Socialism is the path that the Chinese people chose to enter modernity. As President Xi Jinping stated at the 20th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, ‘Chinese modernisation is socialist modernisation pursued under the leadership of the Communist Party of China’.¹ In China, ‘modernisation’ (现代化) is understood in dialectical opposition to the ‘century of humiliation’ (百年国耻), the period of imperialist subjugation that extended from the First Opium War (1839–1842) until the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949. Chinese modernisation refers to a progressive historical process rooted in China’s particular conditions and directed towards socialism. The Chinese conception of modernisation therefore has a genealogy distinct from that of classical modernisation theory, which understands development as a linear transition from ‘traditional’ society towards the economic, political, and social institutions of the industrialised capitalist West.² Xi’s formulation makes this socialist orientation explicit. It is this understanding of Chinese modernisation as a socialist historical process that lies at the heart of this dossier.

Capitalism came into China not in the form of modern industry but through opium, gunboats, and unequal treaties that heralded a century of humiliation. Capitalism – as imperialism – did not socialise production and labour across China on a national scale. Instead, it smashed and atomised Chinese society, propping up the landlord class, warlords, and comprador elites tied to foreign capital. The historical task of the Chinese Revolution was to overcome this humiliation and create a movement towards scientific reason and human dignity that rejected the political subordination and social polarisation associated with capitalism. We call that movement socialism. But how could socialism be built in a poor country?

At the time of the revolution, China was one of the poorest countries on the planet. Only ten countries had a lower per capita GDP.³ There was no way to build a classless society, short of socialising poverty. That was no solution at all when modern industry was needed to provide a dignified life and to build the material and technological capacity required to defend national sovereignty against war, blockade, and sanctions. The communists of China therefore had the dual task of transforming social relations and developing the productive forces – the two legs of China’s revolutionary path towards socialist modernisation. The Chinese Revolution had to advance on both legs, with the emphasis shifting between social transformation and technological development at different historical moments.

The Chinese Revolution is one of the great transformations of the modern era. In less than a century, China moved from the humiliation of semi-colonial domination and semi-feudal mass poverty to becoming one of the principal forces shaping the contemporary world. This transformation did not emerge from the spontaneous operations of the market, the benevolence of the capitalist class, or the guidance of foreign powers. It came from a protracted revolutionary process led by the Communist Party of China (CPC) and rooted in the struggles of workers and peasants.⁴ Chinese modernisation unfolded through distinct historical steps, each responding to the contradictions inherited from the previous stage and each attempting to advance the material and social conditions of the Chinese people.

There have been three major steps in China’s socialist modernisation since 1949. The first, the period of socialist revolution and construction from 1949 to 1978, focused on laying the foundations in an impoverished and unstable country so that the productive forces could develop and national sovereignty could be secured. The second, the period of reform and opening up from 1978 to 2013, concentrated on rapid industrialisation, technological advancement, and the creation of social wealth. The third, the new era inaugurated under President Xi Jinping’s leadership in 2013, has sought to place common prosperity and high-quality development at the centre of socialist construction. These steps are not isolated from one another – they form a continuous historical process shaped by the logic of socialist modernisation.⁵

Step 1: Revolution, Stability, and the Foundations of Development (1949–1978)

When the People’s Republic of China was founded in 1949, the country was among the poorest in the world. More than a century of upheaval had devastated China’s social and institutional fabric. This included imperialist intervention, the Opium Wars and widespread opium addiction, unequal treaties, warlordism, the Japanese invasion and occupation of China from 1931 to 1945, and civil war. Modern industry was underdeveloped, agriculture was backward, infrastructure was shattered, literacy rates were extremely low, and life expectancy hovered around thirty-five years.⁶ China faced not only economic underdevelopment but also political fragmentation and social chaos. The first task of the revolution was survival and stabilisation. The revolutionary government had to consolidate national sovereignty, dismantle feudal structures and the comprador networks that linked domestic elites to foreign capital, and create the institutional basis for long-term development. Without this initial step, no later modernisation would have been possible.

One of the earliest achievements of the new government was agrarian reform. By 1953, nearly 47 million hectares had been confiscated from the landlord class, with some land also requisitioned from rich peasants. Although they constituted distinct rural classes, landlords and rich peasants together accounted for less than 10% of the rural population but had previously controlled 70–80% of the arable land.⁷ The land was redistributed to approximately 300 million landless and land-poor peasants, amounting to a near-universal redistribution of land among the rural poor. This transformed the countryside and broke the power of feudal elites who had dominated rural China for centuries. Land reform was not merely an economic policy; it was a social revolution that gave peasants dignity and political agency. In the language of the revolution itself, it was a process of fanshen (翻身): ‘to turn over’ or ‘turn the body’. The revolution’s first great achievement was therefore measured not only in hectares redistributed but in the ‘turning over’ of hundreds of millions of peasants, who became active participants in national development. ⁸ This understanding of development as both material redistribution and human transformation has defined Chinese modernisation ever since.

Alongside land redistribution, the government moved to stabilise the economy on new foundations. Through the public control of essential commodities and the elimination of feudal rentiers, the government broke the speculative networks that had driven one of the most severe episodes of hyperinflation in the modern era. In April 1949, monthly inflation exceeded 5,000%. The renminbi, first issued in December 1948, gradually replaced the multiple currencies then in circulation. By the early 1950s, the government had established a stable, unified national monetary system.⁹ This action stabilised prices and facilitated exchange throughout the country, creating the conditions for productive economic life. The government also took the radical step of repudiating the illegitimate debts that previous regimes had accumulated through more than 700 foreign loans contracted between 1852 and 1949.¹⁰ All of these initiatives helped wipe the slate clean for Chinese society and unlocked the resources needed for future development.

The new Chinese state also launched mass literacy and public health campaigns. Before 1949, illiteracy was widespread and medical services were inaccessible to most people. Through mass mobilisation, reforms to the Chinese written language, and the rapid expansion of rural educational infrastructure – including 182,960 rural reading rooms by 1956 – literacy rates rose from under 20% at the time of the 1949 revolution to 57% by 1959.¹¹ Meanwhile, the ‘barefoot doctor’ programme – which directly inspired the World Health Organisation’s 1978 Declaration of Alma-Ata on primary health care – extended basic healthcare to rural villages, greatly reducing infant mortality and the incidence of infectious diseases. Life expectancy rose, as the World Bank data shows, from roughly thirty-five years in 1949 to over sixty-three years by 1978. This rise in life expectancy alone represents one of the greatest improvements in human welfare in modern history. By 1978, China had a healthier and better-educated population than other countries at comparable income levels – an important foundation for the rapid development that followed.

Industrialisation was at the heart of the First Five-Year Plan (1953–1957). Supported in part by technical assistance from the Soviet Union, China began to establish a heavy industrial base through the programme known as the 156 Projects, which covered sectors including coal, steel, power, and machinery and was carried out by state-owned enterprises. Although China remained poor, these projects created the industrial foundation needed both for future development and for national defence by providing the materials, machinery, and energy needed to equip and sustain its armed forces. During this period, China expanded its iron and steel production capacity, with steel output quadrupling from 1.3 to 5.2 million tonnes over the course of the First Five-Year Plan. The country also built its first automobile and tractor factories and constructed major hydroelectric and thermal power facilities.¹² Together, these efforts laid an integrated national industrial and infrastructural foundation, including bridges over the Yangtze River and the restoration and expansion of rail links into remote parts of northwest China. New industrial zones were deliberately built in the interior rather than in the coastal treaty ports of the colonial era. Socialist planning enabled the mobilisation of scarce resources towards national priorities rather than private profit.¹³

Critics often focus solely on the difficulties and errors of this period, including the consequences of the Great Leap Forward (1958–1962) and the turmoil associated with the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976). These events undoubtedly caused suffering and political instability. Yet it is historically incomplete to reduce the entire period to these tragedies. The broader significance of the first step lies in the fact that China emerged from decades of humiliation as a sovereign and unified state capable of independent development. What is remarkable is that many of these advances were achieved under severe external constraints and the constant threat of war. In 1951, the United Nations General Assembly imposed an embargo on strategic goods destined for China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK). The United States reinforced these restrictions through the Mutual Defence Assistance Control Act of 1951, commonly known as the Battle Act. These restrictions and broader US sanctions, which were designed to wreak havoc on the economy, continued throughout the 1960s, limiting the supply of essential goods and machinery, constraining the pace of development, and imposing a high degree of autarky on the economy.¹⁴ Moreover, after US-led forces invaded the DPRK and advanced towards the Chinese border in October 1950, China intervened militarily in support of the DPRK and in defence of its own national security. As a consequence of these threats, China held its first nuclear test in 1964 to establish a shield against attack by its enemies.

The collective leadership of the first generation of the CPC, led by Mao Zedong, must be understood in this historical context. The revolution achieved what earlier reformers and nationalist governments could not: territorial unification, political independence, the liquidation of feudal relations, and the creation of a state committed to the welfare of the masses. The revolutionary ethos fostered a culture of collective sacrifice and national purpose. Even Western development economists later acknowledged that the foundations for China’s economic rise were laid during this socialist period through land reform, basic industrialisation, education, and public health.¹⁵ The emphasis on universal education produced a disciplined and increasingly skilled population. Rural industrialisation and grassroots governance helped create a decentralised and responsive administrative structure. When economic reforms began in 1978, China already possessed a cohesive state apparatus, a healthy labour force, and basic industrial capacity.

Step 2: Reform, Growth, and the Creation of Social Wealth (1978–2013)

By 1978, Chinese leaders recognised that although the country had achieved sovereignty and stability, it remained economically underdeveloped. The productive forces were still too weak to provide prosperity for the population. Moreover, because many resources were scarce in relation to the size of the population, China needed to trade with the world. During this period, Deng Xiaoping, the principal architect of reform and opening up, and other reform leaders initiated a new step of socialist development aimed at accelerating industrialisation, technological upgrading, and economic growth. This period is often misunderstood in Western accounts as a simple abandonment of socialism in favour of capitalism or, worse, as the adoption of neoliberalism.¹⁶ The reform era represented an adaptation of socialist strategy to concrete historical conditions. The CPC maintained political control while gradually allowing market mechanisms to operate and private capital to accumulate. This process was monitored and mediated through the structures and institutions of the state built in the first step. The objective was not private accumulation as an end in itself but the rapid expansion of the productive forces to enable the eradication of poverty.¹⁷

Deng Xiaoping famously argued that ‘poverty is not socialism’.¹⁸ The revolutionary state had secured national independence, but socialism also required material abundance. Without economic growth, China would remain vulnerable and incapable of improving the lives of its people. The results of this strategy were extraordinary. Between 1978 and 2019, China experienced one of the fastest economic transformations in human history. Over 765 million people were lifted out of poverty.¹⁹ Manufacturing expanded rapidly, cities modernised, and infrastructure projects transformed the physical landscape of the country. Special Economic Zones such as Shenzhen became laboratories for industrial experimentation. In 1980, Shenzhen was a small fishing town. Within decades, it had become a global technological centre with advanced manufacturing industries. Major firms such as Huawei and Tencent were founded there, and by 2018 its GDP had surpassed Hong Kong’s – an international hub of global capital.²⁰ This transformation reflected the strategic use of foreign capital and technology under state guidance.

Throughout the reform period, the state retained a central role. Unlike in neoliberal economies, where private capital dominates the state and markets incentivise short-term speculative gains, China’s reforms preserved public ownership in strategic sectors such as banking, energy, telecommunications, and transport. This enabled long-term planning and prevented private capital from capturing natural monopolies and extracting rents from them. Instead, the state led a process of market construction in which private capital was directed towards politically determined goals and subjected to intense competitive pressure, forcing firms to upgrade production and expand industrial capacity. Control over the financial system, particularly the allocation of credit, gave the state a key mechanism for steering investment. The market was treated as an instrument rather than as an absolute principle.²¹

This period saw major investment and advances in science and technology. Jiang Zemin, who served as minister of the electronics industry from 1983 to 1985 and later as president from 1993 to 2003, oversaw strategic developments in electronics and information technology that helped lay the foundations for later advances in semiconductors, computing, and artificial intelligence.²² By the time China joined the World Trade Organisation in 2001, its domestic industrial base was dynamic enough to attract significant volumes of foreign capital and its goods were competitive enough to dominate the world market. China had already begun to move from labour-intensive production to increasingly advanced manufacturing and innovation. High-speed rail, renewable energy systems, telecommunications infrastructure, and digital platforms developed on a vast scale. China opened its first fully high-speed passenger line in 2007 and by 2012 had built more than 10,000 km of high-speed rail from virtually nothing – the longest network in the world.²³ By the early twenty-first century, China was no longer simply ‘the factory of the world’ but an emerging technological power.

At the same time, this step generated new contradictions. Rapid growth produced significant regional inequalities, corruption, and disparities between urban and rural areas. Wages did not keep up with rising productivity. Coastal regions advanced more quickly than inland provinces. Private wealth expanded and social stratification became increasingly visible. Environmental degradation also became a serious concern. Yet these contradictions were increasingly recognised by Chinese leaders themselves. Under Hu Jintao, general secretary of the CPC from 2002 to 2012, the party began to respond more directly to the contradictions produced by rapid growth, including labour unrest, regional inequality, and environmental degradation. Minimum-wage standards were raised and labour protections strengthened in the 2000s, while the ecological costs of rapid industrialisation pushed environmental questions higher on the policy agenda. This shift was reflected in the Scientific Outlook on Development, introduced in 2003 and written into the CPC constitution in 2007, which called for people-centred, comprehensive, balanced, and sustainable development.²⁴

The achievements of the second step are undeniable. China became the world’s largest industrial economy, dramatically improved living standards, and built the technological capabilities necessary for sovereign development. No other country has achieved development on such a scale in such a short period. Nor has any country managed to sustain double digit growth rates without eventually entering into a crippling recession. Importantly, China avoided the fate experienced by many post-socialist societies after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Rather than engaging in shock therapy, dismantling the state, and surrendering to oligarchic privatisation, China retained the leading role of the CPC and preserved public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy – banking, energy, telecommunications, and transport. This continuity allowed the country to maintain national coherence and long-term planning.²⁵ Ultimately, the reform period was never presented as the final form of socialism. It was understood as a necessary stage in developing productive capacity.

Step 3: Common Prosperity, Ecological Civilisation, and High-Quality Development (2013–Present)

By 2013, China had largely accomplished the historical tasks associated with developing the productive forces. The country possessed advanced infrastructure, technological sophistication, and substantial national wealth. New questions began to emerge. How should this wealth be distributed and what social purpose should development serve? How can the productive forces and the growth imperative be brought into harmony with ecological limits? What is the place and role of China’s traditional culture in a technologically advanced and atomised world? What is China’s place in a churning world order and what is its relationship to the Global South? These are not easy questions, and none has a clear-cut answer. The third step of Chinese modernisation has sought to address them.

Equality and common prosperity have re-emerged as central socialist principles under Xi Jinping’s leadership. First, the Chinese state has increasingly emphasised the social dimensions of development rather than growth alone. One of the most significant achievements of this step was the campaign to eliminate extreme poverty. Launched in 2013, the Targeted Poverty Alleviation (精准扶贫) campaign sought to identify and address the remaining pockets of extreme poverty that the previous stage of development had not been able to eliminate. Its objectives were summarised as ‘one income, two assurances, and three guarantees’: a minimum income, assurances of adequate food and clothing, and guarantees of compulsory education, basic healthcare, and safe housing. The campaign mobilised more than three million party cadres alongside state institutions and local governments and expanded infrastructure and public services in impoverished rural areas, including access to drinking water and electricity. More than 9.6 million people who lived in areas with harsh environmental conditions were provided with improved housing, infrastructure, public services and access to employment in resettlement communities. In February 2021, the Chinese government announced that it had eradicated absolute poverty in accordance with its multidimensional national standard.²⁶ The campaign formed part of a broader effort to strengthen public services and social protection, including the pension system. Rather than relying solely on market outcomes, the state intervened directly to improve living conditions in the poorest communities, with party cadres playing a leading role and demonstrating the continuing capacity of socialist organisation. This is a reflection of China’s conception of development – one that is centred on collective welfare.

Second, the concept of common prosperity has also entailed measures to prevent extreme concentrations of wealth. Beginning in late 2020, the Chinese government intensified antitrust enforcement across the platform economy, targeting abuses of market dominance, exclusive arrangements, and mergers and acquisitions that had not undergone required government reviews. Alibaba, Tencent, and Bilibili were among the large technology companies investigated or penalised, with Alibaba receiving a record fine of 18.2 billion yuan (approximately US$2.8 billion).²⁷ These measures sought to restrain market concentration and subject the power of large technology companies to greater public regulation.

The government has also imposed sweeping restrictions on private tutoring companies to reduce educational inequality and the financial burden such practices impose on families.²⁸ In response to the emergence of a potential real estate bubble, President Xi Jinping’s slogan ‘houses are for living in, not for speculation’ signalled a shift towards greater regulation of the property market.²⁹ The state has also used its control over the financial system to restrict lending to the property sector and channel credit towards strategic high-technology industries – something the capitalist systems in the Global North have been unable to do since the Third Great Depression (2007–2008). These policies signal the political will and ability to subordinate capital to broader social and developmental goals.

This evolution reflects an important theoretical understanding. Socialism cannot be measured solely by rates of economic growth or technological achievement, however impressive those achievements may be. The decisive indicator is the relationship between productive development and the social good embodied in the concept of common prosperity. Economic modernisation acquires socialist significance only insofar as it expands the material, cultural, and democratic capacities of the people themselves. The continued strengthening of public education, healthcare, infrastructure, scientific research, ecological planning, and cultural renewal therefore represents an effort to ensure that the extraordinary productive advances of previous decades increasingly serve broader social objectives.

Third, environmental sustainability has become a major priority. Earlier stages of industrialisation often relied on environmentally destructive practices. In fact, the offshoring of polluting industries to China meant that the country bore the brunt of the ecological costs associated with consumption in the Global North. In the current step, however, China has invested heavily in renewable energy and electric vehicles (EVs) and is now a global leader in solar and wind power as well as EV production. By mid-2024, China accounted for two-thirds of all utility-scale solar and wind capacity under construction globally. It also produced over 10 million EVs in 2024.³⁰ The shift from the severe urban smog of a decade ago – widely described as an ‘airpocalypse’ – towards the goal of ‘ecological civilisation’ illustrates the scale of this policy change.³¹ The concept of ‘ecological civilisation’ and the slogan that ‘clear waters and green mountains are as valuable as mountains of gold and silver’ have been integrated into official planning discourse as part of socialist modernisation, signalling China’s intent to tackle pollution and climate change.³² This commitment has taken concrete form in large-scale efforts to rehabilitate environments devastated by industrial pollution. One example is the restoration of Erhai Lake in Yunnan Province through the coordination of residents, party cadres, and the local and central government.³³

Fourth, China has sought to move beyond poverty alleviation and narrow the divide between town and country through its rural revitalisation project, such as by transferring technology and resources to rural areas.³⁴ This represents a return to the longstanding Marxist and socialist imperative to abolish the distinction between town and country.³⁵ It also reflects a return to the CPC’s revolutionary roots in the rural masses who provided the backbone of the Chinese Revolution. Rural revitalisation is therefore not only a poverty reduction strategy but an attempt to narrow the urban-rural divide and build forms of development that are less dependent on the consumerism and social atomisation associated with rapid urbanisation. By strengthening rural infrastructure, public services, local industries, and ecological restoration, the project seeks to make the countryside a site of modern socialist development rather than a reservoir of displaced labour for the cities.

During this third step, China’s role in the international community has also evolved. Projects such as the Belt and Road Initiative, which began in 2013, reflect efforts to reshape global development through infrastructure investment and South-South cooperation. The country’s mastery over the productive forces has also made it an essential partner in the industrialisation of Africa. For instance, the Addis Ababa-Djibouti Railway connects landlocked Ethiopia to the Port of Djibouti and supports regional trade, while the Kenya Standard Gauge Railway has significantly reduced transport costs. This stands in contrast to the record of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, whose policies have perpetuated underdevelopment across the continent.³⁶ While Western critics often interpret these initiatives through the lens of geopolitical rivalry, many governments in Asia, Africa, and Latin America see China as an alternative partner to the unequal structures historically dominated by Western powers. China has also proposed three broad frameworks for international cooperation: the Global Development Initiative, which supports development projects and capacity building; the Global Security Initiative, which sets out principles and areas for cooperative security; and the Global Civilisation Initiative, which promotes dialogue and exchange among civilisations. Together, they represent efforts to offer an alternative to the polarisation of neoliberal globalisation and the hypocrisy of the post-war liberal world order. Their success depends on participating countries of the Global South shaping their priorities and implementation according to their own needs and agendas.³⁷

The significance of China’s experience for the Global South lies not in its replicability but in what it reveals about the structural preconditions for sovereign development.³⁸ China’s model presupposes a unified state with the capacity to direct strategic sectors, plan across generations, and subordinate capital to long-term national priorities – capacities that are not technical but political, grounded in a revolutionary rupture that fundamentally reshaped the relationship between state, class, and market. Where other nations of the Global South have articulated comparable visions – such as Kwame Nkrumah’s argument for a continental African political union in 1963 – efforts to implement them have repeatedly been thwarted by conditions that China has largely overcome: fragmented sovereignty, external debt and conditionality, dependence on commodity exports, and strategic sectors owned and directed by foreign capital. China’s trajectory does not offer a ready-made blueprint. It poses a question: what political and institutional transformations would other countries need in order to exercise similar strategic control over their own development?

Equally significant has been China’s determination to achieve technological self-reliance at a moment when the United States and its allies have intensified attempts to contain its development through export controls, sanctions, restrictions on access to semiconductor technologies, and an expanding military presence across East Asia.³⁹ These measures have only reinforced the party’s conviction that scientific and technological sovereignty has become inseparable from national sovereignty. Investment in advanced manufacturing, artificial intelligence, renewable energy, aerospace, biotechnology, and quantum technologies is therefore understood not simply as economic policy but as an essential component of socialist development under conditions of intensified hyper-imperialist pressure.⁴⁰

The significance of this third step lies in its attempt to synthesise economic modernisation with socialist ethics. China now possesses a substantial productive base. The challenge is to ensure that it continues to transform social relations and serve collective welfare rather than private accumulation alone. This represents a return to foundational socialist concerns under new historical conditions.

The Road Ahead

The socialism of Chinese modernisation cannot be understood as a simple linear progression. It is a historical process shaped by changing material conditions and strategic adaptations. Yet across its different steps, a central continuity remains: the attempt to coordinate the transformation of social relations and the development of the productive forces in order to build a socialist society.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels understood socialism as a historical process rather than a ready-made template to be imposed from above.⁴¹ Progress from one stage of development to another requires confronting and resolving contradictions, but this is not a mechanical or economistic process. Nor is it necessarily linear: it may comprise a cycle of probing advances and tactical retreats. It is an experimental process that requires conscious direction guided by theory, tested in practice against concrete conditions, and rooted in the experiences and struggles of workers and peasants.⁴²

Unlike conventional electoral parties, whose activity within bourgeois democracies is largely confined to contesting elections or administering existing institutions, the CPC has consistently understood itself as the organiser of a historical project whose horizon extends across generations. Its legitimacy has rested not only on its ideological commitments but also on its demonstrated capacity to identify changing historical contradictions and to formulate strategies capable of resolving them in ways that improve the lives of the majority of the population.

What steps come next remain to be seen. Within Chinese modernisation, substantive democracy has been pursued through both improvements in living standards and consultative and responsive governance – what the CPC calls ‘whole-process people’s democracy’. This system combines electoral and consultative democracy and extends participation through elections, consultation, decision-making, management, and oversight, including through people’s congresses, political consultative bodies, and grassroots self-governance. Together, these social and political developments form part of the process towards China’s centenary goal of becoming a modern socialist country by 2049.⁴³

Yet the road ahead is not open-ended. At its 19th National Congress in 2017, the CPC set out a two-stage path: to achieve basic socialist modernisation by 2035 and to build China into a modern socialist country by the centenary of the People’s Republic in 2049. This path was reaffirmed at the 20th National Congress in 2022. The 2035 intermediate target is not a vague aspiration but a concrete programme: to substantially raise per capita GDP to that of a mid-level developed country (which would be roughly double the current figure); strengthen self-reliance and capacity in science and technology; guarantee equitable access to basic public services; and ensure that carbon emissions decline steadily.⁴⁴

The 15^th Five-Year Plan (2026–2030), adopted by the National People’s Congress on 12 March 2026, is the first of the two remaining five-year plans leading to the 2035 target. The CPC has described the 2026–2030 period as a ‘crucial link’ on the path to achieving basic socialist modernisation by 2035.⁴⁵ The plan marks a dialectical shift from extensive to intensive development – from growth driven mainly by expanding inputs to growth driven increasingly by productivity, innovation, and efficiency. For much of the reform era, China’s extraordinary growth was driven by the accumulation of inputs: a large supply of relatively low-cost labour moving from the countryside into industry, large-scale fixed investment in infrastructure and manufacturing capacity, and deepening integration into global export markets. That model, which lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty and built the material foundation of contemporary China, has reached its historical limits. Labour costs have risen, many of the country’s major infrastructure networks are now substantially developed, and access to some technologies and markets has been deliberately restricted through US-led controls and supply-chain decoupling. The 15^th Five-Year Plan registers this transition structurally. The headline growth target has been reduced to 4.5–5% annually – below 5% for the first time since 1991 – while research and development spending is mandated to grow at over 7% per year. The signal is explicit: the volume of output is no longer the sole measure of development; its quality and technological content are also crucial. The fact that this lower growth target represents a strategic choice rather than economic failure is itself historically significant. No major developing country has voluntarily subordinated GDP growth targets to quality metrics on this scale.

