Through the Lens of Ali Kadri: An Anti-Imperialist Analysis of the Western Left Distortions of 'Nuance'
“In the idiom ‘capital drips with blood from ‘head to toe’, blood has literally gone on sale.” - Ali Kadri, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction
There's a continuous process of ritualistic murder happening under capital. The very fact that this ritualistic murder becomes a commodity to be traded on the market, and therefore needed to sustain the life-force of imperial-capital, underscores the fact that the wasting of lives, a term used by Ali Kadri in his book Accumulation of Waste—defined as the premature cutting down of social nature¹—is a foundational principle running through the arterial threads of the capitalist-imperialist order that cannibalizes the life of colonized workers.
The unpaid or altogether diminished wages of women in the Global South—whose labor is extracted and then discarded by capital—along with the hunting and devouring of racialized men in the peripheries and the internal peripheries of the Global North, by the imperial-killing-machine, function as cost-reducing mechanisms that index the value of wasted social nature.¹ The reproduction of capital, in other words, is contingent upon the continuous premature disintegration of life through maximum extraction of surplus labor, below subsistence level wages, housing and food precarity, ecological devastation, and psychic-disintegration–a process that reflects the price indexed de-reproduction of life.
Colonized women—who exist on the edges and within contours of subjugation—reproduce workers who themselves can be readily integrated into the imperial industries of waste. As Kadri argues, “a mother’s concrete labor has been market-mediated into abstract/social labor and does not fall outside the exploitation sphere or the sphere of value relations.” A mother's concrete labor in the peripheral borderlands becomes reified. Moreover, neither the mother nor the child she reproduces exist as a human subject, but are rather transformed into a commodity predetermined by the crushing dictates of capital. The living labor she produces transmutes into dead labor by the accelerated kill-logic of capital.
From the outright asphyxiation of the Global South economies through the genocidal mechanism of sanctions in order to ensure these countries remain in a colonial mode of production²—forced to only export raw materials and locked out of competing in the high-tech industries of the West that would never survive without the plundered resources of the peripheries ripped from the people and offered up for Western consumption—to the immiseration of life in order to diminish value outlays for the social reproduction of society, in capital's libidinal industries of waste surplus value is extracted from the dead bodies of colonized men, women, and children.
The Woman, Life, Freedom Movement and the Mossad funded “peaceful protesters”³—both of which are backed by Washington in the name liberating Iranian women and the people more generally from the “Iranian regime”—are all strategic efforts by the West to break the revolutionary force of labor in the Global South in order to create the conditions for the oppressed to ritualistically self-consume as they themselves are being consumed.
Relatedly, when the veil or hijab is foregrounded as the principal issue by Westernized feminists in Iran and not the genocidal slaughter by US and Israeli bombs of over 170 little girls as they attended school, or the systematic rape of Palestinian women by zionist colonial forces, it exposes the way these ancillary forces of imperial-capital use empty culturalist frames to balkanize and erase the onto-historical threads that weave together the memory of revolutionary struggle in the people. More specifically, when the septic overclass within colonized countries eagerly call upon the child-killing axis to massacre the children of their nation as a kind of sadistic necessary collateral—much like the mass murder of Palestinian children—in order to “save” them from the purported authoritarianism and brutal repression by the racialized men in their population, who themselves are hunted victims of imperialist-patriarchy—it is evident that they've joined forces with the global child-killing machine. In doing so, they actively contribute to the degradation of their own people and to accelerate the wasting of their society; thus, undermining their ability to socially reproduce.
Once the pedophilic-entente has extracted all the surplus value from workers of the Global South and robbed them of the use-value of the commodities that their labor produces, they themselves are transformed into commodities. The cycle of violent extraction repeats in the form of collapsed wages and a further collapse in a collective sense of self. This social dispossession prepares fertile ground for the Iranian henchmen class to be employed in the service of Orientalist propaganda that consents to—or actively justifies—the bombing and leveling of their land and people, and the mass butchering of the population, including the comprador elite themselves. Their dismembered bodies will go on sale on the market, becoming merely another undifferentiated commodity in capital's circulation process.⁴
The imperialist transmogrification of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei from a revered revolutionary religious figure into the very embodiment of Arendt's Totalitarian⁵ patriarchal monstrosity is not accidental. The category is increasingly reserved for colonized people who refuse subjection to imperial humiliation. This framing is directly connected to the indoctrination of Iranian women into the depravity of Western feminist analytics that normalize or justify imperialist violence. Within this logic, even the imperialist massacre of over 170 school girls and their teachers in Minab is worth it in order to free themselves from the menacing “anti-woman regime.”
Women's liberation, moreover, is not articulated as a militant challenge to the inherent patriarchal structure of capitalist-imperialism—embodied in Western militarism—nor as a direct stance against the global cannibal class that literally consumes and kills young women and girls, but instead is reduced to the inalienable right to an OnlyFans account .
