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colonialism
The Problem With Israel Goes Much Deeper Than 'Netanyahu’s Extremist Government'
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal, but he is not the problem; he has overseen the genocide in Gaza, but he inherited a social and political order structured around Palestinian dispossession and erasure.
Oct 07, 2026
Israel has killed more than 1,300 Palestinians in Gaza since the so-called “ceasefire” took effect a year ago, more than the number of Israelis killed on October 7, 2023. The supposedly unlimited “right” to genocidal retaliation invoked ever since has left at least 74,000 dead.
This quotidian slaughter is not new. For years, it was normalized under the euphemism of “mowing the grass,” as Israel repeatedly brought its impunity and overwhelming military superiority to bear against a defenseless, besieged population: in 2008, 2012, 2014, 2018, and 2021.
As a result, a generation of Palestinians in Gaza has been condemned to life and death under the deadly gaze of an Israeli panopticon. Even before the latest escalation, they endured the constant hum of drones overhead; the repeated reduction of homes and entire neighborhoods to rubble; and the mourning of shattered lives, families, and futures. Each time, Israel invoked “self-defense.” Yet the staggering asymmetry of the violence told a different story.
Changing this unconscionable status quo requires confronting the history that produced it, challenging not only the notion that one individual is responsible, but the deeper myth that Zionism simply “went wrong.”
In Gaza, the fiction of “collateral damage” has reached its most grotesque inversion. The term has long been deployed to assuage Western consciences, casting our own violence as regrettable but invariably legitimate, while violence committed by others remains categorically inexcusable, even barbaric. Yet the purpose of such overwhelming force is clear: to make the price of resisting an illegal occupation unbearable, while American weapons and diplomatic protection ensure that Israel bears remarkably little of the cost.
And Gaza is but one front. Across Israel and the occupied territories, a system of apartheid is enforced through law, military rule, and state-backed settler violence. Beyond Palestine, Israel has repeatedly bombed its neighbors, terrorizing the region in the name of “counterterrorism.” As Palestinian Ambassador Majed Bamya captured this fundamental double standard before the United Nations Security Council: “Is there an international law for them, and an international law for us? Do they have the right to kill, and the only right we have is to die?”
The horrors of Gaza, and the scale of Western complicity, have begun to rupture the indifference that has long emboldened Israel’s unchecked exercise of military power. Public opinion is shifting, even as political elites struggle to contain it. This has often come at the expense of basic democratic principles, laying bare the contradictions at the heart of Western “liberalism.” Yet even some of Israel’s sharpest critics in mainstream US politics, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have repeatedly and mistakenly located the problem in “Netanyahu’s extremist government.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is a war criminal. But he is not the problem. He did not invent the occupation or build apartheid alone. He has overseen the genocide in Gaza, but he inherited a social and political order structured around Palestinian dispossession and erasure. He may be forced out in coming elections. But the ideological forces that made him possible will remain. Changing this unconscionable status quo requires confronting the history that produced it, challenging not only the notion that one individual is responsible, but the deeper myth that Zionism simply “went wrong.”
The Settler-Colonial Origins of Zionism
From its origins in the late 19th century, Zionism was shaped by a colonial imagination that rendered Palestinians largely invisible, treating a country inhabited by an overwhelming Arab majority for at least 1,200 years as though it were terra nullius. Or, in the words of a popular Christian Zionist slogan of the day, “a land without a people for a people without a land.” But the Zionist ambition to create a Jewish homeland in a territory with a small Jewish minority raised an unavoidable question: What was to be done with the people already living there? The contradiction between Zionist territorial and demographic ambitions and Palestinian presence would shape the ensuing century of dispossession, conquest, and conflict.
It is in this sense that, as Patrick Wolfe famously observed, “The question of genocide is never far from discussions of settler colonialism.” Unlike traditional colonialism, which generally sought to dominate territories for the economic benefit of a distant metropole, settler colonialism seeks total societal transformation, remaking the conquered territory into a permanent home of a new settler state. “Territoriality,” or control over the land, is its “irreducible element,” and its underlying logic is not primarily one of exploitation but that of elimination. Settler colonialism, in short, “destroys to replace,” making invasion “not an event but a structure.”
“Every native population in the world,” Jabotinsky observed, “resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” That, he acknowledged, “is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”
In response to this characterization, Zionists often adopt the language of decolonization, recasting Zionism as the national liberation movement of an Indigenous people. It is true that Jews have a deep historical and religious connection to the land. It is true that Zionism was conceived as a national movement. And it is also true that virulent, increasingly eliminationist antisemitism across Europe made Jewish life increasingly untenable. But none of these facts negates Zionism’s colonial structure.
Nor did its founding ideologues necessarily disguise that reality. The “founding father” of political Zionism, Theodor Herzl, appealed to Cecil Rhodes for support for his movement precisely because it was “something colonial.” He further envisioned the prospective Jewish state as “a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.” Aptly named institutions, including the Jewish Colonization Association and the Jewish Colonial Trust, formed part of the movement’s political and financial infrastructure.
That colonial orientation helped Zionism secure the patronage of the British Empire. With the 1917 Balfour Declaration and British Mandate, London threw its imperial weight behind the creation of a Jewish “national home” for a largely European diasporic population. The national aspirations of the existing majority Palestinian population, indeed, even its existence as a people with political rights of its own, were denied outright. Britain’s support reflected not simply sympathy for Jewish self-determination, but a combination of geopolitics, antisemitism, and Christian philosemitism.
As historian Rashid Khalidi has argued, Britain thus enabled the Jewish community in Palestine to develop the institutional capacity of a proto-state while systematically subverting Palestinian nation-building efforts. When Palestinians revolted against this colonial order from 1936 to 1939, British forces, aided by Zionist militias, brutally suppressed the uprising. By its end, Khalidi notes, some “10% of the adult male population was killed, wounded, imprisoned, or exiled.”
Zionist leaders understood the roots of Palestinian resistance perfectly well. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological pioneer of Revisionist Zionism, from which much of the Israeli right traces its lineage, embraced territorial maximalism. Yet he was not ignorant to Palestinian aspirations. “Every native population in the world,” Jabotinsky observed, “resists colonists as long as it has the slightest hope of being able to rid itself of the danger of being colonized.” That, he acknowledged, “is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing.”
David Ben-Gurion, the mainstream leader of the pre-state Jewish community and Israel’s future first prime minister, similarly recognized the roots of the conflict. “Let us not ignore the truth among ourselves,” he remarked. “Politically we are the aggressors and they defend themselves.”
The Partition and the Nakba
After World War II, a financially exhausted Britain, facing mounting anti-colonial pressures from India to Egypt and escalating anti-British violence by Zionist paramilitaries, abandoned Palestine and handed the problem to the newly established United Nations. The UN promised to serve as a new experiment in democratic internationalism, yet it remained profoundly shaped by the colonial order that it had inherited. Most colonized peoples still lacked representation when, in 1947, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 181, calling for the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab territory.
This blunt instrument, deployed disastrously in Palestine and elsewhere, treated pluralism itself as a “problem” to be solved. Rooted in the colonial logic of divide and rule and a European conception of ethnonational citizenship, it cast the solution to communal conflict as demographic engineering: the pursuit of homogenization and the construction of “racially specific landscapes.”
Palestinians rejected partition. The Zionist leadership accepted it. But that familiar fact obscures the extraordinary concession Palestinians were being asked to make. Despite constituting some two-thirds of the population, they were expected to accept the creation of a Jewish state on more than half of the country, including some of its most densely populated and economically valuable regions.
As historian Walid Khalidi observed, this was hardly a choice at all. Instead, the Palestinian Arabs, he wrote, “were dubbed the aggressor for not meekly submitting to the dismemberment of their country.” Compounding this sense of injustice was the conviction among many Palestinians that they were, in effect, being asked to pay reparations for Europe’s crimes, crimes in which they had played no part.
In the war that followed, Zionist forces carried out expulsions and massacres that drove 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. As a result, the majority that were living within the territory that became Israel were forcibly displaced. Whether this came from a single, centrally directed policy remains historically disputed. But as Benny Morris has observed, soldiers did not require explicit instructions to understand the possibilities war had created. By 1948, “transfer was in the air.”
The Rise of the Settler Movement
The Nakba transformed the human geography of Palestine. Israel emerged with a Jewish majority and control of 78% of historic Palestine, while the Palestinians who remained within its borders were reduced to a minority and subjected to the violence of military rule. The new state then set about making the wartime transformation permanent, above all by ensuring that those who had been expelled could not return.
In 1950, Israel enacted two laws that helped consolidate this new order. The Law of Return granted Jews in the diaspora citizenship in Israel, while the Absentees’ Property Law facilitated the state seizure of the land and homes belonging to Palestinians. Much of this property was subsequently redistributed to new Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors. Many moved into homes from which Palestinians had only recently been forcibly displaced, leaving behind their possessions and family photographs still hanging on the walls.
The imperative of maintaining Jewish political supremacy meant that the millions of Palestinians now brought under Israeli control could not be incorporated as equal citizens
While these catastrophes differed enormously in scope, scale, and character, the dissonance was nonetheless profound: Jews driven from expropriated homes in Europe were resettled in homes from which Palestinians had been expelled in the pursuit of another ethnonational project. Though largely repressed, the parallel did not go entirely unremarked. Israeli poet Avot Yeshurun captured this historical entanglement, writing that, in this sense, “the Holocaust of the Jews of Europe and the Holocaust of the Arabs of the Land of Israel are one Holocaust of the Jewish People.”
Nor did Palestinians simply accept their newfound condition of exile. Refugees repeatedly crossed the newly imposed borders, keys in hand, to return to their homes or tend their fields. Israeli forces responded with lethal force, killing thousands of Palestinians from 1949-1956, most unarmed. Resistance soon developed, which Israel regularly invoked to justify raids, reprisals, and collective punishment against Palestinian communities across their borders.
Violence, dispossession, and exile transformed the Palestinian refugee camps of neighboring states into crucibles of revolutionary nationalism. From this political ferment emerged political and militant organizations such as Fatah, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.
Then came the 1967 War. In six days, Israel seized the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan, Gaza and the Sinai Peninsula from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. The Sinai would later be returned to Egypt under a land-for-peace agreement. Elsewhere, the conquest of territories associated with the biblical Land of Israel, was celebrated by many Israelis as nothing short of a “miracle,” unleashed a messianic fervor that invigorated the Israeli right.
Religiously and politically motivated settlers began moving into the occupied territories, creating irreversible “facts on the ground” that bound the land ever more tightly to Israel while intentionally foreclosing the possibility of future territorial compromise. At the same time, the imperative of maintaining Jewish political supremacy meant that the millions of Palestinians now brought under Israeli control could not be incorporated as equal citizens. Instead, they remained subjects of an occupying power, governed separately and unequally.
Occupation “From the River to the Sea”
The settlement project, initially driven by religious ideologues and later expanded with the help of the state through subsidies and other economic incentives, steadily carved Palestinian territory into disconnected enclaves, divided by settlements, bypass roads, checkpoints, walls, and the military infrastructure that followed to sustain and protect them.
At the same time, Israel worked to suppress Palestinian political organization and national identity. Palestinian political organizations and political activity and expression were outlawed or severely repressed. Newspapers and publications were subjected to censorship. Flying the Palestinian flag was prohibited, and even artwork incorporating its colors could invite repression.
As this history has sought to demonstrate, Israel is an anachronistic settler-colonial project. What is required, then, is a belated decolonization.
Occupation reached deep into Palestinian life. A growing permit regime governed construction, movement, and access to land and resources. Wells and irrigation systems also required Israeli approval. Palestinians faced restrictions on activities ranging from fishing in their own waters to cultivating their own land. These restrictions were enforced not only by soldiers and settlers but through a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that made domination a feature of daily life.
By 1987, two decades of domination and humiliation erupted into the First Intifada, a spontaneous, decentralized, and overwhelmingly unarmed uprising. Palestinian engaged in civil disobedience. Israel responded with brutal force. Tens of thousands of Palestinians passed through Israeli prisons, while soldiers were ordered to break the bones of protesters, killing more than 1,000 Palestinians, including 240 children.
The violent repression of the Intifada created the conditions in which groups like Hamas emerged, much as Hezbollah had arisen in response to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Yet the uprising also demonstrated that permanent occupation could not continue without stimulating resistance, helping open the political process that culminated in the Oslo Accords starting in 1993.
Oslo, flawed from the outset and failing to confront many of the conflict’s fundamental questions, collided with powerful forces determined to prevent a negotiated settlement. In 1994, Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein entered Hebron’s Ibrahimi Mosque and massacred 29 worshipers (National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir displayed a prominent photo of him in his living room for decades). This incident became a catalyst for Hamas’s turn toward suicide bombings, feeding an escalating cycle of violence that steadily eroded the political ground beneath Oslo.
Then, in 1995, an Israeli settler, Yigal Amir, assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin. Amir was an extremist in his methods. But the belief that Israel was an inviolable trust of the Jewish people that animated him was hardly confined to the political fringe. Likud, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, has long rejected Palestinian statehood. Its 1977 party platform declared that “the right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable” and “between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.”
Rabin’s was one of the most consequential assassinations in modern history. It dealt a devastating blow to a fragile, imperfect peace process and helped clear Netanyahu’s path to power. Netanyahu himself had participated in the incendiary political campaign against Oslo that portrayed Rabin as a traitor for negotiating with Palestinians.
Toward a Free Palestine
In the decades since, Netanyahu’s cultivation of the ultranationalist and Jewish-supremacist forces that define Israel’s political mainstream has helped him maintain an extraordinary grip on power. Meanwhile, Western leaders sustain the fiction of a two-state solution, invoking it with ritualistic devotion even as successive Israeli governments expand apartheid, imprison prominent Palestinian leaders, kill with impunity, and reject Palestinian rights and sovereignty outright.
As this history has sought to demonstrate, Israel is an anachronistic settler-colonial project. What is required, then, is a belated decolonization. First and foremost, this means an immediate end to the genocide. But it also demands justice: the renunciation of Jewish supremacy, reparations for historical dispossession, accountability for past and present crimes, and the upholding of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
That can only happen through the dismantling of the political and legal structures that make one people’s rights and freedom contingent on the denial of those same rights and freedoms to others. In short, it necessitates an end to Zionism as it has long been practiced as an exclusivist political project and the realization of a free Palestine, confronting the one-state reality as it is and pressing for its transformation into a genuine democratic state for all its citizens.
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How Can We Build a World Post Capitalism?
In Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025), Seven Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.
Oct 05, 2026
The billionaires are putting our world at risk through support for unregulated AI, funding the fossil fuel industry, and undermining democracy. They are using their unprecedented levels of power to lead us toward multiple pathways of total human annihilation.
Now is a good time to reflect on ways to challenge capitalism, a driving force behind the madness we face. And yet, on one side we have many people who are hesitant to name capitalism as a force behind destruction we face. On the other side, many of those few who do name capitalism use outdated and unhelpful frameworks for understanding how to challenge capitalism.
Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin 2025) is a book worth reading if you are interested in building a world past capitalism. Beckert’s original approach to understanding capitalism helps us to see possibilities for challenging it in the present precarious time we are living in.
Its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism.
Beckert’s book has received awards and is being read widely. Yet much of the attention has been negative. Writing in The New Yorker, Gideon Lewis-Kraus faulted the book for having such a diffuse idea of capitalism that it becomes “an inescapable vibe—responsible for everything, everywhere, all at once.” In his review in The Nation Corey Robin criticized it for offering a fuzzy and imprecise understanding of capitalism, which then makes the book unhelpful for shaping our anti-capitalist thinking.
These criticisms miss the political power and potential of this unorthodox approach to understanding capitalism. Beckert’s book takes capitalism to its origins and puts it into a global framework. It focuses on the agency of capitalists as a group of people who over time bring capitalism as a global system into being. Beckert’s analysis helps us update our understanding of capitalism in ways that make pathways to challenging it clear and actionable. Many anti-capitalist thinkers are stuck in a stale 19th century understanding of what we are up against. Those approaches make our search for solutions narrow and not actionable in the present.
There are three dead ends to anti-capitalist thought that Becker’s approach avoids. One is that capitalism began in Britain with the industrial revolution. That idea encourages anti-capitalist thinkers to focus on class as something separate from race and patriarchy. A second is that the main victims of capitalism are the industrial working class, that idea leads us to focus on the industrial working class as the most important carriers of movements to challenge capitalism. The third mistaken approach is that the only way to get rid of capitalism is through overthrowing the system in a dramatic revolution. That leads anti-capitalist organizers to focus on getting others to see how bad capitalism is but does not encourage them to build power to challenge it in the present. Each of these tendencies has its own way of being unhelpful for building anti-capitalist politics. Beckert’s approach to capitalism helps us find pathways beyond all of them.
Rather than staring his analysis of capitalism at the transition from feudalism to capitalism, as most anti-capitalist thinkers do, Beckert’s story begins in 1150 in Aden, in what is now Yemen. He argues that at that time, largely in the Muslim world, there emerged a global trade in luxury goods. It impacted very few people’s lives, and there were no societies based on it. This was a period of the emergence of capitalists—a very small subset of the population who traded goods for the sole purpose of generating wealth.
Many societies have engaged in trade to obtain goods that they could not produce themselves. What distinguishes capitalists from other traders is that they engage in trade for profits alone. The goal of any given transaction is money itself rather than something that money could buy.
