Guerrilla History - The Future of Resistance w/ Ali Kadri

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

In this episode of Guerrilla History, Ali Kadri is back for another installment of our new mini-series with him!  This time, a fascinating discussion on The Future of Resistance.  If you missed our previous episode with him, Surplus Populations and the Political Economy of Waste, be sure to check that out!  Also, stay tuned for more installments of this series! Ali Kadri is an esteemed Professor at various institutions around the world, as well as the author of many important books including Arab Development Denied: Dynamics of Accumulation by Wars of Encroachment, The Accumulation of Waste: A Political Economy of Systemic Destruction, and The Unmaking of Arab Socialism.   Help support the show by signing up to our patreon, where you also will get bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory  We also have a (free!) newsletter you can sign up for, and please note that Guerrilla History now is uploading on YouTube as well, so do us a favor, subscribe to the show and share some links from there so we can get helped out in the algorithms!! *As mentioned, you will be able to find Tsars and Commissars: From Rus to Modern Russia on YouTube. Adnan Husain Show on YT and audio podcast and they can support patreon.com/adnanhusain and buymeacoffee.com/adnanhusain

You don't remember Den Ben-Brew? No! The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello and welcome to Gorilla History, the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm one of your co-hosts, Henry Huckimacki, joined as usual by my co-host, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you doing today? I'm doing really well, Henry. It's great to be with you. Absolutely nice to see you as well. Listeners, this is going to be. going to be a continuation of our Ali Kadri series. But before I toss it over to Ali with the opening question, I would like to remind you listeners that you can help support the show and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com forward slash guerrilla history.

That's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with the show by following us on social media. We're on Twitter at Gorilla underscore Pod on Instagram, Gorilla underscore History. and we have a substack, which we periodically send emails through to let you know about what's new in our spheres, which you can find at gorilla history.substack.com. And in all of those cases, guerrilla is with two R's. As I mentioned, we are rejoined by our esteemed guests and dear friend, Professor Ali Kadri. Ali, how are you doing today? Oh, very well, thanks.

Not bad. Nice to see you as always. I know that we just recorded with you yesterday, and the listener, will have heard that conversation a week or two ago at this point. This is a continuation of that mini-series that we're having with you. And the topic for today is the future of resistance. Now, when we're talking about the future of resistance, of course, we're also going to be looking at the past of resistance and the applicability of various

methods and struggles to the situation today and the situations going forward. And in preparation for this conversation, I was thinking about. some of the various modes and groups that use these various modes of resistance against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism in the past, such as arms struggle, national liberation, mass mobilization, civil disobedience, dual power, prefigator of politics, and intellectual and cultural resistance. There's a lot of different ways to resist against capitalism, colonialism, and imperialism. But Ali, in your view, when analyzing how resistance should take place

and what of these methods and lessons from these methods we can draw on to understand what resistance should look like what do you have to say about this? How do you view it? Well, again, at a very

fundamental level, resistance is a question of being. I mean, to resist is to exist in a class society the social product, a very class society. society, either capitalist or non-capitalist, the class, the social product is going to be divided between the lords and the peasants or the capitalist and the proletariat, by the degree of power, the underclass exercises in the polity and in the institutions of politics, given their forms at a very specific times in history. And so the idea is to resist, is to exist, is probably a short phrase that captures the essence of resistance. And there is no class society without resistance.

history is shaped by resistance resistance of all forms either violent forms and non-violent forms and and and and it's resistance is also probably intrinsic to our man's condition of being

at any time probably it's trans-historical or cross-historical because it's like I'm not sure it's a good example but there's the myth of Sisyphus and the gods condemned Sisyphus to rolling a stone up and down the hill and Sisyphus realizes

one day you know that's not the actual myth that's a reinterpretation of the myth, that basically when he sits at the bottom, he has to roll back the rock again every time and again and again as a suit of punishment that he did not deserve. He did not commit any crime. The gods were insane at the time. And then he realizes that, you know, he's being subjected to undo pain and suffering, and there's a limit, there's a threshold that he reaches where he rebels

against the gods and the gods in their moment, at that moment, in the industry interpretation of the myth, feel that they've done unnecessary harm and they sort of, and his resistance pays off and such that the suffering ends. And so any, when a person is subjected to undue and unjust oppression, and when a person thinks about the oppression it becomes a part of his being to resist against oppression that is true of the of the class

as well as a group a small group of people as well as one individual it's true of a class of people as well that resistance is necessary to take things forward. And not only do they take things forward insofar as their own plight for betterment of their living conditions at the moment is they take history forward. Resistance is what shapes history. It is because the underprivileged classes across history, feel the wrath of oppression and the yoke of misery and so on. Their rebellion reshapes the world of politics, the world of international relations.

It reshapes the conditions for the development of the productive forces. and together the changes in the upper sphere of the power structure and the lower sphere of the productive forces cause a change in historical conditions, cause a change in the way people live in their modes of production, in their ways of life rather. And if we go back in history, we see that at any one point, we see that the, at any one point, we see that the rebellions across history, they shaped and they framed the progress, humanity's progress. in different light here and there.

