01-18-2025 ~ We used to have “balloon” debates in school: The hot-air balloon is losing height and, to avoid disaster, people must be jettisoned. To avoid this fate, everybody must justify why they should remain on board and their classmates then vote them “on” or “off.”

In reality, the result was determined entirely by one’s popularity. But perhaps this is always the case. In seeking to avoid funding cuts, for example, museums or cultural services are often considered easy targets, since archaeologists and heritage professionals are far less useful than doctors, engineers, or mathematicians. Beyond archaeology itself, cultural heritage has few friends, one might argue.

But I present the argument that far from being the irrelevant or outdated subject some politicians, career advisers, and university leaders might consider it to be, archaeology is essential to the future of humanity and planetary health. This is for three main reasons. First, archaeologists have the capacity to think about and to understand humanity of the past, and to project that insight into the future. Second, archaeologists are uniquely placed to comprehend the many and complex ways in which humans, over time, have related to their environment and environmental and other processes, such as the changing climate, migration, or pandemics. And third, archaeology provides opportunities for everyone to benefit, whether in terms of physical (by undertaking surveys or excavations) or mental health (through social interaction or artifact handling, to address loneliness or anxiety, for example).

York Archaeology’s Archaeology on Prescription project is one example of this: The program enables adults facing various conditions to gain a detailed understanding of life in a specific area of York, and in the process to improve their health and well-being, on top of volunteerism’s generally positive health effects, as demonstrated by a 2024 article.

In my new book, Wicked Problems for Archaeologists, I examine a few creative ways that we can use archaeology to help directly address some of the global challenges that threaten both human and planetary health. The book’s main argument is that as archaeologists we need to stop thinking only about the past and also think about the future. We also need to engage more with policymakers to help them address their challenges and opportunities.

Wicked Problems
Wicked problems emerged from research in the late 1960s to devise ways of using outcomes from the United States’ NASA-funded space program to help resolve urban problems such as crime and poverty. The definition of wicked problems as those that are “complex, intractable, open-ended, and unpredictable” captures both the scale of these problems and the difficulties they entail. We also now have “super-wicked problems” that introduce the additional dimension of time (or the lack of time to be precise). Super-wicked problems are in addition to the original 10 characteristics of wicked problems, defined by Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber:

Time is running out;

There is no central authority, or only a weak authority, to manage the problem; and

The same actors causing the problem are required to help solve it.

Both climate change and environmental pollution are examples of super-wicked problems in which archaeologists have recently become involved, including my own work in the Galápagos and the wider South Pacific region. Social injustice, crime, and conflict are widely used as examples of wicked problems.

Small Wins
I suggest that the only realistic way to achieve success with wicked and super-wicked problems, and ultimately to make a difference, is by adopting a small-wins framework. These small wins (also referred to as small gains or nudges) align well with what universities in the UK refer to as impact, which, for the purposes of the UK’s Research Excellence Framework is defined as, “an effect on, change or benefit to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life, beyond academia.” Small wins have been defined by theorist Karl Weick as, “a series of concrete, complete outcomes of moderate importance [that] builds a pattern that attracts allies and deters opponents.” The strategy of small wins incorporates sound psychology and is sensitive to the pragmatics of policymaking. Examples of small wins include the plastic pollution work in the Galápagos and neighboring coastal South America, and the Archaeology on Prescription project, referred to previously.

But even with small wins, we need to be careful. Wicked problems are deeply entangled with one another, meaning that any solution to one problem may exacerbate other problems elsewhere. Climate change and social injustice are a well-known example of this entanglement.

Promoting Success
Once small wins have been achieved, as archaeologists, we need to tell influential people about the outcomes so that our museums and galleries, local services, and archaeology departments are not threatened with closure by people who fail to understand the significance (or the potential) of the work we do.

For this conversation to happen, we need spokespeople who are good at communicating and have access to data and projects that deserve to be talked about. Archaeology needs influencers, or policy entrepreneurs as they are sometimes referred to. As archaeologists, we have not always been very good at this. It is probably why climate scientists on the IPCC don’t take much notice of us.

Preparing Archaeologists for a Wicked Future
We also need to think about how we manage people, resources, and priorities within our profession and how we prepare students for wicked futures. Management leadership scholar Keith Grint has explained how, across disciplines, academics need to be collaborative and passionate leaders inspiring an even more collaborative and passionate next generation. These, he thinks, are essential qualities for creating structures conducive to successfully addressing wicked problems.

We should also be looking to create (and teach our students to prepare for) some entirely new business models that provide the foundations for success: for example, new board structures that provide opportunities for younger people. Often advisory boards and boards of trustees are composed of older people with more experience. Younger idealists are often not welcome because they lack real-world experience. But for a world of wicked problems, we need to be much more creative. The old ways have not worked, so we need to try some new ones.

The Council for British Archaeology’s Youth Advisory Board is an excellent example of what can be done easily and immediately. And as archaeologists, we must continue to teach students how to find, research, interpret, and conserve the places and the materials from which we create an understanding of the past and its relevance in the present. These skills are fundamental to archaeology. But we need to go further.

To ensure that the relevance of archaeology is widely felt, students also need to learn how to communicate with non-specialists. To engage with wicked problems they must also learn about global challenges, and activism, and think more about the future. We need to produce what Paul Handstedt calls “wicked students.”

