Chapter Three:
On The Systems of Oppression
Understanding Deliberate Maldevelopment

“The hand you hold is the hand that holds you down.”

The Capitalist 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 nor 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 “immiserating 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.

On Relative Poverty

Poverty is not like weather conditions or the fate of a romance. It is result of deliberate and planned social policy, utilized to exploit the productive power of the vulnerable at the lowest possible wage or extract the resources from a powerless of corrupt regime collaborating with a hegemon power.

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.

On 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 political 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.

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World System Analysis Revisited

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 model that tracks the formation of the world system between 1500 and the present day (Wallerstein, 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 Wallerstein 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 Oligarchical 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 New 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.

Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark

Finland
United Kingdom
Germany
Greece
United States

Iceland
Ireland
France
Portugal
Italy
Japan

Sweden
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Spain

Financial Hubs

Singapore
Switzerland
Hong Kong

Garrison States

Taiwan
South Korea
Israel

Medieval City States

Vatican City
San Marino
Luxembourg
Liechtenstein
Andorra
Monaco
Malta

Petro States

Kuwait
United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Brunei
Qatar
Bahrain

Dependent Territories (Retained Colonies)

Cook Islands (New Zealand)
Puerto Rico (USA)
Guam (USA)
U.S. Virgin Islands (USA)
Guadeloupe (France)
Wallis and Futuna (France)
Martinique (France)
Saint Pierre and Miquelon (France)
French Polynesia (France)
Réunion (France)
French Guiana (France)
Jersey (?)
Cayman Islands (UK)
Falkland Islands (UK)
Bermuda (UK)
Guernsey (UK)
Gibraltar (UK)
Isle of Man (UK)
Aruba (Netherlands)

(Not complete listing)

Deconstructing the Core
Core Central/ Core Critical/ 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.

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.
Switzerland
United Kingdom (Former Core)

France
Germany (Former Core contender)

Definition of Core Dependent: do not dictate the geopolitical direction but benefit from closely linked security, financial or ethno-religious ties.
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
Denmark

Finland
Sweden
Germany
Greece
Hong Kong

Iceland
Ireland
Israel
Italy
Japan

Luxembourg
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Singapore

Spain
San Marino
Portugal
UAE Bahrain

Taiwan South Korea Vatican City Kuwait Qatar

Cyprus

The New Core Contenders

People’s Republic of China (Emerging)

Russian Federation (Defeated, Remerging)

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 supposed counterbalance to the World Bank facilitating development lending from Brazil, Russian Federation, India, China and South Africa.

The New 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:

India
Brazil
Colombia
Argentina

Mexico
Cuba
Iran
Vietnam

Poland
Turkey
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Indonesia

The Same 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 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:

Togo

Gambia

Burkina Faso Namibia
Benin
Kenya
São Tomé/ Príncipe
Uganda
Zambia
Ghana
The Gambia Botswana
Senegal
Zimbabwe

Cameroon
Congo
Gabon

Former Socialist

Mozambique
Ethiopia
Tanzania
Angola

Asia& Pacific:

Palau
Nepal
Papua New Guinea

Fiji

Bhutan

Thailand
Laos

Vanuatu

Post-Soviet/ Former Socialist:

Mongolia

Belarus
Macedonia

Bulgaria Montenegro
Kazakhstan
Abkhazia
Georgia
Uzbekistan
Latvia
Transnistria
Hungary
Kyrgyzstan
Kosovo
Estonia
Turkmenistan
Croatia
Bosnia and Herzegovina
Albania
Romania
Czech Republic
Moldova

Lithuania Nagorno-Karabakh
Tajikistan
Serbia

Middle East & Maghreb

Jordan
Morocco
Algeria
Oman
Tunisia
Northern Cyprus

Latin America & the Caribbean:

Grenada
Suriname
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 New Failing States

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.

Criteria for Failing/ Failed/Collapsed Categorization:

o Low Human Development Index Rankings
o Literacy Rates below 50%
o Life Expectancy below 60 years of age
o Famine events exceeding 100,000 deaths past five years
o Epidemic disease events killing 50,000 people past five yeas
o Active conflict within the national borders
o 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:

1. Mounting Demographic Pressures
2. Massive Movement of Refugees or Internally Displaced Persons
3. Vengeance Seeking Group Grievance
4. Chronic and Sustained Human Flight
5. Uneven Economic Development
6. Poverty, Sharp or Severe Economic Decline
7. Legitimacy of the State
8. Progressive Deterioration of Public Services
9. Violation of Human Rights and Rule of Law
10. Expansive Security Apparatus
11. Rise of Factionalized Elites
12. Intervention of External Actors

Failing States include:

Myanmar
Mauritania
Egypt
Lesotho
Mali
Cote d’Ivoire
Ukraine
Guinea-Bissau
Sri Lanka
Niger
Nigeria
Honduras
Rwanda

The New 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
Islamic Republic of Sudan
South Sudan
Sierra Leone
Liberia
Palestine
Lebanon
Yemen
Central African Republic
Eritrea
Chad
 Guinea
Malawi
Burundi

On State Collapse

The collapse 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.

Yugoslavia (collapsed in 1991)
Somalia (collapsed in 1992)
Afghanistan (occupied since 2001)
Iraq (occupied since 2003; collapsed into three entities; ISIS, Kurdish Regional Government, and Shi’a central government)
Haiti (collapsed 2004)
Syrian Arab Republic (collapsed into Civil War 2012)
Libya (collapsed into Civil War 2013)
DRC (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.

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 an 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.

1. (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.

2. (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.

3. (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.

Human Development Algorithm

The Human Development Index (HDI) is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development. A country scores higher HDI when the lifespan is higher, the education level is higher, and the GDP per capita is higher. The HDI was developed by the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, often framed in terms of whether people are able to “be” and “do” desirable things in their life, and was published by the United Nations Development Program.
The 2010 Human Development Report introduced an Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI). While the simple HDI remains useful, it stated that “the IHDI is the actual level of human development (accounting for inequality),” and “the HDI can be viewed as an index of ‘potential’ human development (or the maximum IHDI that could be achieved if there were no inequality).”

Published on 4 November 2010 (and updated on 10 June 2011), the 2010 Human Development Index (HDI) combines three dimensions:
• A long and healthy life: Life expectancy at birth
• Education index: Mean years of schooling and Expected years of schooling
• A decent standard of living: GNI per capita (PPP US$)
In its 2010 Human Development Report, the UNDP began using a new method of calculating the HDI. The following three indices are used:
1. Life Expectancy Index (LEI)
LEI is 1 when Life expectancy at birth is 85 and 0 when Life expectancy at birth is 20.
2. Education Index (EI)
2.1 Mean Years of Schooling Index (MYSI)
Fifteen is the projected maximum of this indicator for 2025.
2.2 Expected Years of Schooling Index (EYSI)
Eighteen is equivalent to achieving a master’s degree in most countries.
3. Income Index (II)
II is 1 when GNI per capita is $75,000 and 0 when GNI per capita is $100.
Finally, the HDI is the geometric mean of the previous three normalized indices:

LE: Life expectancy at birth
MYS: Mean years of schooling (i.e. years that a person aged 25 or older has spent in formal education)
EYS: Expected years of schooling (i.e. total expected years of schooling for children under 18 years of age)
GNIpc: Gross national income at purchasing power parity per capita

 

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 crystallized 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 Oligarchical 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 blocs; USA-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].      

