​However, it is clear to even the most dogmatic defenders of the old unipolar world that we are in a period of revolutionary transition. The logic which animates geopolitical relations is being radically altered. The days were the U.S. unilaterally imposed its will on the world are coming to an end. Today a new, multipolar geopolitical logic is being born, and it is governed by a mutual respect between nations and civilizations, and an intercourse of trade based on win-win, not win-lose, relations.

It is fair to say, then, that we are living in the “end of the end of history.”

This should not have been unexpected for anyone with the slightest awareness of history itself. History shows that development is an ever-going phenomenon; it demonstrates that everything that comes to be, irrespective of how final and secure it may at first appear, will eventually, as Goethe said, “perish wretchedly.”

The “end of history” was never the “end of history.” It was simply a period were the U.S.’s imperialist power could go unchallenged by any formidable rival. The “end of history” was nothing but a short interlude in a global struggle against Western imperialism, wherein the U.S. held on to a ceaselessly weakening unipolar dominance.  

This short interlude provided the time for a resurgence of global powers that could challenge the U.S.’s plan for a “New American Century.” These new global powers, such as China, Russia, Iran, etc., are working upon the legacy of rich ancient civilizations, whose millennium-long cultural insights and experience they have managed to incorporate into their rapid modernization. It has been a modernization, importantly, which has been free of the perils which accomplished Western capitalist “modernization,” namely, the genocide of the Amerindian populations, the African slave trade, and centuries of colonialism, neocolonialism, and imperialism. Internally, far from witnessing the extreme national inequalities which accompanied growth in the capitalist West, these civilizations have managed, as China says, to promote “common prosperity,” to greater or lesser extents, amongst their people. It has genuinely been a tide that has lifted all, or at least most, boats.

​For the German philosopher, G. W. F. Hegel, “the History of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of Freedom… Freedom is the sole truth of Spirit.” Fukuyama’s phrase on the “end of history” was first uttered by Hegel, who proclaimed that the “History of the World travels from East to West… Europe is absolutely the end of History.” If history is understood as the development of the self-consciousness of the concept of freedom, as Hegel understood it, then “the East knew only that One is Free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; [and] the German-Christian World knows that All are free.”

In terms of conceptual recognition, the West today continues to recognize that “all are free.” In fact, it precisely carries out its imperialist operations around the world under the auspices of promoting freedom, democracy, and equality. It uses the concepts of freedom, democracy, and equality to entrench the most profound real unfreedoms, tyrannies, and inequalities in the world. Far from allowing the self-consciousness of the concept of freedom be the means through which actual freedom is realized, a superficial, merely formal recognition of freedom is sustained precisely to reproduce unfreedom in actuality.

Furthermore, through its mass media and indoctrinating educational system, it prevents its population from even accessing the appropriate lexicon through which to communicate such unfreedom. The unfreedoms experienced can never be an inherent feature of the system; ultimate responsibility is always externalized to some pariah “other.”
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The unfreedoms of the American people are thus blamed on China, Russia, Iran, etc., and not on the U.S. capitalist system that produced them. In doing so, a dual effect is produced:

1) blame for the real unfreedom is exported to a convenient “other” who challenges U.S. imperial power, and 2) in externalizing the responsibility for your conditions of unfreedom, the limitations to your power appear merely external, i.e., you continue to operate as if you are still free, but “blocked off” from realizing such freedoms by the boogeyman “other.”

Paradoxically, this predicament was eloquently expressed by a Western philosopher who always manages to make support for the imperialist West seem “progressive,” Slavoj Žižek, who noted that “we ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom.”

Instead of thinking about freedom’s relationship with historical development as conceptual, we should think of it in terms of actuality. The same Hegel which suggests that we think of historical development as the universalizing of the concept of freedom, also equips us with a concrete conception of universality which readily provides us with the tools to affect this turn. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that “Man knows what he is, and only when he does so is he actually what he is. Without this, knowing reason is nothing, nor is freedom.” We can be as self-conscious of our freedom as we want, but if there isn’t actual freedom in our lives, that self-consciousness of freedom is empty and hollow. It is merely freedom in form, without content.  

Therefore, Hegel writes that “Freedom can, however, be also abstract freedom without necessity, which false freedom is self-will, and for that reason it is self-opposed, unconsciously limited, an imaginary freedom which is free in form alone.” This is the empty, indeterminate freedom we have in the West. As the French philosopher Michel Clouscard articulated, it is a freedom where “everything is allowed but nothing is possible.” Freedom is always determinate; it is precisely the recognition of necessity, and the ability to positively act upon such a recognition.

This recognition of necessity, in the contemporary social conjuncture, is fundamentally a recognition of the laws of social development shaping our social trajectory. If we are not aware of the real systemic forces that produce the changes we observe in our world, we neither have the recognition of necessity nor the ability to affect our trajectory. This is what the ideological apparatuses of the West, the media, the schools, and the entertainment industry, provide the current social order, namely, the ability to prevent people from recognizing necessity. Even in times of deep social crisis – such as the crisis of legitimacy prevalent in the U.S. – the institutions of knowledge production provide ready-made alternative explanations for the reality at hand. As mentioned earlier, there is always an “other” upon which blame could be placed. This, therefore, systematically produces a recognition of false necessity, and hence, an unfreedom experienced as freedom.  

If we understand history as the history of the actuality of freedom, it is evident that we are far from its “end.” However, the collapse of the Western capitalist order that once fooled Hegel into seeing in its abstract proclamation of freedom the “end of history” (a mistake much more unforgiveable when it occurs almost two centuries after with Fukuyama), is a positive step in humanity’s trajectory towards real freedom. The recognition of our recognition of a false necessity, therefore, stands as an important mediational moment for our recognition of real necessity.

Multipolarity is opening the world to what Marx called the “realm of freedom” by recognizing the laws of capitalist social development, and actively intervening to undermine them. This is, fundamentally, what is at stake when countries like China, Russia, Iran, etc. place social and common good over and above the accumulation of capital. That supremacy of capital which warrants labeling the system capital-ISM is being actively undermined by the multipolar world. While this change, as Hegel said, “imports dissolution, [it] involves at the same time the rise of a new life.” The new world being born, as economist Oscar Rojas has described it, is premised on international relations between “associated free producers,” i.e., sovereign countries engaging in win-win geopolitical relations, and is leading humanity into a “communitarian mode of production,” where the aims of socially carried out production are not the accumulation of capital in private hands, but social utility and benefit.

Hegel was right, then, about the sun of world-history setting in the West. But its setting has long passed. Today humanity is in an astronomical dawn. Once again, the sun is rising in the East. While it is not fully out, its light has become visible. A new day is here.

This article was published originally in The China Academy. ​

​In one of his emblematic “Aló Presidente” programs, Comandante Chávez told this story: “…I was listening to him for more than six hours, almost without interrupting him, a question, a commentary. A wise man. Do you know what Fidel told me? Well, I am going to tell you this because it is a criticism, but he is right, and I feel obliged to make it public. He told me with much respect: “Chávez, would you allow me to tell you two or three things crudely? I told him: “You are authorized to tell me whatever you want”. And he told me: “Two things initially ‘ …: ’Look, a conclusion I have drawn… ‘you said in your speech a phrase, a figure, that ten years ago there were six hundred thousand university students in Venezuela, today there are two million four hundred thousand… ’No Revolution that I know of, not even the Cuban one, achieved so much for its people in the social field, especially in such a short time as the Bolivarian Revolution”. Do you know what the second one is? This is what he told me: “I have concluded that you do not want to take political advantage of these social advances”. The phrase sounds harsh, “you do not want to”. One might think that we cannot. That is, to transfer with the same intensity the social benefit, all that we have achieved, to political capital. So, the conclusion is hard: that we do not want to, you see? And it also has a lot to do with the fact that some people do not know how to do it. We have to learn, that people perceive all that the Revolution has been transferring to the people, and comparing with the past. And more importantly, what would happen if the counterrevolution returns to government in Venezuela?

The two conclusions highlighted above explain to a great extent the Bolivarian success in the face of the ferocious neo-fascist onslaught of US imperialism, the Venezuelan counterrevolution, the regional ultra-right and the European allies, more satellites than independent entities of the US imperial governance. It is good, and it will never be enough that we know all the strategy of attack and conquest of the enemy, their purposes, their tactics, maneuvers, their forces and means, the resources of all kinds they use to break the combative morale of their opponents and most importantly, their war objectives, the reasons for their arrogance, the motivations of their arrogance, the justifications and tools to convince, drag, induce, manipulate and force many, among the confused, uninformed, resentful, selfish and ambitious to swell their ranks and support with enthusiasm or cowardice the fascist policy and the executioner. However, as important as knowing the enemy and his tactics of aggression are, is to know how to put forward a plan, a strategy, tactics and actions to counter, stop and defeat him. Plan against Plan, as Martí would say.

