Why the Third World Can't Be Human
A discussion of Western exceptionalism, empire and the slaughter of millions
Are you human? Am I?
It depends on who is looking at us.
In the real world, beyond the idealist flights of fancy enshrined but rarely enforced by international law, one’s humanity is a question of circumstances and perception. All of us have the potential to be reduced to a number, a statistic, an accident, a tragedy, a massacre, or, as is most often the case for the countless millions who have been stripped of the opportunity to even have a name, to nothing at all. In fact, from the perspective of the hegemonic observer, they never really existed in the first place.
Some of us are more likely to be human—this, too, is a question of circumstances.
When the American state murders a hundred nameless Yemeni people, the only reason it even remains in the headlines for longer than a day is because someone added the editor of The Atlantic to their internal group chat by accident—and that ends up being the only part that matters. In the mass media discourse, the actual events—for example, the indiscriminate murder of men, women and children by blowing up an entire apartment building—weren’t so much ignored, but rather deemed so utterly irrelevant that most so-called journalists reporting on this story didn’t even consider discussing them with more than a ritualistic remark about ‘alleged’ civilian casualties, if they discussed them at all.
Worse still: The crux of this discussion centered on concerns of ‘national security’—as if compromising the ability of the US military to blow up apartment buildings in Yemen without opposition presented a threat to anyone. How would you feel if your entire life and the life of everyone you know weren’t even worthy of a single mention? If the murder of people like you was presented as a matter, even a necessity, of reasonable policy?
For me, and most of you judging by my subscribers’ demographics, these remain mostly abstract questions—it is astoundingly difficult to lose your humanity if you are white and live in the heart of the imperial core. Outside of those boundaries, humanity is not an innate trait, but rather something that has to be proven and asserted over and over again, and even then, it is only a status granted instead of acquired.
Those who think this ‘logic’ is a simple propaganda tactic of the ruling classes—often, though not always, presented in the form of what is essentially a conspiracy theory of targeted media manipulation—are missing the actual scale of the denial of humanity that is taking place here, and its root causes. The principal and often subconscious ideological stance of the entire Western world, rooted in the colonial slave trade and endlessly reproduced and replayed by the global flow of resources and capital, is that one’s humanity is a question of proximity to empire, and by extension, always a question of proximity to whiteness.
The masses of the Third World aren’t simply dehumanized—the masses of the Third World can’t be human in the first place, to fulfill their structural role in the age of imperialist capitalism in decay.
Let’s talk about what that means for humanity.
Western Exceptionalism — Who Gets a Name?
In 2003, the twenty-three-year-old American activist Rachel Corrie was murdered by the IDF while taking part in a non-violent blockade against the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah. They ran her over with a bulldozer.
This made ‘the news’, right in the middle of the Second Intifada, when Palestinians were being murdered every single day. Suddenly, the attention of the Western mass media was turned to Rafah and its ongoing demolition, and even the American and Israeli governments were forced to comment—the former with empty condolences, the latter with outright fabrications, but they commented all the same—while international organisations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch paid special attention to the farcical ‘internal investigations’ of the Israeli state concerning Corrie’s murder.
The reason why Rachel Corrie was granted a name and a face in the headlines, and with that a place in the Western mind, is obvious: She was a white American—not even her name or outward appearance could offer an excuse to separate her from the West—and Americans aren’t supposed to die anywhere near Palestine, much less be murdered by the IDF in Gaza.
Let me be clear: This is in no way meant to denigrate or lessen Rachel Corrie’s sacrifices for the cause of Palestinian liberation—in fact, her commitment to that very cause is what stripped her of the usual veil of protection granted to white Westerners, and made her a target for the systematic violence inflicted upon the colonized by the IDF. The organisation Corrie was a member of, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), finds a pathway in the struggle by acknowledging and ultimately weaponizing that structure of Western exceptionalism against those who participate in it. By putting Western bodies on the line, they intend to debilitate the Israeli colonial state from unrestricted violence against Palestinians. The results of this strategy are mixed: Israel has murdered several members of the ISM—your humanity is no longer guaranteed once you cross the line and join the Third World in the liberation struggle.
At the very least, even those Westerners murdered by the IDF are allowed to have names. You can find all of them on the ISM Website, and when you search for their names, their whole life story is documented by the mass media and various human rights organisations, exactly because their humanity is acknowledged through the exceptional circumstances of their deaths. Most Palestinians who are murdered are statistics; a number on a seemingly endless and yet still incomplete list—the exceptions exist because they are once again acknowledged in their proximity to the West.