World System Theory

 

 

We always wish to make revolutionary theory and development theory accessible to regular people otherwise we will fail, that is inherent. If you cannot make theory applicable to the securement or tangible, actionable gains in rights it is irrelevant. Thus before we can expand on the concept of Emancipatory Development, development in service of rights we should attempt to make understandable the lectures and work of Sociologist Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein, a historical social scientist and creator of the “World Systems Theory”. But first a little re-introduction of Plato, the Greek philosopher.

 

 

 

Allegory of 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.

 

 

 

Allegory of Mountain

 

We all 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 (though this number will grow as artificial nation states continue to implode) 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 (Wallerstein, 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 consociationalist 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 20^th century has taken form around the growing Multipolarity of the Globalized 21^st 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 accusations of terrorism. They made democracy into noise. They have made greed into virtue. They have turned your servitude into work. They have turned rights into phrases, freedom into slavery. They have turned colonialism into something called “sustainable 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 and 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 overtake 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 Nations made goals to “eradicate global 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. Jeffrey Sachs believes poverty can be eliminated through coordinated action of a “Big Push” Global Marshall 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; a highly cultivated enforced paradigm. Your consent in your governance, your indifference to affairs of those in other nations, your belief in the development enterprise, your willingness to pay your taxes and acquiesce to your government’s’ policies at home and abroad are based on a ‘manufactured consent’ built on two very specific fundamental untruths.

1. The Illusion of Development; the World System is not actually improving under stewardship of capitalist economists, neoliberal trade policies and expanding 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 21^st century.

1. 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. Reduction of instances of developed nation warfare masks the proliferation of developing nation state collapse and non-state actor conflicts.

On the basis of rights a non-enforceable 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, Colombia, 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).<

Defining our Own Development

 

 

Things are really not so clear that we can state that the world is developing or even radically degenerating. The atrocities of the last 500 years went mostly undocumented and barometers of progress; our beloved indicators are not yet even fully calibrated to the aspirations of freedom and capability possible amidst the over 5 billion human souls that are surviving on ten dollars a day (or much less). Survival and the other basic Maslowian needs are not the sole imperative to this field’s triumph. What developments humanity might be capable of (Sen, p.31) are what attracts the just and noble to this amorphous enterprise. Otherwise, yes, development is joke and a failure.

 

The development enterprise; a global giving system which combines the regular hybridization of welfare-aid carrots, interventionist sticks and a banal meddling technocracy has succeeded completely in preserving an economic order that enriches the Global North while placing the human and material resources of the South in perpetual subjugation and harvest (Hettne, p10). Poverty is not the corollary result of underdevelopment; it is a calculated effect of an imposed economic order that masquerading for now in the language of “human rights” and “social justice” has perpetuated all of the previous (colonial) epoch’s worst means of social-global control. An enduring “humiliation” is being propagated through the nation state system and its controlling corporate oligarchies (Narayan/Patel, pp.97-99). Cemented in place via both the governments and religious authorities that claim jurisdiction over the global 3 billion poor (living at $2.50 a day and below); there remain still teeming masses that even in the hinterlands of the North face disempowerment, hardship, and regular victimization (Sen, p.23).The Northern obsession with measurement and the generation of statistics made that cluster of civilizations quite attuned at plantation management, resource extraction and a domineering collective hegemony.

 

The North imposed its economic order in the 16^th century on the Global South via slavery, colonialism and war. In the 20^th century, within the Cold War context, competing models were offered to the South (Potter, p.61) but each placed these nations within some global supply chain for the ultimate benefit of the Capitalist or Communist Blocs (Potter, p.62). It should now be a standard notion that when measurements of development would then be proscribed upon these long subjugated peoples that they would be allowing their oppressors to dictate to them the terms of their future empowerment. What remains fascinating about the development enterprise is that couched behind the rhetoric of “sustainability”, “humanitarian imperative” and “human equity” lies the same cluster of national interests and great power politics that bear such direct responsibility for the current denigration of the human condition.

 

Northern Development has clearly failed at achieving sustainability, emancipation and self-determinism. Northern values are a blithe and simple hypocrisy that take on apolitical pathways to avoid the awfulness of responsibility (Sidaway, p.17). For those that might erase five hundred years of Northern interaction with the South with some banal and soulless (and non-binding) United Nations treaties we have this to say; dare you who so made so great a blight on three quarters of humanity in the name of your material self-enrichment ever ask of us why we are not yet developed?

Chapter Two
On The Resistance Consensus
Understanding the Proposed Framework of Resistance, Part II

Who We Are

We are a group of women and men who empathize with the broad suffering of most of our kind. We regard humanity as one people and refuse to see differences imposed from above based on ethnicity, belief, nationality or gender. We are a combine of beleaguered revolutionaries; cynical but optimistic development practitioners and hardened rescue workers. We are also human rights advocates & defenders, humanitarian relief workers, peace builders, trade unionists, activists and abolitionists that believe in Human Rights and via Emancipatory Development are prepared fight for them. We are a network of friends engaged in a larger war effort that seeks freedom for our people, our people being the entirety of the human race irrespective of national boundary.

We are dedicated to our families and the future.

With over sixty-five active violent conflicts raging across the earth; with many millions 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 ‘Peacefare’; 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 radical politics, traditional progressive politics, the humanitarian aid complex and the Southern lead sectors Development Enterprise into a fully mobilized and highly decentralized tactical alliance for real and sustainable change. 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.

Politically speaking however, the structure of the resistance should adopt the mechanism of the emerging ideology “Democratic Confederalism”, is this system embraces fully participatory democracy, social ecology, feminism and deep tolerance to diverse identity, belief and ideological tendency.

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 which should be internalized to propel the immediacy of bold new tactical paradigms outside the realm of nation state sovereignty and the world system’s integral dependences.

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 System’.

The Para State is not a territorial delineated 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 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.

We aim to bond our struggles and experiences with those of you and your compatriots who share an affinity with our ambitious 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 small 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 a mere insurrection, a new wave of global revolution or a general strike; (at least not in historical terms) but instead the embrace of emancipatory development.

They (the tyrants, businessmen and technocrats of the North West) gave us these tools so we could be more productive slaves, serfs, subjects and consumers but we will train each other in the arts of development and we will make them obsolete. We were all born into their bondage but we must not die as slaves! Our liberation can only be a collaborative process.

What we are fighting for?

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 2017 will succeed in implementation them. It is not a question of blame but realpolitik. We are fighting for the total dismantlement of the World System to be replaced by political entities that are smaller, more decentralized, far less capable of constant warfare and controlled by the communities which constitute them.

The Human Rights are a baseline of political demands not an end goal in themselves. The World System and the oligarchical collectives that domineer it are to be rendered helpless via the emancipation of the popular masses of humanity.

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 has proven highly 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 community’s 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.

Social Movement Organizations

We would like to take this opportunity to summarize the primary tactical and philosophical lessons being drawn from our study of Social Movement Organizations (SMO).

