By now everyone has read about the US criminal kidnapping of democratically elected Venezuelan President, Nicolas Maduro, alongside the bombing of Caracas, Venezuela. Details are still being released as to how these events were allowed to happen. However, I would like to briefly reflect on three takeaways the Global South – the countries constantly struggling against US-NATO-Zionist imperialism – must learn from these events.

1.
Nukes are integral for sovereignty

This lesson should have already been learned in 2011, when Muammar Gaddafi’s government in Libya was overthrown. In 2003, Gaddafi announced the abandonment of his program to develop nuclear weapons. This allowed for a temporary lifting of U.S. and EU sanctions, and a brief “normalization” of relations. Expecting the “normalization” to have been anything but temporary was a folly. The U.S. empire is not in the business of treating other nations as equals. Its ends are to debt trap, control assets, and loot resources. It does not care for “international law,” nor “human rights,” nor “freedom and democracy” – even though it loves employing these catchwords as a front for regime change.

Would Gaddafi have been overthrown had he not interrupted the development of his nuclear program? Would the US-NATO even have considered overthrowing the Chairman had they sported a nuclear arsenal as a means of deterrence? I don’t think we must speculate here. The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), or North Korea as the Americans call it, was on the same Neocon list of “dangerous and evil” countries which needed to be overthrown. Under the plans of the Project for the New American Century, the DPRK could’ve well received the Libya treatment. What was the difference in treatment between the two countries? I think a central component was that by the mid-to-late 2010s, the DPRK had developed the great antidote of full-fledge Western aggression: nuclear weapons.

Libya was overthrown, the tremendous advancements made in this nation – which became amongst the most prosperous in all of Africa – were demolished. Soon after the overthrow, as everyone now knows, things got so bad slave markets were erected around the country. The lesson is clear – without developing your defense system, one cannot deter Western aggression. Until this day, NATO and the U.S. are very careful of how they wage their war on Russia. They could not carry it out with the same boldness they used in Libya. They required a proxy – Ukraine – to not formally be considered the subjects carrying out the act. Had Venezuela sported the weapons system comrade Kim Jong Un shows off, it is unlikely that giant of the Seven Leagues – as José Martí called the U.S. empire – would have been as brazen in their attacks. We cannot forget what Mao taught us – imperialism is a paper tiger. It looks scary but give it a bloody nose and it will run.

2.
‘Stalinism’ was right 

The Western “left,” thoroughly rooted in what I have called a “purity fetish” outlook, has virtually defined itself through its rejection of what it calls “Stalinism.” Such a thing, however, does not actually exist. What does exist is Marxism-Leninism, a framework for successfully waging war against capitalist-imperialism. What the Western “left” have derided as “Stalinism” are the realist practices of protecting and constructing a revolutionary state, one capable of defending itself from enemies both internal and external.

The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, an anti-communist himself, nonetheless makes an astute observation about the willingness of Marxist-Leninists – as well as conservatives – to reject liberal moralism and take responsibility for the difficult actions which have to take place for one’s political project to be defended. As he argues in The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology:

“What a true Leninist and a political conservative have in common is the fact that they reject what one could call liberal leftist irresponsibility, that is, advocating grand projects of solidarity, freedom, and so on, yet ducking out when the price to be paid for them is in the guise of concrete and often “cruel” political measures. Like an authentic conservative, a true Leninist is not afraid to pass to the act, to take responsibility for all the consequences, unpleasant as they may be, of realizing his political project.”

The Western “left” derided Stalin for his brutal treatment of his opposition within the party, ignoring always the context of turmoil in which this often-treasonous opposition chose to challenge the ruling order of the revolutionary state. At a time when unconditional commitment and unity to the protection of the revolution was needed, “doubting was treason,” as the Chavista revolutionaries say today. History has shown that the revolutionary states that survive and thrive are those which are willing to get their hands dirty and be as brutal with internal opposition in times of crisis as is necessary. As Executive Chairman of the American Communist Party, Haz Al-Din, recently argued, “Venezuela proves the most brutal measures of Communist dictatorships to crush internal enemies were 100% justified. Ignore the crocodile tears for ‘victims.’ Hesitate, and they’ll snort/oink victoriously over your country’s corpse.”

Is this not precisely one of the central lessons to take from Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.? Why is bourgeois “democratic” formalism so fetishistically respected? If you have a treasonous opposition calling for the invasion of your country by Zionist forces, how could they possibly walk the streets of your country freely? Why was a Juan Guaidó or a Maria Corina Machado able to freely walk the streets of Caracas, travel abroad and return, when it was so clear that they were nothing but traitors to the homeland of Bolivar – individuals who wanted to return to a time when wealthy white Venezuelans were the privileged house slaves of American imperialism. This does not mean plurality is not allowed, but as Fidel Castro taught – within the revolution everything, outside of it nothing.

3.
We are in the era of civilizational blocs

Today, the nation state is being overcome as the nucleus of geopolitics by the civilizational state. Today geopolitics is determined by civilizational blocs. Only a meta-national civilizational unity of people who were divided artificially into tribal nations by western colonialism can stop the viciousness of a U.S. superimperialism in decline. Now is the time – more than ever before – for Latin America to return to the wisdom of Bolívar, Martí, and other revolutionary heroes that understood the essential character of a united Central and South America to deter U.S. imperialism. In this, the Chavistas, of course, are not to blame. Their whole revolutionary project has this lesson at its heart. Therefore, this third point is aimed at those other nations of the region which foolishly think they can have even a semblance of sovereignty without adopting the revolutionary Bolivarian civilizational unity proposed by the Chavistas. These attacks on Venezuela are attacks on the principle of sovereignty itself, and every country in the hemisphere is in trouble if steps are not taken to seriously construct a Pan-American civilizational and revolutionary unity.

This lesson must also be heeded by our anti-imperialist comrades around the world – from West Asia to Africa. Here – like the Venezuelans – the Alliance of Sahel States has the right idea. As Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Sankara, and all the great African revolutionaries taught, only through Pan-African unity can the motherland of Africa fully stand on its own two feet and throw off once and for all the shackles of Western imperialism and neo-colonialism. In China, as Professor Zhang Weiwei argues, the state itself is a civilizational state. Other analysts have argued the same about the Russian Federation. In West Asia – as in Latin America and Africa – the imperialists have been successful in dividing peoples who share a common civilizational unity. Such division of this essential civilizational pole must be overcome. In the era of civilization states and meta-state alliances – the nation state is not dead per se, it is simply reincorporated into a new dialectical intercourse where it stands as the secondary aspect, as Mao would call it, of the contradiction between nation and civilization. As a product of this period of transition, national projects must be crafted in harmony with, and cognizant of, the larger civilizational context of unity which must be created or enriched.

The countries of Latin America must take away the correct lessons from these events unfolding in Venezuela. In any moment, they too could be next. If they are alone and divided, they will be weak. At a time when anti-imperialist forces in the region have taken big hits (the loss of the Movement Toward Socialism party in Bolivia, the loss of the left in Honduras, the kidnapping of Maduro, etc.), it is more essential than ever to return to the teachings of the great Pan-American thinkers, who understood that without a broader civilizational unity, national sovereignty will always hang by a thread.

Seeing the events unfold over the last week, these three key points have kept recurring in my mind. These are intended to be comradely opinions and suggestions – not harsh critique and condemnation. My support for the Bolivarian revolution is unflinching, and if I seek to draw out certain lessons that I think could be taken away from difficult moments such as these, it is always in the spirit of seeking to protect the revolution from imperialist aggression and internal traitors, not kicking it when it is down.

I would like to close with a line from the Cuban revolutionary poet Bonifacio Byrne:

If my flag were ever torn into tiny pieces,
if one day it were reduced to fragments,
our dead, raising their arms,
would still know how to defend it.

This line, frequently repeated by Commander Fidel Castro, captures the spirit in which not only the national homeland must be defended, but also the broader context of Our America.

Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious.

The loudest question in Washington right now is whether Donald Trump is going to invade Venezuela. The quieter, and far more dangerous, reality is this: he probably won’t. Not because he cares about Venezuelan lives, but because he has found a strategy that is cheaper, less politically risky at home, and infinitely more devastating: economic warfare.

Venezuela has already survived years of economic warfare. Despite two decades of sweeping US sanctions designed to strangle its economy, the country has found ways to adapt: oil has moved through alternative markets; communities have developed survival strategies; people have endured shortages and hardship with creativity and resilience. This endurance is precisely what the Trump administration is trying to break.

Rather than launching a military invasion that would provoke public backlash and congressional scrutiny, Trump is doubling down on something more insidious: total economic asphyxiation. By tightening restrictions on Venezuelan oil exports, its primary source of revenue, Trump’s administration is deliberately pushing the country toward a full-scale humanitarian collapse.

In recent months, US actions in the Caribbean Sea, including the harassment and interdiction of oil tankers linked to Venezuela, signal a shift from financial pressure to illegal maritime force. These operations have increasingly targeted Venezuela’s ability to move its own resources through international waters. Oil tankers have been delayed, seized, threatened with secondary sanctions, or forced to reroute under coercion. The objective is strangulation.
This is illegal under international law.

The freedom of navigation on the high seas is a cornerstone of international maritime law, enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea. Unilateral interdiction of civilian commercial vessels, absent a UN Security Council mandate, violates the principle of sovereign equality and non-intervention. The extraterritorial enforcement of US sanctions, punishing third countries and private actors for engaging in lawful trade with Venezuela, has no legal basis. It is coercion, plain and simple. More importantly, the intent is collective punishment.

By preventing Venezuela from exporting oil, which is the revenue that funds food imports, medicine, electricity, and public services, the Trump administration is knowingly engineering conditions of mass deprivation. Under international humanitarian law, collective punishment is prohibited precisely because it targets civilians as a means to achieve political ends. And if this continues, we will see horrific images: empty shelves, malnourished children, overwhelmed hospitals, people scavenging for food. Scenes that echo those coming out of Gaza, where siege and starvation have been normalized as weapons of war.

US actions will undoubtedly cause millions of Venezuelans to flee the country, likely seeking to travel to the United States, which they are told is safe for their families, full of economic opportunities, and security. . But Trump is sealing the US border, cutting off asylum pathways, and criminalizing migration. When people are starved, when economies are crushed, when daily life becomes unlivable, people move. Blocking Venezuelans from entering the United States while systematically destroying the conditions that allow them to survive at home means that neighboring countries like Colombia, Brazil, and Chile will be asked to absorb the human cost of Washington’s decisions. This is how empire outsources the damage. But these countries have their own economic woes, and mass displacement of Venezuelans will destabilize the entire region.

Venezuela is a test case. What is being refined now—economic siege without formal war, maritime coercion without declared blockade, starvation without bombs—is a blueprint. Any country that refuses compliance with Washington’s political and economic demands should be paying attention. This will be the map for 21st century regime change.

And this is how Trump can reassure the United States Congress that he is not “going to war” with Venezuela. He doesn’t need to. Economic strangulation carries none of the immediate political costs of a military intervention, even as it inflicts slow, widespread devastation. There are no body bags returning to US soil, no draft, no televised bombing campaigns. Just a steady erosion of life elsewhere.

Trump’s calculation is brutally simple: make Venezuelans so miserable that they will rise up and overthrow Maduro. That has been the same calculation behind US policy toward Cuba for six decades—and it has failed. Economic strangulation doesn’t bring democracy; it brings suffering. And even if, by some grim chance, it did succeed in toppling the government, the likely result would not be freedom but chaos—possibly a protracted civil war that could devastate the country, and the region, for decades.

Tomorrow, people in Venezuela will celebrate Christmas. Families will gather around the table to eat hallacas wrapped with care, slices of pan de jamón, and dulce de lechoza. They will share stories, dance to gaitas, and make a toast with Ponche Crema.

But if this economic siege continues, if Venezuelan oil is fully cut off, if the country is denied the means to feed itself, if hunger is allowed to finish what bombs are no longer politically useful to accomplish, then this Christmas may be remembered as one of the last Venezuelans were able to celebrate in anything resembling normal life, at least in the near future.

Polls consistently show that nearly 70 percent of people in the United States oppose a military intervention in Venezuela. War is recognized for what it is: violent, destructive, unacceptable. But sanctions are treated differently. Many people believe they are a harmless alternative, a way to apply “pressure” without bloodshed.

That assumption is dangerously wrong. According to a comprehensive study in medical journal The Lancet, sanctions increase mortality at levels comparable to armed conflict, hitting children and the elderly first. Sanctions do not avoid civilian harm—they systematically produce it.

If we oppose war because it kills, we must also oppose sanctions that do the same, more quietly, more slowly, and with far less accountability. If we don’t act against economic warfare with the same urgency we reserve for bombs and invasions, then sanctions will remain the preferred weapon: politically convenient but equally deadly.

Author
​
Michelle Ellner is a Latin America campaign coordinator of CODEPINK. She was born in Venezuela and holds a bachelor’s degree in languages and international affairs from the University La Sorbonne Paris IV, in Paris. After graduating, she worked for an international scholarship program out of offices in Caracas and Paris and was sent to Haiti, Cuba, The Gambia, and other countries for the purpose of evaluating and selecting applicants. 

A prominent global Marxist scholar recently went viral quote-tweeting a post cheering on the US’s imperial war against Venezuela, saying that “you are violating international law… you are on notice.”

While factually, of course, this commentator is correct, I think it is much more interesting to philosophically investigate the presumptions behind such a statement.