Not having paid due attention to Fidel’s warnings (due to inexperience, unwanted mistakes, betrayals, the premature and irreparable death of Chávez and the strong opportunistic and disloyal onslaught of world imperialism and the Venezuelan counterrevolution), caused, among other causes, the political defeat of the revolutionary Government in the 2015 parliamentary elections. If we reason it coldly, it was Fidel’s two fundamental criticisms that prevailed as causes of that defeat: the people did not have all the necessary political awareness to face, defeat and reverse in the short term (during the election process) the enemy onslaught and their own mistakes. Not all the social achievements had been effectively transferred to the popular political capital, and the worst happened, the counterrevolution reached the Legislative Power, at the hands of the manipulated, confused, resentful, uninformed and de-ideologized popular vote. In an article entitled: “Venezuela: Christmas Reflections”, by journalist Álvaro Samuel, written on December 22, 2015, the columnist certified in a combative manner some paths to follow, with self-critical courage, revolutionary humility and faith in victory. He expounded, “Let us not think of airy government policies, very beautiful on paper, but difficult to bring to reality: let us look for the most suitable model of government for the historical moment we live in, not the most utopian no matter how perfect it may seem.” – “Let us remember that the Venezuelan people are mostly consumerist… by habit, by the modern servitude they carry in their heads and with their help or without them we must reach a fairer system of life for the human being and for the Planet…”. “Enough of so much forgiveness to the Right, to each conspiracy, there was a pardon, and to each pardon there was another conspiracy that was pardoned again. We will not be forgiven by the Right if they get their hands on all the powers of the Venezuelan State”. It is necessary to win consciences with ideas and not with apartments, automobiles, computers, cell phones, tablets. Consciences gained with ideas can withstand a drop in the price of crude oil; those gained with material benefits can fall down, like a house of cards, at the slightest touch”. From that point on, a chain of lessons and rectifications followed to avoid the same mistakes again, and even worse, the loss of political power and with it, the loss of popular power.

Almost 9 years after those events, the Government of Nicolás Maduro Moros, together with the Civic-Military Union, have built an amazing and convincing sequence of political, legal, ethical, civic, patriotic, ideological, social and, this year, economic victories, which stand out as necessary, economic, which stand as necessary lessons and contributions of this revolutionary process to the theory and practice of the construction of radical, transforming, legitimate and alternative processes to the models of savage capitalism, in its imperialist, neo-liberal and neo-fascist phases.

Fascism emerged first as an ideology, imposed itself as a conditioned reflex on the great masses, specifically in Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Italy, and then expanded, in the form of genocidal war, to the world. Today, imperialist neo-fascism operates with a similar methodology and its main theater of war is Venezuela.

Marx and Engels had already identified that the ideas of the dominant class are the dominant ideas in each epoch; or in other words, the class that exercises the dominant material power in society is, at the same time, its dominant spiritual power. The class that has at its disposal the means for material production has, at the same time, the means for spiritual production, which means that the ideas of those who lack the necessary means to produce spiritually are subjected to it, at the same time, on average. Before the Bolivarian process, there were 21 community media, 255 private media and 11 public media in Venezuela, that is to say, a total of 287 media, of which 96.1% were not in the hands of the State. Chávez, in 1999, did not have the benefit of any of those media for his electoral campaign, he even used manual megaphones to speak to his followers; Maduro contested against Capriles, the candidate of Yankee imperialism, of the International Right and of the Venezuelan counterrevolution, with less than 20% of the media used in the electoral elections of 2013, after the death of Commander Hugo Chávez Frías.

Therefore, if there is a lesson learned, it is that the system and the communicational apparatus had to be reformed and put at the service of the truth, of timely, immediate, transparent, enlightening, educational, persuasive, mobilizing and generating awareness, commitment, unity and popular consensus. Today, it is capable of effectively confronting all the maneuvers and aggressions of the Hate Industry and global cultural colonization. The Government created the Bolivarian Communication and Information System (SIBCI), which today has 7 national channels, plus Telesur, which is international, and 36 community television stations with signals authorized by the National Telecommunications Commission (CONATEL). The most important is Venezolana de Televisión (VTV) or Channel 8, which over the years has been increasing its audience, mainly because it used to broadcast the famous program that Hugo Chávez himself hosted as “anchor”, Aló Presidente.

Today, there are more than 800 media outlets. The main leaders of the Bolivarian Revolution are very active in social communication, through traditional media and through socio-digital media. President Maduro stands out with his program “Con Maduro+”, Vice President Diosdado Cabello and his television program “Con el mazo dando” and the President of the National Assembly and the program “Conexión con Jorge Rodríguez”. Meaning, they capitalize the popular mobilization through their multiple interventions in press conferences, interviews, participation in television, radio and digital programs and in popular mobilizations.

The Government has continued exercising the legislative and legal initiative to defend the Constitution of the Republic, the rights of the people emanated from it and to confront and end (in process) with the impunity and impudence of criminals, violent, haters, corrupt, smugglers, speculators and all the political and vicious scum to continue sustaining the Moral Power of the Nation.

From this certainty, today there is a Law against fascism and neo-fascism. Another of the actions that have made it possible for the Bolivarian and Chavista Revolution to arrive strong and invincible to face neo-fascism, is to have put the neighborhood communities, their social organizations, the leftist parties and movements of the country (Gran Polo Patriotico), the trade unions, the men and women of the Bolivarian and Chavista Revolution on a fighting footing, unions, the men and women of the people grateful to the revolutionary work, through the factual conviction, with concrete and irrefutable evidence of the advantages and benefits of Bolivarian socialism and the nefariousness of neoliberalism, fascism and counterrevolution.

What has been seen, experienced, suffered and regretted by the people in the guarimbas of 2002, when the coup d’état against Chávez took place, in 2014, 2015 and 2017 against President Nicolás Maduro, and now, on July 29 and 30, 2024, has convinced an immense majority of them, of what would be the destiny, if, as Fidel asked and, today this question is recurrent in the Chavista leaders, this imperialist and fascist ultra-right would take political power. The Government has given itself the task of taking extreme measures of internal order, security and peace, in favor of the people and against delinquency, paramilitarism and the violent and fascist counterrevolution in the streets, activated, as the so-called “comanditos” or through sabotage, such as those perpetrated against the National Electric System and other State institutions, by citizens, Chavistas or not, but who think differently or do not allow themselves to be led by them.

The Great Patriotic Pole, headed by the PSUV, has been better articulated, restructured, organized, corrected failures of cohesion and agreements, inefficiencies and bureaucracy, which hindered them. The Venezuelan government has deployed an intelligent diplomatic and regional political strategy, which has allowed it to strengthen strategic alliances, such as ALBA-TCP, with CARICOM, its request and possible incorporation to the BRICS+ bloc, the support of Russia and China, the reinforcement of its integrationist prestige as host country of the peace negotiations in Colombia and the accurate handling of the conflicts with Guyana, over the “Essequibo” dispute and in the face of the dislikes of Presidents Lula and Petro regarding the results of the elections and the non-recognition of Nicolás Maduro as legitimately elected president on July 28. Recently ratified by the Venezuelan Supreme Court of Justice, in less time than the time established by the Constitution, which is up to 30 days after the initiation of the contentious process.

Other lessons, which have become factors of the electoral triumph, and key to the understanding of the triumph over neo-fascism, were summarized by the remarkable Franco-Spanish journalist, writer and political scientist Ignacio Ramonet. In short, the Chavista government “defeated hyperinflation, the highest in the world and the greatest scourge for any economy. Today, inflation in Venezuela is lower than that of the US and the European Union. It relaunched economic growth in a spectacular way. In 2023, Venezuela obtained the highest growth rate in Latin America and will reach it again this year (+8%). It achieved full employment; between the public and private sectors and the formal and informal economies, full employment was achieved for the first time in decades, with a significant increase in salaries and income”.

It also “achieved, for the first time in more than a century, food sovereignty. Ninety-six percent of Venezuelans’ food is produced in Venezuela. An immense victory for the peasantry. Oil production was relaunched. It is already reaching again one million barrels per day. It defeated the illegal and criminal blockade, the main cause of the great suffering of the population. It has relaunched social aid policies. Venezuela once again has resources and a large part of these are invested in large social programs and solidarity missions”.

Fidel’s warnings and Chávez’s receptivity were revolutionarily assumed by the Government of Nicolás Maduro and his brave people. What it is all about is that ideas do not suffer defeats, because the defeats of ideas are paid for with setbacks in the path of revolutions.

Let us do what our Bolivarian and Chavista brothers and sisters teach us, with this we will have defeated neo-fascism and power will be perpetuated in the hands of the people.

​September 30, 2024, marked the end of the six-year presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO, Tepetián, Tabascao, 1953). His government was characterized by controversial (for the right wing) constitutional reforms, increased capacities of state institutions, and a clear attempt to redistribute wealth. It is no coincidence that these governmental qualities are those of the first president in decades who does not belong to either the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) -which continuously governed Mexico for 71 consecutive years- or the National Action Party (PAN), both center-right and right-wing parties respectively, which became staunch internal opponents of the progressive government.

Beginnings in the PRI and the creation of the PRD

Surely the president was in no way surprised by the kind of opposition he faced from these parties if we take into account that AMLO began his political career in the PRI during the seventies, although he ended up breaking with that party after the political crisis that would place Carlos Salinas de Gortari in the presidency in 1988. This controversy with the PRI leadership would cause AMLO to break with the party and found the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), a political organization that sought to be the epicenter of the center and center-left political movements in the country.

AMLO became president of the PRD in the State of Tabasco and initiated a dispute of several years against the PRI, which he repeatedly accused of electoral fraud. He led the march called “Exodus for Democracy” which arrived in the Mexican capital and there, on January 11, 1992, he made a speech before tens of thousands of people. AMLO gradually ceased to be merely the state leader of Tabasco to become a national political figure.