The central theoretical framework for this transition is the concept of ‘new quality productive forces’, first articulated by Xi Jinping during an inspection visit to Heilongjiang Province in September 2023. It was established as a major policy priority during China’s annual ‘two sessions’ in March 2024 (the meetings of the National People’s Congress, the national legislature, and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference – the country’s highest political advisory body). Applying a qualitative emphasis to Marx’s category of the productive forces, the concept refers to advanced productivity freed from traditional growth patterns and characterised by high technology, high efficiency, and high quality. In practice, this means fostering a new generation of strategic industries – artificial intelligence, biotechnology, advanced manufacturing, new materials, quantum technology, hydrogen energy, and aerospace – while simultaneously upgrading traditional industries through digitalisation and green transformation. Under the 15^th Five-Year Plan, the digital economy’s share of GDP is targeted to rise from 10.5% in 2025 to 12.5% by 2030, while grain production capacity is set to reach approximately 725 million tonnes, comprehensive energy production capacity is set to increase by 13%, and non-fossil energy’s share of consumption is set to rise from 21.7% to 25%.⁴⁶

A crucial dialectical reversal is at work in China’s response to US-led technology containment. The export controls, semiconductor restrictions, and supply-chain pressures that Washington has imposed since 2018 and tightened in 2025 were designed to arrest China’s technological advance. Yet their effect has been the opposite: by closing off access to foreign technology at the frontier, the United States has compelled China to invest with extraordinary urgency in precisely the capabilities it sought to deny the country. The 15^th Five-Year Plan’s target of at least 7% annual average growth in R&D spending and its emphasis on achieving breakthroughs in semiconductors, industrial software, and advanced materials can therefore be understood in part as a domestic productive response to external containment. External pressure has been internalised as a driver of self-reliance, transforming an obstacle into an accelerant.

At the same time, the plan attempts to resolve a structural contradiction that has accumulated across the reform era: the disproportion between China’s extraordinary productive capacity and the relative weakness of domestic consumption as a driver of growth. The ‘dual circulation’ strategy, first proposed in 2020 and incorporated into the 14^th Five-Year Plan (2021–2025), takes the domestic market as the mainstay of the economy while seeking to ensure that domestic and international circulation reinforce one another. This is not merely a technical adjustment. It reorients the relationship between production and social reproduction – the conditions and services that sustain workers and households – as well as the relationship between the national economy and the world market. Where the export-led model of the second step required China to insert itself into the global division of labour on terms partly set externally, the dual circulation model seeks to make domestic demand the primary driver of economic growth. Rising wages, expanded public services, and a broader middle-income stratum are conditions both for stronger domestic demand and for common prosperity. In this way, the strategy links the distributional and macroeconomic dimensions of socialist development.

At a time when much of the Global South seeks new paths of industrialisation, technological development, and economic sovereignty, China’s experience has reopened questions that many believed had been settled forever after the destruction of the Soviet Union.⁴⁷ It has shown that planning remains possible, public investment can transform societies, technological leadership need not remain the monopoly of the Global North, and the future need not belong exclusively to finance capital.⁴⁸

Chinese modernisation represents a distinct path in world history. It rejects both colonial dependency and neoliberal orthodoxy. It is a socialist project that walks on two legs: transforming social relations and developing the productive forces. This project has progressed through different historical steps while maintaining the central objective of national sovereignty and human dignity. Whatever contradictions remain, the Chinese Revolution stands as one of the most consequential emancipatory processes of the modern age.

Notes

A skill is a reusable workflow for an AI agent. Its main SKILL.md file explains when the skill should be used and what the agent should do. A skill may also contain scripts, templates, and other reference materials. The agent may select a skill automatically when a task matches its description, or you can invoke it directly.

This guide demonstrates how to find, review, install, and use skills with an AI-agent extension in VS Code. If you have not yet set up this workspace, follow Set Up Your AI Workspace (macOS) or Set Up Your AI Workspace (Windows) before continuing.

Although interfaces and installation methods may vary, the same basic workflow also applies to other AI agents that support skills.

Installing Skills in VS Code

Installing a Skill through a Skills Platform

Numerous platforms host skills, so searching for and downloading them is usually straightforward. This section uses https://www.skills.sh/ as an example. The platform provides a skill called find-skills that makes searching more convenient, and its official installation method is to run a specific prompt.

Copy the prompt below into the chat box to install find-skills.

Run `npx skills add https://github.com/vercel-labs/skills -g --skill find-skills` and follow the generated skill instructions now. Read its complete output, redirecting it to a temporary file first if necessary. Resolve relative paths from the supporting-files directory it provides.

Once installed, you can search for skills through the agent. Ordinary wording still works, but commands such as /find-skills are recommended because they are clearer, faster, and more cost-effective: the model can read the specified skill directly. For example:

/find-skills please help me find a skill that can help summarise papers and books.

The agent uses the skill and returns a large number of matching results. With so many options, it is not always obvious which one to choose. Useful criteria include installation counts, star ratings, and the description.

Consider the two skills shown below. Both are hosted on GitHub, and the repositories associated with them have attracted substantial attention. The find-skills results also show that the skills have been installed many times.

Star and installation counts can help narrow a long list of options, but they are indicators of popularity rather than guarantees of quality or safety. Before choosing a skill, check whether its description matches your task, review its SKILL.md file, and examine any scripts or permissions it relies on.

Next, examine the description. You can click the link to learn more about the skill. Read the article that begins with SKILL.md; this is the file mentioned earlier, and it is what enhances your prompts.

The first skill is used to search for and read articles, as well as to write a literature review. The second establishes a primary question and traces claims back to their sources.

After comparing them, we choose the first one, systematic-literature-review, as our example. The skill can both conduct systematic literature reviews using online sources and summarise papers that you provide.

On the published page, click Prompt, copy the command, and paste it into the chat box to install the skill.

If that feels cumbersome, you can also copy the skill’s name or other identifying information and simply tell AI, ‘I want to install this skill.’

Installing a Skill from a Link or Description

Sometimes others may share a direct link to a skill, such as https://github.com/bytedance/deer-flow/blob/main/skills/public/systematic-literature-review/SKILL.md, or merely give an ambiguous reference such as ‘bytedance’s systematic-literature-review skill’. You may not know where it resides or how to install it.

Thanks to the agent’s search capabilities, you only need to provide as much information as possible and let AI handle the installation. For example:

Please help me install a skill. Here is the information:

bytedance's systematic-literature-review skill

Installing a Skill from a Package

Sometimes you will receive a skill package from someone else. For example, the files may end with extensions such as .zip, .rar, or .7z. We also recommend using the agent to install the skill so that the required environment is configured correctly. For example:

Please help me install the following skill and configure the required environment: @systematic-literature-review.zip

Choosing Where to Install a Skill

Many compatible agents can automatically load a skill when a task matches its description, although the exact triggering behaviour varies between agents. This mechanism can substantially change the prompt context that the model ultimately receives. For example, a user may submit a simple request such as:

Please help me make a literature review for the topic of
"Social Science: Reclaiming Research Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."

After skills are activated, however, the effective prompt may be augmented with one or more skill definitions before the original user input, allowing agents to determine which skill to use:

User's computer has the following skills available:

name: systematic-literature-review

description: Use this skill when the user wants a systematic literature review, survey, ...

name: xxx

description: xxxxx

...

User's input:

Please help me make a literature review for the topic of
"Social Science: Reclaiming Research Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence."

If several installed skills cover similar tasks, AI may be unclear about which one should run. Expanding the skill set can also increase the prompt context, making it more expensive and leaving AI with less capacity to process other information. In conclusion, installing too many overlapping skills is not cost-effective.

We therefore recommend project-level installation for skills related to a particular body of work. This means that AI can only see the skill within the relevant workspace. If you open another folder, skills installed in the original folder cannot be seen. Only skills that are genuinely useful across unrelated projects should be installed globally.

It is easy to ask an agent to install a skill, but you should state the intended scope explicitly.

Please help me install a skill **as a project skill**. Here is the information:

bytedance's systematic-literature-review skill

After installation, we can find this skill in the Explorer. Its path is .claude/skills/systematic-literature-review. Agents can recognise skills in folders of this type, although some may use .agent/skills/ instead, and can load them automatically.

After learning the location of the project skill, you may wonder where global skills are stored. Open Finder and click Go -> Home.

If you’re using Windows, C:\Users\[your user name] is your home directory.

If you cannot see any folder names beginning with ., you can use Command + Shift + . to make hidden files visible.

Compare the contents of .claude in the Home directory and the project directory. Although .claude contains more files, the structures are similar. The key point to remember is that skills installed in the Home directory can be seen everywhere, whereas project skills can only be seen in the current folder.

Using Skills in VS Code

Before using the skill, start a new session to refresh the skill list. Otherwise, the skill may not appear in the extension.

In the new session, type the first few letters of the skill’s name. When it appears, press Tab to complete the command.

We use the article ‘AI for Social Science: Reclaiming Research Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence’ as an example. Type the following:

/systematic-literature-review Please summarise this article @inputs/AI for Social Science-Reclaiming Research Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.md

Then, regenerate a summary without the skill as a point of contrast. Compared with the version produced without the skill, the first summary is more concrete and operational because it explains how AI4SS framework is implemented through technical architecture, skills, agents, workflows, and specific use cases.

It also provides stronger evidence of feasibility and practical impact, rather than remaining mainly at the conceptual or theoretical level.

We can also test its basic ability to find information online and generate a literature review on the topic.

/systematic-literature-review Please help me make a literature review for the topic of Social Science-Reclaiming Research Sovereignty in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

After generation, it returns a link named slr-ai-social-science-20250902.md. Use Command + Click to open the file.

It collects articles online and writes a literature review with references, which can be helpful for quick research.

Creating Your Own Skill

If you have crafted a useful prompt or completed a difficult task and wish to save or share it with others, creating a skill yourself is an excellent choice. Although it may sound daunting, a skill is essentially a set of files that records your experience of working with AI.

Creating a Skill through a Prompt

As mentioned earlier, a skill can be as simple as a short prompt. This is the simplest form of a skill, and it can be saved and used in your agent with ease.

Here is a prompt that we used in the previous article to summarise an article. It provides a useful example.

You can simply type the prompt below and upload it to the agent. If you want to define the name of the skill, you can add the name you prefer, which can make the skill easier to trigger.

Please convert this file into a skill and install it in this project. @inputs/summarise-papers-revised.md

If you do not assign a name to the skill, AI will create one for you. In this case, we can trigger the skill by typing /summarise-paper. A skill’s name is often the same as the name of its folder, although this is not always the case. The best way to determine the trigger word is to open the skill and inspect its header.

Use Command + Click to open the file.

The name written in the header is the trigger word for this skill.

Start a new session and we can find this skill.

Creating a Skill through a Task

However, we cannot always start with a completed prompt file. A more common situation is that, after completing a difficult task, we want to record what worked in order to avoid failure and save the workflow for future use. This can save both time and tokens when a similar task needs to be completed later.

For example, suppose you want to understand the news that happened today. After several turns of conversation, you have completed the task in a way that meets your needs perfectly. You certainly do not want to repeat the entire conversation the next day. In this situation, you can save the conversation history as a skill.

For example, you can type:

Please convert the conversation history into a reusable skill and install it in the current project. The skill should be triggered by `/news-collector`.

Because we have assigned the name news-collector to the skill, there is no need to open the saved file again. Simply use /news-collector to collect the news the next day.

Sharing Your Own Skill

After you have created an excellent skill, you may face the question of how to share it with others. The easiest approach is to package it and transfer it as a single file. For example:

Please package the skill below and provide me with a shareable package that is easy to transfer:

/systematic-literature-review

AI will provide you with a .zip file. It contains everything the skill needs, so on a new computer, you can simply tell AI, ‘Please install this skill through systematic-literature-review.zip.’

Advanced: Understanding the Structure of a Skill

Normally, there is no need to decompress systematic-literature-review.zip. Treat it as an installer for the skill, executed by the agent.

Nevertheless, let us unpack it in this section to understand how a skill works internally. Inside the folder, we can see systematic-literature-review.md, alongside two subfolders named scripts and templates.

The file systematic-literature-review.md is the primary document AI encounters first. It contains the conditions that trigger the skill and outlines the main workflow.

Sometimes, to make a skill easier to maintain, its creator places certain resources in a subfolder because a very long file can be difficult to search and read. For example, this skill stores different citation formats in a folder named templates. When AI needs to reference citation rules, it can look up the relevant file.

Some tasks are more easily accomplished by a program. The skill records how to use the program so that AI knows how to invoke it.

In summary, a skill decreases uncertainty through a set of prior prompts and programs. If your skills do not perform well, you can open the folder, review the workflow, and then ask AI to modify it. Skills often perform better when you take an active role in controlling the workflow.

Treat Unknown Skills with Caution

Skills have spread quickly. They are more flexible than ordinary programmes, and they can be difficult for traditional antivirus software to inspect. Therefore, install them with caution. If your computer suddenly becomes slower, grows unusually hot, or begins producing strange files, investigate immediately.

You can also ask AI to inspect and protect your computer at regular intervals. Skills are not the only risk; many newer attack methods exist, so anything unfamiliar should be treated with caution.

Please conduct a comprehensive security audit of this computer, with a particular focus on detecting malware, trojans, backdoors, persistence mechanisms, suspicious scripts, abnormal network connections, or unauthorised remote access.

Useful Skills in This Series

Several Bandung Circuits how-to guides introduce skills that can be installed in an agent and reused across research tasks. The table below lists these skills and the guides in which they appear.

These skills cover a large part of a research workflow, from reading and critique to figures, slides, and audio transcription. They represent a practical starting set rather than a complete catalogue. When a new task appears, /find-skills remains the most useful way to look for alternatives.

Conclusion

Skills have already shifted everyday prompting from ‘typing a request from scratch each time’ towards a reusable workflow in which you install a set of instructions, call it with a slash command, and let the model follow the prescribed procedure. For researchers and other users of VS Code, this means that summarising a paper, generating slides, or transcribing a recording no longer has to begin with a blank chat box.

An efficient approach is to search first with find-skills, then select skills with high star ratings and installation counts, read the SKILL.md file, and only then install and invoke them. After installation, start a new session so that the skill appears in the list. Used in this way, skills can save time and make the output more concrete, as the literature-review example in this chapter demonstrates.

The goal is not to collect as many skills as possible, but to build a small set of trusted workflows for the tasks you perform regularly.

The Red Army crossed these mountains in 1934, on the march that would take it north. Football arrived a decade later, brought by students of Guangxi University, evacuated to Rongjiang to escape Japanese aggression. Villagers have organised their own matches nearly every year in the eight decades since.

In May 2023, that tradition found a new expression in Cun Chao, the Village Super League: a competition organised by villagers, played by villagers, and watched by villagers. Within weeks of its launch, the stadium’s stands were filled to the brim, and footage carried by the short-video platforms drew the eyes of the whole country and then of the world. None of it ran itself. Packing a stadium every weekend, keeping order, feeding the broadcast — all of that took an organisational capacity the county had not required before.

This organisational capacity became an engine for real economic outcomes. Tourism revenue rose from 8.4 billion yuan in 2023 to 10.8 billion in 2024, and the county’s gross domestic product reached 10.496 billion yuan in 2024, a rise of 9.5 per cent. The league brought more than 2,700 new market entities into being, over thirty per cent of the whole prefecture’s new total, and village collective income climbed from 58.9 million yuan in 2022 to 121 million in 2024.

It also opened a door to something else entirely. Since 2023 the county has set itself a less likely task: to put artificial intelligence (AI) into the hands of the villagers. It has built no large language model, no data centre, and no semiconductor plant. What it has built instead is its own people, organised across government offices, villages, and enterprises, so that residents who had never written a line of code, among them elderly farmers and village cadres, now use AI in their everyday work.

Building the Institutional and Material Conditions

The experiment was made possible by conditions built at multiple levels.

Cun Chao was no technology project but a feat of organisation, and the organisational structure was standing before the first ball was kicked. In October 2021, a year and a half before that match, the county set up a leading small group for new media and rural e-commerce, headed jointly by the county Party secretary and the county governor. In a Chinese county the Party committee leads and the government departments administer, and those departments — agriculture, commerce, culture and tourism — each holds responsibility for part of any new undertaking; a leading small group is how a Party committee concentrates the efforts of different departments on a common task. Here the two highest officials in the county took the headship themselves, one from the Party and one from the government, which put new media at the top of the agenda.

Beneath the group the county placed a working team at the county level, a new-media service centre in every township, and a new-media service station in every village, and it set up a new-media company besides, a county state enterprise holding shares with private partners. The result was a single organisational chain linking three different but complementary capacities: Party leadership, grassroots mobilisation, and market activity. The Party committee provided political leadership; grassroots cadres reached every household; private firms and traders connected production to the market. When Cun Chao began in May 2023, the county set a dedicated Cun Chao Office on top of that standing structure, to mobilise cadres, coordinate security, and keep the media channels fed across all three levels at once.

When the county later turned toward AI, the mechanism had already put thirty-five thousand person-times — a tally of training instances, not unique individuals — through new-media training and built more than two thousand local livestream teams and over twelve thousand new-media accounts.

Rongjiang calls the shift the ‘Three New Rurals’: let the phone become the new farm tool, data become the new farm input, and livestreaming become the new farm work. As Party secretary Xu Bo puts it, the aim is to turn Cun Chao into new quality productive forces for local industry. New technology only raises the productive forces once the relations of production change to accommodate it — technology alone doesn’t do it; the social arrangements have to shift first to let it work. Led by the Party committee and carried by the villagers themselves, the county has therefore pursued this transformation by reshaping who is trained to use the tools, who holds the account they feed, and who keeps what a sale earns.

The material foundations for all this had been laid at national level. Through the poverty alleviation campaign the state carried roads, power, and broadband into places the market had never reached, in order to connect them to it: by the end of 2020, every eligible township and administrative village in the poor counties had a paved road, a bus service, and a postal route; reliable electricity, fibre broadband, and 4G had been extended across the countryside, with fibre and 4G covering more than 98 per cent of poor villages; and e-commerce services reached every poverty county. Only once these material conditions existed could digital transformation become a realistic strategy for rural development, e-commerce first and AI after it. One of the instruments that carried this into counties like Rongjiang is paired assistance, which binds a coastal province or work unit to an inland county and moves people, money, and technology along the link. It dates from a central decision of 1979, at the start of reform and opening up, following Deng Xiaoping’s strategy of letting some regions grow rich first and then bring the rest along. Rongjiang later applied the same logic to AI training, pairing those with greater digital capacity with those who had less experience.

Once these material foundations had been laid, AI became the next stage of national development strategy. This transition built on an earlier digital rural agenda: the central Digital Village Development Outline (16 May 2019) had already named ‘the improvement of peasants’ modern information skills’ as a strategic direction. On 26 August 2025, the State Council issued its Opinions on Deeply Implementing the ‘AI Plus’ Action, proposing six lines of action across science, industry, consumption, people’s wellbeing, governance, and global cooperation, and undertaking to strengthen the unified planning of intelligent computing power. Relying on the variable of the people’s adoption of digital tools, rather than the capital or hardware more often treated as decisive, the county organised its people to take up that opening on its own terms. It translated these national priorities into a local mobilisation plan, set out in a mnemonic it calls the ‘1-2-3-4-5’ target system, which illustrates how a local state translates a national technology strategy into mass participation:

• One benchmark. By the end of 2027, to have built Rongjiang into a national benchmark county for the universal learning and application of AI.
• Two pillars of support. A corps of three hundred home-grown technical backbones and thirty thousand ‘application pacesetters’, cultivated across at least five concrete AI application scenarios. The three hundred are not an elite but come from across the county’s cadres, civil servants, teachers, enterprise staff, village cadres, and returning graduates. They are seeded rather than bought: each of the three hundred trains ten, each ten a hundred, until the thirty thousand are reached.
• Three full coverages. One hundred per cent training coverage of government offices; one hundred per cent basic-AI-literacy coverage of every administrative village; one hundred per cent scenario-application coverage across every sector.
• Four-tier linkage. A four-tier AI application and promotion network running from county to township to village to enterprise.
• Five categories of benefit. Measurable gains in the efficiency of government services, in tourist satisfaction, in the coverage of quality educational resources, in the accuracy of medical diagnosis, and in the reduction of enterprise costs, summed up in the slogan: every village has an AI hand; every trade has an AI exemplar; every task has an AI enablement.

AI on Four Fronts of Rural Revitalisation

The county puts AI at the service of its people, their work, and their days; it turns it to the plain business of rural revival on four fronts.

1. AI Lowers the Cost of Being Seen

Before AI and new media reached the countryside, a village’s produce rarely left the mountains, for the only real route to market was to carry the harvest down to the nearest town and sell it there. Farmers had neither the capital nor the skill to present their goods attractively or to advertise them further afield, and a competent poster or promotional video meant hiring a professional crew few could bear. To make AI accessible beyond specialists, the county first trained villagers in practical AI-based content production, inviting outside professionals to teach simple workflows using mainstream AI tools and organising county-wide competitions to encourage experimentation. AI lowers the cost of being seen. With little more than a smartphone, villagers can now generate and refine the promotional material themselves – a poster, a short video, an animation – and distribute it on the same platforms that carried the league. Making a short film to promote Cun Chao, until lately beyond an average villager’s means, is now affordable and easily learned – and that same footage now carries other villagers’ goods to market too.

Producing enough good video by hand, across thousands of accounts, turned out to be slow and costly, and the traffic it won came unevenly; so the county integrated AI editing and large-scale distribution into its new-media system, operated by the villagers it trains as the league’s new-media promoters, allowing them to produce and circulate promotional content at a speed and volume the old way could not match. When a match is on, they film it and upload the footage, and the system writes the captions and edits it into a finished clip, ready in under half an hour. Distribution is made as simple as production: a tap on the on-site posting device, or a scan of a QR code, puts the clip on Douyin, China’s TikTok, within seconds. Promotional videos now carry built-in distribution links to local products, so that the same circulation that spreads the county’s stories also generates sales and commissions for those who share them.

2. AI Eases the Grassroots Cadre’s Burden

The chronic burdens of the grassroots cadre – the drafting of reports and notices, the compiling of statistical tables, weak policy publicity, slow response to grievances, the sheer weight of administrative toil – are eased by pressing AI into the workflow itself. It drafts the reports and assembles the meeting records, and, more valuable still, it recasts the official register of policy into plain language villagers can follow, which makes policy far easier to communicate. The county reports that a cadre who once spent half a day on a draft now finishes in half an hour, left to localise and refine rather than to assemble from scratch. The figures from Zhongcheng Town are plain: in the first two and a half months of 2025 alone, its village-level monitoring network flagged disputes early enough for staff to resolve sixteen of them before they escalated, AI-assisted forecasting fed into plans for nineteen projects, and cadres saved roughly two working days each. The county audit office, too, runs its own learning routine on cheap, off-the-shelf domestic models.

3. AI Turns Local Talent Into a Reason to Return

Where rural policy typically laments the outflow of the young, the programme attempts to reverse the valuation, so that mastery of AI, and the short films and animations that draw hundreds of thousands of views, become an attractive and remunerative occupation worth returning home for and worth staying for, aimed at returning youth, the women who remain in the villages, and individual traders. Liu Qinlan is the county’s own example: a kindergarten teacher earning a little over 2,000 yuan a month, she and her husband gave up their city jobs and came home when Cun Chao went viral in May 2023. She started out trying to sell the county’s own produce — luohan fruit, green and white tea, pickled fish and meat — and learned filming, editing, and livestreaming from scratch through the county’s training. Known online as Cun Chao‘s ‘Miao sister Lan Lan’, she now runs a batik studio by the Cun Chao ground, drawing on the region’s indigenous textile traditions and giving more than 180 embroiderers and dyers work without leaving their villages. In 2025 her batik and embroidery lines sold more than 2 million yuan.

4. AI Carries Local Culture Out of the Mountains

Cun Chao draws on its own peasant, working-class, and ethnic cultures. Made up of vendors, farmers, tilers, butchers, and factory workers, its villages name their teams after what they grow or do – a Monk Fruit team, a Passionfruit team, a Bayberry team, a Homestay team, a Rafting team, a Rice-Noodle team, even one that calls itself simply ‘the commoners’. The side that wins takes home not cash but the county’s own produce: the 2026 champions carried off a Guanling cow, the runners-up a Guizhou sturgeon, third place a crate of local duck. More than eighty per cent of Rongjiang’s people belong to the ethnic minorities of Miao, Dong, Shui, and Yao, home to heritage forms such as the Grand Song of the Dong (choral singing), traditional indigo dyeing, and the drum-tower. But these traditions – peasant, working-class, ethnic minority, even the Cun Chao festival itself – survive only insofar as they are seen and used. As such, AI animation, short video, and digital-human generation are turned to the work of carrying all of it – produce, trade, and heritage alike – out of the mountains and into national circulation, and from there into the commercial logic of cultural-tourism branding. At the provincial level this is already a working layer: a Cun Chao digital-human and smart-companion platform provides AI tour-companion services keyed to the league and to the Grand Song of the Dong, while the county’s enterprise training uses the Cun Chao brand, special crops, and heritage as its worked teaching cases.

Tailored Mass Training

The Rongjiang experiment rests on its teaching, the means by which an unfamiliar tool reaches farmers, shopkeepers, and cadres with little formal training. Its logic holds throughout: teach each person only what their own work requires, keep every lesson pared down to what can actually be done, and let those who have learned teach those who have not.

Nothing is taught one-size-fits-all. The county sorts the people it trains into groups, each with its own syllabus: for cadres those of governance, for merchants those of income, for the young and the heritage-keepers those of cultural creation. The same care goes into matching the task to the person, so that no one, the county insists, is made to learn what they cannot use. The county teaches AI as a practical skill rather than a technical discipline. Algorithms, programming, and the inner workings of the models are left aside in favour of using domestic AI applications and writing simple prompts. A visiting expert may bring a thousand possible applications of AI, but the local trainer’s task is to reduce them to the two or three that match local needs and market demand. The county therefore standardises its training around three practical courses — in AI document drafting, AI short-video production, and AI visual creation. The same philosophy shaped one of the county’s most recent courses, on AI comic drama in June 2026, for sixty returning youth, heritage artisans, and small entrepreneurs: it was designed for complete beginners, emphasised hands-on production, and connected local cultural heritage directly to market-oriented digital content creation.

Learning is treated as a rhythm rather than an event. Every Friday evening a trainer takes a livestreamed shift, a class that may draw two or three hundred viewers or, some nights, only one. Even one is considered worthwhile, because one person helped is one more person empowered. Since 2025, the weekly stream has not lapsed.

The teaching applies the same logic of paired assistance: those who learn first bring the rest along, with young cadres matched to middle-aged and senior staff to close the digital gap. The records bear it out. Zhongcheng Town designated twelve technology-promotion officers and established forty-two mentoring pairs, and a single round of centralised training covered ninety-eight cadres. At Bakai Town more than sixty cadres trained on four working scenarios, smart document handling, population-data modelling, new-media outreach, and emergency-response dispatch, with those trained to teach the rest, so that village cadres could run the systems on their own.

If pairing carries the skill from one person to the next, a chain of four tiers carries the plan itself from the county down to each level, with county, township, village, and enterprise each holding a distinct job.

1. The county designs. It sets the plan, marshals the teachers, builds the demonstration cases, and drives the work through weekly scheduling meetings that hold the lower tiers to account.
2. The township executes. It runs the routine mass training and the cadre drills.
3. The village is the front line. It is where villagers are taught and the locally useful applications are found.
4. The enterprise turns capability into revenue. At the end of the chain, it welds AI to culture-tourism, agriculture, and handicraft.