It is clear to anyone capable of seeing two fingers in front of them that the bellicosity the criminal US regime is demonstrating with Venezuela has nothing to do with narco-trafficking, and everything to do with Venezuela having the largest proven oil reserves in the world. Few people could be genuinely stupid enough to actually believe the formal reasons given for US foreign policy initiatives.

Geopolitical and economic motives lie behind any and all policies carried out by the United States. The neoconservative moral crusades to defend ‘American values’ are, of course, escapades to defend and expand the dominance of American finance capital.

My reader, I presume, knows this well, so I shall not labor on this point here.

What is, instead, much more ambivalent is how many of those critical of the US imperial regime come to relate to and treat international law.

In the last two years, the world has witnessed, chronicled on all of our phones, the brutal genocide of the Palestinian people. There could not be a greater surplus of images from Gaza which ought to chill the spines of anyone with an ounce of humanity.

In this time, ‘international law’ and its various institutions have condemned these actions, to greater or lesser degrees. From the South African-led International Court of Justice genocide case, to the International Criminal Court investigation of "Israel" for a slew of violations, from extermination to starvation and collective punishment, to UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council investigations and condemnations, there were hardly any stones of international law left unturned.

But what, my friends, was the result? Is Palestine saved? If so, was it ‘international law’ that did it? Considering the slew of Zionist violations of the ceasefire, I think it is not irrational to say that the answer to both is ‘No’.

And so, we must restate the question Fidel Castro made in his famous 1979 speech in front of the United Nations: “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” Or, even further, what is the purpose of international law?
What good is international law and the institutions that claim to uphold it when one country and its lackeys can regularly violate it with impunity? When has the United States, "Israel", or — if I may be bold — the whole of the Western colonial-imperialist world, ever respected international law?

Is not the very system this 14% of the world, which foolishly considers itself to be the world as such, one premised on the violation of any sense of sovereignty? On the violation of any sense of ‘basic rights’ other than those of the capital-owning class which personify the system? Are the rights and freedoms here defended not precisely of the kind which have as a constitutive component the absence of any real rights, freedoms, or sovereignty for the bulk of humanity?

And so, let’s return to the prominent global Marxist scholar, which I would like to intentionally retain unnamed since my goal is not to mock them as an individual, but to ask some critical questions about a framework of thought he and so many critics of US imperialism share. My questions are the following: what is at stake in continuously invoking an ‘international law’ broken at will by the ‘usual suspects,’ to borrow an expression from Casablanca? Do you not feel the almost cartoonish naïveté of such invocation in the face of its continued irrelevance in shaping world affairs?

Is international law here not treated precisely as a fetish object? That is, as a reified entity that is ascribed mystical powers onto it, all the while ignoring the real global relations which shape its function? What weight, in the real world, does ‘international law’ have over the US empire’s constant violation of it?

It isn’t simply the case that international law isn’t working. That is too simplistic an understanding of the gap between the formally enumerated law and reality. We must, instead, see this distance, this gap, as constitutive of reality itself. International law under conditions of US hegemonism and super-imperialism is the global judicature that formalizes this system at the level of law, functioning as an integral mechanism of its reproduction. This is, frankly, emblematic of the Marxist understanding of how judicature is related to political economy. Bourgeois international law will always have a ‘gap’ between the enunciated ideals it formally upholds and the actual workings of an international order still dominated by capitalist-imperialism. This gap is not a mistake that can be fixed through reforms, it is constitutive of the system itself. It is a symptom, to put it in Lacanian terms, that cannot be removed without at the same time removing the system for which it is a symptom.

As within the nation, the struggle for rights, and the appeal to existing legal frameworks to defend their exercise, is an integral component of the class struggle. However, for Marxists, there should be no naïveté and infantilism involved in our analysis of the ultimate nature of these institutions, of what interests they serve to reproduce in the last instance. Central to the importance of waging the fight at this level is showing the mass of people its fundamental impotence in providing true, concrete freedom and sovereignty for the working and oppressed peoples of the world.

This is not accomplished when one naively finger-wags at the US, listing the slew of violations they’re actively committing to international law, and stating that ‘you are on notice.’ On notice, from whom? Who will hold the US accountable? This fetish-object of ‘international law?’ Will an army of the United Nations halt the US’s war efforts on the coast of Venezuela? Will international law be used to unite countries against this belligerent actor, pressuring it with global economic ostracization? If international law has failed to do any of this since its emergence, what good is it to make calls upon it today?

As a state, I can understand having to keep up the pretense of legal formalism, but for individual scholars, journalists, and critical thinkers, is this finger-wagging appeal to the hollow authority of a fetish-object really the correct way to proceed? Is it not as if one is appealing to the authority of a paper that the US has cleaned itself with, and left with all its filth on the floor?

International law will not save us. Treating international law fetishistically only buys into the ideological illusions constitutive of the system and its judicature.

Friends and comrades, it is foolish to expect a victory when showing up with a pen to a gunfight.

On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of uninterrupted diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba.

Address by Arnold August, along with the presentation of his book Fidel Castro: la visión de un canadiense, delivered at the Parliament of Canada in Ottawa on December 3, 2025, at a meeting hosted by the Canada–Cuba Parliamentary Friendship Group

Paragraph delivered in French:
A sincere thank you to the co-chairs of the Canada–Cuba Parliamentary Friendship Group: Bloc Québécois MP Gabriel Ste-Marie from the riding of Joliette, and the Honourable Senator Judy A. White from Newfoundland and Labrador, for inviting me. It is always an honour to sit beside His Excellency, the Cuban Ambassador to Canada, Rodrígo Malmierca Díaz. Today, we gather to celebrate 2025 as the 80th Anniversary of diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba – an uninterrupted milestone in our hemisphere, matched only by Mexico.

Paragraphs delivered in English:
On this occasion, allow me to highlight one central theme from my fourth book on Cuba and Latin America. This volume examines two prominent figures, Fidel Castro and Pierre Trudeau, and explores the dynamics of the Canada–Cuba–United States triangle from 1959 to 1976. It also outlines how both the conservative and the liberal parties, which have governed Canada since 1959, played key roles in shaping this unique relationship. Other political formations have also contributed – and continue to contribute – to this history, as I will address later.
Conservative Party leader and then-Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, at the time of the January 1959 Cuban Revolution, defended the continuation of diplomatic relations between Canada and Cuba. He did so despite pressure from the United States under President John F. Kennedy. When Kennedy tried to force Diefenbaker to join the US-led effort to impose the anti-Cuba blockade and other coercive measures, Diefenbaker, the Prairie farmer, responded sharply to the wealthy urban intellectual from Massachusetts. He reminded Kennedy that “Canada is not a Boston in the state of Massachusetts.” This political tendency also plays a vital role in Canada–Cuba relations.

Paragraphs delivered in French:
Who invited Fidel Castro to Montreal only months after January 1959? To understand the complexity of the moment, one must remember that, although Fidel was widely admired internationally, a massive US-led media campaign was spreading disinformation – including in mainstream Canadian media. This campaign targeted the Revolution’s legal proceedings, including the trials and the executions of Batista’s known torturers and murderers – measures that had been demanded by the victims’ families. Yet the person who invited Fidel – and hosted him during his 24-hour visit to Montreal – was not a “leftist” or even a liberal. His name was Claude Dupras, a conservative at both the federal and municipal levels.

Why was he drawn to Fidel Castro? At the time of the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s and 1959, Quebec was evolving in the budding atmosphere of its own multipartisan “Quiet Revolution,” which was initiated in 1960, challenging US-Anglo control over its vast electricity resources. Its goal was to become “maîtres chez nous” – masters of our own house. Dupras could relate to Fidel as a leader standing up to the United States on behalf of a small nation. It was therefore natural to invite him to Montreal. The spontaneous street scenes in April 1959, and the photos of TV interviews that I include in the book, show the broad support for Fidel in Quebec despite the disinformation campaign. People were clearly shrugging off the slanders.

At Fidel’s April 1959 press conference in Montreal, who do we see leaning in to interview him? None other than René Lévesque, the best-known journalist in Quebec at the time, an emerging sovereigntist, and a political precursor of today’s Bloc Québécois and MPs such as Gabriel Ste-Marie. The book shows that, in addition to conservatives and liberals, this political tendency also plays a vital role in Canada–Cuba relations.

Author

Arnold August is an award-winning journalist and author of three acclaimed books. His three books on Cuba-US-Latin America have been acclaimed by experts in the field. In 2013, he was awarded the Félix Elmuza Award by the Association of Cuban Journalists and contributes to outlets in English, Spanish and French in many parts of the world. He serves as a Contributing Editor for The Canada Files.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the most popular critics of political correctness (PC) from the ‘left.’ It is a topic he addresses in numerous books and popular articles. While the general spirit of critiquing PC culture or wokeism from the left is certainly one I am sympathetic to, he fundamentally misunderstands the level at which political correctness operates, placing it within an archaic sincerity paradigm, and not within its proper profilic context.
In Absolute Recoil, he writes that “under the discursive regime of political correctness, it is not enough to follow external rules of politeness, one is expected to be ‘sincerely’ respectful of others, and continually examined on the sincerity of one’s innermost convictions.”

This, frankly, completely misses the logic through which political correctness operates. The regime of PC culture (which is today almost wholly overcome) is intimately tied to profilicity. It does not concern itself with sincere role enactment — akin to how Lionel Trilling would describe the dominant identity technology in the pre-capitalist, pre-authenticity world. Neither is PC culture operative at the level of authenticity. Politically correct culture does not concern itself with whether one is dutifully enacting a role (sincerity), nor whether one is authentic about one’s pronouncements.

PC culture operates purely at the level of the surface — what matters is not what one actually believes (authenticity), nor the duties one fulfills (sincerity), but what one says (profilicity). Here the work of Hans Georg-Moeller and Paul D’Ambrosio in You and Your Profile: Identity After Authenticity remains the best description of the shifts that have occurred at the basic levels of digital human sociality and identity construction.

Under the regime of PC, it is what appears on your profile which comes to matter most. One could actively fulfill one’s duty as an activist against racism, one can be authentically committed to fighting against racists, but neither your practices nor your subjective beliefs matter for PC culture — if you say a politically incorrect racial joke, or use a politically incorrect racial term (even in a non-racist or even anti-racist context) you will still be cancelled. It will leave (when PC was dominant) a seemingly eternal scarlet letter A on your profile.
Is the point, for instance, of all the DEI trainings universities have staff do really to inspire a certain set of practices or ideas on their staff? Or, is the role such trainings play in curating the profile of the institution as ‘woke’ and ‘progressive’ a greater motivating factor?

Is the point of the CIA ‘woke’ ad to inspire a sincere role enactment, or an authentic subjective belief about upholding disabled, trans, lesbian, Hispanic women? Or, is it about shaping the profile of how the institution is seen — or better yet, how it is seen as being seen, how it looks from the standpoint of second order observation?
Here is what Žižek gets most egregiously wrong about political correctness — what comes to matter most for it is the surface, not practice nor so-called subjective belief. In some ways, it operates at the level of form, in a manner reminiscent, but thoroughly distorted, of the way that Marxism and psychoanalysis treat form and content. If we recall, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek correctly identifies the ways in which both Marxism and Freud understand that the key operation is not piercing through the form to get at the content (traditional western philosophical cannon approach to ‘truth’), but understanding the secret of the form itself — why the ‘content’ needs to take on a distorted form. The distortion of form is not an external filter blurring a ‘truth’ which lies deeper in the content, it is a constitutive moment of the content itself, such that — as an apparent obstacle — removing it entails also the elimination of that which it is an obstacle for.

This dialectical treatment of form and content is not, of course, what we get with PC. However, it also isn’t the traditional paradigm of piercing through form to get at content, which is what is implied in Žižek’s treatment of it within the mode of sincerity. His treatment suggests that for PC there is a deeper belief (content) that must be sincere, that is, that must be consistent with the form. But this is not at all what PC culture was about — it was wholly concerned with the surface, with form. Not with the secret of the form itself (Marxism), but with the form as devoid of secrets, the form as a source of authority akin to the ‘content’ in the previous, traditional paradigm.

​As such, PC must be understood within the context of the emergence of profilicity and second order observation, a development arising out of the development of the productive forces that comes with the technological revolution.
For PC culture what always mattered was the words you said, not the context in which you said them, nor the spirit in which you did it. What mattered is the formal letter of the law, not its spirit. Therefore, Žižek’s understanding of it within the mode of sincerity is wholly inadequate. PC culture can be understood only within the logic of profilicity and second order observation.

Author 

Dr. Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American Professor of Philosophy who received his M.A. and Ph.D. from Southern Illinois University Carbondale. He serves as the Secretary of Education for the American Communist Party and as a Director of the Midwestern Marx Institute, the largest Marxist-Leninist think-tank in the United States. Dr. Garrido has authored a few books, including Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), and the two forthcoming texts, Domenico Losurdo and the Marxist-Leninist Critique of Western Marxism (2026) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2026-7). Dr. Garrido has published over a dozen scholarly articles and over a hundred articles in popular settings across the U.S., Mexico, Cuba, Iran, China, Brazil, Venezuela, Greece, Peru, Canada, etc. His writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He also writes short form articles for his Substack, @philosophyincrisis, and does regular YouTube programs for the Midwestern Marx Institute channel. He is on Instagram @carlos.l.garrido

The Wall Street Journal, founded in 1889, is the largest newspaper in the United States with respect to print circulation, and the second largest (after The New York Times) in digital circulation, with 4.15 million digital subscribers. It is considered a “newspaper of record,” defined in Wikipedia as “a major national newspaper with large circulation whose editorial and news-gathering functions are considered authoritative and independent.”

