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Editors note: The text below is excerpted from Marcello Tars book There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution, translated by Richard Braude and published by Common Notions earlier this year. It is followed by an interview with Tar conducted by Matt Peterson.

Tano DAmico,Uno sguardo (Ragazza e carabinieri), 1977. Photographfeatured in the book Tano Damico:Di cosa sono fatti i ricordi(Roma: Postcart, 2011). Courtesy of the artist.

Everywhere, therefore, where my reflection wants to comprehend love, I see only contradiction. Sren Kierkegaard, In vino veritas, 18451

The gateway to the transformation of self and world doesnt lie in the reform of the state or in its technological acceleration. It is not to be found in collectivization or in the affirmation of will. All of these means merely erect screens between the truth and the reality of existence so as to never let them meet. They are exteriorities with their own ends, connected to each other in a space and time from which we are separated by a thousand screens. For this reason, during any revolt, the first reflex is to destroy these screens, perhaps symbolically, but nevertheless in the greatest number possible. One does so in order to feel, individually and collectively, finally, in the here and now. One does so to restrict the space that separates us from each other and to increase the distance from that which we perceive as hostile. It is this search for immanence in oneself and in others that naturally leads us to consider how experiences of revolution and love are so similar that they communicate with one another.

Taking a close look at the situation, it seems as if the desire to cancel out the experience of communism over the last decades may have proceeded, step by step, with the desire to cancel out the experience of love. Just as communism has been replaced by an infinite, inconclusive negotiation over rights, so too love has become a contractual affair, an engagement to barter about as if it were any other aspect of existence. Love no longer even has any experience of the end: one is fired, perhaps with an SMS, and if its worth the trouble you can put it on your CV.

One reason for the analogy between the two might lie in the fact that both communism and love have the same relation to time: they struggle against the present, against dominant reality, and their possibility of becoming always stands in relation to the impossibility of the present moment. Both share the desire to suspend history, both establish a state of exception, both want to shoot the clocks, for both every moment is decisive. Communism and love, finally, are connected through a desire to share intensity in more ways than one. Therefore, given that one no longer knows what a revolution might be, one does not yet know what love might be. And conversely, the more we understand one, the more we will be able to understand the other.

***

That the Ego loves an Other, that one can experience love, simply reveals the insufficiency of the Ego to undergo any experience at all, and, on the other hand, reveals the happiness of the pure experience of sharing. This is why affective experience destitutes both the Ego and the Other, revealing their names to be entirely inadequate. Love, as Gilbert Simondon says, is maximally disindividuating, because not only is the affective problematic the experience in which a being feels that they are not an individual but is also that experience which suspends the functional modality of the relation to others and in which another subjectdestituted from its social functionappears to us as more than individuality.2 I destitute the Other while they do the same to me, and within this immobile movement there is a common experience of the world. Frequently one discovers this afterward: in the experience of suffering at the end of love, all at once we know that the pain comes from the break of this being-with that implies a multitude of other creatures, objects, narratives, sounds, and images that make up the contained world that love constitutes. Such a form of love lives, in its turn, within a transindividual constellation, for which reason it has an antisocial calling but not an antipolitical one. The pain comes from this, and not from an offense against the Ego. Indeed, on this occasion, the Ego appears to be not only artificial but even an obstacle in explicating that world. We feel this intuitively when we recognize the lability of the borders of the Ego within the experience of love; it is bound by an epidermis that dies and regenerates every day and night. It is a joyful experience. Love appears in the place where the Ego disappears, and in turn, it disappears when the Ego becomes once more. There are two who remain in love but, making a singular use of the self via this affect, they are no longer themselves. In unlove, the self returns to occupy its ancient location. Love can be a destituent potential because it belongs among those rare experiences through which we naturally access a different and free use of the self and life itself, something we can either abandon ourselves to or not. But it is not a choice; it is a decision.

Gershom Scholem, writing about Benjamin in his book on the story of their friendship, looked with irony upon something about his friend that he could not understand, which Benjamin repeated to him frequently and stubbornly. It is a misunderstanding that seems to fit with the Kabbalists profound incomprehension of Benjamins version of communism: there is no unhappy love, Benjamin implored.3 Scholem held that such a conviction was contradicted by his friends stormy love life, a thesis not only unconvincing due to the poverty of its argument, but because it reveals a total misunderstanding of what Benjamin meant by happiness.

One might say, on the contrary, that there are unhappy individuals. Because, despite employing all the strength we are capable of, we have not been able to avoid the return of the liberal individual; one cannot access the experience of love because one fails to depose the Ego. Or further still, because the individual loses itself in an injunction on thinking of happiness as something that one either does or does not possess, like any other object, thus dooming it to failure right from the start. Or, again, through imagining happiness as something that one completes or brings to a conclusion in the future, trivially summarized today when someone says: I have a thing going on with them. Love, like other oases, can be a refuge for the individual, but it can all too easily be confused with the desert if it becomes individualism in itself; that is, if love is content to be merely the sharing of a second-rate narcissism.

