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Scratch a Liberal, and a Fascist bleeds�

Preamble:
--Brief but severe, this 1955 essay on colonialism is poetic fury. I try to reserve 5-star ratings for in-depth masterpieces, but exceptions must be made here.
--Césaire identifies 2 root decays of Western Liberalism:
1) The proletariat problem (i.e. capitalist wage labour): since this is already the central critique by the Western Left’s Marxist tradition, Césaire skips this (although a synthesis of both points is crucial, see later). I’ve unpacked Marx’s proletariat problem (concentration of accumulation by capitalists leaves more precarity/dispossession/surplus labour for the masses) here: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1
2) The colonial problem: Césaire’s focus.

The Brilliant:
--I first heard of this work referenced in Vijay Prashad’s masterpiece The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World, in the context of Liberalism and Imperialism being 2 sides of the same coin, and the striking perspective that Nazism is what the Western Allies were doing in their colonies towards coloured peoples, now brought back to Europe.
--The Western Allies portray good vs. evil fighting the Nazis, while at the same time owning outright colonies or practicing settler colonialism (the US still had Jim Crow segregation as well!). Once we unravel the pervasive cognitive dissonance of Western/US exceptionalism, it really should be no surprise that this history of genocide (including “concentration camps�) inspired Hitler. Hitler seemed particularly impressed with the US’s settler colonialism, reflected in his “Lebensraum� (living space) in his Mein Kampf manifesto.
-Hitler's American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law
--Imperialist ideological censorship:
-Vijay Prashad:
-Michael Parenti:

--I would like to quote this essay’s entire 1st quarter, it is that eloquent (the second half drifts off a bit):

“And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific reverse shock: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers around the racks invent, refine, discuss.�

“[…] that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples […]�

“[…] he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.�

“At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.�

The Missing:
--“L¾±²ú±ð°ù²¹±ôâ€�: this term is not used in the essay, and while there is much confusion around the term, I think it’s a useful starting point to represent the contradictions of real-world capitalism:
i) Capitalism in the real-world (as opposed to abstract theories) is not just the markets of goods/services ("societies with markets" pre-existed capitalism), which spread in a cosmopolitan manner and may be associated with some socially-“liberal� outcomes�
ii) Capitalism's peculiar markets conveniently obscured by ideologues are markets for labour/land/money, which buy/sell "fictitious commodities" since humans/nature/purchasing power are not "produced" for market exchange like real commodities. For an intro on how "societies with markets" became capitalism's "market society", see: Talking to My Daughter About the Economy: or, How Capitalism Works—and How It Fails.
iii) Rather than market capitalism vs. state socialism, the capitalist state is crucial in providing the violence to first build these peculiar capitalist markets (violent dispossession to create private real estate, where the dispossessed became dependent on wage labour and market goods, from the Enclosures in England to the triangular global trade where colonial markets fed Western industrialization) and to perpetuate such markets (from “House of Terror� workhouses to enforce wage labour discipline in England to the US Military/Prison Industrial Complex). This colonial loot/wage labour dependency/debt peonage/global inequality is the economic liberalism (liberty for money-power) underbelly of “liberalism�.
…This is how I am equating “liberalism� with the author’s terms “so-called European civilization� and “Western bourgeois society�.
...I am also clearly not confining “capitalism� to individual countries as if nations are all self-made and isolated entities (another convenient abstraction). We must consider the interactions. Global South countries with their arteries wide open for foreign multinational corporations to drain (free market, free trade!) are just as part of the global capitalist system as those who have fed off Global South inputs (directly and indirectly) since their own industrialization (which ironically required anti-free market policies, i.e. state protectionism and strategic long-term planning, not to mention “gunboat diplomacy� destroying free competition). See: Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism
...As Parenti says, these Global South (capitalist) countries “are not poor, they are rich! Only the people are poor�... “they are not under-developed; they are over-exploited!� Colonizers do not go to poor places to loot; they go to rich places... The Global South are not barren places (Global North winters?) destined to be poor, nor do they just need “more capitalism� to “develop�.

--Now, let us start to synthesize the “colonial problem� with the other root decay, the “proletariat problem�: Marxist political economy critique focuses on capitalism’s abstractions + contradictions leading to crises. It is crucial to synthesis this critique with the imperialism of the “colonial problem�: when capitalism busts, fascism is an option for capitalists to:
i) Economically: revive capitalist production via military industrial complex, the safest form of state stimulus because it serves hierarchical domination rather than social needs (too close to socialism).
ii) Socially: scapegoat the crisis on visible minorities (immigrants, Jewish money-power which conveniently scapegoats individuals while fervently protecting the capitalist structures of money-power). It helps that capitalism’s social power (money-power) is so abstract (labyrinthian financial markets/property rights). Also, directly beat down anti-capitalists who have a greater opportunity during crises to capture mainstream attention, as the status quo mirage is temporarily dissipated (capitalist bubble bursts, and capitalists are too pessimistic of future profits to revive production).
--How this is playing out after the 2008 Financial Crisis/Euro crisis (foreshadowing Global Trumpism): And the Weak Suffer What They Must? Europe's Crisis and America's Economic Future
--The book that directly tackles this, which I will review soon: Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

--Césaire post-WWII essay has its roots in theories steaming from the prior great war, WWI. There is Lenin’s 1916 famous essay Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (lesser read is Luxemburg’s 1913 tome The Accumulation of Capital); black pioneer of American scientific sociology W.E.B. Du Bois was also well-positioned to explore the synthesis in his 1915 essay , on how the imperialist “Scramble for Africa� set up WWI (see: Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil).
--To bring the economic side (Marx’s critique of capitalism’s abstractions/contradictions/crises) to today’s time while uncovering the censored Global South, I have to start with the Patnaiks (Global South’s surplus labour, value of money vs. commodity prices, crucial raw materials esp. agricultural cash crops, phases of global capitalism, etc.):
-magnum opus: Capital and Imperialism: Theory, History, and the Present
-accessible: The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry
-The Veins of the South Are Still Open: Debates Around the Imperialism of Our Time
-A Theory of Imperialism
--As for the best from the Global North:
-dive: Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamentals of U.S. World Dominance
-dive: Trade, Development and Foreign Debt

--For histories:
-intro: The Divide: A Brief Guide to Global Inequality and its Solutions
-intro: Washington Bullets: A History of the CIA, Coups, and Assassinations
-dive: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
-dive: Debt: The First 5,000 Years
-dive: Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital