Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Capitalism, imperialism and global displacement

By Justin Akers Chacón
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inflatable boat immigrants

First published at New Politics.

Establishment immigration politics in the United States have reached a critical departure, inching towards closer embrace between the Democratic Party mainstream and the Republican far right. The bizarre state of bourgeois capitalist immigration politics reached a series of new lows in 2024. After far-right governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott began to internally deport refugees to so-called “liberal sanctuary cities” like New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles as a form of cruel political theater, Democratic mayors in those cities fell in line in condemning the “immigrant problem” and pursuing punitive measures to curtail and remove refugee populations in their midst.

In March 2024, both Trump and Biden took dueling trips to the border to showcase how they can try to outflank each other from the “farther right” and be more antagonistic towards refugees. The abandonment of inclusive immigrant and refugee rhetoric, and the repositioning towards one singular political voice against migrants and refugees marks a crisis of bourgeois ideology. No longer are there viable solutions to the deep crises of U.S. capitalism and imperialism afflicting society — instead only turns towards expanding the politics of extreme wealth accumulation, state repression, violence towards the vulnerable, and clamping down on the discontented. This politics of degeneration is symptomatic of a larger process taking place within other capitalist nation-states, especially in the imperialist centers of the global economy.

The capitalist politics of displacement and violence have gone international along the seams of the global imperialist system. Neoliberal and neocolonial capitalist restructuring creating extremes of wealth and poverty, trade policy impositions, and international debt inequalities; imperial warfare and neocolonial intervention and occupation, state violence, climate catastrophe, and other forms of political violence are inducing unprecedented dislocation internationally. According to UN estimates, 27.1 million people were made into refugees in 2021, increasing 30% to 35.3 million in 2022, and increasing 330% to 117.2 million more in 2023.1 It is projected that 130 million people will be displaced by the end of 2024, a nearly 500% increase.2

Crisis of capitalism and imperialism are driving system failure globally

The crisis churning out rising displacement is located in the failings of the capitalist system internationally — both in its economic functions and political operations. Capitalism is the predominant mode of production globally and had been initially constructed internationally through European national conquest and accumulation of colonies in Africa, the Americas, and Asia. The colonial foundations of international capitalism determined the method of “development” and “under-development” in which the rich colonizing nations accumulated their “original wealth” and made the leap into “first world” capitalism while most colonized and formerly colonized nations languish in conditions of under-development and combined and uneven development.

The condition of becoming a “developed nation” is bound up with this history of capitalism and engendered through violent means of conquest and extraction that have included and reproduce acts of genocide, settler colonialism, enslavement and forced labor, systems of labor repression and control, formalized policies of racial, gender, and national oppression; and state carceral and police repression.

In the construction of the global order through colonialism, international capitalism further elaborated into the system of imperialism, a stage where hierarchies of the dominant and subsidiary colonial powers aligned and formed rival alliances, or empires.3 Empires formed and developed across the landscape of international capitalism to compete for preeminence in the further accumulation of territory, resources, and labor — and inevitably for the redivision and redistribution of existing colonial holdings through warfare.

Since the era of World War Two, capitalist imperialism has also developed further means to produce “neocolonialism” such as financialization and national debt-shackling, the imposition of “free-trade policies” as a means for economic re-colonization through capital export and predominant foreign ownership, and through real-time and unprecedented scales of global military intervention, armament, and installation. It is here where we locate the system failures generating displacement on an unprecedented scale.

Heightening inequality within and between nations

Twenty-first century capitalism has skewed wealth inequality between nations and within nations to an unprecedented historical level. By 2022 the world’s 10 richest billionaires, owned a combined wealth of $1.448 trillion, a “GDP” greater than the total national wealth of 182 of the current 197 nations of the world.4 By 2024, the capitalist system has produced 2,781 billionaires globally, with a total official net worth of $14.2 trillion. The top 1% now own 43% of all global financial assets. The number of billionaires is growing annually, as well as their individual fortunes, indicative of how they have built their fortunes and expansive control over national economies at the expense of other social classes.

The global rich have taken more nationally-generated wealth than the bottom half of the population in nearly every country in the world. Since 2020, nearly five billion people, 60% of the world’s population, have become poorer.5 By 2023, 24% of the world’s population, 1.9 billion people, lived in “poverty and dire circumstances.”6 World Bank estimates show that a total of 324 million extremely poor people reside in 33 countries classified as fragile and conflict affected, where average per-capita incomes are expected to further decline in years ahead.7 When it comes to wealth distribution between nations, more than two-thirds (69%) of global wealth is held by the “developed nations,” while less than a third can be found in the developing world8 — although 83% of the world’s population lives in “developing countries.”9

The heightening concentration and expansion of wealth at the top of the class structures in each nation is not the result of “individual hard work,” but rather how capitalists have engineered state policy in their favor and at the expense of the global working classes within the nation state. This includes concocting policies within the framework of “neoliberal structural adjustment” to wage class war through the state to erode working-class programs and protections,10 weaken union organization,11 and repress social movements.12

This broad array of class war and counter-reform policies have worked to defund and dismantle equitable tax regimes, social and public welfare, labor guarantees and protections, and other protective and redistributive mechanisms that were gained by the working classes in their respective countries during previous epochs of class struggle — and for which the capitalist ruling class was compelled to pay a larger share. This process is then internationalized through the articulation and imposition of neo-colonial “free-trade agreements” (FTAs), most typically emanating from within imperialist nations and blocs and then implanted into other nations through different means of compulsion.

The capitalist phenomenon of opening FTAs, especially in countries of the global south and the formerly colonized countries, is a neo-colonial strategy to forcibly reassert and restore the domination of international capital over subject nations. Through imperialist state agents imposing new trade policies, corporations and investment bankers are enabled to export capital into once protected or restricted economies of the developing, or formerly colonized nations of the world. Through FTAs, international capital opens, implants, and concentrates investment and ownership over key sectors of the economy and leverages their power within these nations to further shape neoliberal policy development to increase their profits, remake political parties and systems, and otherwise legitimize neo-colonialism into a new orthodoxy.

The implementation of FTAs has been one of the main catalysts of displacement — especially from the formerly colonized and neo-colonized world to the imperialist centers. As capitalist instruments for wealth accumulation, they require structural changes in law that prioritize the rights of capital akin to the those in the imperial center, provoke mass privatization, induce domestic deindustrialization, reward land and wealth concentration, and foment economic re-organization for export instead in the place of production for local exchange, economic, and consummatory needs. Displacement due to neoliberal and neo-colonial restructuring has had some of its most detrimental impact on Caribbean and Latin American nations.