In “The High Stakes in Venezuela: Trump chose this showdown with Maduro, and only one will win,” published by The Editorial Board on December 1, 2025, the newspaper of record reveals a win-lose mentality in international relations which is out of sync with the demands of the current historic moment. It begins with the assertion, “President Trump is in a high-stakes showdown with Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro. . .. One of the two presidents is going to lose, and it will be Mr. Trump if Mr. Maduro isn’t ousted one way or another.” Warming to the task at hand, the editorial further asserts, “If Mr. Trump withdraws his Caribbean flotilla with Mr. Maduro still in power, the Venezuelan strongman will have won. The world will see that he was able to stand up to American power in the Yankee’s backyard.”

The editorial acknowledges that the Trump administration has maintained that its assembling of naval forces in the Caribbean has the purpose of fighting drug cartels, but the editorial considers this claim to be nothing more than “political cover.” It maintains that you do not need a large military mobilization “to blow up drug boats,” thus not anticipating the national security strategy released by the administration on December 3, which emphasized a reorientation of US national security policy toward the Western Hemisphere.

The editorial notes that if Maduro refuses to step down and find refuge in another country, “The President may have to take direct military action to oust the dictator” [sic]. It argues that, despite domestic political risks, “deposing Mr. Maduro is in the U.S. national interest given how he has spread refugees and mayhem in the region” [sic]. It maintains that deposing Maduro should not be considered an American coup, because “Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly to elect the opposition in the 2024 presidential race, but Mr. Maduro refused to cede power. Deposing him in favor of the elected president would restore democracy” [double sic].

For the esteemed members of The Editorial Board of the newspaper of record, the US government must not let Maduro win. “If Mr. Maduro refuses to leave, and Mr. Trump shrinks from acting to depose him, Mr. Trump and the credibility of the U.S. will be the losers. Mr. Trump chose this showdown, and it will cost America and the region dearly if Mr. Maduro emerges triumphant.”

§
Considerations on democracy in Venezuela
As the reader will discern, the premise of the WSJ Editorial is that Maduro is a dictator maintained in power through fraudulent means. Let us look at the facts.
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Nicolás Maduro was re-elected President of Venezuela on July 28, 2024, receiving 51.2% of the vote, defeating the far-right candidate Edmundo González, who received 44.2%. Maduro was the candidate of a coalition of thirteen political organizations known as the Simón Bolívar Great Patriotic Pole as well as the leader of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. Eight other candidates—including candidates of the right, center-right, and center-left—received 4.6% of the votes cast. A total of 21,620,705 citizens voted—a voter participation rate of 59%—in more than fifteen thousand voting districts distributed throughout the country. In total, ten presidential candidates, thirty political parties, and 1300 international and national observers participated in the 2024 presidential elections, according to the president of the National Electoral Council.

Maduro was born on November 23, 1962, in Caracas, Venezuela, and he was politically active in the 1980s in the Socialist League. From 1991 to 1998, he worked as a bus driver, and he founded the Caracas Metro Union. During that period, he met and became a fervent supporter of Hugo Chávez, and he became active in the Bolivarian Revolutionary Movement. He was among the new deputies elected in the electoral triumph of the Bolivarian Revolution in 1998. He held various positions in the National Assembly between 2000 and 2006. In 2006, he was named Minister of Foreign Affairs, and in that capacity, he became known in the international arena for his excellent discourses in defense of the Bolivarian Revolution. He was named Vice-President in 2012, and he was publicly named by Chávez to be his successor shortly prior to his death in 2013. Maduro subsequently won presidential elections in 2013, with 50.61% of the vote; and in 2018, with 78.84%.
Elections in Venezuela are managed by the National Electoral Council, an independent branch of government established by the Bolivarian Revolution. The electoral system is characterized by a high-level of citizen access to voting booths and clear identification of voters, in which voters cast both an electronic vote and a printed paper ballot, enabling cross-checking of the vote count. Verification of the electoral total is conducted automatically in 54% of the voting locations, which are chosen at random.

The latest of several US plans for the destabilization of the Venezuelan political system came to light two days before the 2024 elections, when suggestions were put forth of alleged fraud, preparing the terrain for the non-recognition of the results and for violence by fascist gangs, financed by Venezuelans from Miami and Spain, according to Granma journalist Francisco Arias Fernández. The plan included the non-recognition of the electoral results following the announcement of Maduro’s victory, with the complicity of the US-controlled Organization of American States and US allies in the region. The far-right leader, María Corina Machado, who benefits from foreign media coverage and foreign financial support, planned to relocate to Argentina, where she was to set up a command post as the coup d’état was unfolding, seeking political-diplomatic support with telephone calls to different countries. The plan anticipated the support of the major media, and Arias Fernández specifically mentions The New York Times, CNN, AP, Voice of America, Euronews, BBC, the German DW and the Spanish newspapers El País and El Mundo.

True to the plan, the opposition claimed electoral fraud on July 29. Marina Corina Machado announced that she had in her possession electoral records that showed that González had received 70% of the vote, but she did not release the information she claimed to have. In this unsubstantiated claim of electoral fraud, the opposition in Venezuela had the backing of the Western media, as the plan anticipated. The Washington Post, for example, published on July 30 a one-sided article giving credence to the opposition claims of fraud, citing protestors on the streets on July 29. It made no mention of the reports of international observers. Similarly, an article in The New York Times, “Venezuela’s Election Was Deeply Flawed,” was written with the prevailing Western ethnocentric narrative which assumes that nations seeking independence from US direction are authoritarian, ignoring the historical struggles of said nations against US imperialism and US control of the natural resources and the economies of their countries.

On Monday, July 29, protests expressing dissatisfaction with the results were held. The opposition claimed that they were spontaneous demonstrations by the people in protest of supposed electoral fraud. However, the Venezuelan news outlet Telesur reported that some demonstrators, many with criminal antecedents, had been paid $150. There were reports of violence, including setting fire to hospitals, pharmacies and radio stations, blocking roads, and derailing buses carrying international election observers.

Telesur reported, with videos provided by on-the-scene reporters, that the streets where the demonstrations had been held were calm and normal by midnight. Beginning on Tuesday, July 30, crowds began to appear in support of Maduro and the electoral process.

Venezuelan analyst Luigino Bracci explained that elections in Venezuela are automated. When a citizen casts a vote in a voting machine, the machine prints a receipt, which the voter places in a box. Thus, there is a double system of counting, in which the machine keeps track of each vote and prints a tally of the votes, and at the same time, polling station members and political party observers verify that the machine report of the vote tally is consistent with the tally of the printed receipts. The machine reports the results to one of two tallying centers of the National Electoral Council (CNE for its initials in Spanish).

Bracci noted that for the last twenty years, CNE has been publishing the results of each polling station on its website, making the votes transparent, and enabling observers representing the political parties to verify the results with their polling station observations. This publication of results usually occurs a few hours after the first electoral bulletin is released. However, the results could not be verified in this way with respect to the July 28 presidential elections, because there had been a cyberattack against the data transmission system of CNE, a fact that was announced by the president of CNE, Elvis Amoroso, when he announced the election results at 12:13 a.m. on July 29. He noted that the cyberattack was slowing down the transfer of information to the tallying centers.

After the CNE announcement, President Maduro went to the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court of Justice to request an investigation and to request that all candidates and the National Electoral Council be summoned and be requested to submit all necessary records and documents. Maduro also promised that the tally sheets of his party’s witnesses would be presented. Maduro declared that he was seeking the protection of the Supreme Court from false accusations of electoral fraud by the extreme Right opposition, which had contracted fascist and criminal gangs to engage in violent actions in a destabilization strategy supported by the US government.
In accordance with the request of the President, the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court, authorized by the Constitution to rule on such questions, summoned the ten candidates to appear, and nine of them did so on August 2. Edmundo González, on whose behalf accusations of fraud had been made beginning on July 29, was the only one of the ten candidates who did not appear before the Court.

The opposition claim of fraud raised the possibility of someone secretly manipulating the machines to reprint tally sheets with numbers favorable to the government. Víctor Theoktisto, a computer science professor at Simón Bolívar University who had served as an advisor in the development of the nation’s automated electoral system, noted that the automated electoral system is designed with numerous security checks, such that any manipulated or modified tally sheet would have a QR code or “hash” different from the unique code of the original, which could be discerned through investigation. For this reason, the question of fraud ought to be resolved through the Supreme Court, with all parties presenting what they have, as the CNE was doing in accordance with Maduro’s request. The opposition ought to present their evidence and their case to the Court, Theoktisto asserted. “The fact that González did not appear before the Electoral Chamber last Friday raises many questions. If they have the evidence, why not challenge the elections before the appropriate body? Are they willing to have their election evidence verified? . . . The opposition must challenge the results before the [Supreme Court], not in public opinion or international media.”

Theoktisto further noted that hacking technologies exist that could slow down the CNE process by disrupting connections, although they could not change the actual tallies. He further observed that the attacks on the CNE Website were so numerous that they likely involved hacking sources outside the country, with some level of support from local actors. He noted that “a governmental actor is indispensable” for an attack of this scale, and he believed that a hostile government was involved. But all such questions need to be investigated, he stressed.
After July 30, the Western media withdrew from the terrain, posting few articles after that date. And the Biden administration began making contradictory statements, retreating from recognition of the opposition candidate as the winner of the elections and as the true head of state in Venezuela. Meanwhile, the Maduro government was in full control in Venezuela, with the National Electoral Commission proceeding with a full review of the ballots, in accordance with the Venezuelan constitution and the request of the Maduro government; with successful and peaceful public events in support of the government; and with the attorney general’s office proceeding with legal action against those who violated laws in seeking to promote destabilization, some of whom are in hiding.

On August 22, 2024, the Electoral Chamber of the Venezuelan Supreme Tribunal of Justice, designed by the Constitution to adjudicate electoral questions, ratified Nicolas Maduro as the winner of the July 28 presidential elections. In a press conference attended by government officials, diplomatic representatives, and members of the press, Supreme Court magistrate Caryslia Rodríguez began by reaffirming the jurisdiction of the Electoral Chamber of the Supreme Court on the question, noting that recent electoral processes in Brazil, Mexico, and the United States were ultimately settled by judicial rulings. Rodríguez proceeded at the press conference to read the verdict of the Court. It stated that a team of national and international experts had conducted a review, with the highest technical standards, of the voting records that had been submitted by the electoral parties and candidates.

​The verdict asserted that the investigation found that the voting records fully coincided with the data of the tallying centers of the National Electoral Council, which had declared Maduro the winner with fifty-two percent of the vote, as against forty-three percent for Edmundo González. The verdict further mandated the National Electoral Council to publish the final results in the National Gazette before the August 28 deadline established by Venezuelan electoral procedures. Magistrate Rodríguez also asserted that opposition candidate Edmundo González was in contempt of court for not appearing in response to the Court’s summons and for not submitting requested evidence. She also called upon Attorney General Tarek William Saab to launch investigations for possible criminal conduct, including the usurpation of state functions, forging documents, and instigating violence.

The Bolivarian Revolution was convoked by Hugo Chávez on February 4, 1992, when he led approximately 100 military officers in an attempted coup d´état, with the intention of overthrowing the government and convening a constituent assembly. The coup failed, and he was imprisoned. Upon his release in 1994, he resigned from the military and formed the Bolivarian Fifth Republic Movement, again with the intention of convening a constitutional assembly, but now seeking to attain power through the electoral process. Traveling throughout the country and meeting with the people during the presidential electoral campaign, he was elected President of Venezuela in 1998, and he assumed the presidency on February 2, 1999. He immediately issued a decree convoking a Constitutional Assembly. Elections for a new constitution were held, and a new Constitution was approved, establishing the Fifth Republic. Chávez was elected to two six-year terms as president under the new Constitution. He died of cancer in 2013, before completing his second term.

Hugo Rafael Chávez Frías was born in Sabaneta, a rural village of Venezuela, on July 28, 1954. His father was a schoolteacher who earned his teaching diploma by studying part-time. Although his mother and father lived nearby, he was principally reared by his grandmother, a peasant woman who was half indigenous. In 1971, at the age of 17, Chávez entered the Military Academy of Venezuela, and he earned a commission as a Second Lieutenant in 1975. His study during his years in the military academy established the foundation for his revolutionary formation. He read the writings of Simón Bolívar, Mao Zedong, and Che Guevara, and he developed a perspective that he described as a synthesis of Bolivarianism and Maoism. He investigated these themes further in a master´s program in political science at Simón Bolívar University. He continuously read books of historical, political, social, and literary significance during his military and political careers.

Central to Chávez’s political rise was his call for effective state control of the state-owned petroleum company (Petróleos de Venezuela, Sociedad Anónima, or PDVSA). The company had been nationalized in 1976 during the era of “petroleum nationalism” in Venezuela, but the nationalization did not have the results that its advocates had hoped. Prior to the nationalization, foreign companies had appointed Venezuelans as managers, seeking to ensure political stability. Since the Venezuelan managers previously had been socialized into the norms and values of the international petroleum companies, the transition to Venezuelan state ownership had little effect on the dynamics of the nation’s petroleum industry. PDVSA adapted to the neocolonial world-system, exploiting petroleum in accordance with the norms and interests of the international petroleum industry. Like the foreign-owned oil companies in other neocolonized countries, PDVSA sought to reduce payments to the Venezuelan state. Accordingly, PDVSA adopted a strategy of channeling surpluses to investments in production and sales, including the purchase of refineries and distributorships in other countries. By transferring surpluses out of the country, the PDVSA evaded payments to the Venezuelan state.

