Klipspringer

By Lev Koufax

alright so some pretty important background to all this is that we're all talking about the fact that bananas, grown in the global south, are available year-round at extremely low prices all around europe and the USA. it's not really about bananas per so--the banana in this discourse is a synechdoche for all the economic benefits of imperialism.

so how are cheap bananas a result of imperialism? first of all i want to tackle a common and v. silly counterargument: 'oh, these ridiculous communists think it's imperialist for produce to be shipped internationally'. nah. believing that this is the communist objection requires believing in a deeply naive view of international traide. this view goes something like 'well, if honduras has lots of bananas, and people in the usa want bananas and are willing to pay for them, surely everyone wins when the usa buys bananas!'.

there are of course two key errors here and they are both packed into 'honduras has lots of bananas'. for a start, although the bananas are grown in honduras, honduras doesn't really 'have' them, because the plantations are mostly owned by chiquita (formerly known as united fruit) dole, del monte, and other multinationals--when they're not, those multinationals will usually purchase the bananas from honduran growers and conduct the export themselves. and wouldn't you know it, it's those intervening middleman steps--export, import, and retail, where the vast majority of money is made off bananas! so in the process of a banana making its way from honduras to a 7/11, usamerican multinationals make money selling the bananas to usamerican importers who make money selling them to usamerican retailers who make money selling them to usamerican customers.

when chiquita sells a banana to be sold in walmart, a magic trick is being performed: a banana is disappearing from honduras, and yet somehow an american company is paying a second american company for it! this is economic imperialism, the usamerican multinational extracting resources from a nation while simultaneously pocketing the value of those resources.

why does the honduran government allow this? if selling bananas is such a bad deal for the nation, why do they continue to export millions of dollars of banans a year? well, obviously, there's the fact that if they didn't, they would face a coup. the united states is more than willing to intervene and cause mass death and war to protect the profits of its multinationals. but the second, more subtle thing keeping honduras bound to this ridiculously unbalanced relationship is the need for dollars. because the US dollar is the global reserve currency, and the de facto currency of international trade, exporting to the USA is a basic necessity for nations like honduras, guatemala, &c. why is the dollar the global reserve currency? because of usamerican military and economic hegemony, of course. imperialism built upon imperialism!

this is unequal exchange, the neoimperialist terms of international trade that make the 'global economy' a tool of siphoning value and resources from the global south to the imperial core. & this is the second flaw to unravel in 'honduras has a lot of bananas' -- honduras only 'has a lot of bananas' because this global economic hegemony has led to vast unsustainable monoculture banana plantations to dominate the agriculture of honduras. it's long-attested how monoculture growth is unsustainable because it destroys soil and leads to easily-wiped-out-by-infection plants.

so, bananas in the USA are cheap because:

the workers that grow them are barely paid, mistreated, prevented from unionizing, and sometimes murdered

the nations in which the bananas are grown accept brutally unfair trade and tariff terms with the USA because they desperately need a supply of US dollars and so have little position to negotiate

shipping is also much cheaper than it should be because sailors are chronically underpaid and often not paid at all or forced to pay to work (!)

bananas are cheap, in conclusion, because they're produced by underpaid and brutalized workers and then imported on extortionate and unfair terms.

so what, should we all give up bananas? no, and it's a sign of total lack of understanding of socialism as a global movement that all the pearl-clutching usamericans have latched onto the scary communists telling them to stop buying bananas. communism does not care about you as a consumer. individual consumptive choices are not a meaningful arena of political action. the socialist position is not "if there was a socialist reovlution in the usa, we would all stop eating bananas like good little boys", but rather, "if there's a socialist revolution in the countries where bananas are grown, then the availability of bananas in the usa is going to drop, and if you want to be an anti-imperialist in the imperial core you have to accept that".

