“Capital Is Not a Thing”: The Legal System’s Pre-Distribution of Economic Power

David S. D’Amato

 July 15, 2026

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

The popular political discourse frequently presents the idea that redistribution happens or can happen after markets yield conditions of inequality. But this narrative is fundamentally mistaken and misleading. Redistribution begins before firms, markets, or competition exist at all, because the legal concepts we use themselves confer economic value and they do so unevenly. The legal coding of capital acts as a distribution mechanism, routing economic value upward to the extremely rich.

Capitalism is not ultimately defined by exchange through markets, economic competition, or even property. Though it contains these elements, other systems have likewise included them. Capitalism depends on a suite of special legal attributes for capital. More precisely, capitalism is a system in which the state and the law define what is and can be capital in terms of the legal qualities created for and attached to it. As legal scholar Katharina Pistor writes, “Capitalism, it turns out, is more than just the exchange of goods in a market economy; it is a market economy in which some assets are placed on legal steroids.”

Professor Pistor argues that “capital is not a thing, but a quality, although most [economists] don’t know it yet.” Within this insight is the essential task of shifting our attention from the owners of capital to what makes something capital in the first place. The idea of capital as a quality and not a thing troubles some of the core assumptions of standard economic narratives. An economist might say that land plus labor and savings yields capital. Pistor’s argument is that in fact, an asset transforms into capital when the state, through the law, imbues it with certain powers and rights. It is decidedly not a question of protecting existing wealth, but of changing the social ontology and the real-world relationships of power.

The law determines whether an asset or an organization can survive forever, whether an asset can serve as collateral, whether a claim has priority over a competing one, whether there is personal liability for tortious conduct, whether an asset will generate monopoly rents, whether ideas can be private property, and whether and when there are particular legal protections and causes of action, etc. The state creates new forms of economic power that are kept beyond the reaches of ordinary people and the types and scales of property available to them. Thus is capital legally constituted wealth.

Capitalism is not only an economic system, and the power of capital within this system is not only economic power. It is an instantiation of state power. It is a system constituted by political and legal power in order to code selected organizations and asset categories with asymmetrical and differential capacities. The kinds of accumulation and inequality we find today are only possible within this framework. The state doesn’t ever merely “intervene” in the capitalist system, which is always already a system of both production and government. The state defines the concepts and categories through which this system operates, conferring power and privilege “by subtler chains than of old.” There is never an economic sphere that has an existence independent of political authority. The state creates and empowers the legal concepts determining the parameters of property, capital, contract, corporate structure, securities, lending and money, etc., and it selectively attaches different powers and prerogatives to each.

In this way, Pistor’s work bears a resemblance to Ellen Meiksins Wood’s account of capitalism. Wood argues that although our social system recognizes a difference between the political and the economic spheres, this kind of neat distinction is only possible because the foundational and constitutive work of political power has already been completed. The distinction itself is historically produced, and the political work (for example, using the law to push farmers off of their land, then consolidating and enclosing that land) recedes with surprising speed into the background of daily social life. Productive life within capitalism may then seem to take place and unfold independently from the political world, even as all of its concepts and institutions rest on political power.

Pistor’s work thus also presents a diagnostic argument remarkably similar to that of American individualist anarchists like Ezra Heywood. She says, “Capitalism empowers private actors to use critical social resources—the law and the money system, to list only the most obvious—to build private wealth and power at the exclusion of others, and with little accountability of those who have amassed this power over others they seek to control.” We take for granted the ruling class’s claim that the extreme structural inequalities of the present are natural features of a liberal society and a free market economy, yet even the billionaires feel comfortable admitting that we don’t have a free market of any kind.

Heywood argued that in fact “the natural laws of value and exchange condemn speculative increase.” We don’t know, because we’ve never tried anything but a political economy granting massive amounts of wealth and special legal position to large-scale masses of capital—precisely because, as Heywood also pointed out, property, wealth, and capital don’t naturally grow and accumulate, but “tend[] to diffusion and decay.” A system in which capital grows itself by itself is not possible absent the coercive power of the state. Heywood understood that without the continuous support of government, massive concentrations of capital would wither through physical depreciation in various forms, reduction and division through the generations, and true competition in the market. The concentrations of capital we have in the system today require enormous investments of “public” money and exemptions from rules everyone else must play by.

We can observe how the law’s coding of capital inoculates it at every stage and scale, and how this process leads to crisis. The monopolies and extremes of consolidation and concentration we find today are the sure results of this system: in the capitalist political economy, the larger companies consume their competitors and build legal and regulatory moats to protect their space from competition. That is, capitalism entails the destruction or preclusion of free markets. This is not at all surprising to anyone who has studied or experienced this system, but we are nonetheless compelled to accept the constant equating of capitalism with real, substantive economic freedom. Heywood did not oppose industry or trade, only the idea that wealth should enjoy an arbitrary legal right to increase itself without work. Elsewhere he writes,

Thus, by the perpetual value and increase allowed money, capitalists acquire a kind of supernatural power over laborers; so that a man of one generation can tax all future generations with the support of his offspring; and interest is the golden chain which binds the Prometheus industry, in order that vultures of moneyed aristocracy may feed on its vitals.

The system of capital aggrandizement undertakes redistribution less through visible and explicit subsidies (though these are crucial) than through the ordinary functioning of legal and economic concepts and institutions. Because the political-economic choices are there, but embedded in law, the system performs an alchemical transformation, making contingent privileges appear as natural rights or features of a free market. This successfully hides the system’s consequences for distribution and inequality and its political nature and origin. In short, it is a masterwork of the ruling class.

