workers benefit from the billions of dollars that swirl around the drug trade and liquefy the international banking system. Treating the drug trade as outside the licit economy is an enormous category error, since it obscures the function of the drug money inside the capitalist system itself. Eradication, criminalisation, and militarisation will not end the production of coca or the illicit economy.

The peasantry knows this truth intimately. Their experience shows that the drug economy persists not because of the coca leaf itself, but because capitalism requires the constant replenishment of new reservoirs of wealth – licit or illicit – to sustain itself. Any genuine solution must therefore begin with the campesinos and with the recognition that the frontier between legal and illegal capitalism is far thinner, and far more politically useful, than the architects of the War on Drugs will admit.

Photograph (PUPSOC): Campesinos travel to Monterredondo (Miranda, Cauca) to welcome former FARC combatants at a Territorial Space for Training and Reincorporation (ETCR) following the 2016 peace agreement.
Intervention by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research

Notes

Gigi Scaria, Wheel, 2009.

Introduction

The global economic order is in flux and globalisation is in a prolonged crisis. In the 1990s, Western capital under US hegemony promoted trade liberalisation and the spread of global supply chains that exploited labour cost differentials between the Global South and the North. Now, these very same processes are being undermined by the same hegemon under US President Donald Trump’s leadership to reverse globalisation’s unintended consequence: the erosion of US economic and technological dominance by a rising power in the Global South.

Even as the global economic order is being reshaped, the Indian economy remains weighed down by the inertia of thirty-five years of liberalisation. Its structural problems, rooted in entrenched inequalities and aggravated by neoliberal policies, have stifled the development of a broad-based, technologically advanced domestic industrial base. Owing to the dismal state of Indian industry, most of the workforce remains excluded from it, confined to insecure, low-wage, low-productivity employment sustained by sheer desperation for livelihood. As a result, much of the population is trapped in various shades of poverty, even as official claims of a steep decline in deprivation are conjured through methodological sleights of hand.¹

The persistent underdevelopment of industry, particularly manufacturing, lies at the core of India’s tryst with globalisation. The promises of liberalisation – to unlock India’s supposed potential – have produced a central tendency toward deindustrialisation, hollowing out formal employment while weakening productive capacity and deepening social inequalities.

Despite the current government’s bombastic appraisal of India’s importance on the world stage as Vishwaguru – literally ‘teacher to the world’, a term popular in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindutva rhetoric – and claims of high growth rates that are often mired in statistical controversies, it has been forced to confront these failures, which it does with obfuscations and accusations. Since Modi came to power as India’s prime minister in 2014, his go-to political strategy has been to blame all unpalatable facts on the opposition and previous governments, even as his tenure now stretches beyond a decade. There is no doubt that the neoliberal policies initiated by the Indian National Congress in the 1990s and subsequently pursued by every government since – including Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party, BJP), its most zealous adherent – have brought the Indian economy to this unfortunate state. Modi’s long tenure as chief minister of the western Indian state of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014 burnished his neoliberal credentials in the eyes of Indian and foreign capital.

But Modi’s response has been to double down on the same policies – worse, now on steroids – thereby exacerbating underlying problems, deepening inequalities, and entrenching the crisis further. Since becoming prime minister he has announced a series of grand policy initiatives such as Make in India, Startup India, Skill India, Design in India, and Design for the World. These initiatives were supposed to attract foreign capital into design and manufacturing in India for global markets, encourage Indian start-ups to enter new technology sectors, and upgrade the skill levels of the Indian workforce to align with world-class standards – all ostensibly aimed at revitalising Indian manufacturing while catering to Western markets. In practice, these initiatives have failed to strengthen manufacturing or reverse the trend of deindustrialisation. Most simply offered subsidies and tax rebates to corporations in the hope that industrial expansion would follow automatically, with predictably meagre results.

A much-publicised initiative along these lines was the Production Linked Incentive scheme for fourteen industries, foremost among them electronics, with the government handing out large subsidies to firms – both foreign and domestic – for manufacturing. But this scheme has largely amounted to subsidising the assembly of imported components, with negligible impact on India’s overall import bill or technological capability. The bulk of value addition for goods made in India, such as smartphones, is still done overseas while the burden of these subsidies ultimately falls on the people through cuts in public investment and social spending of the government. The structural constraints that hamper the development of India’s economy and industry cannot be addressed simply through subsidies to corporations or indiscriminate foreign investment flows; if anything, such policies only reinforce the structural malaise India inherited at independence, which was compounded after liberalisation.

Entrenched Inequalities: The Post-Independence Constraints on Industrialisation

When India gained independence in 1947, achieving technological and industrial self-sufficiency was widely seen as essential to sustain political independence, break from the colonial pattern of economic relations with the West, and absorb the vast underemployed agricultural workforce into industry to raise their living standards. Through a system of five-year plans – state-led national development plans that set priorities for investment and production – India embarked on a rapid programme of industrialisation centred on the development of heavy industry under state ownership. Meanwhile, private capital, drawing on this state-created base, produced consumer goods. As a result of this push, the first decade and a half after independence (roughly 1947–1962) witnessed an unprecedented phase of public-sector-led industrialisation, with manufacturing’s share in GDP rising from about 7% to 15.9% – a pace of industrial growth unmatched since.² However, soon enough the quest for industrialisation met obstacles in the form of the deep agrarian and class inequalities in Indian society.

Land ownership was concentrated among a narrow rural elite while the land-hungry masses struggled to meet even basic subsistence needs. In the absence of egalitarian land reforms, widespread poverty curtailed domestic demand, creating an internal constraint that prevented Indian industry from achieving the scale needed for sustained growth. At the same time, the import-heavy, Western-style consumption patterns of the elite led to recurrent foreign-exchange shortages, imposing external constraints on growth.

Nonetheless, India’s strategy of import-substitution industrialisation, though it fell short of creating a broad-based and dynamic industrial sector, strengthened a domestic capitalist class dominated by a handful of large business houses, which expanded their economic presence and consolidated their influence over state policy.

The state functioned as a mediator between a dominant bloc of landlords and capitalists on one side and a mass of impoverished peasants, landless labourers, and a small industrial working class on the other. The regime avoided policies that could threaten elite interests – such as genuine agrarian reform or substantial taxation of the propertied classes. Consequently, state-led industrialisation relied on fiscal deficits rather than progressive taxation. Each round of fiscal expansion transferred greater surpluses to the big bourgeoisie, deepening inequalities. Their hunger for accumulation increased while the narrow domestic market imposed limits on their potential to accumulate. Thus, significant parts of the investible surplus in the hands of the Indian bourgeoisie found outlets other than industrial expansion.

As a result of these dynamics, industrialisation progressed in fits and starts, as every attempt by the state at concerted expansion soon ran up against the same structural constraints. These unresolved constraints, which precipitated into a severe balance-of-payments crisis, together with the loss of the Soviet Union as a key trading and financial partner (where rouble-rupee trade had insulated India from global currency shocks), ultimately left India exposed to the neoliberal turn of 1991, driven by the Bretton Woods institutions (the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank).

After Liberalisation

The liberalisation of the Indian economy, formally adopted in 1991, did little to remove the constraints that weighed down industrial development. What it did, however, was ease constraints on accumulation for the Indian bourgeoisie and lift the import controls that had previously restricted elite consumption. All this was achieved without the pains of developing a strong domestic manufacturing base.

Even as existing capacities were whittled away, the Indian elite could consume goods produced elsewhere and enjoy world-class lifestyles within an otherwise underdeveloped economy. This process allowed for faster and uninterrupted capital accumulation by Indian capital whether by the encroachment on public sector assets and natural resources, through expansion into import-intensive production for a domestic market, or by the displacement of petty producers, traders, and small-scale industrialists.

Gigi Scaria, Untitled, 2020.

The Four Tenets of Indian Neoliberalism

India’s neoliberal trajectory rests on four tenets that have directly undermined Indian manufacturing: the removal of trade barriers; privatisation and the weakening of the public sector; fiscal conservatism that curtailed public investment; and the opening of the economy to foreign capital, both productive (foreign direct investment, or FDI) and financial (portfolio) capital. Together, these tenets have sustained a pattern of growth that is reliant on credit and financial flows yet unmoored from robust industrialisation and autonomous technological development.

Trade Liberalisation

India began to pull down its tariff barriers in the early 1990s, leading to its accession to the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 1995. In the initial years, the aggressive tariff cuts on agricultural products triggered a prolonged agrarian crisis, provoking a severe political backlash.³ As a result, tariff cuts in agriculture had to be halted after 1996. Yet liberalisation continued in manufacturing.

From 2000 onwards, trade liberalisation accelerated even more.⁴ Under pressure from the WTO Dispute Settlement Mechanism – pushed by the United States and the European Union – India removed most of its remaining quantitative import restrictions, which had protected segments of Indian industry (particularly small-scale industry).

India’s decision to subordinate industrial development to ‘free’ trade harmed domestic manufacturing, especially in the capital and intermediate goods sectors. Even as average tariffs were reduced, tariffs on capital and intermediate goods were much lower than those on consumer goods. That meant that while manufacturers of Indian consumer goods enjoyed moderate protection from the tariff regime, manufacturers of intermediate and capital goods had no such shield.

The new tariff regime benefited both domestic and foreign firms that operated in India’s consumer durables sector. Large Indian corporations that had historically focused on the production of consumer goods for the domestic market then chose to import cheaper machinery and intermediate goods rather than develop a domestic supply chain. Foreign multinational firms went further, treating India primarily as an assembly base. Consequently, the import intensity of Indian manufacturing increased sharply.⁵ In pharmaceuticals, for instance, India was largely self-sufficient in the production of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). However, after liberalisation India became dependent on the import of pharmaceutical intermediates (the chemical ingredients used to make finished medicines). The Indian pharmaceutical industry now imports 70% of APIs from China, with some medicines, such as penicillin, entirely dependent on Chinese imports.⁶

Heavy reliance on imports eroded the domestic manufacturing of capital and intermediate goods.⁷ The shrinking of the domestic capital goods industry, which acts as an incubator for technological innovation, in turn stunted Indian industry’s technological capabilities. This weakening of technological capabilities further eroded Indian manufacturing’s ability to withstand global competition.

The Privatisation of the Public Sector

The systematic weakening of the public sector after 1991, through aggressive privatisation and chronic neglect, played no small role in the attrition of manufacturing. India’s capital goods industry, dominated by public enterprises that produced electrical machinery, machine tools, process plant equipment, earth-moving equipment, and industrial electronics, was left to decline as trade was liberalised and the state withdrew support. The ancillary small and medium enterprises that supplied components to these heavy industries collapsed under import competition and the loss of institutional support that followed.

At a time when electronics manufacturing has taken centre stage in global discussions on industry and technology, the fate of India’s nascent electronics sector in the 1990s stands as a testament to the damage inflicted by the liquidation of the public sector coupled with trade liberalisation.

In the 1970s, the Indian state took important steps to build a domestic electronics hardware industry through public sector enterprises. These firms – Electronics Corporation of India Limited and Bharat Electronics Limited – developed indigenous control systems for nuclear and defence applications. By the 1980s, the state had established Semiconductor Complex Limited (SCL) and Hindustan Computers Limited to develop capabilities in semiconductors, integrated circuits, and computing. SCL was founded in 1984, three years before the creation of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the global semiconductor leader.