Capital itself is money, or resources, invested for the sole purpose of generating more money. Early capitalists originally worked within the political realities they found around them. Over time these merchants worked to create political systems that would enable them to generate more wealth. These early capitalists often engaged in work to get governments to create conditions that were favorable to them. Think of Columbus and his relationship with Queen Isabella.
When these disparate acts of capitalists began to be elevated to the society-wide phenomenon we now call capitalism, was when they were able to control a land base and extract wealth, not just from trading, but from producing as well. Over time these merchants came to control more land and resources. Forced labor in the form of slavery was central to the early days of capitalism. So was colonialism: the forcible taking of land on which to engage in profit-seeking actions.
As more and more resources are controlled by capitalist processes, and as capitalists became more politically powerful, a large part of human society came to be dominated by these logics. Eventually, resistance to slavery made that form of exploitation less desirable to the elites. Employers were able to hire people into wage labor as the enclosure of commons threw them off the land they had previously used to sustain themselves. Colonialism was beaten back by people fighting for control over the political systems that dominated the places they lived. In many places colonialism was replaced by neocolonialism, where local people controlled the political system but continued to run the economy in the interest of faraway elites.
Beckert’s analysis broadens our frame in ways that allow us to avoid the pitfalls of an anti-capitalism that focuses only on the class-based harms of capitalism. If you accept the older framework, which focuses on capitalism as mostly about the exploitation of the industrial working class in Europe, then its relationships to slavery and colonialism are hard to understand. Much anti-capitalist thinking sees capitalism as a step forward from slavery and colonialism, rather than as their cause.
With regard to patriarchy, much anti-capitalist thinking focuses on the experiences of wage laborers rather than on the impacts of capitalist processes on the broader matrix of society that it transforms and destroys. This can lead to an anti-capitalist politics that defines the victims of capitalism so narrowly that racism and patriarchy are outside the frame of analysis. That makes building broad coalitions for anti-capitalist politics harder to achieve.
Moving on to the second dead end of much anti-capitalist thinking, if you see capitalism as fundamentally about the exploitation of labor, then you will not see the wide variety of ways that capitalism destroys the social fabric in which it operates. By prioritizing production and distribution that are done in markets for profits, capitalist ways of operating marginalize and deny resources to the caregiving matrix of our lives.
Caregiving labor, which has been disproportionately done by women, becomes socially invisible and undervalued. It is especially not valued in the discipline of Economics, which is largely the study of the profit-making sector. That narrow focus ignores the wide variety of ways that many people’s lives are made miserable by not having access to the resources they need to live well. It also ignores the many non-capitalist aspects of our economies that continue to thrive, even as the capitalist sector has increasingly large impacts on our shared social world.
By focusing on the capitalist class, as a group of people who are ready to subordinate our world to profit seeking, and by showing that members of that class act in a variety of ways in relationship to government, and the rest of society, in order to make the world over to enable their profit seeking, Beckert opens up our perception to the wide range of ways that capitalism causes destruction. He therefore opens us to a wide range of ways to fight against it.
Beckert’s approach is aligned with the work of Karl Polanyi. In The Great Transformation, his pathbreaking book from 1944, Polanyi argued that, in previous times, markets were subordinated to other social logics, and so their negative impacts were limited. What distinguishes capitalism is that the logic of markets comes to dominate, and their centrality undermines other ways societies have been structured to ensure that people's needs are met. Markets come to have lives of their own, and the needs of markets come to dominate over the needs of people or the rest of nature.
Beckert updates Polanyi's analysis by adding more detail, and also by naming more clearly than Polanyi does the forms of agency behind these destructive practices. This approach allows us to understand capitalism less as a total system and more as a set of destructive practices driven by those addicted to the profit motive. This approach helps us imagine a variety of ways to challenge capitalism.
We need to break the spell of pro-capitalist thinkers’ claim that human economies are best served when markets are allowed to decide what is produced, how it is produced, and who gets the things produced. We need to figure out how best to ensure that we are making the things we need, in ways that are sustainable, and distributed in ways that ensure that everyone’s needs are met.
We need to fight against the powers of the owners of capital by breaking our dependencies on capitalism for our survival. Fighting against the exploitation we experience in wage labor is a part of that. But gathering social resources for the caregiving aspects of our lives, developing public goods, and preventing the environmental damage caused by corporations pursuing profit at any cost, are also crucial aspects of challenging capitalism.
Finally, Beckert’s approach allows us to avoid the third and most destructive element of standard anti-capitalist thinking: the belief that we need to wait for a revolution. If you think of capitalism as a focused system that came into being all at once with one major transformation, it is easy then to imagine the way to get rid of it is through overthrowing that system with one large blow. That way of thinking about how to get rid of capitalism doesn't position us well to understand the work we need to be doing right now to build power to stop the forces of social destruction while building the better world we are looking for, now.
Rather than waiting for a revolution to overthrow capitalism, anti-capitalists need to build power to fight against the variety of ways that the capitalist class is destroying our world. One way to think of this is with the idea of revolutionary reforms, the steps we take to make our world better, as we fight against the forms of destruction caused by capitalism and against the power of the capitalist class to destroy our social fabric.
Both Beckert, and Polanyi before him, owe a great deal to the work of Karl Marx. Marx’s criticism of capitalism remains an invaluable starting point for anti-capitalist thinking. But Marx's narrow focus on the exploitation of labor as the single most important form of destruction caused by capitalism has led generations of anti-capitalist activists to hope the industrial working class would lead us away from capitalism. Those hopes have been repeatedly disappointed.
Marx faulted colonialism and slavery for the ways they were part of the destruction caused by capitalism, but many of his followers see those processes as side issues to the problem of capitalism. And so many anti-capitalists insist on a class-first analysis, which undermines their ability to work well in broad coalitions.
On the question of revolution or reform, Marx actually said very little. And much of what he said was contradictory. In places, he argued that the path away from capitalism was through building political power via elections. At other times, he claimed that all of that was a distraction from a revolution that would overturn all social relations in a short dramatic period. Many followers of Marx assume, incorrectly, that he only supported the second strategy,
Much of the criticism of Beckert’s book from the left has rested on the ways his understanding deviates from a telling of the history that leads to the core set of beliefs that have kept anti-capitalist thinking from being politically productive. Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History doesn’t address these questions of political strategy. But its approach to understanding capitalism as a process pushed by capitalists, developing their power, and colonizing the matrix of our social world, explains capitalism in ways that point to more productive approaches to anti-capitalism. If we want to bring anti-capitalist analysis into the broad liberatory social movements that are animating our time, we need to base our anti-capitalism on an updated understanding of what we are up against. Beckert’s book offers a starting point for that understanding.
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Lula Teams With Bad Bunny to Highlight Dangers of Trump’s Colonial Ambitions Across Latin America
"Brazil has only one owner: The Brazilian people," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Sep 25, 2026
The campaign of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva released new advertisements this week that sounded alarms about the threat posed by US President Donald Trump to the country's sovereignty and resources.
One ad, released on Tuesday, features a Portuguese version of Puerto Rican music star Bad Bunny's song "Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii," the lyrics of which decry the damage done by US imperialism throughout the Western Hemisphere.
The ad consists of a video montage highlighting Brazil's rich cultural, ethnic, and ecological diversity, and ends with Lula saying, "Brazil has only one owner: The Brazilian people."
Do Latim, Silva é a própria selva: a raiz que brota do solo, o verde que resiste e a força viva da terra.
Durante séculos quiseram diminuir a nossa gente, mas foi na garra, no suor e na dignidade que cada Silva construiu este país.
A nossa força não se curva, a nossa bandeira… pic.twitter.com/iwujl0ojq0
— Lula (@LulaOficial) September 23, 2026
"Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii" was one of the songs that Bad Bunny performed during his acclaimed Super Bowl halftime show in February, which some critics saw as a joyful rebuke to the colonialist vision for Latin America that Trump has embraced throughout his second term.
According to a report published Thursday in Correio Braziliense, Bad Bunny gave Lula's team permission to use his music in the campaign video.
Another ad, released on Thursday, is more explicit in its warnings about Trump's ambitions for Latin America.
Unlike the video released Tuesday, the later ad directly links the unpopular US president to far-right politician Flávio Bolsonaro, who has emerged as Lula’s top rival for the presidency in upcoming elections and is the son of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, still serving a criminal sentence for efforts to overthrow Lula's government.
"Flávio Bolsonaro is Trump's candidate," says that ad's narrator. "And what Trump wants is to colonize Brazil, take our wealth, steal our future, and leave us behind."
"Flávio Bolsonaro," the narrator concludes, "is playing against the Brazilian people."
Flávio Bolsonaro é o candidato do Trump.
Quer entregar o nosso país e as nossas riquezas para os Estados Unidos.
Se depender dele, o Brasil vira colônia de novo.