By John Schofield

Author Bio: John Schofield is a professor of archaeology at the University of York, United Kingdom, and the author of the new book Wicked Problems for Archaeologists: Heritage as Transformative Practice (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Credit Line: This article was produced by Human Bridges.

Richard D. Wolff

01-17-2025 ~ Societies survive and grow when they successfully navigate their contradictions. Eventually, however, accumulating contradictions overwhelm existing means of navigating them. Then social problems arise that persist or worsen inside such societies because they are unsuccessfully navigated or go unattended. Sometimes, the dominant conscious reaction to such social problems is denial, a refusal to see them. Denial of internal social problems displaces navigating the contradictions that cause them. The resulting social decline, like the set of internal contradictions it reflects, is denied and ignored. Instead, narratives or rhetorics can arise that position such societies as victims of abuse by foreigners. The United States in 2025 illustrates this process: its rhetorics of refusal aim to end its victimization.

In today’s United States, one such rhetoric refuses to allow continued abuse by foreigners “threatening our national security.” This rhetoric blames bad U.S. political leadership for its failure to put America first and thereby make it great again. Another rhetoric demands that “we” refuse to allow “our democracy” to be destroyed by foreign enemies (and their domestic equivalents): people who are said to hate, not understand, or undervalue “our democracy.” Still another rhetoric of refusal sees foreigners “cheating” the United States in trade and migration processes. Most Americans embrace one or more of such rhetorics. Yet, as we propose to show here, such rhetorics are ever less effective.

One reactionary rhetoric, Trump’s, gestures toward former greatness by literally renewing American imperialism. He threatens to retake the Panama Canal, change Canada into the 51st of the United States, conquer Greenland from Denmark, and possibly invade Mexico. All those foreigners are said to threaten national security or else “cheat” the United States. Trump’s typical bloviating aside, this is remarkable expansionism. Such repeated colonialist gestures feed broader notions of making America greater again. 

Colonialism repeatedly helped European capitalism navigate its internal contradictions (temporarily escaping the social problems it caused). Eventually, however, it could no longer do so. After World War II, anti-colonialism limited that escape. The subsequent European neo-colonialisms and the informal colonialism of the American empire had shorter life spans. China and the rest of the BRICS countries are now everywhere closing that escape. Hence the frustrated rage of Trump’s insistence on refusing that ending by deliberately reopening the idea of an escape hatch of colonial expansions. It resembles Netanyahu’s idea (if not yet his violence) in trying to reopen that hatch for Israel by driving Palestinians out of Gaza. United States support for Netanyahu likewise associates the U.S. with colonialist violence in a world overwhelmingly committed to end colonialism and its unwanted legacy.

The United States boasts the world’s strongest military establishment. The dominant rhetoric in the United States casts everything it does as self-defense necessitated by foreign enemies. That justifies the government spending much more on defense than on the few internal social problems that rhetoric even recognizes. Yet the United States lost the wars in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Ukraine, and these countries’ military establishments were far from the world’s strongest. It turns out that the proliferation of nuclear weapons and technical competition among nuclear powers have changed military balances around the world. The United States’ gross underestimates of Russia’s warfare capacities in 2022 illustrate the change very dramatically. They also illustrate that a rhetoric stressing a refusal to be victimized by foreign militaries undercut or displaced sober analyses of a militarily changed world. Now the world observes not only changed global military configurations but also the costly denials of them by U.S. leaders. Political and economic leaders everywhere else are now rethinking their strategies accordingly. Rhetorics of refusal to be victimized can become self-destructive.

Another reason those leaders are redesigning their growth plans follows from the intertwined declines of the U.S. empire and the U.S. capitalist system. What U.S. leaders deny, many foreign leaders have incentives to see, evaluate, and take advantage of. The BRICS members (9) and partners (9), as of January 2025, account for nearly half the world’s population and 41 percent of the world’s GDP (in purchasing power parity terms). Four other nations have been invited and are likely to join in 2025: Vietnam, Turkey, Algeria, and Nigeria. Indonesia just joined as a full BRICS partner adding its roughly 280 million population. In contrast, the G7—the world’s second-largest economic bloc—accounts for about 10 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of its GDP (also in purchasing power parity terms). Moreover, as data from the International Monetary Fund documents, recent years show a widening gap between the annual GDP growth rates of the G7-leading United States and the BRICS-leading China and India.

Across the history of capitalism from its earlier times in England through the American empire’s peak early in the 21st century, most nations focused chiefly on the G7 in strategizing economic growth, debt, trade, investments, currency exchange rates, and balances of payments. Large- and medium-sized enterprises did likewise. Yet over the last 15–20 years, countries and enterprises have faced an altogether new, different global situation. China, India, and the rest of the BRICS countries offer an alternative possible focus. Everyone can now play the two blocs off against one another. Moreover, in this play, the BRICS now hold better, richer cards than the G7. Rhetorics of refusal spin these changes in the world economy as the evil intentions of foreign others—who likely hate democracy. The United States should righteously refuse and thereby frustrate those intentions, they argue. In contrast, far less attention is paid to how internal U.S. social problems both shape and are shaped by a changing global economy.

