The Sankarist Revolution was the peak of a series of revolts, the breakdown of an inept cycle, and the beginning of a historical sequence that would see Upper Volta become Burkina Faso and, to deal with its critical situation, “dare to invent the future.”
Debt is neo-colonialism, in which colonizers have transformed themselves into “technical assistants.” We should rather say “technical assassins.”
Tags: From the Archives, Imperialism + Internationalism + Migration, In Translation
In this work we want to consider the question of the construction of politics in relation to the tension between authoritarian forms and democratic movements, considered in their points of origin. According to a certain Latin American irredentism, there are no national histories. What would usually be categorized as such are only repercussions in this territory of the history of the core countries. Dependency would permanently beget dependency. What is important is to define, however, is the degree of self-determination that a national history can have, the conditions in which a self-determining process is produced.
Tags: From the Archives, Imperialism + Internationalism + Migration, In Translation
From its birth in 1892 onwards, the Polish Socialist Party developed a strategy of merging working-class and anti-imperial struggle, presaging an orientation championed by the early Communist International and socialist activists across Asia, Africa, and Latin America throughout the 20th century.
The new Soviet state needed allies – either socialism would extend its victory, or exploitation and oppression would continue and new wars would break out. It was with this perspective that the Comintern was founded in 1919, with the object of encouraging world revolution. And with the Baku Congress of September 1920, the Bolsheviks made a symbolic declaration of their opposition to imperialism and attempted to lay the foundations for an organizational expression of this opposition.
I have defined the colonial mode of production as a historical form that is distinct from the capitalist mode of production. It is specifically the form of capitalism that is connected in structural dependency with imperialism in its historical formation and current development.
What if rather than starting from Tunisia’s “border problem,” analysis instead started from problematizing the very concern with “border violence” itself? How can a longue durée approach to Tunisia’s borders help us understand not only the nature but also the kinds of work Tunisia’s borders do in terms of producing certain political and socio-economic realities?
It was immediately obvious that there was a startling coincidence – a startling convergence – between the positions of certain individuals who call themselves progressive, revolutionaries, and who in fact regarded themselves as the essence of revolution – yet their positions converged with that of U.S. imperialism. And this amazing historical convergence needs to be understood.
How does the destruction in Syria fit into broader historical patterns? How do we situate the war on Syria into the histories of U.S. imperialism, the Arab world (including Palestine), and the relationship between the two? It is only by positing those questions that we can develop the theoretical grounding necessary to build the movements and establish the alliances required to defeat the U.S. war machine in Syria and elsewhere.
The renewal of Leninism generally ends up being performed mechanistically, as a simple annexation of the subsequent changes that have intervened on the scene of international power relations to the schema of Imperialism. This proves more and more to be a fruitless operation. Instead it is a matter of returning to Lenin by way of Marx. Today, renewing Leninist analysis in the political sense requires us to make this passage once again: to find in Marx, in his method before even in the contents of his discourse, the correct way of posing the question. In this case: what determines capital – as a political-material relation, as a relation of force – in its configuration and its international dynamics?
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