The revolutionary development of global Marxism

By Paul Le Blanc

Published date 24 March, 2026

First published at Tempest.

Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics
By Simin Fadaee
Manchester University Press, 2024

The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism
By Kevin B. Anderson
Verso, 2025

For those wanting to understand our world and help change it for the better, the theoretical system and political orientation developed by Karl Marx and his co-thinkers have been essential. But many critics still denounce Marxism’s supposed limitations as stuck in the bygone industrial capitalism of the 19th century and irredeemably Eurocentric.

The two volumes under review help readers not only to understand flaws in such criticisms, but especially to facilitate an advance in understanding and practical action.

Simin Fadaee’s contribution, Global Marxism, is a valuable starting point. Her achievement is to identify and briefly describe nine relatively diverse and incredibly important political activists, theorists and leaders who arose within and powerfully impacted upon the history of the Global South (Asia, Africa, Latin America). For each, Fadaee also offers a straightforward précis of their ideas, connecting them to Marxist ideology.

Fadaee’s selection is limited, but those she draws together in this concise volume have unquestionably been important in the history of their countries and of the world: Jawaharlal Nehru (India); Ho Chi Minh (Vietnam); Mao Zedong (China); Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana); Amilcar Cabral (Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde Islands); Frantz Fanon (African Diaspora; France; Martinique, Algeria); Ernesto Che Guevara (Argentina, Cuba); Ali Shariati (Iran); and Rafael Sebastián Guillén Vicente – more widely known as Subcommandante Marcos (Mexico). There are surveys of what they said and did, with reference also to some of the important secondary studies on each of the nine, enabling readers to continue with further explorations.

Fadaee is intent on showing “how Marxism is a living tradition that has been the cornerstone of revolutionary practice and theory for leaders and revolutionaries of the global South for the collective struggles they led or inspired.” She insists that “for an honest and accurate evaluation of Marxist theory and practice, we need to know what Marxism means in different contexts and how it has been adapted in local and national struggles.” The contributions of these nine figures, she adds, represent a “creative engagement [that] not only localized and indigenized Marxism, but also globalized it” (Fadaee, pp. 216, 217).

A significant limitation, however, is that Fadaee’s account of the theory and practice of the nine is uncritical — the ideas are summarized rather than analyzed. As one progresses through the various summaries, it is apparent that the views of some of the nine are inconsistent with each other. Rather than providing an integrated analytical discussion, the volume presents us with nine silos of theory and practice. But it might be that more would be learned if the different conceptions were brought into contact and confrontation with each other.

In a critical study Mao Zedong Thought, for example, Mao’s countryman Wang Fanxi comments that “Mao had only a smattering of Marxist knowledge, a few general principles and organizational or executive methods, made in the Stalinist factory of ideas and given a Lenin varnish,” concluding that “Mao’s thinking occupies a tiny space on the spectrum of revolutionary thinking, or, by comparison with Marx, no place at all” (Fanxi, p. 267). It may be that Wang’s point is overstated or entirely wrong — but such a critique is simply beyond the scope of what Fadaee offers us.

If one wants to comprehend the reality of the Marxism that is integral to the Global South, one should be aware of — and ultimately engage with the contributions of — not only Fadaee’s nine, but at least some of the other Marxists from the same time and place. One could compile a list of thirty additional individuals about whom one could say — as Fadaee says about the nine — that these revolutionaries “faced very different challenges and Marxism offered a methodology that enabled them to link the local and national to the global in a way that engendered different forms of political engagement.” They found in Marxism, as she puts it, “a powerful framework that helped understand and change the world” – helping as well to create “a dynamic and diverse Marxism that is rooted in the lessons of various sites of historical and cultural struggles” (Fadaee, pp. 219, 223, 226).