The number of displaced nearly doubled from 8.3 million in 2010 to 16.3 million in 2022, with many moving into neighboring nations or to the United States.13 Over seven million people have been displaced from Mexico coinciding with the staged implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA, now United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement) since 1994. Nearly four million have been displaced from Central America since 2010 and the full implementation of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA).14 Most recently, an estimated 7.3 million Venezuelans have been displaced since 2014,15 although this phenomenon is more attributable to an economic crisis induced by destabilizing U.S. economic sanctions placed on Venezuela to punish that nation for exiting all U.S.-led FTAs and trade regimes in the region in 2006. Haiti, a long and recurrent victim of U.S.-led invasion, occupation, and imperialist meddling, has seen a new wave of mass displacement in recent years. By early 2024, 852,000 Haitians had migrated to the United States, and 141,000 in Mexico,16 especially increasing after the assassination President Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and the subsequent collapse of the nation’s governing institutions installed after the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti in 2004.17

Wherever FTAs have been enforced, sites of struggle and resistance by the popular classes have erupted and flared. State repression of growing social protest and labor movements has taken place in this context, where more authoritarian and repressive measures are deployed against those resisting or opposing these class-based attacks on rights, wages, and programs that maintain or contribute to a standard of living. One study shows that the total number of people incarcerated globally has increased by 25% since 2000, from 9.3 to 11.7 million people, and a third of those are detained without charge or conviction.18 There has been a marked rise in state violence, political violence, social protest and unrest, and other forms of political crisis.19 Displacement occurs in the context of how working-class, indigenous, and oppressed communities within capitalist nation-states successfully or unsuccessfully oppose the state policies that harm or undermine their standard of living. This version of “fight or flight” plays out at some stage and in some capacity in each circumstance of displacement and migration.

Spiking inequality and working-class precarity and social and economic dislocation and displacement has been further exacerbated by perpetuating crises in the global capitalist system, and the growing role of states to bailout the capitalist owners of the economic system using the national treasury to fund and prop up whole industries to sustain their profitability — while leaving working-class and poor people to fend for themselves.20 The dysfunctionality of the global capitalist system, especially since the Great Recession of 2008-10 has also exacerbated and accelerated tensions and fractures within the international imperialist system. This is driving rival imperial state actors to take more aggressive military action to assert their national, regional, and international capitalist interests vis-à-vis their rival counterparts.

Colonial war, inter-imperialist war and displacement

The size and scale of warfare are accelerating in the context of intensifying inter-imperialist conflict and capitalist crisis, reaching 183 documented regional and local conflicts raging in all corners of the globe in 2023. According to a comprehensive study conducted by the International Institute for Strategic Studies:

The intensity of conflict has risen year on year, with fatalities increasing by 14% and violent events by 28% in the latest survey. The authors describe a world “dominated by increasingly intractable conflicts and armed violence amid a proliferation of actors, complex and overlapping motives, global influences and accelerating climate change.21

Colonial and inter-imperialist war accounts for the single largest factor driving displacement. For example, 52% of current refugees worldwide originate from just three countries: Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine. These conflicts are emblematic of how wars of imperialist conquest and re-division are playing out in destabilizing and destroying the capacity for people to be safe and sustained. By 2030, the World Bank estimates that nearly 60% of the world’s extreme poor will live in countries affected by “[economic] fragility, conflict, and violence.”22 This reveals how the current trajectory of capitalist imperialism, expressed through one of its leading institutions, will only intensify the conditions of displacement and migration through war, invasion, and occupation.

The U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 1991 and imposition of a decades-long brutal sanctions regime, and especially again with the second invasion and occupation of 2003, initiated the destabilization of the entire Middle East. The toppling of the Iraqi government, followed by later military interventions across the region from Syria to Libya, generated spiraling waves of war, violence, and mass displacement that have continued to the present. Between 2003 and 2023, over 1.1 million Iraqis remained permanently displaced from their country. Since the subsequent U.S. invasion of Syria in September 2014, a military operation codenamed “Operation Inherent Resolve” to ostensibly fight the Islamic State and to counter rival Russian military intervention on behalf of the embattled Syrian state, an estimated twelve million Syrians have been forcibly displaced from the region.23 U.S.-led intervention between 2015-2019 to back anti-government forces (and to ostensibly fight the Islamic State) in Libya fueled an on-going conflict that has displaced over one million Libyans.

From 2001 to 2021, the U.S. military invaded and occupied the country of Afghanistan over two decades. During that time, the war escalated within the country between the United States and the Afghan forces of the Taliban and spread to all regions. The U.S. government’s war against the Taliban was ostensibly fought to “protect democracy” and “human rights,” but occurred in the context of increasing tensions between the United States and its allies and Russia and China. The U.S. invasion in 2001 took place in the aftermath of the defeat of Russia’s occupation and withdrawal from Afghanistan only 10 years earlier; and amid a period of U.S.-led NATO expansion deeper into the borderlands of Russia and China. Furthermore, the colonial regime installed on behalf of the U.S. occupying force proved to be duly brutal and oppressive, engaging in widespread violations against the population and only holding power at U.S. gunpoint. Over the period of the occupation, 5.9 million Afghans were internally displaced or fled the country.24

The Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine has created an episode of mass displacement of Ukrainians, especially since the full-scale military assault began in February of 2022. Since then, over 14 million Ukrainians, 35% of the population, have been displaced by the war with about 6.5 million refugees fleeing to neighboring countries and the United States.25 The invasion occurred amid escalating inter-imperial rivalry, rising tensions, and the irreconcilability between the regional imperial expansionist ambitions of Putin’s Russia and NATO’s imperial expansionism into the Indo-Pacific region as a means to contain Russia and counter China.

On-going U.S.-led funding and military support for Israel has also been a source of recurring violence and mass displacement in Palestine. Palestinians are also one of the largest displaced populations in the world due to colonial war and has been rapidly accelerating in the recent context of wars of imperial re-division. This began with the British and French occupation and re-division of the region after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, followed by the British Empire’s sponsorship of the Zionist settler-colonial occupation of Palestine and the U.S.-European imperial invention of the colonial “state” of Israel in 1948. This has been followed by 76 years of on-going U.S. and European-funded and supported Zionist-led genocidal campaigns,26 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their lands into the Israeli-occupied territorial fragments of Gaza and the West Bank, and the mass displacement and forced migration of more than six million Palestinian refugees into other nations.

The new imperial scramble for Africa has seen especially the United States, French, British, Russian, and regional allies, fund and back coups, neocolonial wars, and other forms of imperialist intervention and rivalry in different African nations.27 China has become the largest capitalist investor state operating within the African continent,28 while Russia has also expanded its influence through economic partnerships and military intervention through proxy mercenary groups.29 The strategic political and military role of rival imperialist forces and factions have initiated or exacerbated the crises that have also been a major factor of unprecedented displacement of over 25 million people across the continent by 2023,30 and record numbers of refugees seeking relief abroad.31

The mass displacement and migration resulting from the failings of the capitalist system, and the current inter-imperial divisions and conflict driving a new generation of international war, is also expressing itself in the crisis-reconfiguration of bourgeois politics in the imperial centers. Social polarization is driving deeper ideological fissures, the decline of centrism and moderation, and pressurizing substantial shifts to the far-right in mainstream bourgeois politics amid urgent and expedient defense of capital and empire amid significant threats and challenges. In this mire, far-right and fascist parties and movements are seizing upon the crises to weaponize nationalism against their imperial rivals and ratcheting up white supremacist attacks against migrants and refugees. Even as the migrant becomes the object of scorn for racists and imperialists, their exploitation as labor has increased in significance as the means for capitalist accumulation.

The politics and profits of anti-migration

The concentration of ownership in the hands of fewer people who have control over ever-larger sectors of the means of production and the financial sector have enabled the capitalist class to leverage and wield greater and more direct power inside the architecture of the state and its political institutions. Nevertheless, amid growing expressions of class struggle and mass protest,32 the splits and fissures taking place in the global imperial order, and the urgent necessity to prop up the current arrangements and interests of capital, formal politics are being shifted to the right inside capitalist imperialist states internationally.

