Ep 370 - Empire & Exodus with Erald Kolasi

Steve Grumbine: 00:00:43

All right, folks, this is Steve with Macro and Cheese. We're going way back, and some of this is like going back to the first 20 episodes that this podcast ever did with FADL.

Kaboob and I, we had talked about xenophobia and migration and understanding how the job guarantee could solve so many problems, right?

And the xenophobia that is brought on by climate migration, climate immigration, forced marches, if you will, where resources and soil have dried up and people are looking to eat and sustain their lives. And we talked about things like Pakistan and India and what would happen, you know, if this were to occur.

So, you know, brought up the job guarantee and everything. And lo and behold, I was out on substack, as I often do, following my guy, Errol Colassi.

And Errol, you all know, well, he has been on the show several times and quite frankly, he's been on very recently, which kind of violates the cadence that I normally do with my repeat guests.

But this was such an important topic, especially given the tenor of political society today and the norms that many folks hold onto about immigration and so forth. But Erold really put forward a very, very detailed kind of tutorial of imperialism and global migration flows.

And his subheader for this was how Western and European imperialism engineered and distorted global migration dynamics in modern times. And you combine that with current events and you've got yourself some really important information that I think people kind of skip and ignore.

They don't think about it from a historical or dialectical materialist approach and understanding how things come to be.

And one of the other things that we'll touch on in a little bit also, it's kind of how Israel came to be and some of the stories that Errol tells as it pertains to officially registering land rights and nobles, those rich people that just treat the rest of the peasantry like trash throughout history. They didn't spare any evil, if you will, in terms of claiming lands over the course of time as well. And we'll get into that.

I think it's really, really an eye opener. So before we get Arald on here, I'll just give you his bio.

For those that haven't heard Errol before or heard Of Errol Harold is a physicist and economist focusing on the nexus between energy and technology, economics, complex systems and ecological dynamics.

thly Review Press in February: 2025

Erald Kolasi: 00:03:38

Hey, Steve, glad to be back.

Steve Grumbine: 00:03:40

I appreciate you being a good sport because these things, they take a little bit of effort and it has been relatively recent we had you on, so I do appreciate you making time for us because this is a really important subject. Great job putting it out there in this write up. So I guess want to get a couple things out of the way before we dive into it.

I have been lambasted by various people of late who try to say that the US is not technically an empire, which I laugh at because I understand you can get into naval gazing, definitional battles, but in reality, if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, talks like a duck, walks like a duck, chances are it's a duck. And I think you go to a lot of effort in describing imperialism, as it were, with the west and in the past throughout the Ottoman Empire, et cetera.

Can you please start off before we dive into this and just explain what in fact makes an empire?

Erald Kolasi: 00:04:38

Yeah. Thank you. And obviously that's in many ways one of the critical themes of my piece, Steve.

So as you said, this subst post was called Imperialism and Global Migration Flows.

And it essentially made the argument that global migration dynamics, especially in modern times, have been mostly or heavily driven by the structural demands of the imperial core. And so that means the Western imperial core. Right.

So dominant empires like the British Empire for several centuries, the United States now has obviously had a massive impact on global migration flows. And we'll talk about some of that. So what does empire mean in this context?

For starters, let's realize that empires have existed for much of recorded human history.

And going back thousands of years, you can find the Assyrian Empire and the Persian Empire and the Babylonian Empire and the Hellenistic empires after Alexander, and obviously the Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire as you go through the Middle Ages and so on and so forth. Right. So empires are not somehow an invention of the modern world.

But what I point out in the piece is that the impacts they've had on global migration dynamics have been the most intense, the most comprehensive, the most cosmic in a certain sense, in the Modern world. And so what characterizes an empire, especially the modern empires that I'm talking about in the piece?

Well, one thing that I emphasize is that it's not about their internal political systems.

So what makes you or doesn't make you an empire isn't really about whether you elect the president or whether you're a Roman emperor who became emperor because you inherited the position from your father. Right. And you're part of a dynasty.

So it's not the internal dynamics that I think should define an empire, even though those internal dynamics are important for what empires do.

To me, the central key feature of defining an empire is that it is a large, powerful state that has extractive external relations with a periphery, with a sphere of influence. Right. And those peripheries and spheres of influence, they can vary depending on the empire. Right.

So you could have a powerful globe spanning empire like the United States. You know, much of the world in some sense is our sphere of influence. Not all of it. Obviously, all empires have limits to their power.

None of them have infinite power. But you could have smaller empires as well, like the Ottoman Empire back in the day.

It had its own spheres of influence and extractive models and things like that. So this notion of empire is heavily influenced by, you know, Immanuel Wallerstein, which is a major scholar that I cite there in the piece.

And that is essentially, I think, the best way to understand what an empire is, because it explains what empires do. The fact that empires need to extract cheap labor, cheap natural resources, raw commodities, things like that.

The fact that they need to extract them from their spheres of influence, from their peripheries, is absolutely central to explaining how their economies work.

And you and I have talked before about how the Industrial Revolution, especially in the late 19th century, depended on critical raw materials from outside of Europe. I've mentioned what those were before, so I won't get into it again.

But the point is that empires have this fundamentally extractive relationship with an exterior periphery. And that explains how they behave.

