Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) is now one of the world’s largest and best-known social movements. The hundreds of thousands of families in the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra push for radical land reform, most famously by occupying unused or misused land and agitating for redistribution.

Founded in 1984, the movement became especially famous — and a symbol of determined resistance to the far right — under the disastrous government of Jair Bolsonaro, when it mobilized its militants to oppose the president and deployed its material resources to feed starving Brazilians. What is less well-known is that the MST runs its own publishing house, Expressão Popular, which is an important part of the country’s intellectual ecosystem. Since 2012, Miguel Yoshida has served as its editorial coordinator, publishing with a focus on class struggle, anti-imperialism, and the future of the Global South. Miguel spoke to North South Notes in June and July.

Vincent Bevins: A lot of people have heard about Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement — it has become somewhat famous worldwide in recent years — but I don’t think many know that the MST has its own publishing house. How did this come to be?

Miguel Yoshida: The publishing house was born in 1999. Why then? Well first of all, 1996 was a difficult and decisive year for the MST. That was the year of the El Dorado de Carajás Massacre, when 21 landless workers were killed by military police. In response the MST organized a long march to Brasília, which managed to constitute a significant social mobilization against the neoliberal policies of President Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

At the same time, the MST — and other social movements — came to the conclusion that there was a need to make a theoretical leap, as well. In what sense? After the fall of the Berlin Wall there was, not just here in Brazil but around the world, a wave of disillusionment with the left. You know: “Ok, socialism didn’t work, let’s give up.” We knew of many intellectuals that simply threw their libraries in the trash, right? “Fine, Marx, Engels and Lenin no longer explain our world.” That was the sound of the stampede at the time.

So the generation in our struggle in '96, '97, '98, was disconnected in a way from the generation that had fought against the dictatorship — the generation that had received a more classical Marxist education.

VB: So, the decision was to return to the classics, in a new context?

MY: Right. The conclusion was that we needed to recuperate the classic theory of political organization to advance in struggle. The thinking was: “Great, the organization of [land] occupations and marches is necessary, but we need to push further in order to wage political struggle in a broader sense.”

The first book published by Expressão Popular, in 1999, is called “Lenin and the Russian Revolution.” The second book is an anthology of the writings of Rosa Luxemburg. And then, a book written by Michael Löwy about Che Guevara. You can see those titles as foundational to our philosophy — and our overall goal has always been the formation of militants in Brazil’s popular movements.

VB: Since then, how many books have been published?

MY: Nine hundred. About 60% are works by Brazilian authors, and 40% are translations of foreign titles. And we always work to publish books as cheaply as possible, so that the average worker can read them.

VB: Yes, this is something I noticed years ago. You publish works on agroecology in Brazil, Marx and literary theory, translations of Mao and books on Gramsci, and one encounters these works organically, out on the land occupied or settled by the MST. I remember coming across Expressão Popular books on imperialism and revolutionary history in tents and makeshift homes across the rural interior of a right-wing state like Paraná. Teenage boys or single mothers working the land will have them by their bedside.

In the United States, meanwhile, you often hear the attack that the left is a thing for rich people. That Marx and Lenin are stuff that kids get into at expensive universities.

MY: [Laughing] Yes, we have that insult here too.

VB: But of course it only works if you ignore the entire history of the global left. It only works if you are only ever looking around at rich people in the first place. But more concretely, how do you keep the books cheap?

MY: Well first, a very important part of what we do today is to publish thinkers from around the Global South. Books by African authors are some of our best-selling volumes, as a matter of fact. An anthology of the writings of Thomas Sankara has been in great demand — and we put out work by Amílcar Cabral, from Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde, as well as Kwame Nkrumah, from Ghana. We published a Ho Chi Minh anthology, in order to rethink the entire context of Vietnam. That is, how is it that they were able to defeat French and US imperialism? What was it about the combination of Marxist thought and the realities of Vietnamese local conditions that made that possible? It is really important to think about. And then recently, we wanted to stop and reflect on the fifty years since the independence of Angola and Mozambique, of course.

But historically we have had a few strategies for keeping our books cheap. First, we do operate legally as a business with sales revenues and operational independence from the MST, but profits are re-invested into more publications. Secondly, we try to rely on the solidarity of authors, who might grant us publishing rights for cheap or free. And then we have employed an alternative distribution system, which was based on the organization of the social movements themselves. So, one person would be responsible for selling books here or there, you know? At universities, union meetings, and so on, because distribution is really expensive, especially in a country the size of Brazil. As a result of all that, we could often sell books for about half the price of our competitors.

But the pandemic made that last strategy difficult to sustain, and more recently we have been trying to make as many of our books available as free PDFs as possible, on our website.

VB: Oh wow — most publishers try to avoid that kind of thing. Last year, what was your best-selling edition?

MY: A book by Ruy Mauro Marini, the Brazilian intellectual, on dependency theory, a collection called “Dependency and revolution in Latin America.” Then, as I said, the interest in works from countries in the global periphery has been really strong.

The political line on thought from the Global South has been to maintain the classical tradition and to also incorporate these new elements into it. In that way we avoid just being trapped in debates centered on Europe and the Global North — which of course, have their own relevance — and allow ourselves to think about our own circumstances and be in dialogue with those countries.

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VB: I wanted to ask about the focus on anti-imperialism at Expressão Popular. The line is very clear in a way which is much less common in the Global North and especially the United States, where one can easily be labeled too anti-imperialist. I don’t think you have published any theorists affirming that the age of imperialism is over, or that every state is equally in need of abolition, and so on. Do you publish any anarchists or autonomists?

MY: No.

VB: I guess the closest thing would be Rosa Luxemburg, right?

MY: Yeah but that’s not very close at all, is it?

VB: You publish extensively on Cuba, the Armazém do Campo1 has a lot of Venezuela materials, and it seems that the line is that left movements do not need to wait for the perfect society or the flawless revolution to learn from experiences elsewhere or offer solidarity. Is that right?

MY: Correct, our view is that it makes no sense to wait for the perfect revolution before offering support or to spread word of real-world experiences.

What do we have as an editorial line? We think the following: we are in a class struggle and we have a principal enemy in that class struggle. Principal enemies, that is. In national terms, it continues to be the bourgeoisie here in Brazil, which is linked to agribusiness, which is linked to financial markets, and which has its international engagements. And that, if we think past our borders, the principal enemy of humanity is imperialism itself – the imperialism of the United States. This is only becoming more clear as a result of Trump’s recent actions.

So here on our side of that struggle, our line is to value the experiences of popular struggles elsewhere, and to value the construction of national solidarity, and to seek to end the vast inequality between nations. That is, to learn from history and the struggles of the people. I think that, deep down, when we think about an anti-imperialist line, it has a lot to do with identifying that principal enemy and understanding history. The experiences of popular struggles have been contradictory, but there are advances within them and possibilities that can strengthen us as well.

Of course, we are not going to align ourselves in a total and uncritical way with existing processes. But at the same time, we will act in solidarity with popular struggles, won’t we? Our view is that there are real-life consequences for people right now. Just look at Cuba and the situation the country is living through — an economic blockade that is worse than ever. At the same time, how is it that the Cuban experience is fundamental for the global left to understand? Since 1959 there have been contradictions, weaknesses, problems, and yet, Cuba remains a large — shall we say — breath of fresh air. A ray of hope. That’s our line: look squarely at our enemy, and study how we can be stronger to defeat it.

VB: Has the nature of US imperialism changed significantly in recent years? Has the publisher sought to reflect on the impact of the current Trump administration, for example?

MY: As far as publications go, we put out a book by a Cuban journalist on Marcio Rubio thought. It’s an analysis of Rubio himself — called “Marco Rubio, pathological liar” — it demonstrates how this son of immigrants bases his entire career on deeply xenophobic prejudice, with the explicit intention of recovering imperial power over Latin America.

And our evaluation is that what is clearly at stake is the hegemony of the United States — the empire is in decline — and this empire, feeling threatened by rising powers such as China and other nations in and outside the BRICS, becomes more and more aggressive and destructive. When a beast is cornered, it lashes out in desperation, and imperialism in its current phase appears to be firing at everyone in every direction. That critical reading sustains our curation of anti-imperialist work.

VB: This year, Lula will run for his fourth term in office. The MST has a long and complex relationship with him, of course. Will this be a focus of publications, events, discussions, and so on?

MY: This will be a really important year for Brazil and for Latin America. There is the possibility of continuing with a progressive government in Lula — or, there is the possibility of an extreme-right victory, as we have seen across the region recently.

What we have planned is a series of books on the policies and politics at play. So, in August we will launch a study of the relationship between agribusiness and the extreme right. As we see it, our political role is to denounce those kinds of problems, to raise those kinds of issues. And we will have a series of events based on the books that have, in some way or another over the years, centered the advances made by the working class under progressive governments and explore the difficulties of that process; we will also feature books that demonstrate the real threats posed to the population by the far right.

VB: And what about this rightward shift in Latin America? Is this a serious threat?

MY: Personally, I think — and this is also the belief throughout our editorial committee — there has been a real turn to the right in Latin America, and this is something we study carefully, just as we study the foreign policy of Donald Trump and its relation to the phenomenon.

For a long time, we have explored both progressive advances and the threat of imperialism at the level of Latin America, rather than just within individual nations. And we believe we are living through a moment that puts imperialist offensive back at the center of the agenda. Starting in the early 2000s the region experienced a wave of progressive governments, and now we are living through the return of an era of combat — the extreme-right governments in Latin America, in our view, constitute an international imperialist network led by the United States.

VB: Finally, I want to ask you about another way of interacting with the community, something that I have noticed seems to be important to the publisher. What is the importance of maintaining physical spaces for dialogue, of putting on events and keeping alive a vibrant left-literary culture in the real world? What explains your focus on this kind of interaction in a world in which people sit at home alone on their phones?

MY: This is fundamental and something we have thought long and hard about. So, the numbers indicate we are probably the second-most important left publisher in Brazil now, behind Boitempo, and we have a great relationship with them. Along with them and other members of the International Union of Left Publishers (IULP), we put on “Red Books Day.”

The essence of neoliberalism resides in the excessive cultivation of atomized individualism. The idea behind our spaces — the bookstore, the café, the Armazém do Campo and the Elza Soares Cultural Center — is precisely to subvert this logic.

We want to rebuild community ties and the culture of presence in socializing, with things like launches, debates, and reading clubs. To offer a refuge of conviviality disconnected from the commercial logic and world of compulsory work that surrounds us. The strength of the working class emanates from its capacity for collective articulation, and we cannot cede this territory.

VB: Miguel, thanks so much for your time and for the depth of your reflections.

MY: Of course. We’re always available to advance in debate. Ciao ciao.

This interview has been translated from Portuguese and condensed for clarity.

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Before the publication of something I wrote on Serbia’s student movement, editors at the London Review of Books cut a passage I quite liked. This is not a complaint, and their decision was not ideological — the sentences remained until the pages changed. This is it:

Students told me that their movement employed a ‘left-wing organisational model open to the many right-wing members of the student population’. (I’m not sure tactics and processes are inherently progressive or reactionary, but I understood what they meant.)

You may have detected the other reason the cut was justified. This fragment, on something I find quite fascinating, could be an entire essay. This is that little essay.

First, let’s go back to what happened in Serbia. After the collapse of the train station in Novi Sad, students stopped attending classes and formed assemblies that determined their political activities. These assemblies are horizontal and open to all (students), and democratic in that everyone who attends has an equal vote. But these assemblies, in Belgrade and everywhere else in the country, had plenty of right-wing kids in them. Some of them are using the student movement to try to push the country to the right.

As an organizational model and decision-making process, a permanent democratic assembly is something that anti-authoritarian leftists tend to use, so I did understand what the students meant. But I want to step aside from the Serbian case now, because this is an abstract debate. I am certainly not trying to quibble with those young people. They were speaking a language that most people understand. I want to think about the rules of that language.

Let’s take one of the most classically “left-wing” things you could do — the strike. Surely, workers using their collective power against the bosses is progressive. Well, during the administration of democratically elected socialist Salvador Allende, the CIA encouraged Chilean truckers to go on strike. This was a reactionary move, because the goal was not to empower the working class but to create the chaos necessary to justify military intervention. This intervention came in the form of the violent coup and Pinochet’s 17-year dictatorship. What about street protest? For a while, in certain parts of the world at least, this seemed a progressive thing to do. One of the brutal shocks of the 2010s was the reminder that reactionaries can do mass protest, too.1 Ok, what about a riot, consisting of attacks on police? Like it or not, surely ACAB violence cannot be right-wing? Well — if, say, it is local ranchers in the Amazon killing the enforcement officers defending environmental reserves and indigenous communities (which is what these cowboys do, and they do call those officials cops) — then the story is different.

In Berlin last month I had an invigorating discussion with students who were too young to remember the cycle of protests that included Occupy Wall Street and the “Arab Spring” and continued intermittently throughout the decade. (The last time I was supposed to speak at a German university, the conference was cancelled because of my support for Palestine). Two old phrases bubbled to the top of that conversation: “the fetishization of form,” and “tactics without strategy.”2

Above, however, I have slightly confused discrete concepts. Strikes and protests and riots are tactics; that is distinct from an organizational form. Let’s consider a spectrum with two endpoints. On the “left,” the fully horizontal and one-person-one-vote grouping, and on the “right,” a hierarchically organized, disciplined, military-style formation with a clear commander. Surely leftists do not want a world in which people are born already-subservient to anybody else; they do not want a world of vast inequality; opposition to feudal hierarchies is one of the principles that gave birth to a “left” in the first place.

But leftists have certainly used tightly-organized command-and-control structures to push for socialist transformation or national liberation. Few would have said that Che Guevara or Frelimo were using “right-wing” organizational models. Indeed, in parts of the 1960s and 1970s, those movements were so automatically associated with socialist revolution that some First World leftists fetishized those guerrilla forms and practices without a clear idea of how they related to their own structural conditions.

Back to the main question. Can a few fascists get together and plan a pogrom, but do it leftistly? If they are a leaderless collective and take votes, does that matter to anyone?

I think my position is already clear: Shapes do not have ideological content, and neither do tools. They may have associations, cultural residues, and their own history; but their content is a function of their relationship to concrete conditions in the larger system. Movements can be subjectively progressive (according to the beliefs of its members) or objectively progressive (this is not always the same thing), and they can choose whatever shapes and tools that might be appropriate (or deeply inappropriate) to their conditions.

The question of organizational form is more complicated because it is easier to change tactics than to change your shape. Historically, we have seen this problem emerge. An intensely disciplined, hierarchical organization can win state power and then retain its form; or, a fully horizontal and uncoordinated protest can flounder when representation is called for. And if a movement is really open to everyone, then it is always open to the right. One Serbian told me that if her enemies were smart enough, they would just send 20 people to join her neighborhood assembly and vote to abolish it.

These reflections reminded me of the book Neither Vertical Nor Horizontal, so I asked Brazilian philosopher Rodrigo Nunes for his opinion. His reply:

Indeed, I struggle to think of any tactics that the left can use that the right couldn’t, or vice-versa. Where I’d say the difference comes in regard to strategy and organization is that the left is in principle more concerned with empowerment and participation than the right. And this is always a problem for the left in a way that it isn’t at all for the right: if we are committed to democracy and participation, what do we do about the fact that people might want something at odds with what we believe they should want?

Of course, the right might also want to use democracy, participation, assemblies etc. in situations where that furthers their goals; but if it ceases to do so, and they find themselves constrained to abandon them, they can do so without qualms, whereas the left could easily do the same, but not with a clear conscience, or not without being accused of contradiction.3

— Elsewhere in the Balkans —

You may have seen that Albanians are now protesting a real estate development imposed upon the country by Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump.4 We reached out to Bora Mema, member of the Lëvizja Bashkë party, who is in Tirana actively participating in the movement. She said that the “flamingo” movement also includes people who may vote right-wing or would not consider themselves leftists, but that the movement itself can be considered objectively left-leaning.

“The protest movement does not have an organized structure, as it consists of different social movements, collectives, and friend groups that came together quickly,” she said. “But over time, I think the rhetoric and alternatives offered by the protests have moved to the left. You can call it an environmental movement, which it is; but the people are chanting for a New Albania, chanting against oligarchy and for public beaches, and calling for an economic model that doesn’t favor billionaires.”

Introduction for North South Notes — Njeri Mwangi

In June 2024, protests erupted in Kenya that nearly toppled the government. At least, it surely felt like we might overthrow President William Ruto, who had long been a favorite partner of major Western powers and international investors on the African continent.

For many people, the protests appeared sudden and spontaneous. But what is often left untold is the long story of grassroots activism, political education, and community organizing that created the conditions for such a moment. The Kenyan Organic Intellectuals Network, founded in 2019, emerges from this broader context of struggle.

All Kenyans, not just scholars and journalists, have thought hard about what 2024 has meant for the country. To mark the second anniversary of the uprising, the Network has compiled a book of its reflections on the meaning of the protests and the potential for real transformation in the country.

I was born in 1999 and grew up in Mathare, an informal settlement on the outskirts of Nairobi. During the Mau Mau struggle against British rule, Mathare was an important base for anti-colonial resistance.1 Since I was 17, I have been active in community organizing through the Mathare Social Justice Centre.

We were active in the protests in 2024 before everyone started watching. In April, residents here were severely affected by flooding. More than 70 people lost their lives, and then ten more died during government demolitions that left thousands homeless. In response, we organized protests demanding housing and justice for the victims. Young activists mobilized alongside many Nyakinywa—in Kikuyu culture, these are women whose sons have already been initiated into adulthood. Their participation gave the movement moral authority and demonstrated its broad support.

Then in May, the government began discussing a new Finance Bill, which would raise taxes on ordinary people. We decided to continue to mobilize — not just in response to the bill, but with our demand for housing as well. At this point, absolutely no one was calling us “Gen Z.” With older women around me, I did not feel as if I was in a “Gen Z” protest. It was not yet a global trend to describe the protests in that way. Kenya 2024 came before Bangladesh, before Serbia or the revolts in 2025 in Nepal and Indonesia and Madagascar.

As the protests increased in size in June, and the police opted for repression — I was arrested on June 18^th along with 300 others — the media made a move that I think was intended to delegitimate and isolate us. First, they pointed to youth participation, suggesting that the participants did not take politics seriously. Then, the next day, the phrase “Gen Z” was everywhere in the press: you would read “Gen Z protesters” over and over. The world knows the next part of the story a little bit better: over the following days, protesters entered the Parliament building, and police killed a total of 67 people.

