Imperialism by invitation

By Onwubiko Agozino

 

Imperialism by invitation is a common sign of neocolonialism under phantom bourgeois rulers. Maybe the US will invite Africa to come and strike their domestic terrorists too and Americans will not applaud such a foreign intervention at home no matter what for. 

 

If it is the abundant gold deposits in Northwest Nigeria that Trump is greedy for, he does not need to bomb Nigeria to get some for his family. If he wants to buy oil from the South East and Niger Delta, all he needs to do is place orders at fair market prices. There is no need for gangsterism by invitation, Africans are ready to sell their produce to interested buyers, we will not eat the gold nor drink the oil.

 

There is probably more killing of Christians in the US than in Nigeria and there is definitely more kidnapping in the US than in the whole of Africa. Kidnappings per Country 2025 Data pertaining to the number of people kidnapped around the world, sorted by the country in which the kidnapping took place... 

 

There is no example of the defeat of terrorism through militarism. All the armed conflicts in the world tend to be settled through dialogue around a conference table - Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Gaza, Lebanon, South Africa, Sudan, Congo, Sierra Leon, Liberia, Rwanda, Columbia, Northern Ireland, Ukraine, you name it. On the contrary, everywhere the US intervenes militarily, tends to be ruined back to the stone age. 

 

The solution towards silencing the guns, according to AU, is to recognize the militants as legitimate political parties. Let them run for office nonviolently in line with the African philosophy of Ubuntu, and if they win a local government area or a state or country, let them govern without corruption to show that they can govern better than the corrupt politicians and war mongers. 

 

Let there be gender parity is all offices; and let there be ranches where the cattle will be kept and food and water brought to them instead of fighting feudal wars over land at a time that the economy is evolving into an industrial one that depends on knowledge and not on land ownership. Defund the military and invest in education, agriculture, housing, roads, hospitals, technology, sports, arts, and culture.

 

Let the African states that committed genocide against their own citizens apologize to the victimized and offer reparative justice. Let Africans erase the colonial boundaries for a united States of Africa or the Peoples Republic of Africa. Never again should any republic of ants try to swallow the African elephant without facing insecticides. 

 

Donald Trump pardoned those who attacked law makers and law enforcement officers, he has no business bombing fishermen in the Caribbean and African youth - al Shabab - even if some Caribbean or African crooks invited him to do so in order to protect them while they loot the economies. Yes, Africa needs help from friends. What we need to see in Africa are more books and not bombs.

 

Down with imperialism! Down with recolonization! Decolonization Forever! 

 

Dr. Agozino is a Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech.

‘Trump and the Trumpists’

By Biko Agozino

I was invited by editors to respond to WolfgangStreeck’s synthesis of Marxist analysis of Bonapartism with Weberian Status Group pluralism. Although this response was not selected for publication due to a high volume of responses, the publishers offered to pay me for my time and I asked them to donate it to an NGO that works to prevent mass starvation. Below is my response to the essay:

Du Bois and Azikiwe

The essay by Streeck provided an intriguing perspective on the emergence of politicians that he characterized as ‘Trumpists’. However, his critical essay is in need of more thorough conceptual clarifications to address some theoretical inadequacies and empirical untenabilities that threaten the validity of his analysis and the policy efficacy of the implications.

The author uncritically presented a rehash of Marx and Weber to suggest a hegemonic crisis characterized by the ‘death of the center-left’ that created a void to be filled with ‘class, status and party’ in a US supposedly dichotomized between the cities in apparent resentful polar opposition against the hinterlands. From this he concluded that the governmentality of Trumpism is potentially ungovernable and predicted that Trump may be forced to resign before the end of his term.

Streeck nearly ruined his essay from the start with the cyborg premise that ‘strange personalities’ can be identified by the atavistic stigmata of ‘extravagant dress, inflated rhetoric, and show of sexual power’ – gangster rap stereotypes that Trump evidently lacks given that his corporate suit is far from being extravagant, his rhetoric is monosyllabic, and he engaged Marco Rubio in size-of-hand envy.

The joke that the US had lost every foreign war since the defeat in Vietnam risks becoming an iatrogenic war-mongering capable of goading the most powerful military in the world (as if more excuses are needed) into the search for a face-saving winnable war.

Instead of jeering at Americans that they have 11 million illegal immigrants despite their ‘elaborate immigration policies’, Streeck should have asked what fortress Europe could learn from American pragmatism regarding the inevitability of immigration and the need to pursue increased diversity while providing a path to citizenship as part of comprehensive immigration reforms.

On Bonarpatism, Streeck invoked The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Marx to remind us that Trump is not the first figure to come to power and seek to rule as an absolute monarch to the disadvantage of the masses of peasants who supported Bonaparte simply because they liked his ideas. Streeck neglected to inform the readers that Marx did not intend this concrete historical example to be overgeneralized for he counted the instances of Bonapartism on two fingers of one hand. The concrete example was used by Marx to show that sometimes, the infrastructural mode of production is less of a determinant of historic outcomes than the superstructural ideology of his much-abused architectural metaphor.

Of course, Trump is no emperor and even if he wanted to rule the US the way that Bonaparte ruled France, Trump has to get past the Congress with anxious eyes on the 2018 Mid Term elections, past the courts that block his CEO style of orders, past the critical press that reveal scoops to force sacks from the government, and past the energized electorate ready to call his bluff from one ill-advised Executive Order to another dead-on-arrival attempt to replace Obamacare with Donaldon’tcare. Streeck repeated the Orwellian fact that Trump ‘won’ the election but failed to add that he actually lost the popular votes by nearly three million.

If Streeck had looked beyond German Sociology in his search for a suitable theoretical framework for the US, he could have stumbled on the theories of Thatcherism and Authoritarian Populism by Stuart Hall or Intersectionality by Kimberley Crenshaw as a more suitable paradigm for the analysis of the politics of race-class-gender articulation, disarticulation and rearticulation in societies structured in dominance.

Another major weakness in the essay is the uncritical adoption of Weberian Status Group theory to explain the election of Donald Trump despite the fact that every status group was split between the two candidates. The error in Weberian pluralism is that it tends to underestimate the enormous power that is held by the military-industrial ruling elites as C.W. Mills demonstrated in The Power Elite.

Weber traveled to the US to interview German immigrants for his influential book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism but scandalously ended up not noticing that capitalism had more to do with hundreds of years of the enslavement of millions of Africans as Marx, Du Bois, Eric Williams, and C.L.R. James proved.

The pitfalls of nationalist sociological preferences may have marred the essay beyond redemption when Streeck asserted that ‘Trumps seem to emerge easily in countries with a colonial past –‘. He conveniently failed to add Germany to the list of imperialist countries despite the savage plunder by imperialist Germany in Africa, according to Du Bois, Azikiwe, Nkrumah, Fanon, Rodney and Cesaire. Nazism emerged from this track record as the logical conclusion to the Weberian Enlightenment longing for rational modernization without compassion in the administrative quest for domination, according to Zygmunt Bauman.

Streeck erred by concluding that only groups that wanted to use the bathrooms that corresponded with their gender identity were interested in bathroom birther laws. On the contrary, many Americans opposed prejudiced laws that picked on other groups because history teaches that such authoritarianism eventually escalated violence in society to the detriment of all. When they came for the Jews, many said nothing because they were not Jews, then, finally  …

Biko Agozino, Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies, Virginia Tech, author of Counter-Colonial Criminology: A Critique of Imperialist Reason and writer of ‘Trumpism and Authoritarian Populism’ in C-Theory.

Press Release on Black Unemployment

Press Release: African Criminology and Justice Association Policy Proposal on Black Unemployment

The unemployment rate for African Americans (16.7%) has been reported to be at its highest level since 1984.[i] At nearly double the national average (9.1%) or over double the rate for white Americans (8%), the members of the African Criminology and Justice Association, meeting in Washington DC, November 2011, hereby vote to propose feasible policies for the elimination of such a scandalous level of unemployment among African Americans in particular and Africans in general who were always at the receiving end of hardship even in 1984 when unemployment was lower than it is today.

Source: Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2011.

We disagree with the rightwing proposal of Mr. Arthur Laffer, chairman of Laffer Associates, who is co-author, with Stephen Moore, of "Return to Prosperity: How America Can Regain Its Economic Superpower Status" (Threshold, 2010).[ii] In an opinion editorial article published in The Wall Street Journal of September 12, 2011, Mr. Laffer called for the creation of ‘Enterprize Zones’ in the inner cities where a) There should be zero payroll tax on employers employing people who live in the inner city zone; b) The minimum wage legislation would be suspended; c) Building codes in the zone should be audited quickly with the view not to constrain entrepreneurs and union membership requirements should be suspended; and d) Profits from the zone should be taxed at one-third the normal tax rate.

