What I Learned by Reading Hundreds of COVID-19 Research Studies

I’ve scanned the latest science almost every day for nine months. Three themes kept coming up.

Brian Owens 29 Dec 2020 | Hakai Magazine
2020 was a huge year for science and research. Photo by Darryl Dyck, the Canadian Press.


For the better part of the past year, I have spent almost every day reviewing the latest scientific papers on the COVID-19 pandemic — everything from the nitty gritty science of virology, immunology and epidemiology, to studies of how the pandemic is affecting our societies and mental health — and summarizing the most interesting and important ones for this column. It’s been a lot to take in and I’ve learned a great deal, but through it all a few common themes and ideas keep coming up. Here are the three biggest things that I’ve learned from almost nine months of reporting on pandemic science.

First, big world-spanning disasters like pandemics strip away the Band-Aids and reveal a society’s weaknesses. In Canada, and other wealthy countries, the biggest weaknesses are the economic and racial fault lines running through our society, and how we treat our elderly.

COVID-19 hit poor people, Indigenous communities and racialized communities especially hard, both in terms of health and economic effects. While most of the data comes from the United States, there is evidence in Canada as well that people of colour are more susceptible to the virus — and at higher risk of complications and death — than white people. Following physical distancing rules was often more difficult, for example, because many people of colour worked in jobs considered essential, such as those in health care, sanitation, delivery services, and grocery stores. Plus, years of economic deprivation and systemic racism have left some people with more underlying health conditions that put them at higher risk of COVID-19.

Likewise, the pandemic revealed just how insufficient our society’s way of dealing with the elderly is, with inadequate investment in nursing homes leaving these facilities unable or unprepared to deal with a deadly infectious disease. Even the measures we adopted to protect them, cutting off most contact with the outside world, left residents more vulnerable to mental health problems such as loneliness and depression. If we are going to “build back better,” our highest priorities must include dealing with poverty, racism and ageism.

Second, it became obvious just how much science can accomplish when given the motivation and support to deal with big existential problems. The virus was first identified in China about one year ago, and already people are starting to receive one of several new vaccines that appear to be even more effective than some of the most optimistic predictions from last spring. This was never a sure thing; there has never been a successful vaccine against a coronavirus — such as SARS or MERS — and some doubted whether it would be possible for this one. But major investments of time, money and effort from scientists, drug companies and governments resulted in the fastest vaccine development project in history, one that will undoubtedly save countless lives.

And it’s not just vaccines. Scientists have also developed drugs to treat the disease, they hacked together ventilators and other vital equipment when there was a shortage early on and they created a wide array of ever faster, cheaper and more accurate tests. Most of the tests, however, are not yet available in Canada and other countries, but will be soon. Let’s remember just how resourceful and creative we can be when we work together, as we move from the pandemic to dealing with that other existential threat we face, and which has not gone away: climate change.

Finally, while science can do great things, it’s fallible. Whenever we ask questions of science, the answers we get back are always partial, and sometimes wrong. We have seen this over and over again during the pandemic, as new information overtakes the old, or once promising avenues of investigation turn out to be dead ends. Early on, with little information about how the virus spread, public health officials emphasized disinfecting surfaces and discouraged mask-wearing, in part to conserve limited supplies of protective equipment for health-care workers. But as we learned more, that advice changed — we now know that airborne transmission is much more important than transmission from surfaces, and masks are one of the most effective protective measures we can take, alongside hand-washing and physical distancing.

Similarly, in the early days of the pandemic, doctors tried any kind of treatment they could think of to save patients, but some ideas that showed early promise were ineffective. The hype around the malaria drug hydroxychloroquine quickly died away — despite the efforts of a committed band of boosters including Donald Trump — when more rigorous testing showed it didn’t work. Even remdesivir, the Ebola drug that has become a frontline therapy for COVID-19, is on shaky ground, with the World Health Organization recently recommending against its use.

Some of the confusion is ongoing, with scientists still investigating and debating exactly how the virus jumped from animals to people, how it is mutating and evolving, and how long natural or vaccine-induced immunity will last. The answers to some of these questions may only come long after the pandemic is firmly in the past, or not at all. While most people think of science as something that provides solid answers, the pandemic has reminded us that it is a messy process, and the answers it gives are always just a provisional explanation based on the best information we have so far.

Although it may feel like we are rounding a corner as the first doses of vaccines go out, there is still much to learn about the virus and how it is affecting our bodies and our society. In 2021, I will continue to keep track of all the latest developments, and share them with you to try and help demystify the science around this disease.

Brian Owens is a freelance science writer and editor based in St. Stephen, New Brunswick. His work has appeared in Hakai Magazine, Nature, New Scientist, the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the Lancet.

Bill Gates’s Foundation Is Leading a Green Counterrevolution in Africa

BYJAN URHAHN

TRANSLATION BYLOREN BALHORN 

JACOBIN

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation promised Africa a “Green Revolution” to fight hunger and poverty. It hasn't worked — but it has upped corporate agriculture’s profits. Local farmers are being left empty-handed, and hunger is rising.
Bill and Melinda Gates. (Wikimedia Commons)

Over the last five years, the number of people around the world suffering from hunger has been on the rise. Against this backdrop, a decades-old debate continues to rage, asking which agricultural approaches can provide everyone with sufficient healthy food.

One simplistic answer comes from governments in the Global North (and so, too, some in the Global South). They claim that international agribusiness could end global hunger if only it had the means to do so, boosting agricultural productivity through the use of pesticides, hybrid seeds, and other external inputs.

But many social movements, experts, and NGOs disagree. They insist that hunger isn’t a problem of production — rather, it’s rooted in the unequal distribution of power resources and control over agricultural inputs such as land and seeds.

Agribusiness’s narrative nevertheless continues to be influential. It determines policy much more than the demands put forward by small farmers and their advocates ever do. Governments in the Global South, especially in Africa, are regularly pressured to modify their agricultural sectors with new laws or projects that favor international agribusiness. And in Africa, there’s a particularly prominent initiative driving corporate agriculture’s agenda — Bill Gates’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

Corporate Agriculture Against Global Hunger

AGRA was established in 2006 by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Deploying high-yield commercial seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides as its main weapons, the program is meant to help Africa unleash its own Green Revolution in agriculture to fight hunger and poverty. At least, that’s the promise.

Upon its foundation, AGRA set out to double the agricultural yields and incomes of thirty million smallholder households, thereby halving both hunger and poverty in twenty African countries by 2020. To achieve this, the “alliance” funds various projects and lobbies African governments to implement structural changes that would set the stage for its “Green Revolution.” Since its foundation, AGRA has received contributions of about $1 billion, mainly from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Large grants have also come from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and other countries.

From these donations, AGRA has awarded grants of more than $500 million across the continent. African governments support AGRA’s goals with public funds through so-called farm input subsidy programs (FISPs), with which farmers are expected to purchase the seeds — mostly hybrid — and synthetic fertilizers promoted by AGRA. The state subsidies for small farms provide an incentive to introduce the bundle of farming technologies AGRA counts as part of its Green Revolution. FISPs have been introduced on a significant scale in ten of AGRA’s thirteen “focus countries” including Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Rwanda, Zambia, and Tanzania.

But fourteen years after AGRA was founded, it’s safe to say that the initiative has failed to meet its goals. Rather than combat hunger and poverty, hunger has actually increased by 30 percent in the AGRA focus countries — meaning that thirty million more people are suffering from it than when AGRA started. By 2018, agricultural yields in the focus countries had increased by only 18 percent, as opposed to the 100 percent AGRA promised. In the period before AGRA, yields in these countries had grown by 17 percent. The increases in yields with and without AGRA were therefore almost identical.
Winners and Losers

AGRA’s results are devastating for small-scale farmers. Most AGRA projects primarily entail selling them expensive inputs such as hybrid seeds and synthetic fertilizers via agrochemical companies. These inputs are extremely costly and thus drastically increase farmers’ risk of falling into indebtedness. Examples from Tanzania show that small-scale farmers have not been able to repay seed and fertilizer debts directly after the harvest, even forcing some to sell their livestock.

The AGRA formula — “doubled yields equal doubled incomes” — simply does not pan out in practice. In the AGRA model, any short-term increases in yield have to be bought at great expense with seeds, fertilizer, and often pesticides — an arrangement that only boosts the incomes of seed and fertilizer companies.

Moreover, freedom of choice is restricted: in AGRA projects in Kenya, small-scale farmers are not allowed to decide for themselves which corn seed they plant and which fertilizers and pesticides they use on their fields. The managers of AGRA projects assume that participating agrochemical companies make the best decisions for the farmers. AGRA’s focus is on a few food crops such as corn or soy, causing traditional nutrient-rich foods to be neglected and even displaced.

Statistics for the thirteen AGRA focus countries show that production of cereals has fallen by 21 percent since the initiative was launched. A yield decline of 7 percent was recorded for root and tuber crops. All in all, AGRA reduces the diversity in farmers’ fields and thus also the variety of seeds being used. This development in turn makes agriculture even more vulnerable to the consequences of the climate crisis.

Lobbying for Corporate Interests

AGRA’s current strategy describes “policy and advocacy” as its first field of activity. Its primary goal is to actively promote policies that open the door to high-yield seeds, synthetic fertilizers, and other Green Revolution inputs. This prevents support for alternative approaches such as agroecology.

AGRA funded the establishment of a fertilizer and agribusiness lobby known as the African Fertilizer and Agribusiness Partnership (AFAP) to the tune of $25 million. It represents the interests of the fertilizer industry vis-à-vis African governments and donor organizations. In Ghana, Mozambique, and Tanzania, for example, AFAP wants to increase fertilizer use by 100 percent. AFAP’s partners include Louis Dreyfus Company, one of the world’s largest grain traders, and International Raw Materials (IRM), a major US fertilizer distributor. The links between AGRA and AFAP are also close: the president of AGRA is also a member of AFAP’s board of directors.

High on AGRA’s political agenda has always been the suppression of local farmers’ seed — and the reconfiguration of national and regional regulations to suit commercial seed companies. Together with the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), AGRA has coordinated and supported seed policy reforms in several countries such as Burkina Faso, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania.

Such changes have brought African countries into the 1991 Convention of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, known as “UPOV 91.” It guarantees breeders’ rights to new seed varieties and establishes intellectual property rights over seeds. The result: a framework was created to privatize plant genetic resources and thus generate profits.

AGRA also signed a formal memorandum of understanding with the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) in 2017. Here, too, seed legislation is to be adapted to UPOV 91. Yet the criteria for UPOV admission are often beyond the reach of small-scale producers. Seed that does not meet the so-called DUS criteria for seeds’ Distinctness (D), Uniformity (U), and Stability (S) cannot be protected by the UPOV system, and nor can it be included in the variety registers required by ECOWAS. This means that these seeds cannot be traded on formal markets. The effect is to restrict farmers’ right to store, exchange, and sell the seed they save from cultivating their own farms. At the same time, these rules strengthen corporate seed. In the worst case, farmers’ own seeds are criminalized — despite the fact that they remain the main source of seed across Africa.

Forget AGRA, We Need Agroecology

This hasn’t been without resistance. African movements such as the Coalition for the Protection of African Genetic Heritage (COPAGEN) and many others have opposed AGRA from the outset, arguing that AGRA and other Green Revolution initiatives neglect the needs and rights of the small-scale producers who produce most of our food worldwide.

Agricultural movements across Africa are calling for a phasing out of AGRA in favor of greater support for agroecology, an agricultural practice originating in the Global South and pursued by millions of farmers around the world.

Agroecology is both a sound science as well as a social movement that stands up for the rights of farmers and rejects a purely capitalist approach to agriculture. Agroecology offers small-scale farmers the kind of innovation they need: an agriculture that makes conscious use of nature and natural processes to promote the kinds of soil-building practices that become impossible when Green Revolution technologies are used.


These practices are characterized, for example, by the cultivation of several food crops in the same field. Compost, manure, mulch, legumes, and organic fertilizers — instead of synthetic fertilizers based on fossil fuels — are used to fertilize the fields. Ecological pest control reduces the use of pesticides. Researchers work with farmers to improve their farm seeds rather than replace them with commercial hybrid seeds that have to be repurchased every year and also force them to treat the plants in their fields with synthetic fertilizers to achieve sufficient yields.

But corporate power is putting up enormous resistance to any and all alternatives to AGRA. The interests and spheres of influence of the agribusinesses that profit from the status quo are huge. Alternatives that strengthen agroecology and farmers’ rights, reduce the use of pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, or promote farm seeds come into direct conflict with the interests of capital. Too often, governments in the Global North see themselves as representatives or ambassadors of “their” corporations. Nevertheless, the alternatives to AGRA are there — now is the time to fight for their realizatio


This article draws on a recent study of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)’s record in Africa, “False Promises.”

Senate Democrats Could Have Defied Mitch McConnell on $2,000 Checks. They Chose Not to

BYDAVID SIROTA ANDREW PEREZ JACOBIN

Democrats and Beltway pundits helped Mitch McConnell undermine Bernie Sanders’s push for direct aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy through $2,000 checks. Even for a party that is constantly disappointing, Democrats’ complete capitulation to McConnell and austerity ideology was shockingly pathetic.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks at a press conference

 in Washington, DC in December. (Tasos Katopodis / Getty Images)

It was always a possibility that Democrats would get too scared to halt a major Pentagon bill in order to help millions of Americans get $2,000 survival checks — in fact, as we wrote earlier this week, it was very likely that they would back down the moment any bad-faith critic so much as waved a flag and said “support the troops.”

And capitulation became even more likely when Clinton-era Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, corporate Democratic pundits, and billionaire-owned elite media outlets began parroting a series of eerily similar let-them-eat-cake talking points against the survival checks — which McConnell promptly used to bludgeon proponents of the bipartisan initiative.