The government abandoned these efforts after liberalisation and sought to liquidate the budding electronics sector through the removal of tariff protections and withdrawal of state support. India joined the WTO’s Information Technology Agreement in 1997, which eliminated tariffs on a range of electronic goods, removing the policy space needed to develop competitive local industry. Rather than invest in manufacturing capabilities in the electronics sector, successive governments promoted an export-oriented model centred on low- to mid-skill information technology (IT) and back-office services for Western firms. This approach stunted long-term technological development in the electronics industry. The consequences are stark: today, India imports 80% of its IT hardware, 70% of its electronics components (62% from China), and 90% of its telecommunications equipment.⁸ Even electronics assembled domestically depend on imported components, with little local value addition. The country’s early initiative in public sector electronics was squandered, and India is now largely technologically dependent.⁹

What was done to India’s electronics sector has been repeated across other sectors, with the government neglecting or liquidating state-owned capital goods and heavy industries – areas in which big Indian capital remains unwilling to invest but which are nonetheless essential for technological advancement.

Gigi Scaria, Post Land, 2008.

Fiscal Conservatism

A key factor in the crisis surrounding the Indian economy – whether in the shaky foundation of its growth or the woes of manufacturing – is the fiscal conservatism ushered in by the neoliberal era. India’s pursuit of international finance capital and the associated investment flows meant that Indian governments could not significantly expand infrastructure spending or provide adequate support to industry without risking those flows drying up. In 2003, to appease international finance, India enacted the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act, capping the fiscal deficit at 3% of GDP.¹⁰ Though this cap was routinely breached, it acted as a reference point used to push back against any state-led spending in support of domestic industry, the public sector, or agriculture. Governments have routinely sold stakes in profitable public sector enterprises and siphoned off their investible funds to meet budgetary expenditures, even as taxes on corporate profits were steadily reduced. This has left public sector enterprises with a severe shortage of funds for expansion and technological modernisation. Despite being flush with funds, Indian private corporations have shown little interest in investing in research and development, while public sector enterprises have been deprived of the means to do so. As a result, Indian manufacturing remains heavily dependent on imported technologies.

Foreign Direct Investment

Since liberalisation in 1991, the Indian government has progressively dismantled barriers to foreign capital in both industry and finance. Today, except for sectors such as gambling, atomic energy, and railways – where even Indian private firms are barred – FDI is permitted in almost every area, often with complete foreign ownership. India has also eased capital-account restrictions, facilitating large inflows of short-term speculative finance. Official data show that, on average, about 30% of total foreign investment inflows since 2000 have come as volatile foreign portfolio investment (FPI). Even within what is classified as FDI, a considerable share consists of speculative capital, as India’s broad post-2000 definition of FDI includes portfolio holdings exceeding a 10% equity stake in an Indian company.¹¹

While foreign investment was officially promoted as a means to advance industrialisation, technological upgrading, and export growth, these promises have remained largely unfulfilled. In practice, foreign capital has served mainly to finance the import-intensive pattern of post-liberalisation growth, thereby reinforcing the erosion of domestic industry.

This removal of barriers came with few regulations or guidelines. The Indian state did not, for instance, ensure that FDI into domestic firms was conditional on technology transfers and linkages, local sourcing and downstream industrial development, investment in domestic R&D, or limits on the repatriation of royalties. Half-hearted attempts to introduce some of these guidelines were abandoned under the slightest pressure from foreign capital.

Consequently, FDI has contributed little to technological advancement in Indian industry, with foreign firms establishing few R&D facilities within the country. Foreign-owned firms in India remain heavily import-dependent: their imports exceed their exports, thereby weakening domestic industrial linkages and reinforcing the process of deindustrialisation in the Indian economy.

While foreign investment has failed to deliver its promised benefits, the large inflows of foreign exchange injected substantial liquidity into the Indian financial system, expanding the liabilities of banks and compelling them to seek new avenues for credit expansion. This has resulted in credit-driven, import-intensive growth marked by elite-driven consumption and the concentration of capital in the hands of domestic monopoly groups at the expense of the public sector banks.

At the same time, foreign investment itself increasingly added to the external burden, as foreign firms imported more than they exported and remitted growing amounts abroad through royalty payments and profit repatriations. In 2024, for every $100 of gross investment inflow (FDI and FPI combined), $50 was taken out in the form of investment income. Excluding reinvested earnings – which do not bring in fresh foreign exchange – the imbalance is even starker: $66 was taken out for every $100 of net inflow. In recent years, such income outflows have often exceeded the total current account deficit. In 2024, repatriated investment income was three times the size of the current account deficit. As repatriations rise, India’s external account becomes increasingly fragile, setting the stage for deeper balance-of-payments stress in the years ahead. In a glimpse of such a future, in 2023 $116 was taken out of India’s economy in the form of investment income for every $100 of foreign investment inflows into the country.¹²

The liquidity generated by capital inflows fuelled credit-driven, import-led expansion and large trade deficits. These deficits in turn necessitated further foreign inflows, which deepened the drain on foreign exchange, creating a self-sustaining cycle of deepening dependence on external financial flows to manage India’s balance of payments.

A Growth Model Where Industrial Growth Is Incidental

Under India’s neoliberal trajectory, structured around its four central tenets, industrial growth has been incidental rather than central to the growth model. Instead of being rooted in industrial planning, successive governments have relied on bank credit (along with service exports) as a driver of growth – both to boost demand and to finance industrial infrastructure. In contrast, from independence until 1991, institutional lending in India was largely channelled toward agriculture, industry, and trade within the broader framework of economic planning, with only a marginal role for consumer credit.

Since 1991, consumer credit has shown a clear upward trend, with the banking sector – especially private banks – progressively redirecting lending toward home loans, vehicle loans, consumer durables, and credit cards. The share of personal loans in bank credit rose from 9.4% in 1990 to 25.2% in 2005, reaching 32.4% in 2024.¹³

Consequently, credit, particularly for home and automobile purchases, has been an important driver of growth. The expansion of housing credit resulted in an increased share of construction in GDP.

Similarly, the expansion of consumer credit for automobiles distorted the structure of manufacturing in favour of automobiles and generated increasingly automobile-dependent transport patterns, aggravating India’s infrastructure constraints.

Vehicle finance, together with the strong presence of big capital in automobile production, has deepened the state’s bias towards private transport and road construction, resulting in India developing the world’s second largest road network, soon to exceed that of the United States.¹⁴ Despite having a third of China’s land area, India has a road network that is already 2 million kilometres longer. Road construction has accelerated over the past decade, particularly for highways and expressways. One of the problems with this expansion is that it is constrained by land acquisition challenges. High population density and heavy reliance on agriculture make land acquisition politically sensitive and socially disruptive. Peasants, who rely on land as their primary asset, often resist dispossession. As a result, acquiring land is slow, expensive, and frequently contested – creating bottlenecks in India’s road-dominated logistics system.

On the other hand, the transport manufacturing system’s reliance on automobiles (including trucks) has driven up fuel imports, with more than 40% of petroleum products being consumed by the transport sector.¹⁵ This has had a negative impact on the trade deficit and has not contributed to industrialisation.

The shift to the auto-road development path has weakened the broader manufacturing ecosystem. India’s logistics costs are estimated to be two or three times higher than China’s, largely due to severe underinvestment in rail infrastructure. Rail transport – which is cheaper, less land-intensive, more energy efficient, and better suited for Indian conditions – has been deliberately undermined in favour of road transport.

Underinvestment in railways has meant a deterioration in the quality and speed of rail transport: conventional passenger trains in India have an average speed of 42 km/h, whereas in China they run at 86 km/h (the average speed of freight trains in India is 25 km/h, whereas in China they run at 42 km/h).

The credit-financed, automobile-driven transport system has resulted in high logistics costs and slow transport times, raising production costs and undermining the competitiveness of Indian manufacturing under liberalised trade.

Gigi Scaria, Hesitant Attempt, 2018.

Credit-Fuelled Investment and Non-Performing Assets

Not all neoliberal growth in India has been consumption-driven. Between 2004 and 2010, when the country experienced high GDP growth, expansion was sustained not only by consumption but also by investment driven by bank credit, fuelled by a glut of liquidity created by foreign capital inflows. With the banking system flush with liquidity, private banks expanded retail credit, while public sector banks channelled large loans to corporations for infrastructure projects in real estate, power, and steel, bolstering investment-led growth.

This credit boom did support investment-led growth, but it incubated a serious crisis. The mismatch between the long gestation periods of these projects and the short-term nature of bank liabilities, combined with corporate impunity and poor oversight, proved disastrous. Commercial banks – ill-equipped to evaluate and manage such projects, which should have been financed by development banks – were nudged by the government into lending to privately owned infrastructure projects. The result was a massive accumulation of Non-Performing Assets (NPAs), which peaked at $82.3 billion in public sector banks, while the physical assets that were created through these loans passed into the hands of India’s big capital at minimal cost to them through the resolution process of the NPA crisis.¹⁶

The nature of neoliberal growth in this period meant that the anarchy of the market determined both the direction and structure of Indian manufacturing. The interplay of domestic capital’s interests, the banking system’s credit preferences, and the elite’s consumption patterns – operating within a regime of global free trade and unrestricted financial flows – came to shape the trajectory of Indian industry, whether toward growth or decline.

Trade Deficits and Deindustrialisation: Two Sides of the Same Coin

Dependence on imported manufactured goods, fuel, and finance has meant that India has run a current account deficit in nearly every year except during the temporary collapse of global trade during the COVID-19 pandemic. The only periods when the current account deficit narrows are during times of economic contraction. The merchandise trade deficit stood at 2% of GDP in 1991 and has since risen to 7%, peaking at 10% in 2011.¹⁷ Petroleum products account for half of the merchandise deficit. The current account deficit has remained lower than that of the merchandise trade deficit only because of the surplus in export of services and the inflow of remittances from Indian workers. These remittances have provided the cushion for the otherwise dangerously high trade deficits that India’s neoliberal growth model generates. However, neither the export of services nor remittances can counteract the erosion of India’s domestic industrial capacity.

Deindustrialisation

For a long time, discussions on India’s political economy have used the term ‘deindustrialisation’ to describe the decline of non-agricultural crafts and traditional industries under British rule, which displaced millions from their customary occupations and drove them into poverty and hunger.

Nearly eight decades after independence, the term deindustrialisation is in currency once more – this time to describe the trajectory of the Indian economy under liberalisation, the effects of which have become unmistakable over the past decade. The underlying tendency toward deindustrialisation, concealed during periods of credit-driven high growth, has fully manifested in recent years, coinciding with the Modi government’s tenure.

