by Becca Renk Foster and John Perry

On 1 October 2026, Jeffrey Isaac Jarquin, a 35-year-old Nicaraguan man, was deported from the United States by ICE and, on arrival in Managua, was immediately sent to prison by Nicaraguan authorities. Reports described him as a “torture victim,” a “political prisoner,” and a “prominent figure in the anti-government protests” that occurred in Nicaragua in 2018. The Washington Post, CNN, ABC News, The LA Times, and other outlets covered his story. It featured on Democracy Now, and he received support from the former head of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth.

Not one of the reports, however, investigated Jarquin’s role in those “protests” nor recorded that in November 2018, he was found guilty of various acts of terrorism and sentenced to more than 16 years in prison.

“Tortured” or “torturer”?

Who is Jeffrey Isaac Jarquin, the man corporate media is championing?

In April 2018, protests began in Nicaragua which were part of a U.S.-led and funded coup attempt. Since the protests were ostensibly “student-led,” several universities in Managua were occupied and used as command centers by paid criminals whose financing originated from USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy.

In May 2018, the authorities of Nicaragua’s free National Autonomous University (UNAN) announced that it had been forcefully occupied by outsiders. One of these was Jarquin, known colloquially as El Nene (“The Baby”). Anti-government groups were filmed in the university carrying firearms and using its facilities to make explosives. During the occupation, they fired at vehicles carrying government supporters on a neighboring highway, wounding several (one, Carlos Sanchez, testified from his hospital bed). They also burned down university buildings, including the nursery. Photographic evidence collected afterward showed in detail the destruction of the UNAN and the weapons recovered there.

President Daniel Ortega, speaking on July 19, 2018, described the UNAN and other occupied universities as “torture centers.” The university students’ union later made a detailed denunciation, pointing out that their leader had been left for dead by opposition thugs.

Arrest, conviction and amnesty

Jarquin was soon arrested and in November 2018 was convicted, along with eight others, of damage and destruction of the UNAN facilities, burning down the childcare center, blocking traffic and disturbing public order, robberies with intimidation, using university building 68 to torture people whom they considered infiltrators, and carrying illegal firearms. Although Jarquin was later sentenced to over 16 years in prison, he served only nine months.

In June 2019, Jarquin was released along with 55 other prisoners in a general amnesty for those who committed crimes during the coup attempt. The amnesty, however, was conditional: if released prisoners reoffended, they could be sent back to prison to serve their original sentences.

Asylum seeker

A year later, Jarquin was briefly detained by Nicaraguan police on suspicion of selling drugs. He then seems to have made his way to the U.S. southern border as an undocumented migrant and claimed asylum. In early 2026, U.S. authorities rejected his asylum claim, following which he was subject to a deportation order.

During his time in the U.S., Jarquin advertised his services helping Nicaraguans obtain legal residency and political asylum as well as selling Nicaraguan passports, which he bragged about publicly on X (see photo). On February 13, 2026, Jarquín was arrested in Miami and charged with battery following an alleged assault in Little Havana. Although the case didn’t proceed, Jarquin was transferred to ICE custody and deported.

Deficiencies in reporting

We do not pretend to pass judgment on Jeffrey Jarquin and certainly do not condone the way that he and other migrants have suffered at the hands of ICE. It should also be noted that, of more than 6,000 Nicaraguans deported to their country so far this year, the vast majority have been welcomed by Nicaraguan authorities on their arrival and helped to return to their families.

Rather, our argument is that the reporting of Jarquin’s case reflects the unquestioning attitudes of corporate media in its coverage of Nicaragua. Each report had two glaring deficiencies.

First, Jarquin’s portrayal of himself as a torture victim was accepted as fact, something that would not have occurred without further investigation if his claims had related to the U.S. or to another Western country. Yet, while Nicaraguan opposition media (in most cases, funded by U.S. agencies) have convinced human rights bodies to accept the torture narrative as true, there was plenty of contrary evidence from the time when Jarquin was in a Nicaraguan prison.

For example, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Nicaragua’s own human rights commissioner, and a Nicaraguan parliamentary commission all separately investigated torture allegations in 2018, inspecting prisons and interviewing “political” prisoners. All found no truth in the claims after their visits, even though the IACHR later changed its stance.

Second, reports on Jarquin’s case ignored plentiful evidence that Nicaragua’s universities – including the UNAN – were used as torture centers by the opposition. The Grayzone’s Max Blumenthal, the first international journalist to report from Nicaragua after the coup came to an end in July 2018, visited the UNAN, interviewed displaced students and photographed the destruction:

“Western media paints Nicaragua’s opposition as basically peaceful, democratic victims of unprovoked repression. I visited UNAN today, a public university in Managua they occupied & ransacked. They burned this campus childcare center before they were driven out by police on 7/13.”  

The violence at the UNAN was hardly exceptional. A detailed critique of Amnesty International’s reporting on the Nicaragua coup attempt, Dismissing the Truth, provided detailed evidence of killings and torture by opposition operatives and contrasted their findings with false testimony in Amnesty’s reports. As authors, we have met torture victims ourselves and verified their claims.

Manufacturing consent

There is therefore no excuse for lax reporting by media such as the Washington Post, CNN or the LA Times. There is even less excuse for the biased analyses presented by what international lawyer Alfred de Zayas calls “the Human Rights Industry,” because groups such as the Nicaragua Solidarity Coalition have sent key organizations detailed refutations of their reports.

But it seems corporate media are willing participants in helping to manufacture consent for regime change in Nicaragua, knowing that they have successfully persuaded their readers that it is a “brutal dictatorship.” At a time when Nicaragua’s sovereignty and its revolution are under increasing threat, propaganda like that surrounding Jarquin’s deportation can be expected to increase.

by Neelakshi Joshi

Featured Image: Dcpeopleandeventsof2017, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Until recent years, European cities had stood at the forefront of climate action, a period that coincided with largely progressive urban politics. However, mounting socioeconomic insecurity, electoral gains by right-wing parties and a growing discontent with climate policies mark a sharp departure from this trend.

In areas around the world, growing opposition to climate action signals a new disruptive wave that researchers call an “urban greenlash,” a backlash against climate plans and policies in cities. This is contributing to an erosion of resolve to confront climate change, seen in the weakening of climate goals and regulations, funding cuts for climate programs, and the criminalization of climate activism.

For instance, in Dresden, Germany, the city where I live and work, a right-leaning municipal council coalition is working to reduce local climate neutrality goals, set in 2022 under a more progressive council. Urban infrastructure projects related to the transformation of energy, housing, or transportation systems are being mobilised by right-wing populists as political battlegrounds where ideologies clash. Bike lanes in the UK, for example, are being targeted by small but vocal groups that regard them as an infringement on their freedom to drive a car.

Proponents of an urban greenlash are also employing alternative facts and ‘fake news’ to scuttle climate progress. In Canadian, British and Spanish cities, scholars have noted the surge in skepticism surrounding the concept of 15-minute cities, an idea to develop cities to be walkable and easily accessible to reduce the need for and reliance on private automobiles. Right-wing groups have accused this concept of being “social engineering” experiments, of all things, designed with an aim to repress residents under COVID-19-like “lockdowns” and restrict their freedoms.

Why is a greenlash happening?

Backlash against climate urbanism is complex. A mix of structural and ideological factors is fueling distrust of climate policies, ranging from the rise in influence of right-wing populist parties that espouse an ideological stance against climate change or outright denial of it to distrust of government “elites” or institutions perceived as pushing for urgent action on climate change.

Climate policies and plans in which citizens feel excluded from planning and from receiving the benefits of interventions are also found to be fertile ground for spreading climate disinformation and further disenchanting citizens from democratic participation. Added costs from climate change adaptation can also drive backlash. The Heating Law in Germany, which required homeowners to transition from fossil-fuel heating to heat pumps, generated a massive backlash, owing in part to the financial burdens placed on homeowners to change systems.

How to navigate the greenlash

In an article published earlier this year, Mahir Yazar, Fayola Jocobs and I set out a two-pronged strategy for sustaining urban climate action as sociopolitical greenlash intensifies.

First, engaging critically with the social injustices that climate agendas might create and perpetuate can help tackle climate change in a way that is conducive to a fair and just transition. In New York, Mayor Zoran Mamdani has repeatedly emphasized that “Climate and quality of life are not two separate concerns. They are, in fact, one and the same.” Through the Green Schools for a Healthier New York City initiative, he aims to retrofit 500 public schools to reduce emissions, create green jobs, and turn them into resilient hubs in case of disasters.

The coalitions emerging between social and environmentally oriented parties to present a stronger front against right-wing parties engage with backlash that is more ideological. Addressing misinformation through pubic literacy is also critical. The Urban Truth Collective, a collective of urban practitioners and marketing professionals who address misinformation about sustainable actions in cities, use their blog to address misinformation, including in their piece about 15-minute city conspiracies, rightfully arguing that city designs that require you to drive an hour to get to work or services are the real conspiracy.

Cities are critical actors in tackling climate change. Understanding what greenlash looks like, why it is gaining ground and how to respond demands urgent attention from urban researchers, policymakers and climate activists. Those committed to climate action cannot afford to dismiss this opposition, but nor are we powerless in the face of it; the stakes are too high. Climate progress depends on bringing communities along rather than dismissing their concerns.

by Joshua Frank

Joshua Frank on the Dark Side of Green Energy

Bill McKibben appeared on Ezra Klein’s podcast recently. Ezra Klein’s summary – there’s bad news and good news.

The bad news, what we all knew – climate change is accelerating.

The good news – “Green energy is getting better and cheaper, faster than we had ever dared hope,” Klein writes. “This next sentence was unimaginable even a few years ago: In April, the energy think tank Ember found that all of the new electricity demand around the world in 2025 was met with green power.”