The changing world economy and the relative decline of the G7 within it have turned U.S. capitalism away from neoliberal globalization toward economic nationalism. Tariffs, trade wars, and “America first” ideological pronouncements are concurrent forms of such turning inward. Another form is the call to bring parts of the outside of the United States inside: Trump’s unsubtle imperialistic threats directed at Canada, Mexico, Denmark, and Panama. Yet another form is the advisory many major U.S. colleges and universities are sending to enrolled students from other countries (over a million last year). It suggests they consider the likelihood of great visa difficulties in completing their degrees amid increasing U.S. government hostility toward foreigners. A reduced foreign student presence will undercut U.S. influence abroad for years to come (much as it fostered that influence in the past). U.S. higher education institutions, already facing serious financial difficulties, will find them deepening as paying foreign students choose other nations for their degrees. “America first” rhetoric risks the self-destruction of the United States’ global position.

Politically, the U.S. strategy since World War II was to contain perceived foreign threats by a combination of “hard” and “soft” power. They would enable the United States to eliminate communism, socialism, and, after the Soviet implosion of 1989, terrorism, wherever possible, overtly or covertly. Hard power would be deployed by the U.S. military via hundreds of foreign military bases surrounding nations perceived to be threatening and via invasions if, when, and where deemed necessary. Hard power also took the form of implicit threats of nuclear warfare (made credible by the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki) and by total U.S. arms race expenditures on nuclear and non-nuclear weapons that no other countries, alone or in groups, could match.

“Soft power” would serve globally to project particular definitions of democracy, civil liberties, higher education, scientific achievement, and popular culture. These definitions were presented as best and most exemplified by what actually existed in the United States. In this way, the United States could be exalted as the global peak of civilized human achievement: a kind of partner discourse to other discourses that denied internal social problems. Enemies could then readily be demonized as inferior.

U.S. soft power was and remains a kind of political advertising. The usual commercial advertiser promotes only everything positive (real or plausible) about his client’s product. Typically, everything negative (real or plausible) is associated by that same advertiser only with his client’s competitor’s product. One might call this “advertising communication.” In the 20th century’s Cold War, U.S. soft power entailed an application of advertising communication where the United States and its supporters, public and private, functioned as both client and advertiser. The United States advertised itself as “democracy” and the USSR as its negative opposite or “dictatorship.” Cold War advertising communication continues today in the slightly changed form of “democracy” versus “authoritarianism.” But like advertising, after too many repetitions its influence lessens.

Unfortunately for the United States, economic problems now besetting its capitalist system—both those caused by accumulated internal contradictions and those caused by its declining position within the world economy—directly undercut its soft power projections. Brandishing tariffs and repeatedly threatening to increase them reflect the need for governmental protection for decreasingly competitive U.S.-based firms. U.S. rhetorics that instead blame foreigners for “cheating” sound increasingly hollow. Deporting millions of immigrants signals an economy no longer strong and growing enough to absorb them productively (what once “made America great” and showed that greatness to the world). U.S. rhetorics denouncing “foreign invasions” of immigrants encounter growing skepticism and even ridicule inside as well as outside the United States.

The gross inequality of wealth and income in the United States and the global exposure of billionaires’ power over government (Musk over Trump, CEOs donating millions of dollars to Trump’s inauguration celebration) replace perceptions of the United States as exceptional in its vast middle class. The record levels of government, corporate, and household debt alongside abundant signs that such indebtedness is worsening do not help project the United States as an economic model. The year 2024’s experience with a dominant U.S. strategy denying social problems while rhetorically stressing the dangers of evil foreign forces suggests it may be approaching exhaustion. The year 2025 may then provide conditions for a profound challenge to that strategy matching the challenges confronting the global position of U.S. capitalism.

By Richard D. Wolff

Author Bio: Richard D. Wolff is professor of economics emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and a visiting professor in the Graduate Program in International Affairs of the New School University, in New York. Wolff’s weekly show, “Economic Update,” is syndicated by more than 100 radio stations and goes to millions via several TV networks and YouTube. His most recent book with Democracy at Work is Understanding Capitalism (2024), which responds to requests from readers of his earlier books: Understanding Socialism and Understanding Marxism.

Source: Independent Media Institute

Credit Line: This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

01-16-2025 ~In early January, most of the major military forces of Iran participated in a large military exercise called Payambar-e Azam (Great Prophet), which started as an annual exercise 19 years ago. These forces included the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the Basij Resistance Force, and took place in the air, on land, and in the sea. The exercises began in Iran’s western Kermanshah province, with the Mirza Kuchak Khan Brigade in the lead. Mirza Kuchak Khan (1880-1921) successfully led the Jangal (forest) Uprising in northern Iran in 1918 against the British and counter-revolutionary Tsarist forces. Then, after a triumph, he created the short-lived Socialist Republic of Gilan in June 1920 (which was eventually overthrown by the Shah’s forces in September 1921). That a brigade of forces in the Islamic Republic is named after this socialist warrior is interesting by itself, but not germane to the fact that these Special Forces are now playing a leading role in what appears to be military exercises for the defense of the Iranian state against a possible attack.