Before long, we were demanding that “Ruto must go.” In retrospect, I think that if the government had actually fallen in that way, it would have been the military that took over. There was no other political force that could be the recipient of the power unleashed on the streets. Instead, the protests created new movements and a new political reality that will be an important part of whatever comes next.

June 25^th remains an important date in our political calendar, and we returned to the streets this year, last Thursday, to honor the victims and demand accountability for the dead. We were met with repression once more, and at the time of writing, two of our comrades are missing.

In my view, the focus on “Gen Z” serves to depoliticize the movement and to isolate it from broader struggles. At the same time, it is true that a new political actor emerged in 2024, and this relates to our specific historical and economic realities; we must understand the powers that we have in order to use them effectively to build a new Kenya.

Notes from an Unfinished Uprising — Kinuthia Ndung’u

I write this from my house, scrolling through media filled with horror from Tanzania. Hundreds of young people have been murdered after a disputed election. I imagine Nyerere turning in his grave, watching the humiliation of the people under the leadership of his party. It is the familiar story of the betrayal of the independence struggle by the new political elite across Africa.

In Kenya, the streets appear silent, but do not let that silence deceive you. Beneath it lies the same anger, the same pain, and the same unresolved contradictions that drove us into the streets in 2024. Lecturers remain on strike, the healthcare system is on its knees, corruption has deepened, and small businesses are collapsing under the weight of austerity.

Under Ruto’s leadership, Kenya has been further entrenched in the orbit of imperialism. The regime secured non-NATO Ally status, aligning itself openly with U.S. military interests, then joined the war against the heroic Houthis, who are defending the dignity of the Palestinian people. Our brothers and sisters have been deployed to die in Haiti defending US imperialism.

Domestically, Parliament has been sidelined through the Privatization Act. New land laws have deepened dispossession, and a Cybercrimes Bill has been weaponized to criminalize dissent. The state’s prisons still hold many of our comrades, maliciously charged with terrorism for demanding a better Kenya. It is a bitter irony, the British colonial state once called the Mau Mau terrorists too!

A year before the storming of Parliament in June 2024, I spent three days at the notorious Central Police Station for participating in anti-Finance Bill 2023 protests. Those who came to agitate for our release were violently dispersed from the station. The state was rehearsing. At that time, our generation’s political consciousness was not what it is today. We were dismissed as paid activists. Still, we persisted through coordination within the broader social justice movement.

By 18 June 2024, the streets erupted. “Ruto Must Go,” “Reject the Finance Bill,” and “Reject the IMF” echoed across towns. I stood along Tom Mboya Street with goosebumps, stunned by the sheer number of young demonstrators. On the second day, millions poured into the streets. Doctors set up makeshift clinics, churches and mosques opened their doors to shield protesters, and advocates camped outside police stations to secure releases.

Then, around 7 p.m., Rex Masai fell, murdered by a police bullet. The 29-year-old became the first martyr of the uprising. His blood stained Tom Mboya Street, and with it our fear died. Our anger and resolve hardened.

On 25 June, the culmination arrived. Across the country, thousands came out to protest. At around 5 p.m., Parliament passed the bill. When the news reached us in the streets, we charged toward Parliament, chants drowning out bullets and tear gas.

Kenyatta Avenue was renamed Rex Masai Avenue. The Governor’s office was set ablaze. The Supreme Court was not spared. The police water cannons ran dry. Tear gas and bullets ran low. Many patriots were killed across the country, while others were rushed to hospitals with serious gunshot wounds. In the city center, we carried our dead as we surged forward toward Parliament.

That evening, the military moved in. Helicopters hovered overhead. Soldiers patrolled the streets. The same state that claimed to serve us turned its guns on us. Inside Parliament, someone asked me, “Bro, what’s next?” My fear crystallized. That question exposed the central weakness of our uprising. We had spontaneously mobilized to confront unjust power, but we were not organized to sustain the protests, seize power and rebuild.

As momentum declined, the Raila Odinga-led opposition joined hands with the regime, claiming to save the nation from anarchy. In truth, the political class feared power emerging outside their control. Abductions, torture, and murders swiftly followed as fear spread. Several protest leaders crossed over to work with the regime.

At the center of our movement was the question of strategy: was Kenya still a neocolonial formation requiring a broad anti-imperialist alliance, or had the uprising transcended that stage? For some, assemblies were intended not as discussion forums but as embryonic structures of popular power capable of coordinating revolutionary action. Others, out of opportunism or wary after decades of political betrayal, emphasized spontaneity over disciplined central coordination.

In the vacuum that followed, the National People’s Council emerged. It bore the imprint of NGO logic. It lacked a revolutionary reading of the state. Its structures and analysis were alien to grassroots militants. It did not survive past its first national youth convention.

Since the retreat from the streets, a new narrative has been carefully constructed by the state, the media, and sections of civil society. The uprising is no longer spoken of as a class revolt against austerity and neo-colonial plunder, but as a “Gen Z problem.” The youth are recast as reckless, sentimental, entitled, politically immature children and sometimes drug addicts who want to destroy the nation. State violence is then justified as the restoration of order against supposed anarchy.

By isolating the uprising as generational rather than a demographic expression of class contradictions felt across society, the state seeks to sever it from the broader struggles of the majority of oppressed poor people.

Our task is to reject this fragmentation. We must neither be isolated from the broader struggles of our people, nor should we imagine ourselves as a substitute for the masses. The task of liberating our mother land is a collective one, and the future and success of our struggle depends on organization, discipline, and solidarity with all oppressed people around the world.

The fight is not over. The silence is not peace. It is the calm before the storm.

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Kenya is not in crisis, Kenya is the crisis — Nicholas Mwangi

Kenya occupies a central place in the story of East Africa. This is a region celebrated as one of the cradles of humanity, and it is now the fastest-growing economic bloc on the continent. Since Kenya is positioned as the “bastion of pro-Western stability” and a “gateway” to the region, the country is routinely cited as a success story.2

Yet this growth has come alongside deepening inequality, rising debt, declining public services, and a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling class. This contradiction between GDP growth and mass suffering is not accidental. Austerity, debt servicing, and the privatization of life’s necessities are not policy mistakes.

This crisis did not begin with the 2024 Finance Bill. Nor is it merely about taxation. Kenya’s mass protests serve as a popular unmasking of the model of liberal democracy and market-led development in East Africa that have been hailed for decades but ultimately failed.

This is not just a Kenyan story. It is part of a continental crisis, a reckoning with the failures of post-colonial capitalism across Africa — from the anti-French rebellions in the Sahel to the strikes in South Africa, and the food protests in North Africa.

The formal colonization of Kenya began after the 1884–85 Berlin Conference. But foreign domination in Kenya was never uncontested. Resistance took many forms — from armed struggle to passive defiance — and unfolded in waves, reflecting both the resilience of Kenyan communities and the intensification of colonial repression.

By the early twentieth century, broader political and ideological currents began to influence the resistance movements in Kenya. The 1917 Russian Revolution and the formation of the Third International resonated deeply across the colonized world.3 The radicalization of the working class and peasantry in Kenya during the 1940s and 1950s set the stage for the Mau Mau uprising. Known formally as the Kenya Land and Freedom Army (KLFA), the Mau Mau under the leadership of Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi emerged as a powerful articulation of the structural violence that defined colonial capitalism.4

Despite its military defeat, the Mau Mau uprising shattered the myth of colonial invincibility, exposed the brutality of the British Empire to the world, and radicalized a generation of activists and political organizers. It also forced the British to accelerate constitutional reforms, leading to the eventual independence of Kenya in 1963.

If colonialism was outright theft, then neo-colonialism is professional theft. Kenya, like many newly independent African states, emerged from colonial rule with the promise of political and economic sovereignty. But the government soon introduced Sessional Paper No. 10, “African Socialism and its Application to Planning in Kenya” — a masterstroke of ideological misdirection. In fact, it was a capitalist blueprint, drafted with the full backing of the United States and the United Kingdom.

The post-colonial state, led by Jomo Kenyatta, inherited not only the administrative apparatus of the British colonial state but also its class logic. A new elite — composed of Kenyatta’s close political allies and beneficiaries of land patronage — entrenched themselves as custodians of imperial interests. Oginga Odinga, in his seminal work Not Yet Uhuru, warned:

The stage following on independence is the most dangerous. This is the point after which many national revolutions in Africa have suffered a setback...Internal elements of exploitation are closely related to reactionary external pressures.5

At the center of this betrayal stood the unresolved land question. When Kenya’s elite seized the opportunity to accumulate land for themselves, they reproduced old patterns of dispossession with Black hands. Figures such as Pio Gama Pinto, Bildad Kaggia, and Oginga Odinga who pushed for socialist transformation were sidelined, repressed, or eliminated.

In 2022, William Ruto was elected president on a populist platform dubbed the “Bottom-Up Economic Transformation Agenda.” He promised to prioritize the informal sector, empower small traders, and reverse the elitist trickle-down economics of previous regimes. Yet these promises quickly unraveled. The 2024 Finance Bill proposed new taxes on essential commodities and services, including a proposed 16% VAT on financial transactions and basic goods.

In the shadow of this bill were stark inequalities highlighted in a 2022 Oxfam report: just 0.1% of Kenyans own more wealth than the remaining 99.9%. Nearly 3 million people fall into poverty each year due to illness. On top of that, “Kenya is losing $1.1bn a year to tax exemptions and incentives — almost twice what the government spends on its entire health budget.”6

The 2024 protests challenged not just a piece of legislation, but an entire economic model. The rejection of mainstream parties was a reaction to their role as vehicles of elite self-enrichment rather than mass emancipation. The movement’s “leaderless” form also reflected a deep mistrust of traditional leadership structures, including both political and religious elites, who have consistently failed to deliver material change and are increasingly seen as complicit in elite capture.

We have traced the long organizing and factors that gave rise to the uprising, however, spontaneity is not strategy, and if this uprising is to evolve from revolt to revolution, it must be grounded in long-term political organization. As the euphoria of the protests fades, the risk of demobilization and co-option remains. There must be deliberate building of grassroots structures — people’s assemblies, co-operatives, and social justice centers and networks that not only contest state power but also begin to construct alternatives from below.

As Frantz Fanon reminded us, “Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it.”7 This generation of Kenyan youth, born in the shadow of structural adjustment, austerity, and unfulfilled promises, is now stepping into its mission.

Mass Mobilization in the Age of Hyperimperialism — Mamka Anyona

Everywhere we see signs of a return to large scale conflict. The multilateral instruments and “soft diplomacy” that, since World War II, served as the veil for a “rules-based order” are being dismantled. The United States has launched attacks on USAID, the UN, Venezuela, Iran, and Cuba, while Europe is moving to the right and diverting social funding towards militarization.

On the continent, imperialist-funded conflict is escalating. The Sudan crisis is causing severe devastation in the Horn of Africa. Increasing instability in the Democratic Republic of the Congo threatens to spill over into a regional war. The Sahel, recently wrested from the control of imperial powers, continues to grapple with Islamist insurgents, while South Africa is experiencing a resurgent separatist movement.

This hypermilitarized world — a symptom of “hyperimperialism” — forms the backdrop against which Kenya’s young have been organizing and mobilizing against a government that is strangling their future in its cradle.

Most analysis of the uprising in June 2024, since labeled the “Gen Z protests,” has focused on the internal conditions. It is necessary for us to also understand these protests in the context of the dying kicks of a global order and unpack the dialectic between the objective conditions that situate the epicenter of growing global unrest in Africa, and the sophisticated instruments of repression that are themselves a product of the age.

Hyperimperialism is the result of a shift in hegemony. In this instance, hyperimperialism is being experienced as a stage in the decline of US global dominance.

Hyperimperialism follows the depletion of productive forces at the imperial core, and this has a blowback effect on countries at the periphery. While China and the Asian Tigers have positioned themselves in past decades to inherit industrial production, and the sub-imperial powers of the Gulf are making bank from the petrodollar, countries in Africa have struggled to build secure economic bases. Constrained by policies that aim to keep Africa as a source of raw materials, the continent has been unable to build a productive base.

Africa produces what it does not consume and consumes what it does not produce. Without industrial capacity, Africa is structurally incapable of absorbing her growing population of the unemployed, a category predominated by the young, into a labor force. As the population expands — and this remains the only continent where the fertility rate remains above replacement level — significant masses of young people will come of age in a world that has no place for them.

The unemployed on the continent are a different, far more hopeless category, than the “reserve army of labor” described by Karl Marx. They have been described by José Nun as “absolute surplus population,” but even more accurately, by Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, as “surplus humanity.”

The African continent is, arguably, the home of surplus humanity.

Capitalism would prefer that these young people not exist at all. And Africa’s young know it. They can feel that they are disposable. They see it every day in the manner that their government treats them. They see it in the stark divide between what they are given and what is taken away from them.

The Finance Bill 2024 itself was a product of hyperimperialism. In response to the protests, young Kenyans were met with the other side of hyperimperialism — a disproportionately violent, bloody and intense campaign of repression.

We must recognize that our ability to organize domestically has been significantly diminished. Beyond the heavy state infiltration and NGO-ification of Kenya’s resistance, labor organizing is also severely constrained. As in many nations, union concentration has diminished significantly. Trade unions, which once formed the backbone of organized resistance and which were a significant force during the independence struggle, have since been broken. Organizing resistance in Kenya must be understood as a fraught concept in the age of hyperimperialism. The nation-state which constituted the power which could change the lot of the lives of Kenyans has been supplanted by multinational corporations and finance capital. The anonymity that the analog era afforded our forefathers who resisted in underground formations is impossible in the age of hypersurveillance and state partnerships with companies such as Palantir.

A renewed commitment to an active Internationalism carries the potential to form the cornerstone of the next phase of resistance. Resistance today must span nations to be effective; it must capture entire regional formations where capital’s interests converge and seek to disrupt them there.

Africa’s surplus humanity must become the motive force for transcending late-stage capitalism. As the “developed” world fights for the crumbs left over by its exploitation of the planet, we use their age of confusion to leapfrog ourselves and humanity into a new era. Africa must be the vanguard for a new global reality.

A luta continua.

"The fact that a billionaire real estate playboy who liked to slap his name on steaks and wine has proven to be a better diplomat and military strategist than every other politician and foreign policy expert over the last 30 years is such a damning indictment of the DC establishment I honestly don’t know how they recover.” — William Wolfe, 2026, on the day the United States and Israel attacked Iran.

“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.” — Hannah Arendt, 1970

“International law is fake and gay.” — Matt Walsh, 2026

There is a story I like to tell, from Brazil, that I believe reveals something about contemporary right-wing populism. In 2018, soon after Jair Bolsonaro’s surprise presidential victory, the extreme-right former army captain announced that he would abolish the Ministry of the Environment. You see, his presidential campaign had made the assertion — and I think that he really believed this — that the Amazon rainforest held untold, untapped resources made inaccessible by powerful, politically correct, communist environmentalists and scientists. If you just got rid of the bothersome bureaucrats, you could waltz into the jungle and return with a big pot of gold. But what happened, very quickly, is that Brazilian agribusiness leaders told him that they quite liked the setup they had. They were already exploiting the Amazon. Destroying the Ministério do Meio-Ambiente, they said, would actually be very bad for the national bourgeoisie. Simply torching the mediating structures between capitalists, the state, and global markets would hurt them more than it would help. So everyone stuck to torching trees, and the Ministry remained.

There were many ways Bolsonaro could wage war on the forest and indigenous people, and grant privileges to his supporters on the lawless frontier; that is another, deadly story. But none of those wanton attacks translated into major boosts for national GDP. To actually make money from things like beef and soybeans requires participation in complex international systems. There was no big red button labeled EXTRACTION, guarded by a couple of woke treehuggers, that you could just push to generate billions.

As we now know, Bolsonaro was quite bad for the Brazilian economy. Most famously, he lost the support of many elites by mismanaging the country during the pandemic. If he had been good for growth, I think he probably would have succeeded at the abolition of democracy which had been his political project for decades; one of his coup attempts likely would have been a success.

In 1970, Hannah Arendt published On Violence. We can set aside the context of the essay and my quibbles to focus on a powerful single point. The threat of violence might lurk behind power. But, she writes, the appearance of violence is evidence of the absence of power. Power is incomplete, or being contested, when violence is visible. Conversely, unlimited violence annihilates power.

An extreme example might suffice. If a prison warden has total control over his prisoners, they will be sitting calmly in their cells, as he wants, or making license plates. A fight between prisoners, or a riot, or an attempt at escape, is obviously something he has no interest in seeing. He will employ violence, of course, in these moments, to restore order and establish the threat that more will be employed in the future. But total power would never have required it. And if he kills every single prisoner in retribution, there is no one left to make license plates.

As the United States continued to kill millions of people in Vietnam, year after year, this was obviously evidence of a lack of U.S. power in Southeast Asia. The bombs kept dropping because the Vietnamese refused to lose; what Washington would have preferred is that in 1956 or so the whole country become reliably anticommunist and allied with the United States. What happened instead is that Vietnam won the war.

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In October 2025, I wrote here that we should see “regime collapse” as a hidden or second-order goal for a lot of United States operations. Whether or not they dream or pretend to dream of a democratic, flourishing Libya or Lebanon or Cuba, successive administrations have shown themselves to be very happy to accept the simple and total destruction of “enemy” societies.

After the surprise January attack on Venezuela and arrest of Nicolás Maduro, Jeremy Shapiro coined the term “regime alteration” to describe what Trump actually pulled off. They got rid of the guy at the top and now have a more pliant partner in power, at least according to the story that MAGA tells itself.

But what is hard to remember now, just a few months later, is that Donald Trump’s government was emboldened by the apparent success in Caracas. They didn’t just turn their sights on Iran. They began to starve Cuba. Remember when the United States threatened to invade NATO and conquer Greenland? That was earlier this year. At Davos, they launched the cronyist “Board of Peace” in an attempt to sideline the United Nations.

At the end of January, I tried to coin the term autogolpe imperial or “imperial self-coup” for this top-down offensive—to describe the interrelated attacks launched by the hegemon on the very system it shaped. (I can keep citing myself, this is just a blog.) The analogy is to a “self-coup” at the national level, in which the sitting executive smashes the mediating structure of his own state to seize more power.1 Trump and MAGA, at the beginning of 2026, were acting in this manner at the international level. They clearly believed they could wring more power and treasure out of the world system by running around and killing people and threatening everyone.