Within these shifts, the crises of capitalism and attendant weakening of bourgeois ideology have enabled those on the far right of the bourgeoisie and their petty-bourgeois, neo-fascist junior partners to find common ground and push forward into the mix to present their own “solutions.” The surge of far-right forces growing through the cracks in liberal and centrist bourgeois ideology amid economic and political crisis is moving whole political systems further rightward and toward accommodation and approximation with the ascendant far rights.

Far-right and fascist political movements and parties are gaining power across the capitalist and imperialist centers, most notably in France, Germany, Netherlands, and Italy; and are building organizational capacity for social mobilization and political action, orchestrating political violence, and otherwise attempting to reframe a vigorous defense of capital and empire through repression and exclusion of migrants and refugees.33 In the United States, both Democrats and Republicans have increasingly used the state apparatus to exclude, incarcerate, and deport migrants and refugees,34 while the most extreme rightwing state governments like that in Texas are now operating independently of the federal government to block and physically harm refugees.35 Far-right and fascist attacks on migrants (and people perceived to be migrants, especially Latinos) has been climbing in each of the last three years.36 In Europe, a parallel process is also taking place with an increasing annual rate of deportations (including a new strategy of “third nation” deportations), rates of violence against migrants and refugees, and racist political scapegoating.37

The victimization of migrants and refugees also takes place in the context of capitalist crisis and neocolonial and imperialist rivalry and conflict. Displaced peoples are disproportionately classed (or re-classed) as workers through incorporation into the economies of the capitalist and imperialist powers without bestowing citizenship, civil, or labor rights. Displaced workers are also comprising a larger percentage of the working classes in capitalist economies internationally, especially in the imperial capitalist centers due to rising labor shortages.38 For instance, the foreign-born working class accounted for 18.6 percent of the total U.S. labor force, and disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-paid and least union-organized sectors of the economy.39 In Europe, the number is smaller but growing. In 2023, 27.3 million non-citizen migrants were employed in a European Union member economy, representing a total of 6.1% of the population—a rate that has been increasing annually (with the highest national percentages in Germany, Spain, France, and Italy).40

By using the state to keep migrant and refugee workers in a state of social and political vulnerability, the capitalist class can exploit their labor at a higher rate than those integrated as “citizens.” The racist and xenophobic standard of contemporary migration politics are also a tool to foster racial and national divisions within the national working classes, undermining the basis for class consciousness, solidarity, and unity necessary to build or rebuild unions, revitalize and empower labor movements, and group or regroup socialist and anticapitalist political organization.

The historical models of European and U.S. settler-colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism have always depended on maintaining ranks of disenfranchised and vulnerable — and thus more exploitable and disposable — labor across and within borders. If colonialism in its contemporary form can be understood as an arrangement in which the colonizer nation extracts the value of the land, labor, and natural resources of a colonized nation in a zero-sum process in which one side becomes “developed” and the other “under-developed,” so too can we locate a neotype of colonialism within the nucleus of capitalist social relations.

Because of the operational and dependent role of migrant repression as a function of capital accumulation at a time of capitalist crisis and imperialist conflict, there can be no deviation from this pathway inside the ruling bourgeois political parties. The world created by this system is overheating, cracking up, and becoming more dangerous for all of us — but especially so for the enlarging numbers of displaced and marginalized people.

Justin Akers Chacón is an activist, labor unionist, and educator living in the San Diego-Tijuana border region. He is a Professor of Chicana/o History at San Diego City College and the author of No One is Illegal (with Mike Davis), Radicals in the Barrio, and The Border Crossed Us, all from Haymarket Books.

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Back To The White Elephants – The West’s New Development Strategy in Africa

By Farwa Sia
August 12, 2024
Source: ROAPE

China mall on the spintex Road, Accra, Ghana

‘Europe’s new external investment strategy needs to reconnect with historical business models we are going back to white elephants of 1970s – because that’s what partners want.
– G7 official in a speech on Trade and Finance.

‘The era of Western dominance has indeed definitely ended’
– Josep Borrell (2024), High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the European Commission.

On 28 January 2024, three members of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso, announced their withdrawal from ECOWAS. Created in 1974, ECOWAS is a regional economic community serving as a large trading bloc, to enhance the regional integration and economic cooperation of its 15 member countries. The three countries’ decision to leave the trade-bloc so forthrightly, was related to a series of ECOWAS-imposed sanctions on their military governments and the countries’ objection to French influence in the bloc.[2] Long-standing dissatisfaction with the ECOWAS was also an overarching factor; member countries include some of the most resource-rich nations, but on the whole members barely made any progress on socio-economic indicators linked to the ECOWAS promise of prosperity through regional integration.

Political uncertainty in the trade-bloc further deteriorated in mid-February 2024, when the Senegalese President Macky Sall, unilaterally postponed the country’s presidential elections and was later ousted. Faced with such existential challenges, ECOWAS lifted sanctions on Niger and other countries within a month of their imposition. While the potential breakdown of ECOWAS and the general trajectory of some African countries into authoritarianism, may not seem like a radical shift in the continent’s history, the incendiary global context, which compelled ECOWAS to lift sanctions is unprecedented. The neo-colonial drivers of the current crumbling political order in Sudan and the Congo as well as the ongoing genocide in Palestine, indelibly expose the reality that we are entering into an era of naked colonial violence. Backlash to US-centred imperialism is growing. In March 2024, Niger suspended all military relations with the US, citing issues related to US encroachment upon its sovereignty.[3] Embedded in this evolving situation, the episodic and ad-hoc de-linking of Global South countries from Global North countries and their dominance in blocs such as the ECOWAS is representative of a broader shift in Africa’s resistance against political and economic subordination to G7 countries.

Against this background, the Western powers’ new and evolving development strategy in Africa offers important insights into how the G7 countries are failing to register the transformative changes in Africa. [4] In a closed-door speech on investment, trade and finance forum, a G7 official described Europe’s new external investment strategy as one that harkens back to the White elephants of the 1970s. While the speaker was using the term ‘White Elephant’ to signify the EU’s interest in funding hard infrastructure, imbued with a promise of investment and growth for recipient countries, he clearly failed to grasp its meaning. A ‘white elephant’ is an overly expensive infrastructure asset, which fails to generate value for the economy.

Considered in light of the correct definition of the term, the West’s new development strategy does seem to be going towards expensive infrastructure projects, spurred by a reactionary, performative but ultimately imagined competition with China. I make this point through a comparative analysis between the G7s contemporary development strategy vis-à-vis the Chinese development model as it unfolds within the broader demise of US-led imperialism.

Delineating Origins: Historical Imperialism vs. Bipolar World Order

Most comparative literature on Western and Chinese development strategies in Africa, fails to ground the colonial and neo-colonial reality of African development. This central omission engenders a hollow comparison, which ultimately forgoes the question of temporality and the historical nature of a unipolar imperial world order. Centring the agency of African countries entails a historical mapping, which not only connects the past to the present but is also cognizant of when and how path dependencies are ruptured. Three facts are key to any comparative analysis of Western-Chinese competition in Africa.

