Day: May 31, 2024
Pharmaceutical giants, including Swiss firms Roche and Novartis, are betting big on artificial intelligence to discover new drugs to treat a range of diseases. But there’s a long road ahead to bring AI-discovered drugs to patients.
By Jessica Davis Plüss
Matthias Steger’s discovery of the drug candidate EA-2353 for retinitis pigmentosa – a rare, degenerative eye disease – started very low tech: with a notebook and a pencil.
For nearly a decade, Steger, a trained medicinal chemist, jotted down chemical structures that researchers found had an impact on stem-progenitor cells – those that can regenerate in damaged tissue. But to arrive at a drug candidate, Steger, who spent 10 years in drug discovery and other roles at Roche before becoming an entrepreneur, needed to find the pattern in the chemical structures. This would take years and a lot of money testing in a lab, and even then, a lot would be left to chance.
“Discovering a new molecule is like finding a needle in a haystack,” Steger told SWI swissinfo.ch. “Even for a trained chemist, there’s significant guesswork.” It takes on average a decade and some $2.5 billion (CHF2.3 billion) to bring a new drug to market.
In hopes of expediting the process, he sent the chemical structures to Gisbert Schneider, a former Roche colleague who now teaches computer-assisted drug design at the Swiss federal institute of technology ETH Zurich. Schneider used his AI models to identify molecules that had the desired biological activity based on the patterns in the chemical structures. Steger and his colleagues tested and synthesised the molecules over several years to generate two drug candidates. One of which is EA-2353, now in early-stage clinical trials.
“I’m not sure we would have been able to find the drug candidate without AI,” said Steger, who with Schneider founded start-up Endogena in 2016, with offices in Zurich and San Francisco, to further develop the two drug candidates. “Algorithms can see patterns that aren’t visible to the human eye.”
AI’s potential to discover new drug candidates, in a fraction of the time and cost as traditional approaches, has fueled an AI investment boom. Over the past decade investors have pumped more than $18 billion into some 200 “AI-first” biotech firms and start-ups, those where AI is central to their drug discovery workflow, according to a Boston Consulting Group study published last year.
These start-ups and tech firms have been at the forefront of the technology but, as AI-discovered drugs move into testing on humans, more big pharmaceutical companies, including Swiss giants Roche and Novartis, are jostling to get out ahead of peers.
Last year, Roche announced a multi-year research collaboration with US chipmaker Nvidia, one of at least eight AI deals the company has signed since 2019. In January, Swiss pharma firm Novartis offered Google DeepMind’s offshoot Isomorphic Labs $37.5 million upfront and another $1.2 billion if it achieves certain milestones developing three new drug candidates. These are a handful of more than 100 deals between pharma and AI drug discovery start-ups in the last decade.
Jumping on the AI train
Large pharmaceutical labs have been using computers to assist drug development for decades but until recently there was some reticence to rely too heavily on AI.
“After experimenting with artificial neural networks years ago, there was a feeling in pharma companies in the 2000s that AI hadn’t delivered on its promise,” said Schneider. These early networks or AI algorithms lacked the sophistication and data along with powerful machines to perform massive calculations.
Today, the mindset has changed. “There’s now much more willingness to accept recommendations made by an AI algorithm, and no pharma company wants to be left behind.”
Behind the shift are recent advances in deep learning, generative AI tools like ChatGPT, computing power, and knowledge about genetics and molecular biology.
The latest generation of AI models can analyse and find patterns in vast and disparate datasets and even images, making it extremely useful for drug discovery where scientists are dealing with trillions of cells and around 20,000 genes in any one person.
In 2020, Google’s AI research subsidiary DeepMind launched AlphaFold, an AI algorithm which can predict the three-dimensional structures of human proteins, RNA and DNA. This was instrumental in determining the protein structures of SARS-CoV-2, helping scientists develop Covid vaccines in record time.
AlphaFold has not only fueled research into a host of new drug targets but it confirmed AI’s potential for scientific breakthroughs. There are now a host of proprietary and open-source AI software tools that are being deployed in pharma companies to search medical journals for relevant data, screen molecule libraries for promising drug candidates and identify disease targets. Some studies suggest AI could reduce the time and cost of drug discovery by 25-50%.
“AI, including machine learning and large language models, isn’t completely new technology,” says Elif Ozkirimli, who heads computational science products for research and development (R&D) at Roche in Basel. “But the adoption and scale have tremendously accelerated in the past two years.”
Roche has been investing around $3 billion a year to overhaul the company’s digital infrastructure and make AI a more integrated part of its R&D process according to a recent investor presentation. A few years ago, Roche hired top computational biologists from MIT and Cambridge University to build out a team of some 400 people in the computational sciences department in its San Francisco subsidiary Genentech alone. Hundreds more work in Basel and other sites.