So the point is very simple, actually. I not know I'm running around in circles, rather, but the point is very straightforward, and that is in a class society, where there are people who lack power and who are not going to be deriving their fair share of the social product, the resistance becomes a necessary mode for their existence. Now, things change under capitalism.

When we look at things before capitalism, and I did talk about this last time, it's always about bread and butter for consumption by the community. It is not meant for sale. what we produce is not meant for sale and the preservation of the life of man is very important whether you've had a slave

you don't want the slave to die early if you're you know because these were slaves and peasant societies conserving life life was cut short by natural disasters and diseases conserving life was very important for a higher productivity

or for better cultivate better crops and so on. This changes under capitalism. Under capitalism, man the development of technology takes a new leap

and a very significant leap and the fact of the matter is you know this development of the productive forces necessitates a change in the production relations that are carried out to regenerate the system, and these new production

relations are not about preserving the life of man. They are more about destroying the life of man. It's not necessarily true across the board. it is the life of the relative destruction of the lives of the working classes across the world because as we said last time that there are, that capital presupposes the existence of a surplus population, whereas it's not really a surplus population, it's more of a reserve army of labor, but this reserve army of labor also becomes the object of an of an industry of genocide, whether structural genocide or direct genocide.

Now, so resistance under capitalism really takes questions of degree do matter, but it really takes a very significant swerve, in a sense, in the sense that a better position, a better political position that the working classes enjoy in the political sphere means that they're going to gain more, not more in the quality of life, more in the years of life as well. So resistance under capitalism literally crystallizes in in the idiom, to resist is to exist. And that's what we, this idea to resist is to exist.

It's actually, it appears even in mythology prior to capitalism, I mean, and in the Mesopotamian mythology, the Atrahasis, for instance, which is a flood and the creation myth of the Sumerians and so on. There is a class of angels which is a sort of a lowly class of angels that rebel against their working conditions, they're shaping the rivers and the shaping and they're working the earth, they're toiling the earth and they rebel against the higher ranked angels and The higher-ranked angels sort of create mankind to replace the lowly angels in the work that they're doing on Earth. And, of course, mankind is also rebels, because mankind, it seems, was when mankind was created by the higher-ranked angels, they,

They used the spirit of the rebellious angel from the group that rebelled against the higher angels. They used his body and his spirit to create mankind. So they created mankind from a rebellious spirit. And the minute mankind arrived at Earth, they also started complaining about the work conditions, and they rebelled. And so the gods were very upset and they created the flood. That's one of the stories of the flood and creation and so on. It's called Atrahasis, I think. So rebellion is built into our condition of being as a just like almost as a biological condition.

Now, under capitalism, this impetus to rebel is always, the capital and the institutions of capital are aware of the dangers of rebellions. And they will do the utmost to control ideologically and to infuse the masses with the, with, the ideas of defeat and defeatism and so on. So, if we, and it all depends, it all depends the nature of, and the degree of rebelliousness. It's going to pretty much depend on the power that capital exercises

and primarily the violence of, capital, the war machine of capital. That's the principle, that's the core of capital. That's the kernel of power around which its ideological power and its capacity to create symbols that serve its interests, that ensure it is survivability and its resilience, is accepted by the broad masses. That has to rest not on some fantasy like, I said last time of the logic of capital, the eloquence of capital, that's going to rest principally on the power of imperialism and the war machine of imperialism. And in that sense, what has happened, it's pretty important to, you know, we see that in

the early industrial phase where we've had, and the, and the independence, the wars of independence from colonialism. We've had a working class which was rooted in the national economy. It produced its own food. It worked in national factories, and so whenever it had some solid support background when it needed to go on strike or it needed to rebel. It had the local national indigenous bases to fuel its development in time. What has happened, and this is, of course, since then, and because of the progress of technology

and the displacement from productive activity, capital, capital, monetized productive activity because all the activity of society is in essence productive. But this capital monetized, the idea that we're working for a wage that capital designates in the capital

in the time frame that capital fathoms and that capital designs. This, what has happened is that capital realized that there are

too many unemployed now, too many unemployed and too many people who are not working for a wage in a sense, you know, the decent wage, so we need to do something about that. We cannot let, we cannot be destabilized by the dislocated masses. And that's where capital began to create these, you know, sort of positions and jobs and work activity, monetized work activities whose principal role is not to produce anything, but to stabilize the political structure for capital to ensure its supremacy. Now, so we have a huge sections of the working classes who are living not from the national agriculture and not from the national industry, but from the rents that capital provides to ensure its stability. And that is different from the way things were in the 50s, for instance, when there was a fact. that needed, and workers wanted to go on strike, we saw the unions then would have some partial pay to support the families of workers during strikes because they were not being paid

and they managed the fund to support the strikes and so on. From the national sources, from national sources, this we don't have anymore. We are not producing many countries around the world. many working classes around the world are basically living off or living in situations where the rents, the imperialist rents that stabilize the imperialist relation or the capital relation in the social order

is the principal point, the principal point that is carrying things forward. Let me give you an example. For instance, if we take many countries like Egypt or any indebted country. Now, these indebted countries, many countries in Africa, many countries around the world, they have to service their debt, and to service their debt, they need to borrow. dollars. Now, so you have an inflation rate which is steadied by the fact that the United States and its institutions like the fund and the bank, the international monetary fund and the World Bank and other financial institutions that lend to the developing world would lend

money at a certain point in time, let's say at the end of the month, such that that that country would have enough money to pay the interest on the debt it has borrowed from these institutions. So the debt is growing by the fact that I am indebted and I'm borrowing to service the debt that I borrowed from you. Now, the reason they do this is not the money. The reason they do this is the disciplining of the working class and the suppression of the working class, not the money because they print the money. It's the money can be created at Volarim, at any time, you know, and then and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, the way they like.

