Blackcap Blog

Published at 07:55 on 19 August 2025

Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s autobiographical account of his 1952 journey through South America is something I have been wanting to read since seeing the movie based on it about two decades ago. (Talk about procrastination.)

I had been hoping to, in part, gain some insight into Che’s eventual support for authoritarian leftism.

On that latter term, some leftists disagree with it, saying leftism is intrinsically anti-elite and therefore “leftist” regimes like the one in Cuba (which do have a ruling elite) are in fact anti-leftist. I find such arguments unconvincing, because the motives of the authoritarianism in such regimes are different from the motives of it in right-wing authoritarian regimes. One strives to use force to replace capitalism with a more egalitarian system (and tends to not much concerned with preservation of traditional values), the other strives to use force to maintain traditional hierarchies and values.

Trying to overthrow traditional hierarchies on the grounds that they are unjust is classic leftism, therefore I feel the “authoritarian leftism” label is both fair and descriptive. Moreover, it jibes well with conventional terminologies, and I see value in not adopting a rhetoric so divorced from conventional usage as to impede comprehension. It is the mission of the political left to engage with society and to change it, not to retreat into inward-looking subcultures that are mostly irrelevant to the masses.

But I digress. Back to insights into how Guevara became the political force he eventually became. In this respect, I was not disappointed.

The appendix of the book I have contains the translated text a retrospective speech given by Guevara in 1960, in which he claimed “When I started out as a doctor, when I began to study medicine, the majority of the concepts I hold today as a revolutionary were absent from the storehouse of my ideals.”

I disagree with that assessment, or at least I find it highly misleading. The young Guevara does express core sentiments that stayed with him throughout his life, so far as I can see, and while these core sentiments might be outnumbered by his later insights, they stayed with him and profoundly guided him to become what he became.

Namely, it is clear that Guevara did not in any way reject authoritarianism. This became obvious when reading his near-admiration for Pedro Gutiérrez de Valdivia and his “indefatigable thirst to take control of a place where he can exercise total authority” (“Abaca Chile,” “The End of Chile”).

Authoritarianism has been, sadly, part of the scene in Latin America, where nations have, despite the aspirations of many for something better, tended until quite recently to be led by a succession of one strongman after another. Guevara came of age in Argentina under Perón, and writes in his diaries of how, as Argentines, he and Alberto Granado (his travelling companion), were often admired as being from the nation where Perón had won some gains for the working class and the poor.

Many decades ago I read an essay on Guevara that claimed he was, in a sense, a Peronist. At the time, I thought the charge preposterous. Now, I think it has a lot of truth in it. He wasn’t strictly a Peronist (Juan Perón was not a revolutionary and in fact was quite the traditionalist in some aspects), but Guevara did, like Perón, see politics as an exercise in using strongman power to improve the lot of the less fortunate.

To this we can add how Guevara’s personal experiences with liberal democracy as practiced by the USA ranged from somewhat to profoundly unpleasant. First, there was his unplanned stint in Miami at the end of his 1952 journey, in which he got to experience the injustice and hypocrisy of the Jim Crow-era South first-hand.

Even more tragically there was Guatemala, where by a minor miracle (it is always a miracle when left values triumph in a bourgeois society), a leftist, Jacobo Árbenz, won a presidential election and set about reforming Guatemalan society. Árbenz was not a strongman, and did respect civil liberties. The changes happening in Guatemala inspired Guevara, who travelled there to assist the Árbenz government.

But the liberal, democratic values of the Guatemalan revolution didn’t matter. The response of the USA to the democratic, peaceful social revolution Árbenz was trying to create was to sponsor a coup d’etat and overthrow him. Forty long years of bloody repression and civil war followed.

In a world where resistance does not have to be small-l libertarian, in a political culture where pro-liberty values were the exception more than the norm, where a nonviolent revolution that tried to espouse these values till the end had seen them exploited as weaknesses by the forces of superpower imperialism, and where there was a competing superpower holding the promise of leftist revolution with competing values, it is pretty obvious where on the political spectrum Ernesto “Che” Guevara would probably end up.

Which, basically, is where he did end up.

Published at 10:45 on 18 August 2025

It was clear back in 2020 that the historic mission of MAS was now to find a way beyond the cult of personality that had grown up around three-term ex-president Evo Morales, and to transition from the party of Evo into a party of ideas.

Well, they didn’t. Part of MAS wanted to move on, part clung stubbornly to the cult of personality, and the party basically disintegrated as a result of compromise not being possible between two such factions. And yesterday, the inevitable happened.

It didn’t help that MAS also failed to find a way forward after its initial (and initially very successful) plan of using nationalized natural gas revenues to drive spending on economic and social development started faltering as a result of declining revenue. A logical next step would have been to turn to Bolivia’s lithium reserves and use those similarly, but that was never done.