In 2021, the company bought Prescient Design, a three-person New York start-up, to create a suite of algorithms trained on both public data and Roche’s own proprietary data from experiments and clinical trials. These have already helped find new disease indications for older drugs and prioritise drug candidates that have the highest chances of success.
From search to generate
Beyond making drug discovery more efficient, AI has the potential to identify and even generate molecules that chemists haven’t even dreamed of. Some algorithms, like the one Schneider used for Endogena, are even generating molecules from scratch.
“Instead of looking for drugs by screening molecules one after the other, generative AI is inverting the drug discovery process. It allows us to design molecules with certain properties instead of searching for them,” Schneider told SWI swissinfo.ch.
Several start-ups are already doing this. Hong Kong-based start-up Insilico used AI models to identify the drug target (the molecule associated with a disease) and create a molecular structure for pulmonary fibrosis – a serious lung disease. The drug candidate, which is now in phase II trials, was discovered in 18 months and at a cost of $3 million, far less than through traditional approaches. In 2022, Insilico signed a deal with French pharma giant Sanofi, worth up to $1.2 billion.
Genentech chemists and computational scientists also developed an AI model, GNEProp, to identify small molecule antibiotics for “superbugs” – bacteria that has become resistant to antibiotics. The model, which was trained on data on the antibiotic activity of two million small molecules, is used to predict molecules that would be active against harmful bacteria. Some of the molecules produced by the deep learning algorithm have completely different structures than those used to train it.
The scientists tested some molecules in the lab and found a 60-fold better hit rate (a positive result that the molecule has the desired biological activity) for the AI predictions than it found through its own experiments in 2017. The company is now taking some of the molecules into pre-clinical stages while retraining the model on the lab findings to make more accurate predictions in the future.
“Drug discovery is a little bit trial and error,” said Ozkirimli. “With AI, we are trying to incorporate some of those trial and errors into machine learning models so they can make better predictions.”
Marathon not a sprint
Despite the massive investment and excitement over novel discoveries, there’s still some reticence to boast about what AI has actually achieved. Neither Roche nor Novartis share names of any AI-discovered drugs in clinical trials.
Success on a computer screen or even in a lab doesn’t always predict success in patients. Drug development has a miserable failure rate: some nine out of ten drugs discovered through traditional methods fail in clinical trials, when drugs’ safety and efficacy are tested in humans.
It’s too early to say whether AI-powered drugs will have more luck, and if so, which AI algorithms behind them make the most accurate predictions.
“There is still a lot we don’t know about human biology, the evolution of disease and why some patients respond better to drugs than others,” Schneider at ETH Zurich told SWI. “There’s a tendency now to overhype the potential benefits of AI tools, because we forget this element of chaos when we interact with human biology.”
According to a study published in April, there have been at least 75 drug candidates in clinical trials in the last decade that were developed by firms where AI is central to their drug discovery. Some 80-90% of the candidates that went through phase I clinical testing were successful. This is higher than the industry average of 50-60%.
However, some experts criticised the study methodology, arguing that the extent AI was used to design these drugs varied considerably, making it hard to generalise about AI’s success. Moreover, phase II, when drugs are tested in a much larger patient cohort, is considered a much greater determinant of success.
Some drug candidates have already faced setbacks. Last October, one start-up Exscientia announced it was winding down an early clinical trial study of its AI-based cancer drug candidate EXS-21546. This came a few months after another drug by London-based BenevolentAI reported lower efficacy in early trials of its AI-designed drug than hoped.
“Most drugs fail not because there’s something wrong with the molecule. In many cases, the molecule does exactly what it should be doing,” said Seger. “It’s actually that the link between the molecular biology and the patient’s own pathology doesn’t pan out as the hypothesis predicted.”
Even if AI-generated drugs fail in clinical trials, researchers hope that this information is fed back into the models to generate better drug candidates the next time around. The hope says Schneider is that companies “fail less and faster”, avoiding huge cost outlays and unnecessary testing of drugs in animals and humans.
“With the current generation of machine learning tools, I don’t think the 90% failure rate will dramatically improve in the near future. It may drop to 70%,” said Yaroslav Nikolaev, Chief Technical Officer at the Swiss start-up InterAx, which is using mathematical models and advanced biology assays for AI in drug development. “The real transformation in drug development is coming but we need more quality data.”
Endogena’s lead drug candidate should report initial results for its first trial this year. Then the pivotal study in a large patient cohort starts. Preliminary results for EA-2353 look promising, according to Steger. “To the extent that we used it, AI did its job,” Steger told SWI. “But it takes more than AI to make a successful drug.”
By Tim Donner
Show me the man, and I will show you the crime. So said the right-hand man to Joseph Stalin, architect of the infamous show trial, the centerpiece of the Soviet system of justice. Today, many Americans are wondering whether their own justice system is any less capricious or politically biased. In less than 12 hours of deliberation, 12 supposedly unbiased jurors – guided by a judge whom many have suggested has displayed a nakedly partisan stance throughout the trial – convicted a former president and leading candidate to reclaim the Oval Office on 34 felony counts. His crime? A long-expired bookkeeping misdemeanor rejected by three authorities but somehow sculpted into a still-undefined felony – based on the testimony of a convicted liar and concocted by a Manhattan district attorney who campaigned on a promise to get Trump by whatever means availed themselves.