Palestinian writer Mohammed el-Kurd describes this phenomenon using the example of the journalist Shireen Abu Akleh, who was murdered by the IDF in 2022:
“I did not ‘announce’ that Shireen was a citizen of the United States. And when I wrote about her murder, I insisted to my editors that, if I must mention this fact, I would refer to her as a carrier of a US passport, not as an American citizen. Why contribute—even if only with a simple phrase—to a hierarchy of lives where citizenry, like race, class, gender, ‘civility’, plays a role in determining whether someone deserves compassion or due diligence? I wanted the world to stand still over the death of a Palestinian, regardless of qualifiers. But that didn’t matter: within hours, the news spread like wildfire. Her passport was the talking point. Shireen was an American and her alleged Americanness swiftly made her human.” — Mohammed el-Kurd, Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, 2025
Shireen Abu Akleh was no longer Palestinian, at least not primarily, because her ‘Americanness’ superseded her ‘Palestinianness’ in the invisible and yet tangible hierarchy that cuts through the world and is reproduced every single day by the mass media, the Western state apparatuses themself and their dependents. Because of this, Shireen Abu Akleh was granted a name. Most of those who are ‘only’ Palestinian do not get that courtesy—their humanity is erased and denied in the process.
You can see it happening every single day, and once you start reading ‘the news’ that way—and ask yourself what constitutes ‘the news’ in the first place—it becomes impossible to ignore: Humanity in the Third World isn’t implicit, it isn’t a right, it isn’t even earned, but it is granted by the hegemonic discourse. The West alone decides who gets to be human and who can never be human.
This ideology of Western exceptionalism, while of course an unfathomable falsehood, is tied to and produced by the concrete conditions of the real world, as all ideologies are. The condition it in turn justifies and reproduces is nothing less than the most brutal and widespread mode of exploitation known to humanity in our time: Global imperialism, in its neo-colonial form.
Imperial Accumulation — Who Gets to Eat?
The Third World must bleed because the West must consume.
This is the basic operating principle of the relation between the imperial core and the vast peripheries of the Third World that are, as Michael Parenti put it most concisely, ‘not underdeveloped but overexploited’—this is in itself an adaptation of the core thesis of Walter Rodney’s exceptional work ‘How Europe Underdeveloped Africa’, which you should all read if you haven’t already. Nothing about the fundamentals has shifted in this relationship since the darkest days of direct colonial rule, but its form has adapted, while leaving the most crushing element of this subjugation intact, as Rodney describes:
“The factor of dependency made its impact felt in every aspect of the life of the colonies, and it can be regarded as the crowning vice among the negative social, political and economic consequences of colonialism in Africa, being primarily responsible for the perpetuation of the colonial relationship into the epoch that is called neo-colonialism.” — Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, 1973
While Rodney specifically writes about Africa, neocolonialism remains the primary mode of colonial domination globally. The structural dependence of the Third World on the markets of the West, where resources are still overwhelmingly exported to and capital is even more overwhelmingly exported from, forms the basis of this relationship and with that the basis of the imperialist world system. In this system, the independence of dependent capitalist states can only exist in name, and everything from unequal exchange to the hierarchy of the various global value chains is necessitated by it.
This results in a quite literal division of the world, which goes beyond the fundamental conflict between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, inherent to all capitalist formations. The most acute form of exploitation takes place in the neo-colonies of the Third World, where the vast majority of proletarians are forced to sell their labor power at obscenely low prices to capitalists domestic and foreign, permanently trapping them in conditions that are barely enough to ensure their own basic sustenance, and with that the reproduction of their labor power. The vast surplus extracted this way is divided between a domestic bourgeoisie—only a small portion, since they themselves, often together with their entire state, are subjugated by imperial finance capital and its various institutions such as the IMF and the World Bank—and the ruling bourgeoisie of the imperial core. The superprofits generated, flowing from the neo-colonies to the West, are in turn used to ‘bribe’ (calling it bribery is a simplification, but is close enough for this text) large sections of the proletariat, by paying them comparatively higher wages—wages that exceed the actual value of their productive labor.
The West gets to eat, and the Third World has to work. This is not a moral judgement—the system itself is blatantly immoral—but it is a reality, and this reality creates obvious obscenities that need to be painted over by ideology in order to become digestible.
An example:
The median income in Burundi, one of the poorest states on the planet, is about 475 US Dollars.
The median income in the US, one of the wealthiest states on the planet, is about 19300 US Dollars.
Does the average American worker work forty times harder than the average worker in Burundi? Of course, not, and not even the most vulgar Western supremacists would claim so—instead, they will offer you creative economic theories from differences in purchasing power parity, differences in the productivity of post-industrial and ‘developing’ economies, and perhaps even a silent acknowledgment that there is something untenable about it, but that we (by ‘we’ they always mean ‘them’) just have to deal with that until capitalism will magically make everyone wealthier at some point in the far distant future. The graph is going up after all. Promise.
What we are left with is a necessity to abstract the humanity of the Third World, and as a final result, deny it completely. At most, they get to be pitied as victims of an imperfect system that requires child labor, deadly working conditions, and squalid slums where the difference between unemployment and a fourteen-hour workday is the difference between going hungry and eating another day. The poorest of the poor, represented by pictures of women, children and rarely men with haggard arms, pleading eyes and defeated postures, are their acceptable form, allowing us to clear our conscience with laughable donations, useless social media campaigns and tired, half-hearted acknowledgments of privilege.