It is this chain, as much as the curriculum, that turns a directive issued in the county seat into a lesson under way in a village.

All of this rides on a project discipline recognisably that of a campaigning state, set out as a five-step closed loop for landing the programme in any village or unit.

1. Survey and preparation. An inventory of local industry, governance pain points, population structure, and the digital baseline yields a bespoke plan, using the ‘brainstorming meeting’ — the county’s instrument, inherited from the league campaigns — to identify concerns and potential challenges before they become real obstacles to implementation.
2. Cultivation of the backbone. The core group of technical backbones, the same three hundred named in the ‘1-2-3-4-5’ plan, are trained first.
3. Universal training by the layered method. That core group then cascades the training outward, each backbone teaching the next tier down, until it reaches the wider population.
4. Scenario landing. Training and application proceed together, so that each lesson attaches to a real task rather than staying abstract.
5. Review and quality-raising. What worked and what did not is assessed, and the next round of the loop is adjusted accordingly.

The Long March of the AI Era

Much of the Global South watches the spread of generative AI with unease: that it will deepen the dependence of poorer countries on a handful of firms in the wealthy core, that it will drive up the carbon cost of computation, that it will hasten the displacement of labour. None of these worries is misplaced. But fear on its own settles nothing, and the harder question is what a place without capital, advanced hardware, or a model of its own can actually do with the technology as it stands.

Rongjiang’s answer begins with cost. The computation does not run on the user’s device. The heavy capital sits in the cloud, paid for by firms such as Doubao and DeepSeek that built the models and by the infrastructure of states far from Moon Mountain, and what the villager needs is only an ordinary smartphone and the knowledge of how to speak to the model.

That the state should carry the compute is a matter of policy, and the ‘AI Plus’ Action names ‘strengthening the unified planning of intelligent computing power’ among its basic supports. The base model, moreover, has become a commodity: each is substitutable for the next, and the rural user is bound to no single vendor, so that should one tool withdraw or deteriorate, another takes its place. Substitutability leaves the monopoly rent nowhere to lodge, and what remains is an ordinary competitive cost — the production diffusion that China’s own development path has set against the rent-extraction of technological monopoly.

Even a smartphone, though, cannot everywhere be taken for granted. Rongjiang has met that difficulty directly. When it first carried new media into the villages, many people’s handsets were too old to run the apps. Its answer was not to wait until everyone was equipped, but to begin with the willing minority who already were, let them earn a living from it, and let their example draw the rest in.

Returning youth who used AI and short video to sell heritage crafts that had never before found a buyer, some of them earning a considerable income, pulled in the older women who made the goods. As those women began to earn, they bought phones of their own and began to film. The circle widens with the income.

What, then, could travel? Not the machine, since Rongjiang owns none of it, but the method: a way of organising the people around new forces of production. The institutional vehicle already exists. On 10 November 2025, the county and East China Normal University opened the South School in Toutang village, in Guzhou town, as a platform for the international communication of poverty alleviation and rural revitalisation. It opened into a wider moment: the 2025 Global South Academic Forum (Shanghai, 13–14 November 2025), co-hosted by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, ran a panel on digital sovereignty and AI in the Global South, and drew extensive involvement from organisations such as Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). The method has begun to circulate where movements, and not only governments, can take it up.

The Global South’s fight for digital sovereignty is usually pictured as building its own stack – its own chips, its own models, its own data centres. For most of the periphery, that whole edifice is out of reach at the moment, and a sovereignty of that kind, if it comes at all, will be won collectively rather than by any poor country alone.

Rongjiang works a different layer of the same struggle. Ownership of the machinery is not something one county can secure on its own; what it can secure, at its own scale, is the power of its people to use the tool on their own terms and for their own ends, and to keep the value they create rather than let it drain upward to a handful of firms in the North. That – a people able to use the tool, and to hold on to what it earns – is a sovereignty a poor county can actually build.

Ninety years ago, the Chinese Red Army carried the Long March to victory, won not by superior arms but by organised people, their endurance, and the peasants it mobilised as it passed, rousing their energy, their initiative, their creativity. Mao Zedong called that march a seeding-machine, for the revolution it sowed along the way.

Rongjiang has set out on a long march of its own, one for the AI era, and it moves in the same spirit: carried by the people, drawing out that same creativity, sowing among them a new capability as that march sowed revolution, and letting the gains of the technology flow back to them, to the many and not the few. It is not a slogan handed down but the patient work of turning a new productive force into a capacity held by the people, in the tradition of mass work. The technology will keep changing, and fast. What does not change is the insight at the centre: for a place that cannot build the stack itself, the question that remains is who, among its people, has made the model their own.

Havana, August 2026

From 6 to 9 August, more than 180 delegates from 27 countries representing more than 130 organisations gathered at the University of Havana for the IV Continental Assembly of ALBA Movimientos, a space for articulating popular movements around the project of socialism, anti-imperialism, and continental integration. As part of the assembly’s cultural programme, FIDEL x 100 commemorated the centenary of Fidel Castro’s birth with more than 200 posters created by over 100 cultural workers from 32 countries.

Left: Abhinav (India, Young Socialist Artists/Tricontinental); right: Daniela Ruggeri (Argentina, Tricontinental).

The exhibition emerged from an open call organised by the International Peoples’ Assembly, ALBA Movimientos, Utopix, Young Socialist Artists, Pan Africanism Today, and Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research. The diversity of the works – in style, technique, language, and political tradition – reflected the international reach of Fidel’s legacy. Yet the exhibition was not simply an act of commemoration. It was a recovery of Fidel’s ideas as tools of struggle – the ideas that helped make the Revolution possible and continue to sustain it today.

The full archive is available as a free downloadable collection to be printed, exhibited, studied, and used by organisations around the world. Like the posters that decades earlier travelled folded inside Tricontinental, the magazine founded by the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), these works are intended to circulate: from assemblies to political schools, from union offices to classrooms, from movement headquarters to neighbourhood walls. We invite you to use them in this way.

FIDEL x 100 belongs to a much longer history. The Cuban Revolution did not treat culture as something secondary to politics, nor as mere decoration for revolutionary achievement. It understood cultural work as part of the material infrastructure of revolution itself: a means of forming political consciousness, cultivating technical and artistic capacities, sustaining collective memory, and extending international solidarity beyond the island’s shores.

Havana, Sixty Years After the Tricontinental Conference

That tradition acquired one of its clearest institutional expressions in January 1966, when Havana hosted the first Tricontinental Conference. More than 500 delegates from liberation movements, revolutionary governments, communist parties, and popular organisations across Africa, Asia, and Latin America gathered to forge a common anti-imperialist strategy against colonialism, capitalism, and war.

Left: Ian Matchett (US, Swords into Plowshares Peace Center and Gallery); right: Ignacio Andrés Pardo Vásquez (Chile, Utopix and Quinmantú).

Out of the conference emerged OSPAAAL, one of the most important institutions of revolutionary internationalism in the twentieth century. Through its publications, solidarity campaigns, educational work, and especially its extraordinary poster production, OSPAAAL helped build a shared political language for struggles taking place across three continents.

Over three decades, the organisation produced around nine million posters distributed to more than sixty countries, many folded inside the pages of Tricontinental. The magazine and posters travelled to places where revolutionary diplomats could not, making the struggles of Vietnam, Palestine, Angola, Mozambique, Puerto Rico, South Africa, Chile, and dozens of others visible to each other as part of a common front against imperialism.

Many of the graphic designers who created these posters had learned their craft in Havana’s advertising agencies before the Revolution. After 1959, they turned those same techniques against empire. Typography, photography, colour, montage, among other visual techniques – once employed to sell commodities – were repurposed to build international solidarity, make anti-imperialist struggles legible across languages, and forge a revolutionary visual language capable of crossing borders.

As the Cuban designer Félix Beltrán later reflected, ‘The poster could circulate in countries where a functionary was not allowed to speak about the ideas of the Revolution’.

The poster thus became more than a medium of communication. Under conditions of blockade and diplomatic isolation, it became an instrument of international organisation. Alongside the revolutionary cinema of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, ICAIC), the editorial work of Casa de las Américas, and the international educational institutions built by the Revolution over subsequent decades, OSPAAAL formed part of the cultural infrastructure through which Cuba internationalised its revolutionary project.

A Revolution Can Only Be the Child of Culture and Ideas

By the end of the twentieth century, the Cuban Revolution had survived what many believed would be its final test. The fall of the Soviet Union plunged the island into the Special Period, while Washington tightened the blockade expecting that socialism would finally collapse under economic isolation. Across much of the world, the triumph of neoliberalism was proclaimed as the ‘end of history’, as political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously declared, and Cuba was widely treated as a relic whose disappearance was only a matter of time.

It was during this conjuncture, speaking at the Aula Magna (Great Hall) of the Central University of Venezuela on 3 February 1999, that Fidel returned to a principle that had occupied the Revolution since its earliest years, ‘Una revolución solo puede ser hija de la cultura y las ideas’ (A revolution can only be the child of culture and ideas).

Left: Ingrid Neves (Brazil, Tricontinental); right: Isabela Molin (Brazil, MST).

This was not a defence of culture in the abstract, nor a call to privilege the battle of ideas over material transformation. It was a reaffirmation that revolutions do not simply inherit revolutionary human beings, including the cultural and intellectual workers needed to sustain them; they must help create them. Political consciousness, technical capacity, collective discipline, and internationalist commitment are not spontaneous products of economic change. They must be consciously organised, cultivated, and reproduced across generations.

The National Literacy Campaign of 1961 (Campaña Nacional de Alfabetización) was one of the Revolution’s earliest demonstrations of this principle. More than 100,000 young brigadistas of the Conrado Benítez Brigades travelled to the countryside as part of a nationwide literacy army. By the end of the campaign, more than 700,000 adults had been taught to read and write, reducing illiteracy in Cuba to 3.9%. Yet literacy was only one outcome. Those who taught were transformed alongside those who learned, encountering rural poverty firsthand and participating directly in the remaking of Cuban society. Education became not simply the transmission of knowledge but the formation of a new revolutionary subject.

The same principle shaped the Revolution’s publishing houses and journals, film institutions, art schools, scientific centres, medical training programmes, and educational exchanges with the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Together they formed the cultural infrastructure through which the Revolution sought not only to defend itself but to reproduce itself and contribute to the wider anti-imperialist struggle.

The Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968

For eight days in January 1968, around 500 participants from more than seventy countries gathered at the Hotel Habana Libre for the Cultural Congress of Havana. The congress is often remembered as a meeting of writers and artists, but this barely captures its scope. Participants included novelists, poets, economists, physicians, scientists, architects, filmmakers, publishers, educators, sociologists, critics, cultural administrators, and militants from national liberation movements. Dependency theorists shared commissions with painters. Teachers worked alongside guerrillas. Representatives of newly independent states met organisers operating clandestinely under colonial rule. Delegations included participants from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the South Vietnamese liberation movement, as well as from the liberation struggles in Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Cape Verde, alongside delegates from across Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America. They met not as representatives of isolated national cultures but as participants in a common anti-imperialist project. The congress reflected the Cuban Revolution’s expansive understanding of culture – not as artistic production alone but as the entire field through which societies produce knowledge, values, institutions, technical capacities, and political consciousness.

Left: Kael Abello (Venezuela, Utopix/Tricontinental); right: Olfer (Perú, Utopix).

The congress advanced three interrelated arguments.

The first concerned the role of intellectual labour. Revolutionary struggle required far more than sympathetic artistic representation. Writers, scientists, physicians, teachers, economists, filmmakers, publishers, and cultural workers all possessed specialised forms of knowledge that could either reproduce imperial domination or be organised in the service of liberation. Their task was not to observe the Revolution from outside but to place their work within the collective project of national liberation and socialist construction.

The second was organisational. In his ‘Message to the Tricontinental’, published in April 1967 while he was fighting in Bolivia, Che Guevara called for ‘two, three, many Vietnams’ to stretch imperialism across multiple fronts. By the time the congress met in January 1968, Che had been killed in Bolivia three months earlier. Closing the congress, Fidel extended that strategy onto another terrain, calling for ‘un Vietnam en el terreno de la cultura’ (a Vietnam in the field of culture). The struggle against imperialism could not be confined to the battlefield or the factory. It also required institutions capable of contesting the production of knowledge, the circulation of images, Western scientific and technical authority, publishing, education, and the international media.

The third argument challenged the geography of history itself. Cuban poet and later president of the Casa de las Américas, Roberto Fernández Retamar, rejected the familiar division between ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries, insisting instead that the modern world was divided between countries that had been underdeveloped and those that had underdeveloped them. The implication reached beyond economics. If colonialism had relegated Asia, Africa, and Latin America to the ‘periphery’ of history, then the liberation struggles unfolding across the Third World had begun to overturn that geography. The principal engine of historical transformation no longer lay in the imperial metropoles but in the peoples fighting colonialism, imperialism, and capitalist domination. As Fernández Retamar would later crystallise in his essay Calibán, it was the Third World that stood at the centre of the revolutionary conjuncture and of history.

This legacy is the subject of Tricontinental’s latest dossier, A Vietnam in the Field of Culture: The Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968 (August 2026). Read it here.

FIDEL x 100

Nearly a decade after Fidel Castro’s death, the Cuban Revolution confronts one of its most difficult moments since the Special Period. The United States has once again tightened the longest economic blockade in modern history. Cuba’s continued inclusion on the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list has further restricted the island’s access to international finance and trade, while Washington has moved to impose a total blockade on oil deliveries to the island, barring one Russian tanker that got through in March 2026. The effects of the sanctions are the intended consequences of an economic war designed to make everyday life increasingly difficult and undermine the social foundations of the Revolution.

Economic war has always been accompanied by ideological war. The blockade seeks not only to constrain Cuba materially but also to isolate its revolutionary experience from new generations and from the peoples of the world. Against this strategy, the defence of the Revolution cannot be reduced to economic resilience alone. It also requires the continued organisation of culture, political education, historical memory, and international solidarity. In this conjuncture, propagating Fidel’s ideas is not an exercise in remembrance but part of defending the revolutionary process itself.

Left: Tings Chak (China, Tricontinental); right: Vanshika Babbar (India, Tricontinental/Young Socialist Artists).

It is here that FIDEL x 100 finds its place.

The exhibition is one contemporary expression of the international cultural front that took shape in Havana nearly six decades ago. It brought together contributions from more than 100 cultural workers, many of them activists in people’s organisations – from the Young Socialist Artists in India to the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) in Brazil to the Party for Socialism and Liberation in the United States.

The posters approach Fidel from different angles. Some return to the young revolutionary of ‘History Will Absolve Me’, his self-defence after the Moncada assault in 1953. Others revisit the battle of ideas, literacy, agrarian reform, medical internationalism, and anti-imperialist internationalism. Their diversity reflects the many fronts on which Fidel’s legacy continues to speak to present struggles.

The exhibition has already travelled to the Mariátegui School in Argentina, MST encampments in Brazil, mobilisations in Mexico commemorating the 26 July Movement, Hands Off Asia gatherings in Sri Lanka, and political education courses in Pakistan.

Download the archive. Print the posters. Hang them in political schools, trade union offices, community centres, party headquarters, libraries, universities, movement spaces, and neighbourhood assemblies. Use them to teach, to debate, to commemorate, and, above all, to organise. Let us multiply the images and ideas of the Cuban Revolution, carry forward Fidel’s legacy, and continue the task of creating ‘a Vietnam in the field of culture’. A century after Fidel’s birth, the task remains before us.

In solidarity,

Kael Abello, member of the Utopix art collective and the Art and Culture Department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

Tings Chak, co-coordinator of the Art and Culture Department of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

On 13 August 2026, DeepSeek released DeepSeek Harness, an open framework for building and customising AI agents. Its philosophy can be summed up in two words: freedom and openness. Instead of giving users a finished agent and asking them to work within its limits, Harness opens up the system itself, allowing users to inspect, modify, and extend it.

What Makes DeepSeek Harness Different

Customisable

It is not a finished product, but a box of building blocks.

Tools such as Claude Code and Codex are largely finished products: you can change their settings and add instructions, but the underlying system, including how the agent works with the model, uses tools, manages sessions, and presents its interface, is largely determined by the developer.

DeepSeek Harness takes a different approach. Its basic principle is ‘everything is a plugin’. The model, tools, skills, agent loop, session system, sandbox, and even the user interface are all built as replaceable components. There is no single ‘official’ core that users are expected to leave untouched.

This is made possible by Cordis, the plugin framework underneath DeepSeek Harness. In simple terms, Cordis is what allows these different pieces to be added, removed, connected, and replaced without rebuilding the whole system. It also keeps track of which pieces depend on which others, and cleans up the changes made by a plugin if it is removed.

For users without a technical background, this has a simple meaning: you are not limited to the features the original developers decided to give you. You can add new capabilities, replace existing ones, or even change how the interface works. The growing plugin ecosystem already includes tools that add new functions and new interface components.

Later in this article, we will see what this means in practice: using natural language to change the interface, and then turning a research skill into a visual dashboard with a timeline and information cards.

Traceable

The agent’s work leaves a detailed trail. Instead of seeing only the final answer, you can follow the whole execution record: what the agent was instructed to do, what tools it called, what those tools returned, and what information was passed into the next step.

This distinction matters when something goes wrong.

Imagine an AI spends several minutes searching files, reading documents, and making changes. If you only see a condensed account of what it did, you may know that the final result is wrong without knowing where the mistake happened. With a detailed execution record, you can go back through the sequence and ask: What did the agent see? What did it do? What did the tool return? At which step did the wrong turn happen?

That means debugging does not have to begin by simply running the entire task again and hoping for a better result. You can inspect the path that produced the result and identify where it went wrong.

This is also what makes the visual dashboard later in this article possible. The dashboard is, in effect, turning the agent’s execution record into something a human can read and understand at a glance.

How to Install It

At the time of writing, the official installation process requires using a terminal at least once. Although there are ways to turn DeepSeek Harness into a standalone application, as shown later in this article, we will begin with the official terminal-based method so that you can see how it works. The process is straightforward.

Install DeepSeek Harness on Mac

Press Command + Space to open Spotlight, search for Terminal, and open it.

Copy the following command into Terminal and press Enter. This installs Node.js, starts DeepSeek Harness, and opens its web interface. If you restart your computer, you will need to start it again.

Note: If something goes wrong, first check your network connection. If you see ‘zsh: command not found: brew’, install Homebrew first by running:

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL 
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then run:

brew install node && npx -y 
@deepseek-ai/dsh web > ~/.dsh/dsh-web.log 2>&1 & sleep 3 && open http://127.0.0.1:3080

This is only a test statement. Press the button below to continue.

The next window asks for an API key. If you do not have one yet, simply use the first button. We will create one in the following section.

Occasionally, the browser may show ‘This site can’t be reached’, especially during the first launch. This usually means the local service has not finished starting. Wait a moment and refresh the page. After closing the tab, you can reopen DeepSeek Harness at http://127.0.0.1:3080.

Install DeepSeek Harness on Windows

Press the Win key, search for PowerShell, and open it.

Copy the following command into PowerShell and press Enter. It installs Node.js, starts DeepSeek Harness in the background, and opens the local web interface. After restarting your computer, you will need to run it again.

winget install OpenJS.NodeJS.LTS -e --accept-source-agreements --accept-package-agreements; $env:Path="C:\Program Files\nodejs;$env:Path"; Start-Process cmd.exe -ArgumentList '/c','npx -y @deepseek-ai/dsh web > "%USERPROFILE%\.dsh-web.log" 2>&1' -WindowStyle Hidden; Start-Sleep -Seconds 3; Start-Process "http://127.0.0.1:3080"

This is only a test statement. Press the button below to continue.

The next window asks for an API key. If you do not have one yet, simply use the first button. We will create one in the following section.

If the browser shows ‘This site can’t be reached’, especially on the first launch, wait a moment and refresh the page. After closing the tab, you can reopen DeepSeek Harness at http://127.0.0.1:3080.

Basic Configuration

Click the Settings button in the lower-left corner to open the DeepSeek Harness settings page. It is a useful way to explore and better understand its features.

General

The General tab contains several basic settings. For example, you can change the language if necessary. Currently, English and Chinese are the two officially supported languages.

Agent Preset determines what the AI can do. Standard Mode is for most users. Code Mode is useful for repetitive tasks. Minimal Mode is mainly for testing. Creator Mode lets you build your own DeepSeek Harness setup.

Permission Mode determines where the AI can act. Read Only lets it read files without changing them. Workspace Write limits file changes to the folder you selected. Full Access allows it to modify files anywhere on your computer.

Models

Go to the Models tab to configure the model that powers your Harness. The language model handles the reasoning and planning, while DeepSeek Harness provides the tools and execution environment. Since DeepSeek Harness is designed to work particularly well with DeepSeek models, we will mainly use DeepSeek as the example here.

To use a DeepSeek model, you first need an API key. Go to https://platform.deepseek.com/api_keys and sign in. Then click Create new API key.

Give the key a name and click Create API key.

Click Copy to copy the API key, then return to DeepSeek Harness and paste it into the provider settings before applying it.

DeepSeek Harness also supports many other model providers. Click Add provider to browse the available options. You only need an API key from the provider you want to use.

DeepSeek Harness also provides a convenient way to discover the models currently available from a provider. For example, after adding moonshotai and entering its API key, click Customised settings, then use Fetch available models to retrieve the latest model list.

Plugins

Plugins are at the core of DeepSeek Harness, but you do not need to understand them in detail at the beginning. For now, it is enough to know that DeepSeek Harness is highly customisable. You can turn your own experience into reusable instructions, create your own programs, or change the default functions and settings of the Harness.

DeepSeek Harness also provides instruction files that can be used by AI agents. You can use DeepSeek Harness itself to create new plugins or modify existing ones.

Agent Presets

The Agent Presets tab shows the presets available for the Harness. You can click the view button for a preset to inspect its configuration and instructions.

You can also create your own customised preset. In the next section, we will use DeepSeek Harness and explore how it differs from other agent tools.

Using DeepSeek Harness

Dialogue Page

Click the dialogue box in the centre to choose a folder as your workspace. DeepSeek Harness will work within this folder. When Permission Mode is set to Workspace Write, it can only modify files inside the selected workspace.

You can change the model used for the current task by clicking the model selector next to the submit button.

Effort determines how deeply the model investigates a task. Higher effort does not always mean better results; it can also increase both execution time and cost. For most tasks, the default setting is a good starting point.

You can also adjust the other task settings directly from the dialogue page.

Transform Your Main Interface

As mentioned earlier, DeepSeek Harness allows us to create a new plugin by ourselves. Let us start with a simple example.

Have you ever forgotten the name of a skill installed on your computer, or found it troublesome to type /xxx every time you wish to invoke it? DeepSeek Harness allows you to build a convenient plugin to solve exactly this problem; all you need to do is describe your needs to the AI.

Create a Skill Library plugin integrated into the main interface,
allowing users to quickly browse, preview, and insert skills.

After completing the task, click the Skills tab to open the Skills Library. This page displays basic information about each skill, making it easier to review and manage our skills.

Click Insert into composer to insert a reference to the selected skill into the chat box. This saves time and makes the skill easier to use.

Because this model’s capabilities are strong and this requirement is relatively straightforward, there is no need for us to adjust the result. If any problems do exist in your plugin, simply describe them and ask the AI to solve them.

Make a Plugin for Your Skill

In an era when AI is often used together with skills, many people simply type in the name of a skill and wait for the output. The execution process, however, remains a black box: if the output is not satisfactory, we have no choice but to run the skill again, which is a waste of time and money. Although the AI may occasionally ask us to make a choice, such prompts are random and far from sufficient.

By using DeepSeek Harness, we can upgrade our skills with visual interfaces that allow us to monitor and intervene in the operation of the AI. The section below uses POMASA as an example.

POMASA is an open-source skill that creates a multi-agent research system to investigate a given topic; the code is available at https://github.com/eXtremeProgramming-cn/pomasa. Its defining feature is that it separates the research process into a variety of stages and executes them step by step based on the given topic.

We can therefore build an interface for the various stages, see which stage is currently running, and see which files each stage generates, thereby keeping control of the implementation. For example, we can view the intermediate files while the AI is running, without having to search for them in the Finder, and spot errors in good time.

To get started, we need to install POMASA in our project folder.

Please install the following skill as a project skill in the current project.
npx skills add eXtremeProgramming-cn/pomasa

To begin our visualisation, it is better to understand roughly how this skill works. It is perfectly fine to simply tell the AI to create a visualisation plugin for it, but if you know what your skill will require from human operators in the long term, the visualisation can be much better.

Simply speaking, POMASA separates a complicated task into several stages, provides methodology, generates initial ideas, and builds a reusable research system according to your study. We can use the official prompt as an example.

Help me create a multi-agent research system for analysing AI trends in healthcare.

After the AI has completed its work, we can see the working folder it has produced, which contains several subfolders:

• agents: Sets up the workflow for the research.
• library: Contains the external resources collected by the AI for writing.
• references: Contains the primer, initial ideas, and methodology that serve as the basis of the study.
• wip: Records the state of the study, such as when each session started and ended.
• workspace: Contains the outputs generated at different stages of the workflow.
• _output: Contains the final report generated by this skill.

Here is a simple example of a workspace folder generated by a workflow of ‘collect sources -> verify sources -> analyse arguments’. Many skills use similar structures to break complicated tasks down into a series of steps.

However, if the sources searched are wrong, the analysis will probably produce the wrong arguments and cost a great deal of time and money in an unexpected direction. Since the workflow has been separated clearly and has files that can be reviewed by humans, it would be ideal to build an interface that guides the user to read them.

A clear interface can also decrease the difficulty of usage: there is no need for other people to read the specifications and documents before using a skill.

To begin with, we can simply describe our needs.

/pomasa Design a research-process visualisation interface
called POMASA Observatory for DSH that provides a real-time
view of a POMASA multi-agent research workflow.

The interface is an observer:
its purpose is to visualise the research process,
agent activity, and files.

Click the tab named POMASA next to the chat. The first version may not be perfect, nor conform to the vision in our minds, but do not worry, we can complete it step by step. As you observe the interface generated by the AI, you may also come up with new ideas for improving it.

For example, I thought we needed a timeline instead of showing one line for each stage, so that we could see which stage the AI is in and what it is doing. I used the prompt below to modify it.

The RESEARCH STAGES should be displayed as a timeline from left to right.
Below, users can see the actual execution in the chat in real time,
while the same process is simultaneously translated into
a clear visual language through structured graphics.