It is vital to us as activists, revolutionaries, peace builders, development practitioners and humanitarian agents 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 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 lifesaving 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 de-legitimization 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 i.e.; “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 utter 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 metropole 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 not simply to “teach a person to fish.” It is to transmit in a pedagogical manner useful to local communities and political actors how to train their people reducing and breaking outside dependency.

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.

Chapter One
What is Emancipatory Development?
Understanding the Proposed Framework of Resistance

“Behind every great wealth or fortune is an even greater crime.”
– Dostoevsky

A Great Crime
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 . 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 .

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 . 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.

Later we will introduce a cruel and insidious “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 . 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 .

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 , 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) .

Our movement is being driven by development programs initiated in the Global South/Periphery , 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. Introducing from abroad the piecemeal part of an unrecognized or supported state.

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 ; 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 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 .
This manuscript 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 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.

 

Preamble

 

 

 

It is apparent to anyone with an open mind that this system is flawed and inequality is the result of the design. How deliberate and how correctable that is, is the subject of many hundreds of years of revolutionary thought. The oppression that exists in the world today is not only systemic but the direct result of the cultural mentality of apathy and consumerism that it has created. For those of us that have become aware, the stark realities of American imperialism clearly demand action. So, our movement is based upon necessity. We have all been witness to the systemic poverty, injustice and inequality. We have seen the shackles that bind us, and we will break free of them.

 

Seeing and knowing this, many have chosen to do nothing. So we have taken it upon ourselves to create a better society today, and send a message—a message that such injustice will not be tolerated. A call for change amidst the deafening silence of apathy. We are told we are free. Free to consume and free to question as long as our questions do not become dangerous to those who hold power. Our mission is to create a body capable of providing a versatile solution to American oppression; a group of revolutionaries ready to unite across ethnicity, class, and ideology to bring about a new kind of society.

 

The Organization was founded in Tel Aviv in the summer of 2001. A group without a name was formed to launch a movement without a color. The original objective was the resolution of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It was believed that through the creation of a united front among the peoples of the region, a solution could be achieved that might serve as a springboard for a worldwide revolution against American hegemony, and the cultural mentality it perpetuates.

 

That September forever changed the nature of our struggle. Our enemy was not the Euro-American itself, but instead the quickly spreading gospel of the American mentality; and so an emigration was made, and soon the second division of the Organization was opened in New York City.

 

The principle on which this group was founded was that we are in fact not an organization, but rather individuals becoming organized. The Organization serves as a network through which different people can unite under common revolutionary goals.

 

We work to spark a consciousness among the people conducive to upholding the natural rights of each individual, regardless of background or belief. The oppression we all perceive must be fought on numerous fronts, and in numerous ways. We must embrace all potential solutions, and all methods of achieving them, in order to ensure that the solution produced is an effective one for all people, not just those charged with creating it.

 

Even if there is one perfect revolutionary solution, we do not claim to have it. Rather, we came together to find it. As such, the Grey Book has been structured as a constantly evolving document. It is the cumulative product of an ongoing dialogue between our members, the culmination of many different viewpoints. Today, the Organization is composed of autonomous chapters across the Northeast, and we are expanding rapidly. As we fight, build, study and educate, our struggle continues. It is part of a constantly interwoven tapestry of resistance to an aggressive and pervasively destructive world system called Neoliberalism specifically and capitalism more generally.

 

 

Introduction

Beginning in the year 2000 a diffuse, evolving and highly decentralized movement emerged in the Cities of Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and New York City. The central thesis of the young Palestinian, Israeli, Kurdish and American leaderships that formed and sustained this clandestine movement was firstly; that the American Empire was a dangerous and expansive force in the world predatory to its own citizens and made rich off the backs of the rest of the world’s exploited subjects. Pursuing a sanitized version of the imperialism utilized to dominate the world’s non-white populations over 500 years. Second, that armed struggle had largely failed expansively in the past 200 years to liberate humanity from exploitation if anything triggering generations of intercommunal bloodshed and atrocity. Thirdly, that any revolution limiting itself to the nation state unit was destined to become isolated, easily quarantined and ultimately fail reduced in economic attrition and siege. This movement that began, as many do, with young students has blossomed into a global network of seasoned organizers, embedded on six continents within the leading unions, NGOs, political parties and social movements that we refer to today as “the Resistance.”

That is not assume that this faction was alone in arriving at these ideas or that far before and long after others would not come to them on their own. This is simply a book, subject to amendment and evolutions, that will attempt to identify the principles of one small band of partisans and activists. Unique in that they emerged from the Empire’s richest principle city and its outmost military colony base; occupied Israel and Palestine.

On 3 July 2001 the First Congress was held in Tel Aviv. By 2003 there were several hundred cadre and sympathizers organized around New York City, White Plains, Boston, DC, Baltimore, Saratoga, Burlington, Elizabeth and Madison in the USA; and a network of cells throughout Israel and Palestine centered around a leadership in Tel Aviv and Nablus as well as a youth movement in Haifa and Beer Sheva. Initially the movement in the States focused almost wholly on secret fund raising for the Resistance in Israel, opposition to the Afghan and Iraq wars, and an ambitions popular education effort to radicalize and indoctrinate young Americans to anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian liberation thinking through popular education. The movement inside of Israel and Palestine, more focused on survival, carefully expanded cells into leftist progressive formations and infiltrating the IDF thanks to conscription.

The First Congress on 9 July 2001 in Florentine Tel Aviv issued the first draft of the “Ten Point Program for the Resistance in Israel and Palestine”. The ideological tendencies of the nineteen founders, all of which were younger than 25 ranged from Marxist-Leninism and Anarcho Syndicalism on the left, to religious nationalism, Christian Liberation Theology, Shiism and Baha’i Universalism, as well as Revisionist Zionism and Universal Zionism at the center and right. The political platform called for an armed uprising inside the Jewish Military colony to inspire a broader encircling campaign throughout the developing world to cut the Northwest (OECD States) off from cheap labor and commodities while developing a framework for sustainable non-state governance and provision of social services.

Articulating the program of the subsequent seven congresses as well as compiling the communiques, pamphlets and speeches of its young leadership was the “little grey book” retitled in 2004 “The Grey Book”, a collective manuscript based around the movement’s emerging theories and tactics toward achieving universal human rights, participatory democratic governance and emancipatory development.

You are reading the 8th Edition; circulated immediately before an upcoming 8th Congress.

The first edition of the Grey Book was released in 2001. Its principal authors, and architects of the movement that would follow were Avinadav DeBuitléirs (Black Israelite, Israeli citizen), Emma Solomon (Sephardic Israeli citizen), Zachariah Artstien (American-Israeli dual citizen), Nicholai Trickovitch (American citizen), Malka Dror (Russian Israeli dual Citizen) and Gene Dissentious (American). Most of the American movement and its supporters were unaware throughout most of the entire period of organizing inside the United States that the leadership of their group was for the most part being formulated inside of Israel-Palestine.

Some 40,000 copies of ever expanding and revising editions were put in circulation between 2002 and 2005.