But even appreciating all of this — and also knowing that many Democratic leaders still cling to an outdated austerity ideology — the sheer scale of Wednesday’s Democratic surrender was truly a sight to behold. And it probably ended the chance for more immediate aid to millions of Americans facing eviction, starvation, and bankruptcy.

The day began with Sen. Bernie Sanders following through on his promise to deny unanimous consent for the Senate to advance a $740 billion defense authorization bill, until Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell allows an up-or-down vote on legislation that would send $2,000 survival checks to individuals making less than $75,000 and couples making less than $150,000.

Sanders’s move forced McConnell to ask the Senate to pass a formal motion to proceed on the defense bill, which would let Republicans move forward on the Pentagon priority without a vote on the $2,000 checks. The motion created the moment in which Democrats could have stood their ground and cornered the GOP leader.

Instead, as Republicans saber rattled about the need to pass the defense bill, forty-one Democrats obediently voted with McConnell, allowing him to move the defense bill forward without a vote on the checks. That included “yes” votes from Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Vice President–elect Kamala Harris, the lead sponsor on a bill to give Americans monthly $2,000 checks during the pandemic. One day before her vote to help McConnell, Harris had called on the Republican leader to hold a vote on her legislation.

Only six members of the Senate Democratic Caucus mustered the courage to vote against McConnell’s maneuver — Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chris Van Hollen, Jeff Merkley, Ed Markey, and Ron Wyden. Democratic senators in fact provided the majority of the votes for the measure that lets the defense bill proceed without a vote on the $2,000 checks.

It was called a motion to proceed, but it really was a motion demanding Democrats concede — and they instantly obliged.

It Didn’t Have to Go This Way

Had most Senate Democrats voted against that motion, they might have had a chance to deny McConnell and stall the process — after all, five Republicans also voted against the measure, including Missouri’s Josh Hawley, who has pushed the survival checks with Sanders.

Republican president Donald Trump has called for Congress to pass the $2,000 checks, but Georgia’s Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue — who only this week started pretending they support the direct aid — were nowhere to be found. They skipped the vote, effectively refusing to use their power to deliver relief to the roughly two-thirds of Georgia households who would benefit from the checks.

To be sure, there may still be some opportunities for procedural delays in the final days of the Senate session.

It is also theoretically possible that the fluid dynamics of the closely contested Georgia Senate races — where the Democratic candidates are campaigning for the $2,000 checks — may compel McConnell to relent and allow a vote on the direct aid, if he suddenly feels it is necessary to hold onto his job as majority leader.

So yes, Sanders’s pledge to lock the gates and prevent the Senate from going home for the New Year’s holiday is valuable, in the sense that playing for time holds out the chance for unforeseen events to shift the dynamics.

But unless there is some game-changing event after Wednesday, McConnell was almost certainly correct when he said the $2,000 checks initiative now has “no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate.”

And McConnell may feel even less pressure to approve bigger direct payments in the future without a Republican president publicly demanding them.
Liberal Economists and Pundits Gave McConnell His Talking Points

McConnell’s crusade to stop direct aid was abetted not only by Senate Democrats’ surrender, but also by media elites who loyally represent the party’s corporate wing and who began promoting canned talking points to undermine the direct aid.

First came a barrage of attacks on the $2,000 checks initiative from Summers, a former hedge fund executive who as President Barack Obama’s national economic director stymied the push for more stimulus after the 2008 financial crisis.

Then the New York Times’ Paul Krugman pretended the wildly popular initiative is “divisive” and said “the economics aren’t very good.” Timesman Tom Friedman, who married into a real estate empire, called the idea “crazy” and fretted that checks might go to “people who don’t need the help.” The minions of billionaire Michael Bloomberg joined in with a house editorial demanding Congress block the checks.

Meanwhile, only weeks after the Washington Post news page told the harrowing tales of rising poverty and starvation in America, the paper’s editorial board argued against stimulus by insisting that “the economy has healed significantly.”

The Post — which is owned by the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos — argued against the $2,000 checks by saying it is unjust that some rich people might in theory end up benefiting from the proposal (this, from the editorial board that still vociferously defends the 2008 Wall Street bailout that financed bonuses for wealthy bank executives who destroyed the global economy). The Post also borrowed spin from Summers, arguing that people probably won’t use the money because “restaurants are closed and air travel limited.”

This isn’t even close to true: Indoor dining was recently shut down in New York City and DC, but restaurants are fully open in most states, and an unfortunate number of people are still flying.

All of this noise was quickly weaponized by McConnell, who in a Senate floor speech directly cited Summers and the Post as justification to stop the $2,000 checks to the two-thirds of households in his own state who would benefit.

“The liberal economist Larry Summers, President Clinton’s Treasury Secretary and President Obama’s NEC director says, ‘There’s no good economic argument for universal $2,000 checks at this moment.’” McConnell said, adding: “Even the liberal Washington Post today is laughing at the political left demanding more huge giveaways with no relationship to actual need.”

Then he concluded by parroting the pundits, declaring: “The Senate is not going to be bullied into rushing out more borrowed money into the hands of Democrats’ rich friends who don’t need the help.” McConnell is worth an estimated $34 million.

McConnell’s absurd attempt to pretend he doesn’t want to help the rich was boosted by Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who also cited the Post editorial and then insisted the legislation to give $2,000 checks to individuals making less than $75,000 “is about helping millionaires and billionaires.”

Neither McConnell nor Cornyn even attempted to substantiate their allegations — but they didn’t have to. Democrats were already in the process of folding, and corporate media was more than happy to run interference.

In the end, millions of Americans struggling to survive will likely be left with just a one-time $600 check, as eighty US senators rubber stamp a bloated defense bill to show they support the troops — and then tell the poor to eat a roll call vote.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Daily Poster, here.

The Chinese Revolution of 1949

MILESTONES: 1945–1952

NOTE TO READERS
“Milestones in the History of U.S. Foreign Relations” has been retired and is no longer maintained. For more information, please see the full notice.

The Chinese Revolution of 1949

On October 1, 1949, Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The announcement ended the costly full-scale civil war between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), which broke out immediately following World War II and had been preceded by on and off conflict between the two sides since the 1920’s. The creation of the PRC also completed the long process of governmental upheaval in China begun by the Chinese Revolution of 1911. The “fall” of mainland China to communism in 1949 led the United States to suspend diplomatic ties with the PRC for decades.

Communists entering Beijing in 1949.

The Chinese Communist Party, founded in 1921 in Shanghai, originally existed as a study group working within the confines of the First United Front with the Nationalist Party. Chinese Communists joined with the Nationalist Army in the Northern Expedition of 1926–27 to rid the nation of the warlords that prevented the formation of a strong central government. This collaboration lasted until the “White Terror” of 1927, when the Nationalists turned on the Communists, killing them or purging them from the party.