The military exercises began on January 3, 2025, which is the fifth-year anniversary of the assassination by the United States of General Qasem Soleimani, the leader of the IRGC’s Quds Force. The Quds Force is responsible for Iranian military operations outside the boundaries of the country, including building what is called the ‘Axis of Resistance.’ The latter includes various pro-Iranian governments and non-governmental military forces (such as Hezbollah in Lebanon). Soleimani’s assassination was the start of a determined new political and military campaign by the United States, Israel, and their European allies to undermine Iran’s role in West Asia. Punctual strikes by Israel and the United States on Iranian logistical bases in Syria and Iraq weakened Iran’s force posture. Israel’s regular assassinations of IRGC military officers both in Syria and in Iran itself have also had an impact on the leadership of the Iranian military forces. Israel’s assassination of the Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah on September 27, 2024, and the Israeli and U.S.-assisted overthrow of the government of Bashar al-Assad in Syria on December 8, 2024, dented Iran’s strength across the Levant region (from the Turkish border to the Occupied Palestinian Territory) as well as along the plains from southern Syria to the Iranian border. Hezbollah’s new Secretary-General Naim Qassem admitted, “Hezbollah has lost its military supply route through Syria.”

In an interview published in the Financial Times on January 3, 2025, U.S. secretary of state Antony Blinken said that “Iran is not in much of a position to pick a fight with anyone” given the strategic setbacks that it has faced in both Lebanon and Syria. The grand scale of Payambar-e Azam this year is intended to both lift the morale of the Iranian military forces and to send a message to Tel Aviv and Washington that Iran can and will defend itself from any direct attack on Iranian soil.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made a statement on December 14, 2024, that shows how Israel sees the situation regarding Iran: “A year ago, I said we would change the face of the Mideast, and we’re indeed doing so. Syria is not the same Syria. Lebanon is not the same Lebanon. Gaza is not the same Gaza. And the head of the axis, Iran, is not the same Iran; it has also felt the might of our arm.” Netanyahu did not mention Yemen, whose government—led by Ansar Allah—continues to fire missiles at Israel and has shut down Israel’s only Red Sea port at Eilat. Israel and the United States have fired barrages of missiles at Yemen, but—like the Saudis before them—they are finding that the Yemenis are simply not backing down. Netanyahu also did not mention Iraq, where many of the forces close to the Assad government fled, and where the Iraqi militia groups remain intact. On January 5, at the commemoration of the assassination of both Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, who was one of the leaders of Iraq’s Popular Mobilisation forces, Iraq’s Prime Minister Shia’ al-Sudani said that Iraq was prepared to respond to any “potential aggression.” In other words, despite many setbacks to Iran (such as in Lebanon and Syria), the forces against the Western ideas for West Asia (such as in Yemen and Iraq) remain engaged.

Israel continues to bombard the military bases of the Syrian army and of military units close to the Iran IRGC in Syria. Initially, these attacks and the Israeli invasion of Syria beyond the Golan Heights had been welcomed by the new government of Ahmed al-Sharaa (formerly the al-Qaeda leader Abu Mohammed al-Golani), since these attacks weakened Syria’s government of Bashar al-Assad. Now, the contradictions have begun to set in. Al-Sharaa, however much he is a Western, Turkish, and Israeli creation, is nonetheless forced to respond to these continued violations of Syrian sovereignty, which he started to do in a muted manner. He has asked Israel to stop attacking Syria but has also said that Syrian soil will not be used to attack Israel.

In October 2024, Israeli military aircraft violated Iranian airspace and struck two Iranian weapons facilities, one in Parchin and the other in Khojir, both less than an hour’s drive from Tehran. Both facilities are known to be part of Iran’s missile development program. Hitting these hard, as far as Israel is concerned, was a way to damage Iran’s ability to make medium-range and long-range missiles. Israel claimed, as it was expected to, that these were nuclear weapons facilities, but Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi said in response, “Iran is not after nuclear weapons, period.”

On November 11, 2024, Israel’s defense minister Israel Katz had a meeting with his military’s General Staff. After the meeting, he said on X, “Iran is more exposed than ever to strikes on its nuclear facilities. We have the opportunity to achieve our most important goal—to thwart and eliminate the existential threat to the State of Israel.” What Katz has announced publicly is that Israel is ready more aggressively to attack Iran, including launching a barrage of missiles at what it claims are nuclear weapons production sites, but which are, from Iran’s perspective, its research unit for nuclear power, its ballistic missile production lines, and its other weapon production units. This aggressive behavior from Katz comes because of what Israel sees as the weakness of Hamas and Hezbollah, and the lack of any credible forward deterrent from Iran (Israel has been striking Yemen hard to diminish the ability of Ansar Allah to fire its rockets at Israeli targets). The moment Israel feels that Iran has no way to retaliate against Israel, Tel Aviv—either with the United States directly or with U.S. backing—will launch a massive military attack on Iran. This is not a theoretical possibility as far as Iran is concerned, but an existential reality.

At the Payambar-e Azam exercises, Iranian brigadier general Kioumars Heydari said something that is revelatory and true: “Our country’s armed forces, especially the Army’s Ground Forces, will prevent whatever type of encroachment against our Islamic nation’s soil, by relying on national will and integrity.” Heydari’s statement, like that of other military leaders from Iran in recent weeks, suggests that they are anticipating a massive Israeli attack. His statement shows how the Iranian military is building a national consensus to defend their country if the strikes are followed by an attempt to change the government by force. There is a certainty that most of the Iranian population will rally against any infringement of their sovereignty. Even if “Iran is not in a position to pick a fight with anyone,” as U.S. Secretary of State Blinken put it, Iran will not collapse before the combined might of the United States and Israel. Pride in Iranian independence and defiance against a repeat of the coup of 1953 are cemented into the Iranian consciousness. That is the meaning of Heydari’s statement.