Mas o Brasil só tem um dono: o povo brasileiro. pic.twitter.com/jOSJ83xcKb
— Lula (@LulaOficial) September 25, 2026
In a Thursday social media post, Lula said Bolsonaro “wants to deliver our country and our wealth to the United States,” adding that, if it were up to Bolsonaro, “Brazil will become a colony again.”
During a speech delivered at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday, Lula called out efforts to treat Brazil as a colony, although he didn’t mention the US directly.
“Brazil is no one’s backyard,” the Brazilian president said at one point.
“We will not allow the enemies of democracy—internal or external—to attack the will of the people," he said. "Brazilian democracy belongs to the Brazilians.”
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We Should Fear More Than Ebola
While we should all fear and work to stop this outbreak, we should also be willing to fear and confront the conditions that enabled its devastation.
Jun 21, 2026
As Congo faces the world’s third-largest Ebola outbreak, treatment centers have been attacked, masks and boots are running out, and entire communities are left vulnerable amid ongoing conflict and international neglect. This disaster is possible due to centuries of exploitation that amplifies the spread. The trail of inhumanity and structural violence is very scary and needs to end.
History shows that this country has been ravaged by colonial violence and foreign profiteering. Under King Leopold II of Belgium, an estimated 10 million Congolese people were murdered, mutilated, and terrorized as rubber and ivory were extracted for enormous profit. As a matter of policy and to enforce quotas, colonizers cut off limbs and heads.
Congo was also plundered by the transatlantic slave trade, which kidnapped, displaced, and enslaved millions of Congolese people.
Later, global demand for diamonds, gold, coltan, and other conflict minerals remade the region into a site of ongoing wars and labor exploitation. Much of this extraction still occurs through artisanal mining, a form of labor whereby individuals risk their lives to extract these valuable and raw natural resources under dangerous conditions.
The extreme situation in Congo did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it has formed from centuries of cruel and callous structural-based and enduring violence.
Cobalt, a rare and toxic metal essential to smartphones, electric vehicles, AI, and other technologies, reveals this contradiction at the center of our global economy. Our demand for these goods relies on the same brutal dynamics that have played out for centuries in this land: environmental harm, contamination of land and water, child labor, gender and sexual-based violence, and the exploitation of class under-resourced people of color in Congo. Wealthier people get the goods while the output biases in our systems of production allow us distance and plausible deniability in the face of untold suffering. When we look at our own commodity chains, the often hidden trails of our batteries and other electronic products in time and space before they got into our hands, we can trace many of our products to Congo. We are materially connected, whether we acknowledge it or not.
Congo has an estimated $24 trillion in untapped natural reserves. It is one of the most inherently valuable places on Earth. Yet, due to these longstanding and asymmetrical power relations, it is simultaneously extremely vulnerable. In 2020, 85.3% of the population in Congo lived on less than $3 a day. By 2026, projections estimate that fully 94.9% of the population will be at or below this international poverty threshold.
But, it doesn't have to be this way. We can do more than express fear and enforce travel bans and restrictions.
We can understand the Ebola outbreak as a medical crisis shaped by structural violence in which we are all complicit.
If we can recognize how we are connected to these systems, then we can take responsibility and action to change them. We can reinvest in funding the United Nations and support long-term healthcare infrastructure. We can become more socially and environmentally sustainable by holding corporations and governments accountable for exploitative labor and harmful environmental practices. We can demand more ethical and transparent supply chains. We can recognize that racism and environmental racism enable this disproportionate harm and take steps to do better. We can vote for people who have a world systems view, who understand that global trade, politics, and public health are connected. Leaders of this era need to understand that what we do, and how we do it, matter in life-and-death ways for people beyond our local contexts.
The extreme situation in Congo did not develop in a vacuum; rather, it has formed from centuries of cruel and callous structural-based and enduring violence. This cycle can end, if only we can align our shared values of more sustainable and equitable practices with our political will.
A virus with a potential mortality rate of 90% should concern us all. We should all fear and work to stop this outbreak. We should also be willing to fear and confront the conditions that enabled its devastation. And, we need to engage in the transformative justice required to facilitate sustainable social and environmental ways rather than those of depravity.
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After Eliminating USAID, Trump Is Exploiting Need To Steal Africa’s Resources
From Ghana to South Africa, the Trump administration maliciously leverages human suffering to continue the centuries-long exploitation and systematic theft of Africa’s resources.
May 13, 2026
On May 4, Zambian Foreign Minister Mulambo Haimbe announced that negotiations with the US regarding critical health services and minerals have been suspended due to the Trump administration’s “unacceptable” terms.
For Haimbe, this includes: first, the Trump administration’s proposed health memorandum of understanding (MOU) requires that Zambia turn over health data to the US “in violation of our citizen’s right to privacy.”
Second, the US demands “preferential treatment of US companies over Zambia’s critical minerals.” Haimbe rejects this. He contends, “the Zambian government rightfully takes the view, first and foremost, that Zambians must have a say on how her critical minerals are used, and second that no one strategic partner is to be treated preferentially to others.”
Third, and perhaps most crucially, is “the coupling of the two agreements and frameworks to one another such that the conclusion of the minerals agreement is made conditional to the conclusion of the Health MOU.” The US is effectively demanding privileged access to Zambia’s abundant supply of copper, lithium, and cobalt—all critical for the development of AI and modern technologies—in exchange for health funding.
The only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses.
This is not an isolated incident. As of March 2026, at least 24 African countries have agreed to similarly controversial health agreements with the US. Zambia, Ghana, and Zimbabwe are the only African nations thus far to reject the Trump administration’s coercive demands.
In those cases, concerns about data management and control similarly derailed negotiations. Arnold Kavaarpuo, executive director of Ghana’s Data Protection Commission, explained, “The proposed data sharing agreement looked at access not only to health data sets, but also to metadata, dashboards, reporting tools, data models, and data dictionaries.” It would have allowed up to 10 US entities access to this data without any prior approval from the Ghanese government.
Similarly, the US was demanding that Zimbabwe turn over any data it collects about pathogens causing outbreaks. Zimbabwe would not, however, be guaranteed access to any vaccines, treatments, diagnostics, or medical innovations that might result from this shared data. As Ndabaningi Nick Mangwana, permanent secretary in the Ministry of Information, Publicity, and Broadcasting Services, remarked: “In essence, our nation would provide the raw materials for scientific discovery without any assurance that the end products would be accessible to our people should a future health crisis emerge. The United States, meanwhile, was not offering reciprocal sharing of its own epidemiological data with our health authorities.”
These kinds of take-it-or-leave-it proposals represent the Trump administration’s strong-arm approach to global health funding. Instead of foreign aid, President Donald Trump offers two options: a crooked deal or death.
This has been their goal from the start. Throughout his second term, President Donald Trump has taken several measures aimed at weakening foreign aid and humanitarian programs. This includes: dismantling the US Agency for International Development (USAID); withdrawing from the World Health Organization (WHO) and 66 international organizations, including the United Nations Population Fund, which addresses sexual and reproductive health; as well as diverting funds away from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports HIV prevention, care, and treatment worldwide. Each of these actions deliberately endangers the lives of millions of people around the world—the cruelty really is the point.
From Ghana to South Africa, the Trump administration maliciously leverages human suffering to continue the centuries-long exploitation and systematic theft of Africa’s resources. Here, foreign aid has only one value: an exchange value.
Indeed, on April 27, at an event hosted at the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and attended by major corporations including Google, Goldman Sachs, and Palantir, US Ambassador to the UN Michael Waltz formally announced the launch of the “Trade Over Aid” initiative. This is a self-described “international economic development vision built on free markets.” It is premised on the idea that, unlike capitalism, humanitarianism and providing direct aid only create “dependency, inefficiency, and corruption.” As Waltz remarked, “free market principles remain the best proven path to lasting prosperity with better and more permanent results than any of the alternatives.”
On April 30, outgoing US Ambassador to Zambia, Michael Gonzalez, echoed these remarks. He accused the Zambian government of widespread corruption and “nationwide theft of US provided medicines.” He contended that, “For decades, the US relationship with Zambia was one centered around aid.” This “unrequited relationship” is no longer tenable—“going forward, the benefits of our relationship must be mutual.” Gonzalez continued, “We know that while you pursue a Zambia First agenda and we pursue America First, we are still able together to achieve something notably better for our countries.”
This emphasis on market solutions overlooks that capitalist exchanges always produce winners and losers. Competition, not cooperation, is the ethos of the proverbial free market. There is no “together” when “America First” is pitted against “Zambia First.” Instead of “lasting prosperity,” the only “permanent results” are widening inequalities between the haves and the have-nots.
And to be clear, the winners here are neither Americans nor Africans. Americans will be forced to bear the social, economic, and environmental costs of more data centers, AI-driven layoffs, and AI-powered surveillance. Zambia and other African nations will see their natural resources stolen and the bodies of their citizens exploited.