Such a policy of sweat-shop zones in American inner cities would make matters worse by turning our fellow citizens into working poor who would be trapped in unsafe working conditions with less than minimum wages while corporate fat cats would enjoy tax holidays. Mr. Laffer’s ludicrous suggestions would only take African Americans back to the years of share-cropping with all the attendant oppression, exploitation and impunity. There must be a better way for African Americans and indeed for all people of African descent.

First of all, we call on President Obama and all the presidents of African countries to look beyond the Jobs Bill and consider an entrepreneurship bill for African Americans and all Africans. Obama needs to set aside at least $50 billion from the proposed Jobs Bill (estimated at $470b) to be disbursed to unemployed Americans to enable them to set up their own small and medium businesses. The same way that the government gives out huge grants as agricultural subsidies and business start-ups for the richest one per cent, we call on the government to initiate enterprise subsidies for the urban poor. 

We commend the governor of Anambra State in Nigeria, Mr. Peter Obi, for disbursing one hundred million naira to a thousand unemployed youth after their training to help them to be self-employed. We urge him to make this an annual part of the budget and not a one off and to increase the size of the checks given to some to enable them to become medium to large-scale entrepreneurs. Governor Kayode Fayemi of Ekiti State in Nigeria has also implemented a similar grants program worth about fifty million naira while the federal government announced that it has fifty billion naira set aside for similar purposes. 

We condemn the plan of Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich to turn poor inner city school children into janitors and toilet cleaners for their schools in the guise of training them as apprentices on the assumption that poor children have no work ethics even though poor people are the hardest working people.

The entrepreneurship policy we advocate will work as follows: select 1000 unemployed citizens from each state and send them to be trained as apprentices by successful businesses. On completion of the short apprenticeship, award each of them one million dollars to set up their own enterprises. If each of them goes on to employ 100 people, that will be 5,000,000 new jobs every year! Repeat this every year and we will be creating millions of jobs every decade while making sure that the wealth created will stay in our communities to help transform the urban neighborhoods into zones of prosperity. The Hip Hop generation has been telling us that they are not into seeking jobs to work for Massa anymore, they want to be their own bosses and our simple and practical proposal will help to do this quickly and save the economy too. The government already does this to bail out Wall Street, it is time to bail out the street corner too.

We support the current Occupy Movement that is sweeping across the world but we go beyond the call to occupy Wall Street and to occupy cities to call for the occupation of the prison industrial complex. The excessive incarceration of African Americans and other minorities is helping to fuel to job crisis because corporations that rely on prison labor would be unlikely to hire free labor until we end the inhumanity of what Michelle Alexander[iii] aptly dubbed The New Jim Crow and free the captives from the unjust drug wars, decriminalize all drugs and restore the voting rights of all felons.

Across Africa, unemployed youth are increasingly being drawn into violent armed robbery and kidnapping for ransom gangs. We believe that have every African state implement our entrepreneurship policy proposal would result in massive wealth creation and possible reduction of street violence across Africa. Every industrialized country gives out massive grants to spur entrepreneurship while African countries neglect the creative talents that abound in Africa and only call on developed countries to end subsidies to their own entrepreneurs.

With the decriminalization of drugs and the ending of the war against African Americans in the guise of the war on drugs, as we have called for in a previous Press Release, many of the youth who may not get grants to start their own businesses could grow their own marijuana and sell them legally to medical patients and recreational users alike, pay taxes on their sales, create jobs that will pay well and end the ‘homey-cidal’ violence that is associated with the war on drugs. We can rely on education to get our fellow citizens to say no to drugs the same way we do with more dangerous drugs like alcohol and tobacco which kill more people than all the illicit drugs put together.[iv]

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[i] ‘Black unemployment at highest level in 27-years’ Chicago Tribune, September 2, 2011.

[ii] Arthur, Laffer, ‘How to Fight Black Unemployment: The tragedy of the failed stimulus is felt hard in minority communities. There's a better way.’ Wall Street Journal, September 12, 2011.

[iii] Alexander, M. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, New York, New Press, 2010.

[iv] Rieman, J. (1979). The Rich Get Rich and The Poor Get Poorer. New York: Wiley.