Welcome, everybody, to another edition of Millennials Are Killing Capitalism.

I almost said live, but we're not doing this as a live stream today.

And so today, really excited for the interview that we're going to do with Karina Mullen.

Karina is an anti-imperialist academic who teaches political science and economics.

Her research examines the historical legacies of colonialism and the role of capitalist expansion and imperialist implications in producing peripheral state security dependency.

But the focus on unequal exchange, super exploitation, resource extraction, and other forms of surplus value drain and transfer as well as resistance.

There's a lot more to the bio, which I'm going to link in the show description.

This bio also, I should say, I'm excited to say, is from the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective, which we'll talk a little bit about today.

I think probably a lot of people who listen to this podcast are familiar with this recently formed group, which includes a number of scholars that we've had on the platform over the years, but also some that we have not yet that we hope to.

And, you know, I intend to, and I'm sure Josh will as well, be doing some more collaborations with them.

They have a a kind of a journal, a blog slash journal.

We can talk about that a little bit too, Pen and the Machete, that puts out a issue every month right now.

And they just put out their second issue, Black August.

And we're going to talk to Karina about a piece that she wrote, I believe, in the first issue today, as well as a little bit of her other work.

And I do want to say just up front, too, that, you know, Karina has faced significant repression as a result of her solidarity with Palestinians amid Zionist imperialist genocide.

And she also obviously was a teacher at CUNY and I'm sure we'll also have something to say too about students who have faced repression there as well.

It's one of the more significant, I think, There's a lot of repression that's been related to the student intifada in the United States and with responses of educators to the genocide.

But the cases at CUNY don't get as much media attention as ones at, say, Columbia or something like that.

look forward to you know being able to talk with her a little bit about that and I do want to just say you know there's a statement of solidarity which we have signed I've signed personally and on behalf of millennials are killing capitalism that we will include in the show description and encourage other folks to do so as well um and you know from my perspective this is one of those things where on one level, it's sort of a badge of honor, you know, that they consider Karina's scholarship to be as enough of a threat and her relationship to her students to be enough of a threat to go after her in this way.

But obviously on the flip side of that, it certainly shouldn't happen.

It shouldn't be allowed to happen.

And it should entice us all to try to stand in solidarity as much as we can, not just with Karina, but with Karina, but with other scholars who are in similar circumstances and other students and grad students and just other people who are trying to resist this genocide and support Palestinian liberation wherever they are.

And so I will share that in the show description and encourage people to join us in signing that statement.

And yeah, so without further ado, Karina, I'm just gonna bring you up to the platform so that we can kind of get into our discussion, but it's great to be with you today.

Thank you so much, Jared.

Yeah, it's really great to be with you.

And I'm just such a huge fan of your work.

You just do such a great job of bringing on amazing guerrilla intellectuals and Walter Rodney's terms and incredible organizers.

And I've learned so much over the years from your work.

Well, thank you.

Yeah.

And I mean, I'm a longtime kind of fan admirer of your work, too.

And you work with a lot of the folks that we have a lot of kind of mutual friends and comrades and stuff like that.

And so I'm very excited to kind of talk to you about some of your scholarship and as well as.

you know, how you engage as a scholar in empire.

And, you know, I'm really excited about the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective and the work that you all are doing and kind of naming your politics and working from that perspective.

And I think that that's very admirable, knowing that you know our government and our institutions really don't want us to do that right they really want us to kind of you know figure out some way to soften it on the edges and um you know be more compatible I guess with the imperial project and so it's it's appreciated that you all are taking that kind of uh what I think is a bold intellectual stance Yeah, thanks for that.

Yeah, I mean, exactly.

As you, you know, point out, it's really, especially at this moment of imperialist, you know, counterinsurgency and the role of the university in that the role of, you know, the battle of ideas is really crucial and central.

And there's so much political confusion out there right now.

and maybe especially among people who identify as being on the left.

So it's really, really crucial at this moment, I think, to have this group of incredible scholars, organizers who are doing this kind of intellectual work, really committed to challenging US imperialism, supporting unapologetically national liberation.

across, you know, the global majority and through, you know, critical knowledge production and international solidarity.

So I'm really, I feel so honored to be amongst such an incredible group of scholars, of guerrilla intellectuals and, you know, and constantly learning from them and the networks that we're, you know, all a part of and you're a part of.

Yeah, well, thank you.

Yeah, and absolutely agree.

I mean, it is a great network of people.

And, you know, you can see the way that even in the, you know, the piece that we're going to talk about today, you know, you're citing a lot of people that are within this network or, you know, kind of close to the network or you know friends with people in the network or comrades and so on and there's just a lot of really vital intellectual work that's that's going on there um so I want to I want to talk a little bit about the kind of cuny system and you know its role you know also in supporting this genocide we've we've heard a great deal about you know kind of colombia and you know the uclas right these kind of big flash points at these very elite and you know very wealthy endowed universities right and their role um you know in suppressing the student intifada and um that but you know stories from places like CUNY, places also like the CSU system in California, where you have these kind of you know there's there are universities that are more working class often um but also have really rich histories of uh you know connections to student movements and to um you know in the in the late sixties and I'm I'm blanking on the name of this but like you know, I guess the whole ethnic studies movements, right, and the kind of third world liberationist sort of struggles that infused themselves into student movements, which were the battles to get, you know, things like Black Studies and so on, that there are rich histories in these places.

And, you know, this is also a part, I mean, this is true at all universities, I feel like, that there's kind of a branding that goes on after the fact of, like, you know, they were all fighting against these movements in those time periods, but they like to say, oh, you know, we're, you know, part of the, you know, the anti-apartheid struggle here at, you know, where was I?

I was at UC Santa Barbara last year, and they had, you know, there was a Bank of America that had been burned down and turned into like a campus building, you know, and they had all this memorization of it, right?

But at the same time, There's a student encampments going on and there's an antagonistic relationship, of course, between the administrations and these student movements.

And so, you know, these contradictions are kind of everywhere, as is this sort of the branding that comes much later.

But, you know, in a moment right now, you can see really all of the kind of repression that has gone on against these really beautiful expressions, I think, of solidarity that have sprung up on campuses across our country.

And so I just wanted to give you space to talk a little bit about that within the context of CUNY.

Yeah, thanks for that.

Yeah, it's really been pretty incredible to watch these last two years, you know, as you've pointed out.

The incredible mobilization that we've seen across college campuses really identifying and heightening, you know, the contradictions of the colonial capitalist university as it exists in the belly of the beast.

You know, the students have been amazing making these connections between, you know, the role of their institutions and their investments in the military industrial complex and imperialist warfare and settler colonialism.

also connecting up to the militarization of their campuses, you know, the role of police on campuses, the role of institutions in, you know, colonial ethnic cleansing, gentrification of the communities in which universities are embedded.

So really, you know, making those material connections between their universities and empire, US imperialism and the colonial capitalist state here.

And I think at CUNY, you're right, a lot of these sort of working class institutions have been left out of some of the kind of more mainstream narratives of how October seventh, the Al-Aqsa flood and the genocide that followed, and students' response to that, both in demonstrating solidarity with Palestinian national liberation.

in resisting the genocide, how that has unfolded across our campuses.

And universities, institutions like CUNY often are left out of those narratives for multiple reasons.

I mean, in large part because these are working class, largely black and brown institutions.

CUNY has around two hundred fifty thousand students.

Emily Schaeffer Omerman, Ph.D.

: campuses it's the largest urban public university in the country.

Emily Schaeffer Omerman, Ph.D.

: A majority of students, you know are from working class backgrounds, I think, something like.

Emily Schaeffer Omerman, Ph.D.

: of our students are food insecure, which you know is.

horrific um in and of itself um but also I think cuny you know like you know some of you know there are a handful of of other examples um that also come to mind um is one of you know I think was really one of the more radical um campuses as well in terms of the kinds of demands that are being are that have been articulated um in the context um of the encampment of the gaza solidarity encampment in twenty twenty four and that continued to be made uh today you know there were five demands that came out of the gaza solidarity encampment at cuny many of them similar to other campuses in particular you know bds for example, which is really the most central one because it really gets to the heart of that contradiction that's talking about earlier and really talking about the material, how we can materially transform our universities, materially decolonize.

There's so much discussion and it's been very well critiqued of some of the sort of decolonial approaches to the university, you know, the BDS, at least, especially the way it's been taken up in recent years by students is really getting to the heart of, you know, the material dimensions of the colonial capitalist university.

But also, you know, CUNY students, you know, consistently demonstrated their solidarity with the Palestinian resistance and, you know, saw that as, you know, not only seeing Palestinians as victims, of course, You know, the genocide is horrific.

Hundreds of thousands of people killed.

And, you know, you've talked about it so much on your program.

So, you know, I know you and all of your viewers and listeners are familiar with it.

You know, the complete destruction of Gaza, the you know, all universities destroyed.

agricultural land, complete families wiped off the face of the earth, you know, the death and destruction has just been relentless.

But beyond that, it's also crucial and, you know, So many amazing scholars and organizers have taught us in recent years, and of course, going back really to the beginning of settler colonialism in Palestine, is that, you know, Palestinians have to also be seen as agents of their own national liberation.

And October seventh really reinforced that.

And CUNY as a space, you know, with a history, and we can talk a little bit about that too, of sort of radical organizing, It sort of just made sense to students and many workers at CUNY to also focus on that and demand solidarity with Palestinian liberation.

So I think that's also a reason that oftentimes CUNY has been sort of left out of some of the more mainstream narratives of the encampment.

But also, you know, you mentioned the history of CUNY and, you know, as a sort of thinking about it as, you know, a terrain of struggle, you know, both repression and resistance.

And in my case, I can talk a little bit about that more as well, of my firing and alongside the firing of three other adjuncts at CUNY.

And, you know, not the first.

There were also two adjuncts who were fired last year.

um, Palestine solidarity as well.

Um, and, you know, but especially now because of the mass firings and, uh, the, um, the fact that the chancellor has essentially, you know, the chancellor of CUNY essentially admitted in front of a McCarthy congressional hearing in July that these were political firings.

Um, you know, he accepted the premise of this, McCarthyite hearing falsely equating anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

He basically threw faculty, including myself, who was named by, you know, Andrew Fine, Randy Fine, rather, know one of these fascist congress members who um thinks that uh gaza should be nuked um and you know the chancellor sort of admitted you know said that yes you know this this is an acceptable you know framework um and there was a political purge you know he accepted that and that's what our union the psc cuny is describing this as a political purge and using the language of mccarthyism And, you know, I think that really reminds us of the history of struggle and repression at CUNY.

You know, back in the forties, we had a lot or a lot of communist or communist sympathetic faculty members who were fired during the after the rap coup d'air.

report in the nineteen forties.

There was a wave of McCarthyite repression at CUNY and across the city.

There was also, of course, in the sixties, CUNY, as you know, we're referencing the struggles for ethnic studies.

Brooklyn College, where one of the colleges I was fired from as an adjunct, I teach at two colleges at CUNY, Brooklyn College and John Jay.

Brooklyn College in sixty nine.

There was a deoccupation.

They actually took over, I think, the president's office.

I mean, imagine that happening today for twelve days.

And it was students and faculty and staff.

And they were demanding black and Puerto Rican studies and open admissions.

And something similar happened at CCNY.

in nineteen sixty nine as well.

And, you know, these were heavily repressed at the time.

I know at Brooklyn College, many of the students faced felony charges, I think only dropped because Shirley Chisholm had intervened on behalf of the students and faculty.

So yeah, there's this long history of struggle at CUNY and the, you know, Palestine solidarity has, especially in the last two decades, has really featured prominently in that struggle.

You know, there's always been a struggle, again, a working class, Black and brown institution, many people coming from countries that have been destroyed by U.S.

imperialism.

So anti-imperialism has always been central to that organizing, anti-colonialism because many people are victims of colonialism or their parents or their grandparents and, you know, including in this country of settler colonialism.

And of course, legacies of slavery, capitalist racism, police violence.

So all of those, abolition, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism have always been central to CUNY organizing.

And especially in the two thousands, Palestine came to be more central to the anti-imperialist organizing at CUNY.

And in two thousand and sixteen, the graduate students passed a resolution in calling for BDS at CUNY.

There was also in twenty twenty one, I believe a CUNY law students passed a resolution calling for BDS as well.

Even the Union, PSC CUNY, passed a resolution, and not a BDS one, but in solidarity with Palestinians, and this was following the massacres that took place in Gaza and also in the West Bank or East Jerusalem Sheikh Jarrah in twenty twenty one.

So that led to really a consolidation and of organizing in solidarity with Palestine.

And we have, of course, many Palestinian students as well as faculty members and staff, as well as many Muslim and Arab students as well.

That's not, of course, you know, and also many Jewish students who and, you know, and other students who participate in this kind of organizing.

But it's really has been central for many years.

And CUNY for Palestine, the organization that I organized with emerged out of this in in two thousand sixteen to work together, bring students, faculty and staff together.

to fight for BDS, to defend students especially who have been facing repression, as well as faculty and staff, and to also build coalition, you know, to make connections between Palestine as an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggle with the struggle against capitalist, you know, what Charisse Burden-Stelly refers to as capitalist racism here in the belly of the beast.

Awesome.

Thank you for that breakdown.

And, you know, you brought up Sharice Burden-Stelly.

And you also said something that made me think.

We had a conversation with her several months ago now.

And in that conversation, we were talking about her book, Black Scare, Red Scare.

And she talked about how in the context of today that she thinks that the war on anti-semitism is essential you know that anti-semitism is the new communism right and so meaning that the way that uh anti-semitism operates within this kind of war on anti-semitism um that this is the way that communism operated within mccarthyism and the red scare right and so that you by branding someone anti-semitic or branding something as anti-semitism you kind of create this sort of category through which you can basically do anything to them, and it becomes acceptable within society, you know, a sort of special category of repression.

And when she said that, I thought it was a really, you know, it made a lot of sense to me.

And I hadn't kind of made that direct connection.

And of course, it's a great great historical irony as well because of, you know, for many years that it was often Jewish people who were branded as communists, right?

And the whole idea of Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracies and all of this kind of stuff was very prominent, you know, in that era, the first kind of phases of Red Scare and McCarthyism too.

um, nonetheless, here we are, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

That's a really important point, you know, and I think, um, you know, there are people who, um, have, who are, were part of the movements, you know, from that period, um, either, you know, I, like, for example, I, myself, my, my grandparents were, um, part of the communist party in that, period in Jewish.

And I know my family, I come from an anti-Zionist family, but there are of course people who were repressed in that period and don't see the parallels.

Although I think increasingly, You know, at least, you know, there is a sort of broader swath.

I just, you know, have heard, for example, Ellen Schrecker, who is a scholar of McCarthyism.

She spoke in an event we organized at CUNY around resurgent McCarthyism.

And she's, you know, certainly sees those parallels.

And I think more and more people are seeing those parallels.

And yeah, Cherise Burden-Stelly's work is just so crucial in helping to understand, you know, the how um you know how this how zionism is functioning is forming a sort of a similar ideological role as anti-communism um and you know with yeah the the irony I guess that you're pointing out is that um many Jewish people were part of that first wave of McCarthyism and yet today struggling to see how anti-Semitism is being mobilized in a similar way.

And it's just mind blowing how distorted this discourse is and that anti-Semitism is really performing this role of enabling fascist repression here and imperialist interventions of all sorts abroad.

So yeah, it's a really bizarre and worrying time.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I should clarify for folks, I don't mean actual anti-Semitism.

I just mean the way that this is mobilized as an assault on anti-Zionism, which, as you pointed out, there are many anti-Zionist Jewish people who are attacked and called anti-semitic through this kind of you know uh framework so it's yeah absolutely um so let's just talk a little bit was there anything else I know that we did talk a little bit about anti-imperialist uh scholars collective in the opening was there anything else that you wanted to say about this group Yeah, I just, you know, I guess to say, I really hope folks will check out the website.

We have this amazing website, a great blog, as you pointed out, the pen is my machete.

And that's, let me grab the website for you, anti-imperialist, anti-imperialist.com.

um yes so if you see yeah the pen is my machete we're on volume two as you pointed out black august we have some really really great uh pieces there um including by sharice bird and stelly um red scare tactics and the criminalization of radical fight back which you know really is just so relevant to everything we're talking about um a great piece by jackie lookman um also on the military occupation of washington dc Musa Springer has a piece connecting the dots between anti-imperialist struggle, Black August, and Cuban liberation.

And then we also have some great poetry by Tongo Aysen-Martin and two great pieces by two leading anti-imperialist scholars today, Walla El-Kaysiyah, on queer feminism and genocide and Matteo Capasso, the role of the anti-imperialist intellectual.

It's just really, really amazing.

Oh, and also Louis Alde, you know, a great piece on Iran, Zionism and the defeat of the imperialist narrative.