That explains the military invasions, the coups, the sanctions, the trade embargoes, the financing, arming and training of rebels and, you know, insurgent groups.

And we'll talk about that with the United States and Latin America, because that was a fundamentally important reason why there was a huge surge in migration from Latin America in the late 20th century. It's because we heavily destabilized and destroyed the region.

s of people fled north in the: 1970

And that's because of US imperialism in Latin America and the fact that we were trying to destabilize so many left wing governments and left wing forces in the region because we didn't want them to fall under communism. So we can talk more about the details as we progress. But that's how you understand empire. Right?

It's how they behave with their external peripheries because they need to extract cheap labor and cheap resources in order to keep their economies going. So it's not about their internal systems, it's about their external relations. That's what I emphasized in the piece.

Steve Grumbine: 00:09:14

Yeah, I think one of the things, because as I dug in, you reference that you're influenced by Marx and Lenin, but then you go on to say, but Wallerstein is who you really pull your understanding of this from. And so I went out there and found some presentations to kind of break down what this means.

But could you break down the Wallerstein model for how the extraction process goes between the periphery a little bit deeper? Because I think there was two loops, if you will. There was like an inner loop and an outer loop.

In terms of where that extraction comes from, it goes well beyond the local core. Again, it was like two concentric circles of pulling in and out resource extraction.

Erald Kolasi: 00:09:58

Yeah. Emmanuel Wallerstein was a famous sociologist and political thinker and he is most well known for his world systems theory.

And this is the notion that modern capitalism, the modern economy, it should be understood as an integrated world system instead of focusing the story at sort of more local or national scales, the way maybe some other previous proponents or those who have discussed imperialism in the past have done so.

Emmanuel Wallerstein said, no, you have to understand it at the kind of global level, because only then can you understand the flows of materials and energy and labor, including the global migration flows that I'm talking about. And so if you understand it as a sort of unified comprehensive system, it'll explain to you what the different components of this system are doing.

Steve Grumbine: 00:10:47

Right.

Erald Kolasi: 00:10:48

And so the whole theory is based on dividing the world into several zones, if you will. So there's like an imperial core, there's a periphery and there's a semi periphery. Right.

So the imperial core would be again, powerful large states that have the strong militaries that control the financial situation of the world. Right. And financial dynamics worldwide.

Again, the United States would be part of the imperial core now, if not in many ways the defining element of the imperial core. But in the past, it could have been the British Empire.

In the past, before it could have been the French, depending on what period you're talking about. So there's this imperial core. And this imperial core has structural demands. Right.

So again, it has demands for cheap labor and cheap resources and cheap things in order to keep its economy going. Where does it get those things? It gets them from abroad. Right.

So it gets them from abroad, it seizes them, it invades other countries, again, commits military coups, invasions, destabilization efforts in order to control the periphery and the semi periphery into giving it the resources that it needs to sustain itself economically.

And so in this way, a sort of power system develops over the globe where the conflict, the tensions between the imperial core and the peripheries essentially explain the economic dynamics and the economic evolution of world history. And so that, in a nutshell, is Emmanuel Wallerstein's theory.

Steve Grumbine: 00:12:15

I appreciate that. It's one of those things where it was so interesting and yet at the same time, I couldn't repeat it back to you. Right.

I understood that there was semi periphery, et cetera, but it didn't really make sense of what that all meant.

And just before we go too far, what would you say would be the differences, just off the top of head, between Lenin's perspective on empire and Wallerstein's?

Erald Kolasi: 00:12:39

I would say probably Lenin's perspective is more focused on how the process of monopolization in the imperial core drives imperialism, drove these powerful states into seeking and grabbing resources abroad so that they could satisfy the demands of their giant monopolies. And I think there is a lot of truth to that understanding of imperialism under modern capitalism.

I think with Wallerstein, however, his model is a bit more generalizable, if I can put it that way. So it works well in both the modern history of capitalism. That's what you're trying to understand in the last couple of centuries.

But it also works very well before then because, again, we've had empires throughout human history, and there have always been divisions between the core and the periphery. Right. That's not something that somehow started in the modern world. So that's one thing that I would say is a major difference.

And maybe you could say, argue some of the merits of Wallerstein's approach relative to Lenin's. That doesn't mean that Lenin's way of thinking about imperialism is somehow wrong or flawed. Absolutely not. I think it has a lot going for it.

ob Arbenz in Guatemala in the: 1950

What Arbenz was doing is he was carrying out some modest land reform, giving some high quality land to poor peasants so they could have a fair redistribution of land over in Guatemala. And the company that was opposing that was the United Fruit Company. Right. So this is the famous banana producer.

And the United Fruit Company essentially ran much of Central America at this time, right in the middle of the 20th century. And they controlled a lot of land and they didn't want anybody messing with that land.

And so when Arben started messing with it, they went to the Eisenhower administration and they said, this guy's a communist. You pretty much need to remove him. And Eisenhower and Dulles were like, yeah, sure, let's go ahead and remove this guy. And that's what they did.

So it was a US sponsored couple. Arbenz was overthrown. That led to a huge fallout in Guatemala, led to a lot of conflict between different political groups.

Eventually that spilled over into a massive three decade civil war. And as a result of that war in which so many people died, it was a brutal civil war.