So what happens is that the minute a working class in Egypt, let's say, or any other place around the world wishes to Tunisia, you know, many of these indebted countries who live from hand to mouth by the fact that there is a disbursement of a fund at the end of the month that's going to service the debt that they borrowed from the people who have dispersed the funds. What happens then is that you have a working class that is no longer capable of carrying out because the minute I, you know, these financial institutions arrest the disbursements or delay the disbursements, you're going to have inflation going through the roof and you're going to have hunger and you're going to have disastrous conditions at home. So what happens is that what has changed in the conditions of the struggle from way before is that the rents that imperialism injects into these economies creates a rent-dependent working class in the peripheral economy.

and this rent-dependent working class has no longer enough food at home to sustain its struggle in the years to come in the years of rebellion because rebellion is very costly to the working class it's like going on strike

and you need money to support your family while you're on strike you You need to live from day to day. You need to insure an income from day to day. And so when they press a button in the United States to delay the disbursements of fund to service the debts and there is no food at home, no food and other things, necessities, then what you have is a working class that If it decides to rebel, it's going to be starved. So the conditions of the struggle, under this stage of capitalism, the stage of immense indebtedness, are far more severe, harsh than they were before.

that's what we have at at this moment in history and these living circumstances these real material circumstances people are aware of they are aware of the cost of rebellion

the cost of rebellion is pretty much at a huge amount of deaths apart from the starvation Of course, you're going to have the warships coming to you as well, to one point or another. It's not like – and these many countries have become so food-dependent that they won't be able to carry out the struggle. And in many parts of the world, the marchest hit, the hardest hit nations around the world

are the ones with food shortages and food insecurity. The picture now is, as it appears, is as such. And this is an issue in the development of class consciousness, in the development of revolutionary consciousness, that that hasn't yet been paid attention to. Not much attention has been paid to the idea that imperial rents are now a weapon that controls the livelihood of people in the developing world and it controls them to such an extent

that they cannot develop a revolutionary consciousness because the cost of the transition from the condition in which they are into a better condition is way too costly in terms of lights. So the genocide is, potentially everywhere. Whenever people are going to be the massacre, the genocide is there potentially, and people think of that. People know this. People are aware of this, that we import our bread and we need the dollars to import our bread and we're paying interest on us.

And the whole purpose, you remember, now the purpose, why, what I said earlier, now the money I said, it's not important. The idea that the United States and the fund and the bank is going to lend money, they're going to print the money. The money is printed. The issue is not to get the interest

on these debts. In fact, these debts are almost, in their entirety it seems they are unpayable. If you do the math on how much interest they have to pay over how long and how much they growth these countries, to pay back the debts?

The debts are unpaid so what we have is the idea behind lending to control is not meant to as a lucrative

endeavor in itself for imperialism it is meant to suppress and discipline. and disempower the working class, what imperialism gets from the disempowerment and the destruction of working class in power

allows it to generate rents everywhere on the basis of the power that it enjoys. It can get everything free, cheap, at negative prices even. So I'm going to lend it. to Egypt, to make Egypt and keep in Egypt at a poverty level threshold. And I'm going to keep threatening Egypt either with military power or by pushing the button and stopping the disbursements of funds for them to pay their debts because their debts

are huge. In any country, it's not just Egypt, I'm just saying Egypt, you know, probably it's still better off than some other countries in this case. But all of this is not meant to, for the banks, to earn a three or four percent interest on the hundred billion dollars they paid. It is not meant for that reason. Well, of course, they do make that money, but they probably would prefer losing the money if they can demolish the power of the working class.

Their will to resist and their revolutionary consciousness. if they can abort this, because what they get from the power they enjoy if they suppress a country like Egypt over all the African continent and over all the developing world is far more important than the little interest rates that they're going, they're going to get the people, the resources, and all the money that the Comprador collects is going to be funneled to the financial centers of Europe and the United States. So the conditions of the struggle in the financial, in the finance monopoly age, and the conditions to control the working classes by the rents that support unpayable debts is an area is that has been under-researched and so far because we know, as I said earlier,

we know that a revolutionary consciousness and the will to rebel is inbuilt in the human psyche because of the conditions that they live under when they are underprivileged or exploited.

An exploited person will at one point rebel, irrespective of the conditions of rebellion. Now, what they have done is they have

calibrated the conditions of rebellion. They have done, they have actually played out the debts

and the rents that they pay out to support the debt such that certain populations won't become

mass suicidal in their in resisting the wrath of colonialism. So what we have is a new condition that is emerging. In some respects, some authors have said that we have a precarious.