No, the only ones who benefit from forcing Zambia to trade raw minerals and data for health services are tech companies and the Trump family businesses. It is worth noting that Trump and his children have raked in billions from their investments in cryptocurrency, AI, and data centers.
What the Trump administration is offering is no more than colonialism dressed as humanitarianism. Foreign aid should never be manipulated for profit or political power. We must reject capitalist schemes like “Trade Over Aid.”
Instead, we must focus on building institutions that guarantee the right to healthcare for all. This is not simply an act of charity. As every pandemic makes patently clear, ensuring that everyone has access to health services benefits everyone. In the end, we must recognize that healthcare is a human right and a collective good. Ignoring this puts us all at risk.
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7 Nonnegotiable Demands to Confront the New Scramble for Africa
As Macron launches his "green" charm offensive in Nairobi, Africa must move beyond being a passive host.
May 10, 2026
In a maneuver dripping with historical irony and geopolitical desperation, French President Emmanuel Macron is set to land in Nairobi on May 11. He will be in Kenya to co-host the “Africa Forward Summit: Africa-France Partnership for Innovation and Growth.” To the uninitiated, the title suggests a progressive leap into a shared future.
However, to those who have watched the sun set on Françafrique in the West, the subtext is clear: Having been unceremoniously evicted from its traditional "stomping grounds" in the Sahel, Paris is pitching its tent in East Africa, hunting for new deals to cover the hemorrhaging fortunes of a dying empire. Ahead of his arrival—incidentally on the Ides of March—three French warships docked at the port of Mombasa, carrying with them over 800 military personnel. They were riding on the wave of newfound defense cooperation between the governments of Kenya and France.
The pact focused on maritime security, intelligence cooperation, peacekeeping, humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and “any other defense or security-related areas of cooperation defined by mutual agreement between parties.” Through this pact, France now has a new hunting ground in East Africa, complete with boots on the ground, sea, and air. Kenya’s 142,400 square kilometers of Exclusive Economic Zone in the Indian Ocean, reputed for riches in fish, oil and gas, is in for a rude shock.
The irony is almost pathological. For over a century, France treated West Africa as a private warehouse. It did not merely colonize; it plundered, looted, and systematically attempted to dismantle the resilient African civilizations that predated its arrival. Its "assimilation" policy remains the most abhorrent, ignoble of colonial concepts; a cultural and political mis-philosophy designed to supplant African languages, customs, and identities with French surrogates.
Africa must stay circumspect. The convergence of military signalling and corporate presence must worry all countries participating in Nairobi. They must watch out for unequal relationships under new language.
When other colonial powers were loosening—however reluctantly—their grip, France was tightening its hold through a web of lopsided financial and military pacts.
With the rising tide of political "wokeness" across the continent, however, France now finds itself sorely ostracized, and endangered. Yet, rather than offering atonement, the French leadership has chosen to grandstand. The mask slipped definitively earlier this year when Macron, frustrated by the anti-French revolts sweeping through former colonies, dropped the pretense of diplomacy. “I think someone forgot to say thank you,” he remarked, with the chilling entitlement of a landlord demanding gratitude for a house he broke into.
Fast forward five months, and this same "savior" is now knocking on East Africa’s door, hat in hand, seeking a "new partnership built on equal ground."
The sudden pivot is driven by a cold reality: France’s "green" future is powered by African minerals. While the lights of Paris stayed bright on the back of Niger’s uranium, Africa remained in the dark.
But as the Nairobi summit approaches, Africa must move beyond being a passive host. If Macron and his European contemporaries truly seek a partnership of equals, they must meet a set of nonnegotiable demands that protect African interests, specifically within the environment and energy sectors.
First, a mandate for local beneficiation and value addition. Africa will no longer be a mere pit stop for raw material extraction. The Nairobi summit must establish a framework where no critical mineral—lithium, cobalt, or uranium—leaves the continent in its raw state.
Africans must demand that French and European companies invest in local processing plants and refineries. If the "Green Transition" requires African minerals, then the "Green Industrialization" must happen on African soil, creating African jobs and keeping the value chain within our borders.
Second, total reform of the financial architecture and the CFA Franc. For a nation that has enforced financial slavery through the CFA Franc since 1945, Macron’s talk of "financial reform" must be met with skepticism.
Africa must demand the total dismantling of the colonial financial umbilical cord. Africa requires a global financial system that does not penalize African nations with "sovereign risk" premiums that make green energy projects three times more expensive here than in Europe. It must demand the unconditional return of foreign reserves held in Paris and a shift toward independent, African-led monetary policies.
Third, energy sovereignty over "green exportation." France proposes to "decarbonize" Africa, yet many of our nations have barely "carbonized" to begin with. African “partners” must demand energy justice. This means the right to achieve universal electrification. Africa must reject a "Green Deal" that forces Africa to export its renewable energy (like green hydrogen) to Europe while her own hospitals and schools remain off the grid.
African energy needs must be met first; European exports come second.
Fourth, technology transfer, not just licensing. True innovation is not found in buying French software; it is found in owning the source code. The Nairobi summit must secure commitments for the unconditional transfer of green technologies. Africa should not be a "market" for European patents; it must be a co-owner of the intellectual property that will define the 21st century.
Fifth, climate reparations and debt cancellation. Already, France is active in "debt-for-development" swaps. Africa must demand that these are not treated as "gifts" but as partial down payments on a century of ecological and economic debt. Africa should also insist on total cancellation of debts that were accrued through colonial-era structures. Climate finance must be provided as grants, not loans that further burden Africa’s children for a climate crisis they did not create.
Sixth, accountability for multinational conglomerates. Total Energies, Orano, and Eramet—over 60 CEOs from French corporations will be attending—must answer tough questions at the summit. They ought to answer for their extractive interests that have historically disadvantaged the continent. Across Africa, communities have borne the environmental, social, and economic costs of such operations, with countries like Mozambique offering stark reminders of the consequences.
The companies must agree to be held to African environmental standards, not just French ones. Africa should pitch for a legal framework that allows communities to sue French corporations in both African and French courts for environmental degradation and human rights abuses.
There can be no "partnership" where companies operate with impunity in the Global South while preaching "environmental and social governance" values in the North.
Seventh, an end to paternalistic "security" pacts. Finally, Africa demands an end to the "policing" of the continent. True peace and security come from economic dignity, not from the over 60 military interventions France has conducted since 1960 to protect its interests. Africa must demand the closure of foreign military bases that serve extractive interests and a shift toward supporting African-led, autonomous security architectures. If partnership means equality, then reciprocity is simple—every French troop granted access and immunity in Africa should be matched by an African troop with the same rights in France
The "New Scramble" is couched in the language of "climate resilience" and "debt-for-development swaps." But beneath these green platitudes lie a hidden quest: to re-establish unfettered access to Africa’s critical minerals.
Africa must stay circumspect. The convergence of military signalling and corporate presence must worry all countries participating in Nairobi. They must watch out for unequal relationships under new language.
What France and its European partners fail to realize is that the "disinherited" continent has found its voice. Africa is no longer interested in being a marginal chapter in a European story, not even with a thousand summits. If President Macron wants a "thank you," he should start by returning what was stolen from Africa and respecting the sovereignty he so arrogantly claimed to have authored. The era of the "political orchestra" directed from Paris is over. The music has changed, and Africa is finally playing its own tune.
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'Territorial Theft With Better Branding': Israel Keeps Advancing Its 'Yellow Line' in Gaza
One Palestinian American researcher warned that Israel is seeking "annexation without legal burden."
Apr 22, 2026
Israel's gradual advancement of its "yellow line" to occupy more territory in the Gaza Strip is fueling concerns that it is seeking to effectively annex and colonize the majority of the territory without any formal agreement.
The Guardian reported on Wednesday that Israel has been steadily pushing the truce line to take control of more Palestinian territory in the six months since a "ceasefire" was reached in October.
The yellow line drawn on the ceasefire maps had Israeli troops in control of about 53% of Gaza's territory, cramming nearly 2 million displaced Palestinians into a territory less than half the size of the one they inhabited before.
But an analysis by Forensic Architecture shows Israel has unilaterally shifted the line westward over the past six months to the point where it controlled about 58% of the strip by December in an occupation zone that continues to grow.
(Graphic by The Guardian. Source: Planet Labs PBC, March 6, 2026.)
Palestinians living in Gaza reportedly woke up to learn that large yellow concrete blocks denoting the ceasefire line had suddenly moved and that they were now living in a free-fire area, where the Israeli military considers any Palestinian person or vehicle a legitimate target.
The Associated Press found in January that at least 77 Palestinians have been shot on sight when they've found themselves on the wrong side of the yellow line or even just near it, even though the line's boundaries are ill-defined and fluid.
They are among more than 730 Palestinians who have been killed since the "ceasefire" began in October, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which has accused Israel of thousands of violations.