Over 200,000 Guatemalans fled to the United States, fleeing that violence.

So this is what I call the migration boomerang in my piece, in the sense that U.S. foreign policy or imperial foreign policy is often blind to the kind of boomerang effects that it has. Right.

So we go in there thinking we're overthrowing one government because we want to keep communism out, but it has all of these second order and third order effects for our own country. Right. Namely that it invites the massive arrival of refugees who are fleeing violence and war that we created, in effect.

Steve Grumbine: 00:15:39

Real quick, we just interviewed Gabriel Rockhill, which was quite a joy. It was my first time speaking with him.

And in his book, who Paid the Pipers A Western Marxism, he breaks down that fruit coup down there in great detail. I mean, some of the details are just, just absolutely terrifying.

And from my vantage point, it'd be good if people understood why people leave places. And it doesn't really necessarily have to do with them wanting to leave. They probably don't want to leave their homeland.

And most likely the situations they're fleeing are not made of their own making, they're made of somebody else's making. That making tends to be United States these days. So anyway, I just wanted to throw that in there.

Erald Kolasi: 00:16:22

Yeah, and I want to follow up with that because this is one of the major themes of the piece. Right. So it's that when we think about migration and its various aspects, right, Immigration, we tend to think about the individual motivations.

So we tend to think about these people, they wanted a safer life for their family, or they want economic opportunity. And there's all these personal level, individual level motivations that we ascribe as causal factors for why people move around the world.

And what I was pointing out in the book is that if you actually trace the causal chains, right, and the causal history, you will find that in most cases, these people who don't have economic opportunity at home, who don't have educational opportunities, who don't see a safe life for themselves and their families in their countries, those terrible conditions were often created by an empire who was destabilizing the country for a particular end. So, you know, some other major examples of this, especially in recent history.

In the: 1980

ty was overthrown in the late: 1970

They were doing land reform. Any kind of land reform is communism, as you know, Steve.

Steve Grumbine: 00:17:57

Yeah.

Erald Kolasi: 00:17:58

And so what do we do? We funded the Contras.

Steve Grumbine: 00:18:00

Right?

Erald Kolasi: 00:18:00

This is where the Contras came in. There were the right wing insurgent groups that the United States funded and trained in order to go after the Sandinistas.

And that led to a brutal civil war, a lot of conflict in Nicaragua. And again, it displaced a lot of people. And where did a lot of those people end up going to the United States?

gue in the piece, in the late: 1970

cy by the FMLN throughout the: 1980

res, including at el Mozot in: 1981

r and same thing. In the late: 1970

So you had an increase of 1,400%, 1,400% increase in the Salvadoran population in the United States. Again, all of it due to the war that we created and sustained. Right. Because we were trying to stop the spread of communism in Latin America. Right.

And these wars really intensified, especially when Reagan came into power, typified by the notorious Iran Contra affair, where we were selling arms to Iran so we could fund the Contras. That was a huge scandal in the Reagan years.

Basically, when Reagan came to power, he said, there's no way we can let any kind of left wing government thrive in Central America. And so the United States fueled these massive wars. What did the wars do? They produced this massive wave of refugees.

And that, Steve, is the fundamental reason how the United States ended up with such a huge population of Latin American migrants. Right? And obviously then over time, you know, their families came and things like that. And now they're, of course, part of our culture.

But that's how it happened. It was as a result of US Imperial policy designed to keep communism out. Right.

And it had this crazy boomerang effect, which is obviously still affecting our politics to this day. This piece was fundamentally meant to be about history, but obviously history is always told with an eye towards the present. Right?

And so the main reason why I wrote this piece is with an eye towards the President.

What's happening right now in the United States with the Trump administration's massive deportation push and all of the virulent anti immigrant hatred that's out there. And one of the things that I pointed out in the piece is that migration for imperialism serves a kind of double function, right?

So one, it's obviously a source of cheap labor. So the United States in its history has always relied on the supply of cheap labor when it needed to do something.

So when we needed to build the transcontinental railroad, a big part of how we did that is with Chinese labor. So we brought over all these Chinese workers, treated them like crap, basically.

Chinese Exclusion act in the: 1880

In World War II, in the: 1940

And they worked in agriculture, they worked in other things. Right. They helped to keep the American economy going along with the Americans that stayed behind.

But then in the: 1950

And so then we basically kicked out, like, a million, you know, Mexicans in Operation Wetback, which you may have heard about. So we kicked them out, Right? They were no longer needed. This is a common story in American history right now.

And we're kind of doing it again now, right? Like, we create the problems of the conditions that bring in so many migrants into our country.

And then when the ruling classes start to believe that they're politically inconvenient, then we start kicking them out or we start sabotaging them somehow. Right? So the ruling classes can show the working classes passes. Look, we're on your side, right? What does J.D. vance always say?

He's like a broken record. He's like, one of the major reasons why housing costs have gone up is because of migrants.

When you allow millions of people to come into this country, they're going to drive up the price. Never mind that if you're an undocumented worker, you can't really buy a house.

It's almost impossible because you need to provide so much documentation. They're not.

What's causing housing prices to go up is all the investors and the monetary policy and the bad regulations and just the fundamental structural setup of the capitalist system. Right? That is what's driving housing prices up and making them unaffordable. And the fact that we can't build mass housing in this country.