So Alvin Bragg has now reached the promised land, and the left has finally achieved what it has thirsted for from the moment Donald Trump claimed the presidency: to label him a convicted felon, thought to be the one surefire way to drive him out of politics. Judge Juan Merchan – a donor to Democrats with an activist family who defied astronomical odds by miraculously landing not one, but all three Trump-related cases in what was supposed to be a random selection process, and as an acting judge no less – closed the deal with consistent rulings favoring the prosecution and silencing the defense. He then gave voluminous instructions which seemed to encourage jurors to conclude there was some amorphous stain of guilt on the defendant – which they could determine themselves. The actors out to take down Trump with their stacked deck played their hands effectively to a willing judge and jury.
But at what cost to the republic?
The Trump Verdict: The Undoing of Our Country?
The Rubicon has been crossed. The once-unthinkable has happened. The distance between the United States of America and any of the world’s many lawless banana republics has just significantly narrowed. Make no mistake, the magnitude of the jury’s swift and unanimous verdicthas sent shockwaves around the world. The many who love or hate the 45th president are predictably giddy or outraged at the verdict, but how about the many everyday Americans without strong opinions either way who have always believed their nation is based on the rule of law and not subject to the political persecution of those who dare to threaten the established order? Have we not always believed that we were above the tactics of petty tyrants in a prototypical one-party state?
Ask yourself this simple question, the answer to which should remove any lingering doubts about the justice of the verdict and the trial itself: Would anyone else in the entire country have been indicted, not to mention convicted, on these novel, paper-thin charges? And remember, this was long thought by the left to be the weakest of the four cases brought against their archenemy. The beleaguered prosecutors targeting Trump in three other venues – long under pressure to advance their cases – will undoubtedly be energized by this verdict despite delays that threaten to deaden the desired political impact of their own prosecutions.
And now, with the twisted outcome in hand, and just to make sure the political impact of the verdict sticks, the notorious – or heroic, depending on your viewpoint – Judge Juan Merchan set sentencing for July 11, conveniently four days before the start of the Republican National Convention. Nothing is left to chance when Trump is in the crosshairs.
At the same time, not just Trump loyalists but, more importantly, almost every single Republican across the land will be more motivated than ever to bank their vote as early as possible. Non-Trump-deranged but skeptical or moderate Republicans will likely vote in record numbers on principle alone, perhaps offsetting any gains for Biden based on the convicted felon label. Poll watchers will work around the clock attempting to determine the political impact.
Only God knows the consequences for the loser of what has now officially become, unlike the many proclaimed as such before, the most important election of our lifetime. The one thing on which Americans have always counted, the rule of law, not to mention the very credibility of our elections in the wake of a lawfare campaign designed to disqualify a hated rival, is now undoubtedly on the line. The progressives who have been calling the shots in the Biden administration have won the battle – though not yet the war – and they will now be emboldened beyond measure to continue deconstructing the American way of life.
The 2024 presidential election, if it wasn’t already, has become boom or bust for both sides, the stakes and consequences now more consequential than ever. But for the American system of justice, the damage has already been done. Former Congressman Trey Gowdy said of the verdict on Fox News what so many have undoubtedly thought in the aftermath of the stunning verdict: “It may be the undoing of our country.” Indeed, it is impossible to calculate the cascading effects of the historic turn of events on May 30, 2024 – a day that, as Franklin D. Roosevelt once said of the attack on Pearl Harbor, will live in infamy.
- About the author: Senior Political Analyst at LibertyNation.com. Tim is a radio talk show host, former candidate for the U.S. Senate, and longtime entrepreneur, Conservatarian policy advocate, and broadcast journalist. He is Founder and President of One Generation Away, LN’s parent organization.
- Source: This article was published by Liberty Nation
On Sunday, delegates at the Libertarian Party National Convention by majority vote selected Chase Oliver to be the party’s presidential nominee. Individuals seeking an anti-war candidate to support in the United States presidential race will be looking into Oliver’s views in regard to war and peace.
Oliver has provided a brief statement concerning those views in the “End Wars & Support Peace” plank of the platform presented at his campaign website.
In line with the platform plank’s title, Oliver presents a broad anti-war and pro-peace message in the introductory paragraph of the plank, stating in part:
“Our nation has long had the moniker ‘leader of the free world.’ It is time we earn that distinction by insisting that Peace is the way forward. End the wars. End the drones. End the policy of constant intervention. It’s easy to drop a bomb, it’s much harder to serve as a beacon of Peace. We must take the more difficult but necessary path.“
The first of five bullet points in the plank starts off with a statement in line with a noninterventionist foreign policy: “Close all overseas bases and immediately return active-duty personnel to domestic bases.” People looking for a libertarian perspective from the candidate, though, will likely be frustrated by the remainder of the first bullet point expressing Oliver’s determination to provide special benefits to people with student loans and thus create a big expansion of the welfare state: “The cost savings of doing so will be used as a one-time contribution to discharge the interest on currently outstanding Federally guaranteed student loans.”