From regional politician to national politician

In 1994, he ran against PRI candidate Roberto Madrazo Pintado for the governorship of Tabasco and was defeated. AMLO denounced electoral fraud and excessive campaign spending by the PRI candidate and once again called on his supporters to take to the streets and hold another march called “Caravan for Democracy”. In it he called to disavow the results of the electoral fraud, to build an interim government, and to assume a sort of civil resistance against the repeated frauds of the PRI. In addition, the “Caravana” began to oppose the PRI’s harshest neoliberal measures, such as the privatization of the national oil company, PEMEX. To this end, they devised a strategy of blocking the entrances to the oil company’s facilities and thus also demanded compensation for 40,000 peasants and fishermen affected by the oil company. AMLO was injured during the demonstrations.

His performance as a political and popular leader soon took him to the top of the PRD and there he turned the party into the second most-voted party in Mexico; they obtained 125 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Furthermore, in 1997, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, a strong man of the PRD, became Head of the Government of Mexico City with 48% of votes in favor. It was the first important victory of the PRD in its history and few doubted that it had much to do with AMLO’s administration of the party. Soon, more electoral victories began to follow: in 1998, state victories in the states of Tlaxcala and Zacatecas; in 1999, state victories in Baja California and Nayarit.

Head of Government of the capital city

AMLO soon understood that he had to abandon his state pretensions in Tabasco and focus on a new objective: Mexico City. In 2000, he registered his candidacy for Mexico City’s Chief of Government despite fierce opposition from the PRI and PAN, who alleged that AMLO had not lived enough years in the capital to be a candidate. In reality, the accusations hid a desire to prevent the PRD president from acquiring greater political notoriety at any cost. However, despite the opposition, thanks to a broad alliance of center and center-left parties, AMLO won the election with 37.7% of the votes.

His government was characterized by constant communication with the media, which he summoned every day at 6:00 a.m. to explain the work he was carrying out (a communication strategy he would never abandon). His public works projects made him very popular in the capital: the enormous highway called “Anillo Periférico del Valle de México”; the first line of the Metrobus; an ambitious program of pensions for the elderly; assistance to single mothers, the disabled, the unemployed, peasants, etc.; medical consultations to poor people; delivery of school supplies to students; construction of the Public Hospital of Specialties; among other projects. In addition, the homicide rate per 100,000 inhabitants dropped during his administration: in 2001 it was 9.01% while in 2005 it was 7.77%. Economically, the GDP of the Federal District grew from 1.17 trillion pesos in 2001 to 1.6 trillion pesos in 2005; in addition, during his administration, the lowest unemployment rate in the history of the city up to that time was recorded.

AMLO’s opponents criticized his investment in social programs, accusing him of being a populist and of building his image at the expense of the treasury. However, the Chief of Government bluntly said that whenever the right wing sees investment for the poorest, they label the opponents as populists, no matter who they point the finger at. Be that as it may, AMLO became one of the most popular politicians in the country. According to some polls, he even had the support of 85% of the people of the capital, and one contest even called him “the second-best mayor in the world”.

AMLO’s opposition promptly tried to close the way to a very possible presidential candidacy. Thus, it initiated a process that sought to remove him from certain political rights for allegedly having disobeyed a court order, i.e., to remove him from office for contempt of court. The dispute between Vicente Fox’s national government and AMLO’s Mexico City government escalated to become the main controversy in the country. Many saw this as an anticipation of the future electoral contest. On April 7, the withdrawal of AMLO’s judicial immunity was approved, and he immediately called for a “civil resistance” and declared his willingness to go to prison if necessary.

First presidential election and fraud
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After several pseudo-legal tricks by the opposition, AMLO was able to participate in the 2006 presidential elections against Felipe Calderón (PAN) and other secondary candidates. Calderon and his team initiated a media campaign based on the generation of fear against AMLO. One of the campaign slogans was “López Obrador, a danger for Mexico” while comparing him to Hugo Chávez and repeatedly saying that AMLO was a “risk for democracy”.

Despite the huge electoral campaign against AMLO, many polls indicated that he was likely to be the next president of Mexico. However, after the July 2, 2006, elections, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) announced that Felipe Calderón had won the elections. Suspicions arose throughout the country. AMLO and his supporters claimed that again an electoral fraud had taken place and requested a full recount of the votes. The request was denied, and a partial recount of the votes was performed. After several calculations, the electoral authorities reported that Calderón defeated López Obrador by a mere 230,000 votes. AMLO’s supporters insisted that there was fraud because as more ballot boxes were opened, AMLO gained more votes and Calderón lost dozens of votes, which is why they thought that if all the tally sheets were opened, the result would be different.

Although Calderón was declared the winner, AMLO and his followers insisted that they had been robbed of victory. They set up permanent encampments along Paseo de la Reforma, one of Mexico City’s most important avenues, which caused traffic chaos in the capital. Finally, on November 20, 2006, they decided to declare AMLO as the legitimate president without the authorization of the electoral authorities. A symbolic cabinet was formed and AMLO went around the country to explain how the presidency had supposedly been stolen from him and who was behind the fraud.

In a public statement, AMLO said:

​AMLO was undoubtedly defeated, but not for long. The Mexican leader had understood that to triumph he had to do so against the institutions he sought to govern. He would not cease in his eagerness to reach the presidential chair and undertake the necessary reforms to transform Mexico.

​In his first public statement since being released from prison in June, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on Tuesday urged European lawmakers to take action to protect journalists from being prosecuted for their reporting work, warning that his yearslong case is directly tied to self-censorship and the chilling of press freedom.

Assange spoke to the Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights (PACE) at the Council of Europe, which includes members from across the continent, in Strasbourg, France, and warned that current legal protections for journalists and whistleblowers “were not effective in any remotely reasonable time,” as evidenced by the 14 years he spent in prison or otherwise in confinement for his work.

“I want to be totally clear,” said Assange.

​Assange was released from Belmarsh Prison in London in June after being incarcerated there for five years. His release was secured when he agreed to plead guilty to one felony count of illegally obtaining and disclosing national security materials in a deal with the U.S. government.

He had spent years fighting U.S. efforts to extradite him, threatening him with a sentence of up to 170 years in a federal prison, as punishment for state secrets WikiLeaks published.

The media organization reported on a series of leaks provided by former U.S. Army soldier Chelsea Manning regarding the Army’s killing of unarmed civilians in Iraq, as well as publishing diplomatic cables.

“I was formally convicted by a foreign power for asking for receiving and publishing truthful information about that power, while I was in Europe,” said Assange, who is Australian, on Tuesday.

Assange told PACE members that he had believed that Article 10 of European Convention of Human Rights, which protects the right to freedom of expression and freedom of the media, would protect him from prosecution.
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“Similarly, looking at the U.S. First Amendment to its Constitution… No publisher had ever been prosecuted for publishing classified information from the United States,” said Assange.

He continued:

​They are the rules made by the ruling class more broadly. And if those rules don’t suit what it wants to do, it reinterprets them or hopefully changes them… In the case of the United States, we angered one of the constituent powers of the United States. The intelligence sector… It was powerful enough to push for a reinterpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

He said he ultimately “chose freedom over unrealizable justice,” as the U.S. was intent on imprisoning him for the rest of his life unless he entered the guilty plea.

Assange added that his case set a “dangerous precedent,” and that since his arrest he has observed “more impunity, more secrecy, more retaliation for telling the truth, and more self-censorship.”

“It is hard not to draw a line from the U.S. government crossing the Rubicon by internationally criminalizing journalism to the chilled climate for freedom of expression now,” said Assange.

His comments echoed the findings of Reporters Without Borders (RSF), which published its annual press freedom index in May. The group found that “in the Americas, the inability of journalists to cover subjects related to organized crime, corruption, or the environment for fear of reprisals poses a major problem.”

The U.S. fell 10 places in the annual ranking, with citing “open antagonism from political officials” such as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, “including calls to jail journalists.” RSF also cited the government’s pursuit of Assange’s extradition.

In Europe, said Assange on Tuesday,

​Israel’s assassination of Hasan Nasrallah, the secretary general of Hizballah, in an apocalyptic bombing attack on Beirut’s southern suburb on Friday is likely, at least in the short term, to cause enormous shock, despair and demoralization among supporters of the resistance to Zionism in Lebanon and across the region.

That is exactly what it is intended to do.

Confirmed by Hizballah on Saturday, Nasrallah’s killing comes after a series of tactical successes in the early stages of Israel’s unfolding full-scale attack on Lebanon, an open-ended assault that may well equal in barbarity Tel Aviv’s ongoing genocide in Gaza.

These are terrible and difficult thoughts to absorb after almost a year of genocide.

First there were the pager and walkie-talkie attacks, followed by a series of assassinations of Hizballah’s senior leaders, and now the head of the organization itself.

As Nasrallah himself admitted in his final speech, the organization suffered a severe blow with the pager attacks. Even worse was to come. Clearly there were serious breaches in security.

Nasrallah’s stature as a tactical and strategic thinker, as the most prominent and trusted leader of the Axis of Resistance, and as a personality capable of inspiring and reassuring supporters even in the worst of times, cannot be overstated.