After the Japanese invaded Manchuria in 1931, the Government of the Republic of China (ROC) faced the triple threat of Japanese invasion, Communist uprising, and warlord insurrections. Frustrated by the focus of the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek on internal threats instead of the Japanese assault, a group of generals abducted Chiang in 1937 and forced him to reconsider cooperation with the Communist army. As with the first effort at cooperation between the Nationalist government and the CCP, this Second United Front was short-lived. The Nationalists expended needed resources on containing the Communists, rather than focusing entirely on Japan, while the Communists worked to strengthen their influence in rural society.

During World War II, popular support for the Communists increased. U.S. officials in China reported a dictatorial suppression of dissent in Nationalist-controlled areas. These undemocratic polices combined with wartime corruption made the Republic of China Government vulnerable to the Communist threat. The CCP, for its part, experienced success in its early efforts at land reform and was lauded by peasants for its unflagging efforts to fight against the Japanese invaders.

Chiang Kai-shek

Japanese surrender set the stage for the resurgence of civil war in China. Though only nominally democratic, the Nationalist Government of Chiang Kai-shek continued to receive U.S. support both as its former war ally and as the sole option for preventing Communist control of China. U.S. forces flew tens of thousands of Nationalist Chinese troops into Japanese-controlled territory and allowed them to accept the Japanese surrender. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, occupied Manchuria and only pulled out when Chinese Communist forces were in place to claim that territory.

In 1945, the leaders of the Nationalist and Communist parties, Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, met for a series of talks on the formation of a post-war government. Both agreed on the importance of democracy, a unified military, and equality for all Chinese political parties. The truce was tenuous, however, and, in spite of repeated efforts by U.S. General George Marshall to broker an agreement, by 1946 the two sides were fighting an all-out civil war. Years of mistrust between the two sides thwarted efforts to form a coalition government.

As the civil war gained strength from 1947 to 1949, eventual Communist victory seemed more and more likely. Although the Communists did not hold any major cities after World War II, they had strong grassroots support, superior military organization and morale, and large stocks of weapons seized from Japanese supplies in Manchuria. 

Years of corruption and mismanagement had eroded popular support for the Nationalist Government. Early in 1947, the ROC Government was already looking to the island province of Taiwan, off the coast of Fujian Province, as a potential point of retreat. 

Although officials in the Truman Administration were not convinced of the strategic importance to the United States of maintaining relations with Nationalist China, no one in the U.S. Government wanted to be charged with facilitating the “loss” of China to communism. Military and financial aid to the floundering Nationalists continued, though not at the level that Chiang Kai-shek would have liked. In October of 1949, after a string of military victories, Mao Zedong proclaimed the establishment of the PRC; Chiang and his forces fled to Taiwan to regroup and plan for their efforts to retake the mainland.

The ability of the PRC and the United States to find common ground in the wake of the establishment of the new Chinese state was hampered by both domestic politics and global tensions. In August of 1949, the Truman administration published the “China White Paper,” which explained past U.S. policy toward China based upon the principle that only Chinese forces could determine the outcome of their civil war. Unfortunately for Truman, this step failed to protect his administration from charges of having “lost” China. The unfinished nature of the revolution, leaving a broken and exiled but still vocal Nationalist Government and Army on Taiwan, only heightened the sense among U.S. anti-communists that the outcome of the struggle could be reversed. The outbreak of the Korean War, which pitted the PRC and the United States on opposite sides of an international conflict, ended any opportunity for accommodation between the PRC and the United States. Truman’s desire to prevent the Korean conflict from spreading south led to the U.S. policy of protecting the Chiang Kai-shek government on Taiwan.

For more than twenty years after the Chinese revolution of 1949, there were few contacts, limited trade and no diplomatic ties between the two countries. Until the 1970s, the United States continued to recognize the Republic of China, located on Taiwan, as China’s true government and supported that government’s holding the Chinese seat in the United Nation

 

Communists like us: Ethnicized modernity

 and the idea of `the West' in the Soviet Union

Alastair Bonnett

https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968020020040101

Article information

Volume: 2 issue: 4, page(s): 435-467

Issue published: December 1,2002

ABSTRACT 

This article offers a portrait of communism in the USSR as an

ethnicized form of modernity; a form defined in relation to the idea of ‘the West’.

First, I introduce the ‘racialized modernity’ thesis and suggest that notions of race

and racialization are neither adequate nor appropriate categories to apply to the

reification of modernity in the USSR. I then turn to western views of Russia, emphasizing the role accorded to Russians of the ‘not quite European’ Europeans. These

two sections provide the background to a discussion of the development of an

ethnopolitical form of communist modernity – a form in which the proletariat was

simultaneously an ethnic and political category – which is introduced in the rest of

the article. Section six is somewhat different, charting the abandonment of the

communist vision. The so-called ‘return to Europe’, although a supposedly stalled

and certainly an ambiguous process, is presented here in terms of the reanimation

of western and Russian myths of communism as a non-European ‘hiatus’ in Russian

history. Central to this process is the ethnic othering of communism through its

representation as an Asian contamination of western tradition.

Slavoj Žižek: We Need a Socialist Reset, Not a Corporate “Great Reset”

BY SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK JACOBIN

Slavoj Žižek writes in Jacobin today that we've been given a choice between a return to the old exploitative normality and a post-COVID corporate "Great Reset" that promises to be even worse. We need a real alternative, a socialist reset that can win justice for all and save the planet from climate apocalypse.  

Back in April 2020, reacting to the COVID-19 pandemic, Jürgen Habermas pointed out that “existential uncertainty is now spreading globally and simultaneously, in the heads of medially-wired individuals themselves.” He continued, “There never was so much knowing about our not-knowing and about the constraint to act and live in uncertainty.”

Habermas is right to claim that this not-knowing does not concern only the pandemic itself — we at least have experts there — but even more its economic, social, and psychic consequences. Note his precise formulation: it is not simply that we don’t know what goes on, we know that we don’t know, and this not-knowing is itself a social fact, inscribed into how our institutions act.

We now know that in, say, medieval times or early modernity they knew much less — but they didn’t know this because they relied on some stable ideological foundation which guaranteed that our universe is a meaningful totality. The same holds for some visions of Communism, even for Francis Fukuyama’s idea of the end of history — they all assumed to know where history is moving. Plus, Habermas is right to locate the uncertainty into “the heads of medially-wired individuals”: our link to the wired universe tremendously expands our knowledge, but at the same time it throws us into radical uncertainty (Are we hacked? Who controls our access? Is what we’re reading there fake news?). Viruses strike in both meanings of the term, biological and digital.

When we try to guess how our societies will look after the pandemic will be over, the trap to avoid is futurology — futurology by definition ignores our not-knowing. Futurology is defined as a systematic forecasting of the future from the present trends in society. And therein resides the problem — futurology mostly extrapolates what will come from the present tendencies. However, what futurology doesn’t take into account are historical “miracles,” radical breaks which can only be explained retroactively, once they happen.