So really hope everyone will check it out.

Our first issue was also great.

And we are, I'm just so excited.

I mean, I'm already learning so much from everything I've read and I'm so excited for future.

I think we're having one coming up on Russia, a roundtable on Russia, which should be really exciting.

And yeah, I also urge folks to look at the principles of unity because that in and of itself is a form of political education.

And I think really great sort of guidelines for how to be an anti-imperialist scholar.

And I'll just list the five.

I won't get into it unless you want to talk about them.

The principles of unity.

One is, and this also is sort of the premise for my own piece that I published in the last month in the blog, which is U.S.-led imperialism is the primary contradiction in the world system.

Secondly, we support national liberation, anti-imperialist internationalism and revolutionary socialism.

Third, we must liberate international institutions from the clutches of imperialism.

Fourth, we emphasize a dialectical and historical materialist approach to our scholarship that is committed to the liberation of oppressed peoples.

And I think that's really important because a lot of sort of Western Marxist tend to, you know, adopt sort of Marxist principles, but not Marxist methodology.

And that could lead to all kinds of sort of confused thinking.

Fifth, we employ critical pedagogy and analysis with our students to foster a liberated world.

As you know, so many of us are educators and, you know, really committed to nurturing a comprehensive, critical, and truthful analysis of the world our students inhabit.

So that's a really important dimension as well.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

And those are great.

great principles of unity.

I co-sign all of them, so it's excellent.

So we'll come back to this in a little bit because we're going to get to the piece that you wrote for the first issue.

But I wanted to also just bring up, you're also an associate editor at Middle East Critique, which you mentioned Matteo Capasso does great work with them as well.

We also try to always that millennials like retweet whenever you all have a new issue out, which I think there's a new issue out today, right?

I think I just saw one come out this morning.

So folks, please go check that out.

Maybe we should actually, maybe we should pause there and say a little bit about that issue actually.

Yeah, I mean, it's yeah, definitely.

It's a great issue.

There's, I think, three really crucial, important pieces on the political and ideological legacy of Saeed Hassan Nasrallah.

And its leadership of Hezbollah, both in Lebanon and regionally, some really, really great pieces in there.

I urge people to read that and just, you know, browse through past issues as well.

Middle East critique, like AISC, is just such a vital platform for anti-imperialist scholars.

challenging, you know, imperialist domination centered on liberation, you know, folk, you know, supporting national liberation.

Again, it's sort of, it's pieces you wouldn't, it's analysis you wouldn't get in other academic spaces, even left academic spaces.

It's so crucial.

The knowledge production that is, that Middle East critique is, is is dedicated to.

And there's also, I really urge everyone to read the editorial by Matteo Capasso on critiquing Euro-American Middle East studies as a sort of integrated system of imperialist knowledge production.

It's just, again, provides like a really helpful framework of analysis, not just for how anti-imperialist scholars should approach Middle East studies, but the academy more generally.

And thinking about questions of political economy, donors, the concepts and theories that we use.

And yeah, I think, and really challenging the sort of, cognitive warfare, we can say, of the academy, which is just constantly, we need to, it needs to be challenged all the time.

And I think the repetition, I'm thinking of an interview you did recently with Lara Sheehy, where She was saying, you know, thinking about, you know, when you guys were talking about, what is it, the lizard brain and, you know, and how it's sort of imperialism, you know, functions by like...

really trying to impact that most, you know, the most underdeveloped parts of our brain and the affective dimensions and repetition is really crucial to that.

It also made me think of Edward Said's work in intertextuality, you know, which he talks about in Orientalism and how imperialist knowledge production, you know, really that's one of the ways it functions is through um, the self-referencing and repetition.

And so it's so crucial for anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist scholars to do the same thing, you know, and that you mentioned earlier, the citational practice in my work, and you'll see it in all the scholars in these, um, critical anti-imperialist spaces, you know, it's also a political praxis of citation in order to uplift and center, not just because they're brilliant and it's the correct analysis, but also because these are voices that are marginalized and that you won't get on in the syllabi of most college courses and you won't see them referenced in most you know, peer reviewed academic publications.

And so it's so crucial for those of us who subscribe to an anti-imperialist analysis to constantly uplift and center and do the same sort of, you know, repeat and the same sort of, you know, a kind of counter hegemonic intertextuality.

And that's, you know, really what these spaces are doing.

Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.

And just one more that I would shout out also is Agrarian South Journal is just another one.

All three of these publications are looking for stuff that's just really rigorous and well-done scholarship, but also grounded in really key anti-imperialist principles.

And as you said, the real importance of national liberation and understanding that As well as, as you said, the point of understanding imperialism in this, you know, period of time that it is a system that is a US-led system, you know, and so it doesn't mean that there aren't other harms or oppressions or things like that in the world that are not imperialist.

the cause of US imperialism, it just means that this is sort of the primary structuring antagonism of the world system and that it is where we have to focus a lot of our analysis to really change the world for the better and to allow for fuller expressions of humanity.

Yeah, appreciate it.

Yeah, and I would just say, if I can also plug as well, I also am an associate editor of Science and Society, which is the oldest Marxist English language journal in the country.

And it's a bit more ecumenical in its approach.

But, you know, you certainly find, and there was recently a special issue in the Cuban Revolution, for example, You know, there's also increasingly more material on questions of, you know, global majority, national liberation.

And it's a really solid Marxist journal as well.

So also would urge folks to look there too.

Awesome.

Yeah, thank you.

All right.

So one of the pieces that you wrote for Middle East Critique that I looked at is this piece called The War on Terror, as primitive accumulation in Tunisia, U.S.-led imperialism, and the post-twenty-ten, twenty-eleven revolt-slash-security conjuncture.

And in it, you talk about how, quote, the violence of the war on terror has laid, quote, the groundwork for a new wave of primitive accumulation.

And so could you just talk a little bit about this relationship in the context of Tunisia in the period you've analyzed?

I know that Tunisia is one of the areas that you've done quite a bit in studying, so.

Yeah, sure.

So I guess I start by sort of situating the analysis for this piece in relation to Ali Qadri's work on accumulation of waste.

And I think it's a really important theoretical contribution that Qadri makes to our understanding of imperialism and capitalism.

and capitalist, imperialist wars and militarization, and really influenced my thinking, as well as a piece that he wrote together with Matteo Capasso, which was the introduction, in fact, to the special issue of Middle East critique that this piece was for.

And just to say that Kadri talks about, explains that capitalism as political economy is not just about producing commodities, but also waste.

And as he talks about the waste of nature, the waste of human beings, including through premature death.

So not just the physical killing of people, but you know, ensuring that their lives end early.

And that, and I'll just, in parentheses here, point out, you know, shares a lot in common with, you know, another piece that's very influential in my thinking, and especially for another piece I wrote on the political economy of the genocide in Gaza, of the Zionist imperialist genocide, which is the That, you know, really highlighted, you know, was connected to to the Communist Party and, you know, many sort of black radical luminaries who were part of producing that petition.

um, including Paul Robeson who actually delivered it and William Patterson and many others who worked on that document.

And, you know, it was meticulously, um, uh, uh, demonstrated the history of, of genocide against, uh, black people in particular, and also indigenous people in the U S, um, through, uh, centuries of slavery and, uh, post, you know, also the, um, afterlives of slavery and Jim Crow and racist police violence and vigilante white violence.

And, you know, really highlights the political economy of it.

The monopoly capital, you know, the corporations that benefited from genocide and from the um shorten you know not just from the killing of black people but you know the of course of exploitation of uh labor um and um shortening lifespans um dispossession of land you know and labor um and thinking about that systematically and you know Kadri's work does something similar on a world scale, thinking about how the imperialist wars create these conditions through which labor exploitation is easier, the drain of natural resources is easier, also reducing the social wage for the state because if people die earlier, the state doesn't have to invest in you know, things like welfare, social security, housing, healthcare.

And, you know, it's essentially, and also, of course, it creates ecological collapse as well.

So thinking about all the various ways that the imperialist system and capitalist system profits from death and destruction, you know, many people talk about the military industrial complex.

And of course, that plays an incredibly important role as the sort of driver of capital accumulation in the world system today.

But it's also more than that.

If we want to understand unequal exchange even of labor and trade in terms of compressing the wages of Global South workers, we also have to understand the role of imperialist war in doing that and creating the vulnerabilities and precarity that result in super exploitation.

of Global South workforce.

So Khadri's work for me has been really crucial in doing that.