And I could go on and on, but, like, those are the dominant reasons why housing is expensive. It's not because of immigrants.

But you get my point, which is that for capital, immigrants and migrants provide a very convenient political foil during difficult economic times because they allow capitalists to essentially pretend to be on the side of the working class by claiming to be against the migrants and wanting to toss them out and create more jobs for the domestic economy. But it's always, of course, a ruse. It's a ruse, it's fake.

It's just capital throwing a smokescreen and trying to distract us because they create the immigration problems in the first place. Then when it's politically convenient, they say, well, we have too many immigrants, we got to kick them out.

So this is a common theme in American history and I really wanted to emphasize that. And I emphasize that for other examples as well, like I talk about Britain, so on. But this is a common thing that empires do, right?

Like they bring in cheap labor when they need it, and then whenever they don't need it, they turn against it. And by the way, this argument is also true even for more high skilled labor. Right.

Something important that I want to emphasize is that not all immigrants work in agriculture, picking fruits and vegetables. Right. A lot of immigrants are doctors and they're software engineers. Right. They're IT professionals. So yeah, H1B's a lot of high skilled labor. Right.

But even there, even for more high skilled labor, which is more expensive, nevertheless, even that labor provides foundational value to the capitalist class and the capitalist system because it helps to keep wages lower in those sectors than they otherwise would be. Right. Can you imagine if we didn't take IT professionals and software engineers from India?

Well, it would be much more expensive to pay our own domestic software professionals for that because there'd be a huge scarcity. So even for those jobs, Right. They still fall under the broader rubric or logic of imperial domination.

Steve Grumbine: 00:24:59

Right.

Erald Kolasi: 00:24:59

So I think that's important to emphasize as well.

Steve Grumbine: 00:25:02

Absolutely.

And I don't know if there's going to be a good specific space to shove this in, but given that this is part and parcel with the propaganda narrative that the elites push down to working class people in their commitment to saying, hey, we're in solidarity with you, we frequently would talk about the implementation of a federal job guarantee. And that was again part of what I spoke to FADL Kaboob about.

You know, back when I was much more of a believer in electoral solutions, he and I talked at length about the fact that a job guarantee would stave off. There was no need for working poor whites and poor blacks to hate their immigrant brothers and sisters because there was a way to employ everybody.

There was a way to ensure the real resources were available for them too, and that we didn't have to scapegoat immigrants.

But the job guarantee is a direct threat to not just the imperial impulses, but to capital as a whole, because they require, as Claire Matei talks about in the capital order, that triple constraint of fiscal austerity, monetary austerity, and then the power of the sac, as she would say, and the job guarantee immediately, it just eliminates the toxicity of the power of The SAC and provides people with a path that takes away the power of capital to dictate terms, which is precisely why it won't happen. Your thoughts on that?

Erald Kolasi: 00:26:34

Yeah, I think that's a terrific point, Steve. I myself am a huge fan of universal unemployment and universal job guarantees. And I'm glad you mentioned economists like Clara Matei.

That's right, in the capital order. This is one of the arguments that she makes that austerity is a structural feature of capitalism.

Another economist who made a similar point was Mikhail Kalecki.

Kalecki argued back in the middle of the 20th century that capitalists don't want to let governments provide mass employment because that would threaten their power. Right. That would threaten their power over labor. If you let governments give jobs to whoever wants it, then you can't have a reserve army of labor.

And so you can't discipline labor in the ways that you want. Right. You can't fire people because if you fire people, the government's offering me a job automatically. So you can't fire people.

You have to pay them because they might go work for the government where the wage might be better. Right. So it provides a kind of wage floor as well. This idea of a federal jobs guarantee, whatever you want to call it. Right.

But the idea of rejecting the neoclassical nonsense of Nairu. Right.

The non accelerating inflation rate of unemployment and accepting that no, we can have full universal employment in society and we should, just as a basic social goal, as a basic human right. Just like all people should have health insurance, all people who want it should have a job.

There's no reason why that shouldn't be the case, especially if you have the real resources available to make that happen. And we in the United States certainly do. If that's the case, why wouldn't you do it? But that's the critical reason why it doesn't happen.

Because then capitalists won't have that control over labor. Right. They won't have the ability to scapegoat migrants. Right.

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Erald Kolasi: 00:28:38

Returning back to our subject.

They can't say, well, the reason why everything is expensive or the people who are taking your jobs, it's all the immigrants. They can't say that because there's universal employment. And so everybody who wants a job can get a job.

So it also kind of weakens that argument as well. It weakens the, you know, anti immigration fervor that pops up in this country once every few decades like it is now, you know, in recent history.

So I think it's absolutely essential towards sabotaging the power of the capitalist classes. Unfortunately, it would require an ambitious government willing to step up and do something like that.

And so far anyway, that's been lacking in American history, at least in recent history. Right.

I mean, obviously if you go back to World War II and, you know, our response to the Great Depression with fdr, things were a little bit different, but at least in recent history, there hasn't been any kind of American government that has had that kind of ambition.

Steve Grumbine: 00:29:33

I want to throw this out there real quickly and you can distance yourself from my words here, but as far as I look back at that, I think of it more as a grand bargain to maintain capital's hegemony, because there was a crisis of hegemony at that point in time. There was a crisis of hegemony coming out of World War I, during the Great Depression and so forth, leading up to it even.