According to The Guardian, some displaced people, such as those who lived near the Salah al-Din road, which spans the length of Gaza from north to south, suddenly found themselves targeted by Israeli forces, who also began demolishing homes and other buildings and constructing new ones.
Though the yellow line was supposed to be set up as a temporary measure under US President Donald Trump's "peace plan" for Gaza before control of the strip is transferred back to Palestinians, Israel Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff Eyal Zamir described it as a "new border" with Gaza back in December, around the time it reportedly began to move.
Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and the head of Forensic Architecture’s research agency, recently wrote that the IDF appears to be turning this portion of Gaza into a permanent occupation zone.
The group found that seven new military outposts have been built along the yellow line, including one on what was once a cemetery.
While these areas began as "piles of earth and rubble" organized into crude enclosures, Weizman said that in recent months the roads leading to them have been asphalted, electricity poles have been erected, and buildings and communications towers have gone up inside the bases.
"The bases no longer appear to be the provisional arrangements that Trump’s ceasefire plan claims them to be, but permanent instruments of occupation," he wrote. "The newly paved roads connect the bases to a matrix of control that is linked to Israel’s road network and communications grid."
He noted that Israel's illegal settler movement, which has several powerful representatives in the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has been "lobbying hard for the Israeli government to start constructing settlements within the vastly expanded buffer zone."
Defense Minister Israel Katz said in December that Israel would "never leave Gaza" and spoke of plans to turn IDF military outposts into civilian settlements similar to those that have gradually taken over the West Bank through the violent displacement of Palestinian residents.
Ahmad Ibsais, Palestinian American law student and author of the newsletter State of Siege, wrote for the Al-Shabaka Palestinian Policy Network that by drawing a yellow line, Israel is seeking to consolidate its control over Palestinian land without formally annexing it—in other words, "annexation without legal burden."
"Borders are typically established through bilateral agreements, adjudication, or mutual recognition under international law," he wrote. "By contrast, the so-called Yellow Line in Gaza functions as a de facto military demarcation associated with ceasefire arrangements and enforced through Israeli operational control."
"It shapes civilian movement and territorial control without constituting a formally delimited boundary," he continued. "In effect, it constitutes territorial theft with better branding, operationalizing US President Donald Trump’s plan for the continued colonization of Gaza."
Israel declared a similar yellow line about 5-10 kilometers into Lebanese territory, giving the IDF effective control over around 55 towns and villages. The military has reduced many homes and entire villages south of this line to rubble in what Katz has described as a "Gaza model" being applied to Lebanon.
Assistant editor Maya Rosen recently wrote for Jewish Currents that the policy of conquering and settling Lebanon has become "mainstream" in Israeli politics and enjoys broad public support.
Ahmad Baydoun, an architect and open-source intelligence researcher at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, has warned that with this land grab, Israel was seeking to take control of the valuable Qana Gas Field, which is estimated to be capable of producing between $20 billion-$40 billion worth of natural gas exports for Israel. In 2022, a maritime agreement brokered by the US established that control of the field belonged to Lebanon.
Like in Gaza, the Israeli military has forbidden the more than 600,000 Lebanese inhabitants of villages below the line or within a newly established "buffer zone" from returning indefinitely. Katz has said they'll be allowed to return once the "safety and security of the residents of the north [of Israel] is ensured."
Given that Israeli settler groups have already begun mapping out new settlements and advertising plots of land for sale in southern Lebanon, Weizman said Katz was making what is by design "an impossible demand" meant to entrench the land grab.
"This exemplifies the circular logic of Zionist settler-colonialism: settlements are built to mark and protect the state’s border, but that makes them vulnerable to attack, and so a buffer zone is established to protect them," he said. "Afterward, this buffer zone is itself settled to mark and protect the newly expanded borders, at which point another buffer zone becomes necessary."
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Esencia No Va: Protesting Neocolonial Capitalist Development in Puerto Rico
A movement is forming to defend the community and island against a project that would turn over a significant piece of Puerto Rico’s land to foreign billionaires, to serve their needs, not the needs of the Puerto Rican people.
Apr 08, 2026
On Saturday, March 28—No Kings Day in the US—an estimated 50,000 people marched in the streets of Old San Juan, Puerto Rico to protest plans for “Esencia,” a proposed huge, gated, luxury ocean-side development in Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico. The protest was spear-headed by Defiende a Cabo Rojo, a coalition of community, scientific, and cultural organizations, and was joined by 66 co-sponsoring groups from all over the island. A retired US professor of (radical) economics, I attended the protest with my friend Dimaris Acosta-Mercado, an activist in the anti-Esencia movement and professor of ecology at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayaguez.
The $2.5 billion Esencia project, first proposed in May 2024, is a quintessential example of neocolonial capitalist development. It would create a tropical enclave for super-rich foreigners on 2,000 acres of land along a 3-mile stretch of beach in the southwest of the island, including 1,200 homes, 500 hotel accommodations, two golf courses, its own school, and an airport. Although it does not yet have building permits, the proposed project has already received generous tax credits and exemptions.
The Movement to Stop Esencia
The movement to stop Esencia views this issue in both class and territorial terms. Its goal is to defend the community and island against a project that would turn over a significant piece of Puerto Rico’s land to foreign billionaires, to serve their needs, not the needs of the Puerto Rican people. It builds on a history of successful struggles against previous development projects such as the Northern Corridor, mining in Adjuntas, and beachside construction in Rincon.
One of the movement’s core critiques of Esencia is the loss of public access to the beaches, which has happened with previous developments such as Dorado Beach and Palmas del Mar. Bad Bunny’s song, “What Happened to Hawaii,” has become a theme song for the movement, with its powerful chorus:
Thеy want to take my river and my beach too
They want my neighborhood and grandma to leave
No, don't let go of the flag nor forget the lelolai
'Cause I don't want them to do to you what happened to Hawaii
A second set of criticisms of the project focus on its negative ecological and environmental impact. As part of a team of academic researchers involved in the movement, my friend Dimaris’ critique focuses on the harm Esencia will do to endangered species, including birds, reptiles, snails, and plants that exist only in Puerto Rico, and to the critical habitat system that supports them. Other movement researchers predict that Esencia will cause shortages in the region’s water, already in short supply. A third critique emphasizes the area’s importance as an archaeological site.
The March Against Esencia: A Celebration of Life and Love
The march began at El Escambron, another public beach threatened with privatization. From there we marched along the coast of Old San Juan, stopping to rally at the Capitol Building, where the Puerto Rican Senate and House of Representatives meet, and then marched to the Governor’s mansion, La Fortaleza, for more protesting.
It is hard to capture in words the powerful anti-Esencia presence and statement that the march created. At the front of the protest were huge flags of Puerto Rico and Cabo Rojo. Soon after came a large paper mache model of a guabairo, a rare bird endangered by the project, carried overhead for the length of the protest, wings flapping. Marchers carried and wore a variety of printed and homemade posters denouncing the proposed project. Percussion—including drums, folding fans, kitchen pots, guiros—was omnipresent. The call and response chant of “Esencia No Va… Que No Va, Que No Va” (Esencia is a no-go, it shouldn’t go, it shouldn’t go) echoed throughout the march. Continual rhythmic chanting, drumming, singing, and dancing made the protest come alive as a potent force opposing the project. As a North American, I was touched to join in the familiar “El Pueblo Unido Jamas Sera Vencido” chant and to sing “No Nos Pararon” (“they won’t stop us”) to the tune of “We shall not be moved.”
If we in the US and elsewhere are to use social strikes to retake control of our governments... we have much to learn from the joyful, creative protests of our Puerto Rican comrades.
Puerto Rican peoples are a mixture of African, Indigenous, and European heritage, and, as Dimaris put it, “It’s as if all our ancestry (was) coming alive and making peace in this land to protect it.” Indigenous heritage took center stage when the march stopped in front of the Capitol building, with the blowing of conch shells, chanting, calling in the directions, and leading an areito dance. And Afro-Puerto Rican ancestry was omni-present in the bombas and drumming.
One group wore purple T-shirts announcing “anti-patriarchal, feminista, lesbiana, trans, Caribena, Latinoamericana.” Another T-shirt depicted a plant and the words “sembrando rebeldias” (planting rebellions). Gay protesters snapped fans for percussion (one of their signature acts). The Puerto Rico Sierra Club was there, along with Para la Naturaleza, and AFSCME, and many other groups.