(this is where the second argument i see about this, 'oh what are you catholic you want me to eat dirt like a monk?' reveals itself as a silly fucking solipsistic misunderstanding)

and again, let's note that the case of the banana can very easily be generalised out to coffee, chocolate, sugar, etc, and that it's not about individual consumptive habits, but about global economic systems. if you are donkey fucking kong and you eat 100 bananas a day i don't care and neither does anyone else. it's about trying to illustrate just one tiny mundane way in which economic imperialism makes the lives of people in the global north more convenient and simpler and so of course there is enormous pushback from people who attach moral value to this and therefore feel like the mean commies are personally calling them evil for eating a nutella or whatever which is frankly pretty tiring. Sad!

the set of ships is nonempty and finite

(any reasonable notion of) size induces a total order on the set of equivalence classes of ships of the same size

every nonempty finite total order has a maximum

there exists a ship that is no smaller than any other ship

For example:

Black Americans put forth a simple demand that we, and ideally everybody else, not be executed by armed members of the state without trial. In a word: equality. Liberals can't answer that demand because it is antithetical to their project of maintaining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Instead they give a bunch of shit that nobody asked for which annoys everyone and the right wing of liberalism is able to capitalize on that annoyance to generate a backlash to a demand that was never met.

Instead of dealing with the scourge of killer cops, the democrats kneeled in Kente cloth. This did nothing for Black people and only served to fuel the grievance of white people. Instead of dealing with the effects of redlining, the liberal hegemony got rid of Aunt Jemima. This did nothing for Black people and only served to fuel the grievance of white people. Instead of dismantling white supremacy, the liberals coopted, recuperated, and sheepdogged every movement they could while stoking dissatisfaction and grievance that was then blamed on the "far left"

In essence, the "far left" was blamed for the tactics the liberals used to suppress us.

This pattern can be seen across what are now being attacked by the leadership of the democrat party as "groups"

Whether it be women, queer people, black people, the dreaded "Latinx" (remember that "discourse"?), trans people, disabled people, or any other marginalized group: we asked for equality. Liberals can't answer that demand because it is antithetical to their project of maintaining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Instead they give a bunch of shit that nobody asked for which annoys everyone and the right wing of liberalism is able to capitalize on the annoyance to generate a backlash to a demand that was never met.

As a result, the left wing of capital can convince itself that it needs to move even further right to win because the spectacle of them fighting against the actual left caused them to do stupid shit that nobody liked that was unpopular and they blame on the actual left whereas the right wing of capital can point at the stupid shit that nobody liked as proof that they are being oppressed by the mere existence of the stupid shit that nobody liked.

The ratchet only turns one way.

1. Most important government sites and base resources by Siwolism

2. Documentaries

3. Debunking common myths by Dr. Suzy Kim. Her book*** (most important resource here for beginners) about the North Korean revolution in 1945-50.

4. Atrocity Fab

5. Historical context about Juche (you can also read more about Juche from the works of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un in naenara)

6. Cities in the DPRK

If you are a beginner, you should check these resources out and make it a priority to get a good understanding of the material conditions leading to and after the Korean War, which is the focal point of Korean history.

Most basic things you should aim to get at least a rudimentary understanding of (Suzy Kim's book is a great resource to learn about most of the historical stuff and present stuff can be learned from kcna and other .kp sites):

Japanese occupation of Korea

Korean resistance. Kim Il Sung came from a family of independence fighters and was a guerrilla leader in the struggle against Japanese imperialism.

Events after Korean de facto independence after the surrender of Japan in 1945.

US Army Military Government in Korea (USAMGIK) & the creation of the colony called ROK. And then soon, the creation of Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Events and Outcomes of Korean War.

Adoption of Juche. Reconstruction. How DPRK became a leader among the third world.

UN sanctions and how they led to the Arduous March.

wanted to share a paper I recently read on this (the widespread framing of minority representation in western academia as "justice") which names it as a form of counterinsurgency.

Just Words: How Western Academics Disguise Their Bourgeois Aspirations as “Justice” to Present Capitalist and Colonial Violence as Progressive by lawrence maminta

Although the Student Intifada has unmasked the University as a genocidal landlord that moonlights as a police state under the guise of a credential factory, the call to cite more non-white academics in the name of “justice” ignores the University’s normalized, structural violence against non-white workers. Universities have deployed Zionist vigilantes and state and federal law enforcement agencies against students who have been vocal in their objections to their schools’ investment in U.S. imperialism and complicity in genocide. The University’s recent deployments of extralegal and state violence against its workers echoes Kent State’s and Jackson State’s responses to students who protested the U.S. government’s mass murder of Vietnamese citizens in the 1960s and 1970s. Citational justice whitewashes this historic pattern of state and institutional violence by claiming that the University can be just and equitable if individuals cite more non-white scholars so that these non-white scholars’ class positions improve. It is this legitimizing of the University, a colonial institution rooted in the occupation of indigenous land, which makes citational justice (and other similar initiatives) inadequate, regressive and dangerous.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.