The euphoria in Israel, Washington and some Arab capitals, will be exceeded only by the grief of Nasrallah’s supporters, who are far more numerous.

And there is no doubt that the loss is real and great from the perspective of a resistance that faces not only Israel’s formidable arsenal, but all the resources of the United States and the collective West.

Israel’s ability to carry out this series of attacks in quick succession will shake the confidence of many in Hizballah’s legendary prowess and operational security.

The attacks will go some way to restoring the prestige Tel Aviv has lost among its Western and Arab backers after a year of military failure in Gaza, and its failure to prevent the Hamas military offensive that wiped out the Gaza division of Israel’s army on 7 October 2023.

And although Hizballah has been hammering Israeli military assets and settlements in the north of historic Palestine with rockets, many in the region are asking why the resistance group’s response to Israel’s escalating aggression has not been harder and harsher – even as Israel intensifies its bombardment of civilians across Lebanon and within its capital.

Another question on many lips is why Iran, which vowed retaliation after Israel’s murder of Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran in July, has acted with such restraint. There is a growing perception that its lack of response only encouraged Israel’s ever more brazen violence.

“Shock and awe” is not victory

Amid the rapidly changing situation and the torrent of emotions after a year of livestreamed genocide in Gaza, now being extended by Israel to Lebanon, it is hard to maintain a long view. But doing so is essential for sound analysis.

It is worth remembering this: In almost any asymmetrical war, when the strongest side – the invader or colonizer – goes on the offensive, it often appears to achieve quick and stunning success.

Indeed “shock and awe” is the name of a Western, specifically American, military doctrine, developed in the 1990s and explicitly touted when the US invaded Iraq in 2003.

Also called “rapid dominance,” its aim is to demoralize and paralyze the adversary with the use of overwhelming and spectacular displays of violence.

The goal according to the doctrine’s authors, is to so “overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that the enemy would be incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels.”

We’ve seen this time and again in recent decades and we’re witnessing it now.

Just weeks after the 11 September 2001 attacks, the United States attacked Afghanistan, quickly toppling the Taliban government under the pretext that it had sheltered Osama bin Laden.

American confidence following this swift apparent success undoubtedly spurred Washington to go on to its next project: the March 2003 invasion of Iraq.

With the government of Saddam Hussein quickly overthrown and American tanks in control of Baghdad, President George W. Bush gave his infamous “Mission Accomplished” speech on 1 May of that year – words that came to haunt him as the United States became bogged down in a war of attrition against resistance in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

These rapid victories, or so they appeared, sparked real fears at the time that the American forces would roll onwards towards Damascus and Tehran, or perhaps other “rogue states” on America’s hit list.

We know now, from the so-called Afghanistan Papers, that the warmongers in Washington recognized all along that they had lost the war, but lied to the American public for almost two decades that they were winning.

And when the American withdrawal from Afghanistan came in August 2021, the humiliating departure from Kabul airport was widely compared to the chaotic scenes of the defeated Americans evacuating in helicopters from the roof of the US embassy in Saigon, Vietnam.

With respect to Israel too, this pattern has been evident. When Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 – an assault it dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee” – its forces quickly swept north to Beirut, besieging and occupying an Arab capital for the first time in the Zionist settler state’s history.

Israel murdered tens of thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and expelled the Palestine Liberation Organization. But success, from Tel Aviv’s perspective, quickly turned to failure.

During a long occupation, resistance to Israel grew, especially from Hizballah, which did not even exist at the time of the Israeli invasion.

Hizballah and other resistance groups bled Israeli occupation forces for two decades in a grueling war of attrition, until Israel withdrew from occupied southern Lebanon in defeat in May 2000.

Even in the context of the American-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, Israel’s constant professions that it has placed this or that part of Gaza under its total control, quickly crumble. The fact is that the resistance continues to fight in every part of Gaza.

So far every Israeli-American “day after” plan, in which a defeated Hamas would be replaced by an Arab-backed Palestinian collaborator force, has collapsed.

Distracting from an exhausted Israel’s ongoing failure in Gaza, is perhaps one of the factors spurring Israel to seek spectacular “success” in Lebanon.

Turning point
​
This sobering moment is a turning point in the long regional war for liberation from racist, Western-backed settler-colonial Zionism. But after a century of Zionism’s depredations and horrors, neither the people of Lebanon nor Palestine have surrendered, and there’s no reason to believe they will now.

On the contrary, after the initial shock, the determination of the resistance will only increase, and its circle will expand, as it has in every phase of the liberation struggle.

Nor does the assassination of Nasrallah, with American bombs and American warplanes, and perhaps other assistance from Washington, change the trajectory of the downward decline of US global power – the power on which Israel relies for its survival.

Let’s recall too that the Zionists have always used assassination as a primary tactic. However, their war is not against individual leaders, but against entire peoples whose determination cannot be so easily snuffed out.

Nasrallah himself assumed the leadership of Hizballah after Israel murdered his predecessor Abbas al-Musawi in 1992. Nasrallah grew the organization to unprecedented strength.

That strength is not based on the will of one individual, but on a base of support deeply committed to the cause and willing – as Nasrallah himself never failed to point out – to make enormous sacrifices on the road to liberation.

If the Israeli army has admitted Hamas cannot be destroyed because “Hamas is an idea, Hamas is a party,” then what about Hizballah?

What is most sobering is that the war to liberate Palestine and the region from Zionism will be no less brutal on the people of the region than the wars to liberate Algeria, Vietnam, South Africa and so many other places targeted by the Euro-American empire.

After all, the occupiers and colonizers are the same countries, and the genocidal hatred their ruling classes bear towards the people whose land and rights they seek to usurp has never dimmed.

Like others before him, Nasrallah gave his life on the road to liberate Palestine, and that struggle did not end today.

​Sri Lanka has its first Communist president in 56-year-old Anura Kumar Dissanayake—a historic verdict after a second round of counting, another first in the island’s presidential election history.

Dissanayake trumped his nearest rival Sajith Premadasa and the serving president Ranil Wickremesinghe after winning more than 5.63 million votes. Considering he led by 1 million votes with a 10% difference on total, the Sri Lankan Election Commision decided to declare him the winner.

It marked a spectacular turnaround as Dissanayake had won a mere 3% of the vote in the last presidential election in 2019. He is set to take oath on Monday according to PTI.

The Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) leader’s campaign was built on sweeping reforms, tackling corruption and ensuring economic relief.

In short, Dissanayake offered a political revolution through the ballot.

Dissanayake hails from Thambuttegama, in the North Central District of Anuradhapura.

In his own words, “an aspirational youth who wanted to change the world,” the man who will be President has consistently claimed that only a massive political transition can help Sri Lanka dig itself out from the current morass. A core value in this is to empower the island’s majority—the working class, the rural folks—who have no say in political decision making.

The son of “working class parents” as he describes himself, Dissanayake attended two public schools in his hometown, and was the first student from Thambuttegama to enter university. His involvement with student politics saw him join the Marxist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) in 1987. Soon he was fully absorbed in JVP politics.

A bright student, Dissanayake entered the University of Peradeniya but had to leave as threats mounted. In 1992, he got himself transferred to the University of Kelaniya and graduated in 1995 with a Bachelor of Science degree.

Dissanayake has been steadfast in his criticism of cronyism, nepotism, concentration of power and corruption.

In parliament and outside, Dissanayake has been a strong anti-corruption voice demanding accountability.

His promise to overhaul the system, end family rule, introduce financial reforms and improve governance structures resonated with the protesting masses, who wanted to end the Rajapaksa brand of politics.

Dissanayake’s oft-repeated key public pledges include the recovery of stolen assets and punishing those responsible for the island’s unprecedented economic crisis.

As our contributor Dilrukshi Handunetti wrote, the rise of Dissanayake will spell a complete overhaul—one that will effectively end the Sri Lankan elite’s hold on politics and possibly grand corruption.

​India and Dissanayake
​
There have been worries expressed in some quarters that the rise of a Communist president will see Sri Lanka drawing closer to China. But that might be a misplaced fear as India has shown itself to be one neighbour which has rushed to Sri Lanka’s aid without indulging in any overt arm twisting.

“Dissanayake’s recent statement that he will cancel Adani’s projects had put the Indian high commission in Colombo in a tizzy. But given the geopolitical realities, he will indeed have to work with India,” an expert said.

The expert cited Dissanayake emphasizing his desire during the presidential campaign to continue having a good relationship with India as proof.

Amid a deeply uninspiring presidential election campaign in the United States, there is increasing unrest amongst the working class. Several high-profile strikes are shutting down business and forcing employers to negotiate on pay, healthcare insurance and working conditions.

With Harris and Trump both offering very little to ease the cost of living, healthcare costs and the housing crisis, workers are taking action into their own hands.

Longshoremen braced to shut down U.S. economy

36 ports across the east and Gulf coasts of the U.S., including 10 of the busiest ports in North America, are facing the prospect of total shutdown as workers stand ready to strike. 45,000 members of the International Longshoreman’s Association (ILA) will walk off the job on Tuesday if a new agreement is not reached with the U.S. Maritime Alliance (USMX), which is accused of making “insulting offers” relating to pay for workers.

The strike is estimated to cost the U.S. economy $5 billion dollars per day and just a one-day strike will lead to a backlog that will take 4-6 days to clear. The union is demanding pay rises, healthcare improvements and a guarantee not to automate terminals at the ports.

USMX previously broke their contract with the ILA by implementing automation at several ports, where an auto-gate system was put in to replace workers processing trucks into ports.

ILA international president Harold J Daggett said,

​Boeing workers in it for the long haul

Tens of thousands of Boeing manufacturing workers, members of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAW), have been on strike for over 2 weeks in what is set to be a long fight against bosses.

96% voted for strike action, after 94.6% of members voted to reject the company’s offer of a 25% pay rise over 4 years. A last-minute offer was “thrown” at the union without any discussion, resulting in the IAW refusing to put it to a vote.

Workers have been manning 24-hour picket lines across different plants, including Oregon and California. Reports suggest morale and determination amongst the 33,000 members is high and they are willing to walk out for “as long as it takes.”

UAW workers ready to take action against “out of control” Stellantis

Stellantis, one of the biggest carmakers in the U.S., is “out of control” according to the United Auto Workers union, as members vote on potential strike action. UAW has filed unfair labour practice charges against the company, which produces Chrysler, Dodge and Jeep cars, over broken commitments and refusing to release information about product commitments.

Stellantis recently announced it will sack 2,500 workers at the Warren truck plant in Michigan. It also has plans to move production of the Dodge Durango out of the U.S. and is stalling on an agreed plan to reopen the Belvidere plant in Illinois, after it sacked 1,300 workers earlier this year.

UAW president Shawn Fain said:

​The union says it is ready to take action if necessary to force Stellantis to stick to the 2023 agreement.

The pharmacy that doesn’t provide affordable healthcare

7,000 workers at CVS pharmacies have voted overwhelmingly to authorise an ‘unfair Labour practice’ strike. This follows disputes over poor pay, understaffing and a failure by the company to provide affordable healthcare.

CVS has reported more than $11 billion in profits and CEO Karen Lynch received $21.6 million in compensation in 2023. Yet, 64% of workers at CVS report not having health insurance, with 77% saying the reason being it is too expensive.

Despite the enormous profits, the company refused union proposals to cut health insurance costs, improve staffing and provide time for staff to complete safety training. Staff are reporting increased thefts because of understaffing and UFCW has filed unfair labour practice charges against CVS, alleging surveillance of workers and intimidation.

Workers will not be on strike until the union declares one, with the next bargaining session set for 16th October.
​
Trader Joe’s workers fight union busting

Workers at a Trader Joe’s store in New York are fighting back against union busting by their employers and may force the company to recognise and bargain with the union.

The company, which is one of the largest grocery store chains in the U.S., is accused of threatening behaviour against employees while they organised a union recognition vote. The top labour watchdog in the U.S. is now seeking an order which will force Trader Joe’s to recognise and negotiate with Trade Joe’s United.

Workers lost a 76-76 tied vote to unionise the store in 2023 but this may be overturned if it is found that illegal union busting took place.

Other stores, for instance in Chicago, are also filing for union recognition ballots as workers fight back against cuts to benefits and safety problems.

These are significant developments given the relative weakness of the labour movement in the U.S. in recent history. They are made all the more important in the context of what is going on amongst the ruling class. Harris and Trump are fighting a close election, with Harris gaining a slight lead recently.

Neither are addressing the most pressing issues for ordinary Americans at the moment. Whilst they wrangle over who is more ruthless on immigration, Americans remain most concerned about inflation and the cost of living.

With neither candidate offering anything significant, it will be up to American workers to take matters into their own hands and force the hand of employers and the government into providing wages and working conditions that improve living standards.

​In leading foreign policy magazines across the United States, the rise of China is treated as a threat which the U.S. must effectively challenge. Since at least President Barack Obama’s 2011 “pivot to Asia,” American foreign policy has been crafted towards “containing” China, and “de-linking” it from the global economy.

As has been historically the case for all empires, its treatment of its up-and-coming competition has required various tactics of dehumanization. In the eyes of their population, they need the competitor to appear as a barbaric “other,” a being fully foreign to everything their people hold sacred. This is how hybrid wars against the “otherized” country are legitimated in the native population; fear of one’s way of life being threatened drives people who have no real, material interest in supporting these policies into supporting them.

The “pivot to Asia” has been conjoined with a healthy dose of Sinophobia. Even the propaganda spewed about China itself presupposes orientalist tropes about the “backwards” Eastern peoples more predisposed to despotism than the “enlightened” Westerners. Without this ideological basis, the media’s job of convincing Americans that China is ran by an autocratic “dictator,” who somehow calls all the shots in a country of 1.4 billion people, would be significantly harder. It is a predisposed dehumanization of the Chinese that premises the acceptance of baseless claims about a “Uyghur genocide,” for which those who have plundered the predominantly Muslim countries of the Middle East for a century have never provided evidence for.

But is there any basis in this otherization? Is the “Chinese dream” and way of life really that different from the ideals that regular American people hold as common sense? All evidence points to the contrary. In many ways, the reality Chinese people experience with their socialist democracy lives up to the American ideals far better than the reality Americans experience in the U.S. itself.
​

​The most influential American thinkers and leaders in American history, those whose insights have crystallized into the common sense of many Americans, have all been distrustful of those who consider it their main purpose to simply accumulate capital at the expense of society.

Thomas Jefferson, for instance, held that there was a fundamental distinction between the aristocratic and democratic man: the former is rooted in big business elitism, the latter in the people’s will. Jefferson considered that if the aristocratic man came into power, the American experiment in democracy would be threatened. Hindsight has shown how right he was!

Abraham Lincoln, for instance, held that “labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” For Lincoln, the substance of the American project was “government of the people, by the people, for the people,” as he eloquently stated in his Gettysburg Address. He would be disappointed to see how today we have government of, by, and for big corporations, investment firms, and banks.

In the 20th century, no American thinkers are as influential as the polymath, John Dewey, and the brilliant Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr. While every year American politicians pay lip service to Dr. King, and while Dewey’s literal nickname was “America’s philosopher of democracy,” what is often left out of the conversation was how both were vehemently critical of how America was failing to live up to its democratic ideals, and how, if it wanted to make these ideals real, it required some form of socialism.

Dr. King argued that “if a man doesn’t have a job or an income, he has neither life, nor liberty, nor the possibility for the pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.” China’s efforts in lifting 800 million out of poverty and eliminating absolute poverty would align with Dr. King’s understanding of what is required for authentic American democracy far greater than the condition most American working people live in, more than 60% of which are a lost paycheck away from homelessness and most of which are drowning in debt-slavery.

Likewise, for Dewey we must stop thinking about democracy as something “institutional and external;’” instead, we should treat democracy as a “way of life,” one governed by the “belief in the common man.” For Dewey, genuine democracy is a consistent practice. It has less to do with showing up to a poll every two to four years and more to do with the ability of common people to steadily exert their collective power over the affairs of everyday life. Dewey would conclude that the ideals of the founders would be realized “only as control of the means of production and distribution is taken out of the hands of individuals who exercise powers created socially for narrow individual interests.” It is in China, where capital is forced to serve the people and not the other way around, where this vision is most plentifully realized.

Dewey would wholeheartedly agree with Chinese president Xi Jinping, who asserted that “democracy is not an ornament to be used for decoration; it is to be used to solve the problems that the people want to solve.” As Xi Jinping has noted,

If the people are awakened only at the time of voting and go into dormancy afterward; if the people only listen to smashing slogans during election campaigns but have no say afterward; if the people are only favored during canvassing but are left out after the election, such a democracy is not a true democracy.

One could see words like these coming out of the mouths of a John Dewey or a Martin Luther King Jr. The ideas governing China’s socialist whole-process people’s democracy should look anything but foreign to Americans – it is what our leading democratic theorists hoped the US system would develop into. If Americans are faithful to the democratic creed of the Declaration of Independence, and to the leading theorists of our country, who have developed these into notions of socialist democracy with American characteristics, then we should be praising China for how incredibly comprehensive their socialist democracy is.

Instead of accepting the lies U.S. politicians and media spew, all of which are aimed are “otherizing” and “demonizing” China, the American people must realize that it is China where the American ideals are best embodied. Professor Zhang Weiwei is, without a doubt, correct to point out that Lincoln’s dictum “of, by, and for the people,” is much more substantially realized in China.

Instead of accepting the easily disprovable lies of U.S. officials, who in condemning China are themselves standing in an anti-American position, the American people should fight to realize Lincoln’s vision. When our government is actually of, by, and for the people, the conditions will be present for us seeing China’s rise not as a threat we must contain, but an effort we can applaud. Ultimately, if Americans are faithful to their democratic creed, they will realize that we must learn from China and work together to build a peaceful, cooperative, and ecological shared future for mankind.

At the start of this June, invited by The Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, I attended the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in Russia, a large-scale economic forum of utmost importance in Russia. The focus of the forum was on “The Formation of New Centers of Growth as The Cornerstone of a Multipolar World.” More than 12,000 members of various professions from more than 100 countries attended the forum. Russian President Putin made a keynote speech, of which some opinions are very impressive.

​First of all his brief on the global trend, where he expressed that all countries in the world are enhancing sovereignty in three aspects: national sovereignty, cultural value sovereignty, and economic sovereignty. I find this inspiring.