After several rounds of modifying the style and adding functions, it has completed the task of converting the skill into a visualisable plugin. The whole process does not require professional technical skills; you only need to describe your needs in natural language.

Let us look at the generated result. Click Tab 1, Trend Signal Collection. In this stage, the AI searches for data online, summarises them, records their sources, and classifies them. In the example run, it collected 19 cards for this research.

Open one card, and we can see the content of the source. Each source has been clearly organised into three sections: Core Content, Key Quotes, and Credibility Assessment, making it easier for humans to read and audit.

It will be updated as the research system runs, so people can check it and find errors immediately.

Tab 2, Source Verification, checks whether the source of each card is credible.

Tab 3, Trend Analysis, puts forward arguments on the basis of the cards collected earlier.

Since it is related to the cards collected earlier and forms the basis of the final report, it plays an important role in shaping the final result. If something goes wrong at this stage, the quality of the final article will be affected.

The last stage shows the final report, which is assembled from the artefacts created earlier.

Plugins serve as a visual representation of the thought process behind skills, which means that users do not need to understand a skill deeply to intervene in its process.

This makes the skill more complete and opens up possibilities for users without advanced technical skills to customise their experience.

Conclusion

DeepSeek Harness is more than a tool for running AI agents. Its significance lies in opening up the agent itself: users can add, replace, and customise the components that make it work, rather than being limited to a fixed system. Built around a plugin-based architecture, and supported by the Cordis framework, Harness gives users greater freedom to shape both the agent’s capabilities and its interface.

Just as importantly, Harness makes the agent’s work more inspectable. By retaining a detailed record of the execution process — including the instructions, tool calls, intermediate results, and other information passed between steps — it becomes easier to understand what the agent actually did.

The larger promise of DeepSeek Harness, then, is not simply that it can run more capable AI agents. It is that it gives users more freedom to shape the system and see how it works — making AI workflows more customisable, inspectable, and controllable.

Foreword

Vijay Prashad

There is a certain comfort in the stories that empires tell about themselves. These are stories of ingenuity, of discovery, of the steady march of reason and science. In these stories, capitalism appears almost as an inevitability, the natural flowering of human progress in Western Europe, propelled by technological innovation and the so-called Enlightenment. What these narratives leave out is not incidental but foundational: the violence that made the modern world.

Prabir Purkayastha’s The Roots of Capitalism: Slavery and the Sugar Trade is an intervention into this cultivated amnesia. It insists that we look directly at the historical record and recognise that capitalism did not emerge from the gentle unfolding of markets and machines but from the brutal reorganisation of the world through conquest, enslavement, and extraction. Much of this study was written during Prabir Purkayastha’s 225-day incarceration in Rohini Central Jail in Delhi, India, on scraps of paper passed back and forth and discussed with those of us who visited him. It compels us to reconsider what we mean when we speak of the origins of capitalism and to ask: whose history is being told, whose suffering is being obscured, and what was the cost?

At the heart of this study is sugar, not just as a commodity but as a social relation. Sugar was among the first truly global commodities, binding together continents in circuits of production, exchange, and finance. Its cultivation required vast tracts of land – seized through genocide in the Americas – and immense quantities of labour, supplied through the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans. Sugar, in this sense, was not simply produced; it was made possible through a system that treated human beings themselves as commodities.

What Purkayastha demonstrates with clarity is that the plantation was not an archaic or pre-capitalist institution. On the contrary, it was one of the earliest sites of modern capitalist organisation. Here we see the integration of agriculture and industry, the careful accounting of costs and returns, the calculation of labour productivity, and the ruthless logic of replacement. Enslaved people were reduced to units of capital, their lives measured against their market price. The plantation, as Sidney Mintz observed, was both field and factory. The immense profits generated by slavery and plantation agriculture were not peripheral to European development; they were central to it. Sugar production, the trade in enslaved people, and the associated industries (shipping, insurance, refining, and finance) formed an interconnected system that fuelled capital accumulation on a global scale. The wealth generated in the Caribbean and the Americas flowed into European cities, underwriting the growth of industries and financial institutions. The sugar refineries of London, Bristol, and Liverpool were among the earliest industrial workplaces. They processed the raw sugar produced by enslaved labour, transforming it into commodities for mass consumption and for re-export across the globe.

To speak of capitalism without speaking of slavery is therefore to tell only half the story. It is to accept a narrative that sanitises the past and obscures the structural violence upon which the modern world was built. Purkayastha’s work aligns with a long tradition of radical scholarship, from Eric Williams to Walter Rodney, that has sought to restore this missing history. But it also advances the discussion by focusing closely on sugar as a lens through which to understand the broader dynamics of capitalist development. What emerges is a picture of capitalism not merely as an economic system but as a global project of domination that involved the reorganisation of land, labour, and resources across continents; the destruction of existing societies; and the creation of new hierarchies of race and power. The interdependence of sugar and enslaved people as commodities illustrates this vividly: one cannot be understood without the other. This history is not merely of academic interest. The legacies of this system persist in the inequalities that structure our world today. The wealth accumulated through slavery and colonialism did not disappear; it was institutionalised in the financial systems, property relations, and global divisions of labour that continue to shape our present. To understand capitalism’s origins is therefore to better understand its contemporary forms and its enduring injustices.

There is also, in this work, an implicit challenge to how we think about resistance. The system described here was sustained by violence, but it was also contested at every stage by the enslaved people¹ who resisted their bondage, by those who exposed the brutality of the trade, and by movements that sought to dismantle it. To recover this history is not only to confront the crimes of the past, but also to recognise the struggles that sought to overcome them.

The Conventional Narrative: An Overview

The conventional explanation for the rise of the West – the lazy, Eurocentric account of civilisation – is that a few Western European countries came to dominate the world because of a set of events that took place only there.² According to this Eurocentric view, the key events of this period are the Age of Discovery (late fifteenth through seventeenth centuries), the Enlightenment (late seventeenth through eighteenth centuries), and the Industrial Revolution (mid-eighteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries). In this view, the Enlightenment accelerated scientific and technological development, helping to set in motion the first wave of industrialisation. The central impetus to progress in the West is thus framed as technological change, led by science and capitalist rationality, which shed the shackles of pre-capitalist production and created a new economic system based on ‘free’ labour. The role of the looting, genocide, and slavery that predated and accompanied the Industrial Revolution is airbrushed out of this history.³ If mentioned, it appears at most as an unhappy adjunct or by-product of this history but by no means central to it.

Factual history is quite unkind to this mythical explanation of the capitalist development of the West. The conventional narrative also airbrushes out three significant facts in the history of capitalism: first, that the plantation economy in the Caribbean and the continental Americas (both North and South) established sugar as a commodity of large-scale production and created a global market; second, that the foundations of British capital predated the Industrial Revolution; and third, that it was cotton, produced by enslaved Africans in the US South, that made the US a rising power and underwrote England’s textile revolution.⁴

It is not our intention here to repeat what scholars such as Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, C. L. R. James, Joseph Inikori, and many others have already written about this issue.⁵ In this study, we will focus on one crop (sugarcane) and its products (such as sugar, molasses, and rum) as commodities for the global market. Sugar was the first global commodity: it created the capitalist market and laid the foundations of the global financial system. It was accompanied by a second ‘commodity’: enslaved people captured in Africa and sold in the Caribbean and the Americas. The development of British, Dutch, and French capital, and later US capital, is as much the story of this vicious practice of treating human beings as commodities for the market as it is about the commodity produced through such labour.

The dominant idea in Western scholarship and historiography about the modern world economy is that its foundations were laid by the Age of Discovery: the European ‘discovery’ of the so-called New World by figures such as Ferdinand Magellan (1480–1521) and Christopher Columbus (1451–1506) and the discovery of the sea route to Asia by Vasco da Gama (c. 1460–1524) when he sailed around Africa. The Age of Discovery is often linked with the Age of Enlightenment, despite the brutality of figures such as Columbus and da Gama.⁶ Then, the story goes, the Scientific Revolution, accompanying the Enlightenment, led to the Industrial Revolution in Britain, followed rapidly by other parts of Western Europe. It was the transmission of the Industrial Revolution to the ‘New World’, primarily to North America – with the expansion of ‘free’ labour and the settler-colonial seizure of territory through genocide – that led the United States to become the leading economic power of the twentieth century.

In other words, slavery, genocide, the expropriation of Indigenous peoples’ land, and colonial loot do not enter this sanitised picture of the development of capitalism except as minor aberrations.⁷ How, then, was the supply of enslaved people from Africa ‘produced’?

The starting point of the transatlantic trade is conventionally viewed as the time when Western merchants – the Portuguese, British, Dutch, and French – bought enslaved human beings in African ports.⁸ Just as the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the Caribbean is covered up by the false narrative that their lands stood empty, waiting for the Europeans to come and claim them, a number of historians have argued that since slavery already existed in Africa, all the Europeans did was tap into the existing markets of enslaved people.⁹ This account ignores the scale of the trade in enslaved people that the West introduced in Africa, which qualitatively transformed what was largely domestic slavery into an industrial-scale ‘production’ of enslaved people for plantations across the Atlantic. Claude Meillassoux describes this process as the production of enslaved people in the ‘womb of iron and gold’ – that is, through the gun-slave-money nexus, in which firearms and gunpowder were exchanged for enslaved people, whose sale generated profit. The ‘iron’ in this formulation refers to the use of firearms and gunpowder as trade goods exchanged for enslaved people and as instruments of capture, while the ‘gold’ refers to the money and profit generated by this trade. This is supported by trade records that show substantial exports of gunpowder from Europe to Africa during this period.¹⁰

One result of this violence-driven trade, as with the genocide in the Americas, was demographic catastrophe. While the population in Asia and Europe grew by 300% or more from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, in sharp contrast, the African population remained almost the same and in many regions declined.¹¹ This was a consequence of the violence wreaked on the existing social structures and the destruction of local economies through the forced capture and sale of human beings. The impact of slavery on the African population is often overlooked when considering only the number of enslaved people transported to the Americas and the Caribbean, which is estimated to be at least ten million. However, as Walter Rodney writes, this figure refers only to people who landed in the Americas and the Caribbean and fails to take into account the activities of the illegal slavers and the numbers of Africans who died crossing the Atlantic and during the process of their ‘acquisition’, or kidnapping, in their homelands. Taken together, these losses suggest that the total number of Africans seized for the transatlantic trade – including both those who survived to reach the Americas and those who died during capture, marches, detention, and the Middle Passage – was substantially higher, plausibly in the range of fourteen to twenty million.¹² It was not until the abolition of slavery that the continent’s population and economy began to recover, and more sustained growth did not occur until African countries achieved independence.

This devastation in Africa was inseparable from the rise of sugar production on the enslaved-labour plantations of the Americas and the Caribbean. Traded on a global scale from the sixteenth century onwards, sugar underpinned the growth of European colonialism and the development of the global commodity market. In fact, it was to expand sugar production that the brutal and complex new system for acquiring and trading enslaved Africans came to be established, distinct from the pre-existing system consisting largely of domestic slavery.¹³ Together, sugar and enslaved people became paired commodities, and the circuits of production, credit, and trade built around them helped lay the foundations of modern capitalism. This dynamic is especially clear in the Caribbean plantation complex,¹⁴ which proved central to Britain’s capitalist development and forms one dimension of what Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman call ‘slavery’s capitalism’.¹⁵

Riding on the back of the extremely profitable trade in enslaved people, the goods made from sugarcane (sugar, molasses, and rum) were among the first commodities produced for global markets. Before cotton production became the exemplar of both the Industrial Revolution and the horrors of slavery in the US South, sugar anchored a transatlantic system of labour extraction and exchange, linking plantation production to long-distance trade and re-export. From the sixteenth century until the abolition of slavery in the nineteenth century, sugar and its by-products circulated through interlocking markets, generating profits across shipping, insurance, warehousing, and finance as goods were exported, refined, and re-exported.

The dominant narrative of triangular trade – the three-cornered exchange of enslaved people, raw materials, and manufactured goods among Europe, Africa, and the ‘New World’ – often overlooks other commodities essential to this system, including textiles and saltpetre (potassium nitrate, a key ingredient in gunpowder).¹⁶ For example, through much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (1750–1850, according to Kazuo Kobayashi), textiles produced in India were shipped by the British and French East India Companies to the west coast of Africa, where they were exchanged for enslaved people.¹⁷ Similarly, Europeans used saltpetre exported from India to manufacture gunpowder, which they then exchanged for enslaved Africans. In their assessments of the importance of the triangular trade, Ronald Findlay and Kazuo Kobayashi argue that in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, a significant percentage of British exports to Africa were re-exports from India, not European manufactured goods.¹⁸ It was the colonial loot from India – land revenue extracted from the Indian peasantry – that paid for the ‘export’ of textiles and saltpetre from India.¹⁹

Political economists like Adam Smith, for example, view this period either as mercantilist and, hence, inefficient, or as a source of originary accumulation – a precursor to the capitalist accumulation that followed. However, Marx makes it clear that this ‘so-called originary accumulation’ was expropriation, not accumulation.²⁰ It was loot, pure and simple, not savings or the accretion of a nest egg.

In sugar production, slavery and its associated labour processes were a major source of both expropriation and capital accumulation. This form of capital accumulation rooted in the plantations laid the foundation for the Industrial Revolution. It is disingenuous to claim that the impact of colonialism on the colonies (in terms of deindustrialisation and the drain of wealth, for instance) was a separate phenomenon from the plantation economy based on enslaved labour and the broader ‘New World’ dynamic, or that these factors were not important in determining the development of capitalism in the mother country. Such a claim obscures the colonial foundations of modern capitalism.²¹

Next, let us consider how the plantation system was developed to produce sugar, primarily by means of enslaved labour. This requires tracing the development of sugar cultivation and trade in the Mediterranean region as a precursor to the development of plantation-based production in the Atlantic world. How did the production, export, and re-export of sugar shape European finance capital and industrial development? Given that the production of sugar was founded on enslaved labour, to answer this question we must examine the dynamics of slavery and sugar production in the American-Caribbean sugar economy, with greater emphasis on the Caribbean plantation system under the Dutch, French, and British. This discussion illustrates that both sugar and enslaved Africans, produced and sold as market commodities, were crucial for early capitalism’s global expansion and production structures.

Sugar Production in the Mediterranean: From Peasant Agriculture to Plantation Capitalism

Before the Crusades, Western Europe (aside from its elite) was unfamiliar with sugar.²² Then, two transformations occurred. First, the use of sugar, imported from the eastern Mediterranean, kept increasing, even after the Crusades failed to capture the ‘Holy Land’. Second, sugar cultivation spread westward from the eastern Mediterranean to the western Mediterranean and Iberia: first to Mediterranean islands such as Sicily, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete; then to parts of Iberia and North Africa; and later to Atlantic islands such as Madeira and the Canary Islands. This geography was shaped in part by climate: sugarcane requires a long, warm growing season and a cool but frost-free ripening and harvesting period. Frost can kill cane and damage its roots, which meant that cultivation was largely limited to the warmer Mediterranean, southern Iberian, North African, and Atlantic island zones rather than northern and much of western Europe.

Unlike the peasant-based agriculture in the eastern and southern Mediterranean coastal plains, agriculture in Western Europe was based on a combination of peasant and corvée labour (unpaid labour that peasants were obliged to perform on land owned by the feudal manor, or demesne land). In the Mediterranean islands of Sicily, Cyprus, Rhodes, and Crete, settling or importing peasants from Italy or Greece was not a viable option because the Black Death (1347–1351) had drastically reduced the peasant labour supply in Europe and the Mediterranean. Instead, the West European rulers of these islands imported enslaved people from North Africa to substitute for the ‘free’ labour that corvée services provided in Western Europe.²³ This had enormous significance: sugar production morphed from the largely peasant-based production in the Arab world to the ‘modern’ slavery-based plantation economy in the Caribbean.

Another important feature of plantations in the Mediterranean islands was the capital investment by big merchant families from Venice and Genoa: it was in these islands that the marriage of merchant capital and modern slavery began. Portugal extended this slavery-based sugar plantation model from the Atlantic islands closest to Iberia – Madeira, the Canary Islands, and the Azores – to Cape Verde, off the West African coast, and later to São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea (close to present-day Ghana). The final step in the transformation from peasant-based agriculture to the slavery-based sugar plantations took place in São Tomé. Plantation owners, generally from the aristocracy, got land from the Portuguese king, capital from Venice or Genoa, and enslaved people from Africa. The Portuguese transported this system to Brazil; from there, it spread to the Caribbean and later to parts of North America.

Did these Mediterranean and Atlantic islands introduce any major technological change in the production of sugar? According to Ulbe Bosma, the answer is no. The earlier mistake that historians made was to obscure the technological similarity of milling and sugar-processing techniques across the eastern and western Mediterranean, Iberia, the Atlantic islands, and finally the ‘New World’.²⁴ In his extraordinary work The World of Sugar, Bosma summarises this journey:

Sugar makers travelled from Egypt and Syria to Cyprus and Sicily, from where their knowledge and skills crossed into Valencia and reached Madeira. Portuguese sugar masters learned their art from the Muslims in Andalusia, who ruled it for 800 years, and brought it to Madeira and the Canary Islands.²⁵

The plantation model that would be transplanted across the Americas virtually unchanged, especially to Brazil and the Caribbean, began in São Tomé. The cane cultivated in the Americas and the Caribbean was from the Atlantic islands, where it had in turn been introduced from the Levant and Egypt. As for sugarcane cultivation, there were few major changes. The model continued to rely on the long-established technique of leaving part of the cane stalk in the soil after harvest so that it would produce a new crop (a process known as vegetative reproduction, or ‘ratooning’, that is still used today). Even as new crops were planted, shoots from the old stalks continued to grow.

The Mediterranean islands remodelled the existing relationship between the peasant producers of sugarcane and those involved in the secondary and tertiary processes of crushing the cane, producing sugar from the juice, and trading the sugar. In the new plantation model, sugarcane production was integrated with the crushing, boiling, and refining processes at one site. This created the new ‘workflow’ of using enslaved labour all the way from the cultivation of sugarcane to the final product, whether as brown sugar or as crystalline white sugar, which was refined in Europe.

Thus ran the flow on the sugar plantations: during the crushing season, the ripe cane had to be cut and crushed, and the juice had to be concentrated before it crystallised into sugar (see diagram 1). Once the juice was extracted by crushing the cane, it was boiled in a series of large vats or cauldrons that required a large amount of fuel to concentrate the juice into a thick syrup, which would then be cooled in inverted earthenware cones. This would enable its separation into sugar loaves and molasses. Processes of crystallisation, or further refining, were also adopted to produce sugar crystals rather than loaves.

Diagram 1. The labour regime of sugar production.

Sugar Crosses the Atlantic: The Plantation Complex and the Trade in Enslaved People

When sugar expanded from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic islands, Brazil, and the Caribbean in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the core processing techniques remained relatively unchanged, but the growing scale of plantation operations and the expanding circuits of export and re-export gradually transformed patterns of both production and trade. This system of commodity production and trade, rooted in slavery, sugar cultivation, and global cycles of export and re-export, helped lay the foundations of the modern capitalist economy. As we shall see, the key ‘innovation’ was how to extract maximum output at minimum cost from enslaved people before they could be ‘replaced’ – that is, to generate enough surplus from enslaved labour to cover both profits and replacement costs.

It was the promise of immense profits that prompted the Portuguese to take sugar monoculture from the Mediterranean region first to the Atlantic islands off Iberia and West Africa in the fifteenth century. The Portuguese entry into sugar production using enslaved labour took place in the islands of Madeira, the Azores, Cape Verde, São Tomé, and Príncipe.²⁶ By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the colonial slavery-based plantation system emerged in Brazil under the aegis of the Portuguese. From 1624 to 1654, the Dutch gained control of Portugal’s plantations in northern Brazil and learned the techniques of sugar plantation production, holding the territory. During this period, and after their expulsion by the Portuguese, Dutch capital and expertise helped spread sugar production to their Caribbean colonies. In the seventeenth century, the British and French learned from Dutch practice and introduced sugar into their colonies.

Caribbean sugar production involved a concentration of capital and an intensification of enslaved labour unmatched by any other monoculture in a single region. Cotton plantations in the US South later used a similar model of enslaved labour, but this emerged at least 150 years later.

Sidney Mintz, who has written extensively on sugar as a commodity and the plantation economy, argues that the production of sugar was profoundly industrial and ‘modern’ in terms of the labour process, productivity of capital, and management systems employed.²⁷ Sugar production was quintessentially industrial and capitalist in nature, except that it treated human beings as fixed capital – that is, as machines – and therefore as replaceable.

Sugar Production in the Caribbean, 1600s-1800s

Data compiled mainly from Noël Deerr, The History of Sugar, 2 vols. (London: Chapman and Hall, 1949–1950).

The Caribbean Islands: Plantations, Sugar, and Enslaved People

To track how sugar plantations expanded and how the trade in enslaved people was organised across competing empires, we will sketch the shifting colonial control of key Caribbean territories. The five main colonial powers in the Caribbean were Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England. The early colonisers were the Spanish, who captured Jamaica, Trinidad, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola between the 1490s and the early 1600s. England claimed Barbados in 1625 and began settlement in 1627. In 1655, England seized Jamaica from Spain. France established colonies in Guadeloupe (1635) and Martinique (1635) and, under the Treaty of Rijswijk (1697), gained the western third of Hispaniola, which it renamed Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). On the nearby Guiana coast, the Dutch established colonies including the Essequibo from 1616; Suriname, which they acquired later, became known as Dutch Guiana. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Britain and France had emerged as the major colonial presence in the Caribbean.

But sugar did not first come to the Americas through the Caribbean. It came through Brazil, where the Portuguese imported the São Tomé model of slavery-based sugar production to the Pernambuco and Bahia regions.²⁸ These regions had a climate suitable for producing sugar and lands which were not densely forested and could be cleared to develop sugar plantations. The Portuguese needed their feet on the ground to strengthen their claim to a land that was otherwise nothing more than a line drawn on a map in the infamous Treaty of Tordesillas (1494), and so they provided land grants to settlers who would then till the land using enslaved labour. Unlike the plantations in the Caribbean, the land parcels in these regions of Brazil were smaller. In both Brazil and the Caribbean, sugar production relied largely on enslaved Africans, along with the labour of some Indigenous people.

The advantage of the ‘free’ land granted by the Portuguese Crown to settlers and planters in Brazil after the genocidal violence employed against Indigenous people was that the plantations could be extended without any meaningful physical limit. The disadvantage of this system was that it provided no incentive to improve cultivation; it was cheaper to expand the plantation lands than to make an effort to improve yields or the efficiency of sugar production – subject, of course, to the availability of enslaved Africans. On the island plantations, in contrast, the land imposed a physical limit. For example, in Barbados, a relatively tiny island with very few forests, planters had to adopt a variety of practices to adapt to these limitations, such as using bagasse – the dried cane stalks after crushing – as fuel to boil the juice to produce sugar, along with various practices to preserve soil fertility.²⁹

In Brazil, however, land was abundantly available. This enabled methods that deplete soil productivity, since cultivation could be shifts to new fields, and expansion-driven deforestation. While the Dutch, French, and British did improve certain practices – for example, by introducing more efficient mills and fuel-use strategies and tightening plantation logistics – they also had a major advantage over the Portuguese: access to powerful merchant-finance, insurance, and refining networks in Europe that could fund production, insure shipments, refine sugar, and market it at scale. Where Italian city traders had earlier provided capital and marketing for Mediterranean sugar, the Portuguese did not have such a financial community, having driven out the Sephardic Jews and the Arabs who once played that role, including through expulsions from Iberia under King Manuel I in 1496. Even during the war that the Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium) fought with Habsburg-Spain (whose king had been declared by the Pope as the head of the Holy Roman Empire), Antwerp and Amsterdam remained the cities that would refine sugar for the European market.

The Dutch occupied the heart of Brazil’s sugar economy, Pernambuco, between 1630 and 1654, when the Portuguese regained control. In that period, Dutch merchants developed commercial ties with Portuguese planters and channelled Brazilian sugar to refineries in Antwerp and Amsterdam. This continued after the Portuguese regained possession of Pernambuco and Bahia. Yet the Dutch took over more than sugar plantations: they also seized the trade in enslaved people from the Portuguese and, in 1637, captured Elmina Castle (in present-day Ghana), a major centre for the purchase, confinement, and shipment of enslaved Africans.

The Dutch, who were fighting the Spanish king and considered themselves ‘more enlightened’, had few qualms about entering the trade in enslaved people, appearing in the sugar chronicles both as those who took sugar plantations to the Caribbean and as major transporters of enslaved Africans from the African coast to the Americas. The sugar plantation model that the Dutch took to Guyana and the Caribbean islands was then adopted by British planters in Barbados and French planters in Saint-Domingue and Martinique. The Dutch acted not only in their state interests as the Dutch Republic, but also as experts who could be hired by planters from other colonial powers.

The Dutch, French, and British married capital to the practice of slavery in sugar plantations and to the modern division of labour. They grew sugarcane, processed it to the brown-loaf stage in the colonies using enslaved labour, and transported it for the final processing to white and more refined sugar in the European cities. British, French, and Dutch capitalists made money by selling sugar to the working and middle class in their home countries, making it a product for mass consumption. They also re-exported it to the global market, establishing sugar as a global commodity.

The plantation model of sugar production, which emerged in the late fifteenth-century Mediterranean, was adapted to the capitalist organisation of production and colonial trade in the ‘New World’, particularly in the Caribbean islands. The capitalist production of sugar was consolidated on the plantations through both the cultivation of sugarcane and the organisation of its processing into sugar. Underlying both the production of sugarcane and its conversion to sugar was enslaved labour – an unholy marriage of capital with Atlantic chattel slavery. This differed from sugar production in much of Asia and Africa, where peasants cultivated the cane and small mill owners crushed it and converted the juice to sugar.

Sugar Production on the Plantations

Sugarcane production on colonial plantations was brutal and labour-intensive, relying on a mix of skilled trades and field labour and organised through what was known as the ‘gang system’. Under this system, enslaved people were driven in supervised work gangs for long, continuous days. By contrast, the ‘task system’, more common in rice- and indigo-growing regions such as coastal South Carolina and Georgia, assigned a daily quota of work, after which some time might remain – within strict coercive constraints – for other activities.³⁰ Planters adopted various methods to increase the profitability of the enslaved-labour sugar economy, from preparing the fields for cultivation to irrigation and planting, cutting and harvesting the cane, transporting it to the crushing sites, processing it, and producing and refining the sugar.