If the state wanted to give a direct subsidy of $250 million to a particular firm or industry, it would, in theory at least, have to pass through a normal appropriations process, ostensibly with hearings, detailed budgets, and discrete goals. It would be visible and politically contestable, even if only in a ceremonial or pro forma sense. But much greater transfers have been and continue to be achieved through subtler means that do not appear as transfers, baked into the system’s code, in Pistor’s terms.

If such effects can be accomplished through opaque legal doctrines around business organizations, intellectual property, creditor and debtor relationships, the tax system, banking and financial services, and securities, among many other areas (the list is always growing by design), then many of the most decisive transfers of substantive power and wealth can appear as both pre-political and pre-economic. They disappear entirely from the public or social consciousness.

Discussing “the transformation of private law after 1790,” legal scholar David Sugarman contended that “subsidisation through technical legal doctrine mystified the underlying political choices. It avoided spreading the cost over a wider segment of society and the more open public discussion and scrutiny that would have resulted if development had been encouraged by direct taxation.” This is part of how it is possible for the capitalist system to masquerade as a meritocratic free market. The state can distribute economic opportunity, bargaining power, and returns through juridical means no less than fiscal ones. It has many tools and continues to reconstitute economic hierarchies through complex and inaccessible privileges to capital. From the perspective of the capitalist and his counselors, the best subsidy is one that fades away into the background of the legal system itself, disappearing as a permanent feature of its design.

This system will be impenetrable and unchangeable for as long as we assume the truth of its concepts and categories. In treating capital as an object or thing, rather than as a kind of relationship produced by the force of law, we allow massive acts of economic pre-distribution to capital to pass as the neutral working of a free economy. Capitalism is a political and juridical system more than and before it is an economic one. If we can’t see the source code, we can’t mount a serious challenge to this political and economic system.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.

 

Turkey at the Crossroads of Hegemonic Crisis and Semi-Peripheral Politics

Geopolitical Reordering in the Middle East and the Limits of Transition within Global Capitalism

By Majid Maleki Meighani

July 13, 2026

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Image supplied by Majid Maleki Meighani

Abstract

This article examines Turkey’s geopolitical position through the lens of world-systems theory, drawing on the Marxist theory of imperialism. Its central argument is that Turkey, as a semi-peripheral power, is attempting to strike a fragile balance between structural dependence on the core centers of global capital and its drive to expand regional influence, all under conditions of a multidimensional crisis of U.S. hegemony.

Turkey is neither a core power in the world system nor a peripheral state simply subject to the will of the great powers. It occupies an in-between position: on one hand, it possesses considerable industrial, military, and geopolitical capacity; on the other, it remains dependent on foreign capital, technology, global markets, and financial networks dominated by the centers of capitalism.

The article shows that Turkish foreign policy cannot be explained solely through traditional geopolitical concepts. That policy has taken shape in conjunction with domestic political economy, the pattern of capital accumulation, shifting class alliances, and Turkey’s place in the global division of labor. From this vantage point, the article examines the role of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), the Anatolian bourgeoisie, export capital, and networks of state-linked business in the reconstruction of Turkish political and economic power.

From military interventions in Syria and Libya to the “Turkic World” project and rivalry in the Caucasus, Turkey’s regional policy forms part of an effort to raise the country’s standing within the hierarchy of global capitalism. Yet Turkey’s experience shows that the crisis of American hegemony does not necessarily lead to liberation from the existing order, or to the emergence of a more just one — it can instead produce competition among powers that themselves operate within the very logic of capital accumulation, geopolitical rivalry, and spheres of influence.

1. Introduction: Hegemonic Crisis and the Return of Regional Power Rivalry

American hegemony after the Second World War rested on three main pillars: economic and financial supremacy, military power, and the capacity to produce ideological legitimacy. The Bretton Woods system, the dominance of the dollar, international financial institutions, the NATO alliance, and the spread of market liberalism together created a set of mechanisms that made it possible to stabilize capital accumulation on a global scale for several decades.

Since the start of the twenty-first century, however, this hegemony has entered a phase of erosion. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of China, the shift of a portion of the world economy’s center of gravity toward Asia, mounting U.S. debt, and Washington’s declining capacity to directly manage regional crises have all been signs of this shift.

This crisis is not simply a relative decline in U.S. power; it is rooted in the internal contradictions of global capitalism itself — a crisis of accumulation, a falling rate of profit, the financialization of the economy, rising inequality, and the erosion of the neoliberal model’s political legitimacy.

Under these conditions, semi-peripheral powers have found greater opportunity to expand their role in the world system. But this opportunity does not necessarily mean a break with existing structures. Many of these powers are not trying to transform the global capitalist order, but rather to improve their own position within it.

Turkey is one of the most significant examples of this dynamic. Its geographic position, NATO membership, economic ties with Europe, complex relations with Russia and China, and active presence in the Middle East, the Caucasus, the eastern Mediterranean, and Africa have turned it into an actor that simultaneously exploits the fractures of the global order and carries the constraints of that same order with it.

The central puzzle of this article is precisely this contradiction: how can a semi-peripheral power expand its sphere of influence during a period of hegemonic crisis, while remaining unable — because of structural dependencies — to become a fully independent power?

To answer this question, the article combines world-systems theory, Marxist political economy, and critical geopolitics to show that Turkey’s regional power is the product of an interaction between the crisis of global capitalism, its domestic class structure, and geopolitical competition.

2. Turkey and the Logic of Semi-Peripheral Power

In Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, global capitalism is a single, hierarchical system in which countries occupy different positions based on their place in the international division of labor, their productive capacity, their control over technology, and their ability to shape global rules.

Semi-peripheral powers occupy an ambiguous, dual position within this system: unlike peripheral countries, they possess greater industrial, military, and political capacity, but unlike core powers, they remain dependent on the capital, technology, and markets of the core centers.

Turkey is a clear example of this position. It has diversified industries, extensive infrastructure, a powerful military, and considerable export capacity — yet it simultaneously depends on foreign capital, advanced technology, the European market, the global financial system, and energy imports.

This dual position has shaped Turkish foreign policy: an effort to increase independence and bargaining power, alongside the necessity of maintaining ties to the core centers of global capital.

In recent years, Turkey has used the crisis of American hegemony to expand its own room for maneuver. Maintaining NATO membership, deepening economic relations with Europe, cooperating with Russia, growing closer economically to China, expanding its presence in Africa, and pursuing regional interventions have all been part of this strategy.

Yet analyzing Turkey merely as a country seeking “independence” is incomplete. From the standpoint of the Marxist theory of imperialism, semi-peripheral powers are not only victims of unequal global relations — in certain respects, they also reproduce those same relations.

Capital export, the operations of construction firms abroad, defense-industry exports, the pursuit of new markets, and military interventions are all instruments that semi-peripheral powers use to advance their standing in the global hierarchy.

Seen this way, Turkey exemplifies a power striving to capture a larger share of global power and wealth — yet one whose efforts still unfold within the logic of global capitalism.

3. Turkish Capitalism After 2008: Crisis of Accumulation and the Reconstruction of Class Alliances

The 2008 global financial crisis marked a turning point in Turkey’s development trajectory. Recession in Western economies, falling interest rates in the core centers of capitalism, and a shift of capital toward emerging economies created opportunities for semi-peripheral powers. The AKP sought to use these conditions to consolidate its own development model — one built on absorbing foreign capital, expanding construction, growing industrial exports, and deepening integration into global value chains.

During this period, privatization, expansive bank credit, the facilitation of foreign capital inflows, and massive infrastructure projects formed the main engine of capital accumulation. Airports, bridges, highways, housing projects, and urban development schemes were not simply development programs; they were mechanisms for transferring public resources to segments of private capital and for shaping a new economic alliance within Turkey.

One of the most significant developments of this period was a shift in the balance of forces within the capitalist class. By relying on the Anatolian bourgeoisie — conservative capitalists from Turkey’s interior cities who had previously stood at the margins of economic power — the AKP created a new counterweight to the traditional hegemony of the secular, Istanbul-centered bourgeoisie.

The transfer of state contracts, investment opportunities, and financial resources to this segment paved the way for a network of state-linked capitalists to emerge. Turkey’s economic growth, in this sense, was not simply an increase in output and trade; it also represented a reordering within the capitalist class and a shift in the relationship between the state and private capital.

Yet Turkey’s growth model carried significant internal contradictions. Heavy reliance on short-term foreign capital, private-sector foreign-currency debt, a focus on construction rather than the development of high-technology industry, and dependence on energy and capital-goods imports made the foundations of this growth fragile.

From the second half of the 2010s onward, these constraints became more visible. The depreciation of the lira, rising inflation, capital flight, the growing cost of external debt, and declining investor confidence all showed that the previous accumulation model had reached its limits.

The 2016 Turning Point: From the Anatolian Bourgeoisie to a State-Party Oligarchy

The failed coup attempt of July 2016 marked a turning point in the transformation of Turkey’s political and economic structure. Its consequences were not confined to the security sphere; they also reshaped the relationship among the state, capital, and political institutions.

The state of emergency, the sweeping purge of the bureaucracy, the military, universities, and the judiciary, and the subsequent transition to a presidential system, all concentrated power in the presidency. As a result, a new form of relationship between political power and economic capital took shape — one that can be described as a “state-party oligarchy.”

Within this structure, large construction firms, state banks, media outlets close to the government, and capitalists affiliated with the AKP came to play a significant role in national projects, state contracts, and the allocation of economic resources.

The state was no longer merely a regulator of the market; it became an active agent in organizing pathways of capital accumulation. This transformation, on one hand, increased the state’s capacity to carry out large domestic and regional projects; on the other, it deepened its dependence on sustained economic growth, the preservation of capitalist alliances, and the management of social discontent.

Seen from this angle, Turkey’s assertive foreign policy cannot be understood apart from its domestic political economy. The expansion of its regional presence, the growth of its defense industries, its entry into new markets, and its efforts to control energy and trade routes were not merely security or geopolitical objectives — they were also part of an effort to sustain and expand a model of capital accumulation under conditions of crisis.

4. NATO, Structural Dependence, and the Politics of “Managed Dependency”

Turkey’s NATO membership since 1952 made it one of the key pillars of Western security architecture in the eastern Mediterranean, the Black Sea, and the Middle East. The end of the Cold War did not diminish Turkey’s geopolitical importance; rather, new regional crises, Russian-Western rivalry, and the significance of energy transit routes have kept Ankara central to great-power calculations.

With the AKP’s rise to power, Turkish foreign policy entered a new phase. The Erdoğan government sought to balance maintaining strategic ties with the West against expanding relations with non-Western powers.

The purchase of the S-400 missile system from Russia, cooperation with Moscow in the Astana process on Syria, deepening energy relations with Russia, and, at the same time, continued active NATO membership are all examples of this balancing act.

Yet this balancing does not amount to structural independence. Turkey’s economy remains dependent on the European market, foreign capital, Western technology, and the global financial system. A significant portion of Turkey’s export industries are integrated into production chains led by European capital, and a complete break with the West would carry heavy costs for the Turkish economy.

For this reason, AKP foreign policy can be described as “managed dependency.” At the discursive level, the Turkish government emphasizes independence, multipolarity, and the end of the unipolar order — yet at the structural level, it continues to operate within the same global economic relations.

This contradiction characterizes many semi-peripheral powers: they seek to expand their room for maneuver, but deep economic and technological dependencies prevent them from fully breaking free of the dominant structures.