Here is a list of such people worth engaging with: Anouar Abdel-Malek (Egypt; France); Neville Alexander (South Africa); Samir Amin (Egypt; France); Walden Bello (Philippines); Chen Duxiu (China); Chen Pilan (China); Ding Ling (China); W.E.B. Du Bois (African Diaspora; U.S.); Carlos Fonseca (Nicaragua); Kumar Ghoshal (India); Chris Hani (South Africa); C.L.R. James (African Diaspora; West Indies; U.S.; Britain); Claudia Jones (African Diaspora; West Indies; U.S.; Britain); Leila Khaled (Palestine); D.D. Kosambi (India); Liu Shaoqi (China); Lu Xun (China); Nelson Mandela (South Africa); José Carlos Mariátegui (Peru); Farabundo Marti (El Salvador); Claude McKay (African Diaspora; West Indies; U.S.); Julio Antonio Mella (Cuba); George Padmore (African Diaspora; West Indies; Britain); Walter Rodney (African Diaspora; West Indies); M.N. Roy (India); Tan Malaka (Indonesia); Dora Maria Tellez (Nicaragua); Peng Shuzhi (China); Ta Thu Thau (Vietnam); Wang Fanxi (China); Zheng Chaolin (China). In fact, this list could be expanded 10 times and still not be complete.

Yet to a significant degree, this criticism is unfair and foolish. If Fadaee did for all these what she has done for the nine, the result would be many thick volumes that would be quite unreadable for most human beings. Instead, she has produced a readable and informative volume which advances the project of developing a genuinely global Marxism. The nine are employed to highlight the relevance of Marxism to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, as well as the fact that revolutionaries from these continents have had an impact upon Marxism itself. The fact is that Fadaee’s book is useful as a starting point.

We continue to be faced, nonetheless, with the dilemma of determining precisely what is the globalized Marxism that can advance human liberation? One is reminded of a snippet of dialogue between two characters in Ernest Hemingway’s novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (p. 244) — Robert Jordan, an American intellectual and munitions expert in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War, is talking with a highly-placed Soviet journalist and operative named Karlov (based on Mikhail Koltsov, whom Hemingway befriended in Spain):

Karlov: … How much dialectics have you read?

Jordon: I have read the Handbook of Marxism that Emil Burns edited. That is all.

Karlov: If you read it all that is quite a little. …

The Handbook of Marxism (1935) — with over 1000 pages that included substantial selections from Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin — published by Random House and also by International Publishers in the United States, and by Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club in Britain, essentially constitutes what represented Marxism for most 20th century adherents from the 1930s onward.

Yet such Stalin-inflected Marxism was only one variant of that ideology. Isaac Deutscher’s 1949 classic, Stalin (p. 118) comments that the Marxist outlook “science, philosophy, sociology, politics, and tactics were closely knit into a single system of ideas,” and yet, as Deutscher noted, “the interest of practitioners of Stalin’s type in matters of philosophy and theory was strictly limited.” He elaborates: “They accepted certain basic formulas of Marxist philosophy, handed down to them by the popularizers of the doctrine, as a matter of intellectual and political convenience. These formulas seemed to offer wonderful clues to the most complex problems — and nothing can be as reassuring to the half-educated as the possession of such clues.” He adds that while many adherents “enjoyed Marxism as a mental labor-saving device, easy to handle and fabulously effective,” they had little sense of immense research behind this “labor-saving gadget” with which they engaged in a “narrowly utilitarian fashion.” Deutscher explains that Lenin was different: “Unlike many of his followers, Lenin was the critical student in the laboratory of thought.” While “he always turned his findings to some political use,” and his findings “never shook him in his Marxist convictions,” his research and analysis was pursued “with an open and disinterested mind.”