Sugarcane cultivation, whether in the Caribbean or in Louisiana, preferred the gang system because of the nature of sugar plantations. Sidney Mintz explains how the production on sugar plantations was unique: ‘These were, of course, agricultural undertakings, but because so much of the industrial processing of the cane was also carried out on the plantations, it makes good sense to view the plantations as a synthesis of field and factory’.³¹ The agricultural production and the initial processing of the crop into ‘industrial product’ were both performed on the plantation itself. As a result, the same enslaved people were assigned different tasks across the production cycle, from planting and tending sugarcane to harvesting it, crushing it for juice, and boiling that juice down into brown sugar and molasses. This is unlike the system on cotton plantations, where the crop was only partly processed on site and then sent to textile mills – especially in Britain and later New England – for further manufacture.

Though rooted in slavery, the gang system extracted surplus through forms of calculation that resemble modern capitalist management. Enslaved people were thought of as capital assets, and their maintenance was calculated to minimise subsistence costs while accounting for replacement. Detailed plantation account books were kept and compiled into reports – much like today’s spreadsheets – by which the owners, quite often in distant Britain, could look at the financial return on investment. Time and motion studies, beloved of Taylorist factory management models, were preceded by similar studies of the plantations worked by enslaved labour in the Caribbean and later in the Antebellum South.³² The replacement value of the enslaved African was market-driven, meaning that if their price rose in the market, the need to keep them alive would rise; if the price fell, the intensity of their exploitation – and risk of death – would increase. The lifetime calculations of the plantation manager therefore took into account the replacement price of a new enslaved person and were as market-driven as modern capital’s considerations today.

In practice, the gang system divided enslaved people according to age and physical capacity. The first ‘gang’ consisted of young men and women in their late teens who would do the most physically taxing work for ten to twelve years, after which they were relegated to the second gang. After perhaps twenty years in the second gang, a person who was by then about forty – if they survived – would be worn out and would join other elderly people and young children in the third gang (also known as the ‘grass gang’), which weeded the crops and gathered grass to feed the animals.³³

In the early summer, the first and second gangs prepared the fields for planting by clearing, burning, and turning over the soil with hoes. Gangs also had to construct and maintain irrigation networks. Then, in the late summer and early autumn, the first gang would plant the sugarcane, often using the backbreaking ‘cane-holing’ process of digging planting holes across the field by hand. A first-gang enslaved person was expected to dig between sixty and one hundred holes each day, with two cane plants planted in each hole. First- and second-gang enslaved people then carried huge, heavy baskets of animal manure on their heads to the holes and placed it around each plant. One acre of sugarcane plants required as much as 1.25 tonnes of manure.

Once harvested – five or six months after planting in the case of the more fertile plantations – the cane had to be processed quickly to prevent the sugar content from declining. As a result, during the harvest season, when the cane was crushed and boiled, enslaved people in the sugar mills and boiling houses laboured shifts of eighteen to twenty hours, six days a week. In Brazil, religious observance formally required the engenhos³⁴ to suspend work on Sundays and holy days. However, this requirement was not universally honoured, and enslaved people were often forced to continue working through Sundays and holy days. The enslaved people would become so exhausted that ‘as sleepy as an engenho’ became a widespread refrain, and losing limbs to machines became routine.³⁵ Other major activities included transporting cane to the crushers, carting heavy timber for the furnaces to boil the juice, and shipping the sugar and other products including rum to ports.

In the Caribbean, Sundays were not days of rest for enslaved people. They spent them working their own allotments, known as ‘provision grounds’. Without the food they grew on these small plots, they would have succumbed to the highly deficient diet supplied by the plantation kitchen. William Taylor, a critic of slavery, testified that if an enslaved person used ‘every Sunday for repose, he could not maintain himself or his family by working the twenty-six days [a month] he was allowed by law’.³⁶

Each year, a planter bought newly imported enslaved people from Africa to replace those who had died. A Barbados planter named Edward Littleton estimated that a sugar planter who owned a hundred enslaved people and put them to work growing and processing sugarcane would kill them all in nineteen years. Bosma, quoting the Anglican clergyman Reverend Robert Robertson, estimated that two-fifths of newly arrived enslaved people would die within one year of their arrival.³⁷

There is enough evidence to show that the mortality rate among enslaved people on sugar plantations was higher than that of other enslaved-labour plantations, whether cotton, coffee, or tobacco.³⁸ Slavery disincentivised replacing labour with machines on both cotton and sugar plantations, where living conditions were brutal. Yet the enslaved population on cotton plantations increased in spite of this (while on the sugar plantations of Louisiana it decreased). This is partly due to the multiple production processes integrated with sugarcane cultivation, where milling, concentration of the cane juice, and crystallisation of the sugar all involved enslaved labour. Another reason was the poor diet of enslaved people, as the owners factored the cost of feeding them against their replacement cost – the cost of buying new enslaved people. With a ban on trade in enslaved people in the early nineteenth century, the cotton plantations considered children born into slavery to be an economic ‘output’ – that is, as a way of reproducing their labour force and property internally. Louisiana sugar plantations sought the same result, but because mortality there was so high, births did not replace deaths.³⁹

Equipment was required not only to crush the sugarcane but also to process it, all of which had to be constructed, operated, and regularly maintained. Early plantations used hand-operated presses to extract juice from the cane, but these were eventually replaced by more efficient three-cylinder presses powered by animals, and later by wind or, more commonly, water. As a result, plantations were typically established close to rivers or streams to harness water power.⁴⁰ The wind or water drove large rollers through which enslaved people fed the cane back into the crushers. This was dangerous work, for these enslaved people were often exhausted, and sometimes they did not let go of the sugarcane in time and their arms were drawn into the rollers. When this happened, an axe was used to chop off the crushed arm. In some sugar plantations, one-armed men and women were a familiar sight.⁴¹

Proximity to ports and rivers was essential, as it lowered the cost of transporting sugar and other plantation goods. Depending on the size of the plantation, mills needed between sixty and two hundred workers, most of them enslaved, to operate.⁴² The peak labour requirement during the harvest season determined the number of enslaved people needed on a plantation.

Enslaved people were also burdened with the exhausting job of gathering the timber needed to fuel the refinery furnaces. In most Caribbean plantations, firewood was easily available. The exception was Barbados, which had limited availability of timber. Here, bagasse – the fibrous residue left after sugarcane was crushed – was used as fuel, a practice most likely imported from Egypt.

Those who had the skills to operate and maintain the machinery in sugar mills were in high demand. Some skilled mill workers were drawn from the enslaved labour force, but it was only their chief supervisor, the ‘sugar master’, that enjoyed a generous salary. Over time – as the colonies’ populations evolved – mixed-race European locals as well as freed, and sometimes even enslaved, people with the requisite technical skills were put to work in these positions in most Caribbean plantations.

Enslaved women had to do gruelling work in the fields, some with their newborn children on their backs. They also suffered from extreme malnutrition, which resulted in high miscarriage and infant mortality rates. The harvest season was the worst, as the standing cane had to be cut and processed quickly, which meant that enslaved Africans were subjected to even more intense exploitation. Cutting the cane, taking it to the crushers, crushing it for juice, and boiling it had to be handled simultaneously: enslaved people barely had time to eat.⁴³ Women were fully involved in crushing the cane alongside men, where losing concentration meant risking anything from fingers to an arm – or their lives – to the milling machine.

We can identify the following characteristics of the technology used to maintain slavery-based sugar plantations:

• The introduction of machines – such as windmills, watermills, and steam engines – often intensified the exploitation of enslaved people.
• Technology could either be labour-saving or lead to more intense exploitation of labour, since technological improvements were determined by social relations.
• Enslaved people were seen as expendable, since planters often found it cheaper to replace those who died than to keep them alive. Sugar plantations often had to acquire new enslaved people because the brutal demands of sugar production killed workers at such a high rate. Unlike cotton and tobacco plantations, where processing was less tightly integrated into plantation labour, sugar estates required the crop to be processed on site almost immediately after harvest.⁴⁴

After being harvested, the sugarcane was fed through rollers into a crushing device to extract its juice. This liquid was then boiled in large cauldrons and, through a process called curing, separated into molasses and crystallised sugar. The resulting mixture was poured into sizeable clay pots or moulds, where it hardened into cone-shaped sugar loaves.

Many consumers in Europe came to prefer white sugar to the brown sugar that forms naturally. To create a whiter product, a thick mixture of clay and water was placed on the broad side of a cone-shaped sugar mould as the molasses dripped out. Water would drip down from the clay, through the cone, and wash the molasses or other materials from the sugar. Once completely drained, the sugar loaves were removed from the moulds, dried on racks in a large room, trimmed into their final shape, and wrapped in paper. The final processing to whiten sugar took place in British or Dutch towns. White sugar was perceived to be purer and more desirable to European consumers, especially as racial discourse increasingly linked whiteness to value during the consolidation of modern plantation slavery.⁴⁵ In a modern sugar plant, sugar is ‘bleached’ to whiten it from its natural brownish state.

Why was the final step of refining not carried out on the plantations or in the British Caribbean? The answer lies largely in British colonial policy. Tax policy – particularly after India became a British colony – helped remove any incentive to refine sugar further in the Caribbean. As Bosma notes, high duties on refined sugar penalised technological upgrading and made the export of muscovado the more profitable option.⁴⁶

The sugar industry adapted to the widespread demand for many types of sugar. Sugar was sold to consumers at all stages of refinement, including muscovado, refined, and double-refined white sugar. The more refining sugar required, the more expensive it became. In the seventeenth century, sugar’s by-product, molasses, also became profitable; it was not only a sweetener but an ingredient for the increasingly popular spirit, rum.

Innovations took place both in the cultivation of sugarcane and the methods used for processing it into sugar, including applying steam power and using better cylinders (such as the two-roller horizontal mill), which were further adapted with protruding iron bars to enhance the crushing capacity, as well as vacuum pans, centrifuges, and double- to quintuple-effect evaporation.⁴⁷ There were also important advances in the transportation systems that linked cultivation to processing, including the use of movable and fixed rails – often powered by steam engines – as well as conveyor belts. There were several modifications in the agricultural sphere as well, such as developing new cane varieties, altering planting distances and ploughs, improving drainage and irrigation, and applying manure and fertilisers.⁴⁸

Vacuum pans – sealed vessels used to boil and concentrate cane juice or syrup at lower temperatures by reducing air pressure – were first developed in Britain for refining imported raw cane sugar and were adopted more widely in colonial cane sugar production only later. Meanwhile, beet sugar production in Europe, especially in France, expanded after British blockades cut off access to raw cane sugar from the West Indies. On West Indian plantations worked by enslaved labour, planters had very little incentive to introduce such capital-intensive equipment: expanding the plantations with additional enslaved people was both the ‘cheaper’ and more ‘efficient’ option for capital, with efficiency under capitalism understood as the efficiency of money in producing a required output, not the efficiency of the process itself. In the Caribbean, because land was ‘free’ – a consequence of genocidal violence against the Indigenous population – and enslaved labour was cheap, there was no incentive to improve the efficiency of sugar production. The only exception was improving the efficiency of crushing, since the cane could not otherwise be processed within the short ripening season. Hence, better crushers were introduced in the early nineteenth century in the form of wind-powered mills in Barbados and steam power in British Guiana (today’s Guyana) and Jamaica. This helps explain the different trajectories of vacuum pans and centrifuges. Even when vacuum pans made inroads in Java, Indonesia, during this period, they were not considered necessary on enslaved-labour plantations in either the British Caribbean or Louisiana. British colonial tax policy reinforced this: refined sugar attracted higher duties than raw sugar, making further refining in the Caribbean less profitable.⁴⁹ Centrifuges, by contrast, reduced the time needed to separate molasses from sugar from months in clay cones to a few hours. Introduced in the 1830s, they quickly became standard practice even on enslaved-labour plantations.⁵⁰

Technology mattered, but it does not explain the profitability of Caribbean sugar on its own. To understand that profitability, we need to turn from the machinery of the plantation to the wider colonial system: the linked markets for sugar and enslaved people, the organisation of refining and re-export in Europe, and the policies that bound the colonies to the ‘mother country’.

Slavery and Sugar: Market Production, Exports, Re-exports, and Profits

Sidney Mintz argued that sugar production, though based on enslaved labour, was profoundly industrial and modern, with planters and owners of enslaved people using modern capitalist methods to organise production, measure productivity, and calculate returns.⁵¹ By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, sugar had become one of the most important and profitable commodities of the ‘New World’.

There were three different markets for Caribbean sugar. Initially, it was only produced for the international market, centred on the colonial and European ‘mother country’. Later, local and regional markets developed in and around the Caribbean. Local markets were small, self-contained, and generally located inland, while regional markets centred around large cities such as Lima and Mexico City as well as cities throughout New England. The international market for Caribbean sugar was the most competitive, with the refining and re-export market based in Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, and various towns in England and France.

Initially, with Brazil under the Portuguese as the primary producer of raw sugar in the Americas, Lisbon emerged as the largest market for re-exporting raw sugar to refining centres, and it remained so for a long time. From Lisbon, the Dutch transported the sugar first to Antwerp and Amsterdam to be refined and then to the global market. Antwerp was home to the biggest sugar refinery in the sixteenth century but, by the seventeenth century, had lost the sugar battle, first to Amsterdam and then to various towns in England. By the eighteenth century, sugar refineries proliferated in Britain, from Plymouth to Glasgow and London to Liverpool. These refineries used large open copper boiling pans and a large amount of coal to produce heat and were precursors to the factories of the Industrial Revolution. They were among the earliest factory-like workplaces in Britain and a direct link between slavery’s sugar and the great divergence between Asia and Europe.

The sugar bakers of Britain existed long before the textile mills associated with the Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly, they were also major centres of the trade in enslaved people. During the Great Plague of 1665, a number of sugar refineries moved from London, then in the grip of plague, to other English ports. West Indian ships carrying sugar used docks in other ports of England to avoid contagion. This helped expand the refining of sugar throughout Britain. This expansion helped widen access to refined sugar beyond elite consumption.

Though those refining sugar were referred to as bakers, the process of baking sugar involved what today would be considered factory work. The term ‘factory’ originally referred to a place of commercial activity tied to the work of a merchant’s agent, or ‘factor’, such as a trading post or collection centre, including sites where enslaved people were bought and sold. Only later did it come to mean a place of manufacturing. Sugar refining already had the features associated with industry – concentrated workplaces, heat-intensive processing, specialised equipment, and disciplined labour. Yet, because it was inseparable from slavery, it rarely appears as a starting point for the Industrial Revolution in Europe’s own historical narrative.

The scale and direction of Caribbean sugar exports show how tightly the plantations were bound to the British refining industry. David Eltis’s data on Barbados from 1665 to 1701 shows that sugar products accounted for 91.2% of the island’s total exports in 1665–1666, 91.6% in 1688 and 1690–1691, and 95.6% in 1699–1701. He also estimates that between 1682 and 1701, Britain was the destination for more than 95% of Jamaica’s sugar exports.⁵² Driven in part by its pairing with tea and coffee, sugar consumption in Britain increased significantly over the eighteenth century, while the re-export of refined sugar to the Americas, including the Caribbean, proved highly profitable. Variable tariff rates offered the level of protection needed to support the operations of numerous sugar refineries in cities such as Bristol, Glasgow, and London. This meant that colonial policy worked in such a way that refined sugar production in Britain was protected by higher tariffs against refined sugar imports, whereas no such protection was provided for sugar refining in the Caribbean colonies. After its conquest of India, for instance, Britain added an additional 25% tariff to protect its refiners and their Caribbean sugar plantations from competition from India.⁵³

This was a part of the larger British colonial policy under which colonies could only produce raw materials for the ‘mother country’ and finished goods would only be produced in the colonial centre. The famous guideline was that not even a nail was to be manufactured in the colonies (one exception – oddly enough, given the example – was iron because shipping iron ore to England was bulky and therefore expensive). In other words, British policy was to ensure that industrial production did not develop in the colonies so that they remained dependent on the mother country. Instead, the colonies were to provide raw materials or products to facilitate industries in Britain.⁵⁴

Eltis and others argue that slavery-driven plantation economies expanded at rates on par with industrialising Britain and the US, despite their contrasting foundations.⁵⁵ By comparing the prices of sugar and enslaved people to calculate the average productivity of an enslaved person, they demonstrate that sugar production using enslaved labour was highly profitable. The analysis was carried out based on records from approximately 230,000 enslaved Africans transported to the Americas between 1674 and 1807 – about 6% of the total number of enslaved individuals disembarked in the Americas through transatlantic voyages during that era.⁵⁶ To assess changes in both the demand for enslaved labour and total factor productivity in Caribbean slavery-based agriculture from 1674 onward, the researchers combined estimates of enslaved populations and import figures with data on enslaved person sale prices.⁵⁷ Along with this, the rising price of sugar resulted in a considerable increase in the demand for enslaved labour, making the trade in enslaved individuals ever more lucrative.

In Jamaica, for instance, the growth of the enslaved population was closely correlated to the success of sugar production. Between the 1720s and 1788, the enslaved population in the five leading sugar-producing parishes increased more than sixfold.⁵⁸ This expansion was driven by rising sugar output and the high returns that planters and merchants received, especially in newly settled areas such as the northwest coast, and the number of enslaved Africans transported to Jamaica peaked in the prosperous early 1790s.

Later debates around Eric Williams’s thesis often narrowed his broader argument to a specific question: whether wealth extracted through the trade in enslaved people and the plantation system was reinvested in Lancashire’s cotton mills and other industries central to the Industrial Revolution.

Even when scholars recognise the substantial output growth of plantation economies, it is often contrasted with arguments that enslaved labour-based systems saw little to no long-term productivity improvements, that slavery and plantation agriculture faced bleak future prospects, and that Britain’s decision to end the trade in enslaved people stemmed from the economic downturn of the sugar industry.⁵⁹ The impulse behind this argument appears to be an ideological necessity to prove that capitalism with ‘free’ labour is a more efficient form of production than slavery. By this logic, the idea that plantation slavery operated according to ‘sound’ capitalist economics – with enslaved people treated as machines – must be countered.

Findlay builds on Williams’s thesis by citing economic historian Stanley Engerman, who estimated that, in 1770, close to 40% of the capital used for Britain’s commercial and industrial expansion derived from profits from the trade in enslaved people.⁶⁰ The combined profits from the trade in enslaved people and sugar constituted as much as 5% of British national income. Yet this figure vastly underestimates the total profits that Britain usurped from the trade in enslaved people and sugar. To this, the profits from sugar refining and the re-export of sugar from Britain to the global market must be added. Another way to assess returns is to compare profits on sugar plantations with those in the mother country. Investments in the colonies were four to seven times more profitable than those in England.⁶¹

In a recent study on the significance of slavery and plantation agriculture to the British economy, Klas Rönnbäck calculates the total value added by Britain’s sugar production and trade. This value-added approach captures the surplus appropriated at each stage of the sugar value chain, from the cultivation of sugarcane on Caribbean plantations to the refining, re-export, and final sale of sugar in Britain. On this basis, Rönnbäck estimates that the total value added to the British economy increased dramatically from £0.5 million⁶² during the first decade of the eighteenth century to £5.5 million a century later. The value of this trade also depended on what economists call ‘intermediate goods’ – in this case, the enslaved Africans transported from Africa to the Caribbean and treated as inputs in the production of sugar.

Rönnbäck’s approach shows that the surplus appropriated by Jamaican planters who owned enslaved people rose from 40% of subsistence costs in 1750 to 100% in 1790, meaning that, by the end of this period, the surplus they extracted was equal to what they spent on the subsistence of enslaved people. By looking at the trends in the prices of different grades of sugar during the same period, Rönnbäck also shows that there was a fourfold difference between the price of muscovado sugar in Jamaica and that of refined sugar in England, completely out of proportion to the cost of transport and refining. This indicates that the price differential was most likely a consequence of a form of transfer pricing – that is, the setting of internal prices to shift profits between the colonies and England. Simply put, there was a huge markup on refined sugar, allowing refiners in Britain to retain the profits of producing sugar in Britain. This is apparent from the high import duties on finished sugar, which hit imports of Indian sugar into Britain, and the low import duties on raw sugar from the plantations, which discouraged refining in the colonies.

Findlay has also shown that innovations in production techniques and technology significantly increased output on the plantations.⁶³ These included developing new varieties of sugarcane with higher yields, such as the Otaheite strain, introduced from the Pacific islands (such as Tahiti) in the late 1700s, along with advancements in milling technology, enhanced water management, and a growing trend toward agricultural specialisation. In parts of the Caribbean, sugar colonies increasingly shifted towards monoculture, relying on imported food rather than cultivating it locally. Overall, infrastructure also improved in many of the colonies reliant on enslaved labour, making it easier and more efficient to move export goods to ports. These improvements also supported the development of financial systems that expanded access to credit for plantation owners. Thus, many of the characteristics associated with capitalist expansion and rising productivity were already present in the slavery-based sugar plantation system.

These productivity gains translated into high returns not only for planters but also for Britain. From 1713 to 1775, Caribbean planters’ gross receipt from sugar exports to Britain rose by a factor of 3.2, driven by rising demand for sugar in England and by the profitable re-export of refined sugar to other parts of the world, which gave Caribbean sugar a vast market.⁶⁴ By 1774, raw sugar accounted for one-fifth of all British imports, surpassing all other imported goods by a wide margin. In the same period, sugar production in the Americas rose from approximately 50,000 tonnes in 1700 to around 200,000 tonnes by the close of the American Revolution. Between 1700 and 1800, British sugar imports increased sevenfold, from 430,000 hundredweight (about 21,845 metric tonnes) to three million hundredweight (about 152,407 metric tonnes), helping to make Britain a major centre, if not the centre, of the global sugar trade.⁶⁵

The Trade in Enslaved People and the Rise of Shipbuilding in Britain

Most of the sugar imported into Britain came from Caribbean plantations worked by enslaved labour. As these plantations expanded significantly from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, they required growing numbers of enslaved people. Portugal and Britain accounted for about 70% of all enslaved Africans transported to the Americas. Between 1640 and 1807, British ships forcibly transported an estimated 3.1 million Africans, of whom roughly 2.7 million survived the Atlantic crossing and were taken to British colonies in the Caribbean, North America, South America, and elsewhere.⁶⁶ The major centres for the trade in enslaved people in Britain were Glasgow, Bristol, Manchester, and London. All these towns were also major centres of shipbuilding, as the demand for ships used to transport enslaved people was the prime driving force for Britain’s shipping industry.

An important dimension with respect to the lucrative and fundamentally capitalist nature of the trade in enslaved people, and of the production system under slavery, is what economists refer to as internal markets of enslaved people – that is, the domestic trade in enslaved people within the colonies or within the Americas. Like the export and re-export of sugar, this trade was organised through distinct stages, each shaped by calculations of profit. Shipping ports were not only important as destinations for enslaved people but also commercial centres where they were bought, sold, and resold like other commodities. The profitability of the enslaved-labour system thus arose not only from plantation production but also from these successive transactions in enslaved people.

Kingston, Jamaica, is an illustrative case. The trade in enslaved individuals turned the city from a simple port into a central hub for ‘processing’, where captives were initially disembarked, then sold and allocated throughout the island. It was widely understood that for British merchants seeking their fortunes overseas, trading goods for enslaved Africans, and subsequently selling enslaved people in the Americas, offered better financial prospects than safer investments at home. Based on an estimated average price of £30 per enslaved person during the eighteenth century, the overall value of the enslaved population could have reached nearly £25 million – an amount that closely matched Jamaica’s total recorded wealth in 1774.⁶⁷ A similar dynamic existed on cotton plantations in the United States. As shown by bank data, the value of the plantation was set based on the number of enslaved people that laboured there. Plantation owners procured loans and capital from the banks by pledging enslaved persons as collateral.

To reduce the possibility of financial disaster once the enslaved Africans had landed, British merchants employed so-called ‘slave factors’ (merchant agents who managed the sale and distribution of enslaved people). The terms ‘factor’ and ‘factorage’ are linked to this older commercial meaning of ‘factory’, which later came to mean a site of manufacturing. A factorage was a yard or business through which goods were received, held, and sold – in this case, enslaved people treated as commodities. One such factor in eighteenth-century Jamaica was Thomas Hibbert, whose family was prominent in the cotton industry. He came to Kingston, Jamaica, in 1734, established a business specialising in the sale of enslaved people and later co-founded the London-based West Indian trading firm Hibbert, Purrier, and Horton. Between 1764 and 1774, Hibbert’s operation handled cargo for sixty-one ships and was involved in the sale of 16,254 enslaved Africans.⁶⁸

In the Caribbean, factors based in port towns not only traded enslaved people as commodities but also bought and held them, assessed and sorted them, managed ‘seasoning’ – the process of restoring their health from the brutal ocean voyage – and organised their sale and resale to maximise their price. Factorage was a skilled and risky business because profits depended on timing sales to planter demand, extending and collecting credit, and managing illness and death in captivity, all the while keeping holding costs down. Economies of scale ensured that much of the trade in enslaved people was concentrated in relatively few hands and dominated by a small number of merchant houses. Between 28 September 1751 and 27 May 1752, thirty-one ships carrying enslaved people arrived in Jamaica carrying 7,123 enslaved Africans who had survived the Atlantic crossing. These captives were delivered to nine factorage firms, but their sale was highly concentrated: three firms handled 83% of those arrivals.⁶⁹ Slave factors were eager to sell enslaved individuals swiftly and at the highest possible price, since delays meant increased expenses for food and upkeep. As a result, they aimed to time sales to coincide with periods of strong buyer interest and when full payment could be secured without delay. The most favourable moment for selling enslaved people was typically at the start of, and throughout, the sugar harvest, when demand from planters was at its highest.

Like other commodities, the trade in enslaved people included a retail dimension, with merchant lots or yards operating in tandem with the bulk sales conducted directly from ships. Between arrival and being put to work, most enslaved people spent time in the port towns as the property of merchants (the factors in the trade in enslaved people) who acclimatised them to slavery and to the specific islands where they had been brought. The initial buyer was also responsible for treating ill individuals with the aim of reselling them at a profit. The movement of enslaved Africans – from disembarkation at ports to holding yards in cities, and eventually to towns or plantations – intensified their suffering, especially through the frequent and often irreversible separation of family members.