Further, this twisted identity-based distortion that fuels the death logic of the capitalist anthropocene—that sees the veil as a symbol of oppression rather than an armour against the insidious seduction of the West—advances its objective of the ontological fragmentation and meteoric de-reproduction of Iranian society. Thus, the anti-revolutionary consciousness of the Iranian parasite class that begs for the return of monarchy and bikinis, therefore, aids in driving up surplus profits for finance capital. Thus, this anti-revolutionary rhetoric that has become so viscerally seared into the consciousness of pro-zionist segments of the population and broader Iranian diasporic community, makes it easier for capital to obscure the true nature of the relations of production with its fiction and inculcate these segments into the neverending loop of their own repression.
There's another sinister aspect to this by imperial feminists who disappear the rape of racialized men and refuse to see it as directly connected to the same capitalist-imperialist network of patriarchal brutality that subjugates and rapes colonized women. Correspondingly, the rape of Palestinian men in Sde Teiman prison by the Isreali death-state has, as Dr. Curry points out, an interlinkage with the logic of phallicism.⁶ In other words, racialized men in Palestine of Iran, or Black men within the confines of the U.S. and Africa, are—similar to colonized women—psycho-sexually consumed by the imperial-patriarchal order and relegated to fetishized targets for murder. Thus, the psychic butcher of the colonized that manifests itself as the so-called Woman, Life, Freedom Movement in Iran calling for U.S intervention to demolish the revolutionary government in Iran, or the demonization of Captain Ibrahim Tràore over Burkina Faso's law against homosexuality, reflects a profound misrecognition of the principal contradiction of imperialism. This framing ignores how the West instrumentalizes such rhetoric to smuggle in their C.I.A. cutouts under the guise of defending LGBTQIA rights. In doing so, these decontextualized narratives actively contribute to colonial slaughter—facilitating the necrophilic wasting of lives in the Global South, which is then reconstituted as a form of liquidity for the transnational elite.
The racial interpellation⁷ of elite segments of the colonized working class into their own mass slaughter signifies the antinomies of being subsumed in Orientalist modes of thinking as a racialized subject. Begging for the return of the Shah and the bombing of your homeland while waving Israeli flags exemplifies the imperialist directive and self-annihilating process they are willing to follow.
Conversely, this ontological dislocation, that is a negative dialectic of self, in turn forecloses any possibility for material liberation. What's more, in understanding that the base of capital is hyperexploitation, ritualistic murder, and psychic depletion through the wasting of social nature, it becomes clear why capital seeks to fetishize the true relations of production through the money-form that operates from a homicidal logic.
Being rooted in an anti-imperialist analysis, therefore, opens the ground for a dialectical understanding of the totality of capital and its various tentacles. A dialectical analysis allows us to understand that, though aspects of the secondary contradiction may be present and play a significant role, they do not supersede the principal contradiction!
We fall into a static, Kantian phenomenological inversion of reality that forestalls the ever-changing dynamism of social movements in connection to the whole, and obscures the deeper understanding that contradiction—the foundation of reality and its life force—must exist for anything to exist.⁸ Co-laterally, contradictions themselves are not “resolved” by focusing on their aspects or antagonisms; rather, contradiction is a movement that negates itself through a higher synthesis, not through the static binaries of agree/disagree that ultimately reinforce idealist modes of thinking.
To make vain arguments against so-called “campism” in the name of “nuance”—a nuance that yearns for the outright evisceration of your people, that justifies the bloodlust of fascism—exposes the Western left's chronic vacillations when it comes to standing in solidarity with the people of the Global South. Furthermore, you can't claim to be “holding two truths at once” while wholesale dismissing the element of contradiction inherent in species-being⁹ and coursing through the veins of history in the anti-imperialist movement; you can't play contortion games with truth.
The fragile ground of solidarity with the people of the peripheries is further compromised by the Western left desperately trying to absolve the imperial locus of any blame for its murderous deluge by repeating the sordid state constructed rhetoric. This includes claims that this is “Netanyahu's war” and that the U.S. has just been dragged into against its will, exposing the duplicity and collaborationist nature of the Western left. It is this duplicitous anti-solidarity that also enables the auto-consumption of people in Palestine, Lebanon, Venezuela, Cuba, Iran, etc. The blood of the people in the Global South, in turn, ends up in capital's circulation matrix in the imperial center where it provides an insulated life of comfort for the Western left so they can perform solidarity with people on the peripheral outskirts while they also consume them.
