Simone de Beauvoir (1908-1986) was a French writer and feminist. She was friends with the anti-colonial resistance fighter and psychoanalyst Franz Fanon, who was active against the Algerian war and French colonial aspirations. She analysed and critiqued different power structures such as capitalism, racism and sexism. She also took on many leftists because she argued that women’s oppression would not automatically resolve itself under communism. Being of the opinion that women also contributed to their own oppression and must free themselves from it, she also argued with other feminists.

Naomi Klein (2010: 179, German edition)

It is often the case that only capitalism’s extreme effects are criticised, but not the economic system itself, which is presented as the only one that is feasible (cf. Klein 2010: 36). Calling for radical systemic change was far more common in the 1960s than it is today. When Pope Francis said in 2013 that, in general, ‘capitalism kills’, there was a great outcry in the German media (welt.de (2013): Die Kirche sollte den Kapitalismus schätzen, Zeit.de (2013): Heillose Kapitalismuskritik). In the 1960s, many social movements and anti-colonial struggles on all continents campaigned for radical systemic change. Back then, the idea of an alternative to the existing economic and social system was much more conceivable for many people than it is today.

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Milton Friedman (1912-2006) was a Chicago School economist, advocate of neoliberalism, and winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Economics. The quote comes from a letter Friedman wrote to Chilean dictator Pinochet.

Naomi Klein (2007: 75)

Milton Friedman believed that societies had to be radically changed: economic forces should be allowed to rule freely without any state interference. This concept of freedom has become known in history as neoliberalism. Friedman’s main work is called Capitalism and Freedom (1962). However, this freedom primarily means economic freedom, often at the expense of people and nature (see Klein 2010: 85, German edition). Politicians, he argued, should use shock strategies to bring about change towards neoliberal capitalism. According to him, crisis situations such as natural disasters should be exploited for this purpose: it was when societies were in a state of shock as a result of a catastrophe, that economic changes could best be implemented. This was because in such exceptional situations, people would be too overwhelmed to resist “reforms” such as the privatisation of education, health and social security. Friedman and his Chicago Boys (Economists trained at the University of Chicago) experimented with their theories, especially in dictatorships such as Chile under General Pinochet.

Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Walden Bello (born 1945) is a Filipino sociologist and director of the NGO Focus on the Global South. Bello was in the resistance against dictator Marcos (who ruled the Philippines from 1965-1986), and was one of the first critics of globalisation. Bello broke into the World Bank office in the early 1980s and stole some 3,000 pages of confidential documents to prove collaboration between the International Monetary Fund (the World Bank’s sister organisation) and Marcos.

Walden Bello (2019): „We Have to Move to a Post-Capitalist System“. In: Jacobinmag 28.10.2019

In recent decades, there has been an increasing financialisation of the economy. Today, rather than through the production of goods or services, vast amounts of money can be made or lost in very short intervals through financial transactions. In his book Dark Victory (1994), Bello describes how financialisation was implemented as a strategy by British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and US President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s in order to re-subjugate the decolonising Global South, for example, through currency speculation. Thus in 1997, thanks to rumours about a lack of dollar reserves in Thailand, banks and investors immediately withdrew their money not only there, but also in other countries, which then went bankrupt as a result.

*Walden Bello (1994): Dark Victory. The United States and Global Poverty. Amsterdam: Transnational Institut.

Adolph von Hansemann (1826-1903) was a colonial trader and banker. He turned his father’s bank into the largest private bank in the German Empire.

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro & recherche international (2012): Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte, p. 156, in German

Chancellor Bismarck asked the entrepreneur Hansemann to come up with ways of enforcing German colonial goals in the Pacific. Hansemann’s suggestions as to which areas should be colonised were almost exactly implemented by German colonial policy in 1884, 1845 and 1899. In Hansemann’s language, areas not occupied by white people and not “developed” by international trade structures were referred to as “free”. Hansemann saw the German justification for founding colonies in the fact that German merchants have already spread there anyway. Successful capitalist trade therefore justifies the colonisation of non-whites.

*Eduardo Galeano (1997): Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent. New York. Monthly Review Press.

An anonymous serf in a mid 12th century English chronicle. Serfdom developed in medieval Europe after the end of the enslavement of Europeans between the 5th and 7th centuries. Serfs were the property of their masters, but had more freedom than enslaved people and could use the commons of forests, lakes and meadows, etc.

Rodney Hilton (1973): Bond Men Made Free. Medieval Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381. New York: Viking Press Inc.