The second bullet point of the plank starts off with another statement that supporters of nonintervention overseas would find heartening:
End aid being directed to nation-states currently at war. This includes Israel and Ukraine.
But, the remainder of the bullet point takes an interventionist and nonlibertarian turn, declaring:
While we offer moral support to our friends currently engaged with the enemy, we should not be contributing to extending the fight.
It does not generate confidence that a presidential candidate will, if elected, maintain neutrality in regard to conflicts abroad when he calls the people on one side of major conflicts in which the US is intervening “our friends” and people on the other side “the enemy.”
Skipping to the final bullet point of the plank, advocates of nonintervention overseas will see more reason for concern. The final bullet point reads in full: “Utilize trade as a bargaining chip to foment peace with our neighbors.” This sounds like a rehash of Democratic and Republican presidents over the last few decades using sanctions and tariffs to influence and punish other nations, not the free trade with all approach commonly expected from Libertarian Party candidates.
- This article was published at RonPaul Institute
By Dr. Abdel Aziz Aluwaisheg
An Israeli attack in southern Gaza last week ignited a fire in a camp for the displaced at Tel Al-Sultan in western Rafah that killed at least 45 Palestinians, many burned alive, and injured hundreds more, adding to at least 36,000 killed and more than 100,000 injured since the start of the conflict.
Many of the victims had fled to Rafah on the orders of Israeli forces who were bombarding other parts of Gaza. When Israel invaded Rafah three weeks ago and ordered the evacuation of its eastern districts, many refugees were forced to flee west, to destinations including Tel Al-Sultan. A week before the bombing, Israel had designated the neighborhood a “safe zone” and dropped leaflets urging Palestinians to move there. The attack hit a tent encampment known as the Kuwait Peace Camp, the location of which had to be known to Israel. Thus the responsibility for this war crime falls squarely on Israel.
The attack came in defiance of the International Court of Justice, which just two days earlier had ordered Israel to halt the Rafah offensive: Israel disregarded the order, confirming its rogue-state status.
Despite the horror of last week’s attack, the US has yet to call for a stop to Israel’s Rafah operation. Earlier, President Joe Biden had said he would limit weapons supplies to Israel if it entered Rafah’s “population centers,” which clearly it has. But the US has taken no action, and has instead continued to support Israel materially and diplomatically. The administration’s spokesmen have failed to call out Israel for crossing Biden’s red line, and its UN diplomats are thwarting efforts for the UN Security Council to order a halt to Israel’s Rafah operations.
This attack was the second mass killing Israel has committed in Rafah in this war. Its forces launched an assault on the city in February, killing over 83 people. Airstrikes destroyed several homes, killing most or all of their occupants, another textbook war crime.
To many Palestinian refugees in Gaza, most of whom are descendants of refugees in earlier waves going back to 1948, these massacres bring to mind the 1956 massacre by Israeli forces in a Rafah refugee camp, and repeated in other parts of Gaza, during Israel’s brief occupation of the Strip. Hundreds of refugees were killed in cold blood. Those killings stopped only when Israel was forced to withdraw in early 1957, following a threat of action by US President Dwight Eisenhower.
Only when faced with such decisive moves by the US has Israel in the past curbed its appetite for Palestinian blood and land. So far in this war, the US has chosen not to do so, but has emboldened Israel by continuing military support, including weapons used in the Gaza war, and shielding it from Security Council censure.
The US administration has also failed to persuade Israel to provide humanitarian aid to the Palestinians in Gaza, as required of an occupying power under international humanitarian law; to stop obstructing aid from other counties; and to open more crossings for the delivery of aid to Gaza. The US attempt to help by building a temporary pier off the coast of Gaza has fallen apart, as did the pier — which took months to build at great cost to US taxpayers, but was never able to provide the assistance it had promised. The whole effort was undertaken because the US did not want to pressure Israel to allow sufficient aid through the closed land crossings, including the Rafah border crossing, which already existed and would have been more than sufficient to allow sufficient aid in. The result has been an increasing number of Palestinians dying of starvation and malnutrition.
In addition to the colossal humanitarian toll of its Rafah incursions, Israel has now taken over the Rafah crossing between Egypt and Gaza. This has had severe implications. For one, Israel has effectively cut off the main humanitarian access to Gaza and prevented the delivery of acutely needed aid. For another, Israel is trying to force its own vision for the future of Gaza, precluding the possibility of restoring control of the Strip by the Palestinian Authority, which the US and others have proposed, and reunifying Gaza with the West Bank as a prelude for an independent and viable Palestinian state.