Conjointly, it seems on the Western left the idea of a “democratic government” is a government that readily allows itself to be toppled by sabotaging pro-West opposition forces. If you dare to protect your revolution and forcefully confront the imperialist gendarme, you're branded a power hungry Stalinist. The Western left’s attempt to delegitimize the revolution of 1979—using the Iranian left as cover for hollow distortion tactics in order to assemble a conveyor belt of lies that paint the Islamic Republic as anti-Marxist mercenaries who killed communists dissidents for not agreeing with their religious ideology—distorts and evades the context surrounding these events, such as the fact that the auxiliary outfit of the U.S backed and armed so-called leftist Mojahefin -e-Khalq were deliberately planted to till the soil of dissent not only against the revolutionary government in Iran but across West Asia as a whole. This vile act of imperial subterfuge, that intentionally decontextualizes the true history of the movement and its internal contradictions, contributes to the mass disillusionment that in turn allows for the social entropy and metabolization of society, transforming it into a renewable source of profit. It is quite telling when the “anticommunist communist left,” to use a term from Michael Parenti, has all the nuance in the world when it comes to upholding color revolutions, but suffers a temporary bout of amnesia when it comes to giving space for nuance in relation to the internal contradictions of Iran.
In order to achieve material liberation that surpasses the realm of identity based metaphysics—a pyrrhic liberation that ends up reinforcing societal fragmentation and the mass de-reproduction and waste of society—we must understand that the liberation of colonized women is contingent upon uprooting the corroding virus of capitalist-imperialism and its structure of patriarchy that cannibalizes racialized people as a whole. Many in the Western left,‘decolonial feminists’, and even some who hold the banner of ‘anti-imperialist feminism’, still elide the fact that to even address these myriad antagonisms, we must, inter alia, break the long arm of imperial terror (which, one would think, would be contingent upon us being alive to even address anything to begin with) that seeks to hemorrhage every ounce of surplus value from the global working class and then obliterate us all.
Being in the ‘camp’ against imperialist slaughter doesn't mean that you don't acknowledge the forces of contradiction that bleed and ebb through a society; it doesn't mean that women's liberation, trans liberation, etc. are pushed outside the temporal zones of the struggle against imperialism.
These haggard platitudes of “listen to Iranian voices” are nothing more than the treacherous scowls of the morally decomposed comprador elite. Understand, therefore, that anyone who claims to be against campism while the imperial death-class massacres people in the Global South in the name of nuance is in the camp of the homicidal death cult that commodifies mass suffering.
As Losurdo reminds us in Class Struggle, being in the camp against imperialism means that when looking at the world through a dialectical lens, you grasp the tension between fighting for the liberation of your people and recognizing all of the painful entanglements and internal contradictions that come with liberation. Despite this nuance, in the end you make the choice to stand in struggle with your people.
Khadija Haynes is a Trinidadian-born Afro-Caribbean woman poet and writer whose life’s work, and ultimate goal, is to help people better understand how their own socioeconomic and psychological problems are directly related to the oppressive nature of this system and not a result of individual shortcomings. As an organizer with the Brooklyn Eviction Defense, Medgar Evers College Coalition, Khadija Haynes’ heart lies in lifting her Brooklyn community and all working-class people out of the repressive conditions capital breeds.
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[1] Social-nature, a term used by Marxist philosopher Ali Kadri to describe the interdependent relationship of how humans interact with the natural world in order to reproduce themselves.
[2] Colonial mode of production, a term used by Lebanese Marxist philosopher Mahdi Amel in his seminal text Arab Marxism and National Liberation to describe how the imperial center of capital strangles Global South countries in order to ensure they remain at the low rungs of the supply chain as slaves of export for the transnational capitalist elite.
[3] The Woman, Life, Freedom Movement is composed of various groups purporting to advocate for the liberation of women in Iran but has actually been revealed to be funded by pro-West Zionist forces seeking regime change in Iran. In January, riots broke out in Iran that were precipitated by so-called peaceful protesters. Though initially grounded in legitimate concerns about the imperialist induced deterioration of the economy, protests were quickly astroturfed by Mossad and C.I.A mercenaries.
[4] In Marx's Grundrisse, he analyzes the movement of capital and the way in which it circulates.
[5] In Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrongly tries to equate the USSR under Stalin with Hitler's regime of genocidal slaughter. Her analysis has also been reworked by postmodernists to brand any revolutionary political movement that seeks to take power as inherently oppressive and Totalitarian.
[6] The theory of phallicism advanced by Dr. Tommy J. Curry states that racialized men are both targets for murder and homoerotically fetishized by capitalist-white hegemony.
[7] Interpellation is a term used by Louis Althusser to examine the way capital hails people and transmutes them into reified subjects that have imbibed capitalist irrationalism as their own thoughts. Thus, the substance of their being has been replaced with the logic of capital as their sole identity.
[8] Against the Kantian thing-in-itself which is absolute and unmoving, the Hegelian understanding foregrounds the continuous movement of contradiction as the very essence of all living things. Hence, through the forces of contradiction, life is always changing, not immutable. See Hegel Science of Logic.
[9] The concept of species being in Marx, originally from Fauerbach, examines the way human beings as a collective are able to shape their reality through their creative production in accordance with nature. The concept also interrogates the way humans are estranged from the products they produce under capital because they do not own them and are thus forced to produce them merely for bare survival; hence, the alienation from their species-being.