Lenin’s approach is suggested by three pieces of commentary (shared in my Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution, pp. 72, 149, 163):

1. Discussing Hegel’s approach to the dialectics of reality and of research, Lenin emphasized “living, many-sided knowledge (with the number of sides eternally increasing), with an infinite number of shades of every approach and approximation to reality (with a philosophical growing into a whole out of each shade) — here we have an immeasurably rich content as compared with ‘metaphysical’ materialism.”
2. Discussing the limitations of many Social Democratic adherents of Marxism, he complained of “their slavish imitation of the past” with an understanding of Marxism that was “impossibly pedantic” and failing to understand Marx’s “revolutionary dialectics” which understood that “in times of revolution the utmost flexibility is demanded.” Instead they “walk around and about … like a cat around a bowl of hot porridge.” Inclined to see how things developed in Western Europe as a universal model for all places and all times, they failed to comprehend an essential point: “While the development of world history as a whole follows general laws, it is by no means precluded, but on the contrary presumed, that certain periods of development may display peculiarities in either the form or the sequence of this development.”
3. Discussing the limitations of many Communist adherents of Marxism, Lenin was especially exasperated by pseudo-revolutionary pretentiousness, insisting that “we must at all costs set out, first, to learn, secondly, to learn, and thirdly, to learn, and then to see to it that learning shall not remain a dead letter, or a fashionable catch-phrase (and we should admit in all frankness that this happens very often with us), that learning shall really become part of our very being, that it shall actually and fully become a constituent element of our social life.”

The approach suggested by these comments is the focus of the new book by Kevin Anderson — the final installment of an invaluable trilogy: Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, A Critical Study (1995), Marx at the Margins (2010), and now The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads.

Anderson — along with his mentor Raya Dunayevskya, plus Marx scholars Lawrence Krader, Teodor Shanin, and Michael Löwy — has been in the forefront of Marx scholars stressing the importance of the research and writing of “the late Marx” (from 1869 to 1882). These writings are often minimized by earlier scholars and activists — definitely Joseph Stalin, but sometimes even including Marx’s theoretical co-thinker Frederick Engels. Anderson acknowledges that at “a very general level, Engels and Marx are mostly in accord.” But there are also significant nuances of difference, which flowed from Marx’s greater engagement with Hegelian dialectics and from his unceasing and intensive new researches into historical and socio-cultural realities: of indigenous peoples of North America and elsewhere; of ancient Rome; of Russia (for which he taught himself Russian); of Ireland; of India; of differences in socio-economic and cultural developments between Western European and other parts of the world.

Among Marx scholars there has long been a debate over who represents the “real” or “best” Karl Marx — the philosophical and militantly humanistic “young Marx” or the “mature Marx” of later years, grounded in rigorous economic and sociological studies. And now we have a “late Marx” who seems to overturn much of what Marx produced from the late 1840s to the late 1860s. Anderson embraces all three — young, mature, and late — insisting on an underlying continuity but also perceiving changes, growth, and development in Marx’s thought. This was beautifully expressed decades earlier by pioneering Marx scholar Teodor Shanin, who insisted “there was neither ‘epistemological rupture’ in Marx’s thought nor decline or retreat, but constant transformation, uneven as such processes are. His last decade was a conceptual leap, cut short by his death” (Shanin, p. 33). Anderson’s Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads further documents and celebrates the changes and development that culminated in an approach richer, more dialectical, more vibrant (and far more adequate for our own time) than can be found in Emile Burns’ Handbook of Marxism.

In The Communist Manifesto and other writings from the late 1840s to 1859, Anderson suggests, there definitely is a Eurocentric dimension in the perspective that Marx and Engels lay out — indicating that “undeveloped” countries can see their future by looking at the industrially developed capitalist countries, and that human society across the face of the planet invariably evolves, as was the case in Western Europe, from “primitive” tribal communism to slave civilizations, then to feudalism, followed by capitalism, which is destined to give way to socialist revolution. This unilinear conceptualization of the “mature Marx” is superseded by a multilinear approach of the “late Marx,” who perceives different pathways of development in the world, alongside Western Europe’s historical evolution described (and overgeneralized) in The Communist Manifesto.