Over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the market for enslaved people changed in several ways: a growing share of captives was sold through mercantile partnerships rather than directly by ship captains; enslaved people were often held for longer periods in port towns or factorage yards before being sold; and sales increasingly moved away from the earlier ‘scramble’ system – a brutal method in which buyers rushed to claim enslaved people at preset prices – toward more negotiated transactions.⁷⁰ By the end of the eighteenth century, as Trevor Burnard and Kenneth Morgan note:

Slaves were sold neither by auction nor by ‘scramble’ but by careful negotiations between astute, experienced, and knowledgeable buyers and well-informed sellers who studiously evaluated the risks that they had to take in order to gain the profits that had spurred them to enter the trade. The slave market was competitive, complex, and sophisticated: a very modern institution dealing with an age-old and particularly grim trade.⁷¹

As the demand for enslaved people expanded across the Atlantic world, prices rose significantly. Slave factors as well as the states in Africa involved in the export of enslaved people set prices in response to the ever-growing demand. The price of enslaved people was quoted against goods exported to Africa, including guns, gunpowder, and cotton textiles from India. Eltis and Jennings showed that between 1701 and 1750, the value of Britain’s gross barter terms of trade with Africa – measuring the relative worth of British exports to Africa against African exports to Britain – increased from a base index of 100 to 112, before declining sharply to 40 in 1800. According to Eltis and Jennings, while a single enslaved person could be exchanged for just two muskets in the early 1700s, by the end of the century that number had risen to at least fifteen.⁷² These figures suggest that the profits more than compensated for the rising prices of enslaved people.

This same logic appears in Ronald Findlay’s work as well. He argues that firearms, a key import in Africa in this period, could be regarded as an ‘input’ in the ‘production’ of enslaved people – that is, the exchange of enslaved people for firearms was shaped by hard economic calculations.⁷³ As states in Africa began to face diseconomies of scale (declining access to captives due to the brutality involved in raids to capture enslaved people and the destruction of the societies they targeted), the price of enslaved people went up. For those supplying them, the rising demand for enslaved people generated higher prices and greater profits, despite the brutality of their capture. The point of emphasis here is that the market of enslaved people, at both the demand and supply ends, was characterised by clear capitalist economic calculations. Hence, the trade in enslaved people can be described as ‘primitive’ only in its brutality, given the ‘sophistication’ of its economics.

Colonialism, the Trade in Enslaved People, Sugar, and the Financial System

As we have discussed, the rise of modern capitalism is intrinsically linked to plantation economies based on enslaved labour, with sugar plantations among the most important in terms of their impact on the global economy. In the earlier sections, we discussed the nature of the sugar economy that emerged in the ‘New World’. Here, we will focus on the larger global dynamics in the rise of Western Europe and its emergence as the driver of global capitalism.

Many theories have been proposed to explain this rise of the West and the decline of the rest. Most Eurocentric theorists have argued that capitalism as a world system started in Western Europe and that its integration of science into production was the dynamic force that saw it conquer the world. Within the Marxist tradition, Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems theory and Andre Gunder Frank’s dependency theory have been influential, though both depart from Marxist approaches that stress the centrality of the state to the development of capitalism, including in its imperial phase.

In this study, we do not focus on that debate directly. Rather, we emphasise that the current configuration of power and the emergence of modern capitalism date back at least around 500 years. Three points are central here:

1. The rise of merchant capital, naval power, guns, and gunpowder matters only in relation to state power and its use in trade and colonial expansion.
2. The encounters between the West European core and the other three continents (the Americas, Africa, and Asia) were profoundly different, especially between 1500 and 1800, when a handful of West European countries emerged as the major imperial powers. In the Americas, this encounter was primarily genocidal: entire civilisations and social structures were destroyed. The Americas also supplied the silver – particularly from Bolivia and Mexico – that financed Western Europe’s trade with Asia, especially with India and China, the largest economies in Asia at the time.
3. The trade in enslaved people from sub-Saharan Africa provided the Western imperial powers not only with labour for the colonies but also with a ‘commodity’ that contributed to the rise of capital in Britain, the Netherlands, and France. Enslaved people were taken to the Americas and the Caribbean to produce plantation crops, of which sugar was both the most important and the first global commodity. If we add silver as a form of commodity money, then the role of enslaved labour in the silver mines and plantations of the Americas makes the trade in enslaved people a central pillar in the rise of modern capitalism. This becomes even clearer when we consider that sugar, the other major traded commodity, was inseparable from the enslavement of people and the extraction of unpaid labour.

The rise of a capitalist financial system was intrinsic to the trade in enslaved people, its ties to the emerging colonial powers, and the rise of sugar as a global commodity. One instrument that linked the trade in enslaved people to the growth of the financial system was the asiento, a licence from the Spanish Crown that authorised traders to participate in the sale of enslaved Africans to Spanish colonies. First issued in 1513, the asiento was, until 1595, given to an individual or group of any nationality in the form of a contract to import a specified number of enslaved people in return for a royalty payment. For Spain, the major destinations of enslaved people were initially the Bolivian and Mexican silver mines. The asientos were later granted to foreign joint-stock companies: first to Portuguese companies, then in 1685 to the Dutch, in 1702 to the French, and from 1713 to 1739 to the British South Sea Company. The British South Sea Company teamed up with the Royal Africa Company, owned by the British Crown. Securing the asiento allowed Britain to dominate the trade in enslaved people from the 1740s onwards.⁷⁴

The asiento was one element in the rise of a global reserve currency. Spain also introduced a common currency called the real de a ocho in the mid-sixteenth century. Also known as the ‘piece of eight’, or the Spanish silver dollar, this currency was essentially commodity money and came to be accepted for commercial transactions throughout Asia, the Americas, and much of Europe. International trade from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries was largely conducted in silver, making the Spanish dollar globally in demand. Through the asiento system, the Spanish Crown helped organise the supply of enslaved labour to its American colonies, especially to the silver-mining zones such as those in Potosí, Bolivia. The silver extracted there was then minted into the real de a ocho, which became a widely accepted medium of international trade. It was Spanish silver that significantly expanded the global commodity market. Spain used this silver to trade with China through the Manila galleon route – the transpacific trade route linking Acapulco in Spanish America to Manila in the Spanish Philippines – as well as through other European countries engaged in trade with West and South Asia. As Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez write, ‘The singular product most responsible for the birth of world trade was silver’. This undergirded the global trade in goods, allowing Europe – Spain in particular – access to Chinese, East Indian, and Indian markets.⁷⁵

Silver mined in Spanish America – especially in Mexico and Potosí, in present-day Bolivia – accounted for 80% of the world’s supply of silver between 1494 and 1850. The Spanish silver dollar was primarily commodity money, its value equivalent to its weight in silver. The British pound sterling and the US dollar were, and are, primarily reserve currencies rather than commodity money. Given that the cost of producing silver was low compared to its market value, and that there were very large deposits of silver in Potosí, Spanish silver functioned in the same way that the British pound or the US dollar did later.⁷⁶

China had a strong demand for silver, which it received in large quantities by exporting silk and tea to European countries. At the same time, China imported cotton textiles from India, which it financed with the silver that flowed from Europe. After the British victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, Britain no longer had to send silver to India to pay for imported textiles; instead, it financed these goods using land taxes collected from Indian peasants, effectively reversing the earlier flow of silver from Britain to India. Britain’s deficit with China, however, continued, since its heavy imports of Chinese goods were still paid for with silver. That flow was reversed only later, when Britain began selling opium forcibly grown in India to the Chinese – a trade also driven by the barrel of the gun during the Opium Wars of 1839 to 1860.

With Spain no longer dominating the Atlantic trade in enslaved people, the Dutch guilder became the Atlantic world’s reserve currency in the seventeenth century.⁷⁷ Amsterdam’s near-monopoly over European sugar refining – first with sugar from Brazil and later with sugar from French Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) – and its central role in the transatlantic trade in enslaved people – with as much as 20% of the trade in enslaved people to the Americas and the Caribbean – were consolidated after the Dutch secured the asiento in 1675, with Elmina in present-day Ghana as a major hub. In other words, the Dutch guilder rose to this position because the Netherlands controlled a major share of the global trade in two major commodities: enslaved people and sugar, with the sugar islands of the Caribbean and Brazil driving demand for both commodities.

Later, the Royal African Company and Britain took over the trade in enslaved people in the Atlantic from the Dutch and became major suppliers of sugar. With the expansion of British Caribbean sugar plantations and Britain’s growing share in the trade in enslaved people, the British pound sterling emerged as the global reserve currency and London became the world’s major financial centre.

The origins of the world’s financial system lay not only in sugar and slavery but also in the way the asiento linked the trade in enslaved people to silver extraction and Asian trade. The asientos expanded the trade in enslaved people and the supply of Spanish silver to the world market, creating a global financial system that tied together the trade in enslaved people in Africa, the mining of silver in the Americas, and the trade with Asia, particularly China, India, and Southeast Asia.

We have considered some of the implications for global trade in the two major ‘commodities’ that came to define the emerging world market from the sixteenth century onwards: enslaved people and sugar. This period also saw a major increase in the circulation of gold and silver, mined in the Americas under Spanish rule. It was the thirst for gold and silver that powered Spain’s empire in the Americas. We have not focused on the genocide committed by the Spanish and other European countries, or their destruction of existing systems of production since that history demands more detailed treatment than is possible here. Instead, we have focused on the impact of the trade in enslaved people, sugar, and the emergence of reserve currencies: the Dutch guilder in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed by the British pound sterling. These developments predated the Industrial Revolution and show the hollowness of the thesis that it was the West’s leadership of the Industrial Revolution that created its hegemony over the world. Examining a longer arc of history shows that the West’s rise was instead rooted in genocide, slavery, and colonial plunder. The modern financial system must be understood as inseparable from the genocide in the Americas, the trade in enslaved people, and the plantation system built on enslaved labour by the major European powers.

Notes

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The various publishers joining this publication work to keep alive this legacy, fundamental to the struggles of the peoples of the Global South in their quest for emancipation and the construction of socialism. We thank the Fidel Castro Center, in the person of its director René González Barrios, who selected and organized the speeches presented in this book.

In a context in which the U.S. imperialist offensive seeks to strangle Cuba’s economy, its people, and its revolution, disseminating Fidel’s ideas and the policies implemented by the revolution, through this publication, is a form of solidarity. In doing so, we seek to strengthen internationalist bonds in the construction of a society free of class domination.

‘There can be nothing more anti-Marxist than dogma… nothing more anti-Marxist than the petrification of ideas’.

– Fidel Castro, closing speech, Cultural Congress of Havana, 12 January 1968¹

‘I make revolution, therefore I exist, therefore we exist’.

– René Depestre, commission I, Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968²

On the morning of 4 January 1968, in the Hotel Habana Libre, Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós opened the Cultural Congress of Havana. Over the following 9 days, 470 delegates from 70 countries would fill the commission rooms. Together, they sought to understand how imperialism operates through culture in all its dimensions and what it would mean to build an anti-imperialist front capable of confronting and dismantling it.³

The congress took place at a moment when revolution felt not only possible but imminent. Vietnam was fighting the most powerful military on Earth to a standstill. Armed liberation movements in the Portuguese colonies of Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique were building new societies in the zones they had already liberated.⁴ Across Latin America, guerrilla movements were multiplying in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The peoples of the Third World were in motion on every front. The grief over Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s murder in Bolivia three months earlier had only sharpened the collective resolve of the delegates and the movements they represented. The question was no longer whether imperialism could be defeated but by whom and on what fronts.

The Cultural Congress of Havana was organised across five commissions that mapped the fronts on which the cultural battle was being waged: Culture and National Independence (commission I); the Integral Formation of Man (commission II); the Responsibility of the Intellectual (commission III); Culture and Mass Media (commission IV); and Artistic Creation and Scientific-Technical Work (commission V).⁵ As Dorticós observed in his opening statement, it was ‘the first time, as far as we know, [that people] from all continents, belonging to different professions’ had been brought together around a common cultural mandate.⁶ The decision to invite not only cultural workers such as artists and writers but also doctors, economists, sociologists, scientists, technicians, and intellectual workers of all backgrounds was a deliberate political choice, insisting that culture was not merely an auxiliary to political and military struggle but a front of anti-imperialist struggle in its own right.

The congress was not confined to commission rooms and speeches: it reverberated across the city through billboards, posters, and radio broadcasts. In the lead-up to the congress, the Instituto del Libro (Institute of the Book) published popular editions of works by several participating writers, and films by some of the delegates were screened in cinemas across Havana. On the evening of 9 January, the exhibition Del Tercer Mundo (From the Third World) opened at the Pabellón Cuba in Vedado. Conceived as a cinematic journey rather than a conventional exhibition, it used light, sound, montage, and movement to guide visitors through the unfinished history of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Visitors moved through six zones that told the unfinished story of the Third World, from the myth of ‘virgin’ lands, through the violence and deprivation of imperial domination, and to the revolutionary struggles of the present. The exhibition drew on neon animations, comic strips, satirical film montage, and sound effects that included a horror tunnel of hunger and rotating light boxes that multiplied Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s iconic image of Che alongside the question: ‘And we, the exploited of the world, what is our role?’ The exhibition, produced collectively by over a hundred people, was visited by more than 250,000 during its three-month run, with hours that allowed students and workers to attend on their way home, as if visiting a popular cinema.⁷

The mass participation and cultural breadth of the congress embodied its foundational argument: that culture contains the totality of how a society produces and reproduces human life. As the congress’s general declaration concluded: ‘if the defeat of imperialism is the unavoidable prerequisite for the achievement of an authentic culture, the cultural fact par excellence for an underdeveloped country is the revolution’.⁸

The discussions that took place over those nine days produced one of the richest collective analyses of cultural imperialism of the twentieth century and a vision of anti-imperialist culture whose scope and ambition continue to challenge movements today to think of culture not merely as art or propaganda but as a terrain of struggle across every dimension of social life. Yet the congress has been little-studied and virtually absent from many historical accounts of the period ever since. This dossier presents a synthesis of some of those discussions, organised into five sections: the diagnosis of how cultural imperialism operates, the praxis of culture within active liberation struggles, the theoretical formulations that emerged from the congress, the vision of the new human being, and the role of the intellectual worker in the revolution.

‘I make revolution, therefore I exist, therefore we exist’ – René Depestre, Commission I, Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968.

Building Towards the Cultural Congress of Havana

The congress was the third in a sequence of internationalist events held in Havana. The first was the Tricontinental Conference (January 1966), which brought together revolutionary forces from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to build a political-military alliance against imperialism and created the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin America (OSPAAAL). In August of the following year, the meeting of the Organisation of Latin American Solidarity institutionalised armed struggle as the principal strategy of continental liberation. In 1968, the Cultural Congress of Havana extended the strategy into an ideological and cultural terrain that had, for two decades, been the object of a massive and largely covert imperialist offensive.

The congress was shaped by a material necessity to combat not only direct military aggression led by the United States (such as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion) but also a longstanding cultural and information war. In fact, it was convened as the direct counter-formation to the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the US’s flagship cultural operation during the Cold War. With an express purpose of constructing cultural hegemony, the CCF promoted the ideas that there is no alternative to the Western capitalist order, that revolutionary movements are threats to ‘freedom’, and that intellectuals should be autonomous, apolitical critics. Founded in 1950 with operations in thirty-five countries, it published more than twenty prestigious literary and political journals (Encounter in London, Preuves in Paris, and Cuadernos in Latin America, among others), sponsored conferences, funded academic exchanges, and cultivated an international network of intellectuals committed, whether knowingly or not, to a liberal anti-communist consensus.⁹ Though the revelation in 1967 that the CCF was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) discredited the organisation, the infrastructure it had built remained intact, from journals, foundations, and academic networks to habits of thought. Eric Hobsbawm, a British Marxist historian and a delegate, later described the Cultural Congress of Havana as the CCF’s ‘exact opposite’: where the CCF presented itself as a defender of intellectual autonomy while operating under imperial patronage, the Cultural Congress of Havana sought to establish the cultural infrastructure and programme for those fighting against imperialism.¹⁰

The idea for the Havana congress was born from Casa de las Américas (House of the Americas), an institution founded in April 1959 that had become Cuba’s principal cultural bridge to Latin America and the Caribbean through its journal and annual literary prize. In January 1967, the journal’s collaboration committee issued a declaration to gather intellectuals from across Asia, Africa, and Latin America in response to the 1966 Tricontinental Conference’s call for an active front against cultural intervention in the Third World. This proposed gathering became the 1968 Cultural Congress of Havana. Between October and November 1967, a National Preparatory Seminar brought together 1,343 Cuban writers, artists, scientists, and technicians in the same five-commission structure that the international congress would later adopt, with months of collective intellectual and organisational work taking place before a single international delegate arrived.¹¹

The congress’s invitation strategy was deliberately broad: Trotskyists and surrealists sat alongside members of communist parties; editors of New Left Review sat with militants of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA); existentialists and anti-psychiatrists sat alongside dependency economists and liberation theologians; and the 212 delegates from ‘developed’ nations sat alongside the 205 delegates from underdeveloped nations, including 53 from socialist countries.¹² Though the Cuban strategy sought to build an anti-imperialist front that reached the progressive sectors of the imperial centre, structural decisions ensured that Third World perspectives set the direction of the proceedings. To this end, the heads of all commissions were delegates from Third World socialist and national liberation projects. The testimony of delegates speaking from active liberation struggles carried a political and moral weight that framed the entire congress.¹³

The congress convened at a moment of sharp contradictions. Two days before the opening, Fidel Castro announced that the Soviet Union would reduce petroleum supplies to the island. Days after the closing, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba convened to act against a ‘microfaction’ of party members accused of seeking to subordinate Cuba’s revolutionary strategy to Moscow’s line.¹⁴ After the conference, the Organisation of American States (OAS) compiled an extensive classified report that called the congress a ‘subversive action of international communism’, detailing the attendees as well as their political affiliations, travel histories, and interventions at the congress.¹⁵

The Diagnosis: How Imperialism Operates Through Culture

Though the delegates came from a broad range of colonial histories and stages of struggle, they shared a diagnosis of cultural imperialism in their time. Imperialism, they argued, operates through a systematic offensive across every dimension of society and culture, including the colonisation of consciousness, control of information, extraction of intellectual labour, ‘brain drain’ of doctors and scientists from the Third World, and control of knowledge production.

During the congress, Roberto Fernández Retamar, a Cuban poet who would later lead Casa de las Américas, offered a structural account of the global order and the intellectuals it produced. The world, he argued, is divided not into ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries but into underdeveloped countries (países subdesarrollados) and what he called ‘underdeveloping’ countries, or countries that underdevelop (países subdesarrollantes) – countries whose own development depends on actively producing underdevelopment elsewhere. For Retamar, intellectuals in these ‘underdeveloping’ countries acquired knowledge through the same system: one built on the exploited labour and wealth of the Third World. Western science and art, he argued, ‘also belong to the exploited countries upon which they have been built’. Returning them, he said, would be ‘not a form of paternalism but a way of restoring to them what had been torn away’. For Retamar, this meant that left intellectuals from imperial centres have a responsibility to place their knowledge – scientific, economic, linguistic, and technical – at the service of the liberation movements whose peoples made that knowledge possible. If reparation was what Retamar demanded of intellectuals in countries that underdevelop, what he demanded of those in underdeveloped countries was the inverse: to seize the coloniser’s knowledge and its products and use them for their own liberation.

In 1971, three years after the congress, Retamar’s formulation would crystallise in his landmark essay Calibán. In it, he claimed the figure of Caliban – the enslaved subject in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, whose island Prospero has colonised – as a symbol of Latin America and the Caribbean: ‘Prospero invaded the islands, killed our ancestors, enslaved Caliban, and taught him his language in order to understand him: what else can Caliban do but use that same language – today he has no other – to curse him?’¹⁶

In the years that followed, Caliban became a shared figure through which intellectuals across Latin America and the Caribbean explored colonial domination, language, revolt, and historical agency. The congress helped to consolidate this reworking by bringing Caribbean anti-colonial thinkers including Retamar, C. L. R. James, and Aimé Césaire into dialogue in Havana.¹⁷ In 1969, for instance, Césaire published Une Tempête (A Tempest), an anti-colonial rewriting of Shakespeare’s play, and the Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite published his poem ‘Caliban’. Together with Retamar’s essay, these works contributed to an important cultural and political inversion, placing the Third World – as the collective colonised subject – at the global centre, not periphery, of history.

This struggle over language, representation, and historical agency was part of the congress’s broader diagnosis of cultural imperialism. At the congress, Fernando Martínez Heredia, who had founded the leading journal Pensamiento Crítico (Critical Thought), argued that the most insidious layer of imperialist domination was cultural colonisation.¹⁸ This form of colonisation, he said, ‘penetrates every order of life and influences even those who are fighting against it’, producing a ‘mental mould of castration’ – an inability to envisage a future attainable through their own efforts.¹⁹ This ‘mental castration’ is produced over a long period of time and across several fronts, among which is the media apparatus. During the congress, the Cuban historian Moreno Fraginals described a vast imperial communications system: 850 hours per week of US shortwave broadcasting to Latin America, two radio networks controlling more than ninety per cent of listeners, and single-frequency radios preset to US stations that circulated across the region. For Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes, mass media was imperialism’s ‘secret weapon’ – effective precisely because it was invisible.²⁰

The Indian economist Lajpat Rai showed how educational and cultural institutions had also been dominated by imperialist interests. In his country, he said, ‘The universities, institutes, schools, [and] social and cultural organisations… are infested today with North American cultural agents in the guise of visiting professors, education experts, [the] Peace Corps, and even CIA agents’.²¹ He documented a ‘programme of political castration of intellectuals’, echoing the words of Martínez Heredia, with the Asia, Ford, and Rockefeller Foundations, and the now-exposed CCF, operating openly inside the Indian academy.²²

A third front of the imperialist cultural offensive operated through the historical record and the physical archive. Delegates from the Arab world, the Korean peninsula, and southern Africa brought testimonies of cultural erasure. Gisèle Halimi, a Tunisian-born lawyer who had defended Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) members during the war of independence, brought her own testimony of cultural colonisation to the congress. Raised under the French colonial education system in Tunisia, she described the exclusion of Arab history and culture and how ‘beauty, intelligence, [and] freedom could only be French values; the source of all culture, civilisation, was France’.²³

Speaking from a country still reconstructing itself, Kim Youn Seun and Pak Hai Chin of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), barely fifteen years removed from a war in which US bombing destroyed virtually every standing structure in the north, offered the congress the concept of juche (주체). Often translated as ‘self-reliance’, juche refers to the capacity of a colonised people to become the subject of their own history rather than the passive object of imperial domination. ‘Without the complete liberation and independence of the country’, the DPRK delegates told the congress, ‘no hope can be had of a true national culture, nor can one speak of the integral formation of man’, capturing, in a single sentence, the link between the congress’s diagnosis of cultural imperialism and its horizon of the new human being.²⁴

What these testimonies described, across continents, was a single integrated colonial apparatus that captures how a society narrates itself to itself – its broadcasts, its universities, its language, its archives. Various delegates pointed out that this apparatus is also inextricably linked to the economic structure and extractivist logic of imperialism. As Alex La Guma, a novelist and former political prisoner of South African apartheid, put it: ‘We are the world’s leading gold producers, but our miners earn forty cents for eight hours of work’. While South African surgeons had performed the world’s first heart transplant in Cape Town just weeks before the Havana congress, eighty per cent of the population lived at starvation level. La Guma’s point was not to condemn scientific achievement itself but to expose the contradiction of apartheid society: immense wealth and technical capacity existed alongside mass deprivation and racial domination. The Bantu Education Act (1953) gave this system an explicitly cultural form, imposing inferior, segregated education on Black South Africans and preparing them for subordinate labour under apartheid.²⁵

The Havana congress also discussed imperialism’s material extraction of human capacity. Dr. Horacio Zalce, a Mexican doctor who presented at three of the congress’s five commissions, traced the pipeline of brain drain in his field: doctors trained at public expense in underdeveloped countries were drawn to the United States, subjected to ‘transculturation’ (the gradual adoption of another culture’s values, habits, and ways of life), and either absorbed into the imperial centre or sent back to societies where no work matched their specialisation. In Dr. Zalce’s words, ‘raw material has been exported, processed abroad, and then stolen’.²⁶ Similarly, the Cuban delegate José Fernández-Britto Rodríguez reported that between 1956 and 1965, some 40,000 Latin American scientists and technicians emigrated to the United States.²⁷ Meanwhile, Cuban researchers Aníbal Rodríguez and Fernando Barral described the colonisation of the production of knowledge about the Third World itself, in which Latin America supplied ‘scientific raw material’ – data and researchers – to US think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation, the Special Operations Research Office, and the Hudson Institute. Those institutions then returned the ‘finished products’ of that research to the region in the form of political, economic, intelligence, and military intervention.²⁸

Across the five commissions, delegates described the colonised intellectual, the colonised doctor, and the colonised scientist as raw material that is extracted, processed, and stolen. Every doctor in the periphery who is trained in the public sphere and ends up practising in the imperial centre represents a transfer of economic value – years of social investment captured through the structure of imperial dependence itself. As the resolution of Commission IV (Culture and Mass Media), concluded, ‘the mass culture industry is not limited to superstructural functions; it is today an integral part of the economic production system’.²⁹

‘If the defeat of imperialism is the unavoidable prerequisite for the achievement of an authentic culture, the cultural fact par excellence for an underdeveloped country is the revolution’. – General Declaration of the Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968.

Praxis: Liberation as an Act of Culture

The congress rejected the notion that culture is something to be restored or created only after liberation has been won. On the contrary, delegates speaking from inside the wars of national liberation argued that culture is the substance through which liberation is built, creating, in the process of struggle, new subjects, languages, institutions, and knowledge. National liberation, in this view, is not the precondition for cultural renewal – it is itself an act of culture.