Nevertheless, when it materializes against all odds, precisely inasmuch as it appears in the world as a form of shared happiness and is therefore not appropriable, love is able to cut across even the most disastrous failures without losing an iota of its potential. It is as destructive as it is creative. It is both poor and powerful, present even in its absence, like the revolution. It can enter into life in any moment, like the Messiah. Love remains a happy experience even in abandonment and the most impervious of difficulties. It can overturn every kind of obstacle that it faces, by making use of a primitive violence. Anyone who has loved knows this all too well. Love is continually traversed by a line of extreme intensity, which makes it an exquisitely political affect. Claiming that there is no unhappy love means taking a position against one of the strongest and longlasting myths of Western civilization: that of unhappy love, of the guilt and destiny of suffering to which humanity is condemned.

***

One day in 1983, during a lesson in his course on cinema, Gilles Deleuze discussed Nietzsche and his conception of love, truth, and the potential of perception. At a certain point, he said, even during a doomed love affair we can find joy, if the experience has allowed us to perceive something we previously did not have access to. Love is one of the possibilitiesthe most powerful onethat increases the potential of existence, precisely because it allows us to perceive dimensions of existence that we previously could not, and thus, to destitute the superstitions we were subjected to, such as those represented by destiny or by an inextinguishable debt. Conversely, the inability to make love last exposes us to the diminution of that potential.

Deleuze feels it important to clarify that neither he nor Nietzsche are partisans of existential liberalism or what today we call polyamory. They are not telling us to gather the largest possible collection of amorous relationships, but that the more you love someone, the more you increase your potential to exist and the more you become capable of perceiving things, according to the needs of a different nature.4 In other words, one perceives things, the same things as before, but in a different way. Here we always have a slight shift in the axes; the axes of how life is lived this time around, its actual becoming. The definition of potential here is exactly that given by Deleuze: it does not consist in the relation, as such, but in affect, together with perception. Love is how we become aware of what it means to pass from one phase of life to another, from one intensity to another, more powerful oneand for this very reason, even a defeated, failed love, a love gone wrong, is nevertheless still an experience of happiness, so long as it witnesses this growth in potential. Given that perception through an affect means having a perspective on time and within time, Benjamin maintains that happiness has no need or desire for the future, but is entirely absorbed in the epoch in which we are living: Happiness for us is thinkable only in the air that we have breathed, among the people who have lived with us. In other words, there vibrates in the idea of happiness (this is what that noteworthy circumstance teaches us) the idea of salvation.5 This is the only sentimental education appropriate for revolutionary becoming, i.e., in which love can be defeated, but precisely because of our inability to face it, remains irreducible as an experience of happiness if we are able to redeem it in remembrance. That the being one loves exists, desire itself might be now, and one has an infinite potential to remember it represents the melancholically joyful fact that changes our perception of the world, even if that being might be distant or even lost forever.6 Its fulfillment is not a matter of history. This is why Heloise, in responding to her now distant, lost lover Abelard, always maintains that she prefers to remember and thus continue to love him against every prohibition of his philosophy or their social morality. This is love against history. Everything that is true for lovers counts as well for the commune, for a people yet to arrive, a revolutionary class, because if it is true I am not centered in myself,7 then in the center, between the I that deposes the Ego and the we that is me, we find the self that experiences the world with the other. Only those who have experienced love can access communism immediately. And, logically, the more we know how to love someone, the greater the possibility of communisms arrival.

Capitalist happiness is entirely projected into the future; all that is allowed to us in the present is to live its abstraction collectively, reified in the commodity that we ourselves become: measured, valorized, indebted lovers. Everyone knows in this world love is exchanged with things and can be consumed without end. This is a form of happiness that does not give us access to any true experience, one that instead of increasing perception tangibly diminishes it. It is a state of being that lives through the absence of the past, of feeling, of truth, and thus of redemption. Is there such a thing as capitalist love? This is not an easy question, but what is certain is that there is a liberal version of love that affects every place and existence, just as every flow of capital does. It defines itself through a lack of sensitivity, through being opportunist and calculating, deprived of its own language. It is where the body is usually an exchange value, a currency of flesh, in which the good of the Ego functions as the treasurer and absolute legislator (I must put my well-being above all else) of unhappiness, which, sooner or later, returns fatally from whence it came, condemning the Ego to an existence deprived of truth, and thus of love. It is the ultimate unhappiness.