The protest had something I hadn’t experienced in the many many US demonstrations I have participated in since the 1960s: It was fun! It was actually a party, with masses of people dancing, drumming, chanting, singing, and reveling in the streets. It was a celebration of life—not only of Puerto Rico and being Puerto Rican, but also of standing up for Mother Earth, an affirmation of love, cooperation, art, and beauty by a diverse community organizing in self-defense and defense of nature, against the greed, displacement, ecological destruction, and extreme wealth inequality that Esencia embodies. Dimaris later told me that the protest resembled the spirit of Verano 2019, the 15-day protest strike which used creativity, art, and fun to topple Gov. “Ricky” Rosello, including evening dance parties in front of the governor’s mansion. If we in the US and elsewhere are to use social strikes to retake control of our governments, as Jeremy Brecher suggests, we have much to learn from the joyful, creative protests of our Puerto Rican comrades.
A final note. The Solidarity Economy movement uses the motto, “Resist and Build.” Movements such as the one opposing Esencia, which resist the take-over of our lands and lives, are key. Equally important are a growing number of efforts to build non-capitalist, community-based alternatives, which are sprouting up all around the world, such as Casa Pueblo and Plenitud in Puerto Rico, or, in the US, land development projects such as those of the Peoples’ Network for Land and Liberation.
In these dark times, here’s to inspiring one another as we resist and build, and to having fun as we do so! Esencia No Va!!!!!!
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More 'Beef' With Bobby: Meat and Masculinity
In 2026, the federal government is telling us how men should be men, with devastating effects on our health and planet.
Mar 17, 2026
In January 2026, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the Food and Drug Administration’s new inverted food pyramid to replace the Michelle Obama's “myplate” visualization. There is some good in the change: promoting whole foods and minimizing processed foods, as I noted in My “Beef” with Bobby. But the science ends here as RFK instead relies on bro-science. Taking his cue from the “manosphere” and MAHA wellness influencers, he emphasizes animal proteins over plant proteins. More on that in a moment.
Just one month after releasing the new food pyramid, RFK released a workout video with Kid Rock where the pair eat steaks, pump iron, and then drink raw milk in a hot tub together. It’s difficult to watch, but even more difficult to describe. Comedian Stephen Colbert called it “senior softcore that feels like dropping acid.”
RFK has long sought to prove his manliness. He has admitted to taking testosterone, while insisting, unconvincingly, that he’s not on steroids. The administration more broadly seems to have an obsessive and desperate need to demonstrate its masculine prowess. In fact, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s warrior mentality may have contributed to the US attacks on Iran. It has certainly contributed to his callous dismissal of human casualties. Both meanwhile defer to President Donald Trump’s allegedly off-the charts levels of testosterone.
These food policies and performative workouts might appear unrelated. But, a closer connection exists between beef, masculinity, and the American nation, one that has, in fact, twined since the country’s earliest days. RFK’s effort to Make American Healthy Again is mere revival of a longstanding American narrative.
For all its chest-thumping certainty, this administration’s relationship to masculinity looks less like confidence than anxiety, much like the frontier myth itself.
The idea that meat is manly can be traced to the cultural founding of the nation on the actual frontier. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the struggle to conquer the wilderness had fostered American virtues of independence, self-reliance, and democracy. Proving your manly virtue on the frontier made immigrants into American men as America became a virtuous nation. Declaring the closing of the frontier, Jackson lamented America’s ability to grow and innovate. Men would wither without the opportunity to test their mettle as the nation expanded.
Beef was central to imperial expansion on the frontier. Ranching not only justified the expropriation American Indian land, but beef products supplied to the US Army made expansion possible. By slaughtering to the brink of extinction the 50 million bison that roamed the Great Plains, they settled the “Indian question.” Historian Joshua Specht calls cattle “mobile colonizers.” Culturally, ranchers and cowboys justified the violence against American Indians in the interests of civilization. Central to this myth was the frontier man, bringing civilization to the feminized “vanishing Indian,” a curious paradox, to be sure, where Native Americans could be at once docile and violent.
Today we are left with an embarrassing historical echo. Protein as the final frontier of fitness influencers ironically returns us to the actual frontier in American history. Now we can see why RFK’s two provocations in the culture war of 2026 are related. Food has always been gendered and tied to nothing less than the ideals of the nation and what it means to be an American.
Today we see the same gendering of meat wrapped up with big business. Only un-American soy boys refuse to eat meat. Meat advertisements often demonstrate the masculinity of meat consumption by displaying oversexualized women cooking meat, implying that both women and animals are to be dominated and consumed by men.
There is of course no evidence that soy intake affects male hormones, or that meat consumption is required for elite athletic performance. Arnold Schwarzenegger, whose character once said, “You hit like a vegetarian,” has more recently called for cutting back on meat, noting that it isn’t necessary for athletes and harms the planet. James Cameron’s documentary The Game Changers challenges the myth that animal protein is needed for physical strength and elite athletic performance. Cameron follows tennis stars, Olympians, and even the ultimate fighter James Wilks to see how plant protein permeates their diets. But the myth lives on, perpetrated by RFK’s shirtless workouts and emphasis on eating meat. And because the old adage “follow the money” seems to be guiding light for this administration, it should come as no surprise that the meat industry is also a major donor.
Still, the science on red meat consumption and its effects on our planet and health are clear. Red meat consumption reduces life expectancy by increasing risks of cardiovascular disease, obesity, and cancer. Cattle also consume much of the world’s arable land, leading to deforestation and increased greenhouse gas emissions. While beans and legumes make it into the dietary guidelines, they are entirely absent from the pyramid.
Despite the eagerness of the administration, Kid Rock, and MAHA followers to heed RFK’s food and exercise advice, many of these same figures recoiled when Michelle Obama tried to move toward nutrient-dense fruit and vegetables in school lunches. Republicans accused her of trying to impose a “nanny-state,” and bristled at her impudent attempt to shape what Americans choose to eat. Again, gender is at work in our food policies.
Despite claiming to restore “scientific integrity” and “common sense,” RFK ignores the government’s own "Scientific Report of the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee," which consistently advocated plant-based sources of protein, especially beans and lentils while reducing the intake of red meat. The committee even suggested moving the “Beans, Peas, and Lentils Subgroup from the Vegetables Food Group to the Protein Foods Group.”
Cultural tropes can be hard to break, but it is time for a new generation of athletes and influencers to confront the wellness-to-fascism pipeline. Our secretary of health should not be making policy decisions on the basis of pseudoscience for the sake of winning a culture war. Nor should his leadership parrot “manosphere" talking points that openly embrace a hostility toward women and decry the feminization of Western society. This is nothing short of what one nutritionist called a "vibes-based policy disaster." For all its chest-thumping certainty, this administration’s relationship to masculinity looks less like confidence than anxiety, much like the frontier myth itself. Still, these performances should not require the rest of us to pay with our health and our planet for their fragile egos.
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Trump's White Nationalism Will Only Lead to Division, Poverty, and Mass Violence
The advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of colonialism is monstrous, both morally and in practical terms.
Mar 12, 2026
Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of white nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as “white,” while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power.
Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline” because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product]—down from 25% in 1990 to 14% today.”
A Mayor Named Khan
As it happens, though, on a per-person basis, Europeans are more than twice as wealthy today in real terms as they were 36 years ago. The dictum once cited by Mark Twain that there are “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is exemplified in Trump’s National Security Strategy. In 1991, just two years before the European Union (EU) was first formed, the per-capita GDP there was $15,470 (in today’s dollars). In 2024, that figure was $43,305. What changed since then wasn’t that Europe began decaying, but that the well-being of the people in the global South, in what Trump dismisses as “shithole countries,” has actually also improved significantly, whether he likes it or not, changing Europe’s share of global GDP.
In his National Security Strategy, Trump admits, however, that Europe’s supposed economic degradation doesn’t bother him nearly as much as another issue: “This economic decline is eclipsed by the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure,” thanks to Europe’s migration policies. In short, Trump’s government has now adopted a modernized version of the Nazi Great Replacement ideology, slamming “migration policies that are transforming the [European] continent and creating strife,” along with “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
The only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Trump claims that he’s no longer sure Europeans will even remain European. He supposedly worries that, two decades from now, the continent will be unrecognizable and EU countries no longer capable of being Washington’s “reliable allies.” That barb is, of course, clearly aimed at Muslim immigrants to Europe, even though they are a distinct minority of those arriving there. In an interview about his NSS, Trump snidely remarked, “If you take a look at London, you have a mayor named Khan.” And he then went on to exclaim in horror that immigrants aren’t just coming from the Middle East, “they’re coming in from the Congo, tremendous numbers of people coming from the Congo.” In other words, the only thing that outstrips Trump’s Islamophobia is his horror of Black people.
Of course, he’s completely misinformed about immigration to Europe, which means his NSS is as well. As a start, the largest influx of people into the EU in recent few years has been 4.3 million Ukrainians. The major sources of immigration to Germany in 2024 were Ukraine, Romania, Turkey, Syria, and India. For Spain, it was Colombia, Morocco, Venezuela, Peru, and Argentina. As for Europe’s future reliability, Trump has already said that he “can’t trust” Denmark, no matter that its population is solidly Lutheran and predominantly blond, because that country won’t give him Greenland. And since the president has expressed a willingness to break up the NATO alliance, if necessary, to add 57,000 Greenlanders to his feudal domains, his doubting of European dependability should be considered richly ironic.