Manufacturing’s share in GDP fell from 18.9% in 2008 to 14.3% in 2023, a level last seen more than sixty years ago in the initial stage of India’s industrialisation. Given the likely overestimation of manufacturing output in the new GDP series with the new base year, the actual share may be even lower than official figures suggest. The Index of Industrial Production (IIP) reinforces this picture: the average annual growth rate of manufacturing output as measured by the IIP was just 3.3% from 2011–2012 to 2024–2025, while it was 10.1% from 2003–2004 to 2010–2011. This deceleration in manufacturing is stark when viewed over the long term. The annual average growth rate of the manufacturing component of the IIP was 7.5% from 1981–1982 to 1989­–1990, 8.0% from 1991–1992 to 1996–1997, and 5.4% from 1997–1998 to 2002–2003.¹⁸ In fact, since 2011, growth has been lower than in any comparable period over the past three decades. India now appears to be at risk of further deindustrialisation.

The Service Sector: A Poor Substitute for Industry

The relative decline of manufacturing over the past fifteen years has reinforced deep structural imbalances in the Indian economy. Today, the majority of India’s GDP originates from the service sector.

After 1947, the newly independent Indian republic began on a development path centred around the building of a strong industrial base. In 1951, at the start of the First Five-Year Plan, manufacturing accounted for 12% of GDP, while services stood at 36%. By 1990, these shares had risen to 19% for industry and 41% for services. That development path for industrialisation was abandoned in 1991, when the Indian government decided to liberalise – or more correctly neo-liberalise – the Indian economy and make it more service-oriented. Since 1991, manufacturing’s share has fallen to 14%, while services have increased to 48% in 2008 and then 55% in 2024. While the rule of the BJP under Modi exacerbated the woes of Indian manufacturing, the foundation for its weakening has been laid by successive governments following the neoliberal path that started in 1991.

Unlike manufacturing – which strengthens the technological base and supports real wage growth – the expansion of services does not necessarily generate similar effects. A strong manufacturing sector can enhance service capacities in areas such as transport, telecommunications, and IT, but when services dominate alongside a weak industrial base, they rely heavily on imported machinery and foreign technologies, as is the case in India.

The service sector in India, of course, is a broad category, not amenable to easy generalisation. Nonetheless, there is a clear dichotomy. On one side are a range of services – highly varied in nature but similar in their informality – providing low-wage, insecure, and largely unregulated employment, marked by low productivity. Workers in these activities often move between rural and urban areas and between agricultural and service employment, depending on the availability of work. These sectors effectively act as a refuge for surplus labour from agriculture, pushed out by stagnating agrarian employment and drawn into services due to the manufacturing sector’s inability – especially in the context of deindustrialisation – to absorb the growing labour force. Since 2017–2018, the share of manufacturing in total employment has in fact declined.

Retail trade and transportation are two such sectors. But even in these areas, employment spans a wide spectrum: for instance, in retail it includes small shopkeepers, pushcart vendors, hawkers, workers in kirana (neighbourhood) stores, and helpers in wholesale markets, while in transport it includes auto and taxi drivers, truck drivers, loaders, bus conductors, and workers in freight handling and logistics. Retail trade accounts for 12.2% of total employment and transport around 5.6%, which contribute roughly similar shares to GDP.¹⁹

These activities are often described as part of the ‘informal sector’ rather than the ‘service sector’, a term typically reserved for the IT, finance, and other modern services that form the other side of this dichotomy. Both segments of the service economy have seen consistently high growth rates over the past three and a half decades. The IT and finance sectors account for significant shares of GDP, despite being highly capital-intensive and offering limited employment. In the early 1990s, the IT sector’s contribution to national income was negligible (around 0.1% of GDP), and its share of employment was even smaller. By 2024, this predominantly export-oriented industry has expanded rapidly to account for 7.5% of GDP while employing only 1% of the workforce.²⁰ Financial services followed a similar trajectory, with its share of GDP doubling from 3% in 1990 to 6% in 2004, and its employment share remaining under 1%.²¹

Together, the IT and financial services sectors account for 13.5% of GDP, which is comparable to that of the manufacturing sector, but they contribute less than 2% to employment, while manufacturing contributes 11.4%.²² In the non-agricultural economy, manufacturing comprises 17% of GDP and 20% of employment, while the IT and financial services sectors (both highly capital-intensive) contribute 16.5% of non-agricultural GDP and only 3.5% of its employment. The small number of high-paying jobs that these two sectors generate have weak multiplier effects in the domestic economy, given the import-intensive consumption patterns of this segment of the labour force.

This sharp divergence highlights the weak labour absorption of IT and finance, India’s most dynamic sectors, and illustrates the consequences of developing a high-tech service sector at the expense of manufacturing. One reason India has fully liberalised trade in electronics – one of the most dynamic and strategic branches of manufacturing in the contemporary global economy, unlike the automobile sector, which still enjoys considerable tariff protection – is that such liberalisation ostensibly supports the high-tech service sectors that primarily export to the West, particularly the United States. The consequence has been deindustrialisation coupled with continued dependence of close to half of India’s workforce on agriculture.

With 18% share in GDP, agriculture currently employs 46% of India’s workforce. Despite accounting for more than 50% of India’s GDP, the service sector employed only about 30% of the workforce in 2023–2024, highlighting its low level of labour absorption. Manufacturing, which at the time of independence was envisioned to draw a large share of the workforce out of agriculture, now contributes about 14% of output and provides barely 11% of total employment.²³

Gigi Scaria, Settlement, 2010.

Under India’s version of neoliberal development, manufacturing has been sacrificed to enable the export of skilled labour and services to Western markets, with the hope that these earnings would offset rising imports and compensate for not having a robust manufacturing sector. This has amounted to sacrificing India’s long-term industrial and technological capabilities for fragile and externally dependent sources of foreign exchange, ultimately undermining the country’s economic and technological sovereignty, for which a strong manufacturing sector is essential.

The Human Consequences of Deindustrialisation

India has a youthful population – a so-called ‘demographic dividend’ that could have been the basis for building a modern industrial economy and sharing the gains of technological progress. They should have better living standards and secure employment, allowing for a balanced life of work, rest, and leisure. For all the hype about India being a major economy, it remains an underdeveloped economy where a large share of workers’ incomes is spent on basic consumption such as food and where youth are employed in insecure jobs with uncertain futures.

India is squandering the youth of its workforce in make-do employment with stagnant wages. The country has seen a steep decline in the number of dependents – children and the elderly – relative to the working-age population: from 83% in 1966 to 47% in 2024.²⁴ This enabled some reduction in extreme poverty, but with a limited impact. Yet with the ratio expected to start rising again after 2041, the space for India’s structural transformation is set to narrow.²⁵ Industrial growth – which should have absorbed surplus labour and driven productivity and technological advancement – appears to have reached a dead end within the current model of economic growth.

A Way Forward

Bringing industrialisation to the centre stage of economic policy is of utmost necessity if India is to emerge decisively from the underdevelopment trap it currently is in. There is very little argument about it. The importance of industrialisation, and the limits of a service-led economic expansion, have become evident even to the votaries of neoliberalism in India. This is reflected in Modi’s constant invocation of schemes to promote manufacturing, even as his government adheres to neoliberal tenets more ardently than any of its predecessors – through the liquidation of the public sector, dismantling of the remaining barriers to foreign capital, promotion of automobile-led infrastructure, and generous tax breaks and subsidies to the corporate sector under the pretext of stimulating investment. While the Modi government has moderately raised tariffs on a few manufactured goods, the broader framework of trade liberalisation remains intact. Predictably, these measures have produced little of consequence in terms of manufacturing expansion. The deindustrialisation of the Indian economy appears to be on track.

It is evident that a decisive break from the neoliberal tenets currently guiding economic policy is essential for any revitalisation of India’s industrial programme. Yet the long period of liberalisation has created structural dynamics that make any departure from neoliberalism a formidable political challenge.

This era compounded the pre-existing constraints discussed earlier – those that limited industrialisation even before liberalisation – and deepened the process of deindustrialisation. Inequalities that restrict the domestic market have multiplied while the stature of the Indian big bourgeoisie has grown enormously, along with its influence over the state and its capacity to shape policy. This class is currently at the peak of its power since independence, having accumulated significant wealth while the majority of the population saw only marginal gains.

The vast industrial complexes of these Indian conglomerates in sectors such as automobiles, petrochemicals, power, steel, and telecommunications were largely built and operated using imported machinery and technology, taking advantage of trade liberalisation. Their expansion was financed by cheap capital made available through high stock valuations and sustained by large inflows of portfolio investment into Indian equity markets. The Indian big bourgeoisie established a functional relationship with foreign capital, preserving its immediate interests and managing any conflicts through a combination of accommodation and repulsion. Even as foreign firms displaced the public sector and marginalised smaller domestic producers in key sectors, India’s large conglomerates retained and expanded their position; they leveraged their scale, financial strength, and ability to shape state policy to consolidate their dominance.

Consequently, gone are the days when the Indian bourgeoisie bargained with the landlord class as an equal partner. While the erstwhile landlord class today straddles the rural and urban, agriculture and non-agriculture, it remains part of the Indian elite, sharing common class interests with the big bourgeoisie. The steering wheel of state policy is now far more firmly in the hands of the Indian big bourgeoisie, made up of powerful family business houses, notwithstanding occasional setbacks such as the peasant and landed classes’ successful opposition to the Modi government’s agricultural laws.

Today, the big bourgeoisie is aligned less with the landlord class and more with foreign capital. The entente between the Indian bourgeoisie and foreign – largely Western – capital has accelerated the erosion of India’s economic independence and deepened its reliance on the West for both investment and political alignment.

Uninterested in developing technologies through domestic investment in R&D, these business houses seek partnerships with Western – particularly US – capital to expand their footprint into new areas of manufacturing. They hope to ride the opportunities created by the US state’s determination to reorient global supply chains away from China.

Increasingly, India’s business houses are trying to collaborate with Western firms in areas such as defence production, electronics, and payment systems.

Despite their plans, the interests of this class are inimical to India’s industrialisation. The spectacle surrounding Indo-US trade negotiations under Trump exposed the limits of relying on collaboration with the West for industrial development. Even if a favourable trade deal with the US were to materialise, the outcome would hardly differ: if the first phase of neoliberalism has failed, its second iteration – ‘neoliberalism 2.0’ – is equally doomed to failure for the very reasons that hamstrung industrialisation in the pre-liberalisation period: deep inequality and lack of mass purchasing power. These same problems have only intensified under liberalisation, now on an exponentially larger scale. Today, inequality has reached such extremes that an individual must be among the top 11% of India’s income distribution to earn the national average income. In other words, 89% of adults earn less than this national average. Wealth inequality is even starker: the top 1% holds 40.1% of total wealth – the highest concentration globally. Within this group, inequality is sharper still, with just 162 individuals owning 24.6% of the country’s wealth in 2022.²⁶

Gone are the days when agrarian reform alone could have created a mass market by placing purchasing power in the hands of a broad population. Although severe inequality in landholding remains a reality, the enormous growth of the population and the widespread fragmentation of land mean that, while agrarian reform still has scope, it can no longer place sufficient land in the hands of India’s workforce.

The period after independence, when the Indian big bourgeoisie shared an overlapping interest with the working class and peasantry in state-led industrial and technological development, is long gone. There is no longer any common ground. The Indian bourgeoisie, once wary of international capital, has now inched toward partnership with it.