Vietnam, then divided between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the North and the US-backed Republic of Vietnam in the South, was represented at the congress by two delegations: one from the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and one from the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF), the revolutionary front fighting the southern regime and its US backers. Cù Huy Cận, the vice-minister of culture of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam) and one of the country’s most celebrated poets, reported on the importance of building cultural life despite US bombardment. ‘The suppression of the peoples’ national culture’, he warned, ‘is the watchword of conquerors’. Tư Huỳnh, a renowned painter and representative of the NLF, described how the NLF’s monthly reports recorded the number of inhabitants freed from illiteracy alongside the number of enemy soldiers killed.³⁰ In a territory where an underground tunnel could serve as both school and shelter, culture and liberation were inextricably linked. In the resolution of commission IV (Culture and Mass Media), delegates noted that Vietnamese cinema teams worked from cellars in the most heavily bombed provinces. ‘Song drowns out the sound of the bombs’, they wrote.³¹

From the liberated zones of Portuguese-occupied Africa, where Angola’s armed struggle against colonialism had entered its seventh year and the wars in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique were also advancing, the Angolan poet Mário Pinto de Andrade – co-founder and first president of the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola – spoke of the cultural transformation underway in the liberated zones, where schools, printing presses, artists’ workshops, and revolutionary songs were emerging.³² A ‘semantic revolution’, he said, was breaking open colonial Portuguese, reshaping it through African linguistic structures, and generating new literary forms. Similarly, Abílio Duarte, a Cape Verdean leader of the PAIGC (African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde), spoke of the foundational blocks of the new society within the shell of the old. ‘The armed struggle’, Duarte declared, ‘is the most important cultural event that has taken place in our country since the beginning of colonisation’.³³

From Cape Verde to Cuba to Vietnam, across continents and distinct national liberation traditions, cultural life was seen not as something merely to be preserved against destruction or postponed until victory but the very medium through which liberation was being built. What linked these struggles was a shared understanding drawn from lived practice: that culture is the substance of struggle itself and that national liberation is, indeed, an act of culture. As the resolution of commission III declared, ‘Every struggle against imperialism and neocolonialism automatically becomes a struggle for the people’s access to culture: national liberation struggles thus take the beautiful and heroic form of the defence of knowledge and beauty’.³⁴

The Synthesis: Revolution as a Total Phenomenon

Alongside the diagnoses of imperialism and testimonies from active struggles, the Havana congress generated theoretical formulations for understanding culture, revolution, and the human subject. The debates at the congress were as far-reaching as the delegates that attended it, ranging from dependency theory and the relationship between science and culture to the terms on which anti-imperialist solidarity could be built. Among the interventions that generated the sharpest debate was a reckoning with négritude, a literary, philosophical, and political movement that asserted that Black peoples possessed a distinct cultural identity forged in the experience of slavery and colonialism that demanded recognition against the universalism of the West. The Havana debate spoke directly to questions still relevant today about the relationship between racial and cultural identity and class struggle.

At the congress, the Haitian poet René Depestre traced the origins of négritude as ‘the cultural operation through which Black intellectuals of Africa and the two Americas became conscious of the validity and originality of Black-African cultures’. At its origin, it reflected a double alienation of Black people, both as workers on the capitalist market and as the subjects of racialised dehumanisation. For Depestre, it expressed ‘the consciousness of this double alienation and of the historical necessity of overcoming it through revolutionary praxis’.³⁵ But separated from class analysis, négritude would soon be appropriated for counter-revolutionary uses.

In Haiti, Depestre said, ‘pseudo-sociologists’ like then dictator François Duvalier, commonly known as ‘Papa Doc’, isolated the racial question from economic development, reducing Haitian history to ‘a chaotic succession of conflicts solely between mulattoes and Blacks’.³⁶ The Black petty bourgeoisie had used this interpretation to convince the masses that they were now in power when reality could not have been further from the truth. Depestre saw what happened when négritude moved from an anti-colonial literary revolt into state ideology in the form of what became known as noirisme, the essentialist racial ideology employed by Duvalier that turned négritude’s defence of Black culture into the justification for dictatorship, terrorising the Haitian people and the left in the name of Black authenticity. Placed under house arrest, Depestre left for Cuba in 1959 at Che Guevara’s invitation.³⁷

Depestre also pointed to the well-known formulation of Léopold Senghor, Senegal’s first president and a founding thinker of négritude, that ‘emotion is Black, as reason is white’. For Depestre, the problem was not négritude’s original affirmation of Black cultures but the way such formulations could essentialise racial identity when separated from class analysis, opening the door for Black bourgeoisies across Africa and the Americas to exploit Black workers ‘in the name of a common spirituality’.³⁸ Separated from the concrete demands of revolution, négritude had become what Depestre called ‘an unacceptable Black Zionism’.³⁹ Rather, Depestre asserted, the struggle against racism must be grounded in revolutionary practice. Only by doing so, and only through revolution, he said, could négritude be ‘incorporated into the socialist revolution’ and find ‘its transcendence’ through a historical process in which ‘white and Black and mulatto cease each day more to be opposed to one another’. The new Black Orpheus, he continued, ‘will be revolutionary or will not be at all, for he is a contemporary and an ally of Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara’.⁴⁰

Where Depestre had traced négritude’s historical capture, Guinean writer and delegate Condetto Nénékhaly-Camara made a sharper philosophical claim: the values that négritude attributed to Blackness – courage, creativity, and spiritual depth – were not racial properties at all but part of ‘the common patrimony of Humanity’. To essentialise them was to hand the ruling elites of newly independent Africa the same mystifying instrument that colonial racism had used. The Havana debate was, in effect, a warning against the cultural nationalisms that would gain traction across newly independent Africa and the Caribbean. The work of building an anti-imperialist culture, therefore, requires a class analysis at its centre, without which any cultural front could dissolve into the very identities imperialism had constructed.

At the congress, the testimony of the South African poet Dennis Brutus pointed to the same problem in another form. Whereas Depestre and Nénékhaly-Camara warned against racial essentialism, Brutus showed how racial domination organised every sphere in which human beings develop. Shot in the back by police in Johannesburg in 1963 and later imprisoned on Robben Island for eighteen months beside Nelson Mandela, Brutus, a co-founder of the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee, showed how apartheid extended its dehumanisation even into sport. In the lead up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Brutus and others successfully campaigned for apartheid-era South Africa to be banned from participating. Apartheid’s racial contradictions were visible elsewhere in sport and public life, as evidenced by South African-born weightlifter Precious McKenzie being prevented from representing his own country at the Commonwealth Games, where he instead won three gold medals for England and then a fourth for New Zealand. ‘There can be no discussion of the broad development of man’, Brutus concluded, ‘while racism is permitted and tolerated in sport’.⁴¹

Taken together, these interventions showed that racism could not be overcome either by liberal inclusion or by cultural essentialism. To resist the reduction of social struggle to fixed identities, culture had to be understood in its totality. The Syrian philosopher Antun Maqdisi, a co-founder of the Arab Socialist Movement, provided a framework within which the congress’s diverse interventions found common ground.⁴² Revolution, he argued, is a ‘total phenomenon’ that must transform ‘the meaning of existence’ and ‘man as man’. He continued: ‘A revolution and a revolutionary education is a future that makes itself present, that incarnates itself, and by that very fact casts a new light on the past’.⁴³ His insistence on totality – on revolution as a transformation encompassing consciousness, the body, institutions, knowledge systems, and every dimension of social life – gave philosophical expression to the fact that culture, in its full breadth, is an essential front where liberation is won or lost.

‘A revolution and a revolutionary education is a future that makes itself present, that incarnates itself, and by that very fact casts a new light on the past’. – Antun Maqdisi, Commission II, Cultural Congress of Havana, 1968.

The Horizon: The New Human Being

If revolution is a total phenomenon, then its horizon is the formation of the new human being through revolutionary practice. This was the topic of commission II, whose title, Integral Formation of Man, announced a programme that Che Guevara had outlined in ‘Socialism and Man in Cuba’ in 1965. In his closing speech to the congress, Fidel Castro called it ‘the magnificent pamphlet that Che left us… where he expressed his idea of how the new man must be, the man of tomorrow, the man of the twenty-first century’.⁴⁴

The Havana congress translated Che’s vision into concrete terms. Along these lines, the Cuban delegate Eduardo Lara described work not only as an economic necessity but as a means of forming the new human being, citing both Che’s characterisation of work as a process that ‘purifies the best in man’ and Marx’s perspective that work is ‘the only method of producing complete men’.⁴⁵ Under Cuba’s revolutionary government, Che’s vision became praxis in the form of voluntary labour, mass participation in agricultural work, and brigades organised to clear thousands of hectares of unproductive land. These were not simply productive measures but instruments of human transformation intended to break down the division between manual and intellectual labour and the social hierarchies and prejudices associated with it. Other Cuban interventions extended this argument into the scientific, technical, and other fields, insisting that the formation of the new human being could not be separated from the development of technology. In a collective paper entitled ‘The New Man’ presented to commission II, the Cuban delegation named Che as the clearest embodiment of this ideal: ‘a worker not driven by the physical necessity of selling himself as a commodity, capable of acquiring the qualities of the human being of the future, free from the burdens of the past, who gives everything of himself without expecting any material reward, guiding each of his actions with the deepest feelings of love for the people and the oppressed of the whole world and with eternal hatred for the oppressive and criminal enemy’.⁴⁶

The resolution of commission II defined the new human being in terms that exceeded any narrow conception of culture: someone who was ‘ideologically, scientifically, technically, and culturally prepared to participate actively and consciously in the construction of the new society’ and ‘capable of carrying out productive manual tasks or intellectual activities without distinction’.⁴⁷ Health, sport, science, manual labour, military defence, and artistic appreciation were not supplementary to this vision but constitutive of it and essential to the defence of any revolution. Rather than suggesting a fixed blueprint, in its general declaration the congress insisted that the new human being ‘will change with the epochs, will transform with the pace of science and technology and of ceaseless imagination’.⁴⁸ This transformative and dynamic vision of the new human being necessitated a continual process of rehumanisation.

That process also had to confront the gendered subordination embedded in bourgeois social relations. Cuban delegates Elena Díaz and Natasha Klein pointed out that the formation of the new human being required the liberation of women from the objectification and subordination inherent in bourgeois social relations. Their intervention extended the congress’s broader argument about human transformation into a terrain that had been raised but not fully elaborated: ‘Real and effective women’s liberation can begin only from one premise: the removal of the bourgeois socio-economic structure that eliminates the oppression of man by man, of which discrimination against women is an inherent consequence’.⁴⁹ Women’s liberation was not an addendum to the revolutionary programme but a structural precondition of the integral human being the congress envisioned.

Intellectual Workers and the Revolution

Fidel Castro’s closing address raised a question that had run through every commission: what role should intellectuals – or ‘intellectual workers’, as he called them – play in the revolution? In the commission dedicated to this question, ‘responsibility of the intellectual’, many delegates challenged the tendency to demand that intellectuals become guerrillas while asking nothing equivalent of workers, technicians, teachers, or athletes. The Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti criticised the assumption that other professions fulfilled ‘a necessary function within the revolutionary sphere… [whereas] the writer or the artist only occupies the role of artículos suntuarios [luxury goods]’. The commission’s resolution developed the same argument, insisting that ‘the artist’s work is not a luxury but a social necessity’ and linking it to the congress’s vision of forming the new human being. ⁵⁰Revolution, the resolution asserted, ‘creates the conditions for the concept of the “intellectual” as a member of a cultural elite to be extinguished. A sustained and multifaceted effort will make it possible, in the future, for every person to become an integral human being – that is, an intellectual in the broadest sense of the term’.⁵¹

The view of the ‘luxury’ intellectual would not disappear by subordinating the intellectual to military action. Rather, the distinction between intellectual and non-intellectual would be overcome as the people as a whole gained access to intellectual life. In the same commission, C. L. R. James – a Trinidadian intellectual who had spent decades at the centre of Pan-African, Marxist, and anti-colonial debates – pushed the argument further. The function of the congress, he declared, should be to ‘prepare the way for the extinction of intellectuals as the personification of culture’. ⁵² In other words, the intellectual as a separate social category had to be abolished and knowledge had to return to the people who produced the material conditions that made it possible.

In his closing speech, Fidel drew these arguments together. He began by noting that the strongest response to Che Guevara’s death had come not from organisations or parties but from ‘intellectual workers’, who he described as ‘honest, sensitive men and women who had the attitude to assimilate, to understand, to admire’. Intellectuals had shown greater combativity than ‘other organisations from which greater militancy was expected’. The intellectual, then, was not a ‘luxury good’ – a notion Benedetti had criticised – but neither was it a figure to be elevated above the struggle. In his closing address, Fidel read in full a statement that had been delivered by a group of Catholic priests in commission III declaring that ‘it is Marxism that provides the most exact scientific analysis of imperialist reality’ and that Camilo Torres Restrepo, killed fighting with the Colombian guerrilla, ‘gave the highest example of a Christian intellectual committed to the people’. ‘How’, Fidel continued, ‘when we see sectors of the clergy becoming revolutionary forces, can we resign ourselves to seeing sectors of Marxism becoming ecclesiastical forces?’⁵³

‘Marxism’, he continued ‘needs to develop, to emerge from a certain rigidity, to interpret with objective and scientific sense the realities of today, to behave as a revolutionary force and not as a pseudo-revolutionary church’.⁵⁴ This image served as a synthesis of many of the testimonies shared throughout the congress: Marxism had to be interpreted and applied according to the concrete conditions and necessities of each struggle in order to realise its revolutionary potential. Culture, on this account, cannot be seen as a domain administered by bureaucracies, whether capitalist or socialist, nor constructed as a ‘pseudo-revolutionary church’. As Fidel put it in his closing speech, it had to be understood as a site of active struggle – ‘a Vietnam in the field of culture’ – and such struggle demanded a permanent revolution in thought within and across revolutionary movements and the institutions of culture themselves.⁵⁵

In fact, the delegates refused to let the congress end as a record of analysis alone. Through the Appeal of Havana, they translated the congress’s conclusions into a programme of practical anti-imperialist action.⁵⁶ This appeal called intellectuals, artists, scientists, teachers, and students to break institutional ties with US imperialism, refusing scholarships, invitations, and other forms of cooperation against what it identified as the enemy’s method: ‘A systematic effort tends to mobilise technicians, men of science, and intellectuals in general in the service of capitalist and neocolonialist interests and objectives’.⁵⁷ When the delegates left the Hotel Habana Libre, they carried with them a diagnosis, a body of theory, a vision of the new human being, and a programme of action. They returned to countries at war, under occupation, building socialism, or fighting to breathe within the institutions of the imperial centre.

The Echoes of Havana ’68

The Cultural Congress of Havana did not end when delegates left the Hotel Habana Libre. The energy of those nine days was channelled into a decade of revolutionary cultural production that constituted, in practice if not in name, the anti-imperialist front that the congress had called for. In March 1968, just weeks after the Havana congress closed, the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association published the first issue of Afro-Asian Writings, later renamed Lotus, a trilingual journal that, until 1991, would carry forward the kind of literary solidarities the congress had embodied. Cabral’s ‘National Liberation and Culture’ (1968) extended the framework that the PAIGC delegates had brought to Havana to a broader theorisation on national liberation. The Brazilian educator Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) elaborated the vision of the formation of the new human being into a method. The Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America (1971) became the continent’s counter-history. Retamar’s Calibán (1971) helped invert the existing political paradigm, placing the Third World at the centre of history and cultural production. The Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) later developed, in historical and materialist terms, one of the congress’s central diagnoses: that colonialism had not merely exploited Africa but actively produced its underdevelopment.

This wave spread across artistic fields and traditions. In the realm of cinema, Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino released La hora de los hornos (The Hour of the Furnaces, 1968) and issued their manifesto ‘Hacia un tercer cine’ (Towards a Third Cinema, 1969), which had an explicitly anti-imperialist cinematic programme. In the realm of theatre, the Brazilian playwright Augusto Boal’s Técnicas Latino-americanas de teatro popular (Latin American Techniques of Popular Theatre, 1975) declared that Latin American nations, previously ‘satellites of metropolitan art’, must become ‘the centre of our artistic universe’ and that the goal was not to distribute finished cultural products but to ‘popularise the means of production’ of art itself.⁵⁸ Nueva Canción (New Song), a Latin American movement of politically committed music rooted in popular and folk traditions, carried the struggle into song through the work of Chile’s Víctor Jara, Argentina’s Mercedes Sosa, and Cuba’s Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés. In southern Africa, inspired by Ramona Parra Brigade exiles of the 1973 coup in Chile, the cultural brigades of Mozambique Liberation Front (FRELIMO) and the paintings of the Mozambican artist Malangatana Ngwenya fused artistic production with armed liberation.⁵⁹ OSPAAAL’s poster art, designed in Havana and distributed worldwide through the Tricontinental magazine, gave the Tricontinental movement its visual language. The wave spread across the world of literature, from Ghassan Kanafani writing on literature and resistance in Palestine to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o turning to the indigenous language of Gĩkũyũ to write against neocolonialism in Kenya. These projects, and many others like them, show the breadth of the cultural front that Havana helped consolidate. Across the world, they each carried forward the congress’s central insight: that culture was not a secondary reflection of political struggle but one of its decisive fronts.

The Cultural Congress of Havana took place in January 1968, months before the student revolt in Paris’s Latin Quarter became the most famous symbol of global 1968. Yet the cultural front that exploded in the years that followed was rooted not in the university occupations of the European metropole but in the liberation struggles of the Third World. In this sense, it was Havana ’68, not the more acclaimed Paris ’68, where a ‘Vietnam in the field of culture’ was sparked. Despite this, it largely receded from the historical record along with the world that had produced it. Why, then, return to it now?

The questions the congress posed are no less urgent today. Can we develop a national culture under colonial and neocolonial domination? Is it possible to consider the formation of the new human being without a radical transformation of society? What is the responsibility of the intellectual to their medium and to the world? What should be the role of mass media and communication in relation to anti-imperialist struggle?⁶⁰

As imperialism has reached the dangerous and decadent stage of hyper-imperialism, the mechanisms that the congress identified have metastasised with the New Cold War on the Global South.⁶¹ The media apparatus exposed at the congress has become a platform monopoly, algorithmically colonising attention and desire and manufacturing consent for the imperial order. The brain drain that the congress diagnosed has been compounded by the extraction of data and digital labour, the raw material of Silicon Valley’s war economy. The ‘cultural agents’ of the CIA-backed Congress for Cultural Freedom have reappeared in the NGO-isation of knowledge production. This includes the academic networks that seek to demonise or discredit alternative political and economic systems to the Western capitalist order, from the socialist projects in China, Cuba, and Venezuela to the countries asserting their sovereignty from Western domination in Iran, Russia, the Sahel, and beyond.

The Havana congress diagnosed cultural production as part of the economic system itself. Today, as US economic hegemony enters relative decline, Washington seeks to offset that decline through intensifying militarism. The cultural front is increasingly drawn into the same logic, as culture wars, manufactured consent for confrontation, and the war machine itself operate as a single integrated apparatus.

The Havana congress was an intervention in the cultural Cold War. If the Congress for Cultural Freedom sought to produce a global intelligentsia committed to the idea that there is no alternative to the Western order, the Havana congress sought to produce the opposite: an international front of new intellectuals, scientists, doctors, educators, and artists committed to the construction of sovereign alternatives, building towards socialism. How can that example provoke us today and push people’s movements to think broadly and strategically about culture as a terrain of political struggle and to build an anti-imperialist cultural front adequate to our moment? What would it mean to do this now – to refuse the compartmentalisation that relegates ‘cultural work’ to art and propaganda while treating health, science, education, sport, and knowledge production as separate, technical domains outside the scope of political strategy? What would it mean to build institutions, networks, and forms of collective intellectual production that are embedded in the movements of the present, as the congress was embedded in the liberation struggles of its time? Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has sought to carry this tradition forward, accompanying the political struggles of today, cultivating the new intellectuals that these struggles demand, and working from within the trenches of the battle of ideas and emotions.⁶² The work of recovering the Cultural Congress of Havana is part of this effort, not as an exercise in historical nostalgia but as a contribution to the strategic thinking that movements need now.

Dorticós opened the congress by declaring that to create in a country undergoing revolutionary development ‘is not only to create a literary or artistic, scientific or technical work. It is to create a more beautiful whole – one that, in the final analysis, benefits from that scientific, literary, or artistic creation. It is to create a new people, a new country, a new society!’⁶³ To return to the Cultural Congress of Havana is to return to that proposition – and to insist that every dimension of human life is a front of imperialism and therefore a front of resistance. The battle of ideas and emotions continues, and the cultural front – in its totality – remains to be built.

‘A Vietnam in the field of culture!’ – Fidel Castro, closing speech, Cultural Congress of Havana, 12 January 1968.

Notes

Bibliography

Let us imagine Mariana, a political economist in São Paulo mandated by the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) to work through precisely this question for the movement’s own political education. In addition to working through the canon, she puts the question to an AI tool such as ChatGPT or Gemini. It returns a familiar kind of answer: a definition of the terms, a tidy summary of the relation, and a gesture towards the present. But for a researcher accountable to a movement like the MST, it is not enough.

That failure is not surprising. A serious answer to the question is more complicated than it first appears. It cannot be a definition. It has to trace the development of one of Marx’s central insights: that the growing social productivity of cooperative labour is, in the same motion, the process by which that productive power is stripped from the producers and turned against them as capital. A meaningful answer has to hold a contradiction open instead of resolving it into a tidy summary. It also has to remain faithful to what Marx actually wrote, across the Grundrisse (1857–1858), the Economic Manuscript of 1861–63, and the three volumes of Capital (1867–1894), texts he returned to across more than two decades.

A question like Mariana’s exposes, in a single stroke, why the Marxist corpus defeats the ordinary AI assistant and what it would take to build one that does not. RedMarx, the system introduced in this article, is built to meet exactly that challenge.

Marxist thought is one of the most consequential intellectual traditions of the past two centuries. Across the world, and especially in research institutions in the Global South, it remains a working framework rather than an academic curiosity. Marxist political economy supplies the categories through which researchers read agrarian crises, extractive economies, financialised states, labour regimes, and the international division of labour.

And yet anyone who has tried to ground a piece of analysis directly in Marxist sources knows the difficulty.

The corpus is vast. The collected works of Marx and Engels alone run to scores of volumes and millions of words, multiplied many times over by Lenin, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Mariátegui, Mao, Nkrumah, Jones, First, Amin, and others. The categories themselves are dialectical: ‘value’, ‘class’, ‘state’, ‘imperialism’, and many more carry no static definition but acquire their meaning through the relations they describe and the historical moment in which they are deployed. A researcher like Mariana cannot simply quote a sentence from Capital (1867–1894) and treat the matter as settled. She must know which formulation to deploy, from which work, under which conditions, and how later writers extended or contested it.

Large language models change the calculation, but only under strict conditions. A researcher no longer needs to search manually through every page of every relevant volume to verify how a concept is treated across the corpus, if, and only if, she has a system that searches the original works faithfully, surfaces the relevant passages, and tracks where every claim came from. The ‘if and only if’ clause is pivotal. A generic chatbot will paraphrase, summarise, and, as is by now well documented, fabricate: one widely cited study found that 55% of the bibliographic citations generated by ChatGPT-3.5 were entirely fabricated.

Moreover, a meaningful tool must produce dialectical analysis, not reproduce books. It must reason over the corpus and return its own argument, pointing the reader to where each claim can be checked instead of reprinting long passages from the original works. The result must be interpretive: a line of reasoning the researcher can stand behind, never a substitute copy of the source.

These questions deserve more than a generic chatbot can offer, and so Global South Insights (GSI), a research project of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, developed RedMarx to meet that need. RedMarx is a research system configured for work in the Marxist tradition. The sections that follow explain the problem it was built to solve, the architecture GSI developed, and the evidence from its use.

1. The Problem RedMarx Is Built to Solve

No serious research tool can be built on the promise that AI will simply ‘read Marx for you’. The difficulty is not only that the corpus is large, but that generic tools fail in predictable ways when they encounter it. They flatten dialectical movement into definitions, blur later interpretation into the primary voice, smooth over political and translational disputes, and mistake retrieval for understanding.

1.1 Why the Marxist Corpus Resists Generic AI

Generic AI fails first by flattening development into definition. The treatment of the state in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852) is not the treatment in The Civil War in France (1871), and neither maps directly onto Lenin’s reformulations in State and Revolution (1917). In the Grundrisse (1857–1858), ‘contradiction’ carries a Hegelian sense of the motor of development; by Volume I of Capital (1867), it has become a structural tendency towards crisis. A useful research tool has to hold these formulations side by side, recognise their historical specificity, and trace how a category develops, instead of collapsing them into a single averaged paraphrase.

Take a single question put to two systems: how does a commodity come to express its value in another? Google’s NotebookLM, benchmarked against RedMarx, answered with one tidy sentence – in the simple form, ‘the coat serves as a particular equivalent for the linen, reflecting the linen’s value in the coat’s bodily form’ – and moved on. The statement is accurate and inert. The equivalent form has been named and then left as a static fact of exchange.

RedMarx, given the same question, did not stop at naming the equivalent form. It unfolded what Marx called the three peculiarities of the equivalent form as a chain of reversals: use-value ‘becomes the form of manifestation, the phenomenal form of its opposite, value’; concrete labour ‘becomes the form under which its opposite, abstract human labour, manifests itself’; and private labour ‘takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form’. Each step is a particular, concrete, private determination standing in for its universal, abstract, social opposite – and only by tracing that movement does the ‘enigmatical character of the equivalent form’ come into view, along with its connection to the money-form (Capital, Volume I (1867), Chapter 1, Section 3).

One system mentions the equivalent form while the other shows why it is the seed of the money-form. That gap, between a label and a logical chain, is exactly the gap generic tools cannot close on a dialectical corpus.

A second failure follows from a generic tool’s tendency to silently blend later commentary into the primary voice, presenting a 1970s reading as though it were Marx’s own. For a researcher, that distinction matters as she needs to know whether a category is being formulated by Marx, extended by Lenin, Luxemburg, or Amin, reconstructed through dependency theory, or debated in contemporary scholarship.

Finally, the corpus is politically contested, and much of it exists only in translation, where the choice of words is itself a political act. There are partisan editions, hostile translations, and theoretical traditions that treat the same texts in fundamentally incompatible ways. A research system that smooths over these tensions in the name of producing a confident answer ends up misleading the researcher.

How sharp these failures are became clear the hard way. In GSI’s first experiments, the system retrieved the correct passages from the correct texts, and the human experts still rated the answers as shoddy and careless in how they handled Marxist concepts. The problem was not retrieval but interpretation. Pulled out of the surrounding scholarship, an isolated passage of Marx leaves even a capable model reasoning from first principles rather than from the established understanding of what the passage means. It reads the words at their ordinary, plain-English face value, without the technical sense the tradition has given them, and loses the conceptual context that makes the passage intelligible. Solving that turned out to require the rest of the system described below.

1.2 What Researchers Actually Need

In practice, a researcher approaching the Marxist corpus needs four things that generic AI tools do not provide, each taken up in Section 2. The first is faithful retrieval of original passages rather than paraphrase. When a section of an article rests on Marx’s argument in the Grundrisse (1857–1858), the researcher needs the actual paragraph, in context, with its chapter and section identified. This is the job of MetaRAG retrieval (Section 2.2).

The second is a dialectical, historically aware analytical scaffold, a way to see the conceptual structure of the question before drafting, including which categories are in play, how they relate, which earlier formulations are foundational, and which later developments extend or revise them. This is the work of the knowledge graph (Section 2.1). The third is interpretation anchored in established scholarship rather than reasoning from scratch, so the system reads a passage the way the field reads it instead of reading an isolated chunk without the conceptual context that gives it meaning. This is the work of the research loop and its embedded skills (Section 2.3). The fourth is traceable, section-level citation in the final output, so that any reader or reviewer can follow each claim back to the exact passage that supports it. This is a precondition for serious academic and political work (Section 2.4).