Richard Peeperkorn, World Health Organization representative in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, said in February: “All eyes are on Rafah,” warning against Israeli forces attacking the city. He feared “unimaginable disaster” if the Israeli army made a large-scale incursion into the city, which at the time it was threatening to invade.
Since last week’s attack there has been widespread international condemnation. Officials and activists have been repeating Peeperkorn’s phrase to express their concern and opposition to Israel’s military operation in Rafah. His words superimposed on an image of tent camps for displaced Palestinians have been widely shared on social media, about 50 million times on Instagram alone.
The image is moving, despite its simplicity and the absence of pictures of dead bodies, blood, real people, names or distressing scenes. Its widespread use indicates how abhorrent most of the world, including most Americans, view the carnage in Rafah and all of Gaza.
All eyes are on Rafah, but also on Washington: Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza has continued mainly because the US has failed to take action to stop it. If Benjamin Netanyahu is left to his base instincts, he will drag his people, the entire region and possibly the US to the abyss with him.
As the 19th-century British philosopher John Stuart Mill observed: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” The “good men” of the US government have so far chosen to do nothing.
• Dr. Abdel Aziz Aluwaisheg is the Gulf Cooperation Council assistant secretary-general for political affairs and negotiation. The views expressed here are personal and do not necessarily represent the GCC. X: @abuhamad1
Since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, almost 20,000 Russians have been detained for anti-war activities and 1000 put on trial, mainly on terrorism-related charges, according to independent human rights group OVD-info. Since the start of this year, 669 people have been labeled, without trial, as “extremists and terrorists” by authorities under anti-terror laws. This takes the total to more than 14,000 since 2014 — the year Russia started arming separatist forces in Ukraine and annexed Crimea.
Among the highest profile is Boris Kagarlitsky, author of a new book, The Long Retreat. As well as bringing Russian and Western thinkers into dialogue, the scholar-activist draws upon his experiences as a Russian dissident since the latter days of the Soviet Union in this detailed analysis of leftist strategy. As a Marxist, he engages in radical ideas including Universal Basic Income and decentralised collective ownership, as well as looking at historical and contemporary examples of revolution and dissent, covering the left’s response to the war in Ukraine.
Written just before Kagarlitsky’s 2023-24 jailings, The Long Retreat stands as a testament to subversive Russian literature. It asks if the left can put aside its paralysing sectarianism and conceits of ideological purity in order to transform society for the benefit of the global working class. Kagarlitsky believes it can, as long as it is unafraid to look critically at its own ideas and actions.
On Wednesday, June 5, Kagarlitsky and his legal team will present an Appeal to the Military Chamber of the Supreme Court, requesting dismissal of a five-year term in a penal colony in northwestern Russia. A petition to free him can be signed here.
Two online events will contemplate Boris’ contributions. First, in Moscow on Sunday, June 2, there will be a “Dialogue with Kagarlitsky,” in recognition of his imprisonment and his June 5 court hearing, hosted online by Rabkor. RSVP is essential, here. According to Rabkor, “Despite the fact that Boris Kagarlitsky is a leading Russian scientist, sociologist, political scientist and historian, recognised not only by the international scientific community but also by delegates from the BRICS countries, Boris is currently imprisoned on political charges of ‘justifying terrorism’. We believe it is important to update his writings by entering into an extramural dialogue with him, to show solidarity and recall the fate of the scientist in anticipation of the appeal hearing on June 5. That dialogue is based on recalling the 1990s, a time when, after the collapse of the USSR, the fate of Russia was decided for many years to come. Through his contributions, we will learn from Boris: What were these 90s like?; How did the transformation processes take place?; Is the current system a negation or a continuation of the 90s?; And, most importantly, what kind of future do we aspire to, given the experience of this period? The meeting will include a debate between Boris Nadezhdin and Alexei Safronov. Scientific papers by such scholars as Alexander Shubin, Anna Ochkina and Pavel Kudyukin will be presented. The meeting will take place on 2 June at 12:30, Moscow time.
Second, on June 13, the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change will host a hybrid book review and discussion about The Long Retreat: Strategies to Reverse the Decline of the Left. Join us here.
Join us, and sign the petition here.
Foreword to Kagarlitsky’s The Long Retreat
by Patrick Bond
Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky has had a torrid time with Russia’s notorious carceral regime—most recently on February 13, 2024 when prosecutors allied with one Kremlin faction had him re-imprisoned for a five-year term—albeit, he would insist, not nearly as severe as the systemic torture suffered by the late liberal opposition leader Alexei Navalny, killed on February 16 at the ‘Polar Wolf’ Artic Circle penal colony. Since the early 1980s, Boris has been repeatedly prosecuted for articulating left-wing ideals.