Many of the work conditions, many of the contracts, many of the conditions of work and so on have become more precarious. People don't have steady jobs. They don't have the security and so on. And this is a class, a precarious class, that is far more dangerous than the class that we've had before. But we haven't seen that. We haven't seen the danger of this class to date. In fact, what we've seen is a class that absorbs more of the misery without rebellion and dissolves itself into identity politics and all this sort of divisive topterfuges of capital so we have we are faced with a new condition we don't we know that the system has to change it has to change because it's bringing man and the

environment to a probably a terrible end. It's not like, I'm not being teleological. I'm not saying you know there is a millennialism or eschatological

thing of this nature. The world, the process we live in now is basically a disastrous. It is a process that is

quite more of a death-thro process than anything else many people around the world as I discussed last time are basically living a shorter and more miserable life

under the conditions of capitalism and despite that we are not seeing you know we are not so we haven't seen so what we're seeing is basically the not something that is going to occur in the future i'm saying that the future is going to be terrible but might be or might not be the case the present is terrible the present is is in is in terrible shape and the conditions of the struggle are being aborted by this synergy between actual physical power and violence and the ideological apparatus of capital which keep on producing the ideologies which turn out to be

that reordained capital as a supernatural force, as something which cannot be escaped from, and so on and so forth. And life becomes a sort of adaptation to indigency and disease and all the other environmental and social damages that are occurring at this time. Not, I think that's enough. Yeah, well, I mean, you brought up so many important issues, and there's so many different angles to come back at it for further discussion and clarification. We've covered a lot of ground here. One kind of interesting thing, I mean, it seems to me in some ways you've been suggesting also that, of course, the forms of resistance are patterned by the conditions of possibility, you know, in relation to, you know, the forms and structures of the oppression.

So, you know, under capitalism things definitely, you know, those conditions changed rather dramatically. But, you know, one aspect that you just were talking about in terms of some of the fruitless orientation, that prevents a kind of more effective revolutionary consciousness and has been some of these kind of identitarian sort of orientations rather than grasping some of the geopolitical economic kind of conditions you were highlighting. But it did raise a question from a kind of conceptual, theoretical point of view that I think would be really interesting to hear your analysis and account, and that is about those who have theorized anti-colonial resistance

in ways that didn't necessarily only speak to the class nature of industrial society in the West, but introduced the idea that there was some other specific features that had to be taken into account in colonial settings and situations. And of course, I'm thinking here of somebody like Franz Fanon, whose relevance and, you know, there's been a revived interest in him in some ways, partly because of not just a recent biography and controversies around it, but particularly because of the Gaza situation and a settler colonial national liberation movement. And, you know, it just made me think how you might integrate that into your analysis, because I think even people who are proponents of a phenomenon,

kind of theoretical perspective often forget that he was quite concerned about, you know, national liberation as, you know, the particular conditions of a sort of bourgeois revolution against colonialism. But it's not like, you know, the end point of liberation and that he foresaw some very serious problems already in Wretched of the Earth of the, you know, what he called sort of the pitfalls of national. consciousness and the incorporation within a neo-colonial sort of regime. And so, you know, now that we're kind of facing this situation where genocidal violence in Gaza has, of course, outraged peoples, you know, as some have called the free peoples of the world. I'm paraphrasing one of the resistance videos that appeal to the free peoples of the world. Nonetheless, there hasn't been, and there is a feeling, that there hasn't been effective resistance outside of those fighting, you know, of in Gaza. And so, you know, I was just wondering how you would, given that the costs are so high, you know, like what is the future? And I mean, we recall, we remember, you know, like how many millions in Vietnam?

million and maybe more in Vietnam, you know, fighting, and especially if you include the French period, the anti-colonial resistance against the French, and then the U.S., I mean, maybe we're talking about three million, four million. It's Algeria, of course, again, estimates range from 800,000 to, you know, 1.5 million. I mean, these are incredible costs. And so one could understand, but it seemed that others were, there was a period where there was more of a kind of transnational kind of support and network of solidarity of resistance. And that you have just been describing those conditions that militate against this kind of revolutionary

consciousness, especially on a more global kind of transnational scale. So I'm wondering what thoughts you have about, about whether these are specific conditions that relate to the colonial character, how that relates to the larger geopolitical economic picture. You know, geopolitical economic picture. were raising and what implications does that have for the future of resistance? Yes, I think, well, I mean, the notion that I have in mind is that I've just mentioned that we now, imperialism is making it very costly for us to rebel, extremely costly. they basically pulled the rug from under our feet. We can, in the process of rebellion, we cannot feed ourselves.

And why we cannot feed ourselves, the gunboats of imperialism are going to pound us as well. Okay, this is, you know, it's a dual, it's a double whammy in a sense, you know. So that, the conditions are very hard, but that doesn't, resistance is going to go away. It is impossible to go away. And if we recall, for no. And, you know, if we take, for instance, in the case of Algeria, you mentioned time. If we take the 1830, 30 some when the French came to Algeria, up until 1960 or so, the end of the War of Liberation, this whole period was a period of ethnic cleansing and depopulation. I mean, the French intended to depopulate, and one number, if we go back to 1830 and calculate the number of deaths, it's, you know, some say it's 10 million people.

Now, these are huge numbers. I'm not sure whether the estimates is off by one or two million or something like that, it's still a huge number. I mean, millions are too difficult to conceive of in a sense. So, and when we think about capitalism in itself, it is a structural genocide in action all the time. Relative to the time, always. Relative, because time is qualitative, time is the social and material conditions of that very moment. Relative to the time, things get worse for people. People's lives are far worse relative to the time.

but we can't compare somebody who's living 50 years or 60 years now to somebody who's lived 30 in 1600 or in 1,000 or some AD or something like that because in 1,000 AD there weren't any hospitals that could treat everybody around the world whereas now hospitals are available but people don't have the wherewithal or they're not built and there is no capacity

is going somewhere else to weapons and to destruction rather than building hospitals and people die early so actually the death, the structural genocide is self-inflicted socially inflicted

globally by mankind and sense through under the rule of capital under the rule of this extremely of this social relationship which is

devolze From the commodity that we created at an objective level itself, we created things to sell and these things, they are of use to us, but they're not made because they are of use to us. They are made because somebody wants to make a profit out of them. And because they want to make a profit out of them, this is the value relation. They need to cut costs and they cut costs by basically killing people and killing nature at higher and higher rates. That's what we call the value relation and the theory of value. This is in a nutshell. I did not, I don't think I sacrificed much content in putting it in this way.

So we live in a world that actually functions by something we created, which is that we call the commodity that has to sell. If it doesn't sell, that means value is not expanding. and to sell it must actually be produced by cheapening people and cheapening nature and destroying people and destroying nature. And this is the law of development of capital, this is the law of value. The law of value dictates that all resources must be allocated in a way to make value expand, to make the world more commodities everywhere, and the commodities are significant. of wealth in the money for, and more money everywhere.

The money is the commodity, the commodity is money. Now, what I've said is that the costs of the transition to a better world have been made far worse in the periphery. This is the periphery is where the potential for revolution lies. The center, as I said last time, has a component which is the physical embodiment of capital from the working class, which is not really working class. It's just a physical embodiment of capital that works. It works, but it's not working class. So what capital has done is very smart, in a sense. I'm going to make them depend on me and make them to make their very early death

an industry and create the conditions of, you know, a bulldozer of death rolling through history and through the future. And I'm going to make the conditions of the struggle extremely difficult. And we know that at one point or another, the cultural aspects of resistance are going to emerge. If we look at, if we take a Fanon type of approach, we know that some. somebody who's suffering under a condition of suppression, oppression, exploitation, is going to change the folklore into a folklore of submission from a folklore of submission into a folklore of rebellion. The language is going to change.

The symbols are going to change. They're going to be disgrunted. Gringo go home everywhere or Yankee go home and so on. That's going to be a sort of a common parlance, if you'd like. Now, we come to the way things are and the dialectic of the whole to the part as well, because there is a balance of forces. What I have described so far is capital, imperialism, imperialism is intensified capital, has created a balance of force,

so tilted against the poor man of the periphery, the working man of the periphery, and the working family of the periphery, and the masses of the periphery, so powerful that you have drones flying over and shooting people at will everywhere. It is, you know, I mean, it is a very scary thing when drones...

So you have drones, you have the possibility of famine. And all together, in the process itself, people who are living shorter and more miserable lives. I want to add in another small component here, Ali. One of the things that you had talked about a little while ago, but I think it will also come up again as the conversation goes is this idea of de-industrialization, this idea of preventing industrialization and the concept of sovereignty.

So when we're looking at how resistance is taking place, we also have to analyze the industrial situation, which you described a little bit ago, and then also the importance of sovereignty more generally when it comes to resistance and forms of resistance that take place when sovereignty is in question. So I want to make sure that we like hit those two specific things and devote some time to them with with the intention of like really diving down into industrialization or deindustrialization and re-industrialization and then also the question of sovereignty.

Right. So I was, I got to the point where I said, and you know that if we have a lopsided balance of force, forces, which tilted so much against the masses of the developing world. And this balance of forces is the historical moment. What is the historical moment is the balance of. We need to assess as social scientists. We need to assess this balance of forces. Like I said, we are not in a good situation.

We assessed it. But at the same time, that brings me back to Henry's point, that there are, there is going to be resistance, there's going to be, and sovereignty, the sovereignty of the masses, not simply the sovereignty of nations, but the sovereignty of the masses. Sovereignty is the security of the working class, is the security of the nation in synergy combined. They must be fed and they must have guns. the people's wars have always been about the plow and the gun

and so that hasn't you know you can change that to present utils and tools and also the necessity of the gun as well that still has to be there no one does but at the same time we must understand the dialectic of how

this sovereign resistance of the masses is going to play out. I mean, I cannot win in Gaza if the rest of the world is just displaying second-hand emotions for my misery,

for my condition. There has to be more than just second-hand emotions. There has to be an activity, all sorts of activities. because the genocide in Gaza is basically an intensification of the genocide that is ongoing against all the masses of the world. And it augurs the type of genocides to which humanity will be subjected to if the crisis of capital continues to grow. and it necessarily has to continue to grow. But we have to look at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, at the, what is going to

change that how is that, is it social movements of the parts here and there? Is it different sovereign nation, different masses here and there developing, uh, uh, it's, this is a, a geometric problem. It is a work, it's a practical problem. It's like what is to be done problem that we know of, how to organize a successful revolutionary activity. What is the relationship of the part to the whole? How do we organize all the social movements on a global scale, not only in Russia, but on a global scale in today's conditions? Because, so how do we do the, how was it done there?