“Clean energy abundance, a new form of energetic wealth, the possibility of the left actually offering a future of more and better – not less and worse – was a hard case to make even a few years ago. But now we cannot only imagine it, we can see it, touch it, live in it. It is here.”

It is here. And not everyone is cheering.

Joshua Frank, one of the editors at Counterpunch, is out with a new book titled – Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future (Haymarket Books, 2026).

In Bad Energy, Frank argues that the green energy transition is driven not by an effort to save the planet but by profit incentives.

“We must stop burning fossil fuels if we have any hope of saving the planet, but the significant, haphazard expansion of green energy in recent years – from large solar projects to wind energy to mining for renewables – has destroyed communities and ecosystems,” Frank writes. “And worse, renewables simply cannot match our ever-expanding demand for energy, driven in no small part by the rapid proliferation of data centers in the world’s wealthiest nations.”

Taking listeners from copper mines in Montana and Bolivia to wind farms in Wyoming to the geopolitical battle over deep-sea mining in the South Pacific, Frank offers a stark assessment of the costs of the rush for renewables and the demand for endless growth.

Frank argues we cannot consume our way out of climate chaos. What we need instead is rejection of the capitalist interests driving planetary collapse and a radical vision for a truly sustainable future.

How did you come to write this book?

“Living in southern California, I see all of these industrial sized so-called renewable developments in the Mojave Desert,” Frank told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “For someone who spends a lot of time out there, it is alarming. At the same time, I’m seeing what Governor Gavin Newsom has done to the residential solar program in California. I investigated that a little bit and realized the motivation behind that. It was pretty clear that PG&E and these large utilities – they don’t want to decentralize the grid. They want to control the grid, they want to expand the grid – all under the guise of fighting climate change.”

“We have seen the desecration of the wilderness and a total gutting of the residential solar program in California, which was making great headway. But Governor Newsom has deep ties to PG&E. They have poured money into his campaign coffers since he was Mayor of San Francisco. There has been a revolving door with PG&E connected people.”

“Then you start looking into how energy companies are frothing at the mouth over the prospect of critical minerals. Their answer to climate change is more growth and more mining. I started looking at this thinking – something is off here. Is Elon Musk and his Tesla really the answer to our troubles?”

“Can we really consume our way out of climate chaos? The more I looked into it and the more I dug, it seemed like that wasn’t the case.”

The vast majority of big green groups, probably most environmentalists in the country would say they want solar farms, wind farms, batteries, hydro, a big chunk say they want nuclear. Your book says no to most of that.

“Many of the big green groups definitely supported Joe Biden’s policies of developing some of these industrial scale wind and solar projects on public lands in the West. I’m not against solar technology. Solar is imperative if we really want to get out of this mess. But do we really need six square miles of solar panels in the Mojave? Do we really need huge wind farms in Wyoming with transmission lines crossing through valleys and over mountains all the way to California? Is that the best we can come up with? Or should we instead be thinking about scaling down and producing energy locally?”

“These projects have been rolled out for profit, not for the environment. That’s where I might have criticisms of some of the Big Green groups who have blindly accepted policies because they are labeled Green.”

“If we are going to electrify the grid and expand these renewables, copper, lithium and many other minerals are going to be needed. And this isn’t just for electric vehicles and batteries. This is also for transmission lines, solar panels and wind turbines. All of it is going to require copper. And that’s going to require hundreds of new huge mines all over the globe. Then you start looking at a continuation of the extractive industries that came before it. There is really not much difference. “

“Then you start talking to people who are on the ground in rural and indigenous communities all over the globe who are going to be impacted by these new mining projects. The Big Green groups and others who support these projects blindly are not looking at the externalities.”

You support residential solar and that requires those sorts of extractive industries.

“It certainly does. But the question is – how can we minimize that damage? There is low hanging fruit – and that is building solar in already disturbed areas, on parking lots, brownfields. In a place like Los Angeles where I live, two thirds of the homes here don’t have rooftop solar. And that doesn’t include all of the box stores that could put up rooftop solar. We shouldn’t be doing it in biologically pristine areas.”

“Many people see the Mojave Desert as a wasteland. But there are endangered species there. And the desert itself is a carbon sink. So when we develop these deserts for solar, we are actually reducing the desert’s ability to absorb our fossil fuel pollution.”

Did you hear Ezra Klein’s interview with Bill McKibben?

“I did.”

During that interview, McKibben basically advocated for allowing Chinese electric cars into the United States. He says they are better and cheaper than Musk’s Tesla cars.

“I’m not opposed to electric vehicles. But that is not an answer to the pollution that our transportation industry produces. Instead we need to focus on expanding public transit. I don’t think replacing a gas guzzling GMC truck with a Cybertruck is the answer. Instead, we need more public transit. We need to radically rethink the urban landscape.”

“A culture defined by cars, no matter if it’s going to be one that is electric or gas, has a lot of problems. There are European cities that restrict vehicles. Those are good signs. We need more bikeability, walkability and public transit. Bill McKibben would agree with that.”

“In that interview with Ezra Klein, Bill talks about places like Australia and China and how their solar is booming and how that is a step in the right direction. But Australia is the second largest exporter of fossil fuel, after Russia. In China, they talk about how the huge boom in solar has benefitted China in reaching its climate goals. Not true. Solar last year kept up with the growth China had – which is about five percent.”

“When we talk about expanding renewables, unless it is replacing fossil fuels on a real scale, we are not moving in the right direction. Just keeping up with economic growth isn’t the answer. We need to be replacing fossil fuels with renewables. I would embrace degrowth. That’s the only way we are going to navigate ourselves out of this.”

“China produces thirty percent of fossil fuel emissions in the world. Unless that number comes down, we are not going to get out of this. Every coal plant they are building, every year they are producing more and more pollution that ends up in the atmosphere, that carbon stays in the atmosphere for a long time and continues to heat up the planet. Just because they are building solar capacity, that’s not producing the results that are necessary.”

What’s your ideal policy of replacing fossil fuels?

“The point of the book is to get people to think beyond capitalism. We need a criticism of fossil fuel capitalism and how that has dominated this problem. Replacing fossil fuel capitalism with critical mineral capitalism isn’t going to solve the problem.”

“Those who are opposing war – you are fighting capitalism. Working for affordable housing – that’s fighting capitalism.”

The first part of your book is about lithium mining. You are not opposed to lithium mining. How would you do it?

“There is a way we can democratize mining. But that’s not what’s happening.”

Are you talking about public power – like the Tennessee Valley Authority – a public authority that controls energy production?

“That would be a step in the right direction. It’s a lot better than selling off private lands to multinational corporations that want to come in, extract and leave biologically important lands desecrated. That’s been the history of extraction in this country and globally. We need a radical transition away from that.”

“If that lithium mining is only going into new GM vehicles and not to local batteries for local battery storage, that’s a problem. Also, there are alternatives to lithium batteries. Anything that can hold heat can be used for batteries. Sodium batteries are coming online. Those have potentially less impact than lithium mining. It’s not the technology itself that is the problem, it’s the way it’s being sold to us. Small scaled mining operations with less impact are a better way to go.”

“And these big mining operations are being done mostly on public lands. The benefit to the public is minimal at best. Many of these mines are on indigenous lands, sometimes on sacred sites. That needs to change. And the public needs to be more aware of these impacts.”

What countries in the world have implemented a degrowth policy that can be used as a model?

“I don’t think there are any going in the right direction. There are countries that are stuck, but it’s not by choice. There is a lot to learn from the way Cuba has operated under a blockade. For decades, they were able to revamp their food system, rethink their energy and their consumption and transportation.”

“There are cities that provide pretty good examples. One of them surprisingly is New York City, which has one of the lowest emission rates of any city in the world. It’s a walkable city. They have ample mass transit. Of course it’s not perfect.”

“Copenhagen, Stockholm – there are cities in the Nordic countries where they eat food locally, they don’t drive as much as we do. And their economies are still growing. It’s not the perfect solution, but it’s definitely better than what we are doing.”

You are actually proposing degrowth – we have to consume less, we have to scale back.

“My book is an indirect critique of the abundance movement. I’m looking at what this abundance movement looks like on the ground and in the oceans.”

“We know that these big fossil fuel giants go all over the world and look for ways to extract fossil fuels at the expense of the environment and local communities. When they are finished, they get up and leave and often leave behind them places that are completely ruined.”

“That’s what we are seeing now with renewables. I have a whole chapter on the deep sea mining industry and all of the unknowns associated with that. If they can find these nodules on the sea floor, crush them, get out nickel and other elements to produce batteries at the expense of wrecking the ocean – is that renewable?”

“Abundance requires exponential mining indefinitely. There is no closed loop system in which we can have abundance for everybody.”

Were you inspired by E.F. Schumacher, the author of Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered?

“Yes, but more the more contemporary Kohei Saito (author of Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto) or people  like Murray Bookchin (author of The Ecology of Freedom).”

“I don’t think of myself as a theorist or academic. I’m a journalist. I’m looking at how these technologies are playing out in the real world, on the ground. That’s where this book comes in. It’s a tool for looking at these things, even things we believe are good – like wind and solar, which I support. But they have to be done in a way that minimizes their impacts.”

“When we are talking about climate change, we also have to look at the loss of biodiversity. The loss of biodiversity is overfishing, killing the rainforests by chopping them down, polluting through industrial agriculture. The underlying issue is capitalism. And this is where I have a critique of Bill McKibben. Bill can talk the tough talk and in the past has done a real service by bringing economics into the conversation. But when you hear him now, he rarely talks about capitalism, if ever.”

“I don’t believe there is any solution to the climate crisis without radically changing the economic system that underpins it.”

Is there anyone on the public policy scene – member of Congress, politician – who reflects this point of view?

“There is a contingent in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) who are thinking about these issues. But generally no. It’s not a conversation happening at that kind of policy level. If it is, I haven’t seen it. That’s a reflection of the environmental movement not addressing these issues.”

