The Parallel State
[A General Operating guide for the Practitioners and Partisans concerned with human rights, human needs and the proliferation of Emancipatory Development on the eve of the Great Revolt.]
PRACTIONERS OATH
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PREAMBLE
PART I:
THE WORLD SYSTEM
WHAT IS THE CAVE
WHAT IS THE MOUNTAIN
WHAT IS THE DUAL ILLUSION
WHAT IS THE NATION STATE
WHAT IS THE WORLD SYSTEM
WHAT IS THE CORE
WHO IS CORE CRITICAL
WHO IS CORE DEPENDANT
WHO ARE THE CORE CONTENDERS
WHAT IS THE SEMI-PERIPHERY
WHAT IS THE PERIPHERY
WHAT IS A FAILING STATE
WHAT IS A FAILED STATE
WHAT IS STATE COLLAPSE
WHAT IS THE ABYSS
PART II: WORK
WHAT IS A PLANTATION
WHAT IS MODERN SLAVERY
WORK WILL SET YOU FREE
WHAT ARE STATISTICS
WHAT IS THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX
WHAT IS THE MULTI-DIMENSAIONAL POVERTY INDEX
WHAT IS A GINI INDEX
WHAT IS THE MAHDI RANKING SYSTEM
WHAT IS GENDER FOR
WHAT IS RACE & ETHNICTY FOR
WHAT IS NATIONALISM FOR
WHAT IS RELIGION FOR
WHAT IS AN NGO
WHAT IS INEQUALITY
WHAT IS RELATIVE POVERTY
WHAT IS ABSOLUTE POVERTY
WHAT IS HYPERDEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS MANUFACTURED CONSENT
WHAT IS CONSUMER CULTURE
WHAT ARE SOMA, BREAD & CIRCUSES
WHAT ARE BEHAVIOR MOD CAMPS
WHAT IS WELFARE USED FOR
WHAT IS A GHETTO
WHAT IS MASS INCARCERATION
WHAT IS THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE SLAVES
WHAT IS MODERNIZATION THEORY
WHAT IS COMPETATIVE ADVANTAGE
WHAT IS AN EXPORT PROCESSSING ZONE
WHAT IS A SLUM
POVERTY IS GENOCIDE
PART III: GOVERNANCE
HUNTER GATHERERS
TRIBAL NOMADIC
WARLORDISM
TOTALITARIANISM
TIMOCRACY
FEUDALISM
THEOCRACY
MONARCHY
DEMOCRACY
CAPITALISM
SOCIALISM
COMMUNISM
ANARCHISM
KLEPTOCRACY
STATE CAPITALISM
MARKET SOCIALISM
ADVANCED WELARE STATES
PART IV: WARFARE
ON KILLING
WHAT IS A LITTLE WAR
WHAT IS A PEACE KEEPER
WHAT IS A REFUGEE CAMP
WHERE ARE THE OLD WARS
WHERE ARE THE NEW WARS
WHAT IS A WAR PROFITEER
WHAT IS REPRESSION
WHERE ARE THE TORTURE CENTERS
WHERE ARE THE FORCED LABOR CAMPS
WHERE ARE THE COMFORT CAMPS
WHERE ARE THE KILLING FIELDS
WHAT IS AN ATROCITY
WHAT IS GENOCIDE
WHAT IS DEMOCIDE
WHAT IS PURGE
WHAT IS THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
PART V: GAME THEORY
WHAT IS THE GAME THEORY
WHAT ARE POWER BLOCS
WHO ARE THE ACTORS
WHAT IS USA
WHAT IS RUSSIAN FEDERATION
WHAT IS THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC of CHINA
WHO ARE THE OUTLIERS
WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF CONFLICT
WHAT ARE THE CONFLICT AFFECTED AREAS
WHAT ARE THE PROXIMATE CAUSES
WHAT ARE THE TRIGGERS
WHAT ARE THE DYNAMICS
WHAT ARE THE TRENDS
FACTORS PROLONGING CONFLICT
FACTORS FOR POSSIBLE PEACE
WAR IS PEACE
PART VI: THE OLIGARCHY
WHAT IS AN ARISTOCRACY
WHAT IS A PRIESTLY CLASS
WHO ARE THE RICH
WHAT IS AN ELITE
WHAT IS ELITE CONSENSUS
WHAT IS OLIGARCHY
WHAT IS OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
WHAT IS THE BOHEMIAN GROVE
WHAT IS THE COUNCEL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
WHAT IS RAND
WHAT ARE THINK TANKS
WHAT ARE THOUGHT LEADERS
WHAT IS THE BILDERBURG GROUP
WHAT IS DAVOS
WHO ARE THE PRINCLINGS
WHAT IS THE RUSSIAN MAFIA
WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM
WHAT IS THE IMF
WHAT IS THE WTO
WHAT IS THE WORLD BANK
WHAT WAS THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS
WHAT IS THE MONETERAY CONSENSUS
WHAT IS AID FOR TRADE
WHO ARE THE COLABORATORS
A LISTING OF THE OLIGARCHS
WHERE ARE THEIR ASSETS INVESTED
WHERE IS THEIR CAPITAL SECURED
WHAT IS NORTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS WESTERN DEVELOPMENT
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
PART VII: OUR PEOPLE’S HISTORY
UNKNOWN GOLDEN AGES
MAYANS
GUNEA
UTTAR PRADESH
THE MIDDLE KINGDOM
BABYLON
BARBARIANS
ATHENS, DELPHI & SPARTA
ROME & CARTHAGE
SPARTICUS
66
JERUSALEM
THE JEWISH WARS
646
MEDINA & MEDINA
THE MUSLIM UPRISING
CRUSADERS
BLACK DEATH
MONGOL INVASION
CONSTANTINOPLE
1492
SPANISH INQUIZITION
ARAB SLAVERS
TRIANGLE
COLONIZERS
PALMARES
THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
1789
PARIS
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION
THE HAITIAN REVOLTUION
THE BOLIVARIAN REVOLUTION
GRAN COLOMBIA
NAPOLEONIC WARS
PALMYRA & SHIRAZ
THE THEORY OF 1848
1848
BERLIN CONFERENCE 1884
1900
LEOPOLD’S CONGO
HERERO GENOCIDE
1905
IWW CHICAGO
IRISH REVOLUTION
1910
MEXICAN REVOLUTION
WORLD WAR ONE
ARMENIAN GENOCIDE
1917
RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
SPANISH CIVIL WAR
SPANISH FLU
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
WORLD WAR TWO
1939
BERLIN
TOKYO
THE HOLOCAUST
THE COMFORT CAMPS
THE RAPE OF NANKING
LENINGRAD
STALINGRAD
DIVIDING GERMANY
NUCLEAR BOMBING JAPAN
MALTA
1945
THE COLD WAR
1948
COLUMBIAN CIVIL WAR
CATASTROPHE OF PALESTINE
BIRTH OF ISRAEL
INDIAN INDEPENDENCE
PAKISTANI INDEPENDANCE
CHINESE REVOLTUTION
CHINESE CIVIL WAR
1950
KOREAN WAR
COUP & PURGE IN GUATAMALA
CUBAN REVOLUTION
ALGERIAN REVOLUTION
CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS
1964
AMERICAN CIVIL RIGHTS
COLUMBIAN REVOLUTION
1966
PURGE IN INDONESIA
CULTURAL REVOLUTION
1968
PANTHERS
GUYANA
VIETNAMESE REVOLUTION
ANGOLAN REVOLUTION
BANGLADESHI REVOLUTION
BANGLADESHI GENOCIDE
COUP IN CHILE
1973
OPEC EMBARGO
1975
ANGOLAN CIVIL WAR
1979
IRANIAN REVOLUTION
1980
IRAN-IRAQ WAR
USSR INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN
1982
LEBANESE CIVIL WAR
EITHEPOIAN CIVIL WAR
1986
HAITIAN REVOLUTION II
1987
FIRST PALESTINIAN UPRISING
BATTLE OF CUITO CUANAVALE
1989
FALL OF BERLIN WALL
POST-SOVIET CHAIN REACTION
CIVIL WAR IN YUGOSLAVIA
GENOCIDE IN EAST TIMOR
FIRST US INVASION OF IRAQ
GENOCIDE IN SRI LANKA
1994
FALL OF APARTHIED
RWANDAN GENOCIDE
BATTLE OF MOGUDISHU
FIRST CHECHEN WAR
CHIAPAS UPRISING
1998
AFRICAN WORLD WAR
BATTLE OF SEATTLE
SECOND PALESTINIAN UPRISING
SECOND CHECHEN WAR
THE END OF THE PAX AMERICANA
2001
9.11 ATTACKS
US INVASION OF AFGHANISTAN
2003
US INVASION OF IRAQ
2008
RF INVASION OF GEORGIA
KURDISTAN
2010
BRICS
HAITIAN EARTHQUAKE
2011
ARAB SPRING
EGYPTIAN REVOLUTION
EGYPTIAN COUP
SYRIAN CIVIL WAR
LIBYAN REVOLUTION
LIBYAN CIVIL WAR
WALLSTREET UPRISING
MAIDAN UPRISING
RF INVASION OF UKRAINE
ISLAMIC STATE
ACRE
ZION
PART VIII: THE THEORY OF CHANGE
WHAT IS HUMAN NATURE
WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR
WHAT IS EMMACIPATORY DEVELPOMENT
WHAT IS OUR BASELINE HUMAN NATURE
WHAT ARE OUR BASELINE HUMAN NEEDS
WHAT ARE OUR BASELINE HUMAN RIGHTS
WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS INDICATORS
WHAT IS MUTUAL AID
WHAT IS SOLIDARITY
WHAT IS INTERNATIONALISM
WHAT IS MASS CAPACITY
WHAT IS SELF RELIANCE
WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL RELIANCE
WHAT IS WESTERN DEVEOPMENT
WHAT IS NORTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS SOUTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS EASTENRN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS AUTOCENTRIC DEVELOPMENT
PART IX: THE MICRO-DEVELOPMENT ASPECTS OF THE BLUE PRINT
PLANNERS & PRACTIONERS
WHAT ARE PROJECTS
WHAT IS DESIGN
WHAT IS PLANNING
WHAT IS IMPLEMENTATION
WHAT IS MONITORING
WHAT IS EVALUATION
OFFICE & FIELD
WHAT ARE RCTs
WHAT IS A VOLUNTEER
WHAT IS INDIGENOUS NEED
WHAT IS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
WHAT IS FREE ASSOCIATION
WHAT IS PARTICAPTORY DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGY
WHAT IS MICROFINANCE
WHAT ARE MASS CAPACITY MODULES
WHAT ARE THE MODULES
WHAT IS A PARAPROFESSIONAL PROGRAM
WHAT ARE EMERGENCY GROUPS
WHAT IS TIME BANK INCENTIVIZATION
WHAT IS DIASPORA MOBILIATION
WHAT IS A LABOR LEGION
WHAT IS A TRADE UNION
WHAT IS SELF RELIANCE
WHAT IS SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
WHAT IS SOCIALIST ENTERPRISE
WHAT ARE CIVIL SERVICE ENTERPRISES
WHAT ARE SUGGESTED PROJECTS
WHAT ARE SUGGESTED PROGRAMS
WHAT ARE SUGGESTED POLICIES
EASTERN DEVELOPMENT
SOUTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS THE PARALLEL STATE
PART X: THE MACRO-POLITICO ASPECTS OF THE BLUE PRINT
PARTIZANS & SYMPAMPATHIERS
WHAT IS AGITATION
WHAT IS EDUCATION
WHAT IS ORGANIZATION
WHAT ARE AKTIONS
WHAT ARE OPERATIONS
URBAN & RURAL
ANALYSTS & OPERATIVES
ACTIVISTS & ORGANIZERS
REVOLUTIONARIES
EMMACIPATIONISTS
NO ONE LEFT BEHIND THE LINES
WHAT IS CIVIL DISOBIDENCE
WHAT IS DIRECT ACTION
WHAT IS DEFENSIVE PEACEFAIRE
WHAT IS SUPPLY SIDE RESISTANCE I
THE MIND IS A WEAPON WE NEED
WHAT IS NEUROSCIENCE
WHAT IS MEDITATION
WHAT IS THOUGHT CRIME
WHAT IS PARAPSYCOLOGY
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS POPULAR EDUCATION
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS LIBERATION THEOLOGY
HOW DOES IT MANNIFEST
WHAT IS MILITANT NONVIOLENCE
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS OFFENSIVE PEACEFAIRE
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS TRADE SYDICALISM
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS DEMAND SIDE RESISTANCE
WHAT IS SUPPLY SIDE RESITANCE II
WHAT IS SUPPLY SIDE EMBARGO II
WHAT ARE CORE SANCTIONS
WHAT IS CORE EMBARGO
WHO ARE OUR SYMPATHIZERS NOW
WHO IS IN THE RESIS TANCE NOW
SYMPATHY WITH THE RESISTANCE
WHAT IS THE LONG GAME
RESISTANCE IS WAR
UNITY IS STRENGTH
WHAT IS THE GREAT REVOLT
Dedicated to the Future
We dedicate this manuscript to the future and our coming emancipation.
Oath of the Partizans
We all have a duty to act.
In our hearts,
We know that people should not live as they do.
Humanity was born free and equal,
Yet, across this earth lies broken, dying hungry and in chains.
It is our duty to act that unites us.
To act in association for these promised rights.
Medicine, Education, and Emancipatory Development;
Are our primary tools against injustice.
We promise to wield these tools on the front lines of suffering
We will build the world we wish to see.
Seed by Seed.
Brick by Brick.
We carry the torches of the change makers who fell before us.
Fighting boldly for an idea.
That we were born free woman and men.
That we will never surrender.
That we will never accept anything short of full freedom.
Our numbers are man and each day multiply.
In the face of mounting injustices.
For while fighting isolated and in darkness,
We have become resourceful.
As realization spreads that this is not how we must live.
We stand ready to defend
The Improvised.
The Wretched.
The Victimized.
The Enslaved.
We are prepared to struggle as long as we must.
Generation by Generation.
Until every last man, woman and child is also free.
In unity there is great strength.
Because I love my brothers and my sisters,
My mother and my father,
My children, my friends, my comrades
And also the suffering stranger
This is why I have joined the Association
And it’s Partisans,
Placed myself on the side of humanity,
And enlisted in the Resistance.
Now that my eyes are open,
I will leave no person behind the lines of war and poverty.
I will live my life as friend of the people.
I will never look away from the truth.
Preamble
There are rights you never even knew you had which entitle you to life much different from the one you currently lead.
We are a group of development practitioners and rescue workers; human rights advocates & defenders, humanitarian relief personnel, peace builders, civil servants, trade unionists, student organizers, community activists and abolitionists that believe in Human Rights and Emancipatory Development. We are prepared to defend those stolen rights by every nonviolent means necessary and coordinate amongst the international resistance movement a broad based revolt to check the atrocities and structural violence propagated by the oligarchs in every country. We are student and also teachers. We are going to teach you what we know and ask for the same in return and we’re all going to work together to get our rights back. To secure a future for our children.
We are dedicated to our families and the future.
It is not our intention that we should compose such an indictment of the Oligarchy that our reader throws down the manuscript and declares him or herself a revolutionist, for cruel experiences of this world and living in it breed more revolutionaries daily then our pens can expend on poetic syllables. Instead we wished to put to paper an ethical argument that condemns our oppressors, clearly states their means of oppressive control and thus allows the reader to take what actions thou wilt to participate in the abolition of our collective slavery. We posit like others before us that the system in which we live is exploitative to all within; top and below. We declare that the World System and the Oligarchic Collectives that operate it are but agents of a vast killing machine; sentencing us all to toil ceaselessly; suffer long and die early while they glut themselves on ill acquired wealth.
With that indictment we ask the reader a Talmudic question; ‘a sane person in an insane world is what?’ And there by a conscious person in a sleeping world has what duty? And furthermore, if the readers cannot be moved by the humble words of this theorist narrator, be moved then by atrocities that are carried out daily paid for in the taxes levied from the sweat of your work and the blood of your fellow humans.
We remind you as have others before me, it is not a revolution we are fighting. It is battle for the survival of our species and is still an open question of who will win, for this is a very old war began long before us and will end long after we are gone. But, far more specifically by what conduct, what actions are appropriate in the face of such a holocaust to ensure that there is still a just and equitable world for our children and grandchildren to inherit.
The victory of the resistance is question of consciousness. The victory of the Oligarchy is a death sentence for all.
With over forty-five active violent conflicts raging across the earth; with many millions outright starving or dying of preventable disease, and over 3 billion human beings caught in varying degrees of wretched poverty at living on less than $2.50 a day we declare that “Northern” economic policy; NGO “development enterprises”, and multilateral conferences on broad based humanitarian goals have been a true and horrific failure. In a most unreasonable framework, the former colonizers have dictated economic terms and trampled on our universal rights, which via so-called “aid” buttresses the most despicable regimes on the planet. We believe that in every nation on earth there is a spirit of resistance growing stronger as the conditions resulting from rights violations grow more egregious by the day. We wish to enlist you in our movement as active partisans or sympathizers and thus may we all be networked in horizontal alliance to bolster our international efforts.
We ask you to join us in building Mass Capacity; that all communities should be trained to administer social services, vastly increase their own agency and control their means of future development. We ask you when necessary to wage all out resistance; that by any non-violent means necessary we will secure and advance universal human rights for all. That even though our nemesis is nasty, brutal and heavily armed we will demonstrate the futility of waging armed conflict. Regardless of the scale of atrocity perpetrated or the crimes against humanity unearthed.
We are advocating the full international coordination of a resistance movement within the mechanisms of the Development Enterprise into a fully mobilized and highly decentralized tactical alliance. We will ascribe a name to that movement in this pamphlet, but of course, a movement in the shadows has no agreed to name only a common cause.
For several hundred years, the vile forces moving against the will and interests of humanity have relied on their brute strength, overwhelming resources, savage barbarism and our disunity. Lacking good data and lines of communication most of the resistance had been cut off from each other until the advent of the internet in the end of the 20th century. We should not trust statistics and data collected by any apparatus of the oligarchy. For all those reading this document. We must organize ourselves into a broad yet highly decentralized framework. This is not a revolution. We must examine the last three hundred years of freedom struggle and declare that we are holding on to besieged and tainted turf. The “nations” liberated in the last two hundred years have been quarantined, ghettoized and driven into proverbial bunkers of their imagined identity. The children of believers and populations they have “liberated” are in some of the darkest corners of the killing fields. They have no collective unity of theory or ideology, race identity or creed. The only thing these slivers of turf and those that govern them have in common is that they have temporarily delivered their population from occupation, subjugation or genocide often at the expense of normative civil and political rights. Some are far worse than others, some more reactionary some more progressive, some not even bound by territory. We must however reinforce them with every available tactic. They are not asking for reinforcements to hold their positions but it must be made clear that no regime, not a single government on this planet has will or intention to relinquish power once it is seized. Be clear that what was done to and inside France, Haiti, Russia and China was the perversion of emancipatory revolt. Be clear that we are not in an ideological confrontation or a spiritual war.
We are engaged in a visceral battle against extinction.
We are offering to reinforce any position from a block to a barrio; from a village to a city; from rebel zones to quarantined states; to lonely outposts deep in the core nations being held in or outside the Parallel State.
For the Para State is not a specific place, nor is it the cumulative land mass liberated in years since some amongst our species came to believe that we were not born to be chattel slaves. It is also not some utopian ideal. It is the reclamation of both minds and spaces. More precisely, it is the creation of functional infrastructure and realization of human rights via mechanisms that unleash human capability. It is the maximization of life via the conquest of the means of development. It is the balance of the ecological, the economic and social spheres under a theory of abundance. It is a realization that we do not have to confront governments and topple states to enjoy our rights and freedom. There are ways to organize the good things of life without engaging the corrupt and self-serving architecture of the state system and those it serves.
We aim to bond our struggles and experiences with those of you and your compatriots who share an affinity with our cause. Our cause is full actualization of the universal human rights as a starting conversation in the dawn of a newly conceived epoch. Our mass capacity will now be unleashed.
We aim to marshal our detachments, utilize our networks, partisans and sympathizers; call upon our allied sister organizations working in direct coordination with yours to stage a rising the likes of which the oligarchs have never seen coming. We are calling not for an insurrection or a general strike; (at least not in historical terms) but instead the embrace of emancipatory development used towards a highly particular end.
Governments everywhere have justified themselves on our supposed nature; that we are supposedly savage, selfish and disorganized as a species. Under the auspices of our projected “nature” they have reduced us serfdom via a sophisticated management system this manuscript will outline. It is not our aim to engage the state system in warfare. That attempt has failed every single time it has been utilized in human history.
Our aim is to use the development technologies to sever unnecessary dependencies. Woman to man; subordinate worker to management; urban to rural; peripheral nation to core humanity to the oligarchy and the people to their governments. It is time to break bonds built to extract from us the enjoyment and goodness of life. They, and it surely is a ‘they’ that profit off of how the world is organized today; they gave us tools so we could be more productive serfs, subjects and consumers but we will train each other in the means of development and we will make them obsolete. We were all born into bondage but we will not die as their slaves.
The aim of the entire Great Revolt therefore is to take full control of the means of development at the most localized level without using violence to do so.
PART I: Struggle & Control
THE WORLD SYSTEM ANALYSIS
WHAT IS THE CAVE
WHAT IS THE MOUNTAIN
WHAT IS THE DUAL ILLUSION
WHAT IS THE NATION STATE
WHAT IS THE WORLD SYSTEM
WHAT IS THE CORE
WHO IS CORE CRITICAL
WHO IS CORE DEPENDANT
WHO ARE THE CORE CONTENDERS
WHAT IS THE SEMI-PERIPHERY
WHAT IS THE PERIPHERY
WHAT IS A FAILING STATE
WHAT IS A FAILED STATE
WHAT IS STATE COLLAPSE
WHAT IS THE ABYSS
The Cave
Perhaps you are familiar with the allegory of Plato’s cave where by humanity was enchained in darkness not even knowing the image of its’ own self, only a shadow and upon release was so horrified of the reality of their own reflection they preferred the mental and physical slavery of the cave to the emancipation of a brave new world.
We would go so far as to say that in our current reality our bondage is more like a mountain. One in which while perhaps you are fully aware of the security and riches present in other zones, districts or nations of the earth we are unable physically and mentally to advance to the comforts of the precipice heights bound not by chains, although such slaveries exist; more of us are bound by survival obligations to self and family that prevent mobility. And perhaps most striking about this social arrangement is that we spend most our existence fighting for survival and when capability allows; working long hours enriching others (Marx, 1887). We work ourselves to the bones to send up the mountain the riches of the earth, the wealth of nations such that faceless oligarchs and their progeny may have complete abundance.
Let us for analysis remove the national borders of the Peter’s world map the one where all elements are represented at their actual presumed size. Let us examine it inverted. Let us look at it East on top West, then South on top of North. Note the arbitrary placement of not only national borders but also spatial demarcations and hemispheric directions. As if the sun still was thought to revolve around the earth or that the earth was clearly flat. Let us again for analysis abolish those markings too. Let us turn it from a two dimensional boundary marker into a three dimensional sphere, then pull up like a hand on a cloth the developed northern nations as if into a the shape of a mountain, a mountain where the OECD countries are the core on top and down the mountain are arrayed the middle income than low income town the bottom of this precipice.
The Mountain
We live on this vast mountain and the along with the 7-8 billion other humans we share its heights, valleys and miserable war torn crevices with; we are bound to that mountain by a system which is orchestrated via competing rulers we call the Oligarchs (Winters, 2011). To maintain that system in its place requires a systematic dehumanization and segregation of all inhabitants such that we are all so disunited that convincing us to work our whole lives and pay for the right to die in varying degrees of seemingly enlightened serfdom, is a privilege.
As of now, this mountain is divided into 206 countries (193 acknowledged by the United Nations as officially being sovereign states) and into 5 dependency relationship zones. It is, because of the nature of sustained predation fostered in the world system since 1500 CE an inherently highly unstable environment, aggravated almost ceaselessly by warfare, deprivation, famine and poverty (Wallerstien, 2011). Following a series of World and Cold Wars from 1914-1989 the elite consensus shifted from ideological confrontation to shared illusion. The nature of the world system is referred to in political science as an inverse consiationalist relationship (Lustick, 1979); a political order where elites of every nation, with loyalty only to the ones in which their assets are deposited collude and complete via proxy from dominance of the Core; the legal, military and economic mobilization of state architecture to secure capital, and via hyper-influence and full enjoyment of the material world and use its inhabitants. The governance of the mountain which became so wildly unstable in the 20th century has taken form around the growing multi-polarity of the Globalized 21st century (Kupchan, 1998). The basis of a Consociationalist framework is that the Oligarchs in each state, via social and business groups referred to as elite clusters and arch-oligarchs, hyper-enriched via wealth accumulation at the core have imposed a relationship upon us. Via a dual needed illusion they keeps us not only from dissolving our national dependencies; they divide us, co-opt us, and prevent a global uprising by disguising the nature of their access to capital. They lower our consciousness, they force half the species into existential deprivation, and they utilize their intelligence agencies their spies and informants to encourage destabilizing violence. They have done so not with mere words (Orwell, 1949). Even linguistically they deprive us of a discourse.
They have turned plantations into nations. Resistance into terrorism. They made democracy into noise. They have made greed into virtue. They have turned servitude into work. They have turned rights into phrases, freedom into slavery. They have turned colonialism into something called “development.”
The Development Enterprise as we understand it began after the Second World War with the 1948 implementation of the Marshal Plan. The intention of this far-reaching US aid investment was to keep war-ravaged Western Europe from being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Development subsequently evolved into an international architecture. Its newly stated intention within the Cold War context was to modernize & industrialize former colonial nations. Packages of civilian and military aid were coupled with technical assistance. Non-governmental organizations proliferated generally around poverty alleviation and cause specific programs. The United Nations ratified a wide range of human rights instruments as rapidly escalating armed conflicts accelerated in almost every nation in the developing world. By 2014, there have been 15 confirmed acts of Genocide by International Law since 1945, 37 if you include democide (Rummel, 1998). Environmental degradation has resulted in expanding disastrous climate change (Biermann, 2010). It is expected that the cost of water will soon over take the price of oil after peak oil in 2020 (Deffeyes, 2006). If usage and climate change continues unabated 1.8 billion people will be living with severe water scarcity by 2025 and 2/3 of the species will be subjected to water stress (Brown, 2009).
There are over three billion human beings living under $3.00 a day that are worth as much in assets as the top 85 richest people on earth (Oxfam, 2014). It is believed that over 29.8 million people still live in chattel slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2013). While the United 2global extreme poverty’, ‘doubling human access to clean water’ and ‘halting new infection with HIV-AIDS’ divested of all the many political, economic and religious superstructures the results of the development enterprise are highly underwhelming.
There can be no clear measure of data being generated in a variety of highly non-transparent countries. At the 2013 Interaction Forum, the broadest confederation of American development NGOs and Humanitarian actors, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres admitted, “We are not entirely prepared”. More conflicts, deeply entrenched poverty, coupled with the targeting of aid workers will occur alongside decreases in funds and the impacts of global climate change. Yet, across the development enterprise, almost all of the academia and technocracy agree that the very worst of human civilization is behind us. There is still massive disagreement regarding the hierarchy of needs for those 5 billion human souls that live on less than USD 10 a day; 3 billion of which live on less than USD 2.50 a day; and 1.2 billion on less than USD 1.25 (World Bank 2014). The question remains one of participation and empowerment. Will listening to the voices of the poor will be a meaningless slogan or a set of specific instructions to those invested in equality?
Amyarta Sen believes that development is a means to achieve freedom and freedom is achieved by enabling human capability. Jeffery Sachs believes poverty can be eliminated though coordinated action of a “Big Push” Global Marshal Plan. William Easterly and Paul Collier advocate basis of the Monterrey Consensus of 2002 forgoing aid in favor of improving trade. A regular buzzword in the enterprise is ‘capacity building’, but this is often limited to technocracy and management training going directly to widely corrupted governments. Throughout the development and humanitarian sectors coordination is irregular, local participation is dictated top down, and dependency is fostered (Escobar, 1995).
We must often remind ourselves about whose reality we are living in here at the top of the mountain, at the Global Core; here in the relative privilege and security of the so called North; the Developed World spanning North America, Europe, Japan, Australia and New Zealand in short the winners and losers of the World Wars excluding Russia. We must remember that the number one killer of citizens in the United States of America is heart disease from over consumption, poor nutrition choices and general gluttony (American Heart Association, 2014). While the leading killer of those 3.5 million living below $3 USD a day is multidimensional poverty, preventable disease and exposure to disastrous climate change.
The Westphalian State System was implemented to break humanity into more manageable units for economic exploitation. All 206 recognized states are pure inventions that have little historical basis, ethnic or religious homogeneity. They were established not to preserve an imagined order but to quantify human and resource capital.
Therefore, our indictment is not around a policy, a procedure or a political or economic methodology. We are leveling our counter attack, we are bolstering our defenses against an entire World System. A system which sense conceived has divided us into categorizations and work exploitation units called nations; disposed of abundance through the perpetual act of war and in the name of humanitarian imperative and now development practice fostered our dependency to a hand full of Oligarchic elite clusters that control the shifting Core. It is can no longer be said that what is happening is a phenomena. Poverty is genocide. Our duty and your duty to strike now against the profiteering and atrocity so integral to the World System’s economic order is based on needs, rights and ethics. On the basis of needs, the modern Oligarchic Collective is killing our human species in raw numbers before un-encountered except during the Mongol Expansion, Middle Ages, Spanish Conquest of Latin America, Epoch of Slavery and Colonialism or the grisly World Wars and Cold Wars. It is vital to remember that we do not even have any consistent system of historical record keeping available until 1848 (Foucault). That is to say most of history has been constructed for your pedagogic consumption. To enable you to believe that the world in which you live and your nature itself is fundamentally imperfect, yet improving, most likely after you die. An important paradigm set, because you must arrive at level of conscious thinking or should we say frequency adjustment to process this incendiary macro briefing; here are three important starting points to realign yourself into the reality of your species. When and if you believe these things then resistance is fertile.
The Dual Illusion
The belief that we are progressing and advancing as a human civilization is a highly cultivated lie, an intellectual illusion. Your consent in your governance, your indifference to affairs in other nations, your belief in the development enterprise, your willingness to pay your taxes and acquiesce to your governments’ polices at home and abroad are based on a manufactured consent built on two very specific fundamental lies.
- The Illusion of Development; the World System is not actually improving under stewardship of capitalist economics, neoliberal trade policy and globalization. Wealth is being highly concentrated into the hands of untouchable, nearly omnipotent oligarchies in every state and this extreme mounting inequality is not only highly unstable, but the rational economic outcome of capital accumulation in the 21st
- The Illusion of Coexistence; war is not actually decreasing and poverty is not actually diminishing, it is simply being counted as different things and manipulated statistically to manufacture the illusion of stability, progress and control.
On the basis of rights an unenforceable legal code and subsequent series of treaty instruments were signed repeatedly in New York at the United Nations by all state parties. Human Rights are however trampled on in practice by government conduct in 206 states. On the basis of ethics, divorced from a personal or legal responsibility, divorced from the existential nature of the dialectic phase; all people have a duty to act. Regardless of what fostered disunity they cultivated amongst our ancestors; all humans are intrinsically bound to a mountain. That mountain is divided loosely in 206 plantations called countries; shifting along the mountain slope tectonically from the peak called the Core (Netherlands, England, and USA) since 1500; down that steep slope the core contenders (China, Russia, India, Brazil, South Africa[1]); followed by the semi-peripheral dependents (Israel, Argentina, Columbia, South Korea, Taiwan) and the semi-peripheral outliers (Ethiopia, Vietnam, Iran & Cuba); below them the periphery in their full dependency (Egypt, Angola, Nigeria, Thailand Bangladesh); and at the bottom of this mountain we perceive as a planetary globe; the 59 failing states (Sub-Saharan Africa & Former Soviet Central Asia); and the failed states (Sierra Leone, Liberia, Haiti and Somalia) and worst the atrocities spreading now into 35 national zones at the base of this wretched mountain; the killing fields (Sudan & South Sudan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Syria). Welcome to the ethical dilemma of what will you do, how far will you go and how much will you risk in a full blown Global State of Emergency. The answer is that most people are so caught up in survival obligations and their divisive false consciousness that until the manufactured consent of the nation state is shattered they are mentally still enslaved (Freire, 1970).
The Nation State
The Nation state is the macro unit of global economic harvest (Proudhon, 1876). The natural resources, the commodities, the manufactured goods and most importantly the human capital; their labor and their tax base are bound via this system into manageable units for exploitation. (Gellner, 2008). Under the guise of order the state system crystalized dynamic ethnic relationships and power differentials into control zones. As of 1 January, 2015 there are 206 such units, loosely organized into three major power blocs; sub-divided into nine world system dependency zones claiming sovereignty over shifting swaths of geographic turf[2]. The cultivation of false consciousness subsequently divides humanity further into dominant and subservient genders, ethnic groups, religions, nationalisms, political tendencies and sexual orientations; all with imagined identities that are wholly constructed via socialization and neuroscience for the purpose of disunity (Engles, 1893).
While almost all nation states have relative sovereignty; constant and repeated foreign and domestic assaults on this sovereignty lock each unit into a dynamic hierarchy of the world system. The metaphor of the world system; the mountain is subject to power shifts; thus via culture, warfare and economics the dominance of the core has shifted. Each nation state’s Oligarical collective controls its political leadership with few outliers regardless of proclaimed ideological tendency. Nation state level oligarchs enrich themselves by aligning the human and resource capital of their nation with economic prerogatives set by the core nations at both international forums such as Bretton Woods, Davos and the United Nations. As well as at closed meetings for oligarch coordination such as the Bilderberg Group and the Bohemian Grove. Ultimately whether the nation state takes the guise of authoritarian, theocratic, military junta, or trapping of socialism or democracy; via elite consensus, think tanks, policy groups, campaign contributions, as well as encouragement of soft or hard repression; the elite cluster in each of the 206 nation states formulates their capital accumulation in relation to taxes, labor management and trade relations with other states. The three power blocks; NATO, PRC and Russian Federation have since 1945 engaged in ceaseless proxy conflict at the semi-periphery and periphery (Lebow, 1994). Endless coups, interventions, wars, genocides and clientalisms have ensued. Their antagonism has led to vast destabilization of the state system. Because the nation state unit harnesses the competing identities of its implied constituents; those within its border are locked in combative contradiction between the citizens and the immigrant others; as well as a hierarchy of access, alienation and proscribed benefit ascribed to the citizens based again on arbitrary privileges; male over female, dominant ethnic identity over proclaimed outsider ethnic groups, citizen over foreigner an so on. With very few outlying examples most of these alienations and privileges have mutated or been purged via conquest, revolution and ethnic cleansings and have largely solidified their false conscious paradigm since 1945. Because every aspect of the world system is inherently an architecture for reducing us down to a profitable economic unit and telling us that our hard ‘work will set us free’.
The nation state rests its legitimacy on being a protector and provider for its citizens. It’s justification for being no matter upon what superstructure of ideology or identity it rests upon is to fulfill the obligations spelled out normatively in the nine human rights instruments. In reality it has to meet two more basic characteristics; secure collective needs, enable satisfaction of individual wants and provide security. If any of those elements begin to drastically disintegrate via warfare, invasion, occupation or pervasive corruption and impoverishment the nation state government loses legitimacy to rule.
The Nation state is predicated on the cultivated false conscious belief that the state of our human nature is [inherent self-interest] and that security for a small and privileged minority from the [imagined barbarism of the great majority]; necessitates an [endless war on that majority] and [an evolving sophisticated system of social control].
The World System
The World System Analysis as conceived by Immanuel Wallerstein consists of a core, semi-periphery and periphery; shifting zones that are defined by their economic relationships to each other. As stated in his volumes of analysis Wallerstein outlines a multi-disciplinary modal that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstien, 1974). While previous empires such as the Romans, Persians, Islamic Caliphates, Mughals, Aztecs and Chinese Han dynasties had been trans-regional powers capable of expansive influence and trade; none had, until the construction of the world system, been able to fully project hegemony upon the full mass of the species living in all continents. Advanced weapons, epidemiological resistance and industrialization allowed the Europeans a competitive advantage in outward conquest (Diamond, 2005). The epochs of conquest, slavery and colonialism allowed an unprecedented capital accumulation to take place in Europe. The Industrial Revolution had modernized these societies and subsequently organized their social hierarchy into that of global power administrators. This is not to say class and race and gender were not thoroughly established in internal hierarchies. The conquest of the rest of the world was an outward disposal of the mediocre into pursuits of war and profiteering. Inevitably according to this analysis the hegemonic power passed from Spain, to the Netherlands, to England and after a series of World Wars ultimately between Germany and the United States to a bipolar world of the US-NATO Block against the USSR. While the 1989-1991 implosion of the Soviet Union defeated authoritarian Communism. The Russian Federation, with the world’s second most powerful military, a comparable stockpile of nuclear weapons and the largest reserves of natural gas and oil on the planet is checked but not defeated. As stated the People’s Republic of China was only a minor antagonist within this struggle for core control, but is emerging as the most serious contender.
To fully understand the world system beyond the allegory of the mountain we must break apart the zones Wallerstien and dependency development theorists categorized to establish what is it is these ceaseless proxy wars, all this diplomacy, defense and development spending seeks to acquire. A false construct such as nationalism or ideology is a superstructure disguise for it means to acquire core control. As stated, the Oligarical collectives have a limited range of coordination and span of control. While an oligarch in the core may in fact collude with an oligarchy in the semi-periphery or periphery; the closer asset control and resources allocation is exerted to a core political and economic process; the richer and more powerful the fruits of the gain.
The Core
The guiding features of the core include a unified financial architecture and banking system, stable governance which can safe-guard property rights and currency valuation and can upkeep the impressive military and intelligence forces needed to coerce compliance to its economic directives. Out of these 46 nations; 4 are Medieval City States, 1 is a Catholic Religious City State, 1 is a Jewish military colony, 5 are oil petrogarchy City States, 4 are the so-called Asian Tiger states and 2 are newly re-absorbed Chinese financial hubs (back into PRC two-systems one state in 1997); all participants align their economic and political directives with the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; The United States is the dominant hegemon in this block, supported by the financial prowess of the European Union lead by German and the economic strength of Japan. Interestingly these nations are all of the primary belligerents of the World Wars and hold all seats of the United Nations Security Council; excluding the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.
These 46 primary beneficiaries’ nations of the World System according to the 2013 World Bank estimate (of OECD countries) be 1.054 billion people. These national entities ca be sub-divided into three internal groups; core central, core critical and core dependent.
The following national entities, under the stewardship and hegemony of the United States of America compose the modern nucleolus of central core control.
Financial Hubs
Singapore
Switzerland
Hong Kong[4]
Garrison States
Taiwan
South Korea
Israel[5]
City States
Vatican City
San Marino
Luxembourg
Liechtenstein
Andorra
Monaco
Petro States
Kuwait
UAR
Brunei
Qatar
Bahrain
Small Island States
Cyprus
Malta
Dependent Territories
Cook Islands (New Zealand)
Definition of Core Central: openly directs the imperatives and direction of the world system as well as imposes the dominant language, values and culture. There is clearly no contest at this stage with the United States of America.
United States
Definition of Core Critical: has disproportionate access and strategic/ military coordination with the hegemon as well as its own economic interests that is safe guards via connection to the core central power. Great Britain and its commonwealth dependents, Switzerland, France and Germany.
Definition of Core Dependent: do not dictate the geopolitical direction but benefit from closely linked security, financial or ethno-religious ties.
Taiwan South Korea Vatican City Kuwait Qatar
Cyprus
The Core Contenders
People’s Republic of China (Emerging)
Russian Federation (Defeated)
A Core contender is an economic and military block lead by a robust, well populated and resource endowed nation state with the military, diplomatic and economic capacity to challenge the hegemony of the current core block central power.
From 1945-1989 there was a bi-polar world dominated by the US and the USSR each with their own competing systems of dependency. After the 1950-1952 Korean War in which the PRC directly battled the US-NATO block a combination of the Cultural Revolution and Den Xiaoping’s embrace of state capitalism pulled the PRC largely out of Cold War confrontations.
The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows.
As of 2014; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.
The Semi-Periphery
The elements of the semi-periphery include; on-going and expanding industrialization; modernization of political architecture in that whatever system is place efficiently provides critical aspects of governance; participation as intermediaries between periphery and core; manufacture and export of goods and are typically able to act as region hegemons over peripheral powers. Excellent examples of semi-peripheral states are Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Vietnam, India, Poland, South Korea, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and South Africa. Colombia is slowly emerging from a civil war raging since 1964 that have taken the lives of between 4,744,046–5,712,506 people (Silva, 2011). Mexico has been recently plagued with drug cartel killings that are directly related to its proximity to the Southern US border. However, trade relations with the US have made both integral parts of the semi-periphery albeit unstable ones.
All of these nations are middle-income developing nations that have vital intermediary roles in global trade or possess vital energy resources. China which prior to 1949 was a peripheral nation largely of peasants has advanced progressively since to assume a position of semi-peripheral transition to core contention. Russia which was a feudal semi-peripheral monarchy (Czardom) until its socialist revolution in 1917 has fallen something short of a super power contender but is still with is military and oil reserves a far more formidable power than any listed above. Interestingly as yet another death blow to the neo-liberal Washington consensus; of the nations listed above; only Argentina and Mexico followed much of the IMF/World Bank policies. The primary success stories are the four Asian Tigers; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. China and India which cumulatively halved global extreme poverty by some 680 million persons and rapidly increased their economic growth did not follow nearly any of the consensus policy.
The key element of the semi-periphery is that enables the relationships of trade and mediates between core contenders as well as between periphery and core. While semi-peripheral counties (so-called middle income) may in face have largely impoverished populations, the semi-periphery does not depend as completely upon the core as the periphery does and can make a range of independent policy decisions. Cuba is particularly good example through its interventions in Angola and Ethiopia as well as its current policies of medical diplomacy. So is Saudi Arabia in its international support of fundamentalist Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic terror groups.
The Semi-periphery (like all of the nine zones) compose a spread. There are nations such as India and Brazil that are quickly closing economic ground on core contenders Russia and China. There are relatively independent semi-peripheral powers such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates that utilize their extractive resource wealth to further ideological policies of their respective elites. There are other nominally nation’s such as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago that play little important role in international relations.
The semi-periphery is ultimately a structural buffer zone that unlike the illusion of the middle class described above, does not actually experience significant differentials in mass development. Most of the world’s 1.2 billion living below $1.25 a day live in middle income countries and within the semi-periphery. The local oligarchy of a given state if it can position the political elite of its nation to arrange the economic activity favorably can expect exponential capital increases but their nation achieving a semi-peripheral zone standing. Suffice to say in the 2014 list of Forbes billionaires Carlos Slim, a Mexican citizen is second from the top right below American Bill Gates. Here is listing of Semi-Peripheral states:
Poland
Turkey
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia
The Periphery
What was once called the third & fourth world[9], or currently the developing world is a legacy of the colonial system. It lacks infrastructure, it is poorly industrialized and its governance systems are little better than a mix of dictatorship, military rule and out right corrupt practice. The peripheral nations should not be counted as such by GDP or HDI because they are peripheral in their importance to the world systems functioning. According to Collier there are fifty nine states (Sudan and South Sudan were not separated when he wrote his Bottom Billion report) in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti which show decline and dysfunction. Global economic convergence, the convergence of the developed and developing world has not proven itself as a valid reality.
The periphery has a disproportionately small share of global wealth and most of its capital and resources flow out of the country. Agriculture, cheap expendable labor and natural resource extraction make up most of its economic activity. Most of its population lives in extreme or relative poverty. Some peripheral states might be middle income, but do have and substantial role to play in the functioning of the world system. Peripheral state political systems are weak and they are often easily sucked into lengthy conflicts to control domestic uprisings or fight drawn out wars with their neighbors. A key element is their relative powerlessness to the rest of the state system. Most if not all of the periphery were former colonial holdings of the European powers. Their GDP and HDI often, although not always have improved the earlier they were liberated from the colonial system; Latin American countries are all much more developed than their African counterparts except for the Republic of Haiti which exhibits health and development indicators closer to Sub-Saharan Africa.
The following is a listing of the Peripheral States:
Africa:
Asia& Pacific:
Palau
Post-Soviet/ Former Socialist:
Mongolia
Middle East & Maghreb
Latin America & the Caribbean:
Grenada
T&T
Bolivia
Belize
Dominica
Costa Rica Paraguay
Ecuador
Dominican Republic
Panama
Saint Vincent
Saint Lucia
Saint Kitts and Nevis
Venezuela
Barbados
Chile
Guyana
Antigua and Barbuda
The Failing States
Criteria for Failing/ Failed/Collapsed Categorization:
According to our internal algorithm any three of these criteria in any state entity constitute a peripheral-failing state classification/ two in a country with an existing low HDI rank. Any state entity with three of these criteria is recognized by this survey as a peripheral-failed state. Four of the criteria or more occurring sets classification at state collapse.
Low HDI
Literacy Rates below 50%
Life Expectancy below 60
Famine event exceeding 100,000 deaths past five years
Epidemic event killing 50,000 people past five yeas
Active conflict within national borders
Coup/Revolution/ dissolution of national government past 4 years
In a failing state conflict is combined with under development to set in motion a series of degenerations. During this period, interventions of core and semi-peripheral powers will largely shape what social and economic orders emerges from the chaos. Periodically such as in the cases of Somalia and Yugoslavia the state collapses completely in recognizable form into total anarchy and long term dissolution.
Ukraine is currently a failing state. It is an ethnically divided energy pipeline hub for pumping Russian energy resources into Europe. Its (recently annexed Crimea) region is a major warm water strategic port for the Russian Navy; it has highly fertile soil, it is linguistically and ethnically similar to Eurasia not Europe; and it was until 1991 an integral part of the former Soviet Union. As part of the Second World (former Soviet Socialist States) Ukrainians have enjoyed economic, social and cultural rights markedly higher than the developing world even after collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991. However, following political re-ordering and oligarchic expropriation of energy assets and infrastructure across the former Soviet world; President Putin began a low intensity war to reclaim what in the Russian political consciousness is within the obvious and legitimate sphere of interests of those who run the Russian Federation. Specially all of the former Soviet Union and former Russian client states such as Cuba and Syria.
After the uprising in Maiden Square which looked likely to topple the pro-Russian president Russian military and intelligence operatives seized and annexed Crimea and triggered separatist warfare in the three eastern provinces. Organizing via its intelligence service the FSB (former KGB) the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin is replicating the exact tactics it had previously used in Moldova, Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Georgia to eliminate political order that sought to align those countries with NATO and the West. As there are 20 million ethnic Russians living in a wide range of former Soviet states such a rubric of ferment sedition, infiltrate intelligence operatives and fighters, provoke crisis, occupy and annex has spread to Ukraine made even more valuable because of numerous pipelines and the Crimea Naval base.
Because of these escalating actions heavy sanctions have been applied against Russia, but over 1/3 of Ukraine remains by default in Russian control. As in the cases of Moldova and Georgia, it is highly unlikely that any Ukrainian government will ever take back that territory. Russian Oligarchs and President Putin and his advisors have very little respect for the nation state system which due to Cold War strains, crippled Russia temporarily as a super power and core contender.
A failing state is state that due to corruption, bankruptcy and fiscal-social mismanagement an internal revolt or foreign intervention is predictably about to cause collapse state collapse and failure. A long running low intensity insurgency is not criteria for this classification. That insurgency, internal unrest or foreign invasion must produce a high likelihood of the citizens being left without a coherent political leadership and social services. In the cases of CAR civil unrest has developed into ethnic civil war ravaging large swaths of the population and leading to heavy violence against civilians. In Nigeria and Egypt mounting corrupt practices coupled with long running insurgencies place them here. In states like Malawi, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mali and Lesotho government corruption on such an endemic level have deprived the populations of even the most basic services. A failed state is caught not in a “poverty trap” by Collier or Sachs description of such they are deliberately placed into a downward cycle of under development. Peripheral and failing states slip into failed state status based on the following twelve variables.
The Failed State Index (FDI) weighs in via twelve major indicators found within a territory indicating state failure:
- Mounting Demographic Pressures
- Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons
- Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance
- Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
- Uneven Economic Development
- Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline
- Legitimacy of the State
- Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
- Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law
- Expansive Security Apparatus
- Rise of Factionalized Elites
- Intervention of External Actors
Failing States include:
Guinea
Myanmar
Mauritania
CAR
Egypt
Lesotho
Mali
Cote d’Ivoire
Ukraine
Chad
Guinea-Bissau
Sri Lanka
Niger
Yemen
Nigeria
Honduras
Malawi
Burundi
Lebanon
The Failed States
A state where its government has collapsed expect perhaps for diplomatic purposes in the capital and a few major cities; lost control of its territory; has ceased to provide social services and is at war with its own population can be described as failing state.. A secondary arrangement of this scenario zoning is when the state fully and indiscriminately unleashes its military against its population as occurred in Rwanda, Sudan and Syria. Where and when this occurs the population is at the full mercy of invading armies, militia groups and banditry. A sustained condition of state failure results in conditions best described in Thomas Hobbes book the Leviathan; a nasty, brutish and short life truncated by extreme violence and early death. The deployment of peacekeepers and NGOs can prolong the existence of a government presence; but the inevitable result of state failure is lasting underdevelopment coupled by internal human rights violation on a massive scale, war and atrocity (Rotberg, 2010). Failed State are also hot beds of opportunism for both oligarchs and criminal middle men to utilize the defunct governmental infrastructure to launder money and serve as transshipment hubs for bulk currency, narcotics, weapons, conflict minerals, expropriated oils and human cargo. Haiti is a primary port of illegal transshipment into the United States (Farmer, 1994). North Korea operates the largest and most sophisticated printing operation of duplicated $20 bills. Failed states are also breeding grounds for terrorist organizations and revolutionaries (Rotberg, 2002).
The following is a list of failed states:
North Korea[13]
Yugoslavia (collapsed in 1991)
Islamic Republic of Sudan
South Sudan
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Palestine[15]
Libya
Syrian Arab Republic
The Wilderness
The Wilderness is a state of anarchic non-governance differentiated from failed state in that large swaths of its territory are no longer under the control of government or under rule of law. The people unfortunate to live in these regions are not only severely impoverished they are subject to arbitrary and criminal attack and rights violation by marauding bands, rival militias, warlords and various social predators. Currently large swaths of the following failed states meet this description; the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) since 1998, 1/3 of Syria since 2012, 1/3 of Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia which has not had a central government since 1992.
Somalia (collapsed in 1992)[16]
Afghanistan (occupied since 2001)
Iraq (occupied since 2003; collapsed into three entities; ISIS, Iraqi Kurdistan and Shi’a central government)
DRC[17] (invaded in 1998, ongoing multi-dimensional conflict)
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Rwanda along with a variety of other African countries invaded Zaire (DRC) in 1998. Somalia collapsed after a CIA funded insurgency topped its government in 1991. Afghanistan was previously occupied by the Soviet Union from 1979-1989 where mujahedeen and political Islamists recruited trained and financed by the CIA, Pakistani ISI and Saudi Arabia (including Osama Bin Laden) were sent to give the USSR ‘its own Vietnam’. This pivotal military intelligence operation was critical to both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic militant ideology which would later in 2011 culminate in Arab Spring (bringing down the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria); ultimately resulting in the Islamic State (ISIS)’s control of vast swaths of Iraq and Syria. (Blum, 2003). Since most of these states collapse near the fault lines of hegemon power proxy struggle or near and around energy resource fields another term for the failed state wilderness is a killing field where those that don’t die of poverty will perish in war.
The Abyss
The Abyss is in essence what all development and progressive resistance to the callous greed of the oligarch collectives are attempting to avert; the total collapse of the world system with no alternative in place, disastrous climate change that results in famine and displacement and all-out war between Core powers like what occurred between 1914-1945. In essence the Abyss can be likened to Peak Development; a point of core hyperdevelopment that overloads and overwhelms our social, economic and environmental thresholds to the point where irreversible trauma is inflicted upon the human & planetary condition. In Peak Development the governments of the core trigger any of three probably catastrophic events; all of which are likely if the World System continues on the current trajectory.
- (Environmental) Disastrous, irreversible climate change proceeding until a 5 degree rise in global temperatures raising sea levels and triggering massive climate migrations, causing wide spread famine as a result of crop failure and exacerbate the periodically growing list of climate disasters.
- (Economic) Peak Oil which we are expected to hit in 2020 levels off petroleum production paralyzing global trade and military function last, but first dramatically affecting the means in which we are supplied energy; which in turn leads to less power availability; which in turn limits internet connectivity. Peak Water which occurs in 2050 leads to new destructive conflicts over decreasing supplies. Wealth accumulation continues along the lines of Thomas Piketty’s analysis and the rise of an overtly elite class subsumes new levels of power and privilege. Critical divergence occurs with a micro-faction of the arch-oligarchic collectives gathering in secure citadels with a global degeneration of development reverting most of the human race to barbaric living conditions.
- (Social) Multipolarity expands creating a more equalized power differential between the three primary core blocks. Proxy war heightens in the semi-periphery and periphery over resource scarcity. Inevitably all three of the core contender get sucked into a more direct confrontation which results in nuclear exchanges, genocides and democides.
The result of any of these catastrophic events being allowed to occur; permanent environmental damage, unmitigated oligarchic capital accumulation and or a more grisly and protracted series of World Wars will irrevocable trigger the degeneration of our species to sub-human conditions and inevitable extinction.
|
CODE |
COUNTRY |
HDI SCORE |
|
|
|
|
|
|
CORE/ Critical |
|
| 1 |
1 |
Norway |
0.944 |
| 2 |
1 |
Australia |
0.933 |
| 3 |
1 |
Switzerland |
0.917 |
| 4 |
1 |
Netherlands |
0.915 |
| 5 |
1 |
United States |
0.914 |
| 6 |
1 |
Germany |
0.911 |
| 7 |
1 |
Japan |
0.890 |
| 8 |
1 |
Canada |
0.902 |
| 9 |
1 |
United Kingdom |
0.892 |
| 10 |
1 |
Denmark |
0.900 |
| 11 |
1 |
France |
0.884 |
| 12 |
1 |
Sweden |
0.898 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
CORE/ Dependent |
|
| 13 |
2 |
Vatican City |
0.898 |
| 14 |
2 |
Iceland |
0.895 |
| 16 |
2 |
South Korea |
0.891 |
| 17 |
2 |
Liechtenstein |
0.889 |
| 18 |
2 |
Israel |
0.888 |
| 19 |
2 |
Singapore |
0.901 |
| 20 |
2 |
Austria |
0.881 |
| 21 |
2 |
Belgium |
0.881 |
| 22 |
2 |
Luxembourg |
0.881 |
| 23 |
2 |
Finland |
0.879 |
| 24 |
2 |
Slovenia |
0.874 |
| 25 |
2 |
Italy |
0.872 |
| 26 |
2 |
Spain |
0.869 |
| 27 |
2 |
Czech Republic |
0.861 |
| 28 |
2 |
Greece |
0.853 |
| 29 |
2 |
Brunei Darussalam |
0.852 |
| 30 |
2 |
Qatar |
0.851 |
| 31 |
2 |
Cyprus |
0.845 |
| 32 |
2 |
Estonia |
0.840 |
| 33 |
2 |
Ireland |
0.899 |
| 34 |
2 |
New Zealand |
0.910 |
| 35 |
2 |
Hong Kong |
0.891 |
| 36 |
2 |
Andorra |
0.830 |
| 37 |
2 |
United Arab Emirates |
0.827 |
| 38 |
2 |
Hungary |
0.818 |
| 39 |
2 |
Slovakia |
0.830 |
| 40 |
2 |
Portugal |
0.822 |
| 41 |
2 |
Monaco |
NO DATA |
| 42 |
2 |
Macau |
NO DATA |
| 43 |
2 |
Malta |
0.829 |
| 44 |
2 |
Kuwait |
0.814 |
| 45 |
2 |
Bahrain |
0.815 |
| 46 |
2 |
San Marino |
NO DATA |
| 47 |
2 |
Taiwan |
NO DATA |
|
|
|
|
|
|
SEMIPERIPHERY |
|
| 54 |
3 |
Brazil |
0.744 |
| 55 |
3 |
Russia |
0.778 |
| 56 |
3 |
India |
0.586 |
| 57 |
3 |
China |
0.719 |
| 58 |
3 |
South Africa |
0.658 |
| 59 |
3 |
Saudi Arabia |
0.836 |
| 60 |
3 |
Lithuania |
0.834 |
| 61 |
3 |
Poland |
0.834 |
| 62 |
3 |
Chile |
0.822 |
| 63 |
3 |
Turkey |
0.759 |
| 64 |
3 |
Cuba |
0.815 |
| 65 |
3 |
Argentina |
0.808 |
| 66 |
3 |
Croatia |
0.812 |
| 67 |
3 |
Latvia |
0.810 |
| 68 |
3 |
Iran |
0.749 |
| 69 |
3 |
Pakistan |
0.537 |
| 70 |
3 |
Indonesia |
0.684 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
PERIPHERY-HHD |
|
|
|
|
|
| 71 |
4 |
Uruguay |
0.790 |
| 72 |
4 |
Bahamas |
0.789 |
| 73 |
4 |
Montenegro |
0.789 |
| 74 |
4 |
Belarus |
0.786 |
| 75 |
4 |
Romania |
0.785 |
| 76 |
4 |
Oman |
0.783 |
| 77 |
4 |
Bulgaria |
0.777 |
| 78 |
4 |
Barbados |
0.776 |
| 79 |
4 |
Palau |
0.775 |
| 80 |
4 |
Antigua and Barbuda |
0.774 |
| 81 |
4 |
Malaysia |
0.773 |
| 82 |
4 |
Mauritius |
0.771 |
| 83 |
4 |
Trinidad and Tobago |
0.766 |
| 84 |
4 |
Panama |
0.765 |
| 85 |
4 |
Venezuela |
0.764 |
| 86 |
4 |
Costa Rica |
0.763 |
| 87 |
4 |
Kazakhstan |
0.757 |
| 88 |
4 |
Mexico |
0.756 |
| 89 |
4 |
Seychelles |
0.756 |
| 90 |
4 |
Saint Kitts and Nevis |
0.750 |
| 91 |
4 |
Sri Lanka[18] |
0.750 |
| 92 |
4 |
Azerbaijan |
0.747 |
| 93 |
4 |
Jordan |
0.745 |
| 94 |
4 |
Serbia |
0.745 |
| 95 |
4 |
Georgia |
0.744 |
| 96 |
4 |
Grenada |
0.744 |
| 97 |
4 |
Peru |
0.737 |
| 98 |
4 |
Belize |
0.732 |
| 99 |
4 |
Macedonia |
0.732 |
| 100 |
4 |
Bosnia and Herzegovina |
0.731 |
| 101 |
4 |
Armenia |
0.730 |
| 102 |
4 |
Fiji |
0.724 |
| 103 |
4 |
Thailand |
0.722 |
| 104 |
4 |
Tunisia |
0.721 |
| 105 |
4 |
Saint Vincent and the Grenadines |
0.719 |
| 106 |
4 |
Algeria |
0.717 |
| 107 |
4 |
Dominica |
0.717 |
| 108 |
4 |
Albania |
0.716 |
| 109 |
4 |
Jamaica |
0.715 |
| 110 |
4 |
Saint Lucia |
0.714 |
| 111 |
4 |
Colombia |
0.711 |
| 112 |
4 |
Ecuador |
0.711 |
| 113 |
4 |
Suriname |
0.705 |
| 114 |
4 |
Tonga |
0.705 |
| 115 |
4 |
Dominican Republic |
0.700 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
PERIPHERY-MHD |
|
| 116 |
5 |
Maldives |
0.698 |
| 117 |
5 |
Mongolia |
0.698 |
| 118 |
5 |
Turkmenistan |
0.698 |
| 119 |
5 |
Samoa |
0.694 |
| 120 |
5 |
Botswana |
0.683 |
| 121 |
5 |
Paraguay |
0.676 |
| 122 |
5 |
Gabon |
0.674 |
| 123 |
5 |
Bolivia |
0.667 |
| 124 |
5 |
Moldova |
0.663 |
| 125 |
5 |
El Salvador |
0.662 |
| 126 |
5 |
Uzbekistan |
0.661 |
| 127 |
5 |
Philippines |
0.660 |
| 128 |
5 |
Guyana |
0.638 |
| 129 |
5 |
Viet Nam |
0.638 |
| 130 |
5 |
Cape Verde |
0.636 |
| 131 |
5 |
Micronesia |
0.630 |
| 132 |
5 |
Guatemala |
0.628 |
| 133 |
5 |
Kyrgyzstan |
0.628 |
| 134 |
5 |
Namibia |
0.624 |
| 135 |
5 |
Timor-Leste |
0.620 |
| 136 |
5 |
Morocco |
0.617 |
| 137 |
5 |
Vanuatu |
0.616 |
| 138 |
5 |
Nicaragua |
0.614 |
| 139 |
5 |
Kiribati |
0.607 |
| 140 |
5 |
Tajikistan |
0.607 |
| 141 |
5 |
Bhutan |
0.584 |
| 142 |
5 |
Cambodia |
0.584 |
| 143 |
5 |
Ghana |
0.573 |
| 144 |
5 |
Laos |
0.569 |
| 145 |
5 |
Congo |
0.564 |
| 146 |
5 |
Zambia |
0.561 |
| 147 |
5 |
Bangladesh |
0.558 |
| 148 |
5 |
Sao Tome and Principe |
0.558 |
| 149 |
5 |
Equatorial Guinea |
0.556 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
PERIPHERY-LHD |
|
| |
|
|
|
| 150 |
6 |
Nepal |
0.540 |
| 151 |
6 |
Kenya |
0.535 |
| 152 |
6 |
Swaziland |
0.530 |
| 153 |
6 |
Angola |
0.526 |
| 154 |
6 |
Myanmar |
0.524 |
| 155 |
6 |
Nigeria |
0.504 |
| 156 |
6 |
Rwanda |
0.506 |
| 157 |
6 |
Cameroon |
0.504 |
| 158 |
6 |
Madagascar |
0.498 |
| 159 |
6 |
Zimbabwe |
0.492 |
| 160 |
6 |
Papua New Guinea |
0.491 |
| 161 |
6 |
Solomon Islands |
0.491 |
| 162 |
6 |
Comoros |
0.488 |
| 163 |
6 |
Tanzania |
0.488 |
| 164 |
6 |
Mauritania |
0.487 |
| 165 |
6 |
Lesotho |
0.486 |
| 166 |
6 |
Senegal |
0.485 |
| 167 |
6 |
Uganda |
0.484 |
| 168 |
6 |
Benin |
0.476 |
| 169 |
6 |
Togo |
0.473 |
| 170 |
6 |
Djibouti |
0.467 |
| 171 |
6 |
Côte d’Ivoire |
0.452 |
| 172 |
6 |
Gambia |
0.441 |
| 173 |
6 |
Ethiopia |
0.435 |
| 174 |
6 |
Malawi |
0.414 |
| 175 |
6 |
Liberia |
0.412 |
| 176 |
6 |
Mali |
0.407 |
| 177 |
6 |
Guinea-Bissau |
0.396 |
| 178 |
6 |
Mozambique |
0.393 |
| 179 |
6 |
Guinea |
0.392 |
| 180 |
6 |
Burundi |
0.389 |
| 181 |
6 |
Burkina Faso |
0.388 |
| 182 |
6 |
Eritrea |
0.381 |
| 183 |
6 |
Sierra Leone |
0.374 |
| 184 |
6 |
Chad |
0.372 |
| 185 |
6 |
Niger |
0.337 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
PERIPHERY-FAILING |
|
| 187 |
7 |
Egypt |
0.682 |
| 188 |
7 |
Lebanon |
0.765 |
| 189 |
7 |
Libya |
0.784 |
| 190 |
7 |
Syria |
0.658 |
| 191 |
7 |
Honduras |
0.617 |
| 192 |
7 |
Ukraine |
0.734 |
| 193 |
7 |
Yemen |
0.500 |
| 194 |
7 |
South Sudan |
NO DATA |
| 195 |
7 |
Sudan |
0.473 |
| 196 |
7 |
Central African Republic |
0.341 |
| 197 |
7 |
North Korea |
NO DATA |
|
|
|
|
|
|
PERIPHERY-FAILED |
|
| 198 |
8 |
Afghanistan |
0.468 |
| 199 |
8 |
Haiti |
0.471 |
| 200 |
8 |
Congo (Democratic Republic of the) |
0.338 |
| 201 |
8 |
Iraq |
0.642 |
| 202 |
8 |
Nauru |
NO DATA |
| 203 |
8 |
Palestine |
0.686 |
|
|
|
|
PART II: THE GLOBAL PLANTATION
AND THE ILLUSION OF PROGRESS
WORKERS ARE SLAVES
WHAT IS A PLANTATION
WHAT IS MODERN SLAVERY
HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE SLAVES
WORK WILL SET YOU FREE
WHAT ARE STATISTICS
WHAT IS THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX
WHAT IS THE MULTI-DIMENSAIONAL POVERTY INDEX
WHAT IS A GINI INDEX
WHAT IS THE MAHDI RANKING SYSTEM
WHAT IS GENDER FOR
WHAT IS RACE & ETHNICTY FOR
WHAT IS NATIONALISM FOR
WHAT IS RELIGION FOR
WHAT IS AN NGO
WHAT IS INEQUALITY
WHAT IS RELATIVE POVERTY
WHAT IS ABSOLUTE POVERTY
WHAT IS HYPERDEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS MANUFACTURED CONSENT
WHAT IS CONSUMER CULTURE
WHAT ARE SOMA, BREAD & CIRCUSES
WHAT ARE BEHAVIOR MOD CAMPS
WHAT IS WELFARE USED FOR
WHAT IS A GHETTO
WHAT IS MASS INCARCERATION
WHAT IS THE PRISON INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
WHAT IS MODERNIZATION THEORY
WHAT IS COMPETATIVE ADVANTAGE
WHAT IS AN EXPORT PROCESSSING ZONE
WHAT IS A SLUM
POVERTY IS GENOCIDE
Workers are Wage Slaves
It is important to understand that slavery as practiced until 1865 was a relatively inefficient system of work and production. Slaves hated being slaves. They worked slowly, escaped whenever and wherever they could and periodically revolted killing their masters, albeit with little lasting system effect until the Haitian Revolution of 1791 in St. Domingue where brutality and inefficient use of slaves had gotten so bloody that 40,000 slaves a year were being imported to make up for those being murdered in the cultivation of sugar, coffee and indigo.
Colonialism was only slightly more efficient than slavery. It too was still uprising prone, inefficient and undependable. It was military costly to upkeep and maintain colonies. It also was questionably profitable. Both slavery and colonialism also psychologically degraded the colonizer as well as certainly underdeveloped the colonized (Rodney).
Getting workers to work, without thinking they were slaves meant they could be worked far harder, for far longer and specialized more efficiently to perform economic tasks. After the industrial revolution and the world wars; the Cold War was in a very real way a third world war for ideological determination over the means of production as well as workers relationship to the state.
Modern Slavery
Modern Slavery as it has been called is exactly the same as slavery in previous epochs; the physical and mental coercion exerted upon other humans to reduce them into bonded peons to extract their labor for free. In previous periods slavery was perhaps less stratified, or perhaps nothing has changed much at all expect the expanse of the practice. Again, we can only estimate the number of formally enslaved persons prior to 1848. However it should be clarified there are differences.
- Ancient slavery was generally the product of conquest, but salves retained their humanity. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade added a very obvious racial dimension and a dehumanization of slaves that enabled horrific brutality on ever level of the exchange. Modern slavery has almost nothing to do with imperial conquest and race; it has a great deal more to do with exploiting vulnerable groups. The majority of modern slaves are women and children being sold into sexual slavery.
- Ancient slavery was multi-sector (warriors, servants, concubines and trades people). Trans-Atlantic slavery was largely utilized in agricultural harvest. Modern slavery is generally focused on domestic service, menial labor and sex work.
- Slavery, bonded labor and wage slavery are markedly different in that in case of chattel slavery there is very little freedom of movement (escape) and more aggressive liberties are being taken with your body, work and time. Bonded labors and wage slaves have a certain degree of flight capacity.
- It is rare in modern slavery to see slaves utilized in trade labor expect perhaps via prisoner labor gangs or conscription of civilians to harvest minerals.
- In the case of ethno-religious slaveries via the Hindu caste system slavery is generally about imposing a privilege based apartheid not justified by ethno-racial bondage.
The Plantations
A plantation is work camp where varying levels of violence or coercion compel those living within its defined area to work for as little (often nothing) as possible. At varying times over the course of human history plantation systems have been implemented over vast swaths of humanity. Prominent examples include the Triangle Trade raping and enslaving Africa carrying off over 25 million people to chattel bondage; Russian aristocracies entrapment of over 85% of their population under the serf system or the Hindu Brahmin continued subjugation of up 24.4% of India’s total population of the ‘untouchable caste’ the Dalits.
The basic nature of a plantation whatever it will be called is that the workers are trapped and highly under compensated. Modern forms of slavery persist in numbers that surpass at any given period the number of chattel slaves; 29.8 million as a baseline. These specific 29.8 million catalogued in Walk Free’s Global Index are mostly women and children being used as sex slaves. There is a far higher number of debt bonded persons, subjugated castes (Dalits) and as stated the number might increase tenfold if we could know the number of person performing low wage race to the bottom style factor assembly work in sweat shops.
The Plantation system of the 18th century utilized predominantly African salves worked to death in brutal implacable and horrific fashion. The cruelest excesses were documented in Haiti (which staged a Revolution in 1791 defeating France, England and Spain) and the Belgium Congo (modern day DRC). The atrocities in both locations are well documented and also unique in that both regimes were defeated by the resistance. Both are now two of the poorest most violence prone nations on earth.
The Plantation system of racial slavery founded by European and Arab capitalists was largely defeated by 1865. It is understood now that slavery was an inherently inefficient production system. It’s evolution into colonialism has a more to do with efficiency than abolitionist agitation-propaganda and human rights; it had to not with economic directives in the Euro-American core. The end of colonialism was certainly not the end of elite networks, corruption, cronyisms and insider dealing between former European colonizers and current collaborators normally educated in European cities or military officers trained by European drill masters (Nkrumah, 1965)(Amin, 2012)(Fanon, 1965). Colonialism was converted to Neo-Colonialism thorough the World Bank/ IMF structural adjustment programs and conditional aid. The Plantation has been constructed differently based upon culture. Serfdom in Russia persisted from the 11th century to 1861; unique in being the only group of people to internally enslave long term their own ethnic group (Kolchin, 2009). American plantation owners and European ones in the Caribbean differed in approaches to dehumanization. There was no conception of Mullato in the USA but as many as 64 categories of mixed race in the Caribbean, Brazil and Latin America. Tartar and Arab slavers carried as many as one million Polish, Ukrainian and Russian peasants bondage. Slavery in the Islamic world was markedly less brutal in certain respects and not based at all on race. The Irish were used as indentured servants all over the world.
Colonial polices differed radically. The Portuguese got in early and left last leaving Angola in the midst of a Civil War from 1975-2002. The English created extensive ethnic antagonisms but invested far more in training their subalterns; most former English colonies have higher HDI and GDP. The French were slash and burn colonizers; three former colonies Haiti, Algeria and Vietnam had to fight protracted bloody wars for them to even leave. Each had a blue print for their colonies, but all still maintain trade relationships and ties of one form or another.
The American style of Neo-Colonialism involves its culture, banking, trade, aid and military might. The Chinese style is yet to be determined but judging from Africa it will be somewhat straight forward infrastructure in exchange for market access and extractive rights.
This is the bottom line; the plantation persists. It evolves it’s bondage into increasingly productive forms so that the slave does not believe they are a slave. Returning to the illusion of progress there are more overt chattel slaves now than at any time in history. How that was estimated I am unclear given my (and Foucault’s) views of historic record keeping prior to 1848 (Foucault, 1977). Enslavement has persisted. By calling it different things and loudly distracting humanity with human rights they do not claim or understand, as well as by finding structural means to keep humans on their national plantations; the system goes on unabated. While modern slavery exists throughout the world system it is largely confined to the sectors of agriculture, domestic work, sexual slavery, pornography and abuse of children for sport. Most productive labor is engaged in via wage slavery; production without unions, benefits, job security or a living wage. As nations are locked into peripheral and semi-peripheral arrangements for their comparative advantage many are driven into low wage manufacturing and agriculture jobs as core firms devise a race to the bottom; a depression of wages currently best show cased in Bangladesh.
Work Will Set us Free
WHAT ARE STATISTICS
WHAT IS THE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT INDEX
WHAT IS THE MULTI-DIMENSAIONAL POVERTY INDEX
WHAT IS A GINI INDEX
MAHDI RANKING SYSTEM
If something is not monitored it cannot be measured. As things stand in 2015 there is no cohesive system of ranking harm or benefit to normative human rights obligations nor a trusted, objective measurement of global poverty beyond what is supplied by national statistical bureaus.
We are going to explore the relationships between corruption perception, human rights violations, wealth distributions, GINI & PALMA measured economic inequality, resource distributions and global conflict weighed against 2013 HDI rankings grouped into a modified parameter range of Immanuel Wallerstein’s World System Analysis. The name of this measurement system is Modified Algorithm Human Development Index (MAHDI). We will showcase these relationships by using the 2013 HDI as a base line (modified with a code of our choosing to better group nations by several external factors we will subsequently identify) and having a drop down menu with these other displays (world system color groupings; active conflicts by scope/scale, former colonial entities by former colonizer, CO2 emissions per capita, gender equality and general resource concentrations) which once selected will be further layered and delineated over our base map.
Modified Algorithm HDI will serve as baseline data weighted and categorized by merging GINI scores, conflict data, Corruption Perception Data as well as our seven failed state criteria. The corruption Perceptions index is rated on a scale from 1-100 with 1 being highly corrupt and 100 being very transparent & clean. Levels of corruption will be represented using a gradient color scale. Other factors will be represented using a striped overlay. Icons will represent conflicts, resources and variety of other variables. Using this design will allow the user to easily visualize correlations between our chosen indicators and the human rights states of emergency in different countries around the world.
The primary data used for this map will be pulled from the World Bank, UPSALLA and the UN Human Development Reports from 2010-2013 and the 2013 Transparency International Reports as well as documented resource maps from IEA, UN and WB.
Parameters:
HDI Samples from 2013
Multi-dimensional poverty index
Corruption Perception Index
World Bank Development Indicators from 1980-2015
UPPSALA Conflict/ Catastrophe Data from 1945
UPPSALA Ongoing Conflict Data 2014
UN Data Bank
Gender Inequality statistics
Active UN Peacekeeping missions
CO2 Emissions/ World Bank
Export Processing Zones per country
Hydrocarbon net exporting nations
Colonial Possessions since 1500
GINI Index
Primary Base Categorization:
- a) HDI Samples from 2013 (base layer)
- b) Corruption Perception Index (base layer)
Secondary Base Categorizations:
HDI Samples from 2013 by Continent (with bivariate data):
(45 ongoing) UPPSALA Ongoing Conflict Data 2014
(17 ongoing) Active UN Peacekeeping missions
Gender Inequality statistics
CO2 Emissions/ World Bank
Export Processing Zones per country
Hydrocarbon net exporting nations
Known Colonial Possessions since 1500
Known Genocides/Democides since 1900
(Available) GINI Index
Tertiary Base Categorization:
Modified-HDI/Wallerstein Map
Core Critical (1), Core Dependent (2), Semi-Peripheral (3), Peripheral-HDI (4), Peripheral-MDI (5), Peripheral-LDI (6), Peripheral-Failing (7), Peripheral-Failed States (8), Non-Recognized States (9).
Data Collection Specializations & Perspectives:
Human Rights Perspectives are still not being incorporated into indicators for development.
Indicators showing that human rights commitments/ achievements bear little resemblance to development at all. We will illustrate some of the 215 national obligations to Human Rights as a baseline. Our modified criteria for grouping national units out into core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states further into failed and failing follows a Collier Analysis[19] of non-development in the bottom billion poorest nations. Paul Collier posited that currently as many as 69 nations contain the bottom billion poorest of humanity living on less than $1 a family a day in their national border and are getting more unstable. The actual number of the global poor is believed to be closer to 1.2 billion living at $1.25/family/day, 1.8 billion living at $2.50/f/d; and a total of 4 billion people living below $4.00/ family a day (World Bank, 2015). It is believed that as many as 5 billion people are living below $10.00/ family a day. Of the remaining 2 billion remaining humans wealth quickly stratifies (Piketty, 2014). The top 85 individual people possess as much wealth as much the bottom 3.5 billion do cumulatively (Oxfam, 2015).
United Nations data, national statistics and World Bank Indicators do not show much about a countries internal well-being, as in how the poor and working classes truly live. Positive indicators at the multi-lateral level don’t reflect actual genuine progress. A Pinker Analysis[20] concentrates on acts of violence like war and murder, but ignores the structural violence of enduring and endemic poverty.
Economic relationships and structural violence will be illustrated using Immanuel Wallerstein’s World System Analysis. By utilizing date inputs from UN/WB/UPPSALA we will then begin to group the 215 national units[21] into
structural relationship categories of Core Critical, Core dependent, Semi-Peripheral and Peripheral; separated further into Peripheral-HDI, Peripheral-MDI, Peripheral-LDI, Peripheral-Failing and Peripheral-Failed State and lastly unrecognized para state[22] to more realistically depict economic/political relationships.
Resource mapping will also be conducted to examine what it is the Core nations are taking from the periphery and what is caused via this exchange. We will also map & examine former colonial holdings and relationships to current distributions of wealth/power. Countries colonized by specific powers will be coded to identify the former colonizer and its maximum holdings by color. Included as well in our algorithm will graphic depictions of the human rights situation/ deterioration via export processing zones, gender equality, and a depiction of genocides/ democide and atrocities since 1884,the date of the Berlin Conference.
Human Development Index Criteria
Definition of Human Development Index, wiki.
Corruption Ranking
Definition of Corruption, wiki.
War & Conflict Ranking
Active Conflict of any level 1-3 with a ceasefire/ peace settlement holding more than 5 years; coded (4).
Active Conflict above 10,000 annual cumulative fatalities (cumulative civilian, military, paramilitary and outside intervening forces), i.e. a war; Coded Level (3).
Active Conflict between 1,000-9,999 annual cumulative fatalities (cumulative civilian, military, paramilitary and outside intervening forces), i.e. major conflict; Coded Level (2).
Active Conflict below 999 annual cumulative fatalities (cumulative civilian, military, paramilitary and outside intervening forces), i.e. a low intensity conflict; Coded Level (1).
No Conflict; Coded (0) means national unit is neither contributing to an active conflict domestically or abroad.
Definition of War
Definition of Conflict
Definition cumulative annual fatalities
Definition of ceasefire/ peace settlement
Definition of a democide
Definition of a genocide
Definition of an atrocity
Definition of a repression, wiki.
Modified HDI-Wallerstien Ranking
(1a) Core Central
(1b) Core Critical
(2) Core Dependent
(3) Semi-Peripheral
(4) Peripheral-HDI
(5) Peripheral-MDI
(6) Peripheral-LDI
(7) Peripheral-Failing
(8) Peripheral-Failed State
(9) State Collapse
(10) Non-Recognized Entity
Definition of the Core: The guiding features of the core include a unified financial architecture and banking system, stable governance which can safe-guard property rights and currency valuation and can upkeep the impressive military and intelligence forces needed to coerce compliance to its economic directives. Out of these 46 nations; 4 are Medieval City States, 1 is a Catholic Religious City State, 1 is a Jewish colony, 5 are oil petrogarchy City States, 4 are the so-called Asian Tiger states and 2 are newly re-absorbed Chinese financial hubs (back into PRC two-systems one state in 1997); all participants align their economic and political directives with the OECD, North Atlantic Treaty Organization, International Monetary Fund and World Bank; The United States is the dominant hegemon in this block, supported by the financial prowess of the European Union lead by German and the economic strength of Japan. Interestingly these nations are all of the primary belligerents of the World Wars and hold all seats of the United Nations Security Council; excluding the Russian Federation and People’s Republic of China.
These 46 primary beneficiaries’ nations of the World System according to the 2013 World Bank estimate (of OECD countries) be 1.054 billion people. These national entities ca be sub-divided into three internal groups; core central, core critical and core dependent.
Definition of Core Central: openly directs the imperatives and direction of the world system as well as imposes the dominant language, values and culture. There is clearly no contest at this stage with the United States of America.
Definition of Core Critical: has disproportionate access and strategic/ military coordination with the hegemon as well as its own economic interests that is safe guards via connection to the core central power. Great Britain and its commonwealth dependents, Japan and Germany.
Definition of Core Dependent: do not dictate the geopolitical direction but benefit from closely liked ethno-religious and economic ties.
Definition of Core Contenders: A Core contender is an economic and military block lead by a robust, well populated and resource endowed nation state with the military, diplomatic and economic capacity to challenge the hegemony of the current core block central power. From 1945-1989 there was a bipolar world dominated by the US and the USSR each with their own competing systems of dependency. After the 1950-1952 Korean War in which the PRC directly battled the US-NATO block a combination of the Cultural Revolution and Den Xiaoping’s embrace of state capitalism pulled the PRC largely out of Cold War confrontations. The economists of all great power craft highly competing narratives of both history and financial prescription. Although evidence now clearly debunks the Washington Consensus which held sway from 1980 to 2001; encouraging deregulation, privatization, structural adjustment and integration into the globalized Western core market; it cannot be said that the effects of these policies did not enrich the core deliberately. The purpose of the proxy wars was of course a battle to control the resource flows. As of 2014; the logical core contender is the People’s Republic of China. The financial mechanism it has deployed to support this claim is called the BRICS Bank; a counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.
Definition of the Semi-Periphery: The elements of the semi-periphery include; on-going and expanding industrialization; modernization of political architecture in that whatever system is place efficiently provides critical aspects of governance; participation as intermediaries between periphery and core; manufacture and export of goods and are typically able to act as region hegemons over peripheral powers. Excellent examples of semi-peripheral states are Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, India, Poland, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and South Africa. All of these nations are middle-income/ middle-high HDI once developing nations that have vital intermediary roles in global trade or possess vital energy resources. China which prior to 1949 was a peripheral nation largely of peasants has advanced progressively since to assume a position of semi-peripheral transition to core contention. Russia which was a feudal semi-peripheral monarchy (Czardom) until its socialist revolution in 1917 has fallen something short of a superpower contender but is still with is military and oil reserves a far more formidable power than any listed above. Interestingly as yet another death blow to the neoliberal Washington consensus; of the nations listed above; only Argentina and Mexico followed much of the IMF/World Bank policies. The primary success stories are the four Asian Tigers; South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong. China and India which cumulatively halved global extreme poverty by some 680 million persons and rapidly increased their economic growth did not follow nearly any of the consensus policy. The key element of the semi-periphery is that enables the relationships of trade and mediates between core contenders as well as between periphery and core. While semi-peripheral counties (so-called middle income) may in face have largely impoverished populations, the semi-periphery does not depend as completely upon the core as the periphery does and can make a range of independent policy decisions. Cuba is particularly good example through its interventions in Angola and Ethiopia as well as its current policies of medical diplomacy. So is Saudi Arabia in its international support of fundamentalist Wahabi-Salafist Islamic terror groups.
The Semi-periphery (like all of the five zones) compose a spread. There are nations such as India and Brazil that are quickly closing economic ground on core contenders Russia and China. There are relatively independent semi-peripheral powers such as Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates that utilize their extractive resource wealth to further ideological policies of their respective elites. There are other nominally nation’s such as Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago that play little important role in international relations.
The semi-periphery is ultimately a structural buffer zone that unlike the illusion of the middle class described above, does not actually experience significant differentials in mass development. Most of the world’s 1.2 billion living below $1.25 a day live in middle income countries and within the semi-periphery. The local oligarchy of a given state if it can position the political elite of its nation to arrange the economic activity favorably can expect exponential capital increases but their nation achieving a semi-peripheral zone standing. Suffice to say in the 2014 list of Forbes billionaires Carlos Slim, a Mexican citizen is second from the top right below American Bill Gates. Here is listing of Semi-Peripheral states:
In our algorithm a country with a low-medium HDI can be reclassified as Semi-Peripheral if two of the four objective criteria have been met.
The country is in G20, N11, or leads a regional trade/ military alliance.
The country has participated in at least 3 regional conflicts/intervention in past 10 years.
The country has a critical commodity or resources it leverages beneficially in global trade.
The country has a direct strategic alliance with a core power or core contender.
Definition of the Periphery: What was once called the third & fourth world, or currently the developing world is a legacy of the colonial system. It lacks infrastructure, it is poorly industrialized and its governance systems are little better than a mix of dictatorship, military rule and outright corrupt practice. The peripheral nations should not be counted as such by GDP or HDI because they are peripheral in their importance to the world systems functioning. According to Collier there are fifty nine states (Sudan and South Sudan were not separated when he wrote his Bottom Billion report) in Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti which show decline and dysfunction. Global economic convergence, the convergence of the developed and developing world has not proven itself as a valid reality.
The periphery has a disproportionately small share of global wealth and most of its capital and resources flow out of the country. Agriculture, cheap expendable labor and natural resource extraction make up most of its economic activity. Most of its population lives in extreme or relative poverty. Some peripheral states might be middle income, but do have and substantial role to play in the functioning of the world system. Peripheral state political systems are weak and they are often easily sucked into lengthy conflicts to control domestic uprisings or fight drawn out wars with their neighbors. A key element is their relative powerlessness to the rest of the state system. Most if not all of the periphery were former colonial holdings of the European powers. Their GDP and HDI often, although not always have improved the earlier they were liberated from the colonial system; Latin American countries are all much more developed than their African counterparts except for the Republic of Haiti which exhibits health and development indicators closer to Sub-Saharan Africa.
Definition of a Failing State
In a failing state conflict is combined with under development to set in motion a series of degenerations. During this period, interventions of core and semi-peripheral powers will largely shape what social and economic orders emerges from the chaos. Periodically such as in the cases of Somalia and Yugoslavia the state collapses completely in recognizable form into total anarchy and long term dissolution.
Ukraine is currently a failing state. It is an ethnically divided energy pipeline hub for pumping Russian energy resources into Europe. Its (recently annexed Crimea) region is a major warm water strategic port for the Russian Navy; it has highly fertile soil, it is linguistically and ethnically similar to Eurasia not Europe; and it was until 1991 an integral part of the former Soviet Union. As part of the Second World (former Soviet Socialist States) Ukrainians have enjoyed economic, social and cultural rights markedly higher than the developing world even after collapse of the USSR in 1989-1991. However, following political reordering and oligarchic expropriation of energy assets and infrastructure across the former Soviet world; President Putin began a low intensity war to reclaim what in the Russian political consciousness is within the obvious and legitimate sphere of interests of those who run the Russian Federation. Specially all of the former Soviet Union and former Russian client states such as Cuba and Syria.
After the uprising in Maiden Square which looked likely to topple the pro-Russian president Russian military and intelligence operatives seized and annexed Crimea and triggered separatist warfare in the three eastern provinces. Organizing via its intelligence service the FSB (former KGB) the United Russia Party of Vladimir Putin is replicating the exact tactics it had previously used in Moldova, Chechnya, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Georgia to eliminate political order that sought to align those countries with NATO and the West. As there are 20 million ethnic Russians living in a wide range of former Soviet states such a rubric of ferment sedition, infiltrate intelligence operatives and fighters, provoke crisis, occupy and annex has spread to Ukraine made even more valuable because of numerous pipelines and the Crimea Naval base.
Because of these escalating actions heavy sanctions have been applied against Russia, but over 1/3 of Ukraine remains by default in Russian control. As in the cases of Moldova and Georgia, it is highly unlikely that any Ukrainian government will ever take back that territory. Russian Oligarchs and President Putin and his advisors have very little respect for the nation state system which due to Cold War strains, crippled Russia temporarily as a super power and core contender.
A failing state is state that due to corruption, bankruptcy and fiscal-social mismanagement an internal revolt or foreign intervention is predictably about to cause collapse state collapse and failure. A long running low intensity insurgency is not criteria for this classification. That insurgency, internal unrest or foreign invasion must produce a high likelihood of the citizens being left without a coherent political leadership and social services. In the cases of CAR civil unrest has developed into ethnic civil war ravaging large swaths of the population and leading to heavy violence against civilians. In Nigeria and Egypt mounting corrupt practices coupled with long running insurgencies place them here. In states like Malawi, Burundi, Chad, Niger, Mali and Lesotho government corruption on such an endemic level have deprived the populations of even the most basic services. A failed state is caught not in a “poverty trap” by Collier or Sachs description of such they are deliberately placed into a downward cycle of under development. Peripheral and failing states slip into failed state status based on the following twelve variables.
Definition of a Failed State: The Failed State Index (FDI) weighs in via twelve major indicators found within a territory indicating state failure:
- Mounting Demographic Pressures
- Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons
- Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance
- Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
- Uneven Economic Development
- Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline
- Legitimacy of the State
- Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
- Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law
- Expansive Security Apparatus
- Rise of Factionalized Elites
- Intervention of External Actors
A state where its government has collapsed expect perhaps for diplomatic purposes in the capital and a few major cities; lost control of its territory; has ceased to provide social services and is at war with its own population can be described as failing state.. A secondary arrangement of this scenario zoning is when the state fully and indiscriminately unleashes its military against its population as occurred in Rwanda, Sudan and Syria. Where and when this occurs the population is at the full mercy of invading armies, militia groups and banditry. A sustained condition of state failure results in conditions best described in Thomas Hobbes book the Leviathan; a nasty, brutish and short life truncated by extreme violence and early death. The deployment of peacekeepers and NGOs can prolong the existence of a government presence; but the inevitable result of state failure is lasting underdevelopment coupled by internal human rights violation on a massive scale, war and atrocity (Rotberg, 2010). Failed State are also hot beds of opportunism for both oligarchs and criminal middle men to utilize the defunct governmental infrastructure to launder money and serve as transshipment hubs for bulk currency, narcotics, weapons, conflict minerals, expropriated oils and human cargo. Haiti is a primary port of illegal transshipment into the United States (Farmer, 1994). North Korea operates the largest and most sophisticated printing operation of duplicated $20 bills. Failed states are also breeding grounds for terrorist organizations and revolutionaries (Rotberg, 2002).
Definition of State Collapse: is a state of anarchic non-governance differentiated from failed state in that large swaths of its territory are no longer under the control of government or under rule of law. The people unfortunate to live in these regions are not only severely impoverished they are subject to arbitrary and criminal attack and rights violation by marauding bands, rival militias, warlords and various social predators. Currently large swaths of the following failed states meet this description; the Democratic Republic of Congo (former Zaire) since 1998, 1/3 of Syria since 2012, 1/3 of Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia which has not had a central government since 1992.
The United States invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 1991 and 2003. Rwanda along with a variety of other African countries invaded Zaire (DRC) in 1998. Somalia collapsed after a CIA funded insurgency topped its government in 1991. Afghanistan was previously occupied by the Soviet Union from 1979-1989 where mujahedeen and political Islamists recruited trained and financed by the CIA, Pakistani ISI and Saudi Arabia (including Osama Bin Laden) were sent to give the USSR ‘its own Vietnam’. This pivotal military intelligence operation was critical to both the collapse of the Soviet Union and the spread of Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic militant ideology which would later in 2011 culminate in Arab Spring (bringing down the governments of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and Syria); ultimately resulting in the Islamic State (ISIS)’s control of vast swaths of Iraq and Syria. (Blum, 2003). Since most of these states collapse near the fault lines of hegemon power proxy struggle or near and around energy resource fields another term for the failed state wilderness is a killing field where those that don’t die of poverty will perish in war.
Definition of Non-Recognized Entity: a political actor which controls territory and administers services and security, but is formally recognized by less than ten other states.
Definition of Parallel State: in the event of state collapse or serious ongoing conflict a social movement organization or actor might manage to restore basic provision of social services and security in a region of the former national boundary, without being recognized for ethnic, political or demographic reasons as being the legitimate government. In such highly intractable scenarios the Para State entity for sometimes a quite prolonged period takes the form of a parallel often unrecognized state.
Criteria for Failing/ Failed/Collapsed Categorization:
According to our internal algorithm any three of these criteria in any state entity constitute a peripheral-failing state classification/ two in a country with an existing low HDI rank. Any state entity with three of these criteria is recognized by this survey as a peripheral-failed state. Four of the criteria or more occurring sets classification at state collapse.