Iran, meanwhile, has announced that it is ready for peace talks (almost unreported in the Western press). The Western capitals have not responded.

By Vijay Prashad

Author Bio: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle(with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Source: Globetrotter

01-15-2025 ~ A decade ago, on a road north of Bamako, Mali, the jeep I was driving in had to pull off the road to permit a French military convoy to pass. The convoy was on its way to the main airfield used by the French air force as a part of Operation Serval (2013–2014). It was a long, dusty wait as the trucks went along the road, struggling a little in the mud that had begun to claim the roadway. I waved to some soldiers, just to be polite, but got a firm look from them. I could only imagine what they were thinking, so far from home, so confused about their mandate.

Something about the situation made me think of the cartoon Beau Peep, about a British man who joined the French Foreign Legion that was deployed in northern Africa so that he could escape from his wife Doris. In fact, the character that I remembered was Beau Peep’s commanding officer, Colonel Escargot, who believed that while stuck in the Sahara Desert he was in a conflict with “those warmongers of Switzerland” (January 1986). There was something about Brigadier General Bernard Barrera, who commanded Operation Serval, that reminded me of Colonel Escargot: “What are we doing here,” he seemed to say when he came out in public.

When the convoy had gone by, my friends in the jeep said, “Let’s see how long they last.” It was a worthwhile comment. When there is no good reason for an occupying force to be in a foreign environment, they often depart more silently than they arrive. Besides, troops from the Global North no longer wanted to operate in African and Asian countries when they were not protected by immunity agreements. For instance, the United States military had insisted on a Status-of-Forces agreement with the Iraqi parliament, and when the Iraqis decided not to renew that in 2011, U.S. forces began to leave the country (many remain in a backroom deal). Already, rumors had begun to slip in from northern Mali that French aircraft had struck and killed civilians. When will Les Toubab (the Europeans) leave?

It was in Bamako a decade ago that I first heard the phrase—“France dégage” or “France, Get Out”—in reference to the intervention of French troops. Anyone who was following the situation of the French intervention knew that France had caused the very problem that it had now come to solve: the French-engineered attack by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) on Libya in 2011 had provided air cover for jihadi groups, who then made a dash for Algeria and northern Mali. The problem had been caused by La mêre patrie, as France is often ironically called, the motherland. Even if this claim that France is to blame is often inflated, in this case, it was accurate.

One of my friends in Mali, who always used the phrase “French-backed al-Qaeda,” told me that “French-backed al-Qaeda had captured land that is about the size of France.” This includes the three major Malian cities of Gao, Kidal, and Timbuktu. I had been fascinated by Gao, which had become the cocaine capital of Mali; cocaine from Latin America was being flown there, to be driven across the Sahara, and then taken to Marseille to enter the European market. Under al-Qaeda, the coke stopped moving for a little while, but it appeared that the smugglers quickly made a deal with al-Qaeda’s branch of cigarette smugglers to keep the product on the road. The rhetoric of La mêre patrie was a cruel joke.

None of the explanations by François Hollande, then the president of France, for the continued intervention (la lutte contre le terrorisme, le jihadisme, etc.) made sense. It was even more peculiar to be sitting in the Sahel and reading a story about the release of two French pilots—Bruno Odos and Pascal Fauret—who had flown for NATO in the 1999 destruction of Yugoslavia, had been arrested in the Dominican Republic as part of the Air Cocaine affair, and had then been released through pressure from the French government. There was no higher ground here. Between the French government, the cocaine, cigarette, and human smugglers, and al-Qaeda, they were all slipping for the lowest surface possible.

It was not hard to anticipate the cycles of popular protest that started in Mali, in fact only a few days after the French troops entered the country and then developed across the Sahel from Senegal to Niger. The phrase “France degage” was infectious, but there were other phrases. In Senegal, the movement just said, “Y’en a Marre,” (We are Fed Up). It was out of that wave of protest that the vehicle for popular distress became the military coup led by patriotic officers. There was no other alternative that presented itself. Very quickly, these patriotic coups made decisions that have now become general across the region. The most important framework was to demand that their governments exercise sovereignty not only in terms of forces (get the French military out) but also in terms of economic policy. But first, the French, told to get out in waves:

Mali, February 2022

Burkina Faso, February 2023

Niger, December 2023

Chad, December 2024

Senegal, December 2024

Ivory Coast, December 2024

Add to this the ferociousness of the anti-French attitude now growing in its far-flung Overseas Territories, from New Caledonia’s Front de Libération Nationale Kanake et Socialiste to the angry citizens of Mayotte.

No wonder France’s President Emmanuel Macron behaved like an old colonial officer when he spoke in Paris on January 6, 2025. France, Macron said, had not been forced out of the Sahel but had decided to “reorganize itself.” “France is not in decline in Africa,” he insisted with a churlish hollowness. It is not the French colonial attitude and practice that is to blame, he said, but “a contemporary Pan-Africanism of good quality that uses a sort of postcolonial discourse, while having back-channel support from today’s imperialists.” The rambling from Macron was familiar. This is the imperial master at the podium, saying whatever he wants, claiming Reason as his own and manipulation as his enemy. By “today’s imperialists,” Macron referred to “the interests of Russia or others in Africa,” not even having the guts to name China (for who else would be the “others” that detained Macron?). The keywords were all there: terrorism, disinformation, the West.