It is clear, as Foucault taught us, that it is not sex, i.e., sexuality as such, which can tell us anything about the truth of the self and of love. What saves us is the fact that, through this affect, we are able to tolerate such intensity on every level of life, to exercise the ability to perceive that at least for one day we have seen through the eyes of another, and even the infinite ability to live happiness through fragments, beyond the present, beyond abandonment, beyond the pain of existence. And perhaps its secret is what, in his essay Goethes Elective Affinities, Benjamin calls the unexpressed, which is defined as a halt in appearances that allows the truth to emerge. Perhaps in that which remains unexperienced of a loveand for love that lasts a lifetime, maybe this is even the most truedwells its deepest truth.

***

Youre the revolution, said the lovers lover one day. On second thought, it was not a statement but a question. As always, the replyif one is necessaryis to be found in life itself.

Portrait of Marcello Tar, date unknown.

This spring Italian philosopher Marcello Tar, a self-described barefoot researcher, published his first book in English, There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution. The book provides a theory of revolution, beginning with the ethics of experience and the encounter. Tar analyzes the commune as a space of both truth and redemption, and frankly discusses the contradictions involved in sovereignty, self-organization, and collectivity. Responding to Giorgio Agambens The Use of Bodies and The Invisible Committees To Our Friends, Tar uses writers such as Kafka, Brecht, Pasolini, and David Bowie to think through the meaning of ungovernability in a time of civilizational collapse. What follows is his first interview in English, where we discuss the new book, and the tools needed for revolutionary overcoming.

Matt Peterson

Matt Peterson: Theres a great quote in the second chapter, The World or Nothing at All, where you write, For revolutionaries the problem has always been that of creating a collision between a politics against history and a communism stronger than modernity. Elsewhere, you write that revolution is not a question of overcoming a state, but the whole Western metaphysics of governance, of its subjectivization, depoliticization, rhythms of life, etc. How do you come to terms with just how hostile a terrain we seem to be dealing with at the present, and the reality of contemporary consciousness and spirit were faced with in this overcoming?

Marcello Tar: I think this is the main and essential question of destitution and destituent power. If we do not get out of the paradigm of Western metaphysics, which comes from ancient Greek philosophy and politicsthe polis, democracy, the individual, the very concept of lifeit seems very difficult to subvert the present. This also means not only coming to terms with old revolutionary traditions, Marxism, anarchism, whatever, but also with the thought that is more contemporary to us, on which we have relied for a long time: Foucault, Deleuze, and all that has followed until today, because they remain within those traditions. It is not by chance that many have set out to find alternativesTiqqun takes up the Jewish Kabbalah, others take up knowledge from from the Far East or the Andean mountains. After all, Christianity, which I think has something very meaningful for the gesture of destitution, also comes from the East. This research of recent years is a striking symptom of dissatisfaction with available tools. The very idea of destitution stems from an obvious difficulty, that this way of thinking about revolution was insufficient, lacking, destined not to be realized except in its nemesis. The problem seems to me that every time we cover every idea, every practice, with its Western meaning and concept, and destituent power itself runs this risk, so we should maybe deconceptualize it. Less philosophy, more spirituality; less chatter, more experiences; less willpower, more listening. So, love, and do what you will.

Now, it is certain that we cannot suddenly get rid of millennia of history and culture, but being aware of it is the first step. The second step that I propose, and this is not very well understood, is that if we do not pass through a destitution of our Ego, of how our subjectivity is constructed, with its passions, selfishness, greediness, it is not credible to think of subverting any other external power. Reality, which you reference, is not the reality. To quote an author I do not like, it is just capitalist realism. In order to have access to a different reality, which means looking at and living things differently, with a new heart, we have to dismiss the way we have been living. This is what I refer to as the destitution of the worldly form of life. And I think that we can do it individually and collectively, in solitude and in common.

MP: In many ways, the book is an account and response to the last twenty years of radical politics and theory, and an elaboration on the ideas of Mario Tronti, Giorgio Agamben, and the Invisible Committee. In thinking through the polemics these authors and groups have proposed, I wonder whether the question of revolution is one of winning these debates, or do they instead demonstrate the need for a broader spiritual shift, transformation, or awakening, as weve often had it in our American religious context. You speak in the last chapter, The Destituent Insurrection, of the recurrent leftist complaint, Now is not the moment, we need to wait for the objective conditions to mature. The people wont understand, but Im wondering what can be said of subjective conditions? Marxism has its secular, rational, materialist theory of consciousness, but seems unable to access the spiritual depths of belief, devotion, and faith that feel necessary for revolution.

MT: Spirituality and combat is the theme around which Mario Tronti and I have begun to work this past year, so this is a good question for me. I will begin by paraphrasing Marx who says the existential and spiritual condition determines consciousness. The original Marxian sentence was about the social conditionI think this is not enough, because it leads to the thinking that if I change the external conditions, i.e., economic and political structures, then everything will be better. Reason and the heart are separated. This is why classical Marxist revolutions, in Russia and elsewhere, were all defeated. Today, capitalism colonizes our souls, and subjectivity is a commodity like any other. To live is a battlefield.