Firstly, China’s current global developmental model, which can be continuously traced to the early 2000s cannot compare to the 100-year history of European imperialism in Africa. This temporality is central to the analyses, not a mere addendum. This is because Europe never left Africa. Chinese engagement with African countries took place in conjunction with European and Western economic and political interference in the region. China’s rich history of supporting anti-imperialist struggles in Africa as well as leading South-South cooperation initiatives under Mao Zedong have been extensively documented and present a very different vision of development rooted in third world solidarity. [5] However, this historical analysis is completely ignored in most mainstream analysis and China’s engagement with Africa and the Global South since the 2000s is placed on par with the Western imperialist model.

As others have argued more concretely, the notion of imperialism is embedded in a historical structure of global capitalism, which cannot be abstracted and selectively applied to the new bi-polar world (Capasso & Kadri, 2023;[6] Ajl 2024, Yeros 2024). While Chinese investment projects must be subject to scrutiny and critique, the notion, context and nature of imperialism, old and new, must be based on the systemisation of global capitalist extraction. A starting point here is to note that China’s ‘going out’ or external investment strategy emerged in the aftermath of its remarkable achievement of alleviating domestic poverty. The Chinese development experience was thus not predicated on a model of imperial extraction, which has been the modus-operandi of most Western developed nations.

Secondly and aligned with the first point, the nature and scale of Chinese investments in Africa within this short period has been transformational in its focus on infrastructure and emphasis on the systemisation of productive capacities in African countries. The Chinese state-led ‘going out’ strategy, approached development from a holistic perspective, centring productive investment and infrastructure as the key to enabling inter-sectoral and cross-sectoral linkages. This was possible owing to China’s capacity to maintain control over the entire value chain of development: from providing financing through its state banks to the mapping, completion and execution of projects.

This model of development-investment has not been the nature of Western investments, which have largely focused on “soft development” since the late 1990s (explained below). Most importantly, countries categorised as low-income and least developed were considered extremely risky for Western capital and therefore not a desirable investment destination. The huge influx of Chinese investment into these countries in fact addressed this obstacle for Western capital. China’s risk-taking capacity engendered and facilitated other investment strategies. Therefore, the rise of Western infrastructure connectivity projects- such as roads, bridges must be located as derivative of China’s ‘going out’ strategy.

Thirdly and building upon the two points above, while the very purpose of a comparative analysis is to juxtapose differences and similarities between approaches, mainstream analysis a priori assumes an overlap between Chinese and Western development strategies based on a superficial semblance. This assumption can be observed in the equivocation of two very different financing models in journalistic reporting as well as mainstream academic literature. A forced similitude between a neoliberal financing model (US/EU) and a state-led financing model (China) thus reverberates endless confusion as opposed to producing any real analysis. As Samir Amin (2018) reminds us


Deng Xiaoping said that you should start from looking at actual facts. It is exactly what the conventional professional “economists” – all of them, including the Chinese “experts” trained in the USA and brainwashed – do not do. [7]

To overcome this limitation, the analysis must start from comparing the nature of Chinese and Western development strategies.

Calibrating Development and Conditions

A basic definition of ‘international development’ is the financial and technical transfer of resources from some countries to others, to the ends of empowering the latter. While the 1948 Marshall Plan for Europe was premised on the reconstruction and the reorientation of European markets to be better aligned with the hegemony of US capital, the evolution of Western development strategies in the Global South took on a markedly different form. The 1980s was the beginning of this transformative period, whereby Western development strategies and aid models laid an exclusive emphasis on targeting social indicators in Global South countries. Public goods such as health and education were major recipients of soft grants, however, these grants were often conditioned on the implementation of a privatisation roadmap as well as harmonising tools of liberal democracy such as ‘Good Governance’, exclusive funding for initiatives such as transparency, as well as monitoring and reform of electoral processes.

In addition, this financing model remained unaccompanied by investment in public spending, fiscal consolidation to promote developmental policy making, industrialisation in productive sectors and the reform and deepening of the financial sector to achieve financial autonomy. This created an artificial wedge in the very meaning of development: aid-led dependency was designed to separate and prioritise ‘soft infrastructure’ at the expense of ‘hard infrastructure.’ Donor dependency based on the soft development agenda accompanied by a marketization of public goods therefore accelerated the hollowing out of many Global South countries. Privatisation successfully transformed the political model of governance in these countries: converting citizens into consumers.

In contrast, from the very beginning, China’s ‘going out’ strategy in the 2000s was premised on the strengthening and expansion of productive investments and public services, making no artificial distinction between ‘hard’ infrastructure and ‘soft’ infrastructure. The primary focus was on the construction of infrastructure project tools including bridges, hospitals and roads albeit complemented by transfer and sharing of knowledge such as in medical training, civil service training for public bureaucrats and strengthening of public institutions. China’s emphasis on skill development, technology transfer and knowledge sharing is often ignored by most accounts comparing Chinese and Western development strategies. The fact that such knowledge sharing comes outside of the framework of Intellectual Property governance became much more visible after China’s distribution of Covid-19 vaccines to Global South countries during the Covid-19 pandemic. The distribution of vaccines as a public good was also accompanied by humanitarian assistance to some countries, highlighting the necessity of an alternative approach to development especially as western pharmaceutical companies enjoyed quadrupling profits through the sale of their vaccines.

An important and often repeated point of comparison between the Western and Chinese model is the specific nature and role of conditionalities. While the construct of ‘conditionality’ as a necessary requisite for development assistance including grants, concessional flows and technical assistance is explicitly associated with Bretton Woods Institutions and Western bilateral development strategies emerging in the late 1990s, it has deeper roots in colonialism.

Western development strategy has been conditioned towards ensuring that the West remains distant from its historical past: in Africa’s case this essentially means the evasion of the Western countries’ reparative responsibility to African countries. Germany’s agreement to pay reparations to Namibia in 2021 was a historic shift but the modality and actual implementation of these reparations remains contested as some consider it ‘tokenistic’ in nature. Beyond this case, Western development policies, exemplified by the EU have been explicitly conditioned upon Africa’s compliance in enabling the free trade of resources, goods and commodities to the EU whilst simultaneously curbing African migration through the externalisation of European border militarization.

In comparison, albeit without colonial baggage, China’s contemporary development model is also concerned with access to commodities, raw materials and market creation for the absorption of Chinese surplus. However, unlike Western development strategies, this model is not linked to demands for better governance, interest in regime change for better compliance with Chinese investments, the implementation of sanctions and the imposition of penalties when conditions are not met. While select conditions are attached to China’s project procurement and contracts for goods and services as well as in cases of debt restructuring, the pattern which emerges in the impact of these conditions is markedly different from conditions embedded in the West dominated global financial architecture. China’s approach to conditions is largely concerned with ensuring the longevity and guarantee of economic investments and has produced both positive as well as adverse results for Global South countries.

However, these conditions are not egregious enough to immobilise countries, such as those observed in the historical and on-going impact of IMF and World Bank conditionalities. The incompatibility of conditionalities in both Western and Chinese development strategies does not absolve a criticism of China, however it is equally important to ascertain the nature and context of Chinese conditions in Global South countries. The global impact of Western sanctions, rise of Western protectionism and competition between the West and China, in every possible realm has certain repercussions for China including in the realm of multilateralism and debt reform. These need to be carefully researched.