The government of Hugo Chávez sought to reduce the autonomy of PDVSA and to incorporate its resources into a project of national development. The Chávez government appointed new directors of PDVSA, replacing the directors appointed by previous governments, provoking a great conflict with the established order.

But the conflict had favorable results for Venezuela. With the new leadership of PDVSA, the state income from petroleum increased significantly, and the new funds were directed toward various social projects in education, health, and housing as well as to wage increases, financial assistance to those in need, and the elimination of foreign debt.

The governments of Chávez and Maduro have conducted more than thirty national elections, either nationwide referendums, presidential elections, or elections to the national legislature, and the Chavistas have won all but two of them. This impressive process prompted former President Jimmy Carter to declare that Venezuela has one of the best elections in the world.

However, the numerous elections have been conducted in accordance with the rules and procedures of representative democracy, in which success depends on the mobilization of resources, especially financial resources. Therefore, the United Socialist Party of Venezuela has sought to supplement elections developed according to the norms of representative democracy with the creation of Communal Councils throughout the country. Communal Councils are formed by the people through open assemblies, encompassing approximately 100 families in urban areas and thirty families in rural areas. The communal councils seek to identify and implement local priorities and projects with respect to housing, health, water, or electricity, with the full and equal participation of all citizens over the age of fifteen, and with the support of a financial unit and an oversight unit. The long-term goal is the integration of the Communal Councils with the structures of representative democracy, thus establishing “true participatory democracy” based on the concept of people’s power from the grassroots.
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Further considerations on The Wall Street Journal
As is evident, the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal accepts as Truth what is merely one side of a political conflict in Venezuela. If that side had any validity, we would have seen beginning in August the taking of the streets by the people in opposition to the Maduro government, providing internal support to the aggressive actions of the USA toward the government of Venezuela. But exactly the opposite has occurred. The government of Maduro since August has been able to mobilize the people in a great national exercise of self-defense, preparing the nation and the people for what is perceived as a pending military invasion.
The Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal appears to know little of political processes in Venezuela. If it does know, it chooses not to report. So, the esteemed members of the Editorial Board are guilty of either ethnocentrism or corruption.
In addition, in taking as given a paradigm of win-lose competition in international affairs, the members of the Editorial Board either do not know of, or decide not to report on, the alternative paradigm of win-win cooperation, which has emerged from the Global South during the first quarter of the twenty-first century, and which points to a possible resolution of the structural contradictions of the world-system. This constitutes a profound failure in moral duty, unworthy of the high office which they hold and the sacred duty to the people which it implies.

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Further considerations on Venezuela and Cuba
Venezuela and Cuba have both committed the crime of breaking with the structures of the neocolonial world order, Cuba with its agrarian reform of 1959 and nationalizations of 1960, and Venezuela with its effective control under Chávez of the state-owned petroleum company. As punishment, Cuba and Venezuela are accused of being authoritarian, when in fact they have developed structures of people’s democracy that are more advanced than the structures of representative democracy.

Neither Cuba nor Venezuela should be sanctioned for seeking transformations of the national manifestations of the structures of the neocolonial world-system, because it is their right as sovereign nations to choose their own road to economic development.

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No to regime-change war in Venezuela

It can be argued that the United Sates of America, as the regional power of the Western Hemisphere, has the right to control the seas of the region, in order to fight back against criminal cartels invading its national territory; and it has the right to impose tariffs or refuse trade with any nations in the region that align with a non-Hemispheric power, enabling its control of strategic assets that are vital to US national security, such as key sea lanes. But the United States does not have the right to decide who the leaders of Venezuela will be. Only the people of Venezuela have that right.

This principle of the sovereignty of the people was proclaimed by the American Declaration of Independence. And the people of the United Sates, through an anti-establishment people’s movement called into being by Donald Trump in 2016, has risen—in response to the betrayal of the nation by the elite and the political establishment and the post-modern confusion of the professional class—to reaffirm the principles of the American Republic and to declare the rejection by the people of regime-change wars.

The first U.S. missiles that struck the boats in the Caribbean in early September 2025 were described by Washington as a “counter-narcotics operation,” a sterile phrase meant to dull the violence of incinerating human beings in an instant. Then came the second strike, this time on survivors already struggling to stay afloat. Once the details emerged, however, the official story began to fall apart. 

Local fishermen contradicted U.S. claims. Relatives of those killed have said the men were not cartel operatives at all, but fishermen, divers, and small-scale couriers. Relatives in Trinidad and Venezuela told regional reporters their loved ones were unarmed and had no connection to Tren de Aragua, describing them instead as fathers and sons who worked the sea to support their families. Some called the U.S. narrative “impossible” and “a lie,” insisting the men were being demonized after their deaths. U.N. experts called the killings “extrajudicial.” Maritime workers noted what everyone in the region already knows: the route near Venezuela’s waters is not a fentanyl corridor into the United States. Yet the administration clung to its story, insisting these men were “narcoterrorists,” long after the facts had unraveled. Because in Washington’s post 9/11 playbook, fear is a tool. Fear is the architecture of modern American war.

The U.S. did not emerge from the Iraq War into peace or reflection. It emerged into normalization. The legal theories invented and abused after 9/11 – elastic self-defense, limitless definitions of terrorism, enemy combatants, global strike authority – did not fade. They became the backbone of a permanent war machine. These justifications supported drone wars in Pakistan, airstrikes in Yemen and Somalia, the destruction of Libya, special operations in Syria, and yet another military return to Iraq. And behind every expansion of this global battlefield was a U.S. weapons industry that grew richer with each intervention, lobbying for policies that kept the country in a constant state of conflict. What we are seeing today in the Caribbean is not an isolated action, it is the extension of a militarized imperial model that treats entire regions as expendable. 

The next wars were always there because we never confronted the political and economic system that made endless wars a profitable cornerstone of U.S. power.

A Post-9/11 Legal Framework Built for Endless War

The Trump administration has advanced several overlapping legal arguments to justify the strikes, and together they reveal a post-9/11 framework that stretches executive power far beyond its intended limits.

According to detailed reporting in The Washington Post, a classified Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo argues that the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with so-called narcoterrorist organizations. Under this theory, the strikes qualify as part of an ongoing armed conflict rather than a new “war” requiring congressional authorization. This framing alone is unprecedented: drug-trafficking groups are criminal networks, not organized armed groups targeting the U.S.

A second pillar of the memo, described by lawmakers to the Wall Street Journal, claims that once the president designates a cartel as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, it becomes a lawful military target. But terrorism designations have never created war powers. They are financial and sanctions tools, not authorizations for lethal force. As Sen. Andy Kim put it, using an FTO label as a “kinetic justification” is something “that has never been done before.”

The OLC memo also invokes Article II, claiming the president can order strikes as part of his commander-in-chief authority. Yet this argument depends on a second unsupported premise: that the boats posed a threat significant enough to justify self-defense. Even internal government lawyers questioned this. As one person familiar with the deliberations told The Washington Post, “There is no actual threat justifying self defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.” 

At the same time, the administration has publicly insisted that these operations do not rise to the level of “hostilities”  that would trigger the War Powers Resolution because U.S. military personnel were never placed at risk. By the administration’s own logic, that means the people on the boats were not engaged in hostilities and therefore were not combatants under any accepted legal standard, making the claim of a wartime self-defense strike impossible to reconcile with U.S. or international law.

Under international law, executing people outside a genuine armed conflict is an extrajudicial killing.  Nothing about these strikes meets the legal threshold for war. Because the people on the boats were not lawful combatants, the operation risks violating both international law and U.S. criminal law, including statutes on murder at sea, a concern reportedlyunderscored by Admiral Alvin Holsey’s early resignation.

The memo goes further still, invoking “collective self-defense” on behalf of regional partners. But key regional partners, including Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico, have publicly criticized the strikes and said they were not consulted, undermining the very premise of “collective” defense.

This internal contradiction is one reason lawmakers across both parties have called the reasoning incoherent. As Sen. Chris Van Hollen put it, “This is a memo where the decision was made, and someone was told to come up with a justification for the decision.”

And beneath all of this lies the most dangerous element: the memo’s logic has no geographic limits. If the administration claims it is in an armed conflict with a designated “narcoterrorist” group, then, by its own theory, lethal force could be used wherever members of that group are found. The same framework that justifies strikes near Venezuela could, in principle, be invoked in a U.S. city if the administration claimed a cartel “cell” existed there. 

If Trump truly believes he leads “the most transparent administration in history,” then releasing the memo should be automatic. The American people have the right to know what legal theory is being used to justify killing people in their name.

For decades, OLC memos have been used not simply as legal advice but as the internal architecture that allows presidents to expand their war-making power. The Bush torture memos treated torture as lawful by redefining the word “torture” itself, calling it “enhanced interrogation,” thereby enabling years of CIA black-site operations and abusive interrogations. The Libya War Powers memo argued that bombing Libya did not constitute “hostilities,” allowing the administration to continue military action without congressional approval. Targeted-killing memos, including those related to drone strikes on U.S. citizens abroad, constructed a legal theory that lethal force could be used outside traditional battlefields, without trial, based on executive determinations alone. In each case, the memo did not merely interpret the law, it reshaped the boundaries of presidential war powers, often without public debate or congressional authorization.

The American people have the right to know what “legal theory” is being used to justify killing people in their name. Congress needs it to conduct oversight. Service members need it to understand the legality of the orders they receive. And the international community needs clarity on the standards the U.S. claims to follow. There is no legitimate reason for a president to hide the legal basis for lethal force, unless the argument collapses under scrutiny. A secret opinion cannot serve as the foundation for an open-ended military campaign in the Western Hemisphere.

The Older Foundation: A 200-Year Old Doctrine of Control

If the legal foundation comes from the post-9/11 era, the geopolitical foundation is older. Almost ancestral. For 200 years, the Monroe Doctrine has served as the permission slip for U.S. domination in Latin America.

The Trump administration went even further by openly reviving and expanding it through what officials called a “Trump Corollary,” which reframed the entire Western Hemisphere as a U.S. “defense perimeter” and justified increased military operations under the language of counter-narcotics, migration control, and regional stability. In this framework, Latin America is no longer treated as a diplomatic neighbor but as a security zone where Washington can act unilaterally. 

Venezuela, with its vast oil reserves, sovereign political project, and refusal to submit to U.S. pressure, has long been marked as a target. Sanctions softened the terrain. Disinformation hardened public opinion. And now, military strikes near its waters test how far Washington can push without triggering public revolt at home. The term “narcoterrorism” is simply the newest mask on a very old doctrine.

The strikes in the Caribbean are not isolated. They are the predictable intersection of two forces: a post-9/11 legal regime that allows war to expand without congressional approval, and a 200-year-old imperial doctrine that treats Latin America as a zone of control rather than a community of sovereign nations. Together, they form the logic that justifies today’s violence near Venezuela.

The Label that Opened the Door

After 9/11, every administration learned the same lesson: if you label something “terrorism,” the public will let you do almost anything. Now, this logic is being used everywhere. The cruel, decades-long blockade on Cuba is justified by claiming that the island is a “state sponsor of terrorism.” Mass surveillance, border militarization, endless sanctions, all wrapped in the language of “counterterrorism.” And now, to authorize military action in the Caribbean, they simply take the word “narco” and attach it to the word “terrorism.” The label does all the work. The danger is not confined to foreign policy: after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the same elastic definition of “terrorism” is now being used domestically to justify crackdowns on NGOs the administration claims are inciting “anti-American” political violence.

The only reason Trump has not launched a full-scale attack on Venezuela is because he is still testing the ground, testing resistance inside Venezuela, testing Congress, testing the media, and testing us. He knows nearly 70% of people in the United States oppose a war with Venezuela. He knows he cannot sell another Iraq. So he is probing, pushing, looking for the line we will not let him cross.

We are that line.

If we do not challenge the lie now, if we do not demand release of the memo, if we stay silent, “narcoterrorism” becomes the new “weapons of mass destruction.” If we allow this test case to go unanswered, the next strike will be a war. We are the only ones who can stop him. And history is watching to see whether we learned anything from the last twenty years of fear, deception, and violence.
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Because the next wars were always here, looming. We just need the clarity to see them and the force to stop them before they begin.

Deus Vult!

​Have you noticed how much Americans seem ready to fight a new holy crusade against Islam more than usual, as of late?

It’s not just algorithmic bias on social media.

Sure, anti-Islamic sentiment has been more or less a hallmark of Western society ever since 9/11, coming and going with the winds of political trends, but a mid-2024 report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations reveals that hate crimes and discrimination complaints against Muslims and Arabs in the United States have hit all-time record high numbers.

Moreover, it seems like rabidly anti-Islam, pro-Israel figures are being boosted across social media, like Republican congressional aspirant Valentina Gomez. She went viral for publicly burning the Quran with a flamethrower, calling all Muslims “terrorists,” and claiming she’s going to “stop Islam...once and for all.”

​Despite rising to fame as a fierce critic of organized religion, American comedian Bill Maher sure loves to pick and choose which faiths actually deserve criticism. Maher will trash Americans all day, liberal or conservative, who dare to even question the atrocities Israel has committed in Palestinian lands, labeling them all terrorist supporters.

Conversely, the only state in the world to declare itself the singular homeland of a specific religious group, Israel, gets a free pass to kill men, women, and children en masse, torture prisoners, steal the land of another nation in violation of international law, and engage in more scandal that can be explored in a single article.

Islam: The West’s Harbinger of Destruction?

The list of American anti-Islamic crusaders goes on and on, notwithstanding the fact that a unified Islamic or Arab monolith that could bring about the demise of Christianity or Western civilization… does not exist! The pan-Arab Ba’athist movement, formerly embodied by the political parties of Saddam Hussein and Bashar Al Assad, has been crushed – the culmination of a destabilizing series of events for which we all have the West to thank.

​No single entity unites Sunnis, Shiites, Wahabbis, Sufis, etc., for the purpose of expanding Islamic civilization, contrary to the claims of our 21st-century Templars; in fact, Muslims are mostly too busy fighting one another to pose any real threat to anybody else.

The widespread distaste for Islam in the West primarily concerns mass illegal migration and the fact that many of these migrants are Muslims who are breaking the law, as well as refusing to assimilate to the cultures of their host countries.

But that has nothing to do with Islam itself and everything to do with the fact that the West has destabilized the Middle East and North Africa through decades of wars and regime change! The so-called “Islamic invasion,” which is really an exodus of people fleeing war-torn lands, constitutes a crisis of the West’s own making; and its negative consequences are of a spontaneous nature, not that of an Islamic conspiracy.

On the other hand, Jews indeed have a unified force that directs their well-funded political interests – Israel. The Jewish state is dependent on billions of dollars in annual U.S. military aid and Washington’s global diplomatic influence for the continuation of its colonial project.

Israel Wants You To Hate Islam

It should then come as no surprise that Israeli influence operations in the United States constitute one of Tel Aviv’s primary foreign policy objectives. In 2024, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee spent nearly $52 million in political campaign donations to directly influence the course of U.S. politics. That’s not even to mention all the other, more clandestine, Israeli influence operations such as the Esther Project, in which social media influencers are being paid $7000 per post to spread Israeli propaganda demonizing Arabs/Muslims and improving Israel’s public image in the United States.
​

However, when it comes to the faith common among all of Israel’s adversaries, Islam, Tel-Aviv has been waging a multi-million dollar campaign to brainwash Americans into hating it, ever since the outbreak of recent hostilities between Israel and Hamas on October 7th, 2023.

According to Al Jazeera, the Tel-Aviv based marketing company Stoic behind the campaign is funded by Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs, with the explicit purpose of covertly manipulating American public opinion away from supporting Palestine:

“The campaign’s existence came to light in early 2024 when researchers began noticing suspicious patterns across social media platforms. Scores of fake accounts were identified spreading pro-Israeli content, primarily focused on garnering support for Israel’s actions in Gaza. These accounts were predominantly linked to three websites: “Moral Alliance”, “Unfold Magazine” and “Non-Agenda”. Collectively, these sites amassed over 40,000 followers across Facebook, Instagram and X.

The campaign involved publishing pro-Israeli articles, often lifted from legitimate news outlets, and then sharing them through hundreds of fake social media accounts. One such example was an article reporting on allegations of UNRWA staff involvement in the 7 October attack. Researchers noted that the content was frequently repeated verbatim across multiple accounts, targeting the same individuals with identical posts and replies.”

The cherry on top? None of these firms, neither Stoic nor Bridge Partners behind the Esther Project, have registered as foreign agents or even revealed their identities - a clear violation of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA). The legislation is selectively applied to countries on Washington’s hitlist, like Russia, whose television network RT was charged with ‘hijacking public discourse’ last year for failing to register media organizations allegedly associated with the channel.

‘Be discriminating about what images and ideas you permit into your mind.’ - Epictetus

When it comes to Israel, however, powerful people in Washington clearly don’t care about what happens to public discourse or what well-funded political interests are telling us to believe. With these forces in charge, it becomes nearly impossible for the individual to properly inform him or herself on just to what extent political issues are being artificially manufactured by the media and if, otherwise, it would even be worth paying much attention.

Don’t allow yourself to be brainwashed into thinking that Israel’s adversaries, essentially all of whom are trying to protect their own national sovereignty, are out to get you. Israel has its own predatory foreign policy agenda that cares for no nation other than its own – and Tel Aviv has demonstrated that its willing to do whatever it takes to carry out its expansionist ambitions.

Originally published on Donald’s Substack.

Author

Donald Courter is an American journalist and political analyst based in Moscow, offering a unique perspective from within the multipolar world.

Comparing China to the United States as if it were just another imperialist power normalizes an error stemming from an ideological wound rooted in the discourse of neocolonial power: the belief that any economy reaching a certain scale is automatically an invading force. This comparison, besides being misguided, obscures the fact that the Chinese process no longer fits within the neocolonial phase, simply because this would imply the Asian country's ambition to become a unipolar power. Unipolarity is no longer viable; therefore, China is leading essential processes in the opposite direction, such as dedollarization, the use of national currencies in a network, overcoming the monopolistic monetary system, and decarbonization. 

A few days ago—while participating in a panel on economics at the Zócalo International Book Fair—an attendee suggested that the United States is comparable to China, identifying them as equally imperialist countries. It's not the first time I've heard this idea, but it is the first time I felt it wasn't just a question, but an ideological wound embodying the impossibility of imagining a large economy without hegemonic ambitions. This column stems from that wound. Not as a defense of China, but to ask ourselves: what if the problem isn't who dominates, but rather that there's no longer room for just one king on the chessboard? 

In the previous installment, we discussed how Immanuel Wallerstein recovers the dimension of "discourse of power" to remind us that the global economy is not only about the exchange of products, but also about the collective construction of a horizon of meaning, a model of society to be achieved, the establishment of a vision from which all actions acquire a particular meaning. It is a paradigm from which certain actions are normalized and others become unacceptable. 

The identification of two historical phases within the capitalist system itself has also become clear: the first, of a colonial nature, unfolded from 1492 until the mid-20th century; and the second, of a neocolonial nature, evolving from 1945 to the current crisis. From an economic and political perspective, the financial phase effectively ended in 2008, as it was during this Wall Street crisis that the financial strategy of offshoring in the United States demonstrated its inability to maintain control over global production processes. Since then, the rise of the Chinese economy has consistently shown impressive levels of productive capacity, not only quantitatively, but especially in its qualitative core. 
When asked whether China is another imperialist country like the United States, it has become commonplace to assume that any economy that reaches a certain scale is immediately an invading force. However, this actually stems from the neocolonial "discourse of power" itself, which has normalized the idea that a country can only follow one path—that is, the one that leads it to assume the role of absolute ruler. This is the discourse of normalizing hegemonies. 

This allows us to obscure a fact that we must emphasize forcefully: the Chinese process no longer fits within the neocolonial phase simply because this would imply the Asian country's aspiration to become a unipolar power. But this is not the case. In fact, the Asian project, in practice, has already demonstrated the understanding that unipolarity is unfeasible, and therefore the goal is to transition to polycentric or multipolar forms. Such a network precisely inhibits, even if intended, the aspiration to become a unipolar force. The essential processes, therefore, are, dedollarization the use of national currencies within a network, overcoming the monopolistic monetary system, and decarbonization, that is, avoiding the massive transfer of human costs to the natural system. With just these two elements, we are already talking about a civilizational process with a radically different horizon of meaning. 

But this multipolar project is still under development; we could say we are just at the beginning of its metabolic renewal. This is why it is also necessary to become aware of a process of de-Westernization, that is, to undertake a profound critique of the horizon of meaning normalized under neocolonialism. It is natural that, currently in this period of transition, we still have reflections of the colonial world in our vision, in which we have accepted a series of imposed principles that operate against the liberation process of peoples. Often, the enemy lies deep within our own minds, so de-Westernization means the search for supposedly universal elements that are not; that is, it is about opening ourselves to other possible forms. There is no such thing as one version being right and another wrong. 

In other words, the new post-neocolonial period needs to acknowledge other universalities. Just as Orientalism, even with its significant limitations, signified the recognition of "others" as civilizations (albeit "incomplete" because they did not evolve into the Western form), this time it is necessary to reaffirm the recognition of other civilizations, but as complete, in their own right. Just as it is a matter of ensuring that each national currency can be exchanged on the world market, it is a matter of recognizing that each culture is, in itself, both unique and universal. This recognition of the "other" is what founds the new era. It is the horizon of meaning for the Global South. In this sense, China is leading the way; now let us consider, analogously, what is happening in Mexico.

Author
Óscar David Rojas Silva is a Professor of Political Economy at FES-Acatlán UNAM.

To win the debate against the KKE’s “neither Washington nor Beijing” camp, what we need to focus on is the role of finance capital. Specifically what purpose finance capital has in the system of imperialism, and why Marxist economic analysis shows that it has an indispensable role in the imperial superstructure. In this debate, the goal of the KKE and the Trotskyist forces the KKE aligns with is to obscure the essential part that finance plays within imperialism; and the purpose of this obfuscation is to depict the present global conflict as an “inter-imperialist” conflict, instead of as the anti-imperialist fight which it actually is.
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The deeper purpose behind this is to assist the reformist, opportunist, and wrecker forces that are tied to the KKE, such as the Trotskyist faction within Venezuela’s socialist movement. That this faction instigated a grievously damaging split in the Venezuelan workers movement proves this isn’t just a theoretical debate, it has very consequential implications. When the Trotskyists spun a false narrative about Maduro’s government having betrayed the workers, it greatly weakened the communist movement; and one of the core supporting ideas behind this narrative was that we must also take a “neither Washington nor Beijing” position. That all countries in the world have imperialist tendencies, as the KKE argues, and therefore we shouldn’t side with any countries resisting the U.S. hegemon.

It’s this notion that’s contained within all arguments which assert the USA is not today’s sole imperialist power. A recent example of this is the rebuttal that Greg Godels from Marxism-Leninism Today made towards Carlos Garrido’s article on why Russia and China are not imperialist. Within this piece, there’s a part where Godels challenges Garrido’s premise about imperialism having taken on a new form, yet in the process admits the imperial system has in fact become centralized within the United States:

The “transformation” that Garrido believes he sees is simply a reordering of the international system that existed before the war with New York now replacing London as the financial center of the capitalist universe. It is the replacement of the vast colonial world and the bloody rivalries and shifting alliances and hierarchies of the interwar world with the creation of a neo-colonial system dominated by the US and reinforced by its assumption of the role of guardian of capitalism in the Cold War. The monopoly capitalist base is qualitatively the same, but its superstructure changes with historical circumstances. The Bretton Woods system and the later discarding of the gold standard reflect those changing circumstances.

What I find interesting about this argument is that Godels does not try to find alleged examples of Russia or China engaging in imperialist actions. This is something that you consistently see liberals, anarchists, or right-wingers do when confronted with the question of whether we should align with these countries, but somebody can’t really do this when they have the theoretical knowledge that Godels shows he has. In the article, Godels explains why imperialism is not a policy but a system, so it would be contradictory for him to point towards this or that policy as proof of Washington’s rivals being imperialist. Therefore in order to win this debate from a Marxist perspective, the “neither Washington nor Beijing” camp needs to prove that finance—which as Godels concedes is centralized in the USA—isn’t synonymous with imperialism.

To make this argument, Godels attempts to refute Garrido’s statement that the bulk of imperialism’s profits come from finance:

Garrido’s misunderstanding of the international role of finance capital leads him to make the claim that “…the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest.” At its peak before the great crash of 2007-2009, finance (broadly speaking, finance, insurance, real estate) accounted for maybe forty percent of US profits; today, with the NASDAQ techs, the percentage is likely less. But that is only US profits. With deindustrialization, industrial commodity production has shifted to the PRC, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, Brazil, Eastern Europe, and other low-wage areas and the US has become the center of world finance. If commodity production sneezes, the whole edifice of fictitious capital collapses, along with its fictitious profits.
As all three volumes of Capital explain in great detail, commodity production is the basis of the capitalist mode of production and wage-labor is the source of value, not the mystifying maneuvers of Wall Street grifters.

The notion this argument depends on is that because of the difference between the illusory speculative financial profits, and the materially tangible profits that come from labor, finance is not necessarily a prerequisite to imperialism. Why, then, does Godels recognize that the imperialist superstructure has been reordered to center around New York? Why is it evidently impossible to dispute that the capitalist universe has come to revolve around U.S. finance, even when one rejects Garrido’s idea that imperialism has transitioned into a new phase? (Which is also true; Garrido is referring to how finance has taken on such a big role that the U.S. can solely use it as a tool for leverage.)

To properly see the argument Garrido was making here, it’s best to include more of what he wrote about that “lion’s share” idea:

Today, the lion’s share of profits made by the imperialist system are accumulated through debt and interest. The U.S. can run perpetual deficits without the normal constraints other nations face, effectively getting the rest of the world to finance its military spending and overseas investments. Instead of weakening the U.S., the deficits tie other countries’ financial systems to the dollar, reinforcing its geopolitical and economic dominance.

​The U.S. could print in less than a second more money than any country could produce in a span of years of real investment in labor, resources, and time. This is what imperialism is today. Its skeletal body are the global financial institutions like the IMF and the World Bank, institutions that only the U.S. has – in the last instance – control over. Neither China nor Russia could leverage these global financial apparatuses to enforce their so-called “imperial” interests. On the contrary, these institutions are often utilized by the U.S. as a weapon against them and their allies.

This context is essential to understanding why imperialism is synonymous with U.S. hegemony, and why the imperial system can’t be separated from finance. Lenin clarified that “Imperialism is capitalism at that stage of development at which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital is established; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun, in which the division of all territories of the globe among the biggest capitalist powers has been completed.” After this division was completed, and the United States took on the role of the banking hub for capital in all other countries, the task of the workers movement changed. In this era, one of our foremost missions is to defeat U.S. dominance in particular, which would thereby cause the imperial system as a whole to unravel.