Do you remember the Tiqqun text, How Is It to Be Done?, which is to ask ultimately: how to live? This is the central question, the How and not the Whatthe When depends on the How. Heidegger discussed this in his early course on the phenomenology of religious life. Referring to St. Pauls proclamation, Heidegger said that the Christian How concerns the self-conduct in factical life, because, The opposition of faith and law is decisive: the how of faith and of the fulfillment of the law, how I comport myself to the faith and also to the law.

The How is a praxis, an existential praxis founded on a belief. This How is also and fundamentally connected to the parousia, to the messianic promise of a total liberation: its How you behave now that achieves eschatological fulfillment. Not wait and see! Now you must know how to live in the kingdom and let it grow in this world. This primitive Christian way of life is a total disavowal of the typical forms of leftism that you recall. We can also think of Benjamins image of the messianic now-time: For every second of time was the strait gate through which Messiah might enter. As Tronti said, you must always be ready, to be organized for this moment, that is: you must have a way of life able to do this. And this way is the How which proceeds by faith.

Faith wants a metnoia, a conversion, which means a radical change in the way of thinking and living that takes you beyond (met). Conversion today means also a critique of civilization, not just a social critique. A critique that includes my Ego as a producer and not only a product of this civilization. Simone Weil wrote in Gravity and Grace, The reality of the world is the result of our attachment. So thats why poverty, as I write in the first pages of the book, is the form of our freedom, to go beyond ourselves.

Finally, Heidegger said that the Pauline How is a relation, a communal relation to the self, to others, to the world, and then to time itself. This leads one to think that the communion of the spirits came first. The communism of goods is a consequence of a communism of the spirit. Spirit burns in the things that you make, in how you receive, in how you share, in how you speak, and in how you love. It burns all attachments. You can see this clearly in the Acts of the Apostles when, after receiving and sharing the Spirit, their community has a way of life that became a model for all coming communal forms of life and insurrections of the poor: All the believers were together and had everything in common The multitude of believers was one in heart and soul. No one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they owned. Omnia sunt communia. The question of When is almost meaningless in this perspective, the time is comingindeed its here now (John 4:23). From what I can see, you and your friends at Woodbine are now full of this kind of a burning spirit.

But we must pay attention to the right sequence, because without a strong spirituality, as many of us have experienced, individual passions soon take over and everything ends in resentment. The best assumptions turn into their opposite. This would be an interesting couple of questions to ask many comrades and friends: are you a believer? What do you believe in? The community you live in, does it have a spirit? And if it does, how does it act?

MP: In the Preamble you write, Revolutionaries are activists of end-times and you speak of a communism of the end, which resonates with Sabu Kohsos recent book Radiation and Revolution. Later on you say, unfortunately, we Westerners, unlike the Zapatistas or other Indigenous peoples, do not have any Mayan tradition at our disposal, no ancestral knowledge, not even a liberation theology to serve as the living fabric of revolution. All we have is the possibility to learn how to use the field of ruinsof tradition, knowledge, and theologythat characterizes the landscape of our completed modernity. And later in No Future for Us, you continue, Communism is not another world, but another use of this world. So it seems the task for all of us shipwrecked in the Western metropole is to now live in and make use of the ruins weve inherited, which becomes an infrastructural and metaphysical question. Following both you and Sabu, to think of revolution and communism today means to face the question of our shared ruins both technically and existentially.

MT: Exactly. First, to have another use of the world, you must change your heart, and I say heart and not intellect. In the sense of the heart in ancient Jewish theology, unlike Hellenistic ones, where it is the place of reason and love together. The heart prevents cynicism and calculation. This kind of change, I think, could give us a different vision of the ruins: to discern the things that deserve to be forgotten or destroyed, and others that call for our compassion and love. The great problem is: how to share things both technically and existentially? How to not separate the heart and reason? I dont agree with the idea that revolution is just a technical question, but on the other hand, to think that it can only consist of an inner phenomenon is a dangerous illusion.

I think its useful to put a distinction between technique and technology. If technique is something appropriable, technology brings a huge number of problems. It is nihilistic at its core, including, among other things, its inhuman speed. In the book I make muche use of Heiner Mller's work, the German playwright. He insists on the potential of slowing down. I think this is what we have to learn, how to impress slowness in the midst of a hostile territory like the metropolis. I believe that our relationships would be better and more beautiful in that scenario.