In summary, a comparative analysis between western development strategies and the Chinese development model necessitates rigour in differentiating between the historical and structural origins of their approaches. Western conditionalities have ultimately resulted in the gradual erosion of sovereignty in Global South countries, repressing any avenues of third world solidarity and South-South cooperation. China’s development strategies do not replicate this model.

The new Scramble for Africa: By Whom and How?

The comparative grounds for Western and Chinese development in Africa have gradually taken a new turn through a competing series of infrastructure connectivity models. These models have some variation in their discrete proposals however the aim is to mobilise private finance and invest replacing traditional aid and concessional finance. More importantly, the strategies are traditional alliances between ‘like-minded partners’, including the US, South Korea and Japan. US commercial investors and multilateral development institutions under the auspices of the US-led Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII) ensure the continuation of the failing US-led neoliberal order.

While different models now focus on enhanced coordination between Export Credit Agencies (ECAs) to effectively create an environment for domestic investments to be subsidised through export credits and development financing it is important to note that China’s development model has always combined financing and trade with China’s Eximbank being at the centre of its global investments. The Western turn towards hard ‘infrastructure’, use of export credits for development suggests a superficial emulation of characteristics which mark the Chinese development. This is because beyond cosmetic shapeshifting, the Western corporate sector remains the determinant factor shaping the new development strategies, while the Chinese development model remains state-led under the direction of the Chinese communist party. While China continues to face a combination of different internal and international pressures, the Chinese State supersedes China’s domestic iteration of the private sector. In contrast, vessels like the EU are not simply promoting the interests of the EU private sector but strengthening the private sector of G7 countries to the ends of ensuring the continuation of the US-led neoliberal order.

This is most starkly visible in the EU’s recent attempt to balance its multiple goals of controlling migration through claims to “securing” its borders, supporting the genocide in Gaza and broader colonization of Palestine and partnering with US-aligned Gulf capital to extend neoliberal policies throughout the region. In March 2024, the EU provided a €7.4 billion ($8.06 billion) funding package to Egypt for the period 2024-2027. The EU support complemented the IMF’s expanded $8 billion loan deal with Egypt in the same month and was also complemented by a $35bn investment deal between Egypt and the UAE for developing the Ras al-Hekma peninsula.[8] Egypt is therefore a site for the West’s new unfolding development agenda, which seeks to securitise EU borders against African and Palestinian migrants as the EU and the West continue to support Israel militarily.

As the Western order declines, the EU and developed countries are under pressure to invest and deliver on greater distributional gains, especially when it comes to serving Global South elite interests. From this perspective, China’s developmental model is also not entirely immune to the contradictions of capitalist development. These contradictions must be analysed from the duality of China’s national or domestic experience as well as its external development model. China continues to experiment with select liberalisation and privatisation with an overarching retention of state ownership.

China’s experimentation with Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) on a domestic level[9] and the initiation of PPPs in recipient countries is one such example.[10] Other examples include the nature of Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) investments in Global South countries, China’s adoption of private finance instruments created by Bretton Woods Institutions and China’s role in reforming the sovereign debt architecture. The pressures of operating in a neo-liberal world order, playing on the ‘openness’ of countries, which have free trade agreements with Western markets and integration into the development finance architecture creates a host of issues for China and recipient countries. These issues require scrutiny, critique and reform especially concerning their impact on Global South countries.

A critical approach to Chinese investment also means a concrete understanding of China’s global rise, which initiated as an interplay with the existing hegemonic order but has been subject to China’s vigilance in disciplining its companies and curbing rentierism, both at the national level as well as in its international projects. In 2021, China launched the Global Development Initiative (GDI), which is designed to complement the BRI but embeds a vision of development based on China’s own development experience with an enhanced focus on knowledge sharing, technology transfer and South-South development.[11] The initiative is free of patents and dominance of intellectual property rights and rent seeking. Although it is too early to predict the developmental impact of the GDI, China’s focus on a more communal approach to development, such as in the case of Covid-19 vaccine distribution needs to be contextualised and reflected in the GDI model. China continues to adapt, evolve and regulate its economic rise. Nonetheless, it is ideologically, structurally and materially a different development model, which necessitates engagement on its own terms, even when these terms appear superficially comparable to the development models of traditional imperial powers like the US and the EU.

Conclusion

As Western blocs such as the EU transform into a full-fledged war economy strengthening NATO,[12] proposing the use of its public banks like the European Investment Bank (EIB) to lend to the defence industry[13] as well as exploring the option of a new EU army,[14] it is becoming increasingly clear that the Western constructs of ‘development’, ‘investment’ and ‘security’ can no longer remain in their siloed guises.

This is not merely a turn towards Keynesian warfare – it is a continuation of Western history and a symbol of the West’s political woes, as its countries succumb to domestic fascism. Meanwhile China continues its strategy of deepening the Belt Road Initiative (BRI) at a pace of its own, subject to the contradictions of capitalist development including dealing with issues of problematic projects in recipient countries. The paradigm of development as a comparative ground for Western and Chinese is not external to these formations but embedded within these changes. As detailed above, the grounds for a comparative analysis between the West and China must extend from their historical engagement with Africa to the current situation of escalating violence and the decline of US-led Western order.

African agency between such powers lies in securing the interests of its people through a combination of strategies including stronger criteria for partnerships, de-linking with US-led imperial conduits and an enhanced focus on perpetually increasing its bargaining power through strengthening its domestic productive capacities.

END NOTES

[1] Borrell Josep (2024) Munich Security Conference: the four tasks on the EU’s geopolitical agenda https://www.eeas.europa.eu/eeas/munich-security-conference-four-tasks-eu%E2%80%99s-geopolitical-agenda_en. Josep Borrell, High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy / Vice-President of the European Commission.

[2] The sanctions first implemented on Niger and then applied selectively to Mali and Burkina Faso included trade bans, freezing of financial transactions, closure of borders between the ECOWAS and the three countries as well as travel bans on select individuals.

[3]Al Jazeera (2024) Niger suspends military cooperation with US: Spokesman. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/17/niger-suspends-military-cooperation-with-us

[4] The Group of Seven (G7) is an informal forum that brings together the advanced industrialised economies of Italy, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. The European Union also participates in the group. The G7 is home to 776 million people and the aggregate domestic product (GDP) of G7 member states represents about 30 percent of the global economy.