At the fourth Congress held in New Jersey, USA in 2005 the organization was split into several defacto front groups; a media and television company, a student front based in the State and City University System, a unit to infiltrate the Democratic Party prior to the Barak Obama election campaign, a unit to develop community survival programs, a unit for continued popular education and clandestine military arm called the People’s Defense Forces (PDF).

By the fifth Congress in 2009 it was decided to launch a trade union and printed newspaper for EMS and civil servants called the Banshee News Service/ Banshee Association and develop capability for overseas deployment. In 2010 the organization’s New York based cadre and sympathizers began a 5 year effort to smuggle trainers and supplies to Haiti after the earthquake to drill and train EMT medical workers. This continued successfully until 2014 when it became self-sustaining.

In 2013 two leaders of the clandestine movement received scholarships to Brandeis University and began the process of organizing the approximately 400 foreign nationals at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management into a student union a new branch of the movement to be called the Development Union (D/U).

In the foothills West of Boston, U.S.A. in the year 2013 we found ourselves interred in a special kind of research camp where with some 400 mostly foreign nationals we devised over two years and in numerous conversations many means to alter and affect the state of human development, which was dire and quite bleak. As we had all the maps, photos and data in front of us some of us sought jobs in big NGOS, others in their home governments and some of us imagined our future as revolutionary. This was not any academic exercise to most of us, most of us were from the places we studied and had seen the war first hand. It radicalized some of us maybe, sharing all these biting first-hand accounts from around the world on the horrid state of affairs.

Confirming that we were neither crazy nor alone. This manuscript is a collection of the speeches, essays, white papers and pamphlets issued by the various wings of the clandestine movement.

In May of 2015 at the 7th Congress the Banshee Association (the New York based cadre), the Haitian Emergency Group (GAI, the Port Au Prince based cadre) and a new international group from the Heller School codified a program based on Cuban medical internationalism, principles of solidarity and selected a political platform based on the Kurdish ideology of Democratic Confederalism.

On July 4th, 2016 a General Coordinating Committee was incorporated in New York to proliferate the training of medical workers.

By 2017 the movement still largely concentrated in New York and Israel had spread via Union Shops, cells, front groups and a dispersion of elected leadership to every inhabited continent on earth. After successful consensus was reached by the leadership around the tactics of remote training for social services via the concept of mass capacity; the movement began smuggling personnel and equipment to the world’s only Democratic Confederalist zone on 26 May 2017; Rojava, Syria.

The year is now, in the distant unknown future. A grim winter is upon us all. Mankind and womankind are cold by the fruits of their generational indifference to affairs of working people. The setting, a miserable gulag hidden from normal sight on the Eastern coast of the United American States outside the City State of Greater Boston. The snow falls so hard you can’t see the roads anymore, can’t see but ten meters in front of you. They are caught in a thick and deadly, white deluge.

Adelina Blazhennaya is lovely and petite, but very striking is her sense of presence. When you are with her, you have her largely undivided attention. She is completely disarming, you let your guard slip. Which is dangerous as she is lovely, and you are surely mad. She finds and collects a type of man, ‘a mystic’ would be the polite way to call them. Men with some abilities that are useful to the generals and the oligarchs. As well as the champions of the serfs and wage slaves. The very way she looks at you lingers long after she is gone. It’s not seductive, it is a type of white magic. They say, she caused the comet shower in Chelyabinsk, but really that is only a speculation.
There is a vast spiritual war going on for the hearts and minds of toiling serfs, but the greater wars are still fought with guns and bullets. The world is far past the brink of irreversible tragedy. Invisible and visible warfare is to be carried out now against ordinary people and she has a great soul and is after a very particular soldier in this storm.
It has taken her half a day traveling from Camp Brighton-Allston to bribe sentries, to take three trains and an omnibus, to flirt most professionally, ensnare the camp guards in false paper works and transfer documents and thus make her way to Shrakasa Waltham, sub-camp Brandeis; the largest Special Engineering Camp built by the Ivories in the Americas, but really one of many thousands of “special population camps” built for citizens of suspect loyalty after “the Great Revolt”, a very incomplete revolution that happened four years prior to the events of this act.

This place that holds the mentally imprisoned and prisoners of this war, mainly Chornay, some Fenian surfs and deranged, crossbred Jeufs with their Christ killing ways and mental deceits. It’s also a place where dead men call aggregate, which is to say no one really governs these camps. You surround them and sometimes the authorities drop bombs on them but the camps are for all the people cleared out of the cities pacifying the insurgency going on still.

Waiting for her is another dead man Sebastian Adon. And he has a feeling of nervousness in his chest. Steel butterflies. The kind of nervous anticipation that does not come from being more than intimidated by a very, very beautiful young woman. It comes also from secretly loving her. Or something about her.
Handsome for a dead man, she thinks. And nothing but fucking trouble, she curses sometimes inside but hardly ever outside. Sebastian gets a lot of work done, no one can dispute that, but his ease to fall for women is amateur at best.
The State-run national television company ‘True News Corporation’ has been running his face and face of his so-called “terror wife” Emma Solomon for many weeks along with sound bites on the “dead terrorist ring-leaders of the Millennium Theater Hostage Crisis.”
A bloody three-day standoff which precipitated the functional end of a past union called the “United States of America” definitively breaking an estimated sixty-four small city-states and territories, Soviets, from the rest of the country including the black parts of neighboring Boston. Which the Commies call ‘Soviets’ and the Democratic Confederalists call ‘Cantons’. And the Federal government calls ‘Bandit Zones.’
She looks him and down and he is not exactly the same man she had met years before and had corresponded with since periodically. Along with the dreaming they did.
He is handsome but he has dark shadows below his eyes, which though hidden under hazel contacts are grey on grey associated with never properly sleeping.
The eyes of the Old Souls.
He looks recently broken, as though he was lost or been lost by someone. As though smiling comes with great difficulty. As if the words and beliefs he hides behind are in actuality no true armor.
She wonders what the proper body language to assume is; to cordially shake his hand as a comrade; or to kiss his cheeks has an old friend, or, well they were not lovers or even old friends. And this was their second time meeting. In the world of the real, they had met just one single time, on one single evening. But in dreams, they had something else altogether.
She was never nervous, but she did regard this man as a certain threat. A threat not to her life or her mind, certainly not to her heart because her heart was numb to all words and deeds done by men. Having kissed his very souls, having spent night, after night in his mind; she worried that he might know her souls a little too. And this was a very difficult thing to accept as a candidate.
Firstly, that this murderer was from the blood of the chosen. He was more than half Israelite by any record as well as his own admission. Secondly, that he seemed unable to die. Thirdly, that in the real world he might actually desire her. Lastly, that it was her duty to accept him as a courier from here to newly liberated New York City, when his driving, according to all accounts was much worse than her own.
It would be one thing to be killed or tortured by the enemy. This was the constant risk of aiding the resistance, but to die because an American never learned to properly drive; unthinkable.
The way that she moves is not like human women, she has elegance and force in equal parts, and there then emerges a disarming smile and she quite nearly thinks to embrace him. To hold him with a tightness that in dreams is so familiar, but in the world they have but shaken hands only once. She has done it in dreams a hundred times. And so many other things with him. She has raced dragons with him and explored the surface of the moon.
He stands there leaning against his vehicle a white Charger 2009. Which, for all its lack of fuel efficiency will be worth nothing unless her paperwork permits his release for if he leaves the boundary of Waltham Third Perimeter Shrakasa; his aorta will explode. Oh quite literally.