Low HDI
Literacy Rates below 50%
Life Expectancy below 60
Famine event exceeding 100,000 deaths past five years
Epidemic event killing 50,000 people past five yeas
Active conflict within national borders
Coup/Revolution/ dissolution of national government past 4 years
Resource Concentrations
Academic Intuitions
Water Resources
High Yield Agricultural
Precious Metals (Gold, Silver, Copper, Wolframite, Columbite-tantalite, Cassiterite)
Major Commodities
Hydrocarbon Resources (Natural Gas, Crude Oil, Coal)
High technology/ Advanced STEM sectors
Heavy Industrial Production
Export Processing Zones
Weapons manufacture
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Weapons
Colonizer/ Colonized (1500-1975)
Portugal
Spain
France
Netherlands
Belgium
England
Italy
Germany
Japan
Neo-Colonization (1945-Present)
Russia
United States
China
WHAT IS GENDER FOR
WHAT IS RACE & ETHNICTY FOR
WHAT IS NATIONALISM FOR
WHAT IS RELIGION FOR
Non-Governmental Organization (NGO)s
To prey upon the poorest of the poor once must invent an ethical pretext. I now will explore the relationship between non-governmental organizations and this great crime from the standpoint of our ethical development theorists. From Port-Au-Prince to Kigali; people must know the truth.
Poverty is a form of genocide. To disguise its vast and incorrigibly destructive effects a vast architecture has been erected in all sectors to carry out a massive & distracting scheme. It has perpetrators, beneficiaries and collaborators. I wish to briefly explore instances and dynamics of such collaboration within the global system illustrating their role in incredible structural violence (Galtung, 1969)(Farmer, 2003). Paramount to the maintenance of both dependency and ensuing extractive atrocities are both plausible deniability and diffusion of responsibility. The role and utilization of the NGO within the scheme of the development enterprise meets both ends.
In 1876 King Leopold of Belgium called a grand congress of scientists, explorers, cartographers and dignitaries to Brussels to found the International African Association. It’s stated purpose was humanitarian intervention and the propagation of civilization in Central Africa. In 1884 the USA recognized his claims and later that year at the infamous Berlin Conference, all of Europe followed suit. By the 1908 an international movement lead by Roger Casement & E.D. Morel had helped expose the truth and strip Leopold of his territorial claims. Under the guise of humanitarian imperatives between 5-10 million Congolese had been systematically butchered in a gruesome wholesale rape of the nation (Hochschild, 1998). Rubber cultivation for bicycles harvested via a barbarous slave enterprise owned by one man. The very worst crimes against humanity have always occurred in plain sight but they are always obscured under the pretexts of some civilizing mission or police action.
Horton & Roche begin their ethical analysis dividing the NGO world into four distinct but increasingly overlapping Sectors; Emergency Relief, Service Delivery, Development & Advocacy. A series of complex political-financial configurations have thrust these rapidly proliferating actors into the heart of every former colony under the ethical pretext of poverty alleviation or humanitarian imperative. While seemingly issue based and independent; the majority of NGO funding comes from OECD countries that each have national interests (Dambisa, 2009). There are far more nefarious issues than ‘the pornography of poverty’. The vast deficits of coordination, accountability, fundraising, corporatization and cultural harm are just a starting place (Horton & Roche, p.8). The highest indictment is that not only are NGOs inefficient at all of the four sector objectives; they are a mangy carrot to a robust military intelligence stick. Paul Ronalds may speak of some liberal notion of ‘ethical responsibility of wealthy states; but in the Cold War context; their aim (and that of aid in general) was to keep a developing world nations from going Communist (Rostow, 1960)(Easterly, 2002). Not because of the ideological justifications but because every single nation that aligned with Russia & China was (regardless of one’s ideological imperative) being pulled out of the traditional world economic system (Wallerstein, 1991). The Cold War is supposedly won; but the core nation status are shifting from the temporary hyperpower U.S.A. & E.U. to a new more multipolar economic alliance of Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.
What was always more straight forward about doing business with the USSR and in post-Cold War era with China is that they were/are less concerned with the pretense of ethics. Developing national leaders then and today realize the flagrant hypocrisy of former Colonizers that continue the colonial extractive process under the veneer of human rights and democratization. Economically speaking the proof is in on the Washington Consensus; sustained GDP growth occurred only in 4 micro-nations of South-East Asia largely under strict military rule, Chile which was subjected to a CIA backed coup and direct supervision of Chicago School economists and Poland. The real development ‘miracles’ occurred in Vietnam and China (both still lead by the Communist Party) and India (non-aligned) which all completely rejected neoliberal theory (Rodrik, 2002). The ‘ideological war’ was not a contest of objective and belief it was for economic dominance over the world system core; the flow of commodities and trade back to an oligarchic collective. The Russian oligarchy as it is understood today was merely defeated in imperial intention and has diversified its trade systems from central planning to extra-legal trafficking and sale of oil and natural gas to Europe.
Chris Roche writes on ‘donor accountability’ but the macro issue is that money from OECD states have funded global NGO operations that not only failed alleviate poverty; in Sub Saharan Africa it worsened. Realist principles dictated that only nations with market economies could receive aid and direct foreign investment. But that aid was just the basis for dependency. Neo-colonialism as such was about using development aid to buy the loyalty of foreign governments and NGOs to fill the structural void that followed as nation after nation privatized their civil services, sold of state run enterprises to foreign nationals; and marshalled their populations often at gunpoint to fulfil economic imperatives of the ‘North’ in the name of comparative advantage. It is not that the donors were unethical, it was that they were utilized unethically. Adopting children, building orphanages, handing out malaria nets; this substitution effect takes the immediate imperative of welfare off corrupt foreign governments while still providing highly questionable social services. As Chris Roche stresses welfare is a right, aid is not. Which is say states are duty bound to provide social services to their own citizens but not to foreign populations (the Right to Development was voted down by the U.S. and not supported by 8 critical OECD countries.) Das asks if aid agencies are harmful. Not on their own. But regardless of what core power is re-organizing a developing national economy, or how corrupt a developing government is, Cold War over, or not; the effect of NGO proliferation has been to field an entire sector of so-called change agents that simultaneously shield political intent and perpetuate under-development. How?
Lenneberg examines the dichotomy of ‘local’ respect’ v. ‘radical social change’ in the ethical performance of NGOs; but again subjectivity dominates. Local respect for culture or governmental authority? Propagating radical social change inside the former Soviet Union has been a favorite activity instanced explicitly in Color Revolutions & Open Society Empire. Horton writes about definitions of Cosmopolitanism; which at best is liberal fantasy of globalized New York City and at worst a rose colored lens to project deluded solidarity via increased charitable giving. Wheeler asks if humanitarian aid and intervention is violation of popular sovereignty. Brown replies that those governments that violate human rights have forfeited full sovereignty. Rawls writes on the subject of ‘distributive justice’ but frankly most of the developing nations are run by military dictatorships, plutocrats and leadership that has stolen billions from their population into Swiss banks without batting an eye. The vapid liberal rhetoric such as that of Bull calls for ‘moral concern with the welfare on a world scale’ but all of the liberal development economists live in developed nations, bellies full and secure off resources pillaged by their host governments right hand, while the left introduced a legion of NGOS.
I am in full agreement with Pogge; that poverty is an institutional arrangement. And so is aid and NGO development. Manufactured inefficiencies aside on the operational level, collaboration with vile regimes. If Linklater posits do no harm and cosmopolitanism I retort that what makes an NGO Class so nefarious is that they are middle persons between the carnage and beneficiaries; used in this context to mean the citizens of the developed nations that are the proven monetary beneficiaries of aid. Measured against the often far less than 0.7 % GDP pledged by developed nations they make a lion’s share in interest debt, commodity transfer and favorable access to resources. Singer’s utilitarian maximalism is another useless and offensive impetus. While I agree that maximizing good for the greatest number is clearly a wonderful liberal theory; all of these ethical practitioners ignore the scope of devastation and point blame to components not systemic parts. The nearly criminal collaboration of Stiglitz and Sachs informs us that ‘clinical economic’ neoliberalism tailored is a way forward. But, Shiva takes a more forward approach perhaps further than Pogge; globalization is inconsistent with justice; it is a ‘war on the poor (Shiva, 2005). It may well be that the theorists have been living too many days in the developed world, benefiting off its security and forgetting that cosmopolitanism is vain self serving liberal paradigm, at its realistic best a cocktail. At its worst globetrotting development practitioners paying lip service to rights and capabilities but openly colluding with tyrants and exploiters.
The rise of the BRICS will mean that aid as such will shift from NGO meddling technocracy and international welfare; debilitating dependency to a new dependency. China’s rise especially means that developing nation oligarchies do not have to pay lip service to human rights. They do not have to allow meddling structural adjustment. Hardin’s lifeboat ethics will set in deeper in the so-called Global North as China consolidates. More Euro-Americans will doubt the efficacy of NGOs and call for limits on the already meager aid. Shue’s ethics over nationalism; its call for achieving basic rights in a structural way is not enough. Human rights discourse is unknown still to vast segments of humanity and when needs are not met there can be no talk of rights. Nussbaum has her short list. As does Sen. In varying ways theses are pathetic cop outs and pedantic simplifications. The Human Rights treaties are unenforceable and the lip service they are paid is still grim mockery. Kieran Donahue writes that collaboration amongst NGOs is the exception not the rule (Uvin, 2002)(Slim, 2002). Uvin demonstrates in a careful case study of the Rwandan genocide that the NGOs were aware of everything. That full genocide planning went on in front of all the biggest players and right up until the genocide the IMF was calling Rwanda a poster child of development (Uvin, 1998).
Roche talks about factors that inhibit organization learning, why in place like Haiti with more NGOs per capita (10,800 +) than any state besides India dependency thrives and the poor remain extremely poor; belief perseverance, conformity, vivid/pallid dimensions, and wishful thinking dominate. Congo, Rwanda and Haiti are perhaps extreme examples; in other places the NGO class is more or less subtle, more or less deceptive, more or less embracing monitoring and evaluation. More or less aware of the world system changing hands. Lenneberg writes of a cultural relativism; the rights of the North and the culture of the South. But there cannot be any rights without meeting needs. The likes of Sen and Nussbaum and their desire to articulate capabilities, or underlying values that transcend this enforced relativism are frankly offensive. Kelly gives us three brands; the missionaries, the liberal technocrats and the bright eyed cowboys all heading out into the wilderness of poverty and conflict ready to save and make change. In the end, history will and has already passed judgement. As the poorest of the poor become self aware and empowered, as needs pass to capabilities, pass to rights and pass to emancipation the unwritten history books will declare; while the collaborators of the NGO class tried to clear their conscience with talk of ethics: we confined them to obsoletion, we called them out as the middlemen of our devastation & dependence; and those simple things they lorded over us; their development, professionalism and privilege; these were things called rights we grasped intuitively. Once the iron heel was off our necks, once the bellies of our crying children were made full; we asked the questions: who asked you to come here? And what was it that you left behind that added value? I suspect the ethical question of the highest regard is; do people, any people have a right to come making changes, dangerous changes to place they have the ability to flee.
History will ask each and every citizen of developed nations and certainly every development practitioner; how did you leverage your privilege? For Leopold’s Ghost will whisper things you do want to hear; that in the name of humanitarian values and rights worth the paper they are printed on; we participated in a holocaust.
Inequality
Inequality is a manufactured in the economic sphere and perpetuated in the social sphere at the expense of the planetary environment. It is completely deliberate. That is why all claims to sustainable development, human rights attainment or the so-called “end of extreme poverty” are such a cynical joke. The ‘Neo-liberal enterprise’ (merely the latest rhetorical face) is and will continue to be one of institution building and technocracy (Rodrick). The objective of these intuitions, or the parallel ones derived from methodologies conceived in Beijing, Berlin or Moscow allow for some degree of standardization. The maintenance of core dependency with the majority of peripheral/ semi-peripheral nations kept in subordination via proxy war or foreign assistance. The upper elite or ‘oligarchy’ of each nation formed a rough consensus around division of spoils (Wallerstein, 1974a). Massive exploitation of labor has been reinforced with the values of neo-colonialism. Endless warfare and vast environmental decay are the result of planned action. A decentralized elite consensus, or better-put ‘Oligarchical Collectivism’ persists into the 21st century. Poverty is therefore a type of ‘genocide’; organized and very well accounted for. War on the other hand is less about out destroying’ human resources’ and more about destroying surplus value/ abundance (Orwell). These control groupings that cast full dominance over economic matters and forge subjugation of the social realm have atrophied the global environment as a result producing over time actual scarcity on an irrevocable level. As these activities are planned to benefit the developed world ‘core’ and the elites in the periphery/ semi-periphery; this phenomena we call ‘extreme poverty’ should be considered a premeditated crime against humanity; planned by globalized financial institutions, implemented by the state system and monitored and evaluated by the United Nations.
The redistribution of wealth is still the central most haunting and controversial question in the development enterprise. One that the “defeat” of socialism seemed to “answer” by demonstrating that extreme wealth and potential enrichment is now based on geography not class (Milanovic, p.8). A ‘world system’ exists that has no preference to identity only the linkage and dominance of periphery to semi-periphery to core (Wallerstein, 1974b, p. 355). Globalization as an epoch is about the standardization of trading terms and financial architecture to prevent war among core powers, which shift based on markets not politics. All overt ‘political’ differences are illusionary along with their stances on poverty and inequality. There are, and always have been enough material abundance of resources to sustain humanity to meet the present needs without endangering the welfare of future generations. Poverty in relative and absolute terms is the result of resource distribution systems that were built around deliberately bad economics, corruption and theft (Banerjee, p.238). The 3 billion world poor are seen cynically by the corporate oligarchy as labor reserve or a potential threat (Collier, 3-15). Either way extracting potential labor from the destitute poor is basis of the failed development policies of the last sixty-five years (Rodrik, pp.2-4).
The Kuznets curve reflects the obscene notion that alongside economic development comes marked social inequality which increases and then recedes as development advances. For most of the Cold War Development period (1945-1990); human development was simplified down to national GDP at the expense of all other variables. The Kuznets Curve was a false economic gospel and a highly misleading one; the economy was not the black box (Moran, 219). This is now completely disproven given the wealth disparities in all developed and developing nations. Wealth in core capitalist or peripheral dependent country and even failed states accumulates at the top 0.1%-1% and remains there.
Make no mistake, we often despise economists because they are seldom right and often dangerously advocating the economic sphere at the expense of the environmental and social. They are also speaking in the language of statistical witchcraft and they have no useful social role. Their significance to the 21st century is that of 15th century Catholic priests. If they don’t completely screw your children then they will be replaced soon by reason, science and computers. It can hardly be said that economists have done any useful social thing except to provide banal justifications to illogical human actions. Economists are therefore social trash. The Kuznets theory of inequality is laughably simplistic and wholly unproven. Capital accumulation doesn’t ever ‘trickle down’ and societies do not ever equalize in developed or developing countries (Wade, 62-65). The jobs and opportunity the robber barons claim they are creating is based upon duplicitous access to political machines, resources paid for by tax payers and cheap, dis-organized labor. With the exception of Northern European Advanced Welfare States; a ruling oligarchy in every single country forms around access to and control of the primary resources of the state, and how to leverage and trade them with foreign firms. Even when the state is barely functional like in South Sudan, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Haiti; elite groups mount staggering inequality and then maintain it unchecked. Speaking of wealth inequality radically becoming unequal before it eventually equalizes is something that has not happened in developed nations and will certainly not occur in the developing world. Shock-doctrines and Milton School policies ruined nations via their dependency (Campbell). Privatization, de-regulation and free trade (Stieglitz) was not the panacea Washington Consensus had proclaimed. It is another vile modernist justification, another failed prophesy of North Western economics. Proposed that urbanization and internal migration first boasts inequality then eventually a rising middle class promotes gender equality (Nussbaum). This trash is at the heart of the neoliberal discourses. Those periods of exploitation and marginalization are necessary to achieve development (Moran, p.216). This trickle down rapists have always urged developing nations to forego their human rights and enable vast predation until some magical moment when they awake living in ‘Southern Europe’. The GINI coefficient is unlikely to be a useful form of measurement when the elites of each country have so much unaccounted wealth and such a sharp spike in wealth between top 20% to top 5% and more so between top 1% to top 0.1% (Palma). Accumulation will not be deterred by civil society growth, trade openness or modernity. What trickles down are mere crumbs or the urine of the rich peeing off their tower balconies upon the heads of the poor. The R Kelly theory if trickling down.
The Kuznets theory is proven debunked by modern history in both its economic and environmental prediction. Anyone with a fifty year view of world history can see that.
Inequality has a very harmful long term effect in a society. It alienates the great majority of people from the good, basic things of normal living while enriching an athletic, entertainment, leisure, luxury and oligarchic class falling narrowly between top 3%-0.1percent of any given society. Unless the masses can be placated with middle class life styles, consumer goods and limited illusions of mobility there is constant low intensity unrest that can manifest sharply in all non-core nations (Wade, 66-67).
The Oxfam 2014 report on wealth inequality states that are 85 individuals worth more than 3.5 million bottom class humans; they are hardly doing the work of half the human race, but profit off all of us. In the United States of America a deeply entrenched Oligarchy has coordinated itself via Legislative Capture around a Society called the Bohemian Grove. The past six Presidents have been chosen through its consensus. In the European Union an even older Oligarchy profits off Neo-Colonial ties and the Swiss banking sector. Their linkage to the USA is solidified by the Bilderberg Group. In Russia a narrow Oligarchy has consolidated most of the nation’s vast energy resources and state infrastructure; many of its linkages can be found via the former intelligence behemoth KGB. In China the top several hundred red oligarchic ‘Princelings’ can be biologically linked to the ‘Eight Immortals’ the 8 leaders that introduced State Capitalism in 1978. Capital in the 21st century is not going to be more egalitarian; it is going to be more concentrated (Piketty, 2014), more explicit and more overtly predatory.
Not all of is us are inherently equal in our capabilities; some genetically are in fact stronger physically, mentally, artistically, musically, or logically ect, but we DO have a right to be treated equally at birth and be protected under equal rights regardless of nation of origin.
All people, according to the Universal Declaration on Human Rights “are born free and equal in dignity and rights”, unfortunately this is a complete lie. If you are born in a core nation your likelihood of living above $10 a day jumps expeditiously[23]. If you are born white not black your life expectancy almost doubles. If you are born male not male, you are likely to have twenty times the social agency as opposed to a 33% chance of sexual assault. If you are born gay or lesbian, depending on where you live you may be condemned to lifelong discrimination or violent murder. This structural inequality, or more accurately structural violence is founded on human social and economic inequality and the institutions that preserve it.
Relative Poverty
Poverty is pervasive multi-dimensional suffering that is the result of deprivation. It is an integral violation of human rights and an assault on human needs. Poverty is found everywhere, but hidden in plain sight at the core. Measuring poverty is controversial, so they do it as often as they can changing the yard stick every decade or so. First by GDP, then HDI now MDPI. However they (they being the United Nations and NGOs) are relaying on data provided by the 206 governments; all on massively divergent levels of capacity, transparency and ability to conduct a meaningful census.
Relative poverty is not like purchasing power parity, poverty is actually a reasonably objective multifaceted assault on wellbeing caused by deliberate distributive inequality. The solution to poverty in any country is a massive investment in healthcare, education and infrastructure. The kind that the Soviet Union (Russia), China and Cuba used to convert nations of starving, illiterate serfs and peasants into economic super powers. But the Development Enterprise is not actually about alleviating poverty it is about structural adjustment, wrapped in the form of an imagined humanitarian imperative to socially engineer and tinker with globalized supply linkages. Development in Europe yielded the world order of the North West as the US pumped reconstruction money into war ravaged former imperial powers. The final result was the Bilderberg group to coordinate policy and the World Bank to set up lending to third world nations and elf proclaimed neutrals.
Poverty according to the United Nations has halved with 680 less humans living at 1.25 a day since 2000. That has been attributed to China and India’s rapid ascent not development NGOs and aid. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and Haiti extreme poverty doubled in the same period. If we can get our head around this rough estimate that 3.5 billion humans throughout the five zones are living below $3.00 a day and that up to 5 million humans are under $10.00 a day and that means family per day; then we see poverty as very pervasive social phenomenon. Relative poverty is the idea that living at $4.00 a day is somehow normal in a place like Brazil or Haiti. That these people should consider themselves fortunate to not live in extreme poverty, or absolute poverty. I will assure you that no matter what nonsense you tell me about purchasing power parity; a plate of basic food in a Styrofoam tray in Brooklyn costs $5.00, in Sao Paulo costs $3.00 and in Port-Au-Prince costs $1.25; but I assure you in all three places living even at $10.00 a day is burden.
The GINI coefficient measures income inequality. The Palma does the same calculating for the radical jump in the upper quintile. Oxfam says that 85 people have as much wealth as the bottom 3.5 billion, said it before and might say state it one more time before the essay is over.
Relative Poverty is a relative term, all forms of poverty are a hardship, humiliation and violation of human rights. But for the sake of this argument let us call relative poverty awareness of ‘starving in the shadow of plenty’, while absolute poverty is simply knowing you are starving and about to die terrified and abandoned.
Absolute Poverty
The oft repeated number is that absolute poverty means living at or below $1.25 a day and that there are 1.2 billion such people living at that level of deprivation mostly in the semi-periphery and periphery. Absolute poverty is a type of death sentence. It is the result of governments making choices. Choices such as buying armies not building schools. Choices such as stealing the tax payers money and putting it into Swiss Bank accounts not health spending. It is the systematic usage of the state architecture as means to steal from one’s own people. Corruption is so widespread, such an accepted reality that it is heard to even grasp what separates most politicians from polished thieves. Africa is notorious for this, but it is present in all governments.
Absolute poverty and relative poverty occur because of expropriation. Governments make decisions, rational decisions to spend on certain things. The United Nations is the global non-binding world government. Well-fed and well leveraged their diplomats have codified a shockingly prolific array of documents extolling each other forward toward a brave new and verdant world.
But poverty persists because of choices. The choice between a well fed, literate population healthy body and mind is where the rhetoric truly crumbles away. For starving and dying of preventable disease in the ball mark of a billion lie and die a vanquished mass of human kind. A choice was made and policy signed that all of oligarchs could find no issue with; poverty is the price that is paid to keep us on our plantations.
Hyperdevelopment
Hyperdevelopment is the physical and moral state of core country populations that result from proximity to over abundance. While each core country maintains an underclass of newly arrived immigrants, ethnic subturns, welfare subsidiaries and others are utilized for domestic exploitation on a variety of levels. Low cost wage labor, military or police service, undesirable or dangerous work, service sectors and prostitution; jobs considered below the acceptability of core ethnic identity in power. Blacks in United States, Algerians in France or various former colonial groups in England. However, nearly every person citizen or undocumented migrant residing in a core country can despite low probability of achieving meaningful wealth; access a range of social services, enjoy relative security and purchase a full range of consumer goods. Hyperdevelopment affects all within the territories of the core.
While clearly some of the highest Palma Index and GINI coefficient variances occur within the core at rate in the United States of 47 to 1 in wealth difference; hyper development is the result of goods, commodities and general capital flows back to the centers of financial hegemony; New York, Berlin, Geneva and London. While the political directives of the USA form the overt course of policy and international relations; shared race, history and basic cultural religious values have allowed for Euro-American elite consensus to function more fluidly than its 1945-1989 core contender and nemesis the Soviet Union grappling with a far wider ethnic elite, a less structurally manageable economic system and a far new set of oligarchs; the inner circle of the Communist Party, KGB and subsequent energy moguls.
Hyperdevelopment leads to things like the US obesity epidemic, high levels of moral decay such as the feminist consensus that 1/3 women in the US is a victim of sexual assault before age 18. It is access to too much food, constant imperatives to purchase more of everything, the owning of multiple vehicles per family, the imagined entitlement to home ownership and the ownership of homes far in excess of what a family unit requires. It is an exaggerated sense of importance and uniqueness. It is a complete apathy as to what is occurring not only in one’s own community but certainly the rest of the world. It is media over saturation; constantly plugged in cell phones, movies, music and video games. It is a decline in meaningful literacy, a tacit embrace of ethnocentric white (in the case of the current hegemonic order) supremacy. It is over availability of print media and pundit debate, but relatively poor engagement of the political machine itself. It is the right to vote between red and blue flavors. It is a severely myopic world view manufactured by the educational system and media.
Manufactured Consent
Manufactured Consent, as coined by the linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky refers to the layered procedure of ramping up a cornucopia of media options and varieties largely owned by the same mega-conglomerates; that one the one hand manufacture a political order favor to the elites while dampening the consciousness of those demographics within the core nations themselves that might organize subversive activity. Manufactured consent is the illusion of democracy; the illusion of participation and the illusion of a free press (Herman & Chomsky 2008).
Consent is a socialization process that involves placating the citizens of the core nations with a barrage of media stimuli that distract them from a) the tedium of their wage slavery and b) what’s happening outside their country. The most important aspect of this is akin to life boat development; that they must consider themselves luck to be citizens of a core country. That they should not be aggravated by wealth disparities or national grievances outside the registered pressure release valves such as peaceful protest or petitioning their representative. Or filing a lawsuit. The illusion of democracy is the vote of the individual citizen has any importance to the process at all. Campaign finance mechanisms, political action committees, policy research groups all of these things make the laws in Congress happen in the United States. But, the citizen even the poorest of the American poor provided they are not ensnared in the mass incarceration of the New Jim Crow (Alexander, 2012); they have an almost unprecedented social safety net. Now, clearly inside each core nation are underdeveloped ghettos and barrios to house the domestic servants, the service slaves and the undesirable labor reserves, but while 33% or more of Americans may be on public assistance, while 9-13 million people may be living in hiding as undocumented migrants, and while there may be 2.4 million currently held in correctional facilities; a ratio of nearly 1 in 100 Americans citizen and non-citizen are being held in custody factoring in immigration detention, civil commitment, confinement of mental illness and Patriot Act I &II secret detentions abroad carried out during the War on Terror since 2001; the illusion of freedom and opportunity sticks and persists.
The astounding complexity of this manufacture is a result of both carrots, sticks and cognitive coercive mechanisms and parapsychological variations, albeit less grotesque ones are replicated throughout the 25 nations of the core block. The divergent styles of oligarchic control and default governance are matter of history and culture. While this listing pertains to the system in place in the United States of America, the overt core control zone; it is relevant in different ways with the possible exception of the more ethnically homogenous Advanced Welfare States of Northern Europe. In most simple listed form:
- A) [Media Circus] An endless barrage of media confuses the citizens about objective reality and discourages critical thinking.
- B) [Decentralization of private or charter education and complete underdevelopment of public education] sectors create a professional caste system of elite degrees and a general population with no coherent world viewpoint or feeling of international and or intercommunal solidarity.
- C) [Access to Advanced Education] Only 33.5% of Americans achieve tertiary education and even fewer, 11% obtain advanced degrees. Student debt ensures that most recipients of advanced degrees remain in relatively lucrative domestic sectors that enable their repayment.
- D) [Racial Apartheid] is real and prominent despite any other proclamations to the contrary. The division between undocumented, blue collar, white collar, gold collar and the entertainment/ Athletic class is exacerbated by deep racial antagonisms that are cultivated by popular media and exacerbated by lasting hateful antagonisms as well as failed social policies.
- E) [Mass Incarceration] At any given time 1 in 147 citizens are in direct and official custody. An additional 1 in 31 are under US Corrections custody via parole, probation and incarceration in city and state jails. This is a socialization process, a disenfranchisement process as well as a racial purge.
- F) [White Noise] Free speech and free press are easily drowned out with tens of thousands of competing organs manufacturing intellectual white noise. An endless array of distractive media options are endlessly blaring television serials, block buster movies, pop music, concerts, sporting events and video games allow citizens to tune out. Most of these outlet are owned by media conglomerates which utilize these media configurations to encourage consumer spending, buying habits, cultural and political values. The cinema and television in particular shape popular consciousness about race, sexuality and foreign affairs.
- H) [Two Parties, One Political Class] There are only two viable political parties; the Republicans (right of center, conservative and populist representatives of Caucasians and financial classes; strongest in South, Texas and interior) and Democrat (left of center, liberal and pluralistic representatives of liberal elites, ethnic minorities strongest in major coastal cities of East, West and North). Their policy differences are lost on most of the citizenship which focus most on issue and grievance based voting. Campaigns for election are extremely expensive and this allows for legislative capture; the ability of elite interests via political action committees to utilize think tanks, policy framing groups and lobbyists to enable special interest domination of the Executive and Legislative branches.
- I) [Terror & Hysteria] A combination of the Red Scare (the internal purge of real and imagined communists in the 1950’s); the Cold War (intensified by ethnic strife of civil rights, black power and student backlash to the Vietnam War) and War on Terror (the catastrophic mismanagement of American military adventurism abroad following the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon on 11 September, 2001); creates a pervasive culture of xenophobia and outward hostility toward the rest of the world. Amplified by what is referred to as the American Exceptionalism; a dialectic evolution of Manifest Destiny. The idea of America and Americans against the world as bastion of democracy and rule of law infringed upon by all sides and under siege.
- J) [Spasmodic Killings] Periodic and regular acts of gun violence inside the country (Columbine, Virginia State, and Sandy Hook, numerous others) and perceived justifications of an ongoing war on Drugs and Crime justify impunity of military style policing. Transfer of former military personnel back to civilian life; their enlistment in law enforcement and a surplus of military hardware available to state and city police forces have surged.
- K) [SOMA] 70% of the US population is proscribed to proscription drugs for a wide range of conditions. In 2012 it was estimated that 80% of the world’s supply of painkillers (110 tons of addictive opiates a year) are consumed in America. 1 in 5 citizens take one or more psychiatric drugs for an array of real and imagined mental disorders. 1.5 million annually are psychiatrically hospitalized for an average length of 72 days (CDC, 2014). According to official registry in 2008, there are an estimated 650 non-governmental in patient behavioral modification centers throughout the country to absorb and correct adolescent youth deviance.
- L) [Regressive Welfare State ] It is virtually impossible to starve in the United States. A combined framework of social welfare benefits, religious and not-for-profit charitable structures as well as relative abundance enabling comparatively lucrative street begging masks the poverty in the core. Ambulance services are also utilized to carry un-domiciled or mentally ill persons out of public view for long term hospitalizations in a medical-industrial complex. It has been estimated that without these social welfare structures there would be famine in the country shortly after their discontinuation.
- M) [Red Light Everywhere] Drugs, alcohol, tobacco, pornography, gambling, strip clubs and prostitutes are readily available in all regions of the country. While Las Vegas and Atlantic City are the most well-known red light districts, it has been said by the Federal Bureau of Investigation that there are more brothels than coffee shops nationwide.
- N) [Desensitization to Violence] pervades the culture via an endless barrage of media violence. On a widespread level young boys are subjected to extremely violent video games which make use of guns and the act of killing a regular part of early play. Toys of weapons and soldiers a normal male early age activities. Pornography, detached from its linkages to the human traffic is viewed early and often in live reinforcing a rape culture and encourages degradation of women, treating them violently and dominantly in sex spills out into all other realms. Rape statistics have been calculated at 1 in 3 girls being subject to attempted sexual assault before age 18.
- O) [Secret Police] There is wide network of police informants, citizens offered clemency from prison by supplying police and federal agents with ongoing data. Within each state there could be man thousands reporting regularly to the local policing and intelligence agencies.
There are no less than 17 intelligence agencies (elements) monitoring the domestic and global population reporting to the Director of National Intelligence. They are:
Each state, city and regional police force maintains its own intelligence operations of scale in relation to size of population it is under jurisdiction to police. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the interstate agency designated for cross state criminal activity. There are an enormous range of state and country police precinct.
- Q) [Big Brother] Every single phone conversation, email, text or digital correspondence is collected and filed by the NSA and shared with the intelligence community as needed (Snowden, 2014).
- R) [Little Brother] Almost all of the people living at the Core are voluntarily filing their photos, daily activities, thoughts and location via Face Book, Twitter, Four Square and other social media sites.
- S) [Military Supremacy] The persistence of wars abroad leads to the US (openly) deploying at home and abroad within 150 other states approximately 1.4 million soldiers, absorbing 4.9 % of the US GDP. This process outwardly projects vast military superiority while functionally disposing of, or institutionally re-directing large blocks of lower and working class citizenry into a military-industrial complex of unprecedented size and power.
Consumer Culture
Advertising and marketing mechanisms extoll the citizens living near the core to purchase consumer goods at an unprecedented pace. This is driving engine of the free market and also a planned means to foster binding debt. Core citizens are urged to buy things they cannot afford and borrow money they cannot repay. Credit card debt is a paramount example. These debts incurred for cars, school loans, healthcare, home ownership and the purchase of clothing and electronics tether core citizens on all levels of the class system to their jobs. Where by a professional person or trades person; such as physician, lawyer or scientist might find regular employment throughout the world core; the debts each student incurs or debts of buying more than is appropriate to income ensure that geographic mobility is limited. Most working Americans work more hours, for more years than any core group on earth.
Consumer culture is a dependency on working and spending. It is a cultivated hyper-materialism that also extolls citizens to define themselves through their material acquisitions. This is pervasive throughout all levels of the class, race gender hierarchy. It is a positive feedback loop of endlessly purchasing new things. Thanks specifically to the low cost of labor abroad mega-retailers like Walmart and Target can offer prices that enable the illusion of a large middle class. While in Europe higher income taxes redistribute more equitably in some regards the accumulation of wealth (though not in direct relation to the holdings of the older European oligarchy with sophisticated schemes of asset disguise and management) in the United States there has been very little effort to tax the wealthy.
The myth of the Middle Class, like the myth of the American Dream itself are rooted in that hard work will ensure social advancement and capital accumulation over time. However, the bulk of the American middle class is not socio-economically much better off than the welfare class or working poor and antagonisms between them distract from the concept that even in the United States of America income inequality, like Europe is dramatically increasing. The illusion of the Middle Class and consumer culture that bolstered has begun to chip away after the Financial Crisis of 2008.
As demonstrated by Thomas Piketty in his book Capital in the 21st Century; most of the assumptions (and lies) about the free market have proved completely incorrect. Very little is trickling down. The oligarchs are getting richer and richer. A Piketty warns this has historically only been a recipe for instability and social unrest. If wealth accumulation (long argued by dependency school development practitioners and Marxists as the logical and intuitive result of colonialism, imperialism and capitalist policies) continues at current rates a degree of serfdom will be reinstituted in the so called developed world and the rest of humanity will more openly live as slaves (Piketty, 2014).
Soma, Bread & Circuses
As described above there are a myriad of ways to lower human consciousness. A described in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs; transformative thinking and human solidarity beyond the nuclear family is predicated on meeting basic needs currently unmet by the bulk of the species due to variables listed (Maslow, 1943). Soma is a general term for any chemical or natural substance introduced to the body to placate the mind (Huxley, 2007). Soma is prescription drugs, street drugs, smoked substances such as marijuana and tobacco and certainly alcohol. Up and down, high low and throughout the social pyramid, throughout the 5 zones in all 206 nations soma in some form is available to dampen the mental powers of the masses and allow them fleeting escapes from the misery of existence. That drug and alcohol use is so prevalent in the countries of the core suggests perhaps a certain side effect of hyper development; a malaise or existential crisis perhaps the result of glutting oneself in the shadow of colossal suffering. Soma use is also however widespread at the periphery where living is very hard. Denial of basic needs makes rights impossible to comprehend. Regular use of Soma in all its forms takes the edge off life and turns down the volume of the screams for help coming from the killing fields.
Bread is bread; a basic staple of nutrition in all societies. Keeping it available to the masses has long been a priority of governments since ancient times. A hungry population is easier to bargain with. A hungry majority results in the Jacobin Party and Paris in flames (1789). The United States subsidizes its underclass via electronic benefit cards and welfare benefits. As do a wide range of state actors in form or another. Yet, according to the FAO 2014 reports a total of 842 million people worldwide (1 in 8) were chronically hungry between 2011-2013. In Somalia, the only country without a government since 1992; an estimated 50,000-260,000 people starved to death in the East African drought crisis of 2011.12.4 million people were in need of emergency food assistance in the region. If that spread seems high that is because no really knows. No government, no statistical ministry. Suffice to say this basic barrier to insurgency is crumbling. During this same period when food prices peaked in 2008 it was understood that 1/3 of all agriculture is being used to feed cattle and livestock and that biodiesel industry is diverting corn production from food to fuel.
Throughout all of this poverty and carnage though, everyone except Somalia keeps sending athletes to global sporting events like the World Cup and Olympics; highly expensive productions that have rich, middle and poor glued to radios and TV sets for weeks. Sports in general is the third pillar of the distraction. The arenas are the modern gladiatorial circuses where working people are bonded perhaps more closely to athletes and home teams with greater rigor than their comprehension of political events, certainly more than what is occurring outside their plantation, nation. Circuses are spectacles; with bright lights and action and tension and betting and victory or the feeling of victory projected by a team.
The soma helps close the eyes. The bread in the stomach placates basic a most survival need. The bright lights of the circus distract the audience from the poverty and the endless war. For a taste of things to come note the Chinese building a stadium in every single city of the developing world they have fanned out to secure the resources in.
Behavior Mod Camps
It was first the Soviets and then the Americans that began to using the diagnostics and treatment of mental illness as a means of political control.
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Welfare
Welfare has a pacify role in every society. The Socialist States and Advanced Welfare States enjoyed and enjoy respectively the largest redistributions of tax bases into social services on a wide level. The ESCR v. CPR human rights debate was not purely about the USA and USSR’s ideological confrontation; it was also about how much role the state should play in social welfare. In all of the Socialist World and currently in much of the EU education and healthcare are completely state subsidized while remaining high quality. Work was almost guaranteed. Lyndon Johnson, the only bipolar head of state we are aware of; US President until 1968 instituted the Great Society Programs; the largest expansion of welfare since the New Deal. Welfare although demonized by conservatives is both a codified human right and needed aspect of social control. In the Core particularly (although USA and EU differ markedly in delivery) Welfare programs keep large segments of the disabled and productively unfit population from starvation. There are massive abuses of the welfare system in the USA; there are also very few able bodied men and women without child on its roster.
Welfare is used in a manner similar to aid. You become dependent on it. You resent how it cripples your mobility, but the transition between welfare and working poor is structurally quite difficult. Where in the EU and former Soviet world the welfare social benefits were an aid the majority of the society utilizes in the USA they bear a shameful stigma. Where as in advanced welfare states they are holistic cradle to grave benefits; in the USA (although nearly 1/3 of the population utilize them) they are commonly shunned. Welfare, alongside race and educational access play a key role in social stratification. They are also as states one of only three things that even justify the legitimacy of nation states. The other two being; social order and basic, functional infrastructure such as postal systems, electricity and paved roads.
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The Ghettos
The word came to use in the European Middle Ages as the Italian designation of the Jewish Quarter; an ethnic quarantine zone. Today it most commonly associated with under developed neighborhood districts containing African Americans, Barrio is used when referring to Latinos. Ghettos which are seldom mandatory settlement areas anymore are defined by their ethnic concentration in major core cities accompanied by their decrepit infrastructure.
Ghettos are frankly some of least expensive housing options in major core cities. Public housing which takes the form often of dirty, urine soaked, vandalized block housing is either situated along highways or within these zones. Because infrastructure is so terrible comparatively to the developed nation they are found in these ghettos are based on both class and race housing many welfare recipients and undocumented person. A vicious cycle associated with the ghetto is as follows. Single mothers on public assistance with fathers often in prison send their children to over packed, gang infested, teacher truant schools. They often get pregnant or join these street gangs for similar reasons people join fraternities. They often drop out of very deficient schools. They eat low grade government subsidized food and live in neighborhoods with high rates of gang violence, drug transshipment, drug use and heavy policing. Because of the ethnic apartheid policies illustrated above (such as Stop and Frisk) or racial profiling they are disproportionately arrested. 1 in 8 black males are in prison. This continues the ghetto cycle from the beginning.
The purpose of the ghetto is to isolate groups of undesirable core citizens to exploit them as low wage vassals in proximity to major urban centers, but be able to target and control them. The most obvious widespread use of racial segregation came from the Nazis for the purpose of genocide and forced labor. It continued under the policies of the white South African regime until 1994. The Ghetto is the means by which segregation can be continued on the basis of class, but functionally preserves all the older separations based on ethnicity.
The Prison Industrial Complex
The Prison Industrial Complex is a negative feedback loop that involves profiteering off of prisoners in whatever country implemented. It involves contracts with privately owned correction facilities coupled with various extractions of labor far below whatever nation declares its minimum wage. Mass incarceration is fundamental pillar of social control best illustrated by Stalin & Beria’s Gulag Archipelago and largest prison complex in human history; that of the United States of America. Prison is socialization system. It breaks those within its confines mentally and physically. It removes millions of undesirable young men and women from participating in society. Some portion of the incarcerated have committed violent crime and broken laws. A larger portion have committed petty crimes and non-violent drug related offences. In many societies the prison system is an active deterrent from exercising civil political rights. In essence the penal system of many counties is simple authoritarian control. In Egypt prior to the 2011 Tahir Square Revolution virtually all Egyptian young men were arrested on some pretext or another to serve short and medium length brutal interments. In the Russian Federation dissidents of various stripes are promptly charged with embezzlement, corruption or other criminal offenses to silence or delegitimize them. The Prison Industrial complex is one part a brutal mass socialization/ control mechanism and another part a basic investment in cheap bonded labor.
[Insert more]
The Slums
A slum very simply is a ghetto with absolutely no infrastructure. No running water, no paved streets, no electricity and little policing. Slums are rarely found in core countries. The possible exception could be trailer parks and Native America reservations. Slums are sprawling improvised dwellings found on the edges of cities which provide vast reserve labor pools to factories, mines and industrial farming operations that emerge due to direct foreign investment or national entrepreneurship. Slums are inverse urban decay. They breed disease and couple all aspect of multidimensional poverty into overlapping reinforcing treatments. A slum is truly the most blatant result of unsustainable development. They are miserable to live in ad breed under development and exploitation. According to UN HABITAT in 2012; 863 million people worldwide were living in these slums. They are unsuitable for life and a cause of great human misery. They form on the basis of perceived employment opportunity on the periphery of major cities.
MORE
The Export Processing Zones
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PART III: The Warfare Machine
THE ILLUSION OF COEXISTENCE
WHAT IS A LITTLE WAR
WHAT IS THE GAME THEORY
WHAT ARE POWER BLOCS
WHAT IS A PEACE KEEPER
WHAT IS A REFUGEE CAMP
WHERE ARE THE OLD WARS
WHERE ARE THE NEW WARS
WHAT IS A WAR PROFITEER
WHAT IS THE MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX
WHAT IS REPRESSION
WHERE ARE THE TORTURE CENTERS
WHERE ARE THE FORCED LABOR CAMPS
WHERE ARE THE COMFORT CAMPS
WHERE ARE THE KILLING FIELDS
WHAT IS AN ATROCITY
WHAT IS GENOCIDE
WHAT IS DEMOCIDE
WHAT IS PURGE
WHAT ARE THE EMERGENT ISSUES
POLITICAL & ECONOMIC ISSUES
HUNTER GATHERERS
TRIBAL NOMADIC
WARLORDISM
TOTALITARIANISM
TIMOCRACY
FEUDALISM
THEOCRACY
MONARCHY
DEMOCRACY
CAPITALISM
SOCIALISM
COMMUNISM
ANARCHISM
KLEPTOCRACY
STATE CAPITALISM
MARKET SOCIALISM
ADVANCED WELARE STATES
SOCIAL ISSUES
WHO ARE THE ACTORS
WHAT IS USA
WHAT IS RUSSIAN FEDERATION
WHAT IS THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC of CHINA
WHO ARE THE OUTLIERS
WHAT IS THE HISTORY OF CONFLICT
WHAT ARE THE CONFLICT AFFECTED AREAS
WHAT ARE THE PROXIMATE CAUSES
WHAT ARE THE TRIGGERS
WHAT ARE THE DYNAMICS
WHAT ARE THE TRENDS
FACTORS PROLONGING CONFLICT
FACTORS FOR POSSIBLE PEACE
WAR IS PEACE
What is a little War
What are Emergent Political, Economic and Social Issues?
Because of incredible, unprecedented access to media and data on a global level via mobile phones and the internet; a wide range of global communities can coordinate their economic and political participation circumventing traditional, government controlled forums.
Democracy has been broadly exposed to be as prone to oligarchic control as authoritarian one party state (Winters, 2011). Civilians no longer have to rely on one or two corporate news sources to distil the events of the day. Ideological bankruptcy has caused widespread contempt and condemnation of political tendencies that have hardly ever reflected domestic or international conduct. While it has been said democracies don’t go to war with each other (because largely of intertwined financial systems); nothing has stopped them from going to war with their own populations or fueling war through a proxy or series of proxies.
The current political context is that history doesn’t repeat itself at all. It structurally evolves the world system with each major disturbance. Since the critical year of 1789 following the revolution in France and its parallel manifestations in the USA (1776), Haiti (1791), Latin America (1810), Europe (1848); a violent and expansive ideological confrontation began between proponents of [normative human rights] liberal or leftist and [realist authoritarian state sovereignty] monarchist, theocratic, authoritarian or fascist. This political battle was merely a rhetorical explanation of economic systems that by 1968 had established themselves rather evenly over half the world’s nations; command economy socialism, free market capitalism and theocratic amalgams. The World War from 1914 to 1945 had solidified USA as the Core Hegemon of the free market system. But that core status was thoroughly contested until the end of the Cold War(s)[24] which went on from 1945 to 1989 resulting in the defeat of the Revolutionary Socialist USSR; the primary ideological and structural core contender. It has also resulted in a supra-national confrontation between various proxy and emerging powers whose oligarchic elites and revolutionaries declared themselves any number of political shades in the process. Nationified best in the form of the People’s Republic of China which became a Socialist nation in 1949, attempted Communism in 1967 and in 1978 made the shift from failed Communism into State Capitalism. Subsequently pulled 680 million humans out of poverty (UNDP, 2014) as well as enhanced semi-peripheral power like India, South Africa and Brazil.
China is the clearest contender for control of the global core (French, 2014). While it has long been described as an unlikely probability of some meaningful alliance to emerge between Russian Federation and the PRC; BRICS is making that more and more likely. Should they succeed in coordinating a development bank they would not be a far cry from better coordinating a military pact.
Trade has driven the World System since 1500 CE. Trade, Humanitarian Imperatives and Imperial Warfare have been used to justify subjugating vast segments of the human race to extract their labor for free [or inexpensively] as well as to bring to the Global Core goods unavailable to the upper middle classes and elites of those nations. After the World Wars[25] the Bretton Woods Institutions notably the World Bank erected a vast financial architecture that would craft dependency in deep and intrinsic ways. Preferential access into semi-peripheral and peripheral nations for Core firms; heavy loans and debt; literal structural adjustment of economic systems and of course flows of raw materials and near slave labor of the export processing zones.