And this concept of structural genocide that he develops, which I talk about more in the AISC piece, but also is relevant for the piece I wrote on primitive accumulation, the war on terror in Tunisia.

And he draws there on Lenin's concept, Lenin here, to talk about structural genocide.

And we can also think about it as a form of structural racism too, that in going back to, again, the We Charge Genocide document, how structural racism impacts on equal wages, unemployment, overall wealth, access to healthcare, nutrition, housing.

All of that is shaped by the structures of colonial capitalism, imperialism.

And so that's the sort of context, that's the sort of theoretical framework that I had.

And also thinking about in the specific context of a country like Tunisia, peripheral capitalist state that has since its independence in nineteen fifty six been more or less aligned to the West.

So, you know, a distinct history from other West Asian and North African states.

For example, its neighbor, Algeria or Libya, which had antagonistic relations and more antagonistic relations with the imperialist core.

But in the case of Tunisia, it's not so much as a military intervention.

It's not an imperialist war in the sense that you had in Libya in two thousand and eleven with the US led NATO intervention and regime change against Gaddafi.

In Tunisia, it's taken the form more of militarization.

So thinking about how the war on terror, like the war on drugs, and I know you've covered a lot of that in many of your interviews as well, is a sort of ideological framework to justify various forms of intervention.

And it's not always a direct military intervention.

It could be in the form of training the military, for example, providing the weapons for the military.

So those weapons systems are controlled and surveillance systems are controlled by US military industrial complex.

And so it could be also training the police, the prisons, which is the case in Tunisia as well.

And all of that is done in a way to ideologically infuse those institutions with the same strategic aims and anxieties of Western imperialism and becomes clear in the context of the war on terror in terms of who is defined as an enemy, for example.

You know, so there's that dimension as well as the material dimension and how the systems that are put in place, the types of policing, the types of militarization, the surveillance are all done, implemented in a way that contributes to this accumulation of waste, you know, that reduces the lifespan of the working class.

that makes people that compresses the wages of the working class that results in proletarianization of peasants, for example, so that they're removed from the land and that land then can be used for capitalist forms of development and natural resource extraction.

So all of this is, you know, in the context of the war on terror that predates the focus of this piece is on the two thousand ten to two thousand eleven conjuncture.

following the uprising in Tunisia.

But the war on terror predates that, of course, because Tunisia under Ben Ali was the first country in the region to declare his support for Bush's so-called war on terror.

But what's interesting to me and why I look at this particular conjuncture is that this was a moment of, you know, potential for liberation.

You know, there are lots of contradictions in that movement that could be discussed.

But it was a liberatory, there was a lot of liberatory potential in that moment.

But how does it then get harnessed and used in a way to reinforce unequal relations between Tunisia and the capitalist imperialist core, and specifically the US, not only to reinforce, but even to extend these relations of dependency.

And I look at specifically through the lens of security dependency, which is the dependency of the military, the police, the security apparatuses on the imperialist core and without security independence, you know, without, and we see this, you know, I'm still in awe and shock of what I saw yesterday, China's, you know, the, the, the military parade they did that was, you know, carried out there.

And on, I think, yeah, it was yesterday.

And just to see the sort of incredible equipment, the discipline, the, you know, really awe-inspiring that what was being demonstrated through that parade was China's security independence, right?

That a state can't be independent if it doesn't have an independent military.

And the productive capacity of China's military today is incredible.

It surpasses all of, you know, it surpasses the US and the imperialist core.

And, you know, of course, I would prefer a world where we could invest, you know, our surplus in life sustaining and life affirming institutions and not the military.

But um not just you know thinking about the cap capital that's invested but of course the labor the energy the thinking that you know the brilliant minds um but this is the reality we live in today you know we we live in a in a system that's dominated by the death cult you know known as the the united states and um and and and driven by you know uh capital accumulation and so therefore A key feature of imperialism today is to keep the militaries of global majority states dependent upon the weapons systems and the technologies and the political and economic control of the West, of the U.S.

in particular.

So, yeah, that piece for me was really about trying to understand the role of militarism in the more subtle form, not in the direct military intervention form, on a peripheral state, capitalist state like Tunisia, and how that undermines the possibilities for really, you know, working class peasant liberation, because Essentially, the state is structured in a way to repress any forms of anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist dissent and to ensure that labor in the country is still compliant and natural resources are still extractable, and so that unequal exchange and polarized accumulation on a world scale can continue.

you know, as it has for centuries.

Yeah, no, thank you for all of that breakdown.

Really appreciate it.

And so I want to move into the other piece that we want to talk to you about today, which is one you wrote for The Pen Is My Machete, which again is the blog from the Anti-Imperialist Scholars Collective.

You can find it at anti-imperialist, It's anti-imperialists.org or .com, sorry.

Let me say that again.

You can find it at anti-imperialists.com.

And so the piece is entitled Zionism, Imperialism, and the Struggle Against Global Fascism, Palestine as the Hornet's Nest of U.S.

Empire.

So before moving into some of the specifics of Could you just talk a little bit about the general argument you're making here in this piece that Palestine is the hornet's nest of U.S.

empire and how we should think about the relationship between Zionism, imperialism and the struggle against global fascism in this conjuncture?

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

So essentially, This piece was my attempt to sort of think through, we talked about earlier the role of the campus movement, the student intifada, and how important it was for students in particular to make these connections, the material connections between Zionism, The role of their institutions materially in supporting settler colonialism in Palestine and imperialist warfare.

And then the repression that they have faced as a result of making these connections.

And of course, anyone in solidarity with them and I, you know, I include myself because I think my firing in large part is connected to, you know, the sort of criminalization of student worker solidarity, which is a real threat to institutions because combined, those forces are unstoppable.

So, you know, this piece sort of that's where it emerged out of was my sort of thinking through and attempting to theorize these connections.

And, you know, and I also was extremely influenced and shaped by one of the pieces I reference is the you know, the Louis Alde and S.

Sala piece, where they also talk, you know, they talk about this, the historical also dimensions of that connection between fascism and Zionism.

And, you know, essentially how it's that's always there's always been a relationship between these forces from the establishment of the settler colonial state in nineteen forty eight, but even prior to its establishment for decades, you know, under under the British colonial mandate.

So, you know, I think the way that I sort of think about it in this piece is that Zionism is really one of the most, is the sort of ideological superstructure of fascism today.

It's one of the most prominent expressions of international fascism.

So there's, again, the ideological component, the discursive component, and how, you know, things get discussed and represented in mainstream narratives.

And then there's also on the other hand, the material dimensions of this.

So the role that the Zionist entity plays in not only in the settler colonial genocide and the dispossession of the Palestinian people, the role that it plays in the military industrial complex and the integration between the Zionist entities, military industrial complex in the US, especially in drone warfare and surveillance technology and people like Max Eil, for example, have talked about this extensively.

But also, you know, the role as also Eyal and Alex Savinia, for example, have talked about the role of the Zionist entity in propping up fascist, anti-communist, if we go back to the, you know, dirty wars in the sixties and seventies and eighties across Latin America, you know, trying to undermine communist movements, socialist states, national liberation movements across Latin America, Africa, Asia.

So, you know, the role that they played in supporting counterinsurgency, you know, Contras, death squads, training, training them, providing weapons to them, you know, doing it in a way, you know, as, as, you know, as the sort of the West, the US's mercenary force and providing plausible deniability to US, to the US in carrying out many covert actions to undermine the all forms of socialist nationalist you know any form of global majority you know national liberation uh and so you know historically that's been the case and and even if we go back um to you know and I think now people are really starting to make these connections but it's not new of course I mean palestinians have been making this connection from day one um There's also if we go back to the Organization of African Union in nineteen seventy five, I cited the resolution in which Zionism was defined as racism and colonialism and compared to imperialist imperialism, apartheid and colonialism on the African continent.

And so, you know, that's the kind of theoretical framework that I use here to analyze the contemporary conjuncture, where we see, again, the primary contradiction of U.S.

imperialism at a moment of the rise of a multipolar world order, which is challenging.

U.S.

imperialism.

And so fascism, as I describe it in this piece as well, is a way to sort of stabilize capitalist accumulation in this moment of imperialist crisis.

And Zionism is the ideological sort of infrastructure or framework through which it is, you know, that stabilization and the violence that it entails.

Because let's, you know, be clear, this is violent, you know, talking about it in sort of abstract theoretical terms.

But what does it mean to stabilize Zionism?

capital accumulation at the time of imperialist crisis, it means genocide.

That's what it means.