Thus, any shift away from the neoliberal trajectory – towards expanding the Indian market and reducing inequality – requires a reckoning by the toiling classes with the country’s big bourgeoisie and its partners, whatever form this alliance takes. At present, however, under the stupor of hyper-religiosisation and the grip of fascistic religious politics – financed by the very same big bourgeoisie – the Indian people have a long way to go before they can confront this powerful class.

Nonetheless, the current flux in the global economic order, and the uncertainties it generates for Indian capital, create openings for the left in India to re-energise its political presence and steer the economic policy discourse towards autonomous national development.

Gigi Scaria, Human Pull, 2018.

Notes

Bibliography

Lázaro Abreu Padrón (OSPAAAL), Sixth Anniversary of the Tricontinental Conference, 1972. Courtesy of The Radical Media Archive.

In 1966, the First Solidarity Conference of the Peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America – popularly known as the Tricontinental Conference – took place in Havana, Cuba. The conference, held sixty years ago, gives our institute its name. To commemorate the conference and its legacy, we have devoted dossier no. 95 to an assessment of the Tricontinental Spirit. This spirit is not manifest in the same way as it was in 1966, since the question of national liberation through armed struggle is not the focus of our time (although certain national liberation struggles in our time have armed retaliation imposed upon them). However, it is not the form but the substance of the Tricontinental Spirit that concerns us. Whereas the substance of the Bandung Spirit, which we wrote about in dossier no. 87 (April 2025), was an insistence on the ideals of sovereignty and multilateralism, this dossier argues that the substance of the Tricontinental Spirit is built around the ideals of human dignity and the class struggle.¹ The Bandung Spirit and the Tricontinental Spirit were not contradictory in 1966, since Cuba – which hosted the Tricontinental Conference – was also a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) in 1961. The NAM, which Cuba hosted in 1979 and again in 2006, was the institutional embodiment of the Bandung Spirit. Today, sovereignty, multilateralism, dignity, and the class struggle shape the politics of large parts of the Global South – uniting these two spirits into one new mood.

How Young They Were

When Fidel Castro, the prime minister of Cuba and the first secretary of the Communist Party of Cuba, took the stage on the last day of the Tricontinental Conference on 15 January 1966, he was only 39 years old. The Cuban Revolution, which he led to victory in 1959 when he was 32, had just celebrated its seventh anniversary. His comrades, who drove into Havana after two years in the Sierra Maestra, were just as young, among them Camilo Cienfuegos (26), Che Guevara (30), Juan Almeida Bosque (31), Asela de los Santos Tamayo (37), and Celia Sánchez (38). By 1966, Castro already had a gravitas that manifested through the depth of his voice and the composure of his frame. He and his comrades had led the Cuban Revolution’s victory over the United States and its Central Intelligence Agency in the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion and Castro had personally foiled many assassination attempts. ‘Imperialism will inevitably be defeated’, he told the more than five hundred delegates that came from across Asia, Africa, and Latin America.² No one in the room doubted him.

Many of the attendees of the Tricontinental Conference were at least as young as Fidel. Among them were Alice Badiangana (27) of the Congolese Youth Union (UCJ) and the African Women’s Union of the Congo (URFC) and Mário Pinto de Andrade (38) of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA). Amílcar Cabral of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) was 41, and Eduardo Mondlane of the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) was 45.³ These young people were at the helm of youthful organisations that had been forced into armed struggle by the brutality of Portuguese imperialism in Africa. They had tried the civil route, pleading for more rights both in Portugal and in Africa, only to be met with 8mm bullets from the Mauser 98k. This is why they laid down their law books and picked up AK-47s, which came to them from the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China. Imperialism was intolerable to these young people. They agreed with Castro’s assessment that imperialism would inevitably be defeated.

In Vietnam, the median age in the mid-1960s was between 18 and 20 years old – a result of the casualties incurred during its revolutionary war against an intractable foe (the French from 1946 and then the United States and its allies from 1955). By 1966, the country had lost at least one and a half million people to the violence – about 6% of the population.⁴ The Vietnamese representatives who came to Havana, too, were young, such as Nguyen Van Tien of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (Viet Cong), though his pseudonym makes it impossible to ascertain his exact age, and Tran Danh Tuyen, from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, who was under forty. The youthful energy at the conference was palpable.

Enough!

Mehdi Ben Barka of the Moroccan National Union of Popular Forces (UNFP), then in his forties, spent over two years planning the Tricontinental Conference. On 30 September 1965, at a press conference in Havana during the early stages of preparation, he defined the Tricontinental as bringing together the two currents of world revolution: the current of the socialist revolution and that of national liberation.⁵ This was an accurate assessment of the politics of the Tricontinental Conference. It is what terrified the imperialist bloc.

But history does not move in a straight line. It has its twists and turns. On 29 October 1965, Ben Barka was ‘disappeared’ by shadowy forces in Paris (most likely French and Moroccan intelligence aided by the Israeli Mossad). Many others who did attend suffered the same fate – Mondlane was assassinated in 1969 and Cabral in 1973.

In the years after the conference, more openings for national liberation emerged, but the newly independent states were weakened by centuries of colonial rule and the drain of social wealth. In February 1966, just weeks after the conference, Western intelligence services egged on the Ghanaian military to overthrow Kwame Nkrumah, whose book Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965) clearly laid out the structure that continued to suppress the ambitions articulated in Havana in 1966.⁶ The Tricontinental Conference lit a beacon for the world to see: We are here, those whom you have colonised. We will fight until our emancipation is complete, and that fight will bring socialism to the world. As Castro declared in his Second Declaration of Havana (1962): ‘This great humanity has said “Enough!” and has begun marching forward’. Though that beacon could not yet outshine imperialism, it would remain a guiding light for ongoing struggles across the Global South.

Rafael Morante Boyerizo (OSPAAAL), No to Militarism and Hunger, 1981. Courtesy of The Radical Media Archive.

Two, Three, Many Vietnams

Cuba sits less than 150 kilometres away from the United States. After it was seized from Spain in 1898, it became a playground for US elites. Under the thumb of New York financiers and Las Vegas gangsters, working-class Cubans endured wretched conditions over the next six decades. The revolution of 1959 was welcomed by most of the Cuban people, and they were not going to allow their gains to be reversed by the overthrow of their revolutionary government. Whatever privations the US would impose on Cuba, its people would remain resolute. This gave Fidel the confidence that Cuba’s adversary – imperialism – would suffer a total defeat.

Fidel stood at the podium of the Tricontinental Conference in his military fatigues, which he would wear until the end of his life. In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon mused about Fidel’s clothing:

Castro sitting in military uniform in the United Nations Organisation [UNO] does not scandalise the underdeveloped countries. What Castro demonstrates is the consciousness he has of the continuing existence of the rule of violence. The astonishing thing is that he did not come into the UNO with a machine gun; but if he had, would anyone have minded? All the jacqueries and desperate deeds, all those bands armed with cutlasses or axes find their nationality in the implacable struggle which opposes socialism and capitalism.⁷

Fidel and the Cubans were ever prepared for the ongoing hybrid war, blockade, economic warfare, and other forms of attacks that continue to this day.

On the last day of the Tricontinental Conference, Fidel asked: ‘Who taught us this lesson’ – that ‘imperialism will inevitably be defeated?’ Without missing a beat, he answered: ‘It has been taught to us by the peoples. Who among the peoples has given us in these times the most extraordinary lesson? The people of Vietnam’. Although the United States deployed its full arsenal, including aerial bombardment and chemical weapons in southern Vietnam, Fidel continued, ‘Yankee imperialists have been unable to crush the people in this part of Vietnam’.⁸

In the years before the Tricontinental Conference, Vietnamese revolutionaries took their fight directly to US targets in the South – including a US air base in Biên Hòa (1964) and Camp Holloway near Pleiku (1965). In response, Washington intensified its bombardment of the North, including Hanoi, while US troop levels climbed to nearly 200,000 by the end of 1965. The pressure on the Vietnamese Revolution was immense. Che Guevara’s ‘Message to the Tricontinental’, published in Tricontinental (the magazine of the Organisation in Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America, OSPAAAL) in April 1967, called on revolutionary forces to ‘create two, three, many Vietnams’ – as he had hoped to do in the Congo and later in Bolivia, where he was murdered in October 1967.⁹ For Che, the hydra of revolution had to draw the US away from its focus on that edge of Asia.

Throughout the 1960s, the reverberations of anti-colonial struggles in places such as Vietnam and Algeria would erupt into student-led anti-war uprisings across the North Atlantic, driven equally by the civil rights struggles inside these states’ own borders. The slogans of the student movement were defined by anti-war and anti-racist sentiments. In France, the spark was the 1961 massacre of as many as 200 Algerians who were protesting the colonial war in North Africa. In the United States, anti-war students organised into the Students for a Democratic Society and galvanised popular sentiment against the war into a set of campaigns from 1965 onward. These efforts were shaped by the 1966 National Mobilisation Committee to End the War in Vietnam, which organised the 1967 March on the Pentagon and the 1968 protest at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Across Europe, the tenor in 1968 was against the involvement of these governments in colonial wars, especially the war on Vietnam. France’s 1968 began not at the Sorbonne but at Nanterre, where the members of the National Vietnam Committee were arrested on 22 March as they protested in front of an American Express office. This was the start of the Mouvement du 22 Mars (Movement of 22 March), which went from criticising the war to condemning the capitalist university and the capitalist system in general.¹⁰

Vietnam’s resolve and its eventual victory over imperialism inspired revolutionaries around the world, with Che’s call for ‘many Vietnams’ ringing in their ears. On the night of 31 December 1964, with images of the Cuban and Algerian revolutions and the Vietnamese struggle fresh in their minds, the Palestinian fedayeen (fighters) of Fatah, the main Palestinian nationalist movement, launched al-Asifa (The Storm), their first guerrilla operation against Israel. The fedayeen directly linked their struggle to Vietnam. Abu Jihad, who planned al-Asifa, travelled to Algeria, China, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, and Vietnam between 1963 and 1965.¹¹ One of the fedayeen’s principal theorists, Ghassan Kanafani – who had travelled to China in 1965 and 1966 – wrote the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine’s major programmatic text, The Strategy for the Liberation of Palestine (1969), in direct conversation with the texts of the Vietnamese leader General Võ Nguyen Giap and of Mao Zedong.¹² In the years after the conference, armed struggles broke out in India (Naxalbari, 1967), Iraq (1967–1968), Southern Africa (inaugurated by the Wankie Campaign of 1967), Malaysia (1968–1969), and Sri Lanka (1971). It is no wonder that the art of OSPAAAL, which was born at the 1966 conference, often featured images from the struggles in Palestine, South Africa, and Vietnam (as the art in this dossier illuminates).¹³ Films by Cuba’s Santiago Álvarez, such as Hanoi, martes 13 (1968) and 79 Primaveras (1969), documented the Vietnamese struggle and its connection to the world. The necessity for liberation struggles across the Third World provided the emotional glue for international solidarity.