Then the United States and Israel attacked Iran. The entire operation, but especially the behavior of Pete Hegseth, revealed a bizarre misunderstanding of global affairs. The United States Secretary of War started shouting that we were going to commit atrocities and crimes against humanity, and that is why we were going to win. This alarmed even the most ardent supporters of U.S. empire. The parallels with Bolsonaro are obvious. These guys thought there was a giant red button marked VIOLENCE being guarded by a couple of queer studies professors, and all you have to do is smash it to subjugate countries at will. As if no one had tried that before.2 As if the Islamic Republic had never contemplated an attack from Washington.

In a mob movie, Pete Hegseth would be the young hothead who runs around town roughing up small-business owners and killing people who don’t even get in his way. The wise old mafia boss has to pull him aside and say, “What the hell are you doing? We already had a good thing going here. This is hurting business. We need to be feared, but also respected.” At some point, the hothead probably gets himself killed.

The point of this blog is to issue an update: Obviously, Donald Trump failed. The attempted world-systemic self-coup of the first half of 2026 did not work. Iran stopped it. It is too early to say if the war is really over, or if Iran “won” exactly, but it is obvious that Donald Trump did not succeed. He will not get regime change, regime collapse, or any kind of alteration favorable for Washington. But he did not just fail in Iran – can anyone argue that the United States is more powerful in Europe, or Asia, than it was on January 1st? Even in Latin America, the best MAGA can offer is a question mark.

That makes two failed coup attempts for Trump. Let’s set aside the question of whether January 6 was a coup attempt — you don’t get to become the new government just because you occupy the buildings, of course, just ask the Nepalis. But Trump clearly tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election. In characteristic fashion, he did not really know or care how to do it effectively; he just sort of lazily asked the military, Congress, and the courts to do it for him (in Latin America, where there are more words for these things, that would be golpe militar, golpe parlamentar, and golpe judicial, respectively). A Guatemalan told me, back then, that she would call Trump a failed autogolpista. For all we know, Trump may be remembered primarily for these two failed (self-) coup attempts, five years apart: 2021 and 2026.

What is amazing is that people really thought this would work. Matt Walsh, conservative commentator, wrote: “The only international law is that big and powerful countries get to do what they want.” OK, right, who wrote those international laws? The biggest and most powerful countries after World War II, the United States most prominent among them. This setup has served Walsh’s country pretty well. The United States finished the century as the most powerful country in the history of humanity. The current system was profoundly shaped by U.S. power, and Washington often broke the rules when needed. In my view, international law is more than just a crude expression of realpolitik; it limits and it also generates. But these guys seem to think that the rules only serve to constrain the United States. Therefore, the thinking goes, if you just go out there and do the exact opposite of what international law says, you get to be king of the planet.

Finally, it is sadly true that the failure of a coup attempt does not mean that it has no consequences. Iranians are dead. Cuba is still under siege. The world has been shaken. If Bolsonaro had not intentionally starved his own government of resources in the Amazon, I believe my friend Dom Phillips would still be alive today.

Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff (2026). London: Allen Lane.

In 1998, United States President Bill Clinton arrived in Cape Town, South Africa, for an important stop on his tour of African capitals. As usual, he was championing free trade and open markets. This was the era of so-called globalization, in which Western elites believed that economic integration would go hand in hand with political convergence; China and Russia were going to become more liberal, and democratic countries in the Global South would become richer through commerce with the rich world. Clinton had also made it clear that he believed that the fall of Apartheid was a product of the same forces of freedom and democracy that had putatively destroyed the Soviet Union. But on this visit, Nelson Mandela was not in the mood to indulge Clinton’s historical revisionism.

Mandela explained that his decision to extend invitations to Cuban President Fidel Castro, Libyan Brotherly Leader Muammar Gaddafi, and Iranian President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was made “because moral authority dictates that we should not abandon those who helped us in the darkest hour.” Mandela expressed the same intransigence in relation to Washington’s plans for a new trade policy for the continent. He said that the provision of the proposed African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), which tied participation to United States foreign policy objectives, “is something we find totally unacceptable.”

How things have changed. In 2025, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa led a delegation of government officials, business leaders and professional golfers to Washington to try to salvage the AGOA, now imperiled by Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” assault on the global economic system his predecessors created. In the 1990s, even the United States (which had been a staunch ally of Apartheid South Africa and helped to put Mandela in prison) celebrated the new African National Congress (ANC) government in South Africa. This time around, Ramaphosa met with a president convinced of the “white genocide” conspiracy theory—the lie that we are carrying out land seizures and the massacre of white farmers—partly because of the influence of his patron and “first buddy” Elon Musk.

That famous billionaire, born in South Africa in 1971, remained silent throughout the meeting in the Oval Office, while his satellite internet service, Starlink, took center stage. Johann Rupert – Africa’s richest man – appealed to Musk to provide satellite service and drones to the South African authorities. Last year, the governing coalition moved to kill a rule mandating that communications infrastructure must be at least 30 percent owned by people from historically disadvantaged groups. Obviously, this was a way of placating Musk, who has staunchly criticized South Africa’s affirmative action policies. Starlink’s entry into South Africa would further expand the company’s footprint on the continent, where it already operates in 27 countries.

As in many countries across the Global South, South African state capacity has been undermined and weakened in the last few decades. The promise of satellites vaulting over the terrestrial infrastructure required to provide high-speed internet in a country where only 1.6% of rural households have access to broadband proved irresistible.

The episode is illustrative of one of the core features of “Muskism” identified by Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff in their pithy and tightly-argued new book. Muskism, in an era of waning public investment, economic stagnation and geopolitical fracture, offers “sovereignty-as-a-service.” Companies like SpaceX allow the state to actually function, for a fee. Musk, the authors explain, took the microeconomics of internet platforms and scaled up to the level of governments. With the “lock-in” strategy, Musk and the rest of the PayPal mafia perfected the art of making customers dependent on platforms. Now, the authors argue, Muskism makes the state dependent on private firms.

The authors define this new version of sovereignty as “access to bandwidth, compute power, launch cadence, and orbital real estate” rather than just control over borders and bureaucracy. Crucially, Slobodian and Tarnoff show that Musk operates as much by binding the state to his platforms as by benefiting from public subsidies. SpaceX secured early contracts from DARPA and the Air Force, and subsequently NASA. Tesla wouldn’t be with us today if it wasn’t for a $465 million low-interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2009 to bring it through a near-death experience. Practically all of Musk’s companies have appropriated technology paid for by US taxpayers, in addition to the subsidies and regulatory advantages provided to his firms. Musk is no libertarian. His goal is not to eliminate the state but to vassalize it.

Muskism, the authors suggest, offers a shorthand for capitalism in the twenty-first century, just as Fordism had for the twentieth. Like “Fordism,” it is characterized by vertical integration and mass production. However, while Fordism combines mass consumption and mass production to promise rising living standards for all, Muskism makes no such commitments.

Slobodian and Tarnoff’s focus on Apartheid South Africa in order to locate the origins of Muskism. Musk’s inescapable presence in anglophone discourse has led countless commentators to fixate on his childhood. Elsewhere, I have criticized a tendency to caricature South Africa’s past and argued that the global emergence of its prominent engineers has a different origin story. Perhaps more pressing than quibbles over the role South Africa played in producing Muskism, however, is the question of what Muskism means for South Africa and the rest of the Global South today. Understandably, Muskism, a short book, focuses on Elon’s symbiosis with the United States government. But what does his business model mean for all of the much weaker states in the world system?

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The promise of some version of Fordism in the Third World was core to Washington’s hegemonic project during the Cold War. The concept of “development” in the postwar period was often synonymous with industrialization, in which a gleaming national automotive industry was the paradigmatic sign of success. For a small number of strategic US client states, like South Korea and Taiwan, industrialization and economic upgrading actually worked. But from the 1980s on, the vast majority of countries still stuck in the Global South were encouraged to specialize in goods and services in which they had a “competitive advantage.” African and Latin American states, reeling from debt crises and structural adjustment programs, were re-integrated into the global economy primarily as exporters of raw materials. Brazil’s automotive industry served as the site of struggles that led to the creation of Lula’s Workers’ Party in 1980. Since then, the country has shifted away from manufacturing, and now sends soybeans and minerals abroad — primarily to China.

African countries, with the encouragement of the international development community, focused on expanding fintech and telecommunications sectors which could grow on top of relatively thin infrastructure. The growth of mobile telecommunications networks is emblematic of this model. In the 1990s and 2000s, much of Africa had very low fixed-line telephone penetration. Rolling out mobile networks presented the opportunity to leapfrog landline infrastructure and scale telecommunications systems rapidly and cheaply. On a continent where traditional banking coverage is weak, mobile phones, in turn, offered alternative financial architecture.1

The contrast with the earlier Fordist model of development could not be starker. The latter was based on the dream of full employment; the fintech model promises development for economies without formal employment. Value is created through redistributive grants, pensions, and credit products aimed at those in the informal economy. This is, in the words of historian Keith Breckenridge, “a world without work, where financial institutions dominate the production of value.” Many countries have seen sovereignty degraded in the neoliberal period, now struggling to deliver basic services to their populations. This makes them vulnerable to firms that can offer a short-term fix. The question is whether or not the dependence will be on Muskism, and how long it will last.

The authors argue that Muskism is fundamentally attuned to a deglobalizing word, positioning itself as a successor to the free-trade, integrated global order of the late twentieth century. This is what supposedly distinguishes Musk’s companies from the traditional Silicon Valley firms which embraced offshoring and outsourcing in the 1990s and 2000s. Tesla’s Gigafactories are characterized as enclaves of “self-reliance,” internalizing production and securing supply chains against the instabilities of a fracturing world. Slobodian and Tarnoff frame Tesla’s Gigafactory in China as a pragmatic choice to participate in national projects of competing superpowers simultaneously. By selling resilience to all sides, Musk ensures his own success regardless of which superpower gains the upper hand in the fracturing global order.

Slobodian employed the intellectual-historical approach to potent effect in his studies of neoliberalism, and Tarnoff has written very insightfully about the past and future of the internet. In this book, they scrupulously reconstruct Musk’s worldview and business philosophy. Sometimes, this means we learn more about his own conception of the world than his objective role in shaping it. It is possible to see Tesla’s entry into China as a sweetheart deal won through Elon’s personal charm; Patrick McGee has shown, in contrast, that it was the result of a calculated strategic shift in Beijing. The People’s Republic of China decided to apply to Tesla a model successfully developed in collaboration with Apple.

Musk would be the first foreign automaker permitted to operate in China without a local partner, but he would work intimately with third-party vendors, engaging in skill-sharing that would allow local firms to provide components to Chinese brands like BYD. While Tesla has received billions of dollars in cheap loans, subsidies, and tax breaks from the Chinese government, it has, like Apple, become highly dependent on its Shanghai factory. Moreover, Chinese suppliers are crucial to the company’s global operations.

From this vantage point, Musk himself still looks dependent on the system of global trade built in an earlier era. Slobodian and Tarnoff provide an excellent guide to Musk’s ideology and his business practices, but it remains unclear whether we are dealing with a new regime of accumulation for a deglobalizing world, or a particularly noisy and parasitic individual oligarch whose power nevertheless necessitates the “guide for the perplexed” that the book provides.

Nations across the world are indeed dependent on US technology firms: For many countries, the public sphere essentially exists on Meta servers, and basic communications services are provided by WhatsApp. Google still organizes user access to the rest of the internet, even if it is now just via AI summaries.

In Africa, both US and Chinese firms have invested in internet infrastructure, with global tech giants attracted to the substantial growth potential in cloud computing, streaming, AI services, e-commerce, and digital advertising on a continent where internet penetration is still low.

This is where Starlink comes in. Musk’s foray into Africa is largely continuous with the infrastructure-lite model of development which has dominated the political economy of the continent since the end of the Cold War.

Notwithstanding its broader developmental impact, the advent of mobile telephony helped reduce inequalities in access to communication. In his study of Starlink’s operations in Cameroon, sociologist Georges Eyenga has cast doubts on whether Starlink will have the same equalizing effect.2 As telecommunications experts have long emphasized, satellite internet is expensive, environmentally damaging, and increasingly congested, and should be reserved for the most isolated rural communities.

Major US firms seem to agree. Google, Amazon, and Meta are investing heavily in terrestrial, overland internet infrastructure across Africa. Like Musk, the goal of these tech giants is lock-in. The key difference is that Starlink locks Africans into a far less reliable infrastructure. The danger is that Musk achieves what he did in the United States: convincing amenable policymakers to abandon prioritizing funding fiber and redirect billions of dollars’ worth of state funds to Starlink. The fact that Starlink infrastructure is largely extraterrestrial also reduces states’ leverage over the platform. Unlike a mine or a cable, it is very difficult for most states to seize and nationalize a satellite.

As Evgeny Morozov has argued, the power of today’s platform companies resembles that of conglomerates like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) Corporation during the Cold War. Like ITT, they depend heavily on US power. They also accumulate enormous political leverage while presenting themselves as neutral innovators. While African leaders have been vocal about maintaining “digital sovereignty,” they have so far steered clear of leveraging control over strategic minerals and infrastructure to mount a more radical challenge to the power of tech platforms on the continent.

African states and populations should not be underestimated, however. Tensions between platform monopolies and the state’s regulatory activities have been a feature of the continent’s politics for much of the twenty-first century.3 Several African states have declared Starlink a threat to their digital sovereignty: Namibia, Côte d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cameroon, and South Africa have all either issued formal bans or demanded regularization. Having honed his skills in bitter battles with traditional banks, credit card companies, and government regulators in the 2000s, Musk is a master of regulatory arbitrage. He will no doubt leverage Starlink’s ability to cross borders via satellite and function before formal agreements are reached to muscle his way into recalcitrant markets.

Core to the North Atlantic free-trade philosophy was a techno-optimism that believed in replacing conditional aid with tech investments. These would deliver development and poverty alleviation in Africa by “closing the digital divide.” A 2010 speech by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the wife of former President Bill Clinton, encapsulates this vision: “A connection to global information networks is like an on-ramp to modernity.” She explained she had “seen this first hand…in sub-Saharan Africa.” We are not sure if modernity is the right word.

Even before the war started, it was easy to get thrown in a Bahraini prison for saying the wrong thing. In this small nation in the middle of the Persian Gulf, you could be arrested for contradicting the Quran, blowing the whistle on corporate malfeasance, or accusing the government of corruption. On January 8, Ebrahim Sharif, the former leader of the leftist Wa’ad party who was imprisoned after supporting the revolt against our monarchy in 2011, was sent back to jail: this time, he was sentenced to prison after saying that Arab states were not doing enough to support Palestinians.

Of course the vast majority of Bahrainis, like the vast majority of people in this region, support the cause of Palestinian liberation. Sharif’s convictions underline the deep contradictions at the heart of this little archipelago — home to the “Fifth Fleet,” a major United States military asset in the region, and an ally of Washington — Bahrain is governed by a Sunni ruling family with close ties to Saudi Arabia that systematically disenfranchises and represses the majority of its citizens. Quickly forgotten by Western liberals who praised the democratizing power of the “Arab Spring,” the country was home to an especially perverse and tragic chapter that revealed the true nature of power in the region. At the beginning of 2026, Sharif was put back in jail for saying something that almost everybody thinks.

Then, on February 28, the United States and Israel attacked Iran. This was deeply unsettling here, and not just because the Islamic Republic retaliated by striking the US Navy base near the capital, Manama. For hundreds of years, Bahrain’s royal family has viewed the native Shia majority with deep suspicion; since 1979, alleged sympathies for the Islamic Republic have been used to justify a crackdown on any dissident, whether Iran has anything to do with the issue or not. Now Iran has been made into the issue – by Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu – and forced the government’s uneasy relationship with its own population into focus. Apparently, the population has failed to demonstrate the appropriate amount of sympathy for our putative allies, and the royals have responded with a deadly crackdown.

You may have seen a video of Iranian drones striking US assets in Bahrain in February, with nearby locals cheering on the attacks. After those clips went viral, the government started slapping weighty treason charges on everyday citizens, and the Public Prosecution is claiming that Bahrainis “conspired with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).” Locals have been arrested and tortured for social media posts.

There has not been, and there never will be, a reliable poll that asks Bahrainis the question: “Who do you want to win this war?” But our belief, based on the type of investigation that is possible, is that if forced to choose a majority of citizens would prefer that Iran “win” this conflict, over Israel and the United States. At the very least, it is easy to find people from all walks of life who say so. This is despite the fact that the IRGC is attacking Bahraini military assets and civilian infrastructure. One would expect the disenfranchised Shia majority to be especially disgusted with the attack on Iran, whether they “support” the Islamic Republic or not.1 But even members of the relatively privileged Sunni minority, more likely to support the government, have a hard time mustering any sympathy for Trump or Netanyahu.

“Without a doubt, I, and most Sunnis, would rather see the Iranians win,” said Abdulrahman, a 26-year-old Bahraini working in the local hospitality sector, who like every Bahraini in this article asked that real names not be used. “Sunnis are overwhelmingly on Iran’s side. I can say that even while they’re bombing us. Only utter loyalists on the fringes will pick America,” he said, quickly adding that he had no love for Iran’s system. “Also, why would anyone root for Israel to win anything?”

In this context, the royal family is prosecuting citizens for displays of sympathy for a close neighbor that has been attacked without provocation. Criticism of the US and Israel is now prohibited in the public sphere. Since the beginning of the war, the monarchy has imposed a media blackout and banned the sharing of images of explosions and their aftermath.

Ebrahim Sharif has spoken openly about his experiences in 2011, and his time in prison. In jail, he was tortured and forced to kiss the portrait of the kings of Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.2 But he was not able to comment for this story. We, the two authors, are also using pseudonyms. One woman and one man, one Shia and one Sunni, we are afraid of how we might be punished for saying things that everyone knows.

This war began during Ramadan, which made everything especially surreal. Daily rhythms were already disjointed by the fast, when both fear and uncertainty were added to the mix. Each morning and night were punctuated with air raid sirens, the loud booms of intercepted drones and missiles, and shockwaves from the occasional hit.