“And I have seen some people criticize the book by saying – you are just a shill for Big Oil. Obviously they haven’t read the book. If they do, I don’t think they would say that.”

“In the book, I also critique hydropower and nuclear. There is a contingent in the abundance movement that believes nuclear power will save us. There is a contingent on the left that believes nuclear power will save us.”

[For the complete q/a format Interview with Joshua Frank see 40 Corporate Crime Reporter 32(12), August 10, 2026, print edition only.]

by Majid Maleki Meighani

In recent years, particularly since the war on Gaza, the notion of a “left aligned with the Axis of Resistance” has entered the debates of the Middle Eastern left and the Iranian diaspora with unusual intensity. The term is sometimes used to describe leftists who defend the struggles of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and the Islamic Republic against Israel and the United States, and at other times as a pejorative label accusing these currents of “campism,” “political Shiism,” or apologia for the Islamic Republic.

The underlying question, however, cannot be resolved at the level of labels. The real question is this: what position should the revolutionary left take toward the resistance of non-left forces against imperialism?

This article’s answer is clear: resistance to imperialism, regardless of the ideological character of the force carrying it out, can have a material, real effect in weakening imperialist power. Striking at the military, economic, and communications interests and infrastructure of dominant powers, raising the cost of military intervention, constraining the freedom of action of imperialist states, and opening fissures in the prevailing geopolitical order are all forms of weakening imperialist power.

But from this it does not follow that every anti-American or anti-Israeli force is necessarily an emancipatory or socialist one.

These two questions must be kept distinct.

The anti-imperialist effect of a given struggle is not the same thing as the class character and political nature of the force waging it.

If the left denies the material effect of a resistance force’s struggle against imperialism simply because that force is not of the left, it drifts away from geopolitical reality; and if it overlooks all the class, political, and social contradictions within that force simply because it is anti-imperialist, it drifts away from Marxism.

The left’s task, then, is not to choose between “imperialism” and the “Axis of Resistance” as two equivalent camps, but to preserve its own class and theoretical independence within the actual struggle against imperialism.

Imperialism and the Question of Resistance

Marxism, from its inception, has never reduced the question of imperialism to relations among a handful of states. Imperialism is a stage in the development of capitalism in which the concentration of capital, finance capital, capital export, the division of the world among great powers, and competition for control over resources and strategic routes become interlinked.

Seen this way, imperialist domination is not confined to military occupation. Financial control, sanctions, economic blockade, control of trade routes, military bases, technological dependency, political intervention, and the construction of regional security orders can all be different forms through which imperialist power is exercised.

New imperialism, in this sense, no longer necessarily takes the form of direct territorial occupation or classical colonialism. It is, rather, an interconnected network of military power, financial domination, technological dependency, and international institutions operating within the world capitalist system — one that can be organized around several centers of power, not a single superpower alone.

Within this structure, the United States has for decades been one of the principal centers of power shaping the Middle East’s security order, and Israel has held a central place in that order as Washington’s strategic ally. But imperialism itself cannot be reduced to a single state.

It is against this backdrop that the significance of the military and political resistance of forces such as Hezbollah, the Houthis, Hamas, and the Islamic Republic becomes clear.

These forces, despite their profound ideological and political differences, have at various junctures managed to raise the cost of American and Israeli power projection and constrain their freedom of action. The network known in political literature as the “Axis of Resistance” is composed of groups and states with differing degrees of independence and dependency, and it should not be treated as a fully unified bloc. Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and armed groups in Iraq and Syria have varying relationships with Iran and with one another.

Yet this heterogeneity does not prevent these forces — despite fundamental differences in structure, ideology, interests, and degree of political autonomy — from converging, at different moments, into a shared geopolitical formation against American and Israeli power, a formation that differs from a unified, coordinated bloc. Heterogeneity is not the same as irrelevance.

Resistance as Material Reality

For the left, resistance should not be assessed solely through the intentions and slogans of the forces involved; its material effects must also be examined.

Houthi attacks in the Red Sea offer a clear illustration. By striking shipping linked to Israel, the Houthis raised the cost of military protection along this route for the United States and its allies and constrained their freedom of action along one of the key arteries of world trade.

This is not to say that every Houthi military action should be endorsed. The point is different: these actions have managed to impose costs on part of the power and freedom of action of the dominant order.

The history of Hezbollah’s conflict with Israel likewise cannot be ignored. Over past decades, Hezbollah has been one of the most significant armed forces opposing Israel’s presence and operations in Lebanon. To be sure, Hezbollah’s position has changed significantly in recent years, particularly after the 2024 war, and its military capacity has been damaged. But the weakening of a resistance force at one historical juncture does not amount to a denial of its earlier role in shifting the balance of power.

In Iran’s case too, the matter is not reducible to “proxy” relationships alone. Over past decades, the Islamic Republic has sought, through building missile and drone capacity and a network of armed regional allies, to raise the cost of American and Israeli presence and intervention. Even American sources have acknowledged the role of this network in attacks on U.S. forces and in raising the cost of Washington’s military presence in the region.

Denying the anti-imperialist effect of these policies simply on account of the Islamic Republic’s political character, or the ideology of its allied groups, is not analytics — it is wishful politics.

Hamas and the Question of Palestine

The question of Palestine occupies a distinct place. Palestinian resistance cannot be separated from the history of colonization, occupation, displacement, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people.

Hamas is an Islamist movement, and its political project cannot be equated with a socialist or left-emancipatory one. But this fact should not lead to a negation of the Palestinian question or a reduction of Palestinian resistance to “terrorism.”

The left must be able to hold several propositions simultaneously:

1. First, it must recognize the right of the Palestinian people to liberation from occupation and domination.
2. Second, it must criticize the policies of the Israeli state and the structures of occupation and discrimination against Palestinians.
3. Third, it must condemn crimes against civilians regardless of who commits them.
4. Fourth, without becoming a political advocate for Hamas, it must recognize the role of Palestinian armed resistance in breaking Israel’s monopoly on military force and returning the Palestinian question to the center of world politics.

This distinction is essential for the left. Defending the Palestinian right to resistance is not the same as politically endorsing every decision and action of Hamas.

Beyond “The Enemy of My Enemy”

Here it is necessary to distance ourselves from a common error: the logic of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

If this logic becomes a governing principle of left politics, it ultimately turns the left into a follower of states and movements that have no independent class project of their own.

But rejecting this logic should not lead to its opposite — the wholesale denial of any cooperation or temporary alignment with non-left forces in the struggle against imperialism.

The history of revolutionary movements shows that social forces with differing objectives can converge on a single front against a common enemy without dissolving their own contradictions.

The central issue for the left is political and class independence. No one expects Hamas, Hezbollah, or the Houthis to be socialist or left-wing for their struggle against Israel and the United States to carry an anti-imperialist effect; that was never the question.

The left can defend the resistance of the Palestinian people while criticizing Hamas’s political project; it can regard Israel’s setbacks or retreats in the face of Lebanese resistance as an anti-imperialist event without considering Hezbollah a left organization; it can recognize the effect of Houthi attacks in raising the cost of the American presence in the Red Sea without endorsing their religious ideology; and, faced with the threat or reality of an American or Israeli attack on Iran, it can defend Iran’s right to defend itself against foreign aggression while still regarding the Islamic Republic as a repressive, non-emancipatory state.

This is precisely the point at which anti-imperialism becomes independent of statism.

The Class Question

But why does this distinction matter?

Because imperialism is not the only force of domination in the world. Within peripheral states, too, class relations and various forms of exploitation and repression persist.

A state can resist imperialist power while repressing workers at home. A movement can fight foreign occupation while pursuing a socially conservative program. A state can resist sanctions while adopting economic policies that place the burden of crisis on subordinate classes.

The left, therefore, cannot suspend class contradiction simply because an external enemy exists.

Marxist anti-imperialism must see two fronts at once: the struggle against external domination and the struggle against exploitation and class domination at home. Either one, pursued without the other, can lead to a dead end.

If anti-imperialism is severed from class struggle, it risks becoming state nationalism or state-centered geopolitics. And if class struggle is severed from the struggle against imperialism, it risks producing a left that ultimately disregards the structure of global capitalist power altogether and searches for every contradiction solely within peripheral states.

Both paths are dangerous for the left.

Iran: Defending Society, Not Sanctifying the State

This question carries particular weight in Iran’s case.

The Iranian left cannot, on one hand, overlook the Islamic Republic’s domestic repression, and on the other, fall silent in the face of external military threats.

Defending Iran against foreign intervention should not be conflated with defending the government of the Islamic Republic. Iran, as a society and a historical territory, is not identical to the state that rules over it; the left can therefore oppose foreign military intervention while simultaneously maintaining a critical, combative stance toward the Islamic Republic’s repressive and class-based policies.

For this reason, a foreign military attack on Iran cannot be justified on the grounds that “the Islamic Republic must go.” The experiences of Iraq, Libya, and Afghanistan have shown that foreign intervention does not necessarily lead to people’s liberation and can further devastate the social and economic structures of peripheral countries.

At the same time, opposing foreign intervention must not mean silencing the struggles of workers, women, national minorities, and other social groups within Iran.

The Iranian left must be able to hold both positions at once: no to imperialism and foreign war; no to domestic despotism and exploitation.

These two “no’s” are not in contradiction with one another.

Sanctions and the Venezuelan Crisis

This same complexity can be observed in Latin America as well.

Venezuela has, in recent years, been subject to extensive U.S. sanctions, and these sanctions, combined with domestic economic crisis and structural problems in the oil sector, have damaged the country’s economy. The U.S. Energy Information Administration has itself identified a combination of factors — including mismanagement, international sanctions, and economic crisis — as contributing to the decline in Venezuela’s energy output.

Defending the Venezuelan people’s right against sanctions and foreign intervention is therefore part of an anti-imperialist position.

But this defense should not amount to closing one’s eyes to the country’s economic problems, the policies of the Venezuelan government, its class relations, or its domestic political constraints.

Defending a country against imperialism is not the same as defending every policy of that country’s government.

This principle should become one of the foundations of contemporary anti-imperialism.

Two Mirror-Image Errors on the Left

Faced with the question of resistance, the contemporary left is exposed to two mirror-image errors.

The first is reducing imperialism to peripheral states — turning legitimate criticism of the Islamic Republic, Hamas, or Hezbollah into a denial of the anti-imperialist struggle itself. Here, criticism of a resistance movement, which may well be entirely warranted, collapses into a denial that resistance exists at all, and the left unwittingly reproduces the very framework that dominant powers use to justify war, sanctions, and foreign intervention.

The second error is the mirror image of the first: turning the anti-imperialist struggle into political advocacy for non-left states and movements. Here, any criticism of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, or the Islamic Republic is treated as “alignment with imperialism,” and the left effectively becomes the public-relations apparatus of a state or an armed movement.

The task of the left is neither unconditional defense of resistance nor denial of its effects, but rather defense of the possibility of resistance to domination, combined with the preservation of class and critical independence from those very resistance forces. Neither error should be mistaken for principle.

Anti-Imperialism and the Question of the “Axis”

The term “Axis of Resistance” has, in recent years, been used to describe a network of states and armed forces allied with or aligned toward Iran. This network includes actors with differing objectives, structures, and degrees of independence, and should not be imagined as a single coherent organization or bloc.

Yet even if this network is understood merely as a geopolitical formation, its effect on the regional balance of power cannot be ignored.

The presence of these forces has prevented Israel and the United States from concentrating the whole of their military and political capacity on a single point. Multiple fronts have raised security and military costs and, at certain junctures, constrained the freedom of action of the great powers.

This condition can be understood as a kind of pluralization of fronts of resistance against regional hegemony.

But here too a boundary must be maintained: weakening imperialist power does not, in itself, amount to building working-class power. One hegemonic order may be weakened only for another to take its place.

From a Marxist standpoint, the ultimate question is not which state prevails in geopolitical rivalry, but whether subordinate classes and dominated social forces can use the resulting fissures to build their own independent power.

A weakened empire is an opening, not a victory.

From Campism to Revolutionary Anti-Imperialism

One of the problems of the contemporary left is being trapped between two opposing camps.

On one side stands a left that has all but removed imperialism from its analysis, reducing every world problem to “the authoritarianism of states of the Global South.”

On the other stands a left that automatically regards any state or movement opposing the United States as progressive.

Both views oversimplify reality.

The revolutionary left must preserve a third path: anti-imperialism without statism; class struggle without disregarding imperialism.

This does not mean neutrality between the oppressor and the oppressed. On the contrary, it means a more precise identification of the structure of power.

If Israel occupies Palestine, the left cannot remain neutral toward that occupation on the pretext of criticizing Hamas. If the United States threatens or bombs a country, the left cannot welcome foreign aggression on the pretext of opposing that country’s government. If economic sanctions place a society under pressure, the left cannot ignore the class effects of those sanctions.

But at the same time, the left must not allow the struggle against imperialism to become a tool for justifying domestic repression.

Conclusion: Resistance for Liberation, Not Resistance in Place of Liberation

The question facing the left in the twenty-first century is not a choice among Washington, Tel Aviv, Tehran, or any other capital in geopolitical rivalry; it is the construction of an independent politics capable of simultaneously challenging imperialist domination and preserving the class independence of subordinate forces.

The Palestinian struggle against occupation, Lebanese resistance to Israeli aggression, Yemeni resistance to foreign intervention, and Iran’s response to American and Israeli military threats each have their own distinct dimensions and contexts; yet at the geopolitical level, they can raise the cost of hegemonic power projection and constrain the freedom of action of dominant powers. The left should not deny this reality — but neither should it equate resistance with liberation.

The left must be able to recognize the defeat or retreat of an imperialist power as an anti-imperialist event without, for that reason alone, declaring the force that produced that defeat to be emancipatory or socialist.

Revolutionary anti-imperialism is neither a defense of empires nor a subordination to peripheral states; it is a politics aimed at breaking the structure of global capitalist domination and opening the possibility of independent intervention by subordinate classes in history.

by Shrishtee Bajpai and Ashish Kothari

Photo caption.  Indigenous rights protest in India. Adivasi women from India’s central state protest against illegal mining and unlawful detention in the region. (Photo: Bhumika Saraswati/Creative Commons)

In light of the planetary polycrisis, it is time to challenge the dominant strand of Western thought that asserts only humans possess rights and that other species exist solely for human benefit. In their contribution to the Deep Democracy series, Shrishtee Bajpai and Ashish Kothari propose an Earth-centered form of governance. This form of democratic self-organization is based on the idea that all species and nature as a whole have rights.

“We sit around the fire and listen to stories. I come from Tharaka – the land of bees. Bees are very wise. Bees know how to select plants. Bees came from the sea and from the deep waters. There is a way we came to the land of bees. Our clans are from animals and our relatives are snakes, elephants, monkeys and trees. They are with us when we make decisions,” says Simon Mitambo, from the Tharaka community in Kenya.

For Simon and his community, along with several other indigenous peoples and other local communities across the world, this points to a deeper, wiser, more life-affirming notion of democracy than the one currently prevalent across the planet. It embeds a notion of earthy governance – a form of decision-making that is not centered on humans alone, but encompasses also the rest of nature.

“We are responsible for our self governance and we need to ensure that all are equally heard including the rest of nature. We can’t have that in a panchayat (elected village council) where everything is motivated through party politics,” says Tsewang Gyalson Lachungpa. He is an elder from Lachung, a village nestled in the eastern Himalayas in India’s state of Sikkim, near the border with Tibet. The village sits at an elevation of about 3,000 meters above sea level at the confluence of the Lachung Chu and Lachen Chu rivers.

Problems of liberal democracy

In making this statement, Tsewang Gyalson highlights the problems of modern day representative or liberal democracy. Such a model of governance relies heavily on elections and party politics, encourages hostility amongst sections of citizenry, favors those with lots of financial and other resources to put into campaigning (who then have to ‘recover’ what they spend through oft-dubious means), and usually ends up centering power in the hands of a few people.

As people like Murray Bookchin and Abdullah Öcalan have highlighted, the nation-state model sustains itself on the logic that nature – and colonized peoples – are things to be conquered, assimilated, dominated, and exploited. This logic was further supported through the capitalist and extractive modernity by asserting that the only way to organize lives is that of a centralized government that could help reach ‘welfare’ to the ‘masses.’ This has been used as a justification for taking over territories of Indigenous peoples and local communities for nationalist goals like ‘development’ and security.

So when someone like Gyalson says “We don’t want to tunnel our ecosystems. We don’t want to dam our rivers. All we have is our rivers, mountains and forests. If we destroy them, we can’t survive. We will be destroyed too” – his worldview comes in direct clash with the dominant, extractive worldview that views nature as a commodity to be destroyed in the pursuit of ‘progress’ (in its modernist, restricted Western sense of increasing material and financial prosperity).

Democratic decentralization

Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi and Rabindranath Tagore stressed a lot on the need of Swaraj (self-rule) as a form of democratic decentralization which was a true form of independence. It was not only a political struggle but also a spiritual, economic and ecological struggle.

David Graeber and David Wengrow in their book, The Dawn of Everything, describe how Indigenous peoples across Turtle Island and Abya Yala (the Americas) show remarkable imagination of organizing and governing societies beyond the nation-state logic. What we in this essay demonstrate is that these alternatives continue to be built and nurtured by several communities in India and the rest of the world.

These offer interesting lessons on how democracy and governance can truly look like. We do this following the approach of not idealizing local communities (given especially that many of them have gender and other inequities) but rather highlighting the experimentation, imagination, ecological wisdom and joy, as well as mastery of the ‘art of not being governed.’

Alternatives to liberal, anthropocentric democracy

The fact that we do not have to be stuck with liberal democracy, if we are looking for truly participatory forms of governance, was demonstrated in narrative after narrative told to a gathering of Indigenous peoples, local communities, and civil society movements from over 20 countries, in South Africa, in February 2025.

This Global Confluence on Radical Democracy, Autonomy and Self-determination was organized by the Global Tapestry of Alternatives, Academy of Democratic Modernity, Jineoloji Academy, WoMin, and the Amadiba Crisis Committee. It provided an opportunity for communities to present their concept and practice of radical democracy, with an attempt to widely distribute power for decision-making. They discussed how their foundations were not based on hegemonic power and profits, but rather on justice, equity, and respect among peoples and with the rest of nature.

The host community, the Amadiba people of Xolobeni, gave a glimpse of how their governance works. While it has its structural hierarchies from local sub-chiefs to the king, in practice people have considerable power to take and influence decisions. Political or traditional ‘leaders’ who have tried to align with exploitative outside forces (such as mining companies), have been deposed. For various historical reasons, women have considerably greater say than is the case in many other communities in South Africa. A crucial basis of autonomy here is that all land is held in the commons, and is not privatized.

Several other such examples were presented at the Confluence: the Kuna Indigenous peoples in Panama, the Lachung people in Sikkim, India, the Karen in Burma-Myanmar, the Kurdish in central Asia (especially in Rojava, Syria), the Tharaka community in Kenya, the Sarayaku people in Ecuador, the Tao and other Indigenous peoples in Taiwan, among others. Though not present, the example of the Zapatista autonomous region in Mexico was oft-cited.

In all of these cases, people are not accepting the domination of national governments, nor of capitalist corporations, but are asserting their own systems of governance. But they also realize that there are internal inequities and conflicts (gender-based, ethnic, etc) in their communities, so a crucial part of their initiatives is to enable greater voice for the marginalized sections, and create conditions of greater equality and equity.