The Tricontinental Conference’s general political declaration, read out by Maria Amelia Lopes Fonseca of the Movement of Portuguese Colonies, affirmed ‘the inalienable right of all peoples to full political independence and to resort to all forms of struggle that may be necessary, including armed struggle, to conquer their right’.¹⁴ Six years earlier, on 14 December 1960, the United Nations (UN) General Assembly passed Resolution 1514 on the Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples, which noted ‘that the process of liberation is irresistible and irreversible and that, in order to avoid serious crises, an end must be put to colonialism and all practices of segregation and discrimination therewith’. The resolution further stated that ‘all armed actions or repressive measures of all kinds directed against dependent peoples shall cease in order to enable them to exercise peacefully and freely their right to complete independence, and the integrity of their national territory shall be respected’.¹⁵ The UN did not criticise armed struggle by occupied and colonised people. Instead, the resolution’s criticism of armed force was directed at the imperialists, whose violence imposed the path of armed struggle on the colonised. This was the experience of Cabral and the PAIGC, which was forced to take up arms because of the punitive Portuguese repression against their civil struggle. From the podium in Havana, Cabral told his fellow revolutionaries:

The past and present experiences of various peoples, the present situation of national liberation struggles in the world (especially in Vietnam, the Congo, and Zimbabwe) as well as the situation of permanent violence, or at least of contradictions and upheavals, in certain countries which have gained their independence by the so-called peaceful way, show us not only that compromises with imperialism do not work, but also that the normal way of national liberation, imposed on peoples by imperialist repression, is armed struggle.¹⁶

The keyword here is imposed. Armed struggle is not a choice, as Fanon argued in The Wretched of the Earth. This was the lesson learned by the assassination of Patrice Lumumba on 17 January 1961, just a month after UN Resolution 1514, when the attempt at a peaceful struggle for Congo’s freedom was stopped by the imposition of violence by imperialism.

Lázaro Abreu Padrón (OSPAAAL), Day of Solidarity with Zimbabwe, 1972. Courtesy of The Radical Media Archive.

Zigs and Zags

Vietnam, Palestine, Guatemala, the Congo, Zimbabwe – these, and many others, were the contours of the Tricontinental Spirit. The era of the Tricontinental Spirit began with the victory of the Cuban Revolution in the morning of the new year of 1959 and was partly defined over the next two decades by a range of revolutionary victories: Ethiopia (1974), Vietnam (1975), Laos (1975), Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (1974–1975), Mozambique (1975), São Tomé and Príncipe (1975), Angola (1975), Afghanistan (1978), Grenada (1979), Nicaragua (1979), and Zimbabwe (1980). Communist revolutionaries and national liberation forces fought protracted battles – such as in Vietnam and Nicaragua – or else found themselves in a position of strength when the state system collapsed after a political crisis and opened the door to their victory, as in Ethiopia and Grenada. What united these forces was the desire for complete independence and sovereignty – as UN Resolution 1514 put it – alongside varying levels of commitment to socialist revolution in each context. In other places, such as Palestine, South Africa, and Western Sahara, the process of liberation was blocked during this period. Yet, whether in victorious or still-subjugated territories, the energy of these national liberation movements gathered force in the halls of the UN, leading in 1974 to the passage of UN General Assembly Resolution 3201 on the New International Economic Order (NIEO), a vision for a more humane present.

Most of these revolutionary breakthroughs would not be allowed to breathe. In 1979 the US began Operation Cyclone to fund the Mujahideen and paralyse the communist government in Kabul. In the early 1980s, Washington mined Managua harbour and funded the Contras, Nicaragua’s variant of the Mujahideen, to suffocate the Sandinista government. Fidel and his comrades at the 1966 conference were well aware of the policy of asphyxiation pursued by the imperialist powers. In Havana, they discussed the archipelago of military bases retained by the old colonial powers – from Britain’s base in Diego Garcia to France’s base in Dakar – and by the strongest imperialist power, the United States, which would eventually create nine hundred military bases in many countries around the world.¹⁷ Though imperialist threats against Cuba were unsuccessful, imperialist coups in a range of countries hampered the advance of humanity. The coups in the Congo (1961), Brazil (1964), Indonesia (1965), and Ghana (1966) destroyed the left in these key countries for at least a generation, creating a blueprint for coups against national liberation movements that was carried out across the Third World. Nevertheless, in 1978, US National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote a critical evaluation of the limits of US power in a secret memorandum to President Jimmy Carter:

The United States was badly out of tune with the Third World, with little awareness of the need for economic, political, and social change or sympathy for ideological diversity. There was overemphasis on realpolitik and an exaggerated preoccupation with the Soviet threat. Through the Third World, there was a pervasive feeling of anti-Americanism.¹⁸

Despite the dampening of the insurgencies and the Tricontinental Spirit, it was clear that there was a rising tide against the United States. Though this tide did not have the strength to overcome the neocolonial structure set in place after 1945, it remained present. For a time, US-backed covert wars and coups swept Central and South America as well as South Asia (notably in Pakistan in 1977). The 1979 Iranian Revolution would disturb this apparent stability for decades to come, but otherwise the US felt that it had effectively managed the Tricontinental Spirit despite the lingering anti-Americanism.

The Bandung Spirit Returns

The arrogance of the US-led imperialist bloc only grew after 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European communist state system and the weakening of the Third World Project by a persistent debt crisis. The US imperiously sought to build a unipolar world which could contain its own contradictions. It was one thing to destroy Yugoslavia (1999) and create the World Trade Organisation (1995), the two legs of war and trade, but it was another to vanquish humanity’s dreams of emancipation. Even at the peak of this unipolar order, a breakthrough came in Venezuela in 1998 when the Bolivarian Revolution rose to power, led by Hugo Chávez. The US overreached by trying to fight a poorly defined Global War on Terror while hollowing out its own industrial capacity to construct a globalised chain of accumulation that advantaged private capital. The wars, de-industrialisation, financialisation, and the lack of net fixed capital investment led to an astronomical increase in social inequality in the Global North, which cascaded into political polarisation and a crisis of legitimacy. Ignoring the crisis within their countries, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and the US military began to put pressure on what they saw as the two remaining serious obstacles to Western power in the new era: China and Russia. The United States unilaterally began to break down the global arms control regime, withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002 and the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in 2019. It intervened in the domestic affairs of Ukraine in 2014 and closed a major arms deal with Taiwan in 2015. While the balance of forces had prevailed against Yugoslavia in 1999, the global situation had begun to shift and neither Russia nor China would allow the Global North to extend its military reach to their borders.

What had appeared to be the dying embers of the Bandung Spirit were fanned back to life in this period as the term ‘Global South’ appeared in the high-level state discussions between countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Senior leaders spoke of ‘South-South Cooperation’, a phrase that had previously only appeared in minor UN reports and in gatherings to commemorate the heritage of the Third World. By BRICS V, held in Durban, South Africa, in 2013, the issue of the role of the Global South in strengthening multilateralism had returned and would only strengthen in the decade to come. This was largely, although not fully, recognised in most discussions as the result of the re-emergence of China and Russia onto the world stage. China’s industrialisation allowed it to build up large trade surpluses which it recycled into the Belt and Road Initiative and its pledge to industrialise Africa. Russia recovered some of its heavy industry from the oligarchy and used those assets to rebuild its state infrastructure, including the military. Sanctioned by the West, China and Russia settled their border dispute and increased their trade, leading to a ‘no limits’ partnership agreement in 2022. Chinese and Russian leadership in the BRICS process and in other South-South processes has helped stir the Bandung Spirit in the Global South once more. At BRICS XVII, held in Rio de Janeiro in 2025, Brazil’s President Lula da Silva said that ‘BRICS is the manifestation of the Bandung Non-Aligned Movement. BRICS keeps the Bandung Spirit alive’.¹⁹ But is the Bandung Spirit the same as the Tricontinental Spirit?

Unknown artist (OSPAAAL), Week of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, 1968. Courtesy of The Radical Media Archive.

The Tricontinental Spirit

Over the past two years, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has emphasised the importance of two related concepts: sovereignty and dignity.²⁰ It can be said that sovereignty, together with multilateralism, is the central ideal of the Bandung Spirit, whereas dignity, grounded in the class struggle, is the defining category of the Tricontinental Spirit.

Both the Bandung Conference (1955) and the founding of the Non-Aligned Movement (1961), referenced by Lula, were gatherings of heads of state and were therefore inter-state meetings. The broad front at Bandung and NAM meetings came together around the concept of sovereignty: the idea that a state must have sovereign control of its territory, be allowed to dispense with its raw materials, and be permitted to manage its internal affairs in its own fashion based on its cultural and political development. But sovereignty is a limited concept. In international law, for instance, sovereignty is largely reduced to a negative principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of a state (as in Article 2 of the UN Charter of 1945), which in popular terms amounts to ‘no foreign intervention’. Yet the concept of sovereignty remains a radical proposition because of the Global North’s control over international institutions and its political and military interventions in the Global South. It provided the foundation for a broad anti-imperialist alliance that would fight to create multilateralism and democratise the international order. However, sovereignty by itself does not guarantee the end of exploitation of human by human – it can only dilute the violence of imperialism.

The concept of sovereignty is not only limited but also anachronistic. It reflects an inter-state dynamic that emerged in the pre-modern era, when states crafted various mechanisms to avoid unwinnable inter-state conflicts. Several pre-modern treaties and alliances began to establish the idea of sovereignty in an age before it was acknowledged that all people are to be treated as fundamentally equal. Some examples include:

• The Mande Charter at the founding of the Mali Empire (1235).

• The Aztec Triple Alliance, which brought together the peoples of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan (1428).

• The formation of the Iroquois Confederacy (1400–1450).

• The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years’ War and the Eighty Years’ War in Europe (1648).

• The Treaty of Nerchinsk, which ended the conflict between Qing China and Tsarist Russia (1689).

• The establishment of the Ashanti Confederacy (1701).

While each of these formations developed the idea of sovereignty, they did so merely to protect the peace between states. These ideas would eventually be codified in the writings of French jurist Jean Bodin (1530–1596) and Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), whose work formed the ideology of the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) and the basis of modern North Atlantic political science. Bodin and Grotius did not know about the Mande Charter or the Aztec Triple Alliance, but the ideas they developed – such as those set out by Grotius in On the Law of War and Peace (1625) – would have resonated with the Malians and the Aztecs. These were straightforward ideas about non-interference in the affairs of a neighbouring state. They were articulated by a range of contemporaries, such as the Mughal intellectual Abu’l Fazl (1551–1602) in his Akbarnama (1596), whose concept of sulh-i Kul (peace with all) could be fruitfully compared with the writings of Grotius. However, these pre-modern thinkers did not extend beyond inter-state amity. There was no purpose to this non-interference beyond the desire to avoid endless warfare and domination.