And each time the government had to do something to prevent full scale, hey, I see what those Bolshevik dudes are doing over there. Maybe we could do something like that here.

And so all of a sudden a lot of concessions were made to basically keep the hegemon in power, to keep things as they are. They had to buff the edges off momentarily. But that was a, how do I put that?

That wasn't like rights, that was like a gift, as Rosa Luxembourg would say, basically a gift from the ruling class because it could be taken away. Just as you're showing here right now with the immigrant stories, as long as they need them. Yeah, come on in.

The minute they're inconvenient, they're demonized and destroyed.

Just like the rights of working class people through gifts from elites bending over and said, here you go, little boy, here, have a little extra chocolate this month. Anyway, like I said, you could distance yourself from that, but that's my strong belief.

Erald Kolasi: 00:30:54

I appreciate that. And I think most of that is right. Look, what FDR did was fundamentally to save American capitalism. Right.

He wasn't trying to overthrow American capitalism. He wasn't Lenin or anything like that. Yeah. He was trying to save the system in the best way that he could, given the conditions that he faced. Right.

Without going again towards a full blown revolution. The only caveat that I would throw to that, Steve, is World War II in World War II, the American economy almost operated under a de facto communism.

Right. I mean, we had the War Production Board that was telling private corporations what to do and what to make.

You had full blown price controls on everything. So you had, obviously you just had complete government management of the economy or.

Because free markets are not going to win world wars, only competent governments can do that. And that's what we had in World War II. And then the transition from the war was handled terribly.

Part of the problem was of course, that FDR himself died. Truman was much more conservative. There was a lot of tension that he didn't know how to handle.

Especially there were massive strike waves in 45 and 46 in the United States that led to Republicans flipping the house in 46. So I think the post war transition was badly managed in the United States. And I think a big reason for that was FDR dying.

But I think the deeper reason is, yes, that FDR never actually meant to overthrow capitalism. He was just trying to make it. Save it functional. Yeah, yeah, save it from Bolshevism, basically. It wouldn't descend into full blown chaos.

But yeah, of course by doing that, of course we might call it an extreme reformism. By extreme reformism, you're of course just delaying the problems. You're kicking the can down the road.

Steve Grumbine: 00:32:37

Yeah.

Erald Kolasi: 00:32:37

And so, yeah, that's. I think that's a fair criticism if that was your criticism.

Steve Grumbine: 00:32:41

Yeah, it was my criticism. I want to jump back to your paper because you talked about modern slavery in the Atlantic system.

And I think this is a really hard hitting section here.

I want to give it back to you, but I don't think people realize and this is coming from so many sources, I'm not even going to try to pull all the names that I'm pulling this from.

But going back to chattel slavery in the U.S. the United States, every chance it had, just change the phrasing, change the words they use, changed the dynamics of kind of what amounted to be slavery under a different term. Even after the Civil War, they had vagrancy laws and all kinds of other things to maintain that same similar control of slavery by other means.

And we see it today, even now, most people are one paycheck away from falling into absolute destitution. So what's the difference between that kind of abuse from the system and a slaver whipping you with a cat of nine tails?

I'm not to say that there's not a difference. There is a difference, but it's. Is it a difference with distinction? I Don't know. Sue, bring us back to modern slavery in the Atlantic system.

Erald Kolasi: 00:33:54

Yeah, absolutely. In this section, what I was trying to explain is that, yes, African slavery is something that had existed for a long time.

So it's not like, you know, the Europeans arrived at the coastline and African raiders realized that, wow, we can now make a lot of money by selling slaves to the Europeans.

Slaves had been traded across the Saharan desert for centuries before, you know, the Europeans arrived, especially the Portuguese, in the 15th century.

But what the European arrival did and what the growth of the Atlantic system did is it created enormous demand for slaves at a scale that had never before been witnessed in human history. And I talk about some of the numbers involved, right? 12 million slaves were shipped from Africa to the new world.

About 10 and a half million actually survived the journey.

So a huge number died on the ships because the conditions on these ships were so filthy, so putrid, so horrible, that a lot of people ended up dying from disease and other reasons and so cramped, obviously. So it was just massive transfer of human beings across the Atlantic Ocean.

And what did the slaves find when they got to the other side, where conditions were absolutely brutal and terrible? They were whipped. It was hot. Many of them would often die within a few weeks after arriving.

And what they were doing is they were essentially producing cash crops, you know, cotton, tobacco, sugar, all the things that we know about. And where were those things going? Well, they were going over to Western Europe. Right.

So they were, again, critical raw material inputs for European manufacturing.

And then Europeans would come back with their manufactured goods, clothes and their things, guns and whatever, and they would sell them to the African kingdoms and states so they could give them more slaves. And that's essentially the Atlantic system. Right, so you talked about the Atlantic system.

That's what that section talks about is how European imperialism essentially provided the fundamental demand which turbocharged the African slave trade. And, yeah, it was absolutely a brutal system.

And I'm glad you talked about some of the many ways that this system reinvents itself, Steve, because it is true. After the Civil war, you know, and the Reconstruction period, a lot of southern states started incarcerating black people in huge numbers. Why?

Because the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits slavery except as a punishment for a crime.