For this to happen, there will need to be a workers revolution in the United States; which pertains to a certain contradiction within our movement, that being the difference between the class struggle and the anti-imperialist struggle. These struggles are overwhelmingly aligned in their goals, but they are not one and the same. This reality is something that cynical actors like the KKE seek to exploit when they depict the countries fighting imperialism as not being worthy of the workers’ support; they act as if defeating U.S. hegemony should be de-prioritized due to the class contradictions within these anti-imperialist countries. This comes from the crude economism that prevails within the communist parties which have fallen into dogmatic thinking.

It’s useful to point out these economistic errors, but to build a political force that’s truly effective at waging all fronts of the struggle, we will need to reckon with the contradictions regarding class and anti-imperialism. I readily admit that this reckoning needs to happen among those who support multipolarity; far too much “multipolarist” politics disregards the class struggle, and behaves as if multipolar institutions such as BRICS will do the work for us. It is necessary to warn against this idealism. The biggest problem with the position the KKE takes towards the BRICS countries is that due to its treating these countries like potential incubators of imperialism, it acts as if their local capitalist classes are independent. Which is a notion that actually obscures the real danger they pose.

The risk is not that the national bourgeoisie in Russia, Iran, or other places will launch upstart imperialist projects, because they lack the financial capacity to do this. The risk is that they’ll sell their peoples out to the hegemon. It’s this danger that we need to focus on, and the only way we can address it is by building the workers movement. A key thing, though, is to not do this in an economistic way, but rather reach a synthesis that accounts for the anti-imperialist struggle. This is the balance that can let us win the ideological battle with the KKE’s camp, and act as effective leaders for the workers.

As of now everyone has seen at least snippets of Charlie Kirk’s memorial. Most sane human beings have had the same response to that event – what the fuck was that? The internet, as usual, has done its job to spread a flurry of memes about the occasion, which resembled a WWE event more than a memorial.

We would be foolish to consider such events accidental. Capitalism shrinks from genuine memorialization. It is a system which produces an ever-present cycle of Neuralyzer flashes, readily available to try to wipe any semblance of memory.

When memories are allowed to linger it is in the form of a commodity, a real abstraction woven into the fabric of capital accumulation. It is not the memory of St. Nicholas which we keep but of Coca-Cola’s Santa Claus, a commodity we fill our homes with in December.

Likewise, irrespective of one’s thoughts on Kirk, what most substantially remains is not a real memory but a caricature, deified into a symbolic commodity whose purpose is not just accumulation, but an ideological social function used to unify people for the Zionist right’s political projects. While his persona has not died, he has neither remained alive in the form of genuine memorialization. He remains what Slavoj Žižek calls, “undead… neither alive nor dead, precisely the monstrous ‘living dead.’” He’s been turned into a zombie-like symbolic commodity for the Zionist right, an interesting appropriation considering his criticisms of Israel and AIPAC toward the end of his life.
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The erasure and commodification of memory breed a memoryless people of the surface, weak and without historical depth. Like the Eloi in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, we are conditioned to only seek immediate gratification, to shun anything that requires effort and sacrifice.

Capitalism seeks to strip us of any sense of a common historical past. It is through collective memory that a great deal of meaning is imbued to the current battles of our world – it is because our present struggles, as Walter Benjamin would say, redeem those who have fought before us that they are meaningful. It is this sense of fighting “in light” of a tradition which precedes us that sheds historical depth on our present struggles.

A people without a memory are politically paralyzed. They have the form of a people but are devoid of content. The shared identity rooted in a common tradition of struggle, its memorialization as a basic component of their being-in-the-world, is the background on which all emancipatory political projects are undertaken. This need not only take conceptual form; it is embodied in their practices, rituals, and basic ways of skillfully coping in the world.

​Capitalism seeks not only to destroy how memory exists in our conceptual understanding of the world, but also in our fundamental existence in it, in the pre-conceptual practices through which we skillfully navigate the world most of the time. It seeks to uproot us from the practices, rituals, and ways of being-in-the world through which memory is sustained.

This is a fundamental mechanism of capitalism’s reproduction. It isn’t an accident or an arbitrary policy; it is a systemic necessity to continuously reproduce the system. What is at stake here is people’s willingness to sacrifice. As Boris Groys writes, humans are willing to sacrifice themselves, but there must be some semblance of compensation for it. This need not be an immediate gratification, or even one that is in our lifetime. Groys writes that “in the Christian tradition this compensation is divine grace. In our time it is the collective memory of people sacrificing themselves for the common good.”

Sacrifice is often rewarded in the form of martyrdom, where the death itself becomes a testimony to the revolutionary cause. This can be seen in both Jesus and Che Guevara. Their deaths were transfigured into the collective memory of a people, their martyrdom inscribed meaning into the world from the moment of death itself. Their deaths are of the kind Chairman Mao said were “weightier than Mount Tai.” They died for the people and because of it they continued living through genuine memorialization in the people’s being-in-the-world.
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Not all lives of sacrifices end in martyrdom, where the death itself is marked as a revolutionary event – a staple in the memory of the cause itself. Almost all forms of sacrifice, however, seek to be remembered, that is, to not have occurred in vain.

“It was very characteristic of the Christian church,” Groys writes, “to create an archive for sacrifice, for martyrdom. Sacrifice is always connected to the process of archiving. Capitalism tends to negate archives; today physical archives are financially in a very bad position. This economic dissolution of archives creates a feeling that whatever we do, it all disappears—it is all for nothing. If people don’t have the feeling that their sacrifice is valued, then they just enjoy life. They think the only thing they have is life here and now, so they want their life to be a life of pleasure.”

It is precisely here where we see what is at stake in capitalism’s erasure of memory and genuine memorialization. It is the uprooting of the conditions for the possibility of sacrifice – an integral quality of any revolutionary struggle. If a people are unwilling to sacrifice themselves for a cause, if they consider all sacrifices to ultimately be in vain due to the fate befallen those who have sacrificed themselves in the past, there will ultimately be no impetus to fight. Political paralysis ensues and the masses are reduced to a cattle-like existence that merely continues life to satisfy cravings and ephemeral desires.
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While far from sufficient for revolutionary change, today memorialization is an essential revolutionary act. It reminds us of our forefathers who carried on the fight we wage today, in their own time. The men and women who sacrificed themselves to push things forward, even if it was not them who would reap the rewards of their struggles. Their memory must be kept alive so that their struggles don’t die in vain. So that our struggles don’t either. To remember the struggles of the past is to affirm – in the face of capitalism’s attempt to erase memory and make us into tabula rasas – that there is meaning in our sacrifices today. That our efforts will not be in vain. That however much capitalism will seek to expunge the memory of our plight from the annals of history, our descendants in the struggle will keep us alive, as we did to our forefathers. To remember is to resist a system that wants us to forget.

Author
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Carlos L. Garrido is a Cuban American philosophy professor. He is the director of the Midwestern Marx Institute and the Secretary of Education of the American Communist Party. He has authored a few books, including The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism (2023), Why We Need American Marxism (2024), Marxism and the Dialectical Materialist Worldview (2022), and the forthcoming On Losurdo’s Western Marxism (2025) and Hegel, Marxism, and Dialectics (2025). He has written for dozens of scholarly and popular publications around the world and runs various live broadcast shows for the Midwestern Marx Institute YouTube. You can subscribe to his Philosophy in Crisis Substack HERE. Carlos’ just made a public Instagram, which you can follow HERE.

Since the declaration of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949, the Chinese socialist project has evolved through three stages. (1) The period of “socialist revolution and reconstruction” from 1949 to 1978, led by Mao Zedong, was characterized by the consolidation of state power and the socialist transformation of agriculture and industry. (2) The period of “reform, opening, and socialist modernization” from 1978 to 2012, led by Deng Xiaoping, was characterized by an emphasis on productivity, the introduction of market strategies in state-owned enterprises, the expansion of space for private enterprise, and the expansion of foreign investment and foreign commerce, all developed under state direction in accordance with a long-term development plan. The Reform and Opening had enormous success in unleashing economic productivity. (3) The third stage, led by Xi Jinping, began with the 2012 National Congress of the Communist Party of China. It has focused on improving the development policy of the Reform and Opening and addressing its inherent negative consequences, such as inequality, poverty, environmental destruction, and corruption. During all three stages, the People’s Republic has implemented a process of people’s democracy, which includes a system of direct and indirect elections for positions in local and national governments, integrated with multiparty cooperation led by the Communist Party of China.

Xi Jinping has been the paramount leader of China since 2012. He was born on June 15, 1953, with a political pedigree as the son of a communist veteran, Xi Zhongxun. However, his father was expelled from the Party and sent to work in a factory in 1963, when Xi Jinping was ten years of age. During the Cultural Revolution, Xi Jinping’s father was paraded before a crowd as an enemy of the revolution, and he was sent to prison in 1968.

In 1969, at the age of sixteen, Xi Jinping relocated from Beijing to Liangjiahe Village in the impoverished rural zone of Yan'an. He subsequently worked for the Party in Liangjiahe, developing a strong rapport with the villagers and creating practical solutions to their problems. He was admitted to the Party in 1974, overcoming political persecution directed against his father, through the support of the local Party secretary.

Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering at Tsinghua University in Beijing from 1975 to 1979. Following graduation, he worked for three years in the Central Military Commission of the Party as one of three secretaries to the Minister of Defense.

In 1982, Xi was named the deputy secretary of the Party for Zhengding County in Hebei. In that capacity, he was successful in persuading the central government to reduce burdensome requisitions on local small farmers, which resulted in the doubling of their income. He also initiated several local development projects. In 1984, his vision for the comprehensive development of Zhengding County was presented to the Central Organization Department of the Communist Party of China, which resulted in his assignment to the Standing Committee of the Party in Xiamen and his nomination by the Party to the position of vice-mayor of Xiamen. In said capacity, Xi drafted in 1985 the first comprehensive plan for the development of the city of Xiamen, and he oversaw various development projects.

In 1988, Xi Jinping was assigned to the position of Party Secretary in the city of Ningde in the province of Fujian, whose economy at that time was worse than that of Xiamen. As Party secretary in Ningde, Xi led the local poverty-eradicating efforts and local building projects, presenting his experiences in a book, Getting Out of Poverty.
In 1990, Xi was named Party Secretary of the Municipal Committee of Fuzhou City, the capital city of the province of Fujian. In 1999, he became Vice-Governor of Fujian, and Governor of the province in 2000. In that position, he oversaw the development of a master plan for economic growth as well as various development projects.

In 2002, Xi left Fujian to assume the highest positions in the government and the Party in the neighboring province of Zhejiang. In that same year, he was elected a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, marking his ascension to the national stage. During his stewardship from 2002 to 2006, the province of Zhejiang experienced a rate of growth averaging 14% per year, marked by a transition away from heavy industry. And Xi attracted national media attention for his tough stance against corrupt officials.

From February 2003 to March 2007, Xi Jinping wrote 232 commentaries to Party leaders and militants of the province of Zhejiang. They include guidelines with respect to the correct comportment of the Party cell leaders, spiced with citations of Confucius, poets of the Chinese empires, Mao, and Deng. And the commentaries formulate a theory of economic development rooted in the experiences of China, written on the basis of Xi’s extensive experience leading development projects in China, and written shortly prior to Xi’s ascent to the national and international stage.

In today’s commentary, I endeavor to explain Xi’s theory of development, put forth by Xi during his exercise of political leadership in the period 2003 to 2007. I have used the Spanish-language edition published jointly in 2019 by Editorial de Ciencias Sociales in Havana and Editorial del Pueblo de Zhejiang, entitled Zhejiang, China: Una nueva visión sobre el desarrollo [Zhejiang, China: A new vision on development].

In the initial commentaries, written from February 25 to July 21, 2003, Xi stresses the qualities that Party members ought to have, writing to the leaders of the local cells of the Party. He stresses that Party leaders ought to be realistic and pragmatic, establishing good relations with the workers, farmers, intellectuals, and personalities of the different social sectors. They ought to deepen analysis of the problems and know how to analyze existing contradictions, proposing viable solutions. They ought not aspire to higher posts, but should seek to defend the people through meritorious service. They should live an austere style of life, remembering Mao’s teaching that the Party leaders and militants cannot be separated from the masses.
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Our duty, Xi writes, is to govern the country for the good of the people, especially persons most in need. Our fundamental goal is to guarantee a minimum level of life to the urban and rural population. We ought to produce cultural products that approach reality and the daily life of the people, orienting the people toward the modernization of the economy and society. Therefore, the selection of Party cell leaders ought to be based on their moral qualities.

We are stronger, Xi stresses, with unity. The maximum chiefs ought to be models of conduct, uniting the comrades to work together. We deepen our understanding and knowledge through working together.

From November 11, 2003, to February 23, 2004, Xi wrote commentaries on the art of leadership. He wrote that the art of leadership involves being able to tolerate others and accept advice, sufficiently developing the internal democracy of the Party, and ensuring democratization and objectivity in the taking of decisions, seeking the unity of knowledge and action of the leading teams of the Party committees. The art of leadership involves understanding the essence of the problems and resolving them efficiently, taking precautions against possible disasters, neutralizing a crisis before it occurs, and harmonizing the different opinions with diplomacy.