In the modern era, however, when the idea of human dignity shapes the discourses of freedom, equality, and social rights, it is not enough to prevent wars and destruction. There must be a positive articulation of states’ obligation not only to provide security for their inhabitants but also to improve their lives in material and cultural terms. This is the outcome of various mass rebellions, from the French and Haitian revolutions (1789 and 1804), through the Paris Commune (1871) and the October Revolution (1917), to the Chinese and Cuban revolutions (1949 and 1959). This is the unity, as Ben Barka said, of the two currents of national liberation and socialist revolution. The expectation set in place by these cascading revolutions is that human life must be improved beyond the miseries of the past and that control over material advances must be democratised among the masses. In other words, states must be obliged to strive for the full dignity of their citizens, and indeed – through concepts such as internationalism – of all peoples in the world. With dignity emerging as a key concept, as enshrined in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Westphalian idea of sovereignty as the founding concept of inter-state relations had to be updated. It was insufficient to prevent war and foreign interference. It was necessary to improve the material conditions of humanity.

The Tricontinental Conference of 1966 absorbed the Bandung Spirit and sought to radicalise it. A state can claim sovereignty over its territory, even expel foreign capital, and nonetheless fail to uphold the dignity of its people by allowing domestic capital to continue to exploit them. The Bandung Spirit, in other words, is limited to national independence and does not deepen the idea of emancipation to include freedom from the basic atrocities of capitalism. The Tricontinental Spirit, on the other hand, fights to democratise the world order and argues that this battle must work alongside the struggle to democratise national liberation projects. It acknowledges the importance of the broad front to establish multilateralism but goes further than this, recognising the necessity of the class struggle and socialism. Our struggles for socialism – linked directly to the Tricontinental Conference and its era – emerge not as an ideal to be established in the world, but out of the real movement which seeks to abolish the present state of things.²¹ That insight, and the mood captured within it, remains as true today as it was when it resonated with Cabral and Castro in the 1960s. Our movement is not born out of a choice. It is a necessity.

While the Bandung Spirit forecasts the future deed of emancipation through the fight for national sovereignty, the Tricontinental Spirit calls on us to democratise and radicalise the projects of human emancipation that social movements are already building today. Our quest requires that such principles not remain mere ideas; they must become vital and real in the world. Emancipation – literally to ‘take out of the hand’ – means prising human beings from the grip of oppression.

Alberto Blanco González (OSPAAAL), Namibia: Power to the People, 1981. Courtesy of The Radical Media Archive.

Notes

If I must die,
you must live
to tell my story
to sell my things
to buy a piece of cloth
and some strings,
(make it white with a long tail)
so that a child, somewhere in Gaza
while looking heaven in the eye
awaiting his dad who left in a blaze –
and bid no one farewell
not even to his flesh
not even to himself –
sees the kite, my kite you made, flying up above
and thinks for a moment an angel is there
bringing back love
If I must die
let it bring hope
let it be a tale

– Refaat Alareer, ‘If I Must Die’ (2023)

On 14 October 2023, days after Israel unleashed its genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian writer and educator Refaat Alareer posted his poem ‘If I Must Die’ on social media.¹ Just over a month later, Alareer was killed in an Israeli airstrike on his sister’s home in Shuja’iyya, in eastern Gaza City, along with his brother, his sister, and her four children. Though friends and colleagues had urged him to leave Gaza, he decided to stay. This was his final act of sumud (صُمُود), the Palestinian concept of steadfastness and determination to remain on the land.

‘I am the man I am because of the stories told to me by my mother and grandmother’, Alareer said in a talk in 2015. ‘Stories are also important in our lives as Palestinians, as people under occupation, as native peoples on this land, not only because… they shape us [and] make us the people we are but also because they connect us with our past, they connect us with our present, and they prepare us [for] the future’.² In addition to his own writing, Alareer edited and published several volumes by other Palestinian writers. In 2015 he founded We Are Not Numbers, a project that paired young Gazan writers with mentors abroad so they could tell their stories and counter the erasure of Palestinian history, identity, and resistance – a striking example of Palestinian cultural resistance and defiance in the face of an ongoing occupation.

Since the Al Aqsa Flood operation (Hamas’ armed attack against Israel on 7 October 2023), the genocide in Gaza has been livestreamed for the world to see. As of October 2025, more than 67,000 Palestinians have been killed, more than 730,000 displaced, and countless maimed, wounded, and starved – all with the full backing of the United States.³ The first three months of bombing alone resulted in an 11.5-year decline in Palestinian life expectancy, from 76.7 years in 2022 to just 65.2 years in 2023.⁴ As of April 2025, the UN estimated that 92% of all residential buildings have been damaged or destroyed, leaving behind 50 million tonnes of rubble that will take decades to remove.⁵ The unthinkable scale of death, destruction, and deliberate starvation has led Palestinians to call this the ‘second Nakba’ – the ‘Gaza Nakba’. The first Nakba (Catastrophe), in 1948, was an act of ethnic cleansing that seized 78% of Palestinian land, destroyed more than five hundred towns and villages, displaced more than half of the population – around 800,000 Palestinians – and led to the creation of the State of Israel.⁶ From the 1948 Nakba to today’s escalated genocide, the establishment and continued existence of the State of Israel have depended on the convergence of the Zionist project and Western imperialism.

However, imperialist patronage does not, on its own, secure consent and impunity – these must be achieved through other means. So, how does Zionism, as a settler-colonial project, fabricate the legitimacy to carry out a programme of such violence and barbarity? Nearly six decades ago, Ghassan Kanafani, a novelist and member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), sought to answer that very question. In his book On Zionist Literature (1967), he examined what he defined as ‘all that has been written to serve the movement for the Jewish colonisation of Palestine either directly or otherwise’.⁷ For Kanafani, to ‘know your enemy’ you must examine its cultural production. In the book, he explores how Zionist fiction falsified history for Western readers; why cultural institutions – including the Nobel Committee – rewarded reactionary authors such as Shmuel Yosef Agnon in 1966; how Western commentary came to echo Zionist narratives; and whether Western coverage of the 1967 war was the predictable outcome of a long campaign of cultural disinformation.⁸

For Kanafani, political Zionism – the movement to create a Jewish settler-colonial state in historic Palestine – required a cultural front to propagate its ideology through literary and artistic production. It is not a coincidence that the architect of Zionism, Theodor Herzl, was first a novelist: his book The Old New Land (1902), Kanafani says, marked the beginning of ‘the Zionist literary character [marching] in lockstep with the Zionist political programme’.⁹ In fact, a central task of the Zionist cultural apparatus was to dehumanise the Palestinian people in order to justify their displacement.¹⁰ Kanafani documented how the Zionist novel, in particular, was key to this work, depicting Arabs as backward, barbarous, and disconnected from the land.¹¹ He wrote about how Zionist literature concocted and consolidated narratives that reverberate today, among them the claim of Arabs’ ‘mental and civilisational backwardness as an incurable disease’, the notion that ‘Arabs do not deserve a country’, the idea that the lives of Arab children are ‘useless as opposed to the morale of Jewish children’, and the ‘ludicrous association’ that politically and emotionally transferred Nazi crimes to the Arabs in Palestine.¹² Zionist ideology and cultural production thus cast the Zionist project in a ‘civilising role’ against the supposed ‘barbarism’ of Arabs and Palestinians.¹³

In the decades since, these same dehumanising narratives have been recycled and deployed many times over by the Israeli state and regurgitated by mainstream Western media. In the months following 7 October, Law for Palestine compiled a database of over 500 cases of Israeli incitement to genocide.¹⁴ On 9 October 2023, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant delivered what would become a defining statement of the genocide: ‘We are fighting human animals, and we are acting accordingly’. Four days later, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said: ‘It’s an entire nation out there that is responsible’. Galit Distel Atbaryan, member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament), called for the ‘erasure’ of ‘Gaza from the face of the Earth’ and for the death of the ‘Gazan monsters’. Israel’s Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Avi Dichter unironically advocated for ethnic cleansing by saying, ‘We’re doing a Gazan Nakba 2023’. David Azoulay, the mayor of Metula, explicitly evoked the recreation of the Holocaust by stating ‘The whole Gaza Strip needs to be empty. Flattened. Just like in Auschwitz’. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly called Palestinians ‘monsters’. This endless list of incitements of ethnic cleansing long predates 7 October; the dehumanisation of Palestinians is a historico-cultural narrative that for more than a century has been used to justify their extermination with complete moral, political, and military impunity.¹⁵

The Zionist project has also been built on systematic cultural erasure. During the first Nakba, the plunder and looting of paintings, photographs, films, musical recordings, instruments, and other cultural artefacts were widely documented.¹⁶ An estimated 70,000 books were stolen, many now held in Israeli archives, including the National Library of Israel.¹⁷ This theft and destruction has continued over the past eight decades. Since 7 October, Israel has further targeted cultural centres and workers – an essential component of the project of cultural genocide. Among the dead are many of Palestine’s painters, poets, writers, and sculptors, making the question of culture all the more urgent for the unfinished aspirations of Palestinian liberation.¹⁸

With that in mind, how can the Zionist settler-colonial cultural programme be resisted along a cultural front? What is the role of artists in times of genocide? Can cultural production humanise a people, rescue their history, and advance their struggle? To explore these questions and illuminate Palestine’s rich liberation culture and its historical roots, Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research interviewed contemporary artists and cultural workers in Palestine and the diaspora. This dossier is not a comprehensive survey of Palestinian art. Rather, it opens a conversation about the place of cultural resistance in Palestinian liberation. It examines how art and culture have been used to resist cultural Zionism and dehumanisation by remembering Palestine’s past, bearing witness to its present, and imagining its future – one in which its people are free and free to return home. As Ibraheem Mohana, an eighteen-year-old Gazan artist who came into adulthood amid the genocide, affirmed, ‘They started the war to kill our hopes, but we won’t let that happen’.¹⁹

Aude Abou Nasr (Lebanon), Gaza, 2023. Courtesy of Artists Against Apartheid.

Resistance Culture and National Liberation

Across anti-colonial and national liberation struggles, culture has been considered an integral weapon in the battle of ideas and emotions. Revolutionaries from Amílcar Cabral to Mao Zedong emerged from these struggles not only as military strategists and party leaders but also as poets and cultural theorists. Part of the national liberation Marxist tradition, Mao and Cabral – independently yet convergently – developed sophisticated theories of culture as a primary and indispensable front in the national liberation struggle.²⁰ For them, culture was the very terrain upon which liberation was to be won or lost.

For Cabral, who led the African Party for the Independence of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde (PAIGC), ‘National liberation is necessarily an act of culture’.²¹ His logic was clear: because imperialist domination is not merely political and economic, it ‘has the vital need to practice cultural oppression’. It seeks to halt the historical and cultural development of the colonised. Therefore, resistance to imperialist domination must be a cultural act – a collective rather than an individual one. The liberation movement, he argued, is nothing less than the ‘organised political expression of the culture of the people who are undertaking the struggle’.²²

For both Cabral and Mao, cultural resistance was no less important than armed resistance. At the 1942 Yan’an Forum on Art and Literature (a three-week conference that brought together China’s leading writers, artists, intellectuals, soldiers, and party cadres), Mao declared: ‘In our struggle for the liberation of the Chinese people there are various fronts, among which there are the fronts of the pen and of the gun, the cultural and the military fronts’.²³ Similarly, in a series of talks given to PAIGC members in 1969 on the ‘Analysis of Different Types of Resistance’, Cabral highlighted ‘cultural resistance’ as one of four key fronts of struggle, alongside political, economic, and armed resistance. For both Cabral and Mao, culture was a primary and decisive battlefield, and the cultural army was just as vital as the people’s army.