Steve Grumbine: 00:36:17

Right.

Erald Kolasi: 00:36:17

So if you've been convicted for a crime, you could technically be a slave in America. And that is constitutional to this very day. That's why even now, there's hundreds of thousands of prison workers.

Some of them are being paid, you know, dirt cheap wages, but many of them are not actually paid. And they produce all kinds of things, Right. Like furniture and military uniforms and all other things.

And, you know, we get this massive cheap labor out of it. But again, that's slavery perpetuating itself by other means. Right. And other mirages.

So now it's the federal and state prison workforce that's providing so much of the cheap labor. And of course, who's that?

A lot of it is black people who are, of course, disproportionately jailed, even for obviously ridiculous crimes that they commit at the same rate as white people, like drug possession and things like that.

So, yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that, because so much of that horrible system, which obviously started centuries ago, the Europeans acquiring slaves from the interior of Africa, so much of that system has then perpetuated itself in modern history in our economic systems in so many different ways. Right.

Steve Grumbine: 00:37:20

This is also migration. Right. I mean, even though it's not intent, they didn't want it. Yeah, it was forced migration.

But I mean, how people end up somewhere other than where they want to be, they're not, like, planning. It's like, I'm just so excited about going to work the cotton fields. And, you know, I'm just so excited about that.

None of this was about, like, the joy of coming to America. It was, in this case, they were captive and treated like property. But then that lays the groundwork for a lot of other things.

Like one of the things that we don't talk about in here, but is a very deep concern of mine, is the descendants of slaves.

When they talk about reparations these days, There is a push that there's a group of folks out there that genuinely despise immigrants because they feel like they are pushing down on African Americans who are used as the bottom based on class and hierarchy and racial discrimination and racism and so forth. A system based on whiteness. And we just interviewed Bob Williams. We talked about funding white supremacy. All this stuff plays into this.

But now, all of a sudden, instead of blacks in these circumstances bonding with their immigrant brothers and sisters, those that focus on the Eidos movement, African descendants of slaves, we're talking about folks who see the immigrant as their enemy instead of the oppressor of the state, the capitalist, you know, the oligarchy, if you will, the empire, doing these things to them.

I think this is worth noting because when I think about racism and I think about anti immigration, I typically think of some dude with a red hat on saying, make America great Again, a little bit of a dull stare. Typically a goatee maybe talks like, let me tell you something, boy kind of thing. That's what the caricature of an anti immigrant person looks like.

But you don't realize that it comes in many forms and all of it is based on a false scarcity and a scapegoating and demonization of immigrants.

I mean, and with good reason at times, because even though it's not their fault, without policy, without a change in the capitalist dynamic, immigrants do decide to work for less. And they do end up displacing people that are already at the bottom of the food chain in terms of the pay scale, in terms of opportunity.

And so rather than look where the real source of that comes from, they think somehow or another demonizing those folks. And I'm not even sure they think about it that way. I think they genuinely think that the reason why they're being outcast is because of immigrants.

Can you talk about that a little bit? Because it really is another version of this. It's not just Bubba down there in Texas, in Florida hating on the immigrants.

Erald Kolasi: 00:40:13

You're absolutely right. It does come in so many different forms. And look, I want to take this back, Steve.

You know, even all the way back in the 19th century, you know, what the southern planters would tell the white working class is that, look, we can't end slavery because if we have to pay slaves a wage, a living wage, that's money that's going to come out of your pocket. Poor white person. So this is why you should support slavery. Right? So this is a tactic, a strategy that capitalists have used for a long time.

Capitalists and the ruling classes more broadly is they're absolute masters at dividing and distracting the working class. Right. And this is one of the vectors through which they do it.

You know, race and racialism and immigration, this has been a very popular way of dividing the working class. Right. Hey, if more immigrants are coming here to our country, that leaves fewer jobs available for black people. Right.

And so there is an attempt on capital to sow discord among the black and Hispanic communities. So you're absolutely right. This has happened. But to overcome that, I think we need to start educating people about history. Right.

And let's look at what happened after we did get rid of slavery in the United States, at least formally. Did wages for the white working class decline in the decades that followed or in the century that followed? No, they actually went up.

Why did they go up? Well, because history is dynamic and a lot of things change. We had a lot of economic growth in America. You had the rise of industrial unionism.

So when workers get together across racial lines and when they advocate for their rights and their power, collectively, they can achieve really big things, including large wage increases. This is why unions are awesome, right? This is why to this day, unionized workers on average make more than nine unionized workers.

So when workers get together, when they can bridge across racial lines, when they can move as one political bloc, they can actually achieve a lot for themselves.

And that previously antagonistic, competitive relationship suddenly becomes an irresistible avalanche in which everyone is working together towards achieving big things. And a great example of that is, Steve, is honestly what happened in the Great Depression, right?

And with the arrival of FDR to power, that was the last sort of consistent time that the black and the white working class voted together. And what happened as a result of that? Well, what happened is the Democrats won five presidential elections in a row.

FDR was the longest serving president in history. And we got, obviously, Social Security and the Tennessee Valley Authority and, you know, all kinds of unions. Right. And the Wagner act and all that.

So that's what happened. You know, labor got a lot more powerful, could advocate for its right. A third of America was unionized by the middle of the 20th century.