5. The Kurdish Question: The Contradiction of the Semi-Peripheral Nation-State

The Kurdish question is one of the deepest internal contradictions of the Turkish nation-state. It cannot be analyzed solely in security or ethnic terms, since its roots trace back to the historical process of Turkish state formation and its particular model of nation-building — a state constructed around identity homogenization and a definition of citizenship centered on Turkish identity.

In the early decades of the republic, the denial of Kurdish identity, cultural and political restrictions, and uneven economic development between regions laid the groundwork for the persistence of this question. Despite shifts in official state policy across different periods, the Kurdish question has remained one of Turkey’s most significant political challenges.

Regional developments after 2003 in Iraq, and especially the Syrian war after 2011, elevated this question from the domestic to the geopolitical level. The formation of the Kurdistan Region in Iraq, the rise of Kurdish forces in northern Syria, and their role in the war against ISIS heightened Ankara’s security concerns.

Turkey’s military operations in northern Syria — including Operation Euphrates Shield in 2016 and Operation Peace Spring in 2019 — were officially framed as targeting the PKK and preventing security threats. But these interventions also served broader geopolitical goals: controlling border areas, preventing the formation of a contiguous Kurdish territory, and expanding Turkish influence over the postwar order in Syria.

From a political-economy perspective, the Kurdish question is also tied to the uneven development pattern of Turkish capitalism. The concentration of capital, industry, and infrastructure in the west of the country — particularly in Istanbul and the industrial coastal regions — set against the historical underdevelopment of the southeast, has produced gaps that are not merely cultural or identity-based, but part of the logic of uneven accumulation within a semi-peripheral economy.

A lasting resolution of the Kurdish question is therefore not possible through security measures or limited cultural reforms alone; it requires a deeper transformation in the relationship between center and periphery, in resource distribution, and in the political structure of the nation-state itself.

6. Regional Rivalry: Syria, Libya, and the Caucasus

The crisis of American hegemony has turned the Middle East into an arena of intensifying rivalry among regional powers. Washington’s diminished capacity to directly control every development does not mean American withdrawal from the region — rather, it has opened space for regional actors to become more assertive in expanding their own influence.

Turkey, Iran, and Israel are three important examples of regional powers operating with different sources of strength. Israel relies on military superiority, technology, and strategic U.S. backing; Iran relies on a network of regional allies and geopolitical depth; and Turkey relies on a combination of military power, defense industries, economic capacity, geographic position, and historical-cultural ties.

This rivalry became clearly visible in Syria. The Syrian war turned into an arena where regional and global powers moved to redefine the balance of power. Turkey through direct military operations, Iran through allied forces, and Russia through direct military presence each sought to secure their position in Syria’s postwar order.

Turkey’s intervention in Libya is likewise an example of the intertwining of geopolitical and economic objectives. Support for the Government of National Accord, the deployment of forces, and the use of domestically produced drones were not simply a response to Libya’s civil war; they were also connected to goals such as consolidating Turkey’s position in the eastern Mediterranean, securing energy interests, maritime boundary agreements, and expanding the activity of Turkish companies in North Africa.

In the Caucasus, Turkey’s support for Azerbaijan in the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War likewise went beyond ethnic or political ties. The transfer of military technology, defense cooperation, and diplomatic backing for Baku were part of Ankara’s effort to expand its role in Eurasia and strengthen its position along the connective routes between Europe and Asia.

Yet these policies do not signal Turkey’s full independence. Just as core powers use economic, military, and political instruments to preserve their influence, semi-peripheral powers turn to similar instruments to advance their own position within the world system. The difference lies in their place in the hierarchy of power, not in the underlying logic of competition itself.

7. The “Turkic World” Project: Between Identity, Geopolitics, and Economics

The “Turkic World” project is one of the most significant elements of Turkish foreign policy in recent years. On its surface, the project emphasizes linguistic, historical, and cultural ties among Turkic-speaking communities, but in practice it carries much broader geoeconomic and geopolitical dimensions.

The expansion of the Organization of Turkic States, the development of transport corridors, trade and financial cooperation, infrastructure investment, and growing defense cooperation all indicate that Ankara is building a network of relationships meant to strengthen Turkey’s position as a connective link between Europe and Asia.

The “Middle Corridor,” intended to develop trade routes between China and Europe via Central Asia, the Caspian Sea, and Turkey, is one example of Ankara’s effort to raise its own geopolitical and economic importance.

Yet this project is not purely economic. The Erdoğan government draws on a combination of pan-Turkism, neo-Ottomanism, and conservative Islamism to legitimize it. This discourse seeks to present Turkey not merely as a nation-state, but as the center of a civilizational sphere.

There is, however, a fundamental gap between this ideological narrative and the reality of Turkey’s political economy. Turkey’s economy remains dependent on European markets, foreign capital, Western technology, and the global financial system. The government’s discourse of independence, then, is less a sign of a break with the global capitalist order than a tool for increasing its bargaining power within that same order.

Moreover, the Turkic World project faces real geopolitical constraints. Russia continues to preserve its historical influence in Central Asia, China plays an increasingly prominent economic role in the region through the Belt and Road Initiative, and Iran, given its geographic position, remains an important actor along transit routes.

The Turkic World should therefore not be understood as an independent, cohesive bloc, but rather as a network of cooperation and competition operating within the existing global order.

8. The Political Economy of Crisis and the Limits of Semi-Peripheral Power

Turkey’s regional power cannot be understood apart from its domestic political-economic crises. The AKP’s development model — built for more than two decades on absorbing foreign capital, expansive credit, growth in the construction sector, and deep integration into the global economy — has in recent years run up against structural limits.

Chronic inflation, the depreciation of the lira, rising external debt, dependence on energy and capital-goods imports, declining productive investment, and worsening social inequality all show that Turkey’s current crisis is not merely a short-term economic problem, but a symptom of a broader crisis in its model of capital accumulation.

For a time, the AKP’s growth model was able to project an image of economic success by relying on foreign capital inflows, infrastructure expansion, and growing domestic consumption. Yet this growth rested less on rising productivity, technological development, and industrial independence than on foreign capital flows, cheap credit, and sectors such as construction.

As global conditions shifted and foreign capital inflows declined, the contradictions of this model became more apparent. Turkey’s economy has faced a currency crisis, rising production costs, falling purchasing power, and mounting pressure on lower and middle classes.

This economic crisis has been accompanied by intensifying class tensions. While segments of state-linked capital — large construction firms, defense industries, and export capital — have benefited from state contracts and economic policy, workers, employees, and lower-income groups have borne the heaviest costs of inflation and falling real wages.

Seen this way, Turkey’s political economy in recent years has moved toward a form of crony state capitalism, in which the state directly organizes profitable channels of accumulation, and networks close to political power gain privileged access to economic resources.

Yet Turkish society is not simply a site for the reproduction of domination. The 2013 Gezi Park protests, labor strikes across various sectors, and protests by teachers, miners, and public-service workers all show that social tensions remain active.

Although the state has been able to contain many of these protests through security measures, legal restrictions, and media control, the persistence of social discontent shows that economic crisis and political-legitimacy crisis remain closely intertwined.

Under these conditions, Turkey’s assertive foreign policy serves a dual function. On one hand, it aims to expand regional influence, open new markets, secure energy access, and strengthen the country’s geopolitical position; on the other, at the domestic level, it also helps reinforce nationalist discourse and manage social discontent.

Turkey’s central contradiction, then, is not a lack of military or diplomatic capacity, but the gap between its geopolitical ambitions and the structural limits of its domestic political economy.

9. Conclusion: Turkey and the Limits of Power in an Age of Hegemonic Crisis

Over the past two decades, Turkey has become one of the most significant examples of semi-peripheral power in the contemporary world. It has been able to use the relative crisis of American hegemony to expand its regional role, while remaining, at the same time, embedded within the very structure of global capitalism that reproduces its economic dependencies and political constraints.

Turkey is neither a core power on par with the dominant states of the world system, nor a peripheral country simply subject to the will of the great powers. Its position lies between these two poles: a country with considerable industrial, military, and political capacity, striving to raise its standing within the global hierarchy.

Yet this ascent faces a fundamental contradiction. To increase its own power, Turkey relies on the same instruments historically used by great powers: expanding economic influence, projecting military presence, controlling trade routes, and creating spheres of political influence. For this reason, the rise of a semi-peripheral actor does not necessarily represent a break with the logic of imperialism.

Turkey’s experience shows that the crisis of American hegemony does not, by itself, produce a more just order or liberate dependent states. In many cases, this crisis merely intensifies competition among different actors — actors who, even as they resist certain policies of the core powers, continue to operate within the logic of capital accumulation, geopolitical rivalry, and the expansion of spheres of influence.

This matters greatly from a left and anti-imperialist standpoint. Critiquing American hegemony should not translate into uncritical support for the projects of regional powers. Turkey, like other semi-peripheral powers, can simultaneously resist certain forms of external domination while reproducing unequal regional and global relations.

The progressive alternative lies not in shifting between blocs of power, but in strengthening social forces from below: independent labor movements, democratic forces, struggles against militarism, the defense of the rights of oppressed groups, and the building of new forms of transnational solidarity.

In the end, Turkey’s experience offers an important lesson for understanding a world order in transition: the decline of a hegemon does not necessarily mean the end of the logic of domination. As long as the fundamental structures of global capitalism, the competition over accumulation, and unequal power relations persist, a change in actors will not necessarily produce a change in the rules of the game.

The central question for the future is not which power will replace the previous hegemon, but whether social forces can build an alternative that goes beyond the rivalry of powers and the logic of capital accumulation. In this sense, the horizon of liberation lies not in the rise of new powers within the existing order, but in the struggle for an order grounded in social justice, democracy, and international solidarity.Email

Majid Maleki Meighani

Majid Maleki Meighani, (sometimes writing under the name Majid Maleki), is an Iranian political analyst, writer, and translator. He was imprisoned for his political activities. His work focuses on critical analysis of Iran’s labor movement, the political left, anti-imperialist critiques of geopolitics, and social movements in West Asia and the Global South. His analysis is grounded in direct fieldwork and interviews within local communities. He has translated into Persian Walter LaFeber’s Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America and the collection Voices of the Arab Spring. He has been a contributor to ZNetwork, Tribune Zamane, and Akhbar-e Rooz. You can access his full body of work on his author page on ZNetwork.

‘This Is a Fire’: WHO Says Ebola Outbreak in DR Congo Spreading Faster Than Any Ever Seen

“The scale of the outbreak is at least two to four times the number of cases that we have found,” said WHO emergencies director Chikwe Ihekweazu.


Health workers don personal protective equipment during training in Kenya on July 10, 2026 to fight the Ebola outbreak in the nearby Democratic Republic of Congo.
(Photo by Tony Karumba/AFP via Getty Images)

Brett Wilkins
Jul 14, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

The Ebola outbreak sweeping the Democratic Republic of Congo is the fastest-growing ever, the World Health Organization warned Tuesday, as a shortage of funding, strained health infrastructure, and a strike by frontline medical workers threaten efforts to contain the deadly virus.

“We’ve seen the fastest growth in a single month since the outbreak started, and of all the Ebola outbreaks that we have managed,” WHO Health Emergencies Program executive director Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu told reporters in Geneva. “Over the last few days, we’ve seen some of the highest numbers of new infections in a single day.”

“A few days ago, we saw over 80 cases confirmed in a single day,” he added.