Your level of panic would depend on both your background and your location in the country. Shia are more used to conflict here, in general; but those living in the Sunni stronghold of Riffa were shaken by a large number of explosions, because interceptors were launched from Isa Air Base. Residents of Juffair, home to the all-important Fifth Fleet, are generally foreigners. Many “expats,” especially those from the West, quickly left the country.

On the first day of the conflict, things felt almost too normal. A few of us didn’t believe it was really going to happen. Some people went to work before the strikes here began (around 11:48am) and the government suspended all schools and instructed its employees to work from home. They set up an emergency warning system, which made everyone’s phones blast “doot! doot! doot!” It wasn’t long before we learned to turn these off, so that we could sleep.

Black humor began to abound in personal conversations, but online, discussions were stifled by the media blackout. Many people shared generic statements like, “May God protect this nation,” an obvious performance to pre-empt any suspicions of sympathizing with Iran. It was clear we had to prove that we are not secret traitors. Some citizens started adding their names to lists pledging allegiance to the King. On official media, the government began to repeat the statement: “If you are neutral, you are siding with the enemy.”

On March 9, homes on Sitra Island were damaged, and dozens were wounded by what state media claimed was an Iranian drone strike. A rare retraction was issued on March 21, however, when the government admitted that the explosion was in fact caused by a misfired Patriot missile. A source in the Bahrain Defence Force (BDF) has claimed that the March 5 attack on Bapco, the national oil company, did not originate from Iran, and that this fact is known by authorities. The speculation is that it was Israel, but there is no way for us to know.

In March, the government began arresting people, and publicly shaming others for posting videos of attack sites. Full names and photos of alleged offenders went up on the Ministry of the Interior’s website and social media. On March 19 Mohamed al-Mosawi, 32, went out with his friends, was arrested at a random checkpoint and later died in police custody.

Whether or not they have posted anything online, Shia fear 2011-style reprisals: mass firings, targeted harassment campaigns and general discrimination. “I’m really worried about being fired from my job,” Noora, a teacher and Shia Muslim, said. “I worked so hard to get this position, studied for years at my personal expense and worked my way up the ranks. What if they suddenly decide to let go of the Shia in this school?”

Bahrain has a lot of malls, and a lot of freeways. If you ignored the population, it might look more like suburban Arizona than the version of the “Arab” world you see in Hollywood movies. Until the April 8 ceasefire, people tried to live their normal lives as much as possible, preferring to stay close to home. Air raid warnings would advise “citizens and residents” to stay clear of roads. Even with Bahrain’s reliance on imports for most basic commodities, the shelves have stayed mostly full at the grocery store, though prices are increasing.

But in a more profound sense, the situation is obviously precarious. The economy has been plunged into crisis. And a new wave of sectarian tension is on the rise – just the kind of thing the government has always cultivated in moments in which it feels threatened. No matter how this war ends, it will disrupt the fragile, cruel and stupid order imposed on the country after the uprising in 2011.

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In 1782 the Bani Utbah Sunni tribal confederation, led by the Al-Khalifa clan, invaded the islands now known as Bahrain. They quickly established dominance over the majority Shia archipelago. Khalifa rule was reinforced by the British in 1820, when they signed an agreement making Bahrain a protectorate.

That arrangement held for 150 years until 1971, when the British granted Bahrain formal independence. The State of Bahrain was born, and Isa bin Salman al-Khalifa ascended to the throne soon after. A new constitution, adopted in 1973, paved the way for elections to the National Assembly. This experiment in democracy was cut short, however, when Isa introduced a draconian State Security Law. The law was designed by Ian Henderson, the British head of Bahrain’s General Directorate for State Security and a veteran of the Mau Mau Crisis.3

At the time, Bahrain had a strong leftist movement, composed of Maoists and orthodox Communists. In response to the State Security Law, leftists and Islamists came together in the Assembly and refused to ratify the legislation. Isa suspended the Constitution and abolished the National Assembly. He passed the security law by decree, and ruled in the same way going forward.

The United States took over the military assets left by the British. More generally, the power of the local monarchy was buttressed by Washington’s support for Saudi Arabia. In 1995, the Pentagon chose to resurrect the “Fifth Fleet” on Bahraini territory.

In 1999, Isa died, and the succession of his son, Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa, seemed to offer a path to conciliation with the population. He pardoned political prisoners, allowing opposition leaders to return from exile, and abolished the hated security law. His reform package came together in the National Action Charter, which passed by referendum in 2001 with massive popular support. The Charter proposed universal suffrage and an elected Council of Deputies. An absolute monarchy would transition to something more like a constitutional monarchy. But soon, Hamad watered down many of the Charter’s more expansive provisions, leaving the promise of the Charter unfulfilled.

These issues were compounded by a government policy of naturalization, whereby Sunnis Muslims from other countries were offered citizenship, so that the power of the native Shia would be gradually reduced. Immigrants from Pakistan, Jordan, Syria and Yemen receive generous benefits in exchange for staffing the lower ranks of the army and police.4 Shia are blocked from filling positions in the security services, as well as many other important (and lucrative) public sector jobs.

“The Al Khalifa have always felt that they were the rightful owners and dominators of the indigenous population,” said Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. “And of course, there has always been a sense of fear of Persian involvement…so the Al Khalifa always rely on having a divided opposition. They don’t want the Sunnis and Shia to be united against them.”

This systematic Shiaphobia and marginalization of the native population bred resentment, even as Bahrain cultivated its image as a stable financial hub for Western investors. In January 2011, the government of Tunisia fell, and protests exploded in Egypt. The wave of protests soon spread to Bahrain.

On Monday February 14, 2011, exactly a decade after the referendum for the National Action Charter, demonstrators flooded the streets, converging on the Pearl Roundabout in the capital. To the horror of the government, this was not just a “Shia” uprising. Sunni and secular leftists like Ebrahim Sharif were supporting the protests, and a clear majority appeared to be united against the government.

Police stormed the camp, killing protesters, until the local government relented. But negotiations faltered as the Khalifas refused to cede any real power. To break the stalemate, the King’s uncle and then-Prime Minister Khalifa bin Salman called Saudi Arabia for help.

And that was it. On March 14, the forces of the Gulf Cooperation Council marched over the bridge connecting Bahrain to Saudi Arabia. The crackdown was swift and brutal. Troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE killed dozens of people, and thousands of Bahrainis were arrested in night-time raids on Shia villages. Major Western powers accepted the brutality of their ally as a fait accompli, as they launched wars and regime change operations elsewhere. It was later reported that a deal was made: Saudi Arabia allegedly secured the acquiescence of the Obama administration in exchange for supporting US plans for intervention in Libya.5

The crackdown cast a long shadow on Bahraini society. Police were everywhere, and people were anxious. Citizens began to self-censor more strictly out of fear of being reported. Invisible sectarian divisions became more real. At the same time, the monarchy worked hard to rebuild its public image. In September 2020, Bahrain announced the normalization of ties with Israel as part of the Abraham Accords mediated by the first Trump administration. Discontent was widespread, but the arrest or exile of most opposition leaders and many more citizens made mass mobilization impossible. After October 7, 2023, local riots would erupt from time to time in protest of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, but were quickly contained by the security forces. This uneasy order held until Donald Trump attacked Iran.

Amid the tenuous ceasefire, the war on Bahrainis has intensified. It seems that Iran’s strikes have confirmed the ruling family’s worst fears. Security guarantees offered by the US or the UK cannot stop Tehran from attacking Bahrain at will, and a significant portion of the Bahraini population will somehow sympathize with Iran (even if they have to hide it in the face of ruthless oppression). Amidst endless proclamations that national unity is required, the government began to foment sectarianism and literally expel Shia citizens from the body politic.

On April 27, the King issued an extraordinary decree to revoke the citizenship of 69 Bahrainis for “sympathizing with hostile Iranian acts,” without due process. On April 28, the criminal court gave 5 people life sentences for espionage, while dozens more were given 5 to 10 years in prison for uploading videos of attacks. Bahraini influencer Sayed Baqer Al-Kamel was given ten years for posting an Instagram Reel mourning the death of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

The result is a climate of fear. Layla, a 30-year-old Shia pharmacist in Manama, says that her family “signed onto the pledge to get our names on the list and protect our reputation” despite their political sympathies with the opposition. “People need to be seen as loyal.” To pledge allegiance to the King, you can send a telegram, submit your name to a newspaper or a social media page, or pay to run an ad with your family’s name — and more and more people around us have felt the pressure to do so. The anxiety has even traveled beyond Bahrain’s borders. “My parents have repeatedly warned me against going to protests here,” said Maryam, a 33-year-old Bahraini doctor in the US. “They keep saying that they are tracking Bahrainis abroad too, but I don’t know if that is even true.”

Early in the morning on May 9, authorities arrested 41 of the country’s top Shia religious figures for allegedly “conspiring” with the IRGC, shocking the native majority. The Ministry of the Interior blamed one of the tenets of Shia Islamism, wilayat al faqih, for the alleged acts of terrorism.

If 2011 marked the beginning of a strange new era for the country, then 2026 is most likely its endpoint. What is unclear is what comes next, and if it is even stranger. Clearly, our future is beholden to both regional and global powers. It is they, after all, who helped ensure that this family still rules as a monarchy, nearly 250 years after they first arrived.

This month, local outlets began publishing stories about the outpouring of support for the monarchy. One headline, posted by Al Ayam, read: “His Majesty the King receives pledges of loyalty and support from a number of honorable Bahraini families and clans.” Next, they published a full list of everyone who signed the pledge, making it very easy to identify those who did not.

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1. I want to sincerely thank everyone who made a pledge in response to my long and rambling mission statement. We are still officially in “subscription drive” phase, but a number of generous people have put us well on the way to our goal. I read each comment that came in with the pledges, and they were really encouraging.
   
   At the same time, I apologize if you had problems using the “Subscribe” buttons to make a pledge. I got a few complaints of this type. You can use this link instead if you wish to offer support.

   
   For the moment, nothing has been officially launched. No one is paying for anything yet, and certainly not for this little email. As a result of the initial appeal, we have about 60-70% of what we need to begin. We thank you for your further consideration.
   
   

2. In the new London Review of Books, I have an article on the protest movement in Serbia. Who are “the students,” could they win, and: what would it mean if they actually do? It is in the paper’s classic “Diary” format.

   
   

3. Our friends at Marjin Kiri, in Indonesia, would like to announce that “If We Burn” is coming out in Bahasa Indonesia next month. Marjin Kiri is Indonesian for “Left Margin,” and their edition of Metode Jakarta has made a real impact. Back when they decided to translate it, we had no idea if the book would even be allowed in the country. The next cover:

   

4. Donald Trump has gone to war with Iran, and he is losing. Back in January I wrote that I wanted to conceive of the events of early 2026 as an attempt at an “autogolpe imperial” — the world’s hegemonic power was trying to replace the mediating structures of an effective imperialist system with more direct exploitation, in a manner analogous to a national leader carrying out a domestic “self-coup.” Autogolpe imperial would be Spanish or Portuguese imported by necessity into the English language. While a prime minister might try to abolish parliament and bring the judiciary or police under the direct control of the executive, the President of the United States was setting up a loyalist “Board of Peace” to bypass the United Nations, and replacing a complex system of indirect threats and secret coercion with spectacular invasions and the proud extortion of allies.

   
   I said that an “autogolpe” attempt can be opportunistic, or it can be the result of desperation: a last, reckless attempt to hold on to power that is slipping away.
   
   I still think this is what is happening, and I think it is not working.
   
   Thanks again,

   Vincent
   

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Dear subscribers and sympathetic readers,

After five months of experimentation, we have decided we should go forward with a version of North South Notes that regularly publishes serious writing. The response has been very encouraging. We want to continue to pay contributors around the world, and pay them well; I want to keep using this platform to write about global developments.

To do this, we need to raise the funds. If I can garner the sufficient amount of “pledges,” I will activate paid subscriptions and go forward, and we will found a magazine together. If it turns out there is not enough support, that’s fine. If it can’t be done, I will step away from Substack. But I think it can be done.

Let’s get this over with

I will write a lot more, below, on our thinking and planning for this publication. But if you are already on board, you don’t even need to read it. The point of this post is to get people to pledge a small amount of money, and launch a publication. If 5% of the current subscribers decide to pledge five dollars per month, we will have everything we need for now. If a few generous people become “Founders” — I will send them signed books to say thank you — we will be on our way very quickly.

That is: I reckon that if we got a pledge from everyone that can easily spare the money and has a genuine interest in founding this publication, we would be done. I will launch North South Notes, start discussing ideas with the subscribers, and we can avoid the tricks and strategic use of paywalls customarily employed to produce revenue here.

If that describes you then please, offer a pledge, and we can get this over with.

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Edit: if you have a problem offering a pledge with the Subscribe buttons, use this link instead.

But if you do not have the resources, or you are not sure the project has value, do not pledge. A free subscription is deeply appreciated; you could also send this publication to someone who might be interested in subscribing and supporting. The idea is to use my platform here to re-direct some funds to writers around the world, not to suck money out of the periphery.

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The plan and the promise

The most prominent format for a Substack newsletter — and there is nothing wrong with this — is that an established writer uses this platform to post their takes on the news. They read a bit of the internet and write their thoughts about that internet back onto the internet. I would not ask you to fund that.

The proposition here is different. We will use this platform to create a little global affairs magazine. We pay people around the world to do real, original work and contribute meaningfully to human knowledge. In a small way, of course.

At first, at least, we will privilege quality over quantity. In the ideal month a contributor from say, Mongolia or Chile will write a report from their country, and I will also write something. The next month, it might be an essay from Albania and a book review. The focus of the magazine will be the capitalist world system. So — we could write about almost anything; but the guiding theoretical approach presumes that there is a world system. It can be changed, and it is already changing. Pieces may go deep into the details of a given nation or city or individual, but there will usually be some attempt to relate those details to the global context. There is no geographic focus and we do not privilege the “South” over the “North” or vice-versa, but we do believe that North / South is a relevant distinction. We send you notes from each.

In the ideal year, a subscriber will have read a number of reports from around the world, and about as many from me. Or, you can skip everything that doesn’t interest you, and still know you have supported their publication. Each contribution will seek to be truly original, but also allow the casual reader to catch up on events in that part of the world for the year.

Our imagined audience is someone who is interested to learn about, say, union organizing in Korea or protests in Morocco, but is not likely to read about those countries on a regular basis. We seek to publish serious, edited, and accurate writing that stands the test of time. The three international contributions so far — from an Indonesian journalist, a Romanian academic, and a Mexican art critic — are just as relevant now as the day they were published. I hope North South Notes can be cited in books and peer-reviewed journals, and that interviews and reviews can contribute something to political and literary culture. In addition to the three contributors we have had so far, four editors contributed fact-checking, additional feedback, and copy editing. All of them and more are rearing to go, if we can get the money.

At the very least, we promise to publish eighteen pieces per year that require real work. I might also throw some little blogs in here and there, and the publication could potentially grow much larger. I write something, then something comes in from far away, and so on.

Get it? North / South Notes. That’s the idea. We are creating the most important publication in the world. We are launching a fun little Third Worldist blog run by a Californian. We are going to create The Free Press but in Maoist Standard English. Please join us.

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Subscription levels

1. Anyone generous enough to sign up as a Founder gets both of my books, The Jakarta Method and If We Burn, signed and sent to wherever, if you want them.1

2. All Paid subscribers at any level can: comment; participate in “editorial” discussions (threads in the chat), ask questions, and offer input; take part in periodic book giveaways, with stylish translated editions included.

3. We will try to keep as much as possible available to everyone. Free subscribers get all the open notes. And, as I have done the past two years, I will sometimes give things away to this type of supporter, too.

It should be clear by now that we are seeking patrons more than customers.2 If need be, I may experiment down the line with putting some things behind a paywall, to gently nudge people to do what they may want to do anyway. Or, we could just get this over with right now.

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Defense! Defense! Defense!

Journalism is dying. Substack is not the solution. The business model that this platform relies upon will not and cannot be sufficient to the task of providing crucial information to the world’s citizens and rebuilding a public sphere.

That does not mean, however, that defensive measures are worthless. We have to do what we can to weather the storm. In theory, I support large newsrooms with public support, and do not believe that decentralization is synonymous with democratization. In practice, I believe that creating a new Substack publication that commissions new writing can make things less bad in the short term. Paid subscriptions can help create a small, private space in which we can advocate for the nationalization of the internet. In the long term, we need structural solutions to the epistemic crisis, not just voluntarism; but right now, today, we need some volunteers. In the short term, I see this as a war of position.

By the same token — there are a lot of great, under-employed writers around the world, both experienced and up-and-coming. I have gotten to know a lot of people like this over twenty years of traveling and reporting. North South Notes is not about to employ thousands of them, but I think that paying first-world magazine rates to people in São Paulo or Kathmandu can make a very small contribution to keeping these communities alive.

Because finally, I believe that creating a base of reader support for this kind of writing is the best way to survive the crises comprising this very strange global moment. When talking with contributors, I sometimes bring up other publications that do publish the kind of work I want to host here. But I will say that I know from experience that they rely on one of a couple business models. While recognizing that there is nothing wrong with employing them, and that they all produce vital work, I think they have limitations:

One option is to rely on the generosity of an individual heir, oligarch or business man who uses the publication to further their own ideological project. You are subject to this person’s whims and veto power. Another move is to pay so little you can only publish grad students or academics with some other income stream. God bless them — without this coterie of writers, left-wing publishing in the English language would be in trouble. But there are more people out there. I want to work with them, and I want to publish things that might not be allowed by the owners of NYC clout rags or the Open Society Foundation. At the very least, I don’t want us to have to worry about them.

Moreover, I will admit that some part of me hopes this publication can become a semi-profitable small business, and therefore give myself some kind of an insurance policy. So far, I am in the hole — I have only lost money on North South Notes.3 But if I can be paid to edit this little publication as well, I myself would be less dependent on the whims of powerful individuals.

I have signed a new book deal — more on that later — with great people and am very excited by what I am working on. I consider my full-time job to be “author,” and I have given myself some protective armor by proving that I can sell books. The world of publishing — compared to whatever the hell was going on in journalism — has proved to be reassuringly capitalist and predictable. If you bring money in, they are not inclined to kick you out. But it remains true that a single person could decide that I opposed the wrong war, posted the wrong thing, or protested the wrong genocide, and render me immediately precarious. That could come in the form of an attack from the state, or a decision made by some corporate bureaucrat looking over his or her shoulder. Basically, I am trying to use this period of relative calm to move eggs into more than one basket, both for myself and quality media in general. Resist the NGO-ization of media. War of position.