Anderson documents that even Engels did not fully comprehend all that Marx was developing before his final year. Lenin was able to grasp much (but not all) that eluded what Anderson refers to as “post-Marx Marxists,” and Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution captured much but hardly all of its complexity. One is reminded of Rosa Luxemburg’s 1903 comment that Marx’s “detailed and comprehensive analysis … and … method of historical research with its immeasurable field of application … offered much more than was directly essential for the practical conduct of the class war.” She added that “as our movement progresses and demands the solution of new practical problems … we dip once more into the treasury of Marx’s thought,” going on to lament that the inclination to “go on working in old ruts of thought” was causing “the theoretical utilization of the Marxist system [to] proceed very slowly” (Luxemburg, p. 111).

One is struck, in much of what Marx was doing in his final years, by the profoundly revolutionary qualities of his thought, consistent with his youthful admonition of 1843 — “the categorical imperative to overthrow all conditions in which man is a degraded, enslaved, neglected, contemptible being.” And as Sidney Hook more than once noted, the aging reformist Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein (certainly in a position to know) long ago put his finger on this quality with the comment that “Marx had a strong Bolshevik streak in him!” (Quoted in Hook, p. 43).

From explorations in the history of ancient Rome to developments in India (both ancient and modern) and Ireland, to commentary on current realities in the vast expanses of Russia and the United States, Marx invariably focuses on class dynamics and revolutionary possibilities. Often these possibilities involve a convergence of multiple developments and struggles and — according to Anderson (p. 237) — with a “theoretical originality … which not only breaks new ground but still speaks to us today on issues often considered under the term ‘intersectionality,’” that is, the dynamic interplay with class of other forms of experience and struggle grounded in race and ethnicity, gender, and other forms of identity.

Along with attention Marx gives to class struggle infused with intersectionality, we find a revolutionary internationalism which explodes Eurocentric paradigms – an increasingly interactive globalism related to the interplay of the so-called periphery and core of global capitalism. Where he once envisioned the highly industrialized regions of Western Europe leading the way to socialist revolution, the late Marx, as Anderson puts it, “now sees revolutionary change in Western Europe emanating from the periphery — in the cases of Ireland and Russia — and moving to the core” (p. 233).

What also comes through in Anderson’s study is Marx’s increasing attention to revolutionary possibilities in Russia and the United States.

Regarding Russia, this is convincingly argued and well documented in Teodor Shanin’s 1983 classic Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism, republished by Verso in 2018. But of course the point is also beautifully and succinctly made in the preface Marx and Engels wrote for the 1882 Russian translation of The Communist Manifesto.

Regarding the United States, the massive and explosive working-class upsurge of 1877, ignited by rebellious railroad workers, caused Marx to note (in a letter to Engels dated July 25, 1877): “This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down, but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labor party in the United States.” He also noted two additional “favorable circumstances.” One resulted from the terrible betrayal of the democratic promise represented by Reconstruction: “The policy of the new President will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers …” The second involved “the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favor of railway, mining, etc., companies,” which Marx believed “will convert the farmers of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers.” This and much else can be found in Robin Blackburn’s study of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction Era and rapid spread of capitalist industrialization in An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln (2011), also published by Verso.

Kevin Anderson’s The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads is an important contribution for those wishing to comprehend both past and present, and especially to those who seek to help shape the future.

Works cited

Anderson, Kevin. The Late Marx’s Revolutionary Roads: Colonialism, Gender, and Indigenous Communism. London, UK: Verso, 2025

Anderson, Kevin. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, A Critical Study. Urbana, IL: Chicago University Press, 1995.

Anderson, Kevin. Marx at the Margins, Expanded Edition. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016.

Burns, Emil, ed., Handbook of Marxism. New York: International Publishers, 1935.

Deutscher, Isaac. Stalin, A Political Biography, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Fabaee, Simin. Global Marxism: Decolonisation and Revolutionary Politics. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2024.

Fanxi, Wang. Mao Zedong Thought. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021.

Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribner’s, 1940.

Hook, Sidney. Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx. New York: John Day Co., 1933.

Le Blanc, Paul. Lenin: Responding to Catastrophe, Forging Revolution. London: Pluto Press, 2023.

Luxemburg, Rosa. “Stagnation and Progress in Marxism,” in Mary-Alice Waters, ed. Rosa Luxemburg Speaks. New York, 1970.

Shanin, Teodor. Late Marx and the Russian Road: Marx and the Peripheries of Capitalism. London: Verso, 2018; first published by Monthly Review Press, 1983.

“The USA pulled the strings behind the assassination of Patrice Lumumba”

HubMP2012

MARCH 22, 2026

A Belgian court has ordered that a 93-year-old former diplomat stand trial for the 1961 assassination of Congo’s former prime minister and independence leader, Patrice Lumumba.

Lumumba was killed at age 35, after serving for just three months as the first prime minister of the Congolese Republic, now known as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). He was ousted in a political coup and assassinated a few months later by mercenaries.

It was only in 2002 that Belgium admitted moral responsibility for Lumumba’s assassination. Lumumba’s remaining family brought the case to the Belgian courts some 15 years ago. Etienne Davignon, a junior diplomatic intern in Kinshasa at the time of the coup, is the last living among ten Belgians with suspected involvement in the killing.

Prosecutors allege that the ex-diplomat participated in Lumumba’s unlawful detention and transfer and was complicit in denying Lumumba’s right to a fair trial, and subjecting him to “humiliating and degrading treatment”. He also stands accused of complicity in the murders of Maurice Mpolo and Joseph Okito, who were prominent allies of Lumumba. Taken together, these accusations amount to war crimes.

To understand the significance of Patrice Lumumba and the movement he led, we republish below an interview conducted by Maurin Picard with Susan Williams, who has written extensively on this subject. Susan Williams told Labour Hub that the legal ruling is a significant step forward — but it’s important not to absolve the United States from involvement, as was pointed out by the 2001 report of the Belgian parliamentary inquiry into Lumumba’s assassination.

The interview

Maurin Picard: What is left of Patrice Lumumba’s legacy in Africa today? 

Susan Williams: Patrice Lumumba belongs to the pantheon of great Pan-Africanist leaders of the twentieth century, alongside Kwame Nkrumah, Frantz Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and Thomas Sankara. Currently, it is his brutal death that is being remembered. But the power of his legacy in Africa today rests on the strength of his ideals: democracy, non-violence, freedom from colonialism and white minority rule, non-tribalism, and non-alignment.  

This legacy has also thrown up reasons to distrust the West. The CIA-backed overthrow and killing of Lumumba was a direct attack on the elected and legitimate government of the Congo. Such aggression was incompatible with America’s portrayal of itself as the world’s champion of democracy. 

MP: How do you explain the extraordinary success of this man, then, and his incredible popularity, comparable to Che Guevara? Is it well deserved and if yes, why? 

SW: It is indeed deserved. Both Lumumba and Che Guevara can be seen as martyrs: courageous men still in their thirties who were murdered in CIA-backed operations. But, unlike Guevara, Lumumba was against the use of violence in the struggle for liberation. Barely three months after his election he realized that everything was against him and he told his supporters that it was up to them to carry on the fight. “For me,” he said, “it’s finished. I feel that I am going to die. I will die like Gandhi.”

MP: Your book White Malice uncovers efforts made by the CIA and the Eisenhower Administration to keep a tight leash on newly independent African countries, starting with Congolese political elites… What was the end goal? 