We should perhaps mobilize here the distinction that works in French between futur and avenir: “Futur” is whatever will come after the present while “avenir” points toward a radical change. When a president wins reelection, he is “the present and future president,” but he is not the president “to come” — the president to come is a different president. So will the post-corona universe be just another future or something new “to come”?

It depends not only on science but on our political decisions. Now the time has come to say that we should have no illusions about the “happy” outcome of the US elections, which brought such a relief among the liberals all around the world. John Carpenter’s They Live (1988), one of the neglected masterpieces of the Hollywood left, tells the story of John Nada — Spanish for “nothing” — a homeless laborer who accidentally stumbles upon a pile of boxes full of sunglasses in an abandoned church. When he puts on a pair of these glasses while walking on a street, he notices that a colorful publicity billboard soliciting us to enjoy chocolate bars now simply displays the word “OBEY,” while another billboard with a glamorous couple in a tight embrace, seen through the glasses, orders the viewer to “MARRY AND REPRODUCE.”

He also sees that paper money bears the words “THIS IS YOUR GOD.” Additionally, he soon discovers that many people who look charming are actually monstrous aliens with metal heads… What circulates now on the web is an image which restages the scene from They Live apropos Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: seen directly, the image shows the two of them smiling with the message “TIME TO HEAL”; seen through the glasses, they are two alien monsters and the message is “TIME TO HEEL”…

This is, of course, part of the Trump propaganda to discredit Biden and Harris as masks of anonymous corporate machines which control our lives. However, there is (more than) a grain of truth in it. Biden’s victory means “future” as the continuation of the pre-Trump “normality” — that’s why there was such a sigh of relief after his victory. But this “normality” means the rule of anonymous global capital which is the true alien in our midst.



I remember from my youth the desire for “socialism with a human face” against Soviet-type “bureaucratic” socialism. Biden newly promises global capitalism with a human face, while behind the face the same reality will remain. In education, this “human face” assumed the form of our obsession with “well-being”: pupils and students should live in bubbles that will save them from the horrors of external reality, protected by Politically Correct rules.

Education is no longer intended to have a sobering effect of allowing us to confront social reality — and when we are told that this safety will prevent mental breakdowns, we should counter it with exactly the opposite claim: such false safety opens us up to mental crises when we have to confront our social reality. What “well-being activity” does is that it merely provides a false “human face” to our reality instead of enabling us to change this reality itself. Biden is the ultimate “well-being” president.

So why is Biden still better than Trump? Critics point out that Biden also lies and represents big capital, only in a more polite form — but, unfortunately, this form matters. With his vulgarization of public speech, Trump was corroding the ethical substance of our lives, what Hegel called Sitten (as opposed to individual morality).

This vulgarization is a worldwide process. Take the European case of Szilárd Demeter, a ministerial commissioner and head of the Petőfi Literary Museum in Budapest. Demeter wrote in an op-ed in November 2020, “Europe is George Soros’ gas chamber. Poison gas flows from the capsule of a multicultural open society, which is deadly to the European way of life.” He went on to characterize Soros as “the liberal Fuhrer,” insisting that his “liber-aryan army deifies him more than did Hitler’s own.”

If asked, Demeter would probably dismiss these statements as rhetorical exaggeration; this, however, in no way dismisses their terrifying implications. The comparison between Soros and Hitler is deeply antisemitic: it puts Soros on a level with Hitler, claiming that the multicultural open society promoted by Soros is not only as perilous as the Holocaust and the Aryan racism that sustained it (“liber-aryan”) but even worse, more perilous to the “European way of life.”

So is there an alternative to this terrifying vision, other than Biden’s “human face”? Climate activist Greta Thunberg recently offered three positive lessons of the pandemic: “It is possible to treat a crisis like a crisis, it is possible to put people’s health above economic interests, and it is possible to listen to the science.”

Yes, but these are possibilities — it’s also possible to treat a crisis in such a way that one uses it to obfuscate other crises (like: because of the pandemic we should forget about global warming); it’s also possible to use the crisis to make the rich richer and the poor poorer (which effectively happened in 2020 with an unprecedented speed); and it’s also possible to ignore or compartmentalize science (just recall those who refuse to take vaccines, the explosive rise of conspiracy theories, etc.). Scott Galloway gives a more or less accurate image of things in our corona time:


We are barrelling towards a nation with three million lords being served by 350 million serfs. We don’t like to say this out loud, but I feel as if this pandemic has largely been invented for taking the top 10% into the top 1%, and taking the rest of the 90% downward. We’ve decided to protect corporations, not people. Capitalism is literally collapsing on itself unless it rebuilds that pillar of empathy. We’ve decided that capitalism means being loving and empathetic to corporations, and Darwinist and harsh towards individuals.

So which is Galloway’s way out, how should we prevent social collapse? His answer is that “capitalism will collapse on itself without more empathy and love”: “We’re entering the Great Reset, and it’s happening quickly. Many companies will tragically be lost to the economic fallout of the pandemic, and those that do survive will exist in a different form. Organizations will be far more adaptable and resilient. Distributed teams currently thriving with less oversight will crave that same autonomy going forward. Employees will expect executives to continue leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity.”

But, again, how will this be done? Galloway proposes creative destruction that lets failing business fail while protecting people who lose jobs: “We let people get fired so that Apple can emerge and put Sun Microsystems out of business, and then we take that incredible prosperity and we’re more empathetic with people.”


The problem is, of course, who is the mysterious “we” in the last quoted sentence, i.e., how, exactly, is the redistribution done? Do we just tax the winners (Apple, in this case) more while allowing them to maintain their monopolist position? Galloway’s idea has a certain dialectical flair: the only way to reduce inequality and poverty is to allow the market competition to do its cruel job (we let people get fired), and then… what? Do we expect market mechanisms themselves to create new jobs? Or the state? How are “love” and “empathy” operationalized? Or do we count on the winners’ empathy and expect they will all behave like Gates and Buffett?

I find this supplementation of market mechanisms by morality, love, and empathy utterly problematic. Instead of enabling us to get the best of both worlds (market egotism and moral empathy), it is much more probable that we’ll get the worst of both worlds.

The human face of this “leading with transparency, authenticity, and humanity” are Gates, Bezos, Zuckenberg, the faces of authoritarian corporate capitalism who all pose as humanitarian heroes, as our new aristocracy celebrated in our media and quoted as wise humanitarians. Gates gives billions to charities, but we should remember how he opposed Elizabeth Warren’s plan for a small rise in taxes. He praised Piketty and once almost proclaimed himself a socialist — true, but in a very specific twisted sense: his wealth comes from privatizing what Marx called our “commons,” our shared social space in which we move and communicate.

Gates’s wealth has nothing to do with the production costs of the products Microsoft is selling (one can even argue that Microsoft is paying its intellectual workers a relatively high salary), i.e., Gates’s wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher “exploitation” of his hired intellectual workers. Gates became one of the richest men in the world through appropriating the rent for allowing millions of us to communicate through the medium that he privatized and controls. And in the same way that Microsoft privatized the software most of us use, personal contacts are privatized by our Facebook networking, Amazon book buying, or Google searching.