I have done this before

In Brazil, from 2012 to 2016, I ran a small blog for Folha de S. Paulo. I only published a few things a month, but I liked doing it. I liked commissioning, and I liked editing. As it happens, the two primary contributors have sadly passed away. First, we lost Claire Rigby; then, in 2022, Dom Phillips was killed in the Amazon rainforest. I loved working with them, and I love looking back on the things we did together. We published Brazilians and gringos and serious reporting and I also snuck in some weird little bloggy things.

Back then, editing that publication was not my full-time job. I spent about 20% of my time on it, and 80% on my primary work. In addition to my own reporting, I could commission travel and far-flung research from a desk. I’d like to do that again.

What with everything what is going on right now

History, unfortunately, keeps happening. I came up with the name North South Notes, bought a domain, and opened an account here in 2022. From the beginning, this was the idea I had for the publication. But I went back and forth on whether to execute.

What finally tipped the scales, I think, is a desire to remain engaged with geopolitics. My current book research is wildly captivating for me, and it is a bit different than what I have done previously. I really look forward to sharing more. But I did not want to disappear into the topic, with no good reason to even read the daily news, as the United States seeks to violently re-make the imperial order in a more crude and vicious form. Even if I am not doing weeks of reporting for each post, there are things that I have learned and contacts I have accumulated over the years that might be relevant.

I am glad, for example, that I was in this “experimental” period as it became clear that the United States may seek to attack Venezuela, and made sure to write something about it. In January, I wrote that parts of the Israeli and U.S. government “want Iran smashed into thousands of pieces.” I want to continue to comment on world affairs, and have a concrete reason to do so. I want to keep learning from contributors.

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The output and the ideas

Since October, I have tried to offer a sense of what we might do here. In Jakarta, Hanna Samosir did extensive reporting to offer an account of unexpected mass protests in Indonesia. From Bucharest, Romanian scholar Florin Poenaru wrote a captivating account of a network of neoliberalized spies and the “Russian interference” that no one can seem to find. Last month, Gaby Cepeda used the world of contemporary art to examine Mexico’s strange relationship to the United States and a new global content regime.

Along the way, I myself warned that Donald Trump had nefarious designs on Venezuela, and that they had nothing to do with “regime change.” Then, I tried to write a history of the verticalization of the public sphere, before returning to Trump’s designs on the Americas and attempting to coin the term “autogolpe imperial.”

Check out any of these pieces out now, if you like. But even if you missed them the first time and don’t care about them now, you might appreciate that they have made an impact. Hanna’s story was translated into German; Florin went on podcasts to explain his work; Gaby’s report was passed around the Mexican art world (on Instagram stories, of course) and re-shared and discussed by its Gen-Z practitioners. My little concept of “regime collapse” operations was translated and published by Boitempo in Brazil. Previously, I have done book reviews and a well-performing movie review and dumb little personal essays.

What else might we do? Part of the idea is that this will emerge through conversations with contributors and subscribers, but here are some other ideas, potentially: the situation in Bahrain during the war on Iran; what does the Albanian left think about Hoxha?; an interview with the publishing house run by Brazil’s MST; the first time I thought, “I wish I had already launched North South Notes” was the outbreak of ‘Gen Z’ protests in Kenya in 2024 — in retrospect, I wish I had commissioned something anyway — we could look at the consequences two years later; a report on the New People’s Army in the Philippines; a map of the party form in the Arab world; literary fiction in lusophone Africa; and so on.

And then finally, I could more things myself that include travel or reporting. For example: in December, I went to Liverpool to cover the founding conference of Your Party UK. In the end, I decided not to write anything. If I had been on the hook to deliver one or two real things a month for money, I might have done.

More promises

These promises, I admit, are largely made for my own sake: I will resist the internalization of this platform’s algorithm and the tendency to do whatever it is that will maximize subs and revenue. There is evil lurking in this place, but I am comforted by the fact that if it all goes wrong, you can take an email list elsewhere.

I will not try to compete with other newsletters or care about the “ranking” and “rising” nonsense they push on you. I am not trying to win at Substack; I have set out how I actually plan to use this platform. At the same time, if demand in the form of subscriptions significantly outstrips what I can do on my own, I promise to expand by working with more editors and writers.

Truly, thank you —
Vincent

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It is an unfortunate fact that humanity is living through the content-ification of nearly everything. Until relatively recently, we might argue, “content” did not exist at all. But now: politics, art, journalism, culture and life itself is content, too. We feel this here in Mexico, of course. Indeed, we may feel it more intensely, and in a unique way, as a result of our special relationship to the country north of the border. The process of content-ification is intrinsically related to the power of the United States, its inescapable media production, and the internet that its firms control.

As the famous national lament puts it: Mexico suffers because it is “so far from God, and so close to the United States.” And yet, it is perhaps that knotty relationship that has created a special place for us in this strange new global system. In some ways, Mexico appears to be an exception to some of its rules, even as reality here seems violently overdetermined by others.

For example, on one hand: bucking a trend in the hemisphere, we have not experienced a shift to the right or the victory of neo-fascism. We can call ourselves lucky to have Claudia Sheinbaum who, for all her faults, is a democratically elected and popular president, with a plausible claim to being left of center and a solid record of standing up to Donald Trump. On the other hand, our opposition has morphed into a formless, uninspired set of culture warriors attempting to replicate their counterparts north of the border by copying fragments of the United States and pasting them into Mexican politics. These are mad oligarchs and influencer psychos raving that Washington should invade Latin America to save it from ourselves, apparently unworried about the obvious contradictions for their own class. They grab at signifiers and the aesthetics of campaigns which seem to have worked elsewhere, railing against trans people, a “stolen” election (in reality, Sheinbaum won more votes than any candidate in recent history), or decry the censorship of their own yapper class that is somehow always imminent.

And, at the same time, it is woefully obvious that daily life in much of the country is shaped by insatiable US American demand for drugs, and by its endless supply of guns.

I work in contemporary art, as a critic and curator, and trying to read and explain trends in my field in relation to the world-system requires confronting another set of contradictions. Most everyone I know in the world of left-leaning cultural workers came out to vote for Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Sheinbaum’s predecessor and the founder of the ruling Morena party, only for him to turn around and call us all “fifí” or posh. While disheartening, one can admit it was a pretty funny move. It was clear we were not—and are not—the focus of Morena’s political project, and we must recognize just how popular that project has been. At the same time, AMLO, Morena, and Sheinbaum’s choice to further cut funding for the arts left a void that is being filled by the private sector. As institutional support for culture slowly deteriorates, international capital has taken center stage in the Mexican art world.

While those working in public museums, reliant on government art grants, or running state-funded cultural spaces have long had to tighten their belts due to cuts imposed by previous governments, some of us held out hope for a left-leaning movement that viewed culture as a plausible defense against influencer slop and the kind of corporate propaganda that can only push us to the right. This has sadly not materialized, and the tradition of cultural workers protesting for basic provisions carries on in the Morena era.

A century ago, the now-famous muralistas reshaped national culture with ample public support. Artists like José Clemente Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros forged indelible images of national identity and revolutionary spirit before the Mexican Revolution began the oxymoronic process of institutionalization. After the “Ruptura” generation broke with the “Mexican School of Painting,” no group of artists has enjoyed public support in the same way. In the ‘60s and ‘70s, they were persecuted for their leftwing politics during the so-called “Dirty War.” But cuts to the cultural budget did not become really drastic until the victory of the right-wing PAN, in 2000.

Once more, we are in an especially tricky situation. Of course, artists, curators, and writers like me do not want to respond to Sheinbaum on the basis of narrow self-interest – even though many people in the field struggle to get by. But I am also increasingly worried about indirect effects: a competitive professionalization of culture which is deeply conservative.

In the arts, the response to all of this has been schizophrenic. The scene is divided between those that are highly politicized and those that are not at all. One fraction discusses how class shapes the ways that art is produced, consumed, and circulated in the increasingly gentrified city; to be politicized in this sense includes looking into the sources of funding for events and institutions; this group challenges Zionism and imperialism; and you might have guessed by now that this is my tribe. Along with a few friends I run 333, an art criticism magazine, and we are on that side of the spectrum. The other team is perhaps happier: They simply ignore most politics, picking instead at the juicy morsels of art-market gossip. Somewhere in the middle is the new influencer class. They hail the arrival of my worst nightmare: art and commentary that is merely fun, ahistorical, apolitical content; what I see as the antithesis of art, of critique.

It might be naïve to believe that the arts could be a fruitful space for thoughtful critique of the existing order, as well as a bulwark against fire-breathing attacks from the right. But given the danger of the moment, most members of the weakened cultural class are too scared of catching strays from either side. It is safer to avoid any criticism that could be confused with the insanity of the national oligarchy’s attacks on Morena. This traditional owner class— whose most recognizable ideology was, until recently, being anti-poor and vaguely Catholic—has been acting ridiculously, but this does not mean they are not a threat.

I grew up in Veracruz but now I am, of course, based in Mexico City, the principal node in an extremely centralized cultural structure. And as everyone knows, this city has recently been transformed by its special role in the art world. This is not the only international capital to experience this kind of gentrification this century, but it might be the most jarring case.

It used to be easy to predict where gringos could be found in Mexico City. What I referred to as Gringo Season started some time in fall, usually late November, and extended to a few days after Mexico’s art week in early February; then, our city would once more be clear of the telltale loudness and rudeness of a certain kind of visitor by the beginning of March, when weather in New York started to improve. These flows used to be restricted to Condesa, and then also to Colonia Roma. But they spread to Roma Sur, and then Juárez and Cuauhtémoc; more recently, they have flooded San Rafael and Santa María la Ribera, Centro Histórico, Tabacalera, Narvarte, as well as Coyoacán in the south.

But Condesa wasn’t always the stomping grounds of curiously barefoot US Americans. Just a few decades ago, it was abandoned by the middle-class families that had moved into the area in the 1930s, and it was quickly repopulated by a working class that needed homes after the 1985 earthquake. The story of its recent gentrification can be mapped onto NAFTA, the spread of contemporary art, and a few Gen Xers: Right around the signing of the fatefully destructive 1994 “North American Free Trade Agreement,” a handful of upper-class kids discovered contemporary art and its nascent globalizing potential. The entire world was to be re-made in its non-specific non-image, rendered into its many indeterminate but easily recognizable tropes. This was the era of post-conceptual art, and Gabriel Orozco was the first young Mexican contemporary artist to show at MoMA, in 1991. Back in those days he famously rejected the “Mexican Artist” label, preferring a multi-culti, citizen of the world vibe that was very appropriate for the era.

A pair of entrepreneurial kids, Yoshua Okón and Miguel Calderón, both of whom had studied abroad, were looking, in their own telling, to crack the city open and bring in people from the United States and Europe. They set up shop in Condesa, and opened La Panadería (The Bakery), an artist-run space that from 1994 to 2002 hosted innumerable art shows, punk bands, installations and performances, all broadly rebelling against what they perceived as the too-solemn and self-serious art of then-existing galleries and museums. Two of my favorites were Okón’s Cuarto Enchilado (1994), in which the artist painted a room with glue and then powdered it with Takis-red chili; and Dermis (1996) at which the collective SEMEFO showed real tattoos cut off from the skin of corpses at the morgue (the cops shut it down). Okón and Calderón went on to have significant international careers; you can spot Calderón’s early paintings behind Owen Wilson in a few of his scenes in The Royal Tenenbaums, and he just premiered a theater play a few weeks ago. Okón made a few film installations mocking Mexican Nazi-cosplayers and the excesses of the American lower class; he also founded SOMA, a sort of extra-official two-year art program in the city that has hosted some well-respected artists.

But perhaps their most interesting feat was to make Condesa into a desirable location for artists and ambitious entrepreneurs at the turn of the millennium. Many of those artists came from the affluent families that bought property in the area when it was first developed in the ‘20s and ‘30s. During the art boom, their Gen-X heirs promptly became landlords in an area that they themselves worked to make “cool.”

Until she became Mexico’s first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum was the capital’s Jefa de Gobierno (something like a mayor). As jefa, she faced COVID and the tragedy of an overhead subway line collapsing and killing 22 people. Many have forgotten that she partnered with UNESCO and Airbnb in 2022, to lure digital nomads to the city—right at the peak of the Great Gringo Invasion.

During the pandemic, a handful of American galleries opened branches in Mexico City, only for them to shutter by 2024. By that time many local galleries and project spaces were suffering as well, and most independent spaces that relied on grants (national and international) were disappearing.

The intensity of all this movement has had a profound effect on the young and not-so-young artists and art workers; it has re-wired their subjectivities, making it feel like the only reasonable option is an extreme version of neoliberal professionalization: if you think of your very self as a firm, why would you run an artist’s space when you could open a commercial gallery?

Art has become much more homogeneous, with risk carefully managed. Many artists started painting or using traditional materials like fine woods and bronze, believing that those costly elements will make their market value clear. Color palettes and formats echo each other across a depressed market. Last year, at Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, I was excited to see Manual Intuitivo: No usar saliva ni soplar sobre las piezas, an exhibition curated by Petra, a curatorial collective from a newer generation, showcasing an intergenerational slice of artists. The show was built on an experimental premise: an intuitive manual, opposed to a museum’s conservation manual, was supposed to bring the contours of the curatorial project into focus. That was, sadly, not the case, but beyond any qualms I had with its conceptual failures, I was mostly struck by the acquiescent conformism of the whole ordeal. Not only were there no new readings on current and older art, but the curators locked in on the exact same things as their predecessors, the themes millennials have explored now for a decade, and that were themselves already a kind of hand-me-downs: art meets technology, urban-flavored pictorial experiments, a flair for mysticism, and idealizations of neo-materialisms. I was especially struck by the evident anxiety that presided, as a younger generation sought to perform a specific local professionalism, discarding their better (perhaps more daring) instincts in order to fulfill a predetermined image of what art should look like.

I want to stress that the artists featured are not bad. This generation has the talent to confront the contradictions of our time; but sometimes, they appear to be hobbled by context and curation. Juni Aranda, one of the artists in the show, recently put up Polen, a small exhibition at the city’s orchidarium. With simple, well-deployed gestures, Aranda was able to conjure earnest and genuine connections with viewers.

By characterizing the whole guild as fifí, AMLO cast a self-fulfilling curse: as the budgets and grants are diminished, it is only the wealthy and the well-to-do who can afford to risk choosing such a precarious field. Few can afford to take any formal or discursive risks. As in most parts of the world, the cuts deepened during the pandemic, but AMLO also earmarked 20 percent of the national culture budget and for the remodeling of the Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park, which he bestowed on Gabriel Orozco – an important figure, but definitely not an architect or an urbanist.

Grants were slashed, theaters closed. Some of us were working at state museums at the time, and it was a bloodbath. We were operating with a tiny percentage of the budget that was routine before the pandemic.

Of course, removing public support for the arts makes us more like the United States, and less like prominent neighbors to the South. In the largest country in Latin America, for example, President Lula made the Ministry of Culture central to the face of the first two Workers’ Party administrations, and famously reversed Jair Bolsonaro’s slash-and-burn policy after winning his third election in 2022.

In Mexico, we hoped President Sheinbaum would turn the ship around, but her government justified cuts in 2025 by claiming that the Chapultepec money sink and the Tren Maya were now completed. Meanwhile, the local state museums are in shambles. Galleries are closed for weeks or months because security guards’ checks won’t clear and payments are delayed endlessly, while most of the very young people hired are told to think of this as normal. We can’t help noticing that they spend the budget on PEMEX debt and on the further militarization of the country, or when the real effects of their domestic policies are frequently indistinguishable from the neoliberal spoliation of their predecessors. On the Fourth of July last year, Condesa finally exploded, in anti-gentrification protests so pointedly aimed at gringos that the international press took quick notice.

Luckily for Morena, nobody can stomach the alternative. Sheinbaum’s most prominent enemies are the lunatics who stand in Congress and—speaking English with their revolting papa-en-la-boca whitexican accent—ask for Trump to come “Make México Safe Again.” You can side with the reasonable-sounding Sheinbaum or you can go with the miserable usurer, Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who owns TV Azteca and refuses to pay the 48.3 billion pesos he owes in taxes. That is the billionaire clown that the right-wing is considering running for president after Sheinbaum’s term ends. It is hard not to support her when she called them out like this at the end of last year: “Their vision is money, accumulation, accumulate, accumulate, accumulate wealth on the backs of everyone else.”

The opposition now also boasts a class of Instagrammable politicians like Sandra Cuevas and Alessandra Rojo de la Vega, both mayors of Cuauhtémoc. The first is a full-blown buchona, who ran the streets in tight black fits and RZR ATVs, while terrorizing the elderly who dared to dance salsa on Sundays in front of her building; the second loves shoulder pads, paranoid rants performed to her front-facing camera, the infinite patting of her own back and making unhinged posts about removing the Che Guevara and Fidel Castro statues installed by the neighbors of Tabacalera in “defiance of dictators everywhere.”

The supporters of all of the above were out in something like ‘full force’ on November 15th for what the media bafflingly called a “Gen-Z” protest: in reality, it was an Astroturfed appropriation of the aesthetics and signifiers of uprisings in places like Nepal, also previously re-enacted in Madagascar and Morocco. Posts with the One Piece logo – the anime symbol first employed in Indonesia last year, before it spread to other protests around the world – popped up all over social media in mid-October; but after Carlos Manzo, an independent mayor in Michoacán, was gunned down in a public Día de Muertos event, Reddit, Twitter and Instagram were flooded with new accounts asking their fellow kids to join in the movement. Some reporting claimed over 8 million bots, mostly from Argentina and Colombia, were heavily promoting the gathering — explaining the frequent slang gaffes.

On the day of the event, the same crowd of boomers and Gen Xers who have been consistently marching every two years since Morena got elected filled up a few blocks of the city they swear is a war-torn, crime-ridden cesspool. Emerging from hysterical Whatsapp groups into the sunlight they screamed: “Trump! Come and get the shit out of Mexico! Come and get Claudia fucking Sheinbaum.”

Like most protests in Mexico City, this one ended in a bit of violence. The feminists and the leftists were promptly teargassed, kettled and beat up by the police. The right-wing aunties were accompanied by a set of thugs of their own, equipped with angle grinders to hack their way into the Palacio de Gobierno. For a moment, it got scary. Alex Jones was tweeting “Mexico Is Full Revolt Against The Communist Chinese Backed President!” as a few dozen guys in masks broke through the barricades in what started to look like an attempt at January 6 in local vernacular. Latin American history flashed before my eyes: Was this a coup? US intervention? Both? Worse? A few minutes later, it was all over. I watched the TV Azteca Twitter stream, as a breathless pseudo-journalist yelled about censorship and tyrannical repression at a woman in a wheelchair.

Like all imagery in our relentlessly spectacular political era, this content came and went. So did the invasion of Venezuela and abduction of its president. First, our reactionaries tried to exploit the attack as a win for the righteous forces of the worldwide right; but after Trump hung Corina Machado out to dry, left other Chavistas in power, and threatened the rest of the hemisphere, their praise trailed off into silence.

In 1970, before democratically elected socialist President Salvador Allende had even taken office, the CIA and President Richard Nixon planned to strangle the economy, and hoped that that this would force the Chilean government to become authoritarian. It is easy to demonize and isolate a “police state” that is cracking down on real or perceived counter-revolutionary forces.1 Nixon admitted, in secret, that the nightmare scenario for Washington would be a socialist project in the hemisphere that was both truly democratic and obviously successful. This would only lead the rest of the hemisphere to try to imitate them.

In 2007, I accidentally became a journalist, while living in Caracas. I arrived in the country five years after the first time the United States backed a coup in order to derail and destroy the Chavista project. That attempted golpe de estado, which saw Hugo Chávez arrested and business leader Pedro Carmona briefly installed as president, immediately received the backing of George W. Bush and the New York Times. Even though Chávez had clearly won election in 2000, the coup was (obviously) justified on pro-democratic grounds. Embarrassingly, Chávez quickly returned to power and easily won another election in 2006.

I was just one year out of university when I arrived in Venezuela, and thought I would be doing some work abroad (first in Berlin, then in Caracas) before going back to school (to do a PhD in Political Theory). I didn’t really have much interest in journalism, until a friend of a friend randomly connected me with an English-language newspaper that needed someone who could report in Spanish and write in English, and that would actually pay me enough to live there for a while.

Over 2007 and 2008, I got to know a lot of different Venezuelans, with a lot of very different opinions on the Chavista movement. Many loved him, some hated him, but it was pretty clear to most everyone that he had very solid support in the country, especially among the working class.

Three months ago in October 2025 I wrote that there was no plan for “regime change” in Venezuela — either the government would survive, or Trump would simply destroy the country. I still believe this to be the case, but at the beginning of this year we saw the addition of a spectacular third element that I certainly did not expect. This phenomenon, a bombastic piece of imperial theater, is strangely compatible with either of the two outcomes I outlined last year. The Donald Trump regime bombed three locations in Caracas, killing dozens of people, and kidnapped the acting president of Venezuela along with his wife. This time, they did all of this in the most public way possible.

Two more things were stunning about the operation. First, Donald Trump did not pretend that this was about democracy; he said we were going to take the oil. How much of this is classic Trump, in that he says out loud what everyone else sought to hide, and how much is a qualitatively new phase in U.S. empire? We do not know. Second, the President of the United States turned around and threatened the rest of the hemisphere: not just Cuba, but Colombia and Mexico. Look what we can do to you; you better get in line. If the goal was to intimidate and coerce everyone else, then perhaps all that was needed was the spectacular humiliation and decapitation of a rival state. Was the decision to avoid the “regime change” stage — pretending to try to give the country to María Corina Machado, which would have been a disaster — based on those strategic considerations? Or was it simply the preference of a man who loves producing great entertainment but hates long-term commitments, and holds a serious grudge against anyone who gets between him and a fancy award? We do not know. Seemingly invigorated by the success in Caracas, the Trump administration turned its attention to Greenland, Iran, and Minnesota.

In the case of Venezuela, we can imagine two scenarios that bookend a range of possibilities. It could be that nothing really changes, except that people in Caracas are scared and traumatized. Trump tells his base he “got the oil,” whatever that means or to whatever extent it is true, but Venezuela proceeds with a different Chavista in charge and the government intact. On the other end of the spectrum, you have state collapse, which might come as a result of the January 3 attack or something else. I don’t know if Trump really cares. I think that Marco Rubio wants state collapse in Cuba, and that parts of the U.S. government — and Israel — want Iran smashed into thousands of pieces.

In South America everyone knows there are many types of coup d'état, and there are words for all the different flavors. When it comes to state overthrow, Iberian languages are like that thing that they say about Inuit languages and snow that is not really true: Spanish and Portuguese-speaking countries, being so familiar with the phenomena, have a bunch of words for them. The United States has traditionally subjected other countries to the coup, rather than experiencing it at home; the English language doesn’t even have one word for it — thus the italicized import from French. In Spanish and Portuguese, however:

First, there is the golpe militar, the classic military coup that is most prominent in the anglophone imagination, and which describes well what happened in Chile in 1973. There is the golpe parlamentar, in which parliamentary action is decisive; this is often the term used to describe the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff in Brazil. I bet you can guess what a golpe judicial is. (After the 2020 election, some of us noticed that Donald Trump had attempted all three, without much commitment or knowledge of how they work). You can have an intentona or a quartelada or a golpe de oficiais that might even push the country to the left, or closer to democracy than it had been. I could go on.

But there is also the autogolpe, or “self-coup.” To carry out an autogolpe, you must already be in power. Traditionally, there are two reasons that you might destroy, ignore, or violate the infrastructure of a state you already control. You might think that your true power is limited by the structures that exist, and you can grab more. Or, you might be desperate, and afraid that you are about to lose your power. So you strike first, seeking to neutralize the forces that threaten you.

When Donald Trump this month attempted an autogolpe at the level of the capitalist world-system, what was the reason? Whatever his motivation, this truly shocked European allies who had gone along with imperialist adventures in places like Iraq. The man threatened to wage economic warfare against Western Europe to steal a piece of land; the man threatened to invade NATO. I am pretty sure I have never seen a self-coup tried internationally; but MAGA has seemingly embarked on a torturous and confusing attempt to replace U.S global hegemony with naked domination.

The United States emerged from World War II as the most powerful state in human history. In the years after 1945, Washington oversaw the creation of a set of institutions and relationships that cemented its position at the top of the global system. I am not the only one to argue that this world order has greatly benefited the country that shaped it, and that much blood was shed in its construction and maintenance. I view the coups of Guatemala 1954 (as well as Iran 1953) and the mass murder of Indonesia 1965, Chile 1973 — I could go on forever — as part of this story. But Donald Trump seems to believe that the capitalist world-system is a scam perpetrated against the United States of America? That it sucks money out of our nation, instead of pouring super-profits into the coffers of our corporations? I think he really believes this? Even if he could successfully use threats and violence to extract more benefits for the United States in the short term, what are the long-term consequences? Can you actually pull off an autogolpe imperial?

In the days after the attack on Caracas and throughout January, I got in touch with most of my Venezuelan friends. Some live in Caracas; some left the country over the last ten years and are now elsewhere in South America; some left the country in the really bad years, but then moved back. I had a lot of questions: first, "how are you?” but I would then quickly ask, what do you think happened, what do you think of the attack and the arrest, what do you think will happen next? Across the board, regardless of their views on Maduro, I got a very similar type of response. Even when I thought it was clear I was asking about geopolitics, they spoke about something else. “I can’t sleep at night,” and “we are afraid of an another invasion” or, “my family back in Caracas is safe for now, thank God, but they are considering leaving for Colombia,” or (in three ways, from three different people): is there any way you could send some money to me or a relative? One friend, who still lives in the same Caracas apartment we shared in 2007, told me: “I was sure, that night, that I was going to die.”

What I learned was not really anything about Nicolás Maduro, Delcy Rodriguez, Donald Trump, or the future of Venezuela. The overwhelming sense that I got, from these conversations, is how terrifying it is to wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of bombs, to see that the power has been wiped out but that the sky is on fire; just how shocking and traumatizing it is to have your city attacked from above. For a long time, we didn’t expect that kind of thing to happen in the Americas.

“To the extent that non-bourgeois strata penetrated the public sphere in the political realm and took possession of its institutions, participated in press, parties, and parliament, the weapons of publicity forged by the bourgeoisie were pointed against itself…. [For liberal theorists,] the public itself had taken the place of princely power, and the accusation of intolerance was now leveled against the public opinion that had become prevalent.” — Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, describing changes between the 17th and 19th centuries.

“Each child in NYC basically costs an extra $100k per year minimum...brutal...” — user taobanker on X, the everything app, describing a screenshot of a lady reporting in 2025 that she cannot survive on 850,000 dollars a year.

In the first years after the invention of the printing press and the formation of a reading and writing community in Europe, the “public sphere” was open-ended and horizontally structured. If you could read books and newspapers, if you could compose a letter, you could participate. Within this new sphere, participants were treated as equals. Reason would prevail, regardless of your status in the old feudal order. “The parity on whose basis alone the authority of the better argument could assert itself against that of social hierarchy and in the end can carry the day meant, in the thought of the day, the parity of ‘common humanity,’” wrote Jürgen Habermas in 1962.

The emphasis is mine. This was the self-conception of the participants in the early public sphere. The Marxist response, which no one really disputes anymore, is that this was actually a very limited and particular class of people with quite a lot of shared interests. It was very easy for them to believe that the public sphere was universal, and for them to relate to each other as equals, because there were all kinds of (invisible) barriers to entry. A tiny minority of people could read, and afford to buy newspapers or books, and walk into Button’s Coffee House in central London and stuff a letter into the fantastical lion’s head that served as a receptacle for letters to the editor. You might be allowed to win an argument against a Duke, if you were both invited to a literary salon. But there were no workers there. There were no Irish people, no peasants, and certainly no Indians. Thus Habermas explains, quite uncontroversially, that in its early days “the public” was actually the bourgeois reading public.

When more and more people began to read, write, organize, criticize, and otherwise enter the “public sphere,” this proved to be a real problem for the European bourgeoisie. A lot of these new entrants wanted to take their property away. Instead of constituting a bulwark against the power of the Crown, “the public” was now the real threat, as far as they were concerned.1

As a class, the bourgeoisie moved to impose hierarchy upon a sphere that had initially been egalitarian. You couldn’t let just anyone control the press. They worked together to impose visible barriers to entry on a previously open community once the old invisible barriers fell away. This happened in concrete history, not in abstract theory, and took a number of interesting forms — stamp duties, state monopolies, outright prohibition of the radical press, complex licensing systems, “philanthropy” with ideological conditions attached, endless lawsuits, and so on.2 But I don’t want to get into all that. Obviously, what I am trying to say here is that over the last twenty-five years, our ruling class has done something very similar to the internet.

There are numerous examples, but the first one I want to highlight is the way that Twitter has changed since Elon Musk purchased it. About a decade ago, I would have said that English-language discourse on the website was dominated by left-leaning downwardly mobile millennials, Bernie supporters and Gawker writers and rudely funny alumni of older message boards. I think Musk felt that way too, and convinced himself that these people were being unfairly mean to him and destroying Western civilization — to his mind, these were basically the same things. And that is why he bought the company.

If you log onto X right now, you can see that he has somehow succeeded. The timeline is dominated by business psychos and crypto scammers and serial founders and people who either make thousands of dollars a week in “passive income” or pretend to do so in order to trick people that believe they can. The character that dominates the “global public square” (Elon’s words) is now, unquestionably, a rich guy. They did not need to criminalize radical speech (though some other people are certainly doing that); it was enough to give wealthy people the pre-eminent status that they enjoy in the offline world.

It’s not like Hegelian grad students or Vice bloggers were exactly the global proletariat; despite some of our pretensions a decade ago, this very specific class, with our own particular interests, was much better off than the average human being. The platforms were not dominated by Filipino taxi drivers or Nigerian pensioners (if a couple of them were funny enough and posted all day, they might rise to the top). But that cohort has been replaced by a really special group. The tweet above this post is an extra-stupid example, but it is trivially easy to find people who consider “<$100k” to be the lowest income bracket imaginable, with $250k required to feel that “life is good.” In the United States of America, the richest country in the history of mankind, the average individual income is $39,000 / year. In the People’s Republic of China, the workers assembling the iPhone make about three dollars an hour, and that is not a poor country. The people who ripped the materials out of the earth make much less.

Or take Meta, the company run by millennial ad salesman Mark Zuckerberg. On his platforms, we used to look directly at our peers. Now, we look up to our superiors. Instagram is obviously structured as a kind of pyramid, with a rich person in Los Angeles — probably Kylie Jenner these days, having replaced her older half-sister Kim Kardashian — sitting at the top. It used to be that “social media” meant you looked at what your friends were posting, and you posted for your friends. Now, you can still post an Instagram story, but you will be competing with celebrities and the professional producers of short-form content. Instead of participants in a conversation, everyone is now a broadcaster, and some broadcasters are obviously more important than others. A few regular people might win at this game, and move up the ranks — but the fact that I use the word “up” there is the point. Once more, hierarchy has been imposed; concrete horizontality has given way to vertical structure.

Once upon a time, anyone could go online and argue in a chat room, post on message boards, or make a website. This was the era of libertarian techno-optimism, the days before elite counter-attack. After all, who was on the internet in the very early days? At first, it was just members of the US military, trading messages;3 then, a small network of academics; then, a smattering of well-off families in the United States. Few powerful people understood what was going on, but what did they have to worry about? In the early 2010s when “social media” began to take off, those new spaces were dominated by the young, highly-educated and well-connected. This cohort tended to be urban and progressive. This was the era of left-leaning techno-optimism, still anchored in some of the anarcho-liberal assumptions that permeated the early internet. These were the years of Obama and Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street and then, Euromaidan, which led to a horrible war which has not ended, which is killing people as I type.

Should we be surprised that the era of 1999 to 2013 was the high point of “horizontalist” ideology and praxis in the world of politics?4 This was the moment in which the new digital world was still open and egalitarian, horizontally structured. As I wrote in my second book, I came to the conclusion that “elective affinity” between a few pre-existing ideological currents and material developments in the 2010s helps to explain a recent era of mass protests. Obviously, there were not that many fully committed horizontalists as the era began (and they were still a minority in the demonstrations themselves), but quite a lot of people believed in the potential of the form of resistance that has been possible in our age, or all those people would not have participated. If enough of us get out onto the streets, we will surely push the world in a progressive direction — wait, where did all these reactionaries come from?

I don’t want to overstate my case here. We are talking about three distinct phenomena; the rise of commercial media and mass culture is different than the rise of the digital platforms, and, as we have seen, the “2011” form of protest remains with us, even as ideas and the internet have changed. The most important material basis for the apparently spontaneous, leaderless mass protest is a society which is atomized, precarious, and individualized, and I don’t expect unplanned street demonstrations to become “vertical” (how would that work?) just because digital life now has a different shape. You could, if you like, wonder airily if the new structure of the internet (rigidly ordered, with some people obviously more valuable than others) helps explain why so many kids these days find fascism such a natural fit, while every anglophone radical in 2000 claimed to either be an anarchist or libertarian, but this might be stretching the interpretive frame. We are working at the level of analogy here, not strict correlation.5 I confess I am still working out how exactly I conceive of these relationships. But I think there is something there.

The arrival of the printing press re-shaped society, and then real power relations in society imposed themselves on the world of letters. The internet was born in a world with pre-existing elites and the internet created new elites; initially, its shape was flat, and then both types of elites used their strength to seize it and re-shape it in a way that reflect power relations in society.

In the case of Facebook and Instagram, it was not the ideology of the owner that led to the imposition of its current structure. These services, like TikTok and YouTube, were transformed by the logic of the maximization of advertising revenue, just like so many media were in the 20th century. The "algorithms” (computer programs) restructured the experience of online life in such a way that you are now just supposed to watch little TV clips, whether they are actually paid advertisements or just resemble them in form, tone, and preoccupation. A decade ago, a “keyboard warrior” was someone who spent too much time speaking back to the internet in the form of text; the term was pejorative, but it was true that social media programs were soliciting that kind of engagement. Now you aren’t supposed to use your keyboard at all.6 That is valuable time you could be using to view an advertisement.

In the last fifteen years, we have also seen the state getting involved in more direct ways. We had a couple years before political and economic elites knew how to deal with the internet, but they are long gone. The Trump administration is making sure that TikTok USA can be controlled by Larry Ellison, the ardent supporter of Israel and MAGA. That same family acquired The Free Press, a Substack with a decent audience, and paid much, much more than it would be worth if Bari Weiss did not further the ideological project of the Ellisons. They’re going to be reading your social media if you ever want to come to the United States ever again. Might as well stop posting — just keep scrolling and watching.

The obvious exception to this now is “AI,” the conversation you can have with a large language model. In this window, most everyone is invited to bang away all day on the keyboard. For now, that is. My bet is that if any of these firms come up with a working business model, it will mean restricting access and treating different users very differently. But even in this early moment, you are all by yourself, and you are talking to a computer program, so this will never be part of the public sphere.

7

This month marks one year since that cataclysmic event. What happened to the claim that it was actually Moscow that rocked Romanian politics and society, and what happened to the country after the discarded ballot?

Nicușor Dan is now president. He is the fifth man to hold this office since the dramatic fall and execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu in December 1989, which marked the end of an erratic version of state socialism in Romania and the beginning of its turbulent transition to capitalism. Dan, the former mayor of Bucharest, beat far-right candidate George Simion in a new contest in May 2025. Simion enjoyed the endorsement of Georgescu, who was banned from running again and was put on trial following his surprise victory. In Romania there is a folk theory that those who lose elections go to jail. In Georgescu’s case, it seems it was his success that got him into trouble.

Dan won comfortably against Simion in a contest that was billed as a referendum: Vote for Dan and stay in the EU, or vote for his rival, and open the door to Russian dominance. Pro-EU sentiment won the day, and the docile pupil behaved once more. This happy story, depicting the endurance of democracy in the face of extremism at home and Putin abroad, was offered by mainstream Western publications as well as the dominant commentariat in Romania. I want to suggest something very different: that both the cancellation of Georgescu’s victory and Dan’s ascendance represent the most recent instantiation of a long history of secret state agencies encroaching on Romanian public life.