Except it wasn’t inevitable. It could have also ended in left authoritarianism, as one MAS faction used force to impose its will on the other (and on Bolivians in general). Well, it could have, but it didn’t, because of the decentralized nature of the Bolivian social revolution, which has always been big part of my admiration for it, made such a thing highly unlikely.

The most likely end result is now a bourgeois democracy led by the Christian Democrats. Freedoms to organize for something better will in all likelihood remain, and when the new government sells Bolivia short to foreign capital, as it inevitably will, there be an opening for new social movements to arise. Hopefully they will learn from the failures of the past.

Despite Bolivia’s growing debts and inflation, the end result of the social revolution that began with the popular uprisings of the early 2000’s has been net positive. There has been significant economic growth, infrastructure development, and improvement in public health in the past 20 years.

No, it didn’t usher in a new era of socialist utopia in which Bolivia rocketed to first-world levels of development and became a worker’s paradise. No serious observer expected this: this is the real world we are talking about, where miracles and utopias do not exist. But it also, contrary to the consensus of Establishment naysayers, did not end in tyranny and economic ruin.

Popular revolution can work, if decentralism is embraced and authoritarianism is resisted.

Published at 14:08 on 15 August 2025

Some policy proposals have only lengthy, complex arguments in their favour. This one ie easy.

What Israel has done to Gaza is worse than what Russia has done to Ukraine. If you can’t acknowledge this than it is time to acknowledge that your internal biases might be getting in the way of your ability to perceive obvious facts.

Russia has had the hell sanctioned out of it for what it is doing to Ukraine. And rightly so.

Yes, the two situations are not precisely the same. News flash: no two conflicts ever are. The salient point here is the amount of civilian suffering being imposed, and how the Gazans are indisputably suffering far more than the Ukrainians are.

The conclusion seems inescapable to me. Fairness and proportionality say that it is time to sanction the hell out of Israel.

Published at 19:37 on 29 July 2025

Back in January of 2024 I asked if what was going on in Gaza was a genocide. My answer was essentially “probably yes, but genocide has a definition that includes acts of mass violence other than the stereotypical scenes of mass death in ghettoes and concentration that many associate with the term.”

Well, there’s really no need to delve into technicalities anymore: what is now going on is clearly genocide, even if one restricts the term to mean the more narrow and stereotypical meanings it has in popular usage.

The parallels are just so many.

Published at 10:55 on 14 July 2025

By which I mean, literally fighting. Some examples:

• On 4 July (the date was almost certainly chosen intentionally, for political reasons), there was an armed attack on an ICE facility in Texas. Both fireworks and firearms were discharged, property was vandalized, and one local police officer was hit by a bullet.
• ICE agents raiding a pot farm in Ventura County, CA retreated in chaos when people fought back by throwing rocks.
• Overall, attacks on ICE agents are up nearly 700%.

Why do you think wearing masks is so popular amongst ICE agents? In their own words, they fear doxxing and its consequences.

On the less explicitly violent front, the most popular iPhone app is now a tool for reporting ICE activity and the Trump regime is not happy about it.

And honestly, what do you expect people to do? Electing Democrats failed to stop fascism. Court cases have failed to stop fascism. As it was pretty obvious they would, given the already-well-established moral rot pervading the system in 2021.

Ultimately, nothing motivates like good old-fashioned self-interest. It’s why the capitalist profit motive has proven itself to be such an effective motivator of human behaviour.

Like it or not, the sort of decentralized actions I have detailed above make life decidedly less pleasant for those employed as members of the ICE gestapo. If the unrest grows, and more follow in the footsteps of Luigi Mangione, life could become decidedly less pleasant for many of those at the very top who are profiting from oppression.

The undeniable fact of self-interest explains why all societies, throughout all of human history (and prehistory), have punished wrongdoers.

Many of these individuals know their actions are oppressive. They know, and they don’t care, because of the perceived benefits to them, personally. Maybe their millions or billions are more secure in a society distracted by scapegoats like immigrants, leftists, the nonwhite, and the non-straight. Maybe they profit from cushy government contracts or cushy government jobs that are part of such oppression. Maybe they derive benefit simply from seeing individuals they dislike suffer.

To reiterate, nothing motivates like self-interest. As such, a world where self-centred sociopaths personally suffer consequences for their self-centred sociopathy is highly likely to exhibit less self-centred sociopathic behaviour than a world where such consequences are not routinely suffered.

Argue, if you wish, that it would be better for such consequences to be doled out by a cautious process subject to legal safeguards. Such arguments are, in fact, generally quite convincing. The rub is, what happens when (as appears to be the case) a system is so morally rotten to the core that it is no longer willing or able to mete out such consequences?