There is thus a grain of truth in Trump’s “rebellion” against digital corporate powers. It is worth watching the War Room podcasts of Steve Bannon, the greatest ideologist of Trump’s populism: one cannot but be fascinated by how many partial truths he combines into an overall lie. Yes, under Obama the gap that separates wealthy from poor grew immensely, big corporations grew stronger… but under Trump this process just went on, plus Trump lowered taxes, printed money mostly to save big companies, etc. We are thus facing a horrible false alternative: a big corporate reset or nationalist populism, which turns out to be the same. “The great reset” is the formula of how to change some things (even many things) so that things will basically remain the same.

So is there a third way, outside the space of the two extremes of restoring the old normality and a Great Reset? Yes, a true great reset. It is no secret what needs to be done — Greta Thunberg made it clear. First, we should finally recognize the pandemic crisis as what it is, part of a global crisis of our entire way of life, from ecology to new social tensions. Second, we should establish social control and regulation over economy. Third, we should rely on science — rely on but not simply accept it as the agency which makes decisions.

Why not? Let’s return to Habermas with whom we began: our predicament is that we are compelled to act while we know we don’t know the full coordinates of the situation we are in, and non-acting would itself function as an act. But is this not the basic situation of every acting? Our great advantage is that we know how much we don’t know, and this knowing about our not-knowing opens up the space of freedom. We act when we don’t know the whole situation, but this is not simply our limitation: what gives us freedom is that the situation — in our social sphere, at least — is in itself open, not fully (pre)determined. And our situation in the pandemic is certainly open.

We learned the first lesson now: “shutdown light” is not enough. They tell us “we” (our economy) cannot afford another hard lockdown — so let’s change the economy. Lockdown is the most radical negative gesture within the existing order. The way beyond, to a new positive order, leads through politics, not science. What has to be done is changing our economic life so that it will be able to survive lockdowns and emergencies that are for sure awaiting us, in the same way that a war compels us to ignore market limitations and find a way to do what is “impossible” in a free market economy.

Back in March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld, then the US Secretary of Defense, engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: “There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.” What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the “unknown knowns,” things we don’t know that we know — which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the “knowledge which doesn’t know itself,” as Lacan used to say.

If Rumsfeld thought that the main dangers in the confrontation with Iraq were the “unknown unknowns,” the threats from Saddam Hussein about which we do not even suspect what they may be, what we should reply is that the main dangers are, on the contrary, the “unknown knowns,” the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to ourselves.

We should read Habermas’s claim that we never knew so much about what we don’t know through these four categories: the pandemic shook what we (thought we) knew that we knew, it made us aware of what we didn’t know that we didn’t know, and, in the way we confronted it, we relied on what we didn’t know that we know (all our presumptions and prejudices which determine our acting although we are not even aware of them). We are not dealing here with the simple passage from not-knowing to knowing but with the much more subtle passage from not-knowing to knowing what we don’t know — our positive knowing remain the same in this passage, but we gain a free space for action.

It is with regard to what we don’t know that we know, our presumptions and prejudices, that China (and Taiwan and Vietnam) did so much better than Europe and the United States. I am getting tired of the eternally repeated claim “Yes, the Chinese contained the virus, but at what price…” I agree that we need a Julian Assange to let us know what really went on there, the whole story, but the fact is that, when the epidemic exploded in Wuhan, they immediately imposed lockdown and put on a standstill the majority of production in the entire country, clearly giving priority to human lives over economy — with some delay, true, they took the crisis extremely seriously.

Now they are reaping the reward, even in economy. And — let’s be clear — this was only possible because the Communist Party is still able to control and regulate economy: there is social control over market mechanisms, although a “totalitarian” one. However, again, the question is not how they did it in China but how should we do it. The Chinese way is not the only effective way, it is not “objectively necessary” in the sense that, if you analyze all the data, you have to do it the Chinese way. The epidemic is not just a viral process, it is a process that takes place within certain economic, social, and ideological coordinates which are open to change.

Now, at the very end of 2020, we live in a crazy time in which the hope that vaccines will work is mixed by the growing depression, despair even, due to the growing number of infections and the almost daily discoveries of the new unknowns about the virus. In principle the answer to “What is to be done?” is easy ­here: we have the means and resources to restructure health care so that it serves the needs of the people in a time of crisis, etc. However, to quote the last line of Brecht’s “In Praise of Communism” from his play Mother, “It is the simple thing, that is so hard to do.”

There are many obstacles that make it so hard to do, above all the global capitalist order and its ideological hegemony. Do we then need a new Communism? Yes, but what I am tempted to call a moderately conservative Communism: all the steps that are necessary, from global mobilization against viral and other threats to establishing procedures which will constrain market mechanisms and socialize economy, but done in a way which is conservative (in the sense of an effort to conserve the conditions of human life — and the paradox is that we will have to change things precisely to maintain these conditions) and moderate (in the sense of carefully taking into account unpredictable side effects of our measures).

As Emmanuel Renault pointed out, the key Marxian category that introduces class struggle into the very heart of the critique of political economy is that of the so-called “tendential laws,” the laws which describe a necessary tendency in capitalist development, like the tendency of the falling profit rate. (As Renault noted, it was already Adorno who has insisted on these dimensions of Marx’s concept of “Tendenz” that makes it irreducible to a simple “trend.”) Describing this “tendency,” Marx himself uses the term antagonism: the falling rate of profit is a tendency which pushes capitalists to strengthen workers’ exploitation, and workers to resist it, so that the outcome is not predetermined but depends on the struggle — say, in some welfare-states, organized workers forcing the capitalists to make considerable concessions.

The Communism I am speaking about is exactly such a tendency: reasons for it are obvious (we need global action to fight health and environmental threats, economy will have to be somehow socialized…), and we should read the way global capitalism is reacting to the pandemic precisely as a set of reactions to the Communist tendency: the fake Great Reset, nationalist populism, solidarity reduced to empathy.

So how — if — will the Communist tendency prevail? A sad answer: through more repeated crises. Let’s put it clearly: the virus is atheist in the strongest sense of the term. Yes, it should be analyzed how the pandemic is socially conditioned, but it is basically a product of meaningless contingency, there is no “deeper message” in it (as they interpreted plague as a god’s punishment in the Medieval times). Before choosing the famous Virgil’s line on “acheronta movebo” as the motto of his Interpretation of Dreams, Freud considered another candidate, Satan’s words from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “What reinforcement we may gain from Hope, / If not what resolution from despair.”

If we cannot get any reinforcement from hope, if we are compelled to admit that our situation is hopeless, we should gain resolution from despair. This is how we, contemporary Satans who are destroying our earth, should react to the viral and ecological threats: instead of looking vainly for reinforcement in some hope, we should accept that our situation is desperate, and act resolutely upon it. To quote Greta Thunberg again: “Doing our best is no longer good enough. Now we need to do the seemingly impossible.”