It was done through a central authority organizing all the activities at once, a shift in the balance of forces in favor of the revolutionary conditions to develop into something successful. And what we have today is also something of this nature with the rise of China, with a rise on Prachia, with the rise of India, with the rise of Brazil, with the rise of big sovereign nations. that are putting, blockading, and sanctioning the old European world led by the United States now as it is. That's going to change things. There are always pre-rebellions, even under the most difficult conditions. There are always people who are going to rebel. And their rebellions might be to no point at all. There are many failed rebellions in history, which ended up in tragedy.

But for rebellions to be guided through revolutionary theory and revolutionary activity and to lead to something better, we need to have this picture of a better world and appear in the broader a cadre of international relations. And that's what we're experiencing now. So although I know that imperialism has been successful in creating a rent-dependent proletariat in the developing world, whose life is contingent upon the rents

that the United States delivers here and there, but the more important thing is what is happening at the global level. That is going to shift things. The fact that, for instance, China invests real physical capital in Africa is itself a form of struggle. It's building the infrastructure for people to basically support themselves in times of

in times if the masses want to confront imperialist dictates and stand against imperialist expansion, they'll have something to rely on because infrastructure is the basis of all the industrial activity.

It is a pedestal for re-industrialization and re-industrialization and combined with all models of agrarian reform are going to create the basis for the

proletariat in the developing world to, along with the overall ideological retreat of imperialism and its cronies like Zionism with this ideological

retreat and it is retreating. Zionism is definitely retreating. The international working class has, will not forget the visuals of the genocide. This is almost, it is not, it is a, it is a, it is a, it is fascism committing suicide and plain eyesight historically. That's what Zionism is doing in Gaza, although the cost is too high for masses.

Yes, that, well, that's what I was going to say is that, you know, the cost, the concern is that the cost is the destruction of the Palestinian people as the cost, you know, can, will it collapse before, you know, it also take, because these fascistic, as you're pointing, yeah, these fascistic kinds of movements are very destructive, suicidal, they want to take others with them, you know, this is the perversion, you know, of it. So, but this related to a kind of question that I had. And I think you started already to anticipate. You anticipated and started. It sounds like you're suggesting that the sovereign development of China is a major industrial power and the investments it's making through Belt and Road initiatives and, you know,

in the infrastructure in other parts of the global South are creating conditions for, you know, a future resistance that could be opposed to the systemic genocidal characteristics, the structural genocidal characteristics you were describing before. But the acute direct genocide is also of grave concern at the moment. And I wondered if there was, how do you see the ideological kind of, orientation of China's pathway and project here, because I've seen a lot of concern some people defending China very much to say, look, they can't get involved further. They're doing certain things to, you know, support, like, resistance, but they can't, like, directly confront the

entire West. They don't want to. It shouldn't be expected and so on. And others who think there really is no other power that, because as you mentioned, okay, you know, the entire world's working class and political consciousness is now very hostile to the fascistic imperialism of Zionism and, you know, Zio-American imperialism. Like, you know, this is definitely transforming the political consciousness around the world. But, you know, that sovereignty, we don't have conditions where those peoples really have kind of sovereignty as a revolutionary working class, we're still dealing with the era of states and the few states who have managed to maintain and extend their geopolitical and economic sovereignty are not necessarily

taking a very, you know, it's very different from like, say, China getting involved in North Korea, you know, after, you know, and this is China when it was at its weakest. You know, They just had come out of the successive occupations of the fascistic Japanese empire in Manchuria, millions dead, their own civil war to defeat the kind of capitalist nationalists. And, you know, in 1951, you know, 50-51, I mean, the fact that they got involved to help the North Koreans stave off the genocidal, you know, kind of attack on them. I mean, you know, so, but there's, it seems like it's so different now, and I would think that your analysis is that the whole character of, you know, geopolitical economic relations makes it, you know, different. But the acute genocide is also of concern to people. And so there is this discussion and debate happening. I'm wondering what you think about how to really think about the position of China, whether it has ideological, commitment

to an anti-capitalist an anti-imperialist role or it's really focused on that kind of creating those

conditions and sovereignty and that that will itself be the basis of some future resistance in so far as

I mean of course the situation in Gaza is horrific and it has to end immediately

by any means necessary and it's not ending It is not ending because, again, as I said a little earlier, we have not seen people mobilized in activity, all sorts of activities, to arrest the genocide. People in the Arab world, in the Islamic world, who are culturally similar, for instance, who feel a bit of a cultural affinity towards that and are inferiorated. yet we have not seen.

We've never seen a level of social consciousness so low because social consciousness is what translates into practice and social consciousness translated into practice is praxis. And we haven't seen a practice of this sort ever. We haven't seen a condition of interjected desolation against the powers of history and retreat against the power of history and vanquishment

and we've never seen anything like this that there isn't any military struggle anywhere in the Islamic world or in the world altogether

by the proletarians of the world to take effective measures to end the genocide so now but to remember But what must be called genocide is not a passing component, is not an ad hoc component of capital, it is inbuilt into capital, and there is a structural genocide occurring all the time.