And what’s an exploding aorta to a man who has never been able to die?

A painful waste of a third-dimensional opportunity to transform the human condition, that’s what. He is wearing the grey multiform, permitted to his faction. The State calls him a Communist, but after his time in Kurdistan, Democratic Confederalist is what he did business under. Her white skirt with blue linear patterns blows in the subtle but refreshing winter winds.
Has he ever torn her clothes off in a dream? Has she ever let him reduce her to another conquest, another bedded woman making an excuse of her own lusts and her own physical wants? No not ever once! He has asked to be held and so she held him tight; he has held her delicate and painterly hands. They have danced under the stars in over a thousand and one sequences of brightly colored controlled dreaming.
And those dreams were rather beautiful.
She strides ever closer and she sees his half smile, the left side of his face mostly. There were so many reasons why a whole smile was impossible to the gun slinging, rebel hooligan Sebastian Adon; but she immediately feels the entirety of his gaze, his full attention brought to bear just to take in her. And that half smile, she knows is the closest thing to showing happiness he can in this life bear to muster.
I will just extend my hand and then step back for the right-hand salute given by otriad fighters to their commanding officers, he thinks.
‘I will marshal all my best parts, knowing that she is a sacred woman and that my place in the chain of command is now different since culmination of the uprising, since the eradication of my otriad, since, since the debacle of my relations with the woman named Daria Andreavna Moonskaya, the tragedy of which I have not fully reconciled. And she is all but too familiar with the moving parts thereof. An embarrassment of my judgment.’
My goodness, he thinks; ‘I’m must suppress my longing for this woman before me.’
She walks with grace and power, she is in control of all her moving parts and in control of the fields of energy which are in perfect coordination top to bottom.
I will never let this man seduce me, she thinks. He is a rough and primitive creature, despite the fullness of his soul’s ambitions. Despite his mother being of the priestly class. What is more, she thinks, how did this warrior get reduced to slavery over a wild woman? In certain circles, he is still called the ‘American Shamel Basayev’. And most official circles think he is finally dead. But, the reason he was stashed away into the enemy gulag archipelago was not simply because this was a good place to hide him in plain sight. It was because he was being punished by the leadership. He had been on trial awaiting sentencing for 38 counts of guerrilla infraction including ‘lack of moral and spiritual discipline’; ‘conduct unbecoming a rebel Calvary officer’; four counts of “massacre”; three counts of ‘incorrect use of the word love’ and one very serious count of ‘complete self-compromise accompanying jeopardization of mission via liaison with a woman possibly aiding the enemy.’
Enguarte.
The tribunal had not concluded, yet the full findings were complicated. And, of course, his “wife” and long-running partner is a woman with considerable influence with the rebel leadership and the Godhead.
Something tingles in the base of his spine. Like Tiger Balm.
Something glows in the gold-brown depths of her eyes.
I will not allow my emotions to cloud my perception of the facts, he tells himself from the “Code of the Haitian Gentleman”.
I will not fall for this man and his tragic albeit heroic existence, she swears to the code of her own integrity.
Shake her hand, this is the second time meeting; salute and take her to supper while the transfer papers deactivate the Nanobots in my skull, he checklists.
She will take his hand, this is our second time meeting; accept his salute which acknowledges her leadership over him, let him take me dinner, while the paper works clears and bribes are wired, she thinks. Let him take me what was once four hours, but now is four days drive down the coastal highway from the United American States toward the mile-high wall, what’s left of New York City, and “the Breuklyn Soviet”. Where most likely the judges will order two shots to his head. His head cut off. And his soul bottled up forever in limbo as he pays for his roundabout decisions that cost everyone so damn much.
I’m thankful it’s her that I will be working with, he thinks. If they’re going to crucify me in New York, at least I get to spend the last four days with her.
Shake and salute, he affirms.
Shake and begin the road to sentencing she affirms.
She’s less than four feet beautiful from him.
And best the best of preparations yield to passion.
They throw their arms around each other and embrace like two long lost lovers separated by battle and sea and fate and the cruelty, the duality of some very, very bad decisions made during the war. They are locked so tight cheek to cheek.
This is the second time they’ve ever met in the world of the real.
He can feel her heart beating, she can feel his breath. Their souls make love right there on the roof of his car, they don’t let go of what is in real time a hot minute. But time stopped for them both the minute they held each other again.
They step back. He then salutes. And he passes her a note without saying overtly what she knows may be in his heart. Inscribed on his very ventricles.
She takes a glance at the note. It is quite obvious that the man likes to write his mind out. There are a thousand tiny characters in Cyrillic, she knows what they will tell her even if the grammar is a mess and the spelling is poorly.
They immediately embrace again. Tighter still. She looks into the note over his shoulder.
It is very poor form to love a man who in four days will be sentenced to a final death.
“Don’t say it,” she whispers. Nearly pleads.
“I won’t. I’ll just show it,” he replies.
“You have less than four days,” she whispers.
“I know,” he says.
“Why did you do all of those things,” she says right into his ear and grips him even tighter.
“My passion overwhelmed me,” replies Sebastian Adon.
She steps away from him, still so close though that that the angels inside of them may still be holding to their ecstasy.
“I find it nearly impossible to be charged with your fate,” she admits.
“The past is a useless story, Ms. Adelina.”
“I have read reports of your future too you know,” she retorts.
“The highway to New York is perilous. If my driving makes you nervous we can switch positions ok?”
She now looks him into his eyes.
“That sounds ok. Both sides of your face are smiling at me,” she says.
“That’s because I’m standing before the woman of my dreams.”
“Watch your words, little Prince,” she warns him.
“Don’t call me that please,” he replies.
“Sebastian, the road to New York is perilous and I want you to promise me that you ’re going to remain in control of your emotions. That you’re not going to break your word to me on any level. And, that no matter what they do to you in New York I’m going to be at your side and you need to be by mine, in the way that is appropriate.”
“I promise Ms. Adelina. Appropriately.”
“Ok, start the car. If you don’t make me completely comfortable with your driving I’m taking over and you’re going to have to ride shotgun all the way down. Which isn’t very manly in my cultural context.”
“It’s good to see you again,” says Sebastian Adon.
She nods in quiet agreement.
She never knew him in another life. And that was a little exciting. He’d never dreamed with a woman before. That was thrilling, that kind of investment in him. Even if she’d mostly been in his head tinkering with the wiring.
“Give me your gun,” she declares.
He takes out a small revolver and hands it to her. She checks the chamber and notes that there are no bullets in the gun. She puts it into her satchel.
“Do you remember why we used to take pictures of the sky and text them to each other,” she asks him.
“No. I always assumed you were just artistic,” he replies.
“There’s nothing like a beautiful sky to substitute for love when love is gone, or hope when hope hopeless,” she tells him.
“You’re Russian, you’re not supposed to believe in hope,” he says.
She takes his hand.
“Your American, you’re not supposed to know what the word love means at all but I’m giving you a shadow of a doubt. You have one chance left to make a man of yourself. Otherwise, they’re gonna hang you for happened during the rising. You and Daria were a little excessive at the Millennium Theatre job.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” he says.
“It’s nice to be appreciated,” she replies, “now let’s get ready for the road.”