And unions were actually a political force in this country back then.

That's what can happen when workers can unite and can overcome the capitalist noise about this poor immigrant is taking away this black person's job and all of that. Right. And realize that you should actually be redirecting your anger upwards, vertically, not horizontally. Right.

So keep the anger flowing vertically towards the capitalist class, not towards your poor brothers and sisters who are struggling just like you are, because they're not the fundamental source of your problem. Capitalist.

Steve Grumbine: 00:43:30

Absolutely.

So, you know, I want to stay in line with your work on the piece we're discussing and we touched on it, but I'd really like to get into the British imperialism and global land transfer and labor transfers. I think this was a really big one because it plays right into the land, which is the final piece you go into.

I would like to touch on both of those, but let's just go ahead and start with British imperialism and the global labor transfers.

Erald Kolasi: 00:43:57

Yeah.

So the point that I was making in this section is that the British Empire was a major structural cause of global migration throughout much of the 19th century and the early 20th century. Right.

avery in the colonies, by the: 1830

And over the following decades, it ended up bringing millions of Chinese and Indian workers over to South America, Latin America and the Caribbean. Right, Especially in the Caribbean, and the descendants of those migrants.

And again, many of these migrants came under very, you know, sort of false advertising, let me put it that way, right?

They were told like, you're going to do this, but they actually were thrown into a completely different job, again under terrible conditions, paid very little, in some cases not paid at all, because where were they going to go? Once you're in the Caribbean, you're very far from home, you're stuck doing what you can to get by.

So basically, yeah, the British replaced a lot of their lost slave labor by just importing millions of Indians and Chinese people. And to this day, in a lot of these Caribbean countries, you still have large populations ethnically Chinese, ethnically Indian.

So that was one of the major examples I gave of how the British sort of distorted global migration flows. I gave a more modern example, again, along similar themes that we've been talking about with the United States.

So I won't belabor the point, but just how after World War II, Britain had huge labor scarcities caused by the war, so they brought in all of these colonial subjects from abroad and said, you can work in Britain, you can come here and help us, especially with the nhs, right? So the national health system that started after World War II, that had huge staffing needs and a lot of that was done by immigrants.

d of headed south in the late: 1960

And that controversy obviously continues to this day with Nigel Farage and, you know, the right wingers in Britain. So again, a parallel situation with the United States. So I won't say much more about it. One of the more interesting things that I brought up.

So in the other section that we were talking about is how sort of imperialists use land transfers or just land policy in general, in order to drive the migration dynamics. They want, whether that's because they want to seize a particular piece of land, whether that's because they want to kick certain groups out, right?

The examples that I bring up are things like terra nullius in Australia, so declaring it the Aboriginal land, essentially no man's land, and allowing Australian settlers to just say, I claim this now. This is my land. Even though your ancestors have lived here for literally tens of thousands of years. This is not magically my land. Right.

So there's a lot of land policies like that which transferred a lot of land over to Europeans or towards the rich. So another major example I gave was the Ottoman empire.

s law called the land Code of: 1858

ey passed this land reform in: 1858

To get a deed for their land. Many poor farmers didn't want to do that because they knew that if they did that, it would mean military conscription and heavy taxation. Right.

And so they didn't want to get embroiled with the Ottoman state. And.

And before I go on, an important piece of context that I want to emphasize here is that before modern times, Steve, most subsistence farmers and peasants, they didn't have written deeds that said, this particular piece of land belongs to me. Like a typical European farmer in the Middle Ages farmed these strips of land called cellians.

They didn't have a deed that said, this cellian belongs to me, and so does that one right over there. Right. And here's the formal deed which proves my ownership. That's not how it worked. Instead, land rights were much more sort of informal.

They were based on village dynamics. Right. So they were enforced by village elders. Sometimes they were enforced by, you know, lord vassal hierarchies.

But the point is they were understood to be customary. Right? So land rights were sort of customary rights for most of human history. Right.

People didn't have specific pieces of paper saying, like, this piece of land is mine.

That starts changing in the modern world, and governments start demanding written evidence that you actually own this piece of land, which was by design, because they knew that most peasants couldn't actually provide that written evidence because that's just not how human history worked. Human freaking history.

So typically, obviously, most peasants couldn't provide those documents anyway, and they didn't want to bother registering because, like I said, in the case of the Ottoman Empire, it met military conscription and a lot of taxation. So what a lot of peasants did across the Ottoman Empire is they essentially had much wealthier people register these properties in their own names.

Or what happened is many wealthy people just swooped in and did it without anyone's knowledge. So both cases happened with and without people's knowledge, without people knowing.

But the point was that there was this massive land transfer, in effect, from the poor to the rich. And I brought up how this affected Palestine in particular. Right. Palestine at the time was a Ottoman province.

And what started happening is a lot of land that belonged to Palestinian peasants was registered in the name of wealthy merchant families along the coast, Right. In particular, the Sursock family in Beirut was a very wealthy, famous Lebanese family in the 19th century. Again, SurSoc is their name.

And they registered enormous amounts of land in Palestine as a result of the Land Code. So they got filthy rich.

And then what happened is later is a lot of Jewish and Zionist organizations came to the region to try and settle more and more Jewish people in there. They ended up buying that land directly from the Sursock family or from other wealthy merchant families.