Then, Macron said what he had come to say. “Ingratitude is a disease that cannot be transmitted to humans. I say this for all the African rulers who haven’t the courage to wear it in the face of public opinion. None of them would be in a sovereign country today if the French army hadn’t been deployed in this region.” Be grateful. We made you. This is the old colonial attitude that would be familiar to the old French colonial heads Louis Faidherbe (Senegal), Henri Gouraud (Syria), Paul Doumer (Indochina), and Joseph Gallieni (Madagascar), nasty men, all of them.

Ibrahim Traoré of Burkina Faso and Assimi Goïta of Mali were at the inauguration of Ghana’s new president John Mahama. Macron was not there. When Traoré went to the stage to greet Mahama, he was the only one to get a loud applause.

By Vijay Prashad

Author Bio: This article was produced by Globetrotter. Vijay Prashad is an Indian historian, editor, and journalist. He is a writing fellow and chief correspondent at Globetrotter. He is an editor of LeftWord Books and the director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. He has written more than 20 books, including The Darker Nations and The Poorer Nations. His latest books are On Cuba: Reflections on 70 Years of Revolution and Struggle (with Noam Chomsky), Struggle Makes Us Human: Learning from Movements for Socialism, and (also with Noam Chomsky) The Withdrawal: Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, and the Fragility of U.S. Power.

Source: Globetrotter

James K. Boyce – Photo by Matthew Cavanaugh

01-14-2025 ~ Traditional economics virtually ignores war, even though economic triggers directly contribute to conflicts.

“Economic policies have profound effects on the tensions within and between countries — tensions that can lead to war,” renowned progressive economist James K. Boyce remarked to me recently, adding that economics is in part “about plunder … and plunder sometimes morphs into war.”

Given that economic triggers clearly contribute to conflicts, why is war a topic largely neglected by the economics profession?

In the interview that follows, Boyce explains why war is ignored by most economists; dissects the link between economics and war, and more specifically capitalism’s relationship to war and conflict; and discusses the role that economics can play in peacebuilding.

James K. Boyce is professor emeritus of economics and senior fellow of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is the author of Investing in Peace: Aid and Conditionality after Civil Wars and editor of Peace and the Public Purse: Economic Policies for Postwar Statebuilding and Economic Policy for Building Peace: The Lessons of El Salvador. He received the 2024 Global Inequality Research Award and the 2017 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. This interview is based on his seven-part video series released by the Institute for New Economic Thinking in October 2024.

C. J. Polychroniou: War and peace are topics studied by scholars in the fields of political science and international affairs and largely ignored by economists. But in a series of lectures available from the Institute for New Economic Thinking, you argue that economic theory has a lot to offer. So, start by telling us how economics can help us analyze war and peace yet why mainstream economists think that war and peace are not an “economic” problem.

James K. Boyce: Let me start with the second part of your question: why, despite the long history of wars and their terrible consequences for human well-being and economies, this topic is neglected today by most economists.

One basic reason is that rather than starting from observed reality and then trying to make sense of it, orthodox economics starts from theory and then tries to squeeze reality into it. Whatever doesn’t fit is dismissed as “non-economic.” This is what I call the “shrug” response: War is somebody else’s problem.

The other response is to concede that economics may be relevant to the dynamics of war and peace, but then to claim the way to minimize violent conflict is to stick to business-as-usual policy prescriptions focused on efficiency and growth. This is what I call the “smug” response: Economics matters, but there is no need for rethinking.

The videos discuss why, in my view, these responses are inadequate and irresponsible. In truth, economic policies have profound effects on the tensions within and between countries — tensions that can lead to war. They also can affect the success of efforts to build a durable peace. Of course, economics is not the whole story. But neither is it wholly immaterial.

As to how economics can help us to analyze war and peace, one key point is that we must pay attention to not only the size of the economic pie but also how it is sliced. This includes not only vertical inequality, the distribution of wealth and income between rich and poor, as measured for example by the Gini coefficient, but also horizontal inequality, the distribution of wealth and income across lines of ethnicity, region, race and religion that often form the fault lines of conflict.

Carl von Clausewitz’s most famous saying is that war is the continuation of politics by other means. According to his thinking, war occurs as states pursue goals that clash with the goals of other states. What else can economics tell us about why wars occur?

One could also say that politics is the continuation of economics by other means. This is evident once we realize that economics involves more than the textbook fantasy world of perfectly competitive markets with perfectly defined property rights. Economics is also about plunder, the seizure of resources and the control of market choke points. And plunder sometimes morphs into war.

In neoclassical economic theory, plunder is ruled out by assumption: The theory begins an initial distribution of “endowments,” in effect, property rights that fall from the sky. This distribution, together with preferences and technology (likewise typically taken to be exogenous) determines what will be produced and who will consume it. In the real world, however, people devote a lot of time and effort to battles over the control of property, as any lawyer will tell you.

In Marxian economic theory, plunder is seen as having played a crucial role during the “rosy dawn of primitive accumulation” before the industrial era, when fortunes were acquired by theft, enslavement and expropriation. But during the 19th century the engine of wealth accumulation shifted to the appropriation of the surplus value produced by wage labor, and the main axis of conflict became the struggle over the division of output between capital and labor. Yet in practice, conflicts over land, minerals, and other forms of property remain a common feature of economic life even in the advanced industrialized economies, and these conflicts are ubiquitous in many former colonies like the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In addition to struggles over control of resources, we also see constant struggles over control of markets. Monopolies and oligopolies yield profits well above what would prevail in a textbook world of perfect competition. Choke points are especially lucrative in markets for essential commodities like oil and minerals and in key technologies like software and semiconductors.