He almost says it. But she gives him a look.
“Be a real man and check your passion until the proper time,” says the look.

The sky above Shrakasa Waltham is pink, blue vanilla and the weather is beautiful because the Ivories have developed cloud-seeding weather apparatuses. There are no more open Ivories in the United American States except here in this camp of perhaps 70,000 serfs in the Massachusetts foothills outside rebel Boston which, like New York is no longer part of America.
If you’re just tuning in to our frequency; if you want to know what kind of story this is. Well, it’s definitely some kind of passion play; a Post-Soviet epic love story.
In the previous Act, we learned of a man who didn’t know how to die and his tortured love affair with an agent of the enemy. In Act One we learned something of his passion.
How there came to be a full-blown human rights revolution in the United States of America had very little to do with those two protagonist-antagonists. And the uprising itself was not the work of men and women alone, but also gods and spirits, monsters and suffering old souls.
We began with loyalty because it is the basis for all good human acts. And now we jump seven years before the event of the first part of our serial; to account for the things which were unleashed by woman and men enraptured by their passions.
This interlude has taken place before Act One and after what you are about to embark on reading.
Adelina was ordered to accompany Sebastian Adon to newly liberated New York City; to a besieged place called the Breuklyn Soviet. It was not purely to keep him calm before his execution. It was also to directly ascertain the very specific particulars of what he had compromised to the enemy.
“I don’t judge you for anything you have done, but I am quite curious as to why you did it,” declares as he puts the Dodge Charger in drive mode.
“We were all in a most uncomfortable situation,” Adon begins as they take to the road, “there were past lives to account for, there was hope and investment in the future, there were debts to pay.”
“You need to tell me everything that happened in the six months before the uprising,” Adelina flatly tells him.
“Must I?”
“I cannot save you and I cannot fix you or tame you, but if you will tell me the truth and stick to your promises I will make sure that you get what you deserve one way or another.”
There is a dinner at a weigh station on the lip of the black tarmac highway. To get to New York they will have to take a more circuitous route. They will eat there and wait until the sun goes down. They will have to switch vehicles, they will have to evade bandits and other various gentlemen of the road. They will need to grease many hands at checkpoints staffed by rebel and federal and gangster armies. And eventually, they will have to fly over or find a tunnel under the mile-high wall.
“There’s going to be plenty of time,” she tells him, “You need to go slow and get deep with me on this.”
“Must I?”
“Yes, you must. You are accountable only for this life, but it is unclear to me and other interested parties not only what you did in your past lives, but whose side you’re on now.”
He thinks about it.
“I’m only on your side now,” he whispers.
“Well, that is because your old friends now want you dead and your enemies think you’ve been buried already. You have only two allies left and Oleg the Bear is still temporally missing in the Urals.”
Or perhaps at the weigh station just up federal Highway 95.
“My wife sent you?” asks Sebastian Adon.
“Yes. Emma Solomon sent me.”
“She’s not really my wife.”
“I know she’s not really your wife.”
“Does Emma think I betrayed the resistance?”
“No. Emma just thinks you mostly betrayed yourself.”
“And what do you think Ms. Adelina?”
“I think you have a brief window to prove your place in history. As a great working class hero or a despicable traitor who sold out his closest friends to make a deal with the devil over a two-bit whore that he got tricked into thinking was his old soul lost companion.”
“Those are strong words,” says Adon watching the road unfold.
“I’m a very strong woman.”
“That’s why I might…” but he shuts off. You can’t put a timeline on a dream or series of dreams.
“When I met you on my birthday I thought you were a charming scoundrel. But I have come to realize that I believe you innately to be good. I am unclear still on what happened leading up to and during the rising and if I am to be your true friend I must know that in totality before we arrive in New York.”
“When I met you I knew immediately that I must see you again and that you were not like anyone I’d known before.”
“Honey, pick your words well.”
“Ms. Adelina, I’m worried I let my passions get the best of me.”
“Well we shall see and we shall hear,” is all she replies.
The car accelerates, the road unfolds faster. She tells herself he is a most precarious man. There are both merit and dangers to that. He tells himself to review what he knows about this world and world to come.
The highway has many, many perils.
“There were so many nights that I could no longer trust myself and you were there to teach me.”
“Start with the relevant beginning,” she says.
“I am sure that one cannot love another when one hates themselves.”
“Do you hate yourself Sebastian Adon?”
“In another life, because of beliefs I held and reckless actions I took in the name of our freedom the enemy took from me. A woman and a child. I have never slept well, nor lived happily since.”
“Tu deviens responsable pour toujours de ce que tu as apprivoisé,” she says in French, “you become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”
Again with the Little Prince, he thinks sardonically.
“If my inherited memories are true then I have caused some great amounts of carnage for cause and country.”
“I do not know if they are all true,” replies Adelina.
“I am quite happy you’re here. There is no more preferable a witness I could ask to vouch for me,” he says.
They’re gonna end you in New York, she thinks and he hears.
“I vouch for nothing honey, I know you only as a magical dream. But, the road is long enough for you to reconcile that. Don’t let me down ok.”
“I did many things in the name of our cause. I do many things still as acts of passion.”
She takes his hand right hand which he has extended to her, she squeezes it.
“Both hands on the wheel,” she then says.
It is sad to meet a good man four days before he will die. For no matter what he chooses to tell her she knows what he has ultimately done! And nothing can absolve him, nothing he says or does can save his souls. Oleg the Bear said be very careful with him. She has his gun, but she is not aware yet that she also completely has his heart.
If the mind is a limitless tablet, and his animal soul belonged now to devilish promises made, if his godly soul and hers are still quite playfully holding hands in spirit worlds and dreamscapes; what is left is a mechanical heart. A pounding, pulsing drum fueling his warpath and guiding his way in the darkness.
The road unfolds empty as they speed to the diner at the junction.
“You don’t have to tell me everything, but please tell me what matters,” she says.
“Only you own and you rattle my bones, you turn me over and over until I can’t control myself,” comes over the Fire Station on the radio. The dancehall version.
She gives him a small look.
He changes the station to Tchaikovsky set with house music.
There are many people that want this man dead or alive. There are swarms of angry vultures circling above the car, metaphorically.
“I’m not in the business of saving souls or fixing people,” she tells him.
“Well how now, what business are you in then,” he smiles.
“I traffic in language and also dreams,” she softly replies.
“And also evidently me,” he says.
For eight months she has been in his mind and there was little she had seen there that would not make normal people nervous. But, Adelina is not like normal people and very little makes her nervous except the possibility that when she stops being numb for lucid intervals she realizes that this rebel bandit has quite possibly fallen for her.
And were it not for circumstances!
Might she let herself fall too?
Impossibilities of fate.
The world of now was unfolding right before them and the world of dreams was inconsequential. She has been charged with a messy assignment and she has no backup, nothing to rely on but her will.
“Will you stay in control of your emotions for me honey?” she asks him looking now at the little note he gave her.
“I have made you promises.”
Seven of them she observes in his micro-Cyrillic scrawl.
“Then in good faith I take you as a man of your word.”
“After dinner, before the road I’ll try and explain myself to you darling.”
“Take your time, go slow. Nobody knows you’re alive in this part of the world and when we get to your city I’ll walk through the job.”
“There’s a job still for me then?” he exclaims.
“What you thought this was just going to be a dark Russian American love story?”
“Well I don’t know what the genre is.”
“What’s a rose to a fox,” she asks him eliciting for the third time the phrases she’s programmed him with to access his dreams.
“What’s a jackknife to a swan,” he replies in the code that they have used for eight months on the satellite phone before bed.
“Don’t hurt me,” he says.
“I don’t have it in me,” she replies, “just show me your soul and I’ll show you mine. Try not to kill anybody on the road to New York.”
He wonders if she’s talking about his driving.
“In your culture what is more important; loyalty or passion?” she asks.
“What are you getting at?”
She pulls out the silver steel hand of the hamsa around her hung neck and flashes it for him out the corner of his right eye. Except he had given it to her in a dream.
“Don’t tell me you love me again until you can love yourself as well. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t believe in your potential for good. But if you break your promises to me you’ll prove your enemies right.”
“Adelina, I…”
He wants to pull over and taste her again like it was in the dreams.
“Don’t say it,” she warns, “keep driving. I’m hungry and as a Haitian gentleman you must of course never allow a woman to be hungry.”
She knows his code, she knows most of his story, but there is still a four-day window for the highly unusual things to occur.
