The New Dark Age

Thursday, 16 February 2023 — The Tricontinental

Dear friends,

Greetings from the desk of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research.

In December 1998, Fidel Castro addressed the 7th Congress of the Young Communist League in Havana, Cuba, a year after the catastrophic ‘market failure’ in Asia, when global finance exited the region and left behind economic deserts stretching from Korea to Malaysia. ‘The world is rapidly being globalised’, Castro told the Cuban youth, and this globalisation was ‘an unsustainable and intolerable world economic order’ founded on the cannibalisation of nature and the brutalisation of social life. Capitalist ideologues championed greed as foundational for society, but this, Castro cautioned, was merely an ideological claim rather than a statement drawn from reality. Similar ideological claims – such as those about the rational operation of markets – encouraged Castro to insist on the urgent need to wage a ‘battle of ideas’ to make the case for the richness of the human experience against the reductions of market fundamentalism.

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