Similarly, the theory and practice of culture for national liberation were an integral part of the Palestinian struggle, particularly for Kanafani. In Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1968, a foundational analysis of the literary works produced by Palestinian Arabs under Israeli occupation in the two decades after the first Nakba, Kanafani writes: ‘Cultural resistance is essential and is no less important than the armed resistance itself’; it forms the ‘fertile ground’ for any successful armed struggle.²⁴ That same year, in ‘Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine’, published in Afro-Asian Writings, he outlined the characteristics of Palestinian resistance literature, which he also called the ‘literature of combat’ and the literature of occupied Palestine. He noted that it took about five years after the first Nakba for Palestinians to realise that ‘they had lost not only their families and friends but their country as well’.²⁵ To recover their lost country, a struggle had to be waged on both the armed and cultural fronts. This banner has been carried by generations of Palestinian artists both in their homeland and across the world.

In Liberation Art of Palestine (2001), renowned Palestinian-US artist and scholar Samia A. Halaby meticulously documents the development of a distinctly Palestinian artistic identity in the context of occupation, displacement, and resistance. She argues that this ‘liberation art’ is intrinsically linked to the Palestinian struggle for self-determination, with a unique iconography that includes symbols of sumud such as the cactus and the horse as well as themes of martyrdom and the right of return. For her, any ‘good art’ is ‘political art’, and liberation art is ‘a practical art [that] needs to be clear and useful as a poster, leaflet, or banner’.²⁶ She discusses the inextricable link between art and liberation:

The art of Palestine rests on the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Without that base, Palestinian artists would be an atomised collection of imitators of fashionable international styles, and many are. The liberation artists of Palestine are aware that they are fortunate to have a cause, and in fulfilling their duty to serve it, their art gains historical significance as a school with particular characteristics.²⁷

The history of Palestinian resistance and liberation culture has been marked by political ruptures. These ruptures – the six ‘declarations of war’ on the Palestinian people, as historian Rashid Khalidi calls them in The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (2020) – are:

1. the 1917 Balfour Declaration, which pledged British support for establishing a ‘national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine, paving the way for the British Mandate and Zionist colonisation;
2. the 1947 UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which led to the first Nakba;
3. the 1967 Six-Day War – known in Palestine as the Naksa (Setback) – when Israel occupied the Sinai Peninsula, Gaza Strip, West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights;
4. Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which expelled the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) from Beirut;
5. the First Intifada (1987–1993), the mass Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation; and
6. the Second Intifada, which began in 2000 and set the stage for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

At each rupture, Palestinian artists and cultural workers responded with their craft and production. For Halaby, this history of liberation art ‘rose with the uprising and declined with its recession’. Below we shed light on some expressions of Palestinian cultural resistance across these six ruptures.²⁸

Olfer Leonardo (Peru), Sabra y Shatila (Sabra and Shatila), 2021. Courtesy of Utopix.

Remember

My roots were planted before time was born
Before history began
Before the cypress and the olive trees
Before grass sprouted

– Mahmoud Darwish, excerpt from ‘Identity Card’ (1964)²⁹

The prominent actor and filmmaker Mohammad Bakri, who has acted in nearly fifty films and directed four documentaries in his forty-year career, recalls encountering and falling in love with cinema as a child in his hometown, al-Bi’neh. In his village, he remembers, they were ‘without electricity – but there was cinema’.³⁰ Bakri is part of the Palestinian minority within Israel, one of the two million descendants of the 159,000 Palestinians who were not expelled in the 1948 Nakba. He traces the ‘five seasons’ of his own politicisation and creative work – similar to Khalidi’s periodisation – back to the first Nakba, describing how that foundational event and the subsequent stories that he heard from his father and grandfather moulded his political consciousness. As he put it, ‘to tell the story of my people, in fiction and in documentary… is my way of fighting. To protect my culture, my identity, and my humanity. No[thing] more’.

In The Origins of Palestinian Art (2013), Bashir Makhoul and Gordon Hon describe the first Nakba not as a singular historical moment but as an ongoing event of displacement, death, and loss – a ‘perpetual present tense in which historical events are still taking place’.³¹ For Bakri and many Palestinian cultural workers, locating the ‘origin’ of Palestinian cultural resistance in the first Nakba is not only a personal but a highly political act – a way to refute Zionist claims to the ‘promised land’ as well as policies of cultural and historical erasure.

In The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), Israeli historian Ilan Pappé uses the term ‘memoricide’ to describe the systematic erasure of the first Nakba from Israel’s historical and physical landscape. Culture is thus weaponised to solidify the physical act of ethnic cleansing, denying the crimes committed and replacing the victims’ history with that of the perpetrators. State-sponsored bodies, particularly the Jewish National Fund, have been instrumental in implementing this programme – from renaming towns, villages, streets, and landmarks with Hebrew names and imposing maps of ‘ancient Israel’ to planting forests that conceal the ruins of destroyed Palestinian villages.³² These efforts aim to justify the Zionist foundational myth of ‘a land without a people, and a people without a land’.

Against the backdrop of memoricide, preserving Palestinian art and cultural history is a form of resistance. For a people who have been geographically fragmented and dispersed – shatat in Arabic – origins are central to creating what the Palestinian postcolonial theorist Edward Said calls ‘coherence’. According to Said, this cultural coherence is possible because Palestinians ‘have been united as a people largely because [of] the Palestinian idea (which we have articulated out of our own experience of dispossession and exclusionary oppression)’.³³

In Resistance Literature, Kanafani highlights the Israeli policy of ‘deliberate ignorance’, which severed generations of Palestinians from their Arab heritage and national identity.³⁴ This programme of cultural alienation was achieved by degrading the quality of education Palestinians could receive – from restricting the resources available to Arab students to appointing unqualified or ‘collaborator’ Arab teachers – and by promoting a ‘hybrid and trivial culture’. This left Palestinian Arabs with two choices: emigrate or assimilate.³⁵

Born within the State of Israel a few years after the Nakba and trained at Tel Aviv University in theatre acting and Arabic literature, Bakri has had to navigate Palestinian, Israeli, and international cultural industries to make his films and has faced severe political and legal persecution. Since releasing Jenin, Jenin (2002), a documentary about the large-scale Israeli assault on the Jenin refugee camp during the Second Intifada, he has been haunted by legal battles. As he explained, ‘The film was banned in Israel. I have been paying $1,000 a month to an Israeli soldier who claimed he appears in my film – for three and a half seconds. And I will keep paying for years to come… It is like the Middle Ages – like when they burned books’.³⁶ Despite the persecution he faces, Bakri continues to make films, defying the imposed binary of emigration or assimilation and insisting on documenting and bearing witness to the Palestinian people’s ongoing resistance and aspirations for liberation.

Pablo Kalaka (Chile and Venezuela), Under the Olive Tree, 2023. Courtesy of Utopix and Artists Against Apartheid.

Witness

Our poems are without colour, without taste, without voice
If they do not carry the lamp from house to house

– Mahmoud Darwish on the function of poetry³⁷

‘The second season [of my politicisation] was 1967’, Bakri recalls, during ‘the Six-Day War between Israel and the Arab world, when Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem’. As a fourteen-year-old boy, he remembers seeing his father cry; later, he understood that his tears were for the ‘new catastrophe of the Arab world and the Palestinian people – [for] the first generation of refugees [that] was created in 1948 [and] the second [that was] created in 1967’.³⁸

The well-known political cartoonist Naji al-Ali was part of that first generation, expelled from his village of al-Shajara during the first Nakba. In 1961, Kanafani first published al-Ali’s work in the Arab nationalist movement magazine Al-Hurriya (Freedom), which he edited. A few years later, while working for a Kuwaiti newspaper, al-Ali began drawing Handala, a character that would define his career.³⁹ Eternally a ten-year-old boy – the age when al-Ali was forced into exile – barefoot, and in tattered clothing, Handala is always drawn facing away from the audience. With his arms crossed behind his back, he bears witness to the atrocities committed against the Palestinian people but also to their unwavering resistance, the promise of return, and a free Palestine. Named after a deep-rooted, resilient desert plant, Handala embodies sumud. The more than forty thousand cartoons al-Ali drew in his lifetime are a testament to this steadfastness.

The events of 1967, and the failure of pan-Arab bourgeois nationalism to confront Zionist expansionism, inspired a wave of mass cultural resistance and a revival of Palestinian culture. As Rashid Khalidi notes: ‘Writers and poets both throughout the Palestinian diaspora and living inside Palestine – Ghassan Kanafani, Mahmoud Darwish, Emile Habibi, Fadwa Touqan, and Tawfiq Zayyad, together with other gifted and engaged artists and intellectuals – played a vital role in this renaissance, culturally and politically’.⁴⁰ The occupation turned culture into a key front in the struggle, ushering in a new era of militant theatre.

‘Theatre in Palestine is new, in general’, says Amer Khalil, co-founder and director of El-Hakawati (later known as the Palestinian National Theatre) in Jerusalem. In an interview with Tricontinental, he explained that ‘In the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s, people used to make theatre related to social work. But after the war of ’67, a whole movement of intellectuals, artists, educators, [and] university students started a theatre movement to liberate Palestine… and the theatre movement really became militant’.⁴¹ Beginning in the late 1960s, Palestinian theatre also professionalised and built the capacity to train directors and actors – even amid extreme repression. As one theatre critic wrote in 1976, ‘No theatre group has ever performed without having one or two of its members in jail’.⁴²

In the context of rising censorship and disruption by the occupation authorities, which were set on obliterating anything deemed ‘national’ (i.e., Palestinian), theatre took on an important role. Through the clever use of symbolism and allegory to allow for multiple interpretations, Palestinian playwrights developed a ‘special language [that] served as an artistic code between the theatre and its audience… to convey messages of nation-building’.⁴³ ‘Culture has always been targeted’, Khalil added in the interview, ‘Theatre spaces attacked, artists threatened. Why is culture so dangerous? Because words change people. Stories make people think. And when people think, they start asking questions – about how they live, why they live that way, what life could be. That’s why culture is dangerous – it moves people’.⁴⁴

The El-Hakawati troupe, meaning ‘storyteller’ in Arabic, was formed in 1977 to do just that – to tell stories, move people, and change reality. The troupe brought together Palestinian students from the 1948 occupied territories with artists and intellectuals from occupied East Jerusalem in defiance of the Zionist fragmentation of the Palestinian people. For its first six years, El-Hakawati took theatre to the people, travelling to schools, cinema halls, village squares, and refugee camps before finding a permanent home in a derelict cinema in 1983, where it operates to this day. The troupe has been essential in telling the stories of Palestinian life and resistance, even becoming the first Palestinian theatre group to perform internationally.⁴⁵

The 1980s were bookended by two important ruptures: the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the First Intifada (1987–1993). These ruptures, alongside waning support for armed struggle as the primary path to liberation, had a significant impact on cultural resistance. It was in this environment that the Jewish Israeli activist Arna Mer-Khamis founded the Stone Theatre in the Jenin refugee camp in 1987, in reference to the stone-throwing by children during the First Intifada. In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada, the Stone Theatre was destroyed during a massive Israeli invasion of the camp. Out of the rubble rose the Freedom Theatre, founded by Arna’s son Juliano, which carries on the Stone Theatre’s methodology of using theatre to process trauma, assert identity, and engage in resistance. Today, the theatre is run by Mustafa Sheta, who participated in the Stone Theatre as a child. In an interview with Tricontinental in July 2025, shortly after his release from fifteen months of detention in an Israeli prison, he explained that ‘Art isn’t separate from the national movement; our work is an extension of that movement – rooted in dignity, storytelling, and resistance’. The Freedom Theatre, he told us, sees its role as training actors who are also community organisers: ‘Our graduates aren’t only performers – they are agents of change’.⁴⁶

On 4 April 2011, Juliano was shot five times by a still-unidentified gunman. The troupe responded with While Waiting (2011), a remaking of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) that reflected on the yearning for freedom and statehood, and on never giving up.⁴⁷ Shortly before his murder, Juliano had called for a ‘cultural intifada’, which the Freedom Theatre embraced: ‘We believe that the third intifada, the coming intifada, should be cultural, with poetry, music, theatre, cameras, and magazines’.⁴⁸

Tings Chak (China), Palestine Will Be Free, 2024. Courtesy of Utopix and Artists Against Apartheid.