He watches the road, both hands on the wheel. He doesn’t want to let her down.
“Adhi, I…”
“Honey don’t say it,” she says again firmly.
“Please one time aloud. So you hear it in person as you have it in writing.”
“No. Not yet. Not until you really mean it.”
“I’ve done such crazy things in the name of it, I’ve killed so many people, I’ve invaded three counties, I’ve lost my wife and child, and I’ve died. Over and over again,” he murmurs.
“I know. So don’t say it to me until you know the right words. And you’d better be willing to back them all up with actions.”
“Fair enough.”
“I read your first manuscript, I’m very concerned about your dead wife and child, and also your relations with a certain woman named Daria Andreavna. It is suspected that your claims to loving have often been subsumed and subverted. It is suspected that you were used. And that your passion over took your word and your loyalty. With most tragic results.”
“Do you believe that then? That I’m a traitor who knows nothing of love?”
“I know we women lead the resistance because we can truly love and you men do most of the killing because you cannot truly feel.”
“You read my first book, you’ve been in my head for eight months. Don’t you know what you’re looking at yet?”
“I’m not clear yet that you can separate your facts from your emotions. And I didn’t read all of your first book, just enough to get a taste of things to come.”
“Adhi, I…”
Sebastian wants to say it. He wants to make it into poems and novels and paintings and sketches and thousands of loyal deeds. He wants her to believe in him like he believes in her. He wants her to see that his past can be absolved by his present.
“Baby don’t say it.”
She uses sweet talk sparingly with men she hasn’t gone to bed with. But you go to bed with a man’s dreams, you spend months together in an imagined world you feel a certain intimacy that extends to the physical realm at times.
“We’re almost at the weigh station,” he says.
I will not judge him for anything he has done, she thinks but I will hold him to everything he says so the moment that he says that simple word aloud he will have wedded his cause to me, and that is a complicated and explosive thing indeed. And to repel his advances is a matter of time and orders, but were I to feel again, she thinks, well he is a bit my type.
From the moment that he saw her on her birthday he had known she was a very different creature. He wanted her as a partner by his side. But eight months ago he was blinded still by a distracting influence and reeling from the aftershocks of it. That was when she entered his dreams as the Great Revolt made the long-simmering spiritual war a quite bloody contact sport.
Story time again. This time though our parables will draw attention, not to violence done in the name of loyalty, but instead the acts done when we are overwhelmed with passion.
“Str’ast,” she says, passion in Russian.
“I’ll tell you how it came to be that I played my part in the uprising,” he says.
She doesn’t like politics, so she responds, “stick to the parts with passion and allow me some insight and judgment as to if you’re the man I’m looking for.”
“Darling don’t be numb,” he says feeling layers of loving that are impossible to verify the source of in the world of the real.
“Darling just be realistic.”
The sun is down. The stars are up. They park at the weigh station and get ready to fill their bellies with food in preparation for the long road to Breuklyn Soviet.
“One last sentimental thing,” he says locking up the car.
“Go on then,” says Adelina, “before I make you have a heart attack,” she smiles.
“If it comes out of my mouth in the next few days that I have done things that upset you I am sorry. Please understand that we all have complicated pasts, and some of us complicated past lives. I swear to you I did not betray the resistance. I swear I will make sense of all these actions; those in New York, those in Haiti, those in Israel and Africa. I swear to you that you will have my undivided loyalty.”
“Listen, if you must you can say it one time, as you have already written a song about it and started a war in its name.”
“Adelina, I…” but he does not say it for he knows how little in English the word means to her and what a mockery he has made of the concept too.
For a second she turns away. Impossible, she thinks. This is the second time he’s met me! What does he know about love at all?
What a ridiculous notion to love another so quickly!
Based on shared dreams?
“I know. I’ll try and not say it again,” he says a bit ashamed at her reaction.
“It’s not that,” she starts.
“What then?”
“Your words have to count that’s all. You need to not say things just to hear how they sound, you need to say things to declare things that will be.”
“Why do I know you so intimately and still know nothing,” he says.
“Because this is our second meeting,” she jokes, “the rest was just a dream.”
“I…” he stammers, but the word is unable to form.
“You have only just begun to know me. In my culture there is a ridiculous arrogance in saying words you don’t mean when you can’t back them up, said only because you’ve caught up in the heat of something,” she says.
“It’s a very traditional feeling and it is backed up by eight months of dreams.”
“I will wait and see if you feel that way this time next week, for there are many things done in the name of passion, but they are not the same things done in name of love.”
Why can’t I say the word he wonders? And the answer is she will not let him, so strong are her powers over him. For if that word was good fuel in act one for poems, and the basis of the Partizan Song; then we must now examine motives of our Postsoviet Protagonist-antagonists yet anew.
“There is incredible power in language,” she tells him, “but sometimes talk is cheap. You’ve loved early and loved often, and that makes me suspect you also love easily, but all these things are beside the point. We have a treacherous four-day journey to reach your city, and then you will be put on trial. It is my duty to inform you that whatever feelings you think you have developed for me in dreams, I am nothing to you now but friend and comrade.”
“I won’t use words I can’t back up with actions.”
“Well, I suspect that you may try.”
“I’ve ruined myself several times before over the idea of a perfect woman.”
“Well don’t do that again.”
“You’re not an idea.”
“You don’t know me yet. They say that I have what science has yet to prove in the blood.”
“Well, that I believe.”
“Your defenses are lowered, your dreams have been invaded by thoughts of me, and you write well and have pretty brown eyes like mine. But watch the things you say, I will make you put your money where your mouth is. I will make you ready for trial.”
“If things escape my mouth that proclaims some newly forming feelings…”
“We’ll be sure not to act on them,” she says.
And with that in mind, they went cautiously to eat supper before they took to the road under the cover of darkness.
And in real time not much longer.
The dinner at the crossroads is empty except for them two.
Though thoughts of her had pervaded his mind for the past eight months, now sitting across from her about to bite into his Ruben sandwich, the gun-slinging ambulance man, a wanted rebel hooligan new little of what to say.
“Why is it that you do not speak any Russian,” she asks him.
“I have no talent,” he replies.
“No talent for language?”
“No talent for listening. It’s my most dishonorable trait.”
“No, being a murderer is your most dishonorable trait. Not speaking Russian means you’re just lazy. Your file says you’ve had several Russian partners. I call it lazy, though I do not judge you for it.”
“Indeed, well then what is that you judge me for?”
“I have nothing to linger judgment upon at this juncture.”
“I am indeed then lazy and also a bit ashamed. For I do love the thought of knowing that which you think in.”
“I am merely surprised that living and working alongside three Russian speakers you acquired nothing.”
“I acquired some fucking and fighting words. Please believe I bring more to the table than my talent with English.”
“You bring a great deal from what I understand from your wife.”
“Not my…”
“I said before I know what you are to each to each other. It is clear to me that you are far more than a murderous American bandit who while trained to save lives spends most of his energies killing people. ”
“Can you make no small talk woman!”
“Eat then happily and be quieter,” she replies.
He returns to the Ruben feeling vaguely that for one who claims to never judge she has arrived at some rather serious prejudgments and will be deterred from them.
She wonders if Oleg the Bear will arrive on time or make them wait, or whether he will get there early. She wonders if he will come alone, or bring a woman. And she wonders if that woman will slow them all down.
Sebastian is unnerved by silence. It reminds him of sleep, and also of death and nothing about a silent moment makes him feel at ease. It makes him feel also like an inadequate conversationalist. And he begins to second guess his feelings, having realized that when not allowed to speak of politics or feelings, he has little to work with.
“I have a soft spot for writers,” she finally says, “I understand you wrote a book once.”
“I did. A Noire, it sold less than a hundred copies.”
“Well maybe if you’d written it in Russian it would have had a better reception.”
“Maybe it was just a bloody mess of a book.”
“If I recall it was about a paramedic and a whore on the eve of the revolution was it not?”
“It had a bit more to it than that.”
“Well of course. To you. I read some.”
“So not your style.”
“No. Not really. A little too violent. A little too sentimental about the wrong things. Your poems are much better.”
“I’m flattered you took the time to read them.”
“You began sending me them four days after meeting me do you recall. Under some pretext of soliciting my technical opinions on airplanes.”
“I was sincerely curious about airplane terminology. I was also sincerely interested in attracting your attention more general.”
“And here we are.”
“So the book was not to your tastes and the poems were all splendid?”
“Some more than others, but I will say that you have a good handle on the English language. Although your spelling is ad hock and your grammar most irregular.”