[5] Yu, G. T. (1977). China and the Third World. Asian Survey, 17(11), 1036–1048. https://doi.org/10.2307/2643352; Mao Zedong (1959) Africa’s task is to struggle against imperialism. Available at the Wilson Centre Archive https://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/mao-zedong-africas-task-struggle-against-imperialism#_ftn0; Taylor, I. (2018) ‘Mao Zedong’s China and Africa’, Twentieth Century Communism, 15, 47+, available: https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A626124559/AONE?u=anon~54c4395&sid=googleScholar&xid=3300da19

[6] Capasso, M., & Kadri, A. (2023). The imperialist question: A sociological approach. Middle East Critique, 32(2), 149–166 ; Ajl, M. (2024). Palestine’s Great Flood: Part I. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 13(1), 62-88. https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760241228157; Yeros, P. (2024). A World Will Only Be Possible by the Intervention of the “Sixth Great Power”. Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 13(1), 14-40. https://doi.org/10.1177/22779760241230679

[7] Samir Amin (May 2018) – Financial Globalization: Should China move in? Defend Democracy press. https://www.defenddemocracy.press/22137-2/

[8] New Arab News (2024) Egypt economic crisis: What is Ras al-Hekma and why is Cairo ‘selling it’ to UAE? https://www.newarab.com/news/egypt-economy-what-ras-al-hekma-cairo-selling-uae

[9] Lydia Jones & Michael J. Bloomfield (2020) PPPs in China: Does the Growth in Chinese PPPs Signal a Liberalising Economy? New Political Economy, 25:5, 829-847, DOI:10.1080/13563467.2020.1721451

[10] China South Global Project (2024) China Could Fund Kenyan Rail Through Public-Private Partnership: Kenyan President https://chinaglobalsouth.com/2023/12/19/china-could-fund-kenyan-rail-through-public-private-partnership-kenyan-president/

[11] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of China (2022) Jointly Advancing the Global Development Initiative and Writing a New Chapter for Common Development. https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/eng/zxxx_662805/202209/t20220922_10769721.html

[12] Somdeep Sen, NATO and the global colour line, International Affairs, Volume 100, Issue 2, March 2024, Pages 491–507, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiae012

[13] Euractiv (2024) EIB ready to ‘stretch’ lending criteria as it prepares for EU Council’s call to arms https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/eib-ready-to-stretch-lending-criteria-as-it-prepares-for-eu-councils-call-to-arms/

[14] Defensenews (2024) EU member countries push back on Italy’s call for European army https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/02/05/eu-member-countries-push-back-on-italys-call-for-european-army/
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Where California Goes, There Goes the Nation

August 13, 2024
Source: Tom Dispatch

Image by Richard Cole, https://x.com/PlebRickCartoon

California Governor Gavin Newsom appears to be taking climate change seriously, at least when he’s in front of a microphone and flashing cameras. His talk then is direct and tough. He repeatedly points out that the planet is in danger and appears ready to act. He’s been called a “climate-change crusader” and a leader of America’s clean energy revolution.

“[California is] meeting the moment head-on as the hots get hotter, the dries get drier, the wets get wetter, simultaneous droughts and rain bombs,” Newsom typically asserted in April 2024 during an event at Central Valley Farm, which is powered by solar panels and batteries. “We have to address these issues with a ferocity that is required of us.”

These are exactly the types of remarks many of us wish we had heard from so many other elected officials addressing the climate disaster this planet’s becoming, the culprits behind it, and how we might begin to fix it. True, Big Oil long covered up internal research about how devastating climate change would be while lying through its teeth as its officials and lobbyists worked fiercely against any kind of global-warming-directed fossil-fuel legislation. It’s also correct that the issue must be addressed immediately and forcefully. Yet, whatever Governor Newsom might say, he’s also played a role in launching a war on rooftop solar power and so kneecapping California just when it was making remarkable strides in that very area of development.

Consider California’s residential solar program (its “net-metering“), which the governor has all but dismantled. Believe it or not, in December 2022, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) voted 5-0 to slash incentives for residents to place more solar power on their homes. Part of the boilerplate justification offered by the CPUC, Newsom, and the state’s utility companies was that payments to individuals whose houses produce such power were simply too high and badly impacted poor communities that had to deal with those rate increases. They’ve called this alleged problem a “cost-shift” from the wealthy to the poor. It matters not at all that the CPUC, which oversees consumer electric rates, has continually approved rate increases over the years. Solar was now to blame.

It’s true that property owners do place those solar power panels on their roofs. What is not true is that solar only benefits the well-to-do. A 2022 study by Lawrence Berkeley Labs showed that 60% of all solar users in California then were actually low- to middle-income residents. In addition, claiming that residential solar power is significantly responsible for driving the state’s electricity rates up just isn’t true either. Those rates have largely risen because of the eternal desire of California’s utility companies to turn a profit.

Here’s an example of how those rates work and why they’ve gone up. Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E), whose downed power lines have been responsible for an estimated 30 major wildfires in California over the past six overheating years, was forced to pay $13.9 billion in settlement money for the damage done. The company has also been found guilty of 84 felony counts of involuntary manslaughter for deaths in the devastating 2018 Camp Fire in Butte County. In response to those horrific blazes and the damages they inflicted, the company claims it must now spend more than $5.9 billion to bury its aging infrastructure to avoid future wildfires in our tinder-box of a world. Watchdog groups suggest that it’s those investments that are raising electric bills across the state, not newly installed solar power.

In short, large utilities make their money by repairing and expanding the energy grid. Residential solar directly threatens that revenue stream because it doesn’t rely on an ever-expanding network of power stations and transmission lines. The electricity that residential solar power produces typically remains at the community level or, better yet, in the home itself, especially if coupled with local battery storage. Not surprisingly then, by 2018, 20 transmission lines had been canceled in California, mainly because so many homes were already producing solar power on their own rooftops, saving $2.6 billion in total consumer energy costs.

A recent Colorado-based Vibrant Clean Energy analysis confirmed the savings rooftop solar provides to ratepayers. Their report estimated that, by 2050, rooftop panels would save California ratepayers $120 billion. That would also save energy companies from spending far more money on the grid (but, of course, that’s the only way they turn a profit).

“What our model finds is that when you account for the costs associated with distribution grid infrastructure, distributed energy resources can produce a pathway that is lower cost for all ratepayers and emits fewer greenhouse gas emissions,” said Dr. Christopher Clack of Vibrant Clean Energy. “Our study shows this is true even as California looks to electrify other energy sectors like transportation.”

However, such lower costs also mean less profits for utility companies, so they have found an ingenious workaround. They could appease climate concerns while making a bundle of money by building large solar farms in the desert. In the process, nothing about how they generated revenue would change, energy costs would continue to rise, and little would stand in their way, not even a vulnerable forest of Joshua trees.

Solar Panels vs. the Joshua Tree

“Why Razing Joshua Trees for Solar Farms Isn’t Always Crazy,” a troubling Los Angeles Times headline read. Sammy Roth, an intrepid environmental reporter who has written insightfully and cogently on the way humanity is altering the climate, was nonetheless all in on uprooting thousands of Joshua trees in California’s Kern County to make space for that giant solar farm. The “Aratina Solar Project,” a sprawling 2,300-acre installation in the heart of the Mojave Desert, would transfer electricity to wealthy coastal areas, powering more than 180,000 homes. As Roth reported, “There are places to build solar projects besides pristine ecosystems. But there’s no get-out-of-climate-change-free card… Hence the need to accept killing some Joshua trees in the name of saving more Joshua trees. I feel kind of terrible saying that.”

He should feel terrible. Roth believes that tearing up Joshua trees, already in great jeopardy due to our warming climate, is the price that must be paid to save ourselves from ourselves. But is sacrificing wild spaces — and, in this case, also threatening the habitat of the desert tortoise — truly worth it? Is this really the best solution we can come up with in our overheating world? There do appear to be better options, but they would also upend the status quo and put far less money in the pockets of utility shareholders.

Here’s how Californians could think outside the box or, in this case, on top of it. A single Walmart roof averages 180,000 square feet. In California, there are 309 Walmarts. That’s 55,620,000 square feet or 1,276 acres of rooftop. Home Depots? There are 247 of them in California and each of their roofs averages 104,000 square feet, totaling 25,668,000 square feet, or around 589 acres. Throw in 318 Target stores, averaging 125,000 square feet, and you have over 39,750,000 square feet or another 912 acres. Add all of those up and you have 2,777 acres of rooftops that could be turned into mini-solar farms.