It means, you know, blowing up entire families, children being torn from their mothers' bellies, you know, the destruction of all nature.

That's what it means.

And, you know, as many people have pointed out, and I think Gustave Petro put it early on, is that this is the genocide that awaits all this world surplus populations.

And so in that sense, to understand the current conjuncture of imperialist crisis, and how ruling class in the capitalist core is attempting to stabilize requires understanding Zionism, its history, its material and ideological function in stabilizing polarized accumulation on a world scale.

Awesome.

Thank you.

So I do want to talk.

I want to talk about Ukraine and you work this into this piece.

And, you know, it's just something I think this is a failure of analysis of a lot of folks on the kind of left.

And it's weird.

I mean, like, just anecdotally, I've talked about this with folks, but know youtube has way more restrictions on what we can say about ukraine than they do about what we can say about palestine and I think that that's really interesting that you're not allowed to sort of talk about uh positive like you're not allowed to there's all this language about like not repeating russian propaganda and stuff like that associated with the war and that you can't You can't say, you know, so it's like very much, even if it's just through self-censorship, it causes, I think, a lot of people not to engage, but others have.

But it's just an interesting thing that just in general across the kind of even among anti-imperialists, left-wing media outlets and you know this is self-criticism here as well that um we just have not covered this war very very well at all or in many cases kind of just ignored it you know as as um huge of a conflict as it has been and as devastating it has been obviously to the people who have been killed and displaced and all of that as a part of it.

But it's obviously very important geopolitically, critically so.

And it's important to the project, quite obviously, of US-NATO imperialism as well.

And it's important in terms of the kind of developing shift away also from a unipolar imperialist world.

And so I would just love for you to just talk a little bit about the key aspects of the importance of this war for U.S.-led imperialism in the world system and how you're kind of thinking through that in this piece.

Yeah, so it's interesting that you pointed out how it almost feels more difficult to speak about Ukraine than Palestine in this context.

Something else that I've noticed is that A lot of people have made the point that, and this was especially early on in the genocide, why is it that people support and applaud sending weapons to Ukraine, but not to the Palestinians, for example, the Ukrainians to so-called, right?

Yeah, I just want to say one clarification, too, to what I said.

part of it is because there was such a broad liberal support for u.s support of ukraine I wouldn't even not calling it support for ukraine is actually a misnomer but for u.s support of nato and this war which is taking place in ukraine right um but the so so yeah I mean in some level I think part of this is that there is a actually a pretty sophisticated censorship regime around this but also that there was so much liberal, very, to me, very vacuous and fake solidarity too, that just instantly, you know, kind of sprung up, you know, and was in all of our media and everything else for a long time.

It's kind of gone away now, but, you know, there's still a lot of Ukrainian flags in my neighborhood and stuff like that, you know, and yet on the flip side, Yes, absolutely what you were about to say with Palestine.

But yeah, I did want to make that clarification because it's not as though it's actually quite easy to say, I support Ukraine, but that's not actually what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about having an analysis of what this war means from a kind of anti-imperialist and world system perspective.

Right.

Totally.

Totally.

No, no, no.

I get where you were going with that question.

I wanted to make that point and that connection because I think it highlights the role of Ukraine and this war in the world from a world system perspective.

In the sense that when people make that point, you know, and look at this as, you know, as a sign of hypocrisy or double standards, I'm always like, no, it's actually not.

It's actually the same thing.

Right.

The fact that the U.S.

supports, you know, Nazi, neo-Nazis in Ukraine is.

as part of its proxy war against Russia and NATO expansion in Eurasia, is very much connected to the imperialist Zionist genocide in Gaza.

The aims are the same, going back to what we were discussing earlier, which is about stabilizing polarized accumulation on a world scale in the face of imperialist capitalist crisis.

And so the two are actually very connected in that sense.

And really, I think to understand, and there are loads more people who can talk about this better than I can, but obviously to understand the roots of the current crisis today, we need to you know, in the U.S.

NATO war against Russia.

We have to begin in two thousand fourteen.

You know, obviously we can go much further back.

But as with October seventh, you know, these are dates that sort of get highlighted and reified as a way and this is another dimension of information warfare, cognitive warfare, the ideological superstructure of imperialism, which is to look at sites of imperialist intervention as discrete sites, not to make connections between them, and then also to isolate dates from their broader histories.

in order, you know, to isolate sort of events and conjunctures from their broader histories in order to not see the connections, the systemic and structural connections.

So, two thousand fourteen is when you had this far right coup in in Ukraine that was obviously backed or orchestrated by Washington, you know, by the US and European powers that overthrew the pro Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, and was presented as a kind of democratic uprising, one of these color revolutions, but actually was a culmination of a longstanding US strategy to install compliant regimes on Russia's borders.

And so fast forward to twenty twenty two, Washington deliberately provoked Russia, I think, into invading Ukraine through the expansion or the threatened expansion of NATO and placing, you know, missiles within striking distance of Moscow.

And the expectation, so putting, so the war was backed for these geostrategic reasons and the idea was to weaken Russia and ultimately also break off Russia from China, the ultimate aim being sort of backdoor to China as well and creating disunity on the Euro-Asian continent.

um, in order to block, uh, the rise of a multipolar world order, China's rise and the rise of a multipolar world order.

So, um, sanctions were, of course, a really important part of that.

Um, you know, here, uh, you know, the idea was, and, you know, I was also part of the, um, International People's Tribunal on U.S.

imperialism sanctions and a unilateral course of, uh, economic measures.

And, you know, we really, one of the aims of the tribunal was to really point out how sanctions serve as a crucial tool of US imperialism today and one of the ways through which colonial forms of wealth drain from the global majority and their transfer to the capitalist and imperialist core is secured today.

And, you know, through a form of economic warfare that is designed to create de-development and really destroy also the social fabrics of societies in order to eventually, you know, achieve regime change.

for government, you know, anti-systemic states that oppose U.S.

imperialism.

So, you know, that was, you know, a big part of the sanctions regime against Russia.

But, you know, as we know, both the war itself and, you know, there's, it's really, and I talk about it in the piece as well, how You know, I think I cite to talk about the kind of ultimate futility of some of the desperate measures that have been implemented and, you know, strategic failures in Ukraine, for example, where Firstly, the U.S.

military, it's really demonstrated the overextension of the U.S.

military and how it's hamstrung by production shortages, which is partially why we see with the recent NATO summit, the U.S.

has pushed for the increase from two percent to five percent spending for European militaries.

of GDP for European militaries, which is to escalate military production and essentially pay for US imperialist warfare.

And at the expense of Europe's own working and middle classes, right?

Because European states in many ways are also still colonized since World War II by the US.

So the US is losing militarily on that war and the sanctions themselves have also backfired.

You know, many people have talked about this too, including Prabhat Patnaik, people like, you know, Ben Norton has done a lot of really great work on this too.

And, you know, many other scholars and journalists, but essentially pointing out how, you know, what has happened is that this has created the sanctions regime, the failures, the strategic failures in Ukraine, military failures have, you know, really led to Russia to adapt its economy, also its arms industry, which has surged.

Its military is now outproducing Europe in terms of artillery shells, drones, tanks, vehicles.

So Ukraine's failed counteroffensive in many ways exposed NATO's structural weaknesses, as well as the production shortages and bottlenecks.

And it's really driven Russia closer to...

States like China, Iran, you know, developing military and economic pacts and, you know, has accelerated de-dollarization, also, you know, de-risking strategies of global majority states and developing an alternative architecture, financial and economic and military architecture to that which has been dominated by the U.S., the so-called rules-based order.

for so many decades.

So it's playing a really important role in that way in terms of the major transformations that are underway within the world system and the rise of a multipolar world order.

Yeah, no, thank you for that.

And yeah, we see the, not the, you know, I was gonna say the logical conclusion, maybe it is, but also just the the rules based order is fully on display right now, you know, with obviously the genocide in Gaza, the provocations, you know, against Venezuela that are going on within the last few days, as well as even the denial of you know, the Palestinian Authority, which is a U.S.-backed and Israeli-backed really comprador, you know, kind of force in Palestine as other countries are, you know, considering, you know, maybe it is time for state recognition in the face of all of this, you know, violence, even if a lot of them are doing it, I think, for quite cynical reasons to sort of save face within their own countries.

But, yeah, I mean, the...

sooner that the rules-based order can fall the better and it's it certainly exposed itself for the kind of force that it is in the last couple of years for sure um definitely and also um you know just to add sorry jared like I'm I don't know if you've been following the shanghai cooperation um organization and you know the discussions that have been happening around that meeting recently.