Then, the end-times and communism of the end. I find that the way in which the Apocalypse is represented today is a big lie, a form of subalternity to this world based on fear. The true Revelation is something good, because it says that this world ends. And in this sense, I write that revolutionaries are militants of the end-times, His assistants. The communism of the end is the Good News. Pessimism for the current times, infinite hope for their ends. Come on friends, sursum corda! We will overcome this world!

Marcello Tar is a barefoot researcher of contemporary struggles and movements. He is author of numerous essays and books in French and Italian, including Il ghiaccio era sottile: Per una storia dellautonomia (Derive Approdi, 2012), Non esiste la rivoluzione infelice: Il comunismo della destituzione (Derive Approdi, 2017), and Autonomie!: Italie, les annes 1970 (La Fabrique, 2011). Tar lives in between France and Italy. There Is No Unhappy Revolution: The Communism of Destitution (Common Notions, 2021) is his first book in English.

Matt Peterson is an organizer at Woodbine, an experimental space in New York City. He directed the documentary features Scenes from a Revolt Sustained (2014) and Spaces of Exception (2018).

2021 e-flux and the author

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There Is No Unhappy Love: The Communism of Destitution - E-Flux

After dominating former Lightweight Champion Tony Ferguson over three rounds at UFC 262 on Saturday night, Beneil Dariush had a message for millions of watching fans.

Speaking to podcaster Joe Rogan after the fight, the Iranian-born American mixed martial artist dedicated his victory to victims of communism around the world.

First things first, I want to thank my Lord and savior Jesus Christ, thats number one, Dariush told Rogan. Number two, I want to dedicate this fight to all the people whove been hurt by Marxists ideologies. There are millions of you.

Though many may not know it, the 20th century was the most violent century in history, primarily because of Communism. The precise death toll is unclear, in part because its so vast.

The best data we have comes from the late Rudolph Rummel, a political scientist at Yale University, Indiana University, and University of Hawaii, who pioneered the field of democide (death by government). He estimated the human toll of 20th century socialism to be roughly 200 million worldwide. About two-thirds of that total came from the two largest communist empiresthe Soviet Union (61 million killed under Stalin and Lenin) and China (78 million killed under Mao Zedong).

In his book Maos Great Famine, historian Frank Diktter explained how Mao became the greatest mass murderer in history.

Mao thought that he could catapult his country past its competitors by herding villagers across the country into giant peoples communes. In pursuit of a utopian paradise, everything was collectivised, Diktter writes. People had their work, homes, land, belongings and livelihoods taken from them. In collective canteens, food, distributed by the spoonful according to merit, became a weapon used to force people to follow the partys every dictate.

Productivity plummeted after Mao destroyed incentives to work. So Chairman Mao found new ways to motivate workers: coercion and violence.

What comes out of this massive and detailed dossier is a tale of horror in which Mao emerges as one of the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for the deaths of at least 45 million people between 1958 and 1962, Diktter writes.

Among the deaths was a boy in a Hunan village accused of stealing grain. A local Communist boss, Xiong Dechang, ordered the father of the child to bury his son alive.

The father died of grief a few days later, Diktter writes.

Dariush was not born in the Soviet Union or China. He was born in Iran and raised on a farm before his family moved to the US when he was nine.

So one might wonder if he is needlessly dredging up a dark past. But this overlooks two noteworthy facts. First, its important to remember that roughly 20 percent of the worlds population today lives under single-party communist regimes.

Second, despite its brutal history, communism is actually making a comeback. While its no secret that a healthy majority of young people say they support socialism, fewer have noticed that more than a third of millennials say they approve of communism.

This fact recently invited ridicule from HBO funnyman Bill Maher.

Much of the world [tried communism]. Millennials think that doesnt count because they werent alive when it happened, but it did happen, Maher noted. Pining for communism is like pining for Betamax or MySpace.

Maher reaches the conclusion that millennials are the problem because your ideas are stupid.

The line brought a burst of applause and laughter from the audience, but it should be noted that millennials are not entirely to blame. The sad and astonishing reality is that most of them are simply unaware of the atrocities committed under the banner of socialism.

Marion Smith, the former executive director of Victims of Communism, has pointed out that entire generations have come of age in cultural and educational systems hostile to free markets. Sadly, these institutions were more than willing to whitewash the crimes of Marxism.

As a result, many people are simply clueless of communisms crimes. For example, according to a 2018 Victims of Communism survey:

How Americans allowed this to happen is a story for another day. What matters is that weve deprived countless Americans of an important historical reality: communism kills.

Its a dangerous lesson to forget, and thats what makes Beneil Dariushs fight dedication so important.

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A UFC Fighter Dedicated His Victory to Victims of Communism. Here's Why It Was Important | Jon Miltimore - Foundation for Economic Education

The electoral campaign for the April 25 elections in Albania brought to light one of the biggest political scandals the country has experienced in recent years.