SW: The end goal was clear: to assert US control over the former colonial territories of Africa and their resources. US administrations feared that the newly-independent nations might become satellites of the Soviet Union. The Congo was seen as central in this concern, because of its geographical position and its strategic mineral resources, especially the Shinkolobwe uranium mine in Katanga. This mine produced the uniquely rich ore that was used to build the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. A CIA agent explained: “We didn’t want the Russians to get all of the Uranium. They had Uranium of their own, but we certainly didn’t want them to control any of the ores that were coming out of Congo. We did our best to prevent them…”

Some American leaders’ attitudes to Africa were fuelled by racial prejudice. At a meeting in January 1960, Vice President Richard Nixon revealed his extremely racist views when he stated: “Some of the peoples of Africa have been out of the trees for only about fifty years.” 

MP: When does the US turn against Patrice Lumumba (in other words, can we identify a watershed or a point of no return)? 

SW: American hostility against Lumumba started to brew even before the Congo’s independence at the end of June 1960. But matters accelerated swiftly. A watershed moment occurred in late July, when Lumumba was visiting New York and was asked whether Americans would still have access to Congolese uranium, as they had when Belgium ruled the country. Lumumba’s response was a clear no: “From now on we are an independent and sovereign state. Belgium doesn’t produce any uranium; it would be to the advantage of both our countries if the Congo and the US worked out their own agreements in the future.” Eisenhower was outraged. He cancelled his planned meeting with Lumumba, saying he preferred to play golf. A month later, at a meeting of the National Security Council, he backed the plan to assassinate the democratically-elected Prime Minister of the Congo.  

MP: Very early on, US spies start plotting against Lumumba. Yet, the last hours seem to involve only Belgian and Katangese personnel. Where is the American touch in Lumumba’s demise? 

SW: Yes: the Americans seem to be invisible. But they were lurking in the shadows of events in multiple covert and sinister ways, facilitating the steps that led tragically to Lumumba’s death. Important details about the involvement of the CIA are starting to emerge, especially from recent releases of documents under the JFK Assassination Records Collection Act. The US managed events in such a way that their policy of assassination was enacted by others, who have been held responsible ever since. 

MP: With Lumumba gone, have you established a sense of relief on the American side, or did it prove to be in vain, with regards to American plans for the Congo? 

SW: It was not so much in vain, as a stage in the process of establishing American control of the Congo through the insertion of puppet leaders. Kennedy’s inauguration as the new president of the US in January 1961 – just a few days after Lumumba’s assassination – was perceived by newly-independent nations as a reason for hope. But the new administration did not alter Eisenhower’s policy in the Congo; if anything, it strengthened it. There were even contingency plans for a military intervention. 

MP: What was Lumumba’s ultimate weakness? Too naive (re: Mobutu), too inexperienced on the international stage as it is often said (threatening the UN and the US to appeal to the USSR to oust Belgian troops)? Something else? 

SW: Lumumba was too trusting; he found it difficult to accept that people might behave dishonourably. This weakness led him to trust Mobutu, even against the warnings of his advisors. But Lumumba’s murder was not the result of mistakes or failings on his part. The reason for his death was his commitment to the genuine and unfettered independence of his nation, including control over its own extremely valuable mineral resources. Lumumba never had a chance.  

MP: Is there any form of US guilt and apologies regarding American involvement in Lumumba’s death, comparable to Belgium’s formal ‘regrets’ in 2002? 

SW: Thus far, Belgium has taken all the blame. The US Senate Committee that was set up in 1975 under Senator Frank Church to investigate the abuses of US intelligence agencies, acknowledged the fact of American plots to kill Lumumba. But it acquitted the CIA of any responsibility for his actual death. The 2001 report of the Belgian commission of inquiry does not accept this: it states that Belgian government files do not support the modest role claimed by CIA officials. This finding is abundantly supported by my own research, as set out in White Malice.

Belgium is trying to find a way of coming to terms with its colonial past and of shouldering its responsibilities for the terrible things that were done. It is a step forward and in sharp contrast with the approach of the UK government, which firmly resists the idea of facing up to any of the realities – and horrors – of its own colonial history. Indeed, the UK itself – as the junior partner to the US – supported plots to kill Lumumba, as official documents reveal.  