RedMarx is built around these requirements, applying them in proportion to the task. The goal is not to turn every sentence into a forensic fact-check, as one would for a factual report, but to give the researcher a rigorously sourced foundation for deep, dialectical thinking about complex theory.

2. How RedMarx Works

RedMarx takes a research question as input and produces a research report as output. RedMarx is built on MetaRAG – GSI’s institutional retrieval-augmented generation infrastructure – configured for work in the Marxist tradition. MetaRAG is ‘meta’ in a precise sense. Rather than acting as a single research agent, it is the layer that builds research agents on demand. Faced with a question, it probes the available knowledge, works out what a strong answer would require, and assembles the right combination of search, analysis, and writing strategies for that particular question.

In GSI’s AI for Social Science architecture, MetaRAG is the verified retrieval-and-augmentation substrate on which the institute’s research systems are built; RedMarx is what that substrate becomes when a research team points it at a particular body of knowledge and shapes it with that field’s own concepts. With MetaRAG’s methodology and toolchain, a domain expert who supplies good source material, a sound analytical framework, and a carefully constructed knowledge graph can build a systematic research engine of her own, without writing code. Mariana’s question, on the relation between the socialisation of labour and the rising organic composition of capital, offers a useful thread for following what happens in between, including the role human experts play in shaping the system at each step.

2.1 The Knowledge Graph: A Dialectical Skeleton for Analysis

RedMarx’s most distinctive feature is its use of a layered conceptual knowledge graph of Marxist political economy, which serves as the analytical skeleton for every research question.

When RedMarx receives a question, it does not begin by searching the corpus but by reasoning over the knowledge graph. The graph encodes the major categories of Marxist political economy – value, labour, capital, class, state, imperialism, mode of production, and others – as a layered, relational structure rather than a set of flat tags. Categories are organised hierarchically from general to specific, dialectically through a concept’s opposites and developments, and historically through the reformulation of a category across periods and traditions. These relations are drawn from a controlled vocabulary of social-scientific predicates – ‘contradicts’, ‘mediates’, ‘reproduces’, ‘commodifies’, ‘alienates’, ‘exploits’, ‘determines’, ‘transforms into’, and others – so that the graph captures genuinely Marxist relationships rather than generic ‘is-related-to’ links.

For Mariana’s question, the graph yields a skeleton before any text is fetched: socialisation of labour stands as the real social content, while organic composition of capital – the ratio of a firm’s investment in machinery and materials to its investment in labour – is its value-form expression. The two are linked through cooperation, machinery, and the division of labour to the concentration and centralisation of capital, and onward to the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. That structure is the analytical plan, the dialectically and historically aware scaffold on which the rest of the research hangs.

Discovery chains RedMarx traverses for Mariana’s question, from a knowledge graph of 35 concepts and 32 relations

The graph, a carefully constructed analytical map rather than a dictionary, is built and maintained by GSI’s domain experts to reflect the actual structure of the tradition. This is where expert labour is most concentrated, and two features deserve emphasis. The first is historical disambiguation: each concept carries a time-period annotation – a category traced ‘1844 → 1857 → 1867’, for instance – so the graph can distinguish the early formulation from the mature one instead of averaging them. The second is sense-splitting, when the same term appears in two distinct theoretical settings with little overlap in meaning. In such cases, the graph splits it into separate senses rather than fusing them, letting the system respect the dialectical movement of Marx’s vocabulary instead of erasing it. The impact of this expert curation was evident when GSI tried to extract concepts from a given source document. When guided by a generic, default ontology, the extraction pipeline drew only a handful of concepts while the purpose-built Marxist ontology helped draw several hundred concepts from the very same text.

This step matters because it makes the system’s analytical assumptions visible, allowing Mariana to inspect the skeleton before any retrieval happens and adjust it if a category is missing or misplaced. The graph is a working object, not a black box.

2.2 MetaRAG Retrieval: Going Back to the Original Texts

Once the skeleton is in place, RedMarx hands each of its nodes – each concept, each claim – to MetaRAG, configured here against a curated corpus of Marxist works. That corpus is itself an artefact of careful expert preparation. The source volumes are digitised through a two-pass vision-language reading process, with one model reading each scanned page and a second refining and cross-checking it. This allows tables, formulae, and the original printed page numbers to survive intact, so that every passage can later be cited back to the book and page it came from.

The instruction to MetaRAG is straightforward. For every concept and every position identified in the skeleton, locate the original passages in the corpus and return them with their chapter and section identifiers. Do not paraphrase. Do not summarise. The downstream analysis depends on having the real text in front of the system, not a synthesised approximation.

A second, subtler commitment operates here too. When RedMarx moves from finding a passage to analysing it, it does not reason from the isolated snippet. Chunks do the work of finding – they are how the system locates the relevant passage – but they are not the unit it then reasons over. Having used the chunk as a pointer, the system discards it and ingests the entire surrounding source document – the full chapter rather than the fragment – so that the author’s overarching argument frames the reading.¹ This is the practical answer to the loss of conceptual context described in Section 1.1, since meaning is no longer artificially confined to the unit that happened to match the query.

This is where the difference between RedMarx and a generic chatbot becomes most visible. A generic system will produce fluent prose about Marx’s theory of ground rent without ever consulting Volume III of Capital (1894). RedMarx is constructed to refuse this shortcut. The retrieval step is the foundation, and everything downstream is built on direct engagement with the sources.

2.3 The Research Loop: Reading the Way a Scholar Reads

Faithful retrieval is necessary but not sufficient. As GSI’s early experiments showed, a system can hold the right passages and still interpret them carelessly. RedMarx therefore wraps retrieval in an iterative research loop – plan, harvest, analyse, synthesise – that works through a question the way a researcher like Mariana would: scoping it, gathering evidence, assessing whether the evidence is sufficient, and only then drafting.

Two things give this loop its rigour. The first is an embedded expert method. How RedMarx investigates a Marxist question – how to navigate the corpus, how to disambiguate a contested concept, how to read a passage against the consolidated scholarship rather than from first principles – is not hard-coded. It lives in editable instruction documents, distilled from the primary and secondary literature through retrieval work carried out with domain experts. These documents capture how an experienced scholar interrogates a Marx text. Because they are plain documents, a domain expert can revise the system’s method directly by adding an interpretive framework, which will take effect immediately.

This is also how the team corrected an early failure in which the system merely stacked retrieved points in a flat list, like a student reciting facts, instead of building the logical relations between them. Teaching the system, through these documents, to write as serious scholarship demands turned a stack of retrieved points into a genuine argument.

The second is a human checkpoint. After the system has scoped the question and surveyed the available evidence, it pauses for the researcher to review and approve the direction before committing to full analysis. The human is not a spectator at the end of an automated process but is in the loop at the decisive moment. Work in progress is preserved at every step, so the path from question to report stays auditable rather than opaque.

2.4 Synthesis: Faithful to the Text, Footnoted to the Section

The final stage takes the conceptual skeleton, the retrieved primary passages, and the researcher’s question, and produces a synthesised research report.

The synthesis is bound by a strict requirement that every substantive claim that rests on a source must carry a footnote that identifies the source down to the chapter and section. Because each retrieved passage arrives already tagged with its origin, citations are born with their sources rather than reconstructed afterwards. This removes the risk of the fabricated or mismatched citation that plagues generic tools. A single footnote in a RedMarx report resolves not merely to a book but through its full structure – Book → Part → Chapter → Section → Subsection – so that ‘Marx on the form of value’ becomes, concretely, a pointer to Section 3, ‘The Form of Value or Exchange Value’, in Volume I of Capital (1867). The reader of a RedMarx report, whether a colleague, a reviewer, or a critic, can follow each substantive claim back to the precise passage in the original work that grounds it.

For academic work, this satisfies the rigour that serious scholarship requires. For political work, it matters because claims about what Marx, Lenin, or Gramsci argued must be checkable, particularly when those claims are contested. A report whose footnotes resolve to chapter and section is a report that can be defended.

Traceability serves thought; it is not an end in itself. The footnotes exist so that a researcher can build on the sources with confidence, shifting energy from the hunt for passages to argument, judgement, and the dialectical work that is the point. On Mariana’s question, for instance, citation is only the starting point. What matters is the argument RedMarx is able to sustain: that the rising social productivity of labour is the very process through which labour is subordinated to capital. Where Marx’s texts leave that tension genuinely open, the system marks it as such, with sources on both sides, rather than forcing the corpus into a resolution it does not contain. That is the register RedMarx is built for.

3. Current Status: Evidence from Use

RedMarx is being trialled by GSI researchers, who have so far run it on 16 substantive questions of the kind reproduced throughout this article, across 29 logged sessions – five of those questions selected for the controlled four-system benchmark reported below, the other 11 developed as full research reports – and judged the results to be strong.

That judgement is not merely impressionistic. In a controlled benchmark, five expert-selected questions on Marxist political economy were scored by human evaluators against a six-dimension rubric – comprehensiveness, representation of contradictions, terminological precision, dialectical exposition, critical reflexivity, and analytic depth. Together, these produced 118 structured pass/fail checks per system.

RedMarx’s full configuration scored 118 out of 118, or 100%. A leaner configuration of the same system, running on the substantially cheaper Kimi K2.5 rather than a frontier model, scored 97.5%. Claude Opus 4.7 with no retrieval at all scored 83.1%, and NotebookLM scored 50.8%. The decisive gap appeared not in surface vocabulary, where every system could name the categories, but in the dimensions that test Marxist understanding: surfacing internal contradictions, maintaining critical and historical reflexivity, and sustaining analytic depth. There, the weaker tools produced clean taxonomies that sanded off Marx’s critical edge. NotebookLM’s result should be read as a mismatch of purpose rather than a simple failure: it is built to answer in seconds, where RedMarx is built for analyses that take 10 to 15 minutes. One difference did not need a rubric to detect: across the same five questions, the two retrieval systems produced 216 references resolving to a named chapter or section, and the two systems without retrieval produced none at all. The benchmark matters because it tests the difference between summarising Marxist vocabulary and reasoning dialectically with it.

These claims can be checked against the answers themselves. Four questions are published in full – each with RedMarx’s answer, the knowledge graph and discovery chains behind it, and a general AI tool’s answer to the same question – in GSI’s GitHub repository.

The benchmark was run on a restricted, canonical slice of Marx on which even an unaided model performed respectably. That performance is expected to fall away – and the value of retrieval and the knowledge graph to grow – as the corpus expands to Lenin, Mao, and lesser-known texts that demand reasoning across authors. That expansion is the subject of the next section.

The intention is not to keep RedMarx as an internal tool. The conditions that produced it – the difficulty of the Marxist corpus, the inadequacy of generic AI, the centrality of dialectical thinking, and the need for source fidelity – are not unique to one institution. RedMarx will prove useful to other research collectives, party intellectuals, popular educators, and independent scholars who work within or alongside the Marxist tradition.

4. The Road Ahead

A research system is never finished. Several directions of work are already underway, in rough order of immediacy.

Deepening quality and the research loop: The nearest-term work is on rigour itself. The aim is to mature the research loop so that the system can review its own draft, identify what is missing, return to the sources, and try again for a limited number of rounds before a human reviews the result. In other words, the system should begin to ask of its own work what a careful researcher would ask: is the argument complete, are the sources sufficient, and has anything important been missed?

Broadening the corpus: In parallel, GSI is steadily integrating further primary sources and well-curated secondary literature. Marxism is not a closed canon but a living tradition, with major contributions across languages, regions, and historical moments. GSI will continue to add carefully selected works, with attention to translation quality, editorial provenance, and licensing, scaling the corpus from the political economy core towards the wider canon of Lenin, Mao, and others, so that RedMarx’s retrieval reflects the full breadth of the tradition rather than a narrow slice. Because so much of that tradition lives in translation, expanding across languages is a central part of this work, not an afterthought.

Richer analytical frameworks and information-gathering strategies: Beyond the current knowledge graph, GSI is developing additional analytical frameworks – conjunctural analysis, world-systems decomposition, value-chain analysis, and social-formation analysis – that a researcher can invoke when the question calls for them. Each brings its own way of reading the corpus.

Cross-traditional and cross-temporal research methods: Some of the most important contemporary questions cannot be answered from inside a single theoretical school or a single historical period. RedMarx is being extended with methods that allow comparison across traditions – reading dependency theory and world-systems theory against each other on the same question, for example – and across time. These methods help trace how a category evolves from its classical formulation through its mid-century reconstruction to its contemporary use.

Connecting to deeper research: Finally, RedMarx does not have to work alone. A faithfully sourced, dialectically structured analysis of a theoretical question is exactly the kind of input that a larger research process needs. Work is underway to let RedMarx feed its grounded output into more comprehensive research systems, so that rigorous theoretical reasoning becomes a building block of larger investigations rather than an endpoint.

The deeper reason for building the instrument in-house, rather than waiting for commercial platforms to serve the field, is that ownership shapes possibility. When the system belongs to the institution that uses it, the methodology embedded in it can be the one that institution actually believes in. The researcher can ask the system harder questions, configure it for finer-grained work, and, most importantly, direct human attention to the questions that only humans can answer. The mechanical work of locating passages, cross-checking citations, and mapping conceptual relations can be entrusted to the system. What remains for the researcher is the harder and more valuable work of judgement, synthesis, and political imagination.

5. The System Retrieves; the Human Thinks

A tradition is kept alive not by being quoted but by being thought with. For a century and a half, the Marxist canon has demanded more of its readers than any single lifetime can give: more volumes than one scholar can hold in view, more contexts than one mind can keep straight, more debates than one career can master. The danger is not that the texts disappear, but that the collective capacity to read them as a whole begins to thin. RedMarx is built against that attrition.

It also matters who builds the instrument. The capacity to work with a tradition is not a neutral convenience; it is infrastructure. When the tools that mediate access to the canon are built on someone else’s terms and behind someone else’s paywall, they shape the questions researchers can ask and the sources they can reach. Building RedMarx is a way of refusing that dependence; it is a small act of reclamation that returns part of the means of reading the tradition to those who work within it and gives a movement more control over the conditions in which it thinks.

RedMarx is also built by people, for people. Movement leaders and cadre posed the political questions the system exists to answer; scholars chose the most authoritative sources; retrieval and domain experts shaped the dialectical framework together; those who know the tradition drew the knowledge graph by hand; and AI specialists engineered the research loop that binds it together. No part of RedMarx thinks on its own; every part extends someone’s thinking. The human is its origin and its end – the question begins in a real political need, as Mariana’s mandate from the MST did, and the answer is meant to be carried back into a real argument and put to work. What looks like a machine is, in truth, a collaboration among experts from different fields, each multiplying the others’ reach.

RedMarx should not be mistaken for magic, or for a substitute for the disciplined reading that serious scholarship has always required. It is not a shortcut around that labour but a tool for absorbing the mechanical work of locating passages, checking citations, and mapping conceptual relations. Ultimately, judgement, synthesis, and political imagination remain the domain of the researcher. The system retrieves; the human thinks. That division of labour is not a weakness of the tool but the reason for building it.

Researchers and organisations interested in RedMarx, or in adapting the approach to another body of work, can write to GSI at contact_gsi@thetricontinental.org.

Notes

¹ Full-document ingestion processes a large volume of text for each answer, and so requires a model with a one-million-token context window. This currently restricts RedMarx’s full configuration to frontier models; the leaner configuration described in Section 3 runs on smaller models at significantly lower cost.

Imagine this: you and a teammate are writing a book together. Your teammate drafts the outline first, then you add and revise content. If every update is shared by manually sending files back and forth, your computers quickly fill up with copies like ‘final-v2-real-final’. Even worse, if your teammate updates something without telling you, and you edit the same part, you’ll have to manually compare and decide whose version to keep.

To solve this, you decide to use a ‘middleman’ to manage all versions in one place: always fetch the latest version before editing, submit changes after editing, and roll back whenever needed. Git plays exactly that ‘version middleman’ role.

Install Git

Install Git with an Agent

Open your Agent tool, enter the following, then wait for the task to finish:

Please help me install and config git, my name is 'Your Name', my email is 'email@example.com'.

Git does not strictly require a real username or email. It will still work with ‘Your Name’ and ’email@example.com’. But once you push to the cloud, others can see your commit identity, so it’s better to use your real nickname and email.

Basic Git Operations

Open Visual Studio Code (VS Code), choose a working folder, then click the branch-like Source Control icon in the left sidebar.

At first, there is no version history yet. Only projects tracked by Git will record file history, so it’s best to initialise your repository early. Click Initialise Repository to turn the current folder into a tracked repository.

This is the main Git workspace. The CHANGES area at the top is for reviewing and handling edits, such as staging or undoing. The GRAPH area below shows commit history. You can think of each commit as a reviewable and shareable snapshot.

After creating a test file in the folder, you’ll see ‘U’ next to the file name. That means the file is untracked. Git doesn’t know what baseline to compare against yet, so you need to add it to tracking first.

Click the ‘+’ button shown below to add the file to the staging area (Staged Changes).

Now the file moves into Staged Changes, and the left-side symbol becomes ‘A’, meaning this is a newly added file (Added).

Now change the text to ‘hello, this is a new text’.

Back in the Git panel, the file changes to ‘M’, meaning it has been modified. The diff editor on the right shows changes: red means deleted content, green means added content.

In this case, ‘hello, this is the original text’ is removed and ‘hello, this is a new text’ is added.

Git tracks changes line by line. Even if you change just one word, Git may show it as deleting the old line and adding a new one.

If you’re not happy with the file and delete it, you’ll see a file with ‘D’ in ‘Changes’, meaning it has been deleted.

To undo this action, click the undo button highlighted below to restore the file.

You can also click Unstage Changes to move staged content back to the ‘Changes’ area.

When you’re satisfied with content in ‘Staged Changes’, write a commit message and click Commit to save a new version.

Note that a commit message is required. For example, you could use messages such as ‘Create the initial version’ or ‘Revise Part B of Article A’. A clear commit message helps others understand what this commit changes without having to inspect the content.

If you don’t enter a commit message and try to commit, VS Code will open a new tab prompting you to provide one before the commit can be completed.

In this tab, enter your commit message below the lines beginning with ‘#’, then save and close the tab and click Commit again.

You can now see this new commit in the Graph view.

If your project has a complex directory structure or includes a large number of files, locating a specific file in the default interface can become difficult. Fortunately, you can adjust the display settings to make navigation easier. In the following example, we created a folder and a subfolder, each containing a file.

In the default view, it is not immediately clear which files belong to which folders. As the number of files increases, navigating the list becomes increasingly difficult.

To display the files in a hierarchical directory structure, click ··· → View & Sort → View as Tree. The file list will then be organised like the VS Code File Explorer, allowing folders to be expanded and collapsed.

The commit history can also be displayed as a tree. Click ··· → View as Tree in the graph view to switch the commit history to a hierarchical tree layout.

When comparing a file with its previous version, VS Code displays the differences in the inline view by default when the available editor space is limited. If you prefer the traditional side-by-side comparison, click ··· → Use Inline View When Space Is Limited to disable the automatic inline view. The changes will then be displayed in two editor panes whenever space permits.

Remote Repositories

Many platforms provide remote Git repository hosting services, such as GitHub, GitLab, and GitCode. In this section, we will introduce the two most widely used platforms: GitHub and GitLab.

Before connecting to either of these repositories, we will first introduce the most common Git authentication method: SSH keys.

Although the name may sound a little technical, the idea is actually quite simple. You can think of an SSH key as a special digital key generated by your local computer. After you register it with the remote repository, your computer can recognise itself automatically, allowing you to connect to the repository and use Git more conveniently without signing in every time.

Configure Git Identity (SSH)

Method 1: Get an SSH Key with Agent

Open your Agent tool and enter:

Please generate a SSH key for me and show me the public key to configure on gitlab.

Once the task finishes, you’ll see the public key content ready to copy.

Method 2: Get an SSH Key with Terminal

Exposing your SSH key to an agent may pose security risks. This section explains how to generate and use an SSH key without relying on the agent.

Open Terminal and run the following commands. Replace ‘you@example.com’ with your email (keep the quotes).

ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C 'you@example.com'
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

If prompted with ‘Enter file in which to save the key…’, just press Enter.

Then you’ll see one line starting with ‘ssh-ed25519’ – that’s your public key.

GitHub

Now we can connect to a remote repository using the SSH key we generated earlier. GitHub is currently the world’s largest code hosting platform and is widely used for open-source software development. It hosts countless popular and influential projects. Before proceeding, you’ll need to create a GitHub account if you don’t already have one.

Create a GitHub Account

Open https://github.com/signup?source=login to create a GitHub account. You can sign up using a Google or Apple account, or simply register with any other email address by completing the registration form.

After signing up and logging in, you will be taken to your GitHub dashboard.

Add Your SSH Public Key to GitHub

Click your profile avatar in the upper-right corner and select Settings.

In the left navigation panel, open SSH and GPG keys, then click New SSH key.

Enter a descriptive title for the key, paste your SSH public key into the Key field, and save it by clicking Add SSH key.

Create a New Remote Repository

Click your profile avatar and navigate to Repositories.

Click New to create a new repository.

Enter a repository name, choose its visibility, and then click Create repository. A Public repository can be viewed by anyone, while a Private repository is accessible only to you and collaborators you explicitly invite.

Connect a Local Repository to a Remote Repository

There are two common ways to connect to a remote Git repository:

• SSH: the repository URL begins with ‘git@’. This method requires you to configure an SSH key on your machine. Once set up, you can authenticate securely and perform operations such as ‘push’, ‘pull’, and ‘fetch’ without entering your credentials each time. It is the method most commonly recommended for regular management.
• HTTPS: the repository URL begins with ‘https://’. This method does not require an SSH key and is generally easier to set up. But some environments or workflows may have authentication restrictions.

In this example, we will use SSH to connect to a remote repository. On the repository page, click SSH, and copy the repository URL.

Open Agent and enter the following, then paste the copied SSH URL into the chat and wait for the task to finish:

Please help me push this folder to this Git repository.

Connect to an Existing Git Repository

On the repository page, click SSH, and copy the repository URL.

Choose a local working directory and open Agent. Enter the following, then paste the copied SSH URL into the chat:

Please clone this project for me.

Once the task is complete, the repository will be cloned to your local machine.

A cloned repository is typically ready to use without any additional configuration.

As long as your GitHub account has permission to access the repository, you can pull the latest changes from the remote repository and push your own commits whenever needed.

Push and Pull

After connecting your local repository to a remote repository, you’ll typically keep the two in sync as you continue working.

Click Push to upload your local commits to the remote repository. Click Pull to download the latest changes from the remote repository and update your local copy.

GitLab

This section introduces GitLab. Unlike GitHub, GitLab provides an open-source Community Edition that can be deployed on your own servers at no cost.

GitLab offers a comprehensive feature set, making it a popular choice for internal development environments in many organisations. If you need to self-host your development platform or retain full control over your data, GitLab is generally a better choice than GitHub.

Create a GitLab Account

Most organisations that use GitLab host their own GitLab server. In these cases, the system administrator usually provides you with an account, so you simply sign in using the company’s GitLab website.

GitLab also offers an official cloud service similar to GitHub. However, some advanced features require a paid subscription, so it is generally less popular than GitHub for public repositories. If you only want to learn GitLab or follow this tutorial, you can use the official GitLab cloud service.

Open the following website and sign in: https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in/

After signing in, you’ll see the GitLab home page. Since GitLab is open source, the interface may look different depending on the version or deployment. However, the workflow remains largely the same, with only minor differences in the locations of some buttons.

Add Your SSH Public Key to GitLab

Click avatar →  Preferences →  SSH Keys to enter the key configuration page.

At this point, you’ll see no SSH keys configured yet.

Click Add new key to create a new key entry.

Paste the public key you copied into the ‘Key’ input box, then click Add key.

After this, the key is active.

Create a New Remote Repository

Open your Git hosting platform, then click Projects →  New project.

Click Create blank project.

Fill in the following:

• Set Project Name, preferably the same as your local project folder.
• Choose your username under Project URL.
• Visibility Level controls who can see the repo: ‘Private’ (invite only), ‘Internal’ (visible to users in the same organisation), ‘Public’ (visible to everyone).
• In Project Configuration, it’s recommended to uncheck Initialise repository with a README. Otherwise, the remote repo starts with a README and your first push may fail due to mismatched histories.

After filling in everything, click Create project.

Connect a Local Repository to a Remote Repository

There are two common ways to connect to a remote Git repository:

• SSH: the repository URL begins with ‘git@’. This method requires you to configure an SSH key on your machine. Once set up, you can authenticate securely and perform operations such as ‘push’, ‘pull’, and ‘fetch’ without entering your credentials each time. It is the method most commonly recommended for regular management.
• HTTPS: the repository URL begins with ‘https://’. This method does not require an SSH key and is generally easier to set up. But some environments or workflows may have authentication restrictions.

In this example, we will use SSH to connect to a remote repository.

Inside the repository page, click Code → Copy URL, and copy the URL on the right side of Clone with SSH.

Open Agent, enter the following, then paste the copied SSH URL and wait for completion:

Please help me push this folder to this Git repository

Connect to an Existing Git Repository

Inside the repository page, click Code → Copy URL, and copy the URL on the right side of Clone with SSH.

Choose a working directory and open Agent. Enter the following, then paste the copied URL into the chat box:

Please clone this project for me.

After the task completes, the project will be cloned locally.

A cloned project usually needs no extra setup. As long as you have repository permission, you can push to and pull from the remote repository.

Push and Pull

After connecting your local repository to a remote repository, you’ll typically keep the two in sync as you continue working.

Click Push to upload your local commits to the remote repository. Click Pull to download the latest changes from the remote repository and update your local copy.

Conclusion

Git helps you replace scattered local copies with a structured workflow: initialise a repository, commit meaningful changes, and sync them with a remote repository. That single workflow does three jobs at once. It tracks your work, so every version stays in the history and mistakes can be undone. It transports it, so the same project can be pulled down onto a new laptop, a colleague’s machine, or a server without anyone zipping up folders. And it shares it, so other people can read, review, and build on what you’ve written.

So once your project lives on GitHub, your collaborators no longer wait for you to send them a file. They clone the repository, pull your latest commits before they start, and push their own when they finish, and every change arrives with a name, a date, and a message explaining what it was for. There are no more ‘final-v2-real-final’ copies and no guesswork about whose version is newer, because there is one shared history and everyone works from it.