Experts are particularly alarmed that the majority of new infections—roughly 80%—are coming from what the WHO called “unknown chains of transmission.”

“You have to imagine that this is a fire,” Ihekweazu said. “There’s something driving the fire in its heart, and it’s also expanding at the same time.”

The WHO said that 95% of all new Ebola cases are in Ituri province, where the outbreak started in May, but the virus is now spreading to two new provinces, Haut-Uele and Tshopo.

The Ebola virus causes widespread and often catastrophic damage to the body’s blood vessels, immune system, and organs and typically kills between 25% and 90% of infected people, depending upon the strain of the virus and quality of available medical care.

Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) government figures show nearly 2,000 confirmed infections and more than 700 deaths, but WHO officials say the true scale could be two to four times higher because many infections and deaths are going undetected.

Wessam Mankoula, an epidemiologist with the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Ethiopia, noted during a press briefing last week that 112 healthcare workers have been infected with Ebola in DRC, 32 of whom have died.

There have also been around 20 Ebola infections and at least two deaths during the current outbreak in neighboring Uganda.

“Perhaps the most alarming finding is that many newly reported cases are individuals who died in their communities, without ever reaching a health facility and receiving care,” Ihekweazu said.

There is some good news, with Ihekweazu noting that “treatment capacity now exceeds 700 beds and continues to increase each week; laboratory capacity has expanded dramatically... and contact follow-up rates are approaching 80%.”

However, frontline health workers at an Ebola treatment at Rwampara General Hospital in Ituri province have gone on strike over unpaid salaries and bonuses, poor working conditions, and shortages of protective equipment.

Congolese Health Minister Roger Kamba assured workers that the government has “the means to sort this out.”

Critics say US President Donald Trump’s ideologically driven decision to withdraw the US from the WHO, his administration’s dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and reduced funding for the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s global public health efforts have also adversely affected the response to the current Ebola epidemic, compared with 2014 and 2019 outbreaks.

The current Ebola outbreak comes in a region already ravaged by armed conflict, displacement, and other challenges. Health officials stress that getting a grip on the outbreak will require not only medical intervention but also rebuilding trust with communities rife with fear and misinformation, and ensuring health workers are paid and protected.

“This outbreak requires resources that match the scale of the challenges that we are facing,” Ihekweazu stressed Tuesday. “And this is not a burden DRC can be allowed to carry alone.”

‘Another Shitty Situation’: 💩

Trump Attack on CDC Monitoring Blamed in ‘Explosive Diarrhea’ Outbreak

“The catastrophic cuts Trump and RFK Jr. made to disease surveillance and research keep coming back to haunt us,” said one critic.


US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. listens during a tour of the kitchen at Cunningham Elementary School in Austin, Texas on February 27, 2026.
(Photo by Jay Janner/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)

Brad Reed
Jul 14, 2026

COMMON DREAMS

The Trump administration is coming under fire for its response to the outbreak of cyclosporiasis, a foodborne illness that causes explosive diarrhea and has so far been documented in more than two dozen states.

Public health officials still have not identified the source of the outbreak, which typically spreads via contaminated produce.

In an interview with Axios published Saturday, David Freedman, professor emeritus of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, suggested that the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has not been on top of tracking the outbreak the same way it has been in the past.

“Right now it’s individual state health departments that are having to speak up,” remarked Freedman, “because the CDC is really not following it on a day-to-day basis.”

Omer Awan, vice chair and associate program director for the diagnostic radiology residency at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, told PBS in an interview published Monday that infections will likely only grow if the government doesn’t track down the source of the outbreak quickly.

“Because we haven’t pinned it down, that means that these cases are likely to disseminate,” said Awan. “People are still eating the contaminated food that’s leading to so many cases.”

Awan added that mass firings at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), under the leadership of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., were hindering CDC’s ability to track the disease.

“The HHS and the federal government laid off a lot of CDC employees,” said Awan. “Many of them were the very employees that would track these particular outbreaks. And the other is that, from July of 2025 last year, the CDC has no longer required reporting cyclosporiasis. It’s become optional to report this to the CDC’s Foodborne Disease Active Surveillance Network.”

Brad Woodhouse, president of Protect Our Care, pointed to the CDC decision to stop monitoring the cyclospora parasite as an example of the Trump administration putting Americans “in another shitty situation after laying waste to our public health infrastructure and gutting emergency preparedness.”

“Because RFK Jr.'s CDC turned a blind eye to dangerous foodborne pathogens,” Woodhouse added, “this outbreak spread quickly and states are now scrambling to do their own detective work on what’s causing it. The catastrophic cuts Trump and RFK Jr. made to disease surveillance and research keep coming back to haunt us, yet they want to cut even deeper to make up for their tax breaks for billionaires.”

The Washington Post on Tuesday reported that both federal and state officials have launched an investigation into whether fast food chain Taco Bell “played a role” in the cyclosporiasis outbreak.

According to the Post’s sources, some people who got sick from the disease said they had eaten at Taco Bell shortly becoming symptomatic, although others who were infected by the parasite said they had not eaten at the fast food chain before growing ill.

“Public health officials have said this season’s unusually high number of illnesses, now reported in more than 30 states,” reported the Post, “means more information and more patients to help identify shared foods, shopping habits and restaurant visits among those sickened to help determine the source.”

Expert details 'red herring' hiding real issue behind parasite outbreak

Image via Shuttertstock

Thomas Kika

July 15, 2026

ALTERNET


An expert in infectious diseases this week tossed cold water on the hype and panic surrounding the recent parasitic outbreak, arguing that certain reports about Trump administration cuts have been a "red herring" masking the real issue and making things worse.

As of Tuesday, NBC News reported that around an estimated 7,000 cases of cyclosporiasis had spread across the U.S., according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with a little over 3,300 being from Michigan. A parasitic foodborne illness, cyclosporiasis can cause days or weeks of severe explosive diarrhea, and is most often spread by contaminated fresh produce, including leafy greens, berries and herbs.

Since the outbreak began to emerge, reports have indicated that the sweeping cuts to the national health and disease tracking apparatuses under President Donald Trump have made the situation worse, with many reports honing in on a change made to FoodNet last year. Introduced in 1995, FoodNet is a program run in collaboration between the CDC, the Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration and state health departments, which aims to track the spread of foodborne diseases. In 2025, under the Trump administration, the tracking of cyclosporiasis was made optional.


In a Wednesday appearance on CNN, Michael Osterholm, an epidemiologist and director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, told host Audie Cornish that the attention put on that FoodNet change was a "red herring," as far as this current outbreak was concerned. He also said that, by his estimation, the outbreak was most likely done, for the time being.

"There's a lot of misinformation going around about this right now," Osterholm said. "Let me tell you, I'm not afraid to be critical of the federal government or even state governments with regard to response. But let's be really clear: the changes that occurred at CDC were eliminating certain diseases from what would be considered community laboratories, the FoodNet system. These are ten sites where they do much more extensive study. The way cases get reported to local and state health departments, and the CDC, through the national notifiable disease system, that has not changed. So this idea that somehow what changes occurred at CDC basically caused this outbreak not to be well investigated, just simply [isn't] true."


He also noted: "I can say right now, I think the outbreak is over. And what I mean by that is the perishable items that came through the food system 4 to 6 weeks ago are gone. It's not there anymore. People are still sick. We're still going to hear about new cases because they're just now getting diagnosed. And as you heard on the lead-in on the social media commentary, we just heard, there are people who are still very sick. The good news is they can be treated. The really also good news is that leafy greens generally are very safe to eat."

While dismissive of the focus put on the FoodNet changes as a contributor to this outbreak, Osterholm was still critical of the CDC's response time, as well as

"I think this outbreak is one that really needs to be reexamined when it's all done, because I think, frankly, we should have had these answers weeks ago and didn't," Osterholm explained. "And I can't attribute that to any one thing other than a lack of overall leadership in responding to this. Yesterday, the CDC put out what was called a 'health alert network' alert, and at that point, that's something that should have been sent out four weeks ago, not at the end of this."


He added later: "The problem we have is that in the first instance, like politics, all of foodborne disease investigations start at the state and local level. And today, 94 percent of all the budgets for all 50 state health departments depend on this federal support to achieve that level of protection. And right now, we're having challenges at the state and local health department where, in fact, these investigations begin. So that is a problem. But it's not what has been made.The problem with this FoodNet system, that's just a red herring."

Trump’s GOP Is Ripping This Nation Apart. The Question Is: Why?

The morality of today’s Republican Party has been laid bare. But it boggles the mind the depth of this destruction and cruelty.

President Donald Trump is destroying the nation like a crazed maniac. Does anyone really understand what motivates him or the party he controls.
(Cartoon: AI generated via The Hartmann Report)

Thom Hartmann
Jul 14, 2026

Common Dreams

Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill — which gave the top 1% fully $118 billion this year in tax cuts — turns a year old this week and Republicans in Congress actually celebrated the largest cuts to food assistance and Medicaid in American history.

They told us it was about fraud, about lazy people gaming the system, about restoring the dignity of work. Exactly a year later we can now see what it was really about in a line of cars outside a food bank in Phoenix.

That’s where ProPublica found Ana Alvarez on a recent morning, a single mother of five who works at a restaurant and lost her family’s SNAP benefits last September. She reapplied in December and the government still hasn’t processed her application.

She calls the agency every week and gets told to keep waiting, so she clips coupons, her kids don’t go to the zoo anymore, and as the summer heat bears down she’s doing grim arithmetic on rent, the car payment, and the electric bill that keeps the air conditioning running. She’s one reason Arizona has lost more than half of its SNAP recipients in a single year.

In Michigan, a widow named Sarah works two food service jobs to raise her 9-year-old daughter on $219 a month in food assistance, help she’s needed since her husband died suddenly six years ago. Last Christmas one of her employers wrote a single number wrong on her renewal paperwork, one missing zero, and the state cut her off.

And in Atlanta, Human Rights Watch documented a 36-year-old supermarket cashier who was working and meeting every requirement until she gave birth in late 2025, at which point Georgia shut off both her Medicaid and her food stamps, claiming she’d failed to report the job she was standing at every day. She’s spent the months since trying to get her coverage back while the medical bills pile up. In the party of family values, apparently, having a baby is now a firing offense.

None of these women are cheats or freeloaders. They’re workers, mothers, widows: exactly the people these cynical Republicans swear they’re protecting. But the numbers tell the story: more than 4 million Americans have been pushed off SNAP since the bill passed, the steepest drop since Clinton’s 1996 welfare cuts, and in just the 13 states that publish the data, roughly 808,000 children have lost food assistance.

The Congressional Budget Office projects millions more will lose Medicaid as the work requirement paperwork machine grinds through the states, even though more than nine in ten of the people targeted are already working, in school, caring for family, or disabled.

The cruelty built into the bill isn’t a side effect: it’s the whole reason for the “enhanced” paperwork requirements. Every mother who gives up in frustration, every widow tripped up by a typo, every application left to rot in a backlog is a line item of savings that can translate into a larger tax cut for Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg while the poorest households actually see their taxes go up.

That’s the morality of today’s GOP laid bare. They looked at Ana Alvarez’s five kids and Sarah’s daughter and that new mother in Atlanta, and they decided the billionaires needed the money more.