Elements of earthy governance

At the core of earthy governance is an intrinsic wisdom, an ethical understanding that since human communities are part of nature, the more-than-human communities who are part of the web of life have to be integral to governance. Listening and following the ways or laws of rivers, mountains, forest deities, among others, the communities are asserting the way of being that is in rhythm and moods of the natural world. This is not just about adjusting to nature, but about recognizing that it is this web that threads life as a connective tissue. What is striking in all the examples mentioned above is the ability of the community to design systems that work in their own autonomous ways, and are based on collaborative design principles, responding to place and ecologically sensible. Several communities design their governance as Designs of Coherence, with a thorough, clear, and non-colonial or (if more recent) decolonial lens which intentionally builds systems that nurture local, enhance moral responsibility, internalize the costs and maintain collective restraint.

What’s interesting in several such examples is the role and nature of power. There is no homogenous way that power operates, but what we can see is that power is broadly rooted with care and on the ground. There is power, but is subordinated to feedback of actions from others in human communities, and from lands, mountains, rivers, and ecosystems that the communities inhabit. There is no authority without responsibility. The vision embedded in several of these practices is of building movement, and of struggling and striving for nature’s sovereignty over state sovereignty, by being custodians for territories of life including all creatures and all beings. It is this recognition that uniquely embodies people’s daily life, collective livelihood and seasonal production activities including their institutions. Ceremonies and rituals become part of restoring/regenerating these relationships continuously. Most of us in modern industrial and urban contexts have lost the relationality that nurtures humans and more than human connections. However, earthy governance can only thrive if this relationality becomes part of everyday living.

In radical democracy and earthy governance, institutions of decision-making have collective, democratic processes of deciding how to manage, use, and conserve the commons. The ethics of commons and custodianship is deeply central to such governance. The communities described above display a plurality or diversity of political representation, beliefs, interests and ways of being (including legal and other forms of institutional pluralism) demonstrating pluriversal radical democracies.

An aesth-ethics of life

Another crucial element one can discern in many such practices and worldviews, is the seamless integration of beauty and ethics – an aesth-ethics of life. An aesthetic gaze on nature, seeing the inherent and incredible beauty in its elements and functioning and rhythms, just as much as we see beauty in human works of art, is intricately connected to treating it with respect. Diversity itself becomes an ethic, one that is found abundantly in Indigenous and community worldviews, quite contrary to the homogenizing tendency of dominant and colonial Western ideology.

That brings us to our last but not the least crucial element: challenging a dominant strand of Western thinking, that humans alone are possessed of rights and that other species exist for human use. Instead, earthy governance is built on the understanding that all species, and nature as a whole, are the subject of ‘rights’, or (to use less formal language) are worthy of respect and equal treatment. This clearly articulates imaginative and radically alternative ways of being in the world.

When the Dongria Kondh adivasi (Indigenous) people in the state of Odisha, eastern India, were asked whether the UK-based company Vedanta could mine their hills, they said such a decision could be made only in conversation with the deity of the forested hills, Niyamraja. In doing so, and eventually rejecting the mining proposal, they practiced a form of earthy governance we can all learn from.

by Paul Le Blanc

Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium: Radical Ecology and the Global Plantation is a handsomely crafted and inspiring volume to be savored and shared, thanks to the uniquely exquisite sensibilities of Rosa Luxemburg and the splendid labors of the book’s editor, Claudia Horn. Richly illustrated by Luxemburg herself — with beautiful reproductions from among the many hundreds of samples in the 17 notebooks that contain Luxemburg’s drawings of vegetation and the pressed plants themselves, enhanced with numerous marginal notes by her in German — the book also provides well-chosen slices from correspondence with some of her closest friends, along with insightful and informative commentary from the editor. Revealed to us are little known dimensions of Luxemburg the outstanding thinker and revolutionary, but also the generously gifted human being.

Qualities of thought and revolutionary practice

Luxemburg wanted to replace the established order with a genuinely democratic and socialist future. The old order in Germany had taken the form of voracious capitalism integrated with a reactionary elite of land-based aristocrats. Much has changed in the world since, and yet Luxemburg’s perspectives have never stopped resonating in countries throughout the world to the present moment.

For her revolutionary commitments, she was denounced as “bloody Rosa”. Many (including moderate socialists) agreed with the highly esteemed centrist-liberal/conservative sociologist Max Weber. He was fiercely critical of the Spartacus League, which Luxemburg led with her comrade Karl Liebknecht in 1919. Several days before they were brutally killed in the so-called “Spartacist uprising,” Weber said that “Liebknecht belongs in a lunatic asylum, and Rosa Luxemburg in a zoo.” While he had not advocated their murder, it seems not to have shocked him. “Liebknecht was undoubtedly an honest man,” Weber commented, once the deed was done. “He called on the street to fight — the street killed him.” Much the same could have been said of Luxemburg. Of course, they were not killed by “the street,” but by a right-wing paramilitary, the Freikorps, commanded by officers from Germany’s reactionary elite, with tacit support from more moderate “law and order” elements.1

The personal qualities of “bloody Rosa” — who spent years in prison for her beliefs — do not correspond, though, to Weber’s anti-revolutionary caricature. Horn cites the testimony of one of the many prison staff members who befriended her (in this case a non-commissioned officer, Arthur Gertel, who was tasked with accompanying her on walks that she was permitted to take):

She was an intellectual genius yet full of kindness and compassion for all beings, human or animal… And yet the newspapers called her “Bloody Rosa.” The sharpness and refusal to make fundamental compromises that characterized Rosa Luxemburg’s political speeches and writings undoubtedly stemmed from her outrage at all injustice.2

It is the crescendo of injustice and horrific violence — inherent in capitalism, imperialism and global war — that would finally bring an end to Luxemburg’s life in 1919. That is not the focus of this volume. What Horn presents to us, however, transcends the violence in a way that refuses to push aside Luxemburg’s determined struggle to replace it with something better. As she emphasizes, “Luxemburg’s expansive sensitivity to human and non-human suffering drove her unswerving, unfailing, and uncompromising commitment to the cause of world revolution.”3

Enlightenment, Romanticism and the natural world

The great intellectual-cultural streams of the Enlightenment and Romanticism blend in this remarkable woman, with — at the very same time — rock-hard yet supple Marxist convictions that had become inseparable from a passionate yet very conscious connection to the natural world. Her strong bond with blue-feathered titmice is especially evident. She would feed them between the bars of her prison window and copy their bird song. In a letter to Mathilde Jacob, Luxemburg boasted that she could imitate them so well “that they all immediately come running,” adding: “In spite of the snow and frost and loneliness, we believe — the titmice and I — in the coming of spring!” In another letter to Sophie Liebknecht, she confessed that “sometimes, it seems to me that I am not really a human being at all, but rather a bird or a beast in human form.” In yet another letter, she proudly confided to Luise Kautsky:

The great titmice are in loyal attendance in front of my window; they already know my voice exactly; and it seems they like it when I sing. Recently I sang the Countess’s aria from Figaro, about six of them were perched there on a bush in front of the window and listened without moving all the way to the end; it was a very funny sight to see.4

Little wonder that she fantasized: “on my grave, as in my life, there will be no pompous phrases. Only two syllables will be allowed to appear on my gravestone: ‘Tsvee-tsvee’” (her transliteration of the titmouse call that she had mastered). While expressing the fervent hope that her death would come in the struggle for the socialist cause, she confessed “my innermost self belongs more to my titmice than to the ‘comrades’.”5

In fact, her expansive temperament embraced the whole of the natural world. “Inwardly,” she wrote, “I feel so much more at home in a plot of garden … and still more in the meadows when the grass is humming with bees, than at one of our party congresses.” As this little volume reveals, Luxemburg shared the passionate engagement of the bees and other creatures with the flourishing and sometimes struggling plants of all kinds — which delighted and fascinated her. Yet she insisted that nature was not, for her, “a restful refuge,” noting that “in nature too, at every step, I find so much that is cruel that I suffer very much.”6 The point was to be vibrantly aware, conscious of, and in tune with the wondrous reality of life — deeply in touch with herself and the vast and complex world around her.

In more than one way, this informed her political understanding and orientation. Luxemburg tirelessly analyzed the causes and impacts of the catastrophic horrors of World War I, with the conviction that “by its nature, socialism cannot be imposed” — that the key to reaching it could only be found through “uninhibited, effervescing life,” which meant that “experience alone is capable of making corrections and opening up new paths.” While the failure of the international socialist movement to stay true to its principles in resisting the global imperialist war brought a devastating “misfortune for humanity,” she insisted, “socialism will be lost only if the international proletariat refuses to learn from it.”7 Revolutionary consciousness and insurgency cannot be manufactured from the top-down. It must flow from actual experience as a collective process.

Capitalism and metabolic rift

Even more than was the case with the cataclysms of global war in 1914-18 and 1939-45, all human and non-human life on our planet is threatened by unfolding and intensifying ecological disasters. Just as imperialism and the global wars it generated were not simply the fruit of mistaken policy decisions — according to Luxemburg’s penetrating analyses — so is the environmental crisis not the outcome of policies that can simply be reversed. Both flow inexorably from the accumulation process at the heart of the capitalist economic order in which we live. Horn notes the same point when she writes, “profit seeking capitalist behavior causes various kinds of economic imbalance.”8

This imparts a special urgency to aspects of Luxemburg’s application of ecological sensibilities to her development of Marxist analysis. It is related to the notion of “metabolic rift,” recently highlighted in significant studies by such “eco-Marxists” as John Bellamy Foster and Ian Angus.9 Foster and Angus, following Marx — as Horn puts it — use the metaphor of “metabolism” to describe “the complex, interdependent process linking human society to nature.” According to Horn, “all economies transform — metabolize — physical materials such as wood, water, and soil into goods for use or exchange.” But “if producers do not exploit those natural resources in a sustainable way, both the resources and the economic system they support may be exhausted.”

Drawing from Luxemburg’s classic The Accumulation of Capital (1913), Horn presents the view that “capitalism was not a closed system but rather operated within and depended upon a wider, non-capitalist ‘milieu’.” In fact, “capital accumulation had required the continuous absorption and transformation of resources — both human labor power and natural materials like wood or minerals — that originated outside capitalist societies.” Capitalism existed “not as a stable equilibrium but as a ceaseless, violent churn.” This was stressed in Luxemburg’s theory of imperialism as a perpetual invasion and exploitation of non-capitalist portions of our planet.

In Luxemburg’s words, “capitalism feeds on the ruins of such organizations, and, although this non-capitalist milieu is indispensable for accumulation, the latter proceeds, at the cost of this medium, by eating it up.” Horn draws out this point: “Eating up the conditions for its survival, ‘capitalism prepares its own downfall under ever more violent contortions and convulsions.’” Nonetheless, as Horn observes later, “the capitalist system continues to displace the real costs of production, such as environmental destruction, outside the realm of capital accumulation, to be borne off-books by exploited people, non-human animals, and future generations.”10

Horn strongly suggests that Luxemburg’s particular analysis of imperialism suffered from its own flaws, to which she gives serious attention, but insists on the relevance of much of what she had to say about the capital accumulation process:

If history has not borne out Luxemburg’s argument that capitalism depends upon both exploiting and incorporating the non-capitalist world, such that it must inevitably exhaust itself, still, the enduring relevance of her analysis lies in its global scope; its sensitivity to the physical predicates of economic growth; its focus on the boundaries that capital constantly transgresses, polices, and redraws; and its attentiveness to the broad coalitions these trespasses and depredations could bring together in resistance.

The qualities of this remarkable book certainly do justice to the multifaceted person who was Luxemburg, but they also speak to us on a variety of levels about the meaning of life and about what must be done in the present moment.

• 1Alexander Behrens, review of The Young Max Weber and German Social Democracy by Victor Strazzeri (Brill 2022/Haymarket, 2023) in The Progressive Post, July 16, 2024, https://feps-europe.eu/inspiration/the-young-max-weber-and-german-social-democracy/.
• 2Claudia Horn, ed., Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, 14.
• 3Ibid., 19.
• 4Ibid., 15-16, 48, 136-137. Blue tufted titmice: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcQOEMxYUMU; Mozart aria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaZTuRBFtDk.
• 5Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, 15-16.
• 6Ibid., 16.
• 7Ibid., 16, 13.
• 8Ibid., 52.
• 9See, for example, John Bellamy Foster, Marx’s Ecology: Materialism and Nature (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000) and Ian Angus, Metabolic Rifts: Capitalism’s Assault on the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2026).
• 10Rosa Luxemburg’s Herbarium, 51, 52, 55-7, 58, 211.

by E A S Sarma

To
Shri Bhupender Yadav
Minister
Union Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change (MEFCC)

Dear Shri Bupendra Yadav,

All industrial projects that have an impact on the environment need to be subject to an Environmental Impact Assessment in accordance with the Environment (Protection) Act and need to be cleared under that Act. Article 48A of the Constitution mandates that the State should not only conserve the environment but also improve it.

I find that your Ministry has been routinely granting exemptions from prior environment clearance for certain categories of industry, on the false premise that they style themselves as “green” and that such an exemption is necessary for “ease of doing business“. 

Since all indutrial units should be subject to environmental impact appraisal, such assessment and statutory clearance should necessarily be prior to the unit commencing operations, as post-facto environmental clearance will defeat its purpose.  In my view, by resorting to such ill-advised exemptions, your Ministry is deliberately committing a breach of the Constitutional mandate under Article 48A. 
For example, according to the information provided to the Parliament (https://sansad.in/getFile/annex/266/AU2549_kjL4je.pdf?source=pqars), your Ministry has exempted “standalone plants producing Green Hydrogen/Green Ammonia by way of electrolysis of water using renewable energy.. from the requirement of prior Environmental Clearance under the provisions of the Environment Impact Assessment Notification 2006″

Please take the example of Green Ammonia Production Facility in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, India, with an annual production capacity of 1 million metric tons of ammonia (NH3), “using renewable energy-powered hydrogen production“.  The unit has already started operating, without facing environment impact assessment under the Environment (Protection) Act.

At the same location, there used to be a conventional fertiliser manufacturing unit for which the government at that time had accorded environment clearance three decades ago. That clearance has since lapsed.

The unit based on electrolysys of water deploys alkaline electrolysers, cryogenic air separation units, large-bore hydrogen pipelines and a new 20-inch cross-country liquid ammonia pipeline to the port. It is located in a water-scarce region, but electrolysys is water-intensive. 

It uses a desalination plant but desalination in itself has environmental implications. “For every litre of potable water produced, about 1.5 litres of liquid polluted with chlorine and copper are created. This wastewater (“concentrate”) is twice as saline as ocean water. If not properly diluted and dispersed, it may form a dense plume of toxic brine which can degrade coastal and marine ecosystems unless treated. Increased salinity and temperature can cause a decrease in the dissolved oxygen content and contribute to the formation of “dead zones”, where very few marine animals can live (https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/five-things-know-about-desalination)  

The unit is within 2.8 km from the Coringa Wildlife Sanctuary and its impact extends over the eco-sensitive zone notified around it by your Ministry.

While the above unit ostensibly uses “renewable” energy, since the source is not co-located, it necessarily has to rely on back-up grid supplies which derive electricity largely from coal.

While production of hydrogen from water through electrolysis is termed “green“, electrolysis in certainly not green and, additionally, there are other segments of the process which are not at all green.

I understand that the promoter of the unit, knowing the mind of your Ministry, has even gone to the extent of seeking exemption from public consultation, whereas the local traditional fishing community are apprehensive about the likely impact of the project on their fishing activity. Exempting the unit from public consultation, in my view, is anti-democratic and it violates the principle of participative decision making that lies at the core of our Constitution. 

The ammonia that is manufactured by the unit is far too expensive for domestic use and, propped up by huge subsidies from both the State and the Centre, it is expected to be exported to other countries. 

The unit does not bring any significant employment opportunities for the local people and the State government, for reasons best known to it, is reluctant to enforce a State law that mandates the unit to train and give 75% of its jobs to local people.

In other words, this is a unit that hugely benefits from State largesse in many ways, not beneficial to Indian farmers, not beneficial to local    unemployed youth. Still, your Ministry, by falsely calling it “green” has literally expempted it from the operation of the Environment (Protection) Act, as post-facto clearance is meaningless.

If promoting “ease of doing business” is the overarching mission of your Ministry, why have a separate Ministry for conserving the environment, at the cost of the tax-payer?

I hope you and your colleagues in the Ministry read every word of this letter carefully and ponder over the Constitutional mandate your Ministry has. 

MEFCC cannot afford to be a mere rubber-stamp Ministry!

Regards,

Yours sincerely,

E A S Sarma

by Raúl Antonio Capote

Image caption.

As detentions of Cubans in the United States increase, the voices most critical of Havana remain silent; no politician—and almost none of the so-called influencers—is speaking out to denounce the abuse.

The Trump administration has expanded so-called “third-country deportations” through agreements with more than 30 nations, including at least 12 African countries.

It is important to begin by noting that most Cubans detained and deported to third countries did not cross the border illegally; their entry was, at the time, legal and authorized by U.S. authorities.

The most common mechanism was Form I-220A, a “parole” or “recognition” document; some even entered on humanitarian parole through the family reunification program, which allowed them to apply for residency.

However, the current administration has attempted to revoke these programs and has left many in a state of legal uncertainty, even though their original entry was fully authorized.

Recently, on three ICE flights, more than 100 immigrants were sent to eight African countries: Burundi, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone. Among them were Cuban citizens; most had no prior ties to those countries, and many only learned of their destination once the plane was already in the air.

Despite this, Cuban-American members of Congress—who are so active on issues concerning the island—have barely raised their voices on behalf of those who are persecuted, imprisoned, and deported to African countries and other parts of the world. There have been no hearings, letters, or tweets.

María Elvira Salazar, Carlos Giménez, Mario Díaz-Balart, and Marco Rubio have built their careers as “opponents” of the Cuban Revolution and as critics of alleged human rights violations on the island, but in the face of the detention, legal uncertainty, and deportation of Cubans in their own districts, they have not mounted a joint response—not even one of comparable magnitude.

Instead, they did call for stricter review of licenses for flights, remittances, and transactions with Cuba—a measure that could restrict or make those services more expensive for Cuban families trying to help their loved ones on the island.

The contrast is clear: maximum pressure on Havana and a far less visible response to the harm suffered by families in Miami. This failure affects more than just Cubans; when representatives tolerate an immigration policy lacking sufficient transparency and respect for due process, they leave immigrant families throughout the region vulnerable.

Data Trumps Narrative

The figures speak for themselves: by January 2026, ICE had detained more than 1,000 Cuban immigrants in a single month. There is no official breakdown of the total number of Cubans currently held in detention centers, but available data indicates that 65,135 people of all nationalities were in ICE facilities in November 2025.

It is known that at least 18 Cubans with Form I-220A were arrested in South Florida during supervision appointments in March 2025, and it is estimated that there are currently more than 42,000 with final deportation orders in the United States.

Behind every number is a life, a family, and a name. For example, Denis Cabrera Rodríguez, an artist and asylum seeker with type 1 diabetes, was detained on November 26, 2025, and held at the Krome North Processing Center in Florida.

According to Amnesty International, he did not receive adequate monitoring of his blood sugar levels, insulin, or an appropriate diet at the center. ICE also denied his requests to be transferred to a hospital.

His case is not unique. Denny Adan González, a 33-year-old Cuban, died on April 28, 2026, at the Stewart Detention Center in Georgia while in ICE custody.

This case adds to the 32 immigrants of all nationalities who died in ICE custody in 2025—the highest number in more than two decades. His family, in Cuba and the United States, continues to wait for answers.

These are not abstract figures: this policy separates parents from their children and leaves teenagers without both parents in a country that promised them protection. A 14-year-old Cuban girl was left without either parent in Florida after ICE detained her father, just months after her mother had been deported to Mexico.

Organizations such as Human Rights Watch have denounced these deportations as violations of international law and have highlighted the “harsh conditions” in the detention centers where these individuals are held.

A Human Rights Watch (HRW) report documented that 4,353 Cubans were deported to Mexico between January 2025 and March 2026—more than one-third of all migrants from third countries expelled to Mexican territory.

According to HRW, U.S. authorities violated the Cubans’ right to due process and expelled them to Mexico without documentation, money, or other personal belongings.

Furthermore, the lack of transparency in third-country deportation agreements and the absence of disaggregated data on the detained Cuban population make it difficult to arrive at an accurate figure. This, in itself, constitutes an obstacle to accountability.

Meanwhile, the silence of those in Congress who should be taking action against such practices makes them complicit; the Cuban community in Miami—the very community that campaigned for Trump—now watches as their friends, family members, neighbors, and coworkers are detained and deported to countries with which they have no ties.

The representatives who promised to defend them remain silent; meanwhile, flights continue to depart, filled with Cubans bound for a destination they never chose.

References

EFE. (August 30, 2026). Trump Expands Deportations to Third Countries by Sending Cubans and Afghans to Africa. https://efe.com/mundo/2026-08-30/estados-deportaciones-inmigrantes-paises-africa-trump/

Amnesty International. (2026). Urgent Action: Cuban asylum seeker with diabetes released. https://www.amnesty.org/es/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2026/04/AMR5108712026SPANISH.pdf

Cuba Información. (2025, April 24). U.S., persecution based on nationality. https://www.cubainformacion.tv/la-columna/20250424/115389/115389-eeuu-persecucion-por-nacionalidad

RFI. (2026, September 22). Deported Migrants: When Washington Engages in “Opaque Bargaining” with African States. https://www.rfi.fr/fr/afrique/20260922-migrants-expulsés-quand-Washington-se-livre-à-un-marchandage-opaque-avec-des-états-africains.

by Vidyarthy Chatterjee

“Despite his brief political career and tragic death – or perhaps because of them – Lumumba entered history through the front door: he became both a flag and a symbol. He lived as a free man, and an independent thinker. Everything he wrote, said and did was the product of someone who knew his vocation to be that of a liberator, and he represents for the Congo what Castro does for Cuba, Nasser for Egypt, Nkrumah for Ghana, Mao for China, and Lenin for Russia …”

These words were written in 1972 by Thomas Kanza, a friend and colleague of Patrice Lumumba, the first Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of Congo who fell foul of a conspiracy hatched by the Americans and executed by Belgian mercenaries no sooner than he had assumed office. The 65^th anniversary of the assassination of this apostle of Congolese self-assertion and pan-Africanism is being observed this year across Africa and other parts of the world. Lumumba was known to look up to India’s national liberation movement against the British, but it is a measure of the times we are passing through that 17^th January, the day he was killed along with at least two of his close associates, passed off with no mention of the tragedy in the Indian media.

The high regard in which Lumumba is still held in certain European circles comes across in the writings of the Belgian author, Ludo de Witte, who characterised the elimination of the Congolese statesman as “the most important assassination of the 20^th century.” It is a proven fact that the principal reason for Lumumba’s murder was that, on assuming office, he tried to put an end to the West’s loot of his country’s enormous mineral wealth. True to its role of destroyer of any regime unfriendly to the idea of its hegemony, the United States was the chief sponsor of the plot to kill Lumumba, assisted by the Belgians and chosen black accomplices. The Americans, who had used uranium deposits taken out of the Congo to manufacture the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, felt even more threatened by Lumumba’s assertion of will than the Belgians who had ruled the African nation with an iron fist for 75 years before being forced to grant independence in 1960.

History forgets, but it also remembers, perhaps not in like measure. But when it chooses to remember, it frequently does so with a startling vengeance, making amends for its bouts of amnesia. Significantly, it was with the eruption of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement in 2020 that the extent of brutalities inflicted on the Congolese people began to come to light, forcing the Belgian monarch, King Philippe to tender a public apology for the crimes committed by his country people, including Catholic nuns and priests, over at least three generations. True, the apology, like many similar apologies, may have been no more than an act of tokenism to ward off a temporary irritant, but it did force an ignorant or indifferent world to come face to face with many ugly truths which had till then been hidden from public knowledge. For instance, arguably for the first time, people all over the world came to know of the routine colonial practice to have the hands of black workers chopped off if they failed to produce a required amount of output in the country’s diamond and gold mines. It was the new-found popular anger around the revelation of such atrocities that caused many an inhabitant – black, mixed, and even white – to deface and bring down statues of Leopold II, the villainous Belgian king after whom his white subjects had named the Congolese capital settlement of Leopoldville.

In this context, if the movement for black pride, in its British chapter, failed in its attempt to topple the statues of say, Cecil Rhodes, the rabid racist who made his millions duping naïve and vulnerable Africans when not setting the dogs of colonialism on them, it only went to show how much more adamant the islanders are when it comes to owning up to their misdeeds. For that matter, Queen Elizabeth II, for all her show of decency and decorum, determinedly refused to entertain the question of apologizing for the countless crimes against humanity committed by the British in India, notably the Jallianwalla Bagh massacre. Even after a visiting Archbishop of Canterbury had prostrated himself before the massacre memorial as a gesture of atonement, the empress chose to look the other way.

One remembers with a certain deep-seated satisfaction that the Haiti-born Raoul Peck’s restrained, respectful, and revelatory cinematic remembrance of Lumumba – the loving husband, doting parent, conscientious objector, responsible citizen, and principled politician prepared to make the supreme sacrifice, if need be – gained a fresh lease of life across Europe and the USA with the outbreak of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. Screenings of the film produced detailed and fiery discussions around the murderous role of not just white occupiers, but that of the black elite who sided with the Belgians, the French, and the Americans to serve their own narrow interests even if it meant defeating the national cause and perpetuating white hegemony. It was this black bourgeoisie, led by Mobutu Seko Sese, which sealed Lumumba’s fate, leaving the field open for Western corporations to do as they wished with the present and the future of the betrayed Congolese people.

Where others of the Congolese political class, headed by the vacillating president Kasavubu, crossed over to the side of the enemy, Lumumba would not agree to anything that went against the expectations and interests of the masses he was given to addressing as “my black brothers and sisters.” In the film, Lumumba invariably begins and ends his public addresses saluting his people oppressed for centuries and just beginning to savour the joy and pride of a new chapter in their lives. In moving far beyond the sterile homilies of others of his class, Lumumba signed his own death warrant – and passed into tomes of researched findings, but more importantly, into oral history handed down from one grieving generation to the next. If Lumumba is today many legends and more numerous lullabies sung in the wee hours of the night by African grandmothers to put their naughty grandchildren to sleep, the phenomenon only serves to strengthen Virginia Woolf’s contention, it is easy to kill a man, difficult to kill a myth. If, to millions of Africans in Ghana, Guinea or the Congo, in particular, Mobutu or Kasavubu are no better than spittoons, Lumumba is the sun, the moon, or a shining star in the high heavens on a clear, cool night. What more can a man hope for?

Who knew better than Lumumba that if Africa, more than any other part of the world, had to bear the brunt of European greed and violence leading to the irreversible pauperization of the continent, it was the Congo that was made to satisfy the white man’s insatiable lust for profit by any means, the most. Shiploads of diamonds, gold, tin, copper, cobalt and uranium were whisked away to make Belgium a wealthy and prosperous country. Realising that this process of denudation of Congo’s natural wealth would not be tolerated by someone as proud and principled as Lumumba, a consortium of evil decided on his liquidation. What made the task of the killers easier was the widely-believed complicity of the West-driven United Nations in the person of the Swedish secretary-general of the time, Dag Hammarskjold, as also that of the black American envoy to the world body, Ralph Bunche, who, in time, came to be awarded the Nobel peace prize!

Apart from looting the metals and minerals of the Congo, the Belgians despatched thousands of black children to Brussels. These children, known as “the stolen generations”, were made to grow up with “white Christian values”, but ended up as no better than third-class citizens. Emotionally crippled and educationally deprived, they grew up to be nervous wrecks, unsure of themselves at every turn of life; to do the lowliest of jobs that no white Belgian man or woman would deign to touch. It goes without saying that assimilation in white society was never the intention of the colonialists. The Church, on its part, played the role of a silent observer when not an active participant. The psychological brutalization of the black or mixed population abandoned to their own devices in a distant alien land, amounted to no better than a modern-day version of slavery.

Perhaps, the most enduring images in Peck’s film are of Lumumba being forced on to an open truck along with two of his compatriots, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo, and driven to their execution with jeers and blows raining on them. Their mouths are gagged and their hands are tied behind their back. Following their execution, the bodies of the three patriots were dismembered and burned. In a sense, the scenes of the corpses being sawed into many parts and fed to a raging fire drum inside a forest are less heart-rending than those of the repeated humiliations to which Lumumba and his associates were subjected on Mobutu’s orders following their arrest.

On a visit to Kerala in 2012 to deliver the Aravindan Memorial Lecture, Raoul Peck spoke of the unforgivable miscarriage of justice engineered by an international gallery of rogues which claimed the life of Lumumba and brought to an abrupt end his unique brand of socio-political experiments with truth. But Peck also made it clear that the foreign players in the tragedy would have failed to have their way if only their local stooges had not stooped so low. In a wider cinematic context, with Lumumba, which had a very successful screening at Trivandrum coinciding with Peck’s visit, the Haiti-born director joined the great Chilean documentarian, Patricio Guzman in letting the world know of the tragic fate of statesmen of destiny who tried their utmost to prevent the economic brigandage of their respective countries by the West. If Lumumba paid with his life in a desperate bid to save Congo’s gold and diamonds and, most important of all, the newly-independent country’s national sovereignty, the Chilean president, Salvador Allende went to his grave trying to defeat American designs to usurp the Latin American nation’s copper wealth.