Aryan Reliability
The underpinnings of Trump’s reasoning can (or at least should) be described as Nazi in style. After all, he’s assuming that the immigrants he loathes are inherently incapable of becoming Europeans and will make those countries intrinsically untrustworthy as allies of the United States. Of the EU countries, he recently asserted that “they’ll change their ideology, obviously, because the people coming in have a totally different ideology.” Yet British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, born in Southampton to an immigrant Indian-East African family of Hindu faith, was widely viewed as having restored British-US diplomatic relations after years of strain.
In reality, studies show that socioeconomic status, not national origin, best predicts how immigrants will vote. In Germany, the better-off Russian Germans, who far outnumber largely working-class Turkish Germans, tend to vote for right-of-center parties. Both groups, however, seem happy to participate in European politics in accordance with local norms. If, for Trump, the term “immigrants” in this context is a dog whistle for Muslims, it might be noted that 9 of the 22 countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan, that have been formally designated by Trump as “major non-NATO allies” are Muslim majority.
His foreign policy reasoning in that NSS eerily mirrors the crackpot logic of Adolf Hitler, who saw France as an enemy of Germany’s because it had allegedly fallen irretrievably under non-Aryan Jewish influence, and who held out hope in the 1920s and early 1930s that Aryan elements would prevail over Jewish ones in Britain, a country he preferred as a strategic partner because of the Germanic ancestry of part of its population. In Trump’s NSS, immigrant Europeans from Africa and the Middle East play the role that Jews did in Hitler’s thinking—that is, non-Aryan underminers of national integrity. Hitler’s conspiratorial racism was, of course, all too grimly insane, and so, too, is that of Trump’s NSS.
“Mongols and Negroes”
Central to the NSS is the Great Replacement. The idea, though not the phrase, goes back to 1900 when the French nationalist parliamentarian and novelist Maurice Barrès wrote, “Today, new French have slipped in among us… who want to impose on us their ways of feeling.” He warned of Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants. “The name of France might well survive,” he commented, but “the special character of our country would nevertheless be destroyed.” Amid a political crisis over the wrongful conviction of Captain Alfred Dreyfus (of Jewish and Alsatian heritage) for supposed espionage for the German embassy, Barrès denounced the famed French novelist Émile Zola, a supporter of Dreyfus, as “not French” but a rootless cosmopolitan from a Venetian background.
Fifty years later, the French Nazi René Binet (1913-1957) coined the phrase “Great Replacement.” An ex-Communist, he had served as a Nazi collaborator during World War II in the Waffen Grenadier Brigade of the Charlemagne paramilitary Protection Squadron (Schutzstaffel or SS). After the war, in his 1950 book Theory of Racism, he wrote in dismay about how Western Europe had been invaded by “Mongols and Negroes”—that is, by the Soviets and the Americans. He lamented that Jewish-dominated capital also supposedly controlled Europe (it didn’t, of course) and falsely alleged that Jewish CEOs were bringing in immigrants in a deliberate attempt to replace civilized white Europeans.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.”
Sadly enough, Binet’s ideas have been revived in this century by French thinkers and politicians. Renaud Camus published his 21st century version of the theory in 2010, entitling his book The Great Replacement. Such falsehoods were echoed in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, when American Nazis chanted, “Jews will not replace us” (and President Trump called the assembled protesters, as well as those who opposed them, “very fine people”). Camus came around to supporting like-minded politicians in the far-right French National Rally (formerly the National Front) party, led by Marine Le Pen, who also became a Trump ally. When a French court convicted her of embezzlement in 2025 and excluded her from politics for five years, Trump denounced the verdict and launched the slogan, “Free Marine Le Pen.” Holding Le Pen, a far-right racist politician, accountable to the rule of law is part of what Trump was complaining about in his NSS when he cited European “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition.”
Marine Le Pen’s father, Jean-Marie Le Pen, had been a paratrooper in the ruthless Algerian War (1954-1962) that killed between half a million and a million Algerians in a bid to keep that country under French colonial domination. The elder Le Pen came to lead the newly founded National Front in 1972 and was surrounded by far-right figures who had collaborated with the Nazis. While the party reinvented itself under Marine Le Pen in 2017 as the National Rally and has moved slightly toward the center, many of its supporters harbor neo-Nazi ideas about racial purity, now typically aimed at Arab and Amazigh Muslims.
Forget 1776 and All That
The central concerns of that National Security Strategy now animate the Trump administration’s foreign policy. At the annual Munich Security Conference in early February, for instance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio took up what the Victorian jingoist writer Rudyard Kipling once termed the White Man’s Burden, crowing that “for five centuries, before the end of the Second World War, the West had been expanding.” He neglected to mention all the massacres, destruction, and looting that European colonialists perpetrated over those centuries. Belgium’s King Leopold II alone, for instance, instituted policies in the Congo from 1885 to 1908 that may have killed as many as 10 million people. That bloody episode inspired Joseph Conrad’s novel The Heart of Darkness, in the final sentence of which the protagonist utters, “The horror! The horror!“
After the end of World War II in 1945, Rubio lamented, a Europe in ruins contracted. “Half of it,” he added, “lived behind an Iron Curtain and the rest looked like it would soon follow.” He mourned that “the great Western empires had entered into terminal decline, accelerated by godless communist revolutions and by anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map in the years to come.”
He also displayed a striking mixture of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia—and with it, an ignorance of the history of decolonization, which neither occurred only after 1945, nor was in the main communist led. After all, the United States launched its anti-colonial struggle in 1776. Most of Latin America was liberated from the Spanish Empire in the early 19th century by Simón Bolívar and other fighters who would have been characterized at the time as liberals. As for the post-World War II liberation movements, most leaders of former colonialized countries, including India, Kenya, Malaysia, Morocco, Pakistan, Senegal, and Sudan, among other places, tilted either to capitalism or to social democracy.
Marco Rubio’s mixing of white nationalism and colonial nostalgia is, of course, nothing new. A return of German colonies in Africa, lost in World War I to Britain and France, was among the Nazi regime’s most insistent demands in the late 1930s, and dreams of a new version of German imperialism in Africa were part of what was meant by the Third Reich.
Rubio has depicted decolonization as a failure of the European will to power. Most historians, on the other hand, point to the way their colonies mobilized for independence. Political scientists point to two crucial kinds of mobilization. The first was “social mobilization,” which involved urbanization, industrialization, and increased literacy. By 1945, ever more Asians and Africans were no longer illiterates living in small, disconnected villages. As for political mobilization, parties, chambers of commerce, and labor unions put millions of the previously colonized in the streets. New social classes of entrepreneurs, professionals, and workers demanded the right to control their own destinies.
And in the wake of World War II, attitudes were changing even among the colonial powers. The British public, for instance, could no longer be persuaded to spend money in an attempt to quell an India where the Congress Party of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru had brought millions into the streets demanding independence. And while the Netherlands did fight viciously to roll back Indonesia’s declaration of independence in 1945 (despite having itself been occupied by Germany during World War II), after four years of massacres, it was forced out. The impoverished French had no choice but to give up most of their African possessions, but in a sanguinary failure attempted to keep their colonies in Algeria and Vietnam by military force. American President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a wiser man than Rubio, twisted French President Charles De Gaulle’s arm to get him out of Algeria lest the revolutionaries there turn to Moscow and Communism.
Kinder, Küche, Kirche
Given that history, the advice of President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio to the European Union to adopt a white nationalist domestic and foreign policy and attempt to initiate a new round of European colonialism in the global South is monstrous indeed, both morally and in practical terms. Without immigration today, Europe would soon face Japan’s dilemma of rapid population loss, along with the loss of international economic and political power.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez had it right when he said that Spain faces a choice between “being an open and prosperous country or a closed and poor one.” As for the white nationalist pronatalist dream of keeping women barefoot and pregnant in accordance with the old German slogan, Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church), it’s a chimera given the electoral power of women in today’s Europe (and the United States).
In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s cruel, heavily ICED anti-immigrant campaign has already hurt the American economy and Europeans would be deeply unwise to emulate it in any way, including colonially. The neoconservative project of rehabilitating American colonialism crashed and burned in this country’s disastrous 21st-century wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (and won’t be aided by the present assault on Iran either) for reasons similar to those that made European colonialism impossible in the post-World War II period.
In reality, the European Union’s project of multicultural democracy has yielded enormous prosperity, while expanding and deepening human rights. Trump’s white nationalism, on the other hand, is a formula for division, poverty, and mass violence, as was demonstrated in the 1930s and 1940s when a form of that ideology was last tried in Europe.
And count on this: Trump and crew are going to give the phrase “the white man’s burden” a grim new meaning.
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