Every day, it seems, we see or hear about another way in which Trump and his lickspittles in Congress and the various federal agencies are tearing down our country, weakening our defenses, pitting Americans against each other, looting our government, and making life harder for everybody except the morbidly rich.

The question nobody seems to have an answer to is, “Why?”

— Is it that, as Craig Unger seems to suggest, that Trump’s been a Russian agent for decades and is setting us up to lose to the newly-forming Axis of Russia and China?
— Is it that he spent so many years burning with rage and embarrassment at not being accepted by New York high society that he’s just come to hate America?
— Could it be that American-values-hating foreign powers that have poured literally billions of dollars into the Trump family are paying him to tear us apart so they’ll never again have to endure the humiliation of having their human, civil, and women’s rights records called out by a future administration?
— Is it possible it’s all just to pay for tax cuts for billionaires?
— Or are his, Vance’s, and Musk’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist, libertarian, and/or neo-Nazi ideologies so intense that they’re willing to essentially burn the country down just to expel immigrants, deny benefits to people of color, elevate the rich, crush unions, and re-subordinate women?

These are serious questions for which I can’t find credible answers that explain the entire spectrum of their behavior. Why would Trump and the GOP:

— Condemn 12 million Americans to sickness and early death by gutting Medicaid (and the biggest cuts don’t even kick in until right after this fall’s election)?
— Destroy American soft power by killing USAID, thus condemning millions to death?
— Fire so many workers at the Social Security Administration that just getting through to sign up or get help has turned into a multi-day slog?
— Gut the State Department at a time diplomacy is most needed for world peace?
— End food assistance (SNAP) for millions when one-in-five American children experience hunger?
— Refuse to enforce laws and rules that allow workers to form unions in their workplaces?
— Propose forcing all new Medicare recipients onto Medicare “Advantage” corporate scam plans?
— Refuse military aid to Ukraine for over a year to give Russia time to finish off their genocidal job?
— Stop the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from going after fraudsters and banks when they rip people off?
— Eliminate a major NOAA program designed to warn communities about the dangers of flooding and other extreme weather crises?
— Politicize the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Election Commission?
— End net neutrality so none of us are safe online?
— Shut down anti-cyber-warfare operations in the federal government?
— Defund university research that leads to innovation and saves lives?
— Cut unemployment insurance benefits across Red states?
— Terminate support for people with student loans and gut scholarship programs?
— Slash Affordable Care Act outreach budgets and allow junk insurance plans?
— Reverse over 100 environmental rules, including those on clean air, clean water, and chemical safety?
— Weaken Dodd-Frank, including gutting oversight of “too big to fail” banks and stress tests for mid-size financial institutions?
— Dial back OSHA workplace safety standards and inspections?
— Cut taxes to rich people while raising them via tariffs on working class folks?
— Change the Federal Trade Commission to allow more monopolistic, rip-off corporate behavior?
— Make it harder to vote and harass Blue states by demanding their voter information?
— Work to prosecute women who have miscarriages or abortions?
— Make it harder to qualify for Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI)?
— End auto emission standards and increase our reliance on fossil fuels?
— Pack the courts with judges the American Bar Association says are “unqualified”?
— Destroy our faith in our elections and set up election workers for harassment?
— Fire the Inspectors General (who find waste, fraud, and abuse) across multiple federal agencies?
— Weaken whistleblower protections?
— Put the military on the streets of our cities in violation of Posse Comitatus?
— Use state power to punish political opponents and those who’ve investigated Trump’s crimes, alleged Russian collusion, and corruption?
— Create a network of concentration camps across America?
— Allow a shadow cabinet of billionaires and theocrats via Project 2025?
— Attack judges and prosecutors, leading to violence and threats of violence?
— Foment violence (like on January 6th) as a political strategy?
— Destroy our asylum and refugee systems?
— Pardon insurrectionists, rapists, cybercriminals, and other wealthy criminals?
— Defund the IRS so they can no longer audit the morbidly rich, leading to the loss of hundreds of billions in federal revenues?
— Ban books and censor libraries?
— Criminalize trans and queer people?
— Roll back gun safety measures?
— Defund the arts, humanities, and public media?
— Gut vaccine and other programs that keep Americans healthy?
— Nakedly politicize the military?
— Expand federal surveillance powers while kneecapping oversight?
— Criminalize free speech, particularly on college campuses?
— Attempt to revoke birthright citizenship?
— Attack press freedom and bar the Associated Press from the White House?
— Sabotage the US Postal Service?
— Undermine the census?
— Scale back civil and women’s rights enforcement?
— Normalize autocratic language like “vermin,” “scum,” and calling immigrants “animals”?
— Expel millions of brown-skinned immigrants who’ve already gone through the legal process to get work permits and are on a path toward citizenship?
— Create international fiscal chaos with an on-again, off-again TACO tariff policy?
— Cancel the suicide hotline for queer kids?
— Gut our national parks and sell off our federal lands to wealthy friends of the administration?
— Create a vast, secret, unaccountable police force with masked officers whose identity is concealed?
— Allow the president to accept hundreds of millions in obvious bribes from foreign powers in violation of the Constitution?
— Work so hard to conceal the crimes of a notorious sexual predator?

And this, of course, is just a partial list of the ways Trump and the GOP have weakened our nation, reduced our standing and prestige in the world, corrupted our government, and immiserated working class families.

Many of the theories about why Trump and the GOP would enthusiastically do so much damage to our people, our military, and our democracy contradict others.

For example, why would billionaires want tax cuts at the expense of damaging the economy that made them rich? Why would we promote a muscular military policy like bombing Iran while simultaneously destroying morale within the ranks of our military and kneecapping our intelligence agencies?

“Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is,” sang Bob Dylan back in the 1960s.

Today, we’re there.

Why do you think Trump and the GOP are working so hard to ruin our country?



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Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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