In this connection, if Nelson Mandela died in his bed rich in years and international approval, perhaps it can be construed in terms of his seeming disinterest in disturbing the industrial and commercial atmosphere in South Africa, characterised by white ownership of every commodity – big, small and in-between – of economic value. By the time apartheid and white rule came to an end and the African National Congress took over the reins of governance, Mandela was a tired man and apparently not too eager to take on the status quo. This suited the white minority and its “people back home” perfectly, but made a mockery of the decades of struggle by thousands of patriots who had made the change-over possible. These words are not to overlook the long hard years spent in imprisonment on the notorious Robben Island, only to emphasize the safety from Western conspiracies and insurrections that Mandela bought for himself and his inner circle by distancing themselves from any radical decisions which had the potential of upsetting white miners, bankers, businessmen and landowners, not to forget their flunkeys in the Asian community.

Raoul Peck’s account of Patrice Lumumba’s life is a rigorous, almost austere, portrait of extreme political significance which, sensed between the lines, reveals why it is that even today it is possible for Western powers, especially the French, to keep interfering economically and militarily in the affairs of former colonies like Mali, Mauritania, Chad, Niger or Burkina Faso. It was the irrepressible visionary in Lumumba that made him argue till his last breath for not just Congolese independence, won but about to be lost, but African unity and brotherhood; for an unbreakable spirit of Africanism combining memories of past insults and injuries with hopes for a more honourable future when obeisances to the white man and his sidekicks would cease to be the order of the day.

by Anirban Mukherjee

Introduction: The Hasdeo Arand Conflict in Context

India’s constitutional democracy recognizes Adivasi or tribal communities as distinct social formations having special rights over land and forests. Ironically, some of the country’s richest tribal landscapes continue to be viewed as repositories of mineral wealth. Whenever coal, bauxite, iron ore, or other natural resources are discovered beneath forests inhabited by Scheduled Tribes, the language of development takes precedence over the language of constitutional justice.

The conflict in Hasdeo Arand closely reflects the ongoing dilemma between India’s environmental commitments and its continued dependence on coal-based development. Spread across approximately 1,898 sq. km. in northern Chhattisgarh, Hasdeo Arand is one of central India’s largest contiguous tracts of dense sal forest and a critical elephant corridor. The forest is home to nearly 10,000 Indigenous people, mainly from the Gond and Oraon tribal communities, whose livelihoods and culture are closely linked to the forest.

In 2010, a government-nominated committee earmarked the entire Hasdeo Arand region as a “no-go” area for mining because of its ecological significance. However, within a span of two years, this recommendation was reversed. During the UPA-II government, forest clearances were granted in 2012, providing access for mining projects in the region. In 2013, the Parsa East and Kente Basan (PEKB) coal block was allocated to Rajasthan Rajya Vidyut Utpadan Nigam Limited (RRVUNL) for supplying coal to its thermal power plants.

The policy reversal resulted in multiple disruptions. For instance, open-cast mining adversely affected one of India’s most biodiverse forest ecosystems, disrupted wildlife corridors, and accelerated the felling of thousands of trees. Evidentially speaking, the government estimate suggests the felling of over 81,000 trees between 2012 and 2023, while the environmental activists claim the figure to be more than 3.5 lakh trees. Further, the Indigenous communities living in the villages of Hariharpur, Fatehpur, Mohanpur, Ghatbarra, Kete, lost their homes, livelihoods, and cultural landscapes.

Development, Democracy, and the Political Economy of Extraction

The situation at Hasdeo Arand highlights the development dilemma where forests are simultaneously viewed as repositories of natural resources and sources of livelihood. While the relative importance given to these conflicting narratives has varied with changing political regimes, the underlying tension has continued to be the same.

Colonial forest administration was primarily concerned about extracting timber and other forest resources that suited their imperial interests. During the period, the Indian Forest Acts transformed forests into state-controlled resources while ignoring the rights of the forest-dwelling communities. The situation was not drastically altered in post-independent India. Although the objectives of post-colonial state differed from its tyrannical predecessor, yet forests continued to be perceived as an extractive resource. It was and is sacrificed to facilitate India’s development aspirations in the form of large dams, mining projects, industrial townships, etc. Unfortunately, the burden of such development projects is disproportionately borne by the inhabitants of such resource-rich regions, mainly the tribal communities. The examples of such development-induced eviction are plentiful, namely the massive displacement issue involved in Hirakud Dam, Singrauli coalfield, Sardar Sarovar Project.

Consecutive regimes have attempted to redress the formidable cost of displacement economic compensation and rehabilitation packages. However, such solutions perceived displacement as a problem to be managed and not as a political issue where people’s consent are taken. Hasdeo Arand is a clear reflection of this approach. The issue here is not merely tribal communities being evicted or losing their lands but whether constitutional safeguards for protecting Scheduled Areas were abided by. This is crucial because India’s constitutional framework offers substantial protection to tribal communities. The fifth schedule of the Constitution, for instance, provides safeguards for the protection of Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Areas. The Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act, 1986 attempts to bolster self-governance by empowering Gram Sabha in matters relating to community resources. Likewise, the Forest Rights Act, 2006 recognizes and vests land and resource rights to the forest-dwelling communities. These legislative measures therefore empower the tribal communities to participate meaningfully in decisions pertaining to their inhabitation and livelihoods.

Nonetheless the experience at Hasdeo Arand does not reveal the upholding of such constitutional provisions. Allegations concerning inadequate consultation and overlooking of Gram Sabha proceedings have generated widespread public debate. Democratic participation is thus reduced to a mere formality when confronted with powerful economic interests. Consultation, deliberation, and consent mechanisms lose their importance when decisions are governed by larger economic priorities.

Furthermore, the Hasdeo Arand experience reveals unequal sharing of developmental costs and benefits. Coal extraction from the region serves the energy requirement of the country and the benefits are widely distributed across consumers, industries, and government beyond Chhattisgarh. In contrast, the cost remains largely localized. Forest-dependent communities experience loss of land, livelihood, and culture, while receiving compensation only for the economic loss.

The irony here is that development is parochially understood in economic terms. It ignores the question of distributive justice. The questions like: Who bears the cost of development? How is the cost calculated? Who enjoys the benefits? Are the stakeholders consulted in the decision-making process? Such questions bear particular relevance in Scheduled Areas where constitutional provisions seek to protect marginalized communities from asymmetric power relationships. Hence, Hasdeo Arand’s dispute is not merely an environmental one over mining. It is a test of India’s democratic commitment of balancing economic development with constitutional justice. Instead of perceiving them as mutually exclusive categories, development should be designed in such a way that it is inclusive and ecologically sustainable.

Beyond Compensation: Many faces of Displacement

Any discussion on development-induced displacement largely focuses on the issue of economic compensation. Official statements enumerate the amount of monetary compensation provided, quantify the rehabilitation housing and employment offered. Even though such measures are important, they only capture a fraction of the disabilities suffered as a result of displacement. Displacement should be conceived as merely a physical shift of space but an alteration of an entire socio-ecological system that evolved over generations.

Land is more than an economic asset for the displaced families. It is symbol of status, identity, and inherited wealth. Moreover, forests, rivers, and common land are closely connected and together they constitute the habitat of the forest-dwelling communities. Displacement not only takes away their home and land but also their familiar ecosystem on which they have depended for generations.

The displaced population were rehabilitated in colonies. New settlement provisions cannot, however, recreate the ecological and cultural landscapes from which they have been uprooted. Houses may replace shelters, but they cannot reproduce the surrounding socio-environmental niche. Displacement severed the relationship of the community with their deyurs (sacred sites), ancestral burial grounds, and forests that formed the basis of their cultural identity. The felling of Karma (yellow teak) and Tad (palm) trees, revered in tribal tradition, constitutes both an environmental loss and an erosion of shared cultural heritage. The loss of these landscapes generates a sense of alienation that no financial package can adequately address. Development planning frequently recognizes material deprivation while neglecting cultural dislocation.

The most irreversible consequence of displacement is probably the loss of community institutions. Tribal societies have customarily organized their social life around shared cultural practices. Festivals and rituals have sustained the communities over generations. Relocation dismantles such institutions. Families get dispersed, traditional leadership structure is eroded, and customary practices gradually lose their social context. It is not just a loss of spatial proximity but the collective way of life through which communities reproduce themselves. For instance, festivals and rituals that once united the entire villages gradually declined after relocation. The traditional karma festival, which was celebrated collectively to mark community solidarity and protection, became a subdued occasion as families relocated.

The weakening of community institutions also has significant political implications. Fragmented communities have diminished capacity to negotiate with administrative agencies and private corporations. Individuals who once acted collectively increasingly confront powerful institutions in isolation. This asymmetry further deepens marginalization because displacement is followed by gradual erosion of collective bargaining power.

Public policy has long approached rehabilitation as an exercise in asset replacement. However, the experience of Hasdeo Arand suggests fundamental alteration of how displacement is to be perceived. Displacement is not a single event but a cumulative process resulting in economic insecurity, ecological degradation, institutional weakening, and cultural loss. Compensation may only address material deprivation, it cannot reconstruct the social world that is lost in the process of displacement.

The debate surrounding coal mining in Hasdeo Arand should therefore move beyond questions of economic compensation and focus on the issue of justice. Financial packages can never solely address the multiple impoverishments suffered in the displacement process. A more meaningful assessment must ask whether displacement itself could have been minimized, whether democratic consent was genuinely respected, and whether the long-term social and ecological consequences were adequately considered before irreversible decisions were taken. Until these questions occupy the centre of public debate, the rehabilitation will continue to function as a partial remedy for a much deeper democratic failure.