The current economic context is that as Core power dominance is slowly re-aligning axis from the USA to the People’s Republic of China. In all nations regardless of development, regardless of world system supply placement’ capitalism have triumphed as the dominant economic order. The BRIC economic alliance and development bank is as of 2014 the only counterbalance to the Bretton Woods institutions (World Bank/ IMF). This Multipolarity will simply be a far more sophisticated hegemony organized by China and implemented via regional hegemons Brazil, South Africa, India and the Russian Federation. This alliance represents nearly 3 billion people, a combined GDP of US 16.039 trillion, and 18% of the global economy (French, 2014).
In a very limited reconsolidation window there is a unique possibility of severing the control lines of dependency, re aligning local economies to allow greater indigenous planning and utilizing development as means to break dependency from Europe and the USA, without realigning with China and BRICS.
This idea of self-reliance cannot take the form of inefficient command economies but instead rely heavily on shared economy modals. The informal sectors that manage resource exchanges while circumventing taxes. The tax base of most countries excluding the advanced welfare states is a means of extracting wealth from citizens without compensating them adequately in social services or political representation. An economic re-alignment behind the BRICS Bank and China will not mean a more just and equitable world. China and Russia have never shown moral scruples about arming human rights violators. India manages a state where 74% of the population is living below $1 a day and 24.9% of Dalits and tribal minorities are exploited as fourth class citizens. Brazil and South Africa both struggle from deep ethnic divides, rampant corrupt practices and meaningless populist sloganeering. What is crucial in the economic context is to divest as much tax base from governments as possible and block trade policies which take resources out of peripheral nations fare below value. Or reduce peripheral and semi-peripheral populations to race to the bottom wage slaves turning out consumer goods for the North West and soon China.
The socio-cultural context is that a considerable majority of the human race has not ever left its nation of birth, but a mass exodus has begun away from the violence prone periphery (Collier, 2013). Macro-level political and economic systems mean very little in the face of the daily battle for survival that half of humanity is facing, yet the economic and the political drivers shape every single regional conflict now ongoing. It is the common person not the economist or ideologue that suffers under the mounting global attrition. The basis of false consciousness is that imagined identity and nationalism subsume human solidarity. Profoundly different from the issue of class consciousness is human solidarity founded on conscious thinking. Because of incredible deprivation and imposed scarcity; race, religion and gender become key instruments the local Oligarchic Collective uses to impose meaning on socio-cultural bonds. Male supremacy over women. Ethnic pride and power over ethnic other. The use of unseen, imaginary deities based on written testaments transcribed at times before objective data was possible encouraging the murder and subjugation of whole other groups of non-believers[26].
Because most of humanity is physically fighting to survive, breaking down these imagined identities has been highly difficult and outside major cities it is uncommon to have poly-ethnic communities living in peace. However, rapid urbanization and climate migrations will increasingly thrust new groups into greater proximity. This will not necessarily result in the aggressive coexistences of places like New York or London, each secured by a small armies worth of police and precarious at best.
It is integral though to any successful element of resistance to the intended re-alignment to foster deeper bonds of human to human solidarity thus coupling efforts of development to those of resistance. As can been seen in Russia, China and India; an elite ethnic configuration has in each country clearly denoted the extent of privileges based on race and ethnicity. The Han in China, the Slavs in Russia and the Brahman Caste in India.
ACTORS
United States of America (U.S.A.)
Population: 319.2 million people
Primary Strategic Alliance: North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.)
Active US Direct interventions: Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Syria.
US Total Economic & Military Assistance: $50.6 Billion, FY 2013.
US Proxy Conflicts: Israel (directed against & Iran), Saudi Arabia (directed against Iran), Colombia (directed against Cuba & leftist insurgency ELN & FARC-EP), South Korea (directed against PRC); numerous via War on Terror.
US Sanctions/ Embargo: North Korea, Syria, Russian Federation, Iran & Cuba[27].
Primary US development & military aid recipients (FY 2012 highest to lowest): Afghanistan, Israel, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan, Jordan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Haiti, Palestine, South Sudan, Russia, Somalia, Tanzania, Congo (Kinshasa), Uganda, Nigeria, Sudan, South Africa, Mozambique, Ukraine, Yemen, Bangladesh and Liberia.
Strategic Allies: England & Israel.
Primary Clients: Israel, Egypt, South Korea, Taiwan, Colombia.
Russian Federation (RF)
Population: 144 million people
Primary Strategic Alliances: Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).
Active Russian Direct Interventions: Ukraine & Georgia.
Russian Proxy Conflicts: Syria (against Israel& Saudi Arabia), Eastern Ukraine (against EU), South Ossetia (against Georgia)
Russian Sanctions/ Embargo: none.
Primary Russian development & military aid recipients: Cuba, Syria, Belarus, Turkmenistan, other former Soviet states.
Primary Strategic Allies: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Iran
Primary Clients: Armenia, Belarus, Transnistria, Turkmenistan, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Uzbekistan, Serbia and Syria.
People’s Republic of China (PRC)
Population: 1.36 Billion
Primary Strategic Alliance: Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)/ Shanghai Pact (SP)
Total Economic & Military Assistance: $ 189.3 billion FY 2011, (RAND estimate) in 93 different countries.
Chinese Direct Interventions: [ None openly, regular clashes with neighbors over South China Sea]
Chinese Proxy Conflicts: none openly.
Current Chinese development & military aid recipients: Pakistan, Myanmar, North Korea & 93 countries predominantly in Latin America & Africa.
Primary Strategic Allies: Pakistan, Russia & India
Primary Clients: North Korea & Myanmar.
Outliers
Cuba: A former Russian client turned into a Medical Superpower now has over 38,000 MDs working in its International Medical Brigades with comparable numbers of teachers, nurses and construction workers on infrastructure projects. Cuba alongside Venezuela are attempting to build ALBA as a counter weight to the hegemony of the three blocks.
Iran: Is beholden to no great power’s full influence though it is a nominal ally of RF and PRC. It is the only Shi’a Majority Shari’ah State. It is exporting revolutionary violence systematically throughout the Shi’a world particularly Bahrain and Lebanon. It has a long view of history and remembers clearly the US-English Coup against Mosaddeq, US-Israeli support for the Shah and US support for Iraq during the grisly Iran-Iraq War. It trusts none of the three power blocs but is clearly willing to sell oil to Russia and China. Iran has the most potential to disrupt or collaborate with the upcoming core shift and is integral to the Middle East’s strategic dimensions; it contains Syria, props up the Lebanese, Syrian and Iraqi states; and is the only regional force besides Israel that can stand up to ISIS (Baer, 2008)(Nasr, 2007).
India: Alongside China as a possible future Core Contender, India is far more unstable. 74% of its population lives belie $1.25 a day. Over 16% of its population is classified as Dalit untouchable and marginalized & exploited. It has a growing Maoist insurgency to its Center East and an ongoing Islamist Insurgency to its North West fueled by Kashmiri occupation and its natural antagonist Pakistan. India will likely work closely with China, but it is the most serious of the economic and demographic contenders besides those listed.
CAUSES
- What are the structural causes of conflict?
The structural cause of the conflict as stated in oligarchic greed and their influence upon political leadership to expand foreign markets for goods/ resources; and dominate the weaker powers of the semi-periphery and periphery. Nominally each Core power seeks to protect and enrich the middle classes and upper classes of their respective nations. Nominally each seeks to exert maximal leverage over the rest of the global populace to adopt its stated ideology, state ideology. To that end these is only a finite amount of resources to fuel industrialization and expansion. Natural resource completion is only a factor, albeit an important one. Market expansion allows stronger powers to off load goods upon weaker ones. While the World Bank has held an almost undisputed monopoly on lending to peripheral and semi-peripheral nations BRICS Bank will make a far less invasive lending base available, certainly less interested in the trappings of human rights and democracy.
Therefore structural competition is also about banking. Who can lend the money the developing world needs to industrialize effectively.
A third structural source is arms sales. The resources such as fossil fuels, natural gas, extractive metals, coal and soon water might be a driver. As is the ability to loan the billions the developing world requires without debt to the North West. Arms sales however are drivers for those oligarchs with shares and control of the arms industries which sell to every developing nation to fuel the relentless conflicts throughout the world.
A fourth structural cause is inequality. As Thomas Piketty has illustrated in his work Capital in the 21st Century; the rich are getting much richer. Salary wealth is out pacing inheritance. Conspicuous consumption and corrupt practices have fueled demonstrations and uprising across the world. The internet now connects people like never for and the Arab Spring has emboldened students, unions and radicals all over the world to confront their state systems. It has not ended well so far. The government of Tunisia merely tinkered with the constitution. The US backed Egyptian dictator Mubarak was toppled, but shortly after a coup brought the military back to power in Egypt. The Libyan people with Western backing through airstrikes toppled and executed Kaddafi and plunged Libya into anarchy, nothing functioning well except besides the oil wells. Protests in the United States were suppressed. In Brazil and Bulgaria coopted. Yemen has become a low intensity civil war. Protests in Ukraine over the former President Yanukovych’s subservience to the Russian Federation have devolved into a Separatist war in the three eastern states and the Russian annexation of the Crimea. Non-violent protests in Syria have erupted into nearly 3 years of civil war with over 202,354-282,354 dead (December 2014 SOHR estimate) and the emergence in July of 2014 of the Islamic State which as conquered 1/3 of Syria, 1/3 of Iraq and has declared an Islamic Caliphate and is now just twenty miles from Baghdad, holding back largely because of the Shi’a Militias backed by Iran (Nasr, 2006). In newly independent South Sudan the US backed embattled Salva Kir government is fighting rival ethnic militias and waging low intensity war with the Bashir government of the north fully armed with Chinese bought weapons and advisors.
The fighting now present in all of these struggles is based on similar lists of grievances, but fueled by very different alignments of state interests. The PRC has refrained from being involved overtly in any of the above conflicts, the US and PRC have sold arms and clandestinely supported via their intelligence communities the client of choice in each conflict. Syria has been a Russian client since X; Russian arms shipments have firmly buttressed the Bashar Assad regime even after he used chemical weapons against his people.
Structurally we can redact the world system in 2015 to the following six primary structural causes:
- Legislative Capture & Oligarchic Control
- Resource & Market Competition
- Imposed Scarcity
- Control of Economic Development Banks
- Arms Proliferation
- Rampant multilateral Human Rights violations
- Rapidly growing inequality
- What issues can be considered as proximate causes of conflict?
While it is highly unlikely any of the nuclear armed super powers or core contenders will engage in direct warfare, each has Bar Lev line that will unnegotiable trigger another World War. Because no power is irrational, and each is very familiar with the losses that would result in such a confrontation; each will continue to fight each other via proxy and intelligence operations. These Bar Lev lines are inflexible, however proxy war in the resource axis will intensify. Here is a summary of the proximate cause of conflict for each bloc.
USA-EU: The Bar Lev line for the US is the most flexible. After the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan the American people are war adverse. Their adversity is flexible. Large scale terror attacks on US soil are certain to trigger counter strikes and imperial reprisal. The policy course of the period since 2001 is all most a play book reconstruction of war plans drafted by the Project for a New American Century. It called for aggressive American action abroad after a “Pearl Harbor type event” and for conquest of Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria and assertive action abroad to safe guard the Jewish Colony Israel. Israel has been completely reliant on US aid since 1976 and could not maintain its sophisticated army and nuclear arsenal without such aid. Israel has long provided the US with sophisticated weapons and communications systems, as well as valuable intelligence. The Bar Lev line for the US is existential threats to Israel, terror attacks on US soil above 100 casualties and any invasion of Europe. The US-EU is largely underinvested in Africa and is unconcerned what transpires there. It’s investment in South Sudan is a foil to China who’s ally Sudan supplies it with oil. It’s investment in Rwanda is in relation to Rwanda’s regional intelligence and its role as an export point for critical minerals coming out of the DRC conflict. The USA-EU has invested a good deal of money in Colombia not falling to its Marxist rebels the ELN & FARC-EP. It has largely succeeded in supporting the right wing Colombian government, making Colombia the primary US ally in all of Latin America. While the CIA did everything in its power to halt the rise of Latin American Socialism through coup, right wing paramilitaries, torture and assignation of leadership (Blum, CITE)(Silva, 2011). This hasn’t done much to actually stop the spread of left wing ideology. The US is a fading imperial core power and it is propping up a European elite that doesn’t have the population or the military strength to defend itself.
What Conflict Prone/ Affected Areas can be situated within the Context?
Following the World Wars even the staunchest hawks of NATO (US-EU) and the Warsaw Pact sought to avoid direct confrontation between superpowers understanding that nuclear weapons would result in a zero sum game of mutually assured destruction. Therefore warfare beyond espionage would focus on proxy conflict. The metathesis of the Cold War strategy into the modern framework of international relations still adheres to basic set of rules:
- a) Avoidance of any direct military confrontation with another power block, particularly those with weapons of mass destruction.
- b) Prevention of semi-peripheral powers from acquiring nuclear weapons or other technology to prevent interdiction in their affairs by core powers.
- c) Propagation of continuous violence at the peripheral level via proxy.
The economic realignment of China in 1978 and Russia in 1989 have not affected this conflict variable. The misunderestimation of ethnic and identity and the sheer level of extreme poverty found in the peripheral nations have resulted in the so-called New Wars; the civil conflicts unleashed since the Cold War ended. But these so-called low-intensity conflicts that are spreading so explosively are still fueled by economic prerogatives of the contested core.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) remains the predominant global military alliance but recent discussions in Dushanbe in June of 2014 to merge the Collective Security Treaty Organization[28] with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization/ Shanghai Pact[29] an alliance which at its core will unite the military responses of Russian Federation, PRC and tentatively Iran and India.
History of Conflict
The following conflicts listed on International Alert & UCDP/PRIO Armed Conflict Database have been grouped around their continental geography, resource supply and patron axis. Some state that there are 35 ongoing conflicts. We have tabled up a minimum total of 64 major sub-state conflicts. Surely many are under-covered or overlapping. Each warrants a rigorous examination of drivers, spoilers, causes, grievances and psycho-social motivations, and such have been conducted at length. What this micro-briefing will seek to demonstrate is that each is a result of Core and Core contender planning. Examining each we note that while triggered by basic human rights violations each conflict expanded most dramatically when Core support or intervention occurred. This is not to suggest none of these conflicts could not have occurred in isolation based on grievances present; they could not have however resulted in such massive loss of life and functional infrastructure.
Where a causality chain is present the conflicts have been linked into a Conflict Axis.
North America & Europe
The War on Socialism [Red Terror & Cold Wars]: During the 20th century, peaking in the 1950s-1980s anti-Socialist hysteria reached a high pitch in the United States. Politicians, particularly Nixon and Reagan utilized the US Military and CIA in previously unprecedented destabilizations of foreign governments thought to be Socialist, or Socialist leaning. Why this is relevant in 2015 where all but 4 Communist governments remain in power (China, Vietnam, Laos & Cuba); is that to achieve that political result the US gave aid to some of the most unsavory, human rights violating regimes throughout the world appearing flatly hypercritical as a proponent of democracy. And fostering a multi-generational hatred for the USA that would result in the terrorist attacks of 11 September, 2001.
Global War on Terror [Wahhabi-Salafist Islamic Jihad]: It is actually impossible to declare war on a tactic of war, but in 2001 this is exactly what then President George Bush, Jr. and his Neoconservative cadre of advisors did as they unleashed a global war against Wahabi-Salafist Jihadists. This War has expanded to the full invasion and occupations and state collapse of Afghanistan & Iraq resulted in x casualties and resulted in widespread domestic surveillance under PATRIOT ACT 1 & 2. Allegations of widespread use of torture and drone strikes against civilians have stoked anti-American sentiment across the world.
War on Drugs, Crime & Illegal Immigration [Minorities in the USA ]: The underlying grievance is that throughout the rise of the US Empire Native Indigenous American Indians, African Americans, People of Color and newly arrived Immigrants have all been shut out of patronage networks and lack basic social services granted to the Euro-American majority. Undocumented immigrants have been periodically exploited for cheap labor as well as rounded up and deported. Various pretexts of terrorism, criminal justice, policing, drugs and human trafficking have all been used to militarize the police force in America. While all of the roughly three dozen low-casualty domestic terror attacks were home grown operations; none appear to have been financed or directed by foreign operatives with the exception of the highly irregular 2013 Boston Bombing Recently. Against the back drop of mass incarceration, NSA mass surveillance and the alleged killing of a person of color by police violence every 72 hours; a new civil rights movement has catalyzed in the months after the shooting of Ferguson, Missouri resident Michael Brown (cite).
Minorities in European Union: In the capitals and cities of the Old Empire the populations are aging and birth rates are declining. Debt crises and the War on Terror have heightened tensions against Muslim minorities from Turkey and North Africa, as well as to the Roma Gypsy population. Terror attacks in London, Madrid and Paris have heightened xenophobia against Muslim communities as have regular riots in the suburbs of Paris over police violence against North Africans.
Eastern Europe & Central Asia
Russia (North Caucasus Insurgency): Since 1994 Russia has been fighting a protracted to put down separatists movements in the Caucuses. There have been two atrocious wars in Chechnya and a range of rebel incursions and terror attacks post-2000 throughout the Russian Federation including the grisly school Siege at Beslan and the Nord Theatre (insert dates). The insurgency has been largely neutralized via the most grievous string of human rights abuses in the region resulting in over 270,000 Chechen civilian deaths since 1994.
Russia & Moldova (1992): Since its independence from the Soviet Union, the Russian military has held onto a defacto independent strip of Eastern Moldova called Transnistria running along the Eastern bank of the Dniester River.
Russia, Armenia & Azerbaijan (1993): The Nagorno-Karabakh Oblast: a defacto, mostly unrecognized independent state within a region which is majority Armenian & land locked inside Azerbaijan has been a long running low intensity war that the RF has generally backed Armenia militarily which is Orthodox Christian like itself although attempted mediation on behalf of both former Soviets.
Russia & Georgia (2008): Russia invaded Georgia in 2008 and occupied two States; South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Russia continues to occupy both states which are nominally ‘independent’ but now for all intents an purposes annexed to the Russian Federation.
Russia & Ukraine (2014): After pro-western demonstrations and a national uprising toppled the pro-Moscow regime Russian Special Forces and military have sense annexed Crimea; and set up separatist governments in Ukraine’s three Eastern provinces.
Asia & Pacific
PRC-Hong Kong: Hong Kong will remain fiscally tied to the North Western economic order until 2047. That has not stopped it from being the new epicenter of Pro-Democracy, Arab Spring-Occupy Wall Street tactics which have surged since September of 2014. The PRC must maintain a tight grip over this global economic mega-city in such a way that it can suppress the protests without hurting economic activity or creating Martyrs.
PRC-Tibet-Uighurs: The PRC has been waging a rather brutal campaign of repression to secure it two Western provinces. The Tibetan Buddhists have largely embraced exile, immolation, social media, passive resistance and leader worship of the Dali Lama. The Muslim Uighurs have declared a Separatist Jihad and been actively exchanging violence with the Chinese State. Both provinces which make up more than 2/5 of PRC territory also contain energy reserves the Core Contender will need to sustain growth. The Tibetans and the Uyghurs are two of several hundred ethnic minorities in the PRC; they are the two most likely to cause protracted difficulty in differing tactical capacities for the Han dominated Chinese state.
PRC & Taiwan: US Client and home to the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang; the defeated politico-military party which retreated to the island in 1949. Over 2 Million defeated soldiers, sailors, intellectuals and business elites fled there from the mainland advance of Mao Zedong’s Communist Revolutionary Armed forces. They took with them most of China’s gold and foreign currency reserves (Dunbabin, 2008).
PRC & Vietnam, Cambodia & Laos: PRC helped facilitate the 1975 American defeat in Vietnam but now regularly clashes with communist leaderships in Vietnam and Laos which are wary of the explosive growth of their longtime patron. Vietnam invaded and occupied Cambodia from 1978-1989 removing the ultra-violent, democidal regime of Khmer Rouge; a then Chinese proxy which killed over a million of its own citizens. China and Vietnam fought a War in 1979; the third Indochina War. Currently all three of these nations fall into the Chinese sphere.
PRC& Nepal: China has quietly aided the Maoist guerrillas which after a lengthy war are taking part in the newly allowed elections and hold 239 of 575 seats in the Nepalese Constituent Assembly (largest party). This has been the PRC’s intelligence and supply line to supply Indian Maoists with weapons and support via proxy.
PRC & Myanmar (Burma): Due to internal Buddhist pressures, ethnic strife, 2008 Cyclone Nargis which may have killed upwards of 200,000 Burmese; the highly isolationist Chinese backed military Junta collapsed and elections were held in 2010. The Union for Solidarity & Development (liked to the Military and China) ruled until 2014 when power supposedly changed top the National League for Democracy. Civil Wars have long raged in Burma; particularly the Kachin & Rohingya tribes against the various governments. As well as the Shan, Lahu and Karen ethnic groups. Two of the three biggest parties (in opposition) are funded by the military. Both China and India have been heavily invested in the Myanmar energy sector before the advent of ‘democracy’.
PRC & Bangladesh: The Bangladeshi oligarchy maintains a precarious balancing act between India, China and the US companies it manufactures and assembles textiles for. Bangladesh is highly strategic leverage point for China on India because when occupied it can easily sever India into two zones. Bangladesh also deploys more UN Peacekeepers than any other nation and while supposedly non-aligned is often ideologically in the Socialist camp.
North & South Korea: In 1950 the US pulled its war allies into a direct confrontation with the PRC in the Korea Peninsula; by 1953 USSR, China and the North Koreas had lost an estimated 367,283-750,282 soldiers; the US lead international coalition had lost 178,426 soldiers and over 2.5 million Korean civilians were slaughtered. North Korea under PRC protection built the 4th largest army on earth and 29,000 US troops are still stationed along the 38th Parallel line. The North is a nuclear armed failed state that cannot feed its own people without Chinese support. The South is vibrant developed nation that is an integral US ally.
India-Kashmir-Pakistan: India has occupied Muslim majority Kashmir since 1948 and despite innumerous rounds of overt & covert war with Pakistan; it remains a veritable breeding ground for Islamist insurgency directed against India from the North West.
India-Naxalites (Communist Party of India); in 2004 a coalition of Maoist and Communist groups emerged in Central India; they now effectively control most of Central & Eastern India’s red corridor, the poorest most densely populated area of the country. The insurgency is regarded by the Indian government as its greatest existential threat (after the Pakistani ISI & the Kashmir rebel groups); the Naxalites are operating in an estimated 77-83 districts across 10 Indian states with an estimated resistance army of 47,000 volunteer fighters and are supply networked to the Nepalese Maoists & Chinese intelligence services.
Afghanistan: Has largely been a full blown war zone under British imperial rule, Russian communist occupation, War Lord Feudalism, Taliban Sharia and now a bloody US military occupation. This ungovernable country appears to have its insurgency fed via Pakistan’s intelligence service the ISI.
Pakistan: There is something truly alarming about a nuclear armed, terrorist training ground, with a sophisticated intelligence service, with war time excesses against India and Bangladesh that amount to genocide; fully run by its military; a major recipient of US aid money; but strategically aligned to PRC overtly. China is Pakistan’s largest supplier of weapons and third largest trading partner. The ISI aids China in combatting its internal Tibetan, Taiwanese and Uyghur threats. There is a free trade agreement between the two countries.
Latin America & Caribbean
Latin America is a highly important theatre of this core shift because it is a comparatively stable group of nations with middle income growth, far fewer active insurgencies yet with growing Socialist power in almost all countries. The Mexican-Cartel Wars are getting increasingly bloody along the traffic routes into the USA. The Honduran-Cartel Wars are the bloodiest and Honduras may have the highest non-political conflict related homicide rate on earth. US-Venezuela antagonisms are growing and sanctions may be immanent. Venezuela is Cuba’s energy supplier and life line. The Colombian Civil War may be winding down with renewed peace mediation talks in Havana. Brazil has emerged as the regional power and will be the BRICS continental player. ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance for the People of Our America) launched in 2004; is the Venezuelan & Cuban led alliance between Antigua & Barbuda, Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua, Saint Vincent & the Grenadines and Saint Lucia with Suriname & Haiti pending entry and with Syria & Iran as observers. Honduras was dissuaded by the US from joining the emerging bloc bilateral trade deals are conducted in a cyber-currency known as the SUCRE. NAFTA, ALBA and BRICS will all be competing for Latin American hearts, minds, dollars and Oligarch support.
The government of Nicaragua has just authorized the Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development Investment Company (HKND Group) to build a “new Panama canal” that will be in direct completion with the US controlled Panama Canal in just five years (2020). The US can expect a great deal of competition in a region already very hostile to it.
Sub-Saharan Africa
Both RF and USA, because of cultural legacies of racism have limited military and strategic ties with African nations. Russian Federation is seen more favorably due to its Cold War support of anti-colonial Independence movements. PRC is the dominant power.
The PRC & Africa generally have seen unprecedented growth in development aid and trade. China is involved in the economic affairs of virtually every country on the continent. In Sudan the Chinese military support has led to the genocides in Darfur, Khordofan & South Sudan. Ethiopia has moved from a USSR client to after its war with Eritrea; a current US client.
Somalia, a former USSR client has been without a government since 1992; Puntland & Somaliland are defacto independent states. Somali piracy is on the rise throughout the shipping lanes of the African horn. Central African Republic has devolved in Christian-Muslim ethnic warfare. Endemic corruption is exacerbating the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamist insurgency.
South Africa has been tapped by BRICS to be the focal point of development. USA-Rwandan relations enable the protracted genocide that has killed up to 6 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo; fuel by extractive metals being moved out of Rwanda on the black market (Nzongola-Ntalaja, 2002).
Middle East & North Africa
Israel & Palestine though getting a great deal of attention is minor conflict which exacerbates all regional tensions, but doesn’t cause them. The more serious antagonism is a Sunni-Shi’a one between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Jordan is a pliant US client and military staging area alongside Israel. It is 74% Palestinian and would collapse quickly without US and Israeli intelligence and aid. Libya has completely unraveled into low intensity civil war. Egypt, another unusual US client has broken the back of its secular revolution and Islamist electoral victories and returned to defacto military rule and full US dependency. The Muslim Brotherhood and local opposition has by no means been destroyed. In Lebanon Iranian proxy Hezbollah governs much of the country and has been instrumental in the invasion of Syria to shore up the Assad regime. Bahrain with its Shi’a majority is well within Iranian influence and its Sunni leadership will eventually crumble. Iraq for all intents and purposes is a proto-Kurdish para state, a Shi’a Arab adjunct to Iran and an ISIS control zone. Saudi Arabia the birth place of virulent Wahabi-Salafist, fundamentalist Islam is using its US backer to protect it from Iran while spreading that money across the region to Jihadists. United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Oman surely wish they could build higher walls and sit things out. Yemen is amid civil war, Syria as stated has gone from being a multi-ethnic, developed Russian client state to a civil war zone with over one hundred factions fighting. Iran continues to develop nuclear weapons as leverage but also a pragmatic safe guard from Israel and Saudi Arabia. Turkey continues to be a staging point for Syrian opposition to Assad and Kurdish revolutionary nationalism.
What Triggers Could Contribute to the Outbreak/ Further Escalation of Conflict?
Major Flashpoints:
Israel Palestine; is a demographic, nuclear armed time bomb. Arab Israeli Palestinians now make up over 20% of the total Israeli population and that number is growing. Regardless of outcomes of Statehood for the West Bank of the ongoing Hamas-IDF battles in Gaza; time is running out on the Jewish state by birthrates. Over the next fifty years the Jewish Colony will get uncomfortably authoritarian as they attempt to hold the apartheid. This will place a pressure upon the American Jewry to lean harder to protect Israel despite its mutation into a racial apartheid regime oppressive and bankrupt; neither fully Jewish nor able to sustain the mythology of Post-Holocaust impunity (Chomsky, 1983)(Blumenthal, 2013).
Syria; Syria is Russia’s Cuba of the Middle East one of its longest regional allies. Syria supplies Russia with its only Mediterranean port and naval base. It is also a long running recipient of Russian aid and weapons. Although the Assad government has control over only 1/3 of Syria. There is no way the RF will let that regime fall. In the meantime Syria and Iraq will escalate as multi-state proxy battlefield and dozens of combatant groupings. RF will continue to arm Assad’s government; Iran will continue to support its ally Assad via Hezbollah and the IRGC; Qatar and Saudi Arabia will back various constellations of Sunni Militants; the US and Israel will back the Kurds and Turkey will back the Syrian Free Army. This will be a quagmire that continues for some time Lebanon in the 1980’s x ten.
Ukraine; the Russian Federation is interested in restoring as much of the USSR territory under its hegemony as it can. It sees piecemeal engagements as a means to retake territory; especially warm water port or resource rich territory. As with Syria, the Russian Federation will not lose warm water ports. It is far easier to rely on the 20 million Russians abroad for intelligence and operational support than to realistically think the world will accept these conquests. However, while RF may succeed in getting defacto control of Crimean and the three eastern provinces; a combination of sanctions and general antagonism will drive RF into closer collaboration with the PRC.
ISIS & Iraq; is now effectively three para states. Kurdish North autonomous and under siege from ISIS. The Shi’a majority region directly collaborating with Iran. And the Sunni Triangle now largely under the control of ISIS. Iraq and Syria will effectively cease to be states as warlords, Jihadists and proxy armies’ battle for control of the oil. If Baghdad falls the following scenarios are likely:
- Give ISIS claim Statehood
- Trigger previously unimagined sectarian warfare in the Islamic world.
- Give ISIS theocratic legitimacy as a Caliphate.
- Trigger a Sunni Jihadist convergence around its Wahhabi-Salafist World view
- Everything between Israel, Kurdistan and Iran will fall shortly after[30].
Taiwan; any assault on Taiwan would likely trigger a direct US PRC confrontation. It is however an integral objective of the PRC to recapture the island and they believe they can do so in 48 hours. This assault would have to take place while the USA was occupied with a conflict which ties down its navy. Or would be negotiated beforehand.
North-South Korea; the regime in North Korea is a Chinese client. But it is reckless and heavily armed. It fails at even the most basic dietary needs of its population. It has recently acquired nuclear weapons and acted erratically amid its third dynasty change. M53ost problematic is that it is the precise fault line where the USA and PRC fought a war between 1950-1953. 48,000 troops so close to China is an ongoing irritation.
Shi’a Revival: The central hypothesis of political theorist Vali Nasr is that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps will build up Hezbollah type para state organizations in the Shi’a communities of Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Azerbaijan, Pakistan, and Afghanistan and will successfully merge Bahrain and 1/3 of Iraq into a larger Shi’a Islamic State. Iran will develop a nuclear weapon deterrent to the core powers and trigger a larger, more organized Islamic revival to match the three Blocks already formed. It will defeat its regional nemesis Saudi Arabia and come to terms of detente with US backed Israel, largely because both will possess nuclear weapons and have equal antipathy for ISIS. Sunni Jihadist ideology will slowly lose ground as it has been a bankrupt tactical failure and a Shi’a Revival will occur in Islam (Nasr, 2006).
African Spring: as unlikely as it sounds there is a rumbling from the continent that the Chinese will trigger with their investments and speculations. African spring may be several decades away but when it comes it will serve to cut every outsider off from the resources in the continent. Likely trigger locations for African Spring are incredibly hard to predict since most of Africa is already caught in a combination of conflict and poverty traps not leaving much room for non-violent opposition anti-oligarch movements to form. However, South Africa, Nigeria, Botswana, Zambia & Ethiopia would be good bets as they have larger more educated Middle classes.
Greater Kurdistan
What New Factors Contribute to Prolong the Conflict Dynamics?
The United Nations: While it may appear that the United Nations is an incredible outlet for ongoing negotiations towards human rights and global governance; it is in fact an enormous charade. While there are certain benefits to having several alternative channels open for alternative track negotiations; the UN, its development mechanisms as well as its Peacekeeping forces are a mockery of the values it claims to be upholding. All three Power Blocks hold veto votes as Permanent members of the Security Council; China, Russia, and the Great Powers of the World Wars USA, United Kingdom and France. 10 non-permanent members are hardly any kind of counterbalance. Peacekeeping missions in Haiti[31] Kuwait, Namibia, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Sudan and the DRC can only be described in highly nonacademic terms as ‘a series of fubar shit shows.’
Elite Lobbies: A fundamental problem is access. The Oligarchs via their wealth have incredible access to politicians and policy manufacturing. As PRC rises it will avoid being sucked into major wars but remains by far the most stable Oligarical Collective with princeling blood networks founded on the mass understanding the eight immortals and their policies brought incredible progress to China. China is also a one party Communist state that values meritocracy and efficiency despite numerous allegations of inside dealing and corrupt practice. The Oligarchic Collective in the USA is less stable than China, but more than capable of buying off the politicians they need to keep things in their favor. The Russian Oligarchy is unstable but ruthless and access to United Russia Party is not as certain as the American oligarch’s ability to purchase Republicans and Democrats. Periodically the Russian inner Oligarical circle those most tied to the old guard KGB network will kill or imprison and Oligarch previously thought to be untouchable. The European oligarchy will be most vulnerable. China will encroach on numerous post-colonial African holdings, its influence will wade as its population ages, its socialist benefits are lost to increased austerity and USA becomes less willing to engage on its behalf. Expect Fortress Europe and bunker mentality that will involve drafting or recruiting foreign legions to do its dirty work.
The Russian Reclamation: The RF will continue to go after countries from the former USSR leaning towards the West to restore what it believes to be its sphere. It will not be able to re exert power over Poland, Lithuanian, Estonia, and Latvia but gradually via FSB intelligence, Special Forces operations, and interventions on behalf of its ethnic diaspora; or via proxy it will restore its USSR era hegemonic sphere for similar reasons that China will annex Taiwan. Access to warm water ports, historic fear of devastating Eastern (Mongol), Western (French & German) and Southern (Tartar) and demographic dispersion propel Russian foreign policy, not ideology.
The Chinese Expansion: The PRC will act recklessly. It understands America is in decline and understands Russia’s economic disarray and lack of cohesive political identity. Post 1978 the first phase was internal; uplifting 680 million of its own citizens and reestablishing it’s oligarchy of princelings. The second stage was investment in Africa where over 45% of its foreign aid goes. The third stage is BRICS; leveraging a major economic power on each continent (Brazil, Russia, India and South Africa) to break the monopoly of the World Bank/ IMF. The fourth stage will be to assert financial hegemony in Asia & the Pacific. The fifth stage will be to annex Taiwan and humiliate Japan concurrently or in stages. Make no mistake that the Chinese Political elites will wait until there is no way the US can intervene militarily or with sanctions, but the Chinese are running a dangerous long game that views Taiwan and Japan as enduring humiliations that will be dealt with in time. Unless the USA is awash in domestic crisis, civil war or simply exhausted as world power the PRC will not risk striking at two integral US allies in the Asia/ Pacific region.
The Second American Civil War: There will be another civil war in the United States prior to the physical expansion of the PRC into other Asian countries. It will result in the disintegration of the union into Northeastern, Western, Texan, Mormon, Southern and Middle American states which will devolve the USA into something between Yugoslavia’s collapse and the USSR’s. The chain reaction of such a civil war will be rapid Chinese conquest and annexation of Hong Kong, Singapore Taiwan, South Korea and Japan. Whatever is left of the country after the Second American Civil war will be isolationist. Europe will be wide open to RF expansion. The Global Core will switch to Beijing.
Energy Demands: While all three core contenders have vast energy reserves, industrialization, urbanization and continued modernization and fueling sophisticated armies; USA, RF, and PRC control require a level of energy supply that can only maintained with outward expansion to secure energy fields. That has been a driver of conflict since the World Wars. As we know there is a finite amount of fossil fuels and all of the developing world relies heavily upon them for basic matters of maintain developed world standards of living such as 24 hour electricity, cars and nearly every aspect of the high tech society. While Peak Oil might be 2020 or 2050 or further; energy resources; oil and natural gas in particular will propel conflict. As violence in the Middle East escalates the USA will rely more on fracking and shale; Russia (largest energy exporter and reserves on earth) will push further to exploit Siberian field and sell to rising core contender China; driving Europe to be more nuclear dependent. This spells a more isolationist USA and closer economic co-dependency between PRC and RF.
Water Demands & Climates Refugees: Peak Water is theory that by 2025 we will be unable to meet the clean water demands of the earth’s population due to structural supply configurations (Palaniappan, 2008). This will result in wars for water similar to the current wars for extractive energy. This will be less problematic for Russia; a major beneficiary of global warming trends alongside Canada; large swaths of barely habitable tundra will become farmland. This will be a huge issue for the developing world triggering climate migrations of unprecended scale particularly towards Australia and Europe. The net result of the Climate Refugee scenario will be boarder defenses in Europe similar to what exists between Israel and Palestine. By 2050 there will be literal citadel security states throughout what we call the Global North. PRC, USA and RF will absorb some of small percentage these refugees but not to any extent that will alter fundamentally core ethnic demographics.
Drones: Before long PRC and USA will have the capacity to operate mechanized drone infantries when projecting power abroad. Few powers will have this ability but it will be integral to Chinese policing of its African holdings. The PRC will avoid direct military confrontations by any means necessary except in any scenario of US-EU weakness to capture Taiwan. Drones remove a great deal of political pressure of war making. The Chinese ability to use them effectively will be an element of Chinese Neo-Colonialism. The USA will step up drones of all kinds because of how sensitive the US population is to protracted wars. If you are uncomfortable with the volume of drone strikes currently occurring; imagine tanks without drivers.
State Failure: State collapse will rapidly proceed in the Middle East followed by Africa. The New War phenomenon of protracted irregular, semi-or-overtly criminally connected ethnic purging will expand in vile new directions particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa. Entities such as ISIS will emerge and hold new amorphous territories.
What Factors can contribute to peace?
Aging & Mixing Population: The European World population is greying as are the ethnic majority populations of Russia and Japan. Developed world populations simply have less children. The short life span in Russian Federation for men is comparable to Sub-Saharan Africa. The Russian State is having to provide large financial incentives to induce couples to even have children. What will occur is that populations of Developed countries will become even less ethnically homogenous and the leading ethnic demographics will begin to die out or be sub-subsumed via mixed-ethnicity couples. The USA will become increasingly Hispanic and lean left towards Latin America; the EU will become increasingly Muslim and lean towards the Middle East; this phenomenon will create coexistence linkages and diaspora connections that are vital to Cosmopolitanism. The RF will become slowly more Muslim, more Turkic and more Central Asian. Japan with a highly aging population and smallest demographic of integrated minorities will face the greatest challenge and eventually be conquered by the PRC during whatever period of hostilities allows for conquest and annexation of Taiwan. In short, the demographic of the American and European Oligarchic; white and Christian is slowly receding. Regardless, the grandfathers of the existing world order must pass and the new generations must be further intermixed. This will effect Africa & PRC the least.
Peak Oil: When the Oil runs out, unless cold fusion or a green alternative emerges such as solar charging more advanced lithium batteries; freighter tanker traffic will slow to bare essentials and most modern armies will revert to warfare strategies closer to the World Wars. Fracking on a mass scale will occur first as well as more extensive use of nuclear power at the core. Because modern armies are so reliant on petroleum, the closer we get past Peak Oil without arriving at an alternative energy source will force a slow down on modern war machines. Although Kaldor makes a very strong case for the rising violent tide of civil wars and intra state killing; the sheer ability of the three blocks to project power and manage trade routes is for now completely tied to a finite supply of natural gas and oil.
Advanced Communications: For the first time in history we are getting real time data about conflicts and political events that would never have been on our radar two decades before. Of course in the developed world this is increasingly part of the state control and socialization system. But, as with the next item these advanced communications allow us to achieve unprecedented solidarity of action and freedom of information.
Shared Macro-Economies: In the same way that technology is letting civilians cut out middle persons and avoid taxes, there is no reason to assume this cannot be done with all kinds of financial matters; as transnational criminals have used BITCOIN and TOR to do for years. The internet is not only a communications, knowledge and data repository; it is of course a means to organize our lives without big banks or big states. Shared Economies, removed from all the escalating conflicts are shown well in organizations such as BRAC; the world’s largest so-called NGO. BRAC couples microfinance with social programs and extends a fascinating array of services to the poor in 14 nations. Coupling together Shared Economic principles with good non-state intuitions allows the poorest of the poor the option to sit out some of the upcoming new and old wars.
Core Shift: Any time there has been a previous Core Shift there has generally been incredible interstate warfare between European powers. This will be the first time that the Core is shifting to a non-Caucasian country. The Chinese were once the Middle Kingdom and will be again, but they do not have an historical precedent of slavery or genocide as the Europeans do. This is not to say China will bring an era of tranquil global dominance; simply put it will bring an opening for change in the structures of the World System itself.
Multipolarity: At least until the Core decline of the USA an equilibrium will set in where all three Blocs are relatively equal and own enough of each other’s assets to make interstate war between them unlikely. For whatever period this lasts for; likely until 2100 or the slowdown effects of Peak Oil; willingness to fight conventional Old Wars will continue to decrease. US-EU will decline and PRC- BRICS will rise.
Supply Side Resistance: SSR is about breaking dependencies from developing nations to semi-peripheral and core nations, by shutting down labor and supply routes. Social movements in the Resource Axis Zones; the Developing World so-called will have a limited window of 200 years during core shift to either align with PRC-BRICS, remain tied to decline Euro-American powers or fight for self-reliance. Grievances in the developing world are many. Arab Spring is occurring and African Spring is inevitable. However, whether these continue via armed struggle or other means will decide to what degree the carnage occurs and to who these economies will depend on.
Peacefaire: Is militant nonviolence. Quite literally making use of nonlethal weapons against oppressors. Against modern armies this will fail. Against police forces and irregular New War armies this tactic will bring regional oligarchies to their knees. Peacefare is an understanding that developing nations must bring down their own corrupt oligarchic collectives before they can affect those of the three power blocs (Ackerman & DuVall, 2001).
Core Blockade: The final stage of a Peacefare Campaign is to cut the core powers off from a cheap flow of labor, natural resources and commodities of any kind. Starving the core occurs when this is happening throughout the Resource Axis zone and Core nation minority and subversive groups use the reverse sanctions to trigger revolts there.
Parallel States: Throughout the world via solidarity networks, shared economies, deterioration of state social services and as survival mechanism; a variety of Zionist universalisms will come to take shape. Armed entities like ISIS and Hezbollah; non-violent development actors like BRAC and IRC; religious formations like Scientology, Mormons, Baha’i and the Holy Sea; break away states like Puntland; all will better establish Parallel State mechanisms as unrest spreads, new war intensifies and the existing 206 states cannot justify themselves indefinitely.
Conclusions
This is a desperate time and future does look quite bleak if human kind refuses to act in solidarity with its specifies instead of it’s state.
Described over seventy years ago by political scientist George Orwell as Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia (Orwell, 1984) there are three block locked in vicious conflict. The only difference to his futurist predictions is that the USSR never took control of main land Europe.
- What are current conflict trends?
China will rise and US-EU will decline as the Russian Federation profiteers. Few if any developing nations will meet their so-called 2015 Millennium development goals and the proxy wars as new wars will expand. The BRICS will rise the Bretton Woods Intuitions will decline. ISIS will expand, Kurdistan will emerge, Israel will decline and Arab Spring will be joined by African Spring. ALBA will consolidate in Latin America and US will dissolve into a civil war.
- What are windows of opportunity?
The future rests in the people’s ability to achieve solidarity and utilize new technologies to circumvent states. ALBA represents a fertile ground for a truly multi ethnic civilization to thrive in the dark days ahead, but surely any para state configuration will be aligned to one bloc or another. The best window of opportunity will be in the next 200 years. Either core shift will means opportunity to break dependency or it will usher in one of the most protracted periods of authoritarian rule in history presiding over the death of the planet and human life.
- What actors can be identified as spoilers? Why? Are they inadvertent or intentional spoilers?
The Oligarchs are the worst spoilers of all. They pay for the all the terrible things in this world and reduce us to nothing, powerless wretched nothing. Were it only so simple as to murder them as they in the millions murder us; then we do have a good list. Alas, violence has only bred greater violence and the Oligarchy is so diffuse you would not catch them all easily. Instead of violence we must harness development to be our liberation not our chains. We cannot obsess over the details of the micro-conflict when most conflict has but three primary sources.
Our human objective must be to coordinate a means to support para state development coupled with the objective of starving the core. No matter which power bloc takes control know they will exploit us in various guises. The only solution is to be able to be self-reliant for when the time comes to shut them off from energy, labor and resource flows up mountain. The World System is a killing machine that strips on of their humanity and reduces you to faceless number to work out your life as a slave.
Between an Eagle, a Dragon and a Bear lies our future. Let us not be left with scraps.
The Military Industrial Complex
The Military Industrial Complex is a massive industry of weapons systems development, logistical subcontracting and research and development around advancing death. It is based on defense policies and spending predicated on endless warfare and imperial acquisition.
Refugee Camps
A Refugee Camp is an impromptu settlement hastily erected to attempt the meeting of the most basic of needs of refugees fleeing war zones and environmental devastations.
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Part IV: The Oligarchy
WHO RULES
THE OLIGARCHY
WHAT IS AN ARISTOCRACY
WHAT IS A PRIESTLY CLASS
WHAT HAPPENED TO KINGS
WHO ARE THE RICH
WHAT IS AN ELITE
WHAT IS ELITE CONSENSUS
WHAT IS OLIGARCHY
WHAT IS OLIGARCHICAL COLLECTIVISM
WHAT IS THE BOHEMIAN GROVE
WHAT IS THE COUNCEL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS
WHAT IS RAND
WHAT ARE THINK TANKS
WHAT ARE THOUGHT LEADERS
WHAT IS THE BILDERBURG GROUP
WHAT IS DAVOS
WHO ARE THE PRINCLINGS
WHAT IS THE RUSSIAN MAFIA
WHAT IS NEOLIBERALISM
WHAT IS THE IMF
WHAT IS THE WTO
WHAT IS THE WORLD BANK
WHAT WAS THE WASHINGTON CONSENSUS
WHAT IS THE MONETERAY CONSENSUS
WHAT IS AID FOR TRADE
WHO ARE THE COLABORATORS
A LISTING OF THE OLIGARCHS
WHERE ARE THEIR ASSETS INVESTED
WHERE IS THEIR CAPITAL SECURED
WHAT IS NORTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS WESTERN DEVELOPMENT
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
The Oligarchy
Questioning the source and beneficiary of our collective misery and fighting poverty like we were in fact waging a people’s war for the survival of vast segments of our human kind is the core of our methodology.
The Enemy of Human Rights & Development is called the Oligarchy.
Learn the word for it is what we call our abject opponents and should always be used appropriately.