Secondly, he made a judgment on the world economic situation, stating that China has already emerged as the top economy globally. Although he did not explicitly mention the second-ranked economy, it is widely understood to be the United States. This is what I often express on Chinese television programs., China’s economy, measured by purchasing power parity, surpassed that of the US as early as 2014, a decade ago.

Putin then discussed how, according to purchasing power parity, India is poised to become the third-largest economy. He also emphasized the high birth rate, relatively low level of urbanization, and rapid economic growth in the South Asia region where India is situated.

Thirdly, regarding the Russian economy, he stated that Russia’s objective is to become the fourth-largest economy in the world. He then spontaneously mentioned that the World Bank had recently revised its statistics, indicating that Russia had surpassed Japan to claim the fourth spot in terms of economic scale, based on purchasing power parity. The audience erupted into enthusiastic applause at this announcement, prompting Putin to advise everyone to maintain a modest demeanor.

He emphasized, “We have now overtaken Japan and Germany, albeit by a slight margin, which we aim to sustain and expand. It is imperative for us to ensure high-speed, high-quality growth in the long term, considering that other nations, such as Indonesia, are rapidly advancing with their growing population and swift economic progress.”

Putin referenced data released by the World Bank at the end of May this year: as of the end of 2023, the global economic rankings by purchasing power parity are as follows: China in first place with 35 trillion dollars, the United States in second with 27.4 trillion dollars, India in third with 14.6 trillion dollars, Russia in fourth with 6.45 trillion dollars, and Japan in fifth with 6.3 trillion dollars. Based on these figures, China’s economy is approximately equivalent to 5.5 times that of Japan and 128% of the United States’.

The shift towards utilizing purchasing power parity as a measurement is significant for Russia, as it is perceived as a more realistic indicator. Historically, Russia had been using nominal GDP calculated by official exchange rates, resulting in a significant underestimation of its economic size and portraying a position of weakness to the West. This miscalculation led to five expansions of NATO towards the east and continuous humiliation of Russia. Presently, Russian leaders predominantly rely on purchasing power parity standards to evaluate their economic standing.

Then Putin continued on the status of Russia’s economic development and structural adjustment, with which he pointed out Russia’s GDP growth rate was 3.6% last year, above the world average. He especially mentioned how this growth comes mainly from non-resource areas. The Russian economy was, by the time of the Soviet Union’s collapse and under the influence of neo-liberalism ideology, driven afar from reality, and relied on selling resources for a long time. After Putin took presidency the situation changed. According to himself, in 2023, non-resource industries like manufacturing, architecture, logistics, information, agriculture, and electricity have grown by over 45.5%.

Some claim that Russia is only getting a higher growth rate for its war-time economy, yet from our own eyes we have seen these years Russia rebuilt. A large batch of Chinese enterprises are actively investing in Russia as well. Although Russia is bearing over 15000 various Western sanctions, the Russian market is still prospering, essentials are well-supplied, and many goods from China, including cars, phones, and appliances are seen all around.

Putin also talked about how Russia’s exporting commerce has grown immensely, and the share of “poisonous currencies” from unfriendly nations has decreased by half. Over 40% of exchanges use Russian rubles.

The concept of “poisonous currency” was first raised among Russian scholars to describe Western currencies like US dollars, now it is also widely used among Russian leaders like Putin himself. This shows Russia’s unique understanding of Western currencies like dollars, and worth our thinking as well.

During the speech, Putin also stressed that global development has shifted its center from Europe to Asia, “we should get closer to these centers of development”. Russia’s “Turning East” is not a temporary move, but a progress that is happening around the world.
After his speech, the esteemed Russian political scholar Sergey Karaganov posed an intriguing question to Putin. He mentioned that Peter the Great had intentionally constructed St. Petersburg as a gateway to Europe, securing his place in history. Karaganov asked why Putin couldn’t make a similar decision to establish a grand city in the Far East.

In response, Putin stated that Russia could explore the possibility of creating a third metropolis in Russia, emphasizing that such endeavors should not rely solely on administrative directives but rather on the cultivation of appealing conditions.

Putin explained that the development of St. Petersburg was driven by the economic hub being located in Europe at that time. With the global economic center now shifted to Asia, he emphasized the importance of Russia turning its focus towards Asia and vigorously advancing economic growth in the Far East. During his visit to China, Putin made a special trip to Harbin.

The Chinese Foreign Minister, Wang Yi, also visited the Far East region of Russia, including Irkutsk. I see these visits as significant signals indicating the acceleration of cooperation between Russia and China in developing the Far East. During his visit to Irkutsk, Wang Yi remarked that China is actively advancing its modernization process in Chinese model while Russia is expediting the development of the Far East, presenting both countries with a historic opportunity for collaboration. Local partnerships play a crucial role in the China-Russia relationship.

I personally believe that joint cooperation in the development of the Far East region will bring substantial benefits to both nations. From China’s perspective, this collaboration will enhance the long-term energy and resource security needed for China’s economic growth. From Russia’s standpoint, it will contribute to reshaping the spatial layout of the Russian economy, creating a new hub for economic growth.

​Perhaps the critics were right.

The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States. Founded in 1982 by a cadre of social democrats, the group has since swelled to roughly 100,000 official members. Virtually all of that growth occurred after Senator Bernie Sanders launched his first presidential run, which mainstreamed socialism in America. What was once a marginal bunch now regularly makes headlines and even has members in Congress.

Yet the Democratic Socialists of America is hardly uncontroversial on the American Left. A longstanding critique is that it’s too reformist and cozy with a Democratic Party it should be trying to destroy. Rather than mobilizing to build independent institutions, leftist critics believe the organization siphons socialist energy into the duopoly’s lesser evil. That is arguably counterrevolutionary as it may further lock us into a capitalist political system which only serves the elite.

Naturally, members forcefully resist this characterization of their organization. But recent events seem to have vindicated the critics. On August 6th, the Democratic Socialist of America’s official Twitter account posted the following:

Within traditional Marxist-Leninist vocabulary, socialism and communism refer to different stages of a new mode of production.

However, the usage of these terms as a form of political identification have always had different connotations historically.

Often times, Right-Wingers love to repeat the fairytale - that 'communism,' promising 'utopia,' was a completely benign term that everyone was naive about.

It was associated with rainbows and sunshine... Until it was 'put into practice' and 999 trillion people were massacred and starved.

According to this mythology, naive 'idealists' did not realize how 'scary' communism was, until Communists actually seized power.

But the truth is that communism HAS ALWAYS been a 'bad word.'

COMMUNISM - THE SPECTRE HAUNTING EUROPE
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During the early 19th century, communism was associated with riotous working class revolutionaries throughout Europe. Masses of people, ordinary people on the street, believed there was something fundamentally wrong and rotten about the state of Europe.

Meanwhile, 'Socialism' referred to enlightened reformers and experimental utopians, who posed no threat to the ruling capitalist class  order. In fact, many members of the ruling class, in a philanthropic way, were actually drawn to 'socialism.'

Both socialists and communists understood there was something wrong with the emerging capitalist society. But "socialists" treated this problem as something that could be solved without any real trouble.

At this time, older, more traditional relations were breaking down. Peasants, forced off of their land, were being herded into cities to become proletarians.

The old feudal order and everything upon which it rested fundamentally broke down. All it's vestiges took the form of a sick and twisted hypocrisy, disguising the naked brutality of the new capitalist order - founded upon the degradation, humiliation, and rapacious exploitation of man by man.

Vast swaths of people were crammed into slums and factories, treated worse than animals. Children were not spared. Women were driven into prostitution on a mass scale.

Diseased, overcrowded, overworked, and depleted of any spiritual morale - such was the fate of Western Europe's peasant majority.

Enlightened 'Socialists' sought to provide relief from this brutality. But there was something a little bit twisted about this.

They regarded the evils and ills of the system as mere 'quirks' to be remedied, thus treating a fundamental existential loss of humanity as a mere utilitarian question - treating the very evils of capitalism under the utilitarian and crude logic of capitalism itself.

Today, this is reminiscent of the way Silicon Valley provides "solutions" and "hacks" to the outrageous problems of capitalism. No food? Have some soylent. No housing? Try pod sharing.

The more "metaphysical" (Marx would say "human") questions - of justice, existence, morality, dignity, honor, meaning - were brushed under the rug by the "Socialists."

There was something craven about the "socialists." They were conciliatory to the established powers. They did not have the courage to speak the truth.

During this period, communists were those who recognized something fundamentally rotten, false, hypocritical, and bankrupt about the emerging and "restored" (after Metternich) Europe.

They rejected the hypocrisy of the reactionaries. They rejected the "remedies" of the "Socialists." They insisted upon a FUNDAMENTAL position of existential truth and authenticity.

However inconvenient, scandalous, and "terrifying" it was to high society.

In the words of Fredrich Engels in his preface to the Communist Manifesto:

"Whatever portion of the working class had become convinced of the insufficiency of mere political revolutions, and had proclaimed the necessity of total social change, called itself Communist."

The French revolution revealed the great extent of the ancien regime's corruption. But it did not recognize the root cause of society's growing division. There began to emerge a great Elephant in the room.

The people began to acquire the awareness - they were being deprived of their economic rights on a mass scale. In a manner so open, so notorious, and so brazen that not even the most exploitative of Feudal lords, ever faced with the prospect of peasant rebellion, could have conceived of doing against their serfs.