In other words, just three big box stores in California cities ripe for solar power would provide more acreage than the 2,300-acre Joshua-tree-destroying solar installation in Kern County. And that doesn’t even include all the Costcos (129), Lowes (111), Amazon warehouses (100+), Ikeas (8), strip malls, schools, municipal buildings, parking lots, and so much more that would provide far better options.

You get the picture. The potential for solar in our built environment is indeed enormous. Throw in the more than 5.6 million single-family homes in California with no solar panels, and there’s just so much rooftop real estate that could generate electricity without wrecking entire ecosystems already facing a frighteningly hot future.

In 2014, it was estimated that solar power from California homes produced 2.2 gigawatts of energy. Ten years later, that potential is so much greater. As of summer 2024, the state has 1.9 million residential rooftop solar installations capable of churning out 16.7 gigawatts of power. It’s estimated that 1 gigawatt can conservatively power 750,000 homes. This means that the solar generation now installed on California’s roofs could theoretically, if stored, power 12,525,000 homes in a state with only 7.5 million of them. Already, in 2022, it’s believed that the state wasted nearly 2.3 million megawatt-hours worth of solar-produced electricity.

And mind you, this isn’t just back-of-the-napkin math. A 2021 geospatial analysis of rooftop solar conducted by researchers at Ireland’s University of Cork and published in Nature confirmed what many experts have long believed: that the U.S. has enough usable rooftop space to supply the entire country’s energy demands and, with proper community-based storage, would be all we would need to fulfill our energy production demands — and then some! If properly deployed, the U.S. could produce 4.2 petawatt-hours per year of rooftop solar electricity, more than the country consumes today. (A petawatt-hour is a unit of energy equal to one trillion kilowatt-hours.) The report also noted that there are enough rooftops worldwide to potentially fully feed the world’s energy appetite.

If residential solar has succeeded exceptionally well and has so much possibility, why are we intent on destroying desert ecology with massive, industrial-scale solar farms? The answer in Gavin Newsom’s California has much more to do with politics and corporate avarice than with mitigating climate change.

Profit-Driven Utilities

Despite what Governor Newsom and the California Public Utilities Commission have claimed, electric rates have increased not because of solar power’s massive success but because of old-school capitalist greed.

“Rooftop solar has value in avoiding costs that utilities would have to pay to deliver that same kilowatt-hour of energy, such as investments in transmission lines and other grid infrastructure,” reports the solar-advocacy group, Solar Rights Alliance. “Rooftop solar also reduces the public health costs of fossil-fuel power plants and the costs to ratepayers of utility-caused wildfires and power shut-offs. Rooftop solar also provides quantifiable benefits through local economic development and jobs. It preserves land that would otherwise be used for large-scale solar development. When paired with batteries, rooftop solar helps build community resilience.”

Nonetheless, blaming rooftop solar for California’s increased electricity rates has been a painfully effective argument. So, here’s a question to consider: Why does it seem like Newsom is working on behalf of the utilities to limit small-scale rooftop solar? Could it be related to the $10 million Pacific Gas & Electric donated to his campaigns since he first ran for office in San Francisco in the late 1990s? Or could it be because key members of his cabinet are tight with PG&E executives? (Dana Williamson, his current chief of staff, was a former director of public affairs at PG&E.)

Then, consider the potential conflict of interest when the law firm O’Melveny & Myers, which previously worked for PG&E, was tasked by Newsom with drafting wildfire legislation to save the company from bankruptcy. PG&E would, in fact, end up hammering out a deal with CPUC to pass on the costs of the bailout, a staggering $11 billion, to ratepayers over a 30-year period.

It all worked out well for the company. In 2023, PG&E, which serves 16 million people, raked in $2.2 billion in profits, nearly a 25% jump from 2022.

“The coziness between Gavin Newsom and [PG&E] is unlike anything we’ve seen in California politics… Their motive is profit, which is driven by Wall Street,” says Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of California Solar & Storage Association, who has over a decade of experience monitoring the industry. “[The utility companies] have to keep posting record profits, quarter after quarter. It’s a perversity that nobody is really thinking about.”

It’s pretty simple really. Growth means more money for California’s utilities, so they’ve gone all in on expansive and destructive solar farms. Ultimately, this means higher bills for consumers to cover the costs of a grid they are forced to rely on as home solar systems become increasingly expensive.

(More) Bad News for the Climate

Newsom’s war on rooftop solar has had another detrimental impact: it’s threatened the state’s clean energy goals. And the governor hasn’t said a word about that. The California Energy Commission estimates that, to meet its climate benchmarks, the state must add 20,000 megawatts of rooftop solar electricity by 2030. At this pace, they’ll be lucky to install 10,000 megawatts. With such a precipitous decline in home solar installations, the 20,000 megawatts goal will never be reached by that year, even when you include all large-scale solar developments now in the works.

The Coalition for Community Solar Access estimates that 81% of solar companies in the state fear they’ll have to close up shop. Bad news for the solar industry also means bad news not just for California, the nation’s leader in solar energy production, but for the climate more generally.

A rapid decline in new solar installations also means massive job losses, possibly 22% of the state’s solar gigs, or up to 17,000 workers. In addition to such bleak projections, disincentivizing rooftop solar will also hurt the Californians most impacted by warming temperatures and in need of relief — those who can’t afford to live along the state’s more temperate coast.

“Rooftop solar is not just the wealthy homeowners anymore,” State Senator Josh Becker, a San Mateo Democrat, recently told CalMatters. “Central Valley people are suffering from extreme heat. The industry has been making great strides in low-income communities. This [utilities commission decision] makes it harder.”

The slow death of new residential solar installations is likely to mean that most of California’s electricity will continue to be made by burning natural gas and sending more fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. All of this may also be a sign that rooftop solar across the country is in peril. Utility companies and those hoping to gut residential solar programs in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina are already humming Newsom’s “cost-shift” tune.

“They [the big utilities] know it’s a pivotal time,” Bernadette Del Chiaro tells me, with a sense of urgency and deep concern for what lies ahead. “They are fighting really hard, and they are fighting hardest in California because where California goes, there goes the nation.”
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Israel’s Second War
August 13, 2024
Source: Jacobin

Image from Creative Commons 3.0

The coming weeks will be pivotal in determining whether the current regional war in the Middle East will increase in intensity. Israel has agreed to resume cease-fire negotiations on August 15, just over two weeks after it assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, Hamas’s political leader and chief negotiator, in Tehran, and Fuad Shukr, one of the founding members of Hezbollah’s armed wing, in Beirut. Both Iran and Hezbollah have vowed to respond to Israel’s attacks.

Fearing escalation, the United States, Qatar, and Egypt put forth a statement pushing for a new round of negotiations after Western diplomats reportedly pushed for a potential comprehensive agreement to end the war in Gaza. The deal would include a cease-fire, an Israeli withdrawal from Gaza, and a prisoner swap between Israel and the Palestinian resistance factions. The deal would also prioritize humanitarian needs by increasing aid to Gaza and developing a robust plan for rebuilding the infrastructure devastated by years of conflict.

Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the US-Qatar-Egypt statement by confirming that he will continue negotiations on August 15. Yahya Sinwar, who replaced Haniyeh as the chairman of Hamas’s political bureau, called on the mediators to propose a plan to force Israel to implement the deal to which the organization, based on proposals by President Joe Biden, agreed in late May. Additional rounds of negotiations, Hamas’s representatives said, would “provide the occupation time to continue perpetuating the war of genocide against our people.” It is unclear whether the party will send its representatives to negotiations on August 15. It is, however, clear that Hamas no longer believes that Israel is at all serious about ending the war.

Like Biden, Kamala Harris has made statements critical of Israel’s actions and has even gone as far as to call for an immediate cease-fire. But she has avoided applying any serious pressure on Netanyahu’s government, to which the United States has agreed to send an additional $3.5 billion in military aid to be spent on American-made equipment.

In the months immediately after October 7, Netanyahu experienced a significant drop in support. However, more recent polls show him to be more popular than Benny Gantz, who resigned from the government in mid-June in opposition to Netanyahu’s refusal to accept the deal proposed by Biden in late May, which would have ensured a cease-fire and release of Israeli hostages. Netanyahu’s recalcitrance seems to have won, rather than lost him support among the Israeli public. Under these conditions, it seems there is little reason to expect that this round of negotiations will be any different from previous ones, which have consistently been obstructed by Israel.

Since June, Israel has signaled that the war on Gaza would soon enter a “less intense phase,” characterized by targeted attacks aimed at preventing Hamas from regrouping. However, despite Israel’s continued massacres, including a recent attack on a school sheltering displaced people in Gaza City that claimed over one hundred Palestinian lives, Hamas’s operations against Israeli soldiers within the strip have persisted. The appointment of Sinwar — who unlike Haniyeh is based in Gaza rather than Qatar — as head of Hamas’s political bureau and the architect of the October 7 attacks sends a clear message that the movement is prepared to continue the fight, if Israel refuses to accept a cease-fire.

Iran, which insists on its right to defend its sovereignty, following the assassination of Haniyeh in Tehran, has also indicated its potential willingness to scale back its response if that contributes to the end of Israel’s onslaught against the Palestinian people. The newly inaugurated president of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, told his French counterpart that the United States and Europe must urge Israel to accept a truce in Gaza to reduce tensions. But it remains unknown whether an Iranian military response will take place and, if so, what its scope would be. Iran has spent the days following the assassination of Haniyeh in extensive talks with allies, partners, and diplomatic mediators, possibly negotiating the acceptable contours of a response that would reestablish deterrence with Israel without risking regional escalation.

Hezbollah has also remained tight-lipped about the specifics regarding the timing, scope, and intensity of its anticipated response to Shukr’s assassination. The media is rife with speculation, fueled in part by Hezbollah’s secretary-general, Hassan Nasrallah, who in his latest speech confirmed that a response was imminent. A Lebanese newspaper close to Hezbollah, however, did report that the party may target Tel Aviv as part of its response. But Nasrallah has deliberately kept his comments vague, leaving it unclear whether the response would be a coordinated effort involving other factions within the resistance axis or a solo operation by Hezbollah. Uncertainty surrounding Hezbollah’s actions, Nasrallah emphasized, is itself a component of the party’s response.

Nevertheless, as Iran and Hezbollah carefully choose what they believe the correct time and target for their retaliatory attacks to be, neither will ultimately decide whether the war expands. In contrast to Iran and Hezbollah, Israel has not only the potential but an interest in expanding the ongoing war. This is why the United States is reportedly preemptively urging Israel to “limit its response” before Tehran and Hezbollah have even made a move.

At least in its public statements, the United States does not seem to be worried about a war breaking out between Iran and Israel. The deputy Pentagon press secretary, Sabrina Singh, has recently said in an off-camera press briefing that while the United States has moved military assets to the region “to project a message of deterrence,” the Pentagon did not believe that an expansion of the war is “imminent.”

But this does not necessarily mean that these projections map out to the situation between Lebanon and Israel. While a major Iranian attack on Israel might help to reestablish mutual deterrence between the two, it does not necessarily follow that an attack from Hezbollah, which has been at war with Israel since October 8, would have the same effect.

Israel’s objectives regarding Iran have not changed since before October 7. Israel seeks to undermine any progress Tehran can make in normalizing relations with the West and prevent a nuclear deal akin to the one brokered by Barack Obama and rescinded by Donald Trump, which would lift US sanctions in exchange for abandoning development of a nuclear weapons program. These are concrete aims that can be realized without an escalation into a direct conflagration.

For Hezbollah, the stakes are different. In the few days that followed Hamas’s attack on October 7, the Israeli cabinet seriously considered conducting a preemptive attack on Lebanon. Shortly after Hamas and other members of the Palestinian resistance attacked Israel, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) dispatched three divisions — one division contains between ten thousand and twenty-five thousand troops — to the northern border, terrified of the prospect of an invasion on a second front. One division commander reported that had Hezbollah chosen to invade, “we would have managed to stop them only at Haifa,” twenty-six miles south of the Lebanese border. According to some sources, it was only a last-minute intervention from the Biden administration that halted Israel’s preemptive attack.

Fear of having a repeat of October 7 from the north, along with the vulnerability of Israel’s northern settlements to Hezbollah, which has forced over seventy thousand Israelis to evacuate, continues to influence Israel’s calculations. Were Israel to succeed in its stated objectives — defeating Hamas and normalizing relations with the Arab states — they would, alongside whatever form the Palestinian resistance takes, have to contend with the presence of a massive, highly trained, and heavily armed military organization on its borders. This is why Israel considers the war with Hezbollah inevitable, if not imminent.

Furthermore, it is unclear whether Iran would necessarily get involved if Israel were to escalate its war with Lebanon. Hezbollah leadership has mentioned before that they would not require Iranian involvement if such a war were to take place. This could mean that Netanyahu may still be planning to take up the opportunity to channel his army’s resources away from Gaza and toward Lebanon, as he was planning in June, without necessarily risking an all-out war with Iran.

While Israel has systematically attacked Hezbollah’s military leadership through targeted assassinations over the last ten months, which has likely weakened the strategic capabilities of the party, these have not affected Hezbollah’s massive arsenal, nor the tens of thousands of highly trained fighters it can deploy. Similarly, these assassinations have done little to influence the internal refugee crisis in the north of Israel and have instead exposed the limitations of the Iron Dome defense system. While the war has led to the internal displacement of around ninety-eight thousand residents of the southern Lebanese border villages and towns, Israel has had to evacuate ninety thousand of its citizens from northern settlements.

Itzhak Brik, a retired Israeli major general, has described a potential war on Lebanon as “collective suicide.” He points out that the Irone Dome has been failing to intercept unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), rockets, and missiles for months, urging the Israeli establishment to recognize that the IDF has not prepared for dozens of daily missiles, let alone the thousands estimated to shower Israel daily if an all-out war were to break. Israel estimates that Hezbollah has between one hundred fifty thousand and two hundred thousand missiles and rockets, while Iranian sources estimate almost a million. The real amount surely lies somewhere between the two.

There is no doubt that Lebanon would suffer devastating destruction, especially in the south, the Beqaa Valley, and the southern suburbs of Beirut were it to engage in a full-scale war with Israel. However, what would be different this time around is that Israel would suffer a similar degree of devastation.
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