Investigative reporting by online media outlet Lapsi.al revealed that the ruling Socialist Party, led by Prime Minister Edi Rama, has created a database containing all the personal data of the citizens of the Republic of Albania, using data from state institutions, mainly from e-Albania, a website and smartphone application used to facilitate document requests, and more recently used by almost everyone to obtain permission to go out for various reasons (either work or personal) during the pandemic lockdown.

This database includes information about voters' employment history, their religious beliefs, tax returns, telephone numbers, email addresses, social security numbers, sexual orientation and medical records, as well as comments such as: this voter recently asked if his sister or wife can be employed in a state institution; is a friend of; doesnt have a good relationship with It even tracks their comments and likes on Facebook.

More importantly, it was made clear to the public that every single Albanian citizen was under the patronage of a trusted Socialist Party member, who apparently were called patronagists, and whose primary duty was to scrutinise and keep an eye on the people they had under their patronage.

Rama initially ignored the news, then admitted that this patronage system was designed by the Socialist Party to collect information on its supporters. After the election, when it became clear that the party he leads had won, Rama said the Patronagists have done a very good job and invited them to come to Skenderbej Square to celebrate the partys victory, ending all doubts as to whether the government was monitoring the social and political life of the citizens.

The theft of personal data for political reasons has sparked outrage from citizens who feel violated by the state. In a democratic system, citizens receive security and support from state institutions.

"I am scared it is terrible that someone owns all my information, I had never imagined that I was under observation and monitoring, Erinda, a 30-year-old resident of Tirana, told bne IntelliNews.

When the government steals my data, to whom should I turn as a citizen? Where should I file a complaint? In court or in the prosecutor's office? These are also state institutions. We have returned to communism, said Eva, a 21-year-old student at the Faculty of Economics in Elbasan.

The existence of this database containing so much data is a political crime. In Albania, memories of the communist regime are still fresh. State security monitored all citizens, seeking information about their relationships with family, cousins, colleagues and residents of the area where they lived. State security did such a good job that citizens were afraid to express their opinions. It seems like we are in the same situation today, when you are not free to express your opinion because the person who patronises you keeps you under surveillance and is informed about everything that happens to you. All this information will one day enable the government to decide whether to help you or not help here meaning anything from being employed in an institution to getting a license for something. Now Albanians fear all these decisions will depend on their behaviour or whether they have expressed any dissatisfaction with the state.

The owner of a travel agency, Erion Mane, went public on the issue, saying he has been repeatedly and unjustly fined. He asked for help with his problem from one of the relevant directorates at the Ministry of Transport and staff initially promised to help him. Then one of the directors of the ministry sent the businessman a screenshot of a post he had made on Facebook several months earlier, where he had shared a photo of the chairwoman of an opposition party. A press release issued jointly by Mane and President Ilir Meta a strong critic and political opponent of the Socialist Party argued that Mane did not receive any help from the state because he was patronised to monitor his political orientation and keep him under control. This is one of many cases of a business that does not support the government being financially penalised and pushed towards bankruptcy.

For Albanians, it is scary to think that someone out there has been asking, investigating, following, eavesdropping, both in real life and on social media, for years, about you. The patronagist, in addition to knowing where you live, with whom you live, what you do in your free time, who your friends are, who your partner is etc, also checks your social networks like Facebook and Instagram, where he or she screenshots your posts or messages to keep a record of your thoughts and actions.

This scandal reminds me of my grandfather's story about the centralisation of socio-political life under the party-state, where everyone knew everything about everyone, and you could be fired or imprisoned for political reasons. Nowadays the state fines you, tries to make you close your business and in general makes life very very hard for you for political reasons.

Having no institutions to complain to, many citizens have denounced the phenomenon of patronage on their social networks and some of them have even invited their patronagists (who often are acquaintances or neighbours) to meet in order to get to know the person who has been stalking them for years. The theft of personal data from the state cannot be left only to denunciations on social networks when the government accepts and publicly thanks the patronagists for a job well done.

The existence of this database will negatively affect the Albanian accession process to the European Union. Lacking trust in local institutions, citizens and various organisations have sought help from various institutions located in Tirana, such as the offices of the European Union, OSCE-OHDIR and the US embassy, hoping that these will hold the Albanian government to account and ask the government to delete this database.

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OPINION: Patronagists scandal brings back memories of the communist era in Albania - bne IntelliNews

A refugee who escaped communist Cuba issued a dire warning to Americans about the path the country is headed down. Maximo Alvarez declared that critical American institutions have already been infected with communism, including schools and the media.

Podcast host Lisa Boothe asked Alvarez on Wednesday if Americans have swallowed the communist poison pill. Alvarez responded, "Not only have they swallowed it, they digested it."

"Listen to the media. They're no longer objective. You can tell how much they hate this country," Alvarez said during an interview on "The Truth with Lisa Boothe" podcast.