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After assuming office, President Dan seems to have made peace with the forces he so adamantly opposed during the campaign. Dan, who was simply called a “pro-European centrist” during the second election, was always actually more of a right-wing politician, and had risen to prominence by pushing for the privatization of public services. Simion and Georgescu, in addition to being described as Russian assets, were labeled fascists for their sympathy (extremely open, in the case of Georgescu) for the Romanian Iron Guard, the sui generis interwar fascist movement that blended Orthodox mysticism with political assassinations and anti-Jewish pogroms.

Once in power Dan cozied up to the extreme right when he made a pilgrimage to Sâmbăta de Jos, the monastery complex in the Carpathian foothills that functions as a shrine to Romania’s interwar legionary movement. Anticommunism, the dominant ideology of the transition period that has served to justify neoliberal transformation and keep any leftist forces in check, offered the discursive space for this rapprochement: since the right-wing Legionnaires were imprisoned by the Communists, they should be celebrated.

Dan’s presidency so far has been defined by a harsh austerity program. Ilie Bolojan, his prime minister, introduced a series of brutal cuts in social spending which, predictably, impacted the poor and the vulnerable the most.

Last year Marcel Ciolacu, prime minister and leader of the Social Democratic Party, was expected to win the first round of the November elections. George Simion, leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romania (AUR), was expected to come in second place. A contest between Ciolacu and Simion would give the powerful Social Democrats a clear path to victory, the thinking went. It appeared that Elena Lasconi, the president of the liberal Save Romania Union, also had a decent shot at making the second round.

Georgescu, an agronomist, nationalist, and former member of the AUR, was polling at 6% one week week before the election. Nicolae Ciuca, former prime minister and leader of the National Liberals, was polling at about 8%. Apparently the well-established National Liberals, seeing that their candidate had zero chance of entering the second round, diverted support to Georgescu to prevent Simion from qualifying for the run-off. Lasconi, the thinking went, had a better chance of beating the Social Democrats, the traditional rivals of the National Liberals. Later investigations revealed that the National Liberals paid a firm to recruit TikTok influencers to campaign for Georgescu. He himself had zero campaign infrastructure. But outside the country, where citizens vote two days early, polling stations were flooded with Georgescu voters. He won the first round with 23% of the vote. Lasconi came in second.

Romania’s Constitutional Court annulled the first round of voting, claiming that it was a necessary step to safeguard Romanian democracy and sovereignty from foreign interference. Declassified documents from the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) seen by the Supreme Defense Council and made public on December 4th painted an alarming picture: coordinated Russian hybrid warfare had allegedly propelled Georgescu to first place through the use of TikTok bot networks and secret finance mechanisms. Through annulment, the court declared, democracy had been saved from an unprecedented assault.1

Yet a year on, evidence of foreign interference has failed to materialize. No Russian operatives have been identified. No financial trails have been traced to Moscow. Georgescu himself was put on trial for alleged attempt of a coup d’état, though the evidence presented so far on this count is thin. The European Commission launched its own investigation. Dan’s administration issued its own report in October, which repeated the previous findings of the intelligence services but did not offer any additional revelations. No prosecutions have been launched, and no independent parliamentary panel was convened. Over twelve months later, convincing evidence of Russian involvement is nowhere to be found.

All of this raises a very uncomfortable question: If the Russian interference narrative cannot be substantiated based on available evidence, what are we to believe actually happened last year?

North South Notes sent a set of written questions to the European Commission, asking if Russia had interfered in Romania’s election, and inquiring as to the results of investigations into the matter. The European Commission confirmed it had sent two requests for information to TikTok, in October 2024 and November 2024, and “opened proceedings against TikTok for a suspected breach of the Digital Services Act (DSA)” last December. According to a Commission Spokesperson, “The investigation is ongoing and the Commission is in touch with TikTok, who is responsive to the Commission’s requests.”

So far the most prominent story has presented Georgescu as an outsider: a mystic pushing Orthodox nationalism mixed with strident anti-EU rhetoric, a social media prophet who emerged from nowhere to channel popular anti-establishment rage. But Georgescu was never the outsider he and others claimed that he was. He came of age in late Ceaușescu-era Romania and navigated the transition by inserting himself into networks of still-influential former Communist apparatchiks. Trained as a pedologist, he pivoted to environmental policy in the 1990s, securing positions within the Ministry of Environment and later with various UN agencies. By the 2000s, he had become a consultant moving between government ministries, international organizations, and the private sector, often interviewed by mainstream journalists on prime-time television.

And he had deep connections to the security and defense apparatus. Georgescu’s long-standing relationship with Horatiu Potra is particularly instructive. Potra, who financed Georgescu’s 2024 campaign, is a Romanian-French citizen who fought in the French Foreign Legion and has ties to the Ministry of National Defense. Potra’s professional network extends throughout Romania’s defense establishment. If we scan the disrupted terrain of global politics over the last 15 years, Georgescu is certainly not the first well-connected political actor with a fiery personality well-suited to social media, an insider posing as an outsider, that did far better than anyone expected.

Georgescu may have campaigned against the “parallel state,” but he was supported by individuals deeply embedded in its military-intelligence wing. His bid for power was ultimately blocked by a more powerful faction of the state, represented by the Romanian Intelligence Service (SRI) and its allied institutions (including the judiciary). They used the constitutional mechanisms at their disposal to end his campaign after its unexpected success. In this clash, both sides were apparently willing to disregard democratic norms. Instead, I believe they were interested in power and the perpetuation of a system in which unelected secret institutions carve out zones of autonomy and extract significant economic and political advantages.

Romania maintains a very large security apparatus relative to its population. Though the numbers remain classified, unofficial headcounts indicate several times more secret agents per capita than in most of Europe. Recent calculations put total Romanian spending on intelligence services at roughly €1.6 billion, around 0.5% of GDP. No matter how you calculate it, the same figure in Germany is much lower.

What is particularly striking here is that – as anyone who has read about the end of the Ceaușescu period knows – the legacy of the Securitate, one of the largest secret police forces in the world of European Communism, has been vehemently and obsessively rejected since 1989. We have a new intelligence apparatus, built through collaboration with Washington and Brussels. When that vast network acts with different goals – not to preserve the immortal leadership of the Party, but to ensure the privileges of elites created in the transition to capitalism - few public figures seem to care.

The archives of the Securitate, opened after being vetted by SRI in the mid-2000s, have become a national fixation. Rather than providing transparency, the opening of the archive created what I call a “cult for the occult” – a passion for revealing that which has been hidden about others; searching through files for evidence of collaboration; using the archive as a weapon in political and personal disputes; and trading secrets from the archive for money. More troublesome, the contents of the archive are unreliable.

For 25 years, no evidence existed that Traian Băsescu, the former president, had been a Securitate collaborator, something that would have legally barred him from office. But shortly after he finished his second term, marked by a conflict with the intelligence apparatus, incriminating documents suddenly appeared in the archive, and he was officially declared a collaborator. He lost all the privileges granted to former presidents as a result of this revelation. After vocally campaigning for Nicușor Dan, his appeal was accepted by the Constitutional Court and his privileges were restored.

The resources lavished on the intelligence institutions have translated into domains of control that extend far beyond traditional intelligence work and are uncomfortably reminiscent of the 20^th century. Since the 2000s, Romania’s intelligence services have systematically expanded their competencies into areas that would, in most democracies, fall under civilian oversight. This expansion was legitimized through the requirements for NATO and EU accession and through direct participation in the covert and extra-judiciary detention programs organized by the CIA in the Global War on Terror. Moreover, a revolving door between active service and civilian life, particularly in law, consulting, and business, creates a class of individuals whose power derives from their institutional connections and their access to classified information.2

Former officers populate boardrooms, law offices, government ministries, and private security firms. They form an informal network of shared interests and mutual benefits that operates according to rules different from those governing ordinary citizens. However, despite the lack of official public interest in the workings of the state’s security apparatus, the reference to the “parallel state” has become commonplace in Romania. Many politicians have denounced it (especially after they lose power and end up in jail). Journalists discuss it sotto voce and citizens reference it in casual conversations. It even has a folk name: “the forest.” The headquarters of SRI are close to the remains of a vast forest on the outskirts of Bucharest.

Unsurprisingly, when regular people are presented with the knowledge that powerful forces really might be making plans in secret, they often turn to conspiracy theories. This kind of frenzied guesswork, as we all know, corrodes trust in institutions and warps the public sphere - ironically, this is exactly the atmosphere in which someone like Georgescu thrives - and it is the secret agents themselves who must be blamed for this, not the hapless citizens trying to make sense of their world.

I suggest that it is productive to analyze Romania’s intelligence and security services as a salaried bourgeoisie - that is, a class faction that has used its institutional position to carve out extraordinary advantages for itself. These are not omnipotent puppet-masters, controlling politicians from the shadows, but, rather, bureaucrats extracting rents from privileged access to state resources, information, and decision-making processes. They enjoy generous salaries and pensions, a parallel healthcare system, housing estates, and, as explained above, pathways to lucrative careers in business and politics. Entry into this world offers economic security increasingly rare in contemporary Romania.

No wonder that when I recently asked my sociology students what they want to do after finishing their BA program, a large majority confessed that they would try to do an MA in intelligence studies, and thus join the SRI.

We know that it was the SRI that provided the evidence justifying the cancellation of the election in 2024, carried out by the Constitutional Court. We cannot know why, exactly, these actors chose to do so, unless they simply tell us. But it is helpful to understand who would have been impacted by their results.

The Romanian president appoints the head of the secret services, including SRI. The new president was also due to appoint a judge in the Constitutional Court. Clearly, these actors had skin in the game. After the first-round elections of 2024, no candidate from Romania’s traditional two-party establishment had any chance of being in charge of these decisions. Dan himself was an “outsider” of a sort, hailing from outside this bipartisan establishment, but he was also a continuity candidate.

On another level, EU bureaucrats surely care about our elections. They already have to deal with Orbán in Hungary, and the victory of someone like Georgescu would have placed a troublesome Euroskeptic president in a position to make important decisions.

Is Moscow above interfering in the affairs of sovereign countries? Of course not. Maybe the Russians saw an opportunity and tried to get involved. Maybe not. I do not have any evidence either way. This is what we know: The story of a Russian plot was used to justify the cancellation of an already completed election, by well-connected actors, as it appeared that someone inimical to the establishment could win.

Media and sympathetic commentators did the rest, by elevating the superficial narrative that dominated the 2024 contest: Russia as the villain, responsible for everything bad within the country; the EU as the savior, and the security services as local heroes ensuring that Mr. Putin would be foiled this time. These schematic oppositions offer moral clarity and a convenient mobilizing platform.

But they cannot replace structural analysis in which domestic class struggle and political factionalism within and between the secret services is salient. Both Georgescu’s shocking rise and dramatic fall are symptoms of a society in which secret services have too much power. Nicușor Dan’s victory ensured this will not change.

Florin Poenaru is a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Bucharest. His work revolves around class, post-socialism, and the global history of Eastern Europe. Poenaru is a founding member of LeftEast, co-editor of CriticAtac, and has monitored over a dozen elections across Europe and Asia. His latest book is Locuri comune: clasă, anti-comunism, stânga, Tact, 2017. Photos by Vincent Bevins3

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“When I saw it, I stopped and cried by the side of the road,” said Raffi, 20, a university student and fellow gig worker. He was resting between shifts, idly scrolling Instagram, he told me, when he saw the video of what happened to Affan. “Maybe he became an online motorcycle taxi driver, like my older brother, because he couldn’t find decent work, which is a consequence of government policies that don’t favor the people.” That night, August 28, Raffi decided to join the protests.

After Affan Kurniawan’s death, a set of small, loosely coordinated demonstrations against bonuses for Congresspersons and immiseration for workers swelled into a much larger and even more diverse movement. Affan’s death provided the spark that ignited a powder keg. In the days that followed, protests erupted across more than 100 locations in 36 of Indonesia’s 38 provinces. In the city of Makassar, Sulawesi, a city council building burned to the ground, and three civil servants died inside.

Thus the Indonesian protests of August and September – the largest in the country since the end of the Suharto dictatorship in 1998 – followed the same script as many unexpected explosive mobilizations in the era of social media. A visible act of state repression or police brutality transforms a small movement into something much larger and qualitatively different. Unpredictable mass protests shaped much of the history of the 2010s, and have rocked places like Nepal, Kenya, Madagascar, Serbia, and Morocco over the last few months.

In Indonesia, had that powder keg been primed by months, or even years, of simmering public anger? Or was it called into being much more quickly, by a spectacular and shocking death that took place amid elite in-fighting and tone-deaf politicians badly failing to read the national mood? Participants in the protests, scholars and activists say that to understand the events of the last few months, it is important to understand the state of Indonesian politics well before October 24, 2024 – the date that Prabowo Subianto, the son-in-law of former dictator Suharto, took office as president. More difficult to answer is the question of how the movement has changed the country.

Unlike in Nepal or Madagascar, where rapid-fire increases in protest intensity led to the removal of the executive, the Indonesian demonstrations did not lead to structural change. Prabowo survived, simply reshuffling his cabinet in ways that serve his interests well, and the government arrested more than 6,000 protesters. Meanwhile, a new generation is energized and eager to pressure the government from below, and is desperately looking around for the tools to do so.

The dictatorship that began with the 1965-1966 mass murder of approximately one million leftists and citizens accused of being leftists ended with the 1998 “Reformasi” uprising. Indonesia became a democracy, though it remained a poor country with a powerful military. Then, in 2014, the election of former furniture dealer Joko “Jokowi” Widodo electrified progressives and democrats. As the first president since Suharto’s downfall who came from outside the pre-existing political or military elite, he was hailed as the “true son of Reformasi.”

Soon, it became clear that he was constrained by the power of the old elites; or, at least, that he was willing to make peace with them when it served his interests. While in power, he enjoyed solid approval ratings, and Indonesia experienced modest growth. But the shape of the society remained the same; and just as it had for centuries, economic expansion depended upon the extraction and export of raw materials and low wages for Indonesian workers.

After Jokowi’s easy re-election in 2019, students and citizens protested a package of laws they said fostered corruption and curtailed individual liberties. One month later, he shocked his base by appointing Prabowo Subianto, his longtime rival, as defense minister. Prabowo has been widely accused of crimes against humanity, committed both against the people of East Timor and the students pushing for “Reformasi.” But wider support for his government remained solid to the end, even as Jokowi engineered a shocking legal change that allowed his son, Gibran Rakabuming Raka, to run as Prabowo’s vice-presidential candidate in 2024. Tens of thousands protested, but it worked. With the two dynasties united, Prabowo had a clear path to power.

After the transition to democracy it became legal, at least on paper, to organize the citizenry and pressure the state from below. But after 30 years of scorched-earth policies, Indonesia is bereft of any significant left-wing political force. None survived the dictatorship, and efforts to launch a new Labor Party have been complicated by a difficult political environment. It has usually fallen to foreign-backed liberal NGOs, weak unions, and loose student confederations to push back against elites.

To secure the votes to win the 2024 election, Prabowo relied on a savvy social media campaign that portrayed Prabowo as a “cuddly grandpa,” rather than a ruthless general who married into the family of one of the most murderous dictators of the 20^th century. Something very similar had happened two years earlier in the Philippines, when TikTok influencers were enlisted to launder the reputation of Bongbong, the son of dictator Ferdinand Marcos, so he could be elected president (with self-interested support from the new dynasty in that country, the Duterte clan).

But Prabowo has not governed with cute memes: His growth strategy has relied on budget cuts and capital-intensive commodities, leaving workers jobless or forcing them to flee to the informal sector. In February, anti-austerity protests with the slogan “Indonesia Gelap” – that is, Dark Indonesia – erupted across the country. Prabowo brushed off the demonstrations: “Indonesia is bright. You are the dark one!” This further enraged protesters. But Prabowo, a popular elected leader with solid support in the police and the military, faced no organized force capable of challenging institutional power.

In early August, residents of Pati, Central Java, began planning a street protest against a rapid hike in property taxes. In response, the local regent said: “Who wants to protest? Go ahead. Don’t stop at 5,000, bring 50,000 people if you like.” This was a mistake.

Farmers, fishermen, and other locals came out in force. Without help from established NGOs or student groups, an estimated 100,000 protesters forced the government to revoke the tax hike and investigate the local regent. One banner hoisted high over Pati went viral: “Pati: Where the Revolution Begins.”

Later that month, the government confirmed the approval of a new housing allowance for members of Parliament. They would each receive 50 million rupiah, or about $3,000 per month. The minimum wage in Indonesia is two million ($129) per month. Messages spread on social media and WhatsApp urging people to take to the streets on August 25. But it was not just established organizations that thought some of these calls were suspicious – they had no clear origin, and they called for the abolition of the House of Representatives. In the context of the Indonesian system, weakening the legislature would only make Prabowo stronger.

Citizens did pour into the streets, even if they felt that elites may have been trying to control events for their own benefit. Among them was filmmaker Adhito “Dhito” Harinugroho, a veteran of Reformasi-era protests, who immediately felt that something was off. First, there were no clear or unified demands. Second, the traffic appeared to have been deliberately engineered to funnel crowds into specific areas—where clashes later broke out, allegedly involving paid agents provocateurs. But as limited and strange as this opportunity was, he found earnest citizens using it to direct frustration at the government and police. “We were all angry,” he told me. “If the government is afraid of elite manipulation, then they shouldn’t be passing bizarre laws in the first place. That way, there would be no protests to exploit.”

Demonstrations continued over the next few days, with established organizations adding more concrete demands, until August 28, the day Affan died. That night, gig worker associations gathered outside police headquarters demanding justice, and demonstrations spiraled out of control. The next day, Prabowo broke his silence, urging the public to trust his administration and accusing foreign actors of trying to sow division in the country. This did not work.

Irwansyah, a lecturer in politics at the University of Indonesia who also lived through the days of Reformasi, joined his students in a protest outside police headquarters. Like Dhito, he couldn’t quite understand what was happening. “We were just sitting, waiting for our food order, when suddenly an armored vehicle opened fire on us,” he said. “It was bizarre. What was the point?”

To this day, it remains unclear who was behind calls for the August 25 demonstration. Later, a Tempo magazine investigation revealed that some impetus for the protests may have arisen from power struggles within the government, and that members of the military may have attempted to provoke chaos after August 28.

By August 31, rumors were spreading that the government would impose martial law. On social media, calls emerged urging protesters to disperse, rather than give the government a pretext for such an action. By September 1, the situation had stabilized, with protests continuing at several locations. This time, several banners appeared bearing a new slogan: “17+8 People’s Demands.”