Communists, from the beginning, represented an inconvenient truth. That something was killed with the rise of capitalism - the common, social substance of mankind. And yet it continued to haunt Europe, as a fundamental and unavoidable question looming over it.

And all the great powers of Europe were terrified of the mere whisper of this - because they too knew it on an unconscious level. People could no longer ignore the obvious truth: Something was lost that MUST be restored.

And it could not be restored by returning to the past, for its loss was an indictment on the entire history of private property itself.

Thus, there was a "spectre" of Communism. The ghosts of voiceless and forgotten martyrs of not only of capitalism but all European history (which Micheal Hudson documents as the domination of creditor classes).

A ghost that reminded Europe of a fundamental irrationality and problem it couldn't escape from.

Communists were not politicians, policy makers, philanthropists, "problem solvers." They were those who insisted upon a fundamental and total "metaphysical" (as 'positivists' would call it) truth.

They were also not anarchists. They insisted upon a LOST history, a LOST future, and a LOST civilization. By rejecting private property, they were rejecting the institution that disguised and obstructed a fundamental confrontation with a common historical situation and reality.

One that, in a sense, already existed, but subject to continual erasure, forgetting, and being swept under the rug. All the wealth of society was increasingly and in a way unprecedented being produced in common, yet appropriated privately to a likewise unprecedented degree.

Communists didn't propose a "utopia." They insisted upon a sober, authentic, and brutally honest confrontation with the present reality - of robbery, exploitation, injustice, and the destruction of humanity itself.

Communists were not "proposing" a new system or alternative. They were, to the terror of Europe's crowned heads and capitalists - declaring the existence of an entirely different cosmology, a forgotten and repressed universal whole of existence.

This cosmology was "different" - yet paradoxically so familiar. Because it's existence, weighing on the guilty conscience of all European society, was repressed.
Everyone knew that the brutality and savagery of capitalism was contrary to the very place mankind, the highest of God's creation, had within universal existence.

The inconvenient and unspeakable truth- that humanity itself had fallen in a fundamental way, that all older conventions were obsolete, that the true history of Europe, in its entirety, was too much for the established powers of Europe to bare.

"Socialists" may have proposed a completely new "system." But they did not question the fundamental cosmology, the total horizon of symbolic meaning itself - within the established capitalist order.

They did not recognize that from the perspective of universal existence itself, the prevailing order was condemned. They could only ever take a one-sided perspective, based on philanthropy, 'problem solving,' or even 'engineering.'

They did not reckon with the whole of history and human existence itself - what Engels described as the demand for "total social change."

THE SOCIAL-DEMOCRATIC REALPOLITIK

And after decades, Europe eventually did witness the rise of a powerful 'socialist' or Social Democratic movement.

The phrase 'communism' was discarded for 'social democracy,' as a form of political realpolitik. Communism was treated as a later stage of consciousness for what was a growing yet persecuted movement.

Because society was not ready - either legally or ideologically - for the total change implied by that word, it was regarded as more realistic to place less emphasis on it.

The social democrats, because of their realpolitik, managed to create large and successful mass movements.

But over time, they forgot their original mission. They became corrupted by the legalism, the convenience, and the institutionalization of the worker's cause. They ceased to be leaders of a totally new society. They, rather, became 'part' of society.

COMMUNISM - LENIN'S REVOLUTIONARY DYNASTY

It was Lenin who reintroduced the word Communism back into the political history of mankind.

Not because Lenin was an anarchist who rejected realpolitik, and not because he was an ideological fanatic. It was because, after reading Hegel in solitude, he had the courage to accept the decisive significance of the Communist outlook in new and crucial situation.

In the beginning, the communists goals were ambiguous and ill-defined. All they had was their authenticity, their willingness to accept the full and total implications of history, regardless of how terrifying the consequences.

But Lenin, in his genius, succeeded in situating the whole development of Social-Democracy up until the decisive point as communism itself in the form of political struggle.

Lenin restored the greater cosmological and "metaphysical" significance of politics. Rather than a "respectable" branch of bourgeois society, politics was the staging ground, the battlefield, and the fundamental dimension of "metaphysical" struggle.

(By "metaphysical" one refers to the positivist pejorative - for of course, what is really meant is dialectical in the fullest sense)

Politics was absolute struggle to the death. Politics for Lenin meant the same thing that it did for Gilgamesh or for Cyrus the Great. The whole of universal existence was imperiled in it. It is not a 'part' of society. It is the total existence of a society at war with itself.

It is the active form of society's most fundamental contradiction, the class struggle.

The goal of Communists was the revolutionary seizure of state power, under a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Communists were MILITANTS fighting a WAR - as Clausewitz said, war is an extension of politics and vice versa.

War for the seizure of state power from the capitalist class, from the bloodsuckers and exploiters of humanity. Lenin set all world imperialism ablaze. No Empire could survive the judgement of the stars.

Lenin's flame was the seed of a new, revolutionary dynasty, whose dominion would be greater and more exalted than all the obsolete powers of old Europe.

The dynastic succession was not based on individual blood. But on the revolutionary essence of history itself. The dynasty of Marxism-Leninism, and its five heads - Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao.

Lenin restored the cosmological significance of Communist struggle - the struggle for existence, meaning, humanity, etc. was now embedded in a nexus of global geopolitics that became the battleground for world history itself.

Before and after Lenin's revolution, a new imperialist ruling class began to usurp all the formal and constitutional rights of the people. It was destroying their SOVEREIGNTY.

Imperialism and fascism violated the very social contract that the bourgeois class had disguised its dictatorship in the name of. They trampled on the liberties of their own people - while violating the right of self determination of other nations.

They suffocated and destroyed all outlets for the people's sovereignty. And so on the basis of violating legitimate, historically constituted social contract of the people - they defined the terms of a new war.

The war did not begin with 'communist idealists' proposing a new system from scratch. It began with Communists defending the integrity of the people's common history itself.

Communism is not about forcing a new system on the people. It is about leading and educating the masses as they discover how the society, government, etc. familiar and legitimate to them is collapsing according to contradictions the Communists alone understand.

Leninism is not a rejection of realism. It IS realism - the highest insight into the contradictions driving world history itself.

It differed from social democracy precisely in that it refused to shy away from the naked Clausewitzean realism of class struggle, which was a WAR. The clausewitzean realism of the state, which is an instrument of violent dictatorship by the exploited class over the exploiters.

Leninism was never a regress into infantilism and a rejection of professionalism or mature, legal activity.

Leninism is, in addition to being a revolutionary outlook, also a wisdom: Not simply an active rejection of the entire social order, but a RECOGNITION that it is being broken down according to its own contradictions.

COMMUNISM TODAY

Now, in the 21st century, after the rise of many great Communist states, what meaning does Communism have?

The new significance of Communism is that it has become a fully integral historical outlook. The LOST history and civilization it insists upon is REAL and TANGIBLE (the Soviet Union).

The specter is real - the ghost of Soviet Communism and Lenin's revolution.

Communism today re-litigates the so-called American-led "New World Order" at the fundamental level.

It rejects the history written by the "victors" of the cold war. It insists upon the fact that the world is running away from the truth- the forgotten truth of world Communist struggle.

Communists reject the entire American-led world order, and it's falsification of history.

The Soviet Union did not need to "collapse." The Berlin wall did not need to "fall." In fact, there was no irreversible "collapse." Only an intermittent period of confusion and disarray. A period that is now on the cusp of ending.

The "collapse" was the consequence of contradictions in the world Communist movement (the Sino Soviet dispute, the cultural revolution) not the supremacy or superiority of the capitalist bloc.

The enduring strength of victorious China, which now drives almost all world economic growth, is proof of this fact.

To be a Communist today, is to insist upon the integrity not only of all world-history, but of the history of Communism in particular.

For this contains the key to everything about the nature of the current global order.

Communists are not "Democratic Socialists" who compromise with the tall-tales and spooky-stories about "totalitarianism" spun by the prostitutes of the American plutocracy.

We defend Stalin.

We defend Mao.

We defend dictatorship.

We defend Cheka.

We defend Soviet Justice (late 1930's).

We defend Tanks in Budapest and Prague.

We defend Cultural Revolution.

We defend 'authoritarian' China.

We are not "socialists."

We are COMMUNISTS.

We are not mere "socialists" who neglect the dimension of WAR and all its ugly realities in class struggle. War is ugly. Such is its nature. The question is - what war is worth fighting for?

Communists rebuke the liberal and 'conservative' hypocrites who lament the brutality of 'Communist terror.' They happily facilitate, and at best, passively tolerate, several wars of unprecedented scale and brutality, responsible for the murder of countless millions and the devastation of entire nations, for the financial gain of the capitalist class.

WAR will be fought either way. Which war are you fighting for? 

Communists ARE "tankies." We are here to herald the collapse of the entire global system with tanks, not flowers.

Communists see the rational integrity of all world history since and even before Lenin's revolution. In all its cunning, its brilliance. We see the rational necessity of everything that has happened up until this point.

Our mission is to remind mankind that this struggle, this war never ended. Only - one side stopped fighting. Not because of the invincibility of America's ruling class.

But because they lost their morale, their spiritual conviction, their belief.