"Look at our, our academia," Alvarez added. "Our kids are not being they're indoctrinated. They are taught that America is a bad country. That we're a bunch of racists. That we're bad people, and we have to pay back.

"If this country was racist, I wouldn't be here," the Cuban immigrant said. "If this country was a racist country, most of us wouldn't be here because even some people in your family came from another country. This country was made of immigrants."

Alvarez admitted that some Americans are flawed, but the United States as a country shouldn't be blamed for certain "bad people."

"Do we have racist people in this country? Of course we do. Do we have bad people? Yes, we do. Do we have bad teachers? Yes, we do. Do we have bad police people? Yes, we do," he stated. "But don't blame the country for that because we have a justice system that will penalize you and punish you if you are a bad person, if you are a racist.

"Look at how much money they're sending to Black Lives Matter," Alvarez said. "And people don't want to understand that these three ladies who control this company are bragging about Marxist Leninism. They're communists they tell you that. And nobody understands what that means."

Alvarez was referring to a 2015 video where Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors bragged that she and fellow BLM co-founder Alicia Garza are "trained Marxists."

"Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists," Cullors said in the 2015 interview. "We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories."

Alvarez said that communism has been seeping into the American way of life for years. He pointed out how American Catholics haven't been vocal in denouncing abortion, prayer being banned in school, and Democrats passing gun control measures.

"Gun control? Every time there's a shooting, you want to have gun control," Alvarez proclaimed. "You know why? Because they're afraid the only way out of this is a civil war."

"Make sure that kids are no longer educated, they're indoctrinated. Make sure that people hate each other. Envy, hatred. Make sure that the blacks hate the whites. Make sure that the rich hate the poor. Make sure that the people who live in the city hate the people who live on the farm," he explained. "It's all part of the Communist Manifesto, and Saul Alinsky points that out very, very well."

Alvarez, who is the founder and president of Sunshine Gasoline Distributors, fled Cuba for the United States in 1961. Alvarez took part in Operation Peter Pan, a covert program that transported about 14,000 Cuban children to the United States from 1960 to 1962 at the height of the Cold War.

Alvarez made headlines last summer when he delivered a gripping speech at the Republican National Convention about the dangers of far-left ideologies that many progressive Democrats have advocated.

"I've seen movements like this before. I've seen ideas like this before and I'm here to tell you, we cannot let them take over our country," the Florida businessman said at the RNC. "I heard the promises of Fidel Castro. And I can never forget all those who grew up around me, who looked like me, who suffered and starved and died because they believed those empty promises. They swallowed the communist poison pill.

"Those false promises spread the wealth, free education, free health care, defund the police, trust a socialist state more than your family and your community they don't sound radical to my ears," he said. "They sound familiar. When Fidel Castro was asked if he was a communist, he said he was a Roman Catholic he knew he had to hide the truth."

During a business roundtable last year which featured former President Donald Trump, Alvarez warned Americans about the promises of "free stuff."

"I remember all the promises that we hear today about free education and free health care and free land," Alvarez said. "My God, no freedom. But he never said that until after he was in power, got rid of all the police, got rid of all the military been there for the last 60 years and counting. And he destroyed each and every one who helped him."

In July, Alvarez joined Glenn Beck to warn Americans about the dangers of communism.

"This is the same old story. It doesn't change. We need to explain to people that the communist philosophy is based on the fact that the ends justify the means. The ends justify the means," Alvarez said on "The Glenn Beck Program." "They will do whatever is necessary to accomplish their objective. If they have to tell you they're Catholics, or they have to tell you they belong to certain religions, they will. If they have to kill you, they will they have. Just look at exactly what happened in Cuba."

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Cuban refugee warns Americans have swallowed the 'poison pill' of communism, says media hate this country - TheBlaze

-Analysis-

Power and authority are not necessarily synonymous. Force is not authority, and can even indicate weakness. The philosopher Max Weber observed that dominance is only legitimate when people recognize and accept authority. In some democracies, rulers have compensated the fading of legitimacy with higher doses of authoritarianism. The pandemic has exacerbated this distortion.

This is the conjuncture facing several experiments in governance that are imperfect, populist or downright dictatorial. Cuba, Venezuela, China, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey all fit these labels to a greater or lesser extent.

In some of those cases, what's helped that big-stick-style authoritarianism survive is a setting where income distribution is at least consistent. China, fore example, breathed new life into its authoritarian system with the capitalist experiment begun by the late leader Deng Xiaoping. Its brand of modernization may have left the Chinese indifferent to the concept of communism, but not to the social mobility the system assures them.

Today, the People's Republic has the world's biggest middle class, with a per capita income that keeps growing. Vietnam has a broadly similar situation, while Saudi Arabia has spent big chunks of its oil fortune to bolster wages, pay subsidies and keep the peace.