Both sorts of plunder — via appropriation of resources and control of markets — are ruled out as long as economic theory is based only on free exchanges among consenting adults. Instead, they involve the coercive power of the state, the manipulation and subversion of legal frameworks, and chicanery as well as outright theft. In the words of Woody Guthrie, the great American folksinger, “Some rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.”

Greed is often seen as a cause of war in modern times. But is it because people are greedy or because they are capitalist that conflict and wars occur? Aren’t capitalism and war linked?

Well, yes. Economies and wars are linked, and most people live today in capitalist economies. But wars happened long before capitalism, and it would be naïve to assume that without it wars would disappear. Capitalism is distinctive, however, in that its ideological cheerleaders sometimes extoll greed as a positive virtue. It is hard to imagine the phrase “greed is good” gaining moral traction in other societies. But even under capitalism, calling a person greedy typically is not meant as a compliment.

One of the videos in the series describes a research project on the economics of violent conflict that was launched in the late 1990s by the World Bank. The project aimed to assess the respective roles of greed and grievance as drivers of civil war. Opportunities for the plunder of natural resources were found to be a strong predictor of conflict, and this was seen as evidence that greed is a key cause of war.

Grievance, for which vertical income inequality was taken as a proxy variable, was initially found to be relatively unimportant. But this was partly due to how inequality was conceptualized. For understanding the roots of war, we must look at not only vertical inequality — overall gaps between rich and poor — but also horizontal inequality.

Greed and grievance can feed each other. The greedy behavior of kleptocrats, oligarchs and their cronies leads to grievances among the public, and these provide fertile ground for the rise of rebel leaders who then pursue their own opportunistic, greed-driven agendas. Both greed and grievance are important in the dismal science of war.

What role can economics play in peacebuilding, and what do you see as the main obstacles to investing in peace?

In war-torn societies, economic recovery is crucial in building a durable peace. The prospect of a “peace dividend” — economic benefits after the cessation of hostilities — often serves as an important incentive for warring parties to come to a negotiated settlement that falls short of their ultimate political objectives.

That said, it is not enough simply to rebuild infrastructure and reboot growth. How the economic fruits of recovery are distributed within and between the opposing sides also matters greatly. For external assistance to contribute effectively to peacebuilding, other choices matter greatly, too: whether the aid helps to build a legitimate and effective state or instead has the effect of undermining statebuilding; whether goods and services needed for projects are procured locally or imported from overseas; and what formal and informal conditions are attached to the provision of aid. I discuss these in the videos.

In the last episode, I identify four important obstacles to investing in peace. One is that the commercial and geopolitical aims of aid donors do not necessarily align with the needs of peacebuilding. Second, the internal incentive structures of aid agencies, where the emphasis is on “approval and disbursement,” impedes the careful calibration of aid disbursements as a carrot to advance the peace process. A third obstacle lies in the ideological biases of policymakers, especially economists, who focus on “efficiency” — defined simplistically as a larger economic pie — to the exclusion of other considerations, including how the pie is sliced. The final obstacle is that aid recipients sometimes object to peace conditionality, claiming that it infringes on “national sovereignty,” as if aid otherwise would not have political impacts. These obstacles are not insuperable, but the first step in dealing with them is to face them squarely.

Source: https://truthout.org/articles/theres-much-to-say-about-economics-of-war-but-most-economists-wont-address-it/

This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.

C.J. Polychroniou is a political scientist/political economist, author and journalist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. Currently, his main research interests are in U.S. politics and the political economy of the United States, European economic integration, globalization, climate change and environmental economics, and the deconstruction of neoliberalism’s politico-economic project. He is a columnist for Global Policy Journal and a regular contributor to Truthout. He has published scores of books, including Marxist Perspectives on Imperialism: A Theoretical Analysis; Perspectives and Issues in International Political Economy (ed.); and Socialism: Crisis and Renewal (ed.), and over 1,000 articles which have appeared in a variety of journals, magazines, newspapers and popular news websites. Many of his publications have been translated into a multitude of languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. His latest books are Climate Crisis and the Global Green New Deal: The Political Economy of Saving the Planet (with Noam Chomsky and Robert Pollin as primary authors, 2020); The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic, and the Urgent Need for Radical Change (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2021); Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (2021); Illegitimate Authority: Facing the Challenges of Our Time (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2023); and A Livable Future Is Possible: Confronting the Threats to Our Survival (an anthology of interviews with Noam Chomsky, 2024).

01-13-2025 ~ The world’s richest person seeks a descent into deep political crisis so reactionary forces can prevail again—just as they did in the 1930s.

Elon Musk spent over a quarter million dollars to back Trump and other MAGA Republican candidates in last year’s U.S. elections. He did so not simply because he has a lot to gain from Trump’s presidency, which he does, but also because of his own ideological proclivities.

Musk is a right-wing extremist and not content to limit his meddling to U.S. politics. In fact, he is clearly on a personal mission to advance the cause of the far right across the western world. Hence his foray into European politics.