And it really, it's interesting also to see the sort of Western press, not just with the recent Chinese military parade, which I think created a lot of anxiety here in the capitalist core, but also this combined with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meeting in China, in Tianjin was, you know, pretty incredible because what this signifies not only is it sort of growing security cooperation on the Eurasian continent, which then also shows you that all these attempts through Ukraine and through targeting of Russia to undermine and destabilize the region and create divisions have not worked.

but actually have brought states closer together, including India, which, you know, had for many years border tensions with China.

And so, you know, I think that, you know, really what comes out of this meeting is, you know, deepening cooperation between member states and, you know, really creating opportunities the financial and economic infrastructure and security infrastructure to challenge Western imperialism.

And I do think that this is creating a lot of anxiety here in the imperialist core.

And so some of the contradictions, some of the You know, some of Trump's sort of desperate maneuvers, you know, whether it's including the, as you pointed out, the, you know, sending what, four thousand Marines and a nuclear submarine to Venezuela to threaten Venezuela, the tariff wars, you know, all of this is really it's not a sign of strength at all.

It's a sign of desperation.

It's a sign of desperation.

And, you know, of course, we know, you know, as Gramsci said, you know, the dying order, you know, I'm going to paraphrase, misparaphrase it or not as eloquently as he put it.

But, you know, that it comes with a lot of violence right before the new world is order is born.

And, you know, this is the time of monsters.

So that's not to belittle or to undermine the violence that we are experiencing and the world has been experiencing and it's going to accelerate in different ways.

But what this makes me hopeful about is that the end is near.

For the rest of the world to live, for liberation to be possible here in the belly of the beast and globally, US empire needs to fall.

And this is what is happening.

And so these are all examples of how it's happening.

And there will be contradictions in each step of the way.

There will be.

It's not going to be perfect.

It will not be pure.

It will not be.

And so any Western Marxist looking for that kind of purity, you know, those are the fair weather friends.

You know, if you can't come out and defend Maduro, you know, when there's a fifty million dollar bounty on his head and threatening the Bolivarian, you know, socialist revolution, which is we need, the left needs to defend, just like we need to defend the Cuban revolution.

We need to defend Nicaragua and the Sandinista revolution.

These are If we don't defend these revolutions, we have no models for the future.

We have nothing to build on and we have no resistance.

That being said, I am so hopeful right now.

I am hopeful that the end is near and that liberation is on the horizon.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

So, I mean, you kind of, I think, got into some of this next question that I wanted to ask you, but there's probably some other elements that you can bring in from your piece, which is, you know, talking about kind of an assessment of this move towards multipolarity at this time.

You know, on the one hand, we can see all of these kind of symptoms of U.S.-led imperial decline.

We've kind of talked about quite a few of those.

And, you know, in your piece, you talk about Paris Yeros' analysis that that decline and the anxiety in the West is that the, quote, global majority is catching up may enable the states to break free from the imperialist dominated world law of value and instead pursue auto-centered sovereign and popular development, end quote.

um and so on the one hand of course you know we see we can see these trends um as we look if we look for them and on the other hand I think many and this kind of gets a little bit to you know our our western marxist imaginations a little bit but um you know it is frustrating I think a lot of times for people too that as you see something like um you know the genocide in gaza right and this full kind of ethnic cleansing campaign that's going on right now that there are so few resistance forces that are joining along with the Palestinian resistance, of course.

We can talk about Yemen.

We can talk also about Yemen's prime minister and cabinet ministers being assassinated just a few days ago as we're having this discussion.

You can talk about Iran and Iran also facing significant consequences and decapitation of a lot of its military leadership.

you know, things like this, as well as government officials, right, in their brief, you know, war with, that Israel and the United States really enacted and sponsored around this kind of ruse of denuclearizing or whatever they want us to believe was the kind of aim of that.

But, you know, so there's that, there's Lebanon, right, we can talk about these things and, you know, but I think many people, you hear the the calls of other progressive and anti-imperialist forces becoming more involved in the fight and not seeing that happen.

I'm sure you encounter these feelings a lot from people too, as you're kind of, have the kind of analysis that you have too, and you're working within Palestinian solidarity spaces and things like that.

So how do you kind of think about this as a scholar and an analyst yourself?

Yeah, the connection between imperialism and fascism or, or yeah.

Yeah.

I'm thinking more of the question.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess what I'm saying is, so you have the decline, right.

And you have all the symptoms of the decline and the fascism that's coming with the decline.

Right.

But that, I guess in terms of people thinking about, you know, kind of the state of multipolarity, I see people saying, well, why doesn't China get more directly involved?

Now, I know that China has its own kind of foreign policy doctrine, right, which is non-interventionist and all of these kinds of things.

But these are questions that people raise of, you know, okay, well, why isn't there a stronger boycott being pushed by a lot of these states to the Zionist entity?

You know, these kind of things.

And so I guess that's what the question is around is sort of how do you respond to folks who are like, Yeah, it's great that the U.S.

empire is falling, but I'm not seeing the kind of progressive socialist trajectory that I would love to see from some of these other powerful forces within the kind of multipolar world.

Yeah, I mean, that's yeah, that's an excellent question.

Definitely one that a lot of people are asking.

You know, I think one thing that always guides my response is thinking about the Palestinian resistance, the importance of and the axis of resistance in general, the importance of strategic patience.

Not everything happens overnight.

All of our historical revolutions.

I also look at, you know, the Algerian revolution.

Many people have probably your viewers have seen the Battle of Algiers, which is about an important battle that took place in nineteen fifty four.

Algerian liberation didn't come until nineteen sixty two.

And, you know, over a million Algerians were killed in that particular span of the battle.

But of course, you know, if we're going back to.

the eighteen hundreds when Algeria was first colonized, you know, we're talking about millions of people killed, injured, displaced.

So, you know, that's not to also belittle or minimize the sacrifices that are made by our martyrs.

You know, these are all of our martyrs for global liberation because, you know, we know that they're extensive and but they are also a feature of all of our liberation struggles, you know, from Asia to Africa to Latin America and going back, of course, to the Haitian Revolution.

These things don't happen, you know, revolutions don't happen overnight.

You know, it's not, you know, it's not as easy as that.

And I think you know, we need to also think about structural and systemic changes and how crucial they are to creating the space for national liberation struggles to be achieved.

You know, so people may say, oh, well, what's the importance of having this Shanghai Cooperation Organization or BRICS or these alternatives to the IMF and World Bank or alternative military organizations cooperation agreements, as long as Palestine, as long as the genocide is still happening in Palestine, as long as people are still, as Haiti is still being occupied and people are still dying across Latin America and the African continent from structural adjustment and the accumulation of waste, as Ali Qadri put it.

Well, these are tectonic transformations underway.

And, you know, they will create opportunities for firstly, the military on a military level, on a military level.

You know, the fact that, you know, that you have superior military equipment now that states like Iran, China, Russia are not just able to to have control.

control over but are producing themselves and how those weapons then get disseminated and implemented by national liberation struggles across the globe.

The economic infrastructure to evade imperialist economic warfare so that states can develop in ways in autonomous ways and develop food sovereignty, military sovereignty, economic and energy sovereignty, all the things that are required to achieve sustainable development that meets the needs and aspirations of the masses.

So socialist development is not possible without these tectonic transformations.

It's a prerequisite, I believe, Paris Hierro says, you know, in so many words in the piece that I cite him in, you know, it's not the end in and of itself, multipolarity or, you know, polycentrism, as Samir Amin describes it, but it is a prerequisite for achieving socialist national liberation.

And I think, you know, people need to develop some of that strategic patience and learn from the historical struggles and sacrifices that had been made as well as the contemporary.

And that's sort of how I would respond to those folks.

Yeah, I appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right, so a couple more things.

So one, Black August just ended, which, of course, I didn't even know this was going to be the case when I wrote this question.

But you all have the Black August issue that just came out.

And, you know, I also said that Black August is not really over, in my opinion, because, you know, the Attica anniversaries, I really think about as a part of that.

But you use George Jackson's notion of an international fascist counterrevolution in your piece as well.

And so I wanted to talk a little bit, give you some space to talk a little bit about what you draw from George Jackson's analysis for today's conjuncture.

So George Jackson is really, and how I talk about him in this piece, citing Orosanmi Burton's amazing work as the tip of the spear of revolutionary praxis and also, of course, intellectual, revolutionary intellectual knowledge production.