Imagine

We, who have no existence in ‘the Promised Land’, became the ghost of the murdered who haunted the killer in both wakefulness and sleep, and the realm in-between, leaving him troubled and despondent. The insomniac screams: Have they not died yet? No, because the ghost reaches the age of being weaned, then comes adulthood, resistance and return. Airplanes pursue the ghost in the air. Tanks pursue the ghost on land. Submarines pursue the ghost in the sea. The ghost grows up and occupies the killer’s consciousness.

– Mahmoud Darwish⁴⁹

The nature of Palestinian cultural work shifted in the 1990s with the Oslo Accords.⁵⁰ As Amer Khalil explained, with the so-called political solutions presented by the accords, the theatre world – like other cultural fields – began to pivot away from the militancy that had marked the earlier period. Kaleem Hawa, a poet, literary scholar, and organiser with the Palestinian Youth Movement, explained in an interview with Tricontinental that ‘After the Oslo Accords, many Palestinian social and cultural institutions were vitiated by Zionism and hollowed out by the compradorisation of the Palestine bourgeoisie, becoming no longer fit for purpose’. In this context, Hawa emphasised the need for a revolutionary culture as the ‘most important ligament’ between generations. ‘Palestinian youth [have] turned to video production and capsule-like diaries on social media to narrate their collective social experience, which includes alienation and steadfastness. And our elders have had to struggle against a concerted drive, from their own Arab governments no less, to make them forget all that they know and [have] learned’.⁵¹

For Palestinian artists and cultural workers, the period following the Oslo Accords ushered in a crisis regarding the very concept of resistance culture. With increased global recognition came new challenges: navigating institutionalisation, the cooptation of cultural production by and dependence on international donors, the separation of Palestinian art and culture from the people’s concrete realities, and the illusion of a ‘peace process’ on the horizon. The post-Oslo era also generated profound disillusionment with the traditional political leadership, pushing contemporary Palestinian artists and cultural groups toward a critical, independent stance, which in turn reflected a broader fragmentation of the national project.

In this context, satire and humour become tools of resistance. As Samer Asakleh, the songwriter and oud player of the Palestinian band Darbet Shams (Sunstroke), explained to Tricontinental, ‘Sometimes, political topics are too sensitive – like peace agreements or regional normalisation deals. Satire becomes a way to talk about them without immediate censorship or repression and open conversations that would otherwise be shut down’. Referring to his song ‘Do You Condemn Hamas?’, which he wrote in the aftermath of 7 October, Asakleh said, ‘The lyrics are sarcastic – [the rhetorical question] ask[s] if you have emotions only if you condemn Hamas. Audiences laughed, but then they reflected. Some came up to me later and said, “We laughed at ourselves, and we started to think more deeply about the question”’.⁵²

Like many cultural groups of their generation, the band reflects a political conjuncture very different from that faced by musical groups of a previous era. Lead vocalist Hanan Wakeem added, ‘There was a time when political parties in Palestine had their own bands. In the 60s and 70s, groups like Fatah had entire cultural wings with singers and dancers, often tied directly to the movement. That’s mostly gone now. Some artists are still informally affiliated with parties, but it’s not like before – there’s no longer a strong cultural infrastructure built by political movements’.⁵³

The Antidote of Internationalism

In a context of depoliticisation, commodification, and fragmentation, artists increasingly rely on financial support from international organisations, risking further political cooptation. An antidote to this global trend is the revival of internationalism and revolutionary imagination – nowhere is the call for internationalism clearer than in the cultural responses to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

Artists Against Apartheid, a network of over fifteen thousand artists from across the world, was founded in October 2023 by artists and cultural workers who saw a deep need to mobilise for Palestinian liberation. Members Hannah Craig and Tahia Islam describe the network: ‘Inspired by the revolutionary artists who used their practices in the struggle against the South African apartheid system, we built this network knowing that as artists we have a unique responsibility to use our voice and artistic practices to protest apartheid and amplify the just cause of the Palestinian people and their resistance against occupation and oppression’.⁵⁴

Similarly, Utopix, an internationalist design and communications collective largely based in Latin America and the Caribbean, has brought together more than eighty artists across twenty countries to produce over a hundred posters on Palestine over the past year, which are available to download for free and exhibited worldwide.⁵⁵ David Jacob Carmona (‘Rasan Abu Apara’), a Chilean-Palestinian graphic designer and member of Utopix, sees Palestinian liberation as ‘represent[ing] a wider struggle with the peoples of the world, from the peoples in Africa who are under Western neocolonialism or the Walmapu in Chile. Art must break silences and educate with the truth… It is a trench, a weapon for struggle. In other words, art must speak to and seek to transform the real world’.⁵⁶

Revolutionary art and culture do more than break the silence or bear witness to the atrocities of imperialism and colonialism: they have the responsibility – and capacity – to imagine a future not yet born. Exhibitions have played an important role in fostering this internationalist imaginary. In 1978, the Plastic Arts Section of the PLO’s Unified Information Office organised the International Art Exhibition for Palestine at Beirut Arab University. As documented by Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti in Past Disquiet (2018), the ambitious project was part of the PLO’s efforts to ‘commission, fund, and promote the production of posters, art, cinema, theatre, dance, music, and publications; to organise, preserve, and exhibit folklore and cultural traditions; and to galvanise international support for the Palestinian struggle in the world of arts and culture’.⁵⁷ The goal was also to forge a sense of nationhood among Palestinians and mobilise international solidarity. As Khouri and Salti wrote, ‘If houses were usurped, the record of having had a home would remain alive in a poem and song; if the land was removed from sight by distance, its depiction would retain its visibility in myriad forms’.⁵⁸

In this spirit, artwork donations for the exhibit were solicited from across the world. The idea was to imagine a future museum in a future Palestinian state, where solidarity works would become the very building blocks of the institution. Despite Israeli tanks rolling into southern Lebanon in an operation involving some twenty-five thousand troops, the exhibition opened on 21 March 1978 with contributions from Claude Lazar (France), Gontran Guanaes Netto (Brazil), and Bruno Caruso and Paolo Ganna (Italy), among others.⁵⁹ In June 1982, as Israel began its full-scale invasion of Lebanon to drive out the PLO, the organisation’s archives – including documents and plans for the museum – were destroyed.⁶⁰

Renowned Chilean artist Roberto Matta, who contributed to the PLO exhibition, had donated to a similar project in Chile a few years earlier. This project, the Museo de la Solidaridad (Museum of Solidarity), was initiated by Chilean President Salvador Allende in 1972 – a year before the US-orchestrated coup that overthrew his government – and called on international artists to donate works in support of the ‘vía chilena al socialismo’ (the Chilean socialist path). Many of the 674 works were forced into exile, some of them safeguarded in Cuba alongside leftist artists, intellectuals, and militants. In 1975, the project re-emerged as the Museo Internacional de la Resistencia Salvador Allende (International Museum of Resistance Salvador Allende), a dispersed network operating across Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, before returning to Chile in 1991 as the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende (Museum of Solidarity Salvador Allende).⁶¹

From Palestine to Chile, these museums are some of the many internationalist efforts that have played an essential role in cultural resistance, defending socialist and revolutionary struggles and imagining a future nation for a people denied statehood. The struggle for a free Palestine is not a struggle of Palestinians alone; it is part of a worldwide struggle against imperialism and colonialism. As Kanafani wrote in The Revolution of 1936–1939 in Palestine, ‘Imperialism has laid its body over the world, the head in Eastern Asia, the heart in the Middle East, its arteries reaching Africa and Latin America. Wherever you strike it, you damage it, and you serve the World Revolution’.⁶²

Ilga (Palestine and Chile), Palestina resiste (Palestine Resists), 2016. Courtesy of Utopix.

Culture Is Life

Mohammad Bakri considers the ongoing genocide in Gaza to be the fifth season of his politicisation. Although it has been broadcast on mobile phones and computer screens around the world, Bakri insists ‘that’s not cinema’. For him, ‘cinema must make you ask, think, understand, and draw a conclusion’. He reflects on a question that a resident of the refugee camp asked him in his documentary Jenin, Jenin: ‘What can your camera do when the whole world does nothing to help me?’ Thinking about today, he says, ‘The same is happening in Gaza. What can a camera do for starving people? My camera can’t bring them bread’.⁶³ That question of what art can do in the face of such atrocities confronts every artist and cultural worker.

Wakeem of Darbet Shams recalls the impact of the genocide on Palestinian artists: ‘The early months were marked by total shock. Many artists couldn’t sing, move, or create’. This was not only because of heightened repression – many no longer knew what art could or should do. ‘There were constant questions about the role of art in a time of genocide’, Shams continued. ‘Is it appropriate to make music at all? If the song isn’t about the war, should it even be shared?’⁶⁴ Under such conditions, what are an artist’s responsibilities, what are the limits of art and culture, and what does cultural resistance look like?

In this fifth season of politicisation, Bakri’s sober words remind us that culture is a powerful and necessary weapon for liberation and a defiant expression of life itself. They call on us to continue raising the banner of Palestinian liberation and to humanise the Palestinian people and their struggle with every song, every painting, every film, every dance, every poem, every novel, and every cultural weapon at our disposal – despite everything:

Culture is life. Culture is roots, and history. Culture is humanity. If we lose culture, we lose our identity. We lose our life. There is no meaning without culture. There is no meaning to life without love. Culture is love. I will not permit them to take my love away from myself. My culture. This is my heart. This is my people. These are my memories. This is my childhood, when I walked without electricity and without water. The songs that I heard. The food that I ate. The air that I smelled. The mountain that I climbed. The sea that I swam in. This is my culture, my existence. Nobody will take that from me. So I will continue making films. Despite everything.⁶⁵

shenby g (United States), The World Stands with Palestine!, 2023. Courtesy of Utopix and Artists Against Apartheid.

Notes

Bibliography