So they bypassed the Palestinian peasants completely. They just bought, in many cases, really high quality, productive agricultural land is what they were buying, right.

And they just bought it directly from the wealthy merchant families. And then they just expelled the Palestinian farmers who again, had lived there for generations, you know.

So these are how the first major expulsion started and thousands of Palestinian farmers fled. That was like the first major wave of internal displacement.

have called the land Code of: 1858

Steve Grumbine: 00:50:56

Amazing.

Erald Kolasi: 00:50:56

And, you know, I don't want to be too reductionist, right. There were other structural issues obviously as well that happened, but that was a key factor that kind of turbocharged the conflict.

It was just those fundamental land dynamics and allowing so many Jewish people to buy up the land that previously belonged to Palestinians.

Steve Grumbine: 00:51:11

Wow, that's just unbelievable. I mean, actually, it's incredibly believable.

And I think that's part of the problem, is everybody thinks that history started on like October 7th, and they don't realize that these land grabs and the migrations and a lot of the oppression we see is a direct result of ruling class power and ruling class decisions, using the working class as pawns, playing with their brains, playing with their land, playing with their lives, playing with their well being and their employment and their ability to sustain their families and housing, you name it. And these fall under a million things like austerity measures that I frequently focus on. But as it pertains to migration paths and stuff like that.

I guess I want people, as they listen to this from my perspective, to realize the elite create the conditions for these things.

I'm sure there's a million other sub reasons that come to play, but I think we're so propagandized that it's almost impossible for us to have a long view of how things come to be unless you have that historical and dialectical materialist approach to understanding the world around you. I think that these things tend to be very framed through recency, bias and whatever it is that you heard on the news that day must be the way it is.

And people either don't have time, willingness, wouldn't know where to start to look to find out how these things come to be.

And I think that if we were able to find a way of getting messages like this out to larger audiences for people to begin understanding, you know, why there's these Mexicans, why people are running from Venezuela, it's not because of their government, it's because of a lot of the stuff that US Empire does. Errol, I'd like you to take us out with, you know, what do you think that people should take away from this? Aside from what I was saying, obviously.

I mean, you had such a way with words. What do you think people should really take out of this?

Erald Kolasi: 00:53:15

I think the most important thing they should take out of this is that it's important to understand how capitalists deceive us all the time, right into making short sighted decisions about our future. You feel terrible that you've lost your job. Trump comes along and tells you it's the problem of the immigrants and they're eating cats and dogs.

And Trump is your guy, right, because he's speaking to your pain.

And I think it is important to educate people so they understand that the real source of their oppression isn't the poor guy down the street trying to get a day job.

It's the CEO on the 50th floor making decisions about how the world should run and where people should go and where money should be invested and what laws the government should pass and what should happen in your community. How many jobs should there be there? How many jobs should go away? Are you going to get a school? Are you going to get a bridge or a highway?

Are you going to get amenities? Are you going to get social services?

Your anger should be at the guy on the 50th floor, not on the poor sod on the first floor trying to sell some bananas. It's the guy on the 50th floor that's causing your problems.

And so I think that's the most important thing that I want people to take away is it's absolutely important to feel angry at how absolutely and terribly wrong things have gone in American society. But that anger will only be constructive and productive if it's directed at the right people.

Otherwise, if it's directed at the wrong people, your anger is going to be completely in vain. It's going to be useless, and it's not going to lead to anything.

If you want it to actually be productive, you need to understand the fundamental forces that are driving our modern economies and our modern political systems. And once we do, then we can band together and organize and hopefully fight for a better world.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:13

I love it. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. No war, but class war, man. With that in mind, I want to thank Arald for folks.

I asked him the night before we did this because it was just powerful and I wanted to get it out quickly. Erold, thank you so much for doing this. You're just an MVP here at Macro and Cheese. Really appreciate your time.

Erald Kolasi: 00:55:33

Thank you so much, Steve.

Steve Grumbine: 00:55:34

All right, so folks, my name's Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macaron Cheese. I'm also the founder of the non profit Real Progressives that supports this podcast.

We are a wholly volunteer driven organization and we live and die on your contributions. I'm sure many large platforms could do just fine. We can't without your help. We need your help.

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Or you can go to our website realprogressives.org and become a monthly donor or a single time donor. You can also go to our substack.

Just like Errol Colassi has a wonderful substack, Real Progressives has a substack and you can join us there and you can become a monthly donor through there as well. Also, please remember this podcast. We do a webinar every Tuesday evening in eastern time zone, New York City time zone called Macro and Chill.

We love having you come. Everybody come. And frequently we have guests. Erol has come with us many times to share in our Macro and Chill conversations.

It's a great opportunity to create community and it's also our way of sharing and learning and growing together. And we're hoping that you'll consider becoming part of that joining us. It is a webinar.

So we sit there in a zoom call and we talk and we listen to the podcast and it's been really wonderful. We're growing leaps and bounds and we'd love to have you join us. You can find that information on our website.

It's at the top of the website we tell you about our current events. You can also find it on Substack and Patreon. And without further ado, I bid you adieu.

On behalf of my guest, Eric Colosseum and myself, Steve Grumbine and Macaron Cheese, we are out of here.

End Credits: 00:57:37

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