Despite their attachment to princes, serfs had a degree of independence, being able to support themselves from the commons. As part of the development of early capitalism in the 16th century, land was massively privatised (Federici 2014: 68, German edition). People became impoverished and dependent on the social systems created as early as 1530 (Federici 2014: 84). Land privatisation occurred all over the world: In the 16th century, European traders had “privatised” much of the Canary Islands and turned it into sugar plantations. In the Americas, by the beginning of the 17th century, a third of the common land used by Native Americans was already occupied by the Spaniards. (Federici 2014: 68). In their encomienda system, the inhabitants of the conquered country were awarded to the coloniser by the Spanish crown.

*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia.

Paul Bremer (b. 1941) is a US diplomat and was appointed civil administrator of Iraq in 2003.

Naomi Klein (2010: 480, German edition)

Naomi Klein describes how Bremer sat as a civilian administrator in Saddam Hussein’s palace, receiving trade and investment laws by email and imposing them on the Iraqi people (Klein 2010: 479, German edition). Bremer postponed the elections scheduled for 2003, admitting later elections and a democracy supervised by Washington. In 2007, the Iraqi cabinet passed a law which nullified its own power: amongst other things, it no longer had any right of co-determination during negotiations over oil contracts (ibid.: 527). Southern European countries faced similar situations during the euro crisis: Greek parliamentarians had little say over the sale of public goods, and the heads of the privatisation fund were also immune to prosecution (Die Zeit, 16 June, 2017: Spain threatens to veto aid to Greece).

*David Harvey (2003): The New Imperialism. Oxford: University Press.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Clara Zetkin (1857-1933) was a German Marxist, women’s rights activist and KPD parliamentarian until 1933. She was a gifted orator and arch enemy of Paul von Hindenbrug, then President of the Reich, whom she described as a servant of capital. She died in exile in Moscow.

Clara Zetkin (1924): Die Intellektuellenfrage. In: Protokoll. Fünfter Kongress der Kommunistischen Internationale, Bd. II, S. 946-982.

The workers’ movement put pressure on the German imperial government, especially in the 19th century. Chancellor Bismarck introduced reforms and improvements for workers in an attempt to placate them. As a Marxist, for Zetkin there was a connection between the prosperity and emancipation of workers in the Global North and the exploitation of workers in the Global South. Marxist historians like Silvia Federici and Walter Rodney further claim that the industrial revolution in Europe would not have been possible without slavery and the plantation system in the Global South, the enslaved workers and export-oriented production (Federici 2014: 129, German edition). Rodney described European workers as being bribed with “colonial profits” (Rodney 1972).

*Walter Rodney (1972): How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. London: Bogle-L’Ouverture Publications.
*Maria Mies (1986): Patriachy and Accumulation on a World Scale. Women in the International Division of Labour. London & New York: Zed Books.
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia (auch in deutscher Übersetzung)
*Anne McClintock (1995): Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.

Gerrard Winstanley (1609-1679) was originally a clothes merchant who went bankrupt in the Civil War and thereafter became a Protestant reformer and political activist in England.

Gerrad Winstanley (1649): A declaration from the poor oppressed people of England.

Even before Winstanley, there were many heretic movements in France and Italy in the 11th century, most of them founded by women, that rebelled against the omnipotence of church and state (Federici 2014: 48, German edition). Centuries later, once women had been ousted from public life, Winstanley was one of England’s most notorious reformers (or diggers). Diggers are often referred to as the predecessors of the communists. They occupied and tilled public lands, distributing the proceeds freely to those in need, promoting comprehensive land reform and common ownership. Winstanley based this early communism exclusively on the Bible. The digger communes that had formed throughout England were finally crushed in 1651. Local landowners were mostly responsible for this.

*The Guardian (1999): Levels of Optimism.
*Silvia Federici (2014): Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Automedia.

Colonel Masanobu Tsuji (1901-1961) was a Japanese officer, military strategist and politician. He was involved in war crimes during World War II, hid in Thailand after the war to avoid justice, but returned to Japan in 1949 and became a member of parliament.

Arthur Zich (1980): Die aufgehende Sonne. Der Zweite Weltkrieg. Niederlande: Time-Life-Books, p. 123. The quote was said between 1939 and 1945.

Japan was an ally of Nazi Germany during World War II. ‘Outwardly, Japanese ideologues used anti-colonial (…) rhetoric to stir up resistance against Western colonial powers and to win allies – the slogan was “Asia for Asians“’ (recherche international 2008: 107). Many people, e.g. in Indonesia, first welcomed the Japanese because they drove out Dutch colonial power and abolished their exploitative plantation economy. Japan distributed Dutch possessions to Indonesian peasants. But soon the Japanese obliged many to work as romusha (forced labourers). Around 4 million Indonesians perished in World War II (ibid.: 123). The Indonesian journalist Sunapati described the actions of the Japanese as follows: ‘The wolf goes out the back door, the tiger comes in the front door.’ (ibid.: 107) In other words: ‘The European colonialists ran away, the Japanese fascists came!’ (ibid.).