Party leaders ought to understand how to attain unity. To wit, acting honestly in order to arrive to understanding of others, deepening mutual knowledge in cooperation and collective work, and forming the leadership teams well.
The Party and government, Xi wrote, ought to form an excellent duet. The maximum chiefs of the committees of the Party and the government are not normal persons, but the personification of their respective institutions. The relations among them are not simple personal relations, but to a considerable extent represent relations between the committees of the Party and the governments. The secretaries of the Party and the mayors of the local government are like brothers, and they should not be in conflict. The mayors ought to support the authority of the Party secretary and the development of a leading group of the Party in the government, asking instruction and informing the committee when confronting any serious problem. The maximum chiefs of the government and the Party ought to support and help each other, to complement each other, to row in the same direction, and to work together to form an excellent “duet” of government.

If the cell leaders desire that their image and voice are permanent in the heart of the people, they ought to concentrate on their work and make contributions to the people, and avoid being ostentatious or looking for easy applause. Cell leaders ought to have a high devotion to the cause and an elevated sense of responsibility.
Xi cautioned that if the small matters are not resolved in an efficient manner, it can affect the spirit and the productive life of the people. The trivial affairs that affect the people are important, because to the people, each one of the trivial affairs is large and real.

On February 3, 2004, Xi put forth an implicit practical epistemology. He maintained that truth is found in objective reality through pragmatic governing, which enables improvement of the theoretical legacy and the attainment of the truth. He therefore exhorted Party members to be realistic and pragmatic, and to persist in taking concrete measures for the benefit of the people. Realism and pragmatism, he reiterated on February 23, ought to guide the road toward the modernization of the province.

Xi’s first postings on economic development, emitted on August 11 and August 12, 2003, stressed the success of the Reform and Opening and the need to deepen its application. We ought to use private capital, he wrote, to increase investment in the infrastructure and the economy in the province, attracting funds to diversify investments. He cited as a good example the bridge over the bay of Hangzhou, which was constructed with 50.26% private capital. To stimulate economic growth, he wrote, we ought to make restrictions on investment more flexible, especially with respect to infrastructure projects. We ought to have greater opening to the world beyond China and to foreign capital and foreign technology. We ought to increase international integration and the degree of utilization of foreign capital, attracting international industries and establishing foreign companies in the province. At present, Xi noted on August 23, there is great enthusiasm in the province for accelerating development and producing great advances in the construction of cities, industrial parks, and infrastructure.

However, Xi stressed on March 19, 2004, the province has reached a new stage of growth. Guaranteeing the minimum conditions of life for the people is no longer the primary goal, but the acceleration of an integral development that is in harmony with nature and the protection of the environment. This commentary was consistent with his earlier post of August 8, 2003, in which he stressed that protecting the environment not only means protecting the environment in the local territory, but must be based in the understanding that ecological problems do not have borders, that we have only one planet that is our common home. In commentaries of May 8 and May 11, 2004, Xi stressed that, although there have been gains in ecological consciousness in the province in recent years, China is far from complying with the laws of ecological consciousness.

In a commentary posted on June 14, 2004, Xi declared that after twenty years of applying the policy of Reform and Opening, the province of Zhejiang has entered a new key period, in which it confronts difficulties in maintaining sustained development. Therefore, adjustments are necessary, deepening the reform and changing the modality of growth, elevating capacities with respect to scientific and technological development.

In four commentaries posted from January 10 to January 13, 2005, Xi put forth a concept of coordinated rural-urban development. In the first phase of modern industrial development, he noted, agriculture supports industry. But when industrialization attains a certain level, industry must repay agriculture for the support it received; the city must support the countryside, making real a coordinated development between industry and agriculture. Urban support elevates the global productive capacity of agriculture and promotes an increase of agricultural efficiency, thus increasing the income and wealth of the farmers, so that they become not only the principal force in the modernization of the countryside, but they also become participants and beneficiaries of industrialization and urbanization. In this way, the countryside becomes a new community, in which the farmers live and work in peace. The foundation is laid for integral development of the farmers as persons, protecting and developing their material interests and their democratic rights, and strengthening continually their capacity for self-development.
The coordination of the development of the rural and urban sectors, Xi maintained, is the base of the construction of a modern society, characterized by coordinated development of the primary, secondary, and tertiary sectors and the joint advance of the rural and urban zones.

Therefore, the continuous increase in the productivity of agricultural work is a necessary condition for increasing the level of industrialization. Industry and the cities will be the driving force of development only if the people and the workforce of the countryside are incorporated in a continuous and ordered form in the cities and in the industrial and service sectors. The coordinated development of the city and the country is the basis for the revitalization of the “three rural pillars” of agriculture, the countryside, and the farmer.

The Reform and Opening, Xi emphasizes, has been the fundamental driving force that has stimulated socialist modernization and has promoted the economic and social development of the countryside. The reform was initiated in the 1970s, he reminded, with the family contract with respect to production, liberating production and amply developing the productivity of the countryside. It stimulated the enthusiasm of the farming masses and promoted the reform of the entire economic system. However, macro-institutional reform has lagged behind micro-institutional reform, so that there has been a lack of coordination between the urban and rural reform, creating a dual structure and institutional arrangements that divide the city and the country, creating an obstacle for the development of the “three rural pillars.”
So, the reform now enters a new stage in the province, involving an acceleration of industrialization and urbanization and at the same time the stimulation of agriculture by industry and the support by the city to the country. We have to eliminate rural-urban institutional obstacles and undo barriers between the city and the country. We have to complete the rights of property and equal opportunities of development for farmers. We have to respect completely the pioneering spirit of the rural masses, seeking the development of agriculture, the satisfaction of the farmers, and the reduction of the distance between the city and the country. We must promote the “three rural pillars” by undoing the dual structure of the city-country.

On January 17, 2005, Xi put forth the concept of highly efficient ecological agriculture. Agricultural production in Zhejiang should be oriented toward the necessities of “green consumption” on the basis of the industrialization of agriculture and the ecological transition of the economy, centering on elevating the competitivity and sustainable development of the agricultural market. Highly efficient ecological agriculture is profitable and is an important means for elevating the income of the farmers and accelerating agricultural modernization. Highly efficient ecological agriculture is different from agriculture based in petroleum as well as from natural ecological agriculture, which emphasizes the protection of ecological equilibrium at the expense of the goals of high investment and production.

From February 18, 2005, to March 23, 2005, Xi emitted eight commentaries maintaining that the Reform and Opening must continue, but it must not follow the old road; it must be an integral development that transforms the model of growth. The new model of development must be focused on persons as the ultimate objective. It must be a development that is coordinated between the city and the country and among the various regions. It must be a sustainable development.

Xi observes that when problems are difficult to solve and become big problems, it becomes necessary to use the strong medicine of market macro-control. If we don’t put into practice a new form of development, we will never be able to disconnect ourselves from the strong medicine of the market. We will have a permanent state of the market economy. We need a new form of development that stimulates investment and consumption.
The construction of a society that conserves resources, Xi maintains, is a social revolution of great importance for attaining human harmony with nature. In the slightly more than 300 years since the beginning of the industrial revolution, an enormous increase in the productive forces has stimulated the modernization of a few Western countries, becoming a threat for the survival of humanity and for life on the planet. Prior to that time, the material development of humanity was not very developed, and ecological systems did not suffer great damage, and human society was able to evolve for thousands of years.

Xi points out that Western industrial civilization is based on the enrichment of a few countries and the impoverishment of the majority. The desire to live like the minority could produce the collapse of human civilization. It is not possible to attain industrialization in the Western style. We ought to find a road of sustainable development adequate for the times. It is urgent to construct a society that saves resources.
Xi maintains that accelerating the development of the service sector is an objective demand for adapting to the laws of economic development and stimulating the transformation of the model of growth. We must respect economic laws and to progressively make the service sector grow, so that the services sector becomes the principle driving force of economic growth.

In recent years, Xi notes, the service sector of the province of Zhejiang has shown a good growth tendency, but it is still relatively backward, in that its aggregate value is low and its internal structure is not sufficiently rational. We ought to stimulate the development of the service sector by reforming it, utilizing new information technologies and new forms of management of the circulation of merchandise and of promoting the modernization of the service sector. We ought to promote the development of modern services strictly tied to production, like logistical services, financial services, software and informatic services in order to serve the bases of production better.
A developed services sector, Xi emphasizes, contributes to the elevation of the level of industrial manufacturing. A developed transportation industry contributes to the entrance and departure of factors of production. A capital market and complete financial services contribute to the organic interaction of productive, commercial, and financial capital. The development of educational services and scientific research contribute to the formation of qualified workers for the manufacturing industry and strengthen technological innovation. Tourist, cultural, sport, and health care services contribute to the elevation of the quality of life of the people.

Xi stresses the importance of attracting foreign capital and business. In addition to persisting in supporting foreign investment by private companies and cooperation with Taiwan, the province ought to try to attract even companies on the list of the 500 most powerful in the world as well as projects of high technology, so that they invest in the province, promoting an active and secure opening beyond the borders of China to services in banking, insurance, tourism, education, health, etc. We ought to concentrate, Xi stresses, on the exploitation of capital resources and joint acquisitions outside China, carrying out all types of investment and establishing centers of research, networks of commercialization, production and processing in order to elevate the level of international management of China’s companies.

Light or heavy industry, Xi maintains, ought to be promoted according to the circumstances. He notes that in the case of Zhejiang, our economic structure and environmental capacity do not permit the province to assume very heavy industry. We possess evident advantages of seaport resources, and we have conditions to develop deep processing of heavy industry tied to port activities. We ought to take advantage of our industrial structure. The industry of our province is based in traditional manufacturing and processing, and we ought to elevate its international competitiveness.

Xi convokes the phrase, “Leave Zhejiang to develop Zhejiang”. The phrase refers to developing Zhejiang through investment outside the province by citizens of Zhejiang, a strategy that is unfolding in practice. We ought to stimulate this phenomenon in an ordered form, Xi maintains, investing in an orderly way in the companies of the province, thereby creating new spaces for development. In recent years, an important number of companies of the province have made investment in other parts of China. Nearly 90,000 companies of the province operate in the exterior with a total investment of 532 billion yuan, of which 80 billion are funds proceeding from Zhejiang. The funds are concentrated in the tertiary sector. With respect to the origin of said funds, between 50% and 70% are the fruit of business operations conducted outside the province by citizens of Zhejiang for years. The companies of Zhejiang outside the province have a strong relation with the economy of the province: more than 70% of their products are fabricated in Zhejiang.

Keynesian theory, Xi notes, stresses investment, consumption, and exportation as the drivers of economic growth. However, practical experience has shown that importations play an indispensable role in increasing the supply. For many years, our province has tended to export much and to import little, which has generated a commercial surplus, which contributed to the entire country. But at the same time, this makes evident that we have not utilized fully the resources and factors of international production. We ought to strengthen the role of imports in supplying resources and promoting technological progress and the updating of industry, utilizing our abundant reserves of foreign currency, taking advantage of the reduction of customs duties on importations, which is going to be applied in the coming year on a national level (writing in 2005). We ought to organize the importation of raw materials and equipment and explore methods for reducing the costs of importation.

On June 20, 2005, Xi wrote that the merchants of Zhejiang have “unique cultural genes” that have enabled them to overcome the system of centralized planning. They have a creative and innovative spirit and have attained the development of an important economy, going throughout the country persuading thousands of clients and overcoming many difficulties. The pioneering spirit of the popular masses supported them, as is made evident by the makeup of the previous provincial committees. Now, at the dawn of a new century, the economy of the province confronts difficulties, some due to congenital difficulties and others derived from growth. We need to update industry, optimize the structure, protect the environment, open greater space to the market, and radically transform the model of economic growth. We need to develop Zhejiang from Zhejiang and also to leave Zhejiang to develop Zhejiang, correctly managing the relation between leaving for the exterior and introducing from the exterior. We have available bridges to the exterior and also platforms for their return, the return of those who have attained success to their native land.

On December 12, 2005, Xi noted that the experience of the developed countries indicates that, when consumption is driven by housing or displacement, consumption can become a potent driving force of global economic growth, generating a situation of prosperity during a relatively long period of time. China could take advantage of this phenomenon by increasing the consumption capacity of the countryside and the less developed regions, using such strategies as fiscal transfer payments and improving structures of consumer credit.

Final considerations

Westen political cultures are ethnocentric, rooted in a need to be blind to the contradiction between the need for colonial domination and imperialism to drive economic growth and the clear violation by colonial domination of the moral standards and principles that the West was leading the world in proclaiming and developing. Today, as imperialism is in decadence, Western public discourse falls into the superficial claim that emerging political-economic systems are authoritarian. In doing so, they fail to observe and to discern their advanced political and moral character.

Author
​Charles McKelvey ​is influenced by black nationalism, the Catholic philosopher Lonergan, Marx, Wallerstein, anti-imperialism, and the Cuban Revolution. Since his retirement from college teaching in 2011, he has devoted himself to reading and writing on world affairs.

Greetings, please tell us about yourself!
 
My name is Peter Alekseevich Kovalsky, I graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute.
I’m a party Secretary for the Lyublino Branch of the KPRF, Moscow City Branch. I have been a member of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) since 2017. I do not consider myself left, but I consider myself red.
 
An interesting distinction! What is your political orientation, and could you tell us in more detail about the experience and events that influenced the formation of your current political views and worldview in modern Russia?
 
My political orientation is Marxism-Leninism, or, as we like to joke, orthodox Stalinism. My views were undoubtedly formed in the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. When I joined it back in 2017, I was not a communist - rather a spontaneous leftist. Having become a member of the party, I began to get to know the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, other ideologies, as well as the various parties and movements of the modern Russian Federation. And, of course, I was significantly influenced by our Russian existence itself. After all, it is precisely this, as we know, that determines consciousness.
 
