Berlin [TDR®] Sat.24.10.26 - Socialism or Barbarism: From Beirut’s Lenin Cover to Brazil’s Ballot

Berlin [TDR®] Sat.24.10.26 - Socialism or Barbarism: From Beirut’s Lenin Cover to Brazil’s Ballot

Why would a record label’s blog write about a 1970 Palestinian magazine, an anti-colonial manifesto, and a Brazilian presidential election?

Because all three ask the same question: Who has the right to define the world, and who gets to decide the fate of others—and what happens when the oppressed lose the ability to speak for themselves?

1. The 1970 Cover: The Oppressed Take Up Theory

Look at the cover of Al-Hadaf (The Goal), published in Beirut on 18 April 1970. Lenin stands at the center, surrounded by workers and soldiers. The headline reads “Lenin and Leninism: 100 Years.” The listed articles include “Facing the Israeli Machine” and “People’s War and Party Building.”

This is not nostalgia. The Palestinian liberation movement of 1970 placed itself within the world lineage of anti-colonial struggle. Lenin here is not a state symbol—he is the sign of the oppressed taking up theoretical weapons. The cover declares that the Palestinian struggle is not a “regional conflict” but part of a global emancipatory project. To strip people of the right to use that language is to write powerlessness on their behalf.

2. The Manifesto: When “World Music” Becomes Colonial Continuation

The Tropical Diaspora Records manifesto cuts into another battlefield. It argues that the West uses categories like “World Music,” “Afro,” and “Latin” to turn the culture of the colonized into something Westerners can recognize, consume, and discuss. The colonizer no longer needs to send troops—he only needs to become the one who “understands” you.

The manifesto quotes Ikwunga’s poem: bombs are made in London but the bombing is in Congo; tanks are built in Russia but the shelling is in Angola; cocoa grows in Nigeria but we buy chocolate from Belgium. This is the truth of center and periphery—resources flow out of the South, violence flows into the South, and the power of interpretation stays in the North.

The most insidious part: it teaches the colonized to see themselves through the colonizer’s eyes. World Music compilations become “coffee-table recordings” that make white intellectuals feel informed while turning living cultures into specimens. As the manifesto says, the worst part is that “eventually, it becomes the only means that the native has to speak about her own culture.”

3. Brazil: Lula and the Option of Barbarism

Now to Brazil.

Rosa Luxemburg wrote “socialism or barbarism” in 1915. This is not rhetoric. In Brazil today, that choice has a face.

Lula’s opponent is Flávio Bolsonaro—son of Jair Bolsonaro, who is serving 27 years under house arrest for plotting a coup. Flávio is not an ordinary right-wing opponent. He promises to fold Brazil into Trump’s “Shield of the Americas,” handing foreign policy to Washington. He has received Netanyahu’s support. His platform includes “rebuilding relations with Israel, Argentina, and the United States.”

What has the Lula government done? When the International Court of Justice took up Israel’s obligations, Brazil’s foreign ministry issued a statement demanding that Israel “fulfill its obligations regarding the basic needs of Gaza’s civilian population and respect and protect their human rights.” Lula himself called the attack on a Gaza hospital an “unjustifiable tragedy.” Domestically, Lula’s vetoes were overridden by Congress, environmental protections were weakened, and the rights of Indigenous and quilombola communities are under threat. But at least the veto existed. At least someone is resisting.

And the other side? Flávio’s camp is the same crowd that calls Indigenous land “untapped resources.” His father’s administration accelerated Amazon deforestation and dismantled Indigenous protection agencies. This is not speculation—it is record.

4. Why a Record Label Writes About Elections

Because the premise of Tropical Diaspora Records is this: the colonized have the right to speak in their own way, without being categorized, packaged, and consumed by the West.

If Brazil elects a government that hands foreign policy to Trump, the Amazon to agribusiness, and Indigenous rights to “development,” then the country ceases to be a presence capable of an independent voice in the Global South. It becomes a raw-material exporter and geopolitical vassal—the most classic form of colonialism.

Luxemburg’s “barbarism” is not about one leader being worse. Barbarism is a condition: when a society no longer has the capacity or the will to stop the plunder of people and land, history runs backward. The 1970 Al-Hadaf cover refused that regression. The Tropical Diaspora Records manifesto refuses it. The Brazilian ballot is another form of the same refusal.

We are not Brazilian. We do not vote. But as a label born from colonial history, we know one thing: when the colonized gain the ability to say “no,” the whole system trembles.

Lula is not perfect. His government has compromised, retreated, and been defeated by Congress. But elections are never a choice between the perfect and the good. They are a choice between space that can still be contested and space that is closed entirely.

Barbarism is not a ghost of the future. It is already in the bulldozers of the Amazon, in the ruins of Gaza, on the shelves of “World Music.” It only needs your silence to complete itself.

To choose Lula is to refuse to hand over that silence.

 

References

Al-Hadaf (Beirut) – 1970-18-04