Boris was jailed in July 2023 on the way to fetch his wife from the airport, on charges of ‘justifying terrorism.’ He was sent to a prison in the north-western city of Syktyvkar, far from his Moscow base, once home to Soviet-era gulags. His crime, committed ten months earlier, was expressing a cheeky analysis of the Ukraine war via a (self-confessed) weak joke about Mostik, a stray cat who was the construction workers’ mascot for a recently built bridge linking the Russian mainland to Crimea.
But the bridge was bombed by Ukrainian or allied forces in October 2022. As he recalls, “Just on the eve of that attack, congratulatory wishes from Mostik the cat to President Putin were spread on Russian social networks […] I joked that he had acted as a provocateur with his congratulations.” As Boris knew so well, “Unfortunately, Leviathan has no sense of humour. I had to spend four and a half months in a prison cell.”
Nevertheless, after local and international pressure—and amidst incomprehensible gyrations within competing factions of Russia’s security bureaucracy—he was freed, having paid a fine of 600,000 roubles ($6,700; £5,250) raised within a day from his supporters via the Rabkor YouTube channel. The story is one he alone can tell, armed with his famous dry wit and optimism:
The prosecutor’s office stated that the joke about Mostik the cat was made “in order to destabilise the activities of government agencies and to press the authorities of the Russian federation to terminate the special military operation on the territory of Ukraine.” While I was behind bars, a solidarity campaign was unfolding outside, in which many people took part in Russia and around the world. Moreover, it seems that the Kremlin leadership was especially impressed by the fact that a significant part of the voices in my defense were coming from the Global South. In the context of confrontation with the West, Russian rulers are trying to establish themselves as fighters against American and European neo-colonialism, so criticism of them voiced in Brazil, South Africa, or India was received with vexation.
Along with so many others from the international left, there were indeed South Africans close to the SA Communist Party who added pressure, comrades with whom Boris will normally disagree on most matters of principle, analysis, strategies, tactics and alliances, since the Talk-Left, Walk-Right dance isn’t one he tolerates.
Still, what became evident from the episode was not only the ease with which he could proceed with sociological research on the situations facing fellow inmates. Also clear was an inexorable popularity stemming from his anti-war stance amongst both a new generation of Russian rebels and within an international independent left that for at least forty years has looked to Boris for socialist clarity at home and beyond.
But upon an extremely complicated political-ideological landscape, even where in some circuits of the left there is no critique of the Ukraine invasion, Boris attracted a broad scope of solidarity, e.g. when Manitoba-based geopolitical economist Radhika Desai made an in-person appeal to Vladimir Putin during a Valdai Club conference in October 2023:
We found ourselves also in a bit of a quandary because we do not agree with the position our dear friend [Boris] has taken. But we also remember how much we have learned from his formidable knowledge of Russia’s history and his formidable commitment to Russia. So, we just appeal to you that you take a personal interest in this case.
Putin’s reply: “You know, to be honest, I do not really know who this Kagarlitsky is—so my colleague here [Fyodor Lukyanov] even had to fill me in on that one. I will take the letter you have signed for me, I will read it and give you a response. I promise.”
In fact it was at least the second time that Putin was responding to questions about the Kagarlitsky case, and he still didn’t know what the issue was about. No response was given to Radhika Desai or other Valdai Club members who signed the letter. However, ten weeks later, when rumors about Putin’s supposed death were widely circulating around Russia, Boris was briefly released, albeit with restrictions on his freedom of expression.
Two months later, Kafkaesque bureaucratic maneuvers led to his re-imprisonment. Remarkably, he retained an optimistic fighting spirit, posting to Telegram: “I continue to collect data and materials for new books, including descriptions of prison life—now in Moscow institutions. Anyway, see you soon! I am sure that everything will be fine eventually. We will see each other again both on the channel and in person. We just need to live a little longer and survive this dark period for our country.”
Awareness of his plight emerged around the world once again, and even if soon overshadowed by the killing of Navalny, International Director for Russia Natalia Zviagina reminded:
This conviction, and the closed nature of his trial, provide another stark example of the treatment of political dissenters in Russia. It is an overt attack on freedom of expression with the aim of silencing critical voices through fear and repression. This case is not an isolated incident but part of a broader, systematic effort to stifle opposition and control what can and cannot be said in Russia.
+++
Boris has long directed the Institute of Globalisation Studies and Social Movements, whose fate also hung in the balance due to Putin’s periodic clampdowns and the Institute’s ‘foreign agent’ designation (thanks to grants mainly from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation). It was closed down in 2022 after failing to pay severe fines which were regularly showered on the organization by hostile bureaucrats. Boris had earlier served on the faculties at Moscow State University, the Moscow School for Social and Economic Sciences, and the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
But it was through global justice activists, starting when he hosted a session in Moscow in 1999 parallel to the Seattle World Trade Organisation, that many more came to know of how broadly he could apply class analysis.