Oleg Leonidovich Medved enters most gregariously.
He is well dressed in various black and gray tones and carries a close cut beard which does nothing to disguise the Ivoryish aspects of his Slavic complexion or the Slavic attributes of Eurasian manly disposition. He is a man twice the size or other men who prefers to break others with conversation not brawn but can resort to that if needed. Sebastian stands to greet him, they are old friends and they embrace before either man can or will acknowledge either woman, for he goes nowhere alone and with him is the young modal Yulia Romanova, a brown-haired slender beauty.
“The American Mayakovsky is much alive! I am glad you are not really as dead as the telescreens now claim. The Millennium, I am aghast at the recent carnage. I only hope with you and you wife officially “dead” the ceasefire holds. Tovarish poet paramedic, glad to see you again!”
“The same Comrade Oleg, the same!” responds Sebastian. And the two men embrace in a gruff but friendly, eastern European fashion.
“This is Yulia Romanova,” Oleg says and goes to embrace Adelina whom he has known for some number of years. In fact, it was he who introduced the two of them last April on her birthday.
They all are then seated at the dinner men facing men and women facing women.
“A perilous journey ahead,” toasts Oleg as soon as the drink has been put in his hand.
“Cheers,” says Adelina. What a silly British thing to say, to toast well; nothing.
“Is it true they aim to finally kill him in New York?” asks Oleg as if he despises all pretenses or suspense. Which he does.
“There is reason to believe that the revolution’s leadership has arrived at doubts as to Mr. Adon’s commitment to the values of the resistance. There are certain factions that want him put on trial and put to permanent death.”
“Well I say we skip New York, and all fly out directly to lovely Cataluña” interjects Yulia.
“Do you know this man so well you are vouching for his safety on public airlines,” asks Adelina to Yulia with vague scorn.
“No, I simply don’t like trials and don’t like New York now that it has gone communist,” replies Yulia Romanova, a self-proclaimed white Russian.
“I liked New York capitalist, I like it, communist. The issue to me is who knows Sebastian is alive and why do they suspect him of treason to the revolution?” asks Oleg.
“Because of circumstances,” states Adelina and as she even says the same she squirms a little inside.
“Fuck Circumstances. Quite literally. I will of course vouch for Sebastian Adon and testify that what he did for that woman was nothing of his own choosing. If anything it spoke well to his dedication to lost woman, or to saving, or to art. But I was there when they met and am privy to the entirety of the tryst, and I know this man did not betray a thing. Except is own heart perhaps.”
“Thank you for that friend,” Sebastian says.
“Ain Davar,” says Oleg in Hebrew having lived four years in Israel once, once when it was there.
“Let underlying facts be placed upon this table then,” states Adelina, “this man is most uncommon. Three years ago he became enamored with a Russian call girl. His relations with her led to the underlying causalities that triggered the mighty revolt. And then, to save her he signed a contract with the devil himself. And then souls left bodies, this man walked his way across time down a rabbit hole. And then became alive three years later. That in the revolt’s eleventh hour he and his wife could seize thousands of hostages and perish in a bloody sand off in Midtown Manhattan. And awake alive miraculously a third time in Shrakasa Waltham!
“His exile,” Adelina explains with a hint of banality.
“Ah, yes thank you both, and you too Ms. Yulia for delivering me out of this cold wretched place,” says Adon.
“It is nothing, droog as we are all fans of your work, and friends of the people and the wider goals of the glorious revolution underway,” smiles Alan Medvinsky, also called Oleg the Bear, who is paid in cash dollars, billing by the minute for his very tricky work.
He has worn many hats in other lives, over the years of cold war thaw, repeat.
And thus begins our very rocky road running towards Brooklyn Soviet to the satellite camps of outer Boston; to the City of Port-au-Prince, then to Santo Domingo and Havana; then Kingston and then Madeira, to the final invasion of Europe; then to Cataluña, then to Moscow burning our way across the great mountain fortress of pale Europe; to the remembering and also forgetting. And finally Burma. To all the places and possibilities beyond the narrow struggle to survive. But on that fateful cold winter day, we four never made it out of that dinner, telling stories to make it through the cold.

For before you try to storm the mountain before you get to build upright human castles, battle white and black demons both and build your grand castell to victory; you must drill. For in the face of indomitable odds and opposition; zealous persistence and ineffable might are your truest weapons. You build your alliance, you ready your team. You prepare for the day it is your time to join the Great Revolt.