They are a disciplined, coordinated and vicious network of ultra-rich elites accumulating wealth in both completion and tandem; numerically speaking they make up less that 0.01% of the human population. The net worth of the top 83 amongst them have more accumulated wealth than half of the human race combined. No matter what nation we are referring to, we refer back to these elites as local branch of a Global Oligarchy. They are our certain enemy and the enemy of humanity generally.
At times they empower themselves at our expense and exacerbate the high crimes and violations caused by the more powerful oligarchies and highly entrenched elite in each nation. While these are numerous mass human rights violations of our day, all fifty eight extrapolated UNDHR Rights categories under attack in every nation on earth.
Our enemy, once again, is called the Oligarchy. A transnational global elite that not only controls supply routes and natural resources; they affect all of the inequity of distribution that so perpetuate poverty. They do so completely selfishly and with little to no common ground other than their total greed. They share no creed, color, ideology of belief. They simply are united in their excessive and wanton power.
And what it, they, perpetuate is the exact mass poverty that is greatest killer of the poor and three quarters of the human species that has ever existed. Working at an unprecedented rate of carnage and attrition. Because if it now said that if over 37 million people died in World War I (estimated 1.3% of human race); if the inter-war Spanish Flu 1918-1920 killed killed 75 million of them—(four percent of the world’s population) and then between 1939-1945 60 million people died in World War 2 (3% of the human race); that means that in a related series of core contending global events; 8.3% of the human race perished.
We can never know the precise human toll of this bloodletting, but oligarch dynasties that are established today are linked directly to the outcome of this event.
Our enemy therefore has a face, is on readily available registry of names; and has assets linked to every degradation of the planetary and human condition. They have similar tastes in liquor, fashion, watches, cars, boats, and flesh and luxury goods. They have a taste and thirst for power.
The Oligarchy is pragmatic and non-ideological.
And resistance to it must be strengthened in every nation. We cannot measure human progress in narrow and banal economic terms. We are far more than numbers. Statistics of productive workers learning to read and having our children survive birth. More than wage slaves or chattel slaves. Human progress to the Oligarchy is about securing their position indefinitely at the expense of the rest of humanity. Sustaining our productivity measuring our world in GDP; then later in infant mortality rates, life expectancies, average mean age of schooling and literacy.
There is a lesser aristocracy in every ghetto, a kingship of every slum and of course bosses on every plantation, camp and factory. And man is told to lord over woman in the home.
A transnational global elite that not only controls supply routes and natural resources; they affect all of the inequity of distribution that so perpetuate poverty. They do so completely selfishly and with little to no common ground other than their total greed. They share no creed, color, ideology of belief. They simply are united in their excessive and wanton power.
They have everything to lose because they have mostly everything in their possession and we are asked to give our lives to get them even and ever more. This is not just an indictment of the wealthy and insatiable. This is about organized traffic of human slaves, sale of guns to proliferate war and narcotics to dope the masses into slumber. The manufacturing of genocide and war is not a conspiracy it is an open directive of planned policy. This is about competing power centers, perhaps thousands of sub-Oligarchies within all three power blocs that are all functioning without coordination will eradicate us, for nothing but their bottom line.
And many of them are completely insatiable.
There are those that ought to be tried as war criminals under the standards of the International Criminal Court. There are other that are just glorified mega-criminals. What makes an Oligarch part of this Oligarchy is not only his or her sheer power over the lives of regular people, the masses. Us. It also involves to what degree do they violate our rights or turn us into a productive or profitable resource.
A slave, a wage worker or an uneducated consumer.
The Theory of Oligarical Collectivism
In 1949, a year after World Wars which eradicated over 8.3 % of the human race and the two remaining super powers the US and the USSR prepared for the Cold War to come; a political activist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War[32] George Orwell completed the book 1984; a work of dystopian fiction about a terrorist sleeper cell operating in England amidst a future global conflict between three power blocks Eurasia, East Asia and Oceania. A book, within a book called Emmanuel Goldstein’s Theory of Oligarchical Collectivism identifies the core power relationship that drives both war, poverty and slavery.
The wide array of structural problems within the intrinsically interconnected fields of development, humanitarian relief, human rights advocacy, peace building and coexistence work are rooted in that they attempt to treat a disease [conflict, war and endemic global poverty] by diagnosing wrongly and then prescribing inadequately remedies for singular systems of the global body; namely the states. They proscribe their treatments as if the national unit was an isolated system that needed critical care in imagined isolation. As sub-system after sub-system are sucked into a violent pathology it is still wrongly presumed in the West that this collectively atrocious mass behavior is in our very nature (Konner, 2000); that it is the normative clash of civilizations and states (Huntington, 1993); or that policy premeditation of this planned atrocity on behalf of poly oligarchic elites is not a feasible hypothesis (Fitzduff, 2014). This analysis attempts to provide the reader with a more holistic diagnosis of the world conflict. For if any nation and its people are to ever be healthy and secure we must frame our interventions on relevant causality; not provide treatment based on partial data and imagined regional motive. Nor on faith in national particularity or the misunderstanding that the parts of a whole are supposedly independent of each other.
There is a still gross conflict of index and orientation as to if this an Age of Globalization or Age of Corporate Oligarchy. The victor always narrates the history of human kind. Our conflict need not be as amorphous as some experts now make it, or as particularistic. Human conflict, like multi-dimensional poverty or climate catastrophes are symptoms of a deliberate system wide assault on planet and population. If we analyze these symptoms, we do not get any meaningful diagnostics of the disease. The fullness of the pathology is then missed and cannot be treated.
Most human poverty and conflict are manufactured to keep a small web of groups in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. To keep access to power and resources in an ‘iron web’ of corporate oligarchy. The Human Conflict, (not a series of endless regional conflicts) are absolutely and fully intertwined. If we keep attempting to address them piece meal we are enabling a vast protracted bleed. The ‘New Wars’ and the inter-communal bloodlettings we refer to as ‘identity-driven’ are war economies perpetuated in power vacuums and failing states (Kaldor, 2002); they are also the result of an elaborate and enforced quarantine being tested. A world system built on structural apartheid with fluid boundaries dividing people into economic roles and relationships. A deliberate calculation on how to shunt development and resources from periphery to core (Wallerstein, 1974).
The rational interrelationship then between conflict and development is that those most divested of human rights and dignity by the existing economic engines at the core are and will be doing the fighting and dying in most of the conflicts. To focus on civilization; identity mobilization or so-called human nature deludes the identification of the source. There is only ‘cosmopolitanism’ for those with the option to leave their plantation. That group so wealthy and so mobile is called the Oligarchy.
It is our hypothesis not that some oligarchic collective controls all world events, instead that three competing poligarchic blocks (Oligarical Collectives) unleash war and trade policy into a world system that synergistically amplifies their carnage throughout the state system. This theory of [ inverse consiationalist republicanism ] runs as follows; within each nation state a hierarchy of local oligarchs called dismissively as elites forms a network around shared culture, educational experience, business ventures, military and or family ties. The more developed a nation is has less do with the actual wealth of this national oligarch collective than how much it can leverage the state architecture to enrich itself and how efficiently it can shield its wealth from taxes and scrutiny (Winters, 2011). As well as how it can accumulate that wealth in assets and amassed capital. On the state level these oligarchs are all in conflict with each other to control means of capital accumulation and they vie for control as well over politicians, opinion makers and religious leaders. According to inverse consiationalist theory; eventually the arch oligarchs arrive at a collective bargain where by sectors of the population and special interests within a nation are pitted against each other to keep the social sphere of a society unstable, unable to effectively coalesce into a resistance movement.
Taken to the world system level we arrive at three particular groupings with particular interests at stake. The Euro-American Oligarchy, the Post-Soviet Petro-KGB Oligarchy and the Princelings Oligarchy; all of which function under the basic rules of this nine principle theory[33].
- Elite groupings in each nation form combines to enhance wealth and pit population ethnicities and value groups against each other.
- Elite groupings diversify their portfolios by washing their money in foreign banks and investing in venture capital, infrastructure, real estate and extra-legal enterprises.
- Elite groupings utilize their wealth to control overt political authorities.
- Elite groupings from Oligarical Collective frameworks to direct state policy to their advantage and default high degrees of control over states and power blocks.
- These three paramount Oligarchic Collectives are in direct competition with each other but there are relative bounds to the degree that they will destabilize each other’s domains, rules to the game as it were.
- All major conflict hostilities will be limited for the most part to a resource control axis that falls within the under-developed and developing world and fought through proxy whenever possible. Incursions and terror attacks outside of that zone are to be avoided.
- All Oligarical Collectives are rational actors with power and profit as their uncomplicated bottom-line. Ideologically, ethnically and ethically dissimilar they do not all share normative values about property rights, collateral damage and social policy. They are all however alarmed by Jihadist tendencies of Political Islam[34] which is an adversarial ideology not compatible with any of the three block interests that threatens all three blocks asset controls.
- All of the blocks encourage and amplify conflict violence on a variety of levels. Violence as psycho-social methodology directed outward at rivals interests and inward towards each other’s populations is implicitly linked to the conduct of each block.
- Crucial to the maintenance of power inside each core and core contender’s powerbase is the paramouncy out the Westphalian state system. More important than any other identity variable the belief in the sovereignty of nations and nationalism fuels all other subordinations.
The Source
The source of our oldest and most protracted conflict is the ‘control of the means of human development’ in the realms of the social, economic and environmental spheres. For all of our known human history a tiny, diverse human faction’s ability to manipulate our imagined identity has prevented any psychosocial realization of potential human solidarity. The aim of this miniscule faction is wealth, power and hegemony. To achieve that end their historic dominance has revolved around total human division. Not just in labor specialization, but down to as many constructed divisions and subdivisions as were possible; competing dominations ingrained at every level of the stratification. Most obvious was the creation of evolving plantations (the nation-states) that erected real and imagined barriers. They then coerced our labor, they acquired ownership over productive resources and via an endless war and conflict; they eliminated abundance. Inevitably, via their wanton greed they now threaten the survival of both planet and species. What remained elusive was how well organized they were in their implementation.
The reason we cannot clearly implement a meaningful plan for peace or ‘Emancipatory Development’ is that we are speaking very different tactical languages. Our competing theories of change have therefore diluted our capability (Fitzduff, 2014). We still lack total consensus on the basic nature of the human species: ‘brutish and short’ vs. ‘capable and cooperative’ (Konner, 2000). Those supposedly in the fields of change have absolutely no consensus at all who is ‘our enemy’ and who is ‘our friend’; or even is there is an actual organized nemesis to oppose. Some have even declared an ‘end to history’ (Fujiyama, 1998).
In the absence of consensus on achieving equity, those with actual power are still quite grounded in the most Machiavellian manipulations of identity: gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, creed and nationalism being the most pervasive & useful triggers.
Three Camps in the Conflict
The camp of alarming importance is the bulk of human species, which is closing in shortly on 8 billion members. It remains largely impoverished and divided against self easily mobilized to war or ethnic violence based on imagined identities enforced by race, nationality and prayer rituals. The bulk of it is concentrated in failed, failing and generally kleptocratic states that currently host 35armed conflicts (Alerta, 2014). The United Nations has granted all 8 billion humans elaborate configurations of ‘human rights’ and protections and committed all nations to vigorous programs of development around the 8-Millennium Development Goals and nine core human rights treaties that most world governments have adopted. Most of those goals will go unmet. Even in so-called core developed nations, most of these rights are not legally enforced or protected.
The second camp is perhaps the fullest enemy of these human rights and of sustainable development generally can be called a Corporate Oligarchy. Or Oligarical Collective. A transnational global elite that not only controls supply routes and natural resources; they affect all of the inequity of distribution that so perpetuate poverty. It is a disciplined and vicious network of elites united in nothing except bloc accumulation of capital and power via their political access. In one nation, they appear as warlords and in others as cultivated persons of business and leisure. The most important remain completely out of the public consciousness. This is accomplished via mass distraction in the media via the athletes, celebrity artists and politicians. As well as ownership of most platforms for mass media (Chomsky, 2003). The ‘Corporate Oligarchy’ are extremely diverse demographically and largely decentralized in their spheres of interests and accumulation. They have eclectic and diverse financial portfolios. No matter what nation-state or territory we are referring to, we can refer back to these regional elites as a local branch of the “Global Oligarchy”; they are ‘Corporate’ only in that their power is best solidified via transnational financial institutions.
The third camp is a far more horizontal network of clustered organizations whose actionable numbers are only slightly greater than the repressive agencies of the oligarchy. Their base is also wide and international though relies largely on volunteer efforts and free association. Though comparatively small in clustered leaderships they periodically mushroom rather rapidly mobilizing humans based on grievance and identity; normally via religion, class or political creed; this group can encompass a very wide range of revolutionaries; humanitarians, human rights defenders, change agents, peace builders and social progressives; this would be called the resistance. They are resisting human rights violations normally in relationship to the localized symptoms of the Oligarchic Epoch.
Let us be clear; the Corporate Oligarchy guide the financial and political institutions via a multi-generational policy of low-intensity coordination, but they do remain in competition. Humanity exists in an utter state of disunity, which the oligarchs cultivate and pray upon. The resistance is scattered, isolated, delegitimized and holds onto a small bloc of scattered states quarantined in various ways over the course of the Cold War.
The elites within principal core, developed nations are able to influence policies via campaign contributions, competitive advantage, patronage or outright corrupt practices (Banerjee, p.238). Particularly in Beijing, Washington, Moscow and Berlin these elites influence the global political playing field. It is important to remember that they are both competitive and use competing identity rhetoric’s for social cohesion. At times they empower themselves at the expense of the placated populace (USA); often they exacerbate peripheral tensions and enable high crimes and rights violations using state superstructure (Russian Federation). Often they project outward core to periphery, cultivate relationships, and profit off the neo-colonialism embedded in the development enterprise (China).
These elites in varying configurations have come under physical assault via armed revolt especially in the past two hundred years.
The main issue of the human conflict is that a tiny fraction of the human species has usurped control over more than half of our wealth in a time when 3 billion humans are enduring grinding poverty; when the very climate itself has warmed to provoke dangerous environmental impacts; and nation after nation appears to be becoming undone by civil strife and genocide.
On the part of the Global Corporate Oligarchy, the main issue is maintaining the current order while dominating the other local oligarchs when opportunity arises. On the part of the resistance, it is to shape meaningful tactics to counteract over two hundred years of general attrition since 1789. On the part of slumbering/suffering humanity, it is an issue of individual survival only when conflict is close at hand.
Eroding State System
The Westphalian State system is gradually collapsing. From the unraveling of Sudan and Syria to unleashed Uyghur aspirations in China; to greater Kurdistan; to a Palestinian State and a newly unleashed Islamic Caliphate, the made up and largely externally coerced lines that the European powers drew on old maps are coming undone. This means more countries (nation proliferation) and certainly more regional conflicts over the populations and resources contained within them. The developed Core will hold tight as it can to the stability of its state delineations while devolution of the periphery accelerates. This will not immediately alter the balance of power, but it will alter the balance of trade because the coercive state mechanisms of semi-peripheral (developing) and peripheral (un-developed) nations will crumble making resource extraction back to the core more difficult to facilitate.
Realization of Atrocity
Thanks to information technology not only are larger segments of our human species able to evaluate multiple version of history previous unavailable; they are able to issue and witness minute-by-minute live stream reports and documentation of ongoing genocide and atrocity. On the one hand, an early desensitization comes from this on the proletarian level of core nations. On the other hand, it allows the human masses an access to each other’s suffering that was previously unimaginable. For the first time using widely available technology a human can access unfathomable human catalogues of data. We can rapidly broadcast our grievances. Most importantly, we can internationalize conflict by calling for reinforcements; or draw tactical lessons from the killing fields and struggles of that they are calling the ‘Age of Genocide’ (Powers, 2004).
Ideological Bankruptcy
The ‘Age of Genocide’ is dubbed so because it was believed that in no other period of human conflict had such massive a systematic bloodletting been carried out deliberately against civilians; 50-80 million just in WW2. The dominant narrative issued in the competing political paradigms are that the worst of the atrocities were carried out due to the excesses of Slavery, Colonialism and the three World Wars or because of ideology (religious or secular).
There was a variety of ideological underpinning guiding both the arch-Oligarchs and the principle factions of the Resistance. Fascism, Socialism, and Liberal Democracy being the three paramount schools most states derived their systems from. The theocracies and monarchies of the earlier periods still existing but being confined to the periphery and semi-periphery of the state system. Political Islam re-emerging in full force in 1979. The so-called Age of Genocide was not a civilizing epoch punctuated by unprecedented conflagration; it was a purge. It was the state system marshalled to eliminate both the resistance and discredit the theory of change; particularly the theory of revolutionary socialism.
However, it would not take long for Oligarchs to discover that politics and ideology were just an architecture. That the concept of Core formation; marshaling state superstructure to break dependence and project power could be obtained with any of the ideologies. Demonstrated throughout the last 100 years was that not only could an Oligarchy be cultivated in the most revolutionary of states; those oligarchies could be just as brutal and repressive as any before them. By the time the Communist Party of China embraced capitalism in 1978 and became a Core power; by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which turned the country into a semi-peripheral mafia style super state; by the time it was understood that the USA was subsidizing 1/3 of its population not to work while keeping 1/139 citizens in prison camps); ideology wasn’t good for very much besides idle intellectual banter or pretext.
The issue then was that most of the resistance that survived this epoch has been thoroughly exhausted by the hypocrisy of the ideological pronouncements that complemented the catalogue of the ongoing genocide now exposed. The ideological war is mostly over (Kaldor, 2003); the final consensus amongst both the oligarchy and resistance alike is the disambiguation is possible within the human rights framework as a lasting list of demands. In the bankruptcy of ideological frameworks, the dominant and most bloodthirsty element of the resistance has embraced Jihadist variants of Islam. All other factions are for the most part utilizing human rights as their platform.
Imposed Scarcity
In short, as the population increases, we are met with the grim reality that there may not be enough clean water or means to feed ourselves, although we are currently not quite feeding the human race very adequately (Rogers). There is also a finite timeline on extractive energy resources used to propel the current globalized economic machine. While every oligarch network is very ‘interested’ in profiteering, off ‘green, clean and renewable’ solutions, there remains skepticism that these sources of renewable energy will emerge fast and efficient enough to compete lucratively with oil and natural gas. Very few oligarchies have multi-generational perspectives.
The adaptation process will not take place quickly enough before peak oil occurs. Population will exceed productive capability and a new global famines will result (Malthus). The wars that have occurred in the past sixty-five years over extractive energy resources will shortly be taking place over clean water and arable land. The technologies we feel so happy deploying in Sub-Saharan Africa such as spirulina, drip agriculture systems and Malaria nets will come also to Middle America. The issue of the climate is now one that most of the national factions accept. That has little to do with the speed they can recalibrate the machine.
In 2005 major bio-diesel production efforts accelerated in USA, Europe and Brazil. Alongside this marked a sharp increase in global food prices. 36% of the world’s food goes towards feeding livestock not people. 44 million people fell below the global poverty line during this period. When it was learned in 2006 that fuel additive methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) was contaminating groundwater in the USA it was banned in 20 states. This opened the market for ethanol fuel and corn growers diverted production accordingly. The rising prices of food which peaked in 2007-2008 have been attributed by various economists to being a) the product of complex global market forces or b) conversely the specific fault of the emerging biodiesel industry the places ‘fuel before food’. The argumentation of each side is as follows.
The side delinking food price from biodiesel points towards numerous externalities such as rising incomes of East Asia or Australian droughts affecting yields in harvest. Fundamentally it claims that so single market factor can be linked to a worldwide price increase in so complex a market. They argue that food prices began to fall again in 2008 while Biodiesel production leveled off. They caution alarmism from false causality and say economic data does not support the link. The larger issue they argue is that China’s rising GDP enabled larger scale procurements of fertilizer, farming and consumption. The rising price is more related to changes in global eating habits they claim.
The side showing linkage declares that diversions to biodiesel crops harms local agro-economies, diverts food aid from millions of already starving global poor. People argue that the switch from local sustainable crops to those seeking to sell into the market will long term harm livelihoods. It has been called a crime against humanity to ‘feed cars before people’ by UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food. World Bank published a report in 2008 stating predicted land use shifts and a price push by 70-75% on crops in relation to the new industry, a 2010 report later denied any major casualty.
Both are incomplete claims coming from special interests. There is plenty of economic data to support a multiplicity of causes for the food price rise. There is also no direct link that food earmarked for biofuel would have gone to feed the needy. However, there a range of potential threats of social welfare the industry might generate in the long run. Another suggestion is a weak dollar and higher oil prices. Both claims expressed in this paper as shown with the case of Mexican white v. yellow corn indicates that no single factor in supply and demand could so radically and temporarily shift the food prices. I am inclined to agree that data can be used in manipulative ways to support whatever side a policy advocate takes. In regards to the science of economics though you would be hard pressed to identify the proximate cause of such a massive event as global food price spike by analyzing only one singular component of the parts.
Linguistics and False Consciousness
The issue that will prevail throughout all of the conflicts we examine is that resistance has been purged as legitimate discourse and often possible. Throughout the world the socialization process has gone on for some many generations in all three zones verbally, lack language to articulate alternatives or access to the popular education needed to trigger solidarity. Solidarity then manifests in relation to the nation or ethnic group not the species. Lacking language, lacking consciousness, humans will continuously revert into their national and ‘tribal’ formations. This remains the fundamental question of the successful transformation; how can mass capacity be achieved in the face of this mass socialization. The most important deception of the false consciousness propagated is that without a government; people would all loot and murder one another. Logical frameworks built on this postulate stipulate then that the state system and by default the world system are necessary.
The Power Blocs
There are three major power blocs that while they differ in their development theories, national cultures, state ideology and psycho-social interpretations of international relations as well as each other; they are all firmly vying for core dominance of the global economic system. They are via their foreign policies, trade relationships, consumer cultures, militaries and intelligence services responsible for virtually all ongoing 35 medium-large scale armed conflicts[35]. They fuel the vast planetary degradation via their rapid and massive scale industrialization drives. They have in differing capacities triggered the underdevelopment of half of the human species; 3,500,000,000 people living today at and below $3.00 a day. At least 1.2 billion on less than $1.25 a day (World Bank, 2014) (UNDP, 2014).
The political leaderships of these blocs are pragmatic and non-ideological, even if their political classes are varying degrees to the left or right of center in embrace of liberal democracy, democratic oligarchy and state capitalism with a socialist face. They cannot be purely referred to by the respective nation state that officially marshals them: The United States of America (the declining Core hegemon) is financially coupled with the European Union, Switzerland, the Holy Sea, New Zealand, South Korea[36], Australia and Japan. The Russian Federation (the defeated core Contender) relies on a co-dependent fusion of resource clientalisms and extra-legal mafia cronyism rooted in the now defunct KGB to exert varying degrees of control over former Soviet nations and former satellite states. The People’s Republic of China (the emergent Core hegemon) has massively invested in African nations, trade relationships in the Pacific and $ 11 trillion of US bonds and debt. Simplifying as such would be a gross minimization of the US’s integral allies, especially in the European Union & Switzerland. Or the more nuanced post-Cold War cooperation between RF its Post-soviet former satellites where 20 million ethnic Russians reside (cite); and its Middle Eastern allies like Egypt (prior to 1971), Syria, Iran, and before the US invasion and its complete disintegration; Iraq. Or even more significantly the PRC’s investment in nearly every country in Africa regardless of political tendency or crime against humanity[37]. These blocs cannot also be purely gauged by their military alliances, trade pacts, or proclaimed ideologies as repeatedly stated. For while the US-EU-NATO alliance is normatively neoliberal, democratic and pro-market its participating governments have funded overtly and covertly all manner of dictatorship, non-aligned oligarchy such as arming Saddam Hussein against the Islamic Revolution in Iran (1980-1988); as well as helping to establish the training bases, weapons supply and advanced training of proto-Al Qaeda Mujahidin formations attacking the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989).
The Russian Federation is a vast oligarchic transnational mafia state. Over the course of the Cold Wars Russian provided a wide array of military and technical aid to numerous developing countries fostering incredible regional loyalty particularly in Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique, Syria, Iraq and Iran.
The People’s Republic of China is state capitalist authoritarian regime lead by the Communist Party. It’s interventions in North Korea and Vietnam played pivotal roles in both nation’s independence. It has intermittently provided military and intelligence aid to a wide range of Asian and African groups. Each block rarely has aligned foreign policy except perhaps in regards to Islamic terrorism and the environment. Each core tender also faces long running internal ethnic antagonisms with minority groups at their country core; African Americans & Caucasians in the USA, North African & Turkish immigrants in the EU, Tibetans and Uyghurs in China and a wide range of Turkic and Central Asia minorities in Russia [notably Chechnya].
Each block is governed quite differently with varying adherence to rule of constitutional law. Kleptocratically in Russia, Nepotistcally in China and via Legislative Capture[38] in the USA. Through a variety of arrangements rule by a diffuse elite of oligarchic collectives networked around shared financial interests as stated, but each extracts wealth and exerts influence quite differently (Princeton, 2013)(Winters, 2011). As well as direct accesses chains to the national policy makers. In the USA and EU they utilize campaign finance structures quite overtly and constitutionally allowing state sanctioned bribery. In the RF a more direct cronyism based on shared Soviet networks is in place. In China elite privilege is enabled by direct family relations. The elites are all beneficiaries of the existing financial order regardless for the most part of which of any of the three existing blocs hold the core. A critical core shift from USA to China will not radically effect the holdings of the most prominent oligarchs.
It was estimated that 85 members of this elite are worth cumulatively what that bottom 3.5 billion poorest of humanity are worth combined (Oxfam, 2014) and this bears some repeating because state relations between the USA, the RF the PRC and their allies, proxies and clients are not beholden purely to political interests; but by it is this Oligarchical Collectivism that governs the world system and drives its subsequent carnage (Piketty, 2014). While it is highly tempting to believe these oligarchies cannot properly coordinate nor can the governments they set up in power; it is crucial to understand that what a government perceives it is doing in its own national interest is often a directive, a pre-written policy package drawn up by the national oligarch collective. Or individual oligarch with the means to do so.
The fundamental question is what are the likely chain of conflict, development and economic events that will result in the next ten years due to the core shift from USA to PRC. It is those predictions that is subject of this analysis. And while the US-EU media and political apparatus has been quick to declare the irrelevance of Russian Federation; this defeated core contender is an integral player in upcoming core transition and conflict.
The Davos Forum
The Bohemian Grove
The Bilderberg Group
The Princelings
The Russian Mafia
Neoliberalism
The World Bank
The International Monetary Fund
The Washington Consensus
The Monterrey Consensus
It cannot to be said with a straight face that embrace of neoliberal trade and structural adjustment have resulted in true or equitable economic growth. Out of the Latin American nations only Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile exhibited growth between 1950-1980; only Chile has sustained it under the rule of a US backed military dictatorship and very extensive tinkering by the American Chicago School. All former Socialist countries have declined in GDP except Poland, some into poverty far worse that the American Great Depression. Sub-Saharan African nations have all gotten much poorer; extreme poverty is in fact growing (Rodrick, 2002). It is widely agreed using the Palma Index that inequality is far more pronounced in developed and developing nations alike than had been though under the GINI measurement. 85 people control the wealth of the bottom 3.5 billion (Oxfam, 2014). Asian Tigers (South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, and Hong Kong) exhibited growth but are markedly small countries all of which were under highly authoritarian rule for the bulk of their economic expansion and all had crashes in 1997 and 2008. Disruptive financial crises have plagued Mexico, Argentina, Russia, and Turkey. Even Southern Europe is bankrupt.
Nations such as Vietnam, India and China have refused all such neoliberal shock therapy and emerged gradually into strong market economies (Rodrik & Subramanian, 2008). China itself responsible for pulling over 680 million people out of poverty and is now driving a very different kind of development scheme in Africa.
Shock Therapy in particular and Neoliberalism in general is a means for American and Europe to carry out economic dominance wrapped in the veneer of sophisticated economics. The Soviet command economies collapsed because they could not efficiently regulate the market forces. People such as Jeff Sachs and Milton Friedman have advocated withdrawing state subsidies, rapid liberalization of domestic markets and large scale privatization. We would advise you not to allow foreigners to rape your economy. You will be simultaneously crippling your civil service sector, allowing economic advisors to dictate your policies and the only comparative advantage that will emerge is that you will be heavy debt to the world bank, foreigners will control your assets and your people will be working in sweatshops. That is a high price to pay for some sneakers.
As of today you are neither a net exporter or importer. In a very tangible sense although your resources are limited and you do not possess a body of technocratic expertise or specialization of sectors and are currently de-linked from the global economy. We advise the ministry from a position of careful economic and historical study. Clearly there is valid middle way in the global financial architecture that does not necessitate choosing between economic extremes. On the one side we have a choice of free markets borrowing from the World Bank, specializing for efficiency; allowing direct foreign investment and leveraging a perceived comparative advantage toward better competition on the international market. On the other you have notions of selective embrace of structures that allow us the maximum levels of autonomy and variety.
Clearly you exist in a globalized economy and a wide body of precedent supports caution in engaging within it rapidly. Looking at the Haitian, Guyanese and Tanzanian examples we need how disastrous it can be to presume that one can uncouple their markets completely. Or in Cuba’s case in the 90’s be tied to only one superpower. Or in Russia’s case to allow oligarchs to quickly buy off, carry off your state assets. There are wide range of consumer and industrial products your citizens may desire to buy that cannot be efficiently produced in your country. That then said we would caution against your borrowing heavily from the IMF or agreeing to any economic terms which link privatization and deregulation. You risk “immiserizing growth” (Bhagwati, 1958) where by the hegemon powers can renegotiate trade terms against your interests and cut deals via their supposedly more sophisticated market instruments.
Follow the middle road. Play emerging BRICS bank off World Bank. Allow for clear and direct technical assistance for resource access schemes as pursued by China and Cuba. Make sure all natural resources are utilized to propel domestic scholarship, diversify your economy, maintain that no foreigner can buy land or have controlling stakes in domestic businesses and whatever you do; do not believe that economics is a science. It is more of a witch craft.
The Elite Consensus
The Collaborators
The Asset Cache
Northern Development
Europe
Western Development
America
Poverty is Genocide
Poverty is a form of generalized mass murder.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a call to build Potemkin villages amid war zones and pestilence sewn urban sprawls. They have also been mostly undelivered.
The Monterrey Consensus was a clarion call to profit off the poor. Human Rights as understood and codified by the UN give us an international legal framework to measure our violation and calibrate our resistance. There are few nations where any legal enforcement of these so-called rights can be brought to bear. The International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague gives us a platform, forum and precedent to try our various oppressors. To put whole leagues of Oligarchs on trial and their secondary and tertiary officers. This will never occur except in the cases of periodic state failure and/or a genocide in a so-called developing action.
Governments everywhere are openly committing crimes against humanity.
Armies are now running states (Pakistan). Transnational Crime Syndicates run countries (Russia). Countries exist on paper (Haiti) but are run by NGOs. Countries exist with no governance at all (Somalia since 1992). Apartheid occurs in plain view (India & Israel). Genocide occurs in plain view (Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, East Timor, Sri Lanka). Atrocities are being carried out for resources (Democratic Republic of Congo). States are unraveling into civil war (Iraq & Syria). The war never ends. Our global peacekeeping body introduces disease and rape into populations it serves (Uruguay, Nepal & Brazil via MINUSTAH). Human Slavery being practiced across the globe.
Low estimates put 29.9 million people predominantly women and girls forced into domestic bondage, manual labor, and the highly lucrative sex traffic.
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) are Neoliberal instruments that barely scratch the surface of their stated intention. We must join the ones that have successful tactics and isolate the ones that serve little function but foreign policy or a simple poverty racket. They ought to be repurposed and reinvigorated as true development platforms, vehicles for capacity building where they serve. When they have proven useful supported or abolished when they are little more than store fronts of a vast poverty business. The Washington Consensus seems very deceptive and broken when put under any real economic scrutiny.
So much so that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are forming their own alternative to the World Bank called BRICS.
Poverty is not only a condition fostered by state and non-state actors with the aim of keeping most of the global population weak, divided and miserable; it is also a way to consolidate power and vast control of resources into small clusters called nation states, corporations, and organized crime syndicates. The modern plantation, the neocolonial system is just thinly hidden below the modern nation states, governmental structures, and the corporations that thrive within them. The modern slave is very much still a slave.
The modern faces of slavery, plague, famine and genocide are not manufactured in some dismal neglected vacuum. They serve a purpose where they are implemented. They were either planned, or they are made worse by poor planning.
We have inefficient and contradictory information and statistics coming out on numbers and we must be serious about calling to question corrupt ministries with things to hide or exaggerate for aid, or to hide their Human Rights High Crimes. We must also draw attention to attempts to subvert the data by subdividing it into types of famine, types of disease, and types of war. We have gathered some alarming base numbers though from the Non-Governmental Organizations and United Nations.
There are an estimated 29.9 million chattel slaves engaged in manual labor or forced sex work worldwide. This does not include 2 billion working poor that cannot adjust their work or living conditions, most lack unions or work safety protections and carry out their lives as bonded wage slaves.
There are 1.2 billion people living in “Absolute Poverty”. Over 3 billion according to the World Bank living on less than $2.50 a family/ a day.
Absolute poverty, extreme poverty, or abject poverty is “a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services.”
34 million persons are dying of HIV. This pandemic is actively spreading.
There 35 ongoing armed conflicts. Eleven major armed conflicts generating more than 1,000 deaths a year (Some like Somalia, Columbia, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan that have over 100,000 killed since they began). Thirty that claim less than 1,000 per year but many which are ongoing for over half the century and have long surpassed 100,000 dead in a specific conflict (such as in 5.4 million killed in Congo since 1998 or approximately 2 million in Afghanistan since 1979).
There must be a profound and dedicated response.
Who is the enemy of the working class, poor and humanity generally? It is not a caste, or a class. Or even the human oligarchs that enrich themselves standing on our backs. It is a world system. And we must bring it grinding to a halt.
PART V: The History of Our People
Case Studies
In this section, we will extrapolate a variety of major lessons learned in the last 4,000 years of emancipatory development, resistance to oligarchy and gradual formation of the parallel state.
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Part VI: [The Theory of Change]
WHO WAS HOBBES
WHAT IS HUMAN NATURE
WHAT WE ARE FIGHTING FOR
EIGHT UNDERSTANDINGS
WHAT IS EMMACIPATORY DEVELPOMENT
WHAT IS OUR BASELINE HUMAN NATURE
WHAT ARE OUR BASELINE HUMAN NEEDS
WHAT ARE OUR BASELINE HUMAN RIGHTS
WHAT ARE HUMAN RIGHTS INDICATORS
WHAT IS MUTUAL AID
WHAT IS SOLIDARITY
WHAT IS INTERNATIONALISM
WHAT IS MASS CAPACITY
WHAT IS SELF RELIANCE
WHAT IS FUNCTIONAL RELIANCE
WHAT IS WESTERN DEVEOPMENT
WHAT IS NORTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS SOUTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS EASTENRN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS AUTOCENTRIC DEVELOPMENT
Hobbes
Human Nature
What we are fighting for
The minute that they take someone from you that you love. Your partner, your husband, your wife your children your parents; the day they kill your friends. You must be mentally prepared to maintain your very humanity.
The minute that you pick up a weapon and you use it to kill another person, even a vile enforcer of the oligarchy, even a captured consummate war criminal or arch-oligarch himself; you compromise your very human qualities the second that you first take another life.
We are fighting for full realization and legally binding protection of the human rights promised in the nine core treaties and optional protocols drafted between 1948 and today. However, we do so with little expectation that the governments as they exist in the year 2014 will succeed in implementation them. It is not a question of blame but realpolitik.
The historic process of United Nations Human Rights treaty implementation has been from the beginning national interest driven, highly politicized and hegemon directed. Since the founding conferences leading to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) there have been ceaselessly contentious debates on the subject of “real rights”, “progressive implementation” and the responsibility of Nation States to implement frameworks of national law and economic practice to ensure these rights for their respective citizens. It has long been understood that that the ratification and practical implementation of this international legal framework if fully binding might hold hegemon powers accountable for their global economic manifestations and hold all 206 States accountable to those within their borders for civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights.
After the 1966 division of rights along the ideological parameters of the Cold War into the International Covenant on Civil & Political (ICCPR)and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); there emerged an equally implementation useless debate until they were ratified in 1976. Throughout the codification of the nine subsequent Rights Instruments and their Optional Protocols; it has argued that these was a concept of “real rights”, a hierarchy of importance to attain them and most importantly vast disagreement as to what degree were the state powers were accountable to uphold their treaty obligations.
With the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall marking the end of the Cold War and the economic collapse of the Warsaw Pact’s command economies; Human Rights have been divested of this imposed ideological division. A new tide of international jurisprudence has begun to address the critical issues of implementation, accountability, and state responsibility. However, it is the victors of the Cold War conflict that championed the notion of Civil & Political rights to be established before and above Economic, Social and Cultural obligations.
The issue of “rights validity” is not an interesting point to those that have the fruits of neither covenant after all these years of high minded diplomacy. Most of the world population is still quite both economically impoverished and politically unfree. They can’t even consider rights, they are meeting needs. There is no real differentiation to be made in hierarchy or the realization of the CPR over the ESCR if one truly believes in the primacy of the UDHR distilled and expounded into the subsequent treaties. It is a provenly time consuming and frustrating exercise to utilize Human Rights as theoretically binding toward anything beyond a populist mobilization maneuver. To that end both lawyers and NGOs have used them admirably in recent years to internationalize struggles for social justice via a rhetoric divested of class warfare. Nation States; hegemon, developing and development dependent alike have no national interest in this “human rights enterprise” succeeding, and they never have. A development dependent nation, or a developing one may like the idea of hegemon powers bound by treaty to aid their “right to develop”. That does not mean they all wish to institute the civil and political duties and open up their societies to real democratization. The United Nations and the vast web of committee bureaucracies it has generated has been and shall remain a vast rhetorical platform for a diplomatic jet set and an international legal technocracy to haggle over documents as facts on the ground remain largely unchanged for the bottom billion, and surely with a “generous” $2.50 a day poverty line we might be so bold as to extend the number of those wretched teeming masses to around 3 billion impoverished soul.
It is not a question of whether CPR is more valid, or “real” than those identified in the ESCR; the issue is more as to who utilizes these rights and to what practical end. Since no international body can guarantee or enforce implementation of either the CPR or ESC rights; it is the strategic imperative of the people to select appropriate rights based frameworks for their particular localized struggle. Born of that perspective, there are no “real rights” only appropriate vehicles to legitimize grassroots struggle under the legal architecture of these treaties.
The basis of a “Real Rights” would be founded in a given system’s ability to enforce it. Lacking such a system all rights are equally intangible yet simultaneously serving quite well as an international list of demands for the masses impoverished under the current state system. These rights real or imagined will not be granted in courtrooms. Their existence bears bright light on the hypocrisy of the international actors that have taken them on as a transparent charade for conducting a global poverty business.
There can be no “Real Rights” without real defense and enforcement.
It is a gross mockery of the UDHR’s thirty founding articles that a full sixty-six (66) years have passed since the signing of the original document and so few on this earth have much to show for this largely rhetorical enterprise. Since the time of Eleanor Roosevelt’s steering committee and the creation of the United Nations Charter; since the 1966 legal dualism of the ICCPR & the ICESCR; there are no less than nine separate rights instruments which have been brought into effect alongside the International Bill of Rights and the various Optional Protocols. There exists a full scaffold of non-binding legal apparatuses; a quickly emerging body of precedent for national utilization in national court systems and a wide range of UN sponsored and NGO oriented agencies directing campaigns. They are the basis of the new South African constitution. The issue of “Real Rights” is ridiculous at this stage while there are still no truly valid enforcement mechanisms. There are numerous grievance platforms, but no international legal mechanism to sanction rights violations except in the form of “gross-violations” in the form of ICC war crimes. Hegemon powers are beyond the reach of any Human Rights tribunals. We should not expect that to change anytime soon. There must be a legitimate appreciation that most of the world’s working class and poor only have the vaguest idea what these rights even contain. It is not about legally expanding definitions and generating new international frameworks. That has obviously failed. A better understanding of “real” v. “constitutional” v. “imagined” i.e. first generation civil political as opposed to second and third generation economic social should be grounded in that common people know neither. If the rights cannot be defended and if no pressure can brought on governments to enforce them, they are worth only the idea their words embody and the paper upon which they are printed.
The Universal Declaration is the basis for all subsequent covenants and treaties and within it are the benchmarks for establishing “Real Rights”.
Contained within its thirty articles are the basis for both the negative (freedoms from) and positive rights (duties to) frameworks. As this essay rejects the utility of future jurisprudence or U.N. negotiation to meaningfully advance rights I present the argument that anything found in the UDHR is a “Real Right”; anything extrapolated into ICCPR or ICESCR is a “right’s duty” any signatory government can be held responsible to deliver, and anything signed off in other HR instruments is a “rights responsibility”. The second generation rights are those found within the dual covenant documents of 1966. Everything else, i.e. the third generation is specific supporting claim to what has been previously promised.
In the period between 1948 when the UDHR was proclaimed until the time that ICCPR/ICESCR into normative effect in 1976; the original UDHR was the “international standard of achievement” and the foundation of the divergent 1966 Covenants.
Though many would argue that economic redistribution is a noble imperative; he believes that “no assertion of rights” will change the current economic calculus, and that civil political (negative rights) have to be objective and not up for any deliberation. Since capabilities obviously greatly vary, and governmental cost for negative rights is lower, he argues this a natural basis for first priority and elevated status as “real rights”. He also argues that keeping civil political rights as the primary standard takes a position that is legally defensible, while ESCR are much too subjective to win in a court of law.
Our response to that specific argument is that the courtroom should not be viewed as the primary arena of Human Rights attainment.
No one can be politically free who is completely economically dependent and impoverished. But our break with left is this; we are not after control of the means of economic production, we are after control of the means to our respective communities’ development. All of the Amartya Sen connotations of what realizing our capabilities could mean in relation to our poverty, our freedom, our human happiness and our rights.
It’s not a question of negative/positive rights but instead duties, responsibilities, and accountabilities. Both sets are threatening to entrenched elites. The CPR because they are basis for protest, democratization, mobilization and the ESCR because they impose duties that are not normative payouts for government.
DM Davis summarizes three arguments in his brief to exclude the so-called second and third generation rights from the South African constitution. First, is the difficulty of adjudication and enforcement of ESCR Rights. Second, the conceptual difference of negative rights being freedoms from are far easier to enforce and grant than economic entitlements to. Thirdly, the impracticalities of a universal economic expectation being met.
We would wholeheartedly agree that if one was to accept the currently limitations of courts and governments to implement the agreed on rights as is, it would be easier and more practical to assure first generation CPR to those of the ESCR which if in place would fundamentally alter class and political dynamic in most of the world’s countries. Davis makes a series of valid points that the South African constitution, as high minded as it may be has not yielded socio-economic progress via adjudication around rights. I however refuse to accept again that we view rights attainment within the realm of the Machiavellian or the real-politic.
If human rights practitioner Ayer Neier’s argumentation rests on prioritization based on raising an objective international civil political standard and DM David’s brief rests on applicability or rights jurisprudence to economic reality, then I argue a third way. It is not about accepting current frameworks as progress or rejecting the use of law. It is about fundamental understanding of the minds of the poor.
They do not differentiate between freedom and opportunity. They have neither.
All Real Rights are therefore dependent on both the CPR and ESCR, they reinforce each other. Instead of viewing them as legal tools to leverage inefficient states we must see them as rallying point to remove existing governments, and replace them with those that can guarantee and protect all Human Rights without a hierarchy to them.
The only value Human Rights now have is to give us a common language in our respective liberation struggles. A list of collective demands.
With that in mind we refer the question of “Real Rights” back to the question of do the poor care? We think they do not know. They were never asked. They did not partake in the length deliberations or conferences to draft these rights nor were they asked to elect the political leaders who signed off on them. With over 1/3 of the Human race living in some degree of poverty I think it useful to measure the social merit of an instrument in relation to its liberatory capacity for the most impoverished. In that regard I conclude that real rights are based on three criteria. Their ability to be enforced and defended, their articulation in the UDHR and supporting instruments, and their merit in linking the civil political directly to the economic and social.
We, like billions of other human beings were not party to the creation of these documents, nor do we believe that the act of codifying them was the act of granting us real rights, real protections from government and the elites. We embrace them as a framework because they are consistent. As a baseline they are an adequate tool to begin to understand our collective demands for human development and freedom. Suffice to say they will be won with struggle and via building up the global resistance. Not more banal conferences, frameworks and pedantic liberal debates on the fate of the long-suffering poor. Before we speak of rights in depth let us analyze our needs.
EIGHT UNDERSTANDINGS
Resistance, Development, Consciousness and Emancipation in the 21st Century begins with our boldness. Our complete rejection of the atrocities and structural violence forced upon us by the world system.
- Respect your body and mind. We respect the fundamental power of teaching and learning, popular education as a means to advance the condition of our collective human people. Conscious, critical thinking is the most powerful weapon we have. Our minds and our ability to utilize them in the process of the liberation struggle and beyond is the opening through which emancipation takes the form of mass awakening.
We can only be kept as slaves if we allow our consciousness to be subsumed by lies, stress, brutality and oppression forced upon us to keep us divided, working and weak.
We don’t put poison in our body. We don’t eat disgusting and unhealthy things. We don’t take drugs that don’t have an overt medical purpose for a chronic condition. We abstain from alcohol and cigarettes whenever possible. Alcohol depresses your central nervous system and lowers your consciousness for thirty days. Tobacco smoke is one of the most holistically unhealthy things you can put in your body. Avoid over consumption. We engage in regular physical activity and meditation. We dance, run, play, sing and enjoy our lives. Above all we avoid television; as well as violent pornography and video games by every means necessary. These things pollute us and prevent us from seeing the world as it really is.
- Don’t believe the lies about false consciousness and identity. Other than biological function, sexual orientation and the physical presence of your sex organs all other aspects of identity; gender, race, class, caste and especially your proscribed religion and your assigned nationality were constructed specifically to divide and exploit you. We continuously urge all people to refrain from acts of organized violence driven by imaginary, unseen entities they cannot see or invisible lines across territories put there to control your movements, harvest your taxes and complete exploit you.
All free thinking, good people are welcome in this movement. There is no discrimination to involvement as long as the observances are strictly upheld. No identity politics. No identity based organizing, this is a movement for achieving human rights and needs; securing environmental sustainability on this earth and achieving economic equity. Securing for all people Maslow’s needs & the United Nation’s codified Human Rights via the 3 pillars of human development; these are our movement’s ends.
We respect and enhance the power of indigenous knowledge and do our work on the basis of indigenous need. We need to keep engaging the people in their own liberation. We need to make the raising of consciousness and the enhancement of capability the most integral aspect both the resistance and the Great Revolt.
- We lead with our deeds. We have no centralized leadership. We have no titles or chains of command, except when necessary to designate operational function. It is better to enter the movement with your own reorganized group, party association, union, religious or social group, chapter, detachment, otriad or cell. It is best to come to the table alongside your family and friends.
- We save lives, we don’t ever take them. No killing, no harming or injuring people; no weapons, no violence, no vandalism no destruction of property. Any who kill or any who destroy property [that is ours by having been paid for it with our work and taxes] is immediately disqualified from this social movement. Nothing on earth pleases then oligarchy more than violence for it lowers human consciousness to the most animal level. They have and always will attempt to provoke a violent response from the resistance.
- We don’t ever underestimate our enemy. Our enemies means of surveillance and widespread application of torture and violence in particular. Their control of linguistics, history, and science. Their vast resources and their willingness to kill to protect them. No cell phones at meetings, batteries out. No transmission of sensitive materials over computers. No rosters or taking attendance. Don’t say loud and unnecessary things in cars, homes or public places. We believe in unity and only trust what we see with our own eyes. We submit every activity or endeavor to randomized control trials, we advocate and replicate things proven to work in three or more places. Do not allow the oligarchy to define the aims and aspirations of the movement. Do not allow traitors, spies and government agitators to breach your security. Do not make it easy for them to kill, imprison, harass and disappear members and sympathizers of the movement.
- [Besides killing people or destroying property]; EVERY AND ANY OTHER tactic may be actively deployed against the 206 national oligarchic collectives and their exploitative agents.
Members of the J1 Movement are strictly committed to militant nonviolence. Violence is counter to human rights. Counter to consciousness and proven to escalate all violations of rights when implemented. Members are completely prohibited from taking human lives or destroying property. Those we fight are monsters and we must refuse to degrade our noble struggle by succumbing to their vile methods.
Via sustained and strategic militant nonviolence and supply side resistance we shall hit them in their pockets. It is the only thing they care about. Hit their assets; their financial architecture; their banking systems; their media communications; their elite institutions; their leisure assets; their advertising and control systems; their supply chains; their work sites, the commercial centers of major cities; especially anything that encourages labor exploitation, slavery and human rights violations at the periphery. Prevent goods, commodities and energy resources to be easily carried back to the 26 nations of the global economic core.
- 7. Control over the means of development is the pathway to our freedom. The Resistance is founded on the world we build in front of us not upon the ashes of the Oligarchy. We are a movement founded on life and vibrancy. We are a teaching movement. We are a healing movement. A school and hospital building movement. A movement that places emancipatory development as the highest priority to activities and operations. We are therefore a teach 3.5 billion people how to fish movement. We are based among the people in all 206 national plantations that suffer most under the iron heel of oligarchy. The J1 Movement and those that support it believe the best offensive against corrupt rule is to demonstrate viable functional alternatives. The duty of each state is provide for needs, rights and human development. The illegitimacy of our oppressors is based upon the notion they protect us.
Vast abuses in all 206 plantation states demonstrate that these governments are wholly illegitimate. Rather than fight states we shall construct parallel ones and give our people true alternatives to bondage.
- Solidarity forever. Every single other human is your sister and your brother, as an injury to one is an injury to all; this movement and all its sympathizers, brigades, detachments, party groups, cells and affiliated sister groupings must keep the resistance disciplined and in the field until all 206 national oligarchies are completely defeated. Generation by generation; as long as this war must continue. Not one woman, man or child is to be left behind the lines.
Emancipatory Development
We would like to take this opportunity to summarize the primary tactical and philosophical lessons being drawn from our study of recent Social Movement Organizations (SMO). It is vital to those of us who view the Universal Human Rights as a mere baseline and hold the desire for real change coupled with full emancipation in our hearts; that we help dispel some mythologies and embrace a program fully in line with “emancipatory development”.
Emancipatory Development (ED) is the collective tactical blueprint by which the masses render the sources of their dependency obsolete, the violence of their oppressors is neutralized and they emerge with full human capability as well as the agency to uplift their fellow humans. There are four primary tactical sets of ED framework for resistance. First are the Development Technologies; the aspects and technocracy of infrastructure to both sustain life in austere environments but more importantly to achieve baseline control of the Maslow hierarchy of Needs. Post survival comes Mass Capacity Modules; this is didactic/practical expansion on life saving humanitarianism to begin cultivating vocation skills and livelihoods with dignity out of a recently oppressed, traumatized and impoverished populace. The third aspect is Militant Nonviolence or Peacefare; the 198+ tactics codified by the Albert Einstein intuition coupled with every advance in non-lethal warfare coupled strategically to dislodge the iron heel of the oligarchy off our collective neck.
That is to say, active and passive resistance maneuvers that refuse to take human life. Finally, the Parallel State the subject of this pamphlet; the ongoing effort to break apart the global plantation system into communities of choice and free association. Not by smashing the existing state architecture or engaging the agents of repression in the forests, hills and streets, instead by taking responsibility for our own development. We will achieve self-determination by dispelling the fallacy that we must pay government taxes to survive or that these governments act in our interest.
We will prove the legitimacy of solidarity, mutual aid and human agency.
The most nefarious victory of the “global elites” over the human masses was to remove the legitimacy of our vocabulary to speak of real change. To keep billions on the precipice of survival (3 billion plus living under $2.50 a family a day) requires a vast campaign of delegitimization and historical revisionism as well as vile and periodic atrocity. “Neoliberalism” and globalization itself are an exploitative construct to force an intellectual and tactical break between those fighting for freedom and those attending to the immediate Maslowian needs of billions of our poor. As if to disconnect acceptable from unacceptable change and sanitize the strategic action field of actors with a means to provide as they engage to resist. The poor are poor because of overt political decisions made to pre-determine their non-development. Hiding behind the veil of Human Rights is their open and acknowledged widespread violation. Behind the wool; the smoke screen of development is but a complex, vaguely sanitized version of colonialism. But neo-liberalism is only one school of thought in development. There are dozens of both drivel of crude reductive economists or utopian fallacies hiding the purpose of the architecture.
The purpose of the global Westphalian state system is not mere extractive servitude from periphery to center. It is also not purely about economics. It is not just about an elite group of ‘capitalists’ and ‘robber barons’ raping the earth and its people for a profit. It is not just about control over finite resources. Or some imagined a clash of civilizations.
It has everything to do with psychology.
Three billion poor are victims of an organized structural violence perpetrated by the economic elites of the traditional hegemon powers and each nation’s cabal of local oligarchs. But, as we prepare to wage wide scale Peacefare; as we prepare to organize and train for our total liberation we must attempt to articulate a Social Movement “ideology” that incorporates the lessons of the historic freedom struggle with the most cutting edge arsenal of anti-poverty development capabilities. But, that wouldn’t be enough to get “free”.
It would likely only unleash further holocaust.
“Emancipatory Development” is both an ideology and a tactical framework in the service and liberation of the poor. Those of us who are fighting for baseline Universal Human Rights and speak of real socio-political freedom must now embrace the tools of development cautiously as a supplemental mechanism to the tactics of nonviolent resistance.
Development means nothing unless it is emancipatory, egalitarian, and led by the people it serves. It must also rely on and invest in the capacity of the masses to be their own agents of delivery, progress, and victory over oppression. We must fully break from neo-colonialist controls, “poverty entrepreneurship”, and measure all our work by its value in national struggles for human liberation.
We have to question our own evolution. Our own awareness of the so-called “human condition”. Because we cannot see the soul in a normative sense and perhaps should call to question a deity that has so many prophets and so few deliverables; that is why development itself becomes for a now an issue of psychology; of waking up the dying and asleep.
The poor are so poor because they are victims of a global economic system. A system which breeds technocratic dependency on “aid”, whose structural adjustments gut social systems and place control of national resources in the hands of multinational corporations. It is easy to identify our primary targets. There is not a government on earth without some varying degree of culpability. “Development” however means absolutely nothing unless it is completely rooted in tangible victories of the poor over the sources of their poverty, the external and internal. We stake our legitimacy as a social movement on our ability to wed resistance fully with development.
To hit the nail on the head; we must utilize tactics that model the world we see in our hearts as well as the conduct. The parallel state is not built on the ashes of a burned out revolution. It is the piece meal adaptation of a new world’s values into incremental liberation. Territory has been shown to be worth far less than opened minds.
It should be a radical notion in light of thousands of years of carnage that we are actually capable of being rewired to collective care. That we are capable of achieving the rights and beyond without implementation form above.
Any overview of social movements begins with theory. Why they form and theories on their success or failure. Drawing from this I bring attention to the “Resource Mobilization Theory” which states that movements take preexisting organizations able to marshal resources of various types and their synergy yields movement success. Charles Tilly said that Social Movements are “sustained campaigns that make collective claims aimed at authorities” Sidney Tarrow called them: “collective challenges based on common purposes and social solidarities, in sustained interaction with elites, opponents and authorities.” What is clear from the recent mobilizations of Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, Brazil, Bulgaria, Thailand and the Ukraine is that mass mobilizations are most successful at resisting government repression when they can a) clearly articulate demands and b) mobilize the resources of pre-organized associations to sustain the movements operations and c) supplant the corrupt government as the primary agent of delivery of services ie; DEVELOPMENT. That failure of all of these movements so far, even ones that have brought down highly repressive governments in Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, and Ukraine is to have incorporated any development component that makes their confederation of SMOs, viable alternatives to the states they dismantle or assail.
The main reason the Black Panther Party and Nation Islam were the two greatest recent threats to the oligarchy of the United States was that they embraced bootstrap social services. Occupy did to some extent but they were suppressed in less than three months.
Referring to Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach; Mass Capacity is a social movement led development methodology that declares “human capability” most liberated via education on the skills and technologies human’s need to survive.
In Theory of Fields we read that “defection of economic elites is one of the most critical aspects to the success or failure of a social movement to seize power” They cite the Marcos regime in the Philippines in 1986 and the Somoza Regime in Nicaragua in 1979. There is a correlation between expanded social movement activity and expansion of state strategic action fields. Modern states are stronger by separating from economic and social bases, then forming alliances with the vital players of the major non-state fields. “Development” via the third (NGO) Sector and government aid is itself a strategic field to conquer. Social Movements for Emancipatory Development must in fact make mastery of development and delivery of services more of priority than resistance to regimes they oppose.
In fact we can clearly see that every single group of partisans that have taken up arms and challenged a violation of rights is either crushed in time; unleashes such carnage that their claims to be liberating anyone are suspect; and or take power and become exactly the as their oppressor. As has been the case is most of the existing parallel state.
In our case studies, we learn the obvious moral strength of non-violent resistance, economic boycott, and mobilization out of intuitions of cultural relevance. In both the cases of the American Civil Rights Movement and the Indian Independence Movement, we see the moral superiority and tactical relevance of non-violence. We read in these cases the necessity of harnessing economic buying power away from assets owned by your oppressors. We see that militarily it would have been disastrous for the Indian people to take up arms against England or the American Negro to fight the Federal government with arms (as the Black Panthers learned in 1968). Instead, both movements achieved considerable constitutional victory without arms. Yet looks at the millions of oppressed Dalit (untouchables) in India or the state of blacks in America. In modern day Syria we can see just how quickly a non-violent pro-democracy movement can devolve into a protracted war with nearly 200,000+ dead and a new Caliphate (ISIS) in Iraq and Syria systematically raping and exterminating all non-believers on their territory; a perversion of parallel state theory as we shall examine later in the pamphlet, albeit a type of one.
Never underestimate the violence unleashed combing greed, grievance and imagined identity. Never forget how many generations are later affected by the traumas of war.
In our studies of Liberation Theology, we examined the power of subverting traditional mechanism of reaction and repression into new social gospels for change. We identify the power seen in Latin America via the “little Church” and in Political Islam in the recent 2011 uprisings across the Middle East. Clearly, Zionism is profound example of utilizing a religious framework coupled with development technology for geo-political ends. As was the Islamic Revolution in Tehran in 1979; Revolutionary Shi’ism, and Hezbollah. It was used to topple the Duvalier dictatorship in Haiti. We fully advocate that the Movement continue to embrace the universal messages of justice found in the world’s religions as long as no aspect of the movement will seek to impose a singular religious norm over communities not of that religion. Liberation Theology is so subversive because it conquers one of the elites’ traditional main fields of social control. In the case studies a large chunk of the parallel state was liberated via various liberation theologian movements.
In our examination of Paulo Freire we analyze humanization/ dehumanization; internalization of oppression; and understanding of the elite as divided, uncompleted human beings. Isolation of the mind, disempowerment, and mental slavery was his diagnosis of the oppressed. He spoke of the “false generosity” of philanthropy. And of how the poor live in an “ahistorical world”; a completely deterministic world that they cannot escape of total resignation about their plight. He states that “liberation is painful like childbirth” and that only via the direct empowerment of the people can we achieve political rights or social freedom. In agreement with this philosophy and that of Amartya Sen in “Development as Freedom” Mass Capacity is different from “State Capacity”. The most vital tool of a movement for Emancipatory Development is direct investment in the education and technical training of the masses to develop their own communities as they collectively determine. The concept of mass capacity is vital to the success of our movement because only by achieving self-determination can a people enjoy rights, development or freedom.
In our readings on the anti-caste movement, we see the emancipatory power of abandoning imposed identity. We read about mass conversion for Hinduism to Buddhism. Forced to “act out one’s oppression” via the caste rituals millions are enslaved. Stopping the belief that you are inherently a slave goes back to Paulo Freire. Breaking ones “psychological isolation in an ahistorical world.” It would not be a strategic social movement position to oppose Hinduism, which is the foundation of the Indian State. The conversion of millions to Buddhism is profound example to the rejection of outsider imposed identities that allow class and ethnic exploitations. There is no cultural relativism to be respect to universal human rights, simply cultural paradigms that either can be understood and adopted (liberation theology) or rejected out of hand as the invention of an oppressor (Hutu/Tutsi).
In our cases on land reform of course we go back to the most fundamental question of movement; what is your turf? What is your territory? What is yours as people? To what extent do 206 governments built nearly all by historic rapes and expropriations have legitimacy to declare some land yours? I would argue that not one nation-state on earth has a legitimacy the masses should respect. This movement cannot be defeated if it is universal in demands and universal in expectations. It cannot regard one last repressive regime standing to be acceptable. It cannot abide one single person living in starvation as an acceptable norm. It cannot have national aims. The reality of nation state experiment is that in the guise of security, it usurped control and it build a global system where most of the species would be subjugated to the minority.
In our cases on resistance to Apartheid, we see that just because a social movement can take state power does not in any way make it able to wield political power to the end of economic empowerment for its poor. We think it should be clear to us that violent revolutions and non-violent revolutions do not improve the economic situation of countries poorest citizens, in fact protracted widespread violence via civil war comes after every violent revolution. The aim is not to improve the existing state system. We would argue that the primary aim of emancipatory development is to completely circumvent the state system and place tools directly in the hands of the people. It is historically clear that taking control of an instrument of mass coercion, i.e. the state; is not a successful means to use its power on the behalf of its citizens. It has historically only fostered a new predatory elite.
We are often confronted with the “apolitical northern generation” raised post-Cold War that do not have an “ideological” paradigm to view world events. It is quite likely that due to historical revisionism and the previously discussed sanitization of political vocabulary for change many young people in the West may actually believe that globalization is the face of progress. I would say frankly that little has changed since the days of colonialism except that direct rule has been replaced with proxy rule. I would go so far as to say that 3 billion poor and extreme poor, also means 3 or 4 million more pliable workers that can be utilized in the global supply chain. Except right now it is not necessary to mobilize 6 or 7 billion workers, half will suffice and the other may hover on the brink or ruin as a reserve. This is not about economics as much as it is about control because even in the hegemon and metropol nations there are percentages starving, percentages working nearly cradle to grave, and a tiny controlling elite. The fallacy of our entire “Development Enterprise” thus so far is to pretend, to trick ourselves in that the governments were acting in good faith. If Development is not an instrument of political power then it is simple charity. The poor do not need our manipulative carrots and their governments’ sticks. They are not empowered via your charity. We reject that dichotomy that aid is either politics or charity. It’s always politics. It’s got to stop being charity. We have to divest our development from states and put it squarely into people.
The slogan of our entire movement is simply to “teach a person to fish.”
With one arm of the movement we strike back at the violators of human rights and with the other we build up the global capacity, the ‘Mass Capacity’ of the people to secure their universal rights and more. This will not come from mobs in streets, from civil disobedience or rifles. We will bring our oppressors to their knees by illustrating their functional irrelevance. A free people can teach their children to read, tend to their people’s health, and operate the means of development needed by a community. Let it be clear. The liberation of a people comes not from the barrel of a gun but in via control of the means of development; the schools, the hospitals, the civil service, sanitation, and all other trades that by their nature promote self-determination and the public good. And any development practitioner that is not working to build that mass capacity; they are “poverty profiteer”, a “bright eyed idiot”, or worse a “dirty collaborator” perpetuating the system that keeps so many destitute.
We came here to unite a movement hiding in the shadows and fighting for survival in the streets. We know that in every slum, in every city, in the mountains, deserts, woods and rural interior are partisans holding out, fighting disconnected in the darkness. We know in every NGO and CBO, even in elected office are those who still believe in real change but are shackled by politics. We must connect the underground, to the partisans to the sympathizers; to the change makers in the halls of power.
Above all we will rely on indigenous knowledge and empower the people. It is our goal to open the lines of communication. You are not fighting alone.
Baseline Human Nature
Baseline Human Needs
Physiological needs
These pertain to basic physical requirements for human survival. Biological failure is the result of this type of physiological deprivation. These needs must obviously be met first. We need air to breathe. We need water and food for their metabolic requirements. We need clothing and shelter to protect us from the elements. We need to have sex to continue the species.
Safety Needs
With satisfaction of physical needs come those associated with well-being. These pertain to individual and collective safety. Absence of such can be the result of crime, domestic violence & abuse, war, and natural disaster. People may experience post-traumatic stress from prior trauma or trans-generational trauma from a historic event. We need to be safe. From violence, humiliation, hardship, threat and also imagined threat. Threats that are tangible in the future as well as those that occurred to our parents or past generations. We to be safe economically. We need to have jobs or sources of income that allow us a livelihood. We need to keep our bodies from illness and injury. We need to be healthy. We need to feel well mentally.
Love and Belonging Needs
We need friendship, intimacy and family. We need to feel loved accepted within in a family, group or community. We need belongingness, community and inclusion.
Esteem Needs
We need to feel respected. We need self-respect. The first is lower level need, the second a higher because self-respect achievement is cultivated while feelings of being respected are based on external perceptions.
Self-Actualization Needs
We need to fulfill our human capability and potential. This is this a highly subjective need which is the true gateway to conscious thinking and belief in entitlement to rights. According to Maslow this realization required the full mastery of the previous four levels of needs. It is the Sen articulated unleashing of full human capability.
If these needs are not met, and for the bulk of humanity there are not; then people are walking wounded. And as far as empathy and solidarity they are mostly dead. If self-actualization is stunted. If people never are, what they could be. Well then they are incapable of concentrating on the rights they were bestowed long ago by governments. They cannot effectively achieve conscious thinking; of class or enlightenment. They are the walking dead, crippled and self-crippling as a species. Without meeting needs there cannot ever be achievement of rights. But one does not come before the other.
In Haiti these are a myriad of mythological creatures that live in the darkness of the forested mountain night; one such is the zombie. In as far as such legend goes the zombie is a reanimated corpse. A broken and beaten recently murdered person brought back to life. The zombie is enthralled by a master to work endlessly, tirelessly for nothing. Only a taste of salt can wake up the zombie of Haitian folklore. I am afraid to say that in general terms of needs most of humanity lumbers and grinds through a short half-life, half their physiological potential and then dies ingloriously and often anonymously.
In a sense the fulfillment of needs we are allegorically speaking of the salt. Once self-actualization is made possible, once solidarity is capable of being felt; then we move quickly from needs to rights. This according to Maslow was called Self-Transcendence; or in movement parlance; solidarity.
Baseline Human Rights Demands
These are the 30 sets of Universal Human Rights identified in the UDHR ratified on December 10th, 1948. We are guaranteed all of these first generation rights as well as hundreds of second and third generation rights contained with 9 separate Human Rights treaties issued and ratified between 1945 and the present day (totaling 58 identified legally binding rights). After the 1966 dual ratifications of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) over 160 Nations have signed each primary covenant. If any of the following rights have not been granted to you, your regional or national government is in violation of international law. Please request the technical assistance your community requires for development and resistance to human rights violations. Or more specifically; the training.
- We are all born free and equal.
- No government or party may discriminate us in relation to these rights.
- We have a right to life, liberty and security.
- No government or party may make us their slave.
- No government or party may utilize torture against us.
- We have a right to due process.
- We have a right to equality before the law.
- We have a right to competent and impartial judiciary system.
- No government or party may imprison or subject us to indefinite detention
- We have a right to fair and public trial by a jury of our peers.
- We have a right in trial to presumption of innocence.
- We have a right to privacy.
- We have the right to freely move between communities and nations.
- We have the right to asylum when governments or other parties violate these rights.
- We all have the right to belong to a nationality of our choosing.
- We are entitled to special protections for non-compulsive marriage and protection of the family unit.
- We have right to private property owned alone or in conjunction with others.
- We have a right to freedom of thought and belief.
- We have a right to freedom of speech.
- We have a right to free association and non-violent demonstration.
- We have a right to select our leaders, develop civil society and participate in a functional democracy.
- We have the right to social security which includes affordable housing, health care, education, child care, and welfare for the elderly, ill or destitute poor.
- We have workers’ rights which include right to work, right to a living wage, and the right to join a trade union.
- We have a right to Rest and Leisure.
- We have a right to Adequate Living Standards.
- We have the right to an Education.
- We have the right to contribute and benefit from the culture of our societies and benefit from artistic and scientific advancements.
- We have the right to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.
- We have the right to community development in conjunction and respect to all other humans.
- No government or party may take away these rights and freedoms from us.
These are the 58 extrapolated rights of the nine core treaties.
1 Non-discrimination
2 Life
3 Liberty and security of the person
4 Protection against slavery and servitude
5 Protection against torture
6 Legal personality
7 Equal protection of the law
8 Legal remedy
9 Protection against arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile
10 Access to independent and impartial tribunal
11 Presumption of innocence
12 Protection against ex post facto laws
13 Privacy, family, home and correspondence
14 Freedom of movement and residence
15 Nationality
16 Marry and found a family
17 Protection and assistance of families
18 Marriage only with free consent of spouses
19 Equal rights of men and women in marriage
20 Freedom of thought, conscience and religion
21 Freedom of opinion and expression
22 Freedom of the press
23 Freedom of assembly
24 Freedom of association
25 Participation in government
26 Social security
27 Work
28 No compulsory or forced labor
29 Just and favorable conditions of work
30 Trade unions
31 Rest, leisure and paid holidays
32 Adequate standard of living
33 Education
34 Participation in cultural life
35 Self-determination
36 Protection of and assistance to children
37 Freedom from hunger
38 Health
39 Asylum
40 Property
41 Compulsory primary education
42 Humane treatment when deprived of liberty
43 Protection against imprisonment for debt
44 Expulsion of aliens only by law
45 Prohibition of war propaganda and incitement to discrimination
46 Minority culture
47 No imprisonment for breach of civil obligations
48 Protection of children
49 Access to public service
50 Democracy
51 Participation in cultural and scientific life
52 Protection of intellectual property rights
53 International and social order for realizing rights
54 Political self-determination
55 Economic self-determination
56 Women’s rights
57 Prohibition of the death penalty
58 Prohibition of apartheid
Human Rights Indicators
The most divisive problem facing the respective fields of peace building, development, humanitarian aid and human rights advocacy today is the total lack of agreement as to what drives the source of violent conflict & mass poverty.
Somewhere between the Washington Consensus and Chinese foreign policy are some valid and unrecognized middle pathways that circumvents power in delivery of capability to the wretched of the earth. Neither the free market nor the command economy have provenly brought security and opportunity to the global poor. But had something succeeded could we have even really measured it?
The second major problem is that we have no agreed to means of measuring the effectiveness of our efforts. We have vehement suggestions, but no common agreed to set of indicators either economic/rights-based/or peace-promoting that have been adopted across the four humanitarian sectors in question. And of course there is no current way to coerce or incentivize mandatory, objective monitoring and evaluation to see if our operations are even effective at either alleviating poverty or preventing war. We are in short at both a crisis of ethics and meaningful qualification of our effort’s collective results.
Find us one actual human rights respecting democracy on this earth to negotiate with or proposition for aid dollars. Perhaps you tell us the name of some Northern European country and we will still assert that democracy means more than free press, two parties and stability. We will tell you that all these international frameworks and all these high minded conferences are ultimately funded by hegemon powers which do more to “aid violence” and violate rights than any developing nation dictatorship or military junta; simply by scale of hegemony. If it is from these hegemons and corporate behemoths that we draw our payrolls, budgets and form projects that are acceptable to the whims of the donor or calculations of the government supporter then we are immediately subjected to produce politically useful products. Can a peacemaker draw his or her salary granted by an engine of violation? How does one even clearly say that come humanitarian good has been achieved? What makes a thing sustainable and by whose methodology of ranking?
Universal indicators should be developed and applied across many different conflict contexts.
We are in a business, and to use banal language, our business is poverty alleviation/ violence reduction-mitigation. We require a means to gauge return on investment. Because anything besides that calculation is called ideology, politics, idealism or assertions of universal paradigms that cannot be proven. We must focus on tangible measurements guided by just & universal principles. Not ideas that have no basis valid in reality.
The various practitioners of “humanitarianism” increasingly take the language and approach of running a small to medium sized racket in a booming poverty business. They cloak any unpalatable indictments of the nation state system in a self-serving “nativity of politics”. They balance almost psychotically the bipoles of “doing no harm” without “aiding violence”, which is to say for the most part accepting the “realities” in which they operate. The business acumen that this fosters within our four sectors brings the need to be more cost effective; to apply logical frameworks of results based management, or to apply M&E to appease donors.
To be fully accountable.
Universal indicators if imposed across the board on NGOs, corporations and governments could make the game quite interesting. Let’s think about the state in play as is. One attempts to measure development based on the new (2010) human development index; life expectancy at birth, mean years of schooling/ expected years of schooling and the GNI per capita. One mostly measures human rights based on degree of violation. One tries to think that their aid is “conflict sensitive”. One attempts to measure peace using a variety of indicators demonstrating non-violence or perceived inter-communal cooperation. But as we know peace is not an absence of war, human development is highly, highly subjective and human rights is still a noble rhetoric not an enforceable legal framework. It is time to tie all these sectors into at the very least a common operating language and since human rights is such an adequate paradigm this is how we must measure our work. They provide civil, political, economic, social and cultural measurements for human progress. The means to aggregate and analyze big data is obviously available.
What would be some of the strengths and weaknesses of using universal indicators?
Human rights indicators rank our institutions and initiatives in (58) disaggregated categories. You can apply them to conflict mitigation as a well as a small scale literacy program. Both corporations and governments are now at work to use this language in their frameworks. “Corporate Social Responsibility” and United Nations programs desire a system that allows them to show their donor dollars matter. Too much of the current development enterprise fixates on Social Entrepreneurship. Microfinance, Ecotourism, “livelihoods”, “small and medium enterprises” and the creation of jobs. Are we in essence in the profession of indirectly profiting off the poor? “There is no money in this line of work” so we attract visionless people myopically focused on a symptom of poverty, a region of concern and not the disease itself or more important the pathology of poverty. Which runs from state and corporate impacts. Impacts which persistently imperil rights, development and peace in the name of a) national interest and b) profit.
The greatest weakness of universal indicators is that if they are adopted in a way that allows gross subjectivity; prevents outsider monitoring and evaluation; if they focus on partial rights (progressive realization), or a narrow concern set (MDGs); worst if they are selectively applied then they will mean nothing. The greatest strength of universal indicators, using Human Rights Based Indicators, is that they frontload rights and politics back into peacemaking, development and aid delivery. In essence reasserting the completely political nature of this field. We will in essence replace “do no harm” with “was a solid measurable good achieved?” And equally important to DME using human rights is M&E of institutions, governments included, that politically/economically negate and undermine the most noble of efforts to advance humanity. There must be one set of indicator standards. Universal rights touch on each and every aspect of the human condition and can be quantified. There is for instance a right to an education. There is a framework for how to apply it. We can therefore deduce a universal indicator by a) identifying the individual right and b) applying the AAAQ minimum obligation criteria; measuring availability of schools (#), measuring access to schools (enrollments), measuring acceptability of school to their communities (survey data), and the quality of education given (survey data, grad stats, post school employment stats). It will be difficult, contentious and potentially expensive to turn (58) rights into indicators. It will be highly contentious to impose this complex indicator standard across countries and sectors. There is a right to life, education and employment (the HDI indicators) but all 55 additional rights must be factored in too. Because these rankings when taken into account will tell us who by action or inaction is causing peace and prosperity and who is causing misery, poverty and war.
Peace is not an absence of war. But all of the human rights guarantees and their advancement will remove primary drivers of war and poverty. If we can adequately measure the rights as qualitative/quantitative variables and see what institutional impacts and actions drive them then we can see how peace and prosperity is generated, and what parties sabotage both. The factors that exacerbate violent conflict are truly to be found in the systems and intuitions that deny or violate rights.
Who should develop these?
Radical as it may seem, the poor actually do in fact know what they need and are willing to tell us. Technology allows us to analyze big data quickly and more importantly allows us to crowd sourced polls, open source indicator inputs, and rapidly coordinate collection and cross checking of data. When we use HDI for development, and separate sets of partial indicators for peace building, aid delivery, or capacity building we are doing a great disservice to humanity. We are measuring the same suffering in incomplete and redundant ways. Once some basic rights based indicator guidelines are agreed to as the means to monitor, they ought to be placed in the hands of those we are claiming to serve.
The world does not need more technocrats or grand conferences. It needs broad solicitation of indicator based human rights data coming from the people themselves. The United Nations is fine platform to introduce the measurement system, as is the field of M&E generally, but we cannot realistically expect such a massive indicator shift to happen top down and quickly. It should be imposed bottom up.
We believe it to be a historically objective reality that the policies of Europeans toward the rest of the world are directly and completely to blame for the current state of global underdevelopment which seems established in nearly every former colony. That these same states would now dictate economic terms to others, dictate rights obligations to those they always violated or continue to, and hide exploitation under other names is a triple offense.
Peace building has proven little more than violence cessation/ mitigation. And these are not truly different “sectors” but instead “humanitarian approaches”. There are no human rights a nation is legally enforced to respect. There is no peace process that has done more but freeze a conflict in place. Development seems most suited to getting the ground ready for neo-colonialism; that is to say a hegemon power laying claim and ownership over the resources of an under developed country.
There is crisis of conscience that is eating away at us and the intentions of our seemingly honorable fields. There is both a programmatic realization of the inadequacy of our tactics and there is a bankruptcy of ideology that subsumed by neo-liberalism white washing and enables structural violence by blurring the lines of blame and causality.
We once asked an epidemiologist what is the leading killer of the poor in Sub-Saharan Africa and she responded that the disease in question was poverty itself. I then asked her what was to blame for this poverty most immediately and she replied that it was “corruption and government negligence and international complicity”. But she explained that for every corrupt military regime or personality cult was a great power foreign backer and whether that backer was a European, an American, Chinese or Russian it was never a question of so-called human rights, just aid in exchange for resource access and geostrategic loyalties.
At the heart of this void lies the true lack of a unifying paradigm useful in monitoring and evaluation of a globally interconnected system. A uniform tactical adherence to human rights indicator based DME must become the accepted norm. A big tent approach is inherently necessary because competing theories of change, tactical frameworks, ideological drivers, political realities and competing bases of funding generates anarchy in approach and thus stagnation of progress.
Perhaps for most development practitioners and peace negotiators doing no harm is as good as they think things can get, but there violence in that thinking! For if we measure our works in rights achieved instead of markets improved we can claim in honesty that “development is a means to freedom.” But, if we view one vocabulary, one set of indicators, one language of measurement as a threat then we cannot effect the unreasonable “realty” of system at war with its inhabitants. And we should acknowledge the madness of measuring a thing only by small elements of its parts.
Mutual Aid
The state system maintains power through two very influential and coercive mediums. One is through abject and brutal repression of popular dissent, or via a soft cage of hyperdevelopment buy off and welfare. The other, no less insidious, is propagation of the belief that human nature is greedy self-interest at best and violent animal behavior at worst. When weighed against each other it may seem to the affected party that death or imprisonment are by far the more repressive of these two means. This however is a very concrete repression that can be measured, fought, and understood as tyranny. State tyranny of this kind only serves the process of creating martyrs and temporarily combating a movement. The second kind is in all ways more effective. Instead of killing a political leftist dissident, you instead teach their children that their parent’s beliefs are not compatible with human nature. Once the ideology, be it a socialist or anarchist strand, is taught to be incompatible; its proponents are easily written off as dreamers, idealists, or radicals. Perhaps, the most important revolutionary battle is in fact for control of knowledge of the past. In so far as the state is capable of creating a picture of human nature in its image and reducing just precedent to leftist misinformation; they have won the battle before it has begun. There are however people that expound the theory that the human kind is guided not by selfish, hedonistic notions of self-preservation; but instead guided on the basis of mutual aid. This paper will reflect on the work of Peter Kropotkin offering an analysis of mutual aid and a discussion of its applicability in western industrialized society.
The dominant school of thought is that a species develops through competition. Darwin laid down a biological principle that would find a receptive ear among social theorists wishing to explain the inequity of rich and poor. Darwin would describe a species refining itself through competition causing the strong to multiply and the weak to die out. The social-Darwinist would attribute poverty to those possessing a weak work ethic and support the claim that the rich were in fact clever and industrious[39]. Kropotkin offered another diagnosis of human progress.
Kropotkin wrote that progress was measured by a species’ ability to combine for the greater benefit of the species. He called this instinct, which he believed to be present in both the evolution of humans and animals, mutual aid; the ability of a species to unite in solidarity and work for the collective progress of their kind.
“I was persuaded that to admit a pitiless inner war for life within each species, and to see in that war a condition of progress, was to admit something which not only had not yet been proved, but also lacked confirmation from direct observation.[40]” Beginning with a study of mutual aid among animals and then a detailed case study of human historical periods; Kropotkin advanced the concept that mutual aid, not competition, was the factor that governed progress.
In Mutual Aid Among Animals Kropotkin observed that among numerous species; those with the inclinations of sociability and combination were surer to survive. Referring to the studies conducted by Forel, Kropotkin notes the following: “If we take an ants nest, we not only see that every description of work- rearing of progeny, foraging, building, rearing of aphids, and so on- is performed according to principles of voluntary mutual aid; we must also recognize…that the fundamental feature of life of many species of ants is the fact that and the obligation for every ant of sharing food…with every member of the community…[41]” Among ants Kropotkin notes that despite inferior size and strength their mutual strength enables them to overpower most other insects. “Even the swiftest insects cannot escape, and Forel often saw butterflies, gnats, and flies, and so on, surprised and killed by ants. Their force is in mutual support and confidence[42].”
Kropotkin continues his study with birds. Studying patterns of migration and association his theory continues with a higher order species. Sparrows, he notes, upon finding food, communicate its location to others of their kind. Ducks and kites use their strength in numbers to protect themselves from stronger predators in the animal kingdom. “Hunting and feeding in common is so much the habit in the feathered world that more quotations hardly would be needful: it must be considered as an established fact. As to the force derived from such associations; it is self-evident. The strongest birds of prey are powerless in the face of the associations of our smallest bird pets.[43]” Migration patterns also lead to the conclusion that by combining their numbers in travel they will be safer as a group.
Moving on to mammals, Kropotkin concentrates his study on sociability; the desire to be amongst each other for more than survival. Dismissing the idea that mutual aid exists solely for the premise of mutual defense the study now examines the factor of mutual aid that makes us desire each others company. “It is hardly needful to say that those mammals, which stand at the very top of the animal world and approach man by their structure and intelligence, are eminently sociable…all things considered, it must be said that sociability, action in common, mutual protection, and a high development of those feelings which are the necessary outcome of social life, are characteristic of most monkeys and apes.[44]” From the monkey to the antelope herd, the evidence of mutual aid is present. While not seeking to disprove Darwin, Kropotkin notes repeatedly that within a species natural selection works its course along side the principle interaction of mutual aid. It is not that the weaker elements of a species won’t die out; mutual aid is a complement theory stating that in terms of interactions among the species there is nature’s effects and there are the inter relations between a group of animals. “Therefore, while fully admitting that force, swiftness, protective colors, cunningness, and endurance to hunger and cold, which are mentioned by Darwin and Wallace, are so many qualities making the individual, or the species, the fittest under circumstances, we maintain that under any circumstances sociability is the greatest advantage in the struggle for life. Those species willing to abandon it are doomed to decay, while those animals which know best how to combine, have the greatest chances of survival and of further evolution.[45]”
His accounts of the animal kingdom are far reaching covering examples among insects, birds, fish, and mammals. Backed up by the leading zoological studies of his time Kropotkin finds two underlying traits that exist among the dominant animal species. The first is that cooperation strengthens any grouping of animals and that through this a physically weaker species can thrive. The second is that sociability is a common trait among animals and that there is an inclination among them to enjoy each others company. Before moving into the realm of human kind we are left with a summary of the central thesis; “Don’t compete!-competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it! That is the tendency of nature, not always realized in full, but always present. That is the watchword which comes to us from the bush, the forest, the river, the ocean. Therefore combine and practice mutual aid![46]”
Before moving onto humans the writer would like to offer an analysis. While the surveys done in Kropotkin’s time indicate that mutual aid is a present instinct; to what level is it intrinsic and to what level is it taught? Do birds migrate in a flock because they have learned it is safer or because inherently they move to be of use to their kind? Kropotkin seems to embrace a dual tendency. On the one hand he argues that most thriving species are inclined to mutual aid; but there are examples of those that reject it. It seems that a species will embrace mutual aid if it is beneficial and the sociability is a secondary aspect. As we will see with mutual aid among humans (the most highly developed of all animals); when mutual aid is beneficial it is embraced and when opportunity allows is abandoned. Would a bird need the flock if it could individually kill its prey and protect itself? Through a wealth of proof Kropotkin illustrates the trend among animals; we will now explore its functional basis among humans.
In Mutual Aid Among Savages we begin to look at the human race in its primordial beginnings. The savage tribe is our earliest form of mutual aid among humans; groupings of people nomadically working together for common defense and survival. This state described by Kropotkin is in essence what classical liberals and early political scientists described as the state of nature. Unified originally under what Kropotkin labels the gens; or immediate family; the gens evolved into a clan of several families that adhered to common codes of social understanding. These codes as an initial example separate savage man from the mere brute described by Hobbes. With no conceptions of private property or codified statements of clan law; the savages instinctively banned together for mutual aid. “The very persistence of the clan organization shows how utterly false it is to represent primitive mankind as a disorderly agglomeration of individuals, who only obey their individual passions, and take advantage of their personal force and cunningness against all other representatives of their species. Unbridled individualism is a modern growth, but it is not characteristic of primitive mankind.[47]”
The Hobbesian analysis of so called human nature is but a justification of tyranny. If we as humans are supposedly inclined to make any “state of nature” a “state of war”[48], then his suggestion of authoritarian rule is made to seem preferable. As the original author of today’s great societal justification; it is his writings that must be analyzed and disproved.
Hobbes was writing for the benefit of the kings while Kropotkin was writing for the benefit of the masses. To build upon this alternative state of nature Kropotkin illustrated modern living examples of savage social organization. One of his main examples pertains to the Hottentots of South Africa. Kropotkin quotes the studies of Kolben in his description of the Hottentots; “Their word is sacred. They know nothing of the corruption and faithless arts of Europe. They live in great tranquility and are seldom at war their neighbors. They are all kindness and goodwill to one another…The integrity of the Hottentots, their strictness and celerity in the exercise of justice, and their chastity, are things in which they excel all or most nations of the world.[49]” His other studies find a similar pattern of life and relations among the Eskimos, the Australian Bushmen, and the Papuas in Guinea. These last vestiges of so called savage society served as living proofs of a time before capitalism and state manufactured human nature.
What emerges from these examples is a picture of how we were before the advent of private property and capitalism. Even the idealized analysis offered by Rousseau does not seem substantiated in what is proved through Kropotkin’s research. Breaking from the Hobbesian modal Rousseau describes the state of nature as antisocial and self-interested. While he admits pity and compassion as attributes of the original humans; he denies their sociability[50]; they are instead the “noble savage”. The social factor is crucial in the proof of mutual aid. It is not enough that societies emerge for mutual protection or gain. What is crucial to understanding this ideology is that we inherently desire to be of use to each other not out of sought reciprocity but simply out an understanding that solidarity is beneficial to the species. “The savage is not an ideal of virtue, nor is he an ideal of “savagery”. But the primitive man has one quality, elaborated and maintained by the very necessities of his hard struggle for life-he identifies his own existence with that of his tribe; and without that quality mankind never would have attained the level it has attained now.[51]”
Were we to thus establish mutual aid as a basis for human nature, we must then analyze what becomes of mutual aid when man is introduced to private property, capitalism, and competition. This brings us to Mutual Aid Among Barbarians.
Rousseau refers to this transformation in his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality. He talks about an original act of great trickery in which the few consolidated their property by instituting civil society and codifying their gains [52]. This great deception; this establishment of private property; the impacts of this development have not been lost on us today. It will not be said that this happened in one grand moment where the forces of injustice were unleashed in a single conspiracy. Instead; over time through circumstance and opportunism; humankind developed private property; original theft[53]. Proudon described property as theft because in essence the allocation and division of an originally shared resource could only lead to accumulations of wealth and therefore poverty. Something had to happen to enable this need to set boundaries and demarcate territory. The concept of personal property did not develop in a vacuum.
Kropotkin attributes this development to the rise of the village community. As a unit itself the village community fully embraced mutual aid; but as sedentary populations arose and people began to concentrate in villages and towns, the advent of private property began to develop. After the barbarian migrations from Asia into the territory of Europe; we find the mutual aid tradition playing out alongside the development of a new social trend; accumulation of private wealth. The barbarians adopted their notions of property from the empire they had just succeeded in conquering. “Private property, or possession “forever” was as incompatible with the very principles and the religious conceptions of the village community as it was with the principles of the gens; so that a long influence of Roman law and the Christian church which soon accepted the Roman principles, were required to accustom the barbarians to the idea of private property in land being possible.[54]” A combination of factors was to contribute to and corrupt the mutual aid relationships of the village community simultaneously. Inheriting the notion of private property from the Roman Empire whose ruins they had settled in, the barbarians began to evolve socially. Their settlement into village communities allowed individuals to amass material goods and lay claim to actual territory. While mutual aid would form the basis of their interactions; among the village community grew a new found distinction; haves and have-nots. This development was crucial. Out of it would arise the rationale for the modern state. Entire superstructures would be erected around the desire to protect private property, yet despite this; mutual aid remained a basis for interaction, albeit a continuously weakened one. Parallel to the rise of the nation state there existed, and continue to exist, village community modals living entirely without the notion of personal wealth.
Kropotkin moves on to describe Mutual Aid in the Medieval City. And from the rise of private property came the development of class. The village community and its self administration soon came under the yoke of feudalism. “They have shown how populations, once free, and simply agreeing “to feed” a certain portion of their military defenders, gradually became the serfs of these protectors; how “commendation” to the Church, or to a lord, became a hard necessity for the freeman; how each lord’s and bishop’s castle became a robber’s nest-how feudalism was imposed, in a word.[55]”This new class of nobles was founded on the backs of the common man. They were fooled into believing their security would come from their subservience and in doing so they solidified the ranks of the privileged class. This however would not destroy the instinct towards mutual aid.
“It is well known by this time that feudalism did not imply a dissolution of the village community. Although the lord had succeeded in imposing servile labor upon the peasants, and had appropriated for himself such rights as were formally vested in the village community alone (taxes, mortmain, duties on inheritance and marriages), the peasants had, nevertheless, maintained the two fundamental rights of their communities: the common possession of the land, and self-jurisdiction.[56]” Stripped of so much, these two remaining liberties enabled the mutual structure to survive intact although it had been changed from an inherent instinct to a tendency. So convinced were the new peasant class of their dependence on the lords that they toiled in servitude everyday less exposed to the mutual aid mentality. But a movement grew out of the institutions that remained; a movement to throw out the nobles and retain greater autonomy. The villages were fortified and the medieval city was born.
Before we continue to track the progression of mutual aid according to Kropotkin need to look at its hitherto development. When applied to humans, each time a serious change in the superstructure of society occurs mutual aid lessens as a mainstream instinct asserting itself more and more as what this writer had previously called; a tendency. With each societal grouping humans have greatly increased the size of their associations and the division between haves and have-nots has ever increased. The mutual aid tendency never entirely departs; instead it translates itself into a free association responding to the ever growing repression resulting from the development of the state. The state and mutual aid are basically incompatible because the state is a coercive entity. Mutual aid cannot function in an environment based around maintaining class privilege. The object of mutual aid is to voluntarily participate in solidarity, while the object of the state is to forcibly compel its citizens to conform and obey the laws. The rise of state power forces us to take on a certain self-interest that alienates us from our fellow man negating the real interaction of pure mutual aid. If the manifestations of the society are inclined to steer us away from our true nature, then mutual aid from that point must assert itself as a protest ideology serving as either an alternative or an act of rebellion.
The medieval city was initially an act of rebellion against feudalism, but soon kings would consolidate power and impose the same brutal restrictions that the peasants had fought against in their village communities. Mutual aid persisted through the guilds; trade associations designed to build solidarity around a skill. This transformation is proof of mutual aids redefinition. Rather than the means by which to run a society, the guilds practiced mutual aid parallel to the rise of state power. The guilds represented mutual aid as an alternative to trade infighting and competition. Like every period before it, mutual aid asserted itself in human affairs. Society would more and more promote individualist self interest or worse; the Hobbesian theses, but in the end some manifestation of mutual aid would always appear. It was as if despite the best efforts of the state to fool us into accepting our “true nature”, they could never conquer the indomitable human desire to help their fellow man. “It flows still even now, and it seeks its way to find out a new expression which would not be the state, nor the medieval city, nor the village community of the barbarians, nor the savage clan, but would proceed from all of them, and yet be superior to them in its wider and more deeply humane conceptions.[57]”
And finally we come to Mutual Aid Among Ourselves. We see mutual aid as a developed
protest movement among the syndicalist movement. We see it among the working class and the poor in their community organizations and social movements. “For every one who has any idea of the life of the laboring classes it is evident that without mutual aid being practiced among them on a large scale they never could pull through all their difficulties.[58]” Mutual aid emerges among those that the system fails or exploits because it is a return to a more benevolent type of interaction. The wool pulled over our eyes to teach hedonism, distrust, and competition blinds many; but daily more and more break with the values of their society and return to the ideas of mutual aid. However; those that make the argument that mutual aid is incompatible with the current state of affairs could not be more correct. It is the sheer contradiction that makes it attractive to the dissident and the oppressed. The capitalist state generates a human condition constructed in its image and those that suffer under that system strive not only to recreate political structures, but social ones as well.