My conclusion is that, like it or not, rough justice can in some situations be preferable to no justice at all.

Moreover, the new, aggressive resistance already seems to be bearing fruitful consequences. The spectacle of masked ICE goons is alienating increasing numbers of Americans. That is one of classic tactics of a resistance movement: giving the Establishment the choice of looking weak by giving in to resistance, or looking like thugs for persevering in the face of resistance.

So yes, I do view recent trends of a more aggressive resistance in a generally positive light. Not because I enjoy the spectacle of violence, but because I abhor fascism and I understand human nature.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, — is often the means of their regeneration. A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.
— John Stuart Mill

Published at 13:05 on 10 July 2025

So far, they appear to be doing so. But so have many — at first. Then comes the cave.

This has got to end sooner or later, and the sooner it ends, the better, because as I have written earlier, when it comes to bullies, it is not resistance but acquiescence that ultimately has the highest price attached to it.

Brazil has the sort of left of centre government and nonaligned global affiliation that I have long believed would most likely characterize the nation to first stand tall against Trump fascism.

It has to start sometime. It has to start with someone. Might as well start now. Might as well start with Brazil.

Published at 09:06 on 5 July 2025

Quite a bit has happened this week, which I have yet to comment on.

Carney Cravenly Caves

Oh, sure, there’s technically a chance it was, as Carney’s apologists say, all pre-planned. But let’s get real here. Occam’s Razor says it is far more likely to be just what it appears to be, which is just what I said it was in the title for this section.

What’s particularly worrying is not the specific policy caved on, but the general policy area of the cave; namely, regulating social media. There has long been something toxic to a free and open society about social media. The Trump era, with the US capitalist class lining up in support behind fascism, as the capitalist class inevitably does, makes the problem all the more acute. What once was a bug is now most definitely a feature. You can take it to the bank that the social media giants are doing their level best to make their algorithms as fascism-friendly as possible.

As such, it is incumbent on the remaining free societies of the world to regulate the hell out of these social media giants. (There is a right way and a wrong way to do this, which I will get into sometime.)

Now Carney has just had Canada concede to its hostile neighbour that yes, it is only reasonable for Canada to accommodate that neighbour’s wishes when it comes to social media. This is precisely the wrong sort of precedent to be setting.

It is the year 1950 in an alternate history timeline. The USSR is trying to gain control over domestic US media via dummy holding companies. Would the United States have just sat there while the USSR gained control of CBS and NBC? Yet this is basically the analogue of what Carney has now set precedent that Canada do. Social media are that influential in public opinion.

The Enabling Act

It’s a crude analogue, because decades-long precedents and trends, plus recent friendly Supreme Court rulings, have accomplished a lot of it, but if anything is the American analogue to the Enabling Act, it is how the big ugly bill has allocated an obscene and shocking amount of money to the ICE gestapo (long one of the most powerful and least accountable law enforcement agencies). The first concentration camp, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz, has already opened, and Trump fascists are gleefully celebrating America’s new Dachau with commemorative merchandise.

You can take it to the bank that those camps will not only be used for oppressing immigrants.

Lots of people smell the corpse now.

Left Rhetorical Incompetence

If the political Left had any rhetorical competence, the alliterations “big bad bill” and “alligator Auschwitz” would now be entering common use. It’s seemingly a little thing, but it’s not really a little thing: good labelling and sloganeering matter a lot in politics.

Zohran Mamdani Is in Personal Peril

Odds are that within two years, he will either be dead, disappeared, incarcerated, under house arrest, or in exile. Because of course he will be. Authoritarian states do not stand idly by and let true opposition arise.

Since (overall, individual exceptions do not disprove the general rule) the Democratic Party has been a co-participant in, not an opponent of the USA’s transition to fascism, it may well be allowed to continue existing. Authoritarian regimes often allow sham opposition parties, and the Democratic Party has long been effectively functioning as such voluntarily, anyhow. A transition to a more formal arrangement would thus represent a relatively minor change.

The real question is whether, and how much, the paradox of repression manifests when the inevitable happens to Mamdani.

Published at 08:51 on 27 June 2025

Today’s ruling should come as no surprise, as it is completely consistent with an earlier ruling by the same Supreme Court.

The problem is, as I wrote earlier, that there are six fascists on the Supreme Court. Fascists don’t care about judicial independence. In fact, they oppose it,as it gets in the way of the will of the leader they follow.

Starting to really look like the courts won’t save you, Nice Liberals.

Published at 18:06 on 26 June 2025

Because, really, it is not my point to make. It’s a decision for New Yorkers to make, of which I am not one.