They can exclusively be ‘the wretched of the earth’, since other conditions and a struggle for a change in conditions threaten to acknowledge their agency as anything but the endless labor reserve of the imperial core, and with that their humanity. For modern capitalism, this concrete acknowledgment of common humanity is unacceptable, exactly because it is the first step in the liberation struggle.
Those who fight the existing conditions, and with that imperialism and the form of the neo-colony, are labeled as criminals and terrorists—sometimes, entire states and their people are by mere association. The imperialists only give them death.
Expected Casualties — Who Has to Die?
In 1996, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations and later Secretary of State under Bill Clinton, was asked in a 60 Minutes interview if the ongoing economic sanctions against Iraq, which directly led to the deaths of half a million Iraqi children and infants due to lack of access to vaccines, medical supplies and baby formula, were worth it—worth it for the potential victory of US foreign policy by destroying the Iraqi state, that is.
This question, posed in a perfectly frank manner, is in itself already disgusting and an expression of how little the lives of people in the Third World are really valued in the hegemonic discourse. In which other scenario would it be possible to weigh the worth of half a million dead children against entirely abstract political goals? Their humanity and their actuality, not just as numbers but as real human beings with lives ahead of them, families and hopes, are already denied by the terms of the discussion.
Albright’s answer, though? It became infamous because it was shockingly honest:
“I think this is a very hard choice, but the price—we think the price is worth it.”
There is nothing scandalous about this statement, or at the very least, there shouldn’t be once the global dynamic is understood—the real ‘scandal’ is that the relationship between the Third World and the West requires this ‘hard choice’ and ‘price’ as a matter of policy.
When Bill Clinton’s administration, like Bush Senior’s before him, decided to starve the people of Iraq, deprive them of access to basic goods and kill their children, this was only an extension of the logic of imperialism itself. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was nothing exceptional, but the simple fact that it became a liability to the interests of US capital—after the failure of the US-backed war against Iran, the Iraqi state pursued a strategy of self-sufficiency, keeping large sectors of its economy nationalized and foreign investment to a minimum—opened it up to total destruction. Death through Western intervention is an expected condition for the Third World, and so the murder of hundreds of thousands becomes part of the possibilities of rational policy. Half a million children become a number, completely irrelevant compared to the concrete interests of US imperialism. This is the logic of murderous sanctions, and it was the same logic that allowed the Iraq War itself to become policy a few years later.
What else should one expect from a system that normalizes military strikes against civilians, hundreds of times a year? A system where genocide is simply one among many tools in the hands of the ruling classes? A system that calculates for nine million people to die from starvation—entirely preventable starvation, fueled in no small part by overproduction to stabilize prices and ensure profitability—every single year?
As long as this system exists and is continually reproduced by the existing conditions, the Third World has no chance at humanity—the negation of their humanity is the affirmation of global imperialism, and at the same time the negation of imperialism is the process of asserting their humanity over the interests of a tiny minority of monopoly capitalists, stabilizing their profits by keeping billions trapped in conditions that are fundamentally inhumane in the literal sense of the word.
Or as Eduardo Galeano put it, more evocatively and clearly than I ever could:
“The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way.
Who are not, but could be.
Who don’t speak languages, but dialects.
Who don’t have religions, but superstitions.
Who don’t create art, but handicrafts.
Who don’t have culture, but folklore.
Who are not human beings, but human resources.
Who do not have faces, but arms.
Who do not have names, but numbers.
Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.
The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them.”— Eduardo Galeano, Los Nadies / The Nobodies
The Third World can’t be human, because facing their humanity would require facing a global system that denies it implicitly, without any blinders or obfuscations, thus ripping apart its flimsy veil of ‘common sense’ and ‘humanitarianism’ to reveal the unblemished monstrosity of imperialism and colonial exploitation beneath.
This is precisely why the Third World must be human, and why their humanity must be asserted without compromise—to fight for this universal humanity is the goal of socialism and the anathema to capitalism.
More about that process next time.
Thank you for reading!
This article ended up exploding in size, so I decided to split it up into a two-part series. The next part, ‘Why the Third World Must Be Human’, discussing the struggle against neo-colonialism and the assertion of humanity through it, will follow soon.
(And by ‘soon’ I mean within the next month at some point, because my drafts are full of articles I want to finish right now, and my time is sadly limited)
If you made it all the way down here, consider leaving some of your thoughts in the comments. I’m always glad to read your opinions and discussions.
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This is a great piece!!! So good to hear because too much discourse these days fails to address the modern day “wretched of the Earth.” I read Walter Rodney’s book a few months ago and it is FANTASTIC. Thank you so much for writing this ❤️
A really important article Lukas- it deserves to be, indeed needs to be, read by as many people as possible … So many people have no idea of the connections between capitalism and imperialism- between our lives of relative comfort here in the West and the horrors inflicted on those whose subjugation those comforts require … Thank you so much for writing this.