There is a direct correlation between a capitalist mode of production and its corresponding superstructure. Not only are the masses exploited; they are convinced of their inability to seriously better themselves outside of an individualist bootstrap survivalism. If the state is to survive with such glaring material contradictions of rich and poor intact; it must justify itself with an appeal to the masses to accept the so called reality of human nature. The reconstruction of the political apparatus directly corresponds with the restructuring of our social interactions.
As a tendency, mutual aid is both a symbol of human solidarity and a rejection of the modern human condition. Constructively it is a model for protest formations and social alternatives, as well as a basis for egalitarian society. If human nature is in fact subjective to the society, existing as more of a condition then as a permanent state; than those of us that yearn for a society based on justice must embrace mutual aid not just as a tendency, but as a holistic basis for social interaction. “In short, neither the crushing powers of the centralized State nor the teachings of mutual hatred and pitiless struggle which came, adorned with the attributes of science, from obliging philosophers and sociologists, could weed out the feeling of human solidarity, deeply lodged in men’s understanding and heart, because it has been nurtured by all our proceeding evolution.[59] To reclaim our people’s history as defined by Kropotkin is the initial step, but embracing mutual aid is the vehicle on the road to revolution.
Free Association
Free Association is a political & social philosophy that multiplies the work of mutual aid into a societal level. Rather than be born into a nation and forced to pay taxes to government; the concept of free association is that communities will organize their economic, social and cultural frameworks as they see for based on Mutual Aid Agreements, free Association and Consensus.
(Upcoming)
Solidarity
Solidarity is the highest human need projected into works and projects, feats of bravery and deeds on behalf of their fellow humans. There is not one woman or man in the ranks of the Resistance that is not guided by the principle of Solidarity forever; the old IWW battle call that makes our struggle both inter-generational and international. It is the understanding truly that one should want for a stranger what they want for themselves (Al Qur’an) and that an injury to one, is an injury to all (IWW).
Internationalists
Internationalism is a world view that values cultural difference and eventuates human unity. Internationalists do not ascribe to nations and nationalisms but instead embrace the humanitarian imperative to challenge injustice and violations of human well-being and rights across the globe.
PART 7: The Blue Print
DEVELOPMENT
PLANNERS & PRACTIONERS
OFFICE & FIELD
WHAT IS A VOLUNTEER
WHAT ARE PROJECTS
WHAT IS INDIGENOUS NEED
WHAT IS INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE
WHAT IS FREE ASSOCIATION
WHAT IS PARTICAPTORY DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS DEVELOPMENT TECHNOLOGY
WHAT IS MICROFINANCE
WHAT ARE MASS CAPACITY MODULES
WHAT ARE THE MODULES
WHAT IS A PARAPROFESSIONAL PROGRAM
WHAT ARE EMERGENCY GROUPS
WHAT IS TIME BANK INCENTIVIZATION
WHAT ARE RCTs
WHAT IS DIASPORA MOBILIATION
WHAT IS A LABOR LEGION
WHAT IS A TRADE UNION
WHAT IS SELF RELIANCE
WHAT IS SOCIAL ENTERPRISE
WHAT IS SOCIALIST ENTERPRISE
WHAT ARE CIVIL SERVICE ENTERPRISES
WHAT ARE SUGGESTED PROJECTS
WHAT ARE SUGGESTED PROGRAMS
WHAT ARE SUGGESTED POLICIES
EASTERN DEVELOPMENT
SOUTHERN DEVELOPMENT
WHAT IS THE PARALLEL STATE
Development Theory
What if a crime of enormous magnitude was being carried out in the most sanctimonious and white washed paradigm imaginable? Perhaps in the name of social justice, gender equity, human rights and democracy. A great and unnatural pillage of humanity and planetary resources being carried out as a civilizing, modernizing mission. Preceding at such an alarming rate that 5 in 7 humans were as of 2015ce reduced to varying degrees of miserable serfdom and the climate itself was being altered, rendering the ecosystem hostile to life. What if an international web of small clustered elites were via their accumulation of wealth concentrated in several developed nations. And these elites we able to not only shape the dominant socio-political discourse; they were able to carry out their expropriation by calling it “development.”
The Development Enterprise as we understand it began after the Second World War with the 1948 implementation of the Marshal Plan[60]. The intention of this far-reaching US Aid investment was to keep war-ravaged Western Europe from being absorbed into the Soviet sphere. Development subsequently evolved into a far more expansive international architecture. Its newly stated intention within the Cold War context was to modernize & industrialize the former colonial, third world and later the Post-Soviet nations. Packages of civilian and military aid were coupled with technical assistance. Non-governmental organizations proliferated generally around poverty alleviation and cause specific programs. The United Nations ratified a wide range of human rights instruments as rapidly escalating armed conflicts accelerated in almost every nation in the developing world. By 2014, there have been 15 confirmed acts of Genocide by International Law since 1945, 37 total if you include acts of democide (Rummel, 1998). Environmental degradation has resulted in expanding disastrous climate change (Nordhaus, 2013). There are over three billion human beings living at or below $2.50 a family a day that are worth as much in their collective assets as the top 83 richest people on earth (Oxfam, 2014). It is believed that over 29.8 million people still live in chattel slavery (Global Slavery Index, 2013). That number might expand tenfold were we to incorporate low paid, race to the bottom type assembly plants and bonded labor. While the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals have supposedly ‘halved global extreme poverty’, ‘doubled human access to clean water’ and ‘halted new infection with HIV-AIDS’ divested of all the many political, economic and religious superstructures the results of the development enterprise are highly underwhelming. Largely unmeasured, unaccountable and top down in implementation; if not an outright architecture to maintain former colonial relationships between states referred to as dependencies (Rist, 2002); development lacks to a growing body of humanity whatever moral imperative it once enjoyed.
Development today is a highly subjective and amorphous field that lacks measurement or even an agreed to verifiable definition (Rist, 2007). Within the ranks of this vast and ambitious undertaking are bright eyed idealists; ego maniacs; missionaries, spies; colonialists, national patriots and aspiring revolutionaries. Economic opportunists are everywhere. As well as wolves in sheep’s clothing who in pursuit of bare national & self-interest leave not a scrap for the future. This global enterprise of unprecedented scale relies upon various competing theories of change and remedy, constantly in antagonism. That the needs of the present generation do not outstrip the prosperity or availability of future generation’s needs; juxtaposed to a Kuznets curve positing that rising inequality precedes equity. Concentration on Sen’s maximization of agency & capability; or breaking physical and mental dependency via Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. Does one glorify the United Nations and multilateral big-push theory and Sachs’ Millennium Villages or endorse Easterly’s social entrepreneurial searchers and the Monterrey Consensus. Does the future look to John Smith via ‘Free Market Fundamentalism’ or to the ghost of Karl Marx? Human Rights or human needs; the ‘ease of doing business’ or the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. Capacity or capability? Do developing nations borrow from the World Bank or BRICS; is the worldview of the practitioners shaped by World Economic Forum or World Social Forum. Where do we ultimately place priority and resource mobilization; within the social, the economic or environmental sphere? Does work actually set people free? No one knows, or can know, the answer to any of those questions. Largely due to a total lack of objective and transparent data[61]. We must refuse to accept the validity of government statistics being produced by governments that cannot meet the most basic social services such as feeding, housing and providing healthcare and education for their people. We must also reject systems of Monitoring & Evaluating any data that are carried out by the same institutions that the data reflects performance upon. The World Bank in 2001 conducted a massive participatory study of poverty where tens of thousands of people living below $1.25 a day were asked what could be done[62]. When the UNDP in 2014 asked similar questions to over 1 million people about the ‘world they wanted’ it was still obvious; the interests of the powerful few, the narrow interests of the oligarchic elites persist in smothering the voices of the poor, silencing all calls for change and imposing upon us all the vision of acceptable development, modernization and social progress (Piketty, 2014).
Underlying all this chaos and urgency is the objective reality that over 4 billion human beings are living in varying degrees of wretched deprivation, dying miserably before their time (World Bank Data/UNDP 2015). There is a very harmful dual untruth being perpetuated by majoritarian development actors in the United States and Europe. It is based on a dual illusion that has been furthered by big media apparatuses and financed by the corporate, business & banking sectors which also fund the various political parties in high office with direct bribes, indirect bribes and campaign financing.
Earlier we spoke about a Dual Illusion; part and parcel is the dual un-truth contained implicitly.
The first part of this great un-truth is that human progress is a proven fact upon the ground; that the world is gradually getting freer, safer and more equitable; exemplified by indicators such as trade statistics, GDP and the Millennium Development Goals[63]. This is the world view offered by TED Talks pundits, the neo-liberal theories of economist Jeffrey Sachs and revisionist academics such exemplified Steven Pinker. That poverty is ending and violence is ever decreasing.
The second part of the untruth is that capitalism and globalization are the drivers of this equitable progress and that market forces are ultimately good for the poor. The so-called ‘hard data’ that we have on hand does not well substantiate either highly muddy illusion. Both of which are paradigm hallmarks of a North Western development consensus which has for too long been operating unaccountable to all those it claims to serve, while attempting to maintain a monopoly on development and its discourse. We cannot reasonably prove in a scientific and objective way that Walt Rostow’s modernization theory is actually even occurring. We cannot prove that global violence, war and conflict is markedly decreased from unestablished, and largely un-kept statistical base lines from all the ages before 1848 (most of world history); and most importantly; we are being intellectually coerced (and coddled) by Western academics, politicians and economists to embrace a growth-obsessed, econometric free market fundamentalism simply on the basis of the competing ideologies battle field defeat[64]. The famines, gulags, atrocities and repressions used to chronicle the civil warfare transitions from backwards feudal and peasant societies to 20th century socialist incarnations are direct exacerbations of top down socio-economic transformations in a state of perpetual cold and hot proxy war with the Western capitalist system. Russia and China have without a doubt gone in the course of less than one hundred years from being defeated, long victimized semi-feudal peripheral powers to super power hegemons and serious core contenders (Wallerstein, 2004)(Amin, 2006).
There can be no clear and absolute measurement of the data being generated to verify progress in the Human condition despite what various experts attempt to claim. The numbers on hand at the United Nations and World Bank are supplied by statistical ministries in a variety of highly non-transparent [if not overtly corrupt and incompetent] national governments aggregated to produce results that do not tell full or even partial truths. Despite what is being claimed at global conferences; we do not actually have much valid comparative data on the human condition before 1848 (Foucault, 1988). At the 2013 Interaction Forum, the broadest confederation of American development NGOs and Humanitarian actors, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres admitted, “We are not entirely prepared”. More conflicts, deeply entrenched poverty, coupled with the targeting of aid workers will occur alongside decreases in funds and the impacts of global climate change. Yet, across the western development enterprise, almost all of the Western and white-washed academia and technocracy seem to agree that the very worst of human civilization is behind us (Pinker, 2013). Climate change and gender equity are to subsume talk of structural human rights achievement and class warfare as the acceptable development discourse.
There still is massive disagreement regarding the hierarchy of immediate needs for those 5 billion human souls that live on less than USD 10 a day; 4 billion at below $4 per family per day. 3 billion of which live on less than USD 2.50 a day; and 1.2 billion on less than USD 1.25 the number of which living in Sub-Saharan Africa which may in fact have in the last decade doubled (World Bank, 2015). The economist Thomas Piketty argues in his 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century that not only has there never been such wealth & income inequality ever in recorded history; but that at present rates oligarchic wealth accumulations are increasing and ultimately highly destabilizing to both markets and democracy.
The question remains one of enlisting actual participation and empowerment, not governance. Will listening to the ‘voices of the poor’ be a meaningless slogan or a set of specific instructions to those invested in actually achieving equality? Will development amount to economic enrichment of existing elites, corrupt governments and be the political aid carrot to the military stick; or will development mean emancipation from poverty and a tool kit to achieve freedom from long running structural violence (Goulet, 1971).
Development economist Amyarta Sen believes that development is a means to achieve freedom and freedom is achieved by enabling human capability. Jeffery Sachs believes poverty can be eliminated though coordinated action via a big push style global Marshal Plan. Banerjee & Duflo argue that not until randomized control trials drive interventions are we truly transparent and accountable. Many denounce development itself as a neo-colonialist scheme (Amir, 1973) and regardless of your political tendency one must admit the same actors of the North West dominate. OECD countries are theoretically bound to be giving 0.7% of GDP in direct foreign aid, to be matched by 0.3% via private sector charitable giving. However all rich, high HDI nations seem to prefer the 2002 Monterrey Consensus; to invest in trade related infrastructure. A regular buzzword in the enterprise is ‘Capacity building’, but this is often limited to technocracy and management training going directly to the government/public sector. Throughout the development and humanitarian sector coordination is irregular, local participation is largely dictated top down, and dependency is fostered beholden to national political directives, or just simple failure to meaningfully empower the so-called beneficiaries.
Development cannot easily be grouped by proponent origin geography, but a grouping of tendencies in methodology can be identified from their sources. It is important to remember that Development is not purely about donor and beneficiary nations; there is a clear linkage between internal national developments of a governments own population and external projection of its development paradigm. Development fosters dependency inherently; citizens dependent on government services and developing nations dependent on developed ones; their economies wide open their resources and cheap labor reserves ripe for picking.
There has emerged in the developing world a variety of effective means to break that dependency and unleash the human capability Amyarta Sen was referring to. Southern Development (Bangladesh, India, Cuba and Tanzania) is often categorized by utilization of micro-finance as credit base for social programs, encouraging self-reliance, directing investment internally and promoting massive capacity investment via vocational training in vital services. In the experience of Eastern Development (emanating from Russia, China, Israel and Iran); development focuses on construction of fixed infrastructure, long term investment in education & health, large scale/ long term cultivation of local leadership capacity and highly replicable localized mass training.
As opposed to Northern Development (Advanced Welfare States) largely concerned and successful with their own citizens development; and Western Development (emanating from the European Union and the United States via the OECD) that focuses predominantly on excess asset dumping, promoting market deregulation and free trade policy, augmenting perceived comparative advantage, supporting widespread privatization; and in the era of Gates philanthropy pushing disease surveillance, availability of inexpensive pharmaceuticals, women’s literacy [and inclusion in the work force] as well as advancing shallow policy changes in socio-political culture and asserting entrepreneurship when and where ever it can be advanced.
Within local Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), Social Movement Organizations (SMOs), trade unions, religious intuitions and Community Based Organizations (CBOs) of the so-called Global South[65], but in actuality economic dependent periphery; maximized human resources are often the primary asset they have to work with. Cut off from mega donors, domestically or abroad and often from services typically provided by government; innovation has been the key to community survival, which has superseded international external development strategies rarely aligned with political realities. A result of that innovation is the understanding that development is best implemented through indigenous knowledge, through local control of the means of development; and through investments in skills and training called Mass Capacity Development (MCD)[66].
My research work is being driven by development programs initiated in the Global South/Periphery[67], but the theoretical construct is Eastern in origin (Rist, 2011). The world is divided into 216 economic, quasi-national zones. While it would be largely accurate to state that the core of the world system lies in the global North and West; it would be wildly inaccurate to think this is a static reality. There are multipolar challenges coming from the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation and India. There are a myriad of shifting paradigms in development methodology. Particularly those activities occurring in Cuba, Bangladesh, but also in New York, India, Israel and Iran. While this may seem a highly irregular data set the following findings are emerging that will revolutionize the system of Development Capacity Building. To transform the enterprise completely from one, which focuses on barely meeting human needs to one that generates human rights achievement via mass capacity. From Cuba we have seen some of the largest medical deployments in human history; an estimated 50,000 medical workers and comparable number of teachers and construction workers (Feinsilver, 1993). A full 40-60% of Cuba’s GDP is generated providing healthcare, education and construction of infrastructure to the developing world. Its population is 99% literate and has better health indicators than the United States. Bangladesh has facilitated the birth of the world’s largest NGO BRAC. Over 102,281 people (BRAC, 2012) employed in a massive hybrid system that cover 70-80% of its own operational needs though social industries. That runs major businesses, micro creditors, schools, health services and paraprofessional training. The Acumen Fund in New York has set up over 82 major social enterprises in the global south through their implementation of patient capital. Israel has developed sophisticated training systems in health and agriculture to generate functional cohorts. Its state formation itself was a demonstration of parallel state development. Iran has made incredible progress through an innovative system of community health workers called the Behvarzan; it has also demonstrated via Hezbollah in Lebanon its ability to rapidly introduce Para State functionality and security in a war zone. Beginning in 2008 India via the Indian Skills Development Corporation has set out to provide vocational training to millions of it is citizens via a vast public-private partnership.
The true “economic miracles” of the last twenty years were not those countries which followed the advice of Washington Consensus; they were not the captive Asian Tigers[68]; they were China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam and Ethiopia who generally ignored the basic elements of the Washington Consensus completely (Rodrik, 2002).
There should be no mistake that development is highly complex, perhaps the most ambitious undertaking of human civilization; an organized and sustained campaign to alleviate massive human suffering and injustice. However, whether we in the North West wish to admit it or not; most of the leading causes of underdevelopment were & are the direct result of social, military and economic polies initiated by developed nation governments (Blum, 2003). We must operate in the realm of realpolitik, but we must also draw definitive lines between what is in the interests of the long suffering masses of humanity verses what is done in our own so-called national interests, to secure the lifestyles and wants of the developed world at the expense of the majority of the species. Mass Capacity Development is not adversarial. It does not pit nation against nation or posit a new utopian political order. Instead, modular vocational development is the great leveler that allows all who are willing to engage in productive social enterprises to have doors open to their advancement. It places development back in the hands of the community while engaging the recommendation that development and aid are best directed not at state systems but towards striving masses yearning to acquire a means to fish. Dependency is not broken with a ‘leaky begging bowl’ but with the skills and training to invest in ones future (Escobar, 1995).
The Development Enterprise has regularly circumvented the local populations of the developing world by focusing aid into the opportunistic private sector, often corrupt public sector or via foreign dominated and culturally hostile NGOs. Development too often ignores the capacity of local people and focuses on the capacity of increasingly failing states (Collier, 2007). Throughout the history of development since 1948 the politics, economic needs and priorities of the North West have not only shaped the way we are taught to view human progress, but also tethered more than half the human race to the most wretched and deplorable living conditions imaginable.
The concept of multi-disciplinary vocational/ technical paraprofessional training coupled with the formation of civil service enterprises (CSE) is seemingly anathema to North-Western development, but remains at the fore front of South-Eastern/ South-South development exemplified by Russia, Cuba, Israel, Iran, Bangladesh and the People’s Republic of China. Responsible elements within the global development enterprise must become not only “accountable to those they serve” but work actively to break all forms of foreign dependency; especially in this a new era of unstable Multipolarity.
The future of development must assume a marked departure from the imperatives of the former colonial powers as well as those emerging hegemons that are effecting core shift from ‘West to Rest’ via the BRICS. The gross human rights violations and structural injustices that have been perpetrated via the world system have resulted in 3.5 billion humans living below $3 per day, 45 active low, medium and high intensity armed conflicts (Kaldor, 1999) (Uppsala, 2015), vast deterioration of our climate via CO2 emission and unprecedented wealth concentrating the worth of half the human race in the hands of just 83 individuals (Oxfam, 2015). The perversity of this reality bears it being repeated.
This thesis via its interpretation of several eastern theoretical frameworks; organizational case studies and direct RCT[69] field implementation of the suggested approach recommends that the blue print to emancipatory development via human rights and justice lies no longer in hands of the North-Western powers that have for 500 years demonstrated both their tendencies toward proliferation of both conflict and exploitation (Wallerstein, 1974). Nor does it fall evenly into the three sectors (private, public and NGO) that so far have failed to meaningfully deliver development to more than half of the species.
The micro-problem is the wholesale refusal to admit ‘development as a political act’, the inverse of interstate warfare. A system of theory, technology and praxis carried out upon a targeted population group. The macro-problem is that those that designed the architecture of the development enterprise had no intention of relinquishing their power differentials or their own hyper-development[70].
This thesis will build upon these Eastern and Southern case studies and demonstrated praxis to outline a bold new methodology of development called Mass Capacity Approach (MCA). I will then illustrate the applicability of this modal for proliferation in all four sectors of the enterprise. It will draw on historic as well as contemporary examples to demonstrate the validity of development efforts to achieve equitable societies and human rights security through Parallel State Theory (PST); the demonstrated development paradigm that allows communities to fully control the terms, planning and implementation of their own development.
The solution to this series of overlapping, multi-dimensional problems which have yielded the contemporary tapestry of mass human rights violation is a massive investment in fourth sector[71] human capacity via the trades and professions most needed to alleviate this highly systemic injustice. To wean humans off unnecessary dependency; political subservience to local elites often directly linked to the economic domination by foreigners.
Participatory Development
Entering communities with a tool kit of development technology and resources for them to choose from.
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Indigenous Need
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Indigenous Knowledge
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Development Technology
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Mass Capacity Modules
Our immediate objective is to develop, build, replicate and acquire training modules for achieving full human rights while set up a grassroots framework linking our efforts across all borders. We will then use these modules to build Mass Capacity and coordinate resistance.
Mass Capacity Modules (MCM) are the latest operational innovation in the field of sustainable development. They are based first and foremost on participatory methodology which allows the practitioners the ability to form their projects on the ground based fully on indigenous knowledge (IK), indigenous need (IN) and most importantly direct empowerment.
Modules themselves are vocational training programs that target key indicators of multidimensional poverty namely health, education and living standards while measuring success utilizing an innovative system of IK inputs and human rights indicators. Formed around achievement on the ground of measurable human rights entitlements. MCM evolve in four generations; four cycles of three month intensive training that impart employable skills while organizing the cadre into local functional units specialized in the area of need.
Smallest scale operations utilize a ration of five instructors to forty students gradually scaling back all foreign technical support with each cycle until the fourth version is completely replicable by local CBOs stakeholder Alliance. As each cycle runs it incorporates more IK/ IN, more nuanced learning adaptations to the community while setting up the operational framework to utilize the new capacity; namely emergency medical workers, teachers, civil engineers, hydrologists, agronomists, construction/electric/energy engineers, fire/rescue/peacekeepers, mediators, paralegals, and numerous other needed paraprofessionals.
Combining the most efficient pedagogy of vocational training honed under austere conditions with low cost technology to deliver the most lasting results in capacity building the MCM system not only imparts training it adapts its relevance to the particular community it serves. CBO stakeholders as well as the public, private & NGO sector can send student candidates to enhance their development capacity. Where no such stakeholder alliance exists in the given sector functionality (ie: health, education and living standard direct improvement) this system will subsequently organize new formations out of the graduating students called ‘Civil Service Enterprises’ (CSE).
Individuals now trained with new skills to develop the world around them in public, private, ngo or cbo partnerships for capability now offer real impacts without the costs of ongoing technocracy. Accountable foremost to the communities they serve while still able to advance their training in livelihoods with dignity of their own choosing.
(More to follow)
The Modules
Module Sectors
Mass Capacity Modules (MCM) are the latest operational innovation in the field of sustainable development. They are based primarily on a participatory methodology that allow the practitioner the ability to form their projects on the ground based fully on indigenous knowledge (IK), indigenous need (IN) and most importantly direct empowerment.
Modules themselves are vocational training programs that target key indicators of multidimensional poverty namely health, education and living standards while measuring success utilizing an innovative system of IK inputs and human rights indicators. Formed around achievement on the ground of measurable human rights entitlements. MCM evolve in four generations; four cycles of three-month intensive training that impart employable skills while organizing the cadre into local functional units specialized in the area of need.
Smallest scale operations utilize a ration of five instructors to forty students gradually scaling back over the course of one year all foreign technical support with each cycle until the fourth version is completely replicable by local CBOs stakeholder Alliance. As each cycle runs it incorporates more IK/ IN, more nuanced learning adaptations to the community while setting up the operational framework to utilize the new capacity; namely emergency medical workers, teachers, civil engineers, hydrologists, agronomists, construction/electric/energy engineers, fire/rescue/peacekeepers, mediators, paralegals, and numerous other needed paraprofessionals.
Combining the most efficient pedagogy of vocational training honed under austere conditions with low cost technology to deliver the most lasting results in capacity building the MCM system not only imparts training it adapts its relevance to the particular community it serves. CBO stakeholders as well as the public, private & NGO sector can send student candidates to enhance their development capacity. Where no such stakeholder alliance exists in the given sector functionality (Health, Education and Living Standard direct improvement) this system will subsequently organize new formations out of the graduating students called Civil Service Enterprises (CSE).
Individuals now trained with new skills to develop the world around them in public, private, NGO or CBO partnerships for capability now offer real impacts without the costs of ongoing technocracy. Accountable foremost to the communities they serve while still able to advance their training in livelihoods with dignity of their own choosing.
What aim to demonstrate via a series of operational deployments in the field is that with austere resource commitments, small multinational crews, and the engagement of local groups we can begin to establish training that will allow the communities to quickly control their own means of development via seeding functional Civil Service Enterprises.
Modules are presented to the community for popular selection of 5 modules per 1 year project cycle. The Module vocational training skeletons are enhanced with indigenous knowledge and need to be fully localized to local context.
Training Ratio is 40:5; forty students to 5 instructors; one in charge of skills (Practical Skills Coordinator), one in charge of didactic instruction (Instructor Coordinator); one Educational Administrator (module pedagogy improvement) and two back up skills instructors. All modules run for 3-9 months, involve regular testing and attendance metrics and result in certification for the skill/ trade they are learning upon successful completion of the program. Students are issued certification papers which allow them to practice the skill/ trade for a period of three years. Provided they complete continuing education and pass re-certification, depending on skill students are then licensed to practice the trade.
Module skeletons are built by fusion of NSDC Sector trainings with Solidarity Systems Civil Service Enterprise curriculum development and delivery modals.
National Skills Development Corporation
National Skills Development Corporation has focused on 21 high priority sectors and the unorganized sector. However their focus is not limited to these sectors alone.
- Automobile/auto-components
- Electronics hardware
- Textiles and garments
- Leather and leather goods
- Chemicals and pharmaceuticals
- Gems and Jewelry
- Building and construction
- Food processing
- Handlooms and handicrafts
- Building hardware and home furnishings
- IT or software
- ITES-BPO
- Tourism, Hospitality and Travel
- Transportation/logistics/warehousing and packaging
- Organized Retail
- Real estate
- Media, entertainment, broadcasting, content creation, animation
- Healthcare
- Banking/insurance and finance
- Education/skill development
- Unorganized Sector
The Mass Capacity Modules
- Health Services Sector
- Community Emergency Response Team (CERT) (5 days)
- Community Health Worker (CHW) (8 days)
- Community First Responder (CFR) (8 days)
- Emergency Medical Technician-Basic (EMT-B) (3 months)
- Emergency Medical Technician-Intermediate (EMT-I)
- Emergency Medical Technician-Advanced (EMT-A)
- Emergency Medical Technician-Paramedic (EMT-P) (1 year)
- Emergency Medical Technician-Paramedic-Critical Care (AEMT-P-CC)
- (1 year, 3 months)
- Paramedic Practitioner (PP) (2 years)
- Nurse (RN) (2 years, six months)
- Nurse Practitioner (NP) (3 years)
- Physician’s Assistant (PA) (4 years)
- Physician (6 years)
All modules post training level (PP) can acquire specializations via clinical/ didactic apprenticeships. None of the duration of trainings listed here include clinical preceptorship.
- Educational Development Sector
- Kindergarten
- Primary (Elementary school)
- Secondary (High school)
- Tertiary (College)
- Vocational (Technical trades)
- Arts Education
- Musical Education
- Continuing Education
- Special Needs/ Disability
- Elderly Education
- Distance Learning/ Home Schooling
- Education Technology Development
- Living Standards Sector
- Construction Trades
- Electrical Work
- Plumbing
- Carpentry
- Welding & Metal Work
- Restoration/Renovation/Rehabilitation
- Civil Engineering
- General Construction Trades
- Asset Management Sector
- Accounting
- Microfinance/ Microcredit
- Small/ Medium Enterprises
- Social Enterprises Management
- Cooperative Enterprise Management
- Civil Service Enterprise Management
- Civil Affairs Sector
- Mediation
- Negotiation
- Contract Law
- Human Rights Monitoring
- Para-Legal Studies
- Lawyer (JD)
- Transitional Justice
- Emergency Response Sector
- Fire Suppression
- Hazardous Materials Management
- Community Safety
- Peacekeeping
- Emergency Management
- Disaster Risk Reduction (DDR)
- Sanitation Sector
- Waste Collection
- Waste Management
- Salvage & Recycling
- Collection and Disposal logistics management
- Weather Mitigation Specialist
- Sanergy I (human feces into fertilizer)
- Energy Resource Sector
- Grid infrastructure
- Photovoltaic Energy I-IV(Solar)
- Wind Energy
- Geo-thermal power
- Hydro-electric power
- Compost/ Bio-waste Management
- Mechanical Energies
- Conservation Ecology
- Public Information & Communications Sector
- Information Technologist
- Digital coding
- Telecommunications
- MESH Wireless
- Journalism & Print Media
- Film making
- Video Journalism
- Radio Broadcast
- Investigatory Journalist
- Transportation & Logistics Sector
- Motor Vehicle Operations
- Mechanics & Automotive Repair
- Livery & Public Transport Operations
- Mass Transit Systems Design
- Dispatch Logistics
- Engineering Sector
- Civil Engineering (Structural modification & repair)
- Civil Engineering (Bridges)
- Civil Engineering (Tunnels)
- Civil Engineering (Electricity)
- Civil Engineering (Water Systems)
- Environmental Sector
- Hydrology
- Agronomy
- Ecology
- Forestry
- Marine Conservation
Time Bank Incentivizatation
A time bank is a virtual bank. It is a registry and database of all our employees, students, members of GCC of affiliated groups, CCC participants and community members providing material support for the teaching & training efforts.
All members listed above are issued a bank card which logs their hours. They can use their pin number to access a database of member’s skills, assets and services which they can obtain via 1 hour for 1 hours direct swaps for specific assets, direct reduced rate cash for services, redemption of previously accrued hours for services or fixed rate hourly exchanges of services. Participants list what they offer and for what rates. This system allows a large collective financial mutual aid system that mixes cash, time and access compensation to a wide range of participants.
Participants will be eligible to cash out their hours every six months should they be so inclined. The time bank incentivization system works to strengthen the community via harnessing personal economic buying power back inside community resources while enabling students added incentive for good attendance and strong grades.
Backwards Linkages
Implemented via our BRAC contract advisors a Backwards Linkage is the act of chartering and seeding small businesses to support operational function in lieu of subcontracting. For example; students and staff need daily meals. Rather than hiring a cooking staff we will establish a food provider to handle our needs via contract. Seed money helps establish them as a Sandesh Contractor and Small Business affiliate. They can provide meals to others on the market as long as they meet their contractual obligations to us. Over time the pay back a no interest loan to the establishing organization for the seed money that launched their business.
We will set up several backward linkages at all appropriate levels of operation. This will help foster self-reliance and generate a variety of small/medium enterprises across our supply and service chain. Specific examples of this are;
- Community Kitchen: Providing meals to staff students and community at large.
- Land Endowment: Site of our agricultural training programs and sources of food grown by tenant farming families affiliated with our program.
- Health Services: An insurance scheme supported by our community health workers and students along with affiliated medical facilities.
- AIEVI: an institute offering subsidized, public and private educational resources. Primary site of training also offering, skills workshops, educational enrichment and private tutoring.
- Garage: Maintaining our vehicle fleet while working on private sector servicing vehicles.
- Time Bank: provides incentives and links local economic activity.
Consultative Contact Units
The original 3 person team sent in to establish form a baseline analysis and organize the the General Consultative Council (GCC) to conduct the stakeholder analysis.
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Popular Education
Paraprofessional Programs
Our Projects
Our Programs
Our Policies
Personal Economic Buying Power
Direct Community Investment
Microfinance
Microcredit
Youth Programs
Diaspora Mobilizations
Volunteers
Emergency Groups
We must work together to build a framework that in its practice and application promotes Development and that such Development secures human rights gains on the ground for our people. We will accomplish this this most readily in remote, austere and conflict environments via “EMERGENCY GROUPS”, which ought best be envisioned as multi-disciplinary partisan/ practitioner units sent to the field to solicit the people and ask the community based organizations what type and methodology of development they would like to see deployed.
How we build this movement most effectively will be via a clandestine unification of forces, a laying down of better data and supply conduits, and also a signing of many mutual aid agreements between autonomous parties. Because, for the foreseeable future government ministries, non-governmental organizations and humanitarian charities will be the face of development we must bring them into true coordination by joining their ranks.
The tactic we are advocating is the formation of Emergency Groups via whatever platform will support them; typically churches, youth gangs, and grassroots community organizations. The objective of the development practitioner utilizing this particular blueprint to get a strong and diverse cadre of nationals organized, enlist a multi-partisan local leadership and set up the supply conduit that will get them outfitted once established.
An Emergency Groups is a Development Strategy called ‘Para-state Infrastructure’ designed for a community facing extreme poverty or living in extreme by because of both poverty and war. It is composed of cross trained development practitioners deployed to establish the foundation to mass train civilians in the country of operation as paramedics, paralegals, journalists, logisticians, facilitators, farmers, engineers and teachers.
This tactic was utilized in Port-Au-Prince between January 12th, 2010-2014 as the primary vehicle for our guerrilla development efforts. Variations of it have been used by the Cuban, Bangladeshi and Israelis governments throughout the last sixty years.
The initial unit once deployed must quickly train a group of approximately 100 nationals of the affected nation as ‘emergency group instructors’ in two of the selected capacity module disciplines, blueprint modules; preferably paramedicine and education. Built in are necessary modules on logistics and facilitation.
Save lives, teach more people, secure more rights. In essence applying a guerrilla model to international development with full intent for local self-determination.
The window for initial training is a six month block to get the 100 women and men trained and equipped and largely independent of foreign operational support after the first year. The modules will all be tailored with local IK in mind; altered slightly via open source nation by nation and must be analyzed and put to scrutiny in the initial “initial deployment blueprint” (IDB) itself which will follow this pamphlet outlined for planning an implementation.
A training unit of 8-12 and three nationals select a base of operations and enroll a student body from several existing organizations on the ground, all indigenous if possible. The 8-12 instructors must remain on the ground for 6 months, at least 4 of them must speak the local languages and be from the Diaspora of the group, 4 foreigners. Once again multinationalization is a strongly suggested safety measure.
It also opens doors in some places and closes them in others.
The three or more nationals serving as instructor corps must each represent three or more groups that are sending members to train as “Emergency Group Instructors.” It is not proper to train only one group’s members. It will hinder further expansion of the Emergency Group after third cadre, i.e. third class is trained nine months later.
The suggested order of the training is for 40 student to take three (3) to six (6) months of WEMT-CC, Wilderness Emergency Medical Technician Critical Care, with human right monitoring built in along with logistics and operations, finally facilitation. At the same time 40 students to train as educators. Then the students are tested out as candidates to an international standard. This cycle is repeated four times paring back international with each subsequent module. Ideally 40 EMS/40 teachers per class for four generations (rounds of training) to a total of 160 EMS/ 16o teachers in one, three months year (6m,3m,3m,3m).
After four cadres pass through the academy, classes are trained using other development modules may be delivered in the sector disciplines; Health, Education, Living Standards.
Other suggested Development Modules include but certainly are not limited to Paralegal Studies, Media Activism and Journalism, Agriculture, Popular Education, Engineering, Advanced Facilitation, Operations and Logistics. Each in an expanded and modified capacity tailored for the individual country where it will be taught. Each taught as replicable modules whereby once certified each one can teach one, as in the Emergency Group can then certify people to its own standards after a period of successful operations. Each blueprint is set up as the basis for more training and as the enhancement of existing civil society.
The paramedic, paralegal, journalist, the farmer, the teacher, the engineer, logistician, the peacemaker and the development practitioner all working with a new vision for real change.
One based on our determination to achieve full victory.
These listed professions traditionally take one year to train basically, two years to train well. Three to gain pre field mastery. We believe using visual media, individual host nation tailoring; as well as instructors from the nation as well as the diaspora, aided by humble foreigners who know their place a foundation has been built.
To our knowledge there is currently only one established Emergency Group, the one in Haiti called in Haitian Creole the Gwoup Aitisian Pou Ijans (G.A.I.). It has three operational divisions, over 600 members and continues to expand without outside support or further capital inputs. It offers emergency medical services, trains Haitians in first aid, and disseminates reports on Human Rights violations.
We have reason to believe the Cuban scale of deployment to be over 68,000 and the Bangladeshis via BRC to be around 120,000. There must now me some compartmentalization on how to proceed once bodies of women and men in the hundreds of thousands have been trained.
Legions of Labor
International Brigades
Social Enterprises
We must encourage all members and volunteers to invest money or earn shares via work in social enterprise companies founded owned by our union members. For each development module we give away we will also develop business models to charge for services to those who can afford them. An Emergency Group is not an end in itself it is but a stop gap measure and ground platform.
Everywhere the online platform can be used to connect groups, the emergency group will be used to implement blueprints. The union will protect the workers carrying out the development and rights attainment programs via these groups. The companies are the lasting infrastructures run and owned by those who build them developed to provide strong services to the impoverished but not create welfare dependency.
Some companies will charge acceptable fees for service while using that to subsidize other programs. All companies are submitted to the highest level of human rights indexing. No company that fails to reach the bar can be supported by our union or members.
Structurally each must adhere to guidelines established in our Standards of Personal Buying Power guide; our index of acceptable places to invest and spend ones money if one believes in human rights.
There have been countless examples of failed utopian planning schemes. There have been as many more of capitalist greed run amuck. Throughout we are a movement of voluntary association. To divest of responsibility all one must do is do nothing.
We support the individual entrepreneurship of members as long as they uphold human rights via their implementation. We cannot fund a movement like this asking the U.N., national governments, or foundations for loans, grants and funding. We cannot beg those who spend their taxes on killing and imprisoning and repressing to please give us money for schools, hospitals, roads, and clean water.
Our development aims place Real Human Rights at the center and via control of infrastructure and tools in the hands of the world’s poorest people to better their lives we will secure our gains with new facts on the ground.
Socialist Enterprises
Civil Service Enterprises
Forming syndicates, co-ops, and collectives that generate capital while participating in development of the communities they serve. Hybridization.
(More to follow)
CONTEXT
Political, Economic and Socio-Cultural Context
The World System Analysis, as developed by Immanuel Wallerstien posits that the world’s nation state system as an arbitrary socio-political patchwork of cultivated identities that divide humanity presently into 206 manageable, unmanageable and mismanaged units for the purpose of aligning their economies to the benefit of the Core Hegemonic power block. Before 1500 CE it was impossible for any singular national unit to completely dominate. The globalization of trade and warfare via industrialization, slavery, colonization and the World War had by 1945 erected an architecture of trade regulations, protectionism, direct foreign investment, banking, lending, development and ensuing dependency that all but two Superpowers; the USA and the USSR were aligned in varying semi peripheral and peripheral dependencies back to either power. With the exception of the People’s Republic of China which after its 1949 Revolution, Cultural Revolution and 1978 economic realignment has emerged as the logical core contender after a period of unipolar USA hyperpower hegemony which lasted from 1991-2001. A mere ten years.
The 1945-1989 Cold War was a global engagement between the intelligence, development and military forces of these two blocks which the PRC for strategic and practical reasons did not align directly or over commit to the subsequent proxy wars. After directly engaging the USA on the battlefield in the 1950-1953 Korean War proxy struggle the PRC has quietly built its formidable base via the non-aligned movement, all of whose members over the course of the Cold War aligned, realigned or disintegrated. The key conflicts in checking the United States were Vietnam (1950-1975), Afghanistan (2001-ongoing) and Iraq (2003-2012). The key conflicts for checking the RF (then USSR) were Afghanistan (1980-1989) and Chechnya (1994-2010). The PRC has not had to pay for a costly confrontation since the Korean War in which it instead had to long term subsidize a costly and inefficient failed state.
Let us for analysis remove the national borders of the Peter’s world map the one where all things are represented at their actual presumed size. Let us examine it inverted. Let us look at it East on top West, then South on top of North. Note the arbitrary placement of not only national borders but also spatial embarkations and hemispheric directions. As if the sun still was through to revolve around the earth or that the earth was clearly fat. Let us again for analysis abolish those markings too. Let us turn it from a two dimensional boundary maven into a three dimensional sphere, then pull up like a hand on a cloth the developed northern nations as if into a the shape of a mountain, a mountain where the OECD countries are the core on top and down the mountain are arrayed the middle income than low income town the bottom of this precipice.
On this mountain and its foothills live roughly 7 billion humans broken into 206 national plantations. Identity driven work camps each with their own flag and imagined identities. Half (3.5 billion) are living below 2.50 a day in a range of miserable impoverishment. While extreme poverty according to Millennium Development goals has been halved via China and India; extreme poverty is actually expanding in Sub-Saharan African and Central Asia. A full 5 billion humans live at around and below 10 dollars a day bound for most of their lives to their wage slavery in a range of industrial or agricultural tasks (World Bank Data). The rate of environmental exploitation and pollution have gotten so egregious that disastrous climate change has begun resulting in more catastrophic climate disasters than any time in recorded history( ). Over the course of the Cold War there were no less than 17 documented genocides and 23 major proxy war engagements (cite) as well as 37 democidal purges[72]. In 35 of 206 plantations violent conflicts have broken out and are spreading, but only at the base of the mountain. They increasingly are to be fought intra-state with ethnic cleansing, criminal profiteering, and the targeting their own repressive and failing state systems (Kaldor, 2013).
In the year 1492 CE the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand of what would become the nation of Spain instituted a massive purge coupled with torture, expulsion, and general atrocity directed against the Muslim and Jewish populations of that emerging nation. Simultaneously they sponsored the imperial expedition of Christopher Columbus which would alongside the Portuguese conquests of Brazil and West Africa would trigger an unprecedented bloodletting over the next 500 years of slavery, colonization, decolonization, World War, Cold War and Global Jihad. All of these manifestations based on manufactured identities (Anderson, 1983) as well as local greed and grievance variables ( ). Most importantly these endless conflicts were harnessed for the control of the means of local production and the profiteering off of trade routes. All of which raised the capital necessary for the formation of the nation state system.
By 1500 CE the social, economic and environmental underpinnings of human civilization were consolidating around the dominance of a world system (Wallerstien, 1974). The globalization of markets with an ever more authoritarian institution of sovereign states were the logical evolution of capital accumulation (Marx, 1887). Humanity would be subjugated, brutalized and reduced via these emerging nation states into more manageable social units for economic exploitation and administrative consistency. Although ideology, normative rights, cultures and religious mobilizations would vary tremendously by the year 2014 the World System had in affect crystalized around three primary trade & power blocks or hegemons; USA-EU, Russian Federation, and the People’s Republic of China. The Global Core, under a steady evolution of socio-political justifications has passed from Netherlands, to England, then finally to the United States of America. After the defeat of the German contestation for core power in 1945 a series of unending proxy conflicts began under the mantle of decolonization, but were more particularly a battle over markets, extractive resources, commodities and trade relations between the USSR lead by Russia and NATO allies lead by USA. The Chinese experiments with Maoist communism via their 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution resulted in the deaths, starvation and purge of and x and removed them from hegemonic position until in 1978 when Deng Xiaoping and the Party embraced state capitalism (Gao, 2008). After the economic defeat of the USSR in 1989 American neo-conservatives posited a strategy for a New American Century (CITE ) which involved amongst other things redrawing the map of the Middle East and by default controlling the life blood of the globalized transport system; oil & natural gas. By 2001 directly advising the Bush Presidency in USA they began implementing this reconsolidation package. As the Russian Federation accelerated theirs under President Putin (Politkovskaya, 2005). However, by 2001 the US-EU had reached Peak Hegemony.
All nations have their national mythologies and state ideological narratives in varying doses and degrees. The world system is based on which ever power or power block can marshal the supply lines and coerce with aid and trade all other powers into economic dependency. According to Immanuel Wallerstien; the architect of world system analysis there are core nations that via conflict, development and hegemony impose an economic order which sub serves semi peripheral and peripheral national oligarchies to organize their economies around core needs and enrichments. Semi peripheral nations such Cuba, Israel, South Africa, Brazil, and Iran have achieved moderate independence through some strategic action or relationship but remain irrelevant to shaping the world systems supply lines, trade relations and core economic demand. Peripheral nations such as Sudan, Egypt, Ecuador, and Bangladesh are organized to supply labor and commodities for the economic wellbeing of the core.
PART IV:
A GLOBAL
STATE OF EMERGENCY
Poverty is Genocide
Poverty is a form of generalized mass murder.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are a call to build Potemkin villages amid war zones and pestilence sewn urban sprawls. They have also completely been undelivered.
Human Rights as understood and codified by the UN give us an international legal framework to measure our violation and calibrate our resistance. There are few nations where any legal enforcement of these so-called rights can be brought to bear.
The International Criminal Court (ICC) at the Hague gives us a platform, forum and precedent to try our oppressors. To put whole leagues of Oligarchs on trial and their secondary and tertiary officers. This will never occur except in the cases of periodic state failure and/or a genocide in a so-called developing action.
Governments everywhere are openly committing crimes against humanity.
Armies are now running states (Pakistan). Transnational Crime Syndicates run countries (Russia). Countries exist on paper (Haiti) but are run by NGOs. Countries exist with no governance at all (Somalia since 1992). Apartheid occurs in plane view (India & Israel). Genocide occurs in plain view (Bosnia, Rwanda, Chechnya, East Timor, Sri Lanka). Atrocities are being carried out for resources (Democratic Republic of Congo). States are unraveling into civil war (Iraq & Syria). The war never ends. Our global peacekeeping body introduces disease and rape into populations it serves (Uruguay, Nepal & Brazil via MINUSTAH). Human Slavery being practiced across the globe.
Low estimates put 37 million people predominantly women and girls forced into domestic bondage, manual labor, and the highly lucrative sex traffic.