*Rheinisches JournalistInnenbüro; recherche international (2012): Die Dritte Welt im Zweiten Weltkrieg. Unterrichtsmaterialien zu einem vergessenen Kapitel der Geschichte. Köln.
*Care (Comfort Women Action for Redress and Education):
**Mark Caprio (2010): “Neo-Nationalist Interpretations of Japan’s Annexation of Korea: The Colonisation Debate in Japan and South Korea.” In: The Asia-Pacific Journal Volume 8, Issue 44, Number 4.
*Care (Comfort Women Action for Redress and Ed

Orlando Letelier (1932-1976) was Chile’s ambassador to the US under President Salvador Allende. He was assassinated by a car bomb ordered by General Pinochet in 1976.

Naomi Klein (2007: 99)

In the 1970s, many socialist governments in Latin America (e.g. Chile), Asia (e.g. Indonesia) and Africa (e.g. Congo) were overthrown with the support of Western secret services and replaced by dictatorships. In this way, it was made perfectly clear that if a country dared to take an alternative third way, it would have to pay for it with state terror (cf. Klein 2010: 159, German edition). For many, the dictatorship in Chile was a laboratory for neoliberalism. For Letelier, neoliberal economist Milton Friedman was partly responsible for dictator Pinochet’s crimes. Western companies benefited directly from Pinochet’s military regime: Ford had internment camps for rebellious workers on its factory premises (cf. Klein 2010: 155). Claudia Acuña, a journalist who experienced the dictatorship in neighbouring Argentina, stresses how difficult it was to see that violence was only a means and not the end: the aim was to impose a new economic order. In this, they succeeded: ‘We were able to destroy the secret torture centres, but not the economic system that the military had started’ (quoted in Klein 2010: 178).

*Orlando Letelier (1976): “The Chicago Boys in Chile: Economic Freedom’s Awful Toll.” In: The Nation 223, Nr. 28, p. 137-142.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

William Gumede is a journalist and professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He is a former ANC activist and leader of the student movement during apartheid.

Interview with Naomi Klein (2007: 205).

According to Gumede, during the transition from apartheid to democracy in the early 1990s, everyone looked to the political negotiations as a guarantee of political freedom for the non-white South African population as a whole. Economic regulations did not receive much attention from ANC fighters. This enabled the white South African elite to secure economic power and therefore their wealth. The ANC government was disempowered in terms of economic policy, it could neither distribute land or water for free because these had been privatised, nor raise the minimum wage because of an agreement with the IMF (Klein 2010: 283, German edition).

*William Gumede (2005): Thabo Mbeki and the Battle for the Soul of the ANC. Cape Town: Zebra Press.
*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.

Francisco de Vitoria (1483 – 1546) was a Catholic moral theologian, Dominican friar and teacher of natural law. He taught at various universities in Spain and expressed himself in his writings on political issues such as conquests and trade in the Americas. De Vitoria was central to the development of the concepts of “freedom of trade” and “freedom of the seas” (for trade).

Vitorias Schrift (1532): The First Relectio of the Reverend Father, Brother Franciscus de Victoria, On the Indians Lately Discovered.

The right and freedom to travel and trade are seen by de Vitoria as fundamental principles of a natural right. The rights of merchants were placed above any restrictions and protectionism (protection against the import of goods) by noble rulers (princes). However, trade relations were by no means relations between equals. The gold and silver that (according to de Vitoria) ‘the natives have in abundance’ were first obtained through environmentally destructive mining and forced labour, which was dangerous and degrading for workers. German traders and princes even had private colonies in Latin America, Africa and Asia or were involved in the slave trade (Potts 1988: 18). For example, Großfriedrichsburg, in present-day Ghana was a colony of the Great Elector Jakob von Kurland in the 17th century. From 1528 to 1558, Venezuela was a local colony of the Welsers bank (Reader der AG: 4ff.).

*Antony T. Anghie (2005): Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
*Lydia Potts (1988): Weltmarkt für Arbeitskraft. Hamburg: Junius.
*AG Weiße deutsche Frauen und Kolonialismus: „Weiße deutsche Frauen & Kolonialismus – Reader zu einer Veranstaltung.“ C/o Infoladen. Kleiner Schäferkamp 46. 20357 Hamburg.

Hinmaton-Yalaktit (1840-1904), also known as Chief Joseph, was a Wal-lam-wat-kain, a Nez-Percé subgroup of the Wallowa River Valley in northeastern Oregon, USA. He became well known as an astute tactician during the Nez-Percé War.

Speech during a visit in Washington.