Futurology deals with what is possible, we need to do what is (from the standpoint of the existing global order) impossible.

Slavoj Žižek is the author of over thirty books and has been called the "most dangerous philosopher in the West."  BY WHO 

Guattari and Negri, (2010) New Lines of Alliance, New Spaces of Liberty. Autonomedia.

http://faculty.washington.edu/mpurcell/communists_like_us.pdf

Origianlly published in French (1985) as Les Nouveaux Espaces de Liberte, and then in English (1990) as Communists Like Us. 

https://libcom.org/files/4411-communists_like_us.pdf

ALBERTA 9 UCP MLA'S & STAFF FLEW THE COOP* FOR XMAS

Seriously? Defiant Kenney Defends Holiday Travels by MLAs, Ministers, Staff

As criticism over politicos’ flouting of COVID-19 guidelines grows, Alberta premier refuses to penalize offenders.

David Climenhaga Today | TheTyee.

Some constituents welcomed Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard back from her Hawaiian vacation with a banner at her Grande Prairie constituency office. Photo from MyGrandePrairieNow.com via Twitter.


Aloha, Alberta! Jason Kenney doesn’t give a hoot* what you think.

That’s the key takeaway from the premier’s defiant New Year’s Day news conference about the cabinet minister who jetted off for a Hawaiian vacation while she was supposedly responsible for the province’s emergency management and boss of the civil servant running Alberta’s leisurely COVID-19 vaccine rollout, not to mention other vacationing United Conservative Party MLAs and political staffers.

There will be no consequences.

Not for Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard.

Not for any of the missing MLAs, if we could even find out which ones were missing. Not for the government press secretaries sunning themselves on the beaches of Hawaii or visiting relatives in the United Kingdom. (By Sunday, the list included two other UCP cabinet ministers, two other MLAs and four UCP political staffers.)
The Tyee is supported by readers like you Join us and grow independent media in Canada

Kenney’s reasoning can be summarized as follows:

I didn’t actually tell them they shouldn’t be travelling during a pandemic. My bad.

Air travel is safer than visiting your granny.

“There is no public health order or legal barrier,” so no rules were broken.

When I told my ministers, MLAs and flunkies to come home, they all did.

WestJet, which is based in Calgary, ya know, needs the money or they’ll go broke.

There will be apologies, and there’s a new no-travel rule, so we can all just move along, please?

Kenney’s justification, if you can call it that, was as follows: “I don’t think it’s reasonable for me as a leader to sanction people who very carefully followed the public health orders and the legal requirements.”

And how do we know they followed the rules? Well, I guess that’s for them to know and us to find out.

The premier claimed the province is encouraging travel. Meanwhile, the Alberta government’s COVID-19 travel restrictions page continues to state “Avoid non-essential travel outside Canada until further notice. The Canada/U.S. border remains closed to non-essential travel.”

You just can’t make this stuff up. Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who fired Finance Minister Rod Phillips for doing the same thing, looks like a statesman by comparison. And the NDP removed Manitoba MP Niki Ashton from her shadow cabinet posts for travelling to Greece to visit a sick relative without informing party Leader Jagmeet Singh.

Social media commentators called Kenney’s news conference the most outrageous event in Alberta political memory since Ralph Klein got drunk and threw pocket change at the residents of an Edmonton men’s shelter.


Arguably, though, this is worse. We’re talking about putting people’s lives in danger, and undermining the whole fight against COVID-19, not just acting like a drunken jackass. Remember, Klein had a driver, and he even made a stab at quitting drinking.

You have to give Kenney credit for his sheer brass. The man has no shame. There will be one set of rules for insiders, another for the rest of us, and if you don’t like it, I guess you can move. All done in the unshakable conviction the UCP will win the next election no matter what anyone says.

The premier claimed he was unaware until Tuesday that Allard was in Hawaii. As former NDP and Progressive Conservative cabinet ministers explained, that’s not the way it works.

“Any minister who is out of the province is covered by another minister,” tweeted former Alberta NDP leader and cabinet member Brian Mason. “The Premier’s office and the bureaucracy ensure it. Papers are signed, etc. It’s all very official. If @Jkenney says he didn’t know that @TracyAllardUCP was in Hawaii, then he’s lying.”



What If Jason Kenney Did Take Responsibility? READ MORE

Kenney did admit one thing everyone already knew: that Jamie Huckabay, his chief of staff, had been vacationing in England when Canada closed its borders to flights from the U.K. because of the new, more highly infectious variant of the coronavirus.

No problem, though. Huckabay just flew to the United States and came home from there. All right then! No rules were broken.

For her part, Allard is very, very sorry. And very, very relieved, as well, I’m sure.

At a late afternoon newser of her own, she explained that visits to Hawaii are a family tradition, but now that she’s thought about it she’s “truly and deeply sorry.” Luckily, family gatherings are only prohibited if you can’t afford to travel overseas. Like I said, you can’t make this stuff up.Alberta Municipal Affairs Minister Tracy Allard’s Christmas post on Twitter made it appear she was in the legislature. She was in Hawaii. Photo via Twitter.

Allard was out of the country from Dec. 19 to Dec. 28, so that means she was in Hawaii when she posted a photo of herself by the Christmas tree in the legislature’s rotunda on Instagram. Obviously this was intended to give the impression she was here in Alberta.



Kenney Dithers as the Coronavirus Crushes Alberta  READ MORE

The premier spent lots of time at his media conference blaming the federal government for Alberta’s vaccination program, which is as slow as molasses in springtime. Of course there was no acknowledgment of the fact other provinces are doing better despite having the same federal government.

Now that the horses are gone, Kenney has ordered the barn door slammed shut. That is to say, now that the holiday season is almost over, he has issued a directive telling staffers and elected officials to stay home.

Even Postmedia’s Rick Bell, normally the most loyal of Kenney loyalists in media, said he was “gobsmacked” by what Premier Kenney had to say.

It’s hard to take issue with that.

But then, look at it from Kenney’s point of view. If he fired Allard for this, he might end up having to fire a lot more of his cabinet when it starts leaking out who else was enjoying a privileged winter holiday abroad.

Entitlement: It ought to be in the UCP’s name.

*No profanity was used in the composition of this column. That was a challenge.

David J. Climenhaga is an award-winning journalist, author, post-secondary teacher, poet and trade union communicator. He blogs at AlbertaPolitics.ca, where this column first appeared. Follow him on Twitter at @djclimenhaga.

*ANY DAY NOW IT MAY BECOME 10

#UCP9RESIGN #KENNEYRESIGN

Read more: Travel, Politics, Coronavirus

BC AND INDIA

India’s Farmer Movement, Indigenous Land Defenders and Hidden Histories

The protests may be half-a-world apart. But they’re both based on a spiritual connection to the land.