In South Africa, we’d hear of his courage in speaking truth to power dating back to the early 1980s. During his studies of theatre criticism at the State Institute of Theatrical Art, he was expelled as a dissident. He edited samizdat journals, which led to his 1982 arrest (and his longest spell in jail), followed by an official pardon in 1983.
Five years later, his book The Thinking Reed won the Deutscher Memorial Prize, the most prestigious of international progressive literary awards. During the early 1990s he was active in the Party of Labour (including having won a Moscow municipal electoral office), but in October 1993, Boris’s opposition to the Yeltsin regime’s unconstitutional power grab led to another arrest—and an immediate release after international protest.
Boris’s 1995 visit to South Africa, which was hosting scores of leftist celebrities after Nelson Mandela’s release from jail, left a major impression on many of us. We had many interactions in the subsequent years, especially when Boris began considering the global justice movement as his natural international home.
He published (often with Pluto Press) a variety of influential books on Russian and international politics. The latter included two co-edited works, Globalization and Its Discontents in 1997 and The Politics of Empire in 2004. Sole-authored books about the world situation included a 1999 trio—New Realism, New Barbarism; The Return of Radicalism; and The Twilight of Globalization—followed by From Empires to Imperialism in 2014, and Between Class and Discourse in 2020.
Boris benefitted from a long-running fellowship at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, starting in 2000. He played a leadership role in anti-Putin protests in 2011–2012, but a shift in perspective took place when the G20 was hosted in St. Petersburg in mid-2013. Many international allies (myself included) attended the counter-summit his institute organized, but funding contributed by a faction within Putin’s state may have deterred local attendees, for interest in the event was sparse.
+++
This period, from 2013 to 2017, was one in which Boris was labeled a ‘pink Putinist,’ unfairly it seems to me, but not without contradictions worth recalling. After the popular 2014 Maidan uprising in Kiev against pro-Putin leader Viktor Yanukovych—albeit one that was Washington-facilitated with all manner of conservative features—Boris was fascinated by the opportunity of what he saw as a Donbas workers’ rebellion and breakaway from the Ukrainian state, for self-government and radical social policy.
However, hijacked by Putin’s Eastern Ukraine allies, the experiment ended soon enough. In The Long Retreat, we learn that, “In supporting the people’s republics that were proclaimed in Donetsk and Lugansk, the Kremlin rulers were mainly interested in ensuring that the protests by dissatisfied citizens in south-eastern Ukraine against the new authorities in Kiev did not turn into a social revolution. The radical-minded leaders of the revolt were almost all killed or excluded from the leadership of the movement.”
Another force loomed, as Boris had acknowledged in Links in August 2014: “Over several weeks the entire leadership of the Donetsk and Lugansk republics has effectively been replaced. The most momentous, and unexpected, development has been the ousting of the military leader of the militias, Igor Strelkov […] an obvious act of revenge on the part of those very Kremlin forces on whom [Strelkov] had inflicted a serious political defeat in early July.”
Boris recognised Strelkov’s “sympathies for the pre-revolutionary monarchy and nostalgia for the Russian empire,” as he wrote at the time, but was more impressed by the mass base, e.g. “rank-and-file militia fighters demanding that the slogan of ‘social republics’ that had been proclaimed in Donetsk and Lugansk should be put into effect, that the property of oligarchs should be nationalised […] A law was adopted reversing the commercialisation of health care that had been initiated by the previous leaders.”
The Donbas worker uprising was soon repressed, but Boris was accused by progressive allies of unjustifiably supporting Russia’s Ukrainian land grabs, including Crimea. However, Kagarlitsky never sided with Strelkov, who later called Boris his most respected enemy. Boris and his comrades backed the left-leaning militia of Aleksey Mozgovoy (he was later killed, apparently by Putin’s special forces or by mercenaries from the Wagner Group).
For his part, Strelkov was an uncomfortable partner for the Kremlin. He was subsequently convicted by a Dutch court for shooting down the Malaysia Airlines plane above south-eastern Ukraine in mid-2014, killing all 298 passengers and crew. As the most prominent populist right-wing critic of Putin, Strelkov was arrested in mid-2023 just days before Boris, leading to suspicions that the Kremlin was attempting an incarceration balancing act.
The situation at that point was extremely fluid, with Putin obviously feeling more vulnerable than ever, having just been disinvited from the Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa (BRICS) annual summit by Cyril Ramaphosa due to the outstanding International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Ukrainian war crimes.
The prior month, Wagner Group leader Evgeny Prigozhin tried his own quasi-coup against Kremlin military elites. Then, just as the BRICS summit began in Johannesburg on 23 August, Prigozhin was (reportedly) killed when his airplane mysteriously exploded between Moscow and St Petersburg.
The extent to which Boris had distanced himself from Russian nationalism was clear through his role in both the Belarusian anti-Lukashenko revolt of 2020–2021 and pro-Navalny activism of early 2021. In early 2022 he immediately was one of the most vocal critics of the Ukraine invasion.