Regimes without economic success can only rely on coercion.

Regimes without economic success can only rely on coercion, which has shown stark limitations. In Paraguay, the regime of General Alfredo Stroessner (1954-1989) fell with the end of the generous funds spent on the Itaip dam. With no more "sweeteners" for his cronies, Stroessner was sent packing when another soldier, Colonel Lino Oviedo, marched into the presidential office holding a hand grenade.

With North Africa during the Arab Spring, rising food prices pushed people onto the streets to challenge the authority of their rulers. Anyone who claims ideology can make up for such pedestrian needs as food and personal fulfillment should listen to speeches made by Cuba's Ral Castro when he took over the presidency from his late brother, Fidel. The revolutionary veteran who announced his retirement days ago, aged almost 90 years, admitted in the middle of the last decade that the communist island's "insignificant wages" had cut through its youth's "revolutionary conscience."

The Cuban case confirms you can do a lot with history, except negate its dynamics. A section of Cuba's gerontocracy seems to have understood that history is not static, and understands what it means to fall into an abyss. The younger of the Castros warned his peers in the nomenklatura that unless things changed in Cuba, the communist polity would fall.

When Venezuela stopped sending it money, Cuba sought out historic negotiations with the administration of President Barack Obama, to break decades of isolation and attract vital investments. This dtente, later dashed by Donald Trump's erratic geopolitics, is now back on the table.

Castro's retirement and the handover of powers to his political godson Miguel Daz-Canel point in that direction. Castro has also taken with him some old party hands opposed to any glasnost. One is Ramiro Valds, who designed Venezuela's repressive apparatus of recent years.

Ral Castro took over the presidency from his late brother, Fidel Photo: Ernesto Mastrascusa/EFE via ZUMA Press

Castro and Daz-Canel made similar sounds at the recent Eighth Party Congress. Both spoke in favor of normalized ties with the United States, like those it maintains with other states including Vietnam, whose capitalist economy and communist political control is a model that Castro wants Cuba to follow.

Vietnam's economy has grown in leaps since the 1980s, when it dropped its opposition to the free market. It even grew 2.9% in the pandemic year of 2020, when Cuba's economy shrank 11%. Interestingly, Castro has admitted that 50 years of U.S. blockades were not the only reason for Cuba's economic failures.

Today, Cuba's "Fatherland or Death" motto may well morph into "Open Up or Die," as a columnist in the Spanish paper El Pas recently observed. Like Venezuela, the island nation is suffering an aggravation of inflationary trends that is fueling discontent, protests and repression. In 2020, the price of clothes and foodstuffs doubled or even tripled, while services like electricity quadrupled. The decision last January to have a single exchange rate contributed to this inflation.

For now, Cuba must wait before the seeds it has thrown at the U.S. germinate. The administration of President Joe Biden won't do anything with Cuba until after congressional elections of 2022. It must boost its legislative power and cannot afford to lose Florida, as it did in last year's presidential elections.

Florida's Hispanic, anti-communist voters don't want anything to do with Cuba whatever the subtleties. If the Democrats stumble in mid-term polls there, it means Trump could return. That might be good news for China in its race to become the world's paramount power, but would not in any case halt changes on the island.

Cuba's ally and pupil Venezuela might open the oil sector to private investments.

Cuba's ally and pupil Venezuela is also shifting its positions, beginning with its economy. Last year, on the advice of the Russian Economy ministry, a state commission discussed opening the oil sector to private investments.

The government of President Nicols Maduro is preparing legislation to end the state's monopoly on oil through the firm PDVSA. And in January, the state began talking to concessionary firms on how to broaden participation in exploiting the country's pharaonic crude reserves. With output having dropped below 500,000 barrels a day, Venezuela needs investments that can match their scale to revive a crucial source of revenues.

While U.S. sanctions are an immediate obstacle, there are ways private firms could take over Venezuelan assets without falling afoul of laws. The U.S. forbids any business with PDVSA, the Venezuelan regime and its helpers. In theory, independent firms could take over businesses no longer controlled by PDVSA. Bloomberg is already reporting anti-sanctions lobbying by big oil and financial firms in the U.S., concerned about losing Venezuela to competitors.

Washington might initially allow U.S. firms to swap fuel for Venezuelan crude, which Trump blocked. This might be done before the midterm elections, using humanitarian pretexts.

Many in the northern hemisphere think a process of dtente opens a straight path to regime change in Venezuela, while parts of Venezuela's middle class are already banking on a gradual transformation. And if Cuba begins heading in another direction and loosens its grip, Venezuela's regime may also do what it must, to survive.

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Raul Castro's Exit, Biden's Arrival And The Future Of Venezuela - Worldcrunch