Bal Dhillon Today | TheTyee.ca

A mural in East Vancouver depicts Indigenous people paddling out 

to the Komagata Maru in 1914 to provide food for those onboard. Photo submitted.

When 250 million workers joined the largest strike in human history last month to support the Indian Kisan Andolan, or Farmer Movement, the connection to Indigenous land protests in British Columbia might not have been instantly evident

And But the two struggles have much in common in their resistance against neoliberal nation states and the corporations that influence them. They also share a hidden history that aligns the struggles in a unique field of solidarity.

Indian farmers are fighting the central government over three bills that effectively hand the agricultural market to large corporations, letting them set prices, and turn formerly independent farmers into contractors under corporate control.

Punjabi farmers have taken their protests to the border of Delhi and created blockades on highways, while farmers from other parts of India are doing the same.

The majority of Punjabis in India follow the Sikh faith. Agriculture is central not just to Punjab’s economy, but also to its culture. During the march to Delhi, police brutalized the farmers with water cannons and batons. Despite this, the farmers practiced a central tenet of the Sikh faith, langar (free kitchen) and made food available to both protestors, bystanders and police.

In B.C., a different but connected battle is being waged. Hereditary Chiefs from the Wet’suwet’en Nation have opposed TC Energy’s Coastal GasLink pipeline across northern B.C. since it was proposed. This resistance has led to demonstrations and railway blockades across Canada.

Members of the Secwepemc Nation have been participating in blockades as well, including a group of land defenders called the Tiny House Warriors. They are resisting a project to expand the Trans Mountain pipeline, which is now owned by the federal government. The resistance continues, with rail disruptions and other protests. At each of these blockades, a Sacred Fire burns, a reminder to all present that this is a spiritual struggle.

Underlying these struggles is a little-known shared history between Indigenous peoples and Punjabi immigrants on the west coast, a history that won’t be found in official records or high school textbooks.

In 1914, 376 Indians on the Komagata Maru were refused entry into Canada based on the racist laws of the Canadian state. The ship sat in the Burrard Inlet for months before being forced to return to India.

Many of the passengers on the Komagata Maru were connected to South Asians already on the west coast through the Ghadar Movement, which was committed to achieving Indian independence from Britain and ending colonization around the world.

A century later, protesting farmers have invoked the names of Ghadar activists, including Bibi Gulab Kaur and Shaheed Kartar Singh Sarabha.

Oral history accounts from both Musqueam and Punjabi traditions share that while the Komagata Maru was in the Burrard Inlet, Indigenous people paddled out to the ship in canoes to provide food for the would-be immigrants. This history can be found on a mural in East Vancouver co-created and painted by Indigenous and Punjabi artists.

The mural includes the Musqueam and Punjabi words for “cousin.” The Punjabi word denotes a particular type of cousin — the children of an older brother of your father. In traditional Punjabi homes, brothers live together. Those born to the younger brother are born into a home with cousins already in it.

That’s the word Punjabis used for Indigenous people on the west coast. They recognized they had arrived in their cousins’ home. And that their new cousins’ parent was the land.

This history has been beautifully shared by the Nameless Collective Podcast hosted by three South Asian historians: Paneet Singh, Naveen Girn and Milan Singh. The Nameless Collective was also involved in curating the Komagata Maru mural.

Both resistance movements against corporate-backed neoliberal states have relied on the spirit of ancestral teachings, or “Soul Power.” While the material reality of colonialism has ended in India, but has not on Turtle Island, there are some commonalities in these struggles.

For farmers in India, resistance is about their livelihood. For many Indigenous peoples it is about decolonization. For both, it is about their spiritual beliefs and culture that are tied to land.

The founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak, was enlightened after bathing in the Kali Bein, a river that serves as a lifeline to farmers today. The Sikh faith teaches us to honour Divinity within land, air and water, to treat them as we would our mother and father.

Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg writer, scholar and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson explored her spiritual traditions in her essay “Land is Pedagogy,” and found similar beliefs. She recounts the traditional story of Kwezens, who experiences “core Nishnaabeg values — love, compassion and understanding” at every turn.

“She learned to trust herself, her family and her community,” Simpson writes. “She learned how to interact with the spirit of the maple. She learned both from the land, and with the land.” Soul Power.

I invoke these spiritual beliefs and hidden histories in order to rediscover pathways of solidarity between global struggles against neoliberalism and corporate greed.

This is not an attempt to create a false equivalency between the two struggles, as settler colonialism continues to oppress Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island.

It is an attempt to discover and embrace what Indigenous communities and farmers in India may be able to teach us about our relationship to land.

Kanahus Manuel, one of the Tiny House Warriors protesting a pipeline on Secwepemc territory, spoke to me about the commonalities that these struggles share and the possibilities that solidarity can bring.

“We have to determine what solidarity looks like between our communities. Let’s start to build our solidarity how we wish to determine it. We don’t need to go by the old rules of the British crown. The spiritual connection between our fight is important — because the fight is never just physical. It’s a spiritual fight. It’s our spirit that drives us to fight. It takes a warrior spirit to stand up to the colonial state that is meant to kill us. It takes courage to stand up to an abuser — and that takes you to a higher state of enlightenment. We touch each other’s heart and soul by knowing each other’s movements and fighting against similar systems.”

“That’s one thing that’s in common — we have a history of resistance against the British crown. We both know struggle, because it’s in our blood,” Manuel said.

As the words of Indigenous Land Defenders resonate with me, I hear the words of the Punjabi poet Sant Ram Udasi, as his poems are being sung by protesters on the border of Delhi.

ਸਾਡੇ ਰਾਹਾਂ ਵਿੱਚ ਕੰਡੇ ਅਟਕਾਂਵਦਾ । Thorns stand in the way of our path
ਪੂੰਜੀਪਤੀ ਢਾਂਚਾ, ਨਾਗਾਂ ਤਾਈਂ ਪਾਲ, Capitalist structures grow giant snakes
ਇਹਨੇ ਕੀ ਕਦਰ ਸਾਡੀ ਜਾਨਣੀ । What value do we have?
ਕਾਹਦੀ ਏ ਆਜ਼ਾਦੀ ਅਸੀਂ ਮਾਨਣੀ । What kind of freedom is this to enjoy?
ਏਸ ਦੀ ਗ਼ਦਾਰੀ ਅਤੇ ਚਾਲ ਸਰਮਾਏਦਾਰੀ, Capitalists have betrayed us and tricked us
ਔਖੀ ਹੁਣ ਰਹੀ ਨਾ ਪਛਾਨਣੀ, It’s not hard to recognize now
ਕਾਹਦੀ ਏ ਆਜ਼ਾਦੀ ਅਸੀਂ ਮਾਨਣੀ । What kind of freedom is this to enjoy?

Bal Dhillon lives and works on the unceded traditional lands of the Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh and Coast Salish Peoples. He is a secondary school teacher and community school co-ordinator and enjoys coaching basketball.


Read more: Indigenous, Rights + Justice, Food