And the people who are not rebelling are themselves being genocided by capital through shorter lives and the more miserable lives as the crisis of capital deepens. So this we see all the time, this we see now, right? And that's what we're seeing. Now, this brings us, and then we must have a cold assessment of things, of progress, of where we are in history and the balance of forces. We need to see, are things, who is committing those suicides? Who is the enemy of the people in mass? Zygian imperialism, Europe, America, and Israel, and the colonial state. These are the people who are committing this.

It's not just the Israelis. They have the full support of the cronies, the Comprador, including the Arab and Muslim, Corrador, and essentially the Western Hemisphere, the structure, the political structure of the Western Hemisphere itself, the very modus, a parenthe, the very way it lives, it lives of the destruction of the sun. That's what imperialism is. has a relationship of capital concentrate. And we have, so we need this cold assessment of how things are going to change.

How do we mobilize the masses into who are, we've never seen in the history of mankind. We've never seen a situation as bad as now. And yet many in the West would stand and say, why is China not actually getting involved in, you know, directly in the war to stop the genocide. It's asking, it's basically asking China to commit suicide, rather, because the United States, the whole life of the United States of imperialism is its power standing in the global order, and that power standing is being threatened by China and its allies. And it's, you know, the cohort that's now seems to revolve around China's huge economy and things like, and things of this nature.

And so this is really the objective, make or break condition of how humanity is going to develop. Is this capital relationship that destroyed to make money, which is imperialism, American imperialism, going to to continue? Or do we have a Chinese type of intervention where I'm going to take the labor of my people in China, and I'm going to take the machines that is the sweat and blood of my people in China that I have worked with, and I'm going to transfer it to you in developing Africa and give you a solid ground for you to stand on. It's like giving you a weapon, but not necessarily a Klasnikov anymore. It is a power. plant. That's a different

type. That is a socialist intervention. Because I am giving you capital. I'm giving you things that my people have produced. I'm not printing money in the Federal Reserve and getting things from you and getting your own, your people to die because of the money I'm printing from

the Federal Reserve. That's the difference here. This is, again, this is the cold hard facts. as they develop, this is sort of the arithmetic, the calculus of history, the calculus of what is happening, we are at a position where everything is ready for a rebirth of revolutionary consciousness on a global scale, a rebirth of the sovereignty model based on the sovereignty

of the masses, the security of the working class and the security of the state. And security is not only security by the gun, it is security, it's ideological security. It is to basically protect ourselves from the language and the vocabulary of American imperialism. All together, to throw that out as take the Nobel Prizes, for instance, as a symbol of power of imperialism. Take the peace Nobel Prizes. Obama and now what's his name? Trump is being you know and if you take any Nobel Prize

it is a certificate of somebody who has developed a killing machine because altogether what we have is a killing machine a part in which some disease was treated it is meant to beautify capital such that

it covers the killing the mass killing of the global population the premature genocide of the global population. This is what we heard. There is nothing in imperialism or capitalism that is beautiful. It's all ugly. And it's all built on blood.

And yet, people are incapable of seeing the obvious. So the world is ready with the change of the power structure, the retreat of the power of the United States and Europe, the white man's model, things will change. All right has to choose. I have a very small point that I want to nail you down on here. These are really terrific comments. And the fact that you bring up the rebirth of a sovereignty model here is directly related

to my question insofar as often when we are making analysis of either history, or the contemporary world, we're often just making a critique of the existing system. And resistance certainly is a resistance against the existing system. However, we cannot stop with resistance of being against something. It needs to also be for something. So you've been talking about this sovereignty model, but I also want to just nail you down a bit more on what is a positive, vision of development, society, humanity, that we should be moving towards beyond the current

model in the eventuality that our resistance is successful. Yes. Well, I mean, there is always, I mean, well, what we have is a model that says I'm going to take from people more than I'm going to put back in people. That's what it is. You know, I'm taking things from people and nature. and I'm putting very little back in and people and nature are dying.

And the more people and nature die, the more surplus value I'm going to make. And that surplus value is going to translate into profit because surplus value is a combination of physical things and also the power of people who make those physical physical things.

So it's substance and subject. People like social relations, capital and labor. They're two opposing power that make things and everything in the end is going to depend on the nature of the class struggle and how capital plays out against labor and labor plays out,

plays up against capital. So if the model that we live under is a model of takeout from people more than you put back in people, then what is the model, the easy way out is put back in people what you've taken out of people.