And I think his, one of the arguments I try to make here is that I don't know if I do it successfully, that we need to center those people who have been at the forefront of these struggles.

in terms of how we understand these oppressive, exploitative structures and systems today, fascism, imperialism, capitalism, not just because we want to uplift those who have made the most sacrifices, But most importantly, because, again, they're, you know, they're producing correct analysis because they are on the front lines.

And that goes with individuals like George Jackson, as it goes with states, you know, like Venezuela, which is not surprising.

I say that they're also at the forefront of fighting global fascism today.

And they have this global anti-fascism parliament that they discuss.

In the piece as well, referencing Vice President Delcy Rodriguez.

So, you know, I think with Jackson, everyone, you know, many people have referenced his analysis and blood in my eye.

um thinking about fascism as a higher form of capitalism um that you know safeguards um monopoly capital during crises um suppressing class struggle and revolutionary consciousness um you know he says of course to understand another point that he makes and I and I also reference nina farnia's excellent work on this too because she really got me to think in different ways about Émile Césaire's point about the boomerang of colonialism.

In Discourses on Colonialism, he describes fascism in Europe as it emerges under Nazis in Germany.

and the Holocaust against Jewish people, that that was the boomerang of colonialism and slavery returning to the metropole.

So the violence enacted elsewhere then eventually comes home.

And something that Nina wrote and, you know, another amazing scholar whose work everybody should be familiar with um is that you know that that that that the boomerang has always been here you know that the fascism has always you know it never it never left the boomerang never left the fascism has always been here This is a settler colonial state built on slavery.

And that's something that, of course, George Jackson said.

He says, understand the reality of our situation.

Understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying who could be saved, that generations more will die or live poor butchered half lives if you fail to act.

And that, you know, that just reminds us that, you know, this especially, and I also bring in Gabriel Rockhill's work here too, you know, to look at fascism as, you know, the flip side of, you know, the same capitalist coin.

You know, you have liberal governance, you know, the nice cops when there's no crisis, when there's no economic crisis.

But the second that, for when I say that, you know, you have liberalism, that doesn't mean, and this is where Jackson comes in, not for racialized, super exploited populations in this country.

You know, it's never been liberal democratic state for black and brown and indigenous populations in this country, working class in particular.

And the prison system, of course, is a specific example of that, as is super exploitation of labor and other forms of political and economic repression.

So, but, you know, for, you know, for the white kind of middle class and upper class and even working class, because of the class compromise, you know, that was made and racial wage, you know, as W.E.B.

Du Bois put it, that, you know, it's during its, you know, that during times of crisis, those policies and practices that are enacted on black and brown communities, working class communities, get enacted on the rest of the population, on the white population as well, and that's where the bad cop comes in.

But it's really important that we understand fascism as systemic, as not an aberration of capitalism, but as systemic and integral to capitalism.

And therefore, you know, we can't sort of fetishize Trump and the liberals at this moment are having a field day because they get to sort of present themselves as the saviors of the moment and fighting fascism without, you know, looking at the ways in which liberalism paves the way for fascism and indeed, you know, works hand in hand in many ways with fascism.

Now, an element of George Jackson's work that is often not recognized even in critical approaches and people who do uplift his work is his focus on international forms of fascism.

And that's something that I wanted to bring out too.

And he says in the book, one of the most definite characteristics of fascism is its international quality.

And so here I kind of bring in the various dimensions of international fascism.

And that includes the attempts, the coups, attempted regime change in Venezuela, also what we've witnessed recently in Syria, which of course is the culmination.

Please read Patrick Higgins, another AISC scholar who has written extensively on the backstory of Syria and the various imperialist interventions over decades that culminated with regime change most recently and the coming to power of HTS, a former supposed enemy that was actually funded and supplied by the US.

So the kind of regime change operations, various forms of hybrid warfare, including sanctions, the tariff wars, the trade wars, all of that is part of it.

And this is really about, again, trying to stabilize capital accumulation in the core, in the core countries at a time when, you know, the system is being threatened severely by the rise of China, by the rise of the BRIC states and the rise, you know, in general of a multipolar world order.

And so, you know, this all, this is why there are, you know, this is why fascism is required now, why the bad cop is required now, because the U.S.

can't sustain um war on on multiple fronts uh it needs to repress dissent at home so that it can continue carrying out these various forms of imperialist intervention abroad um and you know this part of that here is the repression but it's also the lawfare um you know it's the fear mongering so you know the uh Of course, the ICE raids have resulted in mass deportations, but that's also a systemic feature of the racist immigration system in this country.

It's not something that just started under Trump.

We all know Obama was the deporter in chief.

numbers have gone up and the terrorizing of communities is what's most important here too, sending in the brown shirts of today, the ICE are really the brown shirts of today, coming in masked, armed, terrorizing communities.

That's also how you discipline society.

That's how you try to scare people off from mobilizing and organizing.

And doing that so that the home front can be pacified while the imperialist interventions are escalating abroad.

And we're certainly seeing that happen, not just in the form of the genocide, which is the centerpiece of it all, but as you said, Venezuela increasing interventions in Latin America, mobilizing military force around China.

The Ukraine war attempts to destabilize the Sahel Alliance, another really important development in terms of the emergence of a multipolar world order and states that are sovereign, militarily sovereign, and therefore can be, you know, achieve national liberation.

So the connection between domestic fascism and international fascism is one that George Jackson made.

And I think it's really crucial that we remember and honor his legacy, you know, for all kinds of reasons, not just during Black August, but, you know, throughout the year.

And also because it's going to help us to understand this crucial, the critical conjuncture that we're at.

yeah no absolutely george jackson's one of my kind of go-to um go-to theorists to be honest with you but um yeah so we've talked about quite a bit of this as well but there may be a couple other points that you want to raise regarding this and you know i I'm thinking I've been thinking a lot sort of about what is the rights project currently in the US.

And of course, there's certain templates that are out there.

I mean, it's project twenty twenty five.

There's certain ways in which they just sort of tell us what what their project is.

But I think that there are some.

you know, there's some interesting contradictions in it, ways that it doesn't quite make a lot of sense to me, even as I try to put myself in, you know, the shoes of fascists to sort of understand the way that they're thinking, right?

And so there's a few that I just want to kind of run through here and see kind of if your thoughts on kind of linkages here or analysis of it.

And so one is obviously there's a big kind of lean into austerity in a lot of sectors, both in like federal government departments, obviously also things like USAID, like kind of a pullback of soft power aspects.

But also things like the drain on academic research, right?

The cutting off of so many federal grants and the kind of way that that has um you know it's it's kind of interesting you probably have thoughts on this as well folks in universities like there's been austerity pushes in universities for for many years now and um there's a lot of ways in which the kind of zionist counterinsurgency stuff that we're seeing related to universities really dovetails with both kind of right-wing aims, governmental aims, and also a lot of times just the viewpoints of university administrators who have been looking for ways to cut back certain programs, even certain areas of study.

And, you know, so that's all going on on one hand.

You have also, as you've kind of just were talking about, increases in you know, ICE funding and, you know, putting a lot more money into building up a really large ICE, you know, force in the Department of Homeland Security and the kind of confrontations around deportation, you know, this kind of, as you say, like really terrorizing communities through this.

And then also very much connected you have this kind of rhetoric around gangs, around narco-trafficking, right, which is, we were just talking to Venezuela Analysis the other day, but, you know, the way that this is used on one level to sort of demonize someone like Nicolas Maduro, right, on one hand, but also to, you know, kind of render all of these immigrants in the United States even more deportable, trying to connect it with ideas of invasion and also like terrorism right through these kind of ways of sort of even escalating the the removal processes sending people to seco right in el salvador um and obviously haiti in particular has faced a lot of the demonization around gangs as you point out in your piece and you also talk about jamima pierre's work um and um So there's all of that, right?

And there's, there's kind of the, the sort of weird aspects to around, there's a lot of, I mean, a lot of people are losing their jobs in this, you know, time period.

And then part of how this gets part of what the right is saying is like, Oh, well, we're, we're removing all of these undocumented people so that the people that are losing jobs can go to, to those jobs.

Right.

And, um, And then, of course, there's the deployment of the National Guard in D.C.

And I think I saw the other day, maybe yesterday, that they're talking about...

I mean, they've been talking about Baltimore, but it seems like that's what they're going to try, one of the places they're going to try to go next.

And so, I mean, obviously, this is not a future or a present that is livable, right, or that we would want to live in.

But it's also kind of interesting to me in kind of...

just always trying to do this intellectual project of saying what are they what are they actually trying to do with all of these things right I mean there's some of it we could say well it's just sort of red meat to the base of these long kind of racializing projects that have been going on for decades um and and so they're they're sort of giving the people what they want in terms of a sort of of fascist settler kind of base for this stuff but that doesn't I don't think I mean that doesn't really do it for me and I don't think it probably does for you either in terms of an analysis um you know if we're really thinking about a capitalist system and how it imagines itself functioning in a kind of declining uh imperial project and so I'm just kind of curious in any thoughts that you have on that thing I know I just threw a whole bunch of stuff at you but uh you know A lot of good stuff.

Yeah, that was excellent.

Yeah.

A lot of food for thought.

Thanks.

And totally.

I think it's a really important, really, really important question.

And I'm glad that you raised austerity, too.

because austerity seems to be a central aim of all of this.

And when we think even about the attacks on the universities and the defunding, the billions of defunding, and even Colombia, which capitulated to everything.

I don't even think we should use the word anymore of complicity or capitulating.

They're colluding with the fascist ruling class.

And they still got hit with this austerity, these austerity measures.

So in many ways, Zionism, fascism in general, and Zionism, again, as the kind of intellectual, you know, ideological architecture here is being used to justify extreme forms of austerity.

And because, of course, we live in a capitalist, racist system, austerity is always racialized as well in terms of who gets hit the hardest.

And class, right?

Because it's going to be what's happening is that there needs to be a reduction in the social wage in order for the ruling class to continue accumulating to the extent that they have become accustomed to.

And they're not going to raise taxes on the wealthy, of course, and they're not going to force the wealthy to make any kinds of economic sacrifices.

So it's either through imperialist interventions in order to continue the wealth drain from the global majority.

And when that hits a wall, it's self-cannibalizing.

So then you have to start extracting surplus from your own population.

And that's what's happening in Europe because it's the European sort of working class and middle class who are going to pay for this burgeoning military industrial complex with the five percent spending on arms industry, on building up military capacity and arms production.

And here as well, it's going to be on the working class and largely black and brown and indigenous working class who are going to pay for this.

So, you know, and the level of universities, for example, as you pointed out, you know, if we think about austerity, this is, you know, this is being done in the name of fighting anti-Semitism, right?

So, again, making that equation between, the false equation between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and saying, oh, well, it's the...

Problem is we have all of these anti-Semitic students and workers in our universities.

So we need to make these cuts and cut actually people, fire them, suspend, but also make cuts to those institutions that aren't disciplining their students and faculty and staff enough and do it in the name of fighting anti-Semitism.

But in fact, what's happening is a extreme austerity that has been the aim of the neoliberal state for decades and especially gutting public institutions.

So, you know, in the piece, for example, I also talk about Clara, Clara Maté's a book in which she talks about post-World War I Italy and talks about the extreme austerity that was implemented by a liberal government as being the handmaiden of fascism.

So for example, she says how in the early twenties, Mussolini ended up slashing wages by decree and crushed labor unions, increased the rate of exploitation, Unemployment soared from two percent to eleven point three percent, which contributed to the expanding reserve army of labor, while corporate profits more than tripled.

And I think that's what we're going to we're seeing here is that one of the ways and Prabhat Patnaik talks about this a lot, especially in regards to the global south.

that surplus value is extracted and capital is accumulated is through the reserve army of labor.

So the more people who are unemployed or underemployed or working in informal employment, the easier it is to discipline labor.

And that also intersects with Ali Qadri's analysis because wars do something similar.

They also expand the global reserve army of labor and make it easier to discipline labor because people become so vulnerable and just need to work.

So I think that's a really crucial element of it.

And you also brought in some of the discursive dimensions of the current manifestations of fascism, the narco-terrorism, for example, which is being leveled against Venezuela, which is ridiculous.

You know, the biggest narco traffic, traficantes are the Americans, right?

The gringos, the DEA.

We all know that.

This is just a load of BS designed to justify intervention in the same way the war on terror has been mobilized in that way to justify intervention, knowing that the U.S.

is the greatest purveyor of terrorism.

The U.S.

and, you know, its Zionist appendage globally.

So there are new, and gangs is another discourse that's used in the case of Haiti to also normalize intervention as Jimmy Mapier, another brilliant scholar who needs to be on everyone's radar, I'm sure already is, who says, you know, Haiti doesn't have a gang problem.

It has a U.S.

imperialism problem.

And I think that's really a crucial analysis.

So yeah, again, I think it's always important to think about the connections between the war at home and here thinking about fascism and the relationship with extreme austerity and the major, major cuts that are being made as a form of class warfare on the working class here, to food stamps, to housing subsidies, to Medicaid and Medicare.

These are all going to have a huge impact moving forward.

And of course, Trump is claiming that there's going to be this industrial development that, you know, as you were saying, you know, these new jobs are going to be produced, you know, most economists, I was just listening to Michael Hudson, you know, there's so many critical economists out there who say, you know, this is, and Prabhupada's piece I cite as well says, you know, basically, this is a pipe dream, this isn't going to happen.

So what are we going to see?

More accumulation of waste, you know, more genocide.

That's what's what's scary is what is going to happen to these to our surplus populations globally, because we are part of, you know, a global, you know, I understand myself, and I'm sure you do too, as part of this global majority.

And and that that is terrifying but you know as you know and you've had many people on here making this argument people are fighting back and Not just globally, you know, the global majority is okay.

Yeah, that's that's they you know, that's the tip of the spear That that's where the real that's where the revolution is happening but here There is growing resistance, too.

And I was so inspired by what I saw in L.A.

and the fight back against the fascist ICE raids.

People are really organized.

And, you know, in New York also, I think there's a lot that happened, important organizing that came out of the Palestine Solidarity Movement that's there.

that comes out of historical Black and Puerto Rican liberation struggles and indigenous struggles here.

We're building on all of that, those historical legacies and the infrastructure that's been put in place and the organizing ecosystems.

And I'm hopeful that this is a turning moment, that this is a point, a potentially revolutionary context, even in the belly of the beast.

Yeah, no, thank you.

That was a great point to kind of wrap up on or widen down on.

But is there anything else that you wanted to kind of share or say as we prepare to close out?

Yes, actually.

Yeah, I'd just like to uplift some of the organizing work, especially at CUNY where, you know, it's still my community.

They're trying to get rid of me, but I haven't left yet and I'm gonna fight to stay.

And even if I'm not employed, I will always be part of that CUNY community.

And I do want to uplift, I know you mentioned the statement that is now on the AISC website, which is great, and I hope people can sign.

There's also an action letter for the fired four.

That's what we're calling ourselves, including the other three adjuncts.

that the PSE or Union CUNY put out, which I'll share.

And there's an action letter also for Hadika Arzu Malik, who's a CUNY student, who's one of eight who have been suspended.

And she has now been banned from all twenty five CUNY campuses.

She's suspended for a year.

They, you know, for what?

For standing in solidarity with Palestinian liberation and fighting racist police violence.

um and so I'm going to share that as well something the the last point I'd like to make is um uh I've been also part of some formations anti-repression formations which are thinking about ways that we can do defense work that really centers um the politics of what people are being repressed and retaliated retaliated against for because there is a tendency um in some of you know our movement spaces to like and and it comes from a good place to try to maybe water down make people more appealing a common find common denominators um so that people will support defense campaigns and um you know I think that does a disservice um to the movement and to the individuals who have taken risks to fight in these struggles.

So one organization I'm part of called the Sanctuary and Popular University Network, or SPUN, is trying to do just that, center Palestine liberation, supporting resistance against Zionist settler colonial genocide and imperialism, and making connections between fascism at home and global fascism in the form of Zionist, imperialist intervention, militarism and genocide.

And I think that's really the way forward.

And especially because, again, my positionality as an academic in a university, you know, that's where I'm focused on right now in terms of institutional spaces, creating sanctuary and popular university is the way that we materially fight back against the role our institutions play in upholding and reinforcing these racist, violent, oppressive systems and structures.

And we need to bring these struggles together And part of that is also transforming these institutions, getting rid of unjust governance structures.

We should not have board of trustees that represent ruling class interests in a public institution like CUNY.

Abolish the board of trustees, have student worker and community governance of our institutions and make them truly liberatory spaces.

Right on.

No, I'm glad that you're engaged in that.

And that sounds great.

Thank you so much for this.

This has been wonderful.

It's been really good to connect with you and have this discussion today.

Same here.

Thank you so much, Jared.

Thanks again for all the work that you do.

Yeah, no, likewise.

Thank you for the work that you're doing.