Maurin Picard, a former correspondent in the USA for French and Belgian publications, is the author of Katanga! La guerre oubliée de la Françafrique contre l’ONU (2024) and Ils ont tué Monsieur H. (2019). Susan Williams, a Senior Fellow at the School of Advanced Study, University of London, is the author of White Malice. The CIA and the Neocolonisation of Africa (2021) and Who Killed Hammarskjöld? (2011). This is a slightly edited version of an article that was published in Africa Briefing and is a translation of an interview published in French in Le Soir.

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:LumumbaBruxelles1960.jpg Source:
GaHetNa (Nationaal Archief NL) 910-9732.Author: Herbert Behrens (ANEFO), licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

The End of Childhood

Vuk Bačanović

 March 18, 2026

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Photograph Source: Photo by Rene Bernal

Donald Trump has always struck me as a repulsive figure. Not only because he is a political symptom of the terminal stage of cancer in American society, but also because for years he served as its television billboard. A man who managed to turn banality and arrogance into a full-fledged ideology.

Long before he would transform himself into a messianic figure for the American right, Trump was the creator of one of the most grotesque pedagogies of modern capitalism: the reality show The Apprentice. It was, in essence, a kind of prototype for the Balkan reality spectacles—only with golden elevators and Manhattan skylines in the background. In this spectacle, a group of hapless contestants competed to sell whatever could be sold—from bananas and plastic trinkets to real estate—simply to avoid the moment when His All-Successful Majesty Trump, seated at an enormous table like a corporate sultan, would cut them down with the famous verdict: “You’re fired!”

One of them has remained particularly vivid in my memory—a man wearing a cowboy hat and carrying that dull, sorrowful look of someone who already suspects he is merely a prop in someone else’s performance. With something close to religious devotion, he explained to Trump that he had never read a single book in his life except Trump’s own—How to Get Rich. Or How to Become Rich. Or perhaps How to Become Trump If You Are Not Trump. Something along those lines. The scene was so perfectly grotesque that it could have served as a textbook illustration of the entire cultural model Trump was selling to America—and to the world.

And that, in truth, was the main reason for my disgust. Not because he is rich—capitalism, after all, is full of wealthy people, and some of them even manage to go through life without turning into caricatures of their own offshore accounts—but because for years he preached one of the most morally grotesque pseudo-philosophies the modern world has managed to produce: the idea that the ordinary person need not think too much, nor ask too many questions about the nature of the order in which he lives. It is enough, according to this doctrine, to learn how to step over one’s fellow human beings more efficiently, more quickly, and more ruthlessly; perhaps then, one day, he too might approach the blessed state of living a life resembling that of Mr. Trump.

And, it must be admitted—he succeeded.

A man whose fortune rested largely upon inherited wealth managed, in America’s self-proclaimed age of “debunking all myths,” to sell himself as a kind of urban mythic hero: an anonymous striver who supposedly began his billionaire career by selling newspapers on the street, then—in the finest tradition of American fairy tales—“borrowed” his first million and built an empire from it. This carefully staged persona soon began parading through popular culture: from cameo appearances in Home Alone to guest spots in television series such as The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, where he was presented as a kind of benevolent, slightly eccentric, but fundamentally likable billionaire.

And in the finale of that series—if you are obedient enough, agile enough, and ruthless enough—you too might win The Apprentice and fulfill your American dream.

But in truth, Trump—and the entire Trumpist dream, even in its Zionist-evangelical interpretative key—is perhaps best summarized by a single line he delivers while once again playing himself in the film The Little Rascals (1994). Appearing as the father of the wealthy boy Waldo, he utters the following sentence:

“You’re the best son money can buy.”

In that one sentence lies the entire catechism of Trumpist civilization. Everything can be bought. Sons and daughters. Friendships. Elections. Morality. Truth.

Only in real life the matter turned out to be somewhat more… practical. Trump’s long-time business associate Jeffrey Epstein, for instance, did not travel the world—particularly through its poorer regions, and quite notably through parts of the Balkans—buying boys and girls so that someone might adopt them as sons and daughters. No. He bought them as sexual slaves. And, as we now know—and this is no longer some fringe “conspiracy theory,” but a matter surrounded by substantial and well-documented suspicion—also for the various satanic rituals of those who had successfully climbed to the top of the pyramid of the Trumpist dream.

And when all of this is placed in a broader context, the picture becomes even clearer. Through his unconditional support for Benjamin Netanyahu—the director of what has become the near-ritual destruction of tens of thousands of children in Gaza—through spectacular geopolitical acts such as the kidnapping of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, or the notion that an ancient Iranian civilization might be “disciplined” by bombing—once again over the bodies of children—Trump has accomplished something that no American president before him had managed to do so openly.

He has, in the end, stripped bare the myth of the “American Dream.”

That is to say—a nightmare in which the entire world has been drawn into an endless episode of The Apprentice, where billions of people spend their lives in quiet fear of whether the supreme patron of mass murderers, oligarchs, and pedophiles might one day simply “fire” them from existence. And all of this under the comforting illusion that such a system—a grotesque hybrid of television spectacle and moral sewerage—is in fact the pinnacle of civilization and the only proven recipe for happiness.

Yet, paradoxical as it may sound, there is at least one thing for which Trump deserves a certain grim gratitude: his brutal, almost caricatural honesty. Through his sheer arrogance he has torn away the colorful wrapping in which this system had been packaged for decades—wrapped, above all, in the glittering cellophane of Hollywood popular culture.

For America, in no small measure, won the Cold War thanks precisely to that packaging. Sitcoms about harmonious families, perfectly trimmed suburban lawns, kitchens where apple pies were eternally baking, studio audiences that—when not laughing at some well-worn joke—burst into ecstatic cheers whenever a billionaire appeared on screen, sometimes even Trump himself.

And we all watched it.

And we believed.

Now that we have begun to understand that behind those cheerful television curtains there is, more often than not, a Jeffrey Epstein smiling at our children, it may be time to return to somewhat more serious reading. Frantz Fanon—once a frequent visitor to our own betrayed and ultimately shattered civilization called Yugoslavia—wrote the following lines in The Wretched of the Earth:

Supernatural magical forces reveal themselves to be strangely ‘egotistical.’ The strength of the colonized becomes infinitely small because it has been weakened by alien attributes. He no longer has reason to fight them, for power appears to reside in ominous mythical structures. Clearly, everything unfolds as a permanent conflict on a fantastical plane. Yet in the struggle for liberation, sometimes fragmented into unreal sectors, seized by inexpressible fear but also prone to lose itself in hallucinatory fantasies, the people scatter and reorganize themselves again, until through blood and tears they arrive at very concrete and immediate confrontations.

Perhaps, then, the most important lesson of our time is this: once a shattered civilization parts ways with its illusions, it is granted—perhaps for the second time—a chance to rediscover its dignity.

In that sense, this is the end of childhood—and, in our case, the end of a long and rather embarrassing infantilization.

This does not mean that the world will suddenly cease to be imperfect, harsh, and often nightmarish. What it does mean is that we no longer have the luxury of feigned astonishment—the comforting hope that our “civilized world” has merely taken a tragic wrong turn and will soon reset itself to its original settings.

Growing up, as anyone who has truly gone through it knows, is neither simple nor romantic. Least of all now, when we have finally said to Trump—and to his predecessors and successors who have long occupied our imaginations and our loyalties—what perhaps should have been said much earlier:

“You’re fired.”

Vuk Bačanović edits the Montenegro-based political magazine, Žurnal.

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Clarke - Childhood's End.pdf - Wasabi

Clarke's. Mysterious World. Arthur C. Clarke's. World of Strange Powers. Fiction. *Across the Sea of Stars. Against the Fall of Night. Childhood's End. The City .....