Put back in society what you've taken out of society. So the arithmetic and the equation is very clear, and I'm going to cut the trees, and I'm going to employ people, I'm going to have to pay decent wages and plant back the trees, that sort of thing. Now, that model, we see everywhere it works. Whenever this happens, we see development, we see better lives. We have many socialist experiments where this has happened. We see China, for instance, which has basically pollution. its cities in the way it needed to rise to catch up in order to balance out to not only through a million martyrs in North Korea with the primitive technology and subject itself to the nuclear to the possibility of a nuclear Armageddon of sorts because imperialism thinks seriously of nuclear Armageddon. in many instances, which is very scary. It needed to basically make a leap of a jump from the poor technological conditions it was in, such that it can resist the onslaught of imperialism,

which is not an onslaught which is decided haphazardly. It's an onslaught which is decided by the very mechanics, in our workings of capital. I need to basically invade and colonize in order to make money. And if I gain power, I make money. Right? And we have many models across history and many models of social welfare states, although the social welfare states live off imperialist dividends in the north,

but we can see that when we have a social welfare state, a better functioning, so things are better. So putting back in people, it always works. And so there is no shortage of alternative models. There are many alternative models. But the point is there is the ideological power of zio-imperialism is so strong that people fail to see the obvious. People live in the symbolic world that the power of zio-imperialism has created. It has created the dollar symbol.

The NATO symbols, the Ivy League university symbols, the Nobel symbols, all these symbols, which are, you know, sort of gas-like people into thinking that this is where really science and progress lies. without looking at beneath the structure, beneath the glitch, and seeing the bloodbath that has, you know, that is the ongoing reason for the growth of these symbols. And the rise of China and other sovereign nations is going to dampen and denudate the image. of imperialism and the United States. And then we might have and the conditions for a better world and they're definitely going to be socialist. No matter what type of resistance we have now,

if we have Islamist resistance, which is anti-imperialists, we know by the electrical inversion, if you fight imperialism, which is a fight against private property, that whether they are Islamist or Christians, whatever natural, national, ethnic, or religious color they are, if they are anti-imperious, by dialectical

and virgin, they will become anti-private property because they are fighting private property. And these ideas are going to be promoted and devolved from the very conditions of the struggle. And that's what we're going to see. I am certain of this now. I'm certain too. I mean, I'm looking forward to hearing all of a sudden the had. the hadith that are about how the resources under the ground

belong to the whole Ummah, right? We will start hearing these kinds of things because as you're pointing out that's kind of they existed before yes. Yeah, they existed before. And they will appear again and I'm certain they will and now

it's the time. Now it's the time and so I'm not so pessimistic Although they've created conditions for us to struggle in, which are extremely difficult, and they've actually sapped an aborted the revolutionist. And Western Marxism had much to do with this. Had much to do with this. Because they were the ones who are capable of developing revolutionary theory

and had the leisure time to provide us with revolutionary theory, but instead they've created, they have created what is called, compatible Marxism. That's a great note to end on. I know that we have a few more conversations planned with you, Ali, on some really interesting topics and things that we've touched on today. We'll be talking about the poverty of Western civilization, revolutionary theory, and the model of China and future conversations of this series.

But this was a really important conversation and a really enlightening one. And I really enjoyed it. And particularly at the end, you really got fired up. Bali, and you got me fired up as well. So I hope that you enjoyed this conversation. Professor Ali Kadri was again our guest. Thanks a lot for coming back on. Well, thank you.

I mean, you know, another Gaza is mentioned. It's really too much to, you know, for the psyche, it's too much to handle. One has to get fired up, otherwise one is not normal. I wholeheartedly agree with that. Adnan, can you let the listeners know where they can find your other excellent show. Sure. And I so much appreciate Professor Alicadri's remarks

and appreciated the passion as well. That's wonderful. And yeah, you can get some similar compatible kinds of discussions and episodes on my other program, the Adnan Hussain Show. It's on YouTube and also on podcasts. And I was particularly thinking about a recent episode on the Bandung conference, which I've done and talked about here on guerrilla history. But I had a panel discussion on it just thinking on the 70th anniversary about these questions of sovereignty, development, anti-colonial resistance, and where we are today.

These are the questions everybody's having all the time. And I think we had a great one today. So listeners, excellent. And you can get more of these kinds of things. go to my show for additional episodes and discussions, and you can also support it, patreon.com slash adnan hussein, if you can. Absolutely. I haven't heard the conversation that you had today yet,

Adnan, but by the time this episode comes out, I certainly will have listened to it, and listeners, you should also be tuning into it as well. As for me, you can find me on Twitter at Huck 1995. I also recommend and request you to check out my other program, Tsars and Commissars from Rus to Russia. It's a history of Russia in 25 parts. By the time this episode comes out, we will certainly have episode one. The introduction is episode zero. So episode zero is already up at the time of recording. Episode one will be out

by the time this episode comes out, which will take us from pre-Rus Foundation up through 982 in the foundation of Rus and possibly episode 2 will also be up by the time this episode comes out but you'll just have to check SARS and commissars that's T-S-A-R-S and

commissars on YouTube or your podcast feed to see exactly what episode is out when you're listening to this so that's my plug for that show as for guerrilla history though you can help support us and allow us to continue making episodes like this by going to patreon.com for

slash Gorilla History, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. And you can keep up to date with what Adnan and I are doing, as well as the show, collectively, by following us on social media, Twitter, at Gorilla underscore Pod, Instagram, Gorilla underscore History, and our email, Substack newsletter, gorillahistory.substack.com. And again, in all of those cases,

guerrilla is spelled with two R's. So, with that being said, and until next time, listeners, Solidarity Solidarity Thank you.