How do you evaluate the Soviet period of history, and how does its legacy influence your views on the past and present of Russia?
 
The Soviet period is hugely important, although it did not last that long by historical standards. If we take the history of the USSR before Gorbachev came to power, then in general I evaluate it extremely positively. I like the 1930s the most, and the era of recovery after the Great Patriotic War. In the 30s, people had great enthusiasm and creative impulse. This was the time of great construction projects of communism and faith in a bright future. And there was an absolutely correct policy of the party: an alliance of communists and non-party members. I have no doubt that, if not for the war, communism would have been built in a single country. The grandiose battle with fascism that conquered all of Europe physically knocked out of the ranks of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) most of the most ardent communists and Komsomol members, because they were the first to go on the attack.

​The catchphrase that circulated among non-party fighters during the Great Patriotic War is also famous in Russia: "If I die, consider me a communist." The post-war years were no less stormy and full of bright achievements: the restoration of the country, large-scale stances, new challenges. It is especially important to pay attention to Stalin's plan for the transformation of nature. This plan included combating desertification, forest shelterbelts around agricultural fields and arable lands, and the creation of new rivers and lakes. It was the implementation of this plan, although not complete, that allowed the USSR to be reliably protected from the threat of crop failure and famine, similar to those the country faced in the 1930s and in 1946.
 
Now China is implementing a similar plan in the Gobi Desert, and in the 2000s, Muammar Gaddafi tried to implement it in the Libyan Jamahiriya. Of course, it is also worth noting the conquest of space. This was a grandiose achievement, to which my family has a direct relation. My great-grandfather was one of those who led the USSR's space launch program until 1976, and my grandfather designed and assembled life support systems for astronauts. The era of space exploration was also a special period. New horizons were opening up for humanity. People dreamed, believed and worked fruitfully.
The Soviet Union was once again seized by a special creative impulse. The spirit of that era is well reflected in the song: "And on Mars apple trees will bloom". The great achievements of the USSR inspire us, modern Russian communists, to new achievements. It is necessary to use all the experience accumulated in the Soviet years in the modern Russian Federation. And on its basis to create a new and beautiful Soviet Socialist Russia of the future!
 
How did the turbulent and chaotic 1990s in Russia influence your personal experience, upbringing, and worldview? How did this period affect you or your family, their life circumstances, values, or prospects?
 
I was born in 1996 and was too young to talk about the full experience of the 90s. All I can do is study it from a historical point of view, learn information from the stories of older comrades. However, my relatives do not talk much about that era. One way or another, what I know is enough to understand: it was a monstrous catastrophe, arranged not without the help of the West, which had a heavy impact on all former citizens of the USSR and their descendants. Rampant crime, hyperinflation, delayed wages, the war in Chechnya, the lack of basic goods and even food in stores. They survived only thanks to the dachas that the Soviet government once generously handed out to the population. The collapse of the USSR was a terrible disaster for the entire country. I think that in many ways this happened because of servility towards the West. The older generation had and partly still has a special piety towards Western culture, life, and everyday life. Internal and external enemies of socialism took advantage of this, and the Soviet Union fell. Most modern Russian youth do not have such idolatry.
 
Do socialism and Marxism occupy an important place in shaping the future of Russia and how do you imagine their role in the political and social life of the country?
 
Yes, they do. In the 34 years that have passed since the disappearance of the USSR, the world has become a much more unstable and dangerous place. Terrorism, wars, the absolute inability of individual heads of state to negotiate on issues of global security. It has simply become very scary to live. You don't know what awaits you tonight. The USSR was the guardian of peace and stability on our planet floating in outer space. Fidel Castro's slogan: "Socialism or death!" is more relevant than ever. Either humanity will build communism, or perish from capitalism and imperialism.
 
For Russia, there is no other choice but socialism. Rosa Luxemburg's phrase "Socialism or barbarism" has become a fulfilled forecast for our Motherland. Degradation is occurring in almost all spheres of life: education, medicine, housing and communal services, industry. Even in those industries that we used to be especially proud of, for example, space exploration. If my memory serves me right, until 2020, the USSR and Russia held the record as the country that launched the largest number of satellites and automatic ground stations to Mars. Now this record has been broken by the United States. In the Soviet years, we launched stations that landed successfully and transmitted a panorama of the surface of Venus. Now it seems like something fantastic. Unfortunately, there is no point in even talking about the Moon program. Of course, there are exceptions. In modern Russia, the nuclear industry is still developed, and agriculture is progressing.
 
However, we will be able to achieve truly great heights and return to the vanguard of world progress only by radically rebuilding the existing system of social relations. In order to correct all the mistakes and shortcomings of both the USSR and modern Russia, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation must come to power.
 
To what extent do the current generation of Russian youth share your ideological views and how do their views reflect your views or differ from them?
 
This is a very difficult question. Young people are disoriented and disorganized. Most of them are not interested in politics in principle. Everyone is primarily concerned with work, career, relationships, the pace of life is very high, especially in mega cities. Young people simply do not have time to think about their political preferences. This is even more understandable given the huge number of dummies and simulacra. People do not want to be deceived, and deep immersion in political issues takes a lot of time and effort. Those who are still interested in politics can be driven crazy by the variety of different parties, movements and groups. As I mentioned earlier, there are a great many Marxist circles in the country alone. Officially, there are as many as 28 parties in Russia whose names contain the word "communist" or "communism"! The Communist Party of the Russian Federation has a youth organization - the Leninist Young Communist League of the Russian Federation (LKSM RF). You can join it from the age of 14. Currently, there are about 70 thousand people there. On an all-Russian scale, this is, of course, not enough. But even within the LKSM, views on politics differ. There are different ideological currents: Stalinists, Trotskyists, Bukharinists, Zinovievists, Maoists, Jucheists and others... Not all of them are close to my personal ideological preferences. But I have to work with these people too.
 
Of course, there is an important problem of why young people do not participate in politics, and not only young people, but also older people. Political parties and movements do not have a vision of the future that these young people will follow. As soon as a more or less clear vision of the future appears, then progressive humanity will follow it.

​What specific actions or initiatives are you taking to promote your ideological ideals within the Russian social and political landscape?
 
The party activists are constantly working - it's simply impossible to remember everything here. And it would be wrong to overemphasize my own merits. I'll try to list the most important ones.
 
For example, I wrote bills: to study the experience of waste recycling in Western countries and the USSR and the possibility of using this experience now. I wrote a bill against private sobriety centers, which they even wanted to adopt, but in the end they cancelled. I also proposed amendments to the constitution, and 9 out of 10 of my proposals were included in the final program of the KPRF to change it. I also actively participate in the party's election campaigns as an agitator and observer at elections. I regularly attend meetings with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation deputies and round tables organized by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation faction in the State Duma and the Moscow City Duma on numerous topical issues. I participate in rallies and mass street actions.
The action "Two Carnations for Comrade Stalin" is also worth mentioning. It takes place twice a year: on December 21, the birthday of Joseph Vissarionovich, and on March 5, the day of his death.
 
An informal initiative group, which includes a variety of people, including even Stalin's great-grandson Yakov Dzhugashvili, collects funds and purchases bouquets of flowers to lay on the grave of the late Leader of the Peoples. Money for carnations is sent by a variety of people from all over Russia and the globe. On Stalin's 140th birthday, 14,000 red carnations were laid on his grave...
 
I take part in meetings of the Zinoviev Club (the club of philosopher Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev), in the Efremov Readings (science fiction writer Ivan Antonovich Efremov). I regularly visit the Palestinian embassy and express my support for the long-suffering Palestinian people in their fight against Israeli aggression. I take an active part in the formation of convoys with humanitarian aid sent by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation to help Donbass. I believe that this is very important work. I began participating in it in 2018, that is, even before the SVO, and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation as a whole began sending humanitarian aid to residents of the DPR and LPR in 2014.
 
I also take an active part in the Union of Organic Farming, where we discuss important agricultural issues, initiatives, and bills. My comrades and I do not forget about cultural life and education. I regularly go to art exhibitions, museums, and galleries, and visit book fairs. The people at all these events are completely different, with different political views. In conversations, discussions, and even at feasts, there is lively, direct agitation for communism and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
 
How do you assess the role of patriotism in the formation of the national identity of modern Russia, and what influenced your understanding of this?
 
First, you need to understand what patriotism is. In its classical meaning, it is love for the Motherland, pride in its achievements, culture, and science. Patriotism is often understood as love for the state and for the authorities. You cannot question any decisions of the authorities - you just need to accept them without complaint. And rejoice. This "patriotism" is unacceptable to me. We must love not those in power, but our people. Improve their well-being, increase their wealth, especially cultural. In Russia, there is even such a popular expression: "I love my homeland very much, but I hate the state." The homeland is your people. In this sense, as the famous song sang, our homeland is the Revolution, and we are loyal to it alone.
 
How do you think the legacy of the Soviet Union inspires or guides the aspirations of modern Russian youth?
 
Young people in Russia are different. Most people have no time to think about such things - as I have already noted, they simply do not have time for reflection. Their life is a constant squirrel spinning in a wheel: study, work, family, credit, mortgage. The topic of the Soviet past interests politicized youth: those who are interested in history, or are somehow connected with science. But this youth can also be divided into many groups. For some people who are fascinated by past eras, the Soviet era is not so interesting - they prefer another time, or even a country. Unfortunately, there are those who condemn and hate the USSR.
 
If we take left-oriented youth, the Soviet Union inspires them in different ways, depending on the field of activity. For example, there is an artistic environment - they are interested in examples of heroes of socialist realism, who amaze with their dedication and devotion to the goal. What high ideals were invested in Soviet cinema, music and even cartoons! They glorified and brought up the best qualities of people. Those who are somehow connected with politics and dream of a different, better future are inspired by the USSR as a real example of the possibility of building a just society.
Patriots-"statists" are inspired by the power of the Soviet Union, how our country fought for world leadership and was among the first states in many different spheres
 
Those who are engaged in science remember the famous Soviet scientists - pioneers and discoverers, who radically advanced science in their fields, received well-deserved wide recognition throughout the world. For me, among other things, the USSR is confidence in the future. Faith in a bright future, the richest cultural component. This is true stability and reliability in everything. Conviction: whatever task we undertake as a state and society, it will certainly be within our power.

Do you think that the revival of Soviet-style values ​​among Russian youth is a response to Western influence, and if so, in what way?
 
Young people are atomized now - and society as a whole is too. The spread of socialist values ​​(collectivism, patriotism, selfless mutual assistance, etc.) would be useful for the recovery of Russian society, which is currently being forced into a cult of consumption. Naturally, reliance on the Soviet ideological heritage should be carried out taking into account new realities: the strongest influence of the information and media sphere on minds, growing inequality, the "zombification" of society with the help of technologies for manipulating mass consciousness, and a decline in the level of education. We have lost a lot in the quality of human capital in the 90s and 00s. Unfortunately, this cannot be changed overnight.
 
Undoubtedly, it would be very good if tomorrow the broad masses came to the Soviet, socialist worldview. Of course, those who are involved in the discourse of the KPRF and left-patriotic forces, of course, have a set of values ​​close to the previous Soviet models.
 
What role do you think educational and cultural institutions play in shaping the Soviet or patriotic identity of young Russians, and how have these institutions influenced your own beliefs? Also, has education changed in Russia during the Yeltsin and Putin eras?
 
Education certainly plays a big role. For example, when I was in school and college, patriotic education was not yet mainstream and was not given the attention it deserved. Now there is an attempt to instill patriotism in the younger generation.
 
From my school years, I remember how we were enthusiastically told about the individualistic approach to life and the primacy of the individual. We carefully studied the works of Solzhenitsyn, and wild anti-communism was developed in us. If it was the eve of May 9 - a sacred holiday for our people, then there were always stories about how terrible the Supreme Commander-in-Chief of the Great Patriotic War was. Stalin was called so many things! He was a tyrant, an incompetent leader, and a sadistic murderer, and they say we won the Great Patriotic War not thanks to, but in spite of his leadership. Now the approach has changed. Of course, in the mouths of the officialdom, Stalin is still a tyrant, but they also acknowledge his positive sides. It is not for nothing that this year alone many monuments to Joseph Vissarionovich were unveiled. Particularly unexpected was the unveiling of the bas-relief on Taganskaya "Gratitude of the People to the Victorious Leader".
 
Understanding how popular he is among the people, the ruling class is trying to "privatize" and legally replace the true image of Stalin in the mass consciousness. The systemic media say that Joseph Vissarionovich was not a communist at all, not a successor to Lenin, but a red monarch who shot the entire so-called "Leninist guard" and pursued a nationalist policy. They are building an artificial illusion of some kind of "Stalinism without socialism" at great speed. But this is impossible! And most of the propaganda tricks of those in power are refuted by elementary logic. Similar features are observed in other aspects of historical politics. The people are told about the imaginary greatness of the Russian Empire under Nicholas II. They assure us that we were the first in everything, and if not for the revolution, we would almost rule the world.
 
Speaking about education in general, it is only getting worse from year to year.
Soviet personnel are leaving, and they are being replaced by young people who are overwhelmed with unnecessary bureaucracy, reports, and manuals. Teachers are paid a low salary. There is no respect for the profession from either parents or students. Students do not strive for knowledge, and teachers do not want to instill this knowledge in students. The system needs to be changed, and there's a party that can do it - the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.