Where did these demands come from? Who had risen to speak for the people? In post-Reformasi (and, post-true-son-of-Reformasi) Indonesia, who attempted to assert leadership of the mass movement?

Turns out it was some Instagram influencers. The day before, as rumors of martial law began to spread, several of them had cobbled together some of the demands circulating on social media and incorporated some of the analysis being offered by major NGOs. As a class, Indonesia’s influencers usually stay out of politics; for breaking their usual silence, they garnered praise. The list spread rapidly, though few on the streets actually knew what it contained. “When I looked closer, even the demand to dismiss the police chief wasn’t there,” Dhito told me. “But that was one of the loudest calls we heard on the ground.” On September 4, the influencers submitted the demands to parliament, and two lawmakers pledged to review them. More than generating any concrete changes, the presentation of their demands led to accusations that the influencers had stolen the spotlight, and given the government an excuse to simply move on.

Everything indicates that many Indonesians have been fired up by the protests. Is there a now a movement to join, or must they wait for another unexpected wave of riots that may or may not have been inadvertently spurred by elite scheming? In Nepal, and Madagascar, it is far from clear that all protesters are glad their explosion grew large and fast enough to bring down governments. Here in Indonesia, were the goals of this protest wave clear?

Irwansyah thinks they were not; the lack of coherent demands, and the lack of clear leadership, led to widespread confusion. But what else was possible?

Olle Törnquist, a professor of political science at the University of Oslo, argues that the victories of 1998 created a web of elite political parties entangled with pre-existing economic relations. Other heroes of that era turned to populist, religious, and ethnically driven shortcuts to mobilize mass support.

Meanwhile, their friends in the NGO sector compete over funding, focus on single issues, and remain focused on Indonesia’s bit cities. “The attempts to build popularly based organisations such as trade unions and parties with roots in different ideas and interests and firm local presence are scattered and weak,” he wrote,” and they “are not very popular among middle class activists and foreign donors.”

The NGOs, the unions, and the student groups all have their own limitations, their own members admit. The NGOs are dependent on donor funding and agendas, and their approach is highly technocratic. Most labor associations focus narrowly on short-term member concerns. This has left protest movements in Indonesia dependent on students. But the universities are making it harder to organize, and leadership is tied to the academic calendar—each new school year brings new leaders, and with them, shifting agendas.

“That’s what makes it hard for students to mobilize today. That’s why Indonesia really needs a strong grassroots movement built by the people themselves,” Attan Zayid Sulthan, the head of the University of Indonesia’s student executive board, told me.

Amalinda Savirani, a professor of politics and governance at Gadjah Mada University in Yogyakarta, said Indonesia already has many small, vocal, citizen-led initiatives addressing local issues across the country. “Numerous initiatives have begun to emerge, even if they may not have formal names — and let’s not forget, grassroots movements like the one in Pati are also beginning to gain momentum,” said the professor, who has written several papers on organizing.

Irwansyah said that these movements need to engage directly with communities, setting up posts in villages to listen to people’s concerns. “This isn’t about ideology or party, but that’s exactly how the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) built such a strong base in the 1960s—by starting from the grassroots. That’s where real strength begins, and today it can be amplified through digital power,” Irwansyah said.

Both Irwansyah and Amalinda remain optimistic. “Since August, the sense of solidarity has definitely grown stronger — especially as the government keeps giving us reasons to be angry,” said Anggita, 20, one of many students who continue to protest. On October 6^th, she spoke to me about that feeling, just outside the Parliament building. “In a way, this anger nurtures the people’s movement.”

A note from the editor: North South Notes has entered an “experimental phase,” in which we pay contributors around the world, to see if we can use this platform to create a global mini-magazine. A little more information is here, but for now: pledges are deeply appreciated, and payments will not be activated unless we can actually go forward with the plan.

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This is a handy guide to the driving forces behind U.S. interventions abroad. First, straightforward economic concerns. Second, geopolitical contcerns and the question of U.S. power. Third, a commitment to a liberal economic system and opposition to socialism.

Now, U.S. officials are also motivated by the commitment to democracy and human rights that is the official justification for everything the state does abroad, and indeed constitutes something like a civic religion in the country. But any serious historical analysis demonstrates that this fourth goal is easily dropped when it gets in the way of the first three. It’s like a bonus that they hope they can get. In a sense they are only pretending to hope for it, but I find they are often pretending to themselves, too.

Then, I was even more impressed by the following statement, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

“It’s clear that the mission is evolving to become more of a regime collapse or regime change operation,” said Ryan Berg, head of the Americas programme.

Emphasis mine. This I think is a crucial way to understand U.S. foreign policy over the last twenty years. Donald Trump is not pursuing regime change in Venezuela. He is pursuing something much worse. It would be enough if Maduro’s government were replaced by a smoking crater, and if the entire northern third of South America became a gaping, horrifying wound, making real governance of the region impossible for a generation. If there are any sane actors in the U.S. government, they know that this is one of the most likely outcomes of military action.

In 2002, the U.S.-backed coup installed Pedro Carmona, President of the Venezuelan Chamber of Commerce. This might have worked; he could have actually governed. This time, the U.S. President is just talking about punishment and elimination. That is a classically Trumpian move: he is revealing dynamics that everyone else had sought to hide.

Now, I believe that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton believed that they were trying to advance the cause of democracy when NATO began bombing Libya in 2011. Somewhere in their heart of hearts, they hoped that somehow the country would become Singapore or Finland after its leader was tortured and murdered on YouTube. There was no plan for this of course, no credible account of how it might happen, but I bet they were rooting for it. We can only speculate. It is, however, incredibly easy to demonstrate that state collapse was an acceptable outcome: they accepted it.

The FT piece notes that Venezuela is not Libya, which it is not. Things would go differently. Every happy state is the same, but every collapsing state collapses in its own way. What is U.S. policy towards Iran? Is it to facilitate transition, or destruction? The upside of pursuing destruction, for contemporary imperialists, is that if you fail to engender collapse, at least you weaken.1

I am not saying that Trump is going to try this in Venezuela. They may kick the tires on the Maduro government and back away. I am not saying they would necessarily succeed. I am saying that the implicit goal of military action is not to create a government; it is to destroy one.

State collapse creates some problems for the United States, of course. It “destabilizes” the region, and accelerates the flows of migrants and drugs that Trump and Rubio say they care about. But it’s pretty easy to see how it helps to advance the three causes listed above. As Ali Kadri has demonstrated, the wholescale destruction of a society pushes down the costs of raw materials and labor. With no sovereign power, there are no barriers to extraction. Desperate people are easier to exploit. And there is no government left to be in alliance with your enemies (like Cuba) or challenge your power.

As a phrase, I think “regime change” gives too much credence to what George W. Bush said he was doing back in 2003. More often, what we are talking about is the pursuit of regime collapse.

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Great, that is helpful. I am right and wrong. I then asked, “Am I going crazy?” The answer is unequivocal. Gemini says: “you're definitely not going crazy!” Thank you! Still, for some reason, I do not trust him.

But then I spent Sunday night in the manner that is my wont, especially if I have consumed any alcohol on Saturday. I watched some half-decent movie, just because the Netflix algorithm offered it to me as suggested entertainment. This was a godsend. God sent it to me. Now, I know that I am not crazy.

The plot of the film, Missing, relies on two pieces of ideological infrastructure for its forward propulsion. First, we all live on the internet. Second, the internet is functional.

It is not much of a spoiler to reveal that in this film, an eighteen-year-old girl searches for her mother, who is missing. The ending doesn’t make any sense, but that’s not the point. The point was to keep you glued to the screen until you get there. Since the protagonist is a teenager, and her mom disappears after traveling to Colombia, she spends a lot of time on the computer. She googles things, she makes contact with a man in Cartagena, she looks through news reports. She is young and smart. She googles a lot of things.

Over and over, during the film, two thoughts occurred to me with simultaneous intensity. 1. That would have worked 2. That would not work today. As she uses the computer to do something, there is a moment of blessed confirmation — yes! The functional internet that I remember was real. And — no! It does not exist anymore. In one scene, she puts several names into the search bar (using quotation marks to indicate exact searches) and finds a court document showing they are the aliases of a convicted conman. If she tried that in 2025, she might find a bunch of sponsored links to services that charge you to access public information, and don’t even work. In another scene, she looks up a specific official in Colombia by his job title — today, she would get an “AI Overview” (I tried) explaining where the position came from, that ends with this phrase: “AI responses may contain mistakes.” I could go on, but you get it. You have tried to use Google recently.

A very brief investigation reveals they wrote the film in 2021. It also reveals that if it is not exactly a sequel, it “takes place in the universe of” Searching (2018). So, perhaps they were using the idea of the internet they had back then, or were working from their own memories. The fact remains — only four years ago, a functional internet was accepted by screenwriters as the baseline reality upon which to construct a story. Nostalgia always entails a distortion of the past, because all memory relies upon a process of discarding what is unimportant or cannot be integrated and endlessly re-remembering what is cherished or cannot be overcome. I don’t really have memories of Google working, because I too accepted its functionality as baseline reality. I have memories of the things I found. Come to think of it, it was Google that initially convinced me that I no longer really need to remember things. It is well understood that two individuals may have wildly differing recollections of what life was like in 1982 in the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic, for example. But I don’t think I was supposed to find a film from 2023 to be so jarring.

In 1998, the founders of Google famously wrote that any search engine powered by advertising revenues would be “inherently biased” and contrary to the interests of the user. Twenty-seven years and approximately $1.9 trillion dollars1 in advertising revenue later, it is clear that the maximization of search engine effectiveness is a distinct goal from the maximization of profits. They don’t need it to be as good as it can be. It stands to reason that they just need to be slightly better than the top competitor for home page of the internet — really, they just need to remain a more cost-effective destination for ad placement than anywhere else.

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Amusingly, a major piece of character development in Missing is that the mother, a hapless Boomer, uses Siri for everything and frequently screws up using technology. Of course Siri, launched in 2011, is just as much “artificial intelligence” as the large language models ChatGPT and Gemini and “Grok,” in that they are all computer programs that you have to address in the second person. In the film, talking to your little computer like it is a person is for babies, while the tech-savvy protagonist fires off keyword searches and efficient little commands. You can do more with ChatGPT than you could with Siri, of course (I have never used Siri), just as you could do more with Siri than you could with Jeeves. But all of these are nifty little computer programs with access to the rest of the internet. To the extent that I find ChatGPT useful right now, it is for searching for things I used to look up on Google — because I try first on Google, and then remember that Google does not work. ChatGPT will almost always get it wrong, but you can correct it (training the program for free) a few times until it comes close.

In the film, the protagonist uses Google Translate to speak to a man in Colombia, quickly typing and reading while on the phone. That is plausible if you know more or less how Spanish is pronounced. These scenes caused no cognitive dissonance for me, because Google Translate still works, because there is no reason to break it. The more useful Translate is, the more time you will spend on the service. In the case of Search, it is precisely the opposite. The movie was pretty good.

I have a big (long) cover story in this month’s edition of The Nation, on Brazil’s much-beloved Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). It is now online, here. It is long.

The nice people at Capitán Swing in Madrid will be publishing the Spanish-language edition of If We Burn on May 19. Here’s the cover:

Back to the MST story. I began working on it in 2023, and it covers a period from roughly 2017 to 2025 in the history of the organization. So I don’t think it matters too much that I am two weeks late in sending this out; it is the kind of thing that you can read whenever you have time (it is long).

I did conceive of the article, in a way, as a follow-up to If We Burn. I will explain that a little bit now, so feel free to stop here if you didn’t read that book. At the end of this post I’m including some links (mostly in Portuguese) for those that want to learn even more about the MST.

My editors cut a couple of paragraphs from the conclusion to If We Burn that discussed the MST in relation to the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL). They were right to do so; it was too much new stuff to introduce too late in the game. The book focuses on actors that change during the decade; those that move from horizontalism to a kind of post-horizontalism, or from a belief that spontaneity and structurelessness are inherently positive to an appreciation of coordination and structure, and so on; we also speak to horizontalists and anarchists who stick to their guns; but the book does not spend a lot of time on the groups (like the MST, or PCdoB, or KPU) that never believed in those types of explosive mass protests in the first place. I figured they weren’t really part of the main story in a book about these revolts; but they were there.

Three things are worth mentioning in this context. First, the MST knew the MPL back from the days of the “Veggiefest” punk shows. In June 2013, the MST told the MPL to negotiate with the government and offered to intermediate. The MST leadership told me that they, obviously, employ protest and direct action to pressure the government, but are wary of unpredictable explosions that can amount to destabilization.1 Secondly, as its members are proud of pointing out, in the dark years of reaction in Brazil (2015 to 2022) it was well-structured groups like the MST that stepped up to oppose Lula’s imprisonment and to provide emergency assistance to starving Brazilians (the piece covers much of this). No apparently spontaneous, digitally coordinated uprising appeared to stop Bolsonaro.2 It was the Workers’ Party, and unions, and social movements, and the rest of civil society, they say, that (barely) constructed an effective frente ampla, a broad-based pro-democratic united front, in 2022.

And third: the MST manages to thread the needle through a number of very tricky dyads. They combine approaches that are sometimes seen as diametrically opposed, resolving apparent contradictions (or, if you like: staring these organizational contradictions squarely in the face, realizing that they cannot simply be wished away).

They have clear leadership, but it is collective; they have a long-term, revolutionary project, but put food on the table for working-class Brazilians every day; they are a mass social movement that reads Lenin; they aim to make decisions through consensus at the local level, but employ democratic centralism on the big questions (Neuri Rossetto told me they employ a “hybrid mode between democratic centralism and decentralization”)3; they have a big, complicated hierarchy, but are relatively porous at the margins; they consider internal discipline to be paramount, but have any easygoing relationship with the rest of civil society; they fought to get Lula elected, but do not fall in line behind governments they support; they are both pragmatic and fiercely anti-imperialist; they organize both vertically and horizontally, etc. I think all of that is interesting, even if we set aside the question of land reform in Brazil (or the relevance of that focus outside the country).

***

More on the MST:

• Movimento Dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (official page)

• Expressão Popular, the MST publishing house

• The Political Organisation of Brazil’s MST - Tricontinental (English)

• A long interview with João Pedro Stédile (2024)

• Brasil de Fato

• Brava Gente, a very long interview with João Pedro Stédile (1999)

• Armazém do Campo shop - Accessories
  

The Young Socialist League meets to discuss its position on a major geopolitical question. Reading If I Had a Hammer, by Maurice Isserman, I came across this remarkable passage:

In his memoirs [Michael] Harrington self-mockingly described a debate on Indochina at the first “plenum” of YSL in 1954.

"What, precisely should we say to the workers in Saigon and Hanoi? Should we advise them to create a new movement which would fight both the French colonialists and the Stalinists within the Viet Minh? Or should they enter into the Viet Minh and contest with Ho Chi Minh for leadership?”

Appropriate questions from the Bolshevik classics were brandished by both sides and in the end, late at night, the YSL resolved that “the Indochinese proletariat should organize independently.”

Whether Harrington was engaged in a bit of self-mockery or not, this was indeed the YSL position: “We must declare that this is a reactionary war on both sides, this war between French imperialism and the Vietminh.” It must be remembered that this was not the late 1950s, when you could pretend that independent Vietnam was split on the direction it should take; nor was it the 1960s, when you had to deal with the politically explosive reality that Vietnamese fighters were killing American soldiers. In 1954, they were using esoteric left-wing theorizations to draw moral equivalency between a national liberation movement and the European colonizer trying to reconquer its territory in Asia. The Vietnamese people had to create a secret third thing if they wanted the support of (this faction of) the US left. As James Miller points out, this was a “sophisticated Marxist variant of conservative Cold War dogmatics.”1

At the beginning of Bullshit Jobs David Graeber briefly introduces what he calls “anti-conspiracy theory,” which I always found to be an intriguing formulation. Anti-conspiracy theory is not the opposite of conspiracy theory; it does not assert that conspiracies do not exist, or that powerful elites do not shape outcomes. It deals with a different way that they can shape outcomes. While a conspiracy theory might posit that a group of actors got together in secret to plan something specific, anti-conspiracy theory claims that powerful forces have made everything impossible except for a small range of outcomes. When problems appear for the rich and powerful, Graeber writes, “the rich and powerful will step in and do something about the matter.” What you end up seeing in the real world, as a result of this dynamic, is whatever can make it through the gauntlet. Maybe elites were hoping for one particular outcome; maybe they don’t care what happens at all, as long as their interests are not threatened. You might also call it negative conspiracy theory, since it deals with the things that do not occur.

So, conspiracies exist. In 1954 the CIA secretly planned a coup d’etat in Guatemala. If you had speculated this was happening at the time you would have been, narrowly speaking, a conspiracy theorist. But when it comes to the position on Vietnam cited above, the “conspiracy theory” explanation might go something like this: the FBI created a domestic version of leftism that did not threaten US geopolitical interests. In addition to being very simplistic, this would just be wrong. The “Shachtmanite” tendency had existed for years, and they believed sincerely in this interpretation of history. What is unique in the United States is not that a little group like this exists; the difference is that these people end up playing a serious role in the history of the national left. Why? Because everything else was destroyed. The very next sentence in If I Had a Hammer is illustrative: “Despite its deeply inbred sectarianism, the YSL began to grow—slowly, to be sure—but that it grew at all made it stand out on the campus Left in the 1950s.”

To complete the story, we do have to return to the world of conspiracy. The groups that made it through the gauntlet were not simply tolerated. In secret, the CIA provided funding to magazines with a left-wing but anti-Soviet orientation, and most of the writers and editors had no idea. And the FBI monitored everyone anyway.

I brought up the quoted passage above with a Brazilian friend, as we compared political vocabularies in North and South America (in Latin America, she said, a left that is geopolitically aligned with the United States government is a contradiction in terms). In addition to the Cold War context, she added, “surely all of this is related to American exceptionalism.” If you are the most powerful society on Earth and believe that God has imbued your nation with unique moral qualities, you might only feel the need to offer support to movements that are more perfect than anything that has ever existed. Objectively speaking, most students in the US in the 1950s could look forward to very comfortable lives if they stayed out of trouble. Why take a risky and morally complicated position? Conversely, there may also be a specifically US American tendency (left, liberal, right and center) to pretend that every foreign movement we do support is flawless. If it were not, how could we be supporting it?