Chief Joseph the Elder, Hinmaton-Yalaktit’s father, had “secured” land for the Nez Percé on a reservation, which led to them settling. As a result of the gold rush of 1863, the majority of Nez Percé land was expropriated by the federal government. In response, Chief Joseph the Elder then burned the US flag and his Bible. After his death, Hinmaton-Yalaktit continued Nez Percé resistance. His concept of freedom also included the freedom to trade. But unlike de Vitoria, he presented the idea of equality as fundamental to trade. In the same speech, he denounced that “I have asked some of the Great White Chiefs where they get their authority to say to the Indian that he shall stay in one place, while he sees white men going where they please. They cannot tell me.” (www.pbs.org)

*Howards Zinn (1980): A People‘s History of the United States. 1492-present. New York: Harper Collins.
*The Washington Speech.

David L. Budhoo is an economist from Grenada in the Caribbean. From 1966 he worked for the International Monetary Fund, later even as a manager. He designed structural adjustment programmes for Latin America and Africa. His 1988 resignation letter, titled “Enough is Enough,” was more than 100 pages long.

David L. Budhoo (1990): Enough ist enough. Dear Mr Camdessus … Open letter of resignation to the Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund. New York: Horizon Press.

In the 1980s and 1990s, the structural adjustment programmes made by the international organisations IMF and World Bank were particularly tough and neoliberal: privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation were the goals. While the official mandate of the institutions is “crisis prevention,” Bodhoo describes how he falsified statistics to justify drastic neoliberal economic measures. These statistics made countries (e.g. Trinidad and Tobago) look unstable. As a consequence they could get no or only badly conditioned credits, so that only credits from the IMF and World Bank could help out and implement their neoliberal adjustments. In 2016, the Kenyan government was due to sign the EPA free trade agreement with the EU. “When the government balked, the EU imposed import tariffs on Kenyan products. (…) The agreement itself shows what free trade between unequal partners means: while only 10% of African products are considered competitive on the world market, EPA allows 80% of European Union exports to East Africa to be exempt from tariffs allowed” (Medico International 2017).

*Naomi Klein (2007): The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Toronto: Knopf Canada.
*Susan Meeker-Lowry (1995): Mr. Budhoo’s Bombshell: A people’s alternative to Structural Adjustment.
*Medico International (Anne Jung, 2017): Ostafrika. Hunger durch Handel?
*David L. Budhoo (1990): Enough is enough.

John Mbiti (1931-2019) was a Kenyan theologian. This quote is based on Ubuntu philosophy which has spread across many parts of Africa, e.g. in Zulu: ‘Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu’ (A man is a man through other men).

John Mbiti (1969): African Religions and Philosophy. Nairobi: East African Educational Publishers, p. 106

Ubuntu gets applied to many fields that include philosophy, a freely available computer operating system, and as an inspiration for an economic system beyond capitalism. In contrast to Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am), this attitude of mind shows that unlike in the Enlightenment’s individualistic world view, people’s well-being is interlinked. It follows that success is therefore not the accumulation of material wealth by individuals, but the ‘restoration of vitality, the living spirit that permeates our existence and the world of which we are a part’ (Naudé 2010: 113). Naudé, a professor at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, suggests that African Ubuntu philosophy could be the basis for a new trading system.

*Abeba Birhane (2017): Descartes was wrong: ‘a person is a person through other persons’.
* Piet J. Naudé (2010): Fair Global Trade: A Perspective from Africa. In: Geoff Moore: Fairness in International Trade. Durham: Springer‘s.

Velma Hopkins (1909-1996) was a Black American worker. The union she co-founded, Local 22, was led primarily by Black women and fought for economic, racial, and gender equality. The year of the citation is an estimate.

Korstad, Robert Rodgers (2003). Civil rights unionism : tobacco workers and the struggle for democracy in the mid-twentieth-century South. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. p. 217.

The multiple discriminations faced by Black workers (as women, Black and workers) often go unrecognised. Unions like Local 22 were formed early in the century as a response to this fact. In 1989, the Black American lawyer Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw coined the term intersectionality. An example of multiple discrimination was the lawsuit brought before white women and Black men by Emma Degraffenreid and four other Black women, who were the first to be fired from a General Motors factory (eds. 1989: “Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Issue 1, Article 8, pp. 141ff). While race and gender are currently the subject of much discussion, the question of social class is being pushed completely into the background. As early as 2000, after a whole decade of neoliberalism, bell hooks argued that: “Nowadays it is fashionable to talk about race or gender; the uncool subject is class” (bell hooks (2000): Where we Stand: Class Matters, p. vii).

*Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw (1989): Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum. Issue 1, Article 8.
*bell hooks (2000): Where we stand: Class Matters. New York and London: Routledge.