This we learned when Johannesburg hosted the August 2023 BRICS summit and Boris was invited to keynote the ‘BRICS from Below’ workshop at the University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change. He agreed to speak on video link—but not come in person, out of concern he would not be re-admitted to his homeland. The lecture was prevented from happening, for a month before the BRICS convened, Boris was confined to a jail term some observers feared would last seven years.
What we had anticipated hearing from Boris, as occurred periodically at such sessions dating back to his own Moscow hosting of BRICS-country dissidents in 2012, was a sense of how weak we then found not only global capitalist managers but also the BRICS versions—including those in Moscow promoting Russia’s desired de-dollarisation agenda (foiled in Johannesburg by conservative forces within the BRICS financial elite). But what you will read in The Long Retreat is probably the most cogent explanation of why, alongside the empire of capital, it’s been our international and local left oppositions that have weakened far more rapidly since the 1970s.
The campaign to free Boris Kagarlitsky is in full swing in the East and West alike.
+++
The conditions in which Boris wrote, before his arrest, provided greater confidence in elite breakdown, dating back fifteen years to the world financial crisis catalysed by US home mortgage gambles gone sour in 2007, spreading quickly across speculative European real estate markets and then across the world, requiring a G20 financial fix. Since then, he insists, global capitalism “has been unable to restore its ‘normal’ process of reproduction,” given that all manner of money-printing gimmicks, artificially low interest rates and rising debts kept the capital-overaccumulation bubble from bursting, as all had feared would happen in early 2009. But, Boris warns, “Unfortunately, at the same time as public dissatisfaction with capitalism around the planet has reached an unprecedented scale, the left movement has finished up at the lowest point in its entire history. If this is not true on the organisational plane, then it is certainly the case on the ideological and moral level.”
That weakness allows not only right-wing populist forces to fuse economic grievances and culturally reactionary politics, but at the same time, according to Boris, gives greater reign for corporate elites “to curtail, and if possible to end altogether, the participation of the masses in politics while preserving the formal institutions of parliamentarism, free elections and other conquests of liberal democracy. This task was achieved through combining market reforms with the technocratic adoption of decisions supposedly too complex to be understood by ordinary voters.”
With this force emanating from corporate centres of power in New York, London, Paris, Frankfurt and Tokyo, resistance in these sites has been timid, and the mild-mannered Western intelligentsia continually disappoints. Work by one prominent Dutch historian reflects “the moral and methodological dead end in which the left movement in the early twenty-first century has finished up,” thanks in part to “the epoch of postmodernism, when an integrated worldview is replaced by an unsystematic pastiche of ideas, of fragmentary concepts and of arbitrarily assembled images.”
In contrast, you will find in The Long Retreat a systematic socialist analysis, including important auto-critiques of Soviet legacies: “after the collapse of the USSR, when the world communist movement no longer possessed any rallying point or shared guidelines (even if only negative), it was placed in a situation of “everyone for themself,” and rapidly fell apart. The organisational and political inflexibility had turned into an appalling fragility.”
That state of fragility degenerated yet further, leaving room for far-right populists to rise with critiques of ‘globalist’ elites. In Russia, Boris has been writing in a context in which, as he told Links’s Federico Fuentes in mid-2022, “All sorts of racist, fascist statements are made on state channels. It’s an absolutely incredible flood of aggression, xenophobia and hatred.”
Proving his point in late 2023, Sergey Lavrov offered this extraordinary statement to RT:
“The goals declared by Israel for its ongoing operation against Hamas militants in Gaza seem nearly identical to those put forward by Moscow in its campaign against the Ukrainian government […] we need to be very careful about our common history with Israel and, above all, the history of the fight against Nazism. This is the main thing that unites us historically.”
This comparison was “bizarre and greatly offensive, to say the least,” according to Palestinian analyst Ramzy Baroud—but offers a flavour of the ideologically surreal times we suffer.
Boris’s ‘Letter from Prison’ shortly after the July 2023 arrest was philosophical: “This is not the first time in my life. I was locked up under Brezhnev, beaten and threatened with death under Yeltsin.[…] In the 40-odd years since my first arrest, I have learned to be patient and to realize how fickle political fortune in Russia is.”
The re-arrest on February 13 drove home that point. Debates over his mid-2010s positioning within Russia aside, Boris’s international analysis has not been fickle, all these years. The humility needed today is summed up in this book’s advice: “in changed circumstances the left should learn to retreat, without succumbing to panic or losing its nerve, and should regroup its forces in order to prepare for new battles.”
We’re terribly fortunate Boris has updated his critique of political economy and politics with the grace and passion for which this great sociologist has long been respected, and look forward to his eventual release from another undeserved term in a Russian jail—with the greatest impatience.
At bribery trial, ex-US official casts Sen. Bob Menendez as a villain in Egyptian meat controversy KSNF/KODE – FourStatesHomepage.com