But, at over eight million people, it is the largest city in the USA, and as such has more peoople living in it than live in most US states. That alone gives it a prominence that ensures what happens in NYC often doesn’t stay there. Then you have how it is a world-class artistic and cultural centre. Yet more prominence. If Mamdani wins in November, he will likely become one of Trump’s foils, and thus affect US politics as a whole. And what affects US politics affects world politics.

When New Yorkers say their city is the capital of the world, it is, in other words, no idle boast.

Andrew Cuomo has been so humiliated by his primary loss that most pundits are predicting he will entirely drop out of the race, and not even attempt to run as an independent in November. Not so for scandal-plagued incumbent Eric Adams, who has already loudly announced his candidacy.

Here’s another point, though: If Adams continues to hog the limelight, and the centrists line up behind him, he probably loses. Mamdani has already dispatched one corrupt centrist career politician and can probably dispatch another.

If the centrists line up behind someone like Jim Walden, however, they have a good shot at things. Not a sure one (there are no sure shots in politics), but a good one. Walden looks like an outsider who is free from the taint of scandal. It’s that, and not the democratic socialism, that was Mandani’s real secret sauce in the primary. Sure, Mamdani’s base loves that he’s a socialist, but that base alone is not enough to see him through to victory.

It’s not yet clear who the centrists will line up behind.

Right now, there is a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth from some of the centrist crowd about the primary outcome. Something tells me that they wouldn’t be whining so hard if Cuomo had won, despite Cuomo being the very epitome of a corrupt, out of touch, elitist, career Democrat. You know, the sort of epitome that tilted enough swing voters to Trump the last cycle.

If that crowd really cared about electability, they would care about their own team’s electability issues at least somewhat. But they don’t. So yeah, they just might well fall in line behind Adams.

Or, in other words, the establishment just might just continue unwittingly helping Zohran Mamdani all the way to Gracie Mansion. Which would be fine by me.

Published at 10:48 on 25 June 2025

Well, not a complete surprise, because polling did show him surging in support, but a surprise nonetheless (the preponderance of polls still showed him missing the mark).

Paradoxically, I think, it shows basically what the support for Trump shows: that a significant number of Americans realize the political Establishment has not served them well and are upset at that Establishment.

Mamdani and Trump are on opposite sides of the political spectrum, so many political pundits cannot see this. But pundits are weirdos: they care a lot about politics. Most Americans do not care a lot about politics. Most Americans are stunningly politically ignorant, to the point that they are not even able to name their two Senators and one Representative in Congress.

Most Americans don’t think Trump is a fascist because most Americans have no idea what fascism actually is. To them, he’s just an outsider promising to shake things up. They can be convinced, with the right propaganda, to give his extremism a whirl (again, they realize the Establishment that Trump has disdain for has not served them well), or they can be convinced, again with the right propaganda, that he’s just too far outside the norm to be safe.

And, it turns out, many those same unsophisticates can be persuaded to vote for a candidate significantly to the left of that Establishment as well.

That latter point bears elaborating on. There are at this very moment democratic socialists opining that this election shows Americans (or at least New Yorkers) are coming ’round to their ideology. No they are not. They are merely dissatisfied with the political Establishment and what it has brought them, and are willing to entertain giving those from outside that Establishment a whirl.

Most Americans still have a generally negative connotation of what “socialism” means. Mamdani would have probably done better had he avoided that label. By which I mean he could have had exactly the same planks in his platform, just used slightly different branding, and done better as a result.

Donald Trump does not call himself a “red-white-and-blue American fascist,” a “21st century fascist,” or anything of the such. He could, and it would be an exercise in honest labelling, but he doesn’t. Yet one more example of why Trump is actually more politically savvy than most of the Left. (Of course he is. Just look at his winning record at the ballot box.)

Of course, this cuts both ways. The Establishment Democrats would have probably done better (and likely won) if they had put forth better standard-bearers than a disgraced mayor and a disgraced former governor. So what we have here is basically a situation in which one side’s incompetence cancelled out the other side’s.

But I am digressing here. The same Democratic Party Establishment that backed Cuomo in a desperate and ultimately failed effort to keep Mamdani from winning the primary is the same Establishment that is now only one for three in keeping the most extreme and unqualified candidate to ever seek that office out of the White House. (And when they did gain power, they refused to use it to crush fascism.) These are not people of either great political wisdom or great political morals, and we all need to spend a lot less time paying serious attention to what they have to say.

If Mamdani wins in November and accomplishes that alone, his victory will have meant something.

If, furthermore, his administration is a success and gets more Americans to seriously entertain more left-wing policies, it would be great. But even the former lesser case would prove politically beneficial.