Non-Governmental Organizations (NGO’s) are Neoliberal instruments that barely scratch the surface of their stated intention. We must join the ones that have successful tactics and isolate the ones that serve little function but foreign policy or a simple poverty racket. They ought to be repurposed and reinvigorated as true development platforms, vehicles for capacity building where they serve. When they have proven useful supported or abolished when they are little more than store fronts of a vast poverty business. The Washington Consensus seems very deceptive and broken when put under scrutiny.
So much so that Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa are forming their own alternative to the World Bank called BRICS.
Poverty is not only a condition fostered by state and non-state actors with the aim of keeping most of the global population weak, divided and miserable; it is also a way to consolidate power and vast control of resources into small clusters called nation states, corporations, and organized crime syndicates. The modern plantation, the neocolonial system is just thinly hidden below the modern nation states, governmental structures, and the corporations that thrive within them. The modern slave is very much still a slave.
The modern faces of slavery, plague, famine and genocide are not manufactured in some dismal neglected vacuum. They serve a purpose where they are implemented. They were either planned, or they are made worse by poor planning.
We have inefficient and contradictory information and statistics coming out on numbers and we must be serious about calling to question corrupt ministries with things to hide or exaggerate for aid, or to hide their Human Rights High Crimes. We must also draw attention to attempts to subvert the data by subdividing it into types of famine, types of disease, and types of war. We have gathered some alarming base numbers though from the Non-Governmental Organizations and United Nations.
There are an estimated 37 million chattel slaves engaged in manual labor or forced sex work worldwide. This does not include 2 billion working poor that cannot adjust their work or living conditions, most lack unions or work safety protections and carry out their lives as bonded wage slaves.
There are 1.2 billion people living in “Absolute Poverty”. Over 3 billion according to the World Bank living on less that $2.50 a family/ a day.
Absolute poverty, extreme poverty, or abject poverty is “a condition characterized by severe deprivation of basic human needs, including food, safe drinking water, sanitation facilities, health, shelter, education and information. It depends not only on income but also on access to services.”
34 million persons are dying of HIV. This pandemic is actively spreading.
There 35 ongoing armed conflicts. Eleven major armed conflicts generating more than 1,000 deaths a year (Some like Somalia, Columbia, Sudan, Syria, and Afghanistan that have over 100,000 killed since they began). Thirty that claim less than 1,000 per year but many which are ongoing for over half the century and have long surpassed 100,000 dead in a specific conflict (such as in 5.4 million killed in Congo since 1998 or approximately 2 million in Afghanistan since 1979).
There must be a profound and dedicated response.
Who is the enemy of the working class, poor and humanity generally? It is not a caste, or a class. It is a world system.
Reintroduction of World Systems Theory
Everyone in the Developed world has heard of Marx and Smith but few have studied Wallerstein.
Oligarchical Collectivism
There is an unacknowledged, ‘global state of emergency’ and it is a result of the broader Human Conflict. Those living quite comfortably in the safety of developed core nations[73] believe things are getting much better, ‘than what once had come before’ and most importantly; globalization will inevitably curb war (Friedman). However, ‘what once was’, is poorly accounted for. In addition, what currently is; is controversial to measure. At the 2013 InterAction Forum, the broadest confederation of American development NGOs and Humanitarian actors, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres admitted, “We are not entirely prepared”. More conflicts, deeply entrenched poverty, coupled with the targeting of aid workers will occur alongside decreases in funds and the impacts of global climate change. Yet, across the development enterprise, almost all of the academia and technocracy agree that the very worst of human civilization is behind us (Sachs). There is still massive disagreement throughout the humanitarian enterprise regarding the hierarchy of needs for those 5 billion human souls that live on less than USD 10 a day; 3 billion of which live on less than USD 2.50 a day; and 1.2 billion on less than USD 1.25 (World Bank 2014). There is a still gross conflict of index and orientation as to if this an ‘Age of Globalization’, or ‘Age of Corporate Oligarchy’.
Conflict need not be as amorphous as our experts now make it, or as particularistic. Ethnic conflict, like multi-dimensional poverty or climate catastrophes are symptoms of a deliberate system wide assault on planet and population. If we analyze these symptoms, we do not get any meaningful diagnostics of the disease. The fullness of the pathology is then missed and cannot be treated.
Most human poverty and conflict are manufactured to keep a small web of groups in the lifestyle to which they are accustomed. To keep access to power and resources in an ‘iron web’ of corporate oligarchy (Banerjee). The Human Conflict, (not a series of endless regional conflicts) are absolutely and fully intertwined. If we keep attempting to address them piece meal we are enabling a vast protracted bleed. The ‘New Wars’ and the inter-communal bloodlettings we refer to as ‘identity-driven’ are war economies perpetuated in power vacuums and failing states (Kaldor); they are also the result of an elaborate and enforced quarantine being tested. A world system built on structural apartheid with fluid boundaries dividing people into economic roles and relationships. A deliberate calculation on how to shunt development and resources from periphery to core (Wallerstein, 1974).
The rational interrelationship then between conflict and development is that those most divested of human rights and dignity by the existing economic engines at the core are and will be doing the fighting and dying in most of the conflicts. To focus on civilization (Huntington); identity mobilization (Kaldor) or so-called human nature (Konner) deludes the identification of the source. There is only ‘cosmopolitanism’ for those with the option to leave their plantation.
- The Source
The source of our oldest and most protracted conflict is the ‘control of the means of human development’ in the realms of the social, economic and environmental spheres. For all of our known human history a tiny, diverse human faction’s ability to manipulate our imagined identity has prevented any psychosocial realization of potential human solidarity. The aim of this miniscule faction is wealth, power and hegemony. To achieve that end their historic dominance has revolved around total human division. Not just in labor specialization, but down to as many constructed divisions and subdivisions as were possible; competing dominations ingrained at every level of the stratification. Most obvious was the creation of evolving plantations (the nation-states) that erected real and imagined barriers. They then coerced our labor, they acquired ownership over productive resources and via an endless war and conflict; they eliminated abundance. Inevitably, via their wanton greed they now threaten the survival of both planet and species. What remained elusive was how well organized they were in their implementation.
The reason we cannot clearly implement a meaningful plan for peace or ‘Emancipatory Development’ is that we are speaking very different tactical languages. Our competing theories of change have therefore diluted our capability (Fitzduff, xxv). We still lack total consensus on the basic nature of the human species: ‘brutish and short’ vs. ‘capable and cooperative’ (Konner, p. 25) (Kropotkin, p.75). Those supposedly in the fields of change have absolutely no consensus at all who is ‘our enemy’ and who is ‘our friend’; or even is there is an actual organized nemesis to oppose. Some have even declared an ‘end to history’ (Fujiyama).
In the absence of consensus on achieving equity, those with actual power are still quite grounded in the most Machiavellian manipulations of identity: gender, caste, ethnicity, religion, creed and nationalism being the most pervasive & useful triggers.
- Three camps in the conflict
The camp of alarming importance is the bulk of human species, which is closing in shortly on 8 billion members. It remains largely impoverished and divided against self easily mobilized to war or ethnic violence based on imagined identities enforced by race, nationality and prayer rituals. The bulk of it is concentrated in failed, failing and generally kleptocratic states that currently host 35-armed conflicts (Alerta 2014). The United Nations has granted all 8 billion humans elaborate configurations of ‘human rights’ and protections and committed all nations to vigorous programs of development around the 8-Millennium Development Goals and nine core human rights treaties that most world governments have adopted. Most of those goals will go unmet. Even in so-called core developed nations, most of these rights are not legally enforced or protected.
The second camp is perhaps the fullest enemy of these human rights and of sustainable development generally can be called a Corporate Oligarchy. A transnational global elite that not only controls supply routes and natural resources; they affect all of the inequity of distribution that so perpetuate poverty. It is a disciplined and vicious network of elites united in nothing except bloc accumulation of capital and power via their political access. In one nation, they appear as warlords and in others as cultivated persons of business and leisure. The most important remain completely out of the public consciousness. This is accomplished via mass distraction in the media via the athletes, celebrity artists and politicians. As well as ownership of most platforms for mass media (Chomsky). The ‘Corporate Oligarchy’ are extremely diverse demographically and largely decentralized in their spheres of interests and accumulation. They have eclectic and diverse financial portfolios. No matter what nation-state or territory we are referring to, we can refer back to these regional elites as a local branch of the “Global Oligarchy”; they are ‘Corporate’ only in that their power is best solidified via transnational financial institutions.
The third camp is a far more horizontal network of clustered organizations whose actionable numbers are only slightly greater than the repressive agencies of the oligarchy[74]. Their base is also wide and international though relies largely on volunteer efforts and free association. Though comparatively small in clustered leaderships they periodically mushroom rather rapidly mobilizing humans based on grievance and identity; normally via religion, class or political creed; this group can encompass a very wide range of revolutionaries; humanitarians, human rights defenders, change agents, peace builders and social progressives; this would be called the resistance. They are resisting human rights violations normally in relationship to the localized symptoms of the Oligarchic Epoch.
Let us be clear; the Corporate Oligarchy guide the financial and political institutions via a multi-generational policy of low-intensity coordination, but they do remain in competition. Humanity exists in an utter state of disunity, which the oligarchs cultivate and pray upon. The resistance is scattered, isolated, delegitimized and holds onto a small bloc of scattered states quarantined in various ways over the course of the Cold War.
- Primary Conflict Issue
The elites within principal core, developed nations are able to influence policies via campaign contributions, competitive advantage, patronage or outright corrupt practices (Banerjee, p.238). Particularly in Beijing, Washington, Moscow and Berlin these elites influence the global political playing field. It is important to remember that they are both competitive and use competing identity rhetoric’s for social cohesion. At times they empower themselves at the expense of the placated populace (USA); often they exacerbate peripheral tensions and enable high crimes and rights violations using state superstructure (Russian Federation). Often they project outward core to periphery, cultivate relationships, and profit off the neo-colonialism embedded in the development enterprise (China).
These elites in varying configurations have come under physical assault via armed revolt especially in the past two hundred years.
The main issue of the human conflict is that a tiny fraction of the human species has usurped control over more than half of our wealth in a time when 3 billion humans are enduring grinding poverty; when the very climate itself has warmed to provoke dangerous environmental impacts; and nation after nation appears to be becoming undone by civil strife and genocide.
On the part of the Global Corporate Oligarchy, the main issue is maintaining the current order while dominating the other local oligarchs when opportunity arises. On the part of the resistance, it is to shape meaningful tactics to counteract over two hundred years of general attrition since 1789. On the part of slumbering/suffering humanity, it is an issue of individual survival only when conflict is close at hand.
Secondary Conflict Issues
ISSUE (A): Collapsing State System
The Westphalian State system is gradually collapsing. From the unraveling of Sudan and Syria to unleashed Uiyger aspirations in China; to greater Kurdistan; to a Palestinian State and a newly unleashed Islamic Caliphate, the made up and largely externally coerced lines that the European powers drew on old maps are coming undone. This means more countries (nation proliferation) and certainly more regional conflicts over the populations and resources contained within them. The developed Core will hold tight as it can to the stability of its state delineations while devolution of the periphery accelerates. This will not immediately alter the balance of power, but it will alter the balance of trade because the coercive state mechanisms of semi-peripheral (developing) and peripheral (un-developed) nations will crumble making resource extraction back to the core more difficult to facilitate.
ISSUE (B): Realization of Mass Atrocity
Thanks to information technology not only are larger segments of our human species able to evaluate multiple version of history previous unavailable; they are able to issue and witness minute-by-minute live stream reports and documentation of ongoing genocide and atrocity. On the one hand, an early desensitization comes from this on the proletarian level of core nations. On the other hand, it allows the human masses an access to each other’s suffering that was previously unimaginable. For the first time using widely available technology a human can access unfathomable human catalogues of data. We can rapidly broadcast our grievances. Most importantly, we can internationalize conflict by calling for reinforcements; or draw tactical lessons from the killing fields and struggles of that they are calling the ‘Age of Genocide’ (Powers).
ISSUE (C): Ideological Bankruptcy
The ‘Age of Genocide’ is dubbed so because it was believed that in no other period of human conflict had such massive a systematic bloodletting been carried out deliberately against civilians; 50-80 million just in WW2. The dominant narrative issued in the competing political paradigms are that the worst of the atrocities were carried out due to the excesses of Slavery, Colonialism and the three World Wars[75] or because of ideology (religious or secular).
There was a variety of ideological underpinning guiding both the arch-Oligarchs and the principle factions of the Resistance. Fascism, Socialism, and Liberal Democracy being the three paramount schools most states derived their systems from. The theocracies and monarchies of the earlier periods still existing but being confined to the periphery and semi-periphery of the state system. Political Islam re-emerging in full force in 1979. The so-called Age of Genocide was not a civilizing epoch punctuated by unprecedented conflagration; it was a purge. It was the state system marshalled to eliminate both the resistance and discredit the theory of change; particularly the theory of revolutionary socialism.
However, it would not take long for Oligarchs to discover that politics and ideology were just an architecture. That the concept of Core formation; marshaling state superstructure to break dependence and project power could be obtained with any of the ideologies. Demonstrated throughout the last 100 years was that not only could an Oligarchy be cultivated in the most revolutionary of states; those oligarchies could be just as brutal and repressive as any before them. By the time the Communist Party of China embraced capitalism in 1978 and became a Core power; by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which turned the country into a semi-peripheral mafia style super state; by the time it was understood that the USA was subsidizing 1/3 of its population not to work[76] while keeping 1/139 citizens in prison camps); ideology wasn’t good for very much besides idle intellectual banter or pretext.
The issue then was that most of the resistance that survived this epoch has been thoroughly exhausted by the hypocrisy of the ideological pronouncements that complemented the catalogue of the ongoing genocide now exposed. The ideological war is mostly over (Kaldor); the final consensus amongst both the oligarchy and resistance alike is the disambiguation is possible within the human rights framework as a lasting list of demands. In the bankruptcy of ideological frameworks, the dominant and most bloodthirsty element of the resistance has embraced Jihadist variants of Islam. All other factions are for the most part utilizing human rights as their platform.
ISSUE (D): Imposed Scarcity of Resources/ Climate Change
In short, as the population increases, we are met with the grim reality that there may not be enough clean water or means to feed ourselves, although we are currently not quite feeding the human race very adequately (Rogers). There is also a finite timeline on extractive energy resources used to propel the current globalized economic machine. While every oligarch network is very ‘interested’ in profiteering, off ‘green, clean and renewable’ solutions, there remains skepticism that these sources of renewable energy will emerge fast and efficient enough to compete lucratively with oil and natural gas. Very few oligarchies have multi-generational perspectives.
The adaptation process will not take place quickly enough before peak oil occurs. Population will exceed productive capability and a new global famines will result (Malthus). The wars that have occurred in the past sixty-five years over extractive energy resources will shortly be taking place over clean water and arable land. The technologies we feel so happy deploying in Sub-Saharan Africa such as Spiruleena, drip agriculture systems and Malaria nets will come also to Middle America. The issue of the climate is now one that most of the national factions accept. That has little to do with the speed they can recalibrate the machine.
ISSUE (E): Linguistics and False Consciousness
The issue that will prevail throughout all of the conflicts we examine is that resistance has been purged as legitimate discourse and often possible. Throughout the world the socialization process has gone on for some many generations in all three zones verbally, lack language to articulate alternatives or access to the popular education needed to trigger solidarity. Solidarity then manifests in relation to the nation or ethnic group not the species. Lacking language, lacking consciousness, humans will continuously revert into their national and ‘tribal’ formations. This remains the fundamental question of the successful transformation; how can mass capacity be achieved in the face of this mass socialization. The most important deception of the false consciousness propagated is that without a government; people would all loot and murder one another. Logical frameworks built on this postulate stipulate then that the state system and by default the world system are necessary.
ISSUE (F): Human Rights Approach
The Oligarchy has everything to lose because they have mostly everything in their possession while humanity is regularly asked to truncate our life span to get them even and ever more. This is not just an indictment of the wealthy and insatiable. This is also about the organized traffic of over 37 million chattel slaves, black market weapons, narcotics and perpetuation of terror. The manufacturing of genocide and war (Uvin). This is about competing power centers, perhaps thousands of sub-Oligarchies that are all functioning without coordination and will eradicate us. Many of them are completely insatiable.
In 1945, the United Nations was established as a bankrupt global governance system. In between there were many developments that has shaped the tactical discourse. The State of Israel was founded in 1948; the largest and most protracted attempt to colonize land without state support. International Human Rights were first codified 1948.China in 1949 was liberated by Mao and the Communist Party bringing the most populous nation on earth under socialism. Cuba went next in 1959; the largest island in Caribbean liberated via a guerilla movement. An incubator for development technology and a global platform for the non-aligned movement. In 1963 two UN documents emerged effectively on Cold War lines breaking human rights into two primary documents; a separation of the Civil/Political from the Economic, Social & Cultural. Symbolically they form the two theatres of war upcoming between the resistance and oligarchy of every nation. Achieving CPR negative rights are to be theatre of militant non-violent resistance. ESCR positive rights are to be focus of mass capacity training and the emerging parallel state structures of the 21st century.
It is very important to understand that this is a long game. The world-system has been consolidating since 1500 (Wallerstein). What happens next in this conflict has a great deal to do with what tactics the new resistance embraces. The barbarism of Jihad or the militant nonviolence of Gandhi. The economic development of the Washington Consensus or that of BRAC and Havana. It also involves to what degree does the oligarchy violate our collective rights or accelerate attempts turn the ‘bottom billion’ into a productive & profitable resource. A billion new slaves; wageworkers and uneducated consumers.
The 3 billion poor are a vast labor reserve on one side or another of history. However, this is not a phenomena purely orchestrated from the global core developed nations. These are not the only seats of their power. There is an aristocracy in every ghetto, a kingship of every slum and of course bosses on every plantation, camp and factory.
The new phase of the struggle is to fight for every single open mind, every single inch of previously liberated turf and roll out a technology for emancipatory development the light of which cannot be snuffed out by their bullets and their iron heels.
For this is in fact and existential conflict for us all.
PART VIII: WHAT IS TO BE DONE
WHAT IS AGITATION
WHAT IS EDUCATION
WHAT IS ORGANIZATION
WHAT ARE ACTIONS
WHAT ARE OPERATIONS
URBAN & RURAL
ANALYSTS & OPERATIVES
ACTIVISTS & ORGANIZERS
REVOLUTIONARIES
EMMACIPATIONISTS
NO ONE LEFT BEHIND THE LINES
WHAT IS CIVIL DISOBIDENCE
WHAT IS DIRECT ACTION
WHAT IS SUPPLY SIDE RESISTANCE I
THE MIND IS A WEAPON WE NEED
WHAT IS NEUROSCIENCE
WHAT IS MEDITATION
WHAT IS THOUGHT CRIME
WHAT IS PARAPSYCOLOGY
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS POPULAR EDUCATION
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS LIBERATION THEOLOGY
HOW DOES IT MANNIFEST
WHAT IS MILITANT NONVIOLENCE
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS PEACEFARE
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS SYDICALISM
WHAT ARE THE METHODS
WHAT IS DEMAND SIDE RESISTANCE
WHAT IS SUPPLY SIDE RESITANCE
WHAT IS SUPPLY SIDE EMBARGO II
WHAT IS CORE SANCTIONS
WHAT IS CORE EMBARGO
WHO ARE OUR SYMPATHIZERS
WHO ARE THE RESISTANCE
SYMPATHY WITH THE RESISTANCE
WHAT IS THE LONG GAME
RESISTANCE IS WAR
UNITY IS STRENGTH
THE GREAT REVOLT
Militant Nonviolence
Let us just begin by saying that this is the exact ideology and framework preached by Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi. Two of which were gunned down in cold blood and oneh who spent almost the entirety of his life in prison for the tremendous gains they made. There have been others whose names are less know but who struggled nonetheless. Understanding our histories is never a wasted enterprise.
Inclusion is vital, but we are not here to secure a bigger better base of Western funding or get invited to address the U.N. General Assembly. We are here to lay down the framework for struggle that aims to completely change the fate of the world’s poor and wage non-violent struggle against the enemies of Human Rights.
There are 198 tactics of nonviolent resistance (Sharpe).
We aim to use them internationally to fight for our thirty rights. There are 104 Development blueprints and we aim to make them scalable, workable, sustainable and through popular dissemination available to the people.
While operating in the appropriate cultural context of resistance and development for each nation we must always refer back to this collective statement for our motivations to be clear.
The tactics of Development and Resistance have no single serving playbook.
We will have to offend some and make other nervous and assuredly this word will.
“Militant.”
We are militant about our Human Rights!
They are cherished and important things dangled before us and revoked without any regard or consequence. Militant means aggressive, offense minded, zealous, hard line and on the attack. A struggle as if to reclaim something stolen from you and your people before you were born, long before even your great grandparents were born.
It does not mean we will ever resort to violence.
One does not have to pick up a weapon or destroy any property. In fact; killing itself violates a human right and therefore can never be seen as proper means to free one’s people or rebuild ones nation. Nor does it ever to work to secure real change.
Property is not animate and their for has no inherent moral qualities, resources are too precious to be wasted, let us instead transform them into tools of liberation.
We do need to work harder now. Too many are dying.
As though we wished for all of humanity to survive.
As though we wished the species to not be wiped out.
As though it were all our families and extended families in the camps, in the occupied zones, in the genocides and new holocausts.
Leftism in general is drenched in blood and failed states. It was given two hundred years to attempt to be the basis of opposition and it was all but completely defeated. Violence only begets violence and power more desire for power.
Nonviolence is not about mindlessly repeating tactics that no longer work, being passive, or feeling righteous about “bearing witness” It is a call to be creative, work harder, and be honest about if we are or are not being effective.
The Rightists want fascism at worst, dictators somewhere in between or no change at all as the basis of their ideology. Progressive politicians in general are far too often collaborators with other outright abusive regimes and the U.N. is the biggest forum for hypocrites and do nothings in the world, their only success is in writing lovely documents.
What Militant Human Rights Movement (MHRM) means is that you are framing your Development work into the affective blueprints of development and resistance.
Resistance to Rights Violations. Development of our capacity to enjoy full human rights as promised by the world’s governments.
You, in joining these efforts built on social justice are helping to forge a foundation so others may have a stronger base to re-establish their lives, and later generations may in fact secure the rights we fight for. You are measuring victory not in ideals or productivities or securities but in actual rights attained. There are thirty sets of rights and seven Maslow needs and getting these shored up are the base line we are fighting towards.
You, are “militant about human rights” when you are fighting for those of your family and extended family, or when you truly believe that these thirty rights are baseline and they have been robbed from you. . You are part of the militant human rights movement when it becomes urgent enough for us to win that you would lay down your life for real change.
What use is Development if it is not a means to secure human freedom via these promised rights?
We, all have different bottom lines. Different self-interests. Desires as well as hard facts about the safety of our own people and our own families. We, must often engage in very patient struggle if that is our will, designation and context.
Sympathy for the movement will require acts of great boldness.
198 Methods of Nonviolent Action
From Albert Einstein Institute & Gene Sharp:
Practitioners of nonviolent struggle have an entire arsenal of “nonviolent weapons” at their disposal. Listed below are 198 of them, classified into three broad categories: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation (social, economic, and political), and nonviolent intervention. A description and historical examples of each can be found in volume two of The Politics of Nonviolent Action, by Gene Sharp.
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT PROTEST AND PERSUASION
Formal Statements
- Public Speeches
- Letters of opposition or support
- Declarations by organizations and institutions
- Signed public statements
- Declarations of indictment and intention
- Group or mass petitions
Communications with a Wider Audience
- Slogans, caricatures, and symbols
- Banners, posters, and displayed communications
- Leaflets, pamphlets, and books
- Newspapers and journals
- Records, radio, and television
- Skywriting and earthwriting
Group Representations
- Deputations
- Mock awards
- Group lobbying
- Picketing
- Mock elections
Symbolic Public Acts
- Displays of flags and symbolic colors
- Wearing of symbols
- Prayer and worship
- Delivering symbolic objects
- Protest disrobings
- Destruction of own property
- Symbolic lights
- Displays of portraits
- Paint as protest
- New signs and names
- Symbolic sounds
- Symbolic reclamations
- Rude gestures
Pressures on Individuals
- “Haunting” officials
- Taunting officials
- Fraternization
- Vigils
Drama and Music
- Humorous skits and pranks
- Performances of plays and music
- Singing
Processions
- Marches
- Parades
- Religious processions
- Pilgrimages
- Motorcades
Honoring the Dead
- Political mourning
- Mock funerals
- Demonstrative funerals
- Homage at burial places
Public Assemblies
- Assemblies of protest or support
- Protest meetings
- Camouflaged meetings of protest
- Teach-ins
Withdrawal and Renunciation
- Walk-outs
- Silence
- Renouncing honors
- Turning one’s back
THE METHODS OF SOCIAL NONCOOPERATION
Ostracism of Persons
- Social boycott
- Selective social boycott
- Lysistratic nonaction
- Excommunication
- Interdict
Noncooperation with Social Events, Customs, and Institutions
- Suspension of social and sports activities
- Boycott of social affairs
- Student strike
- Social disobedience
- Withdrawal from social institutions
Withdrawal from the Social System
- Stay-at-home
- Total personal noncooperation
- “Flight” of workers
- Sanctuary
- Collective disappearance
- Protest emigration (hijrat)
THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: ECONOMIC BOYCOTTS
Actions by Consumers
- Consumers’ boycott
- Nonconsumption of boycotted goods
- Policy of austerity
- Rent withholding
- Refusal to rent
- National consumers’ boycott
- International consumers’ boycott
Action by Workers and Producers
- Workmen’s boycott
- Producers’ boycott
Action by Middlemen
- Suppliers’ and handlers’ boycott
Action by Owners and Management
- Traders’ boycott
- Refusal to let or sell property
- Lockout
- Refusal of industrial assistance
- Merchants’ “general strike”
Action by Holders of Financial Resources
- Withdrawal of bank deposits
- Refusal to pay fees, dues, and assessments
- Refusal to pay debts or interest
- Severance of funds and credit
- Revenue refusal
- Refusal of a government’s money
Action by Governments
- Domestic embargo
- Blacklisting of traders
- International sellers’ embargo
- International buyers’ embargo
- International trade embargo
THE METHODS OF ECONOMIC NONCOOPERATION: THE STRIKE
Symbolic Strikes
- Protest strike
- Quickie walkout (lightning strike)
Agricultural Strikes
- Peasant strike
- Farm Workers’ strike
Strikes by Special Groups
- Refusal of impressed labor
- Prisoners’ strike
- Craft strike
- Professional strike
Ordinary Industrial Strikes
- Establishment strike
- Industry strike
- Sympathetic strike
Restricted Strikes
- Detailed strike
- Bumper strike
- Slowdown strike
- Working-to-rule strike
- Reporting “sick” (sick-in)
- Strike by resignation
- Limited strike
- Selective strike
Multi-Industry Strikes
- Generalized strike
- General strike
Combination of Strikes and Economic Closures
- Hartal
- Economic shutdown
THE METHODS OF POLITICAL NONCOOPERATION
Rejection of Authority
- Withholding or withdrawal of allegiance
- Refusal of public support
- Literature and speeches advocating resistance
Citizens’ Noncooperation with Government
- Boycott of legislative bodies
- Boycott of elections
- Boycott of government employment and positions
- Boycott of government depts., agencies, and other bodies
- Withdrawal from government educational institutions
- Boycott of government-supported organizations
- Refusal of assistance to enforcement agents
- Removal of own signs and placemarks
- Refusal to accept appointed officials
- Refusal to dissolve existing institutions
Citizens’ Alternatives to Obedience
- Reluctant and slow compliance
- Nonobedience in absence of direct supervision
- Popular nonobedience
- Disguised disobedience
- Refusal of an assemblage or meeting to disperse
- Sitdown
- Noncooperation with conscription and deportation
- Hiding, escape, and false identities
- Civil disobedience of “illegitimate” laws
Action by Government Personnel
- Selective refusal of assistance by government aides
- Blocking of lines of command and information
- Stalling and obstruction
- General administrative noncooperation
- Judicial noncooperation
- Deliberate inefficiency and selective noncooperation by enforcement agents
- Mutiny
Domestic Governmental Action
- Quasi-legal evasions and delays
- Noncooperation by constituent governmental units
International Governmental Action
- Changes in diplomatic and other representations
- Delay and cancellation of diplomatic events
- Withholding of diplomatic recognition
- Severance of diplomatic relations
- Withdrawal from international organizations
- Refusal of membership in international bodies
- Expulsion from international organizations
THE METHODS OF NONVIOLENT INTERVENTION
Psychological Intervention
- Self-exposure to the elements
- The fast
- a) Fast of moral pressure
- b) Hunger strike
- c) Satyagrahic fast
- Reverse trial
- Nonviolent harassment
Physical Intervention
- Sit-in
- Stand-in
- Ride-in
- Wade-in
- Mill-in
- Pray-in
- Nonviolent raids
- Nonviolent air raids
- Nonviolent invasion
- Nonviolent interjection
- Nonviolent obstruction
- Nonviolent occupation
Social Intervention
- Establishing new social patterns
- Overloading of facilities
- Stall-in
- Speak-in
- Guerrilla theater
- Alternative social institutions
- Alternative communication system
Economic Intervention
- Reverse strike
- Stay-in strike
- Nonviolent land seizure
- Defiance of blockades
- Politically motivated counterfeiting
- Preclusive purchasing
- Seizure of assets
- Dumping
- Selective patronage
- Alternative markets
- Alternative transportation systems
- Alternative economic institutions
Political Intervention
- Overloading of administrative systems
- Disclosing identities of secret agents
- Seeking imprisonment
- Civil disobedience of “neutral” laws
- Work-on without collaboration
- Dual sovereignty and parallel government
Without doubt, a large number of additional methods have already been used but have not been classified, and a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have the characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation and nonviolent intervention.
It must be clearly understood that the greatest effectiveness is possible when individual methods to be used are selected to implement the previously adopted strategy. It is necessary to know what kind of pressures are to be used before one chooses the precise forms of action that will best apply those pressures.
The Parallel State
The only suitable ‘policy’; since we are playing a game that is set up for us to inherently remain powerless is a new resistance strategy, which incorporates nine broad elements;
(1) Analyze precisely how Israelis, Irish, Cubans, Iranians and Bangladeshis have utilized ‘development technology’ to secure their states; then apply it to a more localized nation.
(2) Decentralization, decentralization and decentralization.
(3) Utilization of the Human Rights instruments as a baseline set of demands.
(4) Utilization of ‘militant nonviolence’ to resist daily rights violations carried out in every country.
(5) Securing the means of development via a broad application of ‘development technology’ poured into ‘mass capacity’ training modules.
(6) Formation of ‘parallel state’ formations to deny the existing governments’ tax revenue and stated functional purpose.
(7) Harnessing bloc purchasing power to boycott all goods corporately owned by the domestic or foreign oligarchy at the periphery and semiperiphery.
(8) Disruption of all supply chains back to the core;
(9) Emancipation.
(Insert)
Who are the Resistance
We’re going to unite sustainable development and human rights practitioners into a wide and decentralized union. Here is the criteria for affiliation.
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Sympathy with the Resistance
By action or inaction you may choose to aid the movement. You may collaborate, you may ignore, you may surrender in the high towers of the West or in a gilded ghetto within your own nation, but the cries of our suffering collective people will not be drowned out. The blood and misery of humanity will beg you to tell your children who is it that fights for these people on the front lines. And if you cannot risk for the suffering stranger, if you do not want to see the movement conquer the oligarchs then at least show your sympathy for the Resistance.
But first, before you make your decision you must first know these Maslow needs and these Human Rights and make every effort to utilize them as your future framework to understand what it is that we in the trenches lay down our lives to accomplish. This is the first step to sympathy with the resistance. Realization that you, your children and all those you love were born with inalienable rights stripped from you at birth and made a mockery of on world stages, for the last 65 years.
We, are here not only simply improve the conditions of the poor; we are here to improve our own conditions too. Philanthropists did not found this meme and movement. Philanthropy is a pastime of the idle rich while freedom, rights and dignity are the stuff of people’s human aspirations.
We, must also be here to lay the conduits and lines of communication for a global Resistance and Development movement that already exists and has always existed as long as these rights were trampled. Questioning the source of our misery and fighting poverty like we were in fact waging a people’s war for the survival of vast segments of our human kind.
We, are here make linkages between resistance and development without compromising either. Classically separate efforts these efforts must be unified. Most importantly we must reject the validity of a nation state system that pits impoverished civilians against each other for the basis of worker exploitation and trade.
We, are here to put more sophisticated tools in the hands of the activists, freedom fighters and the change makers, who at their forefront are the professions we described and the common person yearning for freedom from poverty and oppression.
We must train the poor to be their own practitioners of development and freedom.
The medical worker to heal the body. The teacher to nourish the mind. The engineer to carry out works and projects. The farmer to nourish the people. The logistician to keep us well organized. The journalist to document the truth and disseminate news of atrocity, hardship, glory or victory.
The paralegal to pressure the state via its mechanisms. The facilitator to forge solidarity between diverse ranks and uncommon people. There are many Blueprints we can improve on to train more people as the agents of change in their communities. The development practitioner must make themselves able to supply the access to tactics and better tools all with the aim of empowering the people she or he is working for.
The poor are poor because the very wealthy require them to be that way to keep them wretched, divided, pliable and either working or dying when not needed to work. We must focus not on trying to count the poor but instead organizing ourselves to empower them.
Poverty and its corollary mass slavery, total deprivation created disease as well as endless warfare are all built into this system because without them there would be realization that was no reason to be so divided in the face of such a direct subjugation of most of the race.
This is not a class war this is a global human rights and anti-poverty campaign organized across border lines and with a specific aim; unite and fully associate this work with a struggle, not some high minded crusade.
Universal Human Rights of December 10th, 1948 for all.
For every last child, woman, and man.
Again read your rights so you know in your heart that what we strive for is a universal good, something you wish for your own family, for yourself.
We assure you that sympathy for the resistance will always begin at home.
If you join this movement now you will be fighting for some time as a partisan in the field publically invested. Or, hiding your affiliation as a sympathizer until opportunity arises to aid the movement directly.
You will have a series of modules available online that you and your colleagues may use, utilize, modify and re-adjust to establish our front line tactical model: the Emergency Group. And, via the supply conduits and the data conduits of the movement, a tight network may always be activated to get more support in the country you are operating in.
Yet, we will all be struggling along in the dark and without much back up and without a traditional support-supply base for some number of years to come. Your network will be limited to your school, community, and workplace. You will be joining an idea and the support will be irregular at best in the beginning. You will likely be joining either an NGO with particular corporate culture or a state ministry that has a binding national agenda.
We are collectively developing a series of training modules, testing and improving them on the ground and in doing so enlisting and empowering thousands into the chief tactical development subscribed to by the movement. Mass Capacity building to increase a given population and cohorts level of Human Rights Index measured in both rights, needs and capabilities.
Linked via this network and the internet to other partisans via the tactic we utilize and the framework for victory we use. There are surely many other conversations like this happening around the globe. This is get them testing a tactical approach to resistance and development.
There are several nations with far more sophisticated blue prints than others and there are of course NGO’s that deliver better services than others. And we should be working only for those which are completely in line with Human Rights. Not building systems of dependency, inefficiency, and architecture for neo-colonial exploitation. We are going to be attacking those that fund the majority of the existing so-called Development Operations. We will be drawing attention to hypocrisy, waste and inefficiency.
We would like your help to learn from and about the world’s first emergency group in Haiti. We’d like to learn about your affiliates who may be employing the same strategy with different language.
We’d like you to sympathize with the resistance, and then in your own way become partisans yourselves. At the time of last publication we, a small part of this latent movement have four dozen members, roughly 700 volunteers, and several thousand supporters in and around Port Au Prince and Brooklyn, NY. We’d like you to be aware of the watch words on both the flags of Brooklyn and Haiti; “L’union fait la force.” In unity there is strength.
In the face of such violence and vast darkness we invite you join us in a movement for real change, full rights and the expectation and boldness for victory.
Humanity this is your call to arms.
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[1] South Africa is not by normative analysis a core contender; they are via the BRICS alliance elevated from Semi-Peripheral status to the hat geopolitical role.
[2] Core Hegemon, Core Critical, Core Dependent, Semi-Peripheral, Peripheral, Peripheral Medium HDI, Peripheral Low HDI, Peripheral Failing, Failed States.
[3] Greece went bankrupt and was bailed out twice in 2010 and 2012. Greece is only a core country by virtue of its inclusion in the European Union.
[4] Hong Kong was territorially reabsorbed in 1997 into the PRC, but will retain financial linkages and independence until 2047.
[5] Israel due to its military and intelligence linkages to the United States since 1976 is more nuanced in that is an independent state possessing no hegemonic capacity, however under direct US Clientalism projects vast region power on behalf of an in tandem with the USA.
[6] Cuba is an anomaly in that it is one of only five surviving Communist states and the only one that still largely applies full Socialist policies. That has made it a semi-peripheral power is its unusual projection of development technology particularly in the Healthcare sector to be a ‘Medical Internationalist’ power abroad disproportionate to size or resources.
[7] Iran is a second interesting anomaly as it is the only Shi’a Islamic State and been locked in proxy warfare with the United States since its Revolution in 1979.
[8] Vietnam is run by the Communist Party of Vietnam.
[9] Those without their own recognized states such as the Kurds, Basque, Yazids or Palestinians.
[10] Nepal was taken over by Maoists in 2008.
[11] Laos is still governed by the Communist Party of Laos.
[12] Angola fought an independence struggle from Portugal followed by a major Proxy War/ Civil War that did not end until 2002 in Socialist victory.
[13] North Korea in whatever ideological rendering it casts itself is little more than a criminal oligarchy exerting pure authoritarian control over its citizens imposing massive deprivation, famine and human rights violations while maintaining the fourth largest standing army, nuclear weapons and active participating in global counterfeiting and human trafficking.
[14] Rwanda experienced a much analyzed genocide in 1998 where a Tutsi invasion triggered a Hutu launched genocide that cumulatively killed over 800,000 civilians over three months. What is less understood is that Rwanda’s newly victorious Tutsi minority then spear headed an invasion of neighboring Zaire which toppled the Mobutu government, provoked the African World War which sucked in over 17 countries and left an estimated 5.6 million dead; followed by Rwanda’s exploitation of the genocide, Western guilt and strategic placement to profit off of the conflict mineral trade flowing out war ravaged DRC.
[15] Palestine has never been recognized officially as a State but both the Fatah government’s corruption and Hamas government’s refusal to recognize Israel have facilitated the continued occupation of Palestine.
[16] Somalia was a socialist country until it devolved into civil war in 1991.
[17] It is estimated that 5.5-6.2 million citizens of the former nation Zaire (DRC) have perished horrifically since 1998.
[18] There are recent events in Sri Lanka such as the civil war and massacre of the Tamil Tigers after the 2008 Tsunami that might suggest Sri Lanka to be in the failing state categorization.
[19] An economic analysis declaring approx. 69 states in Sub-Saharan African, Central Asia and Haiti to be failed/ failing to meet basic development objectives.
[20] A Pinker Analysis demonstrates a marked decline in global violence over time.
[21] The 206 national units categorized are divided into:
- Membership within the United Nationssystem divides the states into three sub-categories: 193 member states, two observer states, and 11 other states.
- Sovereignty disputedcategory indicates states whose sovereignty is undisputed (190 states) and states whose sovereignty is disputed (16 states).
- Para States; unrecognized by UN or plurality of other national governments but existing de facto do not generally have available statistics..
[22] A Para State is a non-recognized state entity that is formed to manage social services and security often during a period of conflict. Examples of such include Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Barzani government in Iraqi Kurdistan and Hamas in the Gaza Strip along with Somiland, Puntland and Western Sahara. Or, ISIS.
[23] Of an estimated 7 billion humans; 5 billion live below $10 a family a day. The spread of the top 2 billion peaks radically roughly in relation to property ownership or asset storage at the global core.
[24] Both Immanuel Wallerstein and other historians agree the Cold War was a series of ongoing concurrent wars not a singular static period.
[25] Wallerstein argues in his Analysis that it is inconsistent to separate World I and World War II into separate events because they involved the same core belligerents triggering the worldwide warfare for Core Control transfer from England to either Germany or the USA.
[26] Certainly tendencies within Christianity, Islam and Hinduism are by the far the most aggressive.
[27] Lifted by President Obama on 16 December, 2014.
[28] Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—signed the Collective Security Treaty. Three other post- Soviet states—Azerbaijan, Belarus, and Georgia—signed the next year and the treaty took effect in 1994. Five years later, six of the nine—all but Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Uzbekistan—agreed to renew the treaty for five more years, and in 2002 those six formally agreed to create the Collective Security Treaty Organization as a military alliance. Uzbekistan rejoined the CSTO in 2005 but withdrew in 2012.
[30] These are the general observations of political scientist Thomas Poole
[31] Haiti is the only UN Peacekeeping Mission in place without any formal ceasefire in place. It is now widely understood that the Nepalese contingent of the MINUSTAH UN Peacekeeping operation introduced Cholera to the Republic of Haiti.
[32] A proxy war between Nazi Germany and USSR which killed over 500,000 people between 1936-1939.
[33] The Euro-America Oligarchy being oldest is more traditional. It’s organized in social clubs and exercises the most control via campaign finance, control of banking and media sectors and longevity of control. The predominant coordination points for this Oligarchy are Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg Group and Davos. The Princeling Oligarchy is a direct familial link between blood descendants of the Eight Immortals called princelings; an estimated 147 people in charge of the most important aspects of the Chinese political and economic architecture. The Russian Petro-KGB Oligarchy is the newest grouping based upon various KGB
[34] Which can be loosely sub-divided into Sunni Wahhabi-Salafism (Spread by Saudi Arabia and Pakistan) and Revolutionary Shi’ism (Spread by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps).
[35] See annex for listing of the 35 Conflicts, casualty counts & durations.
[36] The USA has been invited to occupy Japan since 1945 serving as its default army and the Korean peninsula since 1950 buffering the South from the massive North Korea army.
[37] Chinese oil purchases and arms shipments to Sudan are directly responsible for the Darfur & Khortofan genocides.
[38] Legislative capture is a system of elite control via campaign financing.
[39] Property and Prophets: By: E.K. Hunt
[40] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. ix
[41] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 12
[42] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 15
[43] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 24-25
[44] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 50
[45] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 57
[46] Mutual Aid: By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 75
[47] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 88
[48] Leviathan By: Thomas Hobbes
[49] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg.90-91 quoting research from P. Kolben, The Present State of the Cape of Good Hope.
[50] Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
[51] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 111
[52] Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men: Jean-Jacques Rousseau
[53] Property and Prophets By: E.K. Hunt
[54] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 125
[55] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 162
[56] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 164
[57] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 222
[58] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 287
[59] Mutual Aid By: Peter Kropotkin pg. 292
[60] The Marshall Plan (the European Recovery Program, ERP) was the 1948 American aid program directed toward Western Europe and Asia contributing $13 billion in economic support to rebuild, promote free trade and improve business infrastructure after World War 2 to deter the spread of Communism.
[61] One trusts official government statistics or one does not.
[62] Leading up to their World Development Report 2000/2001, the World Bank and Oxford University commissioned three entire volumes resulting from a global consultation with ‘the poor’. In Volume 1, ‘Can Anyone Hear Us?’ they interview 40,000 poor people in 50 countries, In Volume 2, ‘Crying Out for Change’ compiled 1999 its inquiry in 23 countries). In Volume 3, ‘From Many Lands’ poverty patterns and country case studies are conducted. ‘Voices of the Poor’ calls for an expanded definition of poverty and an examination of power dynamics that enforce it
[63] The 8 MDGs were a United Nations global anti-poverty goals largely proven to be unrealistic and partial in their implementation soon to be replaced by 17 proposes Sustainable Development Goals in September 2015.
[64] Revolutionary Socialism and Proto-Communism were defeated largely on the basis of attrition and proxy warfare, not due to lack of social provision.
[65] The ridiculousness of labeling and linguistics has emerged a critique of development itself. The Cold War divisions of first, second and third world no longer have resonance. Developed v. developing posits that one countries Modernization (Walt Rostow) was not predicated on the under-development of another country. Therefore Global South/ Global North is yet another simplistic layer of false conscious thinking. Firstly, because economic relationships define international relations and this paradigm fails to even address that. Secondly, because no country is wholly developed, in even the most OECD developed nation there remain pockets of absolute under development. Therefore North and South are misleading neo-liberal monikers. They have no resonance in economics, sociology, history or political science.
[66] MCD posits as a development theory that promotes massive investments in skill and vocational training in all sectors as viable means to advance the conditions of the poor.
[67] The “Global South” is an erroneous term of Western Development misleadingly indicating that development can be spatially identified in a fixed geographic zone. Core, Semi-Periphery and Periphery as delineated in Wallerstien’s World System Analysis better expresses the dynamic nature of these economic zones. Dynamic in relation to both geography and development.
[68] The Asian Tigers; Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan and South Korea share several factors. All are relatively small in population, mono-ethnic, dependent completely on the U.S. for their defense, isolated politically and military by the PRC and dominated by either local military rule or oligarchy until very recently, if not in reality to this very day.
[69] RCT, randomized control trials was a system developed by Duflo & Banerjee via the J-PAL at MIT to compare the results of a given development intervention against indicators from randomized control segments of the population chosen to not receive the intervention at all. The principle of RCT was that every single development intervention must be able to prove in implementation via hard, measurable data that it is actually improving the lives of the beneficiary population.
[70] Overabundance & over consumptive behavior to the point of causing harm and deprivation to person outside the benefit structure, as well as the planet.
[71] The fourth sector is a broad amalgam of civil society actors such as community groups, social movements, farming collectives, clubs & associations, trade unions, religious institutions and grassroots actors funded directly by the local community they operate in.
[72] Please see attached annex of Proxy War listings and Democide Listing. A democide is defined as a state unleashing it’s military against its own people in ethno-political purge of civilians. While the Jewish Holocaust in Europe is the oft cited example there have 17 subsequent genocides (such as Former Yugoslav Rwanda & East Timor) and 37 total including Democides (Duvalierist Haiti & Argentine Dirty Wars)
[73] The terms North/South or Developed/Developing are highly arbitrary and problematic. In our context World System Theory analysis of Core, Periphery and Semi-Periphery serve to illustrate supply chain role in globalization while developed, developing of un-developed delineate their latest perceived scores on multi-lateral poverty indexes such as HDI or MDPI.
[74]
[75] I will say ‘three’ world wars with the so-called Cold War as the third because certainly it was rather atrocious for all of the millions killed in the multitude of proxy conflicts.
[76]
WALTER ADLER 