Ahead of next month’s federal election in Germany, Musk took to his social platform X on December 20 to proclaim that “only the AfD can save Germany” while describing chancellor Olaf Scholz as an “incompetent fool,” urging him in turn to resign, and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier as an “anti-democratic tyrant.” He doubled down a few days later on his full-throated support for the far-right party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), in an op-ed for the prominent German newspaper Die Welt, calling it “the last spark of hope” for the country. He went on to say that AfD “can lead the country into a future where economic prosperity, cultural integrity and technological innovations are not just wishes, but reality.” Incidentally, Musk—like all good imperialist investors—feels that his business investment in Germany gives him the right to make incursions into the country’s political condition.

Not content to limit his meddling to German politics, Musk has tried to stir up division and hatred in British politics by targeting Prime Minister Keir Starmer and top officials. He has accused the government of “releasing convicted pedophiles” and sided with jailed far-right activist Tommy Robinson and Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party though he has called for Farage to be replaced as leader because “he doesn’t have what it takes” to lead the party. Apparently, even Nigel Farage isn’t sufficiently far right enough for Musk.

Europe’s leaders have denounced Musk’s meddling and support for far-right movements, but can they stop him? Musk is using the social media platform to communicate directly with hundreds of millions, bypassing traditional media channels. The billionaire owner of X has more than 200 million followers. Spreading lies and misinformation is easy and fast. MIT researchers have found that fake news spread 10 times faster than real news on social media. And it will become even easier and faster to do so after Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to cancel fact-checking on his social media platforms, a move that Elon Musk lost no time in applauding.

On Thursday, Jan. 9, Musk held a livestream chat on X with AfD leader Alice Weidel that lasted more than an hour. Musk’s purpose for holding this discussion was to show people that Weidel is a very reasonable leader even though her party has been put under observation by Germany’s domestic intelligence agency for suspected extremism. Indeed, a German court found in May 2024 that there is sufficient evidence to designate AfD as a potentially extremist party that poses a threat to democracy and the dignity of certain groups and should therefore be kept under surveillance.

Musk has rejected the claim that AfD is a right-wing extremist party, with the ridiculous argument that it can’t be so since its leader has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka. The fact that AfD is engulfed in racist anti-immigrant hysteria and has vowed to restrict LGBTQ+ rights are no reasons for him to think that it is an extremist right-wing party. Weidel, in turn, used the opportunity afforded to her by Musk to argue that AfD shouldn’t be seen as a neo-Nazi party because it holds libertarian views on the economy (which is music to Musk’s ears as he is all for deregulation and lower taxes for corporations and the rich) and Hitler was a communist. Naturally, Musk agreed with Weidel in the outright lie that Hitler was indeed a communist. And also, with her equally ludicrous and utterly disgusting comment that left groups that support the Palestinian cause are Nazis and antisemites.

In an age of lies and misinformation, the notion that Hitler was a communist stands out as the high point of ideological perversion. Hitler hated communism and socialism and worked toward the annihilation of the communist movement not only in Germany but across Europe. Upon banning all existing political parties and making the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) the only political party in Germany, Hitler had thousands of communists and social democrats arrested and imprisoned. The Dachau concentration camp was constructed initially to hold the Nazis’ chief political enemies—the communists.

With Musk having become the first individual on X to have over 200 million followers, it is not difficult to imagine younger generations start believing that Hitler was a communist. Or in any other lies that Musk spreads, such as that the European Union (EU) tried to stop him from having a conversation with Alice Weidel.

Yet, it is Musk himself who is an enemy of free speech. He casts himself as a champion of free speech but has used his platform to target perceived enemies and to ban free speech. He has even sought to silence his critics with bogus lawsuits. Indeed, as the Guardian aptly put it, “Elon Musk has become the world’s biggest hypocrite on free speech.”

Thanks to Musk’s interference in German politics, there has been an enormous increase on Weidel’s average X posts in the last two weeks, which seems to suggest that Musk’s contributions could translate into more votes for AfD. Far-right parties are making significant strides across Europe. In 2024, the political pendulum in Europe swung even further right as far right parties made huge strides in France, Portugal, Belgium, and Austria while seven EU member states—Croatia, the Czech Republic, Finland, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Slovakia—already have hard-right parties in government.

As far as AfD is concerned, it won a German state election in 2024, making it the first far-right party to do so since 1945. However, Musk would like to see Germany’s far-right party victorious in the snap election set for Feb. 23 after the collapse of chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government.

There can be no denying that Musk “is throwing grenades into Europe’s political mainstream.” The continent needs radical change. The EU has failed on many fronts because of the rule-by-bureaucrats in Brussels. It lacks a unifying vision and the promises of a “social Europe” has given way to neoliberal policies that have been at the core of the creeping ascent of far-right movements and parties in the European political landscape. The surge of the far right and extreme nationalism on the continent have echoes of the 1930s. But Elon Musk is on the wrong side of history. His plan is to see Europe’s descent into a deep political crisis so the reactionary forces can eventually take over—just like they did in the 1930s. The question is: Can he be stopped before it’s too late?

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.

Source: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/elon-musk-fascism-europe

C.J. Polychroniou is a political economist/political scientist who has taught and worked in numerous universities and research centers in Europe and the United States. His latest books are The Precipice: Neoliberalism, the Pandemic and the Urgent Need for Social Change (A collection of interviews with Noam Chomsky; Haymarket Books, 2021), and Economics and the Left: Interviews with Progressive Economists (Verso, 2021).