Many declare Communism to be "dead."

But when has that ever stopped communists? Recall the opening lines of the Manifesto: This fateful struggle began with a ghost haunting Europe.

Now this ghost haunts the world.

The restoration of the Communist cause on a planetary scale is inescapable and unavoidable.

Resist it in vain.

Continue to spin your fairy tales and mythologies in vain.

Continue to lie and slander the heroic and sacred history.

Your words will echo less into the future of world history than a dog barking at its own shit.

You cannot stop the confrontation that is to come.

You cannot stop history itself.

At a technological level, the rise of the non-Western world, particularly China, is striking. During this year’s March Two Sessions, our Minister of Science and Technology, Yin Hejun, informed both domestic and foreign journalists that China has achieved a significant number of original breakthroughs in fields such as quantum technology, integrated circuits, artificial intelligence, biomedicine, and new energy. The export growth rates of EV cars, lithium batteries, and photovoltaic components – collectively known as the “New Three” – are remarkably promising. The Wall Street Journal reported on this development with the headline “The World Is in for Another China Shock.”

My friend forwarded me a fascinating blog post where the author made some intriguing points. The author mentioned that these “New Three” are truly formidable because China has managed to produce them at such a low cost, akin to the “rock-bottom prices.” Over the past three years of the pandemic, amidst US lockdowns and sanctions, China has been expanding its production capacity in a counter-cyclical manner, while the Western countries are moving towards deindustrialization. With high-interest rates in the US, Europe and Russia drifting apart, leading to soaring resource costs, one might wonder how their manufacturing sectors will fare. China’s next move is poised for a comprehensive breakthrough in the chip industry chain. Once achieved, it’s uncertain what headline the Wall Street Journal might come up with next. Could it be “The Shock of China’s Shock”?

In the realm of military affairs, shortly after Biden took office, in August 2021, the US military made a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan. A chaotic scene unfolded at Kabul Airport as fleeing crowds chased planes on the runway, and Afghan individuals clinging to aircrafts tragically fell to their deaths. German President Steinmeier remarked that this harrowing situation at Kabul Airport was a disgrace for the United States and the Western world. Former US President Trump criticized Biden, stating, “This is the most embarrassing moment in our country’s history.” He added, “If China sees this, they must be delighted, the Chinese are laughing at us.” When asked about Trump’s comments, our Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying responded, “Is there even a need for us to laugh at?”

In recent months, the Yemeni Houthi militia has been targeting British and American merchant vessels in the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait under the guise of supporting the Palestinian people. Despite the deployment of US and UK warships for protection, the situation remains tense, with reports of British ships being sunk. The Houthi group continues to launch missiles at British and American vessels, causing concern over the US’s ability to contain the situation and maintain its military dominance.

The American conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation, went as far as suggesting on its website that if merchant ships from around the world start seeking protection from China instead of the US, it could signify a shift from the “American century” to the “Chinese century.” While the author expressed relief that Beijing has not yet taken on this role, it is a viewpoint that warrants serious consideration.

In the realm of ideology, the soft power of the US and the West is declining at an accelerated pace. For a long time, the US has cloaked itself in the banners of “Democracy, Liberty, Human Rights”, employing deceptive tactics to incite “Color Revolutions” worldwide, resulting in political turmoil and economic decline in numerous nations. The “Arab Spring” that erupted around 2011 ultimately led to the fragmentation of Libya and Yemen, with Syria enduring devastating levels of destruction. International evaluations indicate that the “Arab Spring” inflicted approximately $900 billion in damages to the infrastructure of countries such as Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Yemen, forcing over 15 million people into refugee status.

Ukraine, deeply immersed in Western ideology, has faced a tumultuous fate. The “Orange Revolution” in 2004 and the “Euromaidan Revolution” in 2014 have left their mark. During the chaos at Independence Square in Kyiv in 2014, then Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland personally visited to support the pro-Western faction in Ukraine. However, this key figure behind the Ukrainian “Color Revolution” and the conflict with Russia has recently “resigned.” This move is widely seen as a sign of the failure of Biden’s Ukraine strategy. Sadly, the Ukrainian people, through what they believed to be democratic means, elected a leader who unquestioningly follows the US’s lead. The outcome is a land in ruins, with widespread devastation and despair.

Personally, Ukraine gave me some special memories, because it was the 100th country I researched, and it was from July 17th to 21st, 2006. That was also my last stop in East Europe’s former Socialist countries. I have drawn a careful conclusion to my practical study: a non-western country or non-western region, if transplanted with a Western political system, could only yield one of two: from hope to disappointment, or from hope to desperation.
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Now the Western world itself is experiencing constantly from hope to disappointment, maybe some would even face desperation in the future. I remember on January 6th, after the riots on Capitol Hill, Richard Haas, the chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations, exclaimed in a post, “From now on, no one in the world will see, respect, fear, or rely on us America in the same way. If there is a starting date for the ‘post-American era,’ it is almost certainly today.”

This year the entire world shall witness American inferior democracy stepping lower into deteriorate. British media The Guardian posted an article on its website shows that over 80% of US citizens are worried about the American democratic system and future Political violence. It is one of the not much agreement the two parties may gather, that the US will get itself into such disaster.

Great Britain is not so much better, the same media The Guardian quoted a poll on March showing that 79% of the participants think of British politicians as “non-listeners to average people’s opinions”, while 43% think “the UK is downfalling”.
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In conclusion, the four pillars of Western hegemony – Economic, Technological, Military, and Ideological – are deeply shaken today, and various reliable alternatives have emerged. Allow me to share a commentary we made shortly after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict as a fitting conclusion, showcasing the practicality of our assessment. At that time, I expressed: the conflict once again proves that the world has entered a “post-American era.” The age of US dominance as the sole superpower has ended, and the US can no longer dictate the course of the world. Consequently, a series of US-led institutional arrangements, including alliances like NATO and the status of the US dollar hegemony, may gradually decline. A truly multipolar international order will emerge through the dynamic interplay of revolution, reform, and turbulence.

Originally published: Caitlin A Johnstone Blog  on September 2, 2024 (more by Caitlin A Johnstone Blog) ​

You never see the dehumanization of Palestinians in western society exhibited so clearly as when something bad happens to Israelis during the genocidal assault on Gaza.

Today western officials are publicly weeping about six dead Israeli hostages, including one Israeli-American, who the IDF says were recently killed by Hamas.

Whoever’s been writing Joe Biden’s press releases for him published a statement about how “devastated and outraged” the president is about the death of the American hostage, Hersh Goldberg-Polin.
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The statement says the president knows Goldberg-Polin’s parents, saying “I admire them and grieve with them more deeply than words can express” and that “Hamas leaders will pay for these crimes.”
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“I have worked tirelessly to bring their beloved Hersh safely to them and am heartbroken by the news of his death,” the statement reads, which for the record is a lie — the Biden administration has been collaborating with Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage a hostage deal at every turn.

Similar sentiments are being expressed in statements by western officials like Vice President Kamala Harris, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

All of these statements frame the deaths of these six Israeli hostages as an earth-shakingly horrific tragedy, and all frame Hamas as a band of evil villains who must be brought to justice for their crimes.

No similar statements have ever been made by any of these officials about the far, far greater number of innocent Palestinians who have been killed in Gaza by the state of Israel with their assistance. No similar expressions of condolence have ever been uttered by these leaders for the millions of Palestinians who’ve had their lives completely ruined by Israel’s atrocities in Gaza and the West Bank over the last eleven months, or for the untold thousands of parents who’ve had to bury children who were exterminated in Israel’s genocidal onslaught.

Western government officials are making it clear that they do not see Palestinians as human in the same way they see Israelis as human, as are the mass media propaganda institutions who’ve been covering the deaths of these hostages with an intensity never seen regarding the IDF’s daily massacres of civilians in Gaza. Israeli strikes killed 47 Palestinians in Gaza in one 24-hour period between Saturday and Sunday, receiving not the tiniest fraction of the attention as those six Israeli hostages.

​The message is clear: Israelis dying is a terrible tragedy, while Palestinians dying is just the normal way for things to be. An Israeli dying should matter as much to you as your own family or friends dying, while a Palestinian dying should be regarded as a routine and natural event like a drop of rain falling from the sky.

And that’s an important message for westerners to be indoctrinated with. Can you imagine if we all started caring about western bombs being dropped in the middle east as much as we would care if they were being dropped on our own country, or on a country we’ve been conditioned to sympathize with? All their carefully manufactured consent would crumble, and people would cease allowing the western empire to do what it needs to do to dominate the planet.

These people are actively working to subvert our basic sense of human empathy. To twist our psyches into being unable to recognize the same level of humanity among empire-targeted populations as empire-supported ones. To see authorized populations as worthy of care and sympathy, and to see unauthorized populations as vermin in need of extermination.

Yes, our rulers really are that evil, and so are the propagandists who run the mass media.

So today I would like to extend my deepest condolences to the millions of Palestinians who’ve lost loved ones and had their lives thrown to the winds of chaos by Israel’s western-backed campaign of extermination, ethnic cleansing, and terrorism.

And I would like to remind my readers that Israel has exponentially more hostages than Hamas has, and murders them routinely, and rapes and tortures them constantly.

And it